this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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The sad thing is the concept wasn’t.
Selling NFTs with no physical existence is what is pointlessly stupid.
Before they came along i considered the idea of a blockchain linked video camera where metadata of footage gets written into the chain to combat fake news and misinformation.
The goal would be to create a proof and record of original footage, to which media publishers and people who share can link towards to verify authenticity/author.
If the media later gets manipulated or reframed you would be able to verify this by comparing to the original record.
It was never a finished idea but when i first read nft i thought this is the right direction.
And then capitalism started selling apes and what the actual disgusting money possessed fuck was that.
The certificate/signature part seems okay for verification.
It's the transferable virtual deeds being sold that are the scam. I could sell you a virtual deed to the Golden Gate Bridge right now, you could buy it but it doesn't really mean anything.
Wait just a second! You have a bridge for sale? Tell me more.
Well first of all, it allows travel between point A and point B, usually above the ground
I'm in! Name your price.
And time travel! But you have to drive real slow for it to work
Or you could travel at any speed.
Joke's on you: I constantly time travel for free!
Granted, it's always in the same direction and at the same rate of time change, but no fancy bridges are required.
Not true! The faster you're moving through space, the slower you're moving through time.
Yeah, that's possibly the most famous scam in history (people selling deeds to the Brooklyn Bridge), enough to where "I've got a bridge to sell you" is a figure of speech for calling someone gullible or naive.
And then despite the world knowing about the Brooklyn Bridge scam, the cryptobros actually went and found a bunch of suckers to fall for the exact same scam, only with blockchains instead of notary seals.
It's kind of like selling a website that redirects to Facebook, and thinking that therefore you own Facebook.
I mean we use fiat currency
the issue isnt that it is virtual
The virtual deeds would be great for game licences and trading second hand games online
Wouldn't a code signing be a simpler way to achieve that? The video camera can produce a hash code with each video and you can always run the same hash function against the video file to confirm that it wasn't tampered with.
I guess the problem NFTs try to solve is authority holding the initial verification tied to the video. If it’s on a blockchain, theoretically no one owns it and the date/metadata is etched in stone, whereas otherwise some entity has to publish the initial hash.
In other words, one can hash a video, yeah, but how do you know when that hashed video was taken? From where? There has to be some kind of hard-to-dispute initial record (and even then that only works in contexts where the videos earliest date is the proof, so to speak, like recording and event as it happens).
This is such a funny thing to say since NFTs were all about "owning" stuff on the blockchain.
Indeed. The blockchain provides no media hosting, no enforcement, I guess. It can mark something as owned (and require their private key to decrypt or whatever), but ultimately that ownership is as beholden to reality (read: arbitrary purseholders) as any other system. It’s just a record.
With your scheme you can't prove the timing of when the hash was made, nor who made the hash. At the very least the camera would have to include something that proves the time in the hash, and then sign the result with a private key that can't be extracted from the camera.
Trusted, cryptographic timestamps exist, and have for some time. NFTs don't add anything new.
Okay good. I thought it would, just didn't know any specifically. I wasn't trying to suggest a public blockchain would be the only solution or even the best of multiple solutions, only that they needed to consider more angles beyond just making a hash.
This still fundamentally suffers from the oracle problem like all blockchains solutions. You can always attack these blockchain solutions at the point where they need to interact with the real world. In this case the camera is the "oracle" and nothing prevents someone from attacking the proposed camera and leveraging it to certify some modified footage. The blockchain doesn't add anything a public database and digitally signed footage wouldn't also achieve.
This is correct.
This is a flaw i had considered and never found a solution for. Hence the idea is unfinished.
The only further argument i have is that manipulating camera techniques is as old as film yet it’s the digital tools that are causing the most harm and allow any troll to partake. Staging a scene takes at least some dedication and effort.
If such would be considered on the blockchain than it would also bring in questions all other footage by the same recorder device. “Wallets” from established authors, anonymous or not would have their own reputations of trustworthyness.
You don't have to stage a scene, you can use modern displays, optics, and sensors to inject 'digital' strategies into the 'analog' approach.
This is actually a pretty decent idea considering what's coming now with AI video. I have no idea if it could be implemented, or if media even cares anymore, but I sure would appreciate it.
A private key would be built in to the camera. It would be stored in a way that's hard to get at, physically or in software (like the secure enclaves in phones).
The pics or videos are signed using the private key (again, this process needs to happen in a secure way without revealing the secret key).
The camera manufacturer publishes the matching public key. Anyone can use it to verify that the file matches the signature. But no one can sign a fake image unless they can get at the private key.
This would work even if the camera manufacturer no longer existed. The camera does need to ever be online.
The public/private key pairs are also part of what makes blockchains work, but for this process blockchains would add nothing.
Even if people can't get the key out of rom, which I doubt, they can man in the middle the cable going to the photosensor and inject arbitrary images into the system.
The conceptual issue here is that most attempts at denying the legitimacy of content are not by people who actually operate the given equipment.
If a celebrity claims some third party footage is fake, that celebrity is not the one that would vouch/not vouch for it. If a paparazzi does something wrong, they'd sign it and say "yes it's authentic".
Now maybe you can say "Canon genuine" to say it's not the person, but the camera vendor, but again, with the right setup, you can good old analog feed doctored stuff into a legitimate sensor and get that signature.
Since the anchor for the signature almost never rests with the person who would ever contest the content, it's of limited use.
Traditional signing is enough to say "If I trust the AP, then I trust this image that the AP signed", no distributed ledger really suggested in this use case, since the trust is entirely around the identity of the originator, not based on consensus.
Had thoughts like that before, someone pointed that it already exists and is called C2PA - no blockchain necessary. It's not yet widespread, though.
As for NFT, when it came out I had thoughts that it could be used for completely transparent and automated businesses. Something like an AirBnB with a digital lock on the front door and you could buy an NFT for a daily stay that you could use to unlock said lock. But then if there's only one company that accepts said NFT's then there's zero reason for it to be on blockchain, they can just send you the code, and if they scam you there's no use for either NFT or the code. There could be real estate ownership certificates, but then again, there would always be only one authority issuing them - zero reason for blockchain. There could be like crowdfunding NFT, but then again, there could only one party managing the funds. There were tons of ideas for practical usage of NFT's, but all of them hinge on there being some party linking the zero-trust crypto and the real world, and if there's only a single trusted party then it always makes more sense for that party to deploy a normal database in place of blockchain and just provide an API endpoint to verify ownership.
EDIT: Fixed wrong link
still a solution in search of a problem, unfortunately.
We can still tell when something is AI and it's not at a stage where it can fool mainstream news or the legal system.
Did you reply to the wrong comment?
The problem is “misinformation” and has been since before nft/genai became a thing.
Gen Ai makes misinformation worse but the event that sparked this was a gop shared video of a democrat which was slightly speed up to seem more aggressive.
Also simple framing to cut off context from the original has been a very common form of misinformation for decades.
to be more clear: block chain for images is a solution in search of a problem because no one is looking for mass-verified images, they are looking for source-verified images, because you can still fake something on the block chain at point of creation. In 2025 the main concern about faked images is with AI, but more sophisticated and more convincing images can be made with older, even analog technology like airbrushing.
Your example of a sped up Democrat could still be disseminated on the block chain and it would do nothing to confirm or deny its veracity.
It would but it would be much easier to find/link and compare with the actual original.
Of course i have mentioned this was never a complete finished idea, just some thoughts i had for years.
Nowadays i can conceptualise ai tools that detect near duplicates but those obviously were not a thing when i first came up with this.
I would hope that it would be considered very damning if an official publishers referred to false footage while having all the tools to find and refer to the original. So would it Be damning for the uploader and all footage recorded with their device.
isn't the entire concept just trying to side step journalism though? The block chain is just replacing journalistic standards for something that is more easily corrupted with no guarantee of a better outcome.
And often in tricky journalism such as exposés, you don't want your source to be trackable. That's why Robert Maxwell was such a piece of shit as a newspaper journalist, he would shop his sources to Mossad.
Not at all. I consider journalists the best potential of early adapter.
As a consumer i don't care if i have to copy or screenshot or need to list sources if i am Just sharing to friends.
Publishers however have a responsibility towards the public to provide fair information. And if i post publicly i also try to pay a bit more attention. (Ignoring i failed exactly that just earlier today)
There would be nothing stopping anyone to ignore the system and keep sharing unverified pixels but its a real flex be able to provide open and transparent information about your sources almost upfront.
If enough established organisation start doing this then the ones that don’t will stick out like they have something to hide.
The exposé is an interesting example I had not yet considered but again i think nothing is stopping publishers from publicly stating they cannot provide sources but have the means to get it independently verified.
I also believe its possible for a camera/recorded to exist anonymously on the blockchain, just like you don't know the owner of a crypto wallet.
I initially thought they were like numbered art prints, with a more robust way of guaranteeing authenticity.
That was the marketing hype.
They were actually selling numbered receipts of art prints.
Iain M. Banks had a similar idea in The Player of Games. In the book AI is so realistic that all real photos and videos have to be logged and timestamped for authenticity.
Yes, exactly! People were easily misled to think that provable attribution for a thing is the same as ownership.
FWIW, I think that a blockchain registry for attribution would be invaluable for combating misinformation. The problem is to get content providers (media) and browsers to cooperate over a standard. If you could get a few certificate registrars onboard, it would work even better, since they have the secure infrastructure to seed this whole thing and help manage identities for the parties involved.
One would assume that journalism would be more then motivated to proof authenticity of the images they show.
Of course such assumptions fail to consider the events at cern that fucked up any chance of reasonable reality.
I had an idea sort of like that - media for your camera or cell-camera that was write once, could not be erased or changed, did not forget (you know ssd's and thumb drives forget as the stranded charge leaks away) - Each picture cryptographically signed with GPS and date and time and author/photographer.