Top crypto stories of week 32, 2023
Mon 7 to Sun 13 August 2023
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 7 to Sun 13 August 2023, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- PayPal Launches a Stablecoin (bloomberg.com)
- Three Tomorrows & The Creative Journey (sceneswithsimon.com)
Simon, writing a weekly newsletter, argues that people are seeking new forms of in-person connection after years of online life, and that authentic creative work will get attention regardless of how it is made. He points to running clubs in Williamsburg, crypto DAO FWB's festival held in a forest, and teenagers in New York choosing flip phones and meeting in parks as signs of this shift. He also says book sales in the U.S. are the highest they have ever been, and he is pessimistic about private equity firm KKR's proposed purchase of Simon & Schuster. He argues that AI will not suddenly flood culture with content, because creation is the easiest step in cultural formation.
- GameStop, citing “regulatory uncertainty,” winds down its crypto & NFT wallet (arstechnica.com)
GameStop is shutting down its GameStop Wallet app for iOS and its Chrome browser extension as of November 1, and telling customers to make sure they can access their Secret Passphrase. The company's notice cites "the regulatory uncertainty of the crypto space" as the reason. Game Developer notes the decision may have been in the works earlier, since December 2022 layoffs heavily affected the team working on the Ethereum-based wallet. GameStop advises customers to ensure access to their Secret Passphrase by October 1, 2023, which it says should allow recovery in any compatible wallet, such as MetaMask after exporting keys.
- RADAR Launch: Mochi’s “But Make It Kawaii” AI Journey Campaign, Future Drop #1 (radarlaunch.app)
- Sex Workers Took Refuge in Crypto. Now It’s Failing Them. (wired.com)
Sex workers turned to cryptocurrency to escape banking and payment restrictions, but the article reports that crypto is failing them because it still depends on the banking system. Allie Eve Knox and Allie Rae describe losing bank accounts and payment apps, with Rae saying no major bank would give her a business account. Crypto exchanges also ban sex workers, leaving them with money they cannot spend, and WetSpace, Rae's crypto-centric OnlyFans alternative, depends on a bank account that may be withdrawn. Mike Stabile of the Free Speech Coalition argues that campaigning for laws against banking discrimination is a better investment than building an alternative financial system.
- Marine Cloud Brightening Project (faculty.washington.edu)
- Why is everyone so boring? (overcomingbias.com)
Robin Hanson argues that public life looks boring because people who act lively, passionate or opinionated in public risk attacks from social "bandits" who accuse them of arrogance or violating the sacred. He contrasts this with friends and family, where people are often lively and provocative because the pressure to conform is applied only in moderation. He says large firms and experts mostly choose a boring, officious public tone to avoid such attacks, and that surviving while acting lively takes unusual art, allies, energy, and "eliteness."
- Visa testing credit card gas fee payments through Paymaster Smart Contracts (usa.visa.com)
Visa ran an experiment in which users pay blockchain gas fees with Visa cards, using a paymaster web service built on Cybersource and a Verifying Paymaster Smart Contract under the ERC-4337 standard. The wallet sends the User Operation and card credentials to the web service, which charges the user in fiat currency and then produces a digital signature over the calldata and gas fee information, valid for a set time window. The wallet appends this signature and window to the User Operation, and the paymaster contract checks it, covering gas costs only if the signature is correct. The time window guards against users paying in fiat when ETH is cheap and later redeeming the signature when it is more expensive. The article says merchants or dApps could run their own paymaster solutions using this approach, but notes the product is still in development and its final version may differ.
- Don’t Call Yourself a Programmer (web.archive.org)
The article, titled "Don't Call Yourself a Programmer," argues that engineers should understand how businesses work and frame their careers around increasing revenue or reducing costs rather than around programming itself. It notes that most programming jobs are in line-of-business software, such as an internal travel expense form that could save a 2,000-employee company $250,000 a year at $50 per hour. It cites Peter Drucker's distinction between Profit Centers and Cost Centers and says engineers are usually Cost Centers. It also says that describing oneself as a "programmer" invites replacement, and that most jobs are filled through personal introductions rather than public postings.
- MultiLayered Calendars (julian.digital)
The essay argues that calendars should natively distinguish event types and support multiple layers, so that time is managed in three dimensions rather than as a flat grid of mutually exclusive blocks. It proposes tasks, meetings, blocked time and activities as separate layers, and suggests that health, sleep and listening data could be visualized alongside them. Raphael Schaad, founder of Cron, is cited as pointing out the missing "activities" layer, which covers events like flights that need attention only at certain moments. The author notes that current tools such as Outlook and Google Calendar have changed little, and that Amie treats every calendar event as a task, which the essay considers insufficient.
- Reflections on Trusting Trust (cs.cmu.edu)
- Passkey Demo by Goldfinch (defifortheworld.com)
- tutorial on how to tokengate with 6551 tokenbounad account assets (with APIs) (docs.airstack.xyz)
- Most people don’t care about decentralization. And it’s our fault. (kanfa.macbudkowski.com)
The author argues that most people don't care about decentralization, and that the way it is explained is a large part of the reason. Phrases like censorship-resistant, trustless and no single point of failure trigger unhelpful associations for most people, and decentralization lacks the everyday shortcuts that features like horsepower or megapixels have. The proposed fix is to explain it through concrete examples: contributing to a DAO or open-source project on Discord or GitHub instead of trying to influence FAANG, voting on changes to a platform rather than losing an audience to algorithm changes, and moving friends between web3 social products without being locked into one. Note: the article is written in the first person, so the claims above are the author's own.
- Downfall attacks - Major exploit in Intel CPUs discovered by Google researcher (downfall.page)
Daniel Moghimi describes Downfall, a vulnerability in Intel processors that lets software on one user's machine steal data from other users sharing that computer, and in cloud environments from other customers. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2022-40982, stems from the Gather instruction leaking the content of the internal vector register file during speculative execution. Moghimi introduced Gather Data Sampling (GDS) and Gather Value Injection (GVI) techniques to exploit it, and says it took two weeks to develop an end-to-end attack stealing OpenSSL encryption keys. The article says Intel is releasing a microcode update as mitigation, and that some workloads may see up to 50% overhead according to Intel.
- Honey, I Shrunk the Proof: Enabling on-chain verification for RISC Zero & Bonsai (risczero.com)
- Passkey demo by turnkey (wallet.tx.xyz)
- Paul Graham on how to procrastinate well (paulgraham.com)
Paul Graham argues that procrastination can be good if it means putting off small errands to work on more important things, and that the real danger is "type-B" procrastination, where people feel productive while doing the wrong things. He cites Richard Hamming's question of why you are not working on the most important problem in your field, generalized to asking what the best thing you could be working on is. He also notes that big problems are hard to start because they offer no near-term reward and feel frightening, so people often need to approach them obliquely, and he concludes that letting an enjoyable ambitious project pull you forward works better than a to-do list pushing you.
- Fund flow of a reentrancy attack (explorer.phalcon.xyz)
- Zoom's Updated Terms of Service Permit Training AI on Content Without Opt-Out (stackdiary.com)
Zoom's updated Terms of Service granted the company a perpetual license over customer content that explicitly covered AI and machine learning training, with no opt-out, which drew privacy criticism. After the backlash, CEO Eric Yuan called the change a "process failure" that Zoom "will fix immediately," and on August 11 Zoom revised the clause to say it does not use customer audio, video or chat to train its own or third-party AI models. COO Aparna Bawa said customers decide whether to enable generative AI features and separately whether to share content for product improvement. The author argues that customers should be told when their data is used for AI training and be able to opt out.