Digest Issue 44: How Bluesky works – the network components | Standards Make the World | The Pillars of a Rights-Based Approach to AI Development
Curated collection of knowledge and ideas from the frontier
Table of Contents
The Pillars of a Rights-Based Approach to AI Development
Standards Make the World
The Token Holder’s Guide to Delegation
Marching Towards Ungovernance
How Bluesky works – the network components
Unmasking DAOs — How to comprehensively analyze the decentralization of “DAOs”
Insights and Reflections from DevConnect 2023
Sybil Resistant Airdrops
DAOs Must Confront Dark DAOs — Or Fall Under Their Shadow
The State of Private Voting in Ethereum
Hyacinth Weekly Periodical #1
The Pillars of a Rights-Based Approach to AI Development
Margaret Mitchell
Tech Policy Press
2023-12-05
The current confusion – and outright fighting – over how to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) was already foreseen and proactively addressed by many scholars in AI. As an active participant in these efforts for the past 10 years, it is past time for me to condense some of the key ideas from previous scholarship into a framework. If taken seriously, this framework could significantly help guide how to regulate AI in a way that harmonizes the incentives of both private tech companies and public governments.
The key idea is to require AI developers to provide documentation that proves they have met goals set to protect peoples' rights throughout the development and deployment process.
Standards Make the World
David Lang
Summer of Protocols
2023-11-01
Technical standards are the quiet rules that give shape and direction to civilization. Alongside private organizations and public institutions, standards bodies form a third and critical function in modern society. When they’re well designed, standards can become enabling technologies, like the Internet or shipping containers. Studying the past two centuries of standards-making helps make the process more approachable and useful. Standards Make the World is equal parts history lesson, personal narrative based on the case of the Bristlemouth connector standard, and guidebook for creating disruptive new standards.
The Token Holder’s Guide to Delegation
Samantha Marin
Aragon's Blog
2023-12-11
For many reasons—from saving gas costs by bundling votes to token holders not having time to maintain the context to thoughtfully vote on proposals—delegation has emerged as the primary mechanism for DAOs to boost governance participation and make decisions more effectively.
DAOs like Uniswap, Arbitrum, Optimism, and ENS are all delegate voting DAOs, meaning token holders can delegate their voting power to an individual or group to vote for them. It’s essentially representative governance with optionality to choose your representative or exercise direct democracy if you want to cast votes yourself.
Being a token holder in a delegate voting DAO is a powerful role. By delegating tokens, you’re assigning voting power, and therefore decision-making power, to another address. So how do you choose the delegate that will best represent your interests?
Marching Towards Ungovernance
Reza Jafery
Reflexer
2022-08-29
Cutting the multisig umbilical cord and putting control of core modules in the hands of governance.
One of the core values guiding RAI so far has been “ungovernance”, which we define as progressively revoking privileged permissions over the protocol. To maximize protocol reliability and minimize the influence of unpredictable humans, we aim to remove our ability to change any protocol parameters that we can safely freeze, and make tampering with the remaining protocol parameters as difficult as we can.
How Bluesky works – the network components
Laurens Hof
fediversereport.com
2024-01-18
Welcome to a new short series on Bluesky and how the network works. Bluesky recently released more information on their plans for third party moderation services. While writing about their plans, I realised that to properly explain how it works, I first needed to explain how the network is designed to function.
Most people understand the fediverse in terms of separate instances. Every instance can be a social network in itself, and by connecting with other instances form a larger network, the fediverse. This makes it easier to understand where content moderation happens: every instances has their own content moderation, own moderators and their own rules.
The Bluesky network and the AT Protocol function differently. There are different types of servers; servers for data storage, servers for data aggregation, etc. As such, content moderation happens in different places on the network. T
Unmasking DAOs — How to comprehensively analyze the decentralization of “DAOs”
Guido Perscheid
Medium
2022-11-14
What to expect:
Introducing the concept of DAOs as a specific subtype of a Dapp
In the course of the evolution and use of blockchain technology, new types of business models have emerged, so-called decentralized autonomous organizations, also known as DAOs (Hassan and De Filippi 2021).
By common definition, a DAO describes „a blockchain-based system, that enables people to coordinate and govern themselves mediated by a set of self-executing rules deployed on a public blockchain, and whose governance is decentralized (i.e., independent from central control)“ (Hassan and De Filippi 2021). Hence, pursuant to this definition, DAOs are decentralized organizations being governed by their members through democratic decision-making processes.
Insights and Reflections from DevConnect 2023
Emre Tekişalp, Phil Kelly, and Steven Pack
O(1) Labs
2023-11-29
Insights and Reflections from DevConnect 2023
Another DevConnect has drawn to a close, leaving us with reflections, new connections, and a renewed vision for the future of Web3. In the bustling heart of Istanbul, the o1Labs team was in full swing, deeply engaged in the pulse of the event. We weren’t mere spectators; we were catalysts of conversations and initiators of adoption.
Highlights from o1Labs’ speaking engagements in Istanbul.
Hosting four immersive workshops, contributing our expertise to nine impactful talks and eight panels, and sponsoring a few more, our presence was palpable across DevConnect. Additionally, as a proud Partner sponsor at ZK Hack, our involvement resonated deeply, drawing in the most participation and submissions from
Sybil Resistant Airdrops
Arunsajeev
Holonym
2023-12-27
Is Network Analysis a Sufficient Strategy?
The Web3 data landscape has evolved to analyze better and index data for identifying Sybils and designing more nuanced airdrop mechanisms. For example, the Arbitrum Foundation, with assistance from Nansen, implemented a detailed approach to determine airdrop eligibility. This approach categorized wallets based on their on-chain behaviors, such as bridging frequency, transaction counts, and balances. To filter out Sybil addresses, those anticipating airdrops without genuine utility intent, they used clustering algorithms on transaction data, complemented by human assessment, ensuring that only genuine participants aligned with the protocol’s values received the airdrop.
DAOs Must Confront Dark DAOs — Or Fall Under Their Shadow
James Austgen (Cornell, IC3), Andrés Fábrega (Cornell, IC3), Sarah Allen (Flashbots, IC3), Kushal Babel (Cornell, IC3), Mahimna Kelkar (Cornell, IC3), and Ari Juels (Cornell, IC3)
IC3
2024-01-16
Vote-buying in DAOs can be as easy as liquid staking and can be hidden from public view. To highlight this emerging risk, we’ve built a demo system.
Introduction
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are increasingly popular, and already managing many billions of dollars in treasuries. Their decentralized governance is a transformative new way of organizing communities. But as they grow, DAOs will face a new and potent threat to their decentralization: Dark DAOs.
The State of Private Voting in Ethereum
Odysseas.eth
Odysseas.eth
2023-12-12
This report delves into the critical and evolving landscape of private voting, particularly in digital surveillance, the erosion of civil liberties, and the emergence of centralization in the crypto space. We provide an overview of the significance of private voting, define key terms, outline points and criteria for evaluating voting methods, and discuss the feature set of various protocols. We also present a comparative analysis of private voting protocols in the Ethereum ecosystem, offering insights into their Privacy, censorship resistance, implementation complexity, and other essential attributes.
This report aims to enable developers who want to use private voting in their applications. By creating a simple analysis of the features of every protocol, they can quickly understand which protocol (or combination) covers their needs and dive quickly into the relevant documentation.
Hyacinth Weekly Periodical #1
Vers La Lune
Hyacinth Friday Periodical
2024-01-19
Happy Friday! At Hyacinth Audits, beyond simply utilizing market forces to match the best auditors with protocols looking for high quality, high value audits, it is part of our mission to spread awareness in the web3 space to maximize security for all users. Consequently, we’ve decided to create a regular serialization discussing a variety of web3 security topics. This week, we are going to highlight some recent exploits and hacks as well as hopefully outlining ways in which projects can remain safe while building the next generation of web3 technology.
It’s unfortunate that there were multiple high profile exploits that occurred this week, but hopefully by spreading awareness like this we can decrease the frequency of exploits in the space by making people more apt to utilize high quality smart contract audits.