2 ms·
I'm not saying the idea makes sense, but if you assume that the original owner announces the creation of the painting on the blockchain (we know this is legit b
by opaopa13 11y ago
I'm not saying the idea makes sense, but if you assume that the original owner announces the creation of the painting on the blockchain (we know this is legit because the owner has posted their public key in the past) and every legitimate transaction posts it to the blockchain, then:
If you steal the key, the painting is legally yours. Congratulations! You may send the police to collect your prize.
If you steal the painting, everyone you try to sell it can verify that you're not the real owner. That limits you to black market transactions, I guess.
If there are two claims for the same painting, it's trivial to trace them back to their source and see which one goes back to the original owner.
You prove thing == key by means of a perfect, tamper-proof sticker, which I'm sure someone will invent any day now.
You prove there aren't two keys by looking at the original owner's postings to the blockchain and making sure he hasn't listed the item twice.
If you lose the key, you can never sell the painting legally. At first I thought you could just invalidate the old key and assign a new one, but how can you do that in a tamper-proof way without access to the old private key? I guess if my identity is a separate key, I could post a message saying, "This is X, you know it's really me because here's my digital signature, you can verify that on this date I owned the thing, and I'm telling you to stop using public key Y for it and to use public key Z instead." Now there are two keys, and we have to assume the technology is good enough that no one could be tricked into using the old key; otherwise, I could sell the painting twice.
The real problem is definitely proving that thing == key. Once you have that, you have a system which kinda works (but is in every way worse than just using whatever tamper-proof technology it relies on for a title / certificate of authenticity, as joosters points out).