We introduce Pastel, an open-source, decentralized system that allows artists to register “provably rare” digital artworks on a Bitcoin-like blockchain, while also allowing art collectors to purchase these artworks and “trustlessly” trade them among themselves without reliance on a central authority.
The resulting rare digital artworks can be thought of as continuing the long tradition of limited edition art prints such as those sold by art galleries, often in sets of 10 individually numbered pieces. Unlike such “physical world” prints, rare digital artwork–when implemented correctly using a secure cryptographic digital signature scheme and a robust “near-duplicate” image detection scheme–offer the digital art collector a high degree of certainty in determining the authenticity and provenance of a specific artwork registered in the system. At the same time, rare digital artwork allows artists to directly access and trade with their patrons, without an art gallery or dealer taking a huge slice of the value.
Furthermore, rare digital art collectors can trade among themselves using an integrated, decentralized art marketplace at a minimal cost in terms of fees, providing low-friction liquidity to a notoriously illiquid and fee-ridden traditional art market.
Pastel project focuses narrowly on digital art, with the single goal of optimizing the various engineering and security.
Instead of attempting to serve as a universal platform for building decentralized applications, the Pastel project focuses narrowly on digital art, with the single goal of optimizing the various engineering and security trade-offs for this one application. We believe in building the project upon a sturdy foundation of proven, peer-reviewed technologies wherever possible, although in some cases, we had to invent new technology that did not exist previously.
With the exception of these innovative features, the primary contribution of Pastel is in how it combines these existing technologies in innovative ways, while carefully designing the economic incentives of the network so that the optimal behavior of network participants is to act honestly and in a way that is productive for the performance and security of the network.
The introduction of Bitcoin in 2009 showed the world that it is possible to create a secure, distributed ledger through the use of proof of work and Merkle trees.
Soon after the original Bitcoin software was developed, developers realized that it was possible to embed arbitrary data into the blockchain in a variety of ways. This was quickly used to upload various files to the Bitcoin blockchain, from image files of cartoon characters to the malicious embedding of computer virus signatures (designed to trigger anti-virus software into thinking the blockchain data files were infected).
While there are many ways one can go about writing data to the Bitcoin blockchain, the basic principle is to send a tiny amount of Bitcoin to a large number of addresses. The trick is that these addresses are constructed in a special way, so that while they appear to be valid, regular addresses, in reality, each address represents a small chunk of the data that the user wants to write to the blockchain (because the addresses are selected in this way, the sender cannot know the corresponding private keys to the receiving addresses, causing such coins to be permanently lost or “burned”).
Later, by referencing the corresponding transaction ID, another user of the network can retrieve the list of receiving addresses and thereby reconstruct the original file. This is a very powerful idea since Bitcoin has proven to be a highly secure, immutable ledger. The potential rewards for anyone who could break the security of the Bitcoin system are so large that they have effectively acted as the greatest “bug bounty” in software history.
The ability to write arbitrary data to the blockchain in this way means that we can ignore the details of how Bitcoin is implemented (which is highly complex and non-trivial, representing the work of hundreds of talented and expert software developers around the world) and instead work at a higher level of abstraction, where we can treat it as a cloud storage service like Dropbox, but one in which files can only be added– not deleted or modified. Any file is written in this manner automatically inherits all of the security properties of a Bitcoin transaction: it cannot be forged or counterfeited, and it is truly immutable and irreversible.
USEFUL LINKS
- Website: https://www.pastel.network/
- Telegram: https://t.me/PastelNetwork
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/PastelNetwork
- Medium : https://medium.com/pastelnetwork
AUTHOR INFORMATION
- My Bitcointalk username: Batx_9999
- Link to Bitcointalk Profile: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2264046
- Telegram: t.me/jtaccount2
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