American Robin with dinner and a dark-eyed junco.

"Farcaster is too crypto-centric and self-referential"

*casts about a wide variety of topics*

"Not like that!"

Hello Far-cast World!

I seem to have lost access to @zecnate and then discovered the X onboarding flow, so here I am again. New pseudonym, same great taste.

🛡 Shield all the things!

Focused on tech for increasing agency, consent, and connection.

#Zcash ShieldedLabs.twitter, formerly electriccoinco.twitter.

Silicon Valley Daily

I wonder what the CFOs of private companies think about tokenized shares. And what courts will think if the shareholder agreements have transfer restrictions. 

Are the shares actually derivatives?

The gang learns about private company shareholder agreements and transfer restrictions.

Today, we’re launching the Terminal: 

Pay anyone and any project on Github.

Merit is the financial stack for open source software. We built the Terminal to make it simple for anyone to build enduring projects. 

Any Github user can use it today. Any open source builder can sign up for the payments beta.

Open source software is powerful because it’s multiplayer. In what other industry can you build in the open with friends and collaborators from across the entire globe, and explore every layer of the stack?

Merit solves the high-friction parts of open source development: paying contributors and building enduring projects.

The Terminal enables multiplayer software with drop-in payments: builders can install Merit on their repository, and easily pay contributors using stablecoins.

Founder & CEO at @meritsystems.

Prev @a16zcrypto. 

Did my time in big tech, since recovered.

New mini app from @limone.eth 

Squabble

Scrabble but with money

cofounder & product /builders-garden /farville | 
 organizing /just-frame-it | hosting a web3 hub in rome /urbe-eth /ethrome 🇮🇹🐺

Rome, Metropolitan City of Rome Capital, Italy

New mini app from @limone.eth 

Squabble

Scrabble but with money

https://squabble.lol/

One thing I was wrong about: crypto ETFs would be popular.

For the entire time I worked at Coinbase, the Bitcoin ETF was always "a few months away" and it was going to "eat all the future growth". 

That didn't happen — it took almost a decade to get to ETFs. And during the delay Coinbase and other crypto companies were able to significantly grow.

That said, I do think in 2025, ETFs offer a better out-of-box product for most investors:

1) Works in your existing brokerage account. Ability to get margin if that's important to you. Massively simplifies tax reporting. Easy to buy in IRA.

2) Minimal security risk of having your Bitcoin stolen (via phishing, social engineering, etc.)

The biggest reason you would not want an ETF is if you're hardcore and practice "not your keys, not your coins". But that's not an important factor for most people.

Coinbase, Robinhood and others can definitely get to baseline on the above features, but there are still a bunch of little papercuts to solve.

Smart acquisition. Always weird getting a 3rd party workflow to then have locked tokens sit at Coinbase. Natural extension of custody product.

Big news:
We're acquiring @liquifi_finance, the leading token management platform for early-stage teams building onchain.

Together we can support builders earlier in their journey, accelerating the path to economic freedom. https://t.co/2rU9OYKxTe

Coinbase 🛡️

Smart acquisition. Always weird getting a 3rd party workflow to then have locked tokens sit at Coinbase. Natural extension of custody product.

https://x.com/coinbase/status/1940385699653652500

Books

Book review status update, short term plans, and reflections:

We're almost exactly halfway through 2025.

I've been writing a book review per day since January 1st. That's 183 reviews without missing a day, as far as I know.

I've reviewed everything that I read in 2024 and almost everything I've read in 2025.

The reviews I got the most engagement on were mostly recent-ish (last 75 years) and pop-leaning. Childhood favorites punched above their weight class.

I'm planning on taking a break for at least 3 months, maybe even 6. I'm almost out of books to review, and I think this review business works better as an every-day-or-never thing. 

Plus, I want to spend more time fishing, working on side projects, and playing outside with my kids while they're on summer vacation.

This is the second most fun I've had on social media (the most fun was running a popular NFT account through the rise of NFTs, if you're wondering). Thank you all for the likes, the comments, the quotes, and the rest of the engagement. My favorite reactions were the respectful disagreements. You all are great at that. Thank you especially for pushing back gracefully.

If you've made it this far, I'm inferring that I've earned some credibility with you, and I'd like to expend it all right now. Please carefully consider the following.

You must read good books.

Your entire experience is downstream of the information you consume. The way you think about problems, the way you see the world, the way you feel about other men and women, the things you value, and your sense of how to live a good life are all a product of the playlist of thoughts you put on in your head. 

We consume culture with mothers' milk, as the Romans believed. But we retain some degree of mental plasticity through our whole lives. That means that you, as an adult, are choosing your own propaganda. The thoughts you permit to pass through your mind, the things you look at, the things you watch, and the things you read are not just database entries. They're updating your firmware in real time.

If you choose to consume short shelf life information, you're depriving yourself of abilities to process and understand the world's most important patterns. If you choose to consume partisan information, you are willfully warping your perspective. A poor nutritional diet causes lifestyle diseases of the body. A poor information diet causes lifestyle diseases of the mind.

It's impossible to know what the ideal piece of information for you to consume at any given moment is. Reading about Bictoin on HackerNews in 2011 was extremely high yield for some people. But chances are, if you were reading the latest tech news in 2011, you were mourning the death of Steve Jobs or getting hyped about Arab Spring unfolding on Twitter or something. The chances of a piece of content 100 hours old proving itself of substantial long term value to you rounds down to 0.

On the other hand, the chances of something 100 years old, or better yet 1000 years old, proving itself of substantial long term value to you round up to 1. It's not a perfect system, but give older books the benefit of the doubt nonetheless. The Lindy effect is real, and young content should require extraordinary proof of value before you allocate your time to it. 

Don't worry about falling behind on the news. You can't escape it. I've got 15 years of practice, and I fail at least a little every day. You won't be left behind.

And to state the implicit part of all this explicitly: prioritize books above all else. You should not consume information with the primary goal of adding database entries to your memory. We have the internet for that now. You are training the LLM in your head. You are refining your ability to process novel situations by building up a stable of mental models that have proven themselves valuable across millennia.

I encounter no greater catastrophe on a daily basis than a high horsepower mind malnourished by a suboptimal information diet, or worse, turned against itself by an information diet antithetical to its own true interests.

You are smart people. You don't just sit around on the couch eating chips and candy. Despite your base urges, you eat right.

I implore you to take your mental wellbeing as seriously. You shouldn't just watch short form videos and read political listicles. Read good books, because reading is thinking and every thought that passes through your head leaves behind some trace of itself, great or small, in your deepest nature.

You must read good books.

clouds

TIL there are nephophiles on Farcaster

Here’s a photo of a cumulus congestus from my walk the other day.

aesthetic

politics

69 of the 100 wealthiest congressional districts are now represented by Democrats.

Thank god the internet wasn’t this voluminous when I was younger wouldn’t have gotten a job or married.

cryptoleft

I don’t know how many Marxist/Dem Socialists we have on FC, but there’s a convo I want to have (rather in person but):

It’s presented by Bernie/Zoran/etc that there needs to be zero billionaires because their wealth should be redistributed.

I heard someone else say “what if everyone was a billionaire?” 

I don’t think either are going to happen exactly (no billionaires vs all billionaires), but the decision sets if you make one or the other as the GOAL is fascinating, and I’d love to have that convo with people of many different viewpoints!

Dan Romero

@dwr.eth