Top crypto stories of week 49, 2023
Mon 4 to Sun 10 December 2023
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 4 to Sun 10 December 2023, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total. Most-shared sources: twitter.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Why should you vote on Kiwi in RetroPGF3? (twitter.com)
- Channel.fun - Early Access: A SocialFi app for unique, gated online communities. (channels.fun)
- Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive (signal.org)
Signal argues that it needs substantial funding to operate as a privacy-focused nonprofit, and it estimates that it will require approximately $50 million a year by 2025. Its current infrastructure costs are about $14 million a year as of November 2023, including $1.3 million for storage and $6 million for registration fees. Signal says it avoids monetizing surveillance and relies instead on donations, including an initial loan from Brian Acton, with a goal of being funded mainly by small donors.
- The Road to Mass Adoption Starts With the Wallet (medium.com)
The article is a transcribed keynote from the Autonomous Arcade & Mass Adoption event at DevConnect Istanbul 2023, and its central argument is that wallets should become personal, adaptable tools rather than mainly money displays, which would help onboard the next billion users. The speaker says most wallets focus on financial assets, while wallets also represent identity, memberships and personal interests, as shown by a photo of a person's wallet contents. Citing GeoCities, MySpace, Instagram and the game Draw Something, the speaker argues that every wave of the internet was fueled by personalization. The talk also points to MetaMask Snaps, launched September 12, as work in this direction.
- Grammar Ramsay - A GPT that fixes your grammar like Gordon Ramsay (chat.openai.com)
- Safe launches account recovery (twitter.com)
- Kiwi still needs 8 more votes in OP‘s retro PGF until Dec 6!! Please help! (growthepie.xyz)
- Introducing Gemini: Google’s largest and most capable AI model (blog.google)
Google announced Gemini 1.0, which it describes as its most capable and general AI model yet, optimized in three sizes: Ultra, Pro and Nano. Demis Hassabis, CEO and Co-Founder of Google DeepMind, wrote that Gemini was built from the ground up to be multimodal, understanding text, code, audio, image and video. The article states that Gemini Ultra exceeds state-of-the-art results on 30 of 32 widely used academic benchmarks, and that it scored 90.0% on MMLU, making it the first model to outperform human experts on that test. The company also says it trained Gemini on its Cloud TPU v4 and v5e chips and announced the Cloud TPU v5p system.
- What If Someone Steals GPT-4? (youtu.be)
- What is next for the moviegoing experience? (netspherepop.substack.com)
Writer-level essay central claim: VR, especially with devices like Apple Vision Pro, could become the real competitor for cinemas, while traditional cinemas may survive by shifting toward curated, arthouse and communal experiences. The article says VR could offer a more personal, less distracting and less physically tiring viewing setting, though VR has not yet become mainstream. It cites the Dutch Cineville card, which costs 22.50 Euro for unlimited access to 55 cinemas across the Netherlands, as an example of a model that benefits avid moviegoers. It also suggests the cinema's value lies in its ritual, such as Kino Rotterdam's restaurant and late screenings, and that a multiplex decline may be offset by growth in niche venues.
- State of crypto 2023: Spotlight on crypto policy - A16Z report (a16zcrypto.com)
a16z presents a spotlight report arguing that blockchains offer a credible alternative to current internet control and that U.S. policymakers need clear, practical crypto rules to foster innovation and maintain global leadership. The report, building on its annual State of Crypto Report, says the internet is failing consumers, creators, developers and small businesses because a handful of large platforms control decisions and data, change rules suddenly, and extract high fees. It notes that one in five U.S. adults have purchased crypto, yet critical regulatory guidance has been lacking, and it offers guiding principles for protecting consumers, providing a path to compliance and ensuring innovation.
- Send your name to Jupiter's moon Europa, engraved on NASA's microchip (europa.nasa.gov)
NASA's Message in a Bottle campaign collected names from more than 2.6 million people to be etched on a microchip riding on the Europa Clipper spacecraft. The spacecraft, which launched on Oct. 14, 2024, is traveling 1.8 billion miles to explore Jupiter's moon Europa, considered one of the most promising currently habitable environments in the solar system. The microchip is attached to a metal plate engraved with "In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa," written by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. Technicians at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory used an electron beam to stencil the names onto the chip.
- Zero-Knowledge Proofs in Plain English (mirror.xyz)
- OP Retro PGF list of Farcaster projects that still need to reach quorum (vote.optimism.io)
- The Friendship That Made Google Huge (newyorker.com)
In March 2000, Google's core indexing systems had stalled for months, leaving search results five months out of date while the company negotiated a Yahoo deal that depended on a much larger index. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat found the cause in binary data: memory chips in Google's cheap, mass-produced machines were corrupting bits, and the engineers wrote code to compensate for the failing hardware. The article credits their later work, including storing the index in random-access memory and developing new encoding and compression schemes, with reshaping Google's economics and capacity, and it says the two are Google Senior Fellows, the company's first and only Level 11s.
- Optimism Retroactive Public Goods Funding — My Voting Framework (nickbtts.medium.com)
The author, a Citizen's House Badgeholder for Optimism's Retroactive Public Goods Funding season, describes the framework they used to allocate about 30 million OP across 642 projects. They say Lists were open to self-dealing and collusion, so every project was assessed individually and scored out of 10 across Technical Impact, non-Technical Impact, User Experience and Dev Experience. Multipliers and caps then adjust the scores, including a 4.00 multiplier for Superchain work, a 3.00 multiplier for OP Stack contributions, and a 0.1 multiplier for VC-funded projects. The assessment took well over 100 hours, done with fellow badgeholder Zoomer, and a post-mortem is promised after the ballot is submitted.
- Digital Veblen Goods (twitter.com)
- Google Gemini demo highlights (twitter.com)
- OpenZeppelin Wizard AI assistant (twitter.com)
- An open repository of EVM-compatible wallets (walletbeat.fyi)
Walletbeat is an open repository that benchmarks feature availability across popular EVM-compatible wallets, built as a minimum viable product to encourage transparent comparison. It covers a small sample of features across categories such as ENS support, backup, security, connections, devices, account type, licensing and testnet compatibility, and the project states that its data may contain inaccuracies. The site says a high score means more available features, not necessarily better performance. The project was instigated by Fluidkey and invites contributions through pull requests on its GitHub repository.