All right, here we are.
Welcome to another episode of PBJ.
This is January 9th, 2026, and this is our first one of the year.
Good to see you.
2026?
I thought it was 3036.
I don't know.
What century is it?
The acceleration seems like it sometimes.
On this show, Max operates as if it's 3026.
Sometimes, sometimes.
You know, the future is here, just not even latest.
Deltron.
Deltron predicted it all, 3030.
Happy New Year, though.
Happy New Year, Steve.
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year, DK.
Yeah, yeah.
Happy New Year, Biddy.
How would you think?
January 9th is a milestone in Bitcoin, or a moment in Bitcoin.
Oh, that's right.
The first actual mined block was January 9th, I believe.
The first mined block.
Isn't that correct?
I thought it was.
What happened on the 3rd?
Something happened on the 3rd.
The Genesis block was published.
And then nothing was mined for like a week?
Yeah.
Really?
I didn't realize it was that long.
I know there's something about the...
Genesis block, you can't spend the coin, it's a special block.
You can't spend the Coinbase.
And that was published January 3rd.
That was published, and then it was just left, nothing's happening,
let the week go, nobody's mining anything.
I mean, the code was dropped, so it could have been mined within minutes.
But someone had to run the software and find a block.
And Satoshi, was Satoshi specifically,
do we think that he didn't mine the first one
because he was specifically waiting for somebody else to do it?
when I spoke with him he didn't really say
we should have a follow up
interview with Satoshi
can we patch Satoshi real quick
let's find out
I don't think we know
I don't think we know what he was doing
maybe from his online
activity
messages maybe
he had messages between the third and the ninth
I don't know
it's a reasonable speculation
what else would he be doing
so the third the software
was actually available, the Genesis block
was mined, and then he kind of just like turned
off mining, just
nothing happened for the next week or so, right?
From the third to the ninth?
Yep.
That's how the network worked.
He presumably turned off the software
because otherwise he would have
mined a lot of blocks.
The difficulty level was low.
So who is
Dave Ramsey or whatever is like,
what happens if those nerds turn it off? He actually did
that in that first week.
I don't know.
I hear he was pretty busy that week with staking his Ethereum.
So I don't know.
He had to go do a press tour, make sure that Wall Street was on board.
He needed to go ask permission for a few things.
So we're back, boys.
How was y'all's break?
Where do we begin?
Oh, man.
Steve's looking fancy again.
I like it.
Yeah.
I got some new gear.
Some good swag.
over the holiday break.
Yeah, how was y'all's break?
What would you go to?
It was great.
Iowa State's 15-0 now.
Oh, yeah.
First 15-0 start in school history.
You guys are balling it.
In Ken Palm, you're our top number two.
Three, two.
Yeah.
If you go back, Ken Palm goes back to 1997.
Okay.
So the past 30 years, Iowa State is now a top 12 all-time team.
What is going on?
Like up there with like Duke 99, Duke 01.
What the hell is going on over there?
Because you guys don't have the NIL.
How are you that good?
it's the
it's crazy
we're a bunch of fanatics
I like it
support the team
the corn
no great coach
the corn
it's all the corn
the big corn
no I mean the
the players
the players could have
taken 50 to 100%
more money
this year
and they didn't
they stayed
because they loved the culture
they thought they could
win a national championship
respect
here we go
there you go
wow
it's good to have a mission
like team bitcoin
another thing I did
of a break, I observed
what many people do.
It's a reset, a mental reset
and sort of like look back in the
past year, look forward to the new year.
What do you do? You set New Year's resolutions, right?
So I went through that process
and I think
DK wanted me to speak to some of the stuff I'm
doing.
We chatted on the
high level, some ideas came up
but I wanted to hear actually more about what
actually motivated this and how it's going and what
you actually hope to achieve with these.
yeah well a lot of it is stuff i think max is already doing so interested to hear what you
your thought but i just sort of um i wanted to like a reset on how i spend my time
yeah um i mean so there's i always have physical goals like so you know running or some race or
whatever so i've got i've got those you know i love the dipsy race now so i've got a goal there
um those are easy for me because i love doing them so it's not like hard to do that goal uh
One that is physically related that is a little bit harder is mobility.
Because I'm not a huge fan of stretching and even yoga.
I mean, I don't hate yoga, but I don't get drawn to it like I do with biking or cycling.
Or biking or running.
But yeah, I introduced a mobility goal.
But I think the goals that you're interested in talking about in the show are more around digital habits, internet habits, etc.
So I really tried to account for my time better looking back and then made some changes.
So I know, Max, you've talked about like deleting apps from your phone, getting away from the feed, etc.
So I haven't deleted an app from my phone, but that's not true.
I actually went through every app on my phone and deleted about 70 apps that I don't use anymore.
70? Holy moly.
It's just apps that don't use.
That was more just like standard house cleaning,
not behavioral changes.
But like X in particular, I get sucked into it
like many people in Bitcoin do.
I actually never used Twitter that much at all
until I got into Bitcoin.
I mean, I was one of the first users on Twitter,
but I just didn't really use it that much.
Bitcoin drew me into that.
I was a very regular user.
And then like news and politics, et cetera,
you get sucked in.
I learned a lot. I mean, it's an amazing tool
and it's like a professional tool for me.
So it's not as easy
and also I get links sent to me constantly
and of course I'm also an instigator of sending links, right?
So it's not practical
to just say no to it, I don't think.
It actually would harm how I'm productive at work
including the show
but Bitcoin development, etc. Bitcoin sentiment, etc.
So I can't just cut it off.
But I basically am saying no to speed scrolling, which I think is something you've done.
So I wasn't sure how it would work out, though, because if it's not as simple as deleting the app and literally not logging in, then how do you not get sucked in?
You have to be disciplined and tough and mentally tough, right?
So 10 days into this, I have been mentally tough.
I've not been scrolling.
So let's keep checking back in every month or two how I'm doing because I worry about slipping, but I don't want to slip.
Well, I feel like it's easier now than it was five days ago.
It's been surprisingly pretty easy every day.
You said it's mentally tough.
Like, is that mental toughness?
Oh, well, I anticipated you need mental toughness
just because the product is designed to suck you in.
I mean, like, Mac sends a link, I click,
and my intention is just to look at that.
But then, you know, then you want to look at replies.
to understand context.
And that's, for me, still within bounds.
And then I might want to look at quote tweets
to look at context.
And that's still within bounds.
But then you inevitably...
You've got notifications.
You inevitably get sucked into the feed itself.
And so I anticipate that would be difficult to avoid.
So far, so good, though.
But I do...
I'm not letting my guard down.
I think that's going to continue to be hard to resist.
So, I mean, first of all, congratulations.
I think that's awesome.
And to be clear, like, even though I've tried this, like, to be clear, I have not found a permanent solution. I like sometimes am doing really well with it and sometimes slip and I'm like, God damn it, not again. So I do think having the intention and the willpower is a great place to start and it's awesome. But I'm also very skeptical of willpower for the very long run. So I don't know what the answer is. I'm curious what you guys think. I mean, I think, you know, obviously you keep that going as long as you can.
And I mean, some things that I've tried that have helped, obviously, getting rid of the app, trying to only use it on my computer.
But even still, it's like occasionally it's like, oh, I just want to check real quick.
Like you said, the contacts 20 fucking minutes later, you're like, God damn it, not again.
And it's a constant, like, I haven't found a good solution.
But I'm also with you where it's like, I have considered, do I just like, you know, like, I talked to Lingerley about just change my password, don't tell me.
And maybe that's a good solution for like just doing it for a month.
But then like to your point, like, yeah, there is stuff that like is I would like to be able to check.
So, I mean, one thing that I love in the far future, maybe not so far, is with something like Nostre, you know, in theory, you could just create an app that's like, listen, I don't want the fucking feed at all.
All I want is to be able to see this thing that someone sends me in the context, literally nothing else.
Twitter or any of these closed proprietary platforms, of course, it's hard because they limit the API access.
So I don't know what the long-term answer is.
I mean, I don't know.
DK, do you have any thoughts on this?
I know you've experimented with your own.
Or maybe people in the audience.
It's like, I think this is a struggle for everyone.
I do a ton of experimentation around this.
One thing that I've also been trying to reduce
turning my attention over to an algorithm.
So if Steve or you, Max, send me a link,
just because it happens to be hosted on Twitter,
I'm like, yeah, great, I'll read that.
I generally am fine just reading that and then closing it.
So I kind of just have some ability or habit to do that.
But I have moved Twitter way to the back,
you know, several pages back
that it's not easily accessible.
It's something that I can like go to
and I can click on a link that you send me in Signal
and I can read it on Twitter,
but then I can kind of be done with it.
The one thing I've done is
I was never really much of a big Reddit person.
I don't like love Reddit.
It's like fine.
But what I have done, which is weird,
but what I have done is I've added Reddit
to my main home page of my phone.
And so when I kind of have that instinct,
like, oh, I want to see what's going on.
I want to understand the world a little bit more.
i actually just open reddit and i look a little bit and i'm like okay that's enough
yeah it sort of gives me some some of that same like curiosity satisfaction but it's not tuned to
like quite the same i don't know like uh you know quite the same rage inducing attempts that twitter
tries to the information is overall i'd say lower quality less interesting but in a sense
it gives a it's like a it's like drinking diet coke maybe instead of coke it's not water but
it's like a lighter version yeah i mean i i find stacker news is like that right for me like that
that's what i've done and i i actually like yeah reddit reddit's not perfect i can still get sucked
into reddit but it's way less likely than twitter because it's not like there's a billion fucking
things like look at this incendiary um and there are really good deep threads on reddit for example
there was one i think i sent you guys over the break on reddit singularity around like um uh
yeah, basically some dude who was just kind of like,
oh man, like the singularity actually is here.
And it was like, it was a great post.
I loved it.
And I agree with you on that.
It's still, I think it's a good stopgap.
It's not my perfect one.
Matthew also mentioned deleting the apps using browser.
I do the browser.
I keep my phone black and white.
That's another one that really helps me.
But I don't know, man.
Part of me is just like,
I wonder if the answer is going to be,
you know, in this new AI wave
where when I finally get my assistant,
you know, like that I own,
and we were, DK and I were having a bit of an AI debate.
We'll bring back in a minute.
But if I get that assistant, it's like,
I don't want to see anything.
Like literally all I want to do is
tell me what I need to know.
And if I decide I want to go in deeper context,
we'll do that together.
But that's it.
I don't know.
Yeah.
And I've thought about doing not a,
it wouldn't probably be a large scale type of service,
but for myself, I can imagine,
I've thought about building something like
a Chrome extension that sits on my computer
and reads everything that comes in on Twitter
and then kind of operates according to some like filter that I set.
I say, if it's about really angry stuff, don't show it to me.
If it's something interesting and kind of brings forward
some new knowledge or learning about a topic I care about,
then show me that and then have that Chrome extension
do the reading, digestion and filtering.
And then I build like some reading interface
where I can read the stuff that the Chrome extension has filtered for me.
So I've thought about building that.
I would use that.
Get around to it in the new year.
Yeah, I'd be interested to try that if you do.
Yeah.
A few more things that I'm trying to improve.
Well, the one that I mentioned that I think is why DK suggested talking about on the show
is I'm in like dozens of Discord servers
because a lot of the open source Bitcoin projects are on Discord servers.
So, you know, it's part of...
We'll have a new one soon, right?
Right.
I mean, yeah, we can't have enough Discord servers.
So, I mean, I need to be at least lurking, if not participating in many, if not most of these.
Just part of my job.
But my default behavior, though, is like notifications on.
And I'm just like instinctively like an in back zero type person.
So I just want to like clean it out right away.
So anytime I get a notification, I look at the message and then deal with it.
either consume it and move on or respond or queue it up for,
if it's not an instant response or I need to think about it more,
queue it up for later.
And ultimately, I mean, yeah,
the number of Discord servers grew from like one to six to 12 to literally,
I probably have 25 or 30 now.
Yeah, wow.
So it becomes, it just was consuming my day.
Yeah.
So I, sorry?
You leave notice on for all that?
Well, I turned off notice for maybe out of those like 30 Discord servers, maybe like six or eight are defunct or not really used anymore.
Like ABC.
Oh, yeah. Sorry.
That was one of DK's.
And then I had already turned on muted notifications for like six or eight.
But yeah, I was getting, you know, it was a big, big part of my interaction during the day.
So I've turned off immune notifications for almost all, but a couple.
And just creating a practice of like checking like twice a week and like, you know, batching it basically.
Batching, yes.
And then it's so much more efficient.
So again, just started that, but I think I'll be able to stick to that.
That's not a hard habit to create.
that was just i needed to like step back realize it and then do it um and so did that uh another one
um i created a new rule i cannot bring my phone into the bedroom at night so like and i and uh
but how do you wake up like you have like a analog alarm clock or you just i still use my
phone. It's
outside my room. I hear
it.
And if somehow that's not working,
I'll just get an alarm clock
old school or
an old phone or whatever.
But basically,
no more
falling asleep to
scrolling through Instagram reels
or whatever.
No more waking up in the middle of the night
and then grabbing my phone
and getting sucked into messages and waking me up.
Oh, that's good.
Maybe for like an hour or more, right?
And so that's been super healthy so far.
Hasn't been really that hard.
I guess it feels a little weird now to go to bed without my phone,
but I go to sleep right away.
So I'm happy about that.
I'm not like sitting there awake for hours.
Yeah.
That's why fitness helps because if you get tired from working out,
then your body tends to want to go to sleep.
So yeah, and several other changes like that.
But I think so far so good.
And the main one I'm worried about
that I'll slip up on is the doom scrolling.
So we can keep checking in with each other
every once in a while
to make sure I stay disciplined on that.
Nice.
Well, first of all, congratulations.
These are all great things.
And I would just say
we should definitely all continue.
I think it's great to have community
to check in with people on.
But I think on the doom scrolling thing,
I think we need a better solution as a group,
as a society. And DK, I don't know,
maybe your vibe could have been a step in the right direction.
I don't know. But willpower is a great start,
but I really believe we need a technological,
like we need some structural solution.
Yeah, I agree. A few people are chugging in here on comments.
By the way, I can see comments through this.
Oh, okay. So Matthew Coat says that
we use as a quote freedom app.
I don't know what that app is, but basically he blocks out,
sounds like you know notification stuff in the morning or during work hours or whatever and
yeah totally agree with that and that's that's aligned with what i'm trying to do as well just
be interrupted less during the workday one thing i um for for me like a lot of my role is
responding to people right away connecting people unblocking things so it's a little
I mean there's a cost to me
just blocking everyone out
for a day or two days at a time
because then they might be
people don't necessarily
wait on me but I can
reduce friction or I can unblock
things
and that's typical for a PM
so I think that is a tension
but still I'm way too
far on one end
of that spectrum
so blocking out time makes
a lot of sense
also people were talking about
why the show was late and I was getting
blamed which
I just wanted to comment on that
I will take responsibility however
I blame Elon first of all
because I was at the Tesla
service center we can blame Elon for everything right
and they told me the car would be done at 1030
and then it wasn't done at 1030 and then I
checked in again and they're like oh we'll definitely
have it done by 1130 I'm like I have to be in the studio
and then 1130
rolls around and it's still not ready
It never did. It's still not ready. So I had to Uber here. So then I show up 15 minutes late and then someone asked to take bathroom break.
Hey man, whenever I can empty my bladder, I'm going to take that opportunity. As I learned growing up, quote, never miss an opportunity.
I have a video recording of you taking that opportunity on many occasions.
That's what I do, baby. Too much tea. Pounding tea.
you know
that's my thing
but yeah
so wait
but you mean to tell me
the Tesla mechanic
was not sensitive
to the fact
that you are a star
and had to be
in the studio
I'm like
take your time
I don't want to
I don't want to rush
to the job of my car
I just wanted to know
like
do I need to take an Uber
and they kept saying
well your car will be ready
and I'm like okay
and also Uber
like don't they have
like Tesla
like RoboTaxi ready
yeah
seriously
I mean
is that live
not here
not outside of San Francisco
okay
I think all cars drive themselves as of 2018 or something.
Well, I do generally drive my car in self-driving mode,
and it's fantastic, but it's in the shop
because the camera's not calibrated.
And so I've actually not had self-driving
in the last two weeks, and it drives me crazy.
Once you get acclimated to it,
it feels like you're a century behind
when you go back and you actually have to drive your car.
I see your ill-fated attempt to dunk on Elon, DK.
Sorry, that's not it.
For selling our attention, sure.
With that same service center.
I would say I'm balanced.
I'm not a hater.
I own a Tesla, but I don't.
But man, that service center.
I'm sorry to question this thesis from DK.
I'm not a hater.
I just hate on Elon.
No, I bought the car.
I like the car.
It's a good car.
But man, the service center.
so matt newell says did i tell tesla that we have seven viewers on youtube and that's a funny
comment i love it um but i did not yeah however i will say i interviewed a candidate for a job
this morning and they told me they love pbj and are avid watcher so let's go as you would say if
you were interviewing for a job yeah you might be listening right now so this is like that one time
Steve was telling us something.
He was like, hey, guys, you're not going to believe this,
but everyone on my team agrees.
He's like, okay.
Who's signing those checks?
Anyhow.
Okay.
Good times.
Should we get to some of the news?
Yeah.
Well, I think a pretty quick and easy one would be Walmart.
You want to start with Walmart?
Because the news sounded exciting.
Walmart accepts Bitcoin now.
Okay.
I mean, they're the biggest retailer in the U.S.
big deal.
What does it really mean?
Well, actually, I mean, we'll
talk about that, but I came up with a new
litmus test, too. What it means to
like,
whether something's, whether
an announcement is interesting or not.
If it matters, yeah.
And so, accepting Bitcoin,
the litmus test is
can you use any Bitcoin
wallet to pay? Yeah, that's a good one.
Or at least any, like, you know, Bolt 11
or Lightning-based Bitcoin wallets.
Most Bitcoin wallets, yeah.
Most Bitcoin wallets, right?
And is the answer yes or no?
Well, in the case of Walmart, the answer is no.
You can only pay with OnePay,
which is their own company,
or it's like a subsidiary or something, app.
And even that doesn't even use the Bitcoin network
or Lightning network or anything.
It's just you literally have to buy Bitcoin in OnePay.
And then when you go to Walmart and buy something,
they sell your Bitcoin,
turn it in dollars
and then
pay Walmart
so there's literally
nothing to do with Bitcoin
I mean
other than
like
other than
they say they buy and sell
buying and selling Bitcoin through nice hash okay because they partnered with nice hash okay but they not using Bitcoin in any way shape or form of the transaction So literally all they doing is they saying
over here, you trust us to buy and sell Bitcoin for you.
When we sell it, we'll take dollars and pay dollars on the other end.
Yeah.
I'm not a fan of this approach,
but I do want to sort of steelman the benefits to Bitcoin that this creates,
which is there are people out there who are Walmart customers
who have this OnePay app
and who don't have a Coinbase account
or don't have any other process right now
that has them convenient exposure to Bitcoin.
And so they may become a little more curious about Bitcoin
if they can hold it,
see some price exposure in the app,
and then they can pay smaller amounts
from what they had originally put in
because they saw the price appreciate.
I wouldn't defend it as good.
I'm still sort of on your side,
like, nah, this is kind of like a toothless announcement.
But just to sort of,
I think there's some good in it.
Well, I think the good is rather obvious.
It's an exchange.
Now more people that have a Walmart app can buy Bitcoin.
Also note that I didn't say it was bad.
My litmus test is for interesting.
So I don't think it's that interesting of news.
I don't think it hurts Bitcoin.
I think it helps Bitcoin, but it doesn't really enable Bitcoin payments in any interesting way.
Well, it's just mislabeled.
The news is just mislabeled.
A better announcement would be Walmart's payment app allows you to buy a big one.
Yeah.
And then quote spend it at Walmart.
Now, one question I do have on the spending that makes us slightly more interesting is,
do they handle all the theoretical tax stuff for you?
Theoretical.
Yeah, that's actually...
Nobody ever told me they were theoretical.
No comment.
I just filled out Alex's Presidio Bitcoin survey for members.
I didn't even see that yet.
Oh, you should.
It's fun.
Yeah.
Alex came up with a lot of fun questions.
If it's in the Discord, I don't check Discord at all.
As you know, and now you understand why.
Well, a couple of things.
So first of all, awesome survey.
Tons of categories for members.
but one of them is like, I forget
who's most likely to be audited
by the IRS, I think is one of them.
So now,
no, now I'm going to change
my answer from DK to Max.
Why would I
be audited?
I'm staying with DK.
What did I do?
Hey man.
Anyhow.
Anything shady?
I don't know.
Another reason,
to check
the Presidio Bitcoin member
Discord is we have
AMAs now.
Jack Dorsey. You told me about that.
I knew if it was important enough you would message me.
Jack Dorsey swung by
yesterday. That was dope.
And we did an AMA with him
with members of Presidio Bitcoin
and I thought it went really well. Good vibe.
It wasn't, I mean, he was asking
questions of
people here and I thought it was good.
I mean, it was more of a dialogue.
It was.
I wasn't there.
Is there anything you can share about interesting topics that maybe he hadn't?
I don't think he would have any issues.
Yeah, we didn't.
Yeah.
Well, okay.
So before we jump into that, because I have a lot of thoughts on that, I guess a question
for you, because Steve made that happen, which was awesome.
Thank you for doing that.
It was super cool.
What inspired you?
You've never been like, hey, we're doing an AMA before.
And then you're just like, yo, come on first.
Like a lot of initiatives, I start very serendipitous, random.
Yeah.
We think of things on this show, like Builder, and then now we have a monthly Builder meetup that's spread to five cities around the world, right?
So Jack had let me know that he's going to visit San Francisco this week.
And I'm like, oh, what's a good reason for him to swing by Pristidia Bitcoin?
He'd already been on Haley's 21 and 21 show, so probably not do that again.
And I know that he likes to do AMAs.
So I felt he'd be comfortable with that.
that format.
So I suggested, hey,
you want to swing by and do an AMA?
And we'll just do members.
We had about 20 people.
It was like the right amount of people.
It was still intimate
and everyone got to speak
and everyone got to introduce themselves
so he got to know who he's chatting with.
So yeah, he said yes
and then we did it.
But then, yeah, I mean,
we chatted with Alex
and people here
and we're going to try to do this more regularly.
I love it.
And it doesn't have to be people as prominent as Jack,
but we want interesting people here,
people we can learn from.
And so hopefully we create a cadence
where we have folks coming through here
at least once a quarter,
if not even more frequently for AMAs.
I loved it.
And it was super cool because,
and I was wondering where the hell it was DK.
Now I understand you're out of town,
but this was very, very sweet.
one thing that I liked about it was
I guess because it was off the record
and small I don't know I mean like Jack is like
seems like he's always an open guy but
I don't know like this was the most candidate
I've ever heard him yesterday and it was
I don't know like I certainly asked
questions I thought were maybe you know
probably wouldn't get asked on
an investor day at Block and expect
an answer from and he gave a lot of just like super
frank answers which I thought was super cool so
I mean shock Jack
continues to be a cool guy but
Yeah, it was great.
Yeah.
I mean, to me, it's not surprising because I've interacted with him a lot for six years now.
But yeah, I mean, most people in the room don't have that access or whatever.
But yeah, he's super authentic and he does not equivocate.
Like what he says one place, he'll say another place.
He'll say in public, he'll say to investors, he'll say to a group of Bitcoiners.
So I always, I appreciate that.
Any big takeaways from the AMA or anything that like, I don't know, captured your fancy?
I don't know.
I'd turn it around to you.
Yeah.
I mean, I thought a couple of things.
And again, I don't, I mean, I don't know if there's anything you shouldn't say, but I,
I think a couple of things that stuck out to me.
One, it's interesting to hear Jack thinking about AI and AGI.
We knew he was already a fan of Demis in Google.
He's a big Demis guy, which I thought was cool.
I don't think that's a surprise.
He's retweeted him and stuff.
I think it was interesting.
He was very open and candid about, frankly, as all in and excited as I am about Bitcoin,
I do think it's important to recognize, and I don't say this necessarily all in a negative
way, but the black swan risk, because it's not necessarily bad, because there's white
swan risk here too.
But like, you know, apparently Demis' position on Bitcoin has kind of been, it's not necessary
post-AGI.
And I don't fully agree with that.
Sounds like Jack doesn't fully agree with that.
We all think there's probably going to be market of intelligence and lots of different
kind of intelligences that emerge.
But I also am open to this idea that like, I don't know, like I think it's good to keep
a certain amount of humility and open-mindedness.
Like we could be wrong on certain things.
There are changes that happen in the world.
And like, you know, if in the future, you know, if you're super AGI pilled, and by the
way, I am only more and more AGI pilled as the time goes on.
And the reason is because everyone's like, oh, you know, is it a bubble?
It ain't no bubble.
We haven't even seen the gigawatt cluster runs yet, bro.
Like we're still at the hundreds of megawatt cluster runs.
Everyone's like, whoa, you know, and like, even if there is a little bubble, like, you
know, it's going to be a blip, like a blip.
And so if you're really scaling law pilled and all this improvement we've seen, you know,
in the last like two or three years,
whatever it's been,
is without the base model runs
at the gigawatt cluster run.
I don't think people get that.
Like we've seen all of this improvement
with post-training stuff,
with reasoning, inference time compute.
It's without going from the 100 megawatt scale
to the gigawatt scale clusters.
But we still might,
it might, once energy is no longer,
we might find that it's no longer the bottleneck.
Yes.
And I have no idea.
But like, it doesn't necessarily keep scaling.
with as energy scales?
It doesn't necessarily,
but one, this is like...
It meaning like the current techniques.
Sure.
We might have to find new techniques,
which might take another 10 or 20 years.
We might, but my kind of take on this,
and if people want to see my little talk
from the Type 1 Summit,
I gave a 12-minute talk with a meme
that I need to refine that meme.
I'm very proud.
This is one of the memes.
And by the way,
if I ever end around a repli
and doing vibe coding
and Nick and Matt one day,
I want the meme generator, but the meme is basically, you know, the, the, the curve,
the bell curve where it's like, the dude on the left is like, just trust the curve. The dude on
the right is like, just trust the curve. And then the dude in the middle is like, no, this won't
work. It's like, I, I'm probably the dude on the left. Exactly. I'm probably the dude on the left,
but I'm like, look, man, like zoom out even beyond, um, you know, the current architectures
like transformers. If you go back to Hans Moravec in the seventies, Hans Moravec is just like,
like the the energy and compute theory of everything and like yes there were many breakthroughs that
happened you know since he made his observations in the 70s like we had to figure out llms we had
to figure out transformers but this is where i guess i get a little woo woo and like i don't mind
being woo woo it's like i just think that's god the universe whatever you want to call it and like
that's how it manifests the breakthroughs will happen and a lot of like pure materialist rational
but that's impossible i'm like cool i mean you can express that thesis as you wish i'm going to
express my thesis based on my woo-woo views, but the breakthroughs keep happening. It's the same
with Moore's Law. Why did Moore's Law curve keep happening? It just kept happening. Everyone's like,
well, we may not get the engineering, but they capped. Anyways, so my point is, that's a much
longer conversation, but the broader point is something I'm having more humility about as much
as I think that Bitcoin matters as energy-backed currency for these agents is many orders of
magnitude beyond where we are in terms of compute, that's the singularity. And, you know, beyond that,
like there is a world where these intelligences, maybe they don't even use our old protocols.
Maybe they don't use TCP IP. Maybe they don't need the web. Maybe they don't need any of the
stuff that we, it's like, we're like cavemen swinging sticks and we're trying to guess what
it's going to look like. I think given the information we have on the ground today and
given, you know, sort of my belief that Bitcoin is energy money, you know, we have not figured out
ways to break the fundamental laws of thermodynamics. So as long as we have that,
I think Bitcoin is going to be really relevant for these agents. That's clearly where I would put my
money metaphorically and realistically. However, I also don't rule out the possibility that these
guys might find new laws of physics and stuff that we just, yeah, I mean, we were like little
monkeys and we didn't know. Anyway, so it was interesting to me to hear Jack be certainly not
bearish on Bitcoin, but at least also open this idea of like, yeah, I mean, at that point,
once we go to the singularity, it's like, we don't know. Yeah, I think the timeframe matters,
really. So like, if you know that AGI is guaranteed happening in, you know, 18 months,
then I could be more agreeable that let's not waste our time with Bitcoin. If it's 10 or 20 years,
and there's a bit of a slow takeoff or other big technological changes that need to happen before
we get there, then like you kind of want to be able to marshal resources.
And effectively money is just like the allocation of resources, right?
It's like a ledger to allocate resources.
Yes.
Whether it's energy backed.
I mean, the only real one is the energy backed one.
But like what we're trying to do whenever we create fiat monies even is we're trying
to allocate resources better.
And critically scarce resources.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If the resource is not scarce, too cheap to meter, it doesn't matter.
Yeah, yeah.
So I think the negative, the sort of bear case on Bitcoin would be that all resources and all energy and needs become too cheap to matter.
And I think there's like a reasonable shot that that happens at some point.
But it's probably not like in 18 months, right?
Steve disagrees.
I don't agree because like human, like human nature is to like, there'll be artificial scarcity in the sense that like part of like your identity, like whether it's through fashion or the type of car you drive or you're always looking for some kind of unique edge to like demonstrate your personality.
So if literally everything is infinite, I mean, even like the friends you have, like social groups or your girlfriend or wife or spouse or whatever, like that's scarce.
So I don't see, I mean, I definitely see a world where things that have been costly before become effectively no cost and abundant for sure, but not everything.
Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, as long as we're in this finite dimension, I tend to agree. But I guess what I'm saying is like my like, whatever, 99% cases, I agree with you, and that's probably what's going to happen. But I increasingly leave open the possibility of just being shocked.
one more thing that we talked about at the AMA
was
you know the digital gold
store value narrative just being the
dominant narrative we talked about in this show
a lot
but I mean this isn't like a shocking
statement but you know Jack did say that he feels
like Bitcoin as an everyday money
payments is
headed in the wrong direction over time
like it's not getting
better over time it's getting worse over
time worse in terms of
How is it getting worse?
Narrative, mind share.
I mean, MDK.
I mean, it's small and early, but like that kind of stuff seems to be.
I mean, and we're going to talk about MDK.
I mean, yes, the three of us are advocates.
But not just advocates.
You built something, Steve.
Oh, yeah, I want to hear about that.
David, how much money in the world is allocated towards Bitcoin and store value versus MDK?
How many people in the world know of Bitcoin?
Wait, so are you sad more people are using store of value now?
No, it's just that progress.
That's just a form of progress.
No, this is not a hate on the store of value narrative.
It's just that the store of value narrative is the dominant narrative
and continues to grow in dominance over time, even today.
I would maybe frame it as for the people that even give a shit about Bitcoin,
over time, the narrative has grown more and more.
In the early days, it was purely this is going to be what Satoshi said, peer-to-peer cash.
Over time, it has grown more and more to this is a store of value of the people that care.
It doesn't mean that's not going to change over time.
I think that's mostly because way more people care now.
That's fair.
Huge frontier of new people who care, and they only care for store of value, and they only care for a number to go up.
But the absolute number of humans who are engaged in payments today, that must be higher than it was 10 years ago.
Yeah, I'm actually not sure on that because it's still true.
From six to eight.
Is that true?
I mean, I'm serious.
Or that might be true.
And even if it is true, it's tiny numbers.
Yeah, it's tiny.
Regardless.
The payment era of Bitcoin payments.
So, and I think that's going to bridge us soon to two very, well, Freudian slip there, I guess, but I'm going to get at it.
I think it's going to bridge us very soon to talking about both MDK and this kind of like the new sailor-back stablecoin stuff, which I've been thinking a lot about.
But another maybe way I would frame this is of people that care at all in technology circles, I would say probably in the 2011, 2012, 2013 era, I was not around.
But my understanding is VCs were backing things like BitPay.
And they were thinking this is a peer-to-peer payment technology.
Today, if you serve it, and I would assume that a lot of, call it normie VCs, were at least open to this idea of like, oh yeah, Bitcoin.
It's that internet payment thing. Whereas all those companies effectively have been duds or
zeros or pretty small. And now companies in the traditional tech circles that are seen as peer
to peer payments or like the internet payments with companies like Bridge, which get acquired
by Stripe for a billion dollars. And so I would say in sort of mainstream tech circles, Bitcoin
maybe had a moment where people saw it as payment technology that transitioned to stable coins which
the volume for that is real um and yeah at least in the quote-unquote you know silicon valley talk
that's i mean i would sort of i would severely diminish the importance of like yeah what's worth
investing in or whatever it's more like what are people actually using using sure and like and and
people are using stable coins at a much larger rate for payments oh yeah yeah i'm not saying that
Bitcoin payments is beating stablecoins. I'm saying that
Bitcoin payments, we may be at the dawn of Bitcoin
payments, and one piece of evidence I would bring is
I think it was at the Vegas conference, wasn't Miles
up on stage saying that doesn't
block generate 10%
return on
liquidity from lightning channels and stuff?
I mean, that's usage, right?
But again,
what I'm saying, what Max is saying,
and I think, I mean, it's not like
Jack turned bearish. I mean, he
is the
He is very much bullish and an advocate for Bitcoin payments.
And also, we talk about all kinds of things on the show.
We're going to talk about more things today on the show about reasons to be optimistic.
And we are at the dawn.
But I think it's undebatable that to date, it's losing.
It's losing to stablecoins.
It's losing to the story narrative.
Relative to what it was 10 years ago.
Are there more Bitcoin payments made today than there were 10 years ago?
I think you're both right. It's true. Like, yes, it is certainly. Well, again, the Silk Road thing, we'd have to go check those numbers.
Hold on. Like, let's just simplify it. Let's say there's, you know, stable coins and Bitcoin payments. And 10 years ago, Bitcoin payments was at five and stable coins is zero. And today, Bitcoin payments are at six and stable coin payments are at a billion. Well, did Bitcoin payments grow? Yes. But I mean.
yeah but i don't even see the argument here but well i wouldn't claim that stable coins
are not used they're used way many many orders of magnitude more than bitcoin payments so i think
we're all on the same page with that my point is i think that bitcoin payments is the long-term
way that the payment stuff is going to work and there's going to be some maybe you know multi-year
transitional period where people try to do stuff with stable coins they get kind of borked in one
way or another. And then they've probably come around or maybe there's new technologies that
come around that enable people to use Bitcoin payments like stable coins.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think any of us are disagreeing at our core. I mean, I think a lot
of it just comes down to expectation reality. Like if you came into the Bitcoin project with
the idea that we're going to get Bitcoin peer to peer payments from day zero, you're probably
very disappointed. Right. If you came into the Bitcoin project saying money has to go through,
you know, collectible, store value, medium of exchange, unit of account. And you can maybe on
the margins push things a little bit faster or slower, but like ultimately nature is going to
nature and like, it just, it is what it is. And like, we're going through the progression and like,
here we are. I mean, I will say from my perspective as a VC who has bet heavily on the Lightning
Network for payments, there's no question it's been disappointing that it's gone slower than I
thought it was going to go in 2017 or 2021. No question. Or our 2025 predictions.
Yeah, our 2025 predictions, which were just like, like, miss after miss. So there's no question,
my expectation was incorrect in how quickly it would happen. Am I less confident that it's going
to happen today? No. I mean, I still think more than ever in the long run, there's so many reasons
Bitcoin is permissionless, it's energy back, it has all these properties. And in fact, you know,
I've been thinking a lot more about,
and somebody else want to discuss this compute marketplace idea
and agents using it.
Like ultimately, without doxing,
because he doesn't want to come out yet,
but like someone very smart said something
that just stuck in my head.
It's like, it's not that agents or people prefer Bitcoin.
They're going to choose Bitcoin for payments
because like, oh yes, I've done a long careful analysis
and this is better than that.
It's going to be like, what's going to happen is
stable coins are going to win until they don't.
And they're not, and when do they not win?
Whenever there's like a big reason they stop working.
It's like it works until someone.
This is my point.
This is why if Bitcoin payments is a five today and or was a five, 10 years ago and it's a six today.
But stable coins is what you say, a thousand or a billion or whatever.
Like, that's great because stable coins are a transitional technology that will help people, you know, use digital technologies and somewhat cryptographically somewhat secured, debatably secured.
now I do think the spirit of what Jack was saying though is is also important which and something I've
also thought about he mentioned um that a movie he likes a lot which I actually now want to rewatch
was WALL-E and I think that's important too because I think that you know to go back to one of our
mutual favorite thinkers Kevin Kelly like there are certain technological things that are inevitable
And I think on a long enough time horizon, there are even like characteristics of those
technologies that are inevitable.
However, there are flavors of those technologies that can be birthed at different moments.
For example, a hive mind is inevitable.
That's why my fund is called Hive Mind.
There is a bottoms up version, which I think Bitcoin and technologies like Nostra represent.
And there is a top down version, which is more of like what we see in countries like
China.
They're both hive minds, but they're different characters of hive mind.
I have my beliefs on what ultimately will win.
But like,
as I've learned and one thing I need to be more,
I think,
humble about is I've just been really wrong on timeframes and that's okay.
Like it is what it is.
As long as you're patient enough,
like,
you know,
everything eventually happens.
Yeah.
Yeah,
exactly.
Exactly.
Literally everything.
But,
um,
that's a different conversation.
Uh but but I think what he was kind of getting at which is which is fair is like it does appear that we are and not just on Bitcoin payments but like you know as we
discussed with the X and the attention thievery
whatever you want to call it
sadly it appears that society
is from his perspective
and I would tend to agree with this
moving more towards a Wally world
where people are sitting there fat
slurping their whatever
glued into a seat and
And I think his point was like,
these freedom technologies,
even if eventually they win,
it would kind of suck
if we go through a generation of that,
if there was the possibility
that some people could break away
and tap people on the shoulder
and remind them like,
hey, you don't have to strap in,
you could go live.
Yep.
And I just wanted to bring,
so my takeaway from Jack saying that
wasn't like,
oh, I'm going to stop working
on Bitcoin payments we've lost.
It was more like,
well Spiral is
all about Bitcoin payments
and Presidio Bitcoin
a big thrust within Presidio Bitcoin
and the show and what we talk about is Bitcoin
payments so it's not like
the things I've been affiliated with
and work on haven't been trying
to move the needle here but my takeaway
is like we need to double down
and not only on
the software development and product
development and things like that but also just
the message and
double down on the message
and fight the narrative.
And to me, that doesn't mean like
shit on the store of value narrative.
I totally believe in the store of value narrative.
So it's not like it has to replace that.
And I think it's an attractive step one
for a lot of people, especially today.
Yeah.
So I'm fully on board to store value,
fully on board with what you mentioned, Max,
about collectible to store value
to media exchange,
you know, account over a long period of time.
and also a lot of it being
just a timeline we can't
influence greatly.
But I do think we can influence it.
We can
accelerate it.
Otherwise, I wouldn't
do what I'm doing
because it would be a complete waste
of time.
Maybe it is, I don't know.
I tend to think
it's optimizing it.
But I do think we need to like
double down even more.
And things that we can control,
you know, we can move the needle.
And also be very strategic,
not just work harder,
but also like be very strategic
about thinking like,
where does Bitcoin payments solve a problem?
And so I think maybe this is a good transition point,
which is MDK.
Yeah.
And I think Nick's listening,
who founded Money Dev Kit.
Yeah.
So...
many things to talk about here that I don't
actually I was going to say Steve can I think
you did maybe I don't know if it was one of your first
production five coding projects
yeah I've done some other ones before
that's maybe a nice can you share
that and then we can sort of talk about what you learned
because it's kind of relative to the tee up of the
title and stuff
I've begun three different simple projects
using MDK my goal was
to use MDK and like because Nick's
tweeting and marketing
that like you can one shot it super easy
and there's replet optimizations.
And I'm like, I believe that,
but I want to see it for real, try it myself.
So I tried like a casino, like, you know,
spin a wheel, pay Bitcoin, spin a wheel,
and then win, you know, either win or lose.
Gambling.
Yeah.
And that got put on pause
because MDK doesn't yet support payouts,
but I think in the near future it will.
So I paused that.
then um i turned to uh creating a simple joke it's called joke box um you know you pay to get a joke
uh this is not some like an incredible feat by me literally replit figured out the theme the name
everything for me oh really um what was your problem because by the way so uh steve has a
side hustle now because i believe both dk and i purchased a joke so he's a he's already he's
I think it's doing quite well, yeah.
He's doing numbers.
I think I'm one of the top revenue generators of MDK.
Are you serious?
How many jokes?
Nick, can you tell us how many jokes we got?
Well, thanks to MDK, it has a very nice dashboard for users.
So yeah, I can pull up the dashboard.
I don't know.
I have like a dozen orders.
We're just trying to dock your theoretical object.
you're trying to get me audited by the IRS
even though a lot of these are wash sales
I'm just paying myself
those are merely suggestions
taxes are not real
as we learned on the show
thanks to Max
anyhow
so
so this app
you are teased with a joke
you have to pay
to see the joke.
Very simple website.
But again, my goal was like,
use MDK, get successful payments,
see how easy it was to add MDK.
And I would say it was overall very good
and close to the dream.
The problems I encountered
were not MDK related.
They were my agent trying to get too fancy using MDK.
So I had to be like extra explicit saying like follow the MDK docs exactly.
I had to give it those kind of instructions.
And there are some other weird, like so MDK, it's a self-custody wallet.
So I had, you know, my wallet was generated for me.
I have the client side, I have my 12 words for seed phrase.
And I gave that to Replit as part of my app.
And then like it only read 11 of the 12 words.
And then it failed.
And then as I was debugging it, it's like, well, your seed phrase only has 11 words.
And I went back to look at my prompt.
Oh, I must have had a copy paste error.
And no.
So these are not MDK related, but still overall experience.
Like this is what these are the types of things people might encounter.
So it still was not perfectly seamless.
Yeah.
That said, it was pretty amazing how easily it was to add payments to an application.
Yeah.
And there's no hang-up or gotcha that says it can't be polished, right?
Any problems you ran into, I think, can be fixed and made simple and easy.
Probably.
I mean, the 11 words versus 12 words, I don't really see what MDK can do with that.
I think between Replit or the underlying models or MDK, some combination of them.
This is not like a, it doesn't need a new breakthrough.
We just need to figure out how to get it working.
Yeah.
And again, the high level is like, it's very easy to add payments to any application now.
So, well, two things.
Another next step for me, I want to try out other payment solutions to compare, including stablecoins and stuff like that.
And I'll report back once I've done that.
And then once I get beyond that exercise, then I just want to turn my attention to applications versus payments.
Because then all of a sudden, like payments, payments are solved.
So now just like, instead of just doing like a joke type of application, you know, actually build something that is more substantial and more meaningful to me.
And then payments that are not solved, right?
Like you're doing, you're the developer who has a self-custody wallet and you have users paying the developer, but we don't have like user-to-user payments.
You can't vibe code a user-to-user payment at self-custody very well today, can you?
Sorry?
Like if you wanted to let,
you know, I don't know,
let users bet on the outcome
of the wheel spin
and bet against each other.
Yeah, there's definitely
some payment use cases
that are not well-faulted.
But to be clear,
you're talking about
peer-to-peer coordination
where it's like it leaves
one user's wallet
and goes directly
to the other user's wallet.
Yeah, so the developer
doesn't have to take custody
or be responsible for it.
Well, and that's one
of the nice features today
that we have with,
I guess, Nostra Wallet Connect
is in theory,
you could do that in a way
where you program
or coordinate the payment
and take a cut
as like a business,
but you never touch the money.
Right.
And I feel like that,
so I'm just sort of saying,
I like the optimism
that payments are solved,
but I'm cautious to claim that.
Let me requalify.
Not every payment use case possible
because subscriptions
are not solved either.
So I mean,
not every possible payment use case
is solved,
but the basic one is solved.
Yeah.
And I can just move on
to focusing on applications.
It is just like trivial
to add payments.
And then other payment use cases, payouts, subscriptions, what you guys are discussing are either close or will come.
But super excited that MDK exists.
It's just nice to just like, oh, just check a box.
It's trivial.
We don't have to worry about that anymore.
And to be clear, I mean, I think it's two things.
One, this is the worst MDK will ever be, right?
Like it's a new brand new startup.
So it's just going to keep getting better and better and better.
So all these features are going to come.
But I would say, to be clear, what I think MDK has really narrowed in on are two critical use cases.
One, people that, for whatever reason, are outside of the traditional payment systems.
They can't get Stripe.
Okay, that's like most of India.
Or for people that do, Speed.
That's my understanding.
And Nick or other people, please correct me if you have another thing.
But for people that are in the payment network, in the payment rails like us, like you live in the U.S., why would you choose MDK over Stripe or anything?
because you don't have to sit there and create accounts.
Is that reasonable?
It could be.
One reason I want to do this project
of trying to try other payment technology
is what's the dev UX?
How easy is it for me to vibe code these other solutions?
So I don't know the answer.
I'll report back.
But one answer could be the dev UX is poor.
But that's probably true for a lot of them,
but probably easy to close that gap.
But it's more, I think what you said,
is what where the gap will not be easy or even possible to close which is um avoiding like
registration yeah and i also think it'd be interesting to see like for example as you
start doing agents that are doing lots of things like imagine i say hey i want to test a hundred
different variations to spin them all up now as their own accounts maybe one day that'll happen
with sub accounts but that's still tied to a user like if you're going to more the more and more
autonomous that gets, the more it needs to be. I think speed, ability to have identity not be tied
to the old world systems for autonomous agents, and parallelism, the ability just to spin them
all up at once. I guess maybe Stripe can figure that out, but at least for today, I don't think
that's possible for each of your agents just to quickly have its own wallet. I think the big thing
here too is that most of the people are the ones who just aren't on the rails system. If you're a
kid in India, like most places in the world, if you're 15
years old, I think you cannot have a Stripe account.
Oh, let's talk about that. Steve had a
good idea on this one.
Go ahead.
I definitely want to talk about it. I had that
jotted down, like the call sheet ads
I saw, right? So we'll talk about that.
Real quick before
we get to that, I think a notable
thing from MDK over the break is that
Amjad, who's the CEO, founder
and CEO of Replit,
quote tweeted
Nick's, one
Nick's tweets about MDK
and said positive things.
That's exciting.
That's not super surprising
because MDK took some actions
to optimize for Replit,
so it's a win for Replit as well.
However, I thought the most interesting thing
is that Paul Graham then retweeted Amjad.
And Paul is obviously well-known in Silicon Valley
and great track record and has been...
Especially when it comes to crypto predictions.
But yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say that Paul seems like particularly friendly or an advocate of Bitcoin, right?
But I think what's most notable here, Money DevKit doesn't go out of its way to wave the orange flag and make Bitcoin front and center in its marketing and positioning.
and if you read through the tweet
that Amjad wrote
and even Nick did
and got retweeted, it doesn't like
it's not some Bitcoin Maxi
copy, right?
And I think that's why Paul retweeted
I suspect Paul doesn't even know
Bitcoin's behind the scenes
He just saw
he just saw that
oh, permissionless globally accessible
payments for Replit
easy to integrate
And that sounds really, I mean, that is really attractive and it sounds attractive and great. So I think that's a, that is a win for MDK positioning marketing and, and other others in Bitcoin can probably learn from that.
Yeah. And I mean, I think that's, yeah, go ahead. No, please.
I was gonna say, I think that's an idea that is worth really reemphasizing both in Bitcoin and I think in Noster as well. But these are more like enabling technologies, the more like infrastructure technologies that let us build new experience, let us build new applications, let us build MDK is a new piece of infrastructure.
Amen.
But like when you look at the way Nick talks about MDK in his videos, he almost doesn't mention Bitcoin much.
It's not, it's just like under, you know, behind the scenes, right?
When you look at, you look at BitChat, right?
It's not a Nostra client.
It's just a client that helps you do a thing, but sometimes uses the Nostra infrastructure when necessary.
And we've been talking, you know, Steve and I and another friend have been talking on a private group chat about like a prediction market idea.
And we've talked about how you can build a prediction market.
this is our super secret
the real PBJ chat
this is the title of the chat
you don't even know
I know what I got going on
I'm also working with some people
on some chats
you and Diddy have your own little
but like a prediction market
they can write and publish things
to and from Nostra
to help kind of manage
the information around
the prediction market
but it doesn't have to be a Nostra app
it can just be like
a prediction market right
Totally. And by the way, anybody building in this space should be thinking about how to deemphasize the technology choice and emphasize the user value in the application.
A hundred percent. And like this is another point Jack made. He was like, if Noster, we talked about Noster a little bit. Bob asked specifically about like, you know, what do you think of adoption? That was his like message over and over again. If you market it as a competitor Twitter, you will lose. If it's just infrastructure that enables new things, you will win. That simple.
I think something that's super important here,
and increasingly as I'm thinking about
sort of putting on my investor hat,
where do I want to be?
What kinds of new experiences do I want to invest in?
I think that people are like,
oh, let's build this, whatever,
like a prediction market.
It's like, that's cool.
But you know what's so much cooler?
And I think, Nick, this is really interesting
for MDK to think about is,
how do you make it super easy to remix
and let agents with their own wallets
interact with each other?
That to me is where this is going to get super cool.
So imagine for a minute,
you know, prediction markets took a long time to take off. They're finally starting to take off.
But I think we haven't even seen, you know, 0.01% of what prediction markets can do.
Like if you read guys like I think like Robin Hanson, a lot of people that have talked about
like prediction markets really like what does an economy really do? It is an information
processing unit. It allows you to find information. That's what's beautiful about economy. And by the
way, there's something like this goes back to my energy information entropy piece, which is
continuing to stew in the background. But like the important thing, like forget all the like
moral arguments or whatever. It's like, you know, the sort of high view of how an economy should
work is like when you go in there and just store it with money printing or regulations or whatever,
it's not just like, oh, you know, you're a bad guy or this, that. It's like, no, you're messing
up the information signal. So the economy can't tell you we need more of, you know, we're short
on steel and, you know, therefore we can't. And this is also one of the reasons I'm so long and
just like trust the curves, it's emergent intelligence. Like stop trying to like think
your human brain can figure stuff out. It can't, none of us can stop it. Just stop it. Emergent
intelligence is the answer always. And, uh, anyways, so, so just like some of these ideas
around things like futurearchy and the ability, uh, to use prediction markets in the future
to like, as like, um, you know, kind of like a sort of new form of voting and critically,
what's going to be cool with that is agents can do it and you can mash all these things up together
so it's like hey instead of building like the next prediction market for humans it's like who's going
to build a prediction market that agents can use so high isn't it yeah yeah have you seen by the
way have you seen um the polymarket times no this is a cool hack worth worth uh looking at some some
kid took all the information from i was just responding nick hft prediction market agents
there we go.
Yeah, and I mean, those things are
there's actually a cool blog post I'll share
with you about, or maybe I already
shared with you. That was probably
another chat.
The other chat. I didn't see it either.
I didn't hear that?
It's actually a thing about a guy who's
building a bunch of basically like trading
bots to find signal on
Twitter and then execute trades.
DK is so exclusive now.
He just has himself in it.
I think
I think he's just proving your point.
As material resources go to zero, DK's exclusivity is him and his bots.
So there's a broader topic that plus one is what you were saying, Max, around kind of, you know, information economy, which is we think about the old pre-internet media and information landscape as like, you know, newspapers.
They get, you know, they own distribution.
They own the printing press.
And so that's how truth is kind of disseminated is through that. And the internet was supposed to be this amazing thing that opened up all those channels, made it free to distribute, gave everybody a voice. And we saw that, and that was really good at the beginning. And then we've seen that decay in certain ways.
When everybody has a voice, who controls the algorithm is actually more important than who has a voice. And we also are now getting to this point where AI generative slop is going to end up filling up a lot of the media. What we think of as information nodes is going to get filled with AI generated stuff that's maybe entertaining, but not super informative. Right.
And so I think that like a prediction market is not just some new class of betting or marketplace or exchange.
It's actually a new type of information source.
So think about it's sort of the evolution of the internet.
And it's in the marketplace of like, yes, no on a bid is really like a truth seeking signal.
And it's kind of what we talk about with like Stacker News or what we hope that like, oh, maybe Bitcoin can be part of the thing.
But instead of it just being like the scarcity or proof of work tied to a particular piece of information in an upvote, it actually resolves the world through kind of bid-ask spreads and convergence.
And so actually, like a prediction market is more like a new Twitter than it is just like some new exchange in my mind.
And by the way, there is a beautiful post on Stacker News.
And by the way, I'm super bullish on Stacker News.
I've always been bullish on Stacker News, but I'm continuing to.
kian has finished his like 15 month migration or whatever to be non-custodial and he's he sent us
all an update and said on the site as well that he's gonna be focusing on like user requests again
which and making things nice and kian he has one of the big brains so i'm excited um but like
someone made a post where they're like the stacker news front page is an auction yep and i mean
auction prediction market like whatever but like i i think and kian if you happen to listen this
i hope you continue to explore this idea of agents using stacker news as well which i know you've
already kind of built that in there. But using Stacker News and things like it as information
discovery tools, like that's where the big, big idea is. And you can already see it just like in
a very simple term. It's like, what filters to the top of your Stacker News page? Well, you can
have all the bots in the world that are just slop, slop, slop, slop, slop. But like you have to pay
and people then pay with their money to upvote. Like that is non-forgeable. That's the point of
money. That's why Bitcoin matters. And because Bitcoin is tied to proof of work and energy,
you can't forge it.
That's the whole point.
Yeah.
All right.
Amen.
How about we get back to...
Amen, brother.
I got to tell you,
I went to church in Oakland
for the first time recently.
It reminded me of going to church
on the Pacific Gulf Coast
in New Orleans as a kid.
There was a lot of amens.
It was great.
I love it.
Nice.
You guys wanted to talk about
teenagers vibe coding,
I think, right?
Yeah.
So a couple angles on this.
I mean, actually,
we're just talking about
prediction markets.
and also
DK you shared a post that Shazan
just posted
about younger people
not feeling like they can
become wealthy or grow their wealth
so they're turning to like you know crypto trading
and now prediction markets as a way
to gambling
which can be unhealthy and
ultimately for most people is not a way
it's a way to
it's a negative EV
dishes on top.
So perhaps a healthier way
is the time-tested entrepreneurial
approach where you build
value creation for the world
and then you get a portion of that.
So
vibe coding is a
way that makes it accessible to
way more people to build things.
We've talked about that a lot.
I had an insight. I actually
was playing
a mobile game and I got an ad for Kalshi,
like one of the prediction markets, right?
Yep.
And it just made me realize, oh,
you know, this is how they're acquiring
a lot of customers, probably a lot of younger folks
to do that.
And it like why not instead try to get teens and younger I mean a lot of people but including teens to start vibe coding because it absolutely accessible to them They going to have incredible ideas ideas that no one else in the world can think of They can create them And then now with like things like MDK
it's so easy to add payments. And also, you know, if they're in India or someplace around the world,
or they're just young and more risk-taking, like, you know, generating and also generating
small amounts of revenue,
there's going to be more risk-taking.
And I want to be clear
because I think the genius inside
of what you're saying here,
like the India part is great,
but in the US, if you're under 18,
you can't open a bank account.
Stop, right?
That's huge.
Think about, I think,
how many super smart kids,
you know, like all the kids
that are going to go to MIT or whatever
that are sitting there
in some daycare center, i.e. school,
that if they could start a business
from class when they're supposed
to be studying?
what would they start? I think the big difference too is this is a positive EV.
Yes. Right. Instead of negative EV, because I think what's happened is as, you know,
take an 18 year old 50 years ago, we could probably like just get, you know, go to some
random college, get a random college educated job and actually buy a house. There's no way,
even if you're at the top end of the top end, you can barely do that without a bunch of good
fortune hitting you. So everybody who's 18 has gotten pushed out on the risk curve really far.
So the only way to possibly do something is to get lucky at it versus, so you end up getting,
you know, all the value gets sucked by these platforms and sort of the old heads. But with
vibe coding, instead of, you know, spending a ton of money, you can vibe code something for 25 bucks,
And you could end up making a million dollars out of that.
So you turn that betting, it's a form of gambling.
Entrepreneurship is a form of gambling.
It's like you've got that buzz, you've got that excitement, that potential for the huge
outcome.
Well, you can do that now with $25 input and a million dollars output.
That's a positive EV type of calculation.
So I think you can actually move that same instinct that drives people toward gambling
and move it toward, let's gamble on ourselves.
Yeah.
And a positive EV.
The bottom line, and even though not everyone's going to spend $25 to get a million, there will be losers just like an entrepreneurial game.
But the sum total, though, it's creating value in the world and growing the pie where gambling is not.
So I think two big thoughts to crystallize for me.
Number one is exactly that.
I think there is so much in the world today, anger about wealth and equality and disparity
and all this stuff because there's a fundamental confusion between wealth generation, entrepreneurship
and growing the pie versus finding tricky ways to get more of a fixed pie.
A lot of people hate on quote unquote rich people or whatever because they just think
at them as these, and rightfully so, like basically tricksters who are bankers or whatever playing
pee and shell games and just like take your money. And, or, or people that just got lucky
gambling, just like you spun a wheel, you know, fuck you, you won, like everyone else loses.
So it is the difference between zero sum and positive sum. And that is critical, critical,
like maybe the most important thing for a whole society to internalize. If you're just spinning
a wheel or you're doing tricky stuff to make money, then like you're hurting everyone else.
If you build something net new and you are an entrepreneur and you create, you grow the pie
and you get a piece of that pie, but everyone else gets an even bigger piece of the pie because
that's what you're doing is you're taking some of the value you create, not all of it.
Like definitionally, you're making society a wealthier, quote unquote, more productive,
interesting place. So, you know, my hope for society and with tools like this is you can,
yeah, like not only like, is this a great business opportunity to get young kids making stuff,
But this is a way to teach, instead of nihilism and gambling, this is a way to teach basically being a positive member of society.
Yeah.
So going back to how can we double down on the Bitcoin payments narrative, this to me is something that's not only trying to grow Bitcoin payments, but it's trying to improve society.
A much more positive message to send to young people, become entrepreneurs.
It's never been easier to become an entrepreneur.
her totally and i would i would even take that one step further which is to say not only is it a
great positive message but like think about like you know i kind of joked about this sorry i'm
playing footsie with steve i kind of joked about this but i dk is out here dk is out and i don't
know i don't know what the right what the right joke is but um i should pay you to get the right
like think about and i want to figure this out as an investor's way like sort of selfishly i see a
huge opportunity right which is you know what arguably has been like the most successful
pseudo investment thing of the last 20 years tether well i maybe want to phrase it better
because it's not exactly an investment but like i'll just cut to the chase it's the teal fellowship
right like teal fellowship is probably the highest hit rate invest i say investment in quotes because
i don't think there was any equity tied to it was just right right whatever but why was the teal
fellowship so successful well it took a secret about the world which is to say that there are a
lot of really really really smart people that have capability to go and do really really cool things
that are getting sucked off into an old world dying system to become like i don't know like
get useless credentials in college, right?
And so Peter Thiel, who often sees things way out of the curve,
realized if you could give these people enough support financially and otherwise
to, as you say, take a risk on yourself, try things,
and you find really smart people,
they're probably going to build really big things.
And I think even more than YC,
and YC is kind of a form of this too,
I think they, I don't know,
the amount of billion-dollar ideas that have come out of this is insane.
You can go look at the list for yourself.
And there's also, that's sort of looking at it
with sort of like the traditional venture capital,
billion dollar idea business.
But could you imagine the kid who's like 15
who builds a business that generates $10 million a year?
Life-changing.
Yeah.
I mean, just whatever you want.
You can double down, you can grow it,
you can keep it and do other lifestyle things.
The opportunities are just immense.
So I see the opportunity with MDK.
And I was asking Google, I don't know if I can do this yet.
I would love to do some sort of like a contest
where it's like, okay, MDK targets high schoolers,
smart kids between the ages of whatever, 13 and 18,
but can't open a bank account yet.
Hey, kid, are you trapped in some boring ass daycare
where they're trying to tell you information
that was already useless two years ago?
Cool.
Instead, why not sit there in class
and do something useful for the world,
build an incredible business,
and I would love to figure out how to invest.
All right, whoever wins, whatever,
your first 100K into the business,
which you know selfishly that's a great deal now
Google says the kids can't quite sign legally binding contracts yet so
there's more to figure out but I think it's basically just taking the Teal
Fellowship ideal and going a level earlier and so I think you know Nick if
you're still listening to this I really believe enabling everyone but
particularly the really like capable kids they're already capable at 14 like
remember you guys in high school like I'm guessing you were already pretty
freaking smart I know my friends were and like yeah
A lot of them were kind of just like wasted six years.
And not wasted because there's other experience.
I was talking to a friend of mine who was instrumental in helping establish.
That's the me right there.
Nick came in with the, what's his name?
The Mr. Pink from Boardwalk and Five.
You know, how do you do fellow kids?
No, but a friend of mine who was instrumental in helping establish the Teal Fellowship.
And I pitched him on your idea that you discussed.
And he's like, this seems like the right way to upstream that.
That thing, great.
It upstreamed a lot of the more traditional channels.
But you can actually upstream that now because you can actually accept payments and build things.
Exactly.
And you don't need.
So I think you put together a 100K prize.
Give one Bitcoin or whatever it is and make a prize and get people to apply and enter and then compete for the prize.
and up-level and motivate people to be,
because you don't need,
the Teal fellow was like,
drop out of school,
I'm going to give you 100K
because there's some cost to it, right?
This is actually upstream of that.
This is, don't drop out of school.
You're in high school.
Here's 25 bucks.
A replet will donate the CPU cycles.
Go build something awesome, right?
As part of this program,
compete for one Bitcoin
that you're going to get paid out
if you win this program.
And whoever can maybe generate the most money
in the first 180 days
gets the Bitcoin prize.
So that's exactly what I was thinking.
and I'm super in to do that.
We just need to figure out how to structure the contract.
If there's even a contract,
or maybe it's just like, you know,
if it's a refund, then it's just a gift or something.
Donors or, you know.
Exactly.
It could just be a non-profit.
You can put your fund fees into it.
Maybe our theoretical saver here can contribute.
Much better position than Biddy and co.
it's a good idea and honestly like nick like this has the kind of thing to be like
society transforming so there also may or may not be a new community launching next week
there is if it might launch nick if it does launch next week we'll probably talk about in the show
next week um that could be a vehicle that could be a vehicle for uh yeah i know i was i was not
sure how much that may overlap with this because they're the related but they kind of rhyme but
they're not quite the same, right?
Yeah.
We'll have to, in our other chat group,
the one without Max,
we'll have to discuss that.
It's just me, Stephen Biddy.
This should be in the MDK job.
I'm offended.
Unless, since DK's already volunteered
to fund it all, fine.
I'll be keeping your own chat.
Anyhow, I think, I'm actually,
I was already excited about this
before talking about it on the show,
but just talking about it now,
I find it invigorating.
Yeah.
Steve, I'm curious now, because you have
maybe the most depth on each of these.
Do you feel like this
thing is
different or is it
a branch of the same?
Is it a different program?
It's maybe an evolution
of it. It's maybe like phase two.
Could be
separate.
let's i mean let's chat about it next week because i think when we're when we're less like
but what i bet if we just like similar to the advice i was giving don't talk about bitcoin
don't talk about nostr i wonder if this program were just kind of like a a vibe code for a prize
kind of thing that you could get tons of hitters involved with and really draw a lot of attention
to the thing.
It happens to be that maybe MDK and Bitcoin
is how you mostly take payments,
but you also take stable coins if you want.
And there's a lot of ways to integrate those.
But really the program is not necessarily about Bitcoin,
but it's about getting paid for your work,
building things and getting paid
when you're like in high school.
Totally.
And I think the key thing,
I don't know about the stable coin piece,
maybe you can,
but like the key insight here
is that it's permissionless.
So you don't need a bank account.
So if you're 12 or 13 or 14,
I mean, no one can stop you.
and i'm sure replet has got to love this right i mean so good of course this is i mean this is
like all john's original vision if you go back to the way he used to talk i mean they went all
kind of like enterprise because it kind of had to but like if you listen to him from seven years ago
his whole thing was how do i empower kids like me when i was back in you know the middle east
i don't have access don't have opportunity i mean this is literally his his mission or it was yeah
alright
let's ring the bell on that
I better be in that chat too
we got a few left
we're going to talk about Buck
real quick
DK wasn't sure
if we should talk about it or not
I find it interesting
I don't know
I didn't want to try to tee it up
because I didn't think I knew enough
and I'm not an expert on Buck
I didn't research Buck
But what is Buck?
What's it?
Travis Zander?
Travis Vander Zanden.
Vander Zanden announced it this week.
He has an interesting backstory with Lyft and Uber.
People can go research if they want.
And Bird.
He was the founder of Bird.
And he found Bird.
He tried to cleanse from the internet.
And I also saw some Bitcoiners like Plutteter shitting on it.
So let me be clear.
I'm not advocating buck.
I don't know anything about the company or the token.
As Steve says, he goes all in all.
I may or may not have received a 20% pre-mine.
No pre-mine here.
The reason I found it interesting is because it literally was predicted on this show five months ago.
It was when we were talking about Stretch, STRC, one of the equities from MicroStrategy, where they've created what we viewed as a stable coin built on Bitcoin, though, not on U.S. treasuries and a reserve like that.
And we talked about, you know, maybe Robinhood could create the token or a third party.
And well, guess what?
That's exactly what Buck appears to be to me.
It's built on top of Stretch and it offers 7% yield.
Stretch is paying, I don't know what it's paying now, but it was in the 9% to 10% range.
It's 11% now.
11, yeah, he kicked it up to 11.
So there's a margin there.
Now, one of the criticisms I saw from Pleditor, the Pleditor account, which I didn't go confirm, is that they're taking half the yield themselves.
Well, they're taking 4%.
Buckas.
Yeah.
Well, it wasn't clear to me if it's just that spread or if they're taking even, or I don't know.
I don't know.
Anyway.
So I have no, yeah, I have no idea.
Is this a scam or not a scam?
I don't know.
But assuming there's no weird gotchas,
then it is a form of what we thought could be created.
And as long as there's not any scammy type aspects to it,
I think it's an interesting thing.
Because, again, I assume it's not a pre-mine.
I assume there's not.
A lot of the things that we don't like about other tokens
that are created I don't think apply here.
So assuming the total risk is the stretch, you know, the risk you're taking on with stretch, and then you'd also be taking on some kind of risk with this new company around Bok.
You know, as long as it's limited to that risk, I think it's an interesting introduction.
So, yeah, I agree.
It's interesting.
I'm glad you brought it up.
One thing I know, I did a little bit more research on it.
And one thing I'll note is that it's not available to people in the U.S.
And I think that's because there's been this.
Theoretically.
Only U.S. or ex-U.S. or U.S.?
Ex-U.S.
In the U.S. you're not allowed to use it.
Okay.
And I think that's because, I think it violates all the recent stablecoin legislation.
I think the recent stablecoin legislation was saying you cannot share yield with consumers, right?
And for obvious reasons, that's kind of a protectionist clause.
And so they are sharing yield with consumers.
And so they say no U.S., which I think is actually a real opportunity is to like create stable coins that do share yield of various forms with consumers, with the users of the coin.
But I mean, that might not be enough to get it off the ground, but it's it does not allow it doesn't support U.S. users.
So I have a lot of thoughts on this.
I think, again, if you kind of take your hat of just like see reality clearly and how it's going, I think this is like, this is exactly what we predicted.
It's like, actually, it's all playing out exactly as it should and makes sense.
So there was a podcast that I recommend listening to.
I think I showed it in the group chat over the break.
If you haven't checked it out, it was a recent sailor interview on, I think it was on the Galaxy one.
It was excellent.
Your advice, yeah.
Absolutely excellent.
And look, I mean, he talks about that same thing, the stretch as effectively a yielded stablecoin, right?
He literally asks people to do what this guy is doing.
And, you know, you can have your own opinions on Saylor.
And I know for like the hardcore Bitcoin people, it's like, whatever, he's doing something different than what you want.
That's fine.
Just again, zoom out.
This is how we get, you don't go from A to Z.
You go to A to B, B to C.
That's just, that's how reality works.
And so what Saylor did,
and I have to give him credit,
you know, regardless of what you think of him values,
like he is so damn smart and so damn eloquent
and he can take very complex ideas
and he can explain them beautifully.
So the way he explains it is his vision of the world,
his theory of change or whatever you want to call it today is
Bitcoin is capital.
Someone, well, Bitcoin is capital.
Bitcoin is money.
No, no, no.
critically bitcoin is capital not money this is important point oh yeah bitcoin is capital
his company strategy exists to be a refinery they take capital and just like you know if you're a
wildcatter in texas and you get this raw oil from the ground great that's a very valuable resource
i can't just like take that and put it into my car right so his company exists to refine the raw
capital into credit and that's what stretches and all of his different instruments he offers right
And so what does it mean to offer credit?
Well, you take capital and you package it.
I even sound like capital.
I package it.
I even got the mannerism now.
That's really good.
If I had my eyes closed, I would have thought, yeah.
Have you been working on that?
Bitcoin is digital capital.
Capital becomes credit.
How about this?
How about this, Max?
Credit becomes money.
Have you seen those ones?
But I got to give the guy,
I,
sailor,
if you happen to listen to this ever,
like I'm teasing you,
but like respect,
like this guy's playing 12 D dress.
Right.
So capital becomes credit.
And so he offers different credit.
He takes the raw oil.
We should need Steve to do it.
Cause I believe Steve was called out.
Does the sailor look alike?
No,
I was called that,
but I,
I don't do imitations.
He's got the look,
Max,
he's got the voice.
so you take that and what you do then is you take the raw resource and you package it in a way that
the market can use just in the way that you take oil and you package in a way that the physical
infrastructure and world the cars can use and so he has all these different products stretch is a
very interesting product because it's targeting the uh the u.s treasury essentially and what he's
doing is he over collateralizes an instrument with Bitcoin. And so if you believe, I forget if
it's like 6x over collateralized or whatever it is, but if you believe, and you can go back and
listen to our comment on this five, six months ago, but if you believe that Bitcoin continues to grow
to Cagr of 20% or whatever it's been, 30% or even less than that, if you believe Bitcoin goes up
over time, then he's radically over collateralized. Now he has the $2 billion in cash as well to keep
making these payments. And he can give the market, people that want things like fixed income,
investors that need to buy equities, all these different things that maybe are bullish on Bitcoin,
believe in it at least enough to think it's going up 20% haggard over the next decade,
but they can't buy it directly, or they just want that, like, you know, maybe they're retired and
they want that sort of pension-like payment, then this is a perfect opportunity for them.
Now, what I missed when we talked about this last time was capital goes to credit,
And then we discussed, and I think DK, maybe it was you that said maybe he makes the stable coin.
What he then said in this podcast was, I want another whole round of entrepreneurs to come and take credit and turn credit into money.
And that's a big concept because what he's saying is, you know, this buck thing, who knows about this guy?
Maybe it's a scam, maybe it's not.
But it's just the first of many and you're going to see a giant free market.
Basically, you're going to see free banking on steroids here.
Anyone that can access that stretch credit can now go and create money.
And people will be able to compete with their own money, right?
It's going to be a free market, right?
So some people will say, hey, man, I'm getting paid 11% on P7.
Well, hey, Buck, that's cool.
I'm going to pay you eight.
And so free market's going to free market.
Margins will compress.
there will be different rates paid
based on different regulatory schemes
maybe Brazil lets you do it
the US doesn't
so there's going to be different rates
for where you are in the world
but anyways the point is
all of the sort of like neobanks
that are operating with Bitcoin and stuff
it's a very interesting thing to explore
is this an opportunity to offer
an instrument
ideally it wouldn't even interops
if you're whatever
through tapered assets
or whatever it is
Spark with the Bitcoin network
but to offer this
this stable coin that gives a yield.
And critically, unlike all the other ones,
you know exactly where the yield comes from.
You know exactly what the risk is.
I mean, there's different layers of risk
with the company and in MicroStrategy,
but like fundamentally the risk is,
does Bitcoin go up 20% counter or not?
Yep.
All right, can we get a,
it's going up forever, Laura?
No, I'm sorry.
All I can say is capital, credit.
And seriously, I mean that as a shout out.
Like, Sailor's a genius.
He is.
He's awesome.
he's a genius
alright
I think we're at it
shall we wrap?
let's wrap
it was a good show
yeah
fun to see you guys
yeah
more next week
good times