All right. Welcome to another edition of the Presidio Bitcoin Jam, PBJ.
Hey, guys.
What's up?
How are you doing?
Good.
Two of us came with a theme and one of us did not.
My theme is to be the party pooper.
It's the same as Halloween.
The same as Halloween.
We were holding it down with that holiday spirit.
I don't know.
Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you guys.
That's right.
And to everyone listening.
And DK was teasing me, but, you know, just because I got a little snoopy.
His little snoopy.
Yeah, it's really cute.
It's cute, but it's kind of too small for me to agree that it's festive.
Well, I got to give a shout out to Angela.
She gave me this as an early Christmas present this morning.
I got to represent the Christmas sweater.
But DK was joking.
It's on my nip.
So that's a shout out to Nostra right there.
We're going to be talking about it.
It's not Nipo 5, but it's Nipo Max.
Max is always looking for his Nostra angle.
There it is.
In Max's mind, there's always a segue to Nostra.
Still bullish, baby.
I'm still bullish.
Same, same.
For me, I'm wearing my Christmas Relays hat, a race that DK and I have done twice together.
I think I've done it three times.
I cheated on DK the last time and ran with three other guys.
He does that a lot, though.
Didn't you have your biggest fan of the year on Strava is not me.
And workout partner.
Which is Strava.
Do you know what Strava is?
Yes.
Sorry, this is sports talking.
You don't get to be involved.
but um
with my kind of Strava
um
they have a year
end of year report
it's basically Spotify wrapped
of your like
workouts
yeah
but it's much better than it sounds
but it changes every year
it's really weird
well no
so this year
it showed
who my bestie is
so like who gave the most likes
to my workouts
he got hope
no
he was not
he was even on the top
he was top three
okay well that's
alright thank god
uh
it's a quiz format right
uh
It was a quiz format.
It asks you, who do you think?
Oh, yeah, it was a quiz format.
A dad from one of the Marin dads was number one.
That's kind of cool.
And then Nisha and DK were top three.
But then there's a, who are your top workout partners?
Who do you actually work out with?
Because they start with track set as well.
Definitely Lifetime is DK.
That'll be pretty much impossible to surpass.
but not this year
Nathan was number one
but DK was in the top three there too
I don't even know anything
I'll use another Marin
I've got my own
I got another
the Marin dad mafia
I like it
well I have an app called
what's the app you always drive
mine's called Sauna
and it's tracked to my top Saunas of the year
are you being serious?
but someone should build that for Nostra
it turns out it did Sauna
You can vibe code it.
You should vibe code it.
We're always designing each other work.
I know, exactly.
Let's talk about vibe coding a little bit.
I know we talk about Matt Bliss in the show quite a bit
because he's our favorite vibe coder.
And usually he's online.
I don't know if he's here today.
Yeah, maybe he's...
I'll chime in.
No one's chimed in yet.
Yeah, I do.
Everyone's away for the holidays.
Exactly, come on.
The last three, four episodes,
we've had incredible live audience engagement.
So we appreciate that.
But yeah, Vibe Coding.
So our friend Matt,
he has Vibe Coded up a new app
that DK and I have had the pleasure to test.
How am I left out, Matt?
He is prolific.
I want to see this app.
We're not going to share the URL
because it's not ready for...
Not ready for prime time.
Not ready for prime time, but it's...
Too many naps.
It's pretty amazing.
Matt, you got to share with me too, homie.
It's called...
No.
I can't even call it.
Because you don't give away the URL, right?
Yeah.
I tried to ask AI if it could deduce the URL,
and it couldn't figure that out.
But anyway.
We've yet to do it.
We'll show the concept.
All right.
So Bitcoin has the notion of time locks.
I think most people in Bitcoin generally know that.
But there's never really been that good of products built on it.
I mean, protocols like Lightning use,
I mean, it's a fundamental part of Lightning use time locks
and ARK, et cetera, and Spark,
all these different technologies use time locks.
And we talked about last week,
it'd be cool if you had a product
that was an application level time lock
where you could just be like,
I want this lock for 10 years no matter what.
Well, now you've got that.
Matt vibe-coded it.
And it's a pretty slick UX workflow.
So let's walk through it.
So let's say I want to give a gift to DK.
Yeah.
Or I'll give it to Max.
I'll give Max a gift, but I'm going to shift back to DK because you ran our show through AI and it tagged me as like the, what the, you're the builder, the builder, the allocator.
And he's the trader.
He's the trader.
He's desperately looking.
AI thinks he's a crypto trader.
Yeah.
And it also called a whoopee for some reason.
So, so good.
So I raised that because I'm worried that DK, if I gift him Bitcoin, he's just going to trade it.
Trade it.
Yeah.
He's in a dump it.
He's worried about quantum.
he's going to dump it.
So I want to give him this gift.
He's got some Solana options or something.
I don't know.
And lock it up.
Yeah.
Right.
So with this new tool that Matt,
I can do that.
So through a very simple interface,
I can,
it basically sent,
he gets sent an email
and then he receives this email saying that like Steve created this
for you.
And if you want to claim it,
like click here
and then claiming it
reveals his private key
like the seed words
which are
where's the private key before?
they're generated client side
on this computer
in the browser
so I mean we can nitpick
security and privacy can be improved
but like it's a very good
like first attempt
I mean certainly this app
by by coding it
demonstrates what this product
could look like
feel like
and if someone
thinks there's a real business or product there,
then it could be further developed.
But anyway.
And it's meant to be, by the way,
that the receiver is kind of a noob, right?
So the receiver doesn't have an existing wallet,
may not have any Bitcoin,
doesn't know how to manage private keys,
doesn't know about seed phrases.
So this is like a gifting app too.
Yeah, I mean, it's an alternative
to the gift cards we've talked about.
So DK receives this email.
He claims it by revealing the seed phrase
and he has to secure that,
store it in a password manager
or offline or whatever.
I would not recommend a password manager
for large amounts,
but if it's a gift amount,
maybe that's a reasonable way to do it.
Yeah, it's a trader.
Anyway, they can add cloud back, whatever.
We can afford that later.
But that's how he claimed it.
And then that triggers a notification to me
as the sender to fund it.
Oh, that's a great idea.
Because I can't fund it initially
because the wallet hasn't been created.
Super smart.
And he needs to create it, not me.
Otherwise, I'd have the private key.
That's a great idea.
Good work, Matt.
Thank you, by the way.
Matt says he's down to rug you guys, but not me.
I feel slightly better now.
So then I fund it.
And also, when I configure the gift, I choose the duration, too.
So, in fact, I think for the test, Matt gifted the two of us Bitcoin,
which I think expires during the show.
Maybe yours have already expired.
You say expired, meaning the time lock expires
and now we actually have it.
Mine, I think, will be towards the end of the show
and yours maybe earlier,
but ours should be available.
Would I have gotten an email about that?
You should get an email during the show.
So if we need to take a quick minute.
I think at 1.26, I'll get my email.
I don't remember exactly what time.
One day is obviously just a test.
But in reality, you might choose a year
or four years or what have you.
Ten years.
Or you could be like a baby, like 18 years, like a bond.
Yep.
But it's like this.
That's, I think, a good business idea.
Yeah.
It's kind of based on that.
Yeah, Haley mentioned that a few months ago.
We talked about it briefly on the show, so it could be that.
And this is real.
It's main net.
I checked on the blockchain, the transaction.
It's really there.
It really has a time lock.
It's awesome.
And it's all vibe-coded.
No hand-coding at all, right?
and then an idea I had to make
because if you choose like four years
if I gift someone this who's not a Bitcoiner
they're going to forget about it
they're going to like just probably forget about it
so this product could like update them
with like a newsletter like communication
every once in a while
not in an annoying way
but like if it's four years
maybe once at least once a year
maybe twice a year
at most four times a year
only when it's 10x
but that's it
I mean, you know, that communication you could include like, hey, first of all, like, hey, remember, like, how nice Steve was to give you this gift.
And you have this gift.
He's a great guy.
But also price information and action and like maybe some top news.
And then also just a reminder of like the timer.
Like it's three more years until it's available or whatever.
I love it.
And then like security best practices, you know, and, you know, so do that periodically.
and keeps people excited and engaged.
I think it's super cool.
That's a great idea.
This could actually be like a business.
Yeah.
It should be a business.
It's a great demonstration of a primitive
for like the Ging Dang
or the Baby Bonds kind of thing, right?
It's basically like,
it's all of the basic infrastructure you need.
Now it works itself as a product.
Right.
But you could actually layer on
all kinds of other product.
And services.
Totally, yeah.
That's just like,
I mean, it's almost like an exchange sort of.
That says 2 p.m.
I forgot the timer starts when he,
when he funds it first no no not when he funds it when he first sends the email he sends he sent
us the email at the same time ours expires at the same time oh okay now is this the core timing
though matt because it's half an hour after the show so but anyway you'll update in the new year
um i mean it's incredible that matt you were able to vibe code this like that's gets me more bullish
on vibe coding is that the kind of thing that like my understanding was like for anything like
dealing with private keys or whatever you still probably want to like a human like really artisanal
coding it still? I mean, is this the kind of thing
to like, do you feel that safe?
No,
not really. But I mean, Matt's talking about like,
what does he want to do with it? It's a demo. My understanding is
at most, well, certainly a demo.
He may launch
it, but like have, he already has
a, you can only fund it like
2,500 Bitcoin. And by that,
I mean, sats, right? So
almost dust level on
chain.
So whatever, even if this were a
full-blown product,
business, you'd probably want to
limit it and put some constraints
on it. But you also want minimums
too, right? Because you don't want dust level
Bitcoin. So probably
I thought the sweet spot for a product like this
might be $1,000 to $10,000
gifts, like
that range. Like enough to be
meaningful, enough to avoid dust level
concerns, but not so much
that security has to be like
super epic.
Maybe you can only do really small amounts if
it's a really long time lock.
yeah
oh right
like you can do a thousand dollars
it could be a function of time
and then
but even
if someone actually productized this
there's definitely
things to do for security
and privacy
to improve it
if someone does productize this
hit us up
like I think this is
a phenomenal business idea
yeah
and River too
like you should just
make your gifting flow
better with this
I think there's also
a lot of
like
teachable
kind of education moments
that this surfaces
as I was going
through it, I found myself kind of stuck in a few things with, you know, putting my hat on of like,
hey, if I'm like noob, just getting into this, how do I understand what's going on here? There's a
bunch of like, like, what is a, these 12 words, what am I doing with them? Okay, where do I save
them? Do I save it in a one password or somewhere else? I write it down, right? It's just not natural.
And then I think a noob would assume that, oh, well, I got an email from this guy. I'm sure that
if, if everything goes wrong, I'll just write, write to him and get my Bitcoin restored. And it's not
that way. That's not how Bitcoin works. That's not how the service
works, right? He's not building a custodial
thing where he can help you recover it.
So I think there's a lot of moments to educate
a noob about
how do private keys work?
And hey, you own the Bitcoin. We never
touch it. Make sure you hold
these and stuff like that
that introduce people to
Bitcoin concepts.
And then they could have, for example,
partnerships with Square or something. And it's like,
hey, I'm sure there's all kinds of
referral fee opportunities too.
like, hey, you can also just go get a BitKey
and then do it with that.
Yeah, I agree.
So my understanding from Matt is that
he would love to see someone take this and run.
Yeah, me too.
I mean, you asked about security and human coders and stuff.
Yeah, I think if you're going to really build this
into a business,
I think you can go to one more level of depth
and product-wise vibe coding,
and then you absolutely would want
at least an audit of the code
by an experienced Bitcoin programmer
to make sure that it's secure.
But yeah, so we'd love to see that.
Now, another...
By the way, on that audit,
not suggesting that it shouldn't be done by a human,
but I think even before you get a human involved,
the first time you dispatch a bunch of commands to Replit
and hope that it does something,
you're kind of like probing around
and trying to see if it kind of works
and it's like prototype quality.
I think that's like probably,
maybe that's the level that Matt has gotten it to
at this point, but you could still take
the underlying code and bring it outside
into a different
element you have a direct
relationship with that's not trying to build it
and just be like, here's the code for this thing.
Should I be concerned about how
the private keys are generated?
Matthew's already said he's about
to quote, vibe hack Matt's project.
So we don't even have to, this is the beauty
of the internet.
I think Matt did tell us that
if anyone's interested to learn more about this project,
either reach out directly to Matt Bluz.
I think that's his X handle.
Yeah, okay.
And if you can't find him,
then contact one of us,
and we'll put you in touch.
I also want to talk about the broader Vibe Coding community
that he's thinking of.
Anything else, though, on his specific project?
I think there's a lot of opportunities around this.
So I would focus on the fact
that it's a demonstration
of what can be done.
But think about all of the different
UIs that could be built around this.
So like, you know, you want to do
a gift for a newborn child
that goes for 18 years
or whatever. It's a college type thing.
I think that's a great, you know, Bitcoin
bond type of use case. There's a totally
different UI you could imagine, which
is like, I've been imagining this idea of
like personalized, AI generated
personalized greeting cards. So like
on Steve's birthday, we could
create a greeting card with our faces in it,
doing something fun and silly together.
And I'd be like, happy birthday, Steve.
And it could come along with some Bitcoin, right?
So I think, in a sense, this is the foundational layer,
but it's not just one product.
It's almost like a foundation
that could go in a lot of different directions.
Well, and that's why I said it feels like
the early days of an exchange.
It's almost like an exchange.
Once you have an exchange,
then you can build lots of products on top,
like Bitcoin, back lending, payment services, whatever.
But you need first to get the relationship
with the customer and someone that's acquiring
some Bitcoin. This is a great way, like a new
novel way to do that.
Actually, two more points on this.
The last couple episodes we talked about
the gift card experience
and I had
high hopes for it. It was a little
disappointing because of
the significant
friction on onboarding.
This
does not have that.
Because there's no regulatory
issues here. It's completely
self-custodial. There's no
licensed MSB, there's no regulatory requirements.
So it's a very slick onboarding UX, which I think is great.
And secondly, we talked about business model of gift cards. Gift cards,
it's a tough business model because the middlemen have so much power
that they extract all the margins. Unless you go around them.
Well, and you purely did it. Exactly. So this product goes
around them. So the margins are completely that service.
Now you have to have a plan to acquire customers.
You're not at like Walgreens or a grocery store on a rack.
You don't get that distribution,
but you have to find new ways to distribute,
but you capture all the more.
Yeah, I mean, I was talking a little bit with Bob
and he was giving me just a bit of an overview
of the gift card landscape.
These are massive companies,
like tens of billions of dollars valuation.
I didn't realize how big.
So there's something there.
I also, another flow that I would love to see
that I think would be amazing.
And again, each of these flows,
like there's like, like kind of like scaffolding or like both UI, but also potentially some like
legal stuff that needs like helping. Right. So one that I think would be super dope is for charity
or donations. So I remember a couple of years ago, I think it was Jack and Jay-Z funded one of these
initiatives. And I think they did one in Brooklyn and one in Africa. And they like gave them like
a Bitcoin endowment they couldn't touch for a long time. Amazing. Those two, whatever institutions
are going to be balling out in 10 years.
So imagine if anyone could do that.
So it's like, okay, you want to donate to EFF.
And it's like, well, I can give EFF a little bit of money now.
They're probably going to waste it, like whatever.
Because it's a nonprofit.
But if I give them whatever, like $1,000 today,
and then you have the UI around that,
the deal's like, how do I get that in a tax-deductible way?
So it's something that's a no-brainer for me to do.
I lock it up for them, and in 10 years,
all of a sudden, EFF is balling.
Yeah, that's a good, like a V2 of this could introduce the layer of like, I give a gift of $1,000 or maybe $10,000.
And then it's in $10,000 tranches.
And each, there's a time, you know, one year time, like a two year, three year, all the way to 10 years.
Yeah.
Is another model as well.
You can imagine giving this to your kids or, you know, like nephews or nieces, all kinds of ideas.
So.
It's cool.
I think, suffice it to say, if someone wants to build this, and yeah, I think all three
of us would be very interested in funding this.
I'm extremely interested.
It's a really good idea.
I think it would be a great business.
It sounds like Matt may be leaving the Spiral team soon.
I don't know.
Except Matt.
We won't fund Matt because he has a full-time job.
Anyhow, but then the bigger, so another idea Matt has, and I'm eager to be part of it and
help build it is creating a
vibe coding community. This is
not fully baked so I'm just like there's early
alpha on our show to share this idea
get your guys like let's have a discussion
about it here and then like if the audience
has any ideas I'm sure Matt and
the rest of us would love to hear about it
but you know anyone
who's followed PBJ knows that
DK and Matt
like Miles Suter have done a lot of
vibe coding in 2025
and it's
it's really fun to follow that journey.
I've done a little bit and Max needs to.
Hey,
but I've been using AI a ton lately.
Yeah,
that's good.
So anyway,
yeah,
I think Matt's idea here is create,
create a,
start with a small community of people like DK and Matt.
And I want to participate as well.
And I was speaking with Dustin earlier from Presidio Bitcoin,
you know,
he got second place in our hackathon and totally may,
I'm a big desk.
And he's super excited about this community as well.
But it would just be a community of people who vibe code, build apps together,
but also alpha testing, beta testing.
I love it.
Because even though I have not been building a lot,
I'm definitely an avid tester of whatever DK and same with you, right?
What DK and Matt and others build.
So this would be a group of everyone would be eager and excited to test
and support others while also building their own stuff.
I love it.
You can imagine all kinds of idea generation.
So yeah, what are your thoughts on it?
Yeah, I mean, I love the idea of having a place that's curated.
So we just trust Matt's curation bar is going to be that everybody there
has enough of the right context and motivation and ethos.
And then I think the first users of such a thing
should always be people who are also hacking their own
and wanting to, you know, game recognize game
and see what you're doing,
kind of show off a little bit of like,
hey, I found a way to do this, check it out, right?
I think that's almost like the healthiest
kind of petri dish around which something new could grow
versus, you know, just, you could,
you could always create something just like tweet it out,
but that's a little diffuse versus
this is more concentrated, high signal
of other people who kind of get what you're doing
and go on that journey with you.
So I'm like very excited about that.
Is he, where does this sort of,
I mean, he and I have chatted offline separately about this idea, but where do you think about the line of like, does it have to be Bitcoin focused Fibre coding or could it be things that may have a payment component that get discovered later?
Like, how do you sort of think about what would be most productive there?
I think if it has Bitcoin payment in it somewhere, I don't think, in fact, I think explicitly it shouldn't just be like, this is a Bitcoin app.
Like, that's never, that's not the thing.
I think using somehow Bitcoin Rails
is amazing and that should be part of like payments
but like I would almost
I mean not almost I would much rather
see something that's like oh this is just a cool
app and then later find out wait there's Bitcoin
yeah I haven't discussed that with him so I don't
know what his vision is but yeah my opinion
is it should not be
Bitcoin should not be required it definitely
shouldn't I mean what Max just said it definitely
shouldn't be you have to build Bitcoin apps
and I don't even think Bitcoin payments has to be
required it's just like
build cool shit.
And if
now
the
people who are going to
participate in this
at least initially
are going to be Bitcoiners
so we're going to
we're going to be thinking about
how does Bitcoin
make this app better.
So I have no doubt
Bitcoin will be
weaved in
but I don't think
it should be required.
I also see
Yeah, I agree.
Matt's just agreeing with us.
Yeah, so Matt agrees.
Great.
I also see
I see Austin
join the chat too
and he
he also
participated in our hackathon.
I forget if you guys got third place.
You built whatever place you got. It was a
compelling app and it was vibe-coded.
I think you got third place.
This seems like a community that
Austin would love as well.
One thing that I would say is also
I would love to see also not only a bias
towards Bitcoin, but really a bias towards
an Oster as well. I think, to me, a lot of
the superpowers of these apps are going to be
with the portable identity that you own or
use your own portable identity with the social graph.
Like one thing I would love to see, maybe it's not in B0, but like, you know, and I requested this from Matt and his impressionista.ai or .fun, one of those.
Anyways is that you know I would love for every project to itself have an NPUB which a Nostra identity such that you can easily publish that and just start collecting zaps getting notoriety Like having the platform itself be sort of Nostrify would be amazing Agreed
And I think that just makes me
have even more conviction
that this shouldn't be messaged
and positioned as a Bitcoin thing
or a Nostra thing.
Right.
Yeah.
Because we want to attract people
who don't identify as Bitcoiners
or Nostra ostriches or whatever, right?
So, um,
Nostrages.
Sorry.
I'm not really in that club yet.
Anyway, we want like just a Silicon Valley type builder to join
and then they'll see others using Nostra
and what it enables uniquely and build stuff that,
oh, I didn't realize that.
And same with Bitcoin.
Yeah, I think it's great.
It's like you don't want to push people to be,
hey, you got to use this technology.
It's more like go build wherever you want.
And oh, there's things that you can't do the old way,
but you can do this new way.
this is available in case you need it.
And speaking with Dustin earlier this morning,
he's excited about
exactly what you said, Nostra
within this community too.
Yeah, amazing. And even better if we can, you know,
because we have Builder and stuff, we can just like
demo stuff live too.
It's cool.
Yeah, so if anyone has any more ideas,
share with us or
contact Matt. For sure.
Hopefully we get that going in January.
What's the status? It kind of is,
it doesn't exist yet or it's coming together?
Like practically, I'm thinking it should be a Discord community, but I don't know if Matt...
I think Matt said some of this happens on the MDK Discord today, I think in like a smallish way.
Oh, I haven't even joined the MDK Discord.
I didn't know there was an MDK Discord.
Me neither.
Well, I have not.
Matt has told me about it, so I don't know.
I think...
But yeah.
You know what would be super cool?
So the MDK Discord, maybe that's a natural place to start it because they're already doing this so much.
I mean, you don't want to make it specific to one company, obviously.
Yeah, it would be the MDK Discord.
But it was bubbling up there, and I think he happens to engage there a little bit, but I think it's meant to be kind of a different thing.
But if that's where it is, I mean, so he's saying he plans a Discord community.
That's cool.
I do think, though, it would be sweet over time.
Maybe it starts in Discord because the tools are better, but I would love to see us also dogfood more of our awesome Bitcoin tools.
like a stacker news, how dope would it be if you, I mean, yes, I mean, or even on Nostra,
but like, again, I think there's so much power to this idea of eventually, you know, kind
of like, what was the, you know, like a product ton or something like it, you just like feed
stuff out and then just, you get zapped.
And that's the, that's like the differentiator thing that people are just like, oh, sweet.
Not only do I publish this thing and just like get some notoriety, but like, what?
Like people are starting to win like real money on this thing too.
Anyways, I would lobby for, Matt,
if you haven't played with the Stackernese communities yet,
they're sweet.
And I don't know, Nostra, Stackernese, eventually.
I think it's a good push.
I'm not sure they're ready yet,
but without pushing and someone doing it,
then it won't happen either.
I think there could be promising integrations there.
But first and foremost,
I think it should be a slick communication tool.
I agree.
And I hope, I mentioned this yesterday
and I mentioned this to Matt,
or sorry, last week in this forum and then also with Matt.
But I really like Matt's kind of taste bar
of how focused something could be and should be.
And I feel like if he can imbue that a little bit
on some of the early people,
it doesn't have to be a big ambitious startup.
It's almost better to not be.
It's almost better to just be a fun hack
and something that you like and you want to show off
and other people kind of can appreciate.
But you could think of it almost like it's just a hack.
It doesn't have to be like a company.
In a sense, it probably shouldn't be.
That's almost, it's like,
maybe not the right form for that kind of thing.
And something else would be super sweet,
and we kind of talked,
maybe this is like an organic way
it even grows into its own sort of product,
is like, you can also do,
you know, if you have this on like a stacker news community
or sort of a nostrified app,
you can do bounties too.
Like imagine someone's like,
hey, this is really cool.
Like what I did, remember last year or in April,
where I was like,
and I still really want a mean generator,
someone to do a really good mean generator.
Matt, maybe you're our guy, you're our best one.
of just like, I want a very simple UI
where I can look at all the memes that are out there
and I can be like, whatever, here's like, you know,
DK looking at a girl, thank you.
You're vibe coding it right now, go ahead.
Am I really?
I want an app.
It can be that simple.
I want an app where I can get the top, whatever,
20 memes from the internet.
I can make just a template.
And once I make that template,
it shares it as an impub to Nostra
so I can start collecting sweet, sweet stats.
that's about all that's required to
vibe code it literally just like download the
Replit app
message received
I gotta message this shit
anyway if someone's listening
I offered and paid 100,000 Satoshi Bounty
I'll do it again and like imagine
that like flow or cause like
I'm not gonna like futz with this stuff
I will to a minute like if someone
that can take this from whatever
like imagine people will pay
bounties for cool shit I'll be the first one
so I already did
It's a lemon.
That guy on Nostra, it's a lemon.
I don't even know who he is.
Is he a human?
I don't know.
I don't even care.
He made a decent first round, but it's not good enough.
Speaking of which, I was, I think, the number one funder of a Nostra billboard in South
America or something.
You ask me about this every so often.
Did it actually occur?
In our chat several months ago, I showed you.
So I also put up, I put my money where my mouth was.
We put in similar amounts.
And yeah, it did.
But like.
And did you have a picture of it?
You sent it?
a picture of the billboard?
I mean, I didn't have anything to do with the operations.
I just thought it was a cool idea.
Just like now, all I do is shit talk on television.
I just want to see a picture.
I showed it to you.
Go back under a signal chart.
You asked multiple times.
You were the one.
What are the impact metrics?
Probably zero.
All right.
Yeah.
Good attempt.
It was, yeah.
You try some things.
Cool.
Cool. Well, anything else on the
bi-coding community you want to cover?
I think we have to do.
Predictions.
Yeah, make an AI that just builds my bounty projects.
That'd be cool.
Austin, if that's you, bro.
Any project you hear brainstormed on,
PBJs should have a URL.
I agree. Seriously, you could just
feed all of our PBJs through
an AI and be like, here's 20.
What app should we make for Max?
Alright, so it's the end of the year.
People should know. So I think we decided we're not
going to do PBJ the day after
Christmas, but we will do
the day after, like January
2nd. Feliz Navidad to all
who celebrate. So this will be the last episode
of 2025.
This episode's number 52.
So very good job, guys.
Yeah, we made it. Thanks for those sticking
with us.
And so yeah, let's review 2025
predictions, which we made a year
ago. We made them
at the end of 2024, right? Or just the
beginning of 2025? Yeah.
And then if we have any new predictions.
Yeah.
And it's just a meta point on that.
I will say, so I've been using,
even though I don't really vibe code yet,
maybe one day,
I have been playing a lot with Gemini 3,
the like super pro model.
It's amazing.
However, not as good as I was hoping.
So for this show,
we were discussing whether or not
we're going to do predictions
and Steve graciously offered for one of us
to quote, do the homework
of actually looking at the old predictions.
So I did.
I just fed it to my homie Gemini 3.
So what did you do?
Like a YouTube URL?
Yeah.
You fed the video to it.
That's right.
So you shared with us, I don't know, like a week or two ago, a video that was timestamped
to where we were doing the predictions.
And you were like, wow, we did really poorly.
And I listened.
I was like, yeah, we did.
And then I fed that to Google.
And I was just like, well, at first I fed the whole video.
And interesting because it actually surfaced one more prediction that's not on the list
you guys got.
And I'll mention that because it's interesting.
That came kind of earlier in the show.
And then I was like, well, just keep it to the actual prediction section at this timestamp.
And, you know, it fed them out.
It took out for each of us to various predictions.
Although I think it got wrong a couple of, like, who made which predictions.
Because I listened to it again this morning myself.
So not perfect.
And the analysis was, like, poor.
Yeah, mediocre on some, poor on others.
So anyways, point being, it was, and I think that's kind of the danger with AI still.
It's like, it's really good in certain things.
So you're like, oh, like, it's actually helped me with a lot of stuff.
Yeah, exactly.
It's believable.
And so then you're like, oh, like, I'll just roll this.
one other quick, I guess, pre-pre-prediction before we get into Bitcoin stuff, one of my
predictions in playing with all this AI is it's both good and bad, but this model to me,
Gemini 3, definitely represents a major jump from everything I've used in the past. Even though
it's not perfect and there's still mistakes and hallucinations, it's getting a lot better.
But the danger in that is one thing I think AI is going to do, this is the first prediction,
is it's going to, I think, put people more in their own kind of weird warped reality bubbles.
so as an example in preparing for this show i you know been chatting with my homie google
and we we came up with our own like kind of like list of possible predictions for this year
i didn't have time to listen to it now one way that ai has changed my life i want to give a
shout out to dk for this because i've been using even though here's another app another bounty uh
app that i would like uh i've been using 11 reader to just feed articles in and listen to it like a
podcast because i can't i don't know if i just like have developed adhd over the years but i can't
like fucking sit at a computer and fuck with stuff i like to walk you know i'm gonna walk
15 miles a day i'm a big walker and when i'm 15 miles a day yeah i've been going crazy that's
is that for over what period a couple days yeah okay um i i did a week of 10 miles a day yeah and
that was a lot changes your life but but the reason is because like now now that i have this
new superpower like i can't i don't like like i feel like if i'm sitting inside as the days get
shorter yeah i just like i feel just angry the light is gone i don't like it but if i'm walking
and now I can queue up here
the 10 articles
or things I need to think about
or I'm like learning.
Like I feel like my learning rate
is vertical
with this like 15 miles.
It's not exactly 15.
It was like 14 and a half.
But still,
who's counting besides me?
What's your annual daily?
I don't know.
Let's see.
Annual daily?
I don't always have my phone.
So this is not perfect.
Let's see.
My December is always really low.
So I'm really working
to try to keep the December up.
But with this atmospheric river,
I'm worried.
Bro, I'm about to
about to just absolutely obliterate your December.
Do you even want to know?
Oh, yeah, I do want to know.
You want to know for the year or you want to know for December?
I want to know for the year.
For the year?
Yeah.
7.7.
Is that miles?
Yeah.
What is it in steps?
I don't know.
Man, you got to always do these damn currency conversions.
No, just go to the steps.
I'm getting there.
Do you know your number?
Yeah, do you know yours?
Yeah, it's like 15,000.
Per day.
For the year.
For every day of the year, yeah.
The average.
I'm at 15,440.
okay so we're about the same so i guess i can say i will i you know do 15 miles a day is fine
no no no no no no no because 15 miles that's a new one hold up hold up bro i think i'll be at
like seven or eight thousand despite running and biking a ton don't be don't be getting all crazy
for the week that i've been like up in my game and this is not whatever uh i'm at 20,388 and to
be clear to be clear on my good days lately i've been uh between 26 and 29 very nice but that's a
lot and you're exhausted by the end of the day you hurt and you feel so good it's like i'm like
but the thing is it's like i'm actually getting more done because now when i had this 11 readers
app so good i can just like i've had like 10 things that i wanted to go through and i literally
just i hate sitting at the computer now i can't do it but if i feed them now i'm just like i'm
listening to it and the great thing is and this is where one of my predictions is people are gonna
start getting their own warped reality goals which is not necessarily good because now what i'm doing
i did this last night to prepare for the show i was like all right listen we go back and forth
all right i don't got time to read all your stuff right now i want you to export this happy for you
exactly i'm gonna let you finish but first i'm gonna export this load it up in 11 reader and
then i listened to it like a podcast i was like damn but here's the thing because i was when you
really push google into an area like bitcoin or energy stuff that actually know pretty well
it's like you you listen you're like 80 90 like that's really good and convincing and then every
once in a while they wait a second that's just that's wrong and so you got to kind of got to
test the limits with something you actually know to see where the edges are. But still, I mean,
but the thing is, it sounds really compelling. And some of it was genius. And some of it was
bullshit. So I think people are going to increasingly, but you can make it say whatever
you wanted, right? So people are going to go in their own little reality bubbles where,
you know, I was thinking, you know, I don't know, like, Nick Carr is in a stable coin. So he can
probably have one where he talks about stable coins. I'm, you know, into like Bitcoin payments.
I hear one where it's going to be Bitcoin. Like everyone can hear their own version.
And are you feeding it stuff that you want to read?
Yeah, yeah.
are you are you using it for any discovery or
it's a lot of steps i know um yeah do you even walk bro do you even walk i know i know it's kind
of crazy it's yeah well it's also like it's it's the winter you know i need that light yeah um
anyways but the point is like you can make it say whatever you want to say
yeah and so it's like in in the current reality bubble world you can find like if you want to
and Alex Jones, there's Alex Jones.
You want to listen to whoever's the other equivalent
of Alex Jones, you can find that.
Like ideas from the edge.
Yeah.
But now everyone can have their own custom reality tunnel
and that's, I don't know if it's good or bad,
but it's interesting.
It's new.
So 2025.
He's like, stay on topic.
Exactly.
We have the list thanks to AI.
How do you want to do this?
You want to start with yours?
Sure, however you want to do it.
I mean, I don't have the list in front of me.
I have it in front of me.
all right steve ruthersey bitcoin price will rip to 500 000 in 2025 that was dk that was me
what i would say it's a joke it says max that doesn't sound like the kind of thing a trader
would say and i'm gonna dump it before the dump it the house baby um i also i just want to say i
think it got some of these like labeled by the wrong person so just we'll get to that um but
Yeah, dude, I was super wrong.
Yeah, you know, I'm still trying to understand what is,
I mean, the good news is whatever.
Like, I don't really care.
Like, timing is kind of relevant.
I'm like, you know, long-term thinking.
But it is interesting to me because it's like, you know,
I did think we were going to have more of a traditional cycle.
We haven't had a traditional cycle at all.
In fact, if you price it in gold like Danny does,
we didn't even have a bull run.
I think maybe we're up a few percentage points or something.
like it's bitcoin's down versus gold over five years down versus gold yeah down versus tesla a
lot too as dk and i discussed yesterday but it's it's down versus a lot of things ai stocks but
but specifically like it hasn't even had a bull run like i forgot where i saw this on twitter but
someone's making the point where if you price and adjust for inflation dollars even where it was at
the high in 21 um at the blow off top versus now and you adjust for inflation it's like
similar yeah it's not it's not like a clear bull run at all um so i was super wrong about it i'm
surprised now you know i um maybe the four-year cycle stuff is breaking my my strong suspicion is
and this is just you know the purpose of a system is what it does so i'm not saying it should be
different but i think one thing i was wrong about is like in the same way that i thought i was going
to rip higher in the first cycle in 21 and then it turns out ftx was just printing paper bitcoin
like i think the price would have gone way over 69k the first time if not for that paper printing
my guess is there's one day we're going to discover that like turns out the whole financial
system is like ftx on steroids somehow and there's like all kinds of shenanigans yeah it's just at a
much bigger scale and the whole system is like that um and so you know whatever but yeah but i
was just super fucking wrong and um it's disappointing can't we say that the four-year
cycle has been broken i mean yeah i guess even even even the last cycle it was uh a little
different there were a couple bounces to 60ks yeah and which didn't which was not a similar pattern
in this one if the four-year i forget the exact timing but basically by the end of this year it
should have like we should be in it should have ripped we should be at a blow off top right around
now is when we hit
start the
decline to a bear market.
Which we're sort of in, but we never
had any kind of rip. I know this sounds like
a dumb question, but I'm just going to ask the dumb question.
What the heck is the four-year cycle?
Is it a calendar year? Is it based
on the having?
So it lines up from
having to having?
And to be clear, we still did have...
How many verified sequences
are there? Four of them have happened?
We're in the three.
4.4.
Yeah.
Okay.
And to be clear, I mean, if you look back two years ago, and by the way, just everyone's
like, oh, Bitcoin is so down.
No, it's like, I mean, two years ago, we were at 30K at Christmas.
So like, I mean, just everything in perspective.
Now, someone would say-
Was that high or that was low?
Well, that was low.
I mean, like we were obviously higher than that.
So my point is-
At the time, it was higher or low?
Yeah.
And you saw, you know, Bitcoin price action go higher prior to the halving than it had
in prior cycles.
And part of that was because ETS got approved.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know.
It's just like, I'm not saying halvings are-
irrelevant. Obviously, reducing
the supply is going
to increase price in some way, shape, or form.
But you already know that's going to happen.
Well, that's the question. Is it getting priced in
earlier? I don't think it's possible
to price it in, which is a whole other...
Maybe we talk about that. If you actually
believe you can price it in, I think it's a fascinating
discussion, but I'm quite convinced
you can't price that in.
It's kind of like people talk about the inflation
rate of Bitcoin. Bitcoin has an inflation rate.
We know what the inflation rate is, and it
will eventually hit the $21 million, but it's not actually.
there, right? Yeah. And I just want to agree
with Matthew. I mean, I was super wrong
on my prediction. Like, I'm clearly not a trader. So, I mean,
from now on, if you want price action,
talk to DK.
But we have a lot of predictions.
So let's keep, let's stay on track.
So, because we've only
gone through one of like 20, and
we have to do next year, and we have other topics.
And we got like 400 more.
What a job.
Okay. All right.
Multiple breakout Lightning
Network applications with millions
of dollars flowing through them.
yeah so i would say the spirit of this was wrong it didn't break out as much as i thought it would
however as i did do a little bit more sort of research and reflection on this i don't know
again with lightning it's hard to know the actual numbers you know you saw the announcement of
speed wallet getting funded they claim that they have like a ton of volume and you know in excess
of millions of dollars this has crosses over 1.5 billion dollars in annual volume yeah which to me
sounds like i i'm an ai hallucination dreamly dubious and skeptical but maybe but maybe
and if so
you know
that would be
can we get a refresh
I know I shared in
the group
and you guys are like
I've already talked about that
but what is Speed Wallet
it's the guys
that's the payment processor
for Steak and Shake
oh okay
okay
anyways
point is
also a lot of gaming
and stuff
they either
yeah
I don't know if they have
the games
or they
they're the wallet
to the gambling
but
I mean
so I think there is
real growth there
there's real activity
billions of dollars
but it's
well and to be clear
I said millions
so if they're claiming
billions
like probably
Well, no, the AI hallucination is claiming 1.5 billion.
Anyway, it was not an AI hallucination.
That was in the press release for the third.
I'm quite certain there's real activity there.
Yeah, there's real activity there.
Like, we know there's volume on Cash App.
Like, that has grown.
We know that the exchanges, well, I mean, a year ago,
they didn't even have Lightning, right?
Or two years ago.
So, like, that's probably grown.
So, I would say, technically, I could probably squeeze this to be yes.
But the spirit of what I thought was no,
because I thought we're going to have some, like, clear breakout winners.
Right.
All right, your next one.
Prediction markets on Bitcoin will emerge.
Yeah, they emerge.
Well, predicts.
Predicts.
Yeah.
I don't think they got as big as I thought against Spirit, but like...
And this has Bitnomial secured CFTC clearance for Bitcoin-based prediction markets.
We have to ask Matt Reith about that.
I don't know anything about that.
That was an AI comment.
But if Bitnomial is doing Bitcoin-based prediction markets, that'd be interesting.
Multiple Nostra apps will process millions in payments.
Yes.
Specifically naming Primal.
That's definitely no.
But when I re-listened to what I was talking about today,
I don't know if I got this exactly right.
I think the payment part was totally wrong.
I did say we're going to have breakout Nostra apps
in addition to what we have.
And again, the spirit of what I said was a little too bullish.
However, I actually thought more about this
and I was like, in a way, not the payment volume piece,
but the user piece is yes with BitChat.
I mean, BitChat, I would argue,
is probably the most popular Nostra app ever.
So in the same way we're talking about Bitcoin.
And notably, it doesn't claim to be a Nostra app.
Exactly.
So in a weird way, yes.
On the user front, definitely not on the payment front.
Your next one.
First AI agent to become a multimillionaire
using Bitcoin and Lightning.
Again, it kind of like said that, what's his name?
Truth Terminal, right?
Yeah, Truth Terminal.
Yeah, but that already happened.
It had happened the year before.
So, I mean, technically in a court of law, maybe, but like, but no.
Next one.
Twitter or X.
Lightning.
Yeah.
We'll integrate lightning from mainstream volume.
Next one.
Nostra will be used for authenticity verification to combat deep fakes.
Not really.
No.
And the last one from X.
The U.S. government will nationalize microstrategy.
No.
Now, to be clear, that's AI is wrong on that because I was not saying that would happen
this year.
So part of your 2025 predictions...
But in general, I still believe that's going to happen,
that they will not...
I think there's a risk of that, yeah.
I think that's going to happen.
I don't think it's a crazy idea.
Apparently, David only had two predictions.
Yeah, I think the guy got this wrong.
A celebrity will emerge specifically
because they earned a substantial amount of Bitcoin,
human or agent.
So your AI said verdict correct,
but I think, again, it's affirming the truth terminal thing,
which was 2024.
Yeah, and you also said, like,
someone's going to get famous for earning Bitcoin.
Truth or not, didn't even earn Bitcoin from some Alicia coin.
Next one.
U.S. government will co-opt or nationalize Bitcoin-related assets.
Co-opted 200,000 BTC held by the DOJ,
formerly slated for auction.
Yeah, but the spirit of that is lame.
Yeah, they said they're not going to sell what they already had.
Like, okay.
All right, now we'll rattle through mine.
So Lightning Network will grow explosively.
Did I actually...
I'd have to go...
I actually say it. That doesn't sound like
how I would... Yeah, again, I think
it's not... Listening again today
this morning, you said something along the lines of agreeing
with the spirit of Max.
Yeah. Okay.
And then, I definitely remember the next one.
A major mining pool will adopt Stratum V2.
And that has not occurred,
despite AI saying it occurred. That's not
occurred. Not what I was...
AI is wrong in almost all of these.
Yeah, shit.
Be careful out there.
Not yet, but I remain
bullish on that. Next one, there will
be no consensus rule changes
in 2025. So that's the only one
that really clearly was correct.
It turns out you claim
Bitcoin doesn't change.
Not going out on a huge limb, saying
there won't be consensus changes in a year.
I would just like to make a prediction that the sun will come up
tomorrow. Has everyone got that?
Were we on record?
Next one the next change oh the next consensus change will be the great consensus cleanup in 2026 Well you know We find out We find out And then a couple more
Several major Bitcoin brands will adopt Bolt 12.
Well, we are up to it.
Well, yeah.
So I'd call this a miss.
The good news is like a couple dozen applications support Bolt 12 now.
So it's got a lot of support, but it doesn't yet have Cash App or what I was imagining.
I would say Phoenix is a major brand.
Okay, good.
But I was imagining like Cash App, Coinbase, et cetera.
Cash App is now on public record saying it's the roadmap and it'll happen next year.
That's big.
And then my last one was, and this is the audacious one, Meta will acquire LightSpark.
And that did not occur.
so tldr for predictions um we sucked yeah did a horrible job but but honestly like i i actually
now we're gonna come and make but now but guys now you can believe you can believe us for 2026
yeah we know what we're talking about let's we're we're gonna stop printing money inflation will go
down and there's too many damn billionaires so um but i think another way to judge predictions is
would you make them again?
Would we make these for
next year?
Meaning you can be directionally
wrong or timing
wrong. And my assessment
of most of these... I think we're all right. It's just too early.
I think too early. As always.
So
part of my 2026
prediction... We could just recycle all of them.
Literally, I would recycle
all of
mine.
so the only the only one if anyone wants to be rich as fuck listen closely for the next 30 minutes
so i believe i believe we've been moved from the view to jim kramer yeah
we've moved what the from the view to jim kramer yes i i like that all right all right um yeah i
would actually say yeah i will uh take all of my 2025 predictions move them 2026 including
bumping up the great consensus cleanup
from a 2026 to a 2027
prediction.
2027 meaning you're going to skip
2027. I don't think it'll activate
in 2026. So literally
just bump everything up by one.
You know what? If we're going to do that, let's just say, yeah, but let's
give ourselves the next decade. We'll check
back when you're listening in 2035.
Are you going to rip to 500k?
Yeah, for sure. Check it back in 2035.
I don't like doing price predictions, but
since you gave a price prediction,
what is your...
I'm out of that game.
What is your peak price prediction in 2026?
I'm out of that game.
Okay.
I do have predictions.
I don't want to make a price prediction number,
you know, like a specific number,
but I will say I don't really buy
four-year cycle theory as being like a real thing.
I just think there's too many other...
I mean, it was, to be clear.
I mean, historically,
you can look at any data set
and shape it to some narrative you want.
You can.
You don't think that having played a role early on?
Maybe.
You don't think cutting from 50 to 25?
These are very complex systems.
I think it's hard to make concrete judgments
about exactly what happened and why it happened.
I don't think it's crazy to say,
hey, look, we observed this phenomenon.
These numbers occurred in this way.
But I don't think it's like a thing.
I think it's more like...
I observe this weird phenomenon
where if I take water and move it to 32 degrees Celsius
or Fahrenheit, all of a sudden...
That is very different.
I actually do. I think with a Bitcoin audience, what DK is saying is maybe outrageous, but I definitely agree with you in general.
In general, I agree.
People overfit data all the time.
Exactly. Matthew, you're right. DK, money printing doesn't affect money.
Listen, there's this phenomenon. We don't know why the prices go up.
I mean, it could be correlated.
My own opinion, though.
But I think that there is substance.
I mean, it is definitely factual that the having takes away supply.
And miners are a different type of seller than a regular person.
Like as a miner, you have expenses that are denominated.
You have to pay.
That you have to pay.
So in general, you're forced to sell it, whatever the current market rate is.
Whereas anyone listening or us,
if we don't like the current price,
we can just keep holding it or whatever.
So that forced selling definitely puts downward pressure on the price,
and that gets reduced every four years.
So that's non-debatable.
I also think it's become a marketing event,
which enters the consciousness of people,
which I do think impacts trading and timing.
Like in a bear market, I think there's a ton of people who have already become convinced that Bitcoin's a great investment at that point.
And then they love a bear market because they don't have enough.
But they don't buy it like right away.
They kind of expect it to be 12, 18, 24 months before the next bull market.
So they wait to allocate later.
And it just becomes a thing.
So I think those two are true.
But obviously the first one gets diminished over time.
And now it's almost negligible.
And I agree, like, over time, like, complex systems
are going to be complex systems, and, like,
we're heading... You've heard of the Santa Claus rally
in the stock market? No.
So, which is a good point.
Same thing. That sounds like bullshit. I've created a list
of, like, 21 reasons people
sell, right? And so it's a complex system.
That's why, when people say, like, oh, I'm surprised
the price didn't move on this event,
it's like, well, because there's a million
different variables that go into
the price of Bitcoin. Like, there may be a bunch of
OGs selling calls on Ibit
right now, right? That's, like, a theory that I think
somebody shared in the chat like probably the case how much does that impact yeah the up or
down like i agree with you today but i'm i i think early on cutting the supply now is like a major
to me obvious shock to the system but regardless let's we can't just roll our predictions for
that's super late what i'm saying let's give it the thing i'll the thing i was gonna give is i
think the four-year cycle is an overfit and it has nice narratives around but i think it's overfit
I don't think it's real.
So I think we're about to enter the fourth year, is it now?
Like, we're ending the one that should be down?
I don't even remember.
Right now, if you subscribe to the four-year cycle,
we should have just blown a top off
and it should be entering the bear market.
Which means we're probably going to rip it up.
So I'll make the call that I think it's all bullshit
and, like, you know, I think we'll go higher in 2026.
Well, I will also say we'll go higher.
Despite the four-year cycle, shouldn't we be down?
I'm saying the four-year cycle,
So I'm willing to open to concede that it's gone now.
I think early on, it's like pretty clear to me.
But at this point, I would say complex systems are going to complex.
Anyways, I think we should do real predictions, guys.
This is lame.
We can't just roll them.
Okay, I'll give you a real one.
I've got a whole list of them.
You want to go first?
I only have a few.
You go first.
I got to pull mine up.
Vibe coded Bitcoin payments with at least one example as some interesting moment.
So I think there's going to be some kind of like what I said with the agent stuff.
I think there's going to be somebody like Matt who has already demonstrated on a small scale that a bunch of people are using the software he built and paying him in Bitcoin to use the software that he built on a very small scale.
But if people he doesn't know, I think that as a we're seeing a very early indication of what that looks like.
I think that's going to there's going to be some mainstreaming of that phenomenon in 2026.
My guess is that probably it's likely to happen in the virtual halls that you're familiar with.
So maybe like in Matt's Discord or something would be the kind of place that would instigate.
What specifically?
That apps will be built, an app will be built that does payment?
That has some sort of notoriety that some, you know, I don't want to.
He said have a moment, whatever that is.
Have a moment.
He's leaving himself a lot of record.
I'd say Truth Terminal had a moment.
You could argue it wasn't a moment.
I think it was a moment.
I can already predict.
Yeah, that moment happened before your prediction.
Here's my prediction,
that AI will say you're correct on that
in one year from now.
But I think we should be able to look back.
What a great prediction, DK.
Let's discuss.
We got to look back and be like,
oh, that was obviously,
that was the one.
That thing killed it.
I understand the spirit of what you're saying.
Yeah.
And you could probably quantify it
by saying there's like a lot of users.
I don't know how many you want to say,
tens of thousands, tens of thousands.
A lot of users, a lot of revenue,
you know, some sort of big moment
where like, wow,
that's the guy who made the thing
that made the money that, wow,
you can actually vibe code things
with Bitcoin
and make money.
Excellent description.
Wow.
How about
there's a Wikipedia page
for it?
Is that a good one?
Okay.
Yeah.
So that kind of like,
I don't know too many things
to get their own Wikipedia page.
One would be like
the million dollar homepage.
You all remember that?
Yeah.
Something at that level?
I mean, yeah.
I'd say the Wikipedia page
comes once it has
so much notoriety
and so much durability.
So I don't know
if I'd say
the Wikipedia page arrives.
Like does 2Serminal
have a Wikipedia page?
Maybe.
Probably, yeah.
So something in that scale.
You know, it's not
It's not like Facebook or something, you know, but it's not a moment.
That's one.
Did you want to share one or should I give you another?
I'm going to be a listener.
Okay.
You roll yours through and then I got mine.
Okay.
So somewhat related to our human Bitcoin addresses discussion from last week.
Are you going to relitigate that?
No, because I think Steve's takeaway was DK and Max don't care about privacy or security or any Bitcoin principles.
DK and Max don't care about that.
Wild traded heathens.
Well, trader and alligator heathens.
There's levels.
But I think like, so my next prediction is that it's very abstract, but it's that some new naming convention finally gets reasonable consensus and traction.
And I think human Bitcoin addresses, Bit353 is a great candidate. We've seen like UMA from Spark and Spaces Protocol. And there's a bunch of things. And I could see several of these things coexisting in the future. But I think we'll see some new type of, you know, new meaning something that is not yet widespread today will become pretty much a standard within 2026. People are like, yeah, that's the one we use.
Anchored to Bitcoin or no?
You may have insider info.
No, no.
I'm not going to say anchored to Bitcoin.
I'm just going to say useful for Bitcoin addresses.
Okay.
Yeah.
What's your last one?
Well, four-year cycle's dead.
2026 times higher.
It's not a real thing.
The sun will come up.
All right.
I got a bunch.
Shall we roll?
Shall we rock?
to start this one
I wasn't sure
I asked AI
but if you guys
had to guess
how many lightning
how many let's say
monthly active
lightning network
users are there
to guess
lightning network
users meaning
somebody who
sends or receives
a payment
is that knowable
no it's not
so I
we're just guessing
let's each come
over to remember
before we say it
give me a moment
Steve's checking
the news fear
the Akashic records
monthly
monthly send to receive if you want to do daily or weekly no it's not um
okay i have a number yeah you guys have a number yeah this is monthly activity yeah 75 000.
you think it's that low wow it was yours i was 100 i was a million hundred thousand how did you get
to a million well i just think about just be more bullish yes i mean think about anyone that does
a payment in or out from an exchange
like River, Coinbase, anyone that's
using, I mean, Cash App.
I know you guys have people
withdrawing.
Like how many
I'm not going to be able to answer this, but how many
Cash App users do you think
are monthly active Lightning users?
I thought it was six figures, but apparently not.
If yours was six figures.
Steve blinked twice.
Alright, well, why don't we say
$100,000 as like
something around there.
So my first prediction, even though we're just making that up, is that we're going to have at least an order of magnitude more users, monthly active Lightning Network users, probably more than that.
And specifically, the vast majority of them are going to come from Cash App.
And I think we're going to see the narrative play out.
I think maybe it was Matt who gave me this idea, so I'll give a shout out to Matt Belez, that we're going to see, accept Lightning to let Cash App users pay.
That's going to be a narrative.
If you want to let Cash App users pay with no fees, use Lightning.
And so I think we'll go, if it's 100,000, I think we'll go to at least a million, probably more.
And the majority will be from cash out.
So Nick says 20,000.
That low?
Nick, just to confirm.
Is that monthly actives?
I'm curious, actually, Nick's take on this.
How many monthly active Lightning users are today?
Yeah, how do you think, Nick?
And then while we're waiting for that, I would want to point out Deanna's prediction
that there will be over 100 episodes of PBGA
by the end of 2020.
Oh, so that is Nick's,
so 20,000 is his number.
Wow.
Okay.
So let's say at least an order of magnitude,
I'll just say a million.
I think we get to at least a million people
using Lightning Monthly Active.
I actually think it's going to be more than that.
And I think the majority are going to be for cash.
So are they going to be online or offline?
What do you mean?
Meaning is it going to be people using like a vibe-coded app?
Either way.
I count going to a square terminal as part of it.
All of the above.
But I'm saying if you had to sort of break it down,
is it mostly coming from one or the other?
Because there's a lot of growth in there, right?
I think there's going to be a lot of growth first
on the in-person stuff
from all the things we're doing and Swear is doing.
And then I think that's going to get people using it,
which is going to open up other experiences.
And I'll get to a few of what I think
those experiences are going to be.
But in general, I'm going to say
at least a million monthly active users
on the Lighting Network,
the majority of whom are using cash.
So first, I like the prediction.
I agree with the million.
I don't agree with the majority
he says he meant daily 100k
monthly
DK, Nick and I are
all I mean I said 75
100k
I continue to be too bullish
or not
I think Cash App will see tremendous growth
I don't think it'll be the majority of the million
I mean think of all the
new Spark enabled wallets
Wallet of Toshoshi already has a lot of users
I think they'll
They'll grow.
So that makes me even more bullish.
Yeah.
So I think Cash App won't be the majority.
I think it's even the majority.
And if it's not, I will be thrilled
because I think Cash App is still going to lead the way.
So even if it's not the majority,
I think it'll be the plurality.
And if it's not the majority,
then that makes me more bullish.
So I would love to have that be the case.
Okay, so that's my first prediction.
Good.
My second prediction,
and you're going to love this one.
I swear I didn't plan this.
MDK specifically is going to get major adoption
and power, I'm going to say,
tens of thousands of new apps, at least,
five-coded apps.
I think specifically, MDK is going to be
the most popular way to add payments on Repplet,
so much so that Omjad and Co. are going to notice
and either in some way, shape, or fashion,
I'm not going to predict how they're going to do it,
try and add Bitcoin payments in themselves
once they see the success.
Love it.
Tens of thousands is aggressive.
I think it's possible.
Very aggressive, but I love the direction
of that prediction.
I love it directionally.
I think it's going to be hard for any platform.
Yes, I am.
As Matthew says,
break my own bags will pump.
I am manifesting.
I will continue to do that.
But I also believe.
I'm an investor because I believe.
So, all right.
So that's my second one.
Number three,
I think we're going to see the first site
where a demonstration of the thesis
that you monetize energy
in whatever way it pays the most.
And so I think we're going to see the first site that's explicitly designed with both GPUs for inference and ASICs for mining.
And the first example of real-time electrons moving between the two based on whichever will pay more.
Say that again?
We're going to see the first example of a site where someone builds a site specifically with both GPUs to offer AI inference and ASICs to offer Bitcoin mining.
and in real time shows
they basically have software deciding
the electron goes one way or the other
based on whichever will pay more.
Between ASICs and GPUs?
Yes.
Or like inference workloads?
Yes.
Okay.
Why?
I'm not sure I understand
the spirit of what it's trying to communicate.
So this is part of a much longer conversation.
Tune in next year to Ideas from the Edge.
Got to give a shout out to my guys,
Tomas and Ocampo and John Comcov.
But I think the biggest story of the 21st century
is the commodification of labor and capital
and that it's all photons and electricity
at the end of the day.
And so I think the big story is that
for the first time,
you're going to have fungible markets for labor,
which is compute now,
and capital, which is Bitcoin.
And the sort of like the hurdle rate
you have to clear to get labor
is what you're being paid from the Bitcoin network,
which is the capital rate.
But if I understand correctly,
if you buy a bunch of mining equipment,
you want full utilization.
Not necessarily.
You may have, as we talked about in 2021 in the paper,
I think this is finally going to happen,
depreciate ASICs on-site
where you could just back and forth route.
Okay, when you say between GPUs and ASICs,
GPUs for AI workloads and ASICs for Bitcoin mining,
not ASICs for AI workloads.
Okay, that's what I was trying to clarify.
Physically co-located,
that you can route between them
specifically designed for this purpose.
I think it's gonna be tough with the,
you know, Bitcoin mining is very,
in a sense, like practical mercenaries.
Like, what do I put in
and what do I get out today?
GPU and inference is all about like,
well, it's serving something today,
but it's serving something
to try to gather market share
from somebody else in the future.
And different people can have
10 year timeframe on when they need
to sort of recoup all that.
So I'm cautious about being so easy to switch
from one to the other.
Cool.
I'm pretty confident on this one.
Yeah.
All right.
Hold on.
I absolutely believe in a future
where there'll be discounted an older generation
of ASICs for Bitcoin mining
that are not energy efficient anymore
relative to their competition.
So big farms paying four, six, eight cents for electricity
literally would just take them offline
because they're not profitable.
And then if there's no market for them,
they're literally priced at zero or maybe even negative
because you have to get rid of that.
And then if you have renewable energy
where your energy is zero or negative,
you're happy to take zero or negatively priced equipment.
And even if you only get to run it 20% of the time,
you're profiting.
I totally believe in that.
But I'm not sure I understand a vision
where I buy this old equipment.
I also buy all these GPUs or TPUs or whatever.
And then I have energy available 100% of the time.
Why wouldn't I just buy the AI stuff
and run that 100% of the time?
What advantage am I getting by buying?
For one, you may be limited on how many chips you can get.
You might be using old NVIDIA chips as well.
And this might allow you to overbuild
and build something much bigger
that you were otherwise going to be able to.
I think it's going to be tough to overbuild in AI.
We'll see.
In the near term.
Okay. All right.
So we like all your predictions except for that one,
but it's good.
It's good for predictions to be debatable.
It's good to be debatable.
The next one is...
Worthy of debate.
These two are kind of related,
so I'll bring them one at a time.
The next one is,
I think we're going to see the first agent-to-agent payment without a human in the loop.
Now, you can debate what that means because I don't think it's going to be fully autonomous.
Maybe the agent is still running on a system like AWS that could be unplugged.
I think you're going to see the first agent pay another agent in Bitcoin.
And that you could create a toy example today, but you're talking about something more than a toy?
No, I think a toy would count.
Related to that, I think we're going to see the first example of AI evolution
where Bitcoin is the price signal
or is the like reward function.
So like an agent evolves
its own code or activity
based on trying multiple things
and going with the one that receives the most zaps.
Yeah, I'm still trying to like
make this concrete in my mind.
Is it, do you have like,
is there like an example application
that you can walk us through?
I don't want to say too much,
but like imagine there was like a meme generator on NOS and it had, you know, whatever, like a
certain flavor of memes it's generating. And it ran, I don't know, like two examples, like one
that's more like PC, one that's not. And it like develops along a path based on which of those
gets the most apps. So it develops, meaning it generates new images along that meme.
Like a new version of itself. It's like, okay, the next one now we see, you know, it's like the
meme that gets the most is like i don't know the african child or the guy looking back so we're
really focusing on that okay what else you got is ai going to be able to evaluate these things
the next one is um while we're on the subject on mdk once we're since we're on the ai topic
i think that's probably a little too early for this to happen by itself but i think you're going
to see the first toy example
that gets the conversation going
around the idea of a sovereign AI
as the future business entity,
like beyond C-corporations or LLCs.
So that would be something
like what we talked about
with the, what do you call it,
the Maple AI guys.
Some toy wins enough
that people say,
oh, people start talking
about this idea that like
AI agents with their own
reward function
is the new business entity
beyond C-corps and LLCs.
Mm-hmm.
Okay. I think at least one...
I like that one, by the way. I think that's contained enough. It could be simple early examples. I feel like I'm into that.
Okay, here's my next one.
I don't know how to quantify this one exactly,
so maybe you guys have ideas.
But I think Bhutan is going to emerge
as the clear big winner from Bitcoin,
or at least an example of what is...
El Salvador has kind of been that so far.
I think Bhutan becomes the country
that's clearly gaining the most from Bitcoin
and continues in its march
of becoming its own version of a Singapore.
Yeah, I like that one.
And I actually, I mean, El Salvador.
It's related to this news, right?
Somewhat related to the news.
It's related to this news, but it's been, I feel like El Salvador has had, within the Bitcoin community, at least 100x the awareness.
Yes But Bhutan has had 100x the actual substance and results And so I think that starts flipping in 26 And why is the discrepancy between the awareness versus results Because what
Well, Bhutan has accumulated a ton of Bitcoin through hydro mining.
So it's like clean energy mining.
They've been doing it for years.
They've been purposely doing it kind of on the video.
El Salvador, they supposedly tapped into a volcano.
Like, is that real or not?
It's hard to know.
And even if they have, I think it's a token amount.
where Bhutan has like,
the amount of Bitcoin they've accumulated
is like more than their entire treasury.
Like it's like-
It's 40% of the GDP.
Yeah, it's 40% of the GDP.
It's huge.
It's like massive.
So they have like,
I think it's like 1100,
like something real.
I mean, they're donating a billion dollars
to their like mindfulness initiative.
So isn't that-
Aren't they the ones who say they measure-
Yeah, invest national happiness.
They're investing in a city.
In my understanding,
I'm not sure 100%,
but I think they're not actually investing it.
I need to go deeper on this.
My understanding is,
I think they're going to use it as collateral.
And so I think...
Yeah, I read that on that article.
The key idea, another key idea I want to get out of this
is that more nations are going to look to Bhutan as a model.
Because Bhutan, one could argue,
yes, they have the gross national happiness thing.
They're like a sort of a Buddhist country.
By everything I've heard, their king is somewhat...
I mean, he's a king, but sort of like an enlightened king to a degree.
And so it appears, at least on surface,
that they're using the winnings from Bitcoin
to actually improve the lives of the people that live in the country,
which is really fucking cool to see.
and one could argue that this could emerge
like an alternative to like, you know,
as you have IMF loans,
like, well, now you see another alternative
where someone's using a different form of collateral
outside of the traditional system
and it appears to be working
and that's going to get people interested.
And they're also going to see
that Bhutan's number one export to the world
is hash rate, which is a big deal.
Yeah, I love that prediction.
I totally agree.
And I'm a much bigger believer in Bhutan
becoming what you're saying versus El Salvador.
what scale
is Bhutan
doing hydro
mining on
or like what
have they announced
this specific number
for their treasury
or what they
I think they have
I forgot the number
off the top of my head
I think they have
at least 1100 Bitcoin
I forget the exact number
is it
bigger or smaller
than El Salvador
or
I think it's
smaller but bigger
per capita
because it's a tiny
is what bigger
or smaller
the treasury
oh
the Bhutan treasury
versus El Salvador
okay
is it
does anyone know
how much El Salvador has
I know it's way
bigger per capita
but
I think it's anyways, regardless, I think that narrative, let's look at those numbers because I think it's way bigger.
Absolute and per capita.
Yeah.
So anyways, I think that becomes a big deal.
I just lost my predictions.
I had a couple more.
Oh, no.
Now it's asking me to log in.
Oh, that's annoying.
I assume you guys have not ever been to Bhutan.
Not yet.
I want to go.
I've actually, interestingly, it's a place I've wanted to go since childhood.
as a kid
my dad took me to the
trying to do this damn
everything you got to do with AI now
this is where I feel like
I was partially invited to go meet with the king
to give ideas for what they could do
with bitcoin
through someone I know
that didn't come to fruition
I would definitely take up
the invite
what does a partial invite look like
come by if you're free
someone I know who
who has been to Bhutan and spent weeks with the king
said that they were going to invite folks
to come and share ideas.
Yeah.
That didn't.
I don't know if that actually happened
and I didn't get invited
or if it has not happened.
And what is the rough...
I think I know the fur you're thinking of, too.
What's the rough population of Bhutan?
You mentioned it's tiny.
Is it like it's a million people or 100,000?
I think it's like 800,000.
I don't remember.
It's something in that order.
Okay.
So I got my predictions back.
How many more predictions do you have?
Three more.
Steve's getting tired.
Okay.
I'm just embarrassed because, like, Max is owning me on predictions.
Well, just on quantity.
On quantity.
As Deanna says, I think she had one on there.
Well, it's gone now.
I actually, well, I've given my opinion whether I like or don't like the predictions, but it
feels like AI slop as well.
But actually, not actually.
These are good predictions, homie.
AI slop.
No, they are.
I did use AI to help me with some.
You use AI.
But I came up with a lot of my, and this is what I'm saying.
Google is like, hey, my research partner.
You don't have to anchor on your intelligence.
It's plentiful in the universe now.
The next one is the taste.
The curation, yeah.
It'll still wait.
All right, the next one.
Ready?
First, Bitcoin gets mined in space.
I know the probability of this.
It's high.
You know the probability of this.
You know of an actual project happening.
The guy in charge of doing this just laid out in an email to me
the probability of happening in, you're not on this email.
No, I'm not on this email.
No, you're not on it.
Like a Q3, Q4, and Q1 probability.
Q3, Q4 of 2026, Q1 of 2027.
Yeah.
It's going to happen.
Okay.
The next one.
And is that just like a demo?
Like, hey, we might not like we're going to do this.
It's an experiment.
Like what happens
with the chip in space?
Because this has been a topic.
Hasn't like data centers in space
just kind of blown up as a topic?
I think each of Elon and Sundar.
It blew up as a topic
two days before
we had already planned
to have it as a topic of discussion
at Type 1 Summit.
I would say it blew up
at Type 1 Summit.
Literally the day of.
It happened.
Thank you, Max.
So that one I feel pretty good on.
The next one,
the next three,
this is not exactly a Bitcoin one,
but fuck it.
We rad.
The next one, by the end of 2026,
Google has by far the best model, AI model,
and it's clear that Google is winning.
But it's also clear in the mainstream narrative
that XAI is by far the leader in the AI race
because Elon has a monopoly on getting to space
and everyone is FOMO-ing into,
oh my God, we have to get to space to train these models.
Also, I think to a lesser degree,
but still meaningful is the social media data.
Sure, that too.
And he's closed that off to others, right?
I have a question though.
So I agree on the Google prediction,
but ChatGPT has a massive lead on users, right?
Don't get, I have, yeah.
So what's your prediction around
how that changes a year from now?
No idea.
I just think that Google's going to have the best.
And I mean, and I would say,
go so far as to say,
if it's not, I actually think it'll probably be Claude
and Anthropik.
I think Anthropik's doing really well with the coders.
I think ChatGPT continues to be more of a consumer product.
for the people that are not deep.
I feel like you guys are going to be using Google.
And then that long-term chat GPT loses?
I mean, I think all four are probably going to do just fine
in the long run.
I don't think any of them are going to be big losers per se,
but I think that it's going to become clear.
If there is only one winner,
it's going to be X because of the space.
I would maybe tweak my own version of that,
which is I think the models don't matter long-term.
You need to have something besides the model.
So if you have access to space, great.
If you have the best data centers, cheapest energy,
best proprietary data sets, whatever.
There's some other aspect, but just like,
oh, we have the best researchers and built the best model,
I think it's not a credible differentiator long-term.
I agree.
Nick asks, aren't, or states,
aren't space data centers a meme?
They are both a meme, and they're actually happening.
Okay, the next one.
They have to give them a medic at some point, right?
I mean, look, Elon has just skipped from type 1 to type 2,
so we'll have the type 2 summit next year.
And he claims that money will not matter.
So I asked you, why are you wasting all your time on Bitcoin
if money will not matter?
I disagree with him on that one.
But hold on.
On this show earlier in the year,
I feel like definitely the topic was raised,
and I thought you raised it, that money wouldn't matter.
But maybe you're just raising it as a topic as opposed to having a position.
Yeah, I was raising it as a topic.
As opposed to having a position.
It's not my specific prediction.
I also won't say I feel like it's 100% wrong because I've also qualified as DKN as many times.
If energy really becomes effectively free, then I think that is a possible work.
I think we're not there yet.
And I think that, sadly, the political structures are probably not going to allow that to happen on the first run.
I would love to be wrong.
I think I think like energy being roughly free is is going to happen in the course of our lifetimes
but probably not in the next year yeah and so the timing really matters on like that like is that
transition a 10-year transition yeah yeah and as nick says it's kind of lol the hang on the guy's
launching x money thinks money doesn't matter yeah I would take that with a grain of salt
okay the guy going to court over his pay package right okay my next two predictions my final two
predictions um this one gets back to square and cash app and why one of the reasons i'm bullish
i think title is going to play a pretty major adoption role for bitcoin and they're going to
pay out the first artist in bitcoin next year and that's without any inside info that's just
your inside observation it's just my observation from the world no comment it's very obvious to me
yeah and finally my last one is that my sort of recycle from last year an unexpected nostre app
will break into the mainstream.
And I would asterisk that and say,
we will not call it a Nostra app.
I agree.
People know we'll use Nostra.
And then I want to highlight Matt Belez's
mentioning audience prediction.
AI creates major scientific discovery
that will change the world.
I strongly agree with that.
I think we already have evidence of AIs
making some scientific breakthroughs in some fields.
I think we had a physics or a math one that happened.
and it seems
very, you know, let silicon and electricity
go, like yes, I think more of that will
happen and something substantial probably comes
of it, so I'm with you Matt. Cool.
I agree, I don't know if it'll be next year
or 2027, but I think certainly in the next two years.
I think
Divine,
that's the new Nostra app, oh yeah, that was the
Rabble Nostra app, exactly. He said
maybe that seems ready to do that, yeah.
And Deanna says it'll be her app.
She doesn't know what it is yet, but she'll be vibe good.
Sweet. Sweet.
I only have one prediction.
Okay.
I didn't use AI.
Yeah, I failed to prep.
Sorry.
You can come back in early 2020.
Maybe if I come up with something good, I'll do that.
But I'll predict the flippening in 2026.
Flippening of what?
Oh, this is a good one.
The Bitcoin B symbol over SAT.
Oh.
Oh, okay.
Right.
The sentiment will shift.
The number, the product adoption.
Like the sentiment will be like all of a sudden, oh, that product hasn't upgraded yet or adopted it yet.
And it will feel old and stale.
Yep.
As opposed to like, this is a weird concept.
Sats have already won.
Like the sentiment to date has been, sats have already won.
Why are these people trying to push for a Bitcoin B symbol?
Matt says, hasn't that already happened?
Are you making a DK prediction?
I predict what happened yesterday, this is going to happen.
Those are the best predictions.
In Matt, in my mind, it's already happened.
But I don't think an objective person would say it's flipped.
There's been a flipping yet.
I think it will flip in in 2026.
I would like to make one more prediction,
which is that Max and hopefully DK,
but if not DK and AI, but hopefully DK.
He's just sending me work.
What do I have to do?
Produce a hip hop track together next year.
he seems less confident
that's related to the show or not
I'm going to predict
I think I made this prediction
we're going to get some theme music for PBJ
some custom intros and outros
but he can't be lame
we have a volunteer who's going to
come up with some creative ideas
for an introductory segment
of each episode
who?
you haven't told you this yet
No.
Ken from the Spiral team.
I talked to DK.
Ken's got pretty good taste.
He wants,
well,
he's our number one fan.
Yeah.
He loves the show
and he,
he has some ideas.
Okay,
cool.
I'm open.
Just don't,
don't be lame.
And I like,
I was,
I know I've been going on and on about this with Alex just before
and with Steve on our bike ride yesterday.
I don't know if I've mentioned to you,
have we talked about the Acquired podcast?
You mean you,
you made a big deal of it last week.
Okay.
You guys,
hey,
listen,
I don't mean to get too excited.
Have you guys heard of the Joe Rogan podcast?
I know.
I just found this great podcast.
I'm so late to it, but I'm so in love with it.
I'm even later to it, though.
But you got into the NFL one.
Yeah, I'm an hour into the NFL episode, and it's fucking amazing.
It's really good.
I've already shared it with my whole Fantasy Football League,
calling it a must-listen.
The Google series is amazing.
Yeah, the Google series is dope.
This morning when I went to the gym, I started the Visa one.
Of course, it's amazing.
Dee Hawk, have you read the book?
It's basically that is their primary source, is the book.
So it's kind of like an audio conversation.
Them sort of, they've read the book, they've researched it,
they talked to, I think, the author of the book.
They talked to Dee before he died.
Dude, by the way, if you haven't read that, read that book.
You will love that book.
I think you'll like it.
You both like that book.
Or listen to the Acquired Podcast.
Yeah.
It's effectively like.
But the book, Dee Hawk, is, I forget, what's the name of the book?
It's one for many.
Alan Farrington's a big fan as well.
Shout out to Alan.
He has great taste of books.
That's the book?
Yeah, that's the book.
There's some other book I heard of.
One for many?
One for many is one of the best business-ish philosophy books I've ever read.
10 out of 10 recommend.
And it's very poetic as well.
There's one called The Power of an Idea?
Yeah, that's not...
These are the lame ones that these guys listen to.
That's not the ones...
These are the lame ones.
Okay.
One for many is beautiful and poetic.
And it's a book about life.
and it's by the guy that founded Visa
and a business just happens to be part of it.
Oh, cool.
It's excellent.
But as kind of payments nerds,
I think you'll enjoy the Visa episode.
I'm going to finish NFL and then Visa.
And I'm late to the game here,
but I agree.
It's so good.
I am such a huge NFL fan
and you're not much of an NFL fan.
I mean, I might get back into it a little bit
because I'm a Saints fan
and the Saints have just been so bad for so long,
but now we got a guy that's like,
But I'm a huge fan, spent so much time watching it and understanding it.
And the first 60 minutes I've listened to this podcast,
like 59 of the 60 minutes, it's information new to me.
Really?
And super valuable and interesting.
Because it starts in the 1860s.
So the origin of American football, it starts with college athletics.
And then the introduction of professional and the different leagues.
It's just amazing.
We all grump on fees about the 3%.
None of the early merchants cared at all.
they were like amazing
all these new customers
can come to me
and just pay
and it's so easy
like I think it was
five or seven percent
or something
and they didn't worry about it
so to be clear
one for many
you'll get the payment nerd stuff too
okay
but it's from his perspective
so it's like
a philosopher king
learns about payments
it's kind of like
a little bit like
Jack Dorsey
he's doing it
and he's doing cool business stuff
but like
he doesn't really
that's not
he's not here like
I'm gonna make some margins
like he's like
changing the world in school
right right
so
another thing
that we
headline for today
is contentious
forks
so maybe we
touch on that
I mean it's like
a multi-hour
conversation
but at least
let's touch on it
is this the
knots thing
or quantum stuff
or all of it
it could be either
so for those
that don't know
I worked on a
project with
Lynn Alden
and Crypto Ren
a year ago
called BCAP
Bitcoin Consensus
Analysis Project
we mentioned it
a few times
this show
earlier in the year
never really went deep on it though
I think it's
the question is like
the question on a lot of people's minds is like
how does Bitcoin change? How do you change Bitcoin?
But the flip of that is also a very interesting question
how do you not change Bitcoin?
Because if you are invested
in Bitcoin or using Bitcoin and you really care
about
let's say we're investors
or let's say we're running a business
we care very much
about the properties of Bitcoin
We don't want it to change because we like the properties of Bitcoin.
So we should care about how does it not change?
You say do nothing, but what if other humans in the world do something?
How do you prevent it from changing?
So both sides of the coin, it's the same coin, but it's two different views.
So this project was an analysis of what keeps it from changing and how does it change?
there's of course no like authoritative resource and including this project but it's just an
analysis it's a framework it's one way to think about it i think it's i mean i'm biased but i
think it's a good way to think about it um so we produced that in 2024 launched it a little over a
year ago um and i feel like now that there's a couple of uh topics that are related to this
it's starting it'll be more valuable to other folks um one is the the not stuff so there's
There's a BIP.
It was 444.
Now it's 110.
But trying to like defeat spam and confiscate coins, etc.
But it would be a consensus change.
I don't think there's a whole lot of merit.
Certainly not merit.
There's not much oomph to that.
But like nevertheless, it's a topic in social media at least.
And then Quantum continues to rear its head.
We've talked about it a lot on the show.
and it may be playing a small or large part
in price suppression of Bitcoin.
There's definitely discussion and fear
among investors with quantum.
And so if and when quantum computers ever do
become capable of stealing Bitcoin,
we will need to do a consensus change
to introduce new cryptography.
And we've talked about on the show,
what are the different contentious issues there?
So, BKAP project, I think, addresses both of these quite well.
So, you might see some of us who worked on BKAP go on podcasts and stuff and get more engaged on social media to talk about how it applies to this.
But I was surprised in social media engagement yesterday.
Nick Carter spending time looking at the quantum issue right now, doing a lot of research, writing a lot about it.
Which is great, by the way, because Nick is a smart dude, so I'm happy to see that.
Yeah, Nick's a smart guy.
And he's, he's being, he's positioning as a bit of, I would characterize alarmist though.
So more alarmist than I, I think is really.
But I'm glad because even if he's wrong, like it's good that people are like taking it seriously.
Well, that's an interesting discussion point.
I mean, like, because the question of like, when will a quantum computer be like,
I don't see how we can
we're not going to reach a point in one year
I saw someone relate this to like
the environment issue
and I feel like we came up with a bunch of
rational logical arguments
for why it's not an environmental concern
and we're seeing that play out
and it's kind of like
it has proof points behind it
but with quantum FUD
like a year from now
we're not going to be able to say like
yep a quantum computer is impossible
or a quantum computer
We now have proof that it's going to be 25 years until it's viable.
We're not going to have that.
So it's going to be this looming question.
So how do we move away from alarmism?
So I do think it's good to be raising awareness
because we don't know if and when it will occur.
And if it does occur in a few years and we're not prepared,
that is bad for Bitcoin.
So I think what's important to communicate is like,
what are the key points?
Are we prepared?
What's our level of preparation?
And we covered that at the Presbyterian Bitcoin quantum event.
We need to do a better job,
as we talked about on the show a few weeks ago.
We're going to get that out in January.
Not an Alphadrome.
But in any case,
what I wanted to say in that exchange with Nick on X,
I was really surprised one statement he made, which is that there won't ever be a contentious fork again with Bitcoin because BlackRock will just negotiate it behind the scenes.
And I think that's completely insane.
Like if that is true, like if you guys say like, yeah, I agree with Nick and everyone believes that, then I'm going to just exit Bitcoin.
Like, that coin's, like, completely uninteresting then.
If BlackRock is controlling it and just simply just behind the scenes negotiating it.
How much do they hold?
I bet.
Like, I mean, we can talk about that, but, like.
What was the actual number?
Like, a million?
They hold none.
On behalf of the customers.
Coinbase is the best.
On behalf of the customers.
Like, how much are they, in theory?
I know they're not cussing it, but, like, how much are they, in theory, managing?
I think it's on the order of $800,000.
Okay.
Yeah, because to be clear, I mean, I think Nick's point is, I don't know if they have enough.
I haven't really thought about this issue to have an opinion yet.
But even if it's not their Bitcoin in the docs, they can choose it for.
I know.
We cover that in the B-cap analysis.
So you guys should reread it.
Okay.
But do you agree that if it's true that they control Bitcoin?
I don't think they can do it by themselves.
But one might say maybe today as they keep accumulating coins.
I would probably say just on face without thinking about it a lot.
He's probably wrong today.
But like, could you imagine a world pretty soon where there's enough big players that collectively have enough of the supply?
Probably.
Yeah, but I still don't see how they can't control others from forking.
Like others can create a fork.
Yeah.
And the rest of the world can place bets on that.
Sure.
Like a market can exist.
Yeah, but I think his point is that fork would not get any economic liability.
Like 2017, e-cash for a minute.
It could.
If the Chinese don't like the direction that BlackRock's going, they absolutely will start placing bets on that.
That's a good point. Yeah, if sovereigns can beat, sure.
Yeah, I mean, the world's complex, right? It's not just a BlackRock world.
Or Coinbase or Strategy or what have you.
And also another dynamic which we didn't get into in that social media interaction is futures markets I think will play a big...
I mean, what I said in the show a few weeks ago
and I said on Twitter is that I don't think,
in the specific case of quantum,
I don't think we're going to resolve freeze coins
or steal coins because there's really good arguments
for both positions and they both strike
at the heart of core principles most Bitcoiners care about.
So it's a really hard problem, right?
So I think we're not going to like just have a discussion
and come to consensus.
I think it will come, it'll be a war.
I think there will be a split.
And
And the markets will decide.
That's what I've.
I think the markets will decide pretty quickly, though.
I think they'll decide very quickly now.
But an alternative to that, which is the same sentiment, is that there won't be a split, a chain split, because the markets will have already decided through a futures market.
Like, like, you know, if someone proposes a fork at block height, you know, 1.2 million or whatever, and we all see it's ahead of us, there'll be a futures market.
And if coin A, like the freeze coins are worth 10 times more than the steel, or vice versa, that'll be the winning coin and there'll be consensus.
Because I don't feel like, even if you're in one camp versus the other, this is not a deal breaker issue for most people.
Like you might have a preference for, I think you, at least last show, you stated a preference for steel.
I stated that preference over and over.
I don't like calling it steel.
I'm in camp, free markets, we don't touch it.
Okay, camp free market.
And then sailors in camp-
Steals of very bad bread.
Sailors in camp freeze, right?
And I know lots of people who I respect a lot
and have influence that are in each camp.
Yeah.
But I think most people, if they learn
that the 10x of prices in the camp that you're not in,
you are going to capitulate
versus actually go with the underpricing.
I think for any of these things, I agree with you.
That's most likely to happen on quantum.
I think for something like the span thing,
you're always going to have
the kind of like
orthodox tiny group.
If they want to fork off,
great,
they just want to have
any economic value Like Bcash still exists So I think there will be forks but like it going to be obvious obvious which one has value I don think it a negotiation by BlackRock Now one thing I do
think merits analysis is
to have a fork, you generally need
minor activation.
You don't technically need it, but
that's the easiest way to get a fork.
Since mining is very centralized
with a few mining pools,
you can have mining pools and the BlackRock
and Coinbase of the world get in a room, but
But even then, I think the Chinese are our friend there in the sense that...
It keeps things like a...
I think it's the incentives of Chinese and Chinese companies are not necessarily aligned with Wall Street.
Two last thoughts on that. It'd be interesting to get your take on the BCAP project if it changes at all as BlackRock accumulates more coins.
And second thing on the quantum thing,
I know way over time, so in a future episode,
I would like to see anyone that dismisses Nick's arguments
also be AGI-pilled.
One thing that I will say is I know Nick is AGI-pilled.
I know a lot of people that are debating him
are not AGI-pilled.
I would like to see a credible person
that disagrees with him
or is on the opposite side of alarmism
that also believes that we're not going to see AI
rapidly increasing all kinds of discoveries in mathematics,
technological breakthroughs like Matt said,
in healthcare
because I think
that's one area
where a lot of people
I disagree with
and I do agree with Nick.
Cool.
All right.
Great.
Great episode.
Great year.
Yes.
Great.
Happy holidays.
Looking forward to 2026.
Until next time.
Hasta luego.
Later.
Bye-bye.