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3 Jun, 5 tweets, 4 min read
If you missed yesterday's crypto conference with @FrancisSuarez, me, @chamath, @APompliano, @iam_preethi, @CamiRusso, @bunsen, and more, here's the YouTube link where you can watch the whole thing.

Kicks off with my chat with the mayor!
Here's one of the books I referenced, which should be handed out at Miami airport.

Now that I think about it, if @depalman can get a Kindle edition, we might even do a mass purchase. An electronic bookdrop: first 1000 copies free if you write a review? amazon.com/Man-Who-Invent…
You can read it online for free if you sign up at the Internet Archive, though there may be some kind of rate limiting in terms of the number of simultaneous users. archive.org/details/manwho…
Matthews never was shy about proclaiming the historic proportions of his encounter; he referred to
himself as the "inventor of Castro".
networks.h-net.org/node/14858/pdf
In 1959, Fidel Castro said of New York Times correspondent Herbert L. Matthews (1900-1977): “I am sick and tired of that old man who thinks he is my father. He is always giving me advice.” Matthews used this quote as a source of pride in one of his books…
latinamericanstudies.org/academic/cuban…

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More from @balajis

balajis.com Profile picture
4 Jun
Buy Miami, short SF.

Or, if you believe in the turnaround, go long SF.

Citycoins will express people's faith in city policy. As does emigration. Vote with ballot, and now also with wallet and feet.
Municipal bonds have existed forever. But they are traded in inaccessible venues and don't use modern tech.

The concept of municipal equity, or a natively digital cognate thereof, is new.

What if city residents, working together, could build value & share upside?
The advantage for every city to legalize citycoins is simple: they are a new source of funds for a city.

Figure out the split. The city government gets X% of the coins. Then allow N private operators to build competing city coins with different features. And let market decide.
Read 11 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
3 Jun
Russia is reportedly de-dollarizing. Here's the new portfolio.
As outlined in this series of articles, every country that's not the USA or PRC will shift to national stacks & neutral protocols over the 2020s.

National stacks for domestic trade & communications.
Neutral protocols for international access to the same.
balajis.com/tag/india/
BTC is akin to digital gold, and cannot be frozen or seized by any state. It is this property that makes BTC so precious for safeguarding national security.

A network that cannot be shut down by any state can be relied upon in time of conflict. balajis.com/why-india-shou…
Read 5 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
3 Jun
Crypto makes security tangible. When an account is hacked, the funds are withdrawn right away.
Not all hacks have pecuniary motivations. National security hacks are in a different class.

Still, the capture-the-flag aspect of crypto — where an attacker has a strong incentive to instantly use the private keys, lest funds are moved — is a sharp contrast to silent compromise.
You know who isn't good at security? Government IT developers.

You know who needs to constantly think about security? Crypto developers.

The predator/prey aspect of crypto security is creating a generation of engineers who know how to harden systems. digitalguardian.com/blog/top-10-bi…
Read 13 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
2 Jun
First city coin launches today.

These could become the basis for city apps. Obviously, use city coins to pay locals. Less obviously, use them to recruit talent, invest in companies, and generally bet on a city’s growth.

A bit like municipal equity, instead of municipal debt.
In the 2020s, in the remote economy, cities will rise and fall as fast as startups themselves.

If Miami was a startup, with @FrancisSuarez @rabois and @shervin involved you’d bet on it going up and to the right.

With MiamiCoin, perhaps now you can. 🙂
Miami is the ideal place to try, but it’s an experiment as to whether city coins work for existing cities.

Where they may really come into their own is to build the economy of *new* startup cities, like Culdesac.com and Prospera.hn.
Read 4 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
31 May
What we need: a censorship-resistant inflation feed.

The on-chain, crypto oracle version of MIT's Billion Prices Project. No editorialization, just an undeletable history of prices.

Build it pseudonymously. Build it with an eye to a ban. Build it now so it's ready then.
All you need to look at is recent history in other countries, or the CDC on masks, or the censorship of the lab leak theory, to know that the centralized state isn't going to provide reliable inflation stats.

So, the decentralized network will have to do so.
If inflation censorship occurs the on-chain inflation feed would be the crypto flippening in several respects.

1) decentralized cryptographic truth would be more trusted than centralized emanations of press & state
2) an on-chain app would be one of the world's most popular apps
Read 9 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
31 May
It is also a technical innovation, just not on the dimension people think.

Public blockchains are massively multiclient databases. They support fewer transactions-per-second than a traditional database, in return for millions of simultaneous root users.
Public blockchains are massively multiclient databases, where every user is a root user. They're useful for storing shared state between users, particularly when that shared state represents valuable data that users want to export without fail, like money. balajis.com/yes-you-may-ne…
Agree with thrust of @RyanWatkins_' comment.

But I also think this a key point to articulate: rather than a few people with root access to PayPal's centralized database, anyone with the right public/private key pair can move funds on a public blockchain.
Read 5 tweets

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