Applying NFTs to literature
NFTs represent “proof of ownership” of an object, physical or digital. The object represented isn’t necessarily stored on the blockchain. In this way, creators can customize the way they sell.
How the NFT sale represents the art sale is up to the writer. Unlike buying a book which gives you the entire text, buying an NFT of a book may only give you part of the text, or it might give you the right to add to the text.
The Chaintale, a literary NFT project
The Chaintale ^[https://opensea.io/collection/the-chaintale] calls itself a “collaborative dynamic story.” A piece of the crypto chain is called a link, corresponding to a single NFT which gives its owner/buyer the right to add a block of content to the story.
It’s basically an open collaboration story where the cost of contribution is the purchase of an NFT.
Contributing writers can decide to resell their links, allowing their part of the story to be rewritten, even after the Chaintale is completed.
CPT-415, an NFT novel
CPT-415 ^[https://opensea.io/collection/cpt-415] (named after a toaster’s product code) calls itself a “novel born from the internet.” One NFT equals one page, and the next is only unlocked after the sale of the last. There are a total of 207 pages.
The project’s challenge is to collect your favorite pages, assemble chapters, and solve its puzzles as a community.
The archive of unlocked pages and novel summary is supposed to be available on a URL called 333rain777.com but the link is dead as of writing this note.
Blockchain and crypto within fiction
P. J. Manney’s Phoenix Horizon series^[(R)evolution, (ID)entity and (CON)science] deals in transhumanist technologies like mind uploading. The second novel in her series, (ID)entity, is described as “a call to make cryptos and the blockchain safer and more independent from outside manipulation.”
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Moon depicts a future Earth (and Moon) where two global superpowers are in a kind of Cold War, and cryptocurrencies are weaponized. A stablecoin called “US Dollar” threatens to disrupt the US economy, and citizens all over the world(s) take refuge in another cryptocurrency called “carboncoin.”
Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon takes place in two eras - WW2 and the World Wide Web - going back and forth between them. The book includes promotion of the idea of creating a “data haven” - a spot in Southeast Asia where encrypted data would be kept and exchanged at ease.
- The WW2 group if characters are codebreakers and tactical-deception operatives. The second group of characters are partial descendants of the first. They employ cryptologic, telecom and computer technology to build an underground data haven. Their short-term goal is anonymous Internet banking using electronic money and digital gold currency, while their long-term goal is to distribute Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod (HEAP) media.
- Several characters in the book communicate with each other through a one-time pad (OTP) - an encryption technique that requires a single-use pre-shared key of at least the same length as an encrypted message. The story uses a variation of the OTP technique where there is no pre-shared key, the key is instead generated algorithmically.
Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom deals with a respect-based currency called Whuffie, which resemble Bitcoin in a way. Everyone has mind chips which enable machines to think for people, immediately telling them the social status of others. The system tracks the way each person has earned their Whuffie.