"""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.
> 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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
