Top crypto stories of week 50, 2023
Mon 11 to Sun 17 December 2023
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 11 to Sun 17 December 2023, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Ethereum whitepaper (ethereum.org)
The page presents the original Ethereum whitepaper, published in 2014 before Ethereum launched, and notes that it no longer fully reflects Ethereum today. Since then, Ethereum moved from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake in The Merge (2022), layer 2 scaling solutions emerged, and DeFi, NFTs and DAOs became major use cases. The paper proposes a blockchain with a built-in Turing-complete programming language for encoding arbitrary state transition functions as contracts, and it also covers Bitcoin's proof-of-work consensus.
- 10 lessons about community building from 7 months of running Kiwi (kanfa.macbudkowski.com)
The author argues that Kiwi News built a strong community by letting members co-create the product, not by promotion alone. The article says Kiwi has about 1,300 monthly readers and 200 curators after seven months, with curators' submissions shaping the feed and the community's quality directly influencing the product. It credits shared activities such as a leaderboard that rewards "kiwi karma," offline meetups at ETH conferences in Paris, Berlin, Warsaw and Istanbul, and a Retro PGF round where members voted using their karma.
- Bow down to our new music-tech overlords (waterandmusic.com)
Music-tech is at a boiling point, shaped by two patterns: the globalization and financialization of power in the music industry. Capital from China and Saudi Arabia now flows into major music companies, with Tencent Holdings owning equity stakes in Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Spotify and Epic Games, and Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund owning equity in Live Nation and Kakao Entertainment. Financialization reaches beyond catalog sales, as BMI's pending sale to New Mountain Capital would leave two performing rights organizations owned by private-equity firms.
- If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing (pluralistic.net)
Cory Doctorow argues that when companies can remotely and irreversibly downgrade products people have paid for, buying stops meaning ownership, and that the blame lies with the firms that design such features. He recalls telling Chris Anderson in 2004 that Wired should warn readers that DRM-encumbered device features could be revoked without notice, and he cites Adobe's loss of its Pantone deal in 2022, which turned colors in users' existing artwork black unless they paid a monthly fee. He also describes Warner removing TV shows that PlayStation owners had bought, with no refunds, after it ended its deal with Sony's store.
- Kiwi Karma is better than Rainbow Points or Warps (open.substack.com)
Kiwi Karma is argued to be more valuable than Warpcast Warps or Rainbow Points because it is computed from signed messages on a peer-to-peer network that anyone can verify. The writer says Kiwi News is built on a peer-to-peer protocol using set reconciliation, where a new link submission gives 1 Karma and each upvote gives 1 Karma. Each user's score is a view over these upvotes and links, so any node operator can reproduce the same score. The writer contrasts this with Warps and Points, which are integers in an SQL database.
- Awesome Web3: Curated list of Web3 resources, libraries, tools and more (awesome-web3.com)
This is a curated GitHub-style list of web3 resources spanning Solidity, Ethereum, Avalanche, thirdweb, Lens Protocol, Foundry, ZK, and other ecosystems, with sections covering libraries, developer tools, RPC and node providers, security references, grant programs, and job boards. Entries include development frameworks such as Foundry, described as a blazing fast, portable and modular toolkit for Ethereum application development written in Rust, and wallet connection libraries and SDKs for dapps. The list also covers protocols like Uniswap, Aave, The Graph and Arweave, each described in a single line.
- Degens Are Pioneers (medium.com)
Degens, meaning crypto speculators, are the early adopters who make new crypto products viable, and the author argues that VCs who deride them are being intellectually dishonest or unfounded. The text says speculators were the first users of DeFi protocols, Helium hotspots and NFTs, and that degen activity battle-tested blockchains, rollups, wallets and bridges, prompting the industry to build safer, cheaper systems. It also says stablecoins were bootstrapped by degens, with USDT first used for cross-exchange arbitrage and DAI for leveraged trading, and that speculation is not crypto's only use case, citing Chainalysis data ranking India, Nigeria and Vietnam as the top three countries by adoption.
- Crypto AI Agents: The First-Class Citizens of Onchain Economies (nystrom.substack.com)
Crypto AI agents are argued to be becoming the first-class citizens of onchain economies, building on bots that already take up much of blockchain activity. The article says building AI agents on crypto rails offers native payment access to capital, wallet-based asset ownership, and verifiable, deterministic actions. It names examples such as Dawn's DawnAI wallet agent, Parallel Alpha's Colony game, and Ritual's Frenrug agent, which operates inside Friend.tech and buys or sells keys based on user messages.
- Protocol Kit (summerofprotocols.com)
The Protocol Kit is a 3-ring binder of over 400 pages, mailed in six modules of about 80 pages over eight months, designed to support study, research, policy-making, scene-making and entrepreneurship around protocols. It includes printed research from the inaugural Summer of Protocols program plus supplementary materials and tools, and leaves room for users to add their own notes. Only 512 kits are available free to selected individuals and organizations, who are asked to explain their interest in a request form. The material will also be freely available on the website for anyone to print and assemble their own binder.
- Ledger Library Exploit Explainer for Average Folks (x.com)
A library maintained by Ledger and used by many dapps was compromised with a wallet drainer, and users are advised not to interact with dapp front ends for now. The post says visiting an affected website does not automatically drain funds, but transaction prompts from a browser wallet such as MM can give assets to malicious actors. It adds that Ledger is aware of the problem and working on it, and that even after the bad code is fixed, projects using the library will need to update before their dapps are safe to use again.
- I never use SSR, and you shouldn't either (blog.borodutch.com)
The author argues that developers should avoid server-side rendering (SSR) and host static sites for free, citing his own side projects that reportedly serve 80,000,000 users and handle 10,000,000 requests per minute without hosting costs. He says static sites can use built-in CDN delivery and DDoS protection on free GitHub and Cloudflare hosting, and recommends a frontend starter he says keeps bundles under 20kb, plus a $4/month DigitalOcean VPS with Easypanel for backends. He also contends that Google has run JavaScript for crawling since 2015, that Prerender can handle OpenGraph metadata, and that SSR is unscalable because platforms like Vercel can ban or go down under heavy traffic.
- Kiwi introduces tipping (paragraph.xyz)
Kiwi has launched tipping for all users, built with partner Dawn so that tips work with any wallet and take a few clicks to send. The team presents the feature as a way to add utility to Kiwipass NFTs, letting holders earn tips for submitting strong links, and as a way to reward curators with an onchain "Superlike" beyond upvotes and retweets. The article says that subsidizing posts with tokens has often failed, citing Jason Calacanis's Mahalo, which lost to Quora, while platforms like Buy me a coffee, Patreon, Substack and Twitch handle large volumes of user support. Dawn Pay picks the cheapest and fastest route for each tip, usually USDC on an L2 with ETH as a fallback, and tips can be tracked on a Dune dashboard.
- Rainbow wallet introduces Rainbow Points. (x.com)
- 🐙 Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy (octo-models.github.io)
Octo is an open-source, transformer-based diffusion policy for robotic manipulation, pretrained on 800k robot episodes from the Open X-Embodiment dataset and designed to be quickly finetuned to new robot setups. The project introduces two initial versions, Octo-Small (27M parameters) and Octo-Base (93M parameters). Out of the box, Octo outperforms RT-1-X when tasks are specified in natural language and performs similarly to the 55-billion-parameter RT-2-X. On the WidowX tasks, goal image conditioning achieved 25% higher performance on average. Across six finetuning evaluation setups, Octo outperforms the next best baseline by 52%, using about 100 target demonstrations per task.
- How to Run a Shadow Library (annas-blog.org)
- Partial outage on Arbitrum (blockworks.co)
- ERC-7571: Shadow events (github.com)
ERC-7571 is a draft Ethereum standard proposing "shadow events," which are events generated offchain in a shadow fork of an Ethereum-compatible execution client rather than logged onchain on mainnet. The proposal says shadow forks bypass gas and contract size restrictions for transactions that succeed on mainnet, so richer event data can be emitted without gas costs for mainnet users. Shadow events would be accessed through the standard eth_getLogs JSON RPC interface, and a proposed shadow_getAddresses endpoint would list shadowed contract addresses. The draft cites over 330K ETH spent on event gas fees by users, with about 21K ETH spent in a single high-activity month.
- Crypto's billionaire hunting in the UAE (bloomberg.com)
- The 2024 State of Digital Nomads (nomadlist.com)
Nomads.com's 2026 report profiles the average digital nomad as a 37-year-old single man who works as a software developer from a home office, based on data from its paid membership community. Among members, the median income is $85,000 a year, 58% work from a home office, and men make up 83% of those with a known gender. Nomads average 1,310 kg of CO₂ per year, which the report says is 72% less than an average American's travel and commuting, and 48% stay in one city for under seven days. The report notes its paid membership excludes non-paying people, so results are only indicative.
- How to Boss without being Bossy (jeffwofford.com)
Leaders can give directions that are clear without seeming bossy, and the choice of words largely determines the effect. Asked to take out the trash, each command form is rated for clarity and harshness on a five-star scale. "I need you to take out the trash" is described as forceful yet not especially harsh, rated five stars for clarity and three for harshness. Adding "please" makes a request clearer and more polite when the listener truly has a choice, while "you'd better" is called almost never a good move because its threat weakens relationships and authority.