9 ms·

I made the mistake of diving a bit deeper into the group who bought it and found a proposal where they are talking about literally burning the book they just bo

I made the mistake of diving a bit deeper into the group who bought it and found a proposal where they are talking about literally burning the book they just bought after digitizing it for … reasons I guess [0] At this point I just hope its some sort of practical joke or whatever because this just seems a bit much. [0] https://forum.spicedao.xyz/t/nft-of-the-book-w-proof-of-jpeg-proof-of-burn/48 https://forum.spicedao.xyz/t/nft-of-the-book-w-proof-of-jpeg...

mxxx 5y ago
Fuck me, they’re talking about using JPEG as an archival format before destroying the original. What is going on here.
- cdirkx 5y ago
  > Because the book remains on-chain, the book does not die, but crosses the boundary of physical to digital. It reminds me of the video game SOMA, where people upload a brain-scan of themselves to live on after some catastrophe, essentially making a digital copy of their consciousness. But because they are also still physically alive, they see the digital version of themselves as a clone, someone else. To "complete the transition", they decide they must end their lives at the exact moment the scan is complete.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    The NFT craze reminds me of Nasrudin's "Smoke Seller."[0] [0] https://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~schiff/Net/t26.jpg https://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~schiff/Net/t26.jpg
  - ehnto 5y ago
    SOMA was brilliant. That moment in particular I think was really thrilling, it made me consider some pretty fundamental questions about consciousness in a totally absurd setting. The setting I think helped isolate the core questions really well I felt. Trying not to spoil it by discussing it, if anyone hasn't yet you really should try it, it's a really unique experience in gaming and that's hard to come by these days.
    - smnscu 5y ago
      Yeah it's a bit of a shame that the parent comment spoiled the plot. I definitely enjoyed SOMA's admittedly simplistic take on the teletransportation paradox; however, for me the atmosphere was much more impactful, especially given the story. I think they executed the "last survivor on Earth" trope really well, and it was tough to get through because of that.
    - falcolas 5y ago
      You may enjoy Returnal as well. In terms of an experience you can't replicate in other mediums.
  - brazzy 5y ago
    It goes back at least 50 years more, to Star Trek transporters. And the most chilling version I've seen is in Charles Stross' Glasshouse, where some soldiers fight a virus that infects the consciousness of everyone using such a transporter. They "rescue" an infected population by chopping off their heads and throwing them into a transporter hacked to remove the virus. IIRC only the heads because transporting the entire bodies would be slower and the other side is expected to reconstruct a living body anyway. A few hundred or thousand beheaded people later, they realize that the transporter is broken and would not reconstruct anything.
    - 5040 5y ago
      >It goes back at least 50 years more, to Star Trek transporters. Personally, I like to trace this stuff back to early Christian theological debates. Here's an illuminating quotation: Origen's belief that he could be resurrected in a numerically different body is parallel to Derek Parfit's belief that he could enjoy some kind of survival short of identity, if his present body was destroyed, but the information from it was electronically beamed, so as to construct an exactly similar body and brain with exactly similar psychology at a distance, say on the planet Mars (Reasons and Persons, 199-320). Parfit, like Origen, discounts the need for bodily continuity, and discounts the idea we encountered in Philoponus that it matters whether the original body is replaced gradually, or all at once (op. cit., Appendix D).
    - YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
      For me the archetypal story of the genre is Think Like a Dinosaur: The story postulates a transportation device (supervised by a dinosaur-like race of aliens) which can transmit an exact copy of a person's body to distant planets. The original body is disintegrated once reception at the destination is confirmed. In the story a woman is teleported to an alien planet, but the original is not disintegrated because reception cannot be confirmed at the time. Reception is later confirmed, and the original, not surprisingly, declines to "balance the equation" by re-entering the scanning and disintegrating device. This creates an ethical quandary which is viewed quite differently by the cold-blooded aliens who provided the teleportation technology, and their warm-blooded human associates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Like_a_Dinosaur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Like_a_Dinosaur Transmission protocol errors, eh.
  - nikanj 5y ago
    Are you familiar with the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult?
- tluyben2 5y ago
  But the person who made the suggestion claims to be a post-doc and they ‘invented’ ‘JPEG mining’ whatever that is. So…
- loceng 5y ago
  They didn't mention making it an NFT? Ideology gone wild, wild west.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  I believe JPEG2000 is commonly used as an archival format. Compression artifacts are irrelevant if your scan resolution is significantly higher than the print resolution.
  - lern_too_spel 5y ago
    JPEG2000 supports lossless encoding. Even if you scan at higher than print resolution, if you compress too much with lossy compression, the original print resolution date won't be recoverable.
- 1_player 5y ago
  """Since each page of the book will require many miners (minters), we must decide on what type of NFT each minter gets. I propose the following NFT variations ordered from easiest to most complex: 1. Every minter is rewarded with an identical NFT of the page. 2. Every minter is rewarded with a fraction of the final NFT that contains the page. [...] 3. By leveraging progressive JPEG 7 tech, every minter gets a unique NFT which contains the uploaded image but with different degrees of quality. [...]""" Holy fucking shit. This could be extremely high quality satire, but they're serious, which makes it even funnier.
  - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    What’s tragic is they could just upload the damn thing to internet archive but instead they’re going to use some bizarre storage method that will help ensure the book is actually hard for people to read.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - pjc50 5y ago
    > By leveraging progressive JPEG 7 tech, every minter gets a unique NFT which contains the uploaded image but with different degrees of quality. This is both brilliant and insane at the same time. Next up, I have an MPEG stream to sell you ... where the I-frames are charged at a higher rate than the B-frames!
    - lanstin 5y ago
      If you think of them as eager and well intentioned children, the whole thing is kind of sweet, tho also a big fuck up. It is like a kid driver denting a car because something something girlfriend.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  Yeah of all of the NFT silliness, this one takes the cake for me. I can just imagine the screams from historians and archivists.
- rebelpixel 5y ago
  If they only they took a step back, they'd realize yes they can scan it, but nothing beats preserving the original book itself physically. These guys need to go out, breathe air, and talk to people outside of their bubble.
Genmutant 5y ago
What happens if you upload copyright protected data in cleartext on a blockchain without having the distribution rights?
- chinathrow 5y ago
  You don't need to guess - someone is holding that copyright right now.
- pjc50 5y ago
  You can't really put content on the blockchain, that costs a surprising amount because of all the proof-of-waste. What happens is people put the content on a host and the URL on the blockchain. I suppose in theory it could be kept in IPFS, but few NFTs seem to bother with that.
  - captn3m0 5y ago
    I’m tempted to upload a magnet URL dump to a cheap blockchain (there has to be one, right?)
    - tluyben2 5y ago
      Sure, just take a newly launched one. People are launching bollocks coins every day.
      - qorrect 5y ago
        bollocks coin* , yeah we should make that.
      - mpeg 5y ago
        There's multi-billion-dollar blockchains where transactions and storage cost a tiny fraction of what they do on Ethereum.
  - SahAssar 5y ago
    Read the linked parent forum post. They are talking exactly about putting the actual images on the blockchain.
Sephiroth87 5y ago
Let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and pretend everything worked as they say, in what world is giving access to the book to the few people that pay for the nft, “democratising”?
- BLanen 5y ago
  Libertarian heaven
- sneak 5y ago
  NFT data is public, generally.
  - ethanbond 5y ago
    Then in what sense is owning a token owning anything?
    - sneak 5y ago
      Forget the idea that owning the token represents something. Buying an NFT just means you bought the NFT itself; it does not mean you bought the image, have access to the image, bought any rights to the image. It just means you bought the NFT.
    - mpeg 5y ago
      Kinda missing the point of NFTs there, it's a collector's item and I can't spend $2.6m to buy the actual physical book, but I could spend $2.6k to buy an NFT with 1000 editions which was minted by the owner of the physical book. I don't care about Jorodowsky's Dune, but if I was a fan I could then show off my NFT on twitter, or <<the metaverse>> or just print it out and frame it. FAQS - Can't someone else just download the image and pretend they own it? Yes, just as someone can buy a fake LV bag and show it off. Other collectors will still know, and don't care about the fakes. As the tech becomes more mainstream, sites like twitter will show whether you actually own the NFT you claim to. - Can't someone else mint their own NFT? Yes, but like with real collectors items, provenance matters. Just like one can forge a perfect Picasso but without any plausible proof of origin it would not be worth much. - Can't they decide to mint more "fragments" after the fact, therefore diluting the price of each of the 1000 editions. No, the smart contract that governs the NFT can't be changed. - Won't the link inside my NFT die? No, the link is usually just a SHA256 hash of the content; with the content being hosted on IPFS. It's all p2p so as long as a host somewhere in the world has a copy, you can always find the content by hash, even if the underlying technology changes with time.
gilleain 5y ago
That's pretty insane. Oddly enough - the process in a library for digitising a copy of a book can be fairly destructive, as far as I understood from those doing it (at CUDL). The spine is chopped off, to make it easier to put it into a machine for scanning all the pages. The digital images can (should?) then be stored in a format that allows zooming, for example : https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-03967/1 https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-03967/1
- notRobot 5y ago
  Archive.org has a non destructive book scanning technique! http://blog.archive.org/2021/02/09/meet-eliza-zhang-book-scanner-and-viral-video-star/ http://blog.archive.org/2021/02/09/meet-eliza-zhang-book-sca...
  - gilleain 5y ago
    Nice. I suppose it also depends on how rare the item being scanned is. For a recent printed work, with multiple copies it's less important, while scanning a fragment from a Genizah or a notebook is much more careful process.
    - sdoering 5y ago
      The first time I encountered a digital facsimile was when I studied medieval literature in Germany. There is the great "Codex Manesse" [1] (I once had the opportunity to see the real one in an exhibition) that is one of a kind. It is irreplaceable and there are but a selected few people who are even allowed to touch it (with gloves). It could not be damaged, but was digitized without harm nonetheless [2]. So I actually never thought of digitalisation as a destructive process. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Manesse?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Manesse?wprov=sfla1 [2]: https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg848 https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg848
      - gilleain 5y ago
        Well ideally digitisation would not be destructive, I suppose. With any preservation or analysis of historical artefacts there is some risk/reward calculation. Like some books are so delicate that there is an approach to scan them while still closed: https://news.mit.edu/2016/computational-imaging-method-reads-closed-books-0909 https://news.mit.edu/2016/computational-imaging-method-reads... not sure how much that is used, though (not my area :) )
pjc50 5y ago
They've bought into the idea of artificial scarcity, so of course destroying real things makes them more valuable.
DemocracyFTW 5y ago
[Q] Do we really want to be perceived as book burners? [A] Tbh I don’t care too much what a bunch of normies that probably didn’t even know the book existed think. The book would still exist but digitized and in the blockchain. [Q] Why not just use Arweave, IPFS, and a variety of other long-term digital preservation strategies? All of them are less expensive and resource-intensive. IPFS is not permanent. If it stops being hosted it disappears. Arweave cannot compare to something like Ethereum which is a truly decentralized network. But upmost I would say that cost of uploading is a feat, not a problem. It would make our collection even more special. These are a bunch of seriously sociopathic, inconsiderate and reckless thugs. I'm happy to see them fleecing each other.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  >If it stops being hosted it disappears The same thing applies to blockchains. If no one is hosting it, you can't download it.
  - tluyben2 5y ago
    Sure but ipfs hosting etc rely on one or a few hosts; if you use a blockchain like btc, at least it is vast and that means someone will be hosting at least until btc reaches $0.
    - pas 5y ago
      not necessarily. BTC has UTXO (unspent transaction output), whereas ETH has proper accounts and the money is a property of the account. so if any of these chains only want to focus on sending/storing money (or simply address the evergrowing size of the chain), then they can start purging the old transactions from the ledger. (yes, ETH has smart contracts, but it's not impossible to imagine that ETH will start charging gas for upkeep of that data, and when the smart contract runs out of upkeep it gets deleted.)
      - tluyben2 5y ago
        Yes, but most other way of storage are even easier to purge. Also these people are not exactly sane, so I can see them spend millions on ‘securing the documents on chain’.

mxxx 5y ago

Fuck me, they’re talking about using JPEG as an archival format before destroying the original. What is going on here.

cdirkx 5y ago
> Because the book remains on-chain, the book does not die, but crosses the boundary of physical to digital. It reminds me of the video game SOMA, where people upload a brain-scan of themselves to live on after some catastrophe, essentially making a digital copy of their consciousness. But because they are also still physically alive, they see the digital version of themselves as a clone, someone else. To "complete the transition", they decide they must end their lives at the exact moment the scan is complete.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  The NFT craze reminds me of Nasrudin's "Smoke Seller."[0] [0] https://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~schiff/Net/t26.jpg https://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~schiff/Net/t26.jpg
- ehnto 5y ago
  SOMA was brilliant. That moment in particular I think was really thrilling, it made me consider some pretty fundamental questions about consciousness in a totally absurd setting. The setting I think helped isolate the core questions really well I felt. Trying not to spoil it by discussing it, if anyone hasn't yet you really should try it, it's a really unique experience in gaming and that's hard to come by these days.
  - smnscu 5y ago
    Yeah it's a bit of a shame that the parent comment spoiled the plot. I definitely enjoyed SOMA's admittedly simplistic take on the teletransportation paradox; however, for me the atmosphere was much more impactful, especially given the story. I think they executed the "last survivor on Earth" trope really well, and it was tough to get through because of that.
  - falcolas 5y ago
    You may enjoy Returnal as well. In terms of an experience you can't replicate in other mediums.
- brazzy 5y ago
  It goes back at least 50 years more, to Star Trek transporters. And the most chilling version I've seen is in Charles Stross' Glasshouse, where some soldiers fight a virus that infects the consciousness of everyone using such a transporter. They "rescue" an infected population by chopping off their heads and throwing them into a transporter hacked to remove the virus. IIRC only the heads because transporting the entire bodies would be slower and the other side is expected to reconstruct a living body anyway. A few hundred or thousand beheaded people later, they realize that the transporter is broken and would not reconstruct anything.
  - 5040 5y ago
    >It goes back at least 50 years more, to Star Trek transporters. Personally, I like to trace this stuff back to early Christian theological debates. Here's an illuminating quotation: Origen's belief that he could be resurrected in a numerically different body is parallel to Derek Parfit's belief that he could enjoy some kind of survival short of identity, if his present body was destroyed, but the information from it was electronically beamed, so as to construct an exactly similar body and brain with exactly similar psychology at a distance, say on the planet Mars (Reasons and Persons, 199-320). Parfit, like Origen, discounts the need for bodily continuity, and discounts the idea we encountered in Philoponus that it matters whether the original body is replaced gradually, or all at once (op. cit., Appendix D).
  - YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
    For me the archetypal story of the genre is Think Like a Dinosaur: The story postulates a transportation device (supervised by a dinosaur-like race of aliens) which can transmit an exact copy of a person's body to distant planets. The original body is disintegrated once reception at the destination is confirmed. In the story a woman is teleported to an alien planet, but the original is not disintegrated because reception cannot be confirmed at the time. Reception is later confirmed, and the original, not surprisingly, declines to "balance the equation" by re-entering the scanning and disintegrating device. This creates an ethical quandary which is viewed quite differently by the cold-blooded aliens who provided the teleportation technology, and their warm-blooded human associates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Like_a_Dinosaur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Like_a_Dinosaur Transmission protocol errors, eh.
- nikanj 5y ago
  Are you familiar with the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult?
tluyben2 5y ago
But the person who made the suggestion claims to be a post-doc and they ‘invented’ ‘JPEG mining’ whatever that is. So…
loceng 5y ago
They didn't mention making it an NFT? Ideology gone wild, wild west.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
I believe JPEG2000 is commonly used as an archival format. Compression artifacts are irrelevant if your scan resolution is significantly higher than the print resolution.
- lern_too_spel 5y ago
  JPEG2000 supports lossless encoding. Even if you scan at higher than print resolution, if you compress too much with lossy compression, the original print resolution date won't be recoverable.
1_player 5y ago
"""Since each page of the book will require many miners (minters), we must decide on what type of NFT each minter gets. I propose the following NFT variations ordered from easiest to most complex: 1. Every minter is rewarded with an identical NFT of the page. 2. Every minter is rewarded with a fraction of the final NFT that contains the page. [...] 3. By leveraging progressive JPEG 7 tech, every minter gets a unique NFT which contains the uploaded image but with different degrees of quality. [...]""" Holy fucking shit. This could be extremely high quality satire, but they're serious, which makes it even funnier.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  What’s tragic is they could just upload the damn thing to internet archive but instead they’re going to use some bizarre storage method that will help ensure the book is actually hard for people to read.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- pjc50 5y ago
  > By leveraging progressive JPEG 7 tech, every minter gets a unique NFT which contains the uploaded image but with different degrees of quality. This is both brilliant and insane at the same time. Next up, I have an MPEG stream to sell you ... where the I-frames are charged at a higher rate than the B-frames!
  - lanstin 5y ago
    If you think of them as eager and well intentioned children, the whole thing is kind of sweet, tho also a big fuck up. It is like a kid driver denting a car because something something girlfriend.
UncleMeat 5y ago
Yeah of all of the NFT silliness, this one takes the cake for me. I can just imagine the screams from historians and archivists.
rebelpixel 5y ago
If they only they took a step back, they'd realize yes they can scan it, but nothing beats preserving the original book itself physically. These guys need to go out, breathe air, and talk to people outside of their bubble.

Genmutant 5y ago

What happens if you upload copyright protected data in cleartext on a blockchain without having the distribution rights?

chinathrow 5y ago
You don't need to guess - someone is holding that copyright right now.
pjc50 5y ago
You can't really put content on the blockchain, that costs a surprising amount because of all the proof-of-waste. What happens is people put the content on a host and the URL on the blockchain. I suppose in theory it could be kept in IPFS, but few NFTs seem to bother with that.
- captn3m0 5y ago
  I’m tempted to upload a magnet URL dump to a cheap blockchain (there has to be one, right?)
  - tluyben2 5y ago
    Sure, just take a newly launched one. People are launching bollocks coins every day.
    - qorrect 5y ago
      bollocks coin* , yeah we should make that.
    - mpeg 5y ago
      There's multi-billion-dollar blockchains where transactions and storage cost a tiny fraction of what they do on Ethereum.
- SahAssar 5y ago
  Read the linked parent forum post. They are talking exactly about putting the actual images on the blockchain.

Sephiroth87 5y ago

Let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and pretend everything worked as they say, in what world is giving access to the book to the few people that pay for the nft, “democratising”?

BLanen 5y ago
Libertarian heaven
sneak 5y ago
NFT data is public, generally.
- ethanbond 5y ago
  Then in what sense is owning a token owning anything?
  - sneak 5y ago
    Forget the idea that owning the token represents something. Buying an NFT just means you bought the NFT itself; it does not mean you bought the image, have access to the image, bought any rights to the image. It just means you bought the NFT.
  - mpeg 5y ago
    Kinda missing the point of NFTs there, it's a collector's item and I can't spend $2.6m to buy the actual physical book, but I could spend $2.6k to buy an NFT with 1000 editions which was minted by the owner of the physical book. I don't care about Jorodowsky's Dune, but if I was a fan I could then show off my NFT on twitter, or <<the metaverse>> or just print it out and frame it. FAQS - Can't someone else just download the image and pretend they own it? Yes, just as someone can buy a fake LV bag and show it off. Other collectors will still know, and don't care about the fakes. As the tech becomes more mainstream, sites like twitter will show whether you actually own the NFT you claim to. - Can't someone else mint their own NFT? Yes, but like with real collectors items, provenance matters. Just like one can forge a perfect Picasso but without any plausible proof of origin it would not be worth much. - Can't they decide to mint more "fragments" after the fact, therefore diluting the price of each of the 1000 editions. No, the smart contract that governs the NFT can't be changed. - Won't the link inside my NFT die? No, the link is usually just a SHA256 hash of the content; with the content being hosted on IPFS. It's all p2p so as long as a host somewhere in the world has a copy, you can always find the content by hash, even if the underlying technology changes with time.

gilleain 5y ago

That's pretty insane. Oddly enough - the process in a library for digitising a copy of a book can be fairly destructive, as far as I understood from those doing it (at CUDL). The spine is chopped off, to make it easier to put it into a machine for scanning all the pages. The digital images can (should?) then be stored in a format that allows zooming, for example : https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-03967/1 https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-03967/1

notRobot 5y ago
Archive.org has a non destructive book scanning technique! http://blog.archive.org/2021/02/09/meet-eliza-zhang-book-scanner-and-viral-video-star/ http://blog.archive.org/2021/02/09/meet-eliza-zhang-book-sca...
- gilleain 5y ago
  Nice. I suppose it also depends on how rare the item being scanned is. For a recent printed work, with multiple copies it's less important, while scanning a fragment from a Genizah or a notebook is much more careful process.
  - sdoering 5y ago
    The first time I encountered a digital facsimile was when I studied medieval literature in Germany. There is the great "Codex Manesse" [1] (I once had the opportunity to see the real one in an exhibition) that is one of a kind. It is irreplaceable and there are but a selected few people who are even allowed to touch it (with gloves). It could not be damaged, but was digitized without harm nonetheless [2]. So I actually never thought of digitalisation as a destructive process. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Manesse?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Manesse?wprov=sfla1 [2]: https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg848 https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg848
    - gilleain 5y ago
      Well ideally digitisation would not be destructive, I suppose. With any preservation or analysis of historical artefacts there is some risk/reward calculation. Like some books are so delicate that there is an approach to scan them while still closed: https://news.mit.edu/2016/computational-imaging-method-reads-closed-books-0909 https://news.mit.edu/2016/computational-imaging-method-reads... not sure how much that is used, though (not my area :) )

pjc50 5y ago

They've bought into the idea of artificial scarcity, so of course destroying real things makes them more valuable.

DemocracyFTW 5y ago

[Q] Do we really want to be perceived as book burners? [A] Tbh I don’t care too much what a bunch of normies that probably didn’t even know the book existed think. The book would still exist but digitized and in the blockchain. [Q] Why not just use Arweave, IPFS, and a variety of other long-term digital preservation strategies? All of them are less expensive and resource-intensive. IPFS is not permanent. If it stops being hosted it disappears. Arweave cannot compare to something like Ethereum which is a truly decentralized network. But upmost I would say that cost of uploading is a feat, not a problem. It would make our collection even more special. These are a bunch of seriously sociopathic, inconsiderate and reckless thugs. I'm happy to see them fleecing each other.

charcircuit 5y ago
>If it stops being hosted it disappears The same thing applies to blockchains. If no one is hosting it, you can't download it.
- tluyben2 5y ago
  Sure but ipfs hosting etc rely on one or a few hosts; if you use a blockchain like btc, at least it is vast and that means someone will be hosting at least until btc reaches $0.
  - pas 5y ago
    not necessarily. BTC has UTXO (unspent transaction output), whereas ETH has proper accounts and the money is a property of the account. so if any of these chains only want to focus on sending/storing money (or simply address the evergrowing size of the chain), then they can start purging the old transactions from the ledger. (yes, ETH has smart contracts, but it's not impossible to imagine that ETH will start charging gas for upkeep of that data, and when the smart contract runs out of upkeep it gets deleted.)
    - tluyben2 5y ago
      Yes, but most other way of storage are even easier to purge. Also these people are not exactly sane, so I can see them spend millions on ‘securing the documents on chain’.