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Letters to a Young Degen #1

to Most Redeemable Young Poet Help Helper

My Dear Help Helper,

I have received your letter the last month month but it took me a month to train a LLM to be able to hallucinate genuinely in the smol-speak vernecaular in Finnish. Now, do not get me wrong. I understand that our languages differ only by a suffix rule yet these friends of ours are only fluent in the late Borgesian mechanical keyboard ape-speak. Sometimes, they end up re-writing Shakespeare but none of them has ever tried to go full Adam Smith, or Friedrich von Hayek.

In your letter, you diagram an utterly complex financial primitive protocol with enough gamification that would blush any Homo Ludens on the question of what constitutes a play. Now, hear me: You happen to discard the beauty of scarcity of immediately available blockspace for all the knowledge in society, and take limitations as not plays but fouls. You are wrong.

However, you are onto something heretofore unbeknownst to the newly recruited: Hypershitcoinization is a Dyson sphere that will help otherwise smart but lost toads in search of a genuine open financial evolutionary infrastructure that will act as a test bed for the real protocol design incentives.

Now, hearing this many regen economists accuse me of being a degen, and they think that I am advocating for the normalization of spoilt casinos on the valuable internet networks of money before even deciding on what constitutes "money" [sic].

Recently, I casted—perchance on the wrong premises that would make the matters worse when I did realize a death spiral has rendered it probable on the Base network when it comes to the thermodynamics of current liquidity:

It was just a bait to lure you there. Yet, we have past that curve a long time ago. But what are we gonna do when both individual and institutional market makers tap their hopes into social layer games which could be perfected yet apparently slowly turning into "points" hunt platforms again? It goes without saying that somebody is going to create their own sign-in-with-farcaster platform for points adventures that are even more boring than any copypasta match3 games on Steam.

Yes, you are wrong to assume that if you build unsustainable hype-based financial games that not merely utilize FOMO and but also do not even have any roadmaps to begin with, either; that people will hop on your lottery wagon—snowcrash. We have all witnessed the security loops of building in public when it comes to assumingly primitive innovations that were only be available for a rescue solely by sophisticated engineers in the end. The hype was the same.

Now, prithée, please do think thrice before rolling out your first idea as the ultimate financial rails renaissance where swarms act like slime mould across electricity circuits for what's left over on the board. I know you want to make not only for money but also social status, too, and it is highly probable that you are venturing into this project of yours that is but a fork of malicious forks with the hope that it might help you shine when you are applying to the next Paradigm fellowship, or at least a Kernel cohort.

I have checked the diagrams but I cannot even open them in Draw without redrawing them myself since you do not even how to share a file. &, you are telling me you are the future of France? S'il vous plaît, ne vous accrochez pas à votre avenir comme si vous teniez un sac de pommes de terre gâtées.

Be more bold and take the time-preference bluntly. What does it even mean? If you are not a perfect developer, you will not be able to play those games you think are not that foul plays on the ecosystem—but they are. It is because you have set up precedences with your latest project but it is merely another unsustainable zero-sum game.

I do not tell you that everyone should be free-riding your efforts. I now you are well-meaning young individual, a poet at night, a gas golfer by day. Have you ever considered writing up an EIP? It takes so much time? Well, that is what coordination is all about. I also want to live forever but there are tradeoffs everywhere.

Now, listen to me. Open up Le Rossignol by Stravinsky. Focus on the story. Do not reinvent China. I am looking forward to hearing you from again. I am not able to reply direclty since these foxholes on the chain bars signals especially during the day, and I am retrieving yours by a radio scanner at night.

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#degen#liquidity#defi#base#farcaster#help helper#letters#open finance