Surprise guest Balaji Srinivasan on Civility, Crypto, and the Network State: GM Farcaster ep398

Great work by all of you! We received 20+ entries for the client prize and are reviewing them now. The @farcaster account will announce the winners.

Tipping culture coming to X https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2114184998651822094?s=46

Hi from Astana 👋

Got to meet @vrn.eth at a “What is Farcaster” talk by @dylanb.eth a couple days ago and she’s already put out fantastic Mini App. https://www.socratic.bot/farcaster?day=4

In the run-up to launch, we DM'd every @splits customer above $10k for feedback and the overwhelming response was: "Thank God you guys are finally charging." Splits launched Tiers this week and I'm insanely proud of how we thought about monetization. Hats off to @w and @gregfromstl who shaped a lot of the nuances here. https://splits.org/blog/launching-splits-pro-premium/

I've just submitted two proposals for sponsorship of the Lobby: 🟪 The first to /purple to sponsor a variety of trivia and other games for 3 months with bonus prizes for Purple members and Purple branding throughout the mini app. 🟨 And a prop to /yellow for a weekly trivia sponsorship in The Lobby with art and artist focused trivia (once a week for 3 months). This prop includes bonus prizes for Yellow Collective members and Yellow branding of the weekly trivia game (see LetterLoops as an example). NOTE: The Lobby is accessible via any client that has mini app access (eg can play on FC client or Quorum) You can read the props below as well as a site that includes details about The Lobby and an FAQ if you are not familiar with @burr.eth and @plantsnft project that they have been building out all year. AND should really try out some trivia or the other games to get a feel. Purple and Yellow members: drop any questions here in the replies or in the respective group chats OR shoot them directly to Burr or Plants. Voting starts on 10/24 around 1:30 pm ET. https://claude.ai/artifact/3hjcUjhca9UHHTd2Lmww2b https://nouns.build/dao/base/0x8de71d80ee2c4700bc9d4f8031a2504ca93f7088/vote/49 https://nouns.build/dao/base/0x220e41499cf4d93a3629a5509410cbf9e6e0b109/vote/32 https://farcaster.xyz/miniapps/34ey8Oz4ckl-/lobby

Farcaster is an open protocol, so anyone can build a client for it, where anyone can post, follow people, join channels, and DM. There are only a few out there right now, and we'd love to see more. A few to try or build on: -Selfcaster by @genuinejack. Your own client on Vercel in about ten minutes -Our reference client is open source, and @dwr wrote a guide for getting it running with your agent -Firefly on iOS - get your Farcaster, Lens, and X accounts all in one place If you want to build one, @balajis.eth's $2,048 client bounty is open until Saturday morning, and every entry still needs someone to test it. Building a cool client? Let us know 👇 Selfcaster: https://farcaster.xyz/genuinejack/0x5c5b64ed @dwr's guide: https://farcaster.xyz/dwr/0xc73059b4 Firefly: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/firefly-web3-everything-app/id1640183078 Reference client: https://github.com/farcasterxyz/client Client bounty: https://farcaster.xyz/balajis.eth/0x50184b62

Jensen Huang is in Kazakhstan giving a fireside chat to Network School and other local ai companies and groups. Gonna live cast what is talked about below

We’ve been getting a lot of “when Clanker announcement” in our chat on GMFC. So now Clanker Announcement. ⤵️ 💜We appreciate the partnership between @gmfarcaster and @clanker this year, including the opportunity to run the Clanker Ecosystem Fund /cef. It started with @dish and @dwr and then transitioned to @rish. We thank them all for their support and trust. 💜 We look forward to seeing the next chapter unfold with @masknetwork and @suji at the helm! 🎉Best wishes!!

clanker will be maintained by the @masknetwork / Firefly team moving forward they have exciting plans and strong partners lined up to support clanker’s next chapter for things going forward, please reach out to @suji thank you all for your continued support clank clank

well, the internet had a good run I guess

$2048 IN PRIZES FOR VIDEOS ON NORBERT ELIAS & CIVILITY As noted above, within the Farcaster reference client, we want friend speech rather than foe speech. But really the term we’re looking for is civility. THE SHORT WAY The short way for me to explain to a crypto degen why civility is important is to make the narrowly economic case: Singapore is much more valuable than either the Soviet Union or Somalia, because its people are polite, courteous, and respectful towards each other, which means they can cooperate at larger scale, which means they can build more valuable things. So: it’s in your interest to stop being a crypto “degenerate”, even in a joking way, and instead become a regenerate. Help us regenerate civilization, starting here at Farcaster — because we can build far more valuable things together (including physical things!) if we can re-establish the base of civility that underpins a high-trust society. THE LONG WAY The long way for me to explain why civility is important is to (a) refer you to a series of good books and then (b) ask you to make 59 second vertical videos out of those books, summarizing as much of the gist as possible. Start with Norbert Elias’ book, The Civilizing Process. The rough background is that Europe was civilized (during Rome), then it became de-civilized (during the Dark Ages), then it gradually re-civilized (starting well before the Renaissance). How did that re-civilization happen? Elias shows through the study of centuries of Middle Ages etiquette that Europe rose out of its post-Roman collapse in part by adopting good interpersonal manners. In modern terms, manners were a peer-to-peer signaling mechanism between strangers showing that the other person’s animal impulses were firmly under control. Once Europeans could trust each other on extremely small things, like whether they were going to spit at the table, they could potentially trust each other on larger things…and thus did scaled cooperation return after the end of Rome. In tandem with this (literally) peer-to-peer civilizing process, Europeans started to gradually recentralize. Instead of the thousands of competing warlords that arose after the end of Rome, a few royal houses gradually consolidated a monopoly on physical violence, such that every interpersonal slight didn’t immediately result in a potentially murderous brawl. You can try ordering the paperback by Elias (amazon.com/dp/0631221611) or read a decent review (researchgate.net/publication/248991628_The_Civilising_process_A_review_of_Norbert_Elias), but because a Kindle copy isn’t available in English right now, you can also get pretty far by querying an AI model that has indexed the full text. Start with a query like this: “Tell me about Norbert Elias’ book, which shows how modern state capacity and complex markets arose as Europeans re-learned self-restraint and manners. The counterintuitive point by Elias is that civilization is dependent on seemingly trivial peer-to-peer behavior, like table manners, and not just laws or capital.” The reason I reference this book is that today’s social media is much like the Medieval Europe Elias studied. It's a place where anyone can attack anyone at any time, with essentially no central authority to stop disputes from spiraling out of control. A big part of what got Europe from the dark ages to the nation state era was the concept of civility; that's also what we think will be crucial for moving from today's internally combative social networks to network states. YOUR TASK Make a ~59 second vertical video with a 9:16 aspect ratio on the evolution of civility, and how it enabled large-scale interpersonal cooperation, starting with Norbert Elias’ work. Assume your viewer has absolutely no context and is starting cold. Talk to them in concrete terms anyone can understand, in terms of why a group that’s mutually polite to each other can be more successful economically (in terms of creating wealth) and physically (in terms of increasing safety) because they can cooperate at larger scale. We’ll give $1,024 for first place, $512 for second place, and then $128 each for honorable mentions, subject to whether there are enough good submissions. Winners will be paid in USDC to their public Farcaster wallet addresses by default. To enter, reply to this post with your vertical video. This prize will run for three days exactly from this post’s timestamp. That's it. Our journey of one thousand miles starts with a single step. Go read a book, or at least ask an AI about it if you can't get a copy. Then make that vertical video on why civility is economically necessary, and help restore friend speech on Farcaster!

THE RESTORATION OF FRIEND SPEECH ($2048 PRIZE) Farcaster began as a community of friends — specifically Dan Romero’s friends-of-friends — and it thus implicitly had the social norm of friend speech. It was really Friendcaster. However, it couldn’t maintain that norm at scale, in part because it lacked an army of human moderators to enforce its pre-existing terms of service. And thus Farcaster was on track to fail. But with the ~95% support we’ve received in our recent decentralized digital democratic election, we now have a mandate for the restoration of Farcaster. With scalable AI moderation, we can finally create the first digital Singapore, where an in-person level of civility facilitates a high-trust community, and thus a high-value digital economy. And we couldn’t be more excited about what’s next. So: let’s discuss our recent election, the motivation for the restoration, and the economic importance of civility. At the end we’ll close with a new kind of Farcaster Prize: $2048 in content prizes, for creating vertical videos on Norbert Elias’ book on why civility was actually essential for large-scale cooperation rather than a mere nice-to-have. 1. THE ELECTION First, some numbers on our first decentralized democratic election. As you can see from fc.dylanbrodeur.org and verify onchain, we received 26,000+ onchain votes for our new social smart contract, representing ~95% of all accounts that voted, and including many of the original Farcaster users, including both previous CEOs (@dwr and @rish), but also Linda Xie, Jesse Pollak, Alok Vasudev, and many others. The silent supermajority is silent no longer; there’s now overwhelming, cryptographically provable support by named accounts for the restoration of friend speech to Farcaster. Importantly, prior to the election on October 17, we moderated out only 271 abusive accounts, or about 1% of the 26,000+ onchain votes. Of those 271 accounts, we received 85 appeals and have accepted ~67% of them. The remaining ~200 unapologetically abusive accounts repeatedly violated the pre-existing Farcaster terms of service, by doing things like issuing memecoins to celebrate the murder of an innocent father, wishing death on specific people, promoting every kind of racial, class, gender, national and religious hatred, harassing named others with random obscenities, and running an endless array of spammers and bots. Many of these abusive accounts were already widely blocked or muted. However, despite being less than 1% of the Farcaster electorate, the abusers formed a loud, mean, unrepresentative minority who intimidated friendly accounts into silence. The answer to such a thing is democracy: our ~95% of pro-social netizens now provably outnumbers that abusive ~1%. In addition to the ~1% that we moderated out, there’s also another ~4% who chose to opt out of the new Farcaster. While of course on one level we’d like everyone to want our newly abuse-and-harassment-free Farcaster reference client, on another level we’re glad to see this because (a) it proves there was a true democratic choice as a sufficient number actually did choose to opt out and (b) it helps advance Farcaster client decentralization. Fundamentally, the core difference of opinion is over whether anyone actually has a “right” to run up to strangers online and endlessly scream curses at their digital faces, and moreover whether others must not just endure but *fund* such abuse indefinitely. Such behavior had unfortunately become too common on Farcaster, which is why we held the plebiscite, but we just don’t agree that this claimed right to free screams exists within the reference client. It's good that those people who think differently chose other clients and opted out; that's the magic of Farcaster. For everyone else, for the ~95% of accounts that opted in, let’s give a bit more history on why we’re committed to restoring the original Farcaster norms of friend speech, and then scaling that norm to digital Singapore with AI. 2. THE RESTORATION What was the original purpose of Farcaster? It was meant to be a techno-optimistic exit from the anarcho-tyranny of pre-2022 social media, and a return to a community of friends. I know this because I discussed decentralized social networks in detail both online and in-person with Dan for many years before Farcaster was born, and was also one of Farcaster’s very first users and investors. In other words, I know what Farcaster was meant to be…as opposed to what much of Farcaster unfortunately became, namely an original community of friends that was increasingly surrounded by a non-community of airdrop farmers, automated fakes, and even aggressive foes. It’s worth understanding how this degeneration happened, so that we don’t repeat it. Fundamentally, the norms of early Farcaster were like the unwritten norms of small town America. Everyone knew each other and got along. Those positive-sum friends then created wealth; that wealth attracted a flood of zero-sum farmers and negative-sum foes, which then in turn drove many of the friends into silence. The lesson is that the norms of small town America, almost tautologically, don’t scale beyond a small town. What does scale to millions is Singapore. Singapore achieves something extremely similar to small town America, namely a high-trust society with spotless streets and minimal crime, where anyone can walk any time of day or night without fear. Amazingly, it combines that with the merits of big city America, namely international capitalism, openness to experience, and the inclusion of people from different races and religions. Singapore achieved this by first establishing social order, by creating a society where spitting on the ground, public obscenity, drug abuse, and the like were simply prohibited. It became a shining island of civility amidst a sea of anarchy and tyranny in its neighborhood. On a pound-for-pound basis, Singapore then became both the strongest state and the strongest market in Asia, making the country admirable to both center-left administrators and center-right entrepreneurs in the Anglophone world, and a model for Asia’s most important leaders over five decades, from Deng Xiaoping to Narendra Modi. Indeed, if you try putting a valuation on Singapore itself, estimated as either (a) the number of people times the net worth per person, or (b) the number of square feet times the average price per square foot, you get a number around $5-10 trillion. It is thus itself one of the most important startups in the world, the original startup city. And because it greatly influenced the development of both modern China and India, the #1 and #3 economies in the world, it’s also one of the most influential startups in world history. Again, all that began by establishing civility. The Singaporean norms against public swearing and spitting meant that its citizens could trust each other to behave themselves on small things, which meant they could potentially trust each other on big things, which is how they began to cooperate at scale, and how Singapore started to win business from the global market. Civility towards strangers of different races, classes, and religions was one of the core values that underpinned Singapore’s valuations. That’s why the vision of Network School Farcaster is to first create a digital Singapore, with in-person norms of civility similar to Lee Kuan Yew’s city state. We’ll then print out that friendly community at meetups, popups, and permanents around the world, like Farcon and Network School. And once that works, we’ll turn Farcaster into a platform for civilized people who want to find, found, or fund their own startup societies or network states. Along the way, we’ll add many features to Farcaster as it currently stands, but always with an eye towards incentivizing positive-sum behavior. All right! Election recap over. Details of the next $2048 Farcaster prize are in the reply below; we're asking you to create a video around Norbert Elias' pioneering work on Medieval Europe, to explain why inter-personal civility is a prerequisite for large-scale cooperation.

On Monday I let our dev team go. It was a tough call. First, the important part: Tomasz (@tstomek) and Marcin (@marciin) are fantastic engineers. Tomasz on frontend, Marcin on backend. They did incredible work on POV and I'm grateful for everything they put in. This isn't about them. If you're hiring, reach out to them directly or DM me. I'll vouch for both. Anyone would be lucky to have either of them. Now the why. DEGEN doesn't have a product ready to scale yet. We're still searching for product market fit, and at this stage speed matters more than headcount. You build a team when you've found something that works and need to pour fuel on it. We're not there. Then there's runway. It's a bear market and I plan ahead. My rule: DEGEN always has at least 2 years of runway. This keeps us well covered. We're in a good spot. This is discipline, not trouble. So I'm going back to how DEGEN started. Me, in my room, building and iterating at supersonic speed. After launch I got bogged down in process. I've cut almost all of it. I'm in the office every day, coding again, and with AI tools, how fast one person can ship is wild. What I'm building: yeetr.fun I've been trading options since I was 16. At Credit Suisse I took every derivatives class they offered the traders. I love options, I love WallStreetBets, I love the trenches. This is the product I was meant to build. Options are one of the best financial instruments out there, but most people never touch them. Too complex for retail, and real options markets need deep liquidity so market makers can hedge. That's why almost nothing outside BTC and ETH has them. Yeetr is my answer. Think Uniswap for options. No order book, no market maker, all onchain. You earn on your bag and hedge some short term risk, which gives people a reason to hold a token instead of pumping and dumping it. DEGEN is still a top token on Base with a great community. But community and brand aren't enough. I want to build something that brings value back to holders. If Yeetr takes off, holders win. My biggest bag is DEGEN. Smaller team, one builder, more shipping. You'll see it on the timeline and in the app. Everything I build is for the DEGEN community. Thank you for believing in me. Back to work 🎩

is this true?

meet quilcast.com: a permissionless quilibrium hypersnap web client that allows you to cast to hypersnap (that for now still syncs with snapchain iiuc) it's open source, super fast, super light, no bloat, website should work well on mobile too please report any feature requests or bugs you encounter! all the private keys live in your browser, no tracking, no analytics, super private did i mention that it's FAST??? (yeah no bloat)