We're on, David.
Kick us off.
All right.
Well, then, here we go.
Welcome to Presidio Bitcoin Jam.
How are you guys doing?
Great.
Doing awesome, man.
50 hours, I learned.
Yeah.
This will be...
We're post-50 hours.
That's a lot.
With this show now.
33 episodes booked.
50 hours of content.
Probably more, because sometimes we go a few minutes over.
That's right.
And we...
I don't think we've ever...
We've never gone under.
I don't know.
Definitely not.
I had sort of dabbled in podcasting before,
but I never really fell in love with it
or was super regular about it.
It was kind of always haphazard whenever I felt like it.
And now kind of that we have this cadence and structure,
like let's get together at noon Pacific on Fridays and do this.
It's like, it's a moment of joy I look forward to each week.
And now it's kind of in love with the process.
I absolutely love it as well.
Yeah, every week I'm like,
what new crazy idea are we going to spin up live?
Well, also I'm happy because I really don't feel like
there's any extra overhead
with the show
other than doing
the hour and a half
we talk
because any discussion
we have outside of the show
we would naturally
have anyway.
Any kind of like
testing of
BitChat
or this new app
or that new app
or whatever
or vibe coding
whatever
we're already doing it anyway.
So I just like that
it's like
almost no extra overhead.
We learn a lot
in the show
we've created
you know
generated tons of new ideas
that we actually put
into action too.
And builders
I think probably
the most actionable.
audience members get ideas or get motivated and and it changes their lives too like we you know
we had um andy from buenos aires listen to the show learned that he could work out of presidia
bitcoin for a period of time now he's here and he's here for five months he's a cool dude what
he's great yeah he's we've also learned i i believe he's at the top of the leaderboard on
pull-ups as well well should we let's talk pull-ups in boldly all right all right so
so we talked about pull-ups uh i think last show yep and we have at least seven people at
pristidia bitcoin who are in the double digit club for maximum number of pull-ups so i think
that's pretty phenomenal um max is one of them uh well i i have yet to post new numbers this week so
i i apologize i'm behind i need to grab you haven't posted your numbers so then we have at least
at least eight because i i saw i saw firsthand you can do at least 15 so even our uh funder
mark casey seriously mark was here doing bulbs he came in for the board meeting oh we do a quarterly
board meeting for presidia bitcoin yo mark and he heard about our pull-up you know yeah culture
yeah on the last show all right and uh he came in and he's in the double digit club i'm impressed i
I mean, to be fair, Mark definitely looks like he's in shape.
Mark, if you're listening, you definitely look like you're in shape, man.
But double digits.
He's an old dude like me.
Sorry, Mark.
I can say it because I'm also an old dude.
I was going to be nice about it, yo.
I'm an old dude, too.
It's impressive.
Yeah.
So young, old, we're all doing double digits here.
And then yesterday, Alex, our lead and our producer for the show, he organized a social event for members.
And we went over to the Presidio Bowl, which is like a two-minute walk from Presidio Bitcoin.
And we did bowling.
And Max bailed on this.
I don't know.
Yeah, I'm sorry, guys.
I'm sorry.
Anyway, it was a lot of fun.
Everyone had fun.
Were there any hidden talents?
Well, I believe almost all of us play like once every few years.
Okay.
We're all the same kids.
So we had no like 200 bowlers.
there were a couple
Austin and Alex stood out
they scored at least 130
I think that's solid
solid showing
and then everyone else is just
can you get to 100
but I think everyone was
trending better
we were rusty right the first 5-6 frames
hadn't bowled in several years
so Haley in particular
she bowled like a 50 total
score for the first round which is
not that great a score
then we were able to
given the time limits
we were only able to
bowl like four or five more frames
in the second game
and she already had like 80
oh damn
go Hayley
so she was like
going to soar past 100
yeah I'm not surprised
I mean Hayley definitely
attention to detail
I feel like you need that for
yeah it's good
yeah and we saw
you know
Leo improve dramatically
from beginning to end
anyway we need to do it more
frequently
do the French have bowling?
I don't know
they have patong but that's not really
bowling it's much classier of course
yeah I felt bad
that I had to bail just you know I had an Indian
music concert that was planned so it was very cool
I also went hooping with a bunch of teenagers
yesterday beforehand so I was very exhausted
and I felt like the old man so
we're all old relatively speaking
everything is relative exactly
but that's our
athletic update although
DK is like walking an insane number
of steps yeah yeah I was gonna say
I shared, I think the reason we kicked off in the group chat about all these accomplishments is I shared, I was quite proud that I kind of inadvertently had walked more than 10 miles a day for a few days in a row.
And then I was like, actually, let's get a whole week out of this.
So I managed to do a whole week ended last night of 10 miles per day.
All right.
So in running, a 70 mile week would be like insane.
That's like a big, big week.
But now I'm kind of like into it.
Like, do I keep just going?
Do I do that again today?
Yeah.
Why would you stop?
I don't know.
It kind of gives me old man vibes.
Oh, wow.
Dragging about walking steps.
Back in my day.
I used to do 15 miles a day.
Barefoot.
Given that Max is such a big walker, I wanted to understand.
Does this sort of get into the range of competitive with Max's typical weekly?
You want me to check?
Yeah, yeah.
All right, all right.
By the way, Sean.
I know you walk everywhere, right?
I do.
I'm a big walker.
DK, he convinced me, or he showed me live back when we were sporadic podcasters on Nostra
News.
I had no idea that the iPhone had a feature.
I think Elon is a big walker too, right?
Didn't you and Elon?
Yeah.
Used to do a lot of walking.
Yeah, we used to urban hike everywhere.
Urban hike.
A little bit less this week, actually.
A little bit less.
So I am currently, let's see, actually, no, no, no.
If we count through Thursday, because today's too early to count, average steps, 18,600.
6,
9.
So still up there,
still up there,
but I think you're,
you're probably getting,
you guys' numbers are impressive.
I walk a lot.
So does Deacon.
I mean,
Max made me drive my car over to his house to test if he could get a car like
mine into his garage.
If he doesn't have a car at all.
Yeah.
I would love that.
I think the answer would be no.
Just,
just waiting for the new Elon Roadster.
That could fit in there.
That would be sick.
Should we chat?
Bit chat?
Bitch.
Let's chat.
Do you want to?
Right before this, I looked for the domain
bitchat.me.
That's a good idea.
But it's taken.
And I learned
that someone nabbed
bitchat.com
before Jack or Kelly or someone
could.
Probably Ben Ark. He's always there first.
One last thing before we chat
into bitchat. One request
for proposal since we're always doing this at
our product nights. I've been asking for this product for many, many months now, but I was
sparked listening to you guys talk about how swole we all are here at the Presbyterian Bitcoin.
And I still want a meme generator, a very simple meme generator where I can generate memes,
kind of like image flip or whatever, but it zapped in Bitcoin or in eCash, shared on Nostra easily.
Lemon, he kind of did my little bounty and made some version of that, but I would love to see
someone make this awesome. Actually, there's a real opportunity there. I just couldn't help
seeing in my mind. I'm not exactly sure what the meme is. So I called the audience to both give the
meme generator and the meme. But as we talk about the Bitcoiners sitting here doing double digit
pull-ups into advanced age, as you said. Almost senior citizen. I can't imagine, but seeing some
kind of meme in there where that's contrasted with a certain Ethereum leader dancing on stage.
I think there's a meme in there somewhere.
I'm just going to leave that to the audience to figure out.
But I would love to see that.
I would zap it.
Well, Max, if you want to show us proof of work,
trust me, you could actually build this thing
before the day is over.
You really believe that?
I believe you could do this before the day is over.
I would say lean on Matt a little bit
and you start with Replit
and you can do this entire idea end to end
and have it deployed to a public URL
before the end of the day.
Today, probably challenging,
but I can set aside one afternoon next week.
Matt returns from vacation mid next week.
Perfect.
That's a good choice.
I'll also tell you,
speaking of being swole,
you can vibe code on Replit from your mobile phone.
Are you serious?
Which I do.
While you're working out.
I'll go to the gym.
I'll do a set in between sets.
I'll dispatch a new task to Replit.
And so you can do it while you're walking.
You can do it while you're at the gym.
Yep.
It's amazing.
I feel like this is life-changing technology.
The biggest deal in technology since I've been alive,
40 years since I've been involved in technology.
As a kid, I was playing around.
DK is revealing his age too.
Let's talk about another Vibe Coded app.
Let's do it.
BitChat.
Do you want to set it up?
Who wants to set it up?
Steve?
Steve.
Well, I figured it was on July 4th, July 1st,
but this month, early this month,
Jack Dorsey announced
BitChat, the latest app
that he's vibe-coded
and it sounded
pretty compelling
it's a mobile app
he launched it on iPhone
it's a chat app
it works over Bluetooth
low energy
does not require the internet
it forms a mesh network
around you
implied with that you can't chat with
just anyone in the world. They have to be
nearby you.
It depends on interference and barriers,
but 30 meters
or so.
We tested it here at Presidia Bitcoin.
Leo's on one end,
I's on the other end.
We're still able to chat.
That was just a direct connection,
but it also forms a mesh network.
I think you can go seven or so
hops away.
There's
both
group chat, which is like
public group
chat within the people who are
within proximity, and
private chat
that you can
do with anyone who's within
proximity.
So,
I think that's the...
And there's a few other
cool features initially.
There's like signal-like
verification. So,
if I want to
confirm that the identity I'm messaging with on this app is actually Max. And I see Max,
we can confirm the, the, uh, fingerprint, the, the fingerprint. Thank you. Uh, like signal,
um, you can favorite people. And then there's some fun interactions. Like you can hug someone
or slap someone. Steve slapped me and Bob with a fish, man. I couldn't find the fish, but
yeah um so so a little bit of fun in there as well so that's the um the initial applications
so let's definitely talk about like use cases of this um but then there's also been new features
already added we can talk about that uh there's a roadmap and then we can let our imaginations run
wild as well about what we'd want to see with this um unlike other vibe coded apps i've seen
from Jack or others, this one really seemed to resonate.
And it's like top 200 in the app store.
Jack posted distribution numbers of users
and there's like lots of users in Russia, Ukraine, and US.
And there's like a Fortune magazine article
that covered it today as well.
I have a trillion questions, ideas about this.
um maybe two things to start number one i know we haven't mentioned nostriate and that's part of the
new feature sets that's something we're definitely going to talk a lot about but the fact that bit
chat already has over 100 000 downloads or whatever like it in and of itself is very interesting to
me but it's like a meta point i just want to note at least in my mind um even if no one else gets
good at vibe coding and of course we already know that's not the case we already have dk and mad and
Steve's getting better. Maybe one day I will. Even if all we ever get is now Jack Dorsey is able
to ship Nostra apps at a quick cadence, this was like, I know he's got at least one other out there
that sun tracking app. This is a couple of weeks. There's no way this is more than a month of work
as far as I'm aware. To be clear, Jack is probably the product goat, at least of our generation,
certainly up there with Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. The fact that he can now vibe code and just drop
apps quickly to me makes me so much more bullish on Nostra than I ever have been.
We're going to talk about how he's kind of purple pilling people secretly in here,
but the fact that Jack can now drop, I don't know, an app a month. And then, oh, by the way,
everyone else in the community, the Callies of the world, the DKs, the Mats are also going to
be able to drop. This is going to spin out of control quickly. I have never been more bullish
on Nostra than I am seeing BitChat go viral. And it's like one of his first two apps he's dropped.
Yeah, I think he did do it in like a weekend.
And I think he's leading by example.
I don't think the world,
we're only going to have Jack creating apps.
I agree.
I think we're going to have many, many people.
There's lots of smart people around the world
with great ideas,
many of whom didn't have Jack's programming background
so could never realize them.
Right.
Where historically,
Jack was able to traditionally program
to realize his vision.
And now people with really good visions,
really good ideas can do it as well.
And I think he's doing a great job leading by example.
Yeah.
And to be clear, even with him, I mean, I'm sure we would have gotten a lot more apps
over the last 20 years if he hadn't had to like run public companies and stuff like just
coding in general is like a laborious, tedious project.
But the fact that now people that have really good product instincts or maybe who knows,
maybe one day all of us will develop great product instincts and start dropping apps
like that, like just like bringing that barrier down.
It's kind of like what we said many times in the show.
It's going to make the experts and the wizards like 100x more productive and anyone can at
least enter, you know, enter the chat now. So the fact that it's all going to be done,
I believe with Nostra and with Bitcoin and Bitcoin related stuff like eCash in the background,
I've never been more bullish on Bitcoin and Nostra products than I am right now.
So Max, the big takeaway is lead by example. Show us how that means.
I hear you. I hear you. I hear you. To be fair, I've had another big project I'm working on that
you guys are aware of, which we'll talk about at some point involving photons, but eventually,
yes.
If it's stuck, let me know.
We should be talking about use cases.
Let's talk about connectivity
and
internet and NOSC and going beyond
proximity. What does that look like?
Payments, vibe coding, and
you want to talk about solar or something. So we have all kinds of things
to talk about here. But let's start with use cases.
And maybe let's just start
with the initial application
that's
only
mesh network proximity.
so anyone trying this app out
at first, if they download it at home
their initial experience is going to be quite poor
likely because they'll literally see
no one else, no messages
and they can't really do anything
so that's a bad initial user experience
so where would this be a better
user experience?
I think I've at least heard or thought of
at least a dozen different things
but maybe I'll let you guys start.
There was a service called FireChat
from a company called OpenGarden
that was launched, I don't know,
maybe seven, eight, ten years ago.
And it was a very similar type of
Bluetooth mesh networking service.
And this was, it kind of like
bubbled along for, I think, a few years.
And then I think during the Hong Kong riots,
it really took off because
there was a problem with, you know,
people in the streets needing to communicate and some restrictions around, I think, internet
connectivity and a lot of control that the government was trying to enforce upon the
people. So I think that, you know, just like a protest is a specific use case where we already
have seen like very large scale adoption of this kind of product. But I think there's just like
tons of use cases. Like when I saw the stats that you mentioned around Russia having a lot of
downloads, it reminded me, I used to collaborate with a guy who lived in Russia, and he showed me
a picture of his home. And they live in this very stacked vertical apartment complex where
everybody, maybe it's 40 or 50 stories, but everybody's in close proximity. And you could
imagine that a situation like that, if there's lots of those, people maybe want to have the
ability to communicate with everybody who's in their apartment complex with them. And imagine
And kind of those, you know, if you can do seven hops, that could be like a really great use case.
So it wouldn't surprise me if maybe there's existing kind of like Ukraine and Russia, like areas where people feel oppressed and limited in their communication or just maybe convenient to connect people that are nearby in ways that we don't necessarily live our own lives there.
And then there's kind of rural communities that are maybe disconnected or maybe off the grid.
so those are at least a few of the things that
come to mind for me
let's have the apartment building example
I don't even know if it requires
an oppression
like oppressive government
it might just be like
it guarantees
you that these are people nearby
now it doesn't guarantee you that it's
tenants of the apartment building
but if you're like
I'm going to go play tennis
and you just post that
and then you know that it's going to people nearby,
well, that might be valuable.
Or if it's 3 a.m. and someone's blaring their speakers
and you're like, I don't know who the fuck this is,
but like turn that off.
Valuable.
I have a slightly different ticket
where I think this is going to pop off.
So I think that's a very interesting use case.
I think that the protest is definitely one.
I mean, I will say it did say,
at least in the first version,
maybe this has changed in the last version.
Like, you know, there's still a lot of like cryptography testing
and stuff that needs to be done.
So if you're actually in a super
for-your-life HRF type situation,
probably let it mature a bit.
Also, sorry to interject,
but another thing is governments
can pollute the spectrum as well
and block, they can jam Bluetooth.
So it's still a good tool to have available,
but it's not bulletproof against a government.
At least not yet.
And to me, though, because I was talking with folks who are less, let's say, down the like sovereignty, Bitcoin, Nostra rabbit hole and asking, and they're like, this is kind of cool, but like, why would any normal person ever use this unless they're like in an oppressive regime or whatever?
And the first thing that came to mind, again, another potential vibe-coded opportunity here.
I should do this with VO.
I know, DK.
But I can just see the BitChat app with like the, what is it, OT, the Genesis, like Coco or something.
I basically think this is going to like take off.
So I would not endorsing just like a, an observation going to be like Bitcoin with a sort of gray area use cases.
I think like drug dealing at festivals, it's going to be, or festivals in general.
I just like chatting with people at festivals, but the fact that you in theory have these privacy concerns as well.
It's like, Hey, I'm at this festival ran out of, you know, the honey that I'm looking for.
Anyone know any honey dealers around here?
Yeah.
I think that's, that's how the normie, you know, uh, Instagram crowd comes in.
I believe outside lands is coming up soon.
Exactly.
Maybe we're going to...
If it's released, it won't be in my name.
At Golden Gate Park tonight.
What is?
You know, Dad & Co.
Oh, yeah, that's tonight.
They're performing at Golden Gate Park tonight.
You should roll by the park with your bitch head
and see if you can find some honey.
Certainly won't be me if the feds are listening.
Don't worry.
Yeah, so I agree.
I think that's a very good fit for a use case.
Sorry, DK, you were going to say something?
Yeah, I was going to say,
I think maybe it gets a little bit into another part of the discussion, but when I see kind of a new idea like this, I think it almost should feel a little awkward.
Like anything that's really good and new should feel limited in ways and awkward ways.
And so I like to try to understand what it is today and then kind of like, what are the assumptions?
What does that newly enable?
What are its limits?
What does that break?
So one of the things I was trying to figure out is, what is this?
Is it mostly around location-centric?
There's kind of this privacy thing to it or kind of anonymity or pseudonymity to it.
that that feels like a primitive that's part of what this what this is um and then and then the
the nature of being able to favorite somebody feels like it it changes the fundamental like
limitations that felt like they're part of the early design so i'm trying to think through
what does that imply about where this could go or kind of what it what it sort of flexes out to try
to serve. Do you guys, have you guys played with that favorites feature yet?
Funny you mentioned it. We were debugging it right before the show. That's why we were a few
minutes late. So because there's a brand new release a few hours ago that includes Nostre
and NIT 17, which allows you to meet someone who's nearby, mutually favorite each other. And then when
you part ways and aren't physically approximate, then you can continue chatting,
uh over Nostra So we uh I was told we were we were supposed to see a purple uh globe and we we did
not, we don't yet see a purple globe. So after the show, we will, we'll figure it out. And so is,
is the whole purpose of favoriting somebody, you're kind of like saving them, but you're doing
it in a one way. So I could favorite you, but you might not favorite me back. And this one,
what he's talking about. So to be clear, when you're chatting just on the mesh, it's all going
through Bluetooth to Bluetooth. So if you leave, there's no more messaging. The genius of this,
and this is why I think it's, Jack clearly has a plan with this, is version one didn't even
mention the word Nostra. However, version two, the purple release today, if we double opt-in,
so it requires double opt-in, I have to star Steve, he has to star me. And in theory, when we go home,
now all of a sudden we use Nostra relays to do the encrypted message of DMs back and forth.
So that's like genius because, I mean, and to your kind of question on this, like,
where does this go? I mean, I think there's a million things this could go with, but like,
one thing is like, it encourages people to like, I don't know, like get off the fucking internet
and be friends and like meet up in real life and then actually like make friends and keep chatting
with them. Another use case is dating, right? You meet, you meet someone in person, you mutually
opt in and then you can stay connected once you leave. Right. I didn't even get that. Remember
Paul's start, like before you had highlight or highlighter, Paul had it. He had a highlight.
highlight, right?
And this is
2011
or so?
And the notion by that app was
it was
location-based, so anyone who's
using the app to opt-in,
shows people nearby.
So in some ways similar, but
a different feel
to it than this app.
It might be interesting for us
to analyze that.
And that never really took off.
Why do you guys think it didn't take off?
Well, I think one of the problems that was a big struggle back in the day was the method of connectivity to the people around you.
The sort of way to identify is through GPS.
And in 2011, I think that sounds about right, the battery management was really tough.
So managing a background app to be able to get GPS and then managing to have that background app not consume most of your battery, the way battery management and iOS work was a real challenge.
So here we are, whatever, 14 years later, and BLE is a very different technology than GPS.
And so it might, I don't know all the limitations or restrictions around how it can or can't run in the background.
But that's like BLE is like a very different approach to that kind of thing.
Actually, speaking of BLE, do you remember, and Steve and our friends who worked on these
startups, do you remember Carlos had worked on a BLE messaging tool?
And it was a nightmare at the time.
And Strava app also has always been a nightmare trying to use BLE.
I mean, Bluetooth protocol stacks have always been relatively flaky, especially Android.
But I assume they've matured over the last 10 years.
Yeah, what changed?
Because I think someone was even showing on Nostra, they were showing Jack saying, like,
Bluetooth is like horrible to work with or something two years ago.
So I wondered, like, did something update in the stack in the last two years?
Did he find some new hack that made it easier?
I don't know.
It's definitely a story that we've been a real pain and super flaky.
But maybe iOS and Android finally got their act together.
The thing that, I mean, your point on dating is a good one.
I guess any app to be successful either needs to be for drug dealer or dating.
And this might be both.
The way I see this, though, even outside of that, just like friends or whatever,
I really think that there's something beautiful.
I think there's a seed of something beautiful here,
which is as agents and everything takes more of our attention online
and more and more people go to cue Zuck putting the giant glasses on your head
and you sitting in the metaverse.
I think this plants the seed for the exact opposite of that,
which encourages you to just go into the real world,
take trips, meet people, do things.
and then the internet is kind of like this like sort of background enabling piece which is nice
because it enhances the irl like real world experience but my hope and this is where i've
always hoped nostril's gonna go and again your nostril's been kind of cool with the twitter
experience but obviously that's just the entree to the or the appetizer the entree which is yet
to come but somehow my hope for technology over the next decade is that it is in the background
while we live a more IRL,
solar punk life.
And this to me is like
very much in that ethos.
I agree.
I think one of the observations
I was making,
I think I made it first in our chat,
but then I posted a public note.
I said, favoriting someone
you meet on BitChat
is a form of proof of personhood,
a potential way to rebuild the internet
with more clarity around
who is real versus a bot.
We've talked before about
the dystopian world coin approach
to trying to identify
who is a person and who is a bot.
And we've sort of expressed our distaste in that style.
But this is actually a form of proof of personhood
because if I see you and know you in person
and I favorite you and you mutually favorite,
now I kind of have a different type of internet.
And maybe initially we're using it for private chat
or groups or local chat,
but maybe it could extend that to,
like I think we're already seeing
with the NIP 17 NOSRA thing,
you extend it to an internet of people in a different way.
And so it's an internet that probably it's tougher to find.
It's tougher for bots to sneak their way in to that experience.
You get a lot more certainty around like who it is that you're interacting with.
Yeah, I'd say that's one of the more bullish things that I've heard recently about Nostr.
Yeah.
Because it really does seem like it could, that seems like a strong contender,
BitChat plus Nostr to proving that you're human versus something like WorldCoin.
Yeah, I could not agree more.
And again, it's in a bottoms-up, decentralized, non-authoritarian way.
I think it's awesome.
And we've talked about-
No token as well.
No pre-mined token.
No token, no IRA scan necessary.
So that's always a plus.
I do think, I mean, two thoughts come to mind immediately.
One, there was that tweet.
I think Balaji made a tweet a couple of weeks ago where he was saying like,
IRL, not IRL, like person-only social networks are going to be a really big thing.
And then I sort of made the comment back where I was like, well, I don't think I don't see any way to do that without either Nostra Web of Trust or scan the iris. And he liked that. So it seems like he was actually kind of thinking along those ways. I had not yet thought of this like here to be a thing. But the beauty of this is it's also the basis of other kinds of webs of trust. And we've talked a lot about Web of Trust on here. First is like proof of personhood. But you could imagine this could go on to so many other kinds of things like you could layer on top of that.
I mean, both sort of explicitly and implicitly through AI things like, hey, like if we met,
you know, at, I don't know, like, I don't know how this would be layered in.
It could just be like, you know, based on the date and the GPS location of where you
were.
But if we met at Procedure Bitcoin, that says a certain kind of thing about the person.
If they were sitting here talking, you know, on the builder night.
Okay, well, that's like a really interesting curiosity that you can start saying this person
is likely more Bitcoin or likely more orange pill.
What you can do with the web of trust from proof of person to all kinds of like niche
things we haven't thought of yet, that's going to be cool.
So another use case is
like
merchants. I think it was
Grubles or not Grubles or whatever his name is
tweeted out that
at a conference you might have a
vendor booth with a
giveaway. They give out
eCash and they
publish that and then it only
reaches people who are
within
proximity of that vendor booth
and it would attract people to that booth.
I think that's interesting.
You can also imagine at a farmer's market or any kind of like a truck, food truck area, things like that, or any kind of food court, you could see commerce being promoted there as well.
I mean, we should talk about spam as well, though.
What if spammers just completely flooded that public channel?
Yeah.
And then how do you address that abuse?
but at least starting with use case
I think that's another potentially compelling
use case. Well and one thing on there
actually now that you say
this like if I were to like
kind of bet where I could see this developing
to a really interesting startup opportunity I don't know
if Jack will do this through the company or maybe someone
else could do this maybe Jeff and
Max with they're working on the white noise already
so one of the killer apps that I've
been wanting to see on Nostra forever is local
Bitcoins right so
just peer to peer Bitcoin for cash transactions
And I think the key to getting something like a local Bitcoin is really working is having that be on an encrypted messenger. I thought it was probably going to be from the primals of the world first. And obviously, because it's all interoperable, they could feed into this. But BitChat actually seems like the most credible starting place I've seen.
because now, I mean, you could literally do it like in person, although eventually, you know,
or, you know, maybe you could have like mutual opt-in like, hey, I haven't met you in person
yet, but Steve opts you in so you can still pass your whatever Nostra keys to me. All of a sudden,
you can build all kinds of commerce on top of this. And we haven't talked about this.
I don't think there's like a live release of this yet, but we were talking with Damien and Bob a
little bit about sort of e-cash coming into this thing. But if you have private money backed by
Bitcoin that you can actually send to someone over private commerce, all of a sudden, like,
I mean, that's like one of the most bullish things for freedom, for Bitcoin, like actually
being, you know, medium of exchange I've ever seen.
Peer-to-peer commerce with private communications.
That seems pretty unstoppable.
Yep.
I agree.
Let's talk about some of the different payment forms.
And also, Callie just had a really good podcast on Citadel Dispatch with Matt Odell.
Yesterday?
Two days ago.
I've listened to the whole thing.
It's like an hour and 50 minutes long, but it's really good.
Anyone interested in BitChat or anything we're talking about should definitely check out Citadel Dispatch.
Also, just shout out, Callie.
We've talked a few times in the show about people that just really always push the fuel forward.
We've talked about Pierre.
I think Ben has done that, BenArc a little bit.
Callie is definitely one of those super 1,000x thinkers, coders, deliverers.
If you look at all kinds of stuff, he was early in pushing EllenBits out there.
He was early in pushing the Telegram bot for Lightning payments early in creating and shipping Cashew, making all this possible.
That dude is one of the 100x guys.
He's also a positive force.
Yeah.
I mean, he's not a hater.
No, he's a good guy.
A lot of people get, oh, eCash people hate on Lightning or Lightning people hate on eCash.
And Callie sees the good in Lightning.
He sees the good in eCash.
He also sees the drawbacks, isn't afraid to admit it, sees the good of Nostra.
And by the way, on Callie, if I understand right, it was just a few days after Jack first did the first prototype that Callie came in and did an Android version.
Is that right?
Yeah, he describes, I'll summarize what he talks about in the podcast, but he was not aware that Jack was building this.
so he didn't have knowledge ahead of time.
He saw it when the rest of us saw it announced.
And then he got to work on an Android version
because Jack built a Swift iOS version.
He said he used Goose and Claude Sonnet 4 primarily.
He did have to do some hand coding,
the noise protocol.
The LLM wasn't able to handle that,
but mostly Vibe-coded.
Wow, I didn't know that.
But yeah, so Cali learned about it,
picked it up right away,
and within like half a day,
had an initial Android version.
And he describes this process,
it's similar to what we've discussed before.
He was really more,
even though Cali's a very competent,
traditional programmer he sort of put his
PM hat on and just
instructed the LLM here's what I want
and just wrote up a plan and here's what I want
very meticulous step by
step
and was able to quickly build
a working Android
version
and he also said
similar to Jack that
noise protocol needed some
hand coding and he had to look at code
and stuff like that so someone who doesn't
know how to code probably couldn't have fully done this uh but could have got gotten a long ways but
um yeah he's he's blown away by what what he can do and i i thought he he shared a really
interesting point um a lot of startups use react native or more recent in the past few years flutter
if they want to support both iphone and android yeah because if you know if you're a startup
pre-funding or you only have c funding you have like one dev it's like very difficult to
build and maintain two separate
native code bases, Swift
and Kotlin.
But that's changed.
It's changed. Obviously, they just demonstrated
it with BitChat
how they were able to
quickly build both native code bases
and get an app out there
and see if
the app's interesting, see if there's product
market fit. And I think long term,
if it is a popular app
and the code base does grow
and features grow,
we're still at a point where you need
traditional programmers, you need humans
and they're going to do hand coding
and Callie even points that out. Basically, as
time goes on, code base grows
complexity grows
LLMs get
confused and start not being able
to manage it anymore.
For now.
But to get going
you know
obviously they just proved that you can use
an LLM and you can have native code. So you get the best of both worlds, move fast, get on both
platforms, but also deliver really native, excellent user experiences for users. I like,
by the way, that you're calling it hand coding. It already sounds like we're in that position
where it's like, oh, like the artisanal, like this is, you know, authentic, organic, you know.
I believe Jack literally speaks his English vibe coding. Really? He doesn't type it. So
I think he is literally hands-free
building these applications.
That's a way to do it.
That was the original
Carpoppy
VibeCode. The tweet that defined
VibeCoding says that he used
his Super Whisper as a Mac OS app
so he can speak to the thing.
That's kind of a intuitive form of the
art.
DK, were you going to say something?
Or not?
Yeah.
One of the questions I was asking
in the chat that I don't think I ever quite fully digested touches on this kind of Kali
kind of directional thing is, you know, obviously BLE is a transport protocol.
But when you move up to the layer of BitChat, is BitChat meant to be a messaging protocol?
Or is it more like a messaging app? And now Kali can build the Android version of that same
messaging app but uh you know for example if if um uh if uh max wanted to build the local bitcoins
idea that he's been excited about for a long time and he sees this as a good substrate does he have
to contribute like a feature like you know raise a pull request into the main repo of bitchat or
can he launch a separate app that intends to uh to use the messaging layer of bitchat but doesn't
necessarily need to be part of that product experience.
You should ask Grock right now.
Well, I did ask it and I have not.
Let me Google that for you, bro.
Is it more like a protocol or an app?
And it says, BitChat is primarily an app, but operates using a protocol like the centralized
architecture that leverages DLE mesh networking.
My understanding is it was already using from day one, the white noise protocol, I think.
I may have that wrong but if that's the case
then actually I don't know does that mean
that BitChat is already interoperable
with what Jeff
and Max are working on with white noise
and their sort of
implementation I guess I don't know
if that speaks best to you. I don't know but we do know though
is that the iPhone and Android app are
compatible with each other
they achieve compatibility and I think I mean
it's using the noise protocol just really
they've now added
NIP 17
is another way protocol to communicate.
But as far as other protocols or platforms
for third parties to build stuff, I don't know.
The other thing that's going to be,
it's a good question, DK,
and something we should figure out for next week
because like, yeah, it would be really cool.
Again, my sort of vision for the local Bitcoins thing
has always been it's not just one company,
but imagine you have like, I don't know,
like a hundred different local Bitcoins,
but they all have a shared order book
or a potential for a shared order book.
That's really interesting to me.
The other thing though with the Nostra integration
is I guess like in theory,
I mean, I think someone was mentioning this, that one of the next releases hopefully will be you could just swap out your keys.
So you could just add Nostra keys.
One big question I have is why are the original keys in BitChat not just Nostra keys already?
I think they're very similar.
I don't know.
I'd be curious.
Maybe Jack has some good thinking around that, and maybe he'll explain it on Primal or something, on Nostra.
But regardless, if you can then swap in your Nostra keys, then that gets super powerful,
because then you've already got the whatever 100,000 plus people
that are using Primal and Domus daily and Amethyst, etc.
that can now talk with all these new people very easily.
But in a sense, that kind of breaks a little bit of the contract
that the new system is establishing.
Why?
Well, if you have a bunch of mutual followers,
you might not have been super discerning about
who you mutually followed on Noster.
But BitChat is in a sense like a graph reset.
so i don't know the details of how it's meant to like how those relationships are meant to be
stored are they stored on nostr are they stored locally on your i assume they're probably stored
locally on your device because i think there's a bunch of local storage that you can wipe i think
i read something about a triple tap to wipe your local storage in case you're under duress or
something um my guess is those relationships are some sort of like a a hash that you know you notice
again when it discovers the person, but it's not otherwise like a strongly linked identity and
certainly not a public one. Well, my guess though is that what I'm talking about will be optional.
And I mean, maybe it's a good idea not to combine them at all, but I have to think that if it's
tapping into Nostrum, we already had this kind of like hot network effect going, it would be better.
Like, and maybe you do it where you just like put in your new keys. Like I could just drop my
nostril keys that i use on primal now or maybe there's some like mapping function where it's like
you know i can keep the same keys i have on bit chat but when i want to opt in and also start
sending you know nip 17 messages and eventually other kinds of nostril events then i could access
both right i don't know what the plan is going to be but i mean it's a good question let's talk a
little bit about like connectivity so starting with the mesh network i mean one thing that i
believe is the case at least on ios um the app has to be in the you don't get a guarantee that
it's going to be running in the background so if um so if your phone's in your pocket
it's unlikely to like forward a message that it receives onto the next node in the mesh network
so that's a gotcha that i really haven't seen spoken about too much um or at all really uh
but I do believe it employs a store and forward architecture.
So if your phone does receive a message,
it can hold it until it,
until like the next node that it wants to send to comes,
comes back online.
So I'd like to see like real world,
you know,
experience or data on that to see how well the mesh network actually works.
Android should be much better.
Android,
you generally get better background.
access for an app.
So this also might be location dependent too.
I mean, like Android has much higher market share globally.
Right.
So certain geographies, if it's dominant Android, maybe this is like a non-problem.
Or even like in the US or Japan or whatever, iPhone's pretty dominant.
You know, what's the threshold?
Maybe if there's like 10 or 20% of the users that have Android, that's sufficient.
to have a successful mesh network.
That's one thing I wanted to note.
Now, we're talking excited about Nostra,
but let's just talk about the regular internet too.
Meaning, as long as one node on the mesh
is connected to the internet,
then anyone on that mesh could connect to the internet.
I think I read or heard that's on the roadmap,
but not exactly sure.
I think that could be compelling.
Now that node that's basically acting as a hotspot
would have to be either on Android running in the background
or keep their app open on the iPhone.
It could drain their battery.
So there's some practical...
Could you consume their bandwidth
depending on what their data plan looks like?
Yeah.
So there's a bunch of practical things there.
But nonetheless, for a lot of these use cases,
like, so what?
Okay, so one of the first things that popped in my mind when I started thinking about the implications of this. So do you guys remember there was the Gotenna Mesh Network and they were trying to do lightning payments? This was like 2018 or 2019. This was forever ago. And I remember reading this and just being like super fascinated, but it was like very hobbyist, like no adoption, but it was like super cool in theory.
then um i've recommended this many times you know drew bansal's 2018 blockchain mind candy talk one
of the best talks about in bitcoin of all time and he talks a lot about uh basically establishing
you know mesh he basically talks about like new kinds of mesh networks basically like
with lighting network work the ability to meter in real time and pay for bandwidth storage and
compute all of the resources that we use and his big thing is he's like yeah and you're gonna have
these entrepreneurs are gonna have to go out there
and take all of this bandwidth and sell it And it was like yeah it always I think directionally he super but like how we get there was never clear to me Maybe this is how we get there So to your point imagine like okay
so there could be people with their phones
in the background and like, well, you know,
they've got a fat data plan
or maybe someone comes and sets up a specific node,
just apperate a Bitcoin.
And how would they solve who gets to send a message?
Oh, I don't know.
Wish there was a solution for that, like a market.
Yep. Is it the Helium?
is at the startup with the token and stuff.
So this feels like a way to achieve that
without tokens and stuff.
It's basically like a pop-up enterprise.
It's a pop-up one-person small business
and they show up at outside lands
or they show up at conferences or events.
And yeah, all the concerns I mentioned
about background and battery and stuff,
you'd have a setup where you have plenty of power.
And you could drop a starling.
It's a dedicated system to provide you.
You go out to Black Rock City or Coachella and you bring a Starling and you become just like a spot entrepreneur.
You're an entrepreneur.
It's literally like the dudes that are selling hot dogs.
And you're paid with Bitcoin.
Or honey.
Or you got it.
Well, yeah.
Yeah, same thing.
Bitcoin.
That's just a technology detail.
At least you didn't say SAVS.
I mean you could use lightning too
I mean that's one thing we can get into
like there's so much excitement about e-cash
but like I don't see why lightning can't be used
in this situation either
but again I mean to me
the really really really critical
thing is
when you're thinking about how to achieve
the like bottoms up decentralized
version of the world I know we all want to see
the beauty is
you give people the tools
and then you just let it go wild
like anyone
like how will we solve this problem it's like because at the edge there will always be someone
who says i can go acquire a fatter data plan i can go and build like one of the things you you
you said i wanted to mention because i saw this cool tweet um i think jack shared this one on
twitter someone's already trying to run a whatever they're calling a bit mesh node or whatever
powered by solar and you could imagine you literally like to your point maybe it's powered
by solar you know tapping into starlink and you've got you know whatever massive bandwidth in the
middle of a burning man or whatever. And like, yeah, you're making a lot of money. And then it's
like, well, everyone else sees you're making a lot of money. So they come, it's just free markets.
Then more people say, well, I want to come sell my hot dog. I want to come sell my bandwidth.
And all of a sudden, like just bottoms up intelligence solves everything, man, this is,
yeah, this is cool. This is cool. Let's talk a little bit about, so, okay. So we're clearly
going to see people tapping into the regular internet. We're talking about Noster. So I see
with Nostre, this
proof of human and the
identity piece and
the private messaging
once you
are no longer near each other. I see all that.
But what about just like connectivity
to information?
Can you guys speak to like why Nostre
over the internet? Why the internet over
Nostre? What do you mean in what context?
Well, meaning
like if you
meet with Nostre
only, you could tap into
content and information without TCP IP.
Okay.
Right?
So is there a world...
Maybe that's all right.
Well, is there a world where that's giving unique advantages over the internet?
I mean, short term, I don't think it's going to be either or.
I think it's going to be both.
But to be clear, in the long run, the advantage of Nostra is just more choice on the back
end, right?
And the ability to potentially have services that are listed just with their in-pub.
So that means a lot more uncensorable or like free services.
I think that's probably the world we're headed like on a decade plus or maybe multi-decade
time horizon.
But I think in the short run, we'll do both.
You'll connect to like the traditional, the old world internet is not going to die overnight.
It's going to be a multi-decade long thing.
And yeah, I mean, if you want to tap in and use, you know, Twitter or the legacy services,
go for it.
But in the meanwhile, I think you'll also see like every service you could access on
the internet and plus all kinds of wild ones also popping up just within pubs, which is
also super important because, you know, as the old internet, like we've talked in the past,
the old internet is going to drown and die with AI spam. Well, now we're watching this week,
like they're requiring KYC to like access like basic news services. Now, like the old internet
is kind of fucked. And so I think increasingly the more pressure is put onto like ID people in
the name of terrorism or child safety or whatever, whatever they're wrapping it up with this week,
the more people start looking for the alternative services, the alternative services get better.
But I don't think it's either or short term, but long run, I'm bullish on impups.
And I think it isn't Cloudflare.
I thought I heard that Cloudflare has a new type of service for who they allow to crawl stuff.
That they're kind of like a paper crawl or something.
They talk about it.
They're kind of throttling some of the, because of a lot of the value of crawling for AI training.
so they're kind of throttling that or sort of creating a little bit of a market between
i think content owners and crawlers who desire to crawl that content um i haven't said it
carefully but it feels like it's kind of that old style of like ip address uh you know addressing
of content whereas npubs could be like the new way that we address content just a whole new
ecosystem could be built to have a lot fewer control points around it we have a few audience
questions, so let's go through those. One was
from early on, but let's just address it.
Austin asked, did you just say Elon?
DK is walking with Elon
and he's not a Bitcoin
maxi yet.
Apologies for my pronunciation,
but I said Elad
Gil.
Not Elon.
But I'm not sure.
Is Elon a Bitcoin maxi yet?
He's not a Bitcoin maxi, but I think
he gets the value proposition at Bitcoin.
he just needs to get on
BitChat with DK
and then
Deanna asks
isn't there a layer of anonymity
with the favoriting feature
in new purple release
which is the latest BitChat release
from today
and well
I mean
well let's walk through
what I mean
when you're on BitChat
you start off anonymous
it gives you some like
you know
anon 6506 or whatever
You can change the name to your own NIMH or your actual name or whatever.
So you can stay anonymous.
And then if I then connected with Max in real life, I mean, we would see each other, chat with each other.
We could favorite each other.
Still don't necessarily know our real name or identity.
So you can stay as anonymous as you want.
Yeah.
You can sort of, you choose what you reveal.
Yeah.
I think what's also interesting in that, so we all, you know, in the office without doxing anyone, changed to our preferred pseudonyms.
So it was kind of easy to figure out who Moneyball is, as an example.
However, I do imagine, I mean, one tricky thing that I can imagine here is, imagine you're like at a festival or something where there's like, potentially, like, potential adversaries.
and imagine I'm like, oh, I think this is Moneyball
and there's another Moneyball
and I accidentally friend the wrong Moneyball.
I guess in theory, if we're right next to each other
and we're checking the PGP key
or whatever it is, the fingerprint, that's solved.
But imagine I'm just like, I'm a normie
that is acquiring honey.
Well, that's why we chatted a little bit about this,
but I think there could be design improvements
on the fingerprinting.
Yeah.
Because right now it's very similar to Signal.
And even most Signal users, I think,
either aren't even aware of this.
It's kind of buried and it's pretty nerdy.
It's very cryptography heavy and stuff.
So is there a better design
where it's integrated into the favoriting
and just presented as a more human fun way?
Yeah.
And you still might have to verify these codes or whatever,
but I think it could use some design work.
So I shared that idea with folks planning the Bitcoin design week in September and they agreed that's a good idea.
So that can be like a design exploration we do there.
Well, and the other thing I was going to say is like, you know, another solution.
So if you want to have another NIM or be anonymous, then like, yes, that's a different field.
But again, let's say I want on BitChat to be, you know, whatever max that I am on Primal.
It would be really nice if they're an easy way just to like link up and like step one, borrow my NIP5 identifier from Primal.
So I think I'm using, I was using Pile, but I'm using Nostro.com.
So like easily just like transfer that.
And then eventually, you know, DK come in with your, you know, if I own namespace on Bitcoin, like be able to layer it into that.
Like I think in the long run, like that would be the best option still.
Right now, if I understand when I've, I've used BitChat once at PB and I was able to change my name to DK.
So is that a unique name within that particular chat mesh?
Or is that like you could have conflicting names?
Well, I'm assuming you could have conflicting names.
It's an interesting question.
Maybe it is block, but I'm operating in the assumption
that I could try and like fool people by being DK.
Yeah, I haven't tested it.
I think you could conflict right now.
And then, you know, you could imagine adding code
to make it not conflict within that particular mesh network.
the Nostre linking sounds kind of cool
because you could link to a Nostre but not make it browsable
but I could selectively reveal my Nostre connection
so if you're looking for DK
and there's five people who claim to be DK
I've signed with my Nostre private key
you can see that this is the one that attaches to the DK
that you know from Nostre
yeah that's a good idea
apologies if I'm pronouncing your name wrong
but Diana or Deanna,
she says that was related to the NPUB discussion
and why not connect to my own versus one created in BitChat,
though I still don't know how this works yet.
So I think we're saying the same thing.
I think you sort of spoke to that, DK.
We hope soon.
Yeah, but super exciting.
Let's talk a little bit more about payments.
Actually, I wanted to say for Bitcoin Design Week,
I think we should explore not just that one feature within BitChat.
I could see an entire day or session or track covering BitChat design.
Yeah.
And because there's so many positive implications, not only for Nostra, but for Bitcoin and payments and everything we just talked about.
I think it's very on point for Bitcoin design week.
Yeah, I agree.
I'll be following up on that.
I love it.
But before we jump into the payments stuff, I just, I wanted to just touch one more. I mean,
I do think it's very rare to get like any kind of breakout, like the hardest thing in the world of,
as we've talked about many times in the show, if you're releasing products or content or whatever,
like attention, attention is a scarce resource. So the fact that there's already over a hundred
thousand downloads for BitChad is awesome and like very something precious. One question,
I still don't know if I fully understand. DK, you hypothesized that the reason Russia and Ukraine
might be the other big areas is because of dense apartments.
But to be clear, there's dense apartments all over the world.
There's dense apartments in Asia.
There's dense apartments in New York City.
And maybe that's where the US is.
If you guys, do you all have any other hypotheses
on why this is popping off there?
Do you think it's actually more of a freedom,
like people really need it?
Or is there another reason that culturally
they've been early adopters?
Unclear.
I mean, obviously Jack promoting it.
he's way more prominent than
I don't even know who created Fireside or Gotenna
or any of these things, but he has a way bigger reach.
It could be that just simply better marketing.
It could be, but Jack's also huge in Japan.
I guess my question is, why Russia and Ukraine are not?
Yeah, unclear.
I wanted to check on the stats that we saw.
I think somebody shared it in our chat.
where Russia was number one.
Was that in,
that was iOS downloads
or that was kind of a crossfit chat?
Well,
it's only iOS.
It's not in the Play Store yet.
It doesn't.
Well,
there's a quote fake.
There's someone not named Callie
who put it in the Play Store
before him.
So the only people running
an Android right now
is if you go to GitHub,
build it yourself,
sideload it,
which is probably a few people,
but it's primarily
iPhone. And I'm not sure if Russia, I think
US was still number one. I mean, they
were like close.
Okay, I thought Russia
was the
largest bar in the chart that I saw.
It could have been. I mean, US was certainly up there
too.
I don't know. I mean, it could be
a freedom issue.
Sometimes there's like some
strange thing that you can't even know.
Maybe we think of data
plans as free, but maybe certain telcos
like in Russia just don't have free data plans and messaging still has some other data cost to
it, but people don't like to endure. So, you know, I think there's, there's just like people
are in very different contexts that I think, unless you really kind of do a deeper study of
it, I think it's hard to. That's a good hypothesis. It's worth the deeper study though, I think,
right? Yeah. Because we, we do, I mean, there's the lingering question. This has been tried before.
Why now? Why, why is there more hype now? And also is, is it going to, is the hype going to die?
Like it is, it's a risky app in the sense that like by the end of the year, maybe everyone's sort of forgotten about it that, you know, no one's downloading BitChat anymore. No one's using it because it still didn't take off. There's that risk still. So, you know, so it, it, it, it does bear investigation. Why is it taking off in Ukraine and Russia?
And that can suggest what priorities should be placed in both features and app development, but also how it's marketed, how it's discussed, how promoters of it, people who are excited about it want to talk about it.
or how complimentary apps are built.
So one thing, I've made this call on the show before,
but I want to make it again
because I think it's very timely right now.
One of the companies I would love to fund out of Hivemind
is someone working on basically building
and monetizing a marketplace for bandwidth.
So healing without the shit coin.
If ever there were a time to be exploring that idea heavily,
now is that time.
So if there's someone listening to the show
or you know someone who is really interested
figuring out how to enable these long tail of entrepreneurs to sell hot dogs, metaphorically,
to sell bandwidth and make money on it. I am extremely interested and would love to fund that
idea. Yeah, I totally agree. I agree. I think that's a great one. And I also want to point
out your other one that you've sort of been beating the drum on, this kind of local bitcoins
idea. It feels like that's one whose time has come. And it may be that BitChat has enough early
traction that there could be a killer app that sort of rides on those rails that's actually
kind of more gives more durability or permanence to the use case of bitchat and i think the local
bitcoin one strikes me as interesting because again you know we have we have sort of prior art
that this is interesting and useful and we just have like some problems with how the execution
and regulatory thing works and some of that is fixed by the chat rails so i think like one one
way to kind of help this whole effort is find those killer apps. And that seems like it could
be a killer app to me. So three ideas I want to publicly say that I'm very interested in funding
right now. Number one is figure out how to monetize bandwidth in a marketplace. Number two,
local Bitcoins. Number three, piggybacking on the other idea, which I've been obsessed with,
we've all been chatting about now for months, is how to build the infrastructure, likely with solar
and batteries, which is my other general obsession in the world right now, so that you could basically
fund and deploy hotspots
all over the world
that are completely off-grid.
I think there's something
really big in there too,
which kind of relates
to the first idea,
so maybe they're related.
With battery?
Yeah.
Completely off-grid.
Rom just posted,
Apple has contact key verification
in E.
There's a link.
So we can check that out later.
Yeah.
Thanks, Rom.
Contact key verification?
That's to verify that a key
is related to somebody
you're in contact with?
I guess.
Is it?
Oh, I thought you guys had more context.
I can't click on the link right now.
Yeah, Rom, maybe you can specify exactly what you mean with that, but I think so.
I want to talk a little more about payments here.
So there's different situations where you want to do payments.
One in which you're paying a merchant nearby.
They might have an internet connection.
So there it actually works quite well, even if you don't have an internet connection or you do, but you don't want to use it. Like if it's a privacy sensitive purchase, you can just use BitChat and Bitcoin, pay the merchant and they have the internet connection to finalize the payment.
And it doesn't matter whether you're using eCash or Lightning or whatever.
To finalize a payment in Bitcoin, you have to have an internet connection.
The merchant can provide that.
So either could work.
Now, there's also purely offline transactions.
And there you do have some trust.
but like with eCash
like if I want to pay
let's say
well let's say it's like a farmer's market
and every week I go and buy
you know fresh fish from
Max so I'm like a
trusted customer Max
knows I'm there
he needs it to slap me
Max the fishmonger
people have to use BitChat to really understand
that joke but yes you can slap people
with fish in
BitChat
so there's a trusted relationship
like I'm a recurring customer
I successfully
pay every week
so if Max
does not have an internet connection
nor do I and I pay him
you know $20 worth
of Bitcoin
and he doesn't
it actually doesn't get settled
until the end of the day
when you regain internet
you will
receive that money. The only way you wouldn't is if I double spend it, which I could do, but you
know, A, I have to go out of my way. I have to like change the code or download a nefarious app
intentionally trying to steal people's money. Burn all your trust with me. Burn all that. Yeah.
So in, in there's many social situations where you're going to, you're going to trust another
if you're splitting a dinner bill with, with friends or whatever, there's lots of different
relationships where it's trusted and you can get away with that.
So if you are in a situation where you don't have internet
due to being out in the middle of nowhere, a disaster
situation, or if you want ultimate
privacy, then you can do
purchases that way as well.
Yeah, I think it's super cool. I mean, one other kind of idea that's coming to mind
and just real talk or real time and real talk is,
you know, I've been really fascinated.
I have a buddy who is into Bitcoin,
but is more in this kind of like,
I would say sort of solar punk alternative currency,
local currency movement.
He likes Bitcoin,
but we've been talking about this idea for,
I don't know, seven years now.
Actually, this is the guy I did the sort of Bitcoin distribution
within Mexico a long time ago.
We've been talking about is,
could you have sort of basically like Bitcoin back to local currencies? And so we're already
starting to see, I think eventually we'll see formally Bitcoin back dollars. We're already
seeing informally Bitcoin back dollars through strategy and I think potentially other stable
coins. But I wonder if there's like a cool, I don't know what the killer feature is here,
but some cool idea space where it's like, maybe it's a bit bit chat, but if we're all in the same
local community, like in preceding Bitcoin or whatever at El Zante, you know, the farmer's
market, if you could have like, if there are some advantages to having a local currency that you can
only use if you're there within the range and the Bluetooth network, it maybe has some additional
kicker features. Like maybe there's, I don't know, like some, I'm not sure exactly what it is, but
like I just had this vision of different countries or locales backing with Bitcoin, but still being
able to like adjust their currency rate or features. Like, oh, you can only use this to
get a 10% discount in our communities. If you buy with Bitcoin, it's $10. If you buy with
PBJ or El Zante currency, you get a
local discount to encourage more people to move there or something like that. So you still have levers
you can pull as a government or as a local community or
body. I'm not sure, but I think there's some
idea space there that's cool and worth exploring.
Yeah, it could be interesting to explore. I still
like inflation is the only benefit I see.
And that gets an interesting economics discussion.
And, you know, you can certainly make cases
for benefits of being able to
have inflation at certain points.
Have inflation and have humans
like for a local situation
or some subset of the population
like be able to intervene.
Yeah.
Whereas with Bitcoin, you can't,
like no local constituent can like intervene.
Well, I mean, to be clear, one idea that's coming to mind is imagine you're in a small community and you're like, look, we want to encourage people to invest in the community, not just with their capital, but live here. And so if you're paying with our local currency, you can only do it over whatever the Bluetooth network and you get whatever, a third off of whatever you buy in the community. But it literally only works if you're double starred in our local community. And if you're not, you have to pay the full price of Bitcoin.
so it's almost like
I don't know
like a way for people to
I don't know
incentivize like
time or like
energy investment
in addition to just
and yes
like obviously
but don't you
just by
being on that
local mesh network
or double starred
or whatever
doesn't
yeah that's a good point
deliver the value
that the local community
is seeking
yeah that a fair point so maybe just a double star there something more recurrence recurrence I think right Like somebody who lives there more permanently and has more recurring transactions
maybe more trusted, better contributor
versus somebody who happens to be,
maybe they're in for a vacation.
They are in the mesh in kind of local area,
but they're not as much of a permanent contributor.
Yeah, but I definitely see your point
that if you build up that reputation
or web of trust over time,
maybe if you're still paying in Bitcoin you don't actually need the currency
but there's still two price rates
there's like the people that live here and the people that don't
so Deanna asks
how you slap someone with a trout
on BitChat
and I'll answer that question
the important hard hitting questions
you have to tap on the person's name but not
at the top of the app
but like within the chat log
just tap on their name and then you get
a menu in which you can hug them
or slap them
there you go
Deanna also asks, how do you get the solar punk Dow crypto folks to get on the Bitcoin maxi train?
I mean, let's start by building in the market. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, winning in the market and
like, let's start by like leading by example, right? Like this is, this is my new obsessions
for those of you who aren't aware. We'll talk more about this in the future, but I am increasingly
thinking about eventually how do we get a terawatt scale grid completely off grid from the old grid
and all solar, all batteries.
And I mean, obviously that's like a long-term project,
but short-term project.
I mean, I already saw there's like a community north of here,
one of the more traditional, like,
stripey, crypto-y people who, you know,
obviously I disagree with all their crypto crap,
but they do have cool solar punk values
and they built, you know,
an off-grid solar-powered data center,
which I thought was awesome.
Now imagine if they also had a miner hooked up
or I don't know, they could get paid in Bitcoin,
you know, for people that want to plug into the cloud
they're building.
I don't know. I think it's probably one of the market.
Is that for like a personal use or that's like a commercial project?
I think they were just doing it as a proof of concept.
But again, I don't know what the answer.
A lot of this, it's very challenging in that there's been so much of a divide
between the crypto people and the Bitcoin people for so long.
I mean, I don't know if it's just like education,
but it'd be really cool to get those people to come to Presidio Bitcoin
and be like, we love your solar punk ethos.
We'd love to help you power with Bitcoin.
you don't need a token.
But to your point, maybe the answer is just
no one's going to pay with their trick coins because there's
no liquidity, but over time, they'll
just naturally adopt Bitcoin because that's what's won.
I don't know.
Can we talk about a few other things?
We got like 20 or so minutes left.
Oh shit, it's already 120. Wow.
Yeah.
Well, I think this one's super quick, but
multiple times this year, I've heard DK
say that there's in-kind redemptions
from the SEC.
Oh yeah. I think we hear this
like every other day from DK.
But now he can finally say this
with confidence.
And truth.
I've been saying it with confidence the whole time.
Exactly.
That was actually true.
Exactly.
Yeah, so the SEC approved in-kind redemptions
for Bitcoin ETFs,
which is amazing news,
with the caveat
that it's only for accredited investors
or authorized participants.
Authorized participants.
Not accredited.
Okay, authorized participants,
which is what institutional funds yeah so the the my understanding is when um you know you've got a
like a an entity like a blackrock or a bitwise or somebody who is the issuer of the the etf or the
organizer the marketer of the etf they still have to work with you know somebody like a jane street
or citadel i think is in this business and they're in the business of being this authorized participant
And they help manage the liquidity of kind of how much capital needs to be available to be able to run all the transactions and not get slippage and kind of get good pricing, efficient pricing when moving between Bitcoin and cash.
And so this is really just allowing the authorized participants to be able to not have to keep getting back into cash, which means you end up tying up a lot of capital.
I've heard it can be of $100 million that has to be tied up in a given day in order to be able to just run the operations of an ETF.
And obviously, if you can make that number a lot smaller because you got a lot more efficiency there, then you sort of don't have to have that capital tied up.
So this is sort of...
Accredited investors do not have any changes.
Authorized participants have changes.
They're a very niche part of the market.
and they don't necessarily,
it doesn't imply that it will get to retail,
but I think without this step,
I think it would be hard to get to retail ever.
So I think this is like one step,
but not necessarily confirming that it gets to retail.
Okay.
It sounds like an even tinier step after that description.
Yeah, I'm less jazzed.
But nonetheless,
a tiny step in the right direction.
Well, it's necessary.
It's probably necessary, but not sufficient.
Yeah.
And the reason for people who didn't listen last week or haven't heard us talk about this, why does this matter? A risk with ETS is that they create a tax trap. So they are a really nice vehicle for a lot of folks to introduce themselves to Bitcoin and buy their first Bitcoin.
but as people who have been in Bitcoin for a while know
number goes up and so you buy some Bitcoin
before you know it, it maybe is 10x in value
so your cost basis can be like 10%
of the current value and if you
own Bitcoin and ETF and then later learn like four years later
oh I actually want to use Bitcoin, I want to be able to
to send it to people, buy things,
use a Bitcoin-backed loan
through something self-custodial like lava.
I need access to my Bitcoin.
Can't do that with an ETF.
But then you face the tax trap
because you would have to sell it,
sell the ETF shares
to then rebuy Bitcoin elsewhere
so that you can use Bitcoin.
And of course, that creates a massive barrier
if people are faced with an enormous tax bill.
So in-kind redemption for retail
would allow you to take the Bitcoin
out of the ETF, put it in your own wallet, use it, and not face that tax event.
It's good for freedom.
And I'm still bullish.
I think the movement by the SEC, by the way, I think the proposal came in January and it
was just approved on Thursday or Wednesday.
So I think a lot of Bitcoiners are very skeptical of the state and all of its imagination.
So am I.
but I'll say I don't think the state is as has like this long-term scheme to try to trap all the
Bitcoin yeah we think about that because we care about Bitcoin we think why would you ever sell
this why would you ever get rid of it but but the state and politics works on very short timeframes
compared to that like four-year cycles and stuff so I I actually don't think that there's like some
nefarious plan to try to capture all the Bitcoin not not to say you shouldn't be skeptical and
cautious about it but i i would hope that there is a day and i don't think there's a strong reason
not to a day that you could get from in kind to retail sorry from a retail etf to an in kind
redemption of the native underlying bitcoin as you can with like you know gold but but the actual
step you got to think about like how much extra work is required to do that like are you gonna
log into the same account where you
log in to
buy or sell an ETF and are you going to give it
like a cryptographic address
and are they going to call you up and
verify the numbers?
There's a bunch of infrastructure and process
that would have to be designed.
What is it?
Bitkey integration.
Sure. That seems like
another possible way.
In other similar products.
I don't know. I like the fact
that DK is still confident.
It gives me confidence.
However, this also sounds like something an arc would say, so I don't know.
But yeah, will it require work?
Sure.
But it's like, I mean, BitKey's already proven it with Coinbase and Cash App and others.
Robinhood, it's like super slick integration.
It's like great user experience.
It's secure.
You can do that with ETFs too.
Sure.
Yeah, I agree.
You can.
And I think that's why I'm kind of optimistic it'll work.
And it's just somebody has to build it.
It just doesn't work that way today.
So somebody has to build the Schwab interface that lets you sell the ETF and send the transaction to your Bitcoin.
I tend to agree, but I agree with your point.
I agree with your point, though, DK.
And I think the high order bit is what we talk about mostly on the show, which is we need innovation.
We need to build great applications that have user demand.
if there's a lot of demand from the population to use applications to use their bitcoin and their
bitcoins trapped in etfs there's going to be political pressure to change that yep one thing
i want to touch on briefly is the etfs are honestly much less of a concern for me i want to just
quickly touch on the micro strategy call um so i listened to sailor's earnings call not all if i
I listened to him talk for like 45 minutes or 30 minutes.
And then I listened to the questions.
Lynn was asking a good question.
A couple other folks were asking good questions and a couple high level takeaways that I think
are very relevant.
Number one, you'll notice I have my thumb is pretty messed up.
It was bleeding pretty heavily.
Thank you to Alex for getting me some tape.
I was slicing onions while listening to the call and got very excited.
And so that should tell you a lot of what you need to know.
Um, I mean, damn, every time I listen to sailors speak, I mean, damn, it's like watching Michael
Jordan do his thing.
Like unbelievable.
Now you do look at the markets too, right?
It's down 8.77%.
Excellent.
Like time to, time to smash buy.
Like great market doesn't understand yet.
Efficient market hypothesis is completely wrong.
Um, so on the plus side, a couple of quick takeaways, and then I'm curious how this relates
to ETFs and also exchanges that I'm very bullish on.
so um number one two things i took away from that he mentioned he does agree that stretch
his dollar-like instrument the money market i think money market instrument is better right
because that's a seven trillion dollar industry high yield savings count huge um he calls it the
iphone moment for microstrategy i could not agree more i could not agree more microstrategy is still
apple pre-iphone maybe even you can argue like 1980s apple um people have not understood it yet
But once they do, it's clear to me that he wants not just to go after institutional finance, he wants retail.
He wants the whole global market coming and storing with him.
And I think he's going to get it because it's going to be really hard to compete with 9% or whatever he's giving on his Bitcoin back to money market.
So, oh my God, that's really bullish for MicroStrategy.
Number two.
If only the IPO, I think was $2.5 billion, it came out too, right?
Yes.
And by the way.
That's $2.5 billion of what can be $7 trillion.
And the people who make those decisions are just extremely just numbers driven.
You're going to give me an extra 50 bips?
Of course, I'm going to come over there.
So that's 9% competing with 4.5% or whatever.
I mean, it's unfair.
What is the money market?
And then eventually this spills down to retail who says, hey, I have whatever, a high yield
savings account with Marcus Goldman Sachs or with Fidel.
I don't even know.
like whatever people have. And it's like, why don't I just go into this? And by the way, someone,
maybe it'll be him, will probably make like maybe a wrapper around that. Maybe this is a company
that just offers high yield savings just like because if someone doesn't even have a Vanguard
account or a Fidelity account, like how can they access this? I bet someone's going to come on with
a wrapper. I don't know what the legality is around that, but like there's a huge opportunity
just in letting normal people tap into that. Then though, what I started realizing is, you know,
when Saylor gave his speech, he was kind of like, oh, I'm glad there's all these other Bitcoin
treasury companies. They're going after the other markets and it's all good. Then the president dude,
Fong, the guy that's running day-to-day operations, he comes on and I guess this was a little bit of
alpha in there because he answered a question where he was like, yeah, we're considering just
going to every other market and making the offer. It's like, do we do it with dollars or do we do
it with their currency? So again, I'm extremely, extremely sure that Taylor's going to just roll
up all these other treasury companies, either when they blow up or if they're prudent risk
managers for pennies on the dollar, pennies on the Bitcoin, whatever it is.
So that's all very bullish.
Now, to our point, someone asked him the question.
They were like, hey, man, like basically tip of the hat.
Sat on the Bitcoin.
Sorry, sorry.
Bitcoin on the whatever, on the dollar.
Bitcoin on the Bitcoin.
Yeah, exactly.
We need a better way to say that.
Like, I know you guys are all on the Bitcoin train.
I get it.
But like Bitcoin on the Bitcoin train.
So we need a way to say that.
Anyways, so someone's like giving him the hat tip
and then they kind of ask a little bit
the freedom question, like, but like, bro,
you've already got 3% of the market.
Now there's, I think, 11% of the market
that's all in institutions.
Isn't this going to kill Bitcoin?
I actually thought his answer was pretty good
where he's like, look, even if we absolutely go out there
and take 7.5% of the market, right,
which by the way, he claims getting 7.5%
from where they are today at 2%
would drive the price to $10 million a coin.
That's kind of interesting.
Let's say he even gets to 10% of the market, right?
And a third of the whole market is held, you and I were having this conversation, I think
last week, a third of the market is all held by institutions.
I mean, I do think, and a third, let's say, even gets lost.
And one day quantum, you know, there's still at least a third of the market, hopefully
more, that's held by early people.
And I do think that, you know, his point was like, yeah, well, these like early hodlers,
and by the way, I think this is something that's not talked about enough.
It's how the world is going to change.
What's the world going to look like when like the multi, multi-billionaires are like wild
people that bought it in 2011 and never sold?
I mean, they're going to be, for the most part, pro-freedom and funding some pretty crazy stuff.
So that made me feel a little bit better about all of this.
Even if there is sort of the institutional neutering of Bitcoin, it will never be completely neutered as long as the wild men and potentially women hold their early coins.
So that's good.
But I did start thinking about this a bit more.
And it's like, you know, I have been extremely long on companies like River.
I've said this many times.
I think it's a generational company.
I think they're building JP Morgan
while Coinbase is building Caesars, as Alex said.
I think that's great.
But then if I'm being frank,
the more I think about this,
even with the ETFs or exchanges like them
or Coinbase or however,
I do wonder like,
I mean, they'll always have a place
because of this customer service
and the ability to get your Bitcoin in and out.
But like Alex has a great product, right?
I put in dollars, I get Bitcoin returns out.
I think they're paying like three or 4%.
Like that's awesome.
But like, can anyone,
any of these exchanges compete?
I mean if Saylor is able to give you 9%
can anyone compete
or is he just literally going to put all the banks out of business too?
I mean it's a good question
but to be clear
I think the expectation that 9% comes down
because he's going to
like he wants to move it down right?
Of course.
He's going to test the market
how much demand is there at 9%?
It's going well?
Great.
Let's reduce it to 8.5
8 down to 5.5 whatever
he'll find where the perfect spot is.
But to be clear
I'm saying higher than what everyone else can get.
Yeah, I agree is a good question.
I just wanted to outline,
we talked last week about risks to Bitcoin,
whether it's strategy or ETS or whatever,
like gobble of all these Bitcoin.
I think there's at least three different risks to talk about,
and we've already talked about some of them.
But one is that there's risk to the Bitcoin consensus rules
if there's too much concentration.
Another risk is the Bitcoin network itself.
If there's not network activity,
then there's not fees to pay miners
and the entire experiment dies
because you lose the security model of miners.
And the, what's the third one?
I forget the third one.
I forget the third one too.
Yeah, anyway.
But well, in our conversation after the show last week,
I felt like we had pretty good answers to a lot of those.
side became less worried less worried is definitely something we should keep talking about but like the
the the protocol rules i'm just not super concerned by that and it's because bitcoin uses proof of
work and it doesn't use proof of stake yeah if it used proof of stake then we should all be extremely
concerned uh because there's a direct relationship then on the bitcoin whoever's holding the bitcoin
even if shareholders or others are the legal owners it's whoever's holding the bitcoin that
makes it so i thought of the third risk before i forget real quick the third risk is the honeypot
risk yeah so like if strategy has right i think coinbase has like three million bitcoin or
something now that they're costing right and that'll only grow if they're supporting more
you know more black rocks more strategies or just those companies grow so the but getting back to
the consensus rules because Bitcoin is based on proof of work.
And the Bitcoin consensus analysis project, which I worked on last year with Lynn and Ren,
we go into this in detail, but like what power do investors have?
Their primary power, which is like the nuclear option that they can sell Bitcoin,
or if there's a fork, they can sell one of the forks.
And that's very, very, very powerful.
It's the most powerful out of everyone's powers.
But do we really think a strategy is going to dump all their Bitcoin because they don't like adding a covenant feature to Bitcoin?
I don't think they will.
I think if they don't like that because they don't want Bitcoin touched and they don't risk Bitcoin in that way, they'll definitely go on a campaign.
campaign so that that would be more the influencer stakeholder category that we outlined in that in
that paper not the investor category and that that can be effective influencing absolutely can be
effective like sailor could go to the miners could go to the exchanges and say don't do this
and like all right you go to coinbase and say don't don't upgrade or i'm going to pull my money
out of coinbase and go somewhere else there's those types of powers um so there's still power
there, but I don't believe they're going to just quit their business
and sell Bitcoin. So I'm not super worried
about protocol risk. Then the Bitcoin
network risk, we're going to keep talking about that on the show because that is
I think one of the biggest risks to Bitcoin. We need
there to be sufficient self-custody in Bitcoin
so that people are actually doing real Bitcoin transactions in the network and
generating fees in order to keep the network alive. And this isn't some, well, actually,
you said in two years, if we don't have this, we're dead. I think it's more like two decades,
but like, we can't just blow it up. We can't just, it's somewhere in there. I mean, we can't just
like, uh, be like, ah, it's 20 years away. We'll worry about it then. Cause then if no one's
worried about it, we haven't developed compelling applications, compelling reasons beyond just
buying the Bitcoin ETF,
then Bitcoin is going to be a dead experiment.
So we should keep talking about that,
but I'm not too worried about that
because we talk about innovation all the time
and let's keep driving that narrative.
I agree.
The third thing, the honeypot,
I think that's the biggest actual risk.
And so if strategy is accumulating
an insane amount of coins
or BlackRock or whatever,
and then they're in charge
of where those coins are stored.
And my understanding is that strategy
does diversify across a few
like Fidelity, Coinbase
and maybe another
custodian. That's certainly better
than not diversifying.
But it's still a lot of coins.
And then you take
a Coinbase or Fidelity and they have multiple
customers themselves or whatever.
It's a lot of coins. So that's a big risk.
I mean, we talked about
quantum risks on the show.
We had an event. And like
one of the risks is like, well, a quantum computer can
steal like a million coins or two million coins.
Well, guess what?
Today, right now, there is no quantum computer that can do that.
But absolutely, there are cyber hackers around the world who can break into Coinbase or other custodians and steal the Bitcoin.
Obviously, those companies have like layer, you know, multiple layers of defense.
It's low probability.
It's super hard to do.
But as the honeypot grows, their incentive grows to do it.
And as nation states, I mean, like maybe they're good against normal hackers.
But like, are they good against China coming in?
Like it's going to get a lot more intense.
So I wouldn't want to be in charge of that.
Anything else on strategy?
No, I mean, I think just in general,
like I continue to be just blown away by the opportunity
and maybe slightly less concerned this week
than I was last week with the freedom concerns.
But I think it's something we definitely need to be vigilant on.
And also to your point, I do think,
could they stop it?
Probably not.
But like if we want to get a covenant through,
like sooner is better.
Because I guarantee you the more they accumulate,
they're not going to do it.
All right.
Yeah.
2026 it is.
Yeah.
Covenants in 26.
There it is.
All right.
I think we're way over time at this point.
No, we're 1 minute and 30 seconds.
We started late.
So I promise you'll be ready to move at 1.30 and now it's 1.40.
So I have an errand to run.
You guys want to keep jamming?
No, no, no.
But I'm going to have to call it around.
just hit us on
BitChart
yeah
well
I'll be
I'll be back
soon
and I want to talk
more about
like the local
Bitcoin idea
and I'd like to
I think it was
because it's
that'd be a fun one
I was just thinking
it'd be a fun one to do
at a builder event
if we could actually
play with
your local Bitcoin idea
but I
I need
I've actually
browsed the website
but never
never transacted
and I don't know if you've
transacted or could
describe more about
your experience with it,
but I think that would be
an interesting little,
little brainstorm session
we can do offline,
but maybe we'll come back
and have something to build
for Builder.
I'll say again,
nice try, Fed, but...
Notice he's not in person with us.
I know.
Do we even really know
we're talking to DK?
I don't know.
I'm going to want to see
a proof of signature.
Synthetic,
synthetic influencer DK.
Exactly.
All right.
Have a good one.
Bye, guys.
See you, everyone.
See you.
See you guys soon.