The High Mission of Presidio Bitcoin

Bitcoin + Silicon Valley is one of Bitcoin's most important next integrations.

Last week, I attended the launch event of Presidio Bitcoin, a new co-working and event space in San Francisco. The Presidio was once a military base and sits at the northwest corner of San Francisco. It has gorgeous views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands. The organizers of the event gathered a high-signal group of Bitcoiners, like Greg Maxwell, Wences Casares, Jack Dorsey, Michael Saylor, etc. It was an elite crew.

Rod R. of Bitcoin Park gave a compelling pitch for physical Bitcoin spaces. Ultimately, they have high option value because of the spontaneous conversation and interaction that inevitably ensues. This was the case with Bitcoin Park in Nashville, and is also true at Bitcoin Commons in Austin. Since Bitcoin is globally distributed and mostly software (except for mining), there is high value to face-to-face human connection.

Reconnecting with Silicon Valley

To me, the unique opportunity of Presidio Bitcoin is to reconnect Bitcoin with Silicon Valley. Today, Silicon Valley and Bitcoin are still largely separate universes. To be even less politically correct, they are philosophically out of sync. In the last two decades, Silicon Valley has prioritized closed systems (e.g. Apple, OpenAI), altcoins rather than Bitcoin, and woke politics. But the two were not always this far apart. The original cypherpunk group originated in Silicon Valley, and many of the original thought leaders and innovators behind Bitcoin, like Bram Cohen, Phil Zimmerman, Hal Finney, and Len Sassaman, were all based in the Bay Area.

I'm optimistic that the connection can be rebuilt. For one, the Bay Area still remains the worldwide center for tech innovation, especially in software. As much as I love Texas and its fighting spirit, nowhere can compete with the Bay Area for software innovation. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. Second, the tide of politics is turning in Silicon Valley. Part of this started with Elon Musk and the Paypal mafia leaving the Bay Area. And part is the return of Trump to the White House and Big Tech’s recent realignment with the political right, partly out of political necessity.

The biggest opportunity now is the growth of open-source AI, represented by big companies like Meta, but also smaller startups like LangChain, LlamaIndex, and a network of AI startups. The world is realizing the real value of open-source innovation, even Chinese companies like DeepSeek.

A battle will wage in Silicon Valley in the next decade between closed systems and open source. I expect both to persist in the long term, as there are costs and benefits to both. But the directional change will be greater growth of open source, given that the majority of the industry is closed and proprietary right now.

Bitcoin will shine here, as it is the latest example (following TCP/IP and Linux) of the success of open-source software. Bitcoin will become an ally as the open-source AI ecosystem grows. And Bitcoin can learn from open source AI, like its primacy of research over development alone.

That is the real opportunity for Presidio Bitcoin, and I am excited to see it seize it.