The Pomp Podcast - #1493 Edan Yago | Bitcoin Is Ready To Explode Globally

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Edan Yago is the CEO at BTCS OS & Core Contributor to BitcoinOS. In this conversation we talk about bitcoin, what is going right, areas of improvement for bitcoin, and how bitcoin can continue to scale to many different use cases. =======================Franzy makes franchise ownership accessible for dreamers, go-getters, and investors alike. With the AI-powered Franzy Fit Score, match with the best brands for your financials, experience, and goals. Explore franchise options, get pre-qualified, and access expert coaching to guide your journey. Ready to own a business? Visit https://franzy.com/pomp today!=======================Reed Smith is a dynamic international law firm dedicated to helping clients move their businesses forward. With an inclusive culture and innovative mindset, Reed Smith delivers smarter, more creative legal services that drive better outcomes for their clients. Their deep industry knowledge, long-standing relationships and collaborative structure make them the go-to partner for complex disputes, transactions, and regulatory matters. Learn more at www.reedsmith.com=======================Ledger has been trusted for 10 years to secure 20% of the world’s digital assets. Their latest devices, Ledger Stax and Ledger Flex, feature secure touchscreens for safer, easier crypto management. Go to ledgerpomp.com to take control of your digital future=======================Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/=======================View 10k+ open startup jobs:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on, guys? Today, we've got an awesome episode with Yago. He is the core contributor to Bitcoin OS. He's been building things on top of and around Bitcoin for years.

In this conversation, we talk about Bitcoin's current winning streak, what's going right and how we got here. Then we talk about areas of improvement for Bitcoin and how we can continue to scale it, both not only in terms of transactions, but also many other use cases. Yago's got many interesting ideas and he's been working diligently trying to figure out very technical aspects of how we can improve Bitcoin. I really enjoyed this conversation and I think you guys will as well. Here's my latest conversation with Iago. Today's episode is brought to you by Franzi. If you're a dreamer, a go-getter, or someone looking to own a business, you better listen up.

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All right. I thought a great place to start the conversation is Bitcoin is winning. And I think there's a lot of people really excited about this. Bitcoin has outperformed altcoins and it's pretty much blown most people's expectations away. Usually in a market, the largest asset is actually the one with the least volatility. And the further you got on the risk curve, that's why you're pushing out on the risk curve. You get more volatility both up and down. That's not happening here. So what do you think is driving this? I think two things. First of all, we've got this asset which went from zero to two trillion dollars in 16 years started as a white paper became the first true new asset class of the digital age right but it did all of that during

a period of time when the largest country in the world and all of the other nations were sanctioning it right the united states was sanctioning north korea was sanctioning iran was sanctioning russia was sanctioning bitcoin now all of that has ended suddenly right so we've got this asset which is ability a proven ability to grow faster than any other asset while under sanction and the sanctions are falling away in fact the the the you know this administration is saying it's a priority right so is that like uh uh i heard somebody describe it as it's like pushing a um uh a beach ball under the water yeah and then basically you take your hands away what happens like the thing just pops yeah so i think that's that's a big part of the story right and then the the you know

So nothing in Bitcoin has ever been priced in, right? Like no one was pricing in a $2 trillion asset even six months ago, right? Certainly not 10 years ago, right? This asset is going to continue growing. Everything is working in Bitcoin's favor right now. So it's becoming an established asset. It is becoming an established asset,

which is not connected to any particular geopolitical constellation at a time that the post-World War II geopolitical constellation is falling to pieces. It's the first digital asset for a digital native generation who are about to inherit huge, the largest wealth transfer in all of history is going to be boomers giving their, you know, inheriting to their kids. And that's like real estate, it's stocks, it's bonds. A lot of that is going to get converted into Bitcoin because these are people, you know, you and me,

I've grown up with Bitcoin as our first asset. And probably the most important thing that's happening right now is, you know, we've opened this box with the most powerful genie mankind has ever opened, right? Which is AI. The amount of productivity within my businesses that it is already generating is insane. Like, I can do much more with fewer people. What are some examples of how you guys are using AI inside of these Bitcoin-related companies? Development. Everything from actually writing code to testing, the ability to do research, including complex mathematical research, everything to do with

marketing and preparing materials. The truth is that this is a superpower for every single person who's currently using it right and and and it's general purpose and it's very very plug and play right you it's basically like everyone gets this really really smart assistant who keeps on getting smarter and smarter and smarter and so it's going to take a little bit of time but only a little bit of time for that productivity to start reflecting in the market right we're going to see substantial growth and where's that going to go it doesn't look like the the reason we saw a week ago Nvidia and the Magnificent Seven crash was because it suddenly dawned on people that they're going to really, really struggle to capture the value that is being created.

There's this massive trillions of dollars of wealth are going to be created, but the tech itself, the compute itself is commoditized. And so where is that new wealth that is being generated going to have to go? It's going to go to the scarcest asset. It's going to go to the most digital asset. It's going to go to Bitcoin. That's before you even think about the fact that AIs are going to be a big part and eventually they're going to be the majority of the economy. AI agents interacting with each other

and they're not going to interact in dollars or stable coins because they don't care about the price of vegetables. They don't eat vegetables, right? What they care about is the price of computes. They care about the price of energy

and BTC is the asset of computing. Why won't they use stable coins though? I mean, look, they might, but the reality is that for them, it is going to be a much like we, why do i put it the other way around why do we use stable coins you use stable coins because you've got um you know your very very physical very very human expenses ais don't have this they will have higher frequency transactions um they will want those transactions to be more tied to a digital

economy both in terms of energy and computing bitcoin is literally just energy plus compute um and because it's entirely permissionless and it's the largest digital network in the world right? So they may be using Bitcoin for settling stable coins. They may be using other assets as well, but a big part of that is going to be almost by default in BTC. 70% of the crypto space is BTC. So I think to a first approximation, 70% of these transactions are going to be in BTC. And when you see the AI agents coming to the market, how much of this is like trading type stuff because that seems to be a lot of what people are doing right now versus um hey ai agent uh i need to book a trip go and do some research for me figure out the best places to go and stay

uh rent a car you know do bubble ball whatever and then go book it all for me i think you you maybe remember like the way i got into bitcoin was through ai right 2011 i was a carnegie millen i was building out neural networks and because of that i ended up by mistake reading the bitcoin white paper and it just these two things clicked in my mind because i was really really concerned about what this world which was going to be mediated by like everything's going digital and there are no property rights in the digital world what was it going to look like and suddenly you know the bitcoin white paper was like here here's the recipe here's how we actually bring for the first time property rights and then as a result by extension any rights into the digital world so um

So I think as you're thinking about what this economy looks like, it's going to be more and more and more. In the last batch of YC, there's one of the companies is a company which is their whole thing is they're trying to buy other companies and replace all of the employees with digital agents. And so, you know, one of the big problems, you know this, as someone who's built a business, what is the most complicated thing of building a business?

Regulation's tough, zero to one is tough, figuring out the market is tough, but ultimately the hardest thing is the human element. Scaling the talent that you have, replicating the talent that you have, but let's say you finally put together the perfect team with the perfect culture and they know how to work together. You can't just copy paste that, but if you do the same thing with AI agents, you can. They can just build the perfect team and you can copy paste it to new problem sets. I think people are massively underestimating how impactful this is going to be even in the

short term and certainly in the medium term. It's going to, you know, all of the complexities of, you know, your guys, you know, they've taken a snow day today, right? AI doesn't take a snow day. AI doesn't get involved in DEI. AI doesn't get involved in sexual harassment and AI doesn't get sick you know ai doesn't get pregnant so uh you know or or calling it just all of this stuff this complexity um by the way our team will not be taking this snow day they'll be here by the end of this now that i've said get your ass i mean what you should text them is they've got like yeah they'll be here in 30 minutes so they're replaced by a house so when we think about uh bitcoin and stable coins rolling one of the things that stable coins also are doing is uh they are very large

buyers of US treasuries. That's a great business model for them. David Sachs, the new crypto and AIs are, he's come out and he said, hey, we think that this can further enhance the dollar's dominance. This can protect the global reserve status. And it is, he estimates trillions of dollars of demand for these treasuries. When you see that, do you feel a little bit like Bitcoin is taking a backseat to the stablecoin stuff? Or is it just, in my mind, it almost feels like kind of short-term versus long-term problem, right? Stablecoins are a bandaid for the short-term problem, Bitcoin is the solution for the long-term problem? I think these are very complementary assets, right? So Bitcoin, BTC, isn't a currency yet.

Maybe it never becomes a currency for day-to-day payments, at least for humans, in the way that we think about a currency. Because it is volatile, and it's never going to stop being volatile, right? And so if you are mathematically limited, and you take time to, you know, you need to calculate each time. This is not a problem that a computer has. It doesn't need to try and figure out like the BTC, how much was it worth yesterday, how much is it is today. Maths is, you know, it's native tongue.

But for us, it's really important that the groceries are the same price every single day. And if they are not, if the price of groceries changes, people get really angry and are in the streets, right? So I would say that stable coins are a very, very human asset. BTC is a little bit more agnostic it can be human but in many ways and I and I've expected this for a long time it is like digital first and as a result it's AI first but regardless the even for us right now as just people putting aside AI BTC is um this long-term sound money commodity money

asset the dollar is an asset created by a government with even with the best of intentions you know from elon musk is adding you know close to two trillion dollars of debt every year um it is inevitably that no no nobody stops the train uh when it comes to that just means a slow grinding inflation right it's built into the mechanism and so these are just two very very different assets in terms of what they're doing um even when we had the gold standard there were people using dollars right the daughter was backed by gold but people were still trading in dollars and let's talk about maybe some of the scaling challenges maybe the areas of opportunity uh the areas for improvement with bitcoin you know i think of this as like uh when you're winning

is the exact time that you need to be paying attention to how you could be disrupted or what your weaknesses are um what are some of the things that you see with bitcoin that we actually could improve on to help accelerate it i mean look bitcoin as it is right now is um is extremely limited one of the reasons it hasn't been used in more high frequency commerce is um because of these limitations right so you can only do so many transactions at a time the transactions are relatively expensive and you can't build any applications or services directly into bitcoin so you know for most of the people who got into bitcoin over the years like the the one thing that bitcoin promises you is it's like your financial sovereignty you're truly free you're

basically financially off-grid right it's not money that sits in a bank and the bank can confiscate it it's not money that um you know can be stopped at the border it's literally the one thing that you can truly own even like real estate here in manhattan you know when covert rolls around you you know you're not allowed to charge people rent anymore right so it's the one thing that the only rules around it are set by you um but the problem is that if you want to actually do anything with btc if you want to do anything with bitcoin then you have to give up all of that right so people just sit huddling their bitcoin like like dragons sit in gold because if i want to lend it if i want to turn it into a productive asset if i want to trade it with it if i want to

use it to create a bitcoin back stable coin if i want to you know use it with a service i am inevitably today giving it up uh and then i you know i'll go to a celsius or a block fire or an ftx and people got very very burned by that again and again and again so the question is how can we build an application layer um an economy around bitcoin which is um natively secured by bitcoin and natively interacts by with bitcoin um is as decentralized by bitcoin because it is bitcoin it's basically just an extension of bitcoin and sort of you know you a lot of us have made this distinction you're one of them right the distinction between bitcoin and crypto right there's bitcoin and there's everything else and crypto was supposed to be the answer to this

question of how do we build an economy around Bitcoin? How do we build applications around Bitcoin? And so we've got all of these smart contract chains that have come out and they let you build smart contracts, which are basically like these supposedly trustless systems, which are supposed to allow you to do decentralized finance or decentralized autonomous organizations, et cetera, right? But none of them interact with Bitcoin at all. Bitcoin, and in fact, every single one of these chains is basically like an island, which doesn't communicate with each other. And so we've got, we're in this, this weird situation where BTC, the asset is just powering ahead, but people can't do anything with it. And this whole application layer that was

supposed to, you know, promise us, you know, web three, decentralize all the things, empower people, disempower the large organizations, protect your, your, your privacy, protect your data, monetize your life. All of this stuff has basically fragmented into a bunch of little, little pitsy islands with no access to the big asset base and have basically become a whole bunch of casinos with terrible UX because of the fragmentation with liquidity fragmented, user bases fragmented. When you think of those casinos, how much of it is people are trying to get rich? And if they look at it as like a form of financial investment, although they understand that it's risky versus it is pure entertainment. Well, I think it's a combination of entertainment

and trying to get rich, but the entertainment is driven by the desire to get rich, which is kind of like Vegas, right? So people go down to Vegas to have a good time. But the reason you're at the roulette table, the reason you're at the slot machine, just that action, right? That pulling that thing, it wouldn't entertain you for very long. What's actually entertaining, what's driving the entertainment is maybe I'm going to get rich or maybe I'm going to lose it all. It's the adrenaline rush of wanting to get rich but the thing is with the with with where we are i think as a as a culture right now especially economically is there's seeped into that is a is a is a certain stench of desperation people figure like this is their last shot um and and so people are

desperately trying to go for the riskiest gamble they can when they're you know in the meme coin world. And sure, they're having fun, but but that fun is driven by the adrenaline and by the desperation. When, when you think about what you guys are building, describe kind of at a high level. What is it that you guys are building on top of and around Bitcoin that you think is going to help solve some of these issues? Sure. So look, basically, this problem that I was talking about is that we just, you can't do anything with your BTC. And the entire world of crypto, which was supposed to be built on this massive asset base, two trillion dollar asset base, cannot connect with it, that is the problem that we're looking to solve. I think those are basically the two

fundamental problems that we have with both Bitcoin and crypto today. Crypto isn't succeeding because it doesn't have BTC. BTC isn't achieving its mission, right? And my number go up, sure, but it's not achieving its mission of freeing people because, you know, you're being driven into the ETF and you're just being driven to sit on the asset. Okay, so how do you fix it? Well, satoshi in the very very first version of bitcoin that was ever released um there's weird clues that he actually thought he knew what the solution was right um so in in the in that version 0.1.0 there are little remnants not only of bitcoin and the first blockchain but also of the first decentralized application the first dap um there are little remnants of code that he didn't

fully pull out. And the first decentralized application that was ever built was called Poker Lobby and it was built by Satoshi Nakamoto. And his idea was, well, I'm building this money. People are going to need to do something with it. So I'm going to build a decentralized, trustless poker game into this thing. And he stripped it out just before he made it public because he realized that the way that Bitcoin was today and back then as well, because it hasn't change that much. It just wouldn't scale. So this is, you know, a problem which has obsessed me. The very first sort of token that came after Bitcoin, the very first attempts at token was actually an attempt to build applications and tokens on Bitcoin was called colored coins.

It was this idea that you could take like a set and add some metadata, color it, and then it could be represent gold or it could represent, you know, shares of a company on the world's best ledger, right? The Bitcoin ledger. So why did colored coins not work? The reason colored coins didn't work is because you were coloring sets and there was no way to add additional information. There was no way for Bitcoin to understand or see anything outside of what was just happening inside of the chain. Basically, those tokens were as limited as Bitcoin as BTC is. And so just as developers, developers are just straight jacketed too much

to be able to build something interesting. So I was on your show a few years ago and I was talking about us building the world's first DeFi for Bitcoin. And we built Sovereign into the largest DeFi ecosystem for Bitcoin. There was a central floor to everything that we were doing, which is that you had to put your Bitcoin into this multi-sig federation in order to move it into the system. And this problem kept me awake at night. It was a security flaw. It meant that I wasn't comfortable putting most of my Bitcoin into it. And it meant that the system wasn't being secured by Bitcoin. And so back in 2021, we set up a research group to try and study this problem. And we had this belief that there was a way to scale Bitcoin, basically provide infinite scale, provide infinite programmability, basically take this entire application there, build like a decentralized internet on Bitcoin instead of on all kinds of other systems.

And that you really only needed one thing to do that, which was the ability to verify a new kind of cryptography called a ZK proof. Now, we can dive into it, but for now, I'm just going to put that aside and say, imagine you had this kind of cryptography, which basically allows you to prove that something happened in the outside world, or prove that a computation happened to Bitcoin, and then you could execute it on Bitcoin, right? And we believe that in order to make this change, that we would need some kind of soft fork in Bitcoin. So we started working for almost four years, we were working on building out the soft fork

for Bitcoin until at the end of 2023, we suddenly had this moment like in Pulp Fiction, you know, you open up the suitcase and the light shines out, like the choir of heaven sung to us. And we realized we probably had figured out a way to do it without any soft fork at all. And so in April we published a white paper describing how we were going to do this. White paper was called Bitstark, which is, um, the, the, the sort of a Stark is a kind zk verification for bitcoin and then in bitcoin nashville just before trump got on stage and spoke for the first time ever in block 853626 bitcoin opened its eyes and got a brain we verified the

first zk proof in bitcoin uh now at the time it was a very very awkward sort of hacky kind of thing it was it took 54 transactions it was you know um uh hard-coded we could only prove like one thing, which was like A times B equals C. But since then, we've been building out a system to make this general purpose, to build an operating system, right? The Bitcoin operating system so that you can do any kind of computation, any kind of scale on Bitcoin. And probably by the time people are watching this, we will have launched the testnet of the system. And, you know, it is something that even we thought was going to be impossible, despite the fact that we'd be banging our heads against this problem for over 10 years. And now we're sort of on the

precipice of it happening. So in many ways, like it's kind of poetic, right? The first chapter of Bitcoin is coming to a close. The chapter of Bitcoin, the hated sort of sanctioned asset is coming to a close. And now the new chapter, the chapter of mass adoption of Bitcoin is about to begin. And for that, we need the technology for Bitcoin to scale, to have inherent privacy, to have smart contracts, to have applications built in it, to have AI interact with it. How do you do this with what many people would say are the limitations of Bitcoin in terms of block sizes, scalability, et cetera? Are you using the Lightning Network? Are you using something else? Describe the scalability that you're able to leverage in order to be able to do something

that you're describing. So actually, let me explain just briefly about zero knowledge. Zero knowledge proofs is a way of proving something without having to provide almost any knowledge about how you prove. The best example I always use is if you walked up to a bouncer at a bar and you had to show your ID, they also see your address, your full name, all that stuff. But really all they care about is, are you 21? And so if you could basically, they knew you were 21, but you didn't have to tell them any of your information.

That would be an equivalent. So if you just like put your ID into a slot and then a red light or a green light go over, they know nothing about you. They don't even know if you're 21. they just know you're above 21, right? So that's what zero knowledge proof cryptography was designed for. It's actually designed for privacy. But turns out that this kind of cryptography, because it's providing privacy, is actually providing compression as well, right? Because you think about it, you've got all of these details that get stripped out and one important

detail that you require is provided. So this kind of cryptography, in large part because Ethereum was so bullish on it has really advanced tremendously over the last few years. And so now we're at a place where you can take any kind of computation and you can run that computation and fold it into a tiny zero knowledge proof that proves that the computation happened exactly the way it was supposed to. And these proofs are 300 bytes, right? That is, that is nothing, not even a kilobyte. And so what we can do is we can take 300 byte proofs and write them, verify them and executing them in Bitcoin so that you can take thousands of transactions, compress them into this tiny little 300 byte proof and then write it to Bitcoin so that all

of these proofs become basically a Bitcoin transaction. And what would you use this for? Give me a real world example of something I would do that would benefit from using this system sure so um i'll take it up by levels right so the number one thing that people are interested in doing with this right now is there's this entire world of crypto which has been divorced from bitcoin right so now we have bitcoin layer twos um we have um ethereum layers we have ethereum we have a whole bunch of layer ones like cardano are integrating with boss because what they desperately want is to be able to bring BTC into their system. And now for the first time, it's going to be possible to do this without any third party trust at all, basically

cryptographic integrity, trustless system. We can now do trustless bridging of BTC. And this turns Bitcoin, the chain into a hub where all of the rest of crypto basically becomes a layer two to Bitcoin. And then the second thing that you can do is you can then use this for scaling transactions so you can run thousands of transactions um roll them up into a single transaction and as a proof write that to bitcoin and so you can scale out the number of transactions potentially infinitely that you can do with bitcoin so fast cheap much faster right cheaper and and and you know boundless scale and so when we talk about for example us being able to make payments or even more importantly like maybe automated systems like ai making payments

suddenly this becomes truly feasible. And it has the big advantage over something like Lightning Network is that it's not pre-funded. Just like a regular Bitcoin transaction, you send it when you want to send it. You don't have to pre-fund anything. Then the more sophisticated and maybe more exciting thing is like a few weeks ago, we demonstrated the ability for people to take one of the most secure and common programming languages of the web, Rust, Rust, write software in Rust, and turn that into a smart contract in Bitcoin. So let me just say, what is a smart contract? So here's the idea with a smart contract.

10 years ago, Vitalik, who had been working on Bitcoin, and was working on colored coins actually, became super frustrated that you couldn't do anything in Bitcoin. So he created a chain where you could do verifiable compute. That's what a smart contract is. computation that everyone can verify. Maybe that computation is a DEX like a decentralized exchange. Maybe it's a lending pool. Maybe it's a voting mechanism, whatever. How do you verify? How does compute become verifiable in every single smart contract chain today? The way it does is you take the entire instruction set, the whole piece of software,

you shove it into the chain, and then every single verifier, validator, and full node on that chain needs to independently run every single interaction, every single computation, independently that's why smart contracts don't check don't scale that's why ethereum didn't scale that's why solana goes down right it's because you're instead of doing one computation you're doing the same computation but many many tens of thousands of times but zero knowledge proofs offer us a different way of doing this right with zero knowledge proofs you have maybe even a single person run a computation they can just create a tiny little proof and put that into blockchain that they've run the computation properly. And that computation has now become

a smart contract in the chain because it's verifiable proof, verifiable computation in Bitcoin. And so in a way, if you remember, you remember how, um, in Kenya, they never got landlines in Africa. They never got landlines. They leaped from straight into mobile phones. Well, Bitcoin is, is this perfect pure play ledger. Like it's the perfect ledger for the world, the perfect settlement mechanism for the world. And it doesn't have all of this complexity of shoving all this stuff into it. And it turns out now that we didn't need to shove anything in at all. We just needed to wait for ZK proofs. And so it's really, there's this constant poetic justice about Bitcoin. And the poetic justice about Bitcoin now is just as we need smart contracts

for Bitcoin, just as we need scalability for Bitcoin, the technology to make that possible has presented itself. An idea's time has come. Exactly. All right. What has been the hardest part about doing this so far? Was it the understanding how to do the ZK proofs or something else? Yeah. I mean, figuring out how to do that in Bitcoin has been considered impossible for most of Bitcoin's history. So that is a major breakthrough. Now it's more about the implementation details. Can we build the tools around this that make it really easy for developers to use? And can we integrate enough of these other systems so that Bitcoin can become what

it's always meant to be, which is like an internet of value? Yeah. Tell me your vision. So the technology works. Let's just hold that as an assumption. It's a big assumption, but let's just say that you get it to work at scale, et cetera. What changes about Bitcoin moving forward? And what does the world look like in that kind of timeline? Well, I think what changes is that Bitcoin stops being just a store of value and can become a medium of exchange, can become a unit of account and can become much more than that. So BTC is sort of what we're usually talking about when we're talking about Bitcoin, it's just the asset,

but there's this really valuable infrastructure that we've built. It's the world's most perfect pure play digital ledger, right? There's one ledger that we can all trust. And there's one settlement mechanism that we can all trust. And there's one system for property rights that we can all trust, right? It's the perfect substrate in which to build, you know, a free market economy for the internet. And so that's, I think, the most exciting opportunity. It's building a borderless digital free market that is unstoppable. And it's a very American idea, I think. So that's the exciting thing. Then beyond that, right now, we've got still 30% of the crypto space is not BTC. That's not insignificant junk. And it's fragmented across all of these chains.

They don't talk to each other. We're funding the North Korean government every time there's a bridge hack. They last year, they, they, they stole $1.6 billion, which they've been using to fund building their, their, you know, inter intercontinental ballistic missiles has basically been funded by hacking bridges, right? So now we have the ability to build Bitcoin as a hub for all of this infrastructure that we've built to actually integrate with each other and be secured by Bitcoin. And so on the one hand, we get to release BTC on this, and then we We get to turn Bitcoin, the chain, into this like intent of value. And then the third thing is we get to unify crypto into a cohesive industry.

Do you think the rest of the stuff dies away? Or do you think that it kind of exists out there, but people prefer to use these kind of tools, services, products on top of Bitcoin? By the rest of the stuff, I think you probably mean like all of these other L1s and other chains, right? I don't think they're going to die out. I think some of them, I think they have a choice to make. Like, are they going to integrate and become like the best layer, right?

Are they going to become a great place to build applications for BTC? And are they going to attract huge amounts of BTC capital? Or are they possibly going to go the way of the Dodo, right? I think basically, this is what we've been seeing in the market, right? we've been seeing that Bitcoin has become detached from the rest of the crypto market. And so there's this huge desire now across Ethereum, Solana, Sui, everywhere to integrate into Bitcoin because they realize that that is the economic powerhouse that is powering this entire industry and provide services that are going to be valuable to people who

hold BTC and make BTC a much more valuable asset. What do you need the most help with? People who listen or watch this, what can they do to help you? Well, I mean, I think there's something they can do to help themselves. We're going to build this technology no matter what. This is something that we've been working on since I got into Bitcoin almost. But I think one of the things that we mentioned earlier on, we touched on, there's this overall sense of nihilism that people have, that you have to go out to the casino, you have to

be at the casino table, you have to be trying to trade your way to retire your entire bloodline. And I think trying to retire your bloodline is a great idea, but it's a long-term idea. It's not going to happen right now. And so that desperation, I think what people can do is realize there's so much reasons for optimism. We're building really, really cool things. We're building technologies of freedom that we've never had before. The crypto ecosystem, the Bitcoin market, Bitcoin's finally going to become a currency

which is attached to a true free market, that's going to generate massive wealth, like free markets always do. And we've got, you know, technologies like AI, which give everyone who is willing to spend the time to figure out how to use them, because they're super available, superpowers. And, you know, I know you're, you know, super into,

you know, you have this sort of vitality about the hustle. I think there's never been a better time to take risks, to hustle, to build yourself. But the risks that you want to take are risks about on you rather than sort of on some cockamamie meme coin with a hat. So I think the way people can help themselves is extend their time horizon a little bit more, huddle BTC,

and figure out how they can build something for themselves. It's basically just bet on yourself. Yeah. Right? Which is very difficult for a lot of people to do. but uh when they do it most people i know are very happy i think also it's important not to be discouraged right because um every betting on yourself you're you're going to fail but there's never been a better time ever to fail every single failure is a learning opportunity um

and you just keep going i think one of the cool things about bitcoin culture and one of the things that bitcoin teaches us is that you you just need to have conviction and keep doing keep maintaining that conviction right you know if you've if you've held bitcoin for many years you're definitely up if you keep betting yourself with conviction you know yeah like bitcoin you're going to go up and you're going to go down you're going to have you know you're going to have your own personal bear markets but you know churchill had this really great line when you're going through hell keep going where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about boss well you can go to bitcoinos.build because that's what we're doing. I'm on Twitter, Idan, Iago on Twitter.

And yeah, I think probably by the time this airs, you'll be able to go to the Bitcoin OS website and actually get a little taste of the future of truly trustlessly moving BTC from one place to another and the first applications being built in Bitcoin. i love it i think that uh building is obviously incredibly important um and you know the thing about building is uh sometimes you're right sometimes you're wrong sometimes the tech works sometimes it doesn't sometimes it takes a long time sometimes it doesn't but uh you don't know until you try right and i think that you've always kind of been very focused on hey how do we continue to create you know things around

on Bitcoin. And so wish you the best of luck. We'll do it again in the future. Thank you, Anthony.