OK, I've gone and imagined it. I'm not entirely convinced that any appreciable number of people actually want to do these things though.
Is this a clever application of a trendy technology creating a solution that's searching for a problem? What are the real life business model use cases for such a tool?
Today, Mediachain can automatically link an image to who made it. That same channel can be used to transfer value directly through content in the future. We believe that this will create a huge opportunity for developers to build new media applications that reward creators directly through their content, no matter where it is.
Does your system require metadata along with the image? If so, what about once an image escapes the metadata?
This allows Mediachain to always point back to information about an image, even if its metadata is stripped out as it goes viral, for example. Near duplicate image detection is quite far along and works well for images that are cropped, distorted, etc.
More on our approach in this post: https://blog.mediachain.io/perceptual-resolution-9c00ad5ca55...
Details on the implementation in this RFC: https://github.com/mediachain/mediachain/blob/master/rfc/med...