Singapore Musings
So there’s been something on my mind and I’ve been trying to figure out how to express it so rather than expressing elegantly I’m just going to spew it out all at once.
When I first moved to Singapore in 2013 and 2014, I had an aha moment. It had its shit figured out. And I’d actually never seen a society with its shit figured out before.
The typical excuse people give for not having your shit figured out is multiculturalism. “Yes it works for Japan but Japan doesn’t have racial gang violence”
But when you get to Singapore you have a huge variety of ethnicities. And it’s not all pretty. You have a kind of messed up guest worker program. And an even more messed up system of live in maids. Or at least that’s what I thought at first.
My ex girlfriend lived in Geylang. The red lights district. I was out here working on Transaction banking stuff at some of the big banks with Palantir. But I spent a lot of quality time in Hawker Centers. Because I truly love dank, greasy food. And especially loved it prior to my obsession with radical longevity. So I spoke to guest workers at parata breakfast joints. And was friends with a guy who owned a bunch of brothels and his wife. The whole thing was an eye opening experience.
Essentially - the system has been extremely well thought out, and all the rules and regulations are there for a reason. And they’re constantly iterated on. This ranges from the length of guest worker visas, to where their housing is, to how their housing is mixed ethnically. Granular stuff. And Singapore sends its best and brightest to school at places like Harvard then ships them back and has them think about these esoteric issues. For years.
In America we basically don’t think about hard trade offs and just kind of pretend the problem doesn’t exist. And rock 10 million illegals instead of actually making hard choices like guest worker visas.
So Singapore to me showed me that “Yes it is possible to have a multi cultural system that works extremely well, so long as you spend a lot of thought making it work.”
And behind that - is a Will to Power. Of Lee Kuan Yew. Who sort of memed the entire thing into existence with his force of will.
On Crypto
When you look at crypto, it reminds me a lot of the dysfunction of the United States.
With Bitcoin, there’s no plan to fix the block reward. It’s supposed to be a libertarian asset but it’s basically captured by Blackrock, Microstrategy and increasingly the sovereigns/ institutions getting involved. Not individuals. It is not, in fact, peer to peer digital cash. And because of these things – it’s relegated to a kind of weird capital flight mechanism. That’s well suited to the internet – so has a very high market cap because it’s captured a lot of peoples imagination
This is quite similar to the US which is also captured by institutions. But is a really compelling libertarian meme that generates huge amounts of media and liquidity for the dollar. So it kind of works despite fundamentally not having a plan for its debt. And thrives in the internet enabled society
In markets therefore it was fitting that BTC and the dollar were heavily correlated going into the Trump victory. Huge BTC up move, huge EURUSD down move.
But now we’re out of the idealism and deep in the dysfunction. Scott Bessent punching Elon Musk in the face, before a drug fueled X crashout and a massive deficit expansion by Trump after promising to cut it.
On AI and Post Fiat
So when LLMs came out - and had the potential to create rules. That a bunch of people could agree on. That really interested me. In the same way that Singapore always interested me.
Like basically, because Singapore has extreme rule of law. There is massive efficiency and functional financial freedom. You can walk wherever you want whenever you want. You don’t have to ask someone who is ignoring you to unlock the crest toothepaste so you can buy it. You can start a business without filing endless paperwork and dealing with huge delays.
In crypto - it’s a 1 way bet on anarchy. When nobody I know really enjoys living in an anarchic society.
And the question to me, was in some ways “How do we make the Singapore of Crypto?”
A rules based system that isn’t perfect. And probably has a bit more centralization that most people are comfortable with. But at the end of the day – is well thought out, is fair, and works smooth as butter.
And so that’s the energy I wanted to infuse Post Fiat with. Like, be fine with closed source models. They work better. Everyone uses them. And they deal with KYC/AML for you in some ways if you’re using them in validator selection. Use XRP as a base layer. A bit ‘centralizing’ and anti the libertarian ethos. But whatever. 2 second finality.
You’re basically completely stripping away any idealism that doesn’t have to do with prosperity. But instead of uniting around Fiat (i.e. the Singaporean government) - with Post Fiat - you’re uniting around Machine Intelligence being a very strong planner/ thinker, armed with vast context.
Conclusion
People don’t want to admit the ugly truth about crypto. That its libertarian ideals haven’t been realized. And it’s been coopted by institutions. Including the US government
That’s the real reason people have such a negative response to XRP going up. It represents something that nobody idealistically wanted when they signed up for the cypherpunk ethos
With Post Fiat I wanted something that existed in reality, but was still idealistic. Sort of like what Singapore represents. A place that makes hard trade offs, and is rule based. Therefore maximizing its peoples’ functional Liberty
The real interesting attribute of LLMs is how they can make this possible without centralizing figures, or without undue Trust. Essentially embedding rules based order on top of transaction stores, in a way that can be audited by any Network Member. This feels like the future to me. The Post Fiat Future