President Trump and David Sacks hosted the first Crypto Summit at the White House, Figma and Discord are exploring IPOs, and Palantir has delivered its first two TITAN systems to the U.S. Army
* Re: Securing the dollar as the reserve currency via crypto decisions. I'm unsure how that works without other countries buying into the same cryptos (notably, Bitcoin) or following the same regulations with how it operates. No authoritarian government will sign on for economic "freedom" (quotes used because of the decision to peg to the dollar), which rules out most of the BRICS nations. The EU supports crypto with some wild regulations I don't think the US would adopt. So if you can't agree on the rules and you can't use the vehicle, then how does any of this work globally? My friend Korok Ray (https://substack.com/@korok) has written great stuff on Bitcoin, but I still can't wrap my head around how you come to a global consensus in this day and age. I'd love to get a Chamanth deep dive on how this crypto-economic system works globally.
* Friedberg's optimistic take on Trump's actions was interesting. Moving the government from taxation to consumption revenue is an interesting idea; I'd love to see an analysis of that. I have thoughts on it:
* As an aside to the above, as with most things, the incentive structures between the public good and government spending are misaligned. I think there are a few things Trump and the Republicans can do that would fundamentally shift how the public participates.
1) To align incentives, we should introduce a system where the tax brackets adjust based on the amount of debt the US carries (with a cap at current levels). That would incentivize everybody to watch and vote on govt spending. If you could tell the bottom 75% of the country that their taxes would be 0 if the debt to GDP ratio were under 10%, I can only imagine the concern about how each dollar is spent. Would we say yes to as many international interventions if you were also voting to raise your tax rate from 0% to 15% or 30% to 50%? There's obviously going to be people that try to game the system by introducing more deductions/credits at different levels, but I think that comes with everything and can largely be cured with more observability that I get to soon.
2) Introduce a VAT for luxury goods of x% earmarked for paying down the debt (and moves to funding the sovereign fund if the ratio is low). Make the percentage based on some economic factor so Congress can't just raise spending proportionally. This would feel like a Bernie Sanders-type suggestion, where the rich/ultra-rich pay a consumption tax that doesn't target the bottom 50% at all (unless they're careless with their money). But it does what Warren tried to do with her silly asset-taxation idea, and it would feel like a win for a group of people desperately needing one.
3) Have DOGE create revenue public observability dashboards (similar to Ballmer's USAFacts.org) for every agency (maybe an exception for detail on military-related agencies) and work with a UX person to figure out how to display it in the 250-character world we're in now.
4) There's clearly something the political class is missing in connecting with the American populace regarding needs/concerns. Andrew Yang had an excellent idea of introducing a "happiness index" (the name sucks but the idea is good) that measured actual economic performance (https://2020.yang2020.com/policies/measuring-the-economy/). This would go a long way in making the general public feel like they are being heard.
5) Congress doesn't want this but it would be great if there were an AI tool that analyzes every bill brought forth that can show a tie in to funding mechanisms and an output to KPIs that can long term evaluate how a bill does when it is passed (so a crime bill would be detailed out with funding to DOJ and/or Corrections and KPI is felony reduction amount that is updated every few months/years. It could also include what tradeoffs had to happen, like money to this district for a new Wegmans or something to get that Congressman's vote. Maybe I'll build this open source, but if DOGE built it, it would help inform voters and thus align incentives. Reducing the public's reliance on media to inform themselves should be paramount.
**Final Note on DOGE:** - I think they would've been better off taking a chainsaw to regulations before laying off people. Getting rid of regulations and letting the private market start humming so that laid-off people can have options where to land. They might have been able to avoid a recession if that had happened. Instead, we'll see many people lose their livelihoods and have nowhere to go because the private market is shrinking, too.
* Re: AI. I don't think we're very far off from a Chrome extension named "fork" that generates a complete fork of the functionality and look of a site (or a standalone version that does the same thing). It's relatively simple in theory (I think 12 months is doable). Crawl the site for every action, note what happens as a result of the action, take note of data elements on each page, and then use AI to generate the db schema and code to execute. I think that's inevitable. However, I'm also seeing a trend with some of these AI tools (not as much Cursor/Replit but more so tools like Bolt/Loveable) where people are good at spinning up a production system quickly but the release cycles decrease significantly because the AI isn't good enough to carry it by itself from there. There are multiple reasons for this, most notably that some of these products are being spun up by people who don't know how to code, so once they hit a wall, they're stuck. Also, the code written isn't always great or the best way to code something, so taking over the coding can be a headache. So, the time to market will be low, # of people required to build the product will be low, but skill/time to scale functionality may increase.
The FCA have established the Digital Securities Sandbox with the Bank of England, allowing the first Web3 none crypto RWA’s to test the marketplace under the eyes of the regulators. We’ll be entering the Sandbox in the coming weeks, we’ll be the fourth innovation to enter, hopefully it’ll pave the way for more jurisdictions to start regulated adoption for digital assets
as much as i realise why you(and a bunch of people) hate on jcal there is just something about him that allows to retain attention. sure, sometimes it is annoying or just a few of his jokes, but it is attention retaining. also, when jcal goes hard, he goes hard
I don’t like jcal too much either but you don’t have to love everyone you listen to, you are there to listen and get informative insights, 95% of the time I think J Cal is an idiot but he does have experience and something going on, it doesn’t hurt to listen through a bunch of garbage to get a good thing once in a while.
Couple o' Thoughts:
* Re: Securing the dollar as the reserve currency via crypto decisions. I'm unsure how that works without other countries buying into the same cryptos (notably, Bitcoin) or following the same regulations with how it operates. No authoritarian government will sign on for economic "freedom" (quotes used because of the decision to peg to the dollar), which rules out most of the BRICS nations. The EU supports crypto with some wild regulations I don't think the US would adopt. So if you can't agree on the rules and you can't use the vehicle, then how does any of this work globally? My friend Korok Ray (https://substack.com/@korok) has written great stuff on Bitcoin, but I still can't wrap my head around how you come to a global consensus in this day and age. I'd love to get a Chamanth deep dive on how this crypto-economic system works globally.
* Friedberg's optimistic take on Trump's actions was interesting. Moving the government from taxation to consumption revenue is an interesting idea; I'd love to see an analysis of that. I have thoughts on it:
* As an aside to the above, as with most things, the incentive structures between the public good and government spending are misaligned. I think there are a few things Trump and the Republicans can do that would fundamentally shift how the public participates.
1) To align incentives, we should introduce a system where the tax brackets adjust based on the amount of debt the US carries (with a cap at current levels). That would incentivize everybody to watch and vote on govt spending. If you could tell the bottom 75% of the country that their taxes would be 0 if the debt to GDP ratio were under 10%, I can only imagine the concern about how each dollar is spent. Would we say yes to as many international interventions if you were also voting to raise your tax rate from 0% to 15% or 30% to 50%? There's obviously going to be people that try to game the system by introducing more deductions/credits at different levels, but I think that comes with everything and can largely be cured with more observability that I get to soon.
2) Introduce a VAT for luxury goods of x% earmarked for paying down the debt (and moves to funding the sovereign fund if the ratio is low). Make the percentage based on some economic factor so Congress can't just raise spending proportionally. This would feel like a Bernie Sanders-type suggestion, where the rich/ultra-rich pay a consumption tax that doesn't target the bottom 50% at all (unless they're careless with their money). But it does what Warren tried to do with her silly asset-taxation idea, and it would feel like a win for a group of people desperately needing one.
3) Have DOGE create revenue public observability dashboards (similar to Ballmer's USAFacts.org) for every agency (maybe an exception for detail on military-related agencies) and work with a UX person to figure out how to display it in the 250-character world we're in now.
4) There's clearly something the political class is missing in connecting with the American populace regarding needs/concerns. Andrew Yang had an excellent idea of introducing a "happiness index" (the name sucks but the idea is good) that measured actual economic performance (https://2020.yang2020.com/policies/measuring-the-economy/). This would go a long way in making the general public feel like they are being heard.
5) Congress doesn't want this but it would be great if there were an AI tool that analyzes every bill brought forth that can show a tie in to funding mechanisms and an output to KPIs that can long term evaluate how a bill does when it is passed (so a crime bill would be detailed out with funding to DOJ and/or Corrections and KPI is felony reduction amount that is updated every few months/years. It could also include what tradeoffs had to happen, like money to this district for a new Wegmans or something to get that Congressman's vote. Maybe I'll build this open source, but if DOGE built it, it would help inform voters and thus align incentives. Reducing the public's reliance on media to inform themselves should be paramount.
**Final Note on DOGE:** - I think they would've been better off taking a chainsaw to regulations before laying off people. Getting rid of regulations and letting the private market start humming so that laid-off people can have options where to land. They might have been able to avoid a recession if that had happened. Instead, we'll see many people lose their livelihoods and have nowhere to go because the private market is shrinking, too.
* Re: AI. I don't think we're very far off from a Chrome extension named "fork" that generates a complete fork of the functionality and look of a site (or a standalone version that does the same thing). It's relatively simple in theory (I think 12 months is doable). Crawl the site for every action, note what happens as a result of the action, take note of data elements on each page, and then use AI to generate the db schema and code to execute. I think that's inevitable. However, I'm also seeing a trend with some of these AI tools (not as much Cursor/Replit but more so tools like Bolt/Loveable) where people are good at spinning up a production system quickly but the release cycles decrease significantly because the AI isn't good enough to carry it by itself from there. There are multiple reasons for this, most notably that some of these products are being spun up by people who don't know how to code, so once they hit a wall, they're stuck. Also, the code written isn't always great or the best way to code something, so taking over the coding can be a headache. So, the time to market will be low, # of people required to build the product will be low, but skill/time to scale functionality may increase.
The FCA have established the Digital Securities Sandbox with the Bank of England, allowing the first Web3 none crypto RWA’s to test the marketplace under the eyes of the regulators. We’ll be entering the Sandbox in the coming weeks, we’ll be the fourth innovation to enter, hopefully it’ll pave the way for more jurisdictions to start regulated adoption for digital assets
Off topic but something has to be done about Calcanis before he destroys All In. Unbearable to listen to him go on and on.
as much as i realise why you(and a bunch of people) hate on jcal there is just something about him that allows to retain attention. sure, sometimes it is annoying or just a few of his jokes, but it is attention retaining. also, when jcal goes hard, he goes hard
I don’t like jcal too much either but you don’t have to love everyone you listen to, you are there to listen and get informative insights, 95% of the time I think J Cal is an idiot but he does have experience and something going on, it doesn’t hurt to listen through a bunch of garbage to get a good thing once in a while.
Thanks for the insights!
Looking forward to learning more from you!
Kind regards,
Saad Farooq