Balaji Srinivasan

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…

Much of any digital job is now preparing context for AI models. Organizing files in folders, naming everything correctly, introducing things in the right order, and only then asking the AI to do something in clear written English.

PERSONAL PRIVATE PROGRAMMABLE I’ve been thinking more about the intersection of Claude Code and Obsidian. There is an upcoming tech stack here that I’m calling personal private programmable. Here’s a sketch of the idea. First, if you squint ahead a few months, we will likely have open weight AI models that work as well as Claude Code does today, and that can handle the context that Google Gemini does. We also already have many different kinds of file types that can be exported out of apps, from markdown files (like Obsidian) to git repos to mbox files (from email) to all the miscellaneous file types you store online or on disk. The open we…

FROM ONE TO ZERO There is a scenario in which Silicon Valley could literally go to zero in the next ten years. The successors would be China and the Internet: namely Chinese tech companies and Internet-based crypto protocols, because those have embedded political protection in a way Silicon Valley simply doesn’t. Here’s why this is possible. (1) The first and most obvious factor is that wealth seizures are now on the ballot in the most literal sense. The 2026 “Billionaire Act” referendum[1] directly targets the founders of billion dollar tech companies, which is to say that it directly targets the power law, which is to say that it targets …

This is American Anarchy. From 2021: https://t.co/fVOBT8PlrK AMERICAN ANARCHY American anarchy is the limit case of left- and right-libertarianism, when a good thing is taken so far it becomes bad. It’s what happens when we are all equal and you ain’t the boss of me. When no one is in charge and everything is in chaos. When the left loses control of speech and the right loses control of borders. When you have millions who agree on nothing other than 1A and 2A, with all the commensurate shouting and shooting. This type of anarcho-libertarianism is ascendant in 21st century America, and is the mirror image of the totalitarian movements of 2…

After America, China vs the Internet. After DC, Xi vs Satoshi. China is moving into Canada. Tech is moving out of California. And the world is moving out of the dollar. What that adds up to is Communist vs Maximalist. Because after the dollar ends, DC is out of money. So: Carney, Newsom, Walz, Mamdani turn to Xi. And MAGA, Elon, Texas, Miami turn to Satoshi. I agree that places like Alberta will be a battleground (and indeed are already battlegrounds; see Bessent's recent comments). This was an alternate map: https://t.co/aFdVOrmOEp https://t.co/HVczaoWBjp Communist America will have Chinese drones and robot dogs. And the abundance agend…

The dollar era is ending. https://t.co/m5xRfyG3PJ The hard assets are mooning. https://t.co/fSBo77dAoR The US passport is declining. https://t.co/LxptpjDdb2 The world economy is recentering. https://t.co/4ZAGtBKkQ6

That's exactly what happened in the Soviet Union. At first, communists denounced top-hatted capitalists. Once in power, they began killing "wealthy" peasants. Then, they killed anyone who opposed them. https://t.co/Ae6IWblGWw https://t.co/dYzZh7E9Ds

FROM SILICON VALLEY TO STARTUP CITIES The techxit is on, and not a moment too soon. Now that Elon, Larry Page, and Peter Thiel are all safely out of the failed state of California, anyone who's still there by choice is just in denial about the reality that San Francisco is the next Detroit. Here are ten thoughts on why technologists should immediately exit California, and why we'll need to build something better. (1) First, you can do tech anywhere in the world. That's because the Internet is global. And there are now 400+ cities with unicorns. So you don't need California to do tech: This is good. Technology can and must decentralize out …

Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit is here. San Francisco is the new Detroit. “I did not expect every man I spoke with to be considering an exit, and I was actually shocked to find this applied even to the men most historically outspoken about the unique importance of California.” “Of the 21 men I interviewed, 20 would have been impacted by the ballot measure. All 20 of them, including the Democrats, as well as several of the most committed diehard proponents of revitalizing San Francisco, are now developing an exit plan. (Three have already left.)” The ongoing sovereign debt crisis means Western wealth seizures have only begun. They’re start…