Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by whatsupdog 467 days ago
What stops a Chinese factory to print a 1000 shirts with 0004 embroidered and shipped all over the world? This is just a NFT esque grift.
2 comments

Usually there are ways to tell counterfeit from a real item.
Only if the cost of making a better counterfeit exceeds the cost of the legitimate item. It's a t-shirt, it doesn't have a chain of attestation.
It doesn't cost much for me to write my signature, but people can still detect forgeries.

Unless the counterfeit shirts were manufactured in the same factory, with the same process, I don't think they'll be identical. Dries Depoorter might be adding the numbers herself by hand, so unless the counterfeiter has the same tools as he does, there will likely be differences.

It is actually a reasonable use case for a NFT
Not sure why you are downvoted. This is indeed the exact use case for which NFTs were invented.
Because the NFT isn't the t-shirt. You can own the NFT and the physical t-shirt, and sell the NFT to someone else but give them a fake t-shirt. They don't suddenly have a real t-shirt just because they have the NFT.
> You can own the NFT and the physical t-shirt, and sell the NFT to someone else but give them a fake t-shirt

That's a very smart way to achieve nothing. You now have created an actual copy on a shirt, at your cost, and proceeded to still own a shirt that has no market value now that you don't have it's authenticity proof. Seems like a very smart thing to do.

But it does require buying one real shirt/NFT for each fake a scammer sells.
We used to have these thing called a Certificate of Authenticity that came with memorabilia, no blockchain required!
NFTs were created for the very reason that certificates of authenticity have no value unless the ledger from which they were issued is not public.

How can you know there wasn't more certificates printed than tee shirt created ?

How do you know it's a real certificate in the first place ?

How about you loose the certificate ?

Seriously there really is no reason to not prefer a digital certificate versus a physical one, it is on all accounts superior.

You certainly wouldn't argue cryptographic keys are useless because we have physical ones on any other matter if it wasn't for following the "I don't like blockchain" trainwagon.