Re: The (not so) great base-encoding debate of 2020

On Fri, May 8, 2020 at 8:25 AM Steven Rowat <steven_rowat@sunshine.net>
wrote:

> Is it possible for someone to explain what "fountain code" is in
> (relatively) non-technical terms?
>
> I guess I mean what does it allow that wasn't possible before, and what's
> the main innovation or feature of how it does this?
>
Basically it is redundant information that allows missed frames to be
constructed from parts of other frames. Think RAID 5.

As described in
https://github.com/BlockchainCommons/AirgappedSigning/issues/4#issuecomment-623910583

> One of the problem is when you do animated QR code, you have some frame
that are harder than other for phones to catch, and it's not about the QR
code size (smaller QR code does not scan faster than bigger), so you tend
to have 90% of your data but always miss the same frames if you take a
simple loop approach. Also statistically, the more you obtain frame, the
rarer is it for you to obtain new ones meaning that this does not make a
linear progress but the speed decrease over the scans.. To improve a bit
this condition, what you need instead is to implement replication and
"fountain code" to allow to get the frame data faster. Based on the number
of replicating frames, you can actually approach linear speed (you have
more speed but some contains the data of others so you don't need all of
them).

> — Christopher Allen