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A UUID would work fine. Every product gets a UUID and it goes into a public DB hosted by the manufacturer (or a 3rd party that verifies who is publishing the data).

Then anyone can query against that database to verify if a product is legitimate.

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Wouldn't counterfeiters scrape that database for legitimate UUID's? You could allow consumers to "claim" a UUID as theirs (and when I get a product with the same UUID, I can assume it's a dupe), but that requires every consumer to actually do this...

Make it difficult to scrape?

At the end of the day... we know these things get leaked anyway...

Yes. I did not think it through well enough.

The proposed blockchain solution also requires users to register.

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