I’ve recently been thinking a bit about data as an asset and the concept of data asset tokens. Much of my thinking was influenced by Michael Clark whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the recent Filecoin Uncharted event (thanks Porter). This post is probably more about vocabulary than content, but vocabulary is important (at least that's what I tell my kids).
Often we have books by great thinkers that shape the way we view the world and influence our outlook on the future. For me Yuval Harari is one such thinker. In this post I share my reaction/counterpoint to a statement that Prof. Harari makes in his new book "Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI".
Zeroth Technology, Inc
August 1st, 2024
This white paper introduces the Blinky Light Thingy (BLT), a novel approach for real-time video authentication in live-streaming environments. The BLT embeds cryptographic messages into the physical environment being recorded, making it difficult to modify the video feed in real-time and avoiding the reliance on specialized trusted hardware. This approach addresses the growing challenge of distinguishing between authentic and generative content, particularly in the context of live video streams where it is becoming more common place for someone to "wear" the filter of another person and perpetuate fraud in what is typically considered a trusted environment. By utilizing Ethereum Attestation Services, a "do-it-yourself" hardware device, and open sourced encoding/decoding software, BLT provides a robust method for verifying both the identity of the presenter and the contemporaneousness (real-time nature) of the content.
There are interesting things happening with account abstraction, but one function I haven’t heard much about is transferring the ownership of a wallet from one user to another. There are a bunch of use cases where this could be useful, I'd like to share my thoughts on how this effects supply chain.
I love a good buzz word, especially one that sounds smart; could this be a new narrative that helps us express our intents in a digital world? In exploring where this came from it helped me crystalize my understating of the difference between rules and laws in autonomous virtual worlds. Even though that sounds like a stretch, this is gong to effect the way we do things in the real world sooner rather than later.
In my recent post about supply chain a friend replied in the comments that “I’ve come to the realization that big business doesn’t want that level of transparency, because transparency = accountability.”. To which my quick counter reply was “Being able to keep transactions confidential is key, but even this creates accountability - so we need an incentive that can outweigh that risk ”. I then suggested that this would be a topic for my next post, so here it is 
Does knowing make you accountable? What are the real motivations for supply chain transparency.
This is a drum I’ve been beating for many years now - In my opinion using decentralized networks to create trusted and controlled visibility into the supply chains that literally affect the lives of billions of people every day is inevitable; but we are not there yet…. In this post I summarize my latest thinking on the topic.