Crazy Wisdom
Episode #534: From COVID's Trust Bonfire to Decentralized Everything
- AI & Agents
- Money & Sovereignty
- Crypto & Decentralization
- Ground wire
- Nockbox
- mining company
- Nockchain
- zero knowledge
- proof of work
- blockchain
- GPU miner
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Timestamps
- 00:00Introduction to Groundwire and Knockbox
- 02:48Understanding Zero-Knowledge Proofs
- 06:04Government Adoption of ZK Proofs
- 08:55The Future of Identity Verification
- 11:52AI and ZK Proofs: A New Era
- 14:54The Role of Urbit in Technology
- 18:03The Impact of COVID on Trust
- 20:51The Evolution of AI and Data Privacy
- 23:47The Future of AI Models
- 26:54The Need for Local AI Solutions
- 29:51Interoperability of Knockchain and Bitcoin
Key Insights
- Zero-Knowledge Proofs Enable Privacy-Preserving Verification: Jake explains that ZK proofs allow you to prove computational outcomes without revealing the underlying data. For example, you could prove you're over 18 without exposing your full identity or driver's license information. The proof demonstrates that a specific program ran through certain steps and reached a particular conclusion, and validating this proof is fast and compact. This technology has profound implications for age verification, identity systems, and protecting privacy while maintaining necessary compliance, potentially offering a middle path between surveillance states and complete anonymity.
- Government Adoption of Privacy Technology Remains Uncertain: There are three competing motivations driving government identity verification systems: genuine surveillance desires, bureaucratic efficiency seeking, and legitimate child protection concerns. Jake believes these groups can be separated, with some officials potentially supporting ZK-based solutions if positioned correctly. He notes the EU is exploring ZK identity verification, and UK officials have shown interest. The key is framing privacy-preserving technology as protection against "the swamp" rather than just abstract privacy benefits, which could resonate with certain political constituencies.
- The COVID Era Destroyed Institutional Trust at Unprecedented Scale: The conversation identifies COVID as potentially the largest institutional trust-burning event in human history, with numerous institutions simultaneously losing credibility with large portions of the population. This represents a dramatic shift from the boomer generation's default trust in authority figures and mainstream media. This collapse is compounded by the incoming AI revolution, creating a perfect storm where established bureaucracies cannot adapt quickly enough to manage rapidly evolving technology, leaving society in fundamentally unmanageable territory.
- Centralized AI Models Create Dangerous Dependencies: Both speakers acknowledge growing dependence on centralized AI services like Claude, with some users spending thousands monthly on tokens. This dependency creates vulnerability to price increases and service disruptions. Jake advocates for local AI deployment using models like DeepSeek R1, running on personal hardware to maintain control and privacy. The shift toward continuous learning models will fundamentally change the AI landscape, making personal data harvesting even more valuable and raising urgent questions about compensation and consent for training data contribution.
- High-Quality Training Data Is Becoming the Primary AI Bottleneck: Stewart argues that AI development is now limited more by high-quality training data than by compute power. The industry has exhausted easily accessible internet data and body-shop-style data labeling. Companies are now using specialized boutique services with techniques like head-mounted cameras for live-streaming world model training. This scarcity is subtly driving price increases across AI services and will fundamentally reshape the economics of AI development, with implications for who controls these increasingly powerful systems.
- Urbit Offers a Foundation for Trustworthy Computing: Jake positions Urbit as essential infrastructure for the AI age because its 30,000-line codebase (versus Unix's three million lines) can be understood by individual humans. Its deterministic, purely functional, and strictly typed design aims for eventual ossification—software that doesn't require constant security patches. This "tiny and diamond perfect" approach addresses the fundamental insecurity of systems requiring monthly vulnerability patches. In an era of AI agents and potential prompt injection attacks, having verifiable, comprehensible computing infrastructure becomes existentially important rather than merely desirable.
- Nockchain Creates a Global Repository of Provable Truth: Jake's vision for Nockchain combines ZK proofs with blockchain technology to create a globally available "truth repository" where verified facts can be programmatically accessed together. This enables smart contracts or programs gated on combinations of proven facts—such as temperature readings from secure devices, supply chain events, and payment confirmations. By using Nock's abstract, simple design optimized for ZK proof generation, the system can validate complex real-world conditions without exposing underlying data, creating infrastructure for coordinating action based on verifiable private information at global scale.
Episode transcript
Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. This podcast is for you. If you have an insane drive to find the truth of things, it's not the good answers that we seek, but the good questions. I interview a range of different guests from many different fields, all with the intention to uncover the simple truths that are hidden in plain sight. Most people don't want to go there. I go there, my guests go there, and you benefit. Please let me know if you enjoy these episodes and as always, subscribe on itunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to the podcasts.
Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. I've got Jake Hamilton. He is the founder of Ground Wire and Knockbox. Welcome to the show.
Okay, Knockbox is a little easier. Knockbox is a mining company. We mine Noctain, which is recently, it's about almost a year old now. Zero knowledge, useful proof of work. Blockchain that launched like spring of last year and we, we founded it like right as the chain launched to mine and we actually we mined the first third party block, the first block not mined by the parent company Block 1123, which I'm very proud. Yeah. And we just released our new fastest GPU miner. So exciting stuff. Groundwire is well kind of like Bitcoin. There are different reference like potentially for the term. So like one is that it's like it's a nonprofit, the Ground Wire foundation that we do URBIT core development, Bitcoin development, Bitcoin software development. Generally it is like it's sort of bitcoin centric, you know, Bitcoin centric orbit development. So we do some like pure core orbit development, like just focus on performance and security. We do Noster integration development and our wallet. And our goal is to build a full node, like a performance secure Bitcoin full node implementation inside of Urbit like over the next couple of years. So part of this whole thing, groundwire is also a protocol. So like Urbit has historically used Ethereum for identity like since like 2016 or so. Urban identities are ERC721 Ethereum NFTs. So Groundwire is a protocol for extending the ability the PKI to be able to use Bitcoin as well. And it's sort of, it's a network soft fork I guess. We're not like porting the existing system on Ethereum over to Bitcoin. That's marginally possible, though difficult. What we're doing instead is beyond the Ethereum identities, the networking protocol allows for what are currently just ephemeral one time identities that don't have the ability to rotate their keys or attest the IP address that they can be found at. But we are extending the networking protocol with the ability for. They're called comets because they're seen once or whatever, to attest comets to make them permanent in some, in, well, anywhere. But we're doing it on Bitcoin.
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