Mat Balez

open money & open intelligence @spiral_xyz • co-founded @cityblock • average tennis player • prolific vibe coder • dad of 4

[Mat Balez @matbalez]

@benthecarman Cool work Ben.

[Mat Balez @matbalez]

@vovweb3 @moneyball Qwen 3.6 27B Q6_K

[Mat Balez @matbalez]

this was fun to build

- fork of signal
- agent built with GDK
- using open weights model
- served via e2ee mesh-llm
- via private GPU TEE
- making private search tool calls
- paid for with ₿ over LN

a cool stack of permissionless & open source tech all working together!

[PBJ Podcast @PresidioPod]

An agent inside Signal using decentralized compute paid for with bitcoin

@moneyball demos a fork of Signal built by @matbalez using @Mesh_LLM and @lexeapp ↓

Timestamps:
0:00 - Demo: agent inside Signal
10:51 - The economics of decentralized compute
14:39 - Running inference at home

[Stephen Rowe @Rowebotz]

@matbalez Every layer in that stack is swappable, so no single company can pull the plug on you. An open source dream come true.

Very cool build.

[jack @jack]

awesome

[Steve Lee @moneyball]

@jack thinks bitcoin payment adoption isn’t where it could or should be. We want your ideas on how Block, Spiral, and you can improve adoption odds within 5 years. We need a shift to change our trajectory. Here’s more on our thinking. Now we want yours.

[Mat Balez @matbalez]

this has my attention

[Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross @alexwg]

https://t.co/lZMZeMrBpl

[Mat Balez @matbalez]

dessa is very cool

but the lede was a bit buried

runs locally!

[jack @jack]

this is big (but also really really small…small enough to run on your macbook).

i’m extremely proud of the dessa team for pushing the frontier! ❤️

[Spiral @spiral_xyz]

Spiral’s @moneyball is speaking today at AGNTCon + MCPcon in San Jose about @goose_oss’s evolution into an open-source agentic SDK.

10:35AM in room 230C

[Mat Balez @matbalez]

@alexjhancock @AnthropicAI Updating towards “future will be safe and bright”

[Mat Balez @matbalez]

@vanlancker A whole section of DFW essays and fiction (plus of course obligatory This is Water)

Free Will (Sam Harris)

Crime and Punishment

[Mat Balez @matbalez]

@rot13maxi @grok Nice one

[Mat Balez @matbalez]

@komorama Seems like a starting point would be for it to have maximum context about your current: mental, emotional, physical states, your preference vector (across all dimensions) as well as current work threads, upcoming priorities, basically anything competing for your attention

[Mat Balez @matbalez]

i expect to cross paths with @_austin_f a lot..

..doing product-ey, builder-ey work at the intersection of open money & open intelligence

[Spiral @spiral_xyz]

.@PresidioBitcoin’s resident polymath and compulsive Google Docs comment dropper @_austin_f is helping champion Goose, GDK, and Buzz. With this grant, he’ll onboard bitcoin and FOSS teams, develop a self-paced GDK Builder Course, and add Buzz features like operational agents.

[Mat Balez @matbalez]

who creates the best data wins

[will depue @willdepue]

soon all progress will be data bottlenecked, not intelligence bottlenecked. bio? data bottlenecked. astronomy? data bottlenecked. data all the way down

[Presidio Bitcoin @PresidioBitcoin]

Open Source AI: It's Time to Hit the Gas

Last month, we brought the community together at the Open Source AI Summit in San Francisco's Presidio. Here are our top 5 actionable takeaways. 🧵

[Kevin Weil 🇺🇸 @kevinweil]

"The invention of the boat reduced the importance of swimming, but enabled the discovery of new lands."

Beautiful analogy from @ylecun about the opportunities and changes with AI, in mathematics and in science more broadly.

[Spiral @spiral_xyz]

New vertical: AI Caramba lets the goose team open up about anything AI. In this first edition, @dosinga explains how goose replaced the agent loop with a state machine that can be turned off anywhere and resumed like nothing happened. Where does it go in between? Hell if we know.

[PBJ Podcast @PresidioPod]

“The most exciting bitcoin payment thing I’ve ever heard of”

@moneyball on @spiral_xyz integrating bitcoin payments into Mesh LLM, which will let machines permissionlessly buy and sell AI compute without merchant accounts or traditional payment rails ↓

Timestamps:
0:00 - What is Mesh LLM and why bitcoin fits
7:12 - Mesh LLM as a parallel internet for autonomous agents
9:16 - Why this could be bitcoin’s most compelling payment use case
12:12 - Regulatory questions around decentralized payments
15:37 - Why agent infrastructure needs no accounts

[Mat Balez @matbalez]

@tonklaus @spiral_xyz the prefixed decimals are still extraneous, ugly and remain cumbersome in real product UIs

integer ₿ quantities remain best IMO