Showing posts with label Marc Andreessen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marc Andreessen. Show all posts

Thursday, July 04, 2024

Marc Andreessen

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Thursday, June 22, 2023

Marc Andreessen/Lex Fridman



Avoid These 10 Common Writing Mistakes To Build Your Twitter Audience . The difference between the roaring successes and the majority dropouts? High impact writing. The ability to clearly communicate a message, in a way that builds an audience and gets them excited about becoming your customer. Learning how to write, and applying your skills to scripts, tweets, articles and newsletters is the single biggest investment you can make in your career as a creator and your personal brand. ......... Kieran Drew quit dentistry to become a writer, and now shares what he learns as he builds his creator business. With 160,000 Twitter followers (having only opened his account in August 2020) and over 20,000 subscribers to his Digital Freedom newsletter ........... “One big idea, one captivating story, one core emotion, one core benefit, one call to action.” Drew believes that “specificity is the secret.” ........... “The road to hell is paved with adverbs,” said Stephen King. .......... Avoid words such as really, quickly, rarely, and so on. If a word ends in -ly, it’s not your friend. “Use them as an opportunity to swap out for bigger and bolder language.” Your message will be stronger, less fluffy, and more memorable to readers........... To save serious headaches, see if your sentence passes “the zombie test,” which goes like this: “If you can add ‘and by zombies’ to the sentence, it’s passive. If you can’t, it’s active.” This is the difference between “The world was rocked by Kieran (and by zombies)” and “Kieran rocked the world (and by zombies).” You want the latter, and so does your audience. .............. “First draft fast, second draft slow, one week buffer.” Simple. “Leave time between your drafts, and schedule content one week ahead.” ........... The internet shows you the opposite.” Instead of trying to sound well-educated, “distil core ideas down to their simplest form.” Be clear instead of clever. It makes you easier to consume, instantly memorable, and more than pays off long term........... Add line breaks to break up your paragraphs, use snappy sentences, bullet points and white space. “The secret is to be easy on the eyes.” ......... “Cut a third from your draft before publishing. People are busy. Write like it.” Even if you think what you’ve written cannot possibly be cut down, give it a go. Keep chopping until it’s a third shorter and much punchier. You won’t even remember what you cut out. ............ Remove fluffy phrases like “I think that,” “it’s possible that,” “you could,” and “probably.” Don’t be afraid to take your stance. ........ “Don’t be the guru, be the guide”

How Can ChatGPT Help Create And Implement A Social Media Influencer Program?
How Can ChatGPT Analyze Data To Determine Which Types Of Content Generate The Most Engagement?
Image Generation
How Can ChatGPT Suggest Ways To Use Virtual Events To Engage Customers?
How Can ChatGPT Help Create And Implement A Customer Retention Strategy?
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Sunday, June 11, 2023

11: Marc Andreessen



100 Ways ChatGPT Can Help A Marketer
100 Ways ChatGPT Can Help A Student
100 Ways ChatGPT Can Help A Doctor
Who This Online Course Is For
100 Ways ChatGPT Can Help A Creator


Why AI Will Save the World

AI will not destroy the world, and in fact may save it.

......... A shorter description of what AI isn’t: Killer software and robots that will spring to life and decide to murder the human race or otherwise ruin everything, like you see in the movies. .......... A shorter description of what AI isn’t: Killer software and robots that will spring to life and decide to murder the human race or otherwise ruin everything, like you see in the movies. ........ we have used our intelligence to raise our standard of living on the order of 10,000X over the last 4,000 years........ What AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence – and many others, from the creation of new medicines to ways to solve climate change to technologies to reach the stars – much, much better from here. ............. In our new era of AI: ...... Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful. The AI tutor will be by each child’s side every step of their development, helping them maximize their potential with the machine version of infinite love. .......... Every person will have an AI assistant/coach/mentor/trainer/advisor/therapist that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, and infinitely helpful. The AI assistant will be present through all of life’s opportunities and challenges, maximizing every person’s outcomes. ......... Every scientist will have an AI assistant/collaborator/partner that will greatly expand their scope of scientific research and achievement. Every artist, every engineer, every businessperson, every doctor, every caregiver will have the same in their worlds. .......... Every leader of people – CEO, government official, nonprofit president, athletic coach, teacher – will have the same. The magnification effects of better decisions by leaders across the people they lead are enormous, so this intelligence augmentation may be the most important of all. ........ Productivity growth throughout the economy will accelerate dramatically, driving economic growth, creation of new industries, creation of new jobs, and wage growth, and resulting in a new era of heightened material prosperity across the planet. ........... Scientific breakthroughs and new technologies and medicines will dramatically expand, as AI helps us further decode the laws of nature and harvest them for our benefit. ............ The creative arts will enter a golden age, as AI-augmented artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers gain the ability to realize their visions far faster and at greater scale than ever before. ......... I even think AI is going to improve warfare, when it has to happen, by reducing wartime death rates dramatically. Every war is characterized by terrible decisions made under intense pressure and with sharply limited information by very limited human leaders. Now, military commanders and political leaders will have AI advisors that will help them make much better strategic and tactical decisions, minimizing risk, error, and unnecessary bloodshed. .......... In short, anything that people do with their natural intelligence today can be done much better with AI, and we will be able to take on new challenges that have been impossible to tackle without AI, from curing all diseases to achieving interstellar travel. .......... Perhaps the most underestimated quality of AI is how humanizing it can be. AI art gives people who otherwise lack technical skills the freedom to create and share their artistic ideas. Talking to an empathetic AI friend really does improve their ability to handle adversity. And

AI medical chatbots are already more empathetic than their human counterparts.

Rather than making the world harsher and more mechanistic, infinitely patient and sympathetic AI will make the world warmer and nicer. ........... AI is quite possibly the most important – and best – thing our civilization has ever created, certainly on par with electricity and microchips, and probably beyond those. ......... It turns out this present panic is not even the first for AI. ......... a moral panic is by its very nature irrational – it takes what may be a legitimate concern and inflates it into a level of hysteria that ironically makes it harder to confront actually serious concerns. ......... For AI risk, these are CEOs who stand to make more money if regulatory barriers are erected that form a cartel of government-blessed AI vendors protected from new startup and open source competition – the software version of “too big to fail” banks. .............. If you are paid a salary or receive grants to foster AI panic…you are probably a Bootlegger. .......... The problem with the Bootleggers is that they win. The Baptists are naive ideologues, the Bootleggers are cynical operators, and so the result of reform movements like these is often that the Bootleggers get what they want – regulatory capture, insulation from competition, the formation of a cartel – and the Baptists are left wondering where their drive for social improvement went so wrong. ............... We just lived through a stunning example of this – banking reform after the 2008 global financial crisis. The Baptists told us that we needed new laws and regulations to break up the “too big to fail” banks to prevent such a crisis from ever happening again. So Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which was marketed as satisfying the Baptists’ goal, but in reality was coopted by the Bootleggers – the big banks. The result is that the same banks that were “too big to fail” in 2008 are much, much larger now. ................. And of course, no AI panic newspaper story is complete without a still image of a gleaming red-eyed killer robot from James Cameron’s Terminator films. ............. My view is that the idea that AI will decide to literally kill humanity is a profound category error. AI is not a living being that has been primed by billions of years of evolution to participate in the battle for the survival of the fittest, as animals are, and as we are. It is math – code – computers, built by people, owned by people, used by people, controlled by people. The idea that it will at some point develop a mind of its own and decide that it has motivations that lead it to try to kill us is a superstitious handwave. .............. AI doesn’t want, it doesn’t have goals, it doesn’t want to kill you, because it’s not alive. And AI is a machine – is not going to come alive any more than your toaster will. ............

Short version: If the murder robots don’t get us, the hate speech and misinformation will.

................ the same concerns of “hate speech” (and its mathematical counterpart, “algorithmic bias”) and “misinformation” are being directly transferred from the social media context to the new frontier of “AI alignment”. ................ there is no absolutist free speech position. First, every country, including the United States, makes at least some content illegal. ........... there are certain kinds of content, like child pornography and incitements to real world violence, that are nearly universally agreed to be off limits – legal or not – by virtually every society. So any technological platform that facilitates or generates content – speech – is going to have some restrictions. ............... As the proponents of both “trust and safety” and “AI alignment” are clustered into the very narrow slice of the global population that characterizes the American coastal elites – which includes many of the people who work in and write about the tech industry – many of my readers will find yourselves primed to argue that dramatic restrictions on AI output are required to avoid destroying society. I will not attempt to talk you out of this now, I will simply state that this is the nature of the demand, and that most people in the world neither agree with your ideology nor want to see you win. ............... In short, don’t let the thought police suppress AI. ............. The fear of job loss due variously to mechanization, automation, computerization, or AI has been a recurring panic for hundreds of years, since the original onset of machinery such as the mechanical loom. Even though every new major technology has led to more jobs at higher wages throughout history, each wave of this panic is accompanied by claims that “this time is different” – this is the time it will finally happen, this is the technology that will finally deliver the hammer blow to human labor. And yet, it never happens. ..................

by late 2019 – right before the onset of COVID – the world had more jobs at higher wages than ever in history.

................ AI, if allowed to develop and proliferate throughout the economy, may cause the most dramatic and sustained economic boom of all time, with correspondingly record job and wage growth – the exact opposite of the fear. ................. technology introduced into an industry generally not only increases the number of jobs in the industry but also raises wages. ......... This is not to say that inequality is not an issue in our society. It is, it’s just not being driven by technology, it’s being driven by the reverse, by the sectors of the economy that are the most resistant to new technology, that have the most government intervention to prevent the adoption of new technology like AI – specifically housing, education, and health care. The actual risk of AI and inequality is not that AI will cause more inequality but rather that we will not allow AI to be used to reduce inequality. .......... Tools, starting with fire and rocks, can be used to do good things – cook food and build houses – and bad things – burn people and bludgeon people. Any technology can be used for good or bad. ............ AI will make it easier for criminals, terrorists, and hostile governments to do bad things, no question. .......... AI is not some esoteric physical material that is hard to come by, like plutonium. It’s the opposite, it’s the easiest material in the world to come by – math and code. ............. AI is like air – it will be everywhere. The level of totalitarian oppression that would be required to arrest that would be so draconian – a world government monitoring and controlling all computers? jackbooted thugs in black helicopters seizing rogue GPUs? – that we would not have a society left to protect. ......... We don’t even need new laws – I’m not aware of a single actual bad use for AI that’s been proposed that’s not already illegal. ............. using AI as a defensive tool. The same capabilities that make AI dangerous in the hands of bad guys with bad goals make it powerful in the hands of good guys with good goals – specifically the good guys whose job it is to prevent bad things from happening. ............. if you are worried about AI generating fake people and fake videos, the answer is to build new systems where people can verify themselves and real content via cryptographic signatures. Digital creation and alteration of both real and fake content was already here before AI; the answer is not to ban word processors and Photoshop – or AI – but to use technology to build a system that actually solves the problem. ........... let’s mount major efforts to use AI for good, legitimate, defensive purposes. Let’s put AI to work in cyberdefense, in biological defense, in hunting terrorists, and in everything else that we do to keep ourselves, our communities, and our nation safe. ............ using AI to protect against bad people doing bad things, I think there’s no question a world infused with AI will be much safer than the world we live in today............ AI isn’t just being developed in the relatively free societies of the West, it is also being developed by the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China. .............. China has a vastly different vision for AI than we do – they view it as a mechanism for authoritarian population control, full stop. They are not even being secretive about this, they are very clear about it, and they are already pursuing their agenda. And they do not intend to limit their AI strategy to China – they intend to proliferate it all across the world, everywhere they are powering 5G networks, everywhere they are loaning Belt And Road money, everywhere they are providing friendly consumer apps like Tiktok that serve as front ends to their centralized command and control AI. .............

The single greatest risk of AI is that China wins global AI dominance and we – the United States and the West – do not.

............... we in the United States and the West should lean into AI as hard as we possibly can. ......... more general problems such as malnutrition, disease, and climate. AI can be an incredibly powerful tool for solving problems, and we should embrace it as such. .......... To prevent the risk of China achieving global AI dominance, we should use the full power of our private sector, our scientific establishment, and our governments in concert to drive American and Western AI to absolute global dominance, including ultimately inside China itself. We win, they lose.

100 Ways ChatGPT Can Help Computer Network Architects
100 Ways ChatGPT Can Help Musicians
100 Ways ChatGPT Can Help A Copywriter
100 Ways An Insurance Agent Can Use ChatGPT To Increase Sales
100 Ways To Use ChatGPT For Excel

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Wednesday, March 01, 2023

Marc Andreessen



The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 2: When the VCs say "no"
Part 3 “But I don’t know any VCs!”
Part 4 The only thing that matters
Part 5 The Moby Dick theory of big companies



เคชเคนिเคšाเคจเค•ो เคธเคชเคจा เคฆेเค–ाเคเค•ो เคฎाเค“เคตाเคฆीเคฒे เคจै เคฒเคค्เคคो เค›ाเคกेเคชเค›ि เคช्เคฐเคฆेเคถ เฅง เค•ो เคจाเคฎ 'เค•ोเคถी' เคฐाเค–्เคจे เคช्เคฐเคธ्เคคाเคตเคฎाเคฅि เคฌुเคงเคฌाเคฐ เคธंเคธเคฆเคฎा เค›เคฒเคซเคฒ เคšเคฒिเคฐเคนँเคฆा เคœเคจเคคा เคธเคฎाเคœเคตाเคฆी เคชाเคฐ्เคŸी (เคœเคธเคชा) เค•ी เคจेเคคा เคจिเคฐ्เคฎเคฒा เคฒिเคฎ्เคฌूเค•ा เค†ँเค–ाเคฌाเคŸ เค†ँเคธुเค•ो เค•ोเคถी เคฌเค—्เคฆै เคฅिเคฏो। ...... เคช्เคฐเคฆेเคถ เฅง เคฏเคธ्เคคो เคฅเคฒो เคนो, เคœเคนाँ เคชเคนिเคšाเคจเค•ा เคฒाเค—ि เคฒाเคฎो เค†เคจ्เคฆोเคฒเคจ เคšเคฒेเค•ो เคฅिเคฏो। เค•ुเคจै เคฌेเคฒा เค ूเคฒो เค†เค•ाเคฐเค•ो เค‰เค•्เคค เค†เคจ्เคฆोเคฒเคจ เค…เคนिเคฒे เค–ुเคฎ्เคšिँเคฆै เค—เคเค•ो เค›। เคคเคฐ เคชเคนिเคšाเคจเคธเคนिเคคเค•ो เคธंเค˜ीเคฏเคคाเค•ा เคฒाเค—ि เค…เคนिเคฒे เคชเคจि เคเค‰เคŸा เคคเคช्เค•ा เคจिเคฐเคจ्เคคเคฐ เคธंเค˜เคฐ्เคทเคฐเคค เค›। ....... เฅจเฅฆเฅฌเฅจ–เฅฌเฅฉ เค•ो เคœเคจเค†เคจ्เคฆोเคฒเคจเคฒเค—เคค्เคคै เค‰เค ेเค•ो เคฎเคงेเคธ เคตिเคฆ्เคฐोเคนเคฒे เคฎुเคฒुเค•เคฎा เคธंเค˜ीเคฏเคคाเคฒाเคˆ เค…เคตเคถ्เคฏเคฎ्เคญाเคตी เคคुเคฒ्เคฏाเคเค•ो เคฅिเคฏो। เคค्เคฏเคธ เค•्เคฐเคฎเคฎा เคงेเคฐैเค•ो เคœ्เคฏाเคจ เค—เคเค•ो เคฅिเคฏो। เคค्เคฏเคธเค…เค˜ि เคฎाเค“เคตाเคฆी เคธเคถเคธ्เคค्เคฐ เคตिเคฆ्เคฐोเคนเคฒे เคชเคนिเคšाเคจเคฎा เค†เคงाเคฐिเคค เคช्เคฐเคฆेเคถเคนเคฐूเค•ो เคธเคชเคจा เคฆेเคถเคต्เคฏाเคชी เคฌเคจाเค‡เคธเค•ेเค•ो เคฅिเคฏो। เคค्เคฏो เคธเคชเคจाเคฎा เคช्เคฐाเคฃ เคญเคฐ्เคจे เค•ाเคฎ เคฎเคงेเคธ, เคฅाเคฐू เคฐ เคชूเคฐ्เคตเค•ो เคฒिเคฎ्เคฌूเคตाเคจ เค†เคจ्เคฆोเคฒเคจเคฒे เค—เคฐेเค•ो เคฅिเคฏो। ........ เคเคฎाเคฒे เคฐ เค•ांเค—्เคฐेเคธ เคฎिเคฒेเคชเค›ि เคจाเคฎเค•เคฐเคฃ เค—เคฐ्เคจ เคฆुเคˆเคคिเคนाเค‡ เคฎเคค เคชुเค—्เคฅ्เคฏो। เคเคฎाเคฒेเค•ो เฅชเฅฆ เคฐ เค•ांเค—्เคฐेเคธเค•ो เฅจเฅฏ เคฎเคคเคฎा เคฐाเคช्เคฐเคชाเค•ो เฅฌ เคฎเคค เคฅเคชिँเคฆा เค†เคฐाเคฎเคฆाเคฏी เคธंเค–्เคฏा เคชुเค—्เคฅ्เคฏो। เคฏเคธ्เคคो เค…เคตเคธ्เคฅाเคฎा เคซเคฐเค• เคช्เคฐเคธ्เคคाเคต เคฒैเคœाเคจ เคฎाเค“เคตाเคฆी เคคเคฏाเคฐ เคญเคเคจ। ........ 'เคจाเคฎ เคšाเคนिँ เคชเคนिเคšाเคจเคธเคนिเคคเค•ो เคšाเคนिเคจे เค…เคจि เคญोเคŸ เคšाเคนिँ เค•ांเค—्เคฐेเคธ เคฐ เคเคฎाเคฒेเคฒाเคˆ เคฆिเคจे? เคนाเคฎीเคฒे เคฎाเคค्เคฐै เค•เคคि เคฎुเคฆ्เคฆा เคฌोเค•्เคจे?' ......... 'เคฎाเค“เคตाเคฆी เค…เคฌ เคจ เคชเคนिเคšाเคจเคฎा เค›, เคจ เคตเคฐ्เค—เคฎा, เคจ เค•ुเคจै เคตैเคšाเคฐिเค•ीเคฎा,' เค‰เคจเคฒे เคญเคจे, 'เคฎाเค“เคตाเคฆी เค•ेเคตเคฒ เค•ुเคฐ्เคธी เค–ेเคฒเคฎा เค›। เคค्เคฏเคธैเคฒे เค•ोเคถी เคนोเคธ् เคตा เคธเค—เคฐเคฎाเคฅा, เค–ाเคธ เคจेเคคृเคค्เคตเค•ा เค•ेเคนी เคธाँเค˜ुเคฐा เคธ्เคตाเคฐ्เคฅ เคธเคฎ्เคฌोเคงเคจ เคญเค เคŠ เคธเคนเคญाเค—ी เคญเค‡เคนाเคฒ्เค›।' ...... เค•ेเคจ्เคฆ्เคฐीเคฏ เค—เค เคฌเคจ्เคงเคจเคฎा เคฐाเคท्เคŸ्เคฐเคชเคคि เคšुเคจाเคตเคฒे เค–เคŸเคชเคŸ เคฒ्เคฏाเคเค•ै เคฌेเคฒा เคฎाเค“เคตाเคฆी, เค•ांเค—्เคฐेเคธ เคฐ เคฐाเคช्เคฐเคชाเค•ो เคธเคฎเคฐ्เคฅเคจ เคœुเคŸाเคเคฐ เคจाเคฎ เคฐाเค–्เคจ เคธเคซเคฒ เคญเคเค•ो เคœเคธ เคฎुเค–्เคฏเคฎเคจเคค्เคฐी เคนिเค•्เคฎเคค เค•ाเคฐ्เค•ीเคฒे เคชाเค‰เคจे เคญเคเค•ा เค›เคจ्। ........... เคธเคค्เคคाเคฐूเคข เคจेเค•เคชा เคเคฎाเคฒेเค•ो เคช्เคฐเคธ्เคคाเคตเคฎा เคฎुเค–्เคฏ เคตिเคชเค•्เคทी เค•ांเค—्เคฐेเคธ, เคธเคค्เคคाเคฐूเคข เคฎाเค“เคตाเคฆी เค•ेเคจ्เคฆ्เคฐ เคฐ เคฐाเคช्เคฐเคชाเค•ा เคธांเคธเคฆเคนเคฐूเคฒे เคธเคฎเคฐ्เคฅเคจ เคœเคจाเค‰ँเคฆा เคช्เคฐเคฆेเคถ เคจाเคฎเค•เคฐเคฃ เคฆुเคˆเคคिเคนाเค‡เคญเคจ्เคฆा เคฌเคขी เคฎเคคเคฒे เคชाเคฐिเคค เคญเคเค•ो เคนो। เคธเคญाเคฎुเค– เคฌाเคฌुเคฐाเคฎ เค—ौเคคเคฎเคฒे เคช्เคฐเคฆेเคถเค•ो เคจाเคฎ เค•ोเคถी เคฐाเค–िเคจुเคชเคฐ्เค› เคญเคจ्เคจे เคช्เคฐเคธ्เคคाเคตเค•ा เคชเค•्เคทเคฎा เฅฎเฅจ เคฎเคค เคชเคฐेเค•ो เค˜ोเคทเคฃा เค—เคฐेเค•ा เค›เคจ्। เคตिเคชเค•्เคทเคฎा เคญเคจे เคœเคฎ्เคฎा เฅช เคฎเคค เคชเคฐेเค•ो เคฅिเคฏो।

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Tuesday, March 29, 2022

News: March 29

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Sunday, March 27, 2022

Bitcoin: Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon: 2014/2013

Why Bitcoin Matters BY MARC ANDREESSEN JANUARY 21, 2014 . A mysterious new technology emerges, seemingly out of nowhere, but actually the result of two decades of intense research and development by nearly anonymous researchers. ....... Political idealists project visions of liberation and revolution onto it; establishment elites heap contempt and scorn on it. ....... Personal computers in 1975, the Internet in 1993, and – I believe – Bitcoin in 2014. ...... First, Bitcoin at its most fundamental level is a breakthrough in computer science – one that builds on 20 years of research into cryptographic currency, and 40 years of research in cryptography, by thousands of researchers around the world. ........... Bitcoin gives us, for the first time, a way for one Internet user to transfer a unique piece of digital property to another Internet user, such that the transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer. The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate. ........ What kinds of digital property might be transferred in this way? Think about digital signatures, digital contracts, digital keys (to physical locks, or to online lockers), digital ownership of physical assets such as cars and houses, digital stocks and bonds … and digital money. .......

Bitcoin is an Internet-wide distributed ledger.

...... Bitcoin is the first Internetwide payment system where transactions either happen with no fees or very low fees (down to fractions of pennies). Existing payment systems charge fees of about 2 to 3 percent – and that’s in the developed world. In lots of other places, there either are no modern payment systems or the rates are significantly higher. ........... It’s not as much that the Bitcoin currency has some arbitrary value and then people are trading with it; it’s more that people can trade with Bitcoin (anywhere, everywhere, with no fraud and no or very low fees) and as a result it has value. ........ Critics of Bitcoin point to limited usage by ordinary consumers and merchants, but that same criticism was leveled against PCs and the Internet at the same stage. ........ “Let’s say you sell electronics online. Profit margins in those businesses are usually under 5 percent, which means conventional 2.5 percent payment fees consume half the margin. That’s money that could be reinvested in the business, passed back to consumers or taxed by the government. Of all of those choices, handing 2.5 percent to banks to move bits around the Internet is the worst possible choice. Another challenge merchants have with payments is accepting international payments. If you are wondering why your favorite product or service isn’t available in your country, the answer is often payments.” ............. the claim made by some critics that Bitcoin is a haven for bad behavior, for criminals and terrorists to transfer money anonymously with impunity. This is a myth, fostered mostly by sensationalistic press coverage and an incomplete understanding of the technology. Much like email, which is quite traceable, Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous. Further, every transaction in the Bitcoin network is tracked and logged forever in the Bitcoin blockchain, or permanent record, available for all to see. As a result, Bitcoin is considerably easier for law enforcement to trace than cash, gold or diamonds. .......... Bitcoin is a four-sided network effect. There are four constituencies that participate in expanding the value of Bitcoin as a consequence of their own self-interested participation. Those constituencies are (1) consumers who pay with Bitcoin, (2) merchants who accept Bitcoin, (3) “miners” who run the computers that process and validate all the transactions and enable the distributed trust network to exist, and (4) developers and entrepreneurs who are building new products and services with and on top of Bitcoin. ........... One immediately obvious and enormous area for Bitcoin-based innovation is international remittance. Every day, hundreds of millions of low-income people go to work in hard jobs in foreign countries to make money to send back to their families in their home countries – over $400 billion in total annually ............. banks and payment companies extract mind-boggling fees, up to 10 percent and sometimes even higher, to send this money. ........

it is hard to think of any one thing that would have a faster and more positive effect on so many people in the world’s poorest countries.

......... Bitcoin generally can be a powerful force to bring a much larger number of people around the world into the modern economic system. Only about 20 countries around the world have what we would consider to be fully modern banking and payment systems; the other roughly 175 have a long way to go. ........ Bitcoin, as a global payment system anyone can use from anywhere at any time, can be a powerful catalyst to extend the benefits of the modern economic system to virtually everyone on the planet. ........ A third fascinating use case for Bitcoin is micropayments, or ultrasmall payments. ........ Bitcoins have the nifty property of infinite divisibility: currently down to eight decimal places after the dot, but more in the future. ......... So you can specify an arbitrarily small amount of money, like a thousandth of a penny, and send it to anyone in the world for free or near-free. ......... Future email systems and social networks could refuse to accept incoming messages unless they were accompanied with tiny amounts of Bitcoin – tiny enough to not matter to the sender, but large enough to deter spammers .......... Bitcoin is a financial technology dream come true for even the most hardened anticapitalist political organizer. ......... in 1999, the legendary economist Milton Friedman said: “One thing that’s missing but will soon be developed is a reliable e-cash, a method whereby on the Internet you can transfer funds from A to B without A knowing B or B knowing A – the way I can take a $20 bill and hand it over to you, and you may get that without knowing who I am.” ........ almost no country’s regulatory framework for banking and payments anticipated a technology like Bitcoin......... Far from a mere libertarian fairy tale or a simple Silicon Valley exercise in hype, Bitcoin offers a sweeping vista of opportunity to reimagine how the financial system can and should work in the Internet era, and a catalyst to reshape that system in ways that are more powerful for individuals and businesses alike. .



Why I’m interested in Bitcoin . Some people assume that all Bitcoin advocates are motivated by a libertarian political agenda. That is certainly not my agenda. I’m a lifelong Democrat who supported Obama in the last two elections. I think the Federal Reserve plays an important function .......... it is also true that almost every significant computing movement had early proponents who were ideologically motivated ....... The developers of the first personal computers were closely aligned with the 60s counterculture movement. Open source software was originally created by people who believed that all software should be available for free. Early advocates of blogging and collaborative systems like Wikipedia were trying to democratize the production and dissemination of information. This isn’t coincidental: broad-based technology movements have depended on non-economic participants early on since it often took years for commercial participants to get involved. ........... the 2008 financial crisis. I thought the government did what it had to do at the peak of the crisis but missed an important opportunity afterwards to reform the financial system. ....... there were two ways to improve the system: from above through regulation (which I support), or from below through competition. ........ I started getting interested in Bitcoin about two years ago. Like a lot of people I initially dismissed Bitcoin as a speculative bubble (“Internet tulip bulbs”) or a place to stash money for people worried about inflation (“Internet gold”). At some point, I had an “aha!” moment and realized that Bitcoin was best understood as a new software protocol through which you could rebuild the payments industry in ways that are better and cheaper. ........

banks and payment companies charge $500B per year in fees to provide a service that mostly involves moving bits around the Internet

............. Let’s say you sell electronics online. Profit margins in those businesses are usually under 5%, which means the 2.5% payment fees consume half the margin. That’s money that could be reinvested in the business, passed back to consumers, or taxed by the government. Of all of those choices, handing 2.5% to banks to move bits around the Internet is the worst possible choice. ......... the most exciting aspect of Bitcoin (and this is admittedly more speculative) are all the interesting new business and technology models that “programmable money” could enable. .......... I think Bitcoin could enable a micropayment system for the open web, and thereby provide a business model beyond banner ads for many important services such as journalism. .......... Bitcoin is a serious proposal for dramatically improving the payments industry. There are plenty of open questions but I think it’s an experiment worth running. .

Coinbase The press tends to portray Bitcoin as either a speculative bubble or a scheme for supporting criminal activity. In Silicon Valley, by contrast, Bitcoin is generally viewed as a profound technological breakthrough......... The designers of the Web built placeholders for a system that moved money, but never successfully completed it. Bitcoin is the first plausible proposal for an economic protocol for the Internet........ But to proliferate widely, Bitcoin needs a killer app the same way HTTP had web browsers and SMTP had email clients. That’s why today I’m excited to announce that Andreessen Horowitz is leading a $25M financing of Coinbase, a service that provides an accessible interface to the Bitcoin protocol. ....... Consumers can use Coinbase to convert to and from other currencies and to pay for goods and services. Merchants can use Coinbase to accept payments and convert currencies. Developers can build new services using Coinbase’s API....... Coinbase has grown extremely fast and is now the most widely used Bitcoin service in the US.

The New California Dream Is in Portugal . a nation that now boasts an 89 percent vaccination rate, the world’s highest. Once derided as Europe’s budget-vacation destination, Portugal is now Europe’s top tourist spot several years running. ....... On so many levels, the country can seem like California’s European twin, albeit without the apocalyptic wildfires and lingering droughts. Lisbon especially teases Californians with echoes: as in San Francisco, there’s a stunning red-painted suspension bridge, this one straddling the Tagus River instead the Golden Gate (built by the same engineer who built the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge), seven steep hills, and iconic, many-hued cable cars. World-class surfing can be had 30 minutes away in Ericeira, and Nazarรฉ. ......... “It feels like San Francisco–it even has a Golden Gate Bridge, and then that coastline from Lisbon to Cascais – the surf’s incredible.” ....... Many Californians’ new freedom to work from anywhere only elevates Portugal’s allure. The pandemic laid bare fissures in the state that have been building for years: out-of-control housing prices, an intractable homeless crisis, rising crime rates. We’ve witnessed a massive exodus the past year for the supposedly greener pastures of Austin and Miami. Or maybe not. Postal data proved this “phenomenon” was grossly exaggerated; most Bay Area evacuees moved ten miles to Alameda County, up to Sacramento or south to San Diego. ...... The Portuguese prize California’s billions in venture capital, deep entrepreneurial networks, expertise in sales, marketing and scaling startups. In return they offer driven, gifted employees who are fluent in English (the country ranks 7th in the world in speaking English as a second language), and friendly to boot. ......... Family comes first in Portugal, and the country offers a work-life balance that younger Americans especially demand ......... “The challenging part of SF was the lack of infrastructure for families,” he recalls.

“The competitive nature of daycare and the costs…it’s like putting your kid through Harvard.”

Portugal promised a balance of “just a beautiful country to raise our children.” ......... She quickly made friends and business contacts; blasting out 250 LinkedIn emails to Portuguese CEOs in the hope that one of them might talk with “a skinny tattooed girl,” she was stunned when “twenty-five of them had coffee with me.” Fiorentini is now head of personnel at the Lisbon office of Kencko, a healthcare startup. ........ “They often joke that once upon a time Portugal and California were one, and they split” ..... “The climate is the same, the plants are the same, it’s pretty wild.” .

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