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25 Apr, 4 tweets, 4 min read
If you’ve been fortunate enough to do well this year, consider joining me and @VitalikButerin by donating at the addresses below.

But if all you have is Twitter, help spread the word. For every RT, I’ll donate another $50 to fight COVID in India, up to $100k. #cryptovscovid
Vitalik has donated to the campaign organized by @sandeepnailwal of Polygon on behalf of the global crypto community.

Sandeep is a reputable person and has excellent accountants pitching in to make sure disbursal of funds is tracked. #cryptovscovid
Here's the first $50k in ETH for COVID relief in India.

An important feature of crypto is that it enables fast, transparent humanitarian donations from around the world. You can see the donation on-chain here: etherscan.io/tx/0x750074ebb…
Here's the next $50k donation in BTC.

Today, fast and transparent flows of crypto into India are funding COVID relief. Tomorrow, we can use them to fund India's small businesses and startups.

cc @nsitharaman @ianuragthakur @NandanNilekani @amitabhk87

blockchain.com/btc/address/bc…

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More from @balajis

balajis.com Profile picture
25 Apr
Don’t let these wokes rewrite history.

Every media corporation that ran misinformation on COVID-19 simply turned on a dime and pivoted to hectoring the public.

Utterly shameless liars. No retractions, resignations, or investigations. Which is why they deserve only disruption. ImageImageImage
Here’s me last Jan arguing with BuzzFlu over their legendary banger “Don’t Worry About Coronavirus, Worry About the Flu.”

They got millions of clicks. Turned a little profit. Then stealth-edited the headline weeks later after people sickened & died. archive.is/NyPND
Here’s Recode last Feb with “No Handshakes, Please” which tried to paint tech as paranoid lunatics for taking precautions on COVID.

Never forget that these just-the-flu journalists were the *origin* of memes like “just-the-flu”.

Cooked up in their labs, for clicks and profit.
Read 4 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
22 Apr
Capital is a commodity. Choose investors on the basis of their distribution.
That can be consumer distribution in the form of social media & brand halo, or enterprise distribution in the form of business relationships & actual distribution deals (if the investor is a strategic), or both.

But that’s now what distinguishes investors: their distribution.
This is a way to reconcile the points by @nikitabier & @josephflaherty.

Nikita was arguing that investors should have consumer distribution (eg social media).

Joseph said that they should have enterprise distribution (eg M&A help).

Both are right. But both are more than money.
Read 6 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
18 Apr
Today offline identities are self-reported, yet valuable for online status games.

Tomorrow they’ll all be deepfaked. You will be able to mimic the accent, language, appearance of anyone via AI.

Once that is abundant, identity is no longer scarce. So signaling shifts to crypto.
Put another way, no one will believe your self-reported membership in group X, because (a) anyone will be able to deepfake their way into realistically appearing as a member of group X and (b) a real member of group X might not want to reveal themselves.

No scarcity of identity.
There are a few possible outcomes.

1) Full pseudonymity. Everyone works remote as whatever avatar they want to be & you aren’t supposed to ask who they “really” are.

2) Proof-of-X becomes standard for online status. Could be crypto, could be vaccines or even genes like 23andMe.
Read 4 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
16 Apr
The thing people don't get is: due to rapid growth, a surprising number of people suddenly have >50% of their net worth in crypto.

Many personal flippenings have thus already happened.

And crypto exchanges have all the deposits, so will replace legacy banks.
Unlike today’s banks, but like older banks, you can withdraw all your digital cash from a crypto exchange — and this is good practice.

However, keeping a “checking account” there to do international wires in USDC to other exchanges, or other financial services is reasonable.
It’s a technical problem, but there are various ways to combine fully user-controlled wallets with centralized liquidity & order books. Many are working on this.

This would address the (valid) not-your-keys, not-your-coins argument. And shift exchanges to a hub-and-spoke model.
Read 4 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
14 Apr
The educational flippening is coming.

Soon, spending four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars at a woke American madrassa won’t signal intelligence or employability.

Quite the opposite.
Who do you hire instead? People from around the world and in neglected parts of the US, people without a college degree and people from overseas.

The American college grad is becoming a much worse hire than the American autodidacts and the intelligent internationals.
To head off some objections:

1) Yes, these schools were once good. They’re now bad. Windows was a cutting edge developer platform once as well.

2) We’ll need a new, fairer, less expensive credentialing system; I sketched one model in this recent podcast. tim.blog/2021/03/25/bal…
Read 4 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
11 Apr
Trains are an 1800s technology. Very backwards-looking.

You want business travel at the speed of light? Invest in telerobotics.

Put on the headset and gloves, and start operating a robot in Madrid.
I spoke about this in 2013 and the tech keeps improving. Combine Double Robotics for telepresence, Boston Dynamics for humanoid robots, and Oculus Quest 2 for VR input/output.

The individual technologies for robotic telepresence exist.
Regarding latency, which is an issue for long distances, a few things:

1) Unless you’re making sudden unpredictable movements — not common in business travel — the onboard autonomy should be able to handle it.

2) Ideas from video-game-style lag compensation may also be helpful.
Read 4 tweets

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