Use some mechanism (?) to affirm that your legal identity is tied to that pair.
Affirm ownership of some work with a IRL legal statement (plaintext)
Hash the statement with the pair.
Publish.
In order to "sell" just affirm transfer of ownership to another key, hash your statement (let's call it SYN) then they do same for a similar accepting statement (ACK) and you then SYN ACK)
You are missing the critical component, the double spend protection. Which is exactly the world we had <2008. It is powerful and we used it in finance for decades. However trustless systems that prevent double spends are more powerful, and that is why people are excited.
Legal statements are just strings. They mean nothing outside their jurisdiction and only enforceable by violence in them.
ECDSA signatures and PoW blocks can be validated anywhere in the universe.
Start with a public key pair.
Use some mechanism (?) to affirm that your legal identity is tied to that pair.
Affirm ownership of some work with a IRL legal statement (plaintext)
Hash the statement with the pair.
Publish.
In order to "sell" just affirm transfer of ownership to another key, hash your statement (let's call it SYN) then they do same for a similar accepting statement (ACK) and you then SYN ACK)
I mean this is a very powerful toolset.