Podcasts: The Pragmatic Apocalypse with Balaji Srinivasan š 43 weeks ago
- Category: Podcasts | What Bitcoin Did
- Author(s): Peter McCormack
- Published: 4th July 2023 18:24
āWhatās to come, is, I think, very different than 2008 because 2008 was just a financial crisisā¦ and the central bank was able to print and bail out the banks. With this fiat crisis, thereās no other level to bail it out. Thatās why itās a self-bailout. It is a mass seizure of assets. It makes the entire hidden part of the government come out and show its truncheon.ā
ā Balaji Srinivasan
Balaji Srinivasan is an angel investor, tech founder, and author of āThe Network Stateā. In this interview, we discuss the idea of starting new countries ("network statesā), based on social networks built around a shared ideal that can monetize effectively. We also talk about how and why the media ignores major global news stories, and how to prepare for the coming collapse.
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In the past 14 years, we have seen a powerful global community built around a shared ideal. Bitcoin is obviously much more than a technical innovation: it is a vision of building a new economic paradigm from the bottom up, which shifts the centre of power from the state to the individual. Being open-sourced, leaderless and decentralised, it has proven that there are new ways for people to connect, contribute and collaborate to build new systems.
Balaji Srinivasanās latest book takes this revolution one step further, and explores the idea of starting new countries, or what he calls "network states." These network states can be formed by a group of people connected through a social network, with their own income, real estate, and even their own ideological platforms. It's like a political party, but working outside of the limits of national boundaries.
The measure of success for these network states lies in their ability to materialise their online presence into the physical world: āYou do meetups and eventually you go from crowdfunding brunches to crowdfunding buildings.ā It challenges the traditional notion of what a country is and opens up possibilities for new forms of governance and community-building.
As legacy nations resort to ever more authoritarian methods to protect the fiat system, the importance of allocation, location and organisation to individuals will become more apparent. But, this is more than a theory. Balaji is allocating a material amount of capital to funding startup āNetwork Stateā communities. The aim is to create frontier societies, providing alternatives to failed states and attracting ambitious individuals seeking a new kind of society.
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This episodeās sponsors:
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