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Vinay Profile picture
Vinay
@leashless
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
11 subscribers
Feb 24 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
A lot of people are very afraid of Donald Trump's administration. A lot of people are very afraid of Elon Musk.

I want to explain The Structure Of The Deal in a way which will leave you wiser, but possibly much more deeply disturbed.

Let's talk about human extinction. (thread) Humans can go extinct. A lot of things have to be "just right" for our species to exist.

We've nearly gone out at least once in ancient history.

More recently we faced nuclear war and were kept safe by one stubborn Russian refusing launch orders.

We came entirely too close. Image
Jan 5 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Pathological risk blindness will be the end of us.

* covid is mass-crippling people
* H5N1 has irrevocably contaminated the US food system
* climate change is "entering a new phase" as Nature stops absorbing our carbon output, accelerating warming
* is AI waking up?

now what? At some point either we have a series of miraculous escapes or we get *completely* walloped.

Let me give you an example: AIDS in America.

In 1985 we understood HIV caused AIDS, and had an HIV blood test.

In 1985 10k Americans are infected.

700,000 more go on to die.

Why 70x? Image
Image
Nov 28, 2024 • 36 tweets • 8 min read
1) D&D's "murderhobo" problem has always been there: it's baked into the game's DNA and indeed much of the source material.

2) But _everybody on earth_ is human by D&D standards. Nobody has _ever_ said "Germans are dark elves" or whatever. It's never been a vehicle for racism. If there are cultural problems in old school D&D culture they are these:



And severe forms of theseplausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-soci…
Nov 22, 2024 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
Here's the thing. Real politics is about money and war.

By 2008 we were losing the wars, and America had gone bankrupt and was living on credit cards.

The "progressives" retreated into a sort of fantasy world: can't talk economy, can't talk war.

So they made up imaginary wars. But if enough people believe in an imaginary war, it becomes a real war.

Suddenly the entire weight of the progressive movement focusses on a single issue above all others: trans rights.

The rest of society is like "what the fuck do you mean 'female penis'?" and a war starts.
Nov 12, 2024 • 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, 2024 • 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.
Jul 17, 2024 • 29 tweets • 9 min read
So I *think* I'm relatively politically sophisticated –– worked with/for a couple of very senior defense bureaucrats, lifelong cypherpunk, watched 90s crypto and 2000s crypto get nuked by the Feds etc.

I have some thoughts on this, but they're a wee bit subtle. It'll need detail FOSS software went through a similar political hell period: "Free as in beer" ripped off the development methodology of "Free as in Freedom" and stripped the value out of the Free Software ecosystem replacing it with Open Source.

Yes, "Free" and "Open" were at war.

"Crypto" now
Jun 18, 2024 • 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, 2024 • 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, 2024 • 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, 2024 • 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