Best of farcaster.xyz/vgr on Kiwi News
@vgr on Farcaster · Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
11 stories by @vgr on Farcaster have been shared on Kiwi News since 6 December 2023, with 38 upvotes and 13 comments in total. The latest was shared on 1 July 2026. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- @vgr: Protocols as skeletal horror vs AI's flesh horror - crypto's dual nature
Vitalik Buterin's (no, the author is @vgr, Vitalik Buterin is not named in the text) — correction: the text is a short social media post by @vgr, and it argues that crypto protocols should be framed as a skeletal horror, the counterpart to AI's flesh horror. It contrasts protocols' fixed shapes, barriers and deterministic constraint with AI's shape-shifting, ooze-like nature. The post says normies find crypto cringe and that crypto people wrongly try to make it "Fun," and it suggests the real task is to make crypto a dual horror to AI, characterized by mindless, crystalline determinism and a sharp split between absolute freedom and absolute constraint.
- @vgr: Farcaster didn't test if people want decentralization
Vitalik Buterin's critic, @vgr, argues that the claim "most people don't care about decentralization" is unsupported, and that Farcaster did not test whether people want decentralization. He says people adopt decentralized options like private messaging, Mastodon and Bluesky when they are meaningfully available and within their capabilities. He writes that Farcaster instead tested whether a subset of technically sophisticated users would run decentralized infrastructure under some incentive schemes, which he calls a narrow question about one company's business model.
- @vgr: Peter Drucker's 1950s parable about Ethereum block builders
Vitalik Buterin's tweet, shared as @vgr, presents a parable attributed to Peter Drucker in which the problem with Ethereum block builders is the one focused on maximizing efficiency. In the parable, three block builders are asked what they are doing: the first says building blocks for a fair return, the second says building the fastest, cheapest, most efficiently knapsacked blocks in the mempool, and the third says building a cypherpunk cathedral. The attributed commentary says the first and third builders are not problems, while the second is.
- @vgr: crypto adoption lacks differentiation, memecoins add salt to the sea
- @vgr: AI stack vs crypto stack, 15 layers from power to regulation
@vgr sets out the AI stack and the crypto stack as parallel 15-layer models, running from power sources to cynical regulation. Both begin with power sources and GPUs, and the crypto list asks whether blockchains are comparable to AI models at layer 7. Both stacks put a "corner case forcing function" at layer 10, paranoid and lonely people for AI and degens and grifters for crypto, and both end with visionary FAFOers, techlash critics and cynical regulation politicians. The crypto list also flags a missing layer and labels stablecoins as "crypto slop."
- @vgr: memecoins are useless information traded fast, not real value creation
Vitalik-style essay? No, the title attributes the piece to @vgr, so the argument belongs to vgr. Central point: memecoins are not real value creation because trading useless information quickly does not make it useful. Supporting points: a joke does not become worth a billion dollars because a penny is traded 100 billion times in an hour, or because a million-dollar flash loan is used for one minute. Trading value should track how materially new information enters a market and changes the world, and creator coins are said to fall into the same category as memecoins.
- What archetype will replace “consumer” the way “consumer” replaced “citizen”
- @vgr: rethinking "it's time to build" and the myth of builders
Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) argues that the idea behind Marc Andreessen's "it's time to build" essay (pmarca) is incoherent, because building cannot be cleanly separated from the destruction it involves. He says a society-wide call to build would at best raise the status of builders and at worst unleash destruction far larger than any building, with the building itself mostly naive "pure creation," such as doomed Xanadu-style projects. His alternative is to recognize that building is only one aptitude among many, and to treat the end of a finite game as a prompt to improvise a new one through play-testing rather than slogan-led missions.
- @vgr: Crypto needs cult deprogramming to rejoin society
@vgr argues that the crypto sector needs cult deprogramming to rejoin society. Bitcoin joined what the post calls the zombie apocalypse libertarian ancap cult, but its restrictive vision of digital gold may let it survive, much as gold stays valuable despite goldbug crackpots. Ethereum's cult is less obvious, with "wagmi" offered as a pointer to a mix of neopagan mutualism, ersatz spirituality, and naive global altruism that could not control its own degen casino element.
- @vgr: case study in tokenized market design, information structure first
@vgr argues that designing a properly tokenized market should begin with information structure rather than mechanisms, using a case study that solves a real problem without using crypto, though it could have. The case study's designers focused first on the information structure problem and second on mechanisms. The post contrasts this with crypto projects, which typically start with mechanisms and dismiss the problem as "application details left as a homework exercise for domain experts," even though it is the harder problem. The linked case study is a Substack piece by Matthew Yglesias, "How to actually feed America."
- @vgr: Bitcoin as a pure dollar hedge and economic doomsday indicator
Vitalik Buterin-style framing aside, this post by @vgr argues that Bitcoin's rise should be read as a pure hedge against the dollar and fiat currencies generally, not as a separate narrative. The post states that the USD is down 10% and calls this a bad sign for the state of the world, a "doomsday clock" measure. It adds that the 30-year bond yield was last at this level in 2023, but Bitcoin's all-time high is much higher than it was at that yield peak, so doom is closer. It also says Ethereum's valuation has diverged from Bitcoin's for reasons similar to silver diverging from gold, but more strongly. Wait, I must correct my draft: the post never mentions Vitalik Buterin, so that phrase should be removed.