Top crypto stories of week 34, 2023
Mon 21 to Sun 27 August 2023
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 21 to Sun 27 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.
- Leaked database of 101,000 friend.tech users (theblock.co)
- banteg/unfriendtech-2023-08-21.csv (gist.github.com)
- You Should be Working on Hardware (caseyhandmer.wordpress.com)
The author argues that people should work on hardware rather than software, because hardware markets are far less mature and few people are building in them. Citing Elon Musk's companies, the piece says success in hard hardware comes from founders who take on technical as well as business leadership, and who spend years learning the field. SpaceX is said to have landed more rockets in the last 12 months than the rest of the world has launched, and Tesla is said to be on track to sell nearly 2 million electric cars this year.
- NFT-extended open graph (warpcast.notion.site)
- Social Architecture - Building On-line Communities (hintjens.gitbooks.io)
- Cryptography is not Magic (or Why You should Never Roll your own Crypto) (loup-vaillant.fr)
Cryptography has learnable rules rather than being dark magic, and the piece argues that people should be pointed to those rules instead of being told never to build their own crypto. Implementing primitives mainly requires avoiding timing side channels through constant-time code and checking correctness against reference implementations or test vectors. Designing protocols requires defining a threat model and proving security against it, such as IND-CCA2 for untrusted networks or IND-CPA for passive adversaries. Its stated basis is a programmer working since 2007 who wrote a crypto library whose recent audit found no major flaw.
- Mint and steal NFTs of NYC Citi Bikes in 10 day race (citibike.xyz)
- Centre (Coinbase & Circle consortium for USDC gov) is dissolving (coinbase.com)
- Guess Word, Win .25 ETH! | Onchain Summer (warpcast.com)
- Celebrating Marginal Revolution's 20th Anniversary (with Vitalik) (conversationswithtyler.com)
Marginal Revolution, the economics blog started by Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen in August 2003, marked its 20th anniversary with a podcast conversation featuring co-founders Tabarrok and Cowen alongside Ben Casnocha and Vitalik Buterin. Cowen said his original goal was 5,000 readers, mostly academics, and that the blog has since gone far past what he expected. Tabarrok said the blog's standing shifted once academics who had once looked down on blogging began sending their papers for posting. Both co-founders said the blog remains free, without ads, and has no plans to change its format.
- Social media is doomed to die by Ellis Hamburger (theverge.com)
Ellis Hamburger, a former Snapchat employee, argues that social media apps are doomed to drift away from their original purpose of connecting friends because of their dependence on investors and advertisers. He points to Snapchat's push notification asking users to wish a friend happy birthday as a sign that the app had adopted growth tactics it once rejected. He writes that Snapchat Stories was intended from the start to include ads, and he says users also contribute to the cycle by favoring broadcasting and growing their friend lists. He suggests newer apps and protocols, such as Mastodon, Locket and BeReal, may offer a different path, though the article notes investors have little interest in small-scale social products.
- volatility-as-a-service (decentralised.co)
Crypto products increasingly depend on volatility, and this is driving users toward high-risk platforms as Bitcoin volatility has fallen to its lowest range since 2016. Users are reportedly moving to products such as Rollbit, with about $46 million deposited; Unibot, which has generated nearly $2 million in fees since May; and FriendTech, which drew $52 million in inflows within about seven days of launch. The text argues that short-cycle crypto narratives act as a "narrative casino," and it draws on Eugene Wei's "Status as a Service" framework to suggest how Web3 social products may evolve.
- Founder as a victim, founder as a god (blakemasters.tumblr.com)
Peter Thiel's CS183 class notes, published as an essay, argue that founders are better described by an inverted normal distribution, with extreme insider and extreme outsider traits at once, than by the usual bell curve of ordinary traits. The notes attribute this pattern to a feedback loop in which founders are nurtured into extreme traits, exaggerate them, and are exaggerated further by others. Examples include Max Levchin, who the notes say really has 3 kidneys, Sean Parker's Napster role and Nicaragua trip, and Romulus, whom Livy's account says disappeared during a storm and was declared a god.
- Gitcoin Grants 18: Discover and support the next great web3 project (grants.gitcoin.co)
- The acceleration of addictiveness (paulgraham.com)
Paul Graham argues that addictiveness is accelerating because technological progress makes things we like more concentrated and more engaging, and that people will increasingly have to define themselves by what they refuse. He gives examples such as opium becoming heroin, food shaped by factory farming and processing, and the Internet becoming addictive while he used it. He notes that cigarettes took about 100 years for social customs to turn against them, and he says that rate of adaptation may not keep pace with new addictions. He says he avoids an iPhone to keep the Internet from following him outside.
- Bell Labs: Abandoned photos (abandonedamerica.us)
A photo gallery by Matthew Christopher of Abandoned America shows the abandoned Bell Labs building in Holmdel, New Jersey, including its entry lobby, empty atrium, cafeteria, elevators, data center and a hall of mirrors. The captions say the building is currently undergoing renovations and is anticipated to reopen, though the text is cut off before giving further details. The set also includes a photo titled Saarinen's Swan Song, along with shots of modernist panels and a basement stairwell.
- Networked Thought: What is Digital Gardening? (jzhao.xyz)
The article argues that digital gardens, personal collections of interconnected notes and ideas that evolve over time, are a better alternative to rigid organizing systems for thinking and sharing. The author says formal tools such as Zettelkasten and Notion's hierarchical folders add too much upfront friction and impose artificial order, while linking by concept helps surface unexpected connections. The workflow moves from seeds (quick bookmarks and scratch notes, such as the author's TabSpace tool) to saplings (single linked thoughts) to fruits (longer essays and projects). The author writes mainly for personal knowledge and notes that the public sharing has encouraged feedback, and reports reading only about 30% of the content sent their way.
- Scammers Used ChatGPT to Unleash a Crypto Botnet on X (Twitter) (wired.com)
Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington discovered a botnet of 1,140 X accounts, which they named Fox8, that used ChatGPT to write posts promoting cryptocurrency websites. The researchers found it by searching for the phrase "As an AI language model," a response ChatGPT sometimes produces, and then manually identifying bot-operated accounts. Filippo Menczer, a Bloomington professor who worked on the research with Kai-Cheng Yang, says such bots may be more widespread and harder to detect, and that the botnet was apparently taken down after the team published its paper in July.
- Some rough impressions of Worldcoin (blog.cryptographyengineering.com)
Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency funded by Sam Altman and run by Alex Blania, is described by the author as posing fewer privacy red flags than expected, though the author still has suspicions. The project's core technology is the "orb," a biometric sensor that scans irises to create an "iris code" used to ensure each person registers only once for free token airdrops. According to the author, Worldcoin claims iris scans serve only that duplicate-detection purpose, that raw images are not stored unless users opt in, and that personal data is optional. The author notes that the iris code is stored on servers operated by Tools for Humanity, and that Worldcoin's documentation is vague on several points.
- Is speculation a necessary ingredient for building in crypto? 🤔 (twitter.com)
