My hunch is that they could be building an NFT marketplace. It makes sense.
Seriously though, it's easy to verify if a NFT is genuine - one of the features of Blockchain tech.
You can check that a token exists on chain, but that tells you nothing about whether the person who issued the token owns the copyright to the work. Ie, no guarantees of authenticity.
I currently have no reason to want to own an NFT, and never "buy" content from amazon because it is locked to my account and has no real permanence.
This would certainly be a killer app for NFTs, but I doubt Amazon is willing to cede enough control to actually do this.
Those first few years kissing the asses of IP conglomerates enough to get them to try it will be horrible, and then when you prove success competition will be fierce as there is no moat: not a business I would want to start. But I'd certainly be a customer.
Portable digital assets could be priced higher and would have more demand.
> still have the same hosting costs
Do content owners have to pay amazon hosting costs? I thought that was included in their platform fee.
> dramatically increase the odds of a compromise leaking their material permanently
The odds of leak are 100% already, so this isn't true.
NFTs don’t help with storage because blockchains are both inefficient and global so you still need to pay someone to host the actual media files and only give them to people with valid keys.
Worse from a rights-holder’s perspective, blockchains don’t allow you to remove content. That means that any time something gets compromised, you have valid keys floating around with no way to remove them. It’s true that leaks happen anyway but there are some key differences: these are always the best quality and they look like legitimate usage so it’s harder to block or track the way they go after torrent users. Anything which reduces risk will increase the number of people bootlegging by a hefty margin.
You can do things like, say, having the key in the blockchain be what you use to request a temporary key with lots of rate-limiting but if you’re building the infrastructure for a separate login and distribution system anyway, it comes back to the question of what benefit you get from the extra cost and risk of using NFTs rather than just using that system. If the answer isn’t “a lot more money”, nobody is going to jump on a system which is less reliable and harder to use.
All those cases are highly visible. I don't know what will happen if someone will attempt to force-fork blockchain. But I highly doubt that 51% miners could monetize that power.
Another point: bitcoin miners are using ASICs, not GPU or CPU. Those ASICs are useless bricks outside of bitcoin mining. If bitcoin miners will collapse bitcoin, they'll lose their ASICs investments. AWS can sell their CPUs to anyone, but mining bitcoin on their CPUs is pointless. To mine bitcoin, you need to buy or build ASICs. And you need bitcoin to stay afloat to return investments from those ASICs.
The only danger is if some actor have lot of money (e.g. US government) and want to kill bitcoin. They can rent some fabs, build lots of ASICs and wreak havoc. They'll spend a lot of money, but probably they'll achieve that goal.
Bitcoin and a handful of others use SHA256.
That said, if that happened, think about what would happen next: there’d be a mass exodus of customers and breach of contract lawsuits, governments would bring charges under anti-hacking laws, and the rest of the community would agree to rewrite history back to the point before that happened. He’d lose orders of magnitude more money than he could possibly gain, especially given Bitcoin’s limited liquidity.
That last part is key: we have no reason to think Bezos is a crook, or willing to break his customer’s trust, but say he has been completely compromised by Dr. Evil. This still makes no sense because nobody _wants_ a bunch of random hashes — they want to buy things. Even if he could commit the theft of the century, there wouldn’t be any place to spend it with enough volume to make it worth as much as Bezos makes every second.
Now think carefully about the implications of doing that to steal money. It’s not like they’re hypothetically doing that to hot fix a critical security issue - it’d literally be to profit from betraying their customers’ trust!