
How I became Leonardo da Vinci on the Blockchain - edent
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/06/how-i-became-leonardo-da-vinci-on-the-blockchain/
======
root_axis
There are other prohibitive problems with this idea.

What happens if someone dies or the private key is otherwise lost?

What if the private key is stolen and the thief uses it to authorize a dirt-
cheap sale to themselves?

What happens if the item is sold but the "token" is accidentally (or
deliberately) sent to the wrong recipient?

What happens if the courts determine that someone else is legally entitled to
the work in question (e.g. via divorce judgement) but the current owner
destroys the private key out of spite?

Additionally, this system does not solve any practical problems. If I am a
collector of stolen art, I don't really care about some ephemeral blockchain
token, all I really care about is being in possession of rare art that I can
personally admire.

Finally, it is impossible to generate a reproducible hash based on a physical
object, so there is nothing preventing someone from keeping the original and
selling off a fake in its place, forever corrupting the supposed chain of
trust established by the artist.

~~~
biztos
> being in possession of rare art that I can personally admire

Isn't it usually more about showing off that de Hory painting[0] to your
Yakuza friends?

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmyr_de_Hory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmyr_de_Hory)

------
cwkoss
Blockchains don't really work for ownership of non-digital assets.

I think they can and will be incredibly useful for digital trade, but too many
people are trying to make rigid secure digital systems represent the squishy
nondeterminism of analog law. Fundamentally, you can't keep an accurate
ledger, because there is no interface for proving ownership of physical items.

~~~
coralreef
There is an interface for proving ownership of physical items. It is a
centralized system, composed of courts and governments, but it works.

If someone challenges your ownership of property, you bring your papers to
court.

The same thing could work for cryptoassets: you have a centralized, trusted
system for validation of custody of assets, and then its share distribution is
handled on the blockchain.

~~~
robbiep
In this instance, what advantage does blockchain offer over the existing
systems?

~~~
coralreef
I guess fast, low cost transactions

------
stucof
To wit:

"In other words, blockchain can guarantee parameters of transactions, but it
cannot sanitize the endpoints. It cannot impose the type of social-justice and
good-actor constraints that some of its proponents believe will lead to
disintermediation of centralized marketplaces like Amazon (customers will
still want easy returns, "no questions asked" guarantees and customer service)
or large financial intermediaries (banking clients will still want automatic
fraud reversal and credit card rewards)."

\-- [http://goo.gl/BtVyx3](http://goo.gl/BtVyx3)

------
shp0ngle
The only good implementation of blockchain stamping is OpenTimestamps from
Peter Todd.

And because it is smart and nor an overhyped ICO, it is offered for free and
actually works.

See [https://opentimestamps.org/](https://opentimestamps.org/)

edit: oh, it seems the project in question (veritart) is actually using
opentimestamps.

~~~
Animats
You don't need a "blockchain" for timestamps. There have been timestamping
services for years.[1] There's a standard: RFC 3161. Many of the SSL cert
providers also have a timestamping service.

Timestamping would be very useful if Google used signed timestamps to
determine provenance. Scraper sites should be outranked by the original
source.

[1] [https://freetsa.org/index_en.php](https://freetsa.org/index_en.php)

~~~
pavel_lishin
The obvious rebuttal to your claim is that those services are all
_centralized_.

~~~
optimuspaul
The obvious rebuttal is, do they need to be decentralized?

~~~
pavel_lishin
To prevent any one party from being able to deceive others about the
timestamp.

------
sahoo
> Blockchain is amazing technology - but it is a solution in search of a
> problem.

True.

~~~
this_user
I disagree. Blockchain and crypto currencies that use PoW are a terrible
invention. Bitcoin mining alone is now using more electricity than Ireland,
and this figure is only increasing even more. In an age where the global
effects of climate change are becoming more and more apparent while still too
little is done to mitigate it, maybe we should not exacerbate the problem even
further This applies especially to something like crypto currencies that, so
far, provide very little in terms of tangible societal benefits.

We could of course discuss PoS solutions, but those have their own drawbacks,
and that still would not change the fundamental fact that crypto currencies
and blockchains have yet, after roughly a decade, to find any kind of non-
niche use case. Google needed far less than a decade to become the dominant
search engine. Netflix did the same of video streaming. Modern smartphones
exist for about as long as Bitcoin, and they have become globally ubiquitous.
So how good can the blockchain really be?

~~~
quadrature
I think the two of you are violently agreeing with each other.

------
hobofan
A blockchain only guarantees that calculations are done in a certain way, not
that the input data is correct. That same problem also existed before the
blockchain as you can see with e.g. Amazon reviews and fake news.
Traditionally that problem was solved by having a centralized authority that
decides on what input data is correct and what isn't, but that, of course,
comes with the usual problems of centralization and monopolies, and also,
doesn't seem to work well at scale (as you can again see with the crumbling
Amazon review system).

While the criticism in the blog post at blockchain as a technology is
misdirected in my opinion (and maybe even purposefully misunderstanding what
problems blockchains solve), I think the main problem of "shit in - shit out"
is a very interesting and important one, even more so in decentralized systems
where you don't have the crutches of a centralized verifier available.

However, I'm pretty optimistic that that problem can even be solved with the
help of blockchain. I hoped that I wouldn't have to plug our project[0] before
we have anything published, but this seems too close of a topic to pass up.
Over the next few weeks, we will be publishing both code for our first testnet
and our whitepaper for a decentralized information verification system that
aims to solve the problems laid out in this blog post, that we worked on for
quite some time.

[0]: [https://rlay.com](https://rlay.com)

~~~
nbeleski
How is the information verified in your system? Why does it need a blockchain?

You mentioned that the "criticism in the blog post at blockchain as a
technology is misdirected", how so?

~~~
hobofan
> How is the information verified in your system? Why does it need a
> blockchain?

The information is verified by creating an open system where anyone can point
out wrong information (by providing oposing information). That is done with
the help of a token in our system, which is issued to people who help
establish consensus about what's true and what isn't. The token is the main
reason we need a blockchain, and the gametheoretic aspects behind it dictate
that there needs to be a token or similar in our system for it to work.

> You mentioned that the "criticism in the blog post at blockchain as a
> technology is misdirected", how so?

The "shit in - shit out" problem exists also with traditional systems and is
not solely a blockchain-problem. That's what I meant to say with that.

I think that's about as much as I can share right now without angering my
colleagues. The whitepaper which is coming out in a few weeks goes more into
depth about the specifics of each part of the systems and provides some game-
theoretic and economic foundations for the system.

~~~
gus_massa
> _The information is verified by creating an open system where anyone can
> point out wrong information (by providing oposing information)._

How do you combat "spam", were some users send thousands of fake registrations
of well known art works?

How do you combat sockpuppet that send wrong opposing information to steal the
art work of the original creator?

How do you combat sockpuppets that send wrong information to support fake
claims?

If some piece of art has two claims, who decides which one is the correct?

~~~
hobofan
> If some piece of art has two claims, who decides which one is the correct?

In the end I would say that all of your other questions can be reduced to this
one, by adding weight to claims, which makes the quantity of claims and
indentities irellevant.

We are not focused on the art market, but open to any kind of information. But
for the example of the art ownership verification:

\- Person A (true owner) claims that they own the Mona Lisa with a weight of
10 tokens

\- Person B (non-owner) claims that they own the Mona Lisa with a weight of 10
tokens

\- An additional actor X who knows about the ownership can add additional
weight to the claim of Person A. If the consensus in the end decides (based on
the weights) that Person A is the true owner, actor X will be rewarded. There
are some specifics about how we construct the reward function that I can't
talk about yet, but the core of it is that all participants in the network are
incentivized to only submit true information, and also incentivized to combat
any wrong information they see by providing conflicting true information.

If you are interested in the topic and would like to discuss more deeply feel
free to reach out to me via the email on the website (I'm Max).

~~~
blowski
I can see and am grateful for your effort to answer the questions as helpfully
as you can. But to me, when you say "the owner of the Mona Lisa is whoever has
the most tokens in our system", it sounds like complete nonsense. The Louvre
owns the Mona Lisa, and if your system disagrees with that, your system is
broken.

~~~
hobofan
I can definitely see where you are coming from since that mechanism of "most
token wins", sounds very unintuitive and inherintly cheatable (and in a lot of
places has rightfully bad connotations like "pay to win" in video games). When
I first heard it I also had the same reaction. Sadly I don't think that I can
offer any more information right now, but we are all very eager to publicize
it and put it out into the open for critic ASAP.

~~~
Sangermaine
>I can definitely see where you are coming from since that mechanism of "most
token wins", sounds very unintuitive and inherintly cheatable (and in a lot of
places has rightfully bad connotations like "pay to win" in video games).

It does indeed seem exactly that way. You said upthread:

>An additional actor X who knows about the ownership can add additional weight
to the claim of Person A.

But how do you verify that X is someone "knows about the ownership"? What if X
was someone A or B paid or incentivized to vouch for them so the consensus
would be swayed? How do prevent bad actors from gaming the system in this way?
If the asset in dispute is valuable enough it would certainly be worth it to a
bad actor to pay a little to cheat and have the consensus fall on their side.

~~~
hobofan
> What if X was someone A or B paid or incentivized to vouch for them so the
> consensus would be swayed?

If B were to pay X a bribe of amount N, so X enforces the statement with
amount N, B could also directly enforce the statement with amount N, which
would lead to exactly the same result. If X would receive less than N, to add
a weight of N, they would be gifting some money to B, and vice versa. So
between rational untrusted parties, a simple bribe would not make sense. There
are some rationality assumptions relating to 51% attacks similar to PoS
oriented systems that have to be met, but there are some mechanisms in place
that should reduce the practical requirement regarding rationality among
participating parties significantly.

> If the asset in dispute is valuable enough it would certainly be worth it to
> a bad actor to pay a little to cheat and have the consensus fall on their
> side.

Good question, but I'm afraid that's one of the questions I can't answer right
now without leaking too much information.

~~~
a1369209993
> If B were to pay X a bribe of amount N, [...] B could also directly enforce
> the statement with amount N

Okay, better question: how do you deal with the (pathologic, and therefore
approximately guarranteed to come up) situation where A's life savings are ten
dollars and a horse, B has 100 million dollars, and B claims (with amount ≥
11$) that B owns A's horse.

~~~
hobofan
As long as the "100 million dollars" don't make up more than 50% of the tokens
in the network, the incentives are supposed to play out in a way that all the
other participants of the network contest the wrong statement made by B, and
thus B isn't able to introduce information that is deemed wrong. So in general
the situation should be preventable. There are some specific versions of that
edge case that come to my mind that where that situation could indeed be
unresolvable but in those cases that should be detectable and displayable to
the users of the system.

As I said in my previous comment, there are some rationality requirements
regarding some of the token amount.

------
slasdfh
You can assert that you created media by proving that you had it before anyone
else. Blockchains allow you to upload media or a hash of the media into a
(relatively) permanent, (relatively) immutable ledger. Relative permanence and
immutability are valuable qualities.

Uploading a hash into the bitcoin blockchain is trivial; marketing this type
of service is not. The advertising or promises of a specific venture do not
necessarily reflect the value of a technology.

~~~
SCAQTony
...and that is the purpose of a copyright too when filed with the USPTO.

------
lifeisstillgood
This is confusing claim and dispute resolution.

The Louvre Museum possesses the Mona Lisa, and claims it is the owner. If I
break in and steal it, I possess it, and I can claim ownership. But the Louvre
can take me to court and the judge will resolve the dispute.

Any blockchain is not a dispute resolution mechanism but an efficient claim
storage, and as such blockchains can never expect to replace authority of
courts - which leads to back to the usual politics

~~~
AlexCoventry
I think cryptocurrencies could be part of a novel arbitration system,
actually. Parties to a human-readable contract put up a bond on a smart
contract which authorizes some mutually agreed arbitrator to disburse the
bonds on completion of the contract, according to how things turned out. It's
an irrevocable submission to the arbitrator's authority over restitution and
punishment, but the smart contract prevents the arbitrator from absconding
with the bonds (though they could still collude with one of the participants.)

~~~
tylersmith
This is how we do arbitration in OpenBazaar. Users can offer their services as
arbitrators and compete on terms, price, and reputation. When a buyer makes a
purchase they can choose one from a list of ones pre-approved by the seller.
Then funds are sent to a 2-of-3 multisig address where each of the parties has
1 key.

------
chainyard
We actually built something very similar to this recently. It's an art auction
house app running on a private blockchain that we spun up using Hyperledger
Fabric, with the front-end written in React.

Video walkthrough of the app if you're interested:
[https://youtu.be/HScND22bPcU?t=198](https://youtu.be/HScND22bPcU?t=198)

(Actual demo starts at 3:20)

------
456hdsaq234g
it seems the ethereum blockchain is not immune to human lies. Aka the oracle
problem, provenance problem.

------
mkirklions
My criticism of blockchain is how niche the uses are.

Bitcoin is great, worldwide transactions that are immune from the US
government printing money every year. I understand that.

Voting and timestamps, great uses for blockchain.

However more complex work may need significantly more oversight. Sure its not
great to add columns to a database, but you are not going to have this ability
if millions of people dont need the columns. Thats the fault of decentralized
chains.

Centralized blockchains defeat the purpose obv, but that hasnt stopped
hundreds of coins from doing this.

Im very skeptical of crypto outside of bitcoin.

------
amenod
Bad application of technology doesn't (necessarily) mean that technology
sucks.

Not that I care for most projects in blockchain sphere, as 95% of them are
scam and 4.9% naive / misguided. But blockchain does have its uses, it's just
the ICOs (and other manifestations of greed) that gave it a bad name. Audit
logs anyone? That's the killer feature.

~~~
dullgiulio
For auditing there are auditing companies, they can timestamp the consumers
data.

If you don't want to pay an auditing company, you will have to pay the
computing power for proof of work. Not a big gain.

~~~
amenod
Sure it is. It commoditizes trust, making audit logs easily accessible and
cheap for many many companies. Besides, which auditing company do you trust?

------
mjgoeke
"On two occasions I have been asked, — 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the
machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' ... I am not able
rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a
question."

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage#Passages_from_...](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage#Passages_from_the_Life_of_a_Philosopher_\(1864\))

~~~
Avshalom
Which is cute and all but it's the blockchain proponents that seem to think it
will give right answers. Hell they frequently ellide the need to supply
figures-right or wrong- at all.

~~~
kryogen1c
I don't think this is accurate. It's the nontechnical zeitgeist shouting
blockchain, not those in the know. Just like how carbon nanotubes were
supposed to be the best at everything from conductors to batteries to bullet
proof vests, and there are 0 usable products on the market. It's just easier
to to get away with for programs.

~~~
Avshalom
And yet here we are discussing a blockchain start up putting almost zero
effort into verifying the provenance of a piece of art despite verifying the
provenance of art being its entire business model. Or are we just going to
Scotsman them into non-technical shouting?

------
krrrh
It’s worth noting that Verisart is very similar to
[https://www.ascribe.io](https://www.ascribe.io) which preceded it. Though
ascribe has focused their marketing more towards digital art.

------
chandsie
In the comments the author says, "Blockchain is amazing technology - but it is
a solution in search of a problem." That's really the tl;dr of this article.
Blockchain has a lot of potential value but arbitrarily throwing it at
problems won't magically create the value (not counting investors blindly
throwing money at buzzwords).

~~~
LeoPanthera
I have yet to come across _any_ problems that are solved better with a
blockchain than with any other traditional technology - except for the
original one, a distributed electronic currency.

~~~
456hdsaq234g
also decentralised clocks, which can provide decentralised timestamps, which
is a kind of related concept (double spend resistance)

~~~
a1369209993
Also a non-redactable public record, although it's a bit hard to do that
robustly; you need a transaction saying "find md5^[N]([X]) xor [md5^N(X) xor
data]" to ensure you data is already securely embedded before anyone can
determine that it's classified/copyrighted/otherwise-censor-bait.

------
ThomPete
Blockchain is not optimized for physical reality but the digital one.

------
paulkrush
One could use blockchain to record the microscopic surface imperfections on
the art. It would be like matching up the broken ends of stick...

------
kelvin0
When you only have a hammer, everything's a nail?

------
gabcoh
After just reading the title I thought this was going to be an article about
all of the bots "painting the tape" and manipulating bitcoin prices on various
exchanges.

------
snissn
now try to sell it

------
dick_sucker2
Check out the book The Billionaire's Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace if you're
interested in learning the background on why blockchain technology won't solve
these kind of problems. Hardy Rodenstock fooled the foremost wine expert in
the world.

------
davesque
> I don't understand the blockchain hype.

> A startup has certified my artwork & placed their verification on the
> bitcoin blockchain.

> Now art dealers & auctioneers can feel secure that I am the original artist.

> One small problem… I am not Leonardo da
> Vinci![https://www.verisart.com/works/23f2c64a-08c6-4a42-8013-84ac8...](https://www.verisart.com/works/23f2c64a-08c6-4a42-8013-84ac8422dffb)
> …

Mkay, so the system is working as designed? It seems the issue in this case is
that the people behind that startup are dumb. How does that translate to
blockchain tech not being useful? If you don't properly verify the information
you commit to a blockchain, don't trust the information on the blockchain.
Meanwhile, you can rest assured that the information was committed by someone
who controls a specific private key. Why would anyone expect anything more?

~~~
thisisit
> How does that translate to blockchain tech not being useful?

By proving that without a central authority (centralization) verifying
everything going into the blockchain, it is actually useless?

I have seen tons of threads where people like to mention shipping as a good
use-case for blockchain. Supposedly it ensures manifest etc can't be doctored.
And as this example shows if the data is tainted at source, blockchain is just
a database, a rather complex one at that. In that case, it is better to use a
traditional and controlled database.

~~~
davesque
> By proving that without a central authority (centralization) verifying
> everything going into the blockchain, it is actually useless?

So then I guess there's no use for cryptographic signing, hash chains, and
graph-theoretic consensus protocols? Because that's what you're saying. Your
characterization of blockchains as "useless" only makes it seem like you have
no idea what it actually is. It's not that complicated. It's just a handful of
known and widely-accepted-as-not-being-useless-on-their-own algorithms which
have been combined in a creative way.

> In that case, it is better to use a traditional and controlled database.

So then you get...what? You get the same thing but without cryptographic
integrity checks. If incorrect data is committed, don't use that data. Or,
better yet, commit a revocation of that data. At least you don't have to worry
about Larry's shipping company cooking the books after the fact to their own
advantage.

~~~
mannykannot
> So then I guess there's no use for cryptographic signing, hash chains, and
> graph-theoretic consensus protocols? Because that's what you're saying.

What's being said is that it's not useful for shipping (and physical asset
provenance) applications. The validity of the components is a necessary but
not sufficient step in validating the application, and the latter cannot be
derived from the former. The usefulness of blockchains for currency does not,
in itself, imply their usefulness in shipping.

>At least you don't have to worry about Larry's shipping company cooking the
books after the fact to their own advantage.

This is not as much of an advantage as it seems, if Larry can defraud you by
going around the blockchain. Your risk is then determined by Larry's
inclination to fraud, which is the same in either case. Fixing one hole in a
fence doesn't help if the cattle can get out through another that you cannot
fix.

What this argument needs is the outline of an actual solution to the problems.

------
alcipir
cool, now we all know that you are a fraud, permanently. Your reputation as an
artist is doomed since the blockchain is nothing but a reliable and immutable
ledger. Since it's public and verifiable now that you are knowingly stealing
other artist's work, all of your other works and contracts will be crushed in
the market. (yes, I'm being hypothetical here, I know it was just a proof of
concept, etc)

So.. it is working as intended?

~~~
Isomatik
But the knowledge that he's stealing others' work comes from sources other
than the blockchain record, if you don't count the fact that it's internally
invalid for a living person to claim a work created in 1506. So the immutable
ledger provides no value.

Regardless, taking a picture of a painting doesn't verify that you painted, or
even currently own that painting. Adding a timestamp doesn't change that.

