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Balaji
Immutable money, infinite frontier, eternal life. #Bitcoin
Jeremy Pinnix ☧ Profile picture otaria123 Profile picture DA Profile picture 🇺🇦🌊alwaztypin2.0🌊🇺🇦 Profile picture Matthew Stotts (🌊,🌲) Profile picture 459 added to My Authors
Dec 1 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Huge breakthrough by OpenAI. Deserved props. This could replace Google and StackOverflow for many technical questions. That said, there's something about talking to a chatbot that makes me more conscious that it could be wrong.

This is healthy — you *should* have that feeling when using Google — but search results are shown with a kind of faux impartiality.

That's not present in a conversation.
Dec 1 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
They want you fired for a tweet, while they clap for a fraud. Remember, they don't really care if your crypto is stolen. They're more interested in stealing your crypto. archive.ph/OBe82 Image
Nov 26 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
With companies, people know the words may not match reality. Just because some folks are starting a social network, and using all the same words as Facebook, doesn't mean they'll execute like Facebook.

But many of the same people think laws do what they're claimed to do. People generally only see the words emitted by a politician or corporation. They can't really see the actions. Voting records & balance sheets are currently less legible, less visible, less verifiable, than tweets.

Cryptography could fix this...
Nov 19 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
All Twitters become founder-moderated Twitters.

Farcaster by @dwr.
Poaster by @lastcontrarian.
Twitter by @elonmusk.
And so on for every Mastodon.

This is a huge shift from the Zuck/Jack era. From social media as neutral utility, to social media as founder-moderated community. At the same time we also have a shift towards decentralized social, like lens.xyz.

These seemingly opposed trends sum together. A previously “neutral” commons fractures into 1000 decentralized pieces, each with a known sysadmin that imbues it with character.
Nov 15 • 11 tweets • 7 min read
The net result of FTX is that billions of dollars was stolen from crypto investors to give to Democrat-aligned politicians, nonprofits, and journalists.

This is why there may be no prosecution. Why is SBF so protected?

Why is everyone from SEC to NYT running interference for him?

He was basically Soros junior — just with stolen customer money — and evidently bought off the entire media, nonprofit, political, and regulatory establishment.
archive.ph/HYdcM
Nov 12 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Pagerank is one way to quantify reputation. How do we quantify trust? There’s a fair amount of literature on the Trust Game from game theory. And surveys by organizations like Edelman. And various works on social capital.

What else we got?
frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…
Nov 11 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
The US government-regulated system spent $787 billion of taxpayer money bailing out the banks. Connected bankers weren’t prosecuted. And that’s before they printed trillions.

We’re now exploring the alternative timeline. What if no bailouts? Wanting the establishment to regulate after all the financial crashes is like wanting a drunk driver to serve as policeman after all the car crashes.

They said volatility was over.
They caused the mortgage bubble.
They incinerated trillions.
And the world couldn’t opt out. ImageImageImageImage
Nov 11 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Blue checks combine a few different concepts:

- is this account a human?
- is it unique?
- is it who it says it is?
- and is it important?

@elonmusk can still change course, but right now his solution to the bot problem is causing a more damaging impersonation problem. Damaging to Twitter, that is — but perhaps not society.

If people learn to not trust tweets from verified users without doing diligence (and arguably they shouldn't), you get a Tower of Babel moment where everyone redecentralizes.

All would now agree: the public square is fake.
Nov 11 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Four kinds of trust falling at the same time.

Trust in vote counting
Trust in verified tweets
Trust in vouched reserves
Trust in visual images

Cryptographic verification is a partial solution. But also need high-trust startup societies. The slow vote counting process is making it hard for some to trust the political system.

Estonia does have a better alternative in the form of cryptographically verifiable voting. But they also have a higher trust society. e-estonia.com/solutions/e-go…
Nov 6 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Just to explain (not a dunk) — Apple can pull off hardware but most startups can’t.

You need to be flawless on execution when it comes to physical product. Can’t just backspace if you make a mistake. And even then you can get killed by supply chain forces outside your control. Two of the very best hardware companies of recent times — Oculus and Fitbit — had to eventually be acquired by software companies with high margins that could fund the punishing costs and uncertainty of hardware development.
Nov 5 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Mobility is liquidity. Cash is king, but passport is queen.
Nov 5 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The answer may be a flipped conference, by analogy to a flipped classroom.

In a normal classroom, you attend lectures as a group and do homework by yourself.

But in a flipped classroom, you watch lecture videos by yourself and discuss homework in a group. Similarly, in a normal conference you attend the talks in person & get people’s contact info to talk to them afterwards.

But now that all talks are recorded, you can flip the conference. All talks are posted online and watched at your leisure, while in-person is for discussion.
Nov 5 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This is another possible outcome: rather than Twitter decentralizing because it becomes a protocol, Twitter decentralizes because of unbundling and defection.

Quite possible we see more left-wing Gabs, Parlers, and Truth Socials arise, like Tribel. Personally, I’m more bullish on tech-focused communities like @farcaster_xyz and pseudonymous communities like @poasterapp than I am on communities born mainly out of political warfare.

Does the community have a positive mission, or just a negation?
Nov 3 • 7 tweets • 5 min read
Legacy media hates tech because tech disrupted them. Image Media couldn’t build search engines or social networks. But they could write stories and shape narratives.

Faced with decline, starting precisely in 2013 after Obama was re-elected, there was a visible editorial decision to push wokeness to drive clicks.

That drove the 2010s.
Nov 1 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
The blue checks wanted to abolish billionaires, in the name of equality.

The billionaire will end up abolishing the blue checks, in the name of equality. Of course, these aren't disjoint sets. Many billionaires have blue checks.

But roughly speaking: blue checks are about status and tech billionaires about startups. It's old money vs new money.

Old money wanted to kill new money.
New money is wiping out the status of old money.
Oct 31 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
Remember, the Ochs-Sulzbergers profited from covering up the Holodomor when it was happening — the intentional starvation of millions of Ukrainians by Stalin.

They won a Pulitzer Prize for lying about a genocide.
And they've admitted it.
archive.ph/gzlZs The fact that the Ochs-Sulzbergers have now reinvented themselves as cheerleaders for Ukraine (!) after literally abetting the Holodomor is like Julius Streicher turning himself into a champion of Israel.

The level of brazen fraud is off the charts.
newcriterion.com/issues/2012/6/…
Oct 28 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I'm actually cautiously bullish on both Elon's Twitter and Zuck's Meta. Don't underestimate legit founders. Elon buying Twitter makes sense, if for nothing else than guaranteed control over the "private keys" to his 110M+ follower account.

That alone has more distribution than all legacy media combined, and is certainly worth many billions of dollars.
Oct 19 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The purpose of technological decentralization is freedom.

It’s digital human rights and property rights.

It’s protection against surveillance, seizure, silencing.

And it’s rule of code for when the rules-based order breaks down.

Which is happening. archive.ph/0wlC2 The twin engines of the world economy — the US and China — are at trade war.

Many constants are becoming variables.

40+ years of free trade erased in one day of sanctions.

You can’t just assume a global free market. It has to be built. Or rebuilt. How? macrocosm.substack.com/p/picking-an-e…
Oct 18 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
India is its own power center.
It’s returning as the third great pole on the world stage.
Alongside Abrahamic West and Sinic East, a Dharmic South.
It’s a billion-plus people, now mostly online, and rising fast.
It’s not a colony anymore.
And so it has its own foreign policy. For 18 of the last 20 centuries, the Indian and Chinese civilizations were the largest economies. urbanlogics.eu/china-india-bi…
Oct 17 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
The US is picking a fight with its factory. I don't think this obvious point has been thought through.

China may retaliate. How? They could drive up the cost of living dramatically for every American, in a time of already high inflation. Or deprive key industries of spare parts. Even the F-35 had some Chinese parts!

So: international supply chains are complex, but it's possible China could try to figure out what's being used in Ukraine, to deny the US every nut, screw, and bolt that it needs to win.

2nd order consequences...
scmp.com/news/china/mil…
Oct 17 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I agree with @SamoBurja here.

Of all the things that are right up China’s alley…a giant national project to become US-independent on semiconductors is very much within their capability.

Paradoxically, it’s harder for them to clone Prada than Nvidia. Btw, I like @kamilkazani too, but I disagree on this issue.

Why? Because this is right in China’s wheelhouse.

First, it’s existing tech. They know it works.

Second, it’s clearly valuable, so no arguments on resource allocation.

Third, it’s a matter of their national interest.