How's it going?
Oh, man.
Absolutely nothing happening this week.
Happy Friday.
Very boring week.
How'd you make it through the week?
My week was kind of crazy, man.
I've had a lot of work going on, sort of traditional work.
You didn't work, dude.
You're meant to be capitalists.
That's why I thought someone asked me if I was skiing this week, and the answer was absolutely not.
I've had a lot of things culminating at once.
Traditional work, some solar maxing, some MSTR maxing, which we'll talk about later.
We had the Builder Meetup, which was awesome.
I also went with the Vora guys to go see Deltron 3030.
So that's a little bit of underground hip hop alpha right there.
It was pretty,
it was pretty.
That was last night,
right?
It was two nights ago.
So it's been,
it's been a busy,
it was awesome.
I think Dan,
the automator who's like their sort of producer,
every project he's touched has been just gold.
So he's,
a lot of people don't realize this.
They'll probably know him most is the producer behind gorillas.
But he's also behind handsome boy modeling school.
Dr. Octagon
all kinds of really great stuff
so it was fabulous
Great, well for the more normie
boomer music taste
I've got to recommend the Billy Joel documentary
I was telling Steve about this
Have you seen this?
I've definitely not
You know who Billy Joel is?
Have you heard of him?
I'm a pianist
so I love this kind of
I've been a big fan of him for a long time
But um
we're having fun here ladies and gentlemen
don't worry
he's got a new documentary
kind of autobiography of his life
you know
and first episode came out last week
second episode comes out today I think
and it was great
I've been recommending anybody who has any interest in
Billy Joel or music
or just the history of kind of
what role he played in
the history of music and music at that time
cool
to check that one out
I know Steve is going to do it
because he's
I can tell
he's older than me
he's salivating
this does remind me though
by the way
like I will say
one fun takeaway for me
is just hearing such
really high quality
hip hop again
has got me inspired
and again
I have more on my plate
than I've had
in a long time
but
I definitely want
to get back
into recording again
so
you gotta get more
agentic workflows
so that you get
all of your actual work
out of your life
and then you can focus
on the creative stuff
it is creative
it's very exciting
and you know a lot about it.
My playlist this morning
started with Alice in Chains,
which is a continuation
from last night.
All right.
I think I heard you last night,
actually, as I was walking out of here.
Yeah, you did.
Yeah.
I passed you.
And then,
in the spirit of Billy Joel,
this morning,
I listened to Elton John.
I'm more of an Elton John fan
than Billy Joel.
Okay.
I lumped them sort of together.
Yeah, yeah.
They talk about that.
They were a little bit confused
where people would try to
try to tell him
to be more like Elton
and he's like,
no, no,
we're just really different.
Well, they are very,
they're very different,
but like kind of.
Yeah, yeah.
High level.
And then,
but then I was going on a run
this morning with Matt,
Matt Belez.
And so I,
I needed something
more than Elton John
to pump me up.
So I switched.
I'm going to guess.
You're not going to get it.
Okay, fine.
Go ahead.
Go ahead and put the guess.
Yeah, I want to hear the next one.
I thought it was going to be,
you know,
Ozzy Osbourne passed away this week.
Oh, that's a good guess.
And so I thought I was going to say
Crazy Train.
Okay.
That'd be a good running song too.
That's a good guess.
It wasn't that.
Metallica.
I would have guessed,
well, that's a good guess
because I told you recently
that that's also a good guess.
Another good guess
would have been GNR.
Actually, all those were better
than what I actually said.
But some Def Leppard.
Oh, okay.
Still good.
Got me pumped up.
So when I went on this run with Matt,
Matt and I are both
pretty similar fitness level running.
We weren't sure who was going to,
we wanted to go on a run,
nice casual run,
except there's a segment of the run called the sand ladder.
Are you familiar with the sand ladder?
Oh, yeah, down to the beach.
Yeah, off of Baker Beach.
It's part of the Escape from Alcatraz race course as well.
It's not that big a hill, but it's really steep.
It's super sandy and slippery.
It's like uneven stairs.
So it's like more obstacle course-y for those that are not familiar with it.
Anyway, it's a good time trial.
and it's on the order of a couple minutes.
So it's not like some half hour climb or something.
And I've recently run with other people
at Presidio Bitcoin and people from my team and stuff.
And so I knew, so my PR up this is one minute,
54 seconds, right?
So I figured running with Matt is going to really push,
elevate me, push me to PR.
So we run it and we literally didn't know
who was going to win, but it ends up,
he,
he did,
he handily won.
Did he beat your PR?
He,
he beat,
he,
well,
first,
he beat me by like four or five seconds probably.
So it was like a very,
That doesn't sound that much.
Yeah.
But it was a material.
I mean,
he,
he had me there because I was full gassed.
Yeah.
Um,
and he probably could have ran a couple of seconds faster.
Anyway,
so hats off to Matt for beating me.
Hats off Matt.
Hats off.
I'm actually really happy though.
Uh,
so that's what you were surprised.
Why am I happy?
Why are you happy?
I've never seen you lose and be happy.
because I checked out my PR
and I beat it by 16 seconds.
What?
Oh.
Wow.
Which is huge.
Like going from 154 to 138
is enormous.
Helps have that rabbit there.
Wow.
Iron sharpens iron.
And I,
and I,
it's not like I've been dogging it.
Yeah, yeah.
Like 154,
I pushed hard.
So I like really,
I really pushed hard apparently.
Rocking.
Random 138.
Love it.
So I did really great
and
great.
I'm glad you can celebrate your friends
even when they kick your ass.
So the music,
I always celebrate my friends.
That sounds like a challenge for DK.
Is there a race being lined up yet?
DK cannot run a 130.
I'm not ready for that.
But I also, actually, speaking of competitions,
I've been doing more,
I've not gone all in on pull-ups,
but I've been doing pull-ups last, you know,
a little bit on and off the last couple of years.
I'm at least, I've moved beyond like off the couch
doing like two, struggling to do two.
And I can do like 12 or 13 pull-ups now,
three sets of 10.
that's sort of where I'm at.
Pretty happy with that.
But we have a pull-up bar here
at Presidia Bitcoin.
That's right.
And I'm definitely not number one
at Presidia Bitcoin
because you, me,
and it was Andy, I think.
Lawrence.
It was Lawrence.
Yeah.
Okay.
We all tried to do our most.
And I did 12.
I think I got it at 13,
but like I know more than 13.
And then you did 15.
14 or 15.
15.
But I went first.
Yeah, right.
That's true.
I had more gas than 10.
and Lawrence did more
he did more
Lawrence pretty jacked
I was going to say Austin
I think we could have some strong pull up
competitions within Presidio Bitcoin
hey man this is like the whole vibe of
Presidio Bitcoin and everything we're all pushing each other
Bitcoin pull ups you name it
like get ready there's going to be some big stuff coming out of here
yeah
August will too
so let's see what do we have on
I think Builders
yesterday was last night
builders, right? So I think
the show, the concept
of this event, I think, was sort of invented on
the show. I think you proposed it
a month or two ago.
And so last night was the official
first one, and I think if anybody's been to...
No, the second one.
Sorry, my first one.
The second one that we've hosted.
It still counts even if it were there.
But it's, I think,
inspired by the format of
like a BitDevs or LitDevs, but it's more
for product builders, so it kind of
approaches a new audience, welcomes a new type of builder in, somebody who maybe has opinions and thoughts and ideas around products they want to build,
but maybe isn't necessarily into the technical details of Bitcoin.
It could be, but certainly not a requirement.
So we sort of did a bunch of demos, which were mostly vibe-coded demos, which was really cool to see.
We did a discussion section.
We did some news section and kind of open-ended Socratic method-style discussions,
discussions, which I think the vibe worked really well to kind of get everybody involved.
So I was a fan.
I'll definitely be coming back to him.
Yeah.
And to me, by far, the coolest part was Matt, I guess, he was here to run a race with Steve,
but also kindly decided to do a little vibe coding in addition to that.
It was, I mean, the demos were by far my favorite part.
We had a couple of demos.
Matt's was my favorite because he was live vibe coding.
And so, you know, I definitely still have not put in the time, like certainly DK and probably
Steve at this point.
So it was just really cool for me to see exactly what Matt's prompts were when stuff, because inevitably stuff kept failing.
And it was really valuable to see him kind of bang his head against it and be like, all right, no, actually, we're going to fix it.
And here's how we fix it.
For example, it was very interesting to me.
So he's a repl at Maxi, which is interesting.
But within there, he made some very specific calls.
He was using Lexi and their sidecar, I guess, API so that they could do lightning payments with that.
And he was extremely prescriptive, like access the Lexi SDK at this address.
he was like download the binary
it was like extremely precise
and I didn't realize you had to be that precise
that was pretty cool
you don't have to be
part of what I would suggest
I don't know if it's right for the builder form
Matt and I were just talking about maybe
doing live streams to try to help
explain this stuff a little better
but Matt came to builder
with a lot of work done
he had pre-worked and had the thing working
so he knew he'd sort of gone through a bunch of iterations
and figured out how to do that
And then he showed us, in a sense, it was just a prompt, but it was a prompt he had put a lot of effort into.
Right.
And he did that because we gave him a time constraint of 15 minutes, right?
Right, right, right.
And he couldn't have done truly zero to that in under 15.
Although I think he did Vibeco to a simpler application, literally, for the first time in under 15 minutes.
Yeah.
This was more sophisticated.
So I think there's this trade-off there.
like you live streamed
earlier this week
and for over an hour
and it was more
opening up
like truly starting at zero
and
like make their
unanticipated
problems
and then
that's definitely
more educational I think
but just takes more time
yeah
I mean I think there's room for both
I love the idea of you and Matt
and whoever else
doing a lot more live streams
like I think that's the
like we've talked about this
in the show
like the single highest
ROI thing
that can be done for Bitcoin
right now probably
is just showing people how to vibe go with Bitcoin.
But I would still love to see,
even if it's simpler,
to try at Builder a zero to one demo.
I think that'd be cool.
Yeah.
So yeah, I was thinking we should,
at Builder, we should start with somebody.
I'm happy to volunteer myself as a tribute,
but start with like an empty notepad
and kind of like improv comedy.
Have somebody call out.
100%.
And have people kind of like,
yeah, yeah, let's do that.
How about if it does this?
And kind of go through the process
to show from like literally zero,
not like a constructed prompt,
no constructed anything,
but just go from literally zero
and walk through the process
and be like,
what about this?
Oh, here's how I'll prompt it differently.
I mean, to truly make it that way,
someone from the audience
could suggest what do we want to build
and not have it planted,
but truly, you know,
improv basically, right?
But then have a skilled prompter
driving it so that it goes
kind of as fast as possible.
But then everyone would really,
I think, be inspired by that
and see how it's done.
I could actually see this becoming like a pretty big niche in San Francisco,
like replacing improv and improv comedy.
Like given the amount of vibe coders here,
like someone,
someone shared a tweet this morning saying like,
uh,
you know,
live,
like live streaming coding has been a thing,
but it's for most feels pretty boring watching someone program a computer
because it's just so tedious and takes so long to achieve.
But vibe coding like is 10 X or a hundred X accelerant.
Yes.
so that it gets within the realm of like possibly being entertaining.
Yeah.
Certainly it's,
it certainly is in the realm of like,
if you're motivated to learn and be educated,
then like it,
it's good.
And is it actually a new like e-sports?
Yeah,
absolutely.
I mean,
like I think this,
I mean,
I think Twitch or something maybe newer than Twitch should absolutely take advantage of this.
And one cool thing,
I mean,
I don't know what the latest with Zapstream is.
I know we still have to figure that out.
By the way,
shout out to our,
our stand-up producer today,
who's helping uh we're in the process of getting a lightning wallet uh set up correctly for uh for
nostril so don't worry that is coming we are going to make that happen and i think our next step which
we've been talking about for a while we're already on fountain as well so if you want to stream us
this sweet sweet bitcoin you can make that happen uh a little plug but um we should use app stream
and i like as app streams like a live nostril based client where people can watch you in video
and stream you bitcoin while they watch i mean to me like all these people that are doing nostril
stuff like Alex Gleason with, I think, Shakespeare now, which came out of Ditto. It's like a vibe
coding set of libraries for Noster and Bitcoin. Albee's got their vibe coding platform. All of
you guys should be doing this and doing it where people can stream you Bitcoin. And all of a sudden,
who knows, maybe that catches lightning in a bottle because people are like, it's way more
interesting to do it on these platforms where real money is being exchanged. Oh, by the way,
did that money just 10x in value? That's kind of interesting.
I want to come back to, on a previous show, we've talked about vibe jamming where you have
multiple humans
working together on
VibeCoding. And I think
Repl.it has some feature for this.
It's still on.
Matt shared
with us, I think, DK, but
I opened the tab and I haven't sadly
engaged yet, but I want to play with that because I think that's
super interesting approach. And just
from an entrepreneurial perspective,
whether that's added
to Repl.it or
other feature or if it's a new startup, I think that
could be in a whole new category of emerging growth.
And then the one we just talked about,
which is like live streaming.
Yeah.
And like,
maybe there's enough different here that like a startup could,
could beat Twitch.
Yeah.
You know,
if,
if there's enough,
enough difference there.
So I think for any,
like anyone wanting to start something and,
and looking for ideas,
I think that could be a really interesting category or just,
you know,
expand that or like rebel it should do it or goose.
So let's talk a little bit about Goose.
But before we jump into that, because there's a lot I want to say, there's two quick things I want to do on that.
One takeaway from last night that I guess whenever, I don't know if Alex owns the meetup or whoever does.
One thing I think we should definitely do is a woman in the audience asked for an RFP tab.
Because we have so many good ideas on the show and so many ideas that come out of the meetup itself where it's like, hey, wouldn't that be a dope product?
Who wants to build Twitch for a live stream or whatever?
so I think that is a really good thing
we should definitely sort of maintain for listeners
of the pod but also people that come to the
meetup and the second thing
and maybe we can talk about Goose first but I do
want to make sure we talk about what would it
look like to have the multiplayer
version control for
vibe coding I know Pablo was sort of playing with this on
Nostra but I never really got exactly where that was going
I actually think the
Twitch idea
maybe and I don't know it could
be a Twitch like thing but there's
There's something here.
It's actually one of the questions I left the group with was Matt did all this work, made a great prompt.
Yeah.
And then that prompt kind of disappeared into the ether.
And so he then took the effort to publish it in a tweet today, which is much better than not.
Zero, yeah.
But then also that's going to disappear.
So I almost feel like I wanted to encourage that.
Creating a library.
A library.
And maybe that starts on a GitHub, a Presidio Bitcoin builder GitHub page.
that like any good prompt that gets demoed
is available to anybody in the community who wants,
and you just pull it off there,
just copy, paste into Replit or whatever you want.
Yeah.
It's at least a first step,
but I could imagine that whether it's a live stream thing
or something almost like,
I've been kind of calling it like GitHub for prompts,
something, you know,
GitHub is probably a fine enough GitHub for prompts,
but there's probably stuff you could do even better
that really make, you know,
it's good for collaboration,
but not necessarily very specific to prompting.
You could imagine, I want, maybe this is Goose,
But I kind of want like something that's so open that my whole chat session just get published out to like somewhere that everybody can use.
Kind of like open source prompting and chatting.
And then that, I think, unlocks a whole new data set that will make all of these open source tools AI tools.
And I think there's something like there's so many cool ways you could play with this.
So one of the first projects we got excited about with Nostra early on was, and I think you even contributed the domain name to this, Highlighter.
highlighter.com which is one of pablo's many projects and pablo is the greatest mad scientist
of all time um but um but highlighter i mean what was cool about it was like for those of you who
remember uh showing my age now uh rap genius like from 15 years ago or something um you know it was
like got a lot of traction around hey how do we annotate you know hip-hop lyrics and then eventually
the idea was how do we annotate the lab and i remember andreessen talked about we didn't have
an annotation layer for the web and it never really broke out of there they try to do poetry
and stuff. And you know, it's fine, but it never, it never achieved its potential. We thought maybe
early in the days of Nostra, yeah, we've already escaped philosophy. It's fucking here, baby. And
then it's like, we're at a plateau. There'll be another wave, but maybe, maybe something like this
is maybe the tectonic plates are shifting enough that there is an opportunity now. Cause you can
imagine, imagine you just spit out all of your open source stuff and maybe there's a model that
can help you sift through it and find what you want. But then imagine like with like the good
prompts you like, you can basically go and highlight and zap and resurface parts of the
prompt that you love. So as an example, in Matt's thing last night, maybe I highlighted and say,
okay, I don't want to build any of the actual product experiences that he's building,
but I definitely want Lightning payments that work. Okay, I'm going to highlight,
use the Lexi sidecar SDK and unzip the file. I never in a trillion years would have thought to
ask the bot to unzip the file.
Okay, it makes sense.
So I highlight that.
I'm like, boom, like zap it, you know, whatever.
A lot of Bitcoin.
This is something that everyone should use
in their projects.
And then you can start to service it every time.
So I think there's something,
some mashup with the Nostra open source
highlighter ecosystem
and this like vibe prompting library.
Pablo, if you're listening,
or if there are any other Nostra superstars listening,
this is, I think it's worth experimenting.
My experience with LLMs has me convinced
that that concept of highlighting
that I'd explored for a while, public explore, et cetera,
is completely unnecessary
because the tools should be able to figure out
what is used, what is getting people success.
Like if you have the data of like,
I prompt and it fails, I prompt and it fails,
I prompt and it succeeds
and I stop prompting along that path
and I start prompting along other paths,
that's actually signal to an LLM session
that the thing worked.
Or it's at least a candidate
for what it would look like if the thing worked.
If you look across hundreds or thousands of sessions,
you can probably identify which prompts
work and cause people to stop prompting in that direction.
And then you can just use those ones for them. So you don't actually need a human to do it. You just need
people to run through the examples. So this is a really interesting point.
And I generally agree. However, I think, I don't know
exactly how this is going to play out, but my guess is there's going to be almost two categories of ranking
data. There's going to be sort of implicit and explicit. And
then there's a value, which this is the piece that I wrote back in 2022 before
LLMs really popped off, before Nostra popped off, how to disrupt Google. The idea was that
information should be in marketplaces, like literally like just, you know, identity zaps
information. That's like a signal to see where it ranks. My guess is it's going to be some combo
of these things. Like 100% agree LLMs get a lot of implicit data. Like, okay, this is what people
are vibe cutting with the most. Boom. Like let's, let's suck that into our library. But at the same
time, I don't know exactly where it's going to go, but I think there's always going to be a rule,
like a role for explicit human taste. And maybe the AI is like interact too. Maybe they're also
zapping information. I know they can suck a lot of that taste in implicitly, but I think there's
going to be some, like, I think it's going to go that direction super hard. And then there's going
to be some kind of drawback to like, no, actually we want the humans to like be more explicit in
curating the data sets that the AI is used. I don't know where that balance is going to come
though. I think the more that you try vibe coding, the more that you'll be convinced that it's still
human taste. I don't think the humans are going away anytime soon, but I think it's the human
working with the computer, getting what you want, and then just moving on. And you get enough of that
happening across enough libraries, examples, et cetera. I think the machine can figure that out.
I think I agree it's human. I just think it's human and it's taste. It's just the human decides
what to work on. Their taste tells what to work on, but not explicit signals of like or highlight.
Implicit just takes everything.
Yeah. It's just too easy. Even like I was telling during Matt's demo, he was being very polite and
You know, here's a section where I think we have an error here.
We should, you know, investigate it.
Just drop there.
I just copy paste it.
I screenshot it and just drop the thing and be like, figure it out.
Yeah, you don't even copy paste.
So we have like, we're anchored on these sort of like old ideas, like traditional ideas.
I would just like to say I potentially side with Matt on this one.
You should try actually vibe coding.
I should.
And you'll have more authority on this topic.
I know what he's going to say.
He wants to get on the good side of the AI.
Absolutely.
you guys are being assholes for our future.
I for one welcome.
Yeah, no, no, no.
Like, I mean, believe me,
I say please and thank you, man.
Like, seriously,
I know this is going to be fucked up.
I remember that there was a kid in my high school,
very quiet, kind of like creepy.
I was always super polite to that guy
if that day ever came.
I know who's walking away, right?
So I'm just saying,
I would be nice to the ass.
If we get started,
I didn't give my take on Builder
and since I'm the only one that went to Builder.
That's true.
And Steve actually did all the work for him.
And I did all the work.
Okay.
Just a few additional observations I had.
We had 25 to 30 people.
That's a great turnout.
It's only our second one.
It's the middle of summer.
So really happy with the turnout.
Seven or eight women as well.
And anyone who's been to Bitcoin meetups,
there's very few women that show up.
And so I was happy to see quite a few women show up.
Also, the women, the newcomers to the space,
or to the meetup,
everyone engaged.
Yeah, yeah.
So they're very broad engaged.
So I was happy that we created
a welcoming environment
that people felt comfortable
sharing their opinion,
sharing their view,
adding an idea,
asking a question.
We saw that.
Having the microphones
fly all around the room.
It's not a show.
It's a good community.
That's definitely what we're going for.
It's not supposed to be us
just preaching to everyone.
So I thought that was excellent.
Yeah, great.
And throughout,
whether it be the vibe-coded demos,
we had a startup showcase
and then we had various discussions
throughout all that just great audience engagement.
That was great.
I agree with you guys.
The best part of last night
was the Vibe Coder demos and the startup.
We did three different Vibe Coded apps
and then a startup showcase.
That was, we budgeted like half an hour.
We spent an hour on it,
but it was a high quality hour.
Nobody was bored.
Nobody's on their phone.
The discussion part,
I think you guys were a little disappointed with it.
It wasn't as good as the first one,
but um but we it's having said that there was still like good engagement on it yeah i think
that's a function of the equality of the topic so um i think so what we want to improve for next
time is have uh more and better topics to choose from um and so like we work together to do that i think it could also help if we kind of tee it up a little more like i think you know it not a neg on the process but i think it was like hey here a tweet what do you guys think and i think if we instead said some context here a belief
about the world here's like there's there's this pro and these cons and like are you pro or almost
actually who is yes like do you know the i think is it the is it the oxford debate format you know
the talks for a debate format?
I heard it.
You kind of,
you kind of take a position
and you say,
everybody in the audience
vote pro or con.
So it has,
you can sort of segment yourself
along these binary lines.
You can't be in the middle somewhere.
And then,
you know,
there's people who
debate the topic.
And then at the end,
you solicit,
are you pro or con
from the,
you know,
the participants?
And,
you know,
that's more of an audience style,
but you solicit pro or con.
And then you,
the winner is the person
who changed the most minds,
not the person who has the most votes
for their position.
Yeah, that's cool.
And I like that idea,
and we could also incorporate
the lightning voting in there too.
We could actually.
Yeah, that's one we didn't talk about.
So one of the Vibe-coded apps
was one that came out of nowhere.
David's someone who...
Not this David.
Yeah, we had...
I'm DK.
We had three Davids last night
all engaging in great ways.
So one of the Davids,
he's a long-time traditional engineer.
So, you know, he knows how to program a computer.
And he loves the idea of Builder.
So he volunteered to help out.
And so he's helped out in various ways.
But then the surprise way for me, like right before the meetup last night, he's like, hey, I vibe coded this app to add voting.
And you can like send, you know, Bitcoin as part of your vote for the different topics.
I'm like, that sounds amazing.
I'm like, let's try it out tonight and see how it goes.
And actually kind of unplanned, it worked out quite well while people were eating pizza and chatting.
You could like scan a QR code, go to go to this website and then vote on topics.
And we had, you know, over a dozen people engaged there.
I mean, definitely we had some with 12 votes.
So like at least 12 people engaged in that.
And it helped us rank the topic.
So I think as we prepare topics for each week, we don't really need to care about the length or the number of topics.
I put a lot there.
you know we should
as curators we should make sure
that they are all going to be
like reasonable topics to discuss
and valuable but then let
the participants vote
and rank. That turned out really great
so that was a vibe coded app. Matt had his
And on that app by the way
we didn't get to talk about this
I was thinking about this when I was walking home at night
but I feel like that app is
kind of the live participation
thing of Builder
but to me that feels like the hub around which all kinds of other useful software to empower
our builder community i think the miami builder community happened last night too and like
builder communities around the world as they sprout up to have like a piece of software that
helps you run all aspects of the builder so like let's say i have a topic that i want to submit
for a month out i should do that today submit it and then whenever people want to look at it
whenever they register for the event they can look at it and be like oh i'd like to see that
that, that, that. I don't really care about that, whatever.
I feel like this could be almost like,
I think we used Meetup for registration.
Maybe we can make that all smooth and integrated
because it's basically software is kind of free
to develop these days, right?
I agree. So we'll, there's definitely
ways to integrate it better. We're going to
do that. You mentioned
Builder Miami as well. And so
we already mentioned in the show that
there was going to be a Builder. We already have like another
location pop up and we anticipate
this will spring up all over the
world. But it's exciting that
there's already another builder
in the world, in Miami.
They had their first meetup last night
and they shared a summary with us
and it went super well.
They had like 16 people attend,
so good attendance.
High quality folks there too.
Like Joao showed up
and he's co-founder of OpenNode
and now he has a new startup.
So like a very experienced builder
in the Bitcoin space.
And Stephen DeLorm was there
and like Connor
and like so many great people were there.
and it sounds like they had a similar experience to us
in terms of great audience engagement
and they vibe-coded stuff as well.
Yeah, it's great.
One other thought that came out of that,
I really like your idea, DK,
of having a hub that can share software
and potentially topics and voting even
across all of the builders.
I mean, obviously I loved that
the voting mechanism last night
came from the audience
and from someone local, that's really cool.
But he was asking about ways to make it better
and should I prioritize votes more
or should I prioritize Bitcoin that's Vings apped more?
And what's the formula there?
What's the formula there?
And I mean, yes,
we could have a lot of different takes on this.
Maybe it's an Osterbase,
so it's more open and I love that.
But I do think that maybe the simplest
and fastest way to get something like this off the ground,
more sophisticated-wise,
would be to do a stacker news territory.
Because Cain's already got so much of that
baked in the background
where you can have reputation,
accrue value over time.
And he's got his somewhat complex,
like algorithms for figuring out how to decay votes and you know how you gain reputation um so
perhaps that's another interesting thing to explore be actually creating a stacker news territory for
builder and that that's like one way we could surface what people want to talk yeah so maybe
it's like the the topics go like global builder is a territory on stacker news and that's more like
the topics the information that would be interesting yes to the builder communities worldwide um i think
the stuff that the other david did is almost to me it feels like it's more like an event
management, kind of live event,
event pre-reg, event topics,
maybe you can pull from Global Builder
or from Stacker News or something.
So to be explored.
Great. So we covered Builder
really well, I think. One of the topics
out of that, I want to talk about Goose
a little bit. You want to talk about Goose, I think.
We'll talk about it.
And then it's,
well, so Goose is one of several
different front-end
software interfaces that you can engage
different LLMs, right? And it's
open source.
And what was just recently announced
as well is Block,
who created Goose, has now
created a new group that's very
much like Spiral, the group I run,
and that it's independent
of commercial interest by Block.
And I think they're starting off of five
developers focused
on Goose open source software development.
So just a further commitment to
open source
Goose and have this
independent group of engineers and a grant program was announced similar to what similar to what
spiral has done for six years now so i think that's super exciting um and you know i think
there's interest by goose to um like right now goose i think is optimized for like automating
workflows and whether you're at a corporation or um if you're programming um like a lot of the
Vibe Coding Jack has done has been done through
Goose. And just to clarify
in case people are unaware of Goose
you may be aware of like a cursor
or a windsurf. Those are sort of closed
source commercial IDE like
things you know VS Code forks and stuff
or VS Code itself
with plugins but Goose
is sort of you know in the same vein
as that kind of thing but a lot more just the chat
and not really trying to kind of
also present the code. So think of it as
like an open source
very chat focused kind of
competitor to the closed source cursors and windsurf of the world just to kind of set some
context yeah and in general i think i mean my own experience and talking like with you and a few
other people um is that it's uh it's not as good of out-of-box experience relative to some of the
commercial uh ones um but it is quite powerful like if you put in if you put in the effort you
can like you can create really great stuff so i think um you know the optimist view there is just
it's just a matter of time.
And because it's open,
it'll probably get
it real fast.
The hope is open source.
So it'll get,
and certainly
Locke's hope
is that it's not just
a block thing.
It's a public good.
Lots of other contributors.
And so I am excited
to see this new initiative
that's Spiral-like,
independent group,
starting off with like
five experienced engineers,
but having this grant program
as well.
So cool.
Do we have a Steve Lee equivalent?
Do we know who it is?
There is a lead.
Okay, it's not announced yet.
I don't know if it's announced yet.
But it's not a Steve Lee.
but there's a lead um interestingly he uh worked at google way back when we worked at google so
early early google guy google's having a comeback um see your twitter on that yeah so i i'm in touch
with him and i'm like hey you know i'm happy to give advice when you know anytime i can i can help
out since i've been doing this for six years now at the company um so i think that's really exciting
and then one thing i talked to him about is which we talked about work here yeah it's like you know
Presidia Bitcoin, yes, it has Bitcoin in the title and it's Bitcoin, but as people know, first of all, in this show, we talk about AI a lot.
We talk about the intersection of AI and Bitcoin.
We talk about open source all the fucking time.
Open source.
And so, like the hackathon we hosted here in May, AI was a big part of it in multiple ways.
using AI tools,
like half the participants
Vibe-coded their apps
and half of the top four
were Vibe-coded apps.
And then also,
we talk a lot about AI agents
using Bitcoin as payments.
So there's so much intersection
between those two topics.
I think it's a natural home
for people who want to work
on open source AI,
open source Goose,
that they'd be welcome members here
and like really have a rich environment
to do their work,
be around other open source advocates.
So cool.
So yeah.
I remember when I brought Adrian by here,
he specifically wanted to come by
to see what this felt like
because he was like,
I kind of want to do an open source,
you know, kind of an AI focused open source
kind of workspace.
It's not about startups,
but it's more about helping support
those kinds of contributors.
So maybe this actually becomes
the kind of place that he was envisioning.
Actually, I mean, I hear through the grapevine, there are more and more parts of the building opening up.
So maybe the next move, we just expand.
Yeah, well.
The yoga studio?
The yoga studio is safe.
Don't worry.
Okay.
So the five full-time engineers on that team, I already checked.
They don't live in the Bay Area, so I don't think they're going to live here.
Not yet.
But not yet.
Well, the lead, I've definitely invited.
I think he's going to come visit this fall.
Okay.
So then he'll see firsthand how great Presider Bitcoin is.
but for people listening or if you know
folks that would be interested in a
grant to work on open source Goose
first of all
awesome and then if you happen to be in the Bay Area
or want to live in the Bay Area
and you want to be
a great space to work from with other
awesome people check out
Can people just hop on like the GitHub
and are there a set of lists
or roadmap ideas of
kind of what features or what big projects
or topics Goose is about to undertake
I believe so.
I think they just published,
like, here's the top five priorities right now.
So I think it might be nice to be able
to just sort of get a sense
not of just what the tool feels like,
but also kind of where this is going
to start to figure out if it's something.
I would also like to piggyback on that
and just say that one of the things
I'm increasingly bullish on
is thinking about Nostre as the agentic web.
And so part of the reason I'm busy,
a little alpha drop is uh for for lps in the fund you'll be getting the update later it's finally
done finally it's gonna violate the sec oh shit uh i mean uh no no don't drop too much alpha here
okay not too much alpha but um uh but when now now it's when you give it to i know exactly
setting you up one of the things that i'm um yeah that i'm increasingly sure of is that if
nostril is going to win i think it's going to be for something new and i think agentic ai is the
I'm most bullish on. And so obviously Jack is doing a lot of his like Nostra vibe coding stuff
with Goose as well. All of the like Nostra guys that are vibe coding are using Goose.
So I think that in addition to the intersection between sort of Bitcoin and Goose, I think people
that want to use, you know, open identity and open data transfer on the web, tons of opportunity
there with Nostra. And a shout out to Gigi and Pablo. You know, they have their sovereign
engineering cohort, which they run in Madera. I think they're about to do number five. It's
awesome how many of these they've done. By the way,
they have a really, I forget the name
of it now, but pretty out there podcast. I think it's
probably one of my top three favorite podcasts
in the world right now. So shout out to, I think
Gigi's been doing even more of that. What's the name of it?
I don't even remember, but it's...
Is it Sovereign Engineering?
Somehow that's in the description or something, but it's
by pirates for pirates, so
it's good. But I would love to see us
get a little bit of that Sovereign Engineering energy
here at Presidio Bitcoin. So guys that are
building and vibe-coding with Nostra, with Bitcoin
and trying to build a free web.
I'd love to see that.
And just to summarize some product roadmap ideas for Goose.
Well, we've talked about prompt engineering and prompt skill development and prompt sharing and prompt education, all those things.
And creating a library.
Is that on Nostra, GitHub, whatever?
Maybe not.
Maybe it's the data stored on Nostra and it's integrated into Goose.
It's just part of Goose.
That's one thing that could be facilitated.
We just talked about live streaming.
And maybe that's like a separate project,
but integrated into Goose in a seamless way.
And awareness is created through Goose.
So I think there's a lot.
And then one thing I've talked to them a little bit about is privacy.
Like I love what Maple AI is doing and OpenSecret.
Now with Goose, it's client-side
and you can run a model on your computer too.
So I mean, one way to get privacy
is just run a model in your computer,
run goose on your computer and then it's all local.
But if you want to use a beefier
or either, you know,
one, if you don't want to set that up,
if it's too much friction,
or two, if you want to run an
open source model that is
too beefy to run on your computer
is not beefy enough, then
not enough pull-ups.
I think you need like two of the ultra threes.
Then, you know, what's the privacy
story there?
And it depends on the application. Like you're saying
you want all your prompts to be
like literally public, right?
So obviously for those use cases,
privacy doesn't really,
I mean, it's like literally
the opposite of privacy.
But certainly for corporate stuff,
for like health,
like if any kind of,
any individual who's one
to ask health questions,
things like that,
is going to be very privacy sensitive.
Okay, a couple thoughts
that just came to mind with that.
One, I was actually just chatting
with Tony this morning
without, again,
dropping too much alpha.
Shout out to those guys.
They are like,
they went through a major pivot
and like, I'm so proud of them.
You know, Tony and Marks,
but I mean, obviously Tony's been there for the whole ride.
Like they're really getting product market fair right now.
And it's so exciting to see like privacy.
Like we always ask, does anyone ever really care?
Like the answer is yes.
And like with every new Sam Altman interview that drops,
like revenue goes to the roof.
So just shout out to those guys.
The ultimate marketing tool.
It really is.
And so I'm super happy with that.
So shout out to those guys.
Number two, I do think,
and I wonder if maybe there's some connection here
between Presidio Bitcoin and Goose
where I still think one of the things we're missing.
And maybe it's too early in the curve.
Maybe it's not commoditized enough yet.
But I want to reiterate,
I do not trust even the open source models
until I can see the information it's trained on.
I don't care about the weights.
That's a great start.
I want to see a fully open source model
where I can go and audit and see,
show me every piece of information
that this was trained on.
And it would be nice to see an excluded list too.
Yes.
Like what was intentionally excluded.
I want to see everything in there
because I am not at all yet convinced
that if you don't have,
that the weights themselves are far better than nothing.
But if you don't know exactly what it's trained on,
I don't believe that we don't know what the risks are.
I mean, I agree, but like, how are you going to do that?
Because there's too much information for you.
So you'll have to use another AI.
Yeah, exactly.
And then it's a little bit of a bootstrapping problem.
It is, but you can have multiple bots like checking this
and be like, okay, well, if I don't necessarily totally trust this one,
I have Claude running and I also have XAI.
Unless they're all colluding with each other.
The rabbit hole runs deep here.
Yeah. If the big, if the, the big reset is all coordinated then.
You heard it here first. Um, but, but, but, but in all seriousness, I don't know what is the right
approach to that, but this seems like, I mean, it's probably extremely expensive project, but it
seems like this is perhaps civilizationally, like I could just see, I mean, we're going to talk about
the, the sort of like, which way Western ain't on turning point we're all at. Like there, there,
there is a big turning point in the world. And this is one of the key cruxes of my mind.
if you don't have that open model.
Like open source Goose is great.
Open private model, great.
But unless we see the data set,
I think in 50 years,
we're going to be like,
oh shit, that was a mistake.
Speaking of the big reset,
it's a good transition
to our next topic.
Because I think you mentioned big reset,
kind of joking,
but like...
Are we talking micro strategy?
Yeah.
We're starting to say the strategy
and like their new offering,
which I think you were the first
that I heard observe
that maybe it's a stable coin play.
and then
like you think
I believe I dropped that
in the chat actually
oh was it you
no no it was me
you did too
I got it before you
okay
read the history
that's fair
but I will say
shout out to Max
Max thinks strategy
might be like
the most valuable company
in the world
of all time
ever
and then
so let's talk
let's talk about that
like come on
that's crazy talk
like how could they
become that
and then
is that good or bad
for Bitcoin
is that good or bad
for the world
like
does it lead to like
you know, economic collapse.
That's why you made the big reset comment.
But like, are we, does it set up,
now that Bitcoin is worth a whole lot more
than in past bear markets,
and it's being integrated so much more deeply
in the existing financial system,
and we'll hear your story about how it gets,
you know, 10x bigger, 50x bigger, 100x bigger, whatever.
Then, you know, is it,
then we're entering like too big to fail territory
and like, what if it does,
what if it's too big to fail,
but it does fail
and we have no recourse.
There's no bailout.
You know, then the big,
so, take it away.
So I'll offer my perspective
and then on the stable coin thing,
I'm actually a little
sort of less than the wheat.
So I would love to hear
your take on that as well.
But for me, you know,
this has been a journey
we've talked about on PBJ
over the last several months.
You know, I started off.
I think it was on our first episode, right?
Literally our first episode.
That's right, our very first episode.
But we huddled out there.
And I will say, I mean,
I don't have a ton of microstrategy
or anything like that
and obviously not financial advice,
doing research, blah, blah, blah.
But like I was forced buyer of MicroStrategy
in my Roth IRA originally
because Vanguard wouldn't let me buy the ETF.
So thank you, Vanguard.
And-
Forced.
Interesting definition of forced.
Yeah, well, I probably would have bought iBit
or Bitwise or whatever.
So you could have bought NVIDIA.
If you understand what's happening in the world,
that's a definite-
Yeah, not financial advice.
Not financial advice.
But anyway, so that kind of at least got me.
And it's interesting because like,
I feel like with Bitcoin as well,
like once you own a little bit,
you're like, okay, well now I want to read more.
I'll start learning more.
And it's been, I don't know, a year long or whatever it's been now, almost a year long journey to becoming both on my investment hat, a MicroStrategy maximalist, and on my Bitcoiner hat, terrified.
So here's how I see things happening.
What MicroStrategy has done is they have figured out that they're basically calling a bluff.
And I think Danny said this very nicely in a tweet on the entire fiat financial system.
They're basically saying, and you've said this too in many ways, that the entire fiat financial system is radically overpriced.
NVIDIA is worth over like whatever, 30,000 Bitcoin or 30 million Bitcoin. There's not 30
million Bitcoin that will ever be in existence. Like MicroStrategy is calling the bluff that
everything in fiat land is overpriced. Equities, real estate, debt, all of it. It's all overpriced.
There is no way that any of these companies should be trading 50X earnings. It just doesn't
make sense unless they're the store value, right? And so MicroStrategy and Michael Saylor, who that
man is a savant, he's going to go down as the Michael Jordan of finance. It's unbelievable as
he's calling bluff and he's accelerating his own pace. What he's doing is, you know, everyone's
debating, oh, well, should MicroStrategy be trading in MNAV or not? It's like, dude, that's
just so the wrong question. That's missing the entire point. What Saylor is doing is he's a
company and he's delivering value to the market. When you buy an equity, it's on, you're projecting
the future, what the cash flows or what the balance sheet is a better way of saying that
in this new world of that company is going to look like, you know, years, decades into the future.
And so forget does MicroStrategy trading at a premium to MNAP, the better question is, what is the service that MicroStrategy is offering to the market? Well, the service it's offering to the market is, it's taking Bitcoin, it's over collateralizing that Bitcoin in a loan, so it's just literally saying, here's the Bitcoin as the base, now we're going to go find product market fit for every pool of capital out there that exists that maybe wants some of this Bitcoin exposure, but because of the volatility of Bitcoin, because of mandates, because of regulations, whatever reasons they can't buy Bitcoin,
directly. So we're going to offer them this product instead. And we've talked about that a
lot on the show, right? Like, you know, first he did the convertible debt, then he came out with
these perpetual preferred equities that are targeting, you know, bond managers and portfolio
managers that, you know, we know a lot of these guys that are orange pill, but they can't buy any
other way. Cool. And he's offering rates of return on all of these instruments, you know,
and if you think about it, he's trying to go after different sort of risk appetites,
different tranches in the stack, just like we've seen with, you know, you know, the classic,
I don't know, CDOs and CDO squared and all this stuff from traditional finance.
But the difference is it's not collateralized by homes that are way overvalued, where they're
giving loans for someone in Miami to buy six homes and they make $50,000 a year, which
of course is going to collapse.
Instead, he's over-leveraged this with 7x or more of the Bitcoin he needs, and in some
cases, way more to make the minimum payments on all the offerings.
So you can go deeper in the weeds.
I highly recommend the punter Jeff dude.
I've been binging a lot of his podcasts.
That guy is sharp AF and he knows, I mean, he'll spell it out in great detail.
The big story this week though, and the reason we're talking about this is so far he's been
attacking the bond market.
He's been attacking the equity market, $300 trillion and $100 trillion markets respectively.
But I'm just starting to wrap my head around what happened this week because this is the
most gangster move I've ever seen in my entire life.
Honestly, hats off to Saylor.
I have to believe he's probably working with the state at this point for this to be allowed, but we'll find out.
And what he's doing is now he's offering stable value with stretch.
And I was like, stable value?
What the fuck is that?
And I started reading on this.
I'm trying to understand.
I'm listening to some of these podcasts.
And it's finally started clicking.
I'm like, oh, man.
So this instrument that he's offering, it pays out a monthly dividend.
And there's an interest rate on that dividend.
And the interest rate is adjustable.
He's also got some other things.
I don't fully understand all the mechanics because I got the ability to call or claw some
this back when he wants to. So he has these different levers he can pull. But the idea is
variable interest rate, monthly, paid out monthly, stable value. And you're like, stable value?
Wait a second. This guy's issuing a Bitcoin back dollar. Oh shit. Because if he's at,
and in his little chart where he explains this, he's like, and what are the markets we're going
after? And he's like, all of commercial paper, all of like commercial savings accounts, or
like retail savings account.
Stablecoins I like oh man he coming for Tether He is coming for Tether and then he not stopping there Did he say that publicly Well he didn say it publicly but in the slide stable coins is like a tiny tiny blip compared to the like whatever trillion in like dollar
denominated commercial paper and overnight lending. But when I started to understand this,
I was like, okay. And one tweet from this Bitcoin research account I love just said it perfectly.
Before this week, Saylor was, or MicroStrategy, whatever they're called,
Bitcoin's investment bank.
He gets Bitcoin, he goes to the market, he securitizes it,
he brings capital into Bitcoin.
Great.
As of this week, assuming he's allowed to do this,
and again, I am highly skeptical he's allowed to do this
unless there's some implicit agreement from the state part.
He is now the central bank.
He is issuing effectively dollar-denominated assets,
but unlike stable coins,
which with the Genius Act and all that
can't offer the yield
because Tether is making ungodly sums of money
by just like blanketing all the 5% from treasuries
or whatever it is.
He's sharing yield with his customers
and unlike all of the past algorithmic stable coins,
and by the way,
this has been like the wet dream
of like all of the crypto bros
and Andreessen's back like six versions of this
over the years,
but they never work
because it's always backed by some coin
that people don't want.
You know, it's always scammy people like,
what's his name?
the Korean dude.
Like it's always just...
Joe Kwon.
Yeah, that dude.
It's like...
And look, to be clear,
like, I don't know,
is there a chance
that Saylor gets above his skis here
and starts getting through it?
It's certainly possible.
I'm not saying...
Like this is the first one
where I've been like,
okay, watch this closely.
But he has way more
of a real asset backhand,
which in my opinion
is radically undervalued in Bitcoin.
He has the ability
to adjust interest rate,
to take instruments out.
I think that's what
the sort of call option is,
or clawback mechanism
at any point.
He's got a lot more levers that he can pull.
And again, he's radically over collateralized with how much Bitcoin he has.
So if you start thinking about it, then he's like, okay, well, he can start basically being
the new issuer of the dollar.
And now with the Genius Act, he can tokenize those instruments, which effectively become
stable coins.
Oh my God.
Like it's the story is not tether.
Story is not stable coin.
The story is Michael Saylor is creating the new Federal Reserve.
Now, and when I put on my investor hat, I'm like, as Bitcoin reprices the world, if you
believe that's going to happen. I believe that's going to happen. We all believe that's going to
happen. If idiot, 30 million Bitcoin is literally impossible. This is going to become the most
valuable company in the history of humanity. Oh my God. And then you put on your Bitcoin or hat
and you're like, wait a second, what does that mean for Bitcoin? Oh shit. This guy is going to
suck up so much Bitcoin. And I kind of joke that the attack was never sort of 1984, but brave new
world. It's not going to be like, okay, you can't hold your keys. No, it's going to be like, hey,
like just give us your keys and like you want that mansion and the lambo you got it bro it's all
there and a lot of people are gonna be like sweet i'm in and like i mean look i'm an investor too
like i i you would be foolish not to at least entertain what's happening here and yet i also
increasingly think that if we don't get some kind of a breakout use case for bitcoin payments the
next 12 18 maybe 24 months like bitcoin as money may not function for a generation and that's that's
risk. I know that's spicy, but yeah.
Yep. And we're going to dive more into that
risk in a little bit, but let's
come, so one thing, so
thanks for that explanation.
So do you see
a next step, next
logical step is to issue tokens
that are one-to-one to this
traditional security? I don't even think he needs to
do that because we saw, wasn't
it Robinhood that says we're going to take
a thing, I don't even think that they can't
actually access
OpenAI stock, but they said we're going to tokenize
AI stack can sell it to you.
You're saying he doesn't have to do it.
He doesn't even need to do it.
He just.
Someone else will.
I would think about the spectrum of offerings that Saylor has provided to the market.
You know, starting the first one was MSTR.
And that was just like all the volatility, no yield.
Right.
So you get 100% volatility, 0% yield.
And Stride, Strike, Strife, I think are the other three.
Right.
They're just different.
I'm impressed.
Yeah, I'm impressed.
You've done your homework.
They're different, you know, areas on the, there's different trade-offs of like, you know, how much can you pull back?
You can't claw back any of it.
Here's the risk.
You get a kicker in equity.
So they're different spectrum of a little bit of risk, a little bit of all, a little bit of yield, right?
So they're some yield, some vol.
And then this is kind of like the other end of the spectrum, which is zero vol, all yield, right?
And so that is very, very similar to like stable or money market or U.S. Treasury.
U.S. Treasury is what, four and a half percent or whatever it is.
And I think these ones are nine percent, right?
So it's basically like double.
But if the price were to get bid up, they would issue and drive it down, right?
So he just is presenting this instrument to the market.
And then Robinhood or whoever could take this publicly traded equity that they actually can get access to.
They can't necessarily get access to OpenAI stuff like they claim to, but they can definitely get access to STRC.
They can buy that, tokenize it, and just make it available to everybody worldwide, right?
I see that, but let's talk about potential fragmentation and what that would mean.
So let's say Robinhood does that.
So they'd acquire some of this security and then tokenize it, but that's just a subset of the total.
And then other competitors might do that as well.
but like Robin Hood
names this you know X
and someone else names it Y like there's a name
mismatch and then you use this fragmentation
then we have
we each have wallets
and we just want to have dollars in our
wallet like what we care about is dollars
in our wallet what actually is that
it's this token representation
of this traditional
security but mine is
flavor A and yours is flavor B
and yours is flavor C so how do we
I mean first of all is that accurate that that could play out that way and then secondly how to deal with that fragmentation interoperability maybe the same playbook that stablecoin.
I mean, that's what bridge is.
My bridge is...
And then my last question,
doesn't that suggest that strategy
should be the central issuer of the token,
much like Tether,
and make sure that there's not interoperability issues?
Yeah, I mean, maybe...
I think those are great questions.
I don't think we have tons of clarity on any of them,
but none of them seem like...
It seemed like the kinds of things
that would play out in the market, and they could...
Yeah, I'm not...
These are not posed as like,
oh this future is not going to work out it's more just like we will stumble my guess is it will be
better for strategy and i don't have any inside information on this but my guess is it would be
better for strategy to just say here's a thing in the market go do stuff with it free market and
you know if if robin hood wants to make their own fine and if schwab or somebody wants to make their
own fine uh somebody might there might be a startup opportunity to be like what bridge did
for stable coins to do that for tokenized equity.
Yep.
Right.
So that wouldn't surprise me
if that kind of thing were to emerge.
And if that were to emerge
and there was tons of volume,
but ultimately it was all STRC as the stable coin,
maybe strategy would later come in and say,
okay, let's clean this up.
And to be clear, I mean, markets,
even prior to bridge, I mean, price this stuff, right?
Like for in the early days of stable coins,
or like at least in the last DeFi wave in 2020,
you had the algorithmic stable coins,
like MakerDAO, of course, that's backed by ETH.
like. And then you've got, you know, the USDT and USDC and those traded at different prices
relative to each other based on people's different confidence, liquidity, things like that. So I
think the market will probably solve that problem. Maybe it's interesting for him to issue his own.
Like, I don't know. I mean, at this point, I'm like, sailor can see into the future further than
I can. What I do think about though is, I mean, the banks have got to be like kind of furious
about this, right? Because they just fought to be able to keep the ability to issue stable coins
and keep all of that sweet. And Tether's got to be furious. Like the treasury yield themselves,
I was like, this is kind of like a checkmate move on both the banks and Tether, which is why I'm kind of like, you know.
And Circle.
Circle just IPO'd and the valuation was expected to be $5 billion and now it's $60 billion or whatever.
So getting to the, first of all, it impacts them as well.
Yeah.
Also, as far as like strategy valuation, if you just look at the valuation being applied to a Circle.
Yeah.
and whatever Tether is valued at,
which would be,
has to be much more than Circle.
Yeah.
It does kind of suggest a huge valuation.
And by the way,
I think the STRC IPO was meant to issue 500.
Is that right?
500?
Something like that.
Million.
Million?
I don't remember what that was.
And then I think I saw that it's at 2.8 billion.
2.5, 2.8.
I thought I said 2.5
and I saw there's another one that said 2.8.
so maybe as of this morning
I don't know if it's
radically over
is it priced yet
is it out today or no
I just saw people
speculating
a couple months ago
someone we all know
and respect
I think
I wasn't part of this
conversation but told you guys
that
TetherTron
like
it's one
yeah
he's like
stop LARPing
100%
like USDC is a joke
all the other platforms
are a joke
and
I forget if we talked about
on the show or just privately
but I'm like
I mean I totally disagree
on the underlying platform.
Tether's already demonstrated
you can switch those out over time.
And then Tether itself,
obviously they are in the driver's seat right now,
but I think there's going to be stiff competition.
With the Genius Act,
there's going to be more competition.
I mean, the Genius Act,
we didn't talk about it on the show yet,
but there's a framework
so that you can have federal-issued
or even state-issued ones.
And there's a cap.
A state-issued one can only be up to $10 billion,
But that framework creates a structure where you can imagine lots of competition, lots of different stablecoin issuance.
So anyway, with that backdrop, now we're talking about strategy, maybe checkmate move.
First of all, to the degree that that's true or becomes true, then Tether is very vulnerable.
Extremely.
And let's be clear on this, right?
The reason I'm saying it's a checkmate move is because they have so much more Bitcoin than anyone else in the market. And remember, all of these different instruments, it's all a flywheel that allows them to just keep sucking the Bitcoin out of the market. And so it's reflexive. The more people buy each of these instruments, including the radically oversubscribed dollar instrument they're issuing, the more Bitcoin they get.
So like, I don't think there's any entity that can play catch up with them at this point,
other than perhaps the US federal government itself.
But again, I kind of have to think that they're okay with this.
Otherwise, it's almost like a checkmate move from the Fed against the banks, because the
banks, I mean, like what's going to happen is if you, even if you're Tether, they have
a lot of Bitcoin and maybe Tether is the one entity that has like a Hail Mary they could,
they could throw it, you know, to try and catch up.
And that's probably what they're doing at 21.
But the issue is like, say there's so much more Bitcoin than you do.
So unless somehow, and I'm guessing we're seeing all these OG whales moving lots of Bitcoin. I think one report was that Adam Back was moving in at 21 or something. Maybe they're just like behind the scenes trying to just gather as much Bitcoin as they can to try and catch up. But like, as they start doing that, the genius of what Saylor is doing is it drives the value of his Bitcoin up even faster, which makes it even harder to catch him.
And by the way, all these other treasury companies that we've talked about, like, I think he's just goading all these people into doing this.
No offense to these people, but like, I'm sorry, there's no way you're better at risk management than Sailor.
And you're not going to get the same credit terms.
I have a great meme that one of us has to do.
So, you know the memes where, like, there's someone sitting by someone, they have a gun to their head, and then someone behind it.
It'd be like, we're all facing not each other.
Oh, yeah.
But then there's actually.
No, not the astronaut one.
They're in like a courtroom or church.
kind of pew like seating
and then like so it'd be like
we need the meme generator by the way
you know what I'm talking about or not
there's three people sitting
right in a row
not facing each other
and like so imagine
you guys turning around you have a gun to his head
you think you've got him I've got a gun to your head
but then there's a fourth
person way up high who has a
rifle shot or whatever
I've seen the one with the guy with the bubble
it's the same concept right the guy with the bubble and then you zoom out
and then it's like the guy who's holding the guy.
So seriously, we need a meme.
I thought it was better at memes.
I don't know this one.
Nostra Bitcoin.
I've asked for this like six months ago.
Please someone build this
so we can collect those sweet sats.
Pick one.
Now I forgot.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you.
There it is.
Thank you.
Person of interest, church sniper.
But they don't show the sniper.
The last one.
Or meme generator.
I see it in the bottom.
Yeah.
Oh, you can kind of see the sniper in the bottom, right?
Oh, yes.
Yes, yes, yes.
I've seen it.
Okay, sorry.
But now I'm forgetting
who the sniper is.
Oh, my God.
It's the U.S. government.
Sailor, Ilan, Paolo.
Okay.
Oh, my God.
It'll come to me,
but we can move on.
I had some brilliant,
like, sniper that's not strategy.
Oh, somebody that
we haven't talked about.
Yes.
Okay.
It's going to have to come.
Well, this is,
I know.
You can't give us the clipping.
While you think about it,
I'll give you some time
to think about it.
Austin knows your name.
By the way, we have some chat we should chat on.
Oh, thank you, Austin.
Thanks, Austin.
He's a diehard PBJ fan.
Oh, we do.
Can we scroll up on that?
Is that possible?
In the chat.
There's not much to scroll up on.
Famify bot.
Oh, Famify is back.
Thank God.
Matt was being a courteous Canadian.
Okay, cool, Austin.
What I was going to say is you mentioned that maybe Adam back and people are moving.
I'm certainly not in his position.
But I did hear about private transactions that are offering Bitcoiners allocation in private treasury company transactions if they move Bitcoin into them.
I think Strive, which is Rivette Grumaswamy's, I think that's kind of the way they're trying to differentiate.
Which again is, and I hate to say this, this is why I like the stuff you said.
It's so important that you get the, it's not Hotel California, you get the ability to withdraw in kind.
Because what they're doing is they're saying, hey, Bitcoiners.
it's the same thing i'm saying they're saying give us your keys and don't worry about it
you know malibu or i guess malibu's gone but like i don't know somewhere nice with the
mansion like i don't know man i i i have uh remembered my ultimate check yes i mean it's
kind of a joke but uh satoshi is the one oh yeah yeah because who who has more bitcoin than
microstrategy satosh yeah sure yeah sure so it's a long conflict or not not as a long play
and i think as bitcoiners who appreciate the benefits of self-custody i think we could look
at this and be like this is crazy this is stupid why are we letting them do this this is xrp
and i i would actually take the view that it is it does have that feel to it but i think it's
impossible for Bitcoin to become a
mainstream thing without the
trad fi or tard fi as some people
say kind of ecosystem
I've never heard
I haven't either
I have a friend who always uses that
the things you learn on TVJ
tard fi
I guess tard fi works too
that's not politically correct
probably not
after the Sydney Sweeney drop
political correct
we're back to normal
But I don't think we can, you know, I don't think Bitcoin can get to the whole world without this kind of unfortunate style of, you know, integration with the traditional financial system.
Because it's what people are comfortable with and people are not going to change what they're comfortable with as fast as they're going to understand that they should own some sort of Bitcoin.
You know, own.
At the Presidio Bitcoin launch party, we were fortunate enough to have Jack Dorsey here, David Marcus here, Michael Saylor here.
So three prominent people within Bitcoin with pretty different view or like things that they emphasize around Bitcoin.
And I listen to all of them and I agree with all of them.
In my view, they're not competing visions.
They're just emphasizing different.
I mean, Bitcoin is such a complicated beast.
They're just emphasizing different things.
Jack emphasizes, you know, uh, freedom tech and freedom money. Um, you know, I would call like
Satoshi's vision, the white paper, the type, peer to peer cash. I'm not going to let them
we're taking it back. So, uh, and David Marcus emphasizes like using it as, as, as money,
everyday money. And Jack definitely does as well. I mean, he coined everyday money within block and
I think other people are using now.
Whereas Saylor, that's not what he emphasizes.
It's capital.
It's everything you guys just talked about.
And also, I'm saying this because of what you said, David.
You can love or hate adoption by financial institutions,
institutional money, governments,
whether it be at the local, state, country level.
You can love or hate that.
But first of all, I mean, no one should really be against it in principle because Bitcoin's for everyone. It's permissionless. It's for everyone. So now it's certainly reasonable to like monitor the situation and be like, it's becoming an unhealthy balance. And we're going to talk about it right now on the show about risk to Bitcoin.
Um, so that's absolutely worth discussing and like, okay, but it's, but it's less about
like, okay, we need to change the code to like prevent a bank from owning it.
It's more like what, what are the incentive structures or how do we accelerate using Bitcoin
its everyday money?
Um, so that there's competition for these different use cases and we can protect and
preserve some of the, the key properties of Bitcoin that might be lost over time.
if the dominant narrative
and actual usage of Bitcoin
is number go up
and it just gets sucked
into treasury companies
and ETFs.
So I want to offer
two thoughts on this.
One is a response
to what you said
and then a response
to what you said.
I, again,
putting on my investor hat,
MSTR, holy shit.
Honestly, like,
tip, tip of the hat to Sailor.
I put on my Bitcoiner
or like,
kind of like hoping
this actually promotes
human freedom hat.
I'm like,
we might be in some problems.
We might be in
for some problems here.
Now,
Just to play back on that a little bit, I had a really great chat with Ben Ark. And Ben is one of my favorite people in Bitcoin because, you know, he's much more of the like Bitcoin is not, you know, purely capitalism. In fact, he used to call himself BT socials, which is kind of funny, but it's something new. It's a commons. And for those of you who don't know, Ben is effectively the co-founder of Noster with Fiat Joff as well, who also helped him start Ellen Bits. And anyways, very, very interesting guy. I did a pod with him about a year ago. Highly recommend listening to that. Like we talk a lot about sort of dialectics and sort of like he's a big Hegel fan.
And the thing I asked him when we chatted on Wednesday or Thursday is I was like, Ben, make me not depressed. If it really is, sure, we all get rich, but the whole mission dies. And he was like, yeah, don't worry about it, man. And because he's like, this is just how reality works, dialectics. There's a thesis, an antithesis, and then a synthesis.
Right. And so like, I increasingly think this is the way it has to go. Like to your point,
like there's a new freedom money, but there's still all the old capital that's sitting out in
the old world. And his point was like, Bitcoin is going to reflect some of this in its image.
And then this is going to reflect some of its image. And it's just going to keep going back
and forth until we reach the new stability point. And so I think that, I mean, it's kind of this
question of like, is Bitcoin corrupting the, or not corrupting, is Bitcoin fixing the traditional
financial system? Is the traditional financial system corrupting Bitcoin? The answer is both.
and it's going to keep going back and forth for a long time.
Then the question I come back with,
so in that sense, and by the way,
even if it gets totally quote unquote captured,
I still think it's at most for a generation,
Bitcoin will break free.
People will always remember,
oh yeah, there's that reason
we didn't do the same mistake we made as civilization
for like every hundred years,
for a thousand years or 2000 years,
whatever it's been.
At that point, there's only going to be
like a million Bitcoin left over
that are not lost by these other people.
No, no, no, but at some point-
What do you mean?
You can steal them, right?
Yeah, it'll be stolen or Saylor,
like his predecessor won't be,
or his successor won't be anywhere near as competent as he is.
He'll puke the coins out.
Eventually, nature will solve this problem.
Then the question I have, though, is like,
and this is-
I'm saying Bitcoin is going to be more scarce
than people realize.
There's not 21 million.
There's a million in the future.
Debatable with quantum computers and all that.
But regardless, like-
But they can be so, I mean,
unless you're saying they're going to permanently burn them.
You know, get lost, get hacked.
You know, what happened if Coinbase got hacked?
That's a real one.
Sure, but-
they're not, then they get recirculated.
They'll get recirculated eventually.
Just like with quantum computers, recirculated.
I mean, it might be.
So, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, so yes, but I agree with Steve on,
like, eventually get recirculated.
But then the question I have is a question
that we've been discussing
in sort of the Kevin Kelly context for years,
which is, you know, Kevin Kelly has this wonderful book
called What Technology Wants.
And the fundamental question that I,
and I go back and forth with this,
I don't know the answer,
is like, is everything scripted or is there free will?
Is there the ability to shift things a bit?
And sort of his argument has always been that
technology has to follow a certain pattern, like water flowing down a river. There's a reason that
we see fractal patterns emerge everywhere. That's just how nature works. So he would argue that once
you have different technological blocks that come together, there's an inevitable form,
almost a platonic form of the next technological block in Bitcoin. Some version of Bitcoin was
inevitable. And I agree with him that there are things that are inevitable. However, he also
pushes, and this is the part I don't know, I hope he's right, we'll find out, that the character
of that next building block can in fact be influenced.
And so the argument would be as an example,
some form of a digital communication system
for the whole globe, inevitable.
Digital money for the whole world, inevitable.
A hive mind, which is what I call my fund
for a reason that we're all growing into, inevitable.
But the character of that hive mind
could be China top down,
or it could be Bitcoin bottoms up.
And so the argument is like,
can you, with leverage of whatever sense you want, tip the scales towards the bottoms up versus the
top down? I don't know the answer to that. I certainly hope you can. That's, I think, why
we're all spending all of our time and energy. We're making a bet that you can do that and we'll
find out. If that's the case, my sort of thesis, and I posted a few tweets about this this week,
is I think we got 12 to 18 months, 24 max, before all the Bitcoin or so much gets siphoned off
that we're in serious trouble
to try and find breakout velocity for payments.
Now, I love what Block is doing
and we should talk more about
using Bitcoin as everyday money.
My strong intuition is that
it's going to take too long
to get people paying at Square.
It's great they're doing it.
We should be pushing on every front.
My intuition is
if you're going to get breakout velocity
before capture happens,
and by the way,
I'm not even saying Taylor wants this in a bad way,
before the inevitable consequence of gravity
plays its course,
even if he a totally good actor which he very well may be is that you have to find something with a J potential It needs to be something that could literally just go exponential which is why we had the Bitcoin AI hackathon why we were pushing so much on getting goose in here
why we're talking about payments for agents. And increasingly, I'm of the mindset that we need
something with probably AI that could just go vertical. Then you get into the debate about what
could that be. I've talked about my ideas from the Edge podcast with Drew. If you haven't listened
that. There's a lot of ideas in there. But the two ideas that I came up with the most that can
move the needle, somewhat provocative, but somewhat real. One, on the off chance that
Andre Carpathy listens to this podcast, you should absolutely, I love XAI, but you should
absolutely join Block, work with Jack on Goose, try and get this thing adopted. This is a chance
to save freedom. So that's one move I could see making. The other is Cloudflare. They're in a
tremendous position to influence the way the internet goes. If they were to adopt L402 instead
of like some centralized thing for the way agents are paying each other, that could be
a massive, massive move. But these are just two ideas that come to mind. But my point
is, I think we have a very limited window to tip the scale and it can't just be, it needs
to be something big.
Let's expand on that. So if, let's say the next two years, Bitcoin payments don't become
everyday money, don't explode, which I'd say is the default base case, that, you know,
despite we're all working on it, a lot of people are, but that's the base case. In two
years, why is it inevitable then that it won't happen after that point?
Well, I mean, my fear is that enough people will either have turned over their keys in
terms of they want to just do some kind of in-kind redemption into strategy or one of
these treasury companies because they realize they're going to get better returns that way.
And so they're willing to sacrifice that.
Or enough somehow gets centralized that, well, I mean, one of two things, either there's
the 1984 approach where somehow it becomes harder to hold keys, but you're given tax benefits or
various slaps to hold an ETFs or MicroStrategy instead. Or the narrative just gets so far pushed
that no one is even thinking about that. They're already adopting the centralized versions,
which we'll talk about. Maybe that even comes through kind of like, I don't know,
stable coins or other centralized providers that get enough adoption while Bitcoin is just getting
so heavily sucked into the centralized ecosystem that not enough people are experimenting.
To be clear, I'm not saying it's like 100% checkmate, right?
Like maybe there is still time, but it just seems like the forces of gravity are Bitcoin
gets sucked into more centralized providers, more people get either sticks or carrots to
hand over their keys.
And at the same time, centralized solutions start getting breakout velocity.
And it's like people are doing micropayments with dollars.
So I think to just elaborate on that or expand on that, I don't think it's exactly people
who hold their keys.
there's a set of people who have the option to do it.
So there's obviously a segment of people
who manage their own private keys.
There's a segment of people who hold their coins
on exchanges like Coinbase.
And if we're looking at percentage of people,
number of people, a lot more people hold it on exchanges
than self-custody.
If we're looking at amount of Bitcoin,
then the majority is self-custody still.
But number of people, it's exchanges.
But at least if you hold it on Coinbase
or cash app or whatever, you can withdraw. You have that option. And it generally works.
Yeah.
Wow.
Sometimes people run into hiccups, but-
Cash app meets a few days.
Yeah, and Coinbase too. I mean, you are beholden to policies and whatever.
I think the dangerous part is if your Bitcoin is an IOU and you can't withdraw it. And that's
the case right now with ETFs. It's also the case if you buy strategy or any of these Bitcoin
treasury companies. And it ultimately becomes the tax trap. Because the tax trap is like,
I have, let's say I have $10,000 and I make an investment and I buy a BlackRock's ETF or strategy
doesn't really matter, either one. And then it moons. It goes to $50,000, $100,000. And now I
I have a huge capital gain.
But now I've reached a point in my life,
I actually want some Bitcoin to use as everyday money.
All of a sudden that's become valuable to me.
Well, I can't do that with these products,
at least today's versions of those products.
And I'm hesitant to, I can't withdraw.
Bless you.
But I'm in a tax trap.
Yeah.
Because I have to take this massive haircut
to sell it to turn it into actual Bitcoin that I can use.
And then it creates significant friction.
If I have to pay 30, 40, 50% tax
and lose that much of my Bitcoin just to spend it.
So I think that's the huge risk.
This is not here today,
but this in-kind redemption,
I think it was, you keep reminding me that it was, I think,
proposed in January for authorized participants.
so like the Jane Streets of the world
for more efficiency
and it's not yet been proposed
to make it to retail
but if you had in-kind creates and redemptions
to and from retail
wouldn't that avoid the tax trap on ETFs?
Yes, but not strategy.
But microstrategy, you're never going to redeem.
So something everyone should be
people who care about the health of Bitcoin long-term
and this is not just
I mean, there's a segment of people
a large segment of people in Bitcoin
that only care about store value,
number go up.
They either believe that
it'll never become everyday money.
They don't even care if it does,
or they think it's like 50 years from now.
I'm not judging.
I'm just saying there's a large segment of people
that are in that camp.
There's obviously a camp of people
who work towards this
or want it to be that
or believe that's the entire purpose of Bitcoin.
So I think
but the point of me saying that
is that long term
if Bitcoin loses its core principles
then everyone will lose.
Yes.
And that's one of the things I'd like to...
And that message doesn't get out enough.
It doesn't get out enough.
And I don't think
most of the people in the camp
of number go up, store of value
don't care about everyday money
don't realize
that their investment long term
becomes, I'd call it,
it's a LARP.
I mean, David and I talked about this
when we were mountain biking
the other day,
over the weekend,
that ultimately, to me,
Bitcoin just becomes like XRP or something.
It's a spicy take.
Yeah, because there's
a million different tokens.
There's a reason why we are
diehard Bitcoiners and a lot of other people
are diehard Bitcoiners. If you've done enough education
enough work, you understand the distinction and what makes Bitcoin different than all the other
tokens. And then when you compare different, you know, compared to like Ethereum, it's a little
bit more interesting debate because Ethereum has a lot of positives to it. But, you know,
we can certainly lay out why Bitcoin is very highly differentiated to Ethereum and why it stands to
win in the end. But again, something like XRP, like something that's extremely has all kinds of
crazy pre-mine token issues
and centralized. I'm watching the chat now.
Oh, the army?
Yes, I'm going to try to mention it.
Please no, God no. I think we need to tweet
it out to get a traction, but
we don't need to do that. Don't do that, Ashu, please.
We should scroll and see
what else we're saying. But if
Bitcoin loses
core properties such as
realistic ability
to self-custody, decentralization,
privacy,
I mean, it's not perfect privacy, but the privacy it has.
Censorship is persistent.
If it loses those properties, then it's sort of like, okay, it's kind of just another token.
And I use XRP as an example, but it's just another token.
So it's no longer like, why is it distinct?
Why does it deserve this multi-trillion dollar valuation compared to thousands or millions of other coins we can create, mean coins or whatever?
So I think that everyone, definitely including the people who are in it for the investment, need to care about this. So important things to monitor and everyone, including big money, needs to advocate for is in-kind redemptions and not in-kind redemptions just for institutional investors, in-kind redemptions for everyone.
and so if we got that
then that
that basically addresses
that risk with ETFs
but then we're talking about the
Bitcoin treasury companies
and millions of Bitcoin
being sucked into those
if they don't have an in-kind
redemption then that's the same
tax trap risk
and I see it as less
clear to me
what's the motive, first of all
what's the motivation for strategy to offer that?
Because they have all these complicated
financial engineering mechanisms
and it's very important to them to have
maximizing
Bitcoin AUM.
I don't think they would ever have.
So I don't see the motivation for it.
So to me, that is
the pinpointing of the threat
that Bitcoin
treasury company strategy is the leader
there, sucking up all this
Bitcoin, no ability
for any shareholder to access that Bitcoin.
It's a tax trap that creates enough economic friction
so that those people never use it.
It's alcohol.
It's everyday money.
Yeah, that's correct.
And then, okay,
and then another part of this concern
is that anyone who monitors the mempool of Bitcoin,
like the Bitcoin network,
how many transactions are there
trying to be transacted on the Bitcoin network,
which is distinct from the price or how many people own bitcoin or even use bitcoin because
if you use bitcoin and it's purely on a custodial platform and never has to touch
the the bitcoin network well then there's no activity in the bitcoin network so if you monitor
the the bitcoin network and and the mempool for people not familiar with that is just simply the
queue of transactions that have been broadcasted globally that want to get transacted and
ultimately mined.
That has historically been, well, first of all, the fee markets, the fees you have to
pay for a transaction have historically been quite low.
Most of the money made by miners is through the Coinbase reward, the subsidy, the minting
of new Bitcoin.
As we know, that goes to zero.
So for Bitcoin to thrive long term, there has to be a thriving fee market.
There needs to be strong demand to broadcast transactions and enough so that people are competing to get into the next block and pay a lot of money.
Otherwise, there'll be no economic incentive for miners and the entire security model gets destroyed.
Here's a spicy question.
I'm just curious, but like, doesn't Lightning kind of limit the need to have transactions through the mempool?
Yes and no.
So, I mean, yes, it's true that like if we open a lightning channel, you and I can transact infinitely back and forth and never touch the chain again.
We only had one on-chain transaction.
But on the flip side, anyone who studied lightning, another criticism is it doesn't scale because it takes up too much block space.
And you constantly rebalance the channels if you need to reopen or close them.
Like lightning as it's currently, the protocol is currently constructed, can't be used by the world.
Because if 8 billion people use lightning channels, there's not enough block space to open those lightning channels. So it actually would overwhelm demand for block space. So while it does create this efficiency layer, if Bitcoin payments take off, it creates on-chain demand.
But lightning, there's a lot of lightning transactions. My understanding is that from any kind of triangulation you can make on lightning, it's growing quite well. It's small but growing. And so is it, my understanding is like the mempool and Bitcoin block transactions are not growing.
I think the explanation is clear there. So it's still tiny. And it's not enough to dent into the, I think a reduction in demand for block space is ETF, introduction to ETFs.
So there's a shift of incoming capital is going to ETFs, which don't hit the chain at all. And people are doing less like buying on Coinbase, moving those coins to Kraken to like buy some other coins or trade or whatever, or move it to self-custody or whatever. There's less of that. There's more ETF buying.
So that reduced demand dramatically, and the lightning growth pales in comparison to that reduction, despite the growth of lightning payments. So if that continues to grow at the rate it's growing, absolutely it will increase the demand for block space, and then great, problem solved. Whether it's lightning, ARC, Spark, there's all kinds of different technologies that facilitate payments, but it just requires a much bigger payment growth than the tiny market we have.
And to be clear, I mean, I definitely think it is part of it.
I agree ETFs are probably a much bigger part.
Like, yes, like short term, it sucks some volume off the chain.
But my guess is that a lot of the stuff that's happening at Lightning is net new.
Like, for example, the Zaps on Nostra, I imagine just would not happen if there was another network.
And also, like a lot of these guys, like, again, they're constantly opening and closing channels and rebalancing things, too.
So, like, there's still a decent amount of on-chain activity that exists today that is probably.
Let's take that example, though.
But like Nostra's apps, Stacker News apps, they don't impact the on-chain hardly at all.
Because the predominant amount, the vast majority of his apps are from custodial wallets.
And those custodial wallets just have a few lightning channels.
So they've just done a few on-chain transactions, tiny.
And yet there can be like millions of zaps.
So the footprint on-chain is very tiny there.
But again, if we see hyper growth of Bitcoin payments on any kind of, and as long as those payments are done, there's a sufficient amount of like inter-system payments.
So it's not just one company's effectively custodial system. As long as there's enough interplay there, then we will see a material footprint on chain. And then the Bitcoin network is healthy. There'll be a healthy fee market. It all works out.
But the long-term risk here is that so much Bitcoin gets sucked into strategy and Bitcoin treasury companies. And number one, either Bitcoin's everyday money never takes off. And then the Bitcoin network just has no activity. And there's already people calling for creating tail emission. There's a concern that miners aren't going to have an incentive to mine once the minting of Bitcoin trends towards zero.
so in I mean even at the quantum bitcoin event there was one person saying that in eight years
if we don't see growth of bitcoin payments or something that creates sustainable demand for
the network that we're going to have to introduce tail emission I think that's I think it's more of a
15 to 20 year time frame where it starts to get concerning not eight years but either way that
narrative will only grow louder so you're saying the degenes are our only hope
well that's i i don't know if it's sustainable sustainable then uh mempool or you know block
space demand um so the concern is that whether it's eight years or 15 or 20 years that the voices
will grow louder saying like hey miners aren't making much money a whole the whole in an entire
premise of bitcoin is that the security model we need an incentive economic incentive for miners
and everyone's like, well, the fee market ain't happening. Everyday money ain't happening. So
how do we address this? Well, we change Bitcoin to introduce continuing a tail emission,
continuing to pay a subsidy to miners, which would of course change the supply gap of 21 million.
Now there's an alternative that was discussed at the quantum Bitcoin event, which is like,
well, there's all these like presumed lost coins or these coins that ultimately don't make the
transition to post-quantum Bitcoin. So we'll take all those, burn them. I mean, definitely
one of the key questions of how to deal with quantum, if we need to deal with quantum,
is do we burn these coins that will be stolen by a quantum computer? If we do burn them,
one proposal is to take them and recycle them into an incentive program for miners. So that,
that would be a source of tail emission. And the beauty of that is that there's,
we're not touching the 21 million. But at best, I think that can be argued. I mean,
first of all, you can get a philosophical arguments of burning the coins, but if we just set that
aside, assuming everyone's decided we're going to burn the coins, we burn the coins. Now, what do
we do to them? Literally keep them burned or recycle? A nice thing about that is that like,
okay great we we aren't touching the 21 million narrative but it's a stopgap it's a band-aid right
because it's okay once all that's issued out then we reach a point again if there's not bitcoin
network activity there's not fees okay now we need to expand the 21 million so it would hurt
if that were ever introduced it would in my opinion substantially hurt the credibility of
any kind of statement saying like yes in 50 years there'll still be this the same monetary policy
is today. It becomes Ethereum. I think it kills it.
To me, like one of the... You can't compromise
neutrality. A top three, you can argue it's number
one, but a top three
tenant of Bitcoin is the
monetary policy that was set forth
on day one is the same
as today. And I
can credibly believe that in
50 years it'll be the same.
There's a strong, I mean, we're talking about risks
to this, right? But we still believe there's a
high probability it's going to be the same in 50
years. But it's really important, but that's
not a guarantee, right? It's not a certainty.
It's really important for us to talk about and reason about how could that not be the case. So I think a huge risk is we don't see sufficient Bitcoin network activity. We don't see sufficient fees from transactions as the subsidy declines towards zero. Growing louder voices that will be appealing to people to change the monetary policy of Bitcoin.
and I don't think we want to reach that future
because then if we get to that point too,
then investors will be like,
what did I invest in again?
I thought the normal reason I invested
is that that doesn't change.
I said this kind of jokingly,
but I actually kind of want to double down on this right now,
which is that the irony is the most hardcore
Bitcoin is money people really probably need the DGENs,
at least short term.
I hope we find one of these AI breakout cases,
but the reality is Bitcoin got started
it is gray to dark market money.
And if you really want it to survive,
no matter what,
I'm not saying necessarily dark,
but like it should be at least,
I mean, in gray areas,
that's where Bitcoin thrives.
We were talking about last night,
like when do you use stablecoin?
Maybe I didn't interpret your D-gen.
I thought you meant like ordinals and runes.
I do.
I mean that, but to me,
there's that and there's also like dark markets.
Yeah, well, so I'm talking more about the runes
and the gray, let's say gray area.
But like what I'm saying is like,
for the people like,
oh no, it's money and this and that.
It's like, dude,
the gamblers are the ones who are operating
in this like liminal space between what is and is not allowed.
And like the gamblers and like the kind of the guys living on the riverboat, those are
the ones that keep Bitcoin what it is without the without the riverboat people.
I mean, it's I mean, your point that, you know, it gets captured and then loses all
of its value.
Like that's that's a real risk.
Well, my my optimism and I know we're kind of running over time now, so we'll we'll draw
to the close.
But my optimism is that I think there are a billion people who are newly enabled to build
things yes and they didn't know how to build things before but they had ideas now they're able
to build things and there needs to be money transactions when people build things because
like you know running these models there's a cost to and keeping these things alive and then the
value you create and the things that you build get paid by other people and so instead of saying like
let's evolve the existing world to use bitcoin mostly i think it's great that people do that
but i think the growth and my optimism for the growth and kind of hitting these j curves
and kind of these exponentials is that things that could never be built or were not like all
of the ideas and the creativity of humanity has not been applied to building the ways that bitcoin
could and would be used and now we've unlocked that yeah that's possible so like the next
is it 18 months is it 24 months when you have a billion people building applications some of them
are going to figure out interesting things to do with Bitcoin.
Which is why I come back.
I agree with you, and I love that optimism.
You and Ben are making me feel a lot better.
You made me feel a little bit more scared.
But I mean, I said this jokingly, but I actually mean it.
That's why we need something big like Carpathia to come work on.
And increasingly getting the goose people working with Bitcoin people,
I think that's probably our number one shot
at not having this dystopian future.
And I agree.
Net-net, I'm optimistic.
I'd probably just quit and work on something else
if I thought it was all going to fail, right?
So I agree with that point, David.
And we just need to like triple down on it.
Make it happen.
But we actually have,
like we have even more risks to talk about.
So we're going to,
we'll tackle that either next week
or in a future PBJ episode.
It's super important for us to
think through all the risks,
be critical, critical analysis,
be honest.
So that, you know,
both to like communicate and educate people,
hear from people,
you know, where are we wrong in our analysis?
But then also like come up with solutions, right?
Which we're already doing,
but like improve how we're working to solve this.
One other thought,
just while we're on that subject,
you've said this many times
and maybe you're even the guy to experience this
because you're so deep in there.
I also agree with you
in addition to just like vibe coding and stuff,
increasingly I think it's going to be something with games
that like probably young people are embracing.
You know, yesterday without doxing anyone,
there was a very sharp young guy
who told me he's been to Bitcoin for like 15 years.
I'm like, but that would make you like 12.
And he was like, that's right.
And I was like,
how did you even get started?
And the sort of like implication was he to like steal his dad's passport to get started, right?
So like, I do think the like Skibbity Cash that Block was working on and like all this stuff to get like young people,
because young people are also unbanked, right?
And I mean, I'm becoming a Skibbity maximalist here.
Like I actually think our best shot at-
Just to be clear, I don't think Block worked on Skibbity.
I think a Block employee may have contributed personally.
A Spiral grantee and a Spiral employee worked on that project.
Fair enough.
regardless,
uh,
whoever did it is,
is a legend.
And,
uh,
I actually think that's our best shot is like,
if we get the kids gaming with this stuff and remember kids are in bank,
like this guy's having to steal his dad's passport to participate.
Great.
There's a market like,
there's so much energy.
You know,
you look at Roblox,
like if you're a 12 year old kid,
you have no way to earn money.
So,
so these 12 year old kids and they're smart,
build a game on Roblox and make money doing that.
Like that's actually a credible way,
you know,
better than a paper route.
And they could probably do a lot better than their parents in the new
economy so yeah so call it all right that was great great show yeah love jamming in the ice
good to see you all right bye bye