Balaji Srinivasan

Perhaps obvious, but... The US government doesn't make money by taxing (like many presume) or by manufacturing (like many desire) but instead by printing. That is, it makes money by administering a global financial empire. And dollar inflation is global taxation.

THE TELEGRAM NETWORK STATE? The Telegram TON IPO could be important. Mainly because they get the importance. But first...ok, yes, what got announced it isn’t technically a Telegram offering, nor is TON formally issued by Telegram, nor is it really even an IPO. To be precise, what just launched is a crypto treasury company called VERB that holds $500M+ of TON, which is a coin issued by a foundation that was once formally affiliated with Telegram and then became independent but is now affiliated again. Got all that? But these are really just implementation details. The offering could be important[1] simply because (a) Telegram has a billion …

@sriramk Games, yes. Apps, I don’t know. Games and entertainment can tolerate probabilistic output, so AI can fill screens unpredictably. Apps and businesses often can’t tolerate unpredictability. So they need to bound the use of AI.

The decline in social trust is a Western phenomenon. And particularly an American phenomenon. Because the opposite is happening abroad. Look at Edelman's trust numbers for China and India. They've been ascending with technology. https://t.co/JnTI2ufDl8 You can of course argue with the Edelman numbers[1] for any given jurisdiction. For example, I am skeptical about their stats for Nigeria and Kenya. However, their numbers do track both (a) the GDP figures[2] and (b) the visible improvement on the ground in places like Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, India, and China. In general, the big picture is that the former first world is now mostly the desce…

A republic, not an empire. But what does that mean? For Britain, it meant decline. https://t.co/jppo5d9Uds We see this sentiment all the time in tech. A Google that’s nostalgic for the garage. A global behemoth that warmly remembers its womb. And at the scale of a tech startup, it actually is possible to build a giant company and then scale another one from scratch within one human lifetime. But at the scale of a country…it’s harder. Were the US actually so precipitous as to shut down its global empire and return to the proverbial garage, that would likely mean a 99% markdown for US living standards and the end of the dollar as the reserv…

Regulate big tech with a thousand startup piranhas. Or protect big tech with a thousand anti-startup regulations. Those are the choices.

LLMs may have topped out, for now. But the broader AI deployment has just begun. https://t.co/uwGgQ6uxTM Figure is from @tomaspueyo's recent post: https://t.co/M8AOd44H8t https://t.co/tIYBlX37Vw @tomaspueyo It took 20 years from the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. And billions of miles, and billions of dollars. But AI can now do this valuable task end-to-end. And probably many others. https://t.co/Ajqk7EhKWr @tomaspueyo Like the transition from artisanship to mass production. https://t.co/uaekJxRV1O

Introducing AI agents alongside humans on the Internet is like introducing cars alongside humans on physical streets. (1) Some spaces will be AI-only, like bots trading against each other, similar to dedicated highways for cars. (2) Some will be human-only, like proof-of-human social networks, similar to walkable communities offline. (3) And some will be a mix, like Claude Code, similar to city streets with human and machine mixed in close proximity. But the whole digital world will need to be rearchitected.

There are now two kinds of AI retards. The first kind of retard uses AI everywhere, even where it shouldn’t be used. The second kind of retard sees AI everywhere, even where it isn’t used. Usually, it’s obvious what threads are and aren’t AI-written. But some people can’t tell the difference between normal writing and AI writing. And because they can’t tell the difference, they’ll either overuse AI…or accuse others of using AI! What we actually may need are built-in statistical AI detectors for every public text field. Paste in a URL into an archive.is-like interface and get back the probability that any div on the page is AI-generated. …

The deep point is: the Internet is not the same as America. Every graph shows that the Internet is economically competitive. But America minus the Internet is not. All the green shoots, all the remaining optimism really comes from the Internet. It’s AI, robotics, drones. It’s people building things and working together and doing well. Unfortunately, much of the non-Internet US economy is not like that. Since the 2008 financial crisis, many non-Internet companies have gradually become zombies, dependent on Fed printing and state intervention both directly and indirectly. The Internet is as American as America was British. America started …

Good rebuttal to Cloudflare by Perplexity. The core point is that an AI agent is just an extension of a human. So when it makes an HTTP request, it shouldn't be treated like a bot. Functionally, Perplexity is only making this request at the user's direction. @eastdakota What are your thoughts? If users couldn't delegate their actions to AI agents, and all agent traffic was forbidden by robots.txt, then agents wouldn't be able to log in on behalf of users & perform actions. Perhaps robots.txt should get a new section for AI agents.

I have good news. Yes, the land is moving in an illiberal direction. It’s disorderly anarcho-nationalism and anarcho-communism in America. And disturbingly ordered nationalist communism in China. Businessmen are now randomly murdered in the USA and randomly expropriated in the PRC. All manner of hatred bursts forth every day on social media — against whites, nonwhites, men, women, the young, the old, and everyone in between. And the values of peace, trade, and win/win cooperation that built the modern world seem like they’re on the ropes. But all is not lost. Because the cloud is moving in the opposite direction. As the Internet is actual…

Ten thoughts on AI. https://t.co/qcjPZiOenj https://t.co/Rv0xn8rPAS

Strongly disagree. (1) The actual reform would be to make IPOs easier, by essentially eliminating Sarbox. And we'll actually get that reform... but only via crypto, because all companies will become cryptoequities. However, that means they'll list on Internet capital markets and crypto exchanges, rather than NYSE/NASDAQ. (2) See how the number of US public companies has crashed since the early 2000s? Then, ten years later, the number of Internet coins started soaring. The big picture is that we're just sunsetting US capital markets in favor of Internet capital markets. (3) Now, let's talk about why random government interference with volun…

This is like the assassin who missed congratulating themselves for electing Trump. Remember, the DOJ did bankrupt Spirit Airlines by blocking its merger with JetBlue. It didn’t kill Figma, but that’s only because the founder is amazing — not because state harassment helped! https://t.co/cw3g2Bg5gs Success truly has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan. Because the Figma IPO is so big that apparently even the most dedicated anti-tech haters want to get their name into the winner’s circle. But the chutzpah here is off the charts. This one reminds me of Gensler taking credit for the Bitcoin ETF, after he got forcibly dragged across th…

Prompt your AI like the old Twitter. Limit responses to 140 characters, or 140 words, or perhaps 140 lines. Otherwise you’ll get back 140 pages. AI companies should do this too. Save millions on tokens by defaulting to concision.

The way Bitcoin scales is offchain and other chains. Practically speaking, you either load BTC into an exchange and then do offchain transactions, or use something like wrapped BTC on another chain. That’s more hub-and-spoke than fully p2p, but anyone with BTC can set up a hub. For example, with even 10 BTC you can set up a hub for a small community, much like a centralized exchange. So long as no individual settlement is over $1M USD you can handle most of the community’s business by just doing offchain settlement between parties. Yes, that hub is trusted, but the goal after all is to eventually rebuild high trust societies. And softwar…

This actually makes sense to me, because AI is great for images, video, user interfaces, and anything where we can verify by eye. And Replit generates useful prototypes whose functionality can be instantly visually verified. It makes easy anything that should be easy. That’s how I think about Replit nowadays. It’s almost like the minimum description length (MDL) concept from computer science. If it’s conceptually easy, if what you want can actually be described in a few sentences or an interactive session (because prompting is also a skill), then Replit makes it easy. For any kind of data analysis or CRUD app or sample code on how an API …

AI social is the replacement of humans with bots. That's Character, Grok, and all the chat apps. Crypto social is the addition of wallets to accounts. That's Base, Farcaster, and all the coin apps.

As blockspace increases, the idea of the ledger of record is becoming more feasible. As AI progresses, the ledger of record is becoming more necessary. It means the only truly verifiable citations are links to onchain data via block explorers. Crypto is what AI can’t fake. A thread from 2020 on the ledger of record. A video from 2021 on the ledger of record, going into more detail. Note that it does anticipate the use of AI-based summarization of onchain data to create news. https://t.co/1SnhElumIv

If your manufacturing is not price-competitive abroad, your military is not price-competitive abroad. Because the wartime economy is just a subset of the peacetime economy. You can only turn plowshares into swords if you’re cranking out plowshares at low cost and high quality. Military equipment will be bought at whatever price. It’s a non-negotiable spend for any regime. That’s why North Korea spends 25%+ of its GDP on the military. So it’s not totally crazy to reboot manufacturing with a military-first approach. It may work over the very long run. The issue is that those armaments need to be price-competitive abroad to win any war of att…

All property becomes cryptography. Let me explain why. (1) First, right now, trillions of dollars worth of digital gold is secured onchain. Bitcoin is now valued everywhere there is an internet connection. And no matter what political faction you're in, everyone agrees on the raw fact of who owns what amount of BTC. (2) Next, right now, the full legalization of stablecoins means that every other asset goes onchain. Because if there is a legal status for onchain currency, of course there's a legal path for onchain stocks, onchain bonds, and every other type of financial asset. (3) So, that's a lot right there. But there's actually a next st…

This flipped within our lifetimes. Before 2016, it was considered paranoid right-wing extremism (albeit true; see Venona) to claim that Russian spies had infiltrated the US government. After 2016, it became mainstream conventional wisdom (albeit false; see Russiagate) to claim that Russian spies had infiltrated the US government. The reason is that for much of the 20th century Russia was on the communist left. But by 2016, Russia was now on the nationalist right. So, the idea of a Russian conspiracy was not useful to the left before 2016. Then it became useful to the left after 2016. Venona proved there really was a communist conspiracy …

The public sector is the platform. The private sector is the apps on that platform.

New podcast on the Bitcoin Network State.

Privacy is not a crime. Free Roman Storm! https://t.co/0IfNesOpSm https://t.co/S1RXX0gWNV

AI copy on the page is the new lorem ipsum. It's lorem aipsum.

JP Morgan is updating their p(doom), but for the dollar. https://t.co/NtCivnXCJo Just the fact that JPMC is now admitting this is a big step. "De-dollarization has increasingly become a substantive topic of discussion among investors, corporates and market participants more broadly." As the US deglobalizes, the globe dedollarizes. https://t.co/DgOddBzUzp https://t.co/O3YLh2hwwZ Yes, but no manufacturing economy can be realistically stood up in time to replace the sheer consumption that money-printing enables. Example: to make $1T, you can (a) print or (b) sell $1000 phones to 1B people. Obviously, the former is far easier. https://t.co/g…

Customers get mad at grocery store prices because they can't see the Fed. Investors get happy about rising stock prices because they can't see the Fed. And everyone is confused about housing prices because they can't see the Fed. But you can. https://t.co/ALqnbdXbAH Spot the Fed. https://t.co/TqqI0Wx7CT I do agree that Keynesianism was the most successful variant of Communism. It also seized ~100% of wealth from the population over time, but did it gradually and invisibly as opposed to suddenly and violently. But that business model is ending. https://t.co/BFlayTRJH0 https://t.co/f33rcThanh

Crypto has decentralized to Asia. https://t.co/G7OiOROsgn AI is decentralizing to Asia too. Manus, Deepseek, Qwen, Kimi. Interestingly, they are also decentralizing out of China. By going open source, and by physically moving out of China.