Blockchain and Weave

Rina Chen’s living notebook on digital craft and design.

Research Theme

NFTs today:

  • Represent digital images
  • Often detached from material reality

Opportunity

  • Re-anchor NFTs in material processes
  • address the ecological concern of Proof of Work
  • Provide a speculative future of Proof of Weave

Ochiai Yoichi: material will deteriorate but remembered, digital may not deteriorate butwill be forgotten

  • Weave: material diffusion
  • cryptography: information diffusion
  • blockchain: consensus

Immaterial vs Material Value

NFTs:

  • Speculative
  • Detached from labor

Weaving:

  • Labor-intensive
  • Embodied

Tension:

What happens when slow craft meets speculative finance?

Energy vs Labor

Bitcoin:

  • Energy-intensive computation

Weaving:

  • Human/manual labor

Compare:

Proof-of-Work vs Proof-of-Weave

Decentralization Myth

Blockchain claims decentralization, but:

  • Mining pools centralize power

Weaving:

  • Historically communal, but also industrialized

Potential question:

What does “distributed” really mean in material vs digital systems?

By translating cryptographic and blockchain processes into textile structures, it explores how information, matter, and trust can be encoded, distributed, and perceived across different media.

Evaluate Where Validation Breaks Down

  • Humans disagree

  • Structure ambiguous

  • Who “owns” the textile?

  • Individual vs collective

  • Blockchain = instant
  • Weaving = slow

Experiments / code

“Proof-of-Weave” (Inspired by Proof-of-Work)

In Bitcoin:

  • Mining = computational work

You could define:

Proof-of-Weave

A textile is valid only if it follows a specific algorithmic rule derived from a “key”

  • The weaving process itself = “work”
  • The fabric = proof

Blockchain-Based Weaving Protocol

Design a system where:

  • Each participant:
    • Receives a “block instruction”
    • Weaves a segment
  • The next segment:
    • Depends on previous one

In the software side, each block/nft generates a hash, the hash will be manually weaved by its sequence (8 digit for 8 shaft?) where tieup and threading is only revealed to the contributor

Ideas:

  • Each step depends on previous state
  • Cannot skip steps
  • Certain transformations require duration

  • Cannot be compressed

  • A loom is monitored 24/7, people will come to weave on it (open to public) under monitor
    • like the coffee machine example