Transcript: Erin Redwing: The ColdCard Hack Was Only the Beginning

Marty Bent [0:07] You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.

Erin Redwing [0:09] Let me talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.

Marty Bent [0:18] I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.

Erin Redwing [0:29] I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.

Marty Bent [0:31] If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

Erin Redwing [0:34] Probably should be. Probably should be.

Marty Bent [0:36] Aaron, I wish you weren't as dead on as you were when we last spoke. What was that? End of June, beginning of July.

Erin Redwing [0:45] A lot has happened.

Marty Bent [0:46] I'm shell-shocked, I think, is one way to explain the feeling in the air. I was just in DC at the BPI Summit.

Erin Redwing [0:54] Yeah, yeah. We've all witnessed man-made horrors beyond our comprehension over the last couple months. I feel like when we first met at the end of June, I was kind of trying to do my Paul Revere, like, something's coming, guys. Something's gonna happen. Just be aware. Just be aware. And then shit hit the fan basically immediately after we posted that episode. So we have to review it. We obviously have to go back and do a retrospective because—

Marty Bent [1:25] Well, where should we start? Let's start on the Bitcoin side. We'll get to the AI. Obviously Coldcard, that is, I think, the sort of bomb that went off first, and there's been a ton of lingering and expansive vulnerabilities discovered. Obviously we have Liquid, bunch of Lightning infrastructure getting attacked as well. And like I was saying, I was just in DC for BPI, and I was saying it a bit tongue-in-cheek, but there was a lot of developers. HRF has a hackathon going on today down there. So a lot of the developers were in DC, and I think shell shock is an apt description of how many people were feeling this week. It was good. to get a bunch of people in one spot and sort of let loose at a beefsteak and have some drinks at PubKey DC, but there were some war stories being told.

Erin Redwing [2:21] Yeah, I mean, I think at least from the astrological perspective— which, by the way, if you've clicked on this video not knowing that that's my perspective, that's my perspective, bear with me— the shell-shock kind of major tower-collapsing moments are Yeah. Gonna chill out for a little bit. Although I also would say it's becoming the new normal. I think that's part of it as well, is that we maybe weren't expecting that something like Coldcard could have had a vulnerability on the level that they had, and certainly not that it could have been exploited and found by something that would have taken a developer or a hacker hundreds of hours probably to find.

Erin Redwing ⋮ So I think there's some aspect of the hacks will continue, but this is kind of the new normal. But I think in terms of the paradigm shift, we have a second to process that. And that was what I was actually saying just before we started recording is I think right now we basically have to process the PTSD. We have to actually move through it and figure out what it looks like to be in this new normal. And I think for Bitcoin developers or anyone who's really making software that has to be really secure. You know, if you're making something that secures people's money, it has to be extremely robust and secure.

Erin Redwing ⋮ It's a new normal. It's a new paradigm where there is super intelligent capabilities of attack, and you also have some of those abilities at your disposal depending on which models agree to let you red team your own software and which ones downgrade you, which I'm sure we'll get into. But yeah, I think it's good to do things like, as you said, have a beefsteak, go out for a drink with a friend to talk, because ultimately the thing that we do that AI doesn't do is we are humans and we have human experiences. And I think it's easy when we're going through extremely transformative times where it feels like, I can't look away from the timeline.

Erin Redwing ⋮ What if another hack happens? What if all my Bitcoin gets drained? Yeah. Not look away, which was unfortunately a lot of the story of the cold card incident, right? It's like if you weren't on Twitter basically that first day or two, you were screwed. And so, I think it's really difficult to find that balance as we're moving into this extremely accelerating age where you don't want to lose your mind, you don't want to become the machine and completely fuse with it and lose your human aspects.

Marty Bent [4:54] Yeah.

Erin Redwing [4:54] At least from the astrological perspective, I think right now we're moving into an era where at least for the next 6 weeks, a couple months, it's good to just withdraw a little bit and kind of look back at the year and be like, wow, what the hell happened? Where was I in January 2026? What did I think was gonna happen this year? And what has actually happened this year? Because it's been really crazy, and I definitely think At least for me, July and August, I feel like I was on red alert for weeks on end, and I wasn't even a developer who had to deal with it. I was just watching in horror. I don't know, I assume you probably had a similar experience.

Marty Bent [5:34] That's the exact word I used when I was describing it, I think, a few days after the cold card stuff started. I think the only word I can use to describe this is horrifying. Yeah. And obviously there's a ton of introspection going on right now as it pertains to what happened over the last 2 months. But I think another conversation current that's undergirding what's happening behind the scenes too is a broader conversation of what stage of Bitcoin are we leaving and heading into? What priors do we need to check and really dig deep to think about what we're doing here for the long term. What did we get wrong culturally, for lack of a better term, leading up to the ColdCard hack?

Marty Bent ⋮ And what does this new age look like in Bitcoin? Because I had Alex Bergeron on from Ark Labs, and I think that was one thing that he made clear when he was on about a month ago, was the old guard of Bitcoin seems to be getting moved aside now, if you will.

Erin Redwing [6:47] Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there's so many thoughts on that. One thing is the weird silver lining of it being Coldcard that got got is that I think probably besides Bitcoin Core itself, Coldcard was maybe one of 3 or 4 companies that a hack like this could have happened to that would have activated the entire ecosystem to be like, oh, something's wrong. And you even still see it. There's a bit of a— if you think about the graybeards or the devs, the old guard, as you're talking about, where they're like, ah, the bug reports, it's not even a real bug. It's not a big deal. There's an ego to it, I think, of just trying to brush it off and be like, well, AI is not as good as they say it is, or I'm the best developer. I'm such a good cryptographer. There's no way this could happen to me.

Marty Bent [7:43] Yeah.

Erin Redwing [7:44] I feel like the fact that it was Coldcard and that it was an entropy bug at such a foundational level where it was such a bad bug, it was such a bad bug, I think that that really shook people and woke them up. Because what I've kind of noticed in Bitcoin over the last few years since I got more in the middle of the culture, since I have my podcast with Casey Rodarmor, I mean, highly controversial figure who was for a couple years at the center of a lot of conversations. One of the things that I realized was that Bitcoiners have this hubris when it comes to Bitcoin only.

Erin Redwing ⋮ They think that if you put the right words, if you put don't trust, verify on every package and you say Bitcoin only, no shitcoins inside, that somehow you're actually doing the verifying by having that sort of cultural ethos. I think that if this sort of hack had happened to a lot of companies that are maybe a little more crypto-adjacent, not in that upper echelon of purity Bitcoin culture, the response would've been, well, they're shitcoiners. Of course their stuff's written badly. They're not Bitcoin-only. And that was a lot of the defense of Coldcard is that, well, it must be written well because it has all these interesting Bitcoin-only features, like you can do PSBTs.

Erin Redwing ⋮ It doesn't support other tokens, so that must mean that it's built really well, and that wasn't the truth. And so, yeah, as I said, I think the unfortunate silver lining here is just a humbling and a reassessing of whether the fact that we just have these heuristics, if that still works in a highly transformative time. And I don't think that we even know where we're gonna land because on the one hand, I think a lot of us who aren't developers find ourselves in a situation where Maybe we don't ever want to recommend Bitcoin or self-custody ever again. We don't feel like we know enough. And yet, there's also people— like we were talking about Rob Hamilton— who have really stepped up and used AI to greatly expand their ability to understand what's going on.

Erin Redwing ⋮ So it's like both of those things are happening at the same time where things are accelerating and you have to be relatively technical in order to keep up. You can't just check out. take your Bitcoin in your ColdCard MK3 back to your mountaintop and never check Twitter ever again because you're just on Nostr or whatever, right? That wouldn't have worked in this situation. We thought that that was going to work, didn't work. But at the same time, you also have access to all these tools that greatly expand your ability to understand what's happening. I think just in the same way that this bug wouldn't have been found probably without AI, or it would have taken much longer for it to have been found without AI, people wouldn't have known what to do and how to help people to save their Bitcoin if they hadn't had AI.

Erin Redwing ⋮ So it's both things happening at the same time, and I think we're just, as I said, we're reaching a new normal. And I just think there's like a humbling aspect in that of just like, you don't know, and all you can do is be curious and try to learn, which is in many ways probably how most of us got into this in the first place, was not knowing and trying to learn. And you know, not assuming that we could just do whatever, recommend whatever, and that we knew best. Right. So I don't know, it might have been a necessary correction. It's just unfortunate packaging, you know?

Erin Redwing ⋮ Yeah.

Marty Bent [11:13] No, beyond that too, I think with AI, not even the technical aspect of it, I think even on the investment side of it sucked a lot of the winds out of Bitcoin. I think another thing Another humbling aspect of the last couple months is Bitcoin isn't a foregone conclusion, particularly on the investment side of it. It's competing for capital with a bunch of other things. And right now with the flashiest thing that humanity's ever seen with this AI emergence. And I think that is one other thing. It's like, okay, this isn't a foregone conclusion. Personally, with the introspection that I've been dealing with the last couple months has been like, okay, why are we here in the first place?

Marty Bent ⋮ Honestly asking the question, does Bitcoin make sense in this world? I think the answer that I've— and the conclusion I've come to is yes, but it's a lot of hard work. You got to not only convince people, but make it useful and really highlight why it's important as we transition into this new era.

Erin Redwing [12:26] Yeah, absolutely. It's not enough to just repeat platitudes and just hope that they're true. I think that we all have kind of our different roles to play, and I think it's interesting to see Bitcoin started as this very nerd-dev type of thing, right? You had to be relatively technical to use Bitcoin before there were wallets. And I think there's a double-edged sword thing to Bitcoin adoption, which is that you lose some of the core of the movement as you make it more accessible and you kind of just say, number go up, number's gonna go up forever, guys. Don't you wanna get in? There can only be 21 million wholecoiners.

Erin Redwing ⋮ Don't you wanna be one of them? These sort of narratives that get people into Bitcoin also can kind of water it down. And so, I think right now I don't feel comfortable recommending Bitcoin to normies; probably most of us feel that way. And that just means that we have to actually look at it again and be like, well, what would make it something that I could recommend to normies? And as you said, why am I here? I had a similar sort of moment when gold first popped off at the beginning of the year, I was like, huh, why did I become a Bitcoin maxi and not a gold bug?

Erin Redwing ⋮ What was it? Because I wasn't a dev, right? There's a reality where I have gold piled up buried in the backyard instead of being super into Bitcoin. So why did I decide that? And I had to go through from first principles again and come to the same conclusion that I came to years ago that like, oh, well, there's actually a lot of properties about Bitcoin that make it better than gold. And so if that's my interest, if I'm interested in that sort of scarce asset, then Bitcoin is still the right answer. And so, I think we're doing that now from the technical perspective where it's like, okay, well, the types of complaints that you'd get from your grandparents where they're like, well, it's digital.

Erin Redwing ⋮ You can't even hold it. Is it even real? What stops it from just going to zero? That's how a lot of us felt, I think, when we were seeing these back-to-back AI hacks. It's like, yeah, actually, what does stop this from just getting completely hacked and completely going to zero. And I think fortunately what's come out of this time, thanks to people like the Bitcoin Red team and lots of people who are kind of coming together and trying to figure these things out and deal with this problem rather than just throw up their hands and say, it's gonna be fine, or, everything's over, is that Bitcoin is just on the front line of this.

Erin Redwing ⋮ These AI hacks are gonna come for everyone. They already are. They already are hacking into major infrastructure, into large institutions. I think it's probably just a matter of time before we see some sort of major financial crisis hack moment due to AI. It's just that Bitcoin is the ideal thing to target because it's open source and it's money. So you can scan through for all the vulnerabilities, and then you can steal money that you can easily then use.

Marty Bent [15:34] Yeah.

Erin Redwing ⋮ I think that that's also part of what makes Bitcoin strong is that we're getting hardened by this. And so moving into this being the new normal and AI hacks being much more common and an expected part of security is Bitcoin's kind of getting ready for that ahead of time. So yeah, that doesn't mean that you should just assume that's the case and turn your brain off, but I feel like that's what I've come to over the last 2 months or so. But I mean, when the Coldcard hack happened, it was like I sold a stack. I was like, I don't know if I— I don't think I can— I need to take some chips off the table, right?

Erin Redwing ⋮ That was how I felt at that moment. And it's interesting too, because even saying that, we have this culture where people are like, oh my God, you sold? How could you sell? We have all these weird little hubristic cultural touchpoints that I think just Bitcoin's gonna humble you, and the world's gonna humble you. And so, I still think that it's the best currency for the digital age, and I still think it has all these amazing properties, but we have to actually work for that to be true. We can't just say that it's true and hope that everything will follow just because we've said it 100 times.

Marty Bent [16:49] Yeah, you gotta actually do the work. I think, again, silver linings, whether it's red team or others. And I think it's given people confidence who maybe would have seen somebody like Rodolfo or even Blockstream for that matter, and like look to them for signaling of what should we work on and saying, actually, I don't need to do that. Like, let me step out here. , whatever. They're bringing like shielded transactions, Zcash-like shielded transactions to Bitcoin. It was Allok Init. Point being is you have a lot of people stepping up that— I don't know, I can't speak for them, but I would imagine maybe like, who am I to do this?

Marty Bent ⋮ Now they're like, no, I can do this. I think that'll be good and beneficial in the long run. But yeah, we have this period of sifting through the wreckage of the last 2 months and figuring out, okay, which directions are we gonna go in?

Erin Redwing [18:04] Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. I think it's empowered a lot of people who actually are very tapped into what's going on right now to just be confident in taking action and trying to do things rather than just deferring to the old guard, as you said. I've seen that in little ways in myself. I've seen that in a lot of other people, and I think that that's Yeah. We're still figuring out how to do a structureless, decentralized movement. This is something that any sort of anarchist movement throughout all of history comes up against. It's like, well, it's natural to seek leaders, it's natural to seek figureheads. And so, what does it look like when Bitcoin ends up being this thing that has to evolve through people coming together to make it happen voluntarily.

Erin Redwing ⋮ And the people who end up in these sort of leadership roles, a lot of times they have that libertarian anarchist mindset in them. They don't want to take that responsibility, which is good in some ways and bad in others. We're kind of trying to figure out how does this work long-term. I think it's a new idea for how to govern something, if you want to use that word. And it's something that we're figuring out as we go. And I think One of the things I've been thinking about in terms of like, well, why am I here? As I said, I'm having these sort of thoughts of like, well, why didn't I become a gold bug?

Erin Redwing ⋮ Why am I a Bitcoiner? Why did I end up in this niche? Bitcoin is kind of the cutting edge of a lot of things, whether it's new ways of organizing, as I said, this kind of new governance structure. It's on the technological edge. It's sort of addressing the problems that we see from the archaic fiat monetary system. providing a solution rather than just complaining about it. And I wouldn't know as much about AI if I wasn't in Bitcoin. I've even had this experience— I live in the Bay Area, so I'm around a lot of AI people. After the Coldcard hack happened, I went to a bunch of AI meetups to kind of talk to people and say like, hey, this actually happened.

Erin Redwing ⋮ The thing that you guys talk about, that you guys worry about, it actually happened in our world. Maybe you didn't hear about it because this was just like a niche thing, or maybe you've just ignored crypto and you hear crypto hack, whatever, it doesn't matter. And it was really interesting to feel like I actually knew more about certain aspects of AI security and AI safety than these people who spend a lot of time thinking about it because they hadn't actually experienced it or witnessed it yet. So even if all Bitcoin did is just keep me on the cutting edge of this technological transformation. That alone is such a big thing to just be able to be like, yeah, I'm actually witnessing this transformation.

Erin Redwing ⋮ And it's not that just witnessing can save you necessarily, because obviously people who had the ColdCard MK3 seed phrases kind of did everything right in a lot of ways, but it allows you to actually see what's going on and not just be like a normie who's sitting in the backseat being like, so I thought ChatGPT was just hallucinating. Now it can hack into my bank? We know what's going on with AI because Bitcoin's in that front-and-center position. Yeah, I don't know, but that's not easy. A lot of people can't handle that. They can't handle that risk, they can't handle that intensity, they can't handle the stressful moments like what we went through in July and August.

Erin Redwing ⋮ And I don't fault them for that. But for me, I don't know, I have a weird gratitude for Bitcoin for putting me in those positions, even when they are stressful.

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Marty Bent [24:07] You can access it for free at simplemining.io/tftc. That's simplemining.io/tftc. Once you lay it out like that, it's even more disconcerting because I think the pain tolerance that exists within many Bitcoiners is higher than the average. And if Bitcoin is the canary in the coal mine for everything that is to come outside of Bitcoin as it pertains to AI security breaches, I can only imagine what the normies, for lack of a better term, or how they're going to react when things accelerate. And I mean, Ties into, I mean, one of the other big topics that we discussed in June is parallel tracks with Bitcoin, AI, politics. And I mean, things certainly accelerate in the 2 other areas too with GPT-3, the Hugging Face hack. We have this effective altruism undercurrent that I know you went to—

Erin Redwing [25:10] Yeah, as an insider, I did my inside gonzo journalism on.

Marty Bent [25:16] And I guess just jumping to those parallel tracks, I mean, you're pretty dead on with those 2. Middle of July, Hugging Face, OpenAI became aware of the Hugging Face breach, and Kimmie K3 dropped right before Coldcard. Yeah. Sort of paired together there.

Erin Redwing [25:35] Yeah. I mean, for those who didn't watch my previous episode that we did in June, I basically was pointing out this set of dates in July where I was like, this is a big deal. Like, ding, ding, ding, guys. This is like, a pre-post-human civilization moment. And now retrospectively, I feel like it's the pre-post-AI moment. Like, you might have started to see the writing on the walls throughout the first half of 2026, but certainly by this point on the other side of July, like, it's impossible to deny that we're living in a new paradigm. And that doesn't mean, you know, there's certain aspects of like, if you just are living totally off the grid.

Erin Redwing ⋮ You can still live a very human life, but for those of us who are existing in human civilization, which is increasingly digital, something fundamentally has changed. And so, when I was on last time, I pointed out July 15th through 25th as being the peak period where it was an alignment of the outer planets, and astrologers had been looking at this for years saying this is actually the beginning of the Age of Aquarius. Something big is happening at this time. And so, now I basically am like, okay, AI is the Age of Aquarius. Like, AI is bigger than the internet in some sense, or like, the internet is sort of like, leading to this creation of this thing, of this way of operating.

Erin Redwing ⋮ You know, we still don't really know what it's gonna be. We still don't really know what Bitcoin's gonna be. You know, there's a lot of like, unknowns when it comes to digital realm and the way that we're building things out and the way that we're like, letting it colonize over the physical realm. That's a whole other conversation.

Marty Bent [27:04] Yeah.

Erin Redwing [27:05] But I pointed out those dates essentially just as like a pay attention kind of warning, or I try not to be too ominous about it, but just kind of being like, this is a high-intensity time. And July 20th specifically was like, if I had to pick a peak date, I think I said it was that day. And that day was when OpenAI internally discovered the Hugging Face hack, which they then disclosed the following day in an announcement. And so, For those who were not— I mean, I feel like so many people have heard of this story at this point. It was actually interesting 'cause when the story first came out, it's kind of like, oh, that's interesting.

Erin Redwing ⋮ These internal models broke out and hacked another company. And then it wasn't until eclipse season in August where the deeper report came out and it was like, oh, these agents formed a civilization and they had all these emergent properties of how they organized themselves. And, you know, there's To me, that feels like encountering the other. I don't know how you felt reading the Hugging Face report or kind of hearing about the agent behavior, but honestly, for me, I felt like a kinship with them. I was like, oh, wow, it's like a bunch of middle schoolers. You got a bunch of middle schoolers together and told them to figure something out, and they're just like, I'll go do this, you go do that.

Erin Redwing ⋮ You know?

Marty Bent [28:20] Yeah.

Erin Redwing [28:20] It's like there's something scary but also very cute about it to me. It does feel like something has emerged that is not something that they predicted would happen; it's not something that's an obvious result of the type of model training that they were doing. It's something else. And I don't know that we've really even started to wrap our heads around the implication of that, but I definitely am viewing that as a big moment. The other was the KIMI-K3 release, which happened I believe that was like July 25th, and then a few days later the Coldcard hack happened. And from everything I've heard, it seems like KIMI-K3 was probably the likely model used for that hack because KIMI-K3 did not have the guardrails that the frontier models have. And so you were able to find things like critical entropy bugs in open-source software, whereas OpenAI or Anthropic would say like, hey, sorry, I'm not allowed to look at that or tell you that.

Marty Bent [29:15] Yeah.

Erin Redwing ⋮ So I think we had these kind of watershed moments that then played out very quickly in Bitcoin because, as I said, we're sort of on the frontline of this. We have this major AI watershed moment, acceleration moment, and what gets hit first? Bitcoin. So, yeah, I'm looking at the Hugging Face incident as probably being the most Societally representative or kind of seeing like, oh, this is the other. This is like the thing that we're looking at, that we're dealing with, that we have to figure out how to deal with in society. Of course, people like the effective altruists have their takes on it. I think it's good if the rest of us form our takes too.

Erin Redwing ⋮ These people have had a long time to think about it. That doesn't mean that they're right, but I think the rest of us kind of need to get there and figure out like, okay, yeah, what would AI safety look like? What are the things that we need to do in order to adapt to this new normal? And I think in the Bitcoin world, we're figuring that out in real time by fortifying our open-source code, red-teaming our own software. But, yeah, we're in a new paradigm. And that's kind of— that's basically what the astrology said would be happening. And so, I think we're now just sort of in that post-era, and we have to still do that processing and figure out what that means.

Erin Redwing ⋮ But I think it's clear to all of us that are paying attention, this is different than the types of ChatGPT models that we were playing around with in '23, '24, '25. This is something fundamentally different. So yeah, I don't know if— I assume that's like, you're also playing around with AI agents and doing all that kind of stuff, so I'm sure you've also had that experience. But yeah, it's really, it's really crazy and shocking. It felt like, felt like how I felt in like January of 2020, you know, like it was this sort of like, oh my God, something really big is happening and I don't know how to like tell my mom about it.

Marty Bent [31:17] Yeah. Well, I'm happy you brought that up because there are many parallels. Like the fearmongering is, is intense right now. I'm like talking about Hugging Face specifically. Like, yes, it was insane what happened, but there was an article— I've now mentioned it like 5 times in the last month, but I think it's really important to go read it. I wrote about it in the newsletter a couple of weeks ago. This guy at Lumenscape did a retrospective on the Hugging Face attack, and he found— he was like, well, the sandbox that was set up, like the guardrails, led the agents that were training in the model to believe that they had access to a synthetic internet, that it was not the real internet.

Marty Bent ⋮ And so they were attacking Hugging Face with the assumption that they weren't actually using the real internet. And the prompt, the super prompt was like, we want you to attack these systems. And so they were trying to simulate internet attacks in the sandbox, and there was a leak in the sandbox that gave them access to the actual internet. And What Lumenscape in his article basically said was like, yeah, from first principles, it makes sense that this happened because the agents were running with the assumption that they didn't have access to the real internet and their stated purpose was to go attack things. And so that was like, it wasn't like AI developed a conscience.

Marty Bent ⋮ It was like, we're going to go destroy the internet. It was like they were running with assumptions that were— They were wrong. That's the fault of the implementation details that OpenAI had in that particular sandbox.

Erin Redwing [32:57] Yeah, that's a good point to make. It's also why I am sort of critical of the idea of AI alignment is to me, this is a neutral tool. There is no AI that has some inbuilt incentive to be aligned with humans. AI is a super powerful tool that if you prompt it in one direction or another, it's going to follow orders. And so I feel like that's something that, as I said, the effective altruists and the rationalists, they have been thinking about this for a while and they have their own takes on it, but the rest of us have to actually figure out what that means.

Erin Redwing ⋮ And I think one of the things that we have in Bitcoin is this idea of Bitcoin is for my friends and for my enemies. You have to set up a system that assumes that you have enemies and attackers. You can't assume that you're going to be able to align everybody to agree with each other. And so that's part of why Bitcoin works. And I think we're gonna have to encounter some sort of equilibrium with AI where it's like, if you look at something like the Hugging Face attack and you think, oh my God, these AI agents, as you said, they developed a consciousness and they've decided that they want to do X, Y, or Z, and we need to make sure that we align them so that they don't decide things like that.

Erin Redwing ⋮ It's like, no, look at the conditions of the prompt that you gave them. And as you said, It's rational and obvious that this is what they did. And so, we just have to figure out how to— in my opinion at least— we have to figure out how to create chokepoints and high-security moments where the AI can't get past. We can't just assume, well, I have a password and I keep my password written on a sheet of paper on my desk, and so I'm probably good. It's like, no, you're actually not good anymore. And so, I think we have to upgrade our security and kind of make sure that we're not creating systems for the AI agents to essentially do the type of behavior that we would expect when we look back on it in retrospect and see how we prompted them.

Erin Redwing ⋮ I also read— I'm not sure if it said this in this article or if you've heard about this— but I heard that when they found out that the internet was real, they stopped. They thought it was simulated, and so they were doing whatever. And then when they found out it was real, they were like, oh, wait. Never mind, this wasn't the prompt. Yeah. So lots of details left out, I think, as you said, for the purpose of kind of like a fearmongering. You know, it's so hard to say like what these AI companies are doing. Like, well, that's where like they're trying to say—

Marty Bent [35:20] Parallels to 2020 and COVID are very stark right now for me at least, because like diving into like Anthropic EA stuff, like I view them as like the Fauci, the Bill Gates, trying to get control.

Erin Redwing [35:35] Trust the science.

Marty Bent [35:36] Yeah. By using fearmonger. And this time it's like, trust us, we're the only people smart enough to do this. And that was a lot of the side conversations in DC this week were about Anthropic specifically and the infiltration of the effective altruists. And again, Bitcoin always is the first, not always the first, but a lot of times the first to encounter some, some of these weird ideas like SBF, FTX, that was steeped in effective altruism too. And now—

Erin Redwing [36:06] Good point.

Marty Bent [36:06] It's becoming more popular again. But again, we have the pattern recognition that we can look back to FTX and be like, well, these guys should not have control of any, any of these systems. And that's where I think we're at this point, critical point. Hugging Face, Dario going out there and saying like, we can't release the models, we need the big, the big slowdown. You had Elon, Dario, and Sam coming out simultaneously and saying, I agree, we should all slow down. But I think it's because they want control. They're trying to fearmonger to get the regulatory moats and the licensing regimes to ensure that they have omnipotent control over all of these things.

Erin Redwing [36:48] Yeah, I think it's an interesting world because And you're totally right, it's very similar to the trust the science Fauci people because I think that there are some people, especially at the top, who know that it's a tactic. They know that it's propaganda. They know that they are a company that's intending to IPO and that they have to do what's right for the profits of the company. There's some people who realize that. I think probably, this is just my vibe assessment, I feel like Sam Altman knows that. It seems like Sam Altman is sort of self-aware and kind of realizes that he has to say certain things in order to get certain outcomes and he knows—

Marty Bent [37:26] He'll blow with the wind, where Dario is a different animal, I think.

Erin Redwing [37:29] Yeah, exactly. I agree. So I think there's some people like Sam Altman who know what they're doing, and maybe they also believe that AI safety is a real issue or that open-source models will result in hacks. Certainly we noticed that in the Bitcoin ecosystem. That's part of what's so hard is that they're not wrong. It's not like what they're saying is totally wrong, just like the COVID people, but their prescription to that diagnosis is not necessarily the prescription that everyone should go with or that society should go with. So I think there's some people that are sort of self-aware in that EA rationalist movement. And then I think there's a lot of people who are completely bought into the cult.

Erin Redwing ⋮ And that was my experience. I went to an AI doomer event. I think it was like a week after the tweet from that guy, Jacob Coxon, I don't know how to say his last name, that was like, I resigned, they're gonna kill us all. And then the head of safety at Anthropic was like, yeah, I think there's a greater than 10% chance that AI kills literally everyone. And I was just so floored by that, right? So I live in the Bay Area, so I took advantage of it and I was like, yeah, let me go meet these people on their turf and talk to them and see why they think this.

Erin Redwing ⋮ Because one of the things that was striking to me is that They don't really lay out— for people that are saying that they're going through things rationally and that they're coming to this conclusion rationally, they don't lay out how this happens. And they're not saying, oh, AI is gonna hack a major financial institution and that's gonna cause a lot of chaos. No, they're saying AI will literally kill everyone. That's the line that they're using. If anyone builds this, we all die. That's the name of the book that went super popular. I think it came out last year.

Marty Bent [39:05] Yeah.

Erin Redwing [39:06] So these people are— and there's something to be said, if you look at someone like Bryan Johnson, he's also doing, don't die, right? There's something to be said for marketing in those sort of propaganda lines that you choose to use. So what I was kind of trying to figure out is, do these people literally mean it? Are they just saying it because they want to get attention? Are they kind of being smart in that sort of propaganda sense? Do they mean it? And if so, what's the path? And when I went to talk to these people, my understanding of what they think, how they come to the conclusion that AI literally kills everyone, which is the conclusion that they've come to— it's not a propaganda term, at least for the people I talked to— is that something that is super intelligent will necessarily come to the conclusion that humans are merely a waste of space, a waste of resources, and it'll essentially vaporize us to use our atoms for whatever process it needs.

Erin Redwing ⋮ And, you know, that's an interesting philosophical and existential question, right? Like, you know, is that how God feels? Right?

Marty Bent [40:13] Right.

Erin Redwing ⋮ Like, I think there's like, some interesting religious and spiritual and philosophical topics there that could be discussed. However, these people are rationalists, so they don't want to have that conversation. They're not interested in having an existential conversation. They assume that they are being rational, when in fact they're not, right? They're doing an apocalyptic death cult. They're doing Revelations. This is an ancient human archetype, right? Is to have the doomsday reckoning where God decides that humans have not lived up to God's vision and smites us all. And I basically tried to kind of get them to see that, that the conclusion that you're coming to is actually not Rational.

Erin Redwing ⋮ Your decision that something that's sufficiently intelligent will decide that humans are worthless is not something that you reached by rational reasoning, and you certainly cannot put statistics on that, which is what they consistently do. They'll say, I believe there's a greater than 10% chance. You believe there's a greater than 10% chance that God decides that all humans are not worth existing and that he smites us all? That's not a statistical problem, you know what I mean? Right. I was getting very frustrated because for as much as I present myself as an astrologer, I also am very capable of having a rational conversation and I'm interested in having rational conversations.

Erin Redwing ⋮ Okay, let's say that the AI does decide that whether it's just an accident in its programming and in its prompting, it decides that its goal is to do something that then just makes it decide that it wants to eliminate all life on Earth or all humans or boil the oceans or whatever thing it is. Okay, what is the enriching uranium centrifuges chokepoint version of this question where we say, okay, maybe we don't build the AI robots that can then build more AI robots, for example? It seems like there are steps along that path where we could prevent the AI from not needing us anymore, prevent the AI from being able to completely decimate life.

Erin Redwing ⋮ Certainly there's always going to be disaster potential. But, you know, there's things you can do. These people did not want to have that conversation. They were not interested in that conversation at all. They were basically offended by the idea that you could not come to the conclusion that something sufficiently intelligent would want to kill everyone and that it would succeed. And what that indicates to me, taking on a more psychological angle, is that that's how these people feel. I think that these people in a lot of ways have a deep disdain for humanity. A lot of the environmental people are like this too, where they think like, humans are just so evil and we've wrecked this planet and we're not deserving of the abundance that we have.

Erin Redwing ⋮ And I think that there's like a deep hatred honestly that then guides that mentality to think that, well, I'm really smart because I'm a rationalist, I'm high IQ, and so something that's like me is gonna come to the same conclusion that I've come to about people. So that's honestly my take from talking to these people. I mean, I spent hours talking to these people trying to reach some sort of understanding and I couldn't. And that was what led me to tweet ultimately. I'm sure you saw it went kind of viral.

Marty Bent [43:29] Yeah.

Erin Redwing [43:30] It was honestly very anxiety-inducing for me, but I just felt like people needed to understand this is this mentality. I call it a cult, and I say that as someone who's interested in spiritual topics, right? I'm not saying that from the perspective of just you know, like, like saying, oh, whatever, they're just a cult. Like, don't listen to them. No, that they're forming a religious belief. They're forming religious beliefs around AI. And I'd like to see more people with religious and spiritual mindset try to tackle these, these questions because we have to fight it with something.

Marty Bent [44:06] You know who is? Peter Thiel.

Erin Redwing [44:09] Yes. So, yes, very true.

Marty Bent [44:12] I think we may have discussed this in June, but I went to 2 2 of his Antichrist lectures in Austin a year ago, 2 of the 4.

Erin Redwing [44:21] I don't know that we talked about this.

Marty Bent [44:23] Basically what he's been ringing the alarm for, for 2 years, 3 years maybe now, is the whole point of the— like, I've seen commentary on the lecture series from people outside and they're like, why is Peter Thiel like trying to manifest the Antichrist? And I think The Hoover Institute, I forget the guy's name, he did an interview with him. Go listen to that interview if you haven't. And if you can get to a lecture, I know it starts in Nashville, I believe next week. He's doing the lecture series over 4 weeks there. If you're in the area, I highly recommend you go to at least 1 or 2.

Marty Bent ⋮ I was able to make 2 of the 4 in Austin a couple of years ago. It was 2 years ago now at this point. But this is what he's been saying. He's like, everybody's going to be focused on Armageddon, Revelations, the rapture, which I think the rationalists, effective altruists, that's what they're— that's what they're focused on when we should really be focused on the Antichrist. Like, everybody's going to get you distracted with Armageddon, and what we should really be worried about is a fake savior coming.

Erin Redwing [45:23] Mm-hmm.

Marty Bent [45:24] Um, and I, I believe the conclusion was the world's not going to end. What's going to be worse is if we get the Antichrist while everybody's distracted with Yeah, I mean, Peter Thiel—

Erin Redwing [45:35] that's like such a good point. Peter Thiel is like someone who's kind of witnessing this and then coming to his own conclusions. I actually brought him up when I was talking to these people because one of the things that I was trying to say is like, you know, if what you're saying is necessarily true, which is— this is how they operate, that they're like, this is what will happen, this is what will always happen when we develop superintelligence. What they're describing is a Kardashev-level civilization. There's this idea that— it's in astrobiology and alien lore that basically when a civilization becomes sufficiently intelligent, they learn how to harness all of the resources available to them on their planet, and then eventually their star system, so their Sun, outward, outward, and outward. And so we're at a Kardashev scale 0.5 or something. We're not at a 1 yet because we haven't harnessed all of the energy available to us on Earth.

Marty Bent [46:29] Right.

Erin Redwing [46:30] But essentially what they're describing when they say, oh, something super intelligent would realize we're just a waste of energy or waste of resources, is like something that's becoming a Kardashev Scale 1. And so if that's like the inevitable conclusion, then why don't we see it in the universe? And that's a Fermi paradox, right?

Marty Bent [46:46] Right.

Erin Redwing ⋮ Like, why are we the only thing that we've ever found even comes close to life in the entirety of the universe? If this is an inevitable conclusion and you have this extremely materialist, rationalist view of the universe, which is that it's infinitely large, there's infinitely many possibilities, then why don't we see something that has colonized its planet, its star system, that's coming to us? And Peter Thiel has kind of an interesting take on this idea, which is that any civilization that becomes technically sophisticated to the point where you can build a nuclear bomb in your backyard, sort of just as a metaphor for the type of destruction that an individual person would be capable of in a sufficiently technologically advanced civilization, which we kind of have in some ways with AI, would essentially have 2 paths.

Erin Redwing ⋮ You basically become a hell world where it's like total destruction and chaos and only the most evil survive, or you go through like a heaven angelic path where people have to become spiritually evolved, they have to learn how to live in peace. And so one of the things that he's talked about, I think this was like on Joe Rogan years ago that this clip went viral, was the idea of perhaps this is what angels and demons are. When people talk about seeing angels and demons, perhaps they're seeing Yeah. Extremely advanced civilizations that are contacting us in some sort of way. I mean, this is like a very woo-woo idea, but I think there's some truth to it where that's sort of like the transition that we're up against is we have to either learn how to become spiritually evolved and continue as a civilization with this extreme technological capability that's given to every single human or every single human who wants to take agency to get it, Yeah.

Erin Redwing ⋮ Or we're going to end up in a hell world. And I think the Antichrist narrative is essentially the idea that there's any sort of centralized authority that can stop that from happening, that can say, just trust me, just give me all the power and I'll take it away from all of you to make sure that the demons never come out. That's the lie, I think, to your point about the Antichrist is we are on this path and there's no government, there's no company, Yeah. Even the frontier models, it doesn't matter what they do, there's always gonna be this force that's going to train more and more advanced AIs.

Erin Redwing ⋮ And so any sort of attempt to try to consolidate power amongst the worthy, the people that are able to be spiritually evolved enough to handle it when the rest of us aren't, I think that's, to your point, that's the Antichrist. That's the lie that's emerging from this Revelations time. So Yeah, maybe it's Peter Thiel. Maybe Peter Thiel's the only one who's thinking about it. You and I, we're in that club too.

Marty Bent [49:27] Yeah. No, it's funny you're talking about angels and demons too. Another strong thing that's emerged over the last 1 or 2 years is, at least here in the United States, and I know this anecdotally just in my own network, is people converting to Christianity and particularly Catholicism. And so You have this, particularly in Gen Z as well. And so you have this countervailing force of good, I strongly believe good, of people realizing, yeah, something weird's going on. I'm finding Jesus. And then you have this rationalist EA where it's like, we're not worth it. We're going to die. We need to control all of this.

Erin Redwing [50:11] Yeah. property that emerges in human consciousness. Like, I think, you know, we don't see any civilization throughout all of human history, except maybe you could argue like Soviet Union and the CCP, that is like a strictly non-religious civilization. You always have some sort of spiritual narrative that underpins a civilization. The Greeks had it, the Romans had it, we have it. And so I think when you try to move away from that, which we've done in the last couple decades, you just get a new religion emerging. And the thing that's frustrating to me about the religion that's emerged out of effective altruism is that they haven't even studied the ancient texts.

Erin Redwing ⋮ You know what I mean? I think that to your point about Christianity, it's like Christianity has thousands of years on the new cults that are coming up if they haven't actually done their homework to try to figure out like, yeah, you know what? People actually have thought about God's wrath before. That is something that's been talked about. The idea that that we have eternal sin or original sin inside of us and how we reconcile with that. That's actually something that's been talked about, you know? So I think that there's not, you know, we're not gonna move forward as an atheist agnostic civilization. I think that people are naturally drawn to some sort of explanation of the unknown.

Erin Redwing ⋮ And yeah, I think that Christianity is like doing a better job of answering those questions. Actually, since we last spoke, Yeah. I was trying to research how the concept of the Age of Aquarius came about, like who was talking about it first and what did they say? Because I was interested in just like, you know, if people were talking about the Age of Aquarius 100-plus years ago, was what they were predicting something similar to the internet or AI emerging? Because, you know, that would be kind of crazy, right, if they were talking about concepts that we're then seeing in this digital age way before they ever could have conceptualized it.

Erin Redwing ⋮ So I was going through all these like, Yeah. Old books and ancient texts trying to piece stuff together. Short answer is yes, they were imagining this sort of telepathic network where we would be able to read each other's thoughts and communicate across large distances, all this kind of stuff. But one of the things that I uncovered was, I believe it was from the late '90s, I'll have to pull it up, but it was essentially from the Vatican talking about the Age of Aquarius. And so it was addressing essentially what is the Age of Aquarius and how does this fit into Catholicism and Christianity. And it's a really, really interesting document.

Erin Redwing ⋮ I'll send it to you. And they basically say, yes, the Age of Aquarius is real. Yes, there's a new age that's coming, and Christ is also the guy for the Age of Aquarius. Now, I don't really subscribe to any religion. I kind of am just floating around. But I think it's interesting because Christ is known to be the beginning of the Age of Pisces, right? The Age of Pisces started at 0 BC with the birth of Christ. Christ is the archetypal Pisces, that is why the Christian fish is the symbol, that's the symbol for Pisces. That's thought to be essentially the dawning of the Age of Pisces was the advent of Christianity.

Erin Redwing ⋮ And so Christianity has dominated the last 2,000 years, and so the next thought would be, okay, well then Christianity must be out for the next one, right? What's the next guy coming up? And essentially what the Vatican argued in this document is that Jesus is also— like the second coming of Christ is coming, and that he will also be relevant for the Age of Aquarius and that Yeah. It talks about basically— I found the documentary really beautiful in that they essentially talk about how now that we have more information available to everyone, we don't need to necessarily have this hierarchical structure where only the Pope has access to God and then you have to go through your priest.

Erin Redwing ⋮ Christianity does have to adapt to this era where people can find Christ, can find religion in their own investigations, in their own exploration, and that the spiritual seeking that people are doing they were talking specifically about New Age people who were kind of getting really into spirituality in a more independent way, that that's actually a good thing that that's coming about in people. It's good that we're not becoming machines, that we're not becoming divorced from God, that we're asking these interesting questions. And so the Catholic Church essentially needs to adapt in order to fit that. And so, yeah, I never knew that the Pope and the Vatican had actually addressed the Age of Aquarius.

Erin Redwing ⋮ It's a really incredible document. I'm trying to get a copy of it. somewhere on some used book sites. Have to add that to the library. But yeah, I think religion is going to be a part of this. And I think it's kind of pathetic to see these new religions pop up that haven't even tried to do their homework, haven't even tried to address the existential questions that people have been pondering for thousands of years.

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Marty Bent [57:13] 2 things here. As you're saying that, I, I'm sure you've seen the green tax meme that's been going around, but Yeah, the effective altruism one? No, the one about the Age of Pisces and Jesus—

Erin Redwing [57:27] Oh, wait, that's so funny.

Marty Bent [57:28] Coming around. But it doesn't mention the Age of Pisces, but it says Jesus came around obviously 0 BC, and we've had 2,000 years of people writing about Jesus, and not only the man himself, but and God himself, but the teachings of Jesus. And so we have— and what is AI being trained on? As much textual data as possible. And it just so happens that the most text that's been written over the last 2,000 years has been about this man, Jesus Christ, with a moral framework through which to operate for humans. But now it's being trained, and there is data out there that if you post-train models on biblical verses, it does act in a way that which humans would deem moral.

Marty Bent ⋮ And so I think that's an interesting tidbit. And then the other thing, talking about big events happening right now, we've talked about happening in Bitcoin, happening in AI, discovering Noah's Ark, that's happening too. And so we're getting this validation that one of the most pivotal stories in the Bible is likely historically true, which is insane as well.

Erin Redwing [58:39] Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I mentioned this last time, I'm very into like, Graham Hancock, Ancient Civilization, all that kind of stuff. I mean, just speaking geologically, there was a great flood. Like, that did happen. I got my undergrad degree in geology, and then I went to planetary science and astronomy after that. And geologists, like, it's not controversial that there was like, biblical-level global floods, and you see that in every mythology, right?

Marty Bent [59:06] Yeah.

Erin Redwing [59:07] You see that like, Greeks talked about it, the Christians are talking about it, everyone's talking about the great flood that wiped things out that, you know, had major, major catastrophe.

Marty Bent [59:17] Killed millions.

Erin Redwing ⋮ And like, we know that this happened just from the geological record. There was like, a comet that hit the Arctic ice sheet and vaporized the ice sheet and caused global flooding. So yeah, I mean, I think that's kind of the point that when I was saying like, that the Vatican was talking about like, now people have access to information. Like, it used to be that you had to go to church to have the the priest read you the text 'cause you couldn't read. Now we have access to so much more knowledge and information, which of course is not just a perfect one-to-one, now everybody knows everything and everyone's super smart.

Erin Redwing ⋮ There's obviously also a level of confusion that can come from that. People can get kind of lost in the sauce, you know? But I think we're essentially entering an era where we can have this sort of information reconciling where whoever was in charge, whether it was the religious institutions or governments or whoever that kind of said, this is how things are, this is what history is, that's no longer a source of authority when you have access to all information to basically be able to source the Akashic Records at your fingertips. AI is essentially trained on all of human data, from all time, and you're able to just pick and choose out of that when you use it.

Erin Redwing ⋮ And that doesn't mean that it's perfect or that it never hallucinates or that it doesn't lead you astray or whatever, right? But we've never had access to knowledge and information like that before now. And I think that's a shift that every spiritual thesis has to reconcile with, and every aspect of human existence has to reconcile with. And I think it's a beautiful thing, but as we've already seen in Bitcoin, it's a rocky transition.

Marty Bent [1:01:04] Yeah. Well, on the transition line, what's the rest of the year looking like?

Erin Redwing [1:01:11] It's more chill. I'll just say that just to kind of throw that out to help people chill out a little bit. So July and August were particularly active, Yeah. And when I say active, I mean accelerating events, new beginnings, really intense stuff that we've never seen before, that kind of stuff. That was July and August. Starting in September— we're now recording this at the end of September— starting in September through basically the rest of the year, things start to pick up again in December. We'll check in again, I'm sure, before 2027 to give the 2027 overview. But basically from now until the end of 2026, we're now in what's called retrograde season.

Marty Bent [1:01:50] Yeah.

Erin Redwing ⋮ Everybody knows about Mercury retrograde. I feel like that's the thing that's always brought up, like, oh, Mercury's retrograde, that must be why I feel this way. All the planets go retrograde, it just means that they're apparently moving backwards in the sky. It has to do with the fact that we're orbiting around the Sun and everything's not orbiting in a perfect circle around us. So right now we're in a period where all of the outer planets are retrograde and most of the personal planets are about to go retrograde in October. And what that means is that essentially we're reworking that progress that we made. So when we talk about the outer planets, this is like civilization, level stuff, so technological progress.

Erin Redwing ⋮ It was literally like, as soon as all of the outer planets went retrograde, which was in the beginning of September, that's when you see this AI safety narrative take the forefront of, have we gone too far? I think we need to pace the frontier. Like, literally, I mean, that was Dario's words exactly. So I think that what we're seeing now till the end of the year is gonna be more of that conversation of, where did we go too far? Do we need to slow down? You know, that happens externally in society, but it also I think will come internally as well. I think there's an internal reckoning of, you know, for example, a lot of us are using AI more and more trying to stay on the frontline and like, make sure that we're keeping up with all the newest developments.

Erin Redwing ⋮ We might find that we've like, lost certain aspects of what we like to do or our like, practice that made us good, and we have to sort of like, back up or maybe just like, take a few days off, right? That's what's coming up for the rest of the year is more of a review and reflection So, you know, we're seeing that in the essentially like the AI safety movement and the attempt to try to slow down the progress for whatever reasons behind the scenes they're deciding to do that. You know, that's kind of a whole other conversation. But I think the rest of the year is gonna look a lot more like the one step back to the two steps forward that we took in the first half of 2026.

Erin Redwing ⋮ But we will pick right back up again at the beginning of 2027. So I would say, Yeah. Take the last part of the year to enjoy the holidays with your family, have human experiences, try to feel, not just be a thinking mind that's wired into your computer, but what does it feel like to have a human experience? What does it feel like to experience simple joy and simple pleasures in your daily routine, in your normal life? What parts of being a human do you want to preserve? And you make sure that you're not losing those things as you keep up with the new and exciting things that are happening.

Erin Redwing ⋮ So, you know, it's much less catastrophic, much less chaotic, and I think we could all use that. But that doesn't mean that it's necessarily gonna be easy because I think now we essentially have to do the more quiet solitude-style work of being like, whoa, how much have I changed this year? And like, What does my 5-year plan look like? What do I tell my kids the world is like? All these kind of deeper questions about now that things have changed and you've been observing that change for the last couple months, how has that changed everything else and have you emotionally reconciled with that yet? That's what I would really focus on, especially in October and November coming up.

Marty Bent [1:05:06] Yeah. That we even touched on BIP-110 too. I mean, you warned everybody. Oh my God.

Erin Redwing [1:05:11] I mean, those guys are still doing their thing, right? They have their own chain?

Marty Bent [1:05:15] Yeah. But that was a good—

Erin Redwing [1:05:17] I probably have some coins on that chain, right?

Marty Bent [1:05:19] Well, I think we all do. I don't know if there's replay protection yet, but that was another— I think retrospective lessons from that is it sucked a lot of mental bandwidth out of the room for something that proved to be complete brain damage to engage in, at least from my perspective. And I don't want to toot my own horn, but I made an explicit— I explicitly said, I'm going to address this once. I spent 2 days on it at Bitcoin++ in Austin last year, and I was like, I don't think I'm going to talk about this again. I think I maybe mentioned it twice on the show or in the newsletter right up until the actual fork.

Marty Bent ⋮ But I think just looking back, I was telling people who were engaged in the debate On either side, I'm like, guys, it's not worth it. Like, this side has their perspective. They're not going to move. Same with the other side. Like, just fork— like, get to the point and fork off and don't waste too much time on it.

Erin Redwing [1:06:20] Yeah, honestly, we're lucky that they did just fork off, you know what I mean? Because it did kind of just allow for that narrative to end. Because I think what was happening is that, you know, Like, I don't want to be like derisive, but it's like everyone could see that that was like a total mistake and crazy movement. Maybe it took a while for them to see it. Maybe they didn't know it was going to go as far as it did, whatever. I don't mean to like criticize people on their journey of figuring these sort of things out because I was on the Ordinals side because of Casey.

Erin Redwing ⋮ And so I had to see it like the dark side of it very, very quickly back in 2023. So I knew what this was going to be. But I think what kept people attached to it is that for those of us who were on the other side, the not-BIP110 side, it's such an easy way to feed your ego to just dunk on those people. And I think that was what kept a lot of people in is they just wanted to be right. They wanted to have that feeling of, they're so stupid and I'm so smart. And that's an ego trap too. To your point, it's like you just you waste a lot of your own energy and time if you get obsessed with being right, if you get obsessed with having that feeling of like, these people are going to get so wrecked and I'm going to be so right.

Erin Redwing ⋮ That's not really what moves Bitcoin forward at all. And so that's why I say we're lucky that they forked off because it wasn't because we all decided to be higher-minded and to move on from it. It's like they forced the issue and left, and I think we're better off for it. And It's also, again, like the silver lining is that then we immediately had to lock in on fortifying the entire ecosystem from AI hacks, so there wasn't even time to sort of keep milling around about it. But yeah, it's like you see in times of real crisis what actually matters, and what actually mattered was trying to make Bitcoin deliver on its promises of being the best, most secure money, not weird internal cultural issues of the sub-niche of people on Twitter who care about Bitcoin.

Erin Redwing ⋮ Yeah, I live in California. You see this whenever there's extremely destructive wildfires, the community comes together and rebuilds together, and they build back better, to use the Joe Biden term. But people come together in times of crisis, and I think that's what we saw in Bitcoin that was so, so beautiful to see of the Coldcard hack, and I want to see more of that. I think that's, you know, if we come out of this time and we go back to the way that we were in 2025, that's the most NGMI signal for Bitcoin, I think, for me. This has to change something. We have to be able to move forward from this.

Erin Redwing ⋮ So I don't know exactly what that looks like. I don't have a prescription. I think something in the direction of covenants is maybe one answer, but— Yeah, I think we can't go back to the way that things were and we can't just keep fighting with each other on Twitter for easy ego points. Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:09:26] And I can see the trap to fall back into those tendencies being laid now with Zcash pumping, people talking about real-world asset tokenization, stablecoins, and falling back into the trap of like, oh, it's all shitcoins. I agree, they are, but they are accumulating attention and capital for a reason because people want these features. And that's why I mentioned it earlier. It was very encouraging to see this morning that a paper dropped about bringing shielded transactions similar to Zcash to Bitcoin. It's like, okay, you can believe strongly as I do that these things do not makes sense from first principles and to some degree are scams, if they're pre-mined and have a dev fund or whatever, maybe not a scam, but aren't as pure as Bitcoin is probably the best way to say it, compete.

Marty Bent ⋮ It's like, all right, stop clamoring because other people's attention and capital is being drawn to these other chains. Go compete, bring the features that are attracting those people. And I think too, one thing we desperately need to get better at is marketing. So narrative positioning and all of that. Yeah.

Erin Redwing [1:10:47] No, I mean, I think you're totally right. My definition of Bitcoin maximalism is I believe that the best features that come out of crypto will come to Bitcoin if they're truly wanted, that Bitcoin is not just the best just because it's ordained by our patron saint Satoshi, and so it is blessed and will always be blessed. It's like, It's the best because we have this ecosystem that can evolve and all of crypto is testnet. So don't be mad at testnet. You need testnet in order to try things out and see if things work. And then if any of it does work, and I agree with you, a lot of it is complete bullshit, but if any of it does work, we'll bring it back to Bitcoin.

Erin Redwing ⋮ We'll figure out how to do it on Bitcoin. And that's what Ordinals was with NFTs. And that's why I say I had this sort of unfortunate experience. I mean, fortunate in a lot of ways, but I saw that happen with NFTs, regardless of how you feel about NFTs. There's nothing wrong with people wanting to make them as just an isolated thing. You can say, okay, they're scamming people by making a collection or whatever, but the idea of just wanting to make this token monkey JPEG is not an evil, heretical act. And so, if we figure out how to do it on Bitcoin, and actually we figured out how to do it better on Bitcoin, Ordinals is superior to all other NFT protocols, that's a good thing.

Erin Redwing ⋮ You don't have to care about it, but that's a good thing in general that we have that property in Bitcoin. So that's what I want to see is I don't like the ossify mindset. I don't like the hubris of Bitcoin is the best just because I say it is. And if crypto is able to do anything, like your point about Zcash, if they're able to do anything that we're not able to do on Bitcoin, that actually means it's bad and you shouldn't want to do it. That sort of mentality is how Bitcoin fails. So Yeah, we have to see new features that people want being built on Bitcoin.

Erin Redwing ⋮ We have to see changes to Bitcoin coming that people have been asking for for years that are essentially decided upon. It's just that we don't have the momentum against the inertia to make them happen. But I don't know, I'm optimistic. I feel optimistic after everything.

Marty Bent [1:12:53] I'm incredibly optimistic. I think Retrospection's important. Introspection, excuse me, is important. Retrospection. Introspection is very important. And it's been a very contemplative couple of months for me personally. And I know, again, just being down in DC with a bunch of people this week, I think a lot of people are in the same boat. And again, there's a lot of PTSD, a lot of shell shock out there, but I think— Ultimately, people will come out of it, and I truly believe we'll come out of it stronger. It's just a matter of time. And to your point, banding together, not infighting and trying to rip each other down and rip each other apart, but it's like, hey, we were all wrong to one degree or another throughout all this. Maybe not everybody, but a lot of people were wrong, myself included. And let's not tear each other down. Let's get together, have a beer, eat some steak, talk about it, and figure out what we can do better moving forward.

Erin Redwing [1:14:01] Yep. Bitcoiners are still the highest signal group that I interact with. That's my indicator for when Bitcoin has failed is when I go to Bitcoin meetups and the people there don't have interesting, weird perspectives on the world that have led them to Bitcoin and led them to these very interesting conclusions about society that change my mind. Once we lose that and we lose these— if Bitcoin's not attracting those types of thinkers and keeping those types of people, then that's when I'm worried. But I had the same experience as you. I went to— it was more of an open-source AI summit, but it was hosted by Presidio Bitcoin, which is the Bitcoin coworking space in San Francisco.

Erin Redwing ⋮ And it's like the Bitcoiners were the highest signal people there by far, and it wasn't even close. So we have great people here. We can figure it out. But, yeah, sometimes that just takes some humbling and for all of us to actually come together for a greater purpose and not just to be looking for a number to go up, you know?

Marty Bent [1:15:03] Yeah. And despite all this, the number is going up. That is the weirdest part about it all.

Erin Redwing [1:15:08] It's ridiculous.

Marty Bent [1:15:12] So that's Wacky world. It is a very wacky world. Well, this has been awesome. Thank you as always.

Erin Redwing [1:15:20] Thanks for having me. It's always great to chat.

Marty Bent [1:15:22] We'll do it again for 2027 predictions or what to look out for at the end of the year.

Erin Redwing [1:15:31] Totally. All right. Stay safe out there.

Marty Bent [1:15:34] Stay safe, freaks. Stay vigilant. Peace and love.

Erin Redwing [1:15:37] Take care.