Centralization Strikes Again - May 2022 Edition
“They want to punish you for your speech because they can’t punish you for your thoughts..” — Naval Ravikant
Timeline
May 1 - An NFT marketplace on Solana requests Solana validators not to block their marketplace contract amidst ongoing troubles with the network spam. Source
May 2 - CryptoTwitter anon ChainLinkGod is foiled by Twitter’s impersonation policies. Source
May 5 - Argentina’s Central Bank blocks all financial institutions from carrying out operations using digital assets and crypto. Source
May 8 - YouTube bans Ethereum-focused newsletter and podcast, Bankless, for violating YouTube Community Guidelines. Source Source 2
May 8 - Binance disables loans and borrowing amidst ongoing UST (US Terra stablecoin) crisis. Source
May 8 - French African Colonial Bank (BEAC) urges Central African Republic President Touadéra to resume “strict compliance” with prevailing French colonial currency system after the Republic chose to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. Source
May 10 - Binance breaks circuits on UST trading for any price below $0.70 amidst ongoing crisis with stablecoin. Source
May 10 - Twitter announces plans to ban visibility of tweets that use “copypasta” — lingo for the internet phenomenon of using and repeating copy-and-paste text. Source
May 10 - Reports reveal that Discord private servers are not so private after all, since the API leaks name, description, members list, and activity data for every private channel on every server. Source
May 11 - A public SEC form filing made by Coinbase reveals that cryptoassets held in custody on behalf of customers, in the event of bankruptcy, will be subject to bankruptcy proceedings. In such cases, customers could be treated as general unsecured creditors. Source
May 11 - Meetup.com experiences outages on many group pages, preventing administrators from accessing or logging into pages. Source
May 12 - Widespread suspensions made by Binance amidst ongoing UST stablecoin crisis. Source
May 12 - Terraform Labs officially halts the Terra blockchain to prevent governance attacks due to severe Luna inflation and significantly reduced cost of attack. Source
May 13 - Binance suspends trading of Luna and UST. Source
May 13 - Crypto.com reverses profitable user trades amidst UST crisis, citing transactions were “quoted at an incorrect price”. Prompts severe community backlash. Source
May 14 - Multiple DeFi protocols become compromised due to a GoDaddy domain exploit. Source
May 14 - Attackers use a malicious advertisement script through crypto ad platform Coinzilla to target CoinGecko and Etherscan. Source
May 16 - Stani Kulechov, popular founder of DeFi protocol Aave and social protocol Lens, reshines a spotlight on Vimeo. In March, Vimeo gave its content creators a sudden price hike (from $200 to $3,500) that they must consent to or face abandonment by the platform. Source
May 20 - Singapore High Court blocks potential sale and transfer of rare NFT. Source
May 22 - YouTube removes more than 70,000 videos and 9,000 channels relating to the war in Ukraine, citing violation of content guidelines. Source
May 22 - NFT marketplace OpenSea removes Iranian artist’s work from its platform. Source
May 26 - Reports reveal DuckDuckGo has a syndicated search contract with Microsoft that allows some of Microsoft’s sites to ignore its tracker blocking features, effectively allowing the tech giant to track IP addresses when advertisements are clicked. Source
May 27 - The Reserve Bank of Malawi announces a 25% devaluation of their currency. Source
May 31 - Vodafone and Deutsch Telekom announces testing of a new system to track user internet usage through application of an automatically appended “super cookie” on all internet traffic through the ISPs. Source
Op-Ed
If you are interested in contributing to this OpEd, please reach out on Twitter @haochizzle, Telegram @haochizzle, or email tim.ho@chainsafe.io. We’d love to hear from you!
The views expressed are those of the author’s and do not reflect those of ChainSafe’s.
On a recent episode of “Uncommon Core” between CryptoTwitter personalities Hasu and Su Zhu, they referred to a term that I hadn’t quite heard before called the “Overton window”. In the podcast, Su Zhu refers to the “Overton window” when discussing wage inflationary pressures from technology. He argues that people tend to surmise that as baby boomers retire from the workforce, wages will increase as those skills become more in demand. Contrary to that, Su Zhu believes in the opposite; the “Overton window” will finally open up for technology to replace workers.
As a public policy up until present day, it has been incredibly unpopular for politicians to support anything that “smacks the 55-60 year old out of their job”. However, as they retire, wages for jobs like Real Estate brokers will actually deflate as it becomes acceptable for tech to replace many aspects of their duties.
While I will avoid macroeconomic discussions on wage (dis)inflation since I can never claim to have the competencies near to that of a trained economist, I did find the mental model of an “Overton window” fascinating.
As Wikipedia describes it, the Overton window “is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse.” As a mental model, it allows for the intuition that ideas (from alcohol prohibition to civil rights to women’s suffrage to legalizing marijuana) shift and change over the course of time.
We live in a society.
And ultimately, politicians merely operate within the range of “acceptable policies” without hurting their chances of being elected. In effect, they kowtow to the whims of societal norms and values which, invariably, change over the course of time.
My mom will never understand Bitcoin. And god forbid I ever bring up legalized weed at the dinner table. Now imagine how illiberal our great grandparents were in the age of prohibition? That being said, the idea of an Overton window limiting what is and is not acceptable even at a microcosm level within my family allows me to sleep more easily at night. I know full well that values that defined a previous generation will necessarily change with the times.
Public/private key encryption technologies, blockchain-based systems, and more broadly “web3” exists within an Overton window too. The range of acceptable policies might range from “Absolutely forbidden; it challenges national sovereign interests” to “We must proceed cautiously with rigorous regulation” to “It is a fundamental human right to have freedom to transact”.
And while I sense that the Overton window is shifting on web3 to slowly become more broadly socially acceptable, we still have a long way to go.
But make no mistake, the window is shifting. Every day, we inch closer to the event horizon. As society witnesses more acts like the overreach of the Canadian financial censorship during the trucker’s protests, or the switch over to greener consensus mechanisms ala Ethereum proof-of-stake — these ideas will no longer seem as radical. They will seem inevitable.
Blockchain is the megapolitical force of our generation.
It is as unstoppable as the printing press was.
If you have any feedback, please don't hesitate to send them my way, or reach out on my Twitter.
Learn more about ChainSafe by visiting our website, through our Medium, via Twitter, visiting the ChainSafe GitHub, or joining the conversation on our Discord.
❤️ Thank you for reading. If you find this newsletter valuable, we would appreciate your support if you shared it with your network :) ❤️