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Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
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Feb 17 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Three kinds of DAOs

Autonomous DAO — a group that interacts with a truly self-running smart contract with no admin keys and no CEO

Bureaucratic DAO — a mess of politics

CEO DAO — a single clear leader
Yes, I’m well aware that the A in DAO in theory already stands for “autonomous”, but today’s DAOs mostly aren’t autonomous — so the distinction is worth making.
A non-obvious point is that a single decision maker in a CEO DAO may protect user rights more reliably than the groupthink of a bureaucrat DAO.

No decision makers (autonomous) or one decision maker (CEO) can both be better than a group of decisionmakers (bureaucratic).
In what sense would a CEO DAO be “decentralized”? Physically decentralized. Numerous non-voting coinholders. Public, on-chain code. Many key aspects recorded on-chain.

But the specific term doesn’t matter much. And degree of decentralization needed varies by the use case.
Closest analogy to a CEO DAO is an open source project with a BDFL.

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More from @balajis

Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Feb 17
The truckers didn’t have a way to win.
But the Canadian state found 3 ways to lose.

First, they couldn’t censor social, so they lost the narrative.

Second, they went after the money because they lost hard power.

Third, they don’t control hard money, so they’ll lose there too.
We will see how things pan out. Much can change.

But this fits with the thesis that the Counter-Decentralization will fail in the West but succeed in the East.

There was a big push by the Western establishment for retroactive censorship — but it may prove too little, too late.
A state that loses social lacks soft power. No narrative, no obedience.

A state that loses AI lacks hard power. No surveillance, no drones.

And a state that loses BTC/web3 lacks hard money. No seizures, no freezes.
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
Feb 14
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.
Read 4 tweets
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

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