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Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
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Jan 20 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Before/after health is to transhumanism what before/after wealth is to cryptocurrency.
In both cases, the visceral and visible improvements are the direct consequence of powerful new ideas.

The philosophy around digital cash predated the gains by decades. As does that of transhumanism. They came together in the person of Hal Finney, who was an extropian.
"He’s always been optimistic about the future," says Hal Finney's wife, Fran. "Every new advance, he embraced it, every new technology. Hal relished life, and he made the most of everything."
archive.is/gNLv5
Advanced biomedicine didn't get here in time for Hal.

But what he did with Bitcoin may yet unlock the way forward, by breaking the power of the regulatory state, ending global harmonization, and enabling decentralized funding of science outside academia.
Btw, I'm not sure if cryonics will work, but genomic reincarnation may become feasible if eukaryotic chromosome engineering radically improves.

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Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Jan 22
Russian troops have been massing near the Ukrainian border for weeks. Negotiations not looking good. US carriers also apparently now positioned to deter China if something happens in Ukraine.

No idea what's going to happen or which reports are accurate. Monitoring with caution. ImageImageImage
Some thoughts:

1) Fog of war applies. Who knows what reports are real? Military deception is a thing.

2) This is one of those things (possible simultaneous conflicts with Russia and China?) that you'd think would get more attention. Not that attention necessarily helps...
Also, if you're truly taking Gell-Mann amnesia into account, every article has to be put through the filter that media corporations are unreliable narrators.

But *if* they didn't butcher this quote, then Russia is saying negotiations are at a "dead end".
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Read 14 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Jan 16
India is indisputably much safer than America. The infrastructure has improved *dramatically* over the last ten years and the internet works.

Photos will always be accused of being cherry picked, but the respective rates of ascent (and, unfortunately, descent) are palpable.
By the way, I'd rank this as among the most surprising developments in my life.

In 1990, 2000, or even 2010, if you'd told me an Indian city would flip an American city, I'd have been very dubious.

But now? It's obvious. Chennai > SF in a heartbeat.
One reason I'd have been dubious is that it's easy to destroy a city (as even SF's mayor now admits is happening), but hard to build one up.

Yet it's happening. The right photo essay would illustrate the rise of Asia and fall of US cities.
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Jan 15
for-profit = for-profit
non-profit = for-status
Rank order of motives

1) pursuing mathematical truth
2) pursuing science and technology
3) pursuing material things
4) pursuing power
5) pursuing status

Just for fun, let's compare nonprofits, Miami-style materialism, academia, media, Hollywood, tech, and DC on these motives.
Nonprofit: makes no real claim to truth. Values political power and status above money. Indeed, these are engines to turn money into power and status.

Miami: honest about making money.

Academia: at its best, pursues truth, but often power (policy influence) or status (prizes).
Read 10 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Jan 8
"...the only amount of decentralization people want is the minimum amount required for something to exist..."

This is true for the same reason internet apps use the minimum necessary bandwidth to exist.

Blockspace, like bandwidth, is rapidly increasing but costly and finite.
Moxie's article is fine, thoughtful, constructive, worth reading.

But it doesn't discuss the concept of blockspace, which is the key technical constraint on web3, just as bandwidth was to web2 (and arguably web1).

[1] research.paradigm.xyz/ethereum-block…

[2] bitcoinsuisse.com/research/decry…
In 2000, Netflix mailed DVDs. They knew streaming was the future. But they also knew bandwidth was limited.

In 2022, many web3 entities are partially centralized. They know decentralization is the future. But blockspace is limited.

Need Nielsen's Law for blockspace.
Read 14 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Jan 6
It’s actually pretty important to have an agreed-upon quantitative framework for teasing out the relative contributions of luck vs skill vs hard work vs initial conditions.

Gets to core questions about what is inherited privilege vs actual accomplishment.
We recognize that athletes, mathematicians, models, and singers all have intrinsic talents.

Anyone can pick up a ball, pencil, mirror, or microphone and quickly see if they have comparable gifts.

This makes people accept nonuniform outcomes. No entitlement to a Super Bowl Ring.
For anything involving others, though — especially management or finance — many believe no skill is involved. It’s all lucky, lazy fat cats.

I don’t believe we can convince them they are wrong.

I believe we need to make them CEOs & investors too. Make it easy to try their luck.
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Jan 6
People forget just how completely non-obvious the entire digital revolution was every step of the way.

1995: WWW will fail
2002: Google will fail
2007: iPhone will fail
2013: Facebook will fail
Virtually every sentence was wrong in this one. It's like the opposite of the Sovereign Individual.

"Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books & newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure."
newsweek.com/clifford-stoll…
For example, they were calling Facebook a fad all the way till 2013. Then they flipped to calling it a threat to democracy.

To calibrate, in 2010, it was supposedly a joke that Facebook (already with 500M+ users) was worth $33B. It just made ~$33B in revenue in one quarter.
Read 7 tweets

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