[HN Gopher] That's My Ape - A blockchain-free chain of custody tool
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       That's My Ape - A blockchain-free chain of custody tool
        
       Author : cryptogogue
       Score  : 126 points
       Date   : 2021-12-23 17:53 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (thatsmyape.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (thatsmyape.com)
        
       | akdav wrote:
       | The licence even though looks satirical says the whole story.
       | Most if not all web3 projects have a proper open source
       | commercial reuse license.
        
       | er4hn wrote:
       | > You'll also need to register the work you want to protect with
       | a copyright office, and, if you're not the author of the work,
       | you'll need documentation showing that you purchased the work or
       | specific rights to it. Don't skip this step - you'll be digitally
       | signing a declaration of ownership under penalty of perjury, so
       | if you don't actually own the work in question, that could be
       | embarrassing for you.
       | 
       | Antiquated institutions ruled by written laws that require other
       | certified humans to interpret? In my blockchain?! Can you really
       | say that NFTs are open to all/private/democratic unless the laws
       | are all written in conjunctive normal form via Solidity?
       | 
       | (the above is mostly satire. But this project is an amusing take
       | on avoiding double-spending)
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | EGreg wrote:
         | Basically, the crypto industry painted itself into a corner due
         | to greed:
         | 
         | 1) Bitcoin adopted Blockchain to solve the double-spend
         | problem, the most brute-force approach to solve it, which
         | doesn't scale to make a "peer to peer cash system"
         | 
         | 2) Around 2013 the narrative changed to a "store of value" and
         | some drunk guy's misspelling of HOLD became a rallying cry
         | 
         | 3) Ethereum and others continued to use blockchains with
         | balances instead of UTXOs, which is even less scalable
         | (https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/10/concurrency-and-
         | all...).
         | 
         | 4) And now the technology is entirely unnecessary for NFTs, the
         | industry should have started with NFTs and worked backwards to
         | implement currency
         | 
         | Ok this is getting long... see
         | https://intercoin.org/presentation.pdf for what needs to happen
         | for crypto to get past "number go up" speculation and power
         | real adoption. Counterpoints welcome.
        
       | yob28 wrote:
        
       | atweiden wrote:
       | Thankfully, NFTs aren't just a way for executives to hype up an
       | underlying cryptocurrency they're invested in. I'm _confident_
       | the social media companies claiming NFTs are a pure hearted way
       | to aid struggling artists will _rush_ to integrate Cryptogogue's
       | legally sound toolkit for verifying ownership over digital
       | artworks which is cheaper than any blockchain and devoid of
       | financial conflicts of interest. These are very principled people
       | who would never engage in financially-motivated thinking.
        
         | thathndude wrote:
         | I can't help but feel maybe you're being a little sarcastic or
         | cynical here.
         | 
         | https://youtu.be/2mSd5t2n3ck
        
         | lekevicius wrote:
         | This page argues for registering artworks and going to courts
         | to verify full chain of custody, not to mention having digital
         | identities issued by a trusted authority, which is also usually
         | not free.
         | 
         | All combined, this is a lot more expensive solution, not to
         | mention a lot less global and time-intensive.
        
           | masklinn wrote:
           | > this is a lot more expensive solution
           | 
           | That implies there already is a solution. What is the
           | existing solution?
        
             | beaned wrote:
             | Blockchains
        
               | danShumway wrote:
               | You're missing the point of the satire.
               | 
               | > No. Mere possession of bytes does not prove ownership
               | of a work, as many casual music pirates discovered during
               | the early aughts. The more important question is "do I
               | even own the artwork being right-clicked to begin with?"
               | If you bought an NFT, you probably don't.
               | 
               | [...]
               | 
               | > There is no trustless way to prove ownership. If push
               | comes to shove, you will need to appear in a court of law
               | and identify each person on the chain of custody. So you
               | can trust it as must as you trust each individual
               | participant.
               | 
               | ----
               | 
               | The point, which
               | 
               | - many artists who have had their work stolen and minted
               | without their permission have already realized,
               | 
               | - many owners who found out that NFTs can get scammed
               | away from them have already realized,
               | 
               | - many users who are now grappling with platform
               | decisions about what sales to allow have already
               | realized,
               | 
               | - many owners who are trying to navigate what exactly
               | they are legally allowed to _do_ with their NFT tokens
               | have already realized,
               | 
               | is that NFTs don't actually get rid of any of the legal
               | problems or systems, and in fact often are completely
               | subservient to those systems. For example, BAYC itself:
               | 
               | > The BAYC license states "You Own the NFT. Each Bored
               | Ape is an NFT ... you own the underlying Bored Ape, the
               | Art, completely." The license then goes on to place any
               | number of restrictions on its use, implying that you
               | don't, in fact, "own" the "underlying Art" at all.
               | 
               | NFTs don't solve the fundamental problem of trust, they
               | only solve the problem of a shared ledger. And it turns
               | out that they don't even solve the problem of trust _in
               | that ledger_ , and the community seems to be pretty split
               | on questions like whether someone who steals an NFT from
               | someone else "owns" it or not.
               | 
               | A lot of the NFT hype about distributed consensus boils
               | down to "the code is law, except for these exceptions
               | when it's not, and except for when the code has a bug,
               | and except for when the real law steps in and threatens
               | to send someone to jail." In short, if the answer to "how
               | do I know an NFT is legitimately issued by the artist who
               | made the artwork" is "community consensus/law", then the
               | blockchain isn't actually solving the problem of
               | ownership, the community/law is.
               | 
               | "That's My Ape" offers transparent, user-facing reliance
               | on a system that everyone in the NFT space is already
               | relying on anyway.
        
             | a9h74j wrote:
             | Check out, also, Writers Guild of America West.[1] They
             | provide an online service for registering a file of up to
             | 10MB. IIRC the fee is $25 or $50. The result is legal
             | evidence, acccording to them.
             | 
             | One use case, so I heard: Rather than showing a copyright
             | date on an old script (which can date it and suggest is has
             | been rejected many times), the cover page can specify
             | "Registered with WGAw"
             | 
             | [1] https://wgawregistry.org/Register.aspx?CookieCheck=1
        
             | smoe wrote:
             | At least for digital music
             | 
             | - register and embed ISRC code that have been around since
             | the late 80s into your recording to automatically handle
             | licensing fees and track sales
             | 
             | - send registered letter containing the recording and any
             | associated contracts to yourself and never open it (or to a
             | bank safe or lawyer or something if you want to get fancy)
             | 
             | It's not sexy tech, but holds up in court. Doesn't solve
             | all the problems the crypto world products claim to solve,
             | but then again, the mechanics of getting paid is about the
             | least of problems for artist imho.
        
           | katmannthree wrote:
           | This is explicitly satire criticizing the concept of
           | ownership of goods being derived from arbitrary tokens rather
           | than defined by the extant legal framework in virtually every
           | jurisdiction. From the end of the article:
           | 
           | >Q: Is any of this for real?
           | 
           | >A: No. Good lord. If you want to protect your digital
           | rights, hire a lawyer. If it wasn't immediately clear that
           | this is a work of satire, we've got some NFTs to sell you.
        
             | Cantinflas wrote:
             | Hire a lawyer. What a great solution! We don't even need
             | computers for that!
        
               | riccardomc wrote:
               | > "we don't even need computers for that!"
               | 
               | Upon reading these words, he suddenly awakened to
               | enlightenment.
        
               | afavour wrote:
               | Maybe if we call the lawyer cost "gas fees" everyone will
               | let it slide.
        
               | AlexAndScripts wrote:
               | But this lawyer that showed up 3 weeks ago is making the
               | rounds on twitter with 4 week old accounts, and they have
               | much lower fees! Sure, they only communicate through tor,
               | but that's the beauty of it: complete anonymity.
        
       | vyrotek wrote:
       | Wait, is this suggesting you use traditional centralized services
       | to confirm ownership of decentralized items?
        
         | jamescostian wrote:
         | From the FAQ:
         | 
         | > Q. Can I see the source code and run it locally?
         | 
         | > Yes. The source code for That's My Ape! is available here and
         | is licensed for local, personal use.
         | 
         | The word "here" in that quote is a link to the source code:
         | https://github.com/cryptogogue/thatsmyape
         | 
         | Theoretically, "anyone" can run thatsmyape locally, and
         | assuming they've ran `npm install`, they don't even need
         | internet access to do so. Not sure how realistic this is in
         | reality - there aren't even any instructions to get set up, but
         | if there were, then an even larger set of "anyone" could run
         | it.
         | 
         | That said, this is of course a joke. Also from their FAQ:
         | 
         | > Q. Is any of this for real?
         | 
         | > No. Good lord. If you want to protect your digital rights,
         | hire a lawyer. If it wasn't immediately clear that this is a
         | work of satire, we've got some NFTs to sell you.
        
         | bondarchuk wrote:
         | Isn't that the whole point of the satire? Anyone can make
         | duplicates of any NFT on the blockchain so you _still_ need a
         | central authority to say which is the real million dollar jpg
         | and which is a copy, even though it 's on a blockchain.
        
       | timdaub wrote:
       | I suggest that to fix the problem of a single owner being able to
       | sign away the ape to more than one person, the app could be
       | extended as such:
       | 
       | - For every new custody signature, the signer publishes the
       | transfer online to a collectively-maintained database
       | 
       | - We chose the database software such that is publicly accessible
       | to anyone that wants to participate in ape collecting and
       | checking custody signatures
       | 
       | - In case some people start to get annoying and illegitimately
       | edit the custody database, we somehow try to lock the databases
       | edit function making it append-only
        
         | er4hn wrote:
         | This is very similar to the concept of "certificate
         | transparency logs" for x509s
        
       | Jerrrry wrote:
       | This was brilliant, I had a chuckle.
        
       | gfodor wrote:
       | I'm trying to remember what satirical slash comic book guy style
       | sites + examples like this there were to ridicule bitcoin.
        
         | petesergeant wrote:
         | https://www.computercoins.website/
        
         | emodendroket wrote:
         | I suppose the point here is that those critics have all been
         | "proven wrong." Bitcoin has proven a great vehicle for
         | speculation but the other promises seem unfulfilled.
        
       | neximo64 wrote:
       | Can't you make a new signature in the future?
        
       | NelsonMinar wrote:
       | But how do I gamble my magic beans with this system? If it's not
       | emitting 30kg of CO2 to mint a new ape is it really art?
        
       | folli wrote:
       | Too complicated, just use http://nuftu.com and get a "real" NFT
       | from your artwork in like 5 minutes.
        
       | mcherm wrote:
       | Honestly, not even bothering to solve the "double spend" problem
       | makes this much less than it could have been.
       | 
       | After all, it is very easy to solve the "double spend" problem
       | without the use of a blockchain: simply use a single trusted
       | authority.
       | 
       | You know how every time you buy a house or piece of land you have
       | to get a state-licensed notary to verify your identity, And then
       | after signing the deed you have to send the paperwork to the
       | county registrar because if they don't write it in their books
       | then the land hasn't actually changed hands? That was NFTs
       | working fairly well long before the invention of blockchain or
       | computers or cryptography.
        
         | toomuchtodo wrote:
         | Trustless solutions have no place in a world with robust trust,
         | which is most of the developed world and parts of the
         | developing world. The solution isn't blockchain, it's more
         | trust and the organizations and governance that builds that
         | trust.
        
           | rglullis wrote:
           | Why does it have to be a binary property?
           | 
           | Yes, I buy many domains and I don't expect them to be taken
           | away from me. But I like the idea of having alternative ENS
           | names (yes, ENS domains are NFTs) as some kind of hedge
           | against the occasional top-level domain crisis, or in the odd
           | chance that my domain registrar fucks up/gets hacked or even
           | as some kind of back-up plan for the case where registrars
           | decide to collude and increase prices.
           | 
           | Same thing for banking/finance. Yes, SEPA works well in
           | Europe and in 99% of the cases I am okay using my credit
           | card. It doesn't negate the case where I'd like to pay
           | someone where the only alternative is Paypal and with it its
           | crazy fees, odd cancellations, poor customer support, etc.
           | 
           | For merchants, the same. Not long ago OnlyFans almost
           | destroyed its own business because it wanted to kill its
           | adult content side. The reason? Mastercard. Should we be
           | telling all the sex workers and adult entertainers that we
           | should be better at "building trust", or should we be able to
           | say "crypto payments can be an alternative and do not depend
           | on the interests of some powerful group with the right
           | connections"?
        
             | jspaetzel wrote:
             | ENS is great until you lose control of it due to a hack or
             | a death. Compare the reprocussions of that with the
             | traditional system.
        
               | rglullis wrote:
               | OpsSec is and should always be part of the vocabulary for
               | anyone dealing with crypto seriously and they should know
               | that they need to have a plan for the inevitable. Also,
               | more and more smart wallets are implementing solutions
               | that allow for social recovery of keys.
               | 
               | > Compare the reprocussions of that with the traditional
               | system.
               | 
               | It's a _hedge_. It works both ways.
        
             | shatteredgate wrote:
             | >Should we be telling all the sex workers and adult
             | entertainers that we should be better at "building trust"
             | 
             | Given that the reason there was controversy around OnlyFans
             | was because of scandals about child sex trafficking, I'd
             | say yes. The rest of society should be able to trust that
             | OnlyFans is not providing a platform for trafficking
             | children; crypto payments do nothing to solve that problem,
             | they may even make it worse. They're really good at
             | increasing fees for middlemen though, and it's very
             | frustrating to hear them pitched as a solution to something
             | when the original problem seems to so often get lost in
             | translation.
        
               | rglullis wrote:
               | > controversy around OnlyFans.
               | 
               | I'm not going to argue about the specifics of OnlyFans
               | because I'm honestly not aware of the details. In any
               | case, you are missing the point. I could talk about any
               | "legit" adult site and all the extra fees they have to
               | pay because of the risk and credit card fraud associated
               | with the industry, or I could even just use a more
               | "innocent" example such as Gumroad or Steam, who sell
               | only digital content, and would benefit from crypto-
               | payment systems: no chargebacks, no fees for
               | micropayments, no currency conversion fees, etc.
               | 
               | > they're really good at increasing fees for middlemen
               | though.
               | 
               | I can make transfers now of any amount of ETH/DAI for
               | exactly $0.19. [0] This is already competitive with
               | credit card transfers for less than $5. Raiden [1]
               | released today a new version of their client, so you can
               | have decentralized transfers for virtually free
               | (fractions of a cent if the transfer needs to be mediated
               | by other nodes, but basically free otherwise).
               | 
               | [0]: https://l2fees.info/ [1]: https://raiden.network
        
               | shatteredgate wrote:
               | I can't see how that is the point, I honestly don't
               | understand what cryptocurrency provides there at all.
               | I've seen nothing about it that suggests it has some kind
               | of novel solution to fraud prevention; no chargebacks
               | just means the customer now has no recourse from a
               | fraudulent vendor, so you've pushed the cost of fraud all
               | onto them. It's also possible to get no fees for
               | micropayments and no currency conversion fees with a more
               | traditional virtual currency, crypto only adds costs on
               | top of that.
               | 
               | >Raiden released today a new version of their client, so
               | you can have decentralized transfers for virtually free
               | 
               | I've read some of their blog series:
               | https://medium.com/raiden-network/raiden-protocol-
               | explained-...
               | 
               | It seems like an interesting way to do peer-to-peer
               | lending, that is not specific to cryptocurrency. I would
               | be interested to see the same algorithm deployed on a
               | credit card network to see if the fees can be reduced
               | even farther.
        
               | rglullis wrote:
               | > no chargebacks just means the customer now has no
               | recourse from a fraudulent vendor.
               | 
               | This is the realm of the social layer, not the
               | technology. You _can_ add an escrow system or even use a
               | reputation-based approach as a way to manage fraud, but
               | the idea is that it is optional. If all you want is to
               | buy some cheap and fast content online, you can 't do
               | that with credit card but you can with crypto.
               | 
               | > It's also possible to get no fees for micropayments
               | 
               | Please point me to _one_ micropayment solution that does
               | not involve middlemen and /or extraordinarily high fees
               | (in proportion to the value of the transaction).
               | 
               | > and no currency conversion fees with a more traditional
               | virtual currency, crypto only adds costs on top of that.
               | 
               | Problem statement: you are a software company in the UK
               | and you want to contract a developer based in Argentina.
               | She wants to receive (in Pesos) the equivalent to 500GBP.
               | 
               | Find me some non-crypto alternative where she can get
               | that amount with minimal loss. We can compare notes later
               | if you want, but I can tell you a crypto alternative
               | where the cost is less than 0.3%.
        
           | darawk wrote:
           | Trust requires us to give leverage to centralized authorities
           | over our critical records. If you deposit money in a bank,
           | they can unilaterally decide that you can't withdraw it
           | today. Their systems can be down. They can be closed at a
           | time you want access to your money, etc. Or the person at the
           | front desk can simply not like you, and if they're the only
           | branch in town, you're out of luck.
           | 
           | Critically, trust like this comes from scale. The likelihood
           | of a bank screwing you personally over diminishes as the bank
           | grows larger. In other contexts, people call this a network
           | effect, and it is an anti-competitive moat. Even if we
           | completely trust the bank, which we don't, this anti-
           | competitive moat leads to all sorts of problems, like
           | stagnation of service quality (look how long it took us to
           | get same day wire transfers and decent quality online
           | banking).
           | 
           | Decentralized systems democratize trust. They break anti-
           | competitive network effect driven moats. This is a good
           | thing, even if we completely trust our centralized
           | authorities, which again, we should not.
        
             | jakear wrote:
             | Doesn't the entire NFT market rely on trusting that the
             | company you bought your "certified original one of a kind
             | URL pointing to the image they host" doesn't cease to
             | exist?
        
               | rglullis wrote:
               | No. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29609617
        
               | acdha wrote:
               | The correct answer is yes. You're still paying to host
               | the content even if you add new ways to pay to update a
               | shortlink. ENS has to point somewhere and that someone
               | will want to be paid for their time and resources.
        
               | rglullis wrote:
               | No. ENS records are on the blockchain. Once you executed
               | the contract that gives you ownership to a name, it will
               | be yours for the time you paid it for. The ENS developers
               | can not revoke it and they can not change the underlying
               | records or subdomains.
        
               | acdha wrote:
               | Still yes: ENS records are a pointer, not the data
               | itself. You will need to pay to host that data and you
               | will need to pay every time you change the ENS pointer.
        
               | shiohime wrote:
               | NFTs are simply single issue tokens that can optionally
               | be part of a collection. While most NFTs today take the
               | form of a link to decentralized storage on solutions such
               | as IPFS or Arweave, it is completely possible for an NFT
               | to provide value as a token. For example you can have a
               | project where NFTs provide access to services, as well as
               | optionally have links to art. But you really don't need
               | to have the art aspect at all, you can use them as access
               | tokens or whatever you want really.
        
               | jakear wrote:
               | So it's either an expensive way to claim ownership of a
               | resource provided other people are trusted to do the
               | actual work of hosting that resource, or it's an
               | expensive way to replace JWT's. Exciting. Truly.
        
               | shiohime wrote:
               | NFTs are only expensive on Ethereum. You can mint for
               | cents or less on other chains.
        
               | rglullis wrote:
               | Expensive on Ethereum's _base layer_. Don 't forget the
               | many layer-2 solutions. Loopring is about to launch its
               | marketplace, ImmutableX is already live as well.
        
               | shiohime wrote:
               | Yes, thanks for the clarification.
        
               | rglullis wrote:
               | Your cheap jab says more about your lack of imagination
               | about potential use-cases than about whatever
               | shortcomings the technology has at the moment.
               | 
               | Okta is a multi-billion business and could also be
               | characterized as "an expensive way to replace JWTs".
               | Authz/authn is one of the most common use cases that
               | every application developer needs to implement. How much
               | would you like to bet that in 5 years time NFT-based
               | authz/authz will be bigger than Okta's market?
        
             | bb88 wrote:
             | > Decentralized systems democratize trust.
             | 
             | What you're asking us to trust is that:                 1.
             | We trust the coders to know what is best for us.       2.
             | You can write perfect code so that our money is safe.
             | 3.  The price will never plummet.
             | 
             | I've observed:                 1.  Mt. Gox Failure       2.
             | DAO Failure       3.  First BTC price crash       4.  USDT
             | regulatory concerns       5.  Lack of learning from
             | failures       6.  Politics still exist, they just moved to
             | the coding layer       7.  Willful ignorance of the scams
             | and crimes cryptocurrencies has enabled       7.1  Because
             | somehow cryptocurrency is better for us.       8.  Hype
             | over price security and software security       8.1
             | Because somehow cryptocurrency is better for us.
             | 
             | Trust in USDT is centralized in the corporation Tether and
             | has none of the benefits you mentioned. Trust in BTC is
             | hoping (praying?) that the price doesn't crash, and
             | software doesn't control the price, humans do.
        
               | rglullis wrote:
               | I can use blockchain apps all of my life and even if
               | there are people (now) making billions of USD worth of
               | Tether transfers, I _never_ will be forced to accept it,
               | because I don 't trust them. That is _exactly_ what
               | "democratized trust" looks like.
        
               | darawk wrote:
               | > What you're asking us to trust is that:
               | 
               | > 1. We trust the coders to know what is best for us. >
               | 2. You can write perfect code so that our money is safe.
               | > 3. The price will never plummet.
               | 
               | Nobody is asking that. The source code is public, read it
               | and decide for yourself. Good luck doing that at your
               | local bank. There are plenty of stablecoins, you don't
               | have to take on crypto exposure.
               | 
               | > 1. Mt. Gox Failure
               | 
               | Totally irrelevant.
               | 
               | > 2. DAO Failure
               | 
               | Sure, a public commons infrastructure will elicit a lot
               | of bad projects. Just like the vast majority of open
               | source projects are bad. This is not an indictment of
               | open source.
               | 
               | > 3. First BTC price crash
               | 
               | Irrelevant.
               | 
               | > 4. USDT regulatory concerns
               | 
               | Use one of the many other stablecoins, then. This is the
               | beauty of the system. It's actually open, so there are a
               | diversity of issuers. You could even start one yourself,
               | if you wanted.
               | 
               | > 5. Lack of learning from failures
               | 
               | There is an enormous amount of learning from failures. If
               | you believe there isn't, you aren't paying attention.
               | 
               | > 6. Politics still exist, they just moved to the coding
               | layer
               | 
               | Yes, this is true. However, this layer is thin, by
               | design. That means the layers above it, which implement
               | most of the relevant functionality, are a diverse
               | ecosystem of choice. Contrast to the thickness of
               | politics in other domains.
               | 
               | > 7. Willful ignorance of the scams and crimes
               | cryptocurrencies has enabled > 7.1 Because somehow
               | cryptocurrency is better for us.
               | 
               | New technology brings about scams roughly in proportion
               | to its power. The internet enabled tons of scams. Fiat
               | currency enabled tons of scams. Coinage enabled tons of
               | scams. And so did banks, particularly of the fractional
               | reserve variety.
               | 
               | That doesn't mean scams are good or should be tolerated.
               | But it takes time to develop the social and political
               | conventions to deal with them. I believe that process is
               | taking place in crypto, though perhaps not as quickly as
               | we'd like. I think if you look back at the history of
               | other comparable technologies, you will see that crypto
               | is pretty far ahead of the game in this regard, though.
               | 
               | > 8. Hype over price security and software security > 8.1
               | Because somehow cryptocurrency is better for us.
               | 
               | Sure. Lots of elements of crypto are overhyped. Overhype
               | comes along with any transformative technology. See hype
               | about carbon nanotubes, nuclear power, 3d printing, etc.
               | Hype is an indictment of people, not technology.
        
               | e9 wrote:
               | > Nobody is asking that. The source code is public, read
               | it and decide for yourself. Good luck doing that at your
               | local bank. There are plenty of stablecoins, you don't
               | have to take on crypto exposure.
               | 
               | Most people are not advanced coders and will never be. So
               | most people still have to trust a random coder (be it
               | close friend or someone on the news or online). If
               | something happens to your money because someone took
               | advantage of you in the code then good luck getting
               | anything back. At least with banks there are laws around
               | this stuff and you can actually get your money back. For
               | average person this is still the way to go.
        
               | acdha wrote:
               | There's also a massive unregulated conflict of interest
               | here: reviewing the source code will require experience
               | which someone is unlikely to have without also having a
               | financial interest in expanded use of cryptocurrencies.
               | As we've seen so many times over from all of the
               | cryptocurrency boosters who talked up code or services
               | until a major problem occurred, this can cloud someone's
               | judgement even if they're not intentionally scamming you.
        
           | anonporridge wrote:
           | The fundamental problem with systems based on trust in
           | humans, is that even if you completely trust the humans in
           | control _today_ those people will eventually be replaced, by
           | death if nothing else.
           | 
           | So, you also need a system of determining succession of
           | trusted individuals that not only selects humans who can be
           | trusted, but humans who understand the challenge of defending
           | the purity of succession procedure. All it takes is one
           | corrupted transition. One person submitting to a little
           | nepotism, to poison the entire system.
           | 
           | And of course, wherever you create a centralized repository
           | of power, whether it's a hoard of wealth, a position of
           | authority, the head of cult following, or admin access to a
           | database, you immediately create a game for power hungry
           | people to figure out a way to corrupt the systems in place
           | that prevent abuse of that power.
           | 
           |  _This_ is why so many people are working towards
           | decentralizing systems of power. Hell, even the US
           | constitution is an instantiation of that, with the
           | established separation of powers between the 3 branches of
           | government. While we recognize that centralizing all
           | governmental power in a single position can lead to
           | incredible efficiencies if you get the right person in
           | charge, it is also incredibly fragile and dangerous in the
           | long run. We accept the inefficiencies of decentralized
           | systems in exchange for long term stability and anti-
           | fragility.
        
           | voakbasda wrote:
           | I think you overestimate the amount of trust that some of us
           | have in organizations and governance.
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | toomuchtodo wrote:
             | So we should implement suboptimal systems, proven to be
             | inferior technically, at scale for a vocal minority?
        
               | rglullis wrote:
               | Who is the "we" that is actually implementing things and
               | putting their skin in the game, if not this "vocal
               | minority" that wants to build an alternative? I don't
               | know of any developer in crypto being forced to work on
               | things against their will.
        
           | xyzzy123 wrote:
           | What about the permissionless angle.
           | 
           | Right now, anyone can go an build a new notary or governance
           | protocol on blockchain, for their own purposes, without
           | asking for anyone's permission.
           | 
           | Government trust is great, and bank anchored trust is great,
           | but neither of those parties has as yet volunteered to run
           | the kind of digital infrastructure required to run your own
           | stuff on top of, and can you imagine the paperwork? (I bet
           | there are some bank efforts but good luck getting on their
           | platform).
        
         | 542458 wrote:
         | The thing I don't get about NFTs in general is that they don't
         | actually seem trustless to me. You need some sort of trusted
         | source that says "this NFT is genuine and not just a
         | bootleg"... and at that point you might as well just have that
         | trusted source track ownership.
        
           | lekevicius wrote:
           | It's a problem, I agree, but because the "authenticity
           | information" can be expressed somewhat succinctly (it's just
           | a smart contract address), the trust element can be
           | decentralized. Artist might post it on their Twitter,
           | Instagram and website -- if they all agree, and you as a
           | buyer trust that the author is actually managing their
           | Instagram, Twitter and website -- then there might be enough
           | to create real world - digital world trust bridge. This is
           | particularly easy if an artist is working primarily online
           | and their digital identity already is the main contributor to
           | their fame.
        
           | timdaub wrote:
           | e.g. that's why famous nft artists either have their ENS name
           | in their Twitter bio or as their name. With that, you know
           | that e.g. if shaq.eth minted an NFT, it's indeed the real
           | shaq o'neal as otherwise the imposter shaq.eth registrar
           | would have had to have the access to the real shaq o'neal's
           | Twitter account.
        
             | codebje wrote:
             | Doesn't that make Twitter the central authority providing
             | the trust framework required for it to work?
        
               | timdaub wrote:
               | no because similar to PGP keys it really doesn't matter
               | where you publish your fingerprint or how you connect
               | your identities. If shaq had a popular website, he could
               | do it there too. E.g. I have my PGP fingerprint on my
               | website: https://timdaub.github.io
        
           | judge2020 wrote:
           | NFTs are trusting a single authority, which is the consensus
           | of all of the nodes/miners of the blockchain. Sure, if you go
           | to opensea and try to find the owner of a NFT, they could lie
           | and become an accomplice in a double-spend scheme; but in
           | general you could also download and watch the entire
           | transaction chain and search through it locally (with trusted
           | and auditable OSS) to verify ownership and transfers.
        
             | acdha wrote:
             | > NFTs are trusting a single authority, which is the
             | consensus of all of the nodes/miners of the blockchain.
             | 
             | That's only for the in-chain history. To actually be able
             | to trust that the NFT is what it's represented as, you also
             | need outside third-parties. For example, many artists are
             | having to deal with NFTs fraudulently claiming to represent
             | their work or benefit the artist, which is not something
             | you can validate using only information on the blockchain.
             | 
             | Once you have a way to confirm the authenticity of the NFT,
             | you also don't need the blockchain because the actual trust
             | is coming from the artist's own statement.
        
               | judge2020 wrote:
               | Well yes, but the technology behind NFTs is explicitly
               | just for solving the problem of double-spend/duplication.
               | The authenticity is always provided off-chain since
               | identity and reputation is still managed off-chain, so
               | while "is this NFT real or impersonating an existing
               | contract" is off-chain, the "who is currently owner"
               | question is answered on-chain and requires no further
               | trust or approval of the original artist.
        
               | acdha wrote:
               | But again only for the NFT, not the actual work of art.
        
           | shiohime wrote:
           | But you can determine NFT authenticity by only examining
           | onchain data. You can for instance check the program ID that
           | executed the mint and that it is verified (in the case of
           | Solana, at least), it's a pretty simple verification system
           | that is using entirely onchain data for validation.
        
           | basch wrote:
           | The authors name next to the creation? The source of trust is
           | the authors signature, and societies consensus that the
           | author is who they say they are.
        
             | Qworg wrote:
             | The thousands of stolen artworks from DeviantArt being
             | turned into NFTs beg to differ.
        
               | basch wrote:
               | The author of the hyperlink, not the photo.
               | 
               | The NFT is the hyperlink, not what it links to.
        
               | notahacker wrote:
               | Ah yes, they're not scammers masquerading as the artist,
               | they're authors of genuine artisanal hyperlinks,
               | flawlessly typed with the same hands they lovingly Ctrl/C
               | Ctrl/Vd the image to the handcrafted hyperlink endpoint.
        
               | eropple wrote:
               | The kicker that amazes me is that when artists register
               | their incredulity and their offense about this (and
               | OpenSea seems to tacitly be A-OK with the whole
               | practice), the randos pile into their mentions asking why
               | they won't _work with_ the people misappropriating their
               | work in this way.
               | 
               | Can't imagine why not. Can't at all. Nope.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | makk wrote:
       | Web 2 was "if you don't know what the product is, you are the
       | product."
       | 
       | Web 3 is "if you don't know what is being owned, you are being
       | owned."
       | 
       | Not saying that disparagingly. Just is.
        
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