Top crypto stories of week 41, 2023
Mon 9 to Sun 15 October 2023
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 9 to Sun 15 October 2023, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total. Most-shared sources: github.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Superchain Ecosystem Explorer (superscan.network)
- Farcaster is now open to everyone (warpcast.com)
- Harvard lecture slides on Public Goods (scholar.harvard.edu)
- Content moderation double-bind theory (every.to)
The article argues that content moderation creates a double-bind for every company that hosts or publishes user content: the closer content gets to the line of what is prohibited, the more attention it attracts, and the more attention it attracts, the costlier it is to moderate. Citing a 2018 Facebook note by Mark Zuckerberg, the author says engagement rises as content nears the policy line, even when users say afterward that they dislike it. The author gives Logan Paul, David Dobrik, and Basecamp as examples, and argues that ad-based revenue is not the root cause, since subscription platforms such as Substack also reward edgy content. The article also contends that Section 230 lets platforms present themselves as tools rather than publishers.
- Satoshi Nakamoto's original bitcoin sourcecode (github.com)
This GitHub repository, titled "original-bitcoin," is described as a historical archive of Satoshi Nakamoto's original bitcoin source code. The repository is marked as a public archive under the MIT license and contains a src folder, a bitcoin.exe file, supporting DLLs including libeay32.dll and mingwm10.dll, a license file, and a readme. At the time the page was captured, it showed 3 commits, 1.0k stars, 554 forks, and 2 watchers.
- Goodbye, Browser Extension Wallet Wars: EIP-6963 is Now Approved (medium.com)
EIP-6963, a proposal for discovering multiple injected browser extension wallets, has been finalized as a community-wide Ethereum standard, according to WalletConnect. The proposal replaces the single window.ethereum injection point, which caused conflicts when several extension wallets were installed, by creating a channel where wallets can expose their name, logo, UUID, and RDNS to apps. The article says 16 wallets and libraries tested it before approval, and it lists wallets that support or plan to support it, including MetaMask (October 12) and Coinbase Wallet (October 16).
- GitHub - vbuterin/blogmaker: Self-made software package I used to make my blog. (github.com)
This GitHub repository, vbuterin/blogmaker, is a self-made, ultra-simple self-hosted blog publishing tool that its author used for their own blog. Posts are written in markdown with filenames ending in ".md" and dates in yyyy/mm/dd format, and the publish.py script compiles them to HTML using pandoc. Running ./publish.py --sync uploads the site to a server configured in config.md, and rsync is required for this step. The readme suggests a simple server setup using any VPS with apache2 and the /var/www/html directory, and it credits hackmd.io for the CSS styles.
- Complex Systems Won’t Survive (palladiummag.com)
The article argues that America's complex systems are slowly collapsing because the promotion of diversity over competence has weakened institutions' ability to manage them. It traces the shift to civil rights-era laws, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which it says put meritocracy and protected-group diversity on a collision course. Employers then reportedly shifted from direct ability testing to degree requirements from selective universities, and diversity policies spread through firms via HR, Harvard Business Review and McKinsey's "best practices" lists. The author's conclusion is that selection for competence must return or America will face devolution and loss of geopolitical power.
- Community of the DAO (nature.com)
Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are presented as an alternative research funding model and a strong scientific community that readers should join. The article says DAOs use tokens for fundraising and voting, with the pooled treasury funding research chosen by token holders, and that successful projects can become IP-NFTs owned by the DAO. It names VitaDAO (longevity), ValleyDAO (synthetic biology and climate change), AthenaDAO (women's health) and HairDAO (hair loss treatments) as examples. The article also notes that DAOs are not yet self-sustaining and need more token members.
- Saying No (avc.com)
The author, a venture capitalist, argues that saying no to founders should be done honestly and with explanation rather than with vague excuses. He says he replies to most investment pitches with a no, often in one or two lines such as "it doesn't fit our investment strategy," though he admits these reasons are barely useful. He describes an old friend in the business who spent ten minutes explaining why his firm declined a deal, which he found very helpful. The author says the truth, even when it concerns the founder's ability to run the company, is the best approach, since vague replies like "my partners weren't into it" are worse.
- Ethereum and Solana are like Android and iOS (placeholder.vc)
Ethereum and Solana are compared to Android and iOS: Ethereum resembles Android in becoming a platform for third-party networks, while Solana resembles iOS in its tightly integrated, high-performance design. The article notes that Android runs on devices from hundreds of manufacturers, with Google making only 1-2% of them, and holds an estimated 60-75% market share, while Apple has about a third of the market but captures ~60% of mobile spend. It states that layer-2 networks already process ~5-6x more transactions than Ethereum mainnet, but that fragmentation burdens developers and users. The article concludes that the two platforms embody competing tradeoffs and that the status quo may not last.
- .eth website search engine (searchd.eth.limo)
- Can Your Artist Name Influence Your Sales? (kaloh.xyz)
Kaloh's newsletter analyzes whether artists' names relate to their sales, using one year of top-seller data (October 2022 to October 2023) from five blockchain art platforms: Art Blocks, fxhash, Super Rare, Foundation and verse. Full names dominate overall, with 62.7% of the best-selling artists using one, 31.4% using an alias and 5.9% using a short name. Among the top 10 on Art Blocks, nine use full-name structures, and Snowfro's Chromie Squiggles secondary volume (about $24.2M) exceeds the combined top-10 volume of the other four platforms (about $17.2M). Kaloh states it is doubtful the aliases significantly influenced market success, and that art is the most critical factor.
- Happiness is a Bubble (wysr.xyz)
The essay argues that happiness, like a bubble, is ethereal and fleeting, and that meaning is intertwined with it but harder to find after a period of direct danger. The author, who served as an Infantry Officer in the U.S. Army and deployed to Afghanistan and Kuwait in 2016-2017, says that wartime stakes gave a clear sense of good and bad that everyday life no longer provides. Now, meaning must be actively sought, explained and built, and the author describes this as both a relief and a harder responsibility. The essay ends by describing bubbles as forming quickly and unexpectedly from stillness, a substance and a breath.
- The Global Housing Squeeze: A Generational Wealth Apocalypse (joanwestenberg.medium.com)
The article argues that housing unaffordability is a generational and global crisis that technology alone cannot solve, since it stems from wage stagnation, inequality and speculative investment that require policy responses. It cites a claim that over 1.6 billion people worldwide will face inadequate housing by 2025, and that at least 150 million face outright homelessness. Individuals interviewed, including Melbourne designer Sara and Austin resident Michael, describe owning a home as no longer a guarantee for their generation. The piece also points to the U.N.'s warning that financialisation of housing markets contributes to inequality and exclusion, and it describes startups such as Loftium, Domuso and Ori as band-aids rather than solutions.
- This guy is building the best NFT photo collection of all time (youtube.com)
- Evolutionary Game Theory (plato.stanford.edu)
Evolutionary game theory began as an application of game theory to biology and has since drawn increasing interest from economists, sociologists, anthropologists and philosophers. The article says social scientists are drawn to it for three reasons: its "evolution" can mean cultural change in beliefs and norms, its rationality assumptions suit social systems better than traditional game theory does, and it is an explicitly dynamic theory. Ronald Fisher first developed its core ideas to explain equal sex ratios in mammals, and Maynard Smith and Price's 1973 work popularized the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS). The article notes that Nash equilibria can fail to capture evolutionary stability, illustrated by the Hawk-Dove game, whose mixed equilibrium plays Hawk with probability V/C.
- Manufacturing Consensus (drydenbrown.posthaven.com)
- A Categorization of DAOs: The Case of the Aragon Platform (ieeexplore.ieee.org)
- Prospectus On Próspera (astralcodexten.com)
Próspera is a private charter city project in Honduras, and the article examines how it is structured and whether the model could work. The Honduran Congress passed a ZEDE law in 2013 that the Supreme Court had earlier struck down, and Próspera became the first ZEDE, a 58-acre tract on the island of Roatan. The author describes Próspera as a platform for a network of hubs, with a planned hub near La Ceiba, and says that in practice it currently consists of a tract of land with about three buildings.