Top crypto stories of week 40, 2023
Mon 2 to Sun 8 October 2023
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 2 to Sun 8 October 2023, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total. Most-shared sources: lu.ma.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System (bitcoin.org)
- Live: ENS-enabled profiles on Kiwi News (twitter.com)
- Open-Source Funding vs Venture Capital with Scott Moore (theblockchainsocialist.com)
This episode of The Blockchain Socialist podcast features Scott Moore, co-founder of Gitcoin and Public Works, discussing public goods funding, quadratic funding and DAOs. The conversation covers the "everything is coordination" meme, advice for starting a DAO, open source development, and the role of venture capital in crypto. The host and Moore have different views on venture capital, and the discussion explores more collective forms of investment as alternatives to the status quo.
- Using Farcaster protocol for .plan-style daily notes (charlieharrington.com)
The author describes "fling," a way to keep .plan-style daily notes on Farcaster, the decentralized social protocol. Each day, a user posts at most one root cast beginning with the "⌆" character, and any further entries go as direct replies to that root rather than as a thread. Searchcaster's API finds past fling casts, and a val.town script emails a random one each day, so the user can reply by email, which another val posts as a cast. The author says Farcaster's open data access makes this possible without an API key, and reports that the test cast received 6 likes.
- Stablecoins are doomed to fail (prestonbyrne.com)
- Mark Nadal: Conflict Resolution (with guns) (gun.eco)
Mark Nadal, founder and architect of GUN, a VC-funded open source database, argues in a 2015 Distributed Matters talk that distributed systems are fundamentally a physics problem, and that systems should give up strong consistency to stay highly available under network partitions. He describes split brain and the CAP trade-off as reasons master-slave designs fail when a network splits, and he presents a master-master, peer-to-peer design instead. Nadal compares a network delay of 4 to 20 minutes to the light-travel time between Earth and Mars. He proposes an operating-state boundary, with updates above it deferred and updates below it recorded in an append-only structure, and says GUN uses timestamps within this algorithm to avoid their usual vulnerabilities.
- Zuzalu Community Newsletter | October 2023 (app.skiff.com)
Skiff has joined Notion, and the two companies are joining forces to pursue plans for freer, more empowered online lives. Notion acquired Skiff, as announced on Feb 9, and Skiff's services were set to sunset on August 9, with email forwarding available until Feb 9, 2025 for users who chose the extension. Skiff's mission of helping people collaborate and communicate with privacy aligned with Notion's vision of a connected workspace.
- Why I Built Zuzalu (palladiummag.com)
Vitalik Buterin-era author (the article's author, unnamed in the excerpt) describes Zuzalu, a two-month pop-up mini-city for about 200 people held in a Montenegro resort starting March 25, as an experiment in turning online internet tribes into physical communities. The article reports that the form factor worked: guests largely enjoyed the stay, and a longer stay created a different mindset than a four-day conference. Zupass, a zero-knowledge identity system from the 0xPARC team, improved quickly through real-world use, while crypto payments and DAO governance were limited or absent. The article also notes that no country supplied more than one-third of attendees and that the experiment did not yet show a clear path toward the larger geopolitical goals in Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State.
- Seriously, Stop Celebrating Big Tech's AI Monopoly (theindex.media)
- Kiwi Community Call (lu.ma)
- Crypto's biggest use case: Permissionless Identity (kermankohli.substack.com)
The author argues that crypto's biggest use case is permissionless identity: portable, persistent identities that are cryptographically backed, identified through a public key rather than through separate database identifiers on each service. The article contrasts this with Web2, where each service creates its own user identifier and a person's data and reputation stay locked within that ecosystem. It also points to blockchains as a shared time standard, since they assign timestamps to transactions when they are mined, complementing cryptography as a shared authentication standard. The author says permissionless identity can be used on-chain or off-chain and that the key is the innovation, not the blockchain.
- Understanding CryptoPunks (understanding-cryptopunks.vv.xyz)
- Marc Andreessen: It’s Time To Write (m.youtube.com)
- NFT: Chain Letters: MoMA Launches 'Postcard' NFT Art Project - Decrypt (decrypt.co)
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) announced an interactive, NFT-backed digital initiative called "MoMA Postcard," which will debut later this month and lets users experiment with creating art on the blockchain. Participants send digital chain letters with 15 blank "stamps" to collaborators, who build a collaborative art piece around a shared theme. To launch the program, MoMA invited 15 digital artists, including Dmitri Cherniak, Casey Reas, Grant Yun, Anna Lucia and Kim Asendorf, to create the "First 15" series, which is minted on Tezos. The article also notes that the Musée d'Orsay announced a year-long partnership with the Tezos Foundation the previous week.
- Protocol and staking pool changes that could improve decentralization (notes.ethereum.org)
The article argues that Ethereum's emergent two-tiered staking, where node operators run validators and delegators hold liquid staking tokens such as stETH from Lido or rETH from Rocket Pool, has two flaws: centralization risk in node operator selection and needless consensus burden from roughly 800,000 signatures per epoch. Using a Rocket Pool scenario, the author concludes that delegators have no meaningful role and that delegation then reduces to a pointless intermediary. The post proposes that delegators should have a real role, through delegate selection or a lighter consensus participation tier. It suggests better voting tools within pools, more cross-pool competition via capped slashing penalties of 2 or 4 ETH, and enshrined delegation.
- Backed's US short term treasury bond coming to Base (blockworks.co)
- Exploring the Design Space for Dynamic NFTs (mirror.xyz)
- Planet - Native macOS app for building blogs on IPFS (planetable.xyz)
Planet is a free, open-source macOS app for publishing and following websites over IPFS without a central server. Users can link their content to an Ethereum Name (ENS), such as planetable.eth, so others can follow them in Planet or reach the site through gateways like eth.limo or eth.sucks. The article explains that an ENS name can be pointed to an IPFS site by setting its Content Hash field, and that a Planet site's IPNS address, copied from the sidebar, can be entered there with an ipns:// prefix. Planet is licensed under the MIT license.
- Kiwi News Open Office, 2023-10-11 (next Wed) (lu.ma)
- Productivity Is Destroying Our Society. (joanwestenberg.medium.com)
The central claim is that digital tools have not delivered the productivity and freedom they promised: knowledge workers report feeling more fragmented, busy and burned out despite having more tools than earlier generations. The article attributes this "productivity paradox" to always-on devices that fragment attention, to work that has no clear end point, and to employer expectations of 24/7 availability that spill work into evenings, weekends and vacations. Sociologist Richard Sennett is cited as arguing that flexible, project-based work often hides excessive demands and overwork, and Manuel Castells as arguing that informational work blurs time boundaries. The article concludes that solving the problem requires rethinking how work is valued and structured, not just personal time management.