Top crypto stories of week 33, 2023
Mon 14 to Sun 20 August 2023
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 14 to Sun 20 August 2023, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total. Most-shared sources: tbp.tech, youtube.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Picture yourself going to Cypherpunk meetups in 1992 (tbp.tech)
- Donate to Kiwi Gitcoin Grant (explorer.gitcoin.co)
- Coinbase cleared to offer futures to eligible US customers (blockworks.co)
- Farcaster Hubs are now fully permissionless — run one today (warpcast.com)
- How to explain what your web3 product does and convince users to try it (macbudkowski.com)
This guide, first shared in 2022 and now republished on the author's blog, offers a framework for explaining web3 products to users, built around five rules: make them care, make it easy to understand, show how the product solves their problems, help them believe it will deliver, and convince them to try it now. It draws on the author's experience making complex products clear and on conversations with over 100 web3 founders. The guide argues that landing pages should lead with user benefits rather than investor-facing pitches or big visions, and that jargon such as "cutting-edge" and "supercharge" should be avoided. It illustrates these points with 40 examples of good and bad product communication from projects including Zapper, Arweave, Royal, Ledger and MetaMask.
- Don't get a job (youtube.com)
- Against Scarcity (davidphelps.substack.com)
Virtual worlds and NFT platforms largely replicate the scarcity economics of physical land, even though digital goods can be copied without limit. Decentraland's 90,000 land parcels go to the highest bidders, and Upland sells map squares of a simulated New York Stock Exchange for $23,000, so what is called decentralization mainly shifts power to wealthy buyers. Roblox, by contrast, gives users free land and building tools but leaves creators to impose artificial scarcity by charging for access. Drawing on Murray Bookchin's 1971 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, it asks what an online economy without artificial scarcity would look like while still rewarding contributors.
- The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work (web.cs.ucdavis.edu)
- A beginner's guide to seasonal living (futureofliving.substack.com)
Seasonal living means maintaining residences in several locations and moving among them by season, and the author outlines six approaches to it, from renting short-term leases to pooling friends' money to buy homes collectively. The overview of the lifestyle says it differs from digital nomad travel by involving longer, recurring stays in 2-4 chosen locations. The author recommends limiting oneself to 2-4 homes at most, and notes that the lifestyle should not leave usable housing vacant for large parts of the year. The author also describes a group of 17 friends in San Francisco who split an 8-bed Lake Tahoe house during ski season for two years.
- Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire (mitpress.mit.edu)
- Key Extraction Attacks on Threshold ECDSA Implementations (verichains.io)
Verichains reports three new key extraction attacks, named TSSHOCK, that can recover the private key of threshold ECDSA (t-ECDSA) implementations based on the GG18, GG20 and CGGMP21 protocols, including popular Golang and Rust libraries. The article says that most implementations can be attacked by a single malicious party after one or two signatures, with no trace left. It names BNB Chain's tss-lib, whose ambiguous encoding flaw was first reported by Kudelski Security in 2019 and rated Low Severity, along with Multichain, THORChain and Threshold Network projects that use modified versions of it. TSSHOCK was released at BlackHat USA 2023 on August 10, 2023.
- Friend.tech Dune Dashboard (dune.com)
- Ep 342: Vitalik Buterin Fights the Dragon-Tyrant - YouTube (youtube.com)
Vitalik Buterin discusses currencies, freedom, political philosophy, community, aging and why people need not be too scared of men with guns in episode 342 of The Seen and the Unseen. He joins host Amit Varma and guest co-host Ajay Shah for the conversation. The episode's show notes list reading and viewing recommendations, including Nick Bostrom's The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, Aubrey de Grey on ending aging, and Ludwig von Mises's Human Action. The description does not state a conclusion from the discussion.
- Picture the British secretly rewriting crypto history (tbp.tech)
- Vitalik: What do I think about Community Notes (vitalik.eth.limo)
Vitalik Buterin argues that Twitter's Community Notes feature is among the closest mainstream approximations of crypto values, because anyone can write and rate notes and an open source algorithm decides which notes appear. He says the notes are informative and valuable both in his view and in that of many people across the political spectrum he talks to. The algorithm prioritizes notes rated helpful by users who usually disagree, using a "polarity" term that absorbs partisan effects and a "helpfulness" score that must reach at least +0.4 for a note to be shown. Buterin says the polarity axis emerged from the data and maps closely to left versus right, and that the full implementation is 6282 lines across 22 files.
- DAO Anthology - a zine of essays exploring DAOs (ipfs.metalabel.xyz)
- X glitch wipes out most pictures and links tweeted before December 2014 (theverge.com)
X is failing to display images and expanded links in older posts, with the problem appearing to affect tweets published before December 2014. Tom Coates highlighted the issue on a Saturday, after a Brazilian vtuber, @DaniloTakagi, had pointed it out a couple of days earlier. The glitch removed the picture from Ellen DeGeneres's 2014 Oscars selfie, though that image was restored later that night. The @Support account said on Monday, "We fixed the bug, and the issue will be fully resolved in the coming days." The article links the cutoff to Twitter's 2016 "enhanced URL enrichment" changes, and X did not respond to requests for comment beyond an automated message.
- a16z releases open-source microverse packed with generative AI NPCs (cryptoslate.com)
Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has released the code for AI Town, an open-source project that lets developers build their own simulated world populated by AI characters. The project was built in collaboration with portfolio company Convex Dev and is inspired by a Stanford Generative Agent paper. Its characters live, chat and socialize in a virtual town, retaining memories of past conversations, and the stack uses OpenAI for text generation, Convex as the back-end serverless framework, Pinecone for vector storage, Clerk for authentication and Fly for deployment. Developers can customize character data, sprite sheets, the tilemap, text generation prompts and game rules.
- Multiplayer UI Sketchbook (actsnotfacts.com)
This is a collection of lo-fi multiplayer UI sketches, influenced by architecture (specifically A Pattern Language) and small group dynamics. The sketches include hyperlinks that show how busy the page at the other end is, a browser map view with an elf NPC that answers in rhyming couplets, and AI helpers that appear in the avatar bar alongside other users. Some concepts are functional prototypes: the AI chats use gpt-3.5-turbo with multiplayer built on PartyKit and Yjs, and the smart light gesture prototype uses Mediapipe gesture recognition in the browser and MacOS Shortcuts.
- Barbie OnChain: Using Pink To Accelerate New Global Norms. (lesgreys.com)