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Balaji Profile picture
@balajis
Mar 10, 2022 • 9 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X
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No, gold was defeated by the state. FDR seized the gold of US citizens with Executive Order 6102.
theconversation.com/how-the-us-gov… Image
This was just a particularly explicit version of how centralized states expropriated individuals over the 20th century to fund their operations.

Gold was seized at $20.67, then the dollar was devalued so it was $35 per ounce. The state booked the profit.
federalreservehistory.org/essays/gold-re… Image
Even Krugman admits it: fiat currency is backed by men with guns.
Let's go through some of the conceptual issues here.

"It was too inflexible to allow sufficient policy to be done"

In other words, gold once limited the power of centralized states to seize the assets of citizens for their own purposes, like huge wars.
"This monograph presents a survey of the crucial link between state power and finance from the ancient era through to the present day. Cicero once said that the true sinew of war was endless streams of money."
press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/455/ Image
"Investment in accordance to productive capacity"

Indeed, you want to invest in projects with real cash flows. But you also don't want your money debased via inflation. So the measure of any investment is whether it can outperform simply holding BTC.
For years, retail and professional investors alike have benchmarked their returns in BTC terms. That's why coinmarketcap.com makes charts like this easy. You can see whether the no-op of simply holding BTC outcompetes an investment. Image
Additionally, you can quantify the daily fees paid, which can be plugged into a DCF model just like cash flows, even though these are chains rather than businesses.

This is a different sense in which BTC and other coins actually are "productive assets".
cryptofees.info Image
Technologies like mass production & mass media enabled the growth of centralized states till ~1950. The transistor, PC, internet, smartphone, and BTC are now *on balance* decentralizing that power...albeit not without an attempted Counter-Decentralization.
sotonye.substack.com/p/if-einstein-…

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More from @balajis

Balaji Profile picture
Jan 19
FIRST CRYPTO PRESIDENT

Overnight, the vast majority of the net worth ($59B) of the next President of the United States is now held in cryptocurrency. This will hold true even with a 90% drop.

What are the implications?

1) First, President Trump just went from crypto being perhaps 1% of his net worth to 90%+. Many early Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana holders experienced the same thing.

2) Second, this phenomenon — the overnight relative devaluation of all non-crypto holdings — will be experienced by billions globally within our lifetime as fiat dies.

3) Third, every politician, influencer, and celebrity worldwide is watching mouth agog at the phenomenon. They’ll wait to see how it shakes out politically and financially, and if the memecoin shows staying power — big if! — they may do their own.

4) Next, if we do then get a large market with thousands of personal memecoins, it may actually be ok, because every buyer knows what they’re buying: the potential future brand value of the meme.

5) Much depends on how much value the TRUMP asset holds, if any. Other celeb memecoins went to zero quickly, but Trump is Trump, and has the unique qualities of (a) 100M+ followers, (b) daily non-stop coverage, (c) presidential immunity, and (d) unprecedented control over the government.

6) So, whatever form of political counterattack comes his way, Trump is now strongly incentivized to legalize cryptocurrency in the most aggressive way possible.

7) Of course, this will be attacked as a conflict of interest. But Biden took 10% for the big guy, and Pelosi traded her stocks, and Hillary monetized her speeches, and Podesta had his $300B climate slush fund, and Obama got his Netflix deal. All became millionaires via various deniable forms of payola for Democrats.

8) So, Trump’s rebuttal may be that he’s just doing everything in public. His claim may be that disclosure solves the conflict of interest problem.

9) And that may be true, but it doesn’t fully solve the *alignment* problem. As context: the CEO of a company is typically one of the largest shareholders, but he is aligned with all his employees because they hold the same shares. All holders rise and fall as one, ideally.

10) By analogy, you would ideally want the President to be aligned with his citizens, such that they all held (say) USA coin, which gave some dividend from the profits of the USA. Kind of like the Alaska Permanent Fund.

11) So, one way of solving the alignment problem would be for Trump to airdrop some TRUMP to every US citizen. However, it might be easier for him to just send an email in his personal capacity to every Trump supporter offering them some free TRUMP.

12) Specifically: he could give 72 hours notice and all kinds of Democrats would also sign up for his personal email list, just to get the airdrop.

13) Would it be legal? Well, it is certainly legal for politicians to email out *requests* for money. But to my knowledge no politician has attempted a personal airdrop before, to *give* away money — and certainly not at this scale.

13) At current valuations, Trump could give $100 of locked up TRUMP to all 77M Trump voters via airdrop and it would “only” cost him $7.7B in an asset that was worth zero two days ago. Heck, he could give $500 per person and still have $20B+ left over.

14) Yes, it would cost Trump some of his asset to do this. But if you needed to join his email list to get the coin, and if the airdrop could be effected without any cap gains, it would “pay for itself” by turning his base into even more rabid supporters.

15) It could even give him the political support necessary to completely destroy the Democrat patronage machine. Basically, by joining Trump’s email list and supporting his crypto policies you’d get a kind of UBI.

16) And if 77M Americans are also benefiting from TRUMP, charges of conflict of interest go away. It’d be a new kind of social contract, a personal relationship between President & citizen.

Worth thinking about.
To defend the asset after a potential crash, you need a huge base of holders. Not 770k, but 77M in the US.

So, the ideas below are fine, but the scalable strategy is an airdrop by the issuer. It boils down to enlightened self interest. Will Trump airdrop TRUMP to his email list?
No, it’s not liquid enough to buy Greenland.

But if it suddenly gained 77M Republican voters as users, and held them over time — very nontrivial ifs — it would gain value simply from the size of the distribution.
Read 5 tweets
Balaji Profile picture
Jan 19
A memecoin is a zero-sum* lottery.

There is no wealth creation. Every buy order is simply matched by a sell order. And after an initial spike, the price eventually crashes and the last buyers lose everything.

* It’s actually negative sum if the platform takes a cut.
If you want to gamble as entertainment, in moderation, like at Las Vegas, ok.

If you are a professional trader, ok.

But most should buy assets that retain their value over the long run.

It is sometimes possible to add use cases to a memecoin, or to keep it in the headlines to keep its value aloft indefinitely. And we’ve seen examples of that as well.

But in general, don’t invest anything you can’t afford to lose.
You are free to consider any asset a memecoin, and I’m not offended by that, but I’m happy to explain why I think Bitcoin is different.

1) Bitcoin is the base layer asset of a blockchain with ~800 Th/s in hashrate across hundreds of datacenters worldwide.

2) It hasn’t been hacked in 15+ years, and has survived several 80-90% drawdowns.

3) It has hundreds of millions of holders worldwide and a global network effect.

4) It grew gradually over time, rather than all at once, and the mining issuance schedule limits how much can be sold by any one party.

5) It has an “industrial use” in the sense that the Bitcoin blockchain permits hard to fake cryptographic proofs-of-existence.

6) It is the first of its kind and pioneered the entire space.

In short, I think Bitcoin has proven its staying power.Image
Read 5 tweets
Balaji Profile picture
Dec 20, 2024
More broadly: AI + social + crypto leads to retribalization of the Western world.

AI fakes mean you only trust info from your tribe.

Social media fragmentation means you only talk to your tribe.

And crypto tribalism means you only trade with your tribe.
What does retribalization look like in the physical world? This is Germany before Bismarck. Image
Ah, it’s actually not the start.
Congress was highly polarized by 2012.
And Twitter by 2017.
Then Gab and Truth broke away in 2020.
Now Bluesky and Threads in 2024.
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Profile picture
Dec 2, 2024
Bangladesh was a stable country.

But it didn’t want to give up a military base or take sides on Ukraine.

So in retaliation, psychopathic Democrats backed a coup.

Then the White House lied about it, just like they lied about Hunter’s pardon.

Now it’s going fundamentalist. Image
Image
Image
Image
Karine Jean-Pierre lied repeatedly about whether Biden would pardon Hunter. That was a “conspiracy theory” back then and a conspiracy reality today.

Now apply that to claims about other matters. Is it really a coincidence that both Bangladesh and Pakistan suffered coups?Image
Democrats and neocons have been escalating pressure on poor Bangladesh since 2022.

They got their coup earlier this year.
Read 5 tweets
Balaji Profile picture
Nov 22, 2024
Gautam Adani is an Indian magnate.
He’s built ports, roads — everything.
One of the most prominent men in India.
Now comes the Democrat DOJ.
Indicting an Indian doing business in India.
For some ostensible violation of US law!
Why? Adani is perceived as center right.
And Democrats are now far left.
So it’s just lawfare across borders.
Like their attacks on Elon.
And on Israel’s right.
And on European conservatives.
But…I doubt the Trump admin continues it.
Adani is to Indian ports what Elon is to American space. That’s why Indian leftists hate him.

But the left is too weak locally to attack him, so they whistled for backup to US Democrats.

After the Trump admin takes office, let’s see whether this case is still around in a year. Image
It’s even more than that.
Democrat-run districts are corrupt.
As are the Bidens themselves.
Remember 10% for the big guy?
Or the $100B California train to nowhere?
Whereas Adani has actually built.
Just like PM Modi has built up India.
This is why the far left attacks them. Image
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Profile picture
Nov 12, 2024
What comes after wokeness?
Democrats align with Communists.
Newsom shows the way.
He’s lost DC, but has Xi.
So: TikTok becomes the Democrat X.
And California defies Trump tariffs.
It’s unfortunately the obvious move.
And already underway. Image
You might know that Xi visited Newsom in SF last year.

You might not know that Newsom visited Xi before. And promised to be China’s “long-term, stable, and strong partner.”
balajis.com/p/only-newsom-…Image
Blue states like Illinois may follow Newsom in defying any tariffs. They want to keep prices down and stay in China’s good graces.

Frankly, it’s extremely difficult to do business without Chinese parts. So they’ll be making the same argument Raytheon is.

theillinoize.com/articles/pritz…Image
Read 4 tweets

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