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Welcome to Presidio Bitcoin.
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Took a week off.
It's been two weeks.
It feels like I haven't seen you guys in ages.
I know.
How are you doing?
Good.
Cold.
It's been cold in San Francisco.
Yeah, we had a cold snap.
Yeah, what's going on with that?
Atmospheric.
Right.
In the office on Monday, I was absolutely freezing.
Yeah.
Which, I mean, for anyone who knows, like, this podcast studio is, like, hot as hell.
So this is...
The fact that DK and Steve...
I may have to...
I ran over, so I may have to put on a jacket.
Anyways.
Is this new?
You're usually like with a college shirt.
You look kind of fancy.
Is this Japan?
I'm trying to increase my style.
Is it Japanese?
It's not.
Okay.
No, it looks like it could be.
It was purchased in the time frame of Japan.
Okay.
But yeah, so I went to Japan over Thanksgiving week and had a great time.
Do they have any turkey celebratory things in Japan?
No, but we ate a lot.
What'd you eat?
Like four different styles of Japanese.
What was the best?
It was also good.
Yeah, Japan.
Yeah, like the hot pot was really, really good.
I mean, we did sushi with teppanaki.
We also went to a pizza place, which was like phenomenal pizza.
It was probably the best pizza.
In Kyoto.
I hadn't been to Kyoto for like 20 years.
Do you guys just do Kyoto or Tokyo too?
A little bit of Tokyo, yeah.
Four days of Tokyo and four or five days and then three, four days of Kyoto.
Nice.
So I've been to Tokyo quite a few times, but typically for work.
So it was nice to go on a personal vacation.
And then Kyoto had been 20 years.
I'd frankly forgotten all about it.
Kyoto is amazing.
Yeah.
And also I learned like the time of year to go is exactly when we went.
What?
Autumn, the leaves changing.
I have some epic photos and just really, really beautiful.
Yeah.
I also had a request.
Max asked me to get green tea.
I thought you forgot.
And I told Max, I don't know anything about green tea.
Oh, my God.
Steve.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you.
Oh.
And I'm.
Oh, my God.
I don't know.
I don't know what I'm doing.
Yeah.
But I'm told this is ceremonial grade.
This is good shit.
And picked from Kyoto Prefecture.
Wow.
So for those of you who can't see, it says here, Hoki Kiwama Bitcoin Matcha.
What?
Are you serious?
The Bitcoin standard.
No.
I got you.
This is gold, but I'm just...
Thank you, Steve.
It's very sweet.
It's high in...
I did it, chat GPT, because it's all Japanese.
I can't read it.
Even if I could read it, I wouldn't know what I'm reading.
But chat GPT says it's high in the umami.
So five out of five.
And you know umami.
That's my prize quality.
So there you go.
Well, thank you.
That's genuinely very sweet.
Thank you.
Oh, boy.
I can't wait.
I'm going to have some right after this.
I'm doing some green tea matcha here.
Just the Kirkland stuff.
In honor of you.
All right.
In honor of Japan and me.
We're all, yeah.
And I'm sporting.
We have our favorite tea dealer in Japantown who sponsored or served up at the Type 1 Summit.
word on the street is we just came in this morning with 23 bags of that for our type 1 speakers so
that's a little bit of an off drop if you're a type 1 speaker look get ready look forward this
is breakaway what's breakaway breakaway matcha or no no no oh well the other guy i i hear i don't
know if alex wants to chime in but that that may also be included but that's that's not confirmed
this is confirmed so anyways also show well while i was in japan um i had to follow along remotely
on some really exciting sports
during Thanksgiving week.
DK, you want to take about half an hour
while we're back.
I'm sure DK was able to watch live.
I had to watch later when I was back in the States.
He was on Discord discussing with people.
There was a big college basketball tournament
in Vegas, the players era
where they could earn all this NIL money.
And Iowa State rocked it.
You guys dominated, right?
They're 8-0 now.
Even this week, we played some nobody team
that scored 132 points.
And I saw you and Haley were discussing
because Gonzaga at one point was one.
Did you guys beat Gonzaga?
Did y'all play or no?
No.
Gonzaga's had a really good season,
but then they played in the championship
at that Vegas tournament
and lost to Michigan by like 40 points or something.
Michigan's playing ridiculous level.
And they got that UAB player.
What's his name?
The dude that's like going off for triple levels.
Yeah.
Sucked on the Blazers.
So Iowa State plays at number one Purdue tomorrow.
Ooh.
That's a big game.
Biggest test you can have.
And I got to tell you,
So from the Memphis side, there's two things happening.
On the Tigers side, it's been a rough start to the season.
I'm not going to lie.
We got a couple of players coming.
So from Memphis, it's a tough situation because we're outside of like the power of conferences, right?
So we got a, Penny's got the number one, maybe number two now.
It's him and Alabama's strength of schedule.
So like really, really tough schedule, but we just keep losing.
And the first couple of games, I got to say Aaron Bradshaw from Iowa State, like that guy is bad.
Like, man, like I can't believe we paid him.
He's listening.
I like the guy.
He sounds like a sweet, like thoughtful human.
and he's starting to play better, so there's hope.
But man, it is harsh.
But we got some other guys that are ballers.
Julius Bedford, that dude's like, he's like Tony Allen,
like the grit, the grind.
He's out there 6-3, but getting 10 rebounds a game,
just hustle, baby.
Anyway, so the point is, we got a couple big games coming up.
We played Purdue, though.
So to give you a little bit of the recon, Scott.
And you played them pretty well.
Like Texas Tech lost by 30.
Yeah, and we took them to the wire.
I think we were up with like 10 minutes left or something like that.
So hopefully Iowa State's watching film of that game.
Yeah.
I got to say, though,
it's probably a little bit inappropriate, but whatever.
We keep it real on PB.
I don't get it.
I watch Purdue, and it's a bunch of kind of like balding white dudes.
You're saying the players are?
Yeah.
They're like seven feet, though, right?
Well, I mean, there's some talk, but I don't get it, man.
Anyways, it is what it is.
But that leads me to my other point that I want to make.
So I've been getting super back into the NBA,
partially because I'm sad with the Tigers sitting at like 75 and Ken Palm, you know, it sucks.
But on the NBA side, Memphis also got off to a rough start.
You know, Jaws got all his issues always and everything else.
But Zach Eady, talking of Purdue, oh my God.
Tall white dude.
Not just a tall white dude.
I'm watching that man.
First of all, okay, first of all, Zach Eady, no, no, no, Shaq Eady.
This man, seven foot five, he's like a refrigerator.
And people say he's not athletic.
I'm going to come out and say another comment.
That was just racist.
This man is around the basket with feathery touch,
incredible footwork.
Yeah, he's half white, half Asian,
but like, good Lord.
I'm on the Zach Eadie train like MVP.
All right.
I'm going to start watching.
It was good.
Anyways, what do you think, DJ?
All right.
And the last sports comment,
and then we can move on to what we normally talk about.
Both of our teams lost our football coaches.
So yours went to Arkansas.
You told me about the show.
You're happy about that?
Yeah, we don't like him.
He's the kind of guy, he puts up empty wins,
and then he fumbles always in crunch time.
We've never won a conference championship with him.
Thank God Arkansas took him off.
But he upgrades the SEC.
Good for him.
Arkansas, short their administration.
That's a really bad AD, but we'll take it.
And then Iowa State's football coach,
who's delivered a decade of excellence at Iowa State.
He's good.
Kalshi has a 97% chance of going to Penn State.
Oh, so it's not official.
It's not official.
I've been watching Call Sheet like minute by minute.
And it was like 70% last night, then dropped to 30%.
I'm like, it's turning around and now it's 97%.
So that just means we need a big BTC pump.
So a new Iowa State booster can get on the phone and make sure he doesn't leave.
Some Iowa farmer offered him beef for life to save Iowa State.
unfortunately Penn State is probably offering like
a lot
$11 million a year or something
yeah
but who wants some
that buys a lot of
Penn State and that's cold
anyways
we'll see
but that actually brings up one topic
which DK perhaps you'll have some more comments on
and kind of ties into our normal stuff with Bitcoin
it is interesting to me
you know you point that out
and I've seen more people on Twitter
and various venues talking about
Calci, Polymarket
we've talked about the Bitcoin equivalent
which I forget what it's called
Predicts
it does seem like prediction markets
like after the last election
like people have asked for decades
like win prediction markets
why don't they take off
and you can argue gambling
you know in Vegas
kind of was prediction markets
elections were the only kind of critical math
but it does seem like prediction markets
are having a moment going mainstream
would you guys agree with that?
I agree
because one way I help keep it real
break out of Silicon Valley tech
Bitcoin nerd world
is to be in my Iowa State sports forums
right with a bunch of Iowa
and they
most people in those farms
still live in Iowa
and
they're just not
in like Silicon Valley
tech circles generally
and they're
like
everyone's referencing
Kalshi
as to whether
is Matt Campbell
coming or
going or whatever
and so has Kalshi
won over Polymarket?
I don't think so
I think it's still
I looked up
I didn't find
the Matt Campbell
to Penn State
on Polymarket
so
it's almost like
I don't know how these markets get developed,
but it's like a marketing opportunity
if you're the number two player.
Yeah.
Like develop something that's becoming popular
that's not yet on Polymarket.
My understanding is Kalshi is the only regulated one.
And so I think they launched with Robinhood
where you can actually bet on it
with your Robinhood brokerage account or something.
I guess you wouldn't call it back.
Maybe invest in an outcome.
it's not betting it's investing thank god um the american populace really needed that it's just a
prediction yeah it's just a prediction what is the difference between investing and gambling
could you could you draw a strong line in the sand there i mean at some level no but personally i
will say for me investing is something that i plan to hold for many years would you ever buy something
as an investment that you would plan to never sell?
Absolutely.
Is that the definition of an investment?
I'd have to think about it more.
Well, I do think there's a distinction.
One, with cash flow generating businesses,
you're investing in something that's a productive asset
or intended to be a productive asset
versus something that literally is a binary outcome.
Also, maybe getting to your point of long-term
is just like a business investment
intended to be a sustainable investment.
Whereas if you're predicting,
is Matt Campbell going to be hired?
It ends.
I mean, it literally...
Durations.
By a certain date, this has to happen.
So that seems very different as well.
But then if you compare it to gold and Bitcoin,
which are non-productive assets,
or we can argue Bitcoin could be with yields and stuff,
But I think you need a little bit different flavor of argument there.
Yeah, I would also say, I mean, yes, but it certainly is a gradient.
And one thing that I would say is, I know the Bitcoiners absolutely love him, but we're full of narrative violations.
so let's go um i let a lot of my investing strategy be influenced maybe 11 or 12 years ago
by of all people nasim taleb um before he became a bsv supporter and which he lost a lot of
credibility at one point that's i mean just go shoot never worship your heroes like whatever
never meet your heroes yeah none of that um that said uh the book um anti-fragile did you guys read
that book? Phenomenal. And it really, I mean, I read it right out of college. It had a big impact
on the way I think about everything. And part of like the general strategy that I loved about that
was, you know, his whole thing was like 90%, like super, super, super safe.
And then like 10% highest risk on ever. And you can like adjust the numbers, 80%, 20%, whatever.
But the general takeaway for me was everyone that kind of lives in this like mediocre stand world
of like trying to chase like, oh, it's medium risk and medium reward usually just gets
owned. And so really kind of like embracing life at the tails is something that, and, you know,
I think about that with like something like startup investing, right? Like something like Bitcoin,
for me, at least I put in like the left, like that's your solid rock. Although he would disagree
with that. But to me it is. On the other side, I would say investing in things like startups,
like I do through the fund or I know you guys do personally, that to me is like super, super high
risk, but like super high upside. And Bitcoin was like that maybe in 2011 or something. But yeah,
I think that balance is interesting, like where people find the dial.
Yeah.
I wonder the gambling versus investing thing, because it's, you know, I've felt in the past
that I had a clear distinction in my mind of like, what is gambling and what is investing?
And I feel like I can't really articulate a clean line, which kind of, I guess that first
was raised to me a few years ago and now it kind of bothers me.
I can't really articulate it.
Why does that bother you?
I guess I felt I had more certainty about what that is.
And now it all feels like a mess.
we'll go deeper on it on like a
hour to hour bike ride
and then maybe if we come to conclusions
we'll share it
I think DK is entering his phase of postmodern
malays
David and I
almost always
well very often we're already on the same
page we view things similarly
and when we don't see that when we're not on the same page
we almost always
once we talk about converge
convert. Yeah, I see that.
But one thing we've never converged on
and we definitely shouldn't talk about it on the show
or we'll start punching each other.
It's like the S&P 500
or like
an index fund, whether
that's, or actually it's more generally
like
stocks.
I think
I'm more of the
you can actually calculate
the value of future
discounted cash flows or whatever.
And then from there, there's some like alpha and beta and like ebbs and flows.
And where I think you think it's more just like complete meme based and just whatever people believe.
And it's like less grounded on something.
Is this like the market like weighing versus voting machine?
And I think it is.
I think it's more grounded than David thinks.
And then like it sort of comes back to that grounded point through cycles.
Like a mean reversion type of thing.
I mean, this is probably just a duration issue, though.
I mean, I think it's just a complex issue.
Like, what is the money supply?
What are interest rates?
What are the alternatives?
What is the popular narrative that causes people to pile into NVIDIA today or out of NVIDIA?
Like, it's all memes and vibes, in my opinion.
So I wanted the world to be the way Steve describes it.
I'm like, this is the world I want.
Like, you can just be smart and analyze the thing and do the data research, just kind of cash flow and figure out what the right answer is and then invest.
it's just i just don't see it that way i think it's just my hunch is the more we go fiat the
more you're right the more we eventually go on a bitcoin standard the more you'll be right like
eventually i do think it's like like we talked about in the show it's like it's impossible all
of these questions we have like i think about this and it's really hard to explain to people
it's kind of like the greatest lie you know the devil ever played was convincing you you know
one word is the other word and it's like what we call quote-unquote free markets and capitalism
has nothing to do with free markets or very little.
And every year it's less and less
because if the money supply is in fact rigged,
then it's like when you take like sort of rational arguments,
it's like, well, if I'm doing an experiment,
we've talked about Bitcoin as the metric system.
And it's like, okay, you know,
do I expect my chicken that from baby size
to adult size to grow in size?
Like if I'm measuring it, like rationally,
you'd be like, well, of course,
like that would be retarded not to think so.
But on the other hand, it's like, well,
what if tomorrow the dude with the ruler can come in
and you should be like,
actually, we cut the ruler in half.
And you're like, well, I don't know.
It's like your brain on fiat, you know?
Anyways.
But we'll explore more offline
with gambling versus investment.
I think that's an interesting intellectual exercise.
And if we don't have to come back with black guys.
One of us might write off a cliff on our bike.
Yeah, oh shit.
Just kidding.
We know who it is.
All right.
I wanted to cover a few things before.
Max wants to talk about it.
Sign our whoopee.
Yeah.
All right.
Bring it back, Steve.
Bring it back.
Bickey had an announcement this week,
which I think is a really cool new service.
They are, you know, feature or service they provide,
which improves privacy.
Like a month ago,
we talked about one privacy enhancement for Bickey.
Now we have a second one.
This one is not really part of the software or the product.
It's how it's delivered.
So I can speak from personal experience.
You know, when I first got into the space in a serious way in 2017, I bought a Ledger.
You know, I'd done some homework and learned about Trezor and Ledger,
and those two seemed like the best products at the time,
and decided to buy a Ledger.
and I just, you know, I went to the website
and filled out the form and just like
gave me your social security number
and just like, I don't know, bought something.
Like I was not steeped in OPSEC yet
and I just, you know, I delivered it to my house.
Well, then a few years later,
I learned that either their database
or their third-party database, whatever, it got hacked.
And so my home address was revealed,
my email, my phone number.
So now I get daily spam and phishing texts and emails.
I mean, I'm just completely desensitized to that because I get it so often.
And well, I moved away from that address.
So hopefully the people living there have not had any issues.
But it's crazy, right?
So that really bothered me.
And so with BitKey, when it was originally launched, you couldn't buy with Bitcoin.
You had to give an address.
And sure, someone could set up a non-home address, but most people are just going to do what I did.
Was it originally only available via the e-commerce site, like Best Buy or whoever didn't carry it?
Well, they partnered with Best Buy, but you could only buy it online.
so you're still providing
personal identifiable
information.
Even then it feels a little weird like a Best Buy.
I mean, even then do you
really trust? How do you know people aren't at Best Buy
fucking with this in the background either?
I wouldn't be buying at Best Buy.
The Big Key product
does have some remote attestation to help
protect against that, so better than
other products.
In any case,
what they just announced is they partnered
with FedEx, Walgreens, Kroger's,
and some other entity
where you can ship it to FedEx
and go pick it up there.
And also you've been able to pay with Bitcoin.
I think that was launched earlier this year.
So now you can go to the BitQ website,
pay in Bitcoin,
and then specify,
oh, I want to pick it up at my local FedEx or whatever,
and then go pick it up at FedEx.
That's awesome.
Which is, I think, phenomenal, right?
I mean, this is like the no-brainer way to buy a product that's going to hold your private keys.
Right.
How do you think about, like, think about, like, some people who may not necessarily understand the importance of what that means.
That enables you to have a hardware wallet in simple UX, which gives you a substantial amount of privacy by not having it linked to any personally identifiable information.
but like maybe the skeptic would say,
oh, I'm not doing anything wrong.
Why does it matter?
So how would you explain,
like I'm just thinking of, you know,
I was explaining to my brother or somebody.
He was not, you know, he like knows about Bitcoin a bit,
but is not really into it.
How would you explain why it doesn't matter?
I mean, I have to tell my story.
Like I felt violated having my, you know,
my email, my phone number,
and my home address all leaked to criminals
who have a list of people they know own ledgers,
likely have cryptocurrency.
And now, like I said,
I get daily phishing attacks
trying to steal my cryptocurrency.
And
there's certainly been some reports
of people having their home invaded.
We had that two weeks ago
in San Francisco.
On the home invasion,
my own opinion,
I think that's still super rare
and people shouldn't get super freaked out
about that. But it obviously increases the probability
of it happening to you.
if you're leaked in a list associated with cryptocurrency.
So I think, yeah, most people, like your brother or whatever,
they might not have that level of sensitivity to this issue.
But sharing personal anecdotes and concrete stories of what could go wrong,
I think, then makes it, you know, they'd understand why it's important to do that.
Do you think it's important to think about that with respect to KYC coins
versus non-KYC coins?
And like, is there a piece of that
that's kind of like the next step to think about?
I mean, there's different types of,
I mean, there's all kinds of different attacks
that can happen, right?
So, you know, so if you,
the KYC stuff has nothing to do with phishing attacks
to your phone number, your email address,
or home invasions.
Those are very, it's orthogonal attacks.
But like, I guess my point is,
you could imagine
a 6102
government seizure
of Bitcoin at some point.
That's another possibility.
It seems like a possibility.
I'm just saying, yeah, I mean,
there's many attacks
that can be on Bitcoin.
This doesn't solve all of them.
This mitigates
some of them.
In a way that I'm not aware
of any other product.
It's a unique feature.
It's a great feature, by the way.
Whoever thought, that's a really good one.
Do you already have the ability to time lock on BitKey?
I don't think so.
That would be an amazing feature, too.
Because my favorite things are River Unveiled Force Field.
And increasingly, over time, I love where BitKey is going.
So I thought you meant consensus level time lock.
It's application level.
Is River doing?
River's just application level.
It's application level?
I thought it was consensus level.
Well, anyways, either consensus level or application level.
Maybe both.
I'd be interested in maybe you could have varying degrees.
But increasingly seeing all that in the world,
like honestly, as much as I love the self-custody stuff
and I think I'm glad that BitKey's moving,
like I'm increasingly more in the camp of like,
let people like River with their time locks,
just like, hey man, it's time locked in River.
Like I think that's increasingly an attractive proposition
for a lot of people.
And I would love to see BitKey move more.
It's a nice feature.
I used Coinbase Coinbase has had this since like 2016 or something Really Yeah Oh wow I mean I They call it vault right They call it vault It an application level It the same thing as force field
So they've had it forever.
I used it for a period of time.
It's definitely, if you're going to store with a third-party custodian, it's definitely
a nice security feature.
Right.
But it's certainly not impenetrable.
Right.
I've seen many instances of where, in fact, just recently with Twitter, with X,
was they did some upgrade to their two-factor
and I got locked out.
A bunch of users got locked out.
I remember that.
And I was able to get in touch with X
through connections
and they were offering over email
like, oh, we'll just disable your two-factor
to get in.
What?
Yeah.
So it's application level, right?
So all you have to do is trick
some support person internally
to like turn it off.
So same with any kind of vault or force field,
some employee could be tricked.
So it's definitely a nice security feature,
but definitely not as strong as the consensus level time lock.
And then with a self-custody product like Bickey,
you'd have to do a consensus level.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, anyways, that would be a really nice,
I think, distinguishing feature for Bickey.
Yeah.
So anyway, I wanted to be sure to mention Bickey.
Another thing I want to mention is the boss challenge.
Do you know what the boss challenge is?
What's the boss challenge?
I do, but I don't know.
I'll let you put up because it's going to fast.
It's not a sports thing, isn't it?
What would you guess of the boss challenge?
I'm imagining I'm playing Super Mario Brothers
and I'm like the final boss.
You know, the dragon, and you got to kind of like
avoid his fireballs or something.
No, boss here is Bitcoin open source software.
So instead of FOSS, it's a twist on FOSS.
So it's free open source software development.
for Bitcoin. Jonas from ChainCode
has coined the term boss.
It's a great name.
He and ChainCode have created
the boss challenge.
This will be the third year.
So I just want to let people, anyone listening
or anyone listening who knows
people who want to get into
open source Bitcoin development in a serious way
that this is for you.
It's like a three month program, super intensive.
Like I said,
it's the third year running in the first two years.
like 8, 9, 10 developers
in each of those cohorts
have gone on to get,
they've gotten Spiral grants
and many other jobs
working in the open source Bitcoin space.
So it's a really good program.
So if anyone that you know
is interested in going from like
a Google job or tech job
or whatever traditional
software development job
and they really want to get into Bitcoin
and this is a good path.
So this isn't like a beginner 101
one thing that says you're really good at traditional software
and now you want to become good at Bitcoin-ridden software.
So you need to be a competent, skilled software developer.
You can, but you can be, it's 101 for getting into Bitcoin,
but it's an accelerated program.
So you're expected, after one month of intensive study,
then the next two months you work on a project
on a real open source Bitcoin project.
And this is like a full-time program?
It's a full-time program.
So it's someone who
is ready, you're on the beach,
you're ready to quit your job. You're pretty committed
to, you're not just dipping your
toes in the water, but you're committed to full-time
and open-source
Bitcoin software.
Is it
in-person?
I'm not actually sure.
Chaincode has definitely done in-person stuff
before at Chaincode.
But this might be
remote. They might have some
in-person component, but
I think it's mostly remote.
Okay, so this actually is an interesting segue
towards a larger topic I wanted to bring up,
but maybe we'll start with this
since you're already mentioning boss.
So I've been thinking over the break
a lot more about AI scaling laws,
AI software development.
I have a lot of thoughts there
and I want to get your views on all this.
However, one area I want to start
is I was discussing with someone a few weeks ago
at the AI conference here
about Bitcoin development itself.
And he kind of raised a concern,
and you're the closest to all this.
I'm curious your view that,
okay, to set the stage,
AI is getting really good really fast.
You know, every couple months you come back
and you're like, holy shit,
this thing's a lot better.
There's like vibe coding got really good.
And I'm sure we'll talk more about MDK
and some stuff I saw yesterday,
which blew my mind.
But the TLDR is like,
if you thought AI was bad six months ago
or three months ago, try it again.
it's just going to keep getting better and better and better. So like we're on this like
exponential type curve. Now, what I am a little concerned about is you kind of have two camps of
people in the world. I see you have the camp of people who get that and maybe they're super
skilled developers and they're just like kind of like the Carpathie, like embrace the vibe coding,
like let it fill you and go with it and you correct it. And then you've got, you know,
total beginners who are awesome because they're just like, now they can do new things, like not
total beginners, but someone like Matt Belez or DK are now coding crazy applications and stuff.
But then you've got this other group, which are really skilled software developers from
the old world. And I would consider these kind of like the, what are the Jewish dudes with the
curls? Like the-
Hasidic Jews?
Yeah, kind of like the Hasidic, but like there's the Orthodox.
Okay.
And one concern I have that this person flagged for me is that a lot of Bitcoin core developers,
or like a lot of the old Bitcoin core mindset.
And I get why, because it's like the kind of thing
where it's like nuclear submarine code level.
You cannot have any bugs.
You can't necessarily trust the eyes,
but kind of raise the concern
that a lot of these guys are very orthodox
and like used to doing things like themselves.
Now, as I see, you know,
Anthropic just a couple of days ago
released their coding agents
or breaking smart contracts.
Of course, it's Ethereum and Solana.
So it's kind of like crap.
But like, we're going to find a lot more bugs
everywhere in the world that humans couldn't find.
And if you really believe these exponential charts,
then it's like, I don't think we're that far away
from having AIs that are like far better than Greg Maxwell.
And I use Greg Maxwell because I think of him
as like the gold or the Bitcoin standard of developers.
But the point is like, he's not AI.
What is your view on that?
Are you seeing, are there people in the Bitcoin core community
that are like embracing it?
Is it kind of an orthodox?
Like, no, we don't believe in this thing
because it could have bugs.
Like, yeah, what's your view on that?
Yeah, I think, yeah, a few thoughts. One is that I think there's a little bit more hesitancy from protocol developers and lower level software, partially because of just habits and the reasons you mentioned, but also the AI tools are not yet good enough for that type of software.
I've seen it with my own team
working on Lightning Development Kit
which is also pretty low level
protocol software
and I've encouraged them and nudged them
to look at these tools
especially because they are improving
every month
so check in every three months at least
and
the only signs
like Max Fang from Lexi
has started to adopt
Claude into his daily workflow
and he works on software that's also pretty
system-level, low-level software.
So I think that's a good
example of someone embracing it and
working reasonably well.
I don't think it's transformative. I think it's the kind
of thing, it's like a 20%
win kind of thing. Like, meaningful.
Right. And he's
positioned now to keep getting
those gains as AI improves.
That's what I like. So he's changed his behavior.
So it's a very good investment.
The win so far, though, I'd say is like
nice but not game-changing.
So I like to monitor
that.
But I don't think the tools
are there yet to
write low-level
software code yet.
But there's other applications, right?
Obviously the vibe coding stuff, we've talked about that
a lot in the show. But testing
as well.
Code review is another.
And LND has turned on
AI code review for LND.
that's good
LDK's turned it on
a couple times
and it
the first time
it just simply
was not valuable
when you say
turned it on
what does
turned it on mean?
you have a
CI CD
it's just
no when you
open a pull request
it's just
bot automatically
reviews
I mean AI bot
automatically reviews
the code
and then
writes up
a review
and posts it
to GitHub
so if that's a bunch
of like
AI slop
and noisy
it's
it's a
net
negative and certainly that was the case the first go around um and and yeah lnds turned it on i you
know so i think that's improving and it's very plausible that's going to go from net negative to
a net a net win so that's code review um writing tests is another yeah application um now another
thing to consider is like um code being submitted that either a human is presenting but it's actually
done by AI or is it an anonymous account?
It's an AI.
And you don't know.
You don't know who the identity is, who it is, but it's AI-generated code.
There, there's a risk because it could, you know, it could have a bunch of like bugs or
it could have backdoors hidden in it, et cetera.
Now, that's true for anyone.
That's true for humans too, right?
That's true for anyone.
Even if Greg Maxwell submits something, we have to assume like he could make a mistake.
They got compromised or something.
Yeah, compromised, whatever.
But I just, so I think,
so projects, another concern
is like projects being inundated with PR requests.
You can imagine just like thousands of PRs
being generated automatically by AI
and then like how do you sift through all of them?
That's actually being dealt with right now
for the BIPs, the Bitcoin improvement proposal.
There's work being done on BIP3, I think it is,
to improve the process, or like an iteration of the process for BIPs.
Yeah.
And there's debate and controversy over should BIPs be,
should LLMs be allowed to be used for BIPs?
And I hope we don't go like Hasidic, like just get destroyed.
So that's dangerous.
There's some people, so the concern by not using it,
Is it the work imposed on the BIP editors to review potentially an insane amount of content that was just AI slop?
But obviously there's a contingent saying like, we need to embrace tools that improve.
And also, to what degree?
Like if I write a BIP and then have an LLM review it and tweak the language, is that prohibited?
I mean, that's a whole debate going on.
Also, there's sort of, I want to at least raise a distinction and see if my understanding is consistent with your experience here. But like, my understanding is, in Bitcoin development, the ideas are more of the challenge than the implementation. Like the software writing is not that hard compared to coming up with the right ideas and getting consensus on the ideas.
I agree with that, except changing the code and the Bitcoin Core codebase, Satoshi's codebase, is fraught with danger.
I mean, it's C++.
I see.
It was not super well written by Satoshi and it's just been a patchwork ever since then.
With a long-term trend of trying to make more maintainable code, better organized code.
but you know
what was it like
2021 or so
maybe four or five years ago there was the
inflation bug that
several prominent core developers
wrote and reviewed it
so I mean if we were to
select the three best people to be
looking at it it would be those three people
and yet an inflation bug was introduced
only to be
caught by a BCH developer who
really responsibly
disclosed it so
Oh, man.
already can deliver value
and will just continue to deliver value.
So that seems to me,
as we think about,
I know a question we have is like,
how sort of percent of Bitcoin
is going to embrace AI going to the future
and potentially sponsor decentralized AI and stuff.
This to me seems like very low-hanging fruit
where if there's not already a contingent,
like what I would love to see is
that there are a contingent of competent,
really good Bitcoin developers
who are also at least open
to the possibility of being AGI built.
Lalo is a great example.
And I actually think it's super important.
I mean, Lalu has a couple of things going for him.
One, he's young.
Two, he's here.
And I honestly believe it makes a difference
whether you're in San Francisco or not.
I really do.
Like, I talk to people outside the rest of the world.
If they're not saying they're talking to their friends
from Anthropik and other parties,
like they don't see how fast this is going.
And I'm not saying it has to be, right?
Like, I know it's always gonna have a skeptical mindset,
but my fear is if we end up with only the old heads
that don't see this coming, that's like a big risk to me.
And so whether that's sponsoring people that are 100% their whole job is like, we're going to try and attack Bitcoin Core in a responsible way with LLMs, whatever, testing, like finding exploits, that seems like super high value.
Agreed.
So anyone listening that wants to do that or know someone, like Spiral, absolutely give grants for that.
And I forget if we mentioned this in the show or not, but when I was in Berlin in October, met up with Felix Weiss, who's a longtime developer in the Bitcoin space.
And he was eager to show me this demo, and he's never been eager to show me a demo before, and I'm glad he showed me the demo.
I don't think we, I intended to talk about it on the show, I don't think I have yet, but he used Claude for like three months to write a Bitcoin implementation from scratch.
So not like building on core or something, or he didn't fork the core code.
He wrote a Bitcoin implementation from scratch, which could sync, do an IBD, initial block download, which takes maybe like five, six hours using core in like 10 minutes.
So he used a different approach.
Because he's pulling blocks from more nodes?
He just used a different, he just used, I mean, there's a little bit of, there are trade-offs compared to the way core does it.
but it's an interesting approach.
I think it's similar to the LibBitcoin approach,
which is another long-time implementation of Bitcoin.
But what I find fascinating about it is,
he had an idea that he wanted to see in action.
Instead of whining and crying that core is corrupt
or core moves slow or they don't embrace change.
He just made his own.
He also is not threatening forks or anything like that.
He just built his own, leveraged LLM.
He's the first to say there's no way he could have done this without Cloud.
He had to use Cloud.
So embrace the technology, use Cloud, has a working demo,
and has real metrics and numbers behind it.
And I think that, you know, so are people going to flock to that implementation?
No, but it's a really good communication and persuasive tool.
Now he can publish this and share it with people
and share it with the core project, share it with others,
saying like, hey, I tested this result.
Here's what I got.
And perhaps Core will add that one day.
Yeah, and we have some interesting comments.
Vinny here is saying,
it's hard for good devs to trust junior devs.
Luckily, but we have another six months
will be better than us anyway.
All vibes all the time.
And I think that if I have like one message
in thinking through funding people to do this stuff
or like old, you know,
people that are used to the old ways,
it's like, yes, maybe they're not there today.
and like the 20% win is maybe like whatever.
Or maybe you don't even like the 20% win,
you'd rather do things by hand.
But the risk, I think the biggest risk right now
is if you ignore it and you miss.
And like, to your point,
we're about to be flooded with pull requests
and information from AIs.
The only way to defend against that is with AI.
Like I'm 100% convinced if human,
it's going to be like,
I don't even know what the example,
like bringing sticks to a fight with nuclear weapons
if you're not equipped.
so i am i don't know i'm increasingly concerned about that i'm glad to hear hearing lalu is on
top of it makes me like very happy and i think it's something we can also push more for being
here in san francisco continuing to build a bridge between the item and bitcoin but what was it elix
was the guy you mentioned yeah do you know if he do you know sort of what process he used to do that
because i it would not surprise me if there's like if you tried to not implement it and instead
just get an LLM to understand what Bitcoin is without an implementation.
I wonder if it could help us think about it in a better way or sort of get, I think there's
a lot of just, you know, sort of anecdotally transmitted culture pieces of Bitcoin that
maybe don't exist in the code base.
And if we could create a little bit of like an AI thinking model about what is Bitcoin
and what's the purpose and what are the edges on it, then we can take that as an evolving
thing and maybe build different implementations out of it.
And I wonder if we got a really good version of that.
Do you know that from AlphaGo, I think it's Move 37 or something?
Do you know that one?
Yeah, of course.
I wonder if there's like a Move 37 in a Bitcoin implementation.
There will be.
And if we can sort of get an AI to understand what our principles are that we're trying
to achieve, sort of independent of
the implementation,
how, you know, if we could
do that, and I wonder if his Felix,
you know, if he explored any of that.
I don't know.
I mean,
Danny says something similar. He says you can also use
it to come up with seemingly
impossible new ideas. I think
that's exactly what you're saying. It's just like
move 37 for everything.
Yeah, so I don't know any more
details about this process.
I'll ask him though.
I'll point him to this show that we talked a little bit about his good work, and maybe he'll share.
I know he presented this at a conference in the Middle East one or two months ago,
but I think he intends to do a more formal announcement of the project as well, and he should share his process more.
Outside of Bitcoin Core, something else I've been thinking a little bit about is Drew Bansel talked about this idea
that I don't think he was thinking with AI,
but I think it accelerates his idea
that basically you're going to have
all internet services re-architected
in the next 10, 20 years, whatever,
because basically AI is going to get so good at hacking
that all these exploits we can't even imagine
now are going to get found.
And wherever there's like Bitcoin being secured,
that's like what it's going to go after.
And so I think very quickly,
that's like probably where the self-referential AI
sadly starts.
I wish it were something sort of pro-social,
but it's probably just hacking and you know phishing is like the lowest level but it's
going to get better and better and better and so i think drew's point was um basically it's going
to be a part of evolution where the sort of reward function is like can i get more bitcoin
and in doing that that's how we're going to harden all of our systems but in the meantime that would
suck you know if you were part of the the the testing phase of evolution so i don't know i think
the thing I'm just getting more and more concerned about is
like we have a giant blind spot with
how good AI gets the next even two to three years.
Which is why I'm surprised you push
for moving your coins to
instead of having it written on
like a physical piece of paper. I was thinking the same
thing. Yeah.
Because definitely having something in the
physical world is the defense against
remote attacks,
AI. Generated offline,
right? This sort of like,
yeah. Like if it's never connected to the
internet, then the AI is
presumably can't access it.
Yeah, but then it's like
the fucking wrench attack
is getting more realistic too.
I don't know.
Like, look,
I think the risk of remote attack,
traditional remote attacks
and AI ones is like
10,000x higher probability
than wrench attacks.
And look, I think we talked about
custody on shows before.
I think the answer is
don't put all your eggs in one basket.
We've talked about that.
But like, increasingly,
as much as I hate to say this,
like, I do like things like
River, ETFs, block.
And like, yeah, they're not perfect.
but like
I don't know man
like
I trust
that
Jack understands
what's happening with AI
and he's not asleep
at the wheel
and there's going to be
people there
that are thinking about
how to secure
Bitcoin at Block
better than me
he uses BitKey
but I mean
you get my point
but I think
one thing we all agree on
and when we did the
episode in January
where we dedicated
the whole episode to it
I think we all agreed
on one thing
which is
custody diversification
makes tremendous sense
yeah
because the
types of threats and loss of coin risk with self-custody versus a third-party custodian,
they're very orthogonal. And they're all legitimate risks. So put the 50-50 or whatever
split you want to do makes a lot of sense. And you can, if you believe that like ETFs are not
subject to rent-to-tax, which I believe they're mostly not, I've explained my thinking there,
and I think we have agreement on that. If you believe that ETFs are not subject to rent-to-tax,
you can get self-custody of Bitcoin and multi-sig
that is subject to no wrench attacks
in the same sense that the apps are not.
And maybe, you know, I could see all of this
being a big boon for companies like Unchained.
Because Unchained, you know, has built a good business,
but it hasn't, like, skyrocketed.
But maybe this whole AI thing is what causes that to happen.
I do think just in general, I'm like,
I do think, you know, I always try and update my thinking,
like, okay, like, we all believe in Bitcoin,
but, like, things change.
and you know as I see the market movement we had a show on the market like who knows what
happened short term but like talked about quantum risk a lot there's stuff there that I'm still not
fully comfortable with getting doing my own education on that but I do think that like
AI hacking risks are like a new category that I have not taken seriously enough yet and I think
that everyone should be thinking more about that yep agreed and didn't didn't Sundar I thought as
I saw a headline.
Did he say five years for quantum?
I mean, yeah.
I'm also in the camp.
And this is, again, this is my left side of the curve.
But I'm always concerned because whenever I hear these kind of old-ed guys,
like, no, it's like, they're usually wrong.
And when you think about the quantum development with AI,
I think one thing that everyone is under-appreciating,
I'm not saying it's definite, but probability distribution,
certainly not zero is that AI accelerates the development of so many things including quantum I think that one of the giant black ones All technologies compound on each other right Exactly And most people fail to see that They like well actually If someone says well actually run
It's the worst, yeah.
Run.
Anyway, I said my piece on quantum last episode.
But a segue to one thing I did last night.
Block hosted like a dozen merchants or sellers
to come to the Block office in the mission.
so Haley and I went to
meet with them
and orange pill them, get them to
enable Bitcoin payments. It's a really good
experience. But interestingly
the segue here is
that one of them
I asked, what do you know about Bitcoin?
And the first thing out of her mouth was
quantum. And it was just
this is like a
sole proprietor
in Oakland selling
art she makes or whatever.
and she doesn't know hardly anything about Bitcoin.
So I just found it fascinating
that the first thing out of her mouth
on what is Bitcoin or what about it is quantum.
And she didn't say it in like a,
she didn't view it as a risk.
It's more, I think it's like fascinating,
exciting technology was her perspective on it.
And she just associated.
That's what quantum was.
And Bitcoin, you know,
Bitcoin's exciting technology,
quantum's exciting technology.
And she probably read an article
or read a headline where the two were together, right?
So I just found that fascinating.
That's like top of mind for just normal human being.
But not a negative association necessarily.
But anyway, that event was awesome.
We onboarded six merchants onto Bitcoin.
And these are merchants who they didn't know about it
or hadn't configured it?
What was sort of selection criteria for getting them together?
Yeah, getting them to come to Block had nothing to do with Bitcoin.
It was just a square event.
And I think we had done some outreach at a time to the 12
to identify anyone interested in Bitcoin.
Anyway, six of them enabled it.
There were a couple of merchants that didn't want to.
So that's actually good learning, too.
Because at the end of the day, it's a no-brainer to enable it.
Because there's no cost to doing so.
because you can configure it so that your sales get converted to dollars.
So if you don't want to hold Bitcoin,
you don't want any tax questions or whatever, risk,
like there's no reason to not enable it, right?
You don't have to display the itty-bitty if that's not your jam or whatever, right?
So would that not be their jam?
But I was curious, you know, why not?
And one of them at least, you know, they had reasonable reasons.
One, they're already experimenting
with a couple new features from Square
and they're just like, you know, slow down.
Like, I can only handle so many experiments
at once or whatever.
So that's a completely reasonable
answer, right?
The other answer was kind of interesting.
They said they had
like an older clientele and it might
turn them off if they accepted
Bitcoin. Like, they didn't really realize
that they don't have
to promote it.
Right. Or, you know, they don't have to make it
they don't have to market it to every one of their customers.
But it'd be visible on the POS while the consumer is using it or no?
No.
Yeah, I mean, you have to go out of your...
They may have the sticker.
Well, they don't have to do that, right?
So if you do the sticker, if you do the itty-bitty,
if you do any kind of promotions,
which is important for creating awareness of it and promoting it,
then obviously all your customers would know.
You don't have to do that, though.
But I think the most interesting thing is they just had that perception.
or not as much perception,
but that was on their mind
and a factor for them.
Having said that,
the six that converted,
all six were very enthusiastic
about doing so.
None of them were savvy
or super knowledgeable about Bitcoin,
but definitely their perception
was like,
Bitcoin's cool,
it's a positive thing,
it's exciting.
And all of them,
like Haley and I made sure
we purchased something from them
in Bitcoin,
and they were so excited.
Really?
Also, all of them chose to keep it in Bitcoin.
Really?
Oh, wow.
Nice.
They were all very, they're like, how do I see it?
All of it?
Yeah.
100% of it.
And they all wanted to know, like, how do I see it?
So then we like navigated them to the wallet.
And we, Square UI, there's some areas of improvement
with Square UI.
And there's also many Square UIs.
That's one thing I've learned.
There's five different apps in the App Store.
Yeah.
And then there's like many different hardware options available.
and there's different UIs across all these.
So Haley and I learned a ton.
Shout out to Angela, who's the PM on Square,
who worked on this.
She showed up too.
She wouldn't have showed up.
Haley and I would have struck out
because we could not solve some of the problems
of enabling Bitcoin.
I can walk through that if I want.
But anyway, I found it very interesting
that the merchant wanted to see the Bitcoin
in the Bitcoin amount.
Like there's one UI in Square
that just shows it as a dollar amount
and you have to switch modes or something
to see the units of Bitcoin.
They wanted to see the Bitcoin.
So I thought that was really fascinating.
Also, out of the six that enabled,
they all love itty-bitty.
They all got itty-bitty.
We're seeing many, many...
Who are these people?
No, majority.
Were they attracted by the 3%?
Were they somewhat already Bitcoin?
I'll get to that in a second.
But the itty-bitty specifically, though.
Are these middle-aged people, men, women?
What are we talking about?
Let's see.
They're younger than Steve.
Most were, well, that's the majority of people.
Most were like women in their 30s, 40s.
Okay.
Yeah.
So they liked the itty-bitty.
Interesting.
And so, yeah.
But I, like definitely my experience with itty-bitty the past year or two or whatever
is that women and children generally love it
and then guys less so.
Or more mixed.
But I think with small merchants,
I don't think it's really a gender or age thing.
The reason I think most people like,
first of all, they don't necessarily,
I mean, they might think it's quirky or odd,
but it's a great conversation starter.
Yeah, that's true.
And they want conversations with their customers.
So I think they view it as that.
And then also it's a very light touch way
to bring up the Bitcoin.
It's not like a guy with a gun.
Right.
You know, like a Bitcoiner with a gun.
America.
No.
I'll never forget one time
we did a road trip.
My dad and I through Texas
and I went to like a Buc-ee's
or one of those.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's like a Texas-sized gas store.
It's like literally like the size
of the Presidio.
It's like a gas store.
Yeah.
And you walk in
and they had a Bitcoin ATM
and I was so excited.
I was like, look, there's a Bitcoin.
And this was years ago.
I was like, there's a Bitcoin ATM
and the sticker on it,
I shit you not,
and showed Bitcoin with the giant rifle across
and saying, come and take it, buddy.
And I was like, man, I know we're in Texas now.
Well, if it's in Texas, yeah, that'll
rest your audience.
A software approach.
But yeah, anyway,
I found it fascinating. They all love Diddy Biddy.
Now, to your question, what attracted
them to
this?
I think, for one,
it's a little bit of a special group because
they have
they already have an affinity to
block the company and they came to this event.
A lot of them operate out of the Oakland,
like the Oakland office,
the first floor is retail.
So I think they're like friends of Square.
And so I think they,
probably more than the average merchant,
like love to adopt new features
and they're just like more receptive to like,
oh, like, and everyone who was visiting them yesterday
were block employees because it was in the office, right?
you had to imagine and stuff.
So,
I think there's more open
than the general,
you know,
your average merchant.
But definitely,
even with them,
saving fees was huge.
Even like one of them,
I think they are already,
they already enabled Bitcoin,
but whoever's talking to them
didn't sell them on the fee aspect.
And then I told them after the fact
that you save fees
and then their eyes like lit up.
Then you can just tell
that they really go,
oh, this is why I want to like,
market this and get my customers to pay me a Bitcoin
because I get rid of the fees.
That's cool.
We should do,
I know you would talk about the merchant association idea
and maybe Bob would be a good lead on this
because now he's very focused.
It'd be cool to do like a merchant community here
and like just have like basically.
Sorry, a merchant community.
Night, like a few years.
Like pink owl coffee.
Yeah, like have all these people like.
We're way out of the act.
We're going to do a night?
A day?
Well, first of all,
we've already launched and talked about
the online community.
We have two communities.
One, a Facebook group,
which is for merchants.
And then we have
the Discord community,
which is for Bitcoiners
who are going out
evangelizing and getting
sellers to turn it on.
But as far as
an in-person event here,
more than just a night,
we're going to do
a full-blown,
type one level,
quality event next year.
Sweet.
For Presidia Bitcoin.
With merchants.
For merchants.
Yeah.
We're going to fill up
the lawn out here
with merchants.
Oh, sick.
That's awesome.
Are you serious?
That's sick.
Yeah.
Daniel Lurie, we're going to get him to come.
Motherfucker!
Let's go.
Dude, Daniel Lurie, by the way,
that shot hats off that guy.
He does a great job.
He's always out there hustling.
If you get him excited about this,
which I think he will,
I mean, he's at every merchant being like,
hey, I love this Vietnamese coffee.
And I can just see him being like...
I think he'll love it.
So yeah, Haley's going to make this happen.
So something like an off-the-grid style...
Yeah.
That's awesome.
So Haley's going to make it happen.
Fuck yeah.
She's...
That's super cool.
challenge to get, she's excited
and she takes it as a challenge to get
Daniel Lurie here. Let's do it. I think it's
totally achievable. And yet it'll just
be what we attended last night
on steroids. Like
we want 50, 100
vendors out here, right? And open
it up to the public. But we'll also have
an event here
at Presidio Bitcoin with
a smaller
group of people who can fit inside here
to talk
about all the issues
on the payer side and the merchant side
and not just have it be Square specific,
but other point of sale solutions.
And yeah, just a merchant,
dedicated merchant event here at PB.
It's super cool.
It sounds like the merchant story,
you guys, I think, correctly identified
the 3% is what's going to drive interest
and kind of durable usage and conversion
for a merchant to want Bitcoin.
But it sounded like you said
they were kind of excited to get into the UI
and see where the Bitcoin is.
You think they started to understand
a little bit about maybe why
a non-merchant may care about
Bitcoin? Like, are they curious about that?
Or it sounds like they may
hold it. They may have some beliefs that
they've come to or learned about.
The folks
I met last night, I think they, you know,
they have just superficial knowledge
of Bitcoin. I think, again, their view
is just, it's exciting. It's this foreign
world to them, exciting technology.
And they were excited. It was
an exciting moment for them that they're a Bitcoiner now.
Like, they own Bitcoin
they could see it in the UI.
So I think this is like the beginning of their journey.
I think so much of that is just like
general early adopters.
Like when I got my honey dealer on Bitcoin,
he's not a Bitcoiner per se,
but he's someone that thinks,
he's a curious human being.
And so I think if someone's like high on curiosity,
they're gonna be like,
oh, exactly, exactly.
The only guy.
That's the, you know,
something he wants to try.
I will say one point he made,
and like, it's probably the case where like,
whatever, just focus on the curious early adopters
and build from there.
But one thing I noticed when I tried
to Orange Pill,
my farmer's market,
sort of like the curious
guy with glasses
that looks like he reads
Wired Magazine.
Of course, he was like,
oh, great, let's do it.
The woman who's a little bit older,
I don't think it's just an age thing.
Sadly, I kind of got the vibe
from her where she kind of
associated with sort of like Trump
and she was just going,
oh, I don't like all that.
And I think in the Bay Area
being a traditionally
more liberal city or whatever,
I wonder how much
that's going to be an issue.
For the young, early tech adopter people, it's not at all.
But I think it's at least worth thinking through for that woman.
Now, fees, saving, she likes saving.
But we all know people like to virtue signal here.
So it'll be interesting.
Well, and so we have the Discord community for Bitcoiners who are out doing similar things
as what we're talking about.
Austin, who's Austin Bach, who's one of our regular listeners.
He's the local champion in Seattle.
That's another thing, too.
Like Spiral, we initially shipped the itty bitties and a bunch of one pagers to five different Bitcoin hubs in the US, five different cities.
But we got so much inbound saying, oh, I want to be the local champion for my city or whatever, Kansas City and Seattle and Boston.
So we opened that up an application process.
And I think we have like 15 different local champions throughout the US now and growing.
We're actually now running out of itty bitties.
We have to make more.
Great.
The whole process takes like six months to get these from China.
But anyway, wasn't there like...
We need local manufacturing.
Local manufacturing.
Come on.
We need to bring it back to the US.
It's national security.
But I think...
So a lot of people are sharing similar stories as like Bob shared and I'm sharing now.
You guys have in that Discord.
And one of them, one of their reports said that like when they were talking to people,
that they didn't even realize
you could use Bitcoin as money.
So I think the narrative
has been so strong
on number go up and ETS
and digital gold
that tons of people
don't even realize
you can actually use it as money
and it's lightning fast.
So I think this push,
Square enabling it,
now having many different wallets
that work well
and then this Bitcoin army
that we're trying to enable
and is happening
in creating real world conversations
with people
is going to help shift the narrative.
Like, oh, or to us,
like, of course it can be used as money
because we're using it.
But most human beings aren't,
don't even know that,
think that, do that.
I think that's a huge narrative.
Do we have hub leaders in the South yet,
like Atlanta?
Yep, that was one of our initial hubs.
Because there's a physical Bitcoin space
in Atlanta, the Atlanta Bitcoin land.
That's awesome here.
The reason I mentioned that is
I was blown away by a study
a couple of years ago.
I don't know if this is true,
I actually think I shared this with Miles and even he was surprised.
But basically it showed that black Americans own Bitcoin in a much higher clip than you would expect.
And I was like, well, duh, that's because they have Cash App.
Everyone that's from the South, I'm from the South, black people use Cash App.
And they also are generally probably going to be skeptical of the government, centralized power.
So I think some of fighting this political narrative would be really cool to start seeing basically the South,
people that are already on Cash App,
hip-hop culture,
start to embrace Bitcoin more as like,
this is like,
it's resistance money,
it's independence money.
I think that would be really powerful.
I agree.
So we're in Atlanta.
Memphis too.
We need Memphis.
Let's get to Memphis.
So you can find,
help us find a local champion in Memphis.
I actually,
I may have an idea.
Your dad?
No, I'm not.
Okay.
Anyway, yeah.
That'd be good.
Oh, dude, New Orleans.
We got Michael Levine from Lightning Live.
Yeah, let's get the South.
Let's get the South going.
hold on there's one more thing I want to say
what did I want to say about this stuff
Biddy
yeah
Big Biddy
Haley and I went on another adventure
yesterday
before we went to this
so Fold
I think we talked about this maybe on the show
in October Fold announced
a gift card
a Bitcoin gift card
and Million from Primal
who we know and love
and love what he's doing in Primal.
He created a Bitcoin gift card
like five, six years ago
that was available in Canada,
but it never really...
I think he hit some roadblocks
and ultimately just abandoned that idea.
Fold's now doing it.
I've always thought this is like
absolutely the best way to gift Bitcoin to people.
Yes, definitely.
Because it's super simple.
It's a credit card-sized gift card.
It's a really...
even what Million created six years ago
is a brilliant UX for onboarding someone brand new.
So it's really slick UX,
simple form factor to give someone as a gift.
And it's also something they're familiar with.
Gift cards are a thing.
They're already familiar with that.
And the only thing you need to know
is downloading an app from the App Store
and just following one, two, three,
very simple instructions.
But then for years and years, we never had it.
Finally, Folds announced it and launched it.
So I looked up, there's one store in San Francisco,
has it. So Haley and I went to that store.
Sorry, had it.
Steve bought out the store.
Not quite, but
we went to this grocery
store at 1800 Folsom in San Francisco.
It's like
Outer Mission or something?
Where is that?
Sounds like Soma.
Yeah, it's like Soma.
It's the intersection of Soma and Mission.
It was a very
busy grocery store. We had to stay in line
for a long time, but we went and they have gift
cards everywhere throughout the store.
It was crazy how many gift cards they had.
They're always on those end caps, right?
They had them sprinkled, though,
also at every checkout line.
They have candy bars
and stuff. They had gift cards at every
single checkout line.
We looked through the whole store. There was a ton of gift
cards. One
rack or one
specific placement had
Bitcoin cards. There were 10.
We bought six of the 10.
There's still four there for the taking.
They're probably gone by now.
But this is great.
Why are there only 10?
How do we get every store to have?
The lady who checked us out said we are the first people that she had seen buy these.
So I don't know how popular they are yet, but I think it's so great.
But my understanding is these end cap gift card things are heavily controlled.
And so you have to do a distribution partnership.
Yeah, you mentioned Blackhawk.
There's two distributors.
It's not like you go to the shop owner and say, hey, Bitcoin would be great.
but you have to kind of go to Blackhawk and convince them, right?
Which is why I think Million ended up not proceeding.
But if they get a bunch of sales...
And they take a huge margin.
So, yeah, I'm arguing this from the end consumer side,
not like, is it a brilliant business or not?
I hope it's a good business for Fold,
because I want to see this happen, right?
At the end consumer, you could specify,
I think it was $25 to $500 value.
So you tell them at the checkout counter,
That's how much value I want per gift card.
Do they cap how many you can buy?
Well, I don't know.
I bought five $100 ones that I'll give away for holiday guests.
And those then, you download...
We need to check in on this for the gift baskets.
We wanted to put them in gift baskets for the speakers along with the tea.
Oh, I see.
But we need to get 23.
Well, I just want to make sure I understand the UX.
So you buy the gift card, you go to the checkout,
and you say, put $25 on this.
And then...
the receiver of the gift card.
No, you tell them.
Really?
The checkout person is the one that...
Could you just be like,
hey man, 10 grand on this please?
No.
The card itself says like $25 to $500.
So it's a $500 limit.
Let's say you do a $500 limit.
This kind of becomes local Bitcoins.
Then you have to download...
Well, we can have that,
but it is a $500.
It's not $10,000.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
So I'm just trying to make sure I understand the UX.
So you get, say, $500 is the max.
You get on the card.
then you give it to somebody or keep it for yourself.
You download the Fold app and you punch in a number.
I assume it's not like a seed phrase, right?
There's just some code on the card that you scratch off.
I have been busy since buying it.
So I haven't, they're still in my backpack.
Okay.
Yeah.
So I'll have to report back next week on the UX
once you install the app.
Right next to his GAT.
But ultimately this is like a fairly good privacy tool maybe?
That's what I was saying.
Potentially.
I'll have to see if I have to KYC when I try to claim the Bitcoin.
I might.
But even if so, I could purchase them with cash at a store and then sell it to you.
You give me cash back.
Exactly.
So there's obviously money laundering potential there.
But I think that's where you get the $500 limit.
It slows down the velocity so it's not super attractive.
But how many can you buy?
I don't know.
I bought five unquestioned.
I just paid a credit card, though.
So imagine if I would have bought all $10, $500,
and I brought in $5,000 of cash.
The lady is just like, another day in the mission.
The checkout lady, I don't think, would have cared.
But if I would literally hand her $5,000 of cash,
I think she'd be like, I got to call my manager.
What do I do with all this cash?
Because they don't want to have that much cash sitting in cash register.
Then the manager might be like,
oh sorry we have a policy or a rule
or who knows
I mean it's going to be
it's going to vary by store right
but I don't know what the limits would be
but we're going to
do our best to get these at PresidioBitcoin
for people to purchase them
we want to do these as like $25
thank you cards to get the speakers
interested in Bitcoin
so is that the only place we can do it
is there anywhere else in the Bay Area
one in Oakland and one here
in San Francisco
go all right but um yeah and i'll report back once i've completed the user experience as to
how how it was i'm hoping it was i'm hoping it's as good or better than what million did because
what he created was an amazing ui maybe it's opportunity for million to reignite that because
it's also very interesting for primal too right like if you want to get someone like going on
primal it's like here's your first ten dollars or twenty five dollars yeah yeah i actually get them
in costco that'd be great oh yeah exactly next to the gold bar you should be able to buy some
Bitcoin, right? Maybe someone
should, Vinny, maybe someone should make a scratch
off birthday card with the secret key. I've
always liked that idea too, like the scratch offs
like you do with the nickel or whatever.
There's variations
that
others have
created. I think it's
good for gifting. I would definitely want to
move the Bitcoin off of that.
Diana asked me a question. How did you locate
the store? Did you just Google it?
No, from the full website, they have a
search function. You can type
in your zip code
or whatever.
People listen to this
like if we can get it
throughout the whole Bay Area
there will be demand.
Well we have
we have
the lead designer
is a member of
Presidio Bitcoin.
Since when?
Well I mean
he was at Design Week
and
well if you're listening
I don't know
I think he is
or is
Alex
is he already a
member?
Yeah.
Affirmative.
So we hope to see
more of him here
but yeah
he's the one I reached out to
saying hey
can we get these
Presidio Bitcoin
he's working on it.
Can we get 23
for our speakers?
Yep.
We can also ask them that.
Okay.
Awesome.
I love it.
We had a bunch of things listed around AI and Noster.
Is that stuff covered or did you have No we did not cover it Yeah I mean so I mean i i talked about the i mean look the tldr is i starting to get re and um re meaning you you sort of had a
slump and now you're kind of back believe in it or this is a very long complicated conversation
i think you know i don't even know where to begin like i'm starting to see sort of ai bifurcating
where on the short end,
I'm increasingly bullish.
I made this tweet about this yesterday.
I think Chris Pike was like,
I think he's generally a very good investor
and sees a lot of trends ahead.
And he was always kind of very long Apple
when everyone else was long everything else.
And his TLDR was open source models
are going to get so good,
you can run it at the edge.
I think that's happening, right?
And it's interesting because you saw,
it was, I think, announced
that Peter Thiel slashed his position in Tesla
and sold all of his NVIDIA
for Apple and Microsoft.
To me, the Apple move is a move
sort of signifying what Bob McElrath
also said here in his talk,
which is the open source models on device.
And for instance, getting really good.
On the other token, or the other hand,
no pun intended there,
I do think that the frontier models
are going to keep getting better for a long time as well.
And like, everyone's like, oh, like the overbuild,
like there ain't gonna be no overbuild.
Like if you follow the scaling laws,
and I've listened to more conversations with Dario,
and I'd say I'm increasingly impressed with Anthropic
and like really, I have two sort of anti-portfolio companies.
I personally passed that one
because I thought they were too woke
and like, I was wrong.
Man, they're good.
they're really, really good. And I think he's, he's like a very talented alchemist. Like he can
cook better than anyone else. It seems like that's why this is Claude dominating coding.
Anyways, you listen to him and like, what I love about his take is he's just, he's very smart,
but kind of left side of the curve. He's just like, follow the scaling laws. He's like, just
trust scaling. And, um, you know, if you do that and you say, well, we're building the multi gigawatt
clusters for the next runs now, then we're going to build the deco D you know, 10 plus level,
gigawatt clusters for the runs after that,
like, yeah, it's like maybe the models
start tapering off in the S-curve.
But we have a ways to go.
So anyways, all that to say,
I think you're going to see things bifurcate.
A lot of stuff is going to be done on device.
It's like local, easy.
And then there's going to be a lot of
like cutting edge stuff,
like people that are, you know,
folding proteins and doing quantum development.
That's all going to still be done in the cloud.
So I think I'm bullish on both.
But I think we're close enough
to like having good enough things
to satisfy most consumer demand on device today?
Not yet, but I think we're getting there.
I think people are going to be surprised
at how quickly that happens.
And I think that's kind of Apple's play all along.
And I think people are wrong
to just think Apple's like incompetent.
I think Apple's been savvy to kind of sit it out.
That's what I'm saying.
Because they don't really have anything
really to contribute to it
besides like ultimately the hardware,
which could be...
Which is important.
And they've been developing those chips.
It's like they haven't been doing nothing.
Like their M chips are like getting better and better.
But they're not like,
oh, let's go build a model or something.
I don't know.
but everybody else totally yeah and by the way on the like the other end the companies that have
impressed me the most are uh anthropic and google i mean google is just irking right now like have
you all tried gemini 3 yep nano banana pro it's so good like for the first time i'm really using
gemini as like a research partner and like it's actually helping me think through i have some like
i think fundamental i've got some big things brewing in my head around the i try to get this
out at the type one summit,
people didn't fully buy it,
but the relationship between energy,
information and entropy,
I think there's a lot to explore there.
And also sort of a modern day Das Kapital.
I've got a lot of things I'm like,
kind of like whatever in my head,
but like most people I talk to,
like don't understand what I'm talking about,
but Google does.
And so that's very encouraging.
So I'm very bullish on the high end stuff.
I think a lot of it's going to move Denver.
So you have a bunch of slop in your head.
I have a lot of stuff.
You need to clarify.
It is, but it's helpful to have like someone like,
and I can also see why people are going to have like relationships.
people are totally going to marry these things.
They're like, wow, I feel seen.
Someone really understands where my ideas are going.
It's cool.
I think the AI companion is the new OS.
Yeah, well, and you've got a lot of good ideas around that.
I'm long Mika.
Very long Mika.
Send that woman some sats.
But anyways, what I wanted to talk about, though,
I mean, I'm curious y'all's taking all that,
like where your head is at with AI.
But at the same time,
you mentioned on last week's show,
I was concerned during our AI event
that Cody made the point
that basically the base models
did not train on lightning,
very much lightning data
and almost no Nostra data.
And that kind of like,
as the next big training runs,
the gigawatt and multi-gigawatt clusters
use entirely synthetic data,
there's going to be feedback loops
where the pools of data
that were already established,
call it 2023 era,
that's like the presets
for the next several decades.
Was that Cody's point?
That was Cody's point.
And so basically the argument was like,
okay, yeah, there's always ways you can add on fine tuning on top
where it's like, I want to use things like CashU,
but CashU didn't even exist really in 2023
where the libraries, I don't even know,
maybe it existed, but like there was nothing on the web.
And so his point was that like things like the defaults,
like JavaScript and Python, even if Rust is better,
are just going to dominate
because the data that we have today
is going to create 10,000 X more data with those examples.
And that's what the Grok 4 and Grok 5
and all the new models get trained on.
I thought that's a very compelling point.
Now, as a counterbalance to that, Pablo and others in the Nostra community are like, well, it doesn't really matter because we can just import that data in afterwards effectively and fine-tuning other things.
And it does seem like Matt Belez, who's been using MoneyDevKit, which, by the way, that is such a smooth experience.
I am so long in DK.
But it seems like he's getting Nostra and Lightning to work quite easily using Replit specifically.
So what do you think?
are you at all concerned that the base, like, does it matter that the base models are not
going to have enough Lightning and Noster and Cashew stuff in there? Can we add it later?
Like, what do you think? I mean, we touched on this before and I can understand why there'd be
some potential for concern, but ultimately it doesn't really bother me because I think,
you know, if you have enough good examples of the thing and if it actually is the unique only way to
do the thing you want to do, that will get surfaced and it will get incorporated and maybe small to
start and slow to start. But if you
have, like, look, if USD
stablecoins is good enough, then that's what will get
used. I'm not saying it is, but if
it is, then that'll just get used.
You still have to find use cases where
Bitcoin is the only thing that can do the job.
Or where people want to use it. Like, I think
the one that Matt made is
impressionista.fun,
I think. Excellent. I was
super blown away. So basically, like, you can
prompt a thing, send some
Bitcoin. It's like a PG, make a chat.
Yeah.
You can, MikaChat is PG as well.
I'll have you know it's not a horn set.
PG13 at best.
And Matt's made more money too.
Yeah, he's substantially more.
Well, that's because DK has a market.
MDK has a really nice dashboard.
It does, yeah.
I'm happy to market Matt's stuff.
I don't really market my stuff.
PG13.
It's a little edgy, but.
You got a KYC to use DK.
But I think the point is you put in a prompt of a thing you want to see, and then you pay, is it what, 500 Bitcoin?
250.
250 Bitcoin.
And then you get an impressionist painting of the thing you...
And then you pay another 1,000, you get a video.
Another 1,250.
Yeah.
And you get a video of the thing.
So it's 1,500 total for a video.
It's all the modern stuff.
Dude, Mac can make real money on this.
Nano banana.
Oh, yeah.
He's cranking.
This is like a business.
Yeah.
He's making money on this.
Yeah.
And he could scale it really big.
Yeah.
And you could do this for anything.
I mean, I think one thing that people often forget
is just the ease of people just want retardedly simple.
You don't want to sign up for 15 accounts.
What I want is I want 20 beats that I can rap on.
Yes, I could go and revive my Udio
or sign up for Sonos or whatever it's called,
but I don't want to.
I just want to like, I don't want 15 accounts.
I just want to log in and get the thing I want
and I'll happily pay.
Speaking of music, because I know you're a big music guy,
and I've been dabbling in different AI tools
and kind of music context.
I wonder sort of,
have you thought much about
how AI should evolve
or will evolve
the music production process?
Well, I mean,
it's a great question.
I haven't spent a lot of time on this.
It's like,
it's on my list of like things
I want to dive deep on.
Like I just, man,
by the way, also like,
if AI does like free up people's time,
like this idea of like,
what are people going to do?
It's like, dude,
if I could have 15,000 lifetimes
to explore all this,
I would be thrilled.
I have so much I want to do right now.
It's insane.
Like, so I, by the way,
so that's what you're
fire off AIs in parallel. Well, exactly. That's what I want to get to. It's like this,
people being concerned, like AIs are going to take our, it's like, dude, we haven't even started
the arc of civilization yet, bro. We haven't even started. We got so many simulations to run.
But the AI music production, I'm not a producer myself. I would like to learn. It's also on my
list of things. I should talk about this with my producers. We're talking about maybe doing a new
album next year. It's been a minute since we've been in the studio. Yeah, I get back at that.
but I feel like what I personally want is I want to say,
here's some beats that I like or some songs I like.
Make me 20 beats like this.
Let me pick the one that I want.
Make it super easy for me to record onto it
and then let me publish it.
Like I don't really,
now ideally you kind of have like a bifurcation
where the super easy version of that
is like I don't have to do anything
other than what I want to do, which is rap.
All I want to do is really rap.
I want to choose the beats.
I want to be the tastemaker
and then I want to be the rapper
and then I want to publish it.
Do you want to write all the lyrics yourself
or do you want to collab on that?
100% want to write all the lyrics myself.
You don't want to collab.
Zero interest in AI doing that.
Okay.
Because that's what I like doing.
And so in the same way, like, I'm probably never going to.
But as a top partner even.
Nah, bro.
Like, maybe one day.
But, like, to me, it's hard to explain this.
But for, like, this is another reason I'm not worried about stuff like AI.
Like, taking my role.
It's like, the AI, like, there's one thing I'm really, really, really, really good at.
The AI will never be better at me at.
And that's just being me.
and so increasingly and it's not to say that i can't use the ai to get new inputs as a thought
partner and maybe i will start to do that like i'm doing it now for this essay app but like i think
you know i think of kevin kelly's advice which is don't try to be the best anything just be you
like just like follow your weird inclination be the own exactly so i'm confident the ai is never
going to be better than being because i'm not even the same me that i was yesterday like every day i
change and i have new ideas and new interests and like so it's just like why would i ever worry about
someone out competing i'm not even out competing like i'm just i'm i'm you know constantly changing
so um so i like writing and like that's something that like i don't want to give up because that's
like that's fun to me and like this other idea of like people talking about ai it's like oh yeah
i was gonna take all the jobs it's like except for the things you want to do like but you're
not gonna because it's like you know i couldn't like i could be the guy in like zuckerberg's like
you know strap on you know whatever things on my on my face like theme me the bugs
I don't mean in the Mika Jacks
feed me the bugs
and like just pump me full of calories
no because like I like
like are you guys going to do bike rides
for you?
of course not why because you like riding your bike
so anyways
I just think of some of these arguments
AI watch the Iowa State Purdue game
exactly like and give you
a report like it's just so dumb
to me it's like like I don't know it lacks
like so much imagination
of like you do things
ultimately because you
want to do them
and like anyways
so what I want to do
more of
what I would like
is for AI
to empower me
to do more of what I like
which is writing
and like just give me beats
don't make me do
like mess with the production
now I think you can have
another bifurcated area
where it's like
if I want the stems
and I enjoy messing around
with the software
and mixing
and all that stuff
like my buddy Pablo
shout out to Pavlov
then great
that can be an option too
like you know
it could be either
right
I'm interested in new ways that people might gather to create music together with an AI in the loop, but people are collaborating with the AI.
So you mentioned the stems.
Could you get 20 different stems out there?
You pick one of them.
And then other people will be like, actually, I like number 17.
I'm going to grab that one.
Actually, they're close enough.
They came from a common source prompt that we can actually fuse them.
So the stem that you like with the stem that the other guy liked.
And now you're sort of making these collaborative, like AI did a lot of the hard work, the grindy stuff, much like it does in code repo stuff.
But you get to do the creative, architectural kind of thinking design space, and then you sort of have it execute a lot of the details that you don't like.
But how do you collaborate on those things?
So it's very interesting you mentioned that.
There's a company, I can't remember the name of it, but I saw when I was at V1 a couple years ago.
And I think they've actually raised a pretty big round from Andreessen since then, so good for those guys.
but it was two Mexican dudes living in San Diego.
And Jose was one of them.
I mean, I doubt they listen to this podcast,
but if they do, what's up, guys?
They had this whole concept, which I loved.
And it'd be really cool to revisit.
And maybe there is an opportunity
to start up around this as well.
Maybe it's theirs.
Maybe it's a new one or a community.
But basically, it was all about the STEM
as kind of like the building block.
And you could do a lot of cool stuff with that
where it's like, then you put it out in the world
and people can add their own stuff.
Basically, you have like version control for music.
And you could also do cool stuff
where it's like if I'm an artist
and it's like my sort of like Patreon thing,
it's like, oh, like you pay me
because you want to hear,
like you hear the finish song for free,
but you want your big fan.
Here's like the 25 stems I had along the way
or you give me feedback during the production process.
And keep it all like more visible
so that people can see the process
and participate and fork it.
And in fact, what's his name?
The block designer, Rocky,
who got super in Austria.
He was doing a lot of this with Simster.
I still have this
concept in the master.
You know, maybe it's
something we should revisit.
Maybe that'd be something
we could bring back,
maybe with the help of Matt
and Nick or something on.
Yeah, I agree with you, though.
There's a huge opportunity
to make music develop,
to make everything,
frankly, more collaborative.
Yeah.
And I've been
working on a thing right now.
I don't know if I told you
I'm a piano player.
I'm aware.
So I built a game
to practice like drills
that I want to like practice
like voicings of chords or something.
So I built a game and I'm like,
oh, actually, like this makes me,
it makes it more fun,
almost like playing a video game
to get better at playing piano.
And it's sort of like,
feels to me like that idea,
there's something in there
that could be available for other people
to kind of compete in a game
around getting better at a skill you like.
Totally.
And I love this idea of like,
if AI is used well,
like think about like Alexander the Great had the best tutors in the world like why can't we all have
that for everything we want like I've been thinking about this like the best single use of money that I
wish I had done more of and I should do more I don't know why I don't but it's just like paying
for coaches for really things like okay you really want to get good at basketball like why not just
like have someone like teach you how to do it like you know if it's a couple of lessons what
cost you 200 bucks and like you're probably skill arc development goes like vertical from that but
like you could do that with ai for at least anything digital my guy alonzo uh he i think
went from zero to like now i was playing beethoven and mozart with like a piano app like that but
imagine if you could design it exactly the way you want playing the songs you want i want that
for guitar i mean i started messing with guitar a little bit i would love to have you know but but
i was specifically i just want to learn these songs because this is what interests me but but
the thing about like the video game approach to it is you got the challenge you sort of have a
challenge that's like hard enough that you sort of have to work to get there it needs to be just
hard enough yeah if it's too easy it's boring if it's too hard you get frustrated so you kind of
need to find this middle ground which video game designers do a really great job at like finding
the way to like make progress in a video game and just enough difficulty but just enough success
and you could create a really nice feedback loop where an ai is your tutor in like you know for
piano, you've got a digital environment, you can connect it via MIDI. You can actually create
a digital feedback loop where the AI is your coach, watching how you perform, giving you
real-time feedback, and then sort of challenging you just beyond what you can do to sort of help you
improve faster. I love that. And think about how many new savants you're going to unlock in places
like Africa that just never had a shot. Totally. And I think about also the next step of that,
it's like humans are still going to have a role to play too. Now I think about, I think Kevin
kelly again he made this point of one of the most beautiful things about ai is teaching us what we
are as humans right because like the more we see what other things can do it's like great now we
know more of like what makes us unique as a species and um you know i think about like the
more you say that i think the most interesting one of the most interesting opportunities in the
world today is just to totally redesign education yeah because you can totally have the ais like
doing stuff for you but also there's gonna be a role for humans too like i think about how much
i like just like having a friend to talk to and stuff like i don't want to be on the computer all
day and like zucks metaverse like i want to also like a mix of like okay and then i cham with dk
and steve and like i don't know i think there's a ton of opportunity so yeah but but before we we
do sign off i want to go back to to the point we're making because vinny says claude seems to
have no problem reasoning about post training information so coming back to that like do you
know and like matt i don't know if you're listening to this but like how difficult is it for matt to
integrate the lightning and nostril stuff he's doing today in replet or to the extent that you've
used Rabalette on the current models?
And are you at all concerned that as the models continue to get far better, if they're only
trained, if basically if there's like no Bitcoin, there will be Bitcoin data, but no Lightning
or Nostra data in there, like how concerned are you?
I mean, what else are they using?
Are people taking payments with Stripe?
Great.
If Stripe works, use Stripe.
Right.
Bitcoin is designed for situations where Stripe does not work.
And if those situations are important, which I believe they are, but like, you know, you
could debate whether they are or they're not.
But if they are important, then all of
the things that require it will use it
and then that'll just make its way into the data set.
And so interestingly, for something like MDK,
which money development kit we talked
about, we all listened. And that's what Matt did.
On Replit, he used MDK.
It was very easy. I think, I forget exactly
what it, I think it was the easiest
thing he's ever. There's like four areas of improvement.
It was easy and then
there's like four things that Nick's working on
and Nick's connected now with Cody
at Replit. Really? They're going to work, yeah.
yeah.
I connected them.
That's my role in life.
Just connect people.
That's a fucking big connection.
But, you know,
so they're going to like
squash all four of those things
and then it's even easier.
So it's already easy.
It's going to get even easier.
And the only thing to worry about
is if Nick weren't working on this
or Lexi wouldn't work on this,
if there weren't like people
working to make it easy,
then it'd be a problem.
But the fact that like
some models have been trained
without it
and maybe the next generation.
But you do understand,
I get what you're saying.
The compounding nature.
It's the compounding
that I think people can miss.
But it's like
Unless you have it, there's nothing to compound.
You need to start somewhere.
So now we have things like MDK and we have Matt making things with MDK
that are now getting out on the internet.
We need to do it fast.
There's going to be stuff invented in the future that's not in today's models
that are better for society.
Most things have not been invented yet.
I hear you guys in that, but yet the one thing I think that I am increasingly cautious on
is the defaults could become very powerful.
Like the defaults could shape the nature of what gets invented more quickly than we realize.
If the compounding nature of synthetic data is like vertical.
I think that pattern's always been true.
Maybe it's on steroids now.
That's the issue.
But also the pattern exists that the true value creation is the oddball, the weird thing that comes out of nowhere.
We love the oddballs here.
And so that'll still happen.
and then
and you have to believe
that that's like
the most important
use case to solve
is the weird oddball thing
yeah
like if you're trying to like
hey don't use Stripe
use Bitcoin instead
it's like okay
you can try to argue that
but it's
it's like an uphill battle
versus like
hey nothing else works
use Bitcoin
and you're like
oh great
yeah
my eyes lit up
I would love to see
Matt, Nick, Max
from Lexi as well
all you guys
I would love to see more videos
yeah yeah
just showing us
how you did it
yeah
like
explain like I'm five
casual demos, not super polished.
Not polished.
Like, show me.
Also, the prompts.
Well, here's one thing I've observed.
No one seems to share their prompts.
And that includes you and Matt.
We still need to give up for prompts.
And I don't know.
So why do you think that is?
Is it like, that's your IP?
And you want to keep it close to the chest?
Why isn't it just, to me,
the default should be part of the demo.
Part of like, hey, here's my work,
is actually showing prompts.
Because for others who haven't yet been able to achieve the success that you guys have, they're like, oh, that's cool, but how do I do it?
Yeah, I mean, I certainly don't consider it IP.
I'm just trying to get stuff out there.
Matt, I think, has explicitly said to me everything he does is open source and free for everybody.
I think we don't have a coding tool that makes it the default that your prompts get published.
This is an opportunity.
I think if somebody were to say, I don't know if it's a plug into VS Code or something into Cursor or Cloud Code or something, or Goose, but if there were a way to say, hey, default, publish all of my prompts and all of my sessions to this location, I think a lot of people would use that.
And maybe there's like different degrees of control you need.
Like, hey, like, let me review and approve them, you know, or only do it after the session,
if I approve the whole session so that people don't feel too concerned that there's something going public.
Or even one, just I press a button and it packages it up and shares it.
Totally.
Or even, and I include, that can include a video or whatever.
So part of the, like, I want to show off my work.
I hit a button, show off my work.
And it not only creates a video, but also like, here's a link to all the prompts.
Here's the conversation that was had with the AI.
And I did a few live streams where I just showed everything I did.
And Matt and I have done those Vibecast things where we're just showing everything.
But like, you can't take it from that video format and like copy and paste the prompt.
So you actually need it like in its native text format.
Request for a product.
Because I know there was a big push in the early days.
Jack put out the big bounty.
I don't know if anyone's ever taken this to do GitHub on Nostra.
what about if whoever is doing that
instead of thinking about GitHub
we just start from like okay the future is
Vibes and
what does version control for Vibes look like
we need version control
this is a request for a startup
I want to see someone build GitHub for prompts
ideally on Oster but
wherever you think it makes sense
and because then you could do some really cool stuff where you could say like okay
here are all the different forks
I mean there's a bunch of stuff
one thing Vinny makes a point is there's a lot of noise
So like probably you have an AI kind of like, you know, like a fuzz testing or whatever.
It's just like takes the important parts, extracts it.
Extract the, yeah.
Like what was the final thing that worked here?
And like, let's package that up.
Exactly.
And then ideally you kind of have it in a way where you can just like kind of like hover
over it and see.
And then ideally, then what you could do is you could start then pumping that through
different models, right?
And this is something I told the Maple AI guys, which we should talk about more is like
with this idea of like, oh, I've got one, my personal AI, which then has like 15 different
models it farms out to.
It'd be cool if I could say this prompt
with claw generates this. This prompt
with Google generates this. And just
have all these different trees. I think both
are interesting. I also would like to see
the whole thing. Because even if it's
noise, it's like, even if you went
down a wrong path, wrong path, wrong
path, and then finally right path, I
learn from that. Because if I'm
starting at zero, or if I'm
at this level of skill and you're
at this level,
then I'd best
learn how to get that level if I see the work
you did to get there.
I mean, I can understand that
in the traditional sense,
I would 100% agree.
I think in this new world
we're moving to,
you should almost care less
about the dead ends.
And like, if I did the work
to help the machine figure out
how to do this,
that I wanted to be done
and you want the same thing to be done.
The new version is you don't need
to learn all the details and dead ends.
You just need to tell the machine,
you know, do that thing that DK did
and now move on.
And I'm going to do the thing
that only Steve is doing.
Yeah.
So I think actually,
if you look at a lot of these like proprietary,
like, you know, the cursors of the world,
the windsrifts of the world,
a lot of like the story,
and I don't know how much,
and actually in the Anthropic as well,
a lot of the story is
because people are using these interfaces for coding,
They have more data and a good feedback loop.
And they can train better models.
They can compound better models.
So if you want to solve like open source AI
or open source coding,
maybe what you really want to do is get a plugin
for like a goose that becomes like a repo on Noster
where you can default publish
or with a gated approval,
publish everything you want to Noster.
Now you've got Noster is the corpus
of all of the prompt sessions of everything that got done
and like the output software from it.
I love that.
And so for the people out there
that are thinking about this stuff,
Matt, Naked, MDK, Max, Alexi,
the Albie guys, Million, Pablo,
that's a really good idea.
Yeah.
And I think it patterns like,
what was that sort of like,
what would GitHub look like on Nostra?
But oftentimes when we do those things,
like what does Twitter look like on Nostra?
Too much analogy of how the current thing works,
but the opportunities come
not from doing the analogies well and polished,
but it's from finding the things
that couldn't be done before.
Isn't this what Pablo
is kind of trying to do?
We should get on another call
with Pablo and have him
demo us his thing.
Well, I thought his was
more like the council of experts,
kind of advisors idea.
I mean, he's floated
in and out of a bunch of these,
so we should...
I mean, always creative
and happy to, yeah,
spend more time with Pablo.
Future episode.
Yeah.
The future is rich.
Cool.
Okay.
Great show, guys.
Yeah, great.
Yeah.
Okay.
Wrap it.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.