MOVEABLE TYPE by 0xDEAFBEEF

How To

Moveable Type is an open ended word game. During a timed open edition, participants mint randomized characters (letters, punctuation, numbers). Each character is an NFT. Like typesetting, you can place the individual characters on a 2D grid to form a word, sentence, ASCII art or concrete poetry etc, then submit a transaction to "burn" all those character NFTs, permanently fusing them together resulting in a brand new NFT representing your word or phrase. This process is non-reversible - once you've made a word, you can't break it apart again. However, the new text fragment is still mutable: you can transform by inserting spaces or other letters (i.e. you can turn 'bat' into 'boat' by inserting an 'o'),or by fusing it with other text fragments into larger structures like sentences, etc. The one constraint is that you can't reorder the letters within a word. 'bat' cannot become 'tab', but you can make 'ba t' or 'b a t' or 'boat' if you insert an 'o'.

Words of at least 3 letters in length are enforced to be unique, think DNS or ENS,vanity license plates. If you spell 'cat', nobody else can own 'cat'. Uniqueness is case insensitive and ignores whitespace, for example after 'cat' is taken, no one else can spell 'CAT', 'Cat' or 'c a t'. However, other people could still spell unique words that contain 'cat', for example 'the cat' is a different unique word.

There's a very simple built in marketplace for buying and selling letters and words. To prevent squatting and encourage activity, after a certain time period any single character or word less than 3 characters in length will be autolisted - anyone can purchase it for the original mint price. Word 3 letters in length or longer are safe, they will never be autolisted.

FAQ

Letters are randomly chosen from a probability distribution based on their frequency in English text. You can think of me as the chairman of the Federal Reserve of Moveable Type. My mission is to make it fun and interesting, and I believe there's a fine line between oversupply and undersupply where that's the case. Because there's a lot of uncertainty about how many people will participate and how many letters they'll initially mint, I reserve the power to add more supply if its needed. I can also buy back supply when it becomes autolisted (buy anyone can do this as well) At some point in the future, there is a 'seal()' function in the contract that I will call to cap the supply and prevent and future mints. Yes, it's a self contained smart contract. The SVG image and metadata is generated from solidity code. Transcending corporeal rot and decay, your words now exist now in a timeless, spiritual dimension. Punctuation has unique behavior. Allowance for punctuation is stored as a reserve as part of the token, but it's optional whether to make any of it visible. Store punctuation can be inserted, removed in the 2d canvas as you like, but it always remains part of the token. When tokens are combined, their punctuation allowance accumulates. For several reasons, I thought it would be better to have punctuation minted as 'packs', rather than as single characters. To use only some of it, you can erase(make invisible) all the other characters in a pack if you wanted to use just a ! or ? for example. Originally the type characters were called 'sorts' because it was laborious to sort them. I debated the tradeoff in how easy to make the UI in terms of auto sort/filtering, and decided that I'd rather there be some friction/effort involved in the typesetting process, and fleamarket/treasure hunting vibes in the market. That requirement of labor changes how you feel about the typesetting result.