Balaji Srinivasan discusses building network states through a crypto stack: Bitcoin for governance, Ethereum as charter, Solana for transactions. He proposes physical infrastructure like embassies and pop-up villages, plus a crypto REIT model to separate land investment from usage and align incentives.
Okay, go ahead. Sure. Two part question. One is, is anyone actually implementing the techno democracy stuff? And two, if I get my team to implement it, will you take a look? So what I want to do is I want to publish this pack and have the old store comment. That's kind of what I did here. And then tweet at me when you've got something working. And I will look at videos. Absolutely, I'll look at videos. A good demo can communicate in the gift that is working. So, so go, you know, you go in with. All right, so give the mic. Have you heard of the tech forum that's happening in Buenos Aires October 19th? No. Oh, President Millet is analyzing and he'd love for you to speak. Sure, sure, sure. So I'm happy to do that. If you got a speaking invite or something like I got a rapid end shaven, just DM me with it on Twitter and I will look at it. I do look at those. So yes, but please ask me other questions. That's right, topic questions. And after I'll go out there and I'll just answer more questions until it's time to keep going. I have one quick question. Why are we focusing on the earth? What we are building here could be the infrastructure for space. So I actually talked about this. There's four TFs, why focus on Earth? What about space? So if you ask where the population of space is, it's like 10 people on the International Space Station. If you ask where the population of sea is, there's under 100,000 to a million who are on cruise ships or they're just things on the waters at any time. Maybe a few million if you include every captain or whatever. If you ask about the population of land, it's the same billion people, but in between it's the population of the Internet. So land, Internet, sea, space are. You can think of those four possible areas for a frontier and space agent system built up is undeveloped. I mean Elon's amazing, but you know, in between we can just do islands and deserted areas in here. Okay. Oh boy. All right, go ahead. So we talked about two more mics due to network stage and having our own control. Obviously cryptocurrency is the right way to go. Right? But we talk a lot about usdc. I'm especially on soul, but that does not have that system. What about censorship, resistance? I think it's a gear on a bicycle. Okay, so just like you've got, you know, top gear for high hills and so on. Bitcoin is governance and so it's low complexity. It's just literally hold a bitcoin it doesn't need lots of ops per second. You buy it, you hold it for 10 years, right? Then Ethereum is completely immutable. That's what it's meant to be. Then Ethereum is meant to be I think infrequently mutable. I think that's a fair way of putting it. It's like your corporate charter. You don't want to edit it every day but you want to be able to edit it at times. Then you go one more step down. Here's the bicycle Solana. You just blast transactions on chain and everyone will argue if I say oh the security is somewhat less or that on time is somewhat less but you know what transactions underneath a certain amount and maybe just doesn't even matter, the loss doesn't matter. To hold a bitcoin you have your corporate charters or something like that on Ethereum and you transact on Solana and that's completely reasonable. That's one possible approach to many others. We're moving about our nation. We're looking at creating embassies in cities that already were using airport Dubai with digital communities to reconnect them. And Vitalik mentioned that going from only community to free full on societies to difficult serious envisioning pop up villages. Our ambition is to have permanent embassies in cities where we already have to live. Do you see that going against the network state or do you believe it's infrastructure on the way? Yeah, I mean I think there's like think about crypto and like how bitcoin put a poll out over here but I do want to give some folks over here the mica and so on so we'll just make it so politic. So to answer your question tell the ARM the there's going to be many, many, many intermediate forms. Network Safe's meant to put a vision out there and there's lots of interpolations of that. Oh I'm going to do a network city or something. That's fine, that's good. And what's the business model of the network school like how do you financial supporting? Does it include paid placement? And then the other thing, why do you wear a suit? Why do you wear a suit? Yeah. Oh I don't know, just for the occasion I guess Residue. We do need Internet first clothing, whatever that is. I don't know what that is yet. Oh yeah and I think you asked what's the business model? It's very simple. It's just basically pay rent, right. That's V1. V2 is if legal things permit. I do want to set up like a crypto REIT where so just to expense a second. And chances are they've got the NIMBY vs YIMBY problem where you have as the main place around the world, somebody owns a house and their interests are disaligned with the newcomer. The person who owns a house wants rents to go up, the newcomer wants rents to go down, and then they fight politically all the time. Right. Now how do you solve that? Well, if you actually disallow owning a house directly, instead you own shares of REIT and you separate investment from use. Now you're incentivized to actually grow the community in a way that increases the value of the reit. Let's say the REIT loads an island and you just take, you lease. Basically it's like being an investor in Google versus what you're paying for Google services. You separate out those two things. So how much you're investing in Google stock is distinct from how much you're paying them as a customer for those services. By separating those two things out, you now have something where people can invest the reit. People can hold shares in the reit. They separate that out from their land value. And this is how I think we're going to do crypto real estate with obviously legal details to work out. It's just a theory. Right now in a techno democracy, how do you see the role of leadership evolve? Given anyone could be a president, what leadership styles will emerge? I think we're going to see an explosion of new talent. I mean, one of the things that's amazing about technology is, you know, the calendar CEO is a Nigerian and so many tech founders are immigrants, but of course there's lots of amazing people who aren't and people who were born poor in the Midwest or what have you. Mark Anderson, who's a mentor and friend of mine, was born to absolutely nothing in the Midwest. There's no Anderson clan. So gave him that opportunity and that leg up. And so really what it's going to be is we're going to find the Lee Kuan Yew of Latin America. Okay, but Kelly's already Lee Kuan Yew of Latin America. Fine. Of Liberia or something like that. Right. We'll step up. That's what I think will happen, hopefully. Okay, okay, okay. So we have to walk out. We'll need some way of structuring things. You tell me how far we can go. I might have to leave you guys now. But you can DM me on Twitter. I will try to get through as many responses as I can. So message me and thank you all for coming and thank you for helping me build whatever team.
