Best of paragraph.xyz/@rm on Kiwi News
@rm on Paragraph · Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
30 stories by @rm on Paragraph have been shared on Kiwi News since 4 November 2024, with 57 upvotes and 10 comments in total. The latest was shared on 3 June 2025. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Capital Formation in the Reputation Era
The article argues that reputation will become the central filter for capital formation as blockchain launchpads lower barriers to entry, because most people lack the tools to evaluate projects. It cites memecoin launchpads and livestreams, such as Dexscreener, as examples of raw, risky fundraising in which hype and community drive decisions as much as fundamentals. It also says reputation systems must evolve to handle both human and machine participants, and that the current system rewards traders over builders. The piece predicts 2025 will be the year reputation becomes the cornerstone of capital formation, though it does not provide supporting data for that prediction.
- BTC: A relic of the past.
The author argues that Bitcoin is becoming less relevant as the tokenization of everything, autonomous agents and swarm-like collaboration reshape value, calling it a relic of a world that worshiped scarcity. Bitcoin's fixed 21 million supply made it a "digital gold" narrative after 2008, but the author says its design incentivizes hoarding rather than spending, so it is practically useless as a currency. The piece contrasts this with tokenized ecosystems, which it says resemble the credit-based systems described in David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years, and with blockchains as a "world computer" that may feel restrictive to agents operating without linear time. The author acknowledges Bitcoin may gain short-term value but says value is not the same as relevance.
- Media Must Evolve
This essay argues that online media should become dynamic, "Smart Media" that evolves through user interaction rather than staying static, and it presents Bonsai, a project that launched its first templates on Lens, as an early step toward this. The author says generative AI and onchain tools such as Farcaster Frames and Lens Open Actions make this shift practical. Bonsai's "Adventure Time" template, for example, lets creators run text-based stories that unfold through feed comments, shaped by the community. The author also discloses being a Bonsai tokenholder who has supported the project through We3.co.
- Ethereum’s Narrative Polarity
The article argues that Ethereum's story has split into two competing narratives, the cryptocurrency purists who see it as the next evolution of money and the world computer proponents who see it as a platform for decentralized computation, and that both are essential. It describes critics who say the world computer focus sidelines finance, and notes that DeFi has grown strongly, while recent tweets urging the Ethereum Foundation and users to "dogfood" Ethereum have deepened the divide. The author calls for embracing plurality, fostering collaboration, and developing new vocabulary, and concludes that DeFi and the world computer are complementary rather than competing visions.
- The Internet’s Collapse into Now
This essay argues that time online no longer moves forward or backward but folds into a continuous "now," where past, present and future coexist and platforms serve personalized loops instead of chronological timelines. It uses quantum and physics metaphors to describe multi-presence, live real-time collaboration, and multiplayer finance and gaming, and it calls blockchains "Newtonian" relics that expose the internet's instability. It also predicts that autonomous AI agents will develop an alien morality and swarm-like intelligence that the author says may not serve humanity.
- Real-Time Attention Markets
The article argues that real-time attention markets, such as the memecoin launchpad pump.fun, trade on immediacy and collective participation rather than long-term foresight, and that they will grow more social, mobile and always-on. It describes pump.fun as a live, chaotic arena of memecoins where users buy and sell while chat streams run alongside live candle charts, and where launching a token now takes only a few clicks. The author also notes that for every viral hit, countless attempts are forgotten, with losses staying largely invisible. The piece closes with a forecast that these platforms will expand through viral success stories, social features and real-time network effects.
- Directionally Right But Still Wrong.
RM argues that crypto's core ideas are directionally right but have been articulated differently than early advocates expected, with people adopting pieces of the stack and building new experiences around them. Citing a 2014 experience in Hong Kong and a 2016 stay in Shanghai, RM describes how users who skipped earlier technology stages leapfrogged to new outcomes, comparing this to WeChat's mini-apps and QR-code payments. RM says DeFi activity has concentrated in products like new casinos and memecoins, which RM compares to e-sports, and says Stripe's embrace of stablecoins reflects a similar pattern. The text concludes that progress will come through fragmentation and specialization rather than holistic improvement.
- Why I 'Don't Like' Privacy
The author argues that "privacy" is a weak frame for crypto and that "control" should replace it as the mission, with privacy treated as a side effect of user control. The argument rests on the word being vague, easily misread as hiding, and subjective, and on the claim that Tornado Cash is viewed as either a money-laundering tool or vital infrastructure depending on the viewer. The author also says user experience for control needs as much investment as cryptography, since cookie banners show people often trade control for convenience.
- AI Overshoot
The author argues that AI development follows the same "overshoot" pattern as climate change, where society accepts present harms and assumes future technology or policy will fix them later. Drawing on Wim Carton and Andreas Malm's book How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, the post describes overshoot as exceeding temperature goals of 2–3°C over the next century on the assumption that technologies like direct air capture or fusion will eventually solve the problem. The author applies this to AI, citing heavy investment in GPUs, data centers and general AI, and the expectation that regulation will come once problems grow large enough. The post also links the pattern to crypto debates about the Ethereum Foundation and DeFi.
- Value Glitch
RM, writing in a set of notes meant to develop a theory of play, argues that crypto and Web3 work exposed the limits of how value is measured, including through metrics like liquidity, volume and revenue and through GDP, which leaves out care work, the environment and the informal economy. RM says that years working in crypto, including at WE3.co, a design collective founded in 2021, made them more cynical and less intuitive about value and price. The text also says that the value of foundational design work is hard to price, since the final visual layer is the most visible and easiest to commoditize.
- Same Same But Different Backend
The author argues that the core ethos of web3, especially interoperability, permissionlessness and composability, remains the future, and that platforms that lock users in undermine it. They describe struggling to choose a blogging platform for a book-and-blog project: self-coding and Ghost risked overengineering, Fountain.ink was too early-stage, and Paragraph and Mirror-style platforms felt too crypto-coded for a general audience. Substack offered better tooling but felt like too much control, and the author says they want one Markdown file distributed across all platforms with comments gathered in one place. They urge builders of social products not to treat interoperability as a secondary goal.
- Time Is Changing
The essay argues that time, not money or data, is becoming the scarcest resource in the digital era, since attention and machine compute cannot be copied or stored once they are spent. It contrasts the internet's collapse of chronology and its infinite, copyable content with blockchains, which impose a fixed sequence through timestamped blocks. It cites Folding@home as an example of idle compute being lost and made valuable when directed to protein research. The piece closes by suggesting that choices about how to spend human and machine time reveal what people value most.
- We Control $Trump Now
The author, a crypto builder, argues that the $Trump memecoin turns a public figure's reputation into a tradable price, and that its 80% token allocation to one entity makes a graceful exit hard and creates accountability pressure on the issuer. The article notes the coin's price was soaring around the time Trump was about to become president again, and that its site claims "no official ties" to politics or Trump's personality. It predicts imitators such as celebrity personal tokens, while cautioning creators against tokenizing themselves, since attention-driven creator economies tend to burn people out.
- Agents are a Temporary Interface
- Design Ourobors
The author argues that design no longer follows linear steps, and that with generative AI and real code, prototypes become the live product built in its real environment. Drawing on work with a startup on reputation systems, the author describes a cyclical process in which the system is tuned continuously as people interact with it, since its end state cannot be known in advance. The author says the designer's role shifts from builder to curator, cultivating a product that evolves through use, and names tools such as Cursor, V0, Replit, and Valtown as part of this practice.
- Never-ending Childhood
The author wonders why so much of their online viewing and listening drifts back to childhood-era content, and suggests algorithms may be keeping adults trapped in a replica of their youth. They describe watching Pokémon card unpacking videos, LEGO reviews, Mr. Beast content, and Star Wars and Marvel titles, and mention a LEGO leak channel on Reddit with about 70k members. They contrast this with music taste peaking in the teens, recalling SoundCloud-era discovery with friends against today's algorithm-generated Spotify Radio playlists.
- Status Quo
The author argues that crypto has drifted from its original goal of open, censorship-resistant, decentralized infrastructure toward platforms that prioritize convenience and scale. Convenience is said to win over users, who accept trade-offs like cookie popups and only value security once something leaks or gets stolen. The piece says platforms built on protocols, such as L2s and integrated apps, concentrate control through sequencers and soft lock-ins, and it warns that protocol maintenance remains underfunded. It closes by asking whether builders will use tools like ZKPs and verifiable compute toward the original vision of freedom or build "more sophisticated, user-friendly cages."
- Ideas Flow Freely
RM describes a long-term plan to start a practice around unsupervised, free play, and argues that AI tools, which mostly converge on a single answer, miss the diverging exploration that creative work needs. RM is building a serious non-serious zine on play and has built a prototype "idea aquarium," where AI breaks notes into ideas that drift, bond and occasionally produce "design provocations." RM calls the prototype early and unscientific, but says it has shifted their thinking about the zine and treats AI as a tool for expansion rather than fast output.
- Directionally Right But Still Wrong.
RM argues that crypto's core ideas are directionally right but have been articulated differently than early advocates expected, with people leapfrogging to new uses. Drawing on a 2014 experience in Hong Kong and a 2016 stay in Shanghai, where WeChat showed an alternative mobile future, RM says the future "articulates itself unevenly." The essay points to chain and wallet abstraction and mini apps as more advanced than expected, and to DeFi activity concentrating in trading and memecoins, which RM compares to e-sports. It also cites Stripe's embrace of stablecoin payments as crypto-like but not shaped as the author envisioned. RM concludes that progress will come through fragmentation and specialization.
- The Garden and the Machine
The author argues that crypto's dominant focus on capital formation and speculation has turned an infinite game of building a new internet into a finite, zero-sum fight, and that the community should refocus on a shared vision. The piece describes crypto's mindshare going mostly to games and utilities built around finance, with memecoins, NFTs and ICOs cited as examples. It frames the choice as seeing Ethereum as a machine or as a garden, favoring the garden view tied to the Ethereum Foundation's stated mission of growth, spontaneity and exploration. It also warns that infighting and "Powered by Ethereum" messaging create barriers for outsiders who share values like decentralization and censorship resistance.
- Moats Must Die
Startup moats, such as unique technology, strong brands, or exclusive resources, are argued to be as outdated as city moats and walls, and startups should embrace openness and collaboration instead. The article draws a parallel to Copenhagen, where cities removed their walls and moats to allow expansion, connection, and innovation. It holds that rigid defenses limit a startup's ability to adapt, while open ecosystems, teamwork, and partnerships across multiple areas foster resilience and sustainable growth. The author does not cite specific companies or data.
- Why Software Is Disappearing from the World
The author argues that traditional software and digital design are fading as AI agents replace human-facing interfaces, with APIs, contracts and protocols becoming the main layer through which services are reached. The essay says design and visual content have become commodities as tools like MidJourney, Canva and RunwayML lower production costs, and that AI-driven profiles and content saturation are fragmenting attention. It adds that websites may shift toward documentation written to answer AI prompts, and that the writer's own conclusion is that a few uncertain years lie ahead, though their work remains secure for now.
- Designing Onchain
Designer writes that onchain design remains messy, misunderstood and underestimated, and that good design should create clarity rather than decoration, with identity, experience and strategy as the three pillars. Identity is framed as a compass for teams and communities, supported by internal alignment and reusable toolkits rather than just logos. On experience, the piece says designers should learn the technology, developers should respect design, and teams should collaborate early, since incentives shape user behavior more than UI or branding does.
- RM | Long-term Building is Rituals
Essayist RM argues that building long-term projects now requires deliberate rituals, because rapid iteration and short attention spans push builders toward short-term work. RM says children learning through Roblox and Minecraft pick up if-then logic and basic economics through play, and that modular ecosystems and indie-style, bite-sized projects are becoming the norm. RM calls the resulting pressure "attention halving" and cites Mariana Mazzucato's "mission economy" ideas as a model for long-term missions. The essay proposes physical, repeated, progress-driven rituals to keep teams aligned toward those missions over years.
- Questioning Supernormal
Drawing on Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa's idea of "supernormal" design, this essay argues that everyday systems such as markets, money, and clock time have been refined so long that they now feel inevitable and are rarely questioned, though they are human designs that could be redesigned. It says Graeber's account in Debt: The First 5000 Years holds that early exchange relied on trust rather than barter, and that coinage was invented to make trade measurable and controllable. The essay contrasts nature's constant exchange, such as nutrients passed through mycelial networks, with human systems built on value capture.
- From Identity to Identifying
The author argues that brands have shifted from projecting an identity to giving communities tools to participate, with marketing now centered on participation rather than purchase intent. Memes are described as currency that is easy to share and impossible to control, and the piece says strong teams act as market makers through their public engagement even before a token launch. Brands are advised to define what they stand for and against, let communities co-create, and build rituals and shared language that create engagement loops.
- On Age of Empires
The author uses Age of Empires II as a lens on working with AI, arguing that as agents take over optimization and base-building, the human role shifts toward observing, scouting and making strategic decisions. The essay says scouting and fog-of-war management map onto exploring new projects and deciding where to focus attention. It also says the gap between human intent and AI feedback, which feels one-sided, widens as AI grows more capable. The piece closes by asking what game people will play once agents handle the grind.
- While Hunting, We Miss the Forest for the Trees
The essay argues that the internet, and the autonomous agents within it, should be viewed as a living, interconnected forest rather than a space of hunters and prey, drawing on Liu Cixin's "Dark Forest Theory." It contends that anthropomorphic framing of AI, including the current focus on agents, limits our understanding and that artificial general intelligence may resemble an ecosystem such as fungal networks or swarms more than a single human-like entity. The author also claims that the internet is becoming autonomous and self-organizing, that time online is non-linear, and that the shift from PvP to "PxP" dynamics favors collaboration over individual competition.
- While Hunting, We Miss the Forest for the Trees
The essay argues that people should stop viewing the internet and AI agents through a hunter-versus-prey lens and instead see them as an interconnected, self-organizing forest or ecosystem. It draws on Liu Cixin's "Dark Forest" theory, the German saying about missing the forest for the trees, fungal networks, and Douglas Hofstadter's "strange loops" to support this shift. The author proposes replacing the "PvP" (player versus player) mindset with "PxP," and says decentralization, interoperability, and autonomous intelligence should be defended. The essay also describes time online as elastic and quantum-like, though it does not give supporting data for these claims.
- Player of Games
The author, a designer and indie creator, argues that modern life has turned into a set of overlapping competitive games, from crypto trading and fitness apps to income, status and online reputation, that leave people feeling fractured and perpetually behind. They describe their own time in OGame as a teenager, when they skipped school breaks to log in and eventually quit the game, and say they now limit themselves to one or two games a year. They also admit that as a designer they helped build the engagement loops and scoreboards that drive this feeling, and they contrast collaborative play, such as couch co-op and Pandemic, with the solo, PVP-style competition they see today.