Balaji Srinivasan

Liquidate. Emigrate. Accelerate. And get out of that failed state. Doing technology in California is Iike solving the Riemann Hypothesis on the decks of the Titanic. It doesn’t matter how great your work is. The platform is collapsing under you.

As a Farcaster investor, can confirm: money is coming back to investors. Dan and the team built something genuinely amazing, perhaps the best decentralized social protocol. He's independently wealthy from Coinbase, and could have done whatever he wanted, but he decided to spend many years grinding on Internet freedom and decentralization. For that I salute him. Also, protocols sometimes take a bit longer to cook than the lifespan of companies. The handover to Neynar (one of the first Farcaster indexers) may help make Farcaster a truly decentralized social protocol. The tech is real, and it works. It just needs a killer app. Still worth it…

Traditional finance says rapid inflation is bad, but deflation is also bad, so slowly losing your wealth via inflation is good. Bitcoin rejects this. Traditional medicine says rapid death is bad, but life extension is also bad, so slowly losing your health via aging is good. Bryan rejects this. Inflation is slowly losing your wealth. Bitcoin fixes this. Aging is slowly losing your health. Longevity fixes this.

Winners write history. So: if you do not write the history, you will not win. Fortunately, the Bitcoin blockchain is the most unfalsifiable form of history ever invented. A cryptohistory.

Free speech is open borders for ideology. (1) One way of thinking about the last ten years is that the American left busted the physical borders of the right, while the right smashed through the digital borders of the left. (2) Because the left relied on mind control, on controlling the discourse. And the busting of those digital borders by the Internet is what hurt them the most. They wanted stern penalties for crossing the line, for saying the wrong thing. So then the left tried to re-impose speech controls, but lost control. Will the right succeed in re-imposing border controls? We will see. (3) Btw, of course I am aware that these are…

WHO LOST CANADA? It was obvious that China/Canada would happen. Here's how it happened, and what may happen next. (1) First, in early 2025 it looked like Canadian conservative Pierre Poilievre was a straight shot to win Canada. Instead, all the MAGA posts about annexing Canada undercut Pierre, boosted left nationalism, and turned what looked like a sure thing into an epic defeat. The result was Mark Carney: (2) Carney is on the left but is far more intelligent than his predecessor, Justin Trudeau. He's also the former governor of the Bank of Canada, and understands that the G7 (including Canada) is in the midst of sovereign debt crisis. And…

Even in 2013, it was clear we'd have to leave. The collision between the rising network and the failing state was all too obvious. And much has played out as foreseen. Fortunately, we've already globally decentralized. That's what the Internet means. https://t.co/FSRE6vbCz1

The end of Western Keynesianism will be even bigger than the end of Soviet Communism. They’re just going to destroy every Western fiat ledger. Anything stored on any fiat ledger, from currencies to stocks to bonds, will be first exorbitantly taxed and eventually simply seized. Or simply inflated to zero. That is the logic of the sovereign debt crisis.

Silicon Valley technologists exiting California should move to Starbase, Texas. Tech won 97.74% of the vote there. It’s populated by engineers. It’s what tech used to be. And Elon is the de facto mayor. This is how tech wins democratically. Voting with feet, wallet, and ballot.

One of the big AI companies should consider acquiring Tailwind, or do a strategic investment. And maybe rehire all the devs. They’ve given the ecosystem so much.

In 2026, Claude Code could finally unleash the golden age of local and decentralized apps. The reason is that Claude Code allows you to quickly clone any moderately complex cloud-based app into a decent local one that runs on only your files. This is an important update to Obsidian founder Kepano’s concept of “file over app.” His argument was that files are portable (and hence more reliable) but apps are not. The new information is that apps are suddenly portable too. That is: apps of moderate complexity without strong global network effects are suddenly easy to clone. The clone won’t be perfect right away, but it’ll be pretty good. And if…

Water, water everywhere… But not a drop to drink. Printer, printer everywhere… But no money for anything. https://t.co/Z2N46YTFj6

Just because something has never happened, doesn’t mean it can never happen. Humanity never flew, and then it did. https://t.co/gBFhp2Lcej

@yishan Counterargument: a future China-backed California may be like the current China-backed Venezuela. They’ll give enough support to keep the lights on and people down in a kleptocratic socialist state. But it’s not going to be very functional. More likely to be anarcho-tyrannical.

Exit communism. Exit California. https://t.co/xfWxgJO7Eb The right to exit is a fundamental human right, literally encoded in article 13 of the UN charter. It is the physical embodiment of democracy. You vote with your feet to vote against an illegitimate state. The states that inhibited the human right to exit are the worst states in history. The Soviets, Nazis, Cubans, North Koreans, and East Germans robbed or shot those who tried to leave. Democrats destroyed democracy in California. They built a one-party state, where "elections" are held but the party always wins. https://t.co/GpWmkhUZIF https://t.co/3YdTfmRtst Democrats destroyed …

The disruption that’s not priced in is the disruption of Silicon Valley itself. Because California is the physical platform on which it’s built. And that platform is collapsing.

@karpathy I know the feeling, but sometimes I think the opposite. Perhaps the hard part is just the precise articulation (and iteration) of what one wants, more than the speed of the computer executing on that. https://t.co/u7n4Wa7akA

I'm not saying I fully believe this yet. And I'm not saying that there are zero gains or anything like that. But we may still end up wetware-limited, more than we think. Loading in the context & writing the prompts is a lot like setting up the environment & writing the programs.

@Honack You can do technology without building capital (eg open source). You can do capitalism without advancing technology (eg small business).

Well, there are two parts to the argument. Americans are uncalibrated on how much the rest of the world has advanced BOTH because (a) they don’t fly there (as other data also shows) AND (b) they don’t see media on the world outside the West. You mention Hong Kong; they aren’t as uncalibrated because Shenzhen is right across the way, and US media is always on the TV. They know where China and America actually are in relative terms. Also, if there is demand, flights do exist. EWR has direct flights to Israel. SFO similarly does have many direct flights to Asian capitals, because tech does need to travel to Asia.

@mattyglesias Reasonable thesis, and I do think that’s part of it, but LA-Tokyo is 12h while LA-Shanghai is 14h and LA-Singapore is 16h. Visas are also part of it. But whatever the reason: much of the world is out of sight and hence out of mind. Even smart Americans are very uncalibrated.

@michaelmiraflor Ok, but overall international travel stats aggregated across airlines would likely show a similar story. I think a better argument might be visa-friendliness. Even still…if there was demand it would exist. See also:

Notably absent: places like Warsaw, Dubai, Riyadh, Shenzhen, Bangalore, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City, and Shanghai. That’s why many Americans aren’t calibrated on the world outside the West. They aren’t flying there, and they aren’t seeing it on their TVs. So the rise is invisible, despite being all too visible. Relatedly, see this map of US protectorates. This is what many incorrectly think of as the “developed world.” Unfortunately, in reality, it’s more like the declining world. That’s what the G7 sovereign debt crisis means. Meanwhile, China and the Internet are the ascending world.

Western states create so much dysfunction that eventually they themselves become dysfunctional, and effectively cease to exist. Then a new era begins. https://t.co/6Kdb0aqLaA

The technologist is the capitalist of the 21st century.

THE REAL VALUE OF AMERICAN REAL ESTATE Molson asks: what's safe when fiat fails? A great question. We unfortunately have more films on alien invasions and killer robots than we do on fiat failures, so relatively few have thought through this scenario. But given that decades of accumulated borrowing is now finally coming due, it's worth modeling what happens when the dollar is debased to pay the unpayable debts: We'll focus on the question of whether real estate is really safe in the event of an American fiat crisis, but many of the concepts apply broadly to any G7 country in the midst of sovereign debt crisis. (1) First, the conventional w…

This is the EV flippening. Electric vehicles now fill up roughly as fast as gas. The new BYD chargers add 400km of range in just five minutes. https://t.co/bw6Yg4jElc To be clear: I will always be an Elon supporter, and of course Tesla pioneered modern EV technology, but the Chinese companies in this space are highly competent and not to be underestimated. BYD announced their charger earlier this year, in March: https://t.co/GS3zVqavJk https://t.co/dWAjIttIvB

New season of the Network State podcast. https://t.co/xZLZH4dsik We may need to rebuild civilization from scratch. But where? Bitcoin offers an answer: everywhere and nowhere. After all, it’s a decentralized currency, knit together by the Internet. Both the mining datacenters and the Bitcoiners themselves are spread out all over the world. We can generalize this concept from currency to *community*. Take all the deindustrialized towns, abandoned villages, and empty culdesacs around the world. Many of these places are newly empty because of falling fertility and deindustrialization. But you can populate them with digital nomads, and connect…

Base is hosting physical popups around the world. And connecting them together.

China has many cities that specialize in specific products. Like Detroit for cars, they have Cixi for hair dryers, Wenzhou for lighters, and Ningbo for home appliances. We’re familiar with this idea for cultural sectors, like NYC/Shanghai for finance, Silicon Valley/Shenzhen for tech, DC/Beijing for politics, and Hollywood/Hengdian for movies. But of course spatial concentration works for many industries. We’ve written about this already for drone zones and biotech boroughs, but specializing around an *existing* sector is an interesting concept for startup societies and network states. Perhaps obvious, but a chosen specialization for a cit…