Venkatesh Rao ☀️ (vgr)

Venkatesh Rao ☀️

Delver at contraptions.venkateshrao.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

82033 Followers

Recent casts

Thanks to AI, a lot of dumb and lazy people are now stuck in places only smart and hardworking people could get suck before.

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Capture resistance is upstream of censorship right? I think capture resistance is 2d: aggregation resistance and enclosure resistance. There’s a 2x2 there. Many decentralized protocols are aggregation resistant but not enclosure resistant. Aggregation resistance is about plurality and multiplicity but enclosure resistance is about openness and heterogeneity

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Increasingly convinced protocolization *is* decentralization. So this actually maps to “centralize till it hurts, decentralize till it works” It’s a radical thought, but what after all is a protocol, ontologically? You take a gestalt flow-like behavior (or zen ideal of such a behavior) and break it up into hard and soft little pieces that interact with a mix of hard and soft rules that separate concerns, loci of agency, and points of action. Even if it’s a one person micro-protocol, the behavior gets chopped up so you’re in discrete states through the flow. Protocolization is *narrative discretization.” Instead of crude sampling, you make up sampling ontology and grammar that captures 80% of the effectual power of the behavior with a 20% codification.

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Top casts

I’m interested in a general compute version of this proposition abstracted away from details of blockchains. Perhaps: Logic > long-term memory > …DRAM > “HBM” > register memory HBM in scare quotes because I don’t mean the specific hardware standard but anything at that level in the memory hierarchy. Feels like the scalability basically tracks memory hierarchy in proportion to latency, with memoryless logic as the cheapest thing?

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Alex Honnold randomly climbing Taipei skyscraper while world is crashing and burning is a nice boss non sequitur move. Fully narrative capture resistant but can still compete for headlines with Greenland, Davos, Minneapolis, Clawd, etc. and win. Life goes on outside the narratives that try to corner attention.

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True or false: Unrestrained rehypothetication has made Bitcoin effectively an uncapped inflationary asset.

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I see three basic narratives for Ethereum going forward 1. Shut up and transact 2. Shut up and transact with extra cypherpunk steps 3. World computer

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Onchain profile

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