10 — Non-Goals

The following are explicitly outside the scope of the MIR protocol. These are not future features. They are architectural exclusions.

Reputation Scoring

MIR does not calculate trust scores, reputation rankings, or behavioral ratings. Claims are raw records of participation. Scoring is a downstream application concern, not a protocol function.

Trust Evaluation

MIR does not determine whether a domain is trustworthy or whether a claim is true. The protocol proves who signed a claim, not whether the claim is accurate. Evaluating source credibility is the verifier's responsibility.

Identity Verification

MIR verifies that a domain controls a signing key. It does not verify real-world identity of individuals, organizations, or the subjects referenced in claims. MIR is not an identity provider.

Behavioral Analytics

MIR does not model, predict, or profile user behavior. Claim data is structured for portability and verification, not for analysis pipelines.

Content Evaluation

MIR does not assess the quality, accuracy, or nature of events referenced in claims. A mir.review.submitted claim means the domain attests a review was submitted. MIR does not evaluate the review itself.

Surveillance

Subject identifiers are domain-scoped hashes. The protocol is designed to resist cross-domain correlation without subject consent. MIR does not provide tracking, monitoring, or surveillance capabilities.

Access Control

MIR claims are not credentials. They do not grant or deny access to systems. A verifier may use claims as input to access decisions, but that is the verifier's logic, not the protocol's.

Encryption

MIR claims are signed, not encrypted. The protocol provides integrity and authorship guarantees, not confidentiality. Claims are designed to be publicly verifiable.

Claim Chaining

MIR claims are independent documents. There is no relatedClaimId, parentSig, or causal link between claims. A mir.transaction.refunded claim does not formally reference the mir.transaction.completed it corrects.

This is by design. Causal links would require a shared ordering authority or a registry that tracks claim sequences — undermining the "registry is optional" property. Lifecycle reconstruction is the consuming system's responsibility, using subject, domain, type, and timestamp to infer sequence.

Domains MAY include application-specific identifiers in metadata (e.g., a platform transaction ID) to enable linking at the application layer. The protocol does not interpret or enforce these.

Consensus

MIR does not use distributed consensus, blockchain, or any replicated state machine. Claims are signed documents, not ledger entries. There is no global ordering requirement.

Post-Quantum Cryptography

The current specification uses Ed25519. Migration to post-quantum signature algorithms is a future concern that will be addressed in a future protocol version if and when it becomes necessary. The protocol version field (mir) enables this migration path.

Centralized Authority

No single entity — including any registry operator — is the authoritative source of truth for MIR claims. Claims are independently verifiable. Multiple registries may coexist. The protocol is designed to function without any central coordinator.