A bit meta, but in parallel to migrating to Kbin, I also started playing with the news aggregator https://news.kiwistand.com/, which is a Hacker News clone for Web3.

As I understand it, a key difference from HN, though, is that Kiwi is an open protocol for submitting and upvoting links. It does not contain identity management features nor the ability to store comments and replies. All you can do, as a user, is connect your Ethereum address to post and upvote links. You also need one ERC-721 Kiwi NFT in your wallet to have the ability to post.

Clients are then free to build their own commenting system (similar to Kbin or Lemmy) on top of the Kiwi protocol. Those clients may store comments data on the blockchain (e.g., an L2) or on a traditional server instance (federated or otherwise), and they may use Web3 authentication, e.g. Metamask or SIWE.

I thought this community might be interested given the Web3 focus and the openness of the protocol. Read more at https://paragraph.xyz/@kanfa/what-is-kiwi (disclaimer: I have zero affiliation to this project).

I thought today (July 5) might be the day we break $2K, but we didn’t and we seem to be receding right now.

Which leads me to ask, having lost sight of the /r/ethfinance pulse:

What’s this community’s sentiment with regard to the next few months? Are we still stuck in a foreseeably long bear? Are we at the cusp of a crypto spring? Are there trigger points (such as the Blackrock ETF’s approval, or the XRP verdict) that you think must happen before this is even decidable?

spez: thank you for the replies. I love that among four replies, one says surge up, one says crab sideways, and one says drop back down to the local low.

For the weekly doots livestream today (Friday, July 7) we’ll be joined by Frisson from Tally, an on-chain DAO framework. To listen in and participate, join the EVMavericks Discord at 12pm EST (4pm UTC+0) in the #public-voice channel, or follow along on YouTube!

If you want to help support the work being done to make these livestreams a reality, consider minting the POAP for this week. All proceeds go to those helping out with the stream.

What’s everybody using for gasprices nowadays? It looks like gasprice.io has joined the long list of now dead gas prediction tools.

Sorry for the rant-y doomer post, so feel free to skip, but amidst the recent “Threads” news (as well as some other things like the whole Reddit debacle, and some dumb AI stuff), I’ve given up trying to advocate anything on the open or decentralized front to my peers. They only care about UX and literally nothing else.

It actually has me pretty bearish on what we try to do here in Ethereum-land as well. If normal people are only ever going to flock to centralized services (especially those who’ve been known to cause harm historically) because it “just works on their iPhone” or “is 100% free no matter what”, and they’ve already been conditioned to hate (and I mean hate from what I’ve seen from my peers) crypto by all of the scammers and the media, how can we possibly win people over at this point? If the answer is “with the tech” like we’ve been saying for the past X years, will the UX ever be genuinely good enough to get people to care?

We’ve all been conditioned over the past couple of decades to be used to the amenities of unsustainable services, and are so used to consuming content in general, that the only viable “alternatives” on the internet for the vast majority of people is to go back and forth amongst the tech giants who can afford to subsidize their free services via their other offerings, or sell and feed users’ data to the ever-growing array of AI modals, who will in turn consistently churn out “content” that displaces all of the creators, writers, artists, video editors, etc. who need these social services in the first place to get work in the online gig economy.

Unsustainable service then implodes, people flock to the next fancy unsustainable giant-controlled service, and then we repeat again.

And GOOD LUCK trying to get any of these people to conceptually understand DeFi and the like in 2023, let alone feel empowered enough to use it to the extent they do with what they’re used to today. Sign in with Ethereum? Nah, Apple lets me sign in to every site now with just my iPhone; it’s wayyyyy easier than that. And crypto wallets? Nahhhh, Venmo is super easy AND I can send things with silly funny emojis!

Idk, times like these make me feel silly for doubling-down and validating on Ethereum instead of just selling back in 2021; heck, I could’ve retired 30 years early, lol. I like to think I’m trying to help make the world a better, and more open + equitable place by helping keep the proverbial lights on as the bigger brains build, but it feels like the time to do anything with massive impact past niche market segments has passed, and I genuinely don’t know, with the current state of things + tech, what the online world is going to look like in 20, or even 10 years. At this rate, it’s not looking good.

/end rant. I’m just so tired. :P

Should I EigenLayer?

I’m having a hard time deciding if I should point one of my validators at an EigenPod, and I’d appreciate some input.

I’ve been thinking about this for weeks. I went through all the documentation, created a pod, and have a json file ready to set my withdrawal address for a single validator (I still have 0x00 credentials, because I don’t want to declare my reward income yet, and the process of changing credentials is frankly terrifying).

In contrast to LST restaking, native restaking on EigenLayer has been slow to gain traction. As of this writing, 134 validators have signed up, out of an expected initial cohort of approximately 300. Based on Sreeram’s recent Bankless panel participation, I believe those fewer than 300 brave (stupid?) souls will receive a significant airdrop in the future, and may have privileged access to lucrative opportunities.

I’m honestly torn. If there’s a problem with the BeaconProxy contract, losing a validator would suck, but it wouldn’t significantly damage my crypto prospects. Part of me thinks EigenLayer is a grave threat to Ethereum, and should be shunned. Another part of me is excited about the possibility of being among the first to participate in something genuinely innovative.

What say you, fam? I’m leaning toward broadcasting the message. It should be an interesting journey, even if it ends in disaster

Somewhat interesting development: https://publicgoods.network/ Looks like the public goods funding projects (Gitcoin, protocol guild, clr.fund, giveth. etc.) have built a new L2 on the OP stack. The differentiator as stated is that the majority of sequencer fees will go to public goods in an effort to secure more sustainable public goods funding. The details on the governance mechanism are scant so far from what I can find, and execution there in my estimation will make or break this idea. I will say I like the idea of sequencer fees being directed towards public goods rather than just a few VCs pocketing them which seems to be the current trend in the L2 industry, but introducing governance there also opens up a very large can of worms and will be interesting to see how they intend to keep that credibly neutral and prevent capture
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