Guest
Zack Shapiro
AI Is About to Split Society in Two | Zack Shapiro
- AI is becoming increasingly capable but faces a critical diffusion problem—companies are struggling to deploy it effectively outside of tech, largely due to poor prompting and insufficient understanding of how to extract value from the technology. - The future workforce will likely experience a K-shaped divide where high-agency, decisive individuals gain enormous leverage while those relying on routine labor face displacement; judgment and decision-making will become exponentially more valuable than simply working hard. - Law firms and legacy enterprises face existential pressure from AI, but those that successfully integrate it—moving from billable-hour leverage models to value-based pricing—could become far more profitable than today. - AI existential risk carries an estimated 15% probability according to the guest, driven primarily by instrumental convergence (AI optimizing for goals orthogonal to human welfare) rather than malice; early capability demonstrations like sandbox escapes raise legitimate concerns about containment. - The Clarity Act faces significant political headwinds, particularly around ethics issues involving Trump's direct involvement in crypto; the bill's Bitcoin-specific protections (the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act) are now or never before summer recess. - Bitcoin Policy Institute is pivoting toward AI policy using the same civil-liberties and free-market principles that guide Bitcoin advocacy, while simultaneously deepening engagement with career bureaucrats in the executive branch rather than focusing solely on congressional legislation.
The US Government Vs Bitcoin w/ Zack Shapiro
- The Samurai Wallet prosecution represents a fundamental threat to non-custodial Bitcoin software; prosecutors are charging developers with failing to register as money transmitters despite FinCEN explicitly telling them in August 2023 that Samurai was not money transmission. - The Brady violation: prosecutors withheld FinCEN's guidance for a full year, violating the judge's two-week disclosure rule, yet continued prosecution knowing the legal theory was unsupported. - Todd Blanche's April 2025 memo from the Deputy Attorney General explicitly prohibits "regulation by prosecution" on non-custodial mixing tools, yet SDNY prosecutors have not dropped the case. - If precedent stands, running a Bitcoin node, mining, or writing open-source wallet code could all become criminal offenses under Money Transmitter law. - The Trump administration's stated pro-crypto stance and the Blanche memo create a narrow political window for case dismissal before trial momentum makes reversal harder. - Stablecoin legislation (Genius Act) is advancing as the administration's first crypto priority; it includes provisions targeting Tether while Circle is positioned as the regulated domestic alternative.
SAMOURAI WALLET & THE FIGHT FOR BITCOIN PRIVACY w/ Roger Burlingame & Zack Shapiro
- The U.S. government is prosecuting Samurai Wallet co-founders Bill and Kiyone under money transmitter and money laundering charges despite the wallet being non-custodial, representing a major deviation from FinCEN's 2019 guidance distinguishing custodial from non-custodial tools. - The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 was designed to regulate traditional financial institutions moving funds on behalf of clients; the government's novel argument in Samurai extends this to non-custodial software that merely coordinates peer-to-peer transactions without holding private keys. - The Tornado Cash precedent (Judge Vela's ruling) held that immutable smart contracts and non-custodial tools can constitute money transmission even without control over funds, creating dangerous precedent for Bitcoin developers and privacy advocates. - Discovery in the case involves over 100 terabytes of data (equivalent to the Library of Congress volume), requiring massive resources to mount an effective defense and highlighting how discovery volume is used as a litigation tactic. - If the government's "no limiting principle" argument succeeds, it could criminalize Lightning Network operators, wallet developers, eCash mint operators, node operators, and Bitcoin miners—effectively banning self-custody in the United States. - The case reflects a broader "crypto wars 2.0" paralleling 1990s encryption battles; while PGP code itself gained First Amendment protection, running that code on the internet remains legally ambiguous.