Trails

What a trail is — and is not

A trail asserts exactly two things: these dated headlines match this arc’s boundary, and this date precedes that one. It does not assert cause, importance, or agreement between outlets — [tier 3 of 4]. We have not ordered these into a chain, named witnesses, or checked whether outlets agree. The curated stories are tier 4: a human-ordered chain, and the only tier that makes claims a person had to read for.

• same-day clustering only; one development written up across a publication-lag boundary stays two rows (the +/-1 day merge was built and refuted on measurement)
• phantom identity is visible only where a publisher exposes an article ID (decrypt, The Block) — other publishers' duplicates are unmeasured, not absent
• a date is the publisher's own page date where a capture holds one; elsewhere it is the archive stamp, and 3.2% of capture-checked coindesk rows drift +/-1-3 days
• date contradictions are detectable only where a publisher exposes a sequential article id (decrypt, The Block) — 565 of our 1,175 upper-bound rows. The other 610, including all 591 cointelegraph ones, are UNMEASURED: an arc no flag reaches has not been checked, and must not be read as having passed

Across all 67 trails: 3478 matched headlines, 2228 printable, 1171 counted but not shown (no captured publisher title), 64 phantom rows removed, 100 corrected against a captured copy of the page, 1 left out of their trail’s order because their stored date is later than the articles published after them allow, and 1138 dated by the published-date the article page itself states, rather than by the day we first found it archived.