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Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

In the second case, couldn't Louis Vuitton also host the associated records itself?

There are several concepts related to this in other areas: provenance, catalogues raisonnés, serial numbers, title registries, pedigree registries, among others. People who make or who deal in rare or expensive things often adopt some of these mechanisms to help answer questions like: which one is this? is it genuine? who owns it? who used to own it? is it stolen?

(There are lots of different threats, but some of these mechanisms help respond to each. Properly identifying and authenticating an individual object may be the hardest problem of all here—but that's potentially less of a database issue than the others.)

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Unsurprisingly, catalogues raisonnes are a hotbed of legal activity and controversy. Many scholars will now not offer opinions on the authenticity of a work for fear of getting sued:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/arts/design/art-scholars-...

And works with supposedly excellent provenance still end up being repudiated by authentication committees:

https://www.antiquestradegazette.com/news/2011/double-denied...

Due to the misaligned incentives in the art authentication world, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that a blockchain would be a good way of tracking records in the artworld, particularly if artists register works directly on it.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/06/how-i-became-leonardo-da-vi...

  By putting your artwork on the "BitCoin Blockchain", 
  Verisart will hand wavy magic increase the trust in 
  art dealers and reduce fraud.


  That's a pretty neat idea. A distributed public ledger of 
  who I have sold my art to. And, if they sell it, they have 
  a cryptographically signed certificate proving its 
  provenance. The seller can sign the certificate with their 
  private key to say they've sold it to the new owner of a 
  specific public key. Nifty!


  Except… and I hate to bring the art industry into 
  disrepute… what if I sell a fake and keep the original in 
  my Underground Vault?


  There's no way to permanently attach a digital certificate 
  to a physical work of art.

  Incidentally, this is the problem with all the startups 
  claiming the blockchain will revolutionise the integrity 
  of global logistics markets. Sure, you can slap a QR code 
  on a crate - but nothing stops an unscrupulous middle-man 
  from replacing or adulterating the contents of the crate.

  Let's get back to Verisart's other issue. Proving that I 
  am the creator or owner of a piece of artwork.


  Long story short, I convinced them that I painted the Mona 
  Lisa.

In China there is a lot of issue with fake milk powder. You can now buy powder which contains a barcode in the container sealed at the factory that you can look up online to Ensure it came from the factory and not a 3rd party counterfeit. Blockchain adds exactly 0 value to this.

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