Crypto Represents International Capitalism: Balaji Srinivasan on Blockchain, China and Internet
Renowned tech visionary Balaji Srinivasan, former general partner of Andreessen Horowitz and CTO of Coinbase, explains why politicians are wrong about the internet, which evolved into a global field for collaboration and competition simultaneously.
China and crypto: What do they have in common?
No political movement — be it socialist or nationalist — managed to shape a proper framework to deal with the internet since all their ideas emerged in a different tech context. Silicon Valley legend Balaji Srinivasan opines that modern ideologies are getting "online" wrong since they emerged when there was land, but no cloud.
Meanwhile, the internet already established more powerful social connections than ideologies and even nation-states. Digital social networks represent more influential designs of human interaction compared to those limited by state borders.
As such, only China and cryptocurrency represent textbook examples of the right perception of the internet's impact and opportunities:
There are, however, two factions who take the Internet seriously: China and Crypto. Because they have the Great Firewall and the Blockchain respectively. These are very different types of fortifications that both treat the digital realm as something to be defended, walled off, and protected.
The two represent different approaches to leverage this knowledge. China, with its Firewall, targets vertical integration of digital society by making its citizens use only Chinese apps and restricting access to global websites.
By contrast, the cryptocurrency segment addresses making software so secure that it can run in the open, on every computer in the world.
As such, for Balaji Srinivasan, China represents nationalist socialism, while crypto represents international capitalism.
Blockchain grows faster than internet, data shows
As covered by U.Today previously, Srinivasan claimed that both Bitcoin (BTC) and AI have already entered vertical phases of their adoption curves.
To illustrate this take, he shared the charts of performance results of OpenAI's large language models and the net AUM of ETFs on Spot Bitcoin in the U.S.
Vladislav SopovCommenting on his post, former Phunware CEO Alan Knitowski also noticed that Bitcoin (BTC) might be growing faster than the internet in terms of massive adoption trajectory.
According to his estimations, we are somewhere in 1999 based on the level of global adoption of Bitcoin (BTC) as a technology and asset.
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