Finale conversation at the Baltic Honey Badger Conference in Riga, Latvia. The longest running bitcoin only conference in the world.
Video: https://primal.net/e/note1ysx6vqm9h4mlyq0yel3kxplm4xcuhwtwjgzwuhy3ne4thehsntwschsdzw
ODELL on Nostr: https://primal.net/odell
Jack Dorsey on Nostr: https://primal.net/jack
Jack Mallers on Nostr: https://primal.net/jackmallers
Grant Gilliam on Nostr: https://primal.net/grant
Max Keidun on Nostr: https://primal.net/p/npub1797h37mc98f6363m5nysxd0t2swuz7nxq4z83saw77em3czld6xqvuar68
More info about Ten31: https://ten31.vc
More info about Strike: https://strike.me
More info about Block: https://block.xyz
More info about HodlHodl: https://hodlhodl.com
More info about Debifi: https://debifi.com
website: https://citadeldispatch.com
nostr live chat: https://citadeldispatch.com/stream
nostr account: https://primal.net/odell
youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@citadeldispatch
stream sats to the show: https://www.fountain.fm/
(00:00:00) Introduction and Panelist Welcome
(00:00:38) Opening Remarks and Event Significance
(00:01:31) Panelist Introductions
(00:01:55) Building Bitcoin Businesses
(00:02:50) Jack Mallers on Building Strike
(00:07:59) Bitcoin Business Profitability and Philosophy
(00:10:14) Bitcoiners' Lean Lifestyle
(00:12:11) Challenges of Building Bitcoin Companies
(00:13:00) Jack Dorsey Joins the Panel
(00:14:02) Square's Transition to Block and Bitcoin
(00:17:16) Defining a Bitcoin Company
(00:18:56) Corporate vs. Open Source in Bitcoin
(00:21:16) Regulatory Challenges for Bitcoin Companies
(00:24:00) Future of Bitcoin in Corporations
(00:28:11) Supporting Open Source Development
(00:31:05) Funding and Investment in Bitcoin
(00:35:29) VCs and Bitcoin Investment
(00:39:01) Control and Influence in Bitcoin
(00:44:56) Bitcoin's Adoption and Market Dynamics
(00:49:00) Attracting and Retaining Bitcoin Developers
(00:56:54) Human Connection and Company Culture
(01:00:55) Intersection of Bitcoin, AI, and Nostr
(01:03:01) Open Source vs. Corporate Development
(01:09:05) Building Trust in Bitcoin Products
(01:17:31) Closing Remarks and Thank Yous
[00:00:00]
Unknown:
Please welcome us on stage Odell, Max Kaye, Grand Gilliam, Jack Dorsey, and Jack Mullers?
[00:00:10] ODELL:
Correct. Correct. Thank you, sir. I actually don't know where Mallers is. Thank you, Miles. And also, big Jack. Jack Dorsey is having a conversation real quick and he's gonna come back out here and moderate this panel. But until then, I'll be the moderator. First off, foremost, I want to, thank you all for coming to this event. And I wanna thank Max and Anna and the rest of the Honey Badger crew. This event particularly is incredibly special to me. 2019 Riga was the first time I ever spoke on stage. I'm pretty sure, which is crazy. That was only 5 years ago. It feels like a decade. Can we get a huge round of applause for Jack Mallers?
And, yeah, it just means a lot. It's it's kinda crazy how far we've come. And, you guys have been a huge part of it. So thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for coming. I still remember you in 2019 drunk in Old Town. So that's one of the fond memories.
[00:01:28] Max Keidun:
Fake news. Fake news.
[00:01:31] ODELL:
So I'm joined here, with Max, obviously. We have Grant, who's my fellow partner at 10:31. And we have Jack here, who's, founder and CEO of Strike. And then sitting next to him is Jack Dorsey, cofounder of Twitter and Square, now Block. So, guys, I mean, I think we can talk about whatever the hell we want to talk about. Bitcoin only. I mean, I I wanna I kinda wanna talk about building Bitcoin businesses. I think, you know, Grant had an earlier, an earlier presentation talking about how moving to a Bitcoin standard changes the calculation when you are building businesses. You know, running a business is an incredibly hard thing to do to begin with.
Running a a business under a Bitcoin standard might be even more difficult. And all you guys are doing it, and you're building businesses, and some of you are doing it at a scale that is is quite extraordinary. So with that said, since Jack just stepped up on stage, why don't we start with Jack? How do you think about that building out Strike and, you know, expanding it around the world under a Bitcoin standard or a looming Bitcoin standard?
[00:02:51] Jack Mallers:
Is my mic on? Yeah. What's going on? How are you guys? Building a Bitcoin business. I don't know if you guys caught Grant's keynote earlier. It was phenomenal. It was around a simple point that's lost on the world today of a a business should be profitable. It's a really core tenet of how we've built Strike. We think of profitability more than just a financial obligation. We think of it as a moral obligation. We wanna be net producers to society. We think that, you know, if you're producing more value for the world than you're consuming from the world, then you're making the world a better place. Another way of saying that financially is being a profitable business. So that's always been a core focus and tenant for us. So building something that has extremely low cost, extremely high margins, extremely high scale from, like, a a pure business standpoint is huge. And, again, we think of it as 1st moral because we're quite literally to the definition making the world a better place is if what we're producing is being valued more by our customers than we need to consume to produce it. And then, of course, we get to stack a lot of Sats with cash flows, and we think it's building in a massive capital base with us. So I think that's, like, the core tenant of where to start, build a culture around that. Not everyone wants to sign up for that. Not everyone agrees with that worldview, but we do at Stripe. And then from there, there's all sorts of really amazing things that flourish from Bitcoin as the heart and the pulse and the nucleus of a company, which I can talk about, but I guess I'll stop there. I don't know if that was, what you wanted me to say. I mean, I just I want you to speak your mind. I'm not I'm not expecting you to say anything. I'm I I do that often. Yeah. That was what was on my mind. It is it is kinda crazy that
[00:04:38] ODELL:
there's, like, 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars of assets under management and the just the basic concept of just run a profitable business is, really hard for people to grok. And Bitcoiners are are built different in a lot of ways. I think Bitcoiners it's if if you've been in the space for long enough, your lifestyle itself is very lean. You know, we have, you know, Pierre Pierre Richard has famously said, if you own chairs, you're short Bitcoin. Right? And that's pretty crazy and that, yes, it is a meme, but every meme is based in reality. Right? And and it's this idea of trying to, you know, really, really keep your whole lifestyle as lean as possible, as productive as possible, and as profitable as possible. Yeah. I mean, I'm gonna
[00:05:23] Jack Mallers:
I'm gonna take this way over the top now. Nice. So yeah. Yeah. Here we go. Just bear with me for a second. I like the analogy. I've said it many times before of, death to life, Bitcoin to money. This is aggressive and emotional, but what I mean by that is, you know, the only way I can value my life, which is a proxy for the time that I'm allowed on the planet, is because I know for certainty I will die. Right? I I wouldn't be thinking about reproducing or getting married or I'd go to the gym in 10000 fucking years. Who would care if I could live forever? But it's the promise that my time is finite is the reason I can value it. And the reason my life is value valuable and I wanna catch sunsets, and I wanna reproduce, and I wanna be healthy, and I'm not gonna eat the doughnut, I'm gonna eat a rib eye, is for that very simple reason. Monetary energy has been infinite. Right? How many dollars can exist? As many as they want. And so it's been impossible to value money ever.
Bitcoin is that finite promise in the same way that death allows us to value our lives, which is very, very important. Right? Like the Steve Jobs quote, like, death is the change agent for life. It's very valuable to our our species. Bitcoin gives that not only to all of us as individuals, but to companies. All of a sudden, when you have a cost of capital, a way to value something, you see businesses in the fiat world where they just take excess cash, excess VC funding, and they pour it into growth. It's impossible to understand what to value, new products, new employees, new marketing. And it doesn't who knows if it's working or not? It could produce no it could produce no net profits, and they're gonna get 10 x the valuation. It doesn't make any sense. And so for a business at our core, we operate on Bitcoin, meaning that we understand the true value of capital of money. So internally at the company, we think over the last 10 years, Bitcoin has produced 63% annualized returns on average over the last decade.
So we think at the business, if we can't build anything that can produce at least 63.1% returns on a year over year basis, it's not worth our time and our energy, which is phenomenal. Right? So, you know, if someone gave me a $1,000,000,000 to help build Stripe some more, there's a very good chance I wouldn't hire one more fucking person. I might just buy a $1,000,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. And that's a huge that's that finite promise of death, right, which allows us to value capital and decisions. So we only build things people value. We only build things that people care about. We keep our team lean, we keep our costs low, and we just focus on being net producers for society. But I like that analogy of death to life, Bitcoin to money because now we have something to measure against that makes it all worth it. Before, you're kind of just swimming in no man's land. Right? And I I think you see that, stock markets, equities, venture capital, it's a mess. So really, really core. I mean, without Bitcoin, obviously, Stripe would be nothing, but even, like, our identity, and how we make decisions, that that capital measurement is is how we do everything every day.
[00:08:25] ODELL:
Yeah. I don't wanna follow that straight fire. You're welcome to.
[00:08:29] Grant Gilliam:
I don't know how you follow that. We could talk about how great my keynote was again. It was great. But Yeah. No. The point I was trying to make during it was that all you really need to do sort of, like, come back to the the financial side of it is generate net positive Sats flows, and you are better off. We're used to this world where you have to outpace inflation to grow. If you're not keeping up with inflation inflation, then you're falling behind. And everyone's really worried about how do you generate incremental yield on your Bitcoin, but really all you need is just net positive sats flow. And so I think another way of saying it is sats flow is the real yield on Bitcoin.
I'm hearing deep thoughts from Jack saying it's about morality and life. And so maybe sats flow is the real yield is wrong. Maybe it's morality is the real yield on Bitcoin or life is the real yield on Bitcoin.
[00:09:30] Jack Mallers:
No. Like, energy is the base layer of money. Right? Like, money is our time and energy in an abstracted form. So the problem with society, like, you know, fix the money, fix the world, what's the opposite of that? Break the money, break society? Something along those lines. Right? So if energy is the base layer of of money, then if the money's bad and we can't value our energy, then everything gets all fucked up. And if you wanna talk about it on the topic of a company, then, yeah, how many people do you need to hire? How much money should you be spending on marketing? How many products do you need? How many countries should you be in? It's impossible to value that in the same way that if I'm gonna live forever, should I go to the gym today?
It's an impossible question to answer. Right? Because you have nothing to measure against. So that's the whole point is if, like, energy is the base layer of money as a concept, and and and now we can measure it, then, like, everything changes. That's all I was trying to say. You make make real decisions, produce real value.
[00:10:34] ODELL:
Yeah. No. You you both make a lot of sense. Good. I mean, Max, you've been building out Huddl Huddl and now Debutify, for years. How do you think about it? Do you have
[00:10:47] Max Keidun:
Pretty much complicated.
[00:10:48] ODELL:
Can we get a huge round of applause for for Jack Dorsey?
[00:10:54] Jack Mallers:
Jack, thank you for joining us. Thanks for showing up late. It means a lot.
[00:11:00] ODELL:
Nobody told me this was starting. So I I let us off, but you're supposed to be the moderator of this panel. So feel free to just start it. No. Go ahead.
[00:11:08] Jack Dorsey:
You want me to continue? I can do that for you. I don't know what you're saying. I have no context whatsoever.
[00:11:13] ODELL:
It. So, Max, what what are your thoughts here?
[00:11:17] Max Keidun:
Building, companies on Bitcoin is complicated because everyone thinks that, well, I'd rather buy some Bitcoin and outperform any company out there. And, like, I think Grant can align to that because, like, Bitcoin is, like, super performing asset. And, it's way more simpler. You know, just buy Bitcoin, maybe borrow against that, buy more. This is what Saylor is doing. But, then again, some companies are pretty much successful. And if they're not being built, then there's no added value. And the price of Bitcoin is just just not gonna go up up if it's that important for some people. And, yeah. And we've been doing this on top of multisig, which is way more complicated than doing something else in a non custodial way, peer to peer, and that's, I think, one of the toughest market inside of the Bitcoin to build on. Specifically for HODL. HODL is also allows to do an anonymity, and, that's kind of goes with regulation, and there's a certain pressure on that side. So keeping up with all the core values of Bitcoin is really hard, but it pays off in the end.
[00:12:29] ODELL:
Do you have any advice for people in this room that might be thinking about Don't do that.
[00:12:34] Max Keidun:
Fair enough. I mean, build, build business on top of Bitcoin if you're crazy enough. My first advice is just, you know, buy Bitcoin, learn about it, support businesses that are already there. If you wanna build a proper business on top of Bitcoin, think twice. Yeah. I mean, running businesses is incredibly difficult. Know what you're asking. Business on top of a Bitcoin is, like, 10 times more difficult. Exactly.
[00:12:59] ODELL:
Especially yes. I I mean, it's it's rough out there, but people keep slinging it. Jack, I mean, you are, a shareholder of X, and you've also built one of, the largest Bitcoin businesses in the world. What is how how do you think about how do you think about this this transition of Square, now Block, getting more and more involved with Bitcoin? I mean, from my view, it's been very deliberate, and it's been really impressive to watch you during that kind of transitionary period. How do you think about that? Thank you. I think that's one of the few compliments you've ever given me.
[00:13:42] Jack Dorsey:
How do I think about it? I'm I'm very proud of it. I I, as, as Max said, like, it's it's I don't I don't think, there can be a true Bitcoin company in the context of the of the governments that that we that we build in, and I think that's going to be increasingly true as as time goes on. So I think we can be at best Bitcoin adjacent, and I think we can at best, you know, build businesses on top of this on top of this protocol and do whatever it takes to to help address, issues that we see, which are number 1, like, for us, it's accessibility to Bitcoin, making it just super easy to get in in whatever use case that that makes sense.
Number 2 is to make it more secure. And for us, that manifest is mining better mining hardware, that's made in the US. That's open source. Bit key, self custodial wallets. Just more options around securing and and ideally in the future, more privacy options as well. And then 3 is making it more usable every day, and that's where we get into the the currency part. And I think, Jack has done an incredible job here in leading that, and there's a bunch of, other at scale implementations of what it feels like to to pay with Bitcoin. Zaps on Nasr being the biggest at scale implementation. If you haven't how how many people have Zapped on Nasr in this audience?
Yeah. This is why this is why I love the small Bitcoin conferences because they're actually focused on living up to the to the messaging and the and the principles, and and it's it's about the action. But I I think it's going to become increasingly hard to to run a Bitcoin business because I don't think it really can exist. I I think we have to be somewhat adjacent, and there'll be things that are principally in Bitcoin that we all love and that we all fight for that we can't do as a company. And that's a really unfortunate intersection.
We can continue to push for it and lobby for it and and do all these things, but the reality is those walls feel like they're closing more and more. And we're seeing actions of what it means to have a a choke point on a service such as what what happened with Pavel and Telegram. When you have a CEO, the CEO can be called in front of congress, can be arrested, can be assassinated. One of the greatest gifts Satoshi gave us is we don't know who this person is, and, they disappeared. And even if they came back, it wouldn't matter much. You can't do that in a in a corporate context as far as I know. But you can, evolve your company to be more focused on open source, to contribute more to free open source software, to doing more of your work in public transparently, and to contribute to open protocols such as Bitcoin and Aster, that you may not benefit from directly as a company.
But if other people benefit, you eventually will if you're building products on those protocols. And I I think that's a a reasonable compromise to being a Bitcoin company as as we'd want it to to be known. Clap for Matt. You want me to take over moderation? You you promise you're gonna Jack, what are your thoughts on this?
[00:17:17] Jack Mallers:
On being a Bitcoin company? I I answered before you showed up. I can answer again if you want. Oh, sorry. It's okay. Grand answer is fine. You. I I mean, with the way we think about it at strike as being like of the Bitcoin company a Bitcoin company, it's so I won't I I gave an analogy about death and stuff. It was intense. I want to yeah. Talk about it later. I think, like, a a core principle for Strike is I don't think that there are many companies focused on Bitcoin, and I think Bitcoin is the opportunity. Like, when we were conceptualizing the business, we're like, okay.
Coinbase and Binance, those are crypto exchanges. BlackRock is an asset manager. Fidelity is a brokerage service. Like, Bitcoin seems to be the opportunity. If you look at Coinbase's quarterly filings, half of its volume is Bitcoin. So you can make the argument that at least half the business is Bitcoin, but if you were to take Bitcoin out of Coinbase, the whole thing probably falls apart, yet they can't focus on it if their life fucking depended on it. And so at Stripe, when we say, like, we're a Bitcoin company, I agree with Jack.
We're a centralized regulated, highly regulated audited organization. We don't pretend that we're not. Right? Like, sometimes people download Strike and they're like, you're KYC ing me, man. It's like, yeah. There's, like, government guns to my head. I don't I'm not shy about that. But when I say we're a Bitcoin company, I'm long Bitcoin short crypto through strike. Right? Like, I think Brian and not to overly pick on Brian, but I think focus on crypto versus focus on Bitcoin compounds. And I I don't know if that is what you meant in, like, being a Bitcoin company, but I mean, I just completely disagree with Jack,
[00:18:59] ODELL:
but it's a semantics argument. Which one? Chuck. I said, why'd you guys have to sit next to each other? You said I agree I agree with Mallers. Okay. I I think every business is going to be a Bitcoin business, and I think every person is going to be a Bitcoiner. But I do respect this concept that if you're if you're building true FreedomTech under, like, the ethos of Bitcoin and very aligned with the ethos of Bitcoin, it's incredibly difficult to do that with a centralized structure in place and having a CEO in place. Now I will say, you know, Huddl, Huddl, and Debify are actually this very interesting example here of while they do have a centralized structure in terms of leadership, they don't take custody of funds, right, which is a just a paradigm shift in how you could run a financial services business. Like, that was never even possible before Bitcoin existed.
So I would take it back to you, Dorsey. It feels weird calling you Dorsey. I'm gonna call you Jack, and I'm gonna call you Mallers. Does that work? Just stay. No. Don't take it the same way. What what do you think about that? Like, is there something there in terms of if you're running a business, Like, the self custody aspect really changes a lot of things. Yeah. Yeah. I I I think there's a I think there's a different a a number of different creative approaches
[00:20:21] Jack Dorsey:
to this work. I think it's, I I think it, probably much not not to diminish the effort, but in in our context, it's probably much harder to do things like that with the fact that we have all these other businesses that are that are highly regulated. And I the things I would want to do, I'd probably want to start as a separate startup because it would be far easier and we could take far more far more risk. But given the the scale that we're at, not just with Bitcoin. It may have nothing to do with Bitcoin. It has everything to do with the rest of our business and competitive dynamics. And just look at just look at New York as example and operating Bitcoin products within New York as an example.
It is nearly impossible. It's a state that is full of all the bankers, and, that makes it very difficult to even ship something like Bitkey within that state, such that most Bitcoin companies that get to scale won't even try New York and or exit from it. And New York is talking to other states to to follow. And these these regulations are gonna become more and more fragmented, and companies like ours will have to go state by state by state by state. And the amount of work to differentiate your product by state by state level is just immense. I mean, it it compounds into something that, it just doesn't make sense to launch some things in that case. Now that's not true of every product, of course, and and, again, there's ways around it and the the bit license and everything that they're considering with with Lightning, but that that's gonna be to me, in in my view, we're gonna see more of that, not less of it.
[00:22:18] Jack Mallers:
I think, what do you think about every company eventually does something with Bitcoin? I made a comment. So I think, the S and P 500 or, like, US capital markets, the stock market, is generally a pretty good proxy to understand what's going on in the world because it's what had to have been monetized after we left the gold standard. Right? It's, like, wealth and capital had to go somewhere. It's all sitting in the US capital markets primarily. And so if you see the performance of, like, the highest market caps primarily in the United States on New York Stock Exchange and such, you can kinda see directionally how the world has evolved and where value is being created and what industries are being disrupted. If you look at the top of the stock market over the last decade, it's a lot of big tech. Right? Like Microsoft and Facebook and there's Amazon in there, like, a lot of Internet born companies.
And I made a comment, I think it was a few years ago, that I think in 10 years from now, the biggest companies in the world will be Bitcoin companies. And I feel pretty confident about that still. Like, I think MicroStrategy but what what I meant by that is that, you know, you need Bitcoin more than Bitcoin ever needs you. Like, Donald Trump needs Bitcoin more than Bitcoin needs Donald Trump. Like, I personally need Bitcoin a lot more than Bitcoin will ever need me, like a 100%. And I think that goes for every individual, every corporation, every government, and eventually, Bitcoin kind of manifests itself and realizes itself playing a role in your life in some form of fashion. And I do think 10 years from now when you look at the S and P 500 or, you know, the top businesses in the world, there will be, like, a core Bitcoin tenant similar to how you see tech and Internet evolving today. And and and so but maybe we're now arguing over the semantics of what a Bitcoin company means. Well, I
[00:24:07] Jack Dorsey:
I think that every company will have to use Bitcoin Mhmm. Because it will be that currency of the Internet, and you will have to participate. And it'll be smart for them to hold Bitcoin just like it's smart for any individual to. But I would hate for the fact I would hate a a reality where the majority of our interface to Bitcoin is through companies because it by definition, it will be restricted. It'll go against the philosophies and the principles of Bitcoin in many ways, and it's hard to craft an implementation that enables that. So, like, I I think the the the best we can do as Bitcoin companies is also make sure that we're contributing to Mhmm. Open source projects that can actually have the principles and carry carry forth the the principles of of, what we love about what we love about Bitcoin. So I don't disagree I don't disagree with you, but I just I don't I don't want a bunch of companies to own all the Bitcoin, and I don't want a bunch of companies to be the only interface
[00:25:00] Jack Mallers:
to the Bitcoin. Well, you know what's funny is, I think nobody does. I don't think you can because you would kill you'd kill the project. That's part of the game theory is, you know, if we all wanted concentrated coins and concentrated access, then Bitcoin itself would die. So that's part of that, like, open network, economies of scale, network effects, like, cyclical loop that you get is that at Strike, if we're doing well, one of the best things we can do is support Bitcoin doing better, not necessarily ourselves. And if Bitcoin does better and Bitcoin's healthier and Bitcoin's distributed and people can still take self custody of their coins, then our business will compound on top of that. But it's that's a very, very unique I mean, like, that level of game theoretical genius from Satoshi. Like, it's hard to imagine that he, or she or they had the foresight for that. But I don't I agree with you, but I don't think anyone could disagree with you. I think we all agree. I think everyone in this room agrees.
[00:26:05] ODELL:
Attaboy. We all agree.
[00:26:07] Jack Dorsey:
Right? I think we all agree. Man. Yeah, I mean, you're so should back to my moderator role. You're you're, you're building a mainstream media conglomerate. You are running
[00:26:17] ODELL:
a nonprofit Rich coming from you. Gone? You're running you're running a non nonprofit,
[00:26:23] Jack Dorsey:
to grant developers in this ecosystem and and also Nostra. What, like, what have you seen work and and not work just from a very high level point of view?
[00:26:34] ODELL:
And how do you how do you how do you rectify the schism between the the corporate incentives and the needs and the and what open source can can bring? Yeah. I mean, I think at the core the core of the value prop of Bitcoin, right, is is that you're able to spend and save without permission. And the second it becomes permissioned, that value prop gets eroded. And I think that's what, Jack was talking about when he was talking about this this game theory incentive that it's not in anyone's best interest to capture Bitcoin fully. And it's a little bit hard to objectively quantify what does it mean to capture Bitcoin fully. So as a result, it's important that as many of us lead by example as possible to push the tide as much towards open source development to FreedomTech development.
And what does that look like in practice? What that looks like in practice is is better education, encouraging more people to get into development in the first place, making sure that they are they are competent and supported, supported both financially, but also through mentorships and education and whatnot. I would say that if you look back, like, 4 years ago, when we were just getting started with OpenSats, we're just getting started with Open Sats. The the open source funding landscape was a lot different. I don't think Spiral was launched yet. HRF Dev Fund wasn't launched yet, and obviously, Open Sats wasn't launched yet.
The that it has been incredibly optimistic and and impressive to see that trend going up. I mean, at OpenSAT specifically, we're funding almost 200 open source contributors in 40 plus countries around the world. They get paid out in Bitcoin monthly. Our entire treasury is held in Bitcoin Multisig. Obviously, we are a centralized organization, but we're a nonprofit. But we are able to use Bitcoin in a way that allows us to achieve a scale, achieve an efficiency, achieve a transparency that was never before possible. So that it's it's incredibly powerful to to to watch this all play out, but I would caution people that because it's basically impossible to objectively value what does Bitcoin being fully captured or to captured means. We need to constantly be on the offensive on that front, and there does feel like there's a little bit of complacency.
Right now, a lot of our most prolific developers are incredibly burnt out. They finally have substantial financial resources, but those are still very limited compared to the private market opportunities that they have. They have a community that is very divided, which is a good thing in Bitcoin a lot of the times. It's it's it's important that we don't all agree about everything, but it can be very difficult to watch when, you know, you're working like a thankless job and and people on Twitter are just, you know, cheering number go up. So the the burnout's a real issue with our with our more established developers or more experienced open source contributors, and the I like to call it the replacement rate. It's like, it's like the birth rate of new developers compared to, like, the death rate of of existing developers. There's a discrepancy there. We're there were not we're not net new adding, the higher level contributors because, I mean, that's a hard thing to do. Like, people with actually years of experience, that are more yeah. That that that that are that are I I don't wanna say qualified, but that are more comfortable with working on these kind of systems. These systems are some of the most difficult things to work with in the world. I mean, if you talk to someone that works on privacy software, they have almost no metrics on how their software is being used because they don't track their users.
And they ship it and it's running live. That that code is just running in production. And if Bitcoin is gonna be the the this base of a global distributed financial network, like, the stakes are incredibly, incredibly high. So they're under a ton of pressure. It's it's very difficult work. It's it's often very thankless, and we just have to do our best as as a community, as an ecosystem, as an industry, to support them as much as possible.
[00:31:05] Grant Gilliam:
We, we talked a little bit about the funding topic, earlier on a panel. And I think to Matt's point, this industry has never been as flush with cash, not just on the not for profit side, but also on the for profit side. There's lots more investors that are pursuing, capital endeavors in the space. And I think it probably is also true that despite this massive influx, like, relatively speaking, it's still small relative to everything that's going into the broader crypto space. But relatively speaking, we've had a big influx in capital, but I don't think you're seeing developer increase to the same level of extent, company formation from an investment side that is investable in in large dollars.
So that's, I mean, that's an interesting dichotomy, I think.
[00:32:03] Jack Dorsey:
Why why do you think that is a like, why isn't a 16 looking at at this ecosystem?
[00:32:10] Grant Gilliam:
Well, the obvious answer is that, when you pursue the crypto oriented investments, we've had this period over the last several years when you, can pursue much more near term liquidity through tokens. I mean, that's the obvious answer. I mean, you asked Matt what is what has he seen work, in his endeavors. The way I would answer it from a 10 30 one perspective is just pursuing alignment with Bitcoin, caring about Bitcoin, being Bitcoiners. I think there's people at these larger funds that understood really early on that Bitcoin was, a very significant innovation and gave it some mind space a long time ago.
But I think they've moved on, and they don't they don't consider themselves Bitcoiners, look at the space, or care about the space in the same way. And so I think that's how 10/31 has found product market fit, at least with the people who are building in the space, is that we live and breathe Bitcoin. We come, we participate, we contribute, and we are just authentically Bitcoin. And I don't think you can say the same thing about the other funds. You're actually one of the few VCs.
[00:33:36] Max Keidun:
Like, I'm not trying to make you happy, but, you're one of the few VCs that actually say that they invest in Bitcoin companies and they invest a lot of VCs just ride on the Bitcoin and they're like, yeah, we're Bitcoin pro only, but they invest in a lot of shit coins and tokens and crypto and etcetera, etcetera. So there's like, from my experience in the space, there's like 4, 3 VC funds in Bitcoin space that are actually Bitcoin VCs, and all others just say that they're Bitcoin VCs, but they do prefer or they do invest in other projects as well. Yeah. I mean, I think there's 2 sides to this. Right? There's the first side that a 16 z,
[00:34:14] ODELL:
and these other large, allocators, really love dumping shitcoins on retail. They get that instant liquidity. They never had it before. Like, historically, the VC game was a a game that you had to play on a longer term scale, that you had illiquidity in your investments. You weren't able to exit them until, hopefully, they went public or there was an acquisition. Obvious obviously, they very rarely believed in building profitable businesses, so the the idea of a dividend bank paying company is completely foreign to them. And so they've kind of ignored Bitcoin up until this point. Now I think that won't continue to be the case, and there are certain times where they do poke their heads into the space. But the smart Bitcoin founders usually do not want to participate with them.
And the ones that do choose to participate with them usually get pressured into adding shitcoins, so then they're no longer a Bitcoin only business. So the end result is you very rarely have a a Bitcoin only business that's aligned with the Bitcoin ethos and and the values and supporting open source development and trying to push forward self custody and these other freedom oriented aspects of Bitcoin, that have them on the cap table because it's just diametrically opposed.
[00:35:30] Jack Dorsey:
It's crazy to me that, these people who portray themselves as, like, the founders of the Internet and incredible technologists don't see the merits of the technology in Bitcoin. Like, everyone we just talked about, but there's so many other technologists we can point to that have either written Bitcoin off or onto the new hype cycle, which currently right now is is AI and LLMs. What about the merits of Bitcoin is not attractive to these folks?
[00:36:03] ODELL:
Right. What are they what are they not seeing? Why are they choosing to be blind to it? By the way, I think you're the best moderator in Bitcoin, so thank you for stepping up to the plate. The, you know, I I think it could be even more malicious than that. I think they understand the value prop of Bitcoin. They understand that it's fundamentally, a complete game changer that it could be it could very likely be the standard currency of the world. And they probably own Bitcoin themselves personally, but you have to follow incentives. Right? And they have very they're they're they're thinking on short time frames. They're not thinking long term. They're not thinking, on this idea of of of it I mean, of integrity. They're not thinking integrity first. They're thinking profits first. And if they follow these hype hype cycles, if they go into these buzzword bullshits, they're able to raise way more money. They're able to collect fees on it. Ideally, they convince the founder to launch a token. Like, they all in their contracts all have these cutouts that if, like, you don't have a token, but you have a token in the future, we get our pro router share of the token, and then they start trying to pressure you into having the token.
And they make way more money in the short term off of it. And I think you go if you go a decade in the future, if you go 2 decades in the future and you're actually thinking in a low time preference way, in a long term thinking way, the people that don't do that, will actually be able to look their children and their grandchildren in the face and be like, we actually did the right thing and and and look how well that worked out for us and you should follow that example and and, you know, be a productive human being.
[00:37:44] Jack Dorsey:
I agree with that. I I think it comes down to a simple answer, though. I I I think they can't control the outcome. Yeah. I think they can own the outcome. Like, they recognize that Bitcoin is unownable, ultimately.
[00:37:55] Jack Mallers:
I was my answer is I think what you're same thing is I think it's very obvious they see opportunity and control and is why I think I think that that's where they see the opportunity. And I think there's an argument to be made that, unfortunately, like, the Internet, you know, the Internet had some unfortunate chapters where a lot of the opportunity on top of the web was, like, really controlling, like, Zuckerberg. And so I think it's very obvious someone like Marc Andreessen thinks that the opportunity in this space is where there can be control, yeah, and that there's a tremendous amount of vulnerability for him and others from Big Tech to let go of the project and invest in its fundamentals and to assume that free market value will seek itself back to them because they can find a way to create it without control.
That's what I think. It's pretty obvious to me, and I think that these guys, Coinbase included, have raced to the local valley top and have totally missed that there's a mountaintop in the skyline. And, you know, when founding Strike, that's what we're like, we're gonna skip the local hilltop that everyone seems to be celebrating on and just march towards hiking the mountain. And I think that that's it. And and and on the local, Valley Top is where you can control. Like, I think their interest in Ethereum comes down to influence and control.
Their ability to you know, we talk about finding liquidity, but, like, at the end of the day, again, it's like controlling your own destiny, having influence. I mean, liquidity at that that early of a venture investment is a bailout effectively. It's the same thing as a central bank bailout in my opinion. So, yeah, I think it comes down to control. And there's a there's an interesting argument that you probably can participate in and how much of how the Internet played out influences that, like, Silicon Valley bias because you know right?
[00:39:58] Jack Dorsey:
Yep. No. I mean, Facebook's a incredible example of this. There was a point, I'm sure you all remember, that, they were trying to integrate more payments into Facebook. And instead of choosing the open protocol of of Bitcoin, they decided to create their own entirely new protocol called Libre. Was it Libre? They changed the name once or twice. Right? Libra. Right? Libra? Yeah. And it was, in Matt's words, an unmitigated disaster. And what, like, why why is it so hard for a company like that to look at a open protocol like Bitcoin that's been around for over a decade when they started that, has been battle tested, has never gone down, has had almost zero security flaws, or or hacks, on the on the main network, has a very committed developer ecosystem around it.
Why go that route? Because if we can understand that, we can we can use that as a template in the case study for other companies who are considering doing the same. And you know they're going to they're going to have to because eventually Bitcoin will have the usage that they can't ignore anymore. But is that just about control? Are there are there other other reasons that that companies, like, need to take that wrong fork in the road?
[00:41:20] Grant Gilliam:
The the only other idea I have around this because what I heard was incentives control. The only other one is just not everyone is smart or perfect at all things. Like, there are Bitcoiners that I very much respect who also have bad ideas about things that aren't related to their field of expertise and people who've told me, you know, the investments that we're making in the ecosystem, they don't get it. They don't think it makes sense. And over time, I feel like some of the specific examples they're referring to were proving very wrong.
And what I've learned from that is, look, I highly respect certain people, but not everyone's right about everything all the time. And so there could be people who just, they may be highly experienced, very well credentialed in building technology. That doesn't necessarily mean that they need to go build their own technology and money, but they don't see why that's not the case.
[00:42:25] Jack Mallers:
Yeah. I don't I don't know if anyone needs to teach anyone anything outside of the free market, in my opinion. I've always called shitcoins an arbitrage on the trend. You know, I love that. And if I can sell a banana to my left for $10 and I can buy banana to my right for a dollar, I'm making $9 all day as long as the market remains that inefficient. Right? That's what we call an arbitrage trade. Arbitrage trades can't last forever, though. Eventually, the banana to my right and left, they're both worth $5. Right? So market's correct. And so I think Shitcoins are an arbitrage, and they're they're an arbitrage trade. Is that what's the arbitrage? Well, there's certainly a regulatory arbitrage. Like, everyone's become their own central bank, which is extremely profitable. Right? If I can print money in my basement and pay Justin Bieber to tell 8 18 year olds to buy it on Robinhood, that's a really profitable business, but there's some regulatory arbitrage involved in that. And then there's an informational arbitrage, where people don't fundamentally understand the technology, understand the value, understand the ecosystem, and I'm allowed to convince someone that Pinkcoin and Bitcoin are, like, kinda sorta the same thing, except Pink Pinkcoin's better because it has a cheaper price. Right? But I think at the end of the day, these things correct, and the bananas are worth $5 and the market becomes efficient again. And so I don't know who needs to teach Zuckerberg, probably the fact that he got his fucking ass kicked.
He tried to launch something, he looked like an idiot and a moron, and that's one of the most competitive men in the world. And I bet that didn't feel good. Right? I think, like, Bitcoin gets adopted like gunpowder. Right? If you don't adopt it correctly, you become the victim. Alright? If you're going to war and you show up with sticks and stones instead of gunpowder, you're dead. So I, like, I think that at the end of the day, like, Mark Zuckerberg is gonna think twice because he looked like a fucking moron and embarrassed his shareholders, and his whole team quit. And so that's my opinion is, like, it's an arbitrage trade. It's not a sustainable vision. It's not the the the mountaintop in the skyline.
It's taking advantage of market inefficiencies, which, you know, you can make moral arguments for or against. Right? But at the end of the day, I don't think it's very long lasting, and I think the free market will punish people aggressively, and shamefully, for mistakes that they make just like Zuckerberg. He might be good at other things, but when it came to our space, he's a fucking rookie and a chump.
[00:44:57] Max Keidun:
I think after your rant, they're not gonna adopt Bitcoin at all. Mark needs Bitcoin more than Bitcoin needs Mark. So on his own time. True. But I think effectively everything comes comes to control. You know, Bitcoin is about having the control over the money, your money, and all these companies, they just wanna control everything. Like, Facebook wants to control what you see, what you consume, effectively what you pay and how you pay. So that that's it.
[00:45:28] ODELL:
I mean, to bring in full circle, market dynamics, free market, user choice, learning by getting wrecked, when will the the, the Fiat VC start getting into Bitcoin? The guy who was leading the Libra initiative, David Marcus, left, founded a Bitcoin company, and it was funded by a 16z. It brought it full circle. That's all I have to add.
[00:45:57] Jack Dorsey:
And but do you think that's a function of of him, previous relationships, the technology stack and company he's building? Like, what what drove that? Because that is an outlier.
[00:46:13] Jack Mallers:
Yeah. I think pre like, probably not a 16 z's fundamental thesis changing, but I think the point about face Facebook seeking control in their core business, again, I think the Internet had a dark chapter where, like, you know, one of the problems with I talked about this guy. I've never met him, so whatever. The new new Zuck with his chain and his MMA, maybe he's a cool guy. I don't know. But the problem with Mark's business is his users aren't his customers. Right? This is like a huge problem in the Internet is that he's building a product for all of us in theory to use in this room, but his customers are advertising.
Right? And it creates this awful dynamic and totally broken incentives where he tries to pray and control his users to benefit his customers. And that's that's, like, to me, the core fundamental issue. You know, you've got a guy that is so hated, but has the most one of the most successful businesses and most used products in the world. Like, that lot that intuitively doesn't make any sense. Everyone uses his stuff. Everyone hates him. Right? Like, from the highest level possible, how is that real? And so I think therein lies, like, a lot of the issue and a lot of, like, from the Internet, from the a 16z, from the, you know, I'm Marc Andreessen. I created the web browser. You know, it it's, you know control was the opportunity at the end of the day in the web. And that's I mean, you know, before this, we're in Nasser conference and, you know, there's there's a whole separate conversation of fixing the web.
But I think that that's the biggest point is that, like, Facebook what Facebook has been taught is that control is higher stock price, and Zuckerberg will go to any extent to exercise control. And like, there's no I don't even think he would walk back that claim at this point. And so how do they approach Bitcoin? We wanna control it. We can't control it? Not interested. And they'll just have to go through a lot of pain before that's rectified. This is my honest opinion. But I thought I think the unfortunate, like, recent years of the web and a lot of the shit that you unfortunately had to go through at Twitter and stuff, I think that that's where that bias comes from, and I don't think David Marcus changed the way Marc Andreessen thinks about control. No. I don't. And I love David. He's a great guy, and I'm really happy he's working on Bitcoin, but I that's not my opinion. Yeah. I think that model will be broken. Can we talk about, like, engineers
[00:48:50] Jack Dorsey:
and people working on the on these on these platforms? You all run or help fund organizations or developers to work on Bitcoin. There is a monster hype cycle right now, around work that is not Bitcoin related and financial freedom related and privacy, or permissionless tech related. And it pays a lot of money, and it's super interesting. It feels a little bit dangerous in the same way that early Bitcoin did. How are you attracting and, more importantly, retaining engineers to work on this on this protocol, on these on these products? And what's the tension you've seen? And how do you think this plays out in in 3 years? Because while we do have an incredible developer ecosystem right now, it's constantly stressed, and it's constantly tested. It's tested by new technology trends.
It's tested by, frivolous lawsuits, people who pretend to be Satoshi and sue developers to change the code so that you can get access to the original Bitcoin of Satoshi. It'll continue to be challenged in the courts. It feels like everything if you choose a Bitcoin path, everything is either against you right now or coming at you to tell you to stop. So who is this type of person that you're hiring? Why are they staying with you? And what do you see as the challenges in the future?
[00:50:24] Max Keidun:
In our case, I have, like, part of the people are actually very much into bitcoin, but part of the people who works for us, they're they're being taught by us and educated by us what is Bitcoin. So these people actually now start to admire Bitcoin and how it works. But, we try to, you know, limit them off the drama and we try to keep their privacy. That's number 1. So we don't disclose who our developers are. We avoid disclosing that publicly, and we mostly only disclose the business development team. And another reason we have remote team, so most of our developers actually in in in countries that are that are more friendly to to Bitcoin developers than than other countries.
[00:51:13] Jack Dorsey:
What are those countries?
[00:51:16] Max Keidun:
Those who are,
[00:51:18] Jack Dorsey:
well, I'm not gonna disclose those countries because No. No. But but generally, like, what countries do you look at as being more I mean, emerging markets.
[00:51:26] Max Keidun:
Like emerging markets, these most of the emerging market countries like Latin America or Southeast Asia, they're pretty much friendly towards Bitcoin. And they they respect privacy, and then literally don't care about what you're doing, how you're earning your money. And, it's kind of like that.
[00:51:49] ODELL:
I mean, I think the single biggest advantage we have is is is that Bitcoin has this it has this draw. Right? I mean, I think most of us I mean, you guys are at a Bitcoin conference. I don't even know how many Bitcoin conferences there are a year now. I I I think I think most industries don't even come close to this, and that's because Bitcoin is is becomes more than a a career for a lot of people. It becomes more like a lifestyle. And and and people a lot of our our our most prolific, engineers, are, you know, they're die hard Bitcoiners. They're not all die hard Bitcoiners. Some of them, you know, maybe aren't necessarily as committed committed to, like, the concepts or the ethos or, like, I I hate to say culture, the culture of Bitcoin, or like the freedom movement aspect of Bitcoin, but most are. And what I see a lot happens is they start with a very high paying private sector job that is completely irrelevant to Bitcoin.
You know, maybe they consume some podcasts. Maybe their uncle or their nephew recommends them to check out Bitcoin, and they they start stacking some Bitcoin. And as a result, they start getting into the community and they start going to meetups. And, I mean, Grant was talking earlier, like, this industry is very heavily motivated by this idea of proof of work. Right? I think it's one of, like, the great transformations that Bitcoin is is kinda bringing to the world is that at its core, Bitcoin requires proof of work, requires real energy and and commitment, to acquire it in the first place. And as a result, everything that comes later also is expected to have proof of work. And so we have this this global community that really respects proof of work. And as you get deeper into that community, you start contributing in a part time basis. And then that part time basis becomes a little bit more than part time. And that's the key where something like an Open Sats or these these Bitcoin businesses that are out there that are are employing developers, really comes in. Because at that point, when they're thinking about jumping over the ledge, you know, and leaving their high paying AI job or blockchain job or whatever hype job, to go into Bitcoin, there needs to be mechanisms there to to try and decrease that friction a little bit. There'll always be friction and that's what always works against us, but that's because hard things, you know, are inherently harder. Personal responsibility is more difficult.
So as a result, there will always be friction there, but the key is to try and reduce that friction as much as possible.
[00:54:29] Jack Dorsey:
Correct.
[00:54:31] Grant Gilliam:
Yeah. I think, forcing people down the path to care about Bitcoin, it's it's a hard thing. They they generally as they come to learn it and this is not just, I think, the engineers. This is across all All the disciplines. All layers of talent that you need for a company as you scale. They come to value the mission, their soul more than what they're giving up, from those high paying jobs. And it's sort of like as you think about scaling a company, as as you guys were saying, it gets harder to be a Bitcoin company the bigger you are.
One of the challenges that we've seen is that there really is a high correlation between the talent. It could be engineers. It could be finance people. It could be legal people, but there's a high correlation between the people who tend to work out for the companies and being Bitcoiners, which is hard to it's hard to force them down that path. And there's also a high correlation to the ones that they don't really care about Bitcoin as much, but they're a very high level finance person or a high level, legal person. And it just doesn't work out because they they're not willing to stick it out relative to the other opportunities that are out there. I will say there's there's also another piece there that we have to our advantage
[00:55:53] ODELL:
where for the first time ever and and this is key if the employees or the open source contributors are Bitcoiners because they actually hold their assets in Bitcoin. Is we have an industry she's working on it. She's got it. We we have an industry where, like, everyone almost has this this global shared equity across industries. Like, I've heard you talk about it, Jack, in the past, like, the this perverse incentive of offering stock options because you're you're forced to to try and get an exit and rush to public. But employees that hold Bitcoin and and and stay on Bonsac Sats, over time, that value is accruing to them across the entire ecosystem regardless of which company. So it creates this kind of alignment and community that just doesn't exist in, you know, AI. Like, that that just wasn't possible before.
[00:56:51] Jack Mallers:
And this for, like, the company or for Bitcoin at at large engineers? Both. I mean, for so, I think, fundamentally, as as a human, we all wanna be part of something bigger than ourselves. I think that's, like, the desire we all share, connection. I think inherently being born and being human, you wanna be part of something that's bigger than yourself and working on something that will last longer than you will. I think the best example of that is family. Right? Like, finding relationship, having kids, and working on your bloodline that is, by definition, bigger than you, and your bloodline now will last longer than you will.
And so I think we seek that out as human beings inherently all the time in different forms. I think Bitcoin is one of the most powerful and expressive forms of that, of being something far bigger than yourself and being something being part of something that will last far longer than you will. And so at Strike, and with myself personally, we really try hard to lean into that as a culture. And so beyond salary and equity and Bitcoin, what we can give you is that form of connection, I think, in being human, And, you know, some of my most successful employees that have done tremendously well and carry a lot of responsibility and are unbelievable at what they do at Strike join not as Bitcoiners, but I think that culture that we've built, where people are attracted to being part of that, I think, and, you know, it could exist in AI and such. And, you know, the other thing too is we, you know, we have a culture where if you need to go, it's probably in the best interest of both of us because in order for me to be successful in what I started, I need you to be on the same page as me. And so sometimes people go, but I think that that it's culture for us, culture messaging, brand, and, like, the whole, like, dying on that hill, you know, truly, truly authentically expressing that purpose, and connecting with my employees in that way, has allowed us to be successful with engineers?
[00:59:15] Jack Dorsey:
I I think the greatest well, I know the greatest thing we've we've done at Block in this regard is Cray Spyro. The the fact that we decided to to really, like, start small, we we decided to hire 1 person who could hire 4 other people, a total team of 5, and their mission was just to work on Bitcoin and work on open source, and they took no direction from us. And it has been some of the most valuable idea generations for our company, even though we had no expectation around that. We've gotten incredible work from them that we use in our main product like Cash App, which is, based on LDK, which they they created.
It's an incredible recruiting tool. People wanna work alongside them, not necessarily on the open source aspects, but they see the the mastery of their craft and how good they are as engineers and and people intersecting with the the community. So for any of you with a company, even if it's just one person or half, half time person that you're paying, and we we pay them in Bitcoin, because we didn't want to align their incentives to our stock and to our company. But the you know, what they're actually working on, which is which is Bitcoin, and as they make it more viable, hopefully, Bitcoin becomes more viable. But to just dedicate some resources to full on open source under their own direction, and I think you'll be really massively surprised.
I also don't think I I, I don't think these, these trends are necessarily in conflict with one another. I think if Bitcoin does become the native currency of the Internet, we are gonna have, like, a lot of agentic AI systems and agents doing biddings for human, and they will have to transact. And they will seek the most friction free way to transact, and it will not be Visa or Mastercard. It will have to be something like a protocol for the Internet that's open, that no one government can can control and no single corporation can own. So I I think we could probably do a better job at, like, pointing at the potential intersections of these technologies and get both sides of it, because you just know that's going to that's going to happen, that's going to occur.
And I don't think we we really talk about that enough. And, again, bringing up Noster again, like, I think we have a protocol where these things can play right now, and we can test a bunch and then really scale them up to a a much broader usage and and use case. So to me, that's super exciting.
[01:01:59] ODELL:
Shout out to Spiral team. Shout out to Steve Lee. Shout out to Steve Lee.
[01:02:09] Jack Dorsey:
I don't know. Is this clock 0 because we're out of time, or is it
[01:02:13] Max Keidun:
Oh, we still have time. No worries.
[01:02:17] Jack Dorsey:
Okay.
[01:02:18] ODELL:
Matt? I I mean, I think we have, like, 4 like you have a question in mind. No. I mean, I I'm just gonna say the buzzwords, but Nostra AI Bitcoin, there's something there.
[01:02:35] Jack Dorsey:
Do you have any more questions for us, Jack? Yeah. I mean, I have a ton of questions, but you look like it's a question, not in the statement. No. You're good. Okay. The, I guess the another big question for me is, like, what use cases and what friction points in Bitcoin is a company best served to solve versus an open source initiative? Like, I would I would I would probably theorize that privacy is best served in a non corporate environment, but there might be counterexamples to that. But as you think about, like, what Bitcoin what the gaps are, what the flaws are, and how and there's a bunch of people in here probably thinking about starting a company or thinking about join joining or contributing to open source initiative.
As you think about the enumeration of the use cases and and the gaps that we all know exist, like, how do you segment those,
[01:03:36] ODELL:
or or do we segment them? Yeah. I mean, I I I don't think it necessarily has to be black and white. Right? I mean, I think, there are certain projects or goals that, can intuitively, you can intuitively interpret could have, concerning regulatory implications, right, and and provide a lot of risk to a to a centralized company founder, startup founder. And those should probably just be non monetized open source projects that are, funded through grants or donations. I mean, one of my dreams is that, organizations like like Open SaaS, organizations like Spiral become less relevant as users are just donating directly with things like Zaps with no middlemen, just Bitcoin directly to these developers. But in either situation, just basically donation funding a community open source project makes a lot of sense on things that are are are regulatory, that there's a lot of regulatory pressure on. And usually those things are heavily focused on freedom or privacy.
But there is a middle ground and it's actually one of my dreams that I that I I hope to see become a reality. I expect it to become a reality, but it's gonna take a lot of work from a lot of people. And it's only possible really because of Bitcoin, I think, because you have this native money of the Internet that's not controlled by anyone. And that's the sustainable open source business model where the whole business is built on open source tech that the actual entire stack of the business can be forked at will, redistributed, remonetized, like not a restricted open source license or source viewable license, like an actual full false stack. And those companies exist today. Like Start9 is a full false stack. Primal is a full false stack.
Mempool space is a full false stack. And they're all trying different ways to monetize on top of that stack. And you get this beautiful combination of, this situation, as you said, where one of the main concerns if you're running a centralized business is is that purse that founder can be arrested. That person can have a gun put to their head. They can get assassinated. In those situations, that could happen, and the stack still exists. Someone else can continue it on. Right? It it it it it inherits and keeps that same viral nature that makes open source so powerful, but has a business model on top of it.
But that makes it much more difficult. Right? That's the hardest path. And I think part of the reason that we're starting to see that now is because there is this growing global community that is incredibly passionate and and and and and wants to take the harder path because they know it'll be a brighter future at the end.
[01:06:27] Jack Dorsey:
Max? Yeah. This is an okay answer.
[01:06:32] Max Keidun:
I mean To mid clap. I mean, free open source contributors, definitely, they have more freedom, but, I think they're they, are cheered less in the community, and they're supported less in the community, and that's the issue. Because, like, it's not on Nostra, but if you go on Twitter, which is x, and you'll see that a lot of Bitcoiners, they actually cheer corporations or companies instead of cheering free open source developers or developers who doesn't request anything. And it's like, for a company, it's pretty much not that complicated to raise money. You can just go to v c if you're successful enough, then you will be able to get some checks.
For free open source developer, like, not many people actually understand how how successful the code is or how successful the application they have built is. So it's really hard sometimes for them to get grants. So I think yeah. Like, free open source developers definitely more freedom, but, less support in many ways. Not only financially, but also as a community, I think. We are massively failing, and I'm sorry to say that, but, we are massively failing to support, developers that actually building really cool stuff. Like, guys from the BISC, for example.
That's the last resort if you wanna buy Bitcoin, literally. And I think they don't get much credit as they need to get. That's it. Yeah.
[01:08:06] Grant Gilliam:
Brent? Yeah. What I would add is I think the the overwhelming majority of effort that developers and engineers can make is mostly towards the open source stuff right now. Like, the reality is that there haven't been too many businesses that have found interesting ways to monetize. I mean, it's still so early that the main monetizable business models are brokerage, people are willing to pay for custody, there's credit products, People were paying for the privacy oriented services, and that it that now is a pretty significant gap still. But the further you go down the line, we haven't we haven't really seen a lot of development on the company side. So I think that actually forces a lot down the the open source, path.
[01:09:05] Jack Dorsey:
Jack. Jack. What was the was it What was it? Should be a protocol or what should be open sourced? Yeah. No. What what use cases, what products should be worked on by companies versus open source an open source approach? You make that distinction.
[01:09:21] Jack Mallers:
Yeah. I'm not sure I'm not sure we have to. You know, I do think that there's sometimes people assume that because Bitcoin exists, that no companies need to exist. I think the opposite. I'm very bullish businesses on top of Bitcoin. I think it goes back to SaaS flow, or talk about just being profitable. And again, I think of that more morally than financially, is like serve someone something they value that they're willing to pay for, and I think businesses should be building that. I really deeply believe in that relationship and that level of incentive, and that Bitcoin allows anyone to withdraw themselves from a relationship with a business. There's no forced relationships with government or business.
And then for open source, I would hope everything is open source. I think I agree with Matt. I would hope everything is open source someday. And, you know, we at Stripe try our best to fund all sorts of different efforts, whether it's developers directly, or through initiatives like OpenSats and HRF, to support these developers. And I I agree with Max as well. I mean, support too doesn't need to be financial, you know, like moral support, letting these people know that we value them and see them and appreciate them, and we wouldn't be here without them. So I'm not sure that there's a huge distinction in, like, us as a company. We we, recently worked with Spiral and Steve on Bolt 12 stuff. We open sourced our Bolt 12 testing playground to if you if you guys need to test Bolt 12 interoperability for all use cases across all the different Lightning implementations, the Lightning node implementations, that's open source now on on our our strike repository. So I hope I hope we don't have to draw a distinction.
What's your opinion?
[01:11:17] Jack Dorsey:
I agree with you. I'd I'd I don't I don't think we have to, but I'd I also I think there there are some some things within the Bitcoin space that I'd rather be heavily biased towards an open source project than be owned by a a company that has a a particular incentive. Like what? A lot of the privacy and more of the permissionless work. And I just I don't see a path towards greatness in a corporate context in in many ways. They might have early success in that, but, because as we see, like, the walls feel like they keep closing in terms of, like, what's what's allowed and what's not. And it's putting this, again, like, choke hold and single point of failure upon a a project that might be absolutely necessary and critical to, financial privacy.
So I think we have 5 minutes left. Maybe we'll, we'll just end with one one topic which is, we have this saying in the Bitcoin community which is, don't trust, verify. And a lot of people probably in this room have the capability to verify. You can look at the source code. You can talk with people building it. You can see the actions. But I just wanna hear from you all how you think about building trusted products and trusted companies and earning trust. Open source is obviously one path towards that, but it's not something that the vast majority of people in the world can actually benefit from, in terms of trying to verify the code or verify how it works. They might know someone who can help them through that, but how with without that one thing, how do how do you build trusted products and companies or projects?
[01:13:07] ODELL:
I mean, I think if you if you have to add trust if you have to add trust to the system, you try and minimize the trust as much as possible. You try and be as transparent as possible. And then it really comes down to to long term proof of work and and and leading by example and actually showing what you're doing and how you're doing it and and building up a a reputation. But in general, especially when Bitcoin is in place, you really, really want you have to reduce that trust as small as possible if there's any element of trust there at all. Yep. Thanks.
[01:13:43] Max Keidun:
In our case, like, from our experience, we just build non custodial stuff. And, like, all our products build on top of multisig, which is which is effectively created every time you interact with HODL, HODL, Debitfy on public Bitcoin blockchain, which you can verify through any block explorer out there. And we also there's no also vendor lock in, which means that even if we go down for some reason, both Huddl Huddl, Debitfy, you can still access with your counterparty funds that are locked in, in the multisync. So we only hold one key out of the majority out of the set of the keys. So we don't actually we cannot control, funds that are locked there. So we have built that system again, which is really complicated because, like, building on top of multisync user friendly solutions are really, really hard. But we have taken that path path. And, like, 6 years we've been doing that, and finally, there's some progression in that way.
Great.
[01:14:45] Grant Gilliam:
Yeah. I mean, I think that question as it relates to us building trust is slightly different from these guys. But the two words I always say is for 10/31 is authenticity and proximity. I mean, we're here today. We are authentically, Bitcoiners. And coming to Matt's point, I mean, he said proof of work. We do it by trying to be the the trusted partners to the founders who care deeply about Bitcoin because we do too. And, the relationships we have with the space is our most valuable assets. And we always tell people who we're trying to build a relationship with, like, if you're if you're trying to build trust in us, the best way to do it is just go talk to the people in the space because we think we've built the integrity, the proof of work, and there's no substitute for talking to the people that we interact with on a day to day basis. Yeah. 100%.
[01:15:48] Jack Dorsey:
Jack?
[01:15:50] Jack Mallers:
No. I think proof of work is is definitely an obvious one. I agree with these guys in that, you know, build stuff that works, be here year in, year out, fight the good fight. I think maybe one of the more counterintuitive ones for us at Strike that was core from day 1 was prioritizing Bitcoin and fighting for Bitcoin, which maybe sounds simple while I'm on the stage, but as a corporation, it's not necessarily intuitive. I'll give you guys, I think, one of my favorite examples when we were a very young business. So, you know, early venture raised coming out of beta.
I got contacted by an Indy 500, which is a race in America, a car race. So like a competitive car race, like one of the most popular races in America, and they wanted to do something with us, and I had the opportunity to race the strike car, and they would have cut us a really cheap deal. We were a young startup. They just wanted something to do with the space, but no one would have given a fuck about the strike car, and I felt like truly in my heart that the best thing we could have done as a business right there was help promote Bitcoin, and get more people involved and race the Bitcoin car. And so we did as a business, and it had nothing to do with our company at all. And it had everything and and we authentically believed that. We thought the best thing for our business and for Bitcoin was for Bitcoin to race next to the PNC Bank car, not for Strike. And so that I think is a is a fun story. I think that was 3 years ago at this point, but that is, I think, core to, you know, who we've become, and I think why the community and and customers trust us is because they know we're here for the right reasons through through that approach. Yeah. A 100%.
[01:17:33] Jack Dorsey:
I I think for us, it's it's making sure that we're building options and as many options as possible that people don't have to trust us. So one of the reasons we we worked on the custodial wall and and Bitkey is, like, we want people to get their Bitcoin off exchanges, and we'd love to find more creative solutions to enable that and and help them. There are limits to that, of course, again, in the corporate context of of how we exist, but, there's a lot more we can do. And I I I wanna make sure that our our tools are provide features and functionality and utility that, you don't have to trust a company. You don't have to trust a CEO.
You can still extract value from it, and you're free to move wherever you need to where you where you do wanna place that trust. And, ideally, it's tools that allow more trust in in yourself, which is the whole concept of having the seed phrases, and, obviously, there's better iterations of that. But that that trust in self is is probably the thing that I think, we all wanna we all wanna align to and all wanna feel much more. So with that, any final words? Matt, moderator? Excellent job. Excellent job. Give it up for Matt. Matt O'Dell.
[01:18:53] ODELL:
I was about to thank you for moderating. I thought you did a great job, but Thank you, Matt. I I mean, I just wanted to thank Max and Anna and and the whole Honey Badger team again and all of you guys. This has been such a wonderful experience.
[01:19:23] Unknown:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Good work. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So, guys, don't leave just yet. Don't leave just yet. We have one final surprise, a special announcement. So 2024 will be remembered not just for the Baltic IBager, but also as the year when politicians all over the world discovered Bitcoin and proactively are using Bitcoin in order to get elected. And a lot of Bitcoiners, on social media are openly picking aside. So we discussed a lot with the with Max and Anna, and we decided that it's time for the Balticoni Badger to pick a side as well. So when it comes to politics, Balticoni Badger strongly endures Rhaenyra Targaryen, first of her name, true queen of the 7 kingdom.
What I'm trying to say is that Bitcoin is for everyone, not just for those you like. Bitcoin is not red. Bitcoin is not blue. Bitcoin is for everyone. Bitcoin is freedom. Don't pick a side. There is there are no sides. Bitcoin is beyond politics. Thank you so much. Please welcome the father of dragons, Max Kaye.
[01:21:07] Max Keidun:
Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Thank you. Guys, I wanted to thank you all for coming here. You're all very special. I wanted to thank all the sponsor speakers. I wanted to to thank Nostriga team, Marce, for for helping us as well. There you are. Those who have been with us for like 5, 6 years, OGs wanted to thank you as well. Security team, street food court team, volunteers, and also I wanted to thank Anna. Yeah. Ricky Ricky said in the morning that she's a mother of dragons, but I would say she's a mother of honey badgers. So, yep, let's that's an official now. That's an official. Thank you all.
See you next year maybe and, yeah, we're all Satoshi. Thank you. Bye bye.
Please welcome us on stage Odell, Max Kaye, Grand Gilliam, Jack Dorsey, and Jack Mullers?
[00:00:10] ODELL:
Correct. Correct. Thank you, sir. I actually don't know where Mallers is. Thank you, Miles. And also, big Jack. Jack Dorsey is having a conversation real quick and he's gonna come back out here and moderate this panel. But until then, I'll be the moderator. First off, foremost, I want to, thank you all for coming to this event. And I wanna thank Max and Anna and the rest of the Honey Badger crew. This event particularly is incredibly special to me. 2019 Riga was the first time I ever spoke on stage. I'm pretty sure, which is crazy. That was only 5 years ago. It feels like a decade. Can we get a huge round of applause for Jack Mallers?
And, yeah, it just means a lot. It's it's kinda crazy how far we've come. And, you guys have been a huge part of it. So thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for coming. I still remember you in 2019 drunk in Old Town. So that's one of the fond memories.
[00:01:28] Max Keidun:
Fake news. Fake news.
[00:01:31] ODELL:
So I'm joined here, with Max, obviously. We have Grant, who's my fellow partner at 10:31. And we have Jack here, who's, founder and CEO of Strike. And then sitting next to him is Jack Dorsey, cofounder of Twitter and Square, now Block. So, guys, I mean, I think we can talk about whatever the hell we want to talk about. Bitcoin only. I mean, I I wanna I kinda wanna talk about building Bitcoin businesses. I think, you know, Grant had an earlier, an earlier presentation talking about how moving to a Bitcoin standard changes the calculation when you are building businesses. You know, running a business is an incredibly hard thing to do to begin with.
Running a a business under a Bitcoin standard might be even more difficult. And all you guys are doing it, and you're building businesses, and some of you are doing it at a scale that is is quite extraordinary. So with that said, since Jack just stepped up on stage, why don't we start with Jack? How do you think about that building out Strike and, you know, expanding it around the world under a Bitcoin standard or a looming Bitcoin standard?
[00:02:51] Jack Mallers:
Is my mic on? Yeah. What's going on? How are you guys? Building a Bitcoin business. I don't know if you guys caught Grant's keynote earlier. It was phenomenal. It was around a simple point that's lost on the world today of a a business should be profitable. It's a really core tenet of how we've built Strike. We think of profitability more than just a financial obligation. We think of it as a moral obligation. We wanna be net producers to society. We think that, you know, if you're producing more value for the world than you're consuming from the world, then you're making the world a better place. Another way of saying that financially is being a profitable business. So that's always been a core focus and tenant for us. So building something that has extremely low cost, extremely high margins, extremely high scale from, like, a a pure business standpoint is huge. And, again, we think of it as 1st moral because we're quite literally to the definition making the world a better place is if what we're producing is being valued more by our customers than we need to consume to produce it. And then, of course, we get to stack a lot of Sats with cash flows, and we think it's building in a massive capital base with us. So I think that's, like, the core tenant of where to start, build a culture around that. Not everyone wants to sign up for that. Not everyone agrees with that worldview, but we do at Stripe. And then from there, there's all sorts of really amazing things that flourish from Bitcoin as the heart and the pulse and the nucleus of a company, which I can talk about, but I guess I'll stop there. I don't know if that was, what you wanted me to say. I mean, I just I want you to speak your mind. I'm not I'm not expecting you to say anything. I'm I I do that often. Yeah. That was what was on my mind. It is it is kinda crazy that
[00:04:38] ODELL:
there's, like, 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars of assets under management and the just the basic concept of just run a profitable business is, really hard for people to grok. And Bitcoiners are are built different in a lot of ways. I think Bitcoiners it's if if you've been in the space for long enough, your lifestyle itself is very lean. You know, we have, you know, Pierre Pierre Richard has famously said, if you own chairs, you're short Bitcoin. Right? And that's pretty crazy and that, yes, it is a meme, but every meme is based in reality. Right? And and it's this idea of trying to, you know, really, really keep your whole lifestyle as lean as possible, as productive as possible, and as profitable as possible. Yeah. I mean, I'm gonna
[00:05:23] Jack Mallers:
I'm gonna take this way over the top now. Nice. So yeah. Yeah. Here we go. Just bear with me for a second. I like the analogy. I've said it many times before of, death to life, Bitcoin to money. This is aggressive and emotional, but what I mean by that is, you know, the only way I can value my life, which is a proxy for the time that I'm allowed on the planet, is because I know for certainty I will die. Right? I I wouldn't be thinking about reproducing or getting married or I'd go to the gym in 10000 fucking years. Who would care if I could live forever? But it's the promise that my time is finite is the reason I can value it. And the reason my life is value valuable and I wanna catch sunsets, and I wanna reproduce, and I wanna be healthy, and I'm not gonna eat the doughnut, I'm gonna eat a rib eye, is for that very simple reason. Monetary energy has been infinite. Right? How many dollars can exist? As many as they want. And so it's been impossible to value money ever.
Bitcoin is that finite promise in the same way that death allows us to value our lives, which is very, very important. Right? Like the Steve Jobs quote, like, death is the change agent for life. It's very valuable to our our species. Bitcoin gives that not only to all of us as individuals, but to companies. All of a sudden, when you have a cost of capital, a way to value something, you see businesses in the fiat world where they just take excess cash, excess VC funding, and they pour it into growth. It's impossible to understand what to value, new products, new employees, new marketing. And it doesn't who knows if it's working or not? It could produce no it could produce no net profits, and they're gonna get 10 x the valuation. It doesn't make any sense. And so for a business at our core, we operate on Bitcoin, meaning that we understand the true value of capital of money. So internally at the company, we think over the last 10 years, Bitcoin has produced 63% annualized returns on average over the last decade.
So we think at the business, if we can't build anything that can produce at least 63.1% returns on a year over year basis, it's not worth our time and our energy, which is phenomenal. Right? So, you know, if someone gave me a $1,000,000,000 to help build Stripe some more, there's a very good chance I wouldn't hire one more fucking person. I might just buy a $1,000,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. And that's a huge that's that finite promise of death, right, which allows us to value capital and decisions. So we only build things people value. We only build things that people care about. We keep our team lean, we keep our costs low, and we just focus on being net producers for society. But I like that analogy of death to life, Bitcoin to money because now we have something to measure against that makes it all worth it. Before, you're kind of just swimming in no man's land. Right? And I I think you see that, stock markets, equities, venture capital, it's a mess. So really, really core. I mean, without Bitcoin, obviously, Stripe would be nothing, but even, like, our identity, and how we make decisions, that that capital measurement is is how we do everything every day.
[00:08:25] ODELL:
Yeah. I don't wanna follow that straight fire. You're welcome to.
[00:08:29] Grant Gilliam:
I don't know how you follow that. We could talk about how great my keynote was again. It was great. But Yeah. No. The point I was trying to make during it was that all you really need to do sort of, like, come back to the the financial side of it is generate net positive Sats flows, and you are better off. We're used to this world where you have to outpace inflation to grow. If you're not keeping up with inflation inflation, then you're falling behind. And everyone's really worried about how do you generate incremental yield on your Bitcoin, but really all you need is just net positive sats flow. And so I think another way of saying it is sats flow is the real yield on Bitcoin.
I'm hearing deep thoughts from Jack saying it's about morality and life. And so maybe sats flow is the real yield is wrong. Maybe it's morality is the real yield on Bitcoin or life is the real yield on Bitcoin.
[00:09:30] Jack Mallers:
No. Like, energy is the base layer of money. Right? Like, money is our time and energy in an abstracted form. So the problem with society, like, you know, fix the money, fix the world, what's the opposite of that? Break the money, break society? Something along those lines. Right? So if energy is the base layer of of money, then if the money's bad and we can't value our energy, then everything gets all fucked up. And if you wanna talk about it on the topic of a company, then, yeah, how many people do you need to hire? How much money should you be spending on marketing? How many products do you need? How many countries should you be in? It's impossible to value that in the same way that if I'm gonna live forever, should I go to the gym today?
It's an impossible question to answer. Right? Because you have nothing to measure against. So that's the whole point is if, like, energy is the base layer of money as a concept, and and and now we can measure it, then, like, everything changes. That's all I was trying to say. You make make real decisions, produce real value.
[00:10:34] ODELL:
Yeah. No. You you both make a lot of sense. Good. I mean, Max, you've been building out Huddl Huddl and now Debutify, for years. How do you think about it? Do you have
[00:10:47] Max Keidun:
Pretty much complicated.
[00:10:48] ODELL:
Can we get a huge round of applause for for Jack Dorsey?
[00:10:54] Jack Mallers:
Jack, thank you for joining us. Thanks for showing up late. It means a lot.
[00:11:00] ODELL:
Nobody told me this was starting. So I I let us off, but you're supposed to be the moderator of this panel. So feel free to just start it. No. Go ahead.
[00:11:08] Jack Dorsey:
You want me to continue? I can do that for you. I don't know what you're saying. I have no context whatsoever.
[00:11:13] ODELL:
It. So, Max, what what are your thoughts here?
[00:11:17] Max Keidun:
Building, companies on Bitcoin is complicated because everyone thinks that, well, I'd rather buy some Bitcoin and outperform any company out there. And, like, I think Grant can align to that because, like, Bitcoin is, like, super performing asset. And, it's way more simpler. You know, just buy Bitcoin, maybe borrow against that, buy more. This is what Saylor is doing. But, then again, some companies are pretty much successful. And if they're not being built, then there's no added value. And the price of Bitcoin is just just not gonna go up up if it's that important for some people. And, yeah. And we've been doing this on top of multisig, which is way more complicated than doing something else in a non custodial way, peer to peer, and that's, I think, one of the toughest market inside of the Bitcoin to build on. Specifically for HODL. HODL is also allows to do an anonymity, and, that's kind of goes with regulation, and there's a certain pressure on that side. So keeping up with all the core values of Bitcoin is really hard, but it pays off in the end.
[00:12:29] ODELL:
Do you have any advice for people in this room that might be thinking about Don't do that.
[00:12:34] Max Keidun:
Fair enough. I mean, build, build business on top of Bitcoin if you're crazy enough. My first advice is just, you know, buy Bitcoin, learn about it, support businesses that are already there. If you wanna build a proper business on top of Bitcoin, think twice. Yeah. I mean, running businesses is incredibly difficult. Know what you're asking. Business on top of a Bitcoin is, like, 10 times more difficult. Exactly.
[00:12:59] ODELL:
Especially yes. I I mean, it's it's rough out there, but people keep slinging it. Jack, I mean, you are, a shareholder of X, and you've also built one of, the largest Bitcoin businesses in the world. What is how how do you think about how do you think about this this transition of Square, now Block, getting more and more involved with Bitcoin? I mean, from my view, it's been very deliberate, and it's been really impressive to watch you during that kind of transitionary period. How do you think about that? Thank you. I think that's one of the few compliments you've ever given me.
[00:13:42] Jack Dorsey:
How do I think about it? I'm I'm very proud of it. I I, as, as Max said, like, it's it's I don't I don't think, there can be a true Bitcoin company in the context of the of the governments that that we that we build in, and I think that's going to be increasingly true as as time goes on. So I think we can be at best Bitcoin adjacent, and I think we can at best, you know, build businesses on top of this on top of this protocol and do whatever it takes to to help address, issues that we see, which are number 1, like, for us, it's accessibility to Bitcoin, making it just super easy to get in in whatever use case that that makes sense.
Number 2 is to make it more secure. And for us, that manifest is mining better mining hardware, that's made in the US. That's open source. Bit key, self custodial wallets. Just more options around securing and and ideally in the future, more privacy options as well. And then 3 is making it more usable every day, and that's where we get into the the currency part. And I think, Jack has done an incredible job here in leading that, and there's a bunch of, other at scale implementations of what it feels like to to pay with Bitcoin. Zaps on Nasr being the biggest at scale implementation. If you haven't how how many people have Zapped on Nasr in this audience?
Yeah. This is why this is why I love the small Bitcoin conferences because they're actually focused on living up to the to the messaging and the and the principles, and and it's it's about the action. But I I think it's going to become increasingly hard to to run a Bitcoin business because I don't think it really can exist. I I think we have to be somewhat adjacent, and there'll be things that are principally in Bitcoin that we all love and that we all fight for that we can't do as a company. And that's a really unfortunate intersection.
We can continue to push for it and lobby for it and and do all these things, but the reality is those walls feel like they're closing more and more. And we're seeing actions of what it means to have a a choke point on a service such as what what happened with Pavel and Telegram. When you have a CEO, the CEO can be called in front of congress, can be arrested, can be assassinated. One of the greatest gifts Satoshi gave us is we don't know who this person is, and, they disappeared. And even if they came back, it wouldn't matter much. You can't do that in a in a corporate context as far as I know. But you can, evolve your company to be more focused on open source, to contribute more to free open source software, to doing more of your work in public transparently, and to contribute to open protocols such as Bitcoin and Aster, that you may not benefit from directly as a company.
But if other people benefit, you eventually will if you're building products on those protocols. And I I think that's a a reasonable compromise to being a Bitcoin company as as we'd want it to to be known. Clap for Matt. You want me to take over moderation? You you promise you're gonna Jack, what are your thoughts on this?
[00:17:17] Jack Mallers:
On being a Bitcoin company? I I answered before you showed up. I can answer again if you want. Oh, sorry. It's okay. Grand answer is fine. You. I I mean, with the way we think about it at strike as being like of the Bitcoin company a Bitcoin company, it's so I won't I I gave an analogy about death and stuff. It was intense. I want to yeah. Talk about it later. I think, like, a a core principle for Strike is I don't think that there are many companies focused on Bitcoin, and I think Bitcoin is the opportunity. Like, when we were conceptualizing the business, we're like, okay.
Coinbase and Binance, those are crypto exchanges. BlackRock is an asset manager. Fidelity is a brokerage service. Like, Bitcoin seems to be the opportunity. If you look at Coinbase's quarterly filings, half of its volume is Bitcoin. So you can make the argument that at least half the business is Bitcoin, but if you were to take Bitcoin out of Coinbase, the whole thing probably falls apart, yet they can't focus on it if their life fucking depended on it. And so at Stripe, when we say, like, we're a Bitcoin company, I agree with Jack.
We're a centralized regulated, highly regulated audited organization. We don't pretend that we're not. Right? Like, sometimes people download Strike and they're like, you're KYC ing me, man. It's like, yeah. There's, like, government guns to my head. I don't I'm not shy about that. But when I say we're a Bitcoin company, I'm long Bitcoin short crypto through strike. Right? Like, I think Brian and not to overly pick on Brian, but I think focus on crypto versus focus on Bitcoin compounds. And I I don't know if that is what you meant in, like, being a Bitcoin company, but I mean, I just completely disagree with Jack,
[00:18:59] ODELL:
but it's a semantics argument. Which one? Chuck. I said, why'd you guys have to sit next to each other? You said I agree I agree with Mallers. Okay. I I think every business is going to be a Bitcoin business, and I think every person is going to be a Bitcoiner. But I do respect this concept that if you're if you're building true FreedomTech under, like, the ethos of Bitcoin and very aligned with the ethos of Bitcoin, it's incredibly difficult to do that with a centralized structure in place and having a CEO in place. Now I will say, you know, Huddl, Huddl, and Debify are actually this very interesting example here of while they do have a centralized structure in terms of leadership, they don't take custody of funds, right, which is a just a paradigm shift in how you could run a financial services business. Like, that was never even possible before Bitcoin existed.
So I would take it back to you, Dorsey. It feels weird calling you Dorsey. I'm gonna call you Jack, and I'm gonna call you Mallers. Does that work? Just stay. No. Don't take it the same way. What what do you think about that? Like, is there something there in terms of if you're running a business, Like, the self custody aspect really changes a lot of things. Yeah. Yeah. I I I think there's a I think there's a different a a number of different creative approaches
[00:20:21] Jack Dorsey:
to this work. I think it's, I I think it, probably much not not to diminish the effort, but in in our context, it's probably much harder to do things like that with the fact that we have all these other businesses that are that are highly regulated. And I the things I would want to do, I'd probably want to start as a separate startup because it would be far easier and we could take far more far more risk. But given the the scale that we're at, not just with Bitcoin. It may have nothing to do with Bitcoin. It has everything to do with the rest of our business and competitive dynamics. And just look at just look at New York as example and operating Bitcoin products within New York as an example.
It is nearly impossible. It's a state that is full of all the bankers, and, that makes it very difficult to even ship something like Bitkey within that state, such that most Bitcoin companies that get to scale won't even try New York and or exit from it. And New York is talking to other states to to follow. And these these regulations are gonna become more and more fragmented, and companies like ours will have to go state by state by state by state. And the amount of work to differentiate your product by state by state level is just immense. I mean, it it compounds into something that, it just doesn't make sense to launch some things in that case. Now that's not true of every product, of course, and and, again, there's ways around it and the the bit license and everything that they're considering with with Lightning, but that that's gonna be to me, in in my view, we're gonna see more of that, not less of it.
[00:22:18] Jack Mallers:
I think, what do you think about every company eventually does something with Bitcoin? I made a comment. So I think, the S and P 500 or, like, US capital markets, the stock market, is generally a pretty good proxy to understand what's going on in the world because it's what had to have been monetized after we left the gold standard. Right? It's, like, wealth and capital had to go somewhere. It's all sitting in the US capital markets primarily. And so if you see the performance of, like, the highest market caps primarily in the United States on New York Stock Exchange and such, you can kinda see directionally how the world has evolved and where value is being created and what industries are being disrupted. If you look at the top of the stock market over the last decade, it's a lot of big tech. Right? Like Microsoft and Facebook and there's Amazon in there, like, a lot of Internet born companies.
And I made a comment, I think it was a few years ago, that I think in 10 years from now, the biggest companies in the world will be Bitcoin companies. And I feel pretty confident about that still. Like, I think MicroStrategy but what what I meant by that is that, you know, you need Bitcoin more than Bitcoin ever needs you. Like, Donald Trump needs Bitcoin more than Bitcoin needs Donald Trump. Like, I personally need Bitcoin a lot more than Bitcoin will ever need me, like a 100%. And I think that goes for every individual, every corporation, every government, and eventually, Bitcoin kind of manifests itself and realizes itself playing a role in your life in some form of fashion. And I do think 10 years from now when you look at the S and P 500 or, you know, the top businesses in the world, there will be, like, a core Bitcoin tenant similar to how you see tech and Internet evolving today. And and and so but maybe we're now arguing over the semantics of what a Bitcoin company means. Well, I
[00:24:07] Jack Dorsey:
I think that every company will have to use Bitcoin Mhmm. Because it will be that currency of the Internet, and you will have to participate. And it'll be smart for them to hold Bitcoin just like it's smart for any individual to. But I would hate for the fact I would hate a a reality where the majority of our interface to Bitcoin is through companies because it by definition, it will be restricted. It'll go against the philosophies and the principles of Bitcoin in many ways, and it's hard to craft an implementation that enables that. So, like, I I think the the the best we can do as Bitcoin companies is also make sure that we're contributing to Mhmm. Open source projects that can actually have the principles and carry carry forth the the principles of of, what we love about what we love about Bitcoin. So I don't disagree I don't disagree with you, but I just I don't I don't want a bunch of companies to own all the Bitcoin, and I don't want a bunch of companies to be the only interface
[00:25:00] Jack Mallers:
to the Bitcoin. Well, you know what's funny is, I think nobody does. I don't think you can because you would kill you'd kill the project. That's part of the game theory is, you know, if we all wanted concentrated coins and concentrated access, then Bitcoin itself would die. So that's part of that, like, open network, economies of scale, network effects, like, cyclical loop that you get is that at Strike, if we're doing well, one of the best things we can do is support Bitcoin doing better, not necessarily ourselves. And if Bitcoin does better and Bitcoin's healthier and Bitcoin's distributed and people can still take self custody of their coins, then our business will compound on top of that. But it's that's a very, very unique I mean, like, that level of game theoretical genius from Satoshi. Like, it's hard to imagine that he, or she or they had the foresight for that. But I don't I agree with you, but I don't think anyone could disagree with you. I think we all agree. I think everyone in this room agrees.
[00:26:05] ODELL:
Attaboy. We all agree.
[00:26:07] Jack Dorsey:
Right? I think we all agree. Man. Yeah, I mean, you're so should back to my moderator role. You're you're, you're building a mainstream media conglomerate. You are running
[00:26:17] ODELL:
a nonprofit Rich coming from you. Gone? You're running you're running a non nonprofit,
[00:26:23] Jack Dorsey:
to grant developers in this ecosystem and and also Nostra. What, like, what have you seen work and and not work just from a very high level point of view?
[00:26:34] ODELL:
And how do you how do you how do you rectify the schism between the the corporate incentives and the needs and the and what open source can can bring? Yeah. I mean, I think at the core the core of the value prop of Bitcoin, right, is is that you're able to spend and save without permission. And the second it becomes permissioned, that value prop gets eroded. And I think that's what, Jack was talking about when he was talking about this this game theory incentive that it's not in anyone's best interest to capture Bitcoin fully. And it's a little bit hard to objectively quantify what does it mean to capture Bitcoin fully. So as a result, it's important that as many of us lead by example as possible to push the tide as much towards open source development to FreedomTech development.
And what does that look like in practice? What that looks like in practice is is better education, encouraging more people to get into development in the first place, making sure that they are they are competent and supported, supported both financially, but also through mentorships and education and whatnot. I would say that if you look back, like, 4 years ago, when we were just getting started with OpenSats, we're just getting started with Open Sats. The the open source funding landscape was a lot different. I don't think Spiral was launched yet. HRF Dev Fund wasn't launched yet, and obviously, Open Sats wasn't launched yet.
The that it has been incredibly optimistic and and impressive to see that trend going up. I mean, at OpenSAT specifically, we're funding almost 200 open source contributors in 40 plus countries around the world. They get paid out in Bitcoin monthly. Our entire treasury is held in Bitcoin Multisig. Obviously, we are a centralized organization, but we're a nonprofit. But we are able to use Bitcoin in a way that allows us to achieve a scale, achieve an efficiency, achieve a transparency that was never before possible. So that it's it's incredibly powerful to to to watch this all play out, but I would caution people that because it's basically impossible to objectively value what does Bitcoin being fully captured or to captured means. We need to constantly be on the offensive on that front, and there does feel like there's a little bit of complacency.
Right now, a lot of our most prolific developers are incredibly burnt out. They finally have substantial financial resources, but those are still very limited compared to the private market opportunities that they have. They have a community that is very divided, which is a good thing in Bitcoin a lot of the times. It's it's it's important that we don't all agree about everything, but it can be very difficult to watch when, you know, you're working like a thankless job and and people on Twitter are just, you know, cheering number go up. So the the burnout's a real issue with our with our more established developers or more experienced open source contributors, and the I like to call it the replacement rate. It's like, it's like the birth rate of new developers compared to, like, the death rate of of existing developers. There's a discrepancy there. We're there were not we're not net new adding, the higher level contributors because, I mean, that's a hard thing to do. Like, people with actually years of experience, that are more yeah. That that that that are that are I I don't wanna say qualified, but that are more comfortable with working on these kind of systems. These systems are some of the most difficult things to work with in the world. I mean, if you talk to someone that works on privacy software, they have almost no metrics on how their software is being used because they don't track their users.
And they ship it and it's running live. That that code is just running in production. And if Bitcoin is gonna be the the this base of a global distributed financial network, like, the stakes are incredibly, incredibly high. So they're under a ton of pressure. It's it's very difficult work. It's it's often very thankless, and we just have to do our best as as a community, as an ecosystem, as an industry, to support them as much as possible.
[00:31:05] Grant Gilliam:
We, we talked a little bit about the funding topic, earlier on a panel. And I think to Matt's point, this industry has never been as flush with cash, not just on the not for profit side, but also on the for profit side. There's lots more investors that are pursuing, capital endeavors in the space. And I think it probably is also true that despite this massive influx, like, relatively speaking, it's still small relative to everything that's going into the broader crypto space. But relatively speaking, we've had a big influx in capital, but I don't think you're seeing developer increase to the same level of extent, company formation from an investment side that is investable in in large dollars.
So that's, I mean, that's an interesting dichotomy, I think.
[00:32:03] Jack Dorsey:
Why why do you think that is a like, why isn't a 16 looking at at this ecosystem?
[00:32:10] Grant Gilliam:
Well, the obvious answer is that, when you pursue the crypto oriented investments, we've had this period over the last several years when you, can pursue much more near term liquidity through tokens. I mean, that's the obvious answer. I mean, you asked Matt what is what has he seen work, in his endeavors. The way I would answer it from a 10 30 one perspective is just pursuing alignment with Bitcoin, caring about Bitcoin, being Bitcoiners. I think there's people at these larger funds that understood really early on that Bitcoin was, a very significant innovation and gave it some mind space a long time ago.
But I think they've moved on, and they don't they don't consider themselves Bitcoiners, look at the space, or care about the space in the same way. And so I think that's how 10/31 has found product market fit, at least with the people who are building in the space, is that we live and breathe Bitcoin. We come, we participate, we contribute, and we are just authentically Bitcoin. And I don't think you can say the same thing about the other funds. You're actually one of the few VCs.
[00:33:36] Max Keidun:
Like, I'm not trying to make you happy, but, you're one of the few VCs that actually say that they invest in Bitcoin companies and they invest a lot of VCs just ride on the Bitcoin and they're like, yeah, we're Bitcoin pro only, but they invest in a lot of shit coins and tokens and crypto and etcetera, etcetera. So there's like, from my experience in the space, there's like 4, 3 VC funds in Bitcoin space that are actually Bitcoin VCs, and all others just say that they're Bitcoin VCs, but they do prefer or they do invest in other projects as well. Yeah. I mean, I think there's 2 sides to this. Right? There's the first side that a 16 z,
[00:34:14] ODELL:
and these other large, allocators, really love dumping shitcoins on retail. They get that instant liquidity. They never had it before. Like, historically, the VC game was a a game that you had to play on a longer term scale, that you had illiquidity in your investments. You weren't able to exit them until, hopefully, they went public or there was an acquisition. Obvious obviously, they very rarely believed in building profitable businesses, so the the idea of a dividend bank paying company is completely foreign to them. And so they've kind of ignored Bitcoin up until this point. Now I think that won't continue to be the case, and there are certain times where they do poke their heads into the space. But the smart Bitcoin founders usually do not want to participate with them.
And the ones that do choose to participate with them usually get pressured into adding shitcoins, so then they're no longer a Bitcoin only business. So the end result is you very rarely have a a Bitcoin only business that's aligned with the Bitcoin ethos and and the values and supporting open source development and trying to push forward self custody and these other freedom oriented aspects of Bitcoin, that have them on the cap table because it's just diametrically opposed.
[00:35:30] Jack Dorsey:
It's crazy to me that, these people who portray themselves as, like, the founders of the Internet and incredible technologists don't see the merits of the technology in Bitcoin. Like, everyone we just talked about, but there's so many other technologists we can point to that have either written Bitcoin off or onto the new hype cycle, which currently right now is is AI and LLMs. What about the merits of Bitcoin is not attractive to these folks?
[00:36:03] ODELL:
Right. What are they what are they not seeing? Why are they choosing to be blind to it? By the way, I think you're the best moderator in Bitcoin, so thank you for stepping up to the plate. The, you know, I I think it could be even more malicious than that. I think they understand the value prop of Bitcoin. They understand that it's fundamentally, a complete game changer that it could be it could very likely be the standard currency of the world. And they probably own Bitcoin themselves personally, but you have to follow incentives. Right? And they have very they're they're they're thinking on short time frames. They're not thinking long term. They're not thinking, on this idea of of of it I mean, of integrity. They're not thinking integrity first. They're thinking profits first. And if they follow these hype hype cycles, if they go into these buzzword bullshits, they're able to raise way more money. They're able to collect fees on it. Ideally, they convince the founder to launch a token. Like, they all in their contracts all have these cutouts that if, like, you don't have a token, but you have a token in the future, we get our pro router share of the token, and then they start trying to pressure you into having the token.
And they make way more money in the short term off of it. And I think you go if you go a decade in the future, if you go 2 decades in the future and you're actually thinking in a low time preference way, in a long term thinking way, the people that don't do that, will actually be able to look their children and their grandchildren in the face and be like, we actually did the right thing and and and look how well that worked out for us and you should follow that example and and, you know, be a productive human being.
[00:37:44] Jack Dorsey:
I agree with that. I I think it comes down to a simple answer, though. I I I think they can't control the outcome. Yeah. I think they can own the outcome. Like, they recognize that Bitcoin is unownable, ultimately.
[00:37:55] Jack Mallers:
I was my answer is I think what you're same thing is I think it's very obvious they see opportunity and control and is why I think I think that that's where they see the opportunity. And I think there's an argument to be made that, unfortunately, like, the Internet, you know, the Internet had some unfortunate chapters where a lot of the opportunity on top of the web was, like, really controlling, like, Zuckerberg. And so I think it's very obvious someone like Marc Andreessen thinks that the opportunity in this space is where there can be control, yeah, and that there's a tremendous amount of vulnerability for him and others from Big Tech to let go of the project and invest in its fundamentals and to assume that free market value will seek itself back to them because they can find a way to create it without control.
That's what I think. It's pretty obvious to me, and I think that these guys, Coinbase included, have raced to the local valley top and have totally missed that there's a mountaintop in the skyline. And, you know, when founding Strike, that's what we're like, we're gonna skip the local hilltop that everyone seems to be celebrating on and just march towards hiking the mountain. And I think that that's it. And and and on the local, Valley Top is where you can control. Like, I think their interest in Ethereum comes down to influence and control.
Their ability to you know, we talk about finding liquidity, but, like, at the end of the day, again, it's like controlling your own destiny, having influence. I mean, liquidity at that that early of a venture investment is a bailout effectively. It's the same thing as a central bank bailout in my opinion. So, yeah, I think it comes down to control. And there's a there's an interesting argument that you probably can participate in and how much of how the Internet played out influences that, like, Silicon Valley bias because you know right?
[00:39:58] Jack Dorsey:
Yep. No. I mean, Facebook's a incredible example of this. There was a point, I'm sure you all remember, that, they were trying to integrate more payments into Facebook. And instead of choosing the open protocol of of Bitcoin, they decided to create their own entirely new protocol called Libre. Was it Libre? They changed the name once or twice. Right? Libra. Right? Libra? Yeah. And it was, in Matt's words, an unmitigated disaster. And what, like, why why is it so hard for a company like that to look at a open protocol like Bitcoin that's been around for over a decade when they started that, has been battle tested, has never gone down, has had almost zero security flaws, or or hacks, on the on the main network, has a very committed developer ecosystem around it.
Why go that route? Because if we can understand that, we can we can use that as a template in the case study for other companies who are considering doing the same. And you know they're going to they're going to have to because eventually Bitcoin will have the usage that they can't ignore anymore. But is that just about control? Are there are there other other reasons that that companies, like, need to take that wrong fork in the road?
[00:41:20] Grant Gilliam:
The the only other idea I have around this because what I heard was incentives control. The only other one is just not everyone is smart or perfect at all things. Like, there are Bitcoiners that I very much respect who also have bad ideas about things that aren't related to their field of expertise and people who've told me, you know, the investments that we're making in the ecosystem, they don't get it. They don't think it makes sense. And over time, I feel like some of the specific examples they're referring to were proving very wrong.
And what I've learned from that is, look, I highly respect certain people, but not everyone's right about everything all the time. And so there could be people who just, they may be highly experienced, very well credentialed in building technology. That doesn't necessarily mean that they need to go build their own technology and money, but they don't see why that's not the case.
[00:42:25] Jack Mallers:
Yeah. I don't I don't know if anyone needs to teach anyone anything outside of the free market, in my opinion. I've always called shitcoins an arbitrage on the trend. You know, I love that. And if I can sell a banana to my left for $10 and I can buy banana to my right for a dollar, I'm making $9 all day as long as the market remains that inefficient. Right? That's what we call an arbitrage trade. Arbitrage trades can't last forever, though. Eventually, the banana to my right and left, they're both worth $5. Right? So market's correct. And so I think Shitcoins are an arbitrage, and they're they're an arbitrage trade. Is that what's the arbitrage? Well, there's certainly a regulatory arbitrage. Like, everyone's become their own central bank, which is extremely profitable. Right? If I can print money in my basement and pay Justin Bieber to tell 8 18 year olds to buy it on Robinhood, that's a really profitable business, but there's some regulatory arbitrage involved in that. And then there's an informational arbitrage, where people don't fundamentally understand the technology, understand the value, understand the ecosystem, and I'm allowed to convince someone that Pinkcoin and Bitcoin are, like, kinda sorta the same thing, except Pink Pinkcoin's better because it has a cheaper price. Right? But I think at the end of the day, these things correct, and the bananas are worth $5 and the market becomes efficient again. And so I don't know who needs to teach Zuckerberg, probably the fact that he got his fucking ass kicked.
He tried to launch something, he looked like an idiot and a moron, and that's one of the most competitive men in the world. And I bet that didn't feel good. Right? I think, like, Bitcoin gets adopted like gunpowder. Right? If you don't adopt it correctly, you become the victim. Alright? If you're going to war and you show up with sticks and stones instead of gunpowder, you're dead. So I, like, I think that at the end of the day, like, Mark Zuckerberg is gonna think twice because he looked like a fucking moron and embarrassed his shareholders, and his whole team quit. And so that's my opinion is, like, it's an arbitrage trade. It's not a sustainable vision. It's not the the the mountaintop in the skyline.
It's taking advantage of market inefficiencies, which, you know, you can make moral arguments for or against. Right? But at the end of the day, I don't think it's very long lasting, and I think the free market will punish people aggressively, and shamefully, for mistakes that they make just like Zuckerberg. He might be good at other things, but when it came to our space, he's a fucking rookie and a chump.
[00:44:57] Max Keidun:
I think after your rant, they're not gonna adopt Bitcoin at all. Mark needs Bitcoin more than Bitcoin needs Mark. So on his own time. True. But I think effectively everything comes comes to control. You know, Bitcoin is about having the control over the money, your money, and all these companies, they just wanna control everything. Like, Facebook wants to control what you see, what you consume, effectively what you pay and how you pay. So that that's it.
[00:45:28] ODELL:
I mean, to bring in full circle, market dynamics, free market, user choice, learning by getting wrecked, when will the the, the Fiat VC start getting into Bitcoin? The guy who was leading the Libra initiative, David Marcus, left, founded a Bitcoin company, and it was funded by a 16z. It brought it full circle. That's all I have to add.
[00:45:57] Jack Dorsey:
And but do you think that's a function of of him, previous relationships, the technology stack and company he's building? Like, what what drove that? Because that is an outlier.
[00:46:13] Jack Mallers:
Yeah. I think pre like, probably not a 16 z's fundamental thesis changing, but I think the point about face Facebook seeking control in their core business, again, I think the Internet had a dark chapter where, like, you know, one of the problems with I talked about this guy. I've never met him, so whatever. The new new Zuck with his chain and his MMA, maybe he's a cool guy. I don't know. But the problem with Mark's business is his users aren't his customers. Right? This is like a huge problem in the Internet is that he's building a product for all of us in theory to use in this room, but his customers are advertising.
Right? And it creates this awful dynamic and totally broken incentives where he tries to pray and control his users to benefit his customers. And that's that's, like, to me, the core fundamental issue. You know, you've got a guy that is so hated, but has the most one of the most successful businesses and most used products in the world. Like, that lot that intuitively doesn't make any sense. Everyone uses his stuff. Everyone hates him. Right? Like, from the highest level possible, how is that real? And so I think therein lies, like, a lot of the issue and a lot of, like, from the Internet, from the a 16z, from the, you know, I'm Marc Andreessen. I created the web browser. You know, it it's, you know control was the opportunity at the end of the day in the web. And that's I mean, you know, before this, we're in Nasser conference and, you know, there's there's a whole separate conversation of fixing the web.
But I think that that's the biggest point is that, like, Facebook what Facebook has been taught is that control is higher stock price, and Zuckerberg will go to any extent to exercise control. And like, there's no I don't even think he would walk back that claim at this point. And so how do they approach Bitcoin? We wanna control it. We can't control it? Not interested. And they'll just have to go through a lot of pain before that's rectified. This is my honest opinion. But I thought I think the unfortunate, like, recent years of the web and a lot of the shit that you unfortunately had to go through at Twitter and stuff, I think that that's where that bias comes from, and I don't think David Marcus changed the way Marc Andreessen thinks about control. No. I don't. And I love David. He's a great guy, and I'm really happy he's working on Bitcoin, but I that's not my opinion. Yeah. I think that model will be broken. Can we talk about, like, engineers
[00:48:50] Jack Dorsey:
and people working on the on these on these platforms? You all run or help fund organizations or developers to work on Bitcoin. There is a monster hype cycle right now, around work that is not Bitcoin related and financial freedom related and privacy, or permissionless tech related. And it pays a lot of money, and it's super interesting. It feels a little bit dangerous in the same way that early Bitcoin did. How are you attracting and, more importantly, retaining engineers to work on this on this protocol, on these on these products? And what's the tension you've seen? And how do you think this plays out in in 3 years? Because while we do have an incredible developer ecosystem right now, it's constantly stressed, and it's constantly tested. It's tested by new technology trends.
It's tested by, frivolous lawsuits, people who pretend to be Satoshi and sue developers to change the code so that you can get access to the original Bitcoin of Satoshi. It'll continue to be challenged in the courts. It feels like everything if you choose a Bitcoin path, everything is either against you right now or coming at you to tell you to stop. So who is this type of person that you're hiring? Why are they staying with you? And what do you see as the challenges in the future?
[00:50:24] Max Keidun:
In our case, I have, like, part of the people are actually very much into bitcoin, but part of the people who works for us, they're they're being taught by us and educated by us what is Bitcoin. So these people actually now start to admire Bitcoin and how it works. But, we try to, you know, limit them off the drama and we try to keep their privacy. That's number 1. So we don't disclose who our developers are. We avoid disclosing that publicly, and we mostly only disclose the business development team. And another reason we have remote team, so most of our developers actually in in in countries that are that are more friendly to to Bitcoin developers than than other countries.
[00:51:13] Jack Dorsey:
What are those countries?
[00:51:16] Max Keidun:
Those who are,
[00:51:18] Jack Dorsey:
well, I'm not gonna disclose those countries because No. No. But but generally, like, what countries do you look at as being more I mean, emerging markets.
[00:51:26] Max Keidun:
Like emerging markets, these most of the emerging market countries like Latin America or Southeast Asia, they're pretty much friendly towards Bitcoin. And they they respect privacy, and then literally don't care about what you're doing, how you're earning your money. And, it's kind of like that.
[00:51:49] ODELL:
I mean, I think the single biggest advantage we have is is is that Bitcoin has this it has this draw. Right? I mean, I think most of us I mean, you guys are at a Bitcoin conference. I don't even know how many Bitcoin conferences there are a year now. I I I think I think most industries don't even come close to this, and that's because Bitcoin is is becomes more than a a career for a lot of people. It becomes more like a lifestyle. And and and people a lot of our our our most prolific, engineers, are, you know, they're die hard Bitcoiners. They're not all die hard Bitcoiners. Some of them, you know, maybe aren't necessarily as committed committed to, like, the concepts or the ethos or, like, I I hate to say culture, the culture of Bitcoin, or like the freedom movement aspect of Bitcoin, but most are. And what I see a lot happens is they start with a very high paying private sector job that is completely irrelevant to Bitcoin.
You know, maybe they consume some podcasts. Maybe their uncle or their nephew recommends them to check out Bitcoin, and they they start stacking some Bitcoin. And as a result, they start getting into the community and they start going to meetups. And, I mean, Grant was talking earlier, like, this industry is very heavily motivated by this idea of proof of work. Right? I think it's one of, like, the great transformations that Bitcoin is is kinda bringing to the world is that at its core, Bitcoin requires proof of work, requires real energy and and commitment, to acquire it in the first place. And as a result, everything that comes later also is expected to have proof of work. And so we have this this global community that really respects proof of work. And as you get deeper into that community, you start contributing in a part time basis. And then that part time basis becomes a little bit more than part time. And that's the key where something like an Open Sats or these these Bitcoin businesses that are out there that are are employing developers, really comes in. Because at that point, when they're thinking about jumping over the ledge, you know, and leaving their high paying AI job or blockchain job or whatever hype job, to go into Bitcoin, there needs to be mechanisms there to to try and decrease that friction a little bit. There'll always be friction and that's what always works against us, but that's because hard things, you know, are inherently harder. Personal responsibility is more difficult.
So as a result, there will always be friction there, but the key is to try and reduce that friction as much as possible.
[00:54:29] Jack Dorsey:
Correct.
[00:54:31] Grant Gilliam:
Yeah. I think, forcing people down the path to care about Bitcoin, it's it's a hard thing. They they generally as they come to learn it and this is not just, I think, the engineers. This is across all All the disciplines. All layers of talent that you need for a company as you scale. They come to value the mission, their soul more than what they're giving up, from those high paying jobs. And it's sort of like as you think about scaling a company, as as you guys were saying, it gets harder to be a Bitcoin company the bigger you are.
One of the challenges that we've seen is that there really is a high correlation between the talent. It could be engineers. It could be finance people. It could be legal people, but there's a high correlation between the people who tend to work out for the companies and being Bitcoiners, which is hard to it's hard to force them down that path. And there's also a high correlation to the ones that they don't really care about Bitcoin as much, but they're a very high level finance person or a high level, legal person. And it just doesn't work out because they they're not willing to stick it out relative to the other opportunities that are out there. I will say there's there's also another piece there that we have to our advantage
[00:55:53] ODELL:
where for the first time ever and and this is key if the employees or the open source contributors are Bitcoiners because they actually hold their assets in Bitcoin. Is we have an industry she's working on it. She's got it. We we have an industry where, like, everyone almost has this this global shared equity across industries. Like, I've heard you talk about it, Jack, in the past, like, the this perverse incentive of offering stock options because you're you're forced to to try and get an exit and rush to public. But employees that hold Bitcoin and and and stay on Bonsac Sats, over time, that value is accruing to them across the entire ecosystem regardless of which company. So it creates this kind of alignment and community that just doesn't exist in, you know, AI. Like, that that just wasn't possible before.
[00:56:51] Jack Mallers:
And this for, like, the company or for Bitcoin at at large engineers? Both. I mean, for so, I think, fundamentally, as as a human, we all wanna be part of something bigger than ourselves. I think that's, like, the desire we all share, connection. I think inherently being born and being human, you wanna be part of something that's bigger than yourself and working on something that will last longer than you will. I think the best example of that is family. Right? Like, finding relationship, having kids, and working on your bloodline that is, by definition, bigger than you, and your bloodline now will last longer than you will.
And so I think we seek that out as human beings inherently all the time in different forms. I think Bitcoin is one of the most powerful and expressive forms of that, of being something far bigger than yourself and being something being part of something that will last far longer than you will. And so at Strike, and with myself personally, we really try hard to lean into that as a culture. And so beyond salary and equity and Bitcoin, what we can give you is that form of connection, I think, in being human, And, you know, some of my most successful employees that have done tremendously well and carry a lot of responsibility and are unbelievable at what they do at Strike join not as Bitcoiners, but I think that culture that we've built, where people are attracted to being part of that, I think, and, you know, it could exist in AI and such. And, you know, the other thing too is we, you know, we have a culture where if you need to go, it's probably in the best interest of both of us because in order for me to be successful in what I started, I need you to be on the same page as me. And so sometimes people go, but I think that that it's culture for us, culture messaging, brand, and, like, the whole, like, dying on that hill, you know, truly, truly authentically expressing that purpose, and connecting with my employees in that way, has allowed us to be successful with engineers?
[00:59:15] Jack Dorsey:
I I think the greatest well, I know the greatest thing we've we've done at Block in this regard is Cray Spyro. The the fact that we decided to to really, like, start small, we we decided to hire 1 person who could hire 4 other people, a total team of 5, and their mission was just to work on Bitcoin and work on open source, and they took no direction from us. And it has been some of the most valuable idea generations for our company, even though we had no expectation around that. We've gotten incredible work from them that we use in our main product like Cash App, which is, based on LDK, which they they created.
It's an incredible recruiting tool. People wanna work alongside them, not necessarily on the open source aspects, but they see the the mastery of their craft and how good they are as engineers and and people intersecting with the the community. So for any of you with a company, even if it's just one person or half, half time person that you're paying, and we we pay them in Bitcoin, because we didn't want to align their incentives to our stock and to our company. But the you know, what they're actually working on, which is which is Bitcoin, and as they make it more viable, hopefully, Bitcoin becomes more viable. But to just dedicate some resources to full on open source under their own direction, and I think you'll be really massively surprised.
I also don't think I I, I don't think these, these trends are necessarily in conflict with one another. I think if Bitcoin does become the native currency of the Internet, we are gonna have, like, a lot of agentic AI systems and agents doing biddings for human, and they will have to transact. And they will seek the most friction free way to transact, and it will not be Visa or Mastercard. It will have to be something like a protocol for the Internet that's open, that no one government can can control and no single corporation can own. So I I think we could probably do a better job at, like, pointing at the potential intersections of these technologies and get both sides of it, because you just know that's going to that's going to happen, that's going to occur.
And I don't think we we really talk about that enough. And, again, bringing up Noster again, like, I think we have a protocol where these things can play right now, and we can test a bunch and then really scale them up to a a much broader usage and and use case. So to me, that's super exciting.
[01:01:59] ODELL:
Shout out to Spiral team. Shout out to Steve Lee. Shout out to Steve Lee.
[01:02:09] Jack Dorsey:
I don't know. Is this clock 0 because we're out of time, or is it
[01:02:13] Max Keidun:
Oh, we still have time. No worries.
[01:02:17] Jack Dorsey:
Okay.
[01:02:18] ODELL:
Matt? I I mean, I think we have, like, 4 like you have a question in mind. No. I mean, I I'm just gonna say the buzzwords, but Nostra AI Bitcoin, there's something there.
[01:02:35] Jack Dorsey:
Do you have any more questions for us, Jack? Yeah. I mean, I have a ton of questions, but you look like it's a question, not in the statement. No. You're good. Okay. The, I guess the another big question for me is, like, what use cases and what friction points in Bitcoin is a company best served to solve versus an open source initiative? Like, I would I would I would probably theorize that privacy is best served in a non corporate environment, but there might be counterexamples to that. But as you think about, like, what Bitcoin what the gaps are, what the flaws are, and how and there's a bunch of people in here probably thinking about starting a company or thinking about join joining or contributing to open source initiative.
As you think about the enumeration of the use cases and and the gaps that we all know exist, like, how do you segment those,
[01:03:36] ODELL:
or or do we segment them? Yeah. I mean, I I I don't think it necessarily has to be black and white. Right? I mean, I think, there are certain projects or goals that, can intuitively, you can intuitively interpret could have, concerning regulatory implications, right, and and provide a lot of risk to a to a centralized company founder, startup founder. And those should probably just be non monetized open source projects that are, funded through grants or donations. I mean, one of my dreams is that, organizations like like Open SaaS, organizations like Spiral become less relevant as users are just donating directly with things like Zaps with no middlemen, just Bitcoin directly to these developers. But in either situation, just basically donation funding a community open source project makes a lot of sense on things that are are are regulatory, that there's a lot of regulatory pressure on. And usually those things are heavily focused on freedom or privacy.
But there is a middle ground and it's actually one of my dreams that I that I I hope to see become a reality. I expect it to become a reality, but it's gonna take a lot of work from a lot of people. And it's only possible really because of Bitcoin, I think, because you have this native money of the Internet that's not controlled by anyone. And that's the sustainable open source business model where the whole business is built on open source tech that the actual entire stack of the business can be forked at will, redistributed, remonetized, like not a restricted open source license or source viewable license, like an actual full false stack. And those companies exist today. Like Start9 is a full false stack. Primal is a full false stack.
Mempool space is a full false stack. And they're all trying different ways to monetize on top of that stack. And you get this beautiful combination of, this situation, as you said, where one of the main concerns if you're running a centralized business is is that purse that founder can be arrested. That person can have a gun put to their head. They can get assassinated. In those situations, that could happen, and the stack still exists. Someone else can continue it on. Right? It it it it it inherits and keeps that same viral nature that makes open source so powerful, but has a business model on top of it.
But that makes it much more difficult. Right? That's the hardest path. And I think part of the reason that we're starting to see that now is because there is this growing global community that is incredibly passionate and and and and and wants to take the harder path because they know it'll be a brighter future at the end.
[01:06:27] Jack Dorsey:
Max? Yeah. This is an okay answer.
[01:06:32] Max Keidun:
I mean To mid clap. I mean, free open source contributors, definitely, they have more freedom, but, I think they're they, are cheered less in the community, and they're supported less in the community, and that's the issue. Because, like, it's not on Nostra, but if you go on Twitter, which is x, and you'll see that a lot of Bitcoiners, they actually cheer corporations or companies instead of cheering free open source developers or developers who doesn't request anything. And it's like, for a company, it's pretty much not that complicated to raise money. You can just go to v c if you're successful enough, then you will be able to get some checks.
For free open source developer, like, not many people actually understand how how successful the code is or how successful the application they have built is. So it's really hard sometimes for them to get grants. So I think yeah. Like, free open source developers definitely more freedom, but, less support in many ways. Not only financially, but also as a community, I think. We are massively failing, and I'm sorry to say that, but, we are massively failing to support, developers that actually building really cool stuff. Like, guys from the BISC, for example.
That's the last resort if you wanna buy Bitcoin, literally. And I think they don't get much credit as they need to get. That's it. Yeah.
[01:08:06] Grant Gilliam:
Brent? Yeah. What I would add is I think the the overwhelming majority of effort that developers and engineers can make is mostly towards the open source stuff right now. Like, the reality is that there haven't been too many businesses that have found interesting ways to monetize. I mean, it's still so early that the main monetizable business models are brokerage, people are willing to pay for custody, there's credit products, People were paying for the privacy oriented services, and that it that now is a pretty significant gap still. But the further you go down the line, we haven't we haven't really seen a lot of development on the company side. So I think that actually forces a lot down the the open source, path.
[01:09:05] Jack Dorsey:
Jack. Jack. What was the was it What was it? Should be a protocol or what should be open sourced? Yeah. No. What what use cases, what products should be worked on by companies versus open source an open source approach? You make that distinction.
[01:09:21] Jack Mallers:
Yeah. I'm not sure I'm not sure we have to. You know, I do think that there's sometimes people assume that because Bitcoin exists, that no companies need to exist. I think the opposite. I'm very bullish businesses on top of Bitcoin. I think it goes back to SaaS flow, or talk about just being profitable. And again, I think of that more morally than financially, is like serve someone something they value that they're willing to pay for, and I think businesses should be building that. I really deeply believe in that relationship and that level of incentive, and that Bitcoin allows anyone to withdraw themselves from a relationship with a business. There's no forced relationships with government or business.
And then for open source, I would hope everything is open source. I think I agree with Matt. I would hope everything is open source someday. And, you know, we at Stripe try our best to fund all sorts of different efforts, whether it's developers directly, or through initiatives like OpenSats and HRF, to support these developers. And I I agree with Max as well. I mean, support too doesn't need to be financial, you know, like moral support, letting these people know that we value them and see them and appreciate them, and we wouldn't be here without them. So I'm not sure that there's a huge distinction in, like, us as a company. We we, recently worked with Spiral and Steve on Bolt 12 stuff. We open sourced our Bolt 12 testing playground to if you if you guys need to test Bolt 12 interoperability for all use cases across all the different Lightning implementations, the Lightning node implementations, that's open source now on on our our strike repository. So I hope I hope we don't have to draw a distinction.
What's your opinion?
[01:11:17] Jack Dorsey:
I agree with you. I'd I'd I don't I don't think we have to, but I'd I also I think there there are some some things within the Bitcoin space that I'd rather be heavily biased towards an open source project than be owned by a a company that has a a particular incentive. Like what? A lot of the privacy and more of the permissionless work. And I just I don't see a path towards greatness in a corporate context in in many ways. They might have early success in that, but, because as we see, like, the walls feel like they keep closing in terms of, like, what's what's allowed and what's not. And it's putting this, again, like, choke hold and single point of failure upon a a project that might be absolutely necessary and critical to, financial privacy.
So I think we have 5 minutes left. Maybe we'll, we'll just end with one one topic which is, we have this saying in the Bitcoin community which is, don't trust, verify. And a lot of people probably in this room have the capability to verify. You can look at the source code. You can talk with people building it. You can see the actions. But I just wanna hear from you all how you think about building trusted products and trusted companies and earning trust. Open source is obviously one path towards that, but it's not something that the vast majority of people in the world can actually benefit from, in terms of trying to verify the code or verify how it works. They might know someone who can help them through that, but how with without that one thing, how do how do you build trusted products and companies or projects?
[01:13:07] ODELL:
I mean, I think if you if you have to add trust if you have to add trust to the system, you try and minimize the trust as much as possible. You try and be as transparent as possible. And then it really comes down to to long term proof of work and and and leading by example and actually showing what you're doing and how you're doing it and and building up a a reputation. But in general, especially when Bitcoin is in place, you really, really want you have to reduce that trust as small as possible if there's any element of trust there at all. Yep. Thanks.
[01:13:43] Max Keidun:
In our case, like, from our experience, we just build non custodial stuff. And, like, all our products build on top of multisig, which is which is effectively created every time you interact with HODL, HODL, Debitfy on public Bitcoin blockchain, which you can verify through any block explorer out there. And we also there's no also vendor lock in, which means that even if we go down for some reason, both Huddl Huddl, Debitfy, you can still access with your counterparty funds that are locked in, in the multisync. So we only hold one key out of the majority out of the set of the keys. So we don't actually we cannot control, funds that are locked there. So we have built that system again, which is really complicated because, like, building on top of multisync user friendly solutions are really, really hard. But we have taken that path path. And, like, 6 years we've been doing that, and finally, there's some progression in that way.
Great.
[01:14:45] Grant Gilliam:
Yeah. I mean, I think that question as it relates to us building trust is slightly different from these guys. But the two words I always say is for 10/31 is authenticity and proximity. I mean, we're here today. We are authentically, Bitcoiners. And coming to Matt's point, I mean, he said proof of work. We do it by trying to be the the trusted partners to the founders who care deeply about Bitcoin because we do too. And, the relationships we have with the space is our most valuable assets. And we always tell people who we're trying to build a relationship with, like, if you're if you're trying to build trust in us, the best way to do it is just go talk to the people in the space because we think we've built the integrity, the proof of work, and there's no substitute for talking to the people that we interact with on a day to day basis. Yeah. 100%.
[01:15:48] Jack Dorsey:
Jack?
[01:15:50] Jack Mallers:
No. I think proof of work is is definitely an obvious one. I agree with these guys in that, you know, build stuff that works, be here year in, year out, fight the good fight. I think maybe one of the more counterintuitive ones for us at Strike that was core from day 1 was prioritizing Bitcoin and fighting for Bitcoin, which maybe sounds simple while I'm on the stage, but as a corporation, it's not necessarily intuitive. I'll give you guys, I think, one of my favorite examples when we were a very young business. So, you know, early venture raised coming out of beta.
I got contacted by an Indy 500, which is a race in America, a car race. So like a competitive car race, like one of the most popular races in America, and they wanted to do something with us, and I had the opportunity to race the strike car, and they would have cut us a really cheap deal. We were a young startup. They just wanted something to do with the space, but no one would have given a fuck about the strike car, and I felt like truly in my heart that the best thing we could have done as a business right there was help promote Bitcoin, and get more people involved and race the Bitcoin car. And so we did as a business, and it had nothing to do with our company at all. And it had everything and and we authentically believed that. We thought the best thing for our business and for Bitcoin was for Bitcoin to race next to the PNC Bank car, not for Strike. And so that I think is a is a fun story. I think that was 3 years ago at this point, but that is, I think, core to, you know, who we've become, and I think why the community and and customers trust us is because they know we're here for the right reasons through through that approach. Yeah. A 100%.
[01:17:33] Jack Dorsey:
I I think for us, it's it's making sure that we're building options and as many options as possible that people don't have to trust us. So one of the reasons we we worked on the custodial wall and and Bitkey is, like, we want people to get their Bitcoin off exchanges, and we'd love to find more creative solutions to enable that and and help them. There are limits to that, of course, again, in the corporate context of of how we exist, but, there's a lot more we can do. And I I I wanna make sure that our our tools are provide features and functionality and utility that, you don't have to trust a company. You don't have to trust a CEO.
You can still extract value from it, and you're free to move wherever you need to where you where you do wanna place that trust. And, ideally, it's tools that allow more trust in in yourself, which is the whole concept of having the seed phrases, and, obviously, there's better iterations of that. But that that trust in self is is probably the thing that I think, we all wanna we all wanna align to and all wanna feel much more. So with that, any final words? Matt, moderator? Excellent job. Excellent job. Give it up for Matt. Matt O'Dell.
[01:18:53] ODELL:
I was about to thank you for moderating. I thought you did a great job, but Thank you, Matt. I I mean, I just wanted to thank Max and Anna and and the whole Honey Badger team again and all of you guys. This has been such a wonderful experience.
[01:19:23] Unknown:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Good work. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So, guys, don't leave just yet. Don't leave just yet. We have one final surprise, a special announcement. So 2024 will be remembered not just for the Baltic IBager, but also as the year when politicians all over the world discovered Bitcoin and proactively are using Bitcoin in order to get elected. And a lot of Bitcoiners, on social media are openly picking aside. So we discussed a lot with the with Max and Anna, and we decided that it's time for the Balticoni Badger to pick a side as well. So when it comes to politics, Balticoni Badger strongly endures Rhaenyra Targaryen, first of her name, true queen of the 7 kingdom.
What I'm trying to say is that Bitcoin is for everyone, not just for those you like. Bitcoin is not red. Bitcoin is not blue. Bitcoin is for everyone. Bitcoin is freedom. Don't pick a side. There is there are no sides. Bitcoin is beyond politics. Thank you so much. Please welcome the father of dragons, Max Kaye.
[01:21:07] Max Keidun:
Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Thank you. Guys, I wanted to thank you all for coming here. You're all very special. I wanted to thank all the sponsor speakers. I wanted to to thank Nostriga team, Marce, for for helping us as well. There you are. Those who have been with us for like 5, 6 years, OGs wanted to thank you as well. Security team, street food court team, volunteers, and also I wanted to thank Anna. Yeah. Ricky Ricky said in the morning that she's a mother of dragons, but I would say she's a mother of honey badgers. So, yep, let's that's an official now. That's an official. Thank you all.
See you next year maybe and, yeah, we're all Satoshi. Thank you. Bye bye.
Introduction and Panelist Welcome
Opening Remarks and Event Significance
Panelist Introductions
Building Bitcoin Businesses
Jack Mallers on Building Strike
Bitcoin Business Profitability and Philosophy
Bitcoiners' Lean Lifestyle
Challenges of Building Bitcoin Companies
Jack Dorsey Joins the Panel
Square's Transition to Block and Bitcoin
Defining a Bitcoin Company
Corporate vs. Open Source in Bitcoin
Regulatory Challenges for Bitcoin Companies
Future of Bitcoin in Corporations
Supporting Open Source Development
Funding and Investment in Bitcoin
VCs and Bitcoin Investment
Control and Influence in Bitcoin
Bitcoin's Adoption and Market Dynamics
Attracting and Retaining Bitcoin Developers
Human Connection and Company Culture
Intersection of Bitcoin, AI, and Nostr
Open Source vs. Corporate Development
Building Trust in Bitcoin Products
Closing Remarks and Thank Yous
