Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Feb 6 5 tweets 1 min read
The primary censorship tactic used today is to single out one actor, then pile so much cost on them that they buckle. In other words, the mechanism used against ostensibly free speech is to increase the cost of speech.
But this tactic doesn’t work against a sufficiently decentralized blockchain. The cost of censoring or reversing a single transaction now soars into the billions, and is technically hard to boot.

A fickle mob wants only to impose costs, not bear them. They won’t pay to censor.
This is why moving functionality on-chain changes the game, and why our first priority to protect civil liberties must be technological decentralization.

From the slippery slope to the crypto cliff.
We move from the slippery slope to the crypto cliff, from a scenario where an individual's rights can be silently abrogated in isolation to one where the would-be censor must compromise a blockchain — and thus harm hundreds of millions of holders — to censor just one person.
If all you need to censor someone is to “crowdfund” enough downvotes, that’s relatively easy. Angry clicks cost $0.

But if the mob must *spend* something to effect a cancellation, by attacking an offending chain, even $1 per head can be too expensive.

They don’t *really* care.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Balaji Srinivasan

Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @balajis

Feb 5
There's a simple explanation.

For the purely verbal, crypto appears too technical. What's all this about zero knowledge?

For the mainly technical, crypto looks unnecessarily verbal. What's all this about the state?

We usually hear from the former. That post is from the latter.
You can understand gradient descent without understanding history, but you can’t understand Bitcoin without understanding history.
Note that this doesn't mean modern ML/AI isn't important. I spent years doing it, it's awesome.

It's more that "AI ethics" is a bolt-on to AI. The CCP has their own notion of AI ethics, for example!

But in web3 & especially in BTC, the social is inseparable from the technical.
Read 5 tweets
Feb 4
The non-consensus bet is that many Bernie supporters may eventually become Bitcoin maximalists.

Why? They are more concerned with economics than wokeness. And some see that the printed money isn’t going to the poor but the rich. Once they lose faith in the state, BTC is there.
That may sound implausible.

But inflation could be the left’s Iraq. Huge swaths of the right flipped on the state once their trust in US military intervention just led to losses for all, American & Iraqi alike.

So too for left trust in US economic intervention, after inflation?
It’s just like conservatives starting out as gung-ho supporters of US military intervention, seeing that fail, and then flipping completely into becoming isolationists.

MMT will impoverish the poor, not benefit them. And that may cause them to flip on US economic intervention.
Read 4 tweets
Feb 4
State Dept spokesman asserts Russians are pre-positioning the equivalent of crisis actors, is asked for evidence beyond mere assertion, refuses to provide it to protect sources and methods.

Of course one might just trust the government. But not anymore.
Fascinating on several levels

- A media corp employee who doesn’t just trust the US government
- A government that isn’t trusted on its claims
- A public that trusts neither

After Steele Dossier, Snowden, Iraq WMD, babies in incubators, and Tonkin Gulf — feels like a milestone.
The most interesting part is seeing the media corporation employee call the federal government employee the source of Alex Jones-like conspiracy theories.

This is an inadvertent admission that something can be false even if the US government says so. And if a media corp says so.
Read 7 tweets
Feb 3
Their approach is a school-of-fish strategy. They mindlessly mouth the conventional wisdom. When they’re wrong, they’re all wrong together. Who coulda known?

But any individual who did know, and said so, can be singled out for opprobrium.

It’s all about conformity, not truth.
It's actually a good strategy for the establishment, albeit emergent.

Attack any heterodox thought as a group. Then, if the idea breaks through regardless, no one person needs to apologize.

The lab leak theory is a good example. @Ayjchan @mattwridley
scottaaronson.blog/?p=6183
One defense against the school-of-fish strategy is pseudonymity.

That's why Satoshi and project-evidence.github.io put their work out under a pseudonym.

The latter is the renamed version of an early lab leak study that we discussed in April 2020.
Read 5 tweets
Feb 3
This is a Renaissance painting.
No, the opposite of a Renaissance.
Dégringolade.
20 years.
2 stalls.
A full press conference.
A toilet paper ribbon.
No scissors.
Idiocratically oblivious pride in this “accomplishment”.
And a model that is being exported all over America.
I can’t get over how stupid this is.
It is decivilization.
Literal Idiocracy.
Gawking at a flush toilet from multiple camera angles.
13 billion dollars a year for the city.
No one in the whole imbroglio seems to recognize how underwhelming it all is.
The thing is that SF is not just the future of much of America. It is its present.

Its governance model may be terrible for citizens. And terribly wasteful of money. But it secures sinecures for parasites & funds the homeless industrial complex.

They’re happy with the outcome.
Read 9 tweets
Feb 2
In San Francisco
It takes 20 years to build a public bathroom
They held a ribbon-cutting ceremony
And a press conference
This is not a joke
"BART will hold a ribbon-cutting event to mark the reopening of the Powell Street Station restrooms that have been closed for more than 20 years." bart.gov/news/articles/…
You laugh, but the SF model is being exported all over the US, from Seattle to LA.

It's legalized graft, on an enormous scale, always in the name of the people, at the expense of the people. Read @ShellenbergerMD's book about this catastrophe of a city.
amazon.com/San-Fransicko-…
Read 5 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

:(