Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Marketing of crypto as a technology is completely captured by actors who just want to market speculative investments rather than the value creation mechanisms they represent. Imagine if the marketing of Coca Cola were completely buried by the marketing of Coca Cola stock. Or T-bonds were easier to buy than groceries.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
NFTs were an okay entry toy product that created some literacy Global funds transfer is choked by kyc and fiat on/off ramps, but that’s probably as it should be. It will grow slowly. Tx costs for retail are now ok with L2s but fiat exchange rate risks are too high and in-crypto economy too small
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
We need a 3-pronged sector marketing strategy: 1. Increase size/variety of in-crypto dog-fooding economy. 2. Be real about tx costs, volatility, and tax/kyc burdens. Work to lower them for non-apocalyptic futures of extended coexistence with fiat and CBDCs 3. Promote all protocols, not just blockchain tokenized ones
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
This last one is the premise of /sop summerofprotocols.com 60% of the marketing needs are shared with all protocols that have decentralized/distributed architectures. 80% with protocols that use crypto (Merkle trees, keypairs…) but not tokens or blockchains Rising protocol literacy floats all these boats
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Protocolization is a BIGGER story than blockchain-crypto and has been going on about 3x as long, starting with the PC. Any technology that distributes computational agency protocolizes the world further. And replaces industrial monolithic institutional landscapes run by fiat elites with distributed equivalents.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Protocolization is as big as urbanization in transforming ways of life. It is creating a new kind of human with new basic literacy, just as urbanization turned farming households into consumption households. And created “users” and “consumers” who had “jobs” for narrower producer roles.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
We don’t yet know what kinds of humans will emerge at the other end. We’re in the equivalent of 1820s relative to urbanization. The idea of “consumer” was 70 years in the future. Less than 20% of the US had paycheck jobs earning cash salaries. The economy was mostly intra-household production.
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