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George Salapa

George Salapa

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The new base layer of the monetary system.

Money and the vast universe of financial products that are layered on top of it are abstract social constructs moved around as zeros and ones by an old code using low-level commands like “ADD,” “EXECUTE” and ”INIT.”
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The Excel table called crypto.

Publisher
George Salapa
January 22
One vision of future is that people will earn money playing games and trading between each other.
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The cypherpunk visions of the 1980s.

Publisher
George Salapa
January 16
The basic joke on blockchain is to point out how little it does. CSVCHAIN lets you buy NFTs that are just entries made by someone in a .csv file on his desktop. Matt Levine’s ExcelCoin is a pretend cryptocurrency stored on a list in his Microsoft Excel. And an imitation of the famous pirate website NFT Bay lets you download all NFTs from ethereum and solana blockchains, making it very painfully clear that buying an NFT doesn’t give you any real ownership, just a record of purchase listed on blockchain with an URL to an image stored on Google, Amazon or some other cloud server.
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Everything is a footnote to American culture.

Publisher
George Salapa
January 08
Ok, look, if you’d tell me that you hate Christmas with passion, I would probably mostly agree. They tell you to be happy with your family and trees and gifts and puppies, and you instantly absolutely don’t want that. Collectivized merrymaking² with a good potential to tick off one’s mental balance. You especially got to love the aesthetics of it — the trees, red and green everywhere, tiny lights everywhere, the old man, etc. — so very uniform, each time the same, images carved into our minds by the constant stream of American culture.
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Instead of going to therapy.

Publisher
George Salapa
December 12
You know, the basic argument that old finance has against crypto is that it is just a complicated replacement of things that already work. Why you need bitcoin, Visa works perfectly. Why would you program a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that operates automatically according to votes of all investors, when you have a corporation; because, you know, conceptually it is the same thing, no? When you have a company, shareholders have shares and each share has one vote, etc. 
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The best art you never had.

Publisher
George Salapa
December 06
Look, people will pitch you bitcoin in many ways, but what it really is is a successful production of artificial scarcity. You and I can type up some numbers and letters on our computers (f5d8ee39a430901c91a591…) but they would mean nothing. The trick is to achieve an agreement among all users that this string of numbers and letters is scarce. If you send that string of numbers and letters to someone else, the database updates, something gets deducted somewhere and added somewhere else. And because that something is scarce, it is valuable. This is what bitcoin can do and it can do it well.