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Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
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23 Oct, 4 tweets, 3 min read
Institutions tend to censor inflation stats. This happened in Argentina, Venezuela, Zimbabwe.

Twitter should prepare for the moment when it must fact check the establishment on inflation. That will require shadow stats on inflation from consumer purchases, perhaps from Square.
I wrote a spec for a censorship-resistant inflation index. It’s framed for a startup, but Square could easily do this. In a crisis, accurate inflation info would be something people checked Twitter for every day. @milessuter @moneyball @jack 1729.com/inflation
In a pinch, the price of BTC vs each fiat currency may be the best single measure of inflation.

But it is possible that Google may stop showing this info, and centralized exchanges may come under pressure.

This is why on-chain price feeds are more important than many think.
Can someone update this for 2021, ideally with data and graph in a public Google Sheet?

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More from @balajis

Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
24 Oct
I actually don’t think they will.

Jack and Zuck didn’t build their $100B+ companies from scratch to bow to the East Coast establishment, whether that be Trump or the Fed.

The rematch will surprise people.
Tech CEOs don’t win by fighting the last war.

In 2015-2016, the tweeting took many by surprise.

In 2020-2021, the censorship took many by surprise.

But in 2024, or whenever the inflation comes, the censorship-resistance will take everyone by surprise.
To be clear, the companies run by non-founders may buckle. I don’t expect Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon to hold any line.

But Zuck & Jack still control their companies. In different ways, they are adopting cryptocurrency. And they aren’t backing down. m.facebook.com/zuck/posts/101… Image
Read 6 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
23 Oct
Good but no traction: angel investment
Bad but no traction: tulips
Good with high traction: new paradigm
Bad with high traction: threat to democracy
The establishment mindset flips between apathy and panic.

Facebook is a fad, then it’s a threat to democracy. COVID is dismissed as paranoia by preppers, then you have to wear a mask even when vaxxed. Bitcoin is tulips, then they start advocating seizures.
Every disruption like this has, so far, been sort of integrated into the establishment — albeit in a reactionary way. Facebook censorship, COVID lockdowns, Bitcoin-motivated CBDC efforts.

But the less the foresight, the greater the cost of that integration. Eventually too great.
Read 5 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
23 Oct
Hm. China is trying experiments to see if they can set policies that result in a more equal distribution of wealth while preserving market incentives.

The key new thing is that they are doing this zone by zone, as Deng did, rather than opting in the whole country at once.
As described below, I was instantly skeptical.

But if I think about setting parameters in two-sided marketplaces like Uber or eBay, it is true that you can experiment by varying incentives within different cohorts or geographies.
This is related to the problem of doing “social engineering” without even doing “social science”.

Where is the control group when a new regulation is rolled out? How do you select a representative test cohort? And what do you use to account for time-varying behavior?
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
23 Oct
Also would reduce polarization.

Rather than endless 51/49, you have two separate, internally aligned entities with clear sense of direction and what they want to build. Then selective migration of people between jurisdictions.
The counterargument is that two separate polities may evolve differently enough that they *eventually* engage in interstate conflict. Especially if one of them is taking the others’ citizens.

Possible! But the alternative is internal civil conflict, and that isn’t good either.
The honest argument for the EU wasn’t that the bureaucratic superstate is efficient. It was meant to sew together jurisdictions such that they don’t even think about fighting each other. Avoiding war was the motivation. europa.eu/european-union…
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
21 Oct
There are movies where the powerful are good (Superman), where the powerful are bad (Erin Brockovich), and where the weak are good (Revenge of the Nerds), but relatively few where the weak are bad (Ephialtes in 300?).
Thinking about this in the context of Changjin.

The instant cue you have for who the good guys & bad guys are is their relative power levels.

The Chinese are portrayed as scrappy, fighting only in self defense, eating frozen potatoes.

The Americans as powerful, rich, and mean.
It is possible for an underdog to win. They just have a low probability of winning.

But it’s not really possible for the truly weak to win against the powerful. If they win they must have had more power.
Read 5 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
21 Oct
The ledger of record gives us an auditable information supply chain.

“election results, sports outcomes…quarterly financials…all of that will now be cryptographically signed to verify the data comes from the Associated Press”
decrypt.co/83867/associat…
See my talk from August on the ledger of record.
Here’s a summary of my talk on the ledger of record. Briefly, it’s a way to develop a cryptographically auditable information supply chain. chainlinktoday.com/balaji-sriniva…
Read 5 tweets

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