Top crypto stories of week 31, 2023
Mon 31 July to Sun 6 August 2023
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 31 July to Sun 6 August 2023, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total. Most-shared sources: warpcast.com, twitter.com, youtube.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- All-Time tab with the most upvoted Kiwi links ever is live (warpcast.com)
- Dune dashboard tracking EthXY (dune.com)
- Pirate culture (essays.eth.id)
- „Today we tried to perform a decentralized audit of an an orb from @worldcoin“ (twitter.com)
- fabric will match funds up to 5eth (warpcast.com)
- Picture yourself reading about web3 while eating a kiwi (tbp.tech)
- 17 misconceptions about SNARKs (and why they hold us back) (a16zcrypto.com)
The article argues that common misuse of SNARK terminology, including "ZK" for "succinct," inconsistent meanings of "succinct," and confusion between SNARKs and STARKs, obscures important distinctions and creates real risks. It says "ZK-proof" is often used for succinct arguments that are not zero-knowledge, which led one SNARK library to be wrongly assumed private, and it recommends terms like "verifiable rollup" and "zkSNARK." It defines "succinct" as sublinear proof size and "work-saving" as sublinear verification time, so that schemes like those based on IPA/Bulletproofs still count as SNARKs. It also notes that STARKs are deployed non-interactively, making them SNARKs, and that the "STARK" label has caused some people to wrongly assume low security levels are appropriate.
- ERC-6551: Learn about Tokenbound Accounts (tokenbound.org)
Tokenbound's ERC-6551 standard gives each NFT its own token bound account, so the NFT can own assets, take onchain actions, and serve as an identity on Ethereum. Project owners can get a list of their community's account addresses, airdrop directly to NFT accounts, retroactively form DAOs, and reach holders no matter how quickly NFTs change hands. A V2 iframe for viewing an NFT's account contents and an SDK are now live, and a weekly dev call with the team and over 1,900 builders using ERC-6551 is open to join.
- The Tyranny of Structurelessness (jofreeman.com)
Jo Freeman, writing as Joreen, argues that groups claiming to have no structure inevitably develop informal structures that concentrate power, so the women's liberation movement should formalize its decision-making rather than rely on "structurelessness." The essay says the idea of structurelessness began as a reaction against overstructured society and elitism on the Left, but that it became unquestioned ideology that worked for consciousness-raising groups and failed when they took on specific tasks. It states that informal networks of friends act as elites that are hard to see and hard to break, and that making rules explicit and open to all is the way to limit them.
- How to spoof MAC address and hostname automatically at boot on macOS (youtube.com)
- The pseudonymous economy (youtube.com)
- Creative Thinking (www1.ece.neu.edu)
Claude Shannon, speaking at Bell Labs on March 20, 1952, argues that creative research depends on three things: training and experience, a fairly high level of intelligence, and motivation, which he describes as curiosity, constructive dissatisfaction, and enjoyment of finding answers. He says that very few people produce most of the important ideas, and cites Isaac Newton, who had produced enough science by age 25 to make 10 or 20 men famous. Shannon then describes problem-solving techniques that he says good researchers use unconsciously, including simplification, seeking similar known problems, restating a problem in many forms, and generalization.
- “Against Masculinity” — Current Affairs (currentaffairs.org)
The author argues that masculinity is not a useful standard for young men, who need what everyone needs: to be good people with meaningful lives. Writing in Current Affairs, the author says the calls for "positive masculinity" from Christine Emba of the Washington Post and Richard Reeves, author of Of Boys and Men, are misguided, since virtues like courage, self-confidence and compassion are not distinctively male. The author also says that Emba never fully articulates a positive vision of masculinity that is distinct from femininity, and suggests that no such vision could avoid stigmatizing effeminate boys.
- Curve Hack, Liquidations, DeFi, and Contagion Spiral (twitter.com)
Curve founder Michael Egorov's leveraged position is at risk of liquidation after the Curve protocol was hacked, and the author frames this as a test of DeFi's free-market design. The article says Egorov took a $100m loan on AAVE using $280M of CRV as collateral, and that CRV has fallen from $0.72 a week earlier to $0.50. It also says his Fraxlend position's APY is doubling every 12 hours, which could lead to about 59 million CRV being dumped on-chain, and that Aave could be left with $63m of bad debt, which its $330m safety fund would cover.
- Token-Curated Registries in 2023 and A Problem With Price Signals (sceneswithsimon.com)
This newsletter argues that adding price signals to information curation can crowd out other motivations, so that contributors serve the protocol rather than the protocol serving users. The author, who helped popularise Token-Curated Registries, says they have softened on the idea and proposes retroactive funding protocols, where work is done for non-financial reasons before contributors are rewarded. The newsletter also covers the WGA's AI demands, which it summarizes as treating AI as a tool that cannot determine writing credit, and the struggles of short fiction magazines after Amazon ended its Kindle Newsstand program.
- May Scale of Monetary Hardness (reaction.la)
- Someone Used a .eth As Their Real Social Media Username. Now The Name’s Mine… (decashed.eth.loan)
An expired .eth name tied to a long-time Farcaster user's account was re-registered by someone else, who then gained his username, profile URL and future tags. Farcaster added .eth usernames on July 26, and the name had lapsed in January, but its wallet data still resolved to the user's address, so Farcaster validated it for him. After the experimenter registered the name on ENS and had Farcaster validate it as theirs, the feed URL redirected to their profile, while the original user lost the username and followers and was left with a display name and a Farcaster ID number.
- Some reasons to measure (danluu.com)
Dan Luu argues that measuring things is often more valuable than building them, because measurement is undervalued and high-impact measurement projects are easy to find. He cites Kyle Kingsbury's Jepsen work, which found serious data-loss and consistency bugs in many distributed databases, such as Redis Cluster losing 56% of writes during a partition and RabbitMQ losing about 35% of acknowledged writes. He also says that published measurements led to improvements in keyboard latency, Consumer Reports headlight testing, and Tesla Model 3 braking distances, which improved from 152 ft. from 60 mph after Consumer Reports and Car and Driver tests. Luu says his own measurement work is driven mainly by curiosity.
- The Bitter Lesson (incompleteideas.net)
Rich Sutton argues that the biggest lesson from 70 years of AI research is that general methods leveraging computation, such as search and learning, are ultimately the most effective, by a large margin. He ties this to Moore's law, or more generally to the continued exponential fall in cost per unit of computation, which makes massively more computation available over time. He cites computer chess, where search-based methods defeated world champion Kasparov in 1997, and computer Go, where similar gains came about 20 years later. He also describes speech recognition, where statistical methods based on hidden Markov models beat human-knowledge-based methods in a DARPA competition in the 1970s. He concludes that building human knowledge into AI systems plateaus in the long run.
- IP Protocols Part I: Why the next MARVEL might start as an NFT collection (kanfa.macbudkowski.com)
The author argues that the next MARVEL-style universe could work more like Ethereum, with permissionless creation, rather than relying on a single studio's control. The article describes IP universes such as Star Wars and MARVEL as "protocols" whose rules let fans build apps like movies, games and merchandise, and it claims that the value of these protocols grows with the number of high-quality apps and users. It contrasts Disney's restricted model, which it says generated about 3.6X more money for Toy Story than Avatar when merchandise is counted, with Ethereum, where it says scams and hacks damaged reputation. It cites Nouns as an example of a bottom-up brand, and it argues that an additional curation layer is needed to avoid being overwhelmed by low-quality work.