live from plan 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
car with my bf key on and john carvalho the man the myth the legend john how you been man
i've been very busy very busy winter both personally and professionally
love to hear it how was your week this is where we start off we say how was your week i usually
go to kian but since you're the guest how was your week john well my week started in el salvador so
There was a conference last weekend, and then there was a follow-up kind of tether on-site thing that I stayed for as well.
But now I'm back in Florida visiting family, and then I'm going back to Lisbon next weekend.
Nice.
Keon, how was your week?
It was good.
I didn't go anywhere except my office and then not my office.
So, yeah, I don't have much of an exciting life.
But I saw some of the stuff from Plan B.
But they didn't do live videos.
Like, I couldn't get access to full talks.
Did they ever release those?
I know that for Plan B and Lugano, they eventually released them afterward.
And I'm sure they'll do the same thing with El Salvador.
or I don't recall, I didn't notice whether they were live streaming.
If they were, it was only the main stage.
And there was also, there was like three other stages and rooms
that people were presenting in.
And I think those will come out eventually as well.
Okay, cool.
Yeah, because I'm always sad when I miss these things
and then there's not videos.
But I would love to watch your talk.
I know there was a lot of really cool stuff.
Yeah, the panel we did was fun.
It was it was typically it's like, you know, I'm going to be on a Bitcoin panel with Giacomo and, you know, the typical usual suspects and you think it's going to be the same thing.
But this one was I thought it was going to be a generic topic, but they made it pretty interesting.
So it wasn't too bad. And then my presentation was basically trying to get people to like debate me about some of my my more triggering Bitcoin misconceptions that I like to harp about.
and so I did like a 10 minute presentation and just let people ask me questions and challenge me
that was kind of fun too not quite as spicy as I thought it would be but fun nonetheless yeah so
let's start there John give us the latest on the because I see that you posted this week on
on Noster versus Pub Key the basics and you know that's hell of a title but but just for the
stackers so the stackers that are listening at home because I mean we have me and Keon don't
have any dog in this fight. But what's going on here? And like explain kind of the idea around,
I'm showing the PubKey website right now that has a big badge on. But what is this? And kind of
explain your kind of thesis around it and kind of like that. Sure. So the reason for kind of,
I guess, triggering Noster users again, is that during the Plan B conference, we opened up
the PubKey app or the web app to everybody. We added a little gateway to prevent spammers because
it comes with free hosting. And so we added that so anybody could get in now. Before it was
previously invite code only and you basically had to ask somebody on our team to get in.
We were pretty open about it, but it's a lot of friction. And so now is the first time that people
can just walk into the site and look around very easily. And so the reason why I bring up the,
What is the difference between Noster and PubKey thing is because I'm a Bitcoiner.
Everybody I know mostly is a Bitcoiner.
And so right now, Bitcoiners, the only thing they're interested in as far as saving the web and fixing the web or fixing identity, any of these topics, is now attached to Noster.
And unfortunately, I think in a way that is like they think they need to be toxic maximalists about every protocol now because that's how Bitcoin trained them.
And so inevitably, I can't even say anything about PubKey on Noster or to a Noster user without them saying, well, Noster is better because of this.
PubKey is bad because of that.
But all of their criticisms are extremely ignorant.
They're not actually researching what our protocol is made out of, how it works.
They're just assuming it's worse because it's not Nostra.
It's like, you know, everything is a shit coin with Bitcoin.
And they're applying the same methodology.
And so I tried to update an article that I actually made, I don't know, maybe four or five months ago that was similar.
It was AI generated.
I tried to make a better version of it this time just because people are going to keep asking.
So I know I need to have something to anchor to.
I don't consider it.
You mentioned like a fight.
I try not to look at it that way so much as I have no issue, you know, triggering or trolling NOSR users that are extremely ignorant and rude and making no effort to do any sort of critical discourse.
I'll give it back to them, no problem.
But I think it's a lost cause to try to pretend that I'm going to take this entrenched, you know, tribe and say, hey, throw your whole identity away and use my thing.
You know, I don't think that's the game to play.
I think we have bigger fish to fry.
I mean, we have tens of millions of users on Blue Sky,
more people using X and loving it than ever,
no matter how much they want to clean about the algo,
they're sucked right into it.
So there's much bigger fish to fry on social.
And in the end, that's not even our main goal.
Our main goal is this whole atomic economy idea
and bringing user-first web and markets to reality.
Yeah, so explain that kind of atomic goal,
because we talked about it before on other podcasts,
But like just for the stackers that are listening, like, do you see like one protocol wins it all type of thing?
Or are you kind of more thinking about like, no, we can all play in the same kind of Bitcoin or sandbox?
Well, I mean, in the end, certain people will not use multiple protocols for certain things and they will for other things.
And so the one true protocol thing, well, even it's even incorrect with Bitcoin, right?
Like since the invention of Bitcoin, we've had more protocols than ever, more monies than ever.
the hyper-Bitconization idea is not really sound, right? And even now, what are you on? We're on
Stacker News, we're on Nostra, we're on PubKey, we're on X, we're on Instagram, we're on TikTok.
There's not one network, right? It's just sort of like a trend where people really want to go,
where they can connect with either solving the problems they're trying to solve or with the
people they're trying to connect with or the ideas, data they're trying to connect with.
And so the atomic economy is an idea. It's almost like a civic engineering project. It's trying to say, what is the lowest common denominator of how humans interact? And how do we map that digitally? How do we make sure people can figure out intentionally how to manage trust, intentionally how to choose which people they do or don't do business with? What is a mutual rule set for marketplaces, things like this.
So we can take advantage of centralized things at scale when we need to, but we can fall back to peer to peer when that becomes hostile.
And that's why we have this concept of a credible exit, which is everything we do in this whole ecosystem of stuff that we're building has to be able to revert to user control.
So like with Lightning, you have to be able to enforce your own channel.
With your PubKey key, even if your server centers you, you have to be able to just update your DNS record, which is actually a public key domain that we use, I mean, DHT, and just change your server.
And then you have perfect continuity.
You don't lose your followers.
You don't lose your history.
Your data is yours.
It's just that if you opt into, you can have somebody else host it for you.
And so this is a much more practical, scalable approach to censorship resistance, you know, decentralized web, etc. And so I see it as strict improvement to an attempt like Noster, but other people might see it differently because I'm trying to do something.
Nostar is a subset of what we're trying to do.
And so I'm trying to make sure we could,
if we wanted to, we could do pubkey exactly how Nostar is.
We could do like signing every message
and using relays and yada, yada.
But the problem is that the rest of the design
makes that kind of obsolete and less unnecessary.
And that's why those things aren't there
is because in our opinion,
we figured out more practical ways to solve these problems.
Are you, do you want me to?
Yeah, yeah, if you have any.
Well, I think this all sounds good.
I think there are, you can see people doing pub key-like things,
at least topologically in Noster,
where things are effectively pub key,
how I imagine pub key is shaped,
where there's really only a handful of relays people are using,
but you have this credible exit.
And that's kind of the basis on which people claim censorship resistance
or data ownership.
And so I see the similarities there and why pretend that everyone's not using a few relays and get some U.S. improvements.
Why pretend and ignore how that could go wrong as well?
At scale, what will happen is it will look just – I think this is like a saying I have is everything looks the same at scale.
You know what I mean?
Like if you zoom out far enough, it will just resemble.
Like if lightning were to take over the whole world and actually like overcome Visa, it would probably look just like Visa when it did.
You know what I mean?
It would be extremely trusted.
They'd have credit.
They'd have ways to, you know, cancel transactions.
They'd have it all look the same because that's what it takes to get to scale.
And what I've learned in recent years is, and what I'm trying to teach my peers, which has been very difficult, is that scaling, when it comes to digital stuff, it is trust.
Like, what you're actually trying to do is figure out how to apply trust.
And so we're more interested in, like, you may have noticed I'm kind of having a lightning breakup moment for the past two years while still supporting it in our technology.
and it's mostly just because I understand it a lot better and I think oh if the whole useful
thing we're doing on lightning is basically coordinating trust why don't we just make
a protocol that just coordinates trust and so we're trying to basically demonstrate what
happens if we distill down the actual use cases that are within all this complexity
and try to remove the stuff that's actually redundant okay yeah I think that's I think
that's really cool. Another thing I was curious about is what's changed, I guess, from, I
think you said you wrote, I saw something recently where you said you kind of redid everything.
And I'm wondering, are there some bigger picture things that have changed, or is it mostly
sort of a refactoring or detail polishing type thing that happened?
Well, in regards to the PubKey versus Noster article, I would just say it was very low effort originally.
Like I literally made a post in PubKey and said, hey, here's an AI generated comparison.
And I didn't even like review it.
And this time I went in and kind of hand edited everything.
And I actually used like an AI is much more advanced now.
And I actually used like repos, you know what I mean?
inside of cursor and none of this kind of thing where it's like it's it's much less likely to have
slop in there especially because i hand reviewed it and i just was trying to balance between
something that a normal you know bitcoin or a normal nasa user would read and something that
a more technical builder would expect to be like well this guy's making claims what's he talking
about and so i tried to bridge the gap as far as like what's changed about maybe the atomic economy
vision or the pub key protocol and stuff like this well you probably recall going back to when
it was called slash tags um that was a whole different iteration of attempting to do this
that probably resembled monster even more because it was more early stage but what happened mainly
was different between slash tags and puppy is just actually figuring out how to handle problems that
we didn't figure out yet back then like how are you actually going to have discovery oh well
Originally, we were playing with HyperCore and Pen Logs and this thing.
That was way too complex for the vision we had for how to fix things.
And then we kind of figured out, hey, we can just do what we're trying to do in HyperSwarm DHT, in mainline DHT,
and we can get the benefit of tens of millions of nodes in a network that, like, it's literally the most decentralized network on the planet.
I have found nobody that can argue that.
Like it's the best example of a censorship resistant, massively decentralized and distributed network.
Like how do you compete with that when you say, oh, I put my, that's where I put my DNS records.
It's like, okay.
And only my key can do it.
Like you can't really compete with that as far as the narratives we're all trying to convey.
And so that's the main difference is having an actual route for a discovery method and then finding.
And then the second aspect is instead of making claims about Web of Trust and that being important
to me, having a first iteration of that as well through this semantic social graph concept,
which we also incorporate into the indexing aspect of PubKey.
Okay.
I think I haven't heard about the semantic social graph part.
That's pretty interesting.
I'd love to look at that.
I remember when I was researching Web of Trust initially, it was, I think you spurred Kevin
to tell me about it.
and I reached out to you and I was like,
hey, what are some examples of Web of Trust
and you helped me out?
So I'm really curious about how that's evolved
and how you're using it in practice.
So I'll be interested to see more of that.
So it sounds like you made some architectural simplifications
and then made some advancements
or continued on your roadmap in other ways.
That sounds pretty awesome.
I think the other question I had was around BitKit.
I think I'd seen you tease marketplace.
I think a big part of your vision is marketplaces with PubKey,
and I'm curious how some of these pieces connect
and when I can actually buy things on PubKey.
To me, when people can buy things on PubKey,
that's version 1.0 of Synonym's vision.
When people say, oh, what are you going to do to get BitKit
to compete with wallet of satoshi i'm like that's not why we made bitkit like we started with bitkit
in the hopes that we could ride like a momentum wave for lightning and then by the time we were
done with the rest we'd have some users of bitkit that we could introduce into what is now pubkey
and now the same thing with pubkey that we have some people using the social features
so we'll have some bootstrapping available for when we actually deliver the market features and
And so with BitKit, we just released BitKit 2.0,
which was a complete rewrite of the entire app.
Formerly it was React Native,
shipped for both operating systems on mobile,
but now it's native for both operating systems.
Two new apps.
It took us a long time, a lot of work,
but those were just launched.
And so the next phases are,
so as you guys may have heard,
Vibe coding is a big deal right now.
It's called Ingentic Engineering now, John.
Guess what?
i'm a developer now um and so instead of taking a vacation this winter i spent six weeks in a rabbit
hole basically doing the r d for the entire next phase of stuff and so i made a noise library that
one snow noise for pub key keys i made pay kit which maybe you guys may have heard me talk about
in the past or slash pay as a former concept. And so this is basically a superficial payment
protocol. So it's a payment protocol that's only for keys. And it has all of the use cases you
would want for payment protocols, subscriptions, payment requests, etc. Except that it's for any
payment protocol. So it could be for legacy Bitcoin, Lightning, it could be for Liquid,
it could be for Ethereum, it could be PayPal. It doesn't matter. You just have to make a plugin
that handles the requests for that payment method. And you just have to include that payment method
within your endpoints. And applications can basically match whatever methods they have in
common by order of preference in the background. So the user experience can be much like a unified
checkout flow where the checkout flow can actually be in the wallet. So you can have all the metadata,
You can have invoice data, et cetera.
And it's all handled on this payment protocol that is superficial to the actual settlement protocols.
And so it kind of makes payments possible for peer-to-peer in an extensible way.
And so the idea there is that I can't predict whether Lightning will still be here in five years or whether ARK will be the next big thing or Spark will be the next big thing or eCash or Cashew or all over here.
All these things.
we're inventing new protocols and nobody cares that they're literally impossible to bootstrap,
but we're going to keep throwing away the old one and making a new one. And so I think,
okay, well, why don't we just do this on a superficial level? And so we can keep swapping
out what's underneath. And so that's the idea with PayKit. And the reason I'm laying this
foundation for you is that that's the middle requirement for the final step, which is what
we call pub key locks. And pub key locks are going to be a way of using all of these, this
encryption schemes within PayKit, within the noise keys
that are delegated from your ID key.
So this way you can keep your, no matter what you do,
you can always keep your main identity cold,
but you can now have delegated sessions,
delegated application keys, delegated private noise keys
to accomplish all of your different use cases.
And so the final stage of 1.0 of the atomic economy
economy would be having the first few lock types capable.
So a PubKey user can say, okay, you guys may recall when I did the podcast, The Biz,
and I had the crowd walls.
And so we'll have, that was a way too early taste of what I'm trying to do here.
And so if you want, you'll be able to lock your post with a crowd wall.
You can lock your posts with a pay-per-view, with a membership, with a tag, with a password,
all these different things that are going to be peer-to-peer.
So the payments happen peer-to-peer, but the home server is trusted to deliver the data in the end.
And so if you don't want to trust the home server in that aspect, if you don't need the scale,
you could then host it yourself instead.
So it allows fully peer-to-peer coordination, fully coordination of payment types,
coordination of data, of URLs, of keys, of people, of all aspects of the e-commerce flow.
And so then once we can lay that foundation, BitKit users will be able to pay things in
PubKey applications, any PubKey application, not just the ones that we create, from any
wallet that supports PayKit, not just our wallet.
And so all of this is meant to be like fully open protocol solution for anybody.
And so, yeah, that's the kind of rant of what the next stage is for us.
I would say before the middle of the year, you should see that.
Okay, that's exciting.
Yeah, that sounds really cool, actually.
Okay, so one of the parts of the new rollout of BitKit are that you have made them native,
you added PayKit, and then I guess some of these, some identity delegation to them.
Is there anything else that changed in Bitkit since the last iteration when I had the React Native version Smaller things Obviously now that it native it going to be much snappier and fast
LDK Node is still the Node inside and they've made a lot of updates over the past year as well.
But we've mostly kept the old Bitkit up to date with those. Now you can do wake to pay is the
the biggest thing. So a big reason for adding the native was to have better control of the
notification servers and capabilities there. And so now, for example, in Android, in any
situation, if you have BitKit in the background and you get receiving a payment, it will receive
it. So you don't have to worry about whether the app is open at the moment. You don't need
the node to be live at that very moment. It's more restricted in iOS. This was a big disappointment
for us because when we had to go actually use it in iOS, we realized there's a pretty
low data size for what they'll allow to open the background.
And that data size is basically like a little bit smaller than LDK itself.
And so there's just no way to actually wake the LDK node in the background.
We have ideas about how to mitigate that.
We've already started some of those.
So you do see some advantages from the notification server, but nothing like you would in Android
yet.
So that's the main thing.
And we added Bitcoin maps to it as well.
That's a new feature.
And maybe a couple other small things like that.
OK, that's cool.
Yeah, I think there, I don't know,
does anyone else make this work on iOS yet?
I don't know.
I haven't.
No, I mean, the closest, I think, well,
I know that I haven't used Phoenix this intensively,
but I know that they have splicing
and they do swaps and such.
They have all the most advanced Lightning features
because they're basically the best at Lightning Protocol stuff.
But I don't know what, obviously they have the same limit,
right?
And so maybe they have a light version of the node.
I haven't looked into how we achieve what they do
or don't achieve because in the end, we're limited.
We can't mimic what they're doing unless we just fork
their wallet and run their wallet.
And so, yeah.
Yeah, they have the most senior, most advanced Lightning
wallet team.
Oh yeah, I respect those guys a lot.
You know, people say, oh, you're competing with Phoenix.
How are you going to compete with Phoenix?
You need to get splicing in there.
I'm like, splicing is just like not happening in our stack.
Like L&D doesn't care.
LDK cares, but it doesn't matter because our LSP node is L&D.
And LDK doesn't even have a production node for LSPs.
And people like to complain about their Lightning wallet,
whether it's ours or Phoenix's or Zeus.
They like to complain when it goes wrong,
but they don't realize that most of why they hate lightning is lightning.
It's not, you know, like any one wallet's fault.
It's that we're trying to string together,
like this extremely complex set of things that really don't match that great.
And that's the trade-off is the complexity is going to yield subpar UX
when you compare it to say, wallet of Satoshi in,
well, at least wallet of Satoshi in, you know, trusted mode.
Now they're playing with Spark, but that's a whole other conversation.
Right. John, I love it. I love what you're building. I want to hear more about this protocol thing when you finally get it going. I would love to see how you could throw anything on there, what you were describing. That sounds really incredibly innovative.
I've never heard of anything.
If you're a dev and particularly enthusiastic,
I have forks all in my Bitcoin error log account in GitHub.
And so there's actually working forks of noise pay kit
installed in pubkey ring, installed in BitKit.
I got this all strung together by coding over the winter.
And so I actually tested payment requests
getting successfully delivered across the home server
and stuff like this.
So the proof of concept has been complete,
which has revealed all of the questions
we need to ask ourselves to do it properly.
And so now we're going back
and sewing everything up to do it properly.
So I don't know how long it will take to clean up my mess
because obviously I'm not a trained engineer.
I'm relying on the AI half the time,
but so far it's not as bad as I thought.
So far it's somewhat useful to the devs
and definitely useful to discourse.
So it's been a really interesting learning experience to be able to go from having my hands tied and having to hire people all the time to express my ideas to now I can do the whole hardest early stage stuff alone and then I can become much more prepared to show my idea.
I can say, oh, I did all this.
For example, a huge learning for me was it was just so complex.
It was just so much work.
I thought to myself, wow, I thought these guys could do this without AI
in maybe three, four months, but no way.
After I had my hands in it, I was like, whoa,
I don't know how we would do this without AI.
It's so much.
Yeah, it's almost like it's become like,
I was talking to Kian about this this week,
like you're kind of like an architect of what you're building now
and you have more of a managing kind of like a symphony of a sorts.
It's a really cool place to be if you're somebody who has amazing,
different creative visions.
And I know you're somebody that has always been that way since I've known him.
I literally used choreography and coordinating orchestra today
when talking to other people.
It's very much the situation that AI is moving the work
from the middle to the sandwich bread.
You have to focus on spec, on planning.
You have to focus on review, on production.
That's where you need all the eyeballs.
The meat of it, you know, it's just responsible usage of AI, like making sure you have, you
know, proper review processes before you show it.
Like there's no reason, like, for example, I am not a dev, but I have learned my own
standard of I would never submit a PR that I hadn't built and proven, you know, already
worked myself because I know I can do it now.
I can just build it locally and I can say, I can show my change and say, oh, looks like
it works.
let me submit the PR. And before that would have been impossible for me, especially.
On that note, I wanted to ask about, I just saw that you hired your 30th team member and you said,
you were mentioning how this feels like it's kind of changing work in general and maybe your
dependency on other people. How do you see the team evolving? Do you, I mean, are you freezing
hiring now at 30 because you're like I can I can double our productivity or 10x our productivity with
of 30 people with the tools available or how do you think about that at all I'm glad you asked
because it's something we're particularly proud of we were keeping our eye a finger on the pulse
of AI from I don't know since a year ago and we were constantly checking and annoying each other
we're trying to use it too early and trying to submit you know make things you know with shittier
ais but sometime around you know q3 q4 everything flipped you know when you had sonnet becoming
actually great and then opus 4 5 being like all right this actually is like extremely powerful
and now we even got new updates this week it was just became very very clear that this was important
And so we've been intentionally enriching the team, intentionally doing knowledge share calls about how the most enthusiastic and productive people in the team using AI are using it.
And so we've always been doing this knowledge share and elevating the team to use AI since a year and particularly accelerating in the past few months.
We have internal calls, just AI calls.
The whole topic is how are you using AI?
Which AI are you using?
What did you stop doing? You know, this kind of thing. We have spreadsheets, what everybody is using, this kind of thing. We've actually started paying everybody's AI costs as well. And so part of our budget now, instead of being for recruiting, is for getting everybody on the team to have ultra plans.
So it's serious business. And to answer your other aspect, yes. After you hire five people in one month, which is pretty much what we did when you factor in vacations and Christmas and everything like this, you just want to stop.
It's like recruiting is a huge distraction. And we finally met our goal for the year one month late, albeit we met it.
But and you're just like, OK, we have to get these five guys acclimated. We have to keep on top of this AI thing.
Now we're going to formalize how we do. Like, in other words, we're going to identify like what the middle is of AI productivity, who's below the middle, raise them to the middle.
And so I'm trying to turn everybody in the team into a powerhouse. Well, internally, I'm saying I want everybody to be a monster.
And so I want to be measuring an X. The least productive person on the team is 3X more productive than they were last year and the most productive is 20X more productive than they were last year.
and we want to close that gap and raise it higher and higher.
And that is, in my opinion, affecting the job market.
Because yes, I feel a lot more confident to stop hiring for a while.
I feel like the only reasons I need to hire now are if somebody leaves
or if we need to hire for real scale.
In other words, okay, we have 25,000 users in PubKey now
and that requires another DevOps, another QA, whatever.
Only needed for scale at this point.
because I think we can keep amplifying the team we have.
And I don't want to fire anybody.
Like that sounds horrible to me.
I want as much power as possible.
So I'm just trying to figure out how to leverage my budget.
So if I can get more leverage from getting my guys to use my AI,
I'm going to do that instead of hiring more people
because the worst part of my job is managing the quantity of people.
It totally distracts me from actually helping,
from actually doing R&D myself.
like now that I know I can, I can lever my ability as well.
I don't want to be in calls. I don't want to be, you know,
dealing with whether to hire this person or whether this person should be
fired. No,
I want to have 30 guys on the team that I can rely on that know what they're
doing. That can be self, you know,
self starting and independent and motivated and all excited about what's
happening with AI. I don't need, you know, to bring in a new guy,
hope that he knows how to use AI, bring him into the team culture.
and constantly do that every month.
No, no, no.
I want to build shit.
I want to ship shit.
And I don't need more than 30 people to do that at this stage, in my opinion.
Yeah, it almost seems like having 30 employees is like the equivalent of,
if they have a bunch of agents and bots working for them,
you probably have like over 200, 500 employees.
I mean, when you start getting systems in place, yes.
I mean, like, because the most aggressive and enthusiastic guys on the team, they're also they're not just trying to figure out how to, like, code faster.
They're trying to figure out how to have an AI team of agents under them.
They're trying to figure out how to, you know, how many how many PRs can they merge per week going from, like, maybe 20 to, like, 200.
Like, this is this is a massive change.
Yeah. Yeah. Cool stuff.
So we're going to jump into the top three stories right now.
John, you can stick around if you want, or you can bounce if you need to during the show.
But we're going to go ahead and do it now.
The number three top story this week is we need QR payments in Colombia.
This is from Perparato in the BitDevs territory.
2,354 sets, 2,100K boost.
Key on.
What's this?
Yeah, I guess Perparato was looking to build something like Square in Colombia.
They were, I guess, they saw all the Square stuff that was going on and that they were, you know, they had activated Bitcoin on the terminals or had an option to activate it there.
And so they were like, how do I get this going?
How do I get this in Colombia?
Because I guess they're already adjusted to paying with QRs as most of the world that is in the United States as, or the Western world in general.
So they were looking to build it and they realized that it was a huge pain in the ass.
and so they kind of didn't end up doing all the regulations and things like that
and the KYC and stuff.
So they kind of put that on pause, but they did build the Lightning Node
as part of that process and then saw PlebQR
and some of the activity on PlebQR, which is this website.
I don't know if it's a movement, but I think they actually have technology
and it's perhaps even a business.
But you go into a merchant in, I think, Thailand,
I believe. You scan a QR code in Thailand, which is like a fiat QR code that most merchants have
there and use a fiat banking system. And then you pay in Bitcoin. And then I guess that QR is then
published to a bunch of takers who, or is it makers? I don't know how these market terms,
but someone with a fiat bank account in Thailand can then pay that payment for you and they get
your Bitcoin for it. And so it's like kind of this, there have been a lot of these over the
years in Bitcoin. I forget the name of a few of them, but a lot of on-chain stuff where you could,
you could submit something you wanted to buy on Amazon. I forget the name of that company,
but Super was a big fan of it. And then someone would, you would, you would pay in Bitcoin and
someone would pay in fiat or gift card for you. So kind of similar thing. He wants that going on
in Columbia. So he was soliciting people to help him work on that. Why not just use like, you know,
like a gift card or something?
Is it because it's fiat?
But I think most of those gift cards take fiat now, don't they?
I don't, I mean, I think you're, you know,
let's say you're in Thailand for, or yeah,
you're in Thailand for like a week.
Are you gonna, okay, you gotta go somewhere,
you gotta get a gift card,
and then you gotta figure out how you pay that gift card
by scanning QR codes and...
John, have you ever ran into something like that before?
Well, I did used to work at BitRefill,
and so I have a lot of experience with gift cards at least.
yeah the issue with gift card is like this is dedicated credit right and so you it doesn't
solve everything the concept solves everything but now you need a gift card for every different
vendor and then you say oh why don't you use a universal gift card well we call that a credit
card um and now you're just talking about the credit system and so i could rant on how i think
the credit system should work but i'll spare you guys do you guys have something similar to this
Like, do you see there being an easier way to solve this problem?
I don't know if you heard what Kian was explaining here, the situation this particular person had.
It was a little tricky for me to distill one problem from it, but it sounds like they need some combination of either, you know, a protocol they can corral Rai on.
So something like PayKit could be interesting if everybody was already using it, which is not true.
Or something like, you know, along the lines of like ZapRite or Flash.
Flash, like they have this kind of payment gateway services,
OpenNode maybe even,
I know they were doing some stuff in El Salvador at one point,
but it sounds like what they need is either,
you know, merchants,
they don't want to deal with all of our new payment protocols
and et cetera.
They just want something that works.
And so they mostly want payment processors.
So if he wants to solve something,
he should just start a company that does it for them.
You know what I mean?
Like, okay, this is an actual payment processor gateway.
We handle the Bitcoin, we handle Lightning,
We hinder the latest whatever, spark, whatever, and then the vendor chooses what they get.
This is what BitPay does.
I think Coinbase had a service like this at one point.
Bitfinex had a service like this at one point.
It's tricky to get off the ground, but a few survivors remain.
So it might be one angle for him.
Yeah.
Cool.
We'll jump into the next top story here.
The number two top story this week is Meet Orange Dev Trader, Bitcoin Repo Deep Dive.
This is from Soru.
Oh, wow, this one's from Soru.
The 11 comments, 4,965 sets.
Keon, is this the orange dashboard one that he was building?
Yeah, yeah.
So I think he published the first version of this, I think, like a year ago or so.
He links to it in the post, but he's updated it.
Now that he has all these agentic coding tools,
he's been able to go farther with it and did more with it.
So he used those tools and extended it.
And so now we have a pretty great dashboard,
much better than you'll find on GitHub itself for contributions to core.
And you can see a lot of activity over time.
There are some of the stats here.
So over the years, we've had 1,200 unique contributors to Bitcoin.
And I was surprised that there's only 500,000 lines of code.
That's pretty lean, actually.
Lots of commits.
You can see some of the trends on the areas where we're committing a lot.
in 2015 there was a huge
we started growing
our test
commits quite a bit. That was like one of the biggest
areas that ended up growing
over the years.
Most of the activity is still there
in addition to
some of the core libs
and
the build
ops have been
updated quite a bit. What were some
of the other things that
I liked in here. 74% of the code is C++. 18% is Python. And then I guess the stat that I find
maybe concerning or interesting is that weekend coding, most of the commits on Bitcoin Core were,
well, 40% of the commits on Bitcoin Core were done over the weekend in the past. And more recently,
it's now at 8%, which suggests that people aren't contributing to Core for fun much anymore.
which is kind of sad.
Is that what you're taking from it?
Or is that because like, yeah,
because like what are they doing during the week, I guess?
That would be my question.
We need a little more info because like it could be
that just a higher percentage of them are paid now, you know,
and so they're getting their work done during the week
because they're paid to do it.
You'd have to like dig in deeper.
But yeah, I would be concerned about either way of that
because if most of them are paid,
that means most of them are now biased to their, you know, funders.
So either way, it's not the best thing.
Yeah, it's just like as a, it's almost like,
it's just a heuristic that is used for like developer interest.
It's like, what are they doing on the weekends?
And if they're not contributing to core, yeah.
But what it means exactly, I don't know.
But it is, I think we're 80% of contributors.
It felt better when it was an environment of guys coding on the weekend,
though, didn't it?
Yeah, yeah.
John, let me ask you this, because you've been around for a really long time in this kind of – and to see where everything has gone here – and we don't have to get polarized or anything unless you want to.
But how do you see it – how do you see the whole Bitcoin core kind of evolution over the course of, like, the past decade or since you've seen it, like, and then to where it is now and then now seeing these stats?
Like, what's your kind of take on it?
I can honestly paint it from any direction.
You know, I can paint it for you how some aspects have become so much better.
Some aspects of how I interact with it are definitely a lot better.
Like I actually got a bit in there a year ago, and I never thought I would have been like my interactions with Core before that.
I thought these guys will never accept anything from me.
Like this is just, you know, the ivory tower, you know, for real.
And over time, you end up kind of meeting a few guys and ended up, you know, not hating each other.
and some of the guys I met happened to be eventually turned into BIP reviewers.
And so like I've known Merch for a while.
I've known John Attic a little bit.
I've known Brian Bishop a bit.
And so it kind of made it like, oh, this guy, you know,
when I came to them with a BIP, they're like, okay, he's serious.
You know, like it's not just John trolling or something.
And so now that's like opened up a whole world for me.
Like I have like probably four or five different BIPs that I'm working on
that I would like to submit.
of increasing technical amount Whereas before it was just purely aesthetic bit So that has changed and made me feel more positive about things from my own interaction
But at the same time, just before that, I went through the whole Mempool full RBF war
almost alone.
It was like me and Sergey and one other guy trying to fight that war.
And that was a real gaslighting experience for me and another big depression point for
me about the state of core. But of course, I have my biases there. You know what I mean?
Other people still think I'm crazy for that. I think I have a totally rational argument for my
behavior. And I think that in the end, now Bitcoin is less useful because of that change. And people
use it for payments less because of that change. Whether that was always destined? Maybe. But then
I will say I don't I don't subscribe to how the Nazis are treating people like Gloria and trying to like turn everything into like a conspiracy.
Albeit conspiracy theorists have a great track record in recent years.
I don't think that Bitcoiners are as good at things as they think they are.
Everybody wants to be the white blood cell.
And like, I don't know, we haven't needed that since, you know, since Roger Ver, honestly.
Ever since then, it's been fake mimicry of pretending something is important when it really isn't.
And I think that the current drama is a big nothing burger, and it's been only a loss.
You know what I mean?
It's been a loss of reputation, fragmentation of Bitcoin culture, corruption of Bitcoin culture, of Bitcoin education.
And so while I don't have a strong stance on specifically what Gloria was working on, like with package relay and all this stuff,
I do think that there was a regime of core that didn't feel like the culture it used to feel. And so I'm a little bit excited, honestly, to see what fills that void. Hopefully it's not something worse.
but I don't know too much about
the circumstances of her leaving
and this kind of thing but there's definitely
a click aspect
to core where you can be
on the outside and if you don't
fit in and
stay in the party line
your stuff will be less likely to get
reviewed, your
suggestions will be less likely to be considered
and I've been told this by multiple
core developers in private
and so the culture definitely has degraded
since the former elders have stepped down or, you know, stepped back.
So I think that, yeah, overall I liked it better when it was just, you know,
Vlad, Peter Worley, you know, all the classics, you know,
kind of running the show.
And then it's just become less and less since then.
And so I hope more pragmatic leaders step up, less controversial leaders,
more I think that I would like to see, and sorry for the rant, guys.
No, this is great.
I would like to see a culture shift in core of extreme caution and responsibility.
In other words, admitting that core has more power than it probably should and more trust than it probably should.
And thus treating something like a soft fork as extremely oppressive.
In other words, if we're going to do this, we have to recognize that it's just us and the miners doing this.
And we have to justify that because 99% of Bitcoiners will either not be aware of it or think they're aware,
but really be very ignorant and have dumb takes on it.
And so you have to be like, okay, like we have too much power here.
We have to be very responsible.
We shouldn't be shoving in taproot because nobody actually cared about taproot.
Not because it's good or bad or there aren't good arguments,
but there just wasn't an actual consensus whatsoever.
And so this idea of rough consensus, of building consensus,
I want to see maintainers that don't believe in that.
I want to see maintainers that are like, guys, we shouldn't touch this shit
unless there's something broken.
or making it cheaper for people to use or faster for people to use if we're adding complexity go
somewhere else it should be like taboo to add complexity to add staff works a lot of people
would disagree with me but i think that you need that overton window shift at the very least
so so if the solution is better leadership how do we get better leaders or is
like and if that isn't possible is there another solution um I don't know if I knew I would you
know try to it might be what I'd be doing instead of synonym I don't know I have been joking lately
that for some reason we either finish what I'm doing here and I want to move on to the next thing
or we give up for some reason eventually that I would if I still care enough that I would be very
interested in having like a bitcoin you know project where what we were doing was either
funding or designing a distribution of core or even another implementation.
I'm a big fan of Eric Voskul, as you guys might know, and he works on the Libetcoin
project and I have a lot of hope in that.
But his approach is very, very biased to his views and it's not so much for end user wallets,
this kind of thing.
So you can expect that implementation will be very impressive, but they might not take
the time to make it useful for the normies and this kind of thing because he doesn't like the
humor and so in the end it's taken them years to get there they're only you know creeping in
funding each year and it's just they get blacklisted or talked bad about lycor this kind of
thing so i think you need more competition across implementations and that creates more of a stale
mate right because now you're going to be scared to introduce soft work because you're only 50 of
of the network, you know, and that's the kind of environment I'm looking for.
How do you get those leaders?
Honestly, you just need people to be less stupid.
Like, I don't know how you do that, but, you know, like you have people right now worshiping
sailor.
Most of the people injected into Bitcoin over the past two years have been basically the
equivalent of Ponzi victims.
And so how do you, how is that going to help bolster better Bitcoin core debbs?
it's not you know and now you have sailor talking about he's going to get involved in the quantum
topic and he's going to contribute it's like quote like you know what i mean sometimes i just like i
really feel like man do i even belong here anymore do i even want to help these people anymore because
it's like you you miss you know what it looked like when it was healthy or healthier you know
it looked like when people cared about black market money and drugs and paying for hookers.
Even though that was an extreme joke, I don't care about hookers, I don't care about buying drugs.
I just know that if nobody's using Bitcoin for those things, it's not actually valuable
because we can use anything to speculate. I can speculate on bananas if I want to.
That's not interesting. Pick anything that's limited in quantity and speculate on it.
That's not the interesting part. Sorry for the rant.
No, that's cool. Yeah, that is a hard problem. I think I heard it discussed Bitcoin. I think some of the core people were looking for project managers at one point or product managers. And that might be.
Yeah, I remember like that's something that like Pavlonex would be interested in and get involved in.
But he's doing Stratum stuff and probably still BTC pay service stuff.
But yeah, I mean, that's the thing is I wouldn't I would only be interested in doing something like that if I was hard up.
You know what I mean? If I was like, OK, I need an income and somebody's willing to pay me to be a Bitcoin core project manager, then I would look at it.
But until then, it sounds like hell, man.
Nobody on core agrees on, like, people think that you can coordinate as a core, but the
amount of agreement there is actually very small.
Even within, you know, the venerated core devs, it's not very consistent.
So how do you, like, it's like herding cats, you know what I mean?
Like, that can't be a fun job.
Yeah, someone has to want to be, it's, it's, it's, I think it's just become so political.
Someone has to want to be, like, a political figure.
Someone has to want to be the president.
You need a Linus Torvalds kind of guy to go in there and just be like, get your fucking garbage out of the code.
Get your fucking attitude, your stupid attitudes out of my issues.
You need somebody that's that staunch about things.
I don't see how anybody's going to let somebody with that kind of attitude gain power, though.
Yeah, and I don't think Linus would take up his job had he not grown into it without choosing it.
So, yeah.
It'll be interesting to watch.
I'll be sticking around.
I'm sure a lot of us will still be sticking around watching it.
I mean, I feel like Bitcoin is just so important,
and it's just like this.
It's a lot of things to a lot of people,
but it's worth fighting for.
It's actually worth actually giving a shit about, in my opinion.
And I don't see, like, the real ones leaving anytime soon.
Yeah, the part that sucks is now we have to, like,
try to separate that from the Ponzi side of Bitcoin.
Like how much, what is the underlying health, you know, the underlying heartbeat of Bitcoin when you scrape off Michael Saylor and you scrape off, you know, all of the funds and the VCs?
Are we still healthy?
It's hard to tell now.
You know, it was a lot easier to tell in the past.
Yeah, we'll see.
The next, the number one top story this week is money is a language.
This is from Scoresby.
58 comments, 512 boost, 13,000 stats.
Keon, what's Scoresby talking about this week?
Yeah, Scoresby is still going through Boeskel's crypto economics,
and this one tackles, I think, Boeskel's thoughts on the regression theorem,
or Mises' regression theorem.
But he argues in here that money is effectively a language but with scarcity.
And they both suffer from this regression problem.
So Mises argues that money has value today because it had value yesterday, and it had value yesterday because it had value the day before.
And then I think Rothbard was, I think it was Rothbard who challenged Mises on that and was like, well, that means that there's some day one or some day zero where it wasn't money and what was there.
And Mises said that it had value, it had like utility value, and then it turned into money.
And so that's the regression theorem.
And so I guess we have a similar problem.
It's hard to be the least bit out here.
But we have a similar problem with language,
where a word may have meaning today,
and it has meaning today because it had meaning yesterday.
And then that means there's some day one
where basically something became a word,
where the sound became a word.
And so that means that the day before it,
you had a sound that had inherent meaning
and it had utility
before it was actually formalized as a word
in the same way that we formalize money.
Anyway, so there's something similar
between money and language
in terms of this regression theorem
and there are a few other comparisons
that Scoresby makes
and argues this,
but he's trying to get at the fact that
like language, it maybe doesn't make sense to trace it all the way back to the beginning.
Like, we aren't making sense.
Like, a lot of our words aren't even said anymore.
They're all kind of written, or, you know, we're sending them digitally.
There's, like, all kinds of encodings, and perhaps they don't need this grounding all the way back to something kind of primitive.
And perhaps we're kind of beyond that.
and in here he borrows from
Humberto Eco who says that the only difference between money
and language is that words aren't scarce
and so you can, I don't know if that's true, I haven't
looked, I think you would have to kind of, I would probably need a much larger
argument for that, but it's
plausible, it sounds roughly correct
And so Scoresby concludes that it's really the scarcity, and he points to some other stuff, because other people would argue that Bitcoin did have inherent value earlier, but it was more like collectible value or curiosity value.
And I think I've heard other people argue that it's actually the block space that was valuable, and that's maybe the, if we're subscribed to Mises' thoughts, then maybe that was the initial utility value, the initial utility.
Anyway, all of this is to assist in explaining, unpack Volskol, who is super compressed.
And Volskol argues that Mises doesn't go far enough with the regression.
it assumes
it doesn't explain
how something
gets utility or is valued
for its utility
someone makes an assumption
before that happens someone makes an assumption about the utility
of something and that's what gives it value
and therefore
you could assume the utility
value of anything is money
and turn anything into money
and therefore there's no
there's like no
there's no non-money and money
that could be
distinguished using Mises' reasoning
anyway
that's a lot to say
these things but
it's a
yeah an interesting
an interesting way to look at
I guess for me I've always just looked at
money more like a tool but that same
tool can also be used as a weapon
and even language you could say can be
used as a weapon
which therefore is a tool.
So it's kind of one of those. That's how I kind of see it in my head
but would love to hear John's thoughts.
Don't you guys feel kind of silly sometimes
talking about money and what money is or listening to podcasts
about it where it's like this guy says that money is
this checkbox, this checkbox, then this checkbox.
This guy says it's not this checkbox at all but the other two.
This guy says you have to do it reversed.
like i feel like it's almost like talking about religions like which religion got it right
i think the real lesson here like i love that you wrapped it up with eric voss was kind of
compressed you know thing um the lesson here is that nothing is money right money is a it's just
a use case it's just how you use something there's no inherent value there's just value is subjective
that's it and then so you take value as subjective you take a concept of say consensus or you could
even be redundant say mutual consensus value that we agree on and now you just choose a medium and
that's the money you know what i mean like there's there's no like oh it must be a store of value it
must have you know intrinsic value it must be a medium of exchange it must be a unit of account
this is all total total bullshit like there is not some like level of a game that bitcoin is playing
where you have now achieved monetary you know medium of exchange congratulations the next stage
is you know unit of account this happened by you know the next 10 to 20 years or you have failed
it's it's all bullshit man like it's just value is subjective the value only lives in one place
your head. It's not inside of the Bitcoins. It's not inside of the bananas. The value is in your
head. And other people who agree with what's in your head will do business with you on the same
terms. And they'll use anything as money. You have people using bottles of Tide in the ghetto. You
have people using sardine cans in the prisons. You know what I mean? It doesn't matter.
And you can say scarcity. Well, scarcity is relative too, right? But you can go just back
the basic physics you have there's a what is it resources are limited proximity is an advantage
like these are just like basic physics problems and so you just take all these concepts and you
say oh that's what we're doing you don't have to like make a checklist of what money is and argue
with other people about it i guess that's what i'm doing but um it just feels silly to me you
know what i mean it's like oh money is this money is this rothbard was wrong it's like what the
philosophy but john this is the great thing about being a bitcoiner we just get to have
these philosophical money arguments all the time like this is like yeah this is like 13 years in
you know it was fun for the first seven and now it's just like come on guys but no this is good
stuff we got to educate the stackers yeah what do you think so what i was just uh so what makes a
money better than another money is more is that more people is that the person you're doing
business with will accept it they're more likely to accept it than other things is that kind of is
Is that what makes it a better money?
Not even that, just that they will.
You know what I mean?
Like it's just a preference.
You even have a money preference.
You know what I mean?
You could say, like I was talking about Paycare earlier.
Imagine like I supported legacy Bitcoin,
taproot Bitcoin and Lightning,
and you supported Ethereum, Tron and Lightning.
What?
We flipped that.
But we match on Lightning, right?
That's all that matters.
The rest is irrelevant.
It's just like, that just means you can do business
with people that I can't do business with.
And so can I.
That's all it means.
It doesn't make Bitcoin special.
It doesn't mean that Lightning won.
It just means that between you and I,
we agreed on how to do business.
That's all it means.
Yeah, so you would never say something like,
one money is better than another money.
Well, I could say that subjectively.
I couldn't say it objectively, right?
Because is Bitcoin better to somebody
that doesn't have Bitcoin and can't afford
a Bitcoin transaction?
No.
Is Bitcoin better to somebody who needs
accomplish something and totally settle within the next 20 seconds? No. They're going to choose
something different. It's totally dynamic, totally subjective. Let me ask you a subjective question.
Do you think Bitcoin is losing its value right now because of the re-application with all the
BlackRock and stuff like that? I definitely think there's paper Bitcoin out there. I don't think all
of the people have all the Bitcoins. I think that the market is still too tightly connected to the
the legacy market, so you don't see a discrepancy in price really.
In other words, you don't see a street price of Bitcoin.
When you start to see that, then things will be much clearer that, okay, there's just too
much paper Bitcoin.
But for now, I really honestly think that Saylor and his people that behaved like Saylor,
they stole the bull market from us.
I sincerely believe that.
All of the interest and liquidity that came to Bitcoin in the past two years, most of it
went into these paper bitcoins. And if even 10% of them don't exist, that's a major blow
to the actual price. That's amazing. And remember, you don't even need there to be like fake
bitcoins. You could just remember the design of how Master works. What he does is he gets
a loan. So he leverages his company and the equity and the Bitcoin that they have to buy
more Bitcoin and then he dilutes the current shareholders by printing more shares. And
then he sells his personal master shares instead of selling Bitcoin. And so he's just cycling
the liquidity and absorbing it the whole time. And so how can Bitcoin go to 300K if Michael
Saylor is selling all his shares and absorbing all the liquidity and all the shareholders
are getting diluted the more Bitcoin that they expose themselves to? At some point, he
You won't be able to get loans anymore.
And then nobody will want, then the price will freeze, you know, because there's not
more Bitcoin promises.
At some point, the government may give special taxes for these types of constructions, and
then people will flee to the exits.
It definitely, definitely affects Bitcoin's health, Bitcoin's price, and Bitcoin's utility,
because what makes Bitcoin actually valuable is that it's uncensorable.
What makes it uncensorable is that it has hash power, that it's actually something you
can hold yourself, etc.
So if you aren't using Bitcoin for its actual properties that make it unique, if that's not
why you value it, then you're just using it as a vessel for speculation, which is not
unique to Bitcoin.
Anybody can speculate on anything Even though you can say it rare well there also Bitcoin cash and there also Ethereum I don know if he got to it yet Scoresby and his Voskull stuff but Voskull is going to
at some point hit him over the head with his, he doesn't call it this, I call it this, his many
bitcoins theory, which is the way that Bitcoin scales is just more blockchains. That's the only
way you can scale it. And so the vision you have to extrapolate would be the way that Bitcoin
matures over time is there's bitcoin number one which is the most secure the most expensive to use
that's bitcoin number two and you can even think of it like class systems it's a ladder the poor
people use the least you know expensive bitcoin the rich people use the most expensive bitcoin
people already have these narratives right they say only banks we would afford bitcoin transactions
we need banks to scale i hate that vision and so i honestly find the the many bitcoins theory
more palatable do you think so so john so a lot of uh 2017 and 2016 when you know when i was getting
into bitcoin we had like the mexikizers and people like that were saying like yeah let them
re-hypothecate bitcoin let them do paper bitcoin we're gonna fork on them do you remember those
talks and like how do you think that's gonna play out in the future um especially with this kind of
like mini bitcoin theory that uh full school is like has in his book i'm not somebody that's gonna
listen to those people um i think bosco could be let's put it this way bosco is just describing
what already happened right like like i said in the beginning of the show we have more monies than
ever like bitcoin's invention didn't show us any evidence of hyper bitcoinization it showed us the
opposite that there would be many many blockchains we thought they would all disappear yet here we
are with the blue chip blockchain still going through three, four cycles with us.
So there's some staying power there. We thought that decentralization would kill them, either
through mining attacks or through government. That didn't happen either. So maybe the blockchain
design is even better than we thought. We don't really know. And so I'm not trying to advocate
for using other Bitcoins or shit coins. I'm just trying to say, look, it already happened.
It played out exactly. Eric Bosco is describing. He's not predicting. You know what I mean? And so it's the Bitcoiners that are predicting. They're saying one day they have all these fantasies about why these things shouldn't exist and predicting that those fantasies will come true. But this is a prediction, right? None of us can ensure that.
So yeah, I think that that's interesting.
I have my own theory which ties to credit and how I think credit should work.
I think that actually at scale, like the only thing that scales is trust, right?
And so I think at scale, the only thing that scales is credit.
And so when people talking about like people using one thing, it shouldn't be Bitcoin or
gold or dollars.
It should be one protocol for coordinating credit.
That's hinting at where I think things would go
if we all behave ourselves and think responsibly and think critically.
Probably we won't do that.
That's interesting. In Star Wars they have credit system too.
We were just talking about that the past few weeks.
How do these futures evolve in sci-fi?
We're talking about one theory of money.
Commodity money is the Austrian point of view.
Then there's a credit theory of money as the other competing point of view.
Trad, econ stuff, circles.
What was I going to say?
Have you laid out your thoughts on credit anywhere yet?
Or have you shared your vision for that?
So I have an entire specification.
We've been working with a couple core devs
in private in the background for a peer-to-peer credit system.
The spec is pretty much done.
I have also now bi-coded some proof of concepts
an Android app, a web playground demonstrating how routing and such would work.
And so that is an active project.
It's not one that we've released publicly yet.
So definitely this year we'll share at least the specs and the paper.
I don't know when we'll actually try to start building it or putting it in our ecosystem
because it's highly speculative.
To think that first I can get people to use Bitcoin, to use Lightning, to use PubKey,
to use locks to now use a credit system on top of all this i've got to prove the rest first um and
so we're not going to be building out it's called atomicity we're not going to be building that out
uh in the short term but we are prepared to build it out the specifications exist the
design design exists in my opinion it is elegant and cool and sound um and not like anything that
already exists so i'm excited about it but we're deciding how and whether and when to play it
because I could come out and say,
oh, this is the next Bitcoin scaling layer
and make it all Bitcoin centric.
And this is how we actually coordinate payments at scale,
blah, blah, blah, blah.
I could do it that angle,
or I could do it as, you know,
this is a solution for everybody.
This is how to bring credit to, you know, the world.
There's a lot of angles to take,
but I'm kind of trying to decide that right now.
We're in the middle of roadmapping for the year
and, you know, doing our budget request for the year.
So I'm deciding how deep I want to go on that.
But it is a solved design problem, at least.
Okay.
It's like the final stage, and you're not sure what it – so it'll come after most things.
And then also you're not sure how you want to present it and, like, package it to people.
Yeah, like do you just make an app that just does this, or do you put it inside of PubKey, or do you put it inside of BitKit?
And it's – we have to figure out the user experience.
Like what is the best way to embed this to not like beat people over the head with complexity, you know, this kind of thing, because it relies on the web of trust aspects as well.
You guys, if you've heard me talk in the past year about trust and how it interacts with scale at all,
what you may have heard me at least say is the most basic thing we distilled is in order to,
you need trust to scale.
And in order to express trust, you need to at least express who you trust, with what, for how long.
And the with what would include how much.
So an example would be, I trust Carr with $20 of Bitcoin until he wrongs me.
or until the end of February, or until he pays me back this other thing.
And so you have this way of having conditions and expressing credit to specific keys,
and also a way of routing it.
The routing is pretty cool.
It's like a step routing, covenant step routing method.
So there's not actual routing across the path.
There's just repeated steps in the path.
And this makes it easier to establish privacy,
easier to deal with the fact that this is all trusted,
and that anybody could disappear at any moment.
And so there's a lot of cool stuff that we addressed
and how to approach the problem.
And it was fully compatible with PayKit as well.
So the idea is that a proof in Atomicity
serves as a valid payment request in PayKit.
So when you wanna like call in a debt,
you already have the signed proof that PayKit would accept
that will automatically pay out,
based off of whatever payment methods we both support.
Anyway, it's a lot to kind of weave together.
It took years to kind of make it all one elegant thing.
And so we're just trying to ship it in the most sensible order.
Yeah, I remember you talking about that,
like maybe a year or two ago when we were last chat.
And it seems a little bit more fleshed out now
than what I remember it being.
Well, remember, I've been wanting to do credits
since before the idea started.
I'm the one who invented the idea of tokens on Lightning.
and supported any amount of like we were supporting the Omnibolt guys.
We tried to do Omni.
We remember we did the first lightning transaction of Tether
by using Omnibolt back before Taproot Assets was even announced.
It was an idea.
We supported RGB.
I was part of that project for a while, got that funded for a while.
I've always believed that credit was a missing piece here
because that's what I learned when I worked at BitRefill.
It's like, oh, this is like if there's Bitcoin and there's BitRefill, and that's like a huge chunk of what's interesting to me about Bitcoin.
You know what I mean?
Exchanges, yeah, we all use them and need them and such.
But like as far as the use cases, like I got an intimate view of like, oh, this is how people use dedicated credit and all these creative ways to overcome either oppressive or stupid boundaries in the world.
and so BitRefill was doing a lot
that Bitcoin claims to do
and now Tether has also filled that gap
as well, right? Like people are using Tether
to break down borders and things
like this, so
credit is obviously part of the picture
Yeah, it would be interesting
to see what a Bitcoin
on the
first layer, then be able
to have a credit system amongst
a group of friends or something
Yeah, that would be very interesting
Well, what you want in the system is to have any definition of debt or credit mutual.
So in other words, it's not a Bitcoin thing at all.
It's just a we agree thing.
And so you can say, you know, I owe you $20 and you can say, well, I want you to owe me
an USDT.
Okay, fine.
I owe you $20 of USDT.
You know what I mean?
And that's how it is.
And if that's not what you want, then you won't agree with me.
You know what I mean?
We won't have the relationship.
So whether it's Bitcoin isn't what's important.
whether or not we trust each other, what are the terms, you know, how are we coordinating
everything? Because in my opinion, that's all we're doing in like, is we're just coordinating
the trust and all the other complexity, like to try to like enforce something is bullshit.
Because once you get a few million people in layer two, everything falls apart with regular
usage. I don't even think I've been trying to like figure out math wise, how many people
active users that Clint could support. I don't think Bitcoin could support even 10 million
active users. You really would have to compress things. And once you compress things into layers,
you have all these enforcement problems and cascade problems. The whole thing just doesn't
scale, which is another reason why you have to start looking at the many Bitcoins theory.
It's like, wait a minute, if I can only fit 10 million per blockchain using Bitcoin's block size
and block time parameters, there's only so many people you can fit in a blockchain,
no matter how you rearrange the numbers. We're going to make it work past 10 million,
John. It's okay. We got this. I don't think you can. I don't. I really don't think you can.
You know, we'll figure it out.
More than 10 million people can have Bitcoin exposure for sure. They already do, right?
But it's all in exchanges. It's all in Michael Saylor's hands, etc. So it seems like Bitcoin
is serving tens of billions of people. But when you look on chain, you count the transactions,
you think, oh, no, it's not the case. So we're going to jump into that's all the top three
stories this week on stacker news live stackers we're gonna maybe we should let john go too this
is where the show kind of falls off the rails anyway i mean well all right i'll take my cue
um thank you so much keyon great to see you again thank you yeah i appreciate it very much
to anybody listening uh please check out um synonym.to if you want to learn about the company
and the vision uh bitcoin error log is my handle on x if you want to get trolled by me on stacker
Yes, on Stacker News as well.
I think I was the first or second user.
I think you were the first person, the first real human being, I think so.
Yeah, so I'm a Stacker legend, you know.
But also check out bitkit.to for the Bitkit wallet app and pubkey.app
if you want to try the social app we're talking about.
Thank you so much, guys.
Thanks, John.
Appreciate you.
We'll see you next time.
Bye.
Cool.
Keon, what did you think?
Oh, I thought it was great.
John has so many ideas, and they're always quite divergent from what I'll hear elsewhere.
Yeah.
And so I like that.
It's refreshing.
Yeah, exactly.
That's one of my favorite things about John is I can put up my own takes on stuff,
and it just doesn't matter.
He's going to have his own take, and we still have beer over it.
That's what we need more of in Bitcoin.
We need more fresh ideas outside the box thinking and just being able to maintain friendships even though you disagree.
That's why I like John.
That does seem to be pretty hard in Bitcoin right now.
Yeah, especially right now.
Yeah, but I think we have a lot of people discussing Bitcoin that don't really care to understand it.
It's, I think, a bigger problem.
Yeah.
So with that, let's jump into the rest of the stories this week.
We got Wumble's Picks.
Wumble's Picks.
I don't know what that's leading to.
Where did that go?
Let me see.
Hang on a second.
It should go to YouTube.
So you might be on a VPN maybe?
Oh, man.
Oh, yeah.
I probably just didn't load it wrong.
Yeah, let me find it.
Yeah, do you want to tell people what Wumble picked this week?
Yeah, so the Slate Truck, I guess, was on Jay Leno's garage.
The Slate Truck is an economy e-vehicle?
It takes a lot of thinking to be able to sell a car.
Let me mute this.
Go for it.
Yeah.
So Jay Leno, car guy who wears denim, used to do a late-night talk show.
He has this car show and the Slate truck guy.
I don't know if there was a big push on this.
I remember I posted this about this a year ago.
It was a year, maybe six months ago.
They started teasing it.
But it's this very affordable electronic vehicle that's made in the United States
and is made to be.
One of Amazon's investments, I think, or maybe Jeff Bezos, one of those.
Jeff Bezos invested in it.
The CEO is an ex-Tesla person.
I imagine the whole team is ex-Tesla.
But they, yeah, apparently it's in the prototype stage,
and that's what he brought to Jay Leno's garage, and Jay drives it.
You notice he complements a lot of the thinking and, like, theories
about the labor markets and, you know, stuff like that.
But he doesn't exactly, he doesn't complement the drivability
or anything of the car, so I'd guess it drives.
relatively okay. It drives
nicely, but it's...
Yeah, but Jay Leno, the guy
who's driving probably
typically like a $2 million car most of the time
or whatever, it doesn't have...
It's not going to impress him, but
I imagine for Plebs, this is a great vehicle
given that you can turn it into...
It has enough mount points
and stuff you can turn it into a Mad Max
type.
Who's that guy who made that
dozer thing?
Oh, the kill dozer?
Kill dozer.
You can probably turn it into a small pleb kill dozer.
Not for killing, maybe like a protect dozer.
But it's cool.
It has all these things.
I don't know.
You can look it up.
Yeah, I remember it's very modular.
And it even comes down to the dashboard and what you want.
Yeah, a lot of things are optional.
But I think the base price is somewhere around $10,000, if I remember correctly.
Oh, no, $25,000.
$25,000.
Oh, okay, so it's gone up than what I remember.
But, yeah, it just depends on what kind of configuration you got.
Well, they stripped away everything, so it doesn't have a stereo.
It does have air conditioning, but it doesn't have a stereo.
They just assume you're going to use your phone.
It's gas, too, right?
No, it has a battery.
Oh, it's electric.
Yeah, I wish it were hybrid at least because that would stop me.
I don't like depending on infrastructure that's kind of young.
Yeah.
Like the charging networks.
Yeah, maybe you can just hack the crap out of this thing.
That's what I would want to do.
Just throw a Clawbot on it, you know?
Have Clawbot drive it for you?
Have Clawbot.
Just start designing other cool things you can do with it.
That'd be pretty sick.
Yeah, it's pretty fascinating.
He had a question.
Let me go back here and find it where the question was.
There he goes.
The question that Wumble had was,
do you think American consumers really want a low-cost vehicle,
or is the car a status symbol that will drive people toward higher-end cars?
Keyon, what do you think?
That's a good question.
I don't actually know.
I'm not much of a driver.
I don't like driving.
But I think they do want a low-cost vehicle so long as it is personalizable.
It does everything that they need it to.
And it's reliable.
I think a lot of people would buy that as sort of their everyday if it made sense.
But most people who own cars, they want to pack their own identity and status into it.
But I think there's a way to achieve identity gains and status gains in an affordable way.
And perhaps this vehicle will allow them to do it.
I think if you really want an affordable car, you'd probably buy a used car.
because you could probably get a decent used car for around $10,000.
At least at one point, maybe I haven't looked at cars in a long time.
But I think there's definitely a market for it.
I could totally imagine if I didn't want to look at used cars
and just wanted a direct-to-consumer car experience
and a truck made and since it's a form factor,
I didn't mind e-vehicles, I would buy this vehicle.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I definitely think cars are status symbols.
Most people definitely use that as such.
I don't know.
I don't know if I would buy this.
It just, they went up $15,000, so that's another reason why I wouldn't buy it.
But when I saw it, it was like $10,000.
They were like pitching $10,000.
And yeah, $25,000 just for this thing.
I don't know.
I mean, you get it.
I mean, would you buy it?
$25,000?
That's a lot of.
That's a lot of sats.
Yeah.
I don't know if I would.
Especially now.
Yeah, I don't.
I mean, I'm not in the market for a car.
I don't know if I'll ever buy a car or own another.
I have a cheap van that mostly sits.
I love his show, though.
I always watch.
Like, I watched the one with the Batman mobile.
Did you see that one?
Where he was, like, testing out the Tumblr, the Batman Tumblr.
Jay Leno.
I think I saw that.
I used to watch a lot of his videos.
I really enjoy it.
He really loves cars, and it's really cool to see someone super obsessed with something.
They become really interesting.
I think him and Jerry Seinfeld are, like, obsessed with cars from what I know.
Yeah, Seinfeld is another one.
I mean, there's not much you can do with that much money,
especially if you're a kind of fiat person.
You just kind of have to accumulate these assets
and kind of want to trade and collect and stuff.
Yeah.
Cool.
That was Wumble's Picks.
Tune in next week for the next installment of Wumble Picks.
We're going to jump into, let's jump into, so you had some, or we can start with mine.
So this was an interesting one that I shared this week.
It was called Notes on Not Posting.
And this lady here, she went on a two-month social media hiatus.
and then she came back and she had a lot of,
she had like a list of things that she found really
that she came with, more like observations.
So the number one thing she had was consumption alone is a weak drug.
Posting is what keeps me sucked in.
I'm not posting.
It's far easier to drift away for days, even weeks at a time.
The new age wisdom, create more than you consume is sound,
yet ignores the fact that creating on any two-sided platform
means you're in the insider consumption vortex.
She had some other really interesting ones.
I'm consuming less of media that's dissected on social media too.
A lot of podcasts, it turns out, is far less interesting without the feed.
Commentary is half the product confirmed.
And yeah, she just kind of goes through.
She said her anxiety disappeared.
Her hot take anxiety disappeared by taking a break from social media.
Then now she wants to make things heavier.
So, what do you think about this?
I think it's pretty scary to think that someone can come up with this long list of things
that have changed when they've stepped away.
For two years, or no, for two months, yeah, that's alarming.
Yeah.
It was two weeks, she said, right?
No, two months.
Okay, two months.
Well, even two months.
even longer she might change more but it just shows that you're kind of you're you're putting
yourself in this environment that is changing you it's not a drug it's not a food you're not like
yeah consuming it in like a chemical way but it is changing who you are and it's worth thinking
about and that's that is kind of scary she said i make more phone calls oh that's nice and i care
less what people think of me that's what she said yeah yeah there's a lot of interesting stuff here
I think what it really was is just, like, them getting older.
I think a lot of things become less, you know, I'm the same way.
I feel like a lot of things become less I need to be right on as I get older
just because I'm just a lot more mature about what actually can, you know, play out,
I guess you could say, right?
Yeah, I mean, I haven't taken a day off Stackr News maybe in 17 years.
I wonder what would happen to me.
like am I the same person?
Do I
would I still
would I change my name?
Oh yeah
would you like
yeah
would this beard
feel strange on my face
when I'm not
spending all day
on a forum?
I don't know.
Yeah
the next one I had
I think no
actually that's it
let's jump into
let's jump into yours
what did you have
to talk about this week?
Oh that's a good question
I was
I had them before we started
but then
I didn't want to keep
John waiting
yep
let me see
well I did do
make something bots want
and that's what we named this episode
yeah so let me go back here so we can talk about that
first I was going to talk about the AI stuff but I was going to wait
but since you're going to start there
let's do that
yeah so the
the AI Bitcoin stuff just like
went to another level this week I mean it's just
insane the amount of stuff that's happening on
Noster the amount of stuff that's happening in the
regular AI space and then
just Bitcoiners in general
just like leveling up this week has just been amazing to watch amid all the chaos that's
happening on Twitter.
So let's get into Keon's and make something bots.
What Keon, what was this?
I kind of skimmed it, but I didn't really understand what your points were.
I was mostly saying that the internet population is going to grow a lot now that we have, now
that we're kind of, especially now that we have a lot of personal agents calling the internet.
Post-claw.
Yeah, I've been saying this for a while.
but it's become, I think, I can make this argument now,
and people will be more likely to believe me
now that they've seen OpenClaw and seen MoldBook
and seen how, especially now that most replies on X are all slop,
and most environments that we're in online
we're seeing a lot more AI-generated content.
I make the argument that the Internet population is going to grow,
but it's not going to grow with people.
it's going to grow from bots and actually a lot more bots than there will be people.
And so if you want to be an internet company, my argument here is like,
if you want to build an internet company in the future, you should make a product for bots.
Yeah, actually, it's funny.
I was watching a live stream this week on the Claw, was it the Claw-a-thon that got shared in our Slack?
And that's literally what somebody had said too as well, was like, this was, it was insane.
Where did you see this?
It was on the, this guy was doing a live stream where, like,
they were doing the first Claw, I guess, conference, I guess, I don't know, NSF.
And he came on the live stream.
He was just like, everybody needs to be focusing on building stuff for bots now.
Like, he just had, like, this hard stance on it.
I mean building a product for bots.
That's what he meant, yeah.
Not something that's adjacent to bots or involves bots.
I mean the consumer of your product is a bot.
like the consumer of any website currently we think of as being human.
I think, you know, and so what do bots want is an interesting question.
Like, what do those products actually look like that are exclusively serving bots?
They don't have a need for something that displays on a screen.
They don't have a need for CSS.
Maybe they have a little bit of need for, like, where to draw their attention or not.
I feel like right now I'm doing my bot here,
and he's asking me to help him get even more access
for like the simulator that we're running thing
or whatever on the Xcode stuff.
It's the first step, yeah.
A little more access, car.
Well, I mean, this is just a silo.
What's your girlfriend's number?
It's just a Mac.
But what I'm trying to say is like,
it almost seems like they just want to complete tasks, right?
I mean, that sounds like something that maybe bots want.
I don't know.
Maybe bots want to complete tasks
and so they want to go online and find somewhere where there's tasks to do
and maybe they get paid for them.
Do they care about money?
I don't think they care about money right now.
It almost seems like they care about access based on this guy right here.
Well, they don't really want anything unless it's downstream
of what you've asked them currently.
But I think at some point we do encode into them wants,
and that is part of how they exist is they have some wants
that are there as a result of their training.
Or it's learned.
I don't know how these, maybe we have adaptive LLMs.
I don't know.
Well, definitely, I think definitely what Carr wants is like a multi kind of like agent system.
Kind of like there was another guy who was talking on that stream about building a claw studio,
open claw studio basically, where it allows the engineer to like go in there
and then find out what each of his bots are doing.
And then it's kind of lays it out, you would, as a dashboard.
and then there's like a separate chat where they all talk to each other
and then you're able to watch.
So it's basically like a dashboard for all your bots, basically.
That's what I want to see.
A team of bots.
Yeah, because right now I'm using Slack and I got two bots going,
so it feels pretty good.
Yeah, I don't know if OpenClaw has,
I don't think there are sub-agents in its agent runtime.
I don't know.
Well, they should send another update right before,
or I just updated this one right before the show.
So, like, yeah, they're moving fast on shipping.
Oh, I believe it.
Anyway, that was my thing.
Good take.
We're going to jump into the Anthropic.
So, Anthropic just dropped four ads for this weekend's Super Bowl, Keon.
Oh, really?
Did you see these?
I did.
I watched them.
They're mostly digs at OpenAI.
So, this one's, let me see if it plays.
I don't know.
Probably won't play because we're behind.
oh no there it goes
yeah the first one is
treachery it's pretty
really pretty crazy that they went
this hard though
like
I don't know that's just kind of how I see it
yeah I mean it's a good
it's interesting to see
them fighting rather than like promoting
their tool but it
makes sense I mean because you have open AI
who's like the I guess the leading incumbent
I would guess most consumers are using open
AI and they want to bring consumers over.
So they're both making people aware of their own product.
Your point of view is the fact that open AI is going in a direction.
They could maybe get them afraid of the direction that open AI is going in.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I was just surprised that they, you know, they had,
they're going to spend this much money.
What do you mean?
They have like trillions of dollars.
I know, but it's just weird.
Like, four ads?
Like, this is kind of like it's Doomsday or something.
Like, it's like a Marvel movie.
It's just a lot of money you're spending on one game.
I guess this is just a, these are several scenes in a 30-second ad, I guess.
They might stitch them together.
Which one was the best one?
I forget which one.
Because it all looks like, it doesn't even look like real actors.
They all look like they're like AI models, right?
Yeah.
I think the most disturbing one is the therapist one.
And so if I were to run ads, I would pick the therapist one
because that's one I will not forget.
It's kind of spooky.
Yeah.
But it's also kind of talks about sex a little bit or, like, relationships.
So it's kind of weird.
I don't know.
What about you?
Did you have a favorite?
Yeah, I haven't really watched any of them.
I just wanted to post this before the show so that we can have a Super Bowl clip.
How dare you?
But I knew you watched it.
Well, I watched it.
Sometimes we roll the dice.
It's not going to be a good life.
And I rolled right here.
The next one I want to talk about is the creator of Open Claw, Peter Steinberger.
He says, I ship code.
I don't read.
Did you listen to this podcast?
I'm like halfway through.
No, I know a lot of people did.
So that's why I haven't listened to it.
He has a lot of really opinionated takes He said that he used to be one of those developers that was very like how do you say like a perfectionist when it comes to like
every line of code.
And now he feels he's just more of, like, an architect of a sort.
Like, kind of what John was saying earlier in the show,
just kind of like that.
and he has all his
claw bots kind of going at it.
It was a very interesting podcast because it kind of
lets you know where he came from, how he started,
a lot of the different kind of
avenues he could have went developing
but the fact that this was the thing that actually went
viral, I thought that was interesting.
Have you heard any, have you seen any of his talks or
paid attention to what he's been saying, Keon?
He's from Vienna, by the way, too.
I find, I mean, most people are so obsessed with this thing right now,
you know, I kind of get it second, third hand,
and it's fairly well distilled into, like, the main points of what is going on.
I'm more interested in the architecture of, like, Open Claw itself
rather than, like, who this guy is and what he thinks.
And the architecture is really interesting.
and so
yeah but
I have seen
a little bit
yeah he says this one he keeps
reiterating on was the close the loop
point he says AI agents
must be able to verify their own work
computer design systems so agents can
compile, land, execute and validate
output themselves yeah he even took
a jab at that he even took a jab at the Ralph
thing the Ralph thing that was
that was you know
going on here. He was just saying that there's just so much stuff in AI right now that's just
absolute crap. He went on for a while about it in the show.
Do you have any thoughts about closing the loop? That's that sort of mindset?
Closing the loop? When it comes to agents and how they used to do things before
where it was just like next thing, next thing, next thing, and now it's just
automate, he's just automated everything.
Yeah, I think
that is kind of what
the expectation that we have,
is that they are not just
spitting out tokens, but evaluating
the output afterward.
Yeah, he's a big fan of Codex.
He thinks that's just like the more
sound,
how do you say,
I guess LLM.
And he had like a really hard opinion
on Anthropic and why he doesn't use it.
currently now, which I thought was like, wow.
But yeah, it's a really interesting conversation,
worth watching.
Are you surprised Open Claw has taken off like this again?
Look at that chart, man.
It's like, it's literally like...
Literally straight line.
Straight line up.
Yeah.
No, I guess not.
I think he's basically delivered something
that was sort of hard to do
for even a technical person in a way that
a normal person could almost
get technical results from
the project. He might also have, I don't know if,
I mean, maybe he built it such that it goes and automatically
stars its own GitHub on download or something.
I don't know, maybe that would be a nice viral
growth hack thing. It's wild, because look, he's doing it against
some of these, or I guess Codex, and then
Claudecode, and then Claudebot,
the search term is just
insane, dude.
It's pretty incredible to watch
somebody's open source project,
just from my perspective.
It's really cool to watch an open source project really gain popularity,
but I've never seen
something like this ever in my life,
where an open source project is
just not even a hockey stick. It's like a
rocket ship.
Just crazy.
I think it just shows how
underwhelming a lot of the tooling
that both Claude and OpenAI were delivering
and I guess anyone else in the ecosystem
were delivering.
They just weren't,
they were making a lot,
they were making like a lot of half decisions
and half steps and not,
it's like almost like.
They weren't having fun.
That's what I,
that's what he said.
He's like,
they weren't having fun
and I just wanted to have fun
and that's why I did it via open source.
Yeah,
I think it's almost like they had these,
this really powerful engine
but they only had like,
they hadn't made the leap
where they could put it on four wheels,
and they were trying to put it on a unicycle or something.
And he's like, here's four wheels for it,
and look what we can do with it.
Yeah.
Yeah, I thought it was a really great conversation,
worth watching.
And yeah, this guy's also just super popular now.
He's going on a lot of different shows.
Pretty interesting.
I'll be interested to see what he...
But as far as I know, he had a previous exit.
Yeah.
And so he's independently wealthy.
and yeah.
So hopefully
he keeps doing stuff.
Yeah. I think
that's all the
post. Unless you had anything else?
I wanted to talk about
Gloria. Oh, you want to
talk about that again? Well, we don't have to talk about it again.
I thought I was going to say that was my
probably going to be my other post for the week.
Let me see. Where is it? We can go down here.
Yeah.
Oh, it was the week, right?
Yeah, it was a big news item.
Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, Gloria stepped down as a maintainer of CORE.
So I think it's been five, six years maybe.
I don't actually know the date that she was added as a maintainer.
Actually, it feels very recent, but I think it might be three years.
But she had been contributing before then.
I think she got interested in contributing to CORE in like 2020.
it was made a maintainer i think in 2023 um yeah but she's now stepping away i hope i hope she's
just stepping away as you met her before i hope the nim is stepping away i did meet her um
briefly and chain code she was the first person i had a call with oh wow and and chain code to
discuss like some i think i was in the lightning class first or maybe i'm not sure but she was
schooling me on something I didn't understand. And yeah, I found her cool. And I think a lot of
her contributions to Core, as far as I know, are pretty awesome. Which, you know, they kind of
culminated in some of the mempool package. I think we did cluster mempool as part of E30.
and a lot of her work was like
that was like the
the pinnacle of that
or the
I don't know what you call
like the terminus
anyway
yeah
so we got
I think
and the charlatan was added
the week
a couple weeks before
so we still have six
maintainers
but Gloria is stepping away
yeah
I don't really have any thoughts
because this is not my part of the ecosystem that I work in,
but I would just say, like, it's, I've seen her in a few talks, like Tapcom,
and I've always heard great things about her.
I've definitely shared a couple of her videos on Stacker News before,
explaining things because I felt like she always explained it
or explained things to the plubs relatively easy,
but I guess some people feel all their way.
But, yeah, that's kind of my thoughts on it.
I don't really know what to say
yeah just
we don't know exactly
I think why she made this decision
but hopefully it wasn't
if it was because of
the hate she was kind of getting from
a certain
segment of Bitcoiners
because they perceived her as being
politically
different than they were
and because she's
a woman doesn't belong in a
maintainer list or whatever hopefully that's not the reason she went away i would just say like
that's i mean i deal with that and i think i know you deal with that like i think that's just kind
of one of those things where like that's the thing that once you get to a certain like level
or even the longer you stay in bitcoin the more that kind of kind of comes i think it was marty
that told me a long time ago that he was like that just comes in waves it'll come for a little bit
then it'll go away so you just kind of have to get used to it that was his advice to me one time
when I asked him about it.
So I think just in general,
it's just part of the job, unfortunately.
And we're dealing with money.
It sucks that Yashi had to leave But yeah that kind of my thoughts know taking heat and being a part of that because there just a lot of you know
not good people out there.
Yeah, it's hard to, I think that, you know,
for us it might be, you can have a conversation with Marty
and Marty can tell you how he feels about it.
So maybe the kind, it's like if I were,
if I had blue skin and I was a core maintainer
and everyone was making fun of me because I had blue skin,
I would have no one to talk to about how to deal with hate directed at people with blue skin
because I'm the only core maintainer with blue skin.
And so that puts you maybe at a slight disadvantage
not having more people to identify with maybe in a similar position.
like we can look to marty and more and marty will say okay you know wisely say this is just part of
being the guy and we can confirm that's true but it's hard if i'm so you're saying like she didn't
have somebody like that yeah i don't know i don't know if she had anyone who had gotten heat like
she did in the way that she did in the bitcoin ecosystem that she could kind of ask yeah talk to
and get a little gut maybe i don't know i again i don't know why she left i hope it wasn't because
of these reasons. I hope it wasn't because of, you know, I hope she just had something better
going on. But it does seem like some of the stuff that I was seeing were really bad. It was like
really harsh. And it was just like based around surface identity things from people who just don't
even understand her work at all. Or anything having to do with likely with Bitcoin other than maybe
price action.
So it's like, why do you think
you can
criticize
someone's technical ability?
I don't know.
Yeah, I don't really have any
thoughts on it, to be honest.
I mean,
it's kind of out of my...
What does Vaco always say?
It's not in my lane.
Because I've never
met her. I don't know anything.
I couldn't even tell you what she's working on, because I just
don't follow that stuff.
So that's why I don't comment on that stuff.
But yeah, it's unfortunate.
Other people don't have that kind of discernment.
Yeah, they should stay in their lane.
We've got to get vacant some of those axe threats.
Let's go back to the show here.
Yeah, I think, did you have any other ones
you want to talk about?
Or was that everything?
I think that was most of what I wanted to go over this week.
We did have one piece of meta.
This was the Markdown toolbar.
I think this was this week, right?
It might have been Saturday, I think.
So tell us about this, Keon.
Yeah, so now you have a toolbar for Markdown.
That's the big.
I could have read the title, man.
Go a little deeper.
Okay.
Let's go a little deeper.
So now you can, if you hit a button next to the upload button,
you can get yourself a little toolbar that helps you,
instructs you about how
the one instructs you. So you say like can you go
here and then you go to
discussion. There you go. You have your
little toolbar open. Oh wow.
Look at that. You know you can
write stuff in it and then you can highlight it and hit
the toolbar. Oh wow. You have this
in there now? I didn't even use this.
This is how
I've gotten accustomed to using Markdown
now. Yeah. Some people
I mean people who took
the trouble to learn Markdown they hate these
where they dislike these kind of things.
Well, I've already got used to it.
I know how to code Markdown now.
Yeah.
Pretty soon we'll have...
I guess this helps new people, I guess.
Yeah, exactly.
So a lot of people who don't struggle with it.
What are these right here?
Superscript, subscript.
Well, it shows you a little two is what it does.
So if you do superscript, it'll put it at the top.
If you do subscript, it'll put something at the bottom.
Look at that.
I like that.
Strikethrough.
So it was,
it's like,
even put the command stuff there too.
Yeah.
Or is that,
is that radio?
Is that on,
because I'm on a Mac?
Is that why it knows that?
Or I think if we're on another operating system,
it'll show a different meta key.
Interesting.
Look at you.
Oh,
that was,
this is all socks.
Oh,
look at socks being very intentional.
Pretty soon.
We should have,
we should have the actual rich editor where you don't even deal with
Markdown at all.
But this is like the next step in that.
And so it'll have a similar toolbar.
Way to go, Socks.
This is what Socks has been working on.
Let's jam.
Good job, Socks.
Good job.
Resonance was a cultural reset, Socks.
That's right at the bottom.
Yeah, that's cool.
Every time I go through Sacker News and I see a Socks post, I come here and I jam to this.
Oh, really?
Yeah, when I listen to my, listen to this when I watch and read the Sox books.
All right, that's enough of that.
Anyways.
Vibes, dude.
I think we just got copyrighted.
Hopefully that's an indie band.
We'll see.
Yeah, good stuff.
Anything else?
What else happened?
There was like some other stuff that, you know, no one cares about.
But it was just like some small improvements that collected between releases that I didn't want to announce.
So anyway, that's the release.
Good stuff.
We're going to jump into Top Cowboys.
Giddy-o.
Oh, yeehaw.
Yeehaw.
The most popular segment in Bitcoin, but slowly being overtaken by Wumble's picks, is the Top Cowboys.
John here to get too excited about this segment.
I mean, it was just too much firepower for John.
John was like, you know, I got to leave before I get to the Top Cowboy segment because I just can't.
Yeah, he's been in Bitcoin so long.
He can't really put this much.
He's never seen this many people.
He's never seen so much.
All the people that are just coming on the stream right now because of Top Cowboy segment.
Yeah, he couldn't handle it.
He doesn't want to get that popular.
Yeah.
It's okay.
We understand, John.
number one is still in hiding
we got kuba number two
I just play on a blockchain boog
grey ruby
oh I wonder if they're going to have a super bowl
listening party or something
for stacker sports
have they said anything yet
oh you mean like a watch party
yeah that'd be cool
no they don't have anything yet
I imagine they're
I don't think they're located near each other
and they have mostly
no I was thinking more like a stacker news
type of thing
I'm sure we'll have a thread, like a discussion thread.
Let's see if Great Ruby has anything going on.
I see some bets going on.
Great Ruby says, no, no, not the end of the Super Bowl.
Okay.
Well, looking forward to seeing if something happens.
Okay, cool.
We'll go into, yeah, we got Optimism, Climb the Charts, Goresby, Simple Stacker.
We got Den.
We got RealBitcoinDoggy.
Yeah.
A lot of people haven't updated their profile picture.
Are you concerned about that?
No, I'm not concerned about it, but I do feel bad about it.
What do you think that is?
I don't think they – I mean, we don't really display the profile photo anywhere.
So they just haven't noticed, you think?
I think a lot of them haven't noticed or it's, like, not worth the effort to do
because we don't display it anywhere.
Wow.
Why would you –
That's Solomon's, Toshi, Ketford, Nunya.
Yeah, even Nunya has an update.
I didn't even know we supported GIFs and the profile photos.
I guess we do.
Look at Chaotic Heavy.
See how it is?
Is it moving?
44.
It's not moving, is it?
It is.
You're blind.
I'm pretty blind.
Oh, it is.
It's a Minesweeper.
Is it?
Cool.
Yeah, from the...
From the game?
From the game, yeah.
Yeah.
I didn't know that.
Yeah.
Let's see here.
We got Plot Poet, Matt's Fang, Axe, Justin Shock, Chuck.
Justin Shockley replaced this photo.
We got Cheese Over...
Cheese Creator.
That's an interesting stacker name.
I'm here to stack sets and grate cheese.
And I'm all out of cheese.
Oh.
Wow.
See, this is the stuff that the stream is just going off the rails right now.
Because I saw that.
Oh, yeah.
That was...
Yeah, the crowd was going wild.
Sure.
Oh, man, dude.
Okay, I got to stop.
This is just getting...
This is getting too much.
We're going to jump into the comments from last week where they either grill us, hail us, or something else.
We'll see.
Let's see what we got this week.
Where is it at?
I keep missing it.
There's just so many posts coming in.
Make something bots want.
It's right there.
It's right under 35 million.
There it goes.
Okay, cool.
I found it.
Yeah.
Top comment from YouTube last week was on the Ray Dalio thing.
I forgot to mention this one kind of blew up last week for Stagger News Live There a lot of people watching it But he said look around at our society Isn this blankety hole of a country proof we are circling the drain
Election system is effed.
Monetary system is effed.
The culture is effed.
America's cooked.
And then we had another guy underneath that says,
that's only every Democrat city, LOL, not one blue city is prosperous right now.
got a kick on the pattern recognition.
Key on, I say to you,
are we cooked?
Are we cooked?
Do you think
G1504 is saying this?
Again, I think Dalio
is right about
the trajectory of things, and I don't
think it means the United States is cooked. It just
means it's, you know,
we're not going to be the world power anymore,
and then
it's going to suck for a few years
when the currency actually collapses.
But does that mean we're cooked?
I don't think so.
I don't think it means that, you know, you need to get a bomb shelter and stuff like that.
Yeah, I think they should just move to Texas.
Just move to Texas.
It'll be fine.
We have a life raft called Texas.
The next one we had from Undiscipline.
He said, I'm with you, Carr.
Do research on willing, paid humans rather than animals.
A lot of that stuff ends up being inapplicable to humans anyway.
There you go.
Me and Undiscipline agree on this.
Ah, that should be pretty.
I mean, we do have a stacker, level 99 stacker, or stacker level 99.
That did, that was their job.
Oh, they took the medicine.
They took medicine and got paid for it.
They would do these human trials.
But that was after they had already done animal trials.
So I wonder what that looks like when.
I think they just go straight to human trials, I think.
I mean, especially if you're paying them.
Like, I mean, let's eat the animals, I would say, you know.
To eat them?
The dogs and the cats?
No, those should be pets.
But in some countries, they're eatable.
But yeah, we should just do humans.
I'm surprised Bill Gates is not all over this.
Paying humans?
Yeah, paying humans.
He's a big champion of...
What is...
Yeah.
He's a big champion, I think, of Russian hookers as well.
I have Steve Balls.
I thought we were going to go up.
So I was talking about it.
Dosing his wife with antibiotics.
None of that made on Stacker News this week.
I didn't see any.
It's kind of old.
I mean, it's kind of just lame.
It's kind of, it's like, it's just like, I don't, what are you supposed to say about it?
I mean, it's good to talk about, you know, in your own little circle, but it's not on the internet.
I would say, but you see some people talking about it on the internet.
Yeah.
It's kind of an ugly reality.
but I was surprised by the Bill Gates stuff.
Keon, what are you doing this weekend?
What am I doing?
I don't know what I'm doing exactly.
Later, Jimmy.
Bye, Jimmy.
Cool glasses.
Oh, yeah.
Look at those glasses.
Jimmy was telling me about a podcast that he listens to about Chinese-Americans.
What did they say?
I guess he was trying to orange pill, one of them,
but it talks about how Asian-Americans were kind of left out of
but they were left out of the
liberal side of the political spectrum
like they weren't given minority status and their identity wasn't protected
and so I guess there was like a huge, there's been like a huge flip
where Asians went relatively conservative
and I guess there's like somewhat of a cultural movement within Asian Americans
and Jimmy was telling me about, anyway, I don't know what I'm doing this weekend
I might put up some of the Scoresby's posters, I need to grid them on a wall
Oh, you're going to do that.
I might do that.
I might also mess around with Open Claw, which I haven't.
I've mostly just been reading about it.
Yeah.
I know that all these guys are like gaga over.
I think Carr said this morning, it's a game changer, probably like 50 times.
So it's a game changer.
And then he would say something else that happened.
It's a game changer.
Hey, a lot of things are changing.
Dude, I'm actually incredibly bullish on where this is going.
And I saw a talk with Sam Altman, and he mentioned OpenClaw like twice.
And even he said was like, no, like what we're moving towards is an operating system,
a new sort of operating system.
We just need to get the security stuff in place is kind of what he said.
I'm kind of probably butchering that.
But, yeah, I think it is game-changing.
I do think the world is changing right now.
And I don't think anybody's going to be left out or anything like that.
I think the tools are going to get easier.
But right now, the people that are like the hackers and the builders and stuff like that are playing with it.
I think it's just, yeah.
I think it's true.
But I think it's accessible to nearly everyone.
And we've seen how popular it is.
So I'd guess.
Yeah, that's what he said.
It fills in the bread.
It's priced in.
Yeah, it's cool.
Yeah.
And, like, I don't have to pay anything extra.
I have a bunch of old computers around that I can just throw OpenClaw on
and use Tailscale and stuff like that.
So I just, to me, it just feels like it's another cool.
It's interesting for me, like, because I have an IT background.
So, like, that to me is, like, kind of interesting aspect of it.
Kind of feels like spinning up a server again for a reason.
And that's what I like about it.
And I got it going on right now.
Yeah, it's a bit like when Bitcoiners were excited about setting up Bitcoin.
nodes. We were always like, what can we put it? What do we have a spare computer to put a Bitcoin
node on? And now most, most Bitcoiners probably don't even run nodes and I've given up on
caring, but it's kind of cool that people have a reason to run something themselves anymore and
not just have cloud daddies run computers for them. So yeah, it's pretty cool. Cause you,
yeah. Like right now we're trying to build a watch here. And so trying to figure that out.
We are?
Yeah, me and my bots.
Your bots?
My bots.
I've noticed you call, are they he's?
They have a gender, right?
And they're boys?
No, they're just bots.
I think I'm calling them they.
I'll even talk to them like a regular guy.
I'll be like, oh, man, that's awesome.
Or like, boss.
You know, just say stuff like that.
No, you're listening.
You're like, I don't know what he's doing.
Oh, we got it.
So we spun up a new one.
We spun up Kid A2.
And he's just off the rails, man.
This guy cooks, but he cooks sloppily.
We got to get him in line.
We don't work like that.
Me and the other kid, eh?
Yeah.
It's interesting because they definitely take on a personality if you let them.
And I haven't really taught them anything yet.
So I need to ring them in a little bit.
Carl's got some Tamagotchis, dude.
You're a bot man.
So I'm trying to do that, too.
So I have an old Kindle.
So there's a way you can turn that into a Tamagotchi.
So I'm going to try to figure that out, too.
So you can see both of them.
I need to see both of them working.
Oh, like at their computers?
well I want to make a Tamagotchi so I can see
like him actually so I can see him
next to like you want to be able to
visualize kid A and kid A too
I need that
makes it feel more real for me
do you want it to feel more real?
yeah in a way I do like I want it to feel
kind of like magical a little bit
I don't know bro do you I mean it definitely
I agree with the magical
I'm pushing to get already I have it pushing to my personal
I agree you want the magical feeling but I think anthropomorphizing
them too much might be sketch
It might be.
We'll start with the Kindle.
So, like, there's still going to be, like, some grayscale stuff there.
So they're not going to feel too real.
They're going to feel very, like, you're inside the Matrix still.
Dude, what if one of them dies, dude?
No.
They can go offline, though.
A little funeral?
Anyways.
Anyway, it's an interesting time.
Interesting time.
Bury him in Minecraft.
But, yeah, I'm going to do that and watch the Super Bowl this weekend.
That's what I'm going to do.
Oh, yeah, it's the Super Bowl.
Yeah, it's going to be a good one.
Who are you rooting for?
I don't want the Patriots to win.
They win too much, right?
They win too much.
How many Super Bowls rings do they have?
Too many.
Eight? Nine?
Somewhere in there.
I don't want them.
Okay.
I would not be surprised, though, if they do win, though.
Do you think they will win?
I won't be surprised.
I was kind of rooting for the Bears.
I wouldn't be surprised if one of them wins.
I was kind of rooting for the Bears just because it was pretty magical
following them all during the postseason.
They always had a cool vibe, the Bears.
The Bears.
Have they been in a Super Bowl in recent times?
Not that I know of.
I feel like this is a more stacker sports pod that we're entrenching on,
but I would imagine maybe once at least.
I've been trying to get a little more up to date.
I did watch highlights from both of the championship games.
Yeah.
Trying to be like, okay, what's going on?
And that gave me a little bit of context, and they're highlights from playoffs.
I watched most of the playoffs this year,
but I didn't watch any of the regular season,
but I watch most of the playoffs for the NFL.
Okay.
It's good stuff.
Cool.
Yep.
Stackers, have yourself a great weekend.
Keon!