#547: Balaji Srinivasan on Bitcoin, The Great Awokening, Wolf Warrior Diplomacy, Open-Source Ecology, Reputational Civil War, Creating New Cities, and Options for Becoming a Sane but Sovereign Individual

Gold today is a shadow of what gold was. Gold was the thing that kings wanted. It was a thing that constrained all states ... Bitcoin is digital gold. If the world economy has re-centered around it, that's not a trillion-dollar thing; that's like a hundred trillion-dollar thing.

It's unlikely that there's going to be a technical attack on Bitcoin. The only thing that's going to happen going forward is potentially a regulatory or software attack. But outside of that, its community is so strong that it can probably repair on that.

I'm cautiously bullish in both the US and India on cryptocurrency, and I'm cautiously optimistic that both India and China will maintain some degree of stability.

This concept of 'journalists holding politicians accountable' means that the US is a press-controlled state. It also means, by the way, how's that accountability doing? If journalists are holding politicians accountable and, over the last 30 years, the US government has done very poorly, who's holding accountable the people who are holding the government accountable?

China is the exception to the sovereign individual thesis ... If it's not made in China, they look at it with suspicion.

In the very long run—like 20, 30, 40 years—I think this century lines up as centralized China versus a decentralized world, or a centralized China versus decentralized West.

Just like the printing press and Martin Luther kicked off the Reformation, the internet and cryptocurrency have kicked off the decentralization.

As a pragmatist, being in the US as a US citizen means you're sort of de facto funding all the wars the US wages around the world. People are implicitly already making moral trade-offs of some kind.