Fans, Athletes and Lightning

Every passage, on the record.

1. 02:30Reference

   You are going to be much like the value for value model in podcasting, where you're streaming sats to podcast providers like many of you are that are listening to this podcast on Fountain.

2. 02:30Analogy

   You are going to be much like the value for value model in podcasting, where you're streaming sats to podcast providers.

3. 03:44Open question

   If you're on Fountain and you have the ability to send a message to me, let me know if this doesn't make any sense, let me know if what I believe is going to happen might not take place.

4. 04:24Claim

   There was always an intermediary; you always had to go through someone to send value to an athlete before Bitcoin, which meant fees were involved and a minimum you'd think about sending, and it left crumbs on the table. Lightning removes those fees and makes it instantaneous, so as play unfolds in real time you can send value to a player.

5. 06:36Quote

   Talk is cheap and Bitcoin is not.

6. 06:36Claim

   The incentives in professional sports have been hijacked by the fiat system: the current model is that fan attention is sold, and if something is free, you are most definitely the product.

7. 06:36Reference

   This has held back the value that sports can contribute to the extended order overall.

8. 07:40Idea

   Life is about energy, specifically every action life undertakes has the goal of transforming energy from inaccessible to readily accessible. Life wants energy reserves, and facing an unpredictable future, the more energy reserves life has access to, the greater its ability to deal with the changing conditions around it to make sure it continues to survive.

9. 08:19Claim · condensed

   The legacy model's answer is that people like watching sports, their attention (which is simply energy) can be sold to advertisers, who leverage their specialization to unlock energy through increased efficiencies by providing products or services to viewers, closing the value loop.

10. 09:12Claim

    That model creates an environment where incentives drive players, teams and organizations to maximize for attention rather than for what fans actually value in sports, and the reality is we don't know what the value of sports is, because it has been hijacked by a different model than what it was originally intended for.

11. 09:46Quote

    Sports provide an opportunity to display the value of life embracing low time preference behavior in a condensed, easily digestible timeframe.

12. 10:21Reference

    Why do we want individuals acting with low time preference? Because it makes the extended order more efficient, and it's an intelligent use of scarce resources, which we can define as energy reserves.

13. 10:57Claim · condensed

    Athletes become great through hard work, determination, grit, resiliency, practice, focus and sacrifice of the present for future benefit; those low time preference behaviors are hard to show en masse because they take an abnormal amount of time to show their benefits.

14. 11:31Quote

    The proof of work is the actual skill that they have amassed in that time.

15. 12:05Claim

    The end result is more energy because we are molding more productive beings, shaping their understanding of how to operate in the world to achieve the best results possible; sports are a stage to appreciate greatness, and the increased energy reserves come from the inspiration to go out and showcase what low time preference looks like.

16. 12:39Quote

    We should be exploring options that incentivize greatness, as opposed to incentivizing for attention.

17. 13:44Claim

    The problem has been that there has never been a way for fans to directly share value with athletes without a middleman being involved.

18. 14:14Claim · condensed

    The layers between the fans who receive value and the athletes who provide it have required inefficiencies to build up in the system, because someone in the middle captures value and it has to be distributed and cut up on both sides.

19. 14:46Analogy · condensed

    Banks got so large because they held the network hostage to distribute value, charging gatekeeper fees at every juncture you wanted to interact with the network. We've shown Bitcoin can remove that in the financial world; the question is how that happens with value in the real world when it comes to athletics.

20. 15:17Claim

    Bitcoin's open source, permissionless architecture means we now have the ability to send value peer to peer without a trusted intermediary. Bitcoin's base layer is less than ideal for instant transfers because of the security measures that maintain the integrity of the system, which is necessary for a global reserve asset to build trust.

21. 15:49Quote

    You don't have to trust anyone. All you have to do is look at the code for yourself, and you can decide whether or not you want to participate, and no one can alter that.

22. 15:49Claim · condensed

    The Lightning Network is a second layer technology built on top of Bitcoin's base layer that solves for instant payments, letting Bitcoin payments take place at the speed of light while providing all the security benefits of being built on top of the world's most secure asset.

23. 17:41Claim

    Because we know the truth emerges from Bitcoin, because talk is cheap and sats are not, because there's a real world cost, if sats are flowing in a certain direction we know the appreciation is true and actual and real.

24. 18:24Claim · condensed

    This isn't just beneficial to hardcore Bitcoiners looking to overturn the financial system; there are positive talking points even for normies, starting with the fact that fans can interact directly with their favorite players, coaches and teams and know the message will get there because there's no middleman.

25. 19:00Claim · condensed

    From the player's side, athletes are no longer dependent on the organization to supply 100 percent of their salary, which flips incentives: rather than being an employee of a team, a player becomes more like an independent subcontractor who can take that value with them wherever they go.

26. 19:34Quote

    It will not be contained by a walled garden, right? The idea is out there.

27. 20:06Claim · condensed

    It doesn't cost a team a single cent or a satoshi to get involved, because the tools already exist. Maybe not built for this purpose, but they're all available, and we're just leveraging and combining them to unlock more value than was previously accessible.

28. 20:38Claim · condensed

    This also lessens the need for advertisements by a tremendous amount, which results in a better fan experience, because more focus goes on the game rather than on capturing attention.

29. 21:15Claim · condensed

    For Bitcoiners this goes even deeper: by removing gatekeepers in any industry the truth emerges, there is less noise and more signal, and players, teams and leagues will know exactly what fans are responding to based on sats flow, because talk is cheap and sats are not.

30. 21:51Analogy · condensed

    Before eBay, the world had locked value stuffed in their garages; they didn't even know what they had stuffed away in their closet had value. eBay lessened the energy requirement for accessing that value, the market opened up, and now there's a true representation of what an open market looks like for the value in your garage.

31. 22:56Claim · condensed

    This is a real life use case for Lightning based microtransactions that can act as a springboard for further implementations, because professional sports already has so many eyeballs on it.

32. 23:28Open question · condensed

    We don't know the true value of sports, but Bitcoin will help shine a light on whether or not sports are a value add to the extended order; they could even be a net detractor from energy reserves, with salaries grossly overinflated relative to the value actually being provided, and we don't know because there's so much noise to signal.

33. 23:28Reference

    Bitcoin will help shine a light on whether or not sports are a value add to the extended order.

34. 25:43Idea

    It helps onboard high profile individuals by removing initial risk. You don't have to have any amount of Bitcoin to start doing this; if you're an athlete there is no risk at all, all you get is upside, and the higher the profile of the athlete the more they're going to benefit from that exposure.

35. 26:21Claim · condensed

    The technology is constantly being upgraded by individuals I will never meet, because Bitcoin is open source and everyone operates independently, and you can pick and choose what elements to lean into for whatever use you're building.

36. 26:53Claim

    LNURL pay was never, I can't imagine, thought of as a fantastic use case for sending value from fans to players, but that's exactly what we're using it for.

37. 27:57Claim · condensed

    The mental cost of microtransactions is still too high; the system would be better, sats allocation more revealing and larger, and participation greater if that mental cost were removed.

38. 31:21Claim

    The number one fear people raise is that sending money or energy to players in real time may have a negative impact on the neutrality of the game, because a player getting so much energy could alter their behavior. The answer is yes, absolutely, that does exist and can happen.

39. 31:55Analogy

    The easiest way to think about this is something like boxing, where you've only got two participants and one person could just take a dive; the history of boxing is riddled with people who have done this, whether betting on the other person or on themselves to lose.

40. 32:26Claim · condensed

    It's almost the worst way you could try to fix a game this way, because even though it's more nuanced on Lightning, it's an open public timechain, more visible than the present day system, and privacy on Lightning certainly isn't perfect.

41. 33:14Claim · condensed

    Given enough time and resources for the system to develop and challenge the current advertising model, it actually results in fewer sats, less energy, for individuals who try to capitalize on short term gains, because those actions get punished over time: the sats won't flow their way, because only the truth emerges.

42. 33:45Claim · condensed

    In the short run there might be bad actors, but over time, as athletes, teams and organizations know they're rewarded for providing an example of low time preference behavior, it builds a more robust incentive model that actually disincentivizes cheating.

43. 34:53Prediction

    If it works now, and it's only going to get easier, it's going to work better and be more successful later.

44. 35:27Claim · condensed

    The biggest pushback, even from Bitcoiners who see the merits of this, is that athletes like Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi are already some of the highest paid individuals in society, so why give them more?

45. 35:27Reference

    You're thinking about your Cristiano Ronaldos, your Lionel Messis, these individuals who are extremely well compensated for the value they bring to society, according to their advertising models.

46. 35:27Reference

    You're thinking about your Cristiano Ronaldos, your Lionel Messis, these individuals who are extremely well compensated for the value they bring to society, according to their advertising models.

47. 35:58Reference

    It's only fans for sports, but there's no payment processor, which means no censorship.

48. 36:32Prediction

    Advertising in sports is going to completely change, leaning into a model that incentivizes the best fan experience possible, because those are the people actually sending value to the team.

49. 37:10Prediction · condensed

    Salary caps are completely eliminated, because if you can send value directly to individual players there's no way to enforce them.

50. 37:10Analogy · condensed

    If all the fans of a team really want Cristiano Ronaldo to come and they all start sending him sats saying come to Milan, you begin to see how the relationship between owners, teams and players starts to shift, and players become much more anti-fragile.

51. 38:00Claim · condensed

    To determine a player's true value, an organization just has to look at the amount of sats streaming to that player; it's not like Instagram or Twitter numbers, which are easy to fake because there's no cost to pumping fake followers or engagement in those digital arenas.

52. 38:00Reference

    It's not like something that can be rigged, like Instagram numbers or Twitter numbers or engagement numbers.

53. 38:00Reference

    It's not like something that can be rigged, like Instagram numbers or Twitter numbers or engagement numbers.

54. 38:33Claim · condensed

    Free agency markets in every sport are flipped on their head, because where a player chooses to go will be based on what incentives a team offers to let them do their best, since doing their best means being fed sats more routinely.

55. 39:08Claim · condensed

    If fans flood the system with boosts to reward a specific in-game choice and the coach makes that choice, you're actually affecting real world behavior by sending energy over the Lightning Network.

56. 39:43Reference

    We have gone over in the past the Colin Kaepernick situation, where Colin was in an extremely disadvantaged position because he was very weak and fragile compared to the owners of the structure, and no one was actually able to ascertain what the public thought except through social media.

57. 39:43Analogy

    We have gone over in the past the Colin Kaepernick situation, where Colin was in an extremely disadvantaged position, and no one was actually able to ascertain what the public thought except through social media.

58. 40:16Claim · condensed

    Now, if you had a way to send sats, you could see who is sending sats to Colin versus how many people are sending sats to the players opposing his viewpoints, and how much value is flowing where; that's where the truth emerges, because you can't fake it.

59. 41:26Analogy · condensed

    We don't know the true value of the advertising space on Lewis Hamilton's helmet when he's racing in Formula One, because it's offered to such a small group of people. If instead whoever sends the highest boost, the most sats, gets to be on his helmet for the next race, we'd have a much more open and honest representation of what that space is actually worth.

60. 41:26Reference

    Think about someone like Lewis Hamilton's helmet when he's racing around in Formula One.

61. 42:01Claim · condensed

    There could be special perks for whoever sends the highest boost per player, or access to certain events over a season if fans allocate a certain amount of sats, and the value of an advertising space becomes knowable because it's open to anyone, permissionless.

62. 43:13Claim

    Adoption will be incredibly slow, but any value sent or received through the program provides real world proof that a tremendous value pool has been unlocked, and those numbers become staggeringly large across the entire world population of professional athletes.

63. 43:43Quote

    Once this information is out, it is never going back inside the genie bubble.

64. 43:43Claim

    It's access to energy that was previously inaccessible, and life likes controlling easily accessible energy reserves; it's not going to give that up once new streams are opened, especially when it doesn't cost anything because the work has already been done.

65. 44:46Prediction

    If Bitcoin wins, those sats end up becoming incredibly valuable in the future, and that's something you have to appreciate especially if you're in it this early.

66. 45:20Claim · condensed

    It's only going to get easier and more friction free from here, and that's exciting.