Thread – Excerpt from a 30 Jan Ross Rant

1. These following is an excerpt from a recent “Ross Rant.” Joel Ross publishes these periodic reports that provide commentary on the changing scene with an eye toward wise future investments.

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The People's Twitter.
And it would definitely not selectively censor unfashionable opinions if it were run by a government bureaucracy.
Because public sector bodies only ever maximise The Common Good.
Could even call it The International Common Good Association, just to make sure


"I don't like the fact that Twitter is so subservient to the woke elites. Let's create a massive state regulator, so that the woke elites, which have a stranglehold on most institutions... oh no, wait..."

(I mean, he's not entirely wrong. His solution may be rubbish, but there is an issue here. Twitter really does have a substantial amount of market power.
Still: There are people who I just will not ever side with, even when they have a point. And that includes Communitarians.)

As far as I can see, there are no good solutions here.
5 years ago, I would have said "Lol, Twitter is just a private company, like any other. The Guardian wouldn't publish anything by me, but that's not "censorship". They're just not letting me use their platform."
However...

...Twitter really does benefit from substantial network effects. We are on Twitter, because everyone else is also on Twitter. You can set up a rival platform, but that would be like being the only person who has a telephone: not very useful, because there's no one you can call.

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So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.