Okay, so without further ado, I'd like to invite Steve, Max, and DK to come to the front of the room to do a little live PBJ session on the topic of, and this is going to help kind of give us kind of thrust into the rest of the day, on the topic of why is Silicon Valley currently missing Bitcoin?
And then we can talk about and spend some time, you know, actually inserting Bitcoin into the conversation.
So take it away, guys.
Yo, yo.
Hey, so same seats, huh?
So this topic of Silicon Valley and Bitcoin, I think, you know, there's a question that we're often discussing kind of offline and I think is a popular topic among Bitcoiners, which is why doesn't Silicon Valley understand Bitcoin?
What are they missing? How do we convince them?
And I kind of sort of challenge the question to just kind of open it up. Is Silicon Valley missing Bitcoin or should a new type of thing that's not so Silicon Valley be the place where the Bitcoin building emerges? Just sort of open that up as a question.
i like that question should we set some context maybe with a little bit of history
um like in 20 yeah sure and then i think we can answer your question better but like um
the first wave of silicon valley hype and bitcoin i think was in the 2013 era because like pre-2013
it was a very small set of ogs who discovered bitcoin and bought some or transacted with it
ran a node, mined.
And there were a lot of them in that era.
It wasn't like this covert thing.
It was basically every venture firm knew about it
and was buying Bitcoin.
But like in the 2010 to 12 era,
I think it was more like a global phenomenon
within a niche group of people.
Drug dealers and rural-
There was definitely like,
Wences got a lot of people,
one of the funders of this space,
Wences Casares,
got a lot of people in Silicon Valley
taught them about Bitcoin.
I was at Google at the time, as was Matt.
I think you maybe left, but yeah, you had already left, David.
And it was definitely going through Google as well.
But the 2013 era, that's when VCs, I think their conception,
entrepreneurs and VCs were trying to make payments happen.
But I think they viewed it as more like, oh, this is going to replace PayPal or Visa.
But I get the sense that Silicon Valley at the time thought it was like a payment layer replacement and not this revolutionary new money that's like replacing the dollar.
Which if you view Bitcoin in that lens, you realize it doesn't happen overnight.
It's not like you just build a Silicon Valley startup and that happens.
You have to shake up institutions.
And since it's not fiat, not declared by a government, it has to be grassroots and come from people.
And that takes a long time.
So there were a bunch of whiffs in 2013 wave of venture capital funded Bitcoin startups because it wasn't ready yet for that use case.
And I think there was a misconception.
And then ever since then, there's always a better Bitcoin and those get funded. And I would call it a lot of distractions. But I think that, I mean, do you guys agree with that history and that context?
Yeah, I do. And I mean, I think I said this kind of jokingly, but in that early era, the people that really grokked Bitcoin were the weirdos. And again, there's a really interesting paper I've quoted many times. If you haven't read it, who here has read why the yuppie elite dismissed Bitcoin? This is basically the best anthropological piece ever written about Bitcoin. If you haven't read it, just read it.
But the gist of it is very, very, very simple.
And to really grok Bitcoin, there's a lot going on.
Some of it is complex.
And so you need to be, quote unquote, smart or do the work, right?
So he has two axes.
And one axe he uses is like, how smart are you?
How much work have you done if you want to put it in there?
The other axis, though, is how much do you trust the system?
And that's a very, very different axis, right?
so the people that historically and i've seen this in my own circles like i went to a much more
sort of like insider school my friends there still don't get it they're smart they're super
smart they still do not get it to this day at yale jail you you you you were much more likely
to grog bitcoin in jail somebody so embarrassed to say they went to yale seriously actually
quick funny aside, I have a theory.
Highest expected value
job of the last 25 years outside
of super hot startups at Google.
Highest expected value job.
Vibe Coder.
I'm going to go with
volunteer on the Ron
Paul campaign.
Not even kidding. Because you bought the
Coder earlier. Yeah, all those fuckers bought
because they were young, they got it.
But how many people took Bitcoin seriously?
Sorry, how many people even understood
what the Federal Reserve is or what money is?
The people that were out there, I guess it was 2008,
like Ron Paul Reichen, these people,
by most of society's standards, were nuts
and are still nuts.
It's like you had everyone else.
Think about your daily, you're talking about this stuff
and everyone's like, well, should we fund this thing
or should we fund that thing, the economy?
And then you've got this one old guy
who's literally just shaking his umbrella into the air,
being like, we need to go back to the gold standard.
And you're like, oh man, these people are not.
And then you've got Warren Buffett.
Everyone loves Daddy Warren.
They got Warren Buffett, baby.
It's Shilohmunger.
And they're always sitting there, gold.
Gold doesn't throw off any cash, flows, returns.
Anyways, and we did a whole show about that last week.
I won't rehash it.
You should watch it on PBJ.
But anyways, the gist of it is,
unless you, for some reason,
have been outside of the system,
Maybe you grew up, you know, in a country where there's hyperinflation.
Why was he the one guy in Silicon Valley that got it?
Because he's seen his, you know, savings hyperinflate many times.
Maybe, you know, you're whatever, just grew up outside the system, very poor.
Like, anyways, but if you grew up on the inside, the insides work pretty well for you.
If you're from the banking class, done well in Silicon Valley, it's like, you don't even
think to question, like, is the water that we're in working or is it not?
So that's why I think Silicon Valley, you know, didn't get it at first.
And to be clear, some did, right?
Like some people bought a lot of Bitcoin.
I understand about a lot. Peter Thiel, he has the capability to zoom out and see the guys that short
the system, like hedge fund dudes, they understood what was happening. But anyways, and then I think
to your point, Steve, you're absolutely right. Then Silicon Valley tried to pin on it what they
knew, which is payments. And it's like, it will happen. I fundamentally believe that. We all
fundamentally believe that. We get to zoom out. And to your point, protocols over companies,
this is a cathedral. This is a century, multi-century long project, at least multi-decade
long project. And if you don't come in with that view, you know, and you don't come in with a view
of the history of the internet, how long that took, then you're going to miss. So I think Silicon
Valley just wasn't prepared. And then those that were have done very well. And then they keep trying
to fit the payments narrative on top. And then you see people that make so much money. Like you see
the multi-coin fund returning like socket numbers. You're like, wow, I want some of that without
questioning. Well, you know, is this really what I want to dedicate to my life to dumping on grandma?
Just like options on Intel.
Yeah.
Anyways.
So that's my more cynical view.
I think it's changing.
And the last thing I'll say on that, though, is like, I do think Silicon Valley has a very important role to play in all of this.
And I think that it's events like this to show people, OK, we're finally at a point where the things you want payments already and how you can fund those companies.
So let's get back to the original question, David.
Let me make sure I remember it.
is
Silicon Valley missing
Bitcoin or will
Bitcoin just grow and thrive
it doesn't have to grow and thrive
through Silicon Valley but elsewhere in the world
yeah or maybe
I'll add a little more color with the
context is I might
make the claim that Silicon Valley has not
missed Bitcoin but Silicon Valley
has a very different set of incentives
that are not necessarily
compatible with Bitcoin we just think oh
technology it must be silicon valley and i think there's some things that silicon valley has gotten
right about bitcoin like probably a dozen venture firms loaded up on bitcoin the asset with their
discretionary liquid 20 of the fund but they didn't invest in a lot of companies and i think
outside of the ones that they did invest like coinbase there there are a lot of
certain successes to show monetarily in the venture capital style of investing.
So I think historically, that's kind of inarguable.
I mean, how you frame it there is correct historically.
So I think the interesting discussion and question is moving forward,
will something change?
And I think things will change.
So I think you're correct that historically,
buying Bitcoin and holding it,
that's been the use case and where you can thrive.
There's not been a lot of great startups to fund the past 10 years, especially ones that are focused on Bitcoin.
If you're like minting your own tokens and you get those to VCs, that's been incredible returns.
I don't think it's super ethical, but certainly a good VC return.
But moving forward, what's transpired?
Well, one, Bitcoin as an asset has obviously been tremendously successful the past 10 plus years.
There's no doubting that.
and everything appears
it's going to just continue on that trend.
Secondly, the
tools to build on Bitcoin
are dramatically better today
than they have been in the past.
And we all
like we've seen that firsthand.
Like historically, it's taken
several talented developers
over a year to build
a quality Bitcoin application.
Now, people
in this room are vibe coding with
one-shot vibe coding
and like nine minutes later,
they have a working Bitcoin application
or a working application
that integrates Bitcoin payments.
Matt is not the only one who's done that.
He showed a lot of people how to do it,
but he's not the only one.
He gave me the one-shot
and then I one-shotted and then it worked.
And if you want to one-shot something,
talk to Matt.
So I think that's transformative.
So the next three years
are going to be very different
than the last 10 years
and that everyone in this room
and millions and millions of people
around the world
have the ability to create an application,
integrate Bitcoin payments into it,
and you don't have to be a superstar engineer to do that.
So I think we're going to see
hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people building
millions of applications.
A lot of them are going to be toys or junk or learning experiments.
That's totally fine.
When you have that big of numbers,
you only need a small percentage to actually be hits.
and even if i've coding today has its its limits that's totally fine you can get to you can get to
an amazing proof of concept you can even get into production and allow hundreds of thousands hundreds
or thousands of people to use it so you can even get the product market fit today single person
with with a five-coder product and then if if there is a fit great then you can hire good
engineers to make sure it scales and is secure and and things like that um so i think that's
transformative and the ability to add Bitcoin payments we going to see a lot more of that And something David always harped on over time is like Bitcoiners tend to build Bitcoin centric applications and then like no one using it But I think when you open it up to everyone a lot of people including Silicon Valley and big tech who wouldn identify as Bitcoiners they build applications that are compelling for other people And those applications just happen to have Bitcoin integrated into it
No one would call it a Bitcoin-centric application.
And once we have that, we're going to have growth, popularity, and then VCs are going to be chopping into debt to invest.
The only maybe thing I would push back a little bit, I agree on all of that, is on both you guys.
I think you're right so far with this idea that there haven't been good companies to invest in Bitcoin.
Obviously, I'm talking my own book here.
Except for the ones you've invested in.
Yeah, exactly.
But I will...
He won't say he's a VC.
but i will say that the way i think about it is like we've had years now five years
startups but he's like block that have built a lot of the open source community a lot of people
in this room that have built a tremendous amount of extremely important infrastructure a lot of
that's open source um and you've had companies like lightning labs like light spark uh that have
built this really really critical breeze albie you name it all these companies that built all
this infrastructure that the vibe coding stuff wouldn't work with if you didn't have a lot of
various Lexis in the room or they were in the room yesterday. So all of these companies,
like they've been doing like the super heavy lifting in the shadows. It's kind of like,
I remember the old sort of like a book before everyone hated him, the John Morant commercials
where it was always him in the shadow doing the work before you see him going out there
and posterize people. That's the way I see what's happened the last several years. Bitcoin,
that infrastructure had to exist before the application. And I think now we're about to
enter with Vibe Coding, all the new tools, the application layer.
Yeah, there's going to be tons of those.
That's when Silicon Valley's going to get in.
But I still think that all of those companies have been building in the dark,
also stacking Bitcoin, so it'll be around forever,
that you're going to see some incredible success stories
from the infrastructure companies.
It just hasn't happened yet.
Yeah, and I was going to say, I think that we have a lot of focus
in our discussions offline and sort of in the Bitcoin community
wondering when is Microsoft going to adopt Bitcoin or when is Google going to adopt Bitcoin?
And I kind of think like that'd be fine if they do, but I don't think that's really worth a lot
of our focus. And one of the questions I was asking Matt earlier was, what do you think is
the non-Mag7 that's going to be a credible number two to Block? So don't tell me Microsoft or Google,
but tell me like, I think Block has done a great job at moving, it's a technology company fund in
originally in VC, in Silicon Valley.
But what is a credible number two to carry?
That could be.
Yeah.
That's my answer.
That's your answer.
Okay, and Amjad's a huge Bitcoiner.
I'm not sure I understand.
What's the number two Silicon Valley company
that's going to embrace Bitcoin?
So Block has done a great job
at being both a Silicon Valley company
and being a Bitcoin company, right?
With the funding spiral and all the grantees
and everything, and, you know, Cash App.
just block cares about Bitcoin in a way that Silicon Valley mostly doesn't.
And so what is going to be the second company and how do you reach out to them,
meet them, support them in doing that,
as well as all the thousands of startups and the vibe voters and everything.
But instead of saying, go higher,
pick the number two and three and four and 10 that are sort of in the mini block.
I'm going to go, that's a good answer.
I agree with that, but I'm also going to go with Elon.
Tesla X
Elon will undersees
he's going to get over his
Dogecoin fascination
he will
when is that happening?
well I mean
I tried
I
we're
hopefully we'll have a second shot
here in a couple weeks
if you guys haven't heard
TuneIn Type 1 Summit
coming up
the way I think about it is
it's a process
you don't get there overnight
right
and so
you know
before you got
and this is probably true for you two
and I'm
curious, most people in the audience, before you were like a zealot and fully in the Bitcoin cult,
probably bought some Bitcoin, probably bought some shit coins. Over time, you probably realize,
hey, what's this thing that keeps going up forever that everyone says is tulips,
and then it's always going up forever? Maybe I should investigate. Oh, all my shit coins,
that was all went to zero. Elon bought Bitcoin for Tesla, SpaceX, and personally,
from my understanding in 2020.
Seeing what happened.
Smart guy.
He understands thermodynamics,
understands Bitcoin has energy back to money.
If I had to bet on who's going to really bring it mainstream,
I'm going to guess it's probably going to be an X.
I like that.
By the way, when we do this show every Friday,
it's a live show and we always solicit engagement
and that's with us sitting in the studio behind us
and people text chatting with us.
We love that. But now we have a live audience in front of us.
So please, at any point, if you guys have a question or an opinion, feel free to raise your hand and speak up.
Yes.
Nice move, man.
So, yeah, okay.
So with Block, right?
I mean, I've appreciated what Dorsey's been trying to do.
keeping an eye on Bitcoin and all the innovation that he's been trying to put in place around it.
Really appreciate that sort of ideology.
But what I've seen generally, and this is like when I say the market is seeing it, is the stock price, right?
And it's not reflecting in what's happening there.
So part of what excites people when it comes to like innovation on Bitcoin, whether it's DeFi, TradFi, whatever, like I'm personally, I'm agnostic.
I don't care like what these labels are.
Like if there is innovation on Bitcoin and I'm interested, at least I keep an eye on it.
And, you know, it hasn't transpired.
It hasn't paid off.
So I'm just curious or thoughts on, you know, we can take Block as an example or any sort of broader thoughts on what could have been done better.
in that space, right, to attract sort of additional capital.
Because everybody wants, as much as, you know,
a lot of people here believe that, you know,
even though Bitcoin's at $100,000, $115,000,
we're still early, right?
But there's others who are saying,
well, it used to be like a thousand bucks
or a few hundred bucks only 10 years ago.
Now it's 100,000 too late, right?
And they're looking for the next.
And that's kind of where like shitcoins
kind of find their market.
I'm just trying to kind of like get some thoughts
from you guys on, you know,
what could Block do better?
What could some of these other companies do better
where they're like adding value to Bitcoin
but not become shitcoins in the process?
Yeah, I think that's a really good question.
And it also, yeah, I mean,
it shows a very different strategy
for Block and other companies.
I think it boils down to like short-term
versus long-term view and strategy.
with, I think
the people that work out of Presidia
Bitcoin on Bitcoin
as well as Block have a longer term view
and think
that Bitcoin is a bedrock, a foundation
that everything's going to be built
on, but it takes time
and that that might not
show up in short term
financial results
and there remains a lot of skepticism
within Silicon Valley about that
future on Bitcoin, I think
So, and apparently investors as well.
Although, I mean, I would say for Block specifically, while Block does a lot of good for Bitcoin, it's still primarily Square and Cash App with two businesses and it's UF dollars.
I mean, the lion's share, I think Bitcoin is something like three to four percent of the gross profit of the company.
So from a Wall Street analyst perspective, it's almost a rounding error still.
so an investor in block
if someone's investing in block for bitcoin
you have to be someone who would
work out a procedure of bitcoin
who really believes in bitcoin
but I think it's a short term versus a long term
and my kind of disdain
for pre-mine tokens
and shit coins
is that it's indisputable
that it's been highly profitable
for VCs and founders
who create those coins
but none of them have any lasting value.
Every single one of them has lost value to Bitcoin
and retail gets dumped on.
I find it unethical.
So that's, but I understand the rationale
for why VCs haven't or have done that
and not invested in Bitcoin yet.
Yeah, I think people are generally pretty rational
about things and it really comes down
to what is your timeframe.
So if your timeframe is like
you're a public markets trader,
maybe your time frame is, you know, hours or days or weeks.
Could be.
If you're a venture capitalist, your time frame is about 7 to 10 years.
And you have to get that window right.
And if your time frame, if you think it's going to play out over 20 years,
it's just a no-ply zone.
Don't touch it, right?
And it doesn't mean that Bitcoin's going to take another 20 years from now.
But maybe if you'd started in 2013 and you're 12 years in,
you're feeling a little burnt, right?
You're like, we know people who stuck their neck out at their firm and they made a bunch of investments and they're going okay, but then their partners are doing these unethical things and they're getting all the returns.
Why are we taking all this dead weight along?
So the incentives and the timeframes really matter.
But I also think the timeframes are specific to what the market is doing and you can't fight gravity.
I think the one thing that I just keep getting beat over the head with in technology is like, no matter how much you want something, the world has to kind of conspire to provide the opportunities for the things to exist.
You can't just brute force it.
The world has to assemble it.
Now, you can do a bunch of brute forcing behind the scenes and then the world figures it out and then it's takeoff.
That's kind of how most great things end up working.
but you also have to recognize that like you're signing up for that brute forcing thing now i
think we have lived through like what has happened in technology like you know 10 years ago 15 years
ago like that was sort of tail end of the mobile wave there's a lot of like vertical sass and
sass companies and like that was a lot of what bc was excited about like sass companies okay well
they don't really have a need for bitcoin and that's where all the growth is they grow revenue
and they grow share price and so the incentives over the last call it 10 years have been mostly
directed at increasing share price through, you know, vertical SaaS revenue growth. And that's,
like, Bitcoin doesn't really have a role in that. I think the exciting thing about this moment
is that we have the new ingredients of AI, and it's going to fundamentally rewire everything.
Like, there's nobody who's really, like, sate from AI unless they're already investing in AI.
So that goes all the way from, like, the smallest startup to Mag7. If you're a small startup with a
bunch of good revenue today, but you're not AI, you almost can't get funded.
It's like, sounds bizarre, but that's actually true.
You can't be like, oh, we have 5 million ARR, but we don't have any AI story.
They're like, okay, next.
They don't want to talk to you.
So I think it important to focus on what the new ingredients are and how they can enable growth in the future And I think the new ingredients of AI mean that we can build things on our own our own hobbies with no venture capital
and prove that something is exciting and valuable and needed and useful. And we can do it with
Bitcoin if we want. And some people will figure out where Bitcoin is effective and we'll build AI,
will build AIs with AI tools. And those AIs will need Bitcoin, not just like want Bitcoin or
ideologically believe Bitcoin will be better in 20 years, but they'll actually need Bitcoin to
receive payments. There's no other way to pay an AI except for the AI to hold Bitcoin, right? So
because of KYC, all that. And I think that's a pretty profound shift. So in a sense, maybe we've
been fighting gravity. We've been saying Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, it should be there. Why do people
listen. But really what we need is we need the world to kind of inspire in a way that now it's
just obvious because it's the only credible solution for the thing that we're trying to do.
Yeah. I would add a couple of things to that. I mean, you know, I a hundred percent agree with
your point. Don't fight gravity, right? Like at the end of the day, one of my heroes, Buckminster
Fuller, one of his great quotes is don't fight forces, use them, right? And so I would say there
are many dimensions to this question. And it's also a good reminder that capital, it's not,
you know, there's no homo economicus, you know, like there are different pools of capital,
different mandates, different people controlling them, different visions for what that can do for
the world, frankly, different goals for that capital, right? And I think in general, people
with capital want to make more capital for sure. But at the same time, you know, I also agree with
Steve's point, like there are people with different ethical standards, right? Like this whole like
shitcoin thing to me is extremely nihilistic and also probably should be illegal, but that's
a separate question. I'm not going to get into that, but you can probably guess my views.
And so, and I do think that, you know, yeah, there's different pools of capital or maybe it's
like, hey man, already a billionaire, want to squeeze a few more out by like doing some payday
lending. Like, I mean, that's your game, you know, so be it. It's not my game. There's a lot of
capital debts are not their game either. But at the same time, it'd be easy to sit here and be like,
why doesn't the world understand what we're working on? They're so dumb. And they're not
dumb. I agree with DK's point. People are very rational. And I would say it comes down to
strategy and timeline, right? So on the timeline question, you're asking me who am I bullish on
in 20 years, Stripe or Block? All this is not financial advice. Block. Why? Stripe, they're
hotter in Silicon Valley. They've got all the sexy hires and this and that. They're going to
make a lot of money on their tempo thing, which by the way, when Facebook did that,
we blocked those sexy hires. Yeah. Yeah. But you know what I mean? Block's great.
So do I think short term, let's say it comes down to traders versus investors in timeline.
If I'm going to put money in the short run, do I think Stripe's going to go in there and just
absolutely raid the cupboard, make a whole lot of money, just like the shitcoiners did the next
five years, totally. I think it's a great investment. But there's trade-offs. And that's
the thing that everyone has to understand. By doing that, they're focusing on, they're going
to raid the cupboard, make a lot of money in the short run. But when the Bitcoin payment network,
and my thesis has always been Bitcoin is internet of value. It scales vertically,
TCP, IP, HTTP. We're building HTTP or SNTP on top of Lightning and all the edge use cases.
when that time comes, and they've been raiding, playing fiat games and winning fiat prizes,
in five to 10 years when everyone realizes Bitcoin is the internet, it's not the information
superhighway. You got it wrong. It was the internet. Who do you think is going to be way
farther ahead, be able to attract the best talent, know who the best talent is, have all the
infrastructure ready to rock and roll? Is it going to be, yes, they're good engineers, but they've
devoted 95% of their time building this thing that's going to die. If you just think about it
for a minute, like all the tempos that we talked about this on PBJ. Think about it. They're
building a database, just a database. It's a little bit of theater around it, but it's a
database. Do you think Audion's going to use their database? Absolutely not. When Google
launched one, is Facebook going to use their database? Absolutely not. And then you're going
to go through the wars of like, they're going to go through all the things we've gone through as
Bitcoiners many times. They said, well, who's going to market make between them? Man, wouldn't
it be cool if we were in some interoperable network, which is how Visa emerged and that's
what Bitcoin is, the internet. So anyways, so in that time present, I'm betting on Block all day,
every day because, first of all, I know who's finding the best talent in the world, and they're
just so far ahead of the competition, it's going to be impossible, especially in this mind you.
But that's a time horizon, right? The other thing I would say is you also, as an investor or a
founder, we can be very ideological, and we're very lucky that many people in this space are.
That's going to change. Just like the early internet, there was a lot of ideologues.
Back when it was the well, it was better. But eventually, companies come in, this and that.
but you also have to earn the right, in my opinion, to be an ideal law. You can't just die. You can't
just like, oh, we need the sort of largesse of the billionaires to help us out. And we're grateful
that we have that, but that comes and goes. And so from that perspective, if I just put on my,
I want to make money out of the public markets, again, not financial advice, but micro strategies
where it's at, because you look at how things are going step by step. It's like, first you just buy
Bitcoin and HODL. Then you realize, oh, we can speculative attack the dollar by taking infinite
monopoly money, buying up the scarce asset.
Hmm.
Wonder who's going to do really well in that 10 year horizon.
Micro strategy is like, in my opinion, the perfect money making strategy.
I'm skeptical of all the other companies.
But, you know, the more you use that strategy of where we are with the forces of nature,
which is accumulate the Bitcoin, you more you earn the right to do the cool things.
And so I mentioned like all the infrastructure companies that I invested.
I think one of the most underreported stories walks in this case to Tesla's in this case
is they all buy Bitcoin.
Yeah.
and because their ID logs, they're never going to quit.
And so they're earning that right by doing really well
just by like, as Bitcoin goes up, right?
Like we're crazy.
We think it's going to $10 million a coin.
They may not ever need to raise again.
And in that world, they've earned the right to do the right thing
and to be there when the internet catches on.
That's the way I do it.
DJ, I just wanted to circle back to the point that you made
about the intersection between Bitcoin and the AI,
just to call you the degree of inspectors,
we're moving into the brainstorming outside.
so in terms of use cases or product ideas or anything that's come to you and feel comfortable
to share what you feel comfortable sharing what are some of the ideas and the intersections
where bitcoin meets ai that you think might be needed right now in the future and that question
calls my guess but i could imagine you know like right now i'm i'm working on a new idea that i
just started this week and it helps people with video generation and video generation has a cost
to it so to use the underlying atis like gemini you know seed dance seed dream um cling those are
some of the popular ones you have to actually pay to use those atis but if i want to present that to
a user to be able to interact with on the web i need to collect some money for that just some idea
I can help with. I started making this thing. How am I going to collect NamUs? Well, if they're in
the US and they have credit cards, great. I don't care if they want to use Apple Pay or Stripe or
whatever. I don't have that card built, but I could imagine that some people will want that.
But I could imagine there's people in the world who might want to use this kind of service who
don't have the ability to use the Stripe Braille or aren't on the credit card networks. So that's
just like a very concrete example where i want to provide this service to people i don't know
if they can all pay me in the traditional way so i would like to also accept bitcoin as a way to pay
and then they can self-select for whatever way they want to pay like in a sense i like to try to
be non-ideological about it just with my own just my own interest is like hey if it's helpful use it
and i i hope to discover places where it could be helpful and inspire places where it could be
helpful but i don't want to tell you go build you know team your bitcoin does i said so because
otherwise then what's going to happen is somebody else will build a competitive service and just
accept it over visa network right so i want to like in a sense create moments to discover what
the uh what what where where bitcoin really shines for being first required in a sense or where the
customers choose to use it compared to the alternatives um and i think you know that's
just like a simple example because there's a cost and you can charge for it so you can sort of reach
that and because it's on the web so it's not in an app store so you can do that um but i think
there's like you know there's all kinds of examples i mean i've said before i think like the adult
stuff and the gaming stuff are areas that like that's basically how the internet got a lot of
product market fit steve's about to hear this from dk a lot bitcoin core v30 it optimizes for the
foreign but i mean it does it does drive a lot of innovation because it's like follow the twitter
debate what does that mean it's part of the knots versus core debate the knots crowd and saying that
bitcoin core is optimizing for or um i learned something new today like like like gambling and
gaming drove a lot of early internet i don't know if you remember it it steve and i met when we
worked on the mobile team at Google, kind of
pre-Android. It was very early. And I remember
that back in those early days,
60% of the
mobile search queries were
for adult content at Google.
And you don't think of Google as
some adult type of
service. You're just like, it's just Google
search, right? You think Google Maps
queries?
Are you serious? Damn.
Not that high, but
there was a material amount of
adult queries. But I'm
I'm not advocating for that as a type of service.
I'm saying that that is just revealed preference.
That's what people choose to do.
If you put up a box, people choose to do that.
And so, and I think that Bitcoin can support,
Bitcoin and Bitcoin payments,
privacy you get, lightning payments,
is probably one of the like,
it's not just a nice to have,
there's more of a need to have in some of those situations.
But I mean, we're just talking,
you can have, you know,
there's infinite creativity in the world.
We're not going to design all the best ideas,
but when you sort of open up the toolkit
of anybody with an idea,
even with no technical knowledge,
just basically have an idea,
you can now make it.
And you can say,
you know, copy this stuff from Matt's GitHub
and now you can actually accept Bitcoin payments,
even if you don't really know anything
about Bitcoin or Lightning
and you just like just don't accept payments.
You can do that now.
And that's a massive innovation.
That's a massive change in the world.
that's like you're no longer fighting gravity gravity's you know you're just chasing off the
building ledge you know you're sort of falling and it's like yeah the tailwind now oh sorry i
wanted to add one thing that so i agree with dk on the sort of gray areas of the internet that's
always that's so great that's how bitcoin got big in the first place and i think that um i'm
surprised being some more like like i wanna that's like an area they get they only do cash and expect
some more of that happening um torrents and some device torrents that's very i'm very interested in
But in terms of the more palatable things, two things I want to highlight.
Number one, we've talked a lot about this digital life in the future.
If you really want to have autonomous digital life, Bitcoin's going to answer.
So I think DK, Matt have a surprise I won't tell them about, but they have a brilliant idea that allows you to maybe fund some AI.
So that really cool So second thing I say is I think people that just want to vibe code but for whatever reason can touch the traditional rails
That could be because you live in the wrong country, like India, or it's something that
I actually am getting increasingly convicted on.
I was put in touch by a friend.
There's like this whole substack world I wasn't even aware of.
And I read he put me in touch with someone from an energy substack.
Extremely brilliant.
I talked to the kid.
I'm like, who the fuck is this that knows all of this about energy markets?
is so incredibly intelligent.
And the kid looks like 25 max.
Max.
Like for all I know,
this kid's like 16.
And I'm thinking to myself,
that's right though.
Like the smart,
like think about this.
Many of you guys in the audience,
many people you knew when you were kids,
like the smartest people.
I mean,
you were smart when you were 16 in high school.
As you get older,
everyone looks really young.
Well,
I felt old in this conversation.
Kind of sucks.
But anyways,
such a light.
But increasingly, I'm like, well, think about you double that up.
There's a kid in India who's 16.
Why can't they build the biggest business in the world?
They probably will.
Can they use Strip?
No, they don't even have an ID.
They're not legal.
So I'm also very bullish on these sort of like NIMS that are probably like the genius kids.
That's probably what's going to pop.
You got a question or a comment?
Here.
I think there was a...
Also, if I worked at Microsoft, a lot of search and query on things.
those all certain ones.
One of the things I've been thinking about
is using
Bitcoin as a payment method and accepting
Bitcoin as payment, especially for
folks maybe who don't have access to things
like Stripe.
And I was talking to somebody else about this
this week also. The fact
that the Bitcoin asset value
is so high and continues to
go up, I think for normies like
myself and others,
it feels
like it feels disaccentivizing to use it as a payment method you know like us all are losing
value every day and incentivize to spend them but with bitcoin i've usually seen my value of bitcoin
go up over the years and i'm like i don't want to spend this i don't want to send this to anybody
because it's and i i know that it seems like a time horizon thing also right like eventually
bitcoin's going to be the thing that we use and it's not going to be dollars and it's going to
flood about its head. But to get there,
I've, you know, sort of when I
talk to people I know who have Bitcoin, none of them are
interested in, and they're not part of
this type of community. We're not Bitcoiners
at all. Don't want to
spend it because they're like, well, I'm using money.
Why would I spend this thing that continues to appreciate value?
How do we, how does that change
for the average person? I love this
topic.
So
I both kind of agree with it and disagree with it.
I mean, I'd say
that the number one reason people aren't spending
their Bitcoin is because there's not really good reasons
to.
Let's say you wanted
VPN access or some
kind of great market. You want to gamble
and that's really important to you.
The only way you could do it
is with Bitcoin.
Even if you believe
the number is going to go up and you think
US dollars is going to go down,
let's say you have
$20,000 or $50,000
of Bitcoin in savings. Great. Don't touch that.
Just take a portion of your paycheck, $50 worth, turn it into Bitcoin so you can gamble your $50 for your entertainment value.
So it's not like you have to choose between the two.
So I think the number one reason people aren't spending their Bitcoin is there's not yet great reasons to spend your Bitcoin.
And then also I agree with everything you said about longer term volatility goes down and it just basically can replace the dollar.
But think about, I mean, you can always, I think, kind of to dovetail on that, you can always spend and replace. If you want to spend something that requires Bitcoin, you can always replace the Bitcoin with whatever else. But this is not a problem that's unique to Bitcoin anyway. You could, you know, there's other assets in the world that you're like, well, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to sell my house because I think it's going to go up. I don't want to sell my Mag7 stuff because I think it's going to go up. There's all kinds of things that are probably going to go up because of how bad the dollar is.
so so the only thing you want i mean bitcoin's probably the best thing to hold but everything
is a trade-off versus you know what else you could do with it so just like take the whole sum of
everything that you could do and hold almost no cash i mean i was literally having this discussion
with my wife this morning it's like i'd never want to hold any cash it's like if we have a bill
let's convert it in cash just to pay the bill otherwise you don't want to hold any cash that's
actually the that that framing i've heard other people say it and i think it's a good intellectual
exercise which is if you believe that you don't want to sell your bit you don't want to spend your
bitcoin because you think it's going to go up then why do you have any dollars at all you should be
all in on bitcoin get on zero and then when you need to pay a bill you convert it to dollars now
that i would not advise people actually do that because while i'm a huge believer in the long-term
appreciation of bitcoin when you need to pay a bill in a week or a month um you know like
holding the dollar is more, or whatever your liability is in, is more substantive.
I want to add just two quick things in that. I think it's worth mentioning. We've talked about
this a lot on the show, so you can go maybe find some of the old episodes of this, but there's
Bitcoin, the network, Bitcoin, the asset too. I'm particularly bullish on using dollars that are
interoperable with Bitcoin-like network. I don't think it's going to be the stable points. Those
are intranets. Remember, Bitcoin is internet. And so to me, it could be Spark. I see a Spark
had in the audience.
That could be the way it happened.
Could be cashewments.
Could be a lot of different things.
Maybe it's all of them,
but all interoperate with Bitcoin and Lightning.
Because I agree, it's kind of true.
Why would you spend your Bitcoin?
You probably shouldn't.
Also, why would you hold cash
unless you have a future liability?
Well, I'll tell you,
the only other reason to hold cash,
and I think this is sadly,
it's a political issue,
is just the tax treatment.
Giant pain in the ass.
If there were no taxes,
the world would be a very different place.
But in that world, yeah, I mean, it's a pain.
And there's companies like Strike that do help you, I guess, with some of that conversion stuff.
But yeah, I mean, if you figure that piece out, I don't understand why you have a dollar sweet pepper.
Yeah, I just have a quick question.
I used to work in Silicon Valley and now a Bitcoiner.
So I feel like I've gotten a lot of anecdotal evidence of like my basic thesis is that people in Silicon Valley realize they are the biggest beneficiaries observed.
Truth.
Yeah.
Whether that's like through first principles or instinctually or something.
So they're naturally resistant to Bitcoin, I think, to some degree, because they are the very beneficiaries.
I agree with that.
And I don't think it's not like intentional thinking.
It's more just like if you work at Google or in Silicon Valley, like life is good.
Things are working out well for you.
Or if you're a venture capitalist or an entrepreneur or whatever, like here.
That's literally close to the money printer.
Yeah.
So it's not like I don't think people in Silicon Valley are like being intentionally evil about that.
It's just things are working out.
They're smart.
They're doing well.
And so they don't really carve out much time.
I think it's very typical.
You're super busy doing your thing.
you don't carve out time to consider bitcoin like my own personal story i learned a bit in
2013 uh courtesy of matt and one other person i've worked with at google um so you know bought a
little bit read the white paper but then in i i wasn't i was never negative on bitcoin but i
definitely in 2013 i thought it was like this magic internet money and then it went up and down and
you know i just moved on in my life kept working at google doing other stuff didn't even think
about Bitcoin for four more years.
And then I had left
Google in 2015
and in early 2017
so I didn't have a job in early 2017
and I was a professional.
Yeah, I was a professional.
But I had time on my hands.
So that time on my hands
allowed me to deeply
study cryptocurrency at large
and so 2017
is when I really
firmly grasped Bitcoin in a way that I hadn't in the past.
And I've seen that.
I don't think I'm unique.
I've seen that pattern with people from Silicon Valley
who end up having some time to think about this,
learning about money, like a history of money,
can be much more open to it
versus if you're busy building
or busy in the Google bubble or building a startup.
Yeah, I actually had the exact same experience
and that's around the time I met Steve.
I also read about Bitcoin super early on 2011 did not buy any wish I had and it wasn't until
basically I like you know took you know a year or two off because I was living in Mexico it was
very cheap and that's when I just had infinite time on my hands and I just like read more and
more to programming classes learned about like all the beauty realizes it was an Einstein Newton
level breakthrough of like taking the mental realm connecting with the physical all these
things, energy back to money, all this stuff.
But I mean, I didn't have a job.
And I guess that was extremely lucky, extremely fortunate.
And I think for most people, I don't think I've ever met a single person, unless it's
maybe like the chairman of the Federal Reserve or Warren Buffett, that has put 100 hours
or even 10 hours into reading about Bitcoin that doesn't realize, oh man, this is big.
What's the litmus test?
Do you have sort of your own calibration of how you can assess if somebody has spent the
time or not?
just talk to them but like well i have a specific thing in mind that i can ask them okay tell us
he's like do you know what the difficulty adjustment is i think that's sort of like
once you come to that understanding which like a lot of people who hold bitcoin and believe in
don't really understand i think if you've done that then i'm like okay you've probably done
enough work that you
can understand and explain enough about
the specialness of this network.
That's a good, that's a good
test. I do think that's like
on a short list of
incredible inventions and
uniqueness of Bitcoin. What's yours?
This is a good question. I haven't thought of it.
I think that's a very good one.
For me, I come from a slightly
different background. I was in energy and I
still am. And so I appreciate
when it's energy back to money.
And so I sell blockchain as an enabling technology, but like not the thing.
And so for my industry, and this is like people I talk to from solar or in Texas, it's a lot easier to explain that.
And this is something I always tell people.
There's only one currency at the known universe, and it's jewels.
Everything we've ever used as a monetary good is a proxy on jewels, full stop.
There's nothing else.
And this is the purest proxy on jewels of all time.
Then you see the greatest minds in the industry.
Tesla, Edison have all seen that coming.
That was a click for me.
So for at least from people in that world, once they see it as energy money, then it's a different story.
Guys, I think we could probably go all morning here, but maybe just two or three more minutes and then we'll wrap up.
I want to be respectful of your time.
So it sounds like being unemployed.
Unemployed is huge.
It's huge.
It's the new Ron Paul fan.
That's our guidance to Silicon Valley.
Quit your jobs.
Quit your AI job.
Seriously.
Quit your best invest Google job.
That I actually would recommend.
meant. If you're Google Resting investing,
you've already got enough money.
Quit. Study AI.
Study Bitcoin. Study whatever you're interested in.
So if indeed you need
to be unemployed to get
Bitcoin on a deep level, how do you expect
that Elon Musk with his end company
is going to get Bitcoin? Because he's way smarter than I.
Okay, let's leave it there. Thank you, guys.
That was awesome.
Thank you.