
How Banksy Authenticates His Work - quakeguy
https://reprage.com/post/how-banksy-authenticates-his-work
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StavrosK
> We have no idea what has been written on Pest Control’s private half of the
> note. Which means it can’t be easily recreated, and that empowers Pest
> Control to keep the authoritative list of who currently owns each
> authenticated Banksy work.

Why does it matter? Why do you need to recreate their bit? You only have to
fake the bit the owner has, and all this is moot anyway because all they do is
call the current owner and ask if they're selling the piece. They could
literally just give you a number printed in Arial and it would work just as
well.

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andreareina
Am I missing something, or does this scheme only authenticate the
_certificates_ , but not the work itself?

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nickthemagicman
Haha you're right. A copy of the certificate would allow many of that same
work to be forged.

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dfcowell
The transfer of ownership request is the key here. That doesn’t scale,
considering that the current owner needs to authenticate the request.

Sure, you could pull the gig _once_ , but your authentic work immediately
depreciates in value by 100% because it can’t be authenticated any more.

That’s the brilliance of the system. The forged work becomes the “authentic”
work in all meaningful terms because the value is attached to the delegated
ownership, not to the physical item itself.

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hjk05
It’s cool, he’s essentially doing exactly what many crypto companies are
doing. A cryptographic distributed system of ... well bullshit, where behind
the scenes and in reality it’s all just one central authority with a database.

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kentbrew
"His?" [https://www.theonion.com/area-grandmother-comes-forward-
as-b...](https://www.theonion.com/area-grandmother-comes-forward-as-
banksy-1819571587)

