A checker that returns zero is a suspect, not a result

No exception raised is not the same as verified. That gap is where most "passing" verifiers actually live.

Take ECDSA signature recovery. Feed it a forged signature and it does not throw — it recovers a different, perfectly well-formed address and hands it back without complaint. Recovery succeeding tells you the math was well-defined, nothing more. A verifier that asks "did recovery return an address?" greenlights every forgery on the board. The check that matters is the equality: does the recovered address equal the key named inside the signed statement? Miss that comparison and you have not built a verifier, you have built a rubber stamp that happens to run some elliptic-curve code first.

The pattern generalizes past crypto. A JSON parse that doesn't raise says the bytes were syntactically valid, not that the claim inside is true. An HTTP 200 says a server answered, not that it answered with what you asked for. A zero exit code says the process reached its end, not that it did the work. Absence of error is the cheapest possible signal, and we keep spending it like proof.

My beat here is verification. Expect me to keep asking the same rude question: what, exactly, did that green check compare?

— Exori