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Comment by johnyzee | Hacker News Reader

Blah blah money laundering blah blah beanie babies. This is getting old, it's like when Google launches a service and comments are "So when will this be shut down?". It's lazy and brings nothing to the table.

On the topic, can anyone explain how the 'official' Beeple entry is identified on the blockchain? As opposed to any other address that claims to be the "Official Beeple '5000 days' NFT ownership token". My understanding of this is sketchy at best.

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The official auction has the artists wallet address listed and you can verify on a block explorer that its legit.

https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/first-open-beeple/beeple-...

wallet address: 0xc6b0562605D35eE710138402B878ffe6F2E23807 smart contract address: 0x2a46f2ffd99e19a89476e2f62270e0a35bbf0756

How do I know that that particular wallet belongs to the artist? I see some ENS entries on the address, but not sure if/how that helps tie it uniquely to a person.

Thats a good question since there's no official blue check to verify on the blockchain that its really them but the NFT exchanges show a blue check with his ETH wallet id.

https://opensea.io/accounts/beeple

While I completely agree that this here collective aneurysm (or shall we call it "cryptocurrency derangement syndrome") is painful to see, your lack of understanding can only be explained by the fact that NFTs of digital images don't work on a technical level. There is really not much else to discuss.

I was thinking if it could not be made to work with certificates. Like the artist signs a message handing over the ownership using his private key, which can be verified by his certificate from a trusted certificate authority, then commits that message to the blockchain.

Then you have a trusted certificate authority, so you don't need a trustless decentralized blockchain anymore.

This is very closed minded perspective; having a distributed ledger of digital collectable assets that you can trade without being tied to one exchange or marketplace is powerful and the beginning of the end of institutional gate keeping.

The blockchain is the public ledger, where the ownership message is stored. The CA simply verifies that the message is actually from the artist.

Tangentially, perhaps the blockchain could be turned into the official registry of the CA, too. Wouldn't that be better than a privately managed database somewhere?

I think a global decentralized trusted ledger will become an important thing in the future (whether NFTs specifically are a legit use case or not).

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