EP95 Paul Itoi Sphinx & Stakwork.

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

Let's go!

Now, what's the Bitcoin? Bitcoin's like rat poison. Yeah. Oh. The greatest scam in history. Let's get it. Bitcoin will go to fucking zero.

[ Laughs ]

All right, you ungovernable misfits. I'm your host, Max. Everybody knows that Bitcoin is useless, worthless, and doomed to fail. But what if everyone's wrong? What if it's the system that is doomed to fail?

Join me as I speak to some of the brightest people in the space, and slither to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

Welcome back, everyone. Today's episode is with Paul Atoy. This is still live on "21ism." We have a featured article, and here's featured for code. Definitely worth checking out at 21ism.com.

But I thought I'd post it here as well. I love chatting to Paul. He's doing amazing things for the space, and he's just an all-round great guy. I hope you're gonna really enjoy this. And before we dive in, just want to say thanks to the sponsors.

Thanks to CoinFlow UK for sponsoring the show, and for anyone in the UK who's looking to stack sat, definitely check them out, CoinFlow UK. I'd also like to say thank you to crypto cloaks, they're my new sponsors.

They're doing all sorts of amazing products, 3D printed, now some metal node cases as well. And nades, I've just found out, I actually just reached out and said, "I think you've spelled nodes wrong, but it's nades for grenades."

If you haven't seen these things, definitely have a look. It's crypto cloaks.com. Enjoy the show.

Hey, Paul. How you doing? Hey, how are you, Mac? I'm good, thank you. I'm good. Is there anything in the background that I've heard of? I think, you know, my headphones went through the wash as I was just testing them out.

And I might have to switch to this bigger mic one second. Let me just plug it in. It's getting a little background noise. I was hoping it's all right. Yeah, it's like just a bit of a buzzing.

Okay, yeah, one second. Hey, tell me if you can hear me now. Hey, Paul, it sounds better now. I can't hear any of the background noise at the moment. Mute is blinking, I guess. Solid is not mute.

Solid, yeah, solid. Are you using Yeti? Yeah, I have this little Yeti. There's a best buy right next to me, so I grabbed it. Awesome. Yeah, I use the same. Thank you for joining me today.

It's been nice chatting to you a couple of times over the past few months and getting to know you a little bit and really, really proud to be featuring you for 21ism Block 8. We all, as a collective, the six of us, are all in love with what you're doing.

We really see that it is something important for the space and basically like the way that you're going about it in a non-shitcoin-y, proper Bitcoin way, building on lightning and pushing the space forward.

So, yeah, really, really pleased to have you on and looking forward to the chat and seeing what you're doing. Well, likewise, I love what you guys are doing. I used to be an art major, so when I saw your site for the first time, I was blown away and you rarely see this level of quality of design out there,

so appreciate what you guys are doing as well. Thank you. Yeah, we think it's important to show what's going on in the space and explain to people who are coming in. Like, this is not just about number go up.

This is a whole movement. This is a whole scene of artists, developers, memeers, people who care deeply about making some changes and care deeply about freedom. And what we're trying to do is show it off in the best light and capture it each month.

So, we have a reference point to go back and people can go, "Oh my God." Yeah, this is what it was like in the early days. And, you know, before everyone was using it and yeah, I think that's important that we document how this thing moves, how this thing grows.

And yeah, it really gets the heart of the culture. Well, I love also how you divide it where it's not necessarily one medium that you're covering. Because you really can't predict what will capture this moment.

We all know we're in the middle of something huge. And I've always just, with an art background, wondered about the people who do the best job of kind of capturing the time that they're in.

I used to sit with my wife and some friends in San Francisco. If people are from North Beach there, they know this little bar called Vesuvios, which was back when the beat-nicks were there.

And so, you're sitting there picturing these guys writing back whenever they were 60s or whatever, and writing the poetry. And did they think they were capturing the moment at that time, or did they not?

Were they aware? And did they, you know, and I keep thinking about it now. Who's doing the thing and expressing what we're all seeing in this change? And then later on, 10, 15, 20 years down the road, we'll all look back and say, "Yeah, that person really nailed the moment.

"And if we don't know that will that be visual art, "will that be a piece of code? "Will that be a software architecture?" I really don't know. It'll be something that other people can appreciate.

And maybe a time capsule that's designed now, and you see it in 20 years, and you experience this moment today. It's kind of preserved for that later moment. - Yeah, so true. And, you know, I see it all as art.

I see code as art as well. The way people are thinking, the way people are collaborating. And anything worthwhile tends to generally take some time and thought and, you know, whatever your medium is, whether it be paint music or code or memes, you're trying to put something out into the world that either doesn't currently exist

or not in the form that you think it should or feel would be exciting or useful. And that's where all this creativity is coming from, I feel, it's just because there's so many people with so much passion and hope.

And that creates things that you don't see in normal sort of fiat culture. It's very, very different to what I see outside of this world. And, you know, that is something I'm seeing certainly with Sphinx and the ideas that you're coming up with and the way that you're looking at doing things seems to me that you can...

Sounds like a little bit arrogant to say, but like see the future. You see where all this is going and you're taking these ideas and you're making them usable. And that's particularly exciting to me.

You know, maybe we're a little bit further away from it being accessible to everyone, but I'm seeing ideas that were being talked about a few years ago now actually be accessible if you can be bothered to do it.

And that's really fucking cool. That's really something that stands out to me. - Yeah, it definitely is a leap of faith. I mean, for just to go over what Sphinx is, I mean for anyone who hasn't heard of it, it's we built a messaging system that sits on top of the Bitcoin Lightning Network.

So if you think of the foundation being the Bitcoin main chain, you open up channels to note between notes on the Lightning Network. So you have this, the built-in peer-to-peer aspects and sound money of Bitcoin supporting the more real-time exchange of value on the Lightning Network with improved privacy

and just more flexibility at that second layer, the layer approach to money. And then Sphinx really sits one layer on top of the Lightning Network and lets you put information into a Lightning payment.

And that information can be a link to a meme. It can be a message to your wife. It can be a payment with Satoshi's. And the crazy part is you can now send thoughts, art and value and money anywhere in the world instantly and I do it dozens and hundreds of times a day.

And in our own development team, we've actually replaced all of the tools that you might use out there in a traditional company, like Slack or Zoom or for meetings or for phone calls. And we do 99% of our communications through the Lightning Network using Sphinx as a front-end.

So I think many people have tried it out as a messaging system who are familiar with Lightning, but we haven't really scratched the surface on what the Lightning Network can do and it's just a matter of what we can support in the front-end, but the technology is there and we started building this well

before the technology could support it. And maybe that links back to the creativity part, but I used to do a lot of oil painting when I was younger. And in order to oil paint, you have to think about the layers of color you're using.

You can't, it's not like a thick acrylic. The style I was trying to do is more of thin varnishes of color that when light goes through six or seven layers of color, you get this kind of interaction that you can't get in just one hue that you paint on mass.

And so if you, I was never good at it, so I'm not trying to say I'm good at this, but the whole goal and game is you are layering color and the color you put in first is the one that is the most subtle because it might end up between eight or nine different layers.

I mean, if you look at Michelangelo's skin, the way handle skin, that's the kind of maybe the level of mastery that people try to get to where you can't quite tell where does that glow come from.

It's because the light's going through multiple layers of color and it's interacting in a way that mimics maybe an emotional interpretation of what we see out there. So the same thing with software and with any type of design work, you really want to think about, well, what's the end goal?

What am I really trying to do? What are the tools available? How do you build these layers? Even if one or two of the layers are missing, which was the case for us, we started building this before light.

The lightening network could support spontaneous payments, which are called key sense. So before we lightening, you always have to have an invoice. So in order of Max for me to pay you, you would have to create an invoice, give me the invoice over some other network, email or text message or whatever,

then I would get that invoice and I would pay it and then you would receive the payment. And so it had to be first triggered by you requesting money. And that has a lot of benefits and a lot of great things about it.

But imagine if we were trying to do some sort of commerce or meet on a marketplace or do a message, if I were trying to message you, I couldn't ask you, hey, can you send me this receipt so I can send you a message?

It needs the whole purpose. So we actually built the software front end first and did it backwards because the lightening layer itself didn't support the key technology that we needed. And then lightening labs came out with it.

A little over a year ago, it was merged into production and then we've been working on the actual system ever since then. So this has been multiple years in the making, but we've just been layering on those in layers of paint one day at a time.

- It's interesting you say you've done the front end before the back end because you're waiting for the technology to catch up effectively with your vision. Is that something that you knew was going to happen looking at it technically?

Where you were like, I can just see that this is going to be possible? Or how did you judge that? Because to a lot of people, that would be an enormous leap to put in all this effort on design and creating something where the technology is not there yet.

You're doing it the other way round to what most people would do. Most people wait until it's there, they think it's solid. They've been told by enough people that this is gonna work and then they do it and then they're too late.

You've actually gone about it the other way round and that's why it's the first thing that I've seen this in this space where I mean, granted, mine isn't working at the moment because I'm an idiot and I've done something wrong.

But I have had it working and when I've had Sphinx working, it blows my mind. Like it properly blows my mind. It's the first thing with lightning that has done that because it's slick, it's accessible.

You can do the messaging, you can do a call through gypsy. I've had people send me boosts on my pod and that kind of stuff. And I was just like, this is wild. This is so ahead of its time.

This is when the world catches up to the way that you're thinking and what's possible, it's just gonna change so fast. It's amazing. So how did that happen and was it scary to take that punt or did it not even feel like one?

- Yeah, it was. I mean, we don't, you sound like a crazy person when you talk about something like this that doesn't exist. And so we actually, I brought it up with a couple of people and I think it sounded so much like I was trying to pitch an ICO or something.

This is back in 2018 when I was exploring how possible was this on the Lightning Network. I went to a meetup in New York that was sponsored by FOMO. And I brought it up with a couple of people and they literally turned around and walked away like I didn't, it was truly odd.

And I was completely new to the space nervous about meeting people, didn't know anything about Bitcoin. Really, I mean, compared to now it was just, it was pretty funny. And culturally, I just was still not 100% understanding all the different cultural aspects of it.

But when I brought up, hey, I think you could do this. It sounded like such an Ethereum style kind of idea or something, I think people just wanted to get away from you as fast as possible.

So, but I mean, we kept on working on it but we would never bring it up really. I called it an off-label use of Lightning. And we were very hesitant. And we actually moved to slowly 'cause I think I was a little bit oversensitive to offending people talking about this idea.

And so, but I will say that people have been phenomenal about being receptive to things once you can touch and play with something, right? Once you can see it on your screen, you got the satoshis, right?

You possess those satoshis, you saw them instantly come in. Once people experience that, it's kind of like, I mean, here are the same thing. People talk about strike or feeding the chickens, right?

You have that aha moment of, I just, something happened in the real world on my phone. I ain't granted it's on your phone, but so you personally experienced something in the real-time nature of this thing.

And you already have an appreciation for what Lightning is. There's kind of no going back. It's the way I felt when I first opened and looked at an iPhone back in the day. And then what primed me to work on this sort of in a leap of faith was that seeing the internet happen really, the web happen in the 90s.

It was just no one believed that you would be doing hosted applications. So I started a company in late '96 that was running Perl code on servers. And then all of the functionality, we believe, would move from your local computer to a central server, back like almost like a mainframe.

And then the browser was this kind of universal client that was just a window into all of the power that was working on a central computer. And bandwidth is really what allows that. If it was slow, then it would be a horrible experience.

But it made sense for companies and we worked ironically in the advertising industry. So I used to draw pictures for ad concepts and do account management, all sorts of things in advertising.

So taking that understanding, applying it to software and saying, hey, what software does the advertising industry need? Well, when you do a photo shoot in the Caribbean and you wanna get the photo proofs back to Manhattan to show to the client who's not sitting in the Caribbean, how would you do that prior to the internet?

You are, what, air-fed-exing physical negatives back to a shop that's gonna develop your film and show it that's days and days, right? And now you have people camped out there waiting for approval.

So we built some of the first systems that would do what's now called digital asset management. And so you could move photos anywhere in the world back to the office and we had little compact eye packs from the '90s and the clients.

We would give those to clients and they would be able to tap and see their ad proofs or we would show, I think it was Chrysler was a client and we would show Ford ads to the Chrysler client on their little compact eye pack.

So the Ford Motor Company would run some big promotion in LA and the client in New York would see it that same day. Back in the '90s, that was literally like, you were saying about Sphinx, that was mind-blowing that they could pull something out of their pocket and see a newspaper ad that happened 3,000 miles away in color.

And so seeing that and seeing people react, this was easy because you could just say, well, we have a huge problem with centralized systems, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram. They're all facing the same problem where they are trying to be the underlying technology platform

and this was as bad as it was in 2018 is worse now, is just how the heck do you edit the world's thoughts? Hey, this is okay to say on our platform, this isn't. I emphasize what those people are saying, but how can you have the hubris to believe you can keep up with that?

Much less be right. Even the show, the pretense is impossible. - Yeah, it's a scary idea to have people censoring what people are saying. It's just like, there's that saying, isn't it? It's like, the best thing for bad speech is more speech and it seems that it's become accepted by most people

that we should be censoring and that we just allow a certain group of people to censor. And to your point, it wasn't possible to send these photos back from the Caribbean. Instantly, it just wasn't thinkable, now it is.

And a few years ago, it wasn't thinkable to have a value transfer that can go anywhere in the world and no one can stop and it's peer to peer and no one could realistically think that you could send fractions of a penny or tiny amounts and have it confirmed and you actually own it.

And it still blows my mind to this point and seeing it in a slick, usable interface just makes me think I don't know how these other companies eventually compete when people work it out, but when people understand how much of a change this is, how do you see that happening?

Do you think that there's gonna be some of the big players that are gonna try and compete? Or do they realize that their whole business model is to hold the keys for you and use you as the product?

- Probably the closest, and I'm not a big social person. I don't tweet or do anything like that. I don't have Facebook or anything. But to me, the closest is Twitter. They understand 'cause they are so about the ideas, right?

I mean, they are about sharing. It's almost, I find so much value in Twitter. It took me so long to understand the value, but I picture kind of, let's say you've got one of those old fashioned diagrams of your brain where they used to think that certain topics lived in different parts of your brain.

So I still have that kind of old fashioned view of my brain where I'm interested in surfing or hunting or whatever, and I'm interested in Bitcoin or lightning. So with Twitter, you're able to kind of jack in or neural ink the best thinking and arguments in the world on whatever topic and filter feed off of those exchanges and jack that

into different parts of your brain. I mean, that's an incredible hack to absorb this kind of, whatever has survived this melee of ideas, getting to your brain, and then you make the decision based on, I only sort of believe it after I've seen people who know more about it than me hash it out in a logical way, kind of believing

that if they can't explain it in a way that I understand, they probably don't know what they're talking about if I look at it for long enough, right? If, you know, you just have people who can argue atop, even if it's something that's very technical or very specific to a field, you can follow the logic tree at least, and then you can see

when people resort to all the logical fallacies that happen in arguments, you kind of go red flag that person and say, hey, they ran out of ideas and they resorted to sort of these fallacies for the to support to fill their airspace.

So I feel like the ability, so I feel like Twitter is probably the closest in wanting to decentralize things. I don't know if they've made any progress on that front. - Yeah, I agree. I never saw any value in Twitter for a long time.

Then I lurked for six months to a year and then I was like, oh, no, I get it. Like I can see this now. And the idea and the way that these discussions happen is really, really good. It's the only social media I actually enjoy.

And like you say, it's 'cause you can just learn. You know, you can lurk if you want to or you can get involved and you can sharpen your ideas. And it's a very, very good place or has been a very, very good place for me trying to wrap my head around some of these ideas.

Was it something that you used? 'Cause I think you said 2017, you were getting involved and interested in speaking to people about the ideas that you've now built. How early in that process was it for you and were you active on Twitter to try and wrap your head around it?

Or is this something that just automatically made sense to you as soon as you heard it because of previous experiences? - Well, I was exposed to Bitcoin, I was exposed to Bitcoin ideas a long time ago.

And just someone trying to explain it to me, typical story, I'm not getting it, not absorbing it, but just interacting with anything that's new in tech. So nine years ago or so. And then it didn't really, I didn't even know that blockchain, the concept came from Bitcoin, but kind of dove into a research project in 2015

around using how to fix the domain registration system that my wife was working for NuStar as a consultant. And we were just doing a research piece and I was helping her out on the technical stuff.

And that's when I started reading about sort of blockchain and that was 2015 kind of early on the whole business on blockchain stuff and then didn't really just, didn't really pay attention to it after that, but just it was one piece of the puzzle of looking at how blockchains work.

And then went, oh, blockchains behind Bitcoin. Oh, okay, that makes sense. And then a friend worked on Numerai, an acquaintance worked on Numerai, not someone I knew closely, but was exposed to kind of the whole, they were early in the ICO space and stuff and just trying to come up with other uses for it.

Then looked at solidity and just didn't think it would work or scale, then saw what CryptoKitty's kind of underscored that weakness in the system and then kept looking around, found the lightning white paper shortly afterwards and then started working on this from there.

So that was kind of a backwards path into this whole thing. And straight to lightning, that's an interesting path. Yeah, we had, I was working on a healthcare app at the time and we were paying people over PayPal, mainly in South America to do data entry for us.

And you would think that we were paying very well, 15 to $20 an hour, but there's something about the work that people just would not stick around. It was so boring or it was just hard enough where people would have a hard time doing it at say 20 hours a week doing just very repetitive work.

So we, as soon as I read about lightning on it, okay, this is worth experimenting on. And so we built a system that would allow people to do the work in return for getting paid with lightning.

And that was right around 2018. So we were probably one of the early real life use cases where we were paying people in real life to do work and then taking that work and using the output of that work.

And then Brian Murray, who is with Craft Ventures, called and said, "Hey," or sent in, I posted an email form because I assumed, "Hey, maybe some of these people who are doing work "for lightning anonymously are having problems, "I'll put up a support form on our page."

And then the first burden of those fill it out was actually Brian, so that's how we met. And then we've been working together ever since on this idea. And so stack work is the for-profit part of what we do and pays the bills and Sphinx is a completely open source.

There's no revenue model really behind Sphinx itself. I think there will be very valuable businesses built on top of it, but they might not even be businesses, right? You might be just a person doing your own podcast or your own OnlyFans or whatever it is.

It's just the raw materials for interacting with people in a peer-to-peer way. But if you're gonna build an audience safer your podcast, why would you build your whole foundation of your future, have all the benefits of uncensorable money, but then build your audience on a platform that can censor you in a second?

That makes no sense. - Yeah, absolutely. And it's kind of what's happening to a large extent now. Twitter can switch you off immediately. So can YouTube's open all of these other companies that people are sort of rely on for their income.

And that is a real draw when you have something that is open source and something that cannot censor. And I think that's really the way that a lot of these content creators and people are gonna sort of start moving towards because it just makes sense.

And I guess the one thing is just getting that network effect and getting people on there with the sort of ideas you're talking about, being able to use it in so many different ways. I can't see it a problem long-term, but how do you view getting people into it, getting people to use it and wrap their head around it?

Do you have some sort of idea of how that plays out over the coming years? - Yeah, I mean, part of me feels like the whole history rhymes thing. If you look back on AOL and CompuServe, people will say the same thing about the World Wide Web.

So AOL and CompuServe were so far ahead of the web. The web was a joke. It was gray with black text and some horrible picture. They didn't even have center alignment. Everything was jammed on the left side of the page.

There were no line breaks. It was like the blink tag was the fanciest thing you could do. And then you go to AOL and man, there's music and there's chimes going off and all your friends are there, they hit instant messenger.

Why would you ever leave this amazing wall garden? That's only whatever it was, $9 a month. And they were carpet bombing the world with their CDs with this whole thing of get on this thing, get on this thing.

And decentralization always wins. So there's just, it's an inevitability. And you can't change human nature and you can't fight human creativity on mass. And so anything that is funneled through decision makers, I believe, and this is a good thing, that there's something in your amygdala that goes off and goes,

hey, I'm a surf in this person's kingdom. And no matter how many followers you have on Instagram, no one gives crap because you are a slave to that system. And you're just winning the video game that they set up for you to play and you're done whenever they say you're done.

And they know it. And in the back of their head, it's like there's that term, the worried wealthy, they're rich in this environment, this artificial environment, but they're worried 'cause they know it's built on paper and they need to get out of there.

And that drive will take place. So for us, it's not about this project, it's not about trying to get people to try it or anything, love people to try it and test it. But for instance, I can't even use our app on Android, it's so slow, I mean, and it's buggy, and there are all these issues.

But it's a little bit of a cavalier attitude of having seen this is just saying, that's okay, this is the filter, why, let's say Bitcoin early days, command line transactions, I mean, think about how far the wallets and hardware have come, right?

The early adopters, the early adopters will walk through walls if you have something that's valuable enough for them to do. And the easier you make it, the further out that funnel you're going, you're letting more and more people experience it without as much pain, which sounds good, but in the early days,

it's better to self filter out the people who really need and want something and recognize it. So I actually don't mind that there are problems, I don't want to waste people's time unnecessarily, we try not to make any statements about how easy it is or anything, we don't make any claims, it's like beta software that we're just making up

as we go along, but our intentions are here and we know where we're going and what we're trying to make. But and at some point, if it's successful, no one will remember that we started any of this, it'll just be people building on top of it.

And in a couple of years, does anyone talk about the people who created CSS or really figured out a lot of these programming things, that's the kind of picks and shovels part of what we're working on, we're just building these little pieces and people will combine them in super creative ways.

But that will beat AOL and CompuServe and that will beat Instagram, it will beat any of these centralized systems that did an amazing job of showing people what it's like, just like AOL did.

Would the web have succeeded without something like that? It's arguable, you can't argue in null hypothesis, but it's where we're going, yeah, they definitely helped, but it's a stepping stone along the path, right?

So keeping it open, obviously then is important for that. And so my question would be where you're at now with it. If you have someone come along, someone creative, someone with an idea and they say to you, look, I have the time and I have a team, I wanna build this, I don't know, for example, Instagram competitor

and it's a SAP or PIC or whatever. Is that something they can just straightaway build on top of what you've built or would they have to say, look, can we sort of work with you so that it's integrated into the platform?

- It's really step by step for us where we don't feel like we're able to support people well on that effort. People have figured out how to build all kinds of crazy stuff on it already using just the front end tools.

But getting in the first thing that we would love to see people experiment with are the bots. So we copied the Discord bot syntax. So you can almost copy and paste a bot from Discord and change a couple things and it'll run inside of a tribe.

So you could do something like a poll inside it. So anything you've seen in Telegram or Discord, it's programmatically possible to do inside of a tribe. So we've talked about poker games is the first thing I think that would be really fun.

Get in a tribe, you could be part of your podcast audience and part of the fun is just meeting people who are like-minded who are attracted to the content and then say, hey, do you want to play poker on Friday night and there's no bank holding your pot.

There's no third party site or anything like that. It's completely peer to peer. So that's the kind of thing that you could do and anyone could really do in program. And then will there be other clients?

Will there be other types of tribes? Anyone can write that stuff. It's just that in terms of us documenting things and this is our first open source project. So we're doing 50 things wrong, I'm sure already.

Just making it easier for people to code against something. But we feel like we're still in the phase of making the primitives work. Let's say we get a million people onto this thing and 80% are on Android.

That's 80% of the people who are using something that I can't use myself. That doesn't feel great, right? So we're not trying to skip the steps that need to happen. And so we're porting Android from React Native to a native language that runs much faster and works much more smoothly and tour native support and everything.

I just built the tour native version this morning. It's working great. - Nice. - So yeah, so that's what we're working on. And we try not to skip the steps because we know this will happen and it'll happen at scale.

And you just have to grind it out. It's just there are really no shortcuts that I've seen ever work. (laughing) You pay at some point. You pay at some point. And you can pay now when it's tiny or you pay later when you're trying to fix it with millions of people and that's really no fun.

- Stressful. Yeah, it's a nice approach. It feels like the Bitcoin way to get things sorted and working and it's not all about the fluff and the advertising and going out and saying what you're doing.

It's actually doing it and building something that works and the foundations are solid. And it's very refreshing to see that. It's very refreshing to be around people who are thinking that way.

Is it something that you have found a relief moving from a more traditional world into, I assume it's basically Bitcoin-only stuff you're doing now. If you're doing stack work and this or you still sort of have one foot in fiat culture.

- Well, the only touch point we have with Fiat is paying our bills on the stack work side. And we take, if you think about, I can describe stack work a little bit because we just touched on it before.

- Yeah, it's, I'm doing a terrible, terrible job as a host to it. - No, I'm just enjoying the chat. - I just love chatting. So it's fun. So stack work is harder for people to grasp but I think it is actually almost a bigger idea than Sphinx is at this point.

So, but stack work really is what came out of the early experimentation of doing this data entry work. We figured out very quickly that if we ask someone to, let's say, transcribe 70 fields and put them into a screen on your phone or on your computer, just the accuracy and the mental work to do that would be make the failure

right of that task too high. And so what we did was we figured out how to programmatically, it's almost like pre-digesting or pre-juing food. So we actually break a complex task into its most minute steps.

So think about Henry Ford building a car factory instead of having one person who knows how to build the whole car, his innovation of course was to divide it up into very digestible tasks.

You're the screwdriver guy, you're the wrench guy. And so with this, we did the same thing with knowledge work. And so it'll literally be a question saying, is this a picture of a dog or is this a square?

And then put those pieces, so we break it up into those tasks, give those tasks to people so they can do them on their phone. They get paid satoshis for doing every single task. And then at the end, the software puts the pieces back together into an answer that we send back to the customer.

So one customer we've done, Project Sports, does the process of trying to tell if something's a fake handbag, right? Let's say, is this a real Gucci bag? Well, training someone to identify whether it's fake or not, that person might take three to four minutes and look at 25 to 30 different attributes on that bag

down to the stitching style on the inside? What is the language on the little white label in there? What's the material? They can very rapidly go through those decisions as a trained human, but how many of those experts are there in the world, very few?

So what we do is take their brain and say, all right, well, what are you doing? I'm gonna, we're gonna painstakingly write down the flowchart of your brain. And then as you make those decisions, we're gonna note down the trees that you go through.

If yes, go here, if no, then full stop, it's fake. And it turns out that we can send a tiny picture of the stitching to someone and say, does this stitching look like this stitching, the real one?

And that person go, yes, they have no idea that they're working on whether it's a fake Gucci bag. And computer models are still terrible at stuff like that. But a human can do it in five seconds, three seconds, look at it and go, yeah, that's the same, or no, that's not the same.

And so that's 10 Satoshi's for that job, 20 Satoshi's that job. And then that person working somewhere in the world can earn Bitcoin. And I would argue that for 99% of the people who signed up for Stackwork, this is the first Bitcoin and they never knew what a Satoshi was.

That's our most common question is, what is a Satoshi and what do I do with it? They just know that they can earn something of value. And so that's how Stackwork works. It's dividing up the tasks, giving them the people around the world, letting them on their own time with their own phone do the task and earn Satoshi.

So we are, the fiat touch point there is, the company is paying us in US dollars. We buy Bitcoin, we put Bitcoin in the lighting channels. The people do the tasks, transfer the Bitcoin, so Satoshi's over lightning to their Sphinx wallet or whatever they're using.

And that is basically for that end user. Instead of like most people going to a KYC exchange, like Coinbase or something and turning fiat into Bitcoin through that exchange, these people are literally able to turn their free time into Bitcoin.

And so that's incredible. That's a different on-ramp. And it really has the benefit, I think, of dropping Bitcoin into remote countries, into people who don't have Twitter necessarily, or don't have the time to save money, go to an exchange, learn about the value of Bitcoin,

take money that they need to pay bills every day, carve it out and say, "Yeah, I'm gonna buy this asset that goes crazy on price, "and I'm gonna hold onto it until it raises the value. "Is that a realistic path?

"Is that a fair shot at getting into Bitcoin "for people around the world?" I don't, that's a tough pathway, can be done. But that's a really rough set of hurdles to get over. So is it a benefit to lower those hurdles?

I think so, I don't wanna automatically say it's good. But I do think that it's at least interesting. And when we talked about the censorship thing before, well, part of censorship is you just never hear from a lot of people around the world, 'cause they're not connected to this entire high brain

that we have out there with all of these social graphs and everything. So maybe the original censorship is accidental that you just aren't even on the radar. So, yeah. - Yeah, there's a few things in there.

I mean, firstly, it's helping connect people and Sats who otherwise wouldn't probably have exposure to Bitcoin. And generally, I see that as a good thing, people having exposure to it. I let you say it connects people who would otherwise not be able to participate generally in some of the ideas and what's going on.

And it may be that they're just doing some micro tasks at first and they're earning some satoshis, but it might get them curious to think, well, what is this? And, you know, is it something I wanna hold on to, not just exchange for goods or for fiat?

Like, maybe they actually see that this is something that is of more interest. And that's probably a better way for people to learn by actually using it than just, you know, I know people who have bought a lot of Bitcoin, they store it on an exchange, they have fucking no idea about the network side of this.

They don't really care, they just go, number go up. That's all I want is number go up and then I wanna buy this car. And that's fine, but to me, the way of introducing people, the way you're doing it is much more interesting.

And it's people who are kind of a want them involved. You know, I want people who have had different life experiences. I want people who might have had it a little bit harder. I want people who aren't just, got it sat there just so that they can get a different car or some other bullshit.

Like, we want real people who have ideas to be entering the space, that's when it's really exciting. - That's 100%, really. I mean, it's, if we're going through this incredible transformation at the base layer and that person buying it for the car is playing a role in Bitcoin.

It's part of price discovery. 100%, they're playing their role. It's not as interesting as it could be, but I'm not gonna knock that, that's something that needs to happen. And when that number does go up, when we saw it a lot over the holiday period when the price of Bitcoin went up and some stack workers had left some balance

in their accounts of doing the work they can volunteer, they can voluntarily withdraw periodically whenever they want. And they noticed that the value went up because they hadn't withdrawn and spent it.

And then we started hearing more calmly, I try not to spend, I actually leave it on stack work because I won't spend it. And then when I withdraw it to spend it, I really try to do everything I can to spend other stuff first before I spend this because they absolutely saw a huge ramp up in price.

I mean, they went five to six times up from when they earned it in the fall and we've had people on the system for over a year. So some of the people were earning Satoshi's when it was $5,000.

So you're seeing a 10, 11X growth on the asset. So that little, could we tell someone that in an article and would they get it maybe? But if you turned your time into Satoshi's, then you see the value go up, then that's a more visceral learning than anyone describing it to you.

- Yeah, absolutely. And the type of people that are doing this kind of work, I think from a previous discussion we'd had, you'd said mainly it is abroad and I think you said you were sending phones out, is that right?

Just to give a bit of a clearer picture for people so they understand how this sort of the flow works. Where are you finding the people who are earning the SATs and how'd you go about doing that?

- Yeah, it really was thanks to Elizabeth Stark and a couple other people who tweeted about what we were doing very early. And I don't think, I mean, we've never posted anything publicly.

We just put up a webpage at stackworkstakawrk.com that's really readable and explains what we do, I think last Friday. So this was, we have plenty of people who wanna do the tasks and now our goal is to spread the word to companies that need this work and get that out onto our system.

And so one of the hurdles that we heard from people was that they actually didn't have a phone. And so a smartphone to be able to do the tasks. So we've started to actually buy phones for people and then we put all the bookmarks and Sphinx on the phone and then send it out to people so that they can do the tasks

and it takes about 20 minutes a day for six to eight weeks to own the phone outright. And everything extra you get to keep and is part of the earnings that you get. And people are earning five, 15, we limit the number of tasks per person per day 'cause we don't want someone just sitting there 10 hours a day would not be good for anyone.

And so we see just when we check, we look at and go, okay, five, 10, $15 a day on the high end is about right for us in terms of targeting how much earnings per person 'cause we'd rather see more people earning $10 a day than one person earning $100 a day.

- Yeah, you get more people involved. And like you say, I suppose it would probably be for some people who would just sit there all day and night. There are times in life where you just need money, you need to earn and there's no other option.

And then all the ideas about caring for oneself goes out the window, you just work. I guess that can kind of be dangerous. So it's probably a good thing to rotate. And I'm sure if someone was that desperate, they can go under other names unless you take ID and that kind of stuff, I assume.

- Yeah, we can, we really try to use the referral system now that we have a good base. We have just under 20,000 people registered. And it's kind of, no one who registered early knew what this was about and we're able to really jump in in terms of trying to scam it.

We think we've gotten rid of a lot of the people who were trying to just test it out. I mean, I'm sure there's people in there who are using the system in ways we don't expect, but we now have a pretty good auditing system where if you do poor work or repeatedly don't do the job so the way the customer wants them done,

then you lose your login. And then by having the referral system, you get new people in and spreading that around, it's much harder to actually get back in if you were doing a bad job before.

So we've tried to make it somewhat hard to civil attack the system with fake user accounts as much as we can, but it's not, it's not, it's all part of the process having to weed some of that stuff out.

- Yeah. - With all the stuff that you're doing, I mean, it sounds incredibly busy to do the things that you're doing. You're still getting a little bit of time to do some creative stuff. I know obviously you like your artwork and like you said, you've worked creating previously.

Is that something you get any time for or miss? - You know, I have kind of a prioritization where I do the things that I would and best able to do at the moment. So for me, creative outlet is working on product is so creative and I have two young boys, I mean, 13 and 14.

So we spend a ton of time outdoors. We try to hunt and camp and fish as much as humanly possible. And so I prioritize that. And when I'm older, painting, playing the violin again, all those things that I used to do that I know I'll enjoy doing, I'm okay with waiting on that a little bit.

If I prioritize this now, I won't have 13 and 14 year olds to have fun with and hang out in the woods for forever, right? So I just try to prioritize things that way, even if it's temporary.

It's okay that later I know I'll get back to those things. And so I'm not, it's not particularly stressful. But I do, I mean, talking to you is I really do miss the visual art side of things.

And I really feel like I watch for who do we think is, and maybe you have some ideas, but who do you think's doing the most interesting job of looking at this moment in time and capturing it in whatever art form?

I know you're voting somewhat with the people you feature, but what are you seeing out there these days? - I think it's really hard to say who's like most finger on the button. Everyone sort of hits it slightly differently.

I would say some of the memeers in the space are doing a particularly good job. They are pointing out some of the crazy things that's happening in the traditional world in a fun, jokey way, whilst also pointing people towards a better system.

That to me sort of really shows what this space is about. Like, there's a lot of smart people, but they don't take themselves too seriously. And they all have a common goal, so they'll work together.

And I think, yeah, some of the meme is particularly good at that. One of our own self-banks, we've got RD and many others that we featured who have just really nailed that. - It would be wild if memes are the new, or memes have been around forever, but the digital meme being the new high art form.

(laughing) - You never know. You never know what's gonna happen. I mean, it is certainly an art form. I don't know, it's very good to convert people, some of the art in the space is obviously as well.

And the music and video is particularly powerful as well. So that's why we try and get so many different options for people to have a look at, because everyone's different. It hits them differently.

For me, someone like Cypherpunk now, I don't know if you have seen this out before, but he was, I think, the first artist we featured, he's someone I absolutely love his work. And Yonat Vax recently, and Mr. Crown, obviously, who we've talked about, 'cause he does our website, but he also does incredible work with his artwork as well.

So there's almost too much to really pin down who is gonna be the one that people look back in 20 years. Maybe it's all of them, I hope it is. - Yeah, maybe back in the day there was, you would be exposed to so much less, if you think about how many digital images or thoughts or memes were exposed to per day.

The sheer volume and the sources are so varied that maybe it's hard to be nailed down as the one. And maybe the whole thing is almost like a meme soup or something that everyone is contributing to.

So maybe the wrong question is boiling it down to one creator. It's more about the whole river of ideas coming out. That's kind of the way I'm looking at it these days. - Yeah, for sure. I think that's why we've taken this month and month approach across all the categories, is that there's just too much.

So we just try and cherry pick what we see right then, that month where we're just like, wow, this needs to be talked about, this needs to be showing and we're gonna show it. And yeah, there's just too much, it's too vibrant.

And these things cross over a lot of people that we're speaking to are creative in so many ways. And I can just speak to you now. It's like, I'm sure that when you've done what you're doing here at the Bitcoin space and when the kids are growing up, maybe you'll go back to all painting and who knows a few hundred blocks down the road,

it might be that we're speaking again, but it's not for code, maybe it's for art or for music. And that wouldn't surprise me at all with many of the people that I speak to because they are passionate and they're excited people who wanna create.

- It's kind of interesting because if we were to picture a hundred years ago, if we showed people washing machines and electric scooters and all the things that are time savers to someone who spent half hour walking for water or an hour washing clothes by hand in a bucket or whatever, I think the perception would be,

what do you people do all day, right? (laughing)

- The fact that if you broke down wage earning versus whatever, I bet you it's just, we just have a similar percentage breakdown dedicated to sleep, earning, eating, whatever it is. And it's kind of odd that we're constantly, despite whatever productivity gains don't necessarily seem to carve out that time

where you're sitting in the woods practicing the violin or something the way you would picture it with all these modern conveniences, right? So I wonder if we'll ever reach that era or are we somehow just enslaved by our own greed to keep working on things?

(laughing) I mean, I think for us now, it's about curiosity. It's just, hey, we wanna fast forward and see this future exist. And it doesn't feel like work, you're just trying to make something exist that you feel like should exist.

And then whatever happens after that is just interesting. It's just like, I wanna see the end of this movie. And that means, I mean, to talk about health a lot, but it's, why wouldn't you focus on making sure you're around and you feel good?

And then you try to build toward the future. So you're trying to extend out your productive and happy lifestyle or life days. And then you're trying to pull the future inward by building things and exposing things to people.

And a lot of the work here that I see that memeers do and collecting the artwork together and showing people and exposing them in an emotional way instead of a factual way. I think that's pulling the future toward us now so that we can experience this as more people understand that something big is going on here.

So I would say there's people out there like the Plan B or whatever it's called, the Stock to Flow Model, right? So there's these charts and people, there's certain people that will look at those numbers and be convinced.

Then there's other people who will read Mysis Institute stuff, right? And be convinced from words. And then there'll be other people I think that are just what the entry point for them will be seeing this cool video or something like that or a movie or something that really is more of an emotional bridge than this kind of frontal brain

like Excel spreadsheet type stuff. So I wonder if this is the role that 21 is in this playing is just walking into the emotional side. - I hope so because the emotional side is something really important.

And it made me think when you're saying, well, we've got all of these washing machines, dishwashers, all these things that do things for us and we should have more time, but we don't. We have less generally because, well, probably partly because of inflation and the money's fucked

but also it's just kind of the way that we have wired ourselves or the society's moving, which is very, very high time preference. It's not really getting back to nature. It's not grounding yourself and realizing what's important which is your family and your health and your time and enjoying time doing what you want to do.

And I think that should be something that people think about emotionally. Like the fact that people can't spend time with their family and got to work several jobs and they're not happy and then they go and spend money on some stupid shit that isn't going to really make them happy.

I'm hoping that we can unlock or open a window so people can see that this is possible and that there is a better, more enjoyable way to live. It seems certainly to me, even though at the moment I completely neglect my health and I know I do it just because I'm too busy and trying to build stuff and sort of get things off the ground.

I know I do it, but I know I can't do it for long 'cause everything has to be lined up. You have to have a balance and the whole world outside looks very unbalanced at the moment and I'm hoping we can restore some of that.

- Well, I didn't figure out the health prioritization until I was 40, so I can emphasize that when you're building and focused on something, it's really easy to ignore it. But if it's at all possible, just try to carve out 5%, 10% of your brain's face and time and you'll get back 25%.

That's the funny part is that you will through sleep and food and just, I mean, all the impacts on how your dopamine system works and everything, you'll get back easily tenfold the investment.

It's the easiest no brain or compounding return you can get. And I think that this is why the Bitcoin or health intersection and food intersection is so popular is because once you start questioning things, you start questioning advice from all these different sources.

And so, yeah, I mean, everyone finds it in their own time, but if you just set it as a goal to try to do 5% of your research, just follow a couple people on Twitter that are talking about these things.

I read a book when it came out called "The Big Fat Surprise" by Nina Tischals and that got me started down the rabbit hole of questioning health advice. So it sounded absurd. I mean, it sounded crazier than what Bitcoin sounded like at the time and then you go down this rabbit hole

and you realize, wait, we've been wrong about cholesterol. We've been wrong about all these different things and it's just infuriating. Except it has a more immediate return on health and lifestyle.

I mean, how much more real does it get? I would argue that that's even more immediate impact than unsound money, which is maybe a second order fix will be to fix these things, but why wait, just do it now?

It feels incredible. - Do you sound like you went through a half-inch cycle of your own by the sounds of it? - Yeah, definitely, definitely. And you, yeah, you can't ring that bell hard enough without, but it's the same time you can't force people to do anything.

So it's just, you can't force someone to appreciate what Bitcoin is. You can't force someone to appreciate that probably there's things they can do to optimize their health that they don't even see the benefit, right?

'Cause they've never experienced this kind of pop before of, well, I didn't even know I could wake up and feel that way every day. That's what I feel like is the aha moment that would be great for people to have on the health front.

And with lightning and what we're trying to do, I just really feel like the peer-to-peer communications, peer-to-peer commerce, and what can you apply that to? I mean, we really did come at this from a health and food where food equals health, health is food, and being able to get the right advice on food through an uncensored platform,

because a lot of the advice about keto and carnivor and all these things do sound outlandish to the establishment, and they will censor it, and they do. And there's all these people that want you to eat soy or whatever it is, and they truly believe that might be healthy, or they're paid to believe it,

or whatever, it doesn't really matter. It's fundamentally not backed by science and it's bad advice, and so could something like things help people get that advice? I would love that. And then because it's lightning, could you pay for that advice?

And then more people would be incentivized to work in health coaching due to that, and lead people from where they are to where they could be. I think there will be a role for lots of people to have that job, 'cause it's so many people are wrong about things, they're just lost, or listening to, you know, the NIH, or in our case,

you know, the FDA about what they should believe. Well, there could be an army of people that are around for 50 to 100 years re-teaching how this stuff works. And then the second step would be, well, it turns out we're, thought what was healthy is it didn't turn out to be the case.

Well, it turns out we're growing the wrong food, and we're growing it in the wrong way. Could you actually fix that? So that's the future. I wanna pull forward, and it feels closer, but still far away, but I really do think that that's what we'll see.

I just wanna see it sooner rather than later. Yeah, it makes sense to me that it would, with the sort of things like untapped growth is doing, with what you're doing, with all these ideas on diet and health that fly around.

It feels like all the information's there, just even just within Bitcoin Twitter. And it's just using a platform to link those people in exchange value, because it is so valuable to understand diet, to understand health, you know, you talk about low time preference.

Well, you haven't really got low time preference if you're doing what I'm doing and destroying your body, because there's no good in having these sats, if you're dead. Yes. Yes. It's fucking stupid.

Can we say that as many times as possible? 'Cause if you think about it, that would be the ultimate tragedy. If there's all these people who saw it, figured it out early, gathered it, but then didn't, and they have all this Bitcoin, but they didn't actually fix their health.

That would be ironic and tragic at the same time, because they have all the tools that you would need to have to question all these things, and obviously motivation. And you're not afraid to be laughed at, because you saw this thing that everyone was laughing at.

Yeah, every piece is there, no excuse. So just start, don't do tiny things every day. Works much better than some sort of dramatic. On New Year's, I will change everything about how I eat.

And these kind of big goals have artificial big dopamine spikes. So you actually, your brain, when you think of a huge goal, I'm gonna bench press 300 pounds, right? You've never lifted away in your life.

The goal of saying, "Hey, I'm gonna bench 300 pounds." I don't even know if that's a lot or not. I obviously don't bench, but it's like, this is just saying that goal out loud. Your brain plays it through as if you did it.

And it feels good to say that's a goal and do it, even though you haven't done a damn thing. So we just worked with people who were trying to say, "Hey, don't go for that free fake spike of the reward cycle saying the goal, a big goal, which feels good, but nothing ever happens."

It's way better to just say, "Hey, every day I'm gonna do the following tiny, tiny, tiny, little things and then grow them incrementally over time." But you get returns for those tiny actions.

It's just incredibly hard to stay disciplined and to do those things every day. So anyway, there's a whole industry about how to do that, but-- - Have it stacking. - And a lot of stacking is definitely the way to go.

And we try to teach that with the kids as much as possible, which is what we think they should be teaching in school or things like that. How do you actually impact change on yourself? Most people have no idea, right?

Oh, I could never give up blank. Yeah, you can, if you really wanna do it. There's just a methodology to it. Most people fail because they're going about it in the wrong way. And it's not one's eyes foot also.

- Yeah, it's tough, but yeah, I don't wanna, I don't mean to cut it short, but I should probably hop off soon just 'cause I've got a call coming up in, I'm actually a little bit-- - Yeah, no problem.

But yeah. - No, I'm sorry, I kept you. Oh yeah, I knew we were gonna keep this to an hour, but I was enjoying it so much, yeah. (laughing) I kept it over. So no, I appreciate you coming on.

I really, really am excited to see what comes down the line, everything that you're doing. And it's just a pleasure to have someone who is forward thinking and just trying to push the space forward.

And it seems you have a lot of interest in a lot of different rabbit holes. And yeah, been an absolute pleasure to host this. And we're very, very proud to have you on 21ism for BlockA. - Thank you so much for including me.

I'm really proud to be a part of that. That's really awesome. I've admired the site from afar. And I honestly say I never thought I would get this call, so I really appreciate it. (laughing) - Awesome.

All right, Paul, we'll enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks so much for this. And I'm sure we'll speak soon. - Thanks, Max. I appreciate it.