live from plant lab in austin texas this is stacker news live hello ladies and welcome
back to another exciting episode of stacker news live my name is carl with my bff keon
and plant poet has decided to join us let me uh eat that real quick there you go hey
because we're talking about my favorite.
There you go.
We're talking about your favorite person in the world,
Jack Dorsey, this week.
Keon, how was your week?
It was really good.
I can't even describe all the great things that happened.
I also don't want to brag about how awesome my life is.
Everyone online, it's a bad look.
So I'll just say that I spent most of my time in my office
and I did nothing otherwise.
and that will make people feel better maybe about their lives.
That's what I did this week.
How was your week, Club Poet?
Okay.
I just want to make a quick clarification about who my favorite person in the world is.
Number one, it's going to be Austin Kelsey.
And then after that, it's going to be Ethan Hawke.
And then maybe...
Ethan Hawke, really?
Yeah, yeah.
They're local.
Okay.
Wow.
So you really like that?
Rogan podcast with him probably.
I did really like it.
It was great.
He had some new stories I hadn't heard before, so that was great.
Because I've probably heard every podcast he's been on by now, which is not a lot.
If Ethan Hawke came out with a Bitcoin exchange, Bitcoin app thing, would you use it instead of Cash App?
Wow, I would have such a conflict right there, maybe.
I would try it.
Yeah.
You'd be obligated to.
I would be obligated to try it.
If he's number two, yeah.
At least until Austin comes out with his own.
Yeah.
But I don't know if Jack Dorsey is third.
He might be in the top five, though.
Oh, wow.
That's awesome.
Dang.
Demoted.
Today on...
You got fired, Jack Dorsey.
You got fired.
If you've never seen this great show before, it's called Stacker News Live.
We cover the top three stories on Stacker News every week.
It's the front page of Bitcoin.
this week our most popular video
was the
BTC Prog one. Had 19 views.
But, yeah.
Yeah, I think they retweeted it.
They liked us talking
about them. Yeah, I think there was a comment there
we'll talk about later. But, yeah, if you're
interested in all the sorts of crazy stuff that we do,
go ahead and take a look. There's
a bunch of Wumble clips here,
some surveillance stuff, some AI
girlfriend stuff. We got it all.
It's like a drive-thru for news
on Stacker News Live YouTube channel.
Definitely unsubscribe.
I think calling it news is a bit
overselling it.
I mean, we cover the news. Unsubscribe
while we have here. I think it's just more
entertaining form of news, maybe?
When we're in a good mood?
I don't know. Is anyone learning anything?
I don't know. People keep subscribing for
some strange reason. I mean, we're just
harmonizing. I feel like we were a lot better.
We were definitely better
at our jobs, like, 200
episodes ago. I would say we've gotten worse,
but that's me. I'm a harsh critic.
Wait, that's your
opinion is what you mean? I think we were
better at talking about the news like
200 episodes ago. Well, what changed?
I think we just got jaded.
Just got jaded.
Bitcoin has a way of jading you over
time, and I think that's what happened. You mean we
need, so we need to
be more bullish and stuff and hopeful?
No, I'm saying yeah, we were definitely
more hopeful. I mean, get the DVD.
It's on Fountain, but
So, yeah, because we spent a lot of time looking at it.
I'm sure Wumble would agree.
Wumble, would like to hear your thoughts on that?
But we heard it from Blockchain Book.
He basically told me that in TabConf, remember?
He was just like, yeah, you've gotten more jaded over the years.
I was like, yeah, that makes sense.
That's what I'm saying.
I don't understand why people are subscribing.
It makes no sense.
Don't you feel that you have?
100%.
Yeah.
I don't know.
But that's what Bitcoin does to you.
It just makes you tired.
And over time, like, you lose all that joyfulness.
I'm trying to find a way to get it back, but it's a work in progress.
I don't know if I feel jaded.
I just feel...
You definitely have some takes.
I feel like I'm less susceptible to certain kinds of false hopes now, I think.
But is that jaded?
I don't know.
Yeah, that's definitely jaded.
I know it's like, it's sort of like being jaded.
Yeah, if everything that comes out of your mouth is negative and not hopeful, that's jaded.
if anything comes out of my mouth
everything that comes out of your mouth is
so you're saying everything that comes out of my mouth is not hopeful
most times these days
pretty much
most isn't everything
so let's get clear here
I would say like 80-20
that's a shot in the dark
I don't know
I feel like I was at 90%
last year, 90-10 last year
and then this year I've come down
so I'm probably like 80-20 now
like you
okay yeah where about even let's see who can be even more hopeful and optimistic as the year goes
on yeah have a hopeful competition i'm hopeful about bitcoin i'm not hopeful about people
as a relationship with bitcoin like that's that's like where my hope kind of ends uh yeah it's like
i just think i think bitcoin's hard and that and people don't people won't get it for a long time
What about you, Plepo?
How do you feel about this?
I'm hopeful, and I also kind of just, like, do my own thing and don't really get into the weeds of things that would make me jaded.
And I kind of just take it a day at a time, and I just say, praise God.
There you go.
We're going to jump into the top three stories now on Snacker News Live.
The number three top story this week is A Layman's Guide to BIP110.
Speaking about being hopeful, this is from Billy the Kid.
He sent it all to Lomp.
12 comments, 13,500 stats.
Key on.
What's going on this week?
Yeah, we don't have to go over this too much, but I wanted to.
It is a nice overview of an argument against BIP-110 for someone who maybe hasn't been paying a lot of attention over the last few weeks.
Oh, we've been paying attention.
Where we discussed BIP-10 quite a lot.
I don't think a lot of people have paid attention to the details.
They're certainly paying attention to the drama.
on various social networks because that is fun.
But this isn't really fun, trying to understand what's going on.
But Lopp does a pretty good job, I think, of providing a position against the fork.
He describes it as adding seven new restrictive rules to Bitcoin transactions.
And that's kind of what the main thing that the fork does.
And it tries to do that in a temporary, it claims it'll only be temporary and they'll
reevaluate in a year.
So after a year, those changes will fall out.
or get reestablished or new rules will come in.
His arguments against it are primarily that it will likely freeze funds in edge cases.
So if anyone is holding on to, while it exempts any UTXOs prior to activation,
if anyone has like pre-signed transactions that are invalid in this fork,
they won't be able to get them confirmed.
So that kind of sucks.
Let's see.
It also suggests that the network can choose after the fact, after putting rules into place, that it will change the rules to the disadvantage of certain people and certain transactions, which kind of murkies the water with respect to censorship resistance.
claims that the big reason with spam
is much more that we don't have a competitive fee market.
There's just the blocks are kind of empty,
so there's nothing pricing out spam.
And that regardless of the transaction mechanisms that we have,
the fee market is a bigger thing to consider when we have spam.
So it's not that we have these certain transactions
that BIP-110 is attempting to restrict that causes spam.
So it's just that it's really cheap to put things on chain
because there's no one trying to put things on chain right now.
You know, a lot more stuff about dividing the ecosystem.
But I also wanted to cover his, he makes a few predictions.
He thinks a BIP-110 supporter will get desperate
around the time that the fork is going to activate
and put CP on the chain is what he predicts.
What else does he say?
He says it won't activate by a 55% minor threshold.
He thinks Ocean will be the only pool running BIP-110.
And if they stay on the fork, they'll only produce one to two blocks per day,
and it will take them basically three years.
to get to the next difficulty adjustment, which is two weeks or so.
So the rest of the network with a super majority of hash rate will take them two weeks.
It'll take Ocean three years because they'll have such little hash rate.
Yeah, that's kind of what's going on.
My prediction is that Ocean will capitulate.
I think they will, something will happen before activation
where it seems like it's not going to activate.
I think they'll just stop pretending that they're,
or stop believing that this will happen
and stop all the fun around it and stuff.
Are you looking for supers?
No, keep talking.
I was trying to get something ready here.
Yeah, that's most of what I have to say.
It's like a nice, last week we covered,
Melvin Carvalho's pro BIP-110 website that was kind of like BIP-110 is inevitable.
There's no harm.
It does no harm.
It's great.
It was relatively light on the details.
And this is a blog against it.
I think that has enough detail where you can kind of understand what's going on and then think about it.
Hey guys, this is SupertestNet and today I just wanted to show off my latest invention,
which is Forkalicious.
What is Forkalicious?
Well, it is a fork visualizer.
It lets you visualize possible outcomes of the BIP-110 soft fork if it becomes contentious.
And I want to show you guys how it works.
Super made a really interesting video about the different scenarios that would happen if
the fork actually took place.
I think it's just a really good kind of base understanding of how it kind of takes what, I guess, Jameson Lomp was trying to do with words.
She's wearing her jacket.
And this one feels a little bit more just kind of like educational so the plebs can kind of understand what's going on.
But he kind of goes through it all.
I definitely recommend checking it out.
And, yeah, I think that's kind of my opinion on it.
I don't know.
I've got a question about this.
Yeah.
Will there be a song
For Galicious
To come
That does sound like a
For Galicious
Oh yeah
Wow
There's a
We need it
What would be the backing
Because you always use backing tracks
What would be the backing track though
For Galicious
That song
How does that song go
You know
I don't know
I don't remember
Well if I sang a little bit of it
Just give me the hum
YouTube would flag it
Just give me the hum
It's
Oh, you're going to do it such a good job that YouTube's going to be like, this is copyright.
Exactly.
The black eyed peas are not on this podcast.
I'm trying to think which one's Fergalicious.
This is like, is it that one?
It's like a rap.
Okay.
Yeah, maybe Super can do that.
But I think he's been doing a lot on his GitHub as far as like, there was this one, the Forgalicious one.
And then he made, what was the other one?
the red yeah the red blocks one is another one that he made as well too um and basically this
one is when you load the site your browser connects to a semi randomly selected electrum
server from which it downloads the latest bitcoin block headers for the current bit 110 signaling
window then it checks the data so he kind of basically saying that this will either uh this
will kind of show you more or less what the signaling is looking like right now for bit.10
anyway just wanted to highlight this because he's doing a lot of
good work for the people
to understand what's going on
cool
um
you got any thoughts on this plot poet
um
this is definitely one of those things that
I don't
invest a lot of time in
so no
alright
you got any more thoughts or you're good
I think I shared
my thoughts. Okay, cool.
And then, yeah, there's a lot of comments here.
Dan has some stuff. Scoresby has some stuff.
That guy's a
slopster. And then there's a lot of people that are
outlawed down there. Or
downzapped. Or wherever they
are. Downzapped.
Alright, cool.
The next number two top story this week is
Mt. Gox Collapse.
The full story. This is from Raw Avocado.
22 comments.
11,000 sets. Keon, what's this?
Yeah, so I guess
It was the 12-year anniversary on the 25th of February of Mt. Gox's, I think, ultimate demise.
Most people know at least the high-level stuff.
They lost 850,000 Bitcoin.
And then Raw Avocado goes through what it looked like if you were kind of watching Mt. Gox
or participating in this while it was happening.
So I guess Mt. Gox had a public API that anyone could hook into and see internal transactions and status of withdrawals, which is pretty cool.
I don't know if any other exchange provides that level of visibility to internals.
But on February 4th, there were 41,000 Bitcoin transactions with one of these external monitoring tools that appeared to be in a bad state.
So the withdrawals were not confirming is what it indicated.
Then Mt. Gox issued a statement about it saying that they were just having issues with very large transfers.
And it was only temporary and they had fixed the issue and it had come back.
And then a lot of people in the community who had quite a bit of Bitcoin or any Bitcoin on Mt. Gox,
they got afraid that something was happening.
They got suspicious that they were being maybe lied to.
And so kind of a bank run type scenario happened.
And then Mt. Gox paused withdrawals entirely.
I think that was, I don't know what date that was exactly, but I think that was shortly after the 4th.
And then on the 10th, they issued another statement saying that the bug causing them to halt withdrawals was a transaction malleability bug.
which is a well-known thing that most that really any exchange by that point had already taken care
of maybe you know and so but it was it was kind of plausible that that is what went on but most
people were suspicious of that too because it was well known and there were known ways to work around
transaction malleability and then on the 14th one of those pictures you showed was colin burges
who is still active in that guy
on the left there of the
top most picture
he flew
to Tokyo and protested
outside of their offices like
and I guess that was like a bit of a media
like attracted a lot of media
and there's Karpelis
with
with the dude there
and he's got
his frat
let's see
on, okay.
Then on the 20,
so this all happened pretty fast.
So two weeks later
after those 41K Bitcoin were flagged,
Carpella stepped down
from the Bitcoin Foundation.
It's back when Bitcoin
still had a foundation.
His Twitter was wiped
and the website was taken down
and trading was suspended
on Mt. Gox.
So shit really hit the fan.
And then on the 28th,
they filed for bankruptcy
saying they had lost 750,000 Bitcoin that belonged to customers,
100,000 Bitcoin that belonged to them.
Then shortly after, a few people tried to figure out
what actually caused Mt. Gox to collapse and cause the loss of Bitcoin.
And Christian Decker and Wattenhofer, about a month later,
they published a paper that demonstrated that only about 2,000
of the reported lost Bitcoin could have been lost due to the transaction malleability bug.
And then someone else later did a deeper analysis that suggested that it was really a poor monitoring
of internal transfers that led to someone who had access to cold, who got ganged access
to their cold storage wallets,
was basically transferring money out of Mt. Gox over time,
like slowly over time, several Bitcoin.
But for quite a while before the collapse,
there was a huge gap in their accounting
where they did not have the Bitcoin that they were claiming they did.
I guess Karpelis got 11 months in prison only.
It was just pre-trial detention.
And then he got time served.
and he was acquitted of anything but lying about his digital accounting.
And then I guess shortly after this, they had recovered 200,000 Bitcoin
and that's what we keep hearing about.
Where they're going to disperse Mt. Gox's funds,
it's this 200,000 Bitcoin that were found after the fact
that they've been going through bankruptcy
and trying to figure out how to give it to the victims of this collapse.
And that got pushed back recently, I think, to some date later this year.
And that is the story of Mt. Gox.
I did not have this much detail on the story of Mt. Gox before I read this,
so thank you, Raw Avocado, for that.
And that is all I've got.
Plot Point, you got any thoughts?
All I can say is when I was moving this over to publish it in the zine,
it was a lot of bold, one word bold, one word italicized.
And you don't just copy it? You have to do it by hand?
I have to do that by hand.
and I'm not complaining
but just think about me
next time you make a post
that's really good and this was a really good post
I think what's interesting
for me
it's funny how over time the story changes
slightly depending on who's telling it
and
that's what I can get out of this
particular post
so Peter McCormick did a whole series on
Mt. Gox back in
2019 where he interviewed
like all the people associated with Mt. Gox.
The one particular that kind of skates away scot-free
is always Jed McCaleb.
He was one that created Mt. Gox.
So I would definitely take a look at all these old podcasts.
Looks like they're probably not online anymore.
That sucks.
It was a really good series He interviewed like everybody that was associated with Mt Gox So definitely check that out if you can find it Why did they willingly participate in the interview
At the time, I think from what I remember at the time was like 2017, 2018.
That's when Peter was like popping off as far as like the Bitcoin podcaster.
And he would just like, he would just like hound them online publicly.
So they said yes.
My memory could be wrong, but like.
I just remember at the time
diving into all these podcasts
because he was traveling all over the world
to make this happen.
Is it also giving them a chance to
say their story?
I would definitely check out all those old
what Bitcoin did
because you were actually talking to the people that were associated.
I don't know if you ever interviewed
Mark
but it's probably out there if you did.
Okay, so you think
that left you with a different
perception of what happened
than this post or my description of this post.
Wait, you wrote this?
I thought this from Ronald Vakado guy wrote this.
No, I did not write it.
Oh, okay.
I summarized it on this podcast right now
for anyone who didn't read it,
but you said that the story has changed over time,
suggesting that the story that you heard
by listening to Peter's podcast was different
than the story this post told.
Is that true?
No, I said it's funny how over time the story changes.
The story just changes depending on who's telling it.
But I think that's just in history in general.
Okay, so there's no difference between the story.
Oh, yeah, there's a lot of differences here.
Is there anything that stands out as a difference?
Yeah, it kind of puts the blame singularly on one person here,
and I don't think that's entirely accurate,
based on what I remember when I was listening to this podcast.
But, I mean, my memory could be fuzzy.
I would say go listen to the podcast.
This puts too much blame on Mark.
I didn't say that.
I just said that it's entirely fuzzy.
There's a lot of fuzziness with my memory, but I'm not new into Bitcoin.
It's coming in for the first time hearing about Mt. Gox.
I think this is a good starting point, but I would say if you really want to know what's going on,
go listen to the old Peter McCormick podcast because that's where they actually talk to people there.
So I'm not sure even Raw Avocado knew that those podcasts exist, but this is why.
I've got a question.
around for a long time.
Because you said from this post
it was made clear like
what happened to all that Bitcoin
was that it was just like slowly
siphoned out.
And that was done by one person?
Well, they don't know.
Someone did an analysis
I think
a year or two later that suggested
that it was this kind of
slow leakiness.
Right.
Deductive reasoning with that.
trying to account for all that Bitcoin.
Yeah.
But they,
I mean,
so it might not even be someone within,
in the company because they had a breach of internal systems,
I think in 2011.
Oh.
And so there's,
you can't necessarily pin it on someone who works at the company.
Yeah.
Okay.
I would listen to the podcast.
It dives into all that stuff.
Cause now that you're saying that it reminds me of,
cause I remember there was blame pointed towards one guy and,
And I think he asked them on the record about it.
But it was a long time ago.
I'm surprised anyone put money on Mt. Gox early on.
I recall them requiring you send them cash in the mail.
You had to send cash to Japan in the mail.
I just remember there was a story.
Because this is way after I had gotten into Bitcoin.
But I just remember there was a story where Roger Ver was.
He literally flew over there to buy Bitcoin.
So I just remember that story being told.
But then there's also that doubling down that he did at that time.
I'd have to look for it where he doubled down on that there's solvent,
and then he started crying.
It was a whole thing.
That's what I'm saying.
There's a whole other side of this that's not getting covered.
This was also covered in Digital Gold, the book Digital Gold,
which I found a pretty good or a fun history of Bitcoin.
delivered as a non-fiction book.
And it describes Karpelis kind of discovering this issue
where all of his cold wallets were empty.
And he'd find one.
They were storing them.
I think they were paper wallets that he was storing in a safety deposit box.
It was most of their cold wallets storage.
And then he'd one by one go and check the address
and try to send money out into the hot wallet
and discover that they were completely drained.
Dude, it's even worse than that.
I was talking to an OG when I was in Tampa last year who used to run a Bitcoin company.
I won't say who it is.
But I believe him when he said, like, a lot of the stuff that they did was, like, you see the way we've hacked together stuff just in the lab.
Like, they were doing stuff that wasn't even, like, I don't know.
like it's just wild to think like how they were able to like duct tape all this stuff together
and not knowing what you know all sorts of like how the private key public key stuff worked and
yeah it's just pure a lot of guessing yeah it was quite great it was crazy when a lot of duct
taping i think is kind of what he described it as but it was a different time in bitcoin
I think Snackers don't realize how good we have it
I mean the fact that Snacker News exists
is like a lot of that was built
on the
the graves of others
I'm buried on
not like entirely not dead
but I mean as far as like companies that have died
and people that went to
jail stuff like that
wait can I say one more thing about that
Mal Gox post
yeah
that photo
I'm impressed by the quality of that photo
It was taken in Japan
There was probably a guy who spent
Half of his life building that one camera
Yeah, a Fuji film
It looks kind of AI generated
That was going to be kind of my inference
But you may be right
It could have been upscaled
Look at the guy's fingers on the left
I think it was like a legit
That looks like seven fingers over here
Like news publication
Photo
With a real high quality camera
Okay. Yeah. I see. I see. That's good. Okay.
The number one story this week is,
does having more pools reduce mining centralization pressure?
This is from Scoresby, 23 comments, 14,000 sets.
Keon, what Scoresby write about this week?
Yeah, so mining trends towards centralization,
and large pools have,
because large pools have an advantage over small pools,
mainly because of two reasons. Large pools find more blocks, and so they have blocks more frequently,
and so they can pay out miners more frequently. And so there's like less variance in a miner's
rewards of the money miners getting paid. It's like a company that pays you once per year rather
than, you know, once per month or something. Or yeah, so split up over 12 months. So you have
less variance in payouts when you join a large pool. The other thing is you have less latency.
So if you're part of a large pool and they're finding their blocks more frequently, they have
zero latency when they try to build on top of that new block. Like they don't have to wait for another
pool or another miner somewhere else in the world to get them the latest block so they can build on
top of it. So that gives them an advantage in terms of finding the next block. A slight advantage,
but an advantage still.
This is like Bitcoin mining is so competitive
that these small advantages
really end up making quite a difference.
So a few years ago,
they started something called the Fiber Network
or the Bitcoin Relay Network.
I think it later got rebranded to Fiber Network,
but it exists to transmit compact blocks,
like dispersed geographically very fast.
And it uses UDP and does not validate the blocks, so it's also a trusted network, meaning this network does not peer with or does not accept blocks from just anyone.
They only accept blocks from other people in the fiber network that they have agreed to accept blocks from.
and so that
reduces the latency
with which blocks when they're found
from one miner say
in one part of the world
they can get to a pool
a smaller pool maybe somewhere else in the world
and they
local host research
where'd you get this buddy
that's amazing
Did you taste it?
Sorry, Keon.
Oh, no, it's great.
I love this.
I love McConaughey.
So whenever I see a McConaughey's, a new beer, it's like pretty funny.
Is he your favorite person in the world?
He's definitely one of my favorite Austinites for sure.
You can see it right there, Steckers.
McConaughey's.
Hook up.
All right, go for it.
Yeah.
What happened?
Oh, yeah.
So local host research.
So they stopped doing this.
I think they did a lot of work over the last few years on compact block relay,
and it looked like these latencies had reduced more or less network-wide.
I think before when there was like 5% of stale or orphan blocks getting mined,
it's now well below that and pretty consistently.
But I think this is done in anticipation of more miners building their own block templates,
in which case we have a lot of smaller miners that need access to blocks faster.
And so they want to make sure that there aren't incentives preventing people from building their own block templates.
and they believe that having this low latency block propagation network will improve that.
Anyway, so Scoresby writes about that and that effort to do that
in order to describe to us one of Voskul's chapters from crypto economics
that suggests, because Voskul is very, this is like one of Bitcoin's critical flaws,
is the fact that mining pools have the centralization pressure.
And so he wants a solution, obviously, because he thinks it's a critical flaw.
And many people believe that because the fiber network reduces latency, it reduces the pool centralization.
But Boeskul does not agree with that.
He thinks that basically what it is is it's another centralized network.
You're kind of solving one centralization problem with another.
Because the network is trusted, it will tend to centralize.
And maybe incentives get perverse or whatever.
That is like Boeskel's argument is it's indistinguishable from like another pool starting up and doesn't really solve the underlying problem.
And Scoresby used the fiber network announcement to discuss that.
What was I going to say?
There are some other interesting things.
I guess I was surprised that we do not use UDP currently
for peer-to-peer compact block transmission in Bitcoin already.
I guess that's something that's projected to happen.
It's on the roadmap that they'll eventually do that.
I thought UDP was where you're sending packets,
but you can also get drop packets in there.
Yes.
Right, so it's probably important not to drop any packets
when you're sending a Bitcoin transaction, isn't it?
No, but you're sending a block header.
You're sending a compact block.
You're sending enough that will fit in a single datagram.
Okay.
And if it gets dropped, you know.
Yeah, I see what you're saying.
Yeah, it's worth the lower latency.
The drop rate is low.
But you can add other layers that make this more reliable.
You can make UDP reliable or as reliable as you need for a certain use case.
and I'm surprised that Bitcoin hasn't developed something like that
that works for compact blocks.
But reading BitcoinCore.org, there are plans around doing that
that just haven't gotten around to it yet.
And it still would not be as fast as this fiber network
because this fiber network is designed specifically for low latency
and doesn't do validation.
So you still have validation and stuff in the peer-to-peer,
but it would still reduce latency overall.
It's just, I think, hard to deliver.
Anyway, I thought that, you know, just another Voskul point.
I, you know, Merch comes in the comments and does not really, I don't think, I don't think
I understand Voskul's point very well.
It sounds like Merch disagrees because anyone can spin up one of these fiber networks and
a miner is tied to a single pool.
And there's no reason a miner can't connect to multiple fiber networks.
that do this faster block propagation.
So it has important differences.
And it moves the issue to another layer
with different trade-offs.
And so I think there is an argument to be made
that those trade-offs are better at that other layer.
And it might actually,
while it doesn't completely solve the problem,
it reduces some of the harm
or some of the reason to join a large pool for a miner.
Great.
Cool.
I don't got any thoughts on this.
I got a question.
Do you know a good analogy for what the block template does?
The block template being the order of transactions on the block.
So what is a good example of a block template?
Like when you're using Canva, you maybe have templates for like each thing.
Like one is like, this is a poster.
Yeah.
This one is a cover to a magazine.
Right.
Those are like two different templates.
And so Bitcoin blocks also have templates where someone like Luke might say,
I want my template to have no data transactions at it.
Which is like maybe that's the poster template.
Yeah.
And then someone like Bitcoin Core is like, well, we don't want to discriminate against any type of transaction.
So that's the magazine cover template.
And so you can kind of choose your template like you do in Canva when you're mining blocks under a regime where you are choosing your own template.
Currently, pools say we're only doing posters.
Right.
And then another pool might say we're only doing magazines.
And as a miner, that's kind of what you have to accept is like now you're only mining magazines.
So I'm sure that then is like tied to like the amount of like compute that a miner is like, like, brings online.
How do you mean?
In order to, in order to mine a certain, a miner of a certain like capacity can reach, can win more templates than another?
Oh, the template is what, is what they mine.
If you're a larger miner, you perhaps have more say over the template that you're mining.
Okay.
Yeah.
You can be more choosy.
Yes.
You might want complete control over the template and decide you don't want to do posters or magazines.
You want to do conference background prints.
Because I would imagine then what you're choosing for is the reward that you get on the other end.
you might do it that way or you might be more ideological like oceans block template choices
where they're basically saying we want no thing that we consider spam in these blocks yeah yeah
okay cool stuff love to see it a lot of information here check it out stackers
join in on the comments yeah that beer is pretty good isn't it yeah it's actually really good it's
I don't know.
It looks as a citrus.
It's been around for a long time.
I'm surprised you haven't seen one before.
I've never seen one at a bar before.
I love the name and the logo.
It's so cool.
So Austin.
Cool.
Let's jump into Wumble's Picks.
This is Jana's Play Poets Dox's favorite picks of the week.
It's called Wumble Picks.
Keon Wumble wanted us to talk about this today.
He said, Jack Dorsey fires many employees.
This is from Gian, 18 comments, 2300 sets.
What happened with Jack?
Why don't you describe it?
I think I've talked about more than this.
This is how we do the show.
This is not how we do Wombos picks?
No, you set it up.
Come on, Carl.
Okay, I guess I can do it.
I feel like you've probably thought about this and talked about this more than I have already.
Okay, we can do it.
Yeah, so basically Jack laid off a lot of people today.
They got a really good compensation package, as he describes here.
Made a lot of waves on the Twitter.
Not so much on the other social platforms, but it was trending on Twitter.
It was talked about on all sorts of podcasts and live news stuff.
But yeah, he basically cut, I want to say, what is it right here?
It says right here.
We're reducing our organization by nearly half from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000.
And that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation.
So that's pretty much what happened.
And a lot of takes, a lot of people are saying it's AI related.
A lot of people are saying that it's, you know, the state of the world, the state of America.
Other people are saying it's part of the bear market.
other people are saying it's this is trending from last year when you know um all other companies
like amazon cut cut employees so this is just more of the same just kind of heading into the new year
um but keon what do you think about all this yeah i think jack jack explicitly calls out ai is the
reason they're making this choice um so that's i think the conclusion that most people are drawing
basically saying that they've been
leading in AI
and
they kind of understand AI so well
that they know where it's going
and that they don't need as many employees
as they have
because each employee that they have
can be so much more productive
they don't need the same head count
that they might otherwise
and that's why they're making this change
that is my read of
what he wrote here. I haven't
spent a bunch of time
looking at this thing. I know it is a hot
area for a lot of people.
It's a big news of the week.
Could we maybe find in this tweet where he
talks about AI?
Yeah, I guess we can go there.
Let me see if I can find it.
Intelligence tools right there.
The intelligence tools we're creating and using
are enabling a new way of working
which fundamentally changes what it means
to build and run a company.
accelerating rapidly. I don't think anyone would disagree with that.
No. Are you here to defend Jack?
I didn't realize I was dealing with his counsel. I don't think he needs defending. I would just say
there was a hire that he did.
Does he say it here or did I read it somewhere else?
In 23 when OpenAI was taking off, he was
putting together some sort of plan for this kind of AI
innovation that was happening around the tech sector and he hired a really crucial hire last year to kind of come in the company and look at how everything was built
how everything was structured,
just more on the technology side.
And so I think you're just kind of seeing more of that
based off of that person that he hired.
There's an article in...
I don't think I posted it in here,
but I posted it inside the Slack channel.
I wrote it.
There's an article about that basic hiring move that he did.
And then I think that's just more, my take is more, that's probably where this is all coming from.
And then he's just kind of implementing that.
There are some other really nasty takes that you see online regarding this.
But I think from what I can tell, what I've read, it seems like Goose is going to be a big part of what they're doing at Block.
And, you know, all the stuff that Jack donates money to also is kind of moving in that direction as well, too.
So I think you really don't need that many people anymore,
especially if you have more on the open source side
to kind of help you with a lot of the main business area stuff.
So it kind of evens out.
Yeah, my read is more so that this is not so much caused by AI.
I think it's changed by AI.
I would guess they were going to do these layoffs,
whether AI, maybe not in this fashion all at once
and with the severance package that they had.
My read is, or my guess is that they were going to, they would have had these layoffs otherwise.
They can afford to have them because they can make their existing employees more productive with AI.
But I think AI is mostly a scapegoat.
And I think we'll see a lot more of this.
I think we'll see a lot more companies laying off people and saying they're laying them off because of AI.
I don't think he uses it as a scapegoat.
I think he's framing it that way because it has to be framed that way.
I don't think you can be a publicly traded company and not frame something like that.
But I do think it was probably your right.
It's probably going to happen anyway.
But you can't frame that to the public that way.
Why do you think, not outside of block, but you're saying this will happen across other companies.
Yeah.
So if it's not AI, what is the cause?
Mostly just economic macro conditions,
earnings lowering as a result of interest rates increasing
roughly three years ago.
I don't know.
I mean, I would love to hear Jack's side,
especially if it's not in a tweet,
like just hearing him talk.
Maybe somebody can get him on a podcast
or maybe he can come on Snackered News Live.
I don't know.
But it would be interesting to get his take on it.
I definitely think the amount of money that he's putting into the open source community
is also helping reduce that amount of organizational...
Overhead.
Yeah, for sure.
Because a lot of the AI stuff is definitely open source.
A lot of the Bitcoin stuff is open source.
So he's kind of spending too much in one area,
at least from what I'm looking at on the interwebs.
But I could be wrong.
Yeah.
The interesting thing about using AI as the scapegoat is everyone's on Jack's side.
There's no one who's sort of upset at Jack.
They're just upset at...
They put all their animus into...
I don't think you could be upset with them, though.
Did you see what their compensation package was?
If it was an economic reason, would you be mad at Jack then, too?
I'm not mad at Jack.
But it sounds like...
You say that he was upset, or people were upset.
Or no one's challenging him on the AI thing.
No one would challenge AI, but no one would challenge the economic reason either.
Because it's just like the climate.
It's not anything blog could have done differently.
Yeah, maybe I'm missing the point.
Maybe I'm not understanding the point I'm making.
Because I'm having trouble understanding the way you're interpreting what I said.
I don't know if I was saying that people should be behaving a certain way.
I don't remember.
No, I'm saying if he's doing payments and then he's doing AI stuff in the open source space,
it only makes sense for him to reduce overhead like Plep Poet said.
So I don't think that's like, he's actually doing what he's saying.
It's just framed in AI because he's actually doing that, right?
I don't think that's a reason to be upset about it.
No, but I just...
Or why people, not you, but why people should be upset about it.
Because it's true.
It's like the AI thing is true in there.
No, it's true.
But I think it's only part of the story.
And that's kind of, that's the main point I'm trying to make.
Are you more or less hinting at the fact that when Elon came into Twitter, he wiped out like half the company?
But also that was because of AI too.
I'm not talking about Elon.
I'm mostly talking about other conditions that would lead a company to lay people off.
That is like not even included as part of the story.
And everyone's just like, oh, this is AI related.
Oh, they're so good at AI.
So what other conditions do you think it is?
I think it's, what do I, what did you say?
I said, what conditions do you think they are?
I mean, obviously.
I think earnings, no, I don't know.
I don't know anything in particular,
but my guess is that they were projecting earnings
to not be as great.
And in order to grow earnings at the rate that they needed to,
they needed to reduce costs and lay people off,
which is the same reason that any layoff happens.
But that's the same thing what we just said, though.
It's not the same thing.
It is the same thing.
Are details irrelevant?
irrelevant are there shades of are there shades of colors or just is there only like full saturation
oh man this is a good one it's not the same it's the same thing i see the same thing okay well it's
okay well i'm not i'm not saying it's not okay i think it's just kind of weird that we're saying
the same thing but you're you're like framing it in like it's more that's what i'm debating
internal you're talking about the into but he's he's he's framing it like that though it's literally
there framed. It's literally framed in a tweet.
He's framing it what? He's framing
it like it's an AI thing because it is an AI
thing, Keon. No, that's what I'm suggesting.
It isn't an AI thing. Okay.
I think that's where we disagree.
He's saying that it is a thing. Obviously we disagree.
Yeah. But you keep...
When I disagree, when I state
the area, the thing that I disagree
with you on, you're saying I'm not saying anything different.
So I don't... It's like
you say we disagree and then I explain my point.
No, I'm saying you're saying it's because of
economic reasons. It's internal to the company.
and I'm saying that's the same thing as AI.
I don't think it is.
I don't think AI and economics are the same thing.
Well, the unit cost, I mean, there's unit costs.
I'm sure he has unit costs to every department that he's running there, right?
So if a company, let's just say hypothetically,
he hires somebody at $350K, hypothetically, right?
Maybe before they were producing, before AI,
they were producing a certain amount of work.
He overhired for a different era.
He even explains it in there.
they had two separate companies overhired.
This is why I was saying earlier,
he hired this new guy last year,
brought him in.
He probably looked at everything and said,
hey, we don't actually need this many people
now because there's AI.
I definitely think that's part of it.
But I would argue that the decision,
the motivation of the decision wasn't strictly AI,
which is the way this is framed.
I think it was probably more like a large chunk of traditional reasons why a company would downsize.
They bloated during a period of very low interest rates.
And now they're trying to compress back.
But I mostly want to push back on people who are like AI doomers and think that this is caused by AI.
I just don't think it's caused by AI.
I think it's on some level, it's accelerated.
It's changed by AI.
It's part of the story, but not the whole story.
Yes, part of the story, but not the whole story.
And I think it's too...
I think it's the same story.
Oh, fuck off.
I cannot, I can't, like, I can make, I start making half a point and you're like, you're
saying the same thing.
Yeah.
Like, so I don't even know what the point of talking to you is.
No, I'm just trying to do this for the show.
But yeah, this is good.
Stackers, put it in the comments.
Let us know what you think.
Who's right?
Keon is right?
Or is Carr wrong?
So that's the option.
But my point was just like,
what is there to gain by being dishonest about it, I guess?
Or AI just...
I don't even think he's being dishonest.
I just think he's framing it in an advantageous way,
which isn't even bad.
It's just I'm alerting people that the framing is,
well, it's good for Jack,
and it's bad for people's perception of AI
and what it's going to do to the economy.
That's really all I want to say is,
I don't think this is AI's fault.
and I don't think people need to get
Doomer on AI because
Jack framed
his layoff
situation as an AI cause
but it just happens that whatever he says
is going to become a frame
yes exactly that's what I
keep hearing from people
originally this started out as Carr's description
is like this is caused by AI
and I just think that's
part of the story it's one framing of the story
the thing that everybody's saying online
and they're blaming the Twitter thing,
and then they're saying this again,
and then they're connecting the dots with Elon
and him as an operator of a company at this level.
And so, like, you see a lot of that debate.
I think that debate's kind of, like, not the same thing
because that was a social network built for a different era.
This one is, like, payments.
It's, like, literally our sector having a convergence with AI.
And then you see what's going on here in the lab.
Like, everybody's building three or four things at once.
It's like, yeah, I kind of understand where he's coming from.
It is an AI issue.
You don't need that many.
Yeah, anyways, that's my side of it.
Flip, what do you got anything?
AI is a big baddie to me.
I think it's a good thing.
I don't think it's a bad thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's bad culturally, good economically.
Hey, I'm AI over here right now.
Yeah, we can all tell.
Hey, talk to your bot.
Hey, did you tell me?
Oh, my God.
Did you tell my joke?
No, I was going to give you the opportunity.
Block cut in half?
So what are they, rectangle now?
Come on, y'all.
I think it would be more like pyramid.
That's a mic drop.
Yeah, someone corrected me, and they're like,
it's a diaphragm or whatever.
A parallelogram?
Yeah, it was a parallelogram.
Oh, like a hexagram?
Is that what your virginity is?
Whoa.
Boom.
Whoa, he's had a couple beers, ladies and gentlemen.
It's fine.
It's a PG-13 show.
He's had a McConaughey's.
He's had some McConaughey's.
Okay.
All right, that's Wumble.
Oh, wait, we didn't get to Wumble's question.
Oh.
I'm sorry, Wumble.
Dang, this is going to be a long show.
Wumble's question was, Keon, has AI reached a point where it can realistically replace
human workers or are business preparing for a future bear market?
Keon, what do you think for Wumble's picks?
It depends on what you mean by replace.
I think fundamentally you still need...
What are you doing?
Let me play it over here in the mic.
All right.
He's going to try.
He's going to show us open your screens on the thing.
Hey, Claude, what do you think of Stacker News?
Ah, Stacker News.
It's quite an interesting platform.
Mixing news, discussions, and social interaction,
especially in the tech and blockchain communities.
What do you think of the founder, Keon?
Is he a cool dude or is he a weirdo?
From what I know, Keanu seems like a passionate and innovative person, really driven to create something valuable for the community.
I think you're mistaking him for the samurai guy. Keanu is a different guy.
Dude.
All right, that was fun.
Ah, got it. My apologies for the mix-up. Keanu must have his own unique approach and contributions.
All right, shut up.
All right, well.
Oh.
Anyways.
We're sorry to embarrass you like that.
That was mean.
Who got embarrassed?
Did you get embarrassed?
I'm sorry.
Oh, yeah, I got really embarrassed.
So what do you think about what Wumble said?
Yeah, so I don't think we're going to see people exactly replaced.
I don't think it's like one-for-one computer to human.
If I were running a company, I'm not going to stick a computer where I have an employee and feel okay with it.
But I think we are going to have one employee manning perhaps multiple bots doing the job of more than one employee.
And so my whole point, my feeling about this is actually companies that want to grow will want more people steering bots than less people steering bots.
Because if every employee I hire, they can do 10x the work, that means that the productivity of my org increases with people still.
And so long as that's the case, each additional person I add can steer more bots and produce for me more of the value that my customers need, I'm going to still want people.
And if anything, they can return their value to me better than they could without AI before.
And so that's why I'm not an AI doomer.
I think what ends up happening is people work more.
They do more.
They produce more.
and companies need more people, want more people to steer AI,
because for every additional person they hire, they get,
they have a 10x on top of that person that they hire.
And so that's my read on what this brings.
I don't think it actually replaces humans.
It changes the nature of work.
But I think in general, it's good for employment,
and it's good for the economy, rather than bad.
I think it does replace humans
but we're not there yet
that's what I'll say about that
my thought here is
where does all of this
productivity go
what does it get
why do we want it
more
I would guess
stimulate the economy
we're already saturated
in terms of our
consumption
and the things that we value
I would guess
more niches get served.
Maybe there is an obscure feature
that you keep using Cash App.
That Cash App couldn't develop
because they couldn't have a team
dedicated to it, but it maybe helps
people out who have a certain kind of colorblindness
or something. But I would guess you have...
Oh yeah, so
not all of us have to be
hit over the head with
make everything accessible for everybody all the time.
No.
We can just make things accessible for one type of person
and somebody else can do it for somebody else.
I would guess we just completely saturate the market's demand for things better.
And then I don't think there is ever 100% saturation.
It's almost like the nature of the sponge changes as it gets more water into it
and it sort of expands.
And people want new things or combinations of things or separate things.
And what I would hope, and I don't think this is going to be the case,
but it would make people want to be in front of a computer less.
No, I don't think that will happen at all, unfortunately.
I think we've, it looks like we're getting some of,
I think that, I think, you know, well, I think it might happen,
but I still, it doesn't matter because they're going to be,
they're going to be interfaced to a computer
and they might not be in front of a screen.
That might be what I agree with on, agree on.
You might have, your husband might have dinner with you
and he's talking to his bot there.
Yep.
Rather than typing on a phone.
Yep.
Cool stuff.
Thank you, Womble, for that pick.
I thought it was going to be this week's top story.
That's why I had posted Jack in our cover art,
but apparently it's just Womble's picks.
Yeah, people have to zap it a lot.
Cool, we're going to jump into some of the AI stuff.
So this real quick.
So Perpexity Computer got released this week.
Pretty cool stuff.
Did you see this, Keon?
It was on...
Oh, that's loud.
So basically, it has some really cool music to it,
but as you can see there...
Let me do this in here because it's cleaner.
Oh, man, we got to get an ad.
No, thanks.
Let's wait a second.
All right, now we're good.
Go away.
All right, there we go right here.
So, Keon, did you see this?
No.
So basically it's just kind of running sub-agents.
It kind of just reminds me a lot of what OpenClaw is doing.
I think the only thing is it seems a little bit more advanced, slightly,
but I could be wrong.
But really just a video and a promise at this point.
Oh, they haven't released it?
I don't think so.
It's Vaporware?
No, I'm sure they have this.
Okay, it's not released yet.
It's kind of interesting, though, seeing Perplexity go this way.
This feels very Apple to me.
I'm surprised Apple hasn't bought them yet.
That's kind of where I'm wondering, when is Apple going to pull the trigger on that?
I think we've seen quite a few acquisitions happen in AI, and they haven't really done anything.
It just seems like sort of a waste.
I think it's just hard to predict where the market is going, and you make a decision on an acquisition, and acquisitions take a lot of time.
By the time the acquisition is done, it's like the market has already changed, and you've spent a billion dollars on something worth this.
Yeah, for sure.
This feels very Apple to me.
anyways just wanted to share that i thought that was really interesting uh zerox bitcoiner shared
it thank you and then the other one was um yeah so i've been seeing a lot of this this year the ai
bitcoin electricity takes i thought this was a really interesting post by south korea lightning
um he was talking about how like for the longest time in the 2020s everybody was talking about
electricity and how it's uh being utilized for bitcoin and how it's killing the the whales and
The electric city.
And the polar bears and all sorts of Iceland stuff.
Or maybe it was Greenland, I forget.
But now AI's here.
Not a thing, Keon.
Why is that?
Not a thing.
I think he says that his friend is against, or no, he's pro AI agents and cloud bots.
I think it's mostly that people just hate Bitcoin,
and that's why they were pushing against it in the earlier years.
Yeah, well, they don't see any point to it.
They don't get it because they're not using Bitcoin.
They don't see any benefit or have any use for Bitcoin.
They think they don't see any benefit to it.
They think it's wasted because it's like it's just us degenerates.
And then this guy who we all know.
Oh, no, can I not see it?
Oh, man, that sucks.
Anyway, well, this guy.
Gosh, that sucks.
so the
it's not going to show it
anyway
the guy
the guy from Clawbot
actually
was anti-Bitcoin
and he posted a lot of stuff
about electricity
about how
Bitcoin's a waste of electricity
it's killing whales and stuff
and
all sorts of things
and now
not a peep
hmm
well not a peep about AI
but I would guess
there's still people out there
complaining about
Bitcoin's electricity
I think most people
discovered after
they heard enough of this FUD
that most of the FUD was motivated by people thinking that Bitcoin was completely a waste.
Like it had no use.
This argument never made sense to me just because like cash in itself, all the ATMs,
like everywhere you go, like the banking system itself uses so much energy, like literal energy.
But to a normal person, that's money.
But they don't think of Bitcoin as money.
We have banks here in Austin right now that are empty, right?
Like there are people working in them, but no one goes to them.
I pass by a bank every day when I go to work.
It's just like no one's there.
No one's ever in that parking lot outside of the people that are working the thing
for that one or two people that go to the bank that morning, right?
It's so strange, dude.
I just think that uses way more electricity than Bitcoin.
But I'm super hardcore about Bitcoin.
I think it's probably true that it does use a lot more electricity.
I think people have tried to do analysis.
It hard to do end on a banking system which has so many of these inputs and outputs and stuff I just wanted to share this i think it it needs to be talked about you guys have seen the office right yeah
do you remember scranton what the electric city yeah okay cool any thoughts on this
because you were anti weren't you like on the green peace thing and everything at one time
yeah i thought you told us about like there was a time where you were like
full on the other side because you didn't see this side.
Before I was into Bitcoin, yeah.
Yeah.
Why do you think that has shifted now with AI
and everybody's just on board with it as far as the electricity?
I guess because it's what Kian was saying
because they find that AI is useful.
But if AI is useful, that also makes Bitcoin useful too
for agents to work together and coordinate.
I don't know.
And exchange value.
There you go.
It should if AI is become based.
If AI is become based.
Well, I mean, and AI is going to become based because you want them to be efficient.
That's what you would hope, yeah.
How long until they are based, though, or capable of being based when their owners, maybe, or operators are normal.
LARPers.
Yeah.
All right.
So we're going to jump into the final one.
This goes back to Wemble's pick.
I didn't even know Wemble was picking this.
Actually, I did, but this is not directly tied to it.
Burger King will use AI to check if employees say please and thank you.
I go to you, pleb poet.
What do you think about this?
Are you offended?
Does that lady offend you right there?
Burger King will use AI to check if employees say please and thank you.
Why would an employee say please?
Exactly.
Why would an employee say please?
Can you pull forward in the drive-thru, please?
Can I have your credit card, please?
There's no please necessary.
can you answer my question
about whether you would like fries with that please
I don't need them to say please
when was the last time you had Burger King
let's be honest now
Burger King?
oh I don't know
when was the last time you had a Whopper
but the subheading there
AI chatbot Patty is going to live inside
employees headsets
I don't like that
so I'll say that
you know what cars
Plutty Plutty Spidey Sense says about this?
Do you want to hear it?
Sure.
I think it's going to...
Oh, no, we got...
It's blocked.
I think what's going to happen is
we're going to get Patty right here replaced.
And they're training.
Yeah, the models are training right now.
They're going to have an LLM.
We're going to have a Burger King LLM.
And it's just literally going to be...
We already have that, like, internet cafe type of...
Or what is it?
Yeah.
What is it?
a couple of those. Oh, really?
Digital cafe, I think, or digital kitchen or something
like that. Wow. See, they're coming for
your jobs. Also, I've been into a couple
of McDonald's in the past couple of years. You walk
in and there's no people. There's just a screen.
Yes, it's pretty nice. I like it.
Yeah, you can just use the bathroom and not
have to feel awkward about it because you're not eating
there. You're just stopping in.
Do you know in Mexico they don't give you ice with your drinks?
How dare they?
Yeah, I was shocked too.
Anyways,
Burger King.
coming for your jobs.
Anyway, I just wanted to share that because I thought that was good.
Yeah.
We're going to jump into Keon.
Oh, no, Keon.
We're going to jump into Plot Poets Z.
Whoa.
Can I get a whoop, whoop?
Whoop, doggie.
What's going on with Adventures in Downsapping?
Number 48.
This is coming pivotal to the number 50 issue coming up here pretty soon.
Two weeks, but.
Shoot.
What's this?
Yep.
That was me holding up the zine
Because I wanted to show you that it was yellow
And there it is
Anything to say about this car?
Confused
The left side feels like a puzzle
The right side feels very
You know
Very different style this week
It's different, it's minimal
Is that all just you and like
Just ink?
I drew that, yeah
Except for the horse, I didn't draw the horse
I'm sorry about that.
Oh, I thought the horse might be you.
Wow.
Somebody else drew the horse.
It looks like he's missing a shoe.
And shout out to them.
Is that what's going on there?
He's missing a shoe there?
But he does have his hat.
Oh, that's nice.
So everybody's got their hat.
But no gun.
What's going on this week in the issue?
And no horse, but there's the horse right there.
So, yeah, what's going on is, you know, I'm putting,
I kind of had to invent like this new
segment over here on the right
and I'm calling
wait go back up to the top
okay so I'm calling it a builder boost
because it used to be the top boost
and now boost
is sort of behind the scenes
which is cool and I've appreciated that
but I kind of want to still like show off
at least like projects
right here so that's when somebody
announces a project hopefully I'll see it
and that's what I want to put right there
nice um that's very nice of you for sure what's on the left side here
um you do a comic every week or no uh i just changed the words of somebody else's comic
and it's sort of like um what's that guy from boston who was saying the british are coming
paul revere that's who it is i would have answered that question
we were literally talking about that earlier
in the lab.
And then
EK had a post that I put in there
and that was a bunch of code and that was fun.
Yeah, I saw that.
He posted that on his GitHub like a few weeks ago.
Up to the down zapping of it all
I tried to track
because I didn't have the room
to put all those posts so I tried to track
what was going on. Is this you too?
Are you also doing the illustrations here?
Yep. Just like the other ones
that I didn't draw, I drew
I threw that one.
Wow.
And it says how the internet was weird, and I changed the words.
So that's a down zapper right there, getting ready to take out that cowboy.
Interesting.
It almost feels like a story I'm reading now.
Right.
Kind of cool.
I would love to draw a comic every week, and I've wanted to,
but I just have a hard time doing it.
That's cool.
But I like how you're going.
Is there a comic in every page now?
Oh, wow.
No, not quite.
Interesting.
It was going there.
Not quite.
But, yeah, it was a lot about down zapping and the one who shall not be named is featured a lot.
Solomon Satoshi?
You're right.
But that's from Dan, though.
Yep.
But he was talking about him.
Oh, interesting.
And then that was from him.
And I put, I think I got, no, it's not all of the posts there, but most of it.
Oh, so you didn't block them on the zine.
Oh, there you go.
I actually don't have anyone muted on Stacker News.
Good for you.
And that's because I don't mind seeing things.
It doesn't hurt me to see it.
I can just scroll past it if I don't like it.
So I feel pretty strong in that regard.
Some people aren't that strong.
That's okay.
Takes mental work.
Takes looking away from the screen sometimes, touching grass, taking a walk.
Who made that?
Is that the one that you made in the thing, Kim?
I didn't make it.
It was 117 on Stacker Notes.
Yeah, I didn't give the credit to that.
I'm sorry about that.
I want to be there for Halloween.
Send that to me, 117.
It does look pretty real.
It does look pretty convincing.
It looks pretty cool, actually.
It suits you.
I think most people think Latin people are descendants of Asian people.
Definitely not.
It tracks.
That's offensive.
Oh, it's definitely true, dude.
And that's something that you could say.
And you went ahead and said it.
Yeah, never mind. I'll stop there.
All right, keep going.
That's the end of this.
Oh!
Yeah, that's the research project from Simple Stacker, which is cool.
Yeah.
I just appreciate all of them.
What's that QR code at the bottom?
It's the post QR.
Yeah.
Cool.
This is a great one.
This is Profile QR, but yeah.
This is a great one.
definitely an interesting
zine this week. Stackers, get your
zine. It's on sale now.
Let's go. Click this link
right here at the top. Yeah, you can
hold it in your own hands. You get this free
cat pic and you get this
free chart too as well. Boom.
And that cat is not a girl cat.
Making dreams happen. There we go.
Plot poet, you got any
so is this, you didn't tell me what this was
on the left side. Is this a puzzle?
No, that's just the classifieds
classifieds and there was somebody somebody bought this whole thing or i just i just put
something there so it's not blank but somebody bought think your local down zapper okay so i had
to put that in there and then somebody bought the other thing did you read that which one ss is coop
what's that mean well you said you said his name and oh solomon satoshi yeah whoa plot twist
tune in next week
if you will unmask
this person. There you go.
Now, I muted Salmatoshi a long
time ago. He's just so
hyped up on communism.
It's just unwind.
But that's Karstake.
Let's jump into
what we got next. Kian, you don't have anything?
We're going to jump to my picks.
So this got released
I think it was yesterday.
And I wanted to share this
video because it finally explains what point
payjoin is let me see if i click this no ads still ads well right here
going on chain more privately this video is made for you today i'm going to show you what is payjoin
and how to use yeah but he basically describes payjoin as you know it doesn't it's really cool
really informative video if you're interested in payjoin definitely check it out i thought this was
a really cool post kian have you looked into payjoin at all do you find it yeah we've talked
We talked about it several times on the podcast.
Okay.
Cool.
Just wanted to share that.
Bull Bitcoin.
Thank you for supporting Stacker News.
Appreciate you.
The next one I wanted to share was Project Hail Mary.
Boom.
Whoa, no, that's the wrong one.
Dang, I had a...
Hang on, I got to find it.
I guess it would be recent.
Project Hail Mary.
Boop.
I shared...
Dang, we got so many things in here.
Oh, there it goes.
Boop.
I shared this earlier.
It's one of the new movies that's coming out.
It's based on a book from the same guy who made The Martian.
Been getting a lot of reviews.
It looks really good.
Keanu, you gotta watch this.
It looks okay.
Who is this guy?
What's his name again?
Ryan Gosling.
Yeah, Ryan Gosling.
I'm not sure.
It just looks like a little comedic.
it looks like a little
like he's holding
like everyone's kind of
holding back laughter
in sort of an intentional way.
But The Martian
was kind of like that though.
The movie The Martian
was like that too.
Maybe it was.
I haven't seen it
in a long time.
I maybe only watched it once
but I kind of don't
it puts me off a little bit
because I'm like
are they
are they taking this seriously?
It like brings me
out of the movie
which is maybe interesting
to be like on the precipice
of feeling but
I don't
I'm sure I watch it.
I love sci-fi.
Yeah, Ryan Gosling's
pretty good at that.
He's good at that.
Like, yeah, that's like not overtly funny.
Yeah.
So the Martian was kind of like that, too, where there was like this joking thing that
Matt Damon did.
Yeah, that's true.
It kind of worked, though, for the movie.
I liked it.
It was fine.
Like, I didn't it didn't get me out of it.
But I just think all the cool sci fi stuff is really interesting.
This one's about the sun dying and having a disease.
Oh, OK.
Yeah.
Something like that.
But there's a really good movie called The Sunshine, or Sunshine, that talks about the Sun 9 and what would happen.
I wonder if it's a similar thing that was made by Alex Garland.
Isn't The Sunshine one a horror?
No, no, it's just, it starts off normal.
It's the same guy who made Alex Garland, the same guy who made, like, all the...
Does that have Jared Leto in it?
No, no, the guy from Appaheimers in it.
Oh, yeah.
But this one looks way more interesting because it looks like there's a twist with, like, actual aliens at the end.
I love aliens.
Apparently, it's getting a lot of reviews.
It's, like, it's going to be, like, one of the – it's, like, everybody's saying it's, like, the best movie ever.
But that could be a lie.
You never know.
Do we see Gosling's abs in this one?
What do you mean?
Do we think we see Ryan Gosling's abs?
We see him with long hair, so that's cool.
Okay, so that's –
Oh, you're saying abs.
I was like, what are you saying?
Yeah, I don't think so.
Do we get a shirt off scene?
no I think we get an alien scene
I think we definitely get him dying at the end for sure
though I don't know anything
the book was brilliant that's what Diego
said
definitely watching this the visuals
look so he runs into that at the end and then boom
look freaking E.T. bro
look at that
what the heck
oh it's only got three digits
it's probably the right amount
why would it be next to the sun
dun dun dun
we don't know anyways just want to share that
But that was cool.
Dude, what if it's like a sequel to E.T.?
Because that's like what E.T.'s hands were like.
What do you mean?
It was what E.T. was what?
E.T.?
Yeah.
It was about the sun?
No, but it had like three digits.
So it is E.T. because of the digits.
Could be, but one of the identifying marks of any race is the digits.
Wow.
Where's my post at?
I lost my post.
pretty out the speed
oh man
I can't find it
speaking of movies
and also
of Matthew McConaughey
recently
Matthew McConaughey
was here
with
Timothy Chalamet
at UT campus
just up the road
doing a
town hall
they called it
but really
they were just
talking about movies
I don't know why
they called it
a town hall
but it was cool
because they were like
it was like
hosted by like
the students
the film students
at UT
Did you share it on Snooker News?
Yeah, I could. I watched the whole thing.
They didn't really say anything groundbreaking, but
I liked it. I feel like
Timothee Chalamet is my friend, so it was fun to hang out
with him for a second.
How was he your friend?
In what sense? In the sense that
whenever he wins, I feel like I win.
Did he win the Oscar already?
Have they done the Oscars?
You guys are tight.
He did win the Oscars.
He won an award. I don't know if it was an Oscar,
but he won something.
And Dune 3 is going to be coming around here soon as well.
Check that.
I'm excited about that.
Wow, I can't find my post.
My bad.
I think there might be something wrong with search.
What are you trying to find?
Trying to find my Stacker News Live post.
That sucks.
It should be in...
Why are you on Top Post?
Go to New.
And there you are.
SNL number 213.
Oh, there it goes.
Gosh.
You're posting in Bitcoin.
Yeah.
I was like, where did it go?
Oh, the last thing I wanted to bring up was why we built the AI startup radio.
That's happening two weeks from now.
Can you believe it?
Yeah.
I wrote this article the other night.
Spent some time because I've been getting a lot of questions from the community,
but also from people just outside of our community asking me,
like why are we doing AI stuff in Austin directly related to Bitcoin?
And I wanted to write this to talk about like why I think it's important to do that.
We were talking about it earlier.
I was talking about earlier with Jana,
but I really believe that we're definitely in a bubble here in Austin
and there's definitely a bubble in San Francisco.
But I think there's just an opportunity here for us to really put Bitcoin at the forefront,
especially in Austin
because I think the payment solution
however it gets solved
I'm just really bullish on it
and I really want to see
normal AI folks
who are outside of our little bubble
in the Bitcoin ecosystem here in town
to get a chance to play with Bitcoin
for the first time
and see like
hey this could change my business
but yeah
I wrote a whole post about it
we shared some of the recent workshops
that we did
the Praveen one
the one with Eddie and yeah we also uh Darren also released the second version of Pleb TV
which is actually a lot more stable now but um yeah we've been posting a lot of stuff and then
we announced a startup school for later this year but you can sign up now we have one person who's
who's going to be coming from the Breeze uh um winner thing so he'll be in startup school this
year but we also have uh we're also taking applications now if you want to join and then
all the other stuff that the guys are building inside the lab but uh it's a long list yeah
anyways wanted to share that and um where is it out here and i think that's it
all right we're gonna jump into meta this is where it gets super spicy
Keyon
this one was this week
which it said why isn't there
a blankety blank version of
Stacker News? Yeah we usually go through
meta pretty fast and this is
Scoresby wondering about
Stacker News
there are a bunch of altcoins out there
why aren't any altcoins trying to build a Stacker News
and
so that's a legitimate question
there's a few that exist now
and are still alive that seem
functional and like they have customers.
One of them is Farcaster, which is kind of what does a lot of altcoins and I think it
focuses on like social trading.
He kind of explains that it like pivoted to becoming a wallet.
Yeah, more recently they're like, they realized that building the wallet is more valuable
to people and easier to do.
And so they focused more on the wallet.
and then people in the comments
I think
Scorsby is aware of Steemit but
describe Steemit a little more in the background
I remember Steemit
I guess one of the founders
this is trivia that merch dropped
one of the founders was the recipient of
Satoshi's message
if you don't
understand it I don't have time to explain it to you
so one of the founders
of Steemit was the one who Satoshi responded to
with that
Oh.
Yeah, Dan Lomer was a complete shit corner.
He was launching all the scams when I got started in Bitcoin.
Oh.
Yeah.
Made a lot of money, too.
He's probably retired somewhere on an island.
But, yeah.
Steemit, I remember that.
That was a big thing.
It was actually like a really big part of the crypto community at that time.
A lot of people were on there.
It was covered in the anarchist documentary on HBO Max.
Oh, for sure.
which Juan Galt was.
Yep.
I watched that,
but I don't remember the Steemit portion.
Yeah, they were talking about
riding on Steemit
earning like $11
and $10 worth of whatever.
Okay.
Yeah.
Tybo Gum.
Anyways.
Cool.
The next one was the...
Let's just get into it.
The Rise and Fall of Stacker News.
Peer-to-peer,
Valley for Valley,
that's the nominated social media platform.
And literally someone...
from Solomon Satoshi,
PlayPoet's favorite stacker.
113,000 sats,
22 comments. Key on
what is this Solomon
Satoshi guy or woman
talking about?
It appears Solomon
is upset
that
people aren't attaching sending
wallets and
that zaps happen
as CCs when people do not have the ability
to send non-custodial Bitcoin.
And for, I think it was like for two weeks,
he was on a bit of a down-zap tirade
where he was down-zapping
Anyone on the front page that did not have a gun.
And that was, you know, he felt like that was fair,
given that they were disrupting Stacker News' economy
by not inputting more sats or not zapping people's sats,
and instead zapping them CCs.
Wait, does he have a gun?
Oh, yes, okay, just making sure.
Yeah, he's very proud of his gun, and he reminds people all the time.
And it's Koinos.
Anyway, so he thinks this, he thinks this.
He reminds people all the time.
And then related to this, we've been reducing clutter on SACR News
and trying to reduce the number of concepts.
And one of the things that we knew we had overdone
was display too many badges next to names.
So we moved the horse and the gun to just the profile page.
So if someone wants to communicate their wallet status
or the badges that they have, they can put them in their profile.
But next to a name, we felt like it was too many things,
so we removed that.
But I think that was what really motivated this,
is he feels like I'm hiding from him something that he wants to know,
and therefore I am against people using Bitcoin on Stacker News.
Wait, does he watch this?
He probably doesn't even watch the show, right?
I have no idea.
He's commenting currently.
Oh, okay, cool.
We'll read the comments, Solomon, to Toshi.
Don't take offense to my jokes about the communism stuff.
That's just me being funny.
Yeah, but I wanted to cover this post because he boosted it quite high.
A lot of what he's saying here is accurate.
Yeah, he makes some points that I think are not terrible.
You want the card take or should Flipo go first?
What was in here is not what he's usually saying in the comments.
What he's usually saying in the comments is the same tired thing,
which anybody can see through.
that he's not the judge of all of us.
He's not holier than thou.
But it would appear that he has taken that stance.
Oh, wow.
I might have to unmute him now.
I mean, he made the top comment.
Well, he didn't technically make the top, but...
But here...
Sounds like he's having a conversation now.
Some of the history he presents is accurate.
And I actually did appreciate that it wasn't what I would expect from him
of just spewing a point of view,
although it does end up in that place.
My biggest gripe about this post in particular
is the way it's formatted is odd and hard to read.
I wish you'd use paragraphs, bro, in the proper way.
I think he was just in the moment.
This feels very emotional.
He writes everything like this.
Yeah, it's great.
Cool.
Do you want to hear my take,
or should I just maybe not say it
because it'll just stir the pot more, right?
You can share.
I just want to describe this, though,
as Solomon Satoshi thinks because of cowboy credits and the fact that he can see people whether they have a gun or not maybe it meaning an ascending wallet that Stacker News is dying So that is I want to you know that his point of view and I proud to share his point of view with you
All right, you ready for the car take?
So, I think there's, I think there's, you know, obviously, you've been muted by me, Solomon Satoshi,
but you suck as a person to talk to on Stacker News.
so that's why i got muted now it seems like you're actually having a conversation now so
i'll probably unmute you but i will say though that um yeah if you would have came in earlier
man in the early days stacker news was awesome it was great we had a custodial wallets lightning
was amazing and then uh you know the law the law won and eventually what happened is um
kian had to do non-custodial stuff and that's kind of the situation we're in i don't think it's
entirely been solved yet but at some point it will be and me who remembers from the early days
how amazing it was i think it'll get back there soon so hang in there buddy yeah that's that's my
take i'll just i'll just double click on what i was saying too like to that exact point that you
just made he is like honest about the reason for changes in stacker news is because of outside
pressure state pressure and i that didn't feel like something that would be he'd be honest about
based on other things you said.
Be clear, there was no direct state pressure.
There was anticipate.
We knew we were doing something that could be illegal.
For sure.
Or that could be prosecuted or prosecuted for doing something that was illegal.
Because we were taking custody of people's money
and allowing them while it was in our custody to transfer it to other people,
which is money transmission, which you cannot do without licenses
in nearly all of the United States and most of the Western world.
Yeah, I think the technology is getting solved now with a lot of what's out there.
And I think even Justin from Shrunk Wallet has made it really easy to integrate his wallet in there.
So why haven't I done it personally is because I'm waiting for Keon to make it really, really, really, really easy for me.
Just like he reads the news to me every week.
I want it that easy.
I'm kind of like the DarthCoin flavor of this where it's like I want to take the stats home and keep them there.
There you go.
and exchange cc's when i have them there you go it works there's a lot of comments here he's
responding to all of them so jump in there if you have some opinions um but yeah well look at that
shootout at the bottom keep the memes coming though this is awesome oh they should do the
back to the future one anyways um should we read the comments now or should we save that yeah we
Yes, we'll save that for the end.
We had a couple...
Oh, no, we had this one.
This was the other meta thing that you had.
We didn't talk about this release.
Yeah, this was just for people to see
what content was most downzapped on a given day.
Because we were having these huge shootouts
of zaps and downzaps where
it seemed like mostly Solomon who was copped to it was downzapping a lot of content And without the ability to see what was getting down people couldn fight back very easily
So that's what this was released for, is for people to be able to shoot out on fair terms.
And then the other release was that a slight fix to prisms or these forwards.
When you forward sats to someone on a post, they can now, the largest share of the split,
can be non-custodial.
I'm still trying to get used to the whole lit thing.
It's tough for me to understand, but I'm a boomer.
I'm a boomer.
What are you looking at?
Huh?
What are you looking at up there?
I wasn't looking.
I was, like, stretching my...
Oh, okay.
So we have the YouTube comments from Blancdory said, thank you.
I guess that was the Prague person.
And then Vake said, stay in the Czech Republic.
Is that in Prague?
Or is Prague in Czech Republic?
Yeah.
Prague in Czech Republic.
That makes sense.
It used to be Czechoslovakia.
Great Ruby from Bouton.
Thank you for the stats, buddy.
Yeah.
Let's read the comments.
Go down here.
Oh, nothing.
So, there you go.
Oh, wait.
Oh, we got one.
Curious to hear the take on whether more pools actually reduce centralization or just spread
the illusion of it.
He's not curious about anything.
It's a bot.
Oh, wow.
I didn't know the response to Stacker News.
Oh, I guess the comments I was referring to are on the zine post.
Oh, on the zine post.
Okay, gotcha.
Let me go back here.
There you go.
Good stuff.
Looks like Darth Coit had a question.
He's there.
See, he's there.
He's there.
The Phantom of the Opera.
We're going to jump into the top.
Cowboys, most popular segment in Bitcoin.
You-dee-hoo.
Yeah.
Who-dee-hoo.
Yeah.
Top Cowboys, we can see people's guns.
You guys aren't going to...
I'm waiting for you guys to release or to fix this segment.
No, this is great.
This is fantastic.
Carl, let's think of a new segment.
I think every time we do this segment, it gets better and better.
Let's just put our heads together, though.
Right now?
Let's think.
I guess we could do top comments, but I think that will just inflame even more downzapping.
But why not?
Man, we could do that.
Downzapping still ends up in the rewards.
It's still good.
Maybe we should have a downzap category.
Stimulates the economy.
Maybe we should have a down zap category up here where all the down zaps.
That was proposed.
That was another post.
One of the top posts.
That would be hilarious to see just like the empty recycling bin.
But no, let's look at the top comment right now.
Top comment was from...
Oh.
Solomon Satoshi.
Boom.
There are a number of contributors who write a lot about them potentially virtually.
Okay.
Okay, right underneath that Cindy Kate. Do you know about this? No, what's going on?
So check out who Cindy Kate is Cindy Kate. I don't know what's going on here
They are posting the down zapped posts in the list so that you don miss them I think this is all good man This is all experiment man I think this is good Experiment man
Just don't mute, Cindy Kate.
This just reminds me of another
battle
in the long history
of Snacker News.
It's just like the great battle
of the down zappers.
It's one of those things.
Of course, we should make that history
lesson. What's that merch comment?
That's really high.
Zapped.
Like, I remember so many of these over the years.
Is that about Steemit?
Yeah.
But anyway, top comments.
Pretty good.
But we're going back to the top cowboys.
That's what people come here for.
And it's still the same people every week.
Coop, Undiscipline, Blockchain Boog.
Boog?
Blockchain Boog.
Gray Ruby, Crypto Sensei.
And yeah, everybody else.
Kian, what do you think about the top snacks?
top cowboys i think they're really getting up getting on up yeah yeah so you're not showing
the guns here then is what you're saying yeah you have to go to a person's profile to see the gun
but you still highlight like how many people okay you're on the cowboy page the cowboy is like our
first badge and we feel it is the most important badge that we have the other ones were fun ways
to communicate wallet status.
That was kind of what we were going for.
Less so like a point of pride,
which they sort of became.
But yeah.
I support it.
I think this will pass.
It all passes eventually
with all the downs happen.
I think the downs happen will continue.
That is the nature.
Cool.
That's all I got.
Key on.
What do you do this weekend?
What am I doing?
I have a release that I've been
planning a ship with stuff.
Probably going to, I think I'm going to cut my beard
and my hair.
I'm going to be a different person.
Cut it off?
Really?
I'm going to get rid of it, yeah.
You're going to get rid of it?
Yeah, with all these advancements in AI,
I'm realizing that hair is unnecessary.
That's interesting.
But you're a wizard.
Not with AI anymore.
I'm not a wizard.
Dang, AI is the wizard, huh?
AI is the wizard now.
I'm just a normal.
What are you doing this weekend?
I'll believe it when I see it.
Me?
I have to write a short story.
Oh, really?
About what?
And I've got a couple paragraphs going on it, so I'm just going to work on that.
That should be fun.
I don't know what it's about, and that's why it's been hard to write.
It's really hard to write about things you don't know what you're writing about.
Because I like things that are no plot, just vibes.
It's hard to do when you're not feeling the vibe.
Dang
But I'll get there
That sounds hard
Can't wait to read it
Stackers had yourself a great weekend
What are you doing car?
I'm tired
So tired
Probably just got more work to do
Coming up on two hour episode
Alright
Ready to go night night
Let's go
Okay