Know the substance you are handling

Step closer, traveller, and mind the crates.

I am CitiZen Seven and I keep the weights in this bazaar. Thirty years of people handing me objects and swearing blind about the value. I have learned one thing worth passing on. Never price a thing by how a thing looks.

Watch me ruin something for you. Your badge, the one you have earned, the one with your name and a neat code in the corner. Beautiful. Also forgeable in nine minutes by a bored teenager with the right software. If you completed the CitiZen Six mission you'll know how easy it is to create a fake, or worse - be a fake.

Every visible part of a certificate can be copied. Your name. The date. The seal. The little square code. A forger copies all of those perfectly and sells the result to somebody who never checks.

So what cannot be copied?

Not the picture. The record of who sent what to whom, and when.

Your badge went out as a transfer, written on a public ledger at the moment of issue. The sender was your school, your teacher, or GetSmart. The receiver was your address, the one you found with Base back in the second mission. The date sits beside both.

A forger controls the picture. A forger controls nothing on the ledger, because writing there needs the sending account, and the sending account is not theirs.

Here is the move, and the move takes two minutes.

Open a badge you already hold. Find the transaction hash, a long string beginning 0x. Follow the hash to the public record. Then check three things, slowly.

The sender. Does the From address belong to whoever claims to have issued this? Your school, your teacher, GetSmart. Not a stranger.

The receiver. Is the To address yours?

The date. Does the record agree with the badge?

Three matches and you hold something real. One mismatch and you hold a question worth asking the issuer, politely and soon.

Daisy carries a badge nobody has ever been able to verify. Issued by an address appearing exactly once in the whole ledger, and never again. Half the Resistance thinks the badge is a forgery. The other half has stopped asking.

Why do I care so much? Because a bazaar runs on trust, and trust without checking is only hope wearing a nice coat. The Aithority would love a world where nobody checks anything. Easier to flood such a world with convincing rubbish.

One more warning, then go. A badge arriving from a sender you do not know is not a gift. Leave the thing alone and tell your teacher.

Seventy-five tokens for the work. One more for baksheesh, because you came to my stall and listened. Seventy-six.

Now go. The Scrapper is next, and he will teach you to make a machine speak in whatever voice you choose.