Latest / TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast / #723: The Battle for the Agentic Economy with Matt Corallo

Transcript

#723: The Battle for the Agentic Economy with Matt Corallo · TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast

0:00
You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
0:10
You talk about a Fed just gone nuts.
0:13
All the central banks going nuts.
0:16
So it's all acting like safe haven.
0:18
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their
0:23
currency, Bitcoin wins.
0:25
In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
0:28
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
0:31
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
0:36
Mr. Corralo, it's going to be nine years in October since you first came on this show.
0:41
Crazy.
0:42
Wow.
0:42
Crazy to think.
0:43
Almost a decade of recording with Matt Corralo.
0:49
Yeah, that's crazy.
0:51
How things have changed?
0:53
A little bit.
0:54
I mean, you know, a lot changes and people always predict the future to be drastically different.
1:00
And a lot of things change, but most things just end up staying the same.
1:04
You don't really think about that.
1:07
So you're a big fan of nothing ever happens.
1:11
Some things happen, but it's a lot rarer than people think.
1:17
We were talking about how to set up this conversation because I think things are changing in the world of...
1:24
software engineering programming.
1:26
Been a running theme over the last couple of months.
1:30
I've had Justin Moon on talking about vibe coding,
1:34
what it means for Freedom Tech.
1:35
Mark Suman from Maple AI talking about running these models
1:42
in a freedom-oriented, sovereign, and private way.
1:45
And then Calais talking about what he's been doing with BitChat.
1:50
cash you um in clawy.ai to really accelerate his programming efforts and i think uh that's a good
1:59
jumping off point because i think callie i forget it was you who sent the first tweet or callie
2:04
who responded to it or vice versa but there was a little back and forth between the two of you
2:10
highlighting the fact that the progression of these ai tools has gotten to a point where
2:15
there's no excuses for bitcoiners to go out there and win the digital currency game um it won't be
2:22
a lack it won't be because bitcoin lacks anything will be because if bitcoin doesn't succeed the way
2:29
we believe it can it will be because people don't have the willpower in the agency to make it so
2:34
and i thought that was very interesting back and forth actually wrote about it talked about it um
2:38
and i've been thinking about that for the last few weeks since you you and cali had that exchange
2:43
yeah i i think that's really true i mean i think there's two big changes uh that are coming
2:51
with these technology or that are here and coming soon with this technology that i think make a big
2:56
difference uh and give us a really unique opportunity that's unique in bitcoin's history
3:01
so first of all you know you mentioned just these tools are good now at at development at building
3:08
software applications um that wasn't true six months ago that was only that was not really true
3:14
three months ago um literally when the latest generation of models uh cloud three five now
3:22
cloud three six uh the latest codecs came out did they go from you know you still kind of have to
3:29
know how to code or you can do a good demo with these things to you can build something really
3:37
awesome with these things without ever looking at the code or really materially thinking about the
3:42
code um you know you're not going to build a full lightning node you're not going to build the next
3:47
full node implementation they're not at a point where they can do things that are particularly
3:52
complicated in that way and very easy to subtly screw up um but building things that are uh
4:01
kind of easier to build or at least harder to subtly screw up.
4:08
You know, front ends, good web applications,
4:11
you know, good apps on your phone, whatever,
4:14
these kinds of things, they can just build it
4:17
and you don't really have to think too much about it.
4:20
So that's one thing.
4:21
And I think that enables the entire Bitcoin community.
4:25
The Bitcoin community has always been excited to try things.
4:30
It's a lot of early adopters.
4:31
and excited to, you know, it's kind of a,
4:37
there are tons of Bitcoiners building tons of different things,
4:41
trying tons of different things and hoping that one works.
4:45
And I think that's a really great model to get the kind of adoption we want.
4:50
Just having one company building the Bitcoin payments platform
4:54
is less likely to succeed than everyone going out and building.
4:58
But Bitcoiners have to step up and actually do it now.
5:01
The tools are there. You don't have to know how to code. You just have to know how to type. Actually, you don't even have to know that. You need to know how to formulate a thought and have a concept of what you want built. But then from there, it's just a matter of doing it and executing. So on a Saturday and some free time, Bitcoiners have to step up and do it. And I think that's really huge.
5:23
I think the other thing that gives us unique opportunity is that everyone is starting from zero on agentic payments.
5:30
So I think, you know, going forward a number of months to multiple years, but a number of months, really, people are going to start using these tools to buy things.
5:40
um and this isn't you know whether you think ai is like you know asi and like super intelligence
5:46
is coming soon or whether you think it's you know just a sycophant that uh repeats what you tell it
5:54
and and doesn't really add all that much no matter what you think the reality is that these tools are
6:03
very capable of just saying like hey i need to up my beef tap running low on beef tallow can you
6:09
shoot me some more and it can go off and do it and you don't have to think about it right um and so
6:15
i think that's going to be a genuinely non-trivial part of total consumer spend uh in the world in not
6:23
very long not tomorrow but in a few months people are going to start building out all these tools
6:29
and start having all these tools and then in some number of years they're going to be very popular
6:34
for for buying things um but none of the existing payment flows work for this so you can't visa is
6:43
not really gonna work here so for multiple reasons first of all most websites that uh
6:51
offer things for sale with credit cards are anti-botted to fuck like they have captchas
6:57
they detect bots they try to prevent bots because that's how that's part of how they fight fraud
7:02
and they're responsible for fraud because of chargebacks and the way Visa and MasterCard are
7:07
structured. And so that's, they're not, you can't use these existing websites to buy things if you're
7:17
an agent, if you're, if you are a bot. And so they need to build something new. They need to
7:23
restructure the way chargebacks work. So it's not just Visa, it's a whole new Visa, what do they
7:28
call it intelligent commerce platform um and on the flip side the stablecoin people are trying to
7:35
push stablecoins but that also similarly you know there's no merchants who support stablecoins yet
7:40
you know that's a whole new integration point for merchants so everyone's starting at zero
7:45
you know for all of bitcoin's life bitcoin payments certainly weren't really 10x better than
7:53
whatever people had access to you know there's things where bitcoin was 10x better maybe it's
7:57
10x better at savings maybe it's 10x better at some cross-border uh setups maybe it's 10x better
8:04
at settlement whatever but it certainly wasn't 10x better at just domestic payments um and so
8:11
you know you struggle to get over the line right the the classic adage in silicon valley is that
8:16
users don't people don't switch from one product to another unless the other product that they're
8:20
switching to is 10x better if it's a little better you know some people might try it but you won't
8:25
get that kind of critical mass you won't get the switch especially for things that are very network
8:28
uh effect dominated like payments for agentic payments everyone's starting from zero and so
8:35
we have a shot to actually build something that people use like the race is starting now
8:42
uh there's three or four or five different competing standards now being pushed by various
8:48
payment companies ai labs whatever um and we need to be a part of that fight uh we might not win
8:56
but if we stay in that race we will get from fairly low to really material merchant adoption
9:03
bitcoin will be a actually usable option for payments yeah before we get into the landscape of
9:13
when everybody's building competing protocols,
9:15
not only with traditional payment networks
9:19
like Visa, MasterCard, stable coins,
9:21
but even within Bitcoin, that's something I've observed
9:24
over the last month is all these development kits
9:26
and different ways of equipping your agent
9:30
with the ability to send and receive Bitcoin.
9:33
Before that, what led you to,
9:37
what was the tipping point for you to believe this?
9:39
Was it observing what's happening
9:40
or did you build something that you were like,
9:42
oh wow it's it's here it's ready i mean i think it's to a large extent it's the jump in the quality
9:50
of models in the last three months you know there's a lot of things for which they're still not
9:54
they haven't really materially improved on in three or four years uh you know writing from
10:00
scratch and they're great at critiquing writing writing new ideas from scratch not so much um but
10:05
then there's some things where they went from being a useful tool to being actually genuinely
10:13
good at like writing many types of applications like writing a lot of software um and so i think
10:21
that plus plus the you know one of the big step functions has been kind of how long they how how
10:30
well they can work on a task that has multiple steps and they have to to keep working at it to
10:35
get to it um and it used to be that they would kind of collapse in on themselves fairly quickly
10:40
and this this limited your ability to do things like build stuff like open claw or these agents
10:46
that might be able to then go buy something right because this is like this multiple step you have
10:51
to go find different merchants that offer these products you have to find compare the products
10:55
you have to decide which one might be good and then you you might have to come back to the your
10:59
the the human and say like hey here's a product i think it's good should i buy this um
11:04
And they, you know, they might have struggled with that. And I think now they're they're very capable of that. And at the same time, there's so many different companies that have gone from kind of in the early stages of building to, OK, now it's serious. Now we're trying to really push our specific payment rails for these kinds of payments.
11:30
And was there something that you were working on or just simply observing it?
11:34
Mostly observing, yeah.
11:36
Yeah.
11:37
Okay, now let's get into the landscape of what's out there.
11:41
Visa, I think it was Visa or MasterCard,
11:44
earlier this week or late last week said,
11:46
hey, a lot of people are thinking we're going to just bolt on
11:52
a agentic payment protocol into what we're doing now,
11:55
but we're starting this new thing.
11:57
We're going to sort of equip them with agent-specific digital cards
12:01
or whatever.
12:01
obviously the stable coins uh are going after i think base created x402 uh which is funny it seems
12:12
like people in bitcoin were ahead of this trend and seeing where this was going way before many
12:18
others who are who are hopping onto it now which i think could play into our favor but i mean l402
12:22
from roast beef and the lnd team's been out for many years now at this point i think three or four
12:29
years basically seeing that this is going to be a thing you have many people talking about the idea
12:35
of agents suspending up their own real world asset tokens to to conduct commerce with each other and
12:44
it it to your point seems very chaotic right now the landscape for agentic payments doesn't seem
12:51
like there is a uniform protocol that everybody has settled on that makes sense considering
12:58
yeah there's more than that there's also you know google's got one stripe is both pushing
13:05
the crypto angle but then also has their own other protocol that they did with open ai um so there's
13:14
everybody's got a protocol for this um and and i don't think you know i i want to i think in kind
13:20
of a traditional software world we think about this like ah there's so many protocols like one
13:24
has to win people have to start adopting one i don't think that's really true for for ai like
13:30
the things are good at writing code if you give it a protocol spec it can write code to interact
13:35
with that protocol on the fly and use the protocol it doesn care what the specific protocol is What is going to impact what does have to be standardized
13:46
is the actual payment rail.
13:47
Are they using Lightning?
13:49
Do you have to have Bitcoin?
13:49
Do you have to have stable coins?
13:51
Do you have to have a Visa card linked?
13:53
Do you have to have...
13:54
What is the process of getting funds into the system
13:59
such that they can then flow within that system?
14:01
um and so i think that's the the thing that is going to be not necessarily winner take all but
14:08
certainly winner take most um and so that's where we really want you know we want open payment rails
14:15
right if if there's a good shot right now i think that uh the payment rails that get used are either
14:24
you know a stable coin a single stable coin right where there's one company that operates the
14:30
blockchain they run on you know a centralized blockchain they run on right in like the case of
14:36
base or stripe is now building this tempo thing um and also then gets all the interest from all
14:43
the tokens that are being used for the commerce like you know coinbase for the case of usdc on
14:49
base or circle if it's usdc elsewhere um and then once they have a monopoly presumably those prices
14:59
will then continue to increase, right?
15:01
If they have a monopoly on the payment rails
15:03
and the payment token that's being used,
15:05
they'll slowly increase their price over time
15:07
because why wouldn't they?
15:10
And so we want freedom tech there,
15:13
not just both philosophically,
15:16
but also for competitive reasons.
15:19
We've suffered, especially in the US,
15:22
outside the US a little less so,
15:23
but we've suffered in the US
15:25
from this visa tax on all of our commerce
15:29
where whatever two two and a half percent of every transaction sometimes more sometimes less
15:35
gets taken out of the merchant's hands and it really wrecks small businesses i mean that it's
15:42
it's a huge it's a really material portion of their profit goes to the payment networks and
15:50
if and like we have this opportunity where we like need new payment networks for these new types of
15:58
payments and these new types of buyers and just rebuilding the existing monopoly kind of setup,
16:06
whether it's using Visa's protocols or whether it's using a stable coin, a single stable coin,
16:12
would just be such a loss for humanity in the country. And we would just, we'd lose out on so
16:19
much that we could have. Yeah. I mean, and you're getting into like a first principles argument
16:27
here. So let's steel man it and get into basically the first principle argument for why Bitcoin should
16:36
be the medium of exchange for the agentic economy that seems to be emerging. Obviously, you mentioned
16:42
the competitive landscape. And if a monopoly takes us over, they'll have pricing power,
16:49
which will not be good for the end consumer or merchants that are leveraging these payment rails.
16:54
But let's just strip it down to the base and build it up from there.
17:00
Why is Bitcoin sort of suited for this use case particularly?
17:07
Yeah, I mean, I think the network that gets built needs to, you know, I guess I don't think Bitcoin is like uniquely suited in a way that like Visa could not build something.
17:23
that operates here. It can't be the existing Visa network. It has to have different rules around
17:29
chargebacks. It has to have a different setup. It has to have different type of private keys,
17:34
so it can't just be the same kind of card numbers they use today. They'll be issuing
17:39
temporary debit cards. These are things they can build. They're hard. There's some regulatory
17:44
questions around having a different chargeback system, but in theory, this is buildable.
17:49
certainly Bitcoin isn't kind of fundamentally fated to win this over stable coins for some
17:56
reason you know people don't hate stable coins stable coins on a centralized blockchain are
18:01
efficient and cheap payments are fast just like Bitcoin I don't think you know I don't think any
18:09
of these are kind of better or worse in terms of the fundamental properties that might enable them
18:15
You know, Bitcoin on Lightning specifically, payments are cheap, payments are fast, currently cheaper and often faster than stablecoins on most stablecoin platforms.
18:26
But that's something they can fix.
18:29
They can centralize their blockchains more and have payments be faster and cheaper.
18:34
And they are.
18:35
I think Coinbase is moving that direction with base and tempo, I think, from Stripe will be even more centralized and even more of a central database just to make the payments cheap and fast.
18:46
It's really just a question of who gets adoption first, right?
18:52
So who gets merchants to start using their new protocol before the others do and gets payers and agents to start using their new protocol before the others do?
19:02
And I think this is where the Bitcoin community has a real shot because all these other protocols are one company, maybe a partnership of two companies pushing their specific protocol because they want to be the winners and they want to be the ones who ultimately control the flow of how agentic commerce happens and make a ton of money on it by becoming the monopoly.
19:24
whereas Bitcoiners are a ton of different companies and a ton of different people
19:29
who all want to not become the monopoly and and give everyone and give merchants and buyers back
19:36
their economic freedom and give them total control over the way they make and accept payments
19:43
and that kind of network I think gives us a real shot that we have so many different people pushing
19:52
in complementary directions, not necessarily the same direction, and trying from different
19:57
angles and getting more merchants on board and all of that stuff in interesting ways.
20:05
And I think that gives us a real competitive edge here.
20:08
But for that to happen, we need Bitcoiners to really step up and participate, not necessarily
20:14
just build stuff.
20:15
Building stuff is important, but also get merchants on board, actually use these tools,
20:20
right install open claw or clawy or whatever the you know newest hottest agent software is
20:28
um and give it a bitcoin wallet and tell it to go buy your monthly beef tallow or whatever you
20:36
whatever you need um and and see how far it gets and tell it to email merchants and tell it to say
20:42
hey you know i i tried to use your site um i'm an ai agent i tried to use your site to buy this
20:49
thing because i was told to and i couldn't please consider updating your site so that it doesn't
20:55
have captchas and so that it takes bitcoin um and go you know i know the the uh nix laney's team
21:03
at money dev kit has been building some cool stuff here they now have sites where your agent can buy
21:09
coffee with bitcoin and can buy supplements with bitcoin and can buy various things um so they're
21:15
trying to push into this world. They also offer merchant services, make it easy for merchants to
21:20
integrate self-custodial Bitcoin payment acceptance. Obviously, a lot of merchants don't necessarily
21:25
want that. They might want other integration. There's a ton of Bitcoin payment processors out
21:29
there and crypto payment processors that they can integrate into their Shopify. So it's really about
21:35
we have to get moving and we have to have Bitcoin as really pushing on this angle because if we
21:43
don't then you know one of these monopolies can take over and we're going to be stuck with some
21:48
new payment monopoly that's going to be equally shitty and take another huge chunk out of the
21:53
economy and if we do then not only does bitcoin thrive uh and and have a ton of transactions to
22:03
pay the miners and and get a more robust lightning network and and fund more development and and price
22:11
probably goes up because everyone's buying bitcoin to transact in it but on top of that
22:16
for humanity the money is the payment rails people use is free and open and anyone can participate and
22:23
visa is not going to censor porn or gun shops or whatever um and also on top of that visa is not
22:31
going to take this huge percentage bite out of the economy and and transactions are going to be
22:35
cheaper and merchants are going to have more money in their pocket what's up freaks up next the
22:40
The Bitcoin Scaling Conference, where Bitcoin developers meet institutional capital, is coming to New York next month.
22:45
Join Bitcoiners from Blockstream, Chaincode, Brink, and more at the Can't Miss Summit at the intersection of Bitcoin tech and finance.
22:51
This conference has one of the best signal-to-noise ratios, and that's why I'll be joining BlockSpace's third annual Bitcoin tech conference on April 16th at the New York Times Center in Midtown Manhattan.
23:00
There's only room for 200 attendees, and they've already sold more than 100 tickets of their open spots.
23:06
So you've only got a few weeks to get your travel plans in order for New York.
23:08
With a ticket, you get access to the best programming in Bitcoin tech from BitVM to BitChat, catered lunch, and access to the PubKey afterparty.
23:16
We're in the hat, PubKey afterparty.
23:17
Opnext is where builders meet capital, founders find funding, and companies source top talent.
23:21
Plus, meet institutional investors and developers from BlackRock, H.C. Wainwright, and Bitcoin Infrastructure Corp.
23:27
If you're at a venture fund or another finance firm, this is the event to learn more about the quantum computing, leading-edge Bitcoin tech, and topics that will define Bitcoin's futures.
23:35
Go to opnext.dev for tickets and use the code TFTC to get 25% off a general admission or VIP
23:41
ticket to the event. Again, that's opnext.dev, go TFTC for 25% off a ticket. I'll see you there.
23:48
So freaks, this rip of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. BitKey makes Bitcoin
23:52
easy to use and hard to lose. It is a hardware wallet that natively embeds into a two or three
23:58
multi-sig. You have one key on the hardware wallet, one key on your mobile device and block stores.
24:04
a key in the cloud for you. This is an incredible hardware device for your friends and family,
24:10
or maybe yourself who have Bitcoin on exchanges and have for a long time, but haven't taken a
24:15
step to self-custody because they're worried about the complications of setting up a private
24:19
public key pair, securing that seed phrase, setting up a pin, setting up a passphrase.
24:23
Again, BitKey makes it easy to use, hard to lose. It's the easiest zero to one step,
24:28
your first step to self-custody. If you have friends and family on the exchanges who haven't
24:32
moved it off. Tell them to pick up a big key, go to big key dot world, use the key TFTC 20 at
24:37
checkout for 20% off your order. That's big key dot world code TFTC 20. So you mentioned money
24:44
dev kit. I had Nick on a couple of months ago. I love what they're building. Let's dive into
24:48
the landscape of the solutions that are being brought to market. You have money dev kit,
24:53
L402. It looks like they just revamped that breeze has a software development kit. There's some
25:01
Noster Wallet Connect, dev kits that exist out there,
25:04
Cashew, I think they have cash.
25:07
Yeah, Albi has some agentic wallet stuff too.
25:11
There's a ton of Bitcoiners who are exploring this space.
25:15
A lot of Bitcoin groups or companies
25:18
who had wallet software
25:20
have been exploring, okay, can we take our wallet software?
25:25
Can we add it to our agents?
25:27
i think there's also like a phoenix d uh skill for for agents um so a lot of wallet software
25:35
that you could already run on a server now uh agents can easily manage um and especially the
25:41
ones that kind of make it easy so probably you don't want your agent to be running like whole
25:46
hog lnd and like trying to manage liquidity and stuff waste a lot of tokens doing that
25:51
but stuff with an LSP.
25:53
So that's like MoneyDevKit,
25:55
that's PhoenixD,
25:55
that's or stuff that doesn't use Lightning directly,
26:00
but supports Lightning.
26:01
So like Cashew, Wallets,
26:03
picking a mint and stuff like that.
26:05
So I think on the wallet,
26:07
on the client side,
26:08
on the agent side,
26:10
there's a lot there.
26:11
There's a lot of options.
26:12
I would strongly encourage Bitcoiners to go play with.
26:15
I think MoneyDevKit is probably the easiest,
26:17
but the Cashew stuff is also awesome.
26:19
And same with Aldi.
26:21
Uh, so I, I would strongly encourage Bitcoin is to go play with that and like get an agent,
26:25
install it, uh, give it a wallet.
26:27
Uh, money dev kit also has a cool chat bot version now that you don't have to do anything.
26:32
You just add the chat bot to your like WhatsApp group chat or your telegram group chat.
26:37
Uh, and then you can, you can give it a Bitcoin wallet.
26:40
You can send money.
26:41
You can do all kinds of fun stuff with it.
26:43
I know a lot of people, uh, have been playing with like making bets with each other by, by
26:48
having it hold the money and then it resolves the bet.
26:51
So there's a lot of cool stuff people have been doing with that.
26:55
So you don't have to deal with the whole agent thing.
26:58
You can just add that chatbot to your chat.
27:00
And that's also cool.
27:03
And then on top of that, yeah, and then we need the merchant side, right?
27:05
So we need merchants to actually want to accept agentic payments,
27:09
payments from these agents, automated payments,
27:12
and then support that on their websites, on their software stack.
27:16
And that a little more complicated right because that often requires retooling the merchant website The merchant website is probably built around CAPTCHAs and Visa and preventing fraud that they would then have to pay for And suddenly you asking them like no no no remove all of the crap that you built up over all these years for fraud prevention because you don need that anymore We going to give you a payment scheme that doesn have chargebacks
27:41
and there's a lot of consumer protection reasons for chargebacks but if you're buying
27:46
ten dollar coffee your agent's probably going to do fine it's probably going to get you actual coffee
27:52
um and then you don't need a chargeback you it's ten bucks if it screws up you're not that worried
27:59
about it you know okay if you're buying a car or a house or something then then you might want
28:05
some other avenue for which to get your money back if something goes wrong um but for the vast
28:10
majority of purchases people make on a daily basis you don't really need chargebacks um and
28:17
they just are this massive drag on the economy in terms of the the cost uh imposed by visa and
28:23
others to to get it there so yeah it's it's about uh people reaching out to merchants it's about
28:28
bitcoiners saying hey merchant you know i know you haven't cared about bitcoin in the past maybe you
28:34
still don't care about bitcoin but there's this agentic payments thing it's going to be big it's
28:38
going to be a big part of your customer base and you need to start thinking about how you're going
28:44
to support agentic payments you need to start supporting agentic payments and specifically
28:48
the thing that exists for agentic payments that actually is usable today is bitcoin so you should
28:53
add you know bitcoin to your if you're on shopify go find shopify plugins and share those with
29:00
merchants um whatever yeah well that this um you're right about the client side
29:08
and I'm just going to go down a rabbit hole here,
29:11
explain my user experience with my agent
29:13
and it's Bitcoin wallet, which is a Phoenix D server.
29:18
So I had my agent Martin, who's sophisticated Marty,
29:23
do some research on what he thinks,
29:25
what he thought would be the best Bitcoin wallet
29:28
or Lightning setup specifically.
29:31
We tried LDK first, ran into some problems
29:34
with channel management and banged our head
29:36
for a couple of hours and I was like,
29:38
you know what, this is too complicated.
29:41
Go find some out-of-the-box, simpler solution to this.
29:44
And I found PhoenixD.
29:45
And I was like, okay, this PhoenixD thing looks pretty cool.
29:48
I can download it on my server and we can use this.
29:51
So I downloaded it and I was like, okay, we need to fund a channel.
29:58
And so I found this Bolts thing.
30:00
It'll allow you to send on-chain Bitcoin to that.
30:03
Then it'll basically open up a channel immediately with Phoenix.
30:08
So just here's the bolts on chain channel, send it here, and then I'll open the channel.
30:12
So I did that, and it's been working flawlessly since then.
30:17
But the other thing, and this is the client side, but talking about demand side from the merchants,
30:22
the other sort of lightning primitive that exists that has really allowed my agent to do things rather flawlessly is LNURL auth.
30:31
And so since it's running Phoenix Day, I was like, okay, I want you to go test out some spends on some websites.
30:37
like find some websites that allow you to sign in
30:40
with the private key on your Phoenix D server
30:42
using LNURL auth.
30:44
And it found LNMarkets.
30:47
And I was like, okay, it has an API.
30:50
Download the API, figure out how to sign in and all that.
30:52
And let's deposit some sats and make a trade.
30:56
And it did it within five minutes.
30:59
And so that's actually just injecting my own bias,
31:02
my own experience.
31:03
I think one thing that could be beneficial, and we should focus on making it as easy as possible for these websites to integrate, is LNURL auth.
31:16
It's the ability for these agents to sign in with their private key.
31:21
And I don't know, you would know better than I, but is there a way to have an if-and function if they sign in via LNURL auth and have made a purchase before?
31:32
just don't feed them captchas or something like that?
31:34
And could you easily?
31:36
Yeah, I mean, I think this gets back to,
31:38
to some extent, my point that agents don't care
31:41
too much about specific APIs.
31:44
So whether a website uses LNURL auth
31:47
or whether they require the agent to sign in
31:52
with some bespoke sign-in API
31:57
and use a unique private key for it,
31:59
whether it's a totally different protocol,
32:01
kind of doesn't matter.
32:03
Like the agent, like your agent
32:05
didn't have some predefined code
32:09
for LNURL auth.
32:10
It didn't have already built in logic
32:13
for that specifically.
32:14
It said, oh, okay,
32:16
here's a website I want to use.
32:18
It supports LNURL auth.
32:20
Let me go find the spec for LNURL auth.
32:22
And then let me implement
32:23
against that really quick
32:24
and just do that on the fly.
32:25
So it did that on the fly.
32:26
It doesn't care what
32:27
the specific protocol is.
32:29
And I think that's really the cool thing about these agents that because they're fairly competent at writing small scale software, you know, as long as something straightforward and can be specified in a reasonably compact way, they can just use it.
32:47
They don't care.
32:49
And so I think that's what I think.
32:53
So I think that's really powerful.
32:54
um on your point about merchants and using this for uh turning off captchas you know i think to a
33:02
large extent they don't need to right the reason for all of the captchas and anti-fraud and whatever
33:08
is because of chargebacks right like small merchants regularly get people who come to their
33:14
websites and buy stuff with stolen credit cards and then the merchant ends up getting screwed
33:21
Right. So like someone will come to a I think one popular scam, at least a while back, was that people would go sell a merchant's products to legitimate buyers on eBay or Amazon or whatever.
33:33
And then they would when someone bought it from them, they would take a stolen credit card, go to the merchant, have it shipped directly to the legitimate buyer who wanted this thing and was buying it from from this scammer on Amazon.
33:47
and then the merchant would ship the good the legitimate buyer would be happy they would pay
33:52
the scammer via amazon or ebay or whatever um and then ultimately the person who's stolen credit
33:58
card was used would declare their card stolen and the company this merchant would get screwed
34:03
and they would lose lose the money um and so that has so merchants have to do all kinds of stupid
34:12
anti-fraud to try to prevent these kinds of scams from ruining their bottom line. And again, for the
34:20
90-whatever percent of purchases where people don't really need that kind of purchase protection
34:28
that you have with chargebacks, there's no need for these chargebacks to be there and for merchants
34:36
to be putting in pouring capital, pouring time, pouring effort into anti-fraud and chargeback
34:44
protection to retain their earnings.
34:47
This is, I mean, ignore the two, two and a half percent fee that Visa takes for that,
34:53
you know, the Visa network takes from every transaction.
34:56
And also the amount of human effort tied to this anti-fraud stuff that all these merchants
35:03
have to build in not just human effort, but like they have to hire support staff. It's not just
35:09
software engineers, not just like they have to hire, they have to integrate all this capture
35:13
crap and, and anti-fraud technology and ML models to do anti-fraud and whatever. They also have to
35:20
hire humans and support to talk to people and try to fish out whether they're a scammer or not.
35:26
It's a huge drag on all these small businesses and on the economy generally, right? And so if we
35:31
offer options where there isn't chargebacks they can just remove all this crap and all of a sudden
35:36
all those costs go away and sure some uh some customers might want to buy with purchase
35:43
protection and might want to use chargeback supporting payment rails those can be built
35:48
on bitcoin too right you can have some arbiter who sits in the middle of the payment and doesn't
35:55
clear the funds until uh the payment is is not is approved by the buyer and they do dispute
36:02
resolution whatever you can build on bitcoin too it's been built before there hasn't been a lot of
36:06
demand for it in part because there just hasn't been a lot of demand for bitcoin payments um so
36:11
hopefully you know hopefully we can shift that now build more demand for bitcoin payments and then
36:16
those kind of tools might come back people might be more interested in using them and building them
36:21
out. But yeah, I mean, merchants could just remove all of this crap that they've built up over the
36:27
years and just offer payments in Bitcoin. Well, you mentioned Bitcoin payments have not won
36:36
in their first 17 years. And I think many people would point to price volatility and say using
36:42
Bitcoin as your unit of account is risky as a business owner. So on this point, how imperative
36:49
do you think it is for people providing these agentic receive tools bitcoin receive tools
36:56
for merchants uh to include dollar off ramps like auto conversions to dollars or the ability to
37:04
receive stable coins side by side with with bitcoin yeah i mean certainly it's important
37:10
for many merchants and and there are a ton of payment processors uh that will happily take
37:16
Bitcoin and deposit money into your traditional bank account via wire once a day or once a week
37:21
or whatever. This is not like particularly novel technology. You know, for some merchants,
37:30
that's going to be really important. For some merchants, they might be happy to take some
37:34
Bitcoin and actually hold some something other than just dollars. Like we've seen pretty good
37:40
uptake with a lot of merchants just in their desire for bitcoin um so yeah i mean that certainly
37:46
needs to be an option it needs to be an option for for many merchants doesn't need to be an option
37:50
for all merchants not everyone's going to want that um but i think that's pretty straightforward
37:55
there's a lot of uh companies that offer that so that shouldn't be an issue for merchants these days
38:02
it does have some more onboarding friction right they have to do kyc or kyb um to onboard for a
38:09
lot of those platforms because they're regulated whereas for something like money dev kit or
38:13
something that's more native bitcoin or native stable coins um they can just install some software
38:21
package and and they're done there's no real onboarding um so yeah i mean i think stable coins
38:27
are useful there i think we just want to make sure that they're used as the the savings part
38:35
So once a merchant receives money via a more open payment rail, they can then swap it into some stable coin.
38:46
And there's competition for stable coins because then each merchant could have their own stable coin they prefer based on the interest rate they receive for holding that stable coin or whatever.
38:57
And that wouldn't impact the payment rails.
39:00
It's really when all of the payments flow over the same rails, the same stablecoin on the same blockchain, that we get this monopolistic effect where switching costs become infinitely high for people to switch to some new stablecoin because the entire economy has to rotate to using that new one when it was using some old one.
39:24
And that's where you get this monopolistic effect for, you know, eventually those fees will go up and we'll have another visa.
39:30
Sup freaks. Right now, someone with less capital than you is building a better Bitcoin position than you are.
39:35
They're not smarter. They're not luckier. They're just using this downturn differently.
39:39
The small minority will quietly make moves that matter.
39:42
And Unchained wrote a field guide for that small minority.
39:44
It's called 21 Moves to Make in the Downturn.
39:47
Inside, you'll learn how to orient your thinking around Bitcoin's long term properties,
39:50
the common psychological traps that surface during market downturns,
39:54
practical accumulation strategies, and ways to optimize your savings,
39:57
retirement accounts, and idle capital.
39:59
If you plan to use this downturn instead of watching it pass,
40:02
go download it at unchained.com slash tftc.
40:06
That's unchained.com slash tftc.
40:08
What's up, freaks?
40:09
This rep was brought to you by good friends at Silent.
40:10
Silent creates everyday, fair day gear that protects your hardware.
40:14
We're in Bitcoin.
40:14
We have a lot of hardware that we need to secure.
40:17
Your wallet emits signals that can leave you vulnerable.
40:19
you want to pick up silence gear put your hardware in that i have a tap signer right here i got the
40:24
silent card holder replaced my wallet i was using ridge wallet because it secured against rfid signal
40:29
jacking uh silent the card holder does the same thing it's much sleeker fits in my pocket much
40:34
easier i also have the faraday phone sleeve which you can put a hardware wallet in we're actually
40:38
using it for our keys at the house too there's been a lot of robberies they have essential faraday
40:41
slings faraday backpacks it's a bitcoin company they're running on a bitcoin standard they have a
40:46
Bitcoin treasury. They accept Bitcoin via strike. So go to slnt.com slash tftc to get 15% off
40:53
anything or simply just use the code tftc when shopping at slnt Patented technology special operations approved It has free shipping as well So go check it out What the lowest hanging fruit that you want to see built that doesn exist right now at this intersection
41:12
I think it's really about merchant outreach.
41:14
So I'm not aware of a good tool, of a good site that kind of covers all of the options for merchants.
41:24
Like, you know, I'm a merchant.
41:25
I want to take Bitcoin.
41:26
okay you know what store are you using or if you're using shopify click here and here's all
41:31
your options for shopify if you're using uh your own self-hosted what's the self-hosted wc something
41:38
commerce whatever then click here and here's all the plugins um and like i care about receiving
41:44
money via local currency or i care about stable coins and like here's here's the options and i
41:49
think uh it would be great if someone built that out uh so that there's a more easy place to point
41:55
merchants to to say here's where you need to go um and then on top of that once that exists i think
42:04
it'll be really clear what what holds remains so like you know there will be there'll be categories
42:08
where there's no option right it'll be uh you know i'm using this particular commerce platform and i
42:13
want payments via you know i want my payments to come in in bitcoin and then i want to swap to
42:18
you know usdt and it'll be well there's no option for you there's no pre-built option for you
42:24
And there, again, all of the pieces probably exist, and there's probably some plugin for that where they can take Bitcoin.
42:32
And then there's certainly USDT and Bitcoin and USDT swap services, but there's not a cohesive plugin.
42:38
And then I think that is where an agent can totally build that, where the big building blocks already exist, but they need to be put together into some cohesive platform and plugin for this particular commerce solution.
42:51
an agent can absolutely build that
42:54
and someone can just sit down on a Saturday
42:56
and say, you know,
42:57
this is missing.
42:59
I was talking to some merchant who wanted it
43:01
and this tool doesn't exist.
43:03
Let me just spend, you know,
43:05
three or four hours with Claude
43:06
or ChachiPT or whatever
43:09
and have it go build this.
43:11
And I think that's where
43:12
we as a Bitcoin community need to get to
43:15
if we want to grow
43:17
and really become the kind of currency
43:19
that I think we want to be.
43:23
Yeah.
43:24
Yeah, we got to make sure that
43:25
that educational website is AEO optimized
43:31
so that the agents, if they're doing research,
43:33
they can find it quickly and understand what's going on.
43:37
Yeah, it's so fascinating how fast this happens.
43:41
That's like the one question I have.
43:42
When you consider all the capital behind Visa, Stripe, Coinbase,
43:47
all these competing agentic payments companies with their own vested interest and perspectives
43:54
and subjective views on how this should play out it does seem a bit daunting but i think
44:02
your point and my point would be is like the tools basically collapse the the cost to do this to
44:08
near zero so you can't compete that's totally true and also all of them are busy competing
44:13
because they all want to take the crown, right?
44:15
They all want to win.
44:16
It's not like Google and OpenAI and Stripe and Coinbase
44:23
and everyone are pulling in the same direction.
44:26
No, they're all trying to compete.
44:27
They're all trying to have their own solution win.
44:29
And I think that really gives us an opportunity.
44:33
And I mean, I think it is moving fast.
44:36
And so there's a good chance that we start to see some kind of,
44:41
not necessarily winner, but a lot of merchant adoption
44:45
in one or two of these solutions over the next year.
44:48
And so I think Bitcoiners need to also move fast.
44:51
We need to, as a community, be using these tools
44:54
and building these tools and talking to merchants
44:57
and getting them onboarded before anyone else does
45:00
because it's only by doing it quickly and moving fast
45:06
that we can beat these companies that are trying to move as fast as they can.
45:09
all right let's call some people out who uh in your mind is moving too slow is not doing enough
45:15
right now who can be doing more i think it's i think it's you know we have an army of people
45:22
who are interested in bitcoin and have a few hours to spare to learn about bitcoin on a saturday
45:28
that they could also be use using to play with bitcoin and play with these tools right i think
45:33
just saying, oh, all the developers
45:37
or all the people who work full-time on Bitcoin need to do this.
45:40
Yeah, they should. It's true.
45:41
And I think we'll continue to see developers build out these tools
45:46
and hopefully, I hope, also on the merchant side
45:50
and focus on that side.
45:51
But also, we're not going to be able to do this alone.
45:56
The full set of people who work full-time,
45:59
have a full-time job working on Bitcoin
46:00
is not gonna do the level of merchant outreach we need right so there's like we need we need the
46:10
average bitcoiner to be you know saying this week i'm going to talk to to one or two merchants and
46:18
i've got my agent set up i use you know khali's clawee service or i got an old linux laptop and i
46:26
put um a an agent on there or whatever open claw um and i gave it a wallet and now i want it to just
46:36
go buy my monthly creatine subscription um and so just make that happen like go reach out to
46:48
to the different merchants that you have or have your age like the great thing is you don't have to
46:52
do a lot of this stuff anymore you just ask your agent to do it you know give it access to an email
46:57
account and have it send a bunch of emails to 10 different merchants and say like hey you know i i
47:02
want to i want to do this and i i don't want to have to think about buying this anymore i don't
47:08
want to have to manage an auto subscription that may get too fast or too slow i just want to be
47:12
able to text my agent and say hey hey go buy me this this creatine or whatever um and i think just
47:22
everybody does a little bit and we went well to that point about the agents just doing things
47:30
and we've touched on it a bit here but i think it's important to really nail it down like how
47:38
important do you think robust documentation and an open api is for wallet builders in the space
47:45
to make it easily discoverable for these agents we're looking to spend on on the web oh yeah
47:51
absolutely i mean the big thing like agents are these llms aren't necessarily great with
47:59
tons of subtle documentation like you mentioned like trying to use ldk directly like yeah i mean
48:04
an agent's not gonna do great with directly using ldk and building its own lightning node using that
48:12
software uh in kind of an easy environment right they want to use phoenix d or you know a cashew
48:21
wallet or money dev kit or albi or whatever where it's just you know here's one page document that
48:27
explains like install the install the wallet by this command this command gives you an invoice
48:32
this command checks uh your balance and this command lists your previous transactions right
48:37
they want something that's simple and straightforward and well documented and clear um and the good
48:44
thing is i mean like you're writing that in english right it's not like developers also want
48:48
that right it's not like this isn't really that novel like writing things for agents and it's just
48:54
it's really all the same things you were gonna write to begin with um and so but yeah having
48:59
these these simple and straightforward and understandable apis um really just lets them run
49:05
yeah no i'm bullish i think uh i think the merchant outreach is is going to be imperative
49:14
I tweeted this out last night, but we're getting some electrical work done in our house.
49:19
I was talking to the electrician who's doing the work, and I've got to pay the deposit today.
49:25
I just threw it out there like, hey, if you want to take the deposit in Bitcoin, we can make that happen.
49:30
He texted us last night. He was like, you know what? I am going to take it in Bitcoin.
49:33
Obviously, this is meat space. That's a very manual business.
49:36
And I think where I'm going with this is I think one of the larger opportunities that people are recognizing with the emergence of these agents that are competent enough to get a lot of work done, particularly in the realm of software engineering, is that you can go and basically help these small to medium-sized businesses that are typically family-owned and very manual at this point and help them build a website and a social presence rather trivially with these tools.
50:06
I think if you're a Bitcoiner, it's a caught the AI bug and recognizes the profound nature of what's happening right now.
50:15
And this is one of your your ideas is just give them out of the box Bitcoin payments as well.
50:19
If you're going to go help all these small businesses build a presence on the Internet.
50:26
Yeah, totally. Yeah. And I mean, look, mean space also matters, right?
50:30
The square integrating Bitcoin payments means for some million or so merchants in the United States, except New York.
50:39
Thanks, New York. Thanks, BitLicense.
50:42
All they have to do is go in settings and change one setting.
50:45
And then all of a sudden they, for some subset of their payments, and sure, Bitcoin payments aren't huge, but they're not zero anymore.
50:55
Then suddenly they get no fees, right?
50:58
So instead of fees as two and a half or whatever percent fee, you get nothing.
51:03
Right. And so they that's a really huge portion of the revenue.
51:06
And I think just even doing in-person merchant outreach for in-person payments and coffee shops and whatever can make a huge difference for some of these some of these companies and to get Bitcoin payments in meat space off zero as well.
51:18
And I think that's that's also really important.
51:20
And the Bitcoin community should be working hard on that.
51:22
And there's like the Bitcoin merchant community.
51:25
If you Google Bitcoin merchant community, they have a good website that kind of targets more meat space and Square merchants and explains why they should turn the feature on and why they should offer it to their customers.
51:37
And then Bitcoin is obviously also need to be using it.
51:42
The great cash app now, you can pay with Bitcoin without having any Bitcoin.
51:48
So you just have to have dollars in your cash app balance and automatically buy Bitcoin and then send it all in the same transaction.
51:54
you don't have to tell the ira you're not supposed to tell the irs about it there's no
51:58
there's no tax implications there's no nothing um so even if you have a stack of bitcoin
52:03
in another wallet you know install cash out put some dollars in there and then go use it to spend
52:08
bitcoin and make the bitcoin economy happen more and then you're automatically replenishing you
52:13
know you're not you're not selling your stack right um so you don't have to sell your sell
52:17
your stack anymore to encourage the Bitcoin economy to grow. Yeah, so all of the above,
52:25
you know, I think this is the great thing about the Bitcoin community is that there's
52:27
so many different people pushing in complementary directions. And I've said this a few times, but
52:32
I think that's really great. And part of that will be in-person payments. But I think we have
52:37
this opportunity, this genuinely unique opportunity in Bitcoin's history with
52:42
agentic payments as well yeah and something we didn't touch on that i think we should highlight
52:47
as a comparative advantage i think again we've alluded to it um quite a bit but i think the
52:52
interoperable nature of all these different payment mechanisms that exist whether it's
52:59
e-cash bitcoin stable coins on liquid lightning obviously on chain uh we have spark out there
53:07
Arc, and we forgot to mention Arcade, they launched some stablecoin to Bitcoin,
53:12
agentic payment rail as well. And I think comparing it to the competition that you described between
53:20
Google, Stripe, Visa, Coinbase, Circle, whoever it may be, the interoperability does not exist.
53:29
Or if it does exist, it's a bit janky. But within Bitcoin and the disparate sub-protocols that
53:36
people are building on it's rather seamless because of the lightning network yeah and this
53:41
is i mean the wild thing is that this is actually unique even in crypto i mean you look at like even
53:46
the ethereum ecosystem with all their l2s the things aren't compatible you there are bridges
53:52
you can send between them but you have to know to the the like you just scan a qr code and then you
53:58
send money and all of a sudden it went into a black hole because they were expecting it on one
54:01
chain and you're actually on some other chain it's it's awful it's like actually really painful
54:07
and that's what the stable coin ecosystem is built on in many cases um and like usdc on base is a
54:14
different token from usdc on ethereum and if you accidentally send the base one to someone and they
54:20
were expecting it on ethereum all of a sudden the money went into a black hole and like now you have
54:24
to figure out what happened um it's there's actually some really substantial user experience
54:30
challenges as a result of that architecture.
54:33
And so, yeah, I mean, the,
54:36
I think there's always more work to be done on making sure everyone in Bitcoin
54:40
all the wallets and everybody speaks the same language and can,
54:43
and fall back to lightning, even if they might have an option to use something more native within their ecosystem.
54:52
But yeah, it's huge because it really enables this seamless user experience.
54:57
And we've seen people show up and for some reason there's this trend of everyone builds their own little ecosystem
55:07
and then they get stable coins in it and then they go buy with their stable coin at stake and shake.
55:13
And then they post on Twitter about how or on X about how great it is that they can buy with their stable coin at stake and shake.
55:19
And all it's doing is buying with Lightning and it's doing a swap to buy with Lightning.
55:24
And so, yeah, that's that is a huge part of enabling this future of Bitcoin payments is is Lightning and the fact that all of these different ecosystems can just plug into Lightning and get seamless payments.
55:38
Yeah, I think it's very underappreciated in terms of the narrative battle that we're currently in and will only increase from here. I think highlighting that as a value prop for integrating sort of Bitcoin rails for your agentic payments is not giving enough credence in this discussion right now.
56:00
is something yeah absolutely and especially the stable coin people like ignore the the blockchain
56:05
and ethereum l2 mess that you have um but also on top of that you have which stable coin like not
56:14
only okay there's usdc but there's also usdt there's now gusd which is some new one there's
56:20
paypal usd uh there was some rumor that stripe or no facebook's now going to create a new one
56:27
so there's going to be facebook usd so all of a sudden you don't have compatibility there either
56:35
like stable coins oh stable coin payments are going to win well which stable coin that's not
56:39
a single system you can't point and say that's you know merchants are just going to accept stable
56:45
coins no they're going to accept a stable coin or two and payers are only going to have a stable
56:51
coin they're not going to have all of the stable coins as an option so that's not really an answer
56:57
either and sure there's bridges and whatever but when you have 40 or 50 different stable coins
57:04
and they're on 10 or 20 different blockchains there's a lot of complexity there and that doesn't
57:10
actually build a cohesive system either and i think that's that is what's so powerful about
57:15
bitcoin and you're right i think we need to highlight that when we talk to people about
57:19
well where where agentic payment's gonna go it's like well there's this bitcoin thing that has all
57:24
of these different platforms around it
57:26
and you just settle in Bitcoin and then
57:28
whatever platform you wanted to use, you can use
57:30
with a stablecoin on
57:31
even if you want USDC on base, you can
57:34
get that and you can swap that to Bitcoin and make
57:36
that payment. And so that
57:38
really simplifies it and makes it this
57:40
open payment network
57:42
unlike some of the closed
57:44
payment networks from stablecoins.
57:47
Yeah.
57:49
I'm bullish. I think we can
57:50
win this. It's just going to take some effort.
57:53
Yeah.
57:53
it's going to take a lot of effort
57:55
but we can totally win this
57:56
last in this particular agentic payments topic
57:58
before we get to the last topic I want to talk about
58:01
which is an update on Clarity Act and BRCA
58:04
people listening to this
58:07
like Matt picking up what you're putting down
58:10
but I've never done this before
58:11
what can I do
58:12
this has been a common question I've asked over the last month
58:16
but just to really drill it home for people
58:18
how good is this AI tech
58:21
anybody sitting there
58:23
at home listening to this who has never programmed a line of code in their life
58:27
never even hopped into a development environment or a text editor like
58:33
how can they develop the confidence to end or what would you say to them to give them the
58:40
confidence to go try this stuff out yeah or even if you tried ai stuff three months ago like it
58:46
It really is a totally different ballgame from just three months ago.
58:52
And you know I know a lot of people are used to often the free models from OpenAI or from Google They used to those hallucinating all over the place Even the most expensive paid models still hallucinate all over the place
59:06
And there are lots of problems for using them in a lot of the ways that people use them all the time.
59:11
And they're like, yeah, these kind of suck.
59:13
They're sycophants.
59:13
They hallucinate.
59:15
And now you're telling me they're great at coding.
59:17
I don't really believe you.
59:18
Like everyone's been telling me they're great at giving all this information.
59:22
But when I try them for some cases, they really suck and they give me garbage.
59:27
And now you're telling me that everyone's telling me they're great at software engineering.
59:31
I don't really believe you because I don't see it on the cases that I've tried.
59:36
And the reality is they're much better at software engineering than most other tasks.
59:41
Large, complicated software projects, okay, maybe not totally doing it on their own.
59:46
But for stuff like websites, apps, taking larger building blocks and building a cohesive product, they are really good at and they really can do it just from talking to them.
59:59
And so, yeah, I mean, try it.
1:00:01
You do have to fork over some cash.
1:00:03
You want the latest models.
1:00:05
You don't want to be using some of the free options.
1:00:08
They're good, but they're a year behind the latest models.
1:00:12
And again, the latest models only really got good in the last few months.
1:00:16
Um, so, you know, fork over some cash, get the latest models, use the latest Claude, the latest OpenAI, whatever.
1:00:24
Um, and then, yeah, use it, use it with your, your Clawee subscription, uh, which is Kali's self-hosted agent service.
1:00:33
Um, or try Money Dev Kits, uh, OriBot is what they call it, which you can just add to your group chat.
1:00:39
It's not hard.
1:00:40
I think that one is free and might not always use the latest models.
1:00:44
You have to look into how to switch it over.
1:00:46
but but you know just try it like start with something simple start with something that's
1:00:51
applicable to you you know I you know if you have your your at-home candle business or jewelry
1:00:57
business or whatever you know just hook up OriBot and say hey I've got this business I've got these
1:01:03
items put it up on a website integrate you know money dev kit's the easiest if you just want to
1:01:08
if you want to accept bitcoin you don't need dollars necessarily so if you're listening to
1:01:11
this listening to this you're probably a bit corner maybe you just want on bitcoin you don't
1:01:15
necessarily need to swap it to dollars right away.
1:01:17
Just ask it to integrate MoneyDevKit,
1:01:20
build a store around
1:01:21
MoneyDevKit, and
1:01:23
I can almost guarantee you it will work.
1:01:26
Okay, maybe not
1:01:27
exactly the first shot, but
1:01:29
just tell it to fix stuff.
1:01:31
Notice that it's broken, tell it what's wrong,
1:01:34
and in
1:01:35
three or four hours, you will have a
1:01:37
fully functioning website that can take Bitcoin payments.
1:01:40
It really is
1:01:41
that good now.
1:01:43
So just do it.
1:01:45
Just do it. Just do it. We're sponsored by Nike. So thank you for getting that catchphrase in.
1:01:52
I thought they stopped using that.
1:01:54
Did they? I'd be shocked if they did. Just do it.
1:01:58
All right. Wrapping up here, though, Clarity Act. I'm confused.
1:02:05
I've been talking with Kyle Olney behind the scenes.
1:02:08
It seems like the saber rattling between the banks and Coinbase and the banking lobby and crypto lobby is hitting ahead.
1:02:14
And we see within the Trump administration, Scott Besson, Trump himself, really saying, hey, guys, let's get this done.
1:02:22
We need to get this done. Let's get it across the line.
1:02:24
I think everybody, not everybody, but a lot of people are looking at the posturing from Besson and Trump specifically and saying, yay, we're going to get the Clarity Act.
1:02:33
This will be good.
1:02:33
It's unclear to me whether or not the language about self-custodial Bitcoin and the ability for free and open source.
1:02:44
software developers to write code without fearing getting thrown in a cage is still in the Karen Act.
1:02:50
I know you've been on the tip of the spear of advocating for BRCA and including it in the
1:02:56
Clarity Act, but it's not clear to me if the language is still in there or if it will make
1:03:01
it into the final draft. What are you saying? Yeah, I mean, we don't know. Obviously, there's
1:03:08
a lot of debate on the Hill It great that Trump said like no we still need to do this we need to make this happen We running out of time In not very long basically all of Congress is just going to be
1:03:20
focused on the midterms and winning their upcoming elections and not focused on writing new bills,
1:03:26
let alone passing them. So yeah, there's pressure to be had for making sure that the BRCA and
1:03:35
And so protection for LSPs and software developers stays in there.
1:03:40
There's also pressure to be had to get it over the line.
1:03:44
And, you know, obviously the big banks are worried that this great business they have where they pay everyone zero interest and then loan out their money and make interest on it is going to go away.
1:03:57
I mean, it's the dumbest thing because, you know, I was reading an article in the Wall Street Journal the other week.
1:04:02
i was talking about how actually everyone's already moving their money out of banks and just
1:04:06
holding them in brokerage accounts now because brokerage accounts will give you a debit card
1:04:10
they'll let you write checks they'll do bill pay they let you send wires they let you ach
1:04:14
and also they hold your money in a an account that gives you interest because they hold treasuries
1:04:19
for you and now the banks are saying like no no no no crypto can't because stable coins can't pay
1:04:25
interest because people might move their money out of banks into into coinbase when like i mean i
1:04:32
I stopped using a bank. I use a brokerage account for a lot of my dollars now because, yeah, I want some interest.
1:04:38
It would be nice to get some interest more than zero.
1:04:42
So it's the dumbest argument. And but the banks are standing on it.
1:04:46
And some of the Senate is buying it because they're worried that, you know, if banks don't have any money, they'll stop giving loans and that'll crater the economy.
1:04:55
It's anyway. And yeah, you know, the Trump administration coming out and saying like, no, no, no, we have to get this done.
1:05:01
is good obviously you know one or two posts on truth social is not going to like force uh all
1:05:09
the senators to to really say okay and actually no i need to i need to let up on this and go forward
1:05:14
with it we'll see how how involved he gets um you know does he pick up the phone and call some
1:05:20
senators and say like come on just get this over the line this is this is dumb we'll see um but
1:05:25
yeah i think it's all it's all still fairly unclear um i'm not in dc i'm sure coin centers
1:05:32
or the bpi or those folks could give you a more up-to-date sense of where the wind is blowing
1:05:40
but at least what is public right now it's still just kind of up in the air they're still doing
1:05:46
work on it hopefully we get it done soon because if it's not done i mean what i've been told is
1:05:51
basically end of March, it just
1:05:53
starts to become primaries.
1:05:55
Primaries have already started, so in many
1:05:57
cases, a lot of people are already
1:05:59
fighting
1:06:00
for re-election.
1:06:03
But it just becomes re-election
1:06:05
season, and then
1:06:06
you don't get anything passed.
1:06:09
And if we wait
1:06:10
until next Congress,
1:06:13
there's a decent chance that
1:06:15
Warren runs the banking
1:06:17
subcommittee.
1:06:20
Because if the
1:06:21
democrats retake it she would be the the senior member on i think it's the finance committee i
1:06:27
believe she would be a senior on finance and then she would get to steer what happens and what doesn't
1:06:32
and there's no way in hell she's gonna care about any of this stuff you know there's some democrats
1:06:36
who care about this stuff but specifically she certainly wouldn't um and and she would get to
1:06:42
steer what happens in that committee and that's that's very bad for us yeah not ideal people in
1:06:49
i think it's time to stand up and uh yeah i don't know what they're thinking with warren i you know
1:06:55
there's a lot of democrats i think to get it and for warren does not want to step no no that's
1:07:03
abundantly clear uh you should have brian brian armstrong calling her a communist yesterday on
1:07:08
on cable television which was like basically true it's funny it's forced uh brian armstrong
1:07:13
to position to like defend bitcoin harder than he has uh in the last decade which has been
1:07:18
Yeah.
1:07:19
Pleasant surprise.
1:07:20
Yeah.
1:07:20
Yeah.
1:07:21
Yeah.
1:07:21
I mean look obviously clarity is a bunch of stuff for the crypto industry that Bitcoin doesn care about I mean it mostly focused around token regulation that doesn affect us at all But you know hey if we can get the BRCA and protection for software developers
1:07:36
and LSP operators and ARC service provider operators
1:07:39
and and, and, and, and, and in there,
1:07:42
then we got to support that whole hog.
1:07:46
Yeah.
1:07:46
I mean, you mentioned BPI.
1:07:48
I know I said that was the last thing,
1:07:49
but refresh my memory of that research paper
1:07:51
they released on agentic money earlier this week what are your thoughts on that yeah i mean you
1:07:58
know you have to be careful reading too much into like you know llms predict the next token right
1:08:04
and so if there's there's a ton of articles out there about how bitcoin is the best money for llms
1:08:09
there's not very many articles out there about how dollars are the best money for llms and so
1:08:15
if you start typing into an LLM, what is the best money for LLMs or an NAI agents, the response is
1:08:23
going to be, well, look, there's all these articles in my training set about how Bitcoin is great for
1:08:27
this. So the answer is Bitcoin. That doesn't necessarily mean that that's the correct answer.
1:08:34
You know, I think it is to some extent the correct answer in many contexts. But it also doesn't mean
1:08:42
that that's what's going to win even if that is the correct answer even if ai agents prefer bitcoin
1:08:47
you know ultimately the human is going to prompt it and say like hey can you just buy this and if
1:08:54
open ai chat gpt hosted agents products which doesn't exist really yet but i imagine will at
1:09:02
some point um has direct integrations for usdc or their own proprietary payment protocol so that
1:09:10
they get the money, the OpenAI and Stripe payment protocol, where presumably they would get the
1:09:17
revenue from all of these things, then the agent is going to be told to use that. And it's just
1:09:24
going to use that. So I don't think we can rely on agents preferring Bitcoin. It's good to see
1:09:33
that there is a lot of that data out there in their training set. It's good to see that a lot
1:09:39
of people write about how Bitcoin is great for agents. And that shows up in the training set of
1:09:45
these models. But we certainly can't rely on that as going to lead us to victory here. We got to do
1:09:52
the work. You got to do the work, freaks. Just do it. Okay. That's the phrase of the day. Just do it.
1:09:59
Matt, always been a pleasure over the last eight and a half, almost nine years, I'm sure.
1:10:06
this won't be the last keep crushing it and um it'll be fun to watch this play out if you're
1:10:12
out there listening you can do your small part make a website talk to a merchant build um a tool
1:10:20
at the intersection of bitcoin and ai payments that that doesn't exist yet where there is a whole
1:10:25
go do it just go play around with it it's fun you can ask the llm to teach you how to use it
1:10:31
if you're looking for a step one.
1:10:34
Yeah.
1:10:35
All right.
1:10:36
All right.
1:10:37
We'll do this again at some point, I'm sure.
1:10:38
We always do.
1:10:40
Yeah, thanks.
1:10:41
Thanks for having me.
1:10:42
Peace and love, freaks.
1:10:43
Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC.
1:10:46
If you've made it this far,
1:10:48
I imagine you got some value out of the episode.
1:10:51
If so, please share it far and wide
1:10:53
with your friends and family.
1:10:54
We're looking to get the word out there.
1:10:57
Also, wherever you're listening,
1:10:59
whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify,
1:11:01
make sure you like and subscribe to the show.
1:11:04
And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms,
1:11:08
that goes a long way.
1:11:09
Last but not least,
1:11:10
if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free,
1:11:14
make sure you download the fountain podcasting app and go to fountain.fm to
1:11:19
find that $5 a month,
1:11:21
get you every episode a day early ad free helps the show gives you incredible
1:11:27
value.
1:11:27
So please consider subscribing via fountain as well.
1:11:32
Thank you for your time.
1:11:33
And until next time.
1:11:35
Okay.