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21 Jan, 4 tweets, 2 min read
First, much respect to all that @orionwl has done for Bitcoin.

But this illustrates the risks of having a single canonical Bitcoin client hosted at GitHub with named developers.

Only decentralized development, pseudonymity, and multiple clients can forestall such attacks. 🧵
As a freedom maximalist, any point of centralization is a vulnerability. We need:

- multiple widely adopted clients for BTC
- tools to import the BTC ledger into other chains, like trustless versions of WBTC/RenBTC
- other coins as backups
- legal & activism

Defense in depth.
The idea of cryptocurrency will not vanish from this earth. But any insufficiently decentralized protocol will get attacked.

Bitcoin is highly decentralized in terms of hodlers, wallets, etc. But could use more at client & repo level. See this from 2017:
news.earn.com/quantifying-de…
I discussed this years ago with @PeterMcCormack.

Any form of centralization is a risk, including centralization behind one coin, repo, protocol, or developer group.

We’re fortunate that many coins exist because different failure modes confer robustness.
whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/balaji…

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More from @balajis

balajis.com Profile picture
22 Jan
India will not be #1 in the currency game. But it could be #1 in the cryptocurrency game.
That is, given competition from the dollar and the digital yuan, the rupee will never be as strong.

So India could get behind the third international payment rail, the one neither America nor China can deplatform them from.

As can every other state that’s neither USA nor PRC.
This would obviously be a huge reversal from where the world is right now. India’s ban on crypto has taken its toll on a generation of founders, and other places have leapt ahead.

But crypto founders are mobile, and a U-turn is possible if seen as being in the national interest.
Read 4 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
20 Jan
Peer awards are the obvious alternative to press awards.
Employees of media corporations give each other Pulitzers for things like 1619 or Duranty’s chicanery.

They aren’t neutral observers, and wouldn’t be pleased if outsiders began rating them.
nytco.com/company/prizes…
If Facebook was giving out Google’s employee-of-the-year awards, you might expect some disalignment of incentives.

Seeking the approval of direct competitors isn’t smart. And media companies are by their own admission direct competitors of tech companies. theinformation.com/articles/mered…
Read 4 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
19 Jan
One of the more fascinating phenomena is people who think they understand economics that have never built a two-sided marketplace, coded a financial instrument, issued a digital currency, started a company, managed a cap table, met a payroll, or created a single job.
Cryptoeconomics is about reproducible experiments. You can actually issue a currency, set a monetary policy, get opt-in participants, and test your theories in practice.

The proof is in the pudding. And the pudding is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/
Not disjoint at all.

Microeconomics is the theory of individuals & firms. Directly related to running a business.

Macroeconomics until recently was off-limits to experiment. But now anyone can create a currency, set monetary policy, and see what happens.
Read 8 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
18 Jan
Dubai is important to study because it disproves many of the myths circulated during the 2000s about what the Middle East was capable of doing.

Of course it has its flaws, but it's moving in the right direction in terms of economic diversification, the Abraham Accords, and tech.
Follow @WamdaME to see what the future of the Middle East may look like, beyond the stereotypes. There's a global, positive-sum tech community there as well. The Careem exit in 2019 was a big moment for the region! menabytes.com/fadi-ghandour-…
That's also why the $200M Paystack exit was huge for tech in Africa. That's real money for anywhere, and goes even further in Nigeria on a PPP basis. We need 10 more like this, which is why I backed @buycoins_africa and am looking at more in the region.
techcrunch.com/2020/10/15/str…
Read 7 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
17 Jan
Did we forget that California burns to a post-apocalyptic orange every year now?
theguardian.com/world/gallery/…
As Miami sea levels rise, there are engineering solutions. Take a look at what Dubai has done. fircroft.com/blogs/engineer…
Miami is already the cruise ship capital of the world. It may become the land reclamation/seasteading capital too, as sea levels rise and tech minds with the right mindset take on the problem. Like pursuing nuclear energy rather than giving up. @patrissimo @rabois @shervin
Read 4 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
17 Jan
Strongly disagree.

1) There were 272M international emigrants in 2019. The vast majority of those people were not rich.

2) Emigration reduces inequality as people move away from ultra-wealthy cities like SF/NY to the rest of the country and the world.
un.org/development/de… https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/inter
Indeed, it's the wealthy landed aristocracy — like the NIMBYs of California — who have the most control over local politics and the least need to move.
Let's remember that the right to emigrate is an absolutely foundational human right, part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted by people from all over the world, translated into every language.

Exit is the last resort of the powerless.
un.org/en/universal-d…
Read 5 tweets

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