Top crypto stories of week 16, 2024
Mon 15 to Sun 21 April 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 15 to Sun 21 April 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 37 comments in total.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- We Need To Rewild The Internet (noemamag.com)
Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon argue that the internet has become concentrated and controlled much like the monoculture forests of 18th-century Prussia and Saxony, and that it should be "rewilded" rather than repaired. They say a handful of firms now hold near-monopolies over browsers, search, mobile operating systems and cloud computing, with Google and Apple's browsers capturing almost 85% of the world market as of April 2024. Citing internet engineer Leslie Daigle's 2019 policy brief, they note that consolidation is ossifying the internet's layered architecture and making incumbents harder to dislodge. Rewilding, drawn from ecology, is presented as a whole-systems framework for restoring diversity and competition.
- The Word Product I've Ever Reviewed (Humane pin) (youtube.com)
- Getting started with the new Airchat — a living guide by Gary Sheng (wiki.garysheng.com)
- Stack Map of the World (ribbonfarm.com)
The world's technology stack rests on a fragile base that high-level AI and crypto discussions rarely consider. Most of the high-purity quartz needed for semiconductor equipment reportedly comes from one mine in North Carolina, and its production is a closely guarded trade secret known to only a handful of organizations. One guess is that China is close to figuring it out, and disrupting that mine or attacking shipping near Yemen could shut down much of the world. Satirical slogans such as "Decentralize the quartz mines!" accompany a stack diagram inspired by xkcd's Dependency cartoon.
- China orders Apple to remove WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal from App Store (wsj.com)
- Proving new worlds with zkTLS (telah.vc)
Telah argues that data portability will reshape Web3, and that zkTLS, a protocol letting users export data securely from any website, is the infrastructure needed for it. The article traces earlier oracle approaches such as Chainlink's DECO, which Chainlink acquired after development at Cornell University, and notes that oracles cannot scale for personally identifiable information. It surveys projects including Pado Labs, which raised $3M, zkPass, which raised $2.5M, and Reclaim Protocol, which has more than 40 verified schemas. The article also lists open questions, including how to incentivize honest third-party attestors.
- It’s 2024 and there still aren’t enough blockchain developers (nader.substack.com)
- A brief, weird history of brainwashing (technologyreview.com)
Edward Hunter popularized "brainwashing" in the US with his 1951 book Brain-Washing in Red China, and the article argues that the Cold War mind-control race that followed mixed real research with myth. It notes that Hunter claimed to be the first to use the term in writing and speech, but other OSS operatives had used it earlier. The CIA's MK-Ultra program, begun in 1953, funded drug and mind-control research, including Donald Cameron's work at McGill University, whose subjects suffered amnesia but whose experiments never implanted new memories.
- Announcing: Gitcoin Grants 20 (gitcoin.co)
- How Hacker News Ranking Really Works (righto.com)
The article reports an analysis of Hacker News ranking, finding that the published scoring formula is mostly accurate but that many articles are penalized in ways the formula does not show. The author states that about 20% of front-page stories and 38% of second-page stories had been penalized, and that titles containing "NSA" receive an automatic penalty of .4. The author also describes a "controversy" penalty that becomes active once a story reaches 40 comments, which can cause a story to drop sharply or vanish from the top 60, and suspects the exponent is 3 rather than the published 2.
- Aim to get rejected often (amirbolous.com)
The author argues that people should apply for opportunities and reach out to others often, even though rejection is frequent, because rejection says little about a person's worth. The author describes getting rejected one to two times a week, sometimes five to fifteen times a week in busier periods, across internships, fellowships and cold emails. The argument is that outcomes depend on hundreds of variables, including luck, and that the upside of trying is unlimited while the cost is small, similar to how venture capital firms make most of their returns from a few big wins.
- The primacy of winning (piratewires.com)
- Stoicism for Degens (paragraph.xyz)
- A Pointless Experiment On Lens Protocol — Day Ten (app.t2.world)
Papa, the creator of the $Pointless experiment on Lens, reports on day ten of the project, which has grown from a giveaway into a community-building effort and is now shifting toward rewarding builders. The article says $Pointless was sent to the entire Lens community at launch by sydney_bro, and that by day nine liquidity reached $100k and market cap hit an all-time high of $2.5m. Papa announces a community call next Wednesday to launch the Pointless Builders Club, where participants will decide on pointless things to build and receive rewards based on effort, progress, and outcome.
- Internet Archive Snapshot of Kiwi News on April 15, 2023 (web.archive.org)
- Update: SAFU Conversion to USDC (binance.com)
- Content or creation? (joanwestenberg.com)
- The Garden of a Messy, Protocolized Rewilding vs the Fragile Monocultured Lawn (sceneswithsimon.com)
Anti-trust is a good lever for the web and Hollywood, but the writer argues it is too US-centric and prefers protocolization and people-led change, while noting that both carry costs. Daniel Bessner's Hollywood piece reports that as of 2021, CEOs at most of the largest industry companies earned between 200 and 3,000 times the pay of median employees, and that four companies now control film and TV. The writer cites Elinor Ostrom's research on collective resource management and Cindy Lee's album Diamond Jubilee, released as .wav files, as examples, but concludes the best lever is when individual choice becomes collective choice without government enforcement.
- Quasi-Clients (warpcast.com)
- Kiwi Docs to learn more about 🥝 (kiwistand.github.io)
Kiwi is a decentralized hacker news site focused on crypto technology, products and culture, aiming to give the crypto community a space for deep, nuanced conversations. It is built on the open source Kiwi P2P Protocol, which lets anyone run a node and permissionlessly create their own Kiwi app. Kiwi describes its community as primarily web3 founders, developers and creators building the decentralized future, and it calls itself a positive-sum games community.