Uneasy Money: How Ethereum May Have One-Upped Bitcoin in One Big Way

Summary

Unchained – "Uneasy Money: How Ethereum May Have One-Upped Bitcoin in One Big Way"

Host: Laura Shin
Guests/Co-hosts: Kain Warwick (Synthetix), Taylor Monahan (MetaMask), Luca Netz (Pudgy Penguins)
Date: January 30, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the convergence of AI and crypto, exploring viral AI agents (like "Claudebot"), security pitfalls, agent coordination, the meme-coin phenomenon, and the high-stakes narrative around quantum attacks in Bitcoin and Ethereum. The panel analyzes how Ethereum’s recent pivot to quantum resistance could shift the competitive landscape, discusses how scam and flex culture permeate crypto youth culture, and speculates about the next big unlock at the intersection of crypto and AI.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Viral Rise of Claudebot and Security Risks ([01:53] – [11:00])

• Kain Warwick introduces the discussion on Claudebot, an open-source LLM agent that can operate on personal computers and be instructed over messaging apps (e.g., Telegram).
• The panel agrees that agentic AI, while rapidly improving, brings major new security risks, with users often misunderstanding the implications:
  • Taylor Monahan: “For me it made me realize once again that people, even the people who shill security, don't necessarily have like, a deep understanding of ... the foundations of security.” ([04:58])
• They emphasize that using separate devices alone doesn't resolve risk if authentication/session tokens are still available to an agent on the same (or synced) cloud accounts.
• The conversation turns to the prevalence of port scanners used by both researchers and attackers to index open agents and vulnerabilities across the internet.

2. Coordination Problems: AI Agents & Human Organizations ([11:00] – [23:12])

• Kain highlights parallels between Ethereum’s origins (solving coordination problems at scale) and the current evolution in AI:
  • Kain: “Everything’s coordination problems ... the lens that got me so excited about Ethereum...” ([11:17])
• The evolutionary leaps in agentic AI are discussed, focusing on “recursive self-improvement loops” where tools help build better tools at a compounding rate.
• The challenge of getting AI agents to work together (“agent swarms”) is likened to managing large engineering teams or organizations, a problem rapidly being tackled by models like “Kimmy.”
• The danger and promise of rapidly evolving, swarm-coordinated agents is compared to AGI risk: “Once there are no humans in that loop, that's where you get to like a fast takeoff scenario…” ([17:18])

3. AI vs. Crypto: Where’s the Juice? ([23:12] – [34:09])

• The panel laments that AI currently feels "more fun than crypto,” echoing the excitement of Ethereum’s early years (“pre-DeFi Summer”).
• Discussion on speculation drift: while AI agents could use crypto rails for payment and on-chain activity, the integration isn’t widely happening yet.
  • Luca: “Agents can't go and make a Wells Fargo account or a Morgan Stanley account, be on these payment rails... I think the bull run... is going to come around this narrative around AI using crypto rails...” ([32:20])
• The hosts agree: the next bull run may center on AIs using crypto as their native payment and coordination substrate.

4. Crypto Youth Subculture: Scams, Social Handles, & Meme Coins ([36:00] – [56:38])

• Taylor walks listeners through the wild recent saga of scammers/band-for-band competitions (where young hackers flex stolen funds live on Discord/Telegram), the traces of seized funds from major hacks (FTX, Bitfinex), and handle-trading as status/flex NFTs.
• Luca reveals his insider experience as one of the largest buyers/traders of high-value instagram/telegram handles:
  • “…how do you flex on the Internet? One of the best ways to do it is via these usernames...” ([41:36])
• The social status, risk, and adolescent bravado often involved result in spectacular losses, criminal traces, and eventually — meme coins, as scammers or "flexers" monetize their notoriety.
• The entire narrative culminates in scammers launching meme coins to launder stolen money, promote themselves, and escalate the absurd competitive flexing.

5. Meme Coins, Market Cycles, and Distribution ([69:30] – [73:02])

• Market chatter: meme coin volumes are creeping back, with highly cyclical speculation, distribution games, and buybacks.
• The conversation touches on the ephemeral nature of meme coin fads and the search for the "next new thing" — whether NFTs, meme tokens, or something else entirely.
• But with so many distribution games and opportunistic speculation, the hosts express nostalgia for more creative, less extractive cycles.

6. The Quantum Threat: Ethereum’s Strategic Move ([57:21] – [69:30])

• The real "one-upping": Ethereum Foundation’s announcement of quantum resistance R&D, staking million-dollar research prizes and public testnets.
• Kain spotlights the narrative and tactical significance:
  • “It looks really technical... but... you've got the bitcoin people who are burying their heads in the sand... and the Ethereum foundation steps in and goes, 'We are going to lean into this meta and be like, hey, we're going to be quantum resistant.' It's the most bullish thing I've seen out of the EF in a while…” ([61:05])
• Taylor notes the contrast in governance:
  • Ethereum’s “nerd moonshots” and proactive research vs. Bitcoin’s increasingly ossified, anti-change culture.
• The panel cautions that Bitcoin’s hard-line resistance to protocol change may be its biggest vulnerability in a fast-changing environment, especially with AGI and quantum.
  • “It's a risky play if any one of your assumptions ends up being wrong and is invalidated by the world and, and your vibe is 'We can never change the thing.'” (Kain, [68:08])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Taylor Monahan [21:48]: “Humans are not great at coordinating us. Like, that's the hardest thing about scaling organizations. ... I think there’s going to be a tipping point where, yeah, everything just gets completely unlocked once you kind of solve coordination.”
• Kain Warwick [20:30]: “We have aliens that are inside of our planet right now that are smarter than us in very narrow domains. And those domains are rapidly expanding... and we are going to get to a point where they're just smarter than us in every domain, and then what the fuck do we do?”
• Luca [41:36]: “I’ve sold usernames for millions of dollars. I bought usernames for millions of dollars... How do you flex on the Internet? One of the best ways to do it is via these usernames...”
• Taylor Monahan [51:10]: “Once your prefrontal cortex kicks in, you're like, wait, hold up. Maybe I shouldn't be advertising my entire criminal endeavors linked to my handle that I'm very proud of and posting it on the Internet for everyone to see. Maybe I shouldn't do that.”
• Kain Warwick [61:05]: “It's the most bullish thing I've seen out of the EF in a while in terms of like tactical understanding of where the market is and investor concern. And like, we're going to get ahead of this thing and we're going to show that we're working on it.”
• Taylor Monahan [66:01]: “It's wild. And I think that it puts them [Bitcoin maximalists] in a really dangerous position ... you have this really hard line in the sand that you’ve arbitrarily drawn and you refuse to cross it. So you refuse to even consider that there might be something worth doing there.”

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:53] Claudebot and agentic AI security risks
• [04:58] On misplaced device security assumptions
• [11:17] Coordinating teams and AI agent swarms
• [15:34] Macro take on AI “fast takeoff” risk and recursive self-improvement
• [23:12] The fading “moat” in AI/engineering — anything can be replicated instantly
• [32:20] The missing intersection of AI agents and crypto rails for payment/coordination
• [36:00] The saga of scams, flex culture, and criminal youth subculture in crypto
• [41:36] Social handles as status/flex NFTs, the domain-username economy
• [51:10] On the lack of caution among young scammers (“prefrontal cortex” quote)
• [61:05] Ethereum Foundation’s quantum-resistance initiative — strategic gamechanger
• [66:01] The risk of Bitcoin’s conservative ossification

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Tone & Language

Playful, irreverent, and candid. The panelists blend technical expertise with dark humor and self-deprecating stories, illustrating the wild, chaotic, and innovative edge of crypto and AI. There’s a sense of both awe at the pace of technological change and resignation at the persistent madness of crypto’s high-risk, youth-driven subculture.

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Final Thoughts

This episode is a whirlwind through today's most urgent frontiers: AI agents growing exponentially more powerful and inseparable from our digital lives, the persistent wild-west energy of crypto coordination and speculation, and the strategic chess games played by blockchain foundations in the face of existential technological threats. Ethereum’s proactive quantum resistance pivot may be the best example of “uneasy money” — always evolving, always defending its edge.

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For deeper context or full episodes, follow Unchained on X, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript

[Luca]

Agents can't go and make a Wells Fargo account or a Morgan Stanley account beyond these payment rails and in reality, like it should out. Yeah, I mean that to me has to be where I think the next bull run is going to come.

[Kain Warwick]

I think. You know, we just need to convince the cloud bots that Pengu is is the. Is the social. That's medium of exchange.

[Taylor Monahan]

Once your prefrontal cortex kicks in, you're like, wait, hold up. Maybe I shouldn't be advertising my entire criminal endeavors linked to my handle that I'm very proud of and posting it on the Internet for everyone to see. Maybe I shouldn't do that.

[Kain Warwick]

Hey everyone, I'm Kayn Wark and welcome to Uneasy Money. Because what happens on Chain never stays on Chain. I'm here with my co host Taylor Monahan, security at Metamask and Luke Net, CEO of Pudgy Penguins. One quick thing before we start. Nothing you hear on Uneasy Money is financial advice. We're just three builders talking about what's happening on Chain and we want you to always do your own research before aping in. You can find all our disclosures@unchain crypto.com uneasymoney and before we begin, here's a word from the sponsors that make the show possible.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

The Energy Network is an intelligent, decentralized grid that coordinates smart devices to balance supply and demand. Energy dollar is the native token of the network from one of Europe's fastest growing energy startups. Follow Use Energy on X to find out more. Multichain Advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create $50 billion in enterprise value for 80 plus clients over the past four years. They're the partner to help navigate markets, build real traction [e-mail] all right, first.

[Kain Warwick]

Things first, we're going to kick off with a story that is not really about crypto. Although I guess the intersection of crypto and AI is becoming more and more interesting. So Maltbot, or Claude Bot as it is called, which is its own interesting thing, right? The Claude people are like, you can't call it claudebot, guys, you got to do something else. And I had to change the name, so. So agentic AI meets meme coins. So what is claudebot? Claudebot is an open source agent that lives inside of your computer and there's actually a security component to this as well, which we can talk about, but you basically install this. AI runs on Claude the. The LLM and it can do kind of anything that your computer can do. As an agent, you can talk to it through various channels like Telegram. And I think, like, as someone who's been vibe coding pretty hardcore for a year and watching how much smarter these models have gotten, I'm not surprised that this went so viral because I think the gap between people's expectations and reality has kind of collapsed a little bit. Like, you go through these waves, right? Like, you know, there's like the hype wave where like AGI is coming and then you hit a bunch of issues and people go, no, they're actually really dumb. And then everyone kind of fades it for a little while and then they get much smarter and then everyone's like, holy shit, AGI is coming. It's like inside my computer right now. So that's what this last week kind of felt like, I guess.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yes.

[Kain Warwick]

Everything's moving so quickly. Like, I, I tweeted this this morning. It feels like pre defi summer Ethereum.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah.

[Kain Warwick]

Every day there was some crazy thing and it just felt like if you were sleeping for like 20 seconds, you were missing out on like so much alpha. And, and it just feels like that right now. Like the, the, the market is moving so quickly and, and there is something about this like, recursive self improvement loop that's going on where you make coding easier and people start building more tools, and then those tools make it easier to make more tools and you just get this like, crazy loop, right? So, so this guy wrote a post two days ago and was like, hey, guys, maybe don't like, expose all of your small me Internet. And it's even worse, right? Like, if you read through it, it's quite, it's quite an interesting read. It's on, it's on X. We can link it later. But he's like, it's not just that you're exposing ports. Like, that would be like a dumb thing to do, but there's a guy sitting behind those ports who's like, I will do anything you tell me.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And, and the guy who will do anything, right? You've granted explicit permission to do anything on all of your most valuable accounts.

[Kain Warwick]

It's crazy.

[Taylor Monahan]

So I think, and there's like this very weird, like, for me, it made me realize once again that people, even the people who shill security, don't necessarily have like, a deep understanding of like, the foundations of security. Because they're like, I bought a new Mac Mini so it's isolated. And I'm like, bro, the number one reason that you don't want them on your computer is because your computer, like your daily Driver device has session cookies, passwords, authentication, and that all like all your most valuable things live in cloud.

[Kain Warwick]

It unlocks everything. Those are keys. Those keys unlock all your shit.

[Taylor Monahan]

Right? And so that's why we like recommend like don't like having separate devices for things is because your daily driver device that you use all day, every day has everything logged in. And if they get on that device then they can go and get anything from any of your accounts. Now just because you have a separate device that has all of those same session cookies and all like full ass permission to read and write to any of your accounts, to log in, to grab the data, to make changes, right? That does not protect you. That's like, that's actually the core.

[Kain Warwick]

You know what, it's not only does it not protect you, it's actually worse, right? Because it is the illusion.

[Luca]

You wouldn't.

[Kain Warwick]

Grant those permissions on your main machine because you're like, ah, like this has all my stuff on it, right? And then you walk over next door and grant like the exact same permissions on a thing that has like a pipe directly to your stuff.

[Taylor Monahan]

Um, yeah. And these days, by the way, like people don't realize like these days like everything is syncing all the time. So the, the logins and the authentication is really the most valuable thing. Yes, you might have some like old files on your computer, but increasingly the reality is, is like it's all cloud. It's all cloud.

[Kain Warwick]

Anything that you're keychain that has all your stuff, right? Yeah, but it kind of reminds me of like the hardware wallet. People that are like, no, no bro, it's fine. I've got a hardware wallet. You don't understand. And then you start talking to them and it's like you're just signing bytes. Anything that pops up on that thing, you just press all the key. You just press it as quickly as possible. You don't look at anything like you've, you've solved one attack vector of like key exfiltration, which is not the main problem, and exposed yourself to like this illusion of security where you're like, no, no, no, I'm fine, I'll just, I'm gonna sign. So.

[Taylor Monahan]

No, that was my. Yeah, the Ledger. The Ledger. CTO Charles likes to go on Twitter and be like, ledger would fix this. And I was like, it didn't fix it. It didn't fix it, guys.

[Kain Warwick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so, so I think there's, there's like so many things to this story. One is, yeah, Bought this play on Claude Anthropic did not appreciate that and presumably sent them a nice cease. And this, I'm guessing, and the guy was like, don't worry about it. We're going to call it something weird that's not related to Claude. So I think that one was quite funny. But then maybe this was probably the most eye opening thing to me and I kind of knew this, but it had been a while since someone had pointed out to me and it seems like this technology has gotten better. There are these port scanner people who scan ports on the Internet, like just constantly, right? It's like almost like an indexer for crypto, like indexing every port that's on the Internet and the response. And you can just go and search and be like, hey, like I'm looking for this keyword in this port scanner and it gives you all of the things that are responding. I was kind of blown away by that one. That was, that was pretty crazy.

[Taylor Monahan]

It's. Yeah, it's fascinating because there's an incentive, right? Because there's a huge market. If you can get on basically any server, any computer, there's so much you can do with it these days. And thus the tools evolve rapidly in response to that. There's also a large number of like security researchers and stuff that do this for legitimate reasons. But it like, you know, it kind of like goes back and forth. Like they built like really robust tools in them that threat actors are like, oh, that's nice.

[Kain Warwick]

Yeah, I'll take that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Luca, what's, what's your, what's your take been on the Clodbot thing, have you, have you got one running?

[Luca]

No, I'm, I'm out of that sphere a little bit. So much so that I got a guy on our team, on the abstract.

[Kain Warwick]

Team named Jared Watts.

[Luca]

I highly recommend anyone listening.

[Kain Warwick]

Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm learning. I'm starting. I'm not gonna, I, I'm.

[Luca]

It's very obvious to me that if you're not vibe coding and if you're not just completely utilizing the Claude interface, that you're going to be left behind in a big way. Obviously I became a kind of a big pro, at least on the LLM side, but that's not rocket science. But honest, I, I've really, you know, not taking the vibe coding things very seriously. And so Claude bought, outside of buying the, I bought the token, the, the, the Fugazi Claude token. That's where my mind, when I see something trending, my mind instead of just what.

[Kain Warwick]

Yeah, what's the token, you know, skill set.

[Luca]

I'm like, what's the token?

[Kain Warwick]

Well, it's, it's funny I said this last week, right? But like I've been, I've. I must have spent at this point, I would say across like cursor codex, Claude code or whatever, 100k this year in tokens, like easily 100k. And I'm like, there is no direct return on investment for me. Like what am I doing with my life, right? Like it's all like intangible. I'm like, I could have bought so many to. I'm buying the wrong kind of token here. Like this, these tokens.

[Taylor Monahan]

You could have bought more Peggy cards. Dude, what are you doing?

[Kain Warwick]

I know, I know. I could have. I could have finished that sketch set that my son had thought about me.

[Luca]

Are you guys using it at Infinx? Like, are you guys like, I talked to Saigar the other day and he's like, dude, you know, things that used to take us two weeks to ship.

[Kain Warwick]

We'Re shipping in two days. This is great. Yeah, so, so I think my, my hot take on this is like everything's coordination problems. Yeah, that, like the, the lens that. The thing that got me so excited about Ethereum back in, you know, 2016 is like it. All of a sudden there was this giant coordination problem when the DA happened and immediately my like coordination spidey senses went off and I was like, people are coordinating here around this thing and it's like a big deal. And and so I. That like got me to go down the rabbit hole. And this feels very similar. So you have a team of people, five people, 10 people, 50 people, 500 people, 50,000 people, 500,000 people. And you got to coordinate them. Right? Right. As that scales, it gets harder. The bigger the org, the harder it is to. To coordinate people. And coordinating people has been like the primary thing that we've needed to do even down to like the level of an individual person. The reason why claudebot is so cool is because it helps you self coordinate. Why people are so excited about it because it's like I've got all these things that I need to do to coordinate my own life and this thing goes out and like solves those problems for me and you know, deals with my email and deals with like. So that that coordination problem, even down to like a single person, is, is really challenging. Right? But then you get a team of 30 engineers and you try and get them to do something and fucking God help you, like figuring that out. Right? It is really really hard. There's like all of these like social elements, whatever. What's interesting about the, the last, honestly like 6 weeks I would say, right. And for me, I think the big switch that flicked over is Claude code went from. Used to have to type ultrathink to get it to go into like deep thinking mode, even when you had it on max mode. Right. And they, they switched this about three weeks ago where it's on by default, there's no more ultrathink. And that to me is where like it went really parabolic and. And all of a sudden it was like, oh wow, this, this, these things are that much smarter when you make them smart all the time. And so the big question for me is like, how do you coordinate agents? That's actually now the question. Because the single agent can do something sequentially, but context is really hard. They get context poisoning really quickly. And so Ralph, which was the thing that everyone was excited about two weeks ago was about like this coordination problem, right? Like instead of, instead of having one agent that tries to like grind through a, you know, 200 page plan, you have individual agents that spin up, that are ephemeral, that do a loop of work and then they hand over to the next guy and they just loop through it and loop through it. And like that was like a very coarse grain solution to the coordination problem. I think that there are many, many other solutions. And even Kimmy, the new. I guess it's like it looks to be people like I'm not a hundred percent certain about this, but it looks to be like someone has jailbroken Claude and gotten the weights and has like published them as an open source thing. So Kimmy is like this, this open source model that is almost as good as Claude. But one of the things that Kimmy has that Claude doesn't have, they've done this training mode where you have agent swarms and the agents like swarm over a task and like find ways the. I think the big unlock over the next like three to six months is going to be this agent coordination problem. Whoever is at the forefront of that is going to be able to just like blow through some shit.

[Luca]

So Kane, you seem to be on the ground level here and I again I remember meeting you in New York, you telling me you're vibe going a pudgy game. Let me get like a really high level macro of where you think this all goes. Obviously Dario just published that article, kind of the flip side of where you think AI give me the like, where are we three years from now? Where's the disruption going to lead, like.

[Kain Warwick]

Give me the highest level out of.

[Luca]

The weeds perspective based on somebody who's obviously been using this stuff. And I have a lot of respect.

[Kain Warwick]

To your macro takes. What, what, what, what do you think is going on here? So I think I should probably caveat with like my macro takes have a history of being incredibly wrong. So, you know, I'll just throw that out there, right? Like eth is not at 25k, as I bet Carl Simani 18 months ago, that it would be. So, you know, take, take anything that I say from a macro perspective with a grain of salt. But my, my hot take on, on where we're going is that like, we have very, very smart individual people, right? These agents, they're very, very smart individually for like legitimately 20 minutes. And then they get like exponentially dumber every minute that you're interacting with them. And this is like just, it's the weirdest thing. And, and there is no real mental model for this. It's not how we think about humans, right? Like you get a human and you start teaching them stuff and they get better and like, they stay good and they have like this upward trajectory for like 50 years before they start to like taper off, right? And you know, early on there's like a, you know, you get like a three year old, right, and you teach them some shit. And then like at 4, they're like 20 times smarter than at 3. And so there's like this exponential thing. It's weird to interact with an entity that spawns super smart, like autistic level. Like genius knows so many things and then you start talking to it in like 20 minutes later, it's for target. Like that is a weird thing to manage and like think through, right? And that's why I say that, that like, you know, the challenge is going to be in coordinating these things. And so once you, once you figure this out, and Kimmy is the first time that I've seen like a really focused effort to coordinate swarms of agents. There's been people that have been trying to do like sequential stuff, but like coordinating a swarm of agents to go and tackle a task. The interesting thing about this is that right now there's a fairly high cost, even in tokens to getting a single agent to do something. So getting a single agent to do something and then getting other agents to check it is the hard problem here, right? So all of the time that I spent over last nine months learning to vibe code and like trying to figure out where the edges Are the edges are all me. Every single problem that exists in this space is like every time I have to do something. And so the key thing is trying to figure out how do you remove the human from the loop and throw agents at the problem and have them kind of self correct? That's the hard thing. Once you have this recursive self improvement. And that's what, you know Dario's thing, right? He's like, we are using these models to build smarter models, right? Once there are no humans in that loop, that's where you get to like a fast takeoff scenario, right? Where like on Tuesday the models get together and come up with like a new theory for how maybe they can make a smarter model. And then on Wednesday it's 10 times smarter. And then that model's like, I've got some ideas. And like, genuinely, like, we are in this, like, early part of this curve where shit's gonna get crazy. Like the, like pivot to being like a personal trainer or something. At this point, if somebody ETSD from.

[Luca]

The early 2000s is like, this is just gonna be this similar, you know, just as. Just as similar to the tech bubble. What would be your contrarian take to.

[Kain Warwick]

That statement was, so I'm old enough to have been through a couple of AI winters, right? Like, AIs had winters just like crypto, right? Where, and this is why I say, like, there's a hype cycle and then it dies off, and then a hype cycle and dies off. What's interesting about the last three years of AI hype cycles is it's been very compressed, right? And you know, Dario even said this in that recent post where he's like, people get the hype cycle's going like this. Meanwhile, if you actually plot the skill level of the thing, it's a linear thing that just keeps going up, right? It's just up and to the right. And so my hot take is that if you look back at some of the things that people have predicted will not happen, right? So chess, you know, humans are too strategic for a computer to ever be better than, than us at chess. Like, how could a computer ever be a Grandmaster? Well, that fell over in 1997, right? And that was not even a smart model. That was just a brute forcing algorithm, basically, right? Then we had like Stockfish and you know, all of these models that got better and better and better to the point now where like at a game that we've been playing for thousands of years, the best entity that can play it is a computer. And not just A computer, but like a model, right? A model that has the ability to play this thing. And then people are like, okay, sure, sure, sure.

[Luca]

Chess.

[Kain Warwick]

But like, what about Go? Like, go's way too hard. There's like too many positions and atoms in the universe and like, all this nonsense, right? And then AlphaGo Crush, the best Go player to the point where, like, it's laughable, right? And then you go, okay, well, what about, like, these open world games? Then it's like, okay, well, you. Now we're winning StarCraft, right? And then it's like, all right, what about protein folding? Yeah, okay, it can do that, right? There is no thing that anyone has predicted that. And it would be fucking wild if you think about it, to. It'd be like saying that, yeah, sure, there are aliens on another planet that are smarter than us, but they're not gonna be better at us than, like, writing the book. And it's like, what are you talking about? Like, of course they're. They're better at everything. And it's like, okay, okay, we're like, not better at, like, Atari games. And it's like, what? No, like, they're. But what. Anything that you are good at. This thing is smarter than you. It will be better than you at. Um, and. And that's the world that we're in. We have aliens that are inside of our planet right now that are smarter than us in very narrow domains. And those domains are rapidly expanding.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah.

[Kain Warwick]

And we are going to get to a point where they're just smarter than us in every domain, and then what the fuck do we do?

[Taylor Monahan]

Well, yeah, and like, you were talking about, like, the coordination thing, when once.

[Kain Warwick]

You.

[Taylor Monahan]

For lack of better word, stop making them so, like, rapidly, like, adhd, devolving and, like, can, like, refocus them and like, re. Re. Coordinate them. Humans are not great at coordinating us. Like, that's the hardest thing about scalab organizations. It's like. Like, we're really bad at it. It requires, like, this very horrible modes of communication and, like, checks and balances. You put in processes, you create committees. Like, it's. It's the worst thing in the world.

[Kain Warwick]

Yeah, exactly. Agree.

[Taylor Monahan]

So, yeah, that's. I think, like, the major unlock for me is like, the coordination game, which is obviously, like, this is what Blockchain also purports to, like, help solve. Right? Is like, remove the coordination. I think that we vastly underestimate what that results in. I think we haven't. I think we understand a certain extent, like, just how inefficient the coordination is in human land. But I think that there's going to be a tipping point where, yeah, everything just gets completely unlocked once you kind of solve coordination, whatever that means, and then wild things can happen.

[Kain Warwick]

And again, the thing that we have now is this right, recursive self improvement loop that is very human driven. Right. In the last two months, the ability to build tools for AI, for AI to get better has collapsed in terms of cost and time by 90%. Any kid who has access to Claude code can cook up some scheme to try and figure out how to make these agents coordinate themselves better. So you have tens of thousands of people who could not have previously done this, who are now as good as the best engineers who were running these labs three years ago, building software and tools for these things. And there's thousands of people out there. It's, it's wild, it's really wild. And like it's going to change everything. And, and that's not even assuming that we get a better soda model and they'll be next six months, which we will of course like Claude 5 or Codex 6 or whatever. Like, and this is the most interesting thing to me. I was talking to a friend of mine about this last night and I was like, it feels unlike crypto in the early crypto period where it felt like there were still moats. Moats have kind of disappeared. Your moat is you're a smart person building things and you've got a lead on the other smart people who aren't building the right thing and you can build a moat. Anything that you can build can be replicated by like the, the model in like 20 minutes. Yeah, like there are no moats. And that I think is going to be the most chaotic thing is realizing that like moats have disappeared. At least from like an engineering perspective. Anything that you can conceive of will be buildable the in minutes. So yeah, gonna be wild. Good times.

[Luca]

Distribution only mo distribution.

[Kain Warwick]

It is like, you know what? You know what you can't replicate? You can't replicate pudgy penguins. That's what you can't replicate.

[Taylor Monahan]

You know what else you can't replicate? Apparently not getting scammed because there's a whole other side story to this. Going to be talking about scams a lot. Okay, so yes, AI is magical, etc. Etc. Back to Cryptoland ish. In true crypto fashion, this all the Claude bot is exploding. He had to rename Anthropic is mad that he's whatever showing them up. So he renames everything of course, someone grabbed all the old handles. Right. Because why wouldn't you?

[Kain Warwick]

Yeah.

[Taylor Monahan]

There's like this thing that's like the future and everyone loves whatever.

[Kain Warwick]

Yeah.

[Taylor Monahan]

And of course, the person who did that is a crypto person, because why would they not be? And then of course, the thing that they decided to do, which actually I'm not opposed to this as, like, given the available options, right. You can like, go fish people, you can go try to hack people. And in terms of what malicious things you can do, this is the least malicious. But I would prefer people used it for, like, good faith things. Like truly good faith things. But we'll take it. They launched Meme Coins or promoted Meme Coins, including the Claude Meme Coin. There's multiple levels of irony here.

[Kain Warwick]

Yeah.

[Taylor Monahan]

One is that Anthropic was like, oh, God, I don't want our brand to.

[Kain Warwick]

Be, like, tainted by this AI law. And because it was like, hold my beer.

[Taylor Monahan]

And this only happened because they forced the bro to rename. Right. Like, if he hadn't renamed, then you wouldn't have a 16 million dollar market cap meme Coin that went like, of course. And. And then the other side of the story, obviously is. Well, I mean, it's just like the most crypto thing ever, of course. But like, these Claude guys, like, they are not. Not anthropic, but like the Claude bot builder and was like, the AI guys, they're smart guys. They're not crypto guys. He's sitting there going, bro, I just wanted to build something cool. What the hell did you do?

[Kain Warwick]

You know, the, the interesting thing about Meme Coins, I think, right? And like, this, this whole vector is, you know, when I. When I first got into crypto, I was like, I've been in adversarial environments. I know, I know what that's like. And like 20 minutes in, I was like, this is insane. Like, there are people trying to kill you just everywhere, all the time, trying to steal your money, trying to, like, destroy everything that you've ever done. And they're like one second away from pulling it off. And then you live inside of that environment for like eight years. And you. And you forget that people live in a different way. This guy's like, I'm just going to change Twitter handles. What could possibly go wrong?

[Taylor Monahan]

What could go wrong?

[Kain Warwick]

Donna Serbie?

[Luca]

It's the most jading part about being here, frankly.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah, it is.

[Kain Warwick]

Yeah.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah. And also, like, I don't know again, like, I'm. It could be way worse. I'm glad that they didn't fish a whole bunch of people and like destroy people to a certain extent. Like, I don't enjoy the meme comi culture or this, this, like, I just, I really don't like it. I don't think it's good. I don't think it's valuable, however, like, at least it's sort of like limited to the sphere of people who like that they're running into.

[Kain Warwick]

Yeah, you're playing the game. Yeah, agreed, agreed.

[Taylor Monahan]

I think like the most lasting sort of impact is like, it is such a major turn off, like from the outside or even the people that are like one foot in watching and observing. He really don't understand the game and stuff. To them, especially when they saw the charts, they're just like, okay, so wait, you, you usurped this bro's brand after he had been like, you know, screwed by the big bad anthropic corporation. You usurped his brand and then rugged a meme coin on it.

[Kain Warwick]

Like, also, the problem is for, for people outside, right, Crypto is undifferentiated. Like the, the, the guy who, you know, like sniped that handle, launched the meme coin, whatever. Like they're the same guy as like Luca and, and Taylor and I. Yeah. Like, you're all crypto people doing bad things, right. It becomes this undifferentiated mass of bad stuff that people don't like. Yeah. So, I mean, look, at the end of the day, we just need to convince the Claude bots that we're not bad guys and then it'll be fine because they're in charge now, so.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah, exactly. I have one brief. Let's try to keep it brief. Okay. We talked about the macro. AI we talked about, right? All this different stuff. Where is crypto gonna fit into this though? Like, we are gonna, like, that's the next. That's the unlock that I feel like we're kind of dropping the ball on at this point. We're using it to build tools, we're using it to like coordinate people's management of their telegram conversations that they can't keep up with, etc, but like, what the hell are we doing with wallets? With crypto with. On chain trading, like our bots. Right. I feel like we're. There's a, there's. There's a big open table someone should probably sit down at, right. Is anyone doing this?

[Kain Warwick]

So my, my hot take, I was talking to probably the person that I think has like the best long term kind of view on crypto of anyone I know. And he was like, AI is just so much more fun than crypto right now. That was like his.

[Taylor Monahan]

It's like the innovation. It's like, like you said, like defi Summer. Like, it's just, it's this constant. Like, it's fun. There's not a huge amount of risk yet. There's a huge amount of opportunity. Like, you just have to show up alpha.

[Kain Warwick]

You need to show up and learn things. And it's moving so quickly and, and you're in that like, early part of the curve that like, you know, like young, enterprising autist can really like speedrun a lot of stuff. Right. And. And I think it feels exactly like early crypto to me. It feels like the 2016, 2017 era of like Ethereum turns up. You can do stuff now rather than just like forking Bitcoin. Right. You can actually like build software on this platform and it does things and it's like, you know, autonomous. Like it was. It was wild. Right. And this feels like that. I don't know what the intersection looks like, honestly. Like, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. You know, there's something to be said for like agents using Rails, right? Like crypt.

[Luca]

That has to be the great intersection.

[Kain Warwick]

I think that's.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah.

[Luca]

You know, you can't. Agents can't go and make a Wells Fargo account or a Morgan Stanley account, be on these payment rails. And in reality, like it should out that. Yeah, I mean, that to me has to be where I think the next bull run is going to come. And I was talking to somebody else about it, similar to like, I think your point, Kane, but I was, you know, I was kind of frustrated as to like, where's the crypto bit? Because stocks are just been vertical for like almost a year now. I mean, yeah, last time we saw stocks like this, crypto was like if file quarters at 50 billion, you know, so and so like trying to figure out like what's going on. And the truth of the matter is just like from you, when you take the speculation side of it, it's way more advantageous to go bid a AI on tradfi that's, you know, building some sort of silicone wafer than it is, you know, you know, filecoin, even though you'd think filecoin would be biddable in something like this, but nonetheless, it's. I think, I think the bull run, at least for crypto is going to come around this narrative around AI using crypto. Rails like that, I think is going to be the convergence for hopefully our alt season that everyone's been waiting for.

[Kain Warwick]

For now, about five years. Yeah, I, I think, you know, we just need to convince the cloud bots that Hengu is the. Is the best medium of exchange, actually.

[Luca]

Interesting. Actually, I'm going to write that down because I should probably make an effort to go find one of these guys and be like, dude, let's make this the transactional currency. I'm going to write it down.

[Kain Warwick]

Well, it's funny, right? Because in the game that I made, Pengu is the currency. Yeah. I'm going to use this as the currency. So we're. We don't have AI agents running around inside there yet. But soon, soon.

[Taylor Monahan]

You could, you could.

[Kain Warwick]

We could. All right, before we continue, here's a short word from our sponsors that make the show possible.

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[Kain Warwick]

Tay, if you can introduce this segment, I would appreciate it.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah, yeah. All right, so this has been like the highlight of my week. So where do we start? So as most people are aware, the government seizes crypto for all sorts of different reasons. When bad guys do bad things, they seize the crypto. It's a long, long, long process, right? There's like various stages and steps to the seizure process. I think a lot of people don't realize that you have to, like, you have to freeze it. You have to, like, coordinate with the people who have the crypto. You have to, like, move it. There's all these different things. There's like an equivalent. Like, there's like, on chain processes and there's the off chain processes. And the off chain processes take forever because it's the government and it's like courts and a bunch of paperwork. And so in this case that we're about to talk about, we're talking about funds that were seized from a few different ongoing court cases. The first is the FTX Alameda fraud situation, the sbf, Right. So when ftx, when that whole thing happened, there's like a lot of moving pieces, and there's criminal cases against SBF and there's settlements, and there was plea deals, all this stuff, right? Any crypto that were, like, in those people's accounts at some point was, like, seized as part of the larger fraud investigation process. And then eventually it's going to, like, work its way through the system. And I assume that it goes back to, like, the trustee, which then distributes to all the FTX creditors. I assume. I don't actually know. But there's also the bitfinex hack, the 2016 bitfinex hack, if you guys.

[Kain Warwick]

That's my favorite one. It's crazy.

[Taylor Monahan]

So Bitfinex gets hacked by these guys in the U.S. razzle Khan. He's like an influencer. She's amazing.

[Kain Warwick]

So they, like, clearly smart, right?

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, this is early peak, early crypto, right? These aren't like dudes in North Korea or Russia. Like, these are our homebred dudes that found him way in. So, yeah, they got arrested. All of their crypto, all the stolen crypto that ultimately, like, that's this Bitfinex user crypto or. Or Bitfinex, the company crypto, right. That was used by the government. And then again, long process. Right? Because there we go. And through a series of events, Zach XBT got some intel and then promptly tweeted the intel to the entire world, which led to a whole explosion of amazing. These are all very young kids, like teenagers. Like, some of them underage, some of them, like 20. It's a whole different world. So two kids were having a competition, which is known as a band for band or B for B. And this is where these kids, these kids, they go on Discord or Telegram. They go on, like, live chat with each other, and they show off the Money that they have, which is often stolen money. And because it's so easy to manipulate screenshots and videos and they don't trust anything they force, like, in order to like properly do a B for B or whatever, they have to move the money. And they're doing it on live stream and they're like heckling each other and like calling each other names and being really mean. And this was all recorded, and then the recording was sent to Zach because why would it not be? And then Zach tweeted it. So if you go to Zach's Twitter right now, you can go watch the full video of this kid basically moving millions and millions and millions of dollars into an account that he controls while this other kid is screaming at him and calling him names and calling him poor and stuff. And so that's step one, step or part one, part two is that Zach has the video. Zach then apparently goes and traces the on chain stuff, right? And when he traces back to see, like, where is all this, all this money come from? Well, turns out that these are like little. Well, not little. They're million dollar seizure piles. There's multiple of these piles of seized money that's been sitting dormant since like 2021, 2022, 2023. That's the source of the funds that the guy is now like moving on the live stream. And so Zach was like, they, they.

[Kain Warwick]

They didn't know that it was government fund. They just like seemed crazy.

[Taylor Monahan]

I mean, the guys, the. The guys, when they're doing these, these competitions, they're all scammers. They all do different scams and stuff. I'm not sure who knew. I don't know. I don't know. Who knows what. I'm sure that I would say the main character who has, who is moving the money, I think he definitely knew where it came from.

[Kain Warwick]

I mean, he had to get it right, so they like, he would have to get the keys somehow. Right? So.

[Taylor Monahan]

Right.

[Luca]

So I see asymmetric information here that insightful. But it's through like a long line. So to give the audience some clarity, I. For a long time I thought I was one of the biggest holders of Instagram usernames. I probably at one point, oh, my.

[Taylor Monahan]

God, Luca, you're a skid, you.

[Kain Warwick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Luca]

So I, you know, I've sold usernames for millions of dollars. I bought usernames for millions of dollars. And these worlds actually commingle a little bit. The user goes over into the scammer world. And so this, this actually dates back seven, eight Years to a. To a kid named Malone, who was also like 18, 19, who stole $250 million from who we think was actually the guy who did Jelly. Jelly, as funny as that was he.

[Kain Warwick]

And this is, you know, you know.

[Luca]

That guy apparently had like, half a billion dollars in Bitcoin. Again, this is like all, you know, speculation, but, you know, that guy's just like a Silicon Valley billionaire. But these kids are to. To Tay's point, they're all 18, 19, 20 years old, and they all operate through, believe it or not, these user. It starts with the username, because how do you flex on the Internet? One of the best ways to do it is via these usernames on Instagram, on Telegram, and they have this network. There's actually a specific website. I won't mention the website because I don't want to. God forbid I mentioned the website, I might be done so. But they all operate and meet each other through this website. This website also provides other services. You can take down people's accounts. It's like a black market for Instagram or social media services. And then it's wild.

[Taylor Monahan]

It's a whole world. It's so wild.

[Luca]

It's a whole dark world. Web of like, ages 18 to 23, you'd be surprised. They don't get much older, right?

[Kain Warwick]

Like the.

[Luca]

The p. It's a very interesting place. 18. I've never really met anybody. Maybe once or twice somebody was like, in their 30s, but they're all in this, like, 18, early 20s range. And it is such. It is such a mind on how stupid some of these kids are, how smart and how stupid they are in the same breath. Because they're clearly smart in how they're figuring out how to operate and go down these rabbit holes and, you know, have the ability to finesse and scheme and build these relationships with the, The. The customer support agents. And it's incredible how they're able to do that on the same breath. It's like, for Malone, for example, this kid actually stole $250 million, like, realized, broke it apart with all of his boys. But he was in Miami, where with five SVJs in Los Angeles buying girls, Lamborghinis and Birkin bags, I mean, there were stories, Kane and I, and I have some friends, babies who are like the rich of the rich. You would go to the club and.

[Taylor Monahan]

Clear two, $3 million in a night. Yeah.

[Luca]

Are you stupid? I wouldn't even do that, like, if I made billions of dollars. One, but like, two, if you stole the money.

[Kain Warwick]

But that's it's the same thing as the Billion Dollar Whale guy that, like, had the, the mtb.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah.

[Kain Warwick]

Thing. I can't remember his name, but the book is amazing. He stole like, it was like $5 billion and he would just go and spend like $10 million at a club.

[Taylor Monahan]

Easy come, easy go.

[Kain Warwick]

Yeah.

[Taylor Monahan]

Like, I don't know. It's a wild world and I'm laughing. Sorry. Yes, the username. So they all, they all have these usernames that are like one word. Yeah, they're like Flex. So, like, you can mess with like at Flex. And like, that's like their reputation. They love it and stuff. They think they also, they, they'll DM me sometimes and they'll, they'll think that they're like being super low key and like, I'll never know who they are. Like, and I'm like, cool. You know, like for your four telegram handles. And they're all like these little short words, like. So, like exactly where you come from arc here.

[Kain Warwick]

Right? So, like, you, like, I bought them.

[Luca]

You want to know why I bought them? I bought them because I thought they were better NFTs.

[Kain Warwick]

Interesting.

[Luca]

Well, I crushed NFT trading, like, in a really big way. And I rotated all that money into usernames because. And I'll actually tell you, I have.

[Kain Warwick]

A couple, I sold a couple for Fortune.

[Luca]

A lot of them I got smoked on. But I wasn't buying the, like, Flex, like those type of usernames. I was buying what I thought companies were. And so I actually owned AI for a while. I owned intelligence and artificial intelligence. Wow. And I own. And the best one that I owned, that Instagram. So the big problem with this was I didn't actually own the usernames, right. So Instagram would start taking them down. So I actually would have probably made a hundred million dollars if Instagram actually let me. Kept actually let me keep the usernames that I bought. You know, a third of them got just wiped. And the most important one, the one that I would have made all the money on was chat. And so the reason why is because Chat GBT rebranded everything that chat. Right. And so if I would have sold them chat, the Instagram, I could have easily got Sam Altman for 20, 30 million bucks on that. But I, I bought one for 500. I sold it for 2 million.

[Kain Warwick]

Yeah, I mean, this, this reminds me of like late 90s, like, domain seller.

[Luca]

That's what I thought it was. It was like the intersection of nft.

[Taylor Monahan]

Look, it's like I'm in This corporate world, I've got this. And then all these little kids show up. Like, wait, what?

[Kain Warwick]

It's interesting though, right? When you. When you think about it, like, there's a. There's a level of platform risk to, like, name handles, right? Like, and, you know, we had this on. On Twitter. We tried to buy the synthetics handle on Twitter back in the day and somehow got scammed. I still to this day do not know how I got scammed on this, because we were able to, like, log in and then. Anyway, it was weird.

[Taylor Monahan]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Twitter, they're scammers, Kane. Like, they're scammers. Like this.

[Kain Warwick]

Good job. Yeah, exactly. But the weird thing was, like, the guy sold it to us anyway, it's a long story. We don't need to get into it. But we eventually Twitter, like, to your point, Luca, Twitter reclaimed all these handles. And so we're able to get the Twitter handle at Synthetix for free in the end because we had it like, you know, so. So Twitter just when. So the difference, obviously, between domains and Twitter is Twitter is like a centralized platform. Icann is not ish. Right. Like, and so you can kind of own a domain and there's like, a little more decentralization to it. Interesting. You didn't buy ENS handles.

[Luca]

I. I did for a half a second, but I. I then was like, oh, no, I'm just going to buy. These are the ultimate NFTs, the ultimate knowledge.

[Kain Warwick]

Good.

[Luca]

And status symbols are these, like, usernames. But I was then going. So the. How this all segued was before everything, I was going to be in a partner in a company called Weed.com.

[Kain Warwick]

Right.

[Luca]

And so I met this guy who had basically made like a hundred, a couple hundred million dollars on domains. He owns so many. And so when I got into the NFTs, made money there, and I rotated back to the usernames, I was going through his portfolio of domains and getting all the usernames.

[Taylor Monahan]

And then you're like, I could do this better than this, dude. It's like, I got it because the bundle is.

[Luca]

The bundle is actually. It actually adds an even. So you buy the domain with the social handle. You actually could mark up, you know, a total, probably net 10, net 20 on. On the entire package, if it was just a singular thing.

[Kain Warwick]

Wow.

[Taylor Monahan]

And it's a bit. Yeah. Yes. Okay. So we'll leave it at that. Anyways, the handles are a huge flex factor for these guys. They love their handles. This particular guy had, like, four or five different hand pills and every single one is like a 40k, 100k. Like, it's like a thing. And he, like, links them all up. In my opinion, the reason that you don't see them after about 23 years old is because that's when you guys. You boys, your. Your prefrontal cortex is not super fully developed until around that age. There's a direct correlation between this. Once your prefrontal cortex kicks in, you're like, wait, hold up. Maybe I shouldn't be advertising my entire criminal endeavors linked to my handle that I'm very proud of and posting it on the Internet for everyone to see. Maybe I shouldn't do that. But prior to that age, they are very proud, and that is what happened here. He was very proud of all this money that he had. He went banned for ban with this other guy. The whole thing was recorded. It was sent to Zach. Zach tweets about. Gets better, worse, it gets more. There's more to the story. Okay, so that's just part. That was part two. So Zach tweets about it. Hopefully, we're all. We're just assuming that the government has gotten their shit together and figured it out. The government is not one to, like, share back information about this stuff, though, so who. Who knows what's actually happening? But we assume that the government has seen Zach Sweet. And is taking immediate action to secure any. Any open doors that were left open or whatever. The. The one like, connection theory, and this is very unclear, but the guy who stole the money from the US Government, it turns out that his father works.

[Kain Warwick]

Crazy.

[Taylor Monahan]

This is insane. Turns out that his father works for a company that helps the US, the doj, the dod, and the US Marshal Service with cease crypto.

[Kain Warwick]

Like, he's literally just on his dad's laptop. That's where we're at.

[Taylor Monahan]

And so, yeah, so logging into his.

[Kain Warwick]

Dad'S laptop and taking the money, it's.

[Taylor Monahan]

And then again, we don't know. Like, actually, we just don't know the exact mechanism by which anything happened. But, yeah, like, was he. Was it taken from his dad's laptop? There's also, like, maybe a possibility. Well, so, okay, on the Internet, a lot of people immediately were like, oh, his dad did it too. His dad's involved. Personally, I am not. I'm not willing to say that. Like, I. That's a. That's quite a large accusation. Let's be careful there. I think there's a possibility that, like, maybe he just knows super deeply about this world. And like Luca was saying earlier, like, the. Their. They're very smart. Like, they're very quick, they're very clever, they're very smart and they're very quick because they're the young curious mind.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

Right.

[Taylor Monahan]

Like, they're very quick to like pivot one set of information or insight that they have and apply it to like a completely different mode. It's like probably one of the things that they do better than most and. Yeah, exactly. And so you can imagine that perhaps it's like, I don't know, perhaps there's like another. There's a couple steps in the chain where like he gets. He has this insight and expertise and then was able to leverage that or use that to gain entry in some other way. That was not literally his tough laptop, but we don't know yet. All right, so part that was, that's part three was the, the unveiling that his dad literally is like, yeah, he had like a, a multi million dollar contract with the government for the next decade for helping them deal with their se crypto. So that's a thing. And then in true crypto fashion, what happened next? So he launched a meme coin.

[Kain Warwick]

Of course he did.

[Taylor Monahan]

What else are you going to do when you have attention and aren't yet in jail? I don't know what the market cap got you. I ch. Like, last the. When I saw it, it was that like it was over a million. It was rapidly approaching 2 mil. He's been just like, yeah, the money's just being laundered. There's. There's all sorts. There's a huge amount of like drama in between the groups and of the groups and stuff that I don't fully understand anything about. I don't know that I. The meme coin of lp, like I was.

[Kain Warwick]

It's somewhat of a flex to be like, I'm going to launch a meme coin and then I'm keep buying it so that it keeps going up because I have stolen money and I'm like, make this meme coin. A billion dollar meme.

[Luca]

I found out how, how these like guys are. It makes sense. I never. When CZ got hit for laundering money, I was like, how are they laundering money through it? But you know, you can be a seller of a token and then the fugazi money is buying it on the other side and that's how you launder. And it's actually a pretty.

[Taylor Monahan]

No, yeah. No, I mean, in order. The biggest thing I've learned about money laundering, you have to have a fat amount of liquidity. The more liquidity you have, the More thing, you have to do something with the money. You cannot just take money from one place and put it in another account that's not laundering it. You have to do things. And so, and in order to do things, especially in crypto, like, that's liquidity. And so anything with liquidity is going to be used for money laundering. What type and how. This is a weird case because this guy, like, I don't know. I, I, yeah, I had some moments where I was watching this. Like, the, the live. They had. Oh, yeah, they had a live stream, of course, with, like, the Meme Coin lunch. They also got the, the scammer. The guy, the guy who had his money. Sorry, the guy who stole the money from the US Government launches the Meme Coin. And then he was trying to pay influencers to promote his Meme coin. Like, the influencers that are sort of on the edge of crypto. And so they were trying to, like, send money to this guy, to this famous streamer guy to get him to promote the Meme coin. They're, like, coming up with a deal or whatever. I think it turned out that the guy, the streamer guy, was not the streamer guy. It was just another scammer. And so they got scammed. Scammed for, like, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Like, and they're like, they were like, wait, is this. Are we even talking to the right guy?

[Kain Warwick]

Like, but again, it's funny, right? Because, like, if you're in crypto, you don't just go in telegram and message, like, luca, right? Like, because most likely someone's squatting on that handle and it's not going to be LUCA you think you're talking to, right? And you know, you know that you don't just, like, go and message a random person on telegram and assume that it's the person you think it is. But if you are just, like, adjacent to crypto, and this is your first foray into crypto, you can see how you could make that mistake.

[Taylor Monahan]

The whole thing, I mean, because, because the whole thing is just, like, so fundamentally absurd at this point. Like, once we get to the meme going stage of the plot, I was like, all right, like, I'm just here for it. Like, I'm serious. Sorry. Like, I should be really upset and, like, morally opposed to people stealing from the government, but at the same time, like, we're so far gone at this point, and there's, like, nothing I can do about it. Like, yeah, yeah. So I just have to, like, laugh at the whole thing. Scammers gonna scan Scammers, there's streamers involved. I'm like having chat GPT explain to me the kid lingo because I literally don't even know this. I've never felt older in my life, guys.

[Kain Warwick]

That's funny. So from, from SCAMception to in it for the tech. Ethereum versus Quantum. We, we've talked a little bit about quantum resistance in Bitcoin, we've talked a little bit about like where quantum computing is going and, and the various, you know, risks and concerns previously. Fundamentally, I think the, the concern especially around Bitcoin is that the cryptography that underpins Bitcoin and Ethereum and most of cryptocurrencies, not all, but most, is at risk of being undermined by quantum computing. And, and so we need to come up with new solutions to secure things in a post quantum world. And this is like not like tomorrow I think realistically, but it's a little bit like AI and I think the big thing, you know, to go back to your point Luca, about like what are the implications for super intelligent aliens wandering around amongst us? Like shit gets better way faster. And so the people who are building quantum computers who have been like bashing rocks together for the last like fucking 30 years and have like three qubits that you know, work for like 20 seconds, all of a sudden they have like super intelligent people that will work 24, seven that can like do stuff. And yeah, of course there's bottlenecks of like physical, you know, design and stuff, but we are seeing that these models are really good at like modeling things, right? And like, you know, so research in all of these like frontier, like very hard tech things I think is going to change as well, right as, as we learn how to use these models. And so a thing that we might have said like for humans to coordinate to solve this problem, assuming the problem is not intractable, would take 15 years. Humans augmented by super intelligent aliens. Maybe it's five years, right? And then like maybe it's one year or 20 seconds if it's a bunch of agents working together with no humans involved, right? And so all of these things kind of point at like risks that we previously said were like now feel much more compelling. And so the Ethereum foundation is like, well, let's create a security team that we're going to focus on like quantum resistance and, and make it a like top strategic priority. My, my hottest take on this is this is the most un Ethereum foundation thing. It looks really technical, right? But it's, if you actually think about it, from like a kind of tactical standpoint, you've got the bitcoin people who are sort of burying their heads in the sand and most of them are trying to ignore it and saying it's not a real thing. But this is like a genuine meta of like quantum concern, right? Quantum computing concern. And the Ethereum foundation steps in and goes, we are going to lean into this meta and be like, hey, we're going to be quantum resistant. It's the most bullish thing I've seen out of the EF in a while in terms of like tactical understanding of like where the market is and investor concern. And like we're going to get ahead of this thing and we're going to show that we're working on it. That to me was like the biggest deal of this, right? Because this is not a short term thing. But if you look at the market reaction to it and go, well, if all of a sudden Ethereum is quantum resistant and everyone's worried about quantum resistance and bitcoin isn't. It's a kind of, you know, it's a bit of an attack vector. So there's $2 million research prizes, live testnets and a bunch of stuff that is happening. I don't know if you've got a take on this or, or from a tech perspective, but. But yeah, it feels, it feels like a smart thing to do both like technically but also just like from a narrative perspective.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah, I mean I think this is like an area where it's, it is the, in my opinion it's like the best thing for like the Ethereum foundation or like that similar, OR other areas. Right. To be doing because it is like it requires sort of that longer term, higher level overreaching research and like the research might not pay off.

[Kain Warwick]

Like you're just, you're not going to see requires communism. And that's their wheelhouse.

[Taylor Monahan]

So and so when I think about like what is the ideal role of these foundations, right? It's like, you know, on the one hand you have Bitcoin, which is like there is none, right? There's like sort of these informal like people that are coordination.

[Kain Warwick]

Like bitcoin can't coordinate anymore.

[Taylor Monahan]

It's bad, right? And then, you know, but you look at Solana, they've taken a completely different approach. They're much more on the ground floor. A lot of people think that that's much better. I don't necessarily disagree, but you're also not seeing them do you know, these sort of like, kind of. It's like this like the nerd moonshots. Right?

[Kain Warwick]

Yeah.

[Taylor Monahan]

And like, yep.

[Kain Warwick]

Can pull this off.

[Taylor Monahan]

Right. And I think it's great that they're doing it. I think it's aligned with their culture especially. Right. Like, it's aligned there. I think it's also though, like actually valuable because I think this is like, I'm not, I'm not panic stricken about it, but I think it is something that is going to be a thing that needs to be addressed and the people that have understanding of it will be in a place to address it. I also think that the research will definitely, like, just having a deep understanding of this area is going to inform not just the literal, like research that they're doing, but a bunch of other decisions that are going to be made in the short and the long term. So decisions about like, you know, priorities for protocol upgrades. Like, you know, there's a huge amount of conversations and ways to do sort of like the root key management. Right. It's not just a question of like, oh, should we update our private keys to a different key thing? It's like, you know, sort of these fundamental questions about like, yeah, like cryptography and authorization and how do you, how do you not just like secure against the one attack vector, but how do you make this really robust in a really long term way? It concerns me when I see like the bitcoiners just being like, not a deal, like not a big deal. It, it's not so much that I, I fundamentally disagree with their take that it's not a big deal. It's that, that mentality, it's scary.

[Kain Warwick]

Yeah.

[Taylor Monahan]

It puts you in a position to not be. You just sort of like lost that like, curiosity and like, you know, investigation.

[Kain Warwick]

And been on that trajectory for a long time of like, there is a core group of people and you know, to your point, about like 23 year olds and your prefrontal cortex is finally developing. Like there's another arc when people get to be like, you know, 35, 40, 50, whatever. And a lot of those bitcoin guys have been around for a long fucking time. They're old now. And it's like, get off my lawn, you stupid kids sort of thing. Yeah. Like, there's that energy of like, we're fine. Like they, they have become very conservative with like a capital. See, sort of conservative of like, you know, it's political movement of like, no, we don't want to change. We're resisting change. We're resisting anything. Bitcoin is perfect as it is, et cetera, et cetera. And so that, that's a dangerous political movement to kind of creep into bitcoin, a technology that, like, we don't believe in change now. It's like, yes.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah. And I also, I find, I find that people that, that try to hold these very hard lines, like these very tight hard lines like bitcoiners, right? Where they're like. Even the ones that don't fundamentally, like, won't stand up and be like, quantum is not an issue. They're still not going to stand up and be like, we should innovate more. Right. Like, they're still like, yeah, there's still a lot worth doing.

[Kain Warwick]

The extreme end is like, math is all real, right?

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah.

[Kain Warwick]

And like, there's nothing to worry about. And then there's like the people that are like, math might be real, but, like, don't do anything, right?

[Taylor Monahan]

Like that.

[Kain Warwick]

That's the political.

[Taylor Monahan]

It's wild.

[Kain Warwick]

It's wild. It is wild.

[Taylor Monahan]

It's wild. And I think that it puts them in a really dangerous position because you have so. The way that I envision it in my head, and maybe I'm weird, but, like, you have this really hard line in the sand that you've arbitrarily drawn and you refuse to cross it. So you refuse to even consider that there might be something worth doing there. And so you're just like, political. Yeah.

[Kain Warwick]

Like, it becomes like this, this kind of political pseudo religious stance that.

[Taylor Monahan]

It'S against anyone, that even. It's not just for Quantum, it's for everything. Right.

[Kain Warwick]

The issue, in fairness to them, they've lived through 15 years of shitcoinery and.

[Taylor Monahan]

Nonsense and a lot of people with ulterior motives who do want to change bitcoin for their own means, and it doesn't need to be changed. I got it. I got it. Okay. But. And this is the thing. While it does protect against those ulterior motives and risks and bad things, like, it is a very effective mechanism at protecting against that. If you ever cross that line, you are not at all prepared to, to respond to it in any way, shape or form. And it tends to be like, like they're. They're very scared of the slippery slope. They actually have a right to be scared of slippery slope because they have no, like, muscles developed to prevent them from, like, if they go over the line, they're gone. Okay. They're going to be like, let's centralize the whole thing and create a committee. Let's go. Like, it's wild. And to me, that's a, That's A real risk. Because if you don't and set like, yeah, you have no mode of operating. You have no way to deal with this. You have no way to make decisions. Your coordination is not there yet. Like there's so many things where the lack of preparedness and the lack of like sort of practicing on smaller scale things and.

[Kain Warwick]

This is like, it's like an immune system, right? Like they are the isolated tribe of people that have like walled themselves off from the rest of humanity and they're like, no, no, we don't get the flu. And then someone lands on their beach one day and like they're all dead in like 20, no immunity whatsoever. So. So yeah, I think, I don't know it like bitcoin. I mean we've had these concerns, right, like the fee concern, like how will security, you know, if block production. Like the idea that you can just one shot something 15 years ago and look at the world today, like 15 years later. The idea that you can one shot something and never touch it again and it's going to be perfect. It's possible. Like there is something that's almost part of the vibe now is like not touching it is. It's, it's thing. But it's a risky fucking play. It's a risky play if any one of your assumptions ends up being wrong and is invalidated by the world and, and your vibe is. We can never change the thing that's. It's, it's concerning. If bitcoin, if anything can pull it off, bitcoin can like the vibe of like strong money, hard money, whatever. As long as the world doesn't invalidate any of the bitcoin priors, I think we're okay. But yeah, here we are. All right, we've got a few more minutes. Let's. Let's wrap it up with some more nonsense. Pump bounced. As meme coin volume creeps back, it does feel like meme coins are back. We got a little bit of a.

[Taylor Monahan]

Meme coin, two meme coins today.

[Kain Warwick]

We got a bit of a, a bit of a meme coin resurgence. I don't like, I don't know if this feels like early 2023 where meme coins were like starting to, to rip again and we're back in that or if it's like the lost vestiges of, of you know, a thing that's, that's almost dead. A little bit of a dead cat bounce. But pump fun is up like 25 in the past seven days because meme coins are on, on solar back And I'm. I'm really curious your take on this, because I also found this horrifically bad white whale and penguin. Like, Like, I was like, penguin. Come on, guys. Like, can we, like, let's pick something else, right? Like that. That was pretty cool.

[Taylor Monahan]

What is penguin?

[Kain Warwick]

Penguin was this. It was the meme. There was the meme, the video of, like, a penguin that's, like, walking into the.

[Taylor Monahan]

In Greenland or whatever. That one.

[Kain Warwick]

Yeah, yeah. And it, like, keeps trying to, like, walk to the mountains or something, right? Yeah. That was a bit on the nose. When they went. I was like, we have a penguin token, guys.

[Taylor Monahan]

That's one.

[Kain Warwick]

One.

[Luca]

Just airdrop people $2 billion to the face, you know?

[Kain Warwick]

Yeah. What have you done for us lately, Ruka? So, yeah, I like, the trenches. Are the trenches. What are you gonna do? But. But yeah, they've done more buybacks. Buybacks are back, I guess. So, yeah, we'll. We'll see. They bought a quarter of a billion dollars worth of their own token back. It's pretty crazy. Like, you know, the state of the trenches, the state of alts right now, that you could buy a quarter of a billion dollars of something and it doesn't moon in the most insane way. Like, is nuts. It's really nuts. So, yeah, it's still below the ICO level.

[Luca]

Well.

[Taylor Monahan]

And I feel like most of the meme coins that are. That are doing stuff right now are. It's. It's like you have a very select situation with, like, a lot of, like, momentary attention, and you're capitalizing on these people that have capital that are, like, willing to throw it into the meme coin or whatever. But I don't feel like that's deeply. Like, the Meme coins are back. I feel like it's, you know, it's going to be. The Meme coins are going to be another, like, tool in the tool just so to speak, like, thing to do in certain situations. Right. But it's not. I don't know. We need something new to do. Guys, I'm bored. I mean, our bring NFTs back, I wouldn't mind. They were way cuter. So I'm.

[Luca]

They were more fun than us.

[Taylor Monahan]

Yeah.

[Kain Warwick]

Yeah. This is. This is like, I. You know, I don't. I don't. Like, I'm kind of here for any crypto activity on some level, especially if it's, like, a little bit more organic. Like, the. The biggest issue for me with the meme coins was, like, the sniping and bundling and just like, math extraction. Like, that that was really grim. But, you know, something that, like, pops off that over the course of, like, a few days, gets, like, a bit of momentum, and, and, you know, people get excited about, like, I'm not going to sit here and poo poo.

[Luca]

That.

[Kain Warwick]

That's. That's fine. But, yeah, the. The, like, inorganic sniper bundler, like, faux, you know, momentum stuff that was going on for so long, like, that was. Was not amazing. All right, it's been fun. Good luck with your quad potting or mold potting or whatever it is that you're doing. That's it for this episode of Uneasy Money. Thank you all for tuning in. If you like the episode, follow us on the Unchained feed on X YouTube or wherever you get your podcast, and we'll see you next week.