PBJ

With David King, Max Webster, and Steve Lee

PBJ is a weekly live show recorded at Presidio Bitcoin about open money and open intelligence. Join David King, Steve Lee, and Max Webster, longtime open technology advocates with deep roots in Silicon Valley, as they swap knowledge, challenge assumptions, and joust about the big questions of the day.

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Friday · 1 hr 35 min
Binance Hack Unpacked, Human-Like AI Voices, What’s Holding Back Bitcoin Payments
0:00 - Halloween, basketball, and the changing NCAA rules 7:04 - Block’s Dessa speech model: why sound more human? 12:56 - Do human-like AI interfaces put our agency at risk? 26:27 - Can private AI compete with subsidized frontier models? 36:02 - Could Mesh LLM make local AI pay for itself? 39:54 - Binance hack and hardware wallet supply-chain risks 47:59 - Rethinking bitcoin custody as AI attacks intensify 53:59 - Frozen stablecoin collateral exposes hidden risks in DeFi 58:45 - Why Google is entering crypto self-custody 1:05:18 - Why better technology hasn’t delivered bitcoin payment adoption 1:13:31 - Is online gambling finding real demand for Lightning? 1:18:08 - Square payments: fixing checkout friction and communicating rewards 1:25:57 - AI agents and services worth paying bitcoin for 1:27:27 - Could bitcoin naming work without scaling to everyone? 1:33:30 - Will AI chat interfaces control the internet? Show Notes: Dessa: https://block.xyz/dessa Mesh LLM: https://meshllm.cloud/ Spiral: https://spiral.xyz/ SUBSCRIBE: https://www.youtube.com/@PresidioBitcoin
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October 23 · 1 hr 31 min
Chamath's Bitcoin to Zero Warning, Bitcoin-Powered AI in Signal, Lending to Agents
0:00 - PBJ returns 1:01 - AGNTCon takeaways and Goose Development Kit demos 4:48 - Sig demo: bringing decentralized AI (Mesh LLM) and bitcoin to Signal 7:05 - Paying for AI inference with bitcoin over Lightning (Lexe, Alby) 16:14 - Mesh LLM as a buyer of unused GPU compute 23:44 - Privacy, security and liability in decentralized AI compute 28:15 - Can AI agents borrow bitcoin and access credit? 41:06 - Chamath's Bitcoin-to-zero warning and assessing the real risks 46:09 - How secure and resilient is Bitcoin Core against AI-discovered vulnerabilities? 52:23 - The mathematical risks AI poses to bitcoin and cryptography 1:04:14 - Why bitcoin faces unique cybersecurity and quantum risks 1:10:04 - Using AI to rethink Tesla, SpaceX and personal investing 1:16:16 - Tesla's Full Self-Driving and changing minds on Elon 1:20:00 - The long-term investment case for Tesla and SpaceX 1:24:05 - Creating professional presentations with Claude Design Show Notes: goose: https://goose-docs.ai/ Mesh LLM: https://meshllm.cloud/ Chamath on bitcoin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAwG9E1W_ME&t=6428s Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins: https://www.anthropic.com/research/ecdsa-curve-origins Project Loupe: https://www.projectloupe.org/
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October 9 · 1 hr 37 min
Keeping AI or SI open, Will math discoveries break ECDSA, Pathways for agentic payments
0:00 - Confirming DK's identity 2:10 - Naming Open Source AI, how about Open Superintelligence? 5:53 - Open weights, open source, and model transparency 12:02 - Why NVIDIA could make Open Superintelligence real 19:50 - Is bitcoin dying from AI and quantum? 24:56 - ECDSA, and bitcoin’s assumptions 31:55 - OpenAI math breakthroughs and mathematicians’ backlash 39:04 - Winning people over with useful AI demos 49:52 - Fresh addresses, Taproot, and public key risk 57:35 - Steve's visit to Chaincode Dialogues and post-quantum bitcoin 1:02:57 - Anthropic security scans and Project Loupe 1:10:37 - Ledger supply-chain attack and hardware wallet trust 1:14:30 - Personal agents, GrokBot, and AI wallets 1:21:05 - Agent loops, email access, and deterministic control 1:33:23 - Cash App whole-coiner financing and AI banks
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October 2 · 1 hr 29 min
Starlink’s Internet Takeover, White House AI Accord, Bitcoin and Lightning for AI Agents
0:00 - NCAA chaos and travel plans 4:06 - Deepfakes and proving identity (biometrics, signed video, Face ID) 12:07 - Key storage, social recovery and webs of trust 18:43 - Ideas for PBJ: AI fact-checkers, audience agents, live summaries 29:13 - Could an AI become PBJ’s fourth host (via Goose Development Kit)? 32:21 - What the White House AI accord actually does 37:18 - The problem with traditional audits for probabilistic AI systems 43:40 - america.gov and the AI ovethaul of government services 47:56 - Starlink’s path to becoming the internet 51:39 - Starlink’s (surprising) share of global internet capacity 58:42 - Starlink's centralization risk 1:08:48 - The future of the nation state 1:15:55 - Building agent economies with bitcoin 1:24:28 - Bitcoin for agent coordination and streaming inference payments Show Notes: White House Super Intelligence executive order: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/09/inaugurating-the-era-of-super-intelligence AI-powered government services portal: https://america.gov/
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September 25 · 1 hr 41 min
Block Brings Bitcoin to x402, Open USD Enters the Race, Trump Renames AI
0:00 - PBJ growth, consistency, and staying ad-free 12:42 - Why PBJ changed its tagline 15:00 - AI agents the users bitcoin was waiting for 18:36 - How x402 added bitcoin and Lightning support 32:44 - Getting agents and merchants to choose bitcoin 48:26 - Open USD and the new stablecoin power structure 58:47 - Meta, Muse, and who controls agent payments 1:02:25 - Why pitch Lightning instead of bitcoin 1:09:12 - Will agents further centralize the internet? 1:14:02 - Mesh LLM: peer-to-peer inference with bitcoin payments 1:19:02 - Could Signal use Mesh LLM for private AI? 1:25:01 - Bitcoin-style incentives for a decentralized compute market 1:28:45 - Should the internet distinguish humans from agents? 1:35:06 - The emerging permissionless web stack (Nostr Blossom) 1:37:43 - Trump’s “super intelligence” rebrand and AI policy SHOW NOTES: x402: https://block.xyz/inside/block-joins-the-x402-foundation-to-advance-open-agentic-commerce Open USD: https://x.com/openstandard/status/2103152613634293959 Radar: https://radar.particle.pro/
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September 18 · 1 hr 38 min
Grokbot and Muse Take Agents Mainstream, Bitcoin’s Agent Moment, Dario vs Jensen on AI Pacing
0:00 - How Buzz and GrokBot changed PBJ show prep 9:15 - Building a bitcoin-native agent with GrokBot 17:16 - Why agents will need bitcoin 19:08 - Integrating bitcoin payments into Mesh LLM 23:22 - Bitcoin vs stablecoins for agent payments (bitcoin's edge) 34:52 - Designing online services for agents 37:44 - Using GrokBot: building, personal assistant, convenience and security tradeoffs 43:39 - Passwords, 2FA and credentials for agents 56:55 - Why AI needs a new peer-to-peer internet 1:02:16 - Defining AGI, ASI and autonomous agency 1:05:50 - Who is liable for runaway agents? 1:16:28 - Can regulation keep up with frontier AI? 1:25:43 - AI hacking and the questions of agency and autonomy 1:31:01 - Spiral’s open-source AI film and interactive media ideas SHOW NOTES: https://meshllm.cloud/
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September 11 · 49 min
Blockstream Liquid's $320M Hack, Open Source AI Summit Takeaways, Vora Reveal
0:00 - Special Thursday PBJ 0:59 - How Blockstream Liquid works and how it was hacked 6:57 - The strange (extortionate?) “white hat” twist 10:45 - AI security scanning and Liquid’s 'fix' that made things worse 12:50 - What the Liquid hack reveals about federations and custody 20:07 - How Blockstream plans to make Liquid users whole 26:08 - Open Source AI Summit takeaways 31:30 - Anthropic and the threat to open-source AI 39:51 - Open protocols for agents, identity and memory 43:32 - Vora reveals stunning private, local AI hardware SHOW NOTES: https://opensourceaisummit.org/ https://vora.io/
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August 28 · 1 hr 32 min
Nvidia Bets Big on Open-Source AI, AI Finds Core Lightning Bugs, Aluminum-Powered Data Centers
0:00 - Opening banter 0:40 - PBJ Topic Explorer 7:34 - Particle Radar brings AI search for the world’s podcasts 12:35 - Voya Energy's new approach to metal fuels for storage 23:25 - Nvidia doubles down on open-source AI (Hugging Face acquisition) 35:45 - Using GrokBot for long-horizon research 41:54 - Giving agents long-running goals 46:59 - New security risks and attack surfaces from trusting other agents 53:09 - Is Twitter or Cursor’s data more valuable? 1:03:50 - AI security investigations are getting harder 1:06:55 - Core Lightning vulnerabilities and disclosure dilemma 1:18:35 - How far ahead are frontier AI models? 1:23:36 - Building a market for cheap, spare compute 1:30:30 - Darkbloom’s decentralized (Mac) inference network SHOW NOTES: PBJ Topic Explorer: https://pbarchive.ai/topics/ Voya Energy: https://www.voya.energy/news/voya-energy-unveils-a-new-metal-fuels-energy-system-closes-35-million-series-a Darkbloom: https://www.darkbloom.dev/
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August 21 · 1 hr 38 min
BlackRock's New Case for Bitcoin, Stripe Buys OpenRouter, David Sacks at PB
0:00 - What's behind bitcoin's rally? 8:33 - Open Source AI Summit and questions for David Sacks 18:00 - Berd and Block’s growing stack of open-source AI agents 22:30 - Alby's TaskFuel simplifying payments for agents 30:14 - The missing credential layer for agents 36:46 - Making sense of Stripe’s OpenRouter acquisition 48:02 - What's OpenRouter’s moat? 52:50 - Apple, OpenAI and the battle for user intent 57:46 - Making the internet infinitely programmable 1:07:47 - BlackRock's new case for bitcoin 1:21:03 - What causes bitcoin’s four-year cycle? 1:26:25 - Strategy's notable resilience 1:30:49 - Is bitcoin becoming more centralized and how best to measure it? SHOW NOTES: https://opensourceaisummit.org/ https://www.blackrock.com/us/financial-professionals/literature/whitepaper/re-underwriting-bitcoin.pdf
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August 7 · 2 hr 1 min
Bitcoin Security after COLDCARD, PB Media Archive Launch, Announcing the Type II Summit
0:00 - Last week’s breakout episode 1:36 - Bitcoin, AI and energy are starting to converge 12:06 - Announcing the Type II Summit 15:05 - Panthalassa and offshore compute 17:30 - Introducing the PB Media Archive (pbarchive.ai) 22:15 - Reexamining podcast accountability and ad incentives post-COLDCARD 34:55 - The BTCPay Server exploit (happening in real time) 36:11 - No software project should assume it’s safe 41:20 - Why closed source won’t protect software from AI (OpenAI–Hugging Face incident) 53:40 - Project Loupe’s approach to AI security scanning & learnings 1:01:30 - The push to get early AI access for bitcoin developers 1:06:30 - How the COLDCARD incident has rallied bitcoin security (e.g., Bitcoin Red Team) 1:13:00 - The hidden risks of DIY bitcoin entropy 1:21:50 - Was the COLDCARD hack an inside job? 1:28:24 - Rethinking responsible disclosure in the AI era 1:35:12 - How vulnerable is the Lightning Network to AI? 1:37:25 - Will agents choose bitcoin or create something new? 1:42:45 - White-hat hacking, recovery and property rights 1:54:48 - Spiral’s idea for a neutral protocol for multi-vendor wallet security SHOW NOTES: PB Media Archive: https://pbarchive.ai/ COLDCARD PBJ: https://youtube.com/live/cSXOmwI38Jo?feature=share
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July 31 · 1 hr 37 min
The COLDCARD Hack and Future of Self-Custody
0:00 - The COLDCARD hack: bitcoin’s worst security incident ever? 4:30 - What happened and how thefts were identified 7:04 - The random-number failure behind the hack 13:24 - The right way to generate wallet entropy (i.e., dice rolls) 20:45 - Who is affected and what users should do 31:43 - Custody options and why diversification matters 37:37 - The source-license change behind the COLDCARD bug 40:33 - How AI changes open-source security audits 52:30 - How the community can limit further theft 59:56 - Why patches cannot fix keys and recovering stolen bitcoin 1:10:37 - Does AI strengthen the case for custodians? 1:16:30 - Future of self-custody 1:21:43 - Evaluating Bitkey, Ledger, Trezor and multisig post-COLDCARD 1:31:04 - ETFs, custodians and new transparency standards SHOW NOTES: PBJ custody survey episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSanv5Z-DA4 Block COLDCARD blog post: https://engineering.block.xyz/blog/predictable-rng-fallback-and-32-bit-reseed-in-coldcard-firmware
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July 24 · 1 hr 44 min
Bitcoin Security Consortium, Buzz Launches, Wavelength Brings Bitcoin to Any App
0:00 - Opening banter, Nostr momentum & voice-first computing 7:21 - Presidio Bitcoin’s visiting member program 10:30 - Bitcoin Security Consortium: quantum preparedness, tradeoffs & independent funding 26:07 - Buzz launches to strong early adoption 35:53 - Buzz’s Nostr architecture and user-owned identity 48:28 - Can Anthropic or OpenAI copy Buzz? 53:24 - Buzz onboarding, local agents & security tradeoffs 1:03:37 - Learning through shared agents and 15-minute hackathons 1:07:54 - Mesh LLM and bitcoin-powered agent onboarding 1:18:52 - Wavelength and the growing Ark ecosystem 1:27:08 - Foundry’s BIP 110 vote and Stratum V2 1:37:20 - Nostr web of trust for humans and agents 1:41:10 - DK's treasure hunt progress and AI-assisted mysteries
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July 17 · 1 hr 26 min
Kimi K3 and the Open-Weight Race, AI Treasure Hunting, Bitcoin Falls Further Behind Gold
0:00 Making music with AI and the limits of today’s models 3:21 - Latent spaces & the future of creativity 8:04 - Will AI surpass human curiosity? 12:54 - Using AI to rediscover the ancient past 18:23 - How AI is transforming real-world treasure hunting 33:09 - Using Buzz and agents to solve unsolved mysteries 42:32 - Project Loupe’s early success and who should it scan next? 48:07 - Which projects deserve Loupe's audits? 1:08:20 - What Stripe could gain by acquiring PayPal 1:09:56 - Bitcoin’s worsening performance against gold 1:15:51 - Kimi K3, the open-weight AI race, and what it means for frontier AI labs
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July 10 · 1 hr 37 min
Goose Development Kit, Spiral Expands Into AI, Can Bitcoin Names Scale?
0:00 - World Cup fallout and opening banter 5:23 - Goose Development Kit (GDK) week at Presidio Bitcoin 9:29 - Why Spiral is expanding into AI & how it helps bitcoin 19:01 - GDK’s near-term roadmap and Mesh LLM 25:52 - Combining open and frontier AI models 33:20 - Preventing data leaks between AI models 38:02 - Anthropic's possible window into how AI models think 42:24 - How Goose connects apps, agents, and models 47:36 - Subscription pricing versus open agent ecosystems 54:37 - Can bitcoin support a global naming system? (the data-availability challenge) 1:03:10 - Who decides which bitcoin name is valid? 1:11:48 - Merkle batching and the hidden-name problem 1:21:00 - Can auctions work if the data stays hidden? 1:29:00 - Applying bitcoin’s peer-to-peer model to names 1:32:53 - Should bitcoin names use its own blockchain? SHOW NOTES: Goose: https://goose-docs.ai/ Spiral: https://spiral.xyz/ Spiral x AI announcement substack: https://spiralxyz.substack.com/p/spiral-x-goose-the-best-is-yet-to Presidio Bitcoin GDK event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7NGzb8m0nk
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July 3 · 1 hr 37 min
Open Source AI with Goose & Buzz, New OUSD Stablecoin, Fable 5 is Back
0:00 Summer camp. Teaching DK what the World Cup is. Steve visits the PBJ Remote studio. 13:52 What is Goose & the alpha of what's to come with open source AI 20:40 The kinds of things Goose Development Kit enables 33:10 Come and meet the Goose team at PB next Wednesday! 39:26 DK's experience using Buzz as a great example of the ACP standard and using Nostr 54:22 Steve's take on how Buzz changes open source software development 1:04:46 Max's Claude pilling moment, and it becoming more paternalistic over time 1:10:05 Compute constraints causing strange market dynamics 1:13:03 OUSD Stablecoin and its effects on Circle, Tether, and the broader market 1:27:58 Quick comment on Strategy, MSTR & STRC, and its long-term outlook SHOW NOTES Join us on Jamchat.fun
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June 19 · 1 hr 34 min
Announcing PB's Open Source AI Summit, Bitcoin Forks, Running Local AI Recap
0:00 World Cup chatter, DK searching for sports on Google, Good times on Jamchat.Fun 6:05 Recap of the Local AI Builder last night here at Presidio Bitcoin. Tom's local AI setup and how he's using it. 15:05 A watershed moment when Fable received export control from the US government 20:12 Is this like the Satoshi moment for banking in 2008 for AI in 2026? 28:23 Presidio Bitcoin's Open Source AI Summit this September! 36:25 Do you still have a business if everything is built on an AI platform? What's the moat? 40:25 Takes on SpaceX as an AI company post-Cursor buy. Launch is still unique. 47:12 Elon says regulation is the hurdle to getting more solar on Earth, which is why he's going to space 50:56 Bitcoin Forks, working on Bitcoin Core, and how updates happen 1:06:22 What is the timeline for these activities? 1:12:20 Touching on Drive Chain, Quantum, BIP 110, & BIP 361 1:18:42 What is the Paul Sztorc eCash hard fork? First one in 9 years? 1:23:53 Illinois signed into law a transfer tax for digital asset moves like Bitcoin 1:28:15 US Sovereign Wealth Fund buying, or taking, AI company equity as they did with Intel? SHOW NOTES: https://opensourceaisummit.org/ https://tomtunguz.com/
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June 12 · 1 hr 36 min
Anthropic's Fable Drama, Personhood for AI, Bark Launches on Mainnet
0:00 We keep getting requests to talk about basketball. What about the World Cup? 7:40 The future of livestreaming is https://jamchat.fun/ 15:30 Unveiling Buzz, an open source project, for AI native communications built on Nostr 25:26 Bitcoin is open source money, Nostr is open source identity 31:13 To summarize, Buzz brings together agents to collaborate; multiplayer & multiagent workflows 36:11 Extending Buzz functionality with a Lexe wallet integration for bitcoin payments 40:30 What is the future of the corporate structure with autonomous agents and AI personhood? 53:29 Anthropic's Fable 5 drama, what is going on? 1:00:25 What is the best approach for AI deployment? 1:07:34 We're most excited about really good open models & layers coming to the market 1:09:52 Bark launches on mainnet as a bitcoin layer 2, and comparing it to Lightning 1:21:44 Will interoperable decentralized money matter more to agents than humans? 1:26:55 Feedback from last show, Surge uses USDC on Base, and what is the Ethereum vs. Base value proposition? SHOW NOTES: Max's Article on Nostr Identity https://www.hivemind.vc/identity
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June 5 · 1 hr 29 min
USDC on Cash App, Wand Launch, Surge, and the Zcash Crash
00:00 Welcome back (we missed a week) 00:56 The Cash App Wand: tap-to-pay NFC device that sold out in 10 hours 09:07 Surge: a self-custody, no-KYC bitcoin-backed credit line 16:07 The Taproot design and how Surge uses it 21:28 How Surge tackles the oracle & liquidation problem 28:08 Base/Ethereum dependence, MPC & the signer network (Surge's lender side) 37:34 Borrowing against your bitcoin to buy AI stocks instead of selling 38:41 Cash App's USDC integration 51:14 Living design docs, AI-native shows & project constitutions 54:24 Is AI sucking liquidity out of bitcoin? 1:00:00 The IPO wave and the AI bubble debate 1:06:00 The Zcash crash: Opus uncovers an inflation bug 1:07:55 Privacy vs. auditable supply, and why this can't happen to bitcoin 1:11:19 Turnstiles & Orchard: can Zcash actually recover? 1:14:22 AI vs. software security & Spiral's Project Loupe 1:23:40 Cloudflare: AI agents overtake humans in web requests 1:27:32 Wrap-up & teasers (Spiral's AI work, NVIDIA, Sprout)
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May 22 · 1 hr 30 min
MSTR/STRC Outlook, Bitcoin's Security Budget & AI, Evaluating the Nation-State Threat
0:00 Getting off Twitter, losing passwords, and staying up to date with Stackernews 4:30 Why we find the Strategy conversation interesting, and we will still cover basketball 7:11 Can MSTR blow up? Unpacking the claim that Saylor is a new SBF 13:34 What are the outcomes and probabilities of Bitcoin and MSTR's future 21:00 How much does bitcoin need to grow to support MSTR's credit products? 25:00 Is the biggest risk Coinbase and its custodians or esoteric DeFi demand? 32:15 What's the investment thesis of holding MSTR vs STRC? 41:40 Finding new products from the synthesis of old concepts 45:41 Using Proof of Work for hot tubs creates a security issue? 55:55 Bigger picture and putting into context the security budget for bitcoin 1:05:27 Is this a design flaw of bitcoin? 1:11:40 Underlying issue is we don't know what the annual security budget should be. 1:21:00 What are the attack vectors to Bitcoin from a non-economic actor, like a nation-state? SHOW NOTES: Transaction Fee Paper (Budish, 2024) https://socialsciences.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/2024-09/Economic%20Limits%20Crypto%20Blockchains%20-%20QJE%20Sept%202024.pdf
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May 15 · 1 hr 35 min
Bitcoin Core v31 Release, Project Loupe Launches, Lightning Network's Future
0:00 Streaming in any language you want via https://babelagent.xyz/ 10:09 It used to be that if you left your job to study bitcoin. Now it's study vibecoding. 11:50 PBJ Podcast worth a MILLION dollars? 16:44 Okay, let's talk about bitcoin 17:24 Unpacking Bitcoin Core v31 21:12 Steve's top three highlights from Core v31. Feature 1: Embedded ASMAP 30:14 DK's security concerns and Anthropic Mythos model 31:16 Getting to Max's questions and other initiatives around node security 39:27 Feature 2: private transactions 47:47 Feature 3: cluster mempool & discussing block rewards vs fee. 58:22 Okay, what is cluster mempool, how it works, and why this could matter 1:01:56 Closing out the Bitcoin Core conversation and why it's important 1:03:22 Project Loupe, AI security scanning, to discover vulnerabilities in projects 1:13:26 This is important as bitcoin is the biggest honeypot for AI to hack 1:20:31 Another big release! Updates to LDK Server to ease building and operating an LSP 1:29:45 Steve's hot takes on the Lightning Network SNOW NOTES https://babelagent.xyz/ https://bnoc.xyz/
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