Why this matters
A market where good history can't be proved
is a market for lemons.
In 1970 the economist George Akerlof explained why the used car market punishes honest sellers. The paper was called The Market for “Lemons”, and it won him a share of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics.
His argument is uncomfortably simple. The seller of a used car knows whether it has been looked after. The buyer does not. Since the buyer cannot tell a well-kept car from a neglected one, they refuse to pay a well-kept price — they offer something closer to what an average car is worth, because that is the risk they are actually taking.
The consequence is the part people miss. That average price is a discount charged to the person who did everything right, and a subsidy paid to the person who did not. And it gets worse over time: if the honest owner won't accept the average price, they keep the car instead of selling it. The good cars leave the market first, which raises the share of bad ones, which pushes the price down again. Economists call this adverse selection.
See it happen
Two cars, identical to look at. One is worth £15,000, one is hiding £8,000 of trouble.
The honest seller loses £2,000. Not because the car is worse, but because the buyer cannot tell it apart from the one that is. Every pound of that discount is a subsidy paid to whoever is hiding something.
Akerlof also named the cure
The paper doesn't stop at the problem. It points to what it calls counteracting institutions — guarantees, warranties, brand names, licensing — mechanisms that let a seller credibly signal quality instead of merely asserting it. The word doing the work there is credibly. Anyone can claim a full service history. The claim is worthless precisely because it costs nothing to make.
That is the gap PeachStamp is built to close. Not a nicer place to store your receipts — a way to make a true claim about your car cost something to fake.