Welcome in to This Week in Bitcoin, episode 95.
My name is Chris, ChrisLAS.com, JupiterBroadcasting.com.
I just got home late last night, had a great road trip with my buddies down to Pasadena,
California and back. And I did pick up a few Bitcoin stories and observations along the way.
I'll share those with you later in the show, though, because first, I think we both need to
get up to speed on the macro picture since I've been gone and where Bitcoin seems to be finding
itself in all of this. In February, inflation rose by 0.3% month over month. And in the number,
you're probably keeping track of 2.4% year over year. That was in line with expectations.
NBC News Business and Data correspondent Brian Chung joins us from the big board. Brian,
walk us through these numbers and how they compare with these previous months.
Yeah, good morning, Joe. Good morning, Savannah. This is one of those reports that was just as
expected. But of course, the question is, with the war in Iran, how is that going to change going
forward? Because the numbers that we're looking at preceded the conflict happening. So again,
what we're talking about here, as you mentioned, 2.4 percent. That's how much prices rose between
February of this year and February of last year. As you look at the yearly rate, that's essentially
unchanged from where we saw the last reading in January of 2.4 percent. So again, the story here
is largely the same that, yes, we're not at that 2% target that economists say is healthy for an
economy, but nonetheless, that is still vast improvement from the around 9% that we saw it
peak at in the summer of 2022. It's always funny how they talk about inflation, and this data just
came out about an hour before I sat down to record. And when they say, oh, it's up 2.4% from last
year, well, that doesn't sound so bad. Who wants to go into the streets over that? But they never
mentioned the accumulative effect here, right? 24.25 percent. 24.25 percent is the five-year
accumulated inflation from February of 2021 to February of 2026 using the exact CPIU values from
the federal government. And in my opinion, those numbers are lower than the reality for most of us.
But the official federal numbers for the last five years, when you accumulate all of it, is 24.25%.
So if you're someone who has been saving in a savings account or, I don't know, putting it under a mattress or you know someone who's doing that, you need to explain this to them.
Because if they saved $100 just five years ago, I'm not saying 1985, I'm saying five years ago, that now buys $80 worth of goods.
That $100 now buys $80 worth of goods.
The labor they put in to earn that $100 now buys less than the day they did the work.
That 24% isn't ancient history.
We have to wrap our heads around this.
It happened to every dollar you've been holding for the last five years.
What do you think is going to happen over the next five years?
And the dollar has been melting at 24% in five years, and it's just normal now.
Not so bad.
You know, it's not the healthy 2% economists want, but you know, 2.4 is not so bad.
So it's just normal now.
It's just totally normal now that in five years, you're going to lose 24% of your wealth.
And during that time, Bitcoin has been gaining purchasing power against it.
Oh, maybe it's not at $126,000 right now, but we're talking at five-year scales here.
Bitcoin can't be printed.
And every person who realizes the situation, they add to the network effect.
They add to a network effect that has a fixed supply.
So this inflation picture, it's just to me, it gets me a little kind of bullish because if this is what's going to be accepted as normal, then it's almost a mathematical certainty for Bitcoin.
All right.
Now, give me a little grace for playing a pop clip so early in the show here, but I think you'll understand why I'm playing it once I play it.
And the media seems to be a bit surprised by Bitcoin's rather decent reaction to the situation with bombs dropping in Iran.
And so I don't yet really have a take on that.
I'm going to be getting up to speed.
But I did want to play this clip because it talks about it a bit and sets us up for a broader macro discussion.
Joining me now, Anthony Pompliano, founder and CEO of Professional Capital Management.
On set, great to have you.
So much to talk to you about.
But of course, we are going to start with Bitcoin because it has been outperforming over the past week.
Well, I think there's a couple of different things, right?
One is Bitcoin is a resilient asset that is really serving as global insurance.
And so anytime that there's chaos in the world, there's going to be people who run to Bitcoin.
Gold also serves as that use case.
But I think that more and more people, especially as young people get a little bit older, they get a little bit more money.
They start to go and they buy Bitcoin in times of uncertainty.
And I think institutions also what is misunderstood is that in the institutions, the young people 10 years ago, they're now rising to the role of the portfolio manager or the CIO.
And so they also will start to continue to add Bitcoin into their portfolios as well.
And I think you see Bitcoin performing pretty well given what's happening right now.
And yet gold has not performed particularly well over the past call it week.
Well, if you think about what's gone on over the last year or so, pretty much everyone who's going to sell Bitcoin off of the highs has pretty much already sold.
Right. Everyone who's going to buy gold has pretty much bought.
I actually think that's astute.
you actually see it, at least with Bitcoin,
we don't know with gold because it's a black box,
but with Bitcoin, you see the on-chain data
that the whales, they're done selling
and they're back into buying mode.
The institutions are buying.
So the selling from the whales seems to have stopped.
I just think it's interesting the inverse that's occurred.
Going off of the highs has pretty much already sold, right?
Everyone who's going to buy gold has pretty much bought.
And so I think that you saw two assets that diverged
and these two assets, they serve as a store of value.
And I know that the gold bugs have been doing
their victory lap for the last year.
I like gold.
I don't hate gold in any way, but I do think that Bitcoin is a 10x better asset in terms of it is more divisible.
It is more mobile. It is much more resilient than gold.
And so I think that over time, what you're going to see is you're going to see more and more capital flow into Bitcoin.
And look at the ETFs. What took gold's ETF 15 years to do, Bitcoin has done in less than two.
And so I think that just naturally you're seeing the rapid adoption of an asset.
Now, it is going to be volatile, and I think people love to celebrate when Bitcoin falls.
is down 50%. Well, if that was the bottom of the bear market is just a 50% drawdown,
then it's the best performing bear market of all time in Bitcoin's history. And so let's see what
happens. Interesting. Do you think then in light of that and what we're seeing with Operation Epic
Fury, that Bitcoin is shifting gears in terms of how it's trading? Because the conversation had been
that this is, you know, a risk on asset. It's trading as such. It's a liquidity indicator.
It's not a store of value. Do you think that this is an inflection point?
Well, I think there is a very, very big misunderstanding when it comes to what's happening in the global economy right now, and specifically with inflation domestically.
If you look at inflation expectations, people have been saying that we were going to get sky high inflation because of the tariffs.
And I was very loud about the fact that we were not going to get that.
The tariffs were going to be deflationary.
Now, if you look over the last year or so, what we've seen is tariffs are deflationary, deportations are deflationary, AI is deflationary, and robotics are deflationary.
And we see this happening throughout the economy.
And so the big risk right now is still deflation, not inflation in the U.S. economy.
And I understand that oil has spiked in the short term and people are going to freak out about that.
This has been going on for eight days, this Operation Epic Fury.
And so let's say that it ends in the next two or three weeks.
It would have been a short-term impact to oil prices.
And the deflationary nature of what's happening in the economy is still a much, much bigger concern than a short-term oil impact.
So he's saying if the impact on the price of oil only works out to be maybe a couple of months,
then all of these other deflationary things, if they turn out to be true, are going to have a bigger play here.
But then he brings up a point that I think actually should be getting more discussion.
And I think Pomp has honed in on there is pain in the housing market right now.
And I think what people also forget is that take housing as an example.
The government is still saying that housing prices are growing.
Truflation, which is a real time measurement, is saying that housing is in deflation already.
It's down 1.5 percent over the last 12 months.
If that is true, housing is a much bigger input into the CPI calculation than, let's say, oil or energy is at around 5 percent.
And so I think that people, it's very easy to get attracted to the headlines and the volatile oil price.
But again, the structural thing that we are facing is deflation because of deportations, tariffs, AI and robotics.
Yeah, and of course, we get CPI and PCE readings this week.
And this will be before any spike we've seen in energy prices.
We just got those.
We'll look at that according to your lines of thinking.
At what point, though, if you have energy, if you have oil prices at these sustained levels, we know that funnels out into other parts of the economy.
So at what point does that change if it changes?
Well, if it's prolonged, right, if we end up going six, nine, 12 months with really, really high oil prices, obviously, that'll have a very big impact.
The other thing that's pretty interesting, though, is that the U.S. dependency on oil is a percent of production.
Right. So if you think of like how much energy do we need to consume from oil specifically in order to produce one unit of GDP, that has been going down over time.
We're actually lower today than we were, let's say, in 2007, 2008.
Some good research has been put out about that.
Now, it doesn't mean that we're not dependent on it at all, but I do think that people are still caught on this idea that if oil prices go higher, then immediately we get higher consumer inflation.
And I just don't see that happening in the economy.
All right. So let's put it all together.
We've got a war in Iran.
We've got a spike, at least for now, eight-day spike in energy prices.
We've got AI disruption concerns.
We've got cracks in private credit.
And we have a weaker jobs report.
How do you invest right now?
Buy Bitcoin.
I mean, right?
Okay, so I think there's one thing I caught in there, and I wonder if you noticed it too.
They kind of blasted past it, but it is theme du jour right now.
And it's the topic of jobs.
It has Wall Street, quote unquote, worried.
And I think we should just spend a little bit of time on this because it is one of the big, I don't know, B-plot narratives right now.
Goldman Sachs says up to 300 million full-time jobs around the world could be affected by artificial intelligence.
In a report Sunday, their economists predicted 18% of work globally could be computerized.
According to that report, the most affected jobs would be administrative workers and lawyers.
Less affected jobs are expected to be in physically demanding or outdoor occupations like construction and repair work.
Oh, oh, geez. Let me check my notes here, guys. Oh, oh, yeah. Oh, gosh, my bad. That clip's from three years ago. But you'd never know it, would you? It sounds like something that could have been released this Sunday. And why is it? Why are we now two, three years into this being a nearly daily narrative?
I went back and I collected several clips.
I collected clips from the All In podcast.
I collected clips from the BBC.
I collected clips from CNBC.
That right there was from Bloomberg.
Of course, they were quoting Goldman Sachs.
And I decided, you get the picture.
I don't need to play all of them.
You get the idea.
I found solidly since 2022, over and over again, this narrative.
So why is it?
Why is this negative, awful narrative continuing?
And I think understanding this is a good skill to have.
It helps you separate signal from the noise.
So let's break it down because this is going to make you a better Bitcoiner.
Since the day ChatGPT launched, it's basically been rolling.
And I think it really comes down to following the incentive.
So this is actually a clip from yesterday, actually within the last 24 hours.
And this is on the CBS Morning News.
Welcome back.
We all know artificial intelligence is rapidly changing workplaces around the world.
Well, a new study from Anthropic shows white collar jobs are the most vulnerable to AI.
Fears of an AI takeover of renewed interest in skilled trade work.
A recent survey shows 77% of Gen Z say it's important that their future job is difficult to automate.
CBS News Money Watch reporter Megan Cerullo joins us now in studio to explain all of this.
Megan assured me my job is safe as it relates to AI anyway.
We'll see if this is true as time moves on.
So funny.
Now, you probably caught it in there.
That is a study released by Anthropic.
Anthropic and other big tech companies are pumping out study after study.
They have so much funding to do this.
And then there's a bit maybe you don't understand.
After they complete these studies, they don't just put a PDF on their website and then tweet about it.
That just wouldn't really do much.
they send them out via PR Newswire services.
There are several of these PR Newswire, Businesswire, Globe Newswire, PR Web.
You can usually, depending on the article and the size of your company,
you can get an article like they would get one published for around $1,000 per press release.
So they pay $1,000 and then say like PR Newswire alone,
just one of these companies claims to reach 440,000 newsrooms.
So news outlets are looking at these PR Newswires.
like the CBS morning producers.
These PR releases, they're like a goldmine of easy stories.
They have everything they need.
There's a gatekeeper, a process someone has to go through.
Someone had to pay money to get it published, right?
So it's not just spam and slop.
But also the PR releases are written in a way that kind of a standard format You get an idea of the story You know who to contact There contact information And think about what that means for the producer at CBS right
It's a matter of economics and speed.
Now they know how to get a quote.
And of course the company, they gave them the contact information,
which is usually a particular marketing person.
They've got quotes ready to go.
Pew pew.
Yeah, they're ready to go.
Pew pew, we'll tell you about this.
Pew pew.
Yeah, here's your thoughts on that.
Pew pew, yo.
And then, you know, they're elegant and they're quippy
or they're attention grabbing or whatever they need to be for the moment.
The company has them ready to go in their pocket.
CBS News contacts them.
They get the quote.
Now they got a story.
Now they verified the information with a quote from the company.
They're not trying to determine the motivation behind why Anthropic released a PR announcement about taking jobs.
That's not what this story is about to them.
This is a human interest story to them.
It's not an analysis of how tech companies manipulate the market.
So they don't need to take a critical look at the motivations behind why Anthropic published it.
That's not where their heads are at.
they need time
they need air time to fill
they need a story that's human interest that will get attention
and this gets attention
so the tech companies
keep a steady supply of these incredible
somewhat
self aggrandizing stories
and studies
they publish them through the PR news wires
everyone from the New York Times
to your local paper is subscribed
probably the
YouTuber you listen to that does the news
gets these PR news releases.
But that alone does not sustain this cycle since 2022.
For that, for that, you need a bit of what I'm going to call an economy.
And anybody that's been to a lot of tech events,
you know there's an economy around these tech events.
But you can't just have a tech event economy.
You need an evangelist or a few evangelists
that can get themselves on TV and other places with loud microphones.
Joining us right now is Andrew Yang.
He's the founder and CEO of Noble Mobile, a former Democratic candidate, president and New York City's mayor.
He's also the author of Hey, Yang, Where's My Thousand Bucks, which debuted last month.
Good morning to you. You've got the book right here.
We got about a million things to talk to you about AI.
Now, I want you to listen to this with an understanding a little bit of maybe how these events work.
Right. You're setting up an event. It's an AI event.
You want to bring a couple of headline speakers there.
These people, they get paid often for their parents is not always.
But when you bring somebody to be a big speaker at your event, there's an unspoken agreement that they're also going to promote it.
They're going to go on podcasts.
They're going to go on TV if they can.
They're going to post on social media.
They attach their brand and their name to your event and they help you promote.
It's sort of a symbiotic relationship between the speaker and the event when done, I guess what they would call right.
And so when you bring Andrew Yang to an event, you're bringing all of that with you.
You're not just bringing Andrew Yang to sit in a chair and listen to people speak.
You're bringing the brand of Andrew Yang.
And what that is, is access to media.
Dude, last month.
Good morning to you.
You've got the book right here.
We got about a million things to talk to you about AI.
We want to talk about New York.
We want to talk about taxes.
Where do you want to start this morning?
I just came from an AI conference out west and holy cow.
They said to me that what we're going to see in the next six months outstrips what we've
seen in the last 10 years because the see these cycles are an important part of this economy
i mean these these events are and cycles are part of this this economy of sort of reinforcing and
and going there and marketing to each other and talking about what you're doing and putting your
best put forward putting a booth up having your speakers and talking about the future it's it's a
self-feeding cycle and then you get these evangelists that spin off from those events
and they go talk about, they go provide the information to the people.
They talk about what their discoveries were.
In a different context, this would be akin to Bill Gates going to a WHO conference
and then coming on CNBC and talking about medical advice, right?
Maybe he did learn something. He's a smart guy.
But it's not been his entire career.
Came from an AI conference out west and holy cow,
they said to me that what we're going to see in the next six months
outstrips what we've seen in the last 10 years because the rate of change is on a hockey stick
and heading up. And I got to say, I'm pretty up to date on this stuff. And it blew my mind
with some of the stuff I was seeing. In terms of what? What did you see?
Well, there was one company that is selling autonomous coding for enterprises to big
businesses, and their revenue is up 100 fold in the last 12 months. So if that continues,
it's going to eat a lot of the tech budgets from major corporates that used to go to humans.
Now, the problem is this industry changes fast. And if he's talking about the company I think he's talking about, this company has essentially forked the OpenCode project, packaged it up and sold it to enterprises. And they did grow really, really fast.
However, if you go look at the token usage on OpenRouter, you can see that it essentially leveled off around mid-February when OpenClaw came out.
And OpenClaw has shattered the token usage that this company, I believe he's talking about because he never names it.
But I think I know which one he's talking about.
OpenClaw has shattered, shattered the record that that company ever set.
And that company has now leveled off while OpenClaw continues to climb.
And what my point is, these things change and they change within five months.
So you can't sit here comfortably and say, well, I saw this company and they just sold all these licenses to enterprises.
So, you know, software development's over.
That is selling autonomous coding for enterprises to big businesses.
And their revenue is up 100 fold in the last 12 months.
So if that continues, it's going to eat a lot of the tech budgets from major corporates that used to go to humans.
The other thing that doesn't quite make sense there, right?
Because let's just one more time.
That is selling autonomous coding for enterprises.
Now listen to this next point.
To big businesses and their revenue is up 100 fold in the last 12 months.
Their revenue is up 100 fold.
So what do you think they're going to do?
They're going to invest that in the company and that company is going to hire more people.
They're going to hire more people as they grow.
That's what companies do.
So anyways, that aside, like there's just little bits of that kind of stuff.
You just have to really stop and think about it.
This is a very fast-moving industry.
And if a company is really seeing that 100x numbers, they inevitably will hire.
That is the second-order effect of growth like that.
So if that continues, it's going to eat a lot of the tech budgets from major corporates that used to go to humans.
But it sounds like another company has a lot more budget now.
Seeing the employment of recent computer science graduates fall off a cliff from a lot of programs.
if you rewind, what, four years ago,
what would we tell young people
for a secure career, learn to code?
And now the opposite of that is true.
Causation and et cetera, et cetera here.
So here's my hot take on this.
We have witnessed a 15, 20 year bubble
in developer salaries.
And you really see it when you go look
at job postings from Anthropic
and some of these other companies
that are really getting the tech funding right now.
There was one AI company
that is offering $300,000 a year,
more than $300,000 a year, plus all the perks you get, which are numerous, for just managing
the analytics, you know, just doing analytics stuff, just basic tracking stuff.
There are developer positions that pay upwards of $700,000 right now.
We are in peak fiat behavior when it comes to these positions.
And what we are going to watch and probably already seeing is a bit of a correction because
we had put these developers on these pedestals as if they were humans that have achieved
something that only an elite could, and therefore we were compensating them such. However, what turns
out humans weren't particularly great at, machines may get good at. I'm witnessing the same thing
happening with self-driving. I literally was drove by my car from Seattle in downtown Seattle traffic,
where it's horrible, to Pasadena, through LA, through Pasadena, from every spot, from parking
lot to garage to parking garage to event center. And the car was driving better than just about
every other Californian on the road. We're already at the point where a self-driving Tesla is a better
driver than your average Californian. Now, I know it's a low bar. I know that's a low bar,
but it's a bar that we've already surpassed. So it's likely that it's going to get better at some
of these other tasks, too. That will create a market correction. That will be rough for sure,
which they're going to get into in a little bit.
But I think it's more of the fact that we've been paying too much,
$500,000, $800,000, $300,000 to do analytics,
to manage the Google Analytics.
Okay?
It's crazy.
It's fiat bonkers.
It needs a correction.
And I hate to say it.
I'd love to have a tech salary like that.
I used to work in the tech industry, and I probably was paid too much.
I fix that now by being a podcaster.
Cliff from a lot of programs. If you rewind, what, four years ago, what would we tell young people for a secure career, learn to code? And now the opposite of that is true.
So where are you on jobs long term?
Look, Dario Amadei, the CEO of Anthropic, laid it out very clearly, and he's been doing so repeatedly, saying we're going to automate away up to 50 percent of entry level white collar jobs in the next several years.
And I believe him. The easiest people to fire are the people you haven't hired yet, which, again, is why you see the hiring of recent college graduates heading down.
And underemployment rate over 50 percent. The unemployment rate among college graduates is now the same or higher than non-college graduates for the first time in history.
Maybe that's because their college educations are becoming less and less value and they bring less and less value to the marketplace.
I got into this in the last episode, but I think it's just worth mentioning what we are seeing right here in front of us is the lump of labor fallacy at play.
Andrew assumes there is a fixed amount of work to be done ever.
But again, history shows us every major industrial revolution or innovation has always brought net more jobs.
That's just the historical truth.
and there's a very real possibility
as AI makes basic needs
like coding, legal advice,
administration get cheaper and cheaper,
humanity will shift
to higher order value creation
that we just can't think of right now.
For me, it could mean
that perhaps I have less time
focused on running the business
and more time focused on content,
which just makes my business grow,
makes my shows better
and my family better off.
This is all true when we electrified the workforce as well.
We really, really changed things.
What is different is we have to provide a sound medium of exchange to trade the value that we earn.
The people will net benefit if they have hard savings, if they have hard money.
They will net benefit from the deflationary nature of AI and the new higher order value they can create with different types of jobs where they don't have to manage the tedium anymore.
It's actually really a false dilemma.
It's an either or that he's putting forward. Andrew claims, and he often does this, that we have to choose between some sort of massive UBI program or inevitable riots in the streets.
You know, he talks about social collapse if we don't do that. But he ignores the option of fixing the money.
If the currency were hard, like Bitcoin, then the falling costs of goods or services that come down because maybe it's cheaper for AT&T to help you now because they don't have to hire a thousand people in a call center.
So maybe your phone bill comes down 20 bucks.
Maybe this, when you apply that across every service and everything you use and consume, maybe things do get a little cheaper.
And if you can save what you earn in a hard money while things are getting cheaper, maybe you don't need UBI.
See, this is the nuance is if we're going to go down this route, how do you help people through what is no doubt going to be a tough transition?
No doubt. I mean, like if you have call centers with thousands of people and you have AI automate that, that's going to be a tough transition.
But so how do you help them without slowing down the progress and locketing methods and ways of doing things that are just out of date?
Like I just came from Oregon.
I right.
I drove through Oregon.
Oregon still has gas attendants that pump your gas.
A couple of years ago, they made it optional and there's less of them now.
But they still like a couple of years ago when I drove through Oregon, it was illegal for me to pump my own gas.
And they didn't even know how to pump gas for my RV.
I had to tell them how to do it.
I wasn't allowed to do it myself.
Initially, it was because gas was so dangerous and cars were so dangerous that we put these
rolls in.
But of course, as time went on, we weren't so scared about that.
But then it became about keeping the jobs.
We've got to keep the jobs.
If we don't have gas attendance, we're going to lay off X thousands of people across Oregon.
We've got to keep the jobs.
Of course, slowly over time, they've chipped away at that now.
But it does remind me of how we can sometimes lock in a way of doing things that just doesn't
make sense 20 years later at all.
especially when you you know you just think about how rapidly things are changing i think i mean i i
can see it where there's a need especially with inflation and all of that but the problem is is
it just feeds into that the price and rent the price of eggs whatever it might be will just
eventually adjust to consume the additional money that everyone has just how it works it essentially
make the two thousand dollars or whatever the ubi is net out to nothing because the market of goods
will just come up or the government has to do some kind of dramatic market control, which
always seems to blow up and honestly seems impossible with the current state of government around the world right now Or you have to have a fixed supply of money You know to me it like UBI might work I don know for a year but it a temporary
Band-Aid on a gushing wound that would just feed the inflationary cycle.
I think the key difference, the way I see things, and I'm curious how you see things,
Andrew wants to tax the robots to pay the humans to stay home.
That's basically his plan.
And I think Bitcoiners want to use the robots to make everything so cheap that you don't
need a high-paying job to live like a king. I just want a farm, a few animals, the wife and the kids
and my dog. I really didn't just, you know, stay humble and stack sats. But sometimes people want
to mess with our nice things. And I do want to get to some FUD that came up while I was traveling.
It's like they knew I was gone, guys. While I was away, two well-known billionaires who had
previously been quite pro-Bitcoin and has made money on Bitcoin, came out with a new tune that
sounds an awful lot alike around the same time. And we'll start with Ray Dalio.
Okay, so Bitcoin does not have privacy. Any transactions can be monitored and then
indirectly perhaps controlled. Central banks are not going to want to buy Bitcoin
and being able to hold it. So it's not just individuals, it's institutions and so on,
but most, you know, and central banks, so that there are attributes of that.
There has been some question or thoughts of the development of, you know, new technologies like
quantum computing and so on. Can there be issues regarding that? And then there's, you know,
who owns it and what are the other exposures that they have in their portfolio? It tends to
have a pretty high correlation with the tech stocks from an ownership. Just the supply demand
is affected by if somebody gets squeezed in one thing, they sell something, whatever else they
have. So there are those dynamics. It's a long way, and it's a relatively small market that's
a relatively controllable market. I think a lot of attention has been given to Bitcoin,
But as a money, you know, it's it's it's it's small in relationship to gold.
And so, you know, those are the dynamics.
There is only one goal.
What about silver?
All right.
So that was his interview with Friedberg on a one on one on the all in podcast.
And let's break a few of these down because it's sort of disappointing to hear Ray say this.
I think maybe he's got the wrong advice in his ear.
So let's talk about the privacy one, because I think this is interesting.
We're going to come back to it.
So Ray claims that Bitcoin lacks privacy because transactions can be monitored.
However, the reality is that Bitcoin is pseudo-anonymous.
It's not anonymous.
On-chain data isn't tied to a real-world identity.
So you need external leaking factors to tie a pseudo-anonymous transaction on a blockchain to a person.
So it's not just something casuals are doing.
And Dalio himself has been talking a lot recently about CBDCs and how they are coming
and how they will deliver zero privacy and total government control, in his words.
And then these discussions about Bitcoin privacy, because these folks are not very well informed, are always ignorant of layer two solutions.
And I think that is unfortunate because, you know, when we talk about the limitations of gold, when it comes to privacy or when it comes to liquidity or when it comes to moving it quickly, the answers are always third party services.
That's how they always solve these problems that are inherent with gold is third party services.
Well, what is a layer two solution?
Essentially, it's a third party service in a way.
But we don't talk about, though, when it comes to Bitcoin. Then there's this central bank fallacy. And I'm not sure why the Fed or central banks, although a central bank did just buy Bitcoin after Ray said this, ironically, but I'm not sure why central banks owning Bitcoin became the goalpost of 2026.
I mean, this sounds like maybe a conversation for 2036, 2046, but in 2026, this is the goalpost in which we must judge this nascent currency buy?
And he argues that central banks won't buy Bitcoin because they can't control it.
That's the exact reason why there's network demand for it by individuals.
I think what Ray is doing is he's viewing money solely through a lens of state power.
And he's not considering individual sovereignty that are trying to protect themselves from debasement.
people that are looking for savings technology. He's not making that connection. And then, of
course, you know, because it's always rapid fire. There's never just one criticism that is actually
deep and valid. It's always hit several things quick because, you know, when you combine them
all up, it sounds bad. So we got to sneak a vague reference to quantum in there. He says it's an
existential threat. In reality, it's a tired narrative. It's exhausting. I call it exhausting
because it's just really basic.
There's going to be signs.
We'll know it's coming.
Military equipment will get compromised.
You know, like a central bank somewhere,
I don't know, in some third world country,
I don't know, some bank's going to get compromised
and probably wiped out.
You're going to see the federal government
start issuing warnings, right?
It will not be Bitcoin that falls first.
They are very, very far from that.
You have to, you need to look up
the progress they have made in just the last few years to understand that we are so far away from
this, that even if they were to massively accelerate the trend right now by some sort of
AI-guided superintelligence, the physics of building the hardware isn't there yet.
We are so far away. We can do math with bits of 26 right now. Like, that's it.
You're going to need to get to thousands of qubits to crack SHA-256. And even once you do
start cracking, you start crackalacking, it's going to be SSL certificates. It might be old
Satoshi era coins, right? It's not the consensus protocol of Bitcoin. And then Bitcoin, of course,
is an upgradable protocol after all. So, I mean, it just to me seems like it would be the equivalent
of a gold bug worrying about a rocket company like SpaceX finding gold on a huge asteroid in space
and then bringing back a massive amount of gold and tanking the market.
Could that happen?
Yeah, maybe in 2046, maybe in 2036, maybe.
Maybe one day that will happen, right?
It seems like there's incentives that could line up.
Is it a major reason to sell your gold in 2026?
No.
No, you'd be silly for worrying about that today.
Could it happen?
Sure.
Are there incentives to make it happen?
Yes.
Is it going to happen next year?
No.
Right?
That's where we're at with quantum right now.
The gold bugs just need to wrap their head around that.
And then last but not least, he has to throw in the correlation versus causality.
He dismisses Bitcoin because it correlates with tech stocks during liquidity squeezes,
which Ray has been in this game for a long time.
This is where I start to get a little sus.
Ray knows this is an early adoption artifact.
Ray knows you don't blame the asset for weak hands.
Ray knows that as the market cap grows, Bitcoin's beta to the Nasdaq will decouple.
Ray knows that gold itself crashed in March of 2020 before rebounding strongly.
So what's going on here?
Now, this is just my opinion, but I think you have OG gold bugs that bought Bitcoin, you know, when gold wasn't doing well for like a decade.
And now they're kind of going back to their roots now that gold got a pamp and they're feeling good.
It's like it's their favorite child again.
You also have to consider that Dalio's business, Bridgewater, manages massive amounts of institutional and sovereign wealth.
So calling Bitcoin small or uncontrollable is sort of a signal to those clients that, you know, he's still a safe steward of their status quo assets and they don't need to worry too much.
Now, this is where maybe I get a little more speculative.
But it also seems like maybe there's a bigger play here that Ray's not ready to talk about.
Ray's not a regular talking head.
He's an active investor even to this day.
And he's been talking about CBDCs for a few years.
I think you got to consider Ray's history.
So this is, you know, some of this is narrative.
But in 1961, at age 12, Ray has a story about buying a near bankrupt penny stock airline, which then got acquired and then tripled his money overnight when he was 12 years old.
In 1970, he leveraged commodities futures.
He went all in in the 70s on oil, grains, and cattle with max leverage during massive inflation and all the oil shock stuff that was going on.
That turned tiny itsy bitsy Bridgewater into a real viable business and made him a million dollars before he was 30 years old.
Risky bets.
1987. Black Monday.
Ray bet against overvalued stocks ahead of a 22% one-day crash.
Bridgewater profited while everyone else got wiped out.
That made them an institutional name and brought them the big clients from then on out.
And then in the 2007 to 2008 global financial crisis, Ray called the housing debt bubble early and he loaded up on bonds and gold and hedged everything.
His pure alpha fund gained 9% during the financial crisis while everyone lost at least 20% or more.
and their assets doubled to $85 billion and made Bridgewater the number one hedge fund on earth.
Ray will take risks and make bets for long-term plays.
So what's my point?
Well, let's bring in another billionaire.
Let's talk about Chamath.
He made similar statements within just a couple of days of Ray.
And I think this one's pretty interesting because Chamath has made a lot of his money on Bitcoin,
and notice how similar the tune is.
There's a structural failing in Bitcoin that I think people will need to come and wrap their heads around.
The structural failing is that it is not. So if you think about like, what is the value maximizing function right now for a crypto asset to be broadly adopted?
Oh, yeah. By the way, he talks like a VC. I'm sorry.
What is the value maximizing function right now for a crypto asset to be broadly adopted?
It needs to have the features that allow a central bank to adopt it.
Whoa, there's that goalpost again. The central bank goalpost.
Here we are in 2026. All of a sudden, in a couple of months, Chamath went from he's all in on Bitcoin to whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, no.
And I mean literally just like in December he was saying this to now it's whoa, whoa, whoa.
We need central bank adoption.
It'd be broadly adopted. It needs to have the features that allow a central bank to adopt it.
And there are two things that it lacks. You know, one is fungibility and two is privacy.
Now, the fungibility thing is his version of fungibility because a true Bitcoiner knows the difference between fungible and non-fungible, which Hamath is talking about is a privacy angle, a privacy version of fungible that is using the term not in the monetary definition.
So Bitcoin fails on those two dimensions.
So it can never be a structural holding of a central bank.
And that simple thing will keep it in the realm of ETFs and humans.
Does gold satisfy those conditions?
Yeah.
Fungibility, but not easily.
Both.
You have no idea how much the Bank of China owns.
You don't know how many ounces they own.
You don't know how many ounces I own.
When there's a public ledger that says this address has this much,
and you can't really trade it because you know the history
and the provenance of that exact token.
It's been used to buy this.
It was transacted over here.
It went to this wallet.
That lack of fungibility and privacy is a huge deterrent
for broad structural adoption.
That's what you need to then add another 10x of market cap.
So is there room for a different crypto asset that solves for the privacy and fungibility?
Yeah.
And are there projects right now?
Yes, but they're very small scale.
There's huge issues with them.
Those are even more volatile.
Huh.
If only some brilliant thinker with money could come in and fix them.
And then they could solve that problem.
Hmm.
I wonder if that's where this is going.
We're about to see some sort of privacy coin pump that's going to get Dalio and Chamath's brand attached to it.
You know, Chamath, same playbook.
You know, he was early Facebook equity bet.
You know, he made a bunch on SPACs.
He bought a ton of Bitcoin around $80 and $100.
He owned nearly 5% of the supply on the market at the time.
Of course, he sold it to buy real estate and whatnot.
And, of course, he just made a ton of money on Grok AI.
That's Grok with a Q.
So, you know, he's riding high on his own supply and he's going to fix it.
Both Chamath and Ray see themselves as visionary savants with sort of this dark, pragmatic acceptance of the force of government, sort of this inevitability of the state.
So it wouldn't surprise me if these two big brains have some sort of big brain whispering in their ear, telling them that Bitcoin 2.0 is private and they're going to have something ready for them to promote when the time comes.
So why not both play the long game now? Start laying the groundwork today. Then over time, attach your name to the brand whenever this coin starts to come to the surface.
That's my only thinking here, because this gold stuff is ridiculous. It just obviously is an old technology.
And the idea that the central banks wouldn't be able to hold Bitcoin without everybody knowing their balance is some sort of weird, crazy, like version of Bitcoin that doesn't actually match.
And it's interesting how he could own so much and not seem to understand it. All right.
So here's my question. Am I off on this analysis? What do you think? Why would these otherwise
pretty two smart guys start humming the same tune around the same time? I mean, it seems like these
issues they bring up are pretty debunkable I surprised Chamath didn throw in quantum Maybe he will do that next time he gets asked So is my analysis you think on the point or is there something else going on that I missing I like you to boost it and tell me why you think they bringing these things up and where this goalpost comes from
And also, just like, just give me the pleb take.
Does it matter if the central bank ever owns Bitcoin?
And if you think it does, tell me why.
And if you think it doesn't, tell me why.
All right, coming up on the show, it's your boost, but more thoughts on BIP 110, some Bitcoin observations from my trip and more.
So I just want to mention you can support this show by doing what you're already going to do.
That's Stack Sats.
If you buy sats on river, one of the best ways to stack sats in the U.S.,
use my link in the show notes if you would.
The Bitcoin well, it's an amazing automatic self-custody Bitcoin platform for the U.S. and Canada.
No, they don't have a wallet.
You host everything.
Their link's in the show notes as well.
When it comes time to spend some Bitcoin, go from sats to gift card in just seconds.
That's the Bitcoin company.
They only do Bitcoin.
Link for them.
Time to stack sats while you're paying bills.
Passively stack, as they say.
Yeah, that's Foldcard.
and if you need access to your Bitcoin value without selling, that's SALT lending.
I'll have links to those in the notes.
You use them, you support the show.
Appreciate that very much, as well as our members and boosters.
That's coming up next.
And now, as the French say, it is time for le boost.
Make it so.
All right, let's get to the boost.
And Bobbypin is our baller booster this week with 100,000 cents.
All right, Bobbypin, thank you.
He writes, welcome back from scale.
I'm curious if you saw any Bitcoin usage while you were there.
I started listening to you because of Linux and then introduced me to Bitcoin.
The reason why I'm so passionate about Bitcoin now is there's a lot of the same reasons I've been passionate about Linux since 2014.
So it seems like it'd be a great fit.
Bobby Pin, you're on to something there, buddy.
And I will give you a full update.
I created a full update in the latter bit of the show coming up.
So stay tuned.
I will give you my full report, sir, based on your request.
And thank you very much for being our baller booster.
That's very nice.
Appreciate that very much.
JQ3 comes in with 56,100 sats.
I hoard that which your kind covet.
Also very much appreciated.
Boost!
Thank you, JQ.
AI has...
Oh, good.
I asked you guys how AI was impacting work.
AI has augmented the way I work, but I haven't seen it replace or even threaten my job.
The real drawback is that management has started tasking AI responses as...
Taking AI responses as gospel.
Oh, man.
Enjoy Planet X.
Thank you for that report, JQ.
Interesting.
And I will take that signal in.
I love the boots on the ground.
If you didn't get a chance to tell me how AI is impacting your job, I would very much like to know.
A Monday comes in with 36,011 sats.
You're doing very well.
And he says, boosty, boost, boost, boost.
B-O-O-S-T.
Thank you, sir.
Appreciate that.
Chutoy comes in with 22,222 sats.
That's a McDuck boost.
Things are looking up for old McDuck.
Great show.
I'm a dog groomer in southern GA, so I don't expect AI to take my job anytime soon.
So you're telling me you're walking around in Southern Georgia with dogs and you're, are you listening to the podcast while you're doing that?
Like, are you podcast listening?
Chew Toy, this now makes so much more sense why your nickname is Chew Toy.
I never knew this.
This is great.
I love the idea of you walking around dogs where it's hot as balls listening to the show.
I can't even, like, this is a great visual.
I hope you're wearing like, you know, some cool guy 80s shorts.
I mean, if you are, please let me know.
Huh.
I've never been to Georgia.
Would like to go.
I don't think I've ever been to Georgia.
I would like to go.
Thank you very much.
And he says, I'd love to hear about running a node.
I will disclose, as you probably noticed, Wes and I did not get a chance.
I know.
It's like the show that keeps continuing to escape me.
We were so busy.
I'll talk more about that.
But Chutoy, thank you very much.
BTC is my 401k.
Comes in with 21,000 sats.
21 gigawatts.
Plus one for the node special.
it's the next frontier for my Bitcoin and self-hosting journey.
AI has completely flipped my workflow.
Instead of troubleshooting SaaS,
I'm building custom in-house tools to cut subscription fees.
Every bit helps our small business.
Oh, interesting.
Doesn't sound like you're getting laid off either.
Sounds like you're going to make the company more money
and they're probably going to be very grateful for that.
Please do keep me posted.
BTC is my 401k.
I always love hearing from you.
Nakabado 6102 is here with 5,000 sets.
Oh my God, this drawer is filled with fruit loops.
I work in a law office.
AI is used for research and drafting documents.
It hasn't eliminated any jobs, but it has made us more productive.
If anything, we're actually looking to hire.
If I can make a recommendation to folks, check out TryMaple.ai.
It offers end-to-end encryption, so confidential client information remains private and isn't used to train AI models.
Thanks for the value.
Well, thank you for the value, NakamotoSex102.
Interesting that you say you're looking to hire.
if you would care to expand on why,
why the use of AI tools has made you interested in expanding as a business.
Because right now, obviously, the narrative is if you start using AI tools,
you're not hiring.
So you're just flipping the narrative right there.
You understand that, right?
I'd love if you wanted to expand on that at all.
And thank you very much for the boost.
Yes, hi.
Really do appreciate it.
Steve B. comes in with 3,000 sats.
This is a tasty burger.
AI is helping me learn welding and steam fitting.
I can show pictures of my welds, and it mostly diagnoses issues and suggests fix.
AI is helping me.
Oh, that was a double.
I'm a steam fitter apprentice, and AI is helping me learn these different and how to weld and fit pipes.
So glad I found Twib.
I'm a longtime Linux Unplugged listener and just connected the dots.
Thanks for doing what you do.
Holy crap, Steve B.
Are you a first-timer?
Hello, thank you.
I hadn't thought about taking pictures and asking for tips to improve it.
That could be great for learning how to solder.
Huh, interesting.
Thank you very much.
Hey, there he is.
Adversary17 is here with 19,847 sats.
That's pretty funny.
Next caller.
Give him a better one than that soundboard guy.
Yeah, there we go.
Good one.
Adversary says, I'm an IT system admin that also enjoys coding.
LLMs have changed my job a little,
but in that I don't have to spend as much time sorting through search results
to find solutions to my problems.
I am able to find things sooner and have answers that are more catered to the problem that I am having.
For coding, I enjoy doing it, and I don't have a pressure to release anything faster than normal,
so agentic coding hasn't really been a huge part of it yet.
If there was a pressure to ship mostly functional, then he says, I think he got cut off, but he says he probably would.
He says, thanks for adding the question to the show notes.
Great addition.
All right, I'll try to remember to do that again.
Huge update.
JB Mining Pool update coming soon.
Chris, contact me to discuss details.
right I am back now I will try to I have not forgotten
hold on a second hold on a second hold on
I just I gotta take a break a break
I know there's a lot to do there's a lot to do right now
kind of still running on fumes but excited about a JB mining pool very much so
very much so so we'll circle back and then we'll get the word out you all know I want to do it
Thank you very much, adversaries.
It's always nice to hear from you.
Appreciate you very much.
Well, I'll be dipped.
Our next boost comes in from Boba with 4,444 sats.
I've been wondering how on earth these institutions have been buying tens of thousands of actual Bitcoin
when only a finite amount can be mined each day.
It can't all be OTC from exchanges.
I imagine it had to be a backroom suite deals that you never heard about.
Well, go figure.
All the more reason to keep stacking into self-custody.
When the rule makers can change the rules they follow on a whim, it negates the incentive to participate.
I work in manufacturing and our company has softly mandated that all supervisors and leaders must use AI daily.
I see this more as crowdsourcing effort to yield innovation.
AI may dissolve some positions, but it'll be a minute before that actually happens and has any sustainable effect on the markets, in my opinion.
Thank you, Boba.
Interesting field report there, too.
And, yeah, you know, they're buying and selling and making deals with each other on the Bitcoin that we don't get access to.
But on the long-term scale, you just stack and hold sats and be grateful to scare sats that they can't print more of.
Could you imagine if this was one of the cryptocurrencies where they could?
Something else, man.
Thank you, Bubba.
Keep me posted.
I like this next one.
This is really good.
Brewgator comes in.
Just pump the brakes right there.
With 11,101 sats.
I'm a software engineer at IBM, and there's been a recent push for us to start using what is essentially an internal clone of CloudCode as a coding buddy.
My team has mainly been using it heavily to help speed our code review process, which has really been our biggest bottleneck.
That said, everything we do is still human-generated and human-gated.
Oh, human-gated, not generated.
As with most new tools, the team is split.
About half are admittedly against or adamantly against using it, while the other half, well, maybe they rely on it a bit too much.
And then he got cut off there a bit.
But I think it sounds like it's sort of a mid-tier impact there.
And I'd love any, Brugate, a great, great username, by the way, would love any additional follow-up.
Sounds like it's sort of a mixed bag there at the IBM division.
But interesting to hear from that side of the pond.
Thank you very much.
Magnolia Mayhem's back with 4,682 sats.
The traders love the vol.
Have we been building adult daycares for the last few decades?
Hell yes.
I've been everything from a security guard to a chicken farmer to a military engineer to a mailman.
One thing I have learned over the last couple of decades is that we created a whole virtual class to the workforce.
A class of people who aren't actually accomplishing anything but just signing off on things that other people did.
The scary part is this tumor has become so entwined with the tissue of our society that removing it risks bleeding us out.
what's the social equivalent of immunotherapy yeah i kind of feel that way too having worked
at various different places i think some of this ai job fear is that people are realizing that these
jobs are just totally worthless daycare jobs savage magnolia appreciate hearing from you
it's good it's a good take whoo clarkians here with 5 100 sats let's go for the love that is
all is holy. Please read the actual BIP. Lightning would not be affected. Start with BIP110.org.
It took me 10 seconds to look this up. I could go on, but I haven't seen any technical debates
happening. All right. So I will follow up Clarkian in the latter half of the show in the update
section with how BIP110 negatively impacts Lightning. I'm not sure why you didn't see it
if you did the research, but I'll help you. Magnolia5000, okay, is here with 2,341 sats.
All right.
Make it so.
Have we been?
Oh, I see.
You had a dupe boost.
Oh, so you didn't get full credit.
Well, I'll toss another 2K in there.
All right.
Thank you, Magnolia.
Appreciate you, sir.
Sorry you had trouble there.
JPEG18 is here with 2,200 sats.
Coming in hot with the boost.
No message, just value, though.
Appreciate that very much.
OneDullGeek is here with 2,000 sats.
I don't understand what the heck is going on here.
This is an overly terse follow-up from my previous cutoff boost.
Okay, DullGeek.
Whichever may BIP-110 eventually be resolved, the risk of what?
Okay.
The risk of a minority forcing their opinion on Bitcoin doesn't change.
Consider, the risk exists today.
It's what BIP-110 is trying to exploit.
The opposition BIP-110 is not to change anything.
If nothing changes, then the risk still exists.
Meanwhile, I continue to run BIP-110, and I think it does mitigate some risk to Bitcoin.
I can barely understand what you're saying, man.
But I will follow up with BIP-110 later in the show.
I don't understand what the heck is going on here.
Gene Bean's back with a row of ducks, two rows of ducks, actually.
Yes, sir! Sirty, sir, sir, sir!
I think AI is about to impact my job in a big way.
My employer is working on ways that let us use AI that doesn't endanger what we make and our intellectual property.
And once it's in place, it's very clearly going to be a force multiplier for productivity.
There is plenty, as I do as an SRE, that robotics can do way faster,
freeing me up for the interesting stuff.
AI's ability to simultaneously analyze vast amounts of data-defined correlations
is going to enable higher quality service and better meantime resolution.
When dealing with data from large distributed environments
that can also include a lot of UDP multicast,
there's no way a human can see the whole picture,
in the same way that maybe a robot could.
That said, plenty of human work is now and will continue to be needed.
It'll just be more efficient and scalable.
That's good, Gene.
For route planning, oh, yeah, just get an agent for your route planning.
I did, by the way, Gene, get an agent for route planning.
And something that's kind of worth doing is you can connect them to.
With a free developer account, you can connect them to the TomTom API, which is really good and has tons of information.
And you can generate maps and traffic stuff and get route information and EV routing information, everything.
So tying the agent up to the TomTom API was so great if you road trip.
Thank you, Gene. Really good to hear from you. Appreciate that much.
Aliana's here with 5,000.
Put some macaroni and cheese on there, too.
Is AI impacting my job as a database engineer for a huge enterprise software?
Yes.
Yes, it makes me slowly but surely more productive.
Maybe realistically a 5% improvement so far,
but it is going to impact my personal future
as my skills become less valuable.
Oh well, at least society overall would benefit
from these technological investments.
Yeah, maybe we do get there,
but a 5% improvement to your workday right now
seems kind of nice.
And maybe it gets to a point
where you can focus on something else entirely.
I'm curious if you think it goes there.
Ace Ackerman's here with a row of ducks.
That's 2,222 sats.
Thanks for your insights on BIP110.
It's interesting to watch the controversial topics get evaluated by Bitcoin adopters.
Overall, I think the show, I think it is a show of strength for the network.
Yeah.
BIP10 is a little rushed, right?
It's a pretty big change and three months would be one of the shortest review processes ever.
But when you run your own node, you don't really have to wait for consensus.
KiwiBitcoin guides here with 9,100 and 34 sats.
Yes, hi.
Has AI affected my job?
Yes, in a positive way.
I'm self-employed and take care of clients' websites and e-commerce infrastructure.
AI allows me to do way more than before.
As an example, in testing, I use AI to write scripts for automation, and it saves me hours each time.
AI also helps me troubleshoot issues on tools that I don't have as much experience with.
And this is just the beginning.
I haven't even gone deep into agent world yet.
AI is going to disrupt and create opportunities at the same time.
Here's a question for you and Wes.
What is NixBitcoin?
I hear you talk about Nix on LUB.
And as I understand it, Nix is a distro, but maybe it's not.
And how does Nix Bitcoin fit in?
Is it a node implementation or not?
Can you help me with this?
Okay, so he has a question about getting open source believers into Bitcoin.
I'll talk more about that later in the show.
Nix Bitcoin is something that you can lay on top of Nix to turn it into a node.
Nix is a package manager.
There is also Nix OS.
I'm not going to get too far into this right now because we're just going to do an episode
on this in the future.
But think of it as you could plug in a module to a NIC system and that module turns it into a Bitcoin node with the configuration and software necessary.
And we'll come back to that topic in the future.
Producer Jeff's here with 6,666 sets.
Why you got to put numbers and letters together?
Why can't you just go yourself?
AI has entered the chat at work and it's the most common complaint from our customers.
They want to speak to a human.
AI is also being used to create routes for us, and it's been abysmal.
These things are small, but the company I work for has also been pushing AI and other products,
taking human resources away from systems which desperately need attention.
It bites because we know these tools can be used to help, but it's only causing problems right now.
Yeah, it seems like implementation is going to be the make or break it.
You know, I was dealing with SpaceX support because I had to replace a Starlink terminal,
and you had to go through Grok.
There's no getting to a ticket where you eventually, like 24 hours later, get a human response without going through Grok.
And it's like a special Spock edition that's like tuned for SpaceX and Starlink.
And it was able to make changes to my account.
And it was able to add and remove devices from my account and check on status of shipping products and whatnot.
So it was useful, but I had that initial like, oh, I just want to talk to a human.
when I realized the chat bot was actually able to take action against my account and give me
information I kind of eased up and I used it and then I inevitably did I inevitably did have to
create a ticket and a human had to fix it but the thing that was nice about that experience
was Grok gave a great summarization of everything we worked through when I gave it like product
numbers and serial numbers and account information it attached all of it really nicely and cleanly
to the support ticket so when the human did take over Grok kind of left them with everything they
needed to know. But it just seems like you could get that so wrong. And if it's an emergency,
right, I had a couple of days I could chill. I wasn't in a huge rush.
Woo, it's a different story if you're in a rush. Thank you, PJ. Miss you already. It's good to see
you. SK8K is here with 12,345 sets. That is a Spaceballs boost.
So the combination is one, two, three, four, five.
Yes.
That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage.
I own a tavern and pizzeria.
AI isn't replacing me or my staff.
In fact, I could get behind the argument that it increases future job potential.
I use it daily to help fine-tune social media posts,
brainstorm pizza and cocktail features, and even write recipes,
all of which add to my productivity, my reach, and the growth of my business.
Oh, well, interesting, SK. Thank you very much.
That's very good insight right there.
Gene Bean boosted in saying with 2,267 sats saying he misses the show during the scale.
Thank you, Gene Bean.
We missed you at scale.
Jay Moon came in with 3,333 sats.
I like you.
You're a hot ticket.
The Monero wallet, CakePay, has implemented lightning support.
It's worth a read on how they did it with self-custody concerns in mind.
You can find it at blog.cakewallet.com.
I saw that.
I haven't had a chance to read that yet.
I'm very interested.
I'm really, really impressed they got lightning support in a self-custody way.
I will read up on that.
Thank you for that boost.
Thank you, everyone who boosted in, including those of you who boosted below the 2000s cutoff for time.
In fact, I see WTF and others in here also chimed in on the AI topic.
And WTF struck me because they're a teacher, and they're using AI to help them just save time and spend more time on focusing on the students.
There's a lot in here.
And I guess what I'm surprised by is that with the exception of PJ, which is an implementation issue, these were all very positive impacts.
And some of you even said that AI may cause additional hiring.
So did you expect this to be such a 180 from what the narrative is out there?
I thought we'd hear some of this.
I kind of thought it'd be mixed.
I really thought that's, you know, probably going to get half and half.
We did not get a half and half.
Wow.
If anybody has any extra expanding or details from your place of work, I would please do.
This is very educational and very interesting and also will reflect even more on my coverage from my trip to scale that I'm going to get to in just a moment.
In fact, that's really interesting when I think of that.
Okay, here's where we're at.
Thank you everyone who did support the show with a boost.
This is a value for value production.
There's no advertiser here.
I'm spending my time, my energy, and my resources, my proof of work producing a free show for you every week that tries to focus on the signal.
And then you keep it going with a boost or a membership.
And we had 40 of you stream sats as you listen, stacked 58,541 sats.
That is pretty good.
Then when you combine that with everybody who sent in a boost above and below 2000 sats, our grand total for this week, which is really nice to return to, I have to say thank you, everyone, is 477,698 sats.
That is pretty fantastic.
We really do appreciate it.
Well, when I say we, it's me.
It's just an old habit.
And if you want to support the show with a boost, Fountain makes it probably the easiest.
There's a lot of options, including AlbiHub, which allows you to run a bunch of different apps, including just using the podcast index.
Of course, you can also become a member through Fountain or through Jupyter.Party.
Keeps the show going, keeps me focused on you.
You become the customer.
And I think you know how that works.
Well, let's talk a little bit about Bitcoin observations
on my trip to scale and planet Nix.
Wes and I left early Monday after we recorded Linux Unplugged.
It took a couple of days to drive down.
We met up with producer Jeff on the way
and had dinner with him and his lovely lady.
It was a smooth ride the whole way.
The easiest road trip I ever had down the I corridor which anybody that knows me for a while knows that I think are some of the worst drivers in the country Our buddy Brent joined us at our Airbnb in Pasadena
and it was great. The first two days we were down there while I was gone were Planet Nick. So like
the Wednesday that I didn't have an episode last week, we were really just hitting the ground and
kind of getting things sorted and starting our Planet Nick's coverage. And it was just nothing
but Nick's. Two days of really intense builders, meeting people that are creating the stuff a lot
of us use. Things I can't talk about because they have to get releases, but stuff that blow your
mind. In a general sense, I met nine people from Anthropic alone solving problems at scale that
are such bonkers in size that you wouldn't think the stuff they're having to fix would be a problem.
But it's just the tiniest little issues and delays become massive problems at their scale.
Really interesting. And Friday through Sunday, that's all scale. That's the Southern California
Linux Expo. Planet Nix is a subtract. It wraps up. And this is really the largest community-run
open source event in North America. So I'm attending a niche of like 600 people. And then
a couple of days later, it's like 5,000, 6,000 people from all over the country. So you really
get two different niches of a wider ecosystem at the same venue. It's fantastic from a coverage
standpoint. But also, it's very powerful for a few observations that I want to share with you.
And I'm going to save my biggest takeaway for last, but my first observation I think will not be a shocker to you.
And this is related to one of the questions we got in the booth.
There is zero Bitcoin representation, mindshare, companies, talks, anything at North America's largest community-run open source event.
We are still two different worlds, and we are worlds apart.
I blame a lot of this on the affinity scamming that altcoins have enjoyed by getting themselves in the same category as Bitcoin.
and it has deeply tarnished Bitcoin's brand
to the average tech nerd.
And when I say the average tech nerd,
I don't mean you listening to this.
I mean the tech nerd that ignores macro news.
Their form of investing is the Robinhood app.
Frankly, the affluent pleb
who just makes a lot of money at a tech job.
They just, it's not even on their radar
and that's a lot of who's attending these events.
Not all of them, but a lot of them.
There are people there and then they come,
oh Chris, hey, I love this week in Bitcoin.
Yeah, I've had Bitcoin for three years.
It's great. You know, I get a lot of that. So there's people there, but it's nothing at the event.
I have to say, too, boy, oh, boy, I know I mentioned them in the How You Can Support the
show. The Bitcoin company comes in clutch, as my kids would say. It's really a power combo on a
road trip because they have gift cards for Airbnb and Instacart. And so sometimes we're booking while
we're on the road because we're not sure when we're going to stop for the night. So you can go
from sats to gift card in seconds on your phone, you can book the Airbnb, then you can order an
Instacart order that arrives shortly after you get to the Airbnb. Now, it's not the cheapest way
to do it every time, but there are times where it just absolutely is a lifesaver. So that is,
and the fact that it all works on the phone and that you can use Firefox and the Albi extension,
all of that, it's really great. So that was very useful. And some of the support can be directly
attributed to us being able to do Airbnbs and eat on the way and make the coverage possible.
So that's also really great. Then there was this observation, and I think maybe this is the one
that I think is the most important. And this is the one I went in not really knowing what to expect.
Everyone we met, especially at Planet Nix, people that we knew or met that are building things,
are so much further and deeper into using AI tech than even I am or what I expected them to be.
I wasn't sure what I would walk into.
You know, AI technology is kind of controversial in the Linux community.
There's a lot of negative sentiment in the Linux community around AI.
But I feel like it's important to me to relay to you that what I observed
with no emotion attached, no judgment attached to it,
but what I want to relay to you is that the signal was absolutely rock solid clear.
The serious people, the smartest people I know that build the most consequential things I know that were at these events are way beyond the debate around AI.
And if they should use it, it's power usage, IP issues, way beyond that phase.
The movers and shakers are already building with AI technology right now.
And they have left the folks behind that are debating these other issues so hard they don't even know it.
I cannot relay some of the things I saw,
but that observation is as close as I can tell you.
And it's just the people that we're questioning
where if we're going to go, where it's going to go,
should we use it, should we not use it,
are the people that have the luxury
of sitting around on the sidelines.
And the people that are in the thick of things,
building things, creating things,
I saw people that are getting Linux support on hardware
that's never had Linux support before
because they have come up with a way
to get agents to agentically control the physical hardware devices
so they can flip on LEDs and buttons and press things
and trigger things and reset things
to, over time, have the agents work away
at esoteric ARM and RISC architectures
to slowly but surely, bit by bit,
build Linux support for this hardware
that's never been possible before.
And they're doing it right now.
And they're creating open source code with it.
these people are so far beyond the debate.
It's not even the same class of people.
It was shocking because then you would go over to the larger event
and you'd have a lot of moralizing and a lot of discussions of,
oh, should we or should we not?
And it was this just striking contrast.
Okay, so then Bitcoin stuff.
While I'm at it, I had a chance to chat with somebody from a real estate team
in the Pasadena area who started home sales,
negotiating home sales in Bitcoin in 2025,
and they plan to ramp it up in the local area in 2026.
Now, this is a quick visit,
but I did look up the Los Angeles Bitcoin meetup group
and it has 1,671 members.
They didn't have an event while I was in the area,
but I thought that was pretty impressive.
So the Bitcoin scene is there and active,
but doesn't really seem to be front of mind
to the general tech crowd that was at scale.
I think that would be my sort of overall
high-level Bitcoin observation there.
But then when you dig around,
you find businesses taking it,
you find people experimenting with it,
you find people talking about it.
So it's not completely lost.
It's not a Bitcoin desert.
It just doesn't get any representation
at the largest North American open source event.
And that still disappoints me.
All right, let's talk a little bit more about BIP-110,
another request from the Boos.
First of all, let's start with what I consider
to be a reckless activation plan.
A 55% threshold is just way too low.
That is not a safe consensus threshold.
It's how you invite chain instability
and a reorg risk later on.
It's just the fact.
And even if that isn't a bar that can be cleared,
you're talking about a user-activated fork
with rather weak support,
likely minority hash power,
with weak economic backing as a result,
and then that becomes a chain
that is a lot easier to attack.
Those two risks right there should end the conversation.
And I don't understand why those two risks alone do not end the conversation.
If your activation path leads to weak or a vulnerable fork, you're not upgrading Bitcoin.
You're gambling with a fork.
Okay, so that right there should end the conversation.
If anybody has any practical sense on the issue.
My second problem with BIP 110 is we're crossing a line that Bitcoin should never cross.
We do not make previously valid coins unspendable. Once we cross that line, we're a shit coin. It's poison. And I remain very consistent on this point. While I was away, the former operator of Mt. Gox, Mark Karpelpolis or whatever his name is, put a proposal to fork Bitcoin to return nearly 80,000 coins that were stolen in Mt. Gox.
To be clear, I could get somewhere between 30 to 60 Bitcoin back if this fork were to happen, right?
Generational wealth for me and multiple families after me in my lineage, if this fork were to go through.
I am against that fork.
I against that fork It is I am consistent on this issue This is poison Third issue I have is it doesn solve the problem it claims to solve
It does not stop spam.
Look at the data.
I linked it in the last episode.
It doesn't solve the problem.
It could even make things worse, but I'll say that's a separate debate.
I think what you need to understand is the fees are low.
Transactions are clearing.
The chain is not full of child pornography.
These things, these emotional hot-button issues that BIP-110 proponents have used to convince us that we have to rush this thing through in a few months, now in just a few weeks, haven't played out.
BIP-110 asked Bitcoiners to accept a real consensus risk for a solution that doesn't completely solve the problem.
It's a weak activation threshold.
It would create a weak chain, and it doesn't solve the spam.
and it would be a massive hit to Bitcoin's credibility.
Now let's talk about the impact on Lightning.
On average, for legacy Lightning channels,
I don't really see a strong case that BIP-110 directly breaks them on day one.
I don't think it's really a problem initially for Lightning.
For Lightning as a system over time, though, there are some real negative issues.
Lightning operates, I'm sure you probably know this,
but just as a reminder, Lightning operates by having peers exchange
pre-signed commitment transactions.
And they can broadcast those via the blockchain to close a channel at any time.
So the risk is BIP-110 introduces new restrictions on script types and sizes,
such as limiting the taproot tree depth or certain op-if uses.
If the channel commitment transaction, or I guess the hash time locked contract, right, the HTLC,
If that was signed before BIP-110, but it violates these new rules that would go in effect with BIP-110, it makes it unbroadcastable.
So the consequence means that the funds in your channel get frozen for the duration of the BIP-110 activation, which is at least one year.
You would be unable to close the channel on-chain, which makes you vulnerable if your peer goes offline or tries to cheat or if you need those funds.
Lightning would also be really screwed if this 55% miner threshold was how we activated and we had a weak miner-activated or weak user-activated software.
If the network splits between BIP-110 and non-BIP-110 Bitcoin chains, how do you think Lightning nodes deal with that?
Do they have code to know how to deal with that today?
No.
The nodes will be in a state of chaos.
A Lightning node might see a channel closure and confirm on one chain, but not the other.
They don't have an affordance for this.
Do you understand that?
There's also this limiting factor on Lightning's future.
BIP-110 places a cap on taproot Merkle tree depth.
Limiting it right now, this could change, but limiting it to seven levels,
or I think it's like 128 script leaves.
If you look at a Merkle tree, that's how these work.
Now, okay, current simple lightning channels that most of us use probably are not exceeding that depth.
But most scaling proposals that are out there to grow lightning to the next set of users, channel factories or taproot assets, some things I don't like, some things I do like, require complex deep script trees to handle multiple conditions or multiple participants even.
There's situations where there's conditional spending with some of these.
All of that would be broken by BIP 110.
Some of the more advanced things that we could do on layer twos to keep some of that crap off of the layer one gets blocked by BIP 110 by limiting the Merkle tree depth.
So you affect you effectively you're effectively stunting the development of Bitcoin.
Yeah, it kind of wouldn't be impacted on day one or five, but a year into it, you've wrecked the lightning network.
Consensus is a mess.
And you've completely shot in the foot potential developments and growth to scale the technology beyond the mainnet.
And so now all of this behavior has to go back to the mainnet.
You see what happens there?
And these people, they talk about their hard money advocates or purity.
And it's like there's some sort of purity test here.
This is bad on every single level.
It's rushed.
It designs around more users using Bitcoin knots, which just gives Luke more power.
And at best, it gives Ocean more customers.
And if you're still pro BIP110 after this, explain to me how you are comfortable handing Bitcoin over to Luke and Ocean.
Why is that okay?
You have a problem with Core, but you don't have a problem with that?
Just please explain that to me.
And go do your research.
Go look what happens when you only have a 55% mining fork.
You end up dealing with a minority chain that is easy to attack.
And think about the message and the precedent it sets if you take once valid transactions
and rewrite them to be unspendable and invalid, even if they're just locked up.
Think about the precedence that sets.
And then come back to me with a technical argument on how you solve the spam problem.
How does it?
Because right now the spam problem it seems to be addressing doesn't seem to be an issue.
Have you looked at the fee rates?
And this is the innovation of HashCash.
This is what HashCash was helping to solve.
This is why Satoshi and Adam Back talked so early on.
The miners could use some revenue too.
Like maybe we could use the fees to go up a bit.
I just don't know where this ends up.
So please address those questions if you're still a BIP 110 supporter, because to me, it seems like you're looking at a different set of technicalities than I am.
Because, you know, you went to an FAQ and you, I guess, read the proposal and you and I have come away with very different observations.
So, you know, I initially was a supporter of NOTs and now I am very much on the other side of that.
I will change my position when provided with enough evidence.
And I just haven't seen it.
And even just helping understand why the risk and setting the precedent is worth it. I can't get a good explanation on that. What I get is sort of a political style attack about not caring about Bitcoin or being pro-spam. And that to me feels like emotional manipulation.
So I would like any response to try to be as technical as possible, even if this is a very passionate issue for you.
I'd love to hear your feedback as technically as possible and continue the discussion.
I'm down to keep talking about it.
All right.
This is I don't know if this is really worth playing.
Just seems kind of strange to me.
The Clarity Act is still up in the air.
And Trump took to social media and said that the banks are holding the bill hostage.
And then just yesterday, as I record, on March 10th, Senators Angela Alselbrooks and Tom Trills, they waddled off to some big banking convention and, you know, tried to whittle down what they could get compromise-wise.
But it seems like things are still pretty much up in the air.
And this clip of Jamie Dimon is extremely defensive.
You and your peers have reportedly clashed with Coinbase's Brian Armstrong over the Clarity Act
and specifically this idea of crypto exchanges offering rewards for stable coins.
And Armstrong was on CNBC with Sarah Eisen a few weeks ago from Mar-a-Lago,
and he said there's a path forward for the market structure bill that's a, quote, win-win outcome for everyone.
How are you feeling about it right now?
The banks feel strongly that there should be, you know, awards are the same as interest.
And that, you know, a compromise would be that you could pay rewards on transactions, not balances.
If you are going to be holding balances and paying interest, that's the bank.
You should be regulated by a bank.
So we've been firm.
One thing over here, yes.
But if you want to be a bank, become a bank.
Then you can do whatever you want under bank law.
So I remind people, and your viewers may not know, banks have restrictions and requirements.
FDIC insurance, AML, BSA.
We have Community Responsibility Act, which means we have to open 25% of our business, LMI neighbors.
We have social requirements.
I mean, he's rambling through it so fast, you can hardly even understand him.
And when he's this defensive and when he's spinning this hard, it makes me think there really is some meat here to this interest issue.
And of course he is disseminating the truth as best to his ability when he this worked up What really true is that it two different business models right I mean they giving you interest on a fractional reserve product That what the banks are doing Coinbase is going to be giving you interest on a T
There's a bit of a different risk profile, right?
Because the bank is subject to risk.
If there's a run on the bank,
they're not going to be able to provide everyone's money.
So they have to be regulated up the wazoo
because we've seen this happen multiple times.
Now, could the same be true for T-bills?
Honestly, I think the whole thing's stupid.
But the more Jamie disseminates, the more he wiggles, the more he rambles all his sentence
together and claims that they need to be regulated by 20 different entities as if they're not
regulated now, makes me think there is actual meat on this bone that this is the big contentious
issue.
AMLBSA, we have Community Responsibility Act, which means we have to open 25% of our residents,
LMI neighbors, we have social requirements.
We have liquidity requirements, capital requirements, transparency requirements,
reporting requirements, board requirements, government requirements.
If they want to be a bank, so be it.
So what we base it as, level playing field by product.
You know, talk about regulatory moats, right?
That's why you can say if they want to be a bank, so be it, because it'll take them 35 years.
Now, the passage of the Clarity Act still seems to be kind of up in the air.
Mr. Wonderful says the Bitcoin will rocket to $200,000 when it passes.
But we'll see.
The Senate has a busy calendar.
Midterms are getting closer.
That's a lot of weird pressures for them.
It's not a slam dunk.
Polymarket, however, well, they have a slight different take.
And I think this is worth watching because it's kind of come up and down over the years, over the years, over the months, as it seems like people are factoring in different outcomes.
Right now, watching it, I'll try to link this in the show notes.
Yeah, oh, there it is.
Watching it right now, looking at the live Polymarket data, it looks like 62% chance of passing in 2026, which is down 3%.
The highest ever got was just around 75%.
Let's check in on the state of the network.
I'm wrapping up at block height 940,299.
Bitcoin currently sitting at $70,460 for one Bitcoin to U.S. dollars.
That puts our sats per dollar at 1,419 sats to one U.S. dollar.
We are down 44.1% from our all-time high, which was on October 6th, as you well know.
Our difficulty retarget date is March 19th.
We're looking at a downward adjustment of 3.4%.
Keep an eye on that.
And our reachable nodes is down just a few hundred right now.
What happened?
I took a week off and y'all shut your nodes down?
Total reachable nodes, 24,098 on the network right now.
We got to get that up.
Go get a node.
otherwise everything looking pretty normal i'd love to see that node number come up next week
we'll see it's interesting that it's even ebbing and flowing the uh vbytes uh sat per vbyte right
now uh fee is uh ridiculous absolutely outrageous two sats or vbyte right now if you want an
immediate transaction on the bitcoin network well it's good to be back it's good to be back
and the state of the network it's strong
Well, it's time for me to go take a nap.
So links to what I talked about are at thisweekinbitcoin.show.
My goal was to get you the signal between all the stuffs with the wars going on and the fuds going on.
Try to get you the signal and all of that.
Really help you plan for your family, your business, your future, yourself, whatever it might be.
So let me know how I did with a boost.
And of course, I want to know your take on what was,
I can't remember now.
I'm so tired.
Oh yeah, right.
The billionaire FUD.
What's going on with Chamath and Ray?
Seeing you in the same tune all of a sudden,
what is that about?
Tell me if you think my take that maybe they're about to like
shill some sort of privacy coin or maybe it's something else.
Let me know how I did with a boost or send that in.
And that's about it.
I'll leave you with links and stuff at thisweekinbitcoin.show.
You can find the back catalog over there.
I got a fun track for you.
I like the story around this week.
It's a track from an album called Bachelator.
And it's a track of, it's 10 different tracks.
Jeez, I'm really, it's going off the rails here, guys.
This album has 10 different tracks on it.
But what's fun is they composed it as a soundtrack
for an imaginary animated movie
that's set in like a post-apocalyptic future.
Superheroes and supervillains and spaceships
and robots and cyber zombies and aliens of all sizes.
It's just a fun concept to picture
while you listen to this week's song, which is Battle.
Thank you.
I'll be back.
Thank you.
Gonna Make
After
To
Eat