All right, and we are live with another PBJ.
This is January 16th.
How are you guys doing?
We're back.
Good.
Good to see you guys.
Yeah.
We almost came in.
We flew by.
Where's our homie DK?
I hear he may be coming back soon.
Next week?
Is it?
No, next week?
Yeah, next week I think I'll be around.
We'll be in studio next week.
All right.
Yeah.
In the meantime, studio, hold down the fort.
And shout out to our boy Oshu here today.
Yeah.
Doing a great job.
What's up?
I noticed where it's 12.05.
I think we officially started
almost on time,
but five minutes late.
And I was going to propose
a new thing
to try to get us started on time.
What if we create a pot
for every minute late?
You have to contribute to the pot.
So if the live stream
doesn't start at noon,
whoever's not sitting down
owes the pot.
I like it.
I think Max will like it the least
because he'll owe the most.
And then I think I would...
I think just last week alone, your pot is the biggest by far.
That's just cumulative.
Additional.
But I should get extra bonus points for my early morning flights in January and December.
Yeah.
And then I would.
That was your decision to go be a crazy Iowa State fan.
Which is a good decision, but.
And then, by the way, they lost Tuesday.
Seriously?
No, I didn't.
I just thought we were going to win every game this season.
Yeah, y'all were on fire.
Who'd you lose to?
At Kansas.
Well, I mean.
We got blown out, though.
I mean, it sucked.
Kansas, Kansas.
Kansas played like Kansas.
Yeah.
As opposed to Kansas losing with Kansas here.
By the way, Kansas always has a very dark place in my heart.
2008 year, we had D-Rose.
She had won national championship.
Freaking CDR, T-Bag, Kevin Love on the way there.
Went to OT, right?
Well, you did.
In fact, we were up by a lot.
Missed all of our free throws down the stretch.
And Mario Chalmers, I'll never forget.
Yep.
Get that three.
I'm sure DK remembers that, too.
Yeah.
Remember the overtime game, TK?
Beautiful.
Just couldn't remember that.
Yeah.
Hey, actually, this is a good idea from Matt.
So shout out to Matt, who's always in the chat.
Says the pot should go to the viewers since we suffer.
That's actually not a bad idea.
Oh, yeah.
Yes.
Good idea.
Now we need to vibe code the collection tool,
the tracking and collection tool.
And I think Matt is a new vibe coder
as of just a few days ago, I think.
So Max, this is a payment app.
It's perfect to kind of sharpen your chops.
He has some environment issues.
All right.
So straight up.
So we're going to jump into Vibe Coding in just a minute
because you homies have been working on this community,
which I still have not seen.
And I am making the effort.
I finally was like yesterday.
I'm like, fuck it.
I'm going to get off zero.
I'm going to join this damn community.
I want to be a part of it.
I'm going to do it.
And I will say this.
I'm still excited.
I got to list like 15 fucking ideas, bro.
Every morning I got new ideas.
But the reason that it is challenging,
And I, you know, I learned to program on Repl.
Interestingly, in 2018, I was one of their first users.
In fact, their second engineer was my roommate.
I love Repl.
And, but I mean, programming, man, just like the patience.
Oh, God, the patience.
Like, it's not my personality.
Different people got different strengths, different weaknesses.
Like, just like, oh, fuck this variable environment.
Or like, you missed a comma.
And then, you know, but, but the reward was so great.
I stuck with it because I did the Justin Moonbittle boot camp.
I shipped some CLI stuff that could interact with Bits' API,
and I built my little apps because my desire to understand Bitcoin was so strong.
I really, really, really wanted it.
And so I suffered through the horrible, horrible pandemic programming for years.
And then I was like, fuck this.
That's how you develop patience.
That's literally, you have a goal.
You understand what time purpose is, right?
But you need to have that goal.
The problem is, to me, it's like there's opportunity costs.
straight, right? Like I'm working on this amazing essay, which I got to tell you guys about. And
like, we'll talk more about the GPU marketplace stuff. I think I see something like the biggest
company opportunity of all time in that direction. And so it's opportunity costs. Like I'm working
on this great essay thing, or I can go and fucking bang my head against a computer.
And so when I used to do Replit, I remember every day I would sit there and I would program
until I couldn't figure something out. I would rage quit. Literally, I don't have patience for
computers. Rage quit, throw the computer, come back the next day. And then it would click and
be like, okay, I just took some time away. And literally that was the pattern every day. Rage
quit, come back, the next day it would click.
And that sort of happened last night.
I thought we were finally at the point where you can just give it a prompt.
I'm still trying to make my meme generator.
Guys, I've been asking for this for a year.
Finally, I'm trying to take matters in my own hands,
get the meme template, post it, get paid.
But fucking replet!
And MDK, shout out to Nick, he's going to help me.
We got the secrets, it was super easy.
But there's something funky happening. There's always something funky
happening. So, hopefully,
by next week, we'll figure out what that is.
That's my story.
I love that you got off zero.
because I think it's really important.
Actually, I got another friend that I,
you know, he's actually extremely non-technical,
never programmed anything.
And I did a one-hour session with him in Replit
and actually took an idea that he was excited about.
And I vibe-coded it for him and got it started.
So we spent an hour and he was like,
that actually works?
He couldn't believe it.
He was shocked.
He knows nothing about DNS
or how to deploy a website or something.
and he has now a functioning website of his idea.
Now, I helped get it started,
but he saw it's unnecessary.
Like my role in it is totally unnecessary.
He can do this himself.
He didn't believe that, but now he does.
Well, I may still have to come back to you
or one of the other kind gentlemen in our chat
to handhold me through that first horrible variable
of environments that Nick's trying to figure out
what the fuck's not working within stupid variables.
It's just the frustration.
But if you can get me to that point
where I get that first app done.
By the way, this is what I was telling Nick in our chat,
and I'll say this to anyone working on vibe coding.
It's that magic moment.
If you can reduce the friction from zero to pain to zero to fun,
and you can just show something.
And this is why I think, whether it's going to be from the community,
which any of you guys are going to talk about,
or from MDK putting this out, a replet,
just like, here's like, assume that I'm completely retarded,
like a five-year-old or whatever.
I want to just get from zero to something.
Help me get from zero to anything.
and I think the floodgates come down.
Yeah, and I think it's not that hard,
but I think right now when you see rep,
it's like, what do you want to do?
And then it goes through this like
whole planning phase and design phase
and then the thing that comes out
isn't necessarily exactly what you want.
It's a mind shift switch.
Well, I think it's both, right?
Like the planning and learning from you guys.
Like, for example, when Matt Belez,
I watched him do the Vibe Code here at Builder
a few months ago, whatever.
Like, okay, or maybe it was Max from Lexi.
Like, someone showed me like,
you need to like say, here are the docs,
explicitly look the docs.
Okay, that was a good tip.
Like there's a lot of those things you can learn,
but to me it's a fricking troubleshooting.
It's like,
the thing that I hate with programming is when it says error and you're like,
why is this error working?
You feed it to LLM and it doesn't give me an error.
So it's just like troubleshooting.
Like what is the environment variable I'm missing?
Like stuff like that.
Anyways,
we'll get there.
A few comments.
I mean,
first of all,
I,
I feel you.
I,
well,
because I,
I am going through the same,
I've gone through the same thing.
Yeah.
I'm not that,
I'm only a couple steps ahead of you.
Like Matt and DK are like way ahead.
But I think you realize your 2018 experience
and even before that with programming,
it was kind of like death by a thousand cuts.
You'd have a thousand cuts to get from zero to something.
Just getting the dev environment set up,
like pre-replit was like a thousand cuts.
And then once you had that set up,
you'd have thousands more cuts
while you build your software applications.
And that's why, number one, you have to be patient,
you have to be a skilled programmer,
and it takes you a year plus in the past.
Totally.
now we are on the cusp of making it exactly what you want.
There's still, you know, when I first,
I talked about my MDK experience,
I think it was last week or recently on the show.
And yeah, there were a couple hiccups I had to get through.
They weren't even MDK necessarily.
It was more like the Repl.it agent using MDK.
And that's probably what this is.
But you know, I had, you saw my questions in that chat group.
I had questions and had to sort of, quote,
debug it, figure it out.
But debugging and vibe coding is like
very different experience than hand coding.
So I encourage you to keep at it
because what we can observe with DK
and Matt Belez and other people we've seen,
they've leveled up their skills.
And we'll talk about some recent applications
they've been working on
and just I'm in awe of the iteration cycles
that they're going through.
I basically used to say,
here's a bug, here's a problem in chat.
Right. And like before I can even type the next sentence, it's like, okay, push to push change,
check it out. Fixed. Yeah. Added. It's like, it's, it's unbelievable. So the inspiration is there.
I would say it's building for me, right? Like it's still, to be honest, like, I mean, like I do have
ideas around this. I would say the inspiration is still like, obviously I, in 2017, 18, really
wanted to understand Bitcoin. Like you can ask my friends back in those days. I didn't know anything.
I was sleeping on a floor.
All I owned was mastering Bitcoin
from Andrea Sensenopoulos.
I was upset.
You remember, that's when I met you.
I'm not at that level of vibe coding yet.
But what I will say is,
I think DK,
so eventually the product will hopefully get there
and AI models will get there.
So like product solves all of it.
But like, I cannot say enough
whether whoever in this needs to be,
Replit, MDK, the community,
like if you just offer,
if there's a way,
and I'm going to hit you up, DK,
but like specifically,
if there's a way it's like,
hey man, I really want this to work.
Just fucking frustrating.
like click here to schedule like a 15-minute session
or just do like live like office hours every week.
I think we're still in the each one teach one phase.
And yeah, I agree.
Paravibing and learning through that.
And I've talked to a lot of people
who have gotten their start
kind of getting something up of a prototype
where they become convinced,
like they're not really from the software world,
but they become convinced
that this thing is actually a good idea and they like it.
And then they go off and hire somebody
to basically like tutor them in vibe coding.
And I think you mentioned something like this
in our chat,
which to me seems like
it's a real business opportunity.
It's like, get something started,
but then actually now that I feel
enough confidence
that it's kind of in the right direction,
hire like a professional vibe coder
to like really grind through the details.
Yes.
And that should be a worldwide market,
should be payable in Bitcoin
or whatever people want to accept.
And we've talked about this idea
on the show for years
and it's actually related, I think,
to the compute marketplace stuff
we talk about later as well,
but like I will be your first customer.
Like if you're a really good vibe coder,
I swear to you.
Huh?
Yeah.
that yeah exactly i i've got like 15 fucking good ideas and well let me just i'll never have the
patience to how to bootstrap that marketplace yes is don't build the marketplace i don't have the
idea you have the money you are i did it last year and also by the way i gave a hundred thousand
side of the marketplace you don't have to build the whole marketplace out you're the demand side
and now go find one supplier and see how you guys work together and then the next demand that comes
be like, hey, I've got a supplier.
And then once you've got too much activity to manage,
then go build the marketplace.
I think I'm looking at the supplier on the screen right now.
Well, more broadly though,
what if they're like a community?
I know.
A curated community.
If only.
Okay, we're going to do a first on PBJ.
Let's do it.
So people have been listening to us for 50 plus episodes.
Of course they have.
Every single one.
Never missed.
Every one.
Some people have.
We're going to do something new.
I don't even think you know what we're going to do right now.
Well, I mean, I guess all little.
Well, you know, we're going to talk about the title.
I'm in the dark on this one, guys, because I can't get my fucking environment set up.
By the way, the bar for this is higher than just setting up your.
I promise you, my ideas are fucking gold.
I ain't got no question.
You know what I'm saying?
My ideas are going to get.
Yeah.
No.
So everyone's like antsy to hear what is our first.
We're going to we're launching this community live on the show.
Let's go.
We were going to announce it on Twitter earlier this morning,
and they're like, let's do it on the show.
All right.
So hopefully, okay, Matt Belez is listening.
Live announce, live announce.
And we'll give a lot of love to Matt Belez because this is his baby.
He's been up since 4 a.m. getting this shit ready.
So the Spiral team can go ahead and tweet this out from,
I think there's some communication,
but we're announcing a new community called Flint.
All right.
Right?
Based in Michigan?
we'll have to think of that
we'll have to think about that angle
it's called Flint and
to no one's surprise it's about vibe coding
it's kind of a culmination of like
what we've been chatting about quite a bit in the show
since February
March almost a year
really since forever since the early days
basically the whole show we've talked
you know
I'm sure we could run an AI engine and it would tell us
what percentage of the time speaking
but I'd say like 15-20% of the time
at least has been on this
and we've talked about some of the cool apps
that Matt Belez has built and DK has built.
I'm still a bit of a straggler.
I have high aspirations though and so does Max.
But what we've learned is that like,
yeah, anyone can do this.
So it's really just like develop the inspiration
and committing the time.
And so we hope, one hope with this community
is like curate a group of people
who can help each other.
Yes.
They can give each other feedback,
test out their apps,
encourage with positive support.
Critical support too,
but in a very, you know,
very loving, loving way.
Your shit sucks.
And then also gain inspiration.
Like I see,
so you're Mr. Idea, right?
So you'll be building something
and I'm like, that's great.
And it'll help me ideate
and think of new things to build.
100%.
So it's called Flint.
It will be,
it's a curative group.
So there'll be an application process
People can sign up.
We're going to start small.
We want to set a high-quality bar.
And Matt and DK already have produced apps
that are a pretty high bar.
I'd say these apps are not world-changing apps,
but they're simple.
They're simple and focused, but they're polished.
And we'll show a couple.
One which has not been announced or revealed
that DK has worked on, and I think it's super cool.
And actually, Max will like it.
I hope Mika is going to make an appearance.
No, it's not Mika.
Because I beg to differ about world-changing apps.
This is the...
If ever there was a world-changing app that needs a...
The one we're announcing...
It's a G-rated app.
This is a G-rated app.
It's a thinking Mika.
In fact, we'll have to think about,
are we going to have ratings for parental ratings on our apps?
My other app that you know I've been working on
is not quite as G-rated.
it's not Mika
but it's also
it's maybe not as family friendly as
the one we're talking about on the show
is I would give it a G rating
we can also have some Nostra badges
so for whenever DK drops an ad you can have the NC-17
if you guys remember that
well let's go
Ashu do you want to go ahead and
show the website
so we're not going to spend too much time
showing the website but for those watching the show
instead of listening
will walk you through what this is about.
It looks really nice, by the way.
It's flint.dev.
F-L-I-N-T-S dot dev is the website.
And yeah, as you can,
I mean, I think the branding is pretty obvious.
Like with this community,
you're at the beginning of a journey
building applications.
It's all about building applications.
And it's a nice subtle touch.
Like the art is like black and white pen
with orange sparks.
So really nice aesthetics.
Yeah, we also, I mean, you know, this is the Presidio Bitcoin Jam. People that listen know that we talk about Bitcoin a lot. We care about Bitcoin a lot. But also, they know this show and what MaxDK and myself represent and care about is more than just Bitcoin. We care about AI. We care about building really compelling applications, some of which might incorporate Bitcoin, others might not.
And that's also inherent in Flint.
And we've been very intentional about the messaging and copy.
Like, we don't hit you over the head with Bitcoin.
We want people, just like at Presidio Bitcoin,
and just like in the show what we talk about,
we want people who would not identify as Bitcoiners to participate.
Like, we've created the Builder Meetup, monthly meetup here.
We invite and welcome and want people who would not identify as a Bitcoiner to come.
They're just interested in building compelling apps.
It's the same way with the Flint community.
Before I go on, too, with navigating through this website, it's launching from Spiral, which is the org I run.
And Matt Belez, who's on the Spiral team, he's the man behind Flint.
He had the conception of it.
he's built this. We'll talk about actually
this website too in Vivecoding.
Conceived the idea,
executed an idea, and really drove it.
DK and I have been helping out,
and DK's done some compelling
apps that are part of it, but shout out to Matt.
Why is Spiral doing this?
Spiral, our mission
is about making Bitcoin everyday money,
everyday currency.
One thing we realized, we can build tools
like Lightning Development Kit and Bitcoin,
BDK, and these different tools
and protocols. That's all very important
foundational work, but
you still need demand
for Bitcoin payments.
And so we've talked about in the show
a few months ago, the Bitcoin merchant community.
Well, that's an initiative from Spiral to help
catalyze retail payments.
This is an effort
by Spiral to catalyze
payments from
new types of applications.
I love it.
So that's why we think it makes a lot of sense
for this to come from Spiral.
So we're not going to walk through every word on this website, but Asha, if you can guide us down to Firewood, this will show the gallery of apps.
Basically, the concept here, you have to apply.
Once you're accepted, you can join a private Discord, and that's where we will help each other, support each other, and share ideas and information.
Within that private community, there's also a members-only website or portion of this website as well.
There's a Kindling section, which is like very early apps.
So like the kind of apps you and I might build, Max, could be published there.
Well, I slam myself to it.
If I get beyond the environment.
So any member can publish.
There's a low bar to get into Kindling.
and we're seeking feedback
and it's alpha testing.
Then once,
and then other community members
can star,
they kind of vote,
but it's like sort of star,
like a thumbs up,
like we like this.
This is ready to go public.
It's a signal.
And so,
and then,
you know,
if there's enough support
and if the author
of the application
wants it to go public,
then it gets published
to Firewood.
So you can go ahead
and click on
view firewood please
and
let's make sure we're
sharing this
the shed
that's what you were talking about
we can't see
DK can you see the firewood
I can see the firewood
I can see
two and a half apps
okay
cool
yeah scroll down a little bit
yeah
so these are the three apps
that we feel have met
the bar so far
nice
Impressionista
and Bitcoin Lockbox
have been
public
they've been public
we talked about
at least the last one
on the show before.
The shed is just being revealed right now.
Asha, can you click on the shed and share that screen?
And then I'm going to turn it over because it's DK's baby.
Tell us what this is.
Yeah.
All right.
So we're looking at a screenshot of the shed.
The shed is a web application that I made starting maybe about a month ago.
and I've just been iterating on it daily.
So I'm kind of grew up playing classical piano
and kind of reading music.
And I also got into jazz,
but jazz is kind of this whole other world
where it's not about reading music
and it's about like understanding
a lot more details of chords and extensions
and alterations and various kind of jazz scales and stuff.
And I've always known it in my head,
but I've never had it in my muscle memory very well.
So I wanted to build an application that helps me use what I learned is possible now is WebMIDI is a MIDI format that is available in like Chrome.
It's not supported by Safari, but in Chrome and several other browsers where you can actually connect your physical.
I have a physical digital piano that I connect to my computer via USB.
And then I open up this app and I just do the MIDI connections at the top, you can see.
and then I have all of these practice modes.
And so a simple practice mode,
it's not even super jazz oriented,
but just intervals.
So I was listening to a YouTuber
who was doing some jazz instruction
and he's like, here's a bunch of chords
you should be able to get to,
if I prompt you with a chord,
you should be able to get the answer within two seconds.
And I said, oh, that would actually be a fun little game.
Like prompt me with something
and see if I can get the answer in two seconds
or how long does it take me to get there?
And can I improve my timing over time?
so um so intervals is like a simple one if i were connected right now with midi keyboard
um i could click start on the there's a little start game just below uh what we can see in the
screenshot and um and it would give me a three two one countdown oh okay sorry i didn't know we have
the actual application up not just a screenshot but but we don't have web midi connected so don't
don't worry too much but it would start the game and um and then it would prompt me and it would
say, hey, play a major seventh over G or something.
And then I have to play that and it tells me how long it took.
So was it under two seconds?
Was it 3.4, 5.7?
And then it collects up all of my performance of those skills within, I think I have it
on 12 rounds as the default for this game.
Those are all configurable too.
And then it gives you kind of a performance, almost like, think of it as my high score
on the game today.
And so I can keep playing and keep watching how my average timing is improving, hopefully.
And it also measures accuracy.
So is my accuracy improving?
Is my ability to get these things quickly responded to with the appropriate interval or chord or whatever?
Are those happening very quickly?
And I can just watch it.
And I've watched it go from some of these things would take me five seconds weeks ago because I'm kind of trying to think about how the theory maps to my fingering.
and and now I can actually get you know basically all of them under two seconds
because I literally I've been living in this thing I must have used I think I
built the app along the way while I was using it and I think I spent you know at this point 30 hours using the app because I actually am like patient zero user of this app I really care about it and
want to use it for myself. But, you know, I spent a lot of time, so I figured, okay, this is a,
you know, a good one that we can sort of use as a part of the showcase for Flint. So that's what
you got. And I think it's only at the beginning, really. So to me, I could see taking a whole
path of further building on this right now this is just a javascript front end but i could imagine
having like a server side component so that um so that i could store my performances and maybe even
compete against other people who are trying to do those same performances and see how
how they're progressing and i'm progressing so it feels a little bit like maybe strava for piano
in a sense like you're sort of recording your runs and seeing segments and seeing how you
perform over time and then seeing how it compares to other people you know so i think there's sort of
a a long roadmap pretty fun that i have in mind of things i want to do with this uh but this is kind
of very i'd say probably one of the more extensive projects that i've built so far but it's still
only at its infancy and that it's still only just you know you can pull it right off it's served off
of github and we've got the links um if you want to try it we'd love to hear if you have feedback
and requests. But it's just a website served off of GitHub pages.
It doesn't even have a back end yet, but it's still super useful to me. So I thought
let's package it up and put it as part of this community because it's all the ethos of
what we're doing in the community too. I think it's awesome and I happen to have
a MIDI keyboard. So I don't know how to play
piano, but I'm like, I'll test it out. And it worked like a charm. It worked right out of the
box. And I wasn't able to do the exercises because I don't know how to play piano
and it's fairly advanced.
But once you're actually using it, it lights up.
And I mean, it's kind of what you'd expect.
It's really incredible.
I have two thoughts that have jumped to mind immediately.
Number one, I kind of feel like I know we've talked about it a lot on the show,
but it's one thing to understand something intellectually.
Another thing viscerally, this is the future in the sense that everyone,
and again, something I always come back to,
we haven't even seen the gigawatt cluster runs.
This is what we're doing with what we have today.
This is the worst day I will ever be.
Like everyone is going to be able to make their own custom apps.
That's crazy.
Yep.
Real quick, Asha, I think we can get rid of the,
or we can go back to just staring at our three faces.
Yep.
And by the way, I'm going to point out one thing on this
that I'll reference later is you see where the orange buttons are.
It says one intervals.
Thank you.
That's a whole collection of like games I call them
or practice modes that I put together.
but there's infinite number of practice modes in the world that somebody could want to build
and you know whatever you're working on whatever level of skill you're at maybe you're just trying
to learn basic scales or middle c or whatever so you could imagine a version of this thing
that actually uses an llm to expand itself because that's how i build the practice modes is with an
llm so the app itself could have kind of a chat or llm you know co-pilot or kind of collaborator
that could help you customize this piano tutorial
to any form of music.
Doesn't have to be just jazz.
And you could actually expand it to build your own
and everybody else could benefit from everybody else's stuff.
So I think it's like, in a sense,
it's just a sliver of the future.
But to really get this going,
I feel like every app,
I guess maybe the high level thing is,
every app you build with AI
should also natively assume
that others will expand it with AI.
And I think that's not an idea that's very popular yet.
One thing that just jumps out at me immediately, and I'm curious if you've used Bitcoin or
Nostra in here at all, but to me, the biggest thing that jumps out is this makes me insane.
Again, I already understood this intellectually, but very different viscerally. This makes me so
bullish on Nostra. Because in this world where anyone can literally speak into existence anything
at the snap of a finger, what matters is where all of the identity and data goes to in a cruise.
And so I'm sure Google and Apple and Facebook,
whatever, will have their logins
and your identity there.
That's fine.
And that'll probably do really well.
But if you want an open alternative to that world,
I mean, Nostra was literally made for this.
So I don't know how to integrate Nostra
more into the Flint community.
But to me, this is like,
all of the people that have been like,
hey, Nostra could one day be for all the micro apps.
And then yet we still only really have Twitter clones.
And we do have hundreds of little app ideas,
but it's all hackers that never polish their stuff.
But now, I mean, like, I mean, I don't know if you've added this DKM, would you consider adding just log in with Nostra?
Yeah, I mean, so right now, there's not a lot of data persistence, and there's not a lot of collaboration or sharing.
So right now, I do all of the data persistence and just like a local storage just in your browser, which is not like a perfectly ideal thing, but it really works for me, and I really built it for me.
But if other people wanted to use it, Nostra would be the natural place to push that.
But right now, I haven't, well, I don't know.
It's sort of a divergence from Flint.
But I've worked on another app in the past week, which is a Bitcoin app and uses Nostre in exactly the way you're talking about.
And it sort of doesn't really work without Nostre.
So I can tell you a bit more about that.
Maybe we'll actually talk more about it next week or something.
Yeah, I'd love to hear.
But I want to be clear.
I mean, that's awesome.
And I know there will be certain apps that lend themselves more to Bitcoin and Nostre.
whatever. But my point is just like, if you said this is Strava for piano, right? Like forget any
special Bitcoin functionality. Like, okay, I just want to log into this app and see what my friends
are playing. That's it. Like super, super simple. And it's like, I could do that with Google if I
had that social graph or Apple or Facebook or whatever. But for a variety of reasons, you know,
let's say I want an open social graph. It would be so cool if I just log in with Nostra. You and I
are already friends on Nostra. It surfaces you and just says, hey, here's what DK's playing. Hey,
did you know steve tried playing something i was like i didn't know steve played the piano
yep yep and and i think if you i think you had that kind of you know i agree it's a good reason
to be bullish on australia i think if you had such a thing and you had the list of who performed
the 251 progression fastest or fastest average time i think you would end up seeing people speed
run just like you do in video games you see people speed run to try to be the best and
the world would get better at playing piano at every time because there's like a fun competition
that helped yeah i just want to make this point super super clear because i think it's worth
really stressing there are like lots of weird cool new ways to use nostril and bitcoin that
we haven't thought of yet and those apps are gonna be amazing we're gonna keep watching them happen
over the next year but like for any skill acquisition exactly what you're saying the
basics of a leaderboard and social graph which can also be upvoted on that leaderboard based on
who zaps you. That idea alone,
just social graph, show me
a leaderboard and show me specifically a leaderboard
of my friends ranked by
zaps, maybe with some web of trust in the ranking
for any skill acquisition
or really anything.
That alone is transformative.
A couple things. One, I think
the best way to
see the
nostrils happen is just for people to build it.
In this community, it won't be,
it's not a requirement you have to use nostril, but someone
is going to lead the charge.
I mean,
BitChat already demonstrates.
BitChat already
demonstrates Nostra, so we already have
a great example, but others will be created
and it'll influence
other community members.
Hopefully there'll be a lot of
non-Bitcoiner
builders in this community.
Most, I would assume, have never heard
of Nostra or don't understand it or don't believe in it
or think it's a toy or whatever.
but they'll then see other applications
that are built that are really compelling
and then how did you do that?
Oh, Noster, it's the only way.
And that's going to incept them.
And I would even love to see some experimentation.
Like again, I hope one day I get to that level
but I would love to see an app
from someone like a DK or a Matt
that's like already knows how to do this polish
or maybe Nick or someone from the team.
Like just to get people's mind going around that
and then some kind of like, you know,
explain it like I'm five document.
And I think it's worth even considering
a rebrand, not even a rebrand.
I don't know how to say this exactly, but like,
what if you don't even call it Nostra? You're just like, hey,
want open identity?
We recommend use these
docs. Point your Replit agent to these
docs. Oh, what's Nostra?
That's the protocol underneath it. It's just open identity.
I think with all of these, you know, with Bitcoin,
with Nostra, with all of these
tools that, you know, help
preserve freedom and
create more freedom, I think like the
reason of choosing it should always be because
it does something that you can't do the other way it's not like oh i can buy coffee with us dollars
i'm also going to buy it with bitcoin fine like no hate there but just the the place where it
really shines is like wow i wanted to send a payment to a 15 year old in india and i that
was not really possible before because you can't have a bank account i think that's where that's
where these tools really shine so instead of telling people hey go build stuff on nostr just
build whatever you want and if it turns out nostr can help solve your problems better we're going to
be there ready to recommend it. But I'm agnostic. I don't care if Noster fails if it's not useful.
I want it to win if it's useful. I agree. But I would then issue a specific challenge for people
more capable than I am at this point. One experiment I would love to see. And maybe this
will be you, DK. For your app of just playing the piano, okay, we all agree that a global leaderboard
and a leaderboard of your friends ranked by who did something with zaps or something like something
of like who did a thing, who played the fastest or who made the most progress, like ranked
by zaps or ranked by payments, let's say, right?
If someone can find a way, and I think this is what I love about Nick and the MDK team
is like their whole thing.
It's not about Bitcoin.
It's just, hey, accept payments faster because you don't have, I mean, in theory, I'm still
figuring this out, but in theory, all you have to do is just like point it towards the
docs, get a secret and you're done.
There's no account login.
There's no KYC.
There's not, it's just like, it just works, right?
That's the same with Nostra.
Because if I say, hey, try, and I would love to see you do this.
Try building two versions of an app.
In one, to get your leaderboard, you need to use Facebook or Google or Apple.
Right.
In the other, use Nostra.
Now, forget Nostra.
You tell me which one actually was easy.
Or Discord.
Actually, there's a good, because the way the Flint website works.
And that should be on, we should move that to Nostra too.
Flint's authentication right now is Discord.
And we actually didn't discuss Nostra.
so uh i think matt you're listening so we should talk about yeah dog food nostre why not why nostre
why not nostre um we are using discord as a community there's still not a good community
tool as far as i know on nostre so that would be one reason if there were one then you know so again
an idea recursive baby recursive yep and and if there is a super talented vibe coder you know we
could all put it and here's another idea pots dk wants pot sorry a pot um we could all like imagine
everyone could just fund this where it's like listen you know uh and i'm gonna guess the answer
for why we're using discord today is because one the nostril alternative doesn't exist and two
that's not true that doesn't exist i think um hodlbot has a version of her but it's probably
just not as like good or future rich or whatever is like the company that's raised hundreds of
millions or billions of dollars which of course makes sense but like imagine i mean dude this is
so cool for like starting businesses.
This is going to be incredible.
It's like Kickstarter for everything. You can just
pre-fund it. It's like, listen, we really
want to move Flint onto Discord. It's
not good enough. So,
I'll kick in on, you know,
a thousand sats. You kick in a thousand. All of a sudden,
wait a second, there's a giant ass bounty. Now,
then you have to figure out verifiability. Like, who's
going to like, whatever. There has to be some judging criteria,
whatever. But like, that's huge.
Huge.
I'll donate 10,000
Bitcoin to
Max
to get him started
with his paid replet.
I'm definitely not building the Discord thing.
I will take your 10,000 Bitcoin
from my first app. I will get
this damn meme generator up and running. That seems like
sufficiently complex
and good for where I'm at.
It's a great starting point. We need someone of your skill
level and maybe someone listening.
But seriously, why don't we have a good Discord?
I think
Madison, Flotilla.
is that the name of the discord one like an australian okay but i haven't i haven't tried
it lately i don't know i want to make one other meta comment and i i have to say you know matt
belez if if you got that um the website going it looks beautiful absolutely beautiful like really
i'm impressed um my honest assessment of noster and bitcoin is there's like there's the technical
and the hacky stuff but like i think 90 of our problems is it's just for autists by autists and
like we just need designers.
It's just we need designers.
That's it.
Like, I'm serious.
Like, I mean, yeah,
you need some technical stuff, whatever.
But like, and maybe this is something interesting
to get the Bitcoin design community
more involved with Flint
because literally all we need
is people with taste and patience
because if, like, I bet Flotilla
I haven't used yet,
but I bet it's like jank.
I bet it's beautiful.
I mean, I bet it's a beautiful idea,
but I bet it's jank.
But one thing I'd say,
and well, first of all,
love to designers
and we want more designers
involved in Bitcoin.
But I would also say with AI tools,
you don't have to be,
or we can,
You mentioned taste.
And Matt, I mean, like, vibe coders talk about taste.
Right.
And you don't have to be a professional designer background to have taste.
Yes.
So I think that's what's important.
And now if you have taste and you combine that with these tools,
you don't have to be a professional designer to yield a nice result.
Like, I think, you know, what both Matt Blez and DK have created
and like what Jack's created with BitChat and a lot of other examples
are polished.
Yeah.
and demonstrate good taste.
And none of them are professional designers.
So I would love to hear.
And again, this goes to another idea,
which we really need.
And I heard some other people talking about
like Normie land is another massive idea,
which DK mentioned many times,
version control for vibe coding.
Like I want to see, Matt,
how did you get something to look beautiful?
How did you do that?
Yeah, I agree that that would be good.
And I don't know the answer offhand.
What I was going to say,
the development of that website,
I don't know if I have all the details straight
but I have at least the high level
Matt had a web dev do traditional web development
to create that website
in parallel he vibe coded it
I don't know if he ended up scrapping all the web dev
or built on top of it
what I definitely know is
whichever route he took
all the additions
and we've been doing them in real time
last night and this morning
are all him vibe coding.
So even if it was a traditional web dev
got the starting point,
it's been vibe coding since.
And I've found maybe like 10 bugs
or problems with it in the past 14, 15 hours.
Yeah.
All of them fixed instantly by Matt
and with AI tools.
I suggested a few features be added before launch
that were launch gating
and he was bound and determined to launch today.
And he got him done.
I mean, it was absolutely incredible
how quickly you can iterate
without touching a line of code.
So wait, he's saying design in Figma,
trad, web, dev, vibe coding.
So we're not all the way to vibe coding yet.
But maybe we'll get there soon.
I think it's like a hybrid, yeah.
And I will also say,
because I had my website for HiveMind,
HiveMind.vc.
I worked with a designer.
It was a long and arduous process.
And we finally, it took a long time.
A lot of that was on me.
But we finally got something kind of like up and running.
And now he's got me on Webflow and I hate it.
And it's like, I want to make a basic change.
And it's like pushing the boulder up a hill.
And I'm already to the point where,
I mean, just publishing an essay was all,
I mean, again, as you guys know,
I've established I'm not the patient technical guy,
but it was just like, dude,
this is unacceptably horrible.
and I'm just going to throw out there right now
that there's some incredible designers with great taste.
I'm open to redoing another web redesign
on my site later this year.
Again, same thing as in,
I would love to go to the Flint community,
say here, I got the vision, let's sit down.
Someone that has the patience and the skills,
we can work together on the taste.
Like, I would love to pay you to do that.
So I'm just throwing that out into the universe
in case someone wants to all of that.
So a few more things I wanted to mention about Flint.
So one question people in the audience might be asking is like, maybe they're questioning the value of it.
Like they can, you can already go VibeCode, you can go look at Twitter and get resources and information to help out.
But, you know, I think a successful Flint will be a place where you have peers that are going to level up your game.
And they're going to level up your game because you're going to see what they're doing.
and you're like, oh, I'm behind.
Yeah, it's already happening.
It's already happening.
I got peer pressure into doing something.
Yes.
So that's one thing.
And then you're going to have a requirement
to be part of this community
is that you commit to not only building
and building a certain base,
but testing and being a good team member
and community member.
Yeah, that's good.
And yeah, because like myself,
I've been lacking in the building.
I need to up my game there.
You're the best.
But I'm a good tester.
Of everyone in our chat,
Steve is always on the money for testing shit.
120%. So both are important. And there's an expectation, if you're a member, that you
allocate time and do both. So when you're a builder, there's nothing better than to have
people play with it and find problems, find bugs, critique, but also be like, that was fucking
awesome. It makes you feel good, right? Well, it makes you feel good, but also it's super
critical. And I already say this, even though we didn't get everything worked out because it was
a little last minute on my end, but like just not only so you have inspiration from your friends in
a group, but also like people can help you. Like, you know, you shouldn't just sit there and bang
your head against the laptop. Someone can be like, Hey man, you just need to toggle on. You're like,
oh. And then, you know, and we do. So we want to encourage building early and often and getting
simple things out the door. They'll go into the kindling section of the member. And then we want
to, but we do want to encourage high quality to polish taste. And so there'll be a little bit of
a gate to make it public.
Actually, let me step back. Anyone participating,
you own the intellectual property that you built.
Flint doesn't own this. Flint has no
liability. Whatever you build,
it's yours and it's on you.
Are we requiring?
This is an interesting question.
Encouraged, but no.
Are you going to say open source? Yeah, or creative comments.
So open source,
it's encouraged, but not required.
I say that because one thing I did see
in Revit that I love, another feature that we've talked
about is the remix.
like that to me is going to be super cool
and maybe there's just like is it remixable or not
like check a button but like that would be super cool
so there's no there's another product
that isn't launched yet that I just started testing
yesterday that has a
remix feature
remix makes sense inside Flint as well we don't have
it yet but we certainly encourage that
even if we don't have like formal
tools to make it happen
we'll certainly encourage open
source
and you know anyone not doing open source
I'd ask why in a polite way.
Like, why not open source it, right?
And, you know, I suspect most will be open source.
Yeah.
And a cool idea is if you do have the open source repo,
one of the ideas we were chatting about
on the other group chat
is that you could build a little tool
that takes a link.
The one without Macs.
I'm going to keep this goddamn app in there.
You could take a repo
that is already public and open source
and you could ask an LLM,
hey, generate me the prompt
that would be required
to generate this repo.
So basically like reverse engineer the prompt
because effectively it lets you remix, right?
It says, take this thing.
I want to take it in a different direction,
but I don't control the repo.
So write me the prompt
that I would need to submit
to be able to have effectively
all of the software under my own control
in open source.
You could continue to keep it open source
and I'm going to add my own stuff to it.
So in a sense, it's like,
remix you know like minor minor step remix you know dk just hearing you say stuff like that and
like looking at you in your cozy christmas looking sweater like i can just see a vision right now of
like a fire maybe a glass of hot cocoa and like you know like you you and matt saying they're like
vibe coding with dk i know y'all are already doing this like seriously like more the more of like a
chance you can because like yeah i would never thought that's like that's really smart idea
backwards compatible or whatever to backwards
whatever. Yeah, like reverse engineer from your open source.
I think that's almost like that one from being able to, like long term, we've
talked a lot about, you know, GitHub for prompts.
Yes. Which is effectively a little bit like GitHub for the process of prompting and iterating.
It's not like, here's the final prompt only.
But it's like, bit by bit. But I mean, I think
the Flint community is a place where that kind of thing is likely
to emerge because there's gonna be what half a dozen or a few dozen people gathered trying to
make things trying to make them better and we're going to be i mean we already share prompts with
each other like oh i couldn't get mdk to work but i need a little thing oh just you know do this
little tweak or send this prompt like i've used matt's prompts before in the past i suspect just
having like first uh kind of low tech versions you know just paste into a chat group is kind of the
best initial prompt sharing and then we can figure out what product to build around prompt sharing
depending on the stuff that we're just kind of doing again and again.
We just want to optimize and improve.
Agreed.
And so, again, you have to apply to be in this,
and we want to start small, set a culture.
We'll definitely want to grow it over time.
I think we'll also want to have a component that's like public,
like helping anyone too.
So whether it be members offering up 15-minute windows of time
like you suggested to help newcomers, that's a great idea.
and other resources.
I think that would be great.
We also want the app gallery
going from kindling to firewood
to I believe the third phase is blaze.
A blaze is when you take something that's like
so you basically go from private alpha
to public beta.
A blaze is when you actually turn it into a real business.
But do you need the pot for the blaze?
so i i but you and the blaze the blaze can be done by someone other than the original author
too right i mean there might be people who just either don't have the they're not in a position
in life or don't have the time to build a business but they love the fact that they can get ideas out
of their head into a you know public beta state and then they'd welcome someone else you know
taking the torch from them and creating a blaze i love it and i was kind of saying that tongue-in-cheek
but also kind of not.
So about the bot like I two ideas that come to mind immediately for this We really need to figure out how to get this off of Discord or whatever the website onto
Nostra and Lightning-based solution.
It needs to be recursive.
Like, think about how cool this will be.
You know, so again,
the big problem
for everything on the web,
I have so much just going through my head.
I mean, this is really inspiring
because I can see a vision
of the open web exploding again.
And it's super awesome
and super beautiful
and like super important that this stuff takes off
before we're all strapped into Zuckerberg's,
you know, whatever,
cricket eating virtual reality machine.
Like this is important.
And the problem though
is we're about to experience infinity.
There's just going to be so, so, so, so many apps.
And the problem is how do you do search and discovery
in a world of infinity?
and it all comes back to Nostra Web of Trust
and Bitcoin scarce signal, right?
This is all the stuff.
And brands, like Flint.
People, I mean, I'd say like Flint succeeding
if people go to Flint to see the best.
And hopefully we look back
and these apps that we're proud of right now
will laugh at because
like a year from now,
they'll be so,
we'll be like, those were a joke.
But, you know, now it's like, wow,
I can't believe how polished it is
and it was built with no hand coding.
Totally.
But to be clear, what I'm saying on that is
I think this is obviously the right way to start
is with like a high bar of taste and community and brand.
But my point is, imagine, you know,
you've got three apps on there.
Imagine when you have 3 billion.
How are you going to decide which ones to show?
And so if this is all Nostra and Lightning-ified,
you know, then you can just zap it.
And like, I mean, you can still have like certain tastemakers.
You could have like, here's Steve's view,
here's Matt's view, here's DK's view.
But you could also just like,
here's the global leader of board based on raw sats
and or on web of trust adjusted sats,
which is a key in the world.
But my point is, this is a perfect environment in which to test the thesis that we can have better search and discoverability with Bitcoin and Nostra.
It's amazing.
I agree.
And I would suggest we, you know, I like the idea of getting to a flotilla or a Nostra-based solution.
But I feel like doing that today, if we don't have the right tool, is sort of like going to slow us down versus let's get to the point where we feel the pain of the problem.
and then we find that the aspirin
or the whatever,
the pill that solves that pain
is flotilla or a nostril-based solution.
I agree.
I'm just planting the seed
because as we discussed earlier in the chat,
the end game is there.
Yep.
Now, and also just want to-
We can see where this goes.
Yeah.
Let's see where this goes.
Shout out to Matt.
If we can get ahead of things, why not?
Shout out to Matt who's asking me,
what's the bounty, Max?
The bounty depends on the person,
but if you're a really good designer,
we could talk about something serious.
I was also going to say
Yes, exactly
Or did you want to comment on what Matt said?
Sorry, I just agree with Matt
I can't read the chat
He just says rather than starring apps and kindling
we should use zapping
120% goes up
Agreed
And related to that comment and what you were just saying
what I'm already seeing
by people building apps
in Flint is
we're going to generate a feedback cycle
to Bitcoin protocol devs.
Lightning, ARK, Spark, Bitcoin itself.
Because DK is trying to build stuff.
And he's like, Steve, how do I do that?
And I'm like, I should know.
It's frankly embarrassing.
I don't.
And I don't have the answer.
And I don't know if there is an answer today.
So it puts pressure on me
to then go work with protocol devs
to be like, okay,
here are their product requirements.
Here's what they're trying to achieve.
How do we do this today?
And if there's an answer, great.
I'm going to tell DK and then he'll build it.
And maybe we need to improve the dev UX
or the education or whatever.
I think that'll sometimes be the answer.
But we're also going to, I think,
sometimes have the answer where
Bitcoin protocol does not support it yet today.
So we have to fix it.
And we got to fix it.
And, you know, I sort of been beating myself up like,
oh, I should have been doing this years ago
in my role, right?
But I do think to be a little fair to me, I think the past year is really the only window of time where it was realistic.
Because like five years ago, it takes so long to build an application that the feedback cycles are super high cost to get some feedback.
It's not realistic now because you can build so quickly.
You can develop the requirements much more efficiently.
So now is the right time.
I 100% agree.
It couldn't have really been done.
even a year ago, it was still pretty jank.
We didn't have MDK that was focused on this.
I think the time is perfect.
It's making me super bullish on Austria
and Bitcoin Lightning.
Also, to that point,
I think this solves a major, major problem
that the Bitcoin community has faced,
which is, again, for autists, by autists.
We have extremely smart people that are like,
our protocol devs are as good as it gets in the world,
but our application devs are the worst.
But now, with Repli, I mean, it's just...
Sorry to HiveMind's portfolio companies.
I mean, with some exceptions, Stacker News is amazing.
Fountain is really good.
But the fact that we have five good apps after five years, come on now.
And so, but now, VibeCoding will fix that.
And so, what I think is amazing, I want to make a recommendation,
and I will be reaching out to all the HiveMind portfolio companies like Albie.
I mean, MDK is already there.
Breeze, LightSpark, Lightning Labs, all of them.
if they want to win and make money,
should get involved with the vibe coding
in the community and see what,
to your point,
we've all been developing
these like theoretical worlds
without having any real world pressure
to say, what do you,
it's like, well, I think application
to web's need this thing in the protocol.
We have no idea.
But now if you're in there
and if any of you guys are listening,
if I'm invested in you,
please get involved with this.
You're going to find your users here
and they're going to tell you
what you actually need to build.
That's awesome.
Yeah, all of technology is kind of like,
you know, infrastructure,
bootstraps apps bootstraps more infrastructure bootstraps more apps and i think we've had a lot
of building in the infrastructure side and not enough pushing on the app side so if we if part
of what flint can do is encourage more application building which puts pressure like steve was saying
on the infrastructure side to figure out what's actually going to be used and what would be needed
and and what kinds of enhancements would be used by applications and applications that couldn't
have been built before can now be built.
DK, anything else, or Matt Blez, if you're listening and you want to type a response,
anything else important to mention on Flint that we haven't yet?
Yeah, I mean, on the Flint stuff, like I've said before, I think, you know, Matt being
a little bit of the instigator here is really valuable because you can see in the website
design, like the person who put this together actually cares.
It's beautiful.
And it's beautiful.
It's very carefully worded.
And I think it's that, I've said before,
game recognized game.
So when you see that website, you're like,
I'm going to come here and do some really good work.
And I was going to just reference an anecdote.
I got a text from, was it Steve or Matt this morning?
And they're like, hey, we're going to put this thing out.
Can you make your app, can you make an icon for your app?
It should just be like, you know, five minutes.
I was like, yeah, I know that making an icon,
a good one is not going to be just five minutes,
but let me do this.
So I get up and it's like 6, 7 a.m.
And I got down to the app
and I started adding more polish
and improving the documentation
and then making an icon
that I'm actually proud of now,
which I wouldn't have done just for my own use,
but I did because the taste bar
that Matt is encouraging
and sort of the taste bar
that the firewood and gallery encourages.
So I think just like, you know,
as much as I care about my own projects
and my own work,
I feel already the uplift to be better and to show off and make it a better version of what I'm doing because I know there's going to be more eyes on it.
So just wanted to, again, shout out that one of the best things is Matt has great taste and Flint has great taste.
And the people who come in, we're going to just keep encouraging that taste level to increase.
Yeah, that's amazing.
100%.
Yeah, it's amazing.
Well done, guys.
Good job, Matt.
really really really well done and seriously if there's some way you can share like i understand
you still did figma and web dev but like like aspirationally like helping someone design even
if it's start like a simple website like that and i mean i know it's not simple but a website just
like website like a video a guide something like how do you go from like i don't know anything to
i want a nice like here would be an interesting project and by the way i think there's like an
interesting demographic. I know we want to expand and get into the whole world and we're going to do
that. But I was thinking about this for MDK. So Nick, if you're listening and then Matt as well,
one interesting demographic to start with is like, even though we don't want to like focus
on Bitcoin, there are a lot of people in the community who really like Bitcoin and find it
for whatever reason, really amazing and are frustrated because they can't really contribute.
We've talked about some of these people are out there now spreading the good word of Satoshi to
sign up Square to accept Bitcoin payments. But like, I think a really cool, like I could even
imagine a challenge. It could be create your first app or even just something simple. Just even
remove that friction of here's something you can do. Create your own personal webpage.
Vibe code it. Make it look nice. How do you just create a simple personal webpage and maybe have a
tip jar or something on there that uses Bitcoin? I don't know. I'm not saying that's the best idea.
It's a personal website. There are a lot of people out there who would probably put in a few hours
if there were a challenge, a guide that could at least show you from zero to completion on something
that looks beautiful.
So you feel like, oh, it's within like,
oh, maybe I could actually do something
that approaches that.
Yep.
And a personal website would be really nice, I think.
I think it's a great starting point.
Almost you could, you could almost imagine
if you otherwise are thinking about signing up
to like a Squarespace.
Yes.
Or what was the other one?
You know, in fact, I've messed with Squarespace
for some projects and it always kind of,
you know, it does what it does and it's okay.
It's like, it gets it out there,
but it's so restrictive of what you can do
that your hands feel very tied.
And I think if you were to say,
if you wanted to build a Squarespace
or maybe Webflow website,
instead, vibe code the website
and then you have full control to improve it.
You can change the design to do whatever you want.
You're not inside quite the sandbox that you are
when you're working with the kind of traditional
no-code, low-code tools.
Totally.
And then you could do,
if you're really into Bitcoin or an officer,
maybe you could try and have a cool feature on there.
I will tell you,
that is exactly the situation I'm in
where literally to publish that energy essay
I did last time,
I had to like berate my designer to get on a call with me and be like, no, sit down,
publish this thing. It is not working. Like Webflow, have you guys used Webflow?
I haven't.
It's horrible. Just absolutely horrible. And we were on WordPress before, which was only
mildly horrible, but he uses Webflow. So he switched off to WordPress, which I didn't like,
but at least it was open so I could figure it out. I don't know. Anyways, all that to say,
yeah, just like destroy the old web industry, please.
just to
the problem with
building things
is that you're
always dealing
with something
that's broken
like if it's not
broken
then you know
it's done
and you move on
to something
that is broken
yeah
I just checked
to see how our
live launch
is going
how's it going
I still love the concept
but in
but the results
are not there yet
so we have
zero people
have replied
to the spiral tweet
zero
zero people
have replied
to Matt Belez's tweet
zero
and our number
of live views
on X
for this show is 10 times less than normal.
72 right now.
Usually we have 500 to 1,000 viewers live.
And it's 72.
So I don't know if...
Usher, are you able to see what we got on YouTube?
What's going on?
Is today like a holiday or something?
Well, it's a holiday weekend.
So maybe people left early.
I don't know.
But anyway, don't worry.
We actually...
We don't want to admit like 1,000 people right now
into the community
because we want to set the tone and grow.
So that's fine.
I think we succeed by,
because we already have
six or eight people
already vetted in the community.
We just need to build great apps,
publish them,
and build the brand that way,
build awareness that way.
And it can be organic
throughout this year.
Cool.
I like it.
One thing I was going to,
before we,
I know we've spent
most of the hours so far
talking about Flint,
but I guess in the broader context
of Vibe Coding,
Bitcoin and Oster,
But before we move off Flint, I think there was a goal that, if I recall, was part of the website.
Is that true, Steve?
And can you confirm or remind us what the overall goal is?
How would we judge success?
Oh, wait a minute.
Yeah, I'll pull it up.
But the overall mission, the overall, like, did we achieve success?
Is there actually like a very popular application built from the Flint community in the world?
and obviously we're nowhere near that yet,
but that would be success.
And there's all kinds of steps to get there.
There's goals to get there.
Yeah, let me pull up the goal.
I think I mentioned some of the goals already.
I thought there was one overarching goal.
Yeah, that one sounds like what I was thinking.
Yeah, that's the overarching one.
If there's one breakout app and breakouts...
Let me log in through Discord, not Noster.
Fuck that.
That old world selling.
Gold. All right, here we go.
To build compelling products that show what's now possible.
Number two, to help and learn from peers to elevate our game.
Number three, to inspire a new generation of builders.
Number four, to see new businesses created as a result of our community.
Number five, to grow usage of Bitcoin in new and interesting ways.
And number six, to discover new demand for and gaps in emerging protocols.
That's kind of what I mentioned.
Yeah.
So that's our six goals.
but you know
we're gonna have
new
that's
this is all from
Matt and DK and me
but we're gonna have
new smart
ambitious
new people
and new ideas
so we'll keep iterating
and keep improving
sweet
alright
my personal goal
is to get something on there
I don't know how long
it's gonna take me
alright
get your application in
well I'm
I'm gonna be getting you
to be my personal tutor
on this thing
alright
this is the big topic
I cared about
I know you guys
have some other stuff
i think i i think maybe i think max max has things he's excited about should we start there i've got
two big ones i guess they're kind of related you want to start with the alpha yeah yeah okay
well or you can set up the context for it i i i watched the clip you shared a a sailor clip
that i think he was on what bitcoin did and you had a clip that you shared right
well i didn't share it steve shared he was being a fan boy steve was saying
my doppelganger is talking in
I love it
like wish you guys would be
a little less critical of him all the time
like have you noticed how
handsome he looks
that's what I recall
is that right Steve?
something like that
I think on this show I have to wear the hat of being
a critic of Sailor
because you two
sometimes fawn over him
okay
Yeah. Well, let me set it up a little bit because I think it gets into the two topics I want. So I want to talk a bit about what I've learned from Saylor in general, particularly on the collateral piece, which I think is very interesting. And then move that into the GPU marketplace discussion, which I hope is like a longer term discussion we continue to build on. But I think it's very related.
So, you know, the clip Steve shared, some other people had shared, it's like, eh, Middle East
Sailor is being a little bit of a dick to Danny on what Bitcoin did and giving him a hard time
about asking about the treasury companies and whatnot. Was it necessary for him to be mean?
Probably not. Was he right? Yes. That's my takeaway. And so what have I learned? First of all,
I just want to say backing up and taking out the 10,000 foot view, the more I really listened to
and I've listened to a lot of his podcasts. And I'm not doing this as a fanboy. Like,
he's the Bitcoin guy. Fuck yeah. Like there was, by the way, on WaveWake way back in the day,
I remember I tried to share this to people and like the number one song in there was people
singing a sea shanty to Michael Saylor. And it was super weird. Super, super, super, super weird.
And like, yeah, I'm not a cult fan of him, but I, you say game recognized game. I see a great mind,
a truly, truly great mind. And every time I listened to him, I learned something new.
um you know and by the way forget the clip where he was being a little rude um and again that
doesn't excuse being rude like it's probably not necessary but at the end of the episode um he talks
about uh books that he's read like history books and there's the wilder hand like a world history
11 volumes um and uh marie rothbard's economic histories and talk about up my game like shit i
really need to be reading those um you know his understanding of cycles and world history and how
things go, like how there's nothing new under the sun. We just kind of rinse and repeat. It's a
little different every time because it's more of a spiral than a circle because you've news
technology, but it's always rhyming. And, you know, one example he gave.
Spiral.
Coincidence? No such thing. That, you know, he was just kind of mentioning the point that like,
you know, you know, the Bitcoin community is always like 1971. Like that was the year. Everything
went crazy. And he was like, dude, there have been 1971s all the time. Like the story of
every civilization and every sub-civilization is someone gets in power, they get a little too much
power, they get a little too full of themselves. They think they can just like make something out
of nothing in the case of, you know, what we always talk about. Hey guys, let's just print
some money. And he talks about, you know, the colonies like the, I guess, Massachusetts Bay
Colony and all the early colonies. That's also in my mind because I've been watching that fabulous
Revolutionary War thing. Ken Burns, it's really excellent. I recommend it. Anyways,
and he was just like, there was like over a 20 or 30 year period, like multiple times
when a single colony tried to debase the currency
multiple different times over a 20 to 30 year period
to go fund a war.
And every time, of course, ended and failed
because of every time,
you can't just make something out of nothing, right?
So that was like a really interesting takeaway for me.
And just, yeah, like basically how like
the more you can like spot where we are in the history rhyme,
the better you can sort of plan for things.
Okay, so that's just me saying like,
I like him for the reason that he has a great mind.
I really, really believe that.
And I am impressed by his breadth of reading, knowledge and history.
But what new did you learn?
So the new thing that I've learned is, you know, increasingly, it's something that I've learned a little bit more and more.
I think it just keeps hitting me in the head from every podcast I listen to, is thinking about where we are in the adoption cycle.
Okay.
And, you know, it doesn't mean you can't push things in the margins like we've talked about.
And I obviously want Bitcoin to be money.
And I think it's great that we're pushing for it in so many different ways.
And we can probably influence that a bit.
but ultimately what I've come to realize from Saylor that I talked about the end of last podcast as
well is if you zoom out and you take off what you want to be true about the world and you just see
what is true about the world what we know is that bitcoin payments have not taken off yet doesn't
mean it won't happen doesn't mean we can't help but what we do know is bitcoin is collateral and
if you understand the broader financial ecosystem and how the world actually works and how it might
work in the future, you can start to see where that collateral really starts to matter.
And like, you know, as I...
Real quick though, I mean, first of all, I'm an enormous believer in Bitcoin as collateral.
Right.
But I mean, I wouldn't say it's taken off yet either.
I mean, I think the problem is it'll take off sooner than payments, but...
What's the micro strategy market cap right now?
Like pretty massive, I would say.
Whatever, I can go and look.
And yes, it's still in the early stages of takeoff.
What I'm increasingly realizing...
What do you mean by collateral though?
I thought I was thinking like you use it as collateral for a loan.
Well, you can use it for collateral for lots of things, right?
So we've seen it definitely take off as collateral for like consumer lending.
And every time that's happened, there's been rehab obligations blowing up.
That's why we invested in lava.
Fingers crossed.
We don't see that happen again now.
But what he's basically realizing is like, he made this point where he was like, listen,
you know, instead of going to all the banks of the world, and he made this point, he was
like Morgan Stanley or whatever I think it was, funded the civil war.
Like probably not going to go and just like up in power structures that old every once
in a while, maybe, but probably not.
And instead of going and saying, I've got this new bank and y'all should come bank with
me or whatever.
He's like, how do I take what I found, which is this incredible, pristine digital capital,
refine it into a form of collateral or credit that they can use to be successful.
And one thing that he said that really stuck with me is the world is built on capital, but
it runs on credit.
And so what I think he's realizing here is the big, put aside what we want to see about the world, the really, really big business opportunities measured purely in total volume or total profit is if you can go and take that old dying world structure and supercharge it with collateral and credit that are backed by Bitcoin, then you will make the most money.
And so what I'm realizing is, you know, I'm starting to intuitively understand better what he's doing, what he means stripping volatility. You know, he is speculative attacking the old world treasury market, which is crazy to me, by offering stretch. Stretch is the key. This 11% yield that all you have to believe if it's 6x over collateralized by Bitcoin is that Bitcoin's not going to drop whatever it is, 85, 90% for four years or whatever that period is.
that's all you have to believe, which I think we all clearly do. And if you do believe that,
then like you would be a fool not to buy the product that gives you 11% or, you know,
maybe it comes down 10%, 9% versus 3% or 4% in the old world. Like it's just like,
it's like so black, white, right? That's all you have to believe. And so increasingly,
it's not so black and white. It's more gray because, because you, you, why do you buy 11%
yield if you believe Bitcoin is going to return 30 or 40% for the next 10 or 20 years? Why would
you buy 11% yield? Because you have to meet the old existing world structure where it is. And I
think this is his genius. Like this is one of his grand insights. I feel like I'm getting more
mature listening to Sailor. Like younger me would have been like, no, fuck it. We're just going to
like up in everything, flip the tables. Here we come. Bitcoin and everything. And it's like maybe,
but like realistically what's going to happen is we're going to say old world structure first of
all and increasingly this is why i understand why i think he's frustrated some bitcoiners it's like
you don't even want that world like it sounds romantic and like a libertarian anoran fantasy
but like if you go and flip all the tables do you want to live in mad max probably not like like as
much as we say the government is bad the state is bad power structures are bad it's like you know
what's even worse a power vacuum where all of a sudden you got people riding around with like
whatever rifles and shot so to put simply though like the um to answer the question why stretch over
buying bitcoin yeah people have different needs right and i'll get someone just asked you do you
own stretch max you don have to answer that but i i speak to of the Bitcoin he owns at Stretch Absolutely I treasure it
So the money that Presidia Bitcoin has on hand, obviously there's a belief in Bitcoin.
There's a belief in 30% returns or whatever.
but there's actual needs for dollars.
We have liabilities in dollars
in weeks, months, type of time frame.
So we don't want to be all in on Bitcoin.
We need something less volatile.
So some of it is in Bitcoin
and some of it is in stretch.
Yes.
So per city Bitcoin does hold stretch.
And to give you,
so the bigger pools of capital,
which we've talked about is,
we all know someone who's very involved
with that company because he can't buy Bitcoin at his giant equity, public equity fund. He just
can't. And so there's, you know, I forgot we did the numbers last time, but like, what is like a
third of the world's capital is sitting in like public equity funds or something huge. They can't
buy that. A third is sitting in the debt funds. I'm not an expert on this stuff, but like the
point is like really, really, really big slugs of capital. Yeah, there's capital pools that are
locked up with mandates. They have a mandate and they have to play within that mandate. And so
those mandates are sticky. Yes. And that's what creates the opportunity to create products that
fit in those mandates. Correct. And so like the thing that I would say about micro strategy that
I think is interesting is that like it just understands what the world, how the world is
structured today and where the mandates are. And then it provides products that fulfill those
mandates, even if you don't fully get to self-custody or Bitcoin because of the mandate of
the capital pool that you're managing. And I would say there's also sort of a gradation of that,
There are some people that maybe are super orange-pilled, sitting and managing billions, if not trillions of dollars that are locked up in funds that can't buy Bitcoin.
Okay, so that's one area you go after.
And then there's also people, let's say, on the middle of the curve that are like, you know, I think it's interesting.
It's probably not going to zero.
Are they ready to sell their kidney?
Probably not.
But would they like some exposure?
Yeah.
I guess there's different people at different stages on their Bitcoin journey with different mandates.
And critically, those people manage much larger pools of capital than, you know, we as the general public, frankly, even like realize exists. And I think what Saylor's superpower is, is he's kind of the, you know, the elder statesman in the room that for whatever reason, you know, he's still on the edge with technology and he understands why Bitcoin is amazing.
and he's been, you know, frankly old enough
and been through the traditional world enough
that he understands that world extremely well
and he's building a bridge between the new and the old
and by sitting on that bridge and building that bridge,
you know, and I thought it's very instructive.
People always ask him, well, what's next?
What are you gonna do with all this Bitcoin?
He's like, dude, you don't understand.
Like if I can bring 10% of the world's, you know,
bond market to me, I am making whatever it is,
trillions of dollars a year in revenue
with basically no cost.
So it's almost pure profit.
It would be the single greatest business of all time.
Now, I think the AI businesses can overcome that.
And I think that's a separate conversation.
I think, by the way, there's risk
that maybe he's not even fully buying into,
which is the black swan risk of like AGI,
you know, super intelligence take off.
And that's its own really interesting conversation
that we should discuss.
You're saying that we no longer need money.
I mean, that's a possibility.
From your favorite dude you fawn over, but.
I wouldn't say that he was wrong if that's the case.
If we don't need money, then like the whole thing, it's just like a waste of time, right?
Right.
But again, what I want to come back to and just say on that is like, I think what a lot
of Bitcoiners miss is, you know, this dude put aside the way he communicates it, which
could probably be a little nicer sometimes.
But this dude understands the old world.
He knows how to build that bridge and he knows what they need.
And I think he said something really nice, which is instead of fighting the old world,
empower them to win and win a big chunk.
And that's the beauty of Bitcoin.
I've always thought of Bitcoin as a tool of alchemy for selfishness and self-interest to sort of communal interest.
It's a way to get people to say, hey, instead of me just taking your shit, which is kind of the history of power and war and world,
it's like, let me make you an equity holder and the same thing I'm an equity holder.
Let's win really big together.
Yeah, and Bitcoin is ultimately equity for the whole world.
Exactly.
It's equity for the whole world's needs and demands.
It's an equity of the entire world's capital stock.
I think I, and so I didn't watch the whole episode, but I only watched that one clip that I think was quite contentious. But I actually, what I've learned something new from that clip, which I think I changed my mind about in the last year or so, which is I had thought of MicroStrategy as like effectively the leader and kind of the dominant player in the Bitcoin treasury thing. And that sort of all the others are sort of ankle biters and, you know, sort of competitors in a sense.
And I think he articulated there that it's not a competition, it's more of a collaboration. So it's effectively that same point you're making. He didn't quite say it as eloquently as I think we've come up here, which is some sort of equity in the world, the world's future, and all the economic output of the world. But I think that's what he's scratching at here when he talks about MetaPlanet being not a competitor, but a collaborator.
So I've changed my mind on that.
Actually, I still don't get that.
So you're going to have to help me.
Now, we talked about it on the show before.
There's a couple different types of treasury strategies.
We called it the strategy one and the block one, right?
Because both strategy and block introduced Bitcoin on their balance sheet
within a month of each other in 2020.
I think most people know what strategy is.
strategy is like leverage like smart calculated leverage but leverage um whereas the the block
strategy is like put one to ten percent of your treasury in bitcoin as as like a as like a hedge
um and those two are have very different dynamics so i totally believe in a world of we're all in
this together let's invest in each other's like the same equity or whatever if every company puts
1-10% of its treasury
or even up to
100% of the treasury in Bitcoin
they're not competing
like if Tesla is doing that
SpaceX and Block
that doesn't increase the competition between
these companies just because they're holding Bitcoin
however if
every company is levered
over 100% they're
introducing all these securities like
Stretch etc then
they're absolutely competing with each other
and I've argued from
the first episode of this show
that it makes no sense for Facebook to do this,
like Max was arguing.
I still think he does.
It makes no sense to me.
So A, it makes no sense.
B, I don't think every company can do it.
I think only one or a handful can.
And C, they're absolutely competing with each other.
So help me understand how that's going.
So Steve, I'm actually, I'm team Steve on this point
and have been for a long time,
basically since episode one,
which is I don't think Facebook
should just go all in Bitcoin
because they have a great business
or potentially great business.
It has existed for a while.
They could do better with Bitcoin too.
Well, sure.
But that's not what people are investing in.
They're investing in,
are they going to figure out AI?
That is the question.
And also when you say
they do better in Bitcoin,
what do you mean by that?
Do you think they should be levered on Bitcoin?
Or do you think,
should they adopt the strategy strategy
or the block strategy?
Okay, so I,
let me answer that by saying,
and look,
I get what you're saying.
And if your point is for a company specifically in the AI race that having anything to do with Bitcoin is going to detract from their ability to get capital to build energy infrastructure, which, by the way, that's where I want to go.
We're probably not going to time to the GPU marketplace deeply today.
But like, look at who Meta has been hiring yesterday.
Look at Daniel Gross's post on Twitter for what he wants.
It's trading markets, energy infrastructure.
So like, OK, fine.
I'm willing to see that point.
If any touching of Bitcoin, which by the way, I think they'll have to soon, that's my big idea now, will detract from their ability to win that race plan.
What I would say, Steve, to your point is, and this is what I wanted to get at earlier that I learned new from the Sailor podcast, is there's not just the Sailor strategy and the block strategy.
I think there's an infinite number of strategies in between.
That's what I'm seeing more and more.
So what he said yesterday, now, I would obviously evaluate every treasury company independently.
Most of them, I think, are probably run by teams.
I would not personally invest in, right?
For sure.
That's my decision as an investor.
But we've already decided,
does it make sense as an example for MetaPlanet
to exist alongside strategy?
For sure.
Because they're in a trap capital market, Japan.
The other's not there.
So okay.
We all agree on that though.
So the next thing that I learned from his podcast
was that there are going to be infinite opportunities
and he rattled off like 10 of them
of where you can use better capital
to offer a better product.
So he's going after credit,
capital to credit.
I didn't think we were going to make it
through this segment without an impression or two.
You're welcome.
That's for you.
But what he also mentioned is there's other businesses
where pristine digital capital or credit
could make you a winner as well.
One example is insurance.
We're going to see an insurance company,
and I bet, I mean, no insider info or whatever,
but like, I mean, I think Nydig's already pretty big in insurance.
Wouldn't be surprised if they're the big winner there, ultimately,
of figuring out how you can use having perfect, pristine collateral
to underwrite cheaper policies or better policies.
So there will be insurance companies that use Bitcoin.
And I don't think MicroStrategy is going to go after that.
He literally said that.
Like, people get whatever riled up listening to me, whatever.
Like, listen to what he says.
He gave 10 ideas for a company.
The problem is they're not ideas that we as like kind of like Silicon Valley,
computer and builder-y type people are used to.
financial ideas but but my point what i'm those are real things you do well what i'm learning
increasingly from learning from sailor and again everyone has to make their own decision like
you know are you or i the right person to start that company absolutely not like our efforts are
much better spent doing things that are like increasing in my case more on the energy side
lately the builder stuff like great so everyone's doing their part but like what i'm increasingly
learning from sailor is if you just want to make money put everything else aside you just want to
make money. Go where the opportunity is ready. Is it ready for payments yet? No, we're trying to
get there. We're betting on that future. We're trying to make it happen. What it is ready for
is for people to say, if I have better capital, I can underwrite better financial products.
So all kinds of loans, consumer lending, corporate lending, the treasury market,
real estate development. Well, we've talked to companies doing that. But I'm still trying to
understand how they're not competitive.
I'm actually interested. Since Deacon, I
seem aligned.
I think we're mostly... I don't think Block
is a Bitcoin treasury company, even if they hold
some Bitcoin treasury. I think that's a successful
company that's not structured
in the Bitcoin treasury style.
Help me understand how
21 is not a competitor to
strategy.
I think it's
unrealistic to say
not a competitor, but just that
there's more
collaboration than there might be in a traditional business so like is is google a competitor to
facebook and vice versa are they i would say they're pretty directly competitive do they ever
collaborate like maybe at the margin on some little initiatives but they basically don't
collaborate they compete because apple could we use apple and google as an example that's
yeah it's thornier because of the recent you know the not even the recent history deal and
years of surge
billions of dollars
of partnership
it's
it's Apple saying
we're not going to develop
a surge engine
we'll
we'll get paid
all the value
as if we had to
or we can't
how do 21
and strategy
partner
or help each other
I think they help each other
because they each
own a lot of Bitcoin
and their stated mission
is to own more Bitcoin
they have different ways
to go about that
and I
I think the strategy way
to go about that
is we're going to
they probably have
some huge sales force
out there
selling the digital credit product to very people.
And my guess is that the CEP, whatever, the 21 company
is not going to hire a team of people
to go out and sell digital credit.
They're trying to build products that generate cash flows
and those cash flows will either be received
or converted into Bitcoin.
And that will be the basis of a lot of their treasury.
What will be their business model to support leverage?
Like 200% Bitcoin.
Let me try and answer that
because I thought Saylor said something really good yesterday.
And I want to be clear, Barris,
or no, is it Barrison made that point?
Or no, Matt made the last one, which is good.
He says, you know, ignores what he's saying.
It works in theory, but ignores the reality
of the treasury companies today.
That may or may not be true.
Like a lot of the people that are starting treasury companies
to me are definitely giving Alvacargo some of those vibes.
And I would probably, for those of you who remember,
I know Steve always likes him.
I'm going to, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.
What's up, what's up, what's up, what's up?
you got a lot of
treasury connect
yes
thank you
I think Max
should be on
SNL
yeah
thank you
um
so
so I'm gonna agree
with that
and like
when I put my own
personal money
most of these guys
hell no
like I
I agree
but what he makes
is a structural point
I'm also not gonna like
like
whatever
like bad mouth them
because we don't know
what they're gonna do
in the future right
so his point is
um
and he made this point
very actually
I thought eloquently
if you put your money
in an ETF or trust, they cannot, they are legally obligated to just hold the Bitcoin and that's
cool. They can't do other stuff. What he's saying is if you're an early adopter and you have a secret
about the world and the secret is the old monetary system is crap and dying and the new monetary
system is going up 20, 30% caggar, you now have a secret which you don't, you may not even know
exactly what you want to do today. It's like, you know, in angel investing, you know, we back
founders because they have maybe some general secret about the world, which they're exploring.
We're kind of like, yeah, we're going to bet that you're going to be the team to figure out
how to exploit that in the future. And maybe they do, maybe they don't. Similarly, these guys have
realized a secret about Bitcoin and we don't know what they're going to do to structure the products.
But his point is because they're operating companies, they can take this secret, they can
take this radioactive super uranium, which is Bitcoin. And if they're smart, which they may or
may not be. They'll figure out how to structure new real estate companies. They'll figure out how
to structure new insurance companies. They'll figure out how to basically just take any old
business in the old financial world, derivatives companies, anything that made a lot of money,
go and look at how, hey, if we were collateralized or capitalized by hard money rather than something
that can be debased, you're going to win. That's his point. Now, I will also say to your point,
Steve 21 specifically. I don't know any of their details, so I can't say. But if they are trying
to sell the exact same product that MicroStrategy is trying to sell, obviously, I think MicroStrategy
is going to win. So they're probably going to be number two. But even then, I would say they're
not, I mean, they are competitive in a sense, but they're also not that competitive because he makes
another great point, which is the world is relationship-based. And so in the same way,
if you're looking for a banker.
It's like both Silicon Valley Bank,
well, they used to exist.
And first problem,
they both used to exist
before the financial system started crumbling.
But the point is like,
why would you choose one or the other?
Well, maybe you have a friend there.
You just like this guy.
That's it.
Like literally the only deal is like,
I like you, I trust you.
And so there's always a room
for like relationship-based sales.
I would not personally want to bet on that.
But okay,
but that still only affords a few companies.
Not like millions of companies around the world.
But there can be.
Paul levered with Bitcoin all trying to sell to the same fund managers.
A fund manager doesn't have enough time to talk to like 100 million companies.
So that's the critical distinction.
There is room for millions of companies levered on Bitcoin selling different products.
If they're trying to sell the same treasury-like instrument or stretch-like instrument, they're going to probably lose the strategy.
But how can there be, I'm not imaginative enough to understand how millions of companies could be levered on Bitcoin selling securities.
products. Well, I don't think it's just going to be
securities products. I think there's all kinds of products, and that's
what we have to figure out what they are.
What's an example?
Do they regress something like a block?
What's a non-Wall Street
company example
that would be levered
with their Bitcoin and selling a product
to people?
I think the insurance example he gave is a good one.
Well, I call that Wall Street, though.
Let's take
Hoka.
I mean, like State Farm Insurance.
You're saying State Farm Insurance is a Wall Street company?
I mean, they're financial.
Walk us through.
They're financial, but.
Yeah, like Nike.
Like, why would Nike have 200% Bitcoin?
And what product are they selling to support that to be sustainable?
But this is my point.
Okay, so I think we should continue.
I think it's good that we're having this dialogue to like the BenArch episode now with dialectics.
We're going through our dialectics right now.
To be clear, yet we are probably at the phase of adoption where financial products are where this is going to work.
If you're Nike, the block strategy probably makes sense.
And you probably, unless you realize I can make so much more money selling insurance as Nike than I could being Nike,
which they're probably not going to do for a variety of reasons.
So to be clear, I don't think we're at that stage.
But then that suggests every company in the world becomes a financial company.
Well, I think Pierre Rochard made that point.
Again, if you believe.
But what if I want to buy a pair of shoes?
Well, so again, I think it depends on what you as a company, as a manager of a company,
want to do, what your goals for that company are, like how much baggage you have.
If you come into something point blank, you're like, I just want to make the most money humanly
possible. I mean, one way to do that is probably AI, but there's only like four companies that
matter there, so you're probably already out. I think this is Saylor's point. It's like almost
every company in the S&P 500 or certainly every company that's a public company. If you're not an
AI company and maybe a few very special companies like Nike, but even Nike, I mean, honestly,
Do I think they would make, would the world be better off if we all of a sudden lost all
of our shoes?
I would argue that.
But what is, what does the actual future look like in the shoe business?
It's probably not Nike building one shoe and selling it to a million people.
It's probably you getting some custom robot to make you a shoe that perfectly fits you.
And it almost like the brand concept is, do I have the robot with the raw ingredients
and the tool that designs it for my foot
to give me the best thing.
That's still not a financial,
like, levered financial product.
Yeah.
I think we're all agreeing.
It makes no sense that every company in the world
is only going to sell financial products.
I mean, that makes no sense.
Well, so...
I don't even understand what we're talking about.
No, no, no, but hold on.
Let's play that out
because I think it's a very important point.
Like, if you want to stay
in your old operating business
or do new operating businesses,
something close to the block strategy makes sense.
Although, even for block, I would push back and say,
why didn't y'all put even more in?
But again, to me, the division is up to 100% and over 100%.
So sure, you can critique, should block put more in?
It's not a critique.
Even block, like leveraging, could make sense,
but it's a financial company.
Yes.
Most companies in the world are not financial companies,
and the world needs all those services.
They evolve over time.
So we go from Cambodia producing shoes
to robots producing shoes.
But things evolve.
But most industries are not financial.
The AI and the energy.
Okay, you guys have to understand what I'm saying
because I'm looking at Matt saying
I'm depressing with this fiat talk as well.
You guys have to understand.
You have to see the big picture.
I'm not saying everyone should do this.
And if you want to stay in operational business,
yes, buy Bitcoin 100% or less.
The point is, and I think Pierre Rochard
has made this point very, very well.
We're in the early stages
of the speculative attack on the dollar.
Like I believe in hyper-Bitcoinization, right?
So what I think is happening is
if you had every company in the world realize
I could make more money as a financial company
selling some financial product backed by Bitcoin,
all of a sudden you would,
and first of all, it's never going to happen
because there's so many people
that would not believe that
and the requirements would be so heavy.
But all of a sudden what would happen is
the market would reprice, right?
Like everyone did that.
and they all started buying Bitcoin,
they all started selling these new products,
what you would do is you would accelerate
the hyper-Bitcoinization,
probably take the price of Bitcoin
well into the millions of dollars.
And in that process, you would like saturate
and take out of business the other insurance companies.
Again, I'm not even enough to think
this would ever happen overnight.
This is a many decade long process.
But like then once Bitcoin is many millions of dollars a coin,
you've already put out of business
all the old world fiat companies
or Bitcoin, hyper-Bitcoinize them from the inside.
then it starts making sense to sell old world things like shoes.
Just to respond to Matt's comment there,
I do not want to see 200 million companies levered on Bitcoin.
I think it's asinine.
It makes absolutely no sense.
That is my position.
I want to be clear.
Look, everyone makes their own decision.
I'm not saying the leverage is a good thing or a bad thing.
I'm saying see reality clearly
and understand that for any company selling things like derivatives,
insurance credit any of those companies they would be able to offer better rates and a better product
if they had bitcoin as their collateral than not that's it but let me let me ask some companies
will do that but for every 100 million companies to do it makes no let me ask an abstract question
which i already have an opinion on but just wanted to ask it in the abstract is like
do you believe there are any changes happening in the world that may shift the balance of power
away or toward labor and from capital?
Like what, DK?
What possibly could you be?
I mean, is there a shift underway?
Would you say there is a shift
or there's not a shift?
So there 100% is a shift.
And in fact, this is the thing
I've been obsessing over.
And I'm not going to add it
because I've been reading
my friend's book on this.
I would say it's a modern day
Das Kapital,
the best thing I've ever read
on modern economic thought,
which makes the argument
that capital and labor
are in fact becoming
the same thing, which is just fun.
Their new fungible markets are emerging
between capital and labor,
and it's just electricity.
It's just electricity either way.
That's what AI is doing.
And I would argue,
since we're not going to have enough time
to get to it today,
I'm going to tease this
for the future GPU marketplace discussion.
The really big idea,
the idea I'm obsessing over,
and if someone else is putting this out into the ether,
thinking about this idea as well,
and to be clear,
I don't want to fund these financial gains companies either.
I don't find them interesting.
They're going to make a shit ton of money,
and God bless the people
that want to play the insurance game.
It's not what I'm interested in.
What I am interested in though
is figuring out how the robots use collateral
and figuring out how to bank the robots.
That's my teaser.
Good teaser.
Can't wait.
We will talk about it next week then.
All right.
Have a good weekend guys.
Have a good weekend.
Peace y'all.