1.86 million artifacts, locked away behind the red walls. Around ten thousand are put on display for the public year-round. The rest are in storage, under controlled temperature and humidity, with the crates opened only a handful of times a year—literally countable on your fingers.
Some people ask: why not make a batch of replicas to put on display? With 3D scanning so precise, they could be made one-to-one, and to visitors they’d look pretty much the same.
Those asking really do care about the things they can’t see.
But the Palace Museum won’t do it.
Won’t do it.
It’s that simple.
To say they don’t know how to make replicas would be unfair. The Palace Museum has its own artifact-replication operation. Replicas are used to replace objects removed from display cases, and to provide references during restoration. Replicas do the job. Making a replica of a first-grade cultural relic also requires approval: how many will be made, who they’re for, and what they’ll be used for—all of it has to be spelled out.
The sticking point is what happens next. Once a replica leaves the storeroom, there’s no getting it back. There’s simply nothing they can do about it.
Imagine a batch of one-to-one bottles making its way onto the market. Ten years later, they’re in an auction house display case, labeled as Qing-dynasty imperial-kiln wares. How would experts authenticate them then? By connoisseurship, glaze, base marks, and provenance—and those are exactly the things that high-quality fakes can gradually train people to accept. Once enough similar items flood the market, the price gap between genuine pieces and fakes gets worn away.
So they’d rather leave 99 percent of the objects in storage than let replicas cross that threshold.
Many people think preventing forgery is all about making an object hard enough to copy. Not necessarily. The real thing that works is deciding who has the authority to say an object is genuine. That authority isn’t in the hands of the craftspeople, but of the people who keep the records.
The system on the blockchain follows the same logic. It just moves registration from paper files to a public ledger anyone can browse. Which contract and number your token points to, and whose hands it has passed through—all of it is laid out for anyone to see, and no one can change it.
Anyone in the world can right-click and save the image. That doesn’t make it valuable. What’s scarce is that one line in the ledger.
So the two approaches are completely opposite. The Palace Museum prevents replicas from appearing. On the blockchain, replicas can be made freely; I just keep the ledger.
But which approach is sturdier? I can’t say. It’s a thorny question.
The Palace Museum’s approach relies on people keeping watch, on institutions, and on the eyes of generations of expert authenticators. People doze off. There’s still debate today about how that batch of high-quality fake calligraphy and paintings from the 1980s made it into auction houses.
The blockchain approach relies on code and nodes. But code can fork, and nodes can be persuaded. How often have people seized control of governance rights in just the past couple of years?
One fears people; the other fears the majority. Both are pretty fragile.
If you’ve bought digital collectibles, or still have a few profile pictures sitting in your wallet, go back and take a look at what that token actually points to. A file, or a line in a registry.
Of the 1.86 million objects, fewer than one percent get to stand under the lights. That proportion has barely changed in a hundred years. No one can say whether it will change in the future.
#故宫 #数字藏品 #NFT
$BTC $ETH $APE
Some people ask: why not make a batch of replicas to put on display? With 3D scanning so precise, they could be made one-to-one, and to visitors they’d look pretty much the same.
Those asking really do care about the things they can’t see.
But the Palace Museum won’t do it.
Won’t do it.
It’s that simple.
To say they don’t know how to make replicas would be unfair. The Palace Museum has its own artifact-replication operation. Replicas are used to replace objects removed from display cases, and to provide references during restoration. Replicas do the job. Making a replica of a first-grade cultural relic also requires approval: how many will be made, who they’re for, and what they’ll be used for—all of it has to be spelled out.
The sticking point is what happens next. Once a replica leaves the storeroom, there’s no getting it back. There’s simply nothing they can do about it.
Imagine a batch of one-to-one bottles making its way onto the market. Ten years later, they’re in an auction house display case, labeled as Qing-dynasty imperial-kiln wares. How would experts authenticate them then? By connoisseurship, glaze, base marks, and provenance—and those are exactly the things that high-quality fakes can gradually train people to accept. Once enough similar items flood the market, the price gap between genuine pieces and fakes gets worn away.
So they’d rather leave 99 percent of the objects in storage than let replicas cross that threshold.
Many people think preventing forgery is all about making an object hard enough to copy. Not necessarily. The real thing that works is deciding who has the authority to say an object is genuine. That authority isn’t in the hands of the craftspeople, but of the people who keep the records.
The system on the blockchain follows the same logic. It just moves registration from paper files to a public ledger anyone can browse. Which contract and number your token points to, and whose hands it has passed through—all of it is laid out for anyone to see, and no one can change it.
Anyone in the world can right-click and save the image. That doesn’t make it valuable. What’s scarce is that one line in the ledger.
So the two approaches are completely opposite. The Palace Museum prevents replicas from appearing. On the blockchain, replicas can be made freely; I just keep the ledger.
But which approach is sturdier? I can’t say. It’s a thorny question.
The Palace Museum’s approach relies on people keeping watch, on institutions, and on the eyes of generations of expert authenticators. People doze off. There’s still debate today about how that batch of high-quality fake calligraphy and paintings from the 1980s made it into auction houses.
The blockchain approach relies on code and nodes. But code can fork, and nodes can be persuaded. How often have people seized control of governance rights in just the past couple of years?
One fears people; the other fears the majority. Both are pretty fragile.
If you’ve bought digital collectibles, or still have a few profile pictures sitting in your wallet, go back and take a look at what that token actually points to. A file, or a line in a registry.
Of the 1.86 million objects, fewer than one percent get to stand under the lights. That proportion has barely changed in a hundred years. No one can say whether it will change in the future.
#故宫 #数字藏品 #NFT
$BTC $ETH $APE