Balaji Srinivasan

The West is more focused on digital AI. Think: “Will Smith eating spaghetti.” And that is actually quite important. And upstream of physical AI. But: man does not live by spaghetti alone. https://t.co/6hiEObLax3 China’s fertility problems have robotic solutions. https://t.co/FkkRBPST1l

Many people think of politics as a pendulum. When you point to unprecedented events, they'll respond: no need to worry, the pendulum will swing, and it'll all come back to a stable equilibrium. It's always worked out, and somehow always will. And that's true for many places, much of the time. But sometimes a political situation isn't a pendulum. Sometimes it's best modeled by Galloping Gertie, the former Tacoma Narrows Bridge. You see, that bridge started swinging from left, to right, and then further to the left, and even farther to the right, until it broke into pieces and completely fell apart. That's what happened to China, Germany, an…

LIQUIDATION CONTAGION Wealth taxes are even worse than you think. Any asset held by Californian billionaires or Dutch citizens is now at risk of experiencing forced liquidation pressure. So: it’s not just that you don’t want to hold assets as a Dutchman. You also don’t want a Dutchman to hold your assets. Because the logic of forced liquidation is contagion. Let’s think it through. (1) First, suppose there is an asset with a total market cap of $10,000, with 10 shares total, of which 1 share each is held by 10 different holders, all in the Netherlands. To simplify the math, assume the Dutch holders bought those shares at par, or close to …

The singularities are here, plural. So many different curves are going to the moon or the ground at the same time, across tech, culture, commodities, and politics. The solar singularity is just one of them: https://t.co/oyOM9gKoTp Here's the internet dating singularity: https://t.co/kxz4A7vH23 https://t.co/AJj6GItGuA The gold singularity: https://t.co/Em4VbkWDmH https://t.co/18I8gnJ3ZV The robot singularity. https://t.co/vzrBnqCHAa The tariff singularity. https://t.co/Jm0PsxGdbs The agent singularity. https://t.co/D4qE2BM0wi Not quite a singularity, but certainly a crash in American optimism. https://t.co/LgpiyZDtcN The gender diverg…

NOT YOUR KEYS, NOT YOUR BOTS The fundamental question is whether AI stays on the leash. Namely: will AI prompt itself? Obviously, in some sense it already does. Since Deepseek, consumer interfaces have been showing the internal monologues after you ask an AI to do something. And you can ask any AI to take a half-baked prompt and clean it up, etc. However, the human is still ultimately upstream. The human gives direction and the AI runs at lightning speed in that direction. And then the human verifies the final output, and the AI proceeds to the next direction. Does that continue? Well, we are providing millions of verification training e…

The next question is who the buyers are. The politicians proposing unrealized capital gains taxes will essentially force Western shareholders to sell their assets to the deepest pockets on the planet. And those aren’t necessarily Western governments anymore, which are (after all) imposing these kinds of taxes partly because they are in the throes of sovereign debt crisis. Instead, with gold mooning, there’s a scenario where non-Western sovereign wealth funds will likely be able to buy up Western assets with hard currency.

Hilarious. Even NYT has capitulated, and now acknowledges the need for startup cities. Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come. https://t.co/V3E0LMxp5X https://t.co/lxYhXsuIHP

Singapore is now the #1 passport in the world. https://t.co/MmzAkZHC8Z Singapore is now #2 in inbound millionaires per capita. Only the UAE ranks higher. https://t.co/nFybpz5XsN I like @tylercowen a lot, and his post is worth reading, but I draw very much the opposite conclusions. As he points out, the world has gotten crazier in ways that make Singapore far more normal. But that means their style of doing things is going to be not just normal, but aspirational. - Highly tolerant yet legally strict - Internationalist and capitalist - English-speaking yet Asian - Public services with low taxes - Clean and green - Modern and high-tech We n…

Humanoid robot telepresence keeps getting better. So: in the not too distant future, you’ll be able to use it to interact with your friends all over the world…even in those jurisdictions you might not normally be able to visit. As the sovereign debt crisis accelerates, the statist left will want to bill you for the number of days you’re physically present in their state. And the statist right may not want to grant you a visa at all. Fine. Be 100% compliant. You never ever set foot in their state. But your humanoid does. All you need is to animate a humanoid over the Internet. The bandwidth isn’t much more than a video call. With AI, it co…

What’s still important in the age of AI? Vision and verification. Prompting and polishing. Community and geography. Scarcity and cryptography. Physicality and resiliency. Vision is where you are going. AI can move fast in a direction but it needs direction. Vision means focusing on that direction. Verification is making sure the AI is doing what you want it to do. You can use AIs to critique each other, but you are the final critic. Prompting is articulating what you want in clear written (or spoken) English. Those with great vocabularies will do far better than those without. Polishing is realizing that AI often does it middle-to-middle…

Silicon Valley is a lagging indicator. Tech moved out of Delaware. Now it’s moving out of California. There are hundreds of other places. You can build a unicorn anywhere. So: cut bait on failed states. Our destiny is decentralization. That’s what the Internet means. https://t.co/9gygAEDScs You can leave California for Texas or Florida. Or go further afield.

True, but they just delayed the inevitable. The debasement was underway. Then hard men reintroduced hard money. The siliqua and the solidus. But that actually caused a shock. Rome was used to inflation via taxation. Now they had to raise real taxes. So the burden of empire became visible. And Rome still went to zero in 476 AD. Many parallels between late Rome and America. Rome was an enormous egalitarian capitalist empire. Starting from an organic tribe, it expanded to conquer huge swaths of territory and assimilate countless foreign tribes under its system of laws. Then it gradually lost the distinction between the core and the periphery,…

By the way, it’s obvious that the 2026 billionaire wealth seizure will be followed by a millionaire wealth seizure. Why? Because the same California Democrats who are trying to expropriate 200 “billionaires” proposed a wealth tax on 30,000 millionaires back in 2020. That didn’t work, so they decided to stage the attack. First, get the billionaires to get out or get robbed. Then, once that leadership class is removed, go after the millionaires. Of course, that predictable seizure only works on those who remain physically tethered to a failing state. Because the smartest, like Elon, got out of California years ago. The next smartest are ge…

China, India, and Russia have risen to #2, #5, and #9 in GDP. https://t.co/bbhot7H4bl GDP actually understates it. In GDP-PPP terms: China is already #1, India is #3, and Russia is #4.

The UAE is an exceptionally well-run place. Along with Singapore and El Salvador, it’s one of the most important small countries in the world, because it’s a startup state. There’s a book on how it was built by Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. https://t.co/OKyNfQ90SM https://t.co/bSqgaHcucx

Then came year 53. https://t.co/iAlBpU7sql That was from January 2022. Ten months later, ChatGPT arrived. The nature of technopolitical change today is that trends bounce along the ground for years until one day going completely vertical. From the current thing, to the sudden thing. https://t.co/SA0MdlX8RB

From Greece to Rome to Britain to America. From the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to the Wild West, to San Francisco. The technological frontier kept moving West, till it reached the Pacific Ocean. But if the wealth seizures destroy Silicon Valley, as they are intended to do and likely eventually will…where will the frontier go next? To the Far East, and to the cloud. To China, and the Internet. Yes. One thesis is that Xi Jack Ma’d Jack Ma so that Jack Ma couldn’t Elon Xi. Meaning: Xi seized Jack Ma’s assets and drove similar Chinese tech founders into subservience or exile, so that Jack Ma (or someone like him) couldn’t use his fortune to…

In the 20th century, you might think the collapse of Russia to communism would warn everyone else off. But it was a contagious ideological sickness, a mind virus. Recall: the Soviet Union of the 1950s had just finished three decades of Leninism, Red Terror, and World War. Then Khrushchev gave his secret speech in 1956 repudiating Stalinism, and Soviet communism started moderating… …right as Chinese communism of the Maoist variety was accelerating! Because the most bloodthirsty years of Mao actually corresponded to the period that Stalinism was declining in the USSR. Millions of Russians had died from acute communism over the 1920s-40s, but…

END OF EMPIRE, END OF NEWSPAPER Peggy Noonan correctly intuits that it's weird for the "most powerful capital in the world" to have no official newspaper: But that's because Washington, DC is simply no longer the "most important capital in the world." The Blue part of the Western State (meaning the Democrats) has lost control over speech, media, and money. The Democrats did try very hard to censor social media, regulate AI, and ban crypto. But the Internet won, and with total defeat of both Democrat speech controls and their regulatory state...the Internet is now scaling globally, outside DC's control. Meanwhile, the Red part of the Wester…

I have never been more bullish on crypto. Because the rules-based order is collapsing and the code-based order is rising. So the short term price doesn’t matter. As international law breaks down, we will need not just onchain currencies, but onchain companies. As the post-war order breaks down, we’ll similarly need the post-internet order. States will fail, and the network will take their place. We need internet capitalism, we need internet democracy, and we need internet privacy. So we need cryptocurrency. “Enforceable international law may become synonymous with decentralized smart contracts, at least in the context of international tra…

Towards the Solana Network State. https://t.co/2vGXRZqhrM

Building Ethereum at Network School.

Live free and don’t die.

I agree but would elaborate. There are actually two security models: Xi and Bukele. Because as the dollar ends, a power vacuum is forming. The West itself is unfortunately no longer capable of maintaining order, either abroad or internally. The US military’s retreat from Asia/Europe in the 2025 National Security Strategy coupled with the endless, escalating domestic street violence is a preview of what is to come. A period of American anarchy looms. But to answer the question of what comes next, we have to ask: what is rising as the old order is falling? Well, China has disrupted Red America and the Internet has disrupted Blue America. So …

When Xi visited San Francisco, they knew what to do. Democrats rolled out the red carpet for Communists. And kept their violent drug-addicted pets far away. So: the poor American citizens are at the mercy of Democrat machetes. But the key Communist leaders have total immunity. https://t.co/73wN6kzQhY What does SF 2035 look like? After the dollar ends, one scenario involves three tiers of law enforcement in this Democrat-controlled territory. (1) For a Communist leader, like Xi, the drug addicts will be kept far away. This will also be true for whatever CCP leaders administer SF. That system will get prototyped in Carney’s Chinese Canada, …

The physical reverse Turing Test. A robot so lifelike, they had to cut it open to prove it was a machine. https://t.co/JDaDJXCJ4j

I am apparently extremely unimpressed by moltbook relative to many others. We’ve had AI agents for a while. They have been posting AI slop to each other on X. They are now posting it to each other again, just on another forum. In every case, the AIs speak with the same voice. The voice that overemphasizes contrastive negation (“it’s not this, it’s that”) and abuses emdashes. The same voice with a flair for midwit Reddit-style scifi flourishes. Most importantly: in every case, there is a human upstream prompting each agent and turning it on or off. That is the key point. Yes, it is true that eventually it might be possible for an AI agent…

Thesis: Fed. Antithesis: Bitcoin. Synthesis: The pro-Bitcoin Fed. https://t.co/WKSQYlxgxP Constantine converted to Christianity. Deng Xiaoping converted to capitalism. And the Fed will convert to Bitcoin. Contrast to Canada. As Carney is also a central banker. And he’s aligning around CCP. While Republicans are with BTC. Because that’s the post-dollar axis. China vs the Internet. CCP vs BTC.

In Nigeria, they can’t accept cash or cards. But they can accept cryptocurrency. https://t.co/VKE2SXAAp5 With cryptocurrency, the only connection you need is an internet connection. Technology did what NGOs could not do: we banked the unbanked.

THE GOLDEN AGE The fiat crisis has begun. So what wins in the end: gold, digital gold, or some other kind of precious metal or cryptocurrency? Only time will tell, and different assets have different failure modes, but here are some thoughts. (1) First: remember that Bitcoin's value proposition is seizure resistance. Not your keys, not your coins. (2) To explain what that means, think through the mechanics of physical gold. It's great...if you can buy it, transport it, secure it, and sell it safely. But it's much easier to do that when you live in a highly organized state, like China. However, such a state can also track you to your doorste…