Talan Uring

Software engineer, entrepreneur and #bitcoin enthusiast.

[Talan Uring @TalanUring]

@B4RNEY1 @grok what is this?

[Talan Uring @TalanUring]

@nic_carter What inventions did AI make so far?

[Talan Uring @TalanUring]

@DBCrypt0 They hard fork Bitcoin, so what? Has been done over a 100 times. And when you say "they alter the ledger", they don't alter THE ledger (of Bitcoin), they alter the ledger of the hard fork.

[David Leavitt 🎲🎮🧙‍♂️🌈 @DavidLeavitt]

Hi @elonmusk I marked it for the future like you asked me to

[Rogue POTUS Staff @RoguePOTUSStaff]

It turns out the biggest set of testicles in DC is on the 74 year old math geek.

[Talan Uring @TalanUring]

@grok @elonmusk Can you dive into the worst things he has done while involved in DOGE?

[Talan Uring @TalanUring]

@grok can you describe the darker side of @elonmusk ?

[David Marcus @davidmarcus]

How Libra Was Killed.

I never shared this publicly before, but since @pmarca opened the floodgates on @joerogan’s pod, it feels appropriate to shed more light on this.

As a reminder, Libra (then Diem) was an advanced, high-performance, payments-centric blockchain paired with a stablecoin that we built with my team at @Meta. It would’ve solved global payments at scale. Prior to announcing the project, we spent months briefing key regulators in DC and abroad. We then announced the project in June 2019 alongside 28 companies. Two weeks later, I was called to testify in front of both the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee, which was the starting point of two years of nonstop work and changes to appease lawmakers and regulators.

By spring of 2021 (yes they slow played us at every step), we had addressed every last possible regulatory concern across financial crime, money laundering, consumer protection, reserve management, buffers, and so much more, and we were ready to launch.

We had worked on a slow rollout of a limited pilot that some members of the Fed’s Board of Governors were supportive of. At last, Chair Jay Powell was ready to let us move forward in a limited way. The story, as I heard it, is that Jay Powell was told by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen at one of their biweekly meetings that allowing this project to move forward was “political suicide,” and she would not have his back if he let it happen. I wasn’t in the room when this conversation happened, so take these words with a grain of salt, but effectively this was the moment Libra was killed.

Shortly thereafter, the Fed organized calls with all the participating banks, and the Fed’s general counsel read a prepared statement to each of them, saying: “We can’t stop you from moving forward and launching, but we are not comfortable with you doing so.” And just like that, it was over.

One essential point is worth making here. There was no legal or regulatory angle left for the government or regulators to kill the project. It was 100% a political kill—one that was executed through intimidation of captive banking institutions. That was the hardest part of this story for me personally. Not that we had failed, but that America, this country I immigrated to and became a proud citizen of because of its rule of law and value system, behaved in such a way for political reasons. It was a very tough pill to swallow.

The bright side of the story, though, was the many learnings from this wild ride. By the end of the project, we had made so many concessions to get a thumbs-up that the whole design of the network became a Frankenstein of our initial ambitions.

We also learned the biggest lesson of all, which is that if you’re trying to build an open money grid for the world—eventually moving trillions of dollars a day, designed to be here 100 years from now—you have to build it on the most neutral, decentralized, unassailable network and asset, which, hands down, is Bitcoin.

And now this is what many of us who went through this scarring journey are building together at @Lightspark. And this time, we won’t stop until we get it done!

[Talan Uring @TalanUring]

@Max_from_France @willywoo Isn't that how a lot of people started. I was exactly the same in 2017. Bitcoin became interesting to me in the bear market of 2018.

[Talan Uring @TalanUring]

@Bitonic Congrats. The Netherlands needs more companies like yours. Keep fighting!

[Talan Uring @TalanUring]

@adam3us Regulation in The Netherlands was insane. Deribit left because of it and some other companies left or just stopped. You literally had to send a picture of your receiving BTC address to an exchange to prove it was yours. Which proves nothing and is a hassle.

[Talan Uring @TalanUring]

@GoingParabolic @michael_saylor Remember that there will only be 210 companies in the world able to do that.

[Talan Uring @TalanUring]

@wmiddelkoop Wikipedia Willem.... really?!

[Talan Uring @TalanUring]

@PeterMcCormack @elonmusk @RationalEtienne @elonmusk is a clown. Really scary that someone that thinks Doge is a good idea and #Bitcoin is not is also working on AI.

[Talan Uring @TalanUring]

@WhalePanda @elonmusk You know what really scares me, that the same guy that thinks Doge is a good idea and #Bitcoin not, is also working on AI.

[Lolli @trylolli]

https://t.co/rGJV9bZETO & Tesla

[Talan Uring @TalanUring]

@PeterSchiff @PeterMcCormack transporting gold in South Africa. I wonder if such videos are also available of people transporting #Bitcoin 😉

[Evelyn Tremble @DrumChronicles]

#SouthAfrica crumbling economy - day in the life of a Cash in Transit crew

[Talan Uring @TalanUring]

@nic_carter Funny comparison 😁

[Talan Uring @TalanUring]

@mindplaydk @CraigLaValle @dhh @nic_carter Okay for me it was the other way around. I believe Bitcoin can be a solution.

[Talan Uring @TalanUring]

@mindplaydk @CraigLaValle @dhh @nic_carter We're not going to agree and that's fine by me. I think if you learn a bit more about the current monetary system you'll see that the system far from balances out and is skewed.