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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.

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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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