How I got started building on Bitcoin.

Jason is smart. His points about Bitcoin need a detailed response: - Other investment opportunities: I agree with Jason that, compared to 2020 or even 2023, there are more investment opportunities outside of Bitcoin now. Earlier, Bitcoin felt like the only/main frontier opportunity. Now AI, and even robotics, have changed that. However, not everyone can get involved with AI & robotics companies at seed or series A stages, where most of the early value is. Bitcoin is still in its “pre-IPO” days with open access for everyone. - Offers nothing beyond a store of value: BTC very recently got self-custodial yield. Like ETH and SOL, BTC is a productive asset that can generate yield. BTC just got native yield. That takes BTC beyond a store of value and makes it work like a productive asset. Onchain Bitcoin capital markets are already here. This will reprice the asset. - Bitcoin as a consensus trade: Bitcoin did get adoption from institutions, but it’s far from a consensus trade. Large asset managers still hold it as a risk-on asset in a small percentage of portfolios. AI has redirected a lot of liquidity and attention away from Bitcoin, which makes it an even more non-consensus trade now. - AI vs Bitcoin: I don’t view things as AI vs Bitcoin. There might be some attention/liquidity competition, but these are two separate segments, each adding its own value and impact. It’s not zero-sum. Your gold savings serve a very different purpose than your stock portfolio. Jason is a master at driving engagement (good for him!), but these topics are worth discussing anyway. Namely: - How has the world changed because of AI, and should you reconsider how much stock you own vs. how much BTC/gold? - Within the stock portfolio, how much is a bet on AI vs. other sectors? - Are there Bitcoin-adjacent opportunities that have higher risk but higher returns? - Are there ways to get involved in earlier-stage tech opportunities? (hard for most) Personally, I’m long Bitcoin as I believe it should be 150K-200K+ by the end of 2028. More importantly, BTC is becoming a productive asset, and Bitcoin-adjacent opportunities are closer to seed/series-A returns, yet are publicly available. AI will continue to have a massive impact, but it's not zero-sum against BTC for me.

Good morning, planning our next 2-week sprint. Excited about all we can get done!

When handling private keys, we’d move to a room with no devices. No phones. No TV. We were paranoid that a hacked device could record or listen in. Didn’t realize the TVs were *literally* 1st party programmed for full-on spying. Only the paranoid survive.

Optimists build the future, have fun along the way, and win in the end.

Notes from leads offsite in New York: - AI security and quantum are two big upcoming challenges, not just for Stacks but for the broader Bitcoin ecosystem. There is an opportunity to show leadership here. - Growth of BTC deployed in bonds remains the focus. The current bottleneck is institutional custodian integrations; custodians need to be live and tested before larger capital flows into bonds. We’ve made great progress on this lately. - We’re organizing labs into nimble teams that are AI-pilled. Agility matters in this new AI world. 1-3 person teams with tons of agents will run most work streams. We’re building the “AI factory” that’ll automate and enhance our audits, testing, release cadence, and more. The market has a lot of fear about AI finding bugs or breaking encryption, along with fears of an acceleration toward quantum computers. We see these as opportunities to roll up our sleeves and take action. We can reach a state where code is formally verified, and frontier models run continuous tests. Stacks devs are already researching steps towards a post-quantum world. We left the NYC offsite more energized than ever. The work we’re doing on Bitcoin capital markets and the safety of these systems matters more than ever. We embrace the new tools and a changing world. Forward!

The world might look scary right now. But every bug that AI finds only makes the software stronger in the long term. Same goes for Bitcoin and crypto. Projects that adapt will emerge stronger and resilient.

Cybersecurity feels like a frontier again. Teams that stay nimble, learn fast, and adapt continuously will thrive. Let’s go!

Protest in NYC. People asking to “freeze AI”. A few steps away, offsite of Stacks Labs: discussing going all-in on AI for code safety. Two completely different realities, unfolding side by side as our world changes.

Bitcoin’s execution layer. Increasingly convinced that there will likely be one main execution layer for Bitcoin. Game theory of staking dynamics, combined with liquidity concentration, points to this. Staking dynamics: Ethereum has one major source of low-risk yield: the consensus yield. Even though you could earn higher-risk, higher-return yield elsewhere, most capital goes to the lowest-risk option: the effective ETH fed rate. Multiple on-chain Bitcoin yield options would converge on the lowest-risk yield that is meaningful enough. Offering higher yield with added risk can’t lure that capital away. The Bitcoin layer that can offer the effective BTC fed rate yield at scale is the one with the largest market cap and economy size. Liquidity concentration: We saw this with Solana vs. Ethereum L2s. A single execution chain offers better UX, and everyone benefits from concentrated liquidity rather than fragmented liquidity and assets spread across multiple L2s (the various Ethereum ones). We can try to put a valuation framework for what Bitcoin’s execution layer should be worth (an exercise for another post). Right now, I’m just making the point that the probability of getting N different execution layers is very low (unstable equilibrium and bad UX for users). Either one major execution layer exists where, say, 10-30% of BTC supply is actively deployed, or Bitcoin remains a passive asset. I’m an optimist by nature; I believe that we’ll get one major Bitcoin execution layer.

I always pictured the subconscious as something buried deep in the brain that we cannot access. The @doristsao discovery suggests that conscious & subconscious (visual info) may timeshare the same neural circuits. The neurons rapidly switch between the two without us noticing!

Resting heart rate before bed is the ultimate wellness signal. Sleep, stress, workouts, nutrition. So much of how you live shows up in that one number.

We’re all just living in Elon’s simulation.

I agree with Will that there seems to be nowhere safe to park your savings. The world seems increasingly uncertain. Fixing upcoming issues with gold, cash, software stocks etc might be impossible. Bitcoin’s quantum challenges are hard, but solvable. We’re working on it!

I landed back from Singapore on Sat morning. It’s Thur now, and my sleep still hasn’t recovered. And this is someone who optimizes jet lag, sleep timing, meals/activity, supplements, etc., to the max. International travel is biological wreckage.

Silicon is everywhere in the universe. We taught sand how to think. We’re likely not the only ones.

The frontier of bitcoin is privacy, post-quantum, and safety from AI threats. We’re pushing this frontier @Stacks 👊

The new CEO officially started today. Bitcoin bond 2 fully sold out. Bitcoin still needs a quantum upgrade. blockstack:native

Bitcoin bond 2 is fully sold out! 500 BTC more deployed into @Stacks for 3% yield. We saw 45M additional STX locked; approx 6M can be linked back to this bond. The mechanism is working onchain, it’s time to put more fuel into this now.