Venkatesh Rao ☀️ (vgr)

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🤔

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Another must read for crypto people. A great case study in designing a properly tokenized market solving a real problem. They didnt use crypto though they could have, but the main thing is they focused on the actual information structure design problem first, mechanisms second. Crypto people typically start with mechanism first and usually don’t even get to the problem, waving it aside as “application details left as a homework exercise for domain experts” when that’s actually the harder problem. https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/how-to-actually-feed-america

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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

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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”

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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.

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