Top crypto stories of week 34, 2024
Mon 19 to Sun 25 August 2024
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 19 to Sun 25 August 2024, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 57 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, lu.ma.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- 10 Reasons Why Technological Progress Is Now Reversing (honest-broker.com)
According to the text, technological progress has been reversing since around a decade ago, and it presents ten causes for this. It says tech investment has shifted toward virtual reality and artificial intelligence, producing fakery, scams and disinformation, while platforms profit by manipulating and surveilling users, whose real customers are corporations paying for ads or private data. The text also blames postmodernist academic ideas for spreading contempt for truth, and says the US government has never stopped tech leaders, noting that Mark Zuckerberg cannot be fired by Meta's Board.
- First they came for telegram, and i did not speak out— because i used signal. (x.com)
A verse modeled on the "First they came" pattern argues that staying silent about each lost communication tool leaves people with no way to speak out at all. Each stanza names a technology that is taken, from Telegram and Signal to HTTPS, DNS, IPv4, TCP, and physical infrastructure, and each time the speaker's excuse is a substitute such as email, plain HTTP, IPv6, UDP, or mesh networks. The final stanza says that once electricity is taken, there is no internet left and no way to speak out.
- What is the point of minting someone's work? (honest question) (warpcast.com)
- Who decides what to censor? (Farcaster, Nostr, Bastyon, Arweave, and Lens) (simplifiedprivacy.com)
The text rejects the spam and censorship approaches of Nostr, Farcaster, Lens, Bastyon and Arweave, proposing instead that each original poster decide which replies are spam. Under this model, end users can toggle a "criticism and spam" filter for replies, on the reasoning that followers trust a poster's judgment on their own subject, which decentralizes the decision to each individual poster. The text criticizes Nostr and Lens for letting client-side reports or follower-based votes silence users, Farcaster for a centralized official labeling list distributed to other clients, and Bastyon's and Arweave's node-based approaches as an illegal-content vote and a passive storage opt-out.
- Upgrade capitalism (x.com)
- FIDs and identity (dwr.email)
An FID's value comes from its social graph, both stated through following and revealed through activity, rather than from its profile or the onchain primitive alone. Digital identity emerges from apps with utility, so building an identity layer first is the wrong order of operations; an identity layer is earned through time spent, usage and people building on it. Email addresses, phone numbers and OS-level sign-ins such as Sign in with Apple and Sign in with Google are named as the identities at scale in 2024. Email began as the internet's original killer app, and many apps shifted from email to phone numbers as smartphones spread, especially in developing countries.
- Prediction Market on Solana launches (x.com)
- Topology Protocol: A Distributed System Protocolfor the Open Metaverse (paper.topology.gg)
- Local // Onchain (mirror.xyz)
- Railgun adds privacy to Ethereum (railgun.ch)
- How to bring a community to life (davidspinks.substack.com)
David Spinks presents a process for bringing a community to life through small, iterative experiments rather than large upfront plans. The article describes the Cynefin Framework, developed by Dave Snowden, in which a community creator repeats three steps: probe by trying something, sense what emerges, and respond by amplifying what works and dampening what doesn't. In the chicken-gathering example, the writer suggests starting with a container for 20 invitees, then deciding whether to proceed based on the response. The article also recommends starting with internal exploration of one's intuition or external research such as interviews and focus groups, and says community-member fit is best judged by felt energy and member feedback rather than engagement metrics.
- Call for contributions: Ethereum Magicians (ethereum-magicians.org)
The Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians forum is seeking contributions to improve the forum, with a call for volunteers to help with curation and moderation. The post proposes more moderators, a dedicated home for AllCoreDevs and breakout calls, banners or pins for upcoming calls, and templates for each category. It also suggests using the Discourse AI plugin and generating newsletter or RSS-style updates so users can subscribe to specific categories. A one-month period is proposed for submitting logo and category icon designs, followed by a poll starting 2024-09-14T22:00:00Z.
- Resilient Social Networks (app.t2.world)
The author argues that social networks should be built for resiliency, meaning minimal single points of failure, rather than for decentralization, which they call a loaded and poorly defined term. The article says a resilient network must be protected from governments, institutions, third parties, users, founding teams, and its own moderators or operators, with feeds resistant to manipulation and content remaining under its authors' control. It states that blockchain currently offers the best means to achieve this, citing the DeFi protocol Aave as an example of resilience design, and it says the principles will guide the development of Lens V3.
- Crypto UX actually isn't that bad (x.com)
The author argues that crypto UX is not much worse than most everyday internet activity, and that what is missing is a compelling reason for people to use it. Early onboarding attempts through DeFi, NFTs and meme coins each fell short: DeFi was boring and rewarded either large capital or constant market attention, NFTs were expensive or unappealing, and meme coins depended on new buyers arriving. Prediction markets were described as easy to grasp but less viral, while DePIN was called boring outside a few verticals, and Robinhood's success was attributed partly to a favorable macro backdrop of ZIRP and post-pandemic volatility.
- ‘Threads is just deathly dull’ (theguardian.com)
Threads has grown quickly as an alternative to X, but the article's reporters and interviewees describe it as dull and largely driven by its link to Instagram rather than by its own appeal. Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, calls Threads "deathly dull" and says it feels like a platform built to compete with Twitter by a company that hates Twitter. The article reports that Threads hit 200 million active users earlier this month, a year after launch, while Bluesky has 6 million registered accounts and 1.1 million active users. Stella Creasy, the Labour MP for Walthamstow, says she has more than 20,000 Threads followers but has never written a post there, only cross-posting from Instagram.
- Kiwi events calendar (lu.ma)
- Kiwi ETHWarsaw Tapas Meetup @ 6.09 (lu.ma)
The ETHWarsaw Tapas Meetup is an informal, open gathering for people interested in Kiwi, Lens and crypto, hosted by Mac Budkowski and tim daubenschütz. The event describes itself as suited to people who value crypto's original ideals more than trading memecoins. It will be held at Sobremesa Tapas Bar in Warsaw, and the first 10 attendees will receive a free Kiwi Pass and be personally onboarded by the Kiwi founders.
- How to ship fast (varunsrinivasan.com)
The article argues that small teams searching for product-market fit should protect speed by cutting distractions, bureaucracy and unnecessary hires. It advises avoiding "side quests," meaning any work that is neither writing code nor talking to users, and declining them politely. It recommends a daily maker's schedule with one short standup, and skipping big-company practices such as sprint planning and product specs. It also says hiring should stay small, with people who can ship fast, and that tools should be chosen to speed shipping, so a new hire can fix a bug and deploy it on their first day.
- Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov arrested in France by National Anti-Fraud (theblock.co)
- Who’s Footing the Gas Bill? (research.auditless.com)
The author argues that gasless transactions will not make blockchains gasless across the board, and that apps will split into two groups by how they pay gas. Apps are co-tenants on shared blockspace, so base fees still move with congestion, and demand for priority means apps paying all gas would not always make sense. The article cites Mode's sequencer fee sharing, where TVL grew more than volume, and says Blast's volume retention suffered similarly, though Blast Points and Gold programs made its impact hard to isolate. It expects DeFi apps generating MEV to split priority fees with rollups, while consumer apps like social networks may fully subsidize user gas with smart wallets.