The Ledger
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Balaji Srinivasan: Western governments will lose battle against decentralized network elite
“And I think that Western governments will lose. It's going to be super nasty and super gnarly, but on balance, they will lose because their ideology is not one that attracts the very top talent.”
Srinivasan: Bitcoin Is on Track to Become the 'Government of Governments'
“Bitcoin, the reason I say Bitcoin specifically is it's, you know, it's on track. We will see if it can actually get there. Cause it's got various kinds of issues, you know, privacy and other kinds of things that, you know, but It's on track to be the governmen…”
Balaji: US is headed toward anarchy rather than totalitarian dictatorship
“For some time, I'd been increasingly concerned that instead of marching into a future of freedom, we were heading into a time of tyranny. I still think something like this may take place in China's sphere of influence. Arguably, it already has. But as the even…”
Balaji: Tech labs will raise more funding via crypto than grants
“And any lab that is like doing reasonably interesting technology work. Absolutely. Will probably be able to get more funding online via cryptocurrency and NFTs than they will within the academic grants process.”
Balaji Srinivasan: Governments will fail to ban crypto as elites profit
“Like, they're not going to be able to ban it now. It's going to be harder to ban it. If enough members of the elite have sort of defected and are making money from this, only the sort of retro authoritarian chunk, which is Only about 30% of the population. It'…”
Srinivasan: Geopolitics by 2040 may center on China vs. international Indians
“I think by 2040, there's a chance, I'm not saying a hundred percent, but I think that if the last century ended up at least the second half was USA versus USSR, right? I think this century may end up as being China versus Indians, not India. I think that's whe…”
Srinivasan: US will collapse as an empire like the Soviet Union did
“I think the transition from just like the USSR became Russia, I think the USA after whatever collapse becomes America. That say it's like American culture. It's baseball, it's hot dogs, but it's not global empire, right?”
The pandemic will permanently shift tech to a primary remote work model
“So what this is going to do is it's going to force everybody to look at remote work as not a auxiliary,
But as a primary, this is what I, one of the grand challenges I think for tech as opposed to biotech to work on, and it's going to have its hands full buil…”
Srinivasan: Woke ideology cannot win in pseudonymous crypto environments
“That army of wokeness, that ideology can win on like, you know, centralized social media platforms, English internet. But once you start going pseudonymous, once you start having cryptocurrency involved, once you start Going international and having people abr…”
Robotic construction will hyper-deflate building costs and assemble prefabs rapidly
“In the not infinitely distant future you will have the ability to just hit enter on a computer and have a bunch of robots snap together a prefab building. With perfect speed in the rain, you know, in eight hours, perfect site, all of that stuff, right? Some of…”
Robotics will make physical goods cheap, shifting status-seeking entirely digital
“With robots, the physical world should get super cheap. Eventually. And then all status seeking goes to the optional digital world.”
Balaji Srinivasan: Web3 services rivaling US tech giants will emerge in India
“I think you're going to see a whole parallel set of services arise that are the peers of the American tech companies, but in web three in India over the next 10 years, I think it's going to be one of the least anticipated things that's going to happen”
Balaji Srinivasan: Trump de-platforming leads to national stacks and neutral protocols
“So what happens is that the platform of Trump has set off a cascade of things that will lead to National stacks and neutral protocols.”
Balaji Srinivasan: India will become a tech and media superpower
“This is why I think if China becomes, has become a tech and manufacturing superpower, I think India becomes a tech and media superpower.”
China will build a 'Great Biowall' for continuous pathogen surveillance
“There's a great wall of China, the great firewall, and I think we're going to see the great By the wall of China, okay, where, you know, they'll be sequencing and testing the heck out of everybody, scanning the country constantly to see, okay, is a virus risin…”
International travel will require real-time biological screening before boarding
“Now that's going to go to real time, meaning, you know, within a day or an hour before you get on the flight, you know, imagine a next generation TSA that was actually competent, you know, in, in, in countries around the world, which Needs your biological info…”
Diagnostic and imaging companies will receive defense-level funding post-pandemic
“This is going to be a gigantic shot in the arm for every diagnostic company in the world, every medical imaging company, all of those are about to get, like, defense budget level spending.”
Balaji: Many hardware companies will die from Chinese supply chain disruptions
“Hardware companies are just going to die, many of them, because they just can't get the parts from Chinese warehouses.”
Balaji: Society faces an unbundling of institutions before rebundling
“Prior to any rebundling, I think we're on track for quite the unbundling.”
Srinivasan: Practical speech will expand despite institutional attempts to suppress it
“It's like a graph that went all the way up into the right in terms of practical speech. And then they're trying to like jacket back down, but it's going to come back up because the attempt to deprive somebody of the practical, right? You just gave them that vo…”
Balaji Srinivasan: Most English internet users will be Indian
“Most English speakers on the internet are going to be Indian.”