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00:00:01
Mira Hurley Revealed!
209 Plays28 days ago
Milan Dereede joins me to reveal that he's the person behind the Mira Hurley account, one of the most influential Nano Twitter personas over the last few years. He talks about his time at the Dutch Central Bank as a crypto enthusiast and his new venture as a full time crypto builder with his new LLM app, NanoGPT and how it's changing the world.
Reach Milan:
Twitter: @milan_dereede
Nano-GPT Website (KWC ref link): https://nano-gpt.com/invite/4mqDcWPG
Reach Keyword Crypto:
Website: https://keywordcrypto.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/keywordcrypto
Twitter: https://twitter.com/michaelcrupto
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Transcript
Introduction of Milan de Reide
00:00:00
Speaker
Do you have anything specific you don't want to talk about or you do want to talk about? Like what's up? No, not very specifically. Like nano GPT would be fun to talk about. Of course. Uh, I feel, I feel like you might bring up Mira.
00:00:28
Speaker
Hey everybody, this is Michael, bringing back keyword crypto from the dead, because we have a special, special guest, Mira Hurley, who's going to sound, interestingly, not like a woman. Mira, why don't you to introduce yourself? Hello, yes, I will sound more masculine, hopefully than ah most people expect me to sound, I think.
00:00:51
Speaker
But yeah, so my name is Milan, Milan de Reide, I'll pronounce it the Dutch way. But I think most people still know me as Mira Hurley. So also on Twitter, I think I've called myself like Milan formerly Mira Hurley. But that's yeah, yeah, yeah, I figured that would be the best way to do it to get people slowly used to it.
00:01:12
Speaker
I almost wanted you to start up a second account from Ilan and then have the Mira just as kind of like a historical account. But that might get too difficult. Right, yeah, that would have been possible, I think, but then I would have had to sort of start all over in terms of followers. That's true, yeah. So what I've done is I quickly claimed the Mira Hurley name or username on Twitter, on X.
00:01:40
Speaker
And I just put like in the bio that like Mira Hurley is now known as Milan with a link to my profile. So in case anyone got confused. So you mentioned this on, did you mention it on Twitter or did you mention it in DMS about why? Oh no, I, I mentioned it on the Twitter. I think I did this big sort of reveal post where, where I talked about the reasons for sort of doxxing myself now.
Identity and Career Revelation
00:02:10
Speaker
ah Do you want to explain it again here? Yeah, sure. So essentially, when I started posting on Twitter, I still worked at the Dutch Central Bank. And I really wanted to keep the two separate, because there's very little to gain on either side from like linking the two identities, right? like yeah Central bank people would not be very fond of me being on Twitter criticizing the central bank or explaining to everyone like how central banks are corrupt and cryptos the future. So there was very little to gain from that side. And at the same time, you know if you post on Twitter with people knowing that you work in a central bank,
00:02:51
Speaker
Anytime I would criticize Bitcoin, it would be like, yeah, but you're like a central bank shield. Anytime I would talk positively about another crypto, it would be like, yes, but you're a central bank shield. So I figured there was very little to gain. Also, like if I talk badly about central banks, they could always sort of use that against me later, people on Twitter, so that if I ever did say something about Bitcoin or whatever, they would contact the central bank. So I decided to just keep the two separate.
00:03:21
Speaker
for a very long time. and Nowadays, I don't work at the Dutch central bank anymore. I am fully in crypto nowadays. And so it seemed like time to do it. And then the other part is because we started a company for nano GPT, I'm actually just fully publicly docs now, like people can look up who the owners of nano GPT are, which one person at least had already done. Like they contacted me like I finally know So I figured, okay, you know, secrets out there, I might as well just do the full reveal. And yeah, it it comes with a lot of advantages. So it felt like the the benefits finally outweighed the ah disadvantages. Like I finally get to be on this podcast, for example, but which I really wanted to do for a long time. So yeah. We talked about it a long time ago. I know. Yeah. Yeah.
00:04:12
Speaker
ah Sadly, like despite how great AI is nowadays, it's really hard to do the live voice transcription. yeah And also that sort of felt like taking it too far. like I would get into this whole gender identity crisis, right? Yeah, I mean, look, I i i completely understood. I never And to anybody listening, I never pressured, I think, I think, I think you ah had a great persona and that persona was somebody who doesn't do podcasts.
00:04:46
Speaker
Yeah. And yeah, I can, I thought that not, I thought doing my podcast after, you after you had explained it, I was like, you know what? It probably better just to like keep the character alive and and and consistent by not doing random podcasts. Yeah. Yeah. that's crazy I think for the longest time that, that kind of made sense. Like I had to, but I was kind of sad about it every time because I do like talking about crypto And I got quite some invites to to podcasts and it always sounded fun. Like I listened to a lot of podcasts. I like, obviously listened to yours. And then I always kind of wanted to be on there. I feel like it's a great way to help sort of spread nano more. Now that we have nano GPT, it's a great way to talk about it and explain it more. So I always wanted to. So yeah, um I'm kind of happy that I can finally do that now.
00:05:39
Speaker
I am too. I mean i feel like it's it's definitely a next evolution of NanoGPT as being able to like actually know who the people behind it are yeah and have you talk about it publicly. I'm sure, I don't think it could possibly hurt. I think it can only be better for the for the app.
00:05:58
Speaker
and and nano in general, since you're one of the most vocal competent people around, it was, it was kind of difficult to constantly just having to tag you on Twitter about something. Cause it's not only that you're, you're competent, but you're also technically savvy in communicating. Yeah. You were the one who we could always count on.
00:06:25
Speaker
not to demean the, not to demean the person you're talking to. Yeah. I feel like a lot of that comes from Patrick though, to be fair. Like I would still, if people would ask for nano people on podcasts, I would probably still recommend Patrick and Colin because I don't know, they are far more technically competent than I am. They're good at it as well. But yeah, happy that I can contribute nowadays.
00:06:50
Speaker
Yeah, but I feel like, I mean, maybe it's just my feed, but I just feel like I don't see Patrick as often on Twitter. And I wasn't sure if that was- Yeah, what you're saying is I'm spamming your feed, right? Like there's a lot of Mira and now, no, no, I get what you're saying. They're both very busy, Patrick and Colin. So yeah, that's actually true. Yeah, there's probably more output from me than from either of them.
00:07:18
Speaker
Yeah. and i mean And that's all I meant is just in terms of output. And then you have, I mean, I had to actually pull back cause I'm just, I started catching myself being like ghost band and just being like, I am way too vitriolic. I'm way too aggressive. I'm way too much of an asshole. So I need to like tone it down and let mirror, ah you know, just keep, keep tagging mirror on these. I don't want to get into this. I don't want to be that guy anymore.
Journey Through Cryptocurrency
00:07:45
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny because I want to give a little bit of a, like a backstory of like how you got into crypto or what you did or how you got into the central bank or, you know, any of that kind of stuff. Cause yeah, sure. Yeah. Cause now that you're like, are you coding act? Are you actually coding for the GPT? Yeah, I am. Uh, I wouldn't say I'm the most competent, but I am trying. Okay. The way I usually describe it to people is I probably spend as much time as Hagi.
00:08:15
Speaker
on like programming our website. It's just, he's like 10 times as efficient. okay like he's He's a very competent developer and I'm just trying to use LLMs like literally using nanoGPT to develop nanoGPT further. So that's pretty funny. It's like a service building itself.
00:08:34
Speaker
Yeah, yeah yeah lo so my background is, I'll start with my crypto background. So I've been in Bitcoin since 2012, 2013, which I wasn't like super into it. It's just that's when I found out about it and tried it out a bit. And I played online games at the time, where sometimes we would get I would get paid to play this game.
00:08:57
Speaker
And I would sometimes also want to transfer to friends who helped me or something. And we found out about this Bitcoin thing, which was just a funny way to transfer money, right? Like it was cheaper than PayPal. It was pretty quick compared to PayPal and it's just this fun geeky thing. So yeah, that's when I kind of got started in crypto.
00:09:16
Speaker
And then got a bit disillusioned with it in 16, 17, like around the the block size wars, just because I thought both sides had like good points, but rather than like picking one side, I was like, yeah, I mostly think that against arguments are very good for both sides. So it kind of like made me less optimistic on Bitcoin as a whole, rather than being like very fond of Bitcoin cash or Bitcoin.
00:09:43
Speaker
So got a bit less active for a while, or while I was never actively posting, just like playing around with it, reading stuff. And then kind of got back into crypto with RayBlox and with Iota. Iota, I'm actually not sure how to pronounce it because I never pronounced it. Iota, but Europeans tend to say words different than the Americans, so.
00:10:04
Speaker
Yeah. It's also, I've only ever really written and read about crypto for a long time. So many of these words are like, I don't pronounce them very often. So no one can tell me I'm pronouncing them wrong. Well, you guys say, you guys say Nissen over there and we say Nissan. So it's like, there is, I mean, I feel like there's really no correct way. No. I mean, i I'll be in Europe and they're like, Hey, do you want a pair of Nikes? And I'm like, what the hell are Nikes?
00:10:29
Speaker
I'm like, Oh, Nike. Yeah, sure. Okay. you know So youre like I think Nike is the connect correct pronunciation, right? It's like the Greek, the Greek God or something. Nike.
00:10:40
Speaker
i don take three The guy who created the shoe calls it Nike. So so so even if it's even if it's pronounced incorrectly, yeah yeah the name of the shoe is Nike because that's how he says it. So I'm assuming. Yeah, fair enough. But I don't know if it's if he's saying it correctly. He could be completely saying it wrong. so Could be. could be no I think it actually is Nike. I could ask my my grandma. She's an expert on all this Greek historical stuff.
00:11:11
Speaker
But anyway, so what was I saying? I found out about Nano and Iota. Iota was a bad call in hindsight. like I was convinced. like It sounded very good, right? And I was convinced they could solve core decide. I was convinced they would decentralize over time. Never happened so far. So I'm i kind of not even keeping up with it anymore.
00:11:33
Speaker
But I thought Nano solved a lot of the issues that I saw with both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. Like I wanted something that would be the store of value. Like I saw the arguments for the store of value side, but also something that could be actually used as money. And Nano seemed like the only thing I could find that was sort of convincing enough that it could remain usable as money and also remain decentralized in the long run. So yeah, got pretty excited about Nano.
00:12:00
Speaker
ah started reaching out like on the on Reddit forums and in Discord, trying to learn more, ah spamming Colin with questions and asking Patrick 1,000 questions probably. like I would say 90% of my nano knowledge is Patrick and Colin. and They were super kind in answering every single small question I had. So yeah, learned a lot about nano.
00:12:26
Speaker
And then decided like, okay, I can actually contribute something here because by now I've learned so much yet I still feel a bit like a noob. So I can understand what people might not understand and try and write articles to explain nano in a very basic way. And to explain why, like, I think it might be a good store value, that kind of stuff. So yeah, that's how I started contributing in nano. And then, uh, yeah, nowadays, obviously moved on from writing articles and moved into.
00:12:55
Speaker
teaching myself how to develop, how to program and sort of, um, marketing nano GPT. I kind of want to call it like, uh, huggy folks is more on the tech side on like, how do we actually improve the service? And then my role is more talking to people about it, uh, seeing what they want to have improved and sort of spreading the word that this thing exists and might be useful for them. So we have a sort of good division of labor. And then in the times where.
00:13:22
Speaker
Like I feel like I cannot do any more spreading of
Nano GPT Features and Privacy
00:13:25
Speaker
nanoGPT. I try to contribute some some coding as well. Like this morning I added the ah stable diffusion 3.5 models and updated the claw. Hold on, hold on. Before before you get too deep into it, why don't why don't you explain what it is first? Because I feel like you and I both know we're starting talking about it, but people listening might not even know what it is. Oh, yeah. i'm So why don't you get a quick primer on that before we get into like the nuts and bolts of it.
00:13:50
Speaker
Yeah, very good point. Right, so nanoGPT, the simplest explanation is that we offer all the text and image models that you can think of. So chatGPT, Claude, Gemini, also the open source models like llama and stuff. And then for image generation, we have a ton as well, like flux, dolly, stable diffusion. We offer all of those models.
00:14:12
Speaker
but without ever anyone requiring a subscription. so like For me, it was very annoying that to access top models, I would have to pay like 20 bucks a month. And, uh, I kind of wanted to solve that. So we set up the service so you can pay just a few cents every single time you want to use a model. So you pay like one cent and then you get one answer from chat GPT. ah You pay two cents and you get like an image generated by stable diffusion. We try to collect all the models in one place so that sort of everyone can have access to all the top models without needing to get a subscription and without needing to give up your personal information. So.
00:14:51
Speaker
We're quite big on privacy. None of the prompts are ever stored on our servers. None of your sort of conversation history is stored on our servers. ah We have no clue who is talking to what model about what we don't want to know because we value privacy. Like given my history, ah you might sort of understand why I value privacy. So yeah, we're trying to decentralize access to all of these AI models.
00:15:17
Speaker
And then one of the ways we started that is by having nano as a payment mechanism, of course, because that way people can add literally like 10 cents. We've had people who added 10 cents, which to them was like a sizable sum, right? Like some people don't have that much money and they wanted to yeah use like the models for the most pressing issues in their life at that moment. And then, I don't know, it's just really great to hear from people. Like I spent literally 10 cents on your service and it helped me so much.
00:15:45
Speaker
So yeah, we're trying to make it so that everyone can have access to these top models. And yeah, that's now the GPT in a nutshell. And are you, so you said obviously photo and you said regular written prompts. Are you like with like llama, for instance, are you able to generate code? Yeah, yeah, you can do anything. Like code is one of the things I use it for most myself, just because That way I can help improve the website. I think it's one of the bigger use cases of people using these models is for code. So yeah, code definitely works. People use it for like medical stuff, which I'm not sure I would recommend, but as some people have told us, he's like, there was this one guy who reached out. He's like, yeah, I just got some medical advice from, uh, I think he used a chat GPT on our service.
00:16:36
Speaker
And he's like, yeah, it sounded great. I'm like, yeah, dude, I don't know. Like maybe get it checked as well. And he's like, yes, but like my village only has this shaman I can go to. So he was accessing it from, I think it was Nigeria or Kenya. And he's like, yeah, so like it actually is better than my sort of local options. So people also use it for that. Others use it for like storytelling, roleplay.
00:16:59
Speaker
ah writing resumes, writing ah thesis, all kinds of stuff really. It's just a sort of personal assistant that's really good at a lot of different stuff. Yeah, because I told you a while back when we were talking about the subscription model and and I was testing out a writing, something similar to nanogppt, but strictly for writing. And I came against the roadblock today where I clicked over to llama and I asked to you have some code created and it was like, I don't do that, sorry. Oh really?
00:17:35
Speaker
Yeah, so that's that's why yours is so exciting because to be able to do photos, eventually probably videos as well. Code is just like it's, are you already doing videos or is that in in the pipeline? It's in the pipeline. I've been playing around with it myself trying to get it added. And it actually already works like on our local version. The issue is It takes quite a while to generate video, and it's hard to get that to work right, like UX wise. So we have like video working in the back end, but it needs it needs some improvements before we can actually release it to people. But yeah, it's definitely something we want to add.
00:18:16
Speaker
And I mean, we're going to shield nano in this podcast. So just so everyone's aware, it's going to come up. It's I mean, Milan's, you know, obviously creating an app for nano to be used. But I want it it brings it back to the point that to me, Nana was always the great equalizer because rich people in the West were like, oh, you know, I had to spend $14 on transaction fees today. That sucked. Whereas somebody like you said in Kenya or Nigeria, you know, who lives in a small little village with a shaman instead of a doctor is like, oh, $14. I make that in four months or something like that, you know,
00:19:03
Speaker
And so somebody can literally use 10 cents and get a bunch of prompts, ah you'll get a bunch of answer ah questions answered using nano GPT and nano. And you cannot do that with any other cryptocurrency. I mean, Solana is coming close with, with low fees, but at the same time, you're still spending money. Like it's still slowly chips away every single time you use it. Whereas nano, nothing ever gets chipped away.
00:19:31
Speaker
If you have to start with 10 cents, you do one transaction for a penny, now you have nine cents. like it doesn't so like this is This is what people who are big fans of Nano really appreciate and kind of dreamt of the possibilities of of happening. Do you want to talk more about that? and like Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, this is obviously I've been enthusiastic about nano for quite a while. Uh, but this is honestly the reason we integrated it is it's not because we have some sort of vested interest in nano. Like I would gladly have sold my nano if something better had come along, but just it works so well for payments. Like it's ridiculous. Also just as a developer sort of to be able to test.
00:20:16
Speaker
and never have to take into account fees or like waiting or any complication is so nice. It's just you send one nano. Okay. Didn't, didn't work. Like it didn't trigger what I wanted it to trigger. Send one nano back and do it again. Uh, it's so clean in every way. It's just really nice to use.
00:20:35
Speaker
And then of course, as a merchant, it's perfect to be able to accept payments and not have to worry about any fees. Like we cannot accept a 10 cent payment with Stripe. Like if they charges more in fees than we would get like in in payment. So for that kind of stuff, it's really just hard to beat Nano. And yeah, we also added a few ways like that people can earn Nano on our website, mostly for those people that like have very little to spend.
00:21:05
Speaker
so they can have at least a bit more to spend. And even there, like people earn, I don't know, 10 cents. like What sort of traditional service is going to pay out when you have 10 cents in your balance? That never works, right? The transaction fees are always higher than that. So yeah, for those purposes, Nano is just honestly fantastic. And yeah, that's that's why we originally implemented it. We obviously also keep our treasury in Nano, which is something maybe many people don't know.
00:21:34
Speaker
We only kind of revealed it recently, but yeah, it's just a really strong combination of of being fantastic for payments and being scalable at the same time and being a really great store of value fundamentally. So yeah, I get excited every time I talk about Nano, I get excited every time I show it off to people and they're like, wait, wait, did it, did it already come into my wallet? yeah So yeah, it's, it's just ah really fun to play around with.
00:22:02
Speaker
I mean, it's, and it's still to this day, like the most basic of cryptocurrencies in terms of I'm just sending you value back and forth. That's it. And they're like, okay, what's the big, Oh wow. That was fast. Yeah. it's just like and it just stopped And still, I mean, Bitcoin's been around for what, 14 years now, 13 years. And it's still.
00:22:24
Speaker
Still like this is the thing that they could never do. no And somebody finally figured it out and I was just like, wow, okay. Yeah. And it's, it's also just, that's one of the things I also like about our website. I see and know people using our website to demonstrate nano. And it honestly just makes me really proud to see because you can see someone like opening up the website and going like, yeah, click at nano. And then they see a QR code.
00:22:53
Speaker
And then they scan the QR code, send the Nano and boom, it's there. So I'm at the network school right now, which is this Balaji initiative, which is a whole other story, but I keep showing off Nano and NanoGPT to people and the reaction is the same every time. It's like, did this actually confirm? Like is this actually happening? So it's just, it's such a fun thing to demonstrate. And there's honestly nothing in crypto to me anyway, that I've tried that comes close to that experience.
00:23:23
Speaker
Yeah. It's, it's definitely a wonderful experience to be able to send something back and forth over and over and over and over and over, and yeah infinite and never lose any value.
Privacy and AI Challenges
00:23:35
Speaker
And it's like, I feel like I'm playing a game of Pong with people or something like that here by old school. Yeah. Yeah. And it like, I kind of want to figure out a way to play play a game of Pong or something like that. And then when you lose, you get to keep the nano or something like that, that's whoever you're playing against.
00:23:51
Speaker
But, uh, why don't you, do you want to talk about kind of, are you, I mean, can you talk about where you are right now and what you're doing? Yeah, sure. Um, I also just wanted to add like about the ping pong nano back and forth thing. I think that was one of the issues with nano and maybe with crypto in general, like you would get sent a little bit of nano. We did this, these giveaways on Reddit, right?
00:24:14
Speaker
you would get a little bit of nano and it would be like, cool, you know, it transferred. And then it's like, now what do I do with it? Like, what do I do with 10 cents of nano? Like, it's very nice of you to give it to me with, yeah, what's to use. and so but So how many prompts can you do on like basic chat GPT for 10 cents or 10 cents? You can do like seven prompts, like seven average prompts. So it very much depends. That's kind of annoying. Uh, like it depends on how much input and output So we show a sort of median prompt cost when you hover over like the models.
00:24:48
Speaker
But there is a very wide range of of how high or low these costs can go. like You have people that use one of the top models, and then they throw in like literally a book. And then it it it will cost you, like I don't know, one nano for that single prompt or something. And then we have other people who can do 10 prompts for one cent because they're doing like smaller prompts just asking basic stuff, for example.
00:25:15
Speaker
yeah So yeah, it really depends. But the the general estimate is like, I think $1 gives around 60 chat GPT prompts. is the That's incredible. Yeah, yeah.
00:25:28
Speaker
yeah I don't think many people realize just how almost everyone who tries our service, I think, unless you're a big power user of these of these models, like you're doing i don't know hundreds of prompts every day, for most people it just works out cheaper to use our service once they've tried it. And even more so when you consider you can use multiple models and image generators,
00:25:51
Speaker
Whereas like if you want to use chat GPT and Claude, you would have two subscriptions. So it's already like 40 pounds or sorry, $40. So yeah, I think many people don't really understand yet just that this is possible sort of. Yeah, i I was doing the math with you when I was deciding whether to sign up for that. So for everybody listening, it's called Lex. And it's ah it's a writing app. And the AI is tied into it. And so you don't have to leave the app, but I i caught myself jumping back and forth to nano GPT. And then so we sat down and we did the work and did the math and you were like, well, if you do like X amount, you're going to save money using them. And if you do, if you do less than that, you're saving money using me. And so I just kind of wanted to support because like, they're a cool team. So I saw it got in any way, but I realized
00:26:46
Speaker
ton of limitations in terms of like, can't do code, can't do photos, can't do this. From a purely writing standpoint, it's great. And and I love yeah where they're going to go eventually and you like and the ideas they have. But if you're looking for an all purpose, just amazing experience. And like you said, you can jump between all the different, all the, all the different LLMs and that's also amazing. And to have all that for, for a penny, essentially,
00:27:14
Speaker
you know, per, per prompt is absolutely incredible. I mean, like, and like you said, it's, it's, it's the great equalizer. Anybody in the world can use this. All you have to do is say, Hey, can somebody loan me a penny? Yeah. I ran out, you know, and who's going to say who in the West is going to say, no bet, you know, beggar. I'm not going to give you a penny. It's like, of course they're going to send you a penny.
00:27:38
Speaker
yeah yeah you can help You can help people all over the world with with a quick prompt i mean it's just ah versus having to spend $20 per LLM. That's the other thing is like somebody could save up money for their for you know five months and finally get to sign up for the LLM for a month and then realize, oh shoot, I need to and i need another one too for what I'm doing. is just like yeah This is absolutely incredible. so If you haven't used it yet, just really fast, why don't you tell them the website.
00:28:07
Speaker
Yes. So the website is nano-gpt.com. It should be very simple to top up your balance. Like we have a nano, we have a few other of crypto that you can top up with ah very low minimums. We've added credit cards as well, like very recently, I think like ah five days ago, maybe where we have like a $1 minimum for people to add. And then we also have on the website, a usage tab, which people can go into and they can see exactly how much they've spent.
00:28:37
Speaker
ah So like worst case, like you try out the service with a few dollars or something. And then if you notice you're actually spending more than you would, if you got a subscription, like no hard feelings, you know, ah we're happy. We could sort of help you figure that out and help you figure out maybe which model you like best, because you can also just try them all for a bit and see which works best. Yeah. yeah Nano dash GPT.com.
00:29:00
Speaker
Go to it and check it out for yourself. Well, somebody wants llama because they're a coder. So they spend the money on a subscription. But then they're like, oh, shoot, I kind of need JetGB for this. Oh, I can just put $3 in, and that'll last me for two months for how little I use it. But I always have access to it. Or if if somebody throws a curveball at me and says, oh, I you know i need something from Claude. They're like, oh, OK, cool. Yeah, I got some money in Jet and NanoGPD.
00:29:27
Speaker
I can just use that really fast without having to sign up for a subscription or an account. It's also the fact that you don't have to create an account, but you can if you want to. It literally is the best of every world and a feel safe for people who need- Yeah, exactly. We feel that way too. Also because it's like many of these providers store your prompts and your compensation history if you have an account with them.
00:29:56
Speaker
And then they're like, yeah, we, we won't sell it. Like we're not going to do anything with it. Like we prefer it just to not to even be able to do that. Like we prefer, uh, like we don't have the prompt, we don't have the conversation. So there's nothing to sell for us. That just feels safer. We don't want your personal information. Like stay anonymous if you want to, because that way we can never sell your personal information. So it just feels cleaner to me to do it this way.
00:30:21
Speaker
I mean, in in let's say let's say Google never became evil and they promise, hey, we're not going to sell your information. The chances of them not getting hacked some point down the road, no matter how egalitarian and and you know optimistic and and privacy focused these people are, the chances of them never getting hacked in today's day and age with like every company in the world getting hacked at some point, like it's just better safe than sorry. It was like not storing anything. And so that's why it's, that's you know another great thing is you don't yeah have people who build models around you personally, if they get the information.
00:31:03
Speaker
I know it's also, you have this trend right now, which I see combined on Reddit sometimes where it's like, tell me what you know about me. And they ask it to chat GPT and they very proudly share like, Oh, it said this and this. I'm like, that's scary, man. I don't want chat GPT to like accurately describe, yeah, you live here. You do this. You're probably into this stuff.
00:31:21
Speaker
Like I, that'sm insane yeah, yeah. So, but yeah, maybe some people just don't care that much about it, which is fine. Like everyone can decide that for themselves. But yeah, obviously these like open AI, anthropic Google, whatever, they are the biggest honeypots ever at this point, because yeah you share your most private information, like even medical stuff and such with, with, uh, like open AI or whatever provider you use.
00:31:49
Speaker
And that's linked to your IP, to your credit card that you're paying with. It's very easy to link it all together. So I feel like, yeah, I hope they have very good security and protection and they probably do, but I feel like if there's ever going to be a big hack that is such a, such a valuable treasure trove of of data to have.
00:32:10
Speaker
Well, and and the worst part is they're doing the freemium model. Yeah. So how many people are just getting hooked on it using the free version? And then, you know, they're just building up these entire databases of information about these people. And I catch myself doing it with the with the chat GPT Mac app. I just got out of habit. I'm like, stop doing that. Stop using it. You know? And so it's like you have nano in nano GPT. Use it.
00:32:40
Speaker
yeah Yeah. No, but it makes sense. I also wonder sort of how many private keys and API keys and whatever have accidentally been sent to like OpenAI servers and whatever service, just because like you're copying a bit of code and sometimes it goes wrong. I've called myself at one point almost doing it. I'm like, no, no, no, not this not this Python program that I built.
00:33:04
Speaker
Yeah. So yeah, I've done that. I've done that with my, with my passwords to websites. Exactly. I thought I copied something over it and then I hit command paste and just enter really fast in duck dog go. And it's like, your password doesn't, doesn't show up in our, so you know, there's no search history for this password. I was like, thank God. it's like But now it's out there and it's like, damn it. Yeah. Yeah.
00:33:29
Speaker
Yeah, so yeah, we that's why we prefer just not even like ah just to be clear to to people. So all the conversations and all the prompts are stored locally on your device. So it's not like if you talk to one of the models, you can never sort of get the conversation back. but We just, if you use it on your phone, it's stored on your phone.
00:33:48
Speaker
unless you like clear your cache then the conversations are gone or you decide to click the delete button that we have on our website then we like delete it for you from your own cache but they yeah that's the place they're stored so you have this sort of full control over it yourself.
00:34:06
Speaker
And you said, so explain it to people because yeah I feel like I have, you know, an intermediate understanding of it. And you still had to explain it like seven times about why, what I was asking for couldn't really work or wasn't necessary. So explain the actual process of who owns the servers, what the servers do versus what's happening on your, computer on on the person's own computer.
00:34:32
Speaker
Okay. So you mean with the prompts and how to get sent and stuff, right? And in so in why this is a concern for some people, like like that one video I sent you. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. I know what you mean. So what some people prefer to do is to, you have open source models, which anyone can download and you can run them locally on your computer. It takes like some tech skill to set up, but it is possible. You need a strong enough computer for it, all that kind of stuff.
00:35:00
Speaker
But that is like the most private way to use a model because you can keep your computer completely offline. None of the information ever gets sent to any server whatsoever. ah So you can be like completely secure in knowing that your prompt isn't like sent anywhere, stored anywhere. We, of course, as an internet service cannot do that. So what we do is depending on which model you use, we see the prompt come in.
00:35:27
Speaker
and we sort of send it on to, for example, OpenAI. But all that OpenAI sees is that message without any IP linked to it, without any user ID linked to it, to OpenAI, all of it just comes from the same source, like one source, which is us. If you start a second conversation and you ask a different question, there's no way for them to link the two together. like They're just completely separate, nothing identifying them as being the same person, unless you copy and paste your name. Unless you hyped your name and address in each of your mumps. Yes, which I would not recommend. But yes, the video you showed was for people who want to do all of this completely locally. So essentially, you set up the model locally on your computer. And then I think what you sent was a way to then query that local model from an online service.
00:36:24
Speaker
So instead of using an actual online service, your request, like your prompt that you sent, gets sent to the model on your own computer. So that's obviously even more private. The downside is you don't get to use like Chet GPT, Claude, Gemini, all those models. And most people won't have a strong enough computer to actually run the bigger models because they are quite demanding on your computer. Like they're big files and they need like a good CPU or GPU.
00:36:53
Speaker
So for all those people who are unable to run local models themselves or also want like the closed source models and just a lot of different models, we're like as private as you can get pretty much. So I think that's essentially you're like like a Bitcoin or Ethereum mixer, but with prompts.
00:37:12
Speaker
That's kind of one way you can see it. Yeah. We're sort of a proxy in between you and whatever service provider there is. So for them, uh, like normally they would see your IP inside, of course, but like all of it gets sent via our, uh, like middle middleman, you can almost call it. ah So to them, there's nothing that they can do to see that it's you sending it.
00:37:35
Speaker
So yeah, and and in a way, yeah, a mixer has like kind of negative connotations, I guess nowadays, but that is sort of, it is a close. there legality yeah Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So just, but just to clarify, the LLM actually is still storing the prompt. They just doesn't know where it came from. So with all the services we use,
00:38:01
Speaker
No, no, we we don't store it. With all the service providers that we use, we have sort of the maximum privacy settings so that we delete, like we sort of request deletion of the data to the maximum that is possible. But with, for example, OpenAI, Anthropic, they store prompts for 30 days, I believe, for like legal reasons in case a government wants to sort of look at them. Yeah. yeah So for example, they're like ah They're very censored models nowadays. But if someone was to go, like I want to build a bomb, like give me instructions on how to build a big bomb, then that will be stored in the logs. And then I guess the the idea of it is, if there is then an explosion in the next few days in the place where you were prompting about, they can go to OpenAI and be like, hey, we saw like we know this happened. We think they may be used in LLM. Can we see your logs?
00:38:57
Speaker
And then what OpenAI would see is that the request came via our server, but like, unfortunately we literally would not be able to tell them what users sent that prompt just because we have no clue. But yeah, so OpenAI, Anthropic do store the prompts temporarily. They delete them. I believe it's after one month. I would have to look at their, uh, exact privacy policy, but then they store them in a way that it cannot be linked to you. Gotcha.
00:39:25
Speaker
And are you worried at all about it pointing back to you and then you not being able to point to anybody else about like eventually the government's maybe being concerned about that or?
AI Regulation and Risks
00:39:40
Speaker
Like you know in a way, I feel like all of the models have their own censoring built in, right? So it's like, if it's a question you can ask the model and get it to return something to you, then it's a valid question to me.
00:39:54
Speaker
If there's no way to get the answer from the model, then yeah, you won't get an answer from us either just because we have nothing to pass back to you. So I feel like it's not actually going to be possible to do this kind of stuff. But if if it is, then yeah, it's the same as running a model locally, unless it's like OpenAI. But then I feel like, OK, OpenAI is sending the answer back to us. So it's like they're filtering, censoring that's going wrong. If it's an open source model, yeah, it's a model anyone can run, right? like if If that's the kind of stuff you want to do, I would recommend just running it locally on your computer. That's probably the safest option.
00:40:32
Speaker
Yeah, which I think, yeah, I think people would not use our service for that just because it's not, even though it's got great privacy, right? Like if you're doing stuff like that, you probably want the absolute maximum privacy. So you're going to run it locally anyway. Yeah. And I mean, and it's a good point is that each of these LLMs are supposed to be censored for specific things like child pornography, like famous people being naked or stuff like, you know, like revenge porn and stuff like that. yes it's and i and i And I think that this is the one thing that hopefully governments will take into account is that they these LLMs have to be responsible for themselves. We can't expect everybody working in conjunction with them to do all the all the legwork when they're the ones creating it.
00:41:25
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of difficult, right? Like, I i don't know, we we have discussions about this here sometimes as well, because it's like, okay, you can create a deep fake online, or you can draw one yourself. And it's like, okay, how different are the two, right? Or I can, I don't know, write a story that's like, ah would not be or that would normally be censored by the models.
00:41:49
Speaker
And I can just distribute it to people or like put it in the photocopier or put it online. Like, yeah, it's hard for me sometimes to, it just makes it a lot easier to do this stuff, right? That's the difficulty. Like I would not be able to draw a deep fake of Scarlett Johansson and I'm sure there's many, many models that can do that for you. So it does become a lot easier.
00:42:09
Speaker
But yeah, I would say the legality kind of should be the same as just artists drawing it themselves, I guess. But yeah, I'm not an expert on this, sadly.
00:42:21
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it just, it does it does. I mean, my concern is that it, it becomes like the next Facebook where those companies are like, Oh no, we're just, we're, we're a service provider. We can't control what people put on the internet. And it's like, well, in this situation, they're the ones creating the reply. Yeah. yeah So hopefully government will hold them 100% accountable. Like I can ask, I can ask ah a physicist to help me create a bomb.
00:42:51
Speaker
Like it's his responsibility not to give me the answer to it. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Like at a certain point, you can't hold hold the person asking the question responsible just for asking the question, you know, up to a point. I think that makes sense, but at the same time, for example, Llama, Facebook released that as like an open source model and the version they released is like censored for this kind of stuff, right? So if you try and get it to tell you how to make a bomb, it will be like, no, I cannot do that.
00:43:20
Speaker
But then there's always people sort of hacking away at it locally to try and remove the restrictions it has. And then it's like, OK, then is is Meta still responsible? It's not exactly the model they released, but also this person hacking away at it would not be able to build this whole model by themselves. Exactly. So yeah, that that makes it difficult for me to to decide like what the best way to do it is.
00:43:47
Speaker
and I mean, they're going to have to constantly, it's going to be like a browser or any other app, you're going to constantly have to be patching vulnerabilities. And the new vulnerability is going to be people brainwashing the LLM into giving them information that it's not supposed to give them.
00:44:03
Speaker
and it's going to be like a social engineering hack where you convince the person at AT and&T to give you access to an account that isn't yours, that's essentially what they're doing with these LLMs, right? Because it's like, I mean, theyre they're doing a little bit of hacking, but there's people are doing it just verbally in communication with the LLM, tricking it into believing things that aren't true.
00:44:28
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that's, that's one way to do it. But another way to do it is to literally take the Facebook model, like say llama 3.1, and it has a bunch of parameters it's been trained on pretty much. But if you can adapt some of the weights in the model, for example,
00:44:45
Speaker
or train it in a slightly different way. Like it's an open source project in many ways or open source weights. You can change a lot of stuff in there and just run it locally on your computer. And there's no way that meta can then say, ah hey, that's not how you're supposed to use it, right? Or they would just have to stop downloads of it completely. It's actually the mixer example from earlier. So if someone puts code online for a mixer and it runs in a decentralized way or someone manages to run it locally to Yeah, where that's kind of difficult with crypto, I guess, running it locally. But like once open source is out there and people start messing with it locally, it's really hard for any company or entity to do something about it, even if they disagree with how the person is using it. So I see your point, but I think it's going to be really difficult to yeah stay on top of this really.
00:45:37
Speaker
I posted something on Twitter today because I mean, I feel like you and I are talking like just, you know, the first layer of the onion and there's, you know, a thousand layers down. And I just, I just feel like AI is the next atomic bomb. It's just a matter of when it's going to go off. You know, something big is going to happen with AI. And until that happens, like no one's really gonna want it to be you know legislated legislated to any great extent because they're going to like, oh, you know we don't we we want to keep growing and keep building, but like something big is going to happen. It's just a matter of of when, because this is too powerful of a tool for something insane not to happen with it. um yeah it's kind like I try not to think about it because it is super scary.
00:46:29
Speaker
Like how easily, like I think of those villages in India where people started spreading misinformation on Facebook and telegram, and then they went on a rampage and killed a bunch of people for su stuff that wasn't true. And that was just, you know, people spreading propaganda and misinformation on Facebook, let alone using something as powerful as, as AI and and an LLM. Yeah, that that's always the difficulty with it, right? It makes everything a lot easier. It's,
00:46:58
Speaker
yeah I guess the Facebook comparison is a good one because it makes it a lot easier to communicate with people. like I am not a big fan of Facebook, but you know it has a lot of positive stuff in the world as well. but then yeah It also allows people to to do to spread misinformation and WhatsApp allows you to message privately with your friends, but it also allows you to message privately with I don't know, a hit man. But an AI just amplifies all of that like times 100 probably. So yeah, I get your point. I think something will probably go wrong at some point just because a lot of people have suddenly gotten access to a lot more tools. The question is how bad would with the thing that happens be and kind of what can we do about it just because the running models locally
00:47:49
Speaker
for these bad actors is already possible and already they're quite advanced, these models. So I don't know, it's always too easy to say the cat's out of the bag, but it does feel a bit like the cat is out of the bag since like a year ago.
00:48:05
Speaker
I mean, somebody literally gave somebody a grenade, pulled the pin and just walked away and it's like, all right, be safe. yeah yeah And the person's like, what why am I holding it this way? and They're like, oh, you'll figure it out. It's like, okay. Yeah, it's it is it is kind of scary to think about, but let's let's not doom on the glu a focus on the doom and gloom.
Network School Experience
00:48:26
Speaker
ah Why don't you share with everybody what's going on out where you are right now?
00:48:30
Speaker
oh yeah so yeah okay so Since about a month, I'm at the network school, which if people haven't heard of it, I think if you go to ns dot.com, there's there's a bit about it. Essentially, it's um Balaji Srinivasan, who's an early crypto investor and a big tech investor in general. I think he's invested in like a thousand companies. He wanted to build a place where people that are excited about future tech, so like AI, crypto, honestly, just any sort of very tech futuristic stuff could come together and learn from each other, socialize with each other, also learn from like lectures that are being given. So for example, Balaji himself has spoken here a few times, but also Vitalik from Ethereum, a few others, I'm actually not sure to what extent I should be saying all the names, but like,
00:49:25
Speaker
big players in tech essentially come by here. So it's like a fantastic place to learn about all this tech stuff, to meet with other people, just randomly at breakfast, at dinner, whatever, because you're all in the same place, and talk about these sort of future subjects. And then there's also a big health component to it, because, yeah, one of the things you need is like people into tech. But if you really want to be the optimal version of yourself, you need to be in good health, like mentally, physically. So there's also, I don't know if people know Brian Johnson. He's the don't die guy. So he's very much into health, into longevity. And he and Balaji have set this up together. So one component is the learning and like learning about tech stuff and future stuff and AI and crypto. The other part is the health and wellness pretty much ah stuff.
00:50:20
Speaker
So we do like an average day is like you work out in the morning at like 7am, you have breakfast with a ton of interesting people, like some might be into AI, some are like into production, like video productions.
00:50:35
Speaker
Others are, I don't know, have set up a new form of governance for a startup city or something. Just a lot of very interesting people together. And then there's courses during the day either taught by like your co-network schoolers or by lecturers that are coming in. And yeah, it's just a great way to sort of bring together people who are enthusiastic about this stuff. And the long-term plan is to grow it to a sort of town or city, depending on how far into the future you're thinking. and like There's enough space to scale it up to 100 times the people there are now. It's a very nice place to live as well. it's a
00:51:16
Speaker
yeah It's surrounded by good people talking about the stuff I find super interesting with a big health component, which I also find super interesting. So I've been here about a month now and we'll be here another two months roughly. So the program starts with like a three month pop-up city. They call it from September 23rd to December 23rd. And yeah, that's the network school in short. And are you out there by yourself or can people bring family members or like, how does that work?
00:51:46
Speaker
Yeah, so people can bring family members. My co-founder might actually be coming over at some point, so that would be fun. i My girlfriend's also here. There's a few people who have brought their like family, their kids, a lot of people who are just here by themselves. and So they are here for like one, two, three months. Some people go shorter, some people go longer.
00:52:07
Speaker
So it's a bit of a mix of everything. I would say most people were hesitant to bring over their families at first, just because it's this completely new thing, right? And it's like, okay, let's scout it out a bit first. But but earlier during this conversation, the door opened and a kid walked in. So there are there are a lot of kids around here now as well, and actual families. So that's pretty fun. But yeah, it's a bit of a mix of everything.
00:52:33
Speaker
Nice. And what are you specifically doing there? I mean, like, are are you, is it just nano GPT focused or like are you like, explain what you're doing there. So what I'm doing here is not that different from what I do back home. So most of my days nowadays are spent working on nano GPT in some way. Uh, it's just here, I do the same, but my,
00:52:56
Speaker
breakfast, my dinners, my lunches and my random conversations I have during the day have gotten a lot more interesting ah just because you're surrounded with people who like are kind of into the same stuff you are but come from a slightly different background or have a slightly different topic that they know a lot of stuff about. So it's been super useful even for NanoGPT. Like ah one of the providers that we use actually happened to come by. I ran into him at the water cooler and he's like, oh, you're a NanoGPT. Yeah, I remember you guys. Like you were one of the first to use our service. ah So yeah, it's just, um I think it's, it's like a sort of incubator university vibe where you have a lot of people
00:53:37
Speaker
intelligent people interested in the same stuff. So it's a great sort of environment to be in, in general. Nice. Yes. But yeah, in terms of my day to day, it's honestly not that different from what I would do back home. Just more interesting people, more structured food and workouts. And yeah, a nicer, it's a very nice place to stay as well. Like it feels very fancy. Are you doing a lot of red light therapy? No, no red light therapy so far, unfortunately. So Talmadge who calls himself Brian Johnson's blood boy. He's like ah his son is here, but I haven't seen him set up red light therapy yet. Okay. So maybe that's like a V2 thing or something that's coming in the future. but It was funny. I was joking around with a family member today on the phone about and that came up and literally 20 minutes later, an article pops up from the New York Times saying or from Wirecutter saying, yeah, we we tested a bunch of red light. We don't recommend any of them.
00:54:34
Speaker
Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I haven't done it myself. So I don't know what to tell you about that. I can tell you the blueprint food is is surprisingly good. And it does all feel very healthy. Yeah, it's like, it tastes a lot better than I expected. Like the nutty pudding. I don't know how deep you are into this don't die blueprint stuff. The nutty pudding is fantastic.
00:54:56
Speaker
but Yeah. So essentially the Brian Johnson, who's the guy behind a blueprint and don't die. His whole thing is he wants to live healthily as long as possible, essentially. So he spent millions of dollars optimizing every aspect of his health over the past few years. And now he's kind of building that out to a thing that anyone can use or like get to 90, 95% of what he's doing.
00:55:24
Speaker
because like red light therapy or some of the stuff he's doing is expensive. But the basics are good nutrition, do your workouts, get good sleep. So it's like very basic stuff. But at the same time, that's often like pretty hard to actually do, right? Like getting good food, getting good nutrition. yeah Like, okay, do I have to cook all this like,
00:55:43
Speaker
difficult food every day and so here we just have all these blueprint dishes around us all day and very little in terms of bad food around us so you're not very tempted to get bad food and then nutty pudding is like the the breakfast that is in blueprint every day so it's like berries, nuts, some chia seeds, some olive oil and it just tastes fantastic which Yeah, shouldn't be surprising if you hear the ingredients, but I think many people assume like the very healthy food doesn't taste well. And I'm like, yeah okay this is, this is great. Like I could have 10 of these. So is blueprint essentially just like any of the other made to order meals that that are delivered to your door? So blueprint has like a whole a range of products really. So part of it is like the the nutty putting in a sort of powdered form.
00:56:35
Speaker
Some of it is supplements. Some of it is like an olive oil. I think that's actually the three main things like supplements, ah versions of the food and and olive oil. But blueprint is also sort of a whole health protocol for people to follow. So it's like emulating kind of what Brian Johnson does or like emulating 90% of it and just not having to think about, okay, what do I want to eat to today? It's just like, okay, cool. Blueprints got discovered.
00:57:02
Speaker
I can just follow the recommendations they have or like the weekly menu that they recommend. And then here that's made even easier for us because we don't have to cook it ourselves. We have like, we just have print stuff coming and you, you do pay for it. But you have blueprint stuff coming in and you just eat that and you know, you're like eating healthy. So yeah, I really like it to be honest.
00:57:24
Speaker
and what And what, what was the deciding factor that, that made you commit to going for three months? So i'm assuming you pay to go there, it's like paying to go to any school, right?
Transition from Banking to Crypto
00:57:34
Speaker
um Yeah. Yeah. So it's a thousand euro or a thousand dollars per month for the like school plus housing and coworking and everything, which I think honestly is really fair. Like it's not expensive. And I can tell you like it it is, it feels pretty fancy. Uh, and then food is it including the food.
00:57:53
Speaker
No, no, no, the food is another, I would say 15 to 20 bucks a day, pretty much. and So I think all in, you're like 15, 1600 a month, maybe. um Which for for a Westerner, isn't that bad? It's honestly not that bad. And like the facilities are just really good. Like I'm on Starlink right now, which is also kind of cool. There's like a ton of tech stuff going on. It's like yesterday, everyone got a DNA test ah in case they wanted to do one, just because it's like,
00:58:24
Speaker
Yeah. So, and and then other people set up some course here and you're like, Oh, cool. I never knew I wanted to learn about brain computer interfaces, but like nice to have an expert here. Yeah. So it comes with a lot of extras. That's, I mean, that's wild. That's insane. yeah Did you have to pay for the DNA test? ah No, no, just, um, yeah. Throw it in there. Nice. And is Starlink included? Did you get a pay extra for that?
00:58:49
Speaker
No, Starlink is included. like ah The Wi-Fi and the co-working and such are all included. Table tennis is included as well. And the the swimming pool and that kind of stuff. So that's why I say it does feel fairly fancy. like We were warned beforehand that this was going to be frontier, not fancy. And I got in here like, OK, if this is not fancy, then you know I don't know what is.
00:59:11
Speaker
You got to think of the people who are, who are funding it, like they're billionaires. So for them, it's not fancy. I don't know, man. Like if you saw it here, I, yeah, maybe it's not, but, uh, yeah, I can, like, if this is stuff people are into, I would really recommend looking into it, uh, or like contact me if you want to hear a bit more about it or more information. You can apply online. It's like, they have a ton of applications. So there's a bit of a backlog.
00:59:37
Speaker
But I think if you have like an interesting enough background or like a good enough reason to want to join, it's possible to sort of jump ahead in the queue in some cases. But yeah, look into it if it's something that sounds interesting to you. Like my experience has been really good so far. I'm not being paid to say this. I am paying actually for this. So yeah. Do you want to talk at all about your experience at the Fed or at the central bank?
01:00:08
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So I actually did a podcast about this just after I left the Central Bank, but it's in Dutch. So most people are not going to be able to to listen to it and understand it. But essentially, I started at the Central Bank in, I think, 2018. Must be 2018, yeah. And I did like a young professional program, which is a very fancy term for you do a few different roles within the Central Bank, a few rotations.
01:00:36
Speaker
And then I started in like financial markets, I supervised insurance companies, and then I ended up supervising ah banks, Dutch banks, mostly the FinTech banks. And that was honestly really fun. Like the teams are super small. I think I supervised most of those FinTech banks with one or two colleagues, and you just learn a ton about how these banks work.
01:00:58
Speaker
I've always been interested in the financial system. Like I was into crypto before I ever joined the central bank, just because I find that kind of stuff fascinating. Like how does it work? And I figured there was no better place to learn the other side than the central bank itself. So I had a few roles there. And then during my time there, people noticed I was sort of the crypto guy. ah So canize be the one yeah, no, it's hard, man. Like it's, I mean, many of the discussions in central banks are They start from the basis of deflation, very bad, inflation necessary. And I was probably the only person in the central bank that was like, okay, but like, let's actually look at that assumption. So those were always very funny discussions to me. But yes, I was kind of known as the crypto guy. And then at one point, the Dutch central bank was going to lead a working group on crypto, which is you have the IMF and you have the sister organization of the IMF.
01:01:58
Speaker
and assist the organization sets like policy internationally. So they are kind of the ones who would talk about, okay, this crypto thing is not going away. Let's coordinate with a bunch of countries and figure out like, okay, what should our policy around crypto be? So the Dutch Central Bank chaired that, or maybe still chairs, I don't actually know, chairs that committee.
01:02:22
Speaker
And so they needed someone who actually knew a bit more about crypto because frankly, most people within central bank knew like nothing about crypto. So they asked me if I would be interested in taking that role. And it sounded interesting, but at the same time I was like, okay, yeah, but it's like crypto within the central bank. Like how much can I actually do? And they were like, yeah, no, we can like, you can decide or help decide what the policy is going to be. And it's like, um you know, nothing is set in stone yet, all that kind of stuff.
01:02:51
Speaker
So it sounded super interesting. So I moved to that role, which I think officially I was a crypto policy expert or crypto policy lead, depending on who you asked at what time. And my role was essentially sort of largely advising our higher ups, like board of directors and stuff, like explaining to them how crypto works, advising them on what our sort of policies maybe should be.
01:03:17
Speaker
which honestly was super interesting in many ways because yeah you get to really discuss with people that have like way more experience in central banking than I did, but way less experience with crypto than I did. right So it was sort of the straddling of the two worlds was super interesting to me. But I got quite sick of it like fairly quickly just because turned out that the sort of freedom to decide on policy stuff was way smaller than I'd been told. So it would be totally fine to say something about crypto or to go a certain direction as long as that was like as long as it came with the conclusion of crypto bad central bank's good.
01:04:00
Speaker
So I kind of foresaw beforehand that this might be the case. So I just went into it thinking like, okay, you know, best case, this can be really good for crypto and for people in the Netherlands, in the Eurozone.
01:04:15
Speaker
It's great if central bankers at least learn a bit more about it. But then after a while, it felt very much like I was explaining the pros and cons of crypto because like obviously, there's also a lot of scams in crypto. There's like people trading meme coins and losing their money. And like there's also a lot to dislike about the way crypto currently works, or at least about trading in crypto.
01:04:38
Speaker
So I would explain the cons, but then I would also explain like, okay, but this, it can make transactions so much more efficient in many countries. Like people would love to own crypto rather than like being inflated away by their central bank. Uh, it's like a huge efficiency gain in every way. And, and then it would always sort of be like, that's very nice. Those, those like pros. That's great. But like, can we talk a bit more about those cons? Like, can we write those down for a second? Uh, so.
01:05:05
Speaker
That got a bit annoying. So at one point I concluded I think I am not contributing that much anymore. like It feels like I can do more positive for the way our financial system works and for the way we can expand crypto from the outside rather than being inside the central bank.
01:05:27
Speaker
So definitely had a good time there. um And um and like I'm not as big a central bank hater as many in crypto just because I think I know them a bit better. And I know like people don't go to work at the central bank with this sort of evil intention. They're like honestly all very good people and like very well-meaning people. They just come from a very different background where if those are your assumptions, for example, that inflation is needed,
01:05:56
Speaker
And that is kind of what it takes to get into a central bank. If that is your base assumption, it is very hard to understand why crypto might be good. Like if you're unwilling to challenge that assumption, then yeah, your conclusion is always going to be crypto bad, central bank's good. So they are in many ways doing the best they can just within a framework that I don't think holds completely true.
01:06:20
Speaker
So yeah, that's I afterwards I quit. I actually ended up doing the crypto policy job for only three or four months. I'm not completely sure. Left the central bank and well, like traveled for a while, became a consultant for a bit. And and that's afterwards I set up Nana GPT. That's pretty insane. I just can't. I mean, the fact that anybody in crypto used to work at a central bank is is pretty wild. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is quite funny.
01:06:50
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like it's definitely been useful. like I can really understand the central bank arguments as well. And I can understand that they are kind of just trying to do good as well. And many of the like the technology behind crypto, they are honestly like quite fond of in many ways. It's not like they want transaction costs to be high or for people to pay a lot when they do remittances, for example. They just cannot get over the fact that it needs to have a central point that they can like control in a way, or that they must be able to set the interest rates, and they must be able to set the money supply, and they must be able to like intervene in the market if necessary, that kind of stuff. and So it' it's sort of the weird part where they quite like crypto as long as it's centralized, which is like completely against the... Yeah, it's like there's no point then, pretty much.
01:07:49
Speaker
It's funny, because I feel like I'm somewhere in the middle of all that, where I think crypto is great, but I also think central banks are great, because there's no reason for Russia to invade the Netherlands to steal, what is it, the kroner? What's your balance? We have euros. Oh, euro. To steal your euros, because it's like whatever. It's like if every country has their own currency, I guess with the euro, it's different.
01:08:16
Speaker
you know It's just like when you go back to Russia with it, it's just like, okay, well, it's not. Whereas if you go there to steal their gold, gold has value everywhere and now all of a sudden you have this this you know international monetary tool. yeah And so I kind of feel that way with Bitcoin where it's just like they're going to want to steal from everybody. I mean, USD is essentially that because everybody accepts USD. So it's not necessarily the greatest argument of mine.
01:08:44
Speaker
But I understand the concept behind it. It's like, why would we want to let Russia manipulate the price of gold and affect our ability to do what we're doing in America if we're using the gold standard? It's like by having our own currency that we control you know the inflation rate or deflation rate. I can understand the value of that, as especially as the leader of a country.
01:09:06
Speaker
Cause he, even Trump was like that. He's like, Oh, Bitcoin sounds great. Bigger, blah, blah. And then it becomes president. He's like, Oh, and hell no. Because I want to be ruler. I want to be the king of this country is like, I want to have complete control over, over the, over the monetary system. This is like, why would I want to let, you know, people in Afghanistan manipulate the price of, of, you know, ah of, of my currency. And so I think, yeah I think people who aren't leaders,
01:09:33
Speaker
are very opinionated about central banks. And then once they become leaders, they're like, oh, this is actually really smart in terms of security for our own country. I think in a way it makes sense. I also think in another way, like do I as a citizen enjoy my money being debased?
Economic Implications and Nano's Role
01:09:54
Speaker
No, like if I could choose to hold euros that I know are being debased or I can hold euros that are not being debased, then I will hold the euros that are not being debased. So it's like in the end, the country and the leadership of a country consists of whatever people as a whole vote for, right, or what they want to happen. And and I feel like many people just don't really even understand inflation and debasement enough to like understand what's going on, I guess.
01:10:23
Speaker
Because I feel like anyone will tell like, if you give people that choice, like, do you want your currency to be debased or not? Like, everyone will say like, no, like, stop, stop making my money worth less. So I feel like that's kind of the the sort of difference in opinion between indeed the leader of a country and the people actually living in the country and holding the money that is being inflated away. Yeah, I guess like my counter argument to that is,
01:10:53
Speaker
how many $20 bills do you have from 10 years ago? Not necessarily 20, like not necessarily the bills, but like any form of money I hold in euros, like you do hold some money in euros, right? Like, or well, you don't, but like in dollars, yeah you presumably hold quite some money in dollars. It doesn't have to be physical, ah like physical dollars, but anything you keep in a bank or in dollars in any way is being inflated away. And,
01:11:20
Speaker
if yeah so If you're keeping like say a million dollars in your bank account and you're not doing anything with it, the amount of interest you're getting is zero. But I mean, I think they do that for a specific reason. If they give you a zero account like or like, you know, point zero one five, whatever interest rate because they don't want you to keep that money in the bank.
01:11:40
Speaker
because it doesn't do any good for the country. And so they encourage people to invest in stocks or invest in housing or invest in public education, or you know, whatever or schooling or like they want you to use that money and put it to use as opposed to just like kind of hoarding it. And that's why like, you know, the thing about like Elon, Elon being the richest person on the in the on the planet,
01:12:04
Speaker
Technically, like if his stocks all crashed tomorrow, he wouldn't he wouldn't be the richest person on the planet anymore because is most his money is tied up in investments in stocks.
01:12:16
Speaker
and like that potentially is generating income for the country as well, and you know and people investing and in getting dividends and stuff like that. so My argument is like yeah amount of people the amount of money people are actually holding, and they're like, oh, it help it hurts poor people. No, it doesn't. Poor people spend you know, 90 to 100% of their paycheck every single month. They don't have any money left over. And if they do, they're setting up for a vacation, which they're you know using within a year or something like that. So like your money isn't being debased within one year, you know, and any kind of perceptual change. So like, like that's kind of my argument against that. So I see it from both sides, but and in terms of like our modern system, most people are
01:13:08
Speaker
especially the younger generation, they're investing in stocks, you know, like with Robinhood now being making it so easy. Yeah. And E-Trade and all these different, ones you know, old school people, like, OGs will know about E-Trade. But like, you know, we've got these, these investment tools that allow us to not have money sitting there doing nothing.
01:13:29
Speaker
Yeah. yeah i like I can agree with that to an extent, but I also think the more, the higher your net worth is, the less or the lower the percentage you will have in cash. Right. So in a way, this is sort of quite a regressive tax. It's mostly a tax on people who haven't reached the level of I have a million. So I'm going to put most of it into stocks. Like if you have $5,000 saved up.
01:13:57
Speaker
you're probably not going to be putting it into stocks, I would assume. Yeah. Like you want to have like this, this sort of backup savings fund or whatever. Um, and then that's considering the US should have six months rent saved up or like so six month expenses saved up.
01:14:12
Speaker
right Yeah, that's that's a fair bit, I feel like, for most people right to have that saved up. yeah Most people don't have that. No, I was going to say, that's that's hard to get to in the first place. so And then the US and the EU are honestly the best countries for this. like it's Those are very rich places to be. right so And it's easy to invest in stocks. Whereas if you look at the majority of other countries, so we traveled South America the past year for like six months. Argentina is like an annoyingly beautiful example, like not very beautiful for the people there, but like they are getting inflated away so much. And a lot of the, a lot of the economy is still cash-based, right? And people save up by just putting money into the mattress or like a very basic bank account or whatever.
01:14:59
Speaker
They're not like investing in in stocks while they're trying to get the money out of the country. But like frankly, their money is mostly being inflated away. ah So yeah, I think it's in a position of luckx luxury like ours honestly is. Yeah, you're not going to notice it 2% a year or whatever it is. like That's why I don't expect the EU, the US, or Japan, whatever, like richer places to be the first adopters of this or like the most enthusiastic about this.
01:15:28
Speaker
But there is a lot of people in the world for who it makes a lot of sense that you don't want to hold stuff in cash because your cash is just being heavily debased, like way heavier than the 2%, 3%, 4% that we're used to.
01:15:40
Speaker
And I feel like for those people, crypto makes a lot more sense. And for those people, they like at one point, it will make sense for every everyone, I think, just because if you can choose between the basement or know the basement, everything else equal, it's going to make more sense to go for know the basement. But for us, the push is not that big. right The push factor is like the 2% or whatever. So yeah, I get your point to an extent, but I think it's It is quite relevant to a lot of people, I think. Well, and and, you know, just to be clear, I was talking about America alone. I'm not talking about any other country. Yeah. because Yeah. in And the same thing goes with crypto. It's like the vast, vast, vast majority of people in this country in the US don't need cryptocurrency. Yeah. There's zero benefit because they they don't they don't have a need for it. Why would they want to take a risk on it? And I'm like, well, you're not thinking about people in
01:16:38
Speaker
you know, Nigeria, Kenya, who, you know, don't have a local doctor, and he'd ask some questions on on nano GPT, like, Oh, yeah, well, yeah they also are probably going to have a different financial system in terms of inflationary currency. And and they may. So yeah, to make like say in relationship to to the US s and parts of Europe and and nothing else. So yeah, exactly. Like, this is also sort of the thing I often had at the central bank where people within the central bank would be like, but we're doing like a pretty good job at like keeping inflation low or whatever. I'm like, yeah, i'm I'm not trying to explain like that Dutch people would be the best suited to move to a crypto standard or whatever. I'm just trying to explain to you why people, why there are so many people in the world who are enthusiastic about this and who see this as very important and as a way of empowering themselves rather than like having central banks decide stuff for them.
01:17:34
Speaker
So I, that's like, we don't explicitly target an nano GPT at like richer countries, right? i I would much rather have a lot of people who can spend 10 cents only via nano than like one person that can spend a hundred just because like, if you can spend a hundred dollars, like you're good. You, you, you can add funds via credit card anyway. Like you don't really need nano and yeah.
01:17:59
Speaker
So yeah, I feel like there's a lot more to gain for people in countries where like inflation is higher or you don't trust your government or you don't trust your banks. That's like a lot of reasons for a lot of people, I think. Yeah. I mean, your bank could get blown up by the Israelis overnight. You know, like Lebanon just did this yesterday or the day before. I mean, and even Lebanon itself is a great example, right? Because I think many people there had their money in banks.
01:18:29
Speaker
And then I'm not sure exactly whether the country decided to devalue the money and just didn't allow people to but withdraw the money or like it didn't get devalued, but people couldn't withdraw it anyway. I would have to look up exactly what it was. But like for people like that, it's like, yeah, obviously I'm not going to trust these banks anymore, right? I'm yeah going to do whatever it takes to get my money out some way out of the system. And then for most people, the only option is cash, but then the cash gets inflated away.
01:18:57
Speaker
So yeah, I just wish more people had easy access to crypto, like they didn't have to sort of suffer from this, yeah, lack of power, lack of being able to decide stuff yourself, really. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and look, I mean, all they need to do is put it in the stable coin that is Nano.
01:19:18
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it is quite stable, right? A little bit of a Nano slam right there, you know? Yeah, yeah. like I don't mind it too much. I feel like people don't, like I am obviously not very good at predicting prices. I have never been an active trader. I just see this as a long-term thing, like crypto as a whole, but also nano specifically. I like would be very bad at telling you if the price is going to be higher or lower in a week from now.
01:19:42
Speaker
I just see nano fundamentally as like a great store of value and a great medium of exchange, which I think people like insanely under appreciate just how well it works. And I also think people really under appreciate how badly Bitcoin works, both as medium of exchange and store of value and a lot of other crypto as well, to be honest. So to me, it's more of like, a I don't know, 10 year thesis or something that people will eventually figure this stuff out. And, yeah you know, maybe I'm wrong.
01:20:11
Speaker
but Yeah, that's the way I see it. And it's also it goes back to the idea, like, you know, it's it's physically impossible to create more nano, right? Yeah. It's not physically impossible to create more Bitcoin. It's happening out every single 10 minutes. And so and you just have to trust because I was I was I went on a phone date with this with this woman and she actually was into crypto and she brought it up and I was like, oh, thank God. Now we can talk about it. And I don't have to feel, you know, freaked out by like, yeah.
01:20:40
Speaker
But she was like, oh, well, you know, but Bitcoin only has 21 million. And I was like, no, it doesn't. And she goes, well, it's it's going to. And I'm like, how do you know?
Critique of Bitcoin's Limitations
01:20:50
Speaker
How do you know it's not going to keep going once it hits 21 million?
01:20:55
Speaker
And she goes, well, the debt, and you know, and I had to explain to her like, well, there's only X amount of developers working on it right now. And there's one person who kind of decides the final code that goes, get gets pushed through. So it's not very decentralized. It's not, you know, so she had been hearing like a lot of kind of a lot of like pro Bitcoin narratives. And she's like, well, you know, Ethereum can easily, you know, the developers can get hacked or, or blackmailed. And I was like, so can the Bitcoin developers. It's like, there's no, you know, like anything that can happen to one, you know, one like proof of stake or proof of work can happen to another one. Like there's no yeah magical, you know, magic invisible force shield around them. No, in the end, it's like whatever the node runners decide to run, right? Like if you write code that says,
01:21:45
Speaker
which I think like in Bitcoin might happen with like a till emission if I feel like the security budget discussion will keep coming up over the next few years. So maybe people decide, okay, it is worth it to add a till emission so that there is enough money going towards security and then stuff can be changed. it's It's not like it's sort of locked in stone or whatever you want to call it. yeah like It is a changeable thing.
01:22:12
Speaker
There's a very strong social consensus, I think, that like 21 million is the absolute limit. So it is difficult to change that. But yeah, you know the way Bitcoin security works, you need to be able to pay miners. And if there's no other way to do that than through like a till emission or whatever you want to call it, then who knows? Maybe maybe that's the way they go.
01:22:34
Speaker
i think I think one of the biggest disservices the Bitcoin community did to their users and to crypto people in general is using the word immutable without any understanding of what it means because like it's literally written in the white paper that it's not immutable. yeah yeah like the whole The whole defense mechanism is that the chain can be rolled back if it needs to be.
01:23:02
Speaker
if enough if there's enough consensus. like That's literally the opposite of immutable. so yeah yeah and But in their mind, because you you know Nick Carter or whoever says, oh, no, it's immutable. they're like They just blindly believe it because they don't understand how stuff works. And then when you like show them the white paper, now they become completely disillusioned, which I guess is a good thing because you and I both know that
01:23:29
Speaker
or don't know, but surmise that Bitcoin probably won't be able to be what it is now if it doesn't change. Yeah. Yeah, no, I think so too. You have a lot of people I feel like in Bitcoin who like it as an investment, which I totally get. like I understand why people want to invest and make money. And you know it's undeniable Bitcoin has been going up for a long time. It's been a good investment.
01:23:59
Speaker
I just wish people would look a bit more at what they're investing in and what the sort of game theory is and what the thinking behind the the way Bitcoin is set up is what sort of the history of it is as well. Like like you say, the white paper, it's like peer to peer electronic cash. like is that Is that what it is? like Is that what Bitcoin is nowadays? I also feel like that's sort of partly the Twitter bubble that I'm in, just because on Twitter, you talk to people and people Rarely want to go into a long-form discussion or a long-form explanation of something, yeah as you probably are well aware. My threads and my posts are always way too long. I think most people just don't get through them. But like here, for example, I talk to people in real life, and then everyone is far more nuanced, even if they are self-described Bitcoin maximalists or Bitcoin enthusiasts.
01:24:53
Speaker
People are far more nuanced. And if you can talk to someone for more than, what is it, 280 characters? And if it's not like anonymous through a screen where you're just going to call the other shit-coin or whatever, yeah suddenly the discussion becomes a lot more real. I feel like a lot more, it's a lot more facts and there's a lot more back and forth. So yeah, I think that's partially, sadly, just the reality of Twitter or X nowadays.
01:25:19
Speaker
What do you think about the nano ecosystem in general right now with the community still seeming to focus on comparing nano to Bitcoin versus traversing its own path and becoming its own thing? It still feels like and And it could just be the loud, you know, the, the minority of voices are the loudest or whatever, but it still feels like it's constantly trying to compare itself to Bitcoin. And it's not a narrative that is working in my mind. Well, it hasn't worked out so far anyway. Yeah.
01:26:01
Speaker
I don't know. I find this kind of difficult because I understand why people would want to compare it to Bitcoin just because there is so much interest and money investment in Bitcoin. ah so it feels like And because Nano is quite literally a sort of easily comparable to Bitcoin, right? With Ethereum, with many other crypto, there's a lot of differences. Like Nano doesn't do smart contracts, whereas Bitcoin is built to be money, like store of value and eventually medium of exchange.
01:26:28
Speaker
That's like the perfect description of nano as well. So I really get the comparison. I wouldn't say it's what I always focus on myself, but yeah, I guess I largely do in threads and stuff actually. But for us now, for example, with the adding it on nano GPT and adding credit cards,
01:26:47
Speaker
We're not trying to explain why Nano is better than Bitcoin. We're trying to explain like you can use Stripe or you can use Nano, which is just a lot easier to use, lower fees, instant settlement. When it's about store of value, it's like, yeah, Nano is this fixed supply. It's decentralized. The game theory actually works like it becomes more decentralized over time.
01:27:08
Speaker
but difficulty I always run into is people hear crypto, they think Bitcoin. So even if you describe Nano all by itself, like if you describe it as a standalone digital currency, people are going to be like, oh, that's a bit like Bitcoin, right? like How does it differ from Bitcoin? Or like isn't Bitcoin better? but So I think it's just really hard to not have the comparison all the time, just because you know that is what people know. Bitcoin is what 99% of people think about.
01:27:35
Speaker
when they first hear of crypto.
Bitcoin Mining Concerns
01:27:38
Speaker
So yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure what the best way to go is there. Yeah, it's tough because yeah I mean, I understand what you're saying. Like when people ask questions who aren't in the know, all they know is Bitcoin. It's frustrating because it's like you you kind of have to explain it. And then essentially you kind of just have to sit there and shit talk Bitcoin or else why would Nano need to exist? It's like, well, because Bitcoin doesn't really work the way it's supposed to, yeah or what or how it was envisioned. I don't know, maybe maybe Satoshi secretly did envision it becoming the way it is and you know becoming worth almost a hundred thousand dollars. and
01:28:17
Speaker
I don't know you know. It feels from the sort of early writings, I guess, it feels very different. It feels like less of a focus on on digital gold or on store of value, whatever you want to call it, and more of a focus on actually usable money, people using it for transactions and you know the the the vending machine problem, how we could solve it. and I don't know, like maybe we'll never know, but ah just from yeah everything I've read and sort of my experience, I guess, early on, it felt far more digital currency. I felt like the digital gold thing was a thing that came up 2015, 16, I guess. And like, obviously, it's taken over the narrative for Bitcoin, I feel like, yeah because, you know, it is a great selling point, like become rich, buy Bitcoin, become rich is an easier selling point and save 1% on transaction fees.
01:29:11
Speaker
I just don't think it's going to be a long-lasting argument just because I don't think it's a good store of value. But it's a very easy-to-sell proposition, like especially Michael Sator. He's good at explaining Bitcoin as digital gold. I think there's a lot of flaws to his assumptions.
01:29:28
Speaker
like bitcoin that light might be one of you're You're being polite. I'll be i'll be the i'll be bad cop. Michael Saylor is the biggest grifter dumbass on the face of the planet. I mean, my God. But when somebody like Paul Tudor Jones goes on CNBC today or yesterday and is like, no, I'm long Bitcoin. It's like, oh, man, now everyone's going to be long Bitcoin. And he doesn't even have to explain it. Whereas when Michael Saylor tries to explain it, it's like a chimpanzee trying to comb his own hair. He's like, what are you doing? like what
01:30:01
Speaker
none of that makes sense man it's like ah what do you mean man it's a swarm of cyber hornets building an impenetrable wall of energy that you should mortgage your house for to buy and like yeah i've been blocked by him for a long time when I guess if you didn't grow up knowing what so a snake oil salesman is, it's it's you know that's what Michael Saylor is. He's selling the most ridiculous, ludicrous thing and using words that don't make sense, but having enough panache and charisma
01:30:36
Speaker
where people are like, ah yeah, okay, cool. It's just like, I think he recently said something as well about like, people shouldn't want to use it on chain. Like you should just want to use it custodially and keep it like in exchanges. Right? And I'm like, okay. Absolutely insane. Yeah. Are you really describing a decentralized digital money or are we just talking about like an an investment to like term it kindly?
01:31:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's I don't think it reflects very well on crypto. This is like another issue I kept running into at the central bank, right? So it's like, I want to defend crypto, but I also have to explain that actually, yes, I'm also not very fond maybe of Shiba Inu and of people being told to mortgage their house to buy Bitcoin. yeah That's always sort of first barrier you have to get through where you're like, yes, crypto has its bad parts. But like, actually, there's a lot of value behind it.
01:31:31
Speaker
it doesn't It doesn't reflect well on on crypto, I think. And anybody listening, never mortgage your house to buy crypto, please. No, please don't. Just don't do it. No. What's your take on being a former central bank guy? Bitcoin essentially becoming a Wall Street investment tool
01:31:55
Speaker
that could have essentially be controlled by the central bank and any bank, like you said, because sailors openly talking about it just being used as IOUs at this point and not having any value. The IOU is not having any value outside of trust us. We hold we we hold the Bitcoin.
01:32:15
Speaker
Yeah. So I think it kind of takes away the big actual value proposition behind Bitcoin. Like to me, the value in it is that it's decentralized and secure. That's like at the very core, together with the fixed supply, I guess. And I think that's the big issue with Bitcoin is, well, it is like decently decentralized now. Like it's questionable to some extent, and it is quite secure and it is fixed supply so far.
01:32:42
Speaker
It is trending towards centralization constantly and it doesn't matter how good of a story you spin about this, if at one point it becomes cheap enough to attack Bitcoin and profit from it. Like if you could go short on Bitcoin, for example, and successfully attack the chain, like do a 51% attack, mine empty blocks, whatever way you want to do it, that kind of kills the whole value proposition of Bitcoin. And then it doesn't matter if it's like Michael Saylor and a dozen other central bankers telling you, like it's very valuable and Wall Street saying it's very valuable. Like once that happens and the security of it is gone,
01:33:20
Speaker
And people cannot move their Bitcoin, for example, even those Wall Street banks. It's going to be a very hard story to sell. And I think people are going to be like running for the exit to be the first ones to sell the Bitcoin they still have on exchanges. So I feel like it's not so much about what the story does. It's more about can we actually fix this trend towards centralization, this trend towards lower security in Bitcoin.
01:33:48
Speaker
Because if we don't have that anymore, there is no value underlying Bitcoin. That is its whole value proposition. So yeah, I am i am not too optimistic on that line of thinking.
01:34:02
Speaker
and and Explain the road towards centralization and how it's happening for anybody who isn't an aware of, of, uh, how, how it's happening. Right. Yeah. So you can either read like my probably 50 page, uh, tweet spread on this. Uh, no. So essentially the way new Bitcoin are created is through mining, right? Like mining is sort of the consensus mechanism in many ways.
01:34:28
Speaker
If you have 60% of the mining power of the hash rate, you could just decide to mine empty blocks constantly. like Don't allow any transactions and you can censor all transactions. But so far, no one's over 50% that we know of. So people are constantly fighting and adding blocks on top of like what others have created before them.
01:34:48
Speaker
But anyway, so mining the revenue is Bitcoin and it's hard for a miner to change the price of Bitcoin. So the revenue is like relatively fixed. You can say, I have this much hash rate, so I'm getting this much in revenue. What they focus on, all the big miners, or like every miner really, is on the cost side because you want to optimize your profit. You cannot do anything about the revenue really.
01:35:12
Speaker
you want to optimize your cost per hash rate. And all of the costs associated with hash rate, like pretty much literally all of them, have like economies of scale. So if you're a bigger miner, you have access to cheaper capital, like if you want to get a loan. You can buy Essex, like the mining machines, in bulk and get a discount. The place you rent to put all of these Essex, you can get like a discount if it's like a very big place that you can put them.
01:35:41
Speaker
ah You need to perform maintenance on them. You can get one maintenance guy who just is there constantly instead of flying one in every time it's needed. There's like a thousand little things where you have economies of skill for the big miners. And it's not like they deny this themselves. like there're There have been a lot of mergers where they're like, yeah, the only reason we're doing this is economies of skill. So you have economies of skill, but you don't really have much to counterbalance that, right? Because The ones that make the most profit get to reinvest the most. They grow more. They go from 14% of hash rate fifteen to 15% to 16%. And I think if you ask any small miner, or like what used to be private miners or like small, just people doing it,
01:36:26
Speaker
They've been priced out pretty much. You need to have the skill to be able to mine profitably. And I think that's a terrible thing. like That is not the way Bitcoin was supposed to work. I don't think Satoshi exactly foresaw ethics coming. But now that they are here, it's turned into a game of skill. It's turned into the bigger, get ever bigger. And that is the exact opposite of what we want for a decentralized form of money.
01:36:53
Speaker
For all of our native English speakers, he's saying scale, not skill. It's just his accent. I'm so sorry. No, no, no, it's okay. I know it, but just in case they're like...
01:37:05
Speaker
I could see some Bitcoiner coming. I was like, Oh, he's saying skill. He doesn't even know what the phrase is. It's like no and don of scale S C A L E. Yeah. Yeah. I just with, with the way the crypto community is and how much they hate nano and love to talk shit about nano.
01:37:23
Speaker
I could see them pouncing on the most asinine stupid thing as an excuse of why you're wrong. yeah it' saying you don't even You're not even using the correct word. how You obviously don't know anything about cryptocurrency or Bitcoin. like like After this, I will spend an hour practicing the pronunciation of scale. scale
01:37:47
Speaker
ah i just had I just had to, just in case. No, don't know it's fair enough. Thanks.
01:37:54
Speaker
So what do you what do you think about, and so people don't don't understand, we ah Milan mentioned it earlier about with economies of scale, because now all of a sudden it's not just somebody in their apartment running an ASIC or mining on their road on their old laptop like they used to be able to do.
01:38:18
Speaker
Now people are building entire warehouses of ASICs that run nonstop. And that has effects on communities that has effects on animals that live in the in the area. that has that as So just like fracking for oil and natural gas can have disastrous effects on communities if you crack the the aquifer and all this polluted water you know mixed with gas and acids gets into the aquifer that people are getting their drinking water from,
01:38:52
Speaker
and completely destroys the drinking, so the the water supply of a community. Like it's happened in Pennsylvania a bunch of times. We're seeing in Texas, Marathon has a mining, a warehouse in this small town in Texas, and people are actually having negative effects of having it so close to their homes. They're getting nosebleeds, they're getting migraines, they're getting dizzy spells. they're you know, like actual physical negative impacts on human beings living too close. And because of the way Texas' is county line laws work, because they're two miles away, but in technically a different county, they have no recourse. They can't like sue the county to get it to stop because they're not residents of that county.
01:39:41
Speaker
And then they're being told, well, just just move. But now their property is worthless because nobody wants to listen to a Bitcoin mining farm just buzzing and humming all night long and like rattling your bones and rattling your bed. Nobody wants to listen to that. So they can't sell their house. So now essentially they have no recourse. Their home is worthless. They can't live there because them and their children are getting sick from it. mean This is the danger of Bitcoin and it's only going to get worse as the economy scale grows.
01:40:11
Speaker
because it has to continue to scale up to keep that ah security of Bitcoin in place. So like what would you tell somebody who argues, like with Paul Tudor Jones just randomly saying, I'm long Bitcoin because it's clearly a great thing.
01:40:29
Speaker
how do you How do you broach that subject with somebody saying, like oh, fracking is great. you know There's nothing wrong with it. It doesn't doesn't affect people. It just provides a great service. how do you explain How do you discuss that with people about Bitcoin?
01:40:45
Speaker
How do I discuss that with people? I think a lot of you do stuff. What, sorry? I said I threw a lot of information at you though. I always find this difficult because it takes away from what I think the biggest concerns are that Bitcoin enthusiasts would actually care about, because I feel like those people live in close by and suffering from from like the results of these mining farms.
01:41:11
Speaker
They are likely not going to be enthusiastic about Bitcoin in the first place. yeah So the people you usually have this discussion with are Bitcoiners and they have sort of a vested interest not to care too much about like the actual environmental impact. and ah the sort of yeah i'm not sure what i call it like the the sort of effects that it's having in many places, all they care about is the price, right? yeah So then I usually tend to focus just on, okay, but like aside even from the environmental impact, the price impact of decentralization decreasing is going to be big.
01:41:46
Speaker
But within the central bank, for example, many people did care about the energy usage, although I always felt like it was kind of a red herring. Like it was just an easy attack factor for them. But yeah, I feel like to me, it's more of a sort of more of an efficiency question. So if mining was the only way that we could get this decentralized money, and if that meant it had negative effects on people.
01:42:15
Speaker
We would have to talk about the trade off, right? Just like cars have, they have a negative impact from the pollution, but also they allow people to get around. So there's like a positive impact, obviously. So then we would have to talk about the trade off. I think the most annoying part to me is we know there are better solutions or I know there are better solutions and we're not using them. So we have solutions that are cleaner in every single way and they're better to use in every single way. They're fundamentally a better store of value.
01:42:45
Speaker
And we're not using them and instead we're using this energy wasting network where we're literally just wasting energy to determine who gets the next bitcoins and who gets to like centralize it further.
01:42:58
Speaker
So to me, it just feels like a huge waste and it's an inefficiency that I hope the market corrects because I feel like it's just not worth, like I feel like it's not worth having all of these negative effects since we have something that's actually better. It's like, would you want to use an incandescent light bulb if you have an LED? Like who's going to defend the incandescent light bulb? Yeah. Okay. Maybe not the best example. Like there might be cases where you want the light bulb.
01:43:25
Speaker
But like okay you can buy this one fridge that's like literally five times less energy usage. It's the same price. It's better in every way. But then we have people who are like, no, but this old fridge, is like I've invested in this company that builds them. So I'm very, very optimistic.
01:43:43
Speaker
That to me is the primary annoyance. like we We should be getting more efficient with just like if there is a better option, we should be using it. And that to me is the the biggest sort of gripe I have in terms of energy usage. It's not the energy usage itself, like all all of all by itself. like Air conditioning uses a lot of energy. Yeah, fair argument.
01:44:07
Speaker
But if we can get more efficient air conditioners, we would use them. Bitcoin uses a lot of energy. There is something more efficient. Let's use it. So that's, yeah, that's the way I usually approach it.
Nano GPT Innovations
01:44:20
Speaker
And and Bitcoin is only going to get worse. Like that's designed to need more energy. Whereas most things usually are like they evolve and start using less and less energy over time, like like a Mac computer, like the Apple Mac mini. The M1 compared to the Intel processors, the amount of energy it's using is like 10% or 15% of what the, in getting better outcomes. So they're optimizing their machines to need less energy and get better results. Whereas Bitcoin is designed to need more energy for the same exact result.
01:45:04
Speaker
or actually for less of a reward. So, and then not to mention on top of that now, I mean, there there was competition for energy, but it wasn't as strenuous as it's now going to be with AI models k needing huge warehouses to to to run these, these LLMs.
01:45:29
Speaker
And now they're they're going to be, you know, you have, you have people like Google and Microsoft, um, in talks with, with building new nuclear plants just to run LLMs because they say like that's the only way AGI can evolve. You know, they're going to be very concerned about some Bitcoin miner trying to take electricity from them. And I could see that becoming like a huge point of contention.
01:45:57
Speaker
Like what's better for the planet? AI, helping people every single day, helping every single person on the planet or, you know, mining more Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. But also just in terms of the Bitcoin miners, it will probably increase their costs, right? I mean, the more demand for energy there is, the more competition, the more they're going to have to pay, which means like either the hash rate is going to decrease or they need the price to go even higher, right? Or like higher fees, but that's clearly not happening so far. Yeah. But yeah, even just in those very simple terms, it's not good for Bitcoin to have this extra energy competition. I couldn't agree more. What's your, okay, so hold on for a second. had the had the I had the question in my head.
01:46:48
Speaker
Oh, let's, tell let's go back to nano GPT. Uh, you recently added a new option to create an account, whereas before you didn't need one. What happened? So what was the reasoning behind it and what's the benefit of it now? ah Yeah. So we had a lot of requests for this for being able to create an account because essentially we really kept it as private as possible. So if people added the balance to their.
01:47:17
Speaker
uh, to their account. Like if they went to our website, went to the wallet and sent in some nano, it was only stored locally on their device. So it was stored in a cookie on your phone. Essentially, we didn't store any like a copy of it on our servers or whatever. It was just only on your device, which some people really liked, but other people, when you clear your cookies, it's gone. Uh, so they very much disliked seeing their nano being gone.
01:47:47
Speaker
So what we did was we would just always, yeah, super inflationary. hu So we told people like, don't deposit too much. Like nano is literally instant and zero fee. So you can always keep adding in more. And most people did only deposit small amounts. They can withdraw any nano they have on there. So we would always recommend people just withdraw. Like you can always send it back in like literally a second. The next time you come to use our website.
01:48:14
Speaker
But not everyone did, right? It's like more convenient for people to just leave it on. You go to the website, you start typing immediately. I get it. Like it is more convenient. So sometimes people have to balance in there, clear their cookies, and then they couldn't access their balance anymore. In which case we would have to manually return it to them. We experimented with having it automatically sent back to the address they sent it in from.
01:48:39
Speaker
But people were not very fond of that because some people sent in from a swap service or from directly from an exchange or like from some wallet they didn't have control over anymore. So we decided not to do that anymore. So we would manually return when people reached out to us, but it always felt like really bad for people to have to go through that. And so many of those people requested like, can you add a way that I can just log into my account? I stored the balance in there.
01:49:07
Speaker
And then I don't have to worry about clearing my cookies and stuff anymore. So we obliged, like whatever the people request. So we made it possible to create an account with an email or sign in with Google or sign, sign in with GitHub. So create with an email, you can literally use any email we don't check to see if it's like.
01:49:30
Speaker
like a spam email or something or a temp email, whatever, you can use anything you want to. So that's now an option for people in case they do want to store the balance on our servers instead of like having it on their own phone only. It just gives people an extra option. So the way we've done it is people, it's still optional. So people can create an account if they want to, but they don't have to.
01:49:52
Speaker
And if they do create an account, they can log in from any device and they can store their balance so they can access it from any device. So if I send in one nano on my laptop, I create an account like milan at spam email.com. I can then also log in on my phone, use that same balance. And just to be clear, creating an account still does not mean we store the prompts and the conversations.
01:50:18
Speaker
those are still only stored locally on the device, just because we really don't want to have the conversations. If we do ever add that option to also have those stored on the server so that you can access them from anywhere, if we ever add that, we will make it very clear, like a button that you need to select, like, are you sure you want to store the conversations? It will be opt-in, and not something we do by default.
01:50:43
Speaker
But yeah, that's not in the works yet. we we haven't We're not working on even adding that. Nice. Yeah, i didn't honestly, I didn't even think about that when I was using it the original time before you had accounts. I clearly forgot that it's like, oh, oh yeah, if I clear my cache, because i didn't I didn't copy a seed phrase. So of course, like yeah sometimes, and that's the thing, like sometimes we're just trying new things so often. we just I think like I personally just forget certain things. And it's like, oh, shoot, yeah, that's, I'm glad.
01:51:17
Speaker
i I like that option, just you know being able to use like a DuckDuckGo email address or something like that, or just a spam address yeah just to have. When we create an account, do we have access to the seed phrase? ah No. so That was another option we considered, like doing a seed, but we've added credit cards recently as a payment option. and In many ways, we're trying to make this as simple as possible for people to use.
01:51:44
Speaker
And frankly, seed phrases and like private keys are not very easy to use for the vast majority of people. Within crypto, maybe people do understand it, but the reason we dislike seed phrases is first of all, just the convenience, like it's far less convenient than an email address. And second of all, I feel like it's kind of bad practice to get people used to entering their seed phrases their seed phrases on random websites.
01:52:12
Speaker
yeah Like I would prefer if people enter their seed phrases less into websites. So it's not something we really want to encourage. Like if it turns out a lot of people really want this option, we can, we can consider adding it of course, but it's not our preferred option. We would rather. And also essentially what what you're telling people is you don't want them to have a ton of money on the account. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly it. You could see a couple of bucks here and there.
01:52:41
Speaker
What kind of credit card fee do you charge? Like if I were to add 20 bucks worth of USD to it and does it automatically convert it to Nano immediately? So we don't add a credit card fee. We give a discount on Nano just because honestly that's what people like better. Like no one likes seeing a fee added to their transaction. yeah So we've decided, okay, we eat the credit card fees, but we try and move people towards Nano over time.
01:53:09
Speaker
because, well, frankly, it's like better for us, right? Like we pay less in fees. It's better for Nano, which we are very fond of. And it's also better for the user because they get a discount. So we figured that's like a good way to approach it in general. What's the other question?
01:53:27
Speaker
How much fees do we add and I completely forgot. um So yeah, we don't, we don't add any fees to the credit card transaction. We would just very much prefer if people use nano or other crypto. Like obviously we also have other crypto that people can pay with.
01:53:42
Speaker
ah We have Bitcoin Cash and Banana implemented like natively, so people can also deposit like 10 cents of Bitcoin Cash. And we have a bunch of other crypto that you can use via the swap service. ah So we use non-swap, which is... Oh, so if I buy something with a credit card, it automatically, you your swap service converts it to Nano and it's automatically... No, no, no. So the people that add funds via credit card, it's just stored in USD.
01:54:09
Speaker
and okay If people add via other crypto, it gets swapped into Nano. So we have like one crypto. And so to be honest, like it's not just Nano that has the 5% discount because the way we charge it is anything that gets sent in in terms of crypto is immediately converted into Nano. And then we deduct from the Nano balance every time someone uses the service. And on those deductions, we give a 5% discount.
01:54:37
Speaker
So even if you add funds via Bitcoin Cash, you also get the 5% discount. Nice. So in practice, it's a 5% discount on all crypto transactions and then credit card people just pay the fool some in the hopes that maybe this way we can transition more people to use in crypto. Yeah. Do you eat the fees when somebody when when you're converting it from Bitcoin Cash to Nano? Like do those fees get passed on to the user?
01:55:06
Speaker
ah So Bitcoin Cash, we do like I think I would actually have to check because all of this stuff is too complicated for me to implement, so it's how you're doing it. But I think what we do is a 1% spread between just the current nano price and the current Bitcoin Cash price to account for like we have to swap it pretty much. And then once someone deposits Bitcoin Cash, we don't actually swap the 10 cents right away because there's no way to swap those small amounts.
01:55:35
Speaker
But we just credit the person with 10 cents worth of Nano immediately. And then every every time we reach a certain threshold, we convert the Bitcoin Cash to Nano for ourselves. yeah So in the meantime, we have some exposure. Oh, that's a great idea. you know Yeah, we we want to add this for a lot more crypto. So if you go to the balance, you can see we have a lot of other crypto listed there. like Monero, Litecoin, Dash, Solana, a few more. And if you actually click them, it's not possible to add with those ones yet. It's just, it's coming soon. So we added them so people can get like, they can enter their email if they want to get notified when we add like Monero, for example. And then after we've notified people, we delete the email again. It's just like a sort of easy way people can stay up to date on is their currency being added
01:56:30
Speaker
Do you have, I mean, do you have plans of having an email list for like random updates or you just don't even want to store emails for that? Right, so we are planning to do sort of a newsletter thing.
01:56:46
Speaker
So what we have right now is, I think we just pushed it live for API. Let me quickly check our website. Yeah. So for our API, we have like, you can get notified about API updates. So people can enter their email and then click notified. People can unsubscribe at any time. So any email, it will be very simple to unsubscribe. But if you're using the API, it's kind of useful to know if we make changes to it because like your stuff might break.
01:57:14
Speaker
Uh, so we figured that's important to add. We also have an API channel in our discord. So people that don't want to give their email can also just like join that channel. But we kind of want to do the same with just a regular newsletter email so that people who don't use our service every day, but do want to be updated. Like, especially now that we're moving to credit cards, right? Or that we're adding credit cards, the crypto community uses like Twitter, Reddit, discord.
01:57:42
Speaker
But many regular people, they like email. yeah They don't use Reddit. They wouldn't see an update from us if we posted it on our Discord. ah So for those people, we want to give the option to get notified via email. and mostly long chart so Most crypto investors that I've talked to never go on Twitter.
01:58:03
Speaker
that Don't come into contact with any any crypto people outside of like they just invest in some Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever like once every few months. Yeah. So I think people forget. I think people in the crypto Twitter space forget that the vast majority of people aren't on crypto Twitter. Yeah.
01:58:21
Speaker
Yeah. It's like this bubble we live in, right? On Twitter. Yeah. But yeah, no, I think that's a, that's a very fair point. Like it's probably way better for their mental mental health as well. Not to be honest on X so much.
01:58:35
Speaker
but So what do you, what do you, I mean, and we thought we, we touched on it briefly, but. It is difficult because like what do you think about the price? It's and it's like I feel like no matter what happens to to to NANO, no matter how many innovations, no matter how much people are building or or using or whatever, just nothing's happening. Yeah, it is a bit weird, right? Like I used to think there maybe really was some manipulation going on or something, but I've never seen any good proof of it. So it feels very conspiracy theories to think that
01:59:12
Speaker
But honestly, I am not sure. i think I think part of it is many people got interested in nano, and then BitGrill happened. And like to us, it's clear that the nano foundation or like the nano team had nothing to do with it. like It wasn't their fault. But for many people, they got burned on nano that way. right And then it takes a lot of, it's like an extra barrier to get back into it once you've had that experience.
01:59:40
Speaker
I still get this sometimes when I talk to people about that and they're like, oh, that used to be ray blocks, right? Didn't they like exit scam on bit grill? I'm like, well, let me tell you a story. oh And then other people, exactly bad times. But and for other people, maybe they got interested in and it during the previous bull run.
02:00:01
Speaker
And then the spam attack happened, and they concluded, OK, see, I knew that zero feed didn't work. It was like very, I think, very painful for many people. And a very easy validation of zero feed does not work. And I don't think many people realize sort of the improvements in spam resistance. like It takes some effort to get into that and start understanding it, really.
02:00:29
Speaker
and You know, if you've been burned, there's an extra barrier. ah So I feel like that's kind of the current status quo. And also Nano does not really have one big influencer who's like pushing for it, right? It's like Colin is not too active on socials. He's great at podcasts and socials, whatever. He just prefers to be like head down, focused on improving the protocol. And I think that kind of describes many people in Nano. It's like.
02:00:57
Speaker
We like working on this techie stuff. We like improving it further. And no one's really pushing it much to the outside world. George is, of course, but like there's only so much one person can do. So I think that's kind of what Nano is missing in many ways. I think it's like a lack of people knowing about it and really understanding it.
02:01:18
Speaker
And then a lack of hype around it, I guess, which is, it sounds terrible to say, but that's just the thing in the crypto space, right? It's like, it feels like as soon as Nano's price does start increasing.
02:01:32
Speaker
There are no more arguments against Nano because every time you get into a discussion with anyone, it ends up with a price chart, which is extremely annoying. And almost always the Nano BTC price chart, which is. It is. Yes. Yes, actually. yeah Yeah. So I feel like once that argument sort of goes away, it's going to be really difficult to argue against Nano. And I also feel like for many people that have already heard a bit about Nano.
02:01:59
Speaker
I like, if you didn't get any nano in hindsight, it's going to seem like such an obvious like a win like nano. Like in hindsight, it's like ah I never realized this sort of zero fee, instant settlement, fixed supply with great game theory, crypto. I never realized it was going to work out, you know, so I didn't buy like $10 of it or whatever. Exactly. So yeah, I feel like it just needs that push. I hope maybe we can do that with nano GPT.
02:02:28
Speaker
We recently posted about keeping our treasury in nano. We're going to be adding more and more nano to our stash pretty much just because we see it as fundamentally a fantastic store of value. We're going to be explaining a bit more on our blog and stuff about why we think so. So maybe that can be a catalyst. I don't know. ah Maybe it's something else. Maybe some big influencer finally finds out about it and realizes like, Hey, this, this could be big. I don't know.
02:02:54
Speaker
i like I'm patient. I think fundamentally it just works really well. I haven't been able to find anything. where I believe in the long term as much as with Nano. But yeah, the ah price prize performance is puzzling, to say at the least. Painful. And I mean, I could understand like the arguments in the past, like, OK, you don't believe in quote unquote pre-mine, which is fucking stupid. Sorry, excuse my French, but it's stupid. You don't believe in fixed supply, or you know, whatever, whatever. yeah All these different things. And now with meme coins?
02:03:28
Speaker
All those arguments are gone. Yeah. Yeah. little They all created the same time. You know, it's just, it's like every argument that was used against, against nano flew out the window with pumped up fun. And it's just like, you know, be sure. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I've never, I'm never into the meme coins, I guess I've never gotten into them too much. Just because to me, that's not really what crypto is about. And I don't see a long-term future for them.
02:03:57
Speaker
But yeah, if that proves anything, it's like hype is everything, right? Like memes are everything. And then the issue with those meme coins is there is very little that fundamentally backs that hype. Like yes, it's growing in price, but still it's useless. Whereas with Nano, it could it could very much grow in price and then it's actually useful. Like you can actually send it really easily. You can spend it easily. It doesn't have like a bunch of insiders who are still dumping on you. or like So yeah, I feel like it just needs that push. And I don't know where it's going to come from, but I feel certain that it is going to come ah in time. one of One of these days. One of these days, yeah. But yeah. Oh, sorry. Go ahead.
02:04:42
Speaker
No, I was going to say, like obviously don't take any investment advice from me because I'm clearly, like I've always been optimistic on Nano and ah yeah not always been good at predicting prices. I'm good at other stuff.
02:04:59
Speaker
what's ah are you are you guys surviving off of Nano GPT, or you're keeping your
Nano's Financial Strategy
02:05:06
Speaker
day jobs? or like how is like Are you paying yourself? Is there downward pressure on Nano because you're selling it every month to pay you to pay you guys sal each other a salary? like How does that work? right so if if you're able to if you If you're comfortable talking about it. Yeah, yeah know that's fine. so We haven't sold a single single Nano. ah like We haven't sold any Nano at all.
02:05:27
Speaker
So, so far we've just been eating the cost of like eating the cost of our company and getting in nano. So no downward pressure from us, obviously. And now that we've added credit cards, the thinking is we use the income from the credit cards to pay our bills essentially. And then whatever is left over, whatever profit we have, we convert to nano just because we see that as the store of value and as the treasury. So we haven't paid ourselves anything from the business yet.
02:05:57
Speaker
Uh, we hopefully will at some point, but, uh, no, I, I can survive off of savings and other income. So don't necessarily need to get an income. Like I didn't start at a GPT to make money, to be honest. Uh, I just thought it was like a cool fun project. My co-founder, I'll leave that up to him how much he wants to talk about it, but Yeah, there's no no downward pressure on Nano from us. It's the the shortest and clearest version, I think. Well, I mean, and in the long run, downward pressure from one company selling because they accept Nano, if that was affecting the price, then there are much larger concerns. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and I feel like we can we can say with pretty good confidence that we are adding more Nano than we would take out, like, yeah.
02:06:49
Speaker
We like nano, we see it as, we would prefer to hold nano over euros or USD or whatever it is. Nice. Can you talk about the last spam upgrade and last time somebody spammed? Like, do you feel comfortable talking about that? I can, but honestly, others are probably better at it. So if people really want to learn more about it, I would recommend Um, like searching for nano currency and then, uh, yeah, quasi, I don't know how to pronounce this, but ah Patrick is, yeah, cause I had an a Q W A H Z I. Yeah. Like he's great at explaining everything to do with spam, um, and everything to do with the tech in general. I also wrote an article about this, which I think you can find if you look for a senators bucket system or something or senators bucket system sub stack.
02:07:45
Speaker
Um, so the way I understand it is essentially nano, the nano network prioritizes transactions based on first of all, the balance of the person doing the transaction and then on how long it's been since you've done a transaction. So for example, if your balance is between one and two nano, you get put into a specific category into a bucket.
02:08:11
Speaker
If someone else has between two and four nano, they go into a different bucket. If someone has between eight and 16, it's a different bucket. And then the note just processes one from each bucket every single time. And the one that gets processed first, the transaction that gets processed first is the transaction from the person who has not transacted the longest. So the reason this works against spam.
02:08:39
Speaker
is that spam usually tends to be very small amounts. People are spamming 0.0001 nano. So they fall into a different bucket already. And then even if you are in that bucket, a spammer keeps sending transactions like every second. So if you have not transacted for the past, say, six hours, you take priority over someone whose most recent transaction was two hours ago or one second ago.
02:09:08
Speaker
So it's a combination of like differentiation between balances and then just prioritize whoever has not transacted the longest. So that's sort of the best short explanation of it I can give, I think. No, that's a great great explanation.
02:09:26
Speaker
Yeah, and then in terms of spam attacks, so there was a bad spam attack on nano in the past, which is when this whole prioritization was not in nano yet. They used to prioritize in a different way, which frankly turned out not to work. like yeah it' I won't go into the system because it doesn't exist anymore, but it just didn't work. And then since this system has been in place and it keeps getting upgraded pretty much,
02:09:53
Speaker
There was a spam attack like fairly recently, i a few months back. I'm not sure how long exactly. But we know about it because we run a service. right We run a service on the nano network. It's probably one of the bigger services on the nano network. And but we saw that transactions got slowed down to, like say, I think it was on average 18 seconds for full confirmation, rather than like the subsecond that we're used to.
02:10:23
Speaker
But like our service still worked just fine, because 18 seconds is still a lot better than most of the alternatives that we can use. But just for people within Nano, it was like, oh my god, it's gotten so slow, which is just a very nice high standard to have, I guess. Yeah, it's amazing. And now with the latest improvements that have been done, I think they've gotten it down to it being like three seconds under like full saturation. So like if there is a heavy spam attack,
02:10:50
Speaker
the transactions would be delayed to like three seconds for full confirmation. And that is, yeah, it is pretty insane. and ah Then again, it is always sort of theoretical, right? Like I think there has been a spam attack since then. And most people just literally did not notice. ah So that's a good thing. But yeah, i feel I feel fairly confident in it. But then again, I am not the most technical person. I just see what happens on our service.
02:11:16
Speaker
And I see that we were not very impacted by the spam, by the previous few attempts. So as a merchant, it feels good. like It feels safe. But yeah, that's a it sort of it keeps developing, right? It keeps getting better. But even the current version is just fantastic. I don't think like people appreciate enough how good of a job the developers on Nano do. It's kind of insane. And they do it just voluntarily. yeah Really appreciate all of them. It's wild.
02:11:46
Speaker
do you Do you have any opinion on who the spammers might be, whether like maybe be insiders or people who are trying to sabotage the project or?
Enhancements in Nano's Security
02:11:56
Speaker
people who might want to invest in it and they're testing the the infrastructure. like what do you Do you have any hypotheses? I think the like people who want to invest in it and are doing it to test, I think that's very optimistic. I i unfortunately do not think that's... We can hope. Yeah, we can hope. like Honestly, I have no clue who it might be or who's spamming. so It could be that it's someone that was testing it, could be.
02:12:22
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. I can only speculate. I don't know anything more than you do. At the same time, I kind of feel like it is a bit of a moot point. like Yes, it it is illegal, I guess, what they did. So if our service got impacted by it, for example, we can probably technically sue whoever performed this spam attack. But I just feel crypto is decentralized and robust and it should not matter who is attacking, it should be resistant to all of these attacks regardless of who does them, right? So I feel like any time spent focusing on who did this and what my motivation be is time wasted to an extent. So yeah, I can understand the speculation and it is kind of fun in a way to speculate on it, but I have no clue.
02:13:12
Speaker
I mean, because most people doing DDoS attacks are just doing it for the lulz, so I kind of assumed that anybody spamming nano is just doing it just to mess with you know nano nerds. Yeah, yeah, that might be it, right? It might just be like, oh, look at these dumb nano people. like I knew zero fees didn't work. That might be it. like yeah To be fair, it's just okay. it was a It was a harmful attack, I think, especially the one during the previous bull run. But like we should speak we should be able to move beyond this. like We should be able to resist such attacks. Otherwise, there's no point. Nano is going to be attacked by a lot worse than this over the years. yeah So it really hurt at the time. But yeah, otherwise, it was going to to be done some other time. To be fair, the developers would probably have improved spam resistance in the meantime.
02:14:02
Speaker
and have gotten a lot fewer gray hairs and stress out of it. yeah So that might've been preferable because I know like it was super rough on many of them. So in that way, I do really, really not appreciate the person who spammed, but yeah, it's going to happen. It's an open network. And I felt bad saying it the way I did at the time, but I felt like it was a good thing because it showed how resilient the developers are.
02:14:31
Speaker
and how dedicated they are. And I know it sucked because they had a different patch that was like almost on the verge of going out. But in the real world, you don't get to choose when you're going to get spam attacked. People don't wait for patches, unfortunately. Exactly. And so like you need to know if the developers are up for the task of of dropping everything and fixing the problem at hand versus saying, oh, it's not that bad. We can we can fix it. And it's just like, and they didn't do that. they they they jumped into action and worked on you know the real world hair on fire problem that was in front of them. yeah and It gave me a lot more respect and trust and the and in the and the team and the project itself. I felt bad saying it that way, but in reality, like those are the people I want i trust with my money.
02:15:23
Speaker
yeah No, I understand it. like I have so much respect for like everyone, really, who is working on Nano, especially they've been completely volunteer, I think, for like a year now or maybe over a year. And just the amount of hate, like pure hate that many of these people get for building something that is completely open source, given away for free, like anyone can use it. It's honestly insane. Insane. Absolutely insane.
02:15:54
Speaker
I think George has talked about this a few times, but the amount of hate she gets, it's yeah yeah like I don't want to go too deep into it. but yeah it's I can only have respect for people who build something so valuable and so good, despite sort of constantly being under the microscope for it being attacked for it for like how long has nano existed like 10 years now like i think the team still has to deal with lawsuits and stuff over the bit grill like the bit grill hack or exit scam by the bomber whatever you want to call it
02:16:30
Speaker
like They have so much shit to deal with constantly and all they keep doing is is improving Nano literally without being paid. it's like yeah I don't know how anyone can can be critical of them or like, yeah, it just beats me. I think maybe that might be one of the reasons why a lot of investors aren't excited to jump on board is because There is no investment vehicle to immediately make money. Whereas Bitcoin, you have proof of work, you can mine it. Ethereum, you have proof of stake, you can stake it and make a return on it. There's nothing to do yet outside of building a business and accepting Nano and encouraging people to use Nano and having a reason for needing Nano
02:17:20
Speaker
And the Nano GPT is one of the is one of the first like real world use cases where it is so much better to use Nano than any other currency or cryptocurrency in the on the planet. Yeah. Just for the fact that you can do a one cent transaction and not have to worry about fees. Like that's unbelievable.
02:17:44
Speaker
I know it's, I really like building and that a GPT just because like, it's, I don't know. I was always one of those people as well, right? Doing the giveaways on Reddit, sending people little amounts.
02:17:57
Speaker
So I'm just super happy we have something that's easy to show off and that people can actually use. What I wish we would have more of is ways to earn little bits of Nano. So we have some of that on our website, obviously. But we need more of a circular ecosystem around Nano. like As you say, yeah right it's like you can you can buy it or you can use it with Nano GPT. We need more of that stuff. We need more ways to use it, more ways to earn it. and Like to be fair, Bitcoin does pretty well in terms of price without anyone really being tabled able to use it for much. Exactly. So maybe we overestimate to what extent that's needed, but I personally would love to see more real usage and more people accepting it, sent doing transactions in it. That would that would be great.
02:18:46
Speaker
Well, I liked when banana was doing the whole thing where I'm blanking on the name of it, but where you could use excess computer power to like donate to, you know, uh, hospitals at home. Yeah. Yeah. Folding at home. You want to explain that really fast in more detail? ah Yeah. I, uh, so from what I know about it is you essentially use the GPU on your laptop, computer, whatever.
02:19:15
Speaker
to help with medical research. ah So medical research needs a lot of processing power to run simulations, to run yeah just computations on medicine, on anything to do really with medical research.
02:19:29
Speaker
So they need GPUs for that. What banana does is they still have a lot of banana in like a developer fund. So you can contribute to this medical research with your GPU and you get paid some banana every time they use your GPU or like just per day, because the GPU is constantly in use pretty much if you want it to be. So it's a way that you can contribute to medical research, like feel good about doing it and make a few banana on the side.
02:19:56
Speaker
I think, uh, I thought I saw recently that they've actually become the biggest contributor to this whole folding at home thing. Really? Yeah. Yeah. There's like, it's huge. Um, trying to see now I can't really find it quickly, but yeah, it's, they're doing a lot of good through this. Yeah. October, 2024 rank one. Yeah. So in terms of folding at home, there's like different teams sort of doing it. And banana was the biggest team or at least one of the biggest teams.
02:20:26
Speaker
So they've contributed a ton to medical research or people running the GPUs have contributed a ton to medical research and then they get paid some banana. We actually. Sorry, go ahead.
02:20:39
Speaker
No, I was going to say, we actually mentioned folding at home on the earned portion of our website as well, because we also accept banana, right? So yeah this way people can contribute to something good and to something they can, you know, feel good about, get paid a bit of banana and then have it like use it on our website since we also accept banana.
02:20:59
Speaker
I mean, I feel like the nano community should like have a donation fund and donate it to a folding at home program and then people can get paid out in in nano GPT, like in their nano GPT account.
02:21:16
Speaker
Yeah, that's actually a pretty good idea. I wonder how much. People are always donating and like, oh, let's donate some, you know, versus just saying like, hey, you know, do this and earn, you know, 10 cents a day or something or whatever, like five or a penny a day, which is worth X amount of nano, you know, GPT use. I know there's going to be something that, you know, we can figure out how people can do good for the community.
02:21:46
Speaker
I kind of wonder how much banana is distributing this way. Uh, like in terms of just raw cost, pretty much, uh, how easy it would be to replicate with nano, but yeah, it's definitely worth looking into. I'll probably go look into this after this. So is, so, uh, explain Cenotus. Uh, explain the name or the, what, yeah what do you want to explain? Persona, how it, how it came about and.
02:22:17
Speaker
Okay. Originally you weren't, you weren't, you weren't linking it to Mira. Right. Yeah. No, I wasn't. I tried to keep everything really separate. So first of all, the work reason when I started Twitter, um, but senators already existed before I started working at the central bank, I think anyway, yeah but, uh, I wanted to keep senators and Mira separate because I've also had my issues with moderators on Reddit.
02:22:42
Speaker
like the cryptocurrency moderators, which nano people often complain about, but which are super nice to me nowadays. Like they've added the nano GPT bot into the telegram chat for the cryptocurrency community, which is really nice. So people can generate images within the telegram chat and stuff. Oh, wow.
02:23:01
Speaker
But anyway, at the time, I really wanted to keep the two separate because then if I said something as Mira or like share the post from Reddit, I didn't want it to be like, see, this is Senator sharing a post on Reddit and we can ban him for that or whatever. So I kind of wanted to keep that separate. ah And then the Senator's name itself is, i this game I played, actually the one from like 2012.
02:23:26
Speaker
My username in that game was Cenatus, because one of the first teams I joined, we had like a Roman theme. And I thought it would be cool. I was a lot younger when I started this game. I thought it would be cool to have a SPQR that was the team name. So I'm like, fine, I'll take Cenatus as my name. And then it kind of stuck. I don't know
Origin of Cenatus Persona
02:23:45
Speaker
why. like that That game went well, so people knew me as Cenatus. And I was like, fine, I guess this is my this is my online name now. That's not what happened. Yes, man.
02:23:55
Speaker
Yeah, it happens. I changed on Discord just two days ago now, I think, to Milan slash Cenatus. Also, because we have a Discord group for this whole network school thing, people kept being confused by like, who is this Cenatus guy? and ah So whenever I DM'd, I'd have to go like, hi, Milan here. So yeah, I'm moving towards having just my one persona, which is the real me, which makes a lot like, it makes things a lot easier.
02:24:24
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, you can always put formerly in your bio or something like that if you want, but yeah, formerly known as Mira Hurley, formerly known as senators, formerly known as Satoshi. No, I'm just kidding. you hear it hear you heard it here folks first Yeah.
02:24:39
Speaker
yeah No, no, I would have been too young. I think at that time I was definitely not a competent programmer enough to be able to do this. Would you be a competent enough programmer now to do it?
02:24:50
Speaker
No, I don't think so. I don't think I don't know how far like Claude and chat GPT can go in in terms of helping me with this. Yeah. Well, do you have anything else you want to talk about?
02:25:04
Speaker
No, not really. What else is there to talk about? I touched on a lot of subjects. I was going to say, yeah, this is like so this is my first actual podcast in English. Oh, nice. Yeah, I actually explicitly wanted to do the first one here, right? Because you feel like the sort of unofficial nano podcast. You've had Colin and Patrick. And ah you know it's a tough act to follow, Colin and Patrick. I'm honored.
02:25:29
Speaker
Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, uh, and hopefully now I'll start doing a few more podcasts. yeah definitely get out there It's really fun to be honest. Like it's a, it's a fun medium. I mean, if you, if you have somebody you can just relax and talk to and have conversations with it's great. Exactly. It doesn't always work out that well, but for the most part, it's been's been a pretty positive and fun experience just having conversations with people, even people who like didn't know anything about me or the show has to come on. I was like, yeah, sure.
02:25:59
Speaker
Yeah. And they'd be like, Oh, I had so much fun. It's like, yeah, cause I'm just having a conversation with you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It feels very chill. So like, are you relaunching the podcast now or what's the the plan here? Cause it was always a lot of fun to listen to. Yeah. I mean, thank you. I, I don't know. Like this was a good reason to come back. It's been, I think two years now over two years.
02:26:29
Speaker
When I, when I saw you come out of the closet, no, just kidding. When I saw you reveal your true identity, it's like, okay, if, if there's ever a reason to bring it back for either just for one last final hurrah or to try to get it going again, like when I had that online date or that, that zoom date yeah two weeks ago, and we were talking about it, I was like, Oh, this would make such a great podcast episode.
02:26:55
Speaker
That's so funny. But I don't know. i i'm yeah I'm in transition in midlife crisis, so who knows? Well, I'm speaking from someone who's recently done a transition. No, I'm just kidding. oh yeah yeah But I'm honored that you restarted it for me at least. And like if you want feedback on whether you should do it, like I would love for you to get back into it more. Uh, I always enjoyed it, but yeah, up to you. um I appreciate that. I appreciate that. Um, well, cool. Let's, uh, and there, and then thank you. everyone everyone Thank you everyone for listening. And where can people find you on like socials? What, like say your website again, a right? Yeah. So on Twitter nowadays, I am not Mira Hurley anymore. I am Milan M I L a N.
02:27:53
Speaker
Uh, and then I don't actually know what you call it. Underscore Milan underscore D E R E E D E, which I could pronounce for you guys, but it's a very Dutch sounding name. So no one would actually, what? Sorry. deriy Yeah. Milan.
02:28:10
Speaker
you would announce it in Dutch. So that's me on on Twitter. ah You can also follow NanoGPT on Twitter, which is just NanoGPTCOM.
02:28:25
Speaker
That's our Twitter account. And then obviously the website is nano dash-gpt dot.com. We also have a Discord and stuff, but you can easily find that from from either our website or like the the twitter Twitter stuff. So I think that's all. yeah I'm also on Discord, of course. I'm also on Reddit, but that's depending on when my accounts get banned. My username keeps changing.
02:28:51
Speaker
But yeah, if anyone wants to reach out, I'm easy, easiest to reach on Twitter as Milan the reader. Nice, nice. Well, thank you for coming on. Hopefully you do I yeah can't wait to hear more. So make sure you keep everybody up to date on your next podcast episode. Because This is, I mean, people have been using Nano here and there, but this is the first one where we can really see how effective it is versus other cryptocurrencies in and real and real time. And so it's exciting to see where this goes. I'm really looking forward to it. Thanks, man. And thanks very much for having me. I'm honestly honored to be here, given all the other guests you've had, and I had a lot of fun. So thank you very much. Nice. Cool.
02:29:35
Speaker
It was was great to finally meet you. Yes. Great to. Behind the mirror persona. Yeah. Yeah. it's It's really fun for me to finally be able to meet a lot of people that I've only spoken to where they probably had some clue maybe that I was not Mira, but they never knew. So yeah it's nice to finally be able to just be like myself. Yeah. That's great. That's great. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening. and Maybe I'll talk to you in the future. Maybe not maybe this is it either way. It's been a blast