Hi all and welcome to kbin and m/ethfinance, our temporary-and-maybe-someday-more home while reddit learns its lesson.
I didn't get a chance to reply to everyone in the previous thread, but I did read. Please feel free to ask me any questions about kbin, Lemmy, the fediverse, and I'll try to answer. I've spent quite a few days now exploring it. I also encourage fediverse users to chime in, whether it's from Mastodon experience or somewhere else.
The dev (@ernest) is lovely, responsive, and working hard right now. Feel free to chip in with suggestions at m/kbinmeta or if you have web dev experience, maybe consider reaching out directly to help.
No doubt you're all noticing kbin is slow. It's good to remember that the beauty of federated (decentralized) servers is also in the initial brutality. Servers can be run by anyone (great!) but servers must be run by someone (oof). Ernest is one guy, spinning up a server for refugees of a global conglomerate. It's partly why I tried -- and will keep trying -- to open a server of our own.
I'd encourage everyone to have a little patience, be extra kind and gracious, and at worst, take a little time away from the screen if it's crawling. They're planning a large infrastructure change next week. In the meantime, try to enjoy the brave new world here. We haven't had a truly "new" website to explore in many years. It's kinda exciting!
Thanks. Definitely tech skills. Don't need funding anytime soon. I'm extremely tech savvy and have a homelab, but never attempted anything remotely like a kbin server before. I basically crunched an entire server admin course into 3 days to try and get something up and running for us.
Anyway, the only way to register and login currently is Google OAuth, which isn't great for a DeSo website. I also got my Github OAuth key running but... there's no button. I'm unable to get the kbin instance to talk to my SMTP server, which is just a namshi container. So, people were signing up -- and I can see them -- but they're all "inactive" and unverified because no emails are going out.
Perhaps most importantly, I'd be happy to turn off email verification and just let people sign up freely. I just don't know how to do it.
If you've got the skills, I'd see if you can grab the repo from codeberg/kbin and parse through the symfony compose and ENV files. You'll have to explain the solutions to a dumb dumb like me, but I'd greatly appreciate it.
Yo! I also have a non-ETH question, soz. I’m another newbie to kbin, lemmy, fediverse, the whole thing.
I noticed this post, and one for cs, were "pinned" to my subscriptions feed, despite not being subscribed to these subreddits.. ahem, magazines. Is this a "feature" or am I doing something wrong?
Having posts (or is it threads? I am so confused by all this new terminology) from magazines I’m not subbed to appearing in my subscriptions feed is not exactly something I want. If I want to find stuff I’m not subbed to, I’d check the r/all-equivalent page, right? That’s at least how I’d assume most people want it.
Having topics I’m not exactly interested in (no offense) like crypto and counterstrike shoved in my face isn’t a good first taste of the platform IMO. Or are they just pinned for everyone because they’re directly relevant to the Reddit exodus situation?
Probably not replying to the right person here, but thought it fitting since you seem to be in contact with the dev and this thread (post?) is relevant to my question.
Yo! Yes, threads here are either "articles" (on reddit would be a text post), links, and photos. On kbin, a "post" is essentially a tweet. Those are viewable in the Microblog tab.
I too have our daily and the cs at the top of the homepage. While it's possible there's enough activity her to place us at the top, I can't imagine it'll stay that way for long. I would anticipate all of these UI quirks being addressed over the coming days and weeks. I agree it's not ideal. The dev is working around the clock and could even be breaking things as he works.
In the meantime, I'd check out various Magazines and see what interests you can find established here. Hopefully the communities here are chill as they gear up.
I figured it out! Despite setting subscription as my home page in the settings, it seems clicking the home button still took me to the r/all-equivalent. On mobile, you have to use the filter button to filter to only subscribed to see only the magazines you’re actively subscribed to. Hopefully that’s a bug that’s fixed at some point :)
Thanks @kbrot for setting us up with the magazine (will take a while to get used to this title) and 100x thanks to @ernest for making kbin in the first place!
Yes, the server is slow and there are things that could be improved, but everyone can help making this great:
Thank you, kbrot, for sheltering us here while Reddit goes all evil corp on us. Or do I need to write /u/kbrot to ping you?
I have a couple of unimportant and non-ETH related questions -
How do I set up a profile picture? I went to “Profile” but I don’t see where to set it up (on mobile if that matters).
I turned on “Infinite scrolling” in the Settings but the daily still paginates at the bottom (i.e., I have to click on the next page number). How do I change that?
It’s weird feeling like a helpless newb all over again.
It's all the dev's hard work for now. I just made the magazine for us.
You should be able to @ me. Testing this @anon (what a username to claim!)
Settings > Profile > Avatar for the pic
Not sure, I haven't toyed with infinite scroll yet. (Didn't want to push the servers any harder than necessary for now.) It could be a UI bug that needs multiple refreshes or even a log out/in?
literally won't upload for me. Tried with all addons turned off (which is how I had to register) and even on Edge. I just don't get to have one it seems.
(Accidentally cross-posted in the previous weekly. Here's my re-crosspost from ethfinance.)
This post is relevant to ethfinance, as it really underscores that we don't own our community here, Reddit does. If as a moderator your community's desires are at odds with Reddit's desires (not rules, mind you - desires), they will permanently ban you if you choose to stand with your community instead of siding with them.
As we know, a few weeks ago Reddit cut off access to the API. Many subreddits went dark for a couple days to protest. Some subreddits rightly realized that a protest with a defined end date ultimately doesn't make their voice heard, and they wanted to make their voice heard. The /r/dndmemes subreddit was one such subreddit.
Now, one of the rules made clear by the Reddit admins is that you're not allowed to label harmless posts as NSFW to try to harm Reddit's ad revenue. In my opinion, that's fair enough. Content should be properly labeled.
The members of the /r/dndmemes community, however, wanted to continue making a point without violating this rule. So in protest of the API changes, the community decided to changed their meme subreddit into a pornography subreddit. Full-on, D&D-style NSFW content. Every post was tagged NSFW, because every post was NSFW.
This afternoon, r/dndmemes received the following message from the Mod Code of Conduct account:
If you suddenly begin to post, or approve content that features sexually explicit content to your community in order to justify the NSFW label, we will immediately remove and permanently suspend moderators who have participated in this action. 3 moderators have been permanently suspended and removed from the mod team for participating in this activity already. They are not to be added back to the team under any account.
Moments later, and without further warning, the following mods were removed from the team and permanently suspended from Reddit:
u/Dalimey100
u/4cheese
u/EquivalentInflation
As part of their community action, the Reddit admins also removed two of the NSFW flairs that the community had begun using, so it was no longer possible to properly categorize or filter new posts to the subreddit. In the aftermath, due to these sudden changes the Reddit admins made against the community's will, the remaining mods have marked new submissions to the subreddit manual approval to stem the tide of now-banned NSFW content. They're now swimming in a sea of posts that follow the mods' own rules, but don't follow the new rules Reddit Inc has decided to impose on their community, and they're expected to moderate their subreddit according to Reddit Inc's imposed /r/dndmemes rules.
This kind of direct community intervention is completely unprecedented in Reddit's 18 years of operation. Reddit has historically had a very laissez-faire approach to their communities, letting their communities themselves - represented by their community moderators - dictate what they want the content of their communities to be, and how they want their communities to be run. They've held this laissez-faire attitude even to a fault, letting the top mod of each subreddit unilaterally dictate subreddit rules and unilaterally add and remove other moderators, even at the protest of their community. A great example of this was when the /r/bitcoin community wanted to remove theymos as a top moderator due to his wildly unpopular community policies - Reddit Inc did nothing. Of course, that's all flipped on its head now. Reddit is no longer a host for independent communities run by individuals - it's a host for one big community run under the discretion of Reddit Inc, where ownership of "your community" is a privilege that can be taken away unilaterally at the whims of Reddit Inc without recourse.
I foresee a time before too long, perhaps within the next few years, where the /r/ethfinance moderators will have to face a similar choice - whether to side with the desires of Reddit corporate, or whether to stand by the desires of the community, be permanently banned from Reddit, and be replaced with Reddit's own hand-selected moderators.
With ethfinance, of course, the divide between the community and Reddit Inc will not be a divide of SFW/NSFW, because that's not this community's style. It will be a divide over the heart of what ethfinance means to us. Perhaps it will be the inability for communities to opt out of Reddit community points, causing ethfinance to drop in quality due to points-chasing in the same way ethtrader did. Perhaps it will be the discontinuation of old.reddit.com along with the incessant enshittification of new.reddit.com and the official app. Maybe it will be site-wide automod deletion of external links (in the style of YouTube comment automoderation), removing a crucial information-sharing tool from this community.
Whatever the divide is between ethfinance and Reddit Inc, it will stem from this community's desire to just be left alone to do our own thing, in conflict with Reddit's desire to step in to make changes to the community to increase their own ad profits (because shortly, they'll have public shareholders to answer to!) And Reddit Inc is the one with the keys to the server rack, so ultimately, whatever they want to do, they will do. Just one of the perks of running permissioned forum software on top of a permissioned database.
I share this because I truly believe that at some critical mass of platform enshittification, the "magic" of this community will leave /r/ethfinance and go somewhere else, just as it left /r/ethtrader to go to /r/ethfinance all those years ago. And it's important to keep your eyes and ears open, because wherever the magic goes, so will follow the alpha, the good friends, the counterculture that makes ethfinance such a fulfilling and worthwhile place to visit.
Finally, a parting meme to make light of Reddit admin logic:
I assume your sigh comes from caches.xyz not getting traction as an alternative to /r/ethfinance, before or after the great Reddit migration. I’m sure that must have led to some introspection (not about you, about the site itself). May I ask, what do you think are the reasons caches.xyz did not take off in adoption?
Oh no. Not for Caches. It's doing fine. A lot of activity on the site you won't see unless you have the right NFTs. Admittedly the public groups and forums lack engagement. I suppose I did fail at attracting my own community tho... I sigh because I've been trying to warn everyone about this exact scenario for several years now. Unfortunately no one listened, or maybe no one cared. I dunno. Done thinking 'boutit. I do know it was inevitable tho. I've seen it a dozen times with my online communities before. Now everyone is scrambling around trying to figure out what to do. Sigh... A legit attempt was made on my part at least. I tried harder than I ever have before to save this one at least...
ethfinance is the first community that I actively participated in. It was the sole reason I had a reddit account. With the API changes, I have not used my account at all since then.
I do believe each individual can make their own decision regarding this. Sadly kbin is not that well developed UX wise, but I think this can be a catalyst that changes that soon enough.
Eventually I think we will be moving away from reddit if nothing changes. To where? still a mystery to me. I am in favor of platforms that have downvotes though.
Excellent write up, and thank you for taking the time to x-post it here.
I sorely miss /r/ethfinance but haven’t touched my Reddit account since the Apollo shutdown, and don’t intend to. I am enduring the worse UX here on kbin until things improve (I have high hopes for the Artemis app).
Hopefully we can make this place more attractive by the time Reddit’s downward trajectory eventually collides with /r/ethfinance the way it has with other subs (as your /r/dndmemes example showed).
What feature do you want if u/lenster have communities 👥?
If you have an account it'd be great to show support for reddit-like threads and mod tools. You probably won't be able to comment on this post but there's a few comments that say something similar that you can like to give a sentiment boost such as this one: https://lenster.xyz/posts/0x1d6e-0x092a-DA-0563fbdf
Of course today had manyinterestingtalks and Vitalik's keynote, but there is one talk I want to specifically highlight because it resonated strongly with me and my beliefs. This is what we as a community or society in whole should all work on, instead of dreaming about lambos:
"Rewriting the shared myths that run the world" by Tamara Helenius of Commons Stack.
Oh yeah, and Polygon premiered their zkEVM documentary "SCALE" today after the conference closed. It was more or less an infomercial celebrating and thanking the great people who worked on it. I'm a bit of a fanboy myself, but there was not much to learn here.
(crossposted from r/ethfinance - would love to see more action here)
EthCC day 1 recap
Notable talks:
"MEV, toxic flow and its consequences" by Robert Paluba (0x).
A very interesting deep-dive into the analytics they have done on mev strategies for the biggest UniswapV3 pool, ETH/USDC. In the past three months hft market makers have taken over mev for this pool completely and pushed sandwich bots into unprofitable territory. It's just a handful of entities with deep pockets now that run the show and by combining dex/cex arbitrage with transaction frontrunning and block building. Surprisingly, this actually improved slippage for end-users but takes revenue away from other LPs in the pool.
"Introducing Lens Protocol V2" by Stani Kulechov (Aave)
Lens gets a bunch of new features including "actions" and a composable nft-based identity. There still is a waitlist for new users though.
"From self custody wallets to self custody payment - annoucing Gnosis Pay" by Martin Köppelmann (Gnosis)
The just-launched Gnosis Pay combines a Gnosis Safe wallet with real-world fiat payments via visa card or sepa bank transfers, all in a convenient dapp. They utilize a Polygon zkEvm L2 settled on Gnosis chain L1. Early access preorders for the visa card are available for EU residents via a POAP given out during the talk. To me this looks like an exciting product where a lot of puzzle pieces suddenly fall into place for a great user experience, I will definitely order the card to replace my cex visacard (sorry Bitpanda).
"Lessons from a seasoned web3 security firm" by Mehdi Zerouali (Sigma Prime)
Good overview over smart contract security best practices. Sigma Prime also just published a lot of their audit reports, and they offer 8-12 week internships in case anyone is interested.
"Introducing Uniswap v4" by Alice Henshaw and Sara Reynolds (Uniswap Labs)
V4 allows extensive pool customization with smart contract hooks for all important pool interactions. The new singleton contract design optimizes gas usage while "flash accounting" helps with transactions spanning multiple pools (sorry, didn't quite understand the example they provided).
"The New Frontier of Liquid Staking" by Jordan Sutcliffe (StakeWise)
Stakewise V3 has exciting new features: staking vaults are highly customizable and enable "white label" liquid staking solutions for all kinds of organizations. You can mint 111% overcollaterized osETH tokens against your staking deposits and use them in defi. They currently run a public testnet (pacific.stakewise.io) and are eager for feedback from users.
"The Verge: Converting the Ethereum state to Verkle trees" by Guillaume Ballet (Ethereum Foundation)
Description of the different possible strategies for bringing verkle trees to Ethereum. Migrating the existing Merkle-Patricia-Tree state is computationally expensive and will probably need to be done gradually over the course of weeks of months with high gas prices.
Random observations
the sponsor stalls in building B are in a big hall with super high noise level, making it hard to have meaningful conversations
the nethermind devs said snap sync should take only a couple of hours, so there was definitely something wrong when my resync a couple weeks ago took 6 days to complete. They recommended bringing this up in their discord
I have neglected getting a party invite for today and will instead hit the climbing gym :)
Don't forget, the Ethereum Foundation is doing an AMA! Here is my favorite comment in the thread, by Justin Drake, pasted (mostly) in its entirety so that you don't have to jump over to Reddit to read it (the technical stuff at the end got cut off cause kbin has a 5000 character limit).
What are one-shot signatures
One-shot signatures are magical cryptographic signatures where the private key can only sign a single message. One-shot signatures exist (so far only in theory, here) thanks to quantum physics. The private key is a quantum superposition which cannot be copied (see quantum no-cloning) and which must be measured (and therefore destroyed) to produce a signature.
Importantly, the signatures themselves are normal bits and bytes and one-shot signatures do not require quantum communication between parties.
why are they so special?
One-shot signatures are exciting because they significantly open up the cryptographic design space, even beyond indistinguishability obfuscation which is commonly (and incorrectly!) seen as the pinnacle of cryptography. For blockchains specifically, they are a tool to tackle long-standing problems. Specifically, one-shot signatures give us:
slashing removal: The double vote and surround vote slashing conditions can be removed.
perfect finality: Instead of relying on economic finality we can have perfect finality that is guaranteed by cryptography and the laws of physics.
51% finality threshold: The threshold for finality can be reduced from 66% to 51%.
instant queue clearing: The activation and exit queues can be instantly cleared whenever finality is reached without inactivity leaking (the default case).
weak subjectivity: Weak subjectivity no longer applies, at least in the default case where finality is reached without the need for inactivity leaking.
trustless liquid staking: It becomes possible to build staking delegation protocols like Lido or RocketPool that don't require trusted or bonded operators.
restaking-free PoS: It becomes possible to design PoS where restaking is neutered.
routing-free Lightning: One can design a version of the Lightning network without any of the routing and liquidity issues.
proof of location: One can design proof-of-geographical-location which use network latencies to triangulate the position of an entity, without the possibility for that entity to cheat by having multiple copies of the private key.
(technical) How can one-shot signatures be used in consensus?
Going from one-shot signatures to removing slashing conditions and getting perfect finality is relatively easy. The key idea is to create append-only chains of one-shot signatures where every signature signs over the public key for the next one-shot signature. These signature chains can be made stateful, i.e. they can be assigned a state that must evolve according to a specific state transition function for the signatures to be valid.
To illustrate, imagine that every signature signs over a counter representing the epoch number, and that the state transition function requires the epoch number to be strictly increasing for the signature to be valid. By construction it's impossible to have a valid signature chain with the same epoch number, thereby preventing the possibility to equivocate by signing two messages with the same epoch number.
In order to prevent both double votes and surround votes it suffices for the signature chain to hold source and target counters in its state, and for the state transition function to enforce the following two conditions:
Sounds amazing and also far-fetched(?). I am for anything that can simplify the mechanics of the protocol in the long run. Sad that we can't have them do an AMA put of reddit yet
The hacker is a NYC-based “senior security engineer at an international technology company” with expertise in blockchain and smart contract security audits. Looking up his name returns a senior security engineer working at Amazon in NYC. He is facing up to two 20-year sentences.
Oh, and he was arrested by Homeland Security special agent Chad.
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.
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.
Spring/bull is imminent IMO. Price action seems to support it. I am not saying that we won't get another major leg down, but I think we have bottomed for now. We can range here until most people reach apathy (I'm mostly here) and then slowly surge upwards (I think we're near here)
If I'm remembering right, @kbrot believes the Nasdaq is likely to correct around 10% in the next few months following its huge gains in the first half of the year, and eth could retest $1400 or lower around October.
Echoing @laughingmime... it's gotta come with volume. There's just nothing there right now. It can be a pump or a dump, but something's gotta give. No one outside the holders cares about crypto right now sadly. It'll return though. It always does.
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
I’m personally sitting this one out. I’ve watched Sreeram’s lectures and I share some excitement about the innovative concept of Eigenlayer. I can see that the additional degree of abstraction that it brings creates novel use cases that cleverly leverage Ethereum’s consensus protocol.
But I’ve also chosen to forego some yield by solo-staking instead of playing the LST game because I want what’s best not just for myself, but for the Ethereum network of which I consider myself a modest but principled steward.
For now, I’m applying the same cautious logic to Eigenlayer. I may be foregoing some hypothetical future airdrops and extra yield, but I won’t rush into something so fresh that its impact is not yet fully understood. Like you, the risk of slashing my own node is not even my main concern; the risk of subverting the network is.
The most neutral advice I can give is to read Vitalik’s post on the topic if you haven’t done so already (https://vitalik.ca/general/2023/05/21/dont_overload.html) and decide how much risk the restaking use case you’re considering brings to Ethereum.
I have the exact same viewpoint. Hopefully the coredevs design the protocol such that this behaviour is discouraged if it really does bring a net negative effect to the network. Can't expect all participants to be foregoing yields in the long run.
if you’re already apprehensive about changing the credentials at all, then I don’t get why you’re even considering pointing them at the eigenlayer smart contract which should be infinitely more scary. But if it interests you and losing a validator wouldn’t completely sink you, then why not do it for 1 validator? It won’t expose the rest of your stack
personally I’m too risk averse to deal with eigenlayer at this time, I like the idea of restaking but the way it works right now feels a bit to wonky and thorny
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