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This is Bitcoin Study Sessions.
Welcome back or welcome to another session here.
Today we're discussing the Instant Settlement series by Ivan Makadonsky.
And we were just talking a second ago about how to pronounce his last name.
I'll just call him Ivan.
We're now on a first name basis because of my ignorance of phonetics of his last name.
So the Instant Settlement series is a series of essays by Ivan in Bitcoin Magazine from December 2023 to March 2024.
So this is actually an excellent essay series.
I'm really excited we're talking about it right now.
We just finished up Broken Money.
And this essay series on instant settlement is kind of a practical application of some of the theorizing that Alden is doing in Broken Money.
So in Lynn Alden's Broken Money, she describes how he went off the gold standard because gold could not settle quick enough.
That is, once we enter the age of telecommunications, we could transact at or near the speed of light by sending a telegram, a simple message.
But gold couldn't keep up with that.
gold can only move at the speed of material, the speed of horse, whatever. And gold also takes
additional time to authenticate. So a large gap arises between transacting by telegram and settling
that transaction with gold. This speed gap led to the rise of fiat money because that's not backed
by anything. It can settle at the speed of transactions. It's just words. But in the fiat
era settlement then is delayed because banks are not open 24 seven and transactions are usually
done through credit. And that's only kind of settled much later. So what then the question is,
if settlement could be done instantly with a gold like hard and scarce commodity. And so with
Bitcoin, then that's possible to speed a settlement catches up with the speed of transactions,
bring along with it something that's scarce and hard-capped like Bitcoin, so it's now possible.
So what Lucas and I are going to talk about today is the Instant Settlement series,
an exploration of that concept of what happens when settlement catches up with transaction
and it's backed by Bitcoin, and it is in Bitcoin, rather.
I'll do what we usually do, give a short summary of this series,
and then we'll talk about it in depth afterwards.
So Ivan's Instant Settlement series, as I said, explores how instant settlement can change things.
And so he really explores various industries and then also not just the potential changes within industries, but our psychological outlook in general relating to work itself.
So the Instant Settlement series consists of six essays.
The first five essays explore the potential effects in various industries, construction, logistics, publishing, streaming, and gambling.
And the final essay then kind of summarizes the insights from this exploration and goes deeper into those psychological implications of instant settlement on the nature of work and kind of even what we are as humans.
A couple of asterisks to the discussion. Ivan says right up front that he does not have expertise in these industries he discusses. So an industry insider might listen or read the essay and say, ah, that's not how it actually is. But he gets the details broadly right, I think. And again, he's up front that he's not an expert. And the importance is in the overall picture of how an industry might run and the concepts involved.
And of course, in me and Lucas' discussion, it's going to be even more kind of some details are going to drop out.
So a second asterisk, Ivan is the chief of staff at Breeze, which is a company that is working to integrate lightning payments on the Bitcoin network into apps and services.
So he exhorts the reader at the end of each essay to go out and build the app that could enable the Bitcoin lightning network to work in an industry that he's describing in that essay.
And a lot of what he's doing is kind of tracing a general outline or way that an app or set of smart contracts or something like that could take advantage of the Lightning Network in order to transform an industry.
That is, he's not designing an app. He's kind of doing a really broad kind of brainstorming thing, spitballing to help generate new ideas and spark interest.
So the importance is not that he's right about an app functioning kind of as he generally describes in each essay to integrate lightning into a particular industry, but that he opens the door to new thinking about how we might get things done if we did have instant settlement in that industry through such an app, through any potential app, and given that instant settlements in the lightning network are now possible.
So to begin this discussion, the first essay, I'm not going to go methodically through each
essay, but the first essay does give an overall picture of how he talks about the Lightning
Network potentially transforming industry if an app was designed to apply it to an industry.
So he begins with an example.
In the construction industry, imagine building a house.
You have different parties that are involved in carrying that project out.
The house buyer, the construction company, the house planner, like the architect.
the construction worker and the construction supervisors.
And in this, each party kind of has their own incentives,
and those incentives are not always aligned.
For example, the house buyer, of course,
they want to get it done as quick as possible to the highest degree of quality possible.
The construction worker on the other end, at least as far as financial incentives,
is he's being paid for, they're being paid for their time work.
So that person is not inherently worried about how long it's going to take.
They're collecting their salary and pay.
They're not also inherently worried about doing the highest quality possible because, again, they're just based on, generally speaking, the time that they spend doing the work.
So to align incentives, you want a way to reward people not for time passed on the job, and this of course applies to many other industries, but for the actual work that they are doing, the speed and the quality that they're doing, that work at, and that they're completing it efficiently.
instant settlement ivan thinks can help do this an app can be constructed potentially using
lightning payments on the bitcoin network such that construction workers can be paid for
incremental tasks done on the way to completion of an entire project to quote ivan unlike traditional
payment systems these technologies eliminate the delay between completing physical tasks such as
placing a brick, and receiving compensation. So the idea is that an app could potentially be
structured so that tasks such as building a wall, assembling a window, have independent payout.
Workers then would not be paid for their time spent doing those smaller, more granular tasks,
but upon completion of the task, which incentivizes, of course, the speed at which it gets done.
Quality could also be incentivized in this framework.
The supervisor then inspects the potentially completed job for quality.
They then mark it as completed, photograph it, and report it in a potential app that one might design.
This app could also integrate a reputation system, rating a worker on the overall quality of the task completed.
And then the higher a worker's reputation over time, the more likely they would get assigned future tasks. So in this model, the worker would not necessarily need to be on payroll, but could be independently hired for each task.
This would place the worker in some sort of gig economy, essentially, and would kind of decentralize overall the distribution of work and incentivize worker skill development and reputation building.
That really simplifies Ivan's discussion of the construction industry, but it brings out the key insight from that discussion and one of the key benefits that Ivan thinks will come from an instant settlement being more integrated into the construction industry, but industry in general.
And it is that instant settlement can help move us from a pay for time to a pay for work model. When we pay for time, the incentives are to extract the maximum amount of reward and pay for the minimal effort, the office space.
You're watching the rewards, clock watching, maybe even negative behaviors like taking credit for others' achievements, parasitism in the workplace when you want to kind of glide along with others and do as little as possible yourself.
You're getting paid as the clock moves, so what more is needed?
In that type of mindset, skills then corrode over time because people are passing – because passing time is what is rewarded, not necessarily doing good work.
And all of that changes us psychologically when we're in a pay-for-time framework. Pay-for-work, as allowed by instant settlement on the Lightning and Bitcoin network, in that type of model, best performance yields the most money because one's going to get new projects in the future.
People are incentivized then to develop their own skills and to maintain their reputation.
Competition over those smaller projects leads people to further develop themselves.
This kind of reintroduces the idea of craft, of developing your work into an art, which
tends to then satisfy people, we might say spiritually, or as full human beings, and
lead to their retention in the long term.
So if we switch from a pay-for-time to a pay-for-work model, society then is also made better
as things are produced more efficiently instead of high speed and quality and to a higher standard.
Incentives then are better aligned in a paperwork model.
An example that Ivan gives, he has a Sun Tzu quote that's interesting.
He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks.
So the idea is when you have a team, each player should want the same kind of end goal to win the game.
You don't want a player out kind of maximizing their own fame or their own stats at the expense of the team.
Pay for work aligns incentives on the completion of the job rather than workers seeking their own benefit by like delaying completion to accrue more time and more pay that way.
Even more broadly speaking, Ivan believes this can shift us from a kind of fiat mindset.
If people are not tethered to one time-based job, but instead complete many tasks or project-based jobs, then again, that decentralizes work, allows more freedom. People aren't tethered to one job. They have more freedom to pick and choose projects consistent with their own goals.
people maybe even stop chasing money and instead chase the projects that fulfill them or help them develop their craft.
It's not going to be easy, Ivan notes, acknowledges, warns, to change from societally a default mental model based on pay for time to pay for work.
To quote Ivan, quote,
Defeating this enemy requires a collective willingness, the enemy being the pay for time model.
Defeating this enemy requires a collective willingness to break free from the allure of effortless gains and embracing a more natural, purposeful way of working.
So that's one benefit of instant payment is the shifting of mental models and payment models from payment on time to payment on work.
Instant settlement also offers other potential benefits.
It gets rid of fees that are charged by intermediaries and also avoids counterparty risk.
And so an example from the logistics industry in the second essay, I think, helps flesh these potential benefits out.
So again, to get kind of a rough and dirty account of how logistics might work, a typical delivery might look something like this.
The buyer buys from a website, a product of some sort.
The retailer of that product is notified to send it to the buyer's address.
The retailer arranges delivery of that through a logistics company. The delivery person from that company collects the product from the warehouse. The product works its way through some sort of delivery ecosystem, maybe various warehouses bouncing around until it finally reaches the hands of the final delivery person who takes it to the buyer's location.
So there's two frictions in this system.
A first friction in this, when the fiat system is used to manage logistics, are credit card and bank fees.
The buyer is probably going to pay a website in credit with the credit card.
There's going to be a credit card fee, 1% to 3% fee.
Website's going to then have to pay the retailer another 1% to 3% fee.
The retailer pays the delivery person 1% to 3% fee.
instant settlement with the Lightning Network would potentially allow for elimination of this
friction because the credit cards and the banks are disintermediated. They're removed from the
equation. And so fees then are much lower on the Lightning Network. So those fees are eliminated.
Another friction with logistics in a fiat system, all these credit payments present a counterparty
risk. Whenever any credit is extended, you're hoping the other party is going to be good for it
at the end of the day, that a bank or credit card company is not going to go bankrupt, that the
party itself is not going to go bankrupt. So there's always the risk of non-payment when credit
is used. This counterparty risk is minimized with something like the Lightning Network that
would remove credit from the equation in different parties like banks and credit card companies.
so that's then here so far we've seen these cumulative benefits of instant settlement
the lightning network pay for work not time removing credit card companies a bank equation
minimizing counterparty risk associated with extending various forms of credit
one more advantage of the lightning network potentially is it allows for split payments
which I think is best illustrated in another one of Ivan's essays through the example of publishing.
So we can imagine a book that is published and maybe this book is also translated and then sold.
The parties then would be, roughly speaking, publisher, author, translator.
You can use a lightning payment with an app up front designed for this purpose
could automate the splitting of payments between the publisher, the author, and the translator
based on a specific proportion, based on the amount of work actually done,
so that each sale automatically sends the payment to that party.
In this way, each party then earns a fair share based on what they did,
and the app automatically splits those payments, eliminating the counterparty risk.
For example, in the fiat system, the author and translator might wonder,
is the publisher actually reporting the correct number of sales?
Will they continue paying royalties into the future?
But if it's all automated up front with an app made possible using the instant settlement of the Lightning Network, then that counterparty risk is eliminated.
So there's more insights in this settlement series, but I think this is kind of some of the bigger ones up to this point, which are that lightning payments through an industry-specific app can really disrupt and transform things by paying for work instead of paying for time, aligning incentives of different participants in a task, decentralizing work based on task-specific jobs enabled by reputation systems.
So, again, this doesn't touch yet on Ivan's discussion of streaming or gambling, but we'll kind of stop the general summary there and discuss this a bit because this is, I think, a very interesting set of concepts on the table.
and I have some
questions
I've kind of concocted here
but I'm wondering Lucas that was
a lightning summary
of the lightning series here
anything I guess to add to those accounts
construction logistics
or the general concepts drawn
from those at this point
I think
Ivan does a very good job
of elucidating
to us
what we all inherently feel as some sort of undercurrent of potential change,
but very often do not think about in terms of the world that he is describing seems so good for everyone involved
that it's almost hard to think about, hard to wish for,
because you don't want to be disappointed if it doesn't work out that way.
So I like how he has taken these different industries
and broken them down to give us these examples.
When I first heard about Bitcoin,
the first thing that I thought of was something along the lines
of kind of the publishing side, which would be, you know, either in agriculture or with music
that I sell the cow and I retain the ownership of that cow all the way to the plate. And so that
everybody who adds value along the way, I get a portion of that. And as you climb that value ladder,
where it goes from the rancher to the butcher to the, well, you can go straight to the restaurant if you want.
But let's just say there's just three, rancher to butcher to restaurant.
You know, you sell it for $3 a pound here, and then it's $15 a pound here, and then it's $30 a pound here at the end.
And so there's that 10x increase that up until now, producers of commodities have never been able to capture. And they've been working to try and capture that by providing value, by saying, okay, in an effort to gain more of the value that I put forth, what we're going to do is try to develop a system that shows you exactly where your food came from.
You know, this is from steer number 228 that came off the Maddy farm and it was born on March 6th and it was slaughtered on, slaughtered on, on May 1st.
You know, you'll get, you get all that information.
And so there's a lot of value to a consumer like that.
This allows for that.
The other thing is like in music, you know, I, I can see right now, you can see people that are putting out music that otherwise would never have been able to because they're very specialized.
People that are like beat makers, I go, I'm going to, I'm just going to make a beat.
I'm going to put it up on BandLab.
And then I going to let people fork it just like they fork code And they can they can fork my original They can take my beat They can put guitar on it and they can put that up
And then somebody else can see that and they can put marimbas on it.
Somebody else can see it.
They can put organ on it.
Somebody else can see it and they can put rap lyrics on it.
Somebody else can see it.
They can have a chorus over it.
And so at the end you end up with this,
this collaboration of people that are working together only because the thing that they're doing
is what they were going to do anyways. It's what they're good at.
Yeah. And so, yeah, the expression of aligned incentives comes out so strongly. Like,
I'm so glad that he reached out.
So Ivan reached out after we did our first podcast on software.
And he reached out and said, hey, I've written these.
And I think you guys might enjoy discussing them.
I'm so glad that he did because this is the important part.
I've heard Jack Mallers talk about this.
And I completely agree.
Bitcoin will never go anywhere if it's only used as a store of value.
Look at gold, right?
I mean, gold didn't go anywhere because it was a store of value.
It was too unwieldy to use in everyday transactions.
And so it's very important for the long term life of Bitcoin that it become used as a medium of exchange in daily transactions.
And I pulled up some of the stats, this off perplexity, so hopefully I can trust this.
How is the usage of the Lightning Network increasing compared to Bitcoin?
so obviously the um the bitcoin layer is not meant it's meant to be slow right it's meant to
be very slow um so the lightning transactions in the last two years have increased by 1200 percent
in terms of okay so reaching an estimated 6.6 million uh transactions per month there's a high
in there of, I think December 24 was a high of like 72 million transactions. And so it is growing,
it is growing very fast. But to put it in perspective, it says, you know, monthly active
users on the Lightning Network are estimated between around 300 million and a three, sorry,
300,000 and a million. And so I went back and I looked at what other network effect models like Uber and Amazon and Facebook, when did they reach the million monthly active users mark? And the records barely, they don't really go back that far.
so to think of it in terms of that way like I first started using Facebook I think in 2005
it was it was very recently after like it was I was one of I was within probably six months I think
of it at Harvard I can't remember how fast that they they spread it out but I remember I was a
junior and that was 2005. And so, but anyways, um, it was about that. So think about like
Facebook in 2005 is basically where the lightning network is now. Um, and it's growing incredibly
rapid. Um, it's being utilized by people that don't even know they're using it. You know,
Cash App uses the lightning network to transfer value. And so people are using the lightning
network and experiencing as good or better of an experience as they ever did before.
And they don't even know it.
I think that's a sign of a great technology.
Yeah.
It has been utterly frictionless in terms of replacing the settlement rails.
I will stop there because I've got some other notes.
Yeah, because those are such excellent points that you raise.
So just like I love that you're, you know, Ivan did reach out to you. And as you said, how fortuitous, because this is exactly the perspective that complements like Alden's macroeconomic perspective is actually then boots on the ground, how we get this stuff done.
And it's another part of Alden's kind of conclusion is the stuff doesn't do itself.
This is stuff that takes you can't just say Bitcoin fixes this.
It's people using Bitcoin are going to fix things and like knowing how to do it, coming at it with knowledge from your own industry.
I love the example you give from ranching because you have a deep background in agriculture.
You know a lot about that industry from a lot of different angles.
And just hearing how you apply these concepts that Ivan has drawn out that the instant settlement nature of the Lightning Network on the Bitcoin protocol can align incentives, split payments between the different parties, rewarding value provided, divide the different steps into kind of discrete completed tasks.
like those are general concepts that we can take to each of these different industries like you did
with ranching and you know whatever industry whoever dear listener you're in like what how
can you better align incentives how can you better divide value among the actual value providers how
can you reward value instead of chair dampening and clock watching i mean that's instant settlement
is a very powerful idea and thinking about these things writing about them having the courage to do
it too. Ivan is not an expert in this industry. And when you extend beyond your expertise in a
world of social media, you open yourself up to kind of the easy jab, right? If you get some small
detail wrong. But it's not about the small details here. It is about generating a suite of fresh
ideas and kind of general concepts that people can use in their own industry and walk of life to
really build out the Bitcoin network. And I just wanted to finally remark on, I loved your music
example as well. That person could come up with a beat, a hook or something like that.
And then like that can be the project or the task itself, like break things down
into different tasks. A person could do that, follow their own aesthetic direction,
their own meaning of purpose in life, their own creativity, instead of just like,
I'm going to go join some music studio or whatever to help some established artists fill out their songs and whatever they need, I'll do.
Instead, if you can monetize your own artistic and creative direction, you can bring more of yourself into the world through something as technical sounding as instant settlement.
It's just such, you know, these things have, Bitcoin has transformatory potential and it kind of sows and reaps that potential through its technical powers like instant settlement.
And so that, like, I just love your examples and you're tying the macroeconomic down to what people are actually doing.
Yeah. So the, the story that I read the other day, that makes me think of this is, so think about music. And when you hear a musician interviewed, and they talk about all of their inspirations, and who are the people that they listen to in order to be, become the musician that they are, you know, what, what they've done is they've cribbed from that person, they, you know, they've, they've used as inspiration.
That's a way of saying I copied it until I made it my own, basically.
And think about how fascinating it would be to see the hereditary tree of the tracing of all of these people's inspirations through the settlement contracts of all of these different beats.
Let me back up to frame the story that I'm talking about.
The story that I was reading was the Beatles released an album called Rubber Soul.
And one of the Beach Boys, I think it was Brian Wilson.
I'm not sure which one.
One of the Beach Boys heard that album and said, this is the greatest album that's ever been created.
I'm going to listen to this until I'm inspired to do something better.
And so he listened to that until he was inspired to write a song called, I think, Only God Knows Why, maybe.
I think maybe it's God Only Knows.
And then they release an album.
The Beach Boys release an album called Pet Sounds, which is one of them.
This is the Beatles and the Beach Boys.
These are two of the most famous bands to have ever existed.
So these albums are shaping culture.
at hundreds of millions of people at a time.
They release an album called Pet Sound.
The Beatles hear it and decide that this song,
God Only Knows, is the greatest song that's ever been written.
And they're not going to stop until they do something that equals it.
And so they listen to that album on repeat
while writing another album called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,
which was one of, it was like, at the time,
it was like the most transformative thing that had ever happened in music.
It was this, each, it was,
it was songs that were put together in like chapters in a story.
They all, they all went together.
And you know this,
because I'm doing this with my own music right now,
where each one kind of leads into the other.
But this was like, you know, making this massive thing out of, oh, instead of just three and a half minutes, we're going to put all this stuff together.
But I just think about that.
Like when you watch a football game and they show Andy Reid, the coach of the Chiefs, and then they show all the coaches that are tied to him.
Yeah.
Chips and coaching tree and stuff like that.
Think about if you could have that for music.
Like how cool would that be?
I just, and granted, this is one of those, like, how cool would that be things that it doesn't necessarily add a whole lot of value up front that you think.
But it turns out that a lot of times these how cool would that be things have underlying value adds that we haven't even considered yet.
Yeah. And so, yeah, the the you cannot overstate the transformative nature of work by the hour versus work by the task, work by the job, work by the performance.
You know, now we're going from paying people X amount per year to play baseball to paying them X amount per home run, X amount per single, X amount per walk, X amount per great play.
We're able to have a truly equivalent structure.
Like one of the things that came up in.
So there was this lawfare suit against Elon Musk for the bonus that he got for Tesla.
It was this guy that, you know, one of these very frivolous lawsuits where a guy buys nine shares so that he can be considered as a shareholder and then sues for some sort of breach or whatever.
And it was to invalidate the bonus package that Musk got, which was the biggest.
It was like a $60 billion bonus package, the biggest package that anybody had ever gotten in history.
But he got it because he met these incredibly stringent bonus requirements.
It was like double the company sales every single year or something like that.
And if you don't do that, he got nothing.
And if you did do that, he got something.
And one of the arguments made by the prosecution there was that the negotiations for the bonus were not done in an adversarial enough nature.
And how beautifully does that describe how beautifully screwed up the system is?
Where the idea is that if you're negotiating with someone to give them a bonus for running the company that you want to see succeed, that you're supposed to be adversarial.
You're on the same side.
You both own the same equity.
You know, this is, this is, you know, it really is.
It's tantamount to just, it brings to mind, you know, all of the bad things in society.
You said chair dampening.
I'd never heard that term before.
Sitting in the chair long enough, earning your money and you will see where it comes from.
Chair dampening and clock watching.
One of the insults on the farm, you know, is somebody shows back up and you haven't gotten very far.
And they're like, oh, yeah, must be working by the hour today.
Right. Right. Yeah.
There's actually I don't know if you've heard this.
There's what's called Parkinson's law to Parkinson's law is that work expands to fill the time allotted for it.
Right. This is why you should never have meetings that last X amount of time.
It should be, hey, we're going to do this and then we're going to leave.
If you have a two-hour stand-up meeting every Monday, it will last two hours every single Monday.
It brings to mind all of those things.
But moving away from the adversarial nature of negotiation into an aligned incentive structure where everyone along the way is getting paid to perform.
I'm trying to think, I mean, the gig economy is a great example of this.
Obviously, this is kind of where it started.
But to grow that, you just see a lot less waste in the system and a lot less attacks on the system.
A lot less union negotiations, right?
Right.
Yeah.
No, it's supposed to eliminate waste.
In the construction example, the idea that if you have the flexibility on the completion of each task to determine if those workers are sufficient for the next task and the workers to determine if they are getting paid promptly and want to continue on to the next task, that adds a sort of flexibility that makes the whole enterprise overall resilient because you can not fail overall and instead tweak at each different step as you move along it.
So I do think that Ivan does think that flexibility of the end result is – and stability is encouraged when you have task-based completion as you move towards that end final project.
It allows for constant feedback.
Right. Absolutely.
So instead of yearly employee reviews where one time a year your performance is reviewed, then you have hourly, weekly, daily reviews.
And all that's going to do is make you better.
That's just coaching.
Right on.
Yeah, and just one of the things you mentioned a little bit earlier was kind of tracking the artistic provenance of certain ideas that artists are kind of gestating.
And I don't know how exactly this would track onto it.
This is very kind of brainstorming, but like AI, of course, repurposes all of humanity's cultural products to itself produce something which it claims is new.
If there's a way to track and give value to people's inputs into an AI through some sort of lightning base, you get a microsat every time the AI drops your token, a token influenced by you or something like that, then all these – that mitigates the lawsuits based on copyright infringement.
People aren't so worried if their input is going into an AI, if somehow they can be rewarded for having produced that thing that is then being repurposed by the AI as if it was that AI's conscious thought.
And so, yeah, again, that's brainstorming.
I don't know how that all plays out.
That's something that –
I want to think about that for a second because – so the thing about AI that people have been talking about for so long is like, oh, it will just make everything free.
It'll make all of this information free and you'll have the sum of the world's wisdom and knowledge at your fingertips for zero cost.
But if it is set up like that, then, yeah, then you've got micropayments being made to all of the sources that contributed to that.
That's kind of fascinating.
I think what we saw with DeepSeek is that the cost of AI is rapidly crashing to zero.
Like, you know, they made a model better than any other model in the world.
And I think it cost them $5.8 million to train it.
According to their own self-report, there's some question on whether that's like China OPSEC or like China kind of PSYOP or whatever to say, here's how far ahead of you.
and also to obscure the fact that they were stealing a bunch of training from,
I get, I don't know what that is.
This is an emergent situation as far as deep sinks capability,
but I do agree with you.
I mean, there is, I guess, maybe you get too much of the weeds,
but open AI has requested some immense,
enormous amount of money because like compute is going to become so important.
So whether it crashes to zero, it's, I think you're, you're right.
It's going to get marginally less costly per like query or whatever,
even as the number of queries explodes, such as the amount of compute consumed overall is going to increase vastly.
Yeah, I've just never thought about that idea of the AI giving basically micropayments to all of the sources,
but it does make sense.
It's sound, I think, in that it would resolve a lot of the issues that we have now.
It does seem like it would be really hard to enforce, but I love the idea.
And it does seem like – I forget if this was in Alden or Software or just something tertiary I read that Bitcoin will likely be the preferred currency of AI, even if it's given its own kind of unmotivated choice as to what to use, just given that it's permissionless and decentralized.
And so that AI will want to use Bitcoin.
And so micro SAT transactions will be perhaps native to AI as it develops.
That'd be cool.
I think it.
Yeah.
I mean, that that is the most logical answer.
Right.
Because why would you know, this has been the argument for a long time.
why would a internet native worker, which would be AI,
why would an internet native worker use a non-native money?
Right. Yeah.
It would make sense that the internet native worker would use the internet native money
because otherwise it is just added friction to the system
and keeps you from maximizing the potential of that.
Yeah.
Can we talk about logistics?
We can talk about logistics.
Do you have a zero end point you want to focus on I am just so when I was in grad school my major professor had come from a program where he was writing algorithms for flight control um for you know for
um, for airports. And the other day I read something, I can't remember who it was,
some big giant in the airline industry or wherever talking about
the uselessness of air control towers.
Because air control towers, really, they don't...
There's no sense for them to be up in the sky looking at things
because they're never looking anymore.
Everything is on a computer terminal and it's all algorithmically automated
and it saves, you know, thousands of lives every single year by avoiding all the –
well, it may not save lives.
It just increases the throughput.
You know, instead of being able to land two planes an hour, now you can land 30,
something like that, you know.
And it's just fast.
If you're ever at an airport, park on the outside, like a busy airport,
Like I'm in Denver. So Denver International Airport park there and just sit and look and watch how many planes are coming in and out.
And they're landing like every minute or two. Right. It's in the throughput is insane.
And so I think about this, like the logistics side of it.
And you can take it all the way down to the guy who is installing doors on the construction site.
And it's just the straight gig thing.
And he's got an app on his phone.
And that app shows him which jobs are available, what they pay, what the exact specs are, and what the location is.
And, you know, normally he works in a five-mile radius from home.
But now he wants to go visit his sister in Denver. And so he looks at it and he goes, hey, you know, turns out I can hit this one and this one and this one.
And I can make my way three quarters of the way to Denver. I can pay for pay for the entire trip.
It's the same type of work. And so what this does to me is it truly highlights the ridiculousness of my least favorite subject when I was in school was geography.
because when I was like third or fourth grade,
they broke out this book and they said,
here's what the map used to look like.
Here's what it looks like now.
Here's what it might look like in the future.
And I was like, this is all horseshit.
Like this is all just made up lines.
The joke was always, you know,
whenever two white guys got into an argument,
we had to redraw the maps and it kind of pissed me off
because I had to relearn all of these names.
But what this does,
the logistics capability of these digital currencies
and the smart contracts that underlie,
it really does highlight the ridiculousness
of some of these imaginary lines
and the idea that when you go from here to here,
that all of a sudden you're in a different world.
And you are, I mean, you truly are, of course,
but what we're going to see as a result of this
is just so much more blending and blurring of those lines
Where, you know, you're going to like. It is very much in the benefit of a county that is on the border to another state to allow for residents of the bordering county in the other state to compete for jobs.
and also reciprocally to allow their customers or their people to compete for jobs in the other county.
Because it broadens the amount of work that can be done.
It increases the labor force.
Anytime that you have more buyers and more sellers in a market, you have a more clear market signal.
And you have a more efficient market clearing program.
And so I think I think you're going to see that kind of in the beginning where these these little back and forth between, you know, between Norton County and on the top rung of counties in Kansas and the county Harlan County, I think, is the one up in Nebraska that's right north of Norton, where it's like, OK, you know, this guy's going to come down and he's going to ranch down here.
and this guy's going to come up here and he's going to pay me first.
I think you're going to see a lot more of that as a result of this.
This is revolutionizing to the industry.
Right now, it's been a very good job to be a logistics person for trucking.
They're typically stay-at-home jobs.
They typically make over $100,000.
It is a pretty damn good job.
and that's going to be replaced by an algorithm that allows the trucker to just tap, tap, tap.
Okay, I'm taking this freight from New Jersey to California.
And then as soon as I get to California, I can decide on the way or I can just wait.
I can take time off.
I can do whatever.
And then I just get back on the app and I tap it.
This is that Uber for everything idea.
Where the concept of Uber eliminating the third party, eliminating the middleman, which they didn't quite do.
They sort of missed the boat on that one where they kind of became a middleman that takes a massive percentage.
And that's not great.
But that Uber is coming to everything, right?
Uber for babysitters and Uber for grandpas that are helping out around the house doing odd jobs and stuff like that.
Yeah.
I mean that point you note about the – so Ivan's kind of application of instant settlement to these different industries is about eliminating frictions.
One of the biggest – a big friction is arbitrary lines on the map.
And so, I mean, the forex market with these foreign exchange fees for when you change currencies between jurisdictions, there's also just the fact – and Ivan mentioned this in his essay on gambling – that if you're in a very regulated industry, if you remove yourself as a target of regulation, sometimes you can kind of skirt through.
So an open source and permissionless piece of software can do things that a corporation perhaps cannot because there's no target for a regulator.
And so if you have an open source transparent app connected to the Lightning Network, maybe it's going to allow for certain types of frictionless interstate transfers that otherwise would be caught up in red tape and exchange fees.
And of course, we see that with remittances now, but also it definitely applies in the realm of logistics, as you mentioned, that we can integrate supply chains globally in that way.
I guess just as a side point, this is stepping in a different direction from the essay even, but just you noted that it's always better if there's open market irrespective of arbitrary lines on the map.
And I think we see that maybe that's not the case. If market clearance or coming up with a clear price signal is your only goal overall, perhaps, but also these seemingly arbitrary lines, we saw this play out in the US with the immigration debate. They also can mark cultural and even historic. There's reasons why we have these lines. They're not absolutely arbitrary. And they can serve as divisions that are real in the kind of lived lives of people aside from the products they buy.
So that's maybe not an alleyway to go down, but just to note that instant settlement is maybe a market thing, but there are other factors at play that are going to keep lines on the map, perhaps, if that makes sense.
Yeah, there's cultural differences and everything. I think anything that you do to slow down the adoption of clear market pricing, clear signals is in some way a form of protectionism or nationalism or some sort of micro version of that.
Yeah, I mean, good or bad, whatever, it does exist and it always will.
Yeah, removing friction is just the key here.
When I watched Jack Mallers present, I think it was the 2022 Bitcoin conference, and he was talking about Strike and talking about the Lightning Network and talking about how he used, I think it was potato chips,
to explain the difference between the Lightning Network and the traditional banking rails to,
you know, to boomers and the billionaires that they were working with.
I remember watching that and thinking like, oh, Visa and MasterCard are dead, like dead, 100% dead.
And then I became close to someone who was in the MasterCard system.
And I was able to hear a lot of kind of the internal talk about what they're trying to do.
I mean, it's not internal.
It's not privileged information or anything.
But just like, you know, strategy and direction.
And the constant theme was that we're going to bank on our brand.
We're going to bank on the value of the name of MasterCard.
And we're going to put that on new things.
And we're going to leverage and arbitrage that brand recognizability and that consumer trust in order to attempt to stay relevant.
and
that
makes me think of
Mark Andreessen in a recent
podcast
with, I can't remember who it was, but
he quoted a conversation
he had with Elon Musk where he was asked
about why
they don't have like gaudy
hood ornaments
and stuff on Teslas
you can barely tell that it's a
Tesla, it has like a tiny little emblem
on the front and maybe it says the model, but a lot of them don't even say the model.
And he said, you know, well, the thing is that if you make the best product, then you
don't need a brand.
Like the brand doesn't matter.
And I hadn't thought about that MasterCard thing for a long time.
I hadn't thought about that.
Oh, we're just banking on the brand.
We're going to, because it makes sense.
It's like, oh, you know, we're, we're Berkshire Hathaway.
We're JP Morgan.
And we're, you know, we're these big giants that are, we have this trusted consumer model.
And then I got to thinking about, oh, I heard that quote and I was like, oh, we're JCPenney.
We're Sears and Roboc.
We're General Electric.
We're Blockbuster.
You know, we're all these brands that banked on their brand and failed to recognize that it was nothing more than a shift in technology that lessened the friction for the consumer in order to participate in the market.
and to tie this clear back around into something that I think about a lot
probably the most foundational book that I've ever read is Atomic Habits by James Clear
and he talks about the importance of setting up yourself for success you don't achieve the level
we don't rise to the level of our goals we fall to the level of our systems and talks about the
importance of establishing those habits, establishing those rituals in order to get
your goals met. The goal is not the outcome. Goal is the activity. If you're trying to lose weight
and get jacked, then your goal is not to lift 285 pounds. Your goal is to show up at the gym
five times a week and do the workout and do it for five years. And he mentions an example of one
guy who lost like a hundred pounds by creating a gym habit that he started solely by going to the
gym. Like he first started by, I'm going to put my shoes on and I'm going to walk out the door
and I'm going to walk back. And he did that for a week. And the next week it was like, I'm going
to put my shoes on. I'm going to walk out the door. I'm going to drive by the gym and then home.
The third week, I'm going to go into the gym for five minutes and I put him home. And so he's just
like building upon this, building upon this. And what he's doing is he is ritualizing all of these
micro habits that you have to do in order to get there. You have to have your gym clothes ready.
I remember thinking when I read that, I remember thinking, dude, that hits me so hard because there
have been times when I wanted to go to the gym and I was ready and I did not go to the gym because
I could not find the sock that I wanted to. Like I would look at my, oh, I want to wear these socks.
And I'm like, ah, but I can only find one of them. I have 20 other pairs of socks, but I was really
set on this. And that friction, that decision-making friction right there is what kept me from
achieving the goal. And so I think that Ivan accurately represents that everything about
bettering the consumer experience is about removing friction. It's about, we talked about
this earlier, actually off camera, but it's removing the pain point. What is your pain point?
What is the thing that makes it difficult for you to engage in this so that you may not do it
100% of the time, even though you want to do it 100% of the time, you want to give your best
effort. Like nobody, we all want to give our best effort. Nobody feels good about showing up for a
job and slacking off and getting paid shit per hour, um, and doing even shittier work per hour
in order to get that. Like nobody goes home and feels good about that. Nobody writes books about
that. Nobody inspires people by doing that. Um, what you do is you, um, you do create, uh, a hunger
for something like this, a hunger for a pain point removed experience, a hunger for the growth of a
frictionless economy. Um, and, and people that are just excited about being involved in that.
I think there's a lot of joy that is right around the corner looking at those things.
No, I mean it takes us down to one of the key insights from Ivan's essay series of the transformative shift of pay for work from pay for time.
To quote Ivan, quote, work transforms us, makes us better, faster, stronger, and more skillful versions of our former selves.
And who doesn't want that, right?
I mean, who doesn't? That's to be fully human is to always be improving yourself and becoming what you can become. And so his ideas like salary jobs don't incentivize that. They punish that. They generally, I mean, you can have other types of incentive structures, but generally they punish people who want to develop themselves through their work because, you know, that's an extra effort the person has to take and they're not being paid for that.
They're just being paid for the time they spend at that place.
And so this is a question I have for you, Lucas, and maybe just a general reflection
point for anybody who's had these disparate experiences.
Did you, I mean, you've worked both salaried jobs and also done kind of task per task gig
economy work.
And I'm just wondering if you see, if Ivan's insights track onto your own personal experience,
and of course, it's not going to be perfect because the nature of the gig economy jobs
just oftentimes people take them in a downtime because they need to do some
work. So it's not what they would ideally want to be doing,
but do you,
any of these psychological insights that Ivan kind of begins to feel out as
far as like enabling people to self-improve,
did you see that in kind of gig versus salaried work or any sort of the
notes?
Yeah. So just to give some background.
So what you're referencing is my time as a musician and a band leader, which would be the gig side.
And then my experience in banking and finance and sales, which each of those roles, none of those roles were purely salary.
They each were some sort of performance.
They had some sort of performance based aspect.
But yeah, the first thing that came to mind when you were talking about that was this quote that I think the like the most addictive things in life are heroin and a bi-monthly paycheck or something like that.
But I can tell you that the difference of the people that are drawn to the gig economy and the people that are working a salaried job with a 401k and team performance goals, not individual performance goals,
where the team performance goals are 20% performance and 80% staying in line with whatever sycophantic commandments have been laid down as the company culture that you have to step to.
I'll just give a couple observations.
Salaried folks are fatter.
like that's a physical observation that I think is very consistent.
They're less healthy. Um, I don't see them at the gym.
Um,
I am constantly shocked at the hypocritical nature of people involved in those
industries who have something on their LinkedIn profile or put up something
on Instagram to show how they went out of the way and above and beyond to serve a customer.
But the back end of that is that when a customer calls that they aren't particularly fond of
and they happen to be watching a movie at work, then they just say, meh, I'll do it later.
Or even more insidious is when an employee who they aren't particularly fond of wants them to do something that is their job.
Then they slow play it and knock it down.
So you have these internal politics that end up punishing the customer.
And really you never see that You are a consumer and you do not realize how many times in your life that your consumer experience has suffered because John in sales was having an argument with Kathy in accounting
Like, you have no clue.
Um, and, and these are very, you know, another observation is that these are, these salary, um, kind of, uh, kept houses, house mice, house mouse jobs.
They are very incestual.
you know they they encourage even though there's always hr against it there's always these
inner office romances and dramas going on that end up affecting the bottom line of the company
sometimes in massive ways like truly massive ways but at the very least in small enough ways
that can't be noticed, but are felt over time.
So yeah, that would be kind of mine.
But I want to hear your thoughts.
Well, I think just to mention, like, so your observation that health is one of the emergent
things impacted when you are paid for time rather than like work rendered.
And I mean, it just there's probably a lot of it.
I think that is generally true.
And I think there's probably a lot of explanations, like, because if people aren't encouraged to develop a skill set through reward for task completion, your life is just generally and vaguely more depressing if you're not cultivating a craft, but instead you're just like cultivating the ability to while away your time.
another quote from Ivan that I think doubles down or fleshes out this point the result
of the pay for time what kind of model is a culture of dependency where the quest for easy
money overshadows the pursuit of self-improvement so he says that and then I want to pause there
because the next sentence is striking he poses a question how many steps are we from enslaving our
own children to avoid working. And that's maybe a somewhat hyperbolic way of making the point
that once you begin to go down that road of money for nothing, which is the essence of the fiat
mindset of just being paid for sitting or being in a place or even not being in a place, just being
paid for duration of time expended, then it's an easy shift into, I want to be paid for the future
time of other people. And that's the essence of the fiat money printer, where we spend without
balancing through taxation, where we accrue a massive deficit and pass it on to the future.
We use that fiat mechanic to steal value from future generations. We have social security,
which is not funded, which is going to run out in 2034 or something like that,
probably quicker if things keep on accelerating. So I think that he makes an actual, you know,
it sounds hyperbolic, but it's a very good point. How many steps are we from enslaving our own
children to avoid working? We don't want to work now. So we accrue deficits and push them off onto
future generations that are going to have to deal with them. And so it's like, it's very insidious
that pay for time model. And I don't think that, I mean, just the fact that it bubbles out
unconsciously in the form of one's health shows how deep it is in our culture. And, you know,
it's something that we would need an anthropologist, a sociologist to really
get deep and kind of plumb out the implications of what a switch to a pay for work model would mean.
Yeah, I mean, I personally witnessed people slow walk multi-million dollar deals to the plate so
that the sale could go on next quarter or next month or next year because they had already
hit their bonus incentives or something.
So they literally had no incentive to do anything different.
And that's tens of thousands.
If you're talking about a $10 million deal, that's tens of thousands of dollars that is
lost in the system by slow playing that.
There's loss on both sides.
it truly does lead to a corruption of skills. And the other side is the iron sharpens iron,
is that when you're out there and you are competing, that you have a real life barometer
of your skill because it's being measured in terms of what you get paid for. The quote that
money isn't the best way of measuring a man, but it's the best one we have, I think is really
applicable, where it's like, yeah, what value do you contribute? And how does the world,
how does the world view that? And what are they willing to pay in return for that?
I wanted to know about, so like you, so I experienced this, I'm going to lay a little
background, a little groundwork before I ask this question and kind of throw it back to you. But
So Grant and I lived together. Grant was kind enough to allow me to stay with him in Washington for a couple months.
And I got to witness the most insane work ethic I've ever seen outside of my mother, except my mother doesn't get up as early as you.
So I think you've even got her beat.
I'm spiritually older than your mother is what you're saying.
You may be.
yeah there's there's a shot there's a chance but you know so i i got up to washington i'm like hey
i'm gonna move in with my buddy we're gonna have fun there's all this outdoor stuff to do there's
all this blah blah blah i was there for three months and i think that there was i think that
there was one full day that you didn't work and i think that there was one half day that you didn't
work. Um, but every single other, like most Sundays you would work eight hours. Most Saturdays
you would work like 10, probably something like that. Eight to 10. Most days you would work, um,
12 to 14. Um, and this was in a situation where, um, your cohorts were, uh, nine to fivers,
primarily a lot of, a lot of them. And so I'm interested to see, because I know that I have
very much fallen victim to the trap of, well, if I'm not going to get paid more, I'm not going to
work more. Um, it, you know, I'm, I'm a human, I'm a learning, I'm a human, I'm a learning machine.
And it is a feature, not a bug that when you put someone into a program where they do not get paid
more for more performance, that they adjust to that system. That's learning. That's not people
taking advantage of the system. That is learning the system and treating the system as it was meant
to be treated, which is to make people time slaves. And so I'm curious to know what your
thoughts are on that, because I feel like you were somewhat immune to it. Although I'm certain that
there were times where it just felt completely different from that,
where you're like, oh, I'm just going to stare at this clock
and watch my life tick away.
What's your kind of experience been in that,
especially working in law?
Because lawyers charge by the hour.
Yeah.
So a lot of what Ivan says resonates with me
as far as work is a medium for improving one's skill set,
And it's a way that we, you know, he doesn't use these terms, but when you develop a craft, you develop yourself. And I just think that like that material feedback with the world reaches back into you and changes who you are for the better. And it's essential that we do that.
So the work that I was doing as an attorney was salaried. So it was not, I wasn't earning per hour, but you're right that I was working way beyond the nine to five that was set for me. I was working such that, that I got in trouble for working too much because people, they couldn't understand that like the motivation for my work was internal.
I became connected to my clients and really wanted to help them in the specific legal issues that I was working on with them, but also that notion of a craft where I saw what I was doing, saw the ways to improve it, and saw the ways that improving that craft would improve myself.
And so I really wanted to double down into it, but they did not have an incentive structure to reward that, to acknowledge it. And so, I mean, long story short, I'm no longer working at that job. And you could call it burnout or you could just call it, you know, realizing that your incentives, the incentive structure is not matching up with, you know, the way that you actually operate.
And I saw that to be sustainable in that job, I would have to dial back my work ethic, essentially.
I would have to dial back the development of my craft and what I was doing.
And so that this thing, the work I was doing had this perverse incentive that was constantly nagging at me.
It was true that the more work that I did, the less that I was paid because you don't get more if you work more hours.
But I just couldn't stand that insidious dynamic where I was being told to make myself less because to develop your craft less, to care less for the clients that you're assisting.
And so a pay-for-work model really aligns incentives in a way that maybe I would still be working where I was or in the same area of law if incentives had been more properly aligned.
So it just goes back to Ivan's central point that if you don't align incentives within a system, you're going to – he notes this.
Employee retention is one area that's going to be tough because people – I think the best people in the job do want to deploy and develop themselves within the framework of their work.
There are some times in your life where you just need a paycheck to pay the rent and you're going to do the Panera Bread Cashier or whatever.
But, you know, for the most part, we're hoping to find a job that's going to engage us in the world we live in, enable us to make the world better through the skills we have, and enable us to sharpen ourselves as we do that.
And so if you're on line incentives, you lose people like that.
And it's why I don't work where I used to work.
Yeah.
And just for clarification, it was by choice.
It's not as though you were asked to leave.
No, that's correct.
Yeah.
And so that goes to the employee retention thing, right?
Yeah, if they'd had better incentives for retaining.
I mean, maybe that's one of the perverse things is certain types of work don't want to retain people who work hard because it makes others feel bad.
And I don't want to say that that was the case with my cohort necessarily, but I think it perhaps was the general culture of that employer where some people felt bad if others worked more than they did.
Yeah, I think this highlights the hypocritical nature of businesses that bring together their employees and try to unite them under a team aspect that we're all in this together.
And because we're all in this together, that we're all going to have the same standards and we're all going to step to the same beat.
But the glaring issue with that that arises, which is what you noted, is that when somebody in that system puts forth extra effort, then those around them look upon that derisively and they feel as though that person is making them look bad.
Now take that exact same thing and put it on an actual team, a football team.
And you've got the guy who stays after practice and throws 50 more passes, who shows up early and makes sure he gets a stretching in, who's hitting his early morning workouts, who is being overly exuberant in all aspects.
People don't go up to that person and tell them to tone down.
That's not the nail that they hit in order to knock down.
That is the person that they look to as the inspiration.
That's the person that builds this groundswell of other individuals saying, oh, that's possible.
I could put forth this effort.
I could get this much better.
I could have this approach that I'm just here to get better.
I'm not here to
to just
not be somewhere else for a while
and those are the people that
end up with the C on their
uniform, those are the people that are
truly inspiring, so
what's the C on the uniform? I'm not familiar with it
Captain, yeah sorry
yeah I should have said that
but I think it just truly highlights
no absolutely
all these buzzwords like oh we're
in this together, we're on the same team
no you're not
By killing individual performance, you end up killing the team.
Each team, you know, when a team executes individually in order to achieve as a group.
And so you have to have people who are striving to do the best at what they do, regardless of how it makes someone else feel about their own effort.
Right. And you can't even necessarily blame the clock watcher. They have just fully adopted the incentives of the system they're within. They're very intelligent.
Like I said, that's work.
Right.
It legitimately is a threat to their mode of operation if someone is saying we should work at this more intense rhythm or work more so that we can fully deploy and develop our craft.
And the clock watcher says, I'm not rewarded for that and neither are you.
And so step back.
And it's an excellent metaphor you give of the football team.
You know, maybe one aspect of switching to a pay for work system is the return of like, maybe to put too highfalutin language on or something, but it's like a return to everyday heroism where you see people who do when you are inspired to better yourself by seeing the people around you, bettering themselves and working hard rather than trying to pull them down.
So you aren't expected to work as hard as they do.
yeah i think the conclusion that we can come to out of this is that you are a very slow learner
yeah i i've concluded that myself various times so
and by the way it's like that's the same thing with my mom my mom works a state job
and uh it's one of those jobs that like you it would be very difficult to be fired from that job
Yeah. You would have to do a lot as my master, my major professor in grad school.
He got tenure when I was 20 or 21. I didn't know him very well. I just kind of hung out with him
because he was the major professor of some other friends. And he was a cool guy. And he on Friday
nights, we would all gather at his house and all the poor broke college students would come over and
we'd drink his beer and I'd play my guitar on the back patio and we'd smoke cigars and talk like we
knew shit. And, um, and he was a young guy. He was 40 when he got, um, when he got tenure or maybe
even earlier than that. And his wife invited me to his tenure celebration party. And I was like,
I don't know what tenure is. Um, and, and, uh, so I asked him, I said, what does tenure mean?
And like, what did, what actually does that do? He goes, well, he goes, put it this way. He goes,
you could, uh, you could, uh, sexually offend someone twice and they can't like it either time
before you even, before they even think about firing you. And they're like, yeah, that's pretty
much what a state job is. But yeah, so my mom is the same way. She works 80 hours a week at a job
that she could very, very easily work 15 hours a week at, um, and, and still get the same
recognition. And, and she gets all of these recognitions for things that she does and goes
way above and beyond and stuff. And, um, I have noticed negative sentiment from people around her
that, you know, it's, Hey, you're making us look bad. Like we're, we're just here to, you know,
we're just here to punch the time and get out. So yeah, I, I completely understand that. I see
it around my life. And, and now I, I love how Ivan has put this into a framework where I can now,
I can now view my mother and you as slow learners and myself,
myself,
I can,
I can congratulate my,
um,
at times lazy approach to performance,
uh,
because I was not,
um,
because I was not incentivized.
I can congratulate myself for being intelligent.
Yeah.
No,
it's all about building me up.
No resisting perverse incentives in a slow,
uh,
reticent fashion is definitely makes one a slow learner.
Best just to get in the system and operate like the clog that we were born to be.
So this essay has – we've jumped over – I think we've illustrated the broad and general concepts that Ivan wants to reveal by examining various industries.
We've also looked at a couple of the specific industries.
Within that, just to drop some Easter eggs, it's worth reading the entirety of this series because he drops a lot of different interesting examples.
Again, he's applying this idea of what instant settlement might mean in different industries.
And along the way, he kind of casually talks about how influencers could – their incentives could be more aligned with the products that they are acting as the marketers for.
He talks about how taxis, you could revolutionize the way that drivers and passengers kind of contract with the taxi driver for the duration of the ride.
He even talks about how streaming itself seems like pay for time, but it can be also, you know, it's payment for such a small subslice of time. It almost approximates the type of pay for work. And he talks about all these different things in this essay series.
So I would encourage, I guess, if you want to dial in any topics to further discuss, Lucas, we can. But I would encourage everybody to read this essay and see all the different examples he gives. And then he has two quotes at the end that he says are kind of his final message.
One, build utility.
Do not promise future fortunes.
And then second, do not wait or ask permission to do work.
Do the work that you want to do.
And I would encourage everybody to read these essays with that latter sentiment in mind.
Do the work that you want to do.
If you don't understand your industry and industry perfectly, you can still begin to think about how it can be improved with instant settlement.
to maybe even talk with an app developer, someone like Breeze,
about what your industry, how Lightning could be integrated into that.
And just, yeah, keep on thinking, keep on reading,
keep on applying these things that you read about Bitcoin to the world
because we really are on the forefront of how Bitcoin is going to fix all of this.
Yeah, I loved it. I think Ivan did a killer job.
I really enjoyed this discussion because it allowed me to kind of wander through
a bunch of life experiences and think about some people in my life that, um, I can view in a,
in a different light and look upon them favorably and, uh, with grace. And so,
yeah, I'm thrilled that I'm thrilled that we had this discussion and, uh, I'm looking forward to
the, uh, to the next one. Um, this has been very fun. You got anything else? That's it. Thanks for
joining along. I appreciate it, man. All right, gang, if you can't, uh, what do they say? If they
don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy. Have a great day.