Himanshu

[wassieloyer @wassielawyer]

Tbh I’ve had my skepticism re network school in the past, largely because many of its online evangelists sound like cultists.

I’ve read Balajis work cover to cover and find him to be one of the few thinkers, and perhaps the leading thinker which conceptualises cryptocurrencies and blockchain tech as a social technology.

Ive criticised NS in the past (again mainly for the cringe evangelists) but having met Balaji in person and had the privilege to discuss an “opt in” internet based social contract, I can conclude he absolutely is a visionary.

But what impressed me most was not his depth of thought (we had a 2-3 hour long debate on the social contract and nation state concepts), but that he puts his money where his mouth is.

Throughout that 3 hours, Balaji showed himself to not just be a guy in an ivory tower but a practical nation builder. He gave off the vibes of a mayor in a frontier town as we walked the grounds together, discussing immigration, construction, fucking electricity and power down to minute details. He lives there 5 days a week in the same accommodation he sells to people living there.

And while perhaps for marketing reasons, it seems that NS shies away from the Malaysian ghost town reality, Balaji was pretty upfront that Forest City was a failed Chinese ghost town that he wanted to populate from the cloud.

Honestly walked away from it having very deep respect and admiration for the guy. Him winning here would be crypto, at its very fundamental levels, winning.

Will gladly support anything @ns does.

[Samo Burja @SamoBurja]

Completely correct observation, the interesting question is why the high-net-worth individuals have to be told to do this at all.

Most outsiders assume tech money is already doing this, since it is a pretty obvious play. It is surprising that they're not.

[Balaji @balajis]

Should the global tech community continue investing in Malaysia?

Given recent events, I raise this question respectfully for the consideration of Prime Minister Yang Amat Berhormat Dato’ Seri Anwar bin Ibrahim (@anwaribrahim), for the people of Malaysia, and for our friends in the Malaysian tech community. The answer will be of interest to anyone in global tech that’s considering building, investing, or expanding in Malaysia, including executives at Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, founders of tech unicorns like Coinbase and Solana, and investors at the world’s largest venture capital funds like a16z and Polychain.

As context, I am the former CTO of Coinbase and former General Partner at a16z. In October 2024, I opened a startup society called Network School in Malaysia, because I felt I’d been invited in by the government’s pro-tech policies.

Specifically, the KL20 initiative set out Malaysia’s ambition of becoming a top 20 global tech hub. Their MDEC digital nomad visas and MM2H investor visas were created to facilitate an influx of global talent and capital. And the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone was announced to facilitate the flow of capital and talent between Malaysia and Singapore, where I live. When taken in combination with Malaysia’s datacenter buildout and its policy of welcoming visa-free visits for 98% of the world, it seemed like Malaysia might be a great place to build a global tech hub that was simultaneously inexpensive and easy to visit (especially for non-Westerners).

And that’s what we did, by creating Network School. It’s an international tech community with its first node in Forest City, Malaysia. We picked Forest City because it had millions of square feet of empty space, because it was one hour from Singapore’s capital markets, and because it was within the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone. Then, within 18 months, without a single penny of government money, we built Network School into a global attraction that brought thousands of engineers, investors, and builders from 70+ countries to learn technology, burn calories, earn online, and have fun, integrating with the local Malaysian economy along the way.

Indeed, in terms of quantifiable contribution to the Malaysian economy, we’ve already invested 100M+ MYR in our campus to make it startup-friendly. For perspective, that’s about 4% of the budget of Johor, the Malaysian state where Forest City is located. We employ dozens of Malaysians directly and indirectly at every level from executive to staff. We’ve backed Malaysian tech startups like Collektr, hosted events for local teams like Superteam Malaysia, and are major customers of many local businesses like barbers, laundromats, and restaurants. We’ve also revitalized the multibillion-dollar Forest City project, causing millions of MYR in real estate appreciation. And, as the video below describes, we were on the cusp of a 500M+ MYR expansion to grow our community, as well as a global merit scholarship with my friend Amjad Masad of Replit.

However, that emerging multi-billion dollar success story — which should rightfully have been hailed as a huge victory for the pro-tech policies of the Malaysian government — is at risk of being derailed by a fake story spread by an anonymous account named MP4P.

In short: on the day before the July 11 Johor elections, MP4P posted an Instagram post falsely accusing Network School of harboring illegal aliens. The sensational accusations caused a tizzy in Malaysia, until Malaysian authorities came to our campus on July 14 to investigate. (I should note that the officers were very polite and professional.) After checking hundreds of physical passports from 40 countries, including dual passport holders, the authorities confirmed to the press on July 15 that all travel documents were in order. During the process, we cooperated fully; in the thread below you can see a photo of the men, women, and children of Network School smiling and holding up their passports in the bright daylight. Our faces are shown and our names are known; we have nothing to hide.

With that said, the process is the punishment. What MP4P did is very similar to the American crime of “swatting”, because MP4P created a hoax report of a serious threat, thereby forcing the Malaysian police to take time away from protecting the Malaysian people towards investigating a nonexistent issue. Moreover, this anonymous MP4P account has also called for Malaysia to boycott Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft…a move that would cost ordinary Malaysians thousands of jobs…even while MP4P’s own Instagram collaborators promote their Apple and Google apps! I mean, we aren’t talking about a credible accuser, but just someone screaming inconsistently at the top of their lungs on social media for traffic, an all-too-common phenomenon these days.

Anyway, at this point, all further investment we were planning to make in Malaysia is on hold until we get sufficient assurance that such issues won’t recur. So are the investment plans of many of our friends, including the execs and investors at global tech firms that we brought to Forest City. Because to put it very plainly: we have invested 100M+ MYR in Malaysia, while creating jobs for dozens of Malaysians, and our faces and names are known. Our Malaysian executives and employees deserve the benefit of the doubt over anonymous internet trolls.

There are two paths forward. In the first case, if Malaysia still wants continued global tech investment, if it wants to be a top 20 tech hub, if it wants us to revitalize Forest City, then we request an audience with the Prime Minister’s office to discuss the terms of a memorandum of understanding between Network School and the Malaysian government, similar to the document recently signed between the Solana Foundation and the Kazakhstan government.

Specifics can of course be discussed, but we would publicly commit to abiding by all Malaysian laws (we already do) and respecting Malaysia’s sovereignty (never in question). In return, they’d get to know our friendly community, and realize that we actually chose Malaysia because we thought it was a great place to build a tech hub where engineers from the global South, investors from the West, and builders from Malaysia itself could meet new people, build cool things, and perhaps create millions of dollars in economic growth in the fullness of time.

That vision of peace and trade, internationalism and entrepreneurialism, is still on the table. We aren’t asking for any money — just a meeting, to help restore confidence in Malaysia as an investable jurisdiction. Alternatively, if you don’t want our investment, or those of our colleagues at billion dollar funds and trillion dollar companies, we will of course respect your wishes, and reallocate our capital to other countries instead.

Either way, we will remain friends and abide by your decision. Please let us know.

[Himanshu @oniros]

@maxdesalle @ZakuraZcash Great explanation!

[Maxime Desalle @maxdesalle]

How does @ZakuraZcash fit into Zcash's scalability roadmap?

Tachyon compresses the transaction, Zakura moves it fast.

00:00 Zakura explained
00:33 The two halves of scaling: Tachyon + Zakura
01:49 What happens to Zebra?
03:46 The real reason we need scalability ASAP

[Will McEvoy @will__mcevoy]

Max explains why Zakura matters:

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

When starting a company, most people shy away from truly hard problems and go for base hits thinking it will be easier.

The opposite is true. Fewer people attempt the hard problems so there is less competition, and great people are more likely to join you on an impactful mission. Instead, start with something you feel in your bones must be possible or different in the world, even if it's not a business.

Then work backwards from there toward what steps will be required, and see how you can get your first dollar of revenue on an early step which enables the broader vision.

[Edward Snowden @Snowden]

There's nothing else in the digital currency space like the cryptographic technique underlying #Zcash. It's a moonshot: risky, but certain to change everything if it succeeds. https://t.co/jLLotqLevB

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

The Handmaid’s Tale was a bit of a cultural touchstone even before the TV series, so I gave Margaret Atwood a try recently. I read Oryx and Crake first, and I just finished THT.

I didn’t care for either of them, but they were t really aimed at me.

I generally like dystopian and post-apocalyptic settings as environments for striving in fiction, but I don’t want to hear over and over how miserable, passive, and self recriminatory the characters are feeling. I want to hear how the world works and what they are doing about it.

[Samo Burja @SamoBurja]

China will develop reusability successfully, and within a decade catch up to Falcon 9 launch economics. The future of U.S. space dominance rests on Starship.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

I was clearly wrong about Anthropic. They are obviously currently the leader in AI. No company has released a model as good as Mythos/Fable and they will undoubtedly have Mythos 2 ready soon.

And I would never cut them off in a way that hurt them badly, even as a competitor. That’s not my style.

Tesla open sourced its patents and we made the Supercharger network available to all competitors, even though we could have made it a walled garden.

SpaceX launches competing satellite systems with no increase in price or use of unfair terms.

Even my worst enemies can attack me on this platform.

…

[Tech Dev Notes @techdevnotes]

SpaceXAI Starmind

[Samo Burja @SamoBurja]

AI is driving progress in reading the electrical signals of the brain. Brain-computer interfaces have not even reaped low-hanging fruit from scaling yet.

They promise to control machines with our minds, cure blindness, and more.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief (link below):

[Himanshu @oniros]

@DavidDeutschOxf 🔥

[David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf]

https://t.co/ZBpDdyfuJv

[Maxime Desalle @maxdesalle]

My @conconeurope talk is up.

It's about what the Venetian Republic teaches us about error-correcting governance, and why markets might be the answer.

Futarchy for the win!

[Milk Road @milkroaddaily]

Lyn Alden: "The best product Coca-Cola ever sold was their bonds, not their Coke."

Coca-Cola borrows at 2-3% while the money supply grows at 7%. They then use that cheap debt to buy scarcer assets.

Governments do it. Corporations do it. Wealthy individuals do it. Everyone is shorting the currency...

Except the people at the bottom.

They can't access cheap debt and "are getting the full damage of the inflation" on their wages and savings.

FT @LynAldenContact @PeterMcCormack.

[Knowledge Theorie @TOKphysics]

All learning is a modification (it may be a refutation) of some prior knowledge and thus, in the last analysis, of some inborn knowledge. — Karl Popper

[sacha @sacha]

owning a piece of metadao is like owning a royalty on the success of internet-native organizations (tokens > equity) on solana

apart from the team being best-in-class, that's why im bullish and believe that meta is currently seriously undervalued

[Erik Voorhees @ErikVoorhees]

250 years ago a bunch of treasonous anti-regulation extremists created America.

Happy Independence Day, may we some day create it again.

🇺🇸