Top crypto stories of week 42, 2023
Mon 16 to Sun 22 October 2023
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 16 to Sun 22 October 2023, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total. Most-shared sources: twitter.com, techcrunch.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Reddit is killing erc20 community points (techcrunch.com)
Reddit is winding down Community Points, its blockchain-based "internet points" program, with the points to be phased out by early November. Rathschmidt, the company's director of consumer and product communications, told TechCrunch that the resourcing needed was too high to justify and that the regulatory environment had added to that effort. The points were first launched in 2020 and were moved from Ethereum to Arbitrum Nova in 2022. Reddit says it is prioritizing programs that are more set up to scale, such as the Contributor Program and subreddit karma.
- The Techno-Optimist Manifesto (a16z.com)
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto argues that technology and free markets are the main sources of human progress, and that people should embrace technology rather than fear it. It states that economic growth comes from population growth, natural resource use and technology, and that technology is the only perpetual source. It cites William Nordhaus's finding that creators capture only about 2% of the value their technology creates, and says that markets lift people out of poverty. It also claims that as of 2019, before the COVID disruption, jobs, wages and material living standards were at their highest levels in history.
- Launchcaster is one year old (launchcaster.xyz)
- How might we scale Gitcoin's Impact from $50mm GMV to $500m GMV? (gov.gitcoin.co)
The author proposes ways Gitcoin could grow its Gross Marketplace Value tenfold, from about $50 million to $500 million, and says the bulk of the post covers approaches that scale super-linearly. Ideas named include modular "aqueducts" for recurring funding, grants and airdrops for every EVM ecosystem (estimated in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars yearly), and fiat ecosystem grants (estimated in the tens of billions yearly). The post also lists "economically exothermic" funding sources such as MEV and sequencer fees, and describes Passport as a possible billion-dollar opportunity.
- Peter Thiel - The Straussian Moment (hackmd.io)
Peter Thiel argues that the September 11 attacks show the need to reexamine modern political thought, which he says rests on economic models of human nature that leave out people motivated by glory, God or country. He contends that development-era wealth transfers did not contain violence, noting that bin Laden, an upper-middle-class Saudi with an inherited fortune estimated at $250 million, was not a poor man driven by poverty. He traces the modern abandonment of questions about human nature to the Enlightenment, and links it to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which followed the Thirty Years' War.
- Work Is Work (codahale.com)
- How VC and startups became a hollow scam (joanwestenberg.medium.com)
The article argues that startup culture and venture capital have shifted from building lasting companies around technological breakthroughs to chasing investor funding, quick exits and inflated valuations. It blames the change on a tech bull market beginning about fifteen years ago, which made capital abundant and left founders complacent, and says many VC investors now back replicated "for teams" startups and follow each other into rounds out of FOMO. It also says the end of zero-interest rates, the post-COVID tech market crash and costly proxy wars have left the VC and tech ecosystems short of cash and ideas.
- Seemore: Automagic Creator Pages (seemore.tv)
Seemore is a tool built by creator Cameron to automatically assemble a weekly email newsletter that sends a creator's best posts to their audience. Cameron says he built it because followers often missed his best posts and writing a newsletter by hand each week was overwhelming. The page shows sample weekly editions listing links to posts such as "Harvard Business School: A Veteran in Tech's Reflection" and "AI, Content, and Slanted Words." It says the creator only needs to approve each send, while the tool builds the newsletter and steps for connecting socials and confirming a send are listed.
- Forks are good (jacob.energy)
Nouns' built-in fork mechanism is presented as a breakthrough for DAO governance, letting any Noun holder exit into a new DAO with equitable treasury backing. The first Nouns fork was designed by the Verbs team and lets holders hand in a Noun for a forked version, with each Noun backed by about 36.6 ETH from a treasury of roughly 28,000 ETH. The Fork DAO received over 14,000 ETH, and forked Nouns keep the same public-domain art while the fork adds features like No Veto, no Nounders rewards and built-in Ragequit.
- Zero is the Future of Money (brettscott.substack.com)
Beyond both the standard monetary system and Bitcoin, a synthesis is needed, the text argues. It describes money as three layers: central banks and treasuries at the base, commercial banks issuing a much larger second layer, and payment players such as PayPal issuing a third. Money is created when issued and destroyed when redeemed, like a promise, which makes the system dynamic and, in the text's description, controlled by an oligopoly of players. The text cuts off before setting out the synthesis.
- The state of VC in 2023 (twitter.com)
- Limitations of using the phrase "quadratic voting" (github.com)
The author argues that Snapshot's "quadratic" vote type should not be called quadratic voting, since it is a tally method that takes the square root of each option's vote total, not the mechanism proposed by Weyl and Lalley in Radical Markets. Quadratic voting assumes each identity votes once with a fixed number of credits, while Snapshot cannot prevent Sybil identity fraud, so a token-weighted vote lets large ERC20 holders split their balances across many addresses. The author suggests renaming the vote type to something like "vote tally square root" to avoid confusion.
- Private companies can provide public goods (paragraph.xyz)
The article argues that private companies can provide public goods, including pure and hybrid ones, even though the economic definition of a pure public good is too narrow to guide funding decisions on its own. It cites Vitalik Buterin, who notes that real cases involve edge cases such as entrance fees or auctioned statues, and that most goods sit somewhere between pure and excludable. Examples offered include Google and Maxar Technologies providing satellite imagery, Google creating TensorFlow, Facebook creating Llama, Merkle Manufactory creating Farcaster, and Pfizer and Moderna investing billions of dollars in medical research.
- Thread summary of J.P. Morgan's article about Digital Identity (twitter.com)
- Why can't our tech billionaires learn anything new? (davekarpf.substack.com)
Writer Ted Gioia... no, I should not guess; the article doesn't name its author in the text provided, so I will not attribute it. The article argues that Marc Andreessen's "techno-optimist manifesto" is a repackaging of 1990s techno-optimism that thirty years of outcomes have discredited. It contends that Andreessen, a longtime Silicon Valley investor and Facebook board member, claims to be challenging the status quo while tech optimism has in fact been the dominant paradigm. The piece cites the widening wealth gap, unmet promises on environmental problems, and a16z's promotion of Web3 projects such as Bored Ape Yacht Club and Axie Infinity. It also argues that technology is shaped by public funding, institutions and incentives rather than being a single dial that can be simply accelerated.
- Deutsche Post sells postage stamps as NFTs (aroged.com)
- When was the last time Marc Andreessen talked to a poor person? (techcrunch.com)
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen's 5,000-word manifesto calling for "techno-optimism" is criticized in this article as unrealistic and blind to poverty and inequality. The author argues that Andreessen's wealth, largely tied to his firm's investments, biases his view that technology will solve all problems. The article also says his dismissal of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and of Universal Basic Income reflects a failure to understand the people tech affects, citing San Francisco's homelessness and the conditions of Instacart shoppers and Amazon warehouse workers.
- "...users of Unlonely should know how irresponsible the team is about funds" (twitter.com)
- Bitcoin is a disaster (metzdowd.com)
Ray Dillinger argues that Bitcoin is a failure and a disaster, having been reinvented into a debt-based system like the banks early adopters meant to escape. He says the public block chain allows analysis that undermines pseudonymity, and that the block chain's scarce space has led to features like the lightning network and fractional-reserve-style practices, with Mt.Gox cited as an example. He also argues that proof-of-work mining has become centralized through specialized ASIC hardware, concentrating activity in one country and making Bitcoin less scalable, ultimately resembling a credit card processor.
- Inside Andreessen's Techno-Optimism Manifesto: NPC Meme as Ideology (sceneswithsimon.com)
Commentators respond mostly critically to Marc Andreessen's techno-optimism manifesto. Noah Smith defends technological progress as a humanist commitment to giving people as much choice as possible, admitting this is a moral intuition rather than something provable with facts. Ed Zitron calls the essay an embarrassment, a vague libertarian complaint that makes no concrete suggestions. Steven Levy argues the manifesto justifies unchecked markets and inequality, and that its language about "captured people" suffering from ressentiment is dehumanising, which he calls the NPC meme as ideology.