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29 May, 5 tweets, 2 min read
This piece makes many good points. The US is in decline, people are in denial, and China is ascending economically.

But China doesn’t represent universal values. That’s why Crypto Capital may ultimately outcompete both Woke Capital & Communist Capital.
richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-most-chi…
No country is a monolith. Just like there are Woke Americans and Crypto Americans, there are Crypto Chinese and Communist Chinese.

In every country, there will be a tension between nationalists/socialists and internationalists/capitalists. The latter will go crypto.
America long portrayed itself as the neutral champion of a rules-based order, but after years of bailouts, invasions, sanctions, deplatforming it’s not trusted.

Edelman says even after COVID, the US is 24 points less trusted than China worldwide (!) edelman.com/sites/g/files/…
This doesn’t mean China will be widely trusted. To the contrary, expect an insane mud-slinging information war between both parties as things heat up.

When the US now tries lecturing China, it gets lectured right back on invasions & domestic oppression.
asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Inter…
See my followup to this thread below. This separates out the internal vs external trust barometers from the Edelman study (which were confusingly labeled).

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More from @balajis

balajis.com Profile picture
30 May
Who’s trusted more, the US or China?

Edelman reports the US is trusted more globally than China, but not by much: 40% to 30%.

Internally, the Chinese report much higher levels of trust in their own government than Americans — but may not have a choice (some questions censored!)
This follows up an earlier tweet. I dug into the (surprising) study after comments from @Noahpinion @Molson_Hart @sprague.

I’d thought China might be more popular among poor countries, and that was shifting the result, but it looks like the figure was just labeled oddly.
Right before the pandemic, Pew reported that poorer countries tended to tilt in the direction of China and wealthier countries in the direction of the US. pewresearch.org/global/2019/12…
Read 5 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
29 May
I have no opinion on short-term price.

But this article is notable for another reason: one of the most important trends of the last year is the routine use of on-chain data as decentralized truth.
Hard news is now on-chain.

It’s machine-readable, globally available, cryptographically verifiable, financially valuable.

As the cryptoeconomy grows, on-chain data & crypto oracles first disrupt Reuters, CNBC, Bloomberg as sources of financial information. Then all information.
Inflation stats may be the on-chain flippening for financial news.

Historically, countries like Argentina engaged in censorship to try to hide the true inflation numbers.

The data for your Bloomberg Terminal may be similarly debauched.

But on-chain data won’t be.
Read 6 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
28 May
The propaganda is transparent.
It's true that US corporations advocate for censorship at home and a free hand abroad. They have no moral authority.

But the solution isn't to give up on either sovereignty or free speech. It's to embrace both national stacks and neutral protocols.
balajis.com/add-crypto-to-…
NATIONAL STACKS

What’s a national stack? It’s a suite of services, either government or private or both, that make a country digitally independent of American or Chinese companies like Facebook or WeChat. balajis.com/add-crypto-to-…
Read 7 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
27 May
Crypto people who need a steady salary might actually consider joining Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon.

Why?

Big tech only went south recently. A few principled voices internally can still shift the conversation. And you might get cancelled, but there’s a job on the outside.
All of these companies are going to need tons of crypto talent as the cryptoeconomy becomes the main event of the 2020s.

Crypto stands against censorship and surveillance, and for privacy, pseudonymity, transparency, open source.

Help them make money while becoming more fair.
Short of the return of Larry Page, I don’t think it’s doable to bring (say) Google back to what it was before 2013.

But these institutions aren’t as far gone as the state. And an infusion of principled crypto people may blunt the worst-case scenarios for abuse of surveillance.
Read 5 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
21 May
This is funny.

But the future of warfare is actually neither "based" nor "woke". It's all drones.

WW1 opened with horses, which were cut to ribbons by machine guns. Our vision of the military is similarly antiquated: fitness is great, but muscular men lose to unmanned drones.
Soon, men in combat = horses in combat.

It's all unmanned war, robot war, drone war, information war, cyber war.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in…
Btw, to give some credit to the woke, as silly as this specific ad is, they are better at mind control than the based.

That's why they are running the military.

But mind control doesn't work on drones.
Read 11 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
21 May
Decentralization: P2P, internet, domain names, startups, going viral

Counter-Decentralization: MVC, tech giants, usernames, state regulation & censorship, getting cancelled

Redecentralization: CBC, blockchain, crypto domains, remote work & digital nomadism, going pseudonymous
Technical architecture initially favored decentralization, then centralization, and now decentralization again.

P2P: peer-to-peer
MVC: model-view-controller
CBC: client-blockchain-client

See:
The Counter-Decentralization includes ideological & technological measures by centralized states to fend off Decentralization. Xi Jinping Thought is like China's version of wokeness, American social media censorship is the US version of the Great Firewall.
Read 4 tweets

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