# Best of proofinprogress.com on Kiwi News

Page: https://news.kiwistand.com/source/proofinprogress.com

16 stories from proofinprogress.com have been shared on Kiwi News since 18 April 2023, with 36 upvotes and 5 comments in total. The latest was shared on 21 September 2025. They are listed below, most upvoted first.

Summaries are AI summaries of the linked article.

## 1. What Is Sleepminting And Will It Ruin NFT Provenance?

- Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/What-Is-Sleepminting-And-Will-It-Ruin-NFT-Provenance?index=0x65d3e9b7bcf9dd6b40fdd70ce02bd68ebd3bab686831ab4766914e4f2a299ccdc56ff280
- Source: https://proofinprogress.com/posts/2021-04-22/nft-sleepminting-beeple-provenance.html
- Shared 19 February 2024, 6 upvotes, 1 comment

Sleepminting is an impersonation attack described by Tim Daub, in which an attacker mints an NFT under another creator's name without that creator's involvement. The article's example uses a fake "Creator: beeple" listing on Rarible, with the attacker minting to a victim address and later transferring the piece to a buyer. The article argues that this is an interface issue rather than a security vulnerability, since beeple's account was never accessed. It says the fake can be spotted by checking that both the mint transaction's sender and the NFT's sender match the creator's correct address.

## 2. How I made cycling fun again

- Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/How-I-made-cycling-fun-again?index=0x68c6f4592ad0b2e8ab7c6913a744a89cdee609d63cbec5de95a3a3901f23b1f1fcc2c509
- Source: https://proofinprogress.com/posts/2025-09-14/how-i-made-cycling-fun-again.html
- Shared 14 September 2025, 4 upvotes, 4 comments

The author describes giving up on using bikes for city transportation and reframing cycling as a sport, after years of frustration over traffic safety in Berlin. They say they once believed bikes could make inner cities less polluted, quicker and safer, but close calls with motorists left them exhausted and stressed. Their new rules are to ride only for sport, keep workouts under an hour (for example, 15 minutes out and back), and minimize time sharing roads with motorists. They report that this has made cycling enjoyable again, and they bought a Canyon Griyl AL 7 gravel bike to do so.

## 3. The Biggest Coding Mistakes I Made Building Kiwi News

- Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/The-Biggest-Coding-Mistakes-I-Made-Building-Kiwi-News?index=0x68cff62c0bee1c6ffd496fd615639f9b526c4a015d135d3fe83b1d807a1c010ff853b212
- Source: https://proofinprogress.com/posts/2025-09-20/biggest-coding-mistakes-I-made-building-kiwi-news.html
- Shared 21 September 2025, 4 upvotes, 0 comments

The author, who builds Kiwi News, a peer-to-peer Hacker News clone written in vanilla JavaScript, lists three regrets: building on Ethereum, choosing a templating and frontend stack, and building a website rather than an app. On Ethereum, the author says the project did not win over Ethereum maximalists as hoped, citing a shifting purity test, opposition to moving transaction volume off-chain, weak consumer-focused culture, and an L2 roadmap that is hard to criticize openly. The frontend mistake involves server-side rendering with developit/htm and React "islands," which produce boilerplate and cumbersome style maintenance. The author also says consumers view websites as less desirable than apps.

## 4. The Kiwi News badge is a weird mix of an NFT and a Soulbound token

- Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/The-Kiwi-News-badge-is-a-weird-mix-of-an-NFT-and-a-Soulbound-token?index=0x6498bdbbbc347efd998d7620077b926ce3aca0c755207a4bbdcef781db634eb3826e9c58
- Source: https://proofinprogress.com/posts/2023-06-26/the-kiwi-news-badge-is-a-weird-mix-of-an-nft-and-a-soulbound-token.html
- Shared 25 June 2023, 4 upvotes, 0 comments

Tim Daub, author of the Kiwi News protocol, describes the Kiwi News badge as a mix of an NFT and a Soulbound token: it is transferable like an NFT, but its upvote and submit functionality only works for signatures from the minter's address. Daub says he worked on Soulbound token specifications, including ERC-4973 "Account-bound tokens" and ERC-5192 "Minimal Soulbound tokens," before becoming discouraged by criticism and moving to Farcaster. The article states that Kiwi News nodes currently store data only from addresses that originally minted the NFT, so a badge transferred to another address cannot upvote or submit links. Daub says the protocol was shipped two months before the article's June 26, 2023 publication date.

## 5. Smart Contracts are the Programmable Commons

- Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Smart-Contracts-are-the-Programmable-Commons?index=0x6582b8fe9f60847d27a5a2616f8050f7745d396b22515a1096267cd44a9ad2557f77bb53
- Source: https://proofinprogress.com/posts/2022-02-28/smart-contracts-are-programmable-commons.html
- Shared 20 December 2023, 3 upvotes, 0 comments

Tim Daub argues that Ethereum smart contracts are a programmable commons, allowing property to transcend from private ownership into shared, collectively maintained space. He contrasts them with traditional cloud platforms such as AWS and Azure, which he says assume privately owned property and place accountability on identifiable operators. A simple Ethereum contract has no single deployer, operator, or controller, and its execution is redundantly run by all network participants, with no individual responsible for the result. The piece concludes that blockchain property could create new forms of digital ownership that challenge assumptions about price discovery, economics, and the legal system.

## 6. The Wallet-Dapp Dilemma

- Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/The-Wallet-Dapp-Dilemma?index=0x64e9c016d5f34a1f4726598b75bd49a493f4f26de8850ed80e82a65c6d24b116068aaa7d
- Source: https://proofinprogress.com/posts/2023-08-26/the-wallet-dapp-dilemma.html
- Shared 26 August 2023, 3 upvotes, 0 comments

The Wallet-Dapp dilemma describes how a dapp's bugs can cause users to churn even when the dapp itself is excellent, because wallets often sit between users and the app. The article says dapp builders spend 1000 hours perfecting their products while many wallets work poorly, citing three causes: wallets that track user activity break with ad blockers enabled, wallets that connect via the internet make interactions slow, and lesser-known wallets are often neither world-class nor actively maintained. It argues that wallet providers, not dapp builders, hold control, and that they have made millions from token swap features. Warpcast is cited as having implemented its own wallet, which the article notes is costly and difficult, leaving many dapp builders unable to follow suit.

## 7. The AI Crowd is Mad

- Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/The-AI-Crowd-is-Mad?index=0x65cd35bb5df9cc91679e4e196b12e705f30094eb27531217832b31f2d4f5c17148d53222
- Source: https://proofinprogress.com/posts/2023-02-01/the-ai-crowd-is-mad.html
- Shared 14 February 2024, 2 upvotes, 0 comments

The author argues that current discourse about large language models like ChatGPT is too optimistic and needs more nuance, while stating that they are not bearish on AI's potential as a technology. The post argues that bubbles are defined by investors' inflated expectations rather than by the technology itself, and it points to social media survivorship bias as a reason ChatGPT's performance looks better online than in practice. It also questions whether the costs of running transformer models can yield returns, citing a parameter-and-cost table of estimates, and it doubts that source referencing will be a simple "last-mile" fix.

## 8. Built on Stolen Data

- Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Built-on-Stolen-Data?index=0x65325231d7326adcd8c9c35de45185c04cc6ca3dddf900d67d93cba73171a17c24c84683
- Source: https://proofinprogress.com/posts/2021-07-02/built-on-stolen-data.html
- Shared 20 October 2023, 2 upvotes, 0 comments

The author argues that GitHub's Copilot, released as a VSCode plugin, was trained on restrictively licensed code and that this makes its use and distribution deeply immoral and illicit. The article cites a tweet by eevee saying GitHub admitted Copilot was trained on large amounts of GPL code, and a tweet by Armin Ronacher showing Copilot reproducing the fast inverse square root algorithm from Quake III (GPL licensed). A July 8, 2021 edit quotes Nora Tindall saying GitHub Support confirmed by email that it used all public GitHub code for Codex/Copilot regardless of license.

## 9. Observations About Today's Crypto Bull Market

- Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Observations-About-Todays-Crypto-Bull-Market?index=0x6686525f81eff02c842a8b6d51b5d761f646da8d4af1628d7daa91bc81a830acdd90470e
- Source: https://proofinprogress.com/posts/2021-11-30/original-observations-about-todays-crypto-bull-market.html
- Shared 4 July 2024, 1 upvote, 0 comments

The author, Tim Daub, writes a journal-style list of observations about the crypto market's current "late-stage" bull phase, which he says differ from those he made during the 2018 bull market. He says hype-driven projects persist in crypto culture without participants noticing, and that outside commentators now largely equate crypto with scams and have become more aggressive. He also says genuine innovation is undervalued relative to speculative future results, and that noise has become harder to separate from signal for everyone, including experts.

## 10. Effectively distributing texts online is very painful

- Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Effectively-distributing-texts-online-is-very-painful?index=0x653536daf4004f78e579b94e420f77082956eaa966a034126909c0d5fb4c0d1e00977441
- Source: https://proofinprogress.com/posts/2022-09-01/effectively-distributing-texts-online-is-very-painful.html
- Shared 22 October 2023, 1 upvote, 0 comments

Tim Daub argues that distributing blog posts effectively online is very difficult, and that major platforms fail at it. After his article "Six unpopular opinions about software standard development" was flagged on Hacker News shortly after reaching the front page, he tried Twitter, blocking its news feed on desktop and following no one. He found that his readers were scarce, and a tweetstorm about Nikolai.fyi's dmap.sh project gained 400 followers and about 700 likes, but he concluded that Twitter rewards attention over argument quality. He decided to keep his account but spend less time there and to improve his website's discoverability through tags and topic introductions.

## 11. Dissenting through the mainstream

- Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Dissenting-through-the-mainstream?index=0x64cd068a3c49bb33387742ee403ee60c14e27b9aac6b3688d5104c746cba2160d7107b4c
- Source: https://proofinprogress.com/posts/2022-07-10/dissenting-through-the-mainstream.html
- Shared 4 August 2023, 1 upvote, 0 comments

Social networks reward agreeable, easily shared opinion packages, which turns dissent into a commercial product rather than a real challenge. Ranking is driven by click-through rates and a binary tournament of thumbnails and titles, favoring the most comprehensible and composable takes, while dissent is offered as a glossy $9.99 starter pack for overthrowing "the latest tyranny." Real dissent, by contrast, cannot exist within the mainstream; it requires distinction, seclusion, careful curation and sacrifice, and its strength comes from adaptability, asymmetry and solitude.

## 12. Ethereum is the newsfeed we deserve

- Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Ethereum-is-the-newsfeed-we-deserve?index=0x647f4428c2cb9df3d2b8867b1e5f5bdab35f0ed5c400e6428f88c76b1e373d9d9216015a
- Source: https://proofinprogress.com/posts/2022-03-11/ethereum-is-the-newsfeed-we-deserve.html
- Shared 6 June 2023, 1 upvote, 0 comments

Tim Daub argues that Ethereum is a better publishing platform than web2 services like Facebook or Twitter, because it is globally distributed, has no central operator, and does not delete, hide or algorithmically reshuffle posts. He contends that the core social problem of web2 is big tech's curation of public discourse on newsfeeds, which Signal's privacy-focused protocol does not address. Daub responds to Moxie Marlinspike's claim that "People don't want to run their own servers, and never will" by arguing that people avoid hosting public platforms because of the heavy responsibility of moderation. He notes that running an Ethereum full node currently costs him roughly 130 EUR per month.

## 13. The Red Whale that Killed the Ocean DAO

- Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/The-Red-Whale-that-Killed-the-Ocean-DAO?index=0x647359ae5d0376a52391fbe13bb55eff767f7d3aea42937edcdb81f64223d158540cd6c9
- Source: https://proofinprogress.com/posts/2023-01-28/the-red-whale-that-killed-the-ocean-dao.html
- Shared 28 May 2023, 1 upvote, 0 comments

The author, Tim Daub, describes how the OceanDAO, a token-holder-voted grants pool for Ocean Protocol, lost trust during its round 10, which he calls the "red whale" round. An anonymous account downvoted nearly all proposals with millions of dollars, leaving it unclear whether any project would be funded that month. Anonymous Telegram accounts told him they wanted to burn the round's pool because there were too many scammy projects and token investments were too inflated. The official Ocean Protocol explanation blamed early token investors, but the voter analysis was never published and the whale's identity remains unknown. The OceanDAO was later discontinued, and OCEAN's market cap fell from about $400M to $300M lost.

## 14. Are Token Holders Slaying Moloch?

- Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Are-Token-Holders-Slaying-Moloch?index=0x6470e2e38bf9d7df504effa9f24676b079de903b54a5f7256dfba28a0bfd4d1451f85dac
- Source: https://proofinprogress.com/posts/2021-12-15/token-holders-arent-slaying-moloch.html
- Shared 26 May 2023, 1 upvote, 0 comments

The author argues that token holders are not slaying Moloch, the god of coordination failure, and that financial collectivism alone cannot solve game-theoretic problems like the tragedy of the commons. The post traces the idea to MolochDAO, launched in early 2018 by Ameen Soleimani et al., which draws on Scott Alexander's "Meditations on Moloch." It cites Facebook's content moderation failures in Myanmar, which it describes as continuing for profit despite the company's knowledge, as an example of misalignment that buying stock does not resolve.

## 15. Traveled to Milan and now ChatGPT isn't working

- Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Traveled-to-Milan-and-now-ChatGPT-isnt-working?index=0x644b863c5ccc1a5c0d7e482be1c6684f288d336d2baf277ec195d255a27ed3bfc0a58776
- Source: https://proofinprogress.com/posts/2023-04-28/traveled-to-milan-and-now-chatgpt-is-not-working.html
- Shared 28 April 2023, 1 upvote, 0 comments

The author argues that Italy's temporary block of ChatGPT is paternalistic and that the EU should pursue education about data protection instead of blanket bans. The post describes the Italian Data Protection Authority (Italian Garante) disabling ChatGPT for users in Italy, which OpenAI's support message attributes to the Garante's request and says includes refunds for March ChatGPT Plus subscriptions. The author says individuals should decide for themselves whether to use the tool, and that the problem is better addressed by making Helen Nissenbaum's "Privacy as contextual integrity" understandable to a broad audience.

## 16. My deleted Response to Pirate Wires 'Nuclear Disasters'

- Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/My-deleted-Response-to-Pirate-Wires-Nuclear-Disasters?index=0x643e8ba6c92be78f3cbb4cdf8b84b762ab4b738ed3dd39437f30559e3276905f92695275
- Source: https://proofinprogress.com/posts/2023-04-18/my-response-to-pirate-wires-nuclear-disasters.html
- Shared 18 April 2023, 1 upvote, 0 comments

The author, Tim Daub, describes a deleted comment he wrote in reply to a Pirate Wires post by Mike Solana titled "Nuclear Disasters," which Solana removed after saying Fukushima was 12 years ago and calling the comment "a perfect german take." The comment argues that Germany's nuclear shutdown is more nuanced than English-speaking social media suggests, citing fuel supply concerns, grid base-load limits, and the difficulty of backstopping renewables when sun and wind are absent. It also notes that renewables provided up to 40% of German electricity and that France shut nuclear plants during the 2022 heat wave because of river water levels. The author says Germany should instead invest in renewable technology, even if offset with some coal for now.