Balaji Srinivasan
Co-founder of Counsyl and of Earn.com; a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz from 2013 to 2018 and chief technology officer of Coinbase from 2018 to 2019. Wrote The Network State, which he publishes free and in full at thenetworkstate.com, and writes at balajis.com.
Balaji Srinivasan did not write this page.
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Their wordsboth Democrats and Republicans are converging on the same political form as China: namely, a one-party state where elections may be held, but the party always wins. And where the only true vote is the vote with your feet.
↗Why did Stu Woo of the Wall Street Journal Follow Me to Singapore?balajis.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsIndeed, the abrogation of exit rights essentially makes you a slave.
↗Why did Stu Woo of the Wall Street Journal Follow Me to Singapore?balajis.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsI think it's quite unlikely that this "8-bit world" that we've inherited from the 20th century, which still has less than 256 nation states, will continue indefinitely.
↗Why did Stu Woo of the Wall Street Journal Follow Me to Singapore?balajis.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 2 weeks earlier
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Their wordsnew laws are like code that is pushed live to production without even being read (let alone tested), often in the face of tremendous opposition, affecting millions of citizens, with minimal monitoring to ensure they’re producing the desired results, an extremely slow customer feedback cycle, and few ways to truly opt out.
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Their wordsEncryption thus limits governments in a way no legislation can.
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Their wordsIn this sense, the Network is the next Leviathan, because on key dimensions it is becoming more powerful and more just than the State.
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Their wordsAs incredible as it may sound, the blockchain is the most important development in history since the advent of writing itself, as it’s a cryptographically verifiable, highly replicated, unfalsifiable, and provably complete digital record of a system.
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Their wordsAs mentioned before, Uber and Lyft are better regulators than the State’s paper-based taxi medallions, email is superior to the USPS, and SpaceX is out-executing NASA.
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Their wordsthe US establishment is not more ethical than the CCP when it comes to civil liberties. It’s just less competent!
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Their wordseven the most committed American nationalist is hard pressed to name a country that’s better off after a recent US military intervention, something that wasn’t that hard to do from 1945-1991.
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Their wordsthe vast majority of Americans had no practical freedom of speech unless they owned a media corporation or were employed by one.
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Their wordsUnfortunately, no, because politics is about people who disagree with you. If you’re working with computers, or robots, or pure math, you don’t have politics.
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Their wordsIf you want to produce moral and not just technological progress, you’re going to have to introduce new moral premises that invert what people previously believed.
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Their wordsThe primary axis is no longer the politico-economic axis of capitalism-vs-communism, but the ethno-cultural axis of ethnomasochism-vs-ethnonationalism.
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Their wordsToday's world is becoming tripolar. It is NYT vs CCP vs BTC. That's the American Establishment vs the Communist Party of China vs the Global Internet.
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Their wordsThe establishment journalist claims to speak truth to power, but somehow never gets around to investigating themselves or each other.
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Their wordsAnother example is Bitcoin. It’s the Unix of money. You can send millions with a keystroke or rm your entire fortune. That’s more upside and more downside, by making people power users, and taking away the system administrator.
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Their wordsJust like Hollywood once compared Netflix to the Albanian Army, the US establishment doesn’t yet understand how much better Satoshi Nakamoto or Vitalik Buterin is than every apparatchik they have in the Federal Reserve system.
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Their wordsFew institutions that predated the internet will survive the internet.
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Their wordsThis US government can’t build a bathroom in San Francisco, let alone a costeffective fighter jet, destroyer, combat ship, or aircraft carrier.
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Their wordsI disagree with the fundamental moral premise of Maximalism, which is that Bitcoin is the only coin and all other digital assets are sins.
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Their wordsIf you run a two-sided marketplace, you’ll find contra Hayek that not all knowledge is local.
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Their wordsThis gives us a new perspective on why micronations like Sealand don’t work: they start backwards, from the territory and the government, rather than working forwards from a people and their culture.
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Their wordsmissionary societies outcompete mercenary ones, not just in theory but in practice.
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Our reading
A government is legitimate internally if the governed have consented to it, whatever form it takes.
Their wordsGiven the consent of the governed, any form of government is internally legitimate.
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Their wordsAfter the financial deplatforming of Western proles and foreign elites, of Canadian truckers and 145M Russians, it’s clear that digital finance is a weapon of war.
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Our reading
An organization that demands trust ends up with less of it than one that shows its work instead.
Their wordsParadoxically, the organization that demands trust can get less of it, while the organization that shows their work - thereby not asking for trust - builds up more of it.
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Their wordsLaw is a function of latitude and longitude, so if you can easily change your latitude and longitude, you can change the law under which you live.
- 9 months earlier
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Our reading
The internet-based code order is succeeding the nation-state rules-based international order.
Their wordsthe successor to the rules-based order of America is the code-based order of the Internet.
↗Popups are the new startupsbalajis.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsthe Internet is the only thing with global economic scale comparable to China and has also (b) given birth to an entirely new digital legal system that already de facto manages ~99% of global communications and transactions
↗Popups are the new startupsbalajis.com 2nd of 3 in this piece