BTC Sessions - Is This the New Industrial Revolution? AI, NOSTR & Bitcoin Lightning | Roland from Alby Hub

Episode Date: August 12, 2025

Mentor Sessions Ep. 024: Roland Bewick on Bitcoin Lightning Scalability, Nostr Protocol, & AI Bitcoin AgentsUnlock Bitcoin Lightning scalability secrets that could power hyperbitcoinization—imagine infinite transactions, self-custody wallets blending with Nostr Protocol for unbreakable privacy, and AI agents Bitcoin revolutionizing payments. In this BTC Sessions exclusive, Alby Hub's Roland Bewick dives deep into Lightning Network's infinite potential, Bolt 12 privacy upgrades, Nostr Wallet Connect for seamless self-sovereignty, and how AI agents automate your life on a Bitcoin standard. From Lightning's trade-offs to Nostr's decentralized magic, Roland reveals why Alby Hub is the ultimate self-custody wallet for scaling Bitcoin globally. Discover how these tools combat censorship, boost productivity, and pave the way for hyperbitcoinization—where everyone holds their own keys to money and speech. Hesitant on Lightning? Roland shares real-world success in El Salvador, privacy hacks, and future integrations like Ark for massive scalability. This Bitcoin-only deep dive exposes how Nostr Protocol + Lightning crushes fiat limitations, empowers AI agents Bitcoin, and accelerates self-sovereignty. Don't miss why Bolt 12 privacy and Nostr Wallet Connect are game-changers for your stack!Key Topics:Bitcoin Lightning scalability and trade-offsNostr Protocol for decentralized identity and appsAlby Hub as the ultimate self-custody walletAI agents Bitcoin integration for automationBolt 12 privacy enhancementsNostr Wallet Connect for seamless connectionsHyperbitcoinization vision and productivity gainsChapters:• 00:00:00 - Intro: Bitcoin as Internet Currency & Lightning Infinite Potential• 00:01:09 - Lightning Network Basics for Newcomers• 00:02:23 - Lightning Trade-Offs: Risks, Liquidity & Node Management• 00:08:08 - Pathfinding & Real-World Lightning Success in El Salvador• 00:13:34 - Lightning Privacy: Bolt 12 & Public vs Private Nodes• 00:15:53 - Nostr Protocol Overview: Beyond Social Media• 00:19:40 - Nostr Wallet Connect: Private, Seamless Node Connections• 00:22:28 - Alby Hub Mission: Openness, Sovereignty & Innovation• 00:28:30 - Hyperbitcoinization Vision: AI Agents Bitcoin & Productivity• 00:34:28 - AI Integration: Alby MCP Server & Agent Tools• 00:36:18 - Human Rights Tools: Bolt 12 Privacy in Authoritarian Regimes• 00:39:08 - Lightning Scalability Limits & Future Layers like Ark• 00:46:34 - Setting Up Alby Hub: Hardware, Onboarding & Self-Custody• 00:51:56 - Alby App Store Recommendations & Use Cases• 00:53:09 - Latest Updates: Bolt 12, Swaps, Rebalancing & Future PlansAbout Roland Bewick:Lightning App Developer at Alby HubX: @rolznzNOSTR: npub1zk6u7mxlflguqteghn8q7xtu47hyerruv6379c36l8lxzzr4x90q0gl6efWebsite: getalby.com ⚡ POWERED by @Sazmining — the easiest way to mine Bitcoin and take control of your financial future. ⛏️You own the rig 🌍 It runs on clean energy 🔐 You get cheap Bitcoin BELOW Exchange Cost Start stacking wild sats today: 👉 https://qrco.de/bg8Jwq 📚 FREE Bitcoin Book Giveaway: New to Bitcoin? Get Magic Internet Money by Jesse Berger FREE! 👉 Click: bitcoinmentororange.com/magic-internet-money 💡BOOK Private Sessions with Bitcoin Mentor: Master self-custody, hardware, multisig, Lightning, privacy, and more. 👉 Visit bitcoinmentor.io Follow Us on X:• BTC Sessions: @BTCsessions• Nathan: @theBTCmentor• Gary: @GaryLeeNYCCheck out Robbie Bernstein on Bitcoin vs. Government, Trump Fiscal Policy, Decentralization & Media Collapse: Watch here https://youtu.be/6CTotaUoZUoSupport the Channel: Smash the like button, share with your Bitcoin crew, and subscribe for more!#Bitcoin #NOSTR #AI #Lightning #BitcoinLightning #Scalability #NostrProtocol #AlbyHub #AIAgentsBitcoin #SelfCustodyWallet #Bolt12Privacy #NostrWalletConnect #Hyperbitcoinization #BTCSessions #BitcoinPodcast #BitcoinEducation #Podcast #Crypto #MentorSessions

We believe Bitcoin is the native currency of the internet in the world. Lightning is basically infinite. You can facilitate millions or billions of payments. Everyone in the world is their own keys to their money and also their speech through Northshut. You might have an AI agent, right? Your Bitcoin wallet is connected to your AI agent. You can say, book me a trip to Berlin for a week and it will just make the payments.

It will organize everything for you. I think AI gives us the ability to spend more time. It's the building quality products. and ideally like, you know, a bitter world. The Industrial Revolution propelled humanity forward into an era of rapid changing growth and we are set to do it again. But how do we get there?

Today I'm sitting down with Roland Bewick of AlbiHub, the cutting-edge team blending Lightning, Noster and AI to supercharged self-sovereignty. We'll unpack lightning's triumphs and trade-offs, Noster's decentralized magic, explore the future of Bitcoin AI integration and why you need this tech to maximize your freedom and productivity. Stick around to make sure you don't miss out on this massive opportunity.

Going beyond Bitcoin to bring you the skills and insights you need to escape the Fiat matrix. This is Mentor Sessions. All right, good morning, Roland. Thank you so much for joining me today. I really want to get into kind of the Lightning app developments and everything you're doing it over at Elby. And really, you guys are on the cutting edge of both lightning and Noster and AI integration as well, too. So there's tons to unpack there in terms of like how you're able to use these tools and why it's so important. But even before we go there, just to give people, because there's a lot of newcomers in the space.

I don't think people still realize that, that I'm very, fortunate working as an educator here, that there is still a ton of new people coming in. And despite all the resources that we have, it's like drinking from a fire hose of information, right? Just assessing like on-chain, off-chain, what's going on here. So just to kind of give us a quick lay the land, give everybody a framework to build off of, just give us your kind of interpretation. You're talking to somebody new. How are you explaining the Lightning Network, just to begin with? Yep. So if we go back to just on-chain Bitcoin, you know, there's, there's rumors. It's just never going away.

right, that Bitcoin is too slow. That's like the main argument for the shit coins. But there's lightning, which is basically a layer on top of Bitcoin, which enables instant settlement and low fees. That's beautiful. Sorry, continue, yes. Yeah, so there's a lot of trade-offs. But one thing you should know is as a layer too on top of Bitcoin,

it means you can unilaterally exit. So you don't have to trust the network. your money, if you ever want to return back to on-chain Bitcoin, you can. You can always just settle that up. What are those trade-offs? I mean, everything in life has trade-offs, obviously. When you're using Lightning, what are the trust trade-offs? What is the additional risk or what are we giving up in terms of on-chain to get those benefits from your assessment? Yeah, so there's quite a few additional complexities with Lightning. So you kind of, So it's a network just like Bitcoin, right?

And everyone has a lightning node. And basically to make a payment through the lightning network, you have to connect your lightning node to other nodes. And how that works is a channel, right? So you have a channel from your node to one or more other nodes. And then when you make a payment, the payment will jump through these nodes. But because it's on-chain Bitcoin,

you basically have to lock up your Bitcoin in order to do this. So for new users, they might not even have Bitcoin, right? So how do you even lock this up? That's one thing. Also, the liquidity management. So there's definitely some downsides. But on the other hand, just two on-chain transactions, right? So an opening channel transaction and later closing transaction,

you can facilitate millions or billions of payments. So Bitcoin on-chain, you know, seven transactions per second is, the theoretical limit, but lightning is basically infinite. It can be a huge network, and each node probably can process about 20 to 30 transactions per second, but there can be an infinite number of nodes, right? So payments can go through any path on the network, so it's infinitely scalable. There's no need to use some other high-scale layer one cryptocurrency. Oh, that's beautiful.

And if I understand correctly, too, that the, the big one that you lock up in the channel, that has to be in a hot wall. That has to be online at all times as well, too, correct? Yes. So there's definitely, there's more risk there. And there's risk as a node runner that your channels can get closed and then you have to knock open new channels. There's a lot of difficulties, but there's a really cool quote from Megalith, one of our LSPs.

It's kind of like, back in the day, you would have, like, like a car and cars were just invented. And maybe it's awesome to drive, but sometimes your, your tires will blow out. You know, you have to push the car along the road. That's kind of what lightning was like a few years back. And now every single year, we're making so many more improvements, it's becoming more stable, is growing as a network. And today, I mean, it's still not perfect.

Nothing is, but you can get a high rate of success and really cheap and fast payments. So I'm still pretty bullish on lightning. That's awesome. I was going to say, yeah, compared to like even where it was a few years ago, I rarely have a transaction fail. Like it still happens from time to time, but it rarely happens at this point. I was using it last even just in the real world at the sat market here in Calgary. The little farmer's market, everyone coming together selling goods and services for Bitcoin. And again, it's gotten to the point where like I'm not even remotely worried about it.

It just goes through. There's enough of that network infrastructure where it's not necessarily a problem anymore. I do want to even just touch on Nassar before we dive in a bit deeper. But just quickly, maybe not quickly. maybe there's a great story here. So you've been working as a lightning developer since about, is it 2021, 2021, 2022, somewhere around there? Or lighting app developer, sorry.

Yeah. I've been working at Albi for about two years now, but before that I worked on a few other lightning-based projects to some hackathons and stuff. Very cool. It's a bit of a compressed time frame, but even over the time that you've been in the space working on the lightning app development,

have there been any major challenges that you've seen overcome or any kind of big improvements in that time? Yeah, I think especially Albi Hub, the project product that we work on, has really made it easier for normal users to run a self-custodial Lightning wallet. And there's a few things we do there to make that possible. The struggles that we've seen from people who, you know, have to run LND or call Lightning and, you know, use the command line and download these different software and all this stuff. and you know which channel who should I open a channel with how do I how do I get my first channels open all those things we we kind of abstract them away

make it really easy for users get started just with a few clicks so from outside I think the Lightning Network has really become a lot easier to use for people who want to you know on their keys on their money but also not just what we're building but internally So we use LDK, which is a node implementation, has come leaps and bounds, like so many releases, so many bug fixes.

A lot of issues, you know, with maybe payments failing or unfortunately a channel getting closed, a lot of these things have been addressed. And then also we connect to, of course, like an external LND node, and they continually do releases as well. So things have become a lot more stable over time. that's very cool i'm curious you might not have the answer for this but i was thinking about it while

you're chatting there too one of the things so again like i do not have the greatest technical understanding right but i tried to dive in as much as i can and again when something kind of piques my curiosity i'll kind of go and explore it and see if i can make it make sense to me at least that's a better way than i can communicate to everybody else as well too one of the things that i still haven't quite figured out maybe you have some insight on this when we're actually doing a lightning transaction and we're routing those payments how is it do you have any insight on how the nodes are actually finding a path Like how they're determining which way to go. Is it that they have to be aware of all the other nodes that they're connected to?

Or do you have any kind of hint to the background of what's happening there when a channel payment is routing? Yep. So the Lightning node basically needs a graph of the entire network. So traditionally this is done through gossip. And that's actually what we also do with Albi Hub. So basically when you connect to one or more nodes, it will send information back and forward to say, okay, this is my view of the network. and from that within a few minutes,

your node will get a good understanding of all the nodes in the network. And even before it tries to make a payment, it will do the path finding itself. So it doesn't really rely on other nodes at the time of payment. It already has the information. It knows, okay, this will be the cheapest path.

It knows the fees along the paths, all these things. And then it will just try and attempt different paths. So we'll choose the best one first. And if that fails, then it will try another path into it times out or, I mean, ideally succeeds, right? Which is, you know, last year I even, I went to Al Salvador for adopting Bitcoin and stayed there for a month, running my LVub note. I didn't have a single payment for that entire month.

I was living, spending off Bitcoin. So it's pretty awesome. Oh, that's pretty cool. I always said, those events, I imagine are like great opportunity to test it out, to try it out in the real world. to see that kind of success is always phenomenal. Okay, just had a curiosity, when you went to, so you went to Learning Bitcoin, sorry not learning Bitcoin, you went to El Salvador there.

Adopting Bitcoin, yeah. Adopting Bitcoin, thank you. Adopting Bitcoin in El Salvador. I've got Learning Bitcoin coming up in Vancouver here in just a couple of weeks, which is why it's at top of mind. When you're at adopting Bitcoin in El Salvador, were you routing lightning payments that were still going back to like your resident and your node?

Were you using your own self-host at that point? And was it routing all the way back through and still no issues? So I had, I actually went with a team member. So I run Albi Cloud, so it's a hosted service by us where basically you can pay a few dollars a month and we manage the infrastructure. Make sure you have reliable payments online, always 24-7. But my friend, he self-hosts on his umbrella, and that was back in Europe and he flew over here.

And again, he was making all the payments, you know. So awesome, right, like coming from the field world, right? time you make a payment, you know, it goes through these intermediaries. You go there and I don't know, just the freedom, right, of opening your lightning wallet, scanning at the point of sale. It's, yeah, it's just so awesome. One thing I should mention there, though, is so you only actually route payments if you run a public node, an open public channels.

A lot of end users can just run a private node, so they have private channels. they're more like in user so they're not they're not really helping facilitate payments but they are helping the network because they have to spend fees right to make payments but you as a rounding

node you also facilitate payments and earn fees from that so it's it's up to you what type of node you want to run but for most people I would say run a private node you have more private transactions and

if your hardware, like if you don't run a professional node, you probably shouldn't route right, because you can actually make the network worse. Like you can make payments fail more often for other people. So you have to kind of make the choice there. That's a good distinction. And just to put a bow on to, so essentially when we're running a public lightning node,

then we're allowing other people to route through us. But then that means we're going to manage liquidity depending on which way it's going. If someone's basically going, if you're only going to one end of the channel, And the first thing that comes to mind is, I remember Ben talking about, he put out a, he did some sort of a lightning tutorial. And I think he posted his information for people to connect to him.

And just immediately that channel liquidity was on all one side of the channel. Like he was just completely drained in the sense that he wasn't able to use it, I think, was it for outbound payments? Either way, it just couldn't, the amount of management that it required, I think he switched back to a private implementation at that point. And so it's funny too. Another one that reminded me of just telling me about that story of El Salvador was I remember that we were in Bitcoin mentor in PTC sessions, we were in Ontario for an event. And Ben was doing

a demonstration. And this stuff seems like absolute magic to me in the background, right? It's incredible what we can pull off and how fast we can do it. But Ben was giving a live tutorial on Bitcoin and what he did just in front of the audience. And again, it's almost instantaneously. He pulls up a donation, I don't know if it was the address or QR for the, I think it was for the Human Rights Foundation. And he was, we were in Ontario and was going through his node back in Calgary, Alberta, all the way over to Oslo to get to the Human Rights Foundation, and we had it on the screen, and you could just see instantly received. Like that, it went through, like, there was no problems. It was incredible the power of the tech here. One thing that I do want

to tease out, because you kind of touched on it a little bit there too, in terms of the privacy that we get with lightning transactions, and you're saying that running your own private implementation is going to give you a little bit additional privacy. What kind of privacy are we getting? What are the, what are the implications, what are maybe the shortcomings? Can you expand a little bit on privacy and lighting. Yeah, I can expand a bit. So sender privacy is really great. But receive a privacy on bold 11 is not so good at the moment.

Because basically you create an invoice and the lightning invoice itself has your node idea in it. So basically if you receive multiple payments, the person paying can kind of gather knowledge, right, about your receiving, like what you are receiving. And this is kind of solved with Bolt 12, with Blind Pass, basically, I'm not like a Lightning Protocol developer. No worries.

Give me all the hard questions because they're coming top of mind. But basically, you kind of give shards of your node ID to multiple routing nodes. So when you receive a payment, they can kind of reconstruct it, or multiple hops, I think, and reconstruct it and then send it to you. And I'd like to say just fundamentally as well, lightning is more private than Bitcoin, right? Because Bitcoin is public ledger, whereas a lightning payment is going through a specific route on the Lightning network. That payment is not on chain. it's just the knowledge of the basically the send and receive and and the nodes along the path.

So that's definitely an increase. When you run a public node, right, everyone has knowledge of all your channels. They don't know what liquidity you have and they don't know what payments are going through, but they still have more knowledge about you than you as a private node runner where only your channel partners or your pairs know, know who you are. Beautiful. Sorry, I apologize. We got really deep into lightning there.

I had so many questions I wanted to run past you and get your thoughts on. But I do want to even step back again. For anyone who's new to the space, I'm sure they would have heard of Noster, but maybe they haven't necessarily played around with it. For most people, I think the first touch point of Noster is just going to be like that Twitter-like experience, right, primal or Domas, something along those lines. Can you give us even just a quick overview of what it actually is and maybe some of the other applications that it might have?

Yep. But if we step back a bit, if you understand what Bitcoin is, right? It's like you have your own keys to your own money. You're fully in control. And I would say the same thing about Nostro, kind of. You have your keys. So it's not like you have an account on Twitter or Facebook, and your user is just like an entry in someone's database, right?

And they can delete you at any time. They can even impersonate you. This is like with keys, mathematically, you are the only one who can sign, prove your identity as long as you don't lose your key or share it with other people. So this enables you to post notes, sign the note that you post and share it. And the difference between again, just posting to Facebook like a central server, instead you post to multiple relays. And all these relays contain a copy of all the notes,

that you've posted if you're connected to them. And basically when you fetch information, you can fetch data from all these relays. So it's decentralized and a lot more censorship resistant than traditional social media. But Nostra is way more than that, right? It's not just social media. These things like the keys, how the cryptography works,

also how the relays and store data, enable a huge bunch of different use cases. So Nostra Wallet Connect, I can talk about that later, but basically a way to connect your self-custodial node to an application seamlessly, it's powered through a Nostra relay. So basically doing requests back and forward, and the relay kind of just facilitates the request,

enables you to privately interact with your Lightning Node. There's other use cases as well, like games. You could store all the, the social information in games or you could have even, you know, escrow systems like Robo sets, you know, for buying or selling Bitcoin. Basically, the ability to store information on multiple relays and other clients can fetch that data really enables a whole bunch of different applications. Imagine mining Bitcoin, cheaper than buying on an exchange with direct payouts hitting

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down below to find out how Ben and the entire expert team at Bitcoin Mentor can help you accelerate your Bitcoin journey. Use promo code BTC sessions for 10% off. That's very cool. I actually do, I do want to unpack Noster Wallet Connect there for a second because that one I don't quite understand what's going on behind the seams. And I'm curious how it's private as well too. Because trying to connect to your own node remotely can sometimes be a bit of a pain if you're going over to or you have to use like tail scale or something to get in there. But using Noster Wallet Connect to get to your own node seems very easy. almost too easy. Like it just, it works very well and very fast as well too.

So my first incident, like, okay, if there's some sort of communication going over the Noster network there, that that would be publicly available and there might be a privacy leak because anybody else might be able to see the request that you're making of your device. But I've got no idea what's actually going on there in the background. So could you unpack that a little bit for me? Help me understand what's actually happening. Yeah, sure. So it's the way it's so easy actually. You, you don't need any, you know, additional setup because all it is is your lightning wallet wherever it's running it's connected to a relay right so it's a normal htdp connection normal internet connection um and need to collect collect my thoughts here so basically there there's a

privacy part right that your IP is connected to this relay um and so all all the nose connected to all the all the clients connected to this relay the relay knows the IPs but they do not the relay does not understand the request at all that into encrypted that's one thing and also other users cannot just fetch all the data on the relay so so the relay we build for nostril wallet connect and recommend for other builders who run nostril wallet connect relays so one thing about nostril right you can have standard relays for, you know, standard social media cases, but you can also have specialized relays. And that's what we run at Albi. We run a relay for Nostra Wallet Connect exclusively. And basically the way we do it is we ensure that when you set up a connection,

so from an application to the wallet, only the wallet and application can actually read the messages. So everyone else using a relay cannot cannot see what's going on. And even if they could, they can't decrypt it anyway. We can't decrypt it. We have no idea what's going back and forward. We only know that they are actually Nostra Wallet Connect related messages.

That is very cool. All right. So with that, we got a lot of stuff out of the way there and Lane of what actually is going on here. I want to touch on, like, so I know that in terms of like we mentioned Boat 12 earlier. We recently had a new update from Get Albi as well too, from Albi Hub. It's version 1.18, if I'm not mistaken,

that had a ton of new things in there. Can you give me a bit of the lay the land? What is it that you guys are trying to build over at Albi? And more importantly, why are you doing all this work over at Albi? Yep. So what we do at Albi is we're trying to make it easier for users and businesses to use Bitcoin and Lightning. So we believe Bitcoin is the native currency of the Internet in the world.

And what we're doing is we make tools, we make products, we make services to more easily interact with this. And why is it so important? You can ask why is Bitcoin important, right? We want to be self-sovereign and we want other people to more easily be onboarded onto the network and understand why Bitcoin is so important, right? And ideally, at least from my perspective, before I die, I would like to see the Bitcoin standard like, you know, come to fruition.

So what we're doing, so Albi, we have three, three core values, right? We have openness or interoperability. So basically, all our products are fully open source. That's one thing. You don't have to trust us at all. The other one is we build on open protocols. So what we build at Albi, we're not just trying to push the Albi ecosystem. We're trying to grow the lightning and Bitcoin ecosystem as a whole.

And the next thing, of course, is self-sovereignty. So when you run an Albi product, run Albi Hub, only you have access to the Bitcoin. You have the keys, you own the keys, you have the Bitcoin. And last thing is like innovation. So we're really trying to build on the forefront. So figure out new use cases for using Bitcoin, also AI and Nostra and combining those. trying to simplify. So that's what we do with Albi Hub, right?

We're trying to make the simplest user-friendly Bitcoin wallet. But then we're also trying to innovate on programmable money, making things more than just scanning a QR code. So that's the whole idea of Nostra Wallet Connect, right? So you have Albi Hub, which is what we call like a next generation Lightning Wallet. So it's not like a mobile wallet where you just scan, a QI code and pay, and that's basically receive and send, that's basically what it does.

But Albi Hub is this always online hub that's actually connected to all the apps you use on a daily basis, and it's seamlessly connected. So you mentioned Nostra before, right? Damos or Amethyst, you connect your node, and then you scroll through and you zap people and just with one tap, right, you make a payment. And that seamless connection is powered by Nostra Wallet Connect.

But there's just a basic use case. Anything that's programmable payments related, you can do with NostraWallet Connect. So monthly subscription payments, those can be pulled from the Lightning Wallet paid by the app. Split payments, you know, Lightning Prism, all those sort of things. And also, when you create these connections to your Lightning Wallet,

it's kind of like the app has kind of some remote control. but you can give it you as the user give it the permissions you choose the permissions that it should have how much it can spend per day or per month or actually what methods it has so maybe it can only read receive payments so we have like a point of sale you can share with your your workmates you can show QR codes receive payments but only the owner of the hub can actually spend the money That's one example. Yeah, so there's a whole bunch of different lightning methods that your node can do, but only if you give the application access, then it can actually use them.

So it's really powerful what you can build with Nostrow Wallet Connect. And another thing is because it's an open protocol, the application developers themselves, they only need to integrate Nostra Wallet Connect, and they can connect all these different lightning nodes and lightning wallets. Before, back in the day, it was really hard. So you'd have to just make like a copy an invoice and give it to someone who has to pay or show a QR code.

And if you want like a seamless connection for your app to do more advanced things like automation or like pay when you click a button and all that stuff, you'd have to build different integrations for different lightning nodes and different lightning wallets and all that stuff is kind of disappeared with Nostra Wallet Connect. It's kind of like, so another one is Lightning addresses, right? Everyone knows, give me your Lightning address, you can receive a payment. So this is another open protocol that we think is super powerful.

These two together give Lightning, like, just as a great user experience. The Lightning addresses are absolutely fantastic. I love them. And again, it's another thing that seems like magic, especially even just going from the previous where you have to set the amount to show the invoice and here's the QR. Like, just to be able to give, like, oh, yeah, it's just, Nathan Nett-Elby, which is not mine. Maybe I should make it that.

That would be fantastic. But it's so, it's 10 times better. Do you know what I mean? Like it's such an improvement in the user experience that I'm really bullish in sense of how it's going to impact adoption. So I'm curious then. If we're thinking hyper-bitquinization, we know where this is going. We're very excited about the space.

The integration of Noster and Lightning and AI, where do you see this leading to? Is there any sort of what might sound like that? like absurd or crazy implications of this to kind of seamlessly coming together. What's your vision for the future on this? My ideal future, right, is that every one, every person in the world is their own keys to their money and also their speech, right, through Nostia. We'll see if that actually happens. That's another thing.

But AI as well, I think the awesome thing about it is the productivity game. right so anything that can be automated will be automated and what's left over i think gives humans actually meaning right so whatever whatever they do for work ideally like they they have the money and the time to choose something that that is meaningful um so that's that's kind of like the philosophical one but from like a technical side i i i would like to see just bitcoin payments being seamless, right? Nostia, everything's powered by Nostia. So you have your, your identity through this private key, and you can connect it to all these different apps. And AI cases, actually, you might only just have one app. You might have an AI agent, right? It's connected. Your

Bitcoin wallet is connected to your AI agent plus anything else it needs. You can chat with people, or you can say, book me a trip to Berlin for a week, and it will just make the payments. It will, organize everything for you. Like, I think all these things that are just, you know, a task that feels like, I wish someone would do it for me. That's what I think about AI. And for me as a programmer, it's kind of a shame because it's so fast changing towards where AI just writes the code and I just review the code.

I think that's such a shift for a lot of people. people are pushing back but I think at the end of the day right that um creating like value is the most important thing it's not it's not really like the path you have to choose to get there but it's it's like if you have an idea you want to create a quality product that's that's what you should focus on right so I think AI gives us the ability to spend more time actually building quality products and ideally like you know a better world bit of infrastructure, everything, everything we need. No, I completely agree.

It's funny on that same note. I was curious your thoughts on kind of the vibe coding and making it so, it's lowering the barriers of entry. And it's not just in programming. I see it happening in the arts as well, too. Like with the way that we have AI video generation, right? Whereas historically, perhaps like there was always the gatekeepers and the capital necessary to create a movie, right?

Let's just say you have this great idea for a show or a movie. you were limited by the resources you had access to. But now that barrier is slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly coming down more and more and more, meaning that the best idea and the best stories can be the ones to necessarily rise to the top or get all the attention. Same thing even like in the educational space, which I think this would relate to programming as well too, is that rather than needing an army of programmers, the best programmers can really maximize their time, kind of like you're doing, essentially get a lot of the

bulk work done, go and clean up, maybe have some innovative idea of how to a program. something to tackle a new problem, but it means that you're going to get a ton more productivity out of one person. And the other thing that really stood out to me when I was thinking about this, is like, okay, implications of AI and Noster and Lightning is one, the AI agent being able to do task for you, like your own personal system to actually execute on like even the payments layer is really, really cool. But I thought it had, and I think this is probably, I'm curious your philosophical take on this. I think it's going to end up taking a huge bite out of of the managerial class.

And what I kind of mean by that is in sense is if we look at any business, you've kind of got three participants there, right? You've got the entrepreneurs who are focused on the future, right? How can we build? How can we grow? What new things can we do? You've got the employees who are working mostly in the present, right? Just trying to execute on whatever the mission is, what needs to be done that day.

And managers are very rear-facing, right? They're looking at the past data and then trying to make adjustments accordingly. And it seems to me that anything, we're essentially all you're doing is taking a large swath of historical data and then directly executing on top of it, that that can just be automated away. Take like inventory management for one thing. We're low on this, buy more, right? Okay, generally January has a higher bit of this so it can just look at the historical trends and then stock as needed, even payroll and things like that as well. You just hear the hours execute payout, which would mean it's like wonderful creative destruction because I think that there would be a lot

less of those roles necessary that could be automated away. Again, because it's data dependent looking backwards. But that means we be pushing hopefully more people even into the entrepreneurial space, making more builders rather than more managers. And that, I think, gives us huge gains in terms of actual human prosperity, right? It gives us more services, more products, things we didn't even know we necessarily needed because the guy that was just managing inventory is now going to go and maybe pursue his own app idea because he can just vibe code it out.

Yeah, I 100% agree. I think this is a great thing. I think a lot of people are scared, right? that they will lose their jobs. But the most important human ability, I think, is the ability to adapt. So as long as, as long as, and I think you can learn to do that. So yeah. And in the long term, you're going to be more fulfilled, right?

If you have the opportunity to work on something you really care about and essentially creation from yourself, right? it's it's yeah i think that's a lot more fulfilling completely agree yep just just uh when you when you mentioned um connecting a lightning wallet to an ai that's it's actually a brand new product from from albi so i'd like to share it's called basically albcp server it's a bit complicated but what it basically means is your a i agent by default it's just um it can answer basic questions right it could do web

searches, but it doesn't have access to advanced pools. And one of them is like a lightning wallet, right? So giving access to your lightning wallet, this is one of the products we built. So anyone, you know, you can just interact with natural language, like say, what's my balance or pay Nathan $10 or whatever it is. But in the future, I think it's going to be even more exciting because you can combine these tools and your lightning wallet can pay for other tools that cost money. to enable the agent to do all these crazy things.

So, yeah, we're kind of building way in the future here. There's probably going to take five or ten years for this to come around. But you never know. I'm pretty excited. Yeah, I love the day where I can just, you know, say, order me some food or book me a trip or whatever it is, right? And it will pay with Bitcoin. Everything's just done. I think that's so cool.

That's really excited. That is very cool. I wonder if, like I just imagine, and it's funny, you say five, it's so far away, five to ten years. That goes by, that goes by ridiculously fast. Like, everything is moving so ridiculously fast. Five years is not a long time. And of course, it's going to be the people that really take advantage of this,

that'll kind of get that first mover advantage and be able to perhaps make something very powerful out of it. The first thing that popped to mind to is like, I wonder if you could have like one AI agent who's like your master AI agent, who's then able to direct others or go ahead and purchase subscription like software as a service or tools or plugins or things that it needs and just you give it the broader mission here's what you're trying to accomplish here's your budget go do it yep that's that's pretty cool right it's it's wonderful i wonder i'm curious um the team at alby as well so

i had a conversation a couple weeks ago with alice glad seen from the human rights foundation and the also freedom form and we were talking about tools for the individual particularly under like authoritarian regimes it was your latest release that one that came out in July that he brought up directly, specifically referring to the power of like the Bolt 12 lightning addresses. We've talked kind of about the business use case and the, you can think of like the, I'll just say Western World kind of use case as well too.

But have you guys even consider the implications of what you're building as a human rights tool for basically people in authoritarian regimes that might be, you know, under duress? Yeah, definitely. I mean, they might not even have access to a bank account, right? And with and the thing, the difference here is like, yeah, maybe they can have a custodial wallet, but then what happens if they, the custodial wallet blocks their whole country, right? There's nothing you can do. So Albihan, basically, you have your own bank and you can take it with you wherever.

And also you can, you know, escape inflation. So I think not only that. but you can if if you have a computer and you can you can work a bit you can you can charge for your services overseas right and and you can make a lot of money it could change your life your family's life receiving payments to your your lightning load or building even bitcoin apps powered powered by albi hub i think is is really cool um and privacy wise yeah we just added both 12 so even when you receive payments you can cannot quite quite powerfully hide hide where you're actually receiving that money right so even even someone who needs uh donations um they can they can

run a hub receive both to our payments from other people i mean it's still a very brand new protocol not all wallets support it in albhb right now it supports receiving not sending um it's going to take some time for adoption, but yeah, I think it's a good step forward for privacy and for self-sovereignty, right? No, 100%. Kind of on that same note, the same tangent. I'm curious from your viewpoint as the Lightning app developer, are there, what are, if any, the scaling limitations of Lightning? Do you guys have any thoughts on what might be necessary to continue to really build up. If we're thinking hyper-bitquinization, everybody's on board. Are they using lightning?

Are they using something else kind of built on top? What are the current hurdles that are in the way, if any? So, yeah, and there's statistics, right? If everyone had a lightning channel, we wouldn't be able to, we would have to entirely fool the men pool for like two years straight

to open all the channels. So definitely at at that point in time, lightning is not scalable, right? And that's probably there's many years from now, I think. Like you can you can ask like, yeah, we would have to see a lot of Bitcoin adoption. But we are also, me, especially I'm quite bullish on on, on, not just not just because it scales past that limit. Right.

So with virtual UTXOs, you, you don't. So even just on Bitcoin, right, not every, not every person. can have an address with money on it. And even if they could, the fees would probably be so high that they would not be able to even spend it. So with ARC and virtual UTXOs, basically a lot of that goes away.

But even for now, the next few years, it also solves a lot of user experience issues with running a self-custodial lightning wallet. So having to open a channel, right, having to manage your liquidity, all that stuff disappears when you're using ARC. So it basically shifts the model. Instead of each user running their own Lightning Node, they share, it's basically called Nodeless, right? You have keys, you sign transactions, but actually this Arc server will be the one running a lightning node that will be making payments.

So I think in the long term, that's going to be the direction. That's a lot more user-friendly because all the responsibility of running Lightning Nod, nodes, managing channels, all that stuff goes to a professional business running this ARC service. What it basically leaves to the user is that they can instantly receive without any liquidity requirements and that they can send. We have to see in practice what the fees are, what the limitations are. I mean, because we don't have a stable vision running on main net, right? So there's Arc Labs, which has a few mainnet payments already, but they're still, they're still, you know, actively working hard to get it ready for production.

And then there's second, another implementation. And they're in CigNet right now, aiming for the end of the year. I think we'll see how things go, which me and Albi team are quite bullish on as well. We have to see our Arc Labs in second work. Art Labs is really innovating on, you know, the programmable money side, whereas second is very much focused on retail payments. And their vision is that still lightning, so lightning as a whole has a huge network effect already, right?

And they see that lightning is still going to be the main payment rails. So when you pay a merchant, they might, whatever they use, might have a different lightning node than what you're using. So lightning will be, you know, what actually makes a payment possible. And I think this is the ideal approach because it means lightning as the network stays decentralized. Hopefully we have a lot of nodes still. But the trend will be towards more high quality production, like big hub nodes that are,

that are facilitating all these payments. Very cool. And that's sort of framework too. there must be some sort of trade-off. So it sounds like we're using a combination of arc and lightning is kind of where you think things might be headed. In your view, and it is a bit of a philosophical question as well, too, to argue, is that still using Bitcoin in a self-sovereign way

if you're using both those protocols together? Yep. So the really easy way to think about it, Arc and Lightning, it's kind of like liquid, right? You know, liquid swaps. So when you receive a payment, and it's powered by bolts, they will do a swap and you'll receive liquid. But here with ARC, it's still Bitcoin, right?

And that's the cool thing. So there's tradeoffs and trust. And there's these things called rounds. So when you receive an off-chain payment to your ARC wallet, at that point in time, there's some trust assumptions. You have to wait for a next round for your BTXOs to be refreshed at that point. you basically have full 100% custody of the funds and you can do a unilateral exit.

So it is a true layer two or whatever you call it because you can take your funds back to the Bitcoin-based layer at that point. But yeah, users have to understand that there is some trust involved. Yeah, same as Lightning, right? If you, one thing we do at Albi Hub to improve user experience is to open zero confirmation channels, right? So you can buy a channel from our LSP. Well, we have, we have like four LSP's.

You can choose which one. And this goes back, so the open thing, right? So LBHub, you can open channels with whoever you want. It's completely up to you. But we provide these LSPs to improve the experience. So just with one click, you can get a channel. basically the LSP will open the channel to you. And they will open a zero confirmation channel.

So basically you can receive funds immediately. But what you have to understand is that there's a trust tradeoff, right? Because until there's an on-chain confirmation, this lightning channel is actually, it doesn't exist in Bitcoin, right? So if the channel is closed before the confirmation happens, which like we monitor these sort of things. But you could end up losing money, right, because you cannot unilaterally except from a channel that does not exist. And same with ARC, right, there's different tradeoffs. So if you receive money and at that point, you kind of have to, you have to trust, partially

the ARC service provider. But I agree here. Like if the ARC service provider cheats, like if someone can prove that they can cheat, it destroys their business. So I think it's very unlikely that that's going to happen. One thing I think I'm concerned about a bit is like the centralization factor that there will, but I hope that there will be like a lot of ARC service providers and they will be connected through the Lightning Network. Right. So when you're paying someone, someone else, it'll be a lightning payment and then an instant swap to VTX. Very cool. Very cool. So full confession, um, I'm I was using LB Hub a while ago, but I am, I don't say cheap, I'll say frugal, very frugal.

So my setup was old computer parts, and I definitely paid for that because my drive was no good. I was having some issues and thing went down. So played around with it for a bit. And I was like, okay, I got to rebuild my note. And I was just running on Star-O-West. I was using Start-9's operating system there. And last night, I was like, okay, I got the new one built. I bought some better stuff.

I'm good to go. I'm like, all right, let me just try and see if I can set this up again. and it only took me an hour maybe and I was only half doing it I got lbhub back up and running I got go lb on my phone I was setting some lightning transactions back and forth I got that channel opened and it was it's really really easy it's really ridiculously easy how fast you can get this up and running so for anyone that is not doing any sort of self-custodial lightning set up that they're thinking that they might want to give this a try what are the minimum kind of requirements to get this up and running?

What are the first things that they have to do in order to start playing around with something like Albi Hub? So it's just a fact, but you need about $20 for your first channel opening. That's one thing. And the other thing is you need somewhere to run Albi Hub. So it's designed to run 24-7. And we have a lot of reasons for that. But basically, we want to make an amazing experience.

And you can compare it to phone wallets, you know, if you run a full node on the phone, it's slow. It takes time to sync on startup, all those things. We abstract away with Albi Hub. So basically, you need to run it somewhere. You can run it on your desktop. You can run it on a VPS. You can run it on a local server, a cloud server, or we have paid hosting available. We take care of everything.

So those are the two things. I mean, it requires a bit more, you know, commitment. So I would say if you only have, you have less than $20, you don't really plan to use it a lot. You're just testing. I would say just use a custodial wallet, right? Or a cashierment or whatever. But and what I'd really like to see, right, like, and it's happening is I spend lightning

more and more. It's going to become my main wallet, right? So when you have thousands of dollars on there or whatever it is, what your monthly or you're you'll have most of your funds in cold storage of course but your your you're basically your check account uh will be on lightning um what is it going to say at that at that point is basically you probably want the keys to your money right you don't want to just one day lose your funds so um it's it's not for everyone yet and we're really trying to bring it to everyone but that's the current state um so if you're you

if you kind of fit the requirements, you want to be self-sovereign. You use Bitcoin a bit in your daily life or a few times a month, then you just need a few things, and it's pretty easy to get started. In terms of like computing hardware, because you don't essentially need much, right? So you just have to be running some implementation of core, L&D, and then you can plug into that, correct? So actually, the default lightning,

is embedded inside AlbiHub. It's different on Start 9 in Umbrell. So start 9 in Umbrell, they will connect to the existing L&D and Bitcoin Core or Bitcoin Knotes, whatever you run. But the default setup, if you run on a PC on a server, is LDK, and that's very resource efficient. So you only need like a megabyte of RAM and you don't need much CPU.

And we even ran. So there's a tradeoff here. So you can either connect to your own Bitcoin core. And then you're not. So it's like using a Bitcoin wallet and requesting blockchain data from an external server. So what you can do is the default setup is you have the lightning node embedded inside Albi Hub. And it uses Albi servers to get the blockchain data. Got it.

So there's a trust assumption there, right? But what it enables is that you can run on very low, you know, low tier hardware, right? I mean, I wouldn't recommend it, but we did test on Raspberry Pi Zero, which is like $20 just like a super tiny chip, right? And it can run LB00. Oh, nice. But I would definitely recommend it, you know, like you upgraded, a proper umbrella or start 9 or, you know, a decent mini,

mini PC will work fine. Or if you run it at a VPS, just a standard VPS, just make sure that it's got a few gigabytes of memory just to be safe. You can definitely host it for less than $10. We use Albi hosting. We give a bit more convenience there, no maintenance needed. I absolutely love it.

Anytime I see that something so powerful as Albi, how can be run on the cheapest possible hardware? Like that in terms of human sovereignty is always what I want to see, like the lowest cost of entry and the lowest barriers to get this stuff up and running in a at least moderately self-sovereign way. I also was poking around last night, checking out the app store too. There was a ton of things in there.

In terms of somebody who's just like just got this kind of going for the first time, they're playing around with it, which of the apps in the LB store? Do you recommend like you got to use these ones first? You got to check them out. So I'd say the standard popular Nostra apps would be a good choice. So Amethyst, Primal or Damus, whatever you like. Also, AlbiGo, like you installed, Nathan, is a really good combo because it basically enables you to use your Albi Hub in the real world, right?

Scan QR codes, make payments. You can also try the Albi extension. So if you connect Albi Hub to the Albi extension, any website that supports, like any lightning website, you can basically connect your wallet and make seamless payments. So there's things like stick and news or even like, you know, trading websites, Ellen markets you can you can pay directly from your wallet. Yeah, there's a whole bunch. I just recommend to explore.

And one of the awesome things is these are all powered by Noster Wallet Connect. And just as an open protocol, it's growing, it's growing incredibly fast. It's really cool to see. That's amazing. I love it. Is there anything that you guys have planned on the horizon anymore? Like, again, we just said, so I'm trying to remember off the top of my head. So it was, we had the new update came out, which had bolt 12s.

It had on-chain to lightning swaps and lightning to on-chain swaps. There's a bunch of other things. What else is the latest update and what is it that you guys are working on? We made some improvements to sub-wallets as well. So as an LB Hub running, you can basically become like your own wallet of Satoshi, right? You can give wallets to your friends and family. So now we have lightning addresses for all our sub-wollets. So basically they scan a QI code with AlbiGo and they're already set up.

And they use your node, right? So it's a bit more decentralized. That's one thing. Right now, yeah, so we're going to be refining the onboarding a lot because that's still one part where we've noticed a lot of people get stuck. Refining the app store and trying to build more use cases show what's really possible with. programmable money using Lightning,

using Bitcoin, using Nostra Wallet Connect, all of those things. So yeah, as I mentioned, we just released a new product for AI. So if you're interested building AI agents, that's one. And we just continue working on our three main products, which is the Albi extension, the original, Albi Go, the simple mobile wallet, and then Albi Hub, which is your hub for everything you do,

lightning related. I think we're also going to add related to the onboarding, make it easier for people to spend fear to open channels in a few things. I mean, ideally, Albi Hub, you know, I'm a Bitcoin maximalist, but we need the on-ramps, right,

and the off-ramps. We're also thinking about stable coins just for this on-ramp and off-ramp. We'll see how that goes with CFRR users. that's something that our users would like to see. Not sure. Not sure.

At least where I live, it's all lightning. We have like a influencer here. It's like Bitcoin only. It's super cool. But I know some places around the world, there's a lot of stable coin usage. So we have to take that into account. Not sure if you have any thoughts there.

I do. I have so many thoughts. My God. I think that it's meeting people where they are. And I am with you that I am, of course, Bitcoin Maximist, and that's where I see things going. I do think that the hyper-Bitcoinization is going to happen, but I do think it's going to be perhaps longer than we might anticipate, and there's going to be a transition.

My viewpoint is very much so that all fiat currencies are likely going to collapse into the U.S. dollar, and that will be the kind of the last boss battle, but we're not at that point yet. So I think that there are people that will come in to Bitcoin through stable coins first. That might be their introduction, because they just, it's, it's. They don't have a lot in terms of savings. They need something that they have kind of, it's already got the large network effect in terms of retail and people willing to accept it. And then that will be their first introduction to seeing those two things kind of side by side and then realizing the power of Bitcoin and making the shift.

Plus it'll be, you've already been using stable coins and going to use Bitcoin is a little bit more intuitive, right? You've kind of normalized this environment and this idea. So I think it's almost like the two will rise in tandem for the time being. And then that will be the final boss at the end of the movie here. One other thing they want to touch on, because I know that so much. much of what you're doing is making again. It's a better user experience and we're trying to simplify running your own self-hosted lightning node. We added challenging. There's something about channel rebalancing that was also added with the latest update as well too because that is always

something people have to be aware of again. Having a lightning service provider be able to open a channel for you is fantastic. What's going on with the new addition for channel rebalancing? So ideally, so if you think of a custodial wallet, right, it's basically one. node shared by many users and that node will have many channels. But with the self-custodial node, it's more likely users will only have a few channels. And ideally these, the re- the channels are always online, but in reality it's a decentralized network, right? So you could have a channel open with another node and that node goes offline,

no matter what it is, like a power cart or they lose internet connection. And if you only have a single channel, then you cannot make payments anymore, right? You have to either open a new channel or wait for the existing channel to come online again. So the idea with channel rebalancing is that you can, if you have a lot of funds in one channel and not many another, you can send funds from the first channel to the second and kind of balance them out, which means you can both receive and send. And if one goes offline, you still have this backup channel where you can make payments or receive payments. So I think it's more technical and I mean, ideally for users, it's not something they want to deal with.

For now, it's kind of, it's something you do manually through the UI, but later we can automate it. And it's the same with swaps, right? So in the UI, you can manually swap in and out to balance your liquidity. But now, Albi Home has automated swap outs. So it means for merchants, anyone has. who is receiving a lot, you can always guarantee that you have liquidity to receive payments. So if your channel becomes more than half full, it will just swap out with bolts and go straight to your hardware wallet or AlbiHub, on-chain wallet, whatever you like.

So yeah, I think it's a cool feature. I think also for people who are running routing those as well. Like you mentioned, Ben, right, his channel's got a bit unbalanced. So you can do swaps or if only one, a few of your channels are unbalanced, then you can use rebalancing. I think it's, yeah, a more advanced feature, not for everyone. But, yeah, what we kind of do is we iterate a lot. We start with kind of like these manual features that you have to click and do sort of things.

And then if we see people using them a lot, then we can add all. automation and it just happens behind the scenes. I was going to say, can I get my AI agent to just go ahead and manage my liquidity on my node for me? Because that would be wonderful. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, as we talk about ARC, I think, I mean, so ALB, I mean, we're trying to innovate. But today, right now in the present, lightning, running a lightning node is still the best way

to be self-sovereign. we think arc in the next one, two years when this is refined, you know, tested, battle tested. You don't have to deal with liquid any management in all, right? So that's what I would like to see we get to, but we have to deal with what's available today. And if you want to be self-sovereign, that means running a lightning node. And I think you have to understand a bit more, but once everything's, you know, set up, I think it's a great feeling, right? So, yeah, definitely recommend it for people a bit more invested into Bitcoin and Lightning.

Beautiful. With that, Roland, tell me, where can everybody go to check out your stuff? Check out Albi stuff. Where can they find you all those fun links and handles? Yep, so mostly we post on Twitter and Nostra. So just Albi search. You'll easily find us. I'm also on Twitter and Nostia, but I'm mostly posted on Nostia.

So, yeah, trying to, you know. Spend time in the area you want to be. Yeah, yeah. If you enjoyed this episode with Roland, please do like and subscribe and check out the previous episode with Robbie the Fire, Bernstein.