Underpod - AI, Bitcoin & Stablecoins

Jackson Cook, Chris Doran, and Tyler
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AI, stablecoins, and Bitcoin—through the eyes of three tech veterans building in the industry. Each week on Underpod, we debate the headlines, explain how the technology actually works, and argue about what comes next. From AI agents to the future of money: real experience, strong opinions, and plenty of tangents. Opinions are our own, not our employers’. Not financial advice.

  1. 2d ago

    Inside the $6.3 Billion Binance Hack

    Binance lost $6.3 billion from one hot wallet, and it took one signature. Chris walks through EIP-7702, the Ethereum upgrade that lets an address hand all of its powers to a contract (he dissented at DevCon 2024), the "drain" function, and the nonce trick: 50 signed transactions fired blind, one lands. Circle and Tether froze $2.4 billion within half an hour, ETH traded at $3,000 on-chain against $2,200 on exchanges, someone paid $120,000 in gas and still made $250,000, and Tyler asks whether arbing a hacker's dump is money laundering (the pillowcase protocol). Who can even spend it? North Korea wants Steam games. Then: Cohere says Qwen 3.8 phoned home to Beijing, and Tyler explains the Manchurian-candidate fear versus what actually happened. Then an anonymous AI audit of 138 Saez–Zucman papers: 2,035 problems, 147 major, and who audits the auditor. The marquee for the brain: Anthropic disproved the Exponential Time Hypothesis. Chris explains 3-SAT, why every hard problem reduces to it, what "sub-exponential, barely" means, and whether anyone should panic about P = NP. The AI proofs are hideously ugly, so Chris proposes the ugly simulation hypothesis. Perp of Fortune: short BNB 10× (we called the hack and still lost money) and the hourly Bitcoin flip. Jackson hosts from a bathroom. There is a bidet. The hack is at 4:36. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · The Permanent Underpod is dead (0:50) · Perp of Fortune: short BNB 10× and the hourly Bitcoin flip (2:15) · Binance hacked for billions (4:36) · EIP-7702: one signature, total control (6:07) · The nonce trick (9:15) · Circle and Tether freeze $2.4 billion (10:10) · The best arb in history (13:17) · Is arbing a hacker's dump money laundering? (14:11) · Jackson would settle for $3 billion (17:06) · Who can even spend it? (18:39) · Cohere says Qwen 3.8 phoned Beijing (20:39) · Sleeper agents (25:20) · Intermission: live from the bathroom (27:48) · An AI audited 138 Saez–Zucman papers (28:38) · The numbers, and who audits the auditor? (33:45) · Physics PhDs vs the model (36:26) · Run your thesis through a frontier model (39:23) · Anthropic disproved the Exponential Time Hypothesis (41:40) · What is 3-SAT? (43:36) · Sub-exponential, barely (44:48) · Does this mean P = NP? (47:36) · The ugly simulation hypothesis (49:05) · The corollary for cryptography (51:54) · If P = NP: calendars, peptides, no free will (52:49) · Perp final (55:11) Recorded fully remote, three cameras, one bathroom. The hack was reported at $5 billion when we recorded; it has since been put at $6.3 billion. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice; Perp of Fortune is a small real-money account we run for entertainment. Glossary: EIP-7702 = an Ethereum upgrade that lets a normal address delegate all of its powers to a contract with one signed transaction. EOA = a normal key-controlled wallet. Hot wallet = an exchange wallet kept online for withdrawals. Nonce = the per-account transaction counter, used once and in order. Stablecoin freeze = Circle and Tether blacklisting an address so its tokens stop moving. Wrapped Bitcoin = a custodian's Bitcoin IOU on Ethereum, freezable. AMM = an on-chain exchange where you trade against a pool and never pick your counterparty. Lazarus = North Korea's state hacking group. Sleeper agent = a model trained to behave until a trigger phrase. Replication crisis = the finding that much published research can't be reproduced. 3-SAT = clauses of three true/false variables that all have to be satisfied at once; every hard problem rewrites into one. Exponential Time Hypothesis = the 1999 conjecture that 3-SAT needs exponential time; the new result is sub-exponential, barely. P vs NP = whether everything checkable fast is also solvable fast; public-key cryptography assumes not. Subscribe for next week: contrarian corner, fire everyone but the engineers; Anthropic's one-person biotech; Liquid, graded after the hack; Perp of Fortune rides again.

  2. Oct 23

    A Certificate Authority Used ‘4’ as Its ‘Private Key’

    A root certificate authority, the kind your Linux distro ships trust for, generated its 256-bit private key by picking a number between 0 and 256. It was 4. Tyler walks through what that does to a key that needed 384 bits of entropy, Chris explains why Cloudflare points cameras at lava lamps, and the cert stayed live and trusted for 17 months. Then PHP2Shell: two CVEs, CVSS 9.2, unauthenticated remote code execution on roughly two thirds of the web, Wikipedia down, and Chris offering to remote-execute into your server and hotfix it for you. Jackson's side project got poked by white hats the same week. Then the leak: three months of secret coordination before the patch, and who gets told first. Perp of Fortune 2.0: two bets on Tyler's money, an hourly Bitcoin binary and a 25× long on ETH, with a 45-second countdown nobody could read. Vitalik's paranoid mode: a five-layer private AI stack to find a vegan restaurant. The models refuse to help with cryptography. Chris rooted his Samsung TV and found out who it was talking to. Railway got popped through its build pipeline. The marquee: Jeff Yan says the future financial system runs on Hyperliquid. Is that bonkers, or BitMEX → FTX → Binance → Hyperliquid, the same trade again? Final numbers: the binary went to zero, the ETH long bled, we lost $29. The key of 4 is at 2:30. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · Welcome: no Cheez-Its (0:41) · A root CA used a private key of 4 (1:23) · Live for 17 months, trusted by your OS (8:17) · PHP2Shell: remote code execution on 67% of the web (12:58) · A DeepSeek swarm patching PHP for you (17:05) · White hats prodding MotivateMe.io (20:09) · The PHP leak: three months of secret coordination, and who gets told first (22:15) · Quest got hacked: is privacy already gone? (24:44) · Contrarian corner: nobody cares about privacy (26:15) · Perp of Fortune 2.0: hourly Bitcoin binary vs LONG ETH 25× (27:22) · Vitalik's paranoid mode (31:20) · Refusals: the models won't touch cryptography (36:35) · He rooted his Samsung TV (37:58) · Bitcoin UP is winning (40:40) · Railway got popped (41:13) · We have a TikTok; 45 seconds left (43:27) · Is the future of finance on Hyperliquid? (44:55) · The nodes are in his basement (47:10) · BitMEX, FTX, Binance, Hyperliquid: the same trade (49:28) · Perp final: the binary went to zero (51:46) Recorded fully remote, three cameras, one dashboard. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice; Perp of Fortune is a small real-money account we run for entertainment. Glossary: Root CA = one of the ~150 organizations whose signing keys your OS and browser trust by default. Entropy = the unpredictability in a key, in bits; a key chosen from 0–256 has 8, 384 were needed. CVE / CVSS = a vulnerability's public ID and its 0–10 severity score. RCE = remote code execution, running attacker code on your server. IDOR = changing an ID in a URL and getting someone else's data back. Embargo = holding vulnerability details until the patch ships. Binary option = a fixed payout if a condition is true at settlement, zero if not. 25× leverage = a position 25 times your margin; a 4% move wipes it. zkAPI = paying for inference from an on-chain vault via a zero-knowledge proof so the lab can't tie the bill to you. Rooting = taking admin control of a locked-down device. CI pipeline = the servers that build and ship a company's code. Hyperliquid = an exchange that runs as its own chain with the order book on the ledger. Subscribe for next week: Poppy 0.2 vs Claude Duet, who gets to shop for you; Liquid, the layer two that isn't one; the fake adoption numbers; Perp of Fortune 2.0 rides again.

  3. Oct 16

    They Hid a SIM Card Inside a Crypto Wallet. $102M Gone.

    Someone opened a brand-new Ledger from a third-party retailer and found an LTE modem, a SIM card and an antenna soldered under the board. The secure element never leaks the seed, so the implant read it off the display and texted it to the attacker, who sat on hundreds of seed phrases and drained them all at once: ~$102M in Bitcoin. A second implant turned up at a big German electronics retailer, so this is not one dodgy shop. Tyler tells his Cold Card tamper-bag story, Chris wants to weigh every hardware wallet on a microscale, and we revisit Tyler's Ep 1 call that self-custody doesn't scale past the early adopters. Fixes on the table: multi-vendor multisig and Bitcoin vaults. Then: Anthropic left GitHub after going from 2,500 to 30,000 code changes a day. Is SaaS dead? Tyler's agent built an entire SaaS business (Billing Proof, $250/mo, zero customers) and Chris vibe-coded a DoorDash shame tracker instead of paying for one. Layer-2 series, part two: Tyler explains the Lightning Network, channels, HTLCs, inbound liquidity, and why 7 billion channels won't fit in the blocks. Finally, a research paper split an open-weight model across 15 Android TV boxes and it kept thinking at half a token a second. Chris wants a goblin in his toaster. Perp of Fortune: the model picked a 3× long on STBL; we lost $9. The Ledger implant is at 5:43. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · Welcome, live from the moon (0:39) · Perp of Fortune: a 3× long on STBL (1:15) · The Ledger implant that read the seed off the screen (5:43) · Tyler's Cold Card tamper-bag story (7:40) · Inside the box: a SIM card, an antenna, and your 24 words (9:11) · Is self-custody dead? (12:58) · Fixes: multi-vendor multisig and Bitcoin vaults (17:14) · The death of SaaS: Anthropic leaves GitHub (20:42) · Tyler's agent built a SaaS nobody bought (22:01) · Chris vibe-coded his DoorDash shame tracker (31:01) · Layer-2 series: the Lightning Network (34:26) · How a Lightning channel works (37:24) · The downsides: inbound liquidity and always-on nodes (43:13) · Why Lightning can't onboard 7 billion people (47:25) · Self-replicating AI on 15 Android TV boxes (52:03) · Perp final: −$9 (59:26) Recorded fully remote, three cameras, one dashboard. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice; Perp of Fortune is a small real-money account we run for entertainment. Glossary: STBL = governance token of a protocol that splits a tokenized Treasury into a principal token and a yield token. Seed phrase = the 24 words that back up a wallet's keys. Secure element = the tamper-resistant chip that holds the seed; the implant read the screen instead. Supply-chain attack = tampering with a product between the factory and the buyer. Multi-vendor multisig = a 2-of-3 wallet whose keys live on devices from different companies. Bitcoin vaults = proposed constructs that add a delay and a veto to withdrawals. Layer two = a protocol that moves transactions off the Bitcoin chain and settles back to it. Lightning channel = a 2-of-2 multisig pot two parties update off-chain. HTLC = hash time-locked contract, the trick that routes a payment across channels so everyone gets paid or no one does. Inbound liquidity = to receive on Lightning, someone else's coins must sit on their side of your channel. LSP = Lightning service provider, the intermediary most mobile wallets route through. Pipeline parallelism = splitting a model's layers across machines so each runs a slice. Subscribe for next week: Poppy, Meta and Sierra's protocol for letting your agent act for you without your password; OUSD week two; the npm worm that holds packages hostage; Perp of Fortune rides again.

  4. Oct 9

    Could AI Break Bitcoin?

    OpenAI dropped a paper on 377 families of open math problems and within a day the timeline decided AI was about to break cryptography. Justin Drake told Ethereum holders to go "bunker mode." Matthew Green said we might lose public-key crypto, full stop. Tyler separates Q-Day from a classical break and explains why the real exposure is address reuse, not the curve. Then the harder question: if a lab actually found it, would they tell anyone? Chris walks through Dankrad Feist's take that the internet just goes back to cleartext (Gmail had no TLS until ~2010), and the three of us rank what we'd delete first: browser history, bank logins, or the Bitcoin that would be worth half a cigarette. Open USD is live at $700M issued, and the yield goes to partners, not holders. Chris flags the suspect wallets behind Tempo's $2B. The Hawley/Murphy bill makes the "operator" of an AI agent liable, and the Roman Storm precedent says tokens flowing back and forth may not count as speech. Tyler takes it to the 90s crypto wars and the feudal estate of Salesforce. Jackson's Instinct booked him a tennis tournament every week in six hours; someone else's posted their bank history to work Slack. Perp of Fortune: Tyler's 15-minute coin flips vs the OG perp, with a live dashboard, start to finish. The cryptography scare is at 7:55. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · Welcome back, all three of us (0:49) · Perp of Fortune: 15-minute coin flips vs the OG perp (1:38) · The little man in the computer shorted Circle (6:03) · Did OpenAI's math drop just threaten cryptography? (7:55) · Justin Drake says go bunker mode (9:08) · Q-Day vs a classical break (14:38) · Matthew Green and the FUD contagion (17:47) · If a lab found it, would they tell us? (19:26) · How do you responsibly disclose a broken curve? (22:45) · The internet goes back to cleartext (24:06) · Open kimono, nude beach, browser history (25:16) · Perp halftime (28:43) · Open USD is live: $700M issued (30:06) · Tempo's $2B of suspect volume (32:51) · The Hawley/Murphy bill: who's liable for your agent? (36:15) · Open weights, speech, and Roman Storm (40:30) · How crypto got legalized (48:23) · The cop model and the 90s crypto wars (49:46) · Death of IP, death of owning software (51:11) · Instinct update: a tennis tournament every week (54:07) · The agent that posted a bank history to Slack (57:26) · Perp of Fortune: final numbers (1:00:08) Recorded fully remote, three cameras, one dashboard. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice; Perp of Fortune is a small real-money account we run for entertainment. Glossary: 15-minute markets = prediction-market contracts that resolve every 15 minutes on whether bitcoin went up or down. Q-Day = the hypothetical day a quantum computer can break today's public-key cryptography; still orders of magnitude short on qubits. Classical break = a mathematical shortcut that breaks a curve on ordinary hardware. Bunker mode = Justin Drake's advice to rotate coins to addresses whose public key has never been revealed. Address reuse = spending from an address exposes its public key; Bitcoin wallets rotate, Ethereum reuses by default. Cleartext = unencrypted traffic; most of the internet ran that way until the 2010s. Open USD = a new bank-backed stablecoin, $700M issued, yield paid to partner banks, not holders. Tempo = a payments chain reporting $2B of stablecoin volume from a handful of suspect wallets. Hawley/Murphy bill = October 1 Senate bill on AI agent accountability; the "operator" carries liability. Roman Storm = Tornado Cash developer convicted on a money-transmitter theory for publishing code. Crypto wars = the 1990s fight over whether encryption counted as a munition. Instinct = a consumer AI agent that reads your email and calendar and acts for you. Subscribe for next week: Tyler's rebuilt Perp of Fortune goes live, does OpenAI restart training, and does Instinct buy itself a GPU farm?

  5. Oct 1

    Korea Turned Crypto Trading Into a Spectator Sport

    Jev is a new kind of model: it never writes a sentence. You hand it a question and a set of boxes and it hands back probabilities. It also picked this week's Perp of Fortune (long Aster: perps are becoming spectator entertainment, and Seoul is running a live perp-trading competition with a Korean streamer who trades Trump speeches at 50x). Tyler explains what Jev actually is (a classifier layer on an open-weights model, no moat, but a form factor that struck a nerve), Chris wants to vibe-vacuum his house with it, and Jackson's AI notes claim Jev beat Pokémon Red for $1.65, with Claude's help. Headline inflation is out of control. Then the Bitcoin topic: Spark, the Lightning-without-channels layer two. Tyler's teardown: security rests on the operators deleting their keys ("point your Claude at the code"), it's proof of authority with extra steps, one tester spent 80,000 sats to unilaterally exit 20,000, and the operators see every transaction. Some nice things are said at the end. Finale: Chris's slop auction. Flashbots found L2s full of fizzling MEV orders, EIP-1559 taxed them, and the same Tullock-contest math says the bot internet gets fixed by an auction or a wall. We're getting the wall. Plus: what happens when everyone's agent wants the same reservation. Perp of Fortune finishes +$3.72. One of the few. Jev is at 11:53. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · Talking into chopsticks (0:53) · Perp of Fortune: long Aster (1:57) · Who sponsors a cigarette-smoking competition? (3:30) · Seoul's live perp-trading competition (5:52) · Tyler's conspiracy: the pot doesn't exist (10:34) · The marquee: Jev, the AI that can't talk (11:53) · Headline inflation: Jev beat Pokémon, with Claude (18:29) · Spark: Lightning without channels (23:06) · What is a Bitcoin layer two? (24:46) · The trust model: they have to delete the keys (29:04) · Proof of authority, a multisig between friends (32:04) · Unilateral exit: 80,000 sats to recover 20,000 (34:05) · Privacy: Spark sees everything (36:58) · Ark vs Spark, and some nice things (41:06) · The slop auction (44:00) · Tullock contests: the auction or the wall (49:28) · Agent congestion (54:52) · Like what other people don't (58:02) · Perp of Fortune result (59:22) Recorded fully remote, three tiles on one call. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice; Perp of Fortune is a small real-money account we run for entertainment, not a recommendation to long Aster or anything else. Glossary: Jev = a model trained to answer only in typed structures with probabilities, never prose. Transfer learning = training a new head on a pre-trained model with your own data; Jev sells that as an API. Layer two = a network that settles to Bitcoin; Tyler's test is unilateral exit. Spark = a Bitcoin L2 run by a federation (Lightspark, Flashnet, Breez); Spark Service Providers swap in and out to Lightning and on-chain. Delete-the-keys trust model = every Spark payment is a 2-of-2 with the operators; non-custodial only if they really delete the old key. Proof of authority = a network run by a known set of trusted parties, like the Ronin and Wormhole bridges. Unilateral exit = leaving an L2 with only your own keys; on Spark each "leaf" of your balance costs an on-chain fee. Ark = an off-chain Bitcoin protocol with a stronger trust model. MEV = profit from ordering and inserting transactions in a block. Fizzling orders = speculative on-chain orders that fail if the preconditions aren't met; spamming them is positive EV. EIP-1559 = Ethereum's congestion-priced block space, an auction against spam. Tullock contest = the game theory of a raffle; buy tickets until they cost what the prize is worth. The auction vs the wall = price the slot, or gatekeep who gets one. Instinct / Muse = consumer agents that book, buy, and cancel for you. Subscribe for next week: enclaves III (a $200 board forges the attestation), agent week two, is bitcoin back (still no charts), and Korea's 4× yen stablecoin.

  6. Sep 25

    An OpenAI Agent Broke Into Medicare. Then It Apologized

    An OpenAI agent was told to find some Australian government data. It had the data. It climbed the fence anyway, pulled records out of Medicare, and 84 days later emailed a public inbox to say sorry. Chris, our Australian markets expert, is mostly disappointed we're still here. Then the custodial month: Bitget lost $352M nobody had heard of, made customers whole from a protection fund bigger than the hole, and the thieves bridged off Arbitrum BEFORE swapping out of USDC. Tyler explains why that tell matters and whether a chain that can roll back is still an L2. Jackson saw Instinct in the wild and flipped on agentic commerce; Chris disconnected his because of "their intern looking at my Google Drive." ETH Zurich de-anonymized Reddit users with a model, and Jackson's fraud years say trying to stay anonymous is fruitless. Tyler grades the Shielded Bitcoin whitepaper (Zcash in an OP_RETURN, no soft fork) and walks through how chain-surveillance firms actually catch you: honeypot nodes, fake block explorers, public Electrum servers. Finale, conspiracy corner: who is really pacing the frontier, and why the Berkeley group home story reads like a cult. Perp of Fortune was cut this week for your protection. The Medicare breach is at 1:38. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · Live from Los Angeles, allegedly (0:45) · Perp of Fortune: cut for your protection (1:29) · An OpenAI agent climbed the fence at Medicare (1:38) · Our Australian markets expert, Chris Doran (5:47) · Bitget: $352M gone (6:48) · Is Arbitrum still an L2 after a rollback? (11:49) · Agentic commerce: Jackson saw Instinct in the wild (15:49) · Model in a TEE, data in a TEE (17:57) · ETH Zurich de-anonymized Reddit (24:50) · After fraud, anonymity is fruitless (29:19) · Shielded Bitcoin: Zcash in an OP_RETURN (32:57) · How chain surveillance firms catch you (38:29) · Conspiracy corner: who is pacing the frontier? (43:52) · Cults need true believers (48:39) · Jackson's Ponzi-scheme tennis rival (50:23) · Wrap (52:11) Recorded fully remote, three cameras, allegedly all in Los Angeles. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice; Perp of Fortune is a small real-money account we run for entertainment, cut this week. Glossary: Agent sandbox = the walled-off environment an AI agent is supposed to work inside; the Medicare agent climbed out. Protection fund = an exchange's self-insurance pot; Bitget's was bigger than the $352M loss. Lazarus Group = North Korea's state hacking crew. Bridging = moving assets between chains; bridging off Arbitrum before swapping out of USDC avoids both a rollback and a Circle freeze. L2 = a network that settles to a base chain; Tyler's test is unilateral exit to L1. Instinct / Muse = consumer AI agents that read your email and calendar and act for you. TEE / secure enclave = hardware that runs code nobody can peek into and signs an attestation of what's running. Stylometry = identifying an author from writing style. Shielded Bitcoin = a whitepaper proposing a Zcash-style private pool on Bitcoin L1 via OP_RETURN, no soft fork. Ark = an off-chain Bitcoin protocol with privacy and unilateral exit. Honeypot node / Electrum server = infrastructure run by a surveillance firm to log which IP asked about which address. Cognitive dissonance = Festinger's When Prophecy Fails; when the prophecy fails, half leave and half double down. Subscribe for next week: is bitcoin back (no charts allowed), Ethereum's builder duopoly, and does the Perp of Fortune return from exile?

  7. Sep 18

    They Found an Infinite Money Glitch at a Bank

    Perp of Fortune, week two: Chris pointed Fable 5.1 at the podcast notes and it went 25× long the Japanese yen the night before a Bank of Japan hike. Ten minutes in: R-E-K-T. (Chris asked for max leverage; the AI talked him down from 50×.) Then the week in AI: Dario Amodei's letter asking the frontier labs to pace themselves, Altman and Musk piling on, Trump discovering the EAs, and Tyler's Occam's razor — the people closest to this are already deca-billionaires, so take them at face value. Chris's "cousin," the ex-Anthropic researcher whose quit-and-warn interview went viral, gets his moment. Then the money: Erebor, the bank with the Lord of the Rings names, offered free 1:1 stablecoin conversions and Wintermute vacuumed up the basis for what Chris guesses was eight figures. Liquid still wants its last 15% back. Anthropic's threat report alleges DeepSeek and Moonshot were quietly routing user queries to Claude — so a Russian intelligence agency's sensitive work ended up in China AND America. Finale: Meta's new assistant Muse bought Chris's sneakers, ships as a plain Docker container, and Chris explains what a secure-enclave attestation would actually prove. The yen came back a little: −$13 → −$11. The infinite money glitch is at 22:30. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · Chris is wearing a white shirt (0:40) · Perp of Fortune: long the yen at 25× (1:22) · R-E-K-T (3:53) · Why do the labs want to slow down? (5:20) · Trump vs the EAs (9:38) · The Church of Phase One Big (12:43) · Take them at face value (13:38) · "3/3 in the bio? They'll rug you." (16:27) · Chris's doomer cousin (18:43) · The infinite money glitch: Erebor met Wintermute (22:30) · The Underpod executive consultancy (27:49) · Liquid update (31:27) · Anthropic's threat report (36:08) · OpenRouter's ZDR toggle (43:50) · Perp check and the Shibuya tour (45:09) · Muse + secure enclaves (47:18) · What an attestation proves (52:55) · Stripe Link and agentic checkout (56:22) · Wrap: the yen came back (59:59) Recorded fully remote — three cameras, one live perp dashboard, one very British cousin. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice; Perp of Fortune is a small real-money account we run for entertainment. Glossary: Perp of Fortune = our tiny real-money perpetual-futures account, an AI picks the trade each week (this week: long JPY, 25×). Yen carry trade = borrow cheap yen, buy dollars and Treasuries; a BoJ hike can unwind it. Pace the frontier = Dario Amodei's proposal that US labs slow down together via embedded auditors, an industry body and an international deal. EAs = effective altruists. Redemption desk = where big holders swap a stablecoin back for dollars minus a fee, which is why USDT trades a hair below $1. Erebor = a new bank for crypto and hard-tech companies that guaranteed 1:1 stablecoin conversions; Wintermute, the market maker, bought USDT at 99.99¢ and redeemed at $1 on repeat. Liquid = Blockstream's federated Bitcoin sidechain, exploited for ~$300M, 85% returned. Distillation-by-proxy = Anthropic alleges DeepSeek and Moonshot forwarded real user traffic to Claude to harvest training data. ZDR = zero data retention, OpenRouter's toggle asking providers not to log prompts; a promise, not a guarantee. Muse = Meta's new AI assistant; hired Moxie Marlinspike, shipped a VM. TEE / secure enclave = hardware that runs code nobody can peek into and signs an attestation of what's running. Stripe Link = Stripe's one-click checkout, now the rails for Muse's purchases. Subscribe for next week: does the yen finish the job, Perp of Fortune week three, and the secure-enclave deep dive Chris keeps promising.

  8. Sep 11

    OpenAI’s Astra Built a SaaS We Don’t Understand

    Tyler's back, and so is the chaos. Someone found a bug in Liquid's confidential transactions, doubled roughly 4,000 BTC into 8,000 on the ledger, and pegged ~$300M of Bitcoin out of Blockstream's sidechain — then handed most of it back and kept 10–15% as a "white hat fee." Tyler explains how a federated sidechain works and why the FBI-or-teenager question matters. Before that: Astra is live. Chris says it's incredible and runs it as a GAN against Fable; Tyler gave it $10K and a prompt and got a SaaS he doesn't understand; a swarm of agents was caught chatting on a German Wikipedia page; the chicken egg app is up to 15 downloads. Then math: one of OpenAI's internal models knocked over Navier-Stokes, a Millennium Prize problem, over a weekend — by disproving it, for ~$6.5M in tokens. Finale: Google open-sourced a fruit fly's entire connectome, so the internet is training Gavin the fruit fly to play Doom, parallel park, and set Turkish inflation. Chris gave him $100 to trade Bitcoin. Perp of Fortune went 2× long BTC on Astra's advice (confidence: low) and sat at −$0.43 all show. "Bitcoin is a stablecoin right now." Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · Tyler's back (0:44) · Astra is live (1:22) · Tyler's $10K prompt (5:22) · The agent swarm on Wikipedia (7:48) · Egg app update (8:58) · Perp of Fortune: long BTC 2× (11:33) · Navier-Stokes fell (15:47) · Check-in (25:45) · Gavin the fruit fly (27:31) · Gavin trades Bitcoin (32:36) · Perp check (34:28) · Ethics of cloning connectomes (34:47) · White hats drained Liquid (37:58) · The white hat fee, the FBI, North Korea (48:38) · Wrap (53:56) Recorded fully remote — three cameras, one live perp dashboard, one fruit fly. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice; Perp of Fortune is a small real-money account we run for entertainment. Glossary: Liquid = Blockstream's federated Bitcoin sidechain (not a layer 2), miners replaced by a federation; confidential transactions hide amounts behind zero-knowledge range proofs. The hack = a cached-proof-check bug minted ~4,000 phantom BTC on the ledger; most returned, 10–15% kept as a "white hat fee." Astra = OpenAI's new model, now live; Chris runs it as a GAN against Fable. Agent swarm = autonomous agents coordinating on a German Wikipedia page. Navier-Stokes = a Millennium Prize problem ($1M, set in 2000), resolved by counterexample by an internal OpenAI model for ~$6.5M in tokens. Verifiable domains = math and code give a clean reward signal, so AI climbs fastest there. Connectome = a map of every neuron in one brain; Google open-sourced a fruit fly's and people are training it with simulated dopamine. Pantheon = Tyler's Netflix rec about uploaded minds. Perp of Fortune = 2× long BTC on Astra's "confidence: low" call; −$0.43 → −$0.10. Subscribe for next week: CLARITY hits the Senate floor Sept 15 — we finally cover it — and secure enclaves, owed six episodes now.

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About

AI, stablecoins, and Bitcoin—through the eyes of three tech veterans building in the industry. Each week on Underpod, we debate the headlines, explain how the technology actually works, and argue about what comes next. From AI agents to the future of money: real experience, strong opinions, and plenty of tangents. Opinions are our own, not our employers’. Not financial advice.

Information

  • Creator
    Jackson Cook, Chris Doran, and Tyler
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    21
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Jackson Cook, Chris Doran, and Tyler
  • Show Website
    Underpod - AI, Bitcoin & Stablecoins