Top crypto stories of week 51, 2023
Mon 18 to Sun 24 December 2023
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 18 to Sun 24 December 2023, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total. Most-shared sources: twitter.com, polynya.mirror.xyz.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Mirror’s Protocol Rewards (support.mirror.xyz)
- Farcaster Delegator (github.com)
The FarcasterDelegator repository provides an abstract contract that owns a Farcaster id (fid) and delegates casting and admin authority over it to other actors. Its HatsFarcasterDelegator implementation, powered by Hats Protocol, grants authorities to the wearers of two hats set at deployment: the ownerHat, which authorizes all functions, and the casterHat, which authorizes adding a key to the fid so the wearer can publish casts. The docs say they are currently aimed at smart contract and Farcaster client developers, with end-user docs to follow once at least one Farcaster client supports the contracts.
- What I wish someone had told me (blog.samaltman.com)
- A techno-pessimist manifesto (graymirror.substack.com)
Techno-optimism is framed as a treatable condition, and technological progress is presented as insufficient to secure social order. Johannesburg and Kinshasa are described as having the same technology as Palo Alto and Berkeley, yet depending on resources they cannot produce, which the text calls a very fragile system. Quoting Marc Andreessen's techno-optimist manifesto, the text contrasts his rising curve of technology with a falling curve of human spirit, or thymos, which it links to a decline in order.
- Farcaster Wrapped 2023 (farcaster.review)
- You no longer need to bridge across chains to mint what you love on Zora (twitter.com)
- Jeff Bezos on morning routine and „wandering“ (youtube.com)
- HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (blog.neocities.org)
Neocities has partnered with Protocol Labs to become the first major site to implement IPFS in production, making all Neocities sites available for viewing, archiving and hosting by any IPFS node. The article argues that HTTP is flawed and that IPFS, which locates content by cryptographic hash rather than by server location, should replace it. Cited problems include dead links when centrally run servers shut down, such as the 404 errors that result, and the cost and fragility of serving heavy traffic from central datacenters.
- ARWEAVE IRYS DRAMA (twitter.com)
The article, a post praising the Arweave ecosystem and criticizing Irys, claims that Irys is considering forking Arweave while dropping the existing dataset and resetting the token supply, which it calls a greed-motivated move that undermines permanent storage. It says Irys told the author it did not want to support existing data or "give tokens to a bunch of" people, and it argues that Arweave's evolutionary protocol guidelines allow forks that carry forward the dataset and token supply. In response, the post says @ar_io_network will remove Irys bundlers from the trusted set on main Arweave gateways, delaying Irys data availability by roughly 20 minutes to an hour, and it recommends switching to the free bundler at up.arweave.net.
- Address Poisoning Scam: What You Need to Know and How to Protect Yourself (safe.mirror.xyz)
- A brief data availability and retrievability FAQ (hackmd.io)
- A brief history of crypto (polynya.mirror.xyz)
- Refactoring is about features (codesimplicity.com)
Refactoring should always be done in service of a product feature, not for its own sake, according to the article's author, who signs off as Max. Refactoring for its own sake, such as reorganizing unrelated code the author calls "watering the lawn when your house is on fire," gives refactoring a bad name and wastes effort. The article recommends refactoring code right before adding a feature to it, such as splitting a 1000-line function before adding employee sorting by hire date, so that the codebase improves over time. The author also states that this approach usually takes the same or less total time, and reports that his team finished projects faster than teams on newer codebases.
- Why You Should Build in Deep Tech (every.to)
Venture capitalist Leo Polovets argues that deep tech is currently the best sector to invest in and build companies in, citing PitchBook data that he says contradicts three common misconceptions. He says deep tech companies are not more capital intensive than traditional tech, with the median company that exited above $250 million having raised 11-15% of its exit size in prior funding. He also reports that deep tech and life science companies exit 10-25% faster than traditional counterparts, and that defense, space tech and life science companies have 2-5% odds of a $250 million-plus exit, compared with 1-1.5% for SaaS, fintech and AI/ML.
- Who will be named in Epstein documents? (polymarket.com)
- I don’t get blind signatures (reddit.com)
- More like dumb contracts (polynya.mirror.xyz)
- Introducing Protocol Rewards on Sound.xyz (sound.mirror.xyz)
- The Memecoin Grift and How It Threatens Ethereum Culture (coindesk.com)
- Adobe gives up on $20 billion acquisition of Figma (arstechnica.com)
Adobe has abandoned its roughly $20 billion acquisition of Figma, after the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) raised concerns about the deal. The deal, announced in September 2022, would have valued Figma at roughly 50 times its annual recurring revenue. The CMA's November proposed remedies included either prohibiting the deal or requiring divestment of overlapping operations such as Adobe's Photoshop or Illustrator, or Figma's core product, Figma Design. Figma chief executive Dylan Field said he was "disappointed in the outcome," while Adobe and Figma said the CMA's provisional findings contained "serious errors of law and fact."