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Today's Topics:
1. CoinJar Blog Opinion (Stephen Loosley)
2. AI overviews have transformed Google search (Stephen Loosley)
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Message: 1
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2025 05:35:34 +0000
From: Stephen Loosley <[email protected]>
To: link <[email protected]>
Subject: [LINK] CoinJar Blog Opinion
Message-ID:
<sy5p282mb440931a4d2128fc64ab39165c2...@sy5p282mb4409.ausp282.prod.outlook.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252"
CoinJar Blog Opinion
Onchain: A new hack, new money, and a new threat
June 5, 2025 Author Naomi
https://www.coinjar.com/au/blog/new-hack-new-money-and-a-new-threat
Story One
A hack with a twist
On May 22nd, the leading DEX on the SUI blockchain tweeted that it had detected
an incident leading to the loss of $223 million in user funds. So far, just
another successful exploit by a hacker. Shortly after draining the liquidity
pools, the hacker began bridging their funds to Ethereum in an attempt to
launder them. As a result of this massive exploit, memecoins dumped ? including
the supposedly stable coin USDC, which suddenly was stable at 0.
Pinterest
After $60 million had been moved off SUI, the validators collectively decided
to simply freeze the funds, leaving the hackers unable to access the money they
had stolen. Can they do that? Yes, they could. As it turns out, SUI is
structured to give validators the right to exempt transactions from specific
wallets in extreme circumstances as long as a broad consensus is reached.
CT is split in the reaction to this. Some point to the positive effect of
saving $160 million worth of user funds from being drained, while others worry
that the power to freeze might not always be used for such noble causes.
Cetus has suspended operations and initiated a governance vote to decide the
fate of the frozen funds. So far, 90% are in favor of distributing them back to
the victims.
Takeaway: The lesson here is that the social layer can trump the technical. If
people decide to act against the decentralization maxime, not much you can do.
Story Two
Money as a social construct
Remember when you first learned about fractional reserve banking? I was about
24 and just got started in crypto. What blew my mind back then was that banks
just create money out of nothing. Well, it?s not nothing, in the end it?s trust.
Ironically, in crypto the main propaganda is to get away from trust, to create
trust-less money, rejecting the idea that money is just a social construct.
Bitcoin started as an attempt, but it accumulated mainly in the hands of
Michael Saylor and corporations seeking PR coverage (see Metaplanet).
Pinterest
Most memecoins follow a similar pattern of accumulation. But what if there was
money that didn?t follow this path? That?s what Circles promises: a project by
Gnosis that just launched its V2. In essence, everyone on there mints one token
per hour. Through agreements with others to use these tokens, they gain value.
This enables the creation of circles of trust, allowing trust to scale beyond
the bonds of people you know.
Takeaway: Finally, an interesting social monetary experiment. Will it work? Who
knows, but at least it?s an attempt to do something different than all these
PVP coins.
Story Three
EIP 7702 adoption is going great
It?s especially going great if your hobby is draining people?s wallets. While
Ethereum?s recent Pectra upgrade focused on improving UX, it also made it
easier for criminals to drain people with even less clicks.
The proposal in question is EIP7702, which introduced account abstraction, a
buzzword of last year. Once implemented, this allows wallets to behave like
smart contracts, giving them the ability to, for example, batch transactions
(avoiding getting stuck in approve & confirm loops), sponsor gas fees, and use
passkeys.
Wintermute Research
Unfortunately, over 60% of delegations authorize contracts to act on behalf of
wallet users that aren?t in the interest of the user, as Wintermute, a crypto
trading firm, has found. They dubbed these contracts Crime Enjoyer as they?re
all versions of the same copy-pasta code that sweeps wallets if keys are leaked
and sends the funds to the deployer.
One user lost $150,000 this way to a supposed batch transaction. Wintermute
commented they found this trend "funny, bleak and fascinating".
Takeaway: Wallets should step up to make it clearer what users are signing when
they hand over control. What?s more, we should all think about the fact that
all technological improvements will also end up in the hands of our adversaries.
Fact of the week: Speaking of constructs, did you know that the lifetime of
reinforced concrete is about 50 - 100 years? That's because after a while, the
steel inside starts rusting, breaking up the concrete from the inside. Fun
prospect if you're living in a city built from concrete 50 years ago. To learn
more go here. You might never look at concrete bridges the same again.
https://www.noemamag.com/concrete-built-the-modern-world-now-its-destroying-it/
Naomi for CoinJar
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Message: 2
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2025 05:45:41 +0000
From: Stephen Loosley <[email protected]>
To: link <[email protected]>
Subject: [LINK] AI overviews have transformed Google search
Message-ID:
<sy5p282mb440958d0bb67777740d0c943c2...@sy5p282mb4409.ausp282.prod.outlook.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252"
AI overviews have transformed Google search. Here?s how they work ? and how to
opt out
Published: June 13, 2025 6.08am AEST
https://theconversation.com/ai-overviews-have-transformed-google-search-heres-how-they-work-and-how-to-opt-out-258282
Authors
T.J. Thomson Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication & Digital Media, RMIT
University
Ashwin Nagappa Post Doctoral Research Fellow, Queensland University of
Technology
Shir Weinbrand PhD Candidate, Digital Media Research Centre, ADM+S Centre,
Queensland University of Technology
People turn to the internet to run billions of search queries each year. These
range from keeping tabs on world events and celebrities to learning new words
and getting DIY help.
One of the most popular questions Australians recently asked was: ?How to
inspect a used car??.
If you asked Google this at the beginning of 2024, you would have been served a
list of individual search results and the order would have depended on several
factors. If you asked the same question at the end of the year, the experience
would be completely different.
That?s because Google, which controls about 94% of the Australian search engine
market, introduced ?AI Overviews? to Australia in October 2024. These
AI-generated search result summaries have revolutionised how people search for
and find information. They also have significant impacts on the quality of the
results.
How do these AI search summaries work, though? Are they reliable? And is there
a way to opt out?
Synthesising the internet
Legacy search engines work by evaluating dozens of different criteria and
trying to show you the results that they think best match your search terms.
They take into account the content itself, including how unique, current and
comprehensive it is, as well as how it?s structured and organised.
They also consider relationships between the content and other parts of the
web. If trusted sources link to content, that can positively affect its
placement in search results.
They try to infer the searcher?s intent ? whether they?re trying to buy
something, learn something new, or solve a practical problem. They also
consider technical aspects such as how fast the content loads and whether the
page is secure.
All of this adds up to an invisible score each webpage gets that affects its
visibility in search results. But AI is changing all this.
Google is the only search engine that prominently displays AI summaries on its
main results page. Bing and DuckDuckGo still use traditional search result
layouts, offering AI summaries only through companion apps such as Copilot and
Duck.ai.
Instead of directing users to one specific webpage, generative AI-powered
search looks across webpages and sources to try to synthesise what they say. It
then tries to summarise the results in a short, conversational and
easy-to-understand way.
In theory, this can result in richer, more comprehensive, and potentially more
unique answers. But AI doesn?t always get it right.
How reliable are AI searches?
Early examples of Google?s AI-powered search from 2024 suggested users eat ?at
least one small rock per day? ? and that they could use non-toxic glue to help
cheese stick to pizza.
One issue is that machines are poorly equipped to detect satire or parody and
can use these materials to respond in place of fact-based evidence.
Research suggests the rate of so-called ?hallucinations? ? instances of
machines making up answers ? is getting worse even as the models driving them
are getting more sophisticated.
Machines can?t actually determine what?s true and false. They cannot grasp the
nuances of idioms and colloquial language and can only make predictions based
on fancy maths. But these predictions don?t always end up being correct, which
is an issue ? especially for sensitive medical or health questions or when
seeking financial advice.
Rather than just present a summary, Google?s more recent AI overviews have also
started including links to sources for key aspects of the answer. This can help
users gauge the quality of the overall answer and see where AI might be getting
its information from. But evidence suggests sometimes AI search engines cite
sources that don?t include the information they claim they do.
What are the other impacts of AI search?
AI search summaries are transforming the way information is produced and
discovered, reshaping the search engine ecosystem we?ve grown accustomed to
over two decades.
They are changing how information-seekers formulate search queries ? moving
from keywords or phrases to simple questions, such as those we use in everyday
conversation.
For content providers, AI summaries introduce significant shifts ? undermining
traditional search engine optimisation techniques, reducing direct traffic to
websites, and impacting brand visibility.
Notably, 43% of AI Overviews link back to Google itself. This reinforces
Google?s dominance as a search engine and as a website.
The forthcoming integration of ads into AI summaries raises concerns about the
trustworthiness and independence of the information presented.
Where to from here?
People should always be mindful of the key limitations of AI summaries.
Asking for simple facts such as, ?What is the height of Uluru?? may yield
accurate answers.
But posing more complex or divisive questions, such as, ?Will the 2032 Olympics
bankrupt Queensland??, may require users to open links and delve deeper for a
more comprehensive understanding.
Google doesn?t offer a clear option to turn this feature off entirely. Perhaps
the simplest way is to click on the ?Web? tab under the search bar on the
search results, or to add ?-ai? to the search query. But this can get
repetitive.
Some more technical solutions are manually creating a site search filter
through Chrome settings. But these require an active act by the user.
As a result, some developers are offering browser extensions that claim to
remove this aspect. Other users are switching search engines entirely and
turning to providers that don?t provide AI summaries, such as Bing and
DuckDuckGo.
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