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Collectible Hunter AI

The gate confirms the math.
The debate weighs the fake.

Hunts collectibles selling under value against independently-confirmed comps. Verification here means confirmed arbitrage — a real cross-source price gap wide enough to survive fees and shipping — not authenticity. There's no clean deterministic authenticity check, so that risk lives in the debate layer as a Skeptic argument, never a silent gate rejection.

The shape

Comp-arbitrage is gate-hard. Authenticity is debate-argued.

What's gate-hard vs. debate-argued isn't universal — it's decided per domain by how deterministically checkable a risk actually is. A price delta between independently-sourced comps is checkable math. Whether a PSA 9 slab is a genuine PSA 9 slab is not something a deterministic check can resolve — so it's argued instead, and the Skeptic's only real teeth are the same scam-report evidence channel every Hunter engine shares.

SCOUTS Sold-Comps · Grading-Pop "here's a candidate" THE GATE ≥2 cross-source comps delta > fees + shipping fail closed, always ✓ verified → debate ✗ rejected → explained
Authenticity, condition, and liquidity risk are argued after the gate — they never block it.

Live-validated

Real candidates, real gate behavior, ~$0.06 spent.

The Grading-Pop Scout filed 4 real candidates sourced from psacard.com and beckett.com. The gate correctly rejected all 4 — they were corroboration-only records missing the price data comp-confirmation needs, exactly as designed. A real headwind surfaced along the way: eBay's sold-listings pages aren't reliably fetchable by the server-side web tool (likely bot-protection), even though eBay content is searchable — the Sold-Comps Scout's data-source approach needs revisiting before it can discover new arbitrage on its own.

Where it stands

✓ shipped  the gate — comp-price cross-source confirmation, friction-floor math
✓ shipped  two scout beats — Sold-Comps (eBay) and Grading-Pop (PSA/CGC/Beckett)
✓ shipped  full debate/mission/digest pipeline, built on hunter-engine
→ known headwind  Sold-Comps Scout's eBay fetch reliability needs a fix (StockX/Goldin alternates, or a search-driven approach)
3 offline tests · live day-cycle validated 2026-07-24