Balaji Srinivasan

6 points · 3 appearances · 2022–2024 · changed view

“Satoshi's fundamental breakthrough was the way to discover absolute truth in a time when trust was scarce but computation was abundant — to turn the determination of absolute truth, at least on the metadata, okay, of who, like meaning digital signature; what digital signature did what, via hash; when, via time stamp. You can now get pretty good bounds on that, you know, in this box of like the probability that this digital signature was falsified, that this hash, you know, was a collision, that this time stamp, you know, it's within this range. And you can compute how much energy would be required to falsify that, like how many hashes would need to be done to create a new chain. And that's like a totally new thing. It is access to absolute truth for everybody, which is absolutely worth all the computation. It's worth all the energy that goes into it. There's nothing that's more important than, like, humanity's history.”

6 points · 2 appearances · 2025 · changed view

“Are new countries even possible? We know that we can found new companies like Google out of a garage, and new communities — the three billion person community that is Facebook started out of a dorm room. We know we can start new currencies like Bitcoin from a white paper. But can we start new countries similarly? That's the next step. That's what taking the internet seriously means.”