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14 Feb, 4 tweets, 2 min read
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archive.is/vrFAY https://archive.is/vrFAY
"I began to see myself less as a mirror and more as a weapon....I would call some stories kills...I got a man fired because he talked to me...he was a sweet and gentle man. I still feel sick when I think about him. And I think about him a lot." chosenbychoice.substack.com/p/learning-how…
"journalism...is about raw power...Anyone who has ever negotiated to land a contentious interview...knows that you only get those interviews when your subject fears what will happen if they don’t...Today, that fear is disappearing."
cjr.org/public_editor/…
"'Hate drives readership more than any of us care to admit,' one employee on the [New York Times Company's] business side told me." nymag.com/intelligencer/…

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More from @balajis

balajis.com Profile picture
5 Feb
Start your own company
Start your own community
Start your own currency
Start your own city
apnews.com/article/legisl…
San Francisco sucks. You can build something better in the sands of Nevada. And decentralize tech to the rest of the world.

I’ve been working in this area for years with folks like @patrissimo @mwiyas @MarkLutter, so DM if you’re doing a project like this and seeking funding.
Tech companies: take all the money you’d have spent on an expensive office, and use it to bootstrap a city in NV.

Lower the cost of living for employees. Build an equity stake in land. Gain write access to your physical surroundings. Legalize self driving cars & delivery drones.
Read 4 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
4 Feb
India should support crypto as a pillar of its foreign & domestic policy.

It defends national security by preventing deplatforming, deters fraud via on-chain accounting, and offers a decentralized alternative to a new Cold War. @nsitharaman @narendramodi balajis.com/why-india-shou…
As background:

- Crypto is now a $1T industry
- Bitcoin and Ethereum have enabled >$1T in annual transaction volume
- Decentralized finance has ~$30B in assets
- Coinmarketcap.com is more popular than the Wall Street Journal!

It is now a global phenomenon. ImageImageImageImage
NATIONAL SECURITY

Crypto defends India's national security by foiling deplatforming.

Bitcoin prevents financial deplatforming. Digital gold is a rail of last resort for crises like 2008.

And Ethereum prevents social deplatforming. Create social networks the US can't shut down. ImageImage
Read 13 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
2 Feb
Fund! You invented a fund!

This technical illiterate is typical of tech journalism today. Comparing a smart contract to a fund is like comparing a website to a printed book.

This is why tech is building its own media. Hear from iPhone inventors, not gadget reviewers.
Smart contracts vs hedge funds:

1) can be coded by anyone, vs expensive lawyer
2) can be diligenced & used by anyone in any country
3) can be deployed in minutes, vs days to incorporate
4) blockchain enforces payouts, not legal system

As different as website & printed book.
Btw, hedge funds don’t “hedge their bets against one another”. The name is a legacy and many are actually high-risk vehicles.

It’s one thing for these people to know nothing about anything. It’s another to *not know how little they know*. And then to be snide about it!
Read 4 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
1 Feb
Old model: hire former writers as PR people. They’ve worked for media companies and have the relationships.

New model: hire social media influencers as first party content creators. They’ve built audiences from scratch and have a following.
You don’t outsource engineering via an IT department, you start with a founding engineer and end up with a CTO.

You don’t outsource media coverage via a PR department, you start with a founding influencer and end up with an editor-in-chief.
Many traditional PR folks have realized that a PR person without a following is like an engineer that can’t code or a salesperson who can’t sell.

The main skill is no longer working through legacy media, it’s building your own outlet. Not just a blog, a real content operation.
Read 4 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
30 Jan
Don’t be Google

Google has lost touch with their roots. What they did today is the equivalent of banning a web browser because it could access unapproved sites.

Unfortunately, the only effective appeals process is raising a stir on social media.
Must be emphasized how mainstream Element is. It’s used by many companies that don’t want to keep their chat logs on a proprietary server!

We are sliding down the slippery slope of censorship at breathtaking speed. First Parler, ok. But then Discord censoring WSB. Now this?
There are still many executives at Google that I know believe in a free and open internet. Please ping them.

There are obvious antitrust implications as well for banning a chat app like Element that is an alternative to proprietary Google Chat.
Read 4 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
29 Jan
Today showed us that the SEC has had it wrong. The problem isn’t that some cryptos may be securities. The problem is that all securities aren’t yet cryptos.

Now is the time to draft a bill that legalizes security tokens.
If all securities were represented on-chain:

- all users have self-custody of certificates
- brokerages can’t stop you from trading
- trading runs 24/7
- and settlement happens in minutes, not days

Basically, root cause is the antiquated financial backend. On-chain fixes this.
The stockchain

What we just observed was a technology problem that is being cast as a human problem. It was basically a Slashdotting of the legacy financial system, an unexpected workload that it isn’t prepared to handle. Putting stocks on chain really does fix this.
Read 9 tweets

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