There it is. All right.
We're live.
Welcome to the Presidio Bitcoin Jam, the July 27th edition.
How are you guys doing?
Great.
Let's not skip ahead to July already, homies.
You're right. June 27th.
I was getting excited because July is when I get to first see the first Presidio Bitcoin, the Builders Summit.
Is that what's called? Builders Summit? Builders? Builders Program?
Builder.
Okay.
Summit.
But it happened last night.
I was out of town.
So one of the big topics I want to hear about is like, how'd it go?
What happened?
Me too.
I was also out of town.
This is big news.
I just ran with it.
Yeah.
It's just Lance Armstrong is over here in his Mellow Johnny cycle jersey.
We have a new sponsor for the show, Mellow Johnny's.
Before we get into builders, do you want to tell us why you're wearing a jersey?
Did you actually ride in from home today?
Yeah, I biked to work today.
Nice.
Decided to keep the kid on.
Good.
I like it.
Authentic, organic.
We're not trying to pose as a news show here.
We're just being ourselves, right?
Yeah.
I have to also say, Steve, I don't know what you're doing, but your arm's looking swolded.
So I don't know if it's not just a Viking, but it's a good look.
Good look.
Well, we now have a pull-up bar at Presidia Bitcoin.
Oh, that explains it.
Yeah.
We are.
Steve got me into hanging
which I've just
set a new personal best
I'm not much of a hanger but do you know what hanging is?
Will you just hang on the bar?
Yeah, that's like a thing, I didn't know that was a thing
but Steve got me into it
Is it for like lengthening the spine?
Is that kind of the main thing?
I think it's like shoulders and opening up
and I don't know all of
Grip strength, rock climbing
Is that the main thing?
Is rock climbing? I heard it's like a longevity marker
I heard there's all kinds of different benefits.
Multiple benefits.
So all we need is the sauna at Pacifica Bitcoin now.
Do you do two?
And the cold plunge.
We need the contrast therapy.
It's not a real podcast if you don't have contrast therapy discussed.
Exactly.
How long can you hang for?
Yeah, how long do you get?
So I'm just, I'm new at it.
This is my first try.
I actually did it with a 50 pound assist and I did two minutes and it was extremely painful.
What's a 50 pound assist?
Meaning like I'm not holding my whole body weight.
I have like a 50 pound assist.
I'm, you know, my body weight minus 50 pounds.
Come on.
Yeah.
Oh, damn.
Steve's coming at you.
I mean, for pull-ups, the assist is reasonable, but just hang in.
Come on.
Well, I wanted to hit two minutes.
So I hit two minutes.
Okay.
That was very challenging.
It's a good first one.
With 50 pound assist, it was very, very challenging.
I thought you were saying you had a 50 pound weight on your back.
No, no.
That's once you get more advanced.
Steve, what's yours?
I can do two minutes unassisted.
That's good.
Yeah.
But it wasn't your first time, was it?
Ooh.
You've got to let me be myself.
You've got to let me start.
And don't shame me for getting into the game, okay?
My first time, I lasted like 11 seconds.
Because you instantly feel the pain.
Yeah, I think that's a that's what she said moment.
But no, no, no.
We're still on my hand.
Okay.
and because i saw some i saw some instagram reel where this guy is on like at venice beach
challenging people to last one minute and i'm like that seems not too hard yeah so then i got
up my pull-up bar and i held on and like 11 seconds later i let go and i'm like there's no
way i can last a minute and then my kid did it and he lasted well over a minute and i'm like
okay, I got to man up
and then I did it again,
suffered through the initial pain
and then got to a minute.
But yeah, I can do two minutes now.
Yeah.
What about pull-ups?
We should have some kind of like
Presidio Bitcoin pull-up competition.
Where are you guys at in the pull-up game?
I can do 13 pull-ups right now.
All right, that's solid.
Or three sets of 10.
Nice.
Steve's a beast.
Yeah.
That's why he's got those guns.
He's right.
I don't think I'd win, though.
I think we have other people at Presidio Bitcoin that would top me.
Is it the ringleader of the sprints?
Can we say his name on air?
I don't know.
He's pretty tight.
The ringleader of the sprints.
Yeah.
And actually, Max somehow, the other Max, didn't know we had a pull-up bar until yesterday.
And then I saw him.
He looks formidable as well.
It's not necessarily the most jacked guys.
And I definitely.
Yeah.
I wouldn't discount Leo.
Um, and Alex used to do it for hockey.
I know, right.
Our producer and lead of procedure between Alex.
So, uh, it'd be a good competition.
I don't know who would, who would win.
Yeah.
I will say I learned, uh, a little bit of a hack here for me.
I could throw my own hat in the ring too.
We'll have to know when we get back in person.
But, uh, Leishman of all people told me that I could do more if I breathe properly.
My problem was that I was not breathing properly.
So now I'm more focused on the breath.
and I can add a couple extra reps in.
I also think you want to keep your chin up
when you're doing it too.
That's another tip.
I was very focused on breathing
to get through the two minutes hang.
The whole thing was like a meditation for me
just because it was so hard.
The last 15 seconds, it was so hard.
All right.
Well, anyway, our action item
is we're going to have
a Presidative Bitcoin pull-up competition.
I love it.
Yes.
Let's do it.
All right.
Okay.
Yeah, you asked about Builder, though.
Builders, yeah.
Tell me about the title.
So, what was it, three weeks ago, I think, on this show, we thought of this idea on the show.
And in retrospect, it seems so obvious to have a monthly meetup that's focused on building applications with a Bitcoin twist.
but a very you know a similar structure and format to bit devs but a very different
intended audience and vibe far less technical and in you know welcoming and inviting for
designers pms in our case silicon valley folks who don't necessarily identify as bitcoiners so
we moved fast. So we
scrambled, put together
some structure
and a topic list and marketed it
and had our first one last night in the Pristity of Bitcoin.
We moved so fast
that the two of you couldn't even
attend because you were out.
But I'm glad we did it. We had 30
people show up. So we had a great
attendance for the first one.
And our
composition of people was
engineers, builders,
kind of existing Bitcoin?
It was a good, I'd call it a good,
so a great number of people.
It's a good start for the composition,
but we want to keep improving.
We had a couple designers,
a handful of product managers,
mostly engineers though.
And aside from maybe a couple people,
most were Bitcoiners, pretty diehard Bitcoiners,
which of course is totally fine and welcome,
but we're also trying to reach out to people
who wouldn't identify necessarily as a Bitcoiner.
So definitely room for improvement there.
But as a first event, I think it was totally fine.
Plus, I think a bunch of us have reached out to a lot of our Bitcoin curious, but non-Bitcoiner tech friends.
And a lot of them couldn't make this date or are traveling for the summer.
So I think it'll just get better each month from a composition standpoint.
um then we put together a topic list much like a bit devs does um with with some twists though
um we did we want to make demos of a staple of the meetup um and we had two demos we had a
startup showcase where one of the startups uh that works out of presidio bitcoin um adju cash
which they haven't even launched yet.
So there was some alpha.
It's a little alpha right there, yeah.
Alpha last night and on the show here.
But this is Bob Scully's startup and Damian as well.
And so Damian demoed AdiCache for the audience.
I think we kept that short, like a couple minute demo,
and then opened it up to audience questions.
I think it'd be better to give more time for audience engagement.
And sure enough, there's like eight different people
with questions or comments about the demo.
So really good engagement.
And then we had another-
Were the questions kind of in the flavor of,
like maybe you might think about the product,
the business, that kind of stuff
versus kind of deep technical stuff.
It was a good mix,
a little more technical than I think we want in this,
but there were go-to-market
and product and business questions as well.
One broader question,
given that they're focused on sort of e-cash,
I'm curious, like, how much of the audience
was already familiar with e-cash and how it worked
or for how many of them was this totally brand new
and they were just like, whoa, this is an exciting possibility?
We didn't explicitly ask that,
but because the audience was primarily Bitcoiners,
half of which have been to a BitDes before,
I mean, I think the audience generally leaned towards technical
and knowing what e-cash, things like that were.
Cool.
And thus, they were...
more technical questions than I'd expect in what will, you know,
in future meetups for this particular meetup.
But still, great audience engagement.
Then the other demo was impromptu.
One of the audience members was super excited and proud of his Vibe-coded app.
So he got up and plugged his computer in and demoed the Vibe-coded app,
which is really cool.
And then so, you know, it was nice to have like –
Do you know what the app was?
Yeah, what was it?
Yeah, well, interestingly, it was Stratum, Bitcoin mining protocol Stratum. There's a website that someone else created that shows a visualization of the Stratum mining protocol.
And the guy who did a demo last night, he wanted to see different types of visualizations.
and while he is a he's a swift programmer but he doesn't know how to program in javascript or what
you know whatever this website however it was developed so he he he uh made the modification
just through vibe coding english prompting and created the visualizations he was hoping for
so it's cool and then he you know and he explained this um yeah they're good questions from the
audience on that too so i think uh that was good then we then we moved to um like a products section
where we talked about the square accepting bitcoin announcement and the returns on
blocks um lightning node coinbase's credit card phenomenal engagement across those those topics
so much so that we like we went over i mean we had a we had probably like 20 20 different things
queued up for the product section we anticipated we get through about half and we you know we got
through maybe a third and that and we still went way over the a lot of time we had in mind um so
the format as as my understanding is the kind of the bit devs and socratic seminar were you
introducing one of those products like you would explain how the coinbase acceptance works or was
that something that somebody would pop up from the audience and kind of they would they would give the
overview of it. Yes. Haley joined as moderator. So the two of us moderated and the format,
moderators introduced the topic, guide the discussion, but shouldn't dominate the discussion.
So each of these topics, if the moderator is doing their job, they solicit audience engagement.
And we had great engagement, so much so that we ran over way over a lot of times.
Um, so that, I mean, it's obviously we, we, we hit it out of the park in terms of our goal
of audience engagement where the engagement was questions, ideas, opinions, everything
we'd want to see from a, you know, from a lot of people in the audience.
It wasn't just like one or two people.
So that was really, really good to see.
Did you, did you see any folks that did not realize, for example, that maybe there's a
business model in the LSP or in routing fees that are now interested in that?
or was there any interesting takes that you hadn't heard before?
Yeah, a little bit.
I mean, I can't, because it's Chatham House Rules,
I can't name people, but, you know,
someone that the three of us know
that runs a business with, like, lightning routing nodes,
you know, he had some really, you know, good comments.
So, yeah, there was just overall
very good audience engagement and comments. Then we moved on. We covered a couple of regulatory
things fairly quickly. Then we moved on to what I was most excited to cover, which was design.
And then we had some discussion topics queued up. And for design, we had a couple topics in the queue.
The first was SATs and the Bitcoin B symbol, which, of course, spicy topic and fun to talk about.
And then the other was seedless is safer, which is also spicy.
So we covered the first one and that was a really rich, full discussion.
Surprisingly, all but one or two people in the audience are pro Bitcoin B symbol and getting rid of the sats, visually at least.
And there are a couple of people that are sats the standard, sats maxis.
but that was a good discussion
it's kind of what I
hope to see in future
builder meetups
because we ran over time so much
we just skipped the seedless
is safer so we can tackle that in a future
event then we moved on to discussion
topics and we had three queued up
we only were able
to touch on one of the three
and the
first one is just vibe coding
and this is just sort of a
more of a like get an understanding of the audience who's vibe coded what tools they
use what do they build and and that was a great discussion just uh especially for a first meetup
and getting to know folks um and there was definitely a lot of interest in vibe coding
and there's just no question in my mind that's going to be a future part of every every meetup
talking about the tools, talking about our experiences with them,
talking about and demonstrating and showing what people build.
No question that's going to be a big part of this.
What did you learn from that?
Were most people using Replit or other stuff?
And did people actually go through and show their prompts?
Were there any surprises in how people were prompting to get better results?
The tools were a wide variety,
just like we talked about ourselves and other people we've chatted with.
And then there's just the one demo.
But we already have teed up for next month.
We're going to have a demonstration of someone going from zero to a fully working Bitcoin tipping app in under 15 minutes.
And we'll show all the prompts so people can see that progression and how that can be done.
Meaning that's going to be done live or that's already done and going to be demoed.
The 15 minute process can be demoed in a shorter period.
it's going to be done live.
That's awesome.
Oh, cool.
And one thing we didn't do yesterday
was record or live stream the demos
and we do intend to.
So next time we'll be prepared to do that
and do the demos up front.
Yeah.
So overall it went really well.
Given the rush to get,
we like to move fast and then iterate.
and we did really well on that to get the first one going,
learned from it.
The main learning, and then at the end,
we asked our audience feedback about what they liked,
what they didn't like.
Everyone, I mean, we stayed till like 9, 15 p.m.
and I think we could have stayed till midnight.
There was that much interest.
That's awesome.
People, like no one left
and everyone was super paying attention
and engaged all the way to the end.
But the main area of improvement,
and I completely agree with what people,
an audience said is that we spent too much time on like sort of news product or news topics and
people obviously like that because they just kept talking about it but it really required
the moderators to like push to get to the next stuff but then once people's got a taste for like
what i thought were the meaty parts then everyone's like we want more of that so design discussion
yeah and just these general time like the we talked about vibe coding but the other ones we
had teed up was the payments for applications using traditional payment mechanisms, stablecoins
or Bitcoin. That'll be a recurring theme, I think, at this meetup. So like, let's get this discussion
started though, right? And then this whole billboard idea I brought up last week, which I don't even
really have a concrete idea. It's just this notion of an idea. We were going to discuss that as well.
yes yes a concept of a concept um an announcement of a concept
so um so we're going to um shift those segments earlier in the program so we're going to do like
quick intro demos record and live stream that then turn the cameras off and then do design and
other discussions and then do newsy stuff at the end.
And we might not even get to the newsy stuff because the discussions are so rich and everyone
seemed completely fine with that.
Even though people enjoy talking about the news and commenting on it, everyone seemed
totally fine if that just gets pushed off at the end or even not discussed at all.
Because actually at BitDevs, there's a pretty healthy, there was some overlap with us talking
about the news with BitDevs.
Yeah.
Yeah. I hear there's also a weekly podcast on that too.
Yeah, I was going to say that the news seems like something you can kind of get other places.
Whereas like, what are builders actually using? What are the tools? What are the demos? Being
able to ask them, where else do you get that? There's not really a good place to get that.
So it's not surprising to me that that would be like a bigger draw and that that would sort of
encourage people would want that to be more of what the purpose of the thing is.
And the live prompting and workshops, I mean, that's like,
that's what i want the next one yeah so i'm super optimistic about um just getting better every
month i think it's gonna be tremendously successful uh my main concern now is just like
i think there's gonna be demand for like six hours of content and you know realistically we
gotta shove it into two hours so i think we we might have to like you know cut you only have one
startup showcase per event and one vibe coding demo per event just from time constraints we can
also work to get more efficient too um you know with getting people set up the demo and making
sure that when we switch from one person to another it's it's it's fast and there's not like
a two-minute pause or whatever so it's a great problem to have it's a good problem to have yeah
so one thing okay go for it again yeah is there any um thought like would it ever make sense to
break down some of the things and do more frequent even than once a month or does that just get
logistically complex and tough for people to schedule uh i think that'd be too much i think
it's better to have the shilling point and it's also nice because we have like an event almost
every thursday now so it's kind of like that's people remember that so one topic that i mean i
was hoping we would discuss today maybe this is kind of a good transition is um the bitcoin versus
stable coins what were some of your takeaways from that conversation because i've been thinking
know a lot about this like yeah what's your tlbr uh nada because we didn't get to it oh shit damn
no we'll start with that we i mean our topic list is public so anyone can go look at it we
only covered a third of the stuff so the i mean the the it wasn't because we were
inefficient like very rich discussion and great engagement throughout so kind of like you said
I mean, great problem to have.
But yeah, we only covered a third of our stuff.
Well, I think we could still talk about it
because I'm curious.
It's a topic that I think we've maybe listed,
or I know we've sort of touched on in our group chat,
but I don't think we've really gotten anywhere with it yet.
And so maybe I can sort of,
I'll play the sort of, you know,
the left side of the bell curve, you know.
It's like, why don't we just use stable coins
for all our apps.
I don't know.
Like, is censorship
really a problem?
I'm going to play
that side too.
You're the Jedi, I guess.
Yeah, I mean,
I have some thoughts
on Bitcoin,
but maybe even to give
a bit more context on this.
So,
one question,
or at least the way
I've thought about this,
is if you want,
is particularly in the
realm of new business models
using micropayments,
because right now,
obviously,
no one does micropayments
on the web.
And I think there's
a very interesting,
rich sort of debate
about why that is. It could be one reason. It could be a few reasons. I've seen very,
I think, compelling arguments for a few of them, which I think is worth outlining.
And then the other question is just in general, as we go more agentic and agents are doing more
things on the web, clearly there's going to be new business models around agents doing payments.
Are they going to use Bitcoin? Are they going to use stable coins? So maybe just to start,
because this is something I actually, I really feel like I don't know the answer to. I have my
own gut, but as I thought more about why don't we have micro payments on the web? And there was a
really interesting article I shared with you, a Stratetri article talking about sort of Microsoft
and them talking about the agentic web. And, you know, he mentioned, I think, what's his name? Kevin,
not Kevin Smith. That's a funny director, but whoever the CTO is at Microsoft that the original
Scott, right? Yeah, exactly. Not Kevin Smith. That would be something else I recommend people
but he basically was making the argument that part of the original center of the web is not
having payments And if we going to or at least actually that was the strategy guy that was making that argument And this guy talking about what if we have a new open agentic web didn talk about payments specifically um but because we didn have payments in the original version of the web then all of a sudden attention ended up becoming the
currency of the web and is trapped us in one of two hells either advertising hell where the currency
that we all pay with is human attention which is of course scarce um and or uh we end up in
subscription hell where you end up paying for a subscription to everything and then you're like
shit like i want to watch this one show on disney but it's not in netflix i'm not going to pay
another $25 a month. And so you end up in this situation where like no one is happy with the
status quo. Now, one interesting point that the strategy guy made is we actually do have
micropayments today, but you don't see it. And the micropayments are happening, for example,
in like Google's ad network where behind the scenes, you know, there's a lot of like real
time, I guess, transactions being done between, okay, here's a human on this webpage, find which
ad to serve them, you know, I guess, do the accounting to be able to pay the micro fractions
of a cent for that ad and an aggregate that ends up being, you know, whatever it is, multi-trillion
dollar economy. So that's kind of one argument. I've seen, um, Gigi put out a really nice, uh,
essay some years ago where he argues that the reason attention became the currency of the web
is because any sort of debt or credit based system, um, it's much more challenging to sort
of settle up in real time. And so as an example, you know, if I need to, um, make a number of
payments as like an example with imagine an agent in this sort of inference world and then all of a
sudden i make whatever 10 000 payments and they're whatever a fraction of a cent but in aggregate it
starts to add up and then i try and do a charge back on that um that's actually going to be you
know impossible if you want to have a completely open system where uh you know you um you're using
a credit-based money so anyways he has some interesting arguments around that about why
attention became the the current still went there i'm not sure i buy that that couldn't be done
with stable coins or dollars if there was the proper accounting of that. And I think that's
kind of what the Certetri article is making the argument that we do have micropayments just with
ads in the background. The most compelling argument that I've read so far for why we don't
have micropayments came from Zabo, which obviously Zabo is always ahead of the curve.
And his argument is basically just that the mental transaction costs are too high. And so if I'm a
human and I'm on the web, every time I want to click an article, even if clicking, yes,
show me this article is only 0.001 cents. It's too expensive for my attention to be able to
calculate, well, do I want to pay 0.001 cents? It's just easier to pay for things in bundles.
That to me is the most compelling sort of reason we don't have micropayments. And if that's the
case, then an agentic web is going to solve that problem entirely because agents don't have the
attention problem. So in that world, I think micropayments are going to thrive. Then there's
the question of if it's not really a problem with the credit-based system, then stablecoins
should do just fine for them.
So that's kind of my setup.
What do you guys think?
Well, I'm kind of of the mind
that the micropayments are too much
for an individual's,
you know, you don't want to have to think
about every action.
So you want to kind of buy in bundles
or have sort of, you know,
draw down as you use it.
And I think we've had lots of examples of this.
It used to be that way.
You'd buy a bundle of text messages
from your mobile phone operator,
the carrier.
And then as you would send a text,
It would draw it down on your account.
It would be a micropayment similar to like the Google ads example you mentioned, but you're
buying a bundle of it.
It's just being sort of deducted bit by bit.
I find that today when I, when I'm vibe coding, I have like cloud code and I have a API key
tied to a credit card.
And every time I prompt, I can refresh the usage stats and I can see, oh, that prompt
cost me 37 cents or less even.
But that concept of like, I need to decide each time is, I think, too hard, like swipe a credit card or make a decision. I think the idea of like having some sort of relationship and bundle and drawdown is kind of a natural way for humans to work.
But I do think that, like you mentioned, in an agentic world where the agent is the one receiving the money and making the decision about where to spend the money, there's none of that mental overhead or kind of the connectivity needed.
So I do think there's like a chance that we get there with agents.
But I think that like the idea of stable coins for payments versus Bitcoin native payments is possibly related, but different than micropayments.
micropayments may or may not be a thing but i think there's this whole idea of you know are
stable coins what people want are they good enough what are the risks what are the trade-offs
is is bitcoin a better payment system today will it be a better payment system over time
um so i think for that we should we should have steve way in because he's he's the guy who works
on this every day well i heard that i'm not going to take the bitcoin i'm i'll take the trad fi or
stablecoin stance.
But I wanted to actually
respond to one thing
you said, David.
I don't agree with you.
The argument you gave about
that humans don't want to deal
with micropayments,
that's a very common response
and I think it's a weak response
because micropayments
don't require that the user
gives attention to every
subpenny payment.
So I think that's just a flawed UI.
It's not a flaw in micropayments.
Like, I could pay, like, a sub penny amount of money per webpage or per unit of content,
but I don't have to, like, actively make a decision.
Each micropayment is just happening in the background.
And I also didn't have to sign up for an annual premium subscription to do that.
I literally am just paying piece by piece.
so yeah but i think we're saying the same thing we're not you said that the reason you said that
micropayments would be used by uh ai maybe but not humans because humans don't want to have to
make a decision every micropayment and i'm saying that's a flawed ui not a flaw in micropayments
right so but the the example that i gave is a micropayments example i'll give an even more
extreme example which is sort of demonstrates the same structure is i i made an app i think i may
have shared this with you. I made an app this week where I connect all your health kit data
to an, to an LLM. So you can chat and get insights about your health kit data.
And so I didn't want, I want to have a path toward privacy. So I chose deep seek.
And so I topped up $10 with deep seek because you could eventually run on your own infrastructure
on this. Is that a joke? No. Why is that? It's toasted by an American company. I think is where
he's hoping this goes but right now it's pretty terrifying no my point is it's terrifying but it's
also just me playing around there's a path toward me saying take deep seek an open source model run
out my own infrastructure and nobody but me the one who runs the app has access to the data
you should check out maple for that by the way maple ai they already are running deep seek yeah
then you don't have to host your own nitro servers or whatever yeah perfect so so that's
probably like the right solution i mean i'm it's more just like a play thing it's not it's not meant
to be like a real thing but the point is i um i topped up ten dollars with uh with deep seek and
now i have a bunch of people using the app you know using my deep seek payment and i think i've
spent two cents total so far across every everybody who's using it and there's you know maybe half a
dozen people using it all their queries has used two cents so but again i i still think i mean i've
heard this argument i've heard this negative response to micropayments over and over again
from tech people saying that like oh humans don't want to make a decision for every micropayment
which is the argument you made earlier and i totally disagree with it i agree that humans
don't want to make a decision every micropayment but i would call that a flawed ui not a flaw in
micropayments simply don't have the user make a decision every micropayment yeah and as far as
this subscription model i i'd
Clearly it's popular, but is it the natural form that humans want?
I'd say no.
There's a lot of friction in having to decide,
like, oh, do I really want to do annual subscription
or even a monthly subscription?
I'm not talking about a subscription.
No.
I'm saying-
You said topping up.
I top up $10.
That's not a subscription.
$10 input.
Right.
So that's friction.
There's a lot of people who drop off
because they don't want to pay that much money up front.
so like if i came if i came if i came if i came across a new like um media content or brand that
i was completely unfamiliar with i'm not comfortable ten dollars hundred dollars whatever
it is up front like no i don't even know who this person is the content but if i can pay a micro
payment to just get a dose of it and then be like oh i do like it and then pay a little bit more a
little bit more but what's it reduces like it reduces well i actually have a ux in mind so i
I think the way-
Micropayments.
But there's some aggregation point.
Like you have a connected wallet
that you approve and sign
when you want the payment to be made.
So is there like a paywall
where you click yes
or how does it work?
We already have this with Albi.
So I actually do this right now
with Bitcoin and Albi, right?
So with Albi,
the way it works is
I have a browser extension.
I can just, whatever,
top up my wallet there
and because it's, you know,
connected with Viannoster Wallet
connect to all my other apps,
I can literally earn sats
or Bitcoin on Primal go into the Albi wallet.
What's really nice is you can then set a budget
via Nostra Wallet Connect for any site that you use.
And so you have two options.
You can either like for a site like Stacker News,
I just have a monthly budget.
I literally just click a button to do my zap.
I don't even know, you know,
that I don't have to think anything.
I literally just click a button, it works.
And then if it's a new site
that also hooks in via Nostra Wallet Connect,
then you actually can get the experience
you're talking about, Steve,
where it's like, I don't trust this site
and I don't want to pay whatever amount of money.
But they'll offer me for two cents the ability to read this one article.
And as long as it speaks NWC or WebLN, I literally just click the invoice button and it works.
So I think to me, the best payments experience online by far right now is via Albi.
And I think the argument for why it works in Bitcoin and Lightning and why I'm still bullish Bitcoin and Lightning in the long run, and I'll take the other side of this, is because it's an open system.
And so I do think stable coins can clone a lot of this and maybe they'll be able to clone this, you know, whatever next couple of year experience even better where I have some kind of a browser extension or wallet and use that for tipping.
but in general one of the like one of the big lessons i have with bitcoin and e-cash and all
this stuff is if a system is permissioned then the limits of what you can do in that system are
always less and if a system is not permission which bitcoin lightning and e-cash i would say
is like the unpermission version of this you're just going to have way more experimentation and
you can like basically try things that you know even if they find the stable coins are going to
local maximum over the next two to three years which is probably right maybe there's some weird
way of doing payments that no one's thought of yet that can only work in the bitcoin lightning
sort of cash you world and in the long game i'm open on i'm more bullish on the open system but
in the short run i would say yeah stable coins can just clone the albi experience and people
will probably be happy with that to give another example of the micro payment stuff like some a
common occurrence that i run into today and i'm sure many other people do too is you whether you're
on google or someone sends you a link over messaging and it's a link to like the wall
street journal new york times or washington post or this or that media site um and you click on it
and it's a paywall it's horrible like i don't want to subscribe to like 75 different media publications
because i'm not a that's too much money in aggregate i don't get enough value from any
one of them to or i at least don't know if i'm going to get enough value out of um them and so
So I, but I'd be happy to pay like my fair share for the content that I click on to look
at, right?
Like a micropayment.
And so the UX does not have to be me choosing every single time.
Do I want to pay 0.3 cents or 7.6 cents or whatever?
No, just like, like Mac said, and we already have tools for this.
Like I set an overall budget and it could be for the entire web, right?
And I'm willing to pay so much per day or month or whatever.
I set that once and forget it.
And I'm very comfortable economically with that.
And then I just browse the web and then anyone sending me a link, I can click on it and actually
read it, get rid of the paywall.
The UX is tremendously better.
And I don't have this cognitive overhead.
So to me, this is like a no brainer.
I don't know why this doesn't already exist.
So let's pause there.
Why doesn't it exist?
Right.
Like, I think we all agree that seems like a higher maximum than the local maximum of
ads and subscription hell that we're in.
Why didn't this evolve?
Right.
So Gigi says it can't evolve with a credit based system.
I'm not sure I buy that.
I'm saying maybe it's just sort of the accident of not having an open system.
And we just kind of got stuck in the wrong inertia.
That seems the most likely to me.
Why do you guys think we don't have this Albie like system where you just top up and
explore the web right now?
Well, how would maybe it's we'd have to think through like Stripe and credit cards and stuff
today.
Like how would the experience we just.
described work with that well you'd give your credit card to the browser so like yeah why doesn't
like chrome and safari support this well so okay so there's a couple of things one if we had had
and andreessen's talked about this before like in mosaic if they had found a way to integrate
a wallet into mosaic from from day zero we probably would have this my understanding is
from what he was saying is at that time you're basically only games in town were to play with
the credit card networks like visa and mastercard and again permission versus permissionless they're
basically like nah and part of the reason that they're not going to do it is their existing
old world business model is i forget exactly what it is but let's say they take two percent plus a
fixed fee on every transaction so that fixed fee whether it's a quarter or nickel or dime whatever
it is is more than the micropayment but that doesn't explain why they couldn't just do the
top up if let me put a hundred dollars in this and then right knock yourself i think in the time of
mosaic the concern like people didn't weren't comfortable giving their credit cards over the
internet yeah that was pretty early yeah people didn't even trust amazon at that time and there
and there was no like tls there's no https at the time and i mean so so at the time of mosaic i think
that's at least one of the reasons but yeah i mean like ever since then though the past
15 or 20 years why the the the fees of visa i don't see how that um prevented google and safari
from creating a situation where you know they build it into the browser
the consumers sign up you know sign up for like a monthly budget um and then anything they browse
on the web could be micropayments i think i think there's a few things one is the publishers
grew up along with that other version of the web. So the publishers grew up throwing AdSense on
there and monetizing via that style of micropayments, which is using attention and not
having direct pay from the users. So it's really hard to get a publisher who's built in a certain
way and has a bunch of maybe there's journalists or writers on staff who have to get paid and they
have monthly bills and they want recurrence. It's hard to shift them into a totally new world and
say, hey, you're going to get paid for the value you create. And the days you don't create value,
you don't get paid that that just like screws up everybody's you know rent or mortgage or whatever
so i think you could establish a new type of publisher who would opt into this idea if if
if the other stuff didn't exist like maybe that still happens in the future but i think like
the existing publishers grew up in the old way the other thing that i think is like maybe maybe
we're not seeing eye to eye on yet is um i don't feel comfortable topping up a hundred dollars into
Chrome and then letting any site draw that down because I trust Chrome, but I don't trust any
sites. Then am I going to whitelist a bunch of sites that I do trust to draw down? And then if
Mac sends me a link to some scam site and they choose to draw down my whole hundred dollars,
like, am I just out of luck or like how, how would that work? Do you whitelist proactively
things or do you trust that Chrome knows which sites are charging me too much or kind of behaving
badly how would that work i think that's easy you can either whitelist manually or you can say hey
chrome like you know based on all of your knowledge you have a rating system if it's a green site
rock and roll if it's not if it's like a red or yellow site then in that case i do want to be
shown a dialogue box and make the conscious decision do i want to pay or not yes you need
to bootstrap all of that too that's a whole ecosystem but in addition so i agree with one
obvious option is to manually whitelist.
So a UX cost on the user, but that
just solves the problem. Two would be some kind of like
trust system
like Max just said. So yes, DK, you'd have to
bootstrap that, but that then basically achieves the same goal
and reduces the UX burden on the user.
thing that could work in conjunction
with those is that you can
either, I mean, Chrome
would default to this and the user could even overwrite it
like some kind of
safety
max, like you can't go
to one website
and it just draws down the entire $100
in one go.
The most a page could
cost is like a penny
or something. And then
if it exceeds that
I mean, the publisher can request more,
but if it exceeds some threshold,
then the user is asked about it.
And that's the way Albi works today.
Like that's like the actual experience.
You just say, I set a budget for these sites.
And if it's a new site, just show me the dialog box.
Which is exactly, I think we're all saying the same thing.
We're saying some aggregated trust point.
And then you draw down on that aggregated trust point,
you configure the aggregated trust point.
Yeah, but everything that we use today
to top up is not broad.
It's very specific.
This is part of my hope for what,
you know, when I first saw Stacker News,
this was part of my hope
for what I thought Stacker News could provide
is they are an aggregated trust point.
You have a wallet connected there.
You have value already stored in there
and you can upvote
and actually recognize something,
but it doesn't go to the publisher.
I kind of, but actually I disagree with that.
I mean, so yes, we're asking the question,
20 years ago, why didn't the aggregation, the centralized browser do this? But today it's your
own self-custody wallet. So your centralization point is your own. It's like literally the bill
fold in your pocket. That's where you're setting the budget. But you still need, yeah, you need
some budget set somewhere. You need to decide what is allowed to draw that. On your own wallet.
Yeah. So that's not the same as like, you know, topping up on Anthropic and topping up on
Starbucks card and topping up, you know, name the top 50 brands you use, having top-ups for all 50
is a very different experience because you've got 50 different centralized brands you're topping up
versus your own wallet in your pocket. Yeah. I think there's two very interesting questions
here. There's the question of the past, which I actually do think is very important to understand
because I think those incentives sort of dictate or at least inform what's going to happen in the
future. So in the past, if you think about this, who would have had the ability to be these
aggregation points? Well, it's the major browser. So it's basically Google or Apple. Google is
probably not going to do this because their business model is just the greatest business
model in the history of mankind from ads. So like, I mean, why would they like put a lot of money
into this? It potentially cannibalizes their main business. Apple, then it makes sense for them to
be the aggregation point with safari and you know potentially something in ios then the question is
why didn't apple go down the slide i mean one answer would be they're making so much from google
and the search payments that there's like whatever they're paying us 20 billion dollars a year we
just don't care um or maybe it's something else maybe just i don't know somehow because inertia
was so strong in this initial model no one put in the time to like go out there because to your
point you have to go out and build the network effects around all the different kinds of
publishers, which is why, by the way, I'm so bullish right now on Nostra Wallet Connect,
Albi, Bitcoin, Lightning, Open Systems, because that's emerging bottoms up, right? Like we have,
like to your point, Steve, like all the payments I do with Bitcoin or Lightning are in my self
custodial Albi wallet, which hooks up to my browser extension. And I literally, I have one
place that I use money on the web and it's awesome. So one could argue that it was just probably too
much work for someone like Apple and they're already being paid $20 billion a year. So it's
just like, meh, that's my best guess. Well, I think you have to bootstrap new ecosystems
on all sides. You need publishers opting into this, you need users opting into this, you need
value stored in presumably non-custodial ways and with configuration options and stuff. There's just
a lot of complexity that all has to happen kind of at once. So I'm not suggesting it can't happen
in the future. I'm just saying like, why do we not have it? Because like a lot of these technologies
weren't even invented 20 years ago,
let alone right now they're just kind of nascent.
So you could imagine a future,
all the pieces that we kind of have together
that a bunch of us fringe people are playing with
could become mainstream over time.
I can call them fringe people.
So I want to go back, David,
you said that publishers have been accustomed
to their ad-based model,
and so it takes time to switch.
um i mean that that seemed true up until maybe eight to ten years ago because that's when all
of a sudden publishers added the paywall and were much more aggressive at getting consumers to to
subscribe so i'm a little i'm i am a little surprised that the past 10 years that that's
not been sufficient time to overcome building out that ecosystem that you just mentioned which i
agree it has to be built out definitely takes time a little surprised that hasn't occurred the last
10 years though um in some sense like it kind of does happen like look at look at youtube youtube
started when youtube started there were zero videos on youtube right and then it started and
people started putting cat videos and like low value things and things that you know dog out of
skateboard stuff that people said there's no value in that well as an internet native person i would
agree but i think most people would say like dog i've got a funny video of a dog on a skateboard
doesn't matter there's no economic value here have it right and i think that's the kind of stuff
like you build out an ecosystem of that that the same website that today aggregates all kinds of premium tv channels and people pay 80 bucks a month it the new cable bundle And I think the way you get there is you start with people not you know kind of uneconomic content content that people don see as economic valuable but that creates like networks and behaviors and gets people opted in
And then people start creating videos on there and they start getting paid ad rev share.
So they don't get direct pay from the users.
But again, the creator is getting paid ad rev share from YouTube.
So I think there's just like a bit of an evolution. We saw it happen in video because video is so expensive both to maintain and just like was hard to serve. But I think we haven't had that same kind of pain. And I think the centralized coordinator there actually made it work in a way that we haven't seen outside yet.
But I'm optimistic that we can get there outside. I think we just need a little bit of like a galvanizing force to like demonstrate the whole kind of full stack end to end thing.
I mean, this is why I'm so excited about having an open payment protocol system and an open monetary system at the moment when agentic AI is exploding.
Because I honestly think a big part of this answer is just inertia is tough to undo.
And there are only certain periods in the history of whatever technology of the universe where you can actually shift that inertia.
And that's when something rapidly, rapidly changes.
And so I actually think that I was chatting a bit with Jordi from Fusats about this.
And Jordi made an interesting point to me, which is that Stripe arose and solved a problem
of basically making it easy for anyone to accept money on the web.
Because if you think about it, there are new business models that are not just ads.
If I'm a Stripe merchant or I can do subscriptions via Stripe, then that's a new way for me to
monetize.
And they kind of did all the hard work of, I guess, aggregating all the payment providers
to make it easy to take money.
but he made a very good point which is and kind of what fusats is going after which is now there's
an opportunity to aggregate making it easy to pay money on the web as well and i think his argument
you know i don't want to speak for him i don't wouldn't say i understand entirely but we had this
monumental shift happening where you know everyone knows people are using google less there's like a
lot fewer eyeballs on the long tail of the web but this is that whole street territory article i sent
you guys. And so no one knows what the business model for the agentic web is going to be. But
whether it's me as an individual or the agent acting on my behalf, somehow me or the agent is
going out there scouring everything on the internet to get information and bringing me back
some kind of answer. And it does seem like if everyone now, like we have the pieces coming,
we have this open monetary system, we have the MCP sort of protocol, which allows anyone to hook
up an MCP to their existing web or media or, you know, whatever agentic business they create.
And now it does seem like there's this like really beautiful window of time for someone
to come in, maybe to build the next stripe.
Maybe it's a few sats or whatever it is and say, okay, or maybe it's Albie with the wallet
they already have.
We're going to find a way to test this new business model.
Cause like you still have to figure out if I'm willing to pay that money, how does the
guy running the MCP server, how does he make money or more money than he would have made
in the AdSense world?
And I think that's like a giant open question, but like, this seems like the time to be.
Well, I mean, I, when I think about new internet businesses, especially things that touch consumers, I think one of the biggest questions I would want to answer is who is underpowered that this technology newly empowers.
Like, and so get rid of all the other abstractions of like how great it would be if this worked and was at scale and blah, blah, blah.
And just like, who's underpowered today and how do you make them super powered?
Like, how do they feel like they're superheroes now?
and stripe did that initially stripe i think today stripe worked with apple and amazon and stuff
uber but back in the day they didn't they worked you should actually look at their initial website
uh one of the archive.org you can see like all their partners using stripe and they're all these
like ragtags random jank projects they're weekend projects they're hack projects and that's not like
a bad thing that's like when when something is newly emergent it's the people who are most
desperate who are first to adopt it and they're the biggest proponents and the fans of it and the
promoters of it and they actually create enough like in a sense liquidity and value and like
momentum that you can then kind of keep up leveling and up the ladder so you continue to
serve them and more of them but then you go find the you know the the amazons the ubers of the
world too um and actually some of those grow up like uber was much smaller when i think stripe
started serving them and then their growth became stripes growth so i would think about like in
fusat's case like who's really underpowered today who's like oh i don't you know i don't have a
merchant account. If only I could hack a website together and have to deal with merchant services
stuff, then I would build this website. But instead, I'm going to go spend the weekend
hiking because there's no merchant services thing. I don't want to solve that problem.
I just want to build my website idea. Well, one answer to that question is,
and I don't know if this is, there's probably a new explosive growth category I haven't thought of.
But one answer is anyone that monetizes via the long tail of AdSense, they're probably losing
the revenue right now. So if I've historically made some money offering my blog or whatever
with AdSense, I think there's no question the number of eyeballs using Google is going down
with AI. More people are using ChatGPT and other Grok, whatever. And so one question is people that
basically want to monetize NCP servers, that seems one group. I don't know if that's like
the explosive growth. What do you guys think? What do you think is the completely underserved
category well that's probably a trillion dollar question yeah yeah well that's what i'm asking
well well i mean i'll give you i'll give you um you know well i'll tell you about the project that
i just started a couple days ago i think i told steve but haven't told max um this is dogs on
the skateboard converting it doesn't involve rat and it's actually changed since since i started it
But it's a concept of like, you know, it's expensive to make VO3 videos, but they're very, very cool. And so could you create like a competition so that if you make a great VO3 video, you get submitted, voted on, judged, and you can actually win a prize like in Bitcoin.
And so is there a way to take like the arbitrage between people's desire to create VO3, the cost to create it, and create some sort of economic opportunity for having created such a thing?
Right. So that's like a concept. I'm not saying that's the winning formula, but I feel like something where you try to try to make all the pieces hang together in a new set of incentives is, I think, kind of critical to to kind of solving this problem or bootstrapping it in some way.
What do you think, Steve?
I'm not sure about underserved. I agree. It's a good area to explore.
I did have some, I mean, the Bitcoin versus stablecoins, I do wonder if there's an opportunity with Bitcoin around it just being ubiquitous.
Whereas with stablecoins, there's not just one stablecoin.
There's many issuers and there's many platforms.
And it's a combinatorial explosion of pairs.
And they aren't natively compatible with each other.
So you need swap providers and these intermediaries which extract fees.
There's just economic friction between stablecoins.
I think we maybe talked,
I forget if we talked live in the show or just off the show,
but about, you know,
is there going to emerge a dominant stablecoin?
Like, I mean, right now, Tether's number one.
And does Tether take over everything?
USDT on Tron, yeah.
That's it.
Like, I don't...
Tron the standard.
I definitely don't foresee a world
where there is a single pair
that,
is dominant and stays dominant like even in a world where tether owns 99 of the market share
even that they will probably evolve their underlying platform over time which just creates
all this you know incompatibility throughout wallets and the the financial ecosystem
uh and i also don't think like usdc is just gonna lay you know
uh you know rollover thank you um and there's other emerging ones too so i think there'll be
fierce competition and for the next five to ten years at least there'll be many many pairs
and um so but with bitcoin there's just one bitcoin um and that's why it's it's incredibly
important yes right now within bitcoin lightning network and the lightning payment protocol is like
the common language between all wallets whether you're using spark arc custodial lightning
cashew whatever um that doesn't exist on solana or ethereum or basically the stablecoin world
so um it but there even within bitcoin there's there's always new competing payment protocols
which stand to add friction.
And I think that's dangerous.
So Bitcoin has a lead there.
Let's make sure it keeps that lead
in terms of interoperability and compatibility
and reducing economic friction and UX friction.
And then that could be a big differentiator
between stablecoins and Bitcoin.
So if you're an AI or you're a merchant
or a service or whatever,
and you just want to accept money,
it's just way easier to get started with Bitcoin.
and actually like so yeah evolving that idea so let's say you're a startup maybe you eventually
when you're really successful you accept many different forms of money but where do you start
and if you're a startup why not start with bitcoin and today is it like uh widely accepted and are
there a lot of spending wallets no but there's no doubt in my mind there's going to soon be
you know tens hundreds of millions of people around the world in their mobile wallet and
agents who can spend Bitcoin. We'll have the spending wallets for Bitcoin. And then what,
like why it'll become the obvious first choice to accept money will be Bitcoin.
So I think there's a couple of ways this could play out. And I think this is the most important
question, not only for startups and businesses, but also for like the, whether our future is
authoritarian or not, like whether we have freedom in the future or not. So I think one
interesting question, and I actually don't know all the numbers in this, I would want to go look
at a bunch of these different venues is. So clearly Bitcoin has a network effect around people holding
Bitcoin, store value, all that. There's no question. It has somewhat of a network effect
around payments at sites like BitRefill and, you know, in the old days with things like local
Bitcoins and my understanding like Paxful, whatever those companies are in emerging markets. However,
stablecoins clearly also have a real network effect in emerging markets in places like,
you know various african countries argentina vietnam for actual on the ground real payments
and so there's no question that stable coins are kind of like in my mind at least winning for like
the normie user doing payments today now that doesn't mean bitcoin can't win because we are
we already have this huge sort of like um distribution of people that are holding it
um so the question in my mind is there's a few ways this could go one way is if something like
tether on tron got absolute dominant market share i could see where it becomes the the payment
standard. I don't think that's going to happen either because there's going to be so much
competition for people trying to issue their own stable coins. Then the question is, is there a way
to make all those other stable coins and networks interoperable? This is what a company like Bridge
is trying to do, right? Which is literally an exchange between stable coins. And that's why
they got acquired by Stripe for billions of dollars. So Stripe is kind of making the bet that,
you know, it doesn't matter if there's a long tail of stable coins, as long as we can be the
one to market make between them. So that's one option. The thing that makes me a little nervous
there is, it doesn't seem like Stripe or any of those guys or Bridge are leaning into also
doing the interoperable market making with Bitcoin, right? Those are all, they're like,
they're like regulated, you know, stable coins on platforms like Ethereum or Polygon or Solana
and certainly Tron. And so then the question becomes another way that this could go is stable
coins do get very popular, but because Bitcoin is so widely distributed and people want to get in
and out of their savings vehicle that you have stable coins that also speak Bitcoin Lightning.
This is the taproot asset bet from Lightning Labs. This is the Spark bet from LightSpark. I think it's the cash you and e-cash bet from guys that are speaking Lightning. I think it's extremely important in that world if you want Bitcoin to not just become an ETF sort of savings vehicle. Somehow, I don't know what the answer is, but you need to build that interoperability between stable coins and the Bitcoin Lightning networks right now. This is the moment that needs to happen, I think.
the most likely is there anybody doing stuff like that like is there is it relatively easy
to swap between usdt on tron and bitcoin no and is that like other technical limitations that
prevent that or i mean i think there are a hump there's a model that drives but that doesn't
doesn't speed wallet or speed do that well speed is one example but they're like relatively small
compared to like whoever the dominant tron wallet is in argentina my understanding is
if you want to get let's say like where there's actual distribution there's possibility and speed
is showing that it's possible but if you really want to get between tether and bitcoin in you know
mexico let's say you're using bitso so the way to do it is through a centralized exchange which is
fine but that's obviously a bit of a choke point as well i still think and i've said this for many
years um i funded a startup sadly you know it probably wasn't the right one but i still think
this is a huge years ago this thing this is a huge opportunity now which is to build a bridge between
Bitcoin and all of the stablecoin stuff using the Lightning Network. Maybe Bridge will be the one
to do it. I doubt it. I think that's just like if I were like looking for what is the huge, huge
like Coinbase, next Coinbase size opportunity, I think it's for people to market make between
Bitcoin and all the stablecoins. The top root asset Lightning Labs vision of that is that's
all going to happen on edge nodes within their ecosystem. Maybe that works. I'm sure Lightspark
has their own version of that as well. But I think there's tremendous opportunity there.
The other thing is just from a sort of like freedom perspective, you know, if it all comes, the exchange like basically comes in these choke points like, you know, and I'm a big fan of Bitso, but like if it becomes just a few centralized exchanges, then I think that's kind of like if you put your conspiracy hat on kind of like the path of like just turn Bitcoin into this like capital asset, which is sitting in ETFs and like try and choke off the points to make it be used as money.
my guess is if bitcoin is going to become money we've talked about this many times i've mentioned
my pod with uh drew bansel on ideas from the edge we talked a lot about this it's probably going to
happen in gray markets first it's still my guess so whether that's incentivizing torrents or you
know some whatever providers that for whatever reason have trouble plugging into the traditional
payment rails that's probably just like bitcoin got its first start with silk road and sort of
adoption of the dark web is probably the most likely trajectory. Obviously, I'm not saying
anyone should do whatever illegal things, but if I had to guess, it's probably going to follow that
kind of a pattern. Now, on this swap idea that you touched on, my understanding is that part of
the core technology innovation or kind of breakthrough that Shazan and the team at Lava
worked on was being able to bridge the understanding of something that happened on a usdt on seoul
with something that's happening on the bitcoin blockchain that that the kind of how you look at
how the two of those things understand each other is a big part of what makes lava work even you
know even possible to do is that is that true and if if it is if that's a published have they
published anything i never i never understand any details about lava's stable coins yeah i don't i
don't know how much of that is published uh my guess is it's it's something that well i my
understanding is that's pretty core to how it works and it seems reasonable i know we had a
little discussion with shazan the other day around like can i what'd you say can i pay an elephant
or something you were talking about trying to resolve.
It just, for me, it seems super opaque.
So I don't think we have the information
to even learn about it.
Yeah, I think, Shazan,
if you or the Lava team are listening to this,
I know in other conversation,
we've talked a little about this bridge idea.
I think it'd be super cool to publish like an essay
or one, like to Steve's point,
explain how the DLC Oracle and Bitcoin land
speaks with the Solana USDC.
I think that's what they're using.
So that would be interesting, one thing to learn.
But two, I think this maybe even expanding this vision of what it could look like to have.
Because to take a step back, for those of you who are not familiar,
the lighting network uses hashed...
Oops, we might have.
Max, I think maybe your mic died.
Do you need to charge it up?
The battery didn't last very long.
Yeah, I think it was only partially charged.
i guess maybe has a two two hour battery life yeah okay um but but my understanding is if if
lava did achieve that and i think you're right there probably should be more publishing on exactly
what how that works but wouldn't that as a component be useful to just like make available
to other wallets that wanted to make that kind of interoperability easy like anybody who today
supports usdt in any form sol or tron or whatever probably could benefit from being able to have
that wallet sort of just be able to swap swap that right but definitely i mean where we yeah
we're back okay cool we're back awesome um so david just asked um if we assume that lava works
that way wouldn't that be useful but but i'd say that we know a lot more about spark and taproot
assets and that's absolutely part of each of their ecosystems vision is to be bridge compatibility
between Bitcoin and stablecoins.
Yeah.
So I think, yeah.
So they seem to have way more development
and it's more of a thrust of those two ecosystems
than Lava,
and there's more information about them.
So, you know, I think there's no...
And then there's, you know,
Bridge.xyz with StripeBot.
I mean, these already exist in its early days.
We can assume it'll be there,
but it's still economic friction.
I mean, it's both economic friction
and regulatory choke points too.
All these swap providers,
it's hard to imagine them existing
without regulatory oversight and without KYC.
So there's UX friction there
and there's economic friction.
They also seem like they'll have
strong centralization tendencies,
which just to me means
a recreation of
Visa and
like the fees might
start free and then they get
more expensive and then more expensive
and then we just sort of wind up with
what we have today.
So that would be a concern.
I think the only way to get around that
though is like the beauty of the
Lightning Network is
it can operate with any
crypto chain that uses
hash time lock contracts or HTLCs.
Now there's some issues around that with like you can
you know potentially had this free option problem like how long you're waiting for something
uh to to settle between those i guess two chains but i'm trying to find right now casey rhodemore
of ordinal infamy he published a blog casey by the way for those of you don't know i know he's
he's a controversial figure within the the bitcoin ecosystem but that guy is so fucking smart and has
so much alpha he published uh sort of an article or blog like five years ago talking about like
decentralized lightning network switch bridge swaps between bitcoin and like all these other
chains i still think so if someone's we lost you again max max i think we lost you i don't know if
you are swapping out to your swaps i don't know if you're swapping out to your other wireless mic
or if you just want to go raw and maybe he needs to bridge yeah maybe he needs to bridge his swap
a little better.
Alright.
I didn't like him anyway.
But I,
another thing
we should talk about
is,
like,
I believe lightning
is unique
in the world right now
in providing
instant settlement
where instant is like
one second.
So,
another way to like
analyze this opportunity or challenge is what use cases demand finality in one second.
Were you able to hear what I just said, Max?
I think I got the gist.
Yeah.
So this actually gets back to, you mentioned Gigi's article and he, you know, where he
states that the reason micropayments haven't taken off is because they're incompatible
with like a credit system.
whether we believe that or not um to whatever degree it's true
lightning is transformational and that it's not a credit system you get finality of your payment
within one second so what are use cases and product opportunities that require that type of
instant settlement that are incompatible with any kind of credit system like they
need the trust of the finality of the payment and whatever those are bitcoin and lightning should be
a very natural fit for i think the most likely one of those is a combination of two things we've
discussed which is agentic stuff ai and so for those who you know i think this is actually a
really important point worth hitting on in the old model of the internet or the web you effectively
had zero marginal cost every time you like called a server. It was some cost, but it's like,
it's effectively zero. In the agentic version of the web, every time you ask a model to do anything
or perform any kind of inference, there is a real world cost. So that's a really, really important
primitive to understand because if there's a real world cost, someone has to pay that cost.
And if I'm using a credit system and let's say, you know, every time I call an inference,
It's a penny. And I call, you know, 10 million inferences on you or 100 million inferences on you.
And then all of a sudden you're left with a million dollar bill.
If I default, that's a real cost that businesses cannot sustain.
So that one thing to understand Now in a lot of the world if you working with Google and other trusted providers they be able to sustain that cost likely based on trust So I think it going to be some combination of AI Again the kind of long tail or gray market or gray web version of all of this where if let say for whatever reason I don want to use all of the like centralized trusted models like Google or open AI maybe because I don trust their data
And I want to be able to use a free market of model providers who I trust to either store my data better or for whatever reason, I think lightning real-time settlement for something with a real-world cost, which is electricity and computational cost, that is using something like Nostra Web of Trust or is not using the old-world trust systems, that to me is where the explosion is going to happen.
Now, the question is, what's going to be that first killer app where I'm using the free market of models for inference instead of the centralized providers? That I don't know.
and the and the centralized providers have a lot of ability to subsidize usage for a long time so
that's that's another headwind like to really cut through all of the noise and make something
work like this i think you really need to in a sense control a lot of it and then be willing to
let go of a lot over time sort of you almost need to start centralized with ideology to control
or to let go of control over time versus, you know, sort of let these things like,
let these things truly bottom up emerge. Great. But you need somebody who's like pushing it
forward. Who's going to make, make that happen because you have centralized providers who are
subsidizing and making it much cheaper to do that. And like rational actors are going to say,
you know, like, like Google just launched this Gemini code thing and you get like, you know,
I think a thousand prompts a day or something that's subsidized, right?
Like it's paid for by the ad network.
So like if you're building another, you know, another IDE or agentic coding service, you
don't have the ability to subsidize like that.
So in a sense, like people aren't always rational on the transaction level.
They're actually rational over time, but that time can be brought forward by subsidy from
other business models.
I really think you need like a very, a very specific, strong reason to do something different.
And that's why I come back to the, and I don't know what it is, but this sort of gray area, right? So like where I still think this is really going to pop, again, I'm not suggesting anyone do this, but I think this is just looking at reality as it is, is say there's some sort of like new gambling agent. And that agent is doing some kind of like, I don't know, like, like scraping a bunch of MCP servers that are getting data for betting on sports or something where in your jurisdiction, you can't use Google because the government just says you can't.
and so your option is you either use this gray world or you don't and that's probably where it's
going to pop i'm in agreement i i mean i said gambling gaming adult that's those are kind of
good use cases because they're dk brings it back more more desperate need is is always going to be
better hey guys we we had about 15 minutes left i think we wanted to cover the um fannie mae topic
Oh, yeah.
For sure.
Should we switch to that?
Yeah.
Let's do it.
Because I think the payment stuff, it's going to be a recurring theme on this show.
So we'll definitely discuss that again.
But yeah, I guess it's been, I think, two days ago.
Bill Pulte, I saw a tweet by him.
I didn't even know he was part of the U.S. administration until he tweeted that.
But he's the, is it the housing department?
I think he's the head of the FHA
and he runs one of the
largest home builders in the US.
Classic Trump.
Classic Trump administration.
But he's also
a Bitcoin or so.
He also, I lived
in a Bill Pulte home in Tucson,
Arizona. That was a Pulte home.
Did it have his name up in neon?
Right on the front door.
Was it a great, big, beautiful home?
It was a nice,
I mean, it's a track home, but it was a nice home.
So, but he, yeah, I didn't know he was part of the administration, but I definitely had seen several years ago that he's a Bitcoiner because he is like giving away Bitcoin on Twitter and stuff like that.
And now, you know, he announced two days ago that he's ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to treat cryptocurrency as an asset to be considered when someone applies for a mortgage.
So that's a big announcement because I know historically, not only did most lenders not count Bitcoin or any kind of cryptocurrency as an asset, it could even be a negative.
I have several friends who, once a bank learned they owned Bitcoin, they got put in the naughty, risky folder.
And it didn't even matter that they had ample assets, traditional assets like stocks, to cover the loan.
They were discounted because they just owned Bitcoin.
So it's obviously a major announcement and major progress to flip that on its head.
So overall, I think it's very good news.
There are some cautions with it, though, in that it also came with the caveat that the cryptocurrency has to be with a regulated exchange.
So that creates a disincentive to self-custody.
so if it turns out that people who are already self-custodying decide then to store their
bitcoin with coinbase in order to take advantage of this that's that is a net you know or i don't
know if it's a net negative it is a a drawback to this uh and if there's people who are currently
using a custody custodian but would have otherwise self-custodied but then no longer decide to
because of this, that would also be a negative.
Similar to like with ETFs.
I mean, overall, I think it's a net positive for the space,
especially when it creates opportunities
for new people to enter Bitcoin
and who otherwise would not have.
But when you have people who previously self-custodied
sell their Bitcoin to buy BlackRock ETF,
that act I think is actually quite bad for Bitcoin.
So then that created a conversation on social media about why, and, you know, we chatted privately as well, about why self-custody was not included.
You know, a traditional Bitcoiner would put on their conspiracy hat and think that it's the government intentionally trying to get everyone to custody, maybe.
But we also came up with, like, legitimate reasons as well.
And I, you know, DK, you brought, you brought up reasoned, um, uh, seasoning funds is one
of them.
And I'd never heard of that term before, but I mean, but I, um, so thanks for educating
us.
But, um, but I, I knew the, I mean, I knew the concept.
I didn't know that was the term, but, but basically it's very common for a lender.
If they're going to look at assets, you have like stocks, uh, to judge your merit for a
loan or the rate you're going to get or the terms or whatever, uh, that, the, that, that
stock that's held at that lender or their financial institution, it needs to have been
held for like 60 days or 90 days or maybe six months or some period of time there so
that you're not like quickly moving them in and out between financial institutions and
taking out more loans than in aggregate than any one institution is aware of.
So with self-custody, if it was, you know, how would you demonstrate you own the Bitcoin
and what prevents you from,
I think a scenario you brought up, David,
was a group of friends could get together,
pool their funds,
make it look like any one of them
has a lot more money than they have,
and then we could just go around the group
and all of us look like we have five times more money
than we actually have.
But there are solutions to these problems.
So for one, you can prove your ownership
of Bitcoin, even if it's in self-custody. And two, you can, Bitcoin, the protocol has time locks
built into it. So you can lock up your funds for any period of time. So if Fannie Mae has a 90-day
requirement, okay, there can be a solution. And there are solutions that exist where you can lock
up your Bitcoin solutions, meaning the protocol supports it, but there's also wallets that support
locking up your Bitcoin for 90 days. And then you can prove that to the lender and then they can be
confident that you're not, you know, sharing it with friends, at least within that, that 90 day
window, whatever the requirement is. So I think what, what I was left with is like, we need to
understand what the requirements are. And no one, even like Alex from river didn't even know what
the requirements are. He doesn't even know if he's going to be able to participate in this,
even though he has a regulated business, but you know, there's different regulators and different
licenses. And is he the right one? He doesn't know. Then there's providers like unchained capital.
um you know are are they are they part of this or so it would be good to understand what the
requirements are both for businesses but also just for self-custody and open source processes
yeah but my guess so thanks for the overview and i mean there's there's so many details to this
i've been researching it a lot um and kind of learning new things and kind of making new
estimates about it but um i think one of the things is you know and i i'm certainly you know
very willing to distrust any move by the government and willing to wear a tinfoil hat and stuff but but
i don't think that this is as much of a like conspiracy by the government to get you know
your bitcoin into a third-party exchange or something i think it's more just like it's the
easiest way to parallel the existing system and have like information sharing networks where there's
like us regulated entity that has to participate in the information sharing so that you can watch
how money moves around and try to understand what risk there actually is um the the 90 days
seasoning of funds is one thing but oftentimes there's also a question of like where did these
funds come from and you have to like attest to the source of funds and if every 90 days you moved
that around you could still you could still play that little collusion game if you're not buying
new homes every 90 days you know i could i could gather up a bunch of funds hold them for 90 days
time lock it if need be and then once i'm approved for a mortgage i could push the the funds over to
the other friend in the ring and we could still create a ring of fraud that way which we don't
want to do and we would hope that there's a solution where you could prevent that in a similar
way to preventing fraud or limiting fraud or reducing risk in the current system.
So I think time locks are potentially interesting, but that's a little bit closer to collateralizing.
And I think the point here is that this is explicitly not collateral for a mortgage.
This is asset determination, which helps the lender understand if you're likely to be a good
risk and if you have funds available to, you know, reserve funds available to pay down your
mortgage in case you lost your job or whatever. I mean, I'll just make one comment on that because
I actually think this is very interesting. I think that, I mean, there's the question of the time
lock, which is cool, but I think to me, this is more of an opportunity to create protocols,
to basically create new forms of reputation and insurance. I think this is actually a very
interesting opportunity for people in the nostril ecosystem to start exploring so one question is can
i say i have this amount of money can i just prove i have that money well that's what proof
of reserves and companies like hoseki already have solutions built out for that which is great
but it doesn't answer any of the questions of like potential you know collusion with other
people are moving the funds around after that what is how does it work with the prove that i
have the money means something about like like you shot you sign you sign a message with i guess the
utxo that controls a certain amount of bitcoin that proves you know the holder of this private
key sign this message so they they have the private key yeah but the issue is if if you're
talking about like a mortgage you're back in trad fi and now you're back in kyc land and so how do
you tie that signed message well this is this is where i'm going with this so i i think then the
more interesting question is that's like step zero the more interesting question is building a
protocol where you can demonstrate for example if i were going to sign a message for this there's a
couple of different ways i could do this one is i want to say not only do i have control of this
UTXO, but two, I'm committing this UTXO to a very specific loan. So there's a message basically that
says like, Hey, here's the loan that I'm taking out. This UTXO is tied to this for some specified
amount of time, whether it's time locked or not. Then you may have a separate piece. And again,
if you do this more modular, you can plug and play depending on who you're working with,
which is kind of like a KYC module. And so I know, you know, this is kind of like some of the vision
for what TBD was working on with verifiable credentials and all the web five stuff.
I think this can get rebuilt in Nostra is my guess where it's going to happen.
But you could literally have, you know, a third party that says, so imagine you have
the person who holds UTXO, you have the lender, then you also have a KYC provider.
And maybe the lender has a list of KYC providers that they're willing to work with.
So then you, as the UTXO holder, go and work with whoever the KYC provider is.
They say, yep, we know this key, you know, whatever, out of band.
this person, whatever is who they say they are. And then the lender can choose who they're willing
to accept a verifiable credentials from. So someone then attests on top of that loan. So as
the UTXO holder, I say, I'm associating my UTXO with this loan. On top of that, this third party
has come in and given me some whatever credibility and signed a message saying, yes, we know this is
max or whoever they say they are. But someone has to put all those pieces together.
i i think that solves the problem that that you put forth david yeah yeah i think like those feel
to me like the right kinds of building blocks um my guess is the current system is not as exacting
as one might imagine like there's a lot of wiggle room and how it actually works but it's like good
enough and people understand it and then all the these ingredients could be built out into a totally
new system that's actually much easier to verify and more open and actually more rigorous about how
it works. But it does take somebody kind of pushing that agenda and putting those pieces
together and then kind of building the product on top of that and delivering that to the market.
Looping back to our earlier conversation, my guess is, again, you look where the tectonic
plates are shifting, maybe the place to really get this thing going, because again, like whenever
you have to fight the inertia of the old world, it's tough. And unless it's at least 10x better
or 100x better, it's just, and even then with Bitcoin, it's still a multi-decade process.
Maybe someone's going to pilot this in a brand new area, like loans for agents. So you have
autonomous agents that are out there and you're like, okay, this agent wants a loan. Okay.
That means all of the old world system is just thrown out of the window. Who's going to build
a financial system for agents? And that all has to do with native public-private keys
from the ground up.
There is no concept of a human.
That to me is an interesting area
that I would be exploring.
Yeah.
Touching on the point I was sharing before
is I think a lot of times
in consumer internet stuff,
you want to find people
who are severely underpowered
because they become the big champions.
And it strikes me that
with this kind of idea,
there's a bunch of people
who probably have some amount
of Bitcoin wealth
who have very little TradFi wealth.
And they would be the people
who would be underpowered candidates,
that they like really want this.
And if you can provide them
even a fairly broken solution,
they will gobble it up and use it
and sort of promote it and ask for more
because, you know,
sort of like so disempowered
in the current system.
And this would become like
the first step of empowerment.
But I know, Steve,
you've been a little active on Twitter,
kind of asking like,
where have the open source developers been
and why are we not part of this conversation?
Have you heard anything back from Pulte or any of the other participants in this?
Still don't know the requirements.
So I think that would be good to have published.
I got reminded of the startup, I think it's pronounced Hoseki app.
as
Sam
from
he used to work for Fidelity
started that
several years ago
they do proof
proof of
UTXO ownership
including for self-custody
so that seemed like a piece of the puzzle
and
yeah I mean
many open source Bitcoin advocates
liked my tweet
but yeah
no one
no one's
signed up yet to
to work on this. Although, you know, I guess maybe it's less of a open source project and more like a
product that needs to be built that takes a bunch of existing open source software and bundles it
together into a compelling package for consumers. Yeah. And also, I guess part of that, it might be
a new startup opportunity, but part of that would be whoever's driving that initiative should be in
the conversation as we're figuring out how the U.S. exchanges that get the regulated U.S. exchanges
participate in whatever information sharing network there is do we have does that person
have a seat at the table you know kind of another natural i didn't mention casa but like nick newman
too would be a natural person like he should have a seat at the table you know casa unchained
river all those companies i don't think they understand yet and clearly they should be in the
loop on this so it'd be good if the government like published the requirements and include
folks like that
at the seat of the table.
Do we know which
U.S. exchanges
are approved?
I assume Coinbase is one.
Coinbase.
Is that the only one?
I would have guessed
River would be
another candidate.
Did they announce
Coinbase was approved?
No.
No, I think it's just
an assumption.
We don't know.
I don't think anyone knows yet.
A product idea,
perhaps this is something
for me to play with
vibe coding.
I could see something like
btcseasoning.xyz
or season.xyz
maybe btcpaprika.xyz
and
And I do think there's a really interesting opportunity to build for this long-term, whether it's agent loans or the kind of marginal, the people on the edges that got rich off Bitcoin early on.
That, to me, is extremely promising for someone to build this parallel system.
And maybe it's the last, I agree, the rivers of the world should be the ones really hammering home on this work with the traditional mortgage lenders.
But I think there's going to be huge opportunity for a sort of parallel financial system, parallel lending system for agents, the sort of marginal people, let's say. And that's like an area I would definitely be sniffing in. And so maybe we'll help some of those guys get seasoned.
yep should we uh oh go ahead go ahead i was gonna say uh one of the things that i would say
is is best about this announcement i actually i don't know if this i can't tell yet how much
real impact this has given that it's fha loans and it's not using it as collateral but it's
using it as asset evaluation so it it's like a very kind of in a sense it it applies to a lot
of people but it's it wouldn't surprise me if there's like a very narrow set of people who
actually get value from like they they have an fha or need an fha loan and they need to demonstrate
additional reserves beyond what their income shows like it's it may be a bit of a niche i don't know
But I think it does drive the narrative forward that like Bitcoin is relevant as an asset to consider for any kind of loan, you know, mortgages, but also any other kind of loan. It starts to kind of give it some more credibility. So I do think like the more that this narrative emerges, the better it is for Bitcoin in all kinds of contexts.
even if this one i don't know i agree it's used yeah i agree too is the argument then just to be
clear because i didn't realize that i thought you could use it as collateral like so that actually
seems a lot as powerful if you can't use it as collateral is the like the benefit besides maybe
getting approved when you wouldn't have gotten approved that you might get a better interest rate
yeah i think you could get approval or you wouldn't have gotten approved you get a better
interest rate but basically you're showing the lender like hey i have such and such like say
w-2 income that should qualify me for a certain value of a home and they say well do you have 12
months of reserve in case you lose your job then you can still pay your mortgage and so you can
show that reserve in u.s dollars and stocks or now you could show it in bitcoin as long as it's held
in you know or fart or fart coin or fart point maybe yeah he said cryptocurrency he said
cryptocurrency yeah yeah not bitcoin so yeah i i saw a nostril post from alex gladstein this morning
um that i thought was just right on the money it's like because he was talking about how he was in dc
it is again not to harp on this point we have to move forward but it's just like crypto has done
so much damage it's so frustrating like why why is bitcoin still being lumped in with fart coin
or even ethereum someone at the event last night said that uh jokingly that they are going to create
a new coin
and then sell one of those
tokens to their friend for a dollar
and all of a sudden they're worth
$10 million and then use that
for their Fannie Mae loan.
I think there has to be some kind of
liquidity requirement among
other things.
Ultimately just Bitcoin.
Yeah, exactly.
Should we wrap?
We're a little over?
I think we're good.
cool cool all right well good to see you guys in person soon hey now are we doing are we doing
something different next week because of yeah so we so i think we're not doing it on the fourth of
july because it's fourth of july um and we did share enthusiasm for not missing next week though
so we need to come come to an agreement are we going to do on wednesday or thursday or
i think we're pretty flexible so anyone who's planning to tune in next friday uh just a heads
up that we'll probably do Wednesday or Thursday
instead. But look for it on Wednesday or Thursday
because we're doing it. Stay tuned.
Okay. All right. Bye, everyone. See you.
Goodbye.