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2 May, 3 tweets, 2 min read
Prediction: people are going to shift spend away from traditional attire towards virtual avatars and remote gear.
Zoom backgrounds, Oculus headsets, Fortnite skins are just the beginning.

Step into a holodeck room with a pair of VR glasses + cameras for pose detection. Configure your avatar & appear exactly as you wish, picking from NFT outfits for special occasions.
Remote gear = everything you need to project yourself into the Metaverse, from AV equipment to Oculus to possibly fitness tracking later on (for proof-of-workout) and telerobotics (on the other side).

@FirstbaseHQ is an important step towards this.
a16z.com/2021/04/29/inv…

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More from @balajis

balajis.com Profile picture
2 May
I don’t even understand why @elonmusk is bothering with SNL.

If he did Tesla TV or SpaceX Satellite Radio, he’d have his own media arm.

Make @BoredElonMusk the inaugural editor-in-chief. And build an international audience that dwarfs these aging American media properties.
Elon has 52M followers. SNL has 3M. He was doing their corporate parent (Comcast!) a favor.

We need to stop doing these kinds of favors.

Build our own outlets, hire editors-in-chief, make our own movies, tell our own stories, think internationally, and — above all — go direct.
Starlink is a direct competitor to Comcast.

SNL Studios is at least partially owned by Comcast, and is broadcast from the Comcast Building.

So: why should @elonmusk give free content to direct competitors? Give it to Starlink & Tesla customers instead.
corporate.comcast.com/news-informati…
Read 4 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
2 May
@andy_matuschak Most of @elidourado’s arguments for ETH are good. But it just serves a different purpose than BTC.

Ethereum is programmable finance. Bitcoin is digital gold. Even EIP-1559 won’t change that because it signals that Ethereum *has* a mutable monetary policy.
@andy_matuschak @elidourado It’s like when people used to say that Twitter was just one feature of Facebook, the status update.

Products that appear superficially similar early on develop shared cultures and use-cases and differentiate over time. So too for coins.
@andy_matuschak @elidourado Immutability (BTC) and financial innovation (ETH) are both incredibly valuable, but by their very nature can’t be the same thing.

A constantly changing and improving platform (Ethereum) is culturally different from a finished, reliable, immutable coin (Bitcoin).
Read 5 tweets
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.
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
25 Apr
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…
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

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