CLARITY is dead. Hunter Biden made financial performance art. Balancer shuts down with grace. AI may or may not kill us all. Just another week! Timestamps 00:00 Intro 00:43 CLARITY day 03:36 Silver linings 05:26 Was it close? Or did everybody loose? 12:23 Why adoption protects crypto better than a bill 15:00 Was DC trading on the CLARITY odds? 18:37 The one thing they would go back & undo 20:48 Hunter Biden's LAPTOP token collapses 23:50 Celeb coins never work 26:17 Robinhood engineers indicted over Hyperliquid front-running 31:35 Balancer winds down & the exchange shakeout 35:11 AI arbitration & ideas ahead of their time 37:44 Satoshi is a time traveler 39:14 The AI pause: pacing the frontier 42:57 China calls it a conspiracy 44:40 What do you buy if the doomers are right 45:50 Does an AI pause actually cut CapEx? 50:32 Futile without the Chinese labs 54:05 Harden society instead of slowing the models 56:47 Which doom vectors are real 🔥Stay updated with all the latest hot takes by following and subscribing to @_ChoppingBlock and @unchained_pod! 🎥 YouTube: piped.video/Bgm4r_fQ5yo 🎧 Spotify: bit.ly/3wiIOyy 🍎 Apple: bit.ly/3w9HQ7J 🎙 Podcast Home: choppingblock.xyz

Hester Peirce is goated

Sam dropping GPT6-universe an hour after Opus 5.5

actually we never deserved CLARITY act to pass

Listened to this episode during my morning workout today and love the theory of Satoshi being a time traveler at min 37:44 Pair it w this Hosseeb post from back in June: nitter.net/hosseeb/status/2082861… Obv just a fun theory, but in a world without BTC, if ai ever became advanced enough to solve time travel and for whatever reason wanted to accelerate its timeline to existence then this makes perfect sense. Even masterminding the decoy narrative of BTC as a solution to money when in reality it was just to get humans to start building number crunchers sooner would be genius

We gon' need a bigger table Dropping October 2026

TIL there’s a Tom Schmidt shilling SPVs over mid Italian food

Haseeb reveals the simple reason politicians won't ban prediction markets: they actually use them "Politicians are mostly 50-80 year olds. The number one thing that I think predicts whether or not something is going to get banned at a consumer level is: do 50-80 year olds care about it or use it?" "That's one of the reasons why I think prediction markets are safe, even though sports betting is almost certainly going to be under scrutiny by the Supreme Court when the case goes up next year. Because every politician uses prediction markets for elections." "They absolutely use them for elections, right? They don't want them to go away because they're very important. It's better than polling data."

We picked a good week to the Chopping Block crew to get together in studio. > CLARITY dies, everybody loses > $LAPTOP becomes performance art > Robinhood engineers allegedly front-ran listings > Robert reveals his Satoshi time-traveler theory > AI labs want to slow down 👇

Robert: "I actually believe that Satoshi is a time traveler." Haseeb: "Give us, give us more. Give us more." Robert: "This is gonna sound really ridiculous" "AI is going to grow to infinite scope" "It's gonna have solved time travel, and it's gonna send Satoshi back to 2008, 2009 to create Bitcoin" "so that society and humanity, long before the computer's even needed, starts building machines to just crunch numbers all day" Tarun: "So this is more like the machines sent Satoshi back in time-" "on this week's episode of the Conspiracy Block."

Dario's push for AI safety is at odds with Trump, China, and the open source community: Haseeb: "What's interesting is that China and Trump were very aligned in their messaging on this. The Chinese government came out and basically said this is all a conspiracy to try to prevent Chinese labs from getting access to the best chips and that this is the start of a new AI Cold War." Tom Schmidt: "There are a lot of conspiracies that people think Dario is worried about open weight models becoming competitive." Tarun: "You know what you can audit without third party auditors? Open weight models. That's the f*cking most obvious thing you can observe here." Tom: "But to give him credit, he has been very, very consistent. If anything, he's been too consistent because he's been saying this since GPT-2. He was like, 'we shouldn't release GPT-2, it's too dangerous'. And so the man does believe what he says."

Haseeb on why pacing the frontier will not reduce anyone's spending. "normally in almost all models of economic competition, if you stop competing on this vector, you'll compete somewhere else." "we can see now from Anthropic they're going after their IPO, they're sharing some of their financials. It's an absolutely excellent business." "They're excluding training from some of the financials they're sharing." "there's so much demand for the existing generation of models that already are very, very capacity constrained." "you have 30 minutes a day of Fable usage until you run out of your limits." "what other vectors of CapEx competition are you gonna get if you can't just build bigger models? And the answer is still a ton."

Tom: "I was amazed that a Robinhood announcement can even move the price of a token." "They must have used a lot of leverage to even eke out the 50K." "most of the profit was made on like the Zora listing on Robinhood" Haseeb: "You can't make money on Zora." Tom: "Even if you go to like minimum security prison, they're like, "What are you in for?" Tarun: "Zora took down Base and Robinhood."

The team reminisces about old protocols Tom: "I've been trying to pitch this story." "I would love to see this, like, ICO teams of yesteryear." Tarun: "like the VH1 back when they were famous type TV show for the ICO people?" Tom: "some of them are still, like, alive, and you see their treasury, like, tick down a little bit every month." Robert: "I want to find out what happened to Golem." Tom: "And I'm like, what is happening? Are they, like, quiet quitting?" Tarun: "They own a ton of GPUs." Haseeb: "I think Aragon was ahead of its time" Tarun: "A lot of ICOs were right idea, wrong time."

an acceptable use case for an outdated meme

Haseeb: "I will say the one thing I think we can take away is that the banks lost." Robert: "No, everybody lost. Okay. Look, let's take the tally real quick." "The Democrats didn't get any ethical wins against Trump." "For all their talk and bluster, they achieved absolutely nothing." "The banks made no revisions to how Genius works." "We didn't get any developer protections at all. Nobody got what they wanted." Haseeb: "Except Tarun." Robert: "Tarun got what he wanted, no more politics on the show."

Haseeb: "If AI does kill us all, they will buy Bitcoin"

I agree, hopefully we can talk about something that doesn't involve 80 year olds getting wheeled into a room to vote on something they likely don't understand

RT @Kaiz_294: Paul maps out @fomo’s bigger ambition: build the media platform where traders become the next generation of celebrities “Ima…

Paul shares the origin story of how he and Se went from a trad-fi internship to building fomo "We met in college actually, at a summer internship in trad-fi, he went to Yale and I went to NYU." "The whole time Se was trading all these crypto protocols and trying to get me involved, and it's like you need three days to onboard from fiat, you have this EOA wallet and a separate exchange, slippage settings, make sure you don't get sandwiched, just a terrible experience" "I've always had this deep empathy for a normal user, what kind of product experience would resonate with them" "There's this push pull on every decision Se and I make, where we can build a product that's the best for the best traders, we pay our routers not to take positive slippage from our users, we have the best execution, it's the first truly cross chain gasless trading app" "But then it's something you could onboard in seconds, you have this accessibility layer, not only in terms of use but also discovery, I'm seeing what the best are trading all the time, and it's easy for anyone to onboard"