Transcript+
Before we get into the episode, a quick reminder that this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. If you are enjoying On RAMP media content, please like subscribe and share as it goes a long way in helping others find the signal through the noise. Now for a word from on RAMP. On RAMP is a Bitcoin asset management platform built on multi institution custody leveraging our partnership with Bit Go and their 10 plus year track record in securing assets in Coincover, the premier digital asset risk mitigation company. On Ramp's multi institution custody is a segregated institutional grade vault requiring two of three institutions at any point in time to sign once a client's unique permissions have been met at on RAMP We understand that your Bitcoin journey is a multi generational pursuit catalyzed by the ideals of perseverance, aspiration and legacy. That's why we're proud to introduce on RAMP Heritage, a suite of private client services dedicated to ensuring your Bitcoin legacy is preserved and passed on, embodying the true essence of wealth that goes beyond mere numbers. If you would like to learn more, please schedule a consultation. As we prepare for the Bitcoin having and the next wave of global adoption of this nascent and growing asset class, we are halving all annual maintenance fees for clients that secure their wealth before the next Bitcoin epoch. It all comes down. To computers, communicating the information superhighway can be a confusing mix of on ramps and off ramps. Bitcoin is worthless artificial goal. Is it still rat poison? Probably rat poison squared. We need to get into the world of, OK, This is actually foundational technology. What the Internet of Money does is it creates a single network which can do a microtransaction to a giga transaction. The Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government. The one thing that's missing that that will soon be developed is a reliable E cash. Welcome to the third episode of Final Settlement, a Bitcoin podcast brought to you by On RAMP where we take a look at Bitcoin really more from a technological perspective. Going beyond the digital gold thesis, Bitcoin is more than just an asset in your portfolio. Bitcoin is an open source piece of software that people are building on top of and and enabling all sorts of new and innovative forms of utility in the real world. And so with us today, we have David King, also known as Curious DK on his YouTube channel and Twitter. David is an entrepreneur and Angel investor with over 2 decades of experience in Silicon Valley, building technologies, products and informing relationships. And he's also a content producer and an educator sharing his knowledge about technology, Bitcoin and Noster on his YouTube channel. I'm really excited to have you on, David. How's it going? Glad to be here. Thanks for thanks for the invite. I saw you had my boy Max Webster on for episode #2. So when you reached out, I said, all right, these are the good people. Let's do it. Love it. Love it? Yeah. I think one place to start is really just your background because it's fascinating to me, you know your the the amount of time and and sort of effort that you've put in on the, you know, technology side of you know you worked at Google previously and in various startups in Silicon Valley. I I'd really just love sort of a deep dive on your background, your career trajectory and experience learning about new technologies and you know, really honing in on some of your early learnings about software development and and technological evolution from your your time at Google and and elsewhere across Silicon Valley. Yeah, and and I could even back it up because a lot of the foundation for that was laid when I was, you know, like 6 years old or something. My father used to it back. Yeah, so, So my father, you know, he's like a kind of a a nerd math type guy and he was like ACPA professionally, but he was really into figuring out computers like in the early 80s and how they could be used to like make his business better. So he was buying us a new family computer like every two years. And that was like magic box of cool things you could do. So I just started to like play with it and I started programming and he would never let us get video game systems, but we could, he would always say you can build better games yourself. So it's like, OK, you got to figure out how to program. So I would get into that and along that path, like programming, you know, building games and stuff. He got a modem when you know probably I think it's 150 Watt modem probably in like 1984 or something and you know so super slow. But what you're doing is you're you're connecting to these BBSS, these local BBSS, right dial up to Avbs and it's kind of like what I call a proto version of what the Internet is today. And so I was getting to play with like connecting to people and meeting new people and downloading software and all of the stuff that we kind of take for granted on the Internet. Now it's a very primitive version and it was not open at all, but it was like the same types of feelings you get when you're on the Internet. And I was like, OK, like I had no idea where it was going. I was not trying to predict the future. I was just having fun. And I, you know, we sort of graduated from those DBSS to these, these services like, you know, Prodigy, CompuServe, America Online and and then eventually the open Internet. And each one of these things I think was like a formative experience. And seeing, you know, in a sense, I'm like, you know, kind of a software guy, but I'd say like more so an Internet guy because my whole kind of life and career has been watching and participating and figuring out like what's next on the Internet. And I think it's just like an endlessly fascinating, open set of kind of questions and answers you can be playing with. There's always something fun to play with and stuff to hypothesize. So that that sort of, you know, led me to study computer computer engineering and I studied computer engineering and you know, did some internships at Intel and Microsoft and kind of thought maybe I was going to go like big tech route and and but I'd always wanted to do startups. And so I ended up kind of, you know, right after school getting involved in a few different startups and eventually making my way to Google. And at the time, it was not very obvious to people that that was like going to be interesting. I mean, I used it all the time, but. But people didn't really know how Google was going to make money or didn't. You know, Google was making money, but people didn't really understand it. There was no Twitter. It was very quiet. So it was just this thing that I loved, used all the time. It helped make all of this information super accessible. And you know, it it, it reminded me of why the Internet was so great. But it's like magnified, you know, several orders of magnitude over. So that kind of, you know, that's sort of how I got involved at Google. And then I I've just always been involved in startups and excited about like new technologies that could be built. So when I left Google, I actually ended up creating one of the first gaming companies when Facebook was launching the platform and you know, built that for several years and sold it. It's now part of Walt Disney. And and that was right around the time that, you know, like Bitcoin was getting launched and invented and and sort of shared and discovered. And so that's sort of been another piece of like weird early technology and stuff that you know, even sort of can look forward a bit and see where it's going. And I think this pattern of like stuff sits raw and weird and nobody really understands it, but it sort of grabs you for one reason or another and you're just like, wait, how does that work? Why does it work that way like that? Those are the types of questions that I think you know that's always what drives my curiosity and interest to continue pursuing things and you know sort of happened with you know BDSS and early Internet and and you know Internet connectivity and and you know search and information retrieval with you know Google and sort of what was happening in social networking you know in the mid arts and and and I think you know what happened with Bitcoin and kind of what's happening with Noster now and you know has been you know for for kind of a maybe a year and change now really getting some strong momentum. So I'm the type who's like always curious to play with the new stuff and try to form an opinion and you know I don't always get it right the first time but like if I just follow my curiosity I keep finding the things that are you know that that you know many of which end up being interesting. So that's kind of what I've just committed to continuing to do. I love. I love the thread on the curiosity because, like, I think we forget that we're just in the early innings of the Internet, let alone Bitcoin, right, And commercial Internet, you know, twenty 2000s and then bitcoins, right after that. So we're still just seeing how they play together. But this whole notion of just being curious leads you to realize that, like, things aren't actually what they seem or they're not as good as they seem. We generally people accept things as they are just because I think that's just how human nature works. But if you're always looking at what's the next thing because this current thing doesn't really feel right or there's tailwinds that may not feel right. And then sooner that's how you land on, whether it's different businesses like a Google or you know, Bitcoin or Noster. And it's it's awesome that you were at Google that early because I was at Google, but it was a completely different business. You were at Google. That was like with the talent that was the best human capital, probably on the planet Earth. That went off and did a lot of. Things. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Yeah. And that's and that's awesome because I'm sure you've seen and we'll continue to see the world through a lens of like those individuals and innovation that most people don't get to see. And so you get to spot things that most are looking at it from like, oh, that's kind of interesting versus like that's interesting, but it's not really right yet versus oh, that's interesting and it's the right time because I've seen this before. Yeah, and and I think we see that too. Like when I when I joined Google, it was just a search engine there. There was no Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Android from none of that stuff existed. But it was very focused and narrow and I think a lot of people, a lot of people dismissed it and even my parents said are you gonna go work on a website? isntthe.com stuff over? Did that stuff die? And I think when something really, it only has to be narrowly focused and served like one purpose really well and you can start to see how well if you get that right and that grows and impacts a lot of people, there's adjacent that don't necessarily look that adjacent but actually are adjacent. And those adjacent like the the power of the the core thing will expand to also fill the adjacent and transform adjacencies. And I think you see that as a that's a pattern in technology that happens again and again and again. There's almost like, it's almost like the story of technology is these unintended positive side effects that happen when you get one thing really working well. And I think that's, you know, part of the story of the Internet and the story of Google and the story of social networking, the story of Bitcoin, story of an oster, you know, all kinds of future stuff that's going to happen. Yeah. So was was that sort of mental model or heuristic, Was that known while you were at Google? Like, yes, we're narrowly focusing on this thing. Search got to make this the best. But was there sort of a vision internally that, you know, this is going to be the foundation for a lot of things on the Internet and that and how things work out? Yeah, I I I mean when I got there, there was already a really great ads business humming, you know, I think it was you know, generating already you know hundreds of millions of dollars in in revenue. So it wasn't like super speculative, but it was just not talked about anywhere. They kept it very quiet because there's no reason you don't want to like you know tell everybody even how what a great business you have. You know, maybe other people come after it. So it was the kind of thing that was pretty pretty quiet. But the people there, you know, there was like unbounded ambition and you know, like any anything you would come up with an idea and and Larry Page would say, what if it were 10X that, right. Like, how do you make it bigger. And. And people were talking about. Yeah, even even then I remember people talking about like building hardware. And I remember Sergio and said, well, maybe someday we'll want to build a phone. And this was, you know, this was like probably, I don't know, 8-8 years before there was ever any phone before, before Google had even acquired Android. So it was very early. But there was always this sense that like you know organized world's information is not just you know make a search engine for websites but it's like maps as information and you know and and you know Chrome as a as a browsing experience is really important for how people choose to access information, right. So you sort of you get one thing going really well and then you define it in a fairly abstract set of ways. But I think really smart people and you know I think it was a lot of really good good talent there at that time. You know, you just start to see ways that it bleeds into other things and can actually transform all kinds of adjacents. And in the case of Google, it turned out to be kind of like the whole Internet in a sense. Yeah, that that reminds me of. It's something that I've just been thinking about for a long time, coming from big tech and then into the Bitcoin space and why I just, like always anchor back to like human capital is the only capital that matters. Because until it gets here, the bright businesses won't be built. And what you're referencing is like, I've heard from multiple anecdotes and Chris Stock was a popular one back. And I think it was a similar time frame about being there. Being able to walk into rooms, show up and like provide feedback in the stories about like buying data centers under like different CS, 'cause you didn't want Yahoo and others to know that you were actually like growing at that scale in like the fiber auction that I was actually part of the access team that did the fiber. And that was like in in 17, but that was like 10 years if not more probably 13 years versus winning that like some of that like infrastructure to go and lay it out which is half a decade later. It's just incredible to hear like what's there because you can see like the inklings of like the next wave and if you can build those companies and you get the right people, it's all about the human capital. Then there's no shortage of different ways that an organization can grow and actually really like impact the world. Yeah, 100%. And I think it's both organization as well as like protocols or open source software. So I don't think it always has to be one organization that drives it forward. Like sometimes that works and I think we've seen that work well. We'll see more of those. But I think also things like like Linux, everybody likes to poo poo. But like that, that's not a business. But also like we wouldn't have, you know, Google or Facebook or probably wouldn't have Bitcoin or Noster if we didn't have, you know, Linux, you know, an open source version of Unix used to be crazy expensive to to do these things. You could build out big data Centers for a free service if you didn't have Linux. So I think like these examples are both organizational, but I think also like non organizational and kind of collaborative Internet stuff. And that's the stuff that's I don't think we have really great, we don't have tons of history and tons of examples to look at and point to. So I think people sometimes dismiss it. It's just like, oh, there's some crazy hackers. But like, I think we're going to see a lot more of that kind of stuff happen in the future. Yeah. And it's it's great that you mentioned sort of you know the difference between building out in the open. This is something I've I've heard you talk specifically a lot about you know open systems versus closed systems in terms of you know the pace at which software development can occur. And I'm curious like you know, your time at Google and even beyond that sort of working in Silicon Valley, you know what, what did you see in terms of how the Internet was evolving in terms of, you know, open versus closed source and generally the trajectory of things were on. You know, could you see the centralizing forces starting to play out from an early stage or or you know, how did you think about, you know, maybe the the sort of ways that the Internet was being built out like early infrastructure, some of the errors that that may have happened in terms of centralization versus things that could be more decentralized? Yeah. I I think I I think I did not recognize it as early as I, you know, hoped that I could. I I remember distinctly some some calls I had with my brother. He's he's quite a skeptic. So I was telling him how great Google was and how exciting it was. Everything's going. So he's like, well, yeah, but I mean someday you know, stuff will slow down and and sort of what happens then and how do you sort of optimize the world given that you sort of are in a certain situation. And I I don't think at that time, I don't think I could quite see how this thing could become that. So I'd maybe chalk it up somewhat to my naivete. But also, you know, I think these things are like, I think you sometimes need centralized examples of these things before you can really build great decentralized versions. Because the centralized one kind of shows you it's like really easy to iterate and move fast and like it. It compromises in like long term stuff, but it gets all the short term stuff right. And I think by getting the short term stuff right, you can actually iterate and make things better for people and you can understand, oh, people are complaining about that feature, OK, turn it off. People are asking for this feature, OK, turn it on. So centralized actually makes it very easy to build great things fast, but it ends up compromising long term, which is why, you know, a lot of stuff trends toward a lot of decentralized systems because, you know, people don't experience the long term pain until the long term. They experience the short term kind of wins. So you look at like I was talking about BBSS and the, you know, the centralized providers before the Internet, I think like they were kind of a healthy natural step toward getting the more open Internet that we have today. Now, the Internet's not perfect, but it's really good. There's like some critical flaws to the architecture. But like, but it also works and it helps us do what we want. So I sort of think of, like centralized, you know, as a great starting point to show what kinds of products and services serve people's needs. And then over time we can kind of rebuild or, you know, build new forms of things that show revealed preference and show people's needs, but can do it in a way that doesn't kind of have those long term kind of negative aspects to them. Yeah, that's actually a really good point in the sense that a lot of times going through the Bitcoin journey, you kind of, if you go full circle, you end up where you just described. Because initially you look at and you're like, we're going to change everything, right? We're going to reinvent the wheel when we're actually going to repurpose it and it's going to look a lot more like the existing world with just certain like nuances and governance that's a little bit different to keep everybody honest And if if somebody's honest, you can change very easily and that's what makes the whole thing work versus like you know just changing the whole, whole system and maybe some will completely. But I think more often than not it ends up looking more like the the existing world with like this like tweak to keep everybody playing fair versus like just re architecting the whole system. Right. You You do run into the problem though that if you have a centralized system that's good enough, then a more decentralized system isn't always apparent to people why it should matter because you've sort of well, we've got the thing, it's sort of all our short term means what do we care. So I think it really takes some bridging to figure out where the decentralized services if it's just the decentralized clone of a centralized service, you know, maybe it's fun and interesting for people who like to play with these things, but I don't think it's easy to get mass adoption of those things until people experience the more near term pain. That the, the, the. Centralized service is causing them and they have a reason such or the thing that we don't talk about enough is I think we should be focused on new experiences that couldn't exist with the centralized services. And I think if we start thinking about those and building towards new experiences that just like fundamentally you can't do on the centralized services, but they're close enough to some of the things that we can see work, then I think that becomes like a huge propelling, you know, kind of huge tailwind to propel these things forward. Yeah, I know. It's a really good point. I think, you know, adoption of something that is more decentralized and open can happen in a variety of ways. Like one it's, you know, pulling on basically new use cases, things not possible on the incumbent rails. But also it's a greater and broader recognition of some of the pitfalls of centralization over time, which I think you know in sort of the current climate maybe the most prominent example of that is like content moderation, right. And so I think that that's been sort of a a push on some folks at least you know opening their eyes to sort of the the pitfalls of of centralization over time. So maybe you could talk a little bit about like you know sort of the history of of content moderation on the Internet and sort of where we are today and you know if that could be somewhat of a catalyst for more open networks over time and you know sort of maybe where where are we in that timeline? Right. Yeah. I mean I think, I think content moderation is a is a good framing for a lot of the arc of this stuff because so a lot of times it's the it's the kind of content that we might not always talk about. As you know like in a sense if you could be published in the New York Times then you kind of don't have the problems of free speech or like your your content maybe doesn't. It doesn't play in a Gray area, so it doesn't really have a need for technologies that serve that. Whereas if you play in a more of a Gray area, you know, an area that it's not clear that society has yet decided is an OK thing to publish. But maybe we should be asking the question, should it be like what, you know, why did we decide that? Or why do we collectively believe that? And it's not always like even one one versus the other. But I think I think if you sort of look like a content moderation like you know back it it it, you know often times there's like a if there's a business like Google there's a centralized business. You run ads. You send people to websites you you you you you you're imbuing some amount of taste and you have policy that you have to deal with to describe like I I used to help some of the ads policy teams and there's like questions like what kinds of what kinds of ad creative is reasonable to show And like some stuff's very clear. OK that's fine. And some stuff's kind of like borderline and maybe it's around like is this nudity for medical purpose or is this like adult content And like if you're in the business of adult content you might want to try to pose it as nudity for medical purpose. You know and usually for medical purposes can be allowed in certain circumstances and and I think it's, you know, central organizations, you know they they are incorporated companies they they need to follow a set of strict guidelines in the kind of jurisdictions in which they're established. I think that's like that's just sort of the way the world's set up right now and it's totally fine. It's just like they're just, you know, everybody's responding to incentives now is there, there's a bunch of layers to those incentives. Like what does Cloudflare, what does Cloudflare think of the content? What is Visa or MasterCard think of the content? And there's all these layers that now have to weigh in and have, you know, they have their own jurisdictions that they have to comply with. And so in a sense, like the world has gotten very ossified around a few of these platforms and a few of the kind of, you know, the Cloudflare's the world, the Visa's the world, the Google's the world where you kind of have to limit what can be said or done because of those. And then there's other ones where it's just like we have a business interest to not have people leave our website. So we're not going to let you share links or something. And like you know, as a independent business they're free to do that. But then you're like really changing the way people, you know, if you change what people are allowed to say or you let them say anything, but you only promote or give distribution to stuff that complies with maybe your own agenda or your business interest. Totally fine. Totally fair. Like everybody can run the business they want, but then it's like maybe we need something different. That doesn't restrict that. We've seen the problems with this. I think. I think in politics this comes up all the time, right? Because there's people who are, you know, really identify with one or the other of these poles that have been set up. And you know, content moderation is great as long as it's the other side being moderated. But like, I shouldn't be moderated. Like, you know, free speech, right. So I'm I I think we've sort of seen this at you know every step in all these stages. And the thing that excites me about this kind of these new this new world noster and stuff that we can do and kind of more decentralizing speech is we can actually decentralize everything about it including like can it be published and in in what gets surfaced to who and who's allowed to ask for what to be surfaced in their own favorite ways. Like when it's all centralized, you kind of have like one way to publish, one way to read, and you kind of just have to deal with whatever the centralized provider decided to do. And when you start to move that outside of centralized providers, people could publish whatever they want in all kinds of different ways. People could choose to read in very, very different ways. They can choose clients, different algorithms. There's all kinds of kind of flexibility and diversity of ideas of even just like, how do I access the ideas that I might want to see. Those are things that are like, they're all up in the air. They're still to be invented really. Like we're just at the very beginning kind of on the starting starting line of this with some of the stuff we're doing in Oster today. But yeah, I think I think that's kind of stuff that I'm excited about for kind of having having a more custom experience of the web. And the I think the only way to do it is to take it out of the hands of, you know, of a centralized provider because they just have a different set of incentives. It's like all very rational, just, you know, I want to see something different. Yeah, I think, I think it's a big part of this. It's like a lot of this stuff sometimes gets like ideological or tribal and it's really just rational and from a game theory perspective like what is, what is the path we're on. It reminds me, I always like track back to like, you know, Bitcoin and finance in the sense of like Operation Choke Point. It reminds me the same thing. It's like, oh, you know, we can censor you. And it's OK until it's like as long as that can happen, then you're just on the curve of when that can happen to you in the same way being censored via your speech. And this notion of that, like it's, it reminds me of also like the currency because like every time in the West, this is generally like it's like, well, the dollar is fine and other currencies are a lot weaker. It's like, well, they're all the same thing on a different line, like different point on the curve. That's the same side of the speech where you're at. And so if that is to be true, then everybody should care about this because at some point on that curve, your dollar, your currency will, will not be what you think. It preserves the wealth it is in the same way that your speech will not always be there when you need it and it's just TBD win. And so like I don't fall on the like Noster like campus like I've just I I social, social and it's great. And from a few and probably I don't actually give it enough credibility as it should because I use it and that's how I produce, consume content. I think the money is the most important. But then I also go back to this idea of like, well if you don't have a way to express yourself, then a lot of you're not necessarily free. And so that's where this all like it obviously makes sense. You need it And if you have a form of money to run the relays to keep things humming, that's what you need because there's always that operation choke point that hangs in the background that we saw in the like the 2000 Tens when it came to whatever prostitution or gambling. And so all these things start to just play off of each other and they become very rational that you at least wanted open architecture to, like, allow for these things. If we never use them, sure. But if you may, if you end up using them, then you may want to actually know they exist and maybe have some kind of like perspective on it. Yeah. And I think you can always like layer in, you know, if you have regulatory environments, you always layer that stuff in and say like, hey, like instead of the system can only work in a certain way because we've got, you know, a choke point on a particular org. It's like you're not allowed to use this client on. You know, you can only use client X if you live in jurisdiction Y, OK, fine. Like, there's ways to layer that in. I'm not saying I'm a fan of that kind of stuff, but I'm saying there are ways to do that if you know, the people with guns, you know, decide to do that. Like, it's not really, it's not really a negotiation at that point. But, but I think it is the kind of thing where you you want to provide alternatives and you want to allow people to choose, you know, if there's nobody telling them what they have to do given where they live and let people choose what they want and help people be more informed about the kinds of choices they're making. Yeah, you want a more resilient, robust architecture for anything that you do just in life. And so you don't want to be cut off of the rails because somebody determines that you can be. Yeah. And and also like things get shaped like if you are not allowed to say things or you know that the things you say given the central algorithm are going to get nerfed, you'll stop saying them. And you know, when you stop saying them, you actually change your thought process to think, oh, you know, I I'm not going to share that link on Twitter because I know, like, it's just going to get nerves anyway. So then you start to think about things differently. You say, well, what is free speech if it's actually upstream of speech, is your thoughts. And you're not, you know, you're not allowed to speak of things. So you start to you start to modify your thoughts in fact. Right. Yep. Self censoring is a is an output of of some of this. I'm curious just taking sort of a step back back to your sort of timeline and your trajectory and into, you know, very much leaning into Nostra as a thing which we will get to soon. But I want to take a jump back to when you first heard about Bitcoin. I'm assuming you came at it from a technological lens like this open source piece of software is interesting to me. I think, you know, most people come at it from a money or an investment or a speculative perspective. But giving your background, I assume it was more on the technology side. And I'm curious, you know, first of all, when, when did that happen? When you when you first came across Bitcoin and then when did it click that oh this is you know an open platform that things will be built on top of and you did you envision in in sort of the back of your mind something like Noster existing but just didn't know what what form it would take. Yeah, well, yeah, that involves like a lot of history and a lot of trying to remember what exactly I was feeling at each time. I think you're right to to point out that, like the the technological stuff is what really grabs me. But I would say that the reason that I didn't spend more time and effort on Bitcoin when I first heard about it was because people were talking about it like, it's digital gold. And I was like, I'm not really into gold. And it's kind of this financial product. And like, I don't know, like do I want a digital version of a thing that I don't otherwise, you know, I'm not otherwise in love with. It's like I in a sense, I was like, cool, like, it's fine if people like it and want to use it for that. But it didn't grab me because I don't think I studied the technology side of it initially. I didn't really understand in detail all of all of what from a technology perspective. And by the way, technology is always social. Like technology is never purely code, but it's how people choose to use code. And I think unless you like a really, you know, you read the white paper again and again and then try to understand like why this system can't be replicated a second time. Like it's it's the one time or like the whole thing either works in this instance or probably just fails. But like there's not kind of a second version of this thing because of its sort of, you know, the the strange nature through which it sort of came to be. But I think it's that like interplay between what the code does and who the people are who choose to use it. So like, there's users and there's minors and there's people who run full nodes. And there's a lot of features to the network that are really, it's like an conglomeration of human choice that causes it to be that way. And I think when I first was hearing like, OK, computer science, breakthrough Byzantine general problem, like cool, I kind of get that's cool that we now have that. But I didn't see how like a new financial asset was particularly itself that interesting. And I think I, you know, I wish, I wish I could see more of that. And I think that's a little bit of what the Silicon Valley kind of I think the reason, you know when Bitcoin first got started and you know people were starting to think like in Silicon Valley, what can you do with this? People were like, OK, you can build like exchanges, you can build wallets, but like you're not building like new, you know, new revolutionary technologies for how communication and media and information and like gaming and like all of these, you know, these, these categories that I think, you know, we haven't yet seen a ton in, but I think we're starting to see. And at the time it was just like, well, here's a new financial asset. So I think it took a lot more study from kind of first hearing about it to realizing that it's kind of this technological social interplay that makes it work the way it does and which is like really exciting to me. And then I I did take, you know I think around the time that Ethereum was getting launched, I did sort of poke around and try to understand that ecosystem because like all of you know my network of builder friends and stuff like oh, Ethereum, you can actually build stuff now like before we were encumbered when it was just financial. I said now you can build stuff. And so I was kind of like trying to explore that and understand like really like what can you build, what are the things that we want to build like. And and I think I kept coming back to the the fact that like the the things that allowed Bitcoin to work, you know, being very neutral, you know, kind of not having a a visible or active founder were really important to it working as a financial asset. But it didn't necessarily leave a lot of space to build new things. So I think there's like a lot of the idea of it wasn't obvious that it left a lot of space to build new things. I I do believe there's lots that can be built, but I think at the time it didn't, It wasn't clear besides exchanges and wallets like what? What could you build on this? What was this thing all about? And I think, you know, you know, as time progressed and sort of got more conviction about both what Bitcoin is as a technological primitive for the Internet. And then as well, like hearing the narratives of all the other things that were tried, you know, and sort of ending up ultimately kind of like this not, not super excited, sort of dissatisfied with like the results of what the other things were. I think I, I became kind of like a little bit more cautious about what what's what's like the next step here, Like how do you take this new foundation and build something on it. And I think everybody, I think it's like very common to take the era of like well you know once, once you see Bitcoin then you're like oh what about Bitcoin with a tweak in a sense like it's not about Bitcoin with a tweak. It's like let Bitcoin be Bitcoin. That's a great layer. It's a new money fine. But let's build other things that assume that that's new layers same way as we have like we have TCP IP. And when it was time to go like build like application layer like web browsers and and you know in search engines and other stuff, you didn't have to like re prosecute the TCP IP question again and again just like OK peace like that thing works. It's good enough, there's lots of problems with it, but it's like fundamentally we have enough consensus on it. Let's let it be great at that and then let's focus our building energy on what we can do at layers above that, that assume that as a primitive. I think we're just starting to see that now and I think Noster is like a great early example of that, another one that I love. Have you guys played with Stacker news? Yeah. So, so Stacker News is another one. It's like I'd call it Noster adjacent in some ways. It doesn't look like a traditional social media client of of you know, like a like a lot of the Noster clients do. But it actually you know has some bridges to publish and I think there's more coming. But what I like about that is it kind of it says we're not inventing any money, we're taking this money and now we're building a centralized product that assumes the use of that. Now if you get the centralized product going and you have the right ideology and ethos, could you, could you do things like could you make it more noster based or primarily a noster experience over time? Like, I don't see any reason that that couldn't happen. And I think you have a whole new set of incentives than you had 20 years ago. Like the web is a very different place and you can have direct payments to any, you know, anybody in the world as long as the person has like a tool to help them do math, like a little calculator, you can actually send payments and that's like a big new primitive. So I think the incentives are now like radically different. So even if you start a new centralized thing today, I don't think it means it has to remain centralized forever and there might be business opportunities that that support centralized providers choosing to decentralize most of the important parts of of their infrastructure. So yeah, I'm. I'm trying to remember where we. No, you you made a lot of really good points in there and I wanted to touch on one that I think and and I just pulled this up because you had a tweet a few weeks back that I wanted to, I wanted to share because it resonates with what you were just saying. Cryptography can be helpful for for building new things even with the without attaching a new currency. And I think that's a very salient point that gets lost in sort of everything we've seen post Bitcoin and all these other cryptocurrencies, these other protocols, they're trying to build the other things on top without having that solid foundation, right. And then you know, I think what what bitcoiners have been saying for a while is like all of these things can be built on Bitcoin. Ultimately it's just going to take more time because genuinely there's just a more conservative approach to protocol development even on 2nd and 3rd layers. And I think that that's purposeful and and probably rightfully so, but but the reality is, is that you know if it if it has product market fit, if there's a utility for it, I think it ultimately gets built on Bitcoin and you don't need some other token to to do these things. Right. Yeah. And and I think that's like if this, this happens again and again in technology, which is like when somebody comes with a new breakthrough product or idea or concept, it's I think a fairly healthy exploration that goes on where people say, well, great, we have a new primitive, what else can we do with it? And people tried to explore in all kinds of different directions. And you saw, I mean you saw this was like social networking, right? It was like like Friendster was the first social network that I ever signed up to that felt like it was like a real social network. I think it was like 2003 kind of felt, you know, the the first closest thing to you know, what a social network is today. And I was like, OK, great, this is this is done. I, you know, put all my, you know, put all my information into it like it's it's set like this is the winner. I'm not going to do that the second time. And then and then Myspace happened. I was like, OK, second time but not a third. And then you do Facebook and you're like, hey, third time. And and then that idea gets divided into like, well, what if there's, like a social network for, you know, people who like to knit or social network for people who like to, you know, have dogs? And a different one for people who like to have cats and people who like to watch movies and people who like to read books. And so a good idea like social networking then gets explored in like, you know, thousands of different ways and, you know, ultimately, like, you know, one of them kind of ends up amassing kind of most of the attention and value and kind of, you know, improves. And I think in the case of like technology, that's very common. I think in the case of money, it's even more extreme that there's only really like like single, you know, there's only like a single answer to like, the money question because money is such a network network thing and almost like a featureless thing. Like it just has the features of money and it doesn't have, you know, whiz bang features. But I think when you see something like it's a good idea, people start trying to explore the space. And I think what's happened is people tried to explore the space by saying oh, what if you could, you know, add smart contracts on it? Oh, what if you could like make it faster transactions? Or like people tried to explore all these new hypothesis like new technological hypothesis, but they end up compromising sort of using pattern matching to what Bitcoin did and then kind of trying to extend it in different ways versus kind of saying, OK like. Instead of extending that good idea, let's come up with a new good idea. There's so many, there's infinite good ideas out there in the world. But instead of trying to redo the money thing and then attach the technology with a new feature to it, my view is kind of like peace. The money thing is the money thing. That's the decentralized money thing. And this is, this is weird, but I'm open. If you have a better idea than Bitcoin, I want to hear about it first. I don't want to be like the thousandth person here, but I want to hear it first. But it has to actually beat Bitcoin. It can't be like, well, it's not so good at money. We compromise in all these ways, but look at these whiz bang features. It's great technology. It's like, OK, fine, that's not really something that I want to spend a lot of time on. But if you actually have a better Bitcoin, like, let me know. But, but I think it's just like a very high threshold just like if you had a better you know if you had a better protocol for for networking the Internet together I'd be interested to hear like tell me what are your hypothesis. But it has to be really good at that but the threshold to beat it today is insanely high and it can't compromise on a bunch of the core things that matter. It has to actually just be kind of substantially better in some way that you know we were we were failing at before and money it's just coupling with energy it seems like seems like an impossibly hard thing to to you know impossibly hard wall to climb which I think is kind of how I settle out as like bit kinds of money let's move on and like focus on other things like TCPI, PS, the Internet Protocol bit kinds of money let's just let's build great things on top of it. It's not. It's not like we have to be static and stayed and just say like accept the world as it is. We're very conservative. Nobody touched anything. It's like no, fine touch, be crazy, build lots of crazy things, but do it like assuming that this is the money. Because if you reinvent the money and compromise it, then the whole thing just feels kind of thin. So that's why when I see like things like Noster that don't have any attachment to any particular money, like you could use any cryptocurrency you want in the noster protocol, they just turns out that it has a lot of, you know, shared ethos in sort of, you know, with with it's appealing to bitcoiners, right. So it tends to be because it's appealing, it tends to sort of have a lot of that kind of talk on it. But I think like really thinking about the world and the layers and and and then building new technologies and like accelerating the development of new technologies that can be built now that we actually have a global neutral digital money. 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 there's a a really fascinating part that you you shared and I think Max kind of falls in the same bent of almost like like I I take this stance of we're so early that we haven't even figured out how do you custody this thing because I don't think like custody of a 40 or $50,000 asset is the same as 500,000 or 5 million. And so that angle of I think everybody would not be comfortable with how it is today where it's custody. And a good example of this is effectively like you mentioned Gold and I really like how you reference social layers with the technology because when I think about what we're dealing with multi institution custody and how it scales globally, you're basically having a social construct built into the protocol. And I think of it, you know there's differences but that the only difference between gold and Bitcoin is literally multi signature because it's what keeps everybody honest and transparency where where gold ultimately failed. And if that's even remotely true, then there's a lot of market structure that comes from that Whether like this whole notion of execution is always just given up that somebody has to send the dollars first and somebody has to send the Bitcoin. It's like wait, that doesn't seem good. If trust breaks down or you have to send a billion dollars who sends it first, right. And and that's just one angle of the money and why it's important to have diverse backgrounds building on open protocol. Because you and Max I think come from a social perspective of like, you know, the different ways that the Internet was fundamentally like fracture, not completely made whole. And where if we assume this is the money now we can actually start leveraging the other things that are part of this form of money to build these other areas. And they end up converging in different ways at certain points, but they're looked at from completely like not opposite lenses. But one's almost like matter of fact figured out almost when it's still like in its infancy or just starting, if that makes any sense. Yeah, I mean it's it is so early like you know when you think about something like gold, I think it's existed about 5000 years. And so there's tons of history and tons of social consensus that it's the thing and you know based on the stock to flow and the mining ability and difficulty and and just like the acceptability of gold. So it had all these features that have sort of been brewing for 5000 years and now here we are with Bitcoin, we're 1515 years in, right. So it basically has like almost no real history, but you know it has about the same amount of history as the Internet as far as you know gold is concerned. So it it has like a very kind of Internet primitive length of history. You know roughly like it couldn't really worked that well before the Internet. Like it's you know if you think bitcoins weird with the you know existence the Internet, imagine it sort of before the Internet. Like you can argue yeah you can like do all your hashing by hand and mail it in but like it's just it's sort of unrealistic right. I think the Internet and kind of free information flow is kind of a required foundation, but it's very short history compared to gold and the acceptability of gold that like even just like how are you going to cut C gold? And then are you going to have these, you know, these kind of paper currencies that are sort of backed by gold and then you sort of decouple the backing. And there's a lot of history that causes us to be where we are today. And we have almost none of that history of Bitcoin. We have like, you know, the invention of the thing, you know, some exchanges, wallets, people buying it. Now we have ETFs. But like effectively it's just kind of a financial asset we don't really have. We don't really have the payments thing figured out to any real extent. I mean and I'm I use I use Lightning like every day. But like it's not perfect. Like there's a lot of challenges. Doesn't mean we've got really great people working on it. And I'm optimistic to hear what you know as that future unfolds. There's a lot of a lot of really great people who've dedicated their you know, entire life's work to making that that work. But it's still very hard problems. I've played with E cashes but there's a bunch of E cash hypose pediments and and and you know cashew and stuff like that. There's all kinds of these things that are you know possible but we're only 15 years into like the base layer assets. So you know we we've got a lot to figure out still and I don't think it's going to take 5000 years. I think you know given that we now have the Internet we can communicate, we can collaborate faster. We can try new ideas faster. You know, I would suspect that it's you know, measured on the order of years or maybe half a decade or a decade like, but it's not like another 5000 years for us to all figure out how Bitcoin fits in. And I think we also are going to Co evolve our digital systems now that we have digital scarcity. I think that's a big deal because we didn't have a way to evolve our digital systems with these new primitives and we're only now with like you know maybe lightning and E cash and various things. We now have ways to start experimenting with how do digital systems work given that we have digital scarcity because it was just like we didn't have any way to do that before. And I think that's that's what I get excited about like for the future that and I think I think you know Noster is one example of that Stacker news, an example that you know, but I'd love to see thousands of experiments in those directions, centralized, decentralized, like I don't care. It's just tons of building and tons of pushing the frontier of what can we do now that we have digital scarcity. It's a huge invention for a digital communication network. Yeah, it was something you you said or I don't know if it was you or somebody on the the pod, the first one on the from Apple or you said like New York or I think it was you about new architectures. Basically will there'll be new winners. And you mentioned like this this excitement around everything happening here, this realization whether it's AI, Bitcoin or open source technology as a as a whole, like just working in the markets and you've been in the middle of them like either so disruptive that the incumbents will just like fight tooth and nail because it just disrupts the whole model. So there will be all new winners in this landscape, at least in my opinion. And so that just is an exciting you know lens to look at the world through because you're looking at it through again that curious mind of how do you like allocate capital, how do you build and how do you think about this to like where everybody else has seen the old world and like it's going to be the status quo and it's just not the case. Yeah. And it and it may be that like the future, I think we have this model of like, OK, like, you know, Google was a big Internet winner, Facebook was a big Internet winner, Twitter, etcetera. And then I think people are looking at like what are the next companies that are going to win. And it may be that the next things that win at the same scale, like there's just there aren't companies that win at that scale, but there's there's open source projects and there's lots of businesses built. Maybe there's thousands or millions of businesses that get built, but there's not like A1 single central one the way there were, you know, a handful of them the way there were on the Internet, just because, like, the foundation is very, very different. I believe that wholeheartedly in a different lens, but at the same side of I think about like the golden handcuffs that are very much real and like these centralized entities are very non organic and how large they've gotten for through a lot of reasons. And that when you have a form of money that appreciates in value and you have ideas, you naturally do not get that large because people can leave with their capital and go actually start competitors and do different things versus this like large scale. And I think that is what we'll see. I mean we live it like a lot of these concepts it's just like natural from a perspective of my own like if you if you save in a better form of money that appreciates then you can actually take your ideas and go and do things versus having to be stuck on that that hamster wheel. And so I think that just continues to expand or or grow as this proliferation of a better form of money is is with any people that save. Yeah, in a sense it's like a way for I almost feel like this, everything that can be built is effectively like open source, free. There's all kinds of opportunities just like have everything open source. Everybody can remix every can, add their own features and raise PRS and merge things in or fork and clone and just do something totally different. I think there's all kinds of opportunities to do things that are different. And it's not so much about, like, you know, oh, you're mistreating me. So I need to leave. It's more like, oh, this idea over here just grabs me. And I'm just going to, like, put my energy and weight behind it. Not so much because it's like I'm being abused by some central authority. But it's just like, I just want this thing that maybe only, like 100 people in the world want, but I'm one of them. And I'm going to put my energy into it. You know, I think like it's a beautiful world when we have everybody doing and getting what they want and doing their own. You know, kind of let creativity, let human creativity flourish. And you know, maybe empower human creativity with open source AI is that everybody can use and payments maybe flow to relays or or maybe there's like cloud providers or maybe there's like small scale cloud compute, you know, you know, like like GPU clusters that you can use and run something for a little bit get you know get a model out and then kind of use imprints locally or something. So I think this is like lots of opportunities for more diverse things to flourish. And I mean just like orders of magnitude more than any of the stuff we've seen so far. I think it'll be like, you know, new central providers that win some aspects of things. But I think there's going to be a lot more like, I think the decentralized open source be like everybody gets to be creative and have exactly what they want is to me what feels like radically new. And that's that's the stuff that I get excited about. Like, yeah, there's going to be great big new companies built too and that's fine. But like the pattern of all the crazy new exploration, creativity, stuff that that's the stuff that, like, really gets me, gets me excited for the future. Yeah. One key thing you, you reference about like 100 people also think of like a 1100 of the the cost, right. When we think about relationary nature of tech and one thing we've been talking about, me and Brian is like this whole notion of like hardware to software. You know is you go from like hardware to software in the like growth and there's this natural kind of slow from like a mainframe computer to like AWS and like how you're actually managing. And it took years And then this idea of going from like software to software and I think the the first like larger scale version of this was ChatGPT, right, like having a lot of sign ups in that like first month. But it's this idea of going software to software to software. If you go like software to AI to programmable form of money is like this craziness that you start to see growth that we've never seen at a scale and like we're just barely, like squinting to see it. Yeah. And I think it's hard to like when we think about money, we think about money the way it touches our lives, which maybe, you know, people always talk about like, OK, money is an asset. You can own it. Maybe it's like real estate or maybe money is something used to buy, you know, a coffee until all of our mental models and our narratives end up sort of going to what we do with money today. But we don't have any way to think about money as a protocol for AI machines or to dispatch a job to get something done by a farm that you know, happens to publish, offering a service that you want. Maybe it's only 100 Satoshi's to get that done, and then your job comes back and then dispatch it to something else. We just don't have like good. We don't have a good, like, kind of feeling for how to think about that yet. But I think that's like the most important stuff you can do with digital scarcity with like a, you know, an Internet native, neutral money as you can actually now have all kinds of machines that do things for us or for other machines or for the software you want to use at like such a small scale that you'd never be able to, you know, the old payment rails would be like crazy too expensive. You couldn't. You couldn't do it. Plus, not everybody knows everybody, not everybody's in the same jurisdictions, people just like all over the world offering these services, you know, and setting up machines and building software that offer these services. And it's just like kind of super all over the place. And I think that's actually the model of what, you know what Bitcoin is most important to kind of align the incentives to let that ecosystem thrive. Yeah. No, it's a, it's a really good point And it sort of Harkins back to what you were saying earlier around, you know, how does that adoption of a decentralized system happen? And and part of it is actually enabling things that are not possible in the old system, in the old world, right. And I think maybe taking a step back just to, you know what you're talking about earlier around, you know, Noster is sort of an adjacent protocol to Bitcoin. Maybe you can just dive a little bit deeper there and just give sort of an overview, particularly around like the architecture of Noster, just at a high level to better sort of explain that relationship between master and Bitcoin and how they sort of work complementary to each other. Yeah. So, you know, I think one of the core pieces, you know, that that works with Bitcoin is that there is no centralized issuer of accounts. So it, it feels weird, like you're familiar with, oh, money. You go to a bank, you go to a brokerage, you set up an account. And with Bitcoin, you just do some math, right. You can use a calculator, but you basically like do some math and you have like this address that you can do things with and nobody can tell you you're not allowed to do that math because if you have a calculator, you do the math, right. That's kind of a profound concept that there's nobody who who who tells you you're allowed to be in the system. You just do the math. When you're in the system, you know you can participate. And so when I saw Noster, I was initially intrigued because it's very similar. You don't, you know, think about traditional social networks. You go to a sign up page and then you put in your username or your desired username and your e-mail or something, maybe your birthday. And then then they create an account for you, just like a bank would, right? And with nostery, it's it's none of that. You're just like, OK, I'm going to use a little calculator, do some math, you know, plenty of software that'll do that math for you, but but nobody can tell you're not allowed to do the math. So you can create an account kind of as easily as doing that math using these calculators. And so it feels like it has that same underpinning of, you know, I've seen a lot of people try various approaches to like, you know, decentralizing social media and stuff. And often times they're still like, you know, collecting an e-mail address or or you know, like having having a centralized issuer for a namespace. And those kinds of things kind of mean that you're a little bit more like the old system than you are like the new system. And I'm like much more excited about the new system. So I think like really that voluntary opt in nobody can tell you no is like a really important feature of these things and and you know sort of first became like quite aware of it the way sort of you know Bitcoin addresses get generated and and then I think when I saw Noster and I think that's why there's a lot of overlap and interest between people who understand Bitcoin and people who understand Noster's you know has very similar just like voluntary you know opt in yourself to create because you want to participate. The specifics of how kind of the architecture of Nostra work are vastly different than the specifics of the architecture for how Bitcoin work and that's actually a good thing. You don't need a blockchain to do free speech or to do you know speech that can you know is censorship resistant. But because the Bitcoin idea was so powerful for censorship resistance, people have been trying to like create block chains for censorship resistant speech. I mean it's kind of like trying to shoehorn a good idea in a bunch of different ways. Like it's fine, I think people should experiment and try things. But ultimately, like Noster is a very, very different architecture to solve the important pieces about, you know, censorship resistant speech. And So what I mean by that is, you know, one of the things, one of the reasons that blockchain, the blockchain was invented, kind of Co invented with the existence of Bitcoin is because of the need to understand global state. You have to know if if you're trying to prevent the double spend problem, right? So you have to know everything that anybody's spending anywhere. You have to have visibility into that so that you can be sure that like if you sent me something you didn't also send to somebody else, I need to be able to verify that, right? And in speech it's not the case at all. Totally doesn't matter, like if some random person X sends a message to a random person Y that I'm never going to see. It doesn't need to be like trackable by me. We don't need to like some sort of strong guarantee that I can read that message like, I don't know, just almost doesn't matter and speech maybe, I don't know, maybe several orders of magnitude more volume than financial transactions. I don't know if somebody's really done the analysis, but I would guess just empirically that, you know, that's kind of like my, my observation about my experience in the world. So the architecture is very, very different. It's not a blockchain architecture at all. And the insight is that there could be like a set of relays that relay messages and there's a set of clients that are just like apps that you can download from an App Store or you know websites you can navigate to on the web. But they agree to use the same protocol for signing and sending messages and and you know, pulling messages to be able to compose a a view of those messages. And what it does is it really severs the link between the client and the data store. And that is a really important thing, is to sever that link because when that link is connected like it is and, you know, say like Twitter, right, there's like there's a database that holds all the tweets and then use the Twitter client you download. And then, you know, Twitter's awkwardly in the middle, they're trying to decide, well, which tweets should we show from the database. And like that tweet may be illegal in a certain jurisdiction or that tweet doesn't help our business interest because it includes a link and people going to leave the the site. So sort of having those having a. A front end and a back end like you know, a client and a database tightly coupled means that you unfortunately have, you know this kind of taste, you know gets imbued by whoever it is that's running those two. And I think the big thing with NOSTER is you just like have separated those so you have you know, the relays are the data stores you can sign. Anybody who wants can create an account, sign messages, send them to 1 relay or more relays, 10 relays. If you want 50 relays, you can run your own relay, but the relays are going to present the messages to whoever asks for them and so I can send it to 50 relays. Now the interesting thing is that puts all the relays into into heavy competition with each other and if they know that everybody else is in competition to serve those messages, they don't really have like the incentive to try to suppress them. Because like well, if I suppress it, if I choose not to carry it, fine. But like next relay over is going to carry it and so by putting relays in competition with each other, it actually means that it serves the users needs better. Like if I want to write something, I can write something, I can write it with one client or a different client, or if that client hates me, fine I go to another client. But I'm still operating the same protocol. I can send it to 1 relay, 10 relays, 50 relays, my own personal relay and people can reliably get whatever message they want from me. But nobody has to have one record of everything that happened on master, every piece of speech or communication. So that's why it's like a bit of a, it's a very different insight for a different problem to solve, a different problem which is like resistance of speech suppression is very different than resistance of kind of financial transaction suppression. Yeah, that's a, that's a very helpful overview. And I think you know one of the sort of earliest applications or or clients that we've seen popularized on Noster is largely just Twitter clones, right. And I think there's there's some sort of natural reason they're just given, you know that is a a very top of mind application for most users that you know, we would want to try to replicate in a more decentralized fashion. But I'm curious from your perspective like go beyond just the the Twitter clones, like what are the implications of this architecture in this structure for sort of you know, more open and decentralized communications networks More broadly, what other things could this potentially enable in the future be? Careful, Brian gets you to leak alpha. No, it's all good. I mean, I I hope to just leak all the alpha possible and everybody knows about everything, you know, as as soon as possible. I don't want to hold anything back. You know, I I think like we were saying before, there's like the centralized examples help inform user behavior and demand and needs and reveal preferences. But then that actually causes like a little bit of a headwind for a decentralized thing that's just a clone because like, well, we already have the other thing like, like long term maybe it's bad, but like short term, day by day it's fine. So I think like, you know, the Twitter clones I think are a great starting point because they help everybody take something that we're generally familiar with and at least get a chance to play with it. It's like a little bit of a water cooler. We can be like, oh, cool, like we get how this works and we get kind of what it's supposed to do. And it's really those of us using it very, very actively are typically doing so because we're very curious about how the thing evolves and how it was built and what may come next and how it could be used. But it's, you know, I I don't personally go to Noster because like Twitter is censoring my speech. I go there because I think there's like really interesting technological foundations being built. But I do think, you know, I would like to see and you know, I I would like to see I think more experiments that are sort of different in nature that are trying to explore the edges of what can be or trying to serve use cases that are underserved by existing tools on the web. So like, you know, you know, early Internet, you know, and people don't like to talk about this, but like early Internet was like a lot of adult content, a lot of gambling like those, those are just things that like, you know, you set up a way to get people connected and everybody's like a lot of people choose to do that stuff. And so I think there's probably categories within adult and and gambling that are underserved. And you know, I don't consider myself an expert either space, but there's probably, you know, there's people who like are not allowed to be on certain platforms or there's things where like the payment providers prevent certain things from being said or being done and they're very jurisdiction dependent. But but I think those those categories are often at the edge of what's allowable and there's a lot of consumer demand for those. Now, we don't have a lot of experimentation with that kind of stuff yet in Noster or Bitcoin, but I suspect that some of that kind of stuff might be early kind of novel applications that can, yeah, we kind of know people want it and a lot of people do want to use it, but there's a lot of like friction in how they get used in the centralized providers. You know, I think things like prediction marketplaces, I've been playing around with a bunch of those recently that, you know, some people don't kind of like hack projects on Noster. I think that's like a a super cool category where like you know people love to you know sort of hypothesize about the future or try to like make odds or bet on something and that you know in a sense you can't really do that the way you know jurisdictions and and money works and transmission and stuff. It's it's kind of messy to do but there is, you know there's demand for it. And so is there a way to just like is there a way to make kind of tools that help people accomplish the thing that they want to do but but do it with kind of this new infrastructure where like they can't do it with the old infrastructure they can't do it with new infrastructure. And then I think you know and and you know I'm I'm a fan of always you know following the law in the jurisdiction that you live in. Like I'm not sort of saying like try to be like radical against it. But I do think there are things that are at the edges of what is really like specifically defined or sort of the incentives, the organizations that are running that. And I think you want to try to find where you can serve people's needs that are not illegal in the jurisdiction where you reside and incorporate, you know set up whatever your your entity is, where you're you're building these things, but they can serve some of the needs that that are not served by the other ones. So I, you know, I think things like I have some, I have some some friends who who do like those like fantasy sports. Like I think fantasy sports is like a, you know there's there's money flowing. There's communication. I don't, I'm not like a big, you know, sports guy. So I don't really know all the details. But it feels like an area that like there's a lot of people I know who do it a lot and it involves communication and money and like we don't really have products for it because like it's you can't really do those commercially. But maybe if you can build non custodial wallets and and you know decentralize the speech so that there's nobody really you know sort of acting as a as a money transmitter has to be kind of a choke point for taking these things down. I think like let innovation like that flourish and you know help help people try out new things that then sort of create these ground swells and get get more people involved in kind of the the you know, the technologies and sort of explore the edges of what what can be built now. Yeah, I think this anchors back. It's like a drum I continue to be is about the talent in like the human capital is like I believe fundamentally like the best and the largest Bitcoin companies or companies even adjacent to this have not yet even been like started simply because it's just a function of like we're almost excited about 100K. Bitcoin is simply because of the market awareness and then the individuals that you're referencing at all of these different pain points that exist in the market don't probably even know about Bitcoin or know about like the thing maybe they think digital gold like you first came into it versus programmable nature. And so I think of that lens of like we need the Forex trader or the Visa exact that gets the tech and then it's like, oh, I know how to map this, not the person that gets the tech. And it says, oh I know how to fix like payments. And we still are just like starting that in one of the the angles on a late night trip with Marty, he may know of he he coast on the last trade and he we were sitting there like riffing on. And this isn't very kosher in the sense of like what you're describing. It's like I don't know where this would be stood up, but it makes sense from a productivity and utility perspective. What you were describing is like a Torrance and this idea with like I was thinking about like with Bitcoin there is no such thing. Like everybody talks about putting like you know data on the blockchain or some kind of like information. But the reality is that's like not the right way to think about it. It's just whoever stores it has the right marketplace. And there's always an equilibrium where somebody's willing to pay and somebody's willing to take the chance to store it and give it up. And it was this idea, once you have Bitcoin, you can always like create torrents and you can never shut them down. Because every time you pop it up, you can just say like you can create a program on nature. You you see it or whatever, you download it and then if you want to see it and take that next like baton and get that money back has that thing, you know he's created. And it was this idea we said we never talked about it again. And I were like, because this is highly legal, it doesn't make any sense. But this? Is a concept of like nostrum in the sense of like you're always just like paying somebody that if they're willing, somebody's always going to be willing to broadcast that data because you have a form of money, somebody's going to value to accept they cannot be censored. And so you take that mental model. Then everything's possible. Yeah. And I think there's always like an edge of what, you know, sort of what people want and what can be done and what's not explicitly illegal. So stuff that's kind of, you know, it's like nobody's really sure, nobody really weighed in on that or we didn't have a framework for thinking about that. But now you can actually do these things. I think that's like the sweet spot of of what great would look like. And you know, I think it's it, it takes a ton of imagination. So it's not like, oh, everybody's just being lazy. It's just like it takes a lot of imagination and trial and error. And it's actually, it's very risky in a certain way because like, you know, you don't know if it's going to be adopted and you don't know, like if you're going to connect with the audience of people. Like, I mean, you know, Bitcoin may be great, but maybe without payments, maybe the, you know, the adult or gambling use cases wouldn't really work so well. Like that's that's possible, right. And so maybe you actually need more success with Lightning or more liquidity or more people having it for other reasons. But then those those things can emerge. There's like, you know, there's like a little bit of a push and pull, you know like a, you know two sides to it that kind of need to grow up together. And it's hard to say that we're like at point X that everything now can be done. It's like we need to get a little bit more infrastructure so we can get a little bit more a little more apps and a little bit maybe more scaling technologies with payments to allow us to get more app experiences that work in non custodial ways. And it's kind of a a constant progress almost like a like A2 sided marketplace in some sense. Maybe it's the inside of marketplace, but it kind of always needs to keep creeping up and balancing and it's not just like OK now unleash everything, it's more like OK we've got enough there. I mean, I think this is actually kind of a lot about, you know, Noster today is a, you know, it's a it's a it's a protocol, it's technology idea. And we have some clients, but we haven't, I'd say we haven't seen a ton of radical exploration on like what new apps could be built. We have a lot of Twitter clones because they're kind of like, you know, they're safe and they're useful, Like people want them and we know what they should look like. We know what features they should have. But we haven't really explored the edges of, like what are the new types of apps that you just couldn't build before Noster? Like it's, you know, it's something that only works in this kind of ecosystem. Yeah, there's precedent for this with bit Mex and nitrogen sports are both examples in different forms of like they were both Bitcoin on and Bitcoin off. So they never had the rail touch anything and one was offering derivatives. You know bit Mex lasted for a very long time and that's The funny thing. And they had like a three or four multi sig all over the world. So even when they were in handcuffs, they were still able always to like deliver Bitcoin because they always signed once a day to deliver. So they're going and then the other one is Nitrogen Sports, which is gambling across the world, but it's just Bitcoin on and off. And so they like, I think operate in a certain jurisdiction from like whatever DNS are being able to have their website always hosted, but they don't deal with any rails outside of Bitcoin. That was actually my first instance in Bitcoin as I moved to New York City and there was nobody there. And so I was like Googling and then the. Price. Kept running up because you're holding it and it's sitting in this account, but the dollar amount kept going up, but nothing had changed. And I was like, what is happening here in the rest of the history? Yeah. One one thing I wanted to ask you about TK is, is you know, I think this sort of falls under the umbrella of things that are now possible on Noster that aren't possible in, in sort of the incumbent systems and that would be sort of in the realm of micro payments. So if you're talking about like the value for value sort of thesis or zaps which you know take place across various Noster clients. If you could talk a little bit about that just because you know I've, I've sort of wrestled with it in my own mind around how how a tool like that gets sort of adopted by the masses. I see. I I see the value of it in terms of and we talked with Max about this a bit in terms of like you know you could create these new systems for sort of market ranking or value ranking creating these like webs of trust where there's actual you know skin in the game related to the value of a piece of content or you know whatever whatever it may be. I'm curious your thoughts just around that notion around that sort of use case of sort of rapid instant final settlement payments that now enable different micro payments use cases. But then also like, what is the tipping point for that getting adopted? Because I've, you know, I've talked with some of my normie friends about this in the past and they they the retort is so why would I pay money? Bitcoin, this thing that you say is the best asset of all time. Why would I pay money to like something when I am used to liking it for free? Right. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think micro payments is this thing that everybody always like, you know, shies away from her says, oh, that'll never work. It's too much, too much friction, you know, to think about making a micro payment. But we actually do micro payments all the time historically, like we would have these. We have like a data plan with our mobile phone, right. Sorry, it's the dog. We have a little puppy who's excited about this concept I guess. But we have these, we have you know these these payment systems like you know maybe you have like a certain amount of data that you buy from your mobile phone carrier and then like you draw down on that balance and little micro payments every time you like visit a website on your mobile phone. So I think that concept we already have like bundled and then paid out, but it's all done kind of with a single provider instead of with multi providers. All we're doing now is we're taking that sort of mobile phone data plan package idea and now we're saying it doesn't have to all be drawn down an account directly with my carrier, but actually could be sent out to various websites or creators or all kinds of different. So I actually think that we actually heard plenty of experience with micro payments. We just don't have them baked in at the application layer for our Internet services yet. We have them. You know, maybe most people have experience with it in kind of the data carrier provider space. So I think once you, once you have these things, you can actually shape the applications to, you know, I think it's right to say like the in the short case, like why like it here when I have to pay where I like it here and it's free. But then there's the whole system that you need to be thinking about, not just the one interaction of pay versus free, but it's like what content is showing up there, What content is showing up to me because it's created in that way. And maybe there's a totally different type of content, but it would show up if the right incentives were in place. Like today people do content that works with an ad supported, single algorithm driven platform. That's kind of how Twitter works. That's how TikTok works. That's how YouTube works. Like all of these systems are built to serve content that aligns with the the needs and the optimization of a free system that's ad supported which which is fine, like that's how the business grew up. Like I get it no problem at all. But we have a new primitive. So instead of saying like what are the, you know, why would I pay when I could otherwise have it for free. It's like what kinds of new content might get created or what kinds of new platforms or protocols might you choose to use if you could actually have a very different experience with the web. So instead of being like like maybe I don't want to just do the most dopamine inducing app that I can, but actually want to do something like like I'll go, I'll go buy a book and read it on a Kindle for like, you know, 10 hours. Like that's a choice and a different experience. And I'm paying money and that's fine. Maybe I could have a similar type of experience to buying a book, but I could do it as a way to unlock content that may be locked up. Like, there's people who I know of from a lot of the free content they make. And then they, they have like paywalls. And then, you know, if I want to get access to like their whole library or a monthly subscription, like, I'm willing to pay for that. But there's a lot more friction because I don't necessarily want like hundreds of, you know, hundreds of these things that I'm signed up to with monthly recurring. But maybe I could see a thinker or see a piece or see a preview of a piece. And instead of having to like sign up for like a monthly subscription to unlock the piece, I could just like unlock it because I have a way to interact with the web with this digital scarcity primitive. And if I think that future to me seems kind of like obvious, but it's just not here yet. Like it's obvious that we're going to have digital scarcity baked into all of our Internet experiences and we're going to use that digital scarcity to dole out in small amounts micro payments in all kinds of different places. But you know, and it'll be used to unlock content that we want. You know, it's not just all out of I think it's like goodwill, oh let's, you know, support our favorite creators like that's fine. But I think that doesn't really, I don't think that recognizes people you know, actually human incentives though I would like I would love to see somebody build something. You know, maybe it's a TikTok driven, you know, TikTok style app with like short form video but every time you swipe it costs you a SAT or every time you like it costs you ten sets or something like that And and now why does that work? Well creator, some creators realize that like you can come on here and maybe you can make a whole Bitcoin every day if you have great kind of like that's an insane idea. It sounds like that could never work, but like all the pieces are there like that that could actually work where a creator could come on and through creating content in a new environment with a very different set of incentives, not the old ad driven incentives, but with you know, with kind of digital scarcity baked in, you actually just shape, you know, you reshape the kind of content that gets created, gets rewarded, you give people more direct relationships. It's not out of charity or out of sort of patronage, but it's because I actually, you know, already have a wallet established, already have value. And so it's just kind of like fine, it's easy for me which is not today, but like if we have the tools it could be easy for me to to make that kind of payment and maybe it's like around unlocking. So I think there's just like you know, it's like we're very early in the exploration. I haven't seen a lot of people. I mean it's a very risky idea to do kind of what I just suggested there and maybe it wouldn't work until people haven't tried it. But I think there's just like infinite space of ideas of things that could be built. But but we we sort of you know we have enough examples of micro payments working and ways that micro payments can work and the way that they do work with within kind of Bitcoin ecosystem. I think it's just like it's an inevitability that the Internet is going to get like all information communication media is going to be coupled with digital scarcity. But like the actual path to get there, is it gambling first, is it adult content first, is it some sort of other free speech issue first? Like I think the only way to get there is through kind of a lot of exploration, like lots of people building a lot of different things with different perspectives and different, you know, potential customers and users in mind. Yeah, I think. I think that's right. Yeah, I mean. That's fascinating. I think it's a great idea. I say this a lot. I don't think you've heard. It's like generally in the space, if you have a good idea, it's really a good idea. It just hasn't been done yet. We're in the regular world. Good idea. It's probably a bad idea. It's work out. But like the the Stacker news is a good example of that right? Like the essence, you're just providing some your requirements and proof of work to surface content to the top in the same way that you would change the dynamic from the the video content on a TikTok or whatever it would be called. And then it goes back to like Max's version. And it's not just Max's but this idea of like getting the tightest fidelity with energy. Because that energy you're produce, you're you're you're putting all out in the world you're consuming and then you have to require energy by the form of Bitcoin to to like see more of it or to like it and it just tightens a feedback loop of like actual value versus like garbage and that starts to re architect a lot of things. So yeah, no I think that makes makes a lot of sense. Yeah. 100%. Well, maybe maybe just one more final question before before we wrap up. Just curious, you know, how are you spending your time today? What excites you most in the world's of Bitcoin and Noster? And then finally you know where can people find you? Because I think your YouTube, your YouTube channel in particular and and your podcast are extremely informative and and some of the best content on this super nascent space of Noster. So really appreciate you putting that stuff out there and helping myself and others learn about this. So yeah, what are you spending your time on, and where can people find you? Yeah. So I'm, I would say I like continue to be super excited and interested in the interplay of like how you know, sort of digital scarcity and information kind of quality, let's say gets sort of reinvents the Internet. And so you know, I spend my time in part trying to help some entrepreneurs who are already working in those spaces. So people are maybe building things on Noster. You know, I try to play with their tools and get feedback. It's like a big part of what I do is, you know, play with new tools that people are building and try to give feedback or share my perspective on what what I like about it, what doesn't make sense to me, where I'm getting confused, where I'm stuck. And and that helps me learn about new technologies, you know, sort of just getting broad exposure to lots of new things. I do that both in kind of the nostril Bitcoin space, but I also do it in spaces like, you know, I think that there's a category in AI storytelling. I think storytelling is like super underserved in AI. And so like just thinking about an entrepreneur, you know, messaging constantly every day. I think we we trade notes on a product he's building to help help people become better storytellers. You know, help sort of if you have an idea for a script, you can now, you know, you know, build a Hollywood movie, right? Like that's, you know, long term vision, but but in the short term there's like steps to get there that he's actively pursuing. So I always love to play with those kinds of things. I play with a lot in kind of the Noster ecosystem. I have a close friend collaborator who's very active in the Bitcoin community. And so we sit down every week for, you know, maybe a couple hours and play with new kind of Bitcoin or Lightning related tools and just try to like you know, try to run into roadblocks and kind of force. It's a forcing function to help us understand better because then we end up with a whole list of questions. So all of that is you know I'd say kind of exploration around like these very, you know, nascent edges is is you know kind of where I spend, I'd say like most of my time I've also been, yeah, like you mentioned kind of podcasting and I've been writing a bit. I'm just trying to like digest you know and synthesize ideas that I hear from people and and and try out new things. And then and I've actually got a a project that I'm sort of little bit of like a hack project with a friend. You know we've been talking for actually for years about like why is it, you know, why is it that, you know, I think I think so much energy goes into these like very horizontal platform related work which is like all good. Like you know whether it's whether it's wallets or or social media apps and Noster and and it feels like there's an opportunity to make something that is more relatable. It's easy for people to just sort of see and play with and digest and it feels new. So we've been brewing up this idea of something like a a a a global game show that you get you get you can win anybody who wants to play at home and you can win Bitcoin just by showing up and you know sort of playing trivia game at home. So we're we've been kind of hacking around on that idea and and we're going to start play testing soon. But I think you know anything that really makes Bitcoin master these open source technologies more accessible to people, easier to engage with. You know tighter feedback loops on like what's working about the new stuff and what's challenging about the new stuff. So we can sort of get to the the stuff that's working faster. Like that's those are those are things I'm passionate about this where I spend my time. It's another night asking, sorry, I was just another good idea. It was something we meant to do. We just have it implemented. I'm sure you're familiar with MASH and a lot of the tooling that they're creating about making this show or the last trade more interactive from like what are the topics we talk about? And just like dynamics of like winning Sats and like doing like threads or like voting on Twitter before we go and we really haven't done it. But yeah, I think that's an awesome idea in the sense of like, especially if it's intro stuff where people are interested in learning, what better way than to get a better to get a form of money and then learn actually getting a wallet or whatever, however you're going to like get delivered that Bitcoin. Right. And if you if you played with like like there's a a wallet called Mutiny that you can just like they have a really great gifting flow where you can just like send a link to somebody and then they have a wallet directly in the browser. It's kind of amazing. You know, how simple it is and how I think it's like a great way to help new people learn about, you know, learn about Bitcoin because they like, they don't have to start with anything. Just click on the link and now you've got some Bitcoin link. Oh, how did that happen? You know we. Meet you may need Ben or Tony or Paul on the pot or he's joke. They're they're like Wizards. They're literally like, so hold on to what? They're doing doing some cool stuff. We've we've got some mutual friends, but I I don't know them personally, but I've heard heard really good things about them. Yeah, they're really, they're really exceptional. Yeah. Well, awesome. Want to thank you again DK for for. Making your time. This is. DK off he was gonna. There was a second part to the that he was referencing. Oh no, I I was just trying to follow up your your original thing asked where people can find me. So Oh yeah, Twitter.com, twitter.com/DKSF. And that links to curiousdk.com which is kind of my personal website where you can find, you know, the newsletter and you know my end pub. Find it hard to list my end pub. It was on Twitter before but of course my account gets nerfed. So so easiest thing to type into a browser is just you know like curiousdk.com and you can sort of find everything from there. Beautiful. Well, thanks again. Really great conversation and hopefully have you have you on again sometime as things continue to develop at a rapid pace in the Noster world and you're on top of it that. Was a lot of fun. All right. Until next time, next final settlement, guys.
Transcript source: fountain