Balaji Srinivasan

DECOUPLING FROM DOLLARS The US sends India billions in printed dollars for valuable goods. This is actually the US government ripping off India, like it does Vietnam, and everyone else, including its own citizens...not vice versa. To be precise: last year India exported $87B of valuable goods to the US for $42B of goods plus $45B worth of increasingly worthless dollars: That difference of $45B was, effectively, made up by money printing, which the Fed does at will: The current administration incorrectly thinks this is a bad deal for America, because they haven’t fully thought through the fact that the US can print dollars. India was giving…

Bukele Kuan Yew. Ordered liberty. The juvenile libertarian thinks freedom is about anti-social activity. The mature pragmatist understands that a virtuous, self-disciplined society actually maximizes practical freedom.

The dollar is losing reserve currency status. It’s down to 42% of global reserves, and gold is rapidly rising. https://t.co/U4NPAStLBB Digital gold is becoming the reserve currency of the individual. Gold is returning as the reserve currency of the state. Original post below. Recall the Fed admitted that a “small number” of countries were switching to gold. But that small number actually included Russia, India, and China: the RIC of BRICS. It is a huge deal, because in 1950 America made things while in 2025 it only prints things. Specifically, the only two globally competitive exports of the US are (a) the dollar and (b) tech. And tar…

POLITICAL BILLIONAIRES The clip below is a good encapsulation of what modern China is by Eric X. Li, who’s one of the most thoughtful Chinese nationalists. I appreciate his description, because the Internet is the exact opposite. Because on the Internet, capital (in the form of Bitcoin, and more generally smart contracts) really does stand above any given state. The negative way of framing this emerging reality is that Internet capitalists are now above national governments. The positive way of framing it is: anyone can become an Internet capitalist, and there is now truly global rule-of-code that no state can easily abrogate. Moreover, in…

When Bitcoin wins... 0:00 It ends the Fed 02:10 Payments become packets 3:30 Keynesianism falls like Communism 4:20 Real estate falls in real terms 5:40 Fiat billionaires get flipped 6:20 Money printer runs out of toner 7:50 The battle begins... 10:00 ...and it's time to build https://t.co/D5nSUQaJJM

There's a new popup village in Patagonia. It's open from Oct 18 to Nov 15. I'll be giving a remote talk. And many others will be there in person. Come by if you're interested in startup societies. You can sign up at https://t.co/fIt4wWmiYs.

I don’t personally time my posts. But if you do, this is interesting. https://t.co/KNmTh58YT6 From @some_one_else.

What are the largest economies in the world by GDP-PPP? (1) China 🇨🇳 (2) USA 🇺🇸 (3) India 🇮🇳 (4) Russia 🇷🇺 Democrats fought Russia and Republicans are now antagonizing India. But it’s not particularly smart to fight the RIC of BRICS at the same time. https://t.co/Y79i49wcqG

@R_H_Ebright @R_H_Ebright Btw, I appreciate your courageous work over the years to dewokify academia. And we have somewhat similar professional backgrounds (chemical biology vs genomics). I wrote up a more detailed post here.

Before communism, Russia was good at capitalism. https://t.co/DkQCqCmVWN Few truly understand what communism was. Previously functional civilizations were wrecked by what amounted to a fundamentalist takeover.

Don’t be surprised if China offers Terry Tao the chair of the mathematics department at Tsinghua University. And all the funding he wants. Because it is possible for the US to fumble the bag as the destination for global talent. And indeed it is fumbling that bag right now. Remember, China is focused on recruiting global talent now. They recruited another Fields Medalist from Harvard, the Yau of the Calabi-Yau manifold. https://t.co/7V73KcdYhs https://t.co/tAeK92L0rY In a recent shift, China has also begun seriously recruiting tech talent of non-Chinese ancestry. Their new K-visa is focused on this. This is another pickup for Tsinghua: …

This is on track to happen. And when it does, all the anti-tech radicals across the political spectrum will regret all the anti-Elon stuff. But too late. It’s extraordinarily difficult to build something like SpaceX even in peacetime. If huge swaths of society are irrationally trying to get you, the difficulty rises further by orders of magnitude. Meanwhile, China just plows ahead relentlessly.

On many graphs of the physical world, China is in first place by a wide margin. But if you look more closely, India is a distant but real runner up. https://t.co/0jy25Cvb8R The same pattern holds in nuclear. China is #1 in reactors under construction. But India is in second place. https://t.co/dVuLKe1TZW Electricity generation is similar. China’s recent increase is unparalleled in history. But India is increasing quickly, and will flip the EU soon. https://t.co/yRWP6UzBgX In smartphones, China is again global number one. But over the last few years, India has risen to become the #2 manufacturer. More than 20% of iPhones are now made in I…

Many 20th century systems will melt down in a low-trust, high-tech environment. Fraud rates will just get out of control. We’ll need to rebuild those systems with cryptography. Digital signatures are much harder to fake than signatures. In the medium run, states will need to replace the signature-checking step with a digital-signature-checking step. In practice, that could be as simple as having Texas state incorporate Google/Apple-style auth, and then require digital actions on deeds to be authenticated via passkeys and/or Yubikeys. This can be generalized. The state becomes a digital platform and any updates to official registries requi…

We’ve seen this movie before. After they defeated the far left, and wound down their global empire, Russians returned to putting faith in almighty God over their failed State. https://t.co/YK3WyyLZRj Remember, communism was the god that failed. Just like wokeness, the far left tried replacing faith in G-o-d with faith in G-o-v. Yes, it’s true that communism is centralized left and wokeness is decentralized left, but for the purposes of this discussion those are details. Both doctrines elevated the State over God as the central force that should always do something. For example, think about how a woke mocks “thoughts and prayers” after a t…

The war for talent is on. China already took over US manufacturing. Now it's making a bid for the talent pipeline too. https://t.co/dFrlMSJOwp There was a bad argument that went something like this: "if it was smart to recruit great engineers from around the world, why isn't China doing it?" It was a bad argument on three levels. (1) First, China actually did send its own engineers around the world to learn, for decades, just like the Japanese did decades before them. They didn't insist on 100% homegrown talent in every respect. (2) Second, until recently, there was widespread denial that China had even succeeded technologically in any re…

@NSmolenski A few points. TLDR: my post advocates for understanding tradeoffs, not empire per se. (1) First, please reread the post. It's not "advocating" for empire. It is, at most, devil's advocating for empire. That is, it's pointing out that one should consider that (a) the American empire exists, and (b) generates enormous amounts of money for at least some Americans via money printing, before (c) sunsetting it. (2) As context, most people either deny that empire even exists, or only point out the costs and not the benefits. Now, it is certainly possible that sunsetting the empire is still desirable on balance, just as sunsetting the …

What really happened with Windsurf, Figma, and the FTC? New pod with @stevesi & @eriktorenberg of a16z. 2:25 Techlash 3:23 No regulators for computers 6:04 Network vs state 25:02 M&A review 32:04 M&A power law 44:05 What happened with Windsurf? 01:14:16 Winning by legislating https://t.co/vP5mSbmXy0

Here's the podcast that @BritishHodl and many Bitcoiners liked. 0:00 - Introduction 1:32 - West vs East 6:33 - The ascending world 10:30 - Denying while declining 14:00 - Millionaire migration map 18:20 - Several exponentials 20:10 - Four factions (Blue, Red, China, Internet) 25:00 - Red America v China 33:05 - Blue America v Internet 39:35 - Geographical splits 43:52 - Dollar inflation is global taxation 49:30 - Left and right ending their empire 1:07:20 - Superbitcoinization Is already here 1:26:00 - The Internet frontier 1:32:00 - Sovereign debt crisis 1:42:00 - Full faith and credit 1:45:00 - Where's talent moving? 1:48:00 - On India 1:5…

In general, AI text should not be used verbatim. In writing or in speech. Think of it as lorem ipsum. Or more precisely, lorem aipsum. It's placeholder text. All this may change as tech evolves. Perhaps everyone gets their own highly personalized writer, such that the AI copy they emit isn't cliche-ridden and overwritten. But at least for now...there's an instant turnoff when you see someone use AI text verbatim in an application form, or a Substack post, or a tweet. It just signals that they can't write well, or that they're lazy, or something. To be clear, AI is useful for coding, for data analysis, for snippets of legal work, for situat…

The Soviets went nuts on money printing in the years before the collapse. https://t.co/ccDFEykUlY From @ryanmcmaken in 2022: "It took some time for the official numbers to catch up with reality. The regime’s official numbers had long understated even the moderate levels of price inflation in earlier periods, but after the mid-80s, the gap between official inflation and estimated real inflation grew considerably. Efremov summarizes the divergence, noting that in 1988 official inflation was 0.6 percent but 6 percent in the real marketplace. By 1989, official inflation was 2 percent, but it was really 8 percent. In 1990, it was 5.3 percent, b…

Ants are dumb...but ant colonies are smart. More generally, there's the idea of swarm intelligence. Quite a lot of research in this area. Might be applied to crypto and AI agents specifically. And distributed systems more generally. The swarm intelligence algorithms have amazing names. They're all named after bees, fireflies, wolves, whales, dragonflies, cuckoos, and the like. It does feel there's something here in terms of getting crypto crowds to cooperate, and getting AI agents on the same page. CITATIONS (1) Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) Kennedy, J., & Eberhart, R. (1995). Particle swarm optimization. Proceedings of IEEE Internati…

Here’s what the sounds meant. https://t.co/1YrOvwR8qe From @antiartificial, five years ago.

Corporations solved immortality. Partially. https://t.co/d0yy3KzI4i This is in jest. That said, there’s something amazing about a system where every human can get repeatedly replaced over hundreds of years but the organization keeps compounding. Onchain entities and AI agents will take this much further. Original from here:

@karpathy Yes, but we could add an eval for speed. I’m sure it’s a consideration but it could become a more prominent one. “Give the best result you can get in one second of compute on this hardware.” The https://t.co/gI5yz3tgy4 (not grok) guys show what’s possible in terms of speed.

We could address this via constrained execution. Constrain output length, like the 140 character limit on Twitter. Or constrain the runtime, like real-time mode in Linux. https://t.co/f9nVR7FS7I You don’t need to use the concepts exactly, but ideas from real-time OS development could be baked in as constraints during AI training and evaluation. Soft real-time may be sufficient. Unless it’s a car crash if it doesn’t work, like hard real-time. https://t.co/OpEnybplIy

Bitcoin triumphs over the banks. The network triumphs over the state. https://t.co/vti3VzW5sk

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.