Top crypto stories of week 7, 2024
Mon 12 to Sun 18 February 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 12 to Sun 18 February 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 48 comments in total. Most-shared sources: paragraph.xyz, github.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- The Tyranny of the Marginal User (open.substack.com)
The essay argues that popular consumer software keeps getting worse because companies optimize for the "marginal user," the least engaged person whose daily use drives growth metrics like Daily Active Users, rather than for the existing users who value the product most. The author, who says they spent six years at Google, calls this force the Tyranny of the Marginal User and says they do not yet know how to fight it. The author cites OKCupid, which once used detailed questionnaires and match scores of 0 to 100% but now resembles Tinder's swipe format, and says Reddit and Craigslist remain useful because their software has stayed largely unchanged.
- Betting on Farcaster (haardik.dev)
The author argues that Farcaster, a decentralized social network built on Ethereum, is worth betting on, and the writer describes personally becoming invested in it as a user and builder. Joining in January 2023, the writer found an early builder community and became more active after winning a Purple DAO NFT in late 2023 and building Teleport, a Farcaster Hub in Rust. The writer says Farcaster launched Frames on 26 January 2024, which drew many new builders and users, and that the writer's company LearnWeb3 has committed to deeper Farcaster integration.
- Farcaster's Locust Plague (telegra.ph)
Tim Daub argues that Farcaster's surge in daily active users, driven by a wave of airdrop farmers he calls "the Locust Plague," is likely to fade and that the platform will need a period of consolidation before retail users arrive. He cites Dune Analytics charts, curated by Pixel, showing new onboarding peaking on February 5, and notes that high churn after a user's first few days or weeks could push daily active users back toward a mean. He says the hype came from new features and the DEGEN memecoin launch, and that Farcaster onboarded much of the Ethereum-aligned crypto space, with Dan promoting the app on Bankless as a Reddit alternative for people with deep interests.
- Farcaster.vote: a Frame for decentralized verifiable polls (blog.vocdoni.io)
- Jan runs an open source GPT alternative on your machine (jan.ai)
Jan is an open source AI application that runs models on a user's own machine and can also connect to online models. The project says it has more than 6 million downloads, and its page lists open models alongside online services from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral AI, Alibaba, DeepSeek, and Moonshot AI. A memory feature, labeled as coming soon, is described as carrying a user's context and preferences across conversations so they do not have to repeat themselves.
- Thoughts: on Farcaster growth, innovation, speculation — Albiverse (mirror.xyz)
- The Californian Ideology (metamute.org)
- Sam Altman wants $7 Trillion (astralcodexten.com)
Sam Altman reportedly wants $7 trillion to scale up AI, and the author uses rough scaling estimates to argue this would be needed for future GPT models. The author projects that GPT-6 could cost about $75 billion and GPT-7 about $2 trillion, based on each GPT generation costing roughly 30 times more than the last. The article says these figures require vast amounts of compute, electricity, and training data, which the author considers hard to obtain. The author also argues that a centralized push for $7 trillion would contradict OpenAI's earlier compute overhang argument for gradual AI progress.
- How to create frames without any code (paragraph.xyz)
Frames are interactive apps built into Farcaster posts, and this guide explains how non-developers can create them without code using several tools. It covers polls and quizzes (polls.dep.dev and quizframe.xyz), galleries (frames-gallery.vercel.app, limited to five images), and NFT minting through Zora, Manifold, or custom contracts. It also describes Paragraph and Mirror for reading and minting articles, Glass for gating content by token, follows, or likes, and Neynar for multi-page strategies that combine navigation, external links and mint pages.
- Anonymized OP RetroPGF 3 voting dataset (github.com)
- GitHub - kugusha/art-farcaster: A collection of art-related Farcaster links (github.com)
This GitHub repository is a community-curated list of art-related channels and projects on Farcaster, a decentralized social network. It groups channels into general art topics, creators' personal channels, project-specific and collection-specific channels, and related initiatives such as The Yellow Collective, Higher, ENERGY, Basepaint, HUG and the Artist Program, which is funded by NounsDAO. The list also includes tools for artists, such as Gallery.so and Hypersub by fabric.xyz, and visual-focused Farcaster clients like tiles and photocaster.xyz. Submissions require more than 500 followers for general channels and more than 200 followers for personal channels.
- The Skiff Privacy Fiasco, or How not to Shutdown Your Startup (blog.notesnook.com)
Skiff Privacy shut down in 2024 and was acqui-hired by Notion, and the author, from the company behind Notesnook, argues that the shutdown was handled poorly. The post says Skiff's February 9, 2024 website announcement emphasized joining Notion and excitement without clearly stating that the product was being discontinued, with that information appearing only in a hidden FAQ item. It also criticizes Skiff's repeated "open source" claims, since only parts of the product were source available and the backend was not, and it recommends that shutting-down services publish their code and give users a year or two to migrate.
- Binance delisted Monero (twitter.com)
Binance has delisted Monero, and the author argues that crypto is already moving toward centralized financial surveillance without any government coercion. The article cites all non-KYC onramps being shut down, privacy tools being made illegal, and developers going to prison as evidence. It also argues that existing stablecoins function much like CBDCs because they are centralized, censorable, transparent, and permissioned through KYC'd onramps and centralized exchanges. The author says privacy protocols are shutting down citing a lack of product-market fit, and warns that if blockchains reach mass adoption without privacy, sovereigns will have total surveillance over financial transactions.
- Silicon Valley Has a Harvard Problem (time.com)
Elite culture in the U.S. and the West punishes public conviction, leaving leaders cautious and hollow, and the essay argues that Silicon Valley shares this problem. It cites the congressional testimony in late 2023 by the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT, two of whom resigned, as an example of clinical answers without feeling. It contrasts this with Yale president Kingman Brewster Jr., who in 1970 said he was skeptical of black revolutionaries' ability to get a fair trial in the U.S.
- Understanding the Intersection of Crypto and AI (galaxy.com)
This report examines how crypto and AI are intersecting, focusing on decentralized compute protocols, zero-knowledge machine learning (zkML) infrastructure, and AI agents. It argues that crypto offers AI a permissionless, trustless settlement layer, while AI can improve user experience and smart contract automation. The report says demand for high-performance GPUs, with wait times of at least six months, provides a tailwind for decentralized compute, which can sublease excess capacity. It also cites Tether's reported $420 million purchase of 10,000 H100 GPUs through a stake in Northern Data, and describes Akash, which launched its GPU mainnet in September.
- Our Means vs. Your Ends (gotnojuice.substack.com)
The article is a rebuttal to Metalabel's blog post "When The Means Justify The Ends," which announced the company's departure from crypto. The author argues that Metalabel misunderstood what crypto offers, that its three cited "strikes" against the ecosystem are misplaced, and that the root cause lies in unrealistic expectations of web3. The author cites Ticketmaster's control over ticketing as an incentive problem blockchains do not solve, and says Blur's removal of resale royalties reflected market preferences rather than a technical failure. The author also notes that L2 networks such as Optimism and Arbitrum were available for NFT drops by late 2022, before Metalabel's April and May 2023 drops on L1.
- What Makes a Great Ugly Art? (paragraph.xyz)
The author argues that much of the crypto art scene produces low-quality work that gets promoted by hype and speculation, and that real art requires substance such as concept, context and craftsmanship. Examples cited include the 3333 tilting card collections and 69696 cheap glitch works a day during late 2020, and the claim that the big names of 2021-22 will keep relying on projects that cannot tell marketing from bad shitposting. The piece ends by announcing the creation of an /uglyart channel, with no further details given about its purpose beyond "I have plans."
- On the Value of Shitposting (cryptocurrencyposters.com)
The article argues that humor and shitposting are essential to crypto's culture and survival, not a distraction from it. The author, who fields crypto questions from friends and family, says many of the best investors, educators and personalities in the space are shitposters with a sense of humor. The author attributes part of this to selection bias, since early participants who won big had to accept the absurdity of the market, and part to coping with the sector's frequent losses. The author's central claim is that in a marketplace without central authority, humor serves as a trust mechanism that helps the community sort insiders from newcomers and outsiders, and that the author advises newcomers to drop expectations of seriousness.
- Show KN: Detect Web3 Frontend Attacks with dAppling DNS Monitor (blog.dappling.network)
dAppling has released a monitoring tool at dappling.network/monitor that alerts users to possible DNS hijacking of Web3 domains. According to the article, the tool watches over 3,000 Web3 domains from DeFiLlama for nameserver changes, which it says is the change used in recent attacks on Frax, Balancer, Galxe, Velodrome, and Aerodrome. The article states the attacks worked by social engineering a DNS registrar, and that the tool would have detected all five. It checks each nameserver every 5 minutes using Cloudflare's DNS over HTTPS API and notifies subscribers when a change is found.
- Farcaster DAU/MAU ratio (dune.com)