Top crypto stories of week 3, 2024
Mon 15 to Sun 21 January 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 15 to Sun 21 January 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total. Most-shared sources: twitter.com, medium.com, mirror.xyz.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Crypto's Three Body Problem (otherinter.net)
Crypto protocols resist censorship and also resist the law, which leaves their governance to three forces (software architecture, markets, and social norms) that act without a unifying arbiter. The article argues this creates what it calls crypto's "three-body regulatory problem," where protocol designers' intentions can be undermined and governance policies can contradict one another. It cites Lessig's 1998 model of four regulatory forces (law, markets, norms and architecture) as the framework for this claim. It also points to the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, where the state can guarantee deposits, while a hacked protocol leaves users losing their money unless an overwhelming majority forks to restore funds.
- Variant Fund's Requests for Startups: Crypto Projects We’d Like to See in 2024 (variant.fund)
Variant Fund published its 2024 requests for startups, listing crypto project areas it would like to fund, including payments infrastructure, institutional-grade DeFi, information markets, and onchain reputation systems. The fund's partners and data scientists describe each area, such as Alana Levin's proposal for issuing verifiable subdomains from trusted parties, which could help prove charity legitimacy given that the FTC estimates hundreds of millions are lost in charity fraud each year. Mason Nystrom proposes marketplaces for crypto AI agents, and Derek Walkush points to Uniswap V4 hooks as a new frontier of DeFi mechanism design.
- ETHBerlin<<04<<<<Identity<<Crisis<< (ethberlin.org)
The ETHBerlin04 hackathon invites participants to build "anti-identity" features that protect privacy, arguing that blockchain ecosystems have lost shared values and are reinforcing the failures they were meant to fix. The text says the blockchain space faces a multi-dimensional identity crisis, and it questions whether personhood verification, KYC and AML are necessary or unacceptable. It quotes Vitalik Buterin saying a world without proof-of-personhood seems more likely to be dominated by centralized identity solutions, money or small closed communities. The event, held May 24-26, 2024 in Kreuzberg, Berlin, asks hackers to focus on attributes such as private, independent and libre.
- Game Theory and Consumer Crypto (medium.com)
The author argues that web3 should be judged by its game-theoretic incentive design rather than by ownership features alone, and that consumer apps like Tinder could be redesigned around incentives. Using game theory, the author describes Tinder as a game where both sides picking "spam right swipes" leads to poor outcomes, with men's match rates reported below 1%. The author also says Bitcoin's reward halving every four years was designed through game-theoretic reasoning, and that Wikipedia shows a socially good product can succeed without maximizing revenue.
- Are You Punk Yet? Punk Cultures in the Crypto World 🔒🌞🌕🌏✨+Σ (mirror.xyz)
- What builders can learn from RetroPGF3: separating the signal from the noise (mirror.xyz)
- Shutting down Artifact (medium.com)
Artifact, the news reading app, is being wound down, according to a letter from CEO Kevin Systrom. The company says it concluded the market opportunity is not big enough to justify continued investment, and it has removed the ability to add new comments and posts because that content requires moderation the team will no longer have staff to provide. Core news reading will keep running through the end of February, and existing posts will remain visible to users on their own profiles. Systrom says the team of 8 built a product a core group of users loved, and that the app was named the everyday essential app of the year by the Google Play Store.
- Direct-to-Contract: A New Thesis for Network Incentives (twitter.com)
- Vitalik's take on the Network State (vitalik.eth.limo)
Balaji Srinivasan released the first version of his book on "network states" on July 4, 2022, describing communities that start as online clubs, build a physical presence, and may eventually seek political autonomy or diplomatic recognition. The article's author, Vitalik Buterin, frames network states as an ideological successor to libertarianism that departs from The Sovereign Individual by centering moral and community ties rather than individualism and money. The article explores Balaji's examples, such as a health-focused "Keto Kosher" society and a medical sovereignty zone free of FDA rules, and notes that Balaji's book blends the network state concept with a broader megapolitical theory.
- Web3Inbox by WalletConnect (twitter.com)
- Farcaster Arbitrage (onchainletters.xyz)
- Productivity Toolbox - apps & extensions to make your work more efficient (dataglitch.frotograf.com)
This is a personal list of apps and browser extensions the author uses for research, writing, and media consumption, organized by theme and by specific use case. The list is macOS, iOS and iPadOS oriented, which the author says reflects their view that the Mac ecosystem is better suited to productivity tools. Several apps are marked as included in the Setapp suite, and many links include referral codes. The list is updated as new tools are added, with the current update dated 22 February 2026.
- Injunction against Apple’s anti-steering rule stands following SCOTUS decision (techcrunch.com)
The US Supreme Court declined to hear appeals from both Apple and Epic Games, leaving in place a lower court injunction against Apple's anti-steering rule. The injunction lets app developers include buttons, external links and other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms outside the App Store, in addition to in-app purchases. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney called the outcome a "sad outcome for all developers," while Rick VanMeter, executive director of the Coalition for App Fairness, said the policy is illegal and anti-competitive. The Ninth Circuit had earlier ruled in Apple's favor on most claims in April 2023.
- e-beggar check 🥺 (tnx @sui follow fc /e-beggar) (files.catbox.moe)
- Luxury Beliefs are status symbols (robkhenderson.com)
Luxury beliefs, meaning ideas that confer status on the affluent while often imposing costs on lower classes, have largely replaced luxury goods as status symbols, according to the author's argument. The argument draws on Thorstein Veblen, Pierre Bourdieu and Amotz Zahavi, who all describe costly displays that signal distinction. A YouGov survey is cited as finding that Americans in the highest income category were by far the most supportive of defunding the police. A 2019 study led by Joseph Daniels at Marquette University is cited as finding that higher-income individuals were most likely to attribute success to luck and connections rather than hard work.
- Reddit seeks to launch IPO in March (reuters.com)
- Sarastro's Aria (july.rocks)
This personal essay argues that Sarastro's Aria from Mozart's 1791 opera The Magic Flute works as a blessing and encouragement to keep pushing toward enlightenment and creation despite the risk of failure. The author places the opera in its historical context, noting the Reformation starting in 1517, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution beginning in 1789, and Mozart's financial strain in 1790. The essay describes the story's shift from a rescue mission to a quest for truth, in which Sarastro is wise rather than villainous, and it connects that shift to the author's sense of being stuck in the present day.
- USPS story: the $500M typo in 2003 and how it happened (cockroachlabs.com)
A JCL operator who keyed in 2003 instead of 2004 during a USPS payroll update caused about $500 million in overpayments to 150,000 employees, according to Jeff White, a one-time senior manager of database operations. The mainframe's pre-flight report ran to about 5,000 pages, but federal offices closed for Ronald Reagan's death, so no one in finance reviewed it before the payroll ran. When the executive in charge of accounting spotted the problem on Saturday morning, about two-thirds of the payroll had already been paid. Recovering the money took four or five months, because the government could recoup only 16.67% of an overpayment per pay period.
- Against Learning From Dramatic Events (open.substack.com)
The essay argues that dramatic events such as a lab-leak pandemic, the 9/11 attacks, mass shootings and misconduct scandals should usually change a reader's beliefs very little, because each is one more data point against a prior that already allowed for it. It gives a worked example: starting from a 20% per-decade chance of a lab-leak pandemic, proof of a lab leak would move the author to 27.5%, while proof against it would leave the estimate at about 19-20%. The author also says that a mass shooting by a far-left transgender person fit a distribution that included such events "once every few years," and that sexual harassment in a community of 10,000 people, estimated at 10%, would be expected to yield about 1,000 harassers.
- dYdX just topped Uniswap as the biggest decentralized exchange by volume. (twitter.com)