I was wondering the other day about something like this for retro computing hardware, including game consoles.

You can buy a device that looks perfectly good, but has rusty parts, leaking capacitors, shoddy/counterfeit replacement parts, and who knows what else. And if it wasn’t previously opened (they seemingly always are), you don’t know what was done to it.

I don’t think you can really solve that through tech, it’s really more of a record keeping issue. Which actually seems to be mostly how carfax works?

I’ve thought about fixing up consoles and selling them (more for cost recovery and to free up space than for profit), but I wonder about how to share information about the work and the risks in a way that the purchaser is likely to understand and appreciate.