Vinay Profile picture
Ran @Ethereum launch. CEO @Mattereum Forbes https://t.co/uZMfZdnCcj https://t.co/xjXKfNjNkb Book https://t.co/U8UNCuqVug radical ESG https://t.co/sb81MC5G0R
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Nov 12 19 tweets 6 min read
This is kinda the usual IQ bullshit.

Go to some MENSA meetings. You’ll have IQ130 brick layers and IQ150 romance novel editors.

A *tiny fraction* of high IQ people do anything interesting. IQ is one of perhaps five capabilities required to do interesting work.

Mostly bullshit. Here are some of the things IQ doesn’t really capture:

* an instinct and curiosity for the right kind of problem

* not getting side tracked by the history of nutmeg

* maintaining relationships to get access to network intelligence

* endurance on the task until it’s done
Sep 13 30 tweets 6 min read
My father, an Indian medical researcher, studied this extensively as part of trying to improve patient care.

He made doctors role-play an IQ85 patient describing an angina attack while carrying a heavy box upstairs.

It takes *practice* to get the clinical data from low vocab. His conclusion is that without specialised training, and a lot of it, communication is impossible over a 30 point IQ gap.

Average: 100
Nurse: 115
GP: 130
Consultant: 145
Professor: 160

And this is in a setting where the job is about getting clinical data, mind you. Tight focus.
Jun 18 16 tweets 4 min read
I’ve been thinking hard about “Mammon” as a concept. As you know I don’t much believe in Moloch: I believe that humans have 600,000+ years of overthrowing Moloch lock-in when it arises.

Mammon is a different animal: “the love of money is the root of all evil?"

There’s more Mammon conceptually is, I think, **the knowledge that money is the only thing keeping you alive**.

Not the love of money. The fear of dying, and only money stands between you and death.

To get there you need to be unable to depend on nature, family, or society to keep you alive
Feb 18 72 tweets 15 min read
This bull market is different.

There are three ways to make money in crypto:

* speculating / degen (zero sum)
* running exchanges etc (house always wins)
* RWA (better than tradfi speed & cost)

Everything else is basically smoke and mirrors. Crypto has a fourth, fundamental claim: bitcoin is going to be worth a million dollars when the dollar is basically worthless because of hyperinflation.

You can see how people get there, it might even be true, but that's not making people money these days.

It's a long bet mate.
Jan 14 53 tweets 14 min read
The problem is simple: overconsumption causes global systems to breakdown. Elites pretend breakdown symptoms are not connected.

Davos is the result. It's a place for the elites to try and find new ways to pretend the problem is not real.

That is all.


Davos has two problems.

1) Klaus is 4 years older than Joe Biden. Also he's allegedly a paranoid megalomanic who refused to do any real succession planning because his successors might replace him.

So this version of Davos has a couple of years left max.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Sch…
Jan 6 11 tweets 4 min read
I’ve spent a long time thinking about it and I have concluded that black waxed cotton is the one true fabric for most non-mountaineering gear.

I’ve experimented with just about everything over the years. It’s a question of trade offs.

A brief thread.
Image Waxed cotton as a material has been dominated by a single brand: Barbour. Barbour are basically c*nts. Like American western clothing brands they’re selling nostalgia for being rich in a time that barely existed: landrovers, wellies, the English Landed Gentry.

C*nt cosplay brand
Dec 18, 2023 13 tweets 5 min read
I want to talk a wee bit about Gaza and the archetype of the Joker.

Propaganda — American, British — tells you wars have two sides. Us (good) and Them (bad).

The British in Ireland, India etc. killed more people than the Nazis in the Holocaust. But WW2 was good vs evil right? But this guy challenges good vs. evil.

No doubt he’s evil. No doubt.

The question he raises though… just because you fight me ARE YOU SURE YOU’RE SO GOOD? It’s catastrophic for the moralist Batman, the police and so on.

You’re killing more people than I am, says The Joker.
Dec 10, 2023 92 tweets 19 min read
I’m thinking hard about how to extend this model to handle the political disenfranchisement of young people.

The hopes and dreams of a better world where people have individual agency and great collective power are deep-rooted in the blockchain.

Can we deliver that dream too? I believe we can but it needs some careful cultural thinking about how young people got so screwed over by the economy, and what might be needed to fix it.

It’s all about *frontier* and getting away from incumbents to places where it’s genuinely possible to create something.
Dec 9, 2023 47 tweets 10 min read
🧵I want to talk about magic and rules.

I’ve made a lot of magic over the years. I’ve done a bunch of seemingly impossible things. But I’ve spent the last 6 years on @Mattereum which is 100% laying down the rules that will stop Real World Assets on the blockchain being a fiasco. Image What people wanted from the blockchain — and what a lot of them got — was magic, and new rules.

Magic: “internet money machine go brrrrrr” and folks that were futuristic and lucky got *very* rich. A real vanguard movement.

Rules: 1 BTC is always worth 1 BTC. Uncensorable. Free. Image
Oct 23, 2023 8 tweets 2 min read
Most of the folks working on #NetworkState are implicitly thinking in Max Weber’s definition of a state.

"…lays claim to the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force…”

This is the standard, but inadequate, definition of the State. @balajis #thread Where the State is absent, “warlords” appear. Warlords are just tiny little monopolies on violence. Most don’t regard them as states even through they often enjoy a local monopoly on violence and tax for protection.

See my warlords article northatlanticbooks.com/blog/of-warlor…
May 24, 2023 53 tweets 13 min read
Fixing the global economy is the key to fixing the world.

The best tool to fix the global economy is the blockchain.

In this thread I'm going to discuss why the blockchain age is just starting, and how AI factors into the creation of a new economy on-chain.

#Thread Let's start with the problem statement. There is a #polycrisis which is, broadly speaking, caused by a single problem: the human race is asking more of nature than nature can sustain. Nature is dying under the load. When it breaks it will take us with it.

Mar 7, 2023 24 tweets 8 min read
"Hey @Mattereum folks, what do you think about Amazon's announcement they're going to get into the physical NFT business?"

Well funny you should ask, I do happen to have some thoughts about that.

Let's start at the beginning: what is Amazon really? Amazon has four fundamental assets: relationships (your credit card, their wholesalers), physical warehouses, web infrastructure, and behavioural data from billions of purchases.

In the age of AI, the behavioural data is probably worth the most.

So why NFTs & blockchain?
Jan 26, 2023 24 tweets 8 min read
The problem we all face is that our current lifestyles — even for poorer people in the first world — rely on constant exploitation of nature and other humans.

This is the bedrock situation.

Everything else rests on this system. We do not believe it can be fixed so we ignore it. I spent time homeless. I grew up poor. Racism was never a direct problem for me, but the times when it did flare I got some sense of how it was for people who were more impacted. I spent a lot of time in nature, I felt the problem.

Maybe I’m unusually immersed. Too much reality.
Nov 14, 2022 34 tweets 14 min read
A very quick thread on *theories of value* for crypto - why is this industry worth working in, what's going on, what went wrong, and what comes next.

Let's start with the primal root: 1) Bitcoin is a hedge against US dollar inflation.

Yep. Deflationary money is "better" money. 2) Transactional efficiency: a wire transfer takes four days and goes wrong 5% of the time. It's simply easier and cheaper to send tokens. This is truer than ever because of L2s.

3) Ponzi schemes. Why take a slice when you could just eat the entire cake?

Hugely profitable :-(
Nov 10, 2022 27 tweets 6 min read
I want to talk a little about twitter, governance, the FTX implosion, effective altruism, exit/voice/loyalty, and the situation in Iran. Here's a good video on Iran, listen to vocal tone!

Call it a quick outline of a grand theory.

Beginning thread now. The combination of crypto and social media (here, mainly TikTok rather than twitter) has kept an entire generation of talented people out of politics.

The men mostly went to crypto. The women mostly went to TikTok.

It takes a *lot* of charisma and skill to make TikTok work.
Oct 30, 2022 41 tweets 11 min read
People love to make this shit complicated. It's a profession.

It's not complicated: we're using *far too much stuff* because we have no design discipline for "human satisfaction with minimal footprint" and no law to enforce that discipline.

Everything is downstream of that. Nearly everything is toxic if you do it 8 **billion** times, right down to brushing your teeth with a plastic toothbrush.

The first world high consumption niche is *gratuitously* and vehemently unsustainable on every single axis: power, water, toxics, ag footprint.

It must stop
Oct 29, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
This guy - “Eric Patton” - was far out on the right wing. Smart, polite, realistic: somebody facing the global resource crisis head on, and suggesting we save the people that invented science and universalist democracy first.

If he comes back I look forwards to continuing debate When the right wing were driven off twitter we lost the Anvil needed for the Hammer to beat the crooked steel of opinions into the forged steel of truth.

The debate is necessary: deplatforming makes our entire society dumber by silencing the Lawful Evil contingent!!!
Oct 29, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
Look, a fair number of men "man up" when they're going into a board meeting or a rough bar, and "man down" when they're interacting with little old ladies or children.

The idea that *some men* take this to a further extreme shouldn't be controversial: pre-trans Izzard position. The place where this gets complicated is here: a person's emotional state or sense of being *then becomes defined as the legal definition of gender*.

That done, a whole set of laws, regulations etc. get updated. Direct conflicts occur in areas like rugby or swimming, and more.
Sep 23, 2022 23 tweets 5 min read
Right. You want a better world? A safer world? A world that works?

Let me tell you *exactly* how to get one. No muss, no fuss, I'm aiming for a fifteen tweet manifesto on how we fix all of this shit, bolts to satellites, decision-making to economics, tax to stocks.

Ready? 1/15 Let's talk about the "exploitable edge." This is a single fact we can use as an *efficiency gradient* to fix the world.

Here it is: getting security for one family is incredibly expensive ($millions). But security for a society is remarkably cheap.

Socialized medicine etc. 2/15
Sep 11, 2022 22 tweets 5 min read
I’ve been looking back recently on my subculture - burners, and hippies. Roughly the hippies are the 1960s wave of psychedelia and culturally most of the ayahuasca scene builds on that. Emotionally mushy. Burners from the 1990s are emotionally tougher and take on more challenges. This changes how communities operate. “Healing” is paradigmatically huge for hippie and hippie spirituality. Burners are more about “leadership” and initiation. A bit more vanguard. You could say more masculine energy but that’s kind of a tricky read - better to say survivalist!
Sep 4, 2022 56 tweets 13 min read
I think I’ve figured out what’s wrong with money, at least the way we are doing money.

We’re using money to move *lifespan* from one being to another.

Last year I spent a lot of money fixing my teeth. If I was poor it would have been extractions, not crowns. I’d feel much older Now this function of moving lifespan around is not limited to humans.

Take a field. On its own 50,000 things will grow, most of them inedible to humans. But that’s nature doing nature.

Then a hard push to make the fiend grow corn. You remove other life and concentrate on corn.