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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

How would that stop people from getting ripped off by fakes?

fakes wouldn't come with a token that verifies the book is authentic. They are doing the same thing with luxury watches and fashion items. i.e. the real Gucci purse comes with an NFT, (likely NFT + NFC) for authentication and coms with the brand.

How would anyone know to look for an NFT on the fake?

The target of the scammers is someone browsing Amazon, who isn't going to know to look for an NFT. Someone familiar with the author is just going to check the author's website and see the list of books they've published.

The NFT/NFC is locked so the tag is immutable, and only the seller and Amazon have the public key. Barring some hack on the NFT/NFC tagging software (which could happen in theory), you'd need both the private and public key to create a counterfeit object, along with a MFA token of some sort (e.g., biometric data, another OTP like Yubikey). And this would be true for every physical and/or digital print.

If I'm following your idea correctly, a prerequisite would be that we as a society would need to make it impossible to publish a book, digital or physical, without an attached NFT.

It's also worth mentioning that the OP of this comment thread promised a solution that any author could implement without Amazon's involvement, presumably because Amazon is disinterested or disincentivized to care.

No. Not necessary. You only need the verified NFT linked to “authentic” books. 3rd party service does minting and verification. It’s the same strategy luxury fashion houses are using with tagging physical products with NFTs for authentication

I do not misunderstand what an NFT is theoretically technically capable of. The problem is that your proposed idea is non-responsive to the underlying problem that fakes and counterfeits are trivial to source on Amazon.

Wouldn't that require the NFC tag to have a HSM / secure enclave? If the tag just contains a signed token, they'd just copy it, but sticking a secure enclave in an NFC tag is... probably doable, but not cheap or easy. (Or if I'm wrong please correct me, because cheap/easy secure enclaves would be interesting, or I might be missing some detail of how you'd do the NFT side)

No. The NFC chip plus the unique NFT makes it impossible to copy

The counterfeit book won't have an NFT. Someone browsing Amazon will buy a counterfeit Jane Friedman book, and won't know to look for an NFT. The only people who know to look for an NFT will be those who read Jane Friedman's website where she talks about her NFT books, and they'll buy a book from a link on her website, so the NFT won't serve a purpose because they'll already be buying a real book from a trusted source.

> The counterfeit book won't have an NFT.

Or it might come with an NFT created by the scammer, which they might trick the reader into trusting with social engineering.

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