A mill certifies a heat of metal. After that, the metal moves and the paper follows it by hand — cut, restocked, processed, repacked — and at every handoff someone re-types a number from one document into another. The link between the paper and the metal gets re-made on trust, and nothing survives the next step. We record the handoffs, signed by the parties who actually made them.

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We are careful about what that means. We can tell you who handled the material and what each of them signed. We cannot tell you the bar in your hand is the bar on the certificate — nobody can, short of destructive testing — and we would rather say so than sell you certainty we don't have.

Right now that's one person: Hugh, in Washington, DC, a current Georgetown Master's candidate studying supply chain management with career exposure in the defense manufacturing and configuration space. No team, no product, no customers. A thesis rewritten twice under outside scrutiny, and ninety days to find out whether a service center will actually sign.

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The most useful thing you can do is tell us we're wrong.