~ the @_choppingblock crew finds out @tomhschmidt, ct's number one onion futures guy, skipped the actual onion futures protest "i think of him as the onion futures guy forever" "you missed a great opportunity to stand up for what you believe in"

Terry Duffy yells at the clouds, and Tom gets outed as the onion futures guy. Tarun: "Why did they not just have a debate?" Rob: "Terry Duffy has been maybe the most vocal critic of perps and prediction markets." "It was a lot of old man yelling at the clouds going on there." Tarun: "I think of him as the onion futures guy forever. He's like, 'DeFi's only use case is onion futures.'" Rob: "He was in the pictures at the onion futures protest." "Onion bootleggers."

Robert Leshner reveals Bernie Sanders’ take on AI agents is 180° wrong "Talk about the exact opposite conclusion that Bernie should have drawn, right? Bernie, as somebody who at least on the surface tries to be as pro-consumer, pro public, pro retail as possible, he should have the exact 180° opposite take, which is, hey, it's literally impossible right now for a consumer to figure out how to close a bank account, move their money around, optimize their lives. It's functionally impossible, right?" "I have just a personal anecdote. I have a GoDaddy account I forgot about that I don't think has any domains in it. I was like, oh, good reminder, I'll just close this account. No domains, no services, I don't have any balance in there, I haven't used it in forever.” “Even with an AI agent, I couldn't close this old GoDaddy account. I just couldn't. It was like you're going to have to call us, there's forms, the terms of service, all these things are deliberately sabotaging the consumer."

Tarun explains how the "AI financial crisis" could start as a duration mismatch problem "My thing is, where does the AI financial crisis happen? There's a lot of duration mismatch here." "Neoclouds and hyperscalers are borrowing at 10-year tranches. They're selling 10-year bonds, 5-year bonds. Then they sell to smaller providers, they sell to inference providers, maybe they sell to hyperscalers for excess capacity. Those are all 1-to-3-year contracts, maybe 5-year at max." "They're taking this 10-year thing, chopping it up into a bunch of 3-to-5-year contracts, and then charging some premium for that. Then that's their business." "What are the inference providers doing? You have everyone from Cloudflare down to the small inference providers, plus Together, Base10, Moodle, etc." "They're taking this 3-year thing and chopping it up and selling it quarterly to SaaS companies and companies that want to do fine tuning, or companies that are consulting companies doing fine tuning, like Applied Compute type companies. They're charging a little bit of premium." "But if I look at this thing, you have this whole duration curve and you have yield at each duration. If you try to add up all the numbers, there's some slippage that is unexplained. I think that's where that blows out the markets. I have a lot of concern about what is happening in these markets."

.@HadickM says local agents are a rounding error. Tarun says open source always starts ugly. Rob: "you can absolutely use Hermes and, like, set up a local agent" "the amount of capital they have is gonna be essentially de minimis" "I like Hermes, but took me way too much time to get it to the right place" Tarun: "It always starts kind of shitty UX-wise and always improves over time" "No one wanted to use the sanction trading agents, right?" "We should just acknowledge that all commerce is gonna look like crypto"

.@tarunchitra on why defenders had to turn to open source models in the middle of an attack. Tarun: "All these people were trying to patch their system with Claude." "Well, Claude's a piece of shit and will obviously block you from doing anything to protect yourself." "And then the open source models were the only way to ensure that you could safely patch things if you were getting attacked." "This is almost like if 1Password got hacked, and they're like, 'I just need to rotate everything.'" "Anything where the model provider has sufficiently high liability is never gonna be done by a closed source model." "I don't think open source is dead. I think sunlight is the best disinfectant in the long run."

Black October was a wake-up call, but is it over? Naturally, we brought on the least technical technical guy we know to find out: @HadickM Meanwhile, Robert says not that much broke. Tom says it's just the tip of the iceberg. Tarun says closed source is the real risk. Timestamps 00:00 Intro 02:56 Black October: the web's worst 48 hours 09:13 Should we be scared? 12:06 Crypto got here first 15:16 Why Claude won't help you patch 17:13 Banks are blocking AI agents 22:07 Bernie Sanders says pause AI 26:41 Everything is crypto now 33:01 Joe Weisenthal, Hyperliquid, and blockchains 39:25 The Visa and Fireblocks rumor 43:08 2021 was a bubble 45:31 Who's the Fireblocks of AI? 🔥Stay updated with all the latest hot takes by following and subscribing to @_ChoppingBlock and @unchained_pod! 🎥 YouTube: 🎧 Spotify: 🍎 Apple: 🎙 Podcast Home:

I took over @theempirepod this week! We talk through: * The cyberpocalypse * Will the AI labs get nationalized? * The $2.5B Visa - Fireblocks deal * Is anything still investible? Give it a listen 👇

Back in August, Haseeb and Robert were talking about this on The Chopping Block: "The economics of AI and of cybersecurity are making everything really change." "Open source, in a way, is protection against a nefarious developer, but it's not protection against a nefarious third party." @rleshner: "I think open source in general is going to go full circle… every agent out there will analyze it in 0.01 seconds of it being created and prove that it's safe or prove that it's unsafe." "I like to say, don't trust any code before 2026." @hosseeb: "I think within a year, you're going to see best practices change dramatically…"

I was wrong. Agents don't need crypto. It's us humans who do. I break down what the industry got wrong in my @token2049 talk, Agents + Crypto: What's Real and What's Cope 👇

Haseeb says the AI disruption we were promised is nowhere to be found: “the incumbents have AI too motherf*cker” "We talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and they're like, 'oh, our moat's over. How should I internalize this?' My answer is, almost not at all. I think this is a fake story. This is bullsh*t." "We have not seen any major companies that have had their moats eroded by a post-AI company. There are no examples." "Nobody could come up with any examples to give me other than some very obscure companies that build compilers. I'm like what f*cking company is that that builds compilers, and that was their moat?" "Think about browsers. There was all these examples of Opus 4.8 one-shotting browsers. Obviously these were great tech demos. Nobody uses any f*cking vibe coded browsers because they're sh*t, because they suck. They're very good at the first 10 seconds." Tom: "It's not that people write their own software. It's that the model just eats the software. The thing that is competitive with Photoshop is not vibe coded Photoshop. It's just the image models have gotten so good that why would I ever open Figma or Photoshop? Because I can just prompt the model and generate the thing that I want." Haseeb: “It is very easy and compelling to say everything has changed. Businesses are now being turned on their head. Moats are eroding. Nothing is ever going to be the same. So far that call has aged incredibly poorly.” “We are three years post-ChatGPT. We're a full year post Opus 4.5. Where's all the disruption? You can always say 'oh, it's coming, it hasn't happened, you just have to give it time'. But I think actually the thing you have to appreciate, and Jane Street's a perfect example of this, the incumbents have AI too motherfuckers.” “They have bigger budgets than you do. They have more token spend than you do. And to the extent that they will be pulling farther ahead and their software will be more robust."