Delver at contraptions.venkateshrao.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️
79274 Followers
Bit sad when an actor with a real career is demoted to hallmark Christmas movie grade
Now 20-30 hours into Twitter book vibe-coding project. 9-% done. Just the remaining 90%
Step 1: Put the compose button back on the bottom right Step 2: ??? Step 3: Protocol social secret sauce for profit! $$$ while farcaster continues existential struggle in zero-sum wallet market
I need to mute the g m casts 😑 wagmi is dumb philosophy for children Need grittier cypherpunk philosophy for this round We’re not all going to make it, that’s life. Suck it up. (3,3) is a con masquerading as a philosophy Need crypto philosophy for grownups who want life to be interesting not comfy
“Most people don’t care about decentralization” is basically false. I understand the team is coping with sobering results of a long and difficult experiment but please stop with the broad strokes claims about life, the universe, and everything. You have proved nothing even remotely close to such a vast claim. People flood into private messaging platforms and easily switch platforms or use multiple platforms as a retail-agency level “decentralization.” People use mastodon, a federated approximation of decentralization. They’re trying other experiments on Bluesky. People run home servers and websites. People love bazaars. People consume indie games and art. People go camping with backpacks full of decentralized capacity. People want decentralization when it’s actually meaningfully on offer within their capabilities and it makes sense to want. And when they do, they go as deep down the stack as they reasonably can. All due respect to Dan, this sort of flawed sweeping conclusion is what you get if you pretend “revealed preferences” as an absolute source of ground truths and mistake behavioral economists for philosophers. The “preferences” people “reveal” are a function of what they perceive as being plausible in an environment, given their agency within it. They’re not some opaque Freudian genetic impulses they enact unconsciously that they themselves can’t grok but wise product savants can. They’re primarily a mirror held up by user behaviors to unconscious and conscious product doctrines held by the designers. We learned far more about the Merkle team in the last few years than we did about “humanity” or “crypto people.” The main preferences revealed were those of Dan and Varun. To be clear, this is not a criticism. They’re fine preferences, and I’m curious to see what they do next. This has been a fine 4 year experiment, but too many of the conclusions being drawn seem wrong/cope/heat-of-the-moment. The Merkle team and non-FC devs have learned a lot of specific things. The rest of us have learned surprisingly little of general value. We certainly haven’t learned that “most people don’t care about decentralization.” Farcaster did not ever actually test the proposition that people want decentralization. It tested the proposition that a subset of technically sophisticated users were willing to run decentralized infrastructure under *some* incentive schemes, to secure a “plaza” social space, and make the whole profitable for all. True or false, this is not a particularly broad or interesting proposition about human society at large. It’s a proposition about the business model space of a single company that started with specific technical premises and possibilities in mind.
Everyone uses petroleum-based products and infrastructure, but nobody pumps and refines their own oil. “Everyone will be on crypto” is perhaps true in some subtle invisible sense we don’t grok yet, but the way the line is trotted out today it sounds exactly like “everyone will pump and refine their own oil”
Unless you’re building core infrastructure, crypto is a terrible primary interest in life. Like winemaking can be a great primary passion for life but wine drinking is almost certainly not. Even for a Michelin wine critic. Wall Street is saved from its own degenerative tendency by the existence of real assets (and people interested in them) beneath all the layers of derivative financialization. And at least a third of them still turn into ghouls. Crypto has highly impoverished abstractions at the bottom rather than assets. Energy burning in the case of Bitcoin and a social trust ouroboros called “stake” in the case of Ethereum. Both are degenerate “assets” in a sense; ghostly cousins of things like semiconductor fabs or steel plants or Coca Cola factories. Which means that degeneracy *will* be the message of the medium. “As above, so below” as the hermetics say. It’s a miracle the math works out to build on top of such degenerate foundations, but it’s degenerate nevertheless. Unless you add dimensions. That’s the mathematical essence of degeneracy. Things having fewer dimensions than advertised. Like 3 points in a line pretending to be a triangle. You have to bump one of the points orthogonally to make a triangle. Which means if you’re not contributing to the core protocol, you must bring a dimension you care about more than crypto to the party. Music, cooking, politics, medicine, science fiction, climate change, AI, whatever. If you can’t bump crypto down to #2 or lower in your life (and fundamentally private things you can’t really share with the world, like family, or health, don’t count), you’ll doom yourself and contribute to the doom of the sector. And ironically to all bags going to zero. At the macro level, crypto being the primary eigenvector of the future would be a dystopia. But as #2 or lower it can help slouch towards utopia. The situation reminds me of housing markets it’s too hard to build in. House prices keep going up, there is very low liquidity, and the economy slows to a crawling pace set by tourism potential, amount of nostalgia in the history, and the death rate. Crypto, like San Francisco, is kept alive in economic stasis by the sheer crush of adjacent SV capitalism underwriting it. Except SF is at least a beautiful city with tourism potential, and a reservoir of sufficiently desperate service workers a hard commute away to keep it going. And just enough breathing room in the housing market to prevent economic asphyxia. So the degen NIMBYs haven’t yet managed to kill the city. For all its flaws, the NFT boom briefly add a dimension. Even though most people just treated it as another speculative asset, at least a small minority briefly added a dimension to their crypto experience.