Final Settlement E002: Energy-Backed Money with Max Webster

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The Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of gun The one thing that's missing but that will soon be developed is a reliable E cash. We're live. Welcome everyone to the second episode of Final Settlement, a Bitcoin focus podcast brought to you by On RAMP where we take a look at Bitcoin really from more of a technological perspective. Bitcoin is is much more than just an asset. It's more than a financial instrument that sits in your portfolio. This is an open source piece of software and a distributed protocol that people are building on top of in in new and innovative ways and and really enabling different forms of utility by leveraging the underlying technology. I'm Brian Cabellos. I'm joined by Michael Tanguma and our guest today, Max Webster, A fascinating guy, really excited to have him on. He is the founder of Hive Mind Ventures, a Bitcoin focused venture capital firm doing all sorts of interesting things in in the Bitcoin related space. So really excited to have him on. How you doing Max? Good. Excited to be here. You know, I really enjoyed doing the first pod with you Michael and some of the other guys and excited to talk more about protocols and very nice to meet you, Brian. Yeah, great to meet you as well. It's funny, you know, when you came on our other podcast Last Trade earlier last year, it struck Michael, Michael and I that, you know, it was a very different conversation than a lot of the other last trade podcasts. And that kind of sparked honestly the idea and the impetus for this podcast, which is really, you know, let's take this a step further, let's look beyond just the macro context and this thing is a financial asset and really dig into the protocol layer and what this thing is enabling in the real world. And I think that was what that was one of our most viewed podcasts as well. So we knew we had to get you back on and really excited to chat. Most mute and most head exploding emojis like when you. Yeah, that's. It on we even have now a new mutual friend that he you know what listens and consumes content and he'll appreciate the shout out. Without naming him that was referencing loving the Balaji pod I think from Tim Ferriss in just the different mind bending ways. And he referenced that he was in his car with his wife and just said hey I got to turn this off and like re listen to it with like in my own you know den and and with a you know a nice glass of whiskey or whatever he participates in. So yeah, I was super excited to get you back on and there's so many concepts that aren't really discussed in the market for for those that didn't listen, Max had a previous life in Silicon Valley and also investing across other markets I think even like ultra like cryptocurrencies outside of Bitcoin. And I think that really provides him with one of the best lenses. And I think he he really is in the ecosystem. The best venture capitalist on the Bitcoin side because he's built in the existing market and he knows kind of like how people are thinking about it, how to back into what are the the stories that are told. Historically, somebody tells a story to VC, they've never really built anything So that you kind of like take it for face value versus knowing how to back into the 2nd and 3rd order effects of like what are you telling me, what's the story? And does that make sense in map to like user adoption, which historically has been a hard thing when you think about Bitcoin because we're building on new technology, so super pumped to have you Max. Sweet male. I appreciate all the kind words. I really loved our last pod and no pressure now with the head exploding. Emojis, you know? Yeah, exactly. Well, well, an area that I wanted to start is sort of I think foundational to a lot of the other things that we'll talk about, but also sort of foundational to everything that you've been doing recently in the space Max in terms of your investments and and the businesses that you're helping build. But really going back to, you know, this thesis or this concept around Bitcoin being energy backed money. And I think that's, you know, a phrase that gets thrown around and and you know most people probably don't even think you know what are the implications of this or or really understand what that even means. But I think it's worth diving into really you know what you mean by that when when you say Bitcoin is energy backed money and then another way that you've I've heard you describe it is you know Bitcoin is a calorie Ledger which I which I love. But just you know thinking through not only you know what does that mean, but what are the implications of that if we've, you know we have this thing that people like to refer to as digital gold. It's it's scarce asset but really it's you know it's dematerialized sound money that we can now use to build new primitives on the Internet and do all these different things with this you know native currency of the Internet. So just curious on on sort of that leg of your thesis and and really it would also be interesting to hear you know what led you to that because I know you had a lot of experience in sort of the energy world prior to really leaning into Bitcoin. And and, you know, just thinking through, you know what, what in your previous experience allowed you to see Bitcoin through that lens in the first place? Totally. Well, I mean for one, for starters, as you mentioned my quote UN quote prior career was in energy first and foremost. And so you know, I first heard about Bitcoin 2011 when I was a student at university and thought it was super cool. Never thought I'd be allowed to work around that same time. I was getting pretty obsessed with energy. And so, you know, for whatever reason, I love finding kind of like hidden truths or curves, new's curves in the world that people haven't seen yet. And obviously, if you can bet on the S curve before everyone realizes it's an S curve, that's where the alpha is, right? And so for whatever reason, that's just my personality. I love trying to find those. I've always been fascinated with sort of open technology. It was, you know, a kid that grew up with the Internet, loved watching a lot of those trends. I remember as an 8 year old, you know, using all kinds of interesting peer-to-peer networks that inspired Bitcoin and wishing I could have been part of it and a little too young. So I was stoked. You know, I am stoked to now get a second chance at Bitcoin, but you know around 20/11/2012 I start getting really obsessed with energy as well. And so you know, particularly I got very interested in solar and I think something that very few people understand is how quickly the cost of solar has fallen off of a Cliff. And so back then, you know, I started doing this research and you know, solar was quite expensive. It wasn't competitive in any markets with traditional fossil fuels, but it was on what's called a learning curve or an exponential cost decline. And so, you know, I started listening to some people and reading some posts that sounded pretty crazy, like, literally crazy at the time, where they said, you know, solar is going to be the cheapest source of energy in the world by 2020. And my professors in college, everyone laughed, you know, said that's impossible. I don't remember the exact cost, but let's say, you know, it was, let's say, you know, sort of Nat gas or coal, you know, cost like six to seven, maybe eight cents a kWh back then, solar was 30 plus, right. So it's super expensive or like in the high 20s. And so to say that this was going to be the cheapest source in the world, electricity source in the world by 2020 sounded like a madman. But you know, if there's one thing I had learned from watching things like Moore's Law and watching what I came to later called Wright's Law, and this has been written by a few people. You know, the idea is that they're pretty predictable, almost gravity like laws in the universe. And one of them seems to be that, you know, when you have sort of like these modular production systems where you can build a whole lot of them and you can build them fast as you get better and better building those, there's generally some sort of a constant rate that the cost of that decline. And so you know, I looked at solar and back then I thought the learning curve was something like 20%, which means for every doubling of cumulative capacity, the amount installed around the world. Then the levelized cost of energy, which is how we sort of measured the cost of electricity energy markets was falling by I thought like 20%. And if you just chart that curve that meant would go from whatever it was $0.30 to three cents or something like that by 2020 in some of your parts. And so out of college I joined energy startup. It was first hired company called Bright, which is like Sunrunner Solar City from Mexico. We were back by YC first round, Felices, Patrick Halls and all the sort of big Silicon Valley people moved out in Mexico, lived there for many years working on this 'cause I really had this strong thesis that particularly in sunny regions of the world, emerging markets like Mexico, like South Africa, solar was just going to dominate. And lo and behold, by 2020, you know, you started seeing auctions in some of the sunnier parts of the world. You know, for three, two, even sometimes sub two cents a kWh in places like Abu Dhabi and, you know, areas of the Middle East. Obviously, there's a whole lot more to that whole energy story around storage and that that's a big issue, right? Because solar's intermittent. The sun doesn't always shine. And I could talk, I could wax poetic about this, but this is 1 area where I actually, I I still am extremely bullish that solar's going to keep getting cheaper, storage is going to keep getting cheaper and people are going to be shocked by 20-30 to see how cheap it all is. So that was kind of my first big obsession. And I was, you know, constantly, you know, there's kind of three analysts. I think I've gotten this right over the years. This guy Tony Saba, Ramez Nom. Ramez Nom, who's investor, right. And sort of LinkedIn with Ray Kurzweil, Singularity Institute. He was literally just taking sort of a technologist cost curve approach this an Arkan vest. Kathy Wood, who's I think is sort of a Bitcoin champion now. You know, she and her team called this since about 2014. So I've been watching a very, very few people saw this thing happening and I always kind of kept that in the back of my head. And then so I would say I kind of had a prepared mind for thinking of you know what was having the energy markets like kind of understanding that from the 20,000 foot view. Then I, you know while living in Mexico got reinterested in Bitcoin. I started seeing it as a money that was going to be much more useful in emerging markets for obvious reasons. You know, much easier to have a store value. When I saw the the peso to dollar conversion rate go you know fall from like I think it was 12 paces the dollar to like 20 paces the dollar in the couple of years that I was living there, much worse inflation in other parts of the world, the US exports inflation with the dollar, all of that stopping right now too or starting to reverse that trend. And so I was starting to get interested in Bitcoin, but I still didn't really understand it is energy Back to money 2018. I left Bright and I took kind of like a two year sabbatical and I was very lucky. I had the ability to do this. Partially because as a gringo I was able to take advantage of my dollars in Mexico and take some time off. And that time I I started realizing how big of a deal Bitcoin was and I started going down the quote UN quote crypto rabbit hole and play with Ethereum did all of the you know, shit coins or whatever. But I kept coming back to Bitcoin and you know I actually took Justin Moons middle boot camp where we built Bitcoin from scratch and Python. That's why I understood mining and the difficulty adjustment, all this stuff. And I was like oh man, I think this is kind of like an Einstein Newton level breakthrough. I have to get super involved. 2019, I was actually kind of on an around the world trip vagabonding, something I very much miss doing. And I was reading one of my favorite authors and heroes. And in fact I didn't plan this, but I have one of, I actually have two of my Heroes books right here and Buckminster Fuller. And so this one is operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, which is kind of a provocative and very cool name. I think the one that I was reading at that time, there's two the Grunch of Giants and Critical Path. And Critical Path was the one that mentioned it. And Bucky, for those of you who don't know, is sort of a design scientist, philosopher, I don't know eccentric futurist, Gadfly, whatever you want to call him. And he basically, he talked about his whole thesis was that, you know, we should build systems that are the most energy efficient systems possible. And so for him, he was particularly interested in architecture, but you could apply that to human systems, computer systems basically whatever maximizes the flow of energy. And he called for in that book, he said basically, look, you know, I forget the exact words he used, but like essentially if we want a fair economy, then we have to have a fair money. OK, that makes sense. Kind of sounds like Bitcoin. And the only fair money that we can ever have is the one currency of the universe, energy and energy backed money. And you know I started thinking about that and then I started, you know in 2020-2021 going down the rabbit hole, couple other people started playing with this idea. Charles Edwards DiCaprio, I think he was the first person to publish basically trading Bitcoin just on its essentially production cost, which has been shockingly a good way to trade Bitcoin. Satoshi himself in 2010 basically is like it's going to, you know, the cost of Bitcoin will just turn down towards cost production. Therefore hash rate is basically what matters. And so when you start understanding all these things you start saying, wait a second, like what if Bitcoin is just trading and what if it is just energy backed money? And then you start thinking about you're like, well, that makes so much sense because you know, at least in the known universe there is only one currency, full stop, No matter where you choose to demarcate the universe, it's energy, it's calories, it's kilowatt hours. You know, at the molecular level, you have energy out, you know, energy and energy out the cellular level, the biosphere level. And so when I started to understand that, I was like, oh shit, I think this might be what Bucky was talking about. And if you realize, you know, gold, all these other currencies, they were proxies on energy, right. The reason gold was proxy in energy, it takes energy to to dig it up, you know. Then around 2020-2021, shout out Andrew Myers at Satoshi Energy. I met this guy and I was like, oh fuck, this guy really understands where things are going. And he started explaining to me, you know, and I read some of his stuff about commodity money. Commodity money of course is another proxy in energy money because the commodity requires energy to grow it. And he, you know, kind of led me down the rabbit hole of Edison talking about this, for talking about this, Tesla talking about this. And so the deeper I went them where I was like, OK, cool, there there is going to be energy backed money for humanity and increasingly for artificial intelligences as well. The greatest minds in human history have all seen this coming. They didn't know how it was going to happen. They tried different ways because they didn't have the Internet back then. They didn't have, you know, the the tools that we have. And when I started understanding if that's what Bitcoin was, then my conviction went from like high to like all it. Because I I started seeing this as the prophecy. The other thing that I'll mention there is shout out Dhruv Bansal. Dhruv has also just seen things coming before everyone else. He has a talk from 2019, I believe 2018-2019 called Blockchain Minecandy which is like one of the highest alpha talks online. So thank you Dhruv. It's got like 2000 views now and probably 10% of them. And he basically predicted all of this like this is not, it's not, you know, earth shattering once you see it happening. And he came up with something that I, I strongly believe, which is the, the Nakamoto point. He calls it a conjecture, I guess can't prove it yet, but I'm, I'm pretty sure he's right. And basically what the conjecture is, is that the energy markets and the Bitcoin markets are going to be used. They're going to become more, they're going to become the same. And what that means is that the marginal cost of selling an electron to the electricity grid is eventually going to equal more or less with some, you know, minor fluctuations. The marginal cost of selling an electron to the Bitcoin network. And right now you know if the average cost of selling to the grid you get, I don't know what it is, $0.08 a kWh and with an SI don't know what they even right now the the latest miners are doing 19, maybe you're getting $0.15 a kWh. They're still essentially arbitrage opportunity from selling cheap energy to the electricity to to the Bitcoin network. But eventually that's going to sort of even out and I have some crazy theories on where all that's going to go. I think a solar keeps getting radically, radically cheaper, solar plus storage and wind, but particularly solar. You're going to see some wild things happen. But high level Bitcoin is energy backed money. There will come a point where the marginal cost of selling to the network equals selling to the other network, the grid. And that's more or less where we'll stabilize I think. And another interesting point around that is, you know there have been, I forgot where I read this, but some like gold standard guys that were trying to figure out what is the percentage of the, you know, global GDP, which is another way of saying global energy supply, if it's mapped correctly that is needed to secure the energy supply. And people have sort of had conjectures about that. Well, I think in our lifetime we will no longer have to make conjectures. We will have empirical proof that there is a rough percentage of global energy that is needed to secure the energy supply, and that's where we reached the Nakamoto point. Right. Yeah. No, that's that's a fascinating overview of of that sort of concept and thesis. And I think it's, you know, it's it's it's lost on most people who just think you know Bitcoin is this asset right In, in reality it's this innovative tool for really converting energy into a digitally native unit that can be used for whatever that person needs to, to use it for, right. And I think you know you you mentioned in that explanation that commodity money or gold are sort of proxies for for an energy deck money. Maybe dig a little bit deeper on why those are proxies and why the fact that Bitcoin is truly digital native, it creates this like seamless sort of seamless sort of way to make this make that transition happen, right. And and then the sort of 2nd order implications of that, basically anything that you're doing in the digital realm, you can now have this ubiquitous unit that is used to basically attach you know real energetic cost to any activity that is going on in the digital realm. Yeah. Well, I'll answer in a couple ways. I mean, the proxy piece, I mean it's pretty simple, right? Like if you want to so gold is scarce and if you want to mine gold, you have to expend energy to mine it, right. And so that is essentially whatever the miners are spending to mine the gold is the, the proxy cost, the energy proxy cost. Similarly with a commodity money, let's say as an example you're using corn or whatever it is a crop. And by the way, I think it was Edison that had a really interesting idea about doing basically crop back to money where I guess it was during the Depression whenever he was like suggesting that you know farmers basically who are going through a lot of volatility could like sell their crops to the US government. the US government would give them some kind of instrument as like a one year flexible loan that allow them to buy it back. But basically the, the and that instrument that they were giving was, you know to be used as currency as well. So it was backed literally by like crops And those crops are also an energy proxy, right, like you have to, you know, obviously have the the sunlight to grow them. So you know this is a much purer much easily much easier to chart you know way of of of categorizing how much energy went in. But but all of those required energy. The other thing also I just want to mention on the energy stuff because I know there's something a lot of like you know the Bitcoin community is you know always kind of up in hands around what's going to happen with sort of renewables and all this stuff. I think what's what's really interesting. So I actually, you guys may have read this. I was the lead author on a paper in 2021 for Square or Block and Arc Invest where we basically we laid all this stuff out back then saying Bitcoin is is key to a clean energy future and everyone called that absolutely crazy at the time. But a big part of that thesis is that, you know as the cost, particularly solar keeps coming down and down and down, like what we need are free markets for electricity and everything else is going to, it's going to play its course. And I don't know exactly how that's going to play out. But I think, I think, I think a lot of, you know, sort of Bitcoin energy people miss is that when you have extremely cheap solar, let's say you know, it's $0.03 a kWh in some parts of the world and it gets to less than once in a kWh. You know what you're also going to end up having there is, you know, for some of this like energy density stuff you hear about is you're going to have the production of green hydrogen. You're going to have like other kinds of weird electrolysis done to create steel as an example. And you know, green hydrogens created from electrolysis of water, desalina tion of water. Basically when you have energy that is almost free or extremely, extremely cheap, it makes it feasible to do all kinds of new and weird things. And So what I think is going to happen there is when you have truly free like electricity markets, you know, eventually we'll have AI that basically says in real time, I have an electron, do I sell it to the grid? Do I sell it to the electrolysis? You know, whatever green hydrogen producer do I sell it to, You know, my whatever AI inference network, do I sell it to the Bitcoin network. And you have all of these networks that are competing in real time and there's no way to plan it because, you know, free markets are going to do their thing. And so Bitcoin will always kind of be that buyer of last resort. And I think something that like like if there is a quote, UN quote productive use that Nets more than putting into Bitcoin, well then that'll win you know in in real time. But I think something that a lot of other people are are going to be surprised by is this essentially if we over build right, there's a lot of issues with like the grids as they stand. We need much more like high voltage DC connection lines, all the stuff. But you're starting to see more and more people build off grid solar farms, not even connected to the grid, but connected to, you know, green hydrogen manufacturing facilities. And eventually what I think is going to be really cool is you might see some of those that are basically turned into micro grids. Like maybe first you bootstrap a new completely overbuilt sword solar farm with a Bitcoin miner. And then over time you're able to bring in new buyers into that market like green hydrogen producers. And then maybe you create other micro grids. Maybe you have communities that pop up around and then maybe eventually you're able to connect it to the bigger grid, which sadly, that's harder to predict because it requires, you know, permitting and like government policy stuff, though we don't have much control over. So anyway, so I just wanted to add that that's a big part of my vision is really, really, really cheap electricity is going to blow everyone's mind. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. I'll pause there. I know, I know. I know what's going on about that. No, I think it's always important like what you're describing makes so much sense. But I think also anchoring it to on the other side of like what's like a what's happening in practice when I think about like misallocation of capital, right. We've all been in different places like Uber is the poster trial but maybe it's we work because of poster trial as a misallocation capital burning money. And you think about it's the most inefficient way to build right, the unit economics the growth, the the amount of calories from an individual going to the work and and you know building. You think about real estate as a good example too. When you have low interest rates and the things associated and it goes back to that marginal cost to produce a dollars effectively nothing. It's 0. And that idea that there's a cost, whether it was gold or it's Bitcoin, that anchors the world back to, you know, this practical sense of, like you have to produce something to get your Bitcoin or my Bitcoin, you have to produce something in the world or from the network or you just don't get it. And that reality, and this is on the other side of it, but they all tie together as if, you know Larry Leopard, you know, our gold, he's a he's a boomer great guy. He's known as the he was a gold guy for very long, very big in the gold communities found Bitcoin And we had him on a pod in the last trade and we got to the end and we're, you know, we tend to sometimes get a little, you know, cosmic and talk about what we want to see and all that. And one of the things was like, I just want to see on the other side of this accountability, Accountability and accountability is the same thing. It's in the real world. But similar to what you're describing of you want to see the reality of what it costs from somebody to like get the goods delivered to them and they deserve or they get that right. Now. When you go to the market or you go somewhere and you wonder why the service doesn't make sense, there's a reason why. And it's because people you think about like a startup or all the things associated between the rank of how do you produce that unit of currency to pay them and then how they got hired. There's all of this like, inefficiency baked in and that accountability on that person getting it. They know they're going to get the paycheck. They know they're able to pick up the phone and deliver whatever the service is. Or you're going to get like your Amex or your Amazon thing thrown through the car, the truck, and you're going to get it broken. And he's still going to work his job. Like in real world when the marginal cost actually is something to produce it, now you have to fight and crawl up, call for that unit to deserve in your job and then you start to anchor back to efficiency in the world of like what you're doing, why you show up how you get paid and it's on the other end of the spectrum in like the meat space. But it's a very similar concept of you don't get the goods unless you're actually delivering them, which is basically non existent in this world, Frank like from a large part. And I think another way of of saying that is like we're just anchoring back to reality. Like things have just become untethered from reality and the reality, You know what I always think about Bitcoin is it's like an interdimensional portal in a sense, right? It connects the reality of the mind with the reality of the physical universe. And you know, as far as we know, there are laws like thermodynamics in this, in this dimension, in this known universe. And when we become untethered from those, of course our systems break because they're not tethered in reality. And so yeah, I think Bitcoin is a great anchor into thermodynamics. Yeah. And that that tethered to reality, the tether to you know, thinking about opportunity costs, right of of you know what you can do with the marginal dollar. It it has sort of implications for what I want to talk about next which is like you know these layers being built on top of Bitcoin which is something that you've spent a lot of time on whether it's lightning network or or NOSA or other other layers on top of the base protocol. But basically you know having that rationality at the base layer, rationality of this Internet based money allows you to build all these other things that again are still rooted in rationality. So it allows you to build you know whether it's a marketplace or a communications platform, things that are more rooted in reality and rooted in what people, people actually value. And something that you've written about Max, this concept around sort of market based ranking systems or value rank. It's something I think is so fascinating because it it it directly sort of it requires something like Bitcoin, right. For for these things to work. Where you have ubiquitous monetary unit that can be tied to information that is digital and it allows you to build these systems that are actually that the the outcome is that we have better information about whether it's a good or service or a piece of content or a tweet from someone you have better information about. You know the value of something because you can more accurately ascribe value to things in real time. So maybe talk a little bit about your, your, your thesis around those, those concepts. Well, the first thing I'll say is another shout out to Drew, who again, I think is is definitely one of the greatest thinkers in in this space. You know, and he said many times, and I very much agree with him, that the innovation of Bitcoin is just markets. It's just like markets work and we should probably have markets for most things. I mean maybe not everything, but like most things it turns out markets are probably the best way to allocate scarce resources. And you know what Bitcoin is, is it's a market for energy as we just talked about. And you know that's extremely that's like a very helpful way of thinking about sort of this base layer market. But when you think about you know, so if you guys go back or if anyone listening this listens to my last show that I record with Michael, we talked a lot about what I do at Hive Mind And so even though I'm really interested in this energy stuff, I don't invest a ton in that then a couple, but the vast majority what I'm interested in Hive Mind Fund one was focused on lighting network infrastructure. Now I'm interested in like network applications and Noster infrastructure applications in the intersection there. And the reason for that is, you know, if you think about the way the Internet scaled right, it's sort of the OSI model. You have TCP, IP, you know and then on top of that HTTP for the web and then SMTP for e-mail and stuff like that. You know, I think basically this is all going to scale the exact same way. Bitcoin is sort of the base layer TCP IP, the Lightning network is something like an HTTP or SMTP depending on how you look at it. And that's that's extremely interesting to me because you know once you can send very tiny units of Bitcoin around the world instantly for almost free, what that enables is the ability to create new kinds of markets. And so you know one way I'm sure we'll talk about the AI stuff in a little bit as well. But one way I've been increasingly thinking about this is if Bitcoin is like is is energy backed money, it's it's critically and I want to be clear on this, it's not energy, it's not the Michael Segal or Bitcoin is energy that's that's false. It is energy backed money. It is something that was sold in a market for energy. Then on top of that, what kinds of of new things can you do with little units of energy backed money that you can send around the world? Well, in a way you can kind of almost think about it like ATP, you know in a cell and you can start to build what I call metabolic pathways, which is what I think the lighting network is and the metabolic pathways are where you're sending these little units of energy backed money around. Almost sounds like we're building a super Organism or a hive mind of course, which is where my my fund name came. So in that world then you start thinking about well where does micro payments with real energy backed money, what kinds of new problems or new markets could emerge that could solve new problems? Well, one problem that you're talking about that became really kind of, I guess, top of mind for me in 2021 when I published this piece on my blog called How to Disrupt Google, is that, you know, information quality is a real, real problem. And you know, over the last decade, I think there's a lot of reasons. It seems like a lot of society, at least in the US, probably much of the world, is kind of, you know, in chaos and in decay. I certainly think, you know, debasing the monetary supply, that's obviously having a big impact. But I don't think it's all of it. I think a lot of it is just everyone's connected online all the time. That's new. You know, we have no idea what we're doing with the long term implications of being constantly connected to our phones are we're like 10 years, 15 years into this experiment, all these social networks. We have no idea the long term implications of any of this stuff. And of course it's very dangerous because it's all tied not to, you know, anything real with real markets, but to like kind of like fake traps where you, you know, think you get in for free, you become the product, you're the frog gets boiled over time, then all of a sudden you're starting to believe all kinds of crazy misinformation fighting with your neighbors. I think that's playing a big a big role. But we have today and one thing that I concretely noticed in 2021 is that, you know, Google search just kind of like sucks. And, you know, some people have debated how bad this actually is. I think it's pretty bad in 2021, You know, I came across this piece by a guy, I think his name is DKB or something like that. And, you know, I thought it was extremely hit the nail on the head to show how much it hit the hill, hit the nail on the head, not just with me but with Hacker News. Let's call it the Elite Nerd Vanguard. It was the 11th most upvoted post of all time on Hacker News. Pretty interesting. And the basic thesis was Google page rank no longer works because it's so gained, The algorithms are so gained. Like if you type anything in, you know, unless it's like a direct piece of factual information, what you're getting is like, you know, listicles, like 10 things to do, this thing that like don't answer your question at all. Or if they do, it's essentially, you know, an advert. And so that system got game. For those of you who don't know, I mean the way, you know, sort of Google got really big. There were a whole bunch of search engines in the late 90s. Google One, because of page rank. Page Rank was this algorithm developed by Sergei and Larry at Stanford. The thesis was trying to create trust, proxies of trust, and the way they did that was like originally going back to stanford.edu and then out from there they basically built this network of trust. OK, well now that that's pretty gained what I noticed is any time I was searching for real information, I was appending Reddit to the end of my search and turns out all the online nerd vanguard were doing the same. Or stacker, you know, Stack Overflow or whatever, like some good quality forum with real human answers. That's what the real search engine was. Well, that's pretty interesting. But then the problem that he then raised is he's like cool. So you have these like little mini knowledge marketplaces, some of which are pretty good. Some got bad over time. Like core used to be pretty good. Then it got like ad driven and became crap. Reddit was good for a very long time. It's increasingly lowering its quality over time. I think they've made huge missteps there. That should be a monster company, but it's not. And so anyway, so Long story short, he basically spends this whole post being like lamenting the Google's crap, lamenting that you know, all these little good knowledge marketplaces would be much better if there was some way to like standardize a market rank of the information between them. And he brought up this idea of market rank and it stuck with but then he spent the rest of the post was like genius insight. Then he spent the rest of the post trying to like say like how do we solve for inflation and how do we solve for like currency denomination between all these marketplaces? Like, all right. And and this is kind of the beauty, by the way, of like, being somebody's soul sold on Bitcoin. It's like you start to see all these genius insights, but they're just missing this one piece. Right? And so then I was like, all right, cool. I think I know what that missing piece is. And so in my paper, I basically say, cool. I think one way to solve this misinformation problem, which is going to get a lot worse with LLMS creating more and more and more information, is to use one of the two scarce things that we have in the universe that we know. One is attention. That's what we've used so far. That's like killed society, #2 is Bitcoin and tiny units of Satoshi's. And so at the time, you know, this was 2021, I I was like, well, there's different ways you could create this kind of like, you know, what I call a Satoshi depth layer for the web, which if you think about it in dimensions, right, like, this is the information. And then you basically drop Satoshi's on top. That's the depth layer. That's how you kind of like, figure out what's viable. It's not, you know, one way to do it would be to create a brand new knowledge marketplace. I am a major two time investor in Stacker News. I am extremely bullish on that company. Oh my God. I think by the way, Kian's like one of the best folders I've ever seen. I think they're going to absolutely destroy Reddit. We can talk more about them, but they just recently released user owned Subs. Where the users own the Subs can set their own economic policies. Holy shit, that's going to be big and that's one way to do it. Another way to do it would be to basically take the rest of the web and drop Satoshi's on top. So another one of my companies that I'm a major investor in, ALBIE, which stars an open source project now company as well. I was like, well, you could just kind of like tip random things on the web from with a browser extension and that's one way to start getting some of this information signal. By the way, one of the key insights here is you don't need everyone to do this, right? Like the whole like, oh, people never do value for value. Like it's probably true, but if 1% of people do and they will something like that, then that's probably enough to generate the signal. So that that was my first kind of insight. Then Fast forward I'm sure we'll talk more about Noster comes along. I'm like OK, I think this is where it's going to happen natively. I still think the other stuff is interesting. Stacker News as an example is backwards compatible becoming a Noster client where you can log in with a Noster, you can cross post an Oster Relays. Similarly Albie is like the major way to log into most Noster websites that create an Oster wallet connect as well. So, so I think a lot of people are starting to realize this, but I think what's interesting with Noster is in addition to having an easy way to ZAP, you know, notes or information, you also have identity around the web. And that's super important because, you know, if I post a piece of information that says smoking is good for you and like all of a sudden it gets like whatever, like a billion sats like, hmm, maybe that's Marlboro. Maybe I should take that with a giant grain of salt. But if you can start to basically attach reputation and this whole concept, there's this whole thinking that Keon and Artur and Ostrata Band thought a lot about, which is like Web of Trust. You can basically start to like high level, like have the different nodes be like different public keys, non star identities that are creating different nodes and then like the weights between whose apps, what information, you know, that's one way to like figure out the value of that. So Jack Dorsey's app something much more interesting than a random anyway. So long start, Long story short, I think there's a lot to figure out there, but I'm pretty sure that some version of value rank or market rank is going to be foundational to the next Google. And that's kind of one of my main focus areas. Thanks for tuning in. If you're interested in exploring any of these topics further, or want to learn more about how we can help you secure a new or existing Bitcoin allocation, get in touch with our team at on rampbitcoin.com. We look forward to supporting you on your Bitcoin journey. I think it's like. Obvious at this point, like the Internet is kind of broken in the sense of like just trying to use a Google or social media platform and you know again the centralization and the ability from, you know, ads and the censorship, we saw all that happen and then maybe it is like reversed a little bit that there's something there. But when you're. I can't help but think about this sounds kind of like it's almost kind of dumb, but it's like Bitcoin couldn't exist without the Internet. Totally. But I think it couldn't exist without the Internet. Not from like ATCPIP and like transfer of like information and packets, from the virality of how fast it's like aggregated and caught steam because you needed the social virality of it. But then it's if you take that, then it's like Internet was, Bitcoin is the thing. What was created with the Internet or the Internet needed to exist. It's actually the thing that's going to keep the Internet alive in the sense of like the Internet will fundamentally be broken because of all the AI and all the things that we're talking about where you can have infinite amount of information that's transferred over it. So then it makes it unusable. So now you ascribe this value like to what we're talking about to like signal on the Internet. So now you know how to use it again. And if you take that even further, so now we if extrapolating that to the next step, it's like, well, we have AI that's existed but if you go back to the energy, it's the thing that keeps it from like not turning on us and it requires energy to go and it's just symbiosis that bitcoins going to play till like we March towards wherever. We're going to keep everything in check. I see an odd it's all that was enough to tease it. But it's just something I've been thinking about for a while And it was before the AI and all this it was just naturally the Internet. When I think about how fast Bitcoin has caught the viral and people don't generally talk about like means and all the things that were needed to catch the scene, there was a having that's obvious, right, for the reflectivity of the market and market awareness. But there's also like the the stories and the the podcast and the articles that were really needed that you can imagine. If that didn't exist, how much longer would have taken to disseminate all this information. Yeah. And I I think sort of the next step is going to be even Wilder. Now this is harder to predict. I mean as as an investor, I'm much more interested in like, well, what's going to be big in the next couple of years. And so I think, I think Value Rank and some of the AI stuff will be and I think Noster is going to be very big. But if you start thinking many years maybe a decade plus out, this is another idea that was inspired by that Drew talk in 2019. I actually. So I I kind of repackage this a little bit and the way I think about this, this is a bit more sci-fi. But you mentioned you don't mind going cosmic. So here we go. I think of the next Internet, the truly next Internet. What I mean by that is like the physical infrastructure behind it. That's what I'm going to call the Bitcoin orboris. And you guys know the Orboris is like the snake that eats its own tail. I think this is just like a fascinating sort of like paradox that we run into over and over again. We run into it in mathematics. There's like viral incompleteness theorem. We run into it and sort of like the zin Co ONS, we run into it in like certain statements like you say, well it was. You can go like there's all sorts of like interesting linguistics that you can like basically create, create these things that just explode your mind because it can't be true or not true. And I think that that's because that's kind of what consciousness is like. There's a thing within, there's like a member of the set that can't see everything because it can't see itself. And So what I think is going to happen here is that, you know, we, as you said, we needed this first wave of the Internet. And the Internet obviously is still built on one, the energy systems, you know, energy infrastructure powering the servers and then it's built on the actual cables transmitting the information. And so which by the way, that could become a major choke point in the next decade. I hope it doesn't, but it very well might. But we have a solution for that. And I think you know what's going to happen is you have this Internet that pops up, Bitcoin gets released to obviously fix the monetary problem. Then on top of it, we build the Lightning network, which are these metabolic pathways which allow us to start, you know, creating new mini markets for things. We get something like NOSTER and I think there's a debate. I'm obviously very bullish on Noster. So I'm spending a lot of my time today. I think if basically Bitcoin is a centralized network from value lightning to centralized network for payments, Noster centralized network for data, some people think that's going to come directly on top of the Lightning network, like it's a literal layer 3 where this is sort of like a bit of a diagonal layer three. We'll see. NOSTER is anchoring to lighting networks. It's probably good enough. But basically once you have an information network that's that's anchored into lightning Network, eventually what that's going to sort of translate out to is probably every pack that you send needs some kind of payment with it, right? Because again, tethering everything back into reality, there's some cost, energetic cost. And I think what's going to eventually happen is you're going to then once you can basically meter, you know, selling electrons for Satoshi's, selling bandwidth for Satoshi's, selling storage for Satoshi's, you're going to rebuild the infrastructure, the actual Internet infrastructure in a way that we can basically sell bandwidth. And you can create potentially like a mesh network where you know, you're incentivizing lots of people to sell their bandwidth and create a truly peer-to-peer Internet. That sounds crazy. That's probably many, many years in the future. But what's beautiful is if we can build that and now we have the incentives to do it. And if you want to, you know, learn more about this watch again that blockchain Mind candy talk drew goes into like very, very interesting detail about it. You know, you basically solve a lot of these centralization problems where to build a new telecom, whatever, you need huge amounts of capital and build out this big infrastructure project. Now potentially could be done in a more peer-to-peer way. Well, then eventually if we get that new net, then you start hosting Bitcoin back on top of it. So you literally, you had a world, you created the Bitcoin in the world, you build a new Internet infrastructure on top and rehost the Bitcoin on top of that. It's literally something from within the system building a new system which it is itself running inside of in the new version. That's where I think we're headed and I think that's going to take some time to get there. But one thing that does kind of bring me to as an investor is you know I I made a joke about this on Twitter, but I actually mean it. One of my theses at Hive Mind is to like look at all of the like shit coin projects that have gotten any kind of interest, right. So basically like look at like the multi coin portfolio, find the ones that are interesting and then just build them with Bitcoin lightning in Oscar, right. So you know, I invested recently in Open Agents, which also runs GP Utopia, Open Network for compute for AI. And now I'm interested in like rebuilding Helium, which is like the sort of like a bandwidth market with Satoshi's that I'm interested in building. File, Coin and all those other crap storage projects that went nowhere with Bitcoin, Lightning and probably Noster for at least the the lookups of the files. So I know that's a little bit out there, but I think it does tie down to like very concrete things that I want to invest in, which is marketplaces, digital marketplaces for physical resources metered with lightning. It makes complete sense. To two quick points in a Brian, Brian runs a tight ship on this one. So we got, we got topics we're going to go through, but. Just just to to anchor. Where that it makes complete sense from just a pure efficiency perspective. It's like we went and pulled all the data from a central perspective and have to shoot it back out versus what you're talking about is the data and information goes out to the edges, which is just a more robust and resilient network. And then when you reference reference to the altcoin projects and then there's validity, yeah, 100%. The one that always thinks comes to mind is stepping like this idea to have like step in was a it was something like app where if you ran you got tokens and obviously they traded it and turned it into. But you can imagine there's some, like social aspects to like having a unit tied to reward and social proof around group activities that you haven't seen. But once you coalesce around that, and it was an altcoin project where I know people working, I know there's going to be something out there, probably multiple versions of it, because it's just all interoperable and it makes sense because it's money and you like to get paid for doing physical activity and we need, you know, So yeah, no. And I'm. Really. I'm really glad you brought up that that thought Max on on sort of looking at looking at the crypto landscape and saying, you know, these aren't all bad ideas. It's just that they've got it twisted and that they think they need their own token. And part of that is probably greed and grift, but it's also just a lack of recognition that, yeah, you should be building this on Bitcoin. You should be building on the most robust and resilient foundation. But yeah, there's good ideas out there. I mean, it's funny like a, you know, one of the hot sort of crypto narratives is this what they call D PIN, which is exactly what you're describing, which is like decentralized physical infrastructure networks. It's like, yes, we can do these things, but we can do it with Bitcoin. And you really don't need your own token. That'll probably just end up being dumped on retail. But one one question I do want to go back to just in terms of, you know, something like Stacker News or or any of the sort of things being built on Noster in your mind, like how does this manifest over time? From which end does sort of like much larger map, you know, close to mass adoption occur? Does it come from people that first see Bitcoin and then say, like, Oh yeah, obviously I'm going to use these applications that leverage this network. Or does it come from just like better applications and better market ranking systems which give people better insights into whatever kind of market they're looking at? And then they realize, Oh yeah, this is using Bitcoin on the back end. Yeah, I think, you know, it's somewhat of a virtuous cycle, right? Where you know, to, to be clear, I'm not as excited on like the Twitter social media stuff with Nostrum, but you know that stuff is still going with you know 10s of thousands of users at least probably hundreds of thousands to three because the Bitcoiners have have a home there. So that's great and like because of that, you know the more people that use those protocols and the various clients like you get more developers that if those developers are then going to build more interesting new apps. But I do tend to learn more towards the the latter case which you're saying which is just brand new applications where you know Bitcoin or lightning are just used there. And so for me with Noster, you know, I, you know, I've made several investments here. You know, obviously I'm proud investor in companies like Primal, which I really like what they're doing and I think it's fantastic and like there can be a great social experience there. But I think that what's going to happen is it's super network effects. So like you're going to see some new use case that's not Twitter. I think probably part of the problem with Twitter by the way is that the like the network effect on X is so strong and if you really want Bitcoin lightning payments and you're like a Bitcoin obsessive or like a super Uber nerd, great. We got those people. The good news is they're technical for the most part, or many of them are. So they're going to build new stuff, but I think the next big wave in my guess is going to come from something else and I don't know what it's going to be. I'm very interested in marketplaces here. I'm also investor in Helen Betts. They were the first one to release open source software that you can use to run a Nostrom market for anything. I think that, you know, I expect to see someone's going to build local Bitcoins on Oster and then lots of other people are going to plug in that shared order book. I expect to see, you know, GPU Toby and other people doing this for GPUs and what he's working on now, open agents like AI agents where you have one order book for, you know, agents where you paid out in SAT's that can do all kinds of weird stuff and probably stuff that I haven't even thought of yet that I'm going to be surprised about. But what's beautiful is whatever that next marketplace is, the Pops or the next app with Noster is the POPS. Everything else that's integrated, NOSTER identity and NOSTER Login gets those users or gets the potential for those users. So let's say it's, you know, a couple 100,000 people have played with the Twitter clients, you know, and 1020% of them stuck around. Cool. The next big thing that pops anyone that's ever downloaded and gotten a public private key pair. Now they can down they can log into whatever that new marketplace is going to be and any of those new marketplace users can now log into the Twitter clients. OK interesting. That starts to have you know a super network effect. Other you know apps which I've also invested in things like Fountain and Wavelink. You know Fountain is a podcasting app. Oscar's also a lot about value Inc wavely for music. They're also doing some of the value rank, but because they've already integrated an Oscar, you know, whatever that next thing that pops is, they get those users too. And any new users that they bring on, even if it's linear growth or whatever, they're still now Noster users. And they can use the Twitter clones and they can also use Stacker News and then they can also use whatever the marketplace pops. So, you know, if I had to take a step back, one of the reasons I'm so bullish on Noster, I think, and there's a lot that I don't understand about what's going to happen this next wave. But I think that humanity is going through like a phase shift. We're going through a transition becoming. We don't know exactly what this new super Organism is going to look like or even what the economics are going to look like. We know it's going to be tethered. In reality there should be some economic costs. But I think the economics are going to look very different than what, you know, the sort of industrial era like you know, we have this sort of agricultural or hunter gatherer era, agricultural era, industrial era. We're just coming into the post industrial Information Society and I think it's going to surprise a lot of people. One example, I think Kevin Kelly, who's another one of my, you know, major heroes, he. You know. Predicted a lot of this very well in 1997, like the late 90s. Sort of the logic of networks and network economies is very different. And you know, in a network economy, you want to bet on open standards that are really simple, right? Like the easier it is for someone to grow and join and create value for your network, the better off you're all going to be. And what got me so sold on Noster? Well, for one thing I love that it already came out of the bitcoiners and ethos I agreed with, was tied to lightning payments, blah blah. But it's just so simple. Like your identity, there is no accounts, there is no passwords, It's a public key. Interestingly enough, it's a Bitcoin public key, which has some interesting 2nd order effects. But because it's just so simple and like then you share a Jason BLOB with just a couple of fields and like it couldn't be more simple. And so I think it's going to be hard for anything else to beat that on adoption because I think ultimately lowering the friction joining us matters. So yeah, that's why I'm bullish, Something about economics. Do you ever? Think about like some of these companies you invested in fun and they may look a little different than traditional you know quote UN quote Web 2.0 and like you know the unicorns. And something I think about in a in a world where it's tethered in reality and you have a unit that increases in purchasing power, you get, it's less of the app for golden handcuffs, right. Because you have this ability to actually learn and then go produce versus be tied to that kind of, you know, salary. And you see the centralization of like Google's a great example, right. It's like they have 200,000 employees and they pay them just to hang and hang around and not compete with them and I think we end up with a more flat structure. Does that impact any of it or do you think it's still too early from your like investment thesis on like how big these companies get and like the the top, the upside of their like potential, So that's. A really. Yeah. I mean fascinating question I don't know the answer to. I I think the good news is we can win in a lot of different ways. And so I I love placing bets where as long as I'm kind of directionally right, you know, we either win or we really win. And so I think that, you know, it's very possible that we never see a company as big as like a Facebook or Google again in terms of like percentage of GDP. And that's probably good thing for the world, right. Like I don't think and you know even though obviously I want to make money for me and my LP's, I don't think any of us have interest in like, you know, conquering and converting everyone to serfs, you know, and I I don't think that's that that's the Bitcoin ethos at all. Having said that, I wouldn't sleep on how big these companies can get, right. And the reason is open networks. So one way that I tell tell people about thinking about just just take payments companies, right is you know in the lighting network maybe your take rate for payments goes down a lot. Maybe in the traditional credit card networks it's 3% + a flat fee and maybe that gets compressed to .3%. So you have much smaller take rate. But when you have an economy that's open to 8 billion people, the vast majority of the world today is like not really able to plug in the online economy. You have trillions of AI intelligences, You have all kinds of weird new business models that no one's thought of, including stuff like Stacker News, Right. Which by the way, is just the most interesting case study and what a new online economy can look like, where you, you upvote, you get paid for finding things early, you get paid for posting early. And so then you start saying, well, yeah, maybe I only get .3%, but what if global GDP 1000 XS or 10,000 XS? Because there's so many more people and so many more business models and so much more energetic flow. This, by the way, is another reason that I really emboldish on lightning and like, I like the Bitcoin digital gold thesis. But I just think it's very, I mean, look, the good news is, let's say everything you know that I'm saying is right, but you don't believe me. Like if it's just digital gold, you're going to win. And if I'm right about 10% of what I'm saying, you're going to win even more because it all accrues back to Bitcoin as well. And if I'm actually right, like then you're, you know, even happier. So that's the good news is you can be kind of directionally correct. But I I think that, you know, as much as I like Bitcoin as a storage vehicle, I think that's it's a very kind of like boomer last economy way of looking at the world. My increasing thinking is that what the Lightning Network is, is it's a flow network, right? Like your Bitcoin is only useful and it's interesting. It's like energy, right? It's which energy is never stagnant. This is by the way, one of the reasons I'm so, you know, bullish on Bitcoin mining with renewables. And by the way, if you look at interconnection queues in Texas, wherever, it's like literally 8090% solar, wind storage, all the stuff I'm talking about and it will sound crazy to live your of your listeners. Just like go to like the ERCOT air connection grid. It's all fat. But like what's interesting about all that is that if I over produce during sunny or windy times, I have all the surplus of electricity production. I can't just get rid of it, right? Like I have to do something with that electricity and you know I so literally that's when you get negative power prices because the way tax credits work in West TX when the winds blowing really heavily, you know you can't just make energy vanish right? That that's another one of the laws of their dynamics. So in my mind, energy and the digital representations of it are much more valuable when they're networked and constantly in flow, which is when you see in the long run I think what's going to happen in light network, you get a rate of return and you get a rate of return that is directly proportional to how good you are at pointing your flow, IE at taking the stats that you have in a channel and figuring out the right place to allocate them, which is you know, information to allocate flow. And so all that said, I think that your your margins may be lower but the overall size of the economic pie can be much, much, much, much much larger and people that figure out how to point their Bitcoin in new and productive ways are going to be really big winners. Yeah, no, that's that's a fascinating. Way to look at it. I think you know you you mentioned lightning as as a way to you know really expand basically the utility of of Bitcoin, right. Like it. It allows it to scale to more people. I think you know, it's funny because I love hearing your bullishness on Lightning, because I think it gets a lot of criticism, some of it warranted, some unwarranted, honestly. I mean, it's a six year old, roughly protocol, much younger than even Bitcoin, which is a very young, open protocol. But I'm curious how you think about, you know more from, more from the development side of things Like what, what are some of the realities of Lightning today in terms of its scalability and actually being able to service 8 billion people? What sort of things might need to be augmented or changed in the future? And and then sort of stepping back from that higher level, you know from an investment perspective as as someone investing in the space, how do you balance basically you know, potential protocol changes that could make all of these things more useful and more scalable versus hey, let's just build on what we have today and it'll sort of work itself out? I think that, you know, you're absolutely right. Lightning is still a very young protocol. And I think I think one thing that I would just caution everyone, you know when when you're looking at all this stuff is like it's one thing to be very bullish, which obviously all of us are and sometimes I fall into the strap or get a little too bullish too fast, I know that. But like yeah zoom out just like a little bit like to your point Lightning network you know we're six years in or whatever it is Bitcoin 15 ish years in. I mean these the internet's not even that old right. Like at least the web as we know it. And so we're we're still pretty early if you take kind of like the civilizational vantage point for all of this stuff. And so I think that while we would like a lot of these things to happen tomorrow like the Bitcoin or Burst if I was talking about, it's not, it's just not like there are you still have to like take realities of physics and human nature and like it just takes time to build you like of course. And so I think that, you know on the long term view, I think we're actually moving pretty quickly. In the short term view. You know, I think that from business perspective, I mean I'll tell you start out like a lot of my companies have done some wild or more sci-fi bets that'll take some more time. I think the companies that are just like making it rain right now are these like regional exchanges and lightning nodes that are doing payments. So like, if you want to look at like Bitcoin companies today, there's like, as far as I can tell, there's probably a few. More, but there's. Only a few things really. A product market fit exchange. Exchange always works. Exchange between Fiat currencies and Bitcoin? Great. Still a great business. There's gonna be a lot of like call the mini rivers that emerge in these different emerging economies. They're not going the next Google, but you know for fund my size fund almost $21 million, I think we can return the fund many times on our investments in those amazing investors are going to be super stoked and they also do payments and they have lightning nodes that are going to probably become very important to regional routers, IE the Grand Central for their reaches. Those businesses are going to do fantastic and in those cases frankly like they're custodial and that's fine for now. I'm not saying like obviously there's geopolitical things that could shift that, but custodial lightning, it works. It's great. Yes, it has a lot of problems. There's a lot of regulatory issues. It pisses me off that like companies have to worry about getting licenses and all this stuff. But like it is what it is and that's if you want to you know win in this phase, that's where we're at with where the technology is. OK, great. The other two things that you so you've got basically exchange payments and probably like loans like Unchained style stuff, those things all have product market fit to some degree. Everything else is a bit more speculative in my mind. What comes next? Well, you know, if we really it, it depends, right, Like if, if there's like major government crackdowns and certain things, which doesn't appear to be happening. If anything, it appears it's gone the other way. We just got ETFs approved like. But if that were to happen, then yes, there would have to be some kind of like, you know, faster building on the Noxtodial front. But even on that front, we're moving pretty quickly, right? So, you know, I've also invested in companies, you know, like Mutiny, those guys and Breeze. Both of those companies have done a lot of thinking about this. You know Breeze is using green light with their SDK today. Mutiny was building on LDK, you know and Block has put a lot of spiral, a lot of resources behind non CEO Lightning. There's still a lot to be done where you can basically separate the signer on a device from the node which is running in the cloud. That's great. I think all that stuff is awesome. Mutiny recently has gotten a lot of attention. I've also invested in Fetty as well for for using Fetaments. So both those companies are playing there. Kelly and some of the Ellen bits guys have done a lot with cashew and these mints. I think, yeah, the E cash stuff is interesting. I don't think it's the long term solution. I think it's a great tool in the toolbox and like if you want quote UN quote non custodial, it's not non custodial because you know you have to give up custody of your Bitcoin to get it. But it's a different trust model and that's that's probably a good option for some people. I also think people are sleeping unlike other stuff that's like, you know, if you're OK with that level of centralization and risk, like again, everything's a spectrum, right? Frankly, I feel more comfortable. Yes, there's certain risks, but having my like Lightning wallet with cash out, why Block is a, you know, public company that gets audited and like a edge. I don't think Jack Dorsey is going to try and rug us. And if he does, you know, there's the SEC there. And like, I know they're not perfect, but like whatever, there's like certain protections we get there. If things go really South, then there's other jurisdictions that will pop up, ABL Salvador and companies like Galoy operating there blink. Maybe they'll be the one that you can trust more because they're kind of regulated. So that's kind of on the more centralized version. You do have different risk models but probably you're gonna be okay there And on the other end of the spectrum if you really need private you know because you're living in a part of the world where that's necessary maybe the mints are your best option and maybe a mint with you know three of five or five of seven multi sig. You know I personally am less bullish on like randos custom your Bitcoin. That sounds terrifying to me. But like like what you guys are doing sounds a lot makes a lot of sense multi custodian, you know, and I I told Michael I would love to be able to have some Bitcoin store with, you know, a key in with one company in Singapore, another in Switzerland, another in the United States, another in El Salvador. That makes a lot of sense to me. But I do think in the long say medium term, even the next couple of years, I think a lot of people are sleeping on stuff like channel factories, hosted channels where you know maybe you have to trust, you know Lightning Labs and whoever opens those channels with them on your behalf. But like you know both of them have direct you. And then eventually I do think we'll get the fully non custodial stuff working out. But I think that'll just take time and we need patience. And yeah, I would just encourage anyone that's like down and lightning to zoom out. It's like working pretty damn well. Yeah, I think that's. That's certainly the right nuance take on on all of that and just putting my, so I I spent several years in the traditional finance world and I I did a lot of diligence on investment funds. So I'm curious from your perspective as a as a portfolio manager, you know you referenced those sort of different buckets of of almost risk profile of an opportunity right. And part of that is you know potential for monetization and and really more so like the time frame on which that could occur. How do you sort of structure your fund generally in terms of the exposures of those different types of investments? I'm just curious. Well, I mean, so for one thing I am you know, an early stage investor and it's kind of all that I'm interested in. I'm not really interested in becoming a growth stage investor. So I like, I like being the absolute first money, yet I will make exceptions to that like I invested in companies like Lightning Labs, River Light, Spark a little bit later and I think those are going to be great companies. But like typically I like to be the absolute first money yet. And the reason for that is it allows me to frankly cast a much wider net and to play a much riskier game. If you look at the best performing venture fund the last decade, I'm pretty sure it's why I see by like a large margin. And you know why is that? Well, because they get in at the very beginning and it's the beauty of power laws. If you get something and you know it's your question Michael, like how big can some of these companies get? I still think they could be really fucking big. And if I can catch, you know, maybe it's not the next Google in terms of percentage of GDP, but a Google sized company, right, like trillion dollar company, you know, even in a much bigger economy, like that's still super, super valuable. And so anything, I mean like back of the envelope math, right. My first one was $21 million fund back of the envelope with a few maybe strategic exceptions, let's say 90% of the deals I'm doing. I want to see a clear path. I want to see in my mind if this thing works. And I always think you know what could go right, what business models could emerge. But if it goes right, can I at least return the fund that's like the absolute bare minimum, right. And so I'm writing checks, typically between 250K and a mill. So I need to believe that this is my 250 or 500K or 750K stake, whatever it is, is going to be worth at least $1,000,000 in the worst case scenario. Then I start thinking, could I 10X? Could I get $200 million off of this one investment? That's where I get excited when I see stuff like that. So in general, you know, I invested in a lot of companies At some point I need to. In fact, I'm working on it. I don't know when we're getting out but updating my website, but we've invested in and fun one like 38 companies across 42 rounds like I'm spread and I think typically his first money in. And so if any of those companies work at all, I think we return the funnel on one of those. If it really works, maybe we text the funnel on that one. If a bunch of them start working, could we get into some soccer returns maybe that's what I'm shooting for. And so that that's kind of the way I think about this is from a risk profile in terms of the different investments themselves. I mean, I actually didn't think about it as much at the time. But now that I'm kind of, you know, talking my LP's about this, it's kind of nice that I had a bunch of my crazy sci-fi bets, some of the infrastructure and early lightning application bets. But like I I did invest in like 6 of these kind of like regional exchange and like lightning, regional lightning nodes. That gives me like a lot of like confidence that worst case scenario even when all my sci-fi blows up like we have like exchanges and payments and that works and typically it's very, very early not first money. So I think I was kind of just getting a little bit lucky in the way that I I cast it out. But yeah, my my big thing is I want to know anything that I can return. I really want to see a way I can 10X the whole fund off of 1 check. Yeah, and you. Did a lot of smart things there knowingly and and maybe unknowingly and like you've you've you've put constraints on yourself right with going at first money in where you don't need that much capital. And I think the multiples it's obviously improved looking at funds from a lower low amount raise from the multiple perspective and returning capital. But then you're you're basically playing into a tailwind that we think a lot about in the sense of the the just cost to actually start a business has just completely gone down every year and into the latest past couple of years. And I really think complete venture in general is just like almost like in the sense of the the you know zero or nothing or like 100 or nothing and all the things that are associated these large funds are really fundamentally going to get shifted especially with like what we see just with what's happening. And so it ties into like you've put this constraint on the 250 to 1,000,000 and the reality is you should be able to learn really quickly in this new age unless you're doing something insane from a regulatory or like meeting that kind of requirement to get product market a bit. And then your thesis on the regional exchanges is like spot on in the sense we just had to deal with coin MENA and they're licensed by the central bank and by Iran. They have a direct, you know window to the the the bank there and then they're also just got the Vara license in Dubai and the guy's thesis was effectively like finance had a lot of the flow there. But the reality is like in a local market when when it's financial markets and and and it's based, it's built on relationships and trust. And so like you don't want to send your money to you know X place you want to deal with people in your backyard. And so we see that globally and also ties to your point on the Fed events, we have some very strong thoughts on that. I'll share for another deal. But it's like it looks like it, but it looks different in the sense like we're not really going to, in my opinion, we're not some of this stuff, some of this stuff is going to get cosmic and look different, but we're actually, and they get conflated. We're not going to recreate the wheel. We're just repurposing it based on primitives that are unique to the protocol. And this idea of using trusted institutions and financial and media is to your point of square is like this like existed for thousands of years. So why would we just like throw it all away, you know. And so I think like Vetiments exist. They just look with like some regulatory constraints tied to who's holding it and that's what people want because they want governance in like regulatory clarity and Slas and things like that. And this goes back to just like, you know, looking and allocating. It's like if you've kind of seen that from the market and what they adopt, then you have a better understanding. And I think it ties into like, you know, a farmer in an emerging market all the way to a guy that's a billionaire because at the end of the day, the dollar to him and a billion dollars to the other person, still the same thought of like, it's your energy that's been produced and you have to understand how it works. You're just not going to park it there because everybody's trying to get your dollar or your bill in. And so they're the same concept of user adoption. They're just on different scales. Totally, I mean. A couple of reactions that one, you know on the the banks and the Fed and I'm also an investor like in Galois and you know they have a slightly different approach on regional banking and all this stuff as well. Like there's so many different ways this all could play out. But IA 100% agree with you. What I love about Bitcoin and Lightning and Nostrick, what I love about permissionless protocol, it's permissionless. You can do whatever the fuck you want. And 90% of people should not be self gusting. Like dude, the chance you're going to lose your own keys. Like let's get real. Like it's way greater than block losing your stuff. It just is. I'm not saying. And on the other hand, I'm not saying that that's the perfect solution for everyone either. And there are people for whatever reason the early cypherpunks like they don't want to participate in that system. Beautiful. Do it yourself. And you should always have that right of exit. You should always have the ability to interact with these protocols however the hell you want. But human trust is never going to die, and for most people, that's going to be very, very important. For those that you know want to go and build a crazy future and live on the edge, more power to them. That's the beauty of permissionless. Do what you want. Yep, Beauty of Open. Systems and also just having options, right? Having different options I think is key. The diversity of custodial options is very important, something we've heard from a lot of clients and prospects that we've talked to. You know, considering a multi institution custody setup doesn't necessarily have to be 100% of your allocation, but just think about the different options because there's trade-offs associated with all of it and to your point like building on an open system allows you to have the diversity of those options totally. And one more point because Michael, I know you're you're somewhat and Brian you may be as well, but a student of the VC game as well. And just just to riff on that a little bit because I, I do have to say like obviously I love all this stuff and like you know, and I really truly am in this because I want to see a decentralized hive mind build. I believe in human freedom. I think it's incredibly important. Yeah. But I also love the game of investing, right. Like I find this extremely fun And the reality is, you know the bigger the fun size, the harder it is to get good returns, full stop. And you know I look at big funds and I'm not saying there's not a role for obviously it's great like if you want to be a growth investor like more power to you. But that's a whole different world. First of all. It requires like a lot more modeling and diligence and all the stuff, which is just like that's a different personality set. Now you're more of like a Wall Street guy, which is great. And I'm, you know, there are people for him. That's really fun. But what I love is cap, downside, uncapped upside man. That is such an incredible thing in the universe, right? And you know, I see a lot of funds. They start getting super huge, right? You get a billion dollars under management or $2 billion like I, you know, you can't convince me these guys aren't just like collecting fees at that point to me. I'm not interested in that, right. Like I love because if you get to kind of be a bit more of a cowboy, right, and just go out there and play the YC type game a little bit more, you can have uncapped rewards. Frankly. It's just more interesting. Yeah. To spend time with a lot more kind of like out there visionary thinkers, many of whom are not going to work. But that's OK because some will and and you know, one approach I've taken, sorry, I guess and as you guys can hear that the, the, the beauties of life in the city is, you know, I've taken the approach which is also very different in my own funds, which is, you know, I've recommitted half of my management fees always back into my funds. So I'm always, you know, one of my largest LP's. And to me part of that is one, I think the stuff's going to work. So I want the upside. But two, I I never want to get in that game of just like doing a job, to do a job and collect fees. Like, I find that extremely, like, just not interesting. I think that, you know, just like anything like your point about being tethered to reality, if you're good at this, you should really, really see the upside. And if you're not, probably should be something else. Yeah, there's two. Huge themes that you you relate on and I've always appreciated our conversations about this stuff is caps downside and unlimited upside in the sense of, you know there's this reality of I was joking around like the only thing scarcer than Bitcoin is Bitcoin talent OR people building. And so you kind of like limit the downside from acquisition or Aqua higher in the builders of this. So it has a different return profile or 0 profile than traditional like tech where everybody's building on if it goes, it's zero. Yeah. But then also I come from like well, I love like allocating and looking at things from an opportunistic perspective. I love being in like the like building with like your hands and seeing the market and the feedbacks. And it's just seen the reality. I've been on so many firms across the ecosystem whether it's, you know, we work again being that pinnacle all the way into the Bitcoin landscape where too much money literally just kills. And I fundamentally believe in it's part of the ethos that we've lived here at on ramp. It's like constrains breed creativity. And so if you inherently bring those in, then you start to really be very resourceful and how you think about your time. And we let's start to look at it like what better use of our time is it to go spend a bunch of money on marketing or have podcasts like this and we have all this kind of like learn information to be able to you know provide and bring people like yourself on that are experts in their own rights to give to the market. And that helps build confidence and trust in what we're doing. And effectively long term our vision is that if we educate the market then we'll long term you know provide services because where else would you get the service security learning from those individuals. And so just seeing that when you think about large funds and the allocation when you go and give somebody a bunch of capital and now you just like inherently it's almost like a, it's almost like a a rope and you're kind of like here you know just like it just starts getting, you get it's real dangerous on how you can hang yourself because you're effectively out. And it's almost that false signal with that amount of capital to what you're doing. And it gives you like it just it basically untightens the fidelity of like what you're doing and is it returning. And because the money has always been that benchmark when you put it on the scoreboard, so you just continue to do the thing versus actually going back to producing the value. And so I think there's just really something like really profound in the constraints and doing it. And then I think coupled with all the tools that we're having, it's just the reality is you don't need that amount of capital. So to be able to like allocate in that respect and then see that return profile with the downside is I think it's like the future of how capital allocation would be. I I I couldn't agree more and to be clear, like I'm not saying there there isn't a place for you know for big money and late stage investing purely for like deep tech and stuff like that. But I agree with I, I, dude, like, if you can't get an MVP out the door, you know, before we even chat, like, they're probably not the right builder. Because I see people that ship super fast or constantly experimenting now, especially with, you know, Copilot and Revel and all these tools. It's like, you know, come on dude, like and so a little bit of capital can allow people to quit their jobs, hire a few folks, maybe spend a little bit on, you know, some experiments and whatnot. And that's cool. But, like, I I definitely believe that there's also going to be, you know, I think there's many, like I said, I love casting bats. There's many ways we can win. I hope we get some of these like, you know, crazy you know, companies that 10X or 100X to fund. But to your point, there's also in addition to the aquire point, which is good one and that's absolutely true. The talent is scarce. That will be huge in anyway. But you know a lot of these companies maybe they only raise one round, maybe 2 rounds of financing ever and maybe you know they go a long time, maybe it's 10 years. And at some point obviously if the liquidity for the LP's and there might be some creative things around that. By the way, I'm also interested in, you know, maybe one day we have more of a Bitcoin native stock market, maybe comes up in El Salvador or somewhere else, you know, that could be interesting as well. But I do think that or maybe there's like you know, kind of like exit to the investors, the community or maybe you eventually get a dividend. Like there's a lot of different ways these things could go. But if as an example, you invest in another company I've invest in, it's kind of this is sort of an out there 1 Lightning network plus. It's just like a dude in a website, right. He's got a small team with him now, but you know, because he was early and got a great network effect, like I mean they own the vast majority of market share for all Lightning channels opened and you know, basically like they have two different products. One is like a pool, but basically channels open that that's the the metric that matters. And they've opened like I don't know 10X more than anyone else in the market. And it's just like a dude and like you know, I look at him and you know he's a really smart builder and you could use a little bit more capital, a little bit more team. He's moving kind of slowly, but like he's starting General Ave. and he's got the network effect and he doesn't need that much money. And I look about this and I'm like maybe this one takes 8910 years, but like could that be, you know, $100 million company for sure? Could that be a Unicorn? Sure could. And you know, you get in, you know, whatever 4 mil post or something very small and all of a sudden, you know some of these like deals that don't go gangbusters but they're very capital efficient. You know, those could be really good outcomes for the funds as well. The other thing that's very interesting that I think I was just chatting with some of my LP's about or sharing with them in an update is I think something a lot of other people will talk about is most of these Bitcoin companies, certainly most of My Portfolio, keeps a decent chunk of their treasury in BTC. Additionally, a lot of the revenues are in BTC and SAT's, right? And so if you keep that in there and everything happens as we think it's going to happen directionally, Bitcoin goes up over time. You know, some of these companies may have infinite runway. Like, they just may not need to raise again, right? Like if you keep your your money in Bitcoin or a decent chunk of it, Bitcoin goes up. Like maybe you raise one round and then Bitcoin price appreciation is enough that you can keep growing as if you had raised further growth rounds. All that to say, there's, I'm not saying there's not a reason you know there. There's certainly cases where it will help to raise more money. But I think people are going to be surprised at some of these like raise one, precede maybe a seed round and like ten years later exit for a billion dollars and it's just a better. Tether into reality with the cap table, right, when you think from an equity perspective, it's how you get in trouble. When it's messed up in the misaligned incentives versus owning more of the company. You are able to like actually think from a long term perspective versus like how do I get out of this position because I kind of screwed up early on totally. Yep, Bitcoin helps align. Incentives. And it brings rationality back to markets. It's a bit, it's a beautiful thing, boys. I'm into it. Well. I think, I think this is a good spot to wrap. Max, thank you so much for coming on again. It was a fascinating conversation as always and hope to do it again soon. Yeah, hopefully we can make this a. Regular occurrence, we had a tight, tight rip with some other things coming up. But yeah, Max, we always enjoy you coming on and it's always a great conversation. I think we'll see the feedback from some of some of the folks and how many emojis we get. But yeah, thanks for coming on taking time likewise. Guys, well, it's super fun. Appreciate you having me on. And yeah, let's do it again. All right. See you. Guys, a couple weeks.