Dan, Varun, and the team built something amazing and useful. Farcaster is by far the best open social protocol around. I want to see the Farcaster protocol grow in @rish and Neynar’s hands.
Sometimes protocols take a little while to incubate. The silver lining to this transition could be that the Farcaster protocol will become even more decentralized.
I will talk to Neynar and figure out how best to continue supporting Farcaster builders. There is still amazing potential in this mature and functional protocol. Especially with the rise of Claude Code, I feel people could build 10 demos a day to show what’s possible, and one of them could take off.
This year's Network State Conference is on Friday October 3 in Singapore.
Our speakers include Vitalik Buterin, Bryan Johnson, Ben Horowitz, Brian Armstrong, Amjad Masad, Ranveer Allahbadia, Arthur Hayes, Nas Daily, Noah Smith, Andrew Huberman, and the governments of Singapore, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and El Salvador.
Register to attend in-person or remote at ns.com/conf2025.
Individually alpha is collectively beta.
That’s actually the centrist argument against the sort of caricatured ultra-masculinity that’s in vogue today. I understand how that ideology arose, but it actually makes you weak, because it inhibits scaled cooperation.
Essentially: in almost every context in life you can’t and shouldn’t be the leader. Even Elon isn’t running the water supply or sewing his own clothes. In those contexts, he’s just an individual like any other, operating in a context where he isn’t the boss. A “beta” if you absolutely must, or better yet a peer — even if he’s a superalpha at SpaceX.
Steve Jobs understood this too. Also a superalpha at Apple, he nevertheless understood in an email towards the end of his life (attached below) how dependent he was on the rest of humanity in most other contexts.
What few understand is that being a leader is actually a huge responsibility. You simply can’t be at the top of every hierarchy in the world nor should you seek to be. A good life is more about win/win cooperation than the quixotic pursuit of zero-sum dominance. The fact that Western societies have lost faith in both God and the State is part of what’s driven them towards the most primitive sort of chest-thumping Internet he-manism, but being “alpha” all the time doesn’t scale.
Cooperation does.
Thesis
Farcaster should unapologetically use AI to keep the vibe positive and pro-builder in the default client.
Anyone can do what they want in other clients, but defaults matter.
AI could determine whether a Farcaster post is on topic. And whether it’s more positive or negative than you intended. In general, it can scale up opt-in content moderation.
Many kinds of UX uses that are just beginning to be explored.
AI is amazing. But AI is also awful.
I see so much sloppy, low quality, absolutely midwit work done with AI.
The worst part is that many AI users have no taste whatsoever, and are actually proud of their completely error-prone midwit slop. And they don’t understand that the numbers AI generates are often wrong, because they themselves aren’t good with numbers. Even worse is when they deny they used AI to generate the slop.
AI has essentially created a completely new class of midwit, separate and distinct and only partially overlapping with the US university educated midwit. It’s similar in that both are just mindlessly regurgitating what they learned. But I can’t believe that I actually prefer, at least some of the time, the style of the old midwit.
Bring NPC back?! AI is the new NPC.
To be clear, I see all the positive sides of AI. It’s amazing for data analysis, for visualizing via Midjourney, for organizing search results, for summarizing large documents, and for cleaning up audio transcripts. It’s often a better doctor than a doctor, or a better lawyer than a lawyer.
But only in skilled hands. High IQ prompting and verifying gets high IQ output. Low IQ prompting and verifying gets complete slop. I think of AI as amplified intelligence, as opposed to artificial intelligence.
Moreover, the text that AI generates is placeholder text. It’s the new lorem ipsum, it’s lorem aipsum. It is at best a suggestion and meant to be completely rewritten in your voice. By contrast, AI images and video are higher quality, in part because they are more obviously AI.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are focusing much more on AI in the physical world, for drones, robotics, self-driving, and manufacturing. Elon is doing this but relatively few others are. Those physical use cases, at least right now, are pulling out of their trough-of-sorrow stage and getting to full production. Self-driving cars are real and they are here.
Anyway, the problems with digital AI may be solvable. We’ll have all kinds of tools to detect AI and prove that something is not AI. And it’s very possible that models could evolve to generate higher quality results, or at least highly personalized results, so that it’s not the same generic slop from so many.
But just saying: I love AI, but I also kind of hate when it’s used badly. And I can see why others will just see the downsides and not the upsides. It’s extremely similar to crypto in this way. And it’s very simple for people to just say “no AI, no crypto” without parsing through the downsides to see the upsides.
I do think we will get through the other side and turn AI into a power tool with a higher hit rate. Just like we don’t think that much about people getting electrocuted by power lines. The bugs will get worked out. But it’ll be both cultural and technological adaptation.
The Internet is going to win.
It will win much bigger than most people yet realize.
And few if any institutions that predated the Internet will survive the Internet.
So we’ll need to rebuild Internet-first replacements for those institutions.
I think where it actually landed up is:
Bitcoin > Fed
Exchanges > banks
Ethereum, Solana > tradfi
Stablecoins > fiat
And Farcaster/Base/Zora are just starting to take on social.
The rest of big tech isn’t yet directly touched by crypto-based competition but eventually it will be (eg ENS/SNS vs Google login, hardware wallets built into pre-crypto devices).
Of the top ten assets:
- six digital companies
- one digital currency
- three physical commodities
So, the 20th century American economy is nowhere to be seen. It’s been deprecated in favor of the virtual 21st century and the physical 19th.
The future and the past, together against the present.
Does “generational wealth” even exist? And should it? I am not so sure.
(1) First, if you have 2 children and 4 grandchildren and 8 great grandchildren and so on (let alone more!), then your fortune is divided by 2^n, and so are your genes. So your bloodline isn’t set forever. Indeed, unless there’s extreme levels of consanguinity, it’s diluted quite quickly.
(2) Second, very few tactics for wealth compounding get you a reliable 2X every 25 years. What happens instead is that in most jurisdictions (save the UK), you have some titanic war, inflation, or the like every several decades. That zeros out the ledger, interrupts compounding, and has everyone start from scratch.
(3) Third, many children (and especially grandchildren) who inherit wealth tend to fritter it away. The documentary Born Rich shows how the J&J heir essentially became a socialist (for others of course) because he felt so much guilt over his unearned wealth. There is a saying: shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. It’s much easier to spend a fortune than to make one.
(4) Fourth, and relatedly, it’s not obvious that great fortune is even that huge an asset in the modern era. China and India came up from nothing in one lifetime. Startups do this even more quickly. I’m not saying capital has *no* use, but it’s much less of a moat in the Information Age than many think.
(5) Next, outside the West, we are in the age of hyperdeflation. China is making everything in the physical world extraordinarily cheap, while the Internet has made everything digital extremely inexpensive. This is the opposite of what American Anarchy represents, with cars set on fire and money printed, but China and the Internet are crashing prices for everything.
(6) Next, many of these new huge fortunes in the West are a function of the debasement of the dollar rather than genuine wealth creation. $100M just isn’t what it was even 10 years ago, perhaps not even 5 years ago.
(7) Finally, generational wealth is a vision of stasis. Secure the bag and chill out. But that’s just not what humanity is about. It’s about constant, relentless, technological progress over generations. A big pile of cash by itself won’t get us eternal life, won’t get us the infinite frontier. If you want to see the stars, and touch Mars — only technology will do that.
Hence: generational progress over generational wealth. The former is about production, the latter is about consumption.
Everything should eventually be open source. But at the beginning it often needs to be done in a centralized, for-profit way in order to rapidly iterate towards the useful product (eg AT&T Unix, PayPal, OpenAI).
Then, when the user interface is established, a new round of open source innovation occurs which clones the frontend but open sources the backend (eg Linux, Bitcoin, Deepseek).
I agree with this.
As crypto is a community.
That grows by millions every year.
So what we build for the base today…
…is used by normies tomorrow.
Thus we can be all-in on crypto.
In a user-friendly way, of course.
In a high-trust way, too!
But also in a straightforward way.
Because the world is going onchain.
