Top crypto stories of week 20, 2023
Mon 15 to Sun 21 May 2023
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 15 to Sun 21 May 2023, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- 50 best sci-fi books of all time (surprisingly good list) (esquire.com)
This list of 50 science fiction books includes The Echo Wife, Mary Robinette Kowal's The Calculating Stars, John Scalzi's Redshirts, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and Carl Sagan's Contact. Entries describe plots and themes, such as Adina Giorno's alien reporting in Beautyland and Enoch Wallace's intergalactic rest stop in Clifford D. Simak's Way Station. Other titles include Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill, Fredric Brown's What Mad Universe, and Nnedi Okorafor's prequel to Who Fears Death. The excerpt cuts off partway through the list.
- Privacy-preserving Paymaster (ethglobal.com)
This is a project write-up for a privacy-preserving paymaster that lets users withdraw from mixers such as Tornado Cash into a fresh address without holding ETH for gas. Users generate a zero-knowledge proof of the withdrawal and encode it in the paymaster data, and the paymaster validates the proof, executes the withdrawal, pays the gas fee, and deploys a new smart account to receive the funds. The build uses the ERC4337 standard, contracts inherited from eth-infinitism with overridden validation logic, a modified trampoline browser extension to create the UserOp, and open-source Tornado Cash code for deposits and proof generation. The contracts have been deployed to Goerli, Polygon Mumbai, Optimism Goerli, Gnosis Chain, Linea, Mantle testnet and Scroll testnet.
- Future Past - YouTube playlist of tech & design content from the 1960s and 70s (youtube.com)
- Do the weirdest thing that feels right (charliebecker.substack.com)
The author proposes a personal decision rule, "Do the weirdest thing that feels right," and argues that it separates their good choices from their bad ones. They explain that "weird" usually reflects what they think others will judge, so picking the weirdest of several viable options means choosing what is truest to them. They cite moving to China at 22 with no job or language skills as a weird choice that worked out, while staying a second year to pursue an Ivy League MBA, which they did not really want, led to a mostly awful final eight months.
- WTF Happened in 1971? (wtfhappenedin1971.com)
- ERC-6551: The NFT Game-Changer 🎆 (metaversal.banklesshq.com)
ERC-6551, a new Ethereum token standard that launched on mainnet on May 7, 2023, lets ERC-721 NFTs act as their own smart contract accounts, able to own assets and interact with web3 apps. The standard deploys unique "token bound accounts" for each NFT through a permissionless registry, and a single NFT can own multiple such accounts. The article notes that original unwrapped CryptoPunks are not supported, while Wrapped Punks are. It also flags risks: fraud, such as a seller withdrawing ETH after a sale, and ownership cycles that can make assets permanently inaccessible.
- How An Obscure OTC-Traded Derivative From the 80's Took Over Crypto (blog.everstrike.io)
The article traces the perpetual future from an obscure over-the-counter derivative to the leading derivative in crypto. It began in late-1980s Hong Kong, when the Chinese Gold and Silver Exchange introduced an undated futures contract with a nightly interest payment to help gold miners avoid expiration and basis costs. Economist Robert Shiller formalized it as the "perpetual future" in the early 1990s, but it remained largely unused until Alexey Bragin launched Icbit in 2011. BitMEX then popularized the XBTUSD in May 2016, and linear USD-margined perpetuals later became the industry standard. The article says perpetuals now trade in excess of $50bn a day.
- Tornado Cash governance attack (twitter.com)
- The takeaways from Stanford’s 386-page report on the state of AI (techcrunch.com)
Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence released its 386-page AI Index, a yearly survey of the field that draws on experts from academia and private industry. The report finds that AI development has shifted from academia-led to industry-led by a large margin, and that the number of "AI incidents and controversies" has risen by a factor of 26 since 2012. It also reports that more than 70% of Chinese, Saudi, and Indian respondents felt AI had more benefits than drawbacks, compared with 35% of Americans.
- Profiles are Live! (news.kiwistand.com)
- Decentralization for Web3 Builders: Principles, Models, How (a16zcrypto.com)
The article argues that decentralization for web3 should be treated as a single design challenge spanning technical, economic, and legal elements, since design decisions in one area affect the others. It says programmable blockchains, composable smart contracts and digital assets make decentralized systems able to coordinate and operate at new levels, though the more familiar DeFi models may not fit more complex products. For the legal element, it focuses on U.S. securities laws and the Howey test, suggesting a system may be "sufficiently decentralized" if it eliminates significant information asymmetries and reliance on the managerial efforts of others. The article notes that most businesses will not meet this threshold.
- Purists and Tourists in Crypto (1confirmation.substack.com)
The author argues that crypto's open ethos, where anyone can copy code and launch a rival coin or network, has been essential to the industry but carries costs that can be reduced by thinking in terms of "purist" and "tourist" builders rather than relying on gatekeepers. Purists are described as steeped in the craft's history and building in earnest, while tourists chase what resonates for a moment, a model the essay attributes to fashion designer Virgil Abloh. The essay sorts projects by this framework, citing Hal Finney's receipt of the first Bitcoin transaction on January 12, 2009, and describing Terra/Luna and 3AC as examples of value extraction that harmed retail investors.
- group annotation server guinea pigs? (1997.webhistory.org)
Marc Andreessen of NCSA is seeking a few guinea pigs to test an in-progress group annotation server for Mosaic and asks for suggestions on future functionality and user interface components. He says the current support is very simple, with one group per server, one server per Mosaic session, and no security beyond obscurity, but it works and Mosaic 1.1 has built-in client-side support. Under this design, Mosaic queries the server with each document's URL and inlines any group annotations returned as hyperlinks, which assumes a fast local network and a nearby server host. Users choose 'Personal' or 'Workgroup' when annotating, and workgroup annotations are sent to the server over a socket.
- Turn any GameBoy into a secure offline cold wallet (gamewallet.gg)
- What should you do with your life? Directions and advice (guzey.com)
This is a curated list of resources on what to work on, how to pursue a problem, and where to find funding, written by someone who asks many people about their life plans and finds that many are coasting without direction. The author's central advice is to start a project related to the problem you care about, produce a minimal impressive result, and share it with people in that area. The post also highlights cold emails and tweets to people you don't know, which the author says have changed their life, with an estimate that 20-50% of cold emails get answered. Funding sources named include the Thiel Fellowship, which offers $100,000 to people under 23, and Emergent Ventures.
- On Becoming (gestalt.cafe)
Becoming is described as fundamentally a process of truth discovery, in which errors in one's aspirations can only be corrected through action and confrontation with reality rather than thought alone. The author argues that peer groups and traditional institutions do not reliably provide a path to change, so individuals must craft their own environment and take responsibility for choosing and acting. The text cites Mr. Beast, whose peers encouraged his growth and whose money served as a neutral proof point that let him rejoin his previous social circle after his mother failed to understand his path, which he handled by lying.
- A novel account abstraction RPC endpoint for conditional inclusion of UserOps (blog.oplabs.co)
- Interview: Dan Wang, China specialist (noahpinion.blog)
Dan Wang, a China specialist who has moved from Shanghai to a visiting scholar post at Yale Law School, discusses China's industrial policy and technological competitiveness in this interview. He says China has fallen well behind in semiconductors and aviation, where it is at best 10 years behind the leading edge of manufacturing logic chips, but has caught up with the West on most manufactured products outside those sectors. Wang says China's strength lies in mature-science fields such as solar, batteries and EVs, where the bottleneck is manufacturing, and that the US is weak at high-intricacy, high-volume production.
- The Dream Machine (press.stripe.com)
Charter cities, privately backed new cities in developing countries with their own economic regulations and laws, are presented as a way to build stable institutions and better governance, according to the first episode of Stripe Press's podcast Beneath the Surface. The episode traces the idea to economist Paul Romer, whose 2009 TED Talk proposed cities administered by developed countries, and notes that Patri Friedman and Mark Lutter now define the concept differently. It uses Lagos, where an unstable power grid and political corruption make electricity a struggle, to frame the problem these cities would address.
- Don't overload Ethereum's consensus (vitalik.ca)
