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by woodruffw 1705 days ago
> But you can’t—that’s why the fake industry is a multi-trillion dollar industry and why StockX, a 4 billion dollar company, still end up selling fakes to consumers

Two things:

First, let's say I bite the bullet and accept the claim that a human with sufficient information is no better at verifying the authenticity of an item than an NFT would be. Where does that leave me? Now my Burberry jacket and my monkey JPEG are fakes. How has the state of affairs improved for me?

Second: I think the way you're approaching this belies a misapprehension of the counterfeit market. Duplicitous counterfeiting (where the seller deceives an unwitting buyer) is just a fraction of that "multi-trillion dollar industry" -- a very large chunk of it is made of the fake Scott toilet paper and fake Duracell batteries that people knowingly buy at their local dollar store, to say nothing of fake luxuries. There are more harmful examples (adulterated honey and olive oil), but the underlying point is the same: NFTs either (1) don't solve the problem (I eagerly await cryptographic proof that my olive oil is authentic), or (2) are irrelevant because people don't want the problem solved ("I know damn well that my batteries are fake, and I don't care").

1 comments

I agree with you on the physical components but you’re missing the point. If you’ve read the article you’d understand physical goods are different than digital ones. Look at the footnotes, I even point out that NFTs for physical items is not solved.

With digital goods, it is solved. If you have a brand (like cryptopunks or say, the US gov) and you produce some NFT—people can see and verify that the NFT is produced from those parties.

Again, I’m reiterating the same points in the article— it’s the same idea with open-sourced software. You can fork some code and “attempt to sell it” but you won’t go far because it lacks branding and trust.

Half the battle is branding.

Hope that clears it up