medium.com/@cryptocentralsocial/anti-counterfeiting-with-blockchain-vechain-f3328fc1fc4a
Would this sort of tech work with PSA?
The real question is how much are you prepared to pay to grade your cards?
They have the QR code on their labels already, but as far as inserting some kind of chip inside the case I’m assuming that would increase costs quite a bit.
If they put chips in the cases I’ll never use them again.
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A passive 96-bit EPC inlay (chip and antenna mounted on a substrate) costs from 7 to 15 U.S. cents. If the tag is embedded in a thermal transfer label on which companies can print a bar code, the price rises to 15 cents and up.
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Wow thanks for the info. Cheaper than I thought, but that’s not counting all the networking and building a system for it,etc… $0.15 is still probably more than PSA pays for the case and label though. They would most likely charge $1-2 extra on bulk submissions.
This might be a thing in a few year when they’re mass produced and cost next to nothing.
You are starting to touch on the real problem of this issue.
Privacy
When you buy a card now, if you want only the seller knows you have it. With this system there would be a database with all your certified cards. How safe is this database? Before answering remember Equifax? If a database containing everything you are can be hacked, what hope is there for this database. I would not want anyone other than myself to have a true knowledge of what I have or don’t have.
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Well done my cornhusker brother;)
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Maybe a separate premium chipped grading service then. I know I’d be happy to pay a premium for high end trophy cards especially seeing as fake cards are getting more popular
I have never seen a convincing fake PSA label in all my life, don’t see the need for taking extra measures.
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It is a little weird for me on that one as well. I don’t think I’ve even seen anyone attempt to fake a PSA card.
It happens in the sports world, wait until Pokemon starts getting 6 figure cards…
PSA went through a few rounds of counterfeiting already with coins and with baseball cards. Fraudsters found ways to crack open cases with minimal observed damage, and also figured out how to reprint labels. This allowed them to replace a card, or a label, or both. These scams happened more than a decade ago. But PSA has improved their labels and encapsulation to make such alterations much tougher. Its like anything; as the value goes up there will be more people willing to try to come up with a scam. At this point Pokemon isn’t worth enough to worry about it.
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@hammr7 I just wanted to quickly say I am glad you found this forum and share your experience! It has been nice and somewhat surreal reading your recent posts; it really takes me back.
As hammr mentioned, the coin market has more counterfeit attempts. I remember hearing stories about high end rookie cards having issues with cases, but this quickly became a tale of the past. The case and label today make it a fruitless endeavor for scammers.
I think security is always a “what can we do better?” question rather than “what’s working now?” and I think PSA knows that since it’s continuously and frequently updating its labelling/encapsulating system to be more anti-fraud, so I have faith in them.
Regarding the chip and VeChain and privacy – I don’t have much knowledge into how blockchain works, but from what I understand, all the information contained within the blockchain is decentralized i.e. there is no “central hub/database” that can be hacked. In fact, as more information is added to the blockchain, it becomes harder and harder to infiltrate.
Please, please correct me or call me out if I am incorrect, but I believe this is one of the reasons why blockchain is so attractive in providing online privacy.
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What I heard years ago were “stories” of opening cases of high graded cards and replacing with lesser cards and regrading the high grade.
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My pleasure.
Its wonderful to see Pokemon collecting at the level of other collectibles, something I would have doubted back in 2003. At that time it seemed like I was one of just a handful that took it seriously. In fact, even when I switched to collecting Magic cards i was still part of a very small minority, since the game and genre was overwhelmingly dominated by players. But because Magic was more mature, there were a few sites where I could find kindred spirits.
As for explaining the past, the growing pains of the Pokemon community have already been experienced in other collectibles. I have had the fortune of being a part of some of them, so it would be stupid not to share.
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blockchain itself is super transparent. all the transactions ever recorded are on all the nodes within the particular blockchain network - and there are tons of these networks already. blockchain is difficult to hack because each transaction must be verified my multiple nodes before it is accepted. bitcoin actually only requires a few nodes for verification, whereas something like Ethereum or Digibyte requires much more. but, the ID of the sender and receiver are anonymous, as in your wallet is only identified by its scrambled series of letters and numerals. there is no physical ID tied to it, in theory, so governments and agencies cannot trace transactions to an individual. This was why Silk Road was huge…
this is just my elementary understanding. there are coins such as Zcash, Monero and Verge which tout super privacy for their users. Maybe it’s similar to Torrent? it might be interesting to understand those coins, which may in turn shed some light on how blockchain is fundamentally changing everything around us…
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