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Preston Byrne Profile picture
Preston Byrne
@prestonjbyrne
Crypto-lawyer @byrnestorm | Senior Fellow @ASI | cryptolaw prof @FordhamLawNYC | libertarian
3 subscribers
Aug 11 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
It’s really funny watching UK lawyers and politicians claim that they can drag an American to their island to answer for protected speech.

They have no idea. They really don’t understand how awesome the First Amendment is. Relatedly, there other funny character is the British guy who thinks they have free speech and then explains it a 30 tweet thread listing every way in which the UK government can engage in what would be mostly unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination in America
Jun 12, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
AI is the opposite of crypto. AI is digital abundance, crypto is digital scarcity. Putting in some automated crypto-gated systems to impose a cost on the flood of AI spam that’s coming our way is going to be more important in an AI world, not less “Hey, bot. You want me to read that screed you just sent me? Pay me.”
Jun 2, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
And soon they'll be spending millions of dollars litigating over them The thing about clients is that sometimes they don't actually know what they want when they come into your office. Pulling a template off a shelf is fine but the challenge is getting the client to understand commercial realities and possible outcomes...
Jun 2, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
“Trust and safety” is a dumb job title. If the job is censorship, the title should be “chief censor.” Not necessarily. Social media depends on censorship to function - bots, spam, fraud, and more all need to be eliminated. But just call it what it is rather than by some euphemism.
Jun 1, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
“AI Extinction Risk” seems to be an emerging grift for nerds who want to be on TV None of them proposes how they would actually mitigate the extinction risk so here are a couple of suggestions
Mar 12, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Bank failures can be the result of stupidity by those running the bank, or bad government policy. SVB’s collapse appears to have been due to a bit of both, but with major assists from Choke Point 2 shutting down Silvergate and years of bad policy by the Fed. The thing that bothers me most is that when SVB went down the fuse towards a wider crisis had clearly already been lit - SVB’s failure was contagion from the Choke Point 2 strangulation of Silvergate. But SVB is of course orders of magnitude bigger than Silvergate.
Mar 11, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
This reminds me of the period immediately after Lehman collapsed. I was living in the City of London; the mood was dour, but late at night a shipping firm near my apartment had the lights blazing in a top-floor boardroom with a bunch of expensive cars parked in the street below. I doubt whether SVB can be saved. This should have been prevented last week with emergency legislation; the problems SVB have are systemic ones not unique to that bank. SVB was just uniquely vulnerable to a bank run given the nature of its customer base.
Mar 10, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
If the Treasury knew what they were up against, they’d have emergency legislation in front of Congress tonight and they’d enact before Monday.

If other banks are exposed to MBS the same way SBV was, they need to provide bridge finance to get them through high inflation. TARP 2. This is the exact same thing as 2008 only instead of terrible lending practices, it’s Fed policy which is eroding the value of the bonds on bank books. The government created this problem.
Mar 10, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Startups who escaped the carnage so far should diversify their treasuries across multiple banks and Bitcoin. If you do this, after doing this move expeditiously to paper it on favorable terms (3% annual interest) and possibly take some security. Just throwing money at a startup without docs doesn’t do anyone any favors on the next raise.
Mar 10, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
1) Print money to fund Covid social programs and wars

2) Massive inflation

3) Raise rates, fail to tame inflation

4) —> This banking crisis is 100% the result of terrible policy at the very top, supervised by both parties, across multiple administrations. A plague on both your houses.
Mar 8, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This is so intellectually dishonest. Complying with the current disclosure regime is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole - e.g. forcing a self-custody ecosystem for web apps to run all token transfers through a transfer agent. Do what Europe is doing with MiCA. The Internet would not have existed if every app transaction needed to involve a transfer agent and a broker-dealer. What's going to happen is that Africa and SE Asia are going to leapfrog us just like they did with cell phones 20 years ago.