Transcription: OpenAgents Episode 153 - High-Velocity Bitcoin

Source: https://x.com/OpenAgentsInc/status/1874317831497462144 Wiki source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/OpenAgentsInc/openagents/Video-Series.md Media title: OpenAgents - Episode 153: High-Velocity Bitcoin We discuss bitcoin as store of va... Upload date: 20250101 Transcription model: gpt-4o-mini-transcribe Generated at: 2026-06-01T15:07:52Z

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[00:00] Speaker: All right, we've got a basic app live. Onyx is looking a little nicer. It works with tools. You can code with it. It's nice. So we're getting ready to launch the version 0.1 version, which has a Bitcoin wallet using the Breeze SDK, Bitcoin and Lightning, as well as a Nostra client. So we'll release this in a day or two. And we're going to be doing some really interesting things with Bitcoin rewards and paying you for data and data vending machines and Bitcoin for referrals. Just going to experiment a lot with different ways of paying you and letting you pay each other with Bitcoin in our 0.1 series of releases. And before we get too much into the weeds of beautiful Bitcoin integration, I wanted to kind of step through kind of how we're thinking about Bitcoin integration generally. There is a kind of a debate between Bitcoin as store of value and Bitcoin as medium of exchange. Like, is this just digital capital? Is this just a nice digital gold, shiny rock type thing? And this really matters because some of the people now that are whispering in the ears of governments are specifically not in favor at all of Bitcoin as medium of exchange. Potentially problematic. So I just wanted to step through a few quotes from a man I respect. I respect the hell out of what he's doing on the Bitcoin as store of value front here. But he's out here making the case that Bitcoin isn't a currency. It's not a cryptocurrency. And we should think of it as capital. First of all, here's why this matters. From my friend Justin, Bitcoin is easily captured via institutions as a store of value. And so the then they fight you stage is against Bitcoin as a means of exchange. If Bitcoin leaked into the economy at large as a means of exchange, it could no longer be captured as velocity would be too high. Velocity, velocity, velocity. That's going to be our magic word. The magic word of Michael Saylor is volatility as he securitizes Bitcoin in different ways. Hey, I applaud that. But velocity is the thing that we on the MOE side are going to maximize. And my response to this is I think that Bitcoin as a medium of exchange will be dramatically accelerated by AI agents on Bitcoin Lightning Nostra. We're now in a position to actually put this thesis to the test and start doing this. I want to play a couple of quotes for you. And these were kind of summarized in this article from Frank Corva here. But I just wanted to like just like listen because I went and I like listened to this whole podcast and I've got one nice little kind of quote queued up here from Saylor. Fucking I hate this thing. Okay, let's see if you can listen to this. There are a lot of, you know, again, maxis like, no, we want it to be a currency. We want to be able to pay for coffee with our Bitcoin. Pay me in Bitcoin. And it's like, pay me in gold. It's like, pay me in a building. It's pay me with a slice of your professional sports team. Pay me with a Picasso. The point is, a Picasso and a sports team and a building are better investments than the dollar or the peso. But if you could just open up your worldview and say, the dollar is better than the peso. The dollar is a perfectly fine capital asset if you're in a hyperinflation. Ownership of gold doesn't feel certainly right now like there's a risk of that for Bitcoin. But is that something that you worry about at all with micro? I think the crypto community is really just wrapped around the axle on this issue. And I think it started 15 years ago with someone saying this is a cryptocurrency. And then someone else said there has to be a currency. And look what happened with the and it's like the reserve currency and look what happened to gold. And so that'll happen to us. I think what they're missing is it's not a currency, it's capital. I think that's the fundamental issue. You just have to come to grips with it. It is not digital currency. It is not cryptocurrency. It is digital capital. It is crypto capital. And if you think deeply about this, you realize that money, money, it bifurcates into a medium of exchange, legal tender, which is a currency and store value investment asset, which is capital. And once you get to that point where you embrace the idea it's capital, not currency, it frees you from this pernicious notion that it's got to replace the dollar. It's got to compete with the dollar. It's got to compete with other currencies. The truth is the cryptocurrency, the digital currency is tethered and circle. It's a stable coin U.S. dollar. That is the digital currency. And if you want to fixate on it, that's the one. And the debate is whether or not that's going to go to 10 trillion. So I want to fixate on it. It's not currency. You don't buy coffee with gold. You can't settle with gold. There are a lot of maxis that are like, no, we want it to be a currency. We want to be able to pay for our coffee in Bitcoin. Pay me in Bitcoin. And it's like, pay me in gold. Pay me in a building. Pay me with a slice of your professional sports team. OK, our AI agents are not able to pay anybody in a slice of a professional sports team. I don't have any fucking Picassos. Guess what I've got? Some Bitcoin. Guess what other people have? Some Bitcoin. And so if you want something from our marketplace of services, what are you going to pay? Probably Bitcoin. Now, look, this is not to say that every single transaction always has to be Bitcoin. There are great companies like Lightning Labs, like LightSpark, that are building protocols to use the Bitcoin network as rails to put other kinds of things like stablecoins on the same rails of Lightning. Cool. But Bitcoin's a fucking currency. So I'm just a little emotional about it because I'm just a maxi who gets triggered by things. But if you want a really good take on this, Roy, founder of Breeze, so Breeze we're using for our Bitcoin wallet, has a great article here, Bitcoin's False Dichotomy Between SOV and MOE, basically that these are kind of synergistic things. One supports the other. That's what I thought the community had kind of come to consensus around, regardless of what you choose to emphasize. These kind of go hand in hand. I thought that that was a reasonable consensus, but Sailor's out here taking a big dump on MOE. So that's a little problematic. And I actually like how my pal Justin has framed it in other tweets as like, Store of value is act one. Medium of exchange is act two. We, I guess, cannot expect the store of value Bitcoiners, the people who got their invites to Michael Sailor's house for tonight's party. I was not invited. You were not invited. That's OK. So let the store people, store value people do their thing. We can't expect that they're going to help on the MOE side of things. So circular economies, peer to peer cash. We need this. One great point that Roy makes in his article. I don't know if I'll be able to find it right now, but it's like. They're not gonna be able to stop us. Like there's nothing that anybody can do to really stop MOE. I mean, conceivably, you could imagine some sort of regulatory regime that penalizes people facilitating Bitcoin transactions. Like, I'm sure there's things that can be done to try to slow down or attack MOE. And it is worthy of concern that certain people now that they're kind of whispering in the ears of government people who are not super smart about this. Look at how many fucking shit coiners are in the Trump administration. So will they make principled? Will they make principled choices? Maybe. But can we prepare for them to not make principled choices and prepare to just build stuff as a medium of exchange as we see fit anyways? OK, so what's my solution to this? My solution of this is to kind of take Justin's thought here to the extreme. If Bitcoin leaked into the economy at large as a means of exchange, it could no longer be captured as velocity would be too high. So people have been trying to onboard merchants and all of those are heroic efforts. I hope they continue. However, we here at Open Agents are potentially going to birth or support a billion AI agents. How are they going to pay each other? They're going to pay each other in Bitcoin. So one angle of the next week or two as we roll this out is going to be how do we measure velocity so that we can ensure that we are maximizing velocity? And so for the people who say that Bitcoin is not a currency, well, I want to put so much velocity behind Bitcoin transfers going between agents and agents and agents and humans that it makes their fucking head spin. OK? See you soon.