Register of Authentic Cats / Series 2026 / Solana
Sad. Verified. Valuable.
One cat applied to be recognised as himself. This desk cannot examine a cat, so it sold him the mark instead, and it will sell you the same one.
No. 000001 / issued at the counter
Void until sealed
Signed for the register by nobody. This document certifies a payment.
The desk kept both open. Only one of them has ever produced a certificate.
Every seal this desk has issued, shared by everyone reading the page.
Reading the register.
Both certificates, field by field. The digests are computed on your own machine from the files the page actually loaded.
Nothing to compare until a second certificate exists.
On 20 April 2023 every badge issued under the old rules came off in one day, 1214 days ago. Take his.
86.9 percent of the visible animal is the badge: 288,147 pixels of seal against 43,445 pixels of cat, counted off the file he came in.
Absence proves nothing either. Accounts that never paid kept the mark, and their profiles said in writing that they had subscribed and confirmed a phone number.
Tony La Russa, then managing the Cardinals, sues Twitter over an account posting in his name. He drops it in July. Twitter announces Verified Accounts in June, and the badge exists from then on to answer one question: is this person who the account says it is.
Fox2Now, KHOU, Twitter blog
Anyone can apply. Twitter says 187,000 accounts are verified against 310 million monthly users, which is 0.06 percent. The application form is withdrawn later the same year because more people apply than the company can check.
TechCrunch, Recode
Twitter verifies the organiser of the Charlottesville rally, and then pauses verification for everybody: "Verification was meant to authenticate identity and voice but it is interpreted as an endorsement or an indicator of importance." The desk stays shut for 1,288 days.
@TwitterSupport, NBC News, Axios
Applications reopen under the six categories and the criteria quoted above. Eighteen months later the whole thing is for sale.
X blog, relaunching verification
The badge goes on sale at 7.99 a month. Within a day an account called Eli Lilly and Company, verified, posts that insulin is free now. The real company apologises and the stock closes 4.37 percent down. Paid signups are pulled six days after they opened.
Forbes, Fortune, FiercePharma
Every badge issued under the old rules is removed on one day. Some accounts keep theirs without paying, and their profiles state that they subscribed and confirmed a phone number. Stephen King, on his: "My Twitter account says I've subscribed to Twitter Blue. I haven't. My Twitter account says I've given a phone number. I haven't."
Variety, CNBC, Forbes
Three tiers. The mark starts at 8 dollars a month. The tier below it costs 3 and buys the same posting tools without it, so the going rate for the mark itself, on the web, is 5 dollars a month.
help.x.com, X Premium
The Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board looked at roughly 6,000 works in fifteen years and stamped the ones it rejected DENIED, in red ink, on the back. A stamped painting could not be sold as a Warhol again. The board was dissolved in 2011 with about 7 million dollars of legal costs in its final year, and after that nobody could certify a Warhol at all.
NYRB, Art Law Blog, Simon-Whelan v. Andy Warhol Foundation
Michael Spence, Job Market Signaling, Quarterly Journal of Economics 87(3), 1973, and the Nobel that followed in 2001: a signal separates two types only when it costs the liar more than it costs the honest party. Charge both of them the same 8 dollars and the equilibrium pools, which is the formal way of saying the mark is decoration. The badge did not lose its meaning in 2022. The thing that gave it meaning is what got sold.
Spence 1973, QJE 87(3) 355-374
The sad cat this desk certifies is a composite. The face is one animal, the body underneath it belonged to another cat entirely, and the picture has been recut so many times since 2014 that the earliest copy anyone can point to is already a copy. There is no photograph of this cat to compare a claim against.
Know Your Meme, Crying Cat
