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Comment by btbuildem | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about this art stuff, but NFTs seem made for solving the problem of deepfakes. Say a politician does a speech, it is recorded, hashed, a corresponding token is generated and archived. We can all verify that the token exists and has not been tampered with. When someone posts a video of that speech, we can verify whether it's the original "as aired", modified in some way, or fully synthetic. The politician may very well be lying through their teeth, but we can at least verify that the recording is authentic, and of reality as it happened.

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How is this different from publishing the pgp signed sha for the digital file, which is an inherent property of the file?

For example, how Ububtu authenticates its Linux installers, https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/how-to-verify-ubuntu#1-overview

I'm not sure, but I think the trust part (münchhausen trilmma) is handled differently between pgp and blockchain. In pgp you have the web of trust and you choose your "entry" point and who you trust. With nfts you're on blockchain, and have the hole network have a consensus. Therefor the "entry" point for trust is different.

> With nfts you're on blockchain, and have the hole network have a consensus.

Consensus of something completely different than the element you are trusting with the web of trust, so ... basically ... blockchain is better because it does not address the problem at all but instead solves a problem that does not even exist in PGP? Or what is it exactly that you are saying?

What?

With blockchain, is it not the person who spends money to verify it gets trusted? There's no sense that the other nodes endorse the message, just that it won the auction.

Audio doesn't work like this.

If you're speaking and two different news agencies record it, there will be two slightly different recordings, which will have two different files, with two different hashes.

Hell, NFTs don't work like this. They are a hash of an entire file. If I take a slice of a speech for a deep fake, that's a different "file" from the whole speech and will have a different hash.

Every defense of NFTs is always like this, flailing around, misunderstanding basic reality, human interaction, even their own technology, just to try to keep the grift going. It's frustrating.

More importantly people don't work like that. In practice most "fake news" are based on quote mining which is easy to disprove without any knowledge of cryptography whatsoever by just checking the original source, but people share this crap without any verification because it conforms to their beliefs.

Technical solutions won't fix social issues.

Can’t we just do that with a pgp signature verified by the public key of a politician?Blockchain seems like an unnecessary step.

Hmm, but where would we put the data that we know will be safe and trusted? We need a shared database we can all use. One that keeps a record of the changes of its state over time, and anyone can verify it and host a node!

Ah but it might get spammed. We could add a small fee for each write action. But if someone gets too many of the tokens could they alter the history by rewriting it? we need some kind of consensus mechanism, we could reward participation but make it expensive to lie? Make cooperation the winning move in the game. How do we give the tokens value? maybe some kind of natural scarcity to their issuance, or a fee burning mechanism. As more people use the database the value of the tokens will go up too as they are needed for writing to it, which in turn makes it more expensive to attack and safer storage.

That sounds like it might work.

A blockchain wouldn't solve the chain of trust problem, of how do you know that a given public key actually belongs to Joe Biden. The problem that blockchains solve, of distributed consensus, is a different problem.

It's amazing! You could use it for so many things! But what if honest participation becomes expensive? What if speculators find some way to make money off of this and the whole system's purpose is hijacked away from its original purpose?

All of these technologies come with such incredible promise. None of them solve the original intended purpose.

We don't need a shared database. A file and a signature is way more decentralized than this.

That only really solves the problem of authenticity if all speeches are “NFTed”. If you see a video of a politician making offensive remarks outside of a speech setting, you can’t say it didn’t happen just because it wasn’t in NFT format.

Or when the politician in question releases an edited video and "NFTs" it or signs it with their DID. Then you're just back to trusting a consensus of trusted media disagreeing with them.

There's actual serious work being done by cryptographers to address the gravity of this problem. NFTs aren't it.

https://c2pa.org/

NFTs struggle to authenticate even themselves.

NFT is just a JSON with a URL, and if the URL isn't guaranteeing immutability, then NFT isn't either.

Yes, to make this clear: the actual image (or whatever other type of media) is not stored on chain, only a link to the image.

This is why many NFT websites back the NFTs with IPFS.

and then you can skip the whole blockchain and use IPFS directly. NFTs do absolutely nothing for this use-case. They're merely a security hole that is plugged by something else off-chain.

In reality, an implementation that authenticates footage would use classic public-key cryptography with a private key embedded in a HSM in the camera, signing the output. You can't make it trustless with blockchain software, because necessarily the chain of trust has to end on the hardware (the hardware can be verified in theory, but blockchain is irrelevant for this, sinec there's no double-spend protection needed in this security model).

true but to be fair a classic digital signature would be enough, as well. blockchain is a bit of overkill for this purpose

Has this problem not already been solved by digital signature schemes, and are NFTs not built on these very digital signature schemes, and have the digital signature schemes not been utterly useless for solving the deepfake problem, and have deepfake problem not been completely exaggerated to begin with?

I'm actually unsure what you gain from NFTs over simple PGP except the buzzword factor.

I do believe in the potential of NFTs. There are different perspective and speculations about this technology, but it will help us as time pass.

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