Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Payments are the camcorders of our age. The next technology whose time has passed, the new age that is just beginning, will feel qualitatively different. Like the moment Dorothy steps out of her black and white world into the vibrant colors of Oz.
[00:00:20] When value flows as freely as information, the economy changes and society changes with it.
[00:00:30] The best in Bitcoin made Audible. I am Guy Swan and this is Bitcoin Audible.
[00:00:53] What is up guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about Bitcoin than anybody else you know. This show is brought to you by Leden IO if you are on a bitcoin standard like myself, this is an incredible tool to be able to get fiat from your bitcoin, get a bitcoin backed loan without having to sell your bitcoin. Check them out. Got a special link for you down in the show. Notes also a shout out to our other sponsors to Chroma Co. They do red light therapy and light health to synonym and PubKey app. That's P u B K Y app. Building a set of decentralized protocols to re decentralize the web and the hrf, Human Rights foundation, the Oslo Freedom Forum, their amazing conference and their financial freedom Report. Newsletter links, details, tickets, all that good stuff. Oh, and discount right down in the description.
[00:01:52] All right, we've got Roy Scheinfeld back for another read. This is the utility of Bitcoin moving value like information. And I like, I really like this framing because it gets at the heart of the difference between and you might have caught this in the intro quote, but the difference between value transfer and payments and why these are not meaningfully, these are meaningfully not the same thing, even though we've associated them as the same thing. Because payments in the fiat world, everything is credit, everything is a promise and the payments are just another layer of promise on top of a promise. But that fundamentally, if you have digital cash, if you have something where you can actually push payment and you can, you can genuinely push the value in a way that there's not even an invoice. There's nothing, any explicit interaction. There's just, you have value and you can push it to anyone else. And this is digital. It's got no borders, it's got no boundaries, it's got no limitations and there's no explicit intermediary that you ever need, what does that actually do? How does that change our dynamic and our relationship to the value and to the environments online when you can just plug this in and he likens it to when smartphones had a camera and now you have an app ecosystem that can utilize that camera and how this changed social media, how it changes it changed our interactions, how it changed the nature of what we thought of as taking a photo in and of itself. And per usual, I just think he does a fantastic job of laying it out and it's always fun to read. So shout out to Roy, love what they're doing over at Breeze and always enjoy when I got a new update from him. So with that I will let him take it away.
[00:03:45] This is today's read908 and it is titled the Utility of Bitcoin Moving Value Like Information by Roy Scheinfeld Being able to transmit value like information as fast as a text message has profound implications for society.
[00:04:09] Bitcoin unlocks that.
[00:04:12] You'd be forgiven for thinking that technological development was following a predetermined trajectory. In the past few decades, we've seen the rise of personal computers, the Internet, mobile devices, and now the advent of Bitcoin. It's already well established that Bitcoin is the best asset. That's just a matter of basic financial literacy. If you can read a graph, the answer is obviously if you click the link to the article in the show notes, it actually shows a chart showing the cumulative 1 year, 2 year, 3 year, 5 year and 10 year returns comparing Bitcoin Gold, the S&P 500, the NASDAQ, US bonds and crude oil. And in every single instance, Bitcoin outperforms.
[00:04:59] What's less obvious is Bitcoin's utility and how that is going to recast our economic lives in the coming decades beyond its properties as an asset, which are getting most of the attention and recognition.
[00:05:12] Bitcoin is a way to move value.
[00:05:16] That's its core utility. And it's not about buying coffee or underwear. At least not yet, since it's a currency designed on and for the Internet. Retail adoption will likely come after it goes mainstream online.
[00:05:31] And how it will go mainstream online is by commoditizing value transfer, letting anyone move value anywhere for any purpose, without intermediaries.
[00:05:43] Moving value is such a big part of our lives that expanding that realm of possibilities means changing our behavior and the shape of our societies. When it comes to moving value, borders will evaporate, colossal institutions like banks will shrivel and and new connections will sprout like blossoms in spring.
[00:06:03] The scale of the transformation will rival that of the Internet itself.
[00:06:08] Physical books were hard to obtain and easy to ban and sometimes burn. The Internet liberated information, giving far more people access to far more ideas than we had ever had before.
[00:06:22] Conventional money is locked in the walled gardens and preferred pathways of market incumbents.
[00:06:28] Bitcoin represents the end of this system and the beginning of another.
[00:06:33] The Internet unlocked information Bitcoin is unlocking. Value Payments do not equal value transfer to grasp the potential of the current transformation and to differentiate it from boilerplate pro Bitcoin rhetoric, think of it as a shift from the fiat based payment paradigm to to the Bitcoin based value transfer paradigm.
[00:07:01] This sounds more abstract than it really is.
[00:07:05] First, let's recall the familiar payments. Conventional payments are instructions to clear a debt, a definition echoed by professional economists. If someone sells you a coffee or cuts your hair, you owe them and you settle that debt by paying them. Note that in practice, paying them requires instructing intermediaries, banks, apps, cards, middlemen to actually move the value.
[00:07:28] Contrast that with value transfer. There are two key differences.
[00:07:33] First, as we conceptualize it, value transfer is direct. It's not an instruction to an intermediary to perform an action, it's the act itself.
[00:07:43] Second, value transfer need not settle a debt. Payment is a quid pro quo. Value transfer is just quid. You can send value at a whim. It doesn't necessarily imply a trade, though it can.
[00:07:59] Cash makes the differences between payments and value transfer readily apparent. When you pay someone in cash, you're not asking permission. You are physically transferring value from one hand to another. And cash can do more than settle debts. That is more than payments. Dropping some change into a busker's hat or giving your kid an allowance are simple transfers of value without prior debt.
[00:08:24] You can push value with cash rather than just trade it.
[00:08:30] However, cash is being marginalized by the authorities and it's poorly suited to our digital world, so we're losing our ability to transfer value.
[00:08:40] We trust these third party intermediaries like banks, credit card companies and fintech providers to honor our payment instructions and fulfill our requests. But payment instructions are often denied or delayed. More importantly, these payment instructions are limited to predefined patterns dictated by the intermediary's siloed structures. For example, from customer to merchant, from employer to employee, from one bank account to another. If the banks share a wire transfer protocol, this might sound like an exaggeration, but consider platforms like Uber, OnlyFans, Airbnb, and Spotify.
[00:09:17] On the surface, they all look like decentralization. The platforms just connect service providers with consumers. But the payments all run along the platform's predefined paths, which include long chains of greedy intermediaries. Banks, fintech apps, credit card companies, etc. Each of these intermediaries adds cost, a potential point of failure and a source of permissioned friction, regulatory and otherwise.
[00:09:46] The contrast to value transfer is stark. Simply put, value transfer distills the permissionlessness, instantaneousness and flexibility of cash payments without the constraints of having to hold and move physical objects.
[00:10:02] But how do we reimagine cash in a digital world? How do we move from the limitations of payments to to the empowerment of value transfer?
[00:10:12] If only we had a way to send and receive peer to peer electronic cash.
[00:10:18] Bitcoin is more programmable, more flexible, more adaptable than digital payments can be.
[00:10:26] Bitcoin lets us store and move value just as smoothly and easily as our phones store and share a snapshot.
[00:10:34] By treating value as just another kind of information, Bitcoin will enable new patterns of economic activity built on entire ecosystems of particular use cases.
[00:10:46] And yes, it must be Bitcoin.
[00:10:51] Only Bitcoin can facilitate value transfer.
[00:10:56] Value transfer Moving value at will directly between sender and recipient represents a momentous shift from from the conventional payment paradigm.
[00:11:07] So why isn't fintech making it happen?
[00:11:10] Isn't this what stablecoins are for?
[00:11:13] Why is Bitcoin the necessary foundation for an economy based on value transfer?
[00:11:19] The short answer is that payments are deeply embedded in the architecture of the Fiat system, including FinTech.
[00:11:27] A FinTech payment involves an indefinite chain of intermediaries.
[00:11:31] For each intermediary to earn revenue from the transaction, they need a billing model and they opt for discrete payments because that is what regulated money transmitters are allowed to do. Thanks to kyc, AML and risk assessment involved. It's an expensive business, so their fees are commensurately high.
[00:11:51] Beyond cost, intermediation necessarily introduces friction. Each intermediary is subject to regulatory constraints that vary across borders and jurisdictions, with which limits their markets and their reach.
[00:12:04] They also must consider extraneous business concerns like the risk of large clients in one sector revoking their business because of unrelated transactions in another sector.
[00:12:15] Moreover, these payments are no more programmable than the intermediaries allow and they are neither final nor instantaneous. The intermediaries can process them at their leisure and the payer can often rescind the payment. However, after the fact, stablecoins, often touted as a solution, merely substitute one fiat based promise for another. As MICA and the Genius act show, Stablecoins are deeply vulnerable to currency controls. A given Stablecoin might work for cross border payments today, but not next quarter. USDT and nine other tokens were delisted from European exchanges at the beginning of 2025 in response to the new regulations.
[00:12:58] Stablecoins issuers are subject to the same extraneous concerns as fintech providers, and they are only as programmable as these central entities allow them to be.
[00:13:09] Stablecoins are just fiat beheld through blockchain colored glasses.
[00:13:15] Indeed, stablecoins and fintech are digital lipstick on a legacy payments pig.
[00:13:22] Bitcoin succeeds where fintech and stablecoins fail.
[00:13:26] Where their costly intermediation requires payments, Bitcoin enables value transfer where their operational constraints limit access and use cases. Bitcoin is an open, decentralized, neutral monetary network that works for anyone, anywhere, anytime. Where they attract regulatory scrutiny and become geopolitical pawns. Bitcoin offers a minimal regulatory footprint without a native jurisdiction, where they limit programmability to protect established patterns and privileges. Bitcoin fosters innovation and the programmability that it requires. If we could go back to the dawn of the Internet and design a currency optimized for the digital age, it would look like Bitcoin. It is Bitcoin.
[00:14:16] Bitcoin in every app Apps are the vehicles of change.
[00:14:22] They are the nodes of our constant data streams, and they are the tools that alter how we work, how we move, how we love, and how we think.
[00:14:31] Apps define the digital environment to which we humans are adapting, and we build apps to adapt our environment. To us.
[00:14:40] Value transfer is eclipsing payments and apps are its conduits.
[00:14:46] To understand how apps will integrate and foster value transfer and consider the evolution of the digital camera. The first filmless cameras hit the market in the mid-1970s, but for the first two decades they were single purpose devices. Even the cameras attached to early cell phones were just cameras. They took pictures, nothing more.
[00:15:08] The revolution in what digital cameras can do and in our relation to them came in 2007 with the release of the first iPhone.
[00:15:18] It wasn't just the camera itself, but the combination of the camera with apps that changed everything.
[00:15:25] Developers quickly integrated the camera into their apps, enabling users to take, modify and share photos. The synergy of digital cameras and apps changed our reality and our behavior. Apps like TikTok, Instagram and Pokemon Go make behaviors that would have seemed deranged 20 years ago, for example photographing hamburgers, chasing invisible monsters through parks, and choking oneself to the point of blacking out, etc. Mainstream, maybe even aspirational.
[00:15:57] We're constantly capturing our lives and consuming others lives through the images we see in our apps on our phones. Even Meta's AI glasses are basically just a Camera attached to an everything app.
[00:16:12] What Bitcoin does is commoditize value transfer, making it as versatile and freely adaptable as the digital camera on a phone.
[00:16:21] Any developer working on any kind of app can integrate value transfer. Messaging apps can let users attach value to their messages. Social apps can let users raise funds and split bills with the ease of liking a post.
[00:16:36] Building a marketplace like Uber, Spotify, Airbnb only fans no longer requires millions of dollars. And navigating a labyrinth of walled payment gardens, any dev can do it.
[00:16:49] Payments require bankers and lawyers. Commoditized value transfer just needs Bitcoin and developers Bitcoin is maturing out of its adolescence. Specifically, Bitcoin needed Lightning to increase throughput and enhance interoperability.
[00:17:08] For its part, Lightning needed to find its place as the common language for Bitcoin based value transfer. But we're there. A biome of distinct Bitcoin sub networks, including Spark, Ark, Liquid Fediment, Botanics and Kashu have arisen, each with unique advantages. SDKs are now available that let any developer add value transfer to their apps. In terms of the digital camera analogy, it's 2007, the iPhone has just hit the market and developers are starting to play with the camera API.
[00:17:44] It's an opportune moment. The technology is ripe, but the market has yet to price. The transformation in value is about to start moving like information.
[00:17:55] It's late enough for solid projections of what's about to happen, and early enough to take advantage of the disruption.
[00:18:02] The convergence of Bitcoin based value transfer and apps is as inevitable as it was to add a camera to a smartphone.
[00:18:12] Let's make our descendants wonder how we got by payments. Are the camcorders of our age the next technology whose time has passed? The new age that is just beginning will feel qualitatively different.
[00:18:28] Like the moment Dorothy steps out of her black and white world into the vibrant colors of Oz. When value flows as freely as information, the economy changes and society changes with it. Borders matter less. Wealth and value flow like the breeze. Pun intended. Global interactions across political and class. Barriers shift from exceptional to ordinary.
[00:18:53] The components are all in place. Bitcoin is thriving, outstripping every other asset. Lightning allows any Bitcoin endpoint to communicate with any other. Protocols now exist to serve a variety of uses and preferences. Developers are discovering SDKs that simplify the integration of Bitcoin based value transfer into their apps. And they're learning from each other about new ways to apply and leverage value transfer.
[00:19:21] Ways that will make their apps as indispensable as utilities like ChatGPT and Google Maps.
[00:19:28] We're living at the end of an age that our descendants will regard as primitive, like the age before electricity and running water. We're also living at the beginning of an age that they will consider transformative, like the Renaissance or the birth of the Internet.
[00:19:45] Let's make them proud of all we've accomplished for them and and astounded at how we ever got by without the tools, we built a shout out to Leden IO for Bitcoin backed loans. This is how you get fiat out of your bitcoin without selling it. And I got to tell you, just the process of getting a bitcoin backed loan is so night and day.
[00:20:13] From getting a credit loan, getting one in the fiat world, the process is almost scarily easy and you get the money extremely quickly. I think their turnaround is like 7 to 12 hours.
[00:20:25] They also do proof of reserves, they have open books every month and I believe they're actually the number one company in the bitcoin backed loan space and they have survived a hell of a bear market. Do your own investigation, check out the terms, know what you're getting yourself into. But there are some situations where you just need the fiat or there's a good investment and you just know it's not going to outperform bitcoin. But you still want to take the opportunity. This is where a bitcoin backed loan can give you the best of both worlds. And being on a bitcoin standard, this has just been a huge help for me. Shout out to LEDN for a great service and being really cool bitcoiners and for supporting the show. Special link and discount in the show notes.
[00:21:10] Alright, that wraps up the utility of bitcoin.
[00:21:14] Moving Value like information by Roy Scheinfeld. That is Roy Scheinfeld obviously of Breeze. And you know, the more and more I've been thinking about Pear Drive and where we're trying to take it.
[00:21:28] Like I want, I do not want to invent things with this and I'm, I still, we still are having to do an enormous amount of work and our own kind of designing and architecting, but specifically for like bitcoin payments. Like I do not want to have to design a wallet or have to hire someone to design a wallet because that's just an enormous liability and risk that I would basically be putting on the user that I don't want to. And that's the beauty of something like the Breeze SDK or just the SDK for all of these various tools. And just how powerful they can be. When we hit that moment where Spark, Ark, Cashew, Breeze, like, all of these things are just seamlessly interoperable and it's not quite there yet. I still just have little frictions here and there. Ark is not on the main net yet. I'm not even sure about Spark. I. I feel like there was an announcement that they just did recently. I can't. I can't even remember. But there's just so many different things that all will speak Lightning out the gate.
[00:22:34] And I genuinely believe we're about to break into an entirely new space with Bitcoin, with value transfer, with how. How we think about, like, payments and scaling and how the user is actually what the user is interacting with at the edge. But the real beauty of how the systems connect together, of how the architecture of this monetary system, this value transfer system, actually occurs, or how it interacts with everything else, is that it's a separate entity. It's like. And I like the analogy of having the camera on the phone, because the apps don't create a camera every single time you need the camera. You don't buy a separate camera to work with your app. Even though that's really kind of the situation we have with all of our applications and with Bitcoin and all of this stuff is that every single one of them is its own thing. Like, I have a hundred different Bitcoin wallets and hardware wallets and wallets on my phone, and then apps that have like a lightning address and Bitcoin integrated in them, and not one of them is across the other. Like, not one of them is the closest thing that I have to an implementation of actually using the same thing across multiple different apps or locations in like a iPhone or a desktop environment is Albi, because it is connected to with NWC, with Noster Wallet. Connect to my start 9 to my own node, and it works. It works shockingly well. But this is kind of the thing that's missing is that how do you. How do you make the camera and the Bitcoin itself, your interaction, your access to Bitcoin, to that Bitcoin wallet and balance, separate from all of the apps that are using it, so that those apps themselves don't even have. You don't even have like a payment structure inside the app because it's just calling to something else or something else is being connected through, through a layer, through it, through an, you know, API in the application to a Bitcoin instance or to. To the wallet in, you know, another application or it's connecting to the same channel or the same keys within each application. And this is something that I think you can do with the Breeze SDK. You can, like, actually migrate your keys to be available through different applications. I don't know exactly how the process works there. I've only ever used it in the context of, like, the breezewallet itself. But I'll probably get to a point where I have to figure that out really soon and know the intricacies and nuances of how that works to. As we. As we kind of move to that place with paradrive and how we actually want to integrate something like that and what risk we actually want to take on. But regardless, these are exactly the sorts of tools that will start to show a path there where someone like me can integrate it without having to take on an enormous risk or add, you know, an additional attack surface, so to speak, to the user. Because I'm simply integrating with a set of tools and a wallet and a structure that's already built out and exists with the same attack interface. Excuse me, the same attack surface, no matter which way you come at it. But all that aside, I want you to stop and think about what it could actually mean when everyone is. When we have all of the tools and we are beginning to see the network and the access, when you kind of have that iPhone moment where value transfer is just that easy.
[00:26:35] You know, cultures and languages and these sorts of things, like these very, like, social layer things they really maintain and they separate out because of information barriers. And I think that's a big part of what we're seeing right now. There are always natural information barriers because there's only so much information that each person can consume.
[00:26:58] But regardless, we're also seeing this huge global identity crisis because of what the Internet has opened up in being able to access and cross cultures and see more of explicitly what is going on in a different place.
[00:27:15] While barriers still exist and controls still exist, so much more information is still. Is leaking through than it ever has before. And because of that, essentially the powers that be are losing their hold on the narrative.
[00:27:33] People are building and accessing alternative opinions and hearing people say even crazy things and totally reasonable and sensible things and asking very interesting questions when before you could, essentially, the establishment was able to prevent access. They were able to quiet that the alternative way of thinking. They were able to quiet alternative narratives enough to keep them suppressed and have them die out of their own accord, out of just never allowing them to catch steam.
[00:28:07] They were never able to gain momentum. And now the Momentum of these alternative narratives has completely gotten away from them. And I think that's why they're becoming more brazen. I think that's why you see people like Christine Lagarde talking about, we don't have time. We need to rush this. Democracy is getting in the way of our controls and the things we are trying to implement. Government is increasingly seeing the fact that they don't control the narrative as a threat. And they're becoming more and more explicit, they are becoming more and more aggressive. And the people who they still have control over, they are trying to. They explicitly trying to make them more and more belligerent and refusing to. To. To allow a conversation. Like they've literally created a mental psychosis to prevent those who basically still align with the establishment from even allowing conversation with anybody else. Because they're all fascists or they're racists. You're not allowed to even speak to them. In fact, you should shoot them in the throat if you see them speaking to other people. I think this is the curtain falling away.
[00:29:08] This is them realizing that they're just going to have to get violent and very direct about the fact that they're in power and everybody else just has to deal with it. And we know that, you know that, we know that we're full of shit and we're just doing this for power, but it doesn't matter. We're going to do it anyway. That was. Yes, that was a nod to the Scholzenitsyn thing of they know that we know that they know that we know that they're lying about everything, but they're still lying straight to our face so that we know they can do whatever they want and there's nothing we can do about it. I mean, that's not actually the quote, but it's something. It's something conceptually along those lines. But think about this consequence, this huge shift that we're seeing is because of the freedom of information, or it's not the freedom of information. Like, nobody said, oh, it's all free now. But the Internet has simply opened up bandwidth for information and alternative conversations and a decentralized global conversation occurring that allows opinions to permeate that were always stopped at some boundary, some major central hub that didn't allow it to continue to move. And this has an enormous effect on values, on culture, on political narratives, all of these things. And we're seeing the kind of chaos and disruption that comes with breaking down those barriers of information.
[00:30:46] We're about to do that with money. We are in the process of doing that with money. But the network's not large enough to have to build alternative economies in the same way that we have alternative narratives on the Internet.
[00:31:00] But it is moving that direction.
[00:31:03] And think about this. It's not just cultures and, you know, values and religions and all of these like social elements that are affected not only by the access to information, but also the flow of capital into and out of them, but borders themselves.
[00:31:24] The whole reason borders exist, and the only reason they can actually be sustained, is because of the government's ability explicitly to control the movement of capital across that border in and out of the political jurisdiction when value does not know that those borders exist.
[00:31:46] This will shake political institutions on a far, far deeper foundation than even the control of the narrative. Because now the narrative can be moved, monetized, without their gatekeepers.
[00:32:01] And look what happens when we started to unlock this type of thing. Just even in the fintech world, you have things like Twitch and you have numerous different live streaming platforms and norms that have come about where people throw $5 to a creator or they boost during a live stream. Like there are live streamers on Twitch who make a living from tips. And then of course, OnlyFans is basically the same thing, except show me your tits. But consider when you take that, that capability and you separate it from those platforms, that you can just take it wherever you are in the digital world.
[00:32:43] You can take it to Twitter and you can zap that, you can take it to YouTube and you can zap. You can take it to GitHub and you can zap. You CAN be on GitHub and receive zaps, you can be on Twitter and receive zaps. You can, every single thing about your digital environment can send or receive genuine borderless value in virtually the exact same way that you can send and receive pictures and media in all of these different environments. And we have so many little hints of this already. We have Nostr, we have Pub Key, we have Fountain, we have Wallet of Satoshi. We have the. The view of how this could very likely come about and so many different pieces of this without the, without necessarily the network capacity or, and I don't mean that in like the, or how many payments or lightning payments can you do? I mean in the capacity of like the, the network capacity, the, the reach of the network itself to actually get that density for a use case like this to just steamroll because we're kind of, we've only really been able to experience it or expand it. Expand the use case for the use case itself. It's like oh, it's cool that you can zap. So you're going to come to Nostr so that you can zap or to have social media, which means that only people who are, who care about decentralized social media and care about actually wanting to zap with Bitcoin are actually going to go there. It's not a generic use case that anybody could want that just happens to only be possible because of Bitcoin. So I think we're still kind of one layer out from this thing and it's putting all of these tools together in a way where a normal person can just understand the use case and they have every desire to use this tool or to use this benefit or to use this product with or without Bitcoin. But because they have Bitcoin, not only is the product viable or sustainable, but it makes the product that much better. My thinking on a candidate that could actually be important here is something like peer to peer file sharing, which is obviously why I've been so focused on Bear Drive for the last couple of years and why I'm so interested in Keat and Nostr and pubkey and all of these things. I think there are use cases that you can provide in with these tools that the Internet has specifically been lacking because every platform has to adhere to a bunch of arbitrary like copyright and, and I don't mean in the sense that like the uses to not have copyright and to be pirating content. Obviously that is a subsection or a sub use of peer to peer files but just the explicit open, the not being locked behind hosts, but a simple protocol and system for storing, delivering and retrieving files that doesn't, that doesn't have all the barriers that it currently has. I think there's a lot of use cases that you could actually unlock with this which is why we're specifically going in that direction. Why I've been putting a lot of my bitcoin toward it. But I don't know, it's just something I'm trying because it's something specifically that I want. And that's also why I've specifically, you know, multiple times on the show I've mentioned that if you're trying to build something, you want to build something, don't try to build something that somebody else wants or that you think like if you're interested in, you know, peer to peer stuff and you're like, oh, people could do peer to peer file sharing and maybe there's some cool thing if you're not going to use it if it's not something that you're building for yourself, don't build it. Build something for yourself because you're only ever actually going to flesh it out and make it the real thing if you're actually using it. Like after you build a piece of it, you then turn around and you are making use of it because then you'll catch all the nuance, you'll catch all the weird little like tiny quirks of the fact that like during this one particular situation it doesn't actually do it. You think? That would never actually be obvious in testing or in kind of like building the main, creating the main building blocks, but specifically those things that you want or that, that use case that you want, or the thing that's slowing you down that you wish you could make a workflow or an automation process for, or you wish you could have zaps in it or something.
[00:37:11] Build toward that vibe code that. And then share it.
[00:37:16] You know, I can't remember what book I read this in. It might have been Secrets of Sandhill Road or maybe that's, maybe that's a little bit older.
[00:37:28] Maybe teals. 0 to 1.
[00:37:32] I don't know. I'm kind of feeling it's Secrets of Sand Hill, right? But I don't know. But one of those books talks about Slack and this was, I believe what they were actually trying to build and launch was a video game. It was like a multiplayer online video game called Glitch. And there was something really new or different about it, like the world was never ending or something, I can't remember. Maybe it's something to do with the multiplayer. But they were trying to launch this thing and basically they, they were needing to organize internally and have like a bunch of conversations and basic threads and stuff that were happening. And all of the chat messaging and all the tools and stuff that they had just sucked. They didn't work for what they were trying to do. And so they literally built Slack as an internal messaging system to make Glitch work.
[00:38:29] And then Glitch just kind of glitched.
[00:38:34] It basically was not launch, it was not doing what they hoped it would do. It was not catching. But a bunch of people were saying this Slack thing is actually really cool, or this, this chat thing that we've built is really cool and we really love it. And so they pivoted and they released Slack. And obviously today Slack is a huge, huge success.
[00:38:57] But here's the thing is they were trying to build Glitch to make a cool game for other people. They were building Slack to solve their own problem.
[00:39:06] This is why I think the shortest path to us figuring out what those use cases are or what the that that product or that that tool is that could catch on and get a lot of people using it isn't about us trying to figure out what other people are gonna want and predict what it's going to be. It's. It's about us. Especially with the freaking tools that we have available to us with code or excuse me, LLMs and vibe coding. Like, I've been building apps like crazy for myself that I use all of the time. I still use.
[00:39:47] I use Drop Click to convert MP4 file or convert video to MP4 files because it's just faster than all of the other things that I have. And Drop Click is not ready to like share out and stuff. But I, I will at some point just, just for fun and because I'm trying to build it to make it easy to do a bunch of like single use scripts like that black. I spend a ton of time Vibe coding to make little tools to solve my own problems and then I actually use them. I use three or four different applications that I either directly funded or Vibe coded myself on a regular basis because they just solve things that I want solved. Granted, one of them is actually kind of something that's going to be a part of paradrive because it's more of a file viewer. But it lets me actually open up my elements page or my elements folder in like my visual elements and my icons and that sort of stuff that I use for video editing. And my found footage folder is really annoying to sort through because A, it doesn't have good titles, B, even, even like the decent descriptions and stuff don't tell you exactly like what it is or what I need. And then like a really good example is animated icons for DaVinci. So if you go into DaVinci, like an editing software, you see all of these little thumbnails for hundreds of little animation icons. But guess what? They're all black because none of the animations start with the thing in view. There's a fade in or there's a transition in, then the animation and then there's a transition out. So the thumbnail for everything is just black.
[00:41:33] Now DaVinci is really cool. They make it so you can take your mouse and you can just scrub over it and then you can just find the spot where you see the animation. But you have to do this manually one at a time. And if you have a hundred elements that are called loading scre like loading circle or loading icon001 loadingicon002 that's a huge pain in the ass to have to actually manually scroll through every single one of these.
[00:42:03] So I Vibe coded an Electron app that actually brings all of them up. I can, I can just give it a folder and then it brings up all of the videos and then anything that's visible on the screen, plus everything that's this basically one screen down below in the thing. It's basically like a wall. Like, you know, it kind of looks like Pinterest. So everything just kind of like fits together and it show, it plays all of the videos that are visible and then it's got like this lazy load. So if I scroll down, it's already buffering the next like, you know, half a page or page of videos so that there's no like break. And then it's cutting off all the videos that are half a page up above my scroll. So I probably need like a good bit of ram, especially if it's like super high resolution effects or elements. And so that's why I built a automatic converter to MP4. So I actually make, actually have it go through and just let it sit there and do the processing to make smaller MP4 versions of the large MOV like 4K files and then sit it alongside of it and then I have it automatically. It only displays in the viewer the MP4, the smaller video format, so that it doesn't take up a crap ton of RAM or resources to play, you know, 12 or 15 videos at the exact same time. But then if I drag and drop out of the electron thing, it actually grabs the high 4K resolution video, not the MP4 video that I'm actually watching. And so I have this alongside DaVinci. I don't even use the finder or whatever in DaVinci anymore because I can open up my found footage and I can just scroll through and it's like, okay, there's the Pursuit of Happiness scene and there's the, there's that funny TikTok video or here's a bunch of the screaming lunatic political people videos. And I can just kind of like scroll through and be like, oh, I need. This is the video. This, this will actually work really good for this found footage section. And I can, I can just view all of it as if it's like this feed of all of the things.
[00:44:11] And I can navigate or just drag and drop any folder in if I want to look at all my, I like my loading icons or whatnot. And then I can drag from that into DaVinci and I drop the high resolution file, even though I'm not using up all the resources to watch all the high resolution files. But this took me, I don't know, three hours to work out, like, you know, the lazy load thing, because it was like it was loading and then every time I scrolled, it took literally like 15 seconds to start loading the next thing. And it was having to place like I had it to actually use the format of all the videos, like the resolution and the aspect ratios to lay out a grid of all of the videos before even starting to load the videos. So it's like. And it shoots up a grid of how all of the videos are going to sit next to each other so that I can view them all. Because some of them are, you know, vertical video. They're TikTok things or Twitter things. And then sometimes they're, you know, clips from Pursuit of Happiness or October sky or the Matrix. And so they're, they're wide. And I want it all to fit together like a nice pretty wall. I want it to look cool. It's kind of like a GIF viewer. You know, when you go to select GIFs, you don't, you don't have to. You're not looking at thumbnails of GIFs, you're seeing the gifts play, you're seeing the actual webp or GIF animation play to the entire thing. And. But most of the time, you know, there's actually a lot of players that like all the GIFs are assumed square, right? They're just given like a little square spot. Well, some of them are actually tall or wide or something. And you'll notice they're actually cut off. You can't see like the text. It's basically that. Except I formatted it so that it looks like a Pinterest board or something, where if it's tall, it just takes up more vertical space. If it's wide, it takes up more wide space and, or horizontal space. And then they just kind of like fit to get, fit themselves together like puzzle pieces and then just automatically plays all of them.
[00:46:13] This is probably useful to somebody else.
[00:46:16] And it took me a few hours, maybe, maybe a day to really kind of work out all of the little kinks.
[00:46:24] If I include the fact that, you know, I've migrated it from. First it was like browser based, and then I migrated it to Electron.
[00:46:32] Like I said, I did the lazy load thing, I did the formatting and I had to get it right to, okay, what's Using up resources here. So I wanted to just grab the format of all the videos first and lay out a grid, which it can do in no time at all. But then start loading in the actual video into the spaces designated for each video and then stop, you know, X amount or x percent past the top or the bottom of the screen so that we're not loading too many videos, etc. Etc. There was a lot of little things to sort out to get it to just open, show the videos, scroll, select, drag and drop, pull out and work.
[00:47:14] But it does, and it's kind of cool. And I want it to be a view for my peer drive folders because one of the big things I'm going to do with my peer drive folders is have it display all of my editing elements because you know, I have 2 terabytes on my MacBook and I probably have 300 gigabytes ish worth of like editing elements and found footage and all of that stuff. But it bogs like I fill up this hard drive very, very quickly. But I have terabytes and terabytes I have like four or five terabytes of not only just like movies, but literally found footage. Stuff that I've saved for ages that is totally unorganized and doesn't have file names properly done. It's not category. I mean like nothing, just like a mess of like I just saved shit. And I had a, I had a dump folder and then I switched to a new computer and I had a different dump folder and I just put them all in one place and, and then also just like file libraries, like UNCW had a huge elements and like sound effects library that they let us access and I, you know, they said I could access it, so I copied the whole thing. And I've done that a few times in the past of element libraries, audio libraries, icon like things that I've just had anything I got access to at any point. Like I didn't want to have to go to the lab or the thing to go see it. And I don't, I don't. They didn't specifically say I couldn't do it. They said this is free to use for your projects here in the lab. So, you know, ask forgiveness, not permission. Well, the point is I have way too much on my Linux machine that I could ever store on my Mac. But as everybody has probably heard me bitch about way too many times, getting files from my Linux to my Mac and vice versa has been an utter disaster. It has been the bane of my existence. So I had Pear Drive built to solve that problem, which shockingly, it is actually solving that problem. And then I built an app so that I could view them better and I built a little app so that I could convert them easily. And now one little single purpose, things that I'm putting in the Drop Click app is making it so I can download them from Twitter and YouTube easily, which I finally found a trick for that and it's really, really cool. And I think when I put the script into Drop Click to make it easy, it's going to be great. Because, you know, one of the big things about Twitter that makes it so shitty to save stuff, and I might even make an automated thing to, as soon as I save it to automatically, like post it to Nostr or something. I don't know, just. Just for fun or maybe pub key too. But Twitter's like die hard. Like you gotta have an API and there's limits and there's throttling and all this bullshit. And so you. The only reason, the only apps you ever seem to be able to do that can download from something like X or Twitter is something that you have to pay for because they have to have like API and developer access that they pay this enormous sum so that they can scrape Twitter or they can scrape X and then pull videos and content from it.
[00:50:31] Well, there is a fantastic little terminal tool that I found called YT dlp And what you can actually do, there's a. It's kind of like the FFmpeg. For anybody who knows FFMPEG in media, it's the FFMPEG of kind of like downloading and pulling JavaScript and streaming and media elements from a website or from a link. Because there's like a thousand different little extra options. And one of them is cookies from browser, which means that you can take.
[00:51:07] You just type in what your browser is, but it takes cookies from your browser so that if you're logged in on your browser, if you're logged into Twitter, it just uses your web access and the cookies of your current session in your browser to watch the video and then download it in the background. So, so from the standpoint of X, it literally looks like you're in the browser and you just scrolled by and you watched the video. But what's actually happening is that you're pulling the video from your terminal, your command line is using the cookies from your browser to download the video directly to your computer. And that's how I've been saving stuff. I'm gonna make it like a one click Like a paste. Click which browser I'm using and then go. So I can automate the shit out of this process.
[00:51:55] And I'm going to try to get it to copy the, the, the tweet or the note or whatever it is that's alongside it so that I have also the context of what's going on in video. And then I can also make it automatically use Whisper to make a transcript to, to give me like a little detail or a caption as to what the video is. There's so much cool stuff that I can go through and I can vibe code all of this shit and if something doesn't work, I can just kind of like fight through how does this work? What event is triggering this thing?
[00:52:27] And I'm not a, I'm not a developer, but I can build all of this stuff with just a little bit of patience and letting an LLM go through and explain to me what piece is doing what. And just a little bit of engineering thinking about like, oh well, we should build it this way or this is, this is using too many resources and we need to figure out how to do this in a more lean way.
[00:52:50] These things can be built. Like there's so much that we can build and because of that, like when you start having like a breeze SDK, the ability to just import wallet tools and just have a wallet inside whatever environment you're using. And then there's this freedom of value transfer. There's no borders and you can just start breaking down barriers to how people interact and how people zap. I mean, imagine you can download some shit from your friends and you can zap them.
[00:53:18] That's what I want to be able to do. That sounds cool as shit. Build stuff you want, build stuff you want to use.
[00:53:25] All of it is accessible today. The amount of shit that you can build is wild if you know where the tools are and you just can take the time to, to work with them. And I just don't see how this doesn't run away. At some point it's just gonna be.
[00:53:42] Something's gonna click.
[00:53:44] I probably said this a hundred times on the show, but something is and it's inevitable because of the momentum in this direction that we are heading and what the world would look like with the ability to move value, to transfer value just like we do information.
[00:54:05] I could not have put it better than Roy. So we'll let him have the last word, but real fast, a shout out to Leden Ledn IO for bitcoin backed loans and for helping to make My bitcoin standard cost less in bitcoin. Being able to access a chunk of Fiat for some larger projects and not have to sell Bitcoin has been a game changer and not having to do traditional credit. Check it out. I got a special link for you with a little discount too. Then chroma.co these guys make. I've got. I'm sitting here at night, it's super late. I've got. I'm bright red. Everything's red in this room right now because I've got my skylight. I love it. And I don't even realize how awful the, the blue and all like the normal screens are until I accidentally turn on one without my red filter on or without wearing my nightshades. And it's so. It's like, oh my God. It's like punches me in the face. Get your light health right. Stop getting punched in the face by your screens. 10% discount with code Bitcoin audible. And you want to vibe code shit that can't be shut down. That is truly decentralized. Check out the Pub Key set of tools that's P U B K Y Pubkey app is kind of showcasing just the beginnings of what you can do with this. There's a link right down in the show notes. And then lastly, for updates on freedom, tech freedom news and the politics of human rights around the world, the financial Freedom report by the hrf. Check out all our amazing sponsors and a shout out to them for supporting my work. But I think Roy said it best.
[00:55:45] We have so much access to tools to build literally anything that we want.
[00:55:52] And the serious developers, the people who do have the skill and the experience, like Roy and the Breeze team and the Synonym team and the Nostr crew, the people building the projects and the protocols and everything that we get to use Bitcoin itself. They're doing the hard work for us.
[00:56:15] Let's take it. Let's use those things and put them in an application, put them in a tool and see what experiences and things we can build that weren't possible before.
[00:56:27] Quote we're also living at the beginning of an age that they will consider transformative, like the renaissance of the birth of the Internet. Let's make them proud of all we've accomplished for them and astounded at how we ever got by without the tools we built.
[00:56:46] Amen. I'm Guy Swan and until next time, everybody.
[00:56:51] Take it easy, guys.
[00:57:05] Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end up by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it, even if I may not have had it at the beginning.
[00:57:27] Mahatma Gandhi.
