It should be apparent to anyone who has watched the progress of Bitcoin that it behaves as a virtual commodity. It also is fungible in that one Bitcoin can be exchanged for an equal quantity anywhere in the World.
The success of bitcoin comes from its Blockchain software design.
Every Bitcoin has a unique signature that follows it through its travels from one Wallet to another. That 'fingerprint' never goes away and remains an indelible and essential property.
The bitcoin's ownership cannot be transferred from one owner more than once, much as a Dollar with a unique serial number is physically exchanged on a transaction. The serial number follows the life of that dollar and is always associated with it at any point in time.
So, we see clearly that bitcoin does indeed work, and we see indirectly that the underlying extensible blockchain can be applied to other scenarios.
Digital Legal documents, copyrighted documents, books, images, videos, audio files all can benefit from using the blockchain technology.
Imagine if the MPAA and RIAA dispensed with their legal campaign to protect copyrighted works and turned to blockchain technology.
In a blockchain server for music for example, each discrete copy of an 'album' or 'song' would contain an embedded fingerprint to live with the copyrighted material for its entire life in the music equivalent of a bitcoin 'ledger'.
That discrete quantity would then become protected by its identity in the global ledger as is the case for bitcoin. And that music could not be dispensed twice or its in-built encrypted ledger cross-check would return an error to stop the work from being used in more than one instance.
Music might be a blockchain with attributes only for transfer of ownership of just once.
Other kinds of documents might lend to having ownership transferrable multiple times, such as works of art.
This is my thought process and I hope that we as a global society move in this direction. It affords solutions to reduce and eliminate much of the current costs imposed on businesses which need to protect their copyrighted and Legal materials and eliminate theft of said materials entirely.
-- Dietrich
