this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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Yes pictures can be copied and pasted. Digital receipts cannot be forged. It's the difference between "here is an image" and "I own this image".
I own it. I just copied it. It's on my computer. Mine now
Obviously that's not how ownership works.
EDIT: I'm surprised to be getting so many downvotes on this. Are people under the impression they own movies and music they download through torrents? Again, obviously there is a difference between "I have this digital content" and "I own this digital content"
I'm out of the loop here, how does ownership actually impact the world in these cases? If I buy an nft image do I own the copyright to it? Do I get legal control over its use? What's the deal here? I see a lot of talk about ownership of a digital asset but I have thousands of digital images stored and I don't get why a blockchain is needed in the situation?
Good question! In almost all cases, you ONLY own the NFT "wrapper" around the content
For example, if you own an NFT of a picture, you only own the NFT. You do not own the picture or any kind of rights to it
Did you ever buy any movies from itunes?
I did not no, I'm an ardent believer that proprietary file format is a bad form for media as it relies on a single entity to maintain its support.
Yes and another reason not to was it relied on a centralized database to prove ownership which Apple shut down.
A decentralized proof of purchase system provides the means for addressing this problem.
I get that part, the crypto stuff is just a fancy way of getting the paper receipt when I buy a movie at the store. Where I get lost is the product. From what I understand of the nft system, the code isn't in any way related to the image, it's just a receipt of purchase. Does buying this monkey image give the buyer copyright? Does it allow the buyer to distribute the image? Does it work like album art, where the band buys the image from an artist to use as album art making all future usages of that image the property of band? Or are these just a cool sticker that comes with the purchase of a unique string of code that people are using to speculate?
If you're questioning the value of digital receipts for monkey images I'm not disputing that. For me that's on par with beanie babies, postage stamps and other odd things people collect. I don't have to be excited about the current application to be excited about the fact that it works and what that means it could be used for in the future.
And of course, it would make sense that such a system wouldn't be used for something significantly important like property deeds or car registrations right away. NFTs are just another phase of demonstrating the capabilities.
I don't own the NFT, but I own everything in the NFT that matters (the picture)
Again, that's obviously not how ownership works. You can download movies and music too. Doesn't mean you own them. If your argument is "it doesn't stop piracy" I'm not disagreeing with that.
I didn't say that. You genuinely don't understand what NFTs are or how any kind of "ownership" works with them. I don't blame you for your ignorance because that's how they sell them. I blame you for passionately defending your ignorance instead of learning the actual, objective truth
Lol. I gave a counter argument that had nothing to do with NFTs that blew up your home brewed understanding of what digital ownership is and then you turn around and accuse me of ignorance?
Just because digital content is on your device doesn't mean you own it. That's the case for digital movies, music, books and so forth and has been long before NFTs were even a thing. This isn't up for debate. Until you acknowledge that there's no point in even having a conversation.
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Blockchain (assuming that's what your digital receipts are based on) has no concept of identity. They're anonymous by design. Because of that, the concept of "ownership" doesn't really jive with blockchain, because the concept of "ownership" is inherently based on identity. All blockchain is good for is "yes, this transaction is valid", or "no, this transaction is invalid", where a "transaction" is simply the transfer of digital goods (cryptocurrency, nfts, whatever else) from one crypto wallet to another. Anyone with the keys to a particular crypto wallet can access the contents of said wallet, whether they "own" it or not.
So yes, the receipt cannot be forged. The receipt is next to useless though, because all it says is "here's a record of this valid transaction between these two crypto wallets" - there's no record of real, actual ownership or identification involved. And at the end of the day, bits are bits. You can wave your receipt at me all day and claim your bits are the "real" ones, but they're no different from my bits that I downloaded from Twitter.
Anyone claiming to be the owner can cryptographically prove that ownership at any time.
No they can't. They can cryptographically prove that a particular transaction on the ledger is valid. That transaction is not linked to an identity, by design, so it means absolutely nothing as far as ownership goes.
Buddy, you don't know what you're talking about. Private key signatures have been used to prove identities for decades. Do a little research on the basics of digital cryptography before speaking on the subject.
You just proved my point. By itself, blockchain cannot do identification. You need to use something external like private key signatures to do that.
No I didn't prove your point. Private key signatures are a fundamental component of blockchains. Without them blockchains cannot function.
I figure this will probably be a lost cause but let me try to explains some basics about "blockchain". I'll be focusing on Bitcoin specifically since that's what I have the most knowledge in but every cryptocurrency is based in some part on the way Bitcoin works.
The blocks in the chain are comprised of a series of transactions. The first transaction being the coinbase transaction which is the reward miners receive for mining the block. This transaction is unique in that it has no inputs. All other transactions will have inputs with a total balance greater than or equal to the outputs. Any leftovers are also given to the miners as a mining reward. Transactions are verified by miners using private key signatures. Each input is accompanied by a signature proving the inputs are being spent by the individual or group who owns those inputs. Once all transactions have been verified by the miner and the coinbase transaction has been created the miner sets about to mine the block. They do this by hashing the entire block and hoping for a result that comes underneath the value of the mining target.
I can go into more detail on any aspect of this. But what I'm mainly pointing out is that private key signatures are not something external. You cannot have a distributed ledger without some mechanism for proving ownership. Otherwise anyone could spend anybody else's bitcoin. You can leverage other pieces of data contained within a transaction output to represent other information such as the hash of a digital content like an image. An owner can cryptographically demonstrate they have the ability to spend an output without spending it. Thus demonstrating they own digital content which hashes to that value. You can do this with pictures, movies, music, books... whatever.
And frankly, that's the boring part of the capability. Cities and counties could use hashes of deeds or full text of deeds themselves to represent property ownership. Essentially placing the burden of backups, redundancy and lookups on the decentralized nature on a blockchain. This opens the door for better interconnectivity between the way various government bodies track ownership of things like land, homes, cars and whatever else. All this information is already public and stored digitally but the money spent on creating and maintaining these individual systems is incredibly wasteful. The lack of consistency also creates problems in legal spaces.