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17 Mar, 6 tweets, 2 min read
Video games somehow never fully broke through to the highest levels of culture, but NFTs did.
You might dispute the premise, as of course there are AAA games with serious plots and reviews. But the association with children playing and populist fun has sort of held games back.

NFT prices, by contrast, vault them into a kind of stratosphere. You can’t help but look up.
It may turn out that the presence of expensive verified NFTs is what distinguishes video games from virtual realities.
It isn’t exactly money, though. It’s about the highest honor in each field.

Tech: found/fund next Google
Science: win Nobel
Chef: get Michelin star
Open Source: write next Linux

NFTs are attracting the highest levels of art status in a way “video games” didn’t. But VR might.
Perhaps it’s just that games *as* games are too accessible to be elite in the same way a fancy art gallery is.

Apple has maintained a premium brand despite selling millions of phones, but usually the McDonald’s mass market product is less elite than the artisanal cuisinr.
Btw: I’ve played games for decades, love games, etc.

But games are still sort of in the niche that tech was prior to the iPhone.

Maybe virtual reality, virtual currency, and NFTs are how they break out.

See also this talk from 2019:
whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/balaji…

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More from @balajis

balajis.com Profile picture
16 Mar
A digital rupee will need to do everything a rupee can do. That includes foreign exchange.

Which means the digital wallet that holds digital rupees will have to facilitate trade against *other* national digital currencies.

In practice, this will likely be via crypto exchanges.
Put another way, a digital rupee won’t be closed off from the global economy.

To the contrary, it will be more freely traded for other assets, domestic *and* foreign, than the current quasi-digital rupees held on bank ledgers.

Just compare USDC to Fedwire to see the future.
Setting up a digital rupee & thinking it can be air-gapped from the cryptoeconomy is like setting up a website & thinking it will only link to itself. 🙂

A website’s value, in part, comes from its links. A currency’s value, in larger part, comes from its links to other assets.
Read 5 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
12 Mar
The meme economy will become real.

- Meme creators will make NFTs
- Timestamps give proof-of-first
- Memegen partially goes on-chain
- Memetic spread is more traceable
- Memers become millionaires
- Risky art becomes uncensorable & monetizable
- Art moves outside regime control
If you’re building this, reply here and/or DM. Space is moving fast, working products preferred! Suggestions:

1) Focus solely on memes, just like Giphy focused solely on gifs.

2) Clone as much existing memegen-type UX as you need, your initial innovation may be mostly backend.
@Cryptanzee @BitcoinMemeHub @RonenV, figured you might be interested in this thread.
Read 5 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
12 Mar
Glenn and @Snowden were early advocates for encryption to defend human rights against abusive corporations & states alike.

Satoshi was a pioneer in the use of encryption to stop seizures by the same corporations & states.

These are two halves of the same worldview. 🧵
They coincide exactly, because the private keys to *publish* online are the same as the private keys to *transact* online.

The same censorship-resistant blockchain design that prevents seizure of private property also prevents states & corporations from silencing your voice.
When you digitally sign and broadcast a transaction to a blockchain, it is sometimes referred to as *publishing* a transaction.

With the right design, this gives you pseudonymous, verifiable, uncensorable communication and transaction. Free speech and free markets in one stroke.
Read 4 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
8 Mar
Blockchains are much easier to search index than the open web, which is in turn easier than closed social networks.

And GPT-3 can generate better-than-search results on the fly.

So, it sounds cliche, but “blockchain and AI” really are a long-term pincer attack on Google Search.
Why are blockchains easier to index than the web? They have a single canonical endpoint & all records are in the same format. Just need to keep chain tip fresh.

Far easier than crawling the menagerie of web pages.

Which is in turn easier than getting full Twitter API access!
Why can GPT-3 (or sequels) generate better-than-search results?

It also takes a search index as input (Common Crawl), but it doesn’t just present you 10 blue links.

It does the synthesis for you, and may eventually be able to do it offline just with learned parameters.
Read 5 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
7 Mar
v1: the free market
v2: there is always a marketplace operator, whether Airbnb or USG
v3: the free market in markets
When you build a two-sided marketplace or scaled social app, you take on many roles of a government.

Indeed, setting parameters for millions is also a kind of policy making, enforced digitally rather than physically.

But the feedback on error is exit/wallet, more than ballot.
Today, digital punishments like deplatforming are controversial because they are done arbitrarily, by private actors, outside color of law.

Tomorrow, pre-agreed digital punishments may be considered more humane than physical punishments, as more & more state functions go online.
Read 7 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
6 Mar
Disagree. By associating money with a private key, you give a literal incentive for every user to keep the key (a) private and (b) available at all times.

That’s the fundamental issue that previous PKI schemes didn’t solve at the individual level.
If you pin a post-it note with your private key to your computer, that’s available but not private.

If you write it down & keep it in a safe place whose location you forget, that’s private but not available.

So, for individuals, private AND available key storage is nontrivial.
Another way of putting it: private and available key storage for individuals is *expensive*, especially in attention terms.

Pre-crypto PKI could incentivize *organizations* to keep their keys private and available, but not individuals.

Cost wasn’t worth benefit. Till crypto.
Read 5 tweets

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