Why carry the cost forward?

A made object is finished work. The cost of making it has already been paid, and the file that remains can be copied. The making cannot. How that cost was put into the object is How do you make a digital thing scarce? The open question is what the holder is still carrying once the file exists.

The obvious answer is a balance, or a permission. A balance can be written back. A permission can be issued again by the office that gave it. Neither is what this file is. Nobody issued it, and nothing in it is a credit a later entry can restore. What it carries is the fact of a making that already happened.

That is why the two ways of parting with it are not the same act. Handing the file to someone else moves the record. It does not spend the making a second time. Losing the file, or having it refused, leaves the holder without the record of that making, and the next one starts from zero. So what is carried forward is a commitment already made: something expensive to replace if it is given up. That is why it can be put at risk.

The file does not set the price of that risk, and it does not require the risk to be taken. A checker can measure whether this is what that making produces. Why can saying no be cheap when saying yes cannot? is that measurement. Whether to put it at risk is the choice of whoever holds it. Someone can make one and throw it away. The scarcity was in the making. The reason to keep it is whatever needs a commitment that is expensive to replace. How a particular door prices that risk does not follow from the file.