Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp

Venkatesh Rao ☀️

@vgr

513 Following
92787 Followers
Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
I bought the checkmark because I decided I’m insufficiently packaged and branded.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
This pro status is probably the most expensive thing I’ve ever bought with crypto besides other crypto Sumptuary economy here we come. Non-pros better not sport purple.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Brave new world™
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Inner voice: Im in the worst shape of my life Inner voice of inner voice: The worst shape of my life so far
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Weird addressing protocol fail. The hotel we’re staying at, Hyatt kabuki in SF, uses floor number as the second digit. So room 2510 is actually on the 5th floor, 2410 is 4th floor etc. The 2 seems to be a wing or block indicator. I didn’t notice this last time I was here I think because I was in the main wing which has normal numbering. Cc @chenoehart
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Prosocial good deed for the day. Voluntarily checked in my roller bag 😇
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Everybody who went to this thing should basically be blacklisted out of crypto in some form. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/crypto/trump-crypto-dinner-buyers-attend-identity-lamar-odom-rcna208816
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Is the protocol also called farcaster still? It should be called FP
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Varun Srinivasan pfp
Varun Srinivasan
@v
I hope you’re enjoying your farplets
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Stop supporting political candidates based on whether or not they support crypto
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Everyone in crypto needs to take a hard look at the bad shit behind the latest boom. A case of “with friends like these who needs enemies.” Crypto getting in bed with Trump fundamentally begs the question of why we’ve been trying to build this stuff in the first place. Even if you don’t care about the political project, the backlash political project in a few years will care about you. Stablecoins are in one sense a deal with the devil. I’m very ambivalent about them. If they didn’t simplify taxes I likely wouldn’t use them. Long term, every crypto transaction being a capital gains taxable event is unsustainable. Kinda like linking health insurance to employment in the US, an incredibly dumb model that got locked in due to expedient path dependent hacks in the 1930s. I suspect octroi is a better model for crypto taxes. https://open.substack.com/pub/programmablemutter/p/the-new-crypto-is-criming-and-state
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
They’re going nuclear on Harvard https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/us/politics/trump-harvard-international-students.html
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
We really need to normalize thinking of Bitcoin rising as the dollar falling. There’s no other narrative attached to Bitcoin at this point. It’s pure dollar hedge, and by extension a hedge against all fiat. The USD is down 10%. This is a bad sign for the state if the world. It’s a doomsday clock measure. There’s probably a way to model this that incorporates all major reserve or near-reserve currencies normalized by long-term bond yield rate or something. But bond yields are an internal metric. The last time the 30y yield was at this level was 2023 but the bitcoin ath is much higher than the ath around that last yield peak so doom is closer, The Ethereum narrative and valuation has diverged I think for similar reasons to why silver diverges from gold, but stronger. Silver has a few more uses than gold but Ethereum has way more uses than bitcoin. For the record I have a balanced btc/eth portfolio so this isn’t about my bag biases.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Want to flag 2 things here besides the excellent, poignant short story: A protocol meetup in SF on Sunday morning Two free week-long tickets + hotel accommodation for Edge Esmeralda up for grabs for those who can think of a good protocol-themed sessions to offer See within for details https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/time-to-die
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
If you’re in the US, increase your infectious disease precautions. The Trump regime is trying to “Make America Healthy Again” by the 4d chess strategem of dismantling much of public health infrastructure and letting crackpots run what’s left. Presumably this will kill all us non-elite human capital types, triggering a glorious Retvrn to Bronze Age unvaccinated god types. Unless we act as our own CDCs. https://www.npr.org/2025/05/21/nx-s1-5387723/cdc-communications-cuts-social-media-public-health
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
I don’t agree a lot with their design thinking but at least they seem to care about the product in their own way instead of treating it like a political influence machine that’s the product of lemons-to-lemonade resentment by an asshole who own-goaled himself into overpaying for it and literally hates people like me and longform generally Revue was a decent newsletter product. Killing it in favor of long tweets was purely about captive monopolistic attention control.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
I like the idea but wish the feature set weren’t an uncritical clone of X. Longer casts are good but at 10k, you’re encouraging cannibalization of more thoughtfully composed longform. Just add a newsletter feature with a full editor and archival pub support if you want to go there. They can still be casts, but elevate it. Promote thoughtful writing not Bill Ackman type rants. If you must copy, copy substack, not X. I’d also recommend looking for at least 20% differentiated media experience that’s not related to the wallet. Probably something with AI. But again don’t copy grok style integration. It’s terrible. Maybe more like cursor etc? A “stream IDE”? Solve threading with AI? I mean, break some interesting new ground.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Is there a way to download consolidated transactions from the warpcast wallet as a csv or something? I am anticipating some penny ante annoyance next year at tax time.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Came up with a fortune cookie. Marketing is the art of using dead things to draw attention to live things, and killing some things to do so if necessary.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Marketing sometimes feels like it's about deciding what to kill and taxidermy in order to make other things more alive
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