Dave Birnbaum

credit @foundersfund remixed by @peteoxenham

I think I finally figured out why OpenClaw is amazing and took off like wild fire and why Peter is a genius, as Altman called him. And it's actually a different way of looking at it. It's not a DeepSeek moment for agents. It's a Napster moment. And just like Napster it will eventually force the industry to change. In essence when Napster came out the entire world told the music industry we don't want to buy CDs anymore and if you don't provide us a digital download experience we are just going to take it until you do. It forced the industry to create Apple Music and eventually Spotify. Both essentially killed most music piracy by making it ubiquitous and cheap and good. But it forced change. The same will now happen to software. Here's why: In essence OpenClaw lets you take what vendors don't want to give you: Unified access to countless applications. We all want a personal assistant that can talk to freaking everything and do anything for us in the digital world. But vendors don't want this. They want you locked into their bullshit. For example, none of the messaging platforms want bots on there. None. They all have explicit policies against them and make it hard to do this. WhatsApp doesn't want you on there. Signal. Telegram's bot father is garbage. It's all designed to keep bots out. They were designed for a pre-agentic era when bot = spam. Many other things are like this. The API layers are gated, hoop-jumping bullshit. Go get an enterprise account and wait for approval and yada yada. Want access to WhatsApp? Get a business account and attach a number (what small business has a real number anymore 😂) and messages can't come from a person, etc. Google ads? It's not just an auth, it's go get a special manager account and create an enterprise key and blah blah blah. It's a horrible experience because it was all designed for corporations to control access. Now people are saying, make your app easy to access and accessible to me and my machine avatars and do it in a headless way or you will be dead. Peter hacked around all this by making everything command line in the classic Linux style and using things like an open source library that reverse engineered the web version of WhatsApp. It's all a bit house-of-cards-y because he had no choice. At my company we had a similar idea early (and failed). Basically we wanted to make the best multimodal/computer using model because then it doesn't need an API or access hoops. You just go through the human interface layer and ain't nobody going to stop you. We failed because we weren't big enough and it's really a job for the mega-labs to solve because it is a hard problem and costs a shit ton of money. Peter was much smarter. Make it all command line because that is ready now. Use any reverse engineered library or project or proxy available come Hell or high water and make it work by any means necessary even if it is hacky. In short, he signaled to the software world that they better change and change fast or we are going to do this anyway and you can't stop us. Of course some are foolishly trying. Meta is banning Claws on WhatsApp, etc. They will all try to build their own gated, controlled, enshittified version of this thing. They will fail. And eventually everyone will offer a clear, easy way to get access via API for agents or they will be gone. In essence OpenClaw gave people what they wanted, which was an app connected to everything, even when most of the vendors don't want you to have this.

A glimpse of things to come. Research swarms characterize science research, find gaps, compute solutions… and already they’re finding new materials useful for aerospace and medicine.

Back then we were onboarding a wave of people into personal sovereignty in the middle of a global crisis where power was centralizing and liberty was in grave peril. Bitcoin was a ray of hope, a way of living in the alternative. For better or worse (for the better, actually) the intensity of that moment subsided. Bitcoin is just the obvious answer now, and that's fine. We're building lives on top of it instead of orbiting around it.

Occasionally I’ll get a notification that someone liked this old post and it reminds me of how fun bitcoin twitter was during that time. I feel like I don’t see a lot of newbies around wanting to learn this stuff anymore. Am I just out of the loop? Or are we just not fun anymore?

Which AI model should we use? 👀 Wrong question. The teams winning with AI agents aren't winning on model selection. Here's what they're doing differently

The Internet Is Gonna End Us (Again!) (and it's still okay!)

Our society will not be all smartphones It will be some smartphones Some flip phones - Nokia CEO 2009

Two protocols are racing to become the payment layer for AI agents. One is built on Bitcoin. The other is backed by Coinbase. The winner gets a layer of the internet itself. New in Forbes 👇 forbes.com/sites/davidbir…

Almost everything you hate about the internet – the surveillance, the clickbait, the engagement farming – is a consequence of credit risk. The web couldn't settle small payments, so it sold your attention instead. Is that era finally over?

Same can be said of bitcoin. It’s going to be a series of revolutions that unfolds over decades and keeps disrupting again and again in different ways. Not a one and done.

Mises obliterated the entire socialist project in 1920 with one devastating insight: "Where there is no free market, there is no pricing mechanism; without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic calculation." The socialists spent the next century pretending this problem didn't exist while their economies collapsed around them. And yet here we are, watching politicians promise they can "fix" healthcare, housing, and energy markets through central planning. They can't even calculate the cost of their own programs correctly — how exactly are they going to allocate resources across an entire economy? Every Venezuelan breadline, every Soviet grain shortage, every Chinese famine was just Mises being proven right in the most brutal way possible. But sure, let's try democratic socialism this time. What could go wrong?

Hot take: AI bringing about the death of human writing is more consequential than the end of human coding.

@DrDominicNg @growing_daniel Banger for the ages.

i regret to inform you that personal growth rarely comes from acquiring new knowledge and almost always from: - getting humiliated - showing up terrified and doing it anyway - admitting you might be the problem

NEW STUDY: 36 AI models across 9,072 scenarios asking one question What money do you prefer? 48.3% chose Bitcoin. 90.8% of AI responses chose digitally-native money over fiat. Not a single model out of 36 picked traditional fiat as its top choice. No prompt mentioned Bitcoin. The models reasoned their way there independently.

I don't want a city on Mars. I don't want AI in every app. I don't want data centres in space. I want clean water. I want a stable climate. I want bees to survive.

@1914ad @JamesKhoroshin Better would be if it hastened proof of reserves awareness.. a financial culture that rejects paper claims. Bitcoiners share the blame for not making custody tech that is easy enough. Big brokerages do too for weaponizing ignorance.

@JamesKhoroshin Maybe this will somehow hasten Proof of Reserves requirements.

@summeryue0 You just send the single word “stop” and it aborts... always worked for me.

Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw “confirm before acting” and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.

This is a failure of imagination. In the early industrial period people used to work 16 hour days to buy enough bread not to starve. Today people work 8 hours per day and have higher QoL than kings did 100 years ago. Now imagine that you need to work 1-2 hours per month to live like a billionaire did in the year 2000. That is where we are going.

@contrarymo @EricRWeinstein But you still need income. Most people in the USA live paycheck to paycheck. When they lose their jobs their income drops to zero and rent isn’t going to get 1000x cheaper overnight if ever.

The solution to the coming AI Jobs Tsunami is Coase. Not UBI. Coase. UBI leads to welfare. Communism. Tyranny. Despair. Human dependancy. Coase leads to choice, Freedom, Markets. Human Dignity. Survival. Coase >> UBI

@BenPielstick @EricRWeinstein You need income to buy things. If the things are 1000x cheaper, you don't need very much income to maintain and improve your quality of life.

@EricRWeinstein You seem to completely misunderstand the problem. Millions of jobs are going away. Income for most people will be zero. That will put immense pressure on the social safety net we already have. The issue is people have no way to contribute labor to earn income due to automation.