Share this page!

balajis.com Profile picture
Twitter logo
26 Nov, 5 tweets, 3 min read
The proposed new anti-crypto regulation by @stevenmnuchin1 is a form of financial disenfranchisement. It harms people who lack ID, further expands the surveillance regime, and sets up more honeypots for hackers.

It must be resisted vigorously.
Let's remember that OPM was hacked. And the State of Texas, and the Department of Veterans Affairs, and NARA, and even the US Voter Database.

Forcing companies to surveil you is bad enough. Then the databases get hacked and blasted all over the internet.
digitalguardian.com/blog/top-10-bi…
The new regulation is financial disenfranchisement because it takes away a right people already have: the right to use crypto without being surveilled, tracked, and recorded in some US government database. coincenter.org/we-must-protec…
It's also impractical because they want KYC for smart contracts. Imagine requiring KYC for every packet sent and every program deployed!

You can't comply with this & still do crypto. If it does go through, even more crypto founders leave the US market.
This particular form of financial disenfranchisement is also a great way to block people in need from receiving funds. Do you think the Venezuelan or Nigerian governments would provide "KYC docs" for the people their regimes are oppressing? coindesk.com/bitcoin-adopti…

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with balajis.com

balajis.com Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @balajis

balajis.com Profile picture
25 Nov
The Cool War

Thesis: America is transitioning from the coolest country in the world to the holiest country in the world. From blue jeans & counterculture to blue checks & cancel culture.
America's soft power remains, but it's of a very different type, and more vulnerable in the long run. Converting all these soft power institutions like Hollywood into instruments for propagating a very American form of secular gospel may open up space for competitors.
The rise of TikTok is instructive. Twenty years ago, the idea that a Chinese app could outcool Hollywood & SV to win millions of US teenagers would be laughable.

Is it a national security threat? Maybe, but the soft power issue may be a bigger deal than even the data collection.
Read 11 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
19 Nov
We really should be in the middle of a golden age of productivity. Within living memory, computers did not exist. Photocopiers did not exist. *Backspace* did not exist. You had to type it all by hand.
It wasn't that long ago that you couldn't search all your documents. Sort them. Back them up. Look things up. Copy/paste things. Email things. Change fonts of things. Undo things.

Instead, you had to type it all on a typewriter!
If you're doing information work, relative to your ancestors who worked with papyrus, paper, or typewriter, you are a golden god surfing on a sea of electrons. You can make things happen in seconds that would have taken them weeks, if they could do them at all.
Read 13 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
17 Nov
If you're interested in self-hosting, I've been very impressed with cloudron.io. Open source, quick to set up, allows easy installation of Ghost, Mattermost, GitLab, and 80+ other apps.
A few tips:

1) Use a dedicated server from Hetzner or Contabo, not an AWS instance. Reason: it's 10-100X cheaper & you don't need programmability.

2) You'll need to configure the box to send email (eg password resets), which means a host that allows setting PTR records.
Cloudron may be interesting for crypto & dweb people as well because packaging new apps for it is Docker-based and quite easy. docs.cloudron.io/custom-apps/tu…
Read 5 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
12 Nov
"One of the clearest indications of stagnation is the flatlining of energy usage...Hall calls the long-term trend of about 7% annual growth in energy usage per capita the 'Henry Adams Curve'. In the late 20th century, we fell off of it." rootsofprogress.org/where-is-my-fl…
"A good explanation for technological stagnation is that the only technological revolution of the last 50 years, computing, was the only one that didn’t need more power than could be provided by the technology of the 1970s." rootsofprogress.org/where-is-my-fl…
"An even greater regulatory burden applies to nuclear power, which Hall blames for the skyrocketing cost of power plants in the US."
Read 6 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
10 Nov
A new way to fund open source?

- Be open source dev
- Issue a token
- Hold X% of it
- Has 0 value initially
- Award (100-X)% of it over time to folks who contribute code
- Companies then buy token to prioritize bugs & features
- Suddenly, an economy arises!
The basic idea is that the token starts as zero value. There's no ICO, it's just a way for the lead dev to say thank you for people submitting pull requests.

Over time, it organically gains utility, as it becomes a way to pay for the time of people with skill in that codebase.
The value of the token is essentially a bet on how big the open source project will get. If you believe that a project may attain thousands of stars and forks, you buy the token as a way of supporting the devs *and* capturing upside.

Motivated by:
github.com/Marak/faker.js… Image
Read 5 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
2 Nov
Lockdown = Dem votes down?


If Ds are less likely to vote in-person this year than Rs due to COVID, and only (say) 80% of those would have voted in-person actually end up voting by mail, that could mean a big partisan swing to Republicans.

This *may* be what 538 is missing. 🧵
Put another way: whenever you convert from one channel to another, like going from in-person to mail, you will lose some fraction of people.

If a much larger share of Ds are doing that conversion this year than Rs, they lose more votes. That could be the big unmodeled factor.
I looked at how 538 modeled COVID's impact on turnout. It appears they model COVID’s impact solely as higher uncertainty. But not as a partisan factor that favors Rs who will vote in-person more than Ds because they are less concerned about COVID.
fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-f…
Read 8 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

Like this author's thread?

Get email notifications when new thread is out from this Author!

Check out other threads from this Author!

Read all threads by @balajis