Muneeb Ali left the Bitcoin whitepaper unread in a folder called "To Read" for two years. When he finally opened it, he abandoned a nearly finished Princeton PhD and started over with a new thesis on scaling blockchains, which became the foundation of Stacks. Stacks went on to become the first token offering ever qualified by the SEC.
Along the way he built a social network on Bitcoin that grew to 60% of the network's traffic, went through Y Combinator in Sam Altman's first batch, and became one of the few people technical enough to publicly critique Ethereum's early designs. He sits down with Emon Motamedi on why Bitcoin is still the dark horse, what an SEC-qualified offering actually looks like, and why the founders worth knowing are the ones building right now.