How Banksy Authenticates His Work

reprage.com

62 points·quakeguy··7 comments

> We have no idea what has been written on Pest Control’s private half of the note. Which means it can’t be easily recreated, and that empowers Pest Control to keep the authoritative list of who currently owns each authenticated Banksy work.

Why does it matter? Why do you need to recreate their bit? You only have to fake the bit the owner has, and all this is moot anyway because all they do is call the current owner and ask if they're selling the piece. They could literally just give you a number printed in Arial and it would work just as well.

Am I missing something, or does this scheme only authenticate the certificates, but not the work itself?

Haha you're right. A copy of the certificate would allow many of that same work to be forged.

The transfer of ownership request is the key here. That doesn’t scale, considering that the current owner needs to authenticate the request.

Sure, you could pull the gig once, but your authentic work immediately depreciates in value by 100% because it can’t be authenticated any more.

That’s the brilliance of the system. The forged work becomes the “authentic” work in all meaningful terms because the value is attached to the delegated ownership, not to the physical item itself.

Funny, isnt it?

It’s cool, he’s essentially doing exactly what many crypto companies are doing. A cryptographic distributed system of ... well bullshit, where behind the scenes and in reality it’s all just one central authority with a database.

"His?" https://www.theonion.com/area-grandmother-comes-forward-as-b...

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