Today we sit down with Utxo, founder of Nodeless, on understanding the design space for Bitcoin services, the challenges of making Bitcoin accessible and streamlined for everyone, and a vision of how the future may unfold. Don't forget to check out Nodeless.io/guy and if you setup your donation page, post it on social, and tag me, I'll be your first 10,000 sat donation! And don't forget to check out our incredible sponsors and their offers for the audience! • The easy, KYC free integration for B...
Sep 14, 2023•1 hr 31 min
"It means that, given an open-source model, this could help bring about the ability to: Independently calculate the price of bitcoin using only your full node at any block height Develop genuine DeFi applications without the need for (or without sole reliance upon) trusted third-party price oracles" — Daniel Hinton & Steve Jeffress What if we could know, within a 1% precision, what the price of Bitcoin is, by only using your full node, and no other source of data? How useful could that be in...
Sep 11, 2023•58 min
A deflationary money is going to destroy the economy! If the value of money keeps going up, then no one will ever spend it! If no one spends it, then the economy will fall into a depression and it will never escape... at least, this is what we are told. How is it that a sound money system with no special privilege and with no printing machine has been equated with the collapse of the economy? How is it that stuff getting more affordable, has been equated with nobody ever buying anything? How hav...
Sep 07, 2023•1 hr 8 min
"Everything about the concept of a social network and the incredible potential and beauty of #nostr as a protocol is in controlling your experience, what content you see, and how you see it. This is literally the entire point of having follows, followers, and reposts in the first place. It's at the core of the very notion of what social media is." — Guy Swann Should we be running from the dreaded "algorithms" of social media giants, or should we be thinking about them differently? A short articl...
Sep 06, 2023•25 min
"When discussing consensus mechanisms for different cryptocurrencies, one issue that often causes arguments is a lack of understanding (and definition) of the security model that they provide for the historical data in the ledger." — Jameson Lopp Today we have another blast from the past with a deep dive into Bitcoin's security model from Jameson Lopp. The most fascinating thing about this piece is that if understood properly, it gives understanding into why many of the following years in Bitcoi...
Sep 01, 2023•51 min
"I believe it’s important to go back to what this sovereignty is made of. Bitcoin works because an economic majority is aligning incentives for every constituent of the network. The longer tail of the economic distribution may choose to run a node and validate consensus but ultimately consensus follows the money." — Alex B. Today we close out the lengthy back and forth over the evolutionary path of Bitcoin to a billion + users. Alex B brings us a great followup with a less technical and more a...
Aug 29, 2023•43 min
"To not die, Bitcoin must become more used. The current thesis accepted by most “maximalists” is that Bitcoin will continue to be thought of as an investment and its price will keep increasing, the price movements will bring more attention to it in a virtuous cycle. Eventually enough people will want to hold it so they will start accepting it as a payment for goods and services and then it can start to be used as money." Today we dive into Fiatjaf's contribution to the sidechains, drivechains an...
Aug 25, 2023•52 min
"Often overlooked is the importance of interoperability between not only the second-layer protocol and Bitcoin but the layer-2 protocols themselves. A second layer, where end-users can leverage several protocols together and move seamlessly between them, creates a healthier, more resilient financial system and an overall better user experience—both essential for mass adoption."— Chase Smith Today we shift back to the current layer 2 protocols to take note of the tools and ideas around making t...
Aug 24, 2023•37 min
"When reading a draft of this post, my wife got kind of depressed right around here. Her macabre question, basically, is: “if everyone just winds up interacting with sidechains, and not Real Bitcoin, hasn’t the whole thing failed? At every point you’re dealing with some token that isn’t really bitcoin." — James O'Beirne Continuing the thread of discussions in a series of articles on sidechains and trying to frame our thinking for a Bitcoin future where billions can take advantage of its soverei...
Aug 21, 2023•1 hr 14 min
"The headroom there isn’t unlimited — expect it to show up as fee pressure and backlogs and less ability to quickly resolve transaction storms. And that will in turn make it hard and expensive for people with small stacks to continue to do self-custody on the main chain. At that point, acquiring new high value users means pricing out existing low value users." — Anthony Towns It's officially Sidechain Week! Because today Anthony Towns takes us through an thought experiment that sets our current ...
Aug 18, 2023•1 hr 15 min
"While bitcoin is still mainly seen as digital currency, it’s essentially a timestamped log with special properties. As such, it can be utilised for far more things than payments and store of value. I presented some of the alternative uses several years ago and the list continues to grow. Brian Deery, chief scientist at Factom, wrote an excellent history of time-stamping, in which he argues that a secure timestamped record wasn’t feasible before the existence of secure digital value." — Jameson ...
Aug 17, 2023•50 min
With so many common misconceptions about money, how can we possibly make sense of Bitcoin for customers who have spent their entire lives using only a single product, and know almost nothing about it? Without even a means to compare one "product" to another, where do we start? Most only understand money from the context of its network utility - ie. How many places can I spend it at - and have no foundational to make a judgement of its *quality,* which must come before its network adoption. We ha...
Aug 14, 2023•52 min
"A successful blind merge mined sidechain with significant MEV opportunities could offer Bitcoin significant benefits, which could more than offset the disadvantages." - "Blind merge mining works by a third party running the sidechain, building sidechain blocks and receiving the sidechain fees. This entity then creates a Bitcoin transaction, which passes on these fees to the Bitcoin miners in the form of Bitcoin transaction fees." — Bitmex research A trustless, high assurance means of moving B...
Aug 11, 2023•1 hr 18 min
We have an incredible chat today with Pablof7z who is on a mission to make Nostr the global, decentralized marketplace. With highlighter for integrated, universal note taking, data vending machines for micro tasks and shared computing, and using Ai to bring new services and coordination to the ecosystem. Pablof7z dedicates all of his time to building the future. Don't miss our chat in diving down the rabbit hole with him. Links for the many things discussed in the show: • An open system for note...
Aug 08, 2023•2 hr 43 min
Today we delve into a captivating topic, as we explore the potential relationship between AI and evil. My guest Dhruv Bansal brings his profound insights to the forefront as we navigate the depths of this subject. We contemplate the ethical dilemmas that arise when intelligence is harnessed for destructive purposes, and Dhruv expertly unpacks the intricate interplay between AI intelligence, good, and evil, leaving us with a lot to consider about its impact on our lives and the broader world. We ...
Aug 04, 2023•2 hr 38 min
"Talk to a bitcoin maximalist – someone who believes that bitcoin is the only digital asset with innate value – and, more likely than not, they’ll tell you the world’s oldest cryptocurrency is, in fact, ‘not crypto’ at all. The refrain can be confusing: clearly, bitcoin pioneered the use of cryptography – an ultra-secure type of encryption – with the aim of creating a digital currency. Bitcoin is the archetypal crypto. And yet, in the context of how the digital asset marketplace has evolved sinc...
Aug 04, 2023•49 min
"Bitcoin is often referred to as a secure timestamping service. We never had a global record of truth with trustworthy timestamps, so how did this come about? It’s generally due to Proof of Work being combined to a few simple rules by which miners must abide." — Jameson Lopp Can Bitcoin's sense of time be broken? The security and probabilistic assurances of Bitcoin seem simple on their face, but when you dive a little deeper, there is so often tons of nuance and quiet brilliance to unpack around...
Jul 27, 2023•33 min
"Bitcoin represents the explicit encoding of previously implicit values of the tech community. It's not just software — it is a Schelling point and a symbol. As such, it will become widely recognized as the flag of technology over the course of the 2020s." — Balaji S. Srinivasan Today we cover another read from Anil's Bitcoin Essentials list, this time from Balaji Srinivasan. Balaji has a way with words and always brings a unique, high level mental frame to how the world is unfolding. He seems...
Jul 26, 2023•1 hr 18 min
"Some networks are “smart.” They offer sophisticated services that can be delivered to very simple end-user devices on the “edge” of the network. Other networks are “dumb” — they offer only a very basic service and require that the end-user devices are intelligent. What’s smart about dumb networks is that they push innovation to the edge, giving end-users control over the pace and direction of innovation. Simplicity at the center allows for complexity at the edge, which fosters the vast decentra...
Jul 21, 2023•47 min
"The obsession with consumer payments in the Bitcoin community is an unfortunate relic of the fiat money era. Generations that have only known monetary hot potatoes that need to be spent before they devalue have come to view life as a quest of mass consumption." — Saifedean Ammous Today we hit an historical piece from the one and only Saifedean on the economics of Bitcoin for global settlement. While so many fail to recognize the deeper value of money, rather than the shallow service of payments...
Jul 18, 2023•45 min
"To do our best to minimize the economics jargon once again, we might simply ask: what are you going to do with your time? Are you going to create or consume? And how do the characteristics of money, as the salable representation of that time, influence your decision? I sincerely believe that this is the killer app for Bitcoin: pricing capital. If there were ever a time to say that Bitcoin Fixes This, here it is." — Allen Farrington On the announcement of AxiomBTC, Allen Farrington writes an inc...
Jul 16, 2023•1 hr 8 min
"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
