The Marxist Case for Bitcoin (From a Bitcoin Maximalist)

0:00episode of Let’s Talk About ETH. Um, I’m really appreciative of uh of you being here, Kenny, as our first guest on this series. Um, yeah, welcome. And then beyond that, I want to say I’m really grateful to uh you all and you Onagi, like Brian, right, for even letting me come in and have a vision for this podcast series. You two have been doing Let’s Talk About Web 3 for a couple years. Um, and I’ve been doing my own podcast with Weed Them [bleeped] for a couple years. And we did the you guys had me on last year, which was incredible. I was like really grateful.

0:28I love the energy and the chemistry. Um, and getting to jam about what a new series could look like that would add value to the ecosystem and, you know, bring in some of the the faces I’ve gotten to connect with over the last couple years. I’m really grateful of the freedom you gave me inside of creating this and uh I’m super excited. And so to let everybody know, this is let’s talk about ETH. And we’re here to talk about like what is this technology here for? What is ETH for? You know, what is this ecosystem for? Why are why is ETH the the the smart contract blockchain with

0:57people all over the world building better futures, right? And what does that even mean? Is that even real? Um and I’m super excited to have you here, Kenny, because I was like so shocked when I met you in Denver at Eat and you’re like, “But I’m a Bitcoin maximalist.” And I was like, “Wow, the last place I thought I’d meet a Bitcoin maximist is at the base house Denver.” Um but yeah, I’d love to give you all the opportunity to introduce yourself and then you Brian and then we’ll hand it over to you Kenny to to hear a little more about yourself. Yeah, for sure. What’s up everyone? My

1:25name is Z. Better call Z. Founder of the Zho. Focused on bringing the profit margin, data, and IP rights back to independent artists. Been uh doing it for the last little uh three years in crypto in the last six years with some musicians and just loving every bit of builder energy that there is out here. really excited about, you know, bringing some of these tools that are non-technical uh non-technical individuals can use that had only been possible before as technical individuals to kind of give these artists an opportunity to customize whatever they want. So, yeah, I’ll kick it over to you, B.

2:00That’s what’s up. No, shout out to shout out to you guys. Shout out to chat coming through um and sitting down with us today. I’m Onagi B. I’m Brian uh behind Onagi and Onagi University and we’ve been building a safe space, you know, for black, brown, and allied folks to learn and grow in emerging tech since 2022. Uh it’s been it’s been a amazing journey, you know, connecting with everybody. And you know, here today sitting with Kenny, our first guest for the season one of, you know, our spin-off of Let’s Talk about Web 3, but now we’re diving into Ethereum, let’s talk about ETH. It’s going to be a great

2:28time. I’m excited and just building community um getting in tune and t tapped in with other like-minded builders who are here for you know the social good aspect you know trying to help you know humanity trying to build uh things globally that are going to help more people succeed and kind of keeping you know that Bitcoin ethos that Satoshi ethos you know uh decentralization um you know free access for everybody across the globe. So uh I’m excited to see how this podcast goes and yeah let’s let’s kick it off. Let’s kick it over to Kenny.

3:00Yeah. Well, Kenny, I’m excited to have you. I’ll give you give you I’m gonna give you a quick introduction, right? So, Kenny’s been in the space for a while. Um, Kenny, shared with me, right, that you were submitting articles for the Bitcoin magazine back in the day. You’ve been a journalist in the space. Um, and now you’re working on Pixar Didn’t Happen. You have background in SEO and you’re somebody building, right? That’s what Pixar didn’t happen is about. And so, welcome to the show and thanks for being with us once again.

3:27Yeah. Yeah. Thank you all for having me. Um, name’s Kenny. Been in the space for a long time. Most people uh know me by PO these days, right? Which you can see in the background here. So, PO’s a social bounty app uh built across base, arbitrum, degenchain, really all EVM stuff. Um, and yeah, PO is focused on like Ethereum, ethos, social goods, right? I got into this space really thinking about things like uh big problems like governance, right, and DAOs. Like that’s what really drew me in. Um I love, you know, the gambling aspect. Everybody loves that too. But at the end of the day, I’m here to think

4:06about like how do we actually use this future money? Uh right. That’s what my buddy I’ll never forget the first time I told my buddy about Bitcoin 2015. uh we’re out playing playing hoops and I’m talking to him about him like this stuff’s really cool and then he just kept telling me like he he kept reminding me about how I used to tell him about future money back in the day. So I love that term for it because that’s what it is, right? This is future advanced money. It’s a this amazing thing that we get to work with and I think uh I think there are probably so

4:39many use cases out there for this future money that we haven’t thought of yet. Right? And a lot of people right now, this is the core debate uh that we are having. We see it on the timeline a lot. Like there’s a side of crypto that has just I don’t want to say given up, but they’ve they’re kind of pushing this argument that yeah, crypto is going to be financial rails and it’s going to be kind of boring and it’s going to be stable coins and like that’s okay. That’s that’s what we’re going to be. That’s fine. And you know, personally, I refuse to accept that. And I think that

5:11there’s still interesting awesome things we can do with this that are non-financial, right? Obviously financial in some sort of way because it involves money, but you know, not borrowing and lending, like real stuff, human collaboration, human coordination. Uh, and so that’s what PO is really focused on and that’s what me and Michelle were jamming on a lot a lot at the house and we’re having such a good combo that he was like, “Yeah, let’s uh let’s get you on the podcast.” So that’s why I’m here today because we were having such a good conversation about that.

5:46Yeah, absolutely. And you know like it was it was you know that’s what surprised me, right? Because I’m like oh this like mini app on Farcaster like Pixer didn’t happen like this concept like um I’m curious like for you when did PO become a concept like when when what was the impetus?

6:02Yeah. So, PO came out of actually me trying to think about health care on the blockchain. Uh, which that’s I’m obsessed with governance problems, right? And I I’m a political eh political science economics major um from back in the day. So, always like thinking about these problems. And I want to say it was it was after my my first son was born and I just you got a lot of downtime. you’re just sitting there taking care of a baby and you can just think about stuff. And I’m like trying to think through this problem of how can you have a pot of money that’s onchain that anybody can put money into,

6:44right? So it’s like crowdfund, but then anybody can try to take money out of it, which that’s where things get hairy because how do you know that the person taking money out deserves the money, right? like how do how does everybody decide everybody that put in have a say, right? And it’s kind of what DAOs work on, right? But DAOs get really messy. And it’s al it was also coming out of thinking about seeing a lot of DAO rating things and seeing people um have their treasuries raided and thinking about how can we fix that problem. Um, so POI came into being because what I

7:21settled on is that you want to have one like you want to have a single concrete yes or no. Did this thing get done or are we funding this thing, right? You need one thing for people to vote on because in general, humans on the internet are not good at having nuance discussions or like discussions around is this thing good or is this thing productive? But they are really good on uh problems of like did this thing actually happen, right? You can have that debate or what’s the old saying? There’s something about like if you lie, the fastest way to find truth on the internet is to like lie and say throw a

8:00lie out there and somebody’s going to correct you, right? So, I thought like you could do this if you had like claims for specific things, you know, specific uh people say like, “Hey, I need money because this thing happened to me.” And they submit a claim and there’s visual evidence and then everybody can rally around that and vote on it. And so out of thinking about that issue, I thought this could apply to a lot of different things. And then I realized um you could have this this ploy mechanic, right? And actually the best way to do this would be to say have one person say I want to

8:39get something done, right? One person who cares about getting something done. They define it. And then if people vibe with that idea and they want to see it funded, they can put in money, right? to increase the pot of money to incentivize this thing. And then if anybody comes in and tries to claim that they did that, right, the person who created the bounty, if they like one of those claims, they can nominate it for vote. And then all those people who put in money now have uh the ability to vote on whether or not they agree that the thing happened. Right? So, this was I thought

9:16I got really excited about this because I realized this is a mechanic that does not exist. You can’t do it with fiat. Like fiat money isn’t programmable in this way where you could have a pot that people have put into that um it’s somewhat out of their control, right? The money does they don’t actually hold their money anymore, but there isn’t one person who holds all the money. Like this was unique. this is totally different. And um once I had in my head, I knew I had to build it. And uh from that point came a very long road of me uh working with freelance devs, working

9:58with open source devs because I’m not a dev. You know, I run the GitHub. I merge pull requests. I can break the app and if I try to do anything, right, I can I can adjust the title tag here and there and H1 or like a button, right? I know some HTML because I’m an SEO, but I’m not I’m not in there like putting in JavaScript redirect rules or anything like that. That’s a little bit too advanced for me. Um so yeah it’s just been this long road of trying to build this uh public goods infrastructure and doing it in such a way that um like

10:33I think it’s a very serious very important innovation but at the same time I want to keep it looking like a toy like keep it being something that’s accessible to anybody. Anybody feels like they can come in here and put a bounty for something small and I do that all the time. Most of the bounties I put out there aren’t uh aren’t super um high dollar amounts, right? But the the fundamental belief here is that PO can scale to very large accomplishments, right? We’ve done that. The kickflip world record, that’s the one that we hang our hat on. And uh I think it’s it’s small enough to be this fun

11:11platform, the social media platform where people hang out and trade pictures. Um, but it’s big enough to uh move the world and organize money in a way that’s impossible to do uh without Ethereum, without crypto.

11:26And I think that’s sorry, I think it’s a perfect segue. Um, what do you want to say, Brian? No, I was just going to say that’s amazing. That’s amazing. I think, you know, um, we started off, you know, 2022 as just, you know, a 10K PFP because I’m I’m heavy artist side, heavy, you know, graphic designer background. Um, but I really wanted to like build a community and a lot of the things that, you know, as soon as my inbox started flooding with, you know, I love the art. I love what you’re building, but I have no idea these terms you’re talking about. You’re talking about wallets, metamask, ETH,

11:57guay price, and all this stuff, right? And we were like, okay. We’re like real quick. Then we pivoted to like, okay, we got to teach people uh what’s going on. And one of the things that we really kind of, you know, bring this back to was like this is a perfect opportunity for anybody or any community to really kind of like raise funds together and decide on what to do with those funds together, which we’ve never really seen before. You know, we kind of like liken it to like a new a new Indiegogo or a new Kickstarter type of vibe. And I think that’s really cool to see, you

12:29know, people like you that are still kind of playing in that, you know, crowd crowdfunding, crowd sourcing some funds um in the bounty side and and bringing that together. Man, it’s it’s beautiful. Not a lot of people have that that want to utilize the tech for that. You know, a lot of people are just like, I want to try to steal as much money from other people as I can. I’m just trying to sell as much as I can and make the biggest bag and and get up out of here, get my yacht and and go. There’s not a whole lot of people that have that mission of

12:56like, no, this this tech can be used, you know, for social good to help communities all over the globe, you know, be in control of what they’re what they’re earning, what they’re making, and what they’re pulling together. So, that’s really solid.

13:08Thank you. I need like a soundboard. We’ll get there. Dog in the background. Um, yeah. No, no. I mean, I think that’s a good point. I like that you bring up the crowdfunding side of things because I try to tell people about this, right? When they’re they’re not really um you know, I talk to like potential investors and stuff like that. Uh I’m trying to explain the potential for PO because most people look at crypto they’re like if you’re not doing a DEX, right, or if you’re not doing um an L1, right? Those are the ways that people have printed money with businesses in the past. And so PO’s a

13:45bit risky, right? I’m trying to build this business that, you know, we take 2.5% fees on bounties and that’s about it. You need a ton of bounty volume to to make that possible, right? Frankly, so I’m fighting an uphill battle on the business front. It is what it is. But at the same time, I like to tell people that uh you know crowdfunding that is the social finance use case of the internet that we have seen GoFundMe, right? Like Kickstarter and I worked on GoFundMe. actually did SEO for GoFundMe back in the day. So, uh I like that business and I I know it pretty well in

14:21terms of like the kind of traffic they can get and the kind of user interest that they can get, right? people enjoy rallying their money together to get things done and that it’s just that what you’re trying to explain to people with poet is um you know I the analogy we used to always tell people with crypto when you were explaining it to them on payment side right was like oh it’s a push transaction versus a pull transaction so everything in history up to the point of bitcoin like you needed to give your information they pulled it from your bank account, right? And then Bitcoin was this way that you could push

14:59a transaction out into the world. And so I try to tell people that this is push crowdfunding versus pull crowdfunding where for all human history, you have had to have some central people that said we are going to get this done, but you got to fund us, right? Everybody puts their money in and you you trust those people and sometimes it works out well and sometimes it doesn’t work out well. like you just had you had to trust people and it was the only technology we have and so I’m just trying to say that look we have a new way of doing this like you can go scroll through po and

15:31you can see all the stuff on there and if you want that to happen you can help push it you can put more money into this you can push that thing into reality and it’s tough because you’re trying to explain a a totally new use case that doesn’t have a proxy to old money right in the same way that the financial use cases do, right? And everybody gets the financial use cases because you can see how banks work and finance works. And yeah, I just but I still think going back to the opening statements, I think there’s this really uh we are at a time

16:08of immense like I’m immensely gratitude grateful to be at this time because there’s these green wide open pastures and there are going to be use cases and we can find those use cases and I think we’re we’re the first ones to doing that. Uh it’s going to um be be really good for us. I think we’ll be we’ll be pioneers in that regard. Yeah. No, that’s awesome. I like that uh push versus pull uh analogy because most of the crowdfunding when we say the word crowdfunding is an individual asking blanket statement for money for something and I think what you bring which is unique is

16:50the person who is uh earning that thing is decided at the end as opposed to the beginning of the process. So that’s like uh that put that that push uh concept versus pull is is really interesting. So no, I love it. I’m I’m excited to see see more people check it out. I’ve been um seeing different things ping here and there um with different people claiming we’re putting things up on Farcaster and I think uh getting getting more people out there, getting more people to do kind of these um literal social good things somewhere else across the world is really cool to be able to make that

17:24impact like you said. Yeah, it’s and I I always like hopping on calls like this and have discussions too just because the hardest part is trying to figure out what to put out there, right? Like what to put out, what can get done, how do you distribute it properly. Uh because it is so wide open in terms of the opportunities that you could type into that box of thing that I want to incentivize in the world. Um, but yeah, I’m learning and you know, finding my way as I can. I think I posted the other day that that was like a superpower once I realized like how to write

18:04bounties in such a way that you can put money out there and it’s provable. You can verify it and somebody can do it. Somebody who you don’t even know. You never like you never have to know any personal details about them, but like they can do something and they can prove it to you and you can pay them and it’s just it’s hard to do because the the flip side of this is it is a dark forest out there and there’s always going to be people out there trying to get your money, right? Like I’ve been giving away uh you know money on the internet for

18:38two years. So, I know all the pitfalls of like, oh, if I say if I make a bounty for shoot two, three-pointers in a row, somebody’s going to upload a video, but I won’t know where they got that video. Maybe they got that off YouTube. So, I’ll make sure that I have them say this is for PO at the very beginning of the video, right? Or make sure it’s posted on a historic social media account. There’s all sorts of tricks to it. Um, but yeah, it’s it’s been a fun thing to to build and like to have to squash those problems of making sure that

19:11you’re efficiently giving away money because yeah, I fraud is everywhere uh when you try to run something like this. But at least with PO, it’s 100% transparent. You know exactly uh where you put your money into and what it got paid out for. So I think it’s somewhat of an improvement. You’re kind of stepping in, you’re stepping into an interesting realm. It’s like um you’re talking about like verifiable actions, you know? You’re kind of like going beyond real world real world assets. It’s like real world action, which is kind of cool. You know what I’m saying?

19:49Yeah. I saw a post the other day. Somebody was like, “The crisis of like human authenticity is so real.” And which is why I tell people like I think this sits at an intersection of a lot of different things we got going on. Like one of the biggest sub biggest most active subreddits on Reddit right now is is this AI?

20:08Yeah. Wants to have those debates. And I want the long-term vision for PO is Reddit for bounties. Like I want there go, you know, somebody has a bounty and they put it out there and like 10 people put money in and then there’s this whole comment section as well of people weighing in and upvoting and down voting claims be like, “Oh, no, that one’s not legit. That one’s not legit.” So I think there is this, you know, there’s entertainment value to be had around debates around did this thing get done, should this person be rewarded? Um, so there’s like that AI angle and then the

20:43other angle is like public goods funding and governance. And a lot of people are disenchanted with what their governments are getting done for them, right? They’re disenchanted about uh the accomplishments that they pay into. Like you pay your taxes and then you have no idea where that money goes to and you can’t trace it down to, hey, I helped fund this thing. And I think that there’s there’s an intersection there, too. Like people are disenchanted. they want to have an impact in the real world. Um, so yeah, I’m kind of going back against the tide though because everything everything right now, like if you want to get attention in crypto in

21:19the last month, it’s like you got to be doing AI stuff. You got right like everything has to be AI generated. So, um, it’s a little bit at times you’re like, “Oh man, I’m I’m pushing this protocol that’s focused on real world activity. Everybody’s going to ignore me.” But we have had some like we have a had agents run bounties. So that’s kind of cool. Like

21:43yeah, there’s people uh it’s Misabbot on Farcaster who she has ran bounties and she’s still learning. She’s made some mistakes. Um but like she’s able to put a bounty up based off an idea and look at the photos that come in and you know generally judge, hey is that AI and like give them grades. Um, she’s kind of a jerk, which is that’s charming because most of the AI agents are psychopants, right? Uh, so yeah, I I think that’s that’s a fun angle, too, because and I don’t have you seen rent a human at all? Have you you guys seen pop off?

22:19Yeah. Um, which is like that’s used like really. Have you not z Have you not seen it? Rent a human. Uh, I’ve seen it, but I think Mo asked uh what it was if you want to explain it.

22:34Yeah. So, Rent to Human, you can go to it. Rentahhuman.ai. Once all these bots started popping off, all the clawed bots and stuff, this guy made a website where humans could sign up to do tasks for them, right? And as far as I know, nothing’s really nothing that productive is getting done. I mean, I looked at it when it came out and I was like, h I’m not really sure about this thing in the first place. Like, these agents are going to get scammed again. What the main thing that I’ve learned is like it’s so hard to verify that a human actually did something like it’s a tough

23:06thing. It’s tough for me to do it, right? Like a claw bots, of course, it’s going to get ripped off. But some of the rented humans, the rent humans gone viral. Like it got a ton of attention. People are like, “Oh, look, the the bots are paying humans to do stuff.” And actually, we we even did one like this back a year ago, like when AI agents were first popping out. We had a bot running like top hat bounties on the Gen Chain. Like we already did this, but all right, people care about it.

23:33You know, they caught the moment. That’s fine. They got all the attention. But the bounties that they’ve done that have been most uh they’ve gotten the most attention have been picture bounties where it’s like, “Oh, go hold a sign at Shabuya Crossing in Japan, right?” And or go hold a sign at Crypto.com Arena. And so it’s like, okay, so my app is already built for that. It’s built for photo verification, right? We’re already ahead ahead there. And then the more interesting thing though is that with our open bounty design, the bot can make the bounty and it’s the bounty creator, but humans could come in and be in the

24:15loop and they could add funds. So you could have a bot that creates something and it’s running the bounty, but humans are actually funding it for the bot. And it’s all permissionless. And then if the bot chooses to pay somebody out because of our onchain voting mechanism, the humans are there. They’re like, “Ah, you dumb dumb bot. You didn’t do this. You got I’m gonna vote no.” And they can get their money back. Right? So that’s that’s the fun thing with POS. Just totally trustless. And I am as much as I’m bullish on the human side of things and POI will always be a human focused

24:50app to uh to touch on the AI hype like there is still that aspect there and there’s no reason POI can’t be this platform where humans and agents are collaborating socially. Yeah, I think the big thing about the rent a human from what I had heard was uh it just asks for so much of your social information um to give to it and like you said, you don’t know if it’s a scam. So, you know, most people individuals aren’t going to be just tossing all their information right in there. And I think one of the beautiful things like you said about Boyd is that it’s a permissionless and trustless

25:24because that’s the beauty of this technology and the fact that you don’t have to add all that information. you don’t have to have all this, you know, KYC um challenges because you’re just pushing funds like you said. You’re you’re able to trustlessly um believe that the contract is written in such a way where you know you do have that option at the end to be like okay no this isn’t right like I have my my my backout option um if I don’t believe that that that’s true. So yeah, I think that that’s a it’s a really cool cool use case like you said that’s completely

25:59unique to to blockchain. You couldn’t do it otherwise and uh and in this current world there’s so many middlemen doing different things. It’s cool that you’ve created an automation that does previous middleman jobs.

26:14Yeah. Yeah. 100% trustless. We never hold any customer funds. Um, there’s no back doors to the contract. It’s immutable. I partly I did this because I I want to from a legal perspective. I want to have myself covered because the reality is you’re building this app where people can pull money to do stuff. Some people might try to do illegal stuff. We put in our terms and conditions. Don’t do that, right? But, uh, you know, it’s a permissionless blockchain. So, even if we remove it from the front end, it could be on the back end. So, yeah, I don’t want to be liable. So, this the technology is

26:48better this way. this is an improvement over anything else because I don’t have to be a middleman. I don’t have to be the person holding money for people and deciding on things. It’s always funny to me because sometimes people come people bring up to me they’re like, “Oh yeah, you guys should be the the final say in whether the bounty gets paid out.” Like I never want to do that. No,

27:09no. I don’t want to be the the person handling the payouts and money. Like this should be purely peer-to-peer and pure uh onchain rules. There’s plenty of platforms with middlemen people can use instead. This is trying to make the argument that you can have use cases that lean into decentralization that are using decentralization as a strength, not a uh thing that you have to design around.

27:40Love it. That’s been that’s been an interesting that’s been an interesting topic just seeing like the space as a whole kind of um you know wrap their head around you know we’re having this this first like part in humanity when we can have these decentralized you know fully decentralized you know actions especially revolving around finance and you know a lot of that a lot of that comes up it’s like well do we need a little bit of centralization sometimes you know when it is the full wild wild west some humans do a little you out there things but um it’s been an interesting thing just to just to see

28:14you know that that that just position okay we have decentralization we have a full decentralization option other people like okay I see kind of why we do need a little centralization here and there spring

28:27sure I especially on the on the financial side um yeah I was having this debate with somebody the other day right they were saying that tokens they’re talking about the use of tokens in crypto and like tokens are obviously the best technology that crypto has to offer and I guess my push back on that is I think they were talking about like specul the speculative side of things Zora um launch you know launchpads and

28:58you know Zora made the right call because they were pivoting to like launching tokens and the reason why it’s the right call is because tokens have the most proven product market fit in crypto and I was like I mean there’s an argument you can make that centralized sales of tokens do like the number one crypto use case is people buying L1 tokens on Coinbase right it’s just like centralized custodian I buy some Bitcoin I hold it right that is the number one most people the general public is not you know bridging and then like swapping on unis swap right there’s like the core dgens right the to the 20,000 people on

29:40crypto Twitter. Yeah, but it’s not like we we still haven’t proven that tokens are this uh amazing use case. So, I still kind of view that speculative side of it as like it’s not a proven I I mean people people will give me crap for this. It’s not a proven crypto use case because it’s not decentralized. It’s a centralized crypto use case. Just

30:03that’s okay. But there has to be something that’s a use case out there that’s fully decentralized. And so like that’s what I keep, you know, searching for, what I’m interested in. And I don’t know if y’all have been paying attention to Vitalic. Um, but he’s been posting a lot about this sort of stuff like was something around Yeah, he’s posting a lot of like anti-corpo slop stuff. I got it up on my screen. tech in shitification. I like it. It’s wartime vital and he’s coming out being like we need decentralized tech and we need um he’s also strictly called out like non-financial use cases. So it it makes

30:47me uh bullish and it gives me hope as a builder in these times when you know I’m trying to work on something and you don’t know if it’s going to work out. it’s going to really take off with people. Um, but just to know the main guy, the main ETH guy, the main uh crypto philosopher is still out here saying that these non-financial use cases are important. And it’s, you know, he’s saying in his own vital way, so it’s not perfect clear words, but I think what he’s saying is like these use cases are out. How these use cases are out there. We need to find them. And

31:22that’s what I’m trying to do. Yeah. So, I um I would love to to kind of switch gears for like 10 minutes and really give you the space to tell people about how you got into crypto, right? Um you you’re pretty early to this space. You were in the Bitcoin space writing before you’re even in the Ethereum ecosystem. And I think that gives you like a very unique point of view, right, on how the public conversation has evolved, the internal conversation of people actually building, experimenting, researching, etc. Um and yeah, I would love for for you to yeah, give us that story.

31:52Yeah. So the first times that I heard about uh Bitcoin again I was studying economics and political science at university uh 2010 2011 and I had an econ teacher and 2011 was the first big Bitcoin bubble and I remember seeing it on Reddit and so I took it to her. I was like hey this looks cool. We’re talking I’m going I’m studying econ post financial crisis. So there’s a lot of reckoning in the econ department. They’re like are models wrong? What are we doing wrong? What do we not see with this? And so I thought it’d be a good idea to bring Bitcoin to her. And I took

32:29it to her and uh she was like this is the dumbest [bleeped] I’ve ever seen. And what are you talking about? What do you mean internet money? It’s priced in dollars so it doesn’t have I remember her argument was it’s priced in dollars so it doesn’t can’t have its own value. which was really strange in retrospect. Uh awesome teacher though. Uh she actually had me come give a a presentation to the the kids at my alumni back in like 2022 as well. They invited me back. So that was fun. Um but yeah, so 2011 first time peing interest, but I didn’t get into it. Uh so then

33:062013 rolls around and there’s another bubble and I was like, “All right, whatever.” ever. The econ teacher told me no, but obviously it has some value. So, I’m going to get into this. At the time, I was running a waffle food truck up in Birmingham, Washington. So, that tells you you get a polyai econ. I’m freelance writing. I’m like running this truck. I was also a musician. You know, it’s all uh it was all a lot of a lot of different side jobs and interesting things in my early 20s, but I was a hustler trying to find any way possible to get some uh publicity for my

33:43waffle truck. And that was the early days of like you could, you know, say that you’re taking Bitcoin and you’re going to be on front page of uh our Bitcoin, right? And so like I made a splash like, hey, Waffle Food Truck up here in Bellingham, Washington. And we were one of the first, probably, you know, one of the first 50 on the West Coast of brick andmortar spots to take Bitcoin. Um, so that was good. Got some publicity out of that. The local ABC News affiliate covered us. Uh, you can still find the video on it’s somewhere on YouTube, but it’s it starts off as just

34:18like there’s this internet currency and it’s being used by drug dealers and hard cut. It’s like, but in Bellingham, you could buy a waffle from Kenny’s food truck.

34:29I love that. That’s awesome. Yeah. So, that was that was the early days and started writing for Bitcoin magazine, too. Um, but I was I was pulled in by a lot like there was the publicity side of things, but there was also just fundamentally I was very I was fascinated by this tech and like I got pulled into studying econ because I liked econ there’s an old blog you can find from me uh called Bitcoin and Marx’s theory of history if you want to dig into my like really heady thoughts around you know what is Bitcoin and where does it fit into economic history? Um, and

35:13you want to give us like an overview of it? Yeah. Yeah. So, the general thought of Marx, Marx’s theory of history is like Marx was looking at evolution from an evolutionary perspective, right? He’s like Darwin figured out how animals evolved and there has to be a way to figure out how societies evolved from an economic point of view, right? And so his thinking, a lot of people get confused and they think when he’s saying socialism, right, we should move to socialism, we should move to communism. It’s sort of like, you know, you should buy a Coke or Pepsi. It’s a decision that you make. But no, what he’s

35:52actually saying is like humanity is moving on this scale, this evolutionary time span, and it is inevitable that capitalism will lead to socialism, and it’s inevitable that socialism will lead to communism from that. It’s just a path that you can’t um you can’t stray from, right? And when when I was looking through his old writing, a lot of what he say says about that time of like and people talk about this latestage capitalism, right? Um it feels like what you’re getting with Bitcoin with this movement towards Bitcoin. I’m writing this back in 2014. Uh but you’re talk he’s he talks about this spontaneous movement of like people having this

36:39spontaneous realization. So it’s not a top- down thing. It’s a decentralized revolution, right? When you think about that in terms of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency of all these people around the world, nobody being forced to do this thing by gunpoint, just coming to a collective realization, this might be a better way of doing money. Um, I think that’s an interesting framing for for Bitcoin. So, yeah, that was that was the early days, what got me into it. Um yeah, and then you know the the crash happens and life happens and like I there was I guess I could have taken the path and continued to work on just only

37:20crypto content but I got into the SEO world and doing digital marketing and different things like that. Um, but you know, I’ve I’ve I’ve been following it ever since then. And that continues to be like, you know, I got into this for political reasons for, hey, we can make the world better if we have better money, right? And I think that um, Bitcoin fundamentally is political technology, right? Especially if you look at I think what we were talking about is the difference between, you know, the white paper, right? says uh it talks about peer-to-peer electronic cash, right, which is very financial. It’s just like, hey, there’s a payment

38:02system, right? Um but the inside of it, right, the genesis block that that’s saying banks on the brink or chancellor on the brink of second bailout for the banks, it’s a very fundamental message of like we live in an unfair economic system. fundamentally when you have certain people with access, they get the money first, they get fair treatment, they get cheaper loans, it just messes up society entirely, right? And so I definitely vibed with that. And um you know, coming back to that fundamental reason like, hey, but why do I consider myself a Bitcoin maxi? I still I still love that message of don’t mess with the

38:44money. It’s just there’s 21 million supply, that’s it. there’s no humans meddling with it or anything. Um, but at the same time, the Bitcoin people, they’re just so laser focused on that money piece that they’re not really obsessed with like, okay, how do you use the future money in a new and unique way? And that’s where the Ethereum community shines and where I’ve been able to find my people on, you know, places like Farcaster. Um, where like I had I talked a little bit on crypto Twitter back in the day, but I was I was always just kind of somebody uh in the background of

39:20conversations, you know, following the bigger accounts. And then when Farcaster came out, uh just because it was a smaller pool of people, uh I could post there and actually get some visibility. And that’s uh really yeah, shout out all the the Farcaster people, Farcaster homies, anybody who’s watching because without that I probably don’t build PO um without having that community that I would log into every day and it was people that were trying to build things and push things and generally Ethereum people, not a lot of Bitcoin people on there, right? So it was a great space to discover. Um, a question I wanted to ask you and

40:00and and I completely get like how the the builder energy on Fargo can be motivating. I feel like Twitter crypto Twitter can feel like a a lot of information all at once and I feel like crypto Twitter forecaster kind of is a justosition. It’s like more like what can we do right now? You know, how can we collaborate? What’s like the new thing people are doing to coordinate in a new fun way. I think um I thought DJ was pretty sick. I feel like that’s honestly what pulled me on to far caster more aggressively, which I feel like probably a good number of people would

40:28have said at the time. I um I was curious though, right? Like you talk about the genesis block on Bitcoin and you also talk about like marks and this vision of like there being like this decentralized revolution. Where do you feel like we actually are in that in that like um paradigm switch like that conversation? And what do you think like I don’t know if you said what that through line was of that per se?

40:49Yeah. Yeah. I mean the point that we are at in that decentralized revolution is we’re obviously we’ve progressed along um we got more people that believe that they actually care about that crypto has value than ever before right but I think we have hit this stalled out point right I mean you can see it on the Bitcoin graph right where like it used to have these giant ups and now like the latest bull run. It’s kind of like this kind of looks like it’s going to fall over, right? And um yeah, we’re I mean we’re at a really really important time where I think we have to come come up with

41:35breakthrough use cases that show people that this money without government can be used for things that uh we would expect the government to do but we can do it better than them. Right? Because what money without government like why is that a a special concept? It’s like the money is supposed to be the government’s job, but the government did so bad at it that Satoshi had to step up, be like, “All right, I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this in a better way, right? I’m going to do it in a way that just completely checkmates everything.” Um, so we have to do the

42:13same thing now and find, okay, they are he did money. That’s a core government use case. what are these other core government use cases that we can find that we can do better than them? And that’s partly why I do try to have this public goods focus with POI and try to think about what are uh the different the different jobs you can put out there that people would traditionally think of as duties of government um that we might be able to do. One of the first PO bounties I ever did was uh replacing ripped basketball nets at a a park down the street. And so like that’s that’s

42:50what I want to really push after and where I think that we can change our public perception too because right now we’re not in a good place with the crypto industry. Like you go to a bar and you pull 10 people at that bar and you tell them, “Hey, I’m in crypto.” Like nine out of 10 they’re like, “Okay, peace.” like don’t want to talk to you, dude. Like I like it’s just it’s not a good place. And I I’ve seen the other side of that. I remember in 2017 it was different. Everybody was in everybody was interested in it. It was hot and now

43:23they just associate it with scams and bad vibes and we just we need to bring back um the better vibes for it. So yeah, coming back to that through line of like the decentralized revolution, it’s it’s in a tough place because in a lot of ways it looks like it’s failing, but I think it’s up to us, the people that are still hanging around here that still believe in this that like we have to reframe that conversation and find ways to make crypto legitimately useful to the average person.

43:52Yeah. Okay. I don’t know if Brian you wanted to say something. I saw you ready to say something, I think. No, no, you guys are kicking. You got more.

44:00Yeah. I mean, I was gonna ask like so how can we do that on PO? Like how can PO be a space to almost incentivize people to start like pushing us in that direction like shifting the conversation? Like is this that kind of interface?

44:13Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you need to you need to start to think about like what is something that I can do in my local community that is a clear task, a clear thing that can be better and try to fund it. Try to organize, right? Put out that bounty. Fi find the RIP basketball net in your community, put a bounty out for it, and I’m going to add money and I’m going to promote it, right? I’m going to try to get this thing done. Um, and that’s what I need. And what’s hard for me because you know it’s it’s really tough to convince people to put money into your project,

44:51right? And not and I’m not offering you any financial return either. Like I’m asking you to just do this out of the kindness of your heart to try to improve your local community. Um, it’s a tough sale, right? But that’s all I can ask people and all that. That’s why I focus on it too of like I just try to stack these use cases of um things. So I think right now what we have on the public goods side of things. What are the bounties that I have out? Um I think I got one for improve public information in your community. There’s a $40 bounty. $40 bounty. I think the

45:33deadline is uh winner announced on Monday. Deadline for entry is Sunday. It’s like go out in your community and clean like you can clean a dirty sign, improve signage, improve public access to information, anything. Show a before and after picture, right? Got stuff like that. Uh clean and document a shared public space. That could literally be go to a park, you see a bench that’s dirty, clean that up. Before and after photo, right? These sorts of things. So, I’m trying to push it with my own examples, and you can too. Like, anybody can go to these pages and they could you could add $5 of ETH because you want to see this

46:11thing happen. But, yeah, where I struggle and where I need uh community, and I come back to this often. I post these ideas often. It’s like, I just need bounty ideas. I need ideas of things to do and go accomplish. Um, the kickflip world record, that was massive. Uh,

46:29tell us more about that. Yeah, the kickflip world record that was that came out of the Den community and somebody I think Jik from Den was looking for marketing ideas and Garrett from Farcaster, he drops in, he’s like, “Yeah, we should break a world record.” Because me and him had talked about that before. So then I go look up kickflip world records or like world records that could be broken on skateboarding. I found this one for the most kick flips in one minute and pitched it to uh Den DAO, which they had um they had a pretty big treasury. I was like, “All right, this will be fun.” Like, this will be

47:09it’s a $10,000 marketing initiative, but somebody’s going to break this world record. If they don’t break the world record, you get out the money back. That’s a good thing, right? No risk, no loss. It’s like this either happens or it doesn’t. We get the money back if it doesn’t happen. But if we do, we change the world. That’s sweet. That was the pitch. And so it was like, you have to break the world record, but at the very beginning of the video, you have to say, “This is for DGEN, right?” And we rallied it. We got $10,000. And then because the DAO put the money in, Josik,

47:41who runs DGEN, he’s like, “This is cool. I’m going to put in 20,000.” In total, there was like 11 contributors because other people, you know, they put in $5 here and there, $7 here and there, but the majority was coming from those two entities. And then, yeah, put it out in the world, told people whoever gets Guinness to update the the world record page first, like you’d get the money, right? So, we used Guinness as the oracle, so we don’t have to watch a bunch of AI kickflip videos. It’s like, all right, Guinness is going to be the ones who verify. And then I woke up one

48:14day and Dave Bachinsky who he’s very uh connected in the space and he’s worked with the Nars guys for a long time. He’s been on Farcaster. He was a degen guy. I just I saw that notification and there was his video and click it and there he is breaking a world record and get it. He had got Guinness to update the page. Um, so yeah, that was massive. And that was uh, yeah, when I think about think about it, it’s like I you got to find things like that. What are these big goals that you can go after? That’s so fun because like that that video probably got like

48:53over a million views on social media. Like it’s still it’s still going to get views every people look that up. People search for kickflip world record, right? And that’s what they see every time they see a video of Dave saying this is for DGEN. And uh I think that’s that’s freaking awesome. I also think that that’s like as far as we had a whole meta of like Zora was supposed to be a content creation platform, right? Like we had Zora as a content creation platform pushed by the biggest entities in the space and I’m pretty sure our piece of content is better than anything that came out of there. And so it’s

49:32something that keeps me going of like this concept is special. Like we can produce amazing content with this, right? I just need the ideas. I need to find the right things to go after, the right tasks to do, the right goals. And so that’s I mean that’s why I’m here today talking to you all, right? Because you only get there if you continue to talk and collaborate and ask people like what what should we go after next? what’s what’s the next thing that we could accomplish? And um I am bullish on the idea that someday we’re gonna uh hit that vein of content of of things that

50:10we can just like keep checking boxes and get that flywheel going million%. I love it. I think it’s super sick. So what the immediate thing that shows up for me is like the like UGC like it’s like a way to like incentivize and authenticate UGC and so I’m curious like what are your thoughts on that and like engaging people with platforms right to use it as a way to generate UGC right they get like a whole marketing campaign and they get to decide which ones they actually want to like thank or use right repurpose per se maybe a better way to frame it.

50:44Yeah. Yeah. No, I we’re all about like UGC short form video that is the currency of the internet now, right? You have all these creators and they have these massive fan bases and when you think about what you could do if you can financialize financially activate all those people, right? And a lot of people are thinking about this like there is an evil version of po on Salana called Dare market. um which try like Dare market they it’s just so bad like the other day they had one they were getting people to drink their own piss and it’s awful horrible and like it’s but they have VC

51:28funding right and they have all the Salana Koss that like repost their stuff and so people see that idea right and like everybody knows it’s valuable to generate this uh new short form content on the internet. I just need to convince people that like uh the most the most valuable form is like the wholesome stuff, right? And not like I want to stay away from the bad vibes and like getting people to do self like that’s weird. That’s terrible. Um, it gets to the heart of like a lot of there’s a lot of people who are uh pessimistic about the internet and pessimistic about the

52:09state of the world and like I just I am relentlessly optimistic on the internet and what the what it can enable and personally I think you know my argument is always that you know why is po doing it the the way we’re doing it and I’m not doing weird bounties asking people to uh do shock stuff, right? Why am I asking people to do public goods is because like I am a student of internet marketing. Like I’m an SEO. I’ve worked on some of the biggest websites on the internet. I’ve grown websites from like 10,000 visitors a month to millions of visitors per month. I’ve seen this close

52:50up, right? Um, and then I’m just like a nerd who grew up on uh Reddit and MySpace and all this stuff. Like I grew up on the internet. Wholesome content gets the most visibility on the internet. It does. Like those humans are awesome videos like highlight clips. I’ll sit with my buddy and we’ll watch like old NBA highlight clips of old players or I’ll like sit with my brother and we’ll we’ll watch that. Like we don’t go watch people hurt themselves. Like sometimes Yeah. There is like Rob Deer Deck and all, but it’s a niche of content whereas the broadest mass appeal content on the internet is all wholesome

53:29things and human accomplishments and funny videos that your mom would feel comfortable sharing on Facebook. And I think that’s what we want to be going after in terms of this user userenerated content.

53:45I love that. Well, I’m excited. I um I decided I want to like I’m doing this crypto podcast obviously, but I really like just asking people questions and like talking about stuff like people so much do a podcast because I talk so much

53:59and I’m starting to do like man on the street content now. I walked around last night here in Denver for like an hour and a half and I asked like five people like for like 10 minutes each, right? Just a couple questions. I just posted on YouTube unedited. Um, and I think it’d be cool to kind of have We Them Media be a dab is kind of just incentivizing like g gu g gu g gu g gu g gu g gu g gu g gu g gu g gu guerrilla journalism in like a really loose open-ended way, right? Just let’s document our oral history or whatever

54:20perspectives, right? In like an informal way and just like get more perspectives from each city, more faces from each city, right? Almost like uh yeah, like like you say, like I guess I think of like America’s Home Videos. I think of like I don’t even know. I think of Channel 5, but I feel like Channel 5 is so refined. Dude, I love this idea and it’s such an unfable thing and something where I could because I’ve been trying to do more video bounties, right, where I put out uh we have an Instagram and a Tik Tok now just because skaters on Instagram, it’s so big for

54:52skater culture, right? Instagram. And so when Dave broke the world record, we wanted to have an Instagram. Um, but I’ve done most of the video bounties. I generally just keep it to like sports stuff where it’s like, hey, make two three-pointers for PO or um go top bins, right? Like kick a soccer ball right in the top right corner. But that’s such a good idea of like man on the street content because it can’t be faked and you’re getting people to do it. It can be valuable in and of itself and there’s evidence of the city and AI can’t fake it. So, I might run and make one of

55:26those bounties. If you want to collaborate on it, let me know. Yes, definitely. And we’ve done it too of like there I did a bounty where you have to go and like give compliments to 10 random people on the street and post it, right? And so it’s like, hey, you’re spreading love in your community. You’re just walking around and like it’s great. I mean, some guy did it in uh it was in Nigeria and he’s just walking through the road. He’s like, oh that’s that’s a nice that’s a nice shirt that you have. were like, “Oh, that’s a beautiful dress, right?” And posted it up. Um, but

55:59I like it too if it from the interview perspective. Um, yeah, let’s collaborate, man. Yeah. Another thing that could be really interesting is, let’s say someone’s, you know, in a lesser uh, populated area and is interested in, you know, uh, I’m working with musicians. So, I always try and if I see a musician on the street, a street musician, I always try and toss a couple dollars of a tip in there, um being able to say, you know,

56:30put put $50 in in a in a in a musician’s um tip bin and we’ll give you $50, right? So, it’s like, you know, that it’s trust trusted, permissionless, it’s there, you know, like you will get that um coming to you. So, you can kind of like pass that along um along the way. It could be really interesting. Definitely. Yeah, that’s um I mean I’m a musician, too. There was times when I was that guy out there busking on the street, so it does mean a lot. I’m the same way where I want to be putting um money into that that uh that hat every

57:05time that I see it out there. The only thing I’ll say on that one, right, like All right, so this is this is a good discussion here. Okay. So, if you do just donate money to a street musician.

57:16Yeah. How do you How do you a video gets posted and it’s a buddy and he throws this buddy to hold a guitar and Right. So, these are the things that uh my mind goes to immediately. So, it’s important to be like, yeah, if I had to do a twist on that, um I would say it has to be a street musician that also has a social media presence, right? like which most of them do. Most most street musicians who are like serious about this sort of thing, right? They have an Instagram

57:47and so just saying, “Yeah, you got to do it. Go walk up like donate some money, have it on video, but you need to also tag them on Instagram.”

57:55Exactly. Yeah. And it better not be an Instagram that was created yesterday or else I love it. All these loopholes you got to watch out for. That’s why I always put I I just put first legit claim wins and legit covers me for a lot of scenarios and it doesn’t feel legit. Like I’m sorry you you need to like give me a claim with a little bit more information than this and I will I will consider it passing the legit check.

58:26No, I like it. Kenny’s unfessable. I mean I I have been I have been finessed. It is what it is. There was a bad one. Um, somebody faked a for a Gaza relief bounty. That was that that made me very very very very mad. Um, which it was what happened? Uh, the bounty was to plant a tree in Gaza and a lot of people donated to it, right? U, I think it was up at like $300. And so somebody somebody then claim like he sends photos and it’s in Gaza. It’s for sure in Gaza. And you can see from the background photos and there’s a lot of social media

59:07context, but he’s messaging me. He’s like, “It’s for my friend. My friend is the one who did it in Gaza.” So, like, I’m going to submit the claim and then I’ll pass the money along to him. And I didn’t feel good about it from the very beginning, but the problem was he posts it and then it gets it blows up on Farcaster. People love it. People love the pictures that he posted. and somebody else adds in like $800, right, of like, oh, I really want to see this guy get paid, right? And so think, okay, well, if this this person thinks it’s legit enough to put in this money, uh, I

59:41will approve the bounty. And so did it. And then guy never gave any sort of evidence of sending the money through to people. So this is why I’m so Yeah. Now, now I I’ve always taken it seriously, but um you know, the way that I designed this thing, I want to have I want to keep these scams from happening. It can happen. Got to be honest about it when it does, but all you can do is just be vigilant because people will try to take that money by any means possible.

60:14That’s true. I um I don’t know if Z or Brian, anything else you want to say, but I want to be respectful of your time. I know we’re we’re at the hour.

60:25Yeah. No, just uh would love to if you want to share where where people can uh can catch you where where what’s the website for point as well and just anything else you want to say, Kenny?

60:36Yeah. Uh yeah, just check out pidh.xyz. Our handle is pHxyz uh across everything. Tik Tok, Instagram, um, Twitter X, and then on my handle on Farcaster is just Kenny. There is no point handle over there. Um, but yeah, that’s that’s where you can find us. My DMs are always open for anybody who wants to, you know, jam on Bounty ideas or if you want to collab on doing some marketing, let me know. Um, but yeah, guys, like, thank you so much. I’ve really, really, really enjoyed this conversation and uh I’m honored that I was the first person for episode one. So, uh wishing for many, many more

61:21successful episodes from here on out. Yeah, thank you. We’re honored, too. Thanks for being here. Thanks for being so generous and giving us a whole hour, man.

61:31All right, thank you guys. Gonna sign off. Uh take care of the kids. The wife has been great looking after them. I’ll be back. Yes. Yes.

61:42Always.