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24 Jan, 4 tweets, 2 min read
The human rights argument for crypto as a balance against centralized power of all kinds, from nation states to corporations, is more obvious every day.

Money is just a tool to incentivize adoption.
People tried popularizing decentralized systems like Tor without the economic component. It didn’t fully work, because these systems are tricky to build and maintain.

But digital assets now provide an offsetting term that more than compensates for the technical complexity.
Crypto allows open source developers to finally capture some of the value they create. They can choose how much.

But it’s an important and general tool to address the funding gaps that @nayafia talked about in her recent book.
Crypto also allows social media creators to interact directly with their followers, to monetize, and to control their distribution.

User-generated capital > user-generated content.

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More from @balajis

balajis.com Profile picture
26 Jan
The long-term consequence is the end of the 20th century regulatory state.

The SEC is set up to go after Goldman, not 1M retail investors. The FDA was built to regulate Merck, not 1M people with personal genomes. And the FAA is meant to leash Boeing, not 1M drone hobbyists. 🧵
The premise of the regulatory state is that it ostensibly protects the individual from the giant corporation.

That’s the basis of its legitimacy, reputation, and power.

But when they go after an individual directly the facade of “protection” falls away.
press.princeton.edu/books/paperbac… Image
For the SEC to go after all the countless sympathetic individuals on Reddit who profited off the back of a giant fund isn’t just logistically difficult.

It’s *reputationally* difficult.

It’s like the RIAA suing its own customers. You are pursuing the little guy...why exactly?
Read 5 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
25 Jan
Lyn is very smart — but Ethereum really isn’t that early in development anymore. Just from a numbers standpoint, it’s a $100B+ platform hosting multiple billion dollar projects. See defipulse.com.

That doesn’t begin to touch the tech innovation, which is substantial.
I don’t think it’s persuasive to say “Ethereum is still rapidly innovating therefore it’s not worth $100B+”.

Actually, for a platform worth $100B+ to still be rapidly innovating is a very positive signal. Excessive risk aversion is the ultimate risk.
businessinsider.com/amazons-jeff-b… Image
Perhaps the most important difference between a tech investor and a macro investor (like @LynAldenContact) is that Lyn explicitly says she wants to invest in “finished products”.

A reasonable approach, but one that limits upside. newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/open-reply-t…
Read 4 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
23 Jan
Courageous article by Noah.

This a situation where the 50 IQ and 150 IQ guy shake hands and say the obvious thing: buy Bitcoin.
CPI obscures more than it reveals, because price inflation is a vector, not a scalar.

The inflation is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.
Price inflation is obvious in financial markets. Equities are way up thanks to Cantillon effect.

It’s also obvious in the big ticket areas where regulation & subsidy has blocked innovation: housing, education, healthcare.

Tech *partially* offset this by reducing cost elsewhere.
Read 8 tweets
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
21 Jan
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…
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

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