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Notes -
Not sure if folks here keep up with crypto much, but over the weekend FTX had a liquidity crisis and agreed to sell to Binance. This is pretty huge news - FTX was one of the bigger crypto exchanges known for buying out other flailing firms that had crises. This may lead to a larger spiral within the crypto economy. @aqouta curious for your take here.
Also as some folks here may know Sam Bankman-fried of FTX wealth is one of the three major funders of the Effective Altruism movement. Given the circumstances of this bailout, it's likely that FTX was sold for an incredibly small amount - if Binance didn't help them with the liquidity crisis they almost certainly would've fallen to $0 value. Unfortunately this means that the money EA has been pledged/receiving from SBF is going to dry up. I'm curious to see if the EA movement can weather this storm, as they have been rather aggressively growing and it looks like they've been betting on this funding being in place for a long time.
Time to add some wild speculation - Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance, is Chinese. Now that Binance owns FTX, they are clearly the dominate player in the crypto space, or at least positioned well to become the dominant exchange. I wonder if this shift will cause China to reconsider their decision to make crypto illegal? Or is it too much of a risk to state power?
Update: This definitely seems like a coordinated attack. Apparently Coinbase released an article slamming FTX’s native token, then Binance pulled out their entire stake. Without those two events not sure if this would’ve happened.
EAs ought to have acquired enough momentum via their PR in major outlets (rather, this PR seems to indicate the momentum) to not care that much about Sam now, I believe. They're getting their AI safety and longtermism discussions, they've got their China chip ban, and they'll keep getting more stuff. Aren't they already plugged into networks much more valuable than anything crypto bros had to offer? Like, national security council tier?
Off topic, but China making crypto illegal and thus giving up their stake in the digital economy the US cannot control by decree has been the first of many ruinous, small-minded mistakes of Xi era (I mean, outside the obvious geopolitical ones like their handling of Hong Kong and Xinjiang) and they haven't shown the ability to reverse any of those.
Crypto is being pretty thoroughly neutered, no wonder its value is dropping. Ruskies who enabled much of the privacy side are suiciding or getting arrested, and Ethereum is ensuring that blocks are kosher now.
It's darkly amusing to be proven right. People thought that technology will disrupt traditional governance, and instead we're seeing bureaucratic sanctions effectively enforced against abstract cryptographic protocols. Social technology and human networking keep trampling over nerdy bullshit. How about a nice central bank digital currency? It's very high-tech, like in China, but without the scary Social Credit! Just a little oversight from your friendly democratically elected government, to make sure you don't use any of that nasty anonymous fake money like XMR or financing something evil... like Kiwifarms (more evil things are best left unmentioned and dealt with professionally).
I suppose we'll see Tor and i2p and other such bastions of net freedom dismantled completely in a few years, maybe blocked on the level of hardware, with forced upgrades under the guise of onshoring the supply chain and ensuring safety from RussiaChina threat and AGI risk. What a time to be alive.
Is there anywhere else a public discussion of this is happening besides that impenetrable tumblr thread? This seems incredibly significant.
What an absolutely fucking wild thing to off-handedly drop as a polemical jab in an off-topic subthread lol
Writing bills is complex (it's not that far removed from code written in legalese) and boring, it's not that surprising that the job frequently gets fobbed off to true believer activists. Congress and their staff mostly take already drafted bills from outsiders and their job is negotiating to build coalitions of support to get them passed.
The absolutely fucking wild thing here is not that some particular group of policy wonks wrote a policy.
The absolutely fucking wild thing here is that what is potentially one of the most profoundly consequential geopolitical things to have happened in our lifetimes may have been done with any (much less a primary) influence from EAish concerns/panic over the risk of imminent human-extinction from out-of-control AI.
Also, putting the purported screenshot through another round of broken telephone for (what I'm fairly certain was also @DaseindustriesLtd's primary intended) emphasis:
Uh...
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