Hacker News Reader

Comment by emptyparadise | Hacker News Reader

At least you actually get to own beanie babies.

You could play with them to. My sister had loads as toys, bought for around £10 and given away to other kids when she was too old. There was a point to beanie babies other than trying to convince some bigger sucker it had rarity value and they should pay more money for it. I bought my niece a beanie baby recently. I doubt she'd have as much fun with a cryptographic signature claiming she owned a gif.

I'll sell you a paper that says you own a Beanie Baby. That's NFT for you, but without the paper, so you don't even own a paper.

What if Beanie Babies had had authenticity NFTs on the Loopring chain (meaning secured by the Ethereum chain, if Loopring encounters a escalator-becomes-stairs moment),

in order to cut down on the knockoffs, fake tags etc that ate into the LTV of Beanie Babies?

Is there any advantage to doing this over just having a certificate of authenticity signed with the manufacturer's key?

Ease of transfer, even/especially if their centralized app and server goes down.

But that's still detached from the actual physical object. I'm thinking you'd want a physical certificate with a verifiable signature, which would be easy if we have the relevant public keys. Or equivalent, something like a tiny QR code on the actual physical thing that can be scanned to verify the details + their authenticity. Digital stuff is blurrier but actual physical possession of an item is the only absolute way to determine its owner at a specific point in time, all contracts be damned.

Yes, you can etch the key onto the thing as a QR — but I'm not beating away the evangelicals who will call you the Antichrist when you do!

You don’t need a centralized app to make or verify a public key signature and it’s many orders of magnitude less expensive than a blockchain transaction.

Those can be copy and pasted.

Ownership of your unique token, from the Beanie Baby collection on Loopring/the Ethereum protocol, cannot.

And, of course, you wouldn't take one without the other, in most cases....

They can be copy and pasted just like messages on a blockchain — all that does is give someone else a backup copy of your signature. They can’t use that to forge messages to create new copies - only the holder of the private key can do that, and if you try to cheat by issuing the same transaction multiple times it’s immediately obvious.

The key to understanding how this works is remembering that blockchains are only useful when none of the parties involved have identities or trust relationships. In this scenario, you’re exchanging physical objects in the real world which need to be verified for authenticity (which cannot happen on the blockchain) and the trust is rooted in the idea that the manufacturer will not issue the same serial number to multiple people. A blockchain doesn’t add trust or safety, just overhead and expense.

Sorry, I'm out of crayons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com