betting on founders. prev ceo @CoinList, startups.
sf
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If you are in crypto, never forget you are building Wartime technology.
Technology that forcibly removes power from the State and into the hands of Individuals.
Democratizing the capability to create digital financial products, to be your own bank, your own sovereign, your own money printer. Regulatory capture and entrenched interest don’t love.
Even centralized entities make a Faustian bargain, standing at the gallows at the whims of Regulators, trying to be honest brokers and suffice the needs of the State to service their fellow Man.
But one wrong turn, and the State won’t hesitate to execute.
Crypto is political and your politics are digital freedom: the freedom to freely (permisionlessly) transact, create, and distribute, yet abide by the rules of the state when you touch their boundaries (ie. fiat, marketing/launches).
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raghav retweeted
The statue of Prometheus is finally finished.
It was cast in Paris, crossed the Atlantic, and was assembled at Starbase. It took us 100 days to go from nothing to this.
People of the West, we have lived through an era devoid of dreams, devoid of destiny.
But the time has come to reclaim our dream of antiquity.
In a few months, we will start building a new city. It will be the most magnificent city in all of history.
After all, the great dream of the West has always been to rebuild Rome.
Come walk beside us in this endeavor. The world is waiting.
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People really hate thinking about and interacting with crypto, but they don’t mind being the direct recipients of the dollars generated by crypto, as long as it’s delivered to their bank account.
In 2024 someone made an app that would give X accounts free money from trading fees on coins people made for them. People mostly didn't claim the money
"Why wouldn't they take the free money... I don't get it?"
At the time a lot of people said "it's because they don't know it's real money. They think its fake crypto scam money, so they're not even bothering"
I never bought that, it seemed totally ridiculous. Surely people have to know the monkey coins can be exchanged for real dollars by now, right?? I bet they're just holding out for uhhh... moral reasons, or something
It would appear I was completely wrong. An app figured out how to use pumpfun and directly send the money to people with Xmoney deposits and suddenly everyone thinks it's awesome
Prepare to see a lot more cryptocurrency on your timeline
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because of the way bitcoin mining works they understood: 1) finding cheap and sustainable energy 2) how to deal with competitive pressure from china while the chinese supplied them 3) hedging, credit and financial eng to deal with volatile asset cycles and margin compression
It is absolutely staggering how much of the AI compute market is dominated by bitcoiners.
To name a few:
- Crusoe
- Coreweave
- NScale
- Together
- Hut8/Bitdeer/Galaxy
- Core Scientific
- IREN
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You really want to be in SF or DC to maximize impact / earning power / influence right now.
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phenomenal
you know how we were just doing the will smith eating spaghetti test and we’ve blown past that?
i think we should do the Seinfeld dating Sydney episode test going forward.
this is the worst it will ever be, and it’s not bad at all
Seinfeld AI: Jerry dates Sydney Sweeney
Jerry starts dating Sydney Sweeney, but will Elaine like her?
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Generally agree with this, but then you have to be okay with grandma getting scammed out of her life savings. Protect grandma or give everyone the option to invest? Clearly we’re trying to find the equilibrium here but I think we’re choosing to “protect grandma” (sorry she still gets scammed).
And the reality is 99.999% of people still won’t invest even when they have the opportunity and it’s the easiest layup imaginable. NVDA, Intel, the hyperscalers, ZEC. Everyone had (mostly) the same information. Same access. Most people just didn’t take the opp. And a lot still aren’t.
So I dunno, yeah it’s sad everyone can’t invest in Ant day 1 (tbf most people passed until it’s series C) and then everyone thought it was too expensive at 800B anyway so…
Cobie says keeping $5 trillion of generational companies private could trigger a social revolution.
"It is really difficult for normal people to get access to the wealth that is being created."
"There was a privatization of effectively five trillion dollars, and I think this leads to social revolution."
"Every epoch has a period of peace, followed by elites diverging from the public and then social instability. They overthrow the elites and eat them or behead them."
"I think about this private market stuff quite a lot because it is effectively a complete betrayal of the capitalist system."
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raghav retweeted
i’d be surprised if this an ai dc but sure, lets go
300 nvl72 racks
$3.15m/rack/yr
$946m/rev/yr
pays $41m in taxes
lever taxes at 70% ltv
build housing like austin; $300k/1bd
city sells condos; reinvest 4 times over 10 yr
50mw = 6.5k 1bed units
1gw = 130k city built units
San Franciscans do not want a massive new data center in our city. We need to make sure this doesn’t happen.
Do you agree @Scott_Wiener?
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What % of EA and affiliated people have kids? Is this % more or less than other types of groups to have kids? ie. I expect it’s likely in line for having kids in Bay Area (low), but is it much lower than other groups in the Bay Area?
Does EA belief system adherence fade after having children or hold?
Is EA belief system adherence a function of geography, children, or socioeconomic?
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A barista doesn’t care about pacing the frontier, the nuance between open and closed source, and lab margins because of alignment.
Just put the AI in the bag bro. Or keep the data center out of my backyard. Or increasingly, “AI is evil and will kill us all”.
These conversations are meant for x dot com, yet as they leak into the public and the worst spokesman of our industry gets airtime, politicians and sound bites stoke fears in the average person who is wildly disconnected from the nuanced conversations around the frontier, national security, and other debates.
Social amplifies the most neurotic, cynical, destructive voices, and we have no ability to paint a positive and optimistic future for humans if we’re constantly parroting the worst version of what will happen.
It’s incredibly disconnected from the reality which is the greatest technological innovation and capex boom in humanity’s history.
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raghav retweeted
I must be among an extremely small group of people (n=1?) that have both 1) trained a frontier LLM and 2) designed and synthesized custom viruses in a lab with my own two hands.
And I think that the takes on AI killing us all by creating dangerous viruses is total bogus.
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1/ tldr: the US will not slow down AI progress. “Pacing” will mostly be self-contained within the frontier labs, who will internalize more of their advancements while still viciously competing with each other. As we move closer to RSI, the delta between open source and centralized, private labs will probably grow, not shrink. Product and liability laws cover most of the arms and are a good/occams explanation on fear.
Putting aside what feels more like coordination than coincidence, my read of Dario’s letter is that the problem is real and nuanced. I’ve always viewed Dario as earnest, even though he is often perceived as not. You may disagree with his framing of the problem, but you can’t say he hasn’t been consistent and authentic about it.
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7/ My main advice to researchers, CEOs, and people working at the labs/AI cos is that institutional trust is at an all time low. People are tired of being spoken down to and increasingly assume institutions have ulterior motives. And given the incentives, sometimes they probably do!
This started before covid, but post covid institutions have to work much harder for transparency, trust and positive sum outcomes. Saying something like “there’s a 10% chance humanity ends” sounds silly to normal people without explaining concretely how you think that could actually happen. Extraordinary claims without a legible mechanism make people trust you less, not more.
You are at risk of losing the Mandate of Heaven.
8/ A final point is that consumer protection and product liability laws are already extremely good and should cover a lot of the harms people are worried about. Ironically, that also gives Dario and the other lab leads a perfectly rational justification for their current thinking. If you believe your product could cause serious harm, you don’t need an AI-specific regulatory regime to have an incentive to prevent it.
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8/ A final, tangential point is that consumer protection and product liability laws are already extremely good and should cover a lot of the harms people are worried about. Ironically, that also gives Dario and the other lab leads a perfectly rational justification for their current thinking. If you believe your product could cause serious harm, you don’t need an AI-specific regulatory regime to have an incentive to prevent it.
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