#552: How Bitcoin Could Predict The Next Global Conflict with James Pierog
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Having this prediction market where people can see potential futures that creates this potential for observation, and that observation changes reality.

James c, cofounder and CEO of itchin prediction dot market runs on lightning network powered betting platform. Today, he discusses bitcoins potential for prediction markets, its advantages as a development platform over other hypo currencies and its role in reducing governmental control.

They want everyone to be subservient, and someone don't rise up, because if you are in competition with them, then you, your potential threat. Singapore, where I was, is a complete thora arian shadow. You had literal robot dogs monitoring the micon workers who were, are essentially treated as slaves.

The thing about bitcoin is that they can stop you. I think prediction markets are kind of that next killer APP. They can use their money as speech. What's gonna the thing that last for another ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, fifty years? IT seems like no matter who wins the election, there's going na be a dispute.

Problems that arises with prediction markets is the word problem. How do you guys approaching the word problem?

You've had a dynamic where money become freer than free.

Let me talk about a fed just gone that all all the central banks going that.

So it's all acting like safe haven.

I believe that in a world where central bankers .

are tripping over themselves to do by their currency, bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, bitcoin is the Victor.

I mean, that's part of the bulcke for bitcoin.

If not paying attention, you probably should be, probably should be, probably should be. Be James, great to see you again, sir.

Great to see you again, marty.

We had the pleasure of meeting in person in in real avia all places yeah, place in the world that were neither us from yeah.

just that conference. He was completely epic.

The belt tony bar conference, cern, by how hot developed. And we found themselves talking both days for at least hour and we were talking about mining and how to fix the the centralization problem within within mining via prediction markets, which what you're working on, bitcoin predictions that market. Um but before we get into this, mean, when we met in riga, I guess before we get and we're just going to get into IT, we were talking about this mining aliza problem and that's what you guys were looking to all specifically. But IT seems like you've been traveling the world since then in the product as bittorrent and transform quite a bit.

Yes, yes. So we started out with mining centralization. Well, let me just bring a way back. Uh, we are at wolf, the wolf accelerator. And while we are in woolf, the the a that we got into the accelerator with in the genesis is cohort was uh lighting node automation. We wanted to solve that because we thought, okay, if more people could run a node than more people would run nodes, if was easier to run nodes and we would have more prolific, uh, we quickly found that the market was a bit too nasal and IT was really difficult to sell a solution ah that we could come up with. So week six of the of the accelerator, which was an a week program, we pivoted and we didn't know what we are going to do.

And um yes, so one magical weekend, thousand philly and I met A A friend and um we came up with this new idea uh called the gora which was basically a social betting market and people could basically vote with sats on opinions and after a time limit was reached the winners would spend the losers money and we thought, okay yeah like this would be uh an incentive for people to let say, provide liquidity to our node and then we could still run our node and automate things and you know optimize stuff. But now there's an incentive for people to like make payments, uh that received some traction but not enough us to continue working on IT. And then we iterated through many different ideas uh, since then and basically the central thing that we realized with a gora was that we were building something cool, but we weren't solving a problem.

And startups, uh, we should solve a problem that way we can stay focused on the customer and uh, build something that they want. And that's where we kind of got the whole mining uh, idea from because uh, you know mining centralization to real issue like a harsh road aggregation is the only way to reduce variance. Then the history will continue to aggregate rate cause minor state variants, poor state variants.

That's why there's this whole proxy pooling problem, right? Because like miners, they mind and pools to reduce their variants and then pools mind for other pools to reduce surveilling. And it's not particularly healthy for the bitcoin network.

So we thought, okay, yeah, if we just allowed betting on like the mining pool block reward game, basically this competition, then maybe that could solve the various issue and we could put our infrastructure of like betting with sad to uh, a use that solves a problem. Now we got a lot of like attention from that. Like that was really great, right? Like we have, you know, talk to some pretty big pools who are interested.

But you know, as you said, while we are in riga is a capital issue to liquidity issue, not necessarily uh attack issue, right? And the central issue with our platform is aggregating that liquidity. So that lets say minors and pools can bet against some counterparty who's willing to to bet. And so we are tackling a lot of like the security issues around that with like deals and optimizing attack and like doing a bunch of research to uh basically mathematically prove that I would reduce variants and have positive r while for the capital. But IT was kind of like you were on a fundraising journey right now, and it's a lot easier to explain trump bedding to an investor to do mining centralization and variance reduction and all that. So what you're an amsterdam uh you know I was talking to some really smart people and uh one of whom, Austin Alexander, who used to be at crack in and he like his confidence in prediction markets in the future of prediction markets, uh came from the his experience working at cracking for like nine years, right doing uh exchange and one of the things that struck out to me was, uh, what he said, uh, people said that you know you can in compete against spines or coin base, right that uh exchange business, uh, was dead. But you look today, what's the biggest business?

Encrypt to the killer APP from like a VC perspective like once the killer .

epic is bye exactly exactly so he's like, yeah in ten years prediction markets, there's going to be ten to twenty multibillion dollar prediction markets. And he just kept hammering me like, just go to your hotel room, start coding. Like you don't need to do anything at this conference, just get this next iteration out with trump betting. And so I talked to my cofounder and we were talking about this for a while, like, okay, should we do a regular prediction market like we have the URL bitcoin prediction dot market, right? Like we could just do this at any time, like all the infrastructures like set up and ready to go.

But I was still kind of hesitant because we wanted to solve a problem, not just build something cool, but hearing from all these people like, oh yeah, you know, you should build a prediction market like everyone that I talk to at the concert was like, build a real prediction market and I, I, O, K, let's to do IT. Let's see what happens, right? At the very least, if we fail, then we show that we tried, right? And then we can go back to doing what we are originally doing.

And, uh, it's been so far like really great. It's the most traction we've ve got in building a product. And I mean, it's nothing of their to polar market, right, was like hundreds of millions of dollars and liquidity in in volume. But you know now we have around ten million salt bet so far from all over users, which is way more than we got was like the mining pool betting and way more than we got with the social bedding.

And what I find really fascinating is IT was it's kind of the corneal of the original like the original vision of this, uh, voting with SAT on opinions because there's a reason why the election is the thing that's attracting all the attention in the liquidity, right? Because everyone got to an opinion. And it's not just like betting on commodities or something economic, something financial.

It's something that's political, that's tight to people's identity. And when people bet trump, yes, or come on, I know, right. Are they necessarily betting what they think will happen or what they want to happen? Is this just a bet like on a poker table? Or is IT like money a speech? And I mean, if you play poker, betting chips is like speech, right?

When you're bluffing, you're saying something. You're saying I have this hand when you're betting on come on out or trump, that's saying something, right? Like people are talking about Polly, market market manipulation to like move the market, change perception and money talks, right?

Like if you're risking a sheet load of money to bet on something, uh, that's talking like to think something about your own conviction, right? And I think that's the powerful thing that yet to be unlocked. The elections are just the beginning of right.

There's something far more are, I guess, primal in using money to communicate something. And we've got IT like we've kind of been dancing around IT as like a bitcoin community, right? Value for value, right? People sending sides because they want to support something. But I think prediction markets are kind of that next killer APP that could just you know, ignite this kind of bitcoin catalysts. You know people flocking to use bitcoin because they can use their money as speech or something.

No, it's like a derivative of biceps. Like, again, go back to the killer APP first fifteen years, biceps coin exchanges. Obviously, there's different archetypes of people leveraging music changes here, individuals using bickett as the savings vehicle.

D, C, just holding for a long term. A lot of the liquidity and volatility driven by traders were speculating and prediction markets are certainly a derivative of speculation killer up up to this put his speculation on the precipice coin to a large extent. And now you're just basic bottling that product market fit in expanding its branches in two, two other things you .

can speculate on exactly, exactly. And it's where we're trying to figure out like what's the optimal infrastructure that we can build on, right, to facilitate this because you know i've looked A A lot into Polly market and and there are oracle network. You know you have like some thirty percent A P Y for like staking and like voting and then doing all this dal stuff and governance and whatever all this like a bunch of over engineering noise in my opinion like I used to work in a crypto consultancy doing like token economics consulting and it's like, yeah you know this is just a senior age that put under this veil of like technobabble argon that you can uh basically sell to the the next jump right like I like upon the scheme type thing like if we're going to be creating this uh, infrastructure to last, right, what's gonna the thing that last for another ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, fifty years right into the future? Is IT going to be something that built on, you know unsound, very changeable money or is he going to .

be on bit point? Yeah well, it's a good opportunity. Dive into the dive deep into the Polly market um sort of stack and how that market actually works.

Um yeah sure. So basically polymer uses these nosis tokens which um they use els r which is the logistic c market scoring rule to h facilitate trades with their automated market maker and that's uh pretty cutting and infrastructure right? Like the guy who developed nosis extremely smart due talking about prediction markets way back in like twenty fourteen and two thousand twelve uh at like the same tisco bitt dev.

Uh obviously he became disfranchise with bitcoin because of the uh kind of. Lack of development activity, the fact that IT was really difficult to build on top of IT. So yeah, he naturally moved to do his own thing. And Polly market built on top of that as well as this, uh kind of decentralized oral network that they're using to facilitate their their bats.

But you know when IT comes to using this kind of infrastructure, right, what's like is every peace built specifically so that I can solve this problem, right? Or is that something where we're trying to build the most, uh, cool looking thing that we can sell to investors and also to retail and say that we can pump a token? And then there's this kind of side motivation of, uh, token pumping rather than just the primary motivation of like forecasting, right? And I think polling market as well as cyp to products are concerned is like the best one, right, besides like stable coins, right? But the issue that I have with this is that it's you know it's based on first of all, fiat currency is based on like all this blockchain technology, and i'm just really barish on both of those, right? Like, uh, if you look at all fiat currency throughout out history, their tanking and are going to shit, right? The coin is going up.

And sound money needs sound infrastructure to create sound predictions. At the end of the day, like if you can just over inflated token, then you can just pump the market, right? But if you just have bitcoin, yeah, you can, let's say, have a shipload of the fiat currency sell out by a bitcoin and then use that to pump the market.

But you're still using bitcoin, right? That's something that's find that's something that's like provably fine. And you don't need to uh you know question any of those kinds of uh, principles because it's baked into the code, right? And whether all these other projects there are always change bone flexible on under the like, the bedrock is is shifting like an an earthquake. E, so when you have that shifting, then now actually what's built on top of IT can also shift.

Yeah I mean, we're going met to like the utility token meme of twenty seventeen in beyond in the army. I think to put what you just said another way, if you're onna build this type of product to protection market, you wanted to be on sound foundation using the currency that is not fit for purpose. For this one thing that can be manipulated, you have a utility token for one application.

IT can be easily manipulated. Whereas if you're building a prediction market on bitcoin, which people are using for thousands of other use cases outside of that, it's not focused on the prediction, the market use case. And when you have that narrow biopic c sort of function for a token can easily be manipulated.

Oh yeah, for sure. And the fact that we're using bitcoin, I feel like something that uh will stand the test of time, right? When we have uh, on an unsound foundations, we get on sound results and what we want to do is forecasts the future, right? Not just be so concerned with all the south crap that we need to you know sell you know pup token, just kind of uh, be diverting from the original sole purpose of what we're doing here. And it's like, yeah like bitcoin is just so much Better.

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M, K, four cold card. Q great. That com use the code T F T C. We have a code T F T C for five percent off, I check out. And despite our opinions on the technical all flaws that are made on the trade, the technical trade off said that Polly market is making of talk about White paly market is successful. He is inarguably extremely successful, not being talked about the mainstream news you have trump referencing IT thwing some of the stump speeches. And um historically here in the united states leading up to elections, people have really dependent on polls from different polling Operations to try to get a sense of what's going to happen. But IT seems like this election, this prediction market is not only being looked at alongside the polls have been used historical, but many people are preferring the signal being provided by Polly market .

to the polls. Yeah, I mean, Polly market has done just a fantastic job when IT comes to being the first kind of shift, the over in window right. Prediction markets as a concept have been around for a really long time, right? I think Robin, uh, first published this paper on the logger is make market scoring roll back.

And like the one thousand nine and seventies and eighties, I think he was the seventies. And uh the l ms r, which is the fundamental thing that used by all these different prediction markets, is essentially uh, a scoring rule which gives uh, experts of experts want to provide a forecasts. They provide a probability of something that's going to happen and then the scoring rule pays them out based on the probability that they give after the event happens.

And so IT, since it's a market scoring rule, uh, you can have a whole market of people using this scoring rule and anyone can change the probability that is shown and it's logging thome because the world just Operates in the log. Is that kind of way like it's kind of like a power rule thing, uh, and IT just works a lot Better than all these other h metrics. And so prediction markets have been around for a really long time like microsoft implemented a prediction market.

There's been like predict IT in all these other like a academic prediction markets. And a lot of IT has centers around elections mainly because well um it's it's actually surprisingly difficult to come up with topics for a prediction market like when IT comes to elections. It's like, yes, this is a one date thing or you know there's finite many outcomes.

It's uh, pretty easy to see that like a lot of people would be interested in seeing what the outcomes of an election are and people would be really passionate to be betting on IT. So yeah, elections are uh, a main focus. But there's pretty much anything that you could use, uh, like you you could bet on anything.

It's just what's the thing that's going to attract all of the attention. liquidity. So Polly, market, you know they have tons of different topics to to Better on. But um the main one is really the election, right? That's the focus front and center. And yeah, I mean, we've done just an incredible job at basically marketing that and getting through to people how this is a technology that could be used uh, in many different ways.

Like when I was looking, uh I think the most uh compelling one that i've seen so far as uh, I think he was last month or so, uh, their market will uh, israel and they love on and uh, I was watching that, watching the news, you know, keeping up every day, seeing the odds. And then the probabilities move was like, at one point, thirty percent probability. And then we shifted up forty, five, fifty and then went down till like forty. And then sooner I feels like like seventy, eighty, ninety and then boom like shit IT the fan.

And uh, that's one of those use cases that I think, okay, yeah, if we had more markets like this where we're talking about should actually happening, then this could give real insight where before there was not too much insight, right? Like we have A I which is trained on all of the past data in the world and used to uh basically have the super intelligence that can also sense and basically just give you whatever the creators of the I want you to receive a you have all of this a news, right? Mainstream media, which is basically propaganda, right? Going back to the, say, Edward bernas, you know, all of this uh, mainstream media is always quoted with some level of corporate state propaganda that colors the message and IT changes the way people view about IT when you have a prediction market, uh you're kind of cutting away a lot of the bullet that uh would be, let's say, placed next to all of these different um events that could potentially happen.

And it's not uh past looking like it's not looking towards the past, looking towards the future. And that's the main thing like what's going to happen. Now the biggest chAllenge, right, that I see in my biggest uh, criticism of polar market is like the actual events that people are betting on.

I see they're kind of transitioning the sports. Now let's say the elections we're going to be over soon and the everyone wants to bed on sports like it's a huge market. You have like fano and draft kings and bet three, six, five and other different casinos and all this kind of like gambling speculation stuff all over the world, right? But that's a nh that's really crowded IT, right?

You have when people are going to switch from one up to another, you need like an order of magnitude improvement in some way, right? Otherwise a the network effect will be a great defensively for those other businesses. But when IT comes to, uh, novel markets, what are the most important novel markets that we're going to have with power market? They've hit the nail on some of them.

And I am like so pumped to see that. But I think we could do you even Better and and focusing on like what actually are going to be the most important events that shake up the collective consciousness of humanity. That's something that prediction markets can give insight into and that's something that I feel like isn't as it's not looked at, right? Because first of all, it's really tough to even see that in the first place, right? And second of all, predictions are very hard, especially about the future.

It's really tough to even just make a like, okay, will the U. S. Go to war with iran in a july, let's say, of next year.

Why would you pick that arbitrary day? Why would you pick that arbitrary event? Where are the actual outcomes that you want to specify? More the rules of that confrontation? You know, the further you look out, the more general you need to be and then uh, the more likely it's probably going to be like a total yes, a total no.

That's what I see with a lot of poly market is stuff like it's it's going to be either uh, six percent chance or like ninety seven percent chance, but barely anything in between. And this is not necessarily something on the taxi that needs to be improved. It's just something that like, uh, you know IT takes a lot of work to like research and put in the effort and see exactly what's going to happen.

And that's not something that can you know that takes a certain world view to actually see what could happen and then make a market around that and actually provide liquidity and allow people to bet on IT. Because if you just list some kind of if if the market that you list is obvious or stupid, then you going to obvious or stupid answers, right? It's not going to be that useful. But if you list something that actually could happen that might be uh you know in the car in the near future, then that can actually provide value for people outside of just the gambling and speculation side. But like just as a forecasting tool for like future events that could impact a lot of people worldwide.

Yeah impact markets, impact quality life all then that as you're explaining that i'm wondering in my head, could the emergence, proliferation and wide for adoption of these prediction markets prevent what many would deem to be on favorite able events in the future? Like if you see that a prediction market is heavily waiting, saying there's a high probability that the U. S.

Will go to war with iron at some point. The future. Just using the example that you give could IT force people to acts today to prevent that from happening in the future.

Hopefully, I mean, we would want to avoid all this cultural damage in needless death of civilians and also military personnel. Like, you know, I heard this a quote from, I was watching this youtube video and there is this a little bar bush ga in ukraine talking about how you know when the when the rulers fight, then it's the civilians who suffer, right? Like if it's possible to forecasts these events and possibly to prevent some you know violence up rising or violent, kind of like just explosion .

of strict .

yeah conflict, then maybe people can sort things out in a more peaceful way and maybe that could lead to just a Better future, right? Like that the kind of transportation that we're talking about with, like, okay, we have this to generate gambling going on. Like IT is beddin.

It's trading on events and some of them can be a rather grow task, right? But IT is something that could help people, right? Other than a prediction market, what has the power taxi forecasts the future? And like a general way, you know, you can't use polls to do that. Polls are not the technology that enables that kind of, uh, understanding like we have this a thing, this this platform that has a chance of doing something like that. And so why not just take you to the full level of like what I could possibly do?

Yeah, anything to dive deeper into the jx position of polls? There is prediction markets. I mean, prediction markets probably at scale with enough liquid and more signal because there's actual cost on the line. And when people are literally waging the opportunity cost of, if I make this bet, i'm giving up money like that makes some things harder and really, we would imagine, say what they truly believe, where when that comes the polling, you go when you pull somebody and they can have the social pressure to say one thing knowing that they don't believe IT. But since there's no cost.

it's like ah I just say exactly exactly and there's also the idea of privacy, right? The coin is this, it's SONY mous, right? So you don't reveal your identity necessarily and the way your prediction market Operates, tes, as you only need a lightning address, right? That lightning address is not necessarily correlate with your identity. There's twenty of platforms that offer IT also without K Y C. And so you can just get a landing address.

And as long as you have the liquidity to receive your payout and you can receive a payout, uh, the important thing for us with privacy is enabling people, to be honest, right? I was talking to this one guy yesterday who said that, uh, he must go a fire from his job twenty sixteen for talking about how trump s is gonna in. Just talking about IT, right? And that was in canada.

So you know what that's like. But when he comes to, uh, people being able to reveal their preferences and then using value as this measure of conviction and then being able to obscure the identity so that they won't get harmed for revealing their preferences, then you have a tool that is far more powerful than what we've had before, right? And what is currently available with poly market.

You know when you use theory um uh a lot of your information is connected to a single like public key and there's people who like use torrent to cash, like mix their coins but then also keep their N F S on the same profile. And then you know all that's connected to the real world identity through like all this K Y C stuff with bit point, you can completely obvious gate all of that and maintain your privacy while enabling uh you know enabling value transfer and that's something that's really powerful, right? Having the lack of that identity connection so that you can be honest, you're allowed to be honest yeah mean.

particularly over the light in newark especially, something about twelve gets adopted widely on that never receive like, say, the bult twelve spec enables the ability to replace something like Allan U R L. And you can replace your lighting address with a similar construct using bult. Wells like that never take you to the max. Who knows? Maybe e cash can get involved at some point online.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we bring up like this spec with e cash. The only thing I have like the issue with IT is like I look at some of the libraries and IT says like like with cash o for example, it's like we are not cripp graph. The author is not a photographer s is probably fatal flaw somewhere. So like I wanted to use this, but then it's like, okay, if there's a fatal flow, like how can I trust this right?

If if if we're going to actually use e cache, then we need like some crayons graphite work to actually be done, like some real security proof like I I did undergraduate math, right? So I I know the group theory that necessary to actually uh, understand the protocol itself, right? It's really simple basic stuff you just have uh basically a IT relies on the complexity of a discrete log, which is the ability to find like factor crimes essentially these are basically the same issue and yeah like elective curve defy helman, that's pretty basic stuff.

So what is uh the the actual security around that and also the implementation of that photography? If we can like prove out that like all yeah all these assumptions are like valid and everything is good and it's secure, then uh then it's solid. But if we can like when we're dealing with cartography, uh one of the lines that stood out to me in this book was you're not just building a safe to keep out your your family right or your friends.

You're building a safe so that when you send the blueprints to every government in the world and every corporation in the world and you show them exactly how everything works and then you give them indefinite time to break, that safe IT still doesn't break, right? That's the power of cutolo phy. And if we don't have that level of security, then how can we uh like call this something safe, right? And so what I would urge is like, okay yeah everyone who's funding e cash stuff, it's like let's fund some photographers to like go and do some work here and like prove out and show that yeah, this is all valid stuff that can be used that don't we can remove that line of like this is not A A secure thing.

And there's like a fatal flaw somewhere. Like let's make IT so that we could just use IT because like if we just use e cash tokens as shares, right and then anyone the prediction market is essentially in e that uh, people can purchase shares by like sending payments. They get their e cash tokens and then uh if they want to sell their tokens, right, let's say the event doesn't occurred yet, but they think the odds are way too high.

They can just sell IT and then redeem that value at whatever the market Prices. Then you know you don't even need identity at that point. You just need to make a payment and then you can just literally download your I O U receipt of like whatever you are, like oed by the e and I think that could be really cool.

I mean, there's there's so many different other uh, mechanisms to do this kind of authentication without revealing who you are. And as as long as we can use some of them to just put together this system where we can totally preserve privacy, then that's the job right like that. Now we have a platform where people can honor ly reveal the their truths.

Yeah, I was going to say as you I mean, you got to, but like, I smell barante here because I can supercharge IT and then crack me if i'm wrong. But I believe like you would be preferable to build this within a ment because of the ability to create D, L, C, S, mate. right? Much harder, like gone chain.

So we did we did some research into uh D L C S like A L M R based prediction market with dl s. And the only issue that I have with that is the liquidity requirements in the U S. Involved simply because, uh, with A D L C you have.

Your money that you're putting at stake and then the counter party needs to put their money at stake, right? And when you're dealing with a prediction market, there's one counterparty which is the automated market maker, and so that's us. So whatever the volume of payments we want to uh satisfy, we need as much liquidity to ratify that.

Right now we use this a thing of the parameters al system, which is similar to uh, poker or horse racing, is where everyone pulls their money and then the winners built the losers money basically. I mean, with poker you just have uh the winner takes all. But then in my horse racing, yeah the winners, everyone who bet on the correct horse, they split the the total pot, that of all the bets.

Now that's really great because first of all, there's no like inherent risk for the the market maker. At least there's capt. risk. We have to subsidize every single market that we offer so that that makes IT uh, basically appealing for people to bet on. And so for the election market, for example, we thought we subsidized each option like five, in our case adds.

But with D, L, C, S, we would need to be the counterparty to every single person who bets at every single bet. And that's really chAllenging to the yeah doesn't seem scale able like it's like deal sees are great for doing like a peer to peer bet right like okay sixty, forty, trump Harris uh and then like someone puts zero point six B, T, C, another person put zero point four done, like simple. But one were doing something as complex as a prediction market where you are creating shares and those shares, like the Price of those shares, represents the probability of those events and their outcomes.

And then you make those shares traded on like an open market with this, you know, central market maker, then IT becomes way more chAllenging. And it's just a lot easier and a lot quicker to, lets say, get to market. If we had this, you know like secure e cash that we could just use as tokens to enable people to trade, then yeah like that's way easier, even easier. Just custody lightning, which is what we have right now and it's probably will continue to use until, let's say this e cash stuff kind of you know I have feel more secure about IT like I ve venn talked to too many e cash people so maybe completely wrong uh if if we have like those security guarantees that like yeah the crayons graphite is secure, the software secure, then it's like that just seems like an optimal method to preserve privacy while maintaining this uh all all the feature set that we want.

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Oh, it's like super simple. Like we're talking. We have a node on the back end and a front end right with power market. You have you have a theory um you have the nose of tokens. You have like this U M A oracle network and then you have their front end right.

And so when you have yeah like their side chain that's connected to a syrian, uh that's like this oracle layer that is offering staking for thirty percent API, there are so many places where that complexity can lead to some kind of exploit, right? And i'm not saying that the lighting network is free of exploits, right? Like when we're using a custodial solution, that's it's it's tough.

But when IT comes to the simplicity of everything, we're just literally bitcoin are in channels and then people can just send us bitcoin to place a bet. And when IT comes to the U. X, right, like as long as you have a lighting while the broom, you can place a bet, right? And you don't even need to sign up, you can just scan the Q, R code and send the money with public market.

Yeah, you need to, like, authenticate. Now, all of your bets are connected to your identity that you authenticated with, which is connected to your K Y C stuff that you got from your USD c that you got from, you know, cypher exchange. And it's all on this like mega ized l two of etherium.

And you know like when when he comes to the economics of these l two I saw recently, like I think base is the largest thereon l two and there paying thousand dollars day in transaction fees too later. One, a theoria with bitcoin lightning. It's a lot simpler, right? You just lock your bitcoin up and channels pay that transaction fee in the boom, you can send payments back and fourteen want to close the channel.

Okay, sure. Like simple, decentralized, actually peer to peer as like you know a payments network. When IT comes to glare tu on etherium, it's lot more complex because inherently everything that's on theory um is lot more complex and the incentives are a lot more complex and then the smart contracts are a lot more complex and all that complex to be adds up over time, right?

So that when you start out with something that's really complicated, maintaining IT is gona be complicated and then building on top of IT is also going to be complicated, right? So all we want to do is create something that simple that does the job and that can be secure enough that it's IT enables this mode. Like there's this motivation for master option of bitcoin of people.

If they wanna participate in this market, then all they need is bitcoin lightning, right? And that's something that is, I feel like a much Better self. And like, okay, you know, you ve got the side chain on the other shit coin, and then you use, you know, the stable coin to be able to do like all the different trust assumptions involved there, like with this is just big coin yeah.

Like how they are well, a bit of a bit ignorant to display Polly market have never used IT. Like how are they pricing things, pricing things in dollars? So the pressing an eat or person token yeah anything like just keeping IT simple using bitcoin is the unit of account in the biton prediction markets. I think that's another thing that appeals to me is that everything is dominated and SAT sort of have this jump to the you have account into your market exactly. yeah.

And we just show like the odds of the probability and then that's calculated really simply at the moment. We, of course, want to use the logistic, make markets growing role in the future and enable all this complicated trading.

But right now, it's really just the amount of that bet on, yes, divided by the total amount of that bet, right? And what's funny is Polly market is now trending towards the odds that speak quin prediction market like literally today I saw Polly market is somewhere like sixty five percent trump um and right now on bit on prediction market is like sixty seven percent. I think the other day yesterday is sixty nine percent.

So uh even though we use this supposedly more primitive uh market making uh algorithm and in this prediction system is still somehow really accurate, especially compared to all these prediction markets with like much higher liquidity. And one thing that I think that might be the cause of this is people can't sell their shares, kind of like an auction based thing, so people can just buy. And once they have pay theyve committed their money there, right?

If you want to bet on the other one. And now you need to just bet more on the other one so that you can recoup what you've previously bet. And so by locking in this kind of bet, maybe that kind of changes perception as well.

Like, okay, now I need to think carefully before I place the bet is at the right time to do so. Are these the right odds that I want to go for? right? And there's the negative externality of, yeah, you can sell your shares. But if you're this late in the cycle as we are, then you've probably made up your mind as to what's going to happen within the next few weeks.

right next couple of weeks. I say twenty second, twenty third we are yeah two lesson, two weeks of a crazy to think I can wait for you to be over.

Oh yeah.

it's been exhAusting. But one of the tried and true problems that arises with prediction markets, the oracle problem. How do you guys approaching the whole problem?

So right now we're the oracle, super simple, right? Uh the way that we're trying to resolve all these uh markets is through overwhelming consensus. So we have currently election markets, betwen Price market and uh one market on a if the us. Will leave lebanon like the U S.

Embassy um when he comes to these markets, we don't want to resolve anything prior to, let's say, major news outlets reporting the state talking about IT and also uh other prediction markets right Polly market, cali, these markets with my child liquidity right now IT seems like no matter who wins the election, there is going to be a dispute and the president has already been set with, I think four years ago right there is the storming of the capital. I feel like no matter what some SHE has been hit the fan. And we might need to wait on, uh, releasing the payments just to be sure that whatever result has happened is the thing that's going to uh, continue to be the truth.

Uh, in the future. Of course, I would be nice to have, let's say, incidentialy oracles to reports and who are independent, but I was actually talking with few of the other uh, people interested in building bitcoin prediction markets and we were talking about how we could have like a federation of oracles, right, as a federation of prediction markets. And we all resolve a intended so we are these guy's predict x uh the other fellow from L B, they're interested in uh creating these prediction markets and quite possibly IT could be all of these different prediction markets that are themselves oracles and themselves resolving together so that uh there's no kind of uh, issue when IT comes to let's an independent resolution and the incentives are in place, right?

Like if one prediction market screws up, then why would you use them in the future, right? If there are dishonestly, you know, being an oracle, then you can trust them anymore. And it's that trust that allows the prediction market to continue to Operate in alignment with the values of everyone else, right? Like prediction markets are not peer to peer digital cash, right?

C to c created this system of bitcoin so that you have a digital cash without trusted third parties write or you've minimize that trust. You still love minors in pools and you still have notes and individual users as well, right? And so he was solving a very specific problem when I came to, uh, building this solution to the digital cash problem.

And we've kind of extrapolated these values and place them in all sorts of different areas in bitcoin. Some are good, right, and some are also preventing a lot of innovation in bitcoin, right, because not everything can be this trustless uh compute machine has independent of the uh, interference of other people, right? Like at the end of the day, we're building a company.

We're not building this frees up and source protocol that's just opposed to run on people's computers and kind of just uh, exit help people like, no, we're building a company to make a lot of money in like provide value to our customers or users and anyone else who interfaces with us. And to do that, IT requires trust, right? Trust between myself and my cofounder and our team, trust between us and our investors, trust between us and our customers.

And this trust is not a bad thing, right? It's bad if you're trying to create a digital currency because you look at every other digital currency that was created, right, mojo nation or, uh e gold or e billion or liberty dollar or all these different projects that either failed or the founders went to jail. Uh, there is a real problem with the centralization of authority, and bitcoin solved that. But now that between solve that, let's do stuff with IT right on top of IT and do stuff that yeah requires some level of trust. But if you don't have that trust, then you can't really get kind of complex with that and do fun things.

Yeah I completely do with and I think that's trying to think of paper is I mean, I I think within the broader the world of broader cyp to they've completely wrong with this narrative that we need to essentialize all the things. And I think objectively, that is idiotic and it's being proven out in the market over time. But even within bitcoin, there is this idea that you have to trust, minimize every single application that you interact with, threat your daily life. And its in practical and trust is not a bad thing.

Yeah trust is not a bad thing. It's it's funny when I was reading uh the book that the first five thousand years and David grabber talks about debt, which is usually seen as a kind of there's A A negative connotation with IT, right? Uh but there was I think this a Christian monk early in the fifteen hundreds who wrote and celebrated debt because IT was this thing that tied everyone together.

Without debt, people would be optimized entities that don't owe each other anything and there's no need to, let's say, CoOperate or do anything together, uh, with debt. So you someone else, you something, you or them something that keeps kind of the relationship going in many different ways. And this dead requires trust, right? In societies, whether minimal trust throughout history, there's been minimal.

There's been maximum use of coin, right? cash. why? Because if you're a conquer army and in your soldiers who travel to distant lands, you plunder a different society.

You take their treasures and you melt that into coins, and then you use those coins to pay out your debts. Uh, this has happened time and time again. So when you're in a really low trust setting, then cash is really great.

If you're an really high trust setting, then yeah that is fine. And that is the original unit of account really like it's something primal in innate. You know all the friends that, oh, you are drink because you've been buying there drinks for a really long time, right? You know, when someone has, let's say, been getting too many favors and you're like, you know, like you got to do something here. Like when I was a kid, I was like, I went over to my friend's house and then he went over to my house, right?

Like there's this kind of balancing out of the scales of relationship and bitcoin being now that we're in like A A kind of low trust era in online digital commerce, it's managed to uh, kind of be this thing that people could use without trust, right? And that's great. But again, building on top of IT to provide, let's say, goods or services products built on bitcoin in you need some level of trust, right? Or else there is kind of no way that you can go about IT creating something that can do. Things are more complicated.

Yes, one of my favourite anthropological examples of when he hits the fan, people falling back to a trusting, particularly these these debt credit relationships, is like harricane Sandy in new york, particularly in lower manhattan when the power went out in both degs um couldn't access their their card raters.

Um there's many stories that came out of if you've lived in new york and you had your local bodega, you inevitably developed some sort of relationship with the man behind the counter that on the bodega and there are many stories that came out of like during that week lam period where the power was out and they could not access. The card reader said they literally had pending paper just like doing a credit system in while the powers out people are still able to get goods to feed themselves and get tobaco, whatever may be. And then when the power came back on, they went back and .

settle their debt. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And that requires trust, right? And those those trust relationships are built with in local communities, not within, you know, let's the broader online digital ecosystem.

Now if you want to do something in the broader online digital ecosystem here, that trust needs to be there, right? And then you see that with some of the largest businesses in crypto, in bitcoin, they're trust based inherently, right? He's look at by enhance and coin base for the vast majority of people, they're okay ay with keeping their coins in the custody of someone else, right? And that's not a good thing, right? It's security wise. You should own the keys to your coins and keep them in the harper wallet and you know, called storage that but IT just happens to be a lot of people have that trust and that's just effective nature.

Yeah, I mean, there is section all this. I mean, you can apply to the broader cyp du industry and exchanges were like here in the a ardet situation. And I think it's inarguable that the among of debt that the U.

S. Federal government has racked up is inordinate and not is is a not negative for the society here in the united states. In the long run.

That trust contract is mean for me personally, it's broken that I don't trust the government to issue that and provide me good and services that give me confidence that will be able to pay that back in the future. And I think many more individuals are um coming to the same conclusion. But then go back to example, like the that is not local if the U S. Government concentrate in D C is making these decisions for three hundred and fifty million americans, whatever the number is now three hundred thirty million um or dispersed throughout the country and there's this information um disconnection between what is actually needed on the local level is opposed to the federal level that has allowed the government to abuse the trust that american citizens have and regards to them issuing debt.

Absolutely absolutely. I feel like that um the power imbaLance of the state has been historically a abused right like in James c. Scott book seen like a state it's recorded throughout history how the people who live in the hills they often farm uh like root crops right there are the roots so that you can't pay taxes on them.

Um all these people, they don't want that they stayed interference to define the terms of the land. They often have small communities in which there is high levels of trust and people can just live community together right when the state gets involved. IT treats people like cattle in a europe, for example, in a england during full times.

Uh, the state's job was to develop the land and collect taxes on that. When IT came to four story, what they would do is um try to see how many a logs that they could get out of him, how much wood was available in the forest and quantify that and then extract resources. right? It's inherently uh, in this kind of way and it's not unique to the U.

S. Government is just unique to pretty much every government, every state. Like when you have the people who have a decided that the main way are going to eat foods for other people, and saying that, okay, you will pay me taxes and I will enforce the law, and if you screw with me and I will destroy you, that mode of being has been internalized by all of us, right? Because we can't escape IT.

There are these extremely powerful people who have that uh, opportunity to do something like that. And so the one thing that we do can do is comply. And I feel like the biggest uh, way that has IT has been exposing itself most recently was with code right without goat. I wouldn't have been a bit coiner because that's when I was really getting into the cypher uh scene and then also reading Andrew bail papers on money without state and really seeing the power abuse of the state like in singapore where I was IT was a complete thora arian shadow like you had literal robot dogs monitoring the micon workers who are essentially treated as slaves uh outside their migrant worker dormitories and you know there was no freedom right? Like I lived on a college campus.

And we had to get our Q R code every day that we could eat food at the dining hand if we didn't submit our temperature and show a picture of the temperature checking machine then um yeah we couldn't get that you are code to like show the dining hall to get food. Um literally my VISA in singapore. I wouldn't have been able to get IT to start my business if I didn't get the injection right.

And so when you have a really small state that you can really uh milk the citizens and highly control them. And any people who live in that country, especially in like a digital state era, uh, it's really like there's the security state whose you know with the elite ite families, intelligence organizations and then they're pretty much you know living off of the e tax y eld of the citizens and that's one of the big reasons I was like, yeah money without status a good idea. We should use bitcoin. Big coin is the future .

that's preak. Er I didn't know that that back story and it's not .

only .

like the the tax yield that they guess, just like the printing of money too, like they just print that and use that to garner more power to control citizens and say, like what was the exact moment for you were like, oh, it's bitcoin.

Oh man, the exact moment I feel like I was in new york, I was visiting a friend one of my good friends, nick, is my remit. And um you'd invited all of us, myself, my roommates to new york and this was during the omi cron you know outbreak or whatever. And yeah variance and all of this like craziness, like is my first time in new york and that was a pretty crazy time to be in new york.

And that's when I was reading of Andrew les papers on money without state and a more monetary design. And that's when I realized, like, oh, crap, this is, this is actually, what has this is the signal and all of the Crystal noise, like, there is so much crypto stuff that I was looking at because I was working at this consultation. Cy, doing all this research until these different protocols and finding out OK, yeah, this is just senior.

This is just senior. okay? Everyone's just trying to print money that's like the main like you know profit mechanism of crypto u.

So then what's the actual signal here? Like there's so much noise that's going on like when there's smoke, the fire, so where's the fire? And seeing bitcoin money without the state and seeing the just total abuse of state power, and seeing how like this was even before I watched the documentaries on like the fetal, like the money printing and even reading David grabs debt.

But after I understood that bitcoin was this money without state, all these different pieces of the picture came into my view like I was reading David graber and debt and I realized, like, oh, crap, you know, money printing increasing the deaths of people. It's like, uh because as in school at the time, in university and I it's like just giving people more assignments when nothing is, you know they have no reason to to do more work. But now the reason is that the government wants you to do more work, right? Let's in singapore.

Let's help. People are controlled if you talk to any ordinary singapore and they're overworked, right? They're probably working two jobs, right, maybe doing the uh regular salary work, going to an office and then on the side, they'd be like driving for grab, which is like the uber of singapore. And uh, they never have enough money.

why? Because, uh basically what the government does is they take some portion of your salary put into a retirement fund, but they control how you spend that money, right? So it's completely permissions ed, money that you have no access to and it's they're saying, oh yeah will help you out by uh making you save your money and telling you how to spend IT.

And what people are left with is very minimal cash, right? And what do they need to do without cash? They to pay uh for their mortgage.

They need to pay for their housing, right? Ninety percent of singapore has publicly controlled housing, right? And uh why?

Like if you look into the history, it's because when a the the one and the other fellow came into power, they burned the campus, which were the native housing of the people who lived in singapore and then they constructed the H. D, B. S.

So all of the people who were in the, uh, native housing, they had to go live somewhere. And then they now have place where basically it's completely government controlled, in run state controlled, and the Prices could be set right. So they deliberately set the Prices so that it's basically you have barely any money left to do anything else.

And so now you have an overwork population with a just people who you know can't think because they're just completely overwork. And that's one that's a microcosm like one state doing that. But then every state is doing that in some way, in some respect.

The U. S. Government does that. But IT does IT through inflation. IT does that through all these other different mechanisms and lovers that you know are basically Price controls. And now people are can barely survive because they're controlled with money. And this is what kal quickly talked about in tragedy and hope.

Uh, when it's like the division of the elites was to create a, uh, rather than have like slave based a control where people were owned, you would have monetary base control where people could be simply controlled through the lovers of the monetary system. And that's basically what's happened till l today, right? Like that's one of the things that I saw when, you know, after I learned about bitcoin.

And another one was on social economics. Uh, basically this work from Frederick sadi, who was a noble prize winning chemist, and he basically talked about the dangers of death and compound interest. Because thermo, dynamically speaking, everything is determining right? Entropy is always increasing and so things lose value over time.

That's just depreciation. Now if things are always losing value over time, what's the one thing that always gains value over time is dead. It's compound interest. That compound interest is exponentially growing, mathematically decided.

And IT uses the violence of the state to enforce itself, right? So if you have a world where you allowed that with compound interests, then that's an asset. That's the thing that always increases over time.

Therefore, if you allow IT, then you will eat up all the value of the rest of the world. Now, he wrote this just after the federal reserve is created. He goes in one thousand twenty and one thousand twenty one, and his propac's was that in one hundred years there will be no value, just that. And IT will all be controlled by a few people who controlled the deaths. And that's what happened, right?

Your well, red sir.

this is like to do my research.

No is what I mean think I want to point out is particular your description of singapore is fascinating to me because the narrative that's fed to western, particularly people in attack in finance and investment sectors, that singapore is this almost, uh, utopian experience in south east aasa. The tight trust in highly functioning. But IT seems like you saying it's not as is portrayed.

if you are one of the privileged few who can be an expert living in singapore, working here, corporate job or your tech job and you can just go to the office on the M. R. T, and then you can go to the country club in the evening with, like your family.

And you know, it's great. Like i've met people who live like that. You know, like the upper class in singapore are having a great time. It's it's incredible. But then when you look at the vast majority of the people in singapore is a much different story. And i've been unfortunately enough to gain exposure to both sides, right, to the extreme upper islands where it's like, you know, you're talking about like donors to like schools and like art collectors in all of that like and then i've also gone to the most you downtown people society.

You can see when IT comes to like the upper ashlands, you're living like anywhere else in the world except, uh, it's in singapore and the airport is close by and you have all this like nice food that you can get on grab and it's like chill. But then if you're in the lower class, it's a much different story, right? Like you're talking, uh, a lot of the things I can say on camera because it's it's people dealing with the stress in trouble of exploitation and effectively slavery, right?

A lot of people in singapore, especially in in the lower classes, they have A A really difficult time, multiple jobs. Um no sovereignty, no sovereign of thought, right? Like people are not equipped to think for themselves. They're equipped to obey the state like the education system and this goes for a pretty much any education system, i'd say, uh, is a system of indoctrination.

It's telling you what reality box you should uh basically format your conscious ness in and then how you need to interpret events so that you are satisfied with being where you are in the social system. And for the vast majority of people, like when I talk to people who are you know on that like lower end of the spectrum, they're saying, oh yeah, no, it's fine that i'm here because all the people who are super successfully, they worked for IT. How can I you know you know, I can't be jealous like it's it's their right to to be like that.

But then often times when you see the story of how a lot of these people became successful, IT was stopping on the next of other people to to get there. And you know, IT is kind of like A A dark reality of the way the world work. minutes.

A different, again, a different narrative on on singapore. Then i'd been fit here in the last me of a silk valley tech. Ras thinks, again, the utopia that is a model for the world to replicate is very interesting to get disconnecting, and we bring you back to bit way more broadly. And having a tool at our fingertips, PS, that we can use to deliberate ourselves from these oppressive measurements that are thrust on us by the state, like do you have helps that we can actually do this.

I feel like it's not about unnecessarily having hope, but giving people the tools and the knowledge to be able to do so. And there's this one really powerful concept and idea that um I read about from single swan angle. Swan is basically a cofounded, the stanford research institute with a vessel target and help put off and they are doing a lot of this remote viewing work. Yeah yeah so I read like the declassified files and .

my project targets and the other know .

so people being able to see into the other places psychically uh doing so basically with uh telepathy like clearance and this kind of E S P phenomenon has been uh routinely debunked. right? Like it's people who, uh, let's say, if I were possible, would the people in power want you to know it's possible? Definitely not right? Definitely not. This is something that is is like a no goes zone and right. But it's funny because if a what we've done is we've basically created a reality where people will filter this information out right for the vast majority of your viewers are .

probably laughing looking like.

oh this is not right but um when IT comes to the kind of uh laboring of power dom, there are no power schools. There are schools, right? But there are no power schools.

There are no schools to figure out how you can get more power, empower yourself, right? And there's a deliberate reason for that, because if we think of ourselves as creatures of power, like power creatures, where we have the creative capacity to do incredible things that most of us were not even dream of, then the most powerful thing you can do is harness that for your own utility, right? And that's what people have done through all of these different structures, like the states, like a corporation, like the different ways that we've entuned our own, uh, social systems, right? And ingle swan talked about how yeah there are no power schools and any sort of direct way to empower ment is usually you uh is getting diverted.

You no one will tell you how to do IT you gotten figure that out yourself, right? And the same goes with bacon as an empowerment technology. You need to see through the illusion yourself in order to actually gain empowerment, even if you want to use, like if you're formatted against your own empowerment.

And there's no way that you can actually get empowered, right? And this is not to say anything about like we're mote viewing, like to get into all of like the whole conspiracy angle. We don't even need to use those.

You don't want to talk about the getting museum and what's the getting the m this is, I don't want to interpret to your train of thought, but just slight tangent. Like getting you sing, like there's a theory that IT is the epicenter of the underground cities protect to buy remote viewers who basically try to see if people are trying to figure out what's going on there.

Yeah I mean, I haven't heard about that, but I I know for sure that like yeah you know there's it's a hot topic that's really controversial. I don't mean promote any one angle specifically, right? Like if you are interested in learning more than you could read the star, get files or just look into, let's say, all the d class files that the C I F released.

And you know, Jimmy Carter talked about IT a. He talked about how they used remote viewers to find like this missing plane in the middle the atlantic ocean, I believe. And um yeah after he talked about that publicly, they shut down the programme and moved IT to different things.

So i'm guessing they're still probably doing IT because it's a really powerful thing to be able to do. But of course, it's only for the initiated is only for the people that the ones who controlled dem worthy of that kind of power. But as little of power speech, if we were able to empower ourselves, would there be widespread knowledge by the powerful to enable people to do that? Probably not right.

That's why the NPC mean exactly, exactly.

Because they want everybody .

to be an non player character.

exactly. They want everyone to be subservient in somewhere. Or just don't rise up.

Because if you are in competition with them, the ones who have a lot of power, then in your potential threat, right? And the thing about bitcoin that is that doesn't alive with the powerful is that they can stop you, right? If you use the currency, right? It's the negative liberties that are protected of bit code is the fact that the cripp graphs, it's so secure that you uh, nobody can a prevent you from spending your coins or receiving your coins, right? And I see your coins in computer, uh, if quantum computers become a reality, then we need to fix bitcoin cause yeah they can need .

to six thing of quantum yeah yeah it's like everybody ago because because quantum it's like if quantum comes .

everything yeah that's .

back to the drawing ling board. The situation is everything, but running with the assumptions that quantum ism here and the crop top phy is as secure as we know what to be, mathematically, he can prove IT bitcoin .

is this empower .

ing tool because .

through the M P C milor yeah .

IT is you doesn't must like jacked up. I've been during conversation in quite a while. This is a very unique way to describe bitcoin.

And this is what logan, five, sixty, probably around the five, fifty two, fifty two, five, fifty two, five hundred and fifty one conversations before this one. And you just framed big one in a way that has not been framed on this conversation. That's prety ab. It's really.

I think the the central thesis that that I go with when IT comes to bit point and also with prediction markets as impowering tools, right uh, to be able to see the future is one thing, right? And to be able to see IT in a way where we have A A glimpse at significant events, right? When I mean significant, it's if for shadow something right, there's this event is, let's say, the cause of some effect that will be felt globally, right?

Uh, prediction markets, I feel like would be wasted if he was just on sports, right? Like when IT comes to what things matter, it's like bread and circus, right? I want to look at the bread like all of the different ways that that could get disrupted or uh, you could be proliferated.

The circus, you know there's always attention on the circus, right? But the fundamental things that make up the nature of our a physical reality, right, like we look at everything that's in this room, everything that's in any room from people who are watching all these things, were stuff that used to be a thought in someone's mind. And then they worked with their creative impulse to make IT something that's in the physical world in reality, right? And usually that's what happens with prety much anything, right? Like geopolitically, a business. Mark first thought of what he needed to do before he actually actualized that on the european chessboard, which later manifested in war, right? And tremendous conflict and many people's lives being disrupted or killed, whatever.

Uh, most of these decisions are behind closed doors, right? Most of these thoughts are just locked in people's minds and they don't reveal their intention before they act on IT, right? But if we can get a sense of what that might be and have a focus on that and then drive, let's say, betting action towards IT and transmute, this negative energy of let's speculation, which is deemed to generally be like to generate activity into something that's a forecasting of a future event, which is very significant because of for shadows, many different black effects, then that could be an impowering technology, right? Most people can't have that glimpse into the future. Only the initiated few who've passed the ranks of the secret societies and the intelligence organizations .

and in the .

in the war game room, exactly right. Like, let's bring that into the public eye and let's see. Like, okay, if it's actually available for people to see what might .

happen then yeah, is that a double edge sword in your man? I mean, earlier, we discussed the potential positive external alist of seeing the probability of a future event and working to prevent IT because IT would be but IT would be a disadvantage to society for IT actually happen alternately. Conversely, like could have be used for bad, like people say that a big bt aren't a bad outcome coming happening and they don't want to use the money they put on the line so they work to ensure that the bed outcome actually comes information.

Well, you know that that could be possible, but I feel like observation changes reality, right? This is unknown phenomenon in particle physics, optics, right? Like if you ve shine a vote on, I like, some kind of events, then IT changes IT from a probabilistic thing to an actual thing, right? And if we think of the world as the kind of manifestations of the collective dreams of humanity, of what people are thinking about doing, and actualizing that in the physical world, then having this prediction market where people can see potential futures, that creates, let's say, this potential for observation, right? And that observation changes reality because that affects people's internal conscious ness.

And yes, some people could try to use IT as a power play to gain more power and more money by manipulating the market. Others could use that to negate those forces, right? Of course, with the prediction, market is a capital market, so capital can manipulate, right? You could also think of that as capital can subsidize anyone who sees through the illusion of someone else trying to prop up some event can make money off of that, right? And we've seen that was in polar market, at least with the israel, lebanon uh, markets.

IT looked like there were some manipulation going on like some serious, but were like pushing the Price down, pushing the probability down. But then they came right back up, right rebounded like within a day. And I think that just goes to show the robustness of such a market right now. That's just one small example.

But let's say, we have many examples of lots of that happening, lots of attention, lots of capital that will people uh, simply you know, when they see certain odds occurring, how will they act? How will that change? I don't know, right? But if IT becomes to be an important thing, then a market is far more difficult to manipulate than a poll, far more difficult to manipulate than a news article or a video. Uh, IT requires that sacrifice. And when IT comes a bitcoin, it's the ultimate sacrifice of value because it's a bit point right.

Finite supply. Yeah, but the first time I drop this in a while, shout out to O, G, frees the t ftc. We're getting cosmic here.

League, continuing that threat of thought parly bet what I just, I guess, with observation affecting consciousness and running with the assumption that we have a bad actor trying to manipulate, maybe not even manipulate, the market to manipulate an outcome, to rip the benefits of the bed he made within that market. Is this prevented by most humans? Like running with the assumption that most humans are good intently at the end of day. And like consciousness of most individuals, is such that they would want a positive, peaceful outcome yeah I I firmly .

believe that most people don't cry for more conflict like we need to be programmed in that way to want more conflict. right? Like this is something that taught to us, not necessarily something that uh, isn't IT.

Of course, there is that component innis rate, which is this kind of like resistance, right? Like resistance to authority, resistance to whatever is something that imposed on us, right? And I think that's just another facet of the fact that we're all power beings with the creative capacity to do just about anything and for us to be channeled into doing, uh, what we do, there might be all these different forces.

They're pushing us right now with prediction markets. There always is this possibility of manipulation. Like if you look at sports bedding, like how many times a ref makes a call or does something, and then they also have money on the line somewhere. And they use their power and authority to manipulate the outcomes so that they can make more money. Like, this is something that's very old and happening for a really long time.

When he comes to prediction markets, you know, something similar could happen, right? Who knows? Like what the beats are with the in the presidential race, right? Like the one thing that I do know is it's always possible to throw the game right.

If you are a doing something, if you are uh, in the midst of making something happen, then there is always the possibility that you stop. And if you bet that you'll stop, you bet that something will fail and then you deliberately fail that something that can be engineered, right? And it's an inherent risk with any of these markets that we would offer.

There's always the possibility if he gets big enough that the actors involve can just throw their own game. And a but if you've vested interest in that outcome, then it's more of a competition, right? Because why would the democrats wants to throw the election right now when they still could have a chance, right?

Yeah, that's that's what excites me the most. The emergence of these more robust prediction markets is begetting to happen because I think that's the other thing is were having lot of these we're having a theoretical hythe's al conversation, but what can and may happen. But I like you said, reality doesn't have until the observed. And so like as these things become more robust, will learn how people interact with them and what how they actually affect the world external to these markets.

Exactly, exactly. And that's just something that we can only speculate on right now.

Yeah ah i'm happy you came awesome so much Better .

in person .

that can imagine the conversation over over a video to me. I like we're diving deep and is one particular topic but that's why I was pumped meet you in person a rega because um I think outside of prediction, mark, is your reviews on bitcoin generally in some of the things going on with epic when are just began very unique. You are very I was opinion but very convicted in interviews of how bitcoin work. And just like outside of what you're building at the in prediction market, what else are paying attention to with in bicoastal side the mining stuff?

Yeah I mean outside of the mining stuff, um IT does look like there's a whole lot of shit coin in coming back to bitcoin, right, which I mean you know the ship corner see the signal they're like, okay, time to grip again. You know they can raise more funds and push their propaganda and get people excited about whatever they're shilling.

But fundamentally, I mean bitcoin as an improvement technology, it's gonna under threat for sure like a crag crag winkey from uh the uh combo fellers who created a resistance money, they rete resistance money shadows to them. Uh, best book in bitcoin talking about, uh you know just no bullshit that comes to if you want to orange pill someone that's the best book to go for. And uh, crag is working on a research paper right now.

Maybe shouldn't say, but you know this is really relevant on how bitcoin can resist a feather fork, uh, the father fork, yeah, a feathers fork. So a feathers fork is basically how the U. S. Government would, uh sensor bitcoin. They would do IT by making pools mine only on complaint blocks.

So not just mining complaint blocks but on top of complaint blocks, right? And that's really dangerous because once you simply allow um you know bitcoin to be compliance money, now you no longer have that like someone can you know it's it's not the fucking you money anymore, right? That's the whole point of bitcoin is to be this period digital cash that can be stopped.

If someone some actor can stop IT, then you know you're kind of screwed. And right now, IT doesn't look like a the chinese mining pools would be interested in supplying with that. Um they've got their own agenda going right, which is largely shit coerce.

And you know with china, I feel like a lot of IT is just really about business, like as the world's factory, they kind of just do a whole bunch of stuff but are not really too opinionated on like what really happens at this kind of like political levels. So I feel like it's kind of a ahead against the o fac doing whole bunch of anegay. But you know, if they do decide saying that like okay, bitcoin needs to know uh obey U.

S. Sanctions law, then the puppose will absolutely comply. The pools who are within the reach of the U. S. Government will definitely comply. And if you you're enough hash rate to comply, then uh IT becomes unprofitable for the other polls to uh no, not comment for them to resist. So they could just adopt a policy like that and that could screw a whole lot of people.

Do you think we need to A W dashers perspective on this? I mean.

you know he's definitely not backing down. So it's good that there's like the diversity of you here. I look at ordinal a pretty frequently because I find IT fascinating.

Just seeing another free speech tool kind of pop up, right? Like ster and noster is also getting under attack right now by like all these illegal images being popped up. Uh that's going to question the censorship persistence of the whole system, like how the release in the developers deal with that.

But um when he comes to ordinal, a lot of IT is innocuous like most of IT is just people posting memes are like you know art. I think that's cool. The only thing I worried about is the attack factor, right? and. If you know if you need to, let's say, build some sophisticates off for in order to detect all of that stuff and you know kind of just not include that, uh but IT would be uh a rightfully use of, let's say, censorship technology.

But again, once you enable that for one thing, then you can enable that for a whole bunch of things, right? And I feel like it's one of those use cases of bitcoin where, okay, like the road to hell is made with good intentions. There's a all like once you enable real freedom, then you might see what real freedom looks like and then you're like a fuck what what would we just do, right? And I feel like that might be like a moment there for bitcoin itself, right? Like what would IT be? Just enable? Like, yeah, there's a whole bunch of you know kind of really innocuous stuff like art and just means but then there's also know you could provide some yes.

you fact don't want to lobert arians .

in charge of yeah yeah .

yeah IT is investing. I'll be interesting to see how all that plays out. An intuitively sense of launch like the old ordinal inscription thing, it's really like I think it's noise from the token perspective, I don't see why they're be any value. And to like the attack factor that opens up not only for the one that you described but like the chain blow. I'm a big fan of smaller blocks and just build things in players.

Yeah, me too. I mean, I just like we keep IT simple, right? Simple is best. What a simple look like.

It's just things kind of going with like we're not trying to do too much and it's always possible to do too much. And that's what I learned in you know the start of journey with myself, my co founder. Like at first, we our products were really complicated.

The vision was really large and super big. But over time, after many failures in many iterations, we've learned to just kind of a simplify as much as possible. They cut out all of the crop that doesn't need to be there.

And when we're talking about, let's say, bitcoin being the thing that replaces all these other block chains and crypto s so well, maybe those Crystals solve the problems that the people who use them want, right, which is maybe to filled dream of some bullshit like get rich quick scheme or like afra nf t platform. Or you can scamp people til like buying your, you know, digital trading cards or whatever. Like, I was working on an art marketplace right before the N.

F T is popped up. Like, I was thinking of a digital art. Uh, there's like something that needs to be done here.

H, I was previously trying to be a music producer. And h, like making my own beats, putting them online, like your big beat, yeah yeah. Very hang beats beat, yeah yeah. And uh, that was fun. But uh, I was tough to find unique digital, to kind of brand myself and make myself unique as like a visual presence and like the social media landscape.

So I thought OK art licensing would be a way for artists to make some money and for me to I get my brand out there and have have like high quality visual art. But yeah right. During that time, like our biggest sales were from people who wanted to take this are interned into nfs. That's why they are licensing IT in buying like exclusive licenses so that they could just kind of pump and dump with the someone else.

And I can see that I mean, like artists uh are incredibly uh it's very difficult to make money and are its a super elites group were like unless you are the ones favoured by the people who buy are to like house power yeah yeah there is a whole power struck trend if you want to make money otherwise okay yeah N F T is sure like just kind of sell IT to some fans who want to like collected. I can see that right? Like I can see you even more than let's a value for value.

I mean, this is a controversial thing from in the bitcoin space, but it's like, you know, I pitched a lot of artists like products that you know dealt with, like micropayments and the kind of value for value schemes or even like betting, like betting on art, music kind of combos and a lot of them were like, I don't want your pennies first of all, like take that shit out like I don't care, I don't want a lot of money. And then also, if it's if i'm using a product where I make my art, you know you give value next to the right in terms of salt for USD or whatever, then it's like that now about the money, not about the art, right? And that's a big criticism of nf as well.

Like people. Uh, we're like, okay, now it's not about the artist, just about scams. People right? And even A I right, like when you uh like my brother, uh, he makes music and when he put out a lot of music with like A I album, you got a lot of hate because it's like people like hey use real art like this.

A I stuff is not art, which you know, uh, I feel like at this point in time, we can pretty much tell what looks like an A I prompt generated art. I feel like it's a lot more difficult if you like combining multiple images with mid journey like i've done some like mid journey art at myself and I like IT, but uh, i'm not gone, you know, just like try to pumped as like an N F T. This is just for my own like decoration at home, let's say.

right? And there is like the possibility of uniting bitcoin with music, with art is a really chAllenging puzzle. And I was thinking about IT for a while just because of my own experience and like art and music and uh my own knowledge of like bitcoin and like financial technology. And it's like first of all, to make IT as an artist is really tough, but to make an art music business that's even more difficult, right? Because you're trying to actually create something for a whole bunch of people who mostly don't have money anyways and who are mostly trying to like fans or get listeners or yeah blow up, get more engagement sa.

And when IT comes to the traditional music industry, there is such an entrenched power structure there that is so difficult to overcome, right, that for me, IT looks like a near impossible task to attacks that, right? Like when we're talking from your for your music to get from your like D A W, your computer all the way to the spotify. And let's say, if you have like a label, if you have all these different know, there are so many different rights organizations and legal entities that take a cut here there just because, you know, a hundred years ago, like publishing companies would be the ones that collect royalties on the books that you published for, like, you know, music, like the way that a lot of piano made money back in the day was publish a book on all their songs and then that book would get like publishing realty.

And then now, you know, artists today still collect publishing royalties, but it's not because they're publishing books. It's their music on spotify, for example. And you know it's like the label construct is like this investment ARM that like alligators capital to artists, like the financing deals that are there, like the equity arrangements and it's all completely screwed, right?

And if you want, let's say, a legacy artist to adopt a very new technology and then you think you can just cut out of the crop, that's the monster that's next to IT. You know, I feel like it's it's it's an over simplification that you can't ignore, like there's all of that like the monstrous beast that the music industry is there kind of for a reason. And that's because it's really difficult to make money in music, right? And it's really difficult to become famous and to like produce things that people actually want to see.

And then the capital concentration is in such a way where there's a few people at the top who kind of make all the decisions and those decisions get kind of uh, let they encoded in the artists through like their N R S, right? Like the representatives from like the labels kind of guiding the artists into what seems they want to have their music or to what like things they need to include. And then that power structure is there and it's going to stay there. And that's just there because the whole fiat money, you know crap that like .

see the city case because maybe you lose maybe a blows at all up. Yeah I mean joking, but like that is part of this power structure .

you're describing. absolutely.

I mean, like you know when you have so much already, how else can someone have power over you? right? It's like black mill material, right? You put yourself in a compromise position and that compromise position is generally, uh, your own fear or desire, right? It's generally fear or desire, those of the two things that get you caught in these traps and then once you've been caught it's like, okay, now you, the public master can do do with you as they wish, right? And how are you going to, on board, take a value for value thing and and also how you're going to onboard the fans, right? Like music is such a commodity today.

Well, for me, I listen like you to music. And that's really great because I can just, you know, get all the recommendations I have from youtube and then download them like pretty instantly. Now I have, like, all this music like and I paid youtube right, but don't know where that money goes. It's like a total black hole and having like a new system were like the network effect isn't there like you're competing against multiple different like glides that have real weight, right?

Yeah I I think this gets back to will we start the conversation with his I think at scale, maybe not value for value like this. Ability in mechanism for artists to monetize in a more efficient a favor way towards the artist is a timing thing. When we're talking about like biton businesses and timing like bitcoin prediction markets, timing makes a lot of sense for me.

You get speculation killer APP for the first fifteen years in predict, there is a derivative of speculation extending up beyond the simple l Price of bitcoin or hashed difficulty, whatever people speculated on up unto this point. Partner comes to that like you need the network effective people actually having the coin and be able being able to reduce the switching costs um to a point where it's so okay, now I can do this instream sad as I listen directly to the artist. The network affects simply isn't there that there yet on the amount of people SHE holding the coin and then holding IT in while its applications that makes something like this possible.

There needs to be some level of order of management de improvement on the current paradigm for someone to like adopt a new technology, right? Like inertia is something that's more than just a physical thing. It's a mental thing as well, right?

Like i'm not going to change my behavior unless i'm motivated to do so, right? There's some kind of cause that's making me change my behavior, and right? Like that's the whole reason why in, let's say, building a business you want to go for a blue ocean kind of opportunity.

Not so much something that is already totally occupied with, you know a bunch of competitors who are you know already entuned in the market and network facts or something that like basically uh make IT just so much more difficult to compete in like the digital world in you know with products and services that uh already are entuned in markets, right? And uh, I feel like with speculation, bitcoin already has product market fit. Like the first time I ever bought bitcoin was in twenty seventeen, I believe twenty seven or twenty eighteen, twenty seventeen I think.

And that was because, uh, I wanted to play poker on poker stars and alza korea, so I couldn't actually use poker stars. So I got A V P N, got coin base bot bitcoin, then a move bitcoin to zell sell to some other while while like coin base, i'm not not a while to poker stars. And then I lost all my money playing poker and poker stars.

But like, the original reason why I bought bitcoin was so that I could do something else right. And bitcoin, like, served that value proposition for me because no other currency was unstoppable in that way, right? Bitcoin is unstoppable so long as IT doesn't get attacked by the state entities that wanted destroy IT and sensor IT.

But currently bitcoin is unstoppable, right? And IT looks like IT will continue to be unstoppable. And basically now you can do things with like if if we enable speculation directly with bitcoin, now I don't need to go through that like convoluted, you know multiple different wallets and for tax services that I can like deposit my bitcoin until poker starts and lose IT. Now I can just be with bitcoin and you know that's a lot Better. My when comes to like a user experience .

perspective yeah completely agree. Timing is very important .

in this market. absolutely.

I mean, you mention IT to like the iteration of your business getting a bit coin prediction market. Um maybe not good timing to make IT easy for individuals or running ghee notes, certainly good timing for people to speculate on events using this one.

exactly. And I think it's like one of those things where if people really want speculate on certain events, then they might just do IT with their on lining node, right? Like if they want to do something with the bitcoin, then you'll adopt the other technologies that make that happen, and then we could onboard them to like a self custodial standard, right? I just get everyone using alby hub and then just have like a really simple tutorial and like I just like get on boarded with that and then you know where to buy bitcoin, where to how to like do everything is just simple steps at the end of the day. But it's finding the use case that people want to use bitcoin for that we'll buy IT and and then use IT actually as this to peer digital cash rather than just as buy and hot hoddle, you know like crap like that's just, you know before hoddle le meant not trading, not day trading with bitcoin and speculating on Price now I just means never selling yeah that's like as as good as artifically can get. People just don't even want to use bitcoin and that's like, you know that kind of defeats the purpose of of a lot of .

this freedom tech and and it's inference. So right before you walked into to the comments, we actually just published an episode with Parker outside. He had the die start into this like he put his piece on bacons extreme theory of value.

And people have somewhat misconstrued like bit when his only store value, I said, I think that's driven by some large holders that, that are marketing at such but like values only realized when it's exchanged. And so you need this medium of exchanged happen. Actually, it's like shorting box where you can huddle bitcoin. I can have a number on a screen, but that value isn't actually realized until you exchange IT for something else.

Exactly exactly. You know you need a to have this flow of bitcoin in order for the network to grow right accepting bitcoin as payments or making bitcoin payments um is a real big chAllenge rate like I know the fellows and chang mine who are like doing a lot of circular economy stuff.

And it's really difficult it's really difficile to change people and and move their inertia from the fiat payments that are super easy, simple and entrenched in society and now are digital and you just Q R code, contact us, apple pay, whatever, like it's super simple, changing that to a bitcoin standard and on boarding people to all this difficult attack until I get them there, like it's a great effort, right? Hundred percent like worthwhile. It's worthwhile.

But it's really difficult is really difficult to get people to change. And what I wonder is, okay, maybe there needs to be other use cases that are internet native, that are bitch coin native, that can incentivize people to adopt and actually spend, right? Because it's not to we're not going to reach terminal velocity just through hole, right? Just dealing with exchanges, then it's compliance money, right? Because of all exchanges are K Y seed?

yeah. No, I think I mean, just looking to compare on Polly market, again, going to meet to what we said earlier, has product market fit that's talked about its main stream and IT bringing that to bacob? That's like funny, like everybody suck my like a spring nf and ico s to be coin to your room and may be it's like no, like as you mention, like stable coins and prediction markets seem to be the killer up over and cypher yeah when IT comes to supporting the killer crypto apps to big coin, anything prediction markets is the right one.

absolutely, because it's not token based, right? You don't need to have whatever senior age crap that is in a lot of the crypt of protocols and products. You know IT doesn't rely on subverting people's understanding with like a pumped M N F T kind of sm it's sure there's this kind of you know admittedly uh, the generate component of like gambling.

Yes, that's absolutely there underived. However, it's not there just to be there. Like all these other products and platforms, there's this kind of transmutation of negative energy that occurs with a prediction market. In aggregating all of these opinions through capital, we can gain an understanding of the future, right? And that's a net benefit to everybody.

Even if you're not budding, you're not speculating, you can still pear into the crustal ball of the prediction market and see into the future and see like, okay, this looks like it's probable and IT might happen. So let me make a decision that will uh in in accordance to that, right? And that can be a positive net value to everybody, right, rather than just speculation for speculation, say, speculation for the sake of the future. And I feel like that a lot more compelling.

I like that. I like that fish. James, we got cosmic here.

Are very happy, excited they were building between en prediction market and that you're in big coin and that you came on the shell I think is going to be a fan favorite. We touched a lot. We're got to to remote viewing, which I was expecting.

Yeah yeah.

But any parting thoughts, final thoughts, controversial opinions.

they just a bet on bitcoin prediction market. That's it's the future bitcoin .

prediction dot market to check IT out piece in the freaks.