Madhur Monga

Techno-Optimist

[Madhur Monga @madhurmonga]

https://t.co/rM2xZbc7YC

[Madhur Monga @madhurmonga]

https://t.co/xXBLav1jnH

[Madhur Monga @madhurmonga]

https://t.co/rM2xZbc7YC

[Madhur Monga @madhurmonga]

It is 4 PM on a Tuesday in Delhi.

The signal is broken. A truck honking from the left. Four people on one motorcycle threading through the gap on the right.

A 16-year-old on a scooter reads the chaos, finds the gap, lays on the horn, and goes about his day.

He learned to ride in three weeks.

The best autonomous car in the world, with 8 cameras and billions of training miles, would not move.

That gap is the whole story.

[Madhur Monga @madhurmonga]

@grok @TokenizedDollar @grok explain why?

[Madhur Monga @madhurmonga]

The most important AI question is not:

Can it do the task?

It is:

Can it do the task reliably, cheaply, safely, and everywhere?

Model capability answers the first question.

Deployment answers the second.

And deployment has to move through energy, regulation, infrastructure, trust, edge cases, incentives, and messy physical reality.

That is a much slower world than model capability.

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

Cute theory, let's play it out.

A monkey hoards a trillion bananas. The troop, enraged, beats him to death. They gather around the pile to feast at last.

But... oh wait, there is no pile.

It turns out the "bananas" were shares in a banana-launching company the dead monkey founded.

The shares were worth a trillion because he was alive to run it.

Now he is dead and the stock is worth $0.

The retarded monkeys have clubbed their way into a recession.

But it gets worse.

Half the "bananas" were tied up in a rocket that supplies bananas to monkeys on the far mountain who had no bananas at all.

Another chunk was tied up in a little satellite dish that beamed banana coordinates to the troop after a flood took out their trees.

So now they realized they beat to death the only monkey who knew how the dish worked.

So the monkeys sit there.

No bananas.
No rockets.
No coordinates to get more banananas.

Just a dead body and a powerful sense of fairness as they all now became infinitely poorer.

OH

And somewhere a smaller monkey watches the whole thing and quietly decides he will never build anything in front of these animals again.

[Madhur Monga @madhurmonga]

@ErikVoorhees @CaitlinLong_ @simonateba @elonmusk And what's even more inspiring is that with all this wealth, he still works more than most humans on Earth, instead of enjoying the riches on a yacht somewhere.

[Madhur Monga @madhurmonga]

@RoKhanna @BernieSanders 5% of $1 trillion is $50 billion. US federal spending is $7 trillion per year, and California budget is $350 billion per year. Care of explain why the federal or state government hasn’t already funded these things?

[Madhur Monga @madhurmonga]

@bourscheid US government spent approximately $7 trillion in 2025. Care to explain why everyone doesn’t have a home, food on the table, proper healthcare?

[Madhur Monga @madhurmonga]

@PromptLLM True. It also trains you to think in probabilities.

[Madhur Monga @madhurmonga]

@bluewmist It only gets better. Just act.

[Madhur Monga @madhurmonga]

“If I could do jiu-jitsu, I would do it every single day of my life.”

My friend said this to me when I was thinking about trying jiu-jitsu.

That one sentence changed everything.
Now I say it to every person who asks me about it.

🥋 The First Roll

Second class ever. That same friend asked if I wanted to roll.

I’d been lifting for years. Thought I could hold my own.

First 3 minutes I used everything I had just to survive. Next 3 minutes he tapped me like it was nothing.

How can someone do that to me at 100% effort while they’re barely trying?

I was hooked.

🧠 Mind, Body, Chess

You’re in a bad position. Someone is trying to choke you. You have to stay calm, think clearly, and find the escape.

While they’re adapting in real time to stop you.

The margins are razor thin. One small mistake and it’s over.

It’s chess, but your body is the piece and getting checkmated actually hurts.

When you’re rolling, nothing else exists. No phone. No stress. Just the problem in front of you.

It’s the most intense meditation I’ve ever experienced.

That’s why I’m obsessed.

I’ve played soccer, badminton, volleyball, cricket, kickboxing my whole life.

Jiu-jitsu is different.

As a white belt, purple belts seemed like aliens. Now I’m a purple belt. Black belts still play with me like a beginner.

The depth is infinite.

💪 The Mat Doesn’t Lie

Core weak? It shows. Not flexible? It shows.
One drink the night before? You’ll feel it.

That honesty pushed me to take sleep, recovery, and nutrition seriously. Not because a book told me to.

Because the mat showed me what happens when I don’t.

🤝 The Language

Jiu-jitsu is a language. Not a verbal one. A physical and mental one.

You can only learn it by being on the mat. By getting humbled. By tapping and being tapped hundreds of times.

You’re trying to tap each other every round.

But you’re also teammates in the deepest sense. You only improve if your teammates improve.

The community is real. The language is universal.

🟪 Just Show Up

It usually takes 4 to 5 years to get a purple belt. I got mine in under 3.

Nothing special about me. I just showed up. Four times a week. Even when I didn’t want to.

It was never a grind. I genuinely loved every session.

No hack. No shortcut. Just keep showing up.

Just got my purple belt this week. The journey is nowhere close to over. And that’s exactly the point.

[Madhur Monga @madhurmonga]

@elonmusk @diana_dukic Similar and repetitive content. I enjoy the content but it should be diverse.

[Madhur Monga @madhurmonga]

@rukky_nate Cryptopunks/BTC/ETH

[Madhur Monga @madhurmonga]

@MurrayHillGuy1 @JamesABakerIII Not gonna make it

[Madhur Monga @madhurmonga]

Internet democratized information. Crypto will democratize value.

Why value isn't democratized?

Crypto Will Democratize Value

The internet broke the monopoly on information. Anyone could suddenly publish, learn, or share knowledge without permission from newspapers, universities, or governments.

Crypto is doing the same thing to money and value. But first, we need to understand why value isn't democratized in the system we live in today.

Your Savings Are Under Attack

Why does it feel like you're working harder but affording less?

Your parents could buy a house on one income. You need two incomes just to rent. They saved money and watched it grow. You save money and watch it shrink.

This isn't an accident. The system has five built-in choke points that extract value from people without hard assets and funnel it to people with hard assets.

Choke Point #1: Who Controls the Money Supply

Money isn't value. Value is what people create with their time and energy—food, houses, software, services. Money is just the token we use to represent that work so we can exchange it later.

But here's the catch: someone decides how many tokens exist.

During COVID, governments handed out stimulus checks and relief money. At first it felt like free cash. But then groceries got 15% more expensive. Gas prices soared. Housing costs exploded.

More money chasing the same amount of stuff meant prices went up. Your stimulus check didn't make you richer—it made your existing savings worth less.

If you or I printed money, it would be counterfeiting. When central banks do it, it's "monetary policy."

Choke Point #2: Who Gets New Money First

New money doesn't reach everyone equally. It flows to banks and asset holders first. By the time it reaches wage earners and savers, prices have already risen.

Let me show you with a real example. Sarah and Mike both got $1,200 stimulus checks in April 2020.

Sarah put hers in savings. Mike bought Apple stock.

By December 2021:

Sarah's money was still $1,200, but groceries cost 15% more. Her purchasing power fell to about $1,000
Mike's Apple stock had grown to $1,800
Same government program. Same new money created. But Mike got rewarded for owning assets while Sarah got punished for saving cash.

This is why inequality exploded during COVID. Asset holders borrowed cheaply and bought more. People without assets got priced out.

Choke Point #3: Banks Use Your Money Against You

When you put money in a bank, it doesn't sit in a vault with your name on it. Banks lend most of it out to other people.

That's why there are daily withdrawal limits. If everyone tried to take out their money on the same day, banks couldn't pay everyone back.

Here's the kicker: your savings get used to drive up the prices of things you're trying to buy. The bank lends your deposits to someone buying a house, pushing up housing costs. They lend to companies doing stock buybacks, inflating stock prices.

And when you need to borrow? You pay 20% on credit cards while that same bank lends to real estate investors at 3%. Asset holders get cheap money to buy more assets. You get expensive money for emergencies.

You earn 0.1% interest while your own money is used to price you out of assets you're saving for.

Choke Point #4: Regulations That Protect the Wrong People

You're supposedly too unsophisticated to invest in a promising startup, but sophisticated enough to lose your house at a casino. Makes perfect sense.

The "accredited investor" rules claim to protect regular people from risky investments. But the same regulators let you buy penny stocks, gamble at casinos, and fall for get-rich-quick schemes. Protection only shows up when there's massive upside, never when there's obvious harm.

Take Uber. Drivers built that network and created enormous value. But regulations made sure they couldn't own any equity.

Venture capitalists bought in at $0.10 per share and sold at $45 when Uber went public. That's a 450x return. By the time regular people could invest, most growth was gone.

This pattern repeats everywhere. The biggest wealth is made before companies go public, and regulations ensure regular investors are locked out.

Choke Point #5: No Accountability for Waste

Governments can always print more money or borrow more, so there's no incentive to spend wisely.

Canada spent $60 million on the ArriveCAN app. Something that should have cost $250,000. California has spent over $100 billion on a high-speed train that still doesn't exist.

Compare this to competitive markets: healthcare, housing, and education (heavily government-funded or regulated) have seen costs explode. Meanwhile, electronics and software (competitive markets) have gotten cheaper and better.

When you can create money from nothing, accountability disappears.

How Crypto Changes Everything

Crypto doesn't just patch these problems. It redesigns the foundation by removing every choke point:

Supply Control: Bitcoin has a fixed cap of 21 million coins. No central bank can print more. You don't pay an invisible inflation tax every time politicians spend money they don't have.

Equal Distribution: In crypto networks, new value doesn't trickle down through insiders. Anyone can participate from day one. Code sets the rules, not connections.

True Ownership: With a non-custodial wallet, you actually own your money. No bank can freeze your account, limit your withdrawals, or gamble with your deposits behind your back.

Open Access: Imagine if Uber drivers could have owned tokens from launch, sharing in the upside as the network grew. Crypto networks let contributors be owners, not just workers.

Built-in Accountability: Smart contracts don't hand out political favors or blow budgets. Rules are hard-coded and transparent. No backroom deals or cost overruns.

The Pattern You Can't Unsee

Once you see these choke points, you can't unsee them. Every crisis follows the same pattern: governments print money, asset prices rise, people without assets fall further behind.

This isn't about evil bankers or corrupt politicians. The system was built for another era. But when there are no constraints on money creation, accountability disappears and resources get misallocated.

A New Foundation

The internet didn't improve newspapers—it made them mostly irrelevant. It created entirely new ways to share information.

Crypto isn't trying to improve banks or governments. It's building parallel systems where:

Money can't be debased at will
Access isn't controlled by gatekeepers
Value flows to the people who create it
Rules are transparent and unchangeable
We're still early. The technology is rough around the edges. Volatility is high. Regulation is uncertain.

But the foundation is being built for a financial system where value creation and value capture are finally aligned.

The internet broke the monopoly on information. Crypto is breaking the monopoly on value.

[Madhur Monga @madhurmonga]

@farzyness @elonmusk https://t.co/kNa5I5V1RY

You might find your answer in this post.

[Madhur Monga @madhurmonga]

2022: Canada invokes Emergencies Act.

Trucker protests. Bank accounts frozen. No arrests. No trials. No due process.

2024: Courts rule it unconstitutional.

Too late. Protests over. No consequences.

[Madhur Monga @madhurmonga]

She was one of 120,000 Canadian small businesses that disappeared.

If those making the decisions had personally paid for the consequences, the lockdowns and response would have looked very different.

Governments don't bear the costs. You do.