"While many of the innovations in the space are new, they’re built on decades of work that led to this point. By tracing this history, we can understand the motivations behind the movement that spawned bitcoin and share its vision for the future." Context matters. If you don't know the history of the cypherpunks and where we are coming from. Then you may not really know where we are today. Listen to Lopp's amazing piece from 2016, Bitcoin & the Rise of the Cypherpunks . Check out the origina...
Jul 13, 2023•1 hr 13 min
"Since 1800, in 51 out of 52 cases where a country’s debt-to-GDP ratio reached 130%, the country eventually defaulted. The only exception is current Japan, who is frankly in the final stages of circling the drain (e.g., central bank asset purchases and yield curve control). Where is the US now? 129% debt-to-GDP." — Jesse Myers Don't miss this excellent breakdown and visual analogy for the state of government debt and the promises of the US Treasury and the impossibility of a stable or growing va...
Jul 11, 2023•55 min
Ai agents are going to be able to seek out, delegate, and pay for micro services from an ecosystem of other agents & services. But the resources being share will be delivered instantly, and irreversibly in the form of compute cycles. Only an instant, bearer, and irreversible payment method that scales massively will be able to meet the demands and provide a backbone for the economy of Ai exchange. In this Guy's Take episode, I argue why I think Lightning is going to eat ALL of this ecosystem...
Jul 06, 2023•1 hr 38 min
"Today Americans celebrate 246 years of independence from the British Empire. On this day in 1776 the Founding Fathers made a declaration. It was a bold and risky action. Never before had a colonial state defeated its overlord, especially at the apex of its global power." — Alex Gladstein For Independence Day and for all those travelers out there I'm bringing back an absolutely amazing piece by the one and only Alex Gladstein. If you haven't heard it, then you are welcome for bringing it back. I...
Jul 04, 2023•48 min
"So we had built this for a while, but because API calls are basically free, there really wasn't a good match for it. There were some good matches for it and people would do it, but as they were doing it, it was like 'I can do it this way, but I can also do it with dollars.' This is kind of a really interesting paradigm when it comes to Ai stuff is that there's basically 3 or 4 different aspects of Ai that make it so you cannot use credit card relationships to solve the monetization problems the...
Jul 04, 2023•1 hr 27 min
"Your barber or stylist likely has the broadest network of anyone you know. People from every walk of life, including business owners, accountants, teachers, firefighters and politicians, sit in their chairs, sometimes for hours. It is likely that no one else in your sphere of influence has the amount of time and trust to help others learn about and understand Bitcoin." — Hector Alvero We dive into a great, succinct Bitcoin Magazine article today on a surprisingly ripe, yet untapped resource for...
Jun 30, 2023•34 min
We recently had Aleks Svetski back on at Ai Unchained to discuss the project we hinted at in episode 2 that he made public at BTCPrague. The Spirit of Satoshi. A bitcoin centered, custom built LLM intended to encompass the bias, and the perspective of Bitcoin, cypherpunk, Austrian economic point of view. And why this explicit bias is actually a massive feature of Ai that the establishment has misunderstood. Don't miss it. Don't forget to check out the launch page: https://spiritofsatoshi.ai/ And...
Jun 29, 2023•1 hr 18 min
"Neither a startup nor a bank will ever be able to cost-effectively compete on a global scale with the Lightning Network." — Graham Krizek Today we hit a really interesting piece from the founder and CEO of Voltage digging into the recent decades development of every tech company moving to in-house financial instruments and cards. What the problems are that they have sought to get around, why they still get stuck with a plethora of other banking intermediaries, and why lightning not only offers ...
Jun 28, 2023•43 min
"Investing in bitcoin, we believe, is like having the ability to buy shares of a general “Internet ETF” back in the early 1990s, or like being able to buy undeveloped land on Manhattan Island at the start of the Industrial Revolution—it’s the opportunity of a lifetime." — Adamant Research Today we finish yesterday's incredible report on how to think about the market opportunities, risk, and incredible potential rewards as we move forward and how best to secure and protect an investment in the ec...
Jun 24, 2023•1 hr 22 min
"bitcoin is a protocol stack which we can expect to be expanding for many decades, and its foundation is that lean, simple database defended by the world’s strongest firewall; the bitcoin blockchain. In sum, we recommend to not worry about “diversification” in cryptocurrencies and to focus exclusively on bitcoin. It’s the right tool for the job, so pick it up and add it to your toolbox." — Adamant Research Today we dive into the amazing report from Adamant Research who have marked the key zones ...
Jun 22, 2023•1 hr 15 min
"...At some point the entire financial system becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of the Federal Reserve" — Peter St. Onge Today we dive into the fiat and banking crisis with Austrian economist Peter St. Onge in exploring the insolvencies of our banking and political institutions, how we got here, and where things are likely heading. What courses of action are available for the US government and the Fed and what can we take away from the historical examples of countries taking this same path to ap...
Jun 21, 2023•1 hr 24 min
"Expect BlackRock to turn around and shill this to banks, and in particular big banks, such that JPMorgan, for example, can itself turn around and offer “Bitcoin” to its own clients. Of course, it will be an IOU to the BlackRock Stack O’Sats™ that you can transfer to your friend’s Bank Of America Bitcoin IOU account at your leisure. In other words, in short order, the entirety of the Blue Banks’ asset base becomes a funnel into the matrix of the pseudo-Bitcoin narrative attack vector... on the b...
Jun 20, 2023•1 hr 16 min
"The more wonderful something is, the more passion it will arouse. Bitcoin is among the greatest wonders of the late-modern world, so Greg Foss is understandably very passionate about it. So passionate in fact, that he dropped 11 f-bombs in 31 seconds. Why is such a stalwart bitcoin proponent so concerned? Because two guys in cheap wizard costumes did a cringey Fortnite dance? Surely the stakes must be higher. According to some, there is a battle underway for the future and soul of Bitcoin." — R...
Jun 15, 2023•32 min
"What is Bitcoin? Many have attempted to answer this question, but I believe that our quest to do so is doomed to continue in perpetuity . The continuing development of the protocol is where the cutting edge of research into what Bitcoin is and discussion about what it should strive to be actually occurs. It can be tricky for newcomers to wrap their head around what sort of proposals are more likely to be accepted for Bitcoin because there are plenty of unwritten rules regarding protocol changes...
Jun 15, 2023•1 hr 12 min
"These contributions were pivotal in the image generation space, setting Stable Diffusion on a different path from Dall-E. Having an open model led to product integrations, marketplaces, user interfaces, and innovations that didn’t happen for Dall-E. The effect was palpable: rapid domination in terms of cultural impact vs the OpenAI solution, which became increasingly irrelevant. Whether the same thing will happen for LLMs remains to be seen, but the broad structural elements are the s...
Jun 14, 2023•1 hr 17 min
"Zapvertising has two forms, and I believe there is a crucial difference between the two. In one version, a company or creator zaps a ton of notes on the Nostr feed. Blockstream has done this for a couple of days at a time, to great success. It is very unobtrusive. Just a gentle reminder that they are there, and it is a way to earn good will that may lead to follows and possibly conversion to sales. This method has already proven itself to be fairly successful, as I think the amount of goodwill ...
Jun 12, 2023•49 min
With the banking crisis just getting started, with the SEC going after Binance and Coinbase, with rumors of Prime Trust declaring bankruptcy, it is no better time than now to take advantage of the most elegant aspect of Bitcoin, that it is a bearer asset that you can own without the permission or liability of anyone else. There is no better time than now, to withdraw. Today's episode will dig into the recent excellent work from Brad Mills, as well as explore the fundamental reasons for our syste...
Jun 09, 2023•1 hr 22 min
"Nostr isn't just a social network, in a similar way that Bitcoin isn't just a transaction network. Both of these things are true, but they each miss the more significant elements of what they accomplish." — Guy Swann Yesterday I was consumed with a mental thread that I couldn't get out of my head, and so decided to set everything else aside and get this idea out. Today we read my short article posted on blogstack.io, and follow it with a Guy's Take on the possible nuance, where I might be wrong...
Jun 07, 2023•1 hr 8 min
"Much like how two nuclear bombs ended World War II, capital-crushing central bank policy rate hikes and Russian sanctions were like two nuclear bombs dropped on the economy and the banking system. The shock wave took one year to make its way around the world, and now we're dealing with the fallout.European banks like Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse were very intertwined with Russia, and tried to resist cutting ties with Russian business lines as this would inevitably lead to their failures, whi...
Jun 06, 2023•53 min
"Price inflation is the highest it’s been in decades. Labor participation is the lowest it’s been in decades. Wealth inequality is continually going in the wrong direction since 1971 and has accelerated during the QE period. The bond markets are more volatile now than they have been in decades, and 2022 was the worst year for stocks and bonds since 1920. The ballooning of the money supply and growth of the debt-based monetary system is not a left versus right phenomenon — at least in America — b...
Jun 02, 2023•56 min
"The idea of a language user interface as the next step from the thumb tapping we’ve become used to over the past decade is fascinating, and what we should be thinking about is how to make these tools new “bicycles for the mind,” as Steve Jobs said about computers. It’s very important we push back against doomer narratives that lean the world toward “approved Ai” in order to avoid such tools becoming yet another appendage of the state." — Aleks Svetski What are the true power and limitations of ...
Jun 01, 2023•1 hr 2 min
With the Introduction of Ark, the new 2nd layer payments and privacy protocol introduced with Read_734 . I left with a lot of excitement, but I still had a ton of questions, so it felt like time for a chat with Burak, the creator of Ark. We dive into the bigger picture, how this is similar to lightning, how it is different, and then in an attempt to piece together the working parts we go through a bunch of edge cases and detail exactly how the ASP, past owners of Ark balances, and current owners...
Jun 01, 2023•1 hr 26 min
"This is the first time we've interacted with anything other than a parrot that can string together a coherent sentence. And it sounds stupid, but it's actually true. So we are anthropomorphizing, we are projecting our own consciousness onto this thing, and we are immediately imagining Terminator, Minority Report, God knows what else we are imagining - the Ray Kurzweil's of the world - we're imagining that all of a sudden, that's it, we unlocked it, basically we have discovered God. We did it. T...
May 26, 2023•1 hr 18 min
This episode will be part review, and part just going over some very practical, step by step ways to think about managing your keys with a hardware wallet. What you always need to do, how to not over complicate things, who you are protecting your keys from, and more. This episode will be good for those who had been considering taking the dive into their first hardware wallet, and still feel a little uncomfortable about exactly what to do to make sure their keys are there when needed. Guy's Nostr...
May 26, 2023•45 min
"Ark is a trustless, distinct layer two protocol with unilateral exit. ASPs cannot steal users’ funds or link senders & receivers. Users retain self-custody and can revert their funds to the base layer if something goes wrong on the second layer." — Burak Today we dive into possibly the most exciting announcement to come out of Bitcoin2023, a genuinely unique layer 2 protocol, for non-custodial, fully anonymous, fast, cheap, off-chain payments. Introducing Ark. We are diving right in and I p...
May 25, 2023•42 min
"an unbounded number of assets can be minted and/or moved in a single on-chain transaction. This off-chain first design enables asset minters and transactors to enjoy the permissionless nature of the bitcoin blockchain and scale their businesses without running into bitcoin’s scaling constraints. Users will soon be able to integrate their assets into the Lightning Network for instant, high volume, low-fee transactions. This leverages existing network effects and the install base of wallets, exch...
May 23, 2023•1 hr 13 min
Welcome to the first episode of AI Unchained, a new show exploring how AI technology can be a means of empowering the individual, rather than a system of control, and all the tools and perspectives that enlighten that journey. Our first guest is none other than Jeff Booth, the author of "The Price of Tomorrow" on the incredible deflationary force of technology and why our only choice is to embrace it, not fight it. If you are trying to make sense out of the change that is being unleashed, you do...
May 16, 2023•1 hr 36 min
Welcome to the first episode of AI Unchained, a new show exploring how AI technology can be a means of empowering the individual, rather than a system of control, and all the tools and perspectives that enlighten that journey. Our first guest is none other than Jeff Booth, the author of "The Price of Tomorrow" on the incredible deflationary force of technology and why our only choice is to embrace it, not fight it. If you are trying to make sense out of the change that is being unleashed, you do...
May 15, 2023•1 hr 36 min
"Permission can only be denied if it is requested. Direct, peer-to-peer interaction obviates permission and equalizes market power. Don’t request permission to transact; transact. Don’t tinker with the system; supersede it." — Roy Sheinfeld Today we dive into a great piece just dropped from Roy Shienfeld with a great way to think both about Bitcoin and lightning adoption by the mainstream, and also about the path and direction forward to bring the most utility to the most people. Don't build ano...
May 12, 2023•1 hr 14 min
"The biggest complaint members of my audience make about Nostr is the sheer dominance of Bitcoin content. This is understandable. Nostr uses a means of identification and account management very similar to Bitcoin, it has Bitcoin Lightning integration and Bitcoiners tend to be somewhat techy nerds and early adopters. Hence mostly Bitcoin type folks were the first to see Nostr’s potential and get on it. There is a finite limit to growth though with any topic on social media and instead of complai...
May 11, 2023•25 min
