Grounding
NOUN · FORMULA CONCEPT · AI PROVENANCE
Grounding is how confirmability flows up a Thread: a witnessed confirmed node grounds at 1, an assumed or opaque node at 0, and an inferred node inherits the minimum of its parents. A claim is only as strong as its weakest premise — one ungrounded dependency, and the whole claim is ungrounded.
In plain language
A chain is as strong as its weakest link — grounding just takes that saying literally and makes it arithmetic. There's no partial credit: a conclusion resting on four verified premises and one assumption rests on an assumption, which is exactly what a careful reader would say looking at the graph. The formula agrees with the reader.
The minimum has a second virtue: it has no parameters. Nothing to tune, nothing to bikeshed, nothing to game. Wiring junk nodes into a claim can only drag its grounding down, never up — the only way to raise a score is to actually ground the claim. Honest instrumentation is the only winning move.
See it live
Watch the timing branch of Thread TT-0001: four solid premises and one red one — and the red one decides. That branch fades exactly where grounding drops to zero.
Inspect the deciding node in Thread TT-0001 →Related terms
TERM COINED BY TRUSTTHREAD · FIRST PUBLISHED 2026-07-18 · DEFINITION V1 · THIS PAGE IS THE CANONICAL SOURCE