Now we're live.
All right.
Welcome another week of PBJ.
How are you guys?
Good to see you guys.
Yeah, it's good to see y'all.
It's been a...
We missed a week.
We missed a week, yeah.
We missed a week, and we kind of like never missed weeks, right?
Never missed a week.
So it was kind of a big deal.
But you were traveling, and Max, you were traveling.
So I was actually here, ready to do it, but you guys said...
I was already at 9 p.m. Berlin time.
I was not.
I was in Santa Fe, but we'll talk about that.
Well, we're back here.
Steve was pointing at my orange phone.
I already made a big deal of that two weeks ago, so...
On the show?
Yeah.
I had an orange drink.
I had orange everything.
But now we've got our orange sign
repaired and looking good
right behind you there.
Yeah, we didn't really talk about it
being broken a couple weeks ago.
Yeah, we did.
I thought we did.
Three weeks ago.
Oh, did we?
Dude, Steve, what's going on?
Yeah.
What happened on this trip, bro?
We miss a week
and I forget everything.
Anyway.
We were also just commenting
like Steve's jacket,
if it gets too hot.
We've been told
if enough Bitcoin
are streaming our way,
it may get ripped off.
So it's one thing we're testing payments for.
Bent on the comments.
We're looking for audience comments.
21,000 Bitcoin.
Is that what we need?
69,000?
Maybe.
All right.
Let's keep it as if I get too hot, I'm going to take the jackpot.
Start streaming the stats.
Okay.
So you got back from, you want to start just with Berlin?
Can we do that?
I know it's the third one in the.
Start with Berlin.
Because I want to hear.
We actually got started.
Sorry, we took a mountain bike ride.
and we got started talking about Berlin
the other day.
Yeah.
But let's loop back.
Sorry, we talked about it
almost the entire ride.
Yeah.
Much to your chagrin.
You may be shocked.
You hear this, Steve and I
also chatted about Berlin.
Oh, all right then.
But I want to hear the whole,
I want to hear the juice of his bits.
Yeah.
I'm sure he saved the best for you.
I want to hear the last show we talked to.
I was in New York in the last show.
That's right.
And we talked about the chain code event
I went to.
Yep.
So that was just a pit stop to go to Berlin.
I've never been to Berlin.
Really?
Yeah.
First time in Berlin.
I've been to Germany several times.
Never been to Berlin, though.
What did you think?
Just in general.
It was good.
Yeah.
Isn't it Oktoberfest right now?
I liked it.
It is Oktoberfest right now.
So I had a beer.
A beer.
Is that how they do Oktoberfest?
They have a beer.
Well, I ended up, I got sick along with almost everyone else there.
72 houses.
Just a cold, though.
Nothing crazy.
Is everyone still spying?
tattoos and like does it feel like
Portland on steroids still
um
is that the Berlin vibe?
yeah it's like East Berlin everyone's like
cypherpond oh yeah okay
yeah that vibe was
present I thought you meant they were sending the
reinforcements I think I already
told DK this I forget
cool
too soon DK
no in Portland
in Portland I'm aware
either way either way okay
we don't want to talk about reality
it's all fake news
one thing I like to do when I travel is go for a run
and then like do my sightseeing
by foot
so a few of us went
and ran at Temple Hoff Airport
which I'd never heard of before and didn't know the history
but it motivated me to learn the history
first of all it was just a cool experience to run on an airfield
have you ever
run on a landing strip?
but you have right out here
oh right David pointed out
Chrissy Field was a landing strip
Oh, yeah.
The airfield.
We did a flint of sails.
But this is a, it's a closed airport now,
but it's like it turned into a public park.
So it's like a four-mile lap that we ran around,
and then we actually ran on the landing strip.
So that was cool.
Super low fog, sunrise is a cool scene.
But then it motivated me to learn about the history of this airport.
And it was open in like 1923.
It was a major airport.
So it was early in a major airport.
but I think the most notable history is in the
after World War II, like in 1948-49
you know, this airport's in
West Berlin
so it was a portion of the city that was controlled by the allies
but it was landlocked
to the, like Soviets controlled East Germany
and the Soviets blockaded
in 1948 that region
so no supplies could get in
so the allies then used this airfield to drop supplies
and it's just astounding
the level, the scale
of what the operation was.
They flew in,
they had a flight every three minutes
for one year and three months.
Every three minutes?
Every three minutes.
Wow.
250,000 flights.
Wow.
So it's like crazy.
Dropping off supplies.
It's a crazy operation.
Anyway, so it's cool to do that.
Only the Germans could pull that off.
Well, it wasn't the Germans.
Yeah, never mind.
with the Americans.
So that was cool.
But yeah,
I mean,
why did I go there?
My own team,
Spiral team,
we have 15 people
on our team.
We're spread out
all over the world.
One person actually
is in Berlin.
Oh, nice.
But we have folks
in the Netherlands
and all over the US.
So we get together
in person
a couple times a year.
This was our
second meetup
of 2025.
So we did
a three-day retreat
just like we like
to be in person in our show in the city of Bitcoin.
There's a few people here that are on my team,
but most of my team is not here.
So it's great to get everyone in person.
We had a really good three-day retreat.
And then after that was a three-day conference,
BTC++, which Nifty Nay organizes.
And she's absolutely rocking it.
She really is, yeah.
I first met her, she was an engineer at Square
working on Bitcoin.
Oh, really?
That's a long time ago.
Wow.
Yeah, 2018.
Yeah.
And then she went to Blockstream,
and she got Lightning Development Experience,
and now she's off on her own
and just, frankly, kicking ass.
So I think they're doing like six events this year
and have six or seven on tap for next year.
And seeing the quality of this event,
it's pretty impressive
that they're pulling off that many events.
And all over the world, too.
All over the world.
Brazil, Mexico.
I went to the very first BTC Plus.
Were you there in Austin?
You might have been there.
That's where I met Anthony or Tony Giorgio
and a bunch of other people.
Like, that was really good.
But from what I hear, I haven't gone to one since,
but I hear they just keep getting better and better.
Yep, and so each event she hosts has a theme.
So this one was lightning.
Interestingly, it's the first time
she's done a lightning-themed event for BTC++
despite her having extensive knowledge on lightning
and contributions to lightning.
So I don't know how many people were there,
maybe 150, but super high quality.
mostly developers
presentations
but honestly
when I go to conferences I almost never
go or listen to the presentations I don't get a whole
lot of value it's all about the people
either meeting new people or
people I've been working with for years but never met in person
or whatever
I actually found the
presentations at this event
high quality and interesting
so that
was notable but
But like other events, the people were great.
So there's a lot of folks from, a lot of Europeans there that I had not met before.
So it's great to meet them.
And it's definitely Lightning-centric, but there was like Cashew and Arc and developers of other systems there as well that are building on Lightning or using Lightning.
Yeah, companies, open source developers, so just a great group of folks.
most of Spiral stayed
we sort of trickled off
day by day but I stayed I did all
three days
some block engineers came as well so it was
good for them to get that exposure
to different devs
but yeah I'd never met Callie before in person
so it's great to meet you know we
had a great conversation or two
and
yeah just
many other devs so really good event
I gave a presentation
on Spark we've talked
Where can we find that, by the way?
It's on BTC Plus Plus?
It's on YouTube.
It's definitely available, like if you, like the six-hour video, it's, you know, timestamp.
But I don't know if or when it'll be published as a standalone video, but I mean, that works.
Yeah.
But yeah, that's sort of, I'd say that presentation was a culmination of my study the past four-plus months on Spark.
We talked about Spark on this show for like an hour or so before.
More, an hour and a half.
As long as not get into it.
Wait, I think DK, he had one or two questions?
Sorry, no.
DK.
42 questions.
I think it was maybe 45, 50.
It was like AI.
He sent AI slot my way.
He DDoS'd you, bro.
But actually, I used...
I curated that hard.
There were so many more questions.
Actually, I had...
I generally had like a thousand questions.
I was like, most of this is slot,
but I actually don't know the answers to these.
Oh, wow.
I actually...
We make fun of you, but...
I used that.
When I reviewed my presentation, I looked at your document twice to be like,
okay, am I covering this? They were legitimate questions.
That was the intention. That was the intention.
That in the future, you probably want to talk to somebody about this.
I still don't understand these topics, so help us.
Am I covering at least 30% of the 45 questions?
I actually gave this presentation at a Lit Devs event here a couple weeks prior,
just as a test, a dry run, and it took an hour.
Lots of audience engagement and questions, though.
So it was good, but it took an hour,
and I only had like half an hour at this event.
So I improved the visuals of the presentation,
just rehearsed it, cleaned up,
and I think delivered it in like 25 minutes or something.
So sweet.
It was, yeah, anyway, let's not talk too much about Spark.
We've talked a lot about it.
But I'd say it's like the culmination of my study
the past four months, and I kept learning more,
even up to the final days and weeks of that presentation.
So if you're interested in learning more,
go check out my presentation.
But another really interesting conversation we had
was with some developers working on ARK.
And ARK, it's another protocol,
like Bitcoin Payments Protocol,
with a lot of overlap with Spark.
They both use payment trees as like a fundamental building block.
ARK predates Spark.
So I don't know to what extent Spark was inspired by ARK, but ARK was proposed three years ago or so.
And they rhyme.
So Max, if you're ever going to rap about it.
Yeah, Spark.
I'm not sure if that'll be brilliant.
I think there's something around there, around NOAA maybe.
Yeah.
We'll see.
But with ARK, there's now two companies
that have started to build ARK implementations.
ARK Labs is one,
Second.Tech is the other.
And I think they're going
in a little bit different directions.
My understanding of ARK Labs,
they created Arcade.
It's more token platform,
kind of similar to Spark's
business and product direction,
it seems.
whereas Second.Tech is focused on Bitcoin payments
more exclusively, that's my understanding.
Let's see, what's interesting about this?
I think from Second.Tech, they've iterated
on like half a dozen different ARC designs
over the past one to two years as they've been learning
and they just keep improving the design.
Their latest design is what has me most intrigued
because from my position
and Spiral's position,
we've been working on lightning forever
and it's been,
people have been building products
based on LDK for years.
Each time they do it,
they run into problems.
Then we fix those problems
and then the next attempt gets better
but then runs into new problems
and we keep whacking away at these problems.
So the good news is,
and I wrote down a list of like 20 different things.
Not 45?
Yeah, sorry.
I didn't use AI.
Actually, based on my experience working with people trying to build with LDK, wrote down
20 different things, problems they've encountered, and then we fixed them.
So that's great.
So, and this is not an increasing list, it's a decreasing list, but there's still remaining
problems.
Some of which we were actively fixing and they'll get fixed as well, but there's some
that are like fundamental challenges with Lightning.
And anyone who's tried to build with Lightning has learned this.
It's not great for onboarding in terms of scaling.
It doesn't handle low balance as well,
and it doesn't scale to as many wallets
as we would hope in the future
because each user has to have at least one UTXO mined on chain.
So your scaling is limited by the block size.
Rough order, Magnitude.
What is your latest thinking with Lightning as it is today?
I know there's the future possibilities with covenants
and channel factors and other things,
but today, what do you think is a reasonable number of wallets
that can scale via Lightning?
Like order back to you?
Just Lightning.
Just Lightning alone?
50 to 100 million.
Okay.
Still pretty good.
Yeah.
It's not every human.
It's certainly not the AI.
We're not even close to that limit.
So that if there is sufficient demand,
Lightning by itself can absolutely handle way more growth.
Yeah.
But then it does have this fundamental limit.
no amount of like,
you know,
it's not like a bug fix
or something in LDK
to extend that.
You need a different protocol
or some kind of protocol extension,
which I'm going to get to
in a minute.
But I think that
not handling low balances
is a big challenge as well,
especially,
it depends on the use case.
You know,
if you have someone
who already owns Bitcoin
and they transfer in like 500 bucks
into their Lightning wallet
and they go spend it,
well,
that Lightning today
Lightning Walls handled that perfectly fine.
Phoenix is great, Lexi is great, etc.
But we've talked about innovation where AI is doing payments
or brand new applications facilitating micropayments
with Primal and Domus' examples on Nostra.
And that's where you might get an influx of new users
by the thousands and millions,
and they only receive a tiny amount of Bitcoin.
That's their first exposure to Bitcoin.
So if we want to see that grow, you have to handle low balances.
Anyway, so Lightning has some of these fundamental challenges.
What's exciting about Arc, similar to Spark, is that it scales really well for onboarding.
It can scale to basically infinite wallets, and they can handle low balances.
That sounds great, right?
Why not just use Arc?
Well, one challenge with ARK is that it doesn't scale well for payment volume.
So as payment volume grows with ARK, it increases the liquidity requirements of the ASP or ARK service provider.
And in the best case, that would just be a centralizing force and there wouldn't be that many ASPs.
And in the worst cases, it wouldn't be feasible for very large players.
and has ARC always been
kind of effectively like an alternative
or a competitor to Lightning
it's kind of like a different approach or it's always been
considered a little bit of like a
augmentation or complement
I see it as complement
both
you know I think
you know some ARC proponents see it as a replacement
to Lightning at least for
at the end user
device
like we I mean we've talked about in the show
So previously, actually, for people that watch my Spark presentation, there's a really good slide that shows the ecosystem with Lightning Network in the middle and all the Fediment and Cashew and Arc and Spark all connecting to Lightning Network.
Lightning Network is a glue between all these systems is clearly a win.
And so Arc is complementary in that sense.
But in terms of the end user experience, I think most Arc proponents see it as a competitor to Lightning, similar to Spark, similar to Cashew.
similar to Fedimit,
that lightning wouldn't be part of that
end-user experience.
But so, sorry, and just
to be clear, and maybe you can explain this a bit better.
So, for a bit of context,
and we talked a bit about this, but I remember
from like two years ago or whatever, I remember,
I don't know if this guy, Brock, is still around with it.
He was famous for breaking lightning,
and then he dropped ARK, and
I remember when I read quickly,
my TLDR was, this is cool,
but the capital requirement is so high,
it's just, okay, it's not that interesting to me.
and I forgot it.
Are you saying,
when you think about this
as being complimentary or competitive,
I know you're going to talk about
the capital requirements,
how that's come down,
or it could come down,
but wouldn't anyone
that's running an ARC service provider,
maybe you can describe how this works,
also need to hook into an LSP
or that they're running that
or someone else as well?
Or is there a world
where they could just do this
with no Lightning at all?
The ARC lab's design
is not using Lightning.
Okay, interesting.
And the first five of the six designs that second.tech implemented didn't use Lightning.
Interesting.
Again, when I say didn't use Lightning, I'm talking about at the end user client, not interoperability reasons.
Got it.
So that's why I'm saying that I think most devs that are working on Arc, I mean, in their minds, it's a replacement for Lightning.
Interesting.
But yes, I too had the exact same concern about R2 plus years ago, the liquidity requirements.
Yet I was fascinated by all the, I love the innovation, like a new take on how to address onboarding, scaling.
And so what I'm really excited about now, so the context of Spiral, it very much cares about how do we scale Bitcoin payments to as many wallets and people as possible.
And bots.
And that's what, yeah, wallets.
whether it's a bot or a human,
but scaled to as many wallets as possible
while preserving as many properties
of on-chain Bitcoin as possible,
low fees, instant, etc.
And Lightning checks many boxes,
but not all the boxes as we just highlighted.
ARK checks most of the boxes that Lightning doesn't,
but then doesn't check other boxes, right?
So what I'm very excited about
is the last design that Second.tech has been considering
is to combine ARC and Lightning.
And so within an ARC tree,
at the leaves of the ARC tree,
instead of having coins there,
you actually have a Lightning channel
or like a payment channel at the leaf.
And such a design gives you the benefits
of the onboarding scaling due to ARC
and the payment trees
and all the virtual UTXOs that it supports.
But then it gives you the payment volume scaling
due to Lightning channels.
Every time payments are made,
you're not requiring the ASP
to front more money during a period of time.
So it's a huge win for that.
And then interestingly,
there's LSP and Lightning wins here too
because it'll be much cheaper
to sort of right-size the channel size.
Like with regular Lightning,
if a user needs to change the capacity of their channel,
like they're trying to receive more money
and they don't have enough inbound capacity,
well then you have to do at least one on-chain transaction.
Historically more than one. With splicing it gets optimized down to one
but it's still an on-chain transaction every time you want to optimize the channel size.
So that makes it really tough
on the LSP because
the LSP will learn over time, oh these users aren't really
using the channel capacity that much. So it would prefer to shrink it
because it doesn't want to tie up its capital
in channels that aren't being used, right?
So with adding Arc,
you're able to right-size those channels
using virtual UTXOs, not real UTXOs,
so it's much, much, much lower cost to do so.
So I think this marriage can be super compelling.
So that's something that Spiral
is heavily studying right now,
and we're still learning.
Is it live or is it theoretical?
Is there open source code?
It's theoretical, although another thing I learned,
what's great about going to these events,
you just learn things you wouldn't otherwise learn.
Another developer already took LDK
and combined it with ArcLabs Arc implementation
to prototype exactly this.
And what's interesting is it requires a feature
that I don't think any Lightning implementation supports yet,
with custom transactions.
So Lightning has a specific script
used for Lightning channels.
And in Lightning channels,
or in Lightning implementations,
that's hard-coded to just that script.
Or using it for Arc,
you have to have a different script.
So a feature that Leo,
who works, he's on Spiral,
and he's out of Bitcoin,
a feature he's been working on this year
is custom scripts and custom transactions
in LDK so that a developer user of LDK
can customize the script used.
Cool.
And like Taproot Assets needs this.
RGB needs this.
DLCs need this.
There's lots of different use cases for this,
but another user of this would be Arc.
So he's made enough progress on this.
It's in a branch that's not merged yet,
but this other developer, Vincenzo,
took that branch, took LDK,
took ArcLabs Arc,
built a proof of concept of this.
So it's still early.
Much has to be,
I see Fleet Week is now, we have live Fleet Week right outside.
Live Canadian Fleet Week.
That's the state of our world right now.
But yeah, so we still need to,
there's still technical questions to answer,
at least for myself.
We need to build it out.
But regardless of whether Spiral does,
it's my understanding Second.Tech is going to build this out.
I'm going to make a note of that, Second.Tech.
Yeah.
Yeah, Stephen Roos is the founder.
He came from Blockstream, long-time Bitcoin developer.
By the way, I know this one we talk about
in the old days of Monster News and a lot on this show as well,
is how badass that this is the power of open source.
You're behind LDK, and you didn't even know
that people were building new stuff with it.
That's what's so cool, when you just give away the code
or just give away the ideas, man.
Yeah, it's great.
So TLDR I like pretty I think this is pretty compelling as a long solution that checks most boxes that we want for Bitcoin Payments Protocol And once Spiral finishes its homework we could very well become contributors to that code base as well and collaborate with SecondDocTech and hopefully other open source developers
And are most of the people who've been working on ARK for a long time generally warmed to this idea of kind of like the combination of these two technologies? Or are there people who say like, we want to take ARK in a very different direction or keep kind of isolated from light?
Well, second attack is, it's a small team.
So, I mean, I think they're pretty,
I mean, they're the ones pushing this.
So they're clearly on board with it.
And I think that's sort of end of story.
Like the rest of the world doesn't know.
They'll learn on this show.
Arc Labs, I'm not sure what their view on it is.
It might matter less to them
because of the product direction they're going.
But I don't know who instigated
that proof of concept I mentioned.
It might have been Arc Labs as well.
so I'm not sure what their view on it is.
But I mean,
Arc's still a relatively small development community.
So I think the reality is
there's like eight people that know about this.
Got it.
Okay.
Alpha League, baby.
Let's go.
It's cool.
So yeah, I don't know.
Any other questions about Berlin?
It was overall a fantastic experience.
Yes, the Arc stuff is super interesting to me.
I clearly have to do my own work
because I just kind of have ignored it for a while
so that's cool.
What was your general,
actually two questions. One, what was your general takeaway
on just the state of lightning right now? Because I think
one thing that I'll
get into is I have obviously on my own fun
side, I've had
a lot of chats with my LPs and a lot of stuff
and the question I'm getting is like
okay, lightning is awesome. When are people going to actually
be using this thing? So I'm curious.
What is your general... I mean, yes, the answer is
probably we need one of these last mile solutions
whether it's ARC or Spark or Cachy, which is my
other question. But what
is your general thought on the state of lightning today? If you
were talking to someone who says, hey,
you know, I've been super excited about lightning.
I read the white paper in 2017 or 18,
whenever that dropped.
Like, when does this thing go mainstream?
How would you answer that?
Well, first, you made a comment.
Someone asked you, like,
when's someone going to use it?
But it's really the only thing being even used.
So people get excited about Cashew,
Fetiment, ArcSpark,
but like there's no usage on those yet.
I see that for someone coming from stable coin land.
Okay, yeah.
Well, Bitcoin payments,
from that perspective,
Bitcoin payments aren't used.
aren't there yet.
I mean,
we talk about this
on the show
almost every time.
So,
there's no,
there's no information
in this event
that there's no
aha moment
that like,
oh,
it's just around the,
this is going to happen.
Right.
And then all of a sudden
Bitcoin payments
are bigger than
stable coin payments.
There's no discussion
about that.
No aha moment.
So that remains
to be seen.
Yeah.
But within
the volume
that we do have
for Bitcoin payments,
lightning is
most of it.
And so, you know, there's definitely, I mean, there's been a growing sentiment over the years that lightning has failed or dead.
You know, we've talked about that on the show as well, but, you know, it depends on your perspective.
If you thought that lightning was going to be the silver bullet and 8 billion users having a mobile phone, mobile on the phone and AI all using only lightning, well, then you didn't understand the block size.
but you know
we've learned
other things
as well
around user experience
so it's
you know
it's not succeeded
at that
but it's clearly
succeeded at
the glue piece
and well
what are we going to talk
about on the show
next
Square
launching Bitcoin payment
it's not using
ARK or Cashew
or Fetamin
it's using Lightning
so before we jump to that
I definitely want to spend
a lot of time
on the Square payment thing
my other question
on Berlin
you said you got to chat
with Callie
so by the way
the talks are most excited
I definitely want to find
your talk
I want to find Callie's talks
all of his are always
badass and Alan's talk.
Because I know Alan has kind of been going more and more
towards Cashew as well.
Any new, I don't know,
thoughts, takeaways on Cashew? I know you still have
your same question, who's going to run the meds?
But any updated thinking on that?
Well, there's definitely enthusiasm at
the Berlin event around Cashew.
There's a hackathon and about
something like half the projects were Cashew
based. It's definitely like,
it's so much simpler that
it's easy to build and hack with it.
So I think
so that was one data point
yeah Callie's presentation
it was pretty
I don't know if you'd
it was a good presentation by him
but I don't know if you'd learn much
I mean
he went over a lot of like
basics of Cashew
but there were some good call outs by him
on where people could help
the Cashew ecosystem
so still worth watching
I missed Alan's talk in person
but it looks really good
yeah
visit Alan Farrington
yeah
Alan's fucking smart
I mean
I think it walks through
like how the fiat system works
and basically teaches people how convoluted it is.
And I'm sure I'll learn more about it.
So I do have that queued up, but I didn't see it.
But yeah, I'd say that,
what was the vibe like for Lightning at the Lightning event?
I mean, I think everyone sees Lightning's success as the glue.
There's less discussion about it being the end-user solution.
But, yeah, cool.
That was the vibe.
Cool.
From Lightning Payments, you said that Lightning is kind of the way payments work.
Is there any way that we can triangulate?
I know one of the benefits of Lightning is that it's kind of privacy-preserving or enhancing
compared to traditional kind of on-chain payments.
But is there anything we can know about the payments, like payment sizes or volumes or
anything that might give us an intuition around how Lightning is being used? Like, is it used
for traditional type of payment use cases as an alternative to credit cards? Or is it used for
newly emergent use cases that maybe don't have any other way to do it?
Well, as you suggest, because it's private, that data is not publicly available. And we've talked
about this before in the show quite a while ago about how the public metrics that are available
are super misleading.
Yeah.
Like the amount of Bitcoin
locked into public channels
has been pretty flat for three straight years.
Or even gone down.
And yet we know that the monthly growth
is like around 15% per month of payment volume.
So it's just not, it doesn't help.
And I say we know that,
meaning like through private data sources.
And by the way, I think it's just worth mentioning
because we talked about this like a year ago at this point.
So for those who have not listened
to every single episode of PBJ,
what are you doing with your lives?
But just in case there's one person that hasn't,
what we talked about last time,
the challenge, and this has been a challenge.
I mean, I've been investing in Lightning Network stuff forever.
So have you, working on this stuff.
And the challenge has always been,
especially when you, to your point, DK,
when you talk to people that are either
in traditional payments or more in the crypto world,
they'll say, oh, I see Uniswap has total value locked of whatever, a billion dollars.
And I see in Lightning, it's been, whatever, 5,000 Bitcoin forever, Big B Bitcoin.
And they're like, that's interesting, but it's not that much.
And so the point that when I first wrote my thesis on Lightning, hell, in 2018 or 2019,
or no, maybe 2020 before I even had my own fund, the point I always try to make to people
is it's extremely capital efficient
because it's Tor, effectively.
It's an onion-routed network on top of Bitcoin
where you can't know the volume in there.
And it's extremely capital efficient
because you can move in this peer-to-peer network
back and forth at the speed of light.
The challenge with that is like,
okay, so we've got 5,000 Bitcoin locked in there.
Like, that tells us basically nothing on payment volume.
Like, it could be $100 million,
it could be a billion dollars.
We have no idea.
And the only kind of like,
since we've gotten on this, to your point,
is private data.
River published an excellent report
But that's been like three years ago now.
And so River was saying it grew 2,112%
or something like that in two years,
or maybe it was 21, 21%.
I don't know.
It was a lot.
It was like 15% per month.
And then through other data sources,
since then I know that it's continued
growing at that rate.
So a very healthy, very healthy growth rate.
I mean, to answer your question, David,
there's not like super good insights
as to what types of payments are being made.
But I think there's a fair amount that are gambling sites and there's a fair amount that's people wanting to access stable coins.
So they might buy Bitcoin on an exchange and then transfer it somewhere else and then get Tether and then use Tether.
Can we guess at the transaction size?
It sounds like for those use cases, they're kind of traditional types of payment use cases that just want more privacy maybe.
So would they be like traditional,
like it'd be like a $20 transaction,
a $40 transaction,
not like a sub $1 transaction?
Yeah, I don't know offhand.
Okay.
That's a good question.
I mean, I'll just put the call out there again.
It would be sick if we had some website
that tried to guess these.
I know that it's like very difficult to do that,
but like I do think that would change
the questions you're asking.
I think almost every normal investor
or crypto person still has.
I don't know what the answer to that is,
but if you are listening to this
and you have ideas.
Well, Spiral's doing our best to make that not possible by improving privacy.
Which is great.
But having said that, I think what will help investors and others, and just frankly, just mainstream people, feel like this Bitcoin is being used is if they just start seeing it show up on websites or in person.
And where might that happen?
So, you know, Square just released both Bitcoin conversions and Bitcoin acceptance in Square payment terminals.
So I think, and there'll be like, you know, like the sticker, the decals that merchants show like Visa and Cash App and Apple Pay and stuff like that.
Oh, cool. Like a Bitcoin sticker.
There'll be like a Bitcoin sticker, right?
So I think the power of that is, regardless of how many people are actually doing Bitcoin payments.
It normalizes it.
It normalizes it, yeah.
Because you go to your local store, you go to a store or whatever, and then you see the Bitcoin symbol, it's like, oh, it must, I'm not using it, but it must be being used because it shows the sticker there.
People must be using Bitcoin.
So I think that will help change perception, just almost independent of reality, and it could actually be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I like it.
Um, so that's one, one angle, but, uh, but yeah, Square had a big, big event this week.
Um, I think they're doing this like every six months now where just to demonstrate to the
world that like Squares, they're shipping, it's impressive.
Square's shipping, right?
Um, and maybe after a few years of not shipping or not at the velocity desired.
And I think that's, uh, that the Square is changing that, which is great.
It's cool.
Including Bitcoin, um, stuff I care about.
So conversions is a feature that's been available to a select number of merchants for quite a while now. It just simply allows the merchant to take a percentage of their sales and put it in Bitcoin. Percentage of any sales. So most of their sales, or obviously, historically, all their sales have been in fiat. And if they just want to tuck away 1% or 10% or whatever into Bitcoin, they just like select, dial it in on their UI and then they're a treasury company, right?
I like that.
And so that's available now, GA available to all merchants, which is really cool.
That seems like a super pragmatic step for a seller, right?
Like if a seller's been orange-pilled or interested in using Bitcoin as a savings vehicle,
it's a dead simple UI that they can use to achieve that.
And then the other big feature is that they'll squirrel accept Bitcoin,
and that'll become available 100% on November 10th.
For everyone?
It will be available for everyone.
Wow.
Meaning any merchant can enable their terminal.
The merchant has to opt in.
And I saw in the announcement, I don't know the details,
but it looks like no processing fees for a year.
Is that true?
Yeah, for over a year, because through the end of 2026.
That's a pretty big deal.
It's pretty compelling, right?
Pretty shocking, actually. That's awesome.
Well, I mean, let's kickstart adoption, right?
Let's give merchants reasons to use it
and merchants reasons to promote it to consumers
to kickstart that cycle.
So one thing I'm excited about is here in the Presidio,
Alex and Haley and I have been chatting about
how can we get Presidio merchants to start accepting Bitcoin.
Oh, that's awesome. The food trucks.
Because I feel like if we can't make it work here,
how's anywhere else going to make it work?
We have a prime situation here
where we have Presidia Bitcoin.
Everyone has Bitcoin to use.
Two dozen plus members in growing
who are here many times per week.
We have hundreds and hundreds of global visitors
flowing through here annually.
I love it.
All Bitcoiners, high intention.
The kind of people who go out of their way
to go to a merchant and pay in Bitcoin.
They might even start rock climbing
if they can pay in Bitcoin, right?
So whether it's food or a workout or service.
So we're going to work on the merchants here and try to sell them on it.
Whether they use Square or another solution, however they need to enable it, be able to accept Bitcoin.
And obviously, ones that have Square already, it'll be trivial to enable.
Dude, that's a great idea.
Bitcoin jungle, Bitcoin beach, Bitcoin park.
Bitcoin R9.
Bitcoin Presidio.
Well, yeah, I got to come up with a game.
I would love to extend that.
Once we get a little bit of traction in the Presidio,
we should get the Dolphin Club to accept Bitcoin as well
because Lord knows I'm bringing enough Bitcoin people over there
to try to take as many meetings in the sauna as possible.
For sure.
We can extend our meetings beyond the borders
of the federal land here in the Presidio.
It's still city land, actually.
But yeah, that's just a fun little project.
I think Square Sales folks are going to help us as well.
That's awesome.
We'll bring in the pros.
But I think it'll be fun.
We'll learn a lot talking to merchants
and see what the experiences are,
and it'll be great to have.
It's actually a win for Presidio Bitcoin, I think,
because it's just another cool reason
to visit Presidio Bitcoin,
because you just walk and go grab lunch and pay him Bitcoin.
Have you talked to anybody yet?
So far, only Cafe Rx.
I was going to say, because that seems like
Indian Ops that they could kind of make their own call.
Yeah, the lady there, she's super nice.
She's super nice.
She directed me to the owner,
and that's where we're at.
Oh, this is awesome.
Yeah.
Great idea.
Yeah.
So I think that's...
And they use Square.
Yeah, they're Square.
They use Square.
Yes, it should be easy to flip it on.
Yeah.
Cool.
Yeah.
I'm stoked.
Good work.
All right.
Well, it's an idea.
Yeah.
In progress.
What about the stickers?
Is Square going to make them,
or maybe this is actually more Spiral,
because it's kind of not Square-specific,
but the open Square is going to make it here.
I suspect Square.
Square will be.
And then
Spiral
Spiral's thinking of
creative marketing ideas
that aren't necessarily
for Square, but it's more generally
for anyone in Bitcoin.
Well, that's what I mean.
If you have just Bitcoin, except
no mention of Square, you could use it for Square.
Or if someone wants to use BTC Pay Server.
Haley is working on a
merchant guide for Bitcoin.
Dude, this is awesome.
I wasn't even expecting this. Cool.
Nice.
Great.
So anything,
anything final notes
on the Square release
or can we pop over to?
One idea I wanted
to just mention
while we're thinking about this,
it would be really cool
if there was a way
for Cash App users
to orange pill the merchant too.
I don't know what
that would look like,
but some kind of incentive
where it's like,
okay, I already get
buy on Cash App.
If I get this merchant on,
I get some kind of
a sweetener too.
Right.
I'm not as familiar
with this new product
announced, but did you see the neighborhoods?
Yeah, I didn't read the details,
but I was thinking something along.
So it's giving,
it's trying to,
so it's
marketing local businesses to cash
up customers.
So if it's successful,
it'll help the little guy,
it'll help the small merchants.
Cool.
But I haven't used it yet, so I don't,
I can't really comment on the user experience, but I can
imagine. A Bitcoin tab.
I can imagine, yeah.
The neighborhood thing is not Bitcoin specific.
But you can imagine integrations.
Yeah, and you could say,
oh, there's these open maps
where you can find people that accept Bitcoin.
Like Albi has that in theirs.
That would be super cool.
Yeah, BTC map.
BTC map, exactly.
And they can even maybe integrate
the same open source.
That's awesome.
I had one other crazy idea around this.
Maybe it'll come to me later.
That's cool.
Okay.
Cool.
Nice.
And just to clarify,
I think the understanding here is if a merchant is accepting Bitcoin and the customer is using Cash App, then it's never touching like the traditional fiat rails, right?
I mean, the customer is using any Bitcoin wallet.
Yeah, that's the cool part.
They could use a Cash U wallet, a FedMent wallet, ARK, Spark, whatever, right?
But meaning in a sense, it changes the layer around which these transactions happen.
it sort of removes one of the big toll boosts on payment.
Yeah, that's how Locke can offer zero fees
for a year and change.
And I don't know what the fees will be after that,
but I doubt they're going to be 3%.
They said 1%.
Oh, did they say 1%?
Yeah.
But I think that's kind of a big deal
because I think for the history of Square,
it's always kind of been tied to the rails of Visa.
Well, not entirely.
because you do
if you were a cash app user
you could do cash apps
pay at Square
and I don't know
if they gave you a discount
but that was just like
an internal ledger
okay
yeah
how long has that been around
two years
three years
that exists
but like
cash
cash app card
which has like
something like
25 or 30 million
customers
like it's very popular
yeah
that still goes
over Visa network
oh
yeah I remember my crazy idea
this might be
less appealing
in the United States
I think this has
huge potential internationally. Maybe it will be square one day as they go internationally,
or maybe this will be frankly even better as a local open source thing. Maybe it could work in
the US. But one idea that, actually you remember when I was working with my homie Pablo, when we
first met and we're giving away Bitcoin to people in Mexico, which by the way, it was $3,000 back
then. So I hope folks held on to all that. It's kind of crazy that all happened. We got Coinbase
as a nonprofit of all people to give us a Bitcoin to give away, which at least they did something
for Bitcoin. Anyways, what would be really cool is to see, imagine in this map, so you have a map
where you can spend Bitcoin, but you can even go a step further and basically turn every merchant
that accepts Bitcoin into a local Bitcoins dealer. And this could get a little dangerous because you
have a lot of cash and maybe it makes you a threat for robbery or whatever. But just imagine you're
like a corner store in Mexico
and now your side hustle
in addition to accepting
Bitcoin payments is,
oh yeah,
I can just like market make
like cash,
Bitcoin,
take a 2% fee
or whatever it is.
That gets wild and crazy
because then you can have
like a massive explosion
of peer-to-peer trading
which,
you know,
has a few benefits.
Yeah.
Yeah,
you can imagine
point-of-sale systems
becoming like ATMs.
Exactly.
Yep.
Turning everyone into a dealer.
Crazy.
Bitcoin dealer.
Go get us,
We didn't do the trip report to Santa Fe.
Oh.
You want to drop us at Santa Fe?
Yeah, so I mean, I got a lot going on,
which we'll talk about some other stuff.
But I've been extremely busy the last six weeks.
Fun stuff, which I can't talk about,
but a big deadline today.
Then I've got the type one stuff we'll talk about.
But last week was a fun trip.
And the reason I couldn't participate in PBJ
is I went to the Santa Fe Institute.
I think you are.
I don't know if you are.
Are you familiar with Santa Fe Institute?
You've heard of it, no?
Yeah, yeah.
So SFI, for those of you who don't know,
is pretty famous in physics, I would say.
They're kind of known as the hub for complexity science.
And what does complexity science mean?
Good question.
I don't think anyone really knows.
But the gist is studying kind of like emergent properties,
I would say.
So looking at systems and less from an engineering perspective and more from an evolutionary perspective. What happens when you put the pieces in place and then watch as emergent systems emerge or evolve? And so I'm extremely interested in that stuff. I love thinking about what I'll call the holon theory that everything in the universe is part and whole and part and whole.
like the cell is part of a molecule, is part of an organ, you know, is part of an organ system,
is part of a human or a body, is part of a biosphere, is part of a solar system,
is part of a galaxy, just all the way up and all the way down. And so anyways, you know,
most of academia, and my point is just, in my view, is just like a giant waste of time
because it's like super siloed and it's all this bureaucracy and crap and like the peer review
process, when you start learning about peer review, that's a clusterfuck. But a lot of these
academics are very, very intelligent people who could do really valuable things for the world.
So one of the things we discussed on the show that you were posing is like, how do we get
economists sitting in the coin? Like, wow, wouldn't that be awesome if they were doing something
useful instead of like fiat voodoo? Seriously. And so one of my goals was, I think if ever there
is a place. So one of the reasons I'm so bullish and excited about open protocol systems like
Bitcoin and like Nostra is I view them as digital commons, which actually are a form of stateless
socialism, which I view as a controversial take for much of the Bitcoin community. But listen to
my chat with Ben Ark on anarchism, FOSS, and the origins of Nostra if you're interested in those
questions. But I view it as the substrates in which the next forms of human evolution,
or sorry,
of any evolution
are going to emerge, right?
Because you have these systems
where they're open systems
and it's going to mimic
a lot of what happens
in biology.
So one of my personal goals,
because I a fan of SFI was to try and see if I can you know orange and purple pill some of the people there and get folks interested in doing this research And yeah so you know shout out to actually our homie Mark
and one of his colleagues is on the board there.
And I was just like,
hey, I'd like to go orange pill them
and got me in, which was cool.
And I went and did some orange pill.
So my trip-
Undercover?
Did you wear like an orange suit?
Definitely did not.
um i did actually i wore a pterodactyl shirt so that my dad made i was just it's pretty cool uh
did you did you come in you arrived you arrived and they knew that you had that as a well i mean
research no i mean sort of i mean a little bit i mean that that was not my only intention i also
just thought it was cool and i wanted to go and just yeah be part of it but like you know i yeah
i told the told carl the guy to help me out um that that was something i wanted to do anyways so
it was very interesting for many reasons.
There were, of course, some people I talked to
that thought I was crazy, and that's fine.
I'm used to that at this point, being a Bitcoiner.
But there was a lot of really,
I would say, open receptivity
to these ideas.
Without doxing specific names,
some of the researchers,
there was one researcher who was a father
of quantum computing.
If I said his name, you would know it. It's a big deal.
Really big deal.
We chatted for a little while.
You know at first,
Oh, yeah.
Thanks for not doxing him, though.
Yeah.
Father.
Probably two people.
Two fathers.
Or mother.
Anyways, and so we were chatting,
and, you know, first you get the whole,
and this is why, again, I loathe and despise crypto.
It's the only thing I truly hate
because it makes our job so difficult.
It's like I start talking about Bitcoin,
it's like, I don't like all that crypto crap.
It's like, believe me, no one hates crypto more than me.
Trust me.
no one and um i'm like bitcoin and so so i i what i found was really um sort of effective with these
folks is you know talking about the energy angle you know bitcoin is uh this portal between the
digital and the physical realms and when i really hit with this guy i was like okay this is an
einstein new level breakthrough and like you dk where i saw his eyes light up were on two two
things one you know it's kind of hinting i can tell this guy wants a nobel and i was like well
this is a Nobel type of project right around here.
And when I explained to him in great detail
the difficulty adjustment,
because he'd never,
so anyone who's like actually extremely intelligent,
physicist or whatever,
if you can get them to just understand
the difficulty adjustment,
because he kept being like,
well, who shifts the difficulty?
And I was like,
it's a cybernetic feedback loop.
And when I finally saw him click on that,
he goes,
and for those of you who don't know, the difficulty adjustment
the very high level thing that's super important here is
miners, every whatever 10 minutes or so
are supposed to get a block, they have to solve one way hash functions
which basically means you can just think of it as they're brute forcing Sudoku puzzles
it's a loose analogy
but they're brute forcing Sudoku puzzles
and if they want to get the rewards from a block
and transaction fees, they need to append a number
with a certain number of zeros,
or they need to append a number to transactions
to create a number,
hash together with a certain number of zeros.
If there's too much hash power,
which means the blocks are getting solved too fast,
then the system every two weeks self-adjusts
and says, we need more difficulty.
You need to post more zeros to get this reward.
And if there's too few and it's too hard,
then it says you need fewer zeros
and you get faster rewards.
That is a really, really big deal
that truly, truly, if anyone's super intelligent
that comes to you and says,
ah, Bitcoin's a scam,
really, if you sit down with them on this one point,
on that cybernetic feedback loop,
I would be shocked if they're not blown away
and become a Bitcoiner by the end of that conversation.
So anyways, when this guy finally understood that,
saw his eyes light up.
The second thing I chatted with him about
was we talked about quantum biology.
So he's very interested in light and very interested.
So I've also been with my dad
actually getting obsessed with plants since I've been gardening. There's this crazy book called
The Secret Life of Plants. If you want to go way out there, it's cool. But photosynthesis is such
a magical thing. You're literally taking Photon and converting that into life. And so we jammed
on photosynthesis for a long time. And when I told him, I was like, listen, dude, what's the
most magic currency in all of this? He was like, well, it's ATP. And I was like, exactly. Bitcoin
is the digital ATP, which an idea I borrowed from Drew Bansel. Also, shout out. If you haven't
I heard my interview with Drew.
I think it's one of the,
anything that guy's done is like quality.
And when he saw that digital ATP thing,
that's when I was like,
there's a Nobel in here somewhere.
So we'll see if we get a paper published on this,
but I was-
So you're happy you went?
I was pleased on that one.
Yes, I was very pleased.
And yeah, I-
Did you see the general vibe
after you talked to a bunch of people
that they kind of got it
or came to a better understanding
or a lot of them?
Not everyone.
where the people who weren't receptive,
were they just very skeptical to start with
and they sort of bucketed it as-
Yeah, I don't think they were willing to do the time
or like this guy was actually willing
to have the conversation,
talk about the feedback loops.
So there was no one that I got that far in with.
I don't think there's ever been anyone
I've gotten that far in with
that doesn't completely change their mind on Bitcoin.
But yeah, for a lot of people,
they don't want to take the time to go there deep.
That's really fun.
I was also talking about some of their wild ideas with folks.
I talked with another very famous physicist there
and explain my views that consciousness came prior to materialism
and that he walked away at that point.
So, you know, whatever.
You got to shoot your shots.
But it was cool.
And yeah, I hope to stay more involved with that group.
Materialism meaning like tool building?
No, like mind coming prior to matter.
That's a much deeper rabbit hole.
Anyways, the point is it was really cool.
I had a great time.
Thank you, Carl and Mark.
Shout out for making that happen.
I hope that we continue to, who knows, maybe I invited one of the guys to come to our event
we're going to be hosting, which we'll talk about in a minute.
But I hope we continue to build relationships here because that is an institute where if
anyone should be doing this kind of research we're talking about around complexity with
Bitcoin and Nostra, it's them.
Before we get to the big event, I'm curious, did either of you guys attend the Nostra event
last night?
I did.
Because I really wanted to go.
So did Alex, but the two of us had a prior obligation to go to an EFF event.
We can talk about that a little bit as well.
Yeah, we can talk about that too.
But give us a lowdown of how the Nostra event, the inaugural Nostra event at PB.
So I will, but that's awesome.
On the EFF front, we're orange-pilling all the organizations that should be into Bitcoin that are not yet.
So SFI, EFF, like, soon get the Internet Archive.
We need to get all the cool people that maybe got a little shit going in for a minute.
Nostradep is awesome
it was the first one
shout out to Dustin
who just made it
yeah
like
did a really good job
and also shout out to Alex
appreciate the little star
by the way
that was dope
we got the good pizza
like
anyone who knows
double missed out
little star is the only way to go
it was delicious
but anyways
we had a good group come out
some people
I mean I won't dox it
but some people
from like crypto land
I was shocked
that I like fairly famous folks I had never met.
I think Max is friends with them.
And I would say we probably started a little too late.
So that was my only feedback to Dustin
because we got, you know, people came at six
and we started at seven,
probably start at 6.30 next time.
But he gave a great overview of Noster.
He showed kind of the magic of being able
to like create an identity in Primal
and then log in with Iris
and like you get the same graph and the same notes.
And we talked about Highlighter
and a couple other projects.
I think one thing that really struck me from this presentation, which I will kind of shift my own presentation to people of what Nostra is, is he showed them, he's like, when people ask me what is Nostra, I go to Awesome Nostra.
And this is maintained by Algeaz, who is a longtime Lightning Bitcoin guy.
And it's awesome because Awesome Nostra, like even I was blown away.
Have you all been to Awesome Nostra yet?
I've seen it like a while back.
I haven't been there in a while.
It's been a year.
you know what I mean
there's like awesome
just a github page
with a bunch of
cool
exactly
it's just a github page
but the point is like
it's just like
a year ago
it was like
oh there's like
a hundred projects
dude
thousands
he just kept scrolling
and scrolling
and yeah
a lot of it's libraries
and like
while one dude
in the audience
was like
well yeah
but that's libraries
and this and that
and then he was just like
oh I'm still scrolling
well I'm still scrolling
but I'm still
I was shocked
I'm curious
out of the
people that came
how many were
would identify as like Nostra people
versus a more Nostra curious?
It's a good question.
I would say,
so I don't know how many we had,
maybe like 12 to 15,
something like that.
So it was not huge,
maybe closer to 15 than some people left.
I would say all but one
were familiar with Nostra.
One guy was just brand new
and he came to Design Week.
Most people,
there were a few overlap
from some of the Bitcoin events.
It was actually a slightly different crowd,
which I thought was cool.
I think everyone was also a Bitcoiner or Bitcoin curious, but there was definitely a different vibe.
People that were more interested in building a new web, I would say.
Do you think the curiosity kind of biased toward the social media use case of Nostra that a lot of people talk about?
Or was it sort of biasing against that more towards infrastructure?
I think more towards the other stuff, the new ideas.
and I think
so another thing
there was someone who came
who I definitely won't dox
but was very cool
the creator of Hive Talk
came and gave a presentation
yeah not doxing
no but it's a pseudonym
I'm not saying who it was
but it was a really
really cool presentation
and I walked away
extremely impressed by that
and what is Hive Talk?
it's like Zoom
but you can use
Nostrum Lightning
and
very impressive
I was blown away
by like how professional
this person was
and like how thoughtful.
And yeah, it just gave me, frankly,
a lot of confidence to like, you know,
like you and you to a certain extent as well,
like I'm pretty deep in Nostra,
but I'm still like every,
like, and this person was showing,
you know, a bunch of like new sites.
There's like a Nostra calendaring tool or app.
I didn't know that existed.
Like basically they're just like showing me
a ton of different apps I'd never heard of.
So.
That's great.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that event is just another example
of us trying to bridge the gap
Big Tech and Silicon Valley.
And it sounds like it brought in a new mix of people,
which is super cool.
Still a ways to go.
And we have a long...
But yeah, it's a good start.
Real quick, we are getting great audience engagement.
I just want to give them some love.
One comment I saw was someone said
they might be here or be visiting soon.
Can they help out with the merchants?
And I guess my response to that is like,
don't wait for a merchant guide from us
or anything like that.
Just go to merchants,
whether they're here in the Presidio or elsewhere,
and ask, do you accept Bitcoin?
That helps, right?
Because it plants a seed.
Because if we go in and talk to a local merchant
and give them the sales pitch,
some will say, sure,
and others will be like,
I don't have time or there's no demand.
But if they've heard from other customers,
Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin,
then it starts to build a...
an image in their head of like, oh, there's demand for this. It's real.
I should do it. So each and every one of us who
goes and asks that question, I think helps. Actually, which
usually when I ask that question, the response from the merchant
is like, you know, physical or really has no idea what I'm talking
about or like, it's just basically no, right?
But it's kind of a dumbfounded.
in Berlin, I went to a coffee shop.
One of my colleagues said,
oh, you got to go to this coffee shop.
They have an amazing pour over.
So I'm like, all right, it's local and pour over.
I was like, great.
So I go there and then I waited in line
and then I get there and it says cash only.
I didn't have any cash with me
because I just pay with Apple Pay and my phone.
So I thought I'd throw a Hail Mary
and ask if they accept Bitcoin
because I could pay with Bitcoin from my phone.
And well, the bad news is no,
but the good news
the shocking response
the shocking response though was the guy
enthusiastically
said soon
oh yeah
okay like he's like enthusiastic
he's like we don't right now but we're soon going
to accept bitcoin and he's like he was all
about it and then he told me all about it and they're like yeah
we need to improve the 5g in our space
to be able to do it I mean it was like
it was real it wasn't just like a
polite response or something it was real
so maybe assign things to come
I love it
I almost think as Bitcoiners
you could go to the places
that you already go
that you already have a habit
maybe some relationship
with the people behind the counter
and you can say
look I would like to do this
I would like to pay in Bitcoin
you know I'm a loyal customer already right
like I would
yeah I feel like
if you have places
that you show up
three times a week
like maybe Cafe RX or something
if you go there and tell them
that it's important to you
they will probably do this
we need to commit to each other
we need to start asking that question
when we go pay for stuff.
Let's do it together.
And people listening,
if you care about this stuff,
just even if he just does it once.
Yes.
I'm being out loud now.
Like we go to the farmer's market.
I was going to say farmer's markets are perfect.
Every week we go
and we spend hundreds of dollars
at the farmer's market
and everybody is like,
oh, can you do Venmo?
Can you do Zelle?
Because they all want to avoid the fees.
Like they're very, very sensitive to the fees.
But if we went to them and said,
oh, can I pay in Bitcoin?
Like I bet they don't get asked that too much.
Totally.
And that feels like the kind of, like you're probably talking to the decision maker.
Decision maker, exactly.
Or the kid of the decision maker.
One of the vendors at the San Rafael farmer's market, you said, does accept Bitcoin.
Yeah, it's kind of a punk underground, like, you know, juice manufacturer, you know, or something.
Yeah.
But it's only one.
And they also have like XMR or whatever.
They accept a bunch of other stuff too.
Nice.
But yeah, I thought it was nice to see the one.
But I feel like because we're going there all the time.
And you're spending.
and we're like
we have like a personal relationship
with the farmer's market
people
I feel like that's a good
are we committed
all this
to the next show
I'm going to report back
we have to report back
our experiences
and then maybe
a lot of motivate
motivate people
in the audience as well
maybe I'll come
we're going to just
spam CafeRx
at that point
it's just going to be like
alright we'll take your bit
but I
poor lady
I do think
your point on farmer's markets
is spot on because like you said, they're decision makers.
But also, I mean, I was shocked.
I mean, I told you guys, I kind of accidentally converted my honey dealer, which is effectively
a farmer's market kind of guy.
And, you know, he was super excited.
And now I will say you have to be very, one note of caution to everyone is you need to
be like very like, I don't know what the right word is, careful maybe in how you describe
this to people.
Because at one point, you know, he was like, he was like, so let me get this.
He's like, I want to make sure I understand this, right?
He's like, this only goes up, right?
And I was like, okay.
We need a...
We need...
Exactly.
I was like, we need a...
What's your time frame?
Exactly.
I was like, how long you got, dude?
Forever.
Yeah, exactly.
Have you heard of the Federal Reserve?
Ron Paul.
So we talked a little bit about the NOSA event.
I want the EFF event that...
Or it was a Freedom of the Press event,
which is an organization that I think
sort of spun out of EFF.
Alex and I went to that last night.
I think it's important
again this whole
bridging the gap
between Silicon Valley
and Bitcoin
not just tech companies
but also we've talked about
universities before
and I think organizations
like EFF make a lot of sense too
like if you just look at
their charter
their mission
their values
it just screams
Bitcoin to us
but it doesn't
but it doesn't scream
Bitcoin to them
historically
so
it just seemed like
it'll be challenging but like as a clear
opportunity.
So we had invited folks from
EFF to our launch event here
and one of them
attended so that was awesome.
I didn't know that.
My understanding of like
why are they not into Bitcoin?
I don't know if I had the full
crypto.
Well this is my
I probably have a partial view
but my understanding is that they've been
they're not into crypto
they've been inundated with crypto.
That's right.
I mean, like,
they hate crypto.
Right.
And so they think of the scam.
Right.
And then Bitcoin gets lumped in with that.
So I think...
Well, no, one of them's like a board member
of Filecoin, right?
Ooh.
Yeah, there's a lot of Filecoin love last night.
Yeah.
That Alex and I noticed.
Archive also has, like, Filecoin sponsoring.
And actually,
like, a guy I worked at the Google
15 plus years ago,
a really great policy person,
I know he went,
like, I think he's involved with Filecoin as well.
But I mean, what I suspect there is they have money to pay people.
And they give it away.
And the high-level story sounds good.
Like, don't we all want decentralized data storage that persists?
Especially if we don't have to spam the Bitcoin blockchain, right?
So, you know, store it elsewhere.
It sounds really good.
And actually, the technology in Filecoin, from a pure technology standpoint, is interesting and compelling.
But if you look at the whole system, it's hard to see how it's going to work out, right?
But I think that's a next-level analysis.
So if you're not technical or you don't spend a whole lot of time on it, I think it's easy to be like, oh, this makes a lot of sense.
I think also so many of these ideas just get to be popular for one reason or another.
or maybe it comes from some voice that's trusted
for some reason or another.
And then it's just like,
once everybody's talking about it, it feels normal.
So you kind of, you sort of stop asking questions
and just, you know.
But in any case, I think in general,
EFF inundated with scams,
Bitcoin's been lumped in.
So I think it's important that they meet real human beings.
Yeah.
We have a physical space here,
the presidia of Bitcoin.
And over time, they'll see,
oh, these guys aren't scammy.
they're also not just like
greedy trying to make money
that's the only focus
we actually care about freedom money
principles
and all the things they care about with EFF
we deeply care about too
and put those words into action
so hopefully they see that over time
and that helps
yeah so I think Alex and I
had a good time
glad we went to that event
and hopefully there's more connections in the future
yeah I wonder if there's an opportunity to do
have them co-sponsor an event here
or something like that.
Potentially.
Several of them are going to be involved
with the HRF,
like Alex has said's HRF AI event,
which a small part of it's going to be hosted here
at Presidio Bitcoin,
and the rest of it,
it's going to be in the Presidio.
So I think there'll be some overlap there as well.
And we also met an engineer there
who had worked at EFF for 20 years,
and he just got a job at a Bitcoin company.
Lives in San Francisco.
Might even become a member here.
Great.
We might have recruited a member, but he's entering the Bitcoin space.
So we have at least two Bitcoin advocates that are associated with EFF.
I love it.
That's awesome.
We'll throw that over time.
And again, just to kind of hammer that same point home, because I see someone else saying there, yeah, I'm stealing that.
No one hates crypto more than me.
It's not that I just like being angry.
I don't want to hate anyone or anything, but it's just the same story everywhere.
It's just, it's so frustrating when it's like,
you don't understand we're really trying to build
a new TCP IP for value.
You know, we're looking at things like Nostre.
Like, I think another thing that you should hit those guys with,
like people EFF is Nostre,
because that's also very like,
there's no money, there's no token,
like it's not, there's literally no way
you could pump and dump this thing.
It's just your values.
I agree.
I will say one thing that was a little surprising to me,
I brought up, there's like a Q&A session
and I brought up chat control.
and then I
Chat Control?
Yeah, what's that?
Yeah.
What?
What's Chat Control?
It's just like last night.
I guess we should
need to talk about it
on the show.
You guys don't even know
what it is?
Here we are.
In Germany where they're
trying to...
Yeah, so there's
an EU initiative.
I believe it's the second time
they tried to push it through
but Chat Control
is basically ending
end-to-end encryption
messaging apps
because they would...
What?
Remember like...
Yeah.
Wow.
Remember like...
Who's proposing this?
This is EU.
EU, yeah, of course.
Or like, you know, countries in Europe that make up the EU.
So I think it was four years ago,
Apple implemented a solution
which would just scan the photos on your phone
and run them through a filter
to match against like a CSAM database.
And if it matched, then they'd alert, you know,
the feds and then you'd get in trouble.
but Apple
didn't know what the filters were
so the customers
don't know what's in that database
Apple
doesn't know what's in that database
just some other third party provider
or government body or something
knows what's in that database
and we can all agree that CSAM's horrible
and horrific but the
concern is slippery slope
once that infrastructure
is in place and all our phones
are being surveilled and all our photos are being looked at.
And it's not transparent.
Other, other is.
And it's not transparent.
So then other like things are added to the list.
So Apple implemented that, announced it, and then faced a lot of criticism, pulled it back.
Thank God.
But chat control is similar.
Basically, everything, all your messages and everything, your like signal would be scanned
by the government.
And so it's just not private.
It's not encrypted.
this is a proposal right now
or a
yeah but there's concern
so
like Germany has been
against it
historically
and they
I'm not an expert on EU governance
but basically if Germany says no
this isn't going anywhere
right
but when I was in
when I was in
when I was in Germany
they're funding everyone else
there was a lot of
concern raised about this
because there are rumors
that Germany is about ready to flip
and if they flipped
it would pass And then like I mean you guys use Signal right I use it to communicate with a lot of people in Europe we would no longer be able to do that And it would that Or it depends If they pass that well then then you know then an organization like Signal would
have to choose. Do we just ignore and take the legal risks and heat or remove Signal from Europe
or put a backdoor in.
Or put a backdoor in.
I mean, comply, right?
Those would be their choices.
Is it being proposed around like a CSAM issue
or is it just general?
Okay, same kind of.
And to be clear,
those are actually two different options.
They could comply publicly
or they could say we're not going to do it
and then put a backdoor in.
But they could lie.
Yeah.
Lie and comply.
So like Meredith Whitaker from Signal
was in Germany at the same time.
I mean, obviously, it was like
not quite
existential to Signal, but kind of.
Did you see,
by the way, she's on Nostrad now?
I didn't see that. So this is big. This is one of the
other things that came out of Nostrad devs is we were on Nostrad.
And shout out Artur. And
one of the things that shows on the front page is
who's trending is the biggest follows.
She was number two. That's great.
So my understanding is Germany
decided to vote no or not
support it. So I don't think it's going to pass.
But, you know, it's only a matter of time.
Like, when Germany has a change in who's in charge of the country, then that could change.
You said that's likely happening soon, or I don't follow German politics much.
I didn't say that.
Oh, okay.
Just if it were to happen, it's always a possibility.
Well, I mean, people don't live forever, so there'll definitely be new people in charge.
I don't know when.
My understanding, I mean, this is maybe decades old, but my understanding is that Germany is maybe like the most privacy sensitive or conscious country that I know of that I could point to.
Yeah, but well, it sounds like that remains true in this case, but like it might not remain true forever.
It just boggles my mind that any country and any country's citizenry thinks this is a good idea.
I just literally don't understand that at all.
And I mean, well, it seems like very simple minded.
if you're sold on like,
let's stop CSAM, period,
well, then everyone's going to say yes,
but let's think a little bit deeper
about these issues, right?
And how to like handle them
and address them.
So anyway,
well, you guys didn't know about it either,
but I was surprised that it seemed like
no one at this event knew about it.
That's even more alarming to me.
Yeah, EFS is all they do.
It's more, well,
it sounds like at least,
it sounds like it's,
at least Freedom of Press,
it's like US-centric.
so not only is this issue alarming to me
but you guys aren't even aware of it
they're not aware of it
so like the people that should be aware of it
aren't even aware of it
so that's even more alarming to me
like no wonder this stuff is going to be rammed through
because there's no like
I mean I guess Meredith
we've got Meredith over there
but yeah so that was
that was
I was surprised
I thought that was going to be like
a topic of conversation last night
and turns out no one knew anything about it.
Disappointing.
What's the BitChat story?
Any BitChat activity in the Berlin trip?
No.
Conference, BTC++, it feels like.
Sadly, no.
Seriously?
BTC++?
Did you try it and just didn't find anybody around?
Yeah.
Nope.
Okay.
I'm shocked.
But what's interesting,
I mean, with the structure of chat control,
would it apply to something like BitChat, right?
Yeah.
It's peer-to-peer, so how can they enforce it?
Well, it's not in the App Store.
They enforce it, but you can't install it on your phone.
And Google just changed their App Store policy
to be more like Apple's where they don't allow side-loading.
They don't allow side-loading now?
I missed that.
Yeah, that was like a few weeks ago.
Is that proposed or it already happened?
I think they decided it, but I don't know if it's already happened.
That's a big deal.
Yeah.
Man, it really does kind of feel like, to your point,
like the Panopticon is closing in fast.
So we can develop these great apps,
but people can't install them.
This sucks.
We're going to be scanning our eyeballs soon.
You want to talk about Type 1 Summit?
Yeah.
What do we have?
We have 15 minutes left?
On a positive note,
and perhaps one of the reasons
I am less informed than Steve.
You're informed.
Max is busy.
I actually haven't.
Inform about other things.
I've been shocked,
shockingly busy the last couple weeks.
And shout out to the homie Alex.
The second shout out of one show.
He's been helping a ton.
We've been hustling to get this thing together.
So Type One Summit, we have a whole episode on this you guys can go and listen to.
But the thesis is we need to build a new grid because we have the old grids are an order
of magnitude at least too small.
And AI demand and other demand from things like quantum computing, electric vehicles,
electric heat pumps, everything is going to require just too much.
So Datapoint, Texas grid, 80 gigawatts peak load,
and there's about double that asking,
or probably more now,
asking to get built for data centers.
There's no way the grid can take it.
How do we get to terawatt scale grids?
One of my crazy takes is going to be solar and storage.
That's something we'll debate at the show.
Anyways, it's going to be a ton of fun.
So we've been really hustling getting this thing together.
You can check out TypeOneNumberOne,
typeonesummit.org,
and see a bunch of the folks that are coming.
Is the one an I?
No.
I use the one as an I,
but on the URL,
it's the number one.
So anyways.
Thought I asked.
Yeah, exactly.
Now you know.
But you can see
we have an incredible group
coming together.
And I mean,
on the one hand,
it's a bit of a challenge
because it looks like
we're going to radically
oversubscribe to this thing.
If you're still interested in coming,
you should still apply.
But full disclosure,
it's going to be tough
to fit everyone in here.
Your original vision
was intimate,
like 20 people or something.
It was.
Where are we at now, Max?
I don't know.
You'll have to ask Alex.
He's running the...
Max's enthusiasm and energy
about the Energy Summit.
It is starting to spin out of control.
I mean, we're a month away
and it's just like, shit,
we really can't fit everyone.
We're looking at potentially bigger venues.
Maybe we'll get it, maybe we won't.
Hold tight if you haven't heard back from us.
But if you are deep in this industry,
we still have a few spots left
for people that are super, super focused
on solar batteries.
If you're another energy source too,
we're happy to chat about that,
grids and data centers.
The one big area that we're weak on now,
I was telling you guys,
that we really want is...
We got coal coming.
Oh.
C-O-L.
We have C-O-L-E, coal,
the founder of Kila Energy.
Air Mike.
Which is cool.
Generation.
Hole now.
We're weak on the kerosene point.
So if anyone's out there hunting whale blubber, you took it out of my mouth.
Yeah.
If you know Captain Ahab, we're trying to get an intro over there.
I hope you do that.
We also want to discuss making some modifications to the carry model.
Yeah, yeah.
I got you.
That's a joke.
That's funny.
I got you.
Thank you, Deacon.
Anyways, so the one area that we're still super hustling on, if either of you guys have
thoughts on this, actually, there's a few folks I want to mention by you as well.
maybe we can do that off air.
Who's that?
Oh, yeah, I am too.
So, yes.
So, it rhymes with B-Lon Tuss.
And if we can figure that one out,
we should definitely still give that a shot.
We should talk about that after this.
But we do have to get the Tesla shuttle
we're meeting moved, right?
Or no, because we've extended it.
So, we haven't even put this on the website yet,
but I'm going to go ahead and just mention it.
I'm really excited about this.
um okay so yeah whatever fuck it you listen to pbj for the alpha right so on so it was going to be
originally just one day uh we still have not announced the dates the second you just did um
oh yeah damn don't know what you mean
the llm's got shit the llm's got it oh well whatever it is what it is uh so i don't know
where it's going to be. So good luck. So we're going to have, I think, probably six or so
incredible panels and then a bunch of really awesome breakout groups, probably four on the
first day panels, two on the second day, and a lot of awesome breakout groups. It will still be
really intimate when people are sort of ideating. I don't want to give away all the panels we're
working on right now, but one that I'm super excited about is going to be, this took some
work to get over the finish line, but a discussion with Ramez Nam and Casey Hennemer. Ramez was the
first guy that went super deep on solar pilling me at least like 15 years ago. Futurist, I think
buddies with Ray Kurzweil, really, really, really thoughtful, smart guy. And he was the one showing
all the curves for solar and lithium ion storage. So he was basically being the one like solar and
storage are going to disrupt everything, but this was like 2012 or something and everyone thought he
was crazy. And even he was too conservative. I would say this guy, Casey Hannemer is like the
new remess. And he's gotten very famous in the last couple of months. He's been on all the
mainstream pods like Dworkash and everything and like really trying to solar pill these guys.
It's crazy to me listening to people like him, Dworkash and the mainstream Silicon Valley,
they just can't quite wrap their head around it. But I think Casey's right. So what's interesting
is those guys will be in conversation because there's a lot of things they can chat about that
know they agree on, which is very cool, but there's also things they don't agree on, such as
do we need continent scale grids and HVDC lines or not? So one vision of the world is it's going
to be hyper, hyper local. It's just going to be everyone who has their solar in storage. Maybe
there's some local lines between, but it's a very hot topic of debate. And one of the only topics in
this whole field, I really have an open mind on. I don't have that idea. I mean, I have a slight
leaning, but like super open to having my mind completely changed is do we have HVDC high voltage
direct current lines or not? So anyway, so that's going to be, I think for the energy nerds,
one of the most interesting, maybe the most interesting discussion of the year.
So I'm very excited about that. We're also going to do some really wild stuff just to give you a
hint. We haven't fully booked this one yet, but I'm open to things like obviously, you know,
going behind the meter, we're going to have some of the best people in the world talking about
building data centers behind the meter and how big those can go. I'll give you a little alpha
drop. I'm playing with the idea from micro to macro dosing, the evolution of the fractal grid.
So it's going to be pretty out there, but very good. And then I'm also very, I'm starting to
think about doing something around like compute in space, because that's one I don't have an
opinion on as well. It sounds crazy, but maybe it is, I don't know. But point is, this is going to
be a day for the big thinkers to think big, to suspend disbelief, and imagine what a world could
look like if we were starting from ground zero.
What?
I'm super excited for this.
What's the latest thinking on how
those who can't
attend can learn?
Will things be live streamed,
recorded? Will there be summaries published?
All figuring all of that out.
Alex has been helping a tremendous amount
on this and I know he's still figuring some of the pieces
out on what we're going to have AV-wise, depending on where
we are, but my current thinking
is I don't want to commit to anything
yet because we still have to figure out
where we're going to be and all that, but we'll try
and record, maybe live stream,
but at least record the panels,
assuming all the participants are okay with that.
And then the afternoon-evening
discussions will be Chatham House.
So maybe there'll be a summary,
but it won't be attributed to anyone or anything.
But we're going to do
our best to get the panels
filmed.
And those, by the way, generally
I agree with both you guys. I know you talked about this a lot
with some of the conferences you like,
like, yeah, I always just skip the panels.
it's like a waste of time.
This will not be that.
I guarantee you
these will be some of the most interesting
discussions around energy in the world.
We're also going to have some folks
still confirming exactly who,
but some of the policymakers
that are pushing for things like private grids
in states like New Hampshire.
That is fascinating
and a really interesting area.
We're going to have folks
from Latin American countries
where you can just kind of like do things.
So that's going to be very interesting.
And it's going to be awesome.
One area that we are weak on.
So putting out the request
to both of you guys and other people on the show,
we want the data center energy people
from the hyperscalers.
So we've got some of the NeoClouds.
I mean, we're open to more NeoCloud people as well,
but we want to make sure Google, XAI, Microsoft,
AWS are represented.
We have some ins there still confirming those people,
but that's, you know,
I almost think about kind of like two tracks
I'm excited about.
One is the big money, right?
So we want to have,
a lot of finance guys are not listed on the website.
The ones that are coming,
they like to keep a low profile.
I've learned in the last couple weeks, but we will have people that are financing these
things.
We want to make sure we have the guys that are actually spending.
That would be the hyperscalers.
And then I'm going to have another segment be more of the open source stuff.
So in the same way that there's the bid acts to contrast the big public miners, I want
to make sure there is a track to encourage people to be able to spend some of this stuff
out on their own communities.
And that's like, that's like, it has nothing to do with like profitable or venture back
or any of that.
I just think it's really cool.
The more people can take control of their own lives, build their own microgrids, have
their own solar, their own mining, their own storage, their own personal servers, which
we'll talk about, like, I want to make sure both of those are represented.
So.
And I know one of the things that you were sort of theorizing or hypothesizing is that
it may be that there's going to be an explosion of new companies or there's one new company
that needs to get built that nobody's working on yet.
or do you have a sense yet?
Have you kind of from putting this together,
talk to more people,
have you gotten a sense that like sort of
what might kind of emerge
or what kind of things might emerge
as a result of all the people getting connected
and new ideas getting shared?
I mean, we'll see.
I'm super open-minded.
I mean, personally, right?
Like my day job, occasionally,
every once in a while,
I don't just shit talk on PBJ.
Every once in a while,
I actually do some investing work.
So I mean, okay, actually,
I do have something I want to talk about on this.
so yes personally I want to fund a couple companies
that ideally spin out of this or maybe
you know or sort of like the initial
kind of like whatever the
analogy is Tinder the spark for
that's why I think it's important to
to the best of our ability
make the content available
the rest of the world because while we'll have
a bunch of amazing people here
there's a ton of amazing people outside that won't
be there who might start
a company that you want to invest in
it's a great point and we're going to do it yeah
we'll find a way to get as much of that public as we can and maybe even live.
But that's, that's one sort of selfish goal I have is like,
I would love to fund, you know,
be the absolute first money into some of these companies or even help,
like help incubate and like actually roll up my own sleeves.
This is like the first field where I've gotten excited to like actually like,
like really like do operational things, which I, you know,
prefer more of the, the platonic ideal of thinking it went up.
But, but, but, but it, I mean, this is so exciting.
So one of the things I wanted to mention is, I don't know if we'll have this as a panel or breakout group, but I also want to focus on like sort of the Bitcoiners that started off as Bitcoin people and are now more generic energy people.
So, you know, without getting into too many details, you know, I'm an investor in Stoci Energy and it's been crazy to watch them go from Bitcoin sort of brokering like between Stranded Wind and West Texas and miners now into AI compute and just watch their numbers just go vertical.
now there is some public stuff. I shared this on LinkedIn because everyone knows that's the
network where I'm not nerfed and where all the alpha is.
They announced 2.8 gigawatts of new projects
they're developing. 2.8 gigawatts. That's a big fucking deal.
And a year ago, that would have been inconceivable for Bitcoin miners.
So that's one example. Oops, I should have invested.
Yeah, well, I'm about to give my miss here in just a minute.
um cruceau i mean similar numbers we're gonna have some folks from cruceau at least one person
um to be announced but they were you know they were a good company when they were doing bitcoin
money they're like one of the five sexiest companies in the world probably or 10 or whatever
it is right now now that they're doing ai um and then i want to just give a shout out to the giga
guys alex and i alex has been hustling he's been going with events with you me we went to a dinner
or a party some like event for sf tech week which i didn't think was a thing because i was like isn't
every week in SF Tech,
but apparently there's
SF Tech Week.
Who knew?
And it was super fun.
And like these guys,
it was like a German
like Oktoberfest thing.
And like, yeah,
these guys were all dressed up
as Oktoberfest people.
But it turns out they're like...
They're hosing and...
Yeah, it was just like,
what is going on here?
But it turns out they're,
you know,
extremely serious entrepreneurs.
And man,
so I shout out to those guys.
One of the co-founders
will be joining us for the summit.
I'm really excited to have him there.
but their story is incredible as well.
This is my miss.
I don't even remember this
but I chatted with the CEO for a long time
at dinner and he was like,
yeah dude, we chatted years ago, you passed.
And I was like, I don't even remember.
I really don't even remember
but they raised a very small amount of money
and have mostly bootstrapped since then
but they were telling me some numbers
that just any venture capitalist
would blow your mind
on what they're developing right now
and part of what they're doing
is they're making transformers.
They're actually making their own,
they're building a factory
to make transformers in Texas.
That's crazy talk.
That is crazy talk.
And the cool thing for them is like,
you know, it doesn't matter
what it's, Bitcoin, AI compute,
solar, nuclear, whatever.
Everyone needs transformers.
You cannot buy transformers.
Everyone needs transformers.
And so I was going down,
it's like being, I mean,
hats off to those guys
because they did it all themselves.
But the thing that I wanted to mention
on the show today that really clicked for me when talking to those guys was, you know,
when I was first writing that paper that Bitcoin is key to an abundant clean energy future,
I had a lot of things right, but I didn't exactly see one critical piece. You know,
I thought it was going to be more of the Bitcoin miners come in first, kind of like get a system
set up and then maybe a bigger offtaker, you know, I was thinking green hydrogen, maybe compute,
but whatever comes in later, desal, you know, carbon capture, air, whatever.
What I kind of missed was at least what's happened to date.
The real sort of alpha or secret was those companies that started off doing Bitcoin mining
just got such a far head start in understanding the markets, in cornering supply chains,
and in getting very scarce assets like grid interconnects.
And maybe some people will say we all got lucky.
Maybe. Maybe some people will say that it was Bitcoiners understanding scarcity. Maybe.
But what has actually played out in practice with companies like Satoshi and Giga and all these guys
is the Bitcoiners, those guys, when they started the company, they were like 22 or 23 years old.
They're like 27 now. And it's wild. And if you had gone five years ago as a 22-year-old and be
I'm going to manufacture trans...
People would have laughed at you.
Hyperscalers would never work with you in a million years, ever.
You know who would work with you?
The Bitcoin miners.
Why?
Because these guys are cowboys or kind of skirting on the edge of society.
Anyway, it's the same thing with everything with Bitcoin.
It's like because it's a free market, they really need this thing.
Most people did not take them seriously, would not give them lines of credit.
Banks won't even give them a document they need to be able to sign for offtake.
great. So they had to work with like the pirates and the renegades and the weirdos.
Everything goes from the edge. Everything goes from the edge. And so it's just like you have like
kids, like literal 22 year old kids who would never have been taken seriously,
are able to get this huge head start because the renegades literally can't get any financing or
like the traditional mainstream would not work with them. So the kids, you have an opportunity,
the kids get so far ahead and it's like, you know, maybe they're not as good at first,
but eventually they learn and they try stuff and they get better and better and they develop
the relationships and the suppliers realize they're real. Six years in, the serious guys
want to come to the party. Good luck. You're six years behind. And so to me, that's been the big
story with Bitcoin energy so far is because you could start with the renegades and the weirdos,
people on the fringes had an opportunity to get a huge head start and like, it's going to be hard
to catch. So coming away, and I wish I'd invested in that company. I'm cooking myself even more than
you are. So I know we're sort of over time or at time right now, but I want to just mention one
thing i feel like max you have so many great resources on energy and kind of learning about
this and i wonder i almost imagine there should be like hive mind.vc slash energy canon and just
like kind of like what jameson lop i think has kind of for intro to you know everything about
bitcoin or um you know a6nz did it for shit coins i think they have the crypto canon right so
i feel like i'd like to read the energy canon which is just like here's all the best episodes
of the podcast, the episodes on YouTube,
the Casey or whatever,
you know, the blogs
that I should read, the blog posts, the specific
posts. So I can kind of get an overview
of all of the modern
relevant ideas and you can kind of just like curate
that set, put it out there and then
I think it also can show people
your interest but also help promote
the event and get the right
people involved, you know, sort of just
another bad signal. It's a great idea. I love it and I
should totally put that list together and like, yeah,
and open source or whatever, people can contribute their own.
But yeah, it's-
Maybe it's a GitHub page or something.
Yeah, GitHub.
It's great at the AI slop.
He'll just slop stuff together for you.
DK, do you have any questions about energy?
Maybe 450 or something like this in my way.
I will generate 450 questions about energy.
420, sorry, please.
69, actually.
I'll share it down to 69 that I actually am interested in.
Thank God.
It's a good idea.
And just in general, I think maybe one of my biggest things I want to leave folks with,
because I saw Diana or Deanna put this love people on the fringes,
is there are days when it's frustrating because you're just like,
man, mainstream tech has just got all the money and this and that.
And it's like, first of all, yeah, but I always think it's the Steve Jobs quote.
It's like, why join the Navy when you could be a pilot?
At the end of the day, being on the fringes, working on the weird stuff we do with principals,
with values,
caring about freedom.
It's just so much more fun.
100%.
And then eventually it does work.
Like it takes time,
but like eventually
that's where the transformative ideas come from.
So.
Yep.
Wholeheartedly agree.
All right.
Recall it?
To that, let's wrap it.
All right.
Good to hang guys.
Thanks.
Good times.
All right.
Bye-bye.