Top crypto stories of week 25, 2023
Mon 19 to Sun 25 June 2023
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 19 to Sun 25 June 2023, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach (thelastpsychiatrist.com)
The author, a psychiatrist writing on The Last Psychiatrist blog, argues that young graduates should start their own businesses rather than wait for corporate jobs, and that parental and family advice steers them the wrong way. The piece centers on Scott, a 24-year-old graduate who turned down a $40k insurance claims adjuster offer, as reported by the New York Times, and whose father and grandfather pushed him to hold out for a corporate position. The author says Scott and four friends could each borrow $10k to pool $40k in startup capital, and calls more businesses, not more corporate management jobs, the long-term solution to America's economic problems.
- What Web 3.0 looks like [2014 essay by Gavin Wood] (gavwood.com)
Gavin Wood argues that the web needs to be rebuilt around zero-trust design, in which privacy and agreements are enforced mathematically rather than by trusting organisations or governments, a model he calls Web 3.0 or the "post-Snowden" web. He describes four components: static content publication similar to BitTorrent, an identity-based pseudonymous messaging system, a consensus engine, and a browser-style user interface. He names Ethereum as the first workable example of a consensus engine, and says sites will gradually adopt Bitcoin, BitTorrent and NameCoin-style components before moving fully onto a Web 3.0 browser.
- Luxury goods: Europe’s joke on the world (archive.is)
- Farcaster activation analysis - June 2023 (glory-bellflower-ba8.notion.site)
- A New Internet (decentralised.co)
The article argues that social networks depend on controlling their social graphs, which is why no shared protocol for social applications exists at the scale of Meta or Twitter. It explains that platforms earn revenue by keeping users engaged and collecting data for targeted advertising, and that a Web2 product with open social graphs risks competition and declining revenue. It cites Clubhouse, which was valued at $3.4 billion, as an example of how a social graph can vanish, and it points to OpenSocial, proposed in 2007, as an earlier attempt at graph portability.
- Why do hipsters steal stuff? (gwern.net)
Gwern argues that fashions and artworks often copy practical objects because well-optimized functional design is intrinsically aesthetically pleasing and gives artists a strong starting point. The essay holds that fashions drawn from subcultures and trades, such as Red Wing boots, bomber jackets and flannel workwear, lose their original purpose over time and drift into copies of copies. It cites Gustave Eiffel's 1887 argument that the tower's wind-resistant curvature would give it beauty, and it ties this to Christopher Alexander's "quality without a name."
- Extracting embeddings from popular articles on Hacker News (julienc.me)
- No vehicles in the park (novehiclesinthepark.com)
This is an interactive game of 27 questions about a hypothetical park with the rule "No vehicles in the park," where players judge whether the rule has been violated. The game says players can skip to the end after the first seven questions, and that the author will compare results with others and explain why the game was made. Players are asked to ignore local laws or religious rules that might override the park rule and to answer only whether the rule is violated.
- The Rise of Blus ⌐◨-◨ (youtube.com)
- Data representation in Solidity (ethdebug.github.io)
This document is a technical reference by Harry Altman, published December 26, 2018 and last revised October 1, 2021, that explains how Solidity represents data in the EVM locations of the stack, storage, memory, calldata and code, so that line debuggers can locate and decode variables. It covers the stack, storage, memory, calldata and code, and classifies types into direct, multivalue, lookup and pointer types. It is written for Solidity v0.8.9, the version current at the time of writing, and the excerpt ends partway through its table of direct types.
- Multinational Small Business (1993) (nakamotoinstitute.org)
Nick Szabo argues that multinational business will shift from being dominated by large corporations to including a wide range of small businesses, possibly through a rapid "phase change" as telecom and transport costs fall. He names barriers including legal jurisdictional complexity, language and culture, telecom costs and transport costs. He says technologies of jurisdictional independence, such as strong encryption, digital cash and proxy servers, could let small businesses cut through that complexity. He also estimates that government intervention costs the global economy over $3 trillion U.S. dollars annually.
- The Hiker's Dilemma: how to take care of your tribe (acko.net)
The author argues that the saying "if you stop to let others catch up, don't start walking immediately when they arrive" rests on hidden assumptions that favor slower hikers and treat the group's pace as the only valid norm. Arguing from hiking and physics, the author says the better lesson is that people should choose groups that fit their pace, that fast hikers can scout ahead, and that moving efficiently, like pulling a wagon rather than holding a crate, reduces wasted effort. The piece also makes contested claims about gender, bravery and cowardice, and it presents these as its own views.
- Shut up about Gary Gensler, he's unimportant (blockworks.co)
- Reddit is Trying to Sow Division in Mod Teams (quippd.com)
- The Kiwi News badge is a weird mix of an NFT and a Soulbound token (proofinprogress.com)
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.
- A definition and manifesto for the Hypercommons (twitter.com)
The article is a manifesto calling for a "hypercommons," defined as protocol-built public goods and luxuries, the cultures they foster, and their positive externalities, and it urges readers to take part in building it. It cites the @nounsdao ecosystem as an example, noting its funding of open-source software, open hardware, educational resources, internet archives, on-chain protocols, blockchain networks and academic research. It also describes @gnars_dao's skateable sculptures installed in Praça XV in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The author further states that contributors' efforts will, in the author's belief, be reflected in the market value of Nouns as digital assets.
- Dani Filth (CoF) says Spotify are criminals (loudersound.com)
Cradle of Filth frontman Dani Filth says the music industry has become a "hard time" for musicians to earn a living, blaming the shift toward streaming and easy access to music. Speaking to Sakis Fragos of Rock Hard Greece, Filth said streaming platforms "that don't pay anybody" have made things much harder since the digital age began, and he called Spotify "the biggest criminals in the world." He said that across 25 or 26 million plays the previous year, he personally earned about 20 pounds. He added that many people wrongly assume that physical product means musicians are earning a fortune, since record companies, management and accountants take shares of what little money there is.
- Data dashboard on bridging on PolygonEvm (flipsidecrypto.xyz)
Edisyl describes a "knowledge layer" that supplies AI tools with the domain knowledge and company-specific context that expert work requires, installed in a customer's cloud or on premises and working inside tools such as Claude, Codex, Gemini and Copilot. The company states that the models themselves are not the constraint, because they still lack the definitions, regulations and standards a domain expert carries. According to the page, a Knowledge Pack has two halves: domain knowledge from outside sources such as partner data, regulatory sources and standards, and proprietary knowledge covering a company's own terms, policies and data. A semantic layer reconciles the vocabulary in a company's systems with the vocabulary its people use.
- Meditations on the Kiwi News content moderation policy (telegra.ph)
Tim Daubenschütz writes that the Kiwi News content moderation policy, introduced on June 6, 2023 to curb off-topic submissions, has become too restrictive and now holds back content from being posted. He notes that Alex Palmer and others pointed out early on that the document featured too many "DON'Ts," which made users second-guess new links before posting. He credits the policy with streamlining title submissions in the "How to submit" section and with helping keep off-topic content off the front page. The article sets the stage for a change and asks readers about their experiences, whether the site could benefit from a broader range of news, and whether central moderation leads to good outcomes.
- Kiwi competition for people who don't own our NFT yet (warpcast.com)