I think you're asking two slightly different questions. The first is "How can people best accelerate bitcoin adoption?" and I think the answer is education and representation. Talk to as many people in your family, friend and peer groups as you can. Educate them about why bitcoin matters, how to safely buy and protect bitcoin, &c. The motto of bitcoiners is "Verify, don't trust" yet most bitcoiners got to where they are by trusting some friend or family member that helped them understand and onboard into bitcoin -- at least initially. Be this person for your friends and family!

The second question you're asking is "What would you build now?" -- not everyone is a builder of things, so this question has a narrower audience, but it's just as important. I tend to start technical companies at the early stages of the adoption curve of some technology. Bitcoin is still early overall, but a lot of areas have gotten mature (e.g. exchanges). I'd probably be working on Lightning, as it strikes me as both extremely early as well as poised for rapid growth!

I would not have chosen to support ETH for the ~12-18 months that we did. That choice resulted in a lot of bad design choices, attempting to abstract away the differences between bitcoin and ethereum. Ripping out the ETH stuff and making our platform be bitcoin-native took months of time that could have been better spent. Our technology stack, our application architecture, our marketing narrative, our company culture -- they're all better now that we are just focused on bitcoin.

Best decision I made at Unchained? To ignore what my investors say, what my competitors do, and just listen to what my clients are asking me for. To obsess over making my clients happy and safe. To focus on low-churn and long-term retention instead of massive growth. These decisions have cost me, in the short-term, but in the long-term they're the reason Unchained is still here when so many others have failed.

I would lean towards (2) -- I think a finite monetary supply was a top-line goal for Satoshi, and it just so happens that imposing this constraint led to great simplifications of what came before. Check out this talk where I expand on this claim.

Are there any specific bitcoin layers or products where you think they're making a mistake similar to Satoshi's predecessors? That is, adding superfluous requirements that block problem solving?

Thanks for being a client! I could be snarky and say $250/yr is the same as a premium Netflix subscription...is a world-class key agent and collaborative custody platform worth as much to you as watching Netflix shows without ads? But that's not really fair because a lot of people probably have a similar worry as you do and, truly, I empathize. If you're at the beginning of your bitcoin journey, with not a lot of corn, or you're a young person early in your career when income is tight, every little bit of cash leaving your bank account hurts (and is less sats you can stack!).

With that said, Unchained's average clients have significant bitcoin holdings and, for them, this price is very reasonable -- some even say too cheap! It's challenging to build a monetization strategy that is reasonable for clients early in their journey with few assets as well as clients who have 1000s of coins. We do have some differently priced tiers now and will likely support more tiers in the future. Ideally we would be able to find a pricing model that worked for every client -- we're probably not there yet :)

Hello! You are correct, Unchained is not a bank. But companies that are not banks can nonetheless originate and service loans. Unchained has various licenses and partners that allow us to do so. But this is really the "how" not the "why" :)

Unchained has offered bitcoin-collateralized, USD loans since ~2017. I sense some hesitation or disapproval from you about such products. I don't know if I can change your mind -- would you be surprised to know that, as a co-founder at Unchained, even I haven't used our loan product? It's not because I think it's bad or unsafe -- rather the opposite, I think Unchained is one of the safest ways to obtain a bitcoin-collateralized USD loan! -- it's because the cost is higher than I've been comfortable with. Unchained raises USD from the capital markets which we then lend out to our borrowers. The cost of this capital is often quite high, which means our loans tend to have a high interest rate. Bitcoin's historical price appreciation is so significant that, despite this high rate, it often makes more fiscal sense to borrow from Unchained than to sell your BTC (which will also have tax consequences that borrowing will not). But it's also true that if you have good credit and income you can obtain an unsecured loan for a much lower rate. This is the reason I've not personally used this product.

But I would like to! The rate for our loans has generally decreased since we started lending back in 2017, and I hope it gets even lower in the future as the capital markets come to understand how safe our model is. At some point our lending product will be competitive with other, more traditional credit products, and you can bet I'll become a borrower at that time.

Two more comments -- First, I think there's a perception that people who borrow against their bitcoin are leveraging up, using the proceeds to buy even more bitcoin. This may be true in some cases but the vast majority of borrowers at Unchained use the proceeds to purchase real estate (often a first home) or to make a business investment (often in a bitcoin business!). Second, the reason I believe Unchained's loan product is superior to historical bitcoin-based credit providers such as BlockFi, Celsius, &c., is that we use collaborative custody. The borrower gets to hold one private key within a 2-of-3 multisig wallet that maintains the collateral. Unchained holds a second private key and an independent third party holds the third. This structure prevents rehypothecation of collateral and has proven resilient against volatility and other forms of risk going on 7 years now!

To close -- I may not have changed your mind, credit isn't right for everyone, but I hope I've educated you about how Unchained thinks about our credit products and tries to do right by our borrowers :)

Unchained's collaborative custody model requires holding (typically multiple) hardware wallets, each of which costs ~$100 (or more!). This means our solution isn't suitable for people who have just a few hundreds of dollars worth of bitcoin -- which is most people who own bitcoin!

Most Unchained clients are wholecoiners, the average client holds >10BTC, orders of magnitude above average holdings at most exchanges. Our clients care about privacy, security, and service. We pride ourselves on delivering these :)

Surprise? Perhaps the extreme variance of the kind of people that become our clients. They're not what you might expect if your image of bitcoiners comes from bitcoin podcasts or bitcoin twitter. Our clients can be old or young, they can be extremely technical or they can be folks who fumble with computers. They have all sorts of professions, from programmers, to small business operators, to executives, to stay-at-home moms. I'm extremely proud that our concierge onboarding and support teams have managed to help so many people learn how to use hardware wallets and feel safe holding bitcoin through collaborative custody :)

Man, I love me some good SF. You're right, I enjoyed the books listed in the Bitcoin Astronomy post but they're not necessarily my favorites. I love the classics -- Asimov, Bester, Clarke (to quote Martin Prince). Other favorite authors are Neal Stephenson, Ursula K Le Guin, Vernor Vinge -- almost every book they've put out is great. One problem with SF is that there are authors I love whose books I don't recommend because most people probably wouldn't like them. For example, I adore Greg Egan, but I acknowledge that if you like well-realized characters or good prose then you might be disappointed by Egan because all he can offer you is absolutely mind-blowing ideas :) (I feel similarly about the Three Body Problem series...) Or Peter Watts, whose books are the few which leave me feeling confused, but in a good way.

RE: scientists & researchers -- I haven't seen them applying bitcoin to their work yet, I think first they have to apply their methods to bitcoin. That's happening! Check out Micah Warren's textbook on bitcoin, or the increasing number of papers out there analyzing bitcoin from all sorts of perspectives. Hopefully as this kind of work becomes more normalized, the flow can reverse, and bitcoin-y ideas can infect the academy wholesale :)

I'm not sure I agree. I'd like to see the separation of money and state, but I think one of the roles of compliance (as I understand it) is to work with the state where it is today, with its current rules, which definitely regulate much about money.

I don't think Unchained has a subversive compliance strategy, I think we have a conservative one -- we comply with all relevant regulations and best practices. To not do so would be to invite scrutiny and create risk for our business, our employees, our investors, and most importantly, our clients.

I do think Unchained has subversive product strategy. Collaborative custody is much harder than "just being a custodian" but it's also the right strategy -- it's disruptive and scary to the financial powers that be and this makes it subversive.

Protecting and preserving our product strategy through compliance is one of the missions of our compliance team!

Have you seen Fractal Encrypt's Timechain Codex ? It's pretty neat!

I don't think I'd ever turn Bitcoin Astronomy into a book...I'm much more a reader of SF than writer of it. I've begged my wife (who is a screenwriter) to do it for me, but no success yet. Perhaps you, or someone else could do it for me/us? I'd love to read it myself if such a book came out!

Here's a talk where I get into those ideas more. For here I'll just say that all life on Earth uses the same metabolic pathways to produce energy (the Krebs cycle). Some believe this metabolic cycle evolved before life as we know it (cells, &c.) evolved. Computing on the Internet is the crucible in which AI is evolving. It's already powered by money, just fiat money moving through centralized companies. I think bitcoin lets us human beings build decentralized, market-driven ways to deliver services that we've previously delivered through large centralized companies (e.g. ConEd, AT&T, Google, Amazon, &c.). I think the decentralized markets that power the Internet, which are building over the next few decades, become the equivalent of the Krebs cycle for digital life. And just as biological life did not evolve towards planet-devouring grey goo, I don't believe that digital life will evolve towards humanity-destroying superintelligence.

Ohh Kr! Work this out into a post, interesting!

I recently looked over a fundraising deck that we'd prepared back in 2016 and was pleasantly surprised to see how much of what we were planning to do back then is what we're actually doing now.

One major difference is that we are bitcoin-only today. Back in 2016, bitcoin's market cap was <$10B, and we assumed we had to find other assets we could work with -- that's no longer true :)

My brother, I love me some good dal, I have struggled and persevered until my toor dal is as good as my Nani's. Gotta add that dank chaunk!

Unchained -- we started the company because we say how much bitcoin "just sits around" in the HOLD waves. We wanted to "unchain" the value from these coins through financial services.

I think bitcoin becomes the main currency used on Mars because by the time we're settling Mars bitcoin will be the main currency used on Earth. Over time I think Martians will "revolt" and start their own version of bitcoin, to gain the advantages of a combined mining/energy industry. I think this new bitcoin won't be a shitcoin because its center of hash will be far away from Earth -- a property no altcoin on Earth could ever have.

What is the likelihood this *doesn't * come to pass, and bitcoin remains the main currency used on Mars forever ? I hope low, honestly because I love the ideas I put forth in the Bitcoin Astronomy series, and if Martians don't revolt, then maybe none of the rest of it happens. I suppose one reason they might not is if their energy economy grew acceptably without mining. Who knows if that will be true or not!

It's so hard to predict the time something happens by!

In 10 years bitcoin's price will be much higher and adoption will be much broader, that seems safe to say. I think payment nteworks such as lightning (or something else?) will have also grown a lot out of necessity -- L1 fees are expensive! My hope is that by 10 years from now these payment networks will have become robust enough to begin to bootstrap further decentralized markets, e.g. markets for the storage and delivery of data online, or bandwidth, or routing. If we can solve that problem -- decentralizing the Internet -- then I think a lot of cool things become possible!

In the US we mostly market and strategize the same in all states (where we can legally operate and sell our products & services). International is exciting to me, but it's a much more complex and nuanced compliance regime, so will require a different strategy.

Great question! According to GlassNode's HODL Waves chart we're at ~15% of the current supply dormant for more than 10 years. My own belief is that approx 20% of the current supply has already been lost (inclusive of the 15% dormant today for more than 10 years), so I'll conjecture that 20-25% of the supply in 10 years will have been dormant for more than a decade.

Rereading your post -- I think I may have misunderstood the first question. While we do have a mobile app, the mobile app and the device it runs on are not part of the multisig wallet that protects your bitcoin. This is different (IIRC) than the Casa solution :)

We do have an iOS app we just launched recently -- check it out!

Not 100% sure if your second sentence is earnest or sarcastic! But I'll take you as earnest and say that Unchained's motivation for launching a mobile app was not compliance-related but convenience-related. Clients kept asking us for a way to check their balances, receive a deposit, or buy bitcoin while they were on the go -- the mobile app provides these features :)

Great question, thanks for engaging me on these ideas -- I think the bitcoin & computer security connection is really interesting and I wish more people talked about it!

To your first question -- you're right, vulns today do lead to significant financial loss. But I think vulns on a bitcoin-powered Internet would lead to even larger and more immediate losses and I believe the difference is large enough to be a distinction.

I'm a bit confused by this point "If we wanted to include Lightning transactions via every single request, sure - everyone would have to follow best practices and completely isolate and lock down that specific service. But that would only mitigate a single kind of vulnerability, and does not guarantee ethical or competent developer behavior throughout the rest of the web service."

^ What do you mean by "that specific service"? In the bitcoin-powered Internet world, any software that can make a network request from your device is software that can be used to steal money from you, since you're directly paying for network requests -- perhaps directly to the source host you're pulling the data from! So if a vuln in my software lets attackers make 1x1 pixel image request to attacker-controlled servers, that's basically a leak of sats my users will suffer. And they'll quickly see it, because it will be exploited quickly, and I'll come to know about it quickly, and I'll have to fix it -- or they'll stop using my software!

RE: the dissolution of the market for zero days -- I'm not making the claim that there will be no bugs on the bitcoin-powered Internet, just that there will be no zero days! Bugs can and will still exist and manifest, but they'll either be unknown to everyone or known to everyone -- the intermediate state of "known to attackers but not known to defenders" (a zero day!) will not exist because as soon as an attacker knows about a bug, if it can lead to the stealing of sats (via, say, the above 1x1 pixel image request attack) then it will be used to attack. It will never be sat on for weeks or months while it gets sold to another attacker in a zero-day market on the dark web. This is not true today -- a vuln in (e.g.) MS Word or some Siemens industrial control software found by some warez blackhat doesn't immediately turn into money, it has to be weaponized somehow first. If web requests cost sats, then it's far easier to turn vulns into money, and therefore selling them on zero day markets doesn't make economic sense.

To your second question -- I totally agree, the current stack is actually very robust after years of engineering on it. If we move to a new stack, that puts data within payments (I like the way you phrased that!) then we will have a boatload of new vulns that we create. You're absolutely right about this. Yet...so what? If the first part of my thesis is true, then these vulns will be quickly exploited because they'll be able to be used to steal sats. So they'll get noticed quickly and can be fixed quickly -- they won't sit as zero days for untold periods of time :)

Thank you, Max! I would have more to say about each of the five sections and more sections to add!

TLDR: The speaker delves into various harebrained blockchain schemes, emphasizing the lessons learned from Bitcoin and exploring concepts like the relationship between money and energy, the potential of blockchain in space, and the challenges of interstellar value transfer.

In a thought-provoking and engaging talk, the speaker delves into the implications of Bitcoin as sound money and its potential impact on the global economy. They explore the idea that money is a social construct and how blockchains can have real-world effects by moving atoms. Additionally, the speaker delves into the challenges and potential solutions for value transfer in space, highlighting the complexities of interstellar transactions. Overall, the talk offers a unique perspective on blockchain technology and its implications for various aspects of society, from finance to space exploration.

I don't feel like I know enough to choose. I do know that the more I learn about molecular biology, genetics, &c. the more I realize how, well, "evolved" it all feels :) It's not as precise as Mendel's peas, fitness landscapes are dynamic, the information theory analogy is imprecise, and so on.

I will say that Kevin Kelly is always interesting and this article doesn't disappoint. Non-random evolution seems very natural if you're a pantheist, right? :)

From an earlier response:

On the name "Unchained" -- we started the company because we say how much bitcoin "just sits around" in the HOLD waves. We wanted to "unchain" the value from these coins through financial services.

Also maybe just the idea of "unchaining" potential, human, digital, or otherwise :)

Almost no technical differences at the level of bitcoin, or redeem scripts, or private keys. The difference is more at the application level, in terms of additional security features designed for groups of people (e.g. in-app approvals are available for businesses but not for individual vaults) as well as at the level of support from our teams :)

On a long-enough timeline, 100%

Yes, I believe it is!