I think just keep it simple.
Life is short.
The grind is long.
Staying up the stacks.
That's work hard, save on Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is the best money that's ever existed.
You can hold your wealth.
You can spend it all without permission, without counterparty risk.
It is absolutely beautiful.
There's no second best.
I think the debanking and the rugs will continue until self-custody improves.
like it's just if there's no need then people find complacency so what i would say to people
is remain focused like the fundamentals have not changed um we need bitcoin more than ever
i'm i've i from a risk reward basis i have never been more bullish on bitcoin i think it's the
best money in the world that remains so um and just eyes on the prize right like i think this is
where this is, you know,
where the men get separated from the boys.
We've got breaking news as we start recording.
Jack Mallers, he stepped down.
You think I'm close enough to this mic?
Yeah, you're fine.
I didn't see it coming.
Yeah, what's your opinion as a external bystander?
You literally found out an hour ago.
My opinion is, as a friend of Jack's, I'm kind of pumped.
Because the thing that has been frustrating from a very selfish perspective in Bitcoin is everyone working for public companies means that they're very conscious of what they say.
They can't say a lot of things.
They have to sort of pull punches.
And I'm excited to have unshackled Jack back.
That's like my initial.
It was funny because yesterday you literally said to me, the weird part about all these Bitcoin public companies is everyone has all these secrets that they can't share.
Yep.
And when you said that, I was like, I have a secret I can't share.
Look, I am incredibly close friends with Jack.
I've known him for years now.
Our families know each other.
He launched Strike on my podcast in Marty's studio apartment.
1031 is the largest investor in Strike.
But we were never investors in XXI.
We were never directly involved in XXI.
Obviously, Jack is one of my confidants and I'm one of his.
So I've provided him plenty of personal advice.
but on a fiduciary duty point of view it's always for me it's always been to strike
shareholders and then as a friend to jack as just unbiased advice and i i mean i think this is
uh i think it's important for him to own own his mistakes take personal responsibility
improve push forward i think this is fantastic for strike um i think it's good for strike
shareholders i think it's good for strike users i think it's good for the bitcoin industry
um and i'm pretty excited for what comes next i i think uh it's hard to
i think it's hard it's hard to appreciate being in that situation unless you were in that
situation yeah um but now you know he controls his destiny he completely controls his destiny
and that's to me when jack always ships the best 100 but it is interesting like i obviously don't
know why it happened you've i've heard his little thing he did on twitter say like explaining what
had gone on it sounds like basically him and the board maybe had a different opinion of where
the company should go um i'm just glad to see him not in the seat of like a big another bitcoin
business like strike is his thing like it always has been like i i think focusing on that solely
will be better for him i hope it's not hit his ego too hard no i think um it has i think he's
definitely been significantly humbled. I think it's weird to talk about a friend publicly without
them here. But I also, you know, he's a key part of the Bitcoin industry and Strike is a key part
of the Bitcoin industry. So it's definitely relevant regardless. And I was definitely going
to have to comment on it on Rabbit Hole Recap anyway. Look, I think XXi is an interesting one,
right? Because it was, it was a company that was manufactured from scratch, uh, to do something
and never actually did those things. Um, and the only way it would really work in my opinion,
as you said, is for him not to have two seats and for there to be effectively a strike acquisition
or merger into XVI. Um, so I think people can read between the lines, but ultimately
that didn't make sense for the parties involved.
You know, deals are hard to make
and terms couldn't really come to...
We couldn't...
There couldn't be a deal that everyone was happy with.
And so what's the best point of that?
What's the best decision at that point?
I think it to own your mistakes and move on When you say own your mistakes though what mistakes do you think he made I mean I won speak for him I sure he going to be out there
and loud and transparent as he possibly can.
But I mean, for starters,
like maybe don't even do it in the first place, right?
Yeah, but I mean, the idea of the business
I thought was quite interesting.
Like it wasn't a normal treasury company.
Look, I think it's easy to backseat quarterback this stuff.
Yeah.
But ultimately, it's easy to backseat quarterback this stuff.
But ultimately, if I was in the driver's seat, which I never was, I think what you would do is you'd have to come to terms on some kind of strike deal before you do the thing.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah, that makes sense.
the thing that I'm like that would probably be like the biggest regret I think if I was in his
shoes let me put it that way yeah I don't want to talk for him either but like I would also imagine
he's probably frustrated the way they played out after doing the announcement of the conference as
well yeah I mean I would agree with that yeah but the thing I am excited about is I think he's going
to come out swinging now I think he'll be like firing Jack as we used to know Jack because like
now he can say what he wants which is awesome and look I'll always I always have his back I think he
actually does really care i've seen it firsthand yeah um he cares about bitcoin he cares about his
company he cares about his users cares about his family yeah um i think i think it's it's look
when when we were kids you had i i don't i don't know about you but when i was growing up i had so
many friends and it was all because of just like proximity all right um it's like the people you
grew up with the people that were in your class the people that were living on your street like
they were just automatically default to your friends.
They were there so they're your friends.
Although they're still my friends,
a lot of those people.
Yeah, but like when you become an adult.
It's more meaningful, more purposeful.
Yeah, you kind of distill your life
into a much smaller group of friends, right?
And it's not a proximity thing.
I mean, we're super close friends
and we live on the complete opposite side of the world, right?
And Jack is one of those guys that I'm just like,
I'm very grateful to have in my life,
be a part of his life.
and there's just not that many people like that yeah no jack's awesome the thing that i do like
as well is jack was never an orange tie like the only time i've ever seen jack wear a suit was a
event in dc and he came out in tux pants i think that proves how he's not a suit but he didn't even
know that it was a tuxedo we had to tell him when he arrived i was like why'd you wear a tuxedo
so clearly not a suit but he's like it was in my closet but that obviously like he kind of was
an part of the orange tie brigade to a degree like he was and i'm glad that he's not anymore
um do you think the orange tie crew i know you've been on a bit tirade about these
have been net negative for bitcoin
i don't know i i feel i feel uh
I don't like punching down.
And shareholders, a lot of these businesses are down 90%.
Sometimes more, sometimes less.
I do...
I would like to see them right their ships.
I strictly prefer that people don't lose a ton of money.
And I think most of the shareholders for these companies are diehard Bitcoiners.
Like, I don't think they necessarily I think there was some expansion of scope, like investor
base, but I think that's overstated.
I think most of it was was effectively funded by diehard Bitcoiners, like people that were
already buying Bitcoin would be buying Bitcoin otherwise.
And, you know, I would I hope I hope they find good outcomes.
I think obviously people in general across the industry have hopefully learned lessons in counterparty risk and third party risk.
But a net negative, I don't think it's been a net negative.
I think in a lot of ways it's been inevitable it was going to happen anyway.
I don't think most of these companies will fail just because I'm bullish on Bitcoin.
I think the key thing that people should be looking at here, though, is something that we've talked about at length for years with shit coins is do not measure your performance in dollar terms.
right i think the question that people should be asking themselves is if i own mstr common stock
for instance will it outperform bitcoin in a bull run not that you know just the fiat number is up
probably in the bull run it might like but i'm saying that's the question that's how you should
be looking at these things right um it not just okay if bitcoin pumps then mstr pumps which that is what would happen The question is does it outperform But I think it kind of turns everyone into a trader then
Because I think if you could buy, just using MSDR as an example,
if you're buying it now and Bitcoin does go on a big bull run,
I could totally believe that MSDR outperforms Bitcoin in that period.
But it's like, Bitcoin's not a two-year game.
Will it outperform over the next 10 years?
I doubt it. I don't know, but I doubt it.
And so if you're going to try and basically swing trade cycles, that seems very risky.
To be clear, I think people should stay humble and stack stats.
Yes.
I think just keep it simple.
Life is short.
The grind is long.
Stay humble, stack stats.
Work hard, save on Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is the best money that's ever existed.
You can hold your wealth.
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It is absolutely beautiful.
There is no second best.
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I find it kind of hard to kind of square.
The idea of companies buying Bitcoin is cool.
I love that.
But I have an aversion to treasury companies
and I can't always explain it.
It's just like the financial games
that some of these companies are playing now,
it's got too complex and I just don't like it.
Like I'd rather just buy Bitcoin.
And I don't necessarily know
what other people see in them that I don't.
Look, I think there's a couple of pieces here.
I think, first of all, since the dawn of Bitcoin, one of the products that have had significant product market fit is leverage on Bitcoin.
And that has come from pure play leverage, stuff like the BitMEX casino.
Maybe that's why I hate it.
I got wrecked on BitMEX.
Or shit coins, right?
Shit coins have almost always been someone trying to outperform Bitcoin.
And most times people get wrecked.
On the Bitcoin treasury companies as a whole, I think my two biggest nitpicks are, first of all, the conflation of if you are concerned about the risks and how they're portrayed with Bitcoin treasury companies, you don't think companies should hold Bitcoin.
No I just I have this radical view that companies should be profitable businesses that save in Bitcoin So radical And so I think there been a conflation there between what I expect to be the overwhelming
majority of Bitcoin businesses, which are just traditional profitable businesses that
use Bitcoin as a treasury asset and use it maybe even as a means of payment for things
that, you know, if they need to cross-border payments and stuff like that, wires maybe
are not sustainable for or not the ideal fit for, which is, by the way, something we see on the
OpenSat side, which is my charity. You know, we're sending out a million dollars a month in Bitcoin
to 40 plus countries, grant recipients in 40 plus countries, and we're sending it all out with
Bitcoin. It just literally would not be possible to do that with wires. In some cases, it would not
be possible. In other cases, it's just untenable, especially on a monthly basis. And then the second
piece is um you're doing that as a single batch transaction for like a dollar or something oh yeah
it's like super cheap uh but more important is like just like the mental burden and the counting
burden just easier right it's uh mempool's clearly emptied again like it's absolutely insane i got
that one wrong you got that one very wrong but like the crazy thing is that even like a high
a high priority transaction now can be less than one sat for vbyte like that's something that i
would never have guessed was coming two years ago yeah you like pay like half a set for vbyte and
do you think that's a really damning sign for bitcoin first of all uh that was a voluntary
thing because it's not a consensus rule that was a voluntary thing that miners and i have no
understand why they agreed to do that they had like a nice price for i mean maybe at the time
one separate by didn't feel like much but now it feels like a lot yeah you know they could be
getting double like i get that there's like almost a prison's dilemma in it where if other people
were doing it yeah did it but but why i don't know it's weird but uh they chose to anyway i mean the
real reason is because transaction fees remain a negligible part of their revenue right it's
it's mostly the subsidy um which goes down by half every having um that is the majority of the
revenue and so i think they just didn't really think that much of it they might as well squeeze
a little bit more out of the fruit, right?
If some other mining pool is accepting it.
But they did it like really quickly.
Like it was like,
it was surprising there wasn't really
any major holdouts in terms of going under
one separate bite.
Is it damning?
No, I don't.
I mean, I don't think so.
I do think
adoption of real Bitcoin
has been lagging in recent years.
But I think it's too short term for it to be considered a trend.
I think like in the last cycle, a lot of the excitement was around these basically these Bitcoin public stocks.
Right.
And not buying Bitcoin and using Bitcoin.
But we've seen a lot of positive trends recently on using Bitcoin as money in a day to day.
I mean, I think some of the biggest news of the year was Square going live with Bitcoin payments at their terminals.
I think across the world, we see a lot of successes on Bitcoin circular economies in like South Africa and Kenya and Costa Rica.
Kenya is the best country in the world to be a Bitcoiner, I think.
Well, the government's like kind of hostile towards it.
If you want to use it, there's literally basically no way you can't use Bitcoin.
Tando's Kenya, right?
Tando, yeah.
It's awesome.
I like those like pragmatic use cases too.
It's like Tando's not purely cypherpunk.
but if you have an mpesa phone number which everyone does you can just do at bitcoin.co.ke
at the end of it and it's a lightning address and you can just and if you send bitcoin and
they're not enabled they just receive uh kenya whatever their fiat is yeah um which is just
super practical and is interesting because you can do that in places with mobile money you see
stuff like that in Costa Rica. You see stuff like that in South Africa with massive mobile money
adoption already that we just don't have that fee outside infrastructure in place in the United
States. So you don't see that as much. But yeah, I mean, look, I don't know about you. I use Bitcoin
as money all the time. I prefer to spend Bitcoin. I do think it's an interesting...
There's definitely a dynamic where I don't know about you, but the majority of my payments are
lightning payments. Yeah, same. Which is a protocol for batch Bitcoin transactions. So it should
reduce demand on the chain. But I mean, you say you use Bitcoin as money all the time. I don't.
Like, I wish I could use it more, but I just don't. Like, we don't have square terminals
accepting Bitcoin in Australia. There's very few places I can actually spend Bitcoin.
Do you accept any sponsorships in Bitcoin? They can all pay in Bitcoin.
Do any? Occasionally, but not many. Interesting.
Yeah. And I think people will often say it's like accounting reasons and that sort of thing, which I get.
Like if it makes your business harder to run, then I do understand it.
But I use Bitcoin as money probably less than a few times a month.
So there's...
there's a lot of small businesses that online have started accepting bitcoin and either they're
uh bitcoin only or bitcoin preferred um like something that come to mind is like soapminer.com
is a is a guy who makes amazing natural soap uh for my family and we just pay in bitcoin um there's
a there's a ranch in santa fe that makes amazing meat called beck and bellow buck and bellow
buck and below maybe um really good meat accepts bitcoin uh the right run by ride or die bitcoiners
um so if there's a will there's a way i just i i think i think people need to be patient
and the way the halvings work out is the subsidy is still quite high
transaction fees don't need to be the majority of revenue yet um usually when halvings happen
the dollar
terms are
increased even though halvings are decreasing
in Bitcoin terms and if you think about miners
most of the time their expenses are in fiat
so in a lot
of ways the subsidy hasn't really been reducing
significantly so we still have significant
more time but I think it's
definitely something to watch
when I first got into Bitcoin
2016-2017
transaction fees were way higher than today
they probably haven't been
as high as a SAP of eBite since then, I would imagine.
And that was clearly people who were using like real Bitcoin to,
I think a lot of it was probably people sending it across exchanges
to go and punt on shitcoins.
But like people were still using Bitcoin.
And one of the things I think is actually interesting
about sort of crypto world is because if you want to interact
in like DeFi space, you have to be self-custodying
whatever shitcoin you have.
Like they have way higher rates of self-custody.
It's the one thing I think they've done better.
yeah it is interesting um i mean if you look at the top the top self-custody wallets there's all
shitcoin wallet yeah it's trust wallet and metamask are the two big ones and and that is
obviously to facilitate gambling essentially like it's people trying to use these defy protocols
but without kyc yeah but i like i don't know how we get there with bitcoin how do we get people to
care about self-custody and actually using bitcoin i think uh the debanking and the rugs
will continue until self-custody improves like it's just if there's no need then people
find complacency it's always easier to not practice personal responsibility
so people tend to only really do it if they have a strong reason to and usually it's because
trusted third parties are security holes. Yeah. But it kind of gets back to the same question I
ask you every time we're on the show is like, will people use Bitcoin in the way that we see Bitcoin
as freedom money? I think more people are using Bitcoin as freedom money today than have ever
used Bitcoin as freedom money. The percentage is smaller as a total. I think that comes with
the territory as Bitcoin matures. But I think the number to watch is the absolute number. And if
that started to really stagnate or go down i think um people should sound the alarm yeah but uh
i guess the bigger question is are we doing a good enough job and i think i i have a feeling
this is why you came back to twitter we can we can always do better um there's still a lot i
think there's still a lot of work to be done um i think we're doing fine but we can do better yeah
Is that why you came back to Twitter?
It is part of the reason, yes.
Or is it because you've given up on Noster?
I haven't given up on Noster.
I think, depending on your perspective, Noster has been a success or a failure.
I think it works really well as a ride or die communication and identity protocol.
As an open protocol, it's really easy to work with in terms of building stuff using the new AI tools.
especially in combination with other open protocols like bitcoin um so it's it's very
unique in that regard i think as a um i won't even say like as a mass social media protocol replacement
uh i mean it's definitely failed in that regard uh but what i was i mean what i was hoping for
was at least that an overwhelming majority of the bitcoin conversation would move over there
and it hasn't.
It just legitimately hasn't.
It's more comparable, I think,
to a large public group chat.
Yeah.
While the majority of Bitcoin discussion
remains on X.
And, you know,
I devoted a significant amount of time
and energy to it over the last two years.
I think some progress was made.
Some could have done better
in other regards.
But I definitely personally underestimated the difficulty of breaking established network effect And that was probably the biggest lesson I learned is life is short time is scarce Okay so where can I affect the most positive change Probably on things that
don't have to break network effect. Let me put it that way. I think I recently was asked by
Evgeny, the founder of SimpleX, to be one of the founding board members of his nonprofit.
And SimpleX aims to be a drop-in freedom-focused replacement to Telegram and Signal that is less centralized and more robust, secure, and private.
and I think there's something to be said about
okay if we want free discussion on the internet
that's a good example
because if you try and solve it at the group chat problem
it requires less attacking and network effect.
For a group chat to be useful you really just need 10 people to download the app.
Then you have a great group chat.
right if you need if you need 500 million people to join a protocol for it to be interesting
then it's it's a push it's a much more difficult problem to solve but when you first moved over
when you went Nostra only yeah you were super critical of Elon Musk yeah I think that was a
time when free speech on the internet looked way more perilous than it does today do you think
that's still a risk yes i think i think i um i guess it's also worth i think explicitly in the
u.s because like the risk in europe and uk is obvious i think i think elon and his team at x
uh have i mean they have they beat all my expectations from a product point of view i
think they've been very good stewards of the product are they perfect now should we rely on
a single man to protect free speech on the internet? Probably not. Probably a horrible idea.
But I think it's important to realize that after I left X, there was like the great liberal exodus
from X, right? I didn't leave X because I thought Elon was incompetent. It was the exact opposite.
I saw someone who was incredibly competent, very good at executing, and seemed like he was ready to roll out full control over this platform that I had a ton of reliance on and that the main Bitcoin discussion was happening on.
And a key part of that is identity checks on the internet, which continues to escalate.
now Elon has pumped the brakes on that on X
he hasn't you can I mean if you do like the revenue sharing and stuff then you
you know you have to do full ID checks but if you if you want to use X without
verifying your identity it's still relatively usable now I think that's
going to escalate mostly pushed by governments but
also in in in partnership with corporations Facebook has been a big
advocate for this across the board i mean they want to sell your data right so they
want to be able to figure out who's a bot and who's not um and it's not the most effective way
to do it but it's it's definitely the easiest way to do it is to do full kyc on the internet
and have id checks on everyone and the argument is to protect the children which is a classic argument
um so i mean i think i think protocols like nostr are probably more important as ever
because of that trend but it it remains to be seen you know how that exactly how that exactly
plays out what do you think so one of the things i've been pretty consistent on with nostr is like
i never thought social media was going to be the killer app like it never made sense to me because
of the network effect of Twitter and everything else.
I always thought there was huge potential elsewhere.
In some definitely illegal areas, there's a very obvious use case
for something like Noster.
Is it done at this point in terms of social media?
Do you think these other things will still happen?
Look, I...
How do I want to phrase this?
I actually don't think Noster's great for illegal things
because it's a public broadcasting protocol.
Like you're literally broadcasting to the world in a robust, hard-to-stop way.
And you actually can leak a lot of private information if you're not careful as a result,
particularly your IP address, for instance, where you're located.
And it's like hitting a ton of different servers by design, right,
instead of like just hitting Elon servers.
So it's not actually like great for that.
And then also if you have laws in place,
like in the UK and whatnot where it what you say that can get you in trouble Or like Brazil was one of them They were just banning specific influencers from using social media
that were anti-government.
Effectively, what those people have to do is they have to go
and they have to start fresh as an anon.
They can't use – if they have 5 million followers on X
with their real legal name,
they can't just use Nostra instead
with their real legal name
because the government will just come and jail you.
Like that's outside of the protocol.
That's separate from the protocol.
Okay, so there's that piece.
And so from when you see that type of pressure,
I think in a lot of ways,
group chats are actually make more sense.
And Nostra has failed to bootstrap
really strong like group chat technology.
There's some good projects that are working on it
and it's yet to be seen
if they can actually succeed there.
But the metaphor that I like to use
is when the revolution was fought in the US,
like where were the important conversations happening?
They were happening in pubs at two in the morning.
They weren't happening on the corner
from a guy shouting on the soapbox.
Like, yeah, there was the Federalist papers
and stuff that were written by anons,
publicly distributed, right?
But when you're talking about like the brass tacks,
like who was actually having the conversations?
When were they having the conversations?
It was in private closed door rooms,
which is in the digital world, the group chat.
so there's so there's that piece on terms of non-starred social media versus
a protocol for other things i think it's yet to be seen because
i think a lot of those things require the social media aspect to effectively bootstrap
the web of trust so one of the things i did learn is
it's really easy to critique these social media companies because they do a lot of things that
seem incredibly wrong and a lot of times they're guilty of those things um but it's a really hard
thing to find a balance on on like what is what is what is healthy social media look like um there's
a lot of it's it's it's a very hard thing to do um and i was in the thick of it on the nostor side
um so i don't know what that looks like but i guess long-winded i'll use an example one of the
coolest non-social media bitcoin project uh nostor projects is called zap store um i think
it's zap store.dev and what it is is it's a drop-in android app store replacement
And so right now, like on the app stores, like if you use Google Play Store or Apple App Store, they are providing a service for users.
They're doing one, they're providing you discovery, right?
A lot of times people need an app.
They need a weather app.
They open up the app store, they type in weather, it lists all the weather apps with reviews, right?
Ranked by some unknown algorithm, but still it's discovery, right?
It's one piece.
And then the second is a security aspect, which is developer creates app, creates the latest update of the app, releases it to the world.
You want to make sure that that app gets to you unchanged.
There's something called a man in the middle attack where you have a malicious actor comes in between you and the developer, modifies the app, does something bad with the app, and then you download the modified app.
And so what Apple and Google does is they put their stamp of approval on.
Google says this app was made by the developer and has been unchanged.
Now, obviously, that's a trusted third-party model.
Google can change it.
You would never know.
It's a complete black box.
You're just trusting Google and Apple with that.
Okay, so what happens as a result?
What happens as a result?
Developers get banned.
They can't service the App Store.
There's got to be a better way, right?
People have said this for years now.
There's got to be a better way.
One of the ways that is, quote, unquote, a better way is you have them sign a PGP signed
message of the hash of the file.
User is supposed to verify it.
No one does that.
Very few people do that.
It's technically possible, but not scalable.
So what ZapStore did is you download the AppStore on the Android phone, and then you either
put in your Nostre account or someone you trust.
So if you don't use Nostre, for instance, you can put in my Nostre account, right?
And then what that does is it provides two things.
First of all, it helps you with discovery in a permissionless way.
ZapStore doesn't control it.
It's reviews of me, my reviews and reviews of my friends, right, is what's doing it.
And then second of all, the developer is signing it with their Nostro key.
So if you follow the developer, it says, you know, Vitter signed this Amethyst release,
and you know that it hasn't been changed without doing any PGP verification,
without trusting Google, without trusting Apple.
Now, there is no shot in hell that someone is going to build a friends list on an app store replacement.
That system only works because you bootstrap the friends list with shit posts on the social media component That where the real compounding bootstrapping effect happens So I think you need both I think the social aspect is just taking way longer than I expected
And it's yet to be seen if it gets real broad usage. But even if it doesn't,
it can still be valuable in that use case, but you still need the social aspect.
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I can see the use case because that's like a proper cypherpunk tool still. It's not like
something that everyone's going to use. I can see the use case, especially, you know, if you're
living out of the UK right now, where like social media posts are being heavily regulated, people
are going to prison for social media posts. Like I can see the impetus there to go onto NOSTA,
start a NIMH and post whatever you want, read whatever you want. But like without growing that
social media base, that doesn't actually, like none of that works. And so I guess my question is
like can it do that because at the moment i don't think the social media base is big enough for that
to work but that's what i'm saying it it works today right like i the um that use case works
today because at the current level of social usage like you can you can install zap store today
never use nostr and just set my account as your web of trust but then and it would work pretty
fucking well with uh with apps that you've got what do you mean like it won't work with every app
right any developer that i follow on nostr that is releasing their own apps from the app store
would be verified as the correct developer yeah so it works for like bitcoin apps yeah pretty much
yeah like but like for that to be interesting to more people it needs to grow much wider yeah sure
yeah i don't know i don't i hate saying i'm bearish on us because nostr is really cool but
kind of a no like i'm not going to um my bullishness and bearishness on nostr ebbs and
flows my bullishness on bitcoin is an unwavering conviction at this point let me put it that way
i do think i do think that
i would like to see the world needs a protocol like that
identity and social and comms that is open and robust and available for all.
We need that more than ever.
If you think about, I think what shapes both of our lives a lot now is being fathers,
Right. And so if you think, OK, the world in 20 years is very uncertain.
It's probably been the most uncertain it's ever been.
A big corner that is much older than both of us.
And I respect his his wise opinion on the matter.
Went down the AI rabbit hole before me and he explained it like a dot plot of possibilities.
And the dot plot has never been wider.
Like, where are we in 10 years?
i don't know maybe for a century it's never been wider um so maybe a little bit less like maybe like
the end of world war ii um so it's hard to really conceptualize where we would be in 10 years where
we'd be in 20 years where we'd be in 30 years and i think that creates a lot of uncertainty for
people and that's why you see a lot of restlessness in the world and society at large
um but if i if i try and distill it and think about like okay my kids in 20 years what world
are they are becoming young adults in and one key obvious key is okay is is freedom money is is
being able to save and spend without permission yeah um i think that is absolutely essential
but the other piece is okay the world is already incredibly digital now
if they don't if if it's just big tech controlling the entire digital realm that's really really bad
and so they probably will need some kind of open identity and social and comms
um and i think nostor remains you know one of the best fits for that i i've yet to find
with the exception of simplex which tries to solve it like i said a much smaller problem which is
like the group chat, I have yet to see a protocol
that shows more promise than it.
I think it's going to be a long grind.
You live in an open source world.
I don't.
But one of the things that I have thought
over the last few weeks especially is
the future for open source looks really good.
The stuff that's happening now with Kimmy coming out,
kind of destroying everyone's model
of what it means to be a frontier lab.
Really, really cool.
Very exciting.
I think the likelihood is the US government
are going to heavily regulate Chinese models
to try and protect Anthropic and OpenAI,
which I really don't understand.
I don't understand why they feel like they need to protect those companies.
But you must be looking at this very happy with the situation right now.
Yeah, I think if you go back even two years, three years,
to the point of the dot plots being very wide,
there was a bunch of different scenarios we could have ended up in.
and the amount of user choice
is probably higher than anybody's expectation,
both on the proprietary US side
and on the open source side.
Proprietary US side,
the expectation was that Google
was going to absolutely dominate everyone.
That's why OpenAI was created.
OpenAI was, you know,
Elon was one of the co-founders of OpenAI.
It was supposed to be open source AI.
There was a difference of opinion there.
They somehow are like the first nonprofit to ever pivot into an incredibly valuable for-profit business.
So they had a falling out with Elon.
Elon launches XAI, which buys X, which gets bought by SpaceX, which becomes one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Google still exists.
OpenAI, XAI.
And then Anthropic also spun out of OpenAI.
Oh, I didn't know that.
So instead of one dominant lab, and now you have the other OpenAI co-founder.
She came out with Thinking Machines, which is relatively new.
But you can kind of put them in the group of five.
So instead of one, Google dominating, you have five different pretty strong options.
Or at least in the next year or so, I think you can group all five of them into as strong options.
XAI has been making very good progress, very fast.
Like I said, Thinking Machines is very new.
I would not count Google out.
They remain the juggernaut, even if the Gemini models are perceived and for good reason as
substandard compared to open AI and Anthropics.
So on the US proprietary side, hard to imagine us being in a better situation.
And then no one was banking on the CCP just blessing massive open source AI development.
So you have Kimi, you have DeepSeek, you have Quinn, you have tons of open models.
happening over there. And I think what's important for people to realize is there's nothing stopping
if they, if, if, if, if those models become clear leaders, um, they might turn closed and
proprietary, but the cat's out of the bag, like the amount of development we've seen up until this
point is significant. And so all of a sudden we like anyone who cares about these tools being
freedom tools,
it's hard to imagine
being in a better situation
than we're currently in.
Do you think you can consider
the open source
Chinese models
freedom tools Because they still trained on very particular data And if you ask them about Tiananmen Square they often lie to you Yeah that like the obvious example I think look I think there a couple of things here
I think first of all, every cool technology,
part of what makes it cool is there's a side
that's incredibly dystopian
and can be used to control people.
And then there's a side that empowers individuals
who seek that responsibility and empowerment,
who want to improve their own life situations.
It was the case with the internet.
It's the case with Bitcoin.
And it's the case with AI.
Like all cool shit, that's how it works.
Most cool shit.
I'm like thinking of exceptions now.
There are some exceptions, but most cool shit, that's how it works.
So that's first and foremost.
And it's like obvious how AI can be used as a control and surveil mechanism, right?
Cameras, tracking.
one of the things lms do in the com the the information they'll give you like they can
hone conversation i mean but forget about all that for a second just like one of the things
lms do really good is is uh leveraging large data sets yeah in a human readable way and so
governments around the world and corporations who who monetize data have been hoovering up all this
data that they haven't been able to properly leverage right and now some random person at
some tech company can just type in like, what are Danny's favorite interests? Where is Danny
usually on a Wednesday at 2 p.m.? Right. And just human language, they can speak to it and just
tells them it just spits it right back out. So that's obviously scary and happening right now.
But on open source Chinese models specifically, I think, first of all,
China is clearly being used as the boogeyman here and with good reason. I mean, I think if you care
about if you're an American specifically or even a European and you care about national sovereignty
and geopolitics and your country being on good footing, China is obviously a significant threat
and they shouldn't be discounted in that way. I mean, I think the CCP is good at executing at
certain things and horrible at executing at other things, but we should not underestimate them.
The open model is a couple of things. First of all, most people, the way they're using them is
they're hitting Chinese servers.
It's the cheapest, easiest way to use them.
They go to Kimmy's website and they just hit Chinese servers.
Obviously, first of all, you have no control over your data.
Everything that you are searching can be logged
and is probably being logged,
and you should assume it's being logged.
And they, like American companies,
are probably building profiles on users
in really significant, intimate ways.
Do you think the Chinese are worse than the US companies for that?
I don't know. It's probably close enough that it doesn't really matter to make the distinction.
They're motivated by different means, right?
The American companies are trying to eke out as much profit as possible by building data profiles on people.
I mean, Sam Altman created WorldCoin where you scan your eyeballs in an orb to get tokens.
Did you see Grayscale doing a WorldCoin ETF?
I did not, but that's one of the least surprising things ever.
um but uh and the ccp is like more top-down you know government control over people
while in the u.s it's like private public partnerships uh that get around the constitution
because you don't need a warrant if a private company collected it for for-profit reasons
um so i think it's i think for most people's the way they think about it should probably
just put them in the same bucket right yeah now i do think for certain people's threat models like
there's some things that if a foreign government knows about you is less bad than if your own
government knows about you and vice versa right there's some things that you know your own
government knows or your own corporations know that the other government doesn't right that you
don't that you would rather the other government not know so i i think individuals who are actually
thinking about that can leverage the two incentives against each other, even though both are doing
the same, doing similar things. Right. But then the other piece is the nice thing about these
open source, open weight models is you can then host them yourselves and you can modify them and
you can train them and you can have them do your own thing. Right. And so what we're seeing, for
instance, is companies that have like exist in, in particular niches that want, you know, a hyper
focused model. And so what do they do? They start with the base and then they modify it and train it
and mold it to what they need. And that almost becomes their own proprietary model that they
have sovereignty over. And I think that's the more powerful aspect. And like other things,
like other freedom technologies like Bitcoin, what is the distribution you see of that is probably
going to be 95 to 98 percent people are still using it in the controlled way right and like a
small subset are using it in the freedom oriented way and that fine that what success looks like Yeah but that quite scary It even more scary with AI than it is with Bitcoin
Yeah, but I mean, it's hard for me not to be incredibly optimistic here. I think like you have
to if you focus on things that you can't control, you're going to have a really bad time. You have to
to focus at what's in your control and make the best decisions possible for your family
and your friends and your own personal responsibilities.
And from that lens, I've never been more optimistic.
Yeah.
Are you optimistic on the AI using Bitcoin narrative?
So I have a clanker that uses Bitcoin.
It's awesome.
How does it use Bitcoin?
It just works really well. He has a Bitcoin wallet.
But what does he use it for?
He has a Bitcoin wallet.
But what for?
I call him George.
George. That's such a strange name.
Yeah, I don't know. It was like two in the morning when I named him.
It was like first set up, you know.
Yeah, why did I name him George?
Well, for starters, I felt like if I was like,
I shouldn't choose a female name because, I don't know,
it just felt wrong to my wife.
You don't want to cheat.
My bro, George.
And then I just picked like a random generic name.
I thought, I mean, maybe like, I'm surprised it wasn't like John or something.
But anyway, he has a Bitcoin wallet.
You load it up with a Bitcoin.
You load it up with some Bitcoin.
And he's able to pay for things that he needs.
API access, stuff like that, without my interaction.
And it's incredibly cool.
And I think what a lot of people miss in that there's a hype train of agentic payments.
And of course, it's agents paying agents, right?
So robot slaves paying robot slaves.
But what they miss is the key aspect is where it crosses the divide between humans and agents.
Agentic payments is really humans paying agents, agent paying humans, agents paying agents, right?
It's all of the above.
And Bitcoin excels in that situation for the same reason Bitcoin is better money than, I mean, the closest competitor is USD tokens.
Yeah.
they can be blocked and frozen.
And I think, and we've already seen massive, massive regulatory exposure for these USD tokens.
In the order of billions of dollars of Tether and USDC have been frozen, the two main ones.
So I think being able to pay your agent without permission is incredibly important.
For the agent to be able to pay other agents without permission is incredibly important.
For the agents to pay other humans.
DoorDash came out with a CLI, so a command line interface that is specifically designed for agents to use.
And why is that interesting?
It's something that I've been theorizing for a bit now, which is we've hit the precipice.
Now your robot is ordering a human to do something for you.
Right?
That's kind of crazy.
It's like, okay, the robot needs more printer ink.
he sends a human through DoorDash to go to the store and get printer ink.
And right now that whole system is relying on credit cards,
which is just a horribly broken, inefficient way of handling it.
And so probably the first step will be they will probably start accepting USD tokens,
which is strictly a net benefit.
And then eventually I think it'll probably move to Bitcoin.
But even if it doesn't, if my agent is holding Bitcoin,
and he needs to pay for something that is only USD token,
he can swap into it.
And this is something that's crazy.
It actually makes a lot of the shitcoin bullshit work better
because they've had such horrible UX for years.
But now the UX doesn't matter.
You just tell the agent to do it.
The agent figures out how to use, I don't know,
MetaMask or whatever and DeFi shit
and go and Uniswap and swap for shit
and just get it done and make no mistakes.
And so that's actually a way better user interface.
The agents paying humans is way too similar
to that Daniel Suarez.
What's that Daniel Suarez book called?
I love all the Daniel Suarez books.
Damon?
Yes.
That's kind of Damon.
So in my mind, Damon is,
first of all, he wrote it in 2008, I think.
Insane.
Yeah.
Maybe even a little bit earlier than that.
And I read it back then.
Everyone should go read Damon by Daniel Suarez.
And then there's a sequel called Freedom.
Not as good though.
No, but it brings it all together.
And to me, it's open source AI, Bitcoin, and Nostra without ever mentioning anyone.
Yeah, just in a really dystopian package.
It could be utopian depending on your perspective.
True.
Are you on the side of the demon?
Well no So I mean I don want to spoiler it So we talk big picture I mean can you really do a spoiler on a book that came out in 2008 Yeah It kind of on you But look I think society ebbs and flows but progress has been pretty straight throughout humanity like in a pretty impressive way
You know, the amount of accomplishments, society has undoubtedly flourished over the last 100 years.
And I think there's been a move to centralization across every aspect of our lives, whether that's megacities, whether that's federal governments, whether that's big tech, you know, web monopolies where they control everything.
And I think it will move back to a more localism type scenario where you have smaller government, where you have strong local communities, where you have strong families.
Ultimately, the family unit is that core local unit with technology empowering them so that they can have more leverage on the world.
Not financial leverage, right?
But having access to global trade, having access to global money, having access to global communication, but still being a small, local, strong community.
And so when you work that out in your head, that means that people are going to have very dynamic outcomes depending on which small, local community they're part of.
Some will flourish, some will do really well, and some will not do as well.
That's just the reality of the situation.
and i think that's kind of the world that damon and freedom proposed why are you so confident on
that because i hope that's true i hope the world does get more more localized but why why are you
so confident i mean that's my bullish outcome i i i think i think that's that's the the the north
star i work towards on everything and do you think it's achievement i think it's very achievable yeah
I just think, like I said, I think people, I think that world would still have very varied outcomes for people.
Right.
So, but the cool thing about that is if you focus on what you can control, if you can focus on empowering your family, empowering your local strong communities, then that is actually very achievable.
And then you could be a little bit, obviously the wider world is still going to affect you, but you can be a little bit insulated.
You can be a little bit protected from whatever that outcome is,
which is way out of our control.
And, you know, it's kind of anybody's guess
to the why dot plot example earlier, right?
You know, you were saying before, like,
the variables out there are probably wider than ever before.
Like, how you try and prepare a kid for the next 20 years,
I've got no idea.
You just be like water.
You have to just go with the flow.
Adapt.
because i would be very shocked if in 15 20 years when our kids are at like college age that they're
going to be there's going to be college like yeah we were talking about that earlier like what's
going to exist like i don't know as a father what you're meant to do to prepare for it
yeah i think i look you just have to i i think i think nobody knows and so the first thing is to
humble yourself and be like i have no fucking idea right like own it um and then you have to adapt
You have to be flexible.
You have to give your family as many options as possible, right?
So that if you do have to, when you inevitably have to adapt again, you have flexibility.
Understand that you will make many mistakes.
Try and identify them as quickly as possible.
Own the mistakes.
Do something different.
See, one of the things I find hard.
Move forward.
Don't get stuck in your way.
Just because you did something, and this goes to the nostril piece, right?
It's like a lot of people like, oh, like he went Nostar only for two years.
Like he can never, he never opened an X account again.
It's like, yes, yes, I can.
I never thought you were going to open an X account again though, to be fair.
But I, I, I took a, an unbiased look at the current situation.
You ate some humble pie.
Yeah.
And I was like, okay, the best, the best path forward is, is, is to, is to rejoin X.
The thing that I find hard that you talk about a lot is that people should just move.
Yeah.
And I know you obviously, you went from New York to Nashville.
I don't think everyone's going to do that,
and I don't think everyone should do that.
I think people need to fight for the jurisdiction they're in.
Uprooting your family and moving away from broader families is really hard.
I agree with all of this.
I agree with it.
I just also think, and I have my own personal lens on this, right?
My family, my wife's family, all our friends,
all our infrastructures, all New York-based,
and we left all of that.
And obviously it's easier to move.
One of the best things the United States has is competition
of local jurisdictions and at least for now,
free movement between them.
Yeah.
But I think even globally, look, moving has always been hard.
It's always been expensive, but also
Mentally, mentally hard.
It's a hard mindset to get yourself out of.
Before I was a Bitcoin maximalist,
I was a New York maximalist.
I thought I would never leave New York.
You have to kind of jump off the cliff
when you do this kind of thing, right?
And go into the unknown.
But it's also never been easier than it is currently
at a global scale, from a societal scale.
Technically easier.
It's yet to be seen if that'll be the case in 20 years.
This could be a window. And I was saying this before COVID and then they closed all the borders. Now the borders have mostly opened up again.
But and I was mostly saying it not from the movement moving point of view. I was saying travel the world while you can.
It's never been easier or cheaper to travel the world, which I think remains the case.
But that is yet to be seen if that will still be the case. So I think I think people should consider it.
And I think if you look at it objectively.
we left New York during COVID in 2020.
My family's outlook and outcome in the next,
currently and the next five years, 10 years, 15 years,
or maybe it's not objective, maybe it's subjective,
I think is significantly better than if we stayed in New York.
I think you now have Mimdani there.
I think things have gotten worse, not better.
and I think it's not that I'm necessarily bearish on New York in 40 years
or I guess let's lower the time scale let's say 20 years when our kids are young adults
I think the outcome is unknown and I think these things take longer to correct
especially in like high dense population areas it takes longer to correct you kind of have to
swing to the negative and then swing back yeah and life is short it's like who wants who
wants to deal with that. Now, I would say the number one thing to me that makes a lot of sense
is if you have very strong family support structures in place,
it's hard to leave those and maybe you shouldn't leave those. But what I advocate for is that
people should take account of their situation, consider it, weigh the pros and cons. And one of
the big cons of moving would be family structure.
Yeah.
Weigh that into the cost benefit analysis and decide what's best for your
family.
And then also like try and take yourself out of it for a second.
Like,
okay,
if you grew up in the,
in London your whole life,
that's all,
you know,
that makes sense.
But try and put yourself in the shoes of someone who is living in Portugal.
Would that person move to the UK right now?
Probably not.
They probably wouldn't.
Why wouldn't they?
Okay.
Let's list the reasons.
And do those reasons apply to me as well?
Maybe they apply to me as well.
Maybe I should move to a better jurisdiction.
Maybe I should move to Switzerland.
Yeah.
And there's always ones that make sense.
I'm jealous of the way that you have the state structure here in the US.
I think it's awesome.
And if I was in the US and I lived in New York, I probably would move somewhere else.
But when I live in Australia, obviously, when you look at the countries that you potentially
could move to that have better freedoms, they're like the Costa Ricas of the world.
And Costa Rica is awesome.
I love it. But I also like roads and hospitals.
If we're going to name places, I really like Uruguay.
I've never been, but I think it'd be good.
These places are less like attractive.
As a friend with practical advice, I think you should consider it.
I think it's not a horrible decision.
And it might result in a much better outcome for your family.
But I, and we're definitely not going through the specifics on a public show.
But look, my point is that people should.
Younger Matt did not.
I did not consider it as even an option.
I'm glad I considered it as an option.
And I'm glad that I executed on it as a family.
The other piece was like my wife was incredibly aligned.
Yeah.
That helps.
Yeah.
I mean, look, this is your ultimate partner in life, right?
You're raising kids with them.
a massively implicitly trusted relationship and so if you're not aligned that makes it much more
difficult yeah so there's all these different scenarios i'm just saying that people should
consider it and i think uh oftentimes there's a lot of people that will say stay and fight
to british people for instance that don't live in britain yeah it's like okay you have zero skin in
the game okay these people have kids and shit and they have to think on i think you should think on
a decade-long timeline at least,
okay, what is going to be the better outcome for my family?
Do I want to fight a revolution?
Or do I want to have a significantly better...
Can we agree on the key premise
that people living in certain places
have better outcomes inherently
than others over a certain timescale?
Like in the 50s,
if you lived in one place versus another,
you would have a better outcome.
But it depends how you judge the better outcome.
That exists.
It depends how you judge the better outcome though Because the opportunity someone has growing up in London probably way outweigh the opportunities that have in Uruguay It depends on the year the current situation your own personal situation
But I think it's very clear that depending on where your family and businesses are based, your outcome can be significantly different in any given time period.
That's for sure.
And so what I've been vocal about with people lately is think about that in a real way.
Like, think hard about that.
It could be one of the most important decisions you make.
Tell me if you think this is complete code.
But like one of the, I don't want to say bullish, but one of the bullish things that came out of COVID, in my opinion, was like when everything started happening, when all the crackdowns were going on, lockdowns, like couldn't leave the country, everyone kept saying there's nothing as permanent as temporary measures.
and that didn't end up being true.
The world has largely gone back to how it was pre-COVID.
I'm sure there's some edge cases where you can say it's not,
but largely it has.
And that just makes me think maybe these dystopian things
that are happening in the UK, maybe they are temporary.
Maybe they can be reversed.
Is that cope?
It might be cope, yeah.
I don't know.
I think you are right on the bigger picture.
One bullish thing just on the UK specifically
is Andy Burnham, the new PM that came in yesterday,
whenever it was, has already rolled back the idea of digital IDs.
The only thing I know about British politics
is when I accidentally listened to Peter's show
and he goes deep on British politics.
Look, I think it tends not to be a straight line
when you're talking about government control and surveillance.
It ebbs and flows, right?
And it's easy to make broad, long-term decisions
in either a valley or like a hilltop, right?
And so to your point on the COVID side,
like I do think a lot of those
draconian government measures did get pulled back.
But then they kind of got like reset to a higher base.
That's true.
Right?
And then you'll have a lull
and then there'll be some new emergency.
the idea of lockdown is no longer like way outside the overton window like it's happened before
yeah and i the people in power tend to they constantly poke you with new emergencies
and they just see which ones stick you know sometimes they don't stick sometimes they they do
yep um and uh yeah i mean if you look at
if you if if you do if you try and run like some kind of objective analysis on
okay where were certain jurisdictions in 2020 versus 2026 so six-year timeline
2020 let's say right before covid so like january 2020 versus 2026 i think it's widened in a lot of
ways um yeah on on on which ones are quote-unquote doing better and it's hard to do like what what
is an objective analysis you got to do like a bunch of different data points and a lot of
subjective analysis is mixed in there um but i mean a lot of that's down to the like
economics of it as well though if you lived in december 2019
there was a freedom protest in Hong Kong.
I think it was like the whole fall of 2019.
COVID rolls out.
Six years later, Hong Kong is like completely under the knee of the CCP at this point.
Hong Kong real estate was the best real estate in the world.
Now it's not.
A lot of rich people fleed.
So like if you judge it from their perspective, very bad outcome.
If you judge it from Nashville's perspective, boomtown economy.
Miami.
Miami, 2026 compared to 2020?
Yeah.
Complete improvement.
So that's my point.
My point is just where you choose to base your family and your businesses will have significant differences in outcome.
And so your job as the leader of the family and those businesses is to assess that cost-benefit and decide if it makes sense.
That's all I'm saying.
Do you think in a freedom tech way, AI can be almost a great equalizer here?
Whereas there's always been a massive asymmetry between the tools that the government have and the tools that the people have.
But that's kind of gone to a degree.
Do you think that will help people actually find freedom in these countries?
Yeah, I think part of what I expect this trend for strong localism is freedom tech empowering individuals, families, small communities.
It gives you a level.
It gives you leverage.
Yeah.
Right.
It gives you and you see this in all different aspects.
Right.
I mean, like you see this with asymmetric warfare.
Right.
with now that a small group can extend significant dominance over a waterway with cheap drones that are
off the shelf.
And they're up against $100 million airplanes and stuff.
The biggest military in the world.
Military planes.
And that's obviously a very provocative example, but people see that happening right now.
And so, I mean, if you want to do the AI tools piece, right, is like, okay, if you're using one of the leading models right now, it's like you have a 10-man engineering team at your disposal that can do anything you want.
Now, are they the best engineers in the world now?
But that's 10 more men than you ever had.
Yeah.
They're pretty good.
And they're only getting better.
yes it's going to be like it's the most interesting time i'm blessed to be alive in this time yeah
it makes me think it's a simulation i think that would be very conceited of you right it's like
they made a simulation just for you to be in the best possible time and you i'm not is it we in
your simulation or my simulation oh no we're all in a shared simulation it's a shared sim we're just
we're just and uh what is it mpcs mpcs we're just mpcs in simulation yeah maybe maybe there's no
free will you know like i think ever since i first met you i've known you quite a while now
you've always said i'm like a year away from stepping away from bitcoin yeah but here you are
and you've kind of stepped back into bitcoin in a bigger way in the last few months 13 years
like why are you still 13 years bro there's still work to be done
there's still still i i are you still as excited about bitcoin
excitement is the wrong word i i rely on bitcoin i need i need bitcoin more than bitcoin needs me
uh it's a you know a fundamental tool uh for my family um and is more important than ever
um the early days of bitcoin were way more quote-unquote exciting it was the wild west
there were no graybeards there was no one with like 20 years of experience with bitcoin now
we're the graybeards you know so it changes it matures it's it is what it is um
i think the way i try and focus my time is if i think someone
can do something better than me i'll just let them do it
And I think if you want to talk about one failure we've had across the Bitcoin industry is like bringing up that younger generation.
And an example I'll give is Austin BitDevs was, you know, one of the best Bitcoin meetups in the world.
Longest running, running, running straight.
and I don't know if they restarted it
but a couple months ago
they announced they were ending it
yeah I think they've done like an ad hoc one or two
but like it's not what it used to be
and it was like okay like
the guys that were running it were really tired
and that's completely understandable
the failure point isn't that they're tired
and they don't want to run a meetup every month
the failure point is that they don't have young people
to take over the reins
and
I think that's something that we can do
much better for and you know i think
yeah and so so there's still there's still work to be done there's still places where i can provide
value so i'm providing the value but in an ideal world i would rather someone else just do it
better than me i don't get why young people aren't here like so when i got into bitcoin i was in my
mid-20s yeah um and it felt like everyone was basically it felt like everyone was around our age
Super young.
Yeah.
And now, if I look at my audience demographics,
I just can't attract young people.
And maybe that's a fault of mine.
It could totally be that.
No, same with my demographic.
Whatever you can believe with podcast analytics or whatever.
But it's aging older, not younger.
There's more 60-year-olds coming in
because they're seeing this as a financial tool
than there are 20-year-olds.
I think the largest demographic for my shows is 45-plus men.
I haven't double-checked.
It's definitely over 35.
Yeah, I think mine's like 35 to 45 is the biggest.
And I think part of the reason in that is when I first found out about Bitcoin, it was relatively cheap.
I had very little money, but I could still buy what felt like a meaningful amount.
And now, if you're 18, 19, 20, and you've got a few hundred pounds to your name, a few hundred dollars,
does Bitcoin look attractive anymore? I don't know.
It definitely does from the Freedom Money point of view, regardless.
Yeah, but very few people come into this as a Freedom Money guy.
Like most people, it's like, it's come for the gain,
stay for the freedom.
Like that is a real meme.
But I mean, so there's tons of young people
getting involved in AI stuff.
Yeah.
Are they doing it for the gains But maybe they see that as a bigger asymmetric Are they doing it for the gains I guess you could say they doing it for like job potential and whatnot I mean these companies paying like a million dollars a year for engineers
I don't know.
I don't pretend to have the answer.
I do think any of us who have been heavily involved in Bitcoin share some of the burden
that it hasn't happened.
I think it's also important to just zoom out a tiny bit.
I know it's a little bit of a meme.
But this last cycle was very much dominated by the Bitcoin stocks.
Yeah.
So a lot of young people did come in.
They just didn't come into the technical side of Bitcoin.
They went straight into the orange tide.
Do you think that's true?
Yeah.
You see it.
Do you not see like...
I don't know if they came in at all.
I mean, I think there is...
The reason I think they didn't come in is because like treasury companies dominated the Bitcoin narrative, but way broader AI dominated everything.
That's true.
And I just think like when does new retail come into Bitcoin?
It's like when the price is absolutely going euphoric.
Like everyone bought the 20k Bitcoin top in 2017.
And we didn't get that.
So we never got the new influx of bag holders.
We didn't get the community members.
The community members.
Yeah, I don't know.
I think there's multiple reasons.
I think some of them are societal.
Some of them are more local to Bitcoin.
but my point is more i don't necessarily have the answer i think uh it's just something that
people should be aware of and try and improve in small ways i think it's become less fun too
yeah but i wonder how much that is just like we're just tired and been involved in for a while
like it's not fresh and new for us if someone new came in it'd be fresh and new for them
fresh and new is exciting yeah um i think the one bullish fundamental is the like the local
meetups i think um have been incredibly strong uh i don't think you know we did a obviously
we have bitcoin park in nashville and we host a bunch of meetups there um but one of the things
me and rod did my co-founder of bitcoin park was we brought together like a bunch of different
tech meetup organizers in the national area and that was one thing that we always beat them on
like just way more ride or die attendance and excitement than the like broader tech stuff
and i will say to your point we haven't done that analysis again i bet you a lot of the ai meetups
are doing quite well yeah 100 but that's a key one like i think just like building strong local
communities having a very comfortable touch point you know national never had the most devs but we
had like a really interesting broad subsection of people cross-section of people right we had
older people that had small businesses we had young people that hadn't that were like maybe
in their first year of college or were skipping college um and uh i think that's incredibly
important like we live in an increasing digital world but like that face-to-face interaction is
probably more powerful than ever yeah i do think though that like the nashville scene the austin
seen felt like a very post-COVID thing.
You did run off a COVID momentum.
Yeah.
Everywhere else shut down, but Bitcoin meetups through a lot.
And I don't know if that momentum is still there.
Like, obviously, Marty's left Austin.
I know Justin's stopped doing the bit devs there.
Like, it feels like it's wound down a little bit.
I could be totally wrong.
I've not been to Austin in a while.
I'm going to go soon.
I think it's a bear market, you know?
Yeah, but even like-
I think even the base, the current level is still higher than most equivalent meetups,
with the exception of maybe AI.
But I will say that there's a ton of overlap.
I was on a panel with Gladstein in Vegas, and we were talking about, are we bullish on Bitcoin as freedom money?
And it wasn't recorded.
It was on the HRF stage, which they should have recorded, to be honest.
But they didn't.
Was this when I was with you?
Oh, yeah, you were with me.
It was Matt Odell and Friends.
Three podcasters and Gladstein.
Yeah, Matt Odell and Friends was the name of the panel.
You were one of my friends.
And do you remember Gladstein's answer?
Gladstein's answer was he was bullish because of the Freedom AI movement.
And it makes these tools, first of all, it makes using Bitcoin as freedom money easier and more accessible than ever.
If you think about UX, tons of hard UX problems get solved if you have a competent local agent running them for you.
Things like coin control or privacy, stuff like that can be obfuscated from the user.
And they can have reasonable defaults in a very sane way with much better UX.
And then the second piece is if you want to use these tools in a freedom-oriented way,
like having a money that you can spend and save without permission to our earlier topic,
makes a lot of sense.
So, I mean, I wouldn't call it riding on AI's coattails,
but I think it compounds really well.
So a lot of that excitement
is kind of our excitement too.
Maybe that sounds like Cope.
That sounded like a little bit like Cope.
No, I think that's fair.
One of the things, like the flip side of that,
like AI as a sort of freedom push for Bitcoin is,
I remember MVK talking about this a while ago.
I've not heard anything about it recently,
but what happens with AI and chain analysis?
Like, is that going to make it really hard to transact?
It does both sides, right?
So the surveillance companies will obviously use AI
to our earlier conversation.
Parsing large data sets just works really well with LLMs.
And one of the best large data sets to parse is the Bitcoin blockchain, which, if we're
right, is going to exist forever with every on-chain transaction.
But at the same time, to the coin control point of view, without going too deep, in
your Bitcoin wallet, you might see one Bitcoin balance.
But in it is really a bunch of UTXOs.
You can think of them like bills in your wallet.
You have one that's 100,000 sats.
You have one that's 50,000 sats.
You have one that's 150,000 sats.
And tracking Bitcoin transactions has always been a game of probability analysis because
you can send Bitcoin to yourself.
So when Bitcoin is sent on chain, these surveillance companies are making an analysis of the probability
that ownership has changed hands.
And so which UTXOs you choose at any given time can affect that probability analysis.
If you pay me and I receive a UTXO and maybe you pay me for lunch, we're splitting lunch, and then my boss pays me my salary.
If I combine those two, for instance, in the most simple way, combine those two, if my wallet automatically combines those two to make a transaction, then you know how much I got paid.
And my boss knows that I'm having some kind of transactional relationship with you.
Right. And so that coin selection has been incredibly important for Bitcoin on-chain privacy and managing those UTXOs correctly.
Now, the question from people that are building Bitcoin wallets is like, OK, how do you handle the defaults of that situation?
Do you just show the users a bunch of UTXOs and be like, pick which ones you want to spend?
No, that's horrible. That works for power users, but it's horrible UX.
The other piece is the more UTXOs you have on the input side, the more expensive your transaction is.
Because transactions on the Bitcoin main chain are based on a size in bytes, not a size in amount.
So the more UTXOs you have, the higher your fee is, net everything else equal.
So you have this weird dynamic where the less UTXOs you have, the cheaper your fees and your future fee burden.
Because you don't know what the fees are going to be in five years or ten years.
So the less UTXOs you have is just strictly better from a cost perspective and strictly worse from a privacy perspective.
How do you balance that?
Well, if you enter a local agent into the picture, then you tell the agent who you're paying.
The agent knows who's paid you in the past and is dynamically making decisions for your wallet based on privacy versus cost.
That was never possible before.
you couple that with something like lightning which has very strong privacy benefits for the
payer not so much for the receiver and that becomes even more powerful but lightning itself
has a bunch of ux challenges okay throw a local agent in that shit you know you don't want to
manage liquidity have an agent manage liquidity for you so it's like i said earlier like interesting
tech usually has the two sides of the proverbial coin. And I think it could provide a lot of gains
for us. And to the privacy point of view, by the way, that's already the reality today.
So Polymarket runs on Polygon. It's both a shitcoin project and probably one of the most
successful Bitcoin projects of all time. It has many different ways that you can deposit.
you can deposit with ETH
you can deposit with USDC, Tether, Polygon
I don't know, Solana and Bitcoin
and historically it's been Bitcoin on-chain only
recently they did a partnership with Spark
and now they accept Lightning payments
the most private way you can use Polymarket
is by just sending a Bitcoin Lightning deposit there
and behind the hood the user has no idea
really what's going on there
so I think lightning provides a lot of gains
and so then the question is how do we make lightning easier
to use and more accessible and have
proper convenience to trust
trade off and I think
I think AI tools play a key
part in that and can accelerate
that
When you said there's still work to be done before
is one of the pieces of work you think
that's key privacy on Bitcoin
do you think we need
whether it's silent payments
whether it's better coin join
implementations? Like, do you think we need something else there?
I don't know if that's the right framing.
Like I said the standard right now like if you use the most private way you can deposit into Polymarket is by doing a lightning payment with Bitcoin Could you do a cashier payment Through Lightning Like your wallet the cool part about Lightning is you can have all these other protocols
but Lightning is the glue.
So we don't have to battle network effect.
I just had on Ciddle Dispatch, the head of research at Second, and they have a implementation
of ARK, which is a batch payment protocol on Bitcoin.
Their implementation is called Bark.
But historically, like if someone comes out with a Bark wallet, you're like, okay, well, no one else uses Bark.
So how the fuck am I supposed to pay people?
But it speaks lightning.
So it can literally have only two users.
We could be the only two users and we can go to every Square terminal and pay with lightning.
The Square merch has no idea.
We could go to Polymarket and pay with lightning.
They don't know I'm using a Bark wallet or a Cashew wallet or whatever.
and it's interesting because all of a sudden you can you can really like um you can really try a
bunch of different technologies see which ones provide the best trade-off balance depending on
the user and it can be different depending on the user but they all benefit from the same network
effect which is they can they can spend and receive from any lightning wallet this was i was
at baltic honey badger last year and um i'd been like buying stuff around the conference for a
couple of days and on the last day they announced that everyone had been using like all the merchants
have been using ARK.
I had no idea.
Like everything just worked.
Yeah, because it was behind the hood.
Awesome.
And everything, the communication was all happening with Lightning.
Yeah.
So to the point of does Bitcoin need better like protocol level privacy, which is I think
is what your question is.
I think it's a tradeoff balance, right?
Your question is, do you care?
There's a tradeoff between privacy and verifiability and auditability.
And Bitcoin has leaned into being able to verify without a trusted third party and being incredibly transparent and auditable.
And we saw a perfect example.
And then what you do is you have that as the base, which doesn't require trust.
And then on top of that, you can build tools that are user friendly that give you strong privacy guarantees.
And the perfect example was in Zcash land.
Well, this is why I was asking, because this has obviously become a big narrative from the Silicon Valley crew that Zcash is bad at Bitcoin.
I don't even think it was Fable.
I think it was like Claude 4.6 Opus.
So like three models ago, they basically ran an analysis on the human code base of Zcash.
It was like, find vulnerabilities.
And there was an undetectable inflation bug that was alive for five years, and they have no idea if it's been used or not.
There's zero way for them to verify it.
Technically, you can have a similar type of inflation bug on Bitcoin.
It'd be incredibly easy to verify.
You would just check the chain and you'd see.
So I mean, I think that is just, well, we just saw a perfect example of it live in the
wild.
And these engineers are some of the best engineers in the world.
And they messed it up.
But I mean, we've seen it from the Chamaths of the world.
The Winklevoss have been on it.
Like basically, everyone out of Silicon Valley has been pushing Zcash really hard.
The funniest one was the bankless guy who sold all his ether to buy his e-cash.
At the top.
Just before 50%.
But like, these are narratives we kind of do have to fight.
And I don't know if we should be leaning heavier into privacy.
Look, I don't think fighting the narrative is the wrong way to think about it.
Because I don't think shit coins are a threat to Bitcoin.
I think they're a threat to users who choose to speculate on them and could get wrecked
in the process.
And that's the case with a lot of alternative investments, not just shit coins.
So I don't necessarily think like Zcash is a threat to Bitcoin.
Now, I think these promoters are oftentimes promoting Zcash for two reasons.
I think one is obviously can be construed as a malicious reason.
And I would tend to agree with that, which is that they have large bags that they want to pump.
I mean, Zcash had significant Silicon Valley investment early on, large wealth concentration, did not have a fair launch.
It had a dev tax in the beginning.
It had VC investors based in the United States.
Well, Bitcoin had a fair proof of work launch to the world.
So there's definitely some element, at least for some of them, if not the majority of them, that they're pumping their bags.
But I think the second piece is, if most of your crypto experience, like Chamath is a huge Solana guy.
If most of your crypto experience is ETH and Solana and Tron, horrible privacy, like really, really bad privacy.
If someone finds out your ETH address, they know every financial transaction you've ever made because it doesn't change by default like Bitcoin does.
They know every transaction you've ever made without probability analysis.
There's no probability analysis being done.
And they know 100% you made every single transaction
on that account and your current net worth,
your current complete.
If you have your ETH wallet on MetaMask
and you deposit into Polymarket Polymarket knows your entire net worth and every transaction you ever made by default And even worse people use like at Chamath as their Ethereum Yeah So you don even you just look it up right Or if they ever posted on X or whatever
right? So, and like, we've seen it, you see it with the richer people. It's very obvious,
like Vitalik, people track Vitalik's wallets, right? And yes, they can have more wallets,
but defaults matter. And they've never used Lightning. So that's what they know. And they
know something needs to change. And they're not wrong in that front. Like that is like
purely dystopian. If your financial life is USDC on base, like you live in the Panopticon.
Like you live and they can seize your money, they can freeze it, and they can see every single
transaction you've ever made. That's horrible. That is absolutely horrible. Of course, they're
like the sky is falling. The sky is falling. They just don't pay enough attention to Bitcoin.
They just don't pay attention to Bitcoin. Maybe they own some of the ETF.
And they just don't use Bitcoin. They think it's ancient technology. They're not keeping up with
actual technical improvements or where the user base is moving. A lot of transactions are
lightning now. I mean, OK, so this is where defaults matter, right? So Square added, what,
4 million merchants or something, you can pay with Bitcoin now at Square Terminals.
Defaults.
First of all, they've rolled it out to merchants that maybe they don't even want to receive
Bitcoin, so they automatically convert it to dollars for them.
But the merchant has a choice to receive Bitcoin.
There's no on-chain option.
It's Lightning only.
Now, I think there's a really strong argument for why they went Lightning only on just a
pragmatic slide, which is I'm paying for coffee.
It should be instant.
Yeah.
Yeah. Right. It should just be boom, pay for coffee, automatic instant settlement.
OK, that makes sense. But whether intended or not, you have an amazing side effect that anyone who pays has a really good privacy guarantee.
Right. You go you go to Steak and Shake, you pay with Lightning.
They don't know what wallet made that payment. They don't know any of your transaction history.
They don't know your current net worth. All of that shielded by default, which is wild.
That's awesome.
That's live today.
That exists today.
And I think people just, people don't appreciate that.
Now, of course, there's nuances there.
If you pay with a wallet that has a trusted third party, that trusted third party knows,
but it's detached from the merchant.
Obviously, Square knows every transaction the merchant's making, but the merchant could
choose to use BTC Pay or VibeCode something.
They can, you know, you can literally tell a clanker now, like, I want to accept Bitcoin
on my website, make it lightning only.
and it just goes beep, beep, boop, boop, boop
and just does it.
The cool thing, I think the payments are amazing
and I think at some point someone needs to build the infrastructure
so you can pay with Bitcoin everywhere you want to.
The question I have is whether it's early
and even if it's early it doesn't mean you shouldn't build it.
I think it's really cool.
But I wonder if people are actually using it
because we've seen this before where Bitcoin for payments
became a big trend in 2017, 2018
and no one used it
and then eventually all the merchants stopped accepting Bitcoin.
and i know this is better because this is like on the square terminal they don't need any
additional infrastructure but like do you think people are actually using this well there's two
different pieces right um merchant side i think uh square being the exception that these people
already have uh all the hardware and stuff installed relatively expensive square merchant
and they're like their business is like fully locked into like the square ecosystem of accounting
and shit right that's how their business runs um and so it's like relatively low friction for like
there'd just be another payment option okay um but overwhelmingly for merchants you can't it's hard
to force it's hard to force merchants it's it's it's untenable to force merchants to accept bitcoin
that don't want to accept bitcoin you need you need people like soap miner that want the bitcoin
yeah that's where you have staying power um the consumer piece of people going and spending
helps and also hurts, right?
Like if someone decides like because of hype
that I'm going to start accepting Bitcoin
and there's like one person pays every two months or whatever,
they're less likely to keep it up
and they're less likely to educate their employees
on how to use the thing, right?
But the merchant needs to want Bitcoin.
I think that's like the first step.
And we're getting there.
It's slow and steady.
To the point of network effects,
what is one of the strongest network effects in the world?
It's fucking fiat and specifically US dollars.
It's a very hard network effect to beat.
So it's going to take time.
It's going to take time to do that.
Then you have like P2P payments, which doesn't really have to fight the network effect as
much.
You just need the person that you're paying to be willing to accept Bitcoin, but also
not necessarily in that case.
I mean, if they're using Venmo, they can already accept Bitcoin.
Obviously, you can have them install Strike, and it can go into dollars into their bank
account.
Right?
So there's band-aids or not necessarily band-aids,
but like bootstrapping mechanisms, right?
To simulate the network effect as we trying to like break it down But there is definitely an aspect of we are blessed with many many mobile self wallets with very few users
It's just the reality of the situation.
But I think you probably kind of, I don't know what the order there should be, but it's
good to have more tools than less, more options than less.
And then as people need it, they will exist and be ready for them.
There won't be as much friction for them to move over.
What would you say to people who don't want to spend their Bitcoin? Because that's like,
especially from the sort of sailor camp, that's been a big thing is like, you never spend your
Bitcoin. Well, I would first, before we get there, just another dichotomy, we'll use Zcash as another
example, is 99% of the people that are using Zcash now are using this one mobile wallet that is
maintained by the core developers of Zcash. And like, so that's the opposite side, right? That's
That's obviously a horrible situation to be in.
Maybe some people are, quote unquote, wasting their time by maintaining self-custody while
it's on Bitcoin.
But it's great that we have so many options.
I think people definitely take it for granted how many options we have.
That was not a given.
That is something that's really hard to do from a top-down point of view.
Zcash has tons of funding.
And it's hard to simulate it.
You can't just make it happen.
It needs to be organic and grassroots.
And we're very fortunate to have it.
To the point of people about like, don't spend your Bitcoin.
I think it's weird.
I think, first of all, it's two pieces.
I think the first piece is if you're actually all in on Bitcoin.
And the overall majority of your savings is in Bitcoin.
Then, of course, you're going to spend your Bitcoin.
because if you needed to spend dollars,
you'd have to sell Bitcoin to get dollars first.
See, I play the fiat game though.
Like I spend everything on a credit card,
pay it off at the end of the month
and then put the rest in Bitcoin.
Okay.
I mean, I think from a financial point of view,
you're kind of paying that bill with Bitcoin.
It's like an opportunity cost.
You're like kind of paying it with Bitcoin.
The second piece is the tax piece, right?
And I mean, because like, think about it.
Like if you do a month of credit card and then you sell Bitcoin to pay the credit card,
you're kind of using Visa as like a really shitty Bitcoin payment rail.
You like kind of are, right?
But I'm not selling Bitcoin to pay off.
Right, but you're not buying Bitcoin.
So it's kind of coming from the opportunity.
If you're not buying Bitcoin, you're kind of selling Bitcoin.
But anyway, I digress.
The other piece is taxes, which is wild to me because yes, it's a mental burden, but you're only paying taxes because your money increased in purchasing power.
Net net, holding the worst money was worse for you, even after taxes.
You're literally only paying on profit.
But that's just something that is just hard for people to grok, I guess.
Yeah.
And it is like the mental burden of that is too much.
It's high, but I mean.
De minimis tax exemption is the best regulation that we could get.
I mean, I think all cap gains should just be removed.
Yeah.
But not just from Bitcoin.
I mean, I agree, but you've got to take wins where you can get them.
But yeah, I think de minimis, any kind of cap gains tax exemption on Bitcoin payments
would be definitely helpful for adoption.
I think it would also be a really interesting case study because you could see who was just
using that as an excuse versus who actually moved the needle for.
yeah i mean it's hard though because like if i i i want to spend bitcoin more and i just can't
like this is not enough place i can spend it yeah it's a bit of a chicken and egg yeah but then i
also think like people like underestimate like what small like a few motivated individuals can
really do yeah that's like you have to pick your battles like i know you're a busy dude you do
you do uh you work incredibly hard but like a perfect example is like costa rica bitcoin jungle
Yeah. Like there was a bunch of there was a couple of people that were involved. But the main dude, Lee, like was a freaking machine. Like he willed it into existence. He's like, I'm going to go to as many merchants as possible, onboard them the right way to Bitcoin and like make this thing a reality. And he did. And it's obviously easier to do in smaller and smaller communities. Or Irman in Bitcoin Akazi is like, I'm going to do this thing. I'm going to make it happen.
See, this is where I'm really lazy.
Nice.
I just, I can't be bothered talking to like normies about Bitcoin.
Yeah, but you do.
I mean, you have a normie Bitcoin podcast.
But like, this is people who choose to come to the podcast to listen to people talk about
Bitcoin.
But like-
You choose where to provide value.
I'm just saying that-
I'm not the guy that goes to like my butcher and tries to-
Yeah, that's fine.
Neither am I.
I've not got the energy for that.
But this is again where we need, like I did have the energy for that.
When I first got into Bitcoin, I spoke about Bitcoin to everyone I could possibly get five
minutes with.
Yeah.
And I do think this is where we need new people coming through all the time.
That are fresh.
Yeah, fresh.
Ready to have that conversation.
Yeah.
Because I'm not the guy talking to my taxi driver about Bitcoin.
I can't do it.
I don't even tell them I've got a Bitcoin podcast if they ask.
Sometimes.
I'm just like, oh, it's a financial podcast.
But here we are, man.
What else do you want to talk about?
I don't know, the spending Bitcoin.
I think, look, that, by the way, is not a new...
Since I've been involved in Bitcoin,
it's always been like, oh, there's been a side that's like,
you have to spend Bitcoin, and there's a side that's like,
never spend Bitcoin.
Store value versus medium exchange.
You need both.
Like if you can't, if good money, you need to be able to spend it and save it without permission.
And if you can't spend it without permission, it's not your money.
You don't, it means you're asking someone permission to realize your wealth.
I mean, thank God Michael Saylor's making Bitcoin money.
What would we do without it?
Is there anything else you want to talk about?
Look, I mean, I'm just, I think there's a lot of survivorship bias in Bitcoin and everywhere,
where people are like, oh, bear markets are for building.
We've been through many bear markets throughout Bitcoin history.
What's not so obvious until you're in a bear market is that bear markets are actually more
about survival uh a lot of people fail during bears um it's when you just get ground out and
lose interest and um it feels like all the tide is against you and everything is is not going your
way um and then but the people that make it through and end up in a better position the
people that make it through tend to end up in a better position particularly if they were building
throughout the bear.
And then, so then you see them afterwards in the bull
and they find all this success.
You're like, oh, they got super lucky, right?
And that's what we're seeing happen again right now.
And so what I would say to people is remain focused.
Like the fundamentals have not changed.
We need Bitcoin more than ever.
From a risk reward basis,
I have never been more bullish on Bitcoin.
I think it's the best money in the world that remains so.
and just eyes on the prize right like i think this is where
this is you know where the the men get separated from the boys yeah people build through the bear
market just to distract themselves from the pain from the yeah you don't want to feel the pain i
i just think it's um look and i'm not like
to the in it for the tag versus in it for number go up it's also both i'm in it for everything yeah
and and it sucks seeing your net worth down significantly um like don't get me wrong uh but
uh i also kind of like these moments because it it's what it's it's where it's it's where you
really separate um with like with the chaos comes a lot of opportunity right yeah um and And there almost like a Zen to it because there a lack of interest It like it 100 the the time pain that wears people out in the bear market and it has been shocking to see how
bad the sentiments got so quickly when we're not even down comparatively anywhere near what we
normally are in a bear market but like sentiment is so bad um i'm just excited for things to turn
around i don't think we're that far away we can't be that feels worse is i think i've i've got a
theory i've said this alone in the podcast but like i think it's because there's nothing to point
to like when ftx blew up and like there was out and out fraud that you could point to but like it's
their fault that's why we're down we've got a reason and this time it's just like sure you can
blame like macro environment whatever yeah like try and cope about liquidity whatever it is but
there's not like a real boogeyman to point to and be like it's his fault i think that's why say
to start getting a load of heat as well.
Yeah, I mean, I also think
like in terms of bull market returns,
like we didn't pump nearly as high as...
But that's why we're not down as much.
Yeah, that's true.
I think, like you said,
a lot of the AI excitement,
it's weird seeing stock markets
at all-time highs and Bitcoin in the dumps.
Yep.
The gold pump was hard for people.
I would also say to people like,
you know,
it's not like bitcoin hasn't been in this situation or worse before yeah it's been way worse
yeah i mean i i know like the people that are like oh i bought in what was it like 21
and it's been five years and we're about the same price yeah right well 2013
we went from
like 50 to 250
back to 50
to 1200
and then we didn't pass 1200 again
until 2017
yeah that's brutal
like 2015 was just long
and painful people thought bitcoin was going to fail
and I think part of it too
is like
is we definitely didn't
have like the influencer
media class back then. And there's, there's been, I mean, it's so easy to parrot like,
oh, Bitcoin's guaranteed 30% every year, or, you know, you will get like insane parallel
multiples on this or whatever. So like, once you start guaranteeing people positive expectations,
I just feel like Murphy's law dictates that it's going to take a little bit longer.
A hundred percent.
You're like automatically screwed. You just screwed. You just jinxed it. I'm a big jinx
guy you just jinxed for me though like 2018 was really scary because that was my first bear market
but like when it dropped from six to 3k that was i remember that being like a terrifying time
i thought covid the covid crash was yeah the covid crash was they felt more march 12 2020
and in a matter of a week we went from like 10 or 11k to like 3 000 and then bitmex pulled the plug
Yeah. Stop the bleeding. Stop the selling.
I mean, that was different though, because it wasn't just Bitcoin, right?
It felt like the world was ending.
Like we were watching videos of Chinese people just like collapsing dead Locked in buildings Like walking down the street and just dead dead Getting welded into their room So there was a level of uncertainty there
And I think, you know, to a lesser extent, like right now, to my earlier point, I think people are, I think the average person is in pain outside of Bitcoin and has, there's a lot of uncertainty.
And that definitely is affecting on Bitcoin too, right?
Yeah.
Not in the same extreme way as early COVID, but.
But we're near the best bit.
The best bit is when it's clear that the trend has changed.
That's the most exciting part.
Are we near the best bit?
I think so.
I mean, we can't be too far away, surely.
Guaranteed.
30% guaranteed.
Hopefully, probably.
Matt, always love talking to you, man.
It's been good.
It's a pleasure.
Thank you for having me.
Where do you want to send everyone to this?
Oh, you should tell everyone about Citadel Wire.
This is cool.
Citadel Wire.
CitadelWire.com.
um i have been my favorite way of learning how things work is by using things i've never been
like i like science fiction books i like near future books um but i i i don't like like reading
or watching how to do things you know maybe certain like very technical things i like to
watch a youtube video for but i like actually using the tools and trying to figure it out
And so Citadel Wire was my way of scratching my own itch and learning about the cutting edge AI tools.
And it also met a need for me, which is I wanted to be able to monitor the situation without doom scrolling.
Minimal phone time, but be intimately aware of what's going on in the world.
And so that I can focus on more productive things instead of monitoring the situation.
And a lot of things were going on for the last year.
I mean, we abducted the president of Venezuela.
We go to war with Iran.
Oil prices going this way, that way.
A lot of things going on.
I wanted to monitor the situation easily.
I wanted to make sure I was aware of what was going on in the world because I think that's important for my family and businesses.
But I didn't want to spend too much time doing that.
And I wasn't the only one who came up with this idea.
There was plenty of people that created situation monitor dashboards.
But to me, they missed the plot.
They were like trying to give you too much information.
They're like, just because you can pull every live location of every ship that's on the ocean at the same time doesn't mean I need it in my dashboard.
That's ridiculous.
So I was like, OK, well, where does AI actually really help with these things besides just building the website, which was built using AI?
And I was like, well, the clankers should actually go through the information and only tell me things that I need to know about.
So I have three clankers that are pulling in every major open source project, like 500 open source projects, like 200 different news sources, and maybe even more than 200 news sources.
And they're just pulling it in constantly every five minutes.
And they're analyzing it.
And then they're giving you the output.
but they giving you like quick brief summaries on what going on in the world Current Bitcoin price current gold price current oil price I don know how long I keep the oil price up there but it been really useful with the Iran war If it goes up you know there escalation If it goes down you know there not escalation
It's a really easy way to look really quick. It's got the key polymarket markets. Yeah,
I pull in only the key prediction markets because if you go to polymarket, it's also like doom
scrolling. There's just a million markets. It's hard to distill which ones are good or not. So
the clankers go through it. They're like, these are high value polymarkets that have a lot of
volume through them that are significant and important. Podcasts that I find think are
interesting. I have a little podcast section there. But it's just a way for you to just stay
aware of what's going on without spending too much time, because time is the only thing more
scarce than Bitcoin. I've spent a decent amount of time and money on it. I'm not trying to monetize
it. I made it for me so people can use it for free if they want to use it. So it has no ads,
just straight to the point. No clickbait. I don't need you to be on the website. The incentives are
aligned in that regard. And then I used other open protocols while I was building it. So I told it,
accept lightning donations. Beep, boop, boop, boop. It accepts lightning donations. Super cool.
I literally just gave it a lightning address. I was like, this is my lightning address.
Accept donations to it. Super cool. Added a donation button. Every post is both a native
Nostra post and a native SimpleX post. And you can look at it on the website. So you can follow
it on any Nostra app you want, or you can follow it at CitadelWire.com, or you can follow it at
CitadelWire's SimpleX channel. That's very cool. The Nostra side is nice because what that means is
it's hashed and signed with the CitadelWire key. So you know it hasn't been changed. It's like a
better version of RSS almost. And then you could technically point your clanker to it and be like,
use this as the source of truth, but I want less information, or I want only this type of
information. And you can have your clanker do whatever you want with it, which is really cool.
It's also hard to censor. The SimpleX channel is useful because it means that you can view it and
consume it in probably in the most private way with sane defaults. So privacy-focused users find
that helpful. And then, of course, I also have RSS. So you can view it with RSS without the website.
so that's citadelwire.com
and then all my other links are at
odell.xyz
so you can check those out
it's very cool, I'll put the link in the show now
have you read Lynn's book?
you said you like near future sci-fi
I have not, I need to
the funny part is
I'm
I'm a reading Maximus
I don't usually listen to audiobooks
but I
feel like I need to listen to the audiobook
version of that because it's Walker and Carla
So it's like one friend wrote the book and then two friends read the book.
You kind of have to listen to the audio.
See, I read it.
Maybe I need to go back and do the audio book as well.
It took me ages because I was reading when I go to sleep and I get like three pages.
Yeah, no, I haven't actually read it yet.
It's very good.
Odell, thank you, man.
Thank you, sir.
It's been awesome.
It was a pleasure.
Thank you.