[EDIT: This is as it was written in 2017. The project remains a favourite in terms of critical and conceptual success, even if, as usual, the world wasn't quite ready for NFT's before NFT's (and their horrific inaugural motifs) emerged in 2018.] There were a lot of articles about this project this is my favourite. After a couple of false starts (i.e. enthusiastically light) reviews with WIRED and The Guardian etc, and plenty of other mildly confused journalists (= success metric), not to mention confusing Andy (not a success metric) we finally landed a writer who "got" our blockchain-meets-literaure project. 
It seemed very complex so we made a number of films as well to explain... maybe one day it will make sense, maybe not. It seemed simple when I started.
Two for One [241] : the rules
Two-for-One is a disintegrating novel which anyone can read. It is a regular short story, about a guy, yet is also a digital experiment into ideas of access and ownership. A book accessible to all, but owned by just a few - and those who ‘own’ it, are obliged to destroy it a little bit, to reduce it to nonsense, and so enrich it. Any book will fall apart, and also grow in value as it ages, now the same is true of a digital book. A book as interesting to own as it is to read. The story deals with a parent who has lost touch with life and is losing touch with their reality. It is also story about sequences and language. It muddles along, just as this section muddles the digital, academic, and demotic meanings of words. Written in the latin alphabet, 26 letters combine into 128 words on 20 pages collated in one book with 100 individual owners and many more readers.
The original volume uses Blockchain to create 100 records of ownership. We call these culture blocks: a digital key to that contains that book’s provenance. Subsequently each book becomes a unique digital artefact, with a right of ownership that will affect the book. To take ‘possession’ the prospective owner must remove two of the words from each page and add one in return. This way each book is initially identical but will quickly become unique - having different successions of owners, dedications, and words added and removed.
To ‘submit’ a contribution to the culture block the owner must 'dedicate' the book to a new owner. To own it one must give it away. Cute. If a new ‘owner’ doesn’t want to own it then the previous owner can re-dedicate to someone else. (i.e. to truly own it you have to give it away). Anyone may read any of the 100 books online at any of the stages of its disintegration, including the original. Access is not ownership.
The 128th owner will finish each book by deleting the final two words and placing one word on each page. A printed version of the final state would contain the original 20 page story and on facing pages an alphabetised collection of final words from all 100 books.
