TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #725: Why Bitcoin Adoption Is Fragmented with Fernando Nikolic

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

Marty sits down with Fernando Nikolic to discuss how Bitcoin can learn from the music industry's mistakes, the communications failures that have held back adoption, and how AI tools and data curation are reshaping the information landscape for the next wave of Bitcoiners. Fernando on X: https://x.com/basedlayer Bitcoin Perception: https://perception.to/ STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bitkey.world/ OPNEXT https://tinyurl.com/tftc2026 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be forth-turning vibes i think that's uh inept in that description of the times we find ourselves in right now yeah it is and um i think the the the biggest um biggest difference between what's happening now compared to previous times that you can compare with is

how information is being spread and consumed and um because back back in the day right like this is something that i've been thinking about a lot is a lot of the reasons why these like old institutions actually had such a long run before the internet is because they were they were leveraging information asymmetry right um you can go all the way back to uh the church and they they had like the they had the only source of truth right like they were saying i don't know we know what god wants and if you want access to god you got to go through us right and then governments uh had the same thing they were just basically saying no no we know how to control the currency and like private banks don't know you guys definitely don't know we know and all these

institutions and our media like we know the truth we are the unbiased ones you guys need us to get to the truth and etc etc so all these institutions have been able to exist for so long because they were leveraging information asymmetry and that's before the internet really happened and right now when we go through the four turning vibes it's like whoa all these institutions are like crumbling up in front of our faces because everybody has access to free-flowing information and truths and And you see that all that for turning lives comes from that, I think from that, like, Whoa, I didn't know that you guys were so insane, you know, and when, when, when things is transparent.

So it's exciting times. I mean, yes, the time that repeats in history, but I think it's unique now because of the internet and the way we consume information. That's what I was going to bring up. I mean, I think I've said it a couple of times on the show. i think the the internet age whether it's the fourth turning the sovereign individual i think the sovereign individual probably the most prescient description of what's going on now but everybody talks about like oh it's like the america is like the roman empire

of um modernity and it's gonna have a similar downfall and i'm like the internet is always that that variable in the back of my mind it's like i i think it feel it changes things moving forward in a way that or yes there may be some parallels and similarities to civilizations of of history but i i think the the internet variable changes things moving forward particularly the speed with which things happen yeah and it's not necessarily like a disruptive thing i think all these established institutions they find a way to kind of like metastasize and and and shape shift um because i like i come from like i started my career in the music industry right and i was working at universal music uh as a product uh product guy um and that was in the

mid aughts late aughts like 2007 ish and i you know i grew up in norway so i was working at universal music norway and then in sweden uh the pirate bay guys were like doing their thing and And at that time, they were being sued left and right by like Hollywood lawyers, music industry lawyers and stuff like that. And they were kind of like attacking the Pirate Bay guys in a way that showed how stupid and ignorant they were because they were like, you know, we've got to shut this site down. You know, like thinking like, OK, if we shut this website down, that's that's going to fix it. So they were like totally didn't they didn't know how to attack it. Right. And that was in Universal Music, having these conversations with people inside. You know, I remember these conference calls that we had with the London headquarters and stuff.

And they were all just focused on destroying, quote unquote, the Pirate Bay instead of like, okay, what about taking a look at this technology and see why is this so successful and how can we potentially leverage it? i tried to say those things like hey we should maybe leverage torrenting uh to release like low bit rate uh singles or snippets of albums before we released them for real to get people excited and they were like no no we gotta like shut it down completely and then later on like i rage quitted the industry as a result of that but later i saw that they essentially bend the knee to to the torrenting technology and you know they they allowed spotify to be built and then they you know universal and sony bmg and all the big the big four record labels they all had like a a significant share in the um and um and the listing of spotify when they entered the u.s

market so they essentially metastasized into being you know the biggest shareholders of spotify years later just for survival right so we're seeing a lot of these like industries not necessarily being disrupted but uh they'll they're like in the moment right now trying to desperately find a way to stay relevant yeah that's actually been uh following you for years on x been some of my favorite commentary yours is drawing parallels from your experience in the music industry particularly on how well the music industry in sort of the entertainment industry more broadly is at marketing and positioning particular products um but to your point they may not get the the sort of freedom oriented technologies that make it easier to access their their content and

you've had a lot of um very uh stark criticism for for bitcoin specifically and how we're positioning this this new freedom technology it's like we need to combine the um the good good things that pirate bay brought to the market with the good marketing and positioning that things like hollywood and the music industry have had for for many decades yeah i think there's two sides of the bitcoin industry that i have been the most critical about and i i hope i feel like i um will hopefully soon not have these criticisms anymore because i do feel like a lot of things are are improving but i think two two two sides of the industries one is the the you know if you take the first 10 years of bitcoin and you and you take a look at um the engineers the people

building uh you know products for using bitcoin i think it was like uh not very user-friendly nerds building for nerds autists building for autists man heavy and uh you gotta be yeah like super super advanced man in order to understand what the hell you're doing with a with something as simple as you know a wallet sending and receiving you know it should be should be easy but we made it very complicated obviously because of you know we were thinking of trade-offs we want to we want to build something that's secure and we have so many examples of you know all you know all types of protocols being hacked back in the day right um all type of smart contracts being hacked left and right and we're seeing less of that now i think the

the social engineering is maybe the biggest attack vector right now and not so much like the hacking of stuff but still um but then also apart from the like a horrible ux and the subpar products that you know companies in this space were releasing in the first 10 years of bitcoin we also had like this communications problem or this positioning problem where um you know a lot of people who who grok bitcoin they uh they feel like okay there's like you know when you are when you are orange pilled i i do believe it's a very it's a highly personal journey i mean yes you you have access to a community online you can go to a conference or attend uh and you have you know material um but but you you are essentially unlearning a lot that

you thought was true and it's a highly personal experience at least it was for me and i think a A lot of people do, it resonates with them. So you got to like change your worldview, you know, the stuff that you thought were true for many, many years, you got to flip upside down. And then you got to learn about, you know, cryptography, computer science. I mean, I mean, at least on the surface level, right. To, to fully grok Bitcoin.

And then when you do, when it clicks in your head, I think the natural, the natural instinct is, oh shit, the rest of the world needs to hear about this. Right. So you just got to go at the top of the roof and rooftop and yell it out. But, you know, you are essentially going to use the same arguments that convinced you to convince somebody else. And that's somebody else. It's not you.

So, you know, we, you know, a good like marketer or promoter or whatever, they look into the psychology of like influence and stuff like that. And they tap into stuff like, okay, what are you angry about? What are you concerned about? what are you fearful about these deep emotional triggers and then they try to like create the message around that right because these are things that will resonate super super quickly and bitcoiners have been kind of like not doing that and then at the same time the way of doing it is also like bro you don't know you're wrong bro you need to understand bro this shit is fucked

up bro and uh people were just not not going to listen to that stuff and then you have these other losers and in the shit coin land there are like all lovey-dovey all welcoming and stuff and they they go there faster because hey this is a community that is more open and welcome and um it's kind of like the same thing with politics too you know people aren't ready for the truth but they want to belong to a community so they go where they are quote-unquote welcomed instead of actually you know um doing some critical thinking so it's the same problem that you see elsewhere as well and i think um individual bitcoiners have done bitcoin a extreme disservice i would say in terms of like hey are we going to really grow adoption here on a global scale in that's in that

scenario it's been pretty pretty bad but now i think there's just like a lot of interesting companies that are just creating great products that they really think about brand they think about design they think about delightful experience and stuff like that and i think through through those companies i think we have a really bright future and uh i think all the stuff that i've been you know bitching about on x and here for the last two or three minutes is hopefully a thing of a previous generation or a previous era of uh of bitcoin so who are the companies you think are doing it right that you're excited about what do they focus on in terms of presenting the user top of my mind i think um i think uh square cash app they really have that like

they think about brand design to think about good ux when it comes to the apps but they also try their best to tap into the culture and i think that's something again that i that i look back at you know torrenting and the pirate bay and stuff like that it was not only the technology that was awesome obviously but the outcome of that technology was like somebody in sri lanka could now download um i don't know above the rim and and and see uh tupac and maybe download the soundtrack and tap into the culture so it's like technologies that come with like this underlying cultural movement underneath that's like that's like a fucking that's an explosion waiting to happen right those like super impactful stuff stuff and i think that's

what square and cash app and and all those people are trying to do at that level right like jack dorsey wearing a satoshi nakamoto t-shirt at the super bowl you know trying to converge though the mainstream world with our world in a in a cool way i think that's a good example of a company does doing it well. What's up, freaks? Up next, the Bitcoin Scaling Conference, where Bitcoin developers meet institutional capital, is coming to New York next month. Join Bitcoiners from Blockstream, Chaincode, Brink, and more at the Can't Miss Summit at the intersection of Bitcoin tech and finance. This conference has one of the best signal to noise ratios, and that's why I'll be joining Blockspace's third annual Bitcoin tech conference

on April 16th at the New York Times Center in Midtown Manhattan. There's only room for 200 attendees, and they've already sold more than 100 tickets of their open spots. So you've only got a few weeks to get your travel plans in order from New York. With a ticket, you get access to the best programming and Bitcoin tech from BitVM to BitChat, catered lunch, and access to the PubKey after party. Wearing the hat, PubKey after party. Up next is where builders meet capital, founders find funding, and companies source top talent. Plus meet institutional investors and developers from BlackRock, HC Wainwright, and Bitcoin Infrastructure Corp. If you're at a venture fund or another finance firm, this is the event to learn more about the quantum computing,

leading edge Bitcoin tech and topics that will define Bitcoin's futures. Go to opnext.dev for tickets and use the code TFTC to get 25% off a general admission or VIP ticket to the event. Again, that's opnext.dev, go TFTC for 25% off a ticket. I'll see you there. So freaks, this rip of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. BitKey makes Bitcoin easy to use and hard to lose. It is a hardware wallet that natively embeds into a two or three multi-sig. You have one key on the hardware wallet, one key on your mobile device and Block stores a key in the cloud for you. This is an incredible hardware device for your friends and family, or maybe yourself who have Bitcoin on exchanges and have for a long time, but haven't

taken a step to self-custody because they're worried about the complications of setting up a private public key pair, securing that seed phrase, setting up a pin, setting up a passphrase. again bitkey makes it easy to use hard to lose it's the easiest zero to one step your first step to self-custody if you have friends and family on the exchanges who haven't moved it off tell them to pick up a big key go to bitkey.world use the key tftc20 at checkout for 20 off your order that's bitkey.world code tftc20 it's hard too right because like as you mentioned earlier like we're dealing with this nascent emergent protocol that has new ways i mean the way the protocol works it's just people are going to be interacting with technology in ways that they haven't before

i think if i were to try to articulate what you're describing earlier like autist building for autists like first 10 years it's i think it was hyper focused on making sure that everybody understood like hey this is what you're you're dealing with here it's a distributed system that uses private public key pairs and you need to understand how all this stuff works i think that's i mean just that self-custody alone is one of the biggest turnoffs for a lot of people because you're like all right here's the best money ever um oh by the way like you need to secure yourself if you lose these 12 words you lose your money forever it's just like people are like well that's a bit risky yeah and it's uh and so what do you would like what um on top of the protocol

do you think has made this easier like you i think it's something like uh ellen address just being able to send somebody like hey marty at strike dot me if you want to send me money just find a compatible wallet send it there that's another thing it's like what is a compatible wallet we're getting into like all these ux issues standardization issues that emerge too but to your point i do think we're we're definitely getting better at it as time goes on but i think the um time is of the essence here right like i think considering everything going on in the world the fourth turning vibes that we started the conversation with like i truly believe in what i have been doing what i've been doing for the last nine years and is to educate people and

to get bitcoin into as many hands as possible and through the nine years i've been doing it professionally and 13 years i've been in bitcoin um the environment has never been more right for for bitcoin adoption in terms of people needing a solution like bitcoin oh yeah i know 100 and and also let me let me thank you as well for being part of my own you know journey i remember like Like when I was looking back at the DMs on X and it was like something from like 2019 or something was there. And I mentioned something about listening to a pod with you and Alex Leishman. and there was like uh there wasn't there was a i don't know three minute segment where you were talking about virginia and like the new england and how how the economies uh became

you know like circular economies and it's like you know virginia and the new colonies uh emerged and that inspired me to write a blog post about it and i sent it to you and you were like yeah great cool and i sent it to park lewis i sent it to leishman and everybody was super super friendly and they gave me feedback on the article that nobody read except from maybe you leishman and park lewis and five other uh crazy ones that were following me back then but you know that has been instrumental to my personal journey so thank you but i think uh in 2019 that that same i had that same fear you know um and it's only been intensifying in the in the in the seven years that has passed but one thing i do want to say which you know i don't want to be like super

negative on this episode but like i i don't think like you know the bitcoin is not for everyone but it's for anyone i i truly truly believe in that because you know i'm from argentina and you would think that in argentina you know bitcoin would be a no-brainer for for the entire country everybody has been going through insane uh debasement uh you know my my family emigrated from argentina because of a hyperinflationary dumpster fire in 89 i told you about that um and then another crazy one happened in 2001 so it has like this argentina has gone through this like chronic you know uh disease of of inflation and no other country than argentina perhaps maybe maybe other five uh nigeria Venezuela, Turkey, Lebanon, maybe Iran, have seen how just inflation, how that tears the

social fabric apart, having families having to go outside of the country, leaving their families behind just to get a job and send money back. And you would think, hey, Bitcoin, remittances over lightning, all of that is a godsend, right, to people in countries like Argentina. and still ethereum is the biggest it's the biggest community uh it has the most traction in argentina so just because us bitcoiners think that okay these people would be open to bitcoin still doesn't mean that they will get it uh you can give them the the the bitcoin standard uh to read uh you can you can give them 100 podcast episodes people just still won't get it so i think we

we should be okay with just hey there's a bunch of people that will never ever get it and let's not even think about those people and then try to tap into the cohorts around the world that might need bitcoin for very different reasons and this is also related to the information asymmetry that that we're going through right now because you would think the abundance of information would make more people understand bitcoin more the reality is there's so much noise there's so much like low signal out there among the noise that somebody who has to work two three jobs because of inflation to keep you know food on the table don't have time to to get into deep into anything so they you know you have heard and you probably met you know hundreds of uber drivers who are just

like shiba inu maxis but they think bitcoin is uh is uh whatever old tech is because they read they barely read anything so um pockets of the internet will now be in different cohorts online um consuming very different content and we just need to try to tap into those cohorts those pockets online and try to speak the language in order for um for adoption to grow because it's not going to be mass adoption anymore in my opinion we're behind we're beyond that it's going to be a fragmented adoption that is going to look very insane and weird um but it's not going to be like one big you know movement that kind of brings a critical mass uh into our world it's going to be choppy i think is this something you're trying to solve a perception yeah i am i

think um for people who are in the industry um who want to keep up with what is happening yeah you can't rely on logging into x anymore or um or i don't know reading um one or through one or two websites a day in your morning with your morning coffee there's things happening 360 degree 24 7 nonstop from all regions of the world at any given time and manually keeping up with that is impossible so um if you if you consume uh content if you try to educate yourself the old school way you're going to have a very rough time because you're going to be you're going to be beaten by somebody who uses something like perception that just is able to gather 650 plus sources all at same time and can create can do pattern detection automatically in a second instead of you trying to

do that on yourself having 70 tabs open in your browser at the same time so yeah i'm solving that with perception for the people who want to accelerate who want to get to you know what's really happening and what are like the trend clustering all around the world faster than them than their competitors so still in beta we can talk about perception a little bit more but we're still in beta and already have i already have institutional clients already and i think the reception has been pretty good i'm super bullish on on that and uh i do think that is kind of like how we are how we need in order to survive in the like knowledge worker uh industry the way we process data and the way we uh add context to that data is going to be incredibly important for

like job security for your company to stay alive for for yeah uh for not becoming part of the permanent underclass well that's i mean i'm sure if you've been listening and reading my tweets and newsletters like i'm incredibly bullish on ai um just as a productivity booster first for small teams like ours here at tftc and that's how i viewed it over the last two years specifically like um we started really leaning in um about two years ago and automating some back-end processes with ai tools and obviously they've gotten exponentially better as time's gone on and it's allowed us to do more so like combination of like storytelling via ai generated videos telling the story of jackal island the story of getting ripped off the gold standard

um a bunch of other stories but then on top of that like we can put out more content now like we have this five-day week bitcoin brief newsletter that we've gotten back to and it's all been enabled by ai and to your point like curating and surfacing signal that's what um we've been trying to do with the bitcoin brief and uh feedback's been good but i think ai is a double-edged sword you can get consumed by slop yeah and the tsunami of noise that's going to be produced using these tools but if you leverage them the right way you can serve as a ton of signal as well yeah that's why for when i created perception it was more like the reason i created perception was because when i was working at blog stream i was i used to be the vp of marketing and communication

there for people who don't know me and we were like using traditional tools that were like monitoring you know social media monitoring media monitoring whatever and just to see okay how are we doing how are like technologies being discussed online and you know competitors and stuff like that and you know what these tools uh resurfaced was just everything so i will i was like oh shit on tuesday we got this 72 increase in mentions you see what that is all about and i log in and i see just pure pure dribble you know like just casino links and scammers and all kinds of bullshit so these tools that supposedly are tracking the internet for you yeah they track everything and with like i said with the ai slop with grifters with spammers with all that stuff happening not

only on x but just everywhere um you can't rely on these metrics at all you can't even rely on directionally it's all fake so i was like okay i need to we need to build our own system and i started doing that and then i was like oh the data that comes back is pretty interesting let me create a newsletter uh showing some interesting stuff that was mostly based on mainstream media and essentially that was well received because i was essentially just quantifying what people already knew yeah mainstream media sucks and here's here's why um but now you know as i added more sources uh it's it's completely different and i really see the value of a platform like perception but during that process i was like yeah i can't

fuck this up i really need to be super careful about what i actually include what kind of data comes in because that's the trap you know you want to like bring in everything but then you bring in all the bullshit and uh in order to provide a lot of data that is you know that has enough volume to really tell you, hey, these are the trends, this is the sentiment, and this is actually the public perception of X, Y, and Z, you need to curate that a lot. So I think, you know, me coming from the industry and knowing, you know, who's who and what's what, I think that's another strength for, you know, perception to actually be a valuable tool in the future. But you're totally right. And I think what you did with the AI video in particular was

absolutely insane i mean you're you you pioneer that shit like that jekyll island video was absolutely insane and that was towards my my last uh my last uh you know uh period at blog stream and we were discussing that internally we were like yeah we fucked up here because these this this team is a small media team we're like a big company and they beat us to it and look look at what they're doing they're absolutely killing it and i think that's a one example of many examples of just like people who are like hyper focused on something they just edge out uh compared to a bigger new york case bigger media outlets right so freaks right now someone with less capital than you is building a better bitcoin position than you are they're not smarter they're not luckier

they're just using this downturn differently the small minority will quietly make moves that matter an unchained wrote a field guide for that small minority it's called 21 moves to make in the downturn inside you'll learn how to orient your thinking around bitcoin's long-term properties The common psychological traps that surface during market downturns, practical accumulation strategies, and ways to optimize your savings, retirement accounts, and idle capital. If you plan to use this downturn instead of watching it pass, go download it at unchained.com slash tftc. That's unchained.com slash tftc. What's up, freaks? This rep is brought to you by good friends at Silent.

Silent creates everyday, fair day gear that protects your hardware. We're in Bitcoin. We have a lot of hardware that we need to secure. Your wallet emits signals that can leave you vulnerable. you want to pick up silence gear put your hardware in that i have a tap signer right here i got the silent card holder replaced my wallet i was using ridge wallet because it secured against rfid signal jacking uh silent the card holder does the same thing it's much sleeker fits in my pocket much easier i also have the faraday phone sleeve which you can put a hardware wallet in we're actually

using it for our keys at the house too there's been a lot of robberies they have essential faraday slings faraday backpacks it's a bitcoin company they're running on a bitcoin standard they have a bitcoin treasury they accept bitcoin via strike so go to slnt.com slash tftc to get 15 off anything or simply just use the code tftc when shopping at slnt.com patented technology special operations approved it has free shipping as well so go check it out thank you number one but number two it goes to your point of what you're just describing building perception like you have a ton of context personal context of like where the signal is in the space and similarly like that's like i've been building my bitcoin twitter list since 2012 i think or 2013

and i just had i mean just from pure observation over 13 14 years like i've developed these pattern recognition techniques uh with my human brain um to to then be able to curate via these ai tools and it seems like you're doing the same thing to your point that's going to be the edge moving forward is curation and taste i strongly believe that and i think in the realm of building ai products particularly with a focus on data surfacing like you need that that sort of pattern recognition that experience that time in the market you're not like some startup out of yc is going to be like okay we need better bitcoin sentiment tools so we're going to build that like if you haven't been in the space for a while and you don't know the different actors and the

the history of who's been right and who's been wrong over the course of many years it's gonna be hard to to do that from scratch yeah totally it's it's and now we are really like in that in that top of the wave i think where we either fall off the surfboard or we actually ride the wave to the end where we are confronted with so much information and how do we make sense of it and as as a professional working industry you're not you're not going to do that manually but then for us who build tools around that yeah we're kind of like we're doing it now but i i'm i'm very curious to see how like information in general is going to look like in a year from now two years from now three years from now it's going to be something we need to tweak and adjust uh really

fast and be super nimble i think because listen perception has been in beta for six months i i quit blog stream six months ago so it's not even been a year half a year and what i when i exited and i announced me leaving and i was like hey this is now available for beta um that product doesn't exist anymore and that was like a yeah like a tracking tool you log in uh through a dashboard um and then you kind of like create charts and you can create like a spaces where you can like drag stuff from a cluster into a sheet and then you can kind of like run some analysis models on it that stuff is like completely commoditized right now like i think people just create whatever app they need for a very, very specific thing that for anybody else building

a business around it, it's too niche to actually make viable as a business. But for one person who needs something quick, that is very, very specific, they can build it themselves. So apps and front ends and UIs is just completely commoditized. So the data is the only competitive mode that we have at least for the next maybe 12 to 18 months. And it's about how, you know, what you do with that data. You know, in Perception's case, it's a curated feed, but this is a critical, it's mass volume, but it's very curated.

I'm very careful about which Twitter account goes into the database, you know, what tweets go in. And then I do the trend analysis. Then I do, you know, analysis of earnings calls to see whether leadership is evasive or not. I grade them. I take the questions that they're being asked and are they evasive or not?

And then I do like, I run the alpha of the stock price versus the evasiveness versus BTC price. So it's a lot of stuff like you need to know, you need to kind of be part of the industry to know, hey, this is something that is unique that people really want and then offer it to them. But that's like in the five months that I've been doing this,

I had to toss away an app and just put all that data and all that analysis through LLMs. So now perception is the data, it's the narrative intelligence, but you can access it directly on ChatGPT, on Cloud or Google Gemini. And people are like, whoa, that's interesting.

So now I do way more demos, prospects are actually super engaged and my users are upgrading or like they don't turn because all of these people, they are already using these AI tools and just plugging perception into that, they know it's really powerful and impactful because if you try to do the same

with the native intelligence that Claude and ChatGPT or Perplexity has, it's going to be surface level still. There's the depth of data, the niche, and then where I plug it into, that is kind of like the competitive mode right now. But who knows in six months how this whole thing is going to change.

So it's a crazy time to be alive. right no i think you're you like the quick pivot to just direct injection looks like via plug-in or like apis like i i came to the conclusion like two months ago after downloading open claw because it's your point it's like you're we're projectionists now it's like hey if i need a dashboard to look at something or a deck or a report and just tell my my agent like hey, pull all this data that you have access to. Like, look at it over the last week, last two weeks, last month, and give me a report on how we're doing, and boom, it's there.

It's like, I don't have to go into a dashboard or anything. It just does it. And so I think the world is moving towards just, like, these agents are going to do things for you, and they just need access to good data, and they don't need a front end for that. They just need to plug into the data source directly, whether it's API or plug-in, whatever it may be.

Well, how how confident are you that Bitcoin is going to be the preferred? I mean, I know that, you know, the BPI, the Bitcoin Policy Institute, they did research and they concluded that Bitcoin was the preferred preferred currency to be used by these agents. But in terms of like the people, the humans who are going to build agents and companies around agents, what do you think? you know are they going to prefer bitcoin or ethereum or where do you stand on like how bitcoin plays into this whole future um yeah that's funny i just recorded with matt corallo last week and we published that episode on saturday this is all we talked about is um i mean he and cali have been talking for four weeks let me shut my door i get my right in the back but um the uh they were having a discussion on on x like a month ago about hey if uh bitcoin

is going to be the native currency of the internet now's the time to begin building um building the infrastructure because everybody's starting from zero with agentic payments this is new technology none of the infrastructure exists for them yet so we got to go build it and it seems pretty clear that um credit and debit cards aren't going to be the solution due to all the risk associated with handing over that information to to a robot um and so i and to answer your question i think the jury's still out and i think the i spoke with cali too last week as well so the culmination of my conversations with cali matt is like it's up to people to go build it right like you need like and it's never been easier to do it with these with these ai tools it's all

And so I think the demand side is there in terms of Bitcoiners who are sort of on the cutting edge of this agentic economy that's emerging. I would argue that the population of Bitcoiners using these tools, like the amount of Bitcoiners using these tools is probably way higher than any other subgroup outside of AI native companies or individuals who are literally playing in the AI field. So I think Bitcoiners are early adopters of this technology on a per capita basis for our subgroup. I guess it would index way higher is my assumption. And so I think the onus is on us to go build it. And I think that's my point. The demand side is there. There's plenty of Bitcoiners using these tools who would gladly have their agents spend Bitcoin to buy stuff.

But the supply side, the supply of merchants accepting it, I don't think it's there. And so we need tools to make it easier for them to do it with a simple, simple code injections or more library downloads on their website. um and then i i do think man i talked about like i do think you just need to make it as seamless as possible for merchants to um to go in and out of bitcoin in dollars or dollar equivalents and stable coins um yeah like it or not like i just think that's a table stakes you need that yes they don't like the volatility yeah no but also i think that's the one thing that we have for us is that the purchasing power per SAT spent is always going to increase over a long period of time, right? Or like millisats or millibits. So you can like chop it down to

whatever type of micro payment units that you want. The purchasing power will always be greater and greater. So you want to have agents equipped with a currency that works that way and does not do the inverse uh programmatically over time and just lose purchasing power which you know in argentina at least you know the worst money always is the first one to be used so you know in argentina's case is dollar being being bitcoin here in this in this example like the the dollar has always been the strongest currency and the peso has been the shittiest so whenever you get your pesos um you just want to spend it right away you you don't want to hold that right and then whatever you don't spend from that like monthly paycheck for example you put

that into a dollar account and it can rest there for a little while yes that also deprecates in value but not as fast as the peso but the peso is the one that is like is in heavy circulation And then the dollars is for like transactions of, I don't know, if you have a property deed or something like that, that stuff is done in a stronger currency for like, you know, property purchases and you buy a car, sell a car, stuff like that. So I wonder if the agent economy is going to mimic that type of behavior, which is inherently human, right? You don't want to spend the asset that goes up in value over time. you want to spend if you have something worse available that is being accepted by a critical mass of people yeah get that shit out of there i don't want to fucking i don't want to have that but if i can buy something for that yeah i'm going to spend it first so i wonder if i just

want to mimic that behavior um with stable coins versus midcom yeah that's the other thing too like the the agents will do whatever their uh their humans tell them to do at least for a certain period of time who knows maybe they break containment and become uh conscious and conscious and begin making decisions on their own but yeah i guess you could give it like a broad prompt like hey that's what i try to do is be as broad as possible like just uh out of curiosity to see what they what they choose like hey uh i need you to go do this like i want to be able to send and receive bitcoin like figure out which which um wallet works best for you so i did this like a month ago a month and a half ago now at this point and uh because i started by giving it direction

like hey here's what i want you to do go spin up a lightning node using this um using this library and blah blah blah and it just like didn't work and i reframed it's like all right you go do research figure out what works best for you and i found phoenix d server and download one of those and i was like hey here's this bolts a product you can you can send on-chain bitcoin to an address that i'll provide you from bolts and then it'll for a submarine swap in i'll have a lightning channel i can spend i did that within 10 minutes at a phoenix d server and a funded lightning channel so i was like that's pretty cool and like so it it did sort of knew i wanted to have it be able to send and receive bitcoin um but then i i gave it it was like hey just figure out what

works best for you under setup and it did that pretty pretty smoothly oh so they're really cool yeah i think uh you know phoenix bolts arc there's just so many new newish uh companies that are building these uh type of instruments and i'm super bullish on i think i'm super bullish on them i think one one thing is one thing is for certain is that we we are living in a gap between like old world dying and the new world being born and that gap is just getting so much wider and wider is definitely not going smaller and uh you know on one side that environment is kind of where the grifters flourish um but at the same time that's that's the opportunity for for builders you know so definitely i think that the timing of this is uh you know to matt corralo's point is uh

spot on it is now or or never and it's time to build yeah no i think the other thing playing in bitcoin's favor is like you just have this interoperability between all the disparate um sub protocols and bitcoin whether it's lightning liquid arc spark um state chain uh implementations beyond spark like it just all works together whereas in the competing world of stable coins on different chains with different sort of issuers uh at the bottom of the at the bottom of the chain there uh i could see it introducing friction and i said this on the mackeralo on the episode i recorded mackeralo and then i talked with my good friend matt o'dell about he's like no the clanker will just figure it out like yes it may be

a bit complex to have stable coins on one chain then need to bridge it somewhere else um to be able to to send to somebody who's using a different stable coin protocol but you literally just tell your agent like figure it out and it will discover uniswap and figure out how to how to get the right stable coin to the right place then that comes with a bunch of fees like so i do think the interoperable nature of the bitcoin protocols are being built on top of the main protocol does afford us an advantage from a ux perspective i do still think you know one one major trap that we cannot repeat as a bitcoin industry is the uh you know hey things will we will figure it out or you know build it and they will come type of type of thing that has

been such a big big part of bitcoin i think uh because that is the autistic engineering uh way way of thinking right yeah uh bitcoin is uh bitcoin is superior uh they will come as long as the tools are available not really right because you have a fucking apparatus of so many people deep pockets that are wanting to you know take a market share from bitcoin and we're up against them you know they're super organized super well funded and we are yeah we start off at ground zero together at the same time but mad do these people have more organized you know uh structures and more financialization on on their on their side compared to us to be able to really you know start off running um but that's kind of the beauty of bitcoin too you know like the

there's a there's a beauty in the decentralized disorganized nature a bit where we have to kind like organize ourselves as a movement instead of a company but that is also in this day and age you know speed is so important that i just wonder that will the grifters take the attention first and have the market share of attention first so that everybody who knows about a genetic economy will think okay that's a stable coin thing instead of oh that's a bitcoin thing even though maybe a year after we will actually have built superior tools because we're just more careful and we're slow when it comes to when it comes to building though right uh in terms of like the philosophy of building like yeah we can build super quick with ai as

well but bitcoiners who are builders they they think differently about these things they they have a different approach which inherently is a slower moving train i just hope that the narrative doesn't doesn't become a year from now like the agentic economy is a coin thing or a stable coin thing and not a bitcoin thing i think that's apart from building the tools we also need to be on top of that about the narrative we need to make people know that yeah bitcoin is the best but why okay here's why and it has to be some kind of a cultural thing that agent equals bitcoin for it to really succeed i think how do you think we do that how do we win that narrative battle that attention battle as a great question um well i i wish uh that open call guy was a

bitcoiner for example you know some bitcoiner need to create a jewel that becomes you know that takes over into the culture the way of open claw did for example and he's like super anti-crypto which is good i mean for the for the coins but that also includes bitcoin i think i don't think he has a favorable view of bitcoin just because it's not a coin i think he just puts everything into the same bucket so we just need again we need companies we need cash app to create a an agent that is insane i mean you see you see usdc as the circle team they they have i think the first week of when open claw really became a thing i saw them have like workshops they they were like throwing money at devs to build and you know build stupid

shit just to get that like incentive structure in place and to get some mind share from those devs who are like hey you know i just want a grant i just want something to build okay circle is giving me money bet let's let's do that i don't i don't see tether doing that for them you know they are supposedly the bitcoiner stable coiners um so we just need to do that i think um you know somebody who has a really good ear to the streets to, to, to the, to internet culture needs to, to, to bring something that is agentic and represents Bitcoin. But I don't know, I don't know what it is. I'm not a product guy like that, but I think that's, that's the ingredients at least that should perhaps be, uh, yeah, be part of it. Yeah. I think one of the,

benefits that we have is that Replit Amjad Massad is a Bitcoiner. I know Cody Lowe is in there. I saw he quote tweeted the BPI piece, the research piece on agents

choosing Bitcoin. He said this is a good thing. Agents should be using Bitcoin. And so there is a prominent founder within the realm of top tier AI companies that gets it. just like to a point though like leaning into it and making it so people are building agentic commerce tools with bitcoin at the heart of them yeah and still i think this is a

this feels very big now but if you like step outside ask anyone in the street like hey you know about open claw what the are you talking about and uh it feels very big feels like the future but it's still a very small like fraction of everything that's happening in the world right so i think this is this is something that speaks to what i believe is the future of bitcoin adoption in general which is it's going to be fragmented because all these people who are building agents who are using ai who you know spend thousands on mac minis um it's important that they know about bitcoin and they use bitcoin in those tasks and then you know when that segment becomes even bigger. Bitcoin has a strong foothold

in it. But still, there's a bunch of people who have absolutely no clue about even what ChatGPT, well, maybe not ChatGPT, they have like a billion users. If you ask them, like, what's Claude? What's Claude co-work? They have absolutely no idea. So these things seem bigger than they think because they occupy our timeline so much, but we still have so many stories to tell when it comes to Bitcoin about other other shit you know boring stuff like hey purchasing power uh you know uh that's a huge uh value prop um number go up is a huge value prop so um we we still gotta and and now with

all the institutions all the the like the financialization of bitcoin that's a that's another segment as well that is completely separate from the agentic you know economy world, which is completely separate from the cypherpunk thesis, which is completely separated from payments and infrastructure around that. So I think we just got to be on top of our game and find our niche. And then together as a fractured, fragmented community, we'll bring adoption forward. But I think a lot of Bitcoiners need to understand that future adoption will look like a bunch of people that you don't agree with are going to find tremendous value in bitcoin and you just gotta you gotta be cool with it you know you gotta you gotta accept it and i feel like

we're breaking away from it now and there's still some bitcoiners like screaming and and kicking because you know their um their their conviction which is based on very specific things they're seeing a lot of people being convicted about bitcoin too but for a completely different maybe even opposite uh things that they believe in and there's some uh yeah there's some kicking and screaming uh with that but i think that's a sign of i think now bitcoin has now exited this like mono culture and you know uh yeah has exited the monoculture and is now being adopted in different places and that's the fragmented adoption that we're going to see in the future and we we need to forget about like mass adoption as one as one movement yeah

again bitcoin is for anyone not for everyone it's hard for people to grapple with because everybody's like oh we're losing our roots it's like people have said if bitcoin is what we think it is like everybody's gonna want some and uh you may not like the people getting into bitcoin but as long as they're not preventing you from using bitcoin in the way that you want to i think that's that's the biggest the biggest thing to protect right um and that's the uh that's the um the other thing i'm curious to see how it plays out with all this quote-unquote institutional adoption and uh the etfs blowing up like what is the the subset of people that that ultimately self-custody and use bitcoin in a true peer-to-peer fashion i think the agent economy like

is actually a massive benefit towards that direction because you can't use ETF shares to pay for things in the agentic economy. People are going to have to figure out how to get access to actual UTXOs and put Bitcoin in a lightning channel or in an e-cash mint to actually spend if they want to participate in this agentic economy

using Bitcoin payments. Yeah, I think that's true. And, you know, again, I draw parallels to my music business background because, you know, the institutions that the big incumbents of, you know, Universal Music and Sony BMG and stuff like that, yeah, they were fighting. Well, first they were ignoring. Then they were fighting. And then they just became it. In a way, they became the streaming industry, right? They finally understood that our model of having one distribution channel, which is like putting CDs in the stores, is broken fundamentally.

And what the fuck do we do? Okay, we can't fight them. We have spent millions and so many years becoming irrelevant in the process of fighting them. Okay, we got to embrace it somehow. And I feel like we're seeing that this is the first wave, this like institutional wave of these institutions knowing what's up and adopting Bitcoin in this fashion because they want to stay relevant and they want to offer, you know, a wrapped product the same way, you know, Spotify is offering wrapped MP3s in a platform for you. it's not the real deal you're not buying the music but it's uh it's a contract and um many similarities between that as well yeah what's the number one thing that we could we could learn from the positioning of the music industry and how well they do that for for bitcoin

well i think when you're dealing with a technology that is highly disruptive yeah right you can either think that uh the way that you made money uh for so many years is still valid or you can try to be a little bit more pragmatic about it and adapt quickly and adapting quickly is not for everyone um bitcoin is not for everyone um so you just got to find those minds maybe it's a generational thing too right you get wrapped in like habits some costs um which is very very hard to to get out of but i i do think that the most important thing about torrenting or the pirate base and it still exists today you don't have to go to spotify necessarily you should want to go to amazon prime or netflix or anything like that to to watch a movie you can

do it but you do it out of convenience because it's a trade-off that you accept but if you really want to like download the movie or download an album and carry it with you or listen to it whatever you want and don't have to pay anything for it there's still that alternative and uh depending on how big this institutionalization of bitcoin is going to be and by the looks of it if you take a look at like people who self-custody like for real versus people who are just buying into the ibits or any other etf derivatives uh it looks like there's a big you know there's there's there's a there's a it's a it's a big crossroads that we're going into right now and a lot of people with a lot of capital are going into the direction of giving away custody but the real

people who do know that are also part of that they do understand the the you know what self-custody means and what it really not only because of protection of or or you know uh accounts being free starting thing like that is actually related to the price action how many how many people actually know self-custody self-custody bitcoin the real way these people do understand but they are they are a minority and to be honest with you i think they're always going to be a minority um i think a lot of people are just going to be a part of bitcoin in in in in this way and i'm not mad you know um i think the important thing is that at least they can understand bitcoin from a very simple perspective of a um fiat inflation is accelerating uh we are returning i need to

i need to preserve my purchasing power and i understand at least the monetary principles of bitcoin for me to invest in something like ibit to protect my purchasing power hey at least a little chunk of the bitcoin philosophy landed and and i don't expect everyone to get everything about bitcoin at the same time is that's this is how adoption looks like so um if there's any to ask you a question sorry for the rant but if it's a my my one lesson from the music industry is that streaming became the norm and the pirate base torrenting became the french uh probably the french will be self-custodial solutions still and custodial solutions will be bigger but the important thing is that both can exist the problem is when

you know the forces the powers that be try to like change anything inside the protocol or some laws or jurisdictions are you know completely hostile against self-custody that's that's that's an issue i don't i don't see that happening and i think the institutionalization of bitcoin is partially uh the reason why bitcoin self-custody is not outlawed but um it's it's a deep topic man because you know any any law can be passed any day um you know to give up uh years of custodial bitcoin anyway so uh let's see it's a it's a it's a pull and push uh game yeah self-custody is the red line that we have to defend and going back to like the generational thing like the boomers have all the money and the zoomers are completely nihilistic so it's like that's been a area of

focus on on this show throughout the last year is like getting because if you look if i look at the demographics of people that listen and watch this show it's older than me uh like the biggest cohort it's 35 to 45 and it's 45 to 55 and then it's um then it's 25 to 35 but then jumps back up to like 65 and then if you go to uh 18 to 25 it's like literally one percent uh of our audience is in generation z and um and it's a it's just a question that nags i mean it's like what what are these these uh younger folks consuming what is their view on this and from my observation seems very nihilistic and they don't have much hope for their future which is incredibly uh incredibly disheartening um but if we do have this like i mean all the institutions are talking

about this massive wealth transfer from the boomers to millennials and gen z is is on the uh the precipice and as that's happening how many people within the younger generations millennials gen z's and gen alpha to a certain extent can we successfully convince like hey like you need to adopt the money of the future in bitcoin and i think with gen z i don't even want to say we're failings this doesn't even seem like they're they're tapping into the show at least there's other people that are doing other forms of content i think like what julian figueroa is doing with his um with his with his videos is very very good to to reach that generation but this this style uh this is not um is not the the type of style that gen z is consuming

no and i think you know i have a little experimental youtube channel that i started um almost yeah 30 days ago it's been almost a full month and i just do shorts so i go on tiktok and i go on youtube shorts and it's purely shorts one minute clips and i'm trying to kind of like i don't talk about politics i don't talk about money but i i do it in a in a very indirect way so i bring a lot of like philosophy and and history uh to talk about you know politics and money to kind of like bring, bring more people into Bitcoin and more conservative right wing politics. Right. But I don't want to be obvious about it because, you know, I want to do it in a sly runabout way. And I was looking at my analytics and it's actually, you know, it's not

blowing up, but it's, you know, 200 subscribers already. I've gotten 45,000 views in, you know, less than 28 days. So it's good. I was like, okay, this is bullish. And I look into the, the demographics of that is like 45 plus and my biggest is 65 plus so i'm reaching like not the people that really needs to hear it but you know these are the people who have gone through some life experiences and um you know certain things click in their in their head and um they have they have more more life lived so to to understand deeper deeper concepts you know um and young people today i think you know when you look at it's it's about only fans and polymarket it's like dude we're going right back 100 years to the 1910s and 20s where it was all about prostitution and

gambling so it's like we're just like fucking yeah uh status quo 100 years after great it's just yeah yeah it's uh it's disheartening but we're gonna win you gotta you gotta be positive i think that's of course the the most bullish thing within bitcoin is that there's individuals like yourself um like myself like i'm never giving this i like i'll keep showing up recording podcasts writing newsletters educating about people about bitcoin on x and youtube day in and day out and that's that's one thing i've realized is that it's not going to be an overnight success no and i think just consistency and showing up and telling a consistent message for many years i think that's converts people the most is they were like oh i did fall for the siren calls coins and

get on this path and you've been pretty steadfast about being consistent with your message and it turns out that that was right and i think um it's sort of like a yeoman's journey to to just show up and make sure that the information is getting there and it is consistent and clear hundred percent and the consistency repetition that that's like basic pillars of propaganda you know so you gotta you gotta go all joseph gobbles on this shit and just propagandize the shit out of this in order for us to win because we're dealing with i know my wife and i were discussing this the early earlier today like the devil is in disguise it's everywhere so there you gotta do you gotta deal with so much noise and pollution everywhere

and uh i mean there's a clean break of course just not use the internet not not go online to to get uh to get informed uh but that's just uh we were way past that point right we're like we're we are an online society um because of the simple fact that we have niched so hard in our interests that is getting harder and harder to just step outside your house knock on the neighbor's door and find like things to talk about because you know uh i don't know can i talk to bitcoin with anyone else around here no i gotta log in to zoom to do a podcast with you and just to hook up uh you know just to meet my friends online because i'm traveling so much so we we we have to use the internet to to get to this information it is out there but uh you got

to show up consistently with the same message uh to to catch people over time because you're so there's like multiple touch points from when you first hear about a certain thing until you actually believe in it right like it might be years especially when it comes to bitcoin so we just gotta not give up and i guess you and i will come to the point where it's like too late for us to pivot to anything else anyway it's almost like this is it so this is this doesn't work i'm uh i don't know what i'm gonna get into i'm gonna become a farmer yeah yeah same same like uh something offline definitely it's the it's the other side of this i think and i think bitcoin isn't big enough it's a historical thing it's something that will it has already shaken

society but it will definitely leave intent in in um humanity but being a part of it is a privilege you know so what else can we do yeah it is an incredible privilege it's a privilege and an honor to be on this journey with you sir and uh we have to do this more often it's been uh took me too long to get you on the show door is always open i thank you so much for uh for the opportunity and to kick it with you it's uh i knew this was going to be good so yeah didn't disappoint yeah and we've got um go check out perception.2 if you're out there i'm i i gotta talk with you a lot offline because i think we can implement this at tftc let's go in a way um but yeah where where can people find out more

about perception about you um what you're doing easiest thing is just to google my name fernando uh nikolich and uh the easiest thing to do on search is to google bitcoin perception you'll find you'll find the website uh at the top of the search results and then from there you can read you can get a little bit more acquainted with uh what the um what the data is about and then you can obviously uh plug plug perception directly into your favorite ai tool directly from the website through the mcp and then you can start querying and you can find out how the data is and there's a really cool prompt library in um in the perception website as well that you can just use just copy paste those prompts put it into cloud and see what comes out and you're going to be

amazed it's uh nothing nothing like it out there um so yeah please give it a please give it a try and then on on twitter on x i'm i'm based to layer so uh follow me there great great uh handle there base layer just a base layer and i hope you have a great afternoon and uh we'll do this again likewise man thank you so much sir peace and love freaks okay thank you for listening to this episode of tftc if you've made it this far i imagine you got some value out of the episode if so please share it far and wide with your friends and family we're looking to get the word out there also wherever you're listening whether that's youtube apple spotify make sure you like and subscribe to the show and if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms that

goes a long way last but not least if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free make sure you download the fountain podcasting app and go to fountain.fm to find that five dollars a month get you every episode a day early ad free helps the show gives you incredible value so please consider subscribing via fountain as well thank you for your time and until next time Thank you.