(site migrated, initially posted Feb 20, 2022)

🎵 Kanye’s “Fungible Physical Good”

🔒 Avoiding Collisions Makes Crypto Possible

🚚 Truckers, COVID, Crypto Wallets

Donda 2 Only Available on Stem Player#

Kanye West’s Donda 2 Will Only Be Available on a “fungible physical token.” I have to imagine Kanye would not like me using that terminology given his perspective on NFTs:

The new album will be available on the physical Stem Player that was also released with the original Donda album. Part of the reason seems to be Kanye’s dislike of how little musicians extract from the value of their music: “Today artists get just 12% of the money the industry makes.”

Two thoughts — Kanye has reasonable distaste and skepticism of NFTs and all things web3. One goal of web3 is letting artists extract more value of their work, which is a lofty goal. We’ll see what turns out happening. Second, physical goods are cool! Musicians do make money on merchandise, but it is tangential to their actual content — I like the idea of the work being embedded into a physical product. Tbh, I think Hit Clips were rad.

Avoiding Collisions Makes Cryptography Work#

Plug, but my article on Collision Resistance is on Hacker Noon! Pulling out an excerpt below:

Hash functions typically take pretty long things, like long sentences, and encode them into something much smaller. For example, encoding the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” into something like “x3G5.” This is useful because “x3G5” is shorter, which is useful for transportation or storage. Also, it is useful because “x3G5” effectively hides the value “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” If I was the one encoding that info, I could reveal at a later time that “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” was my sentence and you can conduct the same encoding and say, “huh, it really did encode to ‘x3G5’.”

This is significantly less valuable if lots of other long sentences also resulted in the encoding “x3G5.” Compressing and identifying items is a lot less useful if something that’s supposed to be “unique” really isn’t. And if a bunch of sentences result in the encoding, I could lie and later say I was using a different sentence, if it benefitted me.

You might be thinking, okay, well why don’t we just use an encoding that is always guaranteed to have different encoded values? If we want the encoded version to be smaller, this is impossible. Why is that? Well, our original sentence used over 30 letters, but our encoding used only 4. Intuitively, we know that the number of “possibilities” for the sentence is a lot more than the “possibilities” for just 4 letters. This means we can’t uniquely encode all the sentences, some of them will have to result in the same encoding (if you want to see why watch this!).

So, to get around this, a lot of smart people came up with an encoding where it’s “really, really, really hard” to find two things that result in the same encoding. That’s what “infeasible” in the above definition means – “yes, some stuff results in the same encoding, but I bet you can’t find one!” And you know what, they are right, it is really hard to find two values with the same encoding for these functions.

Governments Need to Understand Wallet Software#

Nunchuk tweeted out an email they sent to some body of the Canadian government. The crux being, Canada wants to freeze assets of individuals, and they asked Nunchuk, a non-custodial wallet software provider, to comply. I imagine the government went with the spray and pray approach, and Nunchuk wants to paint the picture of them being incompetent. But who knows! Maybe no one in the Canadian government understands that they cannot do anything about these individuals access to transacting, and that’s the point

Doubt is Welcome

Donda 2 Only Available on Stem Player…