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- [00:00]
A
John, we missed a week. Memorial Day really threw a wrench in our scheduling and we couldn't make it up Tuesday. So we're back.
- [00:08]
B
Yeah, it's a real shame. We brought shame on our households. Relative to your unbroken streak with Odell on rhr, maybe we'll start our streak today going forward.
- [00:20]
A
Yeah, we had a Friday RHR last week. Matt's feeling a little bearish. I feel like he's a little bearish right now, which is usually a good sign for, for the near term prospects of the bitcoin price, though we have drifted a bit lower since we've recorded on Friday, currently below 72,000. But I think bitcoin's in an interesting spot. We're going to, I think, end this conversation on the fundamental value prop of bitcoin and some developments that have happened in recent weeks. But first, I think jumping right into it, just talking about the mimetic power of this administration. And you wanted to start off this week's presentation with the juxtaposition of President Trump and Jerome Powell from last year's audit of the building of the new Federal Reserve building, and Secretary BESANT Presenting the $250 bill with President Trump on it.
- [01:13]
B
Yeah, look, I mean, this guy, you know, much, much can be said about him, positive and negative, and we don't have time to get into all that. But I think the one thing that we all have to agree on is that Trump, across his two administrations, is responsible for some of the most iconic images of the storied history of this great country. And the one on the right, the Besan images, is what I led off the week with, just because I think it so perfectly captures the moment and also the contrast between what happened last year with his iconic image of Trump and Powell, which I think is probably the number one image that Trump will ever produce. I mean, I just, I don't think you can get better than this. But a strong number two is this one with Bessant holding up his $250 bill. You've got larger currency denominations with people struggling with price inflation. That's always a good sign. You've got a Treasury Secretary taking the diametric opposite stance relative to his former counterpart in the Fed as it relates to Trump, clearly, with this wonderful grin. Showing Trump's image on, on the currency, I think tells you a lot where we're going, tells you a lot about where the different camps sit. And, yeah, I just think this picture's worth a thousand words and I'll let it speak for itself.
- [02:28]
A
Yeah, when it gets to, I mean, we just did some pre show prep, more pre show prep than we typically do. And I think what I'm picking up is that the underlying theme of this discussion is going to be the acceleration of the K shaped economy and how we navigate that moving forward. Because it seems very clear that there is some dislocation between AI and the plays within AI and everything else. And it's just really interesting times that we live in. But sticking on geopolitics and the Trump administration, I think one thing that's become clear over the last week that a lot of the price action that we've seen in oil markets basically going below 100 and staying in the mid-80s for the last few weeks has been manufactured price due to the fact that many nations are draining their Strategic Petroleum Reserve as an attempt to route around the supply disruptions because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
- [03:23]
B
Yeah, you know, and I think this relates to the K shaped economy as well.
- [03:27]
A
Right.
- [03:27]
B
Where we're all, you know, those of us who are have the need to actually be aware of what gas prices are, you know, certainly have felt in the last six months the impact of all the disruptions in a way that perhaps the those at the top of the pyramid haven't quite as much. But it hasn't been completely unbearable yet. And I think there's a decent amount of confusion as to why we haven't blown out further. There's been speculation about this and we've talked about a little bit on the show, but Rory Johnston, who's great oil analyst, everyone should follow, had some good data out highlighting that there's some incongruity in the Chinese data that they follow suggesting that you've had imports come. Oil imports come way down. But also mobility indicators that they follow are still strong. So you're not really seeing demand destruction. And he thinks that the delta there is getting backfilled by the Chinese, effectively just making massive withdrawals from their strategic Petroleum reserve. He's kind of interpolating that he doesn't have great data to that point. But it stands to reason. And of course they're certainly not alone. All the cool kids are doing it and we're seeing it in the US last week we just had our second highest SPR draw on record, surpassing the ones from 2022. Highest was the prior week. And then Japan also is running the same playbook here. And so this is keeping a relative lid on oil prices. It hurts, but it's not destructive yet for many sectors of the economy. It's not probably it's getting to be a voting issue in the US but it's not necessarily a rioting issue yet. But the question is when you think about stocks and flows, these are all stocks and deplete them without re upping them. You can only do that so many times and you can't even get them down to actually zero. You need to keep some level of stock in for the SPR to actually work chemically and function the way that it should. So question is how many more times can we run that playbook before you start actually getting more meaningful getting in the street type impacts on the oil price.
- [05:27]
A
Yeah and I think last week was rather interesting as it pertains to this particular theme because you had the CEOs of Chevron and Exxon come out and basically call BS saying hey these prices are artificially manufactured. What we're looking at looks like the prices should increase throughout the summer. Maybe getting back to the 150 to $160 per barrel range. I was following WTI this morning. It looks like it popped above 91 from 85 over the weekend. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the Market Digest to CEOs at two of the largest major oil producers in the world calling BS on this.
- [06:06]
B
Yeah, the degen in me looks at this chart and wants to call a lower high there, but I won't make any bets to that effect. But yeah, look this is obviously we talked about it for the last three or four months. This is kind of the crux of the whole thing is who blinks first, who can maintain enough stability in core input prices to their economies to not have to back off and to maintain leverage in this whole US and China via Iran type of standoff that we're looking at. And it's tbd, right. The Achilles heel over in the US is that this has when this price gets out of hand that has direct and meaningful impacts not just for voters who can ultimately in November potentially constrain Trump's agenda, but also more significantly and more immediately for bond yields which for flows through everything else. So in a hyper financialized over financialized economy we've seen a couple times that it seems like 4.546 on the 10 year is maybe the place where treasury or somebody needs to step in and maybe Trump needs to fire off a positive tweet to keep the move volatility index at bay. We'll see if we need another one of those in a little while. But yeah, this is without being able to make any clear calls. This is obviously the crux that everybody's got to focus on here in the next couple months.
- [07:24]
A
Yeah, I think what is more clear, at least to me I'd be interested to get your perspective on this is it's easier to tell the signals in the AI play right now. The numbers coming out of this sector are absolutely mind boggling. And you have it highlighted here. The Micron hit a trillion dollar market cap for the first time as stock surges 19% and then Dell stock skyrocketed 32% for its best day ever as AI server revenue soars. And then I think on top of that, Dell released their first hydro cooled GPU rack in conjunction with Core Reef and that was announced at the end of last week as well. So it seems like the infrastructure build out is happening. It's real. I know we've been talking behind the scenes using the tools. They're real. They're an incredible productivity gain for teams that know how to utilize them. And I think that's the most important thing to highlight here that know how to utilize them, particularly in a cost efficient way. And again going back to what we said earlier, we're in this very interesting time where you have this geopolitical strife, you have this K shaped economy and then you have this behemoth of an emerging market theme and what will be a part of human society moving forward, which is this AI build out on the infrastructure side and then the utilization on the software side, that is happening at an insane pace.
- [08:46]
B
Yeah, the funny thing here about all this is we had intel, we had Cisco both up on a stick, blow out earnings making new all time highs. Now you've got Micron, you've got Dell, we're running it back with the late 90s stalwarts that really defined the original tech boom and tech bubble. The interesting thing though is for anybody out there who wants to just make kind of a lazy comparison and say, well this is obviously just running back that exact same trend and that exact same set of themes, go look at a Cisco PE chart into 2000. From late 90s to 2000 we're talking 70, 80, ultimately up to I believe 150x earnings forward earnings. So not even established earnings. Looking forward, Wall street consensus earnings. Nvidia right now is trading at 21 times forward and that's on numbers that are definitely way too low. Now you can argue, yeah, maybe everyone knows that they're way too low and that's priced in to buy side consensus already. Okay, fine, but my Point is we are in a very different environment and it can get a lot sillier based on historical trends and precedents. But I think what you're seeing right now is you see this chart on the bottom, you are actually seeing meaningful acceleration in reported earnings. Now that's definitely a function of running it hot. It's like on an inflation adjusted basis. Is it as good as it looks? No, probably not. But that's the game right now to keep the wheel spinning and to keep this working. The administration really needs S and P earnings to rip and thus far you are seeing that. So you could argue there's been a popular meme on Fintwit in the last few weeks. It's not a bubble in the P, it's a bubble in the E. People are overestimating the long term earnings potential of these companies for various different reasons. But for now it's not been primarily other than Intel. Intel's definitely had, it's trading 120x earnings. A lot of these stalwarts right now are trading at, you know, justifiable, like theoretically, like squint and you can kind of see it multiples at least on earnings that are like clearly accelerating. Right. So this is a real story thus far. I think it's probably way too lazy to write it off as just circular financing entirely. You know, as you said, like we're using the tools like we see it, the utilities there in a way that it definitely like the utility is there, the infrastructure is there in a way that it was not in 1999. So for now that analog doesn't really hold. And the question is like can this continue and persist while oil sits where it is and while energy and import prices sit where they are? And can the US leverage its relative strength on the LNG side to continue this power build out that's necessary to maintain all this or is this all going to get short circuited by an ongoing strife in the Middle east and. Unclear, but this is clearly a very strong force pulling in one direction on the US side. Yeah, you're on mute, Marty. Marty, you're on mute.
- [11:34]
A
Sorry. I was saying, even if the energy markets do perturb the infrastructure buildout, I think it'll be temporary. Again, like you said. Like I said, the utility of these tools is there. It's very clear. And we're only the warm up stage of this. I mean the Egyptic economy just became a thing at the beginning of this year. I think you have some charts that will reference but if you look at token usage growth, it's going hockey stick. And that will only continue to go parabolic, especially if robotics actually come to market and become a thing, which I think, I mean, you can make the argument that the Robotaxis and Teslas and Waymos are already a form of that robotics. And if you think about humanoid robots and robots that will be used in manufacturing capacity, like we're at the very early stages of token utilization and consumption, they're going to hit numbers that we can't even fathom right now. And then on top of that, I think to your point about valuation, I think a lot of people were throwing water on the SpaceX sort of valuation of 1.5 trillion, looking at their S1, and actually just recorded an episode with John Tinsman which should drop 20 minutes from now. But I think one thing that he highlighted and that a lot of people are overlooking with the SpaceX numbers that were disclosed is that deal with Anthropic that they did for leasing out Colossus, which I think took them anywhere from seven to $10 billion to build. And I think that's a sort of a. It might have been even cheaper than that. And they're leasing out that compute for 1.6 or 1.9 billion a month to anthropic for the next three years. The multiple that Colossus build out alone is going to be massive. And they're building Colossus too, which is going to be a gigawatt. Obviously, again, going back to the robotics thing hasn't really materialized in a way that makes it obvious to people, but you can easily squint and see that becoming a real thing. And to the point that you were making justifying some of these valuations, SpaceX specifically, but we have it here next, I mean, staying on this theme, anthropic just raised 65 bill series H at a 965 billion post money valuation. OpenAI is beginning to. Their models are beginning to solve and disprove central conjecture and discrete geometry. Again, the utilization, the sort of productivity of these models is being proven out. And then on top of this, I believe Anthropic had its first profitable quarter earlier this year too. So the sort of meme of they're just spending money to win the race, they're not going to make any money on the back end is beginning to dissipate as well.
- [14:09]
B
Yeah, look, I forgot to include that headline here, but I think that's a huge one too for just starting to see data points for proving out the economics. But I totally agree with you And I think even if there's a lot of talk about scaling laws and how far can they go, and if you throw X amount of compute on a log log basis at the problem, do you get a commensurate increase on the curve that has been established in capabilities and all these different metrics? I think that's an important conversation. And definitely if suddenly scaling laws broke, a lot of these stocks would have a problem for a while. But the reality is, if everything stopped tomorrow in terms of improvements in capabilities, I think we're at like 0.01% of the actual utility that can be unlocked from what we have today. I look at my workflows and anyone who follows you knows that you've been kind of on the cutting edge of remaking your business and TFTC with a lot of these tools, and I think you would probably say you can think of 100 things you'd like to do still better with them. I'm even farther behind you. I've really started in the last couple of months to ramp up more and rethink my workflows, but I can start sitting here today. I can imagine another hundred things that I need to build and that I could automate better. And we don't even have a massive business at 1031. Think through, apply that to all of the corporations that are out there that have a ton of inefficiency, but also a ton of creativity in a lot of their workforce. If everything stopped today in terms of advancement, we still have yet to. We have multiple decades of unlocking actual utility and productivity beyond what we have today out of the tools that we have just today. So, you know, fully cosign, like there's a big element of this that is like clearly being proven out right now and that is definitively not fake. And if at all, like, if the curves stop tomorrow, like, we've got a long way to go before we fully kind of harvest what, what's available today.
- [15:59]
A
Yeah, which brings us to the other side of the coin, which is you have all this incredible growth, productivity, efficiency being brought to market, but then that is not being felt by everybody. Again, leaning into the K shape economy meme for looking at delinquency rates, 90 plus day delinquency rates on credit cards, student loan debt, auto loans, mortgages, all beginning to creep up. Credit cards getting to 2008 levels. If you look at savings rates collapsing right now, lowest since April 2008. And so you have this again, this juxtaposition of this incredible wave of productivity sort of infrastructure investment now beginning to be profitability in the AI sector. And then the common man doesn't seem to be able to, to capture that value and put it, put it to work for, for themselves. And they're obviously struggling as inflation begins severe its head again and the prospect of, of the jobs market becomes a bit more tumultuous for, for your average person.
- [17:03]
B
Yeah, I mean, here's your, here's your K shape and I could have picked a bunch of other charts that would, you know, kind of shown the same thing. And it's, it's, it's a really interesting time because we've highlighted this on prior episodes and in prior newsletters, but there's like a, there's kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't impact here or a dynamic here where it's like, you know, what if, what if we're wrong about what if, what if the US is wrong and you know, the AGI pill people are wrong about where this is all going and there's all this, you know, massive capital expenditure and increasingly debt being taken out. Not a massive amount yet, but you can see that increasing and resources being pumped into the data center build out and the AI build out on the assumption that this is going to be, this is the future of the economy. And if for some reason that we're off by an order of magnitude and a lot of that goes belly up or goes upside down, you're going to have a major problem immediately in tax receipts from bottoming out equity valuations. You'll have public markets collapsing, you'll have issues in the credit complex. That's a really bad scenario already. And it's going to get worse if more and more resources get pumped into this thing over the next few years, which is going to happen. Right. So if you're wrong, that's not good as the US what if you're right? What if the AGI pilled people, the Darios and the Sams of the world, which, by the way, some free advice, guys, if you're listening, you're definitely not if you're listening. But please stop going on podcasts or get a PR person who can help you in some way massage this narrative better. But in any case, what if that narrative is right and work is going away? We're going to 30% unemployment before we finally get to AI utopia where everything's abundant and we have the Star Trek future and you've already got a huge amount of the economy looking like this. Right. You've got people with Delinquent student loans and increasingly auto loans and big credit card debt highest since 08. Mortgages are okay now, but what happens when 20% of the white collar workforce in middle management gets laid off? Are mortgages going to look great in that case? Probably not. So if you're right, where does that leave us in terms of the social reaction function to all of this? And this is increasingly getting discussed on various sides that we can talk about, but this is a big cognitive dissonance and tension that is going to bear monitoring, I think, over the coming year.
- [19:14]
A
Yeah. To your point about the narrative side of things, they really need to figure this out. And it is, I mean, we'll just keep going down the chart here because I think what. I mean, I'll skip this for now unless you want to talk about it, because I think the Mamdani. Yeah. Stuff is probably more pertinent to this particular point. Yeah, we can.
- [19:36]
B
Yeah, for sure.
- [19:37]
A
But I mean you, you highlighted this juxtaposition. And I think, to your point, I think Brad Gertzner recognizes this narrative problem and he was on TBPN last week beginning to sort of tried to counteract the negative PR wins that are coming AI's way due to the energy usage, the specter of mass job losses because of the technology. And he's thinking about ways to work with the Trump administration to create an initiative that would, quote, unquote, deliver a very tangible, profound dividend to communities where they're building data centers. And then that's juxtaposed to news from last week of Mayor Mamdani from New York City pledging an aggressive crackdown on bad landlords, saying that New York City will work to transfer ownership of tenants. So talking about overt private property seizure in New York coming after the bad landlords. And you can see if that's becoming popular in the largest city in the United States, the financial hub of the world. It's very easy to project that forward and have people begin to demand similar actions against AI hyperscalers and anybody building out that infrastructure.
- [20:51]
B
Yeah, for sure. Look like, you know, the Mamdani thing, it's not obviously about directly about AI, but you know, people, people hate landlords. Right. In general. And like that feeling can, can be and often is like weaponized by leftists and communists to get certain outcomes. But people really, not just your tie dye hair, liberal arts grad who came out of Barnard or something, not to over stereotype, but your Mamdani base that you would expect. Obviously a lot of emotions can be weaponized in that base. But everyone hates data centers basically right now. And you can argue, I think there's interesting evidence that that's largely like an astroturf campaign that's being encouraged by certain foreign actors. We don't have to get into that, but it's pretty clear there's an increasing tide of everyone from your Barnard grad to your blue collar mechanic to your random white collar worker in random second tier city. Everyone hates data centers increasingly. And so I think it's interesting that you see Gerstner kind of floating this idea that he's going to work with tech leaders in the White House to make sure everyone gets taken care of based on the growth of these data centers and pay a dividend. I love the capitalist framing of the equity based framing of this. What is basically just a welfare payment based on this. You can see him trying to get out in front of it with his own spin. And the question to me is, if you're doing that, what's going to be more popular? Well, here's a well structured dividend plan based on the growth of data centers. Or is it going to be more popular to have a demagogue who says like, you know what, we'll just take your stuff. Right. I think that's like that's increasingly in the overton window now. That's a conversation a lot more people are going to have and going to want to have. And that has real implications for, as I said, like the social fabric and also the monetary and fiscal reaction function to potentially, you know, if you have discontinuous and sudden like nonlinear jumps in unemployment, again with the K shaped backdrop we already have, like what's the response to that ultimately going to be like there's a knee jerk response whether regardless of like whether it's, you know, Trump in office or aoc, whether it wears a MAGA hat or a Che Guevara T shirt.
- [23:05]
A
Right.
- [23:05]
B
Like there's one kind of common reaction function which is in one way or another to print the money, to, to write the checks, to write the stimmies. Maybe you do that by monetizing excess, excess surpluses that have been saved overseas by trade surplus countries that we're friendly with, as it seems like we're trying to do right now, whatever. But this kind of rhetoric leads ultimately in one direction if it gets really popular.
- [23:27]
A
Yeah, it's funny, I've been talking to Tom Mazzaro from Cathedra about this because we actually did some research on this as it pertains to bitcoin mining Back in the day when we were having problems. But I think bitcoin miners have done a good job of sort of figuring out the narrative and how to position things. And AI data center builders could learn a lot from the hard work that we put in over the decade. But it was funny to see Gerstner float this idea because Tom's actually been publicly talking about an Alaskan oil permanent fund like structure for these AI companies and local communities. If you have a data center come in and to your point, it'd be very similar to a dividend. But if they are as profitable, if you think of like Colossus in Memphis and how profitable that's going to be alone, if you were to set up like a permanent fund for the local county, maybe the state, the city, whatever it may be, and just throw, throw some, some dividend into that and you do that over time, I think that could be a good way to, to curb the, the blowback, the narrative blowback that you get. And then on top of that, I think it's a lot of education because I do think that all this is massively beneficial for those who know how to utilize the tools on the back end. But on the front end, I think the energy infrastructure build out is completely necessary. Take AI out of the equation. Like our grid systems need a revamp and a bolstering whether or not AI was a thing. And so I think reinvestment in this energy infrastructure and hopefully investment to a point where we just have abundant, rather cheap energy. Because the case for investing in generation assets and interconnection assets and transmission assets is much easier to make because the revenue is much more reliable. This is going to be overall good for humanity. And this is again going back to Dario and Sam. Stop going on podcasts. Let people who can actually pitch a good vision of the world do the narrative crafting for you. Because there is an actual legitimate good narrative to be spun here from the energy generation side. It's just the market and the average person has no idea how these energy markets work in the first place.
- [25:38]
B
Yeah, for sure. I mean, it was to your point, it was a narrative that worked, a narrative pivot that I think worked well for bitcoin mining several years ago. And I think that one of the most powerful charts people can see is China's construction of new megawatts of grid production relative to the U.S. ours has effectively flatlined for I don't even know how long, like 20 years. And China's just up into the right constantly. And I think people can just See that intuitive, intuitively grok like that's not sustainable and people can understand there is no such thing as a rich energy poor society. And so moving more and more of the narrative to exactly that point I think would be very helpful and is not even just a narrative one like it is legitimately true. But we'll see if that kind of framing can win out. AI data center is bad. We're going to move to seize the means of digital production.
- [26:25]
A
New York will find out the hard way. Hopefully we can avoid it. I think, I think the, the branding of communism and socialism is, is not very good right now. I mean you had a Hassan whatever piker get, get like chased away from like I think he was chased away by ice riders or like get out of here last night. But I digress. We're going to end it on this again. I told you we would talk about bitcoin fundamentals. And from a narrative or not a narrative, excuse me, from a sort of value, fundamental value prop side and then on the technical side and again I think we missed last week so we weren't able to talk about Hermuz safe. And then on top of that we've got incredible developments happening on the privacy and medium of exchange payments aspect of Bitcoin from Calais and the Kashi Protocol project.
- [27:14]
B
Yeah, I mean I think this is, you know, we like to end on bitcoin, but I thought it was a really poetic juxtaposition of headlines. I think we hit Hormuz safe a little bit on the last episode when it just dropped that morning when we talked about it. But we won't have to belabor it again. I'm sure people have heard of it at this point, but you've got Iran floating this idea of an insurance operation for maritime cargo going through the Strait of Hormuz administered by Iran with fees paid in bitcoin settled on the bitcoin blockchain. This is one potential validation of the long running bitcoin thesis that it's money for enemies and you've got a heavily sanctioned country trying to launch what is really frankly kind of a protection racket. I don't really expect it to get off the ground. But trying to launch this with direct integration to Bitcoin because that's the only thing that's appropriate for this very adversarial payment situation for a sanctioned country is a perfect validation that sovereigns care, sovereigns are paying attention. The biggest players in the world understand some of the people, key properties we've been talking about related to bitcoin for a long time. This is not an encouragement from TFTC or 1031 for anyone to go and use Bitcoin to avoid US sanctions. Just an observation of what that might mean. And again, I don't expect it to actually get off the ground in any meaningful way because just using Bitcoin is not going to stop someone from being sanctioned and from feeling the pain of U.S. sanctions for participating with Iran. But interesting data points point on the sovereign side on the technical privacy kind of hundred sat scale like the Hormuz safe is relevant for the thousand plus Bitcoin scale. This is relevant for the 100 sat scale. The average daily user Callie's been if you're not familiar with him, you should follow him on Twitter nostr everywhere. A real monster in Bitcoin and Bitcoin oriented development and has been working for a while on using secure enclaves to facilitate cashew mints. We probably don't have time to get deeply into cashew on the show right now, but basically an implementation of Chami and E Cash that has potential promise to make Bitcoin much more tractable as a medium of exchange for small payments or even increasingly large payments as well. Very simple, very dumb, easy to play with, easy to develop on, makes certain trade offs relative to using Bitcoin itself on the blockchain, but for potentially significant gains in speed, ease of integration and various other benefits. I'll hand it off to you to talk about this particular development, but the high level theme that I think this highlights is if Tally's right and this is moving in a certain direction, you could have the potential here to solve one of the major trade offs of using Choma Ecash, which is the operator of a mint can potentially inflate supply and effectively rug participants in the mint without much pushback from the users or a way to govern that. This could potentially be a solve for that and it just pushes you one step closer to maybe making this very viable at scale. And so I just think it's interesting that as price flattens, flatlines, it's crappy environment out there. We everyone's bored, everyone's going away and buying AI bottleneck stocks. You're seeing meaningful validation at both the sovereign level and the technical level for what we've been talking about in Bitcoin and the reasons that we're here in the first place. Right? Even as the bear market drags on, you're seeing ongoing validation of everything that we care about here.
- [30:42]
A
Yeah, completely agree. Matt and I talked about it on Friday not This specifically, but the fact that sentiment, I think I've been a Bitcoin since 2013, I think the sentiment is the worst since 2015. And historically that is the best time to be allocating to bitcoin. Not financial advice, just highlighting some pattern recognition from my days in the trenches over the years. But as it pertains to what Kali is referencing here for the cashier protocol, I think the trusted execution environments are slept on. We have a company in the portfolio, Maple AI that we backed because of their utilization of trusted execution environments. And essentially for those who are unaware, these environments allow you to run code in secure enclaves. So your phone, your iPhone, you're doing face id. Basically, people think that a lot of people just assume that you're sending your biometric data to an icloud server, but no, your face is a private key that's held on the secure enclave in your phone. You can run software on that. Not only that, but you can interact with secure enclaves in the cloud as well. And what these secure enclaves allow you to do is to run compute in a way that the person actually running the computer has no idea what's going on. It is a trusted execution environment. And what Kali is referencing here, I'm not going to pretend to know exactly what he's built and I think that he's been a bit opaque about what's actually happening and just alluding to what they're doing. But what I assume is that you were able to set up a mint within a secure enclave using one of these trusted execution environments. And you can sign blinded messages for the Mint users or blinded signatures, excuse me, to facilitate payments. And to John's point, if you can do like a reproducible build to prove that the operator of the Mint can actually control it at the end of the day, can't inflate supply, can't prevent people from, from spending, that is going to be massive. And I think the progress, progress that we've seen with TEES specifically is again slept on, but something that I would highlight for anybody listening to pay attention to moving forward particularly. I mean we backed Maple originally, their mutiny while it pivoted to the Maple, but we were very comfortable with the pivot to Maple and focus on AI over non custodial Bitcoin lightning wallets using these trusted execution environments. Because I think as many people become more aware of how much data you're going to be sharing with the hyperscalers, the demand for the ability to do AI compute in an execute trusted execution environment that A hyperscaler doesn't have access to the information, the prompts or the outputs they're putting to that you're putting in and getting out. The demand for products like that is going to increase significantly and I think actually it will be mandated for certain applications like Legal Health, whatever it may be. And so it's really cool to see this being reintroduced to Bitcoin. Mutiny really led the way there many years ago with the non custodial lightning wallets using these secure enclaves. And it looks like Cashew is leaning into it as well. And so this is going to create very secure and private Bitcoin infrastructure, which is great to see.
- [34:08]
B
Yep, absolutely. It's a, it's a good time to be paying attention to what really matters in bitcoin and it's exactly what you'd want to see if when the price isn't going, isn't going your way. The question is what's happening under the hood with fundamentals? And I think we're only getting positive fundamentals, you know, year on year here.
- [34:24]
A
Yeah, that's great. Hey, wild times out there. We're going in the summer. I don't think there's going to be summer doldrums this year. I have a hard time to believe that it's going to be a very doldrum filled summer. I think things are just heating up. Proverbially pun intended. John, great rep as always. We'll be back next week.