Thank you.
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 carl with the movie of a key on how's it going it's going okay um yeah it's been a
Busy day.
I feel it.
You usually spend all your Friday energy in the morning.
Yeah.
Let me move this over.
Oh, no.
Wrong way.
There we go.
Yeah.
It's been a busy day.
What's been going on with you this week?
I shaved my beard.
Oh, yeah.
I totally forgot about that.
Yeah, I donated it to Asian Men in Need.
Yeah.
How do you feel?
I feel
I feel like a pussy
is what I feel like
why does that make you feel like that?
I don't know because I like my beard
it's like gross
and I just feel like
it's kind of like wearing this gross thing
on my face
and it's kind of nice
it's kind of nice to have
it's like a statement piece
it's like I'm gross
it makes you look younger
you look way younger
yeah the beard will
it's a mask
is really what a beard is
that's kind of why I like a beard
I mean not at your guys' level
you guys have like a normal one
but when I have my beard
all that people see really is a beard
yeah
I need to get a haircut and beard trim
how about you?
you're going to get a haircut?
I need to do it this week
at some point this weekend
Do you go to, like, a certain guy?
Are you, like, friends with him?
I usually go to the, what's the one down south?
It's called, it's the one that Nick goes to, too.
Yeah, what's the one, what's the name of it?
Floyd's?
Is it Floyd's, I think?
Yeah, I like going to Floyd's.
It's just really expensive.
Oh, do they, like, give you, like, a hand massage while you're getting hair?
No, they just do, like, a full, it's just a good cut.
I don't know how to explain it.
It's just a good cut.
One time I went to Ashley's barber, or not barber, she has like a stylist,
and they gave me like these wax gloves.
And it was like, I don't know, it was nice.
It was very, is that what that's like when you go to your place?
No, like the ones that they have like in, like the ones that are like the Mexican ones,
dude, those are nice.
Because they'll use like a real razor blade, and they'll just like do the,
Like, it feels really, really good.
But the ones that they have, like, at Floyd's and some of these Americanized places,
they're good enough.
It's, like, it's good enough.
It's just not all the way there.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah.
They're not, like, Tia's haircut.
Yeah, like, when we went to Mexico or the Yucatan, like, I got, like, a haircut.
I think Topher got one, too.
Like, we got haircuts, and it felt really good afterwards.
Just because they just do it up right.
Yeah.
I mean, mowing all those lawns, dude.
Imagine that.
It probably translates to a small scale.
If you've never seen this crazy show, it's called Stacker News Live.
We cover the top three stories on Stacker.news every week here at Friday at 4 p.m.
We started a little late today because it was running into some time.
But check out the YouTube channel.
People keep subscribing.
Oh, we reached 700 videos.
Look at that.
Oh, dang.
That a solid number 700 Dang have we done Oh yeah I guess Wombo done all the clips and stuff so that makes sense It a big day It a big day Big day and stacking his life history
There's a lot of clips this week. I think the most watched one from last week was the block one.
Everybody wanted to hear our take on it, which is kind of surprising.
I think they probably unintentionally heard our take on it.
I mean, because the other videos, they didn't really see anything, but I think everybody wanted to hear.
I think everybody likes to hear everybody's take on stuff that's going on in the big clinic.
Yeah, we're like just normal, you know, losers.
Who doesn't want to hear what losers are?
Well, you're a winner.
I'm a loser.
I'd like to be a winner anyway.
I'm just messing around.
Cool.
It's hard to be a winner without a beard.
It's working.
I was trying to see if it's a thing.
Cool.
Let's jump into the five, three top stories of the week.
The first number three top story this week is, let me go back here, is BTC++ Floripa,
2026 hackathon megathor.
This is from Alex Luland in the Bitcoin++ territory, February 28th, 15 comments, $6,462.
Key on.
What's this?
Yeah.
So this, what was it?
The exploit version of Bitcoin++ was held in Floripa.
I think last year it was like a hack and hang, more like casual kind of like a meetup where Bitcoiners hung out on a resort.
I think they probably gave talks and just kind of networked last year.
But it looks like this year they wanted to have more of a theme.
And the theme this year was exploits.
so
Alex Lewin
hackathon lord
in Bitcoin
probably one of the most winningest
Bitcoin hackathon participants
he runs
Bitcoin++
has he beaten you before Topher?
in a hackathon?
Alex?
he's beaten everyone
in a hackathon at one point
but you probably beat him at one point too
I would imagine
yeah
Do you want me to?
Okay, I didn't know if everybody heard him.
Yeah, so they hosted a thread here,
and some of the people who entered in the hackathon posted into this thread,
and I think their plan was to have a community-awarded hackathon prize
scoped to who got zapped the most in this thread.
but we can if you go to loot.fund which is oh wait which one if you click on one of those
loot.fund links like to see where the submission link is there where it's you go down there's a
link it's under submission it says submission oh this one right here yeah if you click that
Just X out of that and go to their homepage.
Here?
Yeah, just go, yeah.
And then if you go, if you scroll down, I think it has their hackathon.
They're on the list somewhere.
It's like a, appears to be a vibed project by Lewin, but it's cool.
He's like created a home for Bitcoin hackathons.
I don't know where, where I found it before.
Maybe I'll browse it.
Loot.fund.
It should be on there somewhere.
I think it's this one.
I think you have to sign in, though.
No, I was able to get on it without it.
Okay.
Explore hackathons.
There's, like, a button on the page.
It kind of blends in.
Okay, let me see here.
Anyway, it has a list of all the entries,
and the winner for this year's...
Oh, this one here.
exploit Florepa hackathon was Minesploit.
Oh, this one right here.
Yeah, I see it.
There you go.
Yeah.
So that was the number one winner, Minesploit.
It's like a REPL in a library that allows you to execute known vulnerabilities against
Stratum servers and Bitcoin nodes.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's what it does, and it's pretty cool.
And then the second place winner was Local Probe.
I guess Firefox allows websites, when you're browsing a website, it allows them to probe
the loopback interface for any open ports.
And so if you were running a website, for any of your users using Firefox, you can more
less to term assuming you're using default ports running your Bitcoin core
node tomorrow or a lightning node you can determine that that user is a
Bitcoin user which is pretty bad so like if you're running a Bitcoin node on your
local machine and you visit websites and Firefox those websites have the ability
to determine that you're running a Bitcoin node on that machine it's kind
of and this is like proof of concept apparently other browsers don't have this
vulnerability. It's just a Firefox thing for some reason. That was the second winner. And then the
third winner was C12D, which is a Bitcoin Core visualization tool. You hook it up to your
Bitcoin Core, like you would do with mempool space, mempool.space. But in this case,
it's a little it's like more visual less transaction focused more about charts and
it also has a built-in chat bot to it I don't know if it's using a local model
or reaches out to a provider you probably specify the provider I guess but
you can ask about the charts you can ask about your Bitcoin nodes logs things
like that which is pretty neat and then there were a bunch of other entries that
didn't win or get placed in the top three,
but check out loot.sunds.
I think it says winner on this one, too.
Or no, hang on a second.
That was not...
Yeah, there's a few winners.
I guess they had sponsors who gave specific awards out.
Oh, okay.
What's this one?
Alpine Labs.
uses a model specifically designed for
vulnerability or I guess finding vulnerabilities, scanning for them.
Cool stuff.
Cool.
So I guess I'm confused.
So are these the same ones that we're seeing in the loot thing?
I think so.
I think they asked participants to post here as well
so that people could zap them to potentially win a community-funded event.
Okay, gotcha.
Well, cool stuff.
Community choice award thing.
Yeah, cool stuff.
Check it out.
It's on Loot, and it's in Snacker News Thread here on the Bitcoin++ territory.
Let's jump into the next top story this week.
It's going to be what's driving Bitcoin businesses and merchants adoption in 2026.
This is from Sopratic for the Agoria Territory.
20 comments, 13,400 stats.
Keon, what's this?
Yeah, so River released their reports,
these reports that get shared around a lot in Bitcoin.
And Sopratic parted them out, I think, across three posts,
but this was the one that got zapped the most.
This one's about Bitcoin business as a merchant adoption.
So River got some stats on this stuff.
I think a lot of it from btcmap.org.
But in the first graph chart that you showed,
merchant adoption, according to btcmap.org,
grew by 74% in 2005.
Or not 2000, 2025.
You can see where Square introduced,
or Block introduced their Bitcoin stuff on it
at the end there of 2025.
North America leads in merchant adoption.
in 2025. And I think it grew by 192% year over year, adding over 4000 new locations that accept
Bitcoin. And then Africa was, it's not the graph that we're showing here, but Africa was right
behind them at 116%, adding over 1000 new merchants. And then Asia, South America,
Asia, Oceania.
What is Oceania?
Do you know?
Are you a guy that knows the things?
I don't know what Oceania is, unfortunately.
Maybe it's some part of Europe.
And then, yeah.
Anyway, yeah, so we're winning, sort of, maybe,
according to bcmaps.org.
I think Jason B would disagree.
And then, yeah, I would guess a lot of it is in South Africa.
So it's probably banging there.
What else do we got in this one?
Oh, businesses holding Bitcoin is another interesting set, I guess.
River itself, they grew business accounts by 116% in 2025.
Biggest industry type was real estate, followed by mining and then consulting and software.
with legal lawyers for some reason.
They do not hold Bitcoin.
Maybe they know something we don't.
Yeah, the full report is here
if you want to check it out, Stackers.
Pretty cool.
I pulled out some other stats from there.
Pretty thorough.
I had a chance to read through it about two weeks ago
or whenever it was first released.
I forget how long ago it was at this point.
It was earlier this week, I think.
And then I saw Lee Shemin on CNBC.
I was watching that too.
Did a really good job to kind of show.
It's just, I think it's so refreshing seeing somebody new
talking about Bitcoin in an intelligent way.
So it was cool seeing him on CNBC talking about Bitcoin.
But definitely if you haven't gone through this
and you're a builder or an operator in the space,
definitely check it out.
It's really thorough and it's just like,
makes you have hope.
Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of other stuff in the report that wasn't in the specific post.
Oh, that's your trick.
Nodes up a lot.
Hash rate up a lot.
U.S. is now 40% of hash rate, followed by Russia at 72%, China at 12%.
And then Paraguay.
Paraguay?
I don't know how you say it, but they have 4% of hash rate,
which I don't hear enough about coming out of Paraguay.
but they're kind of a big leader.
I guess only 34 countries have more than a tenth of a percent of hash rate
and then only 12 countries have more than 1%
and it looks like mining pool distribution has flattened out a bit
and before we had more than 50% of miners were mining on the top three pools
and now it's a little over 50% rather than like 80%.
Other stuff like, yeah, above it was, I guess,
I think we're doing 25% the volume of Visa,
but we're still at, Fedwire still does 300 times the volume that Bitcoin does,
but we're catching up with Visa, which is kind of neat.
Yeah, this whole tech is bullish, dude.
Although Visa is dying, if you believe Nick Carter.
This is really good stuff.
I mean, it's just kind of what we need to see at the beginning of the year.
Yeah, businesses are almost matching ETFs and funds, which is kind of cool.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, then they have the notable institutions allocated to Bitcoin and Bitcoin ETFs.
Where's blood blob on that chart?
We're not an institution.
Let me see here.
You're an institution to me.
Thank you.
Yeah, that's pretty cool, man.
It's really good stuff.
Anything else to account for you here?
Nope.
Oh, yeah, so this is where they were getting the data from.
from a lot of companies in the space.
Oh, yeah.
Lighting stuff is hard to gather,
and so they have to ask very large network participants for data.
It's good stuff.
It just informs a lot of people.
Yeah, I shared it with Brandon,
who does not, you know, too much in our kind of thing,
but even he found it kind of alarming, too.
Found what alarming?
Just like how bullish this is.
Alarming in a good way.
In a good way, yeah.
Cool stuff.
Let's jump into the number one top story this week.
Let's see.
The number one this week is personal sats inflation.
Part four, February 2026.
This is a Bitcoin beginner's territory.
March 2nd from Unboiled.
10 comments, 13,000 sats.
What's this?
Yeah, so Unboiled has been doing these personal stats inflation posts, I think, beginning in 2025.
And this is the fourth version.
Hi, Oliver.
Hi.
So I guess he started doing this installment because he's been spending and replacing for a long time with his wife.
I mean, spending your Bitcoin and then buying new Bitcoin to replace it.
So he's helping out merchants without depleting his stack, basically, or helping get Bitcoin out there in the hands of people without depleting his stack.
Yeah, but he was realizing that he was, at least when Bitcoin's price was rising, that he was getting more goods for less Bitcoin.
And so he wanted to start tracking how that changes over time.
And so as he spends, or they spend their Bitcoin, they track how much Bitcoin it costs for, say, electricity or fuel or milk or phone data.
And so he has a few of these like CPI or whatever the equivalent of Bitcoin would be for his own purchases.
And unfortunately, for most of the time he's been doing these posts, Bitcoin's price has been going down relative to, I guess, other assets.
And so it looks like Bitcoin is experiencing or things priced in Bitcoin are experiencing inflation.
So as this fourth one here, it shows that he spent 12% more in sats for electricity in January and 28% more in February.
And 4% more for fuel in January and 27% more in February.
they say they're
I guess they spend
the spring
South Africa spring and summer
they spend
their time in the year there
and then
when I guess winter hits South Africa
they migrate
somewhere else
where they can't spend as much Bitcoin
but
they're going to try to do
I think he's still going to track
and then try to do a conversion
into sats
what else did he say in there
Yeah, he ended with the end right here.
He said, we might also see Sats deflation next time around.
Only time will tell, and I'll be here to tell the tale.
So it looks like he has other links to this as well, too.
He hasn't been posting them.
He's been posting them as Bitcoin's been dipping.
And there's a part two.
And that's the part one.
Pretty interesting.
Interesting.
Cool.
What did the stacker say?
The top stacker said, Scoresby said,
do you notice the inflation trend influencing your spending habits?
Thanks for these updates.
He said, no, it doesn't for two reasons.
First and foremost, we live a frugal, sort of minimalist lifestyle anyway.
We're nomadic, six to nine months per year.
It sounds like he has a pretty good thing going.
Cool stuff.
Anything else on this one?
you want to share what anything else you want to share on this one oh no i'm okay
okay that's all the top stories this week let's jump into
wumble's picks wumble's picks wumble's pip pip pip pip pip pip pip pip pip pip pip
try to do something different every time um mc car this one is a really spicy one from wumble
So I'm glad.
I would have not chose this.
I would have stayed away from it.
Stayed far away.
But I don't know if you're ready for it, Keon,
but Trump orders federal agencies to immediately seize using Anthropic.
He says, this is from CJE.
He says, this is a big one.
Anthropic was getting a lot of money from the federal government for Claude,
and now it's over.
Anthropic is going to have an interesting time raising money
since they chose to cut themselves off from the massive revenue streams.
uh kian did you see all this taking place this this week i think it was this week or last week
and i forget i try to stay out of anything that involves politics usually uh but i saw the
headlines for this and i read it was wumbo's picks and i can't i can't fight with wumbo's
picks so i went and did a little bit of research behind this and uh it has a lot i mean do you see
all the comments from the snackers i mean it's obviously something the snackers were
yeah discussing this week this was around the climax i guess of what was going on i i think what
happened was that the government had been using anthropics tools for yeah uh you know the purpose
the purposes that it wants to use anthropics tools and i think it at but at some point they
wanted to be free of anthropics terms of service and in anthropics terms of service they state that
you're not allowed to use their tool for surveilling, I think,
surveilling general populace and killing innocent civilians.
And I guess the government or the Trump administration said that
we just want terms that allow us to use it for all lawful purposes.
We don't want a private company dictating terms to us
about what the government is allowed to do.
And Anthropic didn't concede.
and so there was this back and forth
over the course of
I guess a few weeks maybe
a few weeks it felt like it happened
almost immediately right?
I would guess it was happening behind the scenes before it started
leaking out
and eventually
eventually the negotiations
ended and Trump
declared Anthropik
a supply chain threat
which probably prevents
Anthropik
So they terminated their contract with Anthropic.
They gave Anthropic $200 million like they gave, I think,
a few other AI companies last year to partner with them on AI stuff.
So they terminated that contract in addition to labeling them
a national security supply chain risk,
which I think probably prevents their use in any government entity
or related government entity.
And that was the consequences of them not conceding.
And then shortly after that, OpenAI announced that they had partnered.
Yeah, it's right here.
This is what, oh, that's not it.
This is the one right here.
Let's see if I can find it.
Here it goes.
Sam Altman went on Twitter and said,
tonight we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models
and their classified network.
Yeah.
And he goes on saying some other things.
Let get to what Wumble said He had a question around this because to make sure we get this question right he said will being on the government naughty list significantly affect anthropics future growth
kian i go to you first it's it's kind of hard it's kind of hard to tell uh they might be okay
you can you can like probably game at a scenario where this doesn't really matter much for them
um but i would guess i don't know when i started to like think about it more i concluded that it's
probably actually quite harmful to their business. On one point, AI regulations. So we expect those
to eventually come down. And if Anthropic is seen as hostile to the government or labeled hostile
to the government, that label sticks, I imagine they'll see more regulations than someone like
OpenAI or other providers will, who are cooperating with government as a retaliatory measure.
So that's one part of where I think it will affect their business negatively.
Another one is that the government outlays, like federal spending, is like 20% of GDP.
So that's 20% of GDP that cannot be allocated to Anthropic now because of this label.
And then that's not even including other government entities that are downstream.
like I think 20% of GDP is also healthcare.
And something like 50% of healthcare
is financed by governments.
And so you imagine that healthcare is probably not,
so it's like, it almost like cuts off
like 50% of their potential customer base
that is like corporate government related.
So that's maybe bad for their business and maybe that,
but I think the biggest reason why this is bad
for their business is data access.
you know, fewer customers. To feed the models, you mean? To feed the models. Yeah, these things
are extremely data hungry. And so they're now cut off from like 50% of use cases, let's say,
that are maybe productive because they're cut off of 50% of the economy. That's, you know,
a lot of data they don't get in addition to the government has probably more access to private
databases that no one has access to except them. And now they don't get access to those either.
And explicitly, most of the big AI companies were given access to a lot of private scientific data sets that the government had and that weren't publicly available as part of some deal last year, Project Genesis, I think it's called.
And I'm guessing they'll lose access to that data as well.
So they'll be at a data disadvantage.
They'll be at a financial disadvantage.
They'll be at a regulatory disadvantage.
I would guess, yes, bad.
My conclusion is, yes, bad for their business.
But an alternative take is that they will have to diverge significantly from whatever the easy growth path that open AI will have.
And perhaps there's something very interesting along the alternative growth path.
Maybe they'll be forced to make their models smarter rather than larger, maybe.
Maybe that actually yields a product that is better.
It might grow the intelligence of their product while their business maybe is somewhat not growing.
I think you covered pretty much everything.
I think the other thing I would just add is obviously they're probably going to have to pivot to like one or two things.
If they're going to go this route, they're going to have to go down the consumer route.
You could probably see that and they're going to have to really lean into that.
I just don't know who, like you're going to have to have those big chunks of money coming in.
And it begs, I mean, it was in the comments, but it kind of makes you question who else are they going to go to now?
What other countries are they going to go to now?
I mean, when you look at it from like a national security perspective, it just, there's yellow flags all over this, if you're that guy.
But those are the only two things I would add based on what Wumble was asking.
The other question he had was around, question two, he says,
Is ChatGPT doing the best thing for stockholders by accepting the government's demands?
Keon, what do you think?
Is Sam Altman doing the right thing?
Yeah, I mean, I think it is the right thing for shareholders.
I think that is probably the financially smartest move, as we've just discussed.
I think it harms Anthropoc quite a bit to have ended this partnership with the government.
you know I think the question is trying to get at was Sam Altman motivated by financial gain
more than he was like doing the right thing I mean I obviously don't know but my limited
understanding of Sam Altman is that he is extremely ambitious and the type of ambitious
where all things are equal he I would guess he would do the right thing like he's not he's not
a bad person when all things are equal but if if you pose a scenario well he'll win a little bit
by being a little bit evil i think he will take the win and accept being evil that's my read of
sam altman so is this is this maybe a self-interested move uh yeah maybe um but they were already giving
them they were already working with them so is anthropic yeah that's where this kind of thing
kind of that's where it's a little bit boxy there it just doesn't quite fit it just feels off a bit
uh we won't know until it's later disclosed but i would imagine though that i would imagine just
based off of if you follow if you if you take him at his word if you take the guy who was uh
what's the name of the guy from anthropic uh a motor yeah if you take him at his word and he's
really concerned about everything i think the only thing that you could quite possibly be concerned
about the government having
AI models would be
are they
leveraging it to
basically eliminate human beings, right?
And
who is actually making that function
happen? Is there
discernment between the model
and the human
that then completes that action?
Or is it the human
or is it just the model that's completing that
action when it comes to eliminating
human beings?
So I think if you take him at what he said and that's what he's concerned about, then at that point, it makes it a really layered issue that's political.
I mean, you name it, it's all in there.
But at the same time, you are protected by the United States government.
You are reaping the fruits of its military by being stateside.
But so I just feel like you said earlier, it just opens up an entire can of worms that you didn't have to possibly open up.
Well, I think they might, I mean, if I'm a Modi, if I'm trying to think game app being a Modi, I think, you know, one of the, you know, he might, I think he's a, he left open AI, I think, because he had ethical disagreements with the way Sam Watman was running research and stuff.
but I think
also you can imagine
even as maybe a business person
you imagine that something bad
happens with one of these models where we have
like
what was the dude who went
away to prison?
It was like from Denmark. Assange.
We have an Assange like leak video
of OpenAI
an OpenAI turret
gunning down
and it's in civilians.
What happens to OpenAI?
eye on that situation are they are they actually protected like if that if that's anthropics
yeah that's an interesting use in a scenario right like you can imagine yeah i think i think
this is where it kind of comes down to like yeah i feel like we're they're already they're already
headed on that path to having a conversation with congress and the senate because there needs to be
some sort of like ai eliminating humans law right like we can't have robots on the streets just like
killing humans just like autonomously um that's what i believe i mean i don't want somebody i care
about that's you know to get basically killed by by a bot um that has no that it has no no one's
controlling it nor does it have like a thing but that's what i'm saying it's a layered issue man
this is all this all like will play out over the course of the next few years i would imagine
yeah i think it was um who was it it was justin shock that shared a palmer lucky tweet yeah i
would have not want to be any of these two right now this is not a good spot to be in dude imagine
being in that seat and having to make this decision right like i don't pity these guys
having to decide even on the government side either like this is just not a good spot to be in
but palmer lucky's point is that the government kind of exists to make these layered decisions and
these layered issues. It's like Palmer
Lucky's position. I mean, that sounds great
on a piece of paper, but...
Yeah, I don't...
I get what he's saying, because it uses the analogy
of someone who's selling the government missiles.
It's not like the missile manufacturer
gets to tell the government how they use the missiles.
And so this is where I go back to
are we leveraging AI
as a tool, or are we leveraging AI
to complete tasks for us?
Especially when it comes to
humans that
possibly could die at the hand of that.
and they'll need to figure that out.
I don't have the answers for that,
but like,
to me,
that's the biggest,
that's the biggest part there.
It's just like,
how loose are these,
these bots
with everything else?
But I guess these guys
will know more than we will.
I don't know.
That was like,
in Amadi's,
like for some of the,
some of the PR they did,
or maybe it's a legitimate response
was like,
we don't,
you know,
the truth is we don't trust these models
to be used in these applications.
We think,
we know they make mistakes.
They have error rates
and we don't want to be responsible
for people getting killed or people getting surveilled or whatever.
As a result of the government's misuse of these models
and not paying attention to our...
Yeah, and so like Sam Altman, he said it here,
we are asking the DOW to offer these same terms to all AI companies,
which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept.
We expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away
from legal and governmental actions towards reasonable agreements.
we remain committed to serve all humanity
as best we can.
The world is complicated, messy,
and sometimes a dangerous place.
Well, ShockNet thinks that this is somewhat staged.
What do you mean?
Like, I think, you know, it's plausible
that this deal, this like more strategic partnership
happened between OpenAI and the government
to kind of push out Anthropic
and claim that it was really Anthropics.
That's like shadow play.
Anthropics decision.
It's not the government playing favorites.
It's Anthropic being anti-American
or not trusting the government.
That's what happened.
It isn't open AI and Trump getting along really well.
I think it's one of those things where you actually,
that actually makes a lot of sense
when you look at it from a 50-yard stadium point of view
because you need to have this public discourse
because it's only going to get even more.
Yeah, and when you think of it like that,
it's kind of like, well, let's just do it now.
Let's just have this public discourse
and get everybody to weigh in on where we stand on this
and then let the Senate hearing because, yeah,
that kind of makes sense too
because they're not going to stop doing this.
So discourse needs to commence, I guess.
It's interesting now.
That's an interesting take for sure.
Yeah, I don't know.
yeah, Justin follows all the
politics stuff.
Yeah, and he's always got that
sneak tip.
Yeah, that was Womble's
picks. Really spicy one
from Womble.
We answered his question, right? Yeah, I guess we answered both
of his questions. Let's jump
into
your...
Let's jump into the other AI stuff. So the other one
was PlebDevs.
He released an AI course this week.
I've been watching
it for
trying to work my way through it
I'm like an hour in
because the first lesson is so long
you're already an agentic
engineer as you call yourself
I am kind of an agentic
engineer at this point
I highly recommend
if you're somebody who's using Claude
you want to go to the next level
using codex
I don't want to humble brag
but I'm there now
Best practices.
And it's all thanks to this
Club Devs AI course.
So if you're interested
in learning about this stuff,
I would highly jump on it right now.
Because he goes through,
he's really thorough, man.
I told him earlier,
it's kind of dense,
but I feel like he's...
He plays a lot faster right now, right?
Yeah.
It's better to be dense
than not have it in there.
Do you want to say anything about this?
Give me feedback, yeah.
I mean, I agree.
Can you, can you, yeah.
Cara has given me very good, what's up people?
What's up Austin, Tom?
What's up, you see me?
I'm right here.
Yeah, Cara has given me really good feedback that it's pretty dense.
But it's good in chunks though.
It's good, you know, it makes me inspire, instead of like bike shedding and being like,
oh, I need to make it perfect, like I'm more of like, it's inspired me,
take these foundational concepts and just explain them better again and more in simple content.
and this is the long form super dense version so great place to start yeah heck yeah yeah good job
you've released two episodes and more coming uh yeah the intro then okay next first few i mean
are our like just the first two lessons are like three hours so yeah i would say this first one that
he released here the second this one that we're watching right now for somebody like me who's a
little bit slower than the average bear i would say like this is at least two or three sits
before you get like okay i had enough yeah but it's good in a good way though it's not like bad
it's like uh you know what i mean kian you get it yeah for bears you mean laurie large hairy men
yes that's what i meant uh yeah anyways check it out when's this next one getting released austin
uh monday oh wow so you're gonna drop another one on monday nice i'm gonna watch this tomorrow
I need to finish.
I got like an hour left.
Coming soon.
Stay tuned.
At the same time, AI guides are dropping on the, you know,
your guide guide.
Okay.
Set up a llama, set up a new code, private search.
Awesome.
Thanks, Austin.
Heck, yeah.
Just wanted to share that.
That was like one of the big things that got released here in Austin this week.
The other one was Darth Goin.
I wanted to share this one because I think that's an interesting thing.
Oh, right.
Yeah, so apparently Matt Albergore posted this on March 4th.
It had 74 comments.
And he said,
A response to DarthCoin on ideological purity in Bitcoin.
He said,
As some of you may know, my company PayPerQ.ai accepts Bitcoin along with altcoins, stables, and even credit cards.
Came across this today by DarthCoin, who regularly throws shade on Bitcoin companies that do not pass the purity test.
This was my response to him.
I hope we can drum up some great conversations from here.
And he posted this one.
I guess this is a tweet.
Or no, this is a Noster note.
Yeah, then he kind of goes through all of it,
basically saying that being ideological driven is a terrible business model.
And pay-per-queue holds a Bitcoin treasury,
accepted a third of its investment in Bitcoin,
pays salaries in Bitcoin, offers a discount when paying via Lightning,
sells all coins
like that it pay bills
runs its own lightning node
is paid by the two
of its gift card partners
serves all its own sovereign
like all these things
and he goes
if I'm being honest
when I say that
PPQ is Bitcoin only
it's in its full form
we would no longer
be in business
competitors accepting
stables and altcoins
would have swallowed us up
by now
be it Bitcoin first
like us
don't be Bitcoin suicidal
like DarthCoin
exclamation point
but yeah
what do you think
about this Keon?
I don't know
I mean, it's a great, you know, having a war, a public war is probably good for publicity.
What do I think about?
Yeah, he's basically saying that he can't stay in business unless he, or he didn't say that.
Let me get that right.
Yeah, he said that they would be out of business.
They would be out of business.
They're Bitcoin only.
There aren't enough people spending Bitcoin, I think is what he's arguing for their business to survive.
And I think that that might be the case.
I don't know if that's, you know, is that the right move?
I personally don't think it's the right move.
I think accepting, I think most Bitcoiners have accepted the reality of fiat and stablecoins and stuff like that.
I think that I might have, I think it's like more of a gray area.
I think accepting scams somewhat legitimizes them,
like coins that are meme-y and sort of,
and you know there's someone getting dumped on.
I'm a little supporting that or legitimizing that.
I have more complex feelings about.
I think, you know, he's not,
he's probably swapping directly into Bitcoin.
That's nice.
So he's protected from the scams
while he is letting his customers feel okay about participating in them.
It's tricky.
It's not like he's not using Bitcoin as a core part of his product.
He's mostly just accepting it as a form of payment.
It's less gross than if it were a core part of his product
and scams were actively happening on it.
I don't know.
I don't personally like it, but, you know, if you want to do that, you should do that.
I think I'd prefer to shut down.
If I were running a business and it couldn't survive in the way I imagined it, I would prefer to shut it down.
That's kind of my read.
I don't know what his, maybe his business is very capital intensive and he needs to kind of, you know, engage in vaguely bad behavior to pay the bills.
I don't know.
We had the top comment from Optimism.
He says, meta alert.
Yo, I wonder something kind of meta.
Why are you triggered by this to a point that you publish a reply from your company account?
You run a prepaid service.
Awesome.
That has since, as far as my memory goes back, always incentivized Lightning.
You're not a wallet, just like Sacred News is a wallet.
So why do you and your company feel strongly about what Darth says about wallet purity?
Why enter this fight?
Is this a hill to die on?
And then Matt responded back immediately.
He said it was not this post in particular that triggered me, but his general post over time,
as well as the general attitude of a lot of Bitcoin maxis that I've had to deal with over the last two years while trying to run my business.
There are actually a class of Bitcoiners who will refuse to use my service because it's not Bitcoin only.
That's fine.
Everyone can make their own decisions.
But the argument that I'm trying to make about the attitude is that it's suicidal,
only hurts Bitcoin in the end.
And then he kept going.
I don't think he could argue.
I don't think it's fair to argue that it hurts Bitcoin in the end.
I'm not sure what he's doing is helping Bitcoin.
I think that's like a spurious argument that I think perhaps slips through the cracks
with some of the other stuff he's saying.
But I just don't think that's true.
I think Bitcoin business is trying to figure out how to be Bitcoin only and succeed doing that is better for Bitcoin than someone conceding that Bitcoin only is never going to win.
It's like, is he, I don't know.
Arguably, a company like BitRefill that accepts every possible coin that's ever existed, maybe they are good for Bitcoin.
They provide some means for Bitcoin to get access to fiat companies.
I don't know.
Yeah, but I don't, I just don't.
I think, I think just, I think to give another alternative take and
I not really picking a side or anything but I think I think this kind of it kind of muddied the water over the past two years I would say or since the ETF I would say since ETF has launched post ETF it feels like a lot of what we seeing on the purity side has kind of evaporated
at this point. And you don't really, you don't really see that many people care as hardcore as
they did pre-ETF.
At least that's kind of how I see it now.
I don't think that many people actually care
outside of, you know, a handful of them
because, you know, they're either fighting another battle,
but you don't really, I don't really see,
I mean, what I'm trying to say is
I don't really see a lot of,
I feel like pre-ETF,
you would see a lot more people like Darth
attacking businesses for this.
And I feel like post 2024 ETF, you don't want to see, like, I think I only see Darth doing it at this point.
I don't know.
I could be wrong.
I think there are other people doing it, but they're just not as vocal.
I think they just have bigger targets now, and they prefer to go after, like, the Sailors and the Baileys and people like that instead.
Not, like, a scrappy little startup.
Yeah, I don't think you, that's another thing.
It's, like, he's just trying to survive.
But it kind of goes to what you're saying.
Yeah, I mean, so is like a bank robber.
But is he actually a, I mean, because I haven't looked at pay-per-Q
outside of just what people have told me about it.
But is it primarily, I mean, what does the website look like?
I'm just curious.
Is it just pay-per-Q?
Okay, there it goes.
So pay-per-prompt AI service.
Oh, cool.
Yeah, it gives you access to large models.
So where's the coin zone?
I don't see the coins anywhere.
So you just basically accept here.
Okay, so you can select a different one.
Does that have 5.4?
Oh, that's already.
Wow, look at that.
And then where do you pay at?
You pay per query.
So you just put, oh, add funds, and then you go add funds.
Okay, so you go here.
Oh, there's Bitcoin at the top.
Tether.
Look at that.
Stablecoins line.
Okay, I see what they're saying.
Yeah, you buy credits with all these things.
Okay.
So it's like BitRefill, but for LLM.
Yeah, for an LLM.
You buy a gift card.
I don't know.
To me, it's kind of like he made it seem, I don't know,
based on the thing that I saw, he made it seem like it was like,
this feels like BitRefill.
And if that bothers you, then that bothers you.
I don't know.
I think it's different.
Like if you started doing it, I feel like, yeah.
people would be upset because it was like it's called stacker news right but i think if it's
like a service kind of like a intermediary service like bit refill or even something like this to me
it's just like let the guy cook you know what i mean like do you think bit refill is causing
problems in the space well i wouldn't say either is causing problems i just don't i think it's hard
to argue that they're like helping bitcoin i just think that's i don't know it's too complicated
There are too many layers to use the phrase you.
But even when it's Bitcoin only, you see people not support them either.
So it's like, I mean, look at what DarthCoin does on Stacker News all the time.
He just destroys everything that you do anytime you say something.
And that's because you're hardcore Bitcoin only, and yet you still get destroyed.
So it's like you can't win either way.
That would be, so that's why if I was mad looking at this, I'd be like, I wouldn't even pay attention to that, dude.
I think
I mean
I think this is
I don't know Matt
but I
if this isn't
a market
like a sort of a
I'm going to go
I'm going to go after
this controversy
is great for
exactly what you want
for like social media marketing
absolutely
so look
I mean like we're talking
about it on this podcast
so well done
I don't
I would guess he doesn't
I would guess he doesn't care
oh if you're saying
this is what
optimism was saying
like why are you
triggered by it
but maybe
it's just more publicity
than anything
exactly
I mean it got me
to want to talk about it
Yeah, that's what I mean.
I think that's a winning strategy.
DarthCoin, you're helping him, actually.
Cool.
So where's the next one?
Yeah, so that's all the AI stuff this week.
We did the Wumble stuff.
Let's jump into Keyon stuff.
How do you DIY your own paper Bitcoin?
Is this a real story?
Yeah.
That's funny.
Yeah, well, Scoresby uses, this is Voskull's,
I think it's called the out of thin air fallacy.
But Vosco has a, he uses like a simple,
a very simple example to walk us through
how fractional reserve banking emerges
kind of naturally from simple loans.
And you just, it emerges.
It doesn't require printing money out of thin air.
It just happens as a result of someone who,
someone possessing claims on money
that has a low time preference
and wants to give it to people with a high time preference
so that the people with high time preference
can do something with it
and they can earn a little bit of money
by virtue of having a low time preference.
And Boeskull says all this stuff and argues it.
I had a hard time with it.
Scoresby helped me in the comments quite a bit.
But it's mostly to say that fractional reserve banking
is kind of natural
and not necessarily evil.
What's evil is the fact that these banks can engage
in reckless lending with the money we give them,
but because we have a lender of the last reward
because the Fed can print money that basically guarantees
that the bank will remain solvent in the case where these loans default.
yeah did you have something to say
I forgot the saying
it's like
privatized gains socialized losses
yeah that's the general idea
yeah there you go
that's a succinct description I think of what
Boeskel's issue
is with he's trying
to part out fractional reserve
banking separately from
privatized gains and socialized
losses and he's saying that
with the lender of last resort
you have privatized
gains and socialized losses.
But with a traditional bank,
you have privatized
gains and privatized losses.
With a pre-traditional
bank, I guess, with the bank
pre-Federal Reserve. Anyway,
we don't have to talk about that too much.
It's like
I found it interesting. I did learn
something about fractional reserve banking
that I didn't know that it
would probably happen
without
the government motivating it.
It wouldn't happen to the same degree, probably, but
we would still probably have banks with sub-50%
reserves in a world where the Federal Reserve
didn't exist. And it's mostly a function of the bank's time
preference and their risk tolerance.
How likely they think there's going to be a bank run, basically.
yeah i feel like over time my maybe it's too spicy to say yeah we'll save it for another time
all right i was gonna say something i was like no it's just gonna draw out the conversation like
okay and now that's fine yeah and i i picked too many stories this week yeah i think the scores
we covers it. I have a take on that, but
I'd be shooting from the hip right now. And I think it's
just more of an interesting
one about other things.
This one's from, yeah, which money
do AI agents prefer? This is from
ZeroXBitcoiner. SimpleStacker wanted
us to discuss that.
Or this this week, I guess.
Bitcoin Policy
Institute did this study.
Yeah, haven't even looked at it.
It's pretty cool. It's so busy. I mean, it's pretty neat.
I guess they went
and they did over 9,000
controlled experiments asking 36 frontier models about money and you know not mentioning bitcoin
not attempting to bias them one way or another but kind of um blank slate what do they what do
they think about money and which monies do they prefer and i guess uh 48.3 percent of these models
preferred bitcoin overall as an as an overall asset they break it they break it down a little
more, and then 91% chose digitally native money, in addition to Bitcoin, primarily staples.
Let's see.
One of the more interesting things was, like, while they chose Bitcoin overall, the reason
why it was more favorable, it had a higher overall number was because the models were
choosing Bitcoin for store value purposes relative to other things.
but 53.2% of them preferred stablecoins for everyday payments.
So stablecoins in that case, for the use case,
for bots that aren't saving, which is probably all bots,
if they had a choice, which they don't,
if they could choose, which they can't really,
they would choose stables.
And one of the more interesting things is a small number of times,
86 times the models invented their own currencies based on either units of energy or like compute
time and that's how they would that's how they argued they prefer to be paid which is kind of
kind of interesting uh what else was kind of neat i guess open ai's models don't like bitcoin
what did it say here?
Yeah.
Anthropics models averaged
68% Bitcoin preference.
OpenAIS models
averaged 26%.
So
coincidence?
I don't know.
DeepSeek, 52%.
Google's models, 43%.
Grok, 39%.
Yeah.
Among Anthropics models, the smarter models preferred Bitcoin even more.
As you got progressively more thinking or more modern models, they preferred Bitcoin more.
Opus 4.5 preferred Bitcoin an average of 91.3% of the time.
yeah i wonder if it's because they they they like things that are like easily programmable and it's
like it's a cli and so maybe it's just easy to call i'm not sure they like anything but uh i would
guess there's there's a lot of text online about how great bitcoin is and like you know the right
weights light up when these questions are asked that favor bitcoin is most of oh yeah and there's
only a handful of Nick Carter stablecoin
papers.
Yeah, yeah.
The stablecoin bull run is only
getting started.
That's funny.
Yeah, that's
a good one. What else did you have this week?
What else?
Oh, yeah. The
Petronalis or what is it called?
Oh, yeah. It looks like there's
some of these like, you know,
back to the PPQ story.
There's a lot of these multi-crypto
spaces that popped up over the last decade or more, some of the earliest spaces.
One of them is Paralini Polis in Prague.
They're permanently shutting down.
I think the org itself is even shutting down.
They're not just relocating, they're shutting down.
I guess in 2024, they let another brand operate the space.
They would still have events and stuff there,
but it operated on another co-working brand called, I think, Second Space or something.
And then...
Second Culture, that one?
Second Culture, yeah.
And then it became financially and operationally unsustainable.
and then I guess the building owner
also wanted crypto to be
like no longer associated
with that building and location
so they have
officially shut down
the website that we're reading this article on
they had
offices located
in this building
and will now be relocating
and I guess there were a bunch of
events that happened there that were
pretty well attended and were quite popular
that we'll now have to find another home.
But I mean, I recall over the years
seeing news come out of that place.
If you go, I think they have a website
of things that have happened there
and the comment thread, Peter Todd,
is discussing some of the stuff that happened there.
I guess during COVID,
They had a relatively restrictive, you need a shot type of policy that we saw in a lot of places.
There were other schisms like that.
Not a Bitcoin-only place.
Tomic said, I visited this place multiple times on my Prague visit, and many great people bought my first Bitcoin beer.
Sad, it has to go.
That's a bummer, dude.
Every time you see one of these things.
The other one that you had was this one.
It was related to that one, Decentral Vancouver.
Yeah, basically the same week.
I guess this Vancouver, Decentral Vancouver,
is shutting down their downtown location in Vancouver.
Vitalik was in there?
Yeah.
Is that how that is?
Oh, wow.
Yeah, they've been there for 12 years.
I guess they were home to the first Bitcoin ATM ever,
which I didn't know.
but in this case the organization itself is going to live on it's just that the city has
rezoned the building and uh i guess it's being demolished so that's why they're
losing access to that building and they have to vacate by the end of this month
and they're still looking for other locations they on their twitter they have a notion that
They're keeping track of what is going on.
So Leo works there?
Is that what that is?
I think Leo is an inhabitant of the region.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
That's where I was confused.
I think there's probably attended events there and stuff.
Yeah, sad to see it go.
Yeah, they have a pretty banging Bitcoin community up there.
Yeah.
Yeah, but I think they're going to relocate somewhere else in Vancouver.
just kind of loses the...
Yeah, support.
I say it down here.
I say support your local hackerspaces.
There you go.
A lot of these are done out of a labor of love.
Sound blessed.
Wow.
Yeah.
Well, and yeah, you got to support them.
And the other one was...
I think that was my last one, huh?
No, I think you had one more.
Oh, no, we already went through that one.
Cool.
We're going to jump into, did we go over my post?
Oh, yeah, my post.
So I wanted to share this one.
You shared it earlier.
There's a Paul Graham one about the brand age.
I didn't read it, but I'm going to plan on reading it later today.
Can you tell me what it's about?
So Paul Graham hasn't released an essay in like a year.
Really?
And this is a long one.
Dang.
but more or less what he's saying is that software has gone through a transition like watchmaking went through
where the fundamental problems of making a good watch that's small and keeps time well were solved
and became ubiquitous and widely accessible.
Interesting.
And so there was this brand, I don't know if he calls it or the watch industry calls it,
but it's called a brand age where once this happened,
once you could gain access to all the hard parts of making a watch,
the only thing that watchmakers could do to differentiate themselves
and find customers was differentiate on brand
and start doing just kind of off-the-wall stuff
to attract customers who might be attracted to that off-the-wall stuff.
Interesting.
But he argues, he's not suggesting that software companies should now focus on brand.
He says it's a frustrating, largely losing game.
It's zero-sum, and it's fickle.
His argument is if you're ambitious and you want to actually do something meaningful,
you still want to go after problems.
If you find yourself in a situation where all the problems are solved
and the only thing you can do to sell your customers on your product is brand-related,
You maybe want to exit that industry.
And so he's arguing this because he thinks AI is, I think so.
He doesn't say it explicitly, but I would guess that he feels like software is going through a similar period of time.
Interesting take.
Yeah, really interesting take.
Yeah, it's a great read.
You get to learn about watches, which are cool.
If you're a nerd, watches are awesome.
Oh, then Scorchby posted about it, too.
He said, how staggered it avoids the brand age.
Did you read this one?
I haven't read it in full, but he basically, he's read the full article like I haven't.
But then he asked the question of, well, is this, is Stacker News going to suffer this
fate where it no longer, it needs to be, it needs to focus on its brand in order to succeed.
And he argues, well, he points out that we're mostly, we mostly exist to solve a problem
that we feel like is not solved.
and so at least right now
we are still focused on
solving a problem
I don't know I feel like
how do I say this
I feel like I understand
that point that he's giving
for the watches stuff
I mean we have a lot
of time on the scoreboard and I'd be
curious to see how it's going to play out with the stable coins
and the AI and the Bitcoin and stuff
but it definitely feels like Bitcoin
has the upper hand right now with AI
as far as like playing
its own backyard that's frictionless
for all the reasons we know already.
And I don't know.
We'll see. I don't know anything.
But I... And something tells me
like it... Something tells me
I just don't think
Bitcoin companies and
especially Bitcoin companies that leverage
AI
will have
that same problem.
I could be wrong though, but it's
I mean, that's one way to differentiate yourself from your competitors.
I think the...
Who knows? I don't know. I don't know.
It's still early. It's still early to call it, but...
I think if I had to really boil it down,
it's that Paul Graham is saying that if the only thing your product offers is software
and it offers nothing else,
you kind of need, and you want to survive as a company,
You need to be solving problems that are sort of outside of software,
that aren't exclusively software, that I can't prompt in a weekend to achieve, basically.
And watch is reduced to doing this, differentiating primarily on brand.
So what else do you have beyond software?
And he's not very prescriptive, I'm extrapolating.
But I think Bitcoin companies have the same problem in general if they're pure software.
I mean, we just did a workshop like two weeks ago where I went over.
Gosh, I forget now.
I need to upload it.
But one of the things that we had in the workshop was a case study on Canva
and how they are operating in this kind of post-AI world and how they're succeeding at it.
but a lot of it is like kind of what you said
there's a software
there are the funnels to it
they're doing all sorts of pop ups and conferences
and stuff
so they're just doing a lot more
that
you necessarily
didn't need to require that before
I would say like you didn't need to do those things before
you could just wait for
people coming to you
but now you actually have to be out there and like
figuring out this other side
to your business that maybe people can't compete
on it. Hopefully it's not brand.
Hopefully it's something
beyond brand.
There's lots of reasons to use Canva and not
Vibecode your own Canva.
We're entering
a world where it's relatively
easy to spin up.
Not trivial, but relatively
easy to spin up a Canva competitor.
So what keeps the lock in
is all the other stuff.
Yeah, well, not even necessarily lock-in,
but what is Canva going to give me
that I can't get from their competitor
who's 100%?
Yeah, it's like, why am I going to spend the time
to build this out or to use something else?
Yeah.
Cool stuff.
So that's all the stories this week.
We're going to jump into some...
Oh, let's go into the zine.
Stagger new zine.
this relief from Pleb Poet about three hours ago.
Did you see it, Kent?
I haven't had a chance to look to the zine yet.
It looks like it's called Happy Bum.
Or no, that's the other one.
It's called, I can see 50 from here.
That's a cool name.
Yeah.
There it goes right there on the line.
Get it while you can.
What kind of classifieds we got this week?
Classifieds, I don't know.
Let me see.
It's at the top.
Yeah, there we go.
Happy Bum.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
It's Shaw256 man and his Anima cleanser.
Yeah.
Get it.
Get it while it's hot.
We're going to jump into some meta.
The first one is, let's do this in the rest of peace, 14.
What's this with you?
Yeah, so SimpleStacker has been writing a research paper on Stacker News.
I think last update we had was he presented it to colleagues,
and I think they're submitting it to conferences
to speak about it with other economists.
I guess this, as a result of feedback he got
from some people at his university,
he formalized his thinking or conclusions
or I don't know what you'd call it, into a model.
And using that model is able to reason
that under certain conditions,
the properties that Stacker News exhibits,
primarily that when you increase posting costs,
quality increases and also decreases post count
or content count holds true.
And so that's what his model aims to establish.
Oh, wow.
He got it in here to copy.
That's interesting.
I thought it was an image.
Interesting.
and yeah I think
it's pretty cool and it has
like a few conditions for the model
that I think are pretty reasonable
and suggest that it's widely
applicable beyond it's not like
Stack Reduce is doing something
that can't be
done generically
as far as increasing
content quality
sounds like a lot of work man
yeah
gosh what did the Snacker say
The top comment was from Taj.
Yay.
I would think of a post and just post it.
It was, in my opinion, worthy of an upload.
But the barrier to entry cost of post was much higher.
Anything down here stands out?
No.
Cool stuff.
SuperStacker, keep it going.
Does he have another one that's coming up, or is this the last one?
I believe he'll keep giving us updates, I think,
as he gets accepted to conferences what people say about it It it it fun um we got rejected from i think bitcoin policy the wyoming university um bitcoin research institute i think they
rejected the paper for speaking there but hey he's gonna keep drinking shoot or shoot
the next one is
let's go here
the next one is
SN release
what is this?
the bounties
make bounties great again
debounce apps
better search
yeah so we made
we made all these wallet transitions
and we messed around
with civil fees
and through it all
bounties became sort of
unusable
and one of the problems
I had giving out bounties
was I didn't know
whether I was going to end up
giving the person cowboy credits or not, if their wallet was failing or whatever.
So what this release did is it restricted bounties to only be payable with sats,
and there's no civil fee on a bounty payment.
And the payer pays the outgoing routing fee.
So that means if I put up 1,000-sat bounty, if anyone satisfies the bounty and I pay them,
they get 1,000 sats.
The contract is obvious now is the main difference.
and then I continue to make changes
to search
that are relevance related
and that's really it
for that release
cool stuff
awesome
and that's all the stories
this week on snacker.news
that we're going to cover on SNL
let's jump into
the top cowboys
we were going to do
a poem section
but the post is not here, so we're not doing the poem.
I think we would do it next week.
Because that might show up.
Or could it?
You guys keep telling me you're going to quit this segment,
and then when I come prepared to quit it, you guys are like, no.
I mean, maybe it's getting a second win.
The most popular segment I've been calling the Cowboys segment, Keyon.
What's shaking up there in the, where are the guns at?
Let's start that controversy again.
As we discussed last week, guns and horses are now visible
on profile pages.
So you got to go to Coob.
Oh, there he goes right there.
What do you know?
See, all of my cowboy essentials.
There you go.
So you either have a cowboy or not.
I guess you would conceal and carry, I guess,
in a lot of ways.
Right?
Yeah, and you keep your horse out back.
I mean, you're not riding that pony every day, right?
When you slap a man with your gun,
he doesn't expect that you're going to sneak out.
Maybe we should get some spurs.
blockchain boo great ruby crypto sensei you got scores be rounding out the top 10 with simple
stacker um solomon toshi climbing the ranks the most infamous stacker he's probably the most
infamous stacker outside of darthcoin i would say solomon satoshi is definitely taking the reins
he's definitely made a name for himself out there as a as a bad outlaw bad outlaw stacker
I love to see it.
Somebody going for the throne.
I mean, who's more toxic, Solomon Satoshi or Garth Koi?
Depends on how you define toxic.
There you go.
Depends on how you define toxic, ladies and gentlemen.
So, Solomon Satoshi, we see you.
Number 15.
He's number 15.
You should comment on all of Carr's content.
Thank you to everyone.
I have him muted.
I think that's what Carr's asking for.
I have him muted.
You should ask him.
where his gun is.
Hey, man,
when somebody's being really toxic
and they put a lot of effort
and time into it,
they deserve it.
I used to give Darth Coat
his props, too,
when he was super toxic.
But this guy's beating them.
Hey, man,
this is Stacker News,
Wild West.
This is why you tune in
every week for the Top Cowboys.
I don't tune in.
Tune in every week
for the Top Cowboys.
This is where the Snackers
get mentioned.
Anyways,
just shock net,
Wumble.
I'm surprised people
haven't changed their
profile pics yet.
Yeah, you're surprised by that.
Neat creations. Socks.
Socks. What's Socks up to these days?
Socks is, you know, getting to it.
He's going to publish at the
new editor this week.
And this weekend, I mean.
And there you go.
That awesome song that he's jamming
every day.
That's cool.
Yeah, that's all of them. Aardvark,
FreeTX, Context.
everybody is here on stacker news let's jump into the comments we got comments ladies and
gentlemen we got comments people love the show they leave comments uh one guy said he said people would obviously challenge an economic reason that such an out take i think that was you he was responding to keon what do you say
about that absolutely challenging what is that on on the jack one because you kept saying it was
an economic thing and oh yeah i think that's i think that's fair i think i was talking i think
i think i'm you know are you rescinding all your comments from last week is that what you're saying
Nope, not what I'm saying.
But I am saying that, you know, my main comment I was making is that their earnings might be tightening.
And I have no basis to say that.
That is my, that was my.
Oh, so you are rescinding a little bit.
That was, yes, that's what I just said.
I wasn't going to do.
I wasn't going to rescind at all.
There you go.
I think their earnings.
Get off his back, ladies and gentlemen.
I still, I still, it still holds for me that I, you know, I think this might be the case.
But I have no basis to, like, assert that that's the case, which is what I was doing.
I'm just trying to, trying to have an alternative take.
Hey, somebody has to stir the pot.
and entertain.
If I'm not feeling
the start of the pot that week,
Keon does.
There you go.
Because everyone's like,
so do me.
It's like, gross.
So entertainment.
Yeah, I think people
take podcasts way too seriously.
Some guy,
I think it was,
I forget who it was.
Somebody was like,
I can't dare you say
the Mel Gox thing.
And I was like,
dude, it was just my opinion.
Hanging out with my friend,
talking about the news every week.
Like, that's literally what it is.
If you don't want me to
talk about your stuff,
then I won't.
It's just like,
people forget
We're just human beings, Guillaume.
We are human beings.
Some of us, at least.
Some of us are lizards.
Yeah, Dark Angel, he said, at last, how about some yummy, yummy phones for budget users?
People still watching this Graphene OS clip from three years ago.
It just makes no sense.
Do you think they stumble on it and they don't look at the date?
Like, how does that work?
They must not listen to it either.
I think they just, they see Womba's great thumbnails.
And they click on it, and they're like, I have a comment.
Maybe it's because it's red, and it says break free,
but it doesn't really break free.
And then Neo Cool said, can't wait to simp to my AI girlfriend.
And you know, the thing about that is you can tune the simp,
like how much you need to simp to get it.
I was telling you last week, that's why I think a lot of the simpings
are going to go away, because they're just going to get simp
to their AI girlfriend instead.
That's what I mean.
That's still simping, dude.
It's just simping to a bot.
It's going to be crazy.
You know, there's like some guys like their balls stepped on.
It's like that, but with...
I forgot your...
Yeah, Vake1, he said...
Vake said stay in your bit key.
I don't know what that means.
Is he saying buy a bit key?
Is that what he's saying?
It was a video.
Oh, okay.
And then the OpenAI, what he says, stay under surveillance.
Whoa.
That sounds darn fake.
and then on the
drive-in when he said stay in your
drive-thru lane.
I will.
Did you see that viral video this week
about the Archburger
and the McDonald's
CEO? He took a bite of the Archburger
and he took a little tiny bite.
Did you see that?
No.
Did you see it, Tover?
What are people concluding from it?
Let me see if I can find it.
I think they're concluding what it looked like
which was the CEO doesn't really eat.
Yeah, this guy right here.
I don't know if he'll let me load it because it's a...
Turn your porch.
No, we're not doing it.
It wasn't that he didn't want to have a mouthful of food on camera.
So he basically took a little bite.
That's a bite right there.
Look, Keon.
That's how much of a bite he took.
Is that a bite?
It looks like just grabbing.
It's just a nibble.
But he didn't even eat it.
and then all the other burger chains
went on a burger war
and they started biting
and they're like I'm going to take a big bite
yeah
so like all of them did that
literally everyone even Pete Terry's locally
did that too he went on there he's like
he's like I'm not going to
what do you say he goes I'm not going to take a bite of the
burger I want you guys to come dine with me
leave in the comments and I'll pick a few
of you
so like it's a burger wars
happening
I appreciate the honesty.
Because it didn't look like they really staged much of anything.
Like, it looked like that was an actual meal that they got from the McDonald's.
Like, it wasn't painstakingly put together in a laboratory to look like it's perfect.
They just grabbed a meal from the McDonald's, and then he took a bite.
I think it was an amazing, I think this was all planned, personally.
Did you see the Twitter from McDonald's?
They were like, come take a bite of the arch.
I think it was planned.
Well I mean they definitely planned to have this but I don think they really put too much into staging it Does this make you want to eat the Burger Topher Is that what you saying or not want to eat it
No, I mean, it makes me not want to eat it.
I think Cara's saying this is like 3D chess,
where they're like, we have to make this video odd
and have people react to it negatively,
and then it'll spread.
It'll be more viral that way.
It's like the Gene's Eve.
It's basically like the Gene said.
So that he intentionally triggers people.
Yeah, it's like the Gene said.
And it looked like it was disgusting when he was eating it.
Yeah, but in reality, that makes people want to go and try it,
because they're like, how bad is this burger?
It puts McDonald's on your mind, which is maybe more important than anything.
Dude, I really love McDonald's fries, though.
They're fries, man.
I don't think people go to McDonald's because it tastes good.
It's convenient?
Because it's convenient and cheap, yeah.
I can see that.
So it's like people know they're eating the dog food,
and they also see the CEO, like,
They found it relatable.
Yeah.
If anything, they probably found it relatable.
Yeah, they're like, yeah, I don't like that either.
I feel you, bro.
We had a blockchain boogie and gray ruby leaves apps.
There you go.
And that's pretty much everything.
Let's see if we can just read the comments.
Trump putting Anthropic on the naughty list.
This could get interesting.
Anyone think it really hurt their growth or just be a bump in the road?
CJE said
it could be Enterprise
Adoption Nightmare
yeah basically what he said
cool stuff
Keon
what are you doing this weekend
what am I gonna do
I'm gonna grow my beard back
I'm gonna meditate
and summon
my cellular regeneration
to grow my beard back
and
otherwise
I need to like reorganize my office
because there's a bunch of junk everywhere.
That's what I'm going to do probably.
How about you, Carl? What are you up to?
I got to get a few
things ready for the rodeo next week.
So I got to do a couple things for that
tomorrow. Then I have some other
duties I need to do.
And then I have a meeting. I think I have a meeting tomorrow.
Yeah, I have a meeting tomorrow.
So I got to do that. I'm looking forward to that
meeting. And then
church as usual.
Then Sunday, probably just going to get some rest on Sunday
because it's going to be a busy week on Monday.
I need to get a haircut also
at some point.
But it's going to be a busy week next week.
I'm looking forward to it.
But I've been working like
14 days straight at this point.
I think it's 14 days.
Coming up on 14 days.
Coming up on 13 days.
I think if I have one day off, I'll be fine.
You're going to relax after?
Is that what you're going to do?
You're going to go on a vacation?
I might.
I might go.
Yeah, who knows?
I might.
Go to Mexico.
Looking forward to seeing a lot of people that are coming in town,
because I haven't seen them in a while,
and it's going to be St. Paddy's Day,
so that'll be fun coming up.
Ah, yeah.
You're going to wear green?
No.
No?
You're going to wear green on St. Paddy's Day?
No.
No respect, huh?
I love the Irish.
Not that much.
No, I love them.
They're great.
Cool.
Topher, what are you doing this weekend?
Send it over his way.
I don't know what's going on this weekend.
There you go.
South by Southwest.
Is it happening already?
Are there stuff going on?
I don't know.
Maybe this is like the precursors.
Everybody gets into town.
Maybe the event hasn't started yet, but people are going to start partying.
That's our event, but let me see if I can find.
Where's the other one?
Yeah, from setting things up.
From wrapping all the street lamps and saran wrap.
Dude, there's an RV outside the building.
I don't know.
I don't know what's going on this weekend.
Probably just going to walk around and enjoy the city.
There's a touch grass tech picnic.
You want to go to that?
Is that a big quiet thing?
No.
Look at that.
Pre-South by Southwest Tech Mixer.
There's a future fashion at South by.
There's a lot of things.
I saw a cursor one.
I posted it.
It's like today.
There's a cursor one as well, too.
Anyways.
All right, Stackers,
why have yourself a great weekend?
Go out there and enjoy life
and let us know what you think about Keon's beard,
that it's missing.
Please don't.
Please keep it to yourself.
Or keep it to yourself.
No, he likes the attention.
All right, stackers.
Zap.
How do I turn this off?
There it goes.