Oh, welcome to another edition of PBJ.
How are you guys doing?
Good.
How are you?
It's Friday.
We got nothing to talk about.
Another morning week.
Nothing to talk about.
I'm grateful.
You guys know I had some stuff going on the last couple weeks.
Feeling a lot better today.
Okay.
Good to hear.
It sounds like you might have a direction to improve the situation.
We do.
A couple directions.
Is this about the ED?
I wasn't going to talk about your issue, DK.
Sorry.
On air.
you said you have a gift for us
he's just J for the EV
he's an Elonator
what's the
oh you said EV
yeah
I thought you said EV
DK is pretty wild enough
alright we have lots to talk about today
blood flow
do we need to do a basketball
segment or are you
no
I'm not wearing any Iowa State
it's over
alright
well it's unfortunate
well every team loses
except for one
and my team lost
but you made it far
it was a good season
could be worse
I like loyal to the soil
yeah that's right
well I mean
I still gotta represent Memphis
Steve sent me stuff
that Memphis is apparently
the most hood city in the country
and you know
I'm not a Memphis hater
I'm just the NBA players
are Memphis haters
I just randomly saw that
as I told DK
I am loyal to the soil
but I can also admit
Memphis is
it's pretty good
I like that phrase
yeah
but
oh boy
so much to talk about today
do you want to go
just hit them in order
or what's
what's burning on your
what's top of mind
let's talk about
what's exciting right now
well
maybe the least exciting one
no
Bitcoin
Bitcoin core
privacy
I could
I could describe that
really quick
what's top of mind for you
we're wilding out over here
we can do that
another show if you want.
How about this? Everybody's talking about this
Bitcoin, quantum, like the
Google thing. Everybody's asking me about it.
I haven't studied any
of the updates since the quantum summit
a year ago. So I don't know.
Has anything substantially changed since then?
Well, for those that
didn't see, there's another
wave of discussion and
drama around quantum and Bitcoin this
past week because of
Google dropped a paper
which we can talk about a little bit
and then
there was another
startup, I forget the name of it
but
in collaboration with Caltech
announcing
advances
with a different approach to quantum computing
neutral atom technology or something
far beyond my understanding
but those two
both dropped this week
and it just
causes a lot of hysteria
So I'll try to give my take and what I think is a balanced take on this.
I think the simplest way to explain the Google paper,
because the Google paper claims that there's a 20x performance improvement
in the algorithm to break ECC and break Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
And just to be clear, when Steve's saying elliptic curve cryptography,
he's talking about signatures for Bitcoin.
because there's different kinds of cryptography for different things.
So that sounds substantial.
They also released it in a clever,
probably responsible way, clever way,
definitely good marketing.
So some combination of all those.
And they did not reveal the details,
but they did a zero-knowledge proof
to prove that they have the details.
So that was kind of interesting.
But it definitely spices.
Do you know how that worked?
I saw that in the headlines, but I didn't.
was there much about how that actually worked?
That's how our resident DKB expert described it.
I didn't think they were advanced enough to that,
so no idea.
I didn't read the details.
But so in any case,
oh, interestingly,
the lead person author for that paper
is Hartman Nevin,
who I worked closely with at Google long ago.
He and I worked on Wingman together,
which is the code name for Google Glass.
sounds like someone that should stop by
a procedure of bitcoin
I can reach out to them
in any case
a 20x speed up
that sounds substantial
and let's just assume that claim is
true
it's very material
so I don't think we should
dismiss this announcement
but I think the best framing
that I've heard on it
is n-1
Yes, you cryptic.
I told you that, but I didn't explain it to you,
so I'll explain it to you now.
Where N can be anything.
N is the number of years
before we have a cryptographically relevant quantum computer.
And as we've discussed and people have heard,
there's a wide range of views there
from like two years to five years to 15, 50 are impossible.
So, right.
And I certainly don't know,
And I really don't think anyone knows.
We just have to keep evaluating each new announcement
or piece of progress to understand
what probability we might assign to that.
But if N minus one, just because, you know,
if let's say 10 years from now,
there is a cryptographically relevant computer
that can break Bitcoin keys
and it takes a year to crack one key,
for that computer,
then this announcement
or this breakthrough
would shrink that to two and a half weeks or so,
20 times faster.
So kind of N minus one.
So in the grand scheme of things,
I don't think it changes much.
Now, if every week Google announces a 20x speedup
and then it gets it down to just one qubit
is needed to break Bitcoin,
and then that's a different story.
So I don't think we dismissed this,
but some of the news headlines were outrageous,
saying it's imminent.
And I want to just pause on that one point.
I mean, I think obviously everything should be balanced.
No one's saying FUD or freak out.
And I do think we should also talk a lot
about the solutions that are being developed
because that to me is really exciting.
But I do think one thing that is a little concerning to me
is even if you view this,
I mean, it's obviously a potentially high-impact scenario.
even if you view it as low likelihood or far out. I think one thing in the Bitcoin community
in general that's changing, thankfully, but as I feel like people have not been AGI-pilled enough
or like AI-pilled in general enough. And so, you know, when you have the brightest minds in the
world with access to the best AI in the world at places like Google, we don't really know,
like we have multiple S-curves happening at once and we don't know how compounding S-curves are
going to result in faster scientific breakthroughs. So I think that that's one thing I just really
have not liked about the quantum discourse. Not saying it's possible, not possible. That's
clearly above my pay grade. But I don't think enough people are, you know, waiting that their
past view of how these quantum developments or the rate of progress worked is potentially
completely unlinked with the future as AI gets a lot better. Yeah, I mean, I often bring to mind
Have you guys read the famous Kurzweil book?
Which one?
Singularity is Near?
I mean, a long time ago.
Yeah, a long time ago.
I think I read it 20-something years ago.
But it talked, I remember, about in the 90s,
they were trying to predict how long it would take to map a single human genome.
And I think all the experts said it was 10 or 15 years or something.
And then I think they solved it in three or four years.
Right.
And that's not to say that we should be more paranoid or respond to all this,
But just that I think to double down on what you're saying is the S-curves and the compounding nature of how these technologies converge and discover new things may not be easy for us to sort of project out.
Exactly.
So it doesn't mean let's all panic, but it does mean like interesting to keep an eye on this stuff.
And, you know, if it does turn out that there's a new announcement every few weeks, then, you know, pay more attention even.
And I would be more, I would be very happy on many, many fronts.
I don't think it's just for quantum.
and more inclined to take seriously
more, I guess, Bitcoin and quantum researchers
who are also tracking heavily
what's happening at the frontier labs
and have a real sense,
not just guessing,
of how far along DeepMind and Anthropic actually are.
I'd also, I mean,
so I totally acknowledge the point you made, Max.
It's interesting then to observe it in other fields,
both physical hardware and then software.
So like mapping genome and AI advancements,
those are two things that,
well, at least genome,
it happened faster than thought.
Genome, is that a French?
Is it good?
Oh, good.
And then AI, you know,
it's been promised forever,
but then all of a sudden, boom, came out of the scene.
But like fusion, like when is that going to happen?
That's been also been right around the corner for decades.
But maybe AI accelerates that.
maybe next year is the year of fusion.
We don't know.
Quantum computers feels
more like fusion to me
because of the physics and
the very hard engineering, physical
hard engineering problems.
But we'll see.
I mean, all that, I think
all that changes, I mean, even if you hold that belief
like, oh, there's going to be this rapid
change, it just changes
your probability distribution
might be different than someone else's.
It
If you don't take a super extreme view, I think one has to believe, yes, there should be development in a plan put in place, a plan for different scenarios.
One where it does take 10 plus years in which that's a slow and steady plan and incorporates the latest advances of cryptography so we don't suffer too many drawbacks by upgrading.
And then emergency plans too.
if we're caught off guard and it does happen really quick
so that we save Bitcoin.
So I've talked about, real quick,
I've talked about maybe a few weeks ago
saying that PresidioBitcoin is putting together
like a 12-page report soon.
Which is very needed.
Two weeks.
Yeah, I was about to say.
How many more two weeks?
We now hope to publish it next week.
Austin, where are you at?
I think it's really good.
I think it's a really balanced account
and it covers like describing the risks,
describing sort of where we're at,
a plan,
like these different plans
for different scenarios.
So I think it'll be good
once it's published.
And I think we should cover
also like all the different
worst case scenarios
and what that means
and the potential solutions.
Because like,
just because I'm saying this,
I'm not saying we need to panic.
Like, you know,
there's a lot of different routes
this could go.
The one thing I will say though
is even though I'm more
AGI-Pill and concerned about this
maybe than some people are,
I also tend to agree
with some stuff,
I guess,
Taylor has said in the past of like, look, you know, there's, I agree with him. There's always
a risk of like, if you act too soon, then you end up, you know, messing up a system that doesn't
need to get fixed. So I certainly balance those concerns. And I also agree with him that like,
it does feel like in addition to the frontier labs, and I don't know who's tracking this super
closely in addition to what they release in public, but like, it's also like, I would be
watching the most closely of like, what is DOD, NSA, like, what's the intelligence community saying?
what is Apple saying
like the big tech companies
that are actually tracking this closely
and like super classified government divisions
that's what I would be using
at my like bellwether
I agree that should be paid attention to
but a couple caveats of that
one like NIST has come out saying
like all government agencies
have to upgrade by 2030, 2035
whatever things like that
and at first blush
it might seem to imply
that that's when the government believes
there'll be CRQC, right?
And Bitcoin could be broken.
But that does not imply that.
Because, and same with Google,
just announced that they've fast-tracked
to 2029 as their target date,
which is just two to three years away.
Was that an update from this week with that paper?
Well, I think they, no, I think two weeks ago,
but like right before this paper.
So people are linking to like,
they accelerated to 2029,
they're going to upgrade all Google stuff.
then they drop a paper with a zero knowledge proof that doesn't reveal the actual 20x improvement
but both the government and Google
there's different applications and some applications are you encrypt data
that's supposed to be private and 40 years from now you still want it to be private
so if you encrypt it with technology today
that is broken in 40 years by a quantum computer it's no longer private
So let's upgrade soon in three years, five, ten years, because we believe in 40 to 50 years there could very well be a quantum computer that can break the encryption.
That's a different application than stealing your Bitcoin.
So you shouldn't just assume a 2029 deadline means that that's the date that Google believes or the government believes Bitcoin's going to be broken.
Yeah, and also the fact that Google is changing that deadline also.
I wouldn't put much stock in any number.
The other point, and this is less valuable,
but it's a lot easier for Google to upgrade their systems.
It's a centralized company.
The CEO says do it.
They upgrade their systems.
They don't need anyone's cooperation or input or consensus.
And that's the case with banks, governments, almost anything else.
So that doesn't give an excuse for Bitcoin not to be,
the Bitcoin ecosystem not to be thinking about it,
but it's just a big challenge Bitcoin has that others don't.
The other big challenge is that, you know,
with quantum-resistant cryptography,
the signatures are larger,
it's more expensive to compute the signatures, etc.
I mean, no one wants that extra cost,
but the cost to a scarce resource like the Bitcoin blockchain
is much more cost-sensitive
than a Google or a bank.
And I think it's worth mentioning one very positive side
is, you know, while,
and this is like my kind of general philosophy
with all the AI stuff.
Whenever people doomerism, you know, go doomerism
or like freak out or whatever, it's like, yes,
attackers now have access to AI
and can do some really fucked up stuff.
The good news is defenders also have access to AI
and can play defense much faster than the past.
And so I was encouraged just looking a little bit more
into like Blockstream's research
on their, I think, new quantum, I guess,
resistant hash-based signature scheme.
It looks like those are getting a little bit
thinner. I think it's still, is it two orders of magnitude
bigger or one order of magnitude bigger? Well, there's
Shrinks and Shrimps, I believe.
I was thinking Shrinks. Shrinks was
from maybe one or two months ago. We briefly
talked about it on the show, I think. And then Shrimps was just
the new one.
They're actually...
Kind of a bad name, though.
Yeah.
They're
They're very similar, but different,
but complementary to each other.
So Shrinks is a something like
354-byte signature, I think.
The baseline here is a Schnorr signature
in between today is 64 bytes.
So it's about five times bigger.
Not bad.
If that's all you know, that sounds horrible,
but compared to the 100 or 1,000 times bigger signatures
that most other solutions have,
it's 5x is amazing.
It comes with a drawback, though,
and that you need, with that solution,
you need state, you add state.
You need off-chain data that you need to retain
in order to spend and use that signature,
which is not a showstopper, but it's a big drawback.
The new one that they just announced, Shrimps,
is around 2,500 bytes.
so it's about 40x over 64 or 8x worse than drinks.
It's stateless.
So I think the thinking by the authors is that
if you have a primary signing device
with a key that is never going to be removed,
like maybe in an HSM or even your phone or BitKey or whatever,
that could use this more optimized version.
And that's the happy path.
That's like where you'd normally spend.
And in the recovery scenario,
somehow that signing device fails
or you lose it or whatever.
And now you have to access your backup.
The backup in the recovery process
would have the larger signature version.
Seems like a great trade-off.
It's a good trade-off.
And the reason for that,
why not just use the smaller signature everywhere?
I think retaining that metadata
and extracting it
and transitioning it to another device
is like a failure mode and tricky.
So to avoid that, you could set it up this way.
But that's good because like in the 99% case,
you get the smaller signatures
and in the recovery disaster scenario,
you haven't lost your money,
but you are going to have to pay higher fees.
And for people trying to get an idea
of what's this difference in state,
would this be fair to sort of describe this
as analogous to like a lightning node?
Yeah, I mean, it has state.
so
if you want to keep
track of like
what your channels
where they're balanced
same with like
a multi-sig device
also has state
that you need to
state beyond
just the private key
yeah
the simplest form
of bitcoin
all you need
is this big number
that's it
but these
you know
these other
whether it be
lightning
or multi-sig
or
shrinks
all these
require additional
state
yeah
and that state
is
would
in this
if I understand right
in this scenario
So that state would be kept on the bit key
or kind of in a per-user basis.
It wouldn't be like a single state held somewhere,
kind of replicas of state.
It's not on the blockchain.
Not on the blockchain, but is there some other...
Well, it could be stored anywhere.
I mean, you as the user,
you as the private key holder,
it's your responsibility to have that state.
What the authors are,
my understanding of what they're saying is like,
it's error prone
to try to replicate that everywhere
and transfer it to other devices.
It probably gets produced and
stored in your primary
signing device, so you're never
touching it.
And then for recovery
modes, you use this other signature type.
The drawback is you can't just have
12 words and have access to
moving Bitcoin, right?
No.
With the combination of these two signatures,
you could.
because if your primary
sign device has this extra data,
if it somehow fails, disappears, whatever,
now you don't have that extra data,
but your recovery solutions
don't use that more optimized signature.
They use the shrimps version,
which is stateless.
So you don't need anything beyond your...
But that could still be converted
to stateless one to 12 words or 24 words?
Or would you still need
some additional file or something saved?
It's stateless.
but the 12 words is enough yeah the 12 words would be enough yeah yeah that's interesting
so i i think it's also worth uh well actually one idea potentially maybe a spiral idea one thing
that i would love to understand better is are there researchers in this field working on this
for bitcoin who are also seriously paying attention to what's happening at the front of your labs
i don't know with blockstream i mean i i would guess that they're using ai i mean i'm assuming
and they've got people like Andrew Polster
who are already pretty genius.
But I think it would be one thing,
one project I would like to see as a public good
is someone thinking about these issues for Bitcoin,
putting out research or whatever,
but who also has an actual sense
of what's happening at places like in propaganda.
I don't know the answer.
I'll ask.
I'm curious too.
If not, maybe we can find that.
In general, I think Bitcoin developers
have been historically a little behind
on following the latest AI trends,
but I've seen it with my own team at Spiral.
Huge shift since December
with the big step up in capabilities
of Opus 4.5 and 4.6.
It's been a complete 180.
And now LDK Project is heavily leveraging it.
So it's great to see.
And the way my team operates,
even though I'm the boss, I'm not the boss.
They don't really listen to me.
So this is definitely like they see the value.
they've shifted their thoughts on like,
this has gone from not helpful for something low level
like Lightning Development Kit
to being extremely promising.
In fact, in a few weeks,
I'll talk about something they're doing recently
using how they're using AI tools.
I love to hear that.
So we're also in, you know,
one of the Spiral devs is a core dev.
He has been using it as well.
Maybe in a few weeks,
I'll talk about how he's using it as well.
And we're trying to influence more core devs.
just to see the possibilities with this stuff.
And you guys should publish that too.
Like publish how they're doing it.
Well, that's what, I mean, Austin Krauss is helping.
So we'll have a couple of reports.
One is already underway and almost ready to go.
I'll have my agent review your reports.
We surveyed 50 spiral developers and grantees on their AI usage,
collected all that data, and created a report.
And the report has like four different archetypes,
like different types of users.
So I think Austin's done a really good job on that.
So I'm looking forward to publishing.
I think that's going to come out.
I love it.
Two weeks, maybe even next week.
Can we get a flavor of the archetypes?
Well, it ranges from sort of more like the non-developer type of person,
like a designer, PM, marketing person,
and how they are doing things that they could not do before.
It's literally zero to one.
If you ask, what percentage of performance increase
do you get from your productivity?
this is like infinity
because I couldn't do this before
now I can do it.
All the way down
to like a low level
protocol developer
who historically
has been like
this stuff is non
you know I'm working on
very
you know
security is of
utmost importance
every little detail
matters
dealing with money
dealing with trillion dollar
assets
and so that's
and then
some archetypes
in between
including
including like a builder like the stuff we talk about a lot in the show and like what you do David So yeah so that be a good report And then I expect a separate report too
in maybe three, four weeks from now.
So I want to cover a couple of these comments here
and I think it's worth maybe zooming out
on a broader discussion of what's happening in quantum.
So basically we have a couple different from Jesse
and from Level 99 Slack or Good Name.
Basically everyone's just saying like,
hey, quantum has aristed all kinds of cryptography.
Banks use cryptography.
everyone uses cryptography why are we so stressed on bitcoin it's an everyone problem i think it's
worth pausing and noting why it's a little different for bitcoin you already kind of did
i already did but also but but kind of expanding into what that like what is the worst case scenario
because i think a lot a lot of what we're seeing here is there's going to be either way like fud
within the investment community and like there already was like the jeffrey's dude let's hang
sell because of quantum whether he means it or not so i think that's one of the things to address
is like, what are we talking about?
Are we talking about practice?
Not again.
He doesn't get that right.
AI.
But not your kind of AI.
Allen Iverson.
That's why my initial group was called.
2017, the truth.
The truth.
I forgot his nickname.
The truth.
Let me first respond to Jesse's comment
because I actually love Jesse, but disagree.
Quantum computing is an everyone problem, not a Bitcoin problem.
I mean, yes.
But for reasons I already said on the show,
it's a much, much harder problem with Bitcoin.
You got to get consensus to upgrade.
And there's also Satoshi's coins.
What do you do with Satoshi's coins?
There's a philosophical problem.
Google doesn't have a philosophical problem.
So that's the second reason.
And the third reason is different is just that the Bitcoin blockchain
is just more cost-sensitive than others.
So there's at least three reasons that the problem for Bitcoin is much harder.
And I would actually say a fourth reason, this is what I would dig into.
It's an extension of your first reason.
So to be clear, we're talking about, as far as we understand today, the worst case situation
for Bitcoin is you get quantum computers that can potentially take an exposed pub key and
derive the private key and steal your coins.
Now, there's also questions, even if that happens, of like, how long does that take
to occur.
How many quantum computers are out there?
Who's the actor? If it's Google, they may not want to
hack stuff because they're Google. That's just not
what they're going to do. There's a lot of questions around that.
Let's just say, absolute worst case scenario,
there's a lot of quantum computers out there. There's unsaved
reactors. They can break your signatures
for exposed pub keys pretty fast.
There's also some debate about how many
exposed pub keys there are. Do you have an opinion
on that? Not really. There's like six and a half
million. That's pretty easily
debated.
Well, then never mind.
So it's six and a half million coins.
So let's say roughly a third of Bitcoin is in this situation.
So the good news is two-thirds is not.
When I think about the worst case...
Those are keys, though, not coin, right?
Those are addresses where Bitcoin is held,
but not necessarily corresponding to the amount.
Right, so you don't have...
And I think in this report, we have the number.
I forget it offhand, but I agree.
That's a really important point.
It's like...
Weighted by value.
Yeah, weighted by value.
One other really quick thing.
something like four of this,
four, four and a half of those six and a half million.
Probably be lost.
Well, no.
It's, there's also that.
Well, some multi-million number
is from exchanges that practice address reuse.
Maybe that's what I was thinking.
So that, and I was thinking it was four million,
maybe it was two million, I don't know.
But like a sizable number
could very quickly be addressed.
Like you just have a handful of companies that can stop doing address reuse and then boom.
Amazing.
And so that's where I think I was in the debate on like how many are in this decentralized cluster of uptips, a technical term.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, Satoshi is estimated to have 800,000 to a million coins.
So at least those.
Then there's some other P2PK coins.
So you guys can see.
There's some taproot coins.
There's some confidence interval stuff happening here.
But the general question, and I think why this gets trickier, and I actually haven't gone super deep on this.
maybe one of you guys has, but not only does Bitcoin have to reach decentralized consensus,
which we've seen as extreme challenge, but also let's say today somehow we waved a magic wand,
everyone agreed, you know what? It's time to upgrade. We've got the post-quantum signatures.
Let's go. Bitcoin also has a finite block space. So even if you wanted to move all of those keys
or all of those sitting Bitcoin into new addresses, my understanding is there's some debate. I haven't
look closely. I don't know if you have an opinion on this, but it's not, you can't just do it in one
block, right? This could potentially take... We address this in the report and it's a non-issue.
How long would it take? Well, again, it's a percentage of value. Like a day gets most of it.
Like it's very, very, very quick. I mean, to get all of it is maybe five or six months or something
like that, but like the lion's share of the value is very quick. Okay. So that's good.
And that report runs through the math so people can look at it. I mean, I heard, yeah, exactly.
I don't want to say it because I know there was some dude
who went on, I think, Press and Pish's show
and was talking about the Capriol dude.
It was just like, oh, this is going to take one to two years.
Maybe he means the long tail, but that...
One of the things we do on the show
is dispel some of the misunderstandings.
That's good, and that's why I think this report
will be super valuable. But regardless, even in that world,
so let's say we realize, oh shit,
it's a break glass scenario, we need to move ASAP.
Maybe you can move the lion's share of the coins quickly.
I think it's also worth noting,
probably it would tank price
some degree in the short term because people would freak out. There'd be a lot of uncertainty,
a lot of education would need to happen about what's at risk, what's not. But I think one thing
to maybe put everyone's mind at ease to some degree is, you know, Bitcoin is an anti-fragile
system. Even if the worst case scenario happens here, it could like totally tank the fiat price
for a while. That's certainly on the table. A lot of people wouldn't like that. It is what it is,
but it's not like it would kill Bitcoin, right? It's like in the same way that Mt. Gox
tanked the Bitcoin price. And that sucked if you were holding and needed to get liquidity in the
short term. But if you're, you know,
one sat is one sat, then one Bitcoin
is one Bitcoin, then like in the long run,
whatever, we'll figure it out. That's kind of my take.
We should also,
we're going to publish
this report and then we'll talk about
the report on the show too.
We shouldn't go
through the whole report without, you know, it'd be great
if the audience could read the report, engage
more on it, etc.
One question I had, seriously
I think it'd be cool to get some of those Google dudes like
involved with us in some way, shape, or form if you're already
home. He's great. One minor thing, I didn't know this. I know DK is our California expert,
so maybe he knows this. Did you guys know that Google's quantum research was in Santa Barbara?
Hartman lives there. That's what I figured. Did you know that?
I didn't know that. Yeah. So I went down this little rabbit hole and I was like,
why the hell is this coming out? I didn't know that, but I know Hartman lives there.
I know I was a California expert. You're always driving around on trips,
telling us, oh, you know, he's our mammoth expert. But it was interesting to me. I didn't
realize UCSB, University of California,
Santa Barbara is apparently like
the hub for quantum research.
Isn't that where Hal Fanny lives? And he did
like quantum stuff. I think he lived in
Santa Barbara. Interesting. And I think he
worked on, I think he had a professional
engagement in something
related to that. It would be, yeah. I had
no idea, but it's always interesting to see.
There's probably some military thing at some point.
You can see where all the little outputs were.
But I was shocked it wasn't like Berkeley or Stanford.
I was like, wow, interesting.
Cool. Alright. New topic?
Wait, before we finish this one, I think the Google stuff, I think Google is unlikely to be over-hyping or over-playing the hand.
But another thing that seems to draft off of this is we hear a lot of noise from a bunch of people who I think, you know, have, I think there's a particular company that people have been investing in that.
Project 11.
Have we learned anything new about
what they're saying about this
or anything from Project 11
about this Google news?
Or is it kind of just...
Oh, I mean, just like playing up the hype, right?
The more hysteria and concern,
warranted or not,
they stand to benefit
because they have a centralized solution to...
Right.
I mean, even...
I haven't seen Blockstream
pushing this hard, but they have Liquid
and Liquid could be used as a solution
too.
So for any of these companies
I mean, for anyone talking about this topic
you just need to understand their
motivation and incentives.
And that doesn't mean what they're saying is false or wrong.
You just need to understand
what their biases
might be.
We had the Project 11 duty.
he came to the event, though.
So, I mean, whatever.
It's still worth taking.
He was clapping back at Adam Back today
on Twitter, I saw,
and I didn't really.
I generally agree with Adam Back
as saying in general,
but including this topic.
Yeah.
Well, anyways,
I think it's good that there's people
from different voices.
They can argue it out,
but it's better for all of us
to have different perspectives.
Do you want to answer,
because the people got to know,
the audience got to know.
So to Matt,
what's up, Matt?
Welcome.
And Jesse.
they're asking about this shirt.
I want to give a shout out to my dad.
He always makes me the dopest shirts.
And yeah, I'm feeling in a good mood today,
feeling alive and awake again.
So I wanted to wear something fun.
This is Bebo.
Bebo, believe it or not,
I had an alarm clock of this as a child.
So you would touch the little...
That explains everything, right?
You have no idea how unorthodox my childhood was.
I'm from small town, Iowa.
So a little bit of overlap probably.
Well, not to mention my dad is on a different plane,
but he had me this as a child and I loved it.
And so you tap his little antenna coming out of his head.
When he wakes you up, he says,
Bebo, Bebo, and you tap it.
And anyways, I loved it as a kid.
And so now I have a shirt of it.
And I have to say, I was a little embarrassed.
I posted, apparently this was, I didn't know this,
but featured in some Asian cinema.
And as I always joked as a kid,
because my dad's into weird movies,
you know there's weird movies there's very weird movies and there's japanese movies and uh you know
i always thought the japanese are like just like the like their art school stuff is the craziest
shit you've ever seen in your entire life anyway so i wrongfully assumed that because it was so wild
and wacky this crazy show that it was uh japanese um i was quickly corrected on nostr because nostr
nostr is in fact the hive mind for some truth yeah well for for an orthodox uh dropouts uh
Um, Nostra is the place to go.
And I was quickly corrected within like five minutes that no, it is in fact Taiwanese.
So Taiwanese are also pretty wacky.
Okay.
There you go.
Um, Jesse says project 21 million, which makes me think of what one there blocked, blocked,
dropped the teaser today.
I saw that.
Did you see that?
The faucet stuff?
The faucet.
Okay.
Free Bitcoin.
That's what it, I mean, it's a teaser.
So I don't want to like spill the beans.
Was this dropped on April 1st or April 3rd?
I think it came out today.
I think it provided a date of April 6th.
So we'll all learn on April 6th.
But in that teaser, there was 1 billion
with the Bitcoin B symbol,
which got a few people riled up
because that's more than 21 million Bitcoin.
That's 10 BTC, right?
Implying, yeah.
Nice use of BTC.
Thank you.
That was kind of my reply as well.
But no changes to how many Bitcoin there are.
Good.
But apparently a billion sats for Bitcoin faucet.
That's pretty cool.
Yeah.
And I thought faucets kind of went out of common use a long time ago
because people would just...
Well, it's valuable now.
Yeah, it's valuable and people would just build faucets and grab them all.
So how do you...
Blocks just give away a lot of value.
It's making it rain.
But couldn't you just build bots that collect it?
Or is there some sort of proof of human involved?
Or could you do a partnership with WorldCoin?
No anal swabbing message again?
Self protocol.
Sorry to disappoint you.
Google partnered with a protocol.
I mean, I don't know if this is true.
I heard some rumors.
Block, I don't know, raised a little money trying to change the number of Bitcoin.
All of a sudden now, where are these billion BTC coming from?
I don't know.
It's just a rumor.
Anyway, it's a fun teaser.
Let's see what's in store.
You have no idea.
Well, I can't talk about it on the show.
He obviously has an idea to be sure.
I know.
I don't want to spoil it for the folks working on that.
I know.
Yeah.
But yeah, that's exciting, I think.
Well, Block had all kinds of announcements this week.
Oh.
Mini-AGI.
Okay, no.
Let's talk about Mini-AGI a minute, but while we're on Bitcoin, I have to ask,
okay, so what the hell is going on with this turning on Bitcoin by default?
So the way I thought that was going to work is,
oh, you just go pay to place.
They show you Unified QR code.
I can pay with Lightning.
And I was so excited.
And I went and had lunch with Danny, actually.
Some interesting thoughts there.
And, you know, they brought out the little square reader.
I have to say, by the way, the little square reader,
very nice form type.
Looks good.
The new one?
Yeah.
Yeah, we have one here at PB, too.
It's nice, right?
It's really nice.
But, like, the guy, we asked him about it,
and he got excited at our ramen shop.
He won.
He was like, oh, I want to figure it out.
and we spent like five minutes
trying to figure out how to turn this thing on
and we couldn't turn it on.
So like, what's the deal?
We talked about this a little bit on the show
a few weeks ago,
but I'll go into more detail.
Yeah.
But also just,
it's not as simple as just yes or no
or on or off
or auto-enabled or not auto-enabled.
So a few details.
So last,
you know, last November,
Square enabled Bitcoin payments.
But the seller had to go into a menu,
enable Bitcoin payments,
and through that exercise
I learned a lot more about Square
first of all there's different hardware
there's different products
there's also five different apps you can download from the app store
so just because it exists here
doesn't mean it exists here
and just because something launches today
doesn't mean that like four weeks from now
there might not be another thing that launches
so like if your buddy
or if the business you're at
has an app on their phone
maybe it's not enabled yet
No, it's the handheld reader.
Yeah, so maybe it'll be enabled later.
Also, it's very common with launches is rollout, right?
So maybe like a certain number of sellers have it enabled now and not all of them yet.
So all of that.
And then even there'll be some that there are some really old square hardware that can't upgrade the software.
So they'll never support it.
For most hardware, though, it can, in theory, support it.
But the seller has to upgrade at least the November release.
They don't have to upgrade now with this news,
but they have to upgrade the software from at least November on.
And Square does not do auto-updates.
Because sellers have to proactively update their software.
And a lot of small businesses, that's not something that's top of mind for them.
They're running their business, right?
so all of those
are more of a
it's going to take time
before you get to ubiquity
or close to ubiquity
but let's talk about
another challenge too
let's say it's auto enabled
well it's still the situation
let's say you're the seller
I'm the customer
I walk in your store
it's still the case
that I can't just like
pay in bitcoin
without talking to you about it
why not?
you know, thank you
I'll get into that
So first I'll describe the state of things.
So I have to tell you, hey, I want to pay in Bitcoin.
Or some Square devices have a customer-facing terminal.
I do believe they've improved from November
to where I, as a customer, can tap on the Bitcoin symbol.
So I don't have to talk to you.
I don't have to announce it or you don't have to understand it.
I, as a customer, tap on the Bitcoin symbol
and then pay in Bitcoin. Awesome.
So there's definitely major improvements with this release.
But for situations where I as a customer can't touch the Square software, you still have to have this conversation.
Another challenge is something like 1 in 10 Cash App customers have Bitcoin.
I don't know the specific stats, but there's 60 million active Cash App customers.
all of them have dollars.
A small number of them have Bitcoin.
All 60 million can now pay Square
over the Lightning Network.
Exactly.
And there's no fees for the merchant.
Exactly.
So while we all hope for the future
where people are paying in Bitcoin,
the near-term win for sellers
is cut out the fees.
Save the fees, right?
And they don't care how it's being achieved
whether someone's paying in Bitcoin or dollars.
They don't care.
They want to save the fees.
So the lion's share of the customers walking in your door that can save you fees are the cash up customers with dollars, right?
So another UX challenge here is that those customers, they don't own Bitcoin.
They might not know much about Bitcoin.
They certainly don't go into the store thinking, I'm going to tap on the Bitcoin symbol to pay in Bitcoin because they don't have any Bitcoin.
Right.
So that needs to be overcome as well.
actually we talked about that on the show
like Haley had the idea of like maybe
the messaging like the
seller needs to be educated on like
lightning network and then like
what so the message like
if you're the seller I'm the customer I walk in
and you could say hey I'll give you a discount
Steve if you pay with Cash App
yeah exactly
Cash App's a brand that I
and then I could be like I don't have Cash App
but if I have Cash App I know what it is then
and it's like okay great I can just pay with Cash App
and then whether it's dollars, bitcoin, whatever
I'm paying with Cash App. And you know what they should do
is at that point of sale, you should
also just have it super easy to do the referral.
Right? So the merchant
says, pay with Cash App.
I'm going to give you whatever this discount. Oh, by the way,
you know, whatever the referral bonus is,
collect $10 right now.
Sweet in the deal. Yeah, integrate it.
I totally agree with that as well.
Another,
so then getting back to your question,
why can't this just be,
why can't it be unified QR code? Why can't it just
be automatic? Because the default
Square Screen for most of the products
have a QR code, but it's the Cash App Pay
QR code, which has been
around for years. And that's if you
pay with Cash App, you can do that, and it actually
cuts out Visa. Visa is not used.
I used to do that.
Good for you.
For years, since I've seen Cash App Pay,
I was like, one day, this QR code will
also speak lightning. So I've been waiting.
Jesse asks, when's Square Sponsorship?
Oh, because we talk about block.
Well, hey, we talk about all kinds of products.
companies I work for
companies we invest in
but also companies
we don't invest in
and we're also not afraid
to like completely
rip apart companies
we invest in
and I'm also saying
right now like
I was told one thing
it's not working
I want to get to the bottom
so
anyway
oh okay
here's the
probably the thorniest
problem that is
not non-obvious
how do
the user flow
for tipping
yeah
and it turns out
Bitcoin and Lightning
don't
support the way people tip.
So like if you go to most point of sale terminals,
including Square, and you're paying in dollars,
you are told, oh, I owe 20 bucks or whatever.
Okay, great.
And then you tap to pay
or you somehow give your payment,
your credit card, debit card, whatever.
Then you're presented with,
would you like to add a tip?
And then you can do that.
And it handles that for you.
But with Bitcoin and Lightning,
if you're presenting an invoice,
it needs to be the total amount
unless you do two separate payments.
Yeah.
I've never considered that.
Why does it work that way?
So I'm a little disappointed that,
A, I did not consider this.
B, I've never seen the Bitcoin community consider this.
C, Spiral helped start the Bitcoin design community.
This is something that I think the design community
should have been on top of as well.
No one's thought about this.
No one has thought about this.
Well, sometimes you don't discover problems
until you actually try to do it.
So now we're trying to do it.
So because of that, it makes it difficult for Square to unify because the concern is that Square sellers wouldn't like changing the user flow on tipping.
So that needs, I haven't given it a lot of deep thought, but people need to be thinking about how to address that.
That's a real...
Maybe change user flows, maybe change customer behavior, seller behavior, maybe change Bitcoin Lightning protocol.
I don't know.
And it's a U.S. thing because like in Mexico, for example, when you, you know, you say you
want to pay with terminal, you don't pay with a credit card.
They come and they say like, okay, like, do you want to tip?
You say like whatever, 10, 20%, whatever it is, it's lower standards.
The U.S., by the way, it's kind of crazy.
We have a high tipping standards with like the worst service.
It's terrible.
But anyways, but then they do that first.
So in other countries, it's not an issue.
It seems like it's a U.S. cultural thing.
Yeah, I'm open to ideas there.
But Steve, on the hardware point you mentioned, so do you know, can you confirm that?
that only hardware that gives you the QR code
could even do this in the first place,
that the handheld terminals are definitely not turned on?
I don't know the answer to that.
Yeah, I don't know.
I do know that the rollout is only a portion of sellers.
And I think that cuts across products.
So it could be rolled out on that product,
but just not to every seller.
Well, and for what it's worth,
even this guy with the handheld thing,
he wanted to do it.
We couldn't find out to turn it off.
But if you recall a few weeks ago
when this was leaked and we talked about it,
I made the point that it's not a victory.
It's a very material, good step in the right direction,
including some of the UI improvements they've made.
But there's like 10 more things that need to be improved.
Yeah, we have ways to go.
Yeah.
But it's progress.
And like, you know, November and now we're March,
or I guess April now.
We should assign his homework.
one of us should be able to go and pay at a square merchant with Bitcoin
for a merchant that doesn't know what Bitcoin is next week.
I'm going to keep trying everywhere I go.
Paying in cash-up dollars also is a good exercise to do.
And that's all I do, by the way.
And also to me, and I think the UX needs to improve a little bit there
because when you go to pay, it says,
do you want to pay with Bitcoin or do you want to pay with dollars if you have Bitcoin?
But if someone has Bitcoin in cash-up, why would you ever use the Bitcoin?
Like the whole, like the way Square has set this up, like completely obviates like the
biggest issue that people always had with spending which is oh like maybe this is cap gains or oh I don want to spend my valuable asset I want to use the weak money Great So now you know in your point of lightning network all I do is use the weak money And that what I do every time And in fact I will say this just in general
the flows for interoperability are getting so much better. Like if you want to fund, like,
you know, I'd wanted to try to top me up an Albee wallet with cash app using dollars.
And it was just so smooth and so awesome. And it's like, I honestly think you should get to
the point where unless you bring your own bitcoin you shouldn't even like give people the option to
spend their bitcoin necessarily just be like throw away dollars over the lightning network that's it
all this reminds me what's the current state of the world with like apple pay can that be enabled
where you're paying with like a virtual card that resolves over lightning um i i don't i'm not i don't
have all the knowledge on this i i it's definitely not been available to third parties in general
I think Callie posted some breakthroughs
with one of the Cashew wallets and projects
but I couldn't tell you exactly what the details were
but I think you have to configure one of your
extra hot physical buttons on the phone to do something
and then you can get it or something. It's not perfect
but I do wonder
you just mentioned virtual cards
Cash App has 25 million debit cards
in existence.
Like the 25 million cards
that have been issued
or more.
I think it's the public number.
So like I have
Cash App card
as part of Apple Pay.
Like when I double click,
it brings up my Visa card
and my Cash App card, right?
And I can pay
with the Cash App card.
So you could,
I don't know what all is in,
I don't know if you need
to be a physical debit card issuer
to be able to do that
or if you're just
a Bitcoin wallet, if there's like a relatively low investment way to issue something on a
virtual card, that might be a great shortcut.
Because I think about how I use, whenever I see a square terminal, my default is just
to use it like I use everything else, which is just double tap the side of the Apple Pay.
And if that could be like presented as a card, but then the plumbing beneath the surface
actually does whatever I want it to do.
So that needs to be explored.
and if it can be done relatively easily and cheaply,
every Bitcoin wallet should do that.
If it's not, but I mean,
my understanding of the current state of the art though
is that, yeah, you have to open your app.
So if, you know, the seller, again,
for physical retail, like what's going to get me to
not only have Bitcoin on my phone and spend Bitcoin,
but even dollars on Lightning and Cash App
just to be aware of it and use it,
I have to be aware and I need to be incentivized
because otherwise I'm going to double click Apple Pay
and that's so easy.
It's so much easier than opening it.
I mean, it's marginally better,
but that margin matters when you're paying.
But if I'm offered like 5% off
or something material,
then okay, I'll open Cash App and pay that way.
So a couple ideas on this.
I'm wondering right now if the move is,
I mean, since they're already in this Cash App pay anyway,
and if we really just want to incentivize,
like instead of telling people anything,
even Bitcoin, Lightning,
like if you're like really in the weeds,
It's OG.
There's unified QR code.
You could bring your Albi or Breeze or Prime, like whatever, knock yourself out.
But for like most people, the 99%, you just say, pay with Cash App.
And like Cash App pages defaults to everything is Bitcoin Lightning, everything.
And like internally, I know it's like cheaper and better.
Like if you just have Cash App and Square just to use their own internal ledger, which they
already started with that.
But like if you're trying to like juice the network, just turn everything, like everything
is just a Lightning payment.
I think the main problem there is the tipping flow.
Got it.
Matt Coat is saying that in Canada,
he thinks it's the opposite.
You said some other countries too.
Yeah, Mexico.
One of those other countries.
Well, I forget which one you said.
Our brothers and sisters that are bordering the United States.
And I don't know globally.
The one that gave us the Gulf.
I don't know if it's like a U.S. only thing
or if it's split around the world.
Who knows?
But at least for Square and Cash App,
they're predominantly US.
And then you could also just run promotions.
You make it easy for the seller
to give promotions for using that.
That's some of the stuff Bob is exploring.
But then Cash App or Square
could also just be like,
all right, we're going to give away $10 million
over this whole year.
And it's just like, anyone that uses this,
and you could do it like a lottery style,
you can win $1,000 in Bitcoin and lottery.
Or every time you use it,
you get whatever, unlock the next level.
There's a lot of ways to use it.
I don't know if you guys have run into this.
I don't feel like it's frequently
something that merchants have enabled,
but I have at least a couple merchants
where I've just used the regular Apple Pay flow,
and then they somehow have added me
to their loyalty program.
Like, is that a default?
Is that through Cash App?
Oh, through Square.
Yeah, that's a Square thing.
Is it? Okay.
So that feels like...
I'm being honest, it feels...
I find it kind of annoying, but...
I've just seen it a few times,
but I could see that same thing
if it were able to be a little bit more,
you know, that 3% that you're saving
could be sort of incorporated
into the messaging of those kinds of loyalty programs
so the people that launch the loyalty program
and give more visibility to, like,
what enables the loyalty program.
Yeah.
What pays for the rewards.
All right.
So we don't frustrate Jesse.
We'll talk about not,
well, but we still have more block time,
but let's talk about a different topic.
What does Jesse want?
Oh, he just doesn't want to talk about it.
He wants more square.
He wants block to only sponsor the show
because we talk about block.
Here's a fun topic.
So OpenAI,
so a few months ago,
Coinbase bought a podcast, right?
I forget the name of that podcast
or what it even was,
but they bought a podcast.
And now OpenAI bought,
in a more substantial announcement,
bought, was it TBPN?
Yeah.
Which I did not know
started the same time
that we started this show.
I pointed it out
within the first two weeks.
I was like,
look at what they're doing.
I remember that.
I didn't know it was new, though.
I remember you pointing out,
I just thought,
like, Acquired has been around
for 10 years, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And I just learned of it
like the past six months.
Yeah.
My dear boomer friends.
I'm just trying to stay
atop of things.
Are we supposed to tell them
the latest thing?
I didn't know it was brand new.
Well, the latest?
What, they were being acquired?
That block is acquiring PBJ.
Well, we've got our valuation
points now.
Starting at $100 million.
Someone tweeted that
OpenAI paid $100 million
for this. And then I think,
and then someone I know and respect
nodded yes.
That's DK.
So, I don't know.
By the way,
whatever's DK,
is that rumor-based
or is it confirmed somewhere?
It's not.
I haven't confirmed it
through some private channel,
but I'm saying
that seems about right.
Okay, I agree.
Because they just raised
$122 billion or whatever.
Yeah.
And this is a,
I mean, the,
The theory I sent out, like, basically, there's just urgency for OpenAI to have a better outlet
because Anthropic is in our face every day.
Every day, there's some new cloud news that we're seeing, and we don't see that with OpenAI.
And Grok, Elon, controls the thing they all want to use to get information, too.
They don't have their own information outlet.
The one thing that really surprised me about this, and I'm curious how much they signed off on this,
my understanding is the tbpn show i kind of viewed that as like in a joke sort of as joke
sort of not like every venture fund has to have a podcast now right you're seeing you know people
buying podcasts and making them partners or whatever um actually that's a long tried and
true strategy in all of the industry but i kind of saw tbpn i thought that was like the founders
fund podcast basically because john coogan i think the guy that started it he was an entrepreneur
residence at founders fund trying a bunch of things and then launched this thing and i was
Okay, Founders Fund.
And then they always feature a lot of Founders Fund companies.
And so I just, I mean, I'm not saying anything like off the record ever.
I just assumed this was their thing.
Now, obviously, Founders Fund is a big backer of OpenAI,
but they're also a backer of Anthropic and a bunch of other stuff.
So I was a little surprised that if this was kind of like the strategic arm
of arguably the best venture capital firm in the world,
that they would let them go internal on a company.
I don't think it's, I think you're painting the picture a little bit more.
Black and white.
I think this is like networks of people.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think everybody understands that being able to communicate messages is high value.
If you rewind the clock 20 or 30 years to like pre-social media environment, the very best startups.
I wasn't alive then.
The very best startups would launch to some friends and family.
And, you know, they'd sort of word of mouth would drive everything.
Right.
And sort of we went through this phase where it became much more popular.
You'd see people trying to buy newspapers because you need to sort of get your message out.
You see Elon buying Twitter.
He wants to be able to control the message.
Bezos bought Washington Post.
Bezos had the Washington Post.
Murdoch.
So it's like owning a media channel.
Elon buys Twitter.
Yeah, it's kind of like the old media.
It is kind of old media versus new media.
And I think, in a sense,
like OpenAI doesn't really have a specific mouthpiece
that they control their own.
The other thing is,
a lot of the advertisers on TBPN
are OpenAI's competitors.
so they get to kneecap their competitors ability to buy their way into visibility one question i
have on the tbbn thing is like i mean i i've obviously seen clips from it but like so for
those who you don't know i bet a lot of our viewership i think we're in a very sort of
san francisco bubble yeah they may even know what tbbn is it's like espn but for for tech
and it's kind of got this like basically one thing i've realized is in tech you've got the people
that really love the technology they're just there tinkering all day and then you've got the people
that if they had been you know six five and athletic would have played basketball but it
didn't work out that way.
And so it is what it is.
And so this is like for those guys
because they're always breaking news.
This guy signed with them
and this is the signing bonus.
It's just, it's good.
It's kind of cheesy,
but it's literally like, you know,
they're playing their-
It's meant to feel like ESPN.
Yeah, it's meant to fulfill
these bros ESPN fantasy.
But like, I, wouldn't they're,
I mean, I get it that they probably have very-
Don't we try to be like ESPN
when we talk about basketball?
Steve is ready to join TVP.
It's been real, PBK.
But, I mean, my understanding is, I mean, I know most of the tech community, the people with capital, like, valuated viewership, I'm sure, is very high.
But, like, I think, weren't there viewer numbers that was, like, shockingly low?
It doesn't matter.
It's which viewers.
You want to be Mr. Beast and have 30 million or whatever, but they're kind of, like, ready to buy chocolate from you, but not much else?
I understand.
So, valuated, capital-weighted is probably extreme.
But, like, I don't know.
Just still.
These are the voices you want to influence.
Yeah.
the people listening to tppn yeah but how many subscribers on youtube did i say i i messaged it
out but um we we now have 3 600 we got a boost of i think 800 uh eight or 900 because of haley's
michael saylor interview so thank you haley i thought it came she's delivering all the value
to smash all the eyeballs to pbj hit subscribe right now the presidia bitcoin channel is i think
3,600. I forget the multiple compared
to TBPN. It was maybe
30 or 40
or 80x.
Even if it's 100x
and a million dollar
value.
He wants to join OpenAI.
100 million dollars OpenAI?
We're not for sale.
I agree.
Independence.
Worth it all.
No one has been more
anti-ads than me.
I freaking hate advertising.
I think it's just the absolute worst.
I'd rather just do value for value
and take one-tenth.
I think also all of these commercial platforms
can use money and influence
to create a voice for their platform,
but just like Bitcoin and Lightning
and other open-source technologies,
there isn't really an aggregation
of neutral voices for that.
So I think in a sense,
we can represent that neutrality,
but you can't go chasing
a hundred million dollar payday.
You have to be okay
just trying to look for truth
and neutrality.
Just being some dudes
on a podcast.
Yeah.
But I'm fine with the trade-off.
I'm fine with the trade-off.
It's fun.
That means I get to wear
fun shirts like this.
So, swag, swag.
Should we talk about
Gemma 4 being open-sourced?
I don't know a lot of details.
I haven't played with it.
Have you?
I haven't played with it.
I talked to one person
to play with it
and they said it's sick.
That's it.
but I guess
go ahead
maybe this can kind of talk a little bit about
open source AI in general
go into some of the Nostra stuff
some of the marketplace stuff
so we had an entrepreneur in the
office yesterday
Christopher David has been working on his open agent stuff
I will say as just like a
sort of meta point
it always feels to me
there's moments when ideas, time has come
and it feels like we're finally
getting to the point where the time has come for open networks to train and serve AI, which
is really exciting to me.
He was way ahead of his time a couple of years ago with OpenAgents.
He first launched a marketplace.
You could plug in GPUs, get paid out in sats.
There wasn't a lot you could do with it on the other end.
But now he's starting to see a little bit of traction again with his new idea.
Someone released, I saw on Stacker News, I think I shared this with you guys in the last
week or so, something called OWLs, which is a similar thing.
plug-in GPUs, gaming computers,
former Ethereum miners, whatever,
get paid out in sats.
And then obviously the stuff
that Jack released yesterday for Block,
I'm sure we'll talk a lot more about that.
I was also very excited to see
that one of these was a hive mind protocol for Noster.
So very, you know,
pointing in the same direction, obviously.
But I think-
Oh, Sprout.
Yeah, yeah.
But anyway, so I think there's a lot of cool stuff
with open protocols and decentralized AI.
Specifically on this though,
one thing I discussed with Christopher,
who's been playing with some of these models,
or he plays with these models all day, every day,
is I do think there is a major opportunity
for a rallying cry of we need a deep seek in America.
We need a deep seek moment for America.
We have not seen good open source models.
Llama was starting to do that
and then just kind of like shat the bed.
Meanwhile, Chinese models have just surged ahead
and there's even some question lately.
They've been starting to close source
more of their stuff too.
and not to mention we don't, as we've talked about,
have verifiability for these models.
So who knows, in the same way that I thought America
would have learned his lesson of like,
maybe you don't want to be entirely dependent
on Chinese supply chain for everything you make.
Maybe you don't want to be entirely dependent on China
for the open source models.
Didn't we see one?
Why don't you share something in the chat?
Well, NVIDIA.
Yeah, NVIDIA. You talked about that.
So both the $26 billion investment claim.
What does that mean though?
Did you learn anything more about that?
Open.
Yeah, but...
No, but I mean, they already have an open model.
They're going to train an open model that's supposed to have front-end.
So I don't know how good it is, but it definitely should be on the radar of being America's open source, open model.
An open data set idea.
Also, I was told by someone from NVIDIA
that they go beyond the Chinese models
and all the other models
and that they also disclose the inputs to the model.
That's what I'm talking about.
It's still...
I still have it queued up to go verify that
and understand the details of that.
I think it's Trust Me Bro.
Yeah.
It's Trust Me Bro or should they somehow verify?
But even if it's Trust Me Bro,
that's better than everyone else.
It's a step in the right direction.
So we definitely need to pay attention.
and then
Gemma 4
which apparently does really good on benchmarks
it's four different models for different
form factors including phones
and so
that's exciting and then it makes
it more credible and possible
for these peer-to-peer networks
which yep
announced with Mesh LLM
which McNeil has been
working on and it's great to see that
announced in
like an early form of it.
We should get him to come here. Is he local?
There's a good chance
I'm going to get him here.
He's in Australia, but...
Heard it here first.
Two weeks.
And do you want to give a little overview
of Mesh LLM?
Yeah, so peer-to-peer network.
I mean, what Max already said,
a peer-to-peer network of GPUs,
so if I have a compute job that
I don't have enough compute for,
I can farm it out on this peer-to-peer network.
I don't believe
the initial release works,
but it doesn't have any kind of payment mechanism,
so it's more of a community.
I'm giving away my GPU for you guys to use
or anyone else around the world.
There's no proof mechanism
that I'm proving that I'm running the model
you're expecting,
which definitely seems reasonable
if you're not paying for it.
But you can imagine the evolution of this roadmap
would be like,
well actually I want to earn some money
by plugging this in and letting other people use it
and then the customer will want some proof
that I'm actually doing the computation
and I'm actually running the model they expect
so those are two complexities that need to be added
What would be amazing, I'm just thinking out loud
especially if we start to get some of those guys
and working with and we're kind of building a little core here
people, Jesse and Eric and Tony and all these guys
that are kind of in and around these ideas
with the mesh network, it is just, trust me, bro, is my understanding of like, we're going to,
whatever, either split over different experts in the mixture of expert models or different layers
in more traditional models. The big question that I have on my mind, and Christian Catalini's been
writing a little bit about this from LightSpark. It looks like he's working on something in this
area is this verifiability yeah well all right excellent yeah um is uh this question of verifiability
it would be super cool um one to fund people from spiral like to really like open source what's the
latest with the verifiability research how do you solve that that problem um but two maybe we could
do like a mini event here getting those guys together with like some of the guys that came
to founders you should know who are actually working at the very frontier of verifiability
and compute, like mix some of those two minds.
Because to me, that idea will be cool and a toy
and it's currency.
And that's awesome.
Everything starts as a toy.
I can't wait to try and can't wait to use it.
But to go mainstream, I feel like you need
like the best of the best of figuring out that verifiable.
I have good news and bad news for you, Max.
I may be bringing a bunch of people here,
but it's during your vacation.
Are you serious?
It's not a vacation.
Cancel the vacation.
When is it?
It's not a vacation.
But Undelie's going to be like,
that bastard, he ruined my vacation.
It was super not a vacation,
but if it's important enough, maybe.
And then there's the AI hackathon
that Spiral's going to launch as well.
Also during when I'm out there.
I'm supposed to be offline for 10 days, but.
Yeah.
Okay, well, we should talk more about this.
Yeah, I'll tell you more later.
Yeah.
But.
Damn.
So I have a question for you.
Get through the movement.
Both of you guys,
because you're an investor in open agents, right?
Which I guess means we all are.
Or was the Hivemind fund that were LPs?
Yeah.
Because all the new exciting stuff you invest in
were not LPs in that fund, right?
You should join Fund 2.
Yeah, I can only blame myself.
I can only blame myself.
Well, Fund 2 is already closed, but I mean, I...
Sorry, this is not a SEC solicitation.
No talking SEC regulation, yeah, but like...
Non-solicitation.
All I hear is Fund 3 is going to be fire.
So let's say that Mesh LLM becomes very successful
And it's like an open source project.
There's no company behind it.
There's no business model other than each peer can make money by charging for their GPU.
Is that compatible with a vision from the open agents of the world in any commercial peer-to-peer network?
Yeah, totally.
I mean, I think there's a lot of different ways this could go.
I don't know exactly how it's going to go.
I mean, you could have a proprietary marketplace.
I don't think that's the right move.
I don't think that's what open agents wants either.
I think they want to build a, let's say, view and an interface around an open protocol.
And so I think we all want to open.
I want to open.
My kind of like take on this, a good way of thinking about this question is it would be
a little bit like saying, okay, you can use Bitcoin as an open protocol to like store your
wealth and send payments.
Do you really need block anymore?
and it's like well if you're like you know if you're the dude that's on his computer 24 7 and
can use the command line like probably not like you know unless he wants to interact with the
normal world but he's probably not doing that either um so he's good just bitcoin cli he's
ready to rock and roll uh for literally almost every other person on the planet yes and like i
think you're going to see there's always going to be opportunities to take open protocols and build
value-add services around them. What's open becomes a commoditized compliment. That becomes
commodity. But then there's always special things around it. One very obvious example. Say you're
using one of these marketplaces in the same way that Square does this, and you have a front row,
so you just make it easier for people to use this is one thing. It's like, okay, instead of having
to do the command line, just click a button or talk to your agent. It's just really, really simple.
But then maybe you don't make money on the marketplace itself. Maybe you do, maybe you don't.
but then you make money on adjacent services. So the most obvious to me is banking, right? So let's
say, you know, you've got a fleet of AIs and they're all going to go out there. And I've talked
a little bit about this board. It's something I really want to invest in. If you're listening to
this, maybe you're working on one of these protocols already and you have this idea.
This is one thing I want to invest in. How do you bank these ideas? So in the same way that
Cash App generates a, you know, well, Square lenders or whatever generates a credit score
that's better than FICO for the lender because they have access to all their data, right? So
They can say, oh, you know, small business.
We know it's Christmas time.
We know you're going to be in a crunch.
Here's your extended loan and a better interest rate.
We have better data.
Then they're going to do that for Cash App,
better FICO score, amazing.
Who's going to do that for agents?
So for agents, like I've got this giant fleet of agents
that you need to use this open network,
but because I have all this data from my interface,
I'm going to make you a loan, Mr. Agent.
I'm going to underwrite you better than anyone else
because I have proprietary data
and the other scarce resource, which is capital.
And the other potential scarce resource,
which is I kissed the ring
and the government will let me do this.
So the short answer is, I want it to be open protocol, permissionless, open to everyone,
and there will still be opportunities to build massive companies.
Yeah, I agree with you.
In which case, the open agents of the world should, well, to the degree that Mesh LLM
becomes successful or some other network, then they should, it's in their interest.
I mean, it's in their interest for a network to take off.
the probability
of one taking off
is greater I think
with an open
permissionless network and they can profit the way you just talked about I think one of the biggest constraints to this idea of working is really how do you generate the demand
Like,
how do you go find the demand?
Yeah.
So,
like,
if,
I haven't talked to
Christopher in a while,
but,
if I were sort of
talking through with him,
I'd want to understand
who do you expect
are the first 10
or 100 users
or maybe already has them.
Right.
But,
is,
can you go out
to an enterprise
that values
you know, maybe async,
maybe it doesn't have to be a real-time inference,
but values some sort of async inference,
but needs it really, really cheap.
Maybe it doesn't have to be interactive,
but it needs to come back in 10 or 20 minutes.
That might actually be a new set of trade-offs
that's kind of underserved at the price point,
but I think it takes a little bit of like shoe leather
to go find those.
Maybe it's research, maybe it's commercial,
maybe it's enterprise.
Do you have like any first ideas that jump to mind?
Or if you were trying to answer that question,
where would you start?
I would guess like the large,
all the big companies you've heard of,
you know, OpenAI, Anthropic,
like they're just flush with cash.
They don't really,
probably not going to be super like
responsive to that,
but maybe there's-
Unless you have a podcast.
Maybe there's, you know,
maybe there's like a university research group
that has applied for funding grants,
but is not flush with cash
the way commercial stuff is.
Yeah.
Maybe they'd be,
they want to do more,
but they just don't want to do it
at the price points required.
Yeah.
But if you can change that by 10x or 100x,
maybe that's a good place to go hunting.
It's a good idea, actually.
Or commercial, you know, think about commercial entities.
I haven't really done the list,
but actually I would brainstorm this with
Gemini, Gemma, whatever, your favorite.
But like what are the list of potential
like prospective customers,
who would value the things that this network
uniquely does that like traditional ones do not?
I think about service series Val, Val AI.
I've used it via an API.
It's a really nice place
if you want to try out a bunch of models.
You want to see what all the,
some new open source Chinese model is,
but you don't want to set it up,
install it, whatever.
Get malware.
You can just use it on FAL.
And they've got a little playground.
You can use it.
You can use it with an API token.
You pay them a few cents per API request.
So you're paying for something
that's otherwise free,
but they manage all the inference
and they manage the models
and they kind of become a great place
to just be able to get your experience
experience with these models. And if you like one, you could use it there and you can do it at scale
there if you want, but you don't necessarily, you get to explore a lot and it's a huge business.
Yeah. My buddy John gave me an interesting use case as well. I was like, imagine you're like
a clothes business. I've been introduced lately, both the lady that used to live in my apartment
before me just gets like an onslaught of clothes catalogs. Like it's literally a DDoS town in my
mailbox and I can't stop. It's absolutely horrible. And in some recent discussions with Anjali,
I've realized, like, I did not understand, I think, what percentage of GDP is just like
shopping.
Like, just like a lot of people.
What percent is not shopping?
Well, let's put it this way, like, clothes and shoes.
And I was just like, and man, the price tag.
Are you?
But anyways, I got swag, one of a kind, baby.
end of one
anyways
it's just
it blows my mind
but
yeah anyway
Steve
Steve and I
were just talking
yesterday
he just did a big
clothes refresh
yes
I mentioned October
this is October
okay
yeah
so you're part of the
you're part of the problem
yeah I'm part of the problem
I paid up for this
but yeah
as DK knows
every decade
I go clothes shopping
okay
well what's a decade
I said it's time to go
and then it just goes on
and it was time to go
yeah
because I literally
was looking at
some of the clothes
I'm wearing
and they're like
10, 15, 20 years old
but it's like boiling the frog
you don't really notice the degradation
and the quality of the clothes until you buy new clothes
and it's like oh wow
I was missing out
this is why it's always tough for me to understand
certain normie behaviors
I can't fathom
other people actually go clothes shopping
more frequently than every decade
and enjoy it
it's like a casual
you just browse things
I can see you do a lot of that too
well that's the funny thing
Everybody's always laughing.
Like the stuff that I'm doing.
You actually do do that?
No, no.
It's like my, this is like free at a conference.
This is like, I think my wife or mother-in-law or somebody.
Like everything I have is just like showed up somehow.
She shows up.
It was all like a gift or leftovers.
Elves.
She found it at the park.
It was left behind by someone.
Goodwill.
Anyways, but that's, that's a joke.
But okay.
So imagine one of these clothes companies.
Like, I don't know, Ralph Lauren.
and you know there's like probably like an infinite number of experiments they could run that could
make the money but there's like certain like okay if you're going to a company you're like use ai
like everyone's like i'm gonna use ai because it's the hot thing if you can say i'm gonna cut jobs
and save money for better or for worse that's gonna sell immediately people are like great
that's free money i get it if you're like we have a new uh a new friday yeah maybe we should close
that. But if you
believe that this is
all real, guys.
Not blue screen, not AI.
Proof that we keep this thing, you know, we keep
this thing 100. Like, there's no $100 million
investment happening here.
Can't afford an air conditioner.
It is fucking hot, given that
I was not feeling well last week.
This is a family
friendly show.
No, it's not. This guy's...
What did I say? I think our YouTube channel
has... You've actually done a really good job not
dropping the f-bomb no he's not yeah but you just dropped it earlier in the episode wow oh really
yeah we'll search this is yeah okay number two number two this show dk is the inappropriate one
on this episode shit he's gonna whip out me next like what is this about anyhow um so but but you
can imagine any of these like stores you could be like listen guys um this will make you get
guaranteed money you'll pay up for you'll play the cloud price to just like save 50 okay cool
you could also be like, hey, what if we created for every single customer a personalized lookbook?
And it's just like maybe like a photo of Steve is like aspirational. It's like, you too could
look like this. And then we customize them and like run lots of A-B testing with many different
outfits, right? And get people excited and they, you know, they want to spend their money, et cetera,
et cetera. You know, that may work. It may not work. It's probably going to work a little bit.
Maybe it moves revenue 2%, right?
2% is good, but you're not going to pay
like anthropic models.
So maybe there's a market for these kind of
just like long-term experiments.
Hot or not, but for shopping or something?
I wonder if there's actually more reality to this
than you are even laughing quite a bit.
Do you even know what Hot or Not is?
Yeah, it's on Facebook started.
Sort of.
Right?
It was part of the inside.
A guy we know started it.
Hot or not.com.
Oh, yeah.
It's not what...
This is actually a product,
hot or not.
Got it.
Okay.
It actually was post-Facebook, right?
Yeah.
Well, it was pre-Facebook.
Really?
When did James do it?
I want to say 2001 or something.
Wow.
And Facebook was 2004.
I want to say it was a few years.
It was basically the advent,
when digital cameras started really becoming popular.
It's like upload a photo
and you rank it one through 10.
Yeah, I'm sure there was no spam on that side.
did he raise venture capital for this?
No, no
he just generated a lot of cash
for a bunch of years
with as?
oh yeah
you could like sign up
and have a subscription
if you want to see
how people rate you
or something
I don't remember all the mechanics
you know he went to high school
with Mark and Mike
oh I didn't know that
yeah
but he spun
and
with his ski sisters
oh
he spun a bunch of
they all went to Palo Alto High
a bunch of cool stuff
out of that
like the Hot or Not thing
was kind of an incubator
for a while
and he
I think actually, was it maybe Steve Chen worked out of the incubator
and did like a pre-YouTube video thing out of there.
He also did a bunch of like kind of cool internet things,
none of which caught on, but were kind of like in the vibe
of what was about to happen, you know?
We should start a new PBJ offshoot show, like the History Channel.
Yeah, I love it.
Oh, I love it.
the history of startups and technology.
My elders educate me.
What came before?
They educate me on the techniques of the Holonet.
Idea, actually, Vibe good.
Maybe we do this.
Bot or not?
Has someone done this yet?
And he's like, hot or not?
But then you have to decide, is it real or is it a bot?
Yeah, there you go.
Good brand.
I like the brand name.
Bot or not?
Brand is good.
Okay, but you were saying this thing has legs.
Or as they would say in the South, that dog will hunt.
Which one?
The idea of like the clothes people.
Oh, yeah.
So I was going to say, did you see this news,
I think it just came out yesterday,
about this guy who basically did like a GLP-1 lead gen service with AI?
No.
But that's extremely related to what I'm saying, actually.
Interesting.
Well, I think the story, and I've seen the headlines,
I haven't read in depth,
But I think, you know, there was this bet that I think Sam Altman had made with some group of friends.
It was like, you know, that, you know, we're within a year or two, we're going to have the first single creator billion dollar company.
Oh, yeah. I agree with that 100%.
Well, this is the first kind of evidence that we have.
He made a billion dollars in GLP lead?
I think he basically had like Claude and whatever build a bunch of like landing pages and creative copy.
He didn't buy good stuff, but he used AI tools to build.
I don't want to actually say this one.
Normally, I give away all my ideas, but actually, it just struck me.
I know exactly what I can go home and buy good this weekend
that will also just print.
It's a t-shirt shop, isn't it?
No.
Much better.
But I think he got it to...
I've never seen Max taking notes.
This must be big.
This is very big.
But I think it got to...
Did I see $418 million in revenue in the first year?
Or year two.
And it's only 18 months old, and then he hired his brother.
So technically, it's not a single-person company.
I mean, the TLDR is just like, find a high-value ticket item,
a high-ticket item, do lead gen.
And if you're running a whole bunch of experiments,
maybe you don't want to list your classes.
You can experiment faster than traditional marketers.
And I forget, what are you selling?
GLP-1s.
I think it's like a GLP-1 lead gen to the actual,
whatever the physician or clinic.
It's like telehealth.
You acquire the lead, and then there's somebody else
who actually services it.
So it's not like he's solving,
health. He's doing lead gen for
other companies that are solving health.
Obviously, that's... Oh, does that explain
why I saw the
Viagra Legion on your website?
On your computer earlier? Is that
what you were doing?
Just some research, you know.
Sorry, that was using Claude.
BTC Moon guys
says, great show, guys. Thanks.
So, we appreciate the comment.
Thank you. I thought he was saying
you've overstayed your welcome.
Thank you.
This guy comes all the time.
I always appreciate your comment, BTC Moon guy,
that we're jamming.
Yes, we are, in fact, jamming right here.
We're always jamming.
Yeah.
And Matt, Ote, and Vinny.
Jesse, Vinny.
We got some diehards.
Much love to all you guys.
People want to hear about the Bitcoin Core privacy win,
which I'm eager to share.
How many minutes we got?
We contain him.
Yeah, I don't know.
We got to contain him.
We got to keep the ethos.
Guys, if you subscribe,
If you subscribe to the Bitcoin channel, there's an additional show afterwards.
It's from a spiral grantee as well.
So there's that.
Or we can talk about more block stuff, which is like AGI.
Companies are going to become mini AGI.
I think that's pretty interesting.
I think that's a topic.
Hierarchy to intelligence.
Let's talk about it.
Do you want to give the setup for it?
Nope.
Why don't you set us up?
Okay.
I read the piece.
It was a piece written, I think it was actually written by Jack Dorsey and Roloff Botta, who's the venture investor from Sequoia who invested in the first round of Square.
And it's still on the board.
Yeah.
So I thought even that detail alone kind of struck me because it's like, it's not just showing where Block is moving, but it actually is maybe a little bit of a broader industry commentary was kind of what I took that double byline to mean.
and you know i i think it's worth reading because it kind of goes through the um you know kind of
the history of organizations and how almost like i don't know if they mentioned like the joint
stock corporation but they sort of talk about how hierarchies help information flow and look at it
like a war military context and corporation context and how like so much of the reason that
we have hierarchies for organizations is just really around the friction and information flow
And so this is an idea that instead of, you know, instead of people being kind of these hubs of information flow, you can actually structure an organization so that the information flow happens among the agents and the people are sort of sitting outside in service to guide and direct the agents.
but the organization itself is kind of a collection of agents.
And it's not really about take a certain person's role
and replace it with agents,
but it's take all of the information flow
and get that all working kind of at the center of the thing.
And all the people are at the kind of periphery,
kind of the frontier, guiding, directing, orchestrating agents.
But that's kind of the future of, I think, Block,
they call it, I think, like a mini AGI.
And I think when, I think you shared it,
And I was like, to me, this screams yes.
This is like, this is the future of all white collar work.
It's not unemployment for everybody.
It's like orchestration of agents.
But if you're a coder, it's obvious to you that you should be doing this.
But maybe if you're a marketer, you know, you're not thinking about the world this way.
You're thinking about like the activities you've done in the past.
You know, write a blog post, you know, contact a business development partner, whatever.
Those kinds of things can be enabled, empowered, and scaled much better if you understand how to do these agents.
I've actually, yeah, go ahead.
Well, and also just reducing friction on information flow, right?
I mean, whatever role you're in at a company, you often, like if you're in marketing or business development,
you might have questions that you historically ask the engineers or a PM,
and you can't really effectively do your job until you have that knowledge.
and then you try to
in a large corporation
you suffer the problems
of like okay
we'll schedule a meeting
and you try to schedule a meeting
holy shit
is it hard
to schedule a meeting
at a large company
because
the
large company
you have more people
the more people involved
the probability
on any given day or week
that someone's out
or they already have
a ton of meetings
and
crazy friction
right so at a startup
like the three of us
are starting a company
we can just meet right now
it's like
if I have a problem
I'm going to go grab you guys and be like, let's solve this now.
But at a bigger company, it's like, it's three weeks until I can find a 25-minute slot on everyone's calendar.
Well, what if I have this intelligence where the information I previously needed to ask PMs or engineers to get,
I can just ask the intelligence, ask the AI, and get like 90% of the time, get the right answer.
or at least get 90% of the way there
so that I ask the engineer over a text message
a much smarter, more pointed question
which can be answered asynchronously.
And so getting back, you know,
Block did this layoff not too long ago
and then there was this drama around,
is it really about AI or is it just BS
because they were bloated or whatever?
But again, you know, this hierarchy to intelligence
that's not just a PR move.
It's happening within Block.
Like Block is using BuilderBot.
And BuilderBot is this intelligence
that Block is building a world model,
which gives you all this intelligence
at your fingertips.
It's integrated into Slack.
Like you can literally ask
basically any question, get the answer.
You can create PRs,
much like we're doing with OriBot,
you can do within this 6,000 person company.
So it's very powerful.
What's an example of like,
if you've seen one yet, maybe you haven't,
but like where this world model would slash me
or like speed things up?
Well, I mean, just my own,
I mean, I don't work on block products.
So I don't really,
I'm not really immersed in this world,
but just to play with it,
I asked like for data around like,
you know, cash app,
like how many cash app customers,
got it,
a non-zero balance in Bitcoin.
Right.
And I got, I got an answer
and it also showed me like the SQL query that,
you know, so, so if,
if I wanted to like vet it
And it also even recommended, here's the three people at the company you could go verify this with.
It was like super slick.
This is kind of a crazy idea, too, because like the information in an organization is often like has kind of intentional silos for certain aspects of the information.
And how do you sort of rebuild an AI with the right permissions that can make the information flow?
I did test it to see if I could reveal stuff that shouldn't be revealed or like should there be access control.
and I get social security numbers.
I didn't have that.
I'm afraid to ask that question,
but, you know,
just about like my own,
my own cash tags balance or whatever.
And it wouldn't tell me that.
So, I mean, like there's,
there's still guardrails in place,
but I just found like that,
that query,
it's the kind of thing where historically I,
I would have to find out who is the right person
or what's the right dashboard or whatever.
And it's just such a burden here.
I just ask a question,
get an answer.
And if I only need this,
you know and I didn't really need the answer so I didn't need to go vet it but if I if I'm like
gonna use this in a public report or something and you really want to make sure it's accurate
then it's just made it much easier to then verify either myself because I didn't look at the SQL
query or ask so and so which it told me to yeah I love all this and that's a good concrete example
but I think I mean in a lot of ways this is just saying like middle management no longer necessary
it's like you're either a builder
everyone's a builder
which is what the
block is structuring around three different
roles and
there's the individual contributor
and then there's DRI
directly responsible individual
and then player coach and so player coach
is the one that's still manager
like but
player is in the title
like you're expected to contribute
build and not like
in your 10% time but
like a substantial amount of your time.
Seems like a win-win to me.
It's crazy, too, to think about, you know,
Block is a, how many people were there, 6,000 now?
So it's a huge team to try to retool mid-flight, right?
You've got the airplane already off the runway
and you're traveling across the ocean
and you're like, let's rebuild the airplane before we crash.
I think it's the right move,
but it's also hard to imagine how larger companies
and less tech-forward companies
are ever going to make this transition.
Yeah, well, again, I mean, credit to Jack for doing this.
I mean, like, there's been periods of history
where people maybe criticize him
because he doesn't make decisions or whatever,
but I think, like, the past two to three years,
he's been making many decisions for Block,
and this is, like, a huge one.
My opinion, yeah, I mean, there's some risk with it,
But I think the risk of not doing this far exceeds the risk of taking this decision.
So it seems like a very strong decision.
Imagine what the blueprint of a new company being started today will look like.
It will grow like this organically from day one.
And everybody will be the IC, the DRI, or the player coach.
That'll just be natural.
You just won't think to do something else.
I also think it will help with recruiting.
So I'm currently trying to recruit a superstar engineer to join Block to work on important stuff.
And I think the pitch now, I called it super builder when I was, and he's like, oh, what's that?
And I'm like, oh, I just made it up.
But it sounds weird.
But I mean, I made up the term, but I think it's what's now possible at Block, which is, yes, you're an IC.
But that doesn't mean you're just told to stay in your corner
and work on your little pixel of the product or whatever.
Oh, I see.
It's like, no, you are empowered to do big things
and really not have a bunch of stuff get in your way.
Basically, the best engineers don't want to be micromanaged or slow down.
And obviously, if you're launching a new financial product in CashEverSquare,
there's still got to be some checks and balances
with legal and compliance and stuff like that.
but if you can eliminate 90% of the friction
and really empower strong builders,
super builders,
I think that can be a really effective recruiting tool
to attract great talent.
For sure.
I mean, one way I think about it to me
it just feels like a new database in that sense.
Like you're literally just saying
we have like a new database,
it's a new way of accessing it
and now people can like run experiments and do stuff.
And also it makes me think
I know there's like another thread
that's a little bit tangential
but like the whole like Elon Doge thing
with the government.
Like, imagine if you have, like,
just a little bot
doing all that
for all the government records, too.
Like, that could be...
I mean, that's what I've said.
As much as you may...
Pretty sweet.
You may have, like,
a tribe here or there
in government
and you have a horse
in the race of politics.
Yeah.
I think, ultimately,
the answer has got to be more...
Yeah.
The same concept applied
to, like, governance of a society.
I could not agree more.
And, like,
we're alive to watch it happen, gents.
Pretty cool.
Well, the Bitcoin core privacy
win, I will talk about
on a future episode.
Thank you, Austin.
I missed it, so you'll have to tell me after the show.
But just so people know,
we've got some schedule updates.
So let's see.
We're not doing a show next week.
That's right.
Not at all.
We are doing a show the following week,
but on Tuesday,
which I think is April 14th, if I have it correct.
Sounds right.
So noon Pacific, our usual time, but April 14th.
Unless I'm convinced to change my plans
based on his visit.
or something that happens.
But it's still not so bad
to do it that
because since we're missing
next week.
So we have like
an extra 10 days
of news and information.
And then, yeah.
So we will not do a show
next week.
April 14th
we'll be back.
Back.
Yeah.
Acquired at that point.
All righty.
All right.
Is that it?
We're in a fancy new clothes.
Bye, guys.
Bye, everyone.
Have a good weekend.
Enjoy your vacations, yeah.