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David Galbraith Profile picture
David Galbraith
@daveg
Technologist and VC, former architect. Invented these (i.e. link in bios: https://t.co/xBmFQEvMhb), among other things.
Roy Liu Profile picture 1 subscribed
Jul 2 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Fintech is a niche internet sector that everyone thought would be huge, but outside of China it has resulted in very few platform companies like Revolut. Here’s why.

1. It’s a massive market sector that had everyone drooling but regulation means it’s not a level playing field for startups. 2. Outside of the period of ultra low interest rates it’s ultimately about balance sheet size, which is hard for startups.
Jun 30 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Why France could implode.
This is Germany - the feedback loop of incentives to work to create wealth where a portion pays for a welfare state (a good thing) doesn't work anymore and it's getting worse, with this specific example. But now, let's compare it with France. Image France is a lot worse, the state is 60% of the economy vs Germany's 45% and it hasn't made a profit in half a century, so its debt is increasing. Image
Jun 1 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
My macro view:
Agrarian to Industrial to Digital era.
(Information economy is as big a transition as Industrial Revolution) The introduction of the printing press rewired communication from one to a few to a few to many.
It triggered the Reformation and 200 years of war and eventually led to the US model of popular culture. The masses (via broadcast channels) had more purchasing power than the elite and movies made more money than opera.

The internet rewired communication from a few to many to many to many. This is an even bigger structural change than the printing press delivered.
Everyone has a broadcast channel and people that care about a fringe issue will spend 24/7 promoting it, where moderates won’t.
Fringe issues and conspiracy dominate because there are an infinite number of lies but finite number of truths, so there are more compelling lies than compelling truths and lies win.
Eventually this stabilises when the network settles into a small world topology where people that link tribes gate-keep the lies from spreading.
But for now, we are not just in the 1930s, we are in Reformation 2.
Apr 29 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Wake up Europe, the digital age is bypassing you. You have no Google , Amazon, Meta, Apple. You arrogantly called SpaceX a fanciful dream and it wiped out the European Space Agency. You have no Nvidia and your response to AI has been to regulate before you have anything domestic to regulate. Your car industry is about to be wiped out by the Chinese. Your biggest economy shut down nuclear out of spite and with fraud. Your capital markets have no liquidity and your startups are drowning in bureaucracy. Your border is being attacked by Russia and your defence spending will have to triple just to be where it was with US subsidy given that part of the former Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc is now part of the EU. Your economy has slumped from the world’s largest to way behind the US. Your pensions are paid by three times less people and cost five times as much as people live longer. Your infrastructure is a model for the world but is configured for rail over self drive. Your electricity grid needs half a trillion of investment to cope with planned capacity and replacements, for the switch to renewables, within a decade. There are bright spots such as pharma and your healthcare system is a model for what civilisation looks like it. But to afford it, you need to completely transform from the industrial to digital age, to reform your institutions and rout the sclerotic bureaucratic system. I did this interview for the Guardian nearly a decade ago, shouting at clouds about the same thing. Since then, I’d argue, things have gotten worse. It needs a massive, multinational initiative to correct, urgently. theguardian.com/technology/201…
Nov 20, 2022 • 9 tweets • 1 min read
Here is a recipe for how to build a place like this. Importantly, it has to be a recipe, not a design.

Establish a simple hierarchy like the human body: a head (here, the cathedral), and the rest. At building level either consciously use symmetry or consciously break it. Have squarish spaces between buildings for people to interact. Put trees in them where possible.
May 4, 2022 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Fantastic thread. Why movies are full of recycling franchises like Marvel while innovation in indie fringes doesn't percolate up. I suspect reason for this is the following: Mainstream is hyperconnected, over-dense network (groupthink, ossified) and is potentially disrupted only when overall network becomes a small world one (goldilocks area between connected and Balkanized) and stuff that appears in the creative niches can bubble up to mainstream.
Aug 4, 2021 • 8 tweets • 1 min read
1. Crypto is a technical solution to pure Internet infrastructure, it can’t prevent laws against it. Financial services consist of a technical and regulatory component. 2. The adoption of Internet based currency tokens by central banks uses a crypto based technical solution to replace banking rails with the Internet. It doesn’t use the crypto aspect for regulation so is not decentralised.
Apr 12, 2021 • 10 tweets • 1 min read
China's digital currency, what does it mean?

1. Coins & notes can be replaced by digital and govt now has a way to funnel cash directly to citizens, UBI style. 2. Bitcoin is not challenged much by this. It is digital gold and truly decentralized.
Apr 7, 2021 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
The end of growth .
1. The growth in number of Internet users has halted. 2. Our attention is saturated.
Apr 7, 2021 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Coinbase is like Netscape. It's a well designed UI on top of a new network (Bitcoin/web) created using a new protocol (Bitcoin spec/HTTP). It's worth more than Netscape because it holds currency but maybe it should be valued based on financial services, not tech stock growth. Like Netscape and unlike, say, Facebook, it doesn't own its own protocol. It's not a platform in the traditional sense.
Sep 30, 2020 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Presidential debates don't matter. They are obsolete, game-show era media invented in their current format for TV, which isn't really a thing anymore. Attachment to them is cultural in the US. European countries like France and the UK have only recently started copying them, ironically just as the world is about to move on.
Sep 27, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Elon Musk is doing something even more interesting design wise, than Jobs did. Jobs imported decades old German modernist product design, which, unlike architecture, never really made it to the US, and applied Bauhaus modernism to software design. Musk is postmodern... ...in the best way. He's using retro cultural influences, Flash Gordon era rockets and Stealth Fighter like, origami style, car design from 70s Lotus, to deliberately invert the current norm and show that you can be playful with products that are much more ambitious than Apple's.
Sep 17, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Why the whole environmental narrative of reducing energy consumption is false. Zero consumption and the temperature rises for 40 years, then levels off, the ice melts, we die, the planet survives. theconversation.com/what-would-hap… So we need to geoengineer (sadly) which requires progress, which has always correlated with increased energy consumption (probably has to, due to laws of physics), so we need to massively onboard renewables, so this energy consumption doesn't make things worse.
Sep 8, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The whole spidersweb of bureaucracy and legalese, from form filling to GDPR whack-a-mole to impenetrable language and unread, ass covering bits of paper or disclaimers, from website signups to medication packaging, product instructions, taxes and applications... Is designed for a pre computer, industrial era of paperwork and structured data interpreted and pored over by gatekeepers ordinary people don't have access to. It is obsolete, inhuman impenetrable and intimidating for the most vulnerable or underrepresented in society.
Aug 28, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Most demographic models point to reduced religion as cause of reduced fertility, but this is wrong. Image A more accurate view would be that reduced superstition and increased reason reduces fertility. But this is also wrong as it assumes secular societies have no art of spiritual component.
Aug 28, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Despite the (un)popular perception, Palantir is the closest example of human centric design actually working and replacing sales and marketing
buckfiftymba.com/palantirs-grow… Engineers interview users and iterate on products which people evangelise by word of mouth. It works because the unit economics of extremely high ticket enterprise sales have big Customer Acquisition Costs (enterprise sales teams) and high Costs of Goods Sold (integration costs).
Jul 11, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Starting to design my first building in years Image Image
Jun 9, 2020 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
.@stephen_wolfram theory not everything, so far:
> The universe is a computer
> As in its operation creates itself
> From rule based iteration on a node graph > We can't predict the future from knowing this as it would require a the universe to compute it
> And we can't have a meta computer that could do so, as it couldn't be part of or connected to the universe
Jun 5, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The single thing that has formed my world view over the last few years and why some of what is happening now is inevitable. ncase.me/crowds/ Because there are a finite number of truths and an infinite number of lies, I believe you can prove from the science that Nicky Case demonstrates visually, in the link, combined with the fact that until a new form of communication settles into a stable, small world form...
May 31, 2020 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
So unfortunately nobody is doing the math (health cost of economic shutdown vs heath cost of not, using QALYs or some measure of human suffering caused by either). I spoke to a friend at the WHO and it isn't being done there or, seemingly by the UN agencies in concert. And it isn't being done by politicians on either side as it's politically toxic for most (health related deaths from being poor could be very hard to measure). Which is why we need to have a universal model based on amount of human suffering.
May 29, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
@oliverbeige I'm trying to estimate the number of years of reasonable quality of life lost (QALY style) and absolute life expectancy years lost to Covid'-19 deaths vs the economic impact and poverty e.g. the 40-60m plunged into extreme poverty I.e. would need to know mean age of those thrown into extreme poverty (mostly India, Nigeria and DRC) extreme poverty reduction in life expectancy and some measure of quality of life lost over full lifespan. Compared with average age of death from Covid and life expectancy.