Monotonic Accountability Commit A Computing Primitive for Irreversible Execution

Existing computing primitives—compare-and-swap, two-phase commit, consensus—enforce atomicity with respect to state. None enforces atomicity with respect to permission. When an action is irreversible and admissibility is determined by independent authorities, a stronger property is required: the permission that justified the action at the moment of execution must never subsequently shrink, expire, or be reinterpreted. We call this property monotonic accountability. We define MA-Commit, an abstract operation that atomically verifies admissibility and produces an irreversible effect under monotonic accountability. We prove that MA-Commit is sufficient (any protocol built from it satisfies safety), complete (any safe protocol reduces to it), and non-decomposable (separating validation from execution necessarily violates safety). Together, these results establish MA-Commit as a necessary and sufficient primitive, within the model, for irreversible execution under distributed constraint authority. Monotonic accountability is the property that distinguishes this primitive from all prior atomic commit operations.