Top crypto stories of week 46, 2023
Mon 13 to Sun 19 November 2023
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 13 to Sun 19 November 2023, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total. Most-shared sources: lisnewsletter.com, chat.openai.com, medium.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Bank of JubJub: token wrapper for private balances, using zkSNARKs and HE (bankofjubjub.com)
- Love vs. fame products: A framework for social applications; by Li from Variant (lisnewsletter.com)
Li argues that social apps should be classified along a spectrum from love (deepening connections with people you know) to fame (discovering creators and building reach), and that this split explains why mature networks like Instagram and X have shifted toward fame. Li says the ad-based business model rewards maximizing user attention, while love products tend to rely on subscriptions, and that X's 2023 redesign, which underweights the follower graph and gives Premium subscribers a ranking boost, marks a move from a love platform to a fame one. Li presents crypto as a way for smaller, love-based communities to fund themselves, citing Nouns DAO and FWB shared treasuries and Facebook's dropped group membership-fee pilot.
- KiwiGPT: GPT trained on Kiwi News codebase (chat.openai.com)
- Onvote: Reimagine Web3 governance w/ anonymous voting, multichain support & more (mirror.xyz)
- OpenAI announces leadership transition (openai.com)
OpenAI's board announced that CEO Sam Altman will depart as CEO and leave the board, with chief technology officer Mira Murati serving as interim CEO effective immediately while a search for a permanent successor begins. The board said Altman was not consistently candid in his communications with it, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities, and that it no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading the company. Greg Brockman will step down as board chairman but remain at the company, reporting to the CEO.
- Kiwi Meetup @ Devconnect (lu.ma)
- “How to craft an art tribe with open source DNA?” (medium.com)
The author, an artist, argues that the art world could build a collective dynamic comparable to open source software, and invites debate on how to do so. They describe a Glitch residency at a castle, organized by Primavera De Filippi, which brought together developers, engineers, artists and thinkers without guidelines or hierarchy. The text also contrasts the fragile economics of contemporary art with web3 and NFT culture, and notes that Nicolas Bourriaud observed art increasingly emerging from a program rather than a physical impression.
- Reputation isn’t as powerful as you imagine (longform.asmartbear.com)
Jason Cohen argues that his blog's reputation was a real but limited advantage when launching WPEngine, a WordPress hosting company. His announcement drew only two signups despite about 18,000 subscribers and traffic from Twitter and HackerNews, and the company had 50 paying customers before the post went live. The blog did help him recruit Aaron Brazell, a WordPress core contributor, who joined because the blog revealed Cohen's attitude, perspective and credentials.
- Sam back as CEO of OpenAI? (prediction market) (polymarket.com)
- Superchain explainer (stack.optimism.io)
The OP Stack is an open-source, standardized framework for building Ethereum Layer 2 rollups, and it powers Optimism's OP Mainnet along with many other production chains. Each chain built on it executes transactions on its own network and publishes their data to a parent chain, usually Ethereum, so anyone can rebuild the chain's history from that data. The text lists EVM equivalence, lower costs than Ethereum because only compressed data reaches L1, fast block confirmations backed by Ethereum finality, and modularity as the properties this design provides.
- Reaching truths (gillesdc.com)
The author proposes that truth is bound to context, but some truths have greater reach because they hold across more contexts, and that this framing reconciles objective and subjective views of truth. The essay argues that postmodernism rightly notes all knowledge is mediated by symbols and perspective, but wrongly concludes that no context can be more true than another, since that claim is itself an objective assertion. Citing Alfred Korzybski, Lee Smolin and Kurt Gödel, it holds that every model, including mathematics and physics, is incomplete, so truth is best approximated by combining many models and weighing them by probability.
- Istanbul Diary (studio.ribbonfarm.com)
Venkatesh Rao reflects on attending Devconnect in Istanbul, describing the city as feeling historically complete, like a living museum, while the Ethereum event feels unfinished by comparison. He writes that Istanbul seems to have settled into a "end-of-history phase," with its historical fault lines dormant, even though the city still has live conflicts, including Turkey's disputes with Greece and debate over the future of the Bosphorus. He describes Devconnect as a popup city of mini-conferences, where he hosted a session on his Summer of Protocols work and spoke at Autonomous Worlds and Censorship.wtf events. He says that in technological time the event belongs in 2050, though in historical terms it might belong in classical antiquity.
- Exit games for EVM validiums: the return of Plasma (vitalik.eth.limo)
Vitalik Buterin's post argues that Plasma-style designs, which were largely superseded by rollups, can be revived for EVM chains using validity proofs, though the security guarantees would not cover all users. Validity proofs would let the operator's invalid-block attacks be removed, leaving only unavailable blocks as a concern, and they would reduce the state a user must download from one branch per block in the last week to one branch per asset. The post also proposes a parallel UTXO graph for ETH and ERC20 tokens, with validity proofs showing equivalence to the EVM state, so that withdrawals from the most recent state could be instant in the normal case. It notes that objects without a clear owner, such as a CDP with 1 ETH locked against 1000 DAI of debt, remain where exit games break down.
- Progressive Ownership: A Model for Application Tokens (lisnewsletter.com)
Li Jin and Jesse Walden argue that token distribution for applications should move from opt-out airdrops to an opt-in model they call "progressive ownership," in which users earn revenue share income and can choose to convert it into tokens representing a proportional share of community revenue. They say earlier token eras, including proof of work, ICOs and airdrops, drew speculators and mercenary users before product-market fit was established. Their model applies only to projects with early product-market fit and revenue to share, and cites Optimism's roughly $30 million in year-to-date revenue, MakerDAO's $16 million in October fees, and ENS's $1.1 million in the past month as examples.
- We Love the Art - onchain art contest with 1,000,000 OP prize pool (welovetheart.optimism.io)
- From Net Art to Blockchain Art ft. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy (kaloh.xyz)
Media artists Jennifer and Kevin McCoy discuss their careers in a podcast conversation, covering topics from early net and video art to blockchain art. Kevin created Quantum in 2014, described as the first digital object to capture ownership and provenance before NFTs, and it was later auctioned at Sotheby's for over $1.4M. The discussion also covers the McCoys' first gallery interactions through Postmasters, their teaching at Brooklyn College and NYU, and an eco-friendly approach to reducing crypto's environmental impact.
- BlockGPT for analyzing onchain activity (chat.openai.com)
- A Prayer for a Different Time : Meditation for C. E. R. N. - An Arab and a Jew.. (medium.com)
This piece is a prose poem or meditation presenting Isaac and Ishmael, figures from the Abrahamic tradition often associated with Jews and Arabs, as comrades who reject the enmity of their history and call for a truce. It describes their shared bond to the land as a primal connection rather than a product of formal peace talks. The text envisions the land of their fathers and mothers becoming a sanctuary for all, and it frames their message as resonating through the dissonance of their shared experiences rather than neat rhymes.
- Floor796 - animation with many references to movies, games, anime and memes. (floor796.com)
- POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (orwellfoundation.com)
George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" argues that the decline of English is reversible and that avoiding bad habits of writing can help people think more clearly, which is a necessary first step toward political regeneration. He holds that the decline has political and economic causes, but that bad language also reinforces those causes. The essay identifies staleness of imagery and lack of precision as common faults in modern English prose, especially political writing. It then lists habits such as dying metaphors, verbal "operators" like "render inoperative," and pretentious diction, and it cites five sample passages from writers including Harold Laski and Lancelot Hogben as examples.