It is not just money that suffers if there is a double spending problem. Everybody who makes their living in the creative economy (artists, developers, writers, film directors, musicians, photographers, etc) suffer from the fact that the Internet is the “perfect copy machine.” That is great for those tech ventures who make their money monetizing the long tail, but it sucks if you are a creative worker in the long tail.
In ye olde analog world, we had signed originals. A copy of a Picasso painting is worth very little, but the original…. The first edition of a book signed by the author has value far beyond the sticker price on Amazon.
Using Blockchain technology it would be possible for artists to certify that a digital artifact was original and have that verified by the network.
Anybody working on this?