Best of wassimalsindi.substack.com on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
5 stories from wassimalsindi.substack.com have been shared on Kiwi News since 15 March 2025, with 9 upvotes and 5 comments in total. The latest was shared on 25 May 2025. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Inside the Dark Ages of Blockchain Governance III
The author argues that blockchain has failed to deliver its promised postcapitalist potential, with failures outweighing successes after sixteen years, and that the field's drift toward a "dark enlightenment" reflects a reactionary turn. Governance tools such as quadratic voting and adversarial arbitration are described as offering only limited relief, since they risk new forms of cultural capital and tend to give way to de facto oligarchies. The piece ties this trajectory to the views of Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land, and says that art applications have been the most honest in the space.
- Inside the Dark Ages of Blockchain Governance I
Blockchain governance has recreated familiar concentrations of power, including cartels, feudal hierarchies and technocratic rule, rather than escaping them. Dash's masternode model, which required locking up significant tokens to take part in governance, let a small group of early adopters consolidate control in a loop where wealth begat power and power begat more wealth. Ethereum's requirement to stake 32 ETH effectively excludes the majority of users from governance, and the 2016 DAO exploit and resulting schism showed how technical expertise can justify centralised intervention.
- ṣifrpunk (صفربانك): Much Ado About Nothing?
The author, speaking at the Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress in Bangkok in November 2024, argues that blockchain systems, including Ethereum, often reproduce the hierarchies they claim to dismantle, through naïve design, careless implementation, and implicit power. The talk traces the word cipher back to the Arabic ṣifr, meaning zero, and presents Baudrillard's "brothel of capital" as a description of decentralised finance. It also argues that governance tokens consolidate power among early adopters and institutional players, and that every bazaar contains an encoded cathedral.
- Hyperstitutions, in theory and practice
Wassim Z. Alsindi publishes the full text of "Hyperstitutions in Gigalollapalooza: The Knightwork State in Theory and Practice," a speculative piece dated 2110 and credited to an Ω-LLM trained on the author's work, with the author listed as deceased. The text describes an Epoch War in which Domain forces and Necroprimitives attacked the Newropean Union, followed by a Frankish Caliphate whose urban centres are said to take their name from Urban II, who presided over the 1095 Council of Claremont that launched the First Crusade. The newsletter also lists upcoming talks in Berlin and notes that the text heavily cites itself by design.
- Inside the Dark Ages of Blockchain Governance II
Blockchain governance often falls short of its decentralised ideal, with informal power hierarchies emerging behind technical mechanisms. Dash is the central example: early adopters who accumulated tokens during the network's "instamine" phase used masternodes, which require locking up large amounts of Dash, to build a cartel that entrenched their control. Insiders could have relaunched the network fairly but chose not to annul their entrenchment. Intentional sunsets and failsafes are also proposed for DAOs, and "communitywashing" is described as a way to mask such power dynamics.