Arjun Balaji
@arjunblj
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Following
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Statuses
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crypto investments @paradigm , technology, history, strategy games, boston sports. optimist
on-chain
Joined March 2009
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People on Twitter attempting to explain how “blockchain” voting systems can improve election processes.
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If you were super competitive at anything as a kid—math, video games, programming, poker, speedcubing—you’ll probably do well in crypto.
Few understand this but if it describes you, definitely hit me up.
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It’s always strange when people are shamed on Twitter for changing their mind.
So what do you do when confronted with new information, just stay stupid?
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Bitcoin is a game disguised to teach you about:
- Ethics of money production
- History of central banking & gold
- Adversarial system design
- Commodities markets
- Distributed systems engineering & the software lifecycle
- Securities law
What have you learned from Bitcoin?
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The year is 2055: the world is run by small groups of friends, who all met on Twitter 40y ago and collectively learned how to leverage the global intelligence machine.
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As $LTC approaches that sweet 90% USD drawdown (from a very brief, euphoric wick), never forget the founder who sold the top who has the audacity to tell you to “HODL.”
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Millenial 60/40 portfolio: 60% Bitcoin, 40% Cannabis. 100% prayers.
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I just published “Crypto Theses for 2019”
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Amazon's founder was extorted for nude photos when cheating on his wife.
Bitcoin's anonymous founder can never be extorted!
Long Bitcoin, short the Bezos! ⚡️
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Couldn't imagine a more insensitive bit on current India/Pakistan skirmishes than this one from
@Trevornoah
.
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Michael Saylor: Borrow $650M @ 75bp to buy BTC
Peter McCormack: Borrow $50K @ 7.5% to buy BTC
Same trade; very different rates. 🤔
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Contrary to popular belief, the crypto community is mostly just wholesome nerds who found their home online
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I fear not the man who has sent 10,000 tweets but the man who has sent the same tweet 10,000 times.
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Cryptocurrency is the world’s largest massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).
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The year is 2024. Via a Musk-like maneuver, Cash App and Twitter have morphed, creating a Bitcoin-native millennial bank on top of the most important communications platform on the planet to offer un-censorable speech and payments. Jack wins the Nobel Peace Prize.
@matt_odell
lnbc28600u1pw9n7g7pp5enjn8exsyymyl6mlxmcvy7fdcwuh04z96swfmtasznppglgdyvsqdqqcqzysc8rve6vdwuvketcn7yp8gu3ltvq29vj588erp3at9z2msqj0yhhjdwsf7qtfy5lwf8favm6u3wr5qklvprlhrz89pknpdfxnc55wy6sqnrxjh7
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Aaron Sorkin corrupted a whole generation who received their civics education through West Wing and now confuse idealized fiction with reality.
Finally finished all seven seasons of West Wing. Fascinating to spend evenings in a parallel presidency/presidential campaign. Watched the sober and compelling Jimmy Smits-Alan Alda debate the day after the crazy Trump-Biden shoutfest. Quite a contrast.
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Internet communities will have more power than most corporations or nation states over the coming decades.
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I’m excited to announce that I’m joining the
@paradigm
team, to help
@FEhrsam
,
@matthuang
,
@_charlienoyes
, and
@danrobinson
build the best asset management firm in the cryptocurrency industry.
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Good morning to everyone except all the VCs who told me in April that “shorting ETH is like shorting Apple as they launch the App Store.”
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ZeroHedge once hosted well reasoned heterodox views but eventually devolved into conspiratorial blog-spam. The rabid defense from readers is incredible dissonance—you have to wonder how many missed the rally of a lifetime after DDOSing their brain with apocalypse porn.
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I just implemented Screen Time limits on my 15y/o brother’s phone after seeing his usage (below).
This isn’t isolated, nearly all his friends are hooked on the dopamine IV drip every 20 seconds.
The social media epidemic is real.
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GF kept saying she wants “a wallet on-chain”, I was confused. Turns out she meant something like this:
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Painstakingly explaining Bitcoin and Ethereum to friends and family till they ape into the latest launch on BSC like
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The risk surface of DeFi is growing exponentially.
This is a combo of:
- Contract bugs
- Poor protocol parameterization
- On-chain congestion
- Oracle failure
- Keeper bot/LP failure
Risk is amplified by contract composability and leverage.
I hope everyone understands this.
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In case you are new around these parts:
@CryptoCobain
is the last person you want to beef with. The man literally founded Crypto Twitter.
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The final $TRUMP chart on FTX is great confirmation that you can put crypto degens in *any* market and they will find a way to puke a BART on the chart
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Forget the social credit system, *this* is out of a Black Mirror episode.
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Most "fintech" I see is a better-looking UI for legacy infrastructure. People working on crypto have ambitions to re-architect the stack itself.
Decentralized finance is subversive, cypherpunk technology, coming at a time where most things are boring.
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DeFi projects are launching faster than Google can index results, leaving Twitter the only option. By the time Google surfaces it, the project has probably accrued $400M TLV, 1-2 known vulnerabilities, and a fork of its own.
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Jay Z’s next feature be like:
Stacks overflowing, gas prices feelin shifty
Flexed icy A-Ps now I’m apeing nifties
Bought a Basquiat with fiat but I’m HOVA dot ETH
Got Metamask on lock I’m comin for you NEETs
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I’ve onboarded ~50 people to Ethereum this year, they’re always amazed by the UX
Here’s what we try:
1) Install
@argentHQ
or
@rainbowdotme
2) Set up an ENS name
3) Swap ETH for DAI on
@Uniswap
4) Lend DAI on
@compoundfinance
5) Check out
@ourZORA
Takes <20m and ~$20-50 in gas
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Those who control the memes control the message. The most important political development of 2019 so far: a junior congresswoman who is good at Twitter has forced previously unpopular ideas around wealth distribution to hit escape velocity.
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For people who say "I'm too dumb" or "I don't 'get' econ", two books I often recommend to great effect:
(1) Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
(2) How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes by Peter Schiff (illustrated!)
At a high-level, economic concepts are intuitive!
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It’s highly unlikely that the “new internet” will be 10% owned by a16z and Polychain Capital.
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Broke: Use BCash to pay for your coffee on-chain.
Normie: Use the Bakkt platform to pay for your Soy Latte at Starbucks.
Woke: Don’t spend your Bitcoin.
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Modern Monetary Theory (MMT): “No one knows what it means, but it's provocative, gets the people going.”
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@CryptoCobain
Tell me you got into crypto 6 months ago without telling me you got into crypto 6mo ago
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Request for startup: Superhuman, but for Excel. Improve the macro/scripting model to interface with Python/SQL DBs, teach Silicon Valley the keyboard shortcuts, make millions.
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Unironically going to start referring to Crypto as The Finance Superhighway to bring back these 90s vibes.
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The only time I spend NOT thinking about crypto is the 5-10 seconds after waking up when I’m looking for my phone
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Crypto projects attempting to justify their multi-billion dollar network valuations.
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Seeing mainstream journalists fall for bad hoaxes always makes me wonder how much of the news is true
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You can infer a lot about a potential disruption from the questions it poses.
BTC: “What is money?”
NFTs: “What is art?”
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Thiel’s “crypto is libertarian, AI is communist” dichotomy is perfect.
Apathetic developers building:
- powerful reputation systems
- recommendation engines
- dystopian social credit systems.
Crypto hackers building:
- non-sovereign money
- self-sovereign data
- privacy tooling
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*painstakingly explains Bitcoin, central bank policy, the history of commodity monies, crypto-anarchy, and more to drunk girl at party*
Her: So Bitcoin is basically a really edgy Venmo?
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Positive-sum DAO-to-DAO (D2D) business development will accelerate over the next couple of years.
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A simple checklist for a friend who asked: "How can a non-technical investor begin to analyze tokens as long-term investments?"
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From
#reckless
to wumbology, my latest piece is on the massive
@lightning
infrastructural build out we're seeing. It'll be a big year with improvements coming across liquidity provisioning, privacy, usability, and security.
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The most inspiring 3 tweet sequence on this website.
We all need to think bigger like Hal would’ve wanted.
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Broke: Ethereum fees are too high, making DeFi applications unusable.
Woke: Rising fees are the strongest indication of user demand.
Bespoke: Avg. Ethereum txn size is growing even faster than avg. txn fee. Not much to see here.
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I remember when we were banned from using Wikipedia as students because "anyone can edit it" and "internet encyclopedias can't be relied on."
10y later, Wikipedia is the canonical source of truth on everything. If a fact can't be easily found there, it may as well be lost.
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Like many first time CEOs, the Night King made the mistake of overextending himself instead of delegating effectively to trusted lieutenants.
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Coinbase alumni / founders (1/2):
• Olaf Carlson-Wee (Polychain Capital)
• Linda Xie/Jordan Clifford (Scalar Capital)
• Nick Tomaino (1confirmation)
• Fred Ehrsam (Paradigm VC)
• Joey Urgo (district0x)
• Maria Gomez (Aragon)
• Antonio Juliano (dydx)
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If you are rude enough to be on BitMEX on your phone at the club, you better be at least 5x levered.
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If you liked the recent PayPal and Revolut launches, you’ll love the dozens of neo-banks and fintech teams currently scrambling to figure out what their “crypto strategy” is.
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Low time preference is liberating.
“YOLO” culture is a bit silly, the best things in life come from thinking you’ll live forever.
Work on multi-decade projects, build relationships you’d want to last 100y, treat people like you’ll see them again in the future.
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I wonder if the institutional investors looking at allocating to crypto realize the "top" fund managers have spent hours on Telegram this week analyzing the legitimacy of claims made by a woman from Burning Man who predicts the return (and sale) of Satoshi's coins next month.
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Unpopular opinion: Books are not appropriate for most people in 2018 and we shouldn't universally promote them. Given massive improvement in AV production tools and the potential for novel digital media forms, books as a primary education tool are being replaced quickly.
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Spoiler: You will find common ground with many of the people you vehemently disagree with online when you meet in-person.
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Extremely proud of my most recent essay, written with
@yassineARK
. In it, we use the meta-frameworks Thomas Sowell advanced to explain public policy debates to reason about ideological divides in cryptocurrency.
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One reason software engineers can be know-it-all dicks is because they’ve learned the important meta-skill: how to learn things on the internet.
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I've never worked harder than the last couple of years when I haven't had a boss.
I'll be the first to admit: I made a really shitty employee. Maybe a character flaw, but it was hard for me to care when the stakes weren't high.
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In 2018, millennials don’t visit doctors. They just up their CBD dosage.
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India should be Ground Zero for Bitcoin adoption. Indian households are the largest cohort of gold ownership in the world, ~25k metric tons (~600 tons held by the RBI).
There's deep cultural context here: we’ll stop hoarding it the day Indian politicians become honest.
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Happy 25th Anniversary for my parents, my heroes. They left their family behind to chase the American dream and provide opportunity for their only kid (at the time).
This was the first digital photo of us, just before we left India. I still wear black tees every day.
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When Number Go Up, you have an “ecosystem” of investors.
When Number Go Down, you have a “community” of bag holders.
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The reason why “6mo in crypto feels like 3y” is because exponential growth warps your perception of time (which is grounded in linearity).
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I always encourage talking about what you're working on or exploring in public.
Common concerns are fear of looking dumb or others picking up on proprietary insight.
In my experience, new ideas are rarely copied and transparency is a magnet for feedback and collaborators.
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No matter what happens on Twitter, new blocks still come out about every ten minutes.
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The backlash against Lambda School or Jeff Bezos is just part of the pervasive pessimism most pundits have about technology.
The nerds disrupted the media's status as gatekeepers, everything since has been a response to fading relevance.
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At 21, I decided to spend all my time on crypto and worried it was "too late." I was very wrong.
Crypto is full of mission-oriented people working on hard technical and societal problems.
If you're an ambitious young person, consider making crypto your frontier. DMs open.
Direction is what you choose to work on. Almost no one spends enough time thinking about this. A useful framework for this is to think on a long-but-not-too-long timescale (10-20 years seems to work),
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NYC dollar pizza is an economic miracle, somehow resisting inflationary pressures. How is this possible? Have up-stream materials (dough, sauce, cheese, etc.) costs gone down? Demand going up? Has the size of a slice changed over time?
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At Paradigm, we believe it's our responsibility to help support Bitcoin's development as long-term investors.
As part of that, excited to share that we've started funding the work of Anthony Towns (
@ajtowns
) on Bitcoin Core.
JUST IN: Crypto hedge fund Paradigm is now sponsoring a Bitcoin Core developer (via
@fintechfrank
)
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Surprised more Bitcoiners aren't a fan of Uniswap's design.
The contract has (1) no oracles and (2) no upgradability or admin key. Once deployed, it's autonomous.
Contract voluntarism: When Uniswap v2 launched, users had to choose to migrate (v1 still has $16M of liquidity)
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Congrats to Coinbase on the acquisition of chain analysis startup Neutrino!
FYI, the CEO, Giancarlo Russo, was ex-COO of HackingTeam (), who sold "offensive intrusion and surveillance capabilities to governments, law enforcement agencies and corporations."
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If you can succinctly describe the differences between Keep Network, Keep3r, and KeeperDAO, congrats: you are deep in the 2020 crypto weeds.
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Unfortunate realization: We live in the golden age of "personal productivity" software but the most effective workflow I've found is still Post-it notes/index cards + the default Notes app.
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@rogerkver
Good work copying this tweet:
Industries lobbying against legal marijuana -
* Alcohol *
* Tobacco *
* Big pharma *
* Police unions *
* Private prisons *
* Prison guard unions *
It's almost as if the war on drugs is a sham.
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I would pay for a separate Instagram app that only shows ads.
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Some personal news: Been sleeping 7-8 hours/night. Feels great, highly recommended.
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RUMOR: Coinbase launches $ETC trading but in order to buy, you need to name 5 projects building on Ethereum Classic.
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