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21 Jul, 3 tweets, 2 min read
It used to be that only heavily armed nuclear weapons states had computers. Then rich people had them. Then everyone had them.

It used to be that only heavily armed nuclear weapons states could go to space. Then rich people could. Then…
The point is that not that you have to be so rich to get to space. The point is that it has become so cheap to get to space. ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/2018…
And it didn’t become that cheap by accident.

The self-made tech founders going to space helped lower costs >10X by driving fundamental advances like reusable rockets.

These are durable improvements that we can all build on.

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More from @balajis

balajis.com Profile picture
15 Jul
Current social networks don't have great tools for dispute resolution. They're a combination of anarchy (people yelling) and tyranny (arbitrary deplatforming).

An alternative approach is a global moderator hierarchy. In the event of dispute, the lowest common ancestor mediates.
The moderator hierarchy: a possible implementation

- founder is moderator 0
- founder sets up initial hierarchy, appoints mods 1-N
- mods recruit new users
- new users choose a mod upon signup
- new users can be promoted to mod
- mods are comp'd via token
1729.com/network-union
Choosing a mod has aspects of both friending & following.

Like following, it's asymmetric: when A moderates B, A has privileges that B does not.

But like friending, it's symmetric: you may require both A *and* B to opt in for A to take on the responsibility of moderating B.
Read 7 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
14 Jul
The corporate stack now includes three layers.

1) Legal entities
Delaware C-Corp, Wyoming LLC, bylaws, contracts, etc

2) Centralized services
Stripe, Coinbase, Gusto, SVB, etc

3) Decentralized services
Bitcoin, USDC, defi, private key custody, etc
The legal layer is official filings and local PDFs. The API is lawyers.

The centralized layer is both fiat banking and cloud services. The API is the website.

The decentralized layer is everything crypto related. The API is private keys.
These three layers have an increasing amount of interoperation.

Stripe Atlas bridges the legal and centralized layers.

Coinbase's exchange bridges the centralized and decentralized layers.

And Wyoming's DAO law bridges the legal and the decentralized layers.
Read 5 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
6 Jul
At first I thought this was a bad idea, but now I think there is the kernel of something very interesting here.

Random selection of moderators could, in theory, be a way to implement "you cut the cake and I choose the piece" for governance issues.

Rawls' veil in real life?
Divide & choose is a procedure for fair division of a continuous resource between two parties. The protocol proceeds as follows: one person cuts the cake into two pieces; the other person selects one of the pieces; the cutter receives the remaining piece.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_an…
The veil of ignorance concept: choose a rule as if you had no knowledge ahead of time as to whether you'd be ruler or ruled. Ideally, this would incentivize participants to select rules impartially and rationally.
fs.blog/2017/10/veil-i…
Read 4 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
5 Jul
If there are 1000 people at someone’s door, they could call the police. Assuming they haven’t been abolished.

But if there are 1000 mobbing them online, there is currently no police force. Only slow reports and counter-mobs.
I wrote about this just prior to the social media-fueled disorder of 2020.

I think I correctly apprehended that online madness would soon translate into offline chaos.

But it didn’t need TikTok (video tweets were enough). And it happened faster than I expected.
There are two resolutions to the situation of online madness and offline sanity.

The first is what we have seen: the mindless translation of media- and social media-fueled madness into the physical world.

The second is to set up online polities with physical levels of civility.
Read 8 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
3 Jul
From seeing like a state to learning like a machine.
A state can only make rectilinear decisions based on paper forms. Scalable but binary.

A machine can make curvilinear decisions based on digital data. Scalable and statistical.
Of course, some states have partially adapted & have some of their data online (albeit in often insecure databases).

But it’s just a retrofit. It’s not like the leaders are looking at metrics on the health and wealth of their constituents. Nor are they making decisions via code.
Read 9 tweets
balajis.com Profile picture
2 Jul
File sharing was once huge, and may become huge again.
The fundamental new primitive that blockchains offer for protocol design is tamper-resistant global shared state.

With this, someone could do a crypto Napster, KaZaa, or PirateBay. Probably pseudonymously, or in a country like Denmark with a "Pirate Party". Maybe not in music…
P2P, MVC, CBC

Blockchains allow us to combine the decentralization and programmability of the P2P era with the global state and monetizability of the MVC era.

For protocols with global state, the new architecture is then client-blockchain-client, or CBC.
Read 4 tweets

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