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Venkatesh Rao ☀️

@vgr

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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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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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If you have inventor conceits nothing can give you a deep inferiority complex like browsing Lego videos, especially of very spartan technic mechanism builds. The big builds just look like a lot of patient work, but random little assembly snippets show how seriously creative a lot of people are. The design language is way more expressive than you might think, and it takes only a few parts to get very clever results. In other fields imagination and creativity are not always this starkly obvious and you can delude yourself you’re more talented than you think. Not in Lego. Most people will just create dull and uninspired sculptures and mechanisms. The official builds are usually not very inventive compared to amateur ones, since they have the luxury of designing new parts if needed, and are usually going for visual appeal over inventive construction.
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