Top crypto stories of week 39, 2023
Mon 25 September to Sun 1 October 2023
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 25 September to Sun 1 October 2023, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Ethereum Whitepaper (ethereum.org)
The Ethereum whitepaper, published in 2014 before Ethereum launched, is kept online as a reference, though the site states that it no longer reflects Ethereum today. The paper describes Ethereum as a blockchain with a built-in, Turing-complete programming language for creating contracts that encode arbitrary state transition functions. Changes since 2014 cited on the site include the move from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake in The Merge in 2022, Layer 2 scaling solutions, and DeFi, NFTs, and DAOs emerging as major use cases.
- The Tyranny of the clock (spunk.org)
George Woodcock argues that the mechanical clock has become a tyrannical force in modern life, more potent than any individual exploiter, because it turned time into a measurable commodity that industrial capitalism could use to regiment workers. He traces how clocks spread from medieval monasteries and German cities to factories, where employers manipulated clocks and whistles to cheat workers of time. He describes the result as a regimented life that causes health problems and poorer work, and he concludes that clock time should serve only as a means of coordination, not dominate people's lives.
- You Can Just Do Stuff (alicemaz.substack.com)
People can simply decide to act rather than wait for permission, and freedom is something people take rather than something granted. Illustrating this, a manager recounted realizing that a hard reboot could fix a service outage despite the risk, and a shy student opened a propped-open classroom door with a pair of scissors. The piece also summarizes Dominic Cummings's 2018 paper on ARPA and PARC, crediting their output to a shared vision, intense effort, top talent, freedom from bureaucracy, and speed, with ARPA's Joseph Licklider given a $10m/yr budget.
- The Total Economic Impact™ of Calendly (calendly.com)
Calendly, commissioned through Forrester Consulting, reports a 318% return on investment over three years for its enterprise customers. The study, conducted on Calendly's behalf, was based on customer interviews, data collection, and financial analysis. The source is promotional, as the article is Calendly's own marketing page that promotes the study's findings and says Calendly affects metrics such as customer retention and recruiting lifecycles.
- THE NEW TECHNOLOGIST MANIFESTO (hipcityreg.substack.com)
The newsletter's author presents a manifesto for "The New Technologist," arguing that technology should be a force for collective progress rather than only individual wealth. The statements say technologists should view their work as a joy and a privilege, expand the "capability landscape" so more people can reach their potential, and treat hardware, spatial, crypto, and AI as the four key next-generation areas. The manifesto also calls for narrative and creative direction on major efforts, such as nuclear energy, Mars, and high-speed rail, and for technologists to consider running for government office.
- Should Ethereum be okay with enshrining more things in the protocol? (vitalik.eth.limo)
This Vitalik Buterin post from September 2023 asks whether Ethereum should enshrine more features into its core protocol, and it traces why the original minimalist approach was hard to sustain for account abstraction. The early goal was to make a transaction "just a call," with validation moved into user account code, but EIP-86 pushed complexity onto miners and other layers. Account abstraction then evolved through EIP-2938 into ERC-4337, which the post says has a medium-term roadmap to enshrine parts of it into the protocol. Stated reasons include gas efficiency, since ERC-4337 costs about 42,000 gas versus 21,000 for a basic transaction, and censorship resistance, since wrapped user operations are opaque to protocol-level inclusion lists.
- Experts should curate (zhayitong.com)
The author argues that experts should spend more of their time organizing existing learning resources than producing new ones, since the main obstacle for learners is finding which guides to follow. Khan Academy's knowledge map of K–12 math is cited as an example of an authoritative map that saved learners that metawork, though it is now defunct and covered only first-party content. The Open Source Society University is described as a GitHub readme linking to free third-party sources, but it has only one to two maintainers, and its sections mostly lead to full EDX-style courses rather than modular content. The piece concludes that a better knowledge map needs a comprehensive, modular syllabus and a community of maintainers, and that its long-term sustainability will depend on who derives value from it.
- Introducing the Nakamoto Challenge: Addressing the Toughest Problems in Crypto (a16zcrypto.com)
- AI’s $200B question (sequoiacap.com)
David Cahn of Sequoia Capital argues that AI infrastructure spending has outpaced the end-customer revenue needed to pay it back, leaving a gap he calls the $200B question. He estimates that if Nvidia sells $50B in run-rate GPU revenue, roughly $100B of data center spending follows, and that the GPUs would need to generate about $200B of lifetime revenue for a 50% end-user margin to pay back the investment. Using dummy assumptions, including $10B each for Microsoft, Google, Meta and Apple, he concludes that a hole of $125B or more must be filled for each year of CapEx at current levels. He says overbuilding has historically cleared the way for innovation and that the focus should shift toward end-customer value.
- List of active Farcaster users (flink.fyi)
- Alphapls: newsletter with 5 best crypto alpha tweets of the week (substack.com)
- Onchain Cooperatives: Compensation (indies.substack.com)
Part of a series on Onchain Cooperatives, this post covers compensation models for cooperatives that use blockchain for governance and operations. It describes three approaches: cash paid per task or salary, with Indie Protocol weekly agreements given as an example; dividends or bonuses distributed at milestones, such as Indie Season 7's distribution of about 74,000 USDC; and equity, tied to the $INDIE membership token and a Colorado Limited Cooperative Association. The post also says hybrid client engagements may pay in both cash and equity.
- Ethereum Censorship Dashboard (censorship.pics)
- Building Web3 into the Web (dawn.mirror.xyz)
- AI generated tx majority of traffic on Gnosis Chain (x.com)
- Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses livestream to Instagram and Facebook (techcrunch.com)
Meta unveiled the new Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses at Meta Connect in Menlo Park, California, with the key upgrade that they can livestream video to Facebook and Instagram, a feature the original Ray-Ban Stories lacked. The glasses have a 12-megapixel camera that records 1080p video, and an LED light on the other side that turns on during recording and cannot be covered without the system blocking capture. Preorders open in 15 markets, with sales starting October 12 at $299 for standard lenses, $329 for polarized and $379 for transitions.
- HTML+ (walpo.com)
- Kiwistand v0.7.0 released (github.com)
Kiwistand v0.7.0 is the release notes page for the Kiwi News software, which lists changes from version 0.4.0 through the unreleased 0.15.0. The changelog covers breaking protocol changes, including the removal of the Kiwi Pass NFT allowlist in 0.12.0 and the addition of text-only posts in 0.14.0. Version 0.7.0 itself fixed a bug in the constraints metadata database, hardcoded mainnet mints to preserve their original timestamps, and added an Optimism mint crawler that records mint timestamps. Node operators are told that nodes on different protocol versions will not sync with each other, so all nodes must upgrade together.
- The governance trap (philmohun.com)
Ben Horowitz argues that a16z's "shared economics with centralized control" model suits high-growth firms, because shared control complicates decisions and slows structural change. The article's author then applies this framework to DAOs, which it says emphasize shared control to avoid regulatory scrutiny. The article argues that this shared-control emphasis handicaps DAOs' economic potential, citing public blockchains' claimed 10x improvements in transparency and global access over traditional equity structures.
- NFTs can‘t die (sceneswithsimon.com)
NFTs cannot die, because a blockchain permanently records each token's history of transfers and interactions, even as volume falls and companies shut down or pivot. The medium was largely marketed as a market for prices, which obscured that history, while Receipt by 0xHaiku, which displays each transfer on the artwork, and Rhea Myers's 2014 contract "This Is Art" are cited as examples of work that surfaces it. Ed Zitron is quoted calling NFT hype "a long con on customers and the media." The text also notes that on a shared ledger, a conceptual artwork can be collected in the same block as a phishing theft.