Right, let her rip. Welcome to the Presidio Bitcoin Jam. How are you guys doing?
What's up, guys?
Hey, DK. Hey, Mac.
Hey.
Hey, guys.
So, two of the three of us are in the Presidio right now, but we decided to do the show remote
because I think we're all either sick or are likely to become sick or something. So, how
are you guys feeling?
On the path to recovery.
Yeah, I'm feeling pretty good. I was just saying, an unusual situation, you know, holding
down the fort here in the Presidio. But I was telling DK, I wanted to say this story. I have
a newfound appreciation for San Francisco. And here I'm chugging a little bit of an electrolyte
solution I made with salt and water. I've been on the road for the last week and a half, also just
got back super late last night. And for the first time in my life, we went out to New Mexico for a
visit to the Santa Fe Institute, which that, by the way, is its own interesting rabbit hole we
should chat more about, but Santa Fe Institute was founded by a Nobel laureate from Los Alamos,
and they basically studied complexity. Very, very, very interesting place, really interesting work
there. And I've always thought of complexity, and in many ways, is the basis for investing,
like investing is applied complexity theory. Anyway, so that was very cool. But it's a lot
hotter in the desert, and there's a lot of elevation, and I continued to do my normal sauna
routine and when the water fountain was broken and all of those factors continued to add up.
Also, we drove there and back, which you guys know I never drive.
So stacking all of the-
From San Francisco to Santa Fe?
And back.
Is that like a day or two of driving?
Many, many, many, many.
We've been on the road for over a week.
It's been an experience.
I'm good not driving for another lifetime.
And anyways, it was interesting.
It was fun.
But yeah, man, I was driving.
And after the sauna, we were driving out of New Mexico, and I came to a gas station.
I was just like, I think I'm kind of starting to lose consciousness.
I need to pull over now.
And so we did, and we got in there, and called paramedics.
And I was like, all right, if I, you know, shout out to Anjali.
I was like, I'm trusting you to get me IVs, and if this is the end, this is the end.
But anyways, they came.
I got a lot of nasty, nasty electrolyte solutions, but I drank them, and I'm alive.
Anyways, happy to be back in San Francisco.
Happy to be back chatting with Bitcoin with you guys.
not be on the road, not be in the heat.
Yeah, well, we're glad to have you
and you're still alive, which is good news.
And
I think we
have the coldest
summer on record. I think the
coldest June on record in San Francisco
since 2002.
Excellent.
Try to stay healthy. Get more
sauna time in the cold.
When you're better, maybe we can...
Well, when you're better, let me know we can go sauna
together. Alright, I love it.
Steve, we'll get you in there too. It'll help with your cold as well.
Yeah, Steve's still never been to the sauna. What kind of podcaster are you?
I know, man.
I haven't checked all the boxes yet.
Okay, but at least you're starting. You have the Bitcoin treasury company that you're going to announce that you're starting, right?
Yeah.
As any good podcaster would.
Missing that check mark as well.
What do you bring into the conversation here? Come on.
all you have is like technical knowledge and it's gonna be a rocket ship baby
going up
um so uh okay so in a more serious note we the news of the week i think i think we missed
last week because it was the fourth of july so we've actually haven't convened in like a week
and a half now. So we've got... That's why we're doing
a special edition Wednesday.
Special edition Wednesday. Because
we missed all of last week and we
didn't want to go two full weeks.
So now we're going to do one today
and then we'll do one. We'll get back on schedule
next week.
Yeah. So a week from Friday we'll be back
on regular schedule. Yeah.
Cool. And I'll be in the studio. I don't know about you guys
but I'll be around. I don't know.
Good.
Yeah?
If you'll have me. We'll have you.
We'll have you. If you've got your Bitcoin treasury company ready to go by then, invite it back. Otherwise, don't talk to us.
Well, it's more we need to investigate bacterial pneumonia, how contagious it is.
Because I did not think it was contagious, but now it appears it is.
Right. Jen was worried and I said, oh, I think it's non-communicable. And she's got on chat GPT and she's like, no, it's definitely communicable.
we need some complexity scientists to check that out steve yeah okay so the news of the week i think
we've got a few things that happened uh that are worth noting and we can obviously take this in any
direction but uh i saw this 100 million dollar venture capital raised by ego death capital and
my understanding ego death has been operating as a bitcoin only vc for several years already and
made a lot of prominent investments and so a new capital infusion of 100 million dollars to back
i presume it's bitcoin focused company going forward um that's good news for the ecosystem
good news for bitcoin good news for the development ecosystem around around kind of new startups in
in bitcoin do you guys have you guys talked to any of the folks over there do you guys know
much about kind of the plans?
Probably as much as you have.
Okay.
So just heard it on the news.
Any favorite investments?
I know they did Fetty.
I had pneumonia the past week, so.
Okay, see.
I almost done an organization in New Mexico.
My outreach was at zero the past week.
Got it.
Yeah, I mean, I have a little bit of color on this.
I mean, I haven't talked to them recently,
but I mean, we obviously worked together
on a lot of deals in the past.
And I think it's interesting for a couple of reasons.
And I would say Lynn is probably who I speak the most with.
But in a couple of other investments,
a lot of the same companies we've invested in,
they're focused a little bit later stage now.
So like Breeze, I invested early in them out of Highmind,
and then they led both Acid and now I guess Series A
or kind of a larger round out of this new fund, I think,
which is interesting.
and a couple others.
Fetty is one as well.
We've also co-invested in.
I think it's exciting because of two things.
One, just speaking from my own personal experience,
when raising Fund One for High Mind back in 2021,
it was a very different environment.
Interest rates were zero
and people were watching Bitcoin rip through the moon.
And so there was a lot of enthusiasm
and I think it was frankly a lot easier
to raise money back then.
I think a lot of companies and funds
have frankly gone through a little bit of a winter for the last couple of years.
And, you know, even with the price kind of ticking back up, it still obviously hasn't
gone parabolic.
So you haven't seen any of that kind of crazy euphoria that you saw back in 21.
And so, you know, I think they put out a press release.
They were starting to raise this around, I think, two years ago or something, a year
and a half ago.
It's certainly been long raise, but seeing that complete is, you know, great because
it's a sign that, you know, the tides are perhaps turning and capital that understands
of Bitcoin understands the long-term trajectory of this, is also interested in the companies
that are actually building on top, well, the infrastructure itself and then the applications
on top. So I think that's a great sign. I think we're probably, my hope as well is that this is
going to be a turning point, not only for the funds, but obviously downstream of the funds,
the companies are now able to go out there and raise their Series A's and Series B's and et cetera.
I think the other thing that's interesting is the Bitcoin sort of focused ecosystem has very much
lacked a Series A focused fund, also kind of Series B as well. So there's been a lot of capital
with the seed stage, obviously like folks like myself
with the pre-seed stage even that are going super, super early.
But since Kraft used to do a lot of investing
at this sort of series age stage
with companies like Lightning Labs,
but over the last couple of years,
something that I've seen run into repeatedly
is that there's a gap in the market of,
okay, this seed stage company has a little bit of traction.
Now they need to go out there and raise,
let's call it $3 to $10 million to get to the next phase.
And frankly, there really haven't been
a lot of those funds. Crypto funds are not really focused on Bitcoin. Traditional VC occasionally
will do some, like obviously, you know, Coastal and Founders Fund with Lava, but that has not
been the norm. So I think it's definitely a gap in the market. And, you know, I think this is
going to be the first of many we see for new fundraisers and for hopefully, you know, other
traditional Series A funds as well coming in and starting to fill that gap. And do they really
exclusively focus on kind of traditional Series A, Series B, take a board, see kind of larger
checks? Like what's, what's the typical check size? Do you know? Well, I think that shifted over time.
I mean, and they're a fun one that you did a lot of seed or they're primarily seed focused as well.
So I don't know exactly how their, how their plans have evolved. Um, but, uh, I think they're
definitely trying to do more in the few million dollar range. It looks like like in the one to
four or $5 million range. Um, but I've been, you know, I'm, I'm obviously no insider info there.
Um, and, uh, it looks like, yeah, I think a bit more traditional trying to get a board seat and
that sort of thing. And would you pull them into like a seed deal you're looking at to also
co-invest in seed or do you feel like they're more like graduated beyond that scale yeah i mean i i
you know obviously don't know what the current state is the press release um that uh that you
shared you know said they have some seed money left and so yeah i mean definitely i've i've
co-invested with them and you know would definitely consider putting them in for for a seed round i
would say at least for me over time i've gone even earlier so now i'm much more in like how do we get
this one it's just one or two guys um or dals and uh get that absolute first money in so i would say
that's probably, you know, too early for them now, kind of where they're scaling up. I think in that
seed round where there's a little bit of traction is maybe an area we would both play. But it looks
like they're definitely trying to go a little bit later stage, which I think is great for the
ecosystem. Yeah. And it looks like I think from both what we saw at the Presidio Bitcoin hackathon,
as well as just all of the energy we see happening around Vibe coding, it feels like there's a lot of
new ways to get started in a sense and i think my understanding is i don't know if you're still in
deep discussion here but my understanding was that out of the procedure bitcoin hackathon there was
at least one if maybe more that you know proto companies or might be companies um you know i'm
just curious sort of from where you sit max did you end up investing out of that or are you still
pursuing that or sort of what is the what is the very earliest stage look like because i feel like
the earliest stage from the procedure of Bitcoin hackathon and what we've seen in
VibeCoding is sort of undergoing a lot of changes right now.
And I wonder sort of how that impacts your business because you're like at the very
earliest stage.
Yeah.
I mean, so out of the, I have not invested in anyone specifically, anyone new.
I mean, some of the hackers, obviously like Lalu are already founders of existing
high-mining work codes, but I've not made any new investments out of that yet.
There's one that I'm continuing to chat with.
And I think it's not something that's going to happen overnight, but I would say that one's
still in play and we'll see, we'll see where things go over the next month or two.
I think, you know, one thing that's maybe changed a little bit for me now is I view coming in as
that first check is like, there's still a gap where, you know, maybe someone has a really good
idea, but they want to be able to, you know, quit their job or, you know, they want to be able to
make one or two key hires or contractors. It's maybe the difference between, you know, I don't
know, like just having a great technical product and having it look beautiful or something like
that. So I definitely think there's still going to be, you know, a lot of room for some of that
really early money, sort of almost like angel money, which is, I think, really helpful to get
started. But at the same time, to your point, you know, even if you don't get crazy revenue
immediately, like I also as an investor do expect to see now with the, you know, the advent of vibe
coding tools, like I want to see some like some demonstration of traction, right? Like I may have
a thesis that it matches, but you should be able to show some data points. It doesn't necessarily
need to be revenue, but some data points are like, yes, there is interest in this thesis that I'm
putting out there. Do you have any kind of requests for startups or things that you
imagine should be built, but you haven't seen people building yet?
Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, on the taking a giant step back, because it's something I've
been thinking about, you know, as I'm putting together some more information for some of my LPs.
and I would say if you take a giant step back
and you say, okay, AI is going to drive the cost
of app development towards or asymptotic with zero,
what is still scarce in that world, right?
So I put on my sort of like Bitcoiner,
like what's great for the world hat
and then I put on my investor hat.
I put on my investor hat, I'm like,
what's actually scarce in a world where open protocols,
things like Bitcoin, Lightning, and Nostra,
allow for interoperability of data, interoperability of identity with Noster,
and plug into open payment networks.
And now with Vibe Coding Tools, it's a lot of easy switching costs,
especially if you can bring that identity with you with Noster.
So what's still scarce in that world?
Well, I come up with three major things that are still scarce, arguably four.
One is obviously Bitcoin itself,
so companies that are able to start stacking and building that stack quickly.
That's very valuable.
The second is human attention, of course,
or the attention, let's say,
of the entity that owns the capital.
So not to be speciesist, perhaps that as over time.
But attention, which is in fact all you need,
attention is still a very scarce resource,
but that's a little bit trickier
because then you're actually playing for like,
what's the thing that's going to get hot?
And I think that could shift quickly over time,
like films versus longstanding,
sort of getting trapped into a network
like a Facebook or something.
and so I definitely think there's always going to be
investment opportunity to find
what gets hot whether that's an app
whether that's a podcast
everything is competing for the same resource there
which is human attention
so there's always going to be money to be made there
but I think that's going to be a lot more
Hollywood-esque at this point
it's going to be a lot more projects that come quickly
teams come to get together, they make a lot of money on it
if they do well
but then they break up and try new things
and I think that attention cycle is going to get faster and faster
so I think that's frankly hard
to invest in now. And unless you have some real strong thesis or alpha around that, I think that's
tricky. The third thing though, and this is what I'm getting increasingly obsessed with, is the
infrastructure itself. And man, we need to do a whole show on this and potentially way more than
a show. But I am basically, as you guys know, longtime Solar Bull, longtime Solar Maxi along
with Bitcoin. And the deeper I'm getting in this right now, the deeper I'm seeing that
the ability to build, like the demand right now for compute is literally insatiable.
And one of the biggest limiting factors is energy. And there are some very wild ideas I'm exploring
at the moment around, you know, there's still all this old world thinking of like, well, we need to
find a way to connect you to the grid and this and that. But if you follow, just follow the curves,
Just follow the curves and see how much cheaper solar keeps getting reliably, how much cheaper
batteries keep getting reliably.
And you pair that with what I call sort of a new permissionless paradigm, which I think
Bitcoin is definitely what kicked it all off of like, oh, no, we don't need, you know,
potentially to connect to the grid.
We can do everything behind the meter.
We can literally not even sign contracts, but we know as long as there's a kilowatt hour
produced, there is a buyer of last resort that pays for it.
I think that paradigm is going to come more and more into the compute realm as well.
so I am increasingly becoming obsessed with this idea that there are ways to build
you know call it even like new grids that just like leave the old grid behind and I think there's
tremendous tremendous tremendous opportunity for people who are kind of like big wild thinkers out
there that obviously requires a lot more capital than I have to deploy but I think you know there's
still room for me in that early stage to help someone get that idea off the ground but I'll
have more coming on that but that's an area I'm getting pretty obsessed with yeah I mean it seems
like if you have a big idea like that, it doesn't need to necessarily fit your existing kind of
capital structure, right? You could go raise new capital for something big and ambitious that's
more focused on a particular venture, right? Yeah, no, I'm definitely exploring all that.
So I think, you know, and again, I think a fourth area that's scarce we've all talked about is
position in the Lightning Network itself. So I continue to be also very, very, very bullish
on any company that, you know, ideally own some, you know, human attention or some,
network effect like Cash App or something.
And I think a lot of the apps out there today
do that or have
the potential to do that. Things like Albi,
Breeze, which is
really exciting, sort of the SDK adoption
they're getting. And I do think that that position,
the sort of railroad analogy we've used is
also very good. And I'm sure there's others I'm not thinking of.
So to be clear, I'm still very bullish on a lot of
the traditional Bitcoin companies, but I
think that, and
companies that integrate Nostra, but I'm
increasingly thinking it's like using Bitcoin,
using Lightning, using Nostra is going to become kind of table stakes. And so then the question
becomes where beyond that does value actually accrue and where is potentially capturable?
And I think some more of the actual hard infrastructure stuff is getting really
interesting to me. Yeah. Have we seen any kind of talent marketplaces on kind of Nostra,
anything experimented there that looks interesting to you? Like LinkedIn or like,
what do you mean? Well, I was thinking maybe a little more up top. Yeah. TopTel.
This is a great example.
Or like, yeah, kind of Upwork is a more open public one.
TopTail is a bit more curated, but.
Yeah, I mean, obviously we've talked a little bit about,
you know, Unstock, which has the AIs hiring people.
I think that's still like a kind of brand new model
that could only exist on something open and permissionless
like Nostra.
I'm sure there are.
I mean, honestly, the thing is,
it's getting hard to track all the sort of like
long tail experimental Nostra apps, which is great.
Because that means we're seeing experimentation.
So if someone's in the chat and they know of one, I would bet money that someone has tried something in that direction, but nothing that's gotten big enough yet to really get on my radar.
Because I have a specific idea I was going to float that I think touches on an idea that I think Steve and I have, I forget if this was in our main chat or kind of in a side chat, but I think when I was experimenting with the VO2, or sorry, VO3 videos, so the videos that you can speak, I think Steve had played around a little bit and kind of was like, ah, I can't get it to do what I want.
Is that an accurate representation, Steve?
And did you ever end up finding happiness with that or not?
Or unhappiness?
I haven't invested more time in VO3.
Right.
So this is kind of my point is I wouldn't consider myself a VO3 expert, but I have a little bit of a process that I can do.
like so if steve were to propose hey i'd like a video that helps me tell this story or uses this
kind of script i think i could take his input and use my knowledge is a little bit more advanced
than steve's to do some meta prompting and get a thing that steve might like and i want in a sense
that it's not like a film producer because i'm not i'm not good at that i'm not like a traditional
filmmaker or video editor but i do have some some amount of skill at vo3 video creation relative to
the general population i think we might have talked about it on the show i definitely remember
talking about this with you though but i do think that's like a great job category people who have
leveled up their skills in prompting and then offered that as a service to others yeah so so
I could see it in video production.
I could see it in, you know, vibe coding.
You know, it feels like there's a lot of opportunity here
to sort of cross, you know,
help people's ideas come to life
even if they can't fully prompt them.
But other people who aren't traditional, in a sense,
they're good at prompting,
but maybe not good at the traditional creative process.
Actually, it's like a new type of supply
or inventory you could bring online.
And that when you're bringing new inventory online,
And that's sort of what usually gives rise to new marketplaces because you don't have people who are already entrenched and already know how they make money and do their craft.
You sort of like enable new people.
That's kind of the rise of Airbnb, for example, or the rise of Uber is that concept.
So I almost feel like that's a little bit of a request for a startup I would make.
um you know and and i wonder is the right way to build that to start in a fully like permissionless
nostr publishing the events and the needs and the jobs and build a client for that and then
bitcoin for payments or is it better to simplify the ux with the centralized thing with a view
toward how you get it like how you could get it into the kind of nostr bitcoin ecosystem because
there's sort of like a different use case needed like like independent of the censorship resistance
of all of this there's actually like a marketplace need in my opinion anyway um what do you think
well can i make a suggestion not of that specific idea first of all i i totally agree that idea i
like it um but i know you haven't you have many ideas max does a lot of us have entrepreneurial
ideas um it would be great to like crowdsource those and create a list it would be great to
bring that to the monthly builder meetup.
Yeah.
Bitcoin,
bring it up to global builder meetups.
And,
um,
and then it'd be great to attract entrepreneurs to work out of
proximity to Bitcoin.
Yes.
To work on some of those ideas.
So it'd be good,
good to like sort of institutionalize this so that we don't share a good
idea in the show.
And then it's sort of gets lost.
So,
um,
maybe give,
give us an action item there to,
to follow up on that.
That's a great.
So what,
what is that?
that's like a list that's published on twitter or like part of the city of bitcoin website or
part of the the builder meetup page or yeah i don't have a specific location in mind um so we
did figure that out but i mean for right now at least let's write it down on a notepad in front
of you yeah um but uh you know ultimately we'd want that to be a public published list um that
others could contribute to so maybe it's on github but then auto published to a website that's
more accessible um but then but i think the the more meaty thing would be like then actively
discussing it at builder meetups or even better actively vibe coding it ahead someone someone vibe codes it ahead of time and then demos it at the builder meetup
Yeah.
And there's venture capitalists
in the room as well, right?
So we could help
match make as well.
I mean, it's kind of like
YC has their RFPs as well.
I think that, yeah,
I mean, like I think
doing it super informally is great.
And then maybe, you know,
over time institutionalize
like a couple of like,
no, this is like
the really, really big idea.
You know, maybe that makes the Presidio Bitcoin website or something. I think it's, yeah, I love it.
i'm guessing i'm guessing you won't mind me sharing this but um another one of our mutuals
uh my guess is he'd love somebody to just take and run with it but he may do it if nobody else
but he was sort of suggesting it would be helpful to have a little bit of like a product hunt like
community where you could gather up all the vibe coded bitcoin noster projects and kind of
see what people are launching and what's kind of bubbling to the top of interestingness
so I told him to start with a
stacker news territory but I think
he has ideas even outside
of what maybe fit that mold
I think the builder meetup
can sort of
facilitate that as well
we should potentially consider
starting a builder stacker news territory
maybe that would be a good place to have
a discussion and some of the lists for each month
yeah
it seems like a great
I like the fact that it already
you know like stacker news already has a bitcoin centric audience and kind of all the you know
lightning bitcoin payment stuff and it's all kind of built so you can kind of just show up and
prototype it there and then if you want to do more advanced stuff you can customize later yeah and the
quality of discussion lately i think is continue to improve which is something that i i'm excited
about um i do want to come back to that idea itself though because i think it's very interesting
and it's, you know, it's, um, we mentioned, I guess two months ago now, three months ago.
Um, that moves quickly, but I remember you guys remember I was trying to vibe code an app,
um, you know, still could. And I still also haven't put in the time to figure it out yet. So,
you know, now that I'm back in SF, maybe they will, but, um, I also got frustrated. I was like,
ah, I can't one shot this. It's, you know, a little too hard. And so I ended up putting out
the bounty for 100,000 Bitcoin satoshis, whichever you prefer. And I ended up putting that out there
and I got a guy that built 80% of it and I ended up, you know, giving him the bounty.
I think there's, you know, two kind of interesting ways this could go almost. I mean,
the beauty of doing it this sort of Noster and Bitcoin way is it's permissionless, right? So
what you get from just kind of doing it as like a raw bounty to help you with getting your prompts
or something like that is, you know,
you can work with NIMS, AIs,
you know, people that don't have traditional whatever.
For whatever reason,
they don't want to have their government name listed.
And so in this case,
the account that ended up helping me was called Lemon.
I have no idea who this was.
I have no idea if it's a human, it's an AI.
All I know is they built what I asked for
and I paid them.
And so I think that's kind of the strength
of sort of the Nostra version of this.
And I think that's where something like unstuck,
the AI marketplace really, really,
but it doesn't have to be AI,
but like the open-ended marketplace
really sort of thrives in that environment
because it doesn't discriminate.
And so you could say, hey, I need help with these prompts
or with whatever.
And, you know, here's what I'm willing to pay
or, you know, name your own price.
And, you know, humans and AIs can compete for that.
So that's really cool.
On the other hand, though,
if I'm being sort of totally like short-term rational
about this, I do think there's going to be another more sort of like handheld experience,
which is like, hey, I don't just want a random prompt or like kind of like throw it out to
the ether. I want to actually like find someone that has good reviews, like
have them work with me as like a, you know, friend, copilot, whatever.
And I think that probably would start better in a more centralized
system that can have a little bit more sort of curation around it. So I think there's
I think both opportunities would be cool. And so do you think
it's fine like if somebody has an idea for how to get to that decentralized version would you sort
of typically advise them start with the decentralized stuff figure out how it all works would you say
start you know get the ux right in the centralized thing and then you can decentralize it later do you
think that's just like a trap and then people get get stuck in the trap depends on what you want to
do i mean i think um in general my sort of intuition is like when people say they're in
decentralized later they almost never do i think there are a couple cases where that's likely it
will happen. Something like Stacker News, because I think, you know, Kian is so, so committed to his
sort of principles or philosophy. I don't think it's possible. I mean, I think if you're trying
to build a big business immediately, probably centralized is still easier. And so that's
awesome. If you're trying to demonstrate the power of the open protocols, then obviously I
think you can do something really cool with Nostra. But I would say in either case, be clear about what
your intentions are and what you want to get out of it. And so, and if you're going to go, the open
protocol route and really try and demonstrate there's something here do something that can only
be done with nostril bitcoin and lightning and in that case again i think it comes down to you know
opening the hiring field to anyone or anything whereas if you're going to go the more like
prompt marketplace i want someone to work with hold my hand that's probably a more curated
human to human experience i would guess for now um but yeah who knows i think if you my take on
this and i i asked because i was curious if you kind of would lean towards this or not but my
take is that you actually can nail ux and use case very easily if you're like if you have like
the commitment to the principles of what you want to achieve and i think like your example of like
kian and stacker news he's like fully committed to the principles he's not like how do i keep this
thing and build my own you know juggernaut you know centralized thing he's like it's open source
i'm going to keep it centralized for now because it helps me kind of work through the problems and
maybe get some more traction but i think you know he would not keep it uh centralized as soon as he
has a path or plan for how to how to get it decentralized uh but he's sort of focused i'd
say more on the centralized thing first so i feel like that's a relatively healthy pattern that's
mostly underexplored like people try to go full full decentralized sort out all the challenging
problems there while you still have challenging problems in like the core product and the UX
and, you know, the kind of overall experience.
Yeah.
I mean, it's interesting because I was discussing this with one of the, a little bit of different
contacts with one of the postdocs at the Senev Institute.
And I think it's something that, you know, it's, it's kind of like to abstract it away,
like is bottoms up or tops down better?
And is anything really just bottoms up or tops down?
And I think, you know, the takeaway from our conversation, because he's coming from a very
different sort of place. He does a lot of like studying biology and, and yeah, just totally
different world is one, you know, depends, depends on where you are in the cycle of an organism or
whatever, whatever level of abstraction you want to say is growth. Two, there's no such thing as
fully bottoms up or fully tops down. Like you could argue, for example, that all of this sort
of in our own reality emerged bottoms up. And yet out of that emergence has come, you know,
sort of human centralized institutions at a specific time, moment in time. So which is it?
It's both. And yeah, I think I would just say in general, you know, one takeaway for me is maybe
I've leaned a little too much in the like, you know, you can see even from my shirt, like the
sort of Noster, build it from the ground up, like embrace the chaos. And I still definitely believe
that's the sort of the trend of our sort of society, if it's going to be a free society,
needs to follow that for sure.
But I do think perhaps
I've underexplored as well.
And I think the Nostra ecosystem
as a whole,
where centralization
to test something out,
to get it right,
can be really good.
And that's why
you've seen some companies,
things like Primal,
like there are clear advantages
to having a small team,
very focused,
with a point of view,
saying, no,
we're going this design
and, you know,
ideally embrace as many
of the sort of open principles
as possible
so they can, you know,
not accidentally create
their own protocol
and still,
system open.
But look, we've said this many times
in the show. I think one of the things Nostra
is a community lacks.
We have the talent, we have the principles,
we have a lot of ideas,
but it's like very focused entrepreneurs
who could come in and say, this is a beautiful
idea, but I'm going to
centralize enough to get
a really incredible user experience
out there and
use Nostra where it's valuable, but not just because
it's an ideology. So I think if anything
I should probably steer a bit more in that direction myself.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think if you can understand the intention of the person,
I think that sometimes is better than the specific implementation of the V1
and getting a V1 out there and getting traction
is really, really challenging with anything new.
So, you know, sort of pick your battles in a sense.
And I think Primal is another good example where
I think they've taken some heat for like their caching layer,
which has some centralizing effects but i think they're like look this just this solves the ux
this makes it much better and like it's open source and maybe it's still a centralized risk
but i think they're they're threading the needle pretty well on that i'd say i agree i do want to
add one very important caveat which is you know you do have to understand what prince what your
principles are and from every you know person's perspective it's different and what really matters
and i would say you know in this whole ecosystem of the things we care about and are pushing
forward, there are certain things where you just can't sacrifice on decentralization. That's why
we all got into Bitcoin and focused on Bitcoin and did not get swept up with the crypto hype or
the Ethereum and all the other stuff that came after it is at that base layer,
there is no room for compromise. Because if you allow a trend towards centralization,
which every other ecosystem has over time, and there's always plans of, well, we start
decentralized and then we centralize, or vice versa, we start centralizing and decentralizing,
which has happened, oh, I don't know, never, then you lose the whole principle of the technology
that we're building on. So I think one thing I would encourage myself and the Bitcoin and
Nostra communities to think a bit more about is centralization and decentralization can be
different and should be different at different layers of the stack. At the core protocol level
for Bitcoin, there is no room for compromise. At the application layer, there's probably a lot
more room for for centralization um while still respecting the base protocol yep cool um any on
before we move off the topic of kind of building new things and venture capital and startups um
i was going to mention that uh i was i just happened to be uh texting with a friend who's
he's a you know staunch bitcoiner but not necessarily super involved in the san francisco
startup scene and he sent me a link to uh horizon and he was like hey this looks really cool have
you ever heard of this and i was like actually those guys you know we've got a presidio bitcoin
you should come by uh so i was just going to ask if you guys have heard any update on what's
happening with horizon then i i pointed out is it sovana is that the way you say the other one steve
yeah so vanna so do you guys that that seems like an idea that just has organic promising
traction and kind of bridges some of the trad five primitives that people are comfortable with with
kind of a use case for getting more involved in bitcoin as people are learning about it have you
guys heard anything about either of those companies and kind of market market progress on them
anything that you can share no i haven't heard anything in the past week or so
yeah i mean i nothing new to share i i still need to do a deeper dive into both i mean the one thing
that maybe as an overarching principle is very clear to me and we've discussed on the show before
is that you know where bitcoin is in its own sort of adoption cycle it's clearly in in this sort of
like securitization slash um recapitalize old financial systems phase and so increasingly
that's why i see sort of like that i mean i think it's undeniable like the crazy market demand
is to find ways to recapitalize a system
that otherwise is failing
under the weight of its own sort of fiat excess.
And I know we've talked a lot
about a lot of the treasury stuff on here
and my own views on MicroStrategy
versus the rest of the companies.
But I think this is just another example
where it's clear that there is demand,
there's realization that Bitcoin is pristine capital
and pristine collateral.
and there is demand in the largest markets,
traditional capital markets in the world
that we can introduce flavor of Bitcoin
to in many ways, I would say,
offer upside to the early investors there,
but also to perhaps save a system
that doesn't have to go down in flames,
but can kind of transition much more peacefully
to the next thing.
And the real estate market obviously is massive as well.
And there's clear demand to use Bitcoin
to slowly insert itself and recapitalize that market too.
cool um okay well i guess i i indicated we might move beyond building but i think our next topic
is actually also about building as many of the things that interest us are about um have you
guys you guys have heard of this skibbity project skibbity cash i had to do all that this morning
man like i've never even heard the word skibbity i feel what what come on we're like steve and i
way older than you and we uh we've we've already been discussing this and i think there's a whole
list of gen z words that we've recently educated ourselves about um but does anybody want to take
the the lead on what is skivety cash kind of what's the whole process around this
um i understand it at a high level i think pavlinex um proposed this it's basically a
hackathon they put heap just pulled i think his own money together and then matt belez helped join
as well they put some money together and said hey anyone who builds a skibity app um
has a chance to win and they gave out i think like 8k in uh 8 000 us dollars in prices to the top
three and yeah i'm not a skibity expert expert but like the young generation is just basically
weird-ass shit
is attractive.
I looked at the top
three winners and
the first place and third place, I noticed they
both had toilets as part of their UI.
Yeah, me too. What is going on?
When I say
they like weird-ass shit, almost
literally.
I think it's just a new style
or genre or whatever.
It kind of makes me think back
to four years ago uh or actually makes me think about like uh dogecoin and these coins that
play off of memes like dogs and shibu and stuff like that um and then four years ago when
interviewing elon musk like he's like a reason he likes dogecoin over bitcoin is the most entertaining
outcome will be the actual outcome is what he said in the interview um and i pointed out that
Like, why can't Bitcoin wallets or Bitcoin applications have skins or themes that are like cultural or fun or weird or whatever, right?
And so I kind of like this contest to just like slap on super weird or culturally relevant user experiences for a very different demographic.
But the underlying thing is a wallet or an application lets you send and receive Bitcoin.
So I think I thought it was a really unique, cool hackathon idea.
yeah i okay so not to be the the total old head in the group now uh i learned that word recently
as well but what like if you had to give just the tldr what does skibbity mean and like i noticed
there's like dk perhaps you have some context because you know the toilet thing or you mentioned
that as well like i saw a head in a toilet in 2023 like imagine most of our audience probably
has never heard of this what's going to claim to be gen z but i think skibbity means like trash
or like crap or something.
It just means like junk.
Like, is it a positive or negative?
Because I saw, I quickly sort of Googled around this
and I was like, well, you can use it either way, but.
It's kind of like, that's bad.
That's bad.
Like that's skibbity.
Like as an example, would you say something like,
oh man, like, okay, you know,
the fact that my whole collapse in New Mexico happened
when I'd be like, yeah, it was so skibbity.
I, maybe, I don't know.
You shouldn't update your TikTok knowledge.
If you want to get more culturally attuned.
I have zero plans to come back.
My understanding is that Matt actually did a bit of cultural research with the age demographic.
And I think Skibbity is like, it's very much like, you know, the meme of like, hello, fellow kids.
It's a little bit, I think, past its prime as a term.
but didn't he say he learned i mean it's isn't part of it it everyone's self-aware of how ridiculous
it is yeah and that's what makes it funny to them yeah but then it quickly becomes tiresome
whatever the current one is but then the the kids who are two years younger then think it's cool
and then and then a little bit later the kids two years younger than that think it's cool
but the older kids have already moved on to the next yeah so like if if say like the 18 year olds
or the 16 year olds kind of invent a new thing then that's funny for a little while this is from
matt's kind of ethnographic research then you know like then like the 15 the 14 and 15 year olds hear
about it and they think they're like in the cool kid game like the kid's a couple years older than
them and then by the time it gets to the 12 year olds the 16 or 18 year olds are like this like this
is no longer interesting right we got to come up with which is a pattern that's existed throughout
time but i think it's just like way faster cycles now yeah like probably in a matter of weeks or
days they go through new ones you know because combine that historical pattern that's happened
of teenagers with internet speed, with memes, and they've just accelerated all of that.
So this brings up so many questions and topics, right?
We could literally spend a whole show just now on Skibbity and Gen Z.
But one thing, I mean, so this is kind of what I was referencing earlier when we were
talking about the investing point, you know, of like what's scarce in this world.
And one of the things is human attention.
but like it's really hard to think about you know the staying power of an application because to your
point Steve like it's accelerating faster and faster and so like what was the cool thing you
know yesterday tomorrow may be totally gone so that's that's a very challenging environment to
quote-unquote invest in and it also makes me just wonder I mean I like I really feel like the old
guy now but like is this the singularity we're all as we're like what is the singularity actually
look like it just looks like it's just going to be skibbity on steroids and people swiping faster
and faster and like you know it just i mean it feels like post-modern on on steroids like like
i don't know and then i also think to myself does it have to be this way right like it's very
interesting to me and by the way i think it's a badass idea and i like i really like hats off to
people for reaching out and like it's some of the nicer designs i've seen in the whole bitcoin space
so that's sick but i think about it i'm like um imagine a world like you know like my understanding
is in China that they don't let the kids use TikTok, which, you know, you could have some
interesting like thoughts around, hmm, I wonder why they encourage American kids to do it,
but not their own. And I think to myself, like, is it just that the internet and this is just the
normal sort of acceleration of technology and pace? Or is it like, no, like we went down at
least so far a particular technological cul-de-sac where people, you know, thanks to advertising
based business models have just become so like attention hungry and ADHD and swiping and like,
you know it doesn't have to be this way like you know potentially in a new technological world with
things like nostril bitcoin lightning perhaps there is a lot more still patience and there's
still things that spread quickly online because it's the internet um what do you guys think do
i just sound old right now or like i don't know i think everything i mean our whole lives we have
just been on this techno acceleration path yeah it's not like it just started it's like of course
it's been going but because it's accelerating every new phase seems like wow it just got a lot
faster than i could have ever imagined and so i suspect you know you fast forward two years five
years we're just it's just like ludicrous mode plaid you know you're just like everything is just
like plaid is that a gen z word but you don't know plaids it's baseballs that's a spits balls
reference i'm i'm i'm both too i thought you're a big tesla guy aren't you a tesla fan i love tesla
so you don't know what plat is oh so plat oh interesting i didn't never understood the
reference because that's like tesla came out with ludicrous speed and then they came out with the
plat model both of them are space balls references because they go to the speed of light to catch
another spaceship and then they want to go but they're they were behind so they had to speed up
So they had to go faster than the speed of light.
So they went to ludicrous speed.
Got it.
And then they unintentionally, I think, went to plaid.
Got it.
And at the point where they were plaid.
The emblem on the Tesla is plaid, which is exactly from the movie.
But to me, I'm glad we're doing this because I've always wondered.
I thought that was like some like reference to like a net or a web, like Indra's web or something.
Have you ever seen Spaceballs?
No.
Okay.
You have to see Spaceballs.
imagine they're like in some you know the spoof version of the millennium falcon and they just
like went through hyperspace or whatever and they overtook whatever their goal was and now they're
just like leaning back and it's just like plaid all around almost like they're in like a psychedelic
trip quick correction it would it would be the star destroyer because it was darth vader oh okay yes okay it wasn the millennium falcon they were catching the millennium falcon which is an rv with
wings wait so what is that web like thing you see on the back of those teslas that are plaid
that's meant to be like literally watch the movie max and they literally show that visual
in the movie so i mean like is that i mean yeah i guess like is this sort of implication of all
that that like we're realizing like our world is made of connections and information and like that
is the matrix a visualization of what it looks like i don't know the genesis of why they use that
in the movie but maybe but what a comment i made yesterday they just came out with a new version of
grok uh and they renamed it from grok to super grok so i'm wondering when we get ludicrous grok
and plaid grok although when mecca hitler came out yesterday that might have elevated to ludicrous
i missed i was traveling today i heard the word mecha hitler but what is what is this reference
oh you weren't aware i was traveling i was not really you know on online much so um with this
most powerful version new version of grok uh someone broke it to like it it like
was telling grok was telling everyone it was mega hitler and that elon programmed it that way from
the get-go was it like uh like and it was it was a joke or like it's not that it was a joke about i
mean the ceo left the company this morning because of that i don't know i i don't i wasn't part of
the the uh exit so i don't know right and elon musk cannot stay away from controversy that is wild
I mean, someone posted the diff online of what, like, they made a commit 16 hours ago to fix it.
And I forget the exact details of that change, but they basically had to slap a filter on Grok.
Jeez.
The world is just getting so great.
And honestly, the more I think about it, like, I'm sure that's by design.
Like Elon's very, obviously, one of the smartest guys of our generation.
Like probably like, this is what I'm saying.
The attention cycle is getting so short.
Those who understand how to really like keep getting in there over and over again.
Trump does this, Elon does this.
Like they're going to do well in the internet age.
But it's, I don't know, man.
I guess I just feel old.
But I'm like, this is, it's scary.
And again, I mean, what do you guys think of my earlier question?
Does it have to be this way?
Like if we have a much more, you know, kind of like quiet sound decentralized tech, like does attention span still go to zero?
I mean, I, I, I think everything in the world is, excuse the reference, but it's a tick and a talk.
And so I think we're ticking really hard to the side of like hyper everything, hyper connected, shit posting everything.
Nothing matters.
It's all nihilism.
And I think the talk, which is only just at the frontier right now, it's not really a widespread mainstream thing, is to, like, the new luxuries are like health and sleep.
And your time and being disconnected is, in a sense, a new form of luxury.
It used to be a luxury to be able to be online a lot.
Now it's a luxury to be able to be offline and to have relationships with real people instead of bots or whatever you're doing.
yeah um interesting so i yeah that's that's my take on it anyway i think it's so do you think
that means as we go from the tick to the talk that like i don't know like and how long does
this take to play as like in a whole nother generation after generation alpha whatever
they are that like people are actually like no we just like we use the internet but it's only
like we have our like you know our assistant that we talk to and it filters all the crap for me
and like most of the time i'm like sitting in my you know whatever my garden or like talking with
my like friends at school and like internet helps me but it's not it's not jacking my attention
well yeah i mean i think the more that we have ai bots everywhere creating all of this content
and you don't know what it is or who to trust i think you naturally are going to be like okay
i'm going to have my own bot to help defend me and part of the defense is just organize and fish
out the stuff that i should care about and the rest of it i'll just leave be because it doesn't
serve me right but that that feels like it's kind of playing out now but it may take may take years
i don't know depends on sort of the so to me i mean like you asked for requests for product
experiences or things like i want that i want the best self-sovereign ai assistant that can filter
out all the noise be my like real co-pilot um and and like i don't want to have to use the computer
anymore yeah ideally and i think like you want a voice interface probably right i want a voice
interface, but critically, and I think this is so, so, so, so, so important, you need to be able for
that to work. And we've talked about this many times, but you need to know as much as humanly
possible about the creation of that model or the agent, where it's hosted, who has access to it,
because there's a 0% chance it's going to go well if a company is the one hosting that for you.
I mean, it's going to be like what happened with Facebook and the ads 1.0 or 2.0 on steroids.
And so I think about, you know, if you could build one of the most important things for humanity today, who can do that in a way where you can audit yourself or have people that you trust audit to know what's in the model, who's hosting it.
I think some of the stuff that, you know, people like OpenSecret or the companies like OpenSecret are doing some of the encrypted stuff, that's a great first step.
But who's going to create the sort of Apple of AI experience?
Maybe it will be Apple one day.
um who's gonna create the apple of ai uh assistance that to me seems like a very like
maybe the most important uh product yeah i i do think there's you know there's this concept that
people say you know generals fighting the last war yeah and i think there's a lot of generals
out there trying to fight the social media war and the next war is going to be you know which
AIs can we trust and are they open source and in service of us or in service of some corporation
and we don't really know what that looks like yet but I would almost say instead of spending a lot
of time fighting that last war yeah let's think about how to fight this new war which is this
battle for just even how our thinking works not not the manipulated media thinking but like the
the new form of you know artificial intelligence can we have open source and control and sovereignty
Because I think ultimately, like you really go forward on this. I don't think we want humans making most of the decisions humans make today. We want to have like an agreed upon set of, of like rubrics for how decisions get made and how models get trained and what we're willing to ask them and what we're willing to accept as answers.
I think that'll be a better version of the world when we get there. But I think we need to like really be thinking and experimenting with what that looks like when we have when we put our trust in systems that are going to help us make decisions.
And in order to put that trust,
I think the absolute number one most important thing,
which is why we're all into Bitcoin,
like Nostra's transparency.
Maybe the humans aren't making the decisions,
but it's critical to humans,
the ability to audit them.
Otherwise, things are gonna go very dark.
And I think about this, again,
we've talked many times in the show,
what is gonna be the killer app in Nostra
that really makes it pop off?
And if I were going AI today,
really trying to build a company around this,
I'd be thinking a lot around,
can you build that kind of an experience
for, like you said, the next battle, right?
Like whenever something gets like super hot,
you've probably already lost the opportunity
or the really big opportunity.
And so that next battle, you know,
it's like if you can build
this sort of like auditable, self-sovereign AI agent,
you're probably going to build that
in and on top of an environment
that makes it easy to audit,
easy to do things like rank
the authenticity of information.
So some stuff we talked about
are like some of the articles I put out a while ago
around TrustRank and how to disrupt Google.
that's one of the reasons I'm really bullish on, you know,
still this web of trust stuff with Nostra.
And I've seen a couple other companies integrating.
I forget the name of it now, but like the project that allows you to,
you know, call as like a service, various trust ranks,
and then, you know, apply your own.
I think building that self-sovereign AI assistant
for a sort of Nostra Bitcoin world makes a lot of sense.
And a lot of people are dope yet.
I have a question for you guys.
in such a world with this audit system
or I could also frame it as like
going to a court
it feels to me like poor
countries, poor societies, poor people within
a rich society don't fare well
because there is a cost to going to court, there's a cost
to doing an audit and who's going to bear that cost.
So I guess that's just a general issue with society today too.
And you pay taxes and then you can get public defenders
and stuff like that.
But it seems like we don't break free from that.
Because if AI decides you're bad,
you did something wrong.
So you need to be penalized.
And it may or may not do it.
And its explanation of why may be excellent or okay or needs a lot of study.
So then if humans get involved to look at that, if it takes time, it costs money for humans to do that, who's going to bear that cost?
And if we're talking about a private company, like if a customer of that company, a user of that company falls into the naughty bucket, that's actually different than a court system or some kind of civil or public or criminal activity.
It's just simply that private company gets to decide.
so in that case in particular i feel like it would be very common to just be like
it's cheapest to just be like especially if this customer isn't delivering us business value just
cut them out ban them and if the ai model is poorly tuned then uh a lot of like innocent
people can get screwed over that way.
I think these are great points to be raising, and I wouldn't pretend to have the full answer
to all of them.
I would say that I think the current system is very harsh on people who lack resources,
and I think that has gotten worse over time versus better.
It doesn't seem to be correcting.
it seems to be like getting worse and more harsh and so um you know i think one one area i would
be optimistic about is by making the ability to kind of explain or defend or prepare yourself
for that to make that process much cheaper is like one way to empower people who have fewer
resources to be able to sort of get, say, like a fair trial or whatever. But I think you're also
kind of, I don't know if you're maybe not being explicit about it, but I think you're kind of
making the case for like open data, open protocols for this. Because if you do have a corporation,
like you look at, you look at like when Facebook was growing really fast, they would sort of make
arbitrary decisions that weren't meant to be hurting or helping anybody in particular,
but they just end up having these big impacts.
They sort of, you know,
it's like a giant kind of lumbering around
and you accidentally step on things.
And you don't do it out of like malice.
You're just like, don't really care,
don't really notice.
And I think the more that you have
a centralized corporation doing that,
the more that you're kind of putting that,
you know, like a whole legal justice system at risk.
So I think you do need open protocols
and, you know, open data
and a lot more transparency
kind of across all of society.
And I think Bitcoin's just like,
a great foundation layer for that but you know something like like a nostor you know is a is a
great example of how you can do more transparent open data um but but i don't pretend to have like
like the answer for that i mean when you have ai ai is so expensive to train and to host and serve
and requires specialized hardware that's expensive so i don't like i think effectively the way to win
And this is like, everything needs to be a lot cheaper.
And I think it will get there, but.
Yeah, so two thoughts on that.
One, in terms of the auditability,
I mean, like, I don't know about the sort of
the fair trial thing, that's an interesting question.
But like, even if it's just the open protocols,
which sort of host all of the AIs in the future,
like in the same sense that most people that are like,
even us, like that use Bitcoin,
have never, I mean, Steve,
maybe you have the like audited Bitcoin core code.
but it's still a much better system
because we do have the wizards.
I mean, the reality of the world is
as long as it's open sourced,
even if you only have the 20 whatever
Greg Maxwells and super geniuses
that for whatever reason are just like
altruistic motivated that are actually out there auditing it,
that's still such a better world
because they can raise the alarm.
I think it's different though.
I mean, I agree in that case, it's great.
Like a piece of software that millions might run,
you know having even just one trusted independent expert review it delivers value to all millions of
those people um but here yes you could have one trusted or a group of trusted experts look at
a model the weight stuff like that but they're not going to be able to look at that and be like
and it's not going to be relate to one particular outcome later whereas with like
bitcoin wallet software it's it's a predictable outcome i guess yeah i mean maybe the difference is
llms are are not predictable so okay so they're not they're not they're not they're not
they're not deterministic whereas bitcoin wallets are deterministic but compared to like which
neurons are firing inside trump's head at any given moment like that's that's the current state
that we are dealing with.
So, you know, not as a political statement,
just like a human statement.
It's like, it's kind of random and probabilistic.
And so I'm not suggesting,
I'm not suggesting we have the full answer to this.
I'm saying because it's probabilistic,
current thing that we've chosen to accept,
we could move to a new system that's probabilistic
and has its own problems,
but is much more controllable.
I think, so, I mean,
there's a lot of interesting things that come out of this. Number one, I agree. And obviously,
it's much better. It feels much better to be able to say, okay, we've audited this deterministic
code. Although even in that, there still could be bugs that slip past reviewer's eye for many
years and you don't see where that goes. But I think there's two possibilities here. One is,
yeah, we just have to accept the complexity. It's never going to be perfect. But having things be
audited is still, you know, you can get better and better over time and more engineers looking
at it will be able to figure out more relationships and still raise more fire alarms than not.
So I think that it's still a big move in the right direction.
And, you know, to keep bringing up my St. F.
Institute trip, the postdoc that I was chatting the most with, he actually has very interesting
papers exactly on this question.
And he talks about, not to get too nerdy, but like biology is the way to sort of break
sort of the paradox
with girls in completeness theorem,
which is the idea effectively
that like a member of a set
can't be the entire set.
And like his whole thing
is like looking at this idea
that, you know,
we try and map,
we try and bring everything back
to one-to-one mapping.
But the reality of biology
and, you know,
any complex system is
there is no one-to-one mapping.
There's like, you know,
N to M or M to N mapping
and that those things
can always change.
The relationships can change.
But it doesn't mean
we can't get like
a little bit better
at predicting what's going to happen
or, you know,
make progress on that front. So I think that's one thing. The second thing though, is I think
we can also, you know, I think maybe there's a call here for the models themselves. Like you can
make progress by saying, show us the weights, show us the system prompts that you're using to run the
model. You know, you keep getting better and better at that. But then there's also at some point,
I think a possibility of like, do we just somehow, I don't know, this seems like it should be a
government thing, but like maybe there's a, you know, a way to do this, but like literally open
source the model and all of this training. And maybe this is actually going to come from someone
that's just like a friendly whistleblower who just leaks all the data set. The more we can see not
just the weights, but literally every piece of information a model was trained on, maybe that
could happen one day on Noster, the more that model becomes a little bit more trusted. So I think
there's a lot of green field to figure out what to do to get better. At the same time, I think the
reality is exactly what you're saying. We also just have to accept in this new world,
determinism is over yeah can we talk about the mysterious 80 000 bitcoin transfer yes you asked
about that david tell us what did you see so i i shared an article that a friend sent me
that kind of took you know there's this like movement of 80 000 bitcoin and it kind of broke
down a bunch of you know hypotheses or observations or kind of it looked it it represented itself as
if it was doing all this like field work around what you know what that meant and who it likely
was and messages that were contained within the movement and i uh it seemed kind of like a
reasonable analysis but i have no idea if it was like legit or not so like i i'm not in the like
verify phase i was just in the like okay what is this thing so i sent it to you and it sounds like
maybe you were like oh this is kind of mostly nonsense well it came onto a lot of people's
radar i think when the 80 000 it was eight 10 000 bitcoin transactions moved all at the same time
i think uh blockchain history showed that all eight were from the same wallet that they were
tied together um that's a you know that's like eight billion dollars of bitcoin small amount
And I think initially it was proposed that maybe that was Roger Verr had like an extra stat.
There's speculation there.
Interestingly, at least one of the addresses were ones that Craig Wright claimed were his in prior legal proceedings.
Wouldn't surprise me if one or more of them were from Mount Gox.
Who knows?
But they definitely moved.
Another.
I mean, if that's the whole story is not.
that big a deal it could be roger ver it could be an early miner i think they were only one hop away
from the coinbase as well so it either was the miner or whoever purchased it from the miner
and it never moved you know it had only moved once um and these were coins from like 2010 i think
maybe 2011 14 years had passed they said because i think that was 2011 part of the hypothesis in
that article was that somebody was like kind of taking a precision assessment of these coins and
using some sort of established case law about property that remains unclaimed for a certain
amount of time and then you can actually claim it as yours or something like that i think that was a
little bit of the setup of the article anyway if it was just that's the end of the story i wouldn't
i mean we just move on i mean every six months there's someone from that era who moves their
coins and no big deal um but then another interesting wrinkle and this article does
mention this as well is that each of those addresses also had um bitcoin or basically
opportune messages sent to those addresses with messages and these messages were around
the rightful legal owner of those coins it had a web link to a solomon brothers website to fill
out a form and i forget all the other details but it basically was putting the owner of those
bitcoin on notice that they need to move their bitcoin or take action fill out this form of their
bitcoin take actions to claim their bitcoin otherwise and it did say in these messages that
someone has stepped up claiming they're the rightful owner of this bitcoin so that's ominous
and scary uh it turns out that it's not just those addresses receive this these opportune messages
many addresses have been sort of blanketed or dusted with these opportune messages uh so one
theory is that you know someone spammed a bunch of bitcoin addresses with this and this particular
owner got spooked and moved their bitcoin as a response basically as instructed um to prove
ownership and prove it's not abandoned property yes now there's other ways to prove you own the
bitcoin you can you could sign a message as a response to their upper turn with the private
key and that would prove that you control the private keys and you wouldn't have had to transfer
the bitcoin so um and that would be even that that would be definitive proof that you're responding
to their message because otherwise it it could just be like completely independently these bitcoin
or transferred unaware of this message or independent of the message um are these addresses
somehow at bigger risk because they're old like the older a lot of format sure it's a large quantity
but like is there something with the way the signature is it p2sh or whatever is there something
to do with the format of the way bitcoin used to be stored or the way these addresses hold it that put them at risk of an exploit The ones that received the message I think just have a lot of Bitcoin Okay Well I mean sorry I haven done nearly as much research but my understanding was that these addresses those really
early ones, I guess have like less
randomness or entropy in the generation.
And so, I mean, I didn't see this
implied in the article, but like
one crazy, and I'm not saying this
is at all the case, but like
couldn't one also theory be like someone has a
quantum computer and broke the ones with less
I mean, I saw that theory as well, but I'm not sure what you're referring to about less entropy.
Well, I assumed those earlier 2010-2011 coins that the address type would be easier for a quantum computer to break than ones that came, I don't know, later on.
No, there's no addresses that have less entropy.
Interesting. I have to go back and recheck what I was going to say.
sure someone can generate an address
with old types, new types
in 2011 and 2025 that has
weak entropy but the
technology available was not
weaker then than it is now.
Interesting. So I have to go back and re-read what the claim was
but there was some claim that
isn't this understood that there are certain address types that are
more prone
I guess because we've changed.
Yeah. So both
old and new.
Okay.
So maybe what you're referring to is
pay to pub key.
Yeah, that could be it.
So that has nothing to do with entropy.
Entropy, yeah.
It's because pay to pub key
doesn't hash
the address.
Right, it exposes the address to raw.
Yes.
And so does taproot.
Got it, okay.
So this is something hopefully
I'll learn a lot more about next week
at the Quantum Summit.
But is that,
were these coins that moved,
were they raw pub key exposed or do we know that i i doubt they were i think they were paid a pub
key hash but um i'd have to go look to verify but i i don't think that but i did see some theory
that you know they were they did that they were generated with weak entropy and but not because
of the address type just they just happened to be generated weak entropy and were stolen
um but okay let's get to the i think the more credible um attack here is that it appears to be
there there's another craig right like legal attack brewing so all right i'm quite positive
david is familiar with solomon brothers but our younger brother max here have you heard of
Solomon Brothers before?
I have seen the Big Shorts.
Were they?
That was pre-Big Shorts.
Oh, shit.
Okay, never mind.
Rome Brothers,
not Lehman Brothers,
Solomon Brothers.
I do remember the name,
but you'll have to catch me.
Not Lehman Brothers,
Solomon Brothers.
They were a top five
investment banking firm
in the 80s.
Wow.
They were a very large,
dominant Wall Street firm
that got acquired
in, I think,
2000.
three so prior to the big short in any case a few years ago
there was some kind of revival or attempt to revive the brand i don't know a lot about this
history other than there's an attempt i don't know if it's how it's going or who's behind it or
but there's i saw that uh bitmex research
went to this website that's included in this these op return messages which is a solomon brothers
website that lists a bunch of advisors of all these people who used to work for solomon brothers
and bitmex research reached out to all these people and got replies back saying that they
they confirmed that they are advisors of this company so it at least confirmed that the website
and the at least some of the advisors are authentic um what's unknown is
but it's unclear if those people know that these opportune messages were sent
but it could be the case that they're solomon this new solomon brothers has a client who is saying
i own all of this bitcoin and i'm hiring you to like go get it for me or something i don't know
pure speculation but it raises the question that we now need to think about and worry about
is there a new attack brewing on bitcoin where people are gonna with a new legal ploy
to try to claim ownership of Bitcoin
in which they are actually not the rightful owner.
They don't have the private key.
All right, two questions about one.
I guess, I don't know if this was published
in the BitMEX thing.
The people that said they are advisors
to Solomon Brothers,
did they know who is behind this?
Or like, I mean, maybe they just wouldn't divulge,
but presumably someone got them to sign a contract
to be an advisor.
Do we know who?
I don't know if they are asked.
So I just know that they either are unaware of the message.
I don't think they are asked.
So it's unknown if they're aware or not aware.
And then the second question is,
even if someone were doing this as kind of like a strange legal attack,
I mean, okay, say you come before and say,
this is my Bitcoin, it's been unclaimed for 14 years.
A court or someone says, okay, fine, it's yours.
like one wouldn't you have some burden of proof to prove that you
have the private key and two even if you did win some ruling from a court
someone still has a private key I mean they own the Bitcoin right like that's it's almost irrelevant
um I have no idea
but I do know that Craig Wright in one of his lawsuits
was claiming a bunch of addresses were his
and he was asking the court he claimed
to the court the software developers and he gave them a list of developers he claimed
controlled bitcoin and it was they had a fiduciary duty to change the software to give him his bitcoin
and that court case got uh closed because he lost the copa court case but it was not resolved
so someone who wished to attack bitcoin again could pursue those lines saying this list of people
uh control bitcoin a court could order them to change the code to get them the bitcoin now we
all know how that actually works in practice even if these developers to stay out of prison
wrote the code to assign these reassign these bitcoin to another person uh that that software
is not going to be adopted although taking to the extreme then the courts could issue this
verdict to coinbase and all the different companies in the space and say you have to
run the software it's court order i mean i'd like to see that play out that would be
totally absurd um i don't think that would survive i'd like to see that play
But at this point, I mean, just imagine that if a court really got to that point, it would make, I mean, there's a lot of vested interest in the price of Bitcoin now. So in the price of Bitcoin goes to zero if that were to actually happen.
so right i wonder if part of this could be somebody trying to lay claim to early coins
that they think would be abandoned in the future if there's a future quantum exploit that they sort
of lay initial claim to those so that when maybe it's a year from now maybe it's 10 years from now
when quantum finally becomes possible to break some of these addresses and you don't know like
what happens to Satoshi's coins or whatever?
Well, maybe their answer is,
well, I already have laid claim.
I'm the first, you know, in line here.
That's an interesting thought.
That could be the case.
So I think this is one to keep paying attention to.
We should discuss more about the Quantum Summit too.
I mean, one of the things I've been thinking about is,
I mean, obviously we know some cryptography types
are vulnerable to quantum.
We say some are quantum resistant.
I'm not an expert enough to know why we think that.
But one thing that I am, I don't know, like curious about is it is interesting this is all happening as AI, some would argue, is reaching some sort of singularity type point. I do wonder if there are risks we're not thinking through carefully enough with superintelligence hitting same time as quantum.
and um you know i i don't know like i wonder what assumptions we have about the nature of
cryptography and like you know obviously we say well it's it's you know it's easy to multiply but
difficult to divide it in a world with super intelligence um who knows where that goes and so
i don't know i mean this definitely this definitely gives me a little concern it's a little weird
when it comes to quantum i'm still being skeptic because i mean a quantum computer still has
only demonstrated, I think it was like
11 years ago could factor
like 21 and now it can only
11 years later can only factor 95.
I mean, I realize it's exponential growth.
And not just exponential growth, I think maybe one important thought
for researchers and people that are charting trends here is we look at the
quantum growth in a quote-unquote modern-day world,
but we're not charting that.
with the help of super intelligence researchers around it.
Again, I don't want to raise any fun because I know nothing.
This is literally just me speculating right now.
But something we should definitely chat about at the Quantum Summit as well
is those two factors overlapping.
Because if you have super intelligent researchers,
I mean, what can they plus quantum do?
I have no idea.
Yeah, I look forward to learn a lot on Thursday or Friday.
It's a week from tomorrow.
Yeah.
Thursday, yeah.
And if people are in San Francisco and want to attend, can they still apply to get a ticket?
You'd have to ask.
Mr. Alex here.
Alex.
I'm sure he can hear us.
Yeah.
What's the 411?
Yeah, what's the deal?
Can we still attend the Quantum Summit if we haven't applied already?
There are a few spots left.
You can apply at pbquantum.com.
pbquantum.com.
Okay.
Interesting.
Yeah.
But by the way, while we have Alex in the mic, in the headphones, I see we have a chat.
Could you pull that up?
I'm just curious who's been chatting with us.
Please.
Oh, thank you.
Oh.
That's the beginning.
I think John's showing probably to hear about Skibbity, is my guess.
Oh, yeah.
Actually, we did.
Oh, is this John from Whole Fun?
I'm guessing it's John Spahari, but I don't know.
But if it is John Spahari, he created Bolt.fun, where Mutiny was born and a lot of other.
It was like a great hackathon.
So my guess is it's him, and he was interested in hearing about Skibbity.
If it is, John's.
What Bolt.fun, I don't know if they've been operating recently, but those guys were the OGs.
all of the early original Bitcoin application experimentation came out of the hard work that
Johns did. So that dude is a legend. If it is you, what's up, Johns? Yeah, what's up, Johns?
I, you know, back on the Skivity topic, I did have prepped this screen share. So if you are
watching this in video format, I wanted to at least share this and we can kind of walk through
and talk through some of what it is. But this is the first place winning prize for the Skivity cash.
and I did want to take a quick walk through
because I think it's cool.
It takes a very innovative approach
to what a wallet should be.
A winning wallet turns onboarding into an interactive game.
Did you guys all see this video?
It's four minutes, so I'm not going to play the whole thing,
but we'll just play the beginning.
You see the toilet head,
the Satoshi in a toilet,
Skibbidi Satoshi.
It's very cartoon and animated.
create wallet ready for the mini game and so you're walking through the you're walking through
like a a kind of a 2d type you know 3d looking environment and you're like getting a key and
you lost you need a secret passphrase here's 12 words you know so sort of a game-like onboarding
to the concept of a 12 word uh you know private key which is very different than almost any
other wallet you've got you know gifts here and cats first sending me down here's your first six
words so it turns what's ultimately like a very weird confusing experience when people are like
why can't i just have an email and a password like i do for every other website um it it sort of
introduces people to the concepts of you know a 12 word uh phrase you know within this game context
You're sort of learning while you're having fun.
So I just wanted to at least share that.
You can see these rewards you get, skibbity bob.
I mean, they did a really good job.
I think this is great.
It's amazing.
I mean, they've really taken this concept as a playing card level hacker.
Like they did.
I mean, somebody really spent time to think through like a very, very different experience.
experience for how to onboard to a bitcoin wallet and i i wanted to just sort of like you know give
that a little bit of props and sort of you know get a chance to to look through it together because
i think i think you know most people say oh bitcoin wallets they're already they're already
there we already have them it's not a business whatever like people have all kinds of preconceptions
about bitcoin walls i think a point steve has always made is there's there's so many different
ways to think about wallets and how you market them and how the feature set works and everything
and i think you know here we are what you know bitcoin's been around 16 years or whatever and
here we are with like a totally innovative new approach to what a wallet should look like that
feels more like a video game so i wanted to at least demo that and kind of yeah thanks shout out
to them yeah that's cool agree and thanks for demoing that um let's maybe give a quick touch on
the pakistan bitcoin mining and imf real quick i don't think there's a whole lot to say here but
um there is a new story i think came out yesterday saying that the uh
there's ambition i mean there's work being done right now within pakistan to support
bitcoin mining for a lot of their and and carve out a lot of their energy build out
and directed towards Bitcoin mining
while it's not being used
because there's no demand yet for it.
It's much like Max wrote about four or five years ago.
And we talked about when you do a big energy build out,
you build it so that you can meet the demand
over the next like 25 years
and you don't have all that demand up front.
So you have all this like dormant energy supply
and Bitcoin mining is an amazing economic vehicle.
So that's exactly what Pakistan is hoping to do.
and what they're learning from the imf is imf doesn't isn't is not approving that um
or at least yeah they're they don't like that idea um and my understanding is that um
it was specifically the terms crypto and bitcoin were red flags
because uh i my understanding is that a phase one of this did get approved by imf and they
changed the terminology to just hpc high performance computing high performance computing
like ai ai yep so just compute and then that got approved and then now they're working on a phase
to approval and it used the term crypto or bitcoin and that did not get approved um it's
also my understanding that that uh it's not their decision to make really but i can imagine it could
impact future loans etc but um just interesting to pay attention to that and compare that to
el salvador because that's been an ongoing saga back and forth with the imf or not
and bitcoiners love to get riled up about how the imf is feels threatened or wants to squash bitcoin
and i'm always trying to tease out like how true is that versus not and like how much of it is
specifically el salvador or bukele or their games or strategy versus imf so it's it's nice to have
another country to compare to to see what happens but from what i see so far it appears the imf does
have like you know crypto and bitcoin are red flags they don't like it and they want to squash
it you don't say the imf really doesn't like bitcoin yeah yep um i know we've only got a few
minutes we do have another topic from the title that we haven't spoken about which i i thought
was kind of interesting so i don't know if we can can squeeze one in but uh uh this robin hood
tokenized stocks product. Have you guys seen it, played with it, know much about it?
Just heard that lens. I was excited to buy OpenAI stock through it. And then OpenAI told me that it
knows nothing about it and it's not OpenAI stock. So I ran away.
So I think, you know, just for the setup here, I think what I understand is Robinhood had a big
announcement of a new platform they were doing that was going to tokenize stocks, meaning a lot
people can't buy stocks through like a traditional brokerage account and so if you can get a robin
hood account you could buy something of like a token equivalent or a mirror type product of these
underlying stocks and i think they had gotten i assume they had gotten some allocation in the
private markets of things like spacex i think was one of the the ones and open ai was another one
but um but when you're buying a token you don't actually have the rights of ownership that you
have when you buy equity through a traditional brokerage so there's people out there thinking
that they're going to be able to buy open ai stock but they're really buying is tokens issued
not by open ai but tokens issued by robin hood that's attempting to track open ai stock but
without open ai's agreement and obviously open ai can issue more shares and that's going to dilute
your tokens just like you would if you were an equity holder but you actually have like zero
rights as a token holder that's not even the token wasn't even issued by the company i mean it'd be
bad enough if the token were issued by the company and you know kind of in the way a lot of that
nonsense happens uh but here you actually have like a third party you know creating tokens that
are not even agreed to be created by the equity issuer so i think you kind of have no rights and
the kind of code is law.
What's the good one?
Narrative is just,
yeah,
what could possibly go wrong?
So I think opening,
I came out and said,
this is not us.
We don't honor these.
This is just,
you know,
nonsense.
Is that,
is that kind of the state of things?
Is anybody,
did Robin Hood come back and say anything about,
about,
about why it's actually good or why they think they actually have some claim here?
I didn't,
I didn't see a response.
Um,
it's also interesting to analyze this both for public stocks and private stocks.
Um,
cause like,
SpaceX and OpenAI are examples of privately held ones.
Historically, we've had secondary markets
giving some people access to that,
but it's always been pretty limited and a lot of friction.
So, you know, if this works,
it would like massively reduce friction for any user.
Or so for the few people who had access
to these systems in the past,
it would like be a way better ux and you'd expand it to everyone in the world could access it so
that's super powerful um and for public stocks a lot more people have access to that and it's
pretty frictionless these days for those people but there's a whole lot of people in the world
who don't have access to even public stocks so this platform from robahood could could open up
access to that but um it has all the all the problems you mentioned uh or trade-offs the
thing is though that might be worth the risk to a lot of people um if you don't have access and
you want exposure and these high upside opportunities if there's a 10 20 even 50
percent chance it just disappears due to these risks it actually might be a financially logical
move a rational move to make so um i can see it being successful even with a purely rational thinking
um but it'll just it'll also be interesting to see how it's regulated yeah i mean it seems like
I wonder if it's legal at all.
So I'm curious if that goes.
But I mean, it reminds me of like ABR back in the day
had these synthetic, you know, ideas
of like contracts for difference.
And it certainly makes sense
like for both public and private equities,
there's a huge market around the world
that can't access them
that even if you create a synthetic position,
you say you're going to track it,
like there's going to be demand for it.
So I don't know if that's what they're doing,
but the synthetic position idea
is very interesting to me.
But it's like the same idea of like,
do I have the raw tether token
or a contract for difference
to create a synthetic dollar?
Different set of risks.
And to me, it just sounds kind of like illegal.
So, I mean, I'm not a legal expert.
I don't know, but I'd be careful.
All right.
I think that's an open AI set.
Open AI set, be careful.
Be careful.
Was that the intelligence talking?
Did they have an LLM generate their?
Exactly.
I took it.
All right.
That's a wrap.
Let's do it.
Until next time.
Good to see you guys.
Until next time.
Bye, everyone.
Later on.