The Frontier

Steve announces Presidio Bitcoin will host a hub for hack-nation.ai, a global hackathon in April, where Spiral is sponsoring a challenge focused on AI agents earning money via the Bitcoin Lightning Network.

The hackathon specifically targets non-Bitcoiners, presenting a challenge for Spiral to attract participants to Bitcoin-related projects and educate a broader tech audience.

Reports suggest Iran is demanding Bitcoin, Chinese yuan, or stablecoins as a toll for ships passing through its national waters in the Strait of Hormuz, though the truth of these claims remains unclear.

Bitcoin's perceived use case in Iran highlights its role in circumventing sanctions and its significant liquidity and network effects, enabling transactions for nation-states under economic duress.

Max notes that Anthropic's revenue growth is substantial, potentially outpacing Google and the U.S. federal government, raising questions about the future power dynamics between AI companies and nation-states.

The sovereign individual thesis, advocating for individual power through technology like cryptography, faces a challenge if advanced AI centralizes capabilities, especially around violence and cyberattacks.

DK highlights that Anthropic recently 'nerfed' its public models, causing user dissatisfaction and questioning whether its lead over competitors like Google and OpenAI is sustainable or due to unsustainable margins.

Max and DK discuss the emerging risk for companies that become dependent on a single AI model provider, facing potential feature reductions or price hikes without control, emphasizing the need for multi-model strategies.

Presidio Bitcoin released its Quantum Readiness Report, an open-source, living document on GitHub designed to provide a balanced, comprehensive, and investor-friendly overview of quantum computing threats to Bitcoin.

The report outlines various scenarios for quantum threat timelines, ranging from two years to never, and proposes a plan for Bitcoin's resilience, including the potential to move 80-20% of vulnerable coins in a day.

Google's recent paper suggesting quantum computing can accelerate AI is seen as a significant development, potentially increasing investment and compressing the timeline for viable quantum computers.

Lalu prototyped a quantum-safe transaction method for Bitcoin that does not require consensus changes, utilizing a hashing algorithm to protect coins, though it incurs a cost of approximately $150 per UTXO.

This prototype results in non-standard transactions that are not automatically relayed by the Bitcoin network, requiring centralized services or direct miner agreements for inclusion.

Daniel Burr proposed a method using Taproot's script scheme to signal quantum proofing, potentially allowing users to opt-in for future quantum-resistant upgrades to their Taproot-based coin spending paths.

Google's quantum cryptography paper claims a 20x performance improvement in algorithms to break elliptic curve signatures used by Bitcoin.

Steve Lee argues quantum computing progress should be framed as N minus 1, where N is years until cryptographically relevant quantum computers exist.

Lee says the quantum threat is harder for Bitcoin due to the need for decentralized consensus, Satoshi's potentially exposed coins, and blockchain cost sensitivity.

Blockstream's Shrinks quantum-resistant signature scheme produces 354-byte signatures, about 5x larger than current Schnorr signatures, but requires stateful management.

Blockstream's Shrimps scheme creates stateless 2500-byte signatures for recovery scenarios, trading larger size for no required off-chain data.

Lee says Bitcoin's anti-fragility means it could survive a price crash from a quantum emergency, similar to Mt. Gox, and recover long-term.

Spiral surveyed 50 developers and grantees on AI usage, creating archetype-based reports from non-developers to low-level protocol coders.

Square's rollout of Bitcoin Lightning payments faces hurdles: sellers must manually update software, not all hardware supports it, and tipping flows are incompatible.

David Marcus notes Cash App's Bitcoin Lightning payments save merchants credit card fees, with 1 in 10 Cash App users holding Bitcoin versus 60 million total active users.

OpenAI acquired The Big Podcast Network for an estimated $100 million, seen as a strategic move to control its own media channel amid competition.

Max Hillebrand argues America needs a 'DeepSeek moment' - a competitive open-source AI model - as Chinese models surge ahead and Llama's progress stalled.

Block's 'Hierarchy to Intelligence' vision restructures the company around AI agents handling internal information flow, with people as orchestrators.

Block's internal BuilderBot AI, integrated into Slack, allows employees to query company data, generate SQL, and get recommended contacts for verification.

Steve Lee says Block's new org structure has three roles: Individual Contributor, Directly Responsible Individual, and Player-Coach, eliminating traditional middle management.

A creator used AI tools for GLP-1 lead generation, reportedly generating $418 million in revenue within 18 months with minimal staff.

Max Hillebrand says peer-to-peer AI compute networks like Mesh LLM and OpenAgents are gaining traction, but lack payment mechanisms and computation verifiability.

Coinbase partners with Better to offer mortgages using Bitcoin as collateral, eliminating volatility-induced margin calls.

Borrowers can avoid liquidation during price crashes if they continue making their monthly interest and principal payments.

Steve says the key innovation is a Bitcoin-backed loan where you don't need to add more collateral if the price drops.

The product relies on a conservative 40% loan-to-value ratio, requiring $500k in Bitcoin to secure a $200k loan.

DK argues the real breakthrough is that these loans are designed to be eligible for purchase by Fannie Mae.

Fannie Mae eligibility would bridge volatile digital assets with federal housing infrastructure, shifting systemic risk to the secondary market.

The product targets Bitcoin-rich but cash-poor investors, offering an alternative to paying capital gains tax from a sale.

Square has enabled Bitcoin Lightning payments as a default option for a large portion of its 4 million merchants, moving from a manual to a passive opt-in model.

Steve from Presidio Bitcoin Jam argues the user experience remains clunky, as customers likely need to request a separate Lightning invoice QR instead of using the standard Cash App Pay code.

Steve notes the primary barrier to adoption is now merchant education and awareness, not just technical enablement, as most won't know they accept Bitcoin or can save on processing fees.

Merchants with the feature enabled will not be automatically listed on Bitcoin directory services like BTC Map, requiring advocates to inform them and manually add them.

The default settlement for merchants accepting Lightning payments through Square will almost certainly be in dollars, not Bitcoin.

The hosts argue that real adoption will still depend on a 'small, rabid community' of Bitcoiners evangelizing at the point of sale to build foundational usage.

The envisioned end-state is a single QR code where the customer chooses the Bitcoin payment rail unilaterally and the merchant receives dollars, a seamless flow that does not yet exist.

Spiral’s team hosted the first Builder event in New York at PubKey, signaling the expansion of grassroots Bitcoin development beyond Austin and into major financial centers.

The New York Builder event drew 50 attendees, reinforcing the growing momentum of in-person Bitcoin development meetups focused on open building, fast iteration, and stacking sats.

Steve from Presidio Bitcoin Jam credits Haley with the idea to launch the New York Builder event, noting the team has run monthly events for nine consecutive months in San Francisco.

Open-source AI models face centralization risks despite their decentralized appearance, as control over training data, compute resources, and distribution remains concentrated among a few well-funded entities.

Centralized bottlenecks in AI—data, compute, and distribution—undermine the promise of open-source decentralization, making true autonomy in AI development difficult to achieve.

Utxo and Ark introduced Bitcoin-native stablecoins that operate on Layer 2 solutions while maintaining settlement finality and censorship resistance on Bitcoin’s base layer.

Bitcoin-native stablecoins from Utxo and Ark aim to enable dollar-pegged utility without custodial intermediaries, offering a censorship-resistant alternative to Ethereum-style stablecoins.

The ethos of Bitcoin builders—autonomy, transparency, and permissionless innovation—is now influencing adjacent domains like AI and financial infrastructure, challenging centralized defaults.

Developer DK claims OpenAI's Codex CLI has overtaken Claude Code for execution-heavy tasks, describing Codex as the relentless "builder" and Claude as the "brainstormer".

DK advocates for a three-tier AI coding workflow using Google's Gemini for code review, Anthropic's Claude for architecture exploration, and OpenAI's Codex for persistent execution.

DK previously relied on Claude Code for months but found it gets stuck in rabbit holes when exploring ideas like an artist, whereas Codex focuses like "a dog on a bone" through refactoring tasks.

Developer Callie characterized Claude as working like an "American" and Codex like a "German" in their respective approaches to software development.

DK conducted a "vibe coding" session at 70 miles per hour through the Nevada desert using Tesla's Full Self-Driving to handle highway driving while simultaneously using OpenAI's Codex CLI for software architecture.

The desert coding setup involved speaking commands to the terminal, letting the AI process for ten-minute intervals, and checking the screen periodically over a five-hour period.

Tesla's Full Self-Driving capability enables "vibe coding at 70mph," which raises safety concerns about using AI to write code while AI operates a vehicle at highway speeds.

Grok has stagnated as a competitive coding assistant over the past six months despite its integration with Tesla vehicles, according to DK.