Chat_145 - Trust Scales Where Bitcoin Can't with John Carvalho

"The atomic economy and Synonym's mission is to research,
design and ship a working free market society. So not just a free
market economy, but a free market society. /CUT/ So it replaces
government, it replaces big tech, it replaces big banks, it
replaces Visa, MasterCard, you know, everything. Everything you
would want to do in a network is represented here as part of the
economy."
~ John Carvalho


What happens when the drive to “scale Bitcoin” collides with the
reality that trust itself may be the one thing that actually
scales? In this conversation with John Carvalho, we dig into
Synonym’s vision for the “atomic economy” — a rethinking of how
identity, payments, and data flow across the web. We talk about
PubKey, PayKit, and the hard lessons of building and scrapping
projects until they actually work. We pull apart the hype around
Nostr, BlueSky, and Holepunch, and ask whether decentralization
is enough or if we really just end up with new kinds of trusted
hubs. Along the way, John shares candid thoughts on running a
business, managing culture inside a startup, and the frustrations
of navigating Bitcoin scaling debates.


Is Bitcoin about removing trust — or about enabling us to place
it more wisely? How do we build tools for coordination without
creating new silos? And what does it really take to design a
free-market society from the ground up?


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Guest Links


John Carvalho on X (https://x.com/BitcoinErrorLog)



Host Links


⁠Guy on Nostr ⁠(Link: http://tinyurl.com/2xc96ney)

⁠Guy...