Partir de zéro : comment construire des institutions de A à Z | Bitcoin 2026

Awesome. Let's let's get started. Bitcoin institutions. How is the Bitcoin world looking like? How are we rebuilding things? What things are going to staying? What kind of things are do we have to destroy? Um just to get like a little bit of a warm-up round. Where are we currently? Because we are like rebuilding things, but I I don't think we have to restart from the start. They're already, if you look around, we have like 20 20,000 30,000 people here. We have so many companies here. We already are like 16 years into this. So, we're not starting from like ground zero. Where are we? Where have where do we start? And like what's kind of your first thoughts when you heard the title? >> I'll start. Um, so it's Joe Carlosari. I uh have a history dealing with some of the earliest orders that were ever entered in the court system involving Bitcoin, involving turnover of digital assets. And the fun thing now is that when it was new and novel and I first uh started having to make these arguments to judges and to other litigators, uh it was seen as a guard, a niche, new product. Um nobody understood it. It's becoming more commonplace. It's becoming more accepted. We've drafted contracts that are denominated in Bitcoin. We've had all sorts of securities that are collateralized by Bitcoin. It's becoming more of the the everyday occurrence. And that's exciting for me because once you break through that societal resistance, when you once you break through that this is too weird, we can't put our trust in it, then you start to get people increasingly and exponentially having more faith in it. Um, so it's really exciting where we're at right now, I would say, because it's it's going to be over the next, say, 5 to 10 years where this is becoming woven into the fabric of every one of our institutions. I mean, there's a standing order in federal courts about how to deal with bit Bitcoin uh uh certain conflicts, Bitcoin disputes. That's exciting, right? It's giving institutional clarity. We're getting major pieces of legislation passed by the Congress. We're rewriting the rules of, you know, traditional legacy finance and uh traditional legal system to deal with these things. So, over the coming 5 years, right, you're going to see that at a much more exponential pace. That's what I'm excited about. Bitco Bitcoin itself is is an institution and uh I I see all of us here as as part of that institution. where an institution is something like just a group of people ordered by conventions you know towards a a certain aim to solve coordination problems and that's us and as a result over the last you know 15 to 17 years uh not only do we have the big institution of Bitcoin but we have all these satellite institutions um both new institutions that have been built from the ground up which are Bitcoin ccentric and also uh people who are working in some of the older traditional institutions who are steering those inst initutions towards Bitcoin. I think it's great. >> Yeah. Bo Turner, CEO of Abundant Minds. Um I think the the panel title of starting from zero is kind of a misnomer because really we're starting with what we have. It would be easier if we were just injecting a new system into an open field. But we have to make use of systems, structures, methods of coordinating that we've all been accustomed to over the course of decades. In some cases, some of our institutions are hundreds of years old. So really we're starting from what we have, not from zero. And in a sense, an institution is just like a primitive for a protocol. A protocol is just a more ordered and rules-based institution with a more narrow mandate. And so I think Bitcoin is this first example of an institution that's showing itself as a protocol. And I think what we see coming in the future will look much more like that. It will be much more well- definfined, scoped, and in a way more narrow. What do you think are the institutions that stick? Because I don't think we have to rebuild a whole new world. I don't think we have to rebuild everything. Bitcoin is changing a lot. But like what are the things that are working in our system that are staying no matter if we have a gold standard, a shell standard, a stone standard, a bitcoin standard or like the fiat standard? like what are the things that what are the institutions that stick no matter what with humanity? >> So the way I look at it is that when you introduce something like Bitcoin into the traditional legacy system whether that be financial, economic, legal, what tends to happen is that the institutional players that are entrenched increasingly lose their leverage. So what does that mean practically in our society? Right? There's a whole in my world in the legal system, there's a whole uh plethora of escrow services and middlemen and extractors and they're increasingly losing their leverage over the process of payments, over the process of credits, over the process of collateral markets. And that loss of leverage is what's fascinating because that will then force the institutions to change and react. I'm not one of these people who thinks that the institutions are just suddenly going to collapse. Like I don't I don't believe in the next 5 years we're going to see the Federal Reserve collapse. Um what they're going to do is it's going to respond to stable coins. It's going to respond to evolutions in Bitcoin being used as collateral. It's going to respond to bigger players using Bitcoin on their balance sheet like like the the strategy style. That is a reaction that they will be forced to undertake from the institutional level because of the technological promise of the innovation. So I I'm an academic and I uh often get frustrated with the the slowmoving nature of academic institutions but one thing that you see and uh one thing that I hope to see more of is uh Bitcoin being in integrated as a topic into the curriculum. And I think one thing that will drive this are newer academic instit in institutions you know like the University of Austin in Austin Texas who who are building uh Bitcoin into like classes in economics and public policy and I think this will drive competition in the older institutions and I like Joe I'm not someone who think that universities are done you know even with the the the onward march of AI I I I think some academic institutions in particular will be done uh because of the economic situation we find ourselves in. But universities themselves aren't going anywhere and the ones that survive are going to build Bitcoin in uh into the curriculum I think more and more as we as we move forward. >> Yeah, we all we have to be able to use the institutions that are already here but adapt them to the way that the world is changing, right? We still need a legal system, but that legal system might be enforcing regulation on more autonomous agents than it does people. And we're not really equipped for that. You know, social media was a great example of a technology that institutions were not ready for and moved much quicker than anybody could create guardrails around. And the implications of that are still rippling through the way that we interact with those platforms today. There never really was a way to get a handle on them. And so we have these structures that need to be able to adapt much faster to new actors, new forms of intelligence, new ways of working ourselves through these systems that there's no blueprint for how you create an institution for an evolving future. You're figuring out in real time. And fortunately or unfortunately, we're able to create way more nuanced and novel actions than we are able to create guard rails that appropriately contain those actions nowadays. I I want to try to figure out where we are uh in this panel and maybe we have even another small debate on here because I think this is something like actually I debated yesterday in at dinner with with some people on that question because there are bitcoiners that believe the fiat system, the fiat institutions, the foreign exchange uh all the feed institution with the central banks this will all collapse in like 10 years, maybe 20 years, maybe 100 years, maybe a thousand years. And then there are some people that say this will always be there. There will always be some kind of like government tokens, fiat currency, some kind of like uh institutional uh government tokens. I mean Argentina is an interesting example because they get like free ecurrency, it fails, they build a new one, people trust it again, after 10 years it fails again. So do you guys believe that fiat will be around forever or let's say uh around for our lifetimes the next like 50 years or it actually could completely collapse? >> Yeah, I'll start. I I think fiat will be around for the rest of all of our lifetimes. That's that's my view. Um now will it be weakened? Will it be perhaps thought of as a secondary asset that is uh not as desirable as Bitcoin? I think that's absolutely within my my framework and the analogy I always use is look look at like the newspaper industry look at look at general reporting right newspapers have consistently lost their prominence relative to newer forms of media that's where people are consuming and and absorbed but they're still there right and I think if you look at the last hundred years many institutions you can go at academic you can go at the political level um institutional institutions have lost their leverage they're becoming increasingly weakened and diffused their power is diffuse. So, I think that's going to happen increasingly with finance, with legal. Um, these sort of grid iron systems that we thought had such power and prominence and could impose their will. Um, they're consistently weakening. I mean, Congress is a perfect example. Congress was a much more well functioning organized institution decades ago. Increasingly, it's becoming more gridlocked and mired in uh the inability to act. Uh, that is a process that is evolving. It's until you reform the institution, it's going to continue to weaken in my my view. So why does that matter for Bitcoin? I think Bitcoin and many of these assets we're talking about, things like stable coins, they're going to weaken the traditional leverage that the major players had and make it diffusive. And that's been true of I think all technological innovation of the last, you know, several hundred years. >> I actually agree with Joe. I won't like probably in the the the subportion of the population here that agrees with Joe uh uh which is a min minority I'm guessing but uh I I think if you look globally I think a lot of fiat currencies will fail and so it's probably not a one-sizefits-all um answer to the question. I think you know you know what is what is fiat currency useful for? Well, it's useful for monetary stability where you have, you know, inflation that's not greater than 2% and and a a very small number of currencies actually fit that, but also um there's a great paper by Josh Hendrickson called the the Treasury Standard and he goes through like the last 200 years of history and argues that you know actually um like state states like to run their their own currencies because it gives them flexibility for emergency finance. financing especially during wartime and I don't think that's going away. I don't think Bitcoin is going to um obsolete the the desire for um waring nation or you know adversarial nations to to go to war with each other. And so in so far as we we want uh a low uh inflation asset medium of exchange and also nation states want to retain the ability to you know hit that lever on the money printer. I think we're going to have fiat currencies for a long time. It's just that a lot of them will fail because they don't u do as good of a job as things like the dollar. >> But but it's like a zombie, right? It fails and comes back to life, right? Yes. It's like when you ask will fiat fail, I think like well yeah, they have already failed, right? And they're going to continue to fail and then they'll be resurrected in some form or fashion because you always want to have that intervention you're talking about. >> Yeah. Yeah. I agree. As miners, we think in terms of energy just by default. And I would frame it as the old institutions stay, but they're gradually losing energy. That energy is being sucked into a new system. A great example of that would be, you know, the treasuries have been the savings account for the world for a long time. Vehicles like Stretch are sort of a treasury analog that's sucking the energy out of that system into a new vehicle that looks like what everybody's familiar with but is bringing it into a completely parallel structure. And if you think about energy transitions specifically, every time we've upgraded a system of channeling energy, go from biological fuels to wood to coal to fossil fuels to renewables. Every one of those transitions was on the back of an increase in energy coming from what was used previously. Fossil fuels wouldn't have been enabled without an increase of coal usage to go and actually get those resources. Same with everything before it. You have to use the energy from the system before in order to fuel the next advance of civilization. It's not a wipe it and go to the next thing. You have to use what people have invested in their systems of coordination to get you to the next stage. >> Is there a danger that we rebuild the institutions that we didn't like now with Bitcoin? When you think about Strategy owning a lot of Bitcoin, Coinbase having a lot of Bitcoin, Black Rockck having a lot of Bitcoin, and it's like free for players that have like a control or the legal um ownership of a lot of Bitcoin that we kind of go in a similar direction strategy as maybe a um Bitcoin central bank of the future. >> I mean, I don't I don't really see a problem with individuals, entities, actors that are in the private sector holding a lot of Bitcoin. I don't even even public sector right because as long as at a codebased level we're operating under the same rules and those rules can't be compromised or changed with uh without you know some sort of in undue influence to me it I I don't see it as a problem. Um you know what is a problem right now is that literally you can push a few keystrokes at the Federal Reserve and print a bunch of money. That that is that is the problem right that is the issue that we're trying to solve with sort of a decentralized uh agreed upon permissionless ledger. Um, so I don't I don't view the concentration risk in any way compromising the original idea behind Bitcoin. If you want to buy a bunch of Bitcoin, you can do that. >> I think more generally, Robin, uh, I think that Bitcoin does solve some cooperation and coordination problems with, you know, transacting money and, you know, and the the money the money supply over time uh, in in a way without central authorities. But there are some coordination and cooperation problems which Bitcoin does not resolve and we need new and probably oftentimes centralized institutions to help solve those coordination problems. Uh I think what's a a challenge for Bitcoin going forward, not not necessarily with Micro Strategy per se, but uh I think that in the the Bitcoin ethos in the ecosystem, there's a an allergic reaction to centralized authorities and in for good reason because sometimes those authorities abuse their influence and power. And so I I think it's something like uh we have we have to keep in mind that you know some of the very institutions that we need to solve current coordination problems in Bitcoin might end up you know having a dilitterious effect on Bitcoin in the long term and we'll have to engage in something like creative destruction and and and you know so we might have these kinds of ethereal ephemeral institutions uh to solve especially you temporary problems. >> Most institutions start out very well-intentioned with noble causes and what what tends to happen is this sort of like mission creep or scope creep of what they feel that they can exert power over. And what's beautiful about Bitcoin as a protocol is that it it bounds them to these guidelines and frameworks that you can't really deviate from. If you could think as institutions as a primitive for protocols and we're really bounding these things into something that is far more limited and when you have a protocol that is so outside of any institution or system that has previously exerted power that's a forcing function to rein in the ability to have that mission creep into all the areas of our lives. I mean, if you think about the reason that the Federal Reserve was started, originally it didn't sound like such a bad idea. It's only over the course of time that it becomes this heavily egregious thing. Now, the founding of that particular institution is a whole another story. But it is that ability to keep expanding your scope and go beyond the bounds of your initial protocol that causes so many of these problems. And that is what is so beautiful about this is it's not an institution, it's a protocol and it's enforcing these bounds on institutions. Interesting. I want to stay with Paul for for a minute uh and talk about the biggest institution like one of the biggest institutions that we already have in Bitcoin which is Bitcoin mining the energy infrastructure a huge part of of Bitcoin. How do you see them like them playing a role in the future of of Bitcoin with energy producers potentially coming in Bitcoin mining? The kind of the tension between Bitcoin mining and AI hosting and a lot of the Bitcoin miners are now doing also the AI hosting stuff. How do you look at the Bitcoin mining side of things for the institutional infrastructure? There's a nice tension between Bitcoin mining and our established institutions because in many ways Bitcoin mining is the most pure off-ramp, right? If you have electricity, you can participate in the protocol in a totally nonkyc way. Banks hate this. They absolutely don't like that. They will be very quick to debank you in many cases. And so there's this natural tension that exists. But what is so cool about Bitcoin specifically and mining is that we're always finding a way to sort of exploit the gaps. And so one example of this is bonus depreciation which came back in the last year. Bonus depreciation is meant to encourage business and investment and this expansion investment in infrastructure and it's unintentionally a very natural incentive to have people invest more money in mining infrastructure which just strengthens the Bitcoin network. So that's this sly roundabout way of taking the incentives of the old system, using them to your advantage, and putting that capital into Bitcoin mining. And when it comes to the way that miners interact with like energy companies or utilities, I mean, this is this is one of the most fundamental tensions that we're facing is whether you're talking about mining or AI, you have two of the fastest moving trends and industries that have ever graced the world coming up against the slowest moving, most highly regulated actors in our economy, public utilities. uh and you're seeing that tension play out in real time where in order for the advancement of humanity to occur at least in terms of the field of intelligence and data center development, we are pushing up against these institutions or these organizations that previously had no reason to really evolve or change very quickly. And so just as you see elsewhere in the Bitcoin space, it's this pushing up against the institution that either forces it to change or forces something new to take its place. >> Welcome to predict. The world is a market. [music] Everything is a market. Every headline [music] moves the line. Every moment is your market. Call the moves. Bet on your instinct, your prediction, your edge. Dual bits. Predict where everything is a market. How do you look actually at KYC? I think KYC is an interesting topic in the in the Bitcoin sphere and Bitcoin mining is actually fun for that because you can put your own mind to work and you can get the freshest newest bitcoin which has like nobody has touched those bitcoin before even if you buy like even if I buy from chosen bitcoin he knows who I am so it's like not completely KYC free it's like he he KCD me kind of uh in in that sense so even if we pie peerto-peer there's some sort of like KYC in there. How do you look at the legal structure? I mean in Europe maybe it's a bigger topic than here in America, but we now have travel rules. We have we have to KVC everything. If I send someone sads the exchange ask me who do you send it uh send it to myself someone else a business I have to put the name in there. It's super annoying. But how do you look at KYC and the whole legal implications of Bitcoin being implemented? This kind of more freedom uh technology being implemented into like Bitcoin, a sovereign tool. >> That's a great example of mission creep, right? KYC is this mission creep of we're in the information age. So information is very readily accessible. They want your information and that's not in their original mandate of gathering information specifically in intelligence and banking. And so the ability to circumn that with freedom tools like mining and other ways to get nonkyc Bitcoin are a natural resistance to people feeling that sense of hey this isn't why you're here. This isn't why financial institutions are here. This isn't why in intelligence institutions are here. They're not here to surveil us so they can control our actions. And it's very natural that we would get this vehicle to circumvent it and that people would want to participate in that because privacy is a human right. At least I believe that and many other people believe the same thing. So the fact that we have tools is the beautiful thing about this. You have options to navigate a world where there is this creep on all of your rights. I I it in uh looking towards the future I I I think we'll have this path dependent thing where it just depends on what kinds of new institutions we can build, what kind of pressure we can put on politicians and regulators to pull back some of the KYC AML legislation and reg regulatory frameworks that we see. Um, I can see one future where, you know, we we we just let it go and in that and and that looks to me like a more dis dystopian future and in another future we have people who, you know, uh are are willing to to build and put themselves at risk and uh and uh fight against the this kind of mission creep that that you mentioned with uh you know regulatory frameworks. that eat away at our financial privacy and our freedom overall. >> I think there's always going to be a tension between privacy and security, right? You're going to see people always make the argument that we need more information for national security purposes to prevent bad actors from doing bad things. That will never leave us. The question in my mind is at this particular evolution in Bitcoin, is there a sufficient open cry among the populace for these privacy tools? And I don't think there is because I still think we're in the buildout of the store value phase of Bitcoin. We're still trying to get Bitcoin in the hands of tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people, still establish it as a known trusted reserve. Once it transitions and has accomplished that as something as reliable that you want to store value in for the long term, I think more people are going to then transition to the idea of perhaps we want to have privacy tools for medium exchange purposes. That's an evolution. That's in my view that's a decadesl long evolution. It's not going to happen overnight, not in the next five or 10 years. But over time, I think once you have more and more of the market share for Bitcoin as a native payment solution, it's going to give a drive for privacy solutions. Now, to your point, I can tell you from personal experience about I think KYC, nonKYC, it's all a myth. Um, I've had people that have sold Bitcoin peer-to-peer at Bitcoin meetups and we've tracked them down with subpoenas and put them under oath and made them tell us where the Bitcoin's at, right? So, this this idea that just because there's legislatively imposed KYC on exchanges or maybe there's not, depending on your jurisdiction, that you can't get out forensics and do investigative research. Um, I think you can always get to the bottom of it if you devote enough time and resources. The question in my mind is like how easy do we want to make it for people to track you and surveil you. And to me, I think that's the bigger issue. We want to make it harder, not easier. We don't want people that are using this technology to be uh in many ways uh more identifiable than people using cash or other mediums of exchange in society right now. So that tension will always exist. The question is when will we as a society be strong enough to realize we want safeguards in place to make it harder to surveil and track people which is frankly it should be something that every American every person in the world views as a fundamental right. >> Luckily Joe you cannot subpoena the Bitcoin network when it pays you. >> I could subpoena a node hold node operators right all of them. Um we have about 1 minute 40 left. Um and we have three speakers. I want to get um turn a little bit to the individual. So like there's like an audience here and we are building that future. We had a bitcoin conference. We all like really early adopters of that. Uh no matter what kind of role we are playing into this Bitcoin ecosystem. um from each of you, what is kind of your message to people that listen to that and are building the space uh observing the space and uh participants in this space? >> I'll start. My message is I think it's strange um mostly I think it's driven by some of the lackluster price action that there isn't more energy and excitement. I think it's so weird because I look at all the headlines, I look at the development, I look at the growth and I'm like I'm I'm so excited about Bitcoin. Uh, I think it's it's more exciting now to be in Bitcoin than perhaps any other time in history. Um, and I think because of the for a lot of reasons, for economic reasons, for macroeconomic factors, well beyond the control of Bitcoin, because of the lackluster price action we've had over the last year, somehow it seems like there's not as much energy, which is just is unfortunate. But the good side is uh the good side of that is for the builders, the people that are here, the people are still grinding away. Um, you there's opportunity. There's opportunity everywhere. Um I I I think it's going to be only more exciting over the next, you know, five to 10 years. >> We've seen a lot of uh progress over the last several years with people building new institutions like the Bitcoin Policy Institute, uh new companies, wallet providers, uh mining companies. Uh these are all institutions. There's Troy Cross's the Nakoto project which solves a coordination problem with education. And I think that what we just need is more people doing these things and being courageous and willing to put up the risk. >> We've talked about the tension between old institutions, the new ones coming in, the resistance between those I mean your book is called resistance money. So it's very appropriate. I like to frame it as not how are you resisting the old institutions, but where is the energy you can take from something old and transform into something new? As miners, we're taking energy that is out in the natural world and literally engaging in alchemy to turn it into the hardest money in the world. Where do you have the opportunity in your personal life and where you engage in business or policy to find that stored energy that's just waiting to be turned into another form? That is the way forward. >> Thank you, Joe. Thank you, Greg. Thank you, Bo, for this amazing panel. It flew by like 30 minutes is is way too short. Uh thank you so much for for listening in and uh joining us. Thank you. >> Thank you. [music] >> Every year this community comes together to [music] celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. And every year the stage [music] gets bigger. Sound money center stage. [music] So where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? You come home. [music] Nashville. July 2027.