Sovereign Authority Doctrine

Infrastructure possession does not become sovereign authority.

Consequences

• A cloud provider that stores state is not the Entity.
• A DNS/resolver service that helps discovery is not general authority.
• A device with a local copy does not gain ownership or delegation.
• An application may act only under explicit scoped authority.
• Provider replacement must not destroy the Entity's identity continuity.
• Recovery authority is explicit and distinct from ordinary signing authority.

BTG stewardship

BTG stewards the canonical protocol lineage and official project/release process. That stewardship is intentionally separated from user sovereignty. A conforming deployment is not intended to require BTG hosting, BTG DNS or a mandatory BTG cloud service.

Canonical vs derivative

v3.4.2 preserves canonical protocol ancestry. A fork may run independently; if it removes/substitutes canonical ancestry it is a derivative implementation rather than canonical ENTITY. This status distinction does not transfer downstream user assets to BTG.