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Comment by jozzy-james | Hacker News Reader

I work in the industry dealing with art/design, and the only thing I really see NFT being useful for is a chain of custody to prove authenticity - but that only applies to newly created works, as with historic pieces you're already at a crapshoot on specialists validating stuff correctly.

edit: i use the term 'historic' loosely, i just mean stuff that has been circulating for a while.

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That only works if every owner participates, and if you’ve got every owner participating in the same authority then you don’t need NFTs.

sure, i guess the thought is if you break the NFT chain then you essentially devalue your investment. it's an interesting use-case, but don't see it widely adopted in the art market any time soon.

What prevents a malicious owner from creating a forgery, selling that with the NFT, and keeping the original for themselves?

well, the way i understand it is that the NFT signature would prevent that. granted, i've only recently been looking at NFT and general blockchain custody stuff at work - so i might be missing some key parts on how it all works.

edit: unless you meant the forgery was the first to NFT - which is why i mentioned that i only see it as viable for newly created works that have not already been sold.

You can bake a digital signature into an NFT, but that's not going to help you verify a physical painting.

how so? again, i'm pretty new into researching this for physical works - but i would assume with the provenance/etc that goes into cataloging a piece, it should be...well, at least better than what we currently have.

How are you going to map a digital signature to in-depth verification of a physical painting? There are basically no possibilities here that aren't full of holes, because the real world doesn't come in discrete byte values.

i see them as a chain of custody that accentuates an already broken system of 'in-depth verification' as you put it. but again, i'm only recently looking into the validity of using such a thing. more accountability should be good, overall.

You still have to trust that nobody in the chain of custody has swapped out the physical work with a forgery.

sure, but it's an extra layer over what is currently in place.

The NFT itself can't be forged, but surely the artwork itself can be forged? How would the NFT identify the forgery from the original if the current owner is saying the forgery is the real one?

don't have the answers on that one, but i would imagine it would come with a shift in how stuff is currently done.

An NFT can contain a secret that the buyer can unlock. Presumably a pgp key or similar token. True owner transfers it to a seller upon sale. This could establish and verify provenance.

How does the key or token distinguish the original from the forgery?

Are you talking about digital files or actual physical art?

physical art/design

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