Comment by archagon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by archagon | Hacker News Reader

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I was recently struck by the thought that the blockchain might be ideally suited for the creation of some kind of "digital stamp". As with real stamps, different artists could publish and sell stamp designs of varying quantities. For uniqueness, perhaps aberrations could be algorithmically introduced based on each stamp's unique blockchain hash. The stamps could then be used to creatively sign communications and transactions, with inbound stamps showing up in the recipient's digital stamp collection. (Or maybe they could somehow be tied in to miner fees, to make them function more like the real thing.)

With the blockchain, it seems we finally have a way of assigning scarcity to digital assets. The only problem would be the social value of such goods, but things like CryptoKitties make it clear that this would hardly be a problem. People seem to love collecting rare things, even if the rareness is strictly algorithmic.

I think it would feel great to receive a communication signed by a particularly rare or interesting e-stamp!

What’s to stop someone from creating a marketplace for identical stamps at 1/10 the cost?

What's to stop someone from making a painting that's practically identical to Mona Lisa and selling it for 1/10th the cost?

Nothing, if you’re permitted to make copies of the source of the reproduction (e.g. you went to The Louvre and took a photograph). I would have said that you likely can’t legally print or sell an image of the Mona Lisa you find on Google Images, but Wikipedia says:

> The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that "faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain".

Anyway, reproductions of public domain paintings are commonly produced and sold for far less than the market value of the original.

The Mona Lisa isn’t yet a digital good. But in time it will be possible to make perfect copies, and that raises all sorts of interesting questions.

If by “perfect copy” you mean a physical copy that cannot be distinguished in a blind testfrom the original in any way, then of course we don’t yet have that capability. Perhaps with advanced scanning and 3D printing that would be possible, but I suspect the true original would still maintain higher value as long as a trustworthy chain of custody was maintained. As soon as a thief removes the original long enough to potentially swap it with a perfect copy, the market value of any alleged original would likely vanish.

That would be effectively impossible, because the authenticity of a unique stamp can be verified on the blockchain. Of course, this only matters if people are valuing specific stamps based on their verifiable uniqueness in a specific blockchain, and not just their consumable content (e.g. it’s trivial to share a screenshot of one of these kitties.)

Dunno, it's a super wishy-washy idea! This is mostly me thinking out loud. I was recently looking through my dad's massive collection of old Soviet stamps, and it really made me wish for some sort of digital equivalent. Intuitively, it seems to me that there probably exists some alignment of cryptocurrency concepts to make it work.

several companies have been doing this for half a decade, its nice that people are independently coming up with obvious use cases even if its years later, that means education is happening.

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