Digital Baseball Cards Based on BitCoins

Staten Island, NY Posted: 4/6/2015 1:00:00 AM

How to bring the collectables industry into the 21st century...

For more than 100 years, people have been collecting baseball cards. For some, it's more than a hobby, it's a serious investment in the possibility that some of them will eventually increase in value.

Because of this, collectable card companies invest a lot of time and effort into insuring that collectors continue to buy new cards, by limiting the quantity of cards they print. While it would be quite easy for a card company to simply run millions of copies of the most desired cards, that would upset the collectors who base their entire purchase decision on the fact that there are limited numbers of each card.

As such, the prospect of a digital card would simply be out of the question... or is it?

There is a way to make digital collectable cards valuable... using BitCoins.

Here's how it would work.

If you are unfamiliar with BitCoins, they are a new form of digital currency that are based upon sophisticated encrypted transactions. Without getting too technical, the key thing to know about BitCoins is that they work a bit like real cash. At any given time, only one person can own any given BitCoin and just like real cash, when you give away or sell a BitCoin, you no longer have it and you can't get it back. Another interesting thing about a BitCoin is that you need to make sure you know where you put your BitCoins, because just like cash, if you lose them... you lose the value forever.

That's also how collectable cards work. Only one person can physically own any specific card at one time, when you give away or sell one, you no longer have it and if you lose them, they're gone for good.

Based on this, it would be pretty easy to create a digital collector card that has the same features as one made from cardboard, by basing them on an encryption key based on a BitCoin, instead of crude Digital Rights Management, which is easily defeated.

One of the cool things about BitCoins is that each BitCoin (BTC) is actually 100,000,000 smaller units, called a Satoshi (named after the inventor). This means that each collector card can start out having a value set at almost any fraction of a BitCoin, and increase or decrease in value along with the market price for BitCoins changes.

Think of it like collecting rare metal coins. The gold in the coin has a value, but the real value is in how rare the coin is.

This means every card would have SOME value, but the more rare and desirable certain cards would be, the more valuable it would become, regardless of the BitCoin value inside it.

However, beyond the value of the BitCoin itself, the most important feature is that it's based on a system that guarantees that ownership of the Digital Card is controlled. Even if they created their own CryptoCurrency outside the BitCoin platform, the platform itself is what truly matters. The only way a collectable card can hold any value to an investor is if the publisher can guarantee ownership of each card in the collector's collection is uniquely protected. When they give away or sell a card, it must change hands, and cannot exist in both places. CryptoCurrency like BitCoin guarantees it.

Once ownership of each card is guaranteed, the rest is even easier. All they need to do is base the viewer on a BitCoin Wallet, so that only the owner of the card can decrypt the card. Once decrypted, the Digital Card could contain the usual photo and statistics, but be expanded even further to include audio, video and other media that only the owner of the card can access. While other people can still view screen shots or even copies of the media portion, just like they can view copies of rare printed cards, but ownership of the original would be guaranteed and hence it's value is protected.

I should also point out that the value of the BitCoin itself has no bearing on the value of any individual card. All cards can be issued with the same fractional BTC value. Just like printing physical cards, the quantities can still be controlled, as can the distribution methods, so somebody can still buy a "Pack" of Digital Cards, and hope to get a few rookies with potential. Just like printed cards, they will eventually get duplicates of players they are not interested in, and they can trade or sell them. In the end, the price for the top players will still increase as usual based on demand and scarcity.