All right. It's Friday and it's several minutes past noon. So it must be time for the PBJ show. Welcome.
PBJ.
I don't think we've started on time in months now, but this is our earliest, our closest to noon start.
So I want to congratulate you guys for, I know Steve always has to fluff his hair a little bit.
Yeah, you know. I got a haircut yesterday afternoon just for the show.
Oh, wonderful.
Looking sharp.
I got mine about a week ago.
Yeah, you also haircut.
Kind of high and tight. Yeah.
So speaking of the Navy, we were just talking.
Because some people think it's like a military cut, right?
But are Bitcoiners pirates or Navy?
And you were saying, Max, I think you were saying you wanted to join the Navy.
Hey, man.
Don't quote me on that.
No, it's an interesting topic.
I've thought about more in my life, not just with Bitcoin, but with everything, right?
It's like, you know, I think there are a few tweets out there that were kind of discussing
this in general.
I think maybe Chris Pike had an interesting tweet.
I like a lot of his stuff just discussing has tech in general, you know, gone from being
the pirates to the Navy.
And, you know, I think that's certainly an interesting discussion with Bitcoin as well.
And I think it's also an interesting discussion with just like, you know, is this just the
way the world works and age?
And like, there are certain exceptions, but, you know, most people follow a certain path.
And I was joking.
I was lifting some new weights yesterday and woke up very, very sore this morning.
And so, you know, for what that's worth, I felt kind of old this morning.
But, you know, I think that the question is applied to Bitcoin is for so much of the early
days of this technology, probably the early days of the Internet, you know, it was all
about, hey, guys, we're here to do something radically new.
The system is broken.
We're here to come up with a new system is extremely cypherpunk, extremely on the edges.
Bitcoin got started literally on the edges with things like Silk Road.
and you know increasingly we've seen more people discussing and i think nick carter had a tweet you
guys were mentioning and i i've seen this with my own friends like one of my good buddies in mexico
um you know who was like hey i love being a pirate for a long time but now you know i'm like about to
get married and have a kid and like all of a sudden it's like i don't know man maybe some of this navy
stuff is not so bad and i think one place we're seeing that is with people discussing do they
really want a self-custody or would they rather just move into ETFs or similar, you know,
non-custodial tax advantage things. And yeah, effectively just kind of retire and go their
merry way. I think that would be sad if that's what happened to the whole movement. I think some
some mix of that is probably inevitable. But and we also saw what was the eight billion dollars
worth. I don't know if that was confirmed as Adam Back or someone else that moved.
And I think part of the presumption was it was a conversion from self-custody to ETF.
So it definitely seems like that's a that's a hot topic right now.
But those are sometimes I think those are like the people who are seeding the new Bitcoin treasury company. So it's not necessarily like anti self custody philosophy, but it's more like this is how you seed a new Bitcoin treasury company for better or worse, you know, that everybody wants to do.
Well, and to be clear, I'm not saying this is anti self custody, but more of just like seeing some of the benefits of not self custody. And in that case, I mean, it's a different flavor if it's a Bitcoin treasury company, but it is similar impact.
I think the $8 billion, you're talking about the 80,000 Bitcoin or whatever?
Yeah.
That was confirmed that it was sold.
Oh, never mind.
Yeah, that was a...
Who purchased it, though?
How are they costing it?
Unclear.
Yeah.
But I think it's a different entity.
Yeah.
Because it was for like estate planning or something.
That's the official word from Galaxy.
Yeah.
Which apparently is an intentional release from the customer.
I see.
Because otherwise that's not a normal communication.
Yeah.
I mean, the speculation was that the customer wanted to like give some explanation to like calm the market.
Yeah.
Interesting.
So what do you guys think?
Pirates, Navy.
And to be clear, even like in traditional tech, right, there are people that are outliers that stay, you know, sort of pirates forever.
Like I, I would argue that, uh, I was reading this Buckminster Fuller book out of, no, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, one of my favorite books of all time.
And his sort of argument is that in the past, we used to think that it was like the British sort of Navy that was actually ruling the world, but it was never nation states. It was always the great pirates behind them. And that's a fascinating rabbit hole to go down. To give you a flavor of what this might include, this might include the owners of the East India Company as an example.
right? And, you know, he argued that I think around World War II, the great pirates started
dying out because you needed to have enough sort of technological understanding of, you know,
different fields, including seafaring, to be able to see that most human laws are in fact quite
arbitrary and natural law is like what they were sort of ruled by is Bucky's argument. I would
argue that we're seeing a reemergence of the great pirates right now in the AI race. And so some
people have state pirates. Elon seems like he's, for better or for worse, I'm not making a normative
claim on if being a pirate is good or bad, but at the edges. So it seems like getting rich and old
has not made him lose that spark. And I hope enough Bitcoiners keep that too. But really,
I would have gotten to him as like one of the most statist people out there.
I mean, he's tried to embed himself with the government.
Well, but that's where the claim of Bucky is that the really, truly great pirates just kind of like
take the state from the inside.
Okay.
So.
Steve?
Church of Trojan.
I was going to say the collared shirt guy may be among the most cyberpunk in this conversation.
He's dressing up his status of the three of us.
Now, in getting back to ETS, I heard Nick's comment on his weekly roundup a week ago.
And he just said that I think it was in light of in-kind redemption.
So if you could take your Bitcoin that you're self-custodied, put it in an ETF with no tax ramifications, he was just saying that's maybe attractive to him, might be attractive to a lot of the people.
And he also said that we might look back in a few years and just sort of laugh at the silliness and craziness of seed phrases and all the shenanigans you have to do to try to self-custody.
and he also pointed out that people make mistakes and lose their Bitcoin through self-custody.
So all that's reasonable takes by him and I even have personal friends who did move their Bitcoin
to hook the tax it into ETFs to get better security. But I think that would be a worrying
if that's like a significant trend to worrying trend. What's the concern there? Well one if your
Bitcoin isn't an ETF.
If it's a,
if the in kind is one directional,
you're not two directional,
then it becomes this tax trap.
You can't get it out without paying a big tax bill.
But I've heard from DK about 75 times that,
and one of those times is actually legitimate.
If you're one of three Wall Street firms, right?
So if you're a big Wall Street firm,
you can now do it.
But, you know,
and then how are you going to spend your Bitcoin?
Right.
So there's that concern.
but we also don't know is that ever going to take
I mean we talk about a lot
we're excited about the future of
Bitcoin payments and everyday
Bitcoin is everyday money
but in a world in which it just stays as a store of value
and then
there's a strong trend towards
custodians, what does the world
of Bitcoin look like?
We talked a little bit about this maybe two weeks ago on the show
and we need to keep talking about
the importance of this
for everyone, even for people who
care about bitcoin is as um and only as an investment all they care about that um bitcoin
becomes a larp if there's not network activity because what's the minor incentive to keep
securing the network today it is primarily i mean from the beginning of bitcoin until today it's
primarily the uh minting of new bitcoin but as we all know that goes to zero we talked about this a
couple weeks ago. So if there's not Bitcoin network activity, it's not just for people who
want to see Bitcoin as peer-to-peer cash, but even if you care about Bitcoin security. So we
need to talk about that world. And just to clarify, when you say Bitcoin network activity,
you're specifically just, I mean, I think we all know this, but just to clarify,
this means not that you got your brother or cousin involved in Bitcoin. He went to Coinbase
and bought some because that probably generates probably almost no network activity. But it's
when you send Bitcoin from a self-custody wallet
to another self-custody wallet
that does generate network activity.
Yeah, actual Bitcoin protocol usage,
broadcasting Bitcoin transactions.
Something gets mined.
That's the number that needs to go up as well.
If that number doesn't go up,
then the other number that everyone loves seeing go up
will go down eventually.
Because then, you know,
we'd wind up in a world with no security
and it's just like,
kind of a bogus system.
So now there's many different scenarios
where we'll see that activity.
It doesn't, this is not,
it's not like we have to have
every human being on the planet,
every payment they make
being broadcasting on the Bitcoin network.
A, it doesn't scale that way.
And B, we don't need that level of activity.
We just need some.
And it could even be a world
where no consumers do it,
but just merchants.
Bitcoin does become everyday money, at least for a portion of the economy. And again, it doesn't have to be the whole economy, just like a slice of the economy. Something meaningful, but it could still be relatively niche. But then if there are legitimate transactions going to merchants, some portion of them self-custody, that alone might be sufficient.
or different layer two technologies that support consumer payments.
Those systems also can, even if the end consumers aren't custodying their Bitcoin,
these gateways basically to the network would be self-custodying.
They'd be self-custodying.
They'd be interacting with Bitcoin networks.
Many different ways.
We may just be at a very early stage.
I've heard some people hypothesize that it's crazy to imagine consumers using Bitcoin long term and it's really the settlement layer for other stuff, almost like a new Swift.
And all these other things would be built on top of it, you know, kind of maybe like lightning channels get kind of created and transferred.
but like is it possible that the reason we don't see a lot is because it almost like is not going
to grow up to be that but the layers like lightning or you know some sort of e-cache thing or some sort
of other data that gets written is really what's going to be the like the mainstream you know
transactional use cases and it's really going to be transactions and writing to and from the chain
is going to happen more by like a bunch of different entities but maybe not by an end consumer
Well, let's talk about a scenario where Bitcoin's only really a store of value. Like day-to-day payments, let's just say that never takes off. So then you have maybe hundreds or thousands of financial institutions that are holding Bitcoin, transferring Bitcoin. They need to do settlement, sort of like you mentioned, SWIFT. Is that going to generate enough demand though? I'm not sure.
number one you know the you know bitcoin handles on the order of 300 000 transactions per day if
you have thousands of financial institutions settling once a day with a bunch of partners
or whatever is it really going to fill up the block space i don't know this is one thing we
talked about off the air which is one solution is decrease the block size which to most people
sounds absolutely absurd right i mean like you know what eight years ago whenever there's the
block size wars and people wanted to increase it to 10 megabytes 100 megabytes gigabytes and
increase the block size um one person in the entire space luke dash jr wanted to decrease the
block size to 300k like shrink it by 70 most people completely dismiss that but there is
definitely logic to it he was making that argument in 2017 yeah yeah okay um what was was he making
for the same reason you would make it today?
No, his was more like,
he was focused on IBD time,
initial block download,
like how fast it would take to sync
and like computing resource growth
relative to the blockchain growth.
And his calculation was that
if you reduced it by 70%,
then Bitcoin could keep up
or, you know, with the pace of technology
and otherwise it would grow too fast.
This, by the way, makes me think of
what I think would be two very interesting sort of, I don't know, research papers or academic
studies, and maybe some people have done this. I didn't even realize Luke had published something
about this. One day, perhaps our economists will actually be looking at Bitcoin and doing actually
interesting, useful work. But one question I'd love to see is I've always kind of had my own
mental model of the rate of growth of the chain versus the cost of consumer hardware and each of
the different things, the bandwidth, the storage, and the computer or whatever you need to run that.
I kind of have done my own back of the envelope math. It'd be interesting to see if anyone's done
sort of a thorough study of that. I don't know. Are you guys aware of either of those?
No. And I think that's very interesting, but it is orthogonal to the first thing we're talking
about. I mean, because this is about centralization concerns as opposed to like,
is there going to be sufficient demand and generate revenue?
Well, and so this gets to the second question, which is more sort of on topic that I would also
love to see is, I mean, this is an empirical question, right? So, you know, you basically
asked, is there going to be enough transaction volume to give the miners the fees? Well, like,
again, for an economist, this is something you could easily model out with different assumptions
around value and number of institutions. So, I mean, I think it's going to be a spectrum,
right? On the one end of the spectrum, like everything is custody to Coinbase, which is,
that seems really, really, really, really concerning right now is if everyone, all the
ETFs are using one provider and I know Fidelity is self-custaining and I think Anchorage has some
adoption, but like, seems like that's, that's a real problem. On the other end of the spectrum,
everyone has their own wallet, probably not going to happen. So somewhere in between is where we're
going to land. I mean, in the early days, you know, Satoshi himself talked about Bitcoin banks,
right? So it's not, it's not like it's, it's that, you know, if I just put on my most pragmatist hat,
I bet there's some combo where people have individual spending money, maybe that's e-cash,
maybe for some people itself, custodial lightning or whatever flavor spark. But I do think that
The reality is we're going to see Bitcoin, kind of like you're saying, as more of a settlement
layer for most people.
There will be some sovereign individuals or the great pirates that are playing themselves.
Great.
But most people will probably still have financial institutions because, again, I think Nick
has a great point.
It's like if you have your whole life savings and you just fuck up a word or something,
once you start having kids and stuff, that's really not a risk people want to take.
And I think the interesting question to me is how many financial institutions do you
need to keep the network sufficiently decentralized?
I don't know.
Is the answer 10?
Is it a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million?
Not 10, but let's talk about that.
But I wanted to second your call out
for economists to engage here.
I'd love to see better modeling.
I think it's impossible to completely model it,
but don't let the perfect be the enemy of good.
I think creating some better modeling would be interesting.
But as far as what the world,
yeah, we definitely don't need a world
where every human is self-custodying and transacting.
But, you know, I think a world in which somehow e-cash takes off and there's like hundreds of thousands of mints around the world, that probably alone would be enough activity and demand.
But if it's just the, you know, 4,000 traditional financial institutions in the world that are doing it, I do worry that there wouldn't be enough demand.
So we'd have to reduce the block size.
And because just so everyone understands why that's the case, the way the fees work on Bitcoin, it's not like miners can't, the protocol is not going to insist on like a minimum fee.
Although, having said that, currently, because Bitcoin consensus, there's no minimum fee.
Bitcoin core relay policy right now does have a minimum fee of one sat per V-byte.
And in fact, that's the current discussion right now because miners are starting to mine transactions that are below one sat per V-byte fee.
How is that possible?
Because it's consensus valid.
So even if you do, can you do like 0.1 right now?
Yeah, we're seeing that.
What was the distinction you said?
So just like the whole opportune debacle, there's a difference between standardness rules and what Bitcoin Core, one implementation of Bitcoin's policies are to relay a transaction in the network, and consensus.
There's a delta there.
And so just because something isn't relayed by default by Bitcoin Core doesn't mean it can't be mined.
Just like people mining a Donald Trump JPEG taking up the entire four megabytes in the block or whatever, you can't relay that through Bitcoin Core by default, but it can get mined because its consensus valid.
So there is no minimum fee.
Interesting.
And it's a free market, right?
Like you as a miner, you might insist on like, I'm not going to mine a transaction unless it pays me a certain fee rate, but I can come online and undercut you.
Right.
And DK can come on and it just, it goes, it can go to zero.
Right.
So even if you have, so it's, it's disconnected from willingness to pay.
So you could be a financial institution transferring a billion dollars where you'd be more than happy to spend thousands of dollars on fees to ensure the security of this payment to your adversary, maybe.
Paying an oil fee between two adversarial countries or something.
You'd be more than happy to spend a huge fee.
But if you don't need to, why would you?
So if there's not sufficient demand, if the market overall is not saying here's the minimum fee, you're not going to pay that. So that would be the rationale for decreasing the block size.
if it turns out that the only people trying to transact are these big financial institutions
with a large amount transfers and if you did shrink the block size to make sure that the
demand exceeded the block space then you'd see actual economic willingness to pay play out.
Okay so I'd like to go through two scenarios let's say there's one scenario where we have
roughly the same number of financial institutions that we have today 4,000 or whatever that number
is. If the price
of Bitcoin is high enough, couldn't that
still work? Like if whatever they're
paying whatever, Bitcoin's $10 million a coin.
Yes, they're only doing a few transactions
a day, but they're paying, I don't know, a huge amount.
I guess... I don't see how it's related to the price
of Bitcoin though. Because let's say
if there's 300,000
transactions that can be
sent in a day, if there's only demand
for 250,000, then
the transaction fees will be zero. They'll be zero.
That's a good point. Or you're on
like...
So it's...
One sat.
Have we ever been in an environment
that you would consider sort of like
healthy transaction fee markets?
I feel like I've seen...
No.
I've seen it spike.
When the spammers are here.
We've seen it spike and decrease, but...
No.
There's only...
It's never been...
I mean, this also gets to a topic.
We should also...
Well, but...
Okay.
So two things.
Another thing we should discuss is security budget.
Like how much is even needed?
because we can't say history is the guide because history has nothing to do with like what actually
is needed for security is completely driven by the price of bitcoin because it's a fixed amount
of bitcoin that's minted each block so the only variable is the price of bitcoin which has nothing
to do with security it's all about demand for owning bitcoin right so in the future when that
minting goes away it's then it flips to a completely different system then it is demand
based for to get your transactions into the block also having nothing to do with security
so this is arguably a flaw in the entire system that the point of the fee is security right but
it is not tied to the actual activity.
No one's paying a fee for security.
They're paying a fee to get their transaction mined.
Why is that a flaw, though?
I mean, it's a second-order consequence.
Well, because let's say that we knew
the security budget needed for Bitcoin
was $50 billion a year.
Let's just say we...
When you say the security budget,
you mean how much has to get paid out
globally to miners in order to keep them wanting to run it.
Yeah, and prevent 51% attacks.
Like sufficient security defense.
So let's just say, we don't know that, and we can talk about that,
but let's just say that is actually the case.
50 billion a year.
But, so obviously if we're only paying,
like if we don't get Bitcoin network activity
and we're only paying a billion dollars a year,
then we are at risk of 51% attacks,
double spending and the whole system failing.
um what if it's the flip though let's say that the security budget is actually only needs to be
a billion dollars and we're spending 50 billion a year or 500 billion a year because there's so
much demand right then that's just like a stupid economic loss like it's just friction in the
economy unnecessary friction we're because we're paying 500 times more than we need to for the
security we need. And number one, we do not know how much security we need. And we can go into why
that's such a hard problem to model and understand. And number two, even if we did know, the way
Bitcoin works is not aligned with that. Okay. So just to, I don't know if pushback is right,
but the way that I think about this is in a complex adaptive system, like,
And this is the reason I not worried about in the long run The security I think security almost is perhaps the wrong question to ask The question to start with is I mean is it providing value or not
And so the way I think about it is when we say how much security is a need, well, that
depends on how much value people are moving and how much value people are moving depends
on how much value they get out of it.
So let's say we said $50 billion for all of today's financial institutions.
Well, if they're not getting enough value out of that, then I think what would happen
is there would still be a security budget.
It would just come way down.
So maybe it's a billion dollars.
And then who's still using it then?
Well, you know, the dark web, Silk Road, like the edges of the internet, and it kind of goes back into another dark age and then maybe perhaps reemerges.
So I guess it's almost like, to me, the fundamental question is, are people getting value out of it or not?
If they're getting value, they'll pay.
And then security is like a second order effect of that.
That's the way I think about it.
Are there any proposals for how you might correct this?
Like, I mean, something like a dynamic block size comes to mind.
It sounds crazy.
but no there's been um some thinking around that and actually jameson lop just interviewed with
haley in the studio on 21 and 21 and he's um he's sketching out a proposal on that i know uh aj towns
is another developer who's done some thinking around this and it was certainly proposed in
the past before but i do think that's an area ripe for um even deeper exploration that's that
feels like it solves the problem I'm mentioning.
Because even with what you said,
my interpretation, what you said, Max,
is like it speaks to the difficulty adjustment.
Yes.
But I still think that's orthogonal to what I'm saying.
I'm saying that whatever the security budget is,
the people's willingness to pay,
they're not paying for security.
They're paying to get the transaction mined.
In other words, let's say that we needed
in a given block, let's say we needed a million dollars to make sure that's secure.
That's how the math works out. But there's just not enough demand. So you can get away
paying a penny to get your transaction in. Are you going to be altruistic and pay, you know,
a million dollars divided by 3000 transactions? So like, you know, 300, are you gonna pay $333
because you know that's how much security is needed?
Or are you going to pay a penny
because you know that is going to get your transaction mind?
And like, you know what?
It's a good point.
I guess what I would say that,
and I need to think more about this
because the adaptive block size is an interesting question.
But to that first question,
I would just say that Bitcoin's not valuable enough
to like move a million dollars
or like whatever amount you're trying to move,
it's not the right tool in that world.
Let's play that out.
Yeah.
So let's say that, let's say like Michael Saylor's dream comes true.
Bitcoin's like $43 million a coin.
It's like hundreds of trillions of dollars of value.
It sucks up real estate and bonds and everything.
Let's say all that happens.
And it actually is, it's like true, it's real, it's sustainable.
That's how things are working.
So there's like real value delivered to the world.
Let's just assume all that's true.
right okay um but it's all just uh costed coinbase so there's literally no network activity
or very little like a few institutions sending money back and forth again so there there'd be
like tremendous value for the world it's one that but and also let's say even payment every let's
say also everyday payments takes off but it's just like one company that um or one or a handful
of companies dominate, like LightSpark and Coinbase and Block or whatever, let's say they
dominate payments, then if there's, so they're just tremendous value for the world, but there's
not enough Bitcoin network activity. So again, it's detached.
Well, so what I would argue in that world is that Bitcoin's value actually like went
down by like 99%. And so what happened?
That's why we're talking about in the show. I totally agree. And that's why I think investors
who only care about number go up, which is totally fine that that's all you care about.
they also need to worry about the Bitcoin network activity growing.
100%.
But to be clear, my argument there is, again,
you would have a nominal value where you say this is extremely valuable for the world,
but the real market value, like what people are willing to pay,
actually just fell 99.999%.
And it was a strategic takeover.
And that's how the quote-unquote state won.
Well, that's what I call it.
I've called on the show like a LARP or like XRP.
I think it evolves into that because it's just like kind of bullshit at that point.
Exactly.
It's like we had this conception of Bitcoin being differentiated from all the other tokens.
That's how Bitcoin dies, short term.
Again, it would never, never die.
So my argument is this would be like a generational thing where there would still be, I don't know.
Back into the caves.
Adam Backus.
I mean, kind of jokingly, but like, yeah, there will be some class of hardcore cyberpunks that will never stop.
And so, I mean, it wasn't he the one that famously said he put the stop order or whatever that he would buy all Bitcoin at like 0.01 cents or a penny, whatever.
I'm happy to sign up for that.
Yeah, exactly.
But my point is like, I've got my stop order in for a penny.
Exactly, a penny, a coin.
And when we say a coin, we mean the old world big B Bitcoin too, right?
So in that world, I think what would just happen is you would have Bitcoin would go underground for a generation again.
And the status would be like, oh, cool.
We won.
And then you would just go back and forth.
But to be clear, I think there's two threads for us to be that we are discussing and that we need to just keep discussing.
One is if there's not enough Bitcoin network activity, Bitcoin dies eventually.
Well, you said two years, but I think I mean, I think it's more like 20 years.
But either way, we need to be talking about it.
Yeah.
We need to talk about it now.
That's one thing.
But even if we live in a world where awesome, Bitcoin is everyday money takes off and like self custody is valued, even if it's by merchants or intermediaries or there's like millions of financial, quote, institutions, maybe they're like self-sovereign, like e-cash mints that are like NIMS or whatever, AI agents or whatever.
But there's millions of these.
And then there's lots of network activity.
Let's say all that actually happens.
Great.
Then one thread that we're discussing is solved.
There's tons of network activity. But the second thread is it's still the economic activity on the blockchain is not a direct function of the security needed. And maybe that's maybe it's a who cares if enough money is paid. Exactly. That's a we don't know. The only way we know how much we need is when we start getting attacked. Exactly. And like that could happen. That's a possible future. It dips so low that it gets attacked.
And then we're like, okay, well, that's too low.
Again, we can't be like, okay, everyone pay up more.
But we'd learn what it is.
If we never learn what it is, we don't know what the threshold is.
As long as we stay above the threshold, maybe we're 10% above, maybe we're 100x above.
Then we'd be fine from a security perspective.
Then it's just unnecessary economic friction.
But I do think
more exploration
around dynamic block sizes
is warranted.
Maybe Spiral should fund this.
I mean, it's a good question.
Take an action item.
I still think we need
AI note-taking during our show
to give me action items.
Dear agent, please.
But the dynamic blocks,
let's say there was a proposal
or a hypothesis
that seemed to make sense.
Do you suspect that such a thing
would get a lot of pushback
from certain players?
Like I can imagine
the miners would be like,
oh yeah, like more transaction fees sounds good.
I can imagine that, you know,
maybe gut reaction from investors would be,
I guess a little bit kind of who cares?
Like if they're not spending it anyway,
why do they care if they're just holding?
So who would be like?
Well, first of all, there'd be people
who were around 10 years ago
might be having aversion to this
just because it was like so,
such a nasty fight then
and they don't even want to like broach
the topic of changing the block size in any way.
But whatever, we can get,
I mean, if it's like a legitimate discussion,
and potentially needed, we'll get over that.
As far as the other stakeholders,
their reaction to it,
well, I think it's a function of two things.
One, I mean, how good is the proposal?
It does need to be evaluated along numerous angles.
I mean, technically, does it work?
Adversarily, can it be attacked?
And that needs huge scrutiny
because this kind of change
could accidentally open up some vulnerability
that can be attacked.
So it needs like heavy scrutiny, technical scrutiny.
And then economically, back to the point of like, let's get some economists focused on modern future money.
Exactly.
Like, I still don't understand why.
I know, it's crazy.
Economists at universities don't do that.
Like, this is.
The universities are part of the fiat system.
It's such a novel, interesting challenge and problem.
I think it would be.
You're not going to get tenured.
Intellectually so interesting, right?
I think you need kind of an indie econ hacker.
That would be something cool for spiral to fund is like indie economists.
Because the people at the institutions, they care about tenure.
Again, incentives.
Incentives rule the world.
Like they're not going to take the risk to study something that might get them like fired.
Yeah, we'll do it.
So indie economists, talk to this man.
I'm committing to grants for that.
But also a goal for.
How much is free money to Steve give away on the show today?
Yeah, we're up to a million.
Can I get some of those sweet, sweet sass, please?
Look under your chair.
Oh, I love it.
A big key.
but uh princeton bitcoin also has a goal like bridging the gap between silicon valley right
and silicon valley doesn't just mean google or venture capitalists but also universities like
stanford and berkeley and local universities and eventually trying to crack that nut for like the
whole world like hopefully we can have success here in the the the bay area um and then maybe
that's a template for others to learn from around the world i love it and and not just computer
science students, but also
economists. Although, to be fair, the computer
science students are probably better at this.
And everybody studies computer science these days.
Yeah, exactly. I think like
70 or 80% of the Stanford
class is computer science. Seriously?
Yeah, it's like kind of ridiculous. And they're about to all be
out of jobs. Literally? I think so.
I mean, maybe the number is 60%, but it's not like
I don't know. The majority of the entire student
base is studying computer science. Yeah, everybody studies computer science.
Meaning like as a minor?
No, it's like their major. I think everybody studies computer science.
What? I think it's more than 50%.
I don't know what the number is, but it's...
I know it's high, but that's very high.
Well, I can, I'll fact check it.
Don't take my word for it.
Well, any, even if it was 20%,
I think that's kind of crazy.
So, okay, two thoughts that came out of that.
One, on the adaptive block size thing.
So my initial reaction is, you know,
I think part of what makes Bitcoin
so beautiful is simplicity, right?
So like my, I'm kind of like initially allergic
to anything, to your point,
because again, complexity active system,
it's very hard to model.
Like, I think it's awesome.
We should definitely have people studying it,
do as much work as humanly possible,
test net, whatever.
But again, my fear is always like anytime you met,
like the reason Bitcoin took off in my mind
and so many reasons is Satoshi said,
okay, like having a decentralized marketplace
was basically having like decentralized bids and asks
was impossible.
So we talked a lot about.
So instead he just says, okay, cool.
We're going to give away whatever, a fixed amount.
There's a fixed supply and we give away a fixed amount
for block size reward.
And that just solved the problem with simplicity.
So anytime we mess with simplicity,
it has a flaw and you could argue a flaw.
it might be a fatal flaw.
Totally, totally.
And again,
that's a very supportive study.
I'm just saying in general,
like,
I'm like,
again,
in my old age,
I'm becoming more,
more concerned.
I'm also with simplicity.
I agree with the simplicity point.
The second thing though,
is like,
there are empirical things to study here.
So the Monero community already has this.
So they argued this like forever ago
and the Monero community,
people think of it as a privacy,
you know,
coin or whatever,
but it actually has two very interesting innovations
or experiments that are very similar to Bitcoin.
One is as a eternal tail emission,
which is something interesting.
I know Peter Todd and other people have called for that.
It's like it starts as 1% and that's a fixed amount.
So it goes, it's asymptotic with zero, but never zero.
And the second thing is they also have adaptive block size.
They also have like this like thing
to like prevent ASICs from mining,
which I think is extremely dumb.
Dumb, interesting, dumb is my quick response
to those three things.
Agreed.
So, but the point is like Monero is a real network.
It does have real volume.
It is the currency of the dark web, probably worth.
If I were like a renegade economist applying for Steve's money, I'd probably start with there.
And yeah, it would be fun.
Actually, let's go through those.
I'm already forgetting the three things.
So the interesting, okay.
Tail mission.
Oh, tail mission.
Yeah.
Actually, that's a big topic.
So let's dive into that in a second.
But the third, your number three, I think is dumb.
That's where they try to stay ahead of the ASIC development.
So dumb.
By hard forking every six months and changing the algorithm.
I mean, I thought that's dumb for.
Who gets to decide what your algorithm is?
It's a very centralizing force, right?
So it's a handful of core devs.
Yeah.
The high priest.
They get to decide the rules of Monero every six months.
And I'm sure from the day they started that until now, I'm sure they're earnest and honest and have made good decisions and nothing nefarious.
But what about the next set of developers that come in?
right and also i mean you guys have heard me make this you know call over and over and over and
hopefully we'll talk more about mining and stuff but like to me bitcoin is energy backed money
power backed money full stop if you get rid of the energy you've gotten rid of the system i would
argue that monero actually could i don't i wouldn't say necessarily overtake bitcoin because
there's so such strong network effects from back in the day but it had a shot to like i mean it's
got the real adapt uh adoption on the dark web right like to actually be something with staying
power, except for that one, in my opinion,
super dumb decision.
Now, what's the first thing
you said? Remind me again. Tail mission.
Tail mission, yeah. Let's talk about that.
That was your dumb.
I think that's dumb as well.
Not as dumb as the other thing, but dumb.
Not as dumb as the other thing.
Dumb to introduce it, or dumb
if it were created that way?
Well, let's get into that.
Because we've talked about that. I think we agree, but let's talk about it
live here.
So,
I think, and I'm pretty sure DGA totally agrees with me,
the most important thing about Bitcoin
and its monetary policy
is that whatever it started with,
it's consistent, doesn't change,
and is predictable.
And there's high confidence.
The game theory and system works out
so that there's high confidence among everyone
that in 20 years, 40 years, 60 years,
it's going to be the same.
And then we can plan around that.
That's the most important thing.
So whether it started with 21 million coins or 42 million coins, or whether it had a tail emission or not, is like second order.
The most important thing is that it stays consistent in the certainty.
So that doesn't even really seem that debatable.
However, at this point, whatever it is, to change it now strikes at the heart of what it sounds like we're agreeing is the most important thing.
so first of all
I would argue
adding a tail emission
isn't even better
but let's say
it is better
then
but changing it
just
strikes at the
most important thing
so it's a bad idea
at this juncture
and when you say
tail emission
just to clarify
that's
that it doesn't
in whatever
2140 or whatever
it doesn't stop
having a block reward
but it continues
having a block reward
after that point
and the way that
Monero does it is
it starts off as
1% of the total supply
in the first year
and then it's a fixed amount
of the total supply
of the entire thing.
Yeah, so I don't know
how many coins are,
but let's say it's whatever.
You took 21 million or whatever
and then like
you take 1% of that
and I forget the exact details
of how they do it,
but they keep it as a fixed number
so as a percentage of the supply
it goes past the amount.
What is fixed?
The percentage is fixed
or the amount is fixed?
No, the amount.
That's also done.
It's been a long time.
Yeah.
Because it's literally the same thing
in the long run.
I could be wrong.
Don't quote me on that.
No, I think you're right.
I definitely know
many systems do choose that.
Right.
And I think that is so stupid because all it does is just defer the problem.
Because ultimately, if it's a fixed amount, then it becomes 0% eventually.
Effectively 0%.
Yeah.
I mean, like 1 divided by 2 to the 256 is effectively 0, right?
So that's a dumb system.
It would need to be a fixed percentage or something more advanced than a fixed absolute amount.
Just a hard-coded number.
but also let's talk about the differences there
so the question is
do you want
so someone has to pay for the security of the system
who's paying the decentralized bank
the miners
the ones that are doing transaction selection
who's paying for that
the way Bitcoin is set up
is that it's transactors
so if you want to transact
you have to pay
if you're just saving
you don't have
I mean you had to pay up front
maybe
either if you're self-custaining you pay up front and then you never have to pay again
or if you're relying on a third party you pay just a tiny sliver of what's needed and then you never
have to pay again whereas if you're a transactor using it as everyday money then you are um you're
securing the system on a daily basis we can argue whether that's good or bad or who how it's aligned
or whatever now with a tail emission where you keep inflating the supply everyone's paying
right because everyone everyone who holds the coin i i think i've heard of this somewhere before
like ideally you aim for about two percent per year you could have a basket of goods to measure
slightly differently though you can change the basket whenever you want um but yeah so well
everyone base although um if we simplify and say there's two categories of users like the people
with the wealth and saving and then people who are just spending and let's say this to simplify
the spenders are just earning their paycheck each week and spending it out on bitcoin they don't
have they have no savings so i'd say that the the real cost then is born by the with with tail
mission is born by the the holders the people with the wealth so it's interesting like that's two very
different philosophies right do you tax the people spending or do you tax the people who have the
Well, it's income tax versus capital gains tax.
Right.
We kind of have that system.
And today's Bitcoin setup is income tax.
Purely income tax and no capital gains tax.
And I would argue it's actually a little bit of a reverse of the system.
It's like the system that we have in name, but not in practice.
Right.
So like I always think of a meme that Justin Moon shared where it showed the Federal Reserve
and it showed Robin Hood and it said steals from the rich and gives to the poor.
It showed the Federal Reserve and said steals from the poor and gives to the rich.
and then it showed Bitcoin
and said doesn't steal,
which I think sums it up perfectly.
Well, but maybe, I mean,
we're talking about doing that.
But also I'd say it's not
like capital gains tax,
because capital gains is only
when you choose to create a tax event
by trading.
It's more like a wealth tax.
Yeah, exactly.
So tail emission is a wealth tax.
I do nothing and I'm getting...
And this is my point.
The current system in name,
in theory, you sell things,
but like we've talked about,
and again, I'm happy things
like lava give the superpower to everyone, but it's, you know, in practice, wealthy people
don't actually sell things.
They just get loans.
And so in this system, wealthy people actually get taxed.
So I think, um, and I'm not sure there's like, I don't think even if the three of us debate
it and try to get to a conclusion, I don't think there's like a right answer to that.
Like who pays?
We can talk about the trade-offs and like economic system.
And again, we could, you know, get a bunch of economists to think about this problem.
I kind of like the Justin Moon meme.
Just doesn't steal.
It's a good one.
I get it.
And like,
but help me understand again,
like,
like what does that mean in relation to the current Bitcoin system means the
people paying for the system are the people spending their money daily.
Totally.
There could be this alternative system in which the wealthy people are paying.
It's one or the other.
So what do you mean?
It doesn't,
it's,
it's quote stealing from one of these two groups.
Well,
it's not stealing.
If you actually need to use the service,
I know you could argue is saving the use case that you're going to pay for.
And I suppose that's like an argument.
But like.
But if you're saving and you're not paying, you're, you're amortized the cost of the one
transaction.
He's saying that maybe saving isn't using, but saving definitely is.
I mean, right now it is the use case.
Yeah.
It's the, like people aren't, it's a niche to spend.
So like, I would argue strongly that saving is a use case.
Yeah.
So, so like, and that's where the value, that's where the value is today.
It might be where, I mean, and I fully expect it to be where the value is in the future.
It might be where all the value is in the future.
So I would argue that actually opens an attack vector for Bitcoin, excuse me, to get out-competed
by something that doesn't tax the holders.
Just play this out for a minute.
Let's say, I'm not saying-
But Bitcoin doesn't tax the holders.
Right.
But in this new world where you have the tail emission, which is effectively a wealth tax,
I think that potentially opens the door for something like Bitcoin to arise again, where
it's like if you are storing your wealth in Bitcoin or you're storing your wealth in this,
imagine there's a hard fork one fork taxes you just store one fork doesn't tax you to store
as like a wealthy person i kind of know which one you're going to choose right unless you think that
what depends if you believe i don't know what you think everybody else is going to do yeah well but
also like and it is the budget let's put our let's say we are um we're we're wealthy savers
we're that in that camp and then the day comes where it's like 20 years from now there's still
no Bitcoin network activity. So everyone's freaking out.
Right. Because there's not enough to pay for Bitcoin. So there's like the
volume has been cranked up 100x on the we need to add tail
emission. So on one hand, no, we don't want
it because we don't want to be taxed. But on the other hand, we lose our
entire investment because the whole system fails. So I think I'd rather
be taxed than I'd rather lose. Yeah, I get it. You know, whatever. 10 basis
points per year, then lose 100% of my money. And one could argue that at least this is a
quote unquote, a fair tax, right? It's not like, okay, it's being funneled through some bureaucracy
that goes to fund wars or whatever. It's like, okay, you can see exactly what you're being taxed.
So to be clear, just for the audience, I'm not taking a position on this and I'm not arguing
that we should do this. I'm just saying- Steve is pro-taxing.
Yeah I think it under I think we on a path where it will be discussed a lot more because there be concerns about who paying for the mining security
And so it needs to be discussed more.
I agree.
This should all be discussed more.
We should see the renegade economy.
So I'd love to see that.
However, I don't know.
It's just my gut.
But like somehow I'm still just not worried.
Like I just think I trust.
And yes, we should always push forward.
But that there will be one of two things.
either like mass adoption for payments at some point, because we'll actually have services that
you can only get there, whether that's on the gray edges or AI agents or whatever, or we're
going to see enough financial institutions that it kind of solves itself. To me, that's a very
interesting question. So let's assume for a minute you don't get the mass transaction case,
or at least it takes a long time. So again, the renegade economist can maybe give us a better
number. So we agree, based on what you were saying, if there's 3,000 transactions a day,
There's 4,000 current financial institutions.
Probably 4,000 is too low.
300,000, right?
Yeah, but 4,000 individual institutions, 300,000 transactions a day.
4,000 is probably too low.
So let's just say there's some number of institutions that are regularly transacting with each other.
Let's say there will always be some sovereign individuals, but just for the sake of this, it's like 99% or 90% institutions.
So let's say at least an order of magnitude more institutions is necessary, and obviously the more the better.
So if you have 40,000 that are settling up with each other, you could, in theory, hopefully clear that 300,000 transaction per day hurdle.
Obviously, 400,000 would be better.
Four million would be better.
The higher up you go, but probably at least 40,000 in terms of order of magnitude.
Now, my big question is, what can we be doing?
And I actually, I don't want to spill the beans on any companies that we've all been talking with.
But what can we be doing to see, or let me phrase this another way.
What are the incentives that would encourage at least 40,000 e-cashments, as an example, that are getting everyone to say, I don't want to use, you know, JP Morgan or Fidelity or whatever, the big guys. I want to use this smaller institution. Like, how do we basically see a true resurgence of free banking on steroids? Because I think that's probably enough to get us what we want.
Well, I think also there's the trad fi and regulated class, let's say, and then there's not that. Another concern with traditional financial institutions is that they're very accustomed to signing legal agreements with partners.
And if you do that and you trust the legal agreement and you trust your partner, you don't even need to use the Bitcoin network. You can just transfer value back and forth between each other on the Lightning Network or even your own proprietary technology if somehow the Lightning Network doesn't work for you.
And then even if there's thousands of traditional financial institutions, a lot of their activity, even that doesn't have to hit the Bitcoin network if fees rise too much. Again, obviously they're paying a penny for the incredible value the Bitcoin network provides or even like $100 for like large transfers. They won't bat an eye. Of course, they'll use that. But if it rises too high beyond their willingness to pay, they'll just substitute with another system.
So, okay, so we don't know what the exact number is, but let's just say, you know, we want at least 40,000, 400,000, 4 million financial institutions that people are choosing. I guess the question I pose is why is I, you know, I as an individual would prefer to use as an example, my local credit union versus Wells Fargo or a larger bank.
one of the theses that we saw a couple of years ago from the Fediment sort of side was, hey,
you could have like a local, you know, whatever community members that are cussing your money.
Maybe there's some reason you want to keep the money local to the community or you trust these
people because in your town, I've always been very skeptical that you would want like the random,
like butcher or whatever being one of your signatories on your money. So I, I'm skeptical
on like the super, super local community thing. I am more bullish on this idea that, um, I'm not
exactly sure what's going to be the winning feature here, but that like you would rather a credit
union where it's you and like the 10,000 people that you see every day versus some bank that's,
you know, whatever, 10,000 miles away. What do you guys think are the incentives that get us,
you know, let's say at least 4 million of these e-cashments or new version credit unions versus
big banks? Well, I think trust, you know, as much as we talk about trustlessness, when you talk
about a bank, you're establishing a trust relationship, but that's not a self-custody
thing. So I think whenever you're establishing trust, you'd rather, you'd rather first trust
yourself, then trust your family, then trust your neighborhood and community and town and
whatever, you know? So I think it's just sort of concentric circle expansion. And so.
Well, to be clear, I would much rather trust people that I can talk to, but probably not
just like the local random community. Cause I like, again, self cut, like someone like
loses their seat phrase or something like that's cute. I'd rather trust a professional
that I can like interact with. But like, you can't talk to Sam Bankman-Fried,
but you might be able to talk to
if Steve were running.
Yeah, to me
it greatly matters
which country or jurisdiction
you're in. So if you're in a
jurisdiction in which the
legal
system, the banking system is
relatively good
like the United States, then
I think most people in the US
would prefer to use a bank than
local community members. It's like
what's the best way to ruin family or
friend, your community relationships is money. I lend, you know, I lend David money. I don't get
it back and it ruins our relationship. Right. I mean, that's deadbeat. So, I mean, that's as old
as time, like that kind of human dynamic. So if you have, if you aren't having major issues with
your bank, I think you choose bank. But there are many places in the world where there's low trust
in institutions, whether it be your government, your legal system, your banking system.
And there, you know, it's a totally different answer.
But to be clear, I think there's a spectrum.
I 100% agree with you.
Like, I'm not trusting like the random people in my community to custody the money.
However, if it's someone that is a professional, like let's say, you know, I don't know where
PB and Alex started a bank or whatever.
It's like, well, I know he's doing this full time.
There's investors back.
Like, it's a real deal.
But like, I can like chat with him on a day to day basis, IRL.
That to me is important.
And I also think you might see, even in the United States, right?
Like even in the United States, I would prefer to be able to like call my banker than like
have like an automated system or someone in New York City.
I think that could be enough.
But I also think there might be other like other incentives.
Like imagine for a minute, you know, if you had a, you know, one of these credit unions
where I give them, you know, whatever my money, my Bitcoin, they custody it.
But also I know they're more inclined to give out loans like in the place that I live.
Maybe that's also enough where it's like, I want to encourage like, okay, like the place
where I live to thrive and, you know.
Or you might even just be able to assess
what a loan risk is
in a way that like a big national one can't, right?
Like you might know something specific
about the geography or the real estate
or your weird employment thing
that's actually very good,
but doesn't look good to the national purview.
Steve gave him the skinny on DK.
Don't trust that guy.
Come on, just don't, just don't.
Yeah, I think those are,
you're pointing out good reasons.
So I,
there's several different ways I could imagine
e-catchments taking off. They're all highly speculative
and lowish probability, I think,
but possible. And then if they do, that would be
phenomenal. Same way with
Lightning Network, Lightning Nodes
taking off, or Spark.
There's a myriad of Layer 2
technologies. If any of them take off because people
actually want to do payments, that's a good thing.
But to me, the key again is whatever the technology is, we just don't want a small cabal running
all of it.
To me, there's a spectrum between one company and everyone in the world.
It's probably going to be somewhere in the middle.
The closer we get here, the better.
That's right.
I mean, I agree with your net net.
I still believe that in the future, there will be sufficient demand for the properties
of Bitcoin.
meaning that people will want to do Bitcoin transactions
for the trust minimization in that transaction
that will then generate enough revenue to secure the network.
And even though it's going to be a mystery
what the security budget needs to be,
we'll be above that.
I do actually believe that's still going to happen,
but it's definitely not a certainty.
We really have no idea what the probability of that is.
and when I see
it's a disturbing trend when we see
more and more people
making comments like Nick did
and again definitely not shading Nick
at all I agree with his point
but
DK and I have a mutual friend
who moved
half his Bitcoin into an ETF
because it gives him more peace of mind
I have multiple friends that have done that
so I understand
in the near term
the logic and rationale behind it,
I worry about that trend long-term
if we don't see reasons
to increase the Bitcoin network activity.
So it always comes back to
we need reasons to use Bitcoin.
And the reasons are probably going to come,
I'm going to say it again,
but probably going to be
new applications,
net new things,
not the existing stuff we have
changing to Bitcoin,
but new things that get discovered,
invented, created.
100%.
And I think we've got a lot of people
out there vibe coding today.
We've got a builder product.
A lot of them in this very building.
We've got a builder once a month meetup where we actually talk about these things.
I think we...
Not just talk.
Show.
Yeah.
Actually make, right?
Make and show.
Yeah.
I'm not going to name names because I think it's against the rules, but we saw somebody...
We can't...
Because we want to get in a...
We live stream...
We want to...
We weren't set up yet, but we are going to live stream demos and showcases.
So I think it's okay to out the people who...
Okay.
Well, I was just going to mention Matt sort of from scratch built something in front of us, like with from the prompt to the actual working software.
And I think that's the kind of stuff when we see what can be done and it's easy.
I mean, we see which exact prompt we need to use to get the Lexi wallet installed.
I think that's the thing that helps these new things come to life.
Yeah.
And actually, by the way, we probably shouldn't commit to this because I don't know how regular it will be.
But Matt and I, did Matt tell you, or were you on the thread where Matt and I were talking about this?
I didn't hear about this, but I have an idea where the other day I, um, I tweeted some other
conversation I was having. I tweeted out, uh, uh, I was like, why start a, why start a podcast?
When you can start a vibe cast and Matt comes back to me, he's like, let's do it. And I was
like, do what? I was just like, I'm just like shit posting. I didn't really have something in
mind. So, um, so, so we have a document right now of some of our favorite ideas that we want to
build. Some of them Bitcoin related, some of them not. Um, but it's just stuff that we think we could
create on a live stream
in about an hour, probably going to use
Repplet and try to go from
scratch to a production deployed thing on a live stream
in about an hour. I love it.
We're going to do this, I think we're going to start
sometime this
coming week. I don't think we have a
specific date and time planned yet.
Let's go. Yeah, we're going to do that.
I think that'll be another effort
toward the builder
ethos.
By the way, real quick, our producer
let us know a while ago.
20% of kids at Stanford graduate with a CS degree,
but 95% take at least one CS class.
Okay.
Maybe I got the stat from somebody
who is a little less precise about there.
Even 20% remarked.
I think that's low.
When is that from?
Is that 2025?
2020?
We need to do a deep research.
Yeah.
We need a deep research query.
GPT-5.
Okay.
So we can nerd out on the security budget.
There's more to say there,
or we can move on to other topics
we're hoping to talk about.
I'll leave it to you guys.
There's this, did you guys,
we talked about this KYC thing.
Is there anything?
Well, I was going to say-
The KYC-ization of everything?
Yeah.
The answer is, let's move on.
Well, I don't know.
I'm just mentioning it's another thing that we-
I definitely want to touch on that.
Maybe one thing just to mention
that is a bit more of an evolution of this is
in addition to the security budget
and how much people are paying,
the other thing that I'm always obviously very interested in,
the thing I'm always tracking very closely is hash rate.
And I have been very encouraged.
I don't know if you guys saw,
I shared with you all this morning,
the Caprile tweet, Caprile's, he runs.
I rolled my eyes at it.
Why?
Because I don't think how much it costs to mine Bitcoin
determines the price of Bitcoin.
I think the demand for Bitcoin determines the price for Bitcoin.
Interesting.
I mean, not just interesting, obvious.
Well, I think, I mean, perhaps there's a causation correlation difference here, but it's been remarkably on the money for a long time.
To me, that's one of the things I'm always interested in, though.
That's because miners are rewarded with 99% of their revenue is the minting of new money, which is directly proportional to the price of Bitcoin.
so that would explain why
hash rate goes up
can measure it with
regardless I'm very happy to see
we went over 1x hash
or zeta hash again
and according to him
and his production costs
like what it costs
in actual just joules
we're at 140 or 145 again
so
I assume this is just
a bunch of estimates
because we don't know
what the actual
power cost is
like the energy input
public data
and some private data
two things that
one, I do not think
the cost of production determines
the demand for Bitcoin and thus the price
for Bitcoin. This was like a
popular argument
eight years ago and I never understood it. It makes no
sense. And then secondly,
I
don't think hash rate is actually the
most interesting metric.
It's the
cost.
The cost to produce a Bitcoin.
Yes,
but the cost to mine.
Meaning, let's say we're at 1,000x a hash per second.
It's an enormous difference if that costs
a million dollars to do versus a trillion dollars to do.
Because if it only costs a million dollars,
then we could go attack the network.
It doesn't matter how much hash rate it is.
It matters how much does it,
what's the financial cost to attack the network?
Right.
And that, of course, changes every year
because every year the equipment gets more efficient.
From a security perspective,
it's the cost to attack the network,
not the hash rate.
Although it's interesting,
if the cost to produce a Bitcoin right now
is $140 and people are still mining,
that's interesting.
It shows people are looking towards the future
and bullish.
Is that what he tweeted?
I think so.
The production cost.
That's not true.
Okay.
It's not very responsive.
even if like there's got to be a huge lag because you have to like acquire the hardware and deploy
the hardware and like you can't be responsive to just like the market price right well it was
long-term bullishness right like but also like there's a myriad of ways to measure how much it
costs and each public mining company gives different figures and they're always like
jockeying for like what makes me look best and worse you know and um so that all depends on what
they do well and what they do poorly. They want to hide what they do poorly, but you, you can,
you can, um, you know, you can have like sort of an all in cost or you can have like, what's the,
the marginal cost. And in reality, if the marginal cost is where you determine, do I keep the
equipment running or not? Like if I, if I've signed up, if I've already like prepaid four
year energy contract and I can't get the money back. Well, so from an accounting perspective,
I can amortize that and say, well, here's how much my all-in cost is.
But on a day-to-day basis, you just ignore that.
And well, I mean, if you've already prepared your energy and you've already bought the equipment, then you keep it running.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
I mean, well, you calculate how much you're paying the security guard or whatever.
But I mean, like, you know, that's negligible.
So are miners pretty active with hedging strategies, like trading, say, options in public markets to try to reduce their exposure to fluctuations?
I know as much as you do.
My understanding is over time, a lot more that has happened, which is, by the way, one of the reasons I'm surprised we haven't seen more of a hashrate market emerge.
I think it's maybe starting to now.
But I mean, increasingly, more miners are trying to hold their coins.
That's definitely a trend.
But I think what's interesting about this is, well, there's a couple of interesting things on this.
one, I think he's getting just the electricity cost he's trying to estimate.
So if just the electricity cost of production is 140 a coin, people are still mining.
Very interesting.
Steve, no way.
You don't think that's a correct number?
Well, I mean, if you're using an S9.
Yeah.
Interesting.
I have to go back and check.
I mean, let's do, after the show, let's do a little bit of math and show how absurd that,
or I will, if he published some.
It's all open source.
So it's okay.
He's been tracking this for like seven years.
But anyways, I think the more interesting thing to me and what makes me excited about this is even in a world where the demand for obviously compute or electricity for AI is like going vertical and we've discussed is that going to potentially hurt Bitcoin.
It's exciting and good to see that.
Okay, I know Hashray is still coming on.
There's still people that actually it makes me want to sell my Bitcoin.
If people are that irrational, like why?
If people, if miners are paying $140,000 just for energy and they keep mining, the systems failed.
Like it's completely irrational.
I think the argument is like,
there's like only like brief periods where this holds true.
And like,
that's,
you know,
within whatever,
a couple of weeks or a month,
you end up like leveling out again.
We can look at this report back for next month.
I mean,
for next week.
But anyways,
but I agree if the,
if the cost of energy is 140 cave just for a brief moment and then resumes back to like 45 K or something.
Well,
this,
I mean,
but that's not interesting.
These two numbers kind of go like that over time.
Right.
But whatever.
Well, we'll report back next week, Steve Skeptical. What's also very interesting to me, though, one story I want to mention on the energy side that's got me very excited is your former alma mater, Google, made a very big announcement this week, which I think is pretty relevant to Bitcoin as well, which, you know, as some people know on the show, we're going much deeper on something, hopefully to be announced soon on the energy front.
And basically the thesis is just the demand for compute, particularly for AI has gone vertical.
There's no way to supply that much energy to the grid.
One possibility is going totally off grid, which is something that I'm increasingly interested in.
Something we've seen for some mining as well.
But another possibility is if you can keep data centers connected to the grid and you can actually have demand response, which means they turn off.
Now, this was a huge sort of part of the thesis from the 2021 paper that we put out with Square
about the ability to turn off miners when pricing will say to do that.
Awesome.
That's like a really well-covered phenomenon at this point.
In Texas, they'll shut off when it's really cold or really hot and you need all that electricity.
But one of the issues with data centers for compute has been that data centers traditionally
require the five nines reliability, like 99.9999% reliability.
and um google i think announced a major deal this week which was the first with two different
utilities including tva with tennessee valley authority on my old stomping ground that they are
uh i don't know all the specifics but that they're willing to either power down or shift compute
loads due to market uh signals which is a very big deal because now if you can start deploying
more of these loads that are data centers that you can actually power down whatever a few few
days of the year, then we can install
a lot more on the grid. But why do you need to power them down?
Is that because it gets too hot or there's
other consumer demand? For peak demand.
Whenever you see extremely
for example, imagine a super hot day
in Texas and everyone's got their ACs on.
You basically go and say the actual cost
of our electricity has gone
100x for just a few hours.
In that world, Bitcoin miners were always
really valuable because they can just shut off in a moment
as they're getting paid more to do that.
So it's like a demand response thing.
Demand response is now making its way to
large-scale AI data centers.
But a lot of people were skeptical
on if data centers would ever do this
because they had this like famous,
like, no, we need like perfect reliability
and we'll never play ball with demand response.
Several things.
First of all, thanks for sharing that.
But real quick, like ERCOT, yeah.
I mean, ERCOT's an interesting phenomenon
because it's a decentralized market
and it's like a free market, which...
The freest market.
Freest market, yeah.
I mean, so the prices really can go like 100X, right?
Yeah, or even 1,000X.
Like, you know, people get bankrupt.
Some people could complain,
because obviously if your energy bill
is 100 times more for a week or whatever,
that's pretty devastating to consumers,
businesses, et cetera.
But it reflects reality.
Exactly.
It reflects reality.
So I'm generally pro this
because ultimately we get solutions,
economic and technological solutions
like you're talking about,
which is way healthier
than some kind of subsidization
through taxes or something.
But I had not seen that article
until you sent it out.
First thing I'd say is a good use of AI.
Because I first read the article, like people would have done for decades, and I couldn't find the nugget I was looking for.
I wanted to see how are they doing the demand response.
Because like you said, historically, data centers are like, we'll never shut off.
Yeah.
So I wanted to find, and it's probably in there, but a quick scan by me didn't find it.
So then I just fed it into three different LLMs.
Yeah, that's cool.
And interestingly, one of the three gave me the answer right away.
So it's like, beautiful, right?
I actually forget.
I think it was Claude.
Claude beat out chat GBT5, which I've been disappointed with so far.
Yeah, we should have not.
And then Anne Grock.
But Claude pointed out, so I'll give you a couple of examples, and I learned really quickly.
One is YouTube like video processing That can be deferred and then the other is like with their AI So like if it inference or something
well, you need that to keep running
because literally people are typing in a query
like I didn't expect a response.
But if you're training or something,
that can be paused for two hours or four hours.
And so they do have a couple of examples.
So my takeaway from that, first of all, super cool.
Super cool.
Demand response.
it's going to be super economical for Google
because as we've seen with Bitcoin miners, literally
in the summer in Texas, Bitcoin miners make more
money off of ERCOT paying
them than they do mining Bitcoin.
Yeah. Because it's
so, there's so few
systems that
allow being turned
off during high demand.
But I actually am more bearish on Bitcoin
after reading the Google thing
because in my mind prior
to that, Bitcoin was like
unique.
And now all of a sudden, oh, there's some like legitimate things, expenses and activities that big tech's doing that can be turned off and competitive.
So that hurts Bitcoin.
Although I think it's going to be a massively growing market and they all win.
Exactly.
But it does introduce a competitor.
But it might help because often it validates a market as well.
And all of a sudden then, okay, it's acceptable to do that.
It's harder to decentralize the AI inference stuff compared to like going out to like the stranded energy in Africa and collecting some of that to do Bitcoin mining, right?
Yes.
Well, I mean, that's actually an open topic as well as can you have a lot more inference like really like distributed as well.
Today, obviously, yes, because you need the five.
I don't see how inference is a, like I just said, inference is not a demand response.
You can.
You can just have, instead of it taking you five seconds to generate an image you ask, you can have it generate 10 cents.
I know companies that do that.
It depends on the kind of inference.
But then you're actually hurting the consumer experience.
But the example I gave, AI training, it's not hurting the consumer.
I mean, only in a very abstract way.
Like, oh, they don't get the next generation model.
It's 20 seconds later, and I am so fucking pissed.
Well, I think you're going to see all of the above.
I think that's where they're going to start.
on the inference side, you're going to see, I think, two things play out. One, the deeper I'm
going in the energy rabbit hole, I have to say I have just increasingly more and more respect for
Google across the board. These guys are at the very cutting edge. They know what they're doing.
They've been doing this for a very long time. But you're going to see, I think, they're in
particularly uniquely position to be able to shift loads more. So as an example, let's say,
and I think this is the difference between, let's say, a Google search and the kind of inference
you would do with like a deep research
with a grok or whatever.
In a Google search, like they,
and again, there's probably,
my guess is they're going to have like tiers, right?
Like the data center that's providing the Google search,
they're never going to turn that off
because that is so core to their business
that you get that snappy response in 0.01 seconds.
But if you're having a conversation
and like a deep research
and like, let's say you needed to shift the load
to another data center from, you know,
Virginia to Minneapolis as an example.
And like, okay, that increases the latency a little bit.
Maybe it adds 10, 20 seconds.
But if you're already expecting
it's going to take three or four or five minutes for this deep research to come back, then adding
a little bit doesn't really matter. So I expect to see a lot more like shifting of the inference
lens as well in different tiers. But I agree.
If a deep research query is three minutes, 10 seconds
versus, or 20 seconds versus three minutes, 10 seconds, it's kind of marginal.
But I have noticed the more I come up with a question,
I fire off three or four AIs and like some respond
right away with like initial and like that that's I gravitate towards that so it really depends on
the use case um also the you know another way to distribute the load here is like well if it's
if I've got a data center in Texas and it's super hot in the summer I it's I don't I don't not
process stuff for my customers I just do it in a different location exactly exactly which which
adds a little bit of time for the latency but like again depending on the query and I that could
even be done at it i mean it's like you know it's gonna be hot on july 4th or whatever so it's like
you're already yeah and i think you know to your point i i think what i expect to see next and this
is my sort of big obsession is how much can you just take fully off grid and i think um you know
with certain training you might be able to go entirely off grid um if you have like a big enough
whatever uh like kind of what elon did with you know natural gas as a sort of the backup eventually
solar and batteries batteries are a huge part of that but i think for inference one of my big
sort of questions that I'm exploring now is, you know, instead of having like, okay, I've got one
gigawatt cluster, could I do whatever it is, you know, 205 megawatt little mini sites? And then the
question is like, for the inference, it still needs to be close enough in the city that you could still
get the data back and forth. And like, does it have to use fiber? Could it use satellite? I think
that that's a very interesting, you know, field for exploration.
Oh, and speaking of decentralized internet infrastructure, I was thinking, because we'd
chatted a little bit about the idea of kind of helium without the shit coin oh yeah right i would
love to see it and i wonder if we should be part of that change by like what can we do to create
something of like a like a presidio bitcoin i love it access point that you can access the internet
through say bitchat not not through our typical wi-fi but like a separate access point you can
access through bitchat to kind of demonstrate how to get to the internet without sort of having your
own direct access.
Yeah.
But you still need at least one hotspot.
Yeah.
Like what I'm saying is like Presidio Bitcoin could be a, a demonstrate like the Presidio
Bitcoin SSID, like a.
Okay.
So Presidio Bitcoin could run a Raspberry Pi or server or something like that that connects
to the internet and then it's running BitChat or even Starlink.
And then the only, I can't just like from my laptop or phone, Wi-Fi connect to it.
I have, the only way I can connect to it is through the mesh, BitChat mesh.
So I'm saying as a way to demonstrate it as like a viable thing.
And then you could imagine maybe it's subsidized because like we already have internet here, you know, but you can imagine that somebody could then take the unsubsidized version and say, pay me.
Well, yeah.
So actually, Steve and I were talking a little about this idea, even taking it further.
What would be super dope is you could have that upload point be potentially off grid as well.
So solar and battery powered.
So we can actually show a demonstration case where at PB, we have the ability to have the mesh.
And then we can even do like a cool thing where we have people like mesh all the way out into like the fields or something.
Like and see how we try and set a new world record or something.
Yeah.
And then you've got the off-grid solar plus storage powered either hotspot or potentially like a Starlink or something where you could just like, okay, you know, Alex is all the way in whatever the Baker Beach and send a message.
They got mesh all the way here.
And then we send it up to the satellite.
That would be.
And then have you guys seen Tollgate?
this is one of the cash
yeah so this is one of the cash projects where you can pay
e-cash tokens you can do this with bitcoin too
of course but for
accessing that so you can literally payment
gate it where like Alex needs to
pay to send it across the mesh and
then upload it yeah the vocabulary we
should use is just bitcoin payments
specific technology yeah sure
fair enough another way it's funny
you mentioned solar and then people watching
right now if you look outside
through the window it looks very cloudy
which is accurate
over the Golden Gate Bridge, but otherwise
it's just blue sky.
This is not Arizona or Texas.
We also talked about
I shared putting a
water tower on top.
Presidious Bitcoin could be completely
water tower. That's cool.
You didn't see my response?
No.
The whole
Presidious Bitcoin could be completely self-sufficient.
Our own water.
As long as we get the Costco treat delivery.
The snacks.
have to get fussed in from somewhere.
Take care.
Don't kill the bot, man.
Well, we need like a decentralized drone delivery service.
Or like a farm.
Or grow our own food.
Grow it.
Okay.
All right.
Dude, there's some land out here.
Have I told you guys I have my own garden now?
I've started growing spinach and mustard greens.
Oh, great.
I'll bring some.
We could start planting stuff on the roof.
I love it.
That would be dope.
Solar punk, baby.
We're going to have a solar punk future.
We're reclaiming it for Bitcoin.
I love it.
Okay, before we get on to our next topic,
you mentioned Google.
Have you guys played with Genie 3
or seen the demos of Genie 3?
No, I've seen the demos, yeah.
No, but I mean, we're living it right now.
I know.
I saw your tweet.
You believe in the simulation more now.
Oh, yeah.
Well, who doesn't?
So we are in Genie.
We're in Genie 97 or something.
And then the question is, who is?
Only some of us?
No.
Okay, do you want to move on to KYC?
Well, okay.
I mean, the one thing I think is just, let's do KYC next.
But I think the one thing that's worth touching for Genie is, for those of you who haven't
seen, and by the way, increasingly, I have to give more and more respect to Google the
deeper I go into stuff.
Like, you know, everyone else is kind of like, oh, we got chatbots and this and that.
And then Google's just always like, oh, by the way, like, here's like the virtual reality
world that generates in real time.
And if you haven't seen, it's crazy because it has world memory where you can literally
like paint walls what they show, step away for a minute, come back and the world is still
painted.
one of the so i i like read about this in the reddit singularity um uh subreddit rubber which
i like and one of the jokes in there was are we gonna get gta 7 before gta 6 which dk gets that i
mean the joke is it takes forever to program video games but like could we just like self-generate
that world you want before all the programmers are i totally buy that and like i mean yeah like
if we're about to go into a much more augmented world and let people have their own you know
whatever visions. I just want to say, I think it's increasingly important that there is a Nostra
Bitcoin alternative of that world. Because again, I'll never forget, even though I like some of the
things he's doing now, like photo of Zuckerberg got everyone strapped in with their like VR goggles
and just like eating the bugs or whatever. And like, if we're going to go into, you know,
an infinite recursive loop of simulations, which we probably are in, um, let's make sure that's free.
yeah it's okay we'll talk about kyc internet and this is a it's topical because the uk has a new
online safety act law that is having reverberations around the world and including british people who
are running into a bunch of obstacles but it's just a latest example of like a trend towards
KYC-ing just any
basic internet access
sort of flies in the face
of being able to participate
on the internet as a NIM
and anonymous.
So,
one major question,
it seems like I've started
to see a lot more of these things happen.
I've seen some more, let's say,
conspiratorial people
in Bitcoin Twitter, but is it really
conspiracy if it's right,
be like, okay, kind of closing off the exits,
shutting down more access points on the internet.
I don't want to get too hyperbolic about it,
but it does seem like a lot of this stuff
is accelerating recently.
And I think, I don't know what the trend is,
but my guess is it has something to do with AI
that a lot of people realize,
okay, we're about to have recursive learning AIs soon,
and somehow that's sort of increasing the urgency to do this.
I don't know, what's your take?
Well, I haven't studied it,
but my assumption is that Aukens Razor
is that it's like trying to save children.
Like well-intentioned.
Yeah.
I forgot, was this one packaged
is children or terrorism?
I forget which one.
But no, I mean, again,
I haven't studied it,
so like, I don't know.
But I just assume like the people
who are coming over these laws are,
I mean, because like in the UK,
like 80% of citizens approve this law.
Seriously?
Yeah, very popular.
The fuck?
Yeah.
Because it's shrouded in a
like save children or prevent terrorism.
It is a similar thing that I studied a little bit more about,
which is probably a similar pattern.
Remember a few years ago,
Apple chain,
you know,
Apple's always taken very strong privacy stances,
but they changed their software so that photos on your phone could be in the
background without your control,
uh,
scanned and then uploaded to the FBI and different intelligence.
I miss this.
I miss that.
What?
I didn't see it. You didn't share it in the group chat. It didn't happen.
Yeah, come on, Steve.
This is like two or three years ago.
That's pretty concerning.
And it's to save children. I mean, it's like child pornography.
So basically, there'd be a list of content that is illegal.
And they lead with child pornography, which the vast majority of people would agree.
Yeah, of course.
That that's horrible.
and if there's tools that we can use to prevent that,
let's use those tools.
What do they add next?
So the tool here was, okay,
a three-letter agency has a list,
is not provided to Apple.
They just get like hashes and they do...
Hashes of images.
Hash matching.
This is like an image.
So on your phone right now,
like it's matching against your photos
and if there's a match,
then like you get outed to the authorities and then they'd investigate it so that was um announced
and launched i think something like three years ago damn and then they faced massive backlash
because obviously that can be abused because then you know what you start with something that like
almost everyone agrees but then like you keep adding more crimes slippery slope and also it's
just like massively crosses a line where they're like analyze like i think most humans believe the
photos I take on my phone are my property. I don't want the government snooping them.
Yeah, I actually didn't think Apple could do that.
Of course, they control the software on the phone.
Just like with self-custody wallets, if they want, they can update the software to just
upload everyone's keys to the cloud. They can do that.
I've gone deep in the debates about server versus
a computer you hold in your hands
and a computer that's in the cloud.
It's not...
That seems very different to me.
But when you want a service like, hey,
we got to back up your stuff in case you drop it in the ocean.
Yeah, but I thought that was encrypted.
It sounds like it's in service of the user.
Okay, let's go there.
So like,
it is different in some ways,
but not...
Just because you hold your phone in your hand
doesn't mean you have full control over it.
A, you have no idea what software's running on your phone.
It seems like an opportunity for someone to build something that is like that.
I mean, they've been market failures, right?
Anyone trying to create something privacy-oriented is a market failure.
Anyway, the point is Apple introduced that and also with iMessage, some kind of child protection.
So it's just a similar pattern.
So I think it's well-intended to protect children.
my guess would be for this law that it is well intended trying to save children and it has like
massive popularity and support by the citizens um but all like within a week of launching i sent
that article out there's like 10 different examples of like probably unintended consequences
for adults um that make the internet like way harder to use or onerous or impossible to use or
you lose privacy, like situations where you want to ask a question or get information or communicate
without revealing yourself. And it puts you at physical safety risk. All of a sudden now,
it's like, oops, we didn't think of that. So we have someone in the chat that also says,
a bit simple, Julie Immigrant is Australia's e-safety commissioner in this role as she leads
the world's first government regulatory agent, being committed to keeping its citizens safer
online. So I guess something just happened in Australia too. I guess I would like to believe
that and maybe it's true maybe it's just occam's razor but it does seem like if it's happening in
britain it's happening in um uh australia i guess we kind of had brazil last year a little bit it's
like i don't know it does seem like it's accelerating maybe it's just the fact that now
they can do this but i guess i would question why is it happening today and not a year ago or two
years ago or well i think like again i don't know um but there's just more and more data and
information now about internet activity, social media, et cetera, and the harms it has on teenagers
and children. That's becoming more evident now than obviously like 10 years ago, it wasn't even
a thing. We now have a body of data. So I think there's plausible answers to all these questions.
Now, is it also conspiratorial part of the big reset? Maybe. Either way, it doesn't really matter
because like whatever the rationale is,
there are these repercussions and concerns
that we care about, I think,
and we should be discussing.
So that's what makes BitChat and Noster
very interesting.
I mean, because another,
I guess you mentioned AI,
that could be another driver, right?
So which gets to proof of human.
And we've talked about that on the show
and like, is it even important or not?
That's an interesting debate.
But we did conclude there's at least
certain use cases where it's very important, like dating apps or any kind of any app where you're
going to meet someone in person. You don't want to be tricked online where you're talking to a bot
and, you know, no catfish either. Yeah. Well, either like waste your time because no one shows
up or like it's some other shenanigan or something. Right. Or worse. So there it's valuable. And
there also might be sent like sentiment where you humans just want to know they're interacting
with humans independent of the rational argument that you should be judging it based on the quality
of the content or whatever um so how do we get proof of human we've talked about world coin we're
all very concerned about that another is government ids so another trend is like yeah you know and
so do we see uh social media requiring passport upload to even use it yeah like will we see a day
or X, just to
battle the bot, you have to
upload your passport.
And maybe even
your utility bill and super
owner's KYC just to participate
in social media. And is that going to
be driven by corporations or the law?
Or both.
It's a really good point.
And I think it gets to stuff you talked
about, which BitChat, like double opt-in
friending as humanhood is
a really important alternative web trust.
And similarly, I mean, I love this Cali tweet slash Nostra post where it's just like, look, Nostra is becoming so important right now.
It's the only free internet left.
I think that's probably true.
I mean, yeah.
And I don't know.
It makes our stuff more important than ever.
What's your take, DK?
Do you think this is all driven by trying to defeat the bots?
Which part?
Having KYC everywhere?
Yeah, like requiring everyone to put up their ID.
I think people, you know, there's always a good soundbite.
and I think a lot of people are very responsive to a good soundbite.
So if you say protect children, get rid of the terrorists,
I think a lot of people will hear that, they'll believe it, they'll repeat it.
So I think if you want to make progress on this,
I think you have to speak to somebody who would be kind of tricked by that soundbite
and not expect them to be one of us who kind of already gets it,
but kind of explain why KYC may have some benefits,
but it also has some severe drawbacks.
and what do those drawbacks look like?
So like, I don't know, like what,
imagine you have, I mean, I have a neighbor
who I think is generally a good dude,
but like, you know, every once in a while
we get talking about like fact checking.
He's like, well, let's just, if it's,
I want to have Facebook fact check things for me.
I'm like, that's crazy.
You don't want a fact check.
Like, well, things that are facts should be facts.
It should just be, you know, fact check.
It's like, well, yeah, but the interesting stuff
is at the edge of what is a known fact.
Like what year is it?
It's 2025.
it's a fact fine but the stuff that's not known it's the frontier of what is human knowledge what
can be verified that's what that's the only thing that's interesting like is covid a thing is our
vaccines i think like all of that those are questions that people should be asking and trying
to get answers on and i feel like it's the frontier of what is well known and what is not known
impossible where it's interesting to try to digest it and i think in the kyc discussion it's similarly
Like what is the frontier of where like, okay, if it's just child, you know, child, uh, pornography
or CSAM or it's, um, there's terrorist stuff.
Everybody can agree to that.
What is the frontier where people might start to disagree?
And then can we talk about those cases?
Cause that's the stuff I feel like I'd like to hear more about.
Like, like, is it, are, is, is KYC useful for like, are, are, I guess you're mostly proponents
of non-KYC everything,
but are there areas
where you'd be swayed to say,
like, let's KYC some stuff
and who should do that?
Well, I think, again,
the question is,
how do you KYC
and who's doing it right?
Like, I'm very much, I agree,
like, proof of humanhood
is a very interesting thing
or proof of, like,
someone I trust,
but I think there's ways
to do that,
decentralized bottoms up
and ways to do it tops down.
Now, like, are there certain,
you know, use cases
where, you know,
you do want that?
Look, I mean, I think, again,
getting older,
like, there are certain cases
where, I mean, like,
you're the pirate
and you're like,
the state's always evil and it's like, well, that's not always true. Like, you know, sometimes
the state actually does good things and like, it's, it's always messy. It's in between things
are always shifting.
Fair enough. Yeah, exactly. Steve's buttoning up his shirt there. Um, yeah, but, but I just think,
I mean, I think that's a good way of doing it, but I also think another way to win people over
is to offer again, incredible experiences that they'll just won't be able to get otherwise.
And so, you know, if KYC sort of shuts down the free and open internet, then, you know, I don't know, the kids want Skibbity Cash.
And Skibbity Cash is only available on Noster.
Because, I don't know, some lady, you know, who's 60 years old or something, thinks Skibbity Cash is bad for the kids.
Well, the kids disagree.
So let the kids, you know, kids have Skibbity.
I don't know.
Free Skibbity.
That's a good way to end the episode.
Yeah, exactly.
All right, let people have their Skibbity Cash.
Yeah, Skibbity Cash.
get your skibbity.
All right.
Cool.
Next week then.
All right.
Till next time.
More soon.
That's fun.
All right.