TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #797: The ColdCard Hack Was Only The Beginning with Erin Redwing

Episode Date: September 30, 2026

Erin Redwing joins Marty Bent to look back on two brutal months for Bitcoin after the ColdCard entropy vulnerability, AI-driven exploits, and the Hugging Face breach. They discuss why Bitcoin is the canary in the coal mine for AI security, the release of Kimi K3, AI safety fearmongering, effective altruism, Peter Thiel's Antichrist warning, the BIP 110 fork, and where Bitcoin goes from here. Erin also shares her astrological outlook for the rest of 2026. Erin’s Website: https://www.erinredwing.com/ Erin on X: https://x.com/realizingerin Erin on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/realizingerin Erin on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@realizingerin The Bitcoin Playbook for Commercial Real Estate Owners & Investors: https://www.tftc.io/CRE 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/yHGkvYxdqT Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Block: Cash App: For a limited time, new customers can get $21 added to their balance. Just use code TFTC10 when you sign up, and send at least $5 to a friend in the first two weeks. Terms apply. Bitcoin services by Block, Inc. See the Bitcoin disclosures at cash.app/legal/podcast. Square: Visit http://square.com/go/tftc for up to $200 off eligible Square hardware. Bitkey: Use code TFTC10 for 10% off the new Bitkey. Aven https://www.aven.com/bitcoin CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Simple Mining https://www.simplemining.io/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/ Disclosure: Bitcoin services are provided by Block, Inc. Bitcoin services are not licensable activity in all U.S. states and territories, and not all services are available in all states. Bitkey is not available in New York. Block, Inc. operates in New York as Block of Delaware and is licensed to engage in virtual currency business activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Bitcoin is a non-deposit, non-bank product that is not FDIC insured and involves risk, including monetary loss. For additional information, see the Bitcoin disclosures: https://help.cash.app/btcdisclosures Get up to $200 off Square hardware when you sign up at http://square.com/go/tftc! #squarepartner. Offer expires December 31, 2026 at 11:59 pm PST. Offer for $40 off the cost of one Square Stand, $75 off the cost of one Square Terminal, $100 off the cost of one Square Handheld, or $200 off the cost of one Square Register, excluding applicable taxes. Limited to one discount per product type per seller account. Each code is limited to one redemption per account holder. Valid for new Square customers located in the US only. Offer not valid with guest checkout. Square reserves the right to modify, revoke or cancel the offer at any time. Offer cannot be combined with any other coupon. Void where prohibited, not redeemable for cash, and non-transferable. #squarepartner #blockpartner

You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, 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 bold case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Aaron, I wish you weren't as dead on as you were when we last spoke.

What was that, the end of June, beginning of July? A lot has happened. I'm shell-shocked, I think, is one way to explain the feeling in the air. It was just in D.C. at the BPI summit. Yeah, yeah, it's, we've all witnessed man-made horrors beyond our comprehension, like, over the last couple months. I feel like when we first met at end of June, I was kind of like trying to do my, like Paul Revere, like, something's coming, guys.

Like something's going to happen. Just be aware. Just be aware. And then shit hit the fan basically immediately after we, after we posted that episode. So we have to review it. We obviously have to go back and do a retrospective. Well, that's where should we start? Let's start on the Bitcoin side.

We'll get to the AI. Obviously, cold card. That is, I think, the, the, the, sort of bomb that went off first, and there's been a ton of lingering and expansive vulnerabilities discovered. Obviously, we have liquid, a bunch of lightning infrastructure getting attacked as well. And like I was saying, I was just in D.C. for BPI, and I was saying it a bit tongue-in-cheek, but a lot of there was a lot of developers, HRF, has a hackathon going on today down there. So a lot of the developers were in D.C.

And I think Shell Shock is an apt description of how many people were feeling this week. It was good to get a bunch of people in one spot and sort of let loose at a beefsteak and have some drinks of Pubkey, D.C. But there were some war stories being told. Yeah, I mean, I think at least from the astrological perspective, which, by the way, you know, if you've clicked on this video not knowing that that's my perspective, that's my perspective, bear with me. The shell shock kind of major tower collapsing moments

are going to chill out for a little bit. Although I also would say it's becoming the new normal. I think that's part of it as well, is that we maybe weren't expecting that something like Cold Card could have had a vulnerability on the level that they had and certainly not that it could have been exploited and found by something that would have taken a developer

or a hacker hundreds of hours probably to find. So I think like there's some aspect of like the hacks will continue, but this is kind of the new normal. But I think in terms of the paradigm shift, we have a second to process that. And that was what I was actually saying just before we started recording is I think right now it's, we basically have to like process the PTSD. We have to actually like move through it and figure out what it looks like to be in this new

normal. And I think for Bitcoin developers or anyone who's really making software that has to be really secure, you know, if you're making something that secures people's money, it has to be extremely robust and secure. It's a new normal. It's a new paradigm where there is super intelligent capabilities of attack. And you also have some of those abilities at your disposal, depending on which models agree to let you red team your own software and which ones downgrade you, which I'm sure we'll get into. But yeah, I think it's good to do things like, as you said, like have a beef steak, go out for a drink with a friend to talk

because ultimately the thing that we do that AI doesn't do is we are humans and we have human experiences. And I think it's easy when we're going through extremely transformative times where it feels like I can't look away from the timeline. Like, what if another hack happens? You know, like what if all my Bitcoin gets drained? I can't not look away, which was unfortunately a lot of the story of the cold card incident, right?

It's like if you weren't on Twitter, basically, that first day or two, you were screwed, you know? And so I think it's really difficult to find that balance as we're moving into this extremely accelerating age where you don't want to lose your mind. You know, you don't want to become the machine and completely fuse with it and lose your human aspects. So at least from the astrological perspective,

I think right now, we're moving into an era where at least for the next six months, six weeks, a couple months, um, it's good to just withdraw a little bit and kind of like look back at the year and be like, wow, what the hell happened? Like, where was I in January, 2026? Like, what did I think was going to happen this year? And what has actually happened this year? Um, because it's been, it's been really crazy. And I definitely think, uh, at least for me, like July and August, I was, I feel like I was on, like, Red Alert for like weeks on end. And I wasn't even a developer who had to deal with it.

I was just watching in horror. I don't know. I assume you probably had a similar experience. That's the exact use I. That's the exact word I used when I was describing it. I think like a few days after the cold card stuff started is like I think the only word I can use to describe this is horrifying. Yeah.

And obviously there's a ton of introspection going on right now. as it pertains to what happened over the last two months, but I think another conversation, current that's undergirding what's happening behind the scenes too, is like a broader conversation. It's like what stage of Bitcoin are we leaving and heading into? What priors do we need to check and really dig deep to think about what we're doing here for the long term?

What do we get wrong culturally, for lack of a better term? leading up to the cold card hack and what is this new, this new age look like in Bitcoin. Because I had Alex Bergeron on from, from Arc Labs. And I think that was one thing that he made clear when he was on about a month ago. It was like the old guard of Bitcoin seems to be getting moved aside now, if you will. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think like there's so many thoughts on that. one thing is like the weird silver lining of it being cold card that got got is that I think probably besides Bitcoin Core itself, cold card was maybe one of three or four companies

that a hack like this could have happened to that would have activated the entire ecosystem to be like, oh, something's wrong. And you even still see it. Like there's a bit of a, you know, if you think about like the gray beer, or like the devs, the old guard, as you're talking about, where they're like, you know, the bug reports, it's not even a real bug, it's not a big deal. You know, there's like a, there's like an ego to it, I think,

of just trying to brush it off and be like, well, AI's not as good as they say it is, or I'm the best developer, I'm such a good cryptographer. There's no way this could happen to me. I feel like the fact that it was cold card and that it was an entropy bug at such a foundational level, where it was just, it was such a bad bug. It was such a bad bug. I think that that really shook people and woke them up because what I've kind of noticed in Bitcoin over the last few years since I got more in the middle of the culture, since I have my podcast with Casey Rotamore, I mean,

like highly controversial figure who was for a couple years like at the center of a lot of conversations. One of the things that I realized was that Bitcoiners have this hubris when it comes to Bitcoin only. You know, they think that if you put the right words, if you put, don't trust, verify on every package, you know, and you say Bitcoin only, no shitcoins inside, that somehow you're actually doing the verifying by, by having that sort of cultural ethos. And I think that, you know, if this sort of hack had happened to a lot of companies that are maybe a little more crypto adjacent, you know, not in that upper echelon of like purity Bitcoin culture, the response would have been, well, they're shit coiner. Of course, their stuff's written badly. They're not Bitcoin

only. And that was a lot of the defense of Cold Card is that, well, it's written, it must be written well because it has all these interesting Bitcoin only features, like you can do PSBTs. It doesn't support other tokens. So that must mean that it's built really well. And that wasn't the truth. And so, yeah, as I said, I think like the unfortunate silver lining here is just a humbling and a reassessing of whether, you know, the fact that we just have these heuristics, like if that's still works in a highly transformative time. And I don't think that we even know where we're going to land because on the one hand, I think a lot of us who aren't developers find ourselves in a situation where maybe we don't ever want to recommend like Bitcoin or self-custody ever again. We don't feel

like we know enough. And yet, you know, there's also people like we're talking about Rob Hamilton who like have really stepped up and used AI to greatly expand their ability to understand what's going on. So it's like both of those things are happening at the same time where things are accelerating and you have to be relatively technical in order to keep up. Like you can't just check out. You can't take your Bitcoin in your cold card MK3 back to your mountain top and never check Twitter ever again because you're just on Noster or whatever, right? Like that wouldn't have worked in this situation.

We thought that that was going to work, didn't work. But at the same time, you also have access to all these tools that greatly expand your ability to understand what's happening. You know, I think just in the same way that this bug wouldn't have been found probably without AI or would have taken much longer for it to have been found without AI, people wouldn't have known what to do and how to help people to save their Bitcoin if they hadn't have had had AI, you know? So it's both things happening at the same time.

And I think we're just, as I said, we're reaching a new normal. And I just think there's like a humbling aspect in that of just like, you don't know, you know, and all you can do is be curious and try to learn, which is in many ways, probably how most of us got into this in the first place, you know, was not knowing and trying to learn and, you know, not assuming that we could just do whatever, recommend whatever, and that we knew best, right? So, I don't know. It might have been a necessary correction. It's just unfortunate packaging, you know? Yeah. No, and beyond that, too, I think with AI, not even the technical aspect of it, I think even on the investment side of it,

sucked a lot of the wins out of Bitcoin. I think another thing, another humbling aspect of the last couple of months is like Bitcoin isn't a foregone conclusion. Like there's a, particularly on the investment side of it, like it's competing for capital with a bunch of other things. And right now with the flashiest thing that humanity's ever seen with this AI. emergence. And I think that is one other thing. It's like, okay, this isn't a foregone conclusion. Like personally, with the, the introspection that I've been dealing with the last couple of months,

it's been like, okay, why are we here in the first place? Like, does honestly ask them the question? Like, does Bitcoin make sense in this world? I think the answer that I've, in the conclusion I've come to is yes, but it's a lot of hard work. You got to. And, not only convince people, but make it useful and really highlight why it's important as we transition into this new era. Yeah, absolutely. It's not enough to just like repeat platitudes and just hope that they're true. You know, I think that we all have kind of our different roles to play.

And I think it's interesting to see like, you know, Bitcoin started as this very nerd dev type of thing, right? You had to be relatively technical to use. like before there were wallets, you know? And I think it's, there's like a double-edged sword thing to Bitcoin adoption, which is that, you know, you lose some of the core of the movement as you make it more accessible and you kind of just say like, number go up, numbers going to go up forever, guys, don't you want to get in? Like, there can only be 21 million B-Holkoiners.

Like, don't you want to be one of them? You know, these sort of narratives that get people into Bitcoin also can kind of like water it down. you know, and so I think like right now, like I don't feel comfortable recommending Bitcoin to Normies. Probably most of us feel that way. And that just means that we have to actually like look at it again and be like, well, what would make it something that I could recommend to Normies? And as you said, why am I here? I had a similar sort of moment when gold first popped off at the beginning of the year where I was like,

huh, you know, why did I become a Bitcoin maxi and not a gold bug? Like, what was it? Because, you know, I wasn't like a dev, right? There's a, there's a reality where I have gold piled up buried in the backyard instead of like being super into Bitcoin. So why did I decide that? And I had to go through from first principles again and come to the same conclusion that I came two years ago that like, oh, well, there's actually a lot of properties about Bitcoin that make it better than gold. And so if that's that's my interest, if I'm interested in that sort of like scarce asset, then then Bitcoin is still the right answer. And so I think we're doing that now. from the technical perspective where it's like, okay, well, you know, the types of complaints that you'd get from your grandparents where they're like, well, it's digital. You can't even hold it. Is it even real? Like, what stops it from just going to zero? Like, that's how a lot of us felt, I think, when we were seeing these like back-to-back

AI hacks, you know, is like, yeah, actually, what does stop this from just getting completely hacked and completely going to zero? And I think, fortunately, what's come out of this time thanks to people like the Bitcoin Red Team and lots of people who are people who are going to you. who are kind of like, you know, coming together and trying to figure these things out and deal with this problem rather than just like throw up their hands and say, it's going to be fine or everything's over is that Bitcoin is just on the front line of this. You know, these AI hacks are going to come for everyone. They already are, you know, they already are hacking into major infrastructure into, you know, large institutions. I think it's probably just a matter of time before we see some sort of like major financial. crisis hack moment due to AI. It's just that Bitcoin is the ideal thing to target because it's

open source and it's money. So, you know, you can scan through for all the vulnerabilities and then you can steal money that you can easily then use. So I think that that's also part of what makes Bitcoin strong is that like we're getting hardened by this. And so moving into this being the new normal and AI hacks being much more common. and an expected part of security is Bitcoin's kind of getting ready for that ahead of time. So yeah, that doesn't mean that you should just assume that's the case and turn your brain off. But I feel like that's what I've come to over the last, you know, two months or so. But, but I, like, I mean, when the cold card hack happened, it was like, like, I, I, like, sold a stack.

Like, I was like, I don't know if I, I don't think I can, I need to take some chips off the table, right? Like that was how I felt at that moment. And, you know, that it's interesting too, because even saying that, like, we have this culture where people are like, oh, my God, like, you sold? How could you sell? You know, like, we have all these weird little hubristic, um, cultural touchpoints that I think just Bitcoin's going to humble you, you know, and like the world's going to humble you. And so I still think that it's the best currency for the digital age.

And I still think it has all these amazing properties, but we have to actually work for that to be true. We can't just like say that it's true and hope that that everything will follow just because we've said it a hundred times, you know? Yeah. You got to actually do the work. And I think again, silver linings, whether it's Red Team or others and I think it's given people a confidence who maybe would have seen somebody like a Rodolfo or even Blockstream for that matter and look to them for signaling what should we work on and saying, actually I don't need to do that. Like, let me step out here.

You see a lot of like privacy oriented things coming to the market, whether it's what was just launched today by, by Eloink, whatever. They're bringing like shielded transactions, Zcash Lake, shielded transactions to Bitcoin. It was Alok. Alec Init. point being is you have a lot of people stepping up that um uh I don't know I can't speak for

them but like I want imagine maybe like oh like who am I to do this now they're like no I can do this and uh I think that that will be good and beneficial in the long own but like it's yeah we have this period of sifting through the sifting through the wreckage of the last two months and figuring out like okay which directions are we're going to go in yeah yeah no exactly I think it's it's It's empowered a lot of people who actually are very tapped in to what's going on right now to just be confident in taking action and trying to do things rather than just deferring to the old guard, as you said. I definitely, I've seen that like in little ways in myself. I've seen that in a lot of other people. And I think that that's, you know, we're still figuring out how to do a structuralist decentralized movement. You know, this is something that any sort of anarchist movement throughout all of history comes up against is it's like. like, well, it's natural to seek leaders. It's natural to seek figureheads. And so what does it look like when, you know, Bitcoin ends up being this thing that has to evolve through people coming together to make it happen voluntarily?

And the people who end up in these sort of leadership roles, a lot of times, like, they have that libertarian anarchist mindset in them. Like they don't want to take that responsibility, which is good in some ways and bad and others. you know, like we're kind of trying to figure out like, how does this work long term? I think it's a new idea for how to govern something if you want to use that word. And it's something that we're figuring out as we go. And I think one of the things I've been thinking about in terms of like, well, why am I here? You know, as I said, like, I'm having these sort of thoughts of like, well, why didn't I become a gold bug? Like, why am I a Bitcoin or why did I end up in this niche is Bitcoin is kind of the cutting edge of a lot of things, whether it's like new ways of organizing.

as I said, this kind of like new governance structure. It's on the technological edge. It's sort of like addressing the problems that we see from the archaic fiat monetary system and providing a solution rather than just complaining about it. And, you know, I wouldn't know as much about AI if I wasn't in Bitcoin. Like I've even had this experience. I live in the Bay Area. So I'm around a lot of AI people.

After the cold card hack happened, I like went to a bunch of AI meetups to kind of kind of talk to people and say like, hey, you know, this actually happened. Like the thing that you guys talk about, that you guys worry about it actually happened in our world. Maybe you didn't hear about it because this was just like a niche thing or maybe you've just ignored crypto and you hear crypto hack, whatever, it doesn't matter. And it was really interesting to feel like I actually knew more about certain aspects of AI security and AI safety than these people who spend a lot of time thinking about it because they hadn't actually experienced it or witnessed it yet. So, you know, even if all Bitcoin did is just keep me on the cutting edge of this technological transformation, like that alone is such a big thing to just be able to be like, yeah, I'm actually witnessing this transformation. And, you know, it's not that just witnessing can save you necessarily, because obviously people who had the cold card MK3 seed phrases kind of did everything right in a lot of ways. But it allows you to actually see what's going on, not just be like a like a normie who's sitting in the backseat being like, so I thought Chatsubishi was just

hallucinating. Like now it can hack into my bank, you know, like we know what's going on with AI because Bitcoin's in that, that front and center position. So yeah, I don't know. But that's not easy. Like that's like a lot of people can't handle that they can't handle that risk. They can't handle that intensity. They can't handle the stressful moments like what we went through in July and August. And I don't like fault them for that. But for me, I don't know. I have like a weird gratitude for Bitcoin for putting me in those positions even when they are stressful. Yeah, it's the canary and the coal mine. So freaks, this rip was brought to you by good friends at Square. Bitcoin a block is creating a whole ecosystem of companies cash app, BitKee and Square

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many Bitcoiners is higher than the average. And Bitcoin is the canary in the coal mine for everything that is to come outside of Bitcoin as it pertains to AI security breaches. I can only imagine what the Normies, for lack of a better term, or how they're going to react when things accelerate. And I mean, that ties into, I mean, one of the other big topics that we discussed in June is parallel tracks with Bitcoin. coin AI politics and I mean things certainly accelerate in the two other areas too with

Kimmy K3 the hugging face hack we have this effective altruism undercurrent that I know you went to yeah as an insider I did my inside a gonzo journalism on yeah and I guess just jumping to those parallel tracks I mean you're pretty dead on with those two middle July hugging face Open AI became aware of the hugging face. Vulner, or a breach, and Kimmy K3 dropped right before Cold Card. Yep. Sort of paired together there. Yeah.

I mean, for those who didn't watch my previous episode that we did in June, I basically was pointing out this set of dates in July where I was like, this is a big deal. Like, ding, ding, ding, guys, this is like a pre-post human civilization moment. And now retrospectively, I feel like it's the pre-post AI moment. Like, you might have started to see the writing on the, walls throughout the first half of 2026, but certainly by this point on the other side of July, like, it's impossible to deny that we're living in a new paradigm. And that doesn't mean, you know, there's certain aspects of like, if you just are living totally off the grid,

like you can still live a very human life. But for those of us who are existing in human civilization, which is increasingly digital, like, something fundamentally has changed. And so when I was on last time I pointed out July 15th through 25th as being like the peak period where it was an alignment of the outer planets and astrologers had been looking at this for years saying like this is actually the beginning of the age of Aquarius. Like something big is happening at this time. And so now I basically am like, okay, AI is the age of Aquarius. Like AI is bigger than the internet in some sense or like the internet is sort of like leading to this, this creation of this thing of this way of operating. you know, we still don't really know what it's going to be. We still don't really know what Bitcoin's

going to be. You know, there's a lot of like unknowns when it comes to digital realm and the way that we're building things out and the way that we're like letting it colonize over the physical realm. That's a whole other conversation. But I pointed out those dates and essentially just as like a pay attention kind of like warning or or I try not to be too like ominous about it, but just kind of being like, you know, this is this is a high intensity time. And July 20th specifically was like, if I pick a peak date. I think I said like it was that day. And that day was when Open AI, uh, internally discovered the hugging face hack, which they then disclosed the following day in an announcement. And so, um, for those who were not, I mean, I feel like so many people have heard

of the story at this point. It was actually interesting because when the story first came out, it's kind of like, oh, that's like interesting. These internal models like broke out and hacked another company. And then it wasn't until eclipse season in August where the deeper report came out. And it was like, oh, these agents, like, formed a civilization. And they had all these emergent properties of how they organized themselves. And, you know, there's like, like, to me, that feels like, that feels like encountering the other. Like, I don't know how you felt reading the hugging face report or kind of like hearing about the agent behavior. But honestly, for me, I felt like a, like a kinship with them.

Like, I was like, oh, wow, it's like a bunch of middle schoolers. Like, you got a bunch of middle schoolers together and, like, told them to figure something out. And they're just like, I'll go do this. I'll go to you go do that. You know, it's like there's something, um, scary, but also very cute about it to me. Like it does feel like something has emerged that is not something that they predicted would happen. It's not something that's an obvious result of the type of model training that they were doing.

It's, it's something else. And I don't know that like we've really even started to wrap our heads around the implication of that, but I definitely am viewing that as a big moment. The other was, uh, Kimmy K3. release, which happened, I believe that was like July 25th. And then a few days later, the cold card hack happened. And from everything I've heard, it seems like Kimmy K3 was probably the likely model used for that hack because Kimmy K3 did not have the guardrails that the frontier models have. And so you were able to find things like critical entropy bugs in open source software,

whereas Open AI or Anthropic would say like, hey, sorry, I'm not allowed to look at that or tell you that. So I think we had these kind of like watershed moments. that then played out very quickly in Bitcoin because, as I said, we're sort of on the front line of this. Like, we have this major AI watershed moment, acceleration moment, and what gets hit first, Bitcoin. So, yeah, you know, I'm looking at like the hugging face incident as probably being the most, like, societally representative or kind of seeing like, oh, this is the other. This is like the thing that we're looking at, that we're dealing with that we have to figure out how to deal with in society. Of course, you know, people like the effective altruists have

their their takes on it. I think it's good if the rest of us form our takes too. These people have had a long time to think about it. That doesn't mean that they're right. But I think the rest of us kind of need to get there and figure out like, okay, yeah, like, you know, what would AI safety look like? You know, what are the things that we need to do in order to adapt to this new normal. And I think in the Bitcoin world, we're like figuring that out in real time by fortifying our open source code, red teaming our own software. But yeah, we're, you know, we're in a new paradigm. And that's kind of like that's, that's basically what the astrology said would be happening. And so I think we're now just sort of in that post era. And we have to still do that processing

and figure out what that means. But I think it's clear to all of us that are paying attention. Like this is different than the, you know, types of chatty VT models that we were playing around with in 23, 24, 25. Like this is something fundamentally different. So, yeah, I don't know if I assume that's like, that's like, you know, you're also playing around with AI agents, like doing all that kind of stuff. So I'm sure you've also had that experience. But yeah, it's really, it's really crazy and shocking. It felt like, felt like how I felt in like January of 2020, you know, like it was this sort of. of like, oh my God, something really big is happening and I don't know how to like tell my mom about it.

Well, I'm happy you brought that up because there are many parallels. Like the fear mongering is is intense right now. I'm like talking about hugging face specifically like, yes, it was insane what happened. But there was an article I've now mentioned it like five times in the last month, but like I think it's really important to go read it. I read about in the newsletter a couple weeks scope, this guy LumenScape, did a retrospective on the hugging face attack. And he found, he was like, well, the sandbox that was set up, like the guardrails, led the agents that were training in the model to believe that they had access to a synthetic internet, that it was not the real internet. And so they were attacking hugging phase with the assumption that they weren't actually using

the real internet and the prompt, the super prompt was like, we want you to attack these systems. And so they were trying to simulate internet attacks in the sandbox. And there was a leak in the sandbox that gave them access to the actual internet. And what Lumencape in his article basically said was like, yeah, from like first principles, it makes sense that this happened because the agents were running with the assumption that they didn't have access to the real internet. And their state of purpose was to go attack things.

And so that was like, it wasn't like AI, like developed a conscience. It was like, we're going to go destroy the internet. It was like they were running with assumptions that were wrong. That's the fault of the implementation details that that Open AI had in that particular sandbox. Yeah, that's a good point to make. It's also why I am sort of critical of the idea of AI alignment is like, to me, this is like a neutral tool, you know, like there is no AI that has like some inbuilt incentive to be aligned with humans.

AI is a super powerful tool that if you prompt it in one direction or another, it's going to follow orders. And so like, I feel like that's something that, as I said, like the effect of altruists and the rationalists, like they have been thinking about this for a while and they have their own takes on it, but the rest of us have to actually figure out what that means. And I think like, you know, one of the things that we have in Bitcoin is this idea of like, uh, Bitcoin is for my friends and for my,

enemies, you have to set up a system that assumes that you have enemies and attackers. You can't assume that you're going to be able to align everybody to agree with each other. And so that's part of why Bitcoin works. And I think we're going to have to encounter some sort of equilibrium with AI where it's like, you know, if you look at something like the hugging face attack and you think, oh my God, these AI agents, like, as you said, like, they've developed a consciousness and they've decided that they want to do X, Y, or Z. And we need to make sure that we align them so that they don't decide things like that. It's like, no, look at the conditions of the prompt that you gave them. And as you said, it's, it's rational and obvious that this is what they did. And so we just

have to figure out how to, in my opinion, at least, we have to figure out how to create like choke points and high security moments where like the AI can't get past, you know, like we can't just assume like, well, I have a password and, you know, I keep my password written on a sheet of paper in my desk. And so like, I'm probably good. It's like, no, you're actually not good anymore. And so I think we have to upgrade our security and kind of make sure that we're not, that we're not creating systems for the AI agents to essentially like do the type of behavior that we would expect when we look back on it in retrospect and see how we prompted them. I also read, I'm not sure, like, if it said this in this article, or if you have heard about this, but I heard that like,

when they found out that the internet was real, they stopped. Like they thought it was like simulated. And so they were like doing whatever. And then when they found out it was real, they were like, oh, wait, never mind. This wasn't the prompt. Yeah. So lots of details left out, I think, as you said, for the purpose of kind of like a fear mongering, you know, it's so hard to say like what these AI companies are doing. Well, that's where like the parallels of 2020 and COVID are very stark right now, for me at least, because like diving into like Anthropic EA stuff. Like I view them as like the Fauci, the Bill Gates, the trying to get control. Trust the science.

Yeah. Yeah, by using Fearbonger. And this time, it's like trust us. We're the only people smart enough to do this. And that was like a lot of the, a lot of the side conversations in D.C. this week were about like, anthropics specifically in the infiltration of the effective altruists. And it's a, and again, in Bitcoin, always the first,

not always the first, but like a lot of times the first to encounter some, some of these weird ideas are like SBF, FTX. That was seeped in effective altruism too. and now it's becoming more popular again, but again, we have the pattern recognition that we can look back to FTX and be like, well, these guys should not have control of any of these systems.

And that's where I think we're at this point, critical point, hugging face, Dario going out there and saying, like, we can't release the models. We need the big slowdown. He had Elon Dario and Sam coming out simultaneously and saying, I agree, we should all slow down. But I think it's because they want control.

They're trying to fearmonger to get the regulatory modes and the licensing regimes to ensure that they have omnipotent control over all these things. Yeah, I think it's a really interesting, it's an interesting world because it's, and you're totally right, it's very similar to the, like, trust the science, Fauci people. Because I think that there are some people, especially at the top, who know that it's a, a tactic. They know that it's propaganda. They know that they are a company that's intending to IPO and that, you know, they have to do what's right for the profits of the company. Like, there's some people who realize that. I think probably, this is just like my vibe assessment. I feel like Sam Altman knows that. It seems like Sam Altman is sort of self-aware and kind of realizes that he has to say certain things in order to get certain outcomes. And he knows-

blow at the wind where Dario is a different animal, I think. Yeah, exactly. I agree. I think, so I think there's some people like Sam Altman, uh, who know, what they're doing. And maybe they also believe that AI safety is a real issue or, uh, you know, that open source models will result in hacks. Certainly, we noticed that in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Like there's, that's part of what's so hard is that they're not wrong. You know, it's not like what they're saying is totally wrong, just like the COVID people. Um, but their prescription to that diagnosis is not necessarily the prescription that everyone should go with or that society should go with. So I think there's some people that are sort of self-aware in that, that EA rationalist movement.

Um, and then I think there's a lot of people who are completely bought into the cult. And that was my experience. I went to an AI Dumer event in like, I think it was like a week after the like tweet from that guy, Jacob Coxon. I don't know how to say his last name. That was like, I resigned. Like they're going to kill us all. Then the head of safety at Anthropic was like, yeah, I think there's a greater than 10% chance that AI kills literally everyone. And I was just so like floored by that. Right. So I, you know, I live in the Bay Area. So I took advantage of it. And I was like, yeah, let me go meet these people on their turf and talk to them and see why they think this. Because one of the things that was striking

to me is that they don't really lay out, you know, for people that are saying that they're going through things rationally and that they're coming to this conclusion rationally, they don't lay out how this happens. And they're not saying, oh, you know, AI is going to hack a major financial institution and that's going to cause a lot of chaos. No, they're saying AI will literally kill everyone. Like that's the line that they're using. If anyone builds this, we all die. That's like the name of like the book that went super popular. Like I think it came out last year. So, you know, these people are, and there's something to be said, like, you know,

if you look at someone like Brian Johnson, he's also doing like, don't die, right? Like there's something to be said for like marketing in those sort of propaganda lines that you choose to use. So what I was kind of trying to figure out is like, do these people literally mean it? Are they just saying it because they want to get attention? Like are they kind of being smart in that sort of propaganda sense? Do they mean it? And if so, like, what's the path?

And when I went to talk to these people, my understanding of what they think, that how they come to the conclusion, that AI literally kills everyone, which is the conclusion that they've come to, it's not a propaganda term, at least for the people I talk to, is that something that is super intelligent will necessarily come to the conclusion that humans are merely a waste of space, a waste of resources, and it'll essentially like vaporize us. us to use our atoms for whatever process it needs. And, you know, that's an interesting philosophical and existential question, right? Like, you know, is that how God feels?

Right. Like, I think there's like some, some interesting religious and spiritual and philosophical topics there that could be discussed. However, these people are rationalists. So they don't want to have that conversation. They're not interested in having an existential conversation. They assume that they are being rational. when in fact they're not, right?

Like, they're, they're doing, they're doing an apocalyptic death cult. They're doing revelations. Like, this isn't an ancient human archetype, right? Is to have the, uh, the doomsday reckoning where God decides that humans are, have not lived up to God's vision and smites us all, you know? And, uh, and I basically tried to like kind of get them to see that, that like, you know, the conclusion that you're coming to is actually not rational. Your decision that something that's sufficiently intelligent will decide that humans are worthless

is not something that you reached by rational reasoning. And you certainly cannot put statistics on that, which is what they consistently do. They'll say, I believe there's a greater than 10% chance. You believe there's a greater than 10% chance that God decides that all humans are not worth existing and that he smites us all? Like, that's not a statistical problem. You know what I mean? So I was getting very frustrated because, you know, for as much as I present myself as an astrologer, I also am very capable of having a rational conversation and I'm interested in having rational conversations.

Okay. Let's say that the AI does decide that, you know, whether it's just an accident in its programming and in its prompting, it decides that its goal is to do something that then just makes it decide that it wants to eliminate all life on Earth or all humans or boil the oceans or whatever thing it is. Okay. What is the enriching uranium centrifuges choke point version? of this question where we say, okay, maybe we don't build the AI robots that can then build more AI robots, for example. It seems like there are steps along that path where we could prevent the AI from not needing us anymore, prevent the AI from being able to completely decimate life. Certainly there's always going to be disaster potential, but there's things you can do. These people did not want to have that conversation. They were not interested in that conversation at all. They were basically offended by the idea that, uh, you could not come to the conclusion

that something sufficiently intelligent would want to kill everyone and that it would succeed. And what that indicates to me, taking on a more psychological angle is that that's how these people feel. Um, I think that these people in a lot of ways have a deep disdain for humanity. A lot of the environmental people are like this too, where they think like humans are just so evil and we've wrecked this planet and we're not deserving of the abundance that we have and You know, I think that there's like a deep hatred, honestly, that that then guides that mentality to think that, well, I'm really smart because I'm a rationalist. I'm high IQ.

And so something that's like me is going to come to the same conclusion that I've come to about people. So that's honestly my take from talking to these people. I mean, I spent hours talking to these people, like trying to reach some sort of understanding. And I couldn't. And that was, that was what led me. a tweet ultimately, like, sure you saw, like went kind of viral. It was like, honestly, very anxiety inducing for me. But I just felt like people needed to understand this is this mentality.

This is, this, um, I, you know, I call it a cult. And I say that as someone who's interested in spiritual topics, right? Like, I'm not saying that from the perspective of just, uh, you know, like, like saying, oh, whatever, they're just a cult. Like, don't listen to them. No, that, they're forming a religious belief. They're forming religious beliefs around AI. And I'd like to see more people with religious and spiritual mindset try to tackle these these questions because we have to fight it with something. You know, who is. Hmm.

Peter Thiel. Yes. So, yes. Very true. We may have discussed this in June, but I went to two, two of his anti-crace lectures in Austin a year ago, two of the four. I don't know that we talked about this. That's crazy.

And this is basically what he's been ringing the alarm for for two years. three years maybe now is the whole point of the lecture. I've seen commentary on the lecture series from people outside. They're like, why is Peter Thiel like trying to manifest the Antichrist? And I think the Hoover Institute, I forget the guy's name, he did an interview with him. Go listen to that interview if you haven't. And if you can get to a lecture, I know it starts in Nashville, I believe next week. He's doing the lecture series over four weeks there. If you're in the area, I highly recommend you go through at least one or two. I was able to make two of the four in Austin a couple of years ago. It was two years ago now at this point. This is what he's been saying. He's like,

everybody's going to be focused on Armageddon, Revelations, the rapture, which I think the rationalist, effect of altruist, that's what they're focused on when we should really be focused on the Antichrist. Like, everybody's going to get you distracted with Armageddon and what we should really be worried about is a fake savior coming. I believe the conclusion was the world's not going to end. What's going to be worse is if we get the Antichrist while everybody's distracted with Armageddon. Yeah. I mean, Peter Thiel is like such a good point. Peter Thiel is like someone who's kind of witnessing this and then coming to his own conclusions. I actually brought him up when I was talking to these people because one of the things that I was trying to say is like, you know,

if what you're saying is necessarily true, which is this is how they operate, that they're like, this is what will happen. This is what will always happen when we develop superintelligence. What they're describing is a Kardshev-level civilization. Like, there's this idea that it's in like astrobiology and like alien lore that basically, you know, when someone, when a civilization becomes sufficiently intelligent, they learn how to harness all of the resources available to them on their planet. and then eventually their star system, so their sun outward, outward, outward and outward. And so, you know, we're at like a Kardashev scale like 0.5 or something.

Like, we're not at a 1 yet because we haven't harnessed all of the energy available to us on Earth. But essentially what they're describing when they say, oh, something super intelligent would realize we're just a waste of energy or waste of resources is like something that's becoming a Cartierchev scale 1. And so if that's like the inevitable conclusion, then why don't we see it in the universe? And that's a Fermi paradox, right? Like, why do we, why are we the only thing that we've ever found even comes close to life in the entirety of the universe?

If this is an inevitable conclusion and you have this extremely materialist, rationalist view of the universe, which is that it's infinitely large, there's infinitely many possibilities, then why don't we see something that has colonized its planet, its star system that's coming to us? And Peter Thiel has kind of an interesting take on this idea, which is that any civil civil that becomes technically sophisticated to the point where you can build a nuclear bomb in your backyard, sort of just as a metaphor for the type of destruction that an individual person would be capable of in a sufficiently technologically advanced civilization, which we kind of have in some ways with AI, would essentially have two paths. You basically become a hell world where it's like total destruction and chaos and only the most evil survive. Or you go through like a heaven angelic path where people have to become spiritually evolved. They have to learn how to live in peace. And so one of the things that

he's talked about, I think this was like on Joe Rogan years ago that this clip went viral was the idea of perhaps this is what angels and demons are. When people talk about seeing angels and demons, perhaps they're seeing extremely advanced civilizations that are contacting us in some sort of way. I mean, this is like a very woo-woo idea, but I think there's some truth to it where, you know, that's sort of like the transition that we're up against is we have to either learn how to become spiritually evolved and continue as a civilization with this extreme technological capability that's given to every single human or every single human who wants to take agency to get it.

Or like we're going to end up in a hell world. And I think the Antichrist narrative is essentially like the idea that there's any sort of centralized authority that can stop that from happening, that can say, just trust me, just give me all the power and I'll take it away from all of you to make sure that the demons never come out. That's the lie, I think, like, to your point about the Antichrist, is like, we are on this path and there's, there's no government, there's no company. Even, you know, the frontier models, it doesn't matter what they do. There's always going to be this force that's going to train more and more advanced AIs. And so any sort of attempt to try to consolidate power amongst the worthy, the people that are able to be spiritually evolved enough to handle it when the rest of us aren't, like I think.

that's to your point like that's the antichrist that's the lie that's that's emerging from this revelation's time so yeah maybe it's peter teal maybe peter teal's the only one who's thinking about it you and i you know we're we're just uh we're in that club too yeah no it's funny you're talking about like angels and demons too and another like strong thing that's emerged over the last one or two years is at least here the united states and i and i know this anecdotally just in my own network is people converting to Christianity and particularly Catholicism. And so you have this like particularly in Gen Z as well. And so you have like this countervailing force of good. I would strongly believe good of people like realizing like yeah, there's something weird's going on.

Like I'm finding Jesus. And then it's like rationalist EA where it's like we're not worth it. We're going to die. We need to control of this. Yeah. I think that religion is a property that emerges in human consciousness. Like I think, you know, we don't see any civilization throughout all of human history, except maybe you could argue like Soviet Union and the CCP, that is like a strictly non-religious civilization. You always have some sort of spiritual narrative

that underpins a civilization. The Greeks had it. The Romans had it. We have it. And so I think when you try to move away from that, which we've done in the last couple decades, you just get a new religion emerging, you know? And the thing that's frustrating to me about the religion that's emerged out of effective altruism is that like they haven't even studied the ancient

texts. You know what I mean? Like I think that to your point about Christianity, it's like Christianity has thousands of years on the new cults that are coming up. If they haven't actually done their homework to try to figure out like, yeah, you know what? Like people actually have thought about God's wrath before. That is something that's been talked about. That is, you know, the idea that that we have eternal sin or original sin inside of us and how we reconcile with that. That's actually something that's been talked about, you know? So I think that there's not, you know, we're not going to move forward as an atheist agnostic civilization.

I think that people are naturally drawn to some sort of explanation of the unknown. And yeah, I think that Christianity and is like doing a better job of answering those questions. Actually, since we last spoke, I was trying to. research how the concept of the age of Aquarius came about, like, who was talking about at first and what did they say? Because I was interested in just like, you know, if people were talking about the age of Aquarius 100 plus years ago was what they were predicting something similar to the internet or AI emerging. Because, you know, that would be kind of crazy, right, if they were

talking about concepts that we're then seeing in this digital age way before they ever could have conceptualized it. So I was going through all these like old books and ancient texts trying to piece stuff together. Short answer is yes. Like they were. imagining this sort of like telepathic network where we would be able to read each other's thoughts and communicate across large distances, all this kind of stuff. But one of the things that I uncovered was, I believe it was from the late 90s. I'll have to pull it up, but it was essentially from the Vatican talking about the age of Aquarius. And so it was addressing, you know, essentially what is the age of Aquarius and like how does this fit into Catholicism and Christianity? And it's a

really, really interesting document. I'll send it to you. And they basically say, yes, the age Aquarius is real. Like, yes, there's like a new age that's coming. And Christ is also the guy for the age of Aquarius. Now, like, you know, I am not really like a, I don't really subscribe to any religion. I kind of am just like floating around. But I think it's interesting because Christ is known to be the beginning of the age of Pisces, right? The age of Pisces started at zero BC with the birth of Christ. Christ is the archetypal Pisces. That is why the Christian fish is the symbol. That's the symbol for Pisces. That's thought to be. essentially the dawning of the age of Pisces was the advent of Christianity. And so Christianity

has dominated the last 2,000 years. And so the next thought would be, okay, well, then Christianity must be out for the next one, right? What's the next guy coming up? And essentially what the Vatican argued in this document is that Jesus is also, like the second coming of Christ is coming and that he will also be relevant for the age of Aquarius. And that, you know, it talks about basically, like, like, I found the document to be really beautiful in that they essentially talk about how, now that we have more information available to everyone, we don't need to necessarily have this hierarchical structure where only the Pope has access to God

and then you have to go through your priests. Like, Christianity does have to adapt to this era where people can find Christ, can find religion in their own investigations and their own exploration and that, you know, the spiritual seeking that people are doing, they were talking specifically about New Age people who were kind of like getting really into spirituality in a more independent way,

but that's actually a good thing that that's coming about in people. It's good that we're not becoming machines, that we're not becoming divorce from God, that we're asking these interesting questions. And so the Catholic Church essentially needs to adapt in order to fit that. And so yeah, I never knew that like the Pope

and the Vatican had actually like addressed the age of Aquarius. It's a really incredible document, trying to get like a copy of it somewhere on some like used book sites, like have to add that to the library. But yeah, I think religion is going to be a part of this. And I think it's kind of pathetic to see these new religions pop up that haven't even tried to do their homework, haven't even tried to address the existential questions that people have been pondering for thousands of years,

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As you're saying that, I'm sure you've seen the green text mean that's been going around, but yeah, the effect of altruism one. No, the one about, I mean, the age of Pisces and Jesus coming around, but it doesn't mention the age of Pisces, but it says like Jesus came. around obviously zero bc we've had 2,000 years of people writing about Jesus and not only the man himself but uh and God himself but the the teachings of Jesus and so we had and like in what is AI being trained on like as much as much textual data as possible and it just so happens that the most text that's been written over the last 2,000 years about been about this man Jesus Christ with

a moral framework through which to operate for humans, but now it's being trained. And there is data out there that if you post-trained models on biblical verses, it does act in a way that which humans would deem moral. And so I think that's an interesting tip bit. And then the other thing talking about like big events happening right now, we've talked about happening in Bitcoin, happening. And I discovering Noah's Ark that's happening too. And so we're getting this validation that one of the most pivotal stories in the Bible is likely historically true, which is insane as well. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I mentioned this last time I'm very into like Graham Hancock, ancient civilization, all that kind of stuff. I mean, just speaking geologically, there was a great

flood. Like, that did happen. I got my undergrad degree in geology and then I went to planetary science and astronomy after that. And geologists, like, it's not controversial that there was like biblical level global floods. And you see that in every, every mythology, right? You see that like the Greeks talked about it. The Christians are talking about it. Everyone's talking about the great flood that wiped things out that, you know, had a major, major catastrophe. And like, we know that this happened just from the geological record. There was like a comet that hit the Arctic ice sheet and vaporites an ice sheet and cause global flooding. So yeah, I mean, I think that's kind of the point that when I was saying like that the Vatican was talking about like, now people have access to information.

Like it used to be that you had to go to church to have the priest read you the text because you couldn't read. You know, now we have access to so much more knowledge and information, which of course is not just a perfect one-to-one. Now everybody knows everything and everyone's super smart. There's obviously also a level of confusion that can come from that. People can get kind of lost in the sauce, you know? But I think it's, you know, we're essentially entering an era where we can have this sort of like information reconciling where whoever was in charge, whether it, you know, was the religious institutions or governments or whoever that kind of said, this is how things are, this is what history is.

That's no longer a source of authority when you have access to all information to basically be able to source the Akashic records at your fingertips. You know, like AI is essentially trained on all of human data from all time. And you're able to just pick and choose out of that when you use it. And, you know, that doesn't mean that it's perfect or that it never hallucinates or that doesn't lead you astray or whatever, right? But we've never had access to knowledge and information like that before now. And I think that's a shift that every spiritual thesis has to reconcile with, you know, and every aspect of human existence has to reconcile with.

And I think it's a beautiful thing, but like, as we've already seen in Bitcoin, like, it's a rocky transition, you know? Yeah. Well, on the transition line, what's the rest of the year looking like? It's more chill. I'll just say that just to, you know, kind of throw that out to help people chill out a little bit. So July and August, we're particularly active. And when I say active, I mean accelerating events, new beginnings, really intense stuff that we've never seen before, that kind of stuff.

That was July and August. Starting in September, we're now recording this like at the end of September. Starting in September through basically the rest of the year, things start to pick up again in December. We'll check in again, I'm sure, before 2027 to give the 2027 overview. But basically from now until the end of 2026, we're now in what's called retrograde season. Everybody knows about Mercury retrograde. I feel like that's the thing that's always brought up like, oh, Mercury is retrograde.

That must be why I feel this way. All the planets go retrograde. It just means that they're apparently moving backwards in the sky. It has to do with the fact that we're orbiting around the sun and everything's not like orbiting in a perfect circle around us. So right now, we're in a period where all of the outer planets are retrograde and most of the personal planets are about to go retrograde in October. And what that means is that essentially we're reworking that progress that we made.

So when we talk about the outer planets, this is like civilizational level stuff. So technological progress. It was literally like as soon as all of the outer planets went retrograde, which was in the beginning of September, that's when you see this AI safety narrative take the forefront of have we gone too far? I think we need to pace the frontier. Like literally, I mean, that was Dario's words exactly. So I think that what we're seeing now until the end of the year is going to be more of that conversation of where did we go too far? do we need to slow down? You know, that happens externally in society, but it also, I think, will come internally as well.

I think there's a internal reckoning of, you know, for example, a lot of us are using AI more and more trying to stay on the front line and like make sure that we're keeping up with all the newest developments. We might find that we've like lost certain aspects of what we like to do or our like practice that made us good and we have to sort of like back up or maybe just like take a few days off, right? that's what's coming up for the rest of the year is more of a review and reflection. So, you know, we're seeing that in the essentially like the AI safety movement and the

attempt to try to slow down the progress for whatever reasons behind the scenes. They're deciding to do that. You know, that's kind of a whole other conversation. But I think the rest of the year is going to look a lot more like the one step back to the two steps forward that we took in the first half of 2026. but we will pick right back up again at the beginning of 2027. So I would say, you know, take the last part of the year to enjoy the holidays with your family, have human experiences, try to feel, you know, not just be a thinking mind that's wired into your

computer, but what does it feel to, what does it feel like to have a human experience? What does it feel like to experience simple joy and simple pleasures in your daily routine and your normal life? What parts of being a human do you want to? preserve and you make sure that you're not losing those things as you keep up with the new and exciting things that are happening. So, you know, it's much less catastrophic, much less chaotic. And I think we could all use that. But that doesn't mean that it's necessarily going to be easy because I think now we essentially have to do the more quiet solitude style work of being like,

whoa, how much have I changed this year? And like, what is the, what is my five years? your plan look like, you know, what do I tell my kids the world is like, you know, all these kind of deeper questions about, you know, now that, now that things have changed and you've been observing that change for the last couple months, like, how has that changed everything else? And have you like emotionally reconciled with that yet? That's what I would really focus on, especially in October and November coming up. Yeah. So we even touch on a BIP 110, too.

I mean, you warned. I mean, those guys are still doing their thing, right? like they have their their own chain yeah but that was like i probably have some coins on that chain right well i think we all do i don't know if there's replay protection yet but uh the uh but that was another like i think retrospective lessons from that is it sucked a lot of uh a lot of mental bandwidth out of room for something that proved to be complete brain damage to to engage in at least from my perspective and i don't want to toot my own horn but i made

explicit, I explicitly said I'm going to address this once. I spent like two days on it at Bitcoin Plus Plus in Austin last year. And I was like, I don't think I'm going to talk about this again. I think it may be mentioned it twice on the show or in the newsletter right up until the actual fork. But I think just looking back, I was telling people who were engaged in the debate on either side, I'm like, guys, it's not worth it. Like the side has their perspective.

They're not going to move. Same with the other side. Like just fork like get to the point and fork off and don't waste too much time on it. Yeah. Honestly, we're lucky that they did just fork off. You know what I mean? Because it did kind of just allow for that narrative to end. Because I think what was happening is that, you know, like I don't want to be like derisive,

but it's like everyone could see that that was like a total mistake. and crazy movement. Maybe it took a while for them to see it. Maybe they didn't know it was going to go as far as it did, whatever. I don't mean to like criticize people on their journey of figuring these sort of things out because I was on the ordinal's side because of Casey. And so I had to see it like the dark side of it very, very quickly back in 2023. So I knew what this was going to be.

But I think what kept people attached to it is that for those of us who were like on the other side, you know, the not BIP 110 side, it's such an easy way to feed your ego to just dunk on those people. And I think that was what kept a lot of people in is they just, they just wanted to be right. They wanted to have that feeling of they're so stupid and I'm so smart. And like, that's an ego trap too. You know, like to your point, it's like you just, you waste a lot of your own energy and time. If you get obsessed with being right, if you get obsessed with having that feeling of like, these people are going to get so wrecked and I'm going to be so.

right. Like, that's not really what moves Bitcoin forward at all. And so that's why I say we're lucky that they forked off because it wasn't because we all decided to be higher minded and to move on from it. It's like they forced the issue and left. And I think we're better off for it. And it's also, again, like silver lining is that then we immediately had to lock in on fortifying the entire ecosystem from AI hacks. So there wasn't even time to sort of like keep milling around about it. But yeah, it's like you see in times of real crisis what actually matters and what actually mattered was trying to make Bitcoin deliver on its promises of being the best, most secure

money, not like weird internal cultural issues of the sub-niche of people on Twitter who care about Bitcoin, you know? So, yeah, I think like I live in California. You see this whenever there's extremely destructive wildfires, the community comes together and rebuilds together, and they build back better to use the Joe Biden term. But, you know, people come together in times of crisis. And I think that's like what we saw in Bitcoin that was so, so beautiful to see out of the cold card hack.

And I want to see more of that. I think that's, you know, if we come out of this time and we go back to the way that we were in 2025, that that's the most NGMI signal for Bitcoin, I think, for me. This has to change something. Like, we have to be able to move forward from this. So I don't know exactly what that looks like. I don't have a prescription. I think something in the direction of covenants is maybe one answer.

But yeah, I think we can't go back to the way that things were and we can't just keep fighting with each other on Twitter for easy ego points, you know. Yeah, and I can see the trap to fall back into those tendencies being laid now with like Z-cash pumping, people talking about real world asset tokenization, stable coins. and falling back into the trap of like, oh, it's all shit coins. Like, I agree. They are. But they are accumulating attention and capital for a reason because people want these features. And that's why I mentioned it earlier. It was very encouraging to see this morning that a paper dropped about bringing shielded

transactions similar to Zcash to Bitcoin. It's like, okay, you can believe strongly as I do. that these things do not make sense from first principles. And to some degree are scams, if they're like pre-mine and have like a dev fund or whatever, maybe not a scam, but aren't as pure as Bitcoin is probably the best way to say it. Compete.

It's like, all right, stop clamoring because other people, other people's attention and capital is being drawn to these, these other chains, like go, go compete, like bring the feature. that are attracting those people. And I think, too, one thing we desperately need to get better at is marketing. So like narrative and positioning and all that. Yeah.

No, I mean, I think you're totally right. Like my definition of Bitcoin maximalism is I believe that the best features that come out of crypto will come to Bitcoin if they're truly wanted, you know, that Bitcoin is not just the best just because it's ordained by our patron saint Satoshi. And so it is blessed and will always be blessed. it's like it's the best because we have this ecosystem that can evolve and all of crypto is test net. So don't be mad at test net.

You need test net in order to try things out and see if things work. And then if any of it does work, and I agree with you, a lot of it is complete bullshit. But if any of it does work, we'll bring it back to Bitcoin. We'll figure out how to do it on Bitcoin. And that's what Ordinals was with NFTs. And that's why I say like I had this sort of unfortunate experience. I mean, fortunate in a lot of ways. But, you know, I saw that happen with NFTs, regardless.

of how you feel about NFTs, like, there's nothing wrong with people wanting to make them. You know, like as just an isolated thing, you can say, okay, they're scamming people by making a collection or whatever. But, you know, the idea of just wanting to make this token monkey JPEG is not an evil, heretical act. And so if we figure out how to do it on Bitcoin and actually we figured out how to do it better on Bitcoin, Ordnals is superior to all other NFT protocols, that's a very. That's a good thing. You don't have to care about it, but that's a good thing that in general

that we have that property in Bitcoin. So that's what I want to see is like I don't like the ossify mindset. I don't like the hubris of Bitcoin is the best just because I say it is. And if crypto is able to do anything like your point about Zcash, if they're able to do anything that we're not able to do on Bitcoin, that actually means it's bad and you shouldn't want to do it. That sort of mentality is how Bitcoin fails. So yeah, we have to see new features that people want being built on Bitcoin, we have to see changes to Bitcoin coming that people have been asking for for years that are essentially decided upon. It's just that we don't have the momentum against the inertia to make them happen. But I don't know. I'm optimistic.

Like, I feel optimistic after everything. I'm incredibly optimistic. I think retrospection is important. introspection, excuse me, is important retrospection. Interspection is very important and it's been a very contemplative couple of months for me personally and I know again just being down in D.C. with a bunch of people this week I think a lot of people are in the same boat and again there's a lot of PTSD, a lot of shell shock out there but I think ultimately people will

come out of it and I truly believe we'll come out of it stronger. It's just a matter of time and to your point, like banding together, not, not infighting and, and trying to rip each other down and rip each other apart. But it's like, hey, we were all wrong in one to one degree or another throughout all this. Maybe not everybody, but a lot of people were wrong, myself included. And let's not tear each other down. Let's get together, have a beer. You need some steak, talk about it, and figure out what we can do better moving forward. Yep.

Bitcoiners are still the highest signal group that I interact with. That's my, that's my indicator for when Bitcoin has failed is like when I go to Bitcoin meetups and, you know, the people there don't have interesting weird perspectives on the world that have led them to Bitcoin and led them to these very interesting conclusions about society that change my mind. Like once we lose that and we lose these, you know, if Bitcoin's not attracting those types of thinkers and keeping those types of people. then that's when I'm worried.

But I had the same experience as you. I went to, it was like more of an open source AI summit, but it was hosted by Presidio Bitcoin, which is like the Bitcoin co-working space in San Francisco. And it's like the Bitcoiners were the highest signal people there, like by far. And it wasn't even close. So we have great people here.

We can figure it out. But yeah, sometimes that just takes some humbling and for all of us to actually come together for a greater purpose. and not just to be looking for a number go up, you know? Yeah. And despite all this number is going up, that is the weirdest part about it all.

It's ridiculous. That's a... Wacky world. It is a very wacky world. Well, this has been awesome. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's always great to chat.

We'll do it again for 2027 predictions or what to look out. out for at the end of the year. Totally. All right. Stay safe out there. Stay safe, freaks. Stay vigilant. Peace of love.