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Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
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Feb 14 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The defining scarce resource of each decade?

2000s bandwidth
2010s attention
2020s blockspace
2030s loyalty
First, get people online.
Then, connect the world.
Next, observe that these new connections cause new conflicts by obviating old borders we didn't know existed.
Add crypto to restore digital rule of law.
Finally, rebundle society after the coming unbundling.
Provable patriotism

When something becomes highly abundant, its scarce complement becomes valuable. Given infinite peanut butter, people want jelly.

So, when we enhance technological exit to the nth power, the systems that arise will be those that engender genuine loyalty.
Yes, loyalty is related to legitimacy and reputation. Here's how I'd distinguish: legitimacy is more about process, loyalty is more about passion. And reputation is more peer-to-peer, loyalty is more about leadership.
@aeyakovenko @AaronBastani @Josh_Kale

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Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Feb 6
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.
Read 5 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
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
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
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
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
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
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
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
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
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

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