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Steel-man angle: A desire for data provenance is a good thing with benefits that are independent of utopias/humans vs machines kinds of questions.

But, all provenance systems are gamed. I predict the most reliable methods will be cumbersome and not widespread, thus covering little actual content. The easily-gamed systems will be in widespread use, embedded in social media apps, etc.

Questions: 1. Does there exist a data provenance system that is both easy to use and reliable "enough" (for some sufficient definition of "enough")? Can we do bcrypt-style more-bits=more-security and trade time for security?

2. Is there enough of an incentive for the major tech companies to push adoption of such a system? How could this play out?



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