On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 05/02/25 (OP_RETURN wars, Mastercard and Visa push stables, quantum revisited) (EP.618)

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode:  Will stablecoins disrupt credit cards? The US Treasury Advisory Committee drops a report on stablecoins Mastercard and Visa launch stablecoin integrations Movement labs has more scandals Are quantum timelines accelerating? The real risk of quantum to Bitcoin Could a quantum break fix Bitcoin's security budget? Are any Bitcoin purists left? Circle turns down Ripple's acquisition offer Machinsky is facing a 20-year sentence Arizona passes an SBR bill  Cambridge releases a new report on bitcoin mining Bitcoiners are fighting about OP_RETURN again  What is Bittensor  Content mentioned: US Treasury, Report on Digital Money Coindesk, Inside Movement's Token-Dump Scandal: Secret Contracts, Shadow Advisers and Hidden Middlemen Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance, Cambridge Digital Mining Industry Report: Global Operations, Sentiment, and Energy Use  

Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and host may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated.

The federal government loans American International Group, AI, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry.

So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm New Carter. All right. So what do you think about the NFL draft? you know important things first the only thing that i followed was this should what is the same shador sanders yeah he fell huh he fell what happened there i don't know people were talking about him going in the first round he went like the fifth round is it a personality issue they're saying that some of his well maybe it's just not as good as people thought but they're also saying that

um he was answering face times during his interviews which you know that's you're not supposed to do that I mean, no matter if it's a white collar job or quarterback job, that's just not recommend it. No, it's not. I mean, I've had some bad interviews in my time, but I've never answered a phone call or done FaceTime and interview. Yeah, I'm trying to think what my worst interview ever was. There was one where I got put into basically an office closet and forced to build a LBO model. It was like for four hours.

I was in there. I actually got that job. Did they use the mouse? do they say no using of the mouse? No internet. No internet. But just Excel and basically like a packet of paper. I interviewed at Fidelity International before I joined Fidelity Fidelity.

Oh yeah? Yeah, I think you told me that. How'd that go? I didn't get the job. Oh. I did not get the job. I did the Super Day. I went, made it through like four rounds, whatever.

And then didn't get it. And then, I don't know, it's nine months. later I joined the real fidelity. That's good. That was a good trade for you. Yeah, I mean, otherwise I would have been on the equity research covering European telecoms. It would have been really hard to be starting coin metrics from there, huh? You imagine how bleak of a life that would have been?

Some people love that, but, you know, if you can't be monitoring the on-chain data, I don't think you would have been happy. Yeah, I mean, coin metrics existed at that point in time, but I don't know if they would have let me. They made him not giving me a long leash. Yeah. Yeah. I think you probably wouldn't have been as good at that job because you would have been preoccupied.

Yeah. And I was kind of at the time I was upset, but in hindsight, obviously I didn't care to do byside analysis of oil and gas or telcos. Here's an interview that I don't think I've told you about. But when I was in business school, I interviewed for a strategy job at MasterCard. And they asked me about Bitcoin. This was like 2013, maybe 14. Wow.

And they actually asked me about Bitcoin, whether or not I thought it was like, threat to the card issuers. It's actually going to be irrelevant for this episode. Yeah. So what did you tell them? How are they even on that? I mean, good for them. Super impressive that they were even asking the question.

But one of the first questions was just draw on a piece of paper how MasterCard works, which is a really good question too, because it forces you to see, you know, who's actually done their homework. But you had to connect the issuing banks and how they all plug into the equation and then the technology system. and then they asked about threats and they asked specifically about Bitcoin and I said

I think I just said I think it's pretty early for Bitcoin I don't see it being an immediate term threat I mean in the end it was stable coins they actually do see it as a threat as far as I can tell because they are now using stable coins yeah yeah it's the whole

cash on chain thing right it's you see the technology and you say of this could work with cash, then this would be very disruptive. And I don't think, you know, some people think stable coin payments are going to disrupt credit payments because it's cheaper for the merchant to have a final settlement tool at the point of sale. I don't believe that because people really like the rewards and they like the chargebacks and just like the safety of using a credit card.

But there's just so many other parts of MasterCard's business that involve moving money around, especially internationally. So I think some people get stuck on this thing about oh well stable coins aren't going to disrupt credit card payments, which I agree. But there's just so much more. Yeah. Yeah, I think

that's right. Those businesses, MasterCard and Visa have just compounded capital for so long. They're two of the more impressive businesses ever built. Do you know the MasterCard started piloting their stablecoin project in 21? And it's now four years

later that they finally actually launched. Sounds about right. I mean, you would think that with some regulatory clarity earlier, maybe it could have been faster. Yeah. Speaking of regulatory clarity, I can't tell you how many banks have called me recently and said, what's my stablecoin strategy?

Yeah, just ready to go. It's incredible. Even if the Fed hasn't actually fully rescinded their guidance, they're trying to do stablecoin stuff now. It's really exciting. Kind of across the board, I would say. I think just the past quarter, it's just been a lot of, you know, banks, broker-dealer, as people trying to get ready.

Yeah. And the numbers, no one really has the numbers yet. We're going to publish them next month, hopefully with Artemis, on the growth of real-world stable coin payments, but just incredible growth. So stay tuned for that. All right. Should we hop into some deals of the week? Yeah.

First up, we have new research. I believe that's how it's pronounced. They're decentralized AI training protocol. There is $50 million from Parod. on. Then we have Untu Labs, the developer of a new layer one network. They raised $14 million from framework and electric capital. Then we have Camp Network. They're an IP-focused layer-1 blockchain. There is 25 million from 1KX, blockchain capital, and lattice. Then we have Midin, which is a privacy-focused layer-1 blockchain. There is $25 million from A16Z,

hack VCC, and 1KX. Is this three new L-1s announcing this week? Wow. And we have Zar, a stable coin exchange app for emerging markets initially focused on Pakistan. There is 7 million from Dragonfly, Thannick ventures, A6, and C Cryptone, Coinbase ventures. Terminal 3 is a decentralized data storage platform. They raised $8 million from Illuminate, Titan, and Anamoka. Then you have Gaeta, a decentralized AI protocol. There is 4 million from YZI Labs. Or is a Yizzy? That's a finance one, right? Yizzi. Yeah, Maelstrom and Manifold. Then it's Rover, which is a D-PIN network for 3D data collection.

They raised $2.6 million from borderless geodinette and others. Then we have Denari. They're an asset tokenization company. There is 12.7 from hack, blockchange, F prime, and others. Healthy deal week. Yeah, lots of chunky deals. I mean, new L-1s. Who'd have thought?

Yeah. It's just, I don't think new L-1s will ever not be a thing that raises capital. So some credit card payments news to start here. Visa and Bridge have announced a partnership to launch stablecoin backed cards in Mexico and other parts of South America. Pretty good announcement there. MasterCard had something this week too, right? Yeah. So they had a big press release titled, they're unveiling end-to-end capabilities to power stablecoin transactions from wallets, checkouts.

They're partnering with OKX and Nuve. there's a lot of different pieces here on-chain remittances merchant settlement card payments so paying at points of sale or merchants with stable coins wallet enablement card issuing acceptance their partner with Metamask Crackin Gemini buybit crypto.com I mean they've been evaluating stable coins for a long time and as far as I can tell this is a full embrace of stable coins in the core of their business. So I guess do you think there will be an equivalent kind of stable coin version of Visa and MasterCard?

Or do you think that they just sort of adopt this technology and it runs on top of Visa and MasterCard? Yeah, I think merchant settlement could could and will be in stable coins. It's clear efficiencies there, especially with latency. I think using crypto prepaid cards, effectively more debit cards than credit. I think a lot of users are going to have their account at finance or whatever exchange. They'll have stable coins in a wallet. They want that card experience. And I think they will want to transact in the fiat system effectively with stable coins.

I think that will be a key part of it. As I said before, though, I think people, People really like rewards programs and points and consumers really value the recourse you get with credit cards. So that part, I don't think we're, you know, I don't think people are going to stop using AMX or whatever and just go to stable coins. Yeah. I think that's right. I love the points. The Fidelity card has great points.

You have to put it right into your 529 plan. Yeah, points are fun. I mean, I don't actually use them for anything, but I feel like I'm winning when I get the points. Hopefully I'm allowed to say this. I guess I'm going to say it anyway. but I am now a, I'm in one of the early rollouts of the new Fidelity crypto product where you can actually send assets into the platform. And it's pretty awesome. I think it's going to be a big hit. Yeah, credit to Fidelity for kind of reaching feature completeness almost on that platform,

deposits and withdrawals on chain. That's not a trivial thing at all. So really exciting to see them taking that step. Just continues to be a white knuckle experience to send any amount of cryptocurrency on chain, especially Bitcoin, we have these 10-minute block intervals. You just sit there and wait. But we're not fixing that anytime soon for Bitcoin. Yeah, I guess it takes a long time to send a wire or two. On the quantum front, I've seen a lot of chatter around quantum recently as a threat to Bitcoin. I know we've talked about this.

What's your current doomsday clock for quantum supremacy? So you tell me if this is the wrong way to think about it, but I'm just looking at the exponential growth in AI as a least. indicating indicator that quantum is probably moving on a similar timeline. And so I would say that five to 10 years, we're going to have to come up with some sort of a fix here on Bitcoin. Yeah, I agree. I actually think AI accelerates quantum timelines, because I think AI is going to be making those discoveries, doing new cryptography. Yeah. So I think there are some clocks that say it's actually by 2030. So it's actually a big problem.

problem for Bitcoin more than people think. So like anybody that has an active wallet is transacting on Bitcoin, there'll be ways, and these are already being developed, to wrap your coins in a quantum resistant wrapper. So I think of like a two of two multi-sig, one ordinary signature, one post-quant signature. So there'll be ways to secure your coins if you're aware. But there's the other coins. There's a lost coins. And if a quantum attacker breaks ECDSA, they're not going to just steal all of Satoshi's coins in one transaction. They're going to go for plausible deniability, right? Right.

So they'd go for some old coins that are maybe not even part of Satoshi's hoard and spend them. And it'll just look like an old holder from 2010 waking up. Yeah. So it won't look to the external world like anything weird is happening, just old coins waking up. So we wouldn't even know that there's a quantum break necessarily. So should we have a, what would be the metrics to actually monitor

old coins. Should we be looking at Days Destroyed or Realized Cap or something like that on a regular interval here? Days destroyed for sure. Yeah. I mean, we'll probably have a sense of like, well, we think quantum got sufficiently good that it could break ECDSA or Shnor or something.

But it's a worry, honestly. And there's no easy fix. You can't just steal the coins, all the ancient coins, and put them in a vault somewhere. I mean, you just can't do that. We're not going to get the social consensus to, you know, temporarily apprehend all of the old coins for the greater good and let people claim them. So it's a huge $2 to $400 billion bug bounty outstanding for whoever develops quantum.

Don't you think that other stuff would just get attacked first, though? Don't you think the, you know, people would say the banking infrastructure, but, you know, email systems that are not protected with 2FA, you just. just start to see high profiles, people's emails leak and personal communications and things like that. Or do you go right after Bitcoin? No, I mean, I think it'll be total chaos for all internet infrastructure, which relies on encryption, which is everything. But the difference being that in theory, any transmission protocol is maintained and can be upgraded. So you can just add post-quantum signature so that Bitcoin you can't go back in time and reencumber the old addresses, you know, so like the amount of social consensus you need to upgrade all of the old pay to,

you know, pay to public key address for it. You can't do that. So it's tricky. So what happens here? So let's think about who could actually crack it. So the NSA, Google, you know, any of these hypers theoretically, Chinese government or Chinese tech companies, maybe Russian government, maybe, Israeli government, maybe. I guess the question is, if someone were to actually start to take a bunch of this Bitcoin from these exposed wallets, what do they do with it?

Yeah. I mean, I think it's basically just U.S. or China that will have the capability and the resources. I assume it'll need like a huge data center and things like that. If it's the U.S., it's kind of interesting that we have the reserve. Yeah. Because then they can just kind of chuck it in the reserve

and maybe be fairly benevolent about it, even though they've seized old, let's say, let's just say for the sake of argument, once a quantum break happens, everybody moves their coins that can into new address formats. So we've secured whatever, 19 out of 21 million coins. There's two million coins. It's like truly lost.

So the U.S. government, it's kind of like they just invented this technology to trawl the oceans and scoop up all the gold from the shipwrecks, right? So then they take the lost coins and they just put them in the reserve. Right. So in a kind of weird perverse way, we sort of want the U.S. to be the ones to develop it. And then they could just keep the Bitcoin, not sell it. They have a, let's say, a legal obligation to hold on to it. And, okay, maybe there's some losers.

Maybe there's no losers. Maybe the coins really were lost. That's kind of the best case I can think of. Worst case is North Korea develops quantum and, you know, then we're just screwed. Yeah, I've been, hopefully it's not North Korea, but I don't think they have the infrastructure. But if you're Google, think about this from the tax perspective. So all of a sudden you just take all these bitcoins, you have ordinary income. There's, their CFO is going to be like, guys, even if you get quantum, don't.

take those coins. You're going to create a huge tax liability for me. You just sell them. Yeah, you're going to have to sell. How do you, so do you mark the coins at the time when they were created or the time you took possession of them? Probably the time you take possession of them. And then what is that? You put that on your balance sheet. Yeah. These are coins we stole. Well, the accounting issues regarding stealing old Bitcoin remain outstanding. I'm sure we'll be doing a podcast episode about this in 10 years time. You know, quantum was on the Fuddice, if you recall. It was.

We were awake to the then. The timelines have accelerated for sure. I mean, we made the Fudd dice in 2018, I think. Yeah. In the last couple of years, most of the big tech CEOs have said they're operating on shorter quantum timelines. All right. So we'll keep an eye on that. It's my biggest existential threat.

I mean, look, worst, worst case, someone steals the old coins, sells them. Bitcoin suffers for a while, but the system still works. You know, the fud that, I guess, quantum is good fud. The other fud is just, you know, we've talked about the stability of the block reward and the fee market on Bitcoin emerging. Those are probably the two biggest fuds. So I think quantum could fix that other fud. Just because you circulate the old coins?

So it might be the case that in the Bitcoin community, we see the quantum break happening, and we preemptively institute the recycling policy, whereby we have 10-year-aged coins plus flow into this bucket that gradually feeds back out into minor rewards. So quantum could be the catalyst to actually changing the emissions on Bitcoin. You know, all these Bitcoin purists are really going to hate you for saying that, but then again, all these Bitcoin purists are out there doing, you know, public companies in levering up to buy Bitcoin. So how pure are they? I think anybody that was a Bitcoin

purist and is an advocate of the Bitcoin Reserve of the government buying Bitcoin is no longer a purist. So actually I'm not sure there's any purists left. When is the Castle Island publicly traded entity coming along that's just going to lever up and buy Bitcoin? Yeah, everybody has a SPAC, it seems, and we don't. We have no SPAC. We missed a memo. Yeah. I mean, we were the first to You disclosed, you're the first one to disclose the micro strategy thing in 2020. We've had so much time to do this. We could have built a micro strategy clone and we did not. No, we didn't.

Huge missed opportunity. We just didn't know that it would be a thing. We thought it was a total throwaway mention at the time. Well, I had no idea how ambitious sailor was. So elsewhere, Circle has declined an acquisition offer from Ripple in the range of $4 to $5 billion. not that surprising. Yeah, Circle seems like we'd like to go public here. So keep an eye on that one.

You're going to have to explain to me what's going on with this movement lab situation. So Coin desk had a great report. I mean, the reporter over there who wrote this, I guess let's find his name, actually. Sam Kessler. So wrote this article about movement labs. And I don't know. This is like kind of indecipherable in a lot of ways just around the shenan. but a lot of insider dealing and market making agreements and questions around how many tokens

there are and just it's a hodgepodge of just ugliness. Coinbase announced that they're going to de-list the move token. This thing's worth a lot. Can you explain this to me? No, I can't untangle this one. It seems incredibly complex. It looks like there is some obscure third party that with the assent of the company are not sold a huge amount of tokens. There's just so many intermediaries with these tokens. And I guess if you

don't have your launch entirely nailed down, like someone's going to screw you over and it looks like that's what happened here. I mean, very, very hard to untangle what's going on. We'll refer you to the Coinbase article, CoinDesk. Just not a great thing for the industry, though, to have this type of these shenanigans going on. So I don't know what we can do to prevent this other than hopefully a market structure bill would bring some of this in order, but this is just, you know, devious behavior, it seems like. Yeah, I mean, this is why regulation exists and why it's a good thing, the right kind of regulation. This is why when you go public, you have to be extremely clear and honest about what you're doing and who owns what and enforce lockups and things like that. And a standard for

tokens would make sense. So it's tons of ammunition morally for the, for the, for the market structure bill. Disclosing market maker arrangements and then any payments made to centralized exchanges would be a really good place to start. Yeah, I mean, we see the dark underbelly sometimes and it's disgusting. And there's just so much shady behavior in crypto that would just not be tolerated for a second in public markets. I mean, it would be considered outright fraud. And the fact that there aren't extremely clear rules doesn't mean that you should behave like this. So, I mean, I can't wait for some disclosure-based regime to clean this thing up. I totally agree.

All right. Speaking about bad boys of crypto, prosecutors in the case against Celsius CEO Alex Machinsky are seeking a 20-year sentence, citing his lack of remorse. He pled guilty in 2023 to fraud related to the collapse of their lending business and dealings with their token, the sell token. So 20 years. I don't know. It probably does a little bit less than that, is my guess.

It's kind of incredible that when you're facing 20 years and maybe if you show remorse, you can chop off 10 years. You'd probably just show the remorse. There's a lot to be remorseful for. Like, is your ego worth that much that you're just going to go down with a shit? Like, once you're in year 11, you're probably like, damn, I wish I'd showed remorse. Wish I was remorseful in this one. Yeah.

Does it be just like, take the hit to your ego and, you know, take the deal? Yeah. All right. In Bitcoin News, the Arizona State Legislature, they passed a bill to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve needs to be signed by their governor, unclear if it'll get signed into law. But we're seeing more and more of these. Elsewhere in Bitcoin, MicroSailer's strategy has acquired 15,355 Bitcoin. They now have 553-555-BTC. It'd be kind of clean if they ended with just 5155-5-5.

I don't know if they're going to stop there. That's worth $52 billion. That's a lot of money. Elsewhere, the Solana Policy Institute, I was not aware of that, together with Super State and Orca, they've submitted a proposal to the SEC for a pilot to enable the issuance and trading of equity, equity securities on public blockchains. Where do you think these equity securities end up residing? There is a lot of competition here at the blockchain level to be the backbone here. Yeah, I mean, Salana has stabilized a lot in last year, but I wouldn't, if I'm talking a smart contract

chain, I wouldn't go anywhere other than Ethereum. Yeah, but Ethereum, you don't have the privacy. I don't think Ethereum works at all for this use case. I think you're going to, I mean, that's why something like Canton is actually really interesting, I think. Yeah. Well, you still, I mean, you just need a lot of structural clarity on the regulatory side around how to issue one of these assets.

But then think about the legacy systems integration required to move the equity markets onto blockchain. This is like a multi-decade thing, probably. So speaking of institutional adoption, BlackRock is filed a prospectus to offer tokenized shares of its $150 billion treasury trust fund available exclusively through B&Y Mellon. Yeah, BlackRock's done a lot on Ethereum, so I wonder if you were right to lean that way. But these are DLT shares.

So there's a lot of interesting movements over there, BlackRock. So FIFA also wants to launch their own EVM-compatible blockchain network to host its NFT collection. I don't think you need to launch your own chain to do that. But yeah, we'll be tracking that one. FIFA. What does FIFA even stand for? Oh, it's French. It's like Federation International Football Association, something like that.

I don't know. I should know. Yeah. Soccer. Good for you. Soccer. Sport of the future always will be. There was a very good soccer game recently.

Oh, yeah? Yeah. In the Champions League, if you've heard of that. Champions League semifinal. Yeah, what was it like 1-0-0-0? Well, it was 3-3 Barcelona and Inter Milan, which for us, soccer fans, that's like the equivalent of like 52, 52 in NFL. Yeah, just like watching paint dry.

Pretty exciting game. All right, so the U.S. Department of the Treasury Department, they released a really good report, I thought, on stable coins, digital money. We'll have to put that in the show notes. Would you make of this? Yeah, I thought this was, so this is. flagged by Quinn Thompson. Good job Quinn. So this is the T-back. Treasury something advisory committee. I guess it's part of Treasury. It's probably the best government report on stable coins I've seen

to date. It was not extremely harsh on the sector like many. If you read the central bank, if you ever read something like by the BIS on stable coins, they just hate it and they find all these reasons why it's garbage and it's not going to work. This was extremely fair to the stablecoin sector, I thought. They even talked, they estimated that stable coins could buy, I think 28, hold a trillion dollars of government debt. They had some really interesting findings. Again, not overtly hostile to the sector at all.

So it's, I mean, totally different than what we've seen from other government agencies when they talk about stable coins. So it's definitely worth a read. I want to know who did this. Do you think someone at the Treasury did this, or is this a McKinsey template? Who actually built this? Because it's really impressive. It's good.

And they're actually using real data from the industry. I mean, oftentimes stable coins get talked about theoretically without looking at the actual data, which speaks for itself. Whoever the author is, good job. Good job. Hopefully you can put that on your resume that you built this because it's not attributed. So elsewhere in government, the Defy Education Fund sent an open letter to David Sachs calling for the Trump admin to discontinue the prosecution of Roman Storm and other open source crypto developers. And then we have a Cambridge report on mining. I haven't read this one yet.

They're usually really good, though. Yeah, it's been years since the last, this is Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance. They have done historically some very good reports on mining. it's been years, I think, maybe three years since the last one. It's very good. They do have the issue that they kind of took a survey approach

to the miners and they couldn't really get in touch with any of the Chinese miners because I guess if you're a Chinese minor, you don't want to talk to anyone about what you're doing. The main finding was that emissions, the externalities of mining,

emissions and e-waste are way lower than what others had said historically. I mean, the e-waste point, like this guy DeVries has been harping on about e-waste forever with just like completely unrealistic assumptions. As we actually know, miners recycle most of the A6s. They have these second lives. So there's not a ton of e-waste. The emissions intensity has come down dramatically. A quarter of mining is happening off-grid. So it's not rival with other sources of consumption. They talk about flare gas,

which improves the renewable picture. They found that about half of Bitcoin mining is done with sustainable or renewable sources of energy, which is up from prior estimates. So it's a good report if you care about the ESG aspect of mining. I think people don't care about it as much anymore. It seems like AI is now the target of the ESG people and people have sort of forgotten about Bitcoin. mining and Bitcoin has become this sort of like more obviously useful thing. And so people worry about the environmental impacts less.

But yeah, it's a very well done report. Yeah, I really liked it. There's a, I'm going to put this in our newsletter, but there was a really interesting article that came out. So Cracken recently identified a North Korean national attempting to get a job at the company. And instead of rejecting the candidate, their security and talent acquisition team, intentionally allowed the candidate's application to go forward, basically.

And they turned it into kind of a live intelligence gathering operation. So I thought that was fascinating, actually. So it's a blog post on their website says how we identified a North Korean hacker who tried to get a job at Cracken. Did they find anything out about Lazarus or anything? I think they just were able to study a lot of the behavior. It's not like they actually found out the person necessarily. I guess it wouldn't even matter, right? It's not like you're going to go to North Korea and arrest them.

Yeah. A little bit of counterintel. So there was a big kind of dust up in the Bitcoin world. Did you see this about removing opereturn limits? Yeah, so people are upset about ordnoles and arbitrary data on Bitcoin. Is that the gist of it? Yeah, so this one pertains to opertern. I think it was introduced by Peter Todd. So operturn has been this way to put a very small amount. I want to say like 50 bytes, if I'm not getting it wrong, of data into Bitcoin transactions. And it's been a huge point of contention since inception. I think Vitalik blamed opereturn limits on why he didn't want to develop on Bitcoin, had to make Ethereum.

Yeah. So some people think it's like a denial of service factor for Bitcoin if you increase the throughput. But of course, it's not really. and people have been putting arbitrary data in Bitcoin forever through different mechanisms for a long time. And I think this debate was kind of settled around the time of ordinals and inscriptions. So it's funny that people are so fired up about it given that it's already been settled. Like Bitcoin will permit arbitrary data and there's no way to stop it. I would also add on that, the main detractors, like Luke Dash, is a bit of

detractor this idea he thinks any arbitrary content in Bitcoin that's not transactional is like fraudulent in a way but Luke Dash also put a ton of data into Bitcoin through his mining pool back in 2011. Oh he did. Yeah, I was gonna say he put a lot of religious stuff into Bitcoin. Yeah, he put Bible verses in there. So how could he possibly claim that it's illegitimate now? It's hypocritical. Well, there's a lot of that. There's a lot of hypocritical things going on in the industry. Do you see Barry Silbert went on Frank Chaparro's podcast? Yeah, so Barry's kind of started making public appearances again. It's good to see him back in the public eye. I'm just pissed

as not on ours. I've been trying to have Barry on this podcast forever. Yeah, Barry, if you're listening, you're welcome to coming on the brink. You can even talk about BitTenser if you want. Yeah, I'd love to learn more about BitTensor. BitTenzer is one of those things that I've tried so hard to understand, made very sincere efforts, and I still don't get it. A lot of people are really excited about BitTensor. Yeah, it's very difficult to, I wish there was a, you know, remember in like the early days of Bitcoin? It was like, all right, read these five things and you're going to get it. But we need that for BitTensor.

Where is Nathaniel Popper? Can he write a book about BitTensor so we can get it? Popper. What a great book, Digital Gold. Really good. That was an excellent book. Really good. I mean, BitTenser is lacking its evangelist.

like it doesn't have O'Ns as Casara's character that can put into common terms. It might be Barry. Who knows? Might be. We're going to keep trying. I'm not optimistic about our ability to understand BitTencer,

but I guess it's the biggest crypto AI project. We could probably have a couple podcasts on it at some point. Yeah. Okay. Whoever can put it into plain language that ordinary people can understand, send us a DM.

All right. I am looking forward to it. I think that is it for the week. Everybody have a safe and healthy weekend, and we will see you on Monday.