A combination of national incompetence, ugly nationalism, and woke fanaticism has spent down America’s soft power globally. It’s decades in the making.
Rather than restrain passions and maintain a degree of broad, centrist appeal as befits a world leader — it’s been years of internal knife fighting, punctuated with drone strikes, surveillance, bombings, sanctions, invasions, financial crises, bailouts, and the COVID catastrophe.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
If we zoom out of current events or Russia/US for a second, think about the run-up to the Iraq War. Are we sure the US wouldn't invent a narrative about some foreign leader, technologically deplatform them, invade the country, and then say "mistakes were made" a few years later?
That's the kind of not-too-unlikely scenario that has other sovereigns concerned about US tech companies. After Tonkin Gulf, babies-in-incubators, and Iraq WMD, quite a few wars were started by false narratives. Now imagine a national leader couldn't even rebut these.
If you buy (say) iron ore from a country, that's "decentralized". The vendor can't hit a key to melt the iron after they've sold it to you.
Software is very different. US tech companies retain root access and can kill-switch your communications grid if USG tells them to.
Expect many more national bans on American tech companies in the weeks and months to come.
Market caps will crater when deprived of markets. And we will see a complete inversion as states gradually begin favoring crypto protocols over American companies. theguardian.com/world/2021/jan…
The Regulatory Flippening
In the 1990s, the US government fought encryption. Now it mandates it.
Similarly, once regulators realize that crypto protocols exercise *less power* over their countries than foreign corporations, they’ll adopt a protocol-first approach.
Many governments already encourage the use of open source over proprietary code when available.
They will eventually prefer crypto APIs over corporate APIs for the same reason. Crypto is what comes after open source: it’s also open state & open execution. brookings.edu/wp-content/upl…
Thesis: the crypto version of any product ends up being far more valuable than the original.
Bitcoin is already more valuable than PayPal and will eventually be more valuable than gold.
And the various defi apps on Ethereum will be more valuable than their fintech cognates.
I had this thesis long ago. It's still in the early stages of playing out, but here's why it should be true.
1) far better developer experience with open APIs 2) far better reach for a true protocol than a corporate product 3) far more token hodlers than traditional shareholders
If you can make decentralized gold, wires, lending, borrowing, interest, derivatives, cap tables, or the like work...why would you *ever* use the corporate version?
It'd be like using Oracle over Postgres. You'd always pick the open version, if you can.
It is a matter of national security for India, Israel, and every other country to maintain a sovereign communications channel for their leaders to reach their people directly.
The world cannot be ruled by American corporations.
Every sovereign needs its own basic internet infrastructure: hosting, payments, anti-DDOS.
Over the long term, crypto is the obvious choice for the 80% of the world population that is neither American nor Chinese, as well as large swaths of both Americans & Chinese.
This is now going to happen.
China is already US-independent when it comes to communication & payments infrastructure.
India, Israel, Russia are obvious candidates to go techno-autarkic next. Then perhaps the EU, South Korea, Japan, Brazil.
This is exactly why Bitcoin works. A simple monetary policy specifies a hard cap of 21 million BTC. Anyone with a computer can cryptographically verify this to confirm the supply has not been inflated.
This excellent post by @mattyglesias aligns with what a different kind of policymaker — namely the tech CEO — has learned over the years. To get many people to do something, you need to make it as simple and transparent as possible. slowboring.com/p/making-polic…
For example, if you have a commission plan for your sales reps that they can't rattle off in a sentence, that "policy" is not incentivizing what you want. saastr.com/a-framework-an…