Balaji Srinivasan: recommendation

Transcript context

…The exit option — this is debated quite a bit now with Facebook, with Google. Some people say, “Well, Facebook, you don’t like it, you don’t have to use it. You can just exit.” How persuasive do you find this argument? It’s certainly possible to delete your Facebook account. It is possible, with probably some effort, to ban all Facebook.com domains from your local DNS. It’s harder to exit Google, but also possible. It’s certainly possible to do it if you went to China because all that stuff is banned and you can have a modern life. I understand that the counter to that counterargument is the sheer number of trackers, the ubiquity of it, and it’s hard to live a normal life without having some interaction with those companies. I’m mixed on that in the sense of I personally know how to exit Facebook or Google or whatever if I wanted to do so. I recognize it’s too hard for other people to do so right now. But I think that the right approach is to build exits and build alternatives such that folks can exit from those things and they don’t feel constrained by them. Let’s turn to cryptocurrency for a bit, an area you know something about. Which of the arguments against the future viability of crypto assets do you find most persuasive, granted that you’re not agreeing with them? What’s the best criticism? If someone says, “Oh, cryptocurrencies in 15 years, it won’t be a thing,” what’s the best argument for that point of view?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.