Website For Confirming Genuine Pins
Obviously, people do that. But I'm sure that there's a whole lot more people who aren't good enough at identifying them. The idea behind a site like this would be to allow even the most unexperienced trader to safely trade.Most people use the photos and descriptions on PinPics.
The way I see it, people have already been doing a process similiar to what the site would do for a considerable amount of time. If you buy a pin online, you would more than likely check to make sure that the pin was authentic from photographs. Sure, there's always the fact that you check to make sure the sellers reputable, and I'm sure there are a hundred other things, but the fact remains: people are constantly checking for authenticity through pictures over the internet. While I find your concerns valid (and they certainly put doubts in my mind about the project while making it) I think that there has to be some better way to do this.The problem is even the most experienced pin collector in the world can't usually tell bad pins from good pins from a photograph.
A. A lot of people's photos just aren't good enough.
B. Color differences that are very noticeable when holding a good pin in one hand, and a bad pin in the other are not always very noticeable in a picture, or if you only have access to one pin.
C. Pins often have multiple production runs and from different factories, sometimes over a period of years this leads to variations in AUTHENTIC pins.
D. I follow some of the FB counterfeit/scrapper groups, and the number of people who get the answer wrong is pretty high. Many traders today are simply too new to the hobby to have seen authentic older pins. I have a big concerns that the better produced counterfeit pins are being accepted as authentic because a lot of people just don't know any better. So when a real one pops up, it must be bad. Or people see something older, don't recognize it so it's bad. Or someone is asking about an older pin that has been widely counterfeited so it must be bad, and they disregard the circumstances in which the person is asking about (I collected in 2002, do I have something good. I got these from someone I know collected at the beginning of trading).
I've been doing this since the beginning of pin trading, I have over 11,000 pins, and I don't feel 90% comfortable with knowing what is good and bad. Especially, without having a known authentic right there to compare it with. To be blunt, you are asking for the impossible. You may find 1 or 2 collectors with the collections that are large enough, and were acquired directly from Disney that a person has the experience to do it. But they would still be ignorant of the variations within authentic pins (affecting open edition and hidden Mickey type pins). And would they even want to participate in an endeavor like this? Be responsible for someone else's pins? Who would want that liability?
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