Shhh don’t tell people they’ll ruin it.

We don’t talk about bubble jet.

Bitcoin: An excel spreadsheet a bunch of people agree on.
Machine Learning: Electrons in a room banging on typewriters.
Blockchain: A marketing term for linked lists.

Thanks Biden ya fuckin loser: https://www.npr.org/2023/09/07/1196787623/federal-workers-remote-office-ordered-taxpayers-telework-science

Lol. I gave a counter argument that had nothing to do with NFTs that blew up your home brewed understanding of what digital ownership is and then you turn around and accuse me of ignorance?

Just because digital content is on your device doesn’t mean you own it. That’s the case for digital movies, music, books and so forth and has been long before NFTs were even a thing. This isn’t up for debate. Until you acknowledge that there’s no point in even having a conversation.

Again, that’s obviously not how ownership works. You can download movies and music too. Doesn’t mean you own them. If your argument is “it doesn’t stop piracy” I’m not disagreeing with that.

If you’re questioning the value of digital receipts for monkey images I’m not disputing that. For me that’s on par with beanie babies, postage stamps and other odd things people collect. I don’t have to be excited about the current application to be excited about the fact that it works and what that means it could be used for in the future.

And of course, it would make sense that such a system wouldn’t be used for something significantly important like property deeds or car registrations right away. NFTs are just another phase of demonstrating the capabilities.

No I didn’t prove your point. Private key signatures are a fundamental component of blockchains. Without them blockchains cannot function.

I figure this will probably be a lost cause but let me try to explains some basics about “blockchain”. I’ll be focusing on Bitcoin specifically since that’s what I have the most knowledge in but every cryptocurrency is based in some part on the way Bitcoin works.

The blocks in the chain are comprised of a series of transactions. The first transaction being the coinbase transaction which is the reward miners receive for mining the block. This transaction is unique in that it has no inputs. All other transactions will have inputs with a total balance greater than or equal to the outputs. Any leftovers are also given to the miners as a mining reward. Transactions are verified by miners using private key signatures. Each input is accompanied by a signature proving the inputs are being spent by the individual or group who owns those inputs. Once all transactions have been verified by the miner and the coinbase transaction has been created the miner sets about to mine the block. They do this by hashing the entire block and hoping for a result that comes underneath the value of the mining target.

I can go into more detail on any aspect of this. But what I’m mainly pointing out is that private key signatures are not something external. You cannot have a distributed ledger without some mechanism for proving ownership. Otherwise anyone could spend anybody else’s bitcoin. You can leverage other pieces of data contained within a transaction output to represent other information such as the hash of a digital content like an image. An owner can cryptographically demonstrate they have the ability to spend an output without spending it. Thus demonstrating they own digital content which hashes to that value. You can do this with pictures, movies, music, books… whatever.

And frankly, that’s the boring part of the capability. Cities and counties could use hashes of deeds or full text of deeds themselves to represent property ownership. Essentially placing the burden of backups, redundancy and lookups on the decentralized nature on a blockchain. This opens the door for better interconnectivity between the way various government bodies track ownership of things like land, homes, cars and whatever else. All this information is already public and stored digitally but the money spent on creating and maintaining these individual systems is incredibly wasteful. The lack of consistency also creates problems in legal spaces.

Your conversation style is chaotic. Each comment you bring up some new argument and never acknowledge the counter points I’m making on your previous arguments. Everything you’re bringing up is worth discussing but if you can’t bring it all up at once or focus on one then there’s no way for this to be a constructive conversation.

Yes and another reason not to was it relied on a centralized database to prove ownership which Apple shut down.

A decentralized proof of purchase system provides the means for addressing this problem.

First you said it would make things worse then when I told you it has the potential to make things better you said it wouldn’t happen. 🤷‍♂️

Are we talking about something else now?

Buddy, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Private key signatures have been used to prove identities for decades. Do a little research on the basics of digital cryptography before speaking on the subject.

Did you ever buy any movies from itunes?

A decentralized ownership platform would be good for consumers. Currently all digital rights management is centrally managed by corporations and that ownership is revoked or lost when the company is sold or goes out of business.

Anyone claiming to be the owner can cryptographically prove that ownership at any time.

Obviously that’s not how ownership works.

EDIT: I’m surprised to be getting so many downvotes on this. Are people under the impression they own movies and music they download through torrents? Again, obviously there is a difference between “I have this digital content” and “I own this digital content”

Yes pictures can be copied and pasted. Digital receipts cannot be forged. It’s the difference between “here is an image” and “I own this image”.

Not yet no. And for good reason as it is still fairly new. But ultimately that’s where it’s headed.

Yes he can prove it. Digital receipts stored on a decentralized platform have some exciting use cases.