Imaginary Foundation and (deepfake)Jay-Z's brilliant "99 Problems" Byzantine Generals NFT

Our friends at cultural engineering thinktank and surrealist clothier Imaginary Foundation have released their first NFT, a deepfaked collaboration with Jay-Z that's an ingenious riff on blockchain theory disguised as a joke. (Or maybe it's an ingenious joke disguised as a riff on blockchain theory?) Here's what the Imaginary Foundation's Director says about the project, titled "I got 99 problems but the Byzantine Generals' ain't one":

This NFT Celebrates the 40 year anniversary of the writing of the original Byzantine Generals' Problem white paper which was accepted for publishing in November 1981.

So what is the Byzantine Generals' Problem anyway and why should you care?

Used by computer researchers at Stanford Research Institute, the Byzantine Generals' Problem is an abstract thought experiment which is at the very heart of Blockchain and necessary for a true understanding of its promise for consensus validation at scale:

In its simplest form the problem asks, how can individual parties find a way to guarantee full consensus?

The allegory describes a situation in which a system's actors must agree on a concerted strategy, but some of these actors are unreliable.

Once considered impossible to solve, Satoshi's Decentralized Blockchain architecture can now provide a general solution to the problem. With a layer that can be trusted without having to trust each and every person.

This NFT was made in Collaboration with "Vocal Synthesis" a deep fake audio artist who has spent 1000s of hours training Google's text-to-speech modeling AI software with many notable voices including JAY-Z.

It's about Truth, Consensus and Trust Yo!

"The Byzantine Generals' Problem" NFT by Imaginary Foundation (NTWRK NFT)

Design also available as a limited edition t-shirt, sweatshirt, and art print.

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