the Defeat Principle is adopted

Maintainer ruling, taken in conversation on 2026-09-03 and landed here as the first commit of the round dispatched from it, per the standing practice that a ruling taken in conversation is in force only once it is a dated entry.

No participant extinguishes a debt. A participant may pay it — answer — or move it onto the grounds for saying it is not owed — dispose. Only settlement extinguishes.

This settles the hypothesis the 2026-09-02 round ran under, and the consequences it already carries are now unconditional rather than conditional:

• dispose is required to open a fresh successor inheriting the disposed issue (DefeatTrace.dispose_successor), because a moved debt must land somewhere.
• Met reads only discharging resolutions, so a disposed root satisfies no prerequisite (DefeatTrace.dispose_not_met) and a wait on it reroutes rather than going extinct (DefeatTrace.routes_survive_dispose).
• On the carrier layer the disposition receipt is identically bottom, and on the service layer dispose contributes zero to either terminal fate — it is an obligation-to-obligation transport step with L = 1, ε = 0.

What the ruling does not settle. Whether disposal transfers load in full or at a discount; whether settlement's independence from the disposer's writes is a standing hypothesis or per-realization; and whether legitimacy may presuppose a designated protected participant. All three remain in Awaiting the author.

Rejected alternative: disposition as a terminal exit — content ceasing to be owed without being answered, which is how PRIORITIES.md item 77 originally posed it. That reading makes the disposition term an unaudited hole in every conservation law, which is the laundering channel item 77 names; the transfer reading closes it by construction at the cost of requiring a successor.