That's My Ape - A blockchain-free chain of custody tool

by cryptogogue • 5 years ago

201 187 5 years ago

akdav• 5 years ago

The licence even though looks satirical says the whole story. Most if not all web3 projects have a proper open source commercial reuse license.

er4hn2• 5 years ago

You'll also need to register the work you want to protect with a copyright office, and, if you're not the author of the work, you'll need documentation showing that you purchased the work or specific rights to it. Don't skip this step - you'll be digitally signing a declaration of ownership under penalty of perjury, so if you don't actually own the work in question, that could be embarrassing for you.

Antiquated institutions ruled by written laws that require other certified humans to interpret? In my blockchain?! Can you really say that NFTs are open to all/private/democratic unless the laws are all written in conjunctive normal form via Solidity?

(the above is mostly satire. But this project is an amusing take on avoiding double-spending)

EGreg• 5 years ago

Basically, the crypto industry painted itself into a corner due to greed:

1) Bitcoin adopted Blockchain to solve the double-spend problem, the most brute-force approach to solve it, which doesn’t scale to make a “peer to peer cash system”

2) Around 2013 the narrative changed to a “store of value” and some drunk guy’s misspelling of HOLD became a rallying cry

3) Ethereum and others continued to use blockchains with balances instead of UTXOs, which is even less scalable (https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/10/concurrency-and-all...).

4) And now the technology is entirely unnecessary for NFTs, the industry should have started with NFTs and worked backwards to implement currency

Ok this is getting long… see https://intercoin.org/presentation.pdf for what needs to happen for crypto to get past “number go up” speculation and power real adoption. Counterpoints welcome.

rideontime2• 5 years ago

The same presentation, in video form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAKOWcs8w54

smokey_circles• 5 years ago

I'm not convinced crypto has failed to be a value store or an effective means of currency and these "arguments" don't really talk about the meat of the problems crypto faces.

1. Regulation is pretty much the defining factor in cryptos status as a "real" currency. It's never going to be legal tender without legislation.

2. The idea that the value of a dollar is intrinsic or demonstrable is hilarious. The gold standard is long gone and the petrodollar is a doomed idea that fluctuates wildly. Economics is neither predictable nor rationale, because humans are not. See: gamestop.

3. The amazing derison on the subject. Only America could develop such a polarizing narrative about something fairly mundane.

4. I work in fintech in a part of the world that's still developing. The banks should be scared of crypto and banks such as Monzo. The key quality here is ability to react to a market. Crypto is not as quick as cash but it's MUCH faster than inter-bank transfers (st least this side of the world).

atweiden• 5 years ago

Thankfully, NFTs aren’t just a way for executives to hype up an underlying cryptocurrency they’re invested in. I’m confident the social media companies claiming NFTs are a pure hearted way to aid struggling artists will rush to integrate Cryptogogue’s legally sound toolkit for verifying ownership over digital artworks which is cheaper than any blockchain and devoid of financial conflicts of interest. These are very principled people who would never engage in financially-motivated thinking.

lekevicius2• 5 years ago

This page argues for registering artworks and going to courts to verify full chain of custody, not to mention having digital identities issued by a trusted authority, which is also usually not free.

All combined, this is a lot more expensive solution, not to mention a lot less global and time-intensive.

masklinn• 5 years ago

this is a lot more expensive solution

That implies there already is a solution. What is the existing solution?

katmannthree• 5 years ago

This is explicitly satire criticizing the concept of ownership of goods being derived from arbitrary tokens rather than defined by the extant legal framework in virtually every jurisdiction. From the end of the article:

Q: Is any of this for real?
A: No. Good lord. If you want to protect your digital rights, hire a lawyer. If it wasn't immediately clear that this is a work of satire, we've got some NFTs to sell you.

thathndude• 5 years ago

I can’t help but feel maybe you’re being a little sarcastic or cynical here.

https://youtu.be/2mSd5t2n3ck

gfodor• 5 years ago

I'm trying to remember what satirical slash comic book guy style sites + examples like this there were to ridicule bitcoin.

petesergeant• 5 years ago

https://www.computercoins.website/

emodendroket• 5 years ago

I suppose the point here is that those critics have all been "proven wrong." Bitcoin has proven a great vehicle for speculation but the other promises seem unfulfilled.

mcherm• 5 years ago

Honestly, not even bothering to solve the "double spend" problem makes this much less than it could have been.

After all, it is very easy to solve the "double spend" problem without the use of a blockchain: simply use a single trusted authority.

You know how every time you buy a house or piece of land you have to get a state-licensed notary to verify your identity, And then after signing the deed you have to send the paperwork to the county registrar because if they don't write it in their books then the land hasn't actually changed hands? That was NFTs working fairly well long before the invention of blockchain or computers or cryptography.

toomuchtodo3• 5 years ago

Trustless solutions have no place in a world with robust trust, which is most of the developed world and parts of the developing world. The solution isn’t blockchain, it’s more trust and the organizations and governance that builds that trust.

rglullis23• 5 years ago

Why does it have to be a binary property?

Yes, I buy many domains and I don't expect them to be taken away from me. But I like the idea of having alternative ENS names (yes, ENS domains are NFTs) as some kind of hedge against the occasional top-level domain crisis, or in the odd chance that my domain registrar fucks up/gets hacked or even as some kind of back-up plan for the case where registrars decide to collude and increase prices.

Same thing for banking/finance. Yes, SEPA works well in Europe and in 99% of the cases I am okay using my credit card. It doesn't negate the case where I'd like to pay someone where the only alternative is Paypal and with it its crazy fees, odd cancellations, poor customer support, etc.

For merchants, the same. Not long ago OnlyFans almost destroyed its own business because it wanted to kill its adult content side. The reason? Mastercard. Should we be telling all the sex workers and adult entertainers that we should be better at "building trust", or should we be able to say "crypto payments can be an alternative and do not depend on the interests of some powerful group with the right connections"?

darawk14• 5 years ago

Trust requires us to give leverage to centralized authorities over our critical records. If you deposit money in a bank, they can unilaterally decide that you can't withdraw it today. Their systems can be down. They can be closed at a time you want access to your money, etc. Or the person at the front desk can simply not like you, and if they're the only branch in town, you're out of luck.

Critically, trust like this comes from scale. The likelihood of a bank screwing you personally over diminishes as the bank grows larger. In other contexts, people call this a network effect, and it is an anti-competitive moat. Even if we completely trust the bank, which we don't, this anti-competitive moat leads to all sorts of problems, like stagnation of service quality (look how long it took us to get same day wire transfers and decent quality online banking).

Decentralized systems democratize trust. They break anti-competitive network effect driven moats. This is a good thing, even if we completely trust our centralized authorities, which again, we should not.

voakbasda• 5 years ago

I think you overestimate the amount of trust that some of us have in organizations and governance.

anonporridge3• 5 years ago

The fundamental problem with systems based on trust in humans, is that even if you completely trust the humans in control today those people will eventually be replaced, by death if nothing else.

So, you also need a system of determining succession of trusted individuals that not only selects humans who can be trusted, but humans who understand the challenge of defending the purity of succession procedure. All it takes is one corrupted transition. One person submitting to a little nepotism, to poison the entire system.

And of course, wherever you create a centralized repository of power, whether it's a hoard of wealth, a position of authority, the head of cult following, or admin access to a database, you immediately create a game for power hungry people to figure out a way to corrupt the systems in place that prevent abuse of that power.

This is why so many people are working towards decentralizing systems of power. Hell, even the US constitution is an instantiation of that, with the established separation of powers between the 3 branches of government. While we recognize that centralizing all governmental power in a single position can lead to incredible efficiencies if you get the right person in charge, it is also incredibly fragile and dangerous in the long run. We accept the inefficiencies of decentralized systems in exchange for long term stability and anti-fragility.

xyzzy123• 5 years ago

What about the permissionless angle.

Right now, anyone can go an build a new notary or governance protocol on blockchain, for their own purposes, without asking for anyone's permission.

Government trust is great, and bank anchored trust is great, but neither of those parties has as yet volunteered to run the kind of digital infrastructure required to run your own stuff on top of, and can you imagine the paperwork? (I bet there are some bank efforts but good luck getting on their platform).

rfd4sgmk8u5• 5 years ago

Humans are fundamentally untrustworthy. The solution is less trust and more verify (mathematics).

bgroat• 5 years ago

This has been my stance for a few years.

"Okay, we trust 90%+ of all transactions. Is there a way we can allocate $1T dollars to get that up to 99% without consuming more electricity than many countries?"

It costs civilization 1/3 (current crypto marketcap ~$3T) and delays an environmental apocalypse

voldacar• 5 years ago

Trustless solutions have no place in a world with robust trust, which is most of the developed world and parts of the developing world.

Unless you use a silly spherical cow model of history and risk, the robust trust you are referring to is not rational. Catastrophic breakdowns of society happen far more frequently than people like you assume. Please consider the case made by this essay: https://medium.com/s/story/the-surprisingly-solid-mathematic...

- napkin math indicates that a person living in america at some uniformly random date post colonization would have a little over 1/3 chance of experiencing a revolution or civil war

- Since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, there have been 465 sovereign nations which no longer exist, and that doesn’t even count colonies, secessionist states, or annexed countries. Even if we presume that half of these nation-state transitions were peaceful, which is probably a vast over-estimation, that’s still an average of one violent state transition every 2.43 years.

- In 2010, 8.5 million tourists visited Syria, accounting for 14% of their entire GDP. Eight years later, they have almost half a million dead citizens, and ten million more displaced into Europe. They didn’t see this coming, because if they did, they would have fled sooner.

542458• 5 years ago

The thing I don’t get about NFTs in general is that they don’t actually seem trustless to me. You need some sort of trusted source that says “this NFT is genuine and not just a bootleg”… and at that point you might as well just have that trusted source track ownership.

basch3• 5 years ago

The authors name next to the creation? The source of trust is the authors signature, and societies consensus that the author is who they say they are.

lekevicius2• 5 years ago

It’s a problem, I agree, but because the “authenticity information” can be expressed somewhat succinctly (it’s just a smart contract address), the trust element can be decentralized. Artist might post it on their Twitter, Instagram and website — if they all agree, and you as a buyer trust that the author is actually managing their Instagram, Twitter and website — then there might be enough to create real world - digital world trust bridge. This is particularly easy if an artist is working primarily online and their digital identity already is the main contributor to their fame.

timdaub3• 5 years ago

e.g. that's why famous nft artists either have their ENS name in their Twitter bio or as their name. With that, you know that e.g. if shaq.eth minted an NFT, it's indeed the real shaq o'neal as otherwise the imposter shaq.eth registrar would have had to have the access to the real shaq o'neal's Twitter account.

judge20205• 5 years ago

NFTs are trusting a single authority, which is the consensus of all of the nodes/miners of the blockchain. Sure, if you go to opensea and try to find the owner of a NFT, they could lie and become an accomplice in a double-spend scheme; but in general you could also download and watch the entire transaction chain and search through it locally (with trusted and auditable OSS) to verify ownership and transfers.

shiohime6• 5 years ago

But you can determine NFT authenticity by only examining onchain data. You can for instance check the program ID that executed the mint and that it is verified (in the case of Solana, at least), it's a pretty simple verification system that is using entirely onchain data for validation.

erik_seaberg2• 5 years ago

In theory the state could be a trusted authority on land ownership, but in practice they don’t have their act together. It’s such a mess that you have to pay for third-party “title search” and “title insurance” to protect the lender from the risk that a sale might not be honored because of a dispute about the property line a century ago. I once had an entry-level temp job verifying old claims on microfiche; I could easily believe they still have to do that today.

jeffffff• 5 years ago

are you proposing that there is a technological solution to this? ultimately governments enforce land ownership and whoever they decide is the owner is the owner, no matter what is recorded in a blockchain.

jmvoodoo• 5 years ago

And then after signing the deed you have to send the paperwork to the county registrar because if they don't write it in their books then the land hasn't actually changed hands?

This is actually not true. A proper deed, signed by the seller and presented to the buyer, is enough to transfer ownership of land. The reason it gets recorded is so that it's easier for you to prove, and it's possible to get title insurance. However, it is entirely legal, and binding, to transfer property without recording the deed.

Jetrel2• 5 years ago

Nominally, but in my hometown, I've actually seen a shithead landlord pull fraud on exactly those terms on some pliable marks — some immigrants who didn't feel secure in either understanding the law nor in seeking legal remedy. Basically the guy sold a house to someone on contract-for-deed, and just quietly took all of the recurring payments that were supposed to pay off the contract and ... pocketed them instead of recording them as paid. Essentially he asserted that they were years behind on paying off the loan, when in fact they had paid it in full. Almost classic "indentured servitude".

It's a gamble, plain and simple — the landlord was hustling, and gambling that the tenants would both be too poor (lawyers cost money or at the very least cost time away from work), and simply too afraid to file suit (because a lot of people come from places where if you do try to sue, gangsters come to your house and loosen your teeth a bit).

Don't get me wrong - you are technically correct in what you say. But all theft is inherently cheating against the grain of what's technically legal/illegal. Having something on public record makes con jobs like the aforementioned vastly harder to pull off.

throwawaycities• 5 years ago

That was NFTs working fairly well long before the invention of blockchain or computers or cryptography.

Define fairly well. Title/deed recording is a very fractured system, with almost nearly every county maintaining its own recording system. The cost is astronomical to maintain from the recording offices, employees, to attorneys that complete a majority of the recorded documentation. Finally the “double spend” is in no way solved, title fraud and/or fraudulent deeds are a very real problem, that is rising as much as 30% year over year.

What exactly is an acceptable level of fraud to still constitute having solved the double spend problem in your mind?

Uptrenda• 5 years ago

Fully working? Except for having to go through lawyers, realtors, shitty archaic databases (for 'conveyancing' if such records even exist), and proprietary opaque real estate systems (that often don't even show if a house can be lived in because a tenant is already living there. Have fun having the agent leave that out every time you go to buy a house. Protip: most houses are already being rented.)

Even a centralized system with fully digital inspections, contracts, and good indexing would be better than this. But there's too many pieces that are legacy you would need to replace and currently they work very poorly. Buying property is a nightmare of things that can go wrong.

captn3m0• 5 years ago

My very-similar-idea of signing PDFs for chain-of-custody (also as a NFT satire) included a "use the cert-transparency chain as a side-chain to solve double-spending" bullet point. It doesn't prevent double-spending (selling the same thing twice), but it can ensure that it can be audited.

sandworm101• 5 years ago

Land can and does move without registering the deed (in most US states). There are dangers in failing to register, but it isn't manditory. Doing so will certainly reduce the legal headaches, but the fact that a land right is not registered does not make that right unenforceable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_(real_estate)

makk• 5 years ago

Web 2 was “if you don’t know what the product is, you are the product.”

Web 3 is “if you don’t know what is being owned, you are being owned.”

Not saying that disparagingly. Just is.

vyrotek• 5 years ago

Wait, is this suggesting you use traditional centralized services to confirm ownership of decentralized items?

jamescostian• 5 years ago

From the FAQ:

Q. Can I see the source code and run it locally?
Yes. The source code for That's My Ape! is available here and is licensed for local, personal use.

The word "here" in that quote is a link to the source code: https://github.com/cryptogogue/thatsmyape

Theoretically, "anyone" can run thatsmyape locally, and assuming they've ran `npm install`, they don't even need internet access to do so. Not sure how realistic this is in reality - there aren't even any instructions to get set up, but if there were, then an even larger set of "anyone" could run it.

That said, this is of course a joke. Also from their FAQ:

Q. Is any of this for real?
No. Good lord. If you want to protect your digital rights, hire a lawyer. If it wasn't immediately clear that this is a work of satire, we've got some NFTs to sell you.

bondarchuk• 5 years ago

Isn't that the whole point of the satire? Anyone can make duplicates of any NFT on the blockchain so you still need a central authority to say which is the real million dollar jpg and which is a copy, even though it's on a blockchain.

epolanski2• 5 years ago

All copies of a jpg can be identical?

neximo64• 5 years ago

Can't you make a new signature in the future?

NelsonMinar• 5 years ago

But how do I gamble my magic beans with this system? If it's not emitting 30kg of CO2 to mint a new ape is it really art?

dang• 5 years ago

Please don't post flamewar comments here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

timdaub3• 5 years ago

I suggest that to fix the problem of a single owner being able to sign away the ape to more than one person, the app could be extended as such:

- For every new custody signature, the signer publishes the transfer online to a collectively-maintained database

- We chose the database software such that is publicly accessible to anyone that wants to participate in ape collecting and checking custody signatures

- In case some people start to get annoying and illegitimately edit the custody database, we somehow try to lock the databases edit function making it append-only

er4hn2• 5 years ago

This is very similar to the concept of "certificate transparency logs" for x509s

Jerrrry• 5 years ago

This was brilliant, I had a chuckle.

folli• 5 years ago

Too complicated, just use http://nuftu.com and get a "real" NFT from your artwork in like 5 minutes.

rideontime2• 5 years ago

50 bucks? This version's free.

lifeisstillgood• 5 years ago

Can I confirm my understanding here?

Start with a public key pair.

Use some mechanism (?) to affirm that your legal identity is tied to that pair.

Affirm ownership of some work with a IRL legal statement (plaintext)

Hash the statement with the pair.

Publish.

In order to "sell" just affirm transfer of ownership to another key, hash your statement (let's call it SYN) then they do same for a similar accepting statement (ACK) and you then SYN ACK)

I mean this is a very powerful toolset.

rfd4sgmk8u5• 5 years ago

You are missing the critical component, the double spend protection. Which is exactly the world we had <2008. It is powerful and we used it in finance for decades. However trustless systems that prevent double spends are more powerful, and that is why people are excited.

Legal statements are just strings. They mean nothing outside their jurisdiction and only enforceable by violence in them. ECDSA signatures and PoW blocks can be validated anywhere in the universe.

XorNot• 5 years ago

ECDSA signatures and PoW blocks can be validated anywhere in the universe.

Sure and what's the jurisdiction anybody cares about that in?

zopa• 5 years ago

Nit, probably, but perjury is lying to a court: while testifying, say, or in a deposition. You can't promise that something is true "under penalty of perjury" in a private contract.

kevingadd• 5 years ago

DMCA takedowns are 'under penalty of perjury' when filed even though they're not submitted directly to a court, so I assume they're modeling their contract on that. Kinda silly.

CryptoPunk• 5 years ago

>No. Good lord. If you want to protect your digital rights, hire a lawyer

Not every one can afford a lawyer..

woah• 5 years ago

I think this is actually a satire of NFT satire. It doesn't actually solve the problem of double spends, and alludes to that fact. It also draws a lot of attention to how complicated the "simpler" system it proposes is.

Unfortunately, HN is fully living out Poe's law on this one.

everfree• 5 years ago

The page shouts out Poe's Law itself at the bottom.

kangaroozach• 5 years ago

I can’t understand what is real or fake here…

That's My Ape - A blockchain-free chain of custody tool

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