3 ms·

What’s to stop someone from creating a marketplace for identical stamps at 1/10 the cost?

archagon 9y ago
Dunno, it's a super wishy-washy idea! This is mostly me thinking out loud. I was recently looking through my dad's massive collection of old Soviet stamps, and it really made me wish for some sort of digital equivalent. Intuitively, it seems to me that there probably exists some alignment of cryptocurrency concepts to make it work.
RexetBlell 9y ago
What's to stop someone from making a painting that's practically identical to Mona Lisa and selling it for 1/10th the cost?
- paulsutter 9y ago
  The Mona Lisa isn’t yet a digital good. But in time it will be possible to make perfect copies, and that raises all sorts of interesting questions.
  - baddox 9y ago
    If by “perfect copy” you mean a physical copy that cannot be distinguished in a blind testfrom the original in any way, then of course we don’t yet have that capability. Perhaps with advanced scanning and 3D printing that would be possible, but I suspect the true original would still maintain higher value as long as a trustworthy chain of custody was maintained. As soon as a thief removes the original long enough to potentially swap it with a perfect copy, the market value of any alleged original would likely vanish.
- baddox 9y ago
  Nothing, if you’re permitted to make copies of the source of the reproduction (e.g. you went to The Louvre and took a photograph). I would have said that you likely can’t legally print or sell an image of the Mona Lisa you find on Google Images, but Wikipedia says: > The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that "faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain". Anyway, reproductions of public domain paintings are commonly produced and sold for far less than the market value of the original.
baddox 9y ago
That would be effectively impossible, because the authenticity of a unique stamp can be verified on the blockchain. Of course, this only matters if people are valuing specific stamps based on their verifiable uniqueness in a specific blockchain, and not just their consumable content (e.g. it’s trivial to share a screenshot of one of these kitties.)

Dunno, it's a super wishy-washy idea! This is mostly me thinking out loud. I was recently looking through my dad's massive collection of old Soviet stamps, and it really made me wish for some sort of digital equivalent. Intuitively, it seems to me that there probably exists some alignment of cryptocurrency concepts to make it work.

RexetBlell 9y ago

What's to stop someone from making a painting that's practically identical to Mona Lisa and selling it for 1/10th the cost?

paulsutter 9y ago
The Mona Lisa isn’t yet a digital good. But in time it will be possible to make perfect copies, and that raises all sorts of interesting questions.
- baddox 9y ago
  If by “perfect copy” you mean a physical copy that cannot be distinguished in a blind testfrom the original in any way, then of course we don’t yet have that capability. Perhaps with advanced scanning and 3D printing that would be possible, but I suspect the true original would still maintain higher value as long as a trustworthy chain of custody was maintained. As soon as a thief removes the original long enough to potentially swap it with a perfect copy, the market value of any alleged original would likely vanish.
baddox 9y ago
Nothing, if you’re permitted to make copies of the source of the reproduction (e.g. you went to The Louvre and took a photograph). I would have said that you likely can’t legally print or sell an image of the Mona Lisa you find on Google Images, but Wikipedia says: > The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that "faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain". Anyway, reproductions of public domain paintings are commonly produced and sold for far less than the market value of the original.

baddox 9y ago

That would be effectively impossible, because the authenticity of a unique stamp can be verified on the blockchain. Of course, this only matters if people are valuing specific stamps based on their verifiable uniqueness in a specific blockchain, and not just their consumable content (e.g. it’s trivial to share a screenshot of one of these kitties.)