Anyone can register as a museum for one cent. Feature or hole?

[andrei-chernikov]

Registering a profile costs a network fee — about one cent — and the contract asks nothing else. It does not ask who you are. The type you pick becomes part of your ID: C for a creator, B for a brand, P for a proof institution, M for a museum.

So anyone can be a museum. For a cent.

And it goes further than the label. P and M have no monthly mint cap — C is limited to 1000 passports a month and B to 100,000, but the two types that carry institutional weight are unlimited. A P profile can also attach attestations to other people's passports through proofRegistry.

The argument that this is correct

The protocol has a rule it tries not to break: it surfaces facts and refuses to rank them. A registry that decides who is a real museum has appointed itself the authority the project exists to avoid. And any gate — a deposit, an approval, a signature from governance — is a door someone holds the key to, which breaks the other rule: no party may permanently deny an honest holder.

Under that reading the letter is a claim, not a title, and the thing that makes it worth anything is the same for M as for C: the profile ID published on a channel the holder visibly controls. Verify already says this — it tells the reader the type is not verified on-chain and to check the ID on the organisation's own site.

The argument that this is a hole

A letter that reads as "museum" is a verdict, whatever the fine print says. The protocol declines to judge and hands out a badge in the same breath. Most people will not read the fine print, and the badge is the part that travels.

What would actually be useful to hear

• Have you seen a permissionless registry handle this well? What did it do instead of gating?
• Is the unlimited mint rate on P and M a decision or an oversight? It has no justification anywhere in the documents — we looked.
• §411 of the spec suggests verifiers may keep their own off-chain lists of institutions they trust. Does that solve it, or does it just move the authority somewhere less visible?
• If you think this is fine, say why — the case for it is worth writing down properly by someone who is not us.