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>It does not tell you if the artist has sold the piece multiple times. If you purchased a NON-FUNGIBLE-token, you can be sure that nobody else owns the same ar

>It does not tell you if the artist has sold the piece multiple times. If you purchased a NON-FUNGIBLE-token, you can be sure that nobody else owns the same array of bytes which may or may not prove that you own a piece of art. There may be many prints of the same original work created in multiple NFTs as there are in the art world... but it's not possible to sell the same NFT twice... on the blockchain at least... without re-acquiring it first. Plenty of NFT sellers sell multiple issues/prints/copies of the same original artwork. I think digital prints in NFT format are ridiculous but I digress.

stagas 5y ago
If you have the NFT signed by the artist's PGP key is the same thing though, no? You're the owner. Or the person you sign it to afterwards. What does the public blockchain offer in this case, except for fees?
- qqii 5y ago
  A signature is simply that, a signature. It doesn't guarantee uniqueness and doesn't prevent you copying it any number of times. An identity + timestamping mechanism would guarantee uniqueness of ownership, and a blockchain performs this in a relatively decentralised and trustless manner.
  - stagas 5y ago
    The blockchain sounds very centralised if it's the only place I can participate to verify my ownership. Decentralised would be if there was no third party(in this case the blockchain) necessary for verifying ownership. Which it actually isn't, because all that is needed is the signature of the author and maybe a timestamp or some other metadata signed along.
    - qqii 5y ago
      Of course! The blockchain is only decentralised compared to a centralised service such as Sotheby's and doesn't remove the third party entirely. The thing is unless you restrict the requirements of the artwork and the transaction not involving a third party actually restricts future guarentees that can be made to third parties. If the restrictions of never involving third parties (in proofs of ownership or otherwise) is acceptable, then there's no need for any schema bar making the transaction itself. The issue with removing the third party entirely (as the auther suggests) is the verifiability of the timestamp to any interested third parties. The simplest scenario is proof of existence of the artwork at time T. Without a timestamping mechanism there's nothing stopping the creator lying about when it was created, or when this transaction took place.
- 317070 5y ago
  It prevents the artist from signing the same thing twice. So with PGP you might be the owner of a thing, but you might not be the only owner of a thing.
- dangoor 5y ago
  I wondered about that, too, and thought of a difference: if you sign it over to someone else with PGP, the first owner still has a file that was provably sold to them. They could fraudulently sell it again. A public blockchain would contain the whole chain of ownership, so you could tell who the current owner is.
  - stagas 5y ago
    Can't they have a public personal ledger somewhere for people to audit? Saying I sold X to Y. Like a tweet in a personal account. Why is the common blockchain necessary? Seems like centralization of information, is this what Web3 is about? Power to the gatekeepers?
    - qqii 5y ago
      As long as twitter can act as a trusted third party, tweets are a completely valid ledger as shown by Keybase. Blockchains simply reduce the power and trust required in the third party by offering a different set of tradeoffs.
      - stagas 5y ago
        You don't really need Twitter, you need a platform and require the people that use the platform to bring in their ledgers so they are auditable by the public. I can view someone's work and examine if they're trustworthy or not. Similar to how people are signing their signatures, they could be just bringing together their ledger, which could be a bloom filter so it's just a single line of hash that I can verify I still own the thing they selled, you only need a system that can compare these and see if anything has been double spent. The point is, you don't need a running bitcoin-style blockchain for this. You can achieve the same validity with different means.
        qqii 5y ago
        Using a bloom filter as a distributed hash means you're edging quite close to a blockchain, the only question your schema now has is consensus - how is work examined for trustworthiness? What prevents network spam? I haven't puzzled it though but intuitively it feels like you wouldn't be able to achieve the "same validity" (aka you'd have a weaker set of guarentees) without the liveness of a blockchain like system. Whether you agree with what threshold of validity is acceptable is a different matter.

stagas 5y ago

If you have the NFT signed by the artist's PGP key is the same thing though, no? You're the owner. Or the person you sign it to afterwards. What does the public blockchain offer in this case, except for fees?

qqii 5y ago
A signature is simply that, a signature. It doesn't guarantee uniqueness and doesn't prevent you copying it any number of times. An identity + timestamping mechanism would guarantee uniqueness of ownership, and a blockchain performs this in a relatively decentralised and trustless manner.
- stagas 5y ago
  The blockchain sounds very centralised if it's the only place I can participate to verify my ownership. Decentralised would be if there was no third party(in this case the blockchain) necessary for verifying ownership. Which it actually isn't, because all that is needed is the signature of the author and maybe a timestamp or some other metadata signed along.
  - qqii 5y ago
    Of course! The blockchain is only decentralised compared to a centralised service such as Sotheby's and doesn't remove the third party entirely. The thing is unless you restrict the requirements of the artwork and the transaction not involving a third party actually restricts future guarentees that can be made to third parties. If the restrictions of never involving third parties (in proofs of ownership or otherwise) is acceptable, then there's no need for any schema bar making the transaction itself. The issue with removing the third party entirely (as the auther suggests) is the verifiability of the timestamp to any interested third parties. The simplest scenario is proof of existence of the artwork at time T. Without a timestamping mechanism there's nothing stopping the creator lying about when it was created, or when this transaction took place.
317070 5y ago
It prevents the artist from signing the same thing twice. So with PGP you might be the owner of a thing, but you might not be the only owner of a thing.
dangoor 5y ago
I wondered about that, too, and thought of a difference: if you sign it over to someone else with PGP, the first owner still has a file that was provably sold to them. They could fraudulently sell it again. A public blockchain would contain the whole chain of ownership, so you could tell who the current owner is.
- stagas 5y ago
  Can't they have a public personal ledger somewhere for people to audit? Saying I sold X to Y. Like a tweet in a personal account. Why is the common blockchain necessary? Seems like centralization of information, is this what Web3 is about? Power to the gatekeepers?
  - qqii 5y ago
    As long as twitter can act as a trusted third party, tweets are a completely valid ledger as shown by Keybase. Blockchains simply reduce the power and trust required in the third party by offering a different set of tradeoffs.
    - stagas 5y ago
      You don't really need Twitter, you need a platform and require the people that use the platform to bring in their ledgers so they are auditable by the public. I can view someone's work and examine if they're trustworthy or not. Similar to how people are signing their signatures, they could be just bringing together their ledger, which could be a bloom filter so it's just a single line of hash that I can verify I still own the thing they selled, you only need a system that can compare these and see if anything has been double spent. The point is, you don't need a running bitcoin-style blockchain for this. You can achieve the same validity with different means.
      - qqii 5y ago
        Using a bloom filter as a distributed hash means you're edging quite close to a blockchain, the only question your schema now has is consensus - how is work examined for trustworthiness? What prevents network spam? I haven't puzzled it though but intuitively it feels like you wouldn't be able to achieve the "same validity" (aka you'd have a weaker set of guarentees) without the liveness of a blockchain like system. Whether you agree with what threshold of validity is acceptable is a different matter.