The Wolf Of All Streets - Is Bitcoin Ready For THIS? Jeff Garzik Reveals A Game-Changing Revolution!

Starting point is 00:00:00 Robo Scott and Robo Jeff doing podcasts before you know it. We can go steal their gold. Yeah. Crystal clear to us. The killer apps that we have so far, I can name two. Number one, Bitcoin. And the second is stablecoins. Few people do a better job of articulating a vision for the future of crypto than Jeff Garzik, whether it be how crypto interacts with space travel

Starting point is 00:00:25 or AI or simply DeFi and the current financial system. Jeff can explain exactly where we're going and what it's going to take for us to get there. Yet another incredible conversation with Jeff Garzik. with Jeff Carson. That's sarcasm. I have no plan ever. What do we want to talk about, Jeff? Well, you know, obviously we have a new project coming out with we got a plug hemi uh which is awesome uh there's there you know you and i like could talk about anything at all yeah

Starting point is 00:01:14 you know there's not worried there's like a space launch uh coming up from space chain which is still around uh all the crazy Telegram stuff going on. That's definitely blowing up my Twitter at least. I have a military angle on it that people are retweeting. And yeah, just general L2 explosion. Are there 4 million or 10 million L2s? I'm glad we hit record because I want the audience to see how in-depth our research is, our process for deciding.

Starting point is 00:01:55 But it should be clear that with certain guests, you just show up and you have a great conversation and it can go in any direction. And that's what we're going to do here. Listen, maybe you give us the update, right? You just mentioned, obviously, that you have something new launching, but what's happening with Block now? What are you guys focused on?

Starting point is 00:02:14 What are you excited about? Because that'll probably take us in some fine directions. Definitely, definitely. So where to start? You choose. Your own adventure. Cool. Well, the thing that keeps me up at night in a good way is our new project, our new L2 Hemi, Hemi.xyz. That's the tagline for that. And I'm not the best marketer in the world. I need to get my pitch honed to a razor's edge, I know, which is tough for a nerd.

Starting point is 00:02:52 But we're kind of what's coming next, the next generation of L2s after the current generation of L2s marrying the king and queen of crypto, Bitcoin and Ethereum. So what the world definitely needs is another L2. There's so few. We don't have enough. I'm hoping that you've done exactly what everyone else is doing so we don't have any confusion. I'm going to imagine that you've chosen to do an L2 for a very specific reason

Starting point is 00:03:21 and there's something that differentiates it. So maybe we could talk about that. Definitely. As a Bitcoin developer, Bitcoin script, Bitcoin itself, absolutely bomb proof, the most secure blockchain on the planet, the most, you go back to high school, who's the most likely to succeed? What blockchain is most likely to succeed? The answer, number one, is going to be Bitcoin. It's the stability, the security, no matter whether there's wars on the planet or cyber attacks or pick your black swan event, Bitcoin is going to keep chunking out blocks every 10 minutes on average. And I don't see that changing in the next decade and the next decades. No matter whether it gets

Starting point is 00:04:14 an opcat or an op CTV or another upgrade or it doesn't, it's going to remain stable until I pass away off this earth and my children are holding and running Bitcoin. So that's crystal clear to us. But at the same time, Ethereum is what I call the grand central station of crypto. If you're moving assets to and fro, whether it's to another L2 or to and from Bitcoin, Ethereum made assets programmable. And that's why so many Bitcoin developers and other developers kind of jumped ship for several years into the Ethereum ecosystem. It's just so much easier to program. You can do so much more with it. Self-sovereign contract addresses, they exist on Bitcoin. They don't exist on, excuse me, they exist on Ethereum. They don't exist on

Starting point is 00:05:12 Bitcoin. And that provides a lot of autonomous execution that we decentralists like. But like the champagne waterfall that you see at weddings and at hotels, you can't fit all the champagne into the very tip top glass. It's going to spill over. And that's what we're seeing with both Ethereum and Bitcoin. You can't put all the coffees on Bitcoin. You can't put all the coffee payments on Ethereum. It's just not going to happen. And so that's where the L2 drive is coming from. But this is sort of a hybrid, right? Bitcoin and Ethereum. A Bitcoin L2 where I think we agree maybe there isn't enough development yet,

Starting point is 00:05:55 or we haven't seen one breakthrough, but that's fully compatible on the Ethereum side. So it gives you the best of both worlds, I would imagine. That's exactly right. It's, you know, we kind of think it's, I'm a chess player. I don't claim to be a grandmaster or anything of that nature, but this is five to chin chess moves ahead of the current L2 stack. I'll dive deep a little bit into technology and then kind of resurface.

Starting point is 00:06:28 What we have is an EVM. So it's entirely compatible with MetaMask, entirely compatible with the Optimism Ethereum ecosystem, all the the bridges and tunnels thereof. But that's that was our starting point, not our end point. What you see with the other L2s, they take an EVM and they staple gun it to Bitcoin, or they just photocopied Optimism and launched their own chain. Their tech bench is their CTO and no one else. It's a two-person team. It's not very deep at all. What Hemi is, is we have myself, obviously, a former Bitcoin core developer, CTO Max Sanchez, the inventor of the Veriblock blockchain from several years ago, and importantly, the POP or proof of proof protocol, which is a Bitcoin anchoring protocol It's been field tested for several years.

Starting point is 00:07:26 And we felt that marrying an Ethereum EVM with Bitcoin finality using this proof of proof protocol, it just absolutely made sense. Optimism has their fraud proof worst case is seven days. If you see something going wrong on the optimism chain or optimism forks, you issue a challenge and it takes up to seven days to resolve. We use Bitcoin and Bitcoin, what we call super finality. That gives us a two hour resolution time versus the seven days of a Bitcoin chain. But we didn't stop there. My Bitcoin developer genes really demanded a fantastic builder experience. Bitcoin Script,

Starting point is 00:08:17 again, like Bitcoin itself, it's bomb-proof, it's secure, but it's very, very limited. And we said, OK, everyone else is staple gunning, photocopying an EVM onto an L2. What makes the most sense? And to us, it's burying or embedding a Bitcoin node inside an Ethereum node. OK, well, what does that mean? We added opcodes, kind of like adding CPU instructions for Bitcoin directly to our EVM. We call it an HVM, such that developers from Solidity, from smart contracts, can trigger Bitcoin transactions on the Bitcoin chain. You can send Bitcoin from the EVM. So it's far more than a bridge. You don't bridge assets and then do something. It's just right there in the EVM ready, waiting to go. If you want to parse incoming Bitcoin

Starting point is 00:09:20 payments on the Bitcoin chain, again, we've got visibility in the Bitcoin chain inside the EVM, and that's what's brand new and very novel. So as a developer, I can create ordinals, inscriptions, runes type transactions, sending complicated taproot transactions. All of that can be programmed from the smart contract layer itself. And that's what's new and novel. So the Bitcoin developer experience on Hemi, I think, is 100x better than what it is on Bitcoin itself because of that expandability. And we still retain all the backward compatibility. So all your other smart contracts, 100% backward compatible, all your solidity code, all your auditor's experience, the humans behind the smart contracts that double check everything,

Starting point is 00:10:17 we've imported that as well into our ecosystem. So we'd like to think that just like Apple has their web kit, that's for building amazing browsers and web experiences, their health kit, if you have an Apple Watch for building amazing health tracking experiences, we have a Hemi Bitcoin kit that makes it so much easier for Bitcoin developers to develop Bitcoin yet through an EVM type product. So each chain has been deemed the killer of something. We had Bitcoin, then Ethereum for programmability. It was the Bitcoin killer. And then Solana was the Ethereum killer. And then Layer 2s are the Solana killers, whatever that circle may be. This seems like, assuming it works, it is a other 1,000 layer 2 killer.

Starting point is 00:11:07 I mean, there's so many layer 2s on Ethereum, and there are so many being built on Bitcoin, but it doesn't sound like there are many that are this well thought out that are effectively that hybrid. And I guess the part two of that question is then, why the layer 2 instead of the Solana route of trying to go with a fully programmable layer one that would not require layer twos? Well, you know, taking the last first, I think that Ethereum and Bitcoin have won. They're not going away. And I have no interest in competing against Bitcoin, which I think is suicide, and competing against Ethereum, which I think is suicide, and competing against Ethereum,

Starting point is 00:11:46 which I think is suicide. Ultimately, I know I'm moving into 1970s hippy-dippy land, but it's about bringing people together. It's about bringing people from Bitcoin and from Ethereum together is, you know, one plus one equals three. The sum is greater than the whole of the parts. And I think that's absolutely true in this case, especially now that I'd like to think a lot of the Bitcoiners previously had a lot of hardcore Bitcoin maximalists. I think the Bitcoin pragmatists and the Bitcoin moderate is ascendant. They want to do something with their Bitcoin more than just park it in a cold storage ledger buried 100 feet underground in their missile silo shelter. Yeah, or they like the idea in general of Bitcoin becoming the sole base layer, or at least the main base layer for everything that they've seen built elsewhere that they've rallied against for so long. And ironically, I think some of that is coming full circle. Like

Starting point is 00:13:00 we used to say in 2010, when Satoshi was still around, optimistically, and I think some of us playing out this way, Bitcoin hardcore maxis would say, oh, that technology, it's going to be built elsewhere. And then we can wait and it'll come back to Bitcoin. And if you have extreme levels of patience, if you're willing to wait 14 years, then that maxim, I think, is proving true. You see that with ordinals, runes, inscriptions. But more than that, I wrote in 2015 that Bitcoin is becoming a settlement layer. And it was a very controversial medium post at the time and a lot of mudslinging in my direction for writing that. And I think it's really coming true is Bitcoin is like no other for settlements, but you can't put all the coffees

Starting point is 00:14:01 on the Bitcoin chain itself. And we've known that again since 2010 and the early days. L2s are really farming that role. In Ethereum, they call it sharding. And there's a kind of big official from the Ethereum developers plan for sharding. But what we see today is, I like to call it organic sharding. I think that rather than a Vitalik or a Satoshi kind of being a central planner, you have Darwin at the wheel. You have, when the cost of digital asset creation is near zero, that guarantees you'll have a ton of supply of digital assets. And just power law

Starting point is 00:14:47 applies just like in venture capital, 95% of those will burn away. The Harry Potter sorting hat will sort out 95% of those. And the other 5% will be the Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, key L2s that are surviving that Darwinian trial by fire and are really proving themselves out in the ecosystem. The same thing applies to blockchains as digital assets. The cost of blockchain creation is zero. So we're seeing an explosion of blockchains. Macroeconomics says when the cost is zero, you can have a ton of supply. But is there a ton of demand? And so there's going to be, again, that Darwinian trial by fire, sorting out the, I think at last count, there were 83 Bitcoin L2s that I have on like a DeFi llama list or something like that. And pretty confidently, 90, 95% of those will burn away.

Starting point is 00:15:53 And who will be the remainder? Those are the ones with the most security, the digital assets that have been there embedded for a while, whether it's wrapped Bitcoin, wrapped runes, or coming over from the Ethereum side over bridges and tunnels. Ultimately, may the best man win, and I think we've got the best story. Yeah, I think it's really compelling. So I want an idea of the timeline

Starting point is 00:16:22 of when these things become meaningful. So we've had these cycles, obviously, of building. And I think in the last cycle, it was we're going to have such a meaningful level of adoption and billions of people. We're never going to have enough block space. Right now, the narrative is somehow flipped to where it's like, we have so many chains and so much block space and it's vacant, right? It's like San Francisco commercial real estate. So I think it begs the question of what's the killer app that makes this all needed and what's the timeline or the multiple killer apps?

Starting point is 00:16:56 When do we start actually needing to stress test these things because we're using them so much? I'll take a sideways answer, I guess. I'd like to think that right now we're kind of in the, to draw an analogy with the very early internet, we're in the 1970s in terms of internet. And that was the days when you had, your audience has probably never heard of these modems, where you'd put a phone connecting it to a ancient slow internet connection. That's how I grew up in the late 80s, early 90s. I had a 52.2 when I graduated college and people used to come over to use my fast internet. That's right. 52.2, because, you know, it started at 14.4, doubled up to 28, whatever. And that was like fire. You could download a picture in like 10 minutes.

Starting point is 00:17:53 It was, it really was. And it was stitched together point-to-point connections. That was the internet. And think about bridging digital assets today across blockchains. In my opinion, users shouldn't have to think about that. Right now, should I think, is my ETH on base and now I need to move it to HEMI and transform it somehow and then move it to this other blockchain? I try to come in top level. What is the best user experience?

Starting point is 00:18:26 Because at the end of the day, and I think this gets to the answer of your question, it's got to solve some real problem for real people. I think the killer apps that we have so far, I can name two. Number one, Bitcoin, just the BTC token, the BTC network. It's obviously succeeded. It's obviously not going anywhere. And the second is stable coins. That's my answer every time. I know it's not super exciting, but there are many billions of stable coins out there.

Starting point is 00:19:04 Tether is one of the largest holders of United States treasuries on the planet, right next to Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and the biggest of the big legacy financial institutions. And that's a testament to the staying power of crypto and, in particular, the demand for stable coins. So those are clearly two of the killer apps that have succeeded, are going to continue to succeed. And they're not super exciting, but you had to build that baby step of decentralized money. And then you had to build the next baby step of decentralized stable money. And now we start to open up some more of the use cases.

Starting point is 00:19:52 But I think we're held back by crypto UX. I think we're held back by user experience. And so the next step in that evolution across Hemi, across the entire crypto ecosystem, is going to be making that user experience far more transparent. Okay, I just have assets and you'll have AI smart routers and other autonomous gadgetry to put your assets in a safe yield generating bucket on one chain or another chain, but that's not really going to be surfaced as manual labor for the users to click to bridge and then click to deposit. It's all going to be wallet user experiences. And so these L2s, we're in the 1970s internet version of the L2 ecosystem. And obviously today, when we go to a web browser, we open a new tab, we type in cnn.com.

Starting point is 00:20:53 We don't think about where our packets are routed. We don't think, has someone dialed up the internet and made that final connection so I can download a GIF in 10 minutes. It just works. And we're not at that just works phase of L2s yet. And the wallet experience is going to be what takes us there. So I see the MetaMasks of the world, the Coinbase wallets of the world, wallets that haven't yet been invented. Those are going to be the next frontier that really open up crypto. I agree.

Starting point is 00:21:35 But I think there will be other verticals, obviously, as well. And we've seen them sort of have their moments. Maybe it's Metaverse or NFT or DeFi or AI, right? Gaming. So do any of those verticals appeal to you as something that could find us the next, the third sort of killer app? Because I agree, every time someone says, what's the killer app? I say Bitcoin and stable coins. So it's an obvious answer to me, but we're going to need a hell of a lot more. We are. We are. Absolutely. I always try to take a long view. My clock always starts in 2010 when I first got involved in Bitcoin. And the long view is I just love innovation and I love people trying. And I love people having the freedom to join a permissionless network and build whatever the heck they want to build. And that's, again, getting back to the macro picture, you're going to have a ton of supply of crazy ideas, amazing ideas, bad ideas, and it's got to all filter through that Harry Potter

Starting point is 00:22:43 sorting hat. So what's interesting as it's currently filtering through the hat, I think obviously DEXs are here to stay. DEXs are just kind of the lubrication for the crypto engine. You can use a layer zero or wormhole type bridge to move from just about any chain to just about any other chain or Thor chain, cross chain DEXs. That's the oil and the lubrication, but that's really back end. I don't think that's a killer app. That's just something that we had to check the checkbox on. It's table stakes to get your chain, my chain, the crypto ecosystem going. Again, the bridges and tunnels of the world are really interestingly making the L2s far more a flat egalitarian layer that anyone can enter and exit, which is fast.

Starting point is 00:23:49 That's both fascinating and pro user. They have freedom to choose. They're not kind of, you know, DeFi 1.0. It was let me lock up your tokens and you're just kind of trapped here. What are the nascent killer apps? I think games are still... Game developers, there's not a huge love for crypto, but crypto loves games.

Starting point is 00:24:12 So I think eventually there'll be a meeting of the minds. It's more philosophy, I think, than anything holding that back. You want to move your skin from Fortnite into World of Warcraft. That's interesting to me. Is it interesting to other players? And does it disrupt one ecosystem or another? It definitely opens more questions than killer apps at this point.

Starting point is 00:24:40 There was a game called Dark Forest, which I encourage listeners to check out. That was on Ethereum testnet. And that was a pretty successful game, very engaging, just because it was crypto native and it was unique. But I think games, casual gaming, still has a way to go, but it's very promising in crypto. DeFi is going to have a renaissance. DeFi is absolutely going to have a renaissance. You're starting to see much more advanced lending markets. We had kind of the version one in Aave and Compound, and now you have more professional lending with Ajna, AJNA, and some of the other

Starting point is 00:25:28 lending markets, PERPs, futures, options, all of those, bonds, all of those that are super simple to implement a smart contract, but not so super simple on the regulatory front. People are starting to figure out and deploy to DeFi. And that's really going to add a new level of trading, a new level of price stability in certain tokens. And I think bring institutionals and more traditional finance into crypto and a notable asset TVL side of the token. You'll see a Bitcoin renaissance, I think, with coming back on chain with rollups on Bitcoin, L2s connected to Bitcoin and some of the Ordinals, Runes, inscriptions type of things, seeing some new life. They were previously toys, but now with the maturity of the tools,

Starting point is 00:26:31 I think those verticals are going to start. And ultimately, I think social is like, I don't know how to pronounce it. N-O-S-T-R, Noster. Noster, dude. There you go. You're not. You're clearly, you're going to get your Bitcoin maxi credentials pulled.

Starting point is 00:26:50 You may have been here since 2010. But Noster. So, yeah, things like Noster and other social tools, what we see kind of current events as we record this, the Telegram CEO, Durov, was just arrested in France for using unlicensed encryption, among other things. I want to get into that because you kind of described yourself earlier as a decentralization maxi, right? You've been here since the very beginning. I think that that is at the core of probably your belief system about crypto. And this is terrifying.

Starting point is 00:27:28 So, you know, it's still being unpacked, but we know that he's effectively been charged, Durov, as you mentioned, the CEO of Telegram. When you dig in, it's mostly being complicit for things that happened on the platform that he probably didn't even know about. Maybe there is a level where he was aware of it. But at the end of the day, he created something and the French are saying you failed to moderate the crime that's happening on there.

Starting point is 00:27:50 I mean, to me, that's like saying that Tim Cook should go to jail every time somebody uses an iPhone to send a text message for a drug deal, right? Or something similar. Or the CEO of Bic Pens should be arrested for everything that was written with a pen. Yeah, but I think it's fair to say that now more than ever, since crypto has come into existence, Bitcoin specifically, we're seeing examples or cracks in the facade of centralized systems that are scary and really show us why we need this in the first place. Yeah, there was the early in crypto, we had a takeoff of Google's motto, which has now

Starting point is 00:28:34 probably been deleted. I don't know. Don't be evil was Google.com's motto. and the crypto version is can't be evil and it's all about programming systems where you don't have a golden key you don't have a back door you don't have a centralized repository that uh as facebook ceo mark zuckerberg just said that the government can't knock on your door and say, censor all the COVID information or censor this political thing related to Joe Biden. And it's ultimately, if you don't build these systems, then the government can't knock on your door and say, start injecting these false stories or start censoring these stories that we don't like, which ultimately, as a free speech purist myself, I see that as absolutely the slippery slope is once you start saying yes to those types of censorship requests and Facebook, as they just admitted yesterday, they said they did say yes, and now they regret it.

Starting point is 00:29:54 Yeah, because it was it was Zuckerberg has come to say it's the wrong thing to do, but he built a centralized system. And so just like Telegram put himself in the position of being that master censor, and then you're subject to legal subpoenas, search warrants, national security letters from the government, which open the door to pure censorship. And so if you build a Telegram versus like a signal or WhatsApp without end-to-end encryption, just like the historical example on my Twitter of BlackBerry way back in the day, BlackBerry acceded to government requests, but they eventually failed because they, due to technology, they said yes to some requests of censorship and surveillance and no to others. And when you're a non-technical

Starting point is 00:30:56 politico inside the government, you're not seeing the technical limitations of the BlackBerry or the Telegram network and why they can comply in some instances and can't comply in others, you're just seeing a CEO tell you no. And as a sensor or a military intelligence person, et cetera, you're just going to see a CEO saying no, and you're going to think arrest them. And that's exactly what happened with Telegram. Whereas with Signal, with WhatsApp, the folks literally can't, not won't, they can't turn over the private chats because they're not accessible even to Signal and even to WhatsApp. And so that was the crucial difference. I pay a lot of attention to the Ukraine war

Starting point is 00:31:50 and a lot of the military intel, military tactics, et cetera. And I'm very interested in drones and kind of modern electronic warfare. Apparently a lot of that is going over telegrams specifically. Not Signal, not WhatsApp, not TikTok, not Facebook Messenger. It's going over Telegram. And that naturally makes it a really big target when you're in the middle of a European war and Russians are, and this is the real example, using telegram to communicate with soldiers, using telegram to target Iskander missiles as they get launched and fly to Ukraine. And this is widely known and widely published. I think there might be more to this. There were

Starting point is 00:32:44 some wild theories that he was hiding in France from the Russians the first day before the charges came out. But I guess nothing, I don't do tinfoil hats really, but nothing would surprise me at this point. But either way, if you were trying to cover it up, doing it in a way that is clearly suspect to anyone paying attention to free speech or censorship laws wouldn't be the way to do it. So, I mean, and I've spoken with lawyers in the United States already about

Starting point is 00:33:11 this and they said it's pretty clear that actually nothing he did would be on anyone's radar in the US based on what they've seen so far. So this is uniquely French. He does have a French passport, but what he's done, at least unless we start seeing emails where he was complicit in these things directly, wouldn't have even caused people to blink an eye in the United States, which is saying a lot because we have Ross Ulbricht in jail here and Charlie Schrems and CZs of the world have gotten in trouble in the United States. Yeah, that's absolutely true. And again, my gray beard is showing what France did is taking me back to the early 1990s. And there was an executive order in 1996 by Bill Clinton that, in my opinion, kicked open the

Starting point is 00:33:56 entire internet era. And a little bit of history, prior to 1996 in America, it was illegal to export strong encryption. If you put up a crypto program on a website based in the United States, and that crypto program was downloaded by a Canadian, someone in the UK, someone in China, pick your country, that was illegal if the encryption was stronger than 40-bit encryption. It was absolutely absurd. It was super weak encryption. And there was no way in the early 1990s that this policy was going to secure the internet. And what Bill Clinton did was he changed that. It's called export controls. So 1996, pre-Bill Clinton, if you downloaded that crypto package, you were literally exporting weapons grade munitions. That's how we see that prosecuted. Right. So we know it was the law, but did we ever see anybody get in trouble for that? Not so far, but you had some

Starting point is 00:35:05 really dramatic stories. Phil Zimmerman, the inventor of PGP, exported encryption the only way that it was legally done. He printed out in a book his source code for his software. He took this book on a plane, flew to Europe, and then scanned it in. That's how he legally exported his crypto software under that export controls regime. And so that's what France has. And that's what I'm drawing an analogy with is France has these antiquated export control laws. And so, you know, basically one of two things that Durov was arrested for was unregistered encryption, which is essentially that. And the U.S., again, got rid of that in 1996. And the other was failing to, you know, holding him responsible for all the chats on his entire chat system, which, you know, it would never happen in the United States. Yeah, I mean, we have that Constitution thing. Pretty helpful sometimes.

Starting point is 00:36:14 Yeah, the First Amendment's listed first for a reason. That's the big unlocker for all the other rights. If you don't have free speech and transparency, you can't have any of the other rights. If you don't have free speech and transparency, you can't have any of the other rights. I mean, if you're an Elon Musk or a similar character, you might think twice at this point about where you fly, where you land, and if it's worth it. No, that's absolutely right. And I'm sure he's got his lawyers double-checking that they have the proper encryption licenses for France if he ever flies there. That's a very real risk now for every social media CEO. You can't imagine that anyone's too excited right now to be the face

Starting point is 00:36:59 of a large tech company or to build something similar or to improve on one of these messaging or social services in any sort of centralized manner. I know, but again, all of this speaks to build decentralized, build censorship resistant. It's, you know, the inputs, the real life events, all of those reach an inevitable conclusion of build decentralized. So does that mean that, in theory, we'll see some Satoshi-like anonymous character or DAO or organization that builds the social networks and messaging of the future. I mean, we talked about Nostra and those things, but let's be real.

Starting point is 00:37:47 None of these things have caught any sort of flame as of yet. But if there's literally no incentive to be the tech billionaire guy who builds it in the first place, we might actually see that. That's exactly right. To me, it's a story of both network effect and user experience. And crypto has, and decentralized software frequently has, less than stellar user experience. You've got to do this private key thing and then write it down and put it in a vault, and then I can chat with my buddy. Whereas I can download this other app and just start chatting with my buddy.

Starting point is 00:38:28 And we've got to solve those kinds of problems. Otherwise, people are just going to always use the easiest app to use. And those are going to be the ones that are easily censored. Most people at the end of the day care about free speech and privacy and censorship as much as it can, until it becomes an inconvenience.

Starting point is 00:38:47 That's exactly right. Like I said, you know, I was talking to you while I was doing this. I was like, I'm having some issues with Chrome. Well, I don't always use Chrome, but I know that there's some issues with Chrome and that maybe I should be using a Brave or DuckDuckGo or whatever the preferred one. And I largely do those for certain things. But even me, right? Yeah. The user experience just pushes people in a particular direction and that's inevitable. And that's on us. That's on us as builders to build great products that users want to use. And that's

Starting point is 00:39:19 true for crypto and non-crypto. We just, as a sci sci-fi author John Scalzi says, we're playing the game of life on a higher difficulty setting. Yeah, for people who are listening, you can't see, but Jeff is sitting in space right now. Unless that's just like New York 2055. But I have a feeling, you know, it's a futuristic space city. Jeff and I always get into space and I can't allow him to show up without asking some things. There's still some intersections here between crypto and what's happening with space, correct? There are. There are.

Starting point is 00:39:56 One of my older projects, but still around and still not only alive and kicking, but launching is Space Chain. It's been around since 2017. And it's, as far as I'm aware, the only startup on the entire planet that has six satellite launches under its belt. You've got the bigs, Lockheed Martin, you've got SpaceX and Starlink doing their thing. But we're the only startup that's managed to get to space six. And we have an upcoming launch to the International Space Station, which will be our seventh launch. So we're going to have a node on the space station that will receive periodic satellite internet, and it'll be able to sign certain messages in a multisig and do some other blockchain-level demonstrations from the International Space Station, which is just so exciting. I've got to imagine the way you described that, that maybe now, since our last, there's more of an AI element too, than we would have potentially anticipated before,

Starting point is 00:41:10 but maybe not. So can we do space, AI and crypto? There is. Yeah. You know, let's, let's throw a couple more buzzwords in there. No, just kidding. Yeah. AI actually helps in a number of ways from satellite targeting. AI helps on the launch side, helps Elon get the rockets up to the International Space Station. There's AI embedded in the node to do fraud proofing to a certain extent. This crypto transaction kind of smells bad. This one smells good. That kind of evaluation on the fraud side. And then in terms of what we call remote sensing, that's where satellites are looking down on Earth. There's a lot of AI involved in.

Starting point is 00:42:03 You have an image from a satellite high up, and then there's a lot of AI processing that's going on. I'll give you some specific examples. One is Walmart and other retailers, they look at their parking lots from space and they decide, okay, this parking lot has very little utilization. We can expand the store or it's always crowded. So we need to expand the parking lot to mining and geology. They always take a first look, gold miners, silver miners, copper miners, always take a first look from space and then narrow it down from there. And it's not just, okay, this rock is red,

Starting point is 00:42:47 so it probably has copper in it. It's really some fascinating conditions, such as this African village has dug a number of holes in this area. Therefore, the villagers know- We can go steal their gold. That's right. The villagers know there's gold, so let's check that out as well. I think I saw the movie Blood Diamond.

Starting point is 00:43:11 I know how that is. That's sad. We haven't really seen the manifestation of the AI crypto intersection, but I would imagine you think there's quite a bit there potentially. I mean, we see Nvidia stock go up and then anything that says AI in it for crypto goes up like 3x and then drops a week later. But beyond the speculative price action, I don't think we've seen anything break through yet. Yeah, I agree with that. There's a ton of noise, but there is signal too. And I stratify it

Starting point is 00:43:46 in this way from low to high on the stack. At the lowest level, I think crypto can intersect with GPU resources. So if you're trying to build a decentralized chat GPT, you got to have the horsepower. And to get the horsepower, you're naturally going to need resource allocation. And to me, that's a marketplace, long story short. And so you have marketplaces for GPU resources. The next layer up from that is training and inference. Inference is like queries, like going to chat GPT. And training is using all those GPUs to build the models. And inference, you need the horsepower from that lower layer of GPU resources. So now you got training and inference marketplaces.

Starting point is 00:44:37 And this is real today in the Morpheus project. And Eric Voorhees' Venice.ai, which is a kind of a decentralized chat GPT, is looking at Morpheus for its lower layer. The third layer in the stack is literally chat GPT itself. You've got a decentralized chat GPT, a decentralized API that you can hit where you're talking to a number of decentralized resources. You're not talking to Sam Altman's personal identifying information vacuum. And then... I did not scan my eyeball for WorldCoin. I'm not sure.

Starting point is 00:45:20 Exactly. Although they're probably scanning my eyeball right now through my camera here, but whatever. And yeah, they're getting our voice in our face and they'll be Robo Scott and Robo Jeff doing podcasts before you know it. And then the final layer is you've got AI agents. And this kind of moves into the science fiction of I've got got a you know imagining i've got a personalized ai assistant and i can tell uh i'll give her the name ashley and i can tell ashley to you know do x y and z like fix my darn chrome to to dropbox and uh ashley will uh know what i'm talking about, number one, and then have that ability to actually do that. So connecting those AI agents to crypto is kind of the final stage or closing the loop where I can tell Ashley and trust Ashley, the AI agent to, okay, Ashley, I saw that Bitcoin just nosedived price-wise,

Starting point is 00:46:25 so buy some more and then collateralize it into a lending market and loop it several times for leverage. And Ashley will say, okay, and she'll run off and do all that stuff and she'll have the private keys that queue up the transactions. And then the final step is a transaction summary in front of me. And I click, okay.

Starting point is 00:46:49 And that's a crypto signature that endorses all of the things that AI actually said. So I think there's a lot of AI signal. There's real AI in resource allocation, in crypto trading, in as the world gets more complex, AI will help you parse it. But there's a whole lot of, I heard about AI yesterday, so I staple gunned AI onto my pitch deck. Well, that's also Bitcoin Layer 2s, by the way.

Starting point is 00:47:19 Right. So anywhere, and I think it's fair to say, anywhere that some sort of hype accrues in crypto, a whole bunch of tourists jump in there. And not so different from Long Island blockchain iced tea, right? In the markets, there's a time you just put blockchain in there, put AI in there, put whatever in there, and your stock or token goes up by many multiples. I have to ask you, why did you choose Ashley? Because my wife's three of her five best friends are Ashley in our town. And she even took a picture of me where all three Ashleys were in her backseat at the same time. Is Ashley now the, is that the-

Starting point is 00:48:00 That's hilarious. There was a Canadian comedy show, Kids in the Hall, and they had this little bit, 30 Helens agree, and they got a bunch of Helens together. No, I didn't want to dive too much into politics, but allegedly there are three gatekeepers of Joe Biden in his advanced age. There's Anthony, Ashley, and Annie. And allegedly, they gatekeep everyone who can see Joe Biden. And so, yeah. Crypto investors in the United States face some major challenges. One of them is that there's almost no way to get exposure to the asset class inside of your traditional investment vehicles. The other thing is the taxes. They are absolutely atrocious. What if I told you there was a way to solve both of these problems? Well, there is, and it's with a self-directed IRA from iTrust Capital. Guys, not only can you open a new

Starting point is 00:48:56 self-directed IRA and fund it with the limits each year, but you can actually convert over from your 401k, your Roth IRA IRA any other IRA that you already have and you can do that tax-free just transferring over the balance and then you can go to cash buy as much Bitcoin and you want and not pay taxes when you sell it you absolutely have to try this if you are in the United States use the link down below it's bit.ly slash I trust dash Scott. That's B-I-T dot L-Y slash I-T-R-U-S-T dash S-C-O-T-T. You have to try this now. So we're going to give Joe Biden's gatekeeper to become our chat TBT bot. Great. Our A-A bot. It's interesting. I would have thought Jill would have been one of those,

Starting point is 00:49:40 but hey, what do I know about politics? And so as we kind of come to the end here, is there any final thing? You mentioned Morpheus, by the way, and you mentioned Eric Voorhees. So I thought that was really interesting because Eric Voorhees with Venice sort of said, like, come for the data, I don't have it. It doesn't exist. Good luck, right? So I think that that's the wave of the future if you're building something like one of these. But Morpheus, I know Ryan Condren, who works with you guys, obviously, on Lumarin and Morpheus, and that's pretty awesome too. It is. It really is. And I'll lead into that by saying, boy, the Google search experience really sucks. Over the past five years and moving into the past, I'd say, six to 12 months when Google added AI LL time when you can, you know, ask basic questions and get a decentralized, uncensored answer.

Starting point is 00:50:53 And I think that's far more powerful than what the Google search engine has become. It's become a neutered engine versus even what Google was five years ago. And Venice.ai and I can't name a competitor, but presumably their competitors are going to just sweep the floor in terms of user experience because you'll be able to, you know, ask basic questions. And so you don't have to go to Wikipedia, you know, basic picking a domain biology questions, you know, about I love dogs, I have dogs and cats, and, you know, maybe my dog is limping. So I need some anatomy questions, I can have a conversation with Venice AI and learn all about biology, or I can, you know, I need to find a website and I can have a conversation with venice.ai and know it's not censored.

Starting point is 00:51:47 So that's so, so powerful. And Morpheus, again, far more signal than noise. And I think they're going to power in the future, both Venice and a number of other AI projects. Absolutely love it, Jeff. Where can people follow, check out Hemi? When is that launching? When can people start developing on it?

Starting point is 00:52:09 Can they already give us the pitch? Join, go to Hemi.xyz. We've got our incentivized testnet live now. So you can build on Hemi right now. Docs at docs.hemi.xyz. Follow us on Twitter, Hemi underscore XYZ. We're launching Mainnet in one to two months. And right now we're just testing, testing, testing. I'm Mr. Field Test Engineer for the next little while, just trying to break it and getting ready for that go live, which is going to be really exciting. I have a feeling that's a role you love.

Starting point is 00:52:55 It is. It is. But we got to put meat behind our words that Hemi is the network uniting the king and queen of crypto, Bitcoin and Ethereum. Hemi is what's next after the current crop of L2s. Unite the clones. Love it. Yeah, braveheart. You know, I didn't commit to that. I was going to say it like in the full,

Starting point is 00:53:19 and then I just kind of half-assed it. Oh, you should have. Give me another. Unite the clones. I feel like it's off, but I like it. There you go. That was a good take, too. Yeah, my middle name is McCloud,

Starting point is 00:53:31 so I've got from the clown McCloud. I like that, too. Perfect. Everybody gets it. There's a little something in Braveheart for everyone. There really is. Yeah, I love it. All right, well, maybe in the end,

Starting point is 00:53:42 we scream freedom on the way out for Pavel Durov and we have freedom. Hopefully without the torture in advance. Jeff, thank you so much. Always a pleasure to have you, man. This has been great, Scott. It's always good to catch up. Do it again soon. That's dope.

The Wolf Of All Streets - Is Bitcoin Ready For THIS? Jeff Garzik Reveals A Game-Changing Revolution!

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