Encrypting Digital Art in the Blockchain = A way to make "one of a kind" pieces?

[santapants]

Ok, so I'm a digital artist and for several years, I've been trying to figure out a logical way to really lock a file in as the "original" piece of art. With digital art it can be tough because obviously, files can be copied and pasted, shared, torrented... you name it. So there's no way to really permanently assign the value of something being the original piece.

I've been thinking about it a lot this week though, and what if an original artwork file was encoded in the blockchain (similar to what they're talking about here... http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photographs.html)

Wouldn't that theoretically give us a way to officially designate the "original" piece of art (vs. "prints" or "copies") thereby making it easier to sell digital art as an asset?

I'd love to hear other thoughts on this or any ideas relating to how to achieve this!

- Erin

[davis196]

Selling digital art as an asset?I think that digital art is a product,not an asset.
Currencies,stocks and real estate are assets.Rare paintings that cost millions of dollars can also be considered as assets.Anyway,there`s no way to stop copy-pasting,free sharing and stealing.
The Internet is a big copy-pasting community.I was trying to sell digital art like you,but i gave up.

[santapants]

Selling digital art as an asset?I think that digital art is a product,not an asset.
Currencies,stocks and real estate are assets.Rare paintings that cost millions of dollars can also be considered as assets.Anyway,there`s no way to stop copy-pasting,free sharing and stealing.
The Internet is a big copy-pasting community.I was trying to sell digital art like you,but i gave up.

My question is a bit more to the technical/theoretical side of things; I make a living off of digital art, so selling it isn't the issue - I'm thinking more in terms of like, theoretically I could encrypt a piece of art in the block chain and designate that as the "official" original file. The art is a product only if it is physically printed on a product now, therefore it is an asset. In the most germinal sense, I'm exploring the idea of digitally marking that asset.
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