Top crypto stories of week 30, 2023
Mon 24 to Sun 30 July 2023
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 24 to Sun 30 July 2023, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total. Most-shared sources: github.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Farchive - Download your Farcaster archive (farchive.phyles.app)
- Cooperatives: An Ownership Model for Digital Networks (blogs.orrick.com)
- People want to do Zero Work and Make More Money (wysr.xyz)
People want to do as little work as possible while getting as much reward as possible, and the author argues that anyone trying to change someone's behavior should weigh the work they ask for against the benefits they offer. The piece gives examples such as people picking up a $20 bill from the ground but not digging into a sewer drain for more, choosing credit cards based on perceived rewards, and waiting in line for hours for a free bucket from Finn's. It states that behavior change is work and that rewards can include dopamine, saved time, reduced effort, and cash, with the closer someone is to "asking nothing and giving something," the more likely they are to change.
- Farcaster Social Graph (nobuilder.github.io)
- Kiwi Search has been shipped (warpcast.com)
- Why do we interface? (whydoweinterface.com)
- Awesome Kiwi (github.com)
- EthXY - Onchain version of the million-dollar home page (ethxy.com)
- Bubbles - Voice chats with your favorite onchain communities 🫧 (thebubbles.xyz)
- 10 Charts That Capture How the World Is Changing (July 2023) (digitalnative.substack.com)
Charts on falling institutional trust, AI, venture capital and social apps are presented as evidence of a changing world, and built-in distribution is described as the central challenge for startups in 2023. Americans' confidence in higher education fell from 57% in 2015 to 36% in 2023, which the piece attributes to student debt, COVID and a fast-changing job market. Bloomberg is cited as expecting generative AI to reach a $1.3 trillion market and 12% of total tech spend within 10 years. Threads reached 100M users within a few days of launch, which the piece credits to its use of Instagram's userbase.
- A social experiment through an NFT: The Blackhole (blackhole.eth.limo)
- Why you need to worry about the ‘wet-bulb temperature’ (amp.theguardian.com)
- FIP: Direct Casts (github.com)
This Farcaster draft proposes moving Direct Casts, the existing Warpcast messaging feature, onto hubs while retaining privacy and secrecy guarantees. It adopts the asynchronous Triple-Ratchet Protocol for per-device-per-application messaging, with users able to revoke access to a given device or application for later messages. The draft adds two new stores, Keys and DirectCasts, each with its own message types and CRDT rules. Keys have a per-user size limit of 200 and a cutoff one year after release unless extended in a new FIP, while Direct Cast Requests have a per-user limit of 200.
- Wingman - flight delays prediction market (wingman.wtf)
- Deception, exploited workers & cash handouts: Worldcoin’s first ½ million users (technologyreview.com)
Worldcoin, a project of San Francisco-based Tools for Humanity, collected iris scans and other biometric data from its first roughly 450,000 users in 24 countries, and MIT Technology Review's investigation found wide gaps between the company's privacy messaging and what users experienced. The investigation reported that representatives used deceptive marketing, collected more personal data than the company acknowledged, and failed to obtain meaningful informed consent. Orb operators are paid commissions in the stablecoin Tether for each person they register and work without contracts or guaranteed pay, according to a company spokesperson. Worldcoin said new users earn at least $15 for the scan and $5 more on wallet login, though the total later changed to $25 for later recruits.
- Avalanche to invest $50M in real world asset tokenization (techcrunch.com)
The Avalanche Foundation is allocating up to $50 million to buy tokenized real-world assets created on its layer-1 blockchain through a initiative called Avalanche Vista, according to John Wu, president of Ava Labs, the firm that created Avalanche. Wu said the focus is on operational efficiency, accessibility and liquidity, and that liquidity is currently the hardest part of tokenization. The article notes that KKR tokenized part of its private equity fund on Avalanche through Securitize in September, and that Ava Labs has a "long pipeline of deals" expected over the next 12 to 18 months.
- Malcolm Collins on Demographic Collapse, Reproductive Technologies (rss.com)
- What do I think about biometric proof of personhood? (vitalik.eth.limo)
Proof of personhood aims to tie each registered account to a unique real human, and biometric versions such as Worldcoin's iris-scanning Orb raise tradeoffs that must be weighed against social-graph approaches or giving up on proof of personhood entirely. Worldcoin, co-founded by Sam Altman, scans each user's iris with the Orb and stores only hashes of the scans to check uniqueness. The text lists four major risks for Worldcoin's design: privacy, accessibility, centralization through possible Orb backdoors, and security issues such as hacked phones or 3D-printed fake people.
- The Graph - 72x sync speed boost with Substreams (thegraph.com)
- WidgetKit- embeddable widgets for Warpcast (mirror.xyz)