TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #420: Powering Livestreaming With Sats Through Vida with Lyle Pratt

Episode Date: May 15, 2023

Marty sits down with Lyle Pratt, founder and CEO of Vida, to talk about what he's building. Lyle on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lylepratt Check out Vida: https://vida.page/ 12:48 - What’s Vida? 16:56 - Lyle’s history 20:51 - Telecom architecture and using bitcoin to solve problems 27:57 - New tools like AI, Nostr, and LN 32:30 - Current state of lightning 33:46 - Vida demo with some difficulties 35:45 - Monetizing your attention 37:41 - The Vida team 44:56 - Vida can be a better Restream 50:44 - Lightning adoption is a bright light in a dark future 1:01:12 - Future Nostr integration 1:05:28 - Leveraging AI 1:10:29 - Explaining LLMs 1:16:46 - Living in interesting times 1:27:20 - Resource demands of AI 1:31:03 - Thank God For Bitcoin 1:36:31 - Wrapping up Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠CrowdHealth⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bitcoin Talent Co⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TFTC Merch is Available: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Shop Now⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the TFTC Movement: Main ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Clips ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Marty Bent: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠

what's up freaks happy friday you're not listening to this on friday because we're posting it on monday but it's friday at the present time when i'm recording these ads vibes are high just recorded with lyle pratt from vita i just tweeted it out but i truly do believe that what vita is building particularly i mean they have a big plan but the product that we leveraged today to stream the episode live was their their live streaming product vita.life if you want to go to the page i think this is a crossing the chasm product for bitcoin because it gives like so for any of you guys listening to this and want to get a little inside baseball to how tftc works when we stream particularly rabbit hole recap we stream that live

every week there's a couple of softwares we use ecam to create the skins and handle the the screen on the live record and then restream which allows us to broadcast it out to multiple platforms twitter youtube twitch wherever vita as a product now provides me as a podcaster as a streamer with all that functionality on their platform significantly cheaper than the added bonus is the bitcoin monetization that's baked in to the product so the live chat for our hr i like to believe will transition away from youtube and twitch to vita and we're going to push our listeners to do that because of the ability to boost sats in the live stream directly to our wallets it's crazy and so again i think this could be a crossing the chasm

product for bitcoin because if you are able to give live streamers who don't care about bitcoin the same functionality and the same experience as restream riverside ecam all in one place with vita significantly cheaper you sort of trojan horse the bitcoin monetization in the back end it could be massive could be wrong but i have a feeling that this could be one of those types of products you're gonna learn all about it during the conversation uh before you jump into it we gotta give we gotta go back to three episodes now that was episode 420 blaze it um we gotta read the top four boosts from 417 and 418 uh 417 and ex-intelligence officers view on ukraine with lee slusher big episode this is number one on the fountain charts right now a lot of people got a

lot of value out of this at patar 133 000 sats six figure boost thank you patar incredibly refreshing interview which disregards the 2d cartoon cutout mainstream narrative dave column was right again let's all pray the senseless slaughter ends soon and we learn to live with each other peacefully war is a racket i agree war is a racket at north of the wall 66 666 sets sixes across the board palindrome boost highest signal since julian assange this is i mean i don't know about if it's that high signal but this is very high praise coming from north of the wall growing up in nato norway neighbor to the former cccp and now russia is like growing up in the ministry of truth in george orwell's 1984 one state-owned media nrk

is like bbc2 the so-called quote-unquote private media is like the new york times and washington post three jen stollenberg is the former prime minister of norway and the ceo of nato since 2014 it was the communist cccp that freed the most northern part of norway from the german nazis in 1945 red flag and then you guys should go to fountain and read the comments there's a six comment thread it's pretty long I don't time to read it right now but very on the on the ground boots on the ground high signal insight from our from our friend north of the wall north of the wall thank you for the boost really appreciate it at eric99 50,000 sats beware freaks beware and then last but not least at lone star another great show marty 2000 sat boost thank you guys

for boosting the show that was a very high signal episode highly recommend you guys go check it out if you haven't already um and wait a second i'm gonna send something to someone real quick boom next rip 418 a first principles breakdown of the monetary crisis with peter st ange Another great rep. Different flavor from the Lee Slusher episode that dove deep into economics. Everything going on in the economy. If you haven't checked it out, go check it out. At Eric99, 50,000 sats.

Be aware. Thank you, Eric. Love your support. At Garth, 20,000 sats. 70 years for a Bitcoin standard, but I want it now. We'll get it, Garth. I don't think we're going to have to wait 70 years. At LoneStar, 7,777 sats.

Sevens across the board. Palindrome boost. Week in and week out. Show in and show out. Lone Star coming to support it. Awesome show yet again. Systemic fragility. Yes, there is systemic fragility.

That Lone Star, he's number three and number four. Looks like he listened to this two days in a row, May 10th and May 11th. 6,666 sats, sixes across the board, pound drum boos, great discussion. When thinking about fiat, we must remember it was engineered in a different era, in a mechanical age before even the thought of electronic calculation, not to mention digital abstraction of physical assets let's stay humble i agree let's stay humble those are the top four boosts of rip 417 to 418 thank you guys for supporting uh if you via podcasting 2.0 go use fountain breeze podverse any of the podcasting apps

they're podcasting 2.0 enabled if you guys want to send value back to the show if you're getting it it's a great way to do it uh it's always great to see the support keeps me coming day in and day out to bring this content to you freaks if you can't stream sats can't boost sats just give us a like a subscribe a rating a review on whatever platform you use a little bit of that support goes a long way as well this room is brought to you by good friends at river river mining seen a lot of people tweeting about it miners are cheap on river right now i think i saw an s19j pro for like 2300 fees still relatively high looking at the block clock if you're watching on the video exahash per second 332 exahash you need to diversify your sat streams river mining

makes it very easy to do that you can buy miners again cheap they're already plugged in so you'll be hashing immediately you don't you know there's no like pre-order buy they have to wait for they have availability machines plugged in ready to go you buy they're plugged in they're streaming sats directly to your river account uh this is for individuals who want to buy one asic institutions want to buy hundreds they river mining is a professional operation they have set up all the ppas the hosting agreements it's all there it's not something you have to wait for in the future if you want to diversify your sat streams get sats delivered to your river account every day via mining go to river.com slash tftc sign up for account for an account then

go to river.com slash mining get your asic get the hosting set up and start streaming sat straight to your river account river.com slash tftc this room is also brought to you by our good friends unchained unchained is down the hall from where i am right now here at the bitcoin commons in austin texas and they are here to build the bitcoin financial institution of the future leveraging bitcoin's native multi-sig properties that eliminate single points of failure and distribute risk the way it should be there's no rehypothecation on unchained if you use one of their vaults you hold two keys so you have full control of your bitcoin but unchained's the third has a key as well they can be the second of the two or three multi-sig quorum if you need them

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them out at unchained.com check out the trading desk tell them the tftc sent you just do it it's a beautiful thing it's a beautiful thing this rip was also brought to you by crowd health mentioned in this episode crowd health i'm using it right now you'll learn that my son got a rock stuck in his ear long story we have to get a procedure done on monday we're using crowd health it's been an incredible experience my wife and i talked with the crowd health health advocate yesterday she made us feel really comfortable about the process we've got it set up they're negotiating the price is lower uh and it's all going to be taken care of by crowd health it's been an incredible experience so with crowd health it's not health insurance

it's coming to bring sovereignty back to health care by providing a different model health insurance is notoriously expensive opaque and impersonal crowd health as i just explained is not that way it's very personal you have an advocate that you can call at any time you don't have to wait in some call room on the line talking to somebody in some other country person is in texas was talking to them they set us up you pay the first 500 of your medical expense and the rest gets crowdfunded by the rest of the crowd health community you pay a monthly fee that goes into a dedicated bank account that builds up over time it's a beautiful thing me and my whole family using it we're literally using it right now to take care of this get the rock out of my son's

ear procedure um so go to joincrowdhealth.com slash tftc sign up you'll get 99 a month for the first six months this rip last but not least was brought to you by bitcoin talent co bitcoin talent co has an internship program that they've launched so if you're a company in the space looking to get interns this summer go set up a profile with bitcoin talent co reach out to them they've got hundreds thousands of individuals looking to show their worth in the bitcoin space go to bitcoin talent.co to do that what is bitcoin talent co it's a recruiting company built by bitcoiners for bitcoiners that is here to help companies looking for talent acquire that talent and talent that's looking to get into the space but doesn't have many connections to get

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understand your needs they'll understand where they need to go to get the talent that you need and they'll make it happen enjoy this word below freaks it was a good one You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.

If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. And we're live on a new platform. Sweet. Do we have to check it? Let me just make sure we're all good to go. It's exciting. It's been in the works for a while, Lyle. Yeah, it has.

Too long. Had a few delays here and there, and I don't know. Things have come up. We've had a few good reasons to delay, I suppose. Checking the Vita page. We're live. it's working it's pretty fascinating yeah so any of you freaks who are watching this live stream whether it be on twitter or youtube if you're on twitter i put a link to the vita page

in the tweet why don't you guys go watch it there because you can experiment and you can tip us with sets as you as you watch and we have somebody in the room already we have somebody in the Vita room already. Let's go. Sweet. Yeah. So what's going on in the background? In the background, in the background of Vita. Yeah. Well, um, lots of stuff, you know, this is a Vita.live, the, uh, platform that we're streaming to today. It's a, it's a new platform. We've kind of soft launched, uh, a few weeks ago and basically it's the easiest way to monetize a live stream on the internet. So, you know, you can, uh, set a rate in sats and Bitcoin for someone to watch a stream. Uh, you can set a rate for people to chat and the chat in the room. You can set a rate

for people to join the stage with you. Like if you're doing a paid AMA, you know, or something like that. And we also have these really cool things we call room sponsorships, which can be turned on, on a room so that anybody watching something in the room is earning Bitcoin as they watch. And then the hosts can also earn Bitcoin based on the number of viewers that come into the room. So it's kind of a new way for a brand to sponsor a creator, the creators in total control over, you know, which sponsors they enable on their room. And it's a easy way to sort of give sats to pretty much anyone, you know, any community. Yeah. If you're on YouTube watching this and you want to go check it out, go to Vita.live and look up Marty Bent. That's where

we're streaming yeah on vita this is pretty powerful i'm very excited yeah it's a cool tool um it's sort of you know another step in our vision to make earning bitcoin online easy to make monetizing any type of audience or interaction easy you know it's useful for podcasters like yourself it's also useful like if you're just a consultant charging money for your time you know it's easy for somebody to book a paid room with you. Um, so yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a super useful tool. We had to do a lot of other things. Like we do HD local recording, like you would get from, uh, something like Riverside. We do it totally for free. Uh, we also do stream forwarding, uh, which is built in that's totally free. Um, something you would normally pay for with a

service like, uh, like YouTube, I mean like a restream. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, it's a, it's a powerful tool um it's all about monetization it's all about you know giving your your audience bitcoin and earning bitcoin from your audience and uh you know it's sort of the the next step in a much larger larger vision of you know empowering people to earn bitcoin online yeah i'm really excited about it and particularly because you're building this because i think your experience professionally uh in the telecoms industry and being around bitcoin i feel like i been following you on Bitcoin Twitter for like almost a decade now. It's been a long time. Yeah. It has, it's gotta been getting close. It's getting close. It's same thing to you. I mean,

I've been following you for so long. I feel like I know you probably much better than I actually do just because I've been following you for so long. You know, I was just talking to Andy from crowd health, you know, right outside the studio and, and we, you know, see each other on Twitter and interact on Twitter. And then, you know, you walk into the commons and you see these people. So it's great you know if you're out there and you haven't been to the bitcoin commons here in austin you should come yeah and so let's talk about the story of like founding vita what were you doing before and why did you feel like vita was the company that you have dedicated your life to work on yeah um well so i guess it was back in 2018 i was working for the uh telecom company that had

acquired my previous company i had done a startup it was kind of one of the first um you know online only business phone systems. And we built a lot of infrastructure. You know, we, we made a white label version of that product. Eventually we ended up cloning Twilio's like entire API stack on open source software and sort of that's what powered our platform. And that caught the attention of this telecom company at the time they were a public company on the NASDAQ called IntelliQuint and they wanted to compete with Twilio and, you know, in the market. And so they acquired my company I joined and like led an API team, uh, sort of, you know, keep that short. Basically Twilio ended up becoming their biggest customer. So they didn't actually ended up competing,

you know, with Twilio. But, um, in 2018, I was leading a team. We were hiring a bunch of machine learning engineers to basically spot fraud in, uh, the telecom and the, in the network faster because, um, if you know anything about telecom fraud and spam is like a huge issue. And somebody that is running like a fraud campaign through your, through your network to like a high cost destination, think like native American reservation or like an international phone number, or like one of those, you know, uh, numbers in Utah that, you know, you get spam calls from those actually cost a lot of money per minute to call. And so people do these traffic pumping campaigns to drive phone calls into these areas. And they have like a brown bag deal with, uh, you know, somebody that's

getting paid. So essentially they're making money to drive spam, you know, to these destinations. So, um, we were trying to spot the, these things faster. And about that same time, it was 2018, the lightning network, you know, had become real, like the first version of, uh, L and D, you know hit the hit the hit the wild and um it just sort of fascinated me because it you know set off this light bulb that wow we can transfer value over the internet instantly now you know and what would the telecom industry look like um you know now that we can now that we can transfer value instantly over the internet what does that change you know what does that enable and one thing was like okay well if our customers had to pay us in real time as they push traffic to

our network we wouldn't have these problems because the spammers wouldn't be able to afford to actually you know spam our network and spam your phone and so I kind of started playing and fiddling around with a SIP a VoIP proxy that basically only worked if you fed it Bitcoin in real time. And, um, similar to HTTP 402, which you guys are probably familiar with, um, SIP, the dominant VoIP protocol in the world has SIP 402, which does the same thing. And it's a similar story, you know, um, they sort of put it in the protocol thinking, yeah, surely one day we're going to be able to, you know, uh, digit, you know, send digital payments, you know, but it wasn't possible until Lightning, right? And so I started implementing SIP 402. And, you know,

eventually, sort of realized that this was a huge opportunity in a $1.4 trillion telecom market, and Lightning was going to inevitably change that market. And I wanted to be building a company that was creating tools and infrastructure and APIs to facilitate that transition. So yeah, that's kind of the i don't know the story of what got me here yeah when you first told me that it was mind blowing you never think of the underlying architecture of what happens when you make a phone call or do a facetime or do a live stream yeah yeah and when you explain to me like sip is similar to http and it has this 402 error that's like mind blowing i've always thought like payments on the internet payments that pos system but never thought like telecommunications like making a phone

call yeah there's architecture yeah that bitcoin can fit into absolutely i mean you know um sip is by far and away the dominant you know voice video protocol used in telecom networks you know all over the world um you know most of the voice video traffic all over the world is flowing over the protocol in some form or fashion um and you know it's not just for you know telecom like phones you know pstn phone systems like when you spin up a vita rim uh you know and join the rim there's a session being initiated over web rtc like from your browser so you know the same protocol that we can use to enable a carrier to bill for the traffic flowing through their network in real time lets us do the same thing in a web session you know to your vita rim so it's it's the same

technology, but it's compatible with all of the existing telecom networks that, you know, that are out there. And that's a real important part of our vision, you know, because all of the VITA services, whether it's, you know, sending a paid message or like, you know, paying to watch a live stream or paying to join, you know, a VITA room, conference room, that's the same technology that would be used by a international carrier that is, you know, sending a voice call to Latin america and they're eliminating their settlement risk because they're getting paid in real time as that call progresses yeah and you quantified the telecommunications industry is a 1.4 trillion dollar industry but when it comes to like settlement risk and spamming like how big of a

problem is that from a monetary perspective it's a 20 to 40 billion dollar annual you know problem So essentially, telecom companies lose that much money every year to these spam and fraud campaigns. You know, lately, there's been like a huge regulatory push in the United States, especially around, you know, SMS spam. You know, we're all tired of getting the SMS spam and spam hitting your phones. You know, our phones just constantly, you know, ring all the time. Why? Because it's free. It's literally free for a spammer to make your phone ring. Right. That's the underlying problem. And, you know, the government's trying to create all these rules. There's these new things called stir shaken, which is kind of like they make anyone originating a call into the PSTN use a special certificate so that they can trace the spam back to the source. but it's kind of a losing battle. Um, you know, but if we just could address the real issue,

which is it's free to make your phone ring, you know, if we could put a price on making that happen, even if it was just a few sats, you know, it would completely eliminate all of that. Uh, so, you know, it's going to take us a while to, you know, change this 20 to $40 billion a year problem, you know, with Bitcoin. But my view is that over time, all the telecom networks are going to wake up to the fact that this is now possible and uh you know part of them waking up is going to be us sort of telling that story yeah and so functionally how does how does it work how would it work in your grand vision in the future when the infrastructure is all built out lightning's fully enabled for an end user what does that look like when they're making a call they have to send

some sats is there like a staking thing where they get them back or is it a de minimis amount where Yeah, I think it's a de minimis amount. But, you know, I think whatever app or, you know, phone you're using to make that call is essentially going to have, you know, a wallet associated with it. And then the destination is going to have a wallet associated with it. And then, you know, if you want to make somebody's phone buzz, you got to, you know, you have to pay whatever the destination rate is. Um, you know, sometimes maybe those rates will be set by, you know, the carrier providing the service. Maybe they're set by the end user, you know, directly. That's my hope is that end users have control over, you know, the prices, um, you know, of, uh, the, the price for distracting them, right. With some notification. Uh, but it could turn out, it could turn out lots of different ways. You know, I can't predict the future. All I know is that real-time settlement's definitely going to be used in this, you know, in this industry and it's going to need some specific

building blocks in order to make, you know, any of these use cases happen. So we're sort of starting at the bottom and, you know, and building up. Yeah. And so what's the settlement time dilation like right now? Yeah. I mean, it can take, you know, 30, 60, 90 days for a carrier, you know, to get paid for traffic that they handle on behalf of another carrier. Like, you know, another good examples like international roaming so let's say you take your phone to france and like your phone is connected to like an orange telecom you know tower in france and you're using data that they're providing you know through their tower and um you know you go home and then like 90 days later orange gets paid you know by at&t or something like that right so this isn't about just like

legacy phone call you know voip calls or like you know legacy sms's it's about international data roaming but also it's about enabling uh spam prevention on new protocols like like noster you know we've already seen the power of you know zaps as a signal you know on a twitter like you know post in noster but the same thing could be done with a dm right why don't we have noster clients that let you set a dm threshold such that the client only shows dms in your inbox if they've been zapped, you know, based on whatever your minimum amount is that you set, you know, to capture your attention. My view is that that's going to be the inevitable path that Nostra clients take because they're going to face the same spam problems that, you know, all other open

protocols face. So, you know, something we've been doing in Vita is integrating as much as possible with Nostra. You can, you know, log in, you can, if you land in a Vita room right now where this live stream is going, you're going to get a little pop up. If you have a Nostra extension installed that says, Hey, you know, log in with Nostra right now, you log in, we import your lightning address. So if you get paid, it goes straight to your lightning address. You know, we use non-custodial web LN to, uh, you know, zap the room, uh, you know, just like you would in any other Nostra client later, we want to merge our messaging interface with Nostra encrypted DMS behind the scenes so that it's cross compatible. You know, um, we were not

trying to build a walled garden we're trying to sort of set an example of what uh you know real time payments how real-time payments can enhance and enable you know communications in different ways yeah it's been really cool to see you really lean in to noster yeah and then what we were discussing last week too like leaning into the ai stuff and yeah how this new open communication protocol with Nostr and this new productivity tool in AI can sort of supercharge what you're able to build. Yeah. You know, we have, I hesitate to say this, but we've rolled out an experiment like actually last night where anyone with a Vita account can actually go in and turn on an AI agent on their Vita account. And it's pretty simple. Like you configure this welcome message that this

The AI agent will send to anybody that lands on the landing page for the AI agent. It's like Vita.cash slash whatever your username is. And then you can tell the agent, hey, I want you to ask questions about this video that you just provided to the user and make sure they understood X, Y, or Z about the video. So imagine you're a marketer and you are promoting a product. right? And you've got like the 60 second ad or like promotional video about some product you're releasing. So the bot says, Hey, you know, I'm here to give out Bitcoin rewards. Uh, if you talk to me about this video. And so the user watches the video, they say, okay, I'm ready. Chatbot responds, you know, what did you think about like the color of the, you know, a Cadillac, you know,

in this video, right? User responds, you know, what's your favorite thing, you know, about this new Cadillac? Like, what do you like most about it? User responds. And then after a couple of questions, the bot responds, Hey, you know, here's 200 sats, you know, for, for telling me about this. And it's the same Vita messaging interface that, you know, you can use to charge for receiving messages. It's just the opposite. It's one that does the opposite. It's one that pays out Bitcoin for interacting with it. And so, um, you know, our hope with this tool is that it's sort of a backdoor way to get, uh, you know, brands and products and people spending money to promote their products to essentially buy bitcoin you know give it out to millions of people so

we'll see um it's it's an experiment but yeah check it out you know go to go to vita.live or vita.page click on automations and set one up and you know see what happens yeah and particularly for like the end user flow too i think what you're doing by leaning in the nostre if somebody has a nostre profile set up with an ellen address in it it's making it very seamless to get paid yeah as an end user across the internet. I mean, Vita is just one example, but I think what you just described, if you use the Noster sign-in flow, it's like seamless monetization for the end user. Yeah. It goes straight to you. We don't touch your money. You know, it's a, that's a big part of, you know, we've been, it takes a lot of time actually to, you know, make your product work

non-custodially. You know, there's still, there's still a lot of, you know, pain points in, you know, in doing that. But, you know, every year, every month they get, you know, the community sort of solves a few more of them, makes it easier. Now things are easy enough such that, you know, you can have a lightning address, which was a huge, a huge win.

You know, Andre from Zebedee, you know, sort of inventing that was a huge thing because it's easy. It's just like a, you know, it's an email address that you can use to receive Bitcoin. So, you know, getting Vita to work with Lightning addresses so you can bring any Lightning address to the platform. And any time you get paid on the platform, it goes straight to your Lightning address. That was a big thing. And then recently, over the past couple of weeks, rolling out WebLend support so that, you know, you can make payments to other Vita users, whether you're chatting with them, whether you're on a one-on-one call with them, whether you're in a room with them.

And, you know, we don't touch your money. It goes straight from your, you know, your WebLend enabled wallet. and um you know if the user on the other side has a lightning address it goes straight to their lightning address and we're not in the middle um but you know the number of people that sort of can use these non-custodial tools is still very small so you know we do support you know just signing up and uh you know customing your funds you know for now to make it easy but uh we're hoping to you know eventually be able to sort of uh you know lead users into using it non-custodially yeah so what are your thoughts on the current state of lightning obviously you're building on

it there's a lot of naysayers out there yeah you mean like uh in the recent hyphy environment yes you know there's been so much uh anti-lightning fud you know in this hyphy environment a lot of it seems to originate from people that, you know, were maybe running a lightning node and, you know, perhaps they had like this forced channel close or something while fees were high. And yeah, that sucks. You know, we definitely need our lightning nodes to, you know, better handle situations like that. But I mean, the fact still remains that if you have a lightning wallet, and that wallet has some connectivity to a channel with capacity you know you can send bitcoin instantly without you know hitting the mempool and without paying fees like that's still

the reality um i think that you know in the future things like fedements and um you know things like that are going to make onboarding users much easier uh so i don't know i mean i I think it's, you know, people are just mad and, you know, yelling on Twitter. Yeah. So, not being rude, I'm opening my phone. We have 11 people in the Vita live chat. It's audio only. Can you turn on the video in Vita?

If you go to the Vita page. It should be picking up the video. I was considering restarting just Vita's end of it to see if that'll fix it. i wonder if it's uh i wonder if it's like a weird restream issue it might be a restream restreams restreams been weird about that sometimes about certain platforms no but it's been cool i mean you freaks can't see maybe we can pull it up on the screen though logan for anybody watching just to give them uh a view of what it's like in the chat we've been zapped four times we've got people chatting and so like for

rhr specifically which is a live show every week this is something that we're going to integrate and hopefully move our live chat over to vita yeah and we'll be able to overlay this on the screen correct yeah yeah yeah cool yeah it's uh that's fascinating how how good it works too it just works yeah well it's taken a lot of time to get that you know to uh to you know get the ux right and um you know doing real-time video is not simple um you know but fortunately we've we've had experience building things like this before. Um, not simple as the video is not even showing on the, hopefully we'll figure that out. But yeah, I mean, um, you know, I don't know doing, we want to build tools that are useful, right? We want to build tools that are useful to people

in a variety of contexts that make it easy to earn Bitcoin online. And, uh, we want to make it easy for brands to be able to, you know, cut people in to their promotional campaigns so that, you know, they're earning when they're giving up their attention to a brand. Like fundamentally, that's a big problem on the internet, right? We consume these ads on all these platforms all the time. They're monetizing our attention. You know, they're monetizing our time sort of without our consent and without us getting anything for it, you know? And if we can build if we can tweak tools and build platforms that let brands, uh, you know, cut an audience into, you know, their promotion, then it better aligns the incentives of the, you know, the,

the brand user relationship. And we distribute sats to people using marketing dollars that are already getting spent, you know, out in the wild. And, um, you know, that's a, that's hugely powerful thing i mean you know if we can create a product that you know apple wants to use you know to promote something in the future you know that's a ton of money flowing into bitcoin you know that people you know like you and me plebs are getting and they're in their pockets yeah and with the ai chatbot specifically like the brands love this because you're like forced to interact and actually pay attention and then you get when we talked about this last week you get rewarded and sats for that like what does that sat reward do psychologically for the consumer

they're like oh i got sats from this brand maybe i should go buy their product yeah yeah maybe or and you know maybe the brand can even you know boost it if you do go buy you know buy the product give you sats back you know if you come back and say yeah hey i followed up on this and i actually bought this thing, you know? Um, but yeah, I mean, it's, uh, it's still early in our vision, but, um, you know, we're moving quickly. Uh, it's only three of us, you know, full time so far. Um, me and my co-founders, Brandon and Noah, uh, and, uh, yeah, it's been great. You know, the, those guys, they're super talented. I couldn't have done all this by myself. Um, and I'm, I'm fortunate to have those guys to sort of help make this vision a reality.

Well, for you, I mean, I've gotten to know you very well and Brandon and Noah not as well, but well enough to know that I think you guys as a team building in Bitcoin is something that anybody listening to this who's a hardcore Bitcoiner should be extremely excited about because you guys are competent killer builders who have all successfully launched and sold companies in the past and have now dedicated yourselves to building out a product

that leverages Bitcoin in a very unique and powerful way. Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think it's inevitable that more teams like ours move into building on Bitcoin. I mean, I guess the light spark, David Marcus, he's another example of somebody who's been successful in some other context, who's now, you know, understood the truth about Bitcoin and the lightning network and is now, you know, building in the space. And over time, you know, that's inevitable. More people are going to wake up because, you know, lightning is the best protocol

for instantly sending value over the internet. I mean, it's just, it's not a, you know, it's not like a debatable thing when you understand, you know, the limitations of blockchains, you know, and digital currencies and how things work like lightning is the best and it's going to pull in teams like ours you know um and it's going to snowball you know it's just sort of still the beginning yeah to give the freaks a little history of of your team because you guys have worked together not broken up but like gone done your own thing and then eventually gotten back together yeah yeah uh so uh noah and i actually were college roommates um back in college we used to run this website uh called vg pro video game pro.com and uh it started out as like a you know

a file site like a video game file site so like if you wanted to download a patch you know for a game you would come to our you know to our website to do that or like if you are a mod publisher and you wanted to like upload your mod for the community to you know download it you could do that on vg pro you could like put your own ads so that your ads were shown on your mod pages so you sort of monetize your mods um so like noah and i were working on internet monetization you know like 15 years ago or actually longer than that i'm kind of you know aging myself but um yeah i mean we've been we've been working on this for a long time vg pro we had like a million and a half uniques a month you know on the website so it was pretty you know pretty significant uh traffic

profile but we also remember like getting totally screwed by ad networks you know uh back then you know we would make like cents per cpm while they would be you know charging brands and stuff you know 30 bucks you know cpm or something like that and so we always sort of wanted to create better monetization tools that you know rewarded the content producers you know in a more equitable way. And then also rewarded the people consuming those advertisements, um, you know, as well. And, you know, here many years later, you know, we've come back together and, you know, started working on that. Um, you know, Noah's a really super talented guy. He's one of those rare guys that can, uh, you know, actually code and build and design, you know, and make things look

incredible. Uh, you know, has a, has a real mind for user experience and, you know, making things work well. You know, he was previously an entrepreneur in residence at Gradient Ventures, which is Google's AI venture arm. Before that, you know, he founded a company called Radius. You know, they raised like $130 million and sold. And then Brandon, I met at IntelliQuint. He sort of joined through a different acquisition from mine, but, you know, we're sort of, you know, similar contexts, you know, similar stages in life, similar interests, Uh, you know, we worked together for five years while, while we were there. And when I left to do Vita, it was just sort of like a no brainer, you know, for him to

come along to, he's also super talented engineer, a builder, you know, business guy, he's led 150 person engineering teams, you know, so knows about building organizations, uh, at scale and building networks and systems that, you know, have to function at scale. So, you know, I mean, I'm super blessed to, you know, to have these two guys, you know, building this with me yeah no it shows in the product like it's beautiful it works and again i'm extremely excited to have builders like you three in this space not to denigrate anybody who's been building in the space today but again it's we've had this thesis that eventually it's similar to the 90s where people didn't realize it but everywhere is going to be a

quote-unquote, internet company. And we're in that similar period with Bitcoin where everybody's going to not be a Bitcoin company, but they're going to have Bitcoin integrated into their stack. And it takes competent builders that can actually build and then scale a product to bring that thesis and that vision to fruition. Yeah, and, you know, it's like no builder can predict the future,

but you can sort of have an idea about you know what the future is going to look like you know you can have an idea about how a piece of technology is going to influence you know the way an industry moves you know like like telecom or like advertising or marketing and um you know it's um it's it's fortunate to be working with guys that understand that you you know you can't nail you know the perfect sort of idea of how the future is going to manifest like on the first try like it takes constant iteration constant building willingness to get your hands dirty willingness to try something throw it away if it doesn't work you know willingness to try something if it does seem like it's working to you know reinvest heavily quickly you know to flesh it out

and that's what we've been doing you know for the past for the past year actually not quite a year and um you know looking forward to kind of continuing that momentum continuing to build that momentum um you know we just i guess we can talk about this haven't really talked about it publicly anywhere else but you know we just closed some some fundraising some funding uh thank you 1031 for participating in that uh very excited yeah um you know we we've already brought on uh one uh person in sort of a part-time role that we're hoping to bring on full-time you know uh soon so we're already sort of beginning to expand the team and uh you know more resources to push this vision along and uh push the rock up the hill yeah

what we're trying to do now by showcasing this on vita because you mentioned restream earlier like ideally at some point in the next couple months we just completely replace restream with vita we do all of our uh rtmp what is it yeah rtmp rtmp forwarding from vita instead of going to restream yeah and i pay a lot for restream per month just to do all that just to do the forwarding and the aggregation of the different social platforms we send it to um so it's a highly valuable product but um it also excites me incredibly because it creates this vision of people talk about crossing the chasm into the mainstream for bitcoin like once it gets caught up in the minds of influencers or i shouldn't say content creators that uh that aren't really

privy to bitcoin or aware of bitcoin they find that they can get a restream like experience with vita and not only that they get the added benefit of embedded monetization yeah that could be massive for for adoption yeah i mean you know that's a that sort of bigger point in general of you know if we want to expand you know the footprint of bitcoiners you know we want to bring people in to you know using bitcoin like we need to build products that normal people that don't necessarily care about bitcoin can get value from right regardless and you know by getting value in some you know way unrelated to bitcoin but by placing sort of bitcoin as a part of the bigger experience that they can also benefit from we show them the benefits you know

we're not telling them we're showing them the benefits of turning on this feature you know enabling payments on their chat you know enabling you know payments on their join to participate but at the same time you know we're still providing this high quality product that you know functions as well as restream does the things that restream does functions as well as Riverside, you know, does HD local recordings, uh, shout out to Kevin Rook, um, who has been helping us test our HD local recording a lot over the past, uh, over the past few weeks. Um, but yeah, you know, he's, he's a good example. He used to record all this podcast on Riverside because they do the HD local recording where, you know, it doesn't matter how bad the internet

connection is of the person joining, you know, you're still going to get that high quality local stream from your participant. And, uh, you know, you can do that for free in Vita, in a Vita room, you know, so, um, there's no reason, you know, to go use a product like, uh, like Riverside and that's tangible value that anyone can, you know, get benefit from. And, uh, you know, over time we hope that by offering that, you know, those points of tangible value, we get more creators using our platform, using our product, um, you know, creating and recording their podcasts and turning them into live shows you know on the platform and then in turn exposing them to the rest of our tools yeah and again getting very excited here because we talked

about the bigger picture of like telecom the settlement risk the potential there and the opportunity to to fix that problem that's why we're very excited 1031 to be partnering with and supporting you guys because the like it goes well beyond telecom yeah like content creators into the mix like there's yeah a wide spectrum of places that you guys can fit into yeah absolutely um i mean you know fundamentally communications right telecommunications i mean it's it's fundamentally about you know connecting you know people to one another and like telecommunicate the telecommunications industry manifests like in tons of things like zoom, right. As a part of the telecommunications industry, you know,

Google meet, right. That's like a telecommunications product. You know, YouTube, a YouTube stream, right. You know, this is another good example. So like it touches everything, communication tools, touch everything, you know, all kinds of business interactions, you know, all kinds of, you know, products, you know, use APIs, communication apis under the hood and um you know we're just trying to build you know useful things in that industry and that leverages bitcoin you know to settle the value of that communication and uh you know eventually we're going to find all sorts of use cases that you know that that

are valuable um even like things like just conferences like helping conferences monetize you know they're they're paid live streams a couple of weeks ago btc plus plus used vita you know to uh monetize their live stream you know uh it's literally just sending an rtmp stream to the platform and you have a paid you know a live stream like there's no there's not an easier way to do it uh you know and uh so yeah if you're listening to this and you put on a conference you know use vita yeah you put that that's like the lightning paywall to get in like similar we have with the newsletter when we do the paywall to post bits for for live streaming it's it's uh again very exciting that uh yeah that we're at this point like did you think

and going back to like bitcoin more broadly did you think bitcoin would be at this stage where you can build these types of tools because you've been in it for a while yeah um i mean i remember reading the you know the lightning network paper in 2017 i guess is when it was yeah 2017 maybe it was 2016 when the paper came maybe 2016 i can't remember um but you know i remember being a little bit skeptical because you know it seemed complex right um and that was a lot of the early you know sort of hate you know i can speak oh this is too complex it'll never work right well you know um building things that scale is hard right there's a reason why it's complex like you can't you know the world the world's communication cannot run on a base layer whether your blocks are

you know 10 terabytes big or whether you're you know um whether you can handle i don't know 17,000 transactions a second like like uh solana or something like that it doesn't matter like that's still a micro tiny portion of what the world needs and to you know have a protocol like lightning that scales yeah it has some additional complexity but that's why it works and um you know in 2018 when like when when i was working on that project and lnd came out and it was working it's like you know it's like okay well you know this is actually um this is actually a reasonable path and you know it's only been a year and it's already doing this, you know, what are, what are the Bitcoiners going to build, you know, in another year from now and another year from now, and now, holy crap, it's

20, 23, you know, today, and we can do stuff like this, you know, and we have people like David Marcus also building in the space and, you know, and we have so much more momentum, you know, and it's only been a, it's only been a few years, you know, and we have like decades ahead, you know yeah no i feel fortunate not just for myself but for my children for humanity more broadly that we do have the ability to build this stuff right now because yeah you look out at the world it's getting very necessary yes it's desperately needed yeah for sure for sure it's um the world's world's getting crazy you know um part of me you know hopes it slows down a little bit you know because we've got a lot of stuff to build uh you know the past week you know with uh the fee the fee spike

you know i think it's sort of open everyone's eyes to wow you know this could this could happen at any moment right there's nothing in the protocol preventing fees from increasing by an order of magnitude tomorrow if some event happens right maybe that event is like some shit coiners putting shit on the chain you know or maybe that event is like you know a major nation you know adopting or like you know something leaking that you know somebody's mining you know or something like that which has been happening which has been happening right so i mean at any day my point is that the base chain you know can become a lot more expensive and we as bitcoiners have a lot of work to do to make sure that you know we have the the necessary tools um you know available for

for users to keep growing and you know builders to keep building um so what uh what would you define as your like low-hanging fruit of stuff that needs to get done that's actionable like in the short term to yeah um well you know i think personally i'm like super bullish on on fediments and you know stuff that the guys at fetty are doing uh justin moon i mean he's right right behind us. Yeah. Justin, I mean, you're doing great work, but, um, I mean, it's, uh, it's, you know, something like that is going to be necessary, um, because it's the easiest onboarding tool, uh, you know, for, uh, for sort of a unaware, um, you know, non-technical person to, you know, to use. Uh, the other thing is that for services like Vita, you know, applications

that are trying to be able to provide a service, you know, to users in a way that we don't have to hold their money. Right. If every lightning product out there, like Vita has to be partially custodial, that's not going to work long-term. Right. I mean, eventually the government's going to make it too hard or, you know, something, you know, it's just, it's just not going to work. Right. But if you could log into Vita with, you know, a Fetty account and sort of bring your money end of the service, right. Um, it would make things a lot easier. So, you know, I think we need more things like that, uh, as fast as possible. Um, you know, even things like Ellen bits, you know, behind the scenes, like if we had, um, a whole bunch of people running, you know,

uncle Jim, Ellen bits nodes, you know, that would be helpful too. But, uh, you know, we need the, we need the privacy layer of, you know, effediments and, and Xiaomi and e-cash to sort of, uh, close the loop on you know on that on that ux equation i think yeah i agree it's got to get a lot easier for the masses that's why i actually dropped an episode with obi this morning talking about where they're at and they're getting close to launch and again that ux of just man what they've done like how they've sort of uh you know shifted their their vision and turned it into like this mobile app that lets any community sort of onboard into like this essentially like it's like this i don't know community bank home you know yeah in an app um you know it's really

it's really amazing uh i was talking to a guy about this i guess it was earlier this week over beers and he's like really interested in building you know um sort of self-sustainable agricultural industrial communities you know and co-ops and stuff and uh we got to talking about like how you know big big industry big farming is like destroyed a lot of part of america a lot of sort of the you know i don't know how to say this the um it's destroyed a bit of the you know the legacy in you know the legacy of the small family farm that used to be self-sufficient and self-sustaining you know and well one of the big you know misaligned incentives that has destroyed that you know is fiat money you know and we got into all that but now you know you can create this

sort of community bank um you know that where the incentives of incentives of the bank are completely aligned with the community's purpose whatever that is um and that's a i think that's going to be a powerful super powerful thing i do as well sorry we um i've got uh my son's got a sickness that my wife's texting me about i just had to get that that's important for sure yeah the um no but it's it's feels like it's needed now more than ever like just getting it to that point where it's easy for people to onboard again crossing the chasm with a product like vita where you sort of trojan horse it into the just the met like massive content creators out there and then you think about how viral can get there where you have like there's a show whatever

where this guy in california brings on all these girls to talk about like the uh the dating the dating scene in the world right now they monetize via super chats and i think about this my youtube page too because return on monetization recently and like it's net 30 and we don't even and they're taking 50 and they're taking 50 and then all is going to take is from the vita perspective is one um big content creator be like holy crap yeah i'm making keeping more money than i ever had settling instantly that's letting me reinvest in what i'm doing quicker uh i'm partnering with advertisers who are willing to spend more because they know they can get better attention with this ai chat bot that um can uh that can demand sort of attention from

the end user and so that's like on the content creator side something like fetty you have this user experience where it's just easy to onboard and people are using it and you have the viral nature of that where it's, Hey, it took me five, five minutes to get on this app and I received money instantly from another part of the world. Similarly, we've seen this with strike and they're saying globally, like people in Vietnam who use it for the first time, like, Holy crap, I got money in two minutes and I didn't pay 10% in fees. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's so many flywheels that are beginning to turn, you know, it's like, uh, you know, two or three years ago right we had a couple of flywheels and they were just barely budging right

and you know we were all having to sort of push them to get them to turn right now they're beginning to get some momentum you know there's a whole lot more you know there's a whole lot more things that are sort of driving people into the ecosystem and um you know those things are only going to grow but you know we do have to stay focused on like providing real tangible value that people want and need to use right like we can't there's no way that vita is like a content destination is going to replace youtube like anytime soon right but we can provide a great experience that makes producing content uh you know really easy and makes monetizing that content really easy where you can still push the content to youtube where your audience is and then over

time as that audience moves you know to vita well then you know that's great it helps us but well i think that's another product feature to highlight is like it's not just for live streaming like the video will live on the platform after yeah it's been recorded yeah yeah um you know people can come and you know watch the replay uh you know on vita um you know if you're if you're sort of originating a stream from vita you can push it out to other destinations you know like youtube or twitter or wherever your audience is we've got a lot of plans for like overlaying monetization um, into those video feeds that go out to those other destinations, you know? Um, so, you know, it's, uh, again, it's still, it's still the beginning, but it's such a big, such a big space.

You know, the building blocks that we're building are so useful, you know, in such a broad variety of contexts that, you know, it's sort of inevitable that we find, you know, people that want to use them i mean you know it's uh it's uh it's communication tools with monetization you know it's uh it's uh it's a useful thing it's very useful and again with master too like the the blending it feels like you can see like the the slow merge towards that protocol yeah i'm a huge um a huge master fan um are we allowed to talk about what you guys are thinking from the the relay perspective yeah yeah for sure um so like we you know we have this media server that you know powers things like our video calls and our video

rooms right um it's built on open source tech in fact the media server itself is actually open source today i think if you go on my github you can you can find it but um you know the vision is that we want to let anybody deploy one of these media servers um and they're designed to be run alongside a Nostra relay. We haven't released the stuff that sort of the Nostra hooks that hook into the media server that make it easy for anyone with a Nostra pub key to sort of host one of these. That's what we're trying to finish up.

But the vision is that you can run one of these media servers alongside a Nostra relay, and it essentially becomes like a voice video relay server, Nostra relay server, that you can interact with with your Nostra pub keys. You know, another example is like the chat and Vita rooms. We're working on mirroring to NIP 28 public chat rooms in Nostra. So, you know, the chat in a Vita room, you can open up in a Nostra chat client, you know, and interact with the chat. You don't have to use our clients. Again, we're not, you know, we're not trying to build a walled garden, you know, app. You know, we're trying to, we're trying to build new tools that the community, you know, can use. Um, and that includes like, you know, you'll be, if you're hosting one of these media servers, you can like all of your streams can originate from your media server. And if you go live and broadcast that stream, all the other Nostra relay servers will, will know where to access the broadcast and be able to relay the actual, you know, broadcast so that we're not dependent on, you know, centralized, you know, broadcast, uh, platforms like YouTube. Um, you know, so that's, uh, you know, it's, uh, still in the works, you know, but I think Nostra is very powerful because it's simple, you know, it's a, it's a relatively, um, simple

protocol and that makes it easy to build on. It makes it easy for, you know, people like us who, you know, we're not like Nostra experts, but we know how web sockets work, you know, and we know how like pushing events works, you know, and it lets us sort of build this into the ecosystem in a way that is useful to you know others in the in the community yeah i mean it's been mind-blowing to see the innovation that's been happening on nostre i mean start with domus and snort social and similar twitter-like clients but seeing it expand into different types of presentations for the events that are streamed yeah yeah or pushed to nostre yeah i mean you know like if you, Elon just yesterday, you know, was talking about how he's, you know, trying to bring

voice and video, encrypted voice and video calls, you know, to Twitter. And, you know, supposedly they have like encrypted DMs, which are, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't trust your, you know, your personal information with that yet. So, but, you know, that's what he's trying to do, right? Twitter already have spaces, right? You know, not the Nostra community, Nostr clients need tooling to be able to also offer experiences like that. You know, with our Vita media relay server, you can host, you know, audio rooms like spaces, but you can also do full video rooms, you know, with full broadcasts. You know, you can do one-on-one encrypted video calls and encrypted audio calls with ZRTP, you know, so like we hope to be able to, you know, provide

these this sort of piece of infrastructure that others can you know continue building on such that eventually you know if you're on vita hosting a live stream you know maybe someone else is watching that you know and consuming that in some other noster client participating in the chat and some other noster client zapping your room with some other noster client there's no reason why that can't happen no and another thing too that you've been leveraging as well we talked about last week is like ai as a way to help you actually build and think through problems and if you're comfortable sharing i mean the story you told me last week of how much time you saved yeah um i mean there's a ton of hype right with chad gbt and gbt4 but there's also a ton of

value i mean it is a useful tool um you know if you if you are a developer right and you've ever try to, um, you know, like you're, you're trying to build something or engineer something that you haven't ever, you know, done before or approach before. Right. Typically, you know, you'd go to Google, right. And start, start Googling, right. Start reading stack overflow, start, you know, start reading forum posts about how somebody has approached this problem before and how you can sort of fit that into your context. Right. I mean, I am an expert Googler, like, I mean, like i'm a self-taught you know and you know programmer you know google taught me you know how to code right uh i mean it's been a long time but but but you know google taught me but now you

know if you have a a problem you know a coding challenge or something you're trying to figure out you know how to do you can literally ask this thing and it gives you examples you know of code and then you know if the example comes back and it doesn't quite fit your context you can just give it your context and it rewrites it, you know, specifically for you. And I don't know how much time I've saved, you know, over the past couple of months, like, you know, feeding problems in this thing and it giving, you know, valuable solutions. Now, you know, it doesn't mean that it's like, you know, spitting you out like perfect bug free thing that you can just like paste into your platform, but it's a lot more and a lot more faster, you know, useful, you know,

output than sort of, you know, spending a few hours researching a problem, collecting, you know, solutions and, you know, and going about it like that. And just over the past few months, sort of interacting with GPT in these ways, you know, sort of made it clear that, you know, there was an opportunity for us to leverage things like that in Vita, you know, to provide, again, useful communication tools for individuals or for brands you know we're trying to promote products you know useful tools that help us sort of distribute sats to more people faster you know which is sort of a you know big goal of mine with vita um yeah and i mean i was playing around with one of the ai agent softwares and browser softwares yesterday uh and just fed it like a simple

um prompt like hey check out my website tftc.io and help me figure out like a seo strategy to get better um discovery on the search engines yeah it ran it like looked at the website figured out and telling anything about the website i was like all right you talk about bitcoin a lot let's search bitcoin for like the top keywords and then it was like all right i'm going to download this open source scraper and like scrape the web to figure out yes and it did that like and i'm thinking and i spent a dollar to for it to do all that and like spit me out like a strategy with like the words and how best to improve seo that would have cost me like thousands of dollars yeah yeah it's um i mean there's no denying it it is a you know it's a disruptive

thing um my hope is that well actually last week there was a sort of leaked uh internal report from google where they were talking about uh where google was talking about open ai doesn't have a moat google doesn't have a moat people using these open source uh lms are already outperforming you know what we can do um you know this the cat's out of the bag right and we as sort of a developer community that loves freedom i mean that's what sort of what bitcoiners are right like we need to make sure that um the open source community keeps pace right because there's definitely some dystopian things that could you know that could come about if like there's one big llm provider and like it's you need to use world coin tax orb dude you know um sam orb dude

it's uh it's uh like that that could be bad right uh but um you know i'm i'm confident that uh you know we'll figure out cool things and we'll you know we'll be able to actually push forward with uh open source tool sets and open source lms you know weights that we can feed into to other projects and not sort of be dependent upon these monolithic providers I mean, even Google is afraid of the open source community and what they're doing already. Could you explain the difference between an open source AI LLM and the waiting system and what OpenAI or Google or Microsoft's doing? Yeah, I mean, I could give it a shot. So an LLM is trained on tons of input, tons of data, right?

And it's just a pattern matcher, right? It's a, it's something that you give it a prompt and it's literally generating, you know, word by word, really less than that, you know, letter character by character, you know, and trying to sort of fit a pattern that, that matches the input that it, you know, that, that it was fed. Right. Well, uh, a while back, Facebook open sourced a, um, an LLM. I can't remember, I can't remember how many, um, inputs, you know, there's has versus open AI,

but, uh, there's been a lot of innovation to essentially do more, uh, with less. And so this open source thing that Facebook released is now powering tons of open source projects, uh, you know, for totally free, like people have this LLM running in the browser, like using Wasm, um, uh, running on mobile, you know, and, you know, maybe it's not like exactly as good as GPT-4, you know, in certain contexts, but it's literally been like two months, you know? So it's like, you know, it's, um, it's, uh, the thing, the thing about these, these LLMs is like, if you have the weights, you have everything you need. Um, what are the weights? It's, it's hard. It's hard to explain. It's, um, think of it like, think of like your brain, right? You have all these neurons

in your brains right in your brain and there are these connections right between each neuron in your brain and some of those connections are like stronger you know than others and so like when your eyes receive input like and it's feeding through neurons in your brain right you're you're used to looking at things in a specific way and so your neurons in your brain are like weighted right to consume that information filter and filter it in a certain way right lom weights are kind of the same thing right it's thousands you know millions of parameters of weights where you put in information and it's filtering through this you know graph of neurons you know to sort of come up with a with an output right and those weights are like you can sort of if once

they leak like they're out right you don't have to retrain the whole lm like the weights are like sort of, it's like a, it's like taking a brain, you know, and sort of plugging it into something else. And if you think about it, it's kind of scary because like, what if, um, you know, what if, you know, some company does create, you know, a much more powerful, um, evil system and those weights get leaked to like North Korea, you know, or something like that. Right. Um, I, I wonder how much you know these companies are investing in security you know for these for these things uh i guess we'll find out you know over the next few months yeah in the context of like open source for the closed source you have to imagine the open source is going to win out just because

people are going to want to use it for free and then they'll get so much more data yeah um you know like the the argument there's been an argument you know for the past i don't know a few years a while that you know open source can't win the ai race because all the data that you train you know these these elements on is like proprietary it's like a good example is like tesla right tesla cars are much better at self-driving than like anything else and the reason for that is they've been collecting real driving data you know for over a decade now real driving data and like all sorts of scenarios right and that data that is being fed into their machine learning you know self-driving algorithms is you know it's valuable right like um if gm you know when they

bought cruise if they would have had the same data they'd probably be a lot further you know now with their with their efforts but it's like the counter argument is that like data is everywhere you know it's like you know the internet is full of it right it's like unless you unless you're training something for a very very specific um you know use case that needs like very very specific you know hard to collect data um you know like you can get data everywhere the entire internet you know is just data and that's what these llms have been you know fed on and and now we already have an open source one that's being leveraged and improved in like tons of ways and so i don't know i'm i guess i'm you know maybe not confident but i'm hopeful that like you know the open source

community can build enough of a bastion to you know to compete against these uh you know um these orb scanners the sam orb guy orb dude no that's funny too that facebook released the open source one is zuck having like a come to jesus moment he's doing muay thai he's yeah that's a question getting jacked surfing you know he foiling you know maybe he is you know maybe uh maybe he's actually you know becoming a bitcoiner too watching his buddy david marcus you know do stuff over there i don't know we'll see that would be talk about a crossing the chasm moment yeah it was obviously they did libra well that's where it tried to got shot down pretty quickly yeah i'm not gonna hold my breath for zuck though me neither

But thanks for the, the LLM. Do you think this stuff can be applied to like Bitcoin and make lightning better? Could it, it's helping you build your products, I guess. Yeah.

I mean, you know, I think it's, I think, I think what these things do is they help people do more with less, you know, we're going to see like teams, we're going to see very small teams do,

you know, build incredible companies and produce incredible content. I mean, like Hollywood's probably going to die. I mean, like, you know, like you're going to be able to produce a movie, um, you know, like three dudes in a garage are going to be able to just produce this incredible, you know, stuff, uh, using these tools. But, you know, like if we can do it, like anybody else can do it too. Right. So it's lowering

the barriers, uh, you know, to, to creating incredible things. So, you know, I think that it's going to, you know, it's going to, it's going to change the world for sure, because it's going empower capable people to do even more um you know is it going to disrupt a ton of stuff absolutely yeah i mean the government is going to print so much money trying to keep the world the same you know i mean it's it's it's going to be nuts you know the world is going to change and the government's not going to like that because it's going to change so much it's going to destroy all sorts of things you know but uh i don't know buckle up i guess yeah it's really i mean it's a chinese proverb or curse may you live in interesting times and

at any point in history the person living in the present can say this is the most interesting time but it does seem like this is the most interesting time when you factor in the unraveling of the banking financial centralized government system that seems to be losing control and there's a collapse in confidence and then you have the rise of bitcoin and this which is a a deflationary currency with massive deflationary pressures on the tech side with stuff like ai it's just like how like it feels like we're in the middle of like a washing machine and yeah all this stuff is going on at once yeah it's um i mean you know i've heard these arguments that Like, you know, AI is communism, you know, and like Bitcoin is, you know, democracy or libertarianism or whatever.

But like if you think about it in the context of smaller groups of people are going to be able to do more with less. That fundamentally is a hugely decentralizing force, right? What would have previously taken, you know, sort of a combined organization of thousands of people, you know, to accomplish, which is like a, you know, a centralizing force, right? It requires all of these, you know, this organization, you know, supporting all of these thousands of people to sort of accomplish something. And then you're going to say, okay, well, now with these tools, a small group of people can accomplish the same thing. That's decentralizing in society, you know, that's not centralizing. So maybe the, you know, the, the, you know, the training or whatever is centralized, but if we have these open source systems, it's very empowering, you know, for a more decentralized world, I think. And I wouldn't have told you that a year ago, you know, because, you know, I was still, you know, worried that these things would only be, you know, created and accessible in these walled gardens, you know?

Yeah. No, I'm very optimistic. i'm not uh well versed frankly smart enough to dissect the the ai sphere well enough to know whether or not it's going to kill us in the future but my gut says this is going to be a positive for for humanity i think there's a lot of modern day luddites out there who are yeah sounding the alarm bells yeah i mean you know there's going to be pluses and minuses you know it's like spam on the internet is going to get way worse right yeah like you know you're not going to be able to tell you know if you're interacting with one of these things you know in

your chat on your youtube you know show or whatever right like spam in general is going to get much much worse now that you can you know create these artificial agents that are so much more convincing you know than what you could previously do um which is you know perhaps another long-term you know force that pushes people toward paid communication protocols and building in you know payments into communications not to like earn tons of money just to filter out the noise yeah you know um a you know spam bot you know program to sort of reach as many people as possible is going to quickly run out of money you know if it takes five ten sats right to sort of initiate communications with human being yeah so these spam bots are trying to do it with millions

of people at once yeah yeah i mean that and you know um that gets expensive you know so uh i think that you know sam orb dude is gonna you know he has another vision right like there's it's not a coincidence that the same guy you know that started open ai has created this you know utterly you know creepy privacy uh poaching shit coin that scans your eyeballs to verify who you are because he knows that, you know, these, these AI powered bots are going to be everywhere. And, you know, his, his, you know, bet is that, you know, tech in general builders, you know, companies are going to need ways to digitally verify real people. Right. Um, unfortunately the way he's going about it is uh very dystopian you know very creepy um and and creepy so um you know i hope i hope i hope

he doesn't you know build up much momentum but you know it is easy to it is easy to envision a future where things like that are used you know to verify human identity um so i don't know you know we better build quick yeah do bitcoin or nostra private public key pairs fix this in any way Yeah. I mean, you know, keys for sure. You know, the, the, the, the only problem with, you know, using keys to like verify your identity is like, the only thing you can verify is that you hold the key, right? Not what is behind the key. So for example, you know, I could create, you know, AI powered bots that spin up Nostra keys, you know, and, and fill out Nostra, you know, a picture and profile information and, you know, at a glance, like they look real, right? So we need, we need something else to essentially add context, you know, to these keys, you know, something like a, you know, a social graph, like, okay, this looks like a legitimate person because like Marty and, and this and Lyle and like, you know, all these other people follow them and interact with them, you know, so there are things we can build, but it doesn't solve exactly the same problem as what Sam or dudes trying to, you know, solve with, with the world coin, which is, this is a human being. yeah um and in fact a specific human being in that part a specific human being is the you know where all the privacy concerns come from yeah no i was trying to explain this problem to my wife in the car the other day um and i imagine there's going to be like similar to how smartphones have

been normalized in our lives everybody has one in their pocket walk around with it most people um something like a tap sign or inner pocket but like when you send a tweet or a note on master like tap sign execute sign with that private key but then it's like all right going on the problem that you just described like how do you know it wasn't like bots spinning up that then i was like maybe you need maybe you do need some like meat space verification like yeah a couple people verifying like hey i saw marty signed this key in person like it is his yeah it's um i mean you know it's an unsolved problem it's a difficult problem um you know but i you know hope that it doesn't come down that like essentially existing on the internet requires people to you know give

up their give up their privacy you know um that would be that would be really really bad for like freedom in general you know if that's sort of what happens um you know worse worse than any cbdc you know yeah um so yeah hopefully uh hopefully we can build alternatives that you know that that accomplish at least a similar you know a similar goal well it's all happening so fast too yeah it is which is people need to be aware of this and uh if you're capable start thinking about this problem and yeah yeah um yeah i don't know uh you know i'm sure we're gonna i mean you know if vita vita continues to grow we're gonna encounter this problem right like we're gonna need to we're gonna need to verify in some way that we're dealing with

you know not a bot right and um so you know who knows maybe we can you know help you know add uh to the the tooling you know in that regard yeah now my mind's racing like you can make the argument that there could be good bots out there providing value could they have bitcoin wallets attached to them yeah yeah like they're getting paid for providing value yeah for sure i mean you know um it seems reasonable to me that like if they're know if there are ever these uh you know sort of ai agents that are sort of moving around the internet you know sort of uh autonomously right and you know if they are you know as smart as we fear they will be right i mean to me it's like it's obvious they're going to be bitcoiners

because you know there's no better way to send value over the internet you know there's no better way to have the assurances that your value is going to get where it needs to go like there's no better currency to be acquiring if you were such you know an ai agent so i mean that seems you know i don't know maybe sci-fi and crazy but um like you know the the reality of bitcoin to us will be just as real to you know any of these theoretical um you know autonomous ais you know that are sort of living in in the interwebs yeah the the hyper bitcoinization dark horses ai is like oh crap like this is better like i'm trying to acquire as many sets as possible yeah i mean we better acquire our own before the before we have to compete to acquire

them with the ais yeah that's another interesting thing i wonder if uh i think i've seen rumblings of this beginning to bubble up do they get painted with the same brush as the bitcoin mining industry because it's going to take an insane amount of energy to do all this as well yeah yeah it's um it's a good question you know um it's uh i mean they probably won't get painted with the same brush because you know because you know senator warren uh you know doesn't you know doesn't hate you know ai but she for whatever reason you know they're threatened by bitcoin right um but i don't know maybe it will um i mean you know for a long time like gamers you know hated bitcoin and crypto in general, because it made their GPU prices go up, you know, but now are they going to,

you know, they're going to hate, you know, you know, using these AI tools, you know, for the same reason. I don't know. But they do, you know, they are using a lot of power and consuming a lot of resources. And, you know, they're still very scarce. So it is, in a way, a similar story to, you know, ASICs and Bitcoin mining, I suppose. Yeah. Yeah.

It's going to take a lot of energy. I mean, I just know from the Bitcoin mining industry, there's a lot of hosting providers in the mining space that are beginning to integrate GPU strategies because they see the opportunity. Makes sense. Makes sense. Well, you know, hopefully, you know, maybe this will be more incentive for the, you know, silicon fabrication industry to decentralize more. Yeah. You know, we can hope. um and that's actually uh people worry about this happening too fast i think that will be the limiting factor is because we know this very um very well in the bitcoin space like rack space

to get an asic plugged in is very in the supply of rack space is very short right now and like we're working as hard as we can to build out infrastructure to plug in asics you have to imagine the gpus are facing the same problem yeah i mean you know i think what some people don't quite understand is it does take you know tons of gpus to actually train you know your model but a model operating at scale the inferences um cost just as much like you know at scale so if anybody doesn't know what i'm talking about so when you're training you know an ml model of some kind you know you call that training when you're trying when you have a trained model you know weights when you have weights you can use you know to feed information into that's called in

the inference process so you're feeding in the model is inferring you know an output and you know they use gpus for inference as well um you know google has like their own that they build uh tensor process tensorflow processing units i think is what they're called and that's an inference um you know um a piece of hardware specifically for inference um but you know takes a lot of energy you know it takes a lot of those gpus to to operate you know something something at scale um and i don't know you know maybe maybe they come up with some tech to make inference easier you know i'm sure they will um it's kind of hard to hard to predict what that will look like but the world's the world's a changing it is are you optimistic yeah always i mean we have bitcoin

you know um we're gonna we're gonna eventually go back to sound money yeah that's gonna create all sorts of you know positive uh you know that's gonna fix so many misaligned incentives you know in the world um you know i mean yeah i'm super hopeful yeah you've been in it for a minute excuse the rhyme um like what got you into it originally um was it sound money was it yeah yeah sound money um you know like my grandfather was like a you know kind of a gold bug and like you know owned a ton of farmland and you know that he acquired like after you know we went off the the gold standard and you know and i have a i have an undergrad degree in economics um you know so i've always sort of been interested in you know and in money and in economics and stuff and you

know i guess in 2014 after mt gox basically didn't kill bitcoin it was sort of a wake-up call to me i'm like okay well if it didn't die you know with like the 80 percent of the exchange you know that sort of the account the bitcoin economy you know going under with this thing then it's probably not going to die you know um and then you know sort of started falling down the rabbit hole you know like everyone else um but yeah i mean sound money i mean you know fix the money fix the world you know as you you always say um it's a it's a very real thing to me uh i don't know not a lot of people know this but i was also one of the authors of thank god for bitcoin with jimmy song and read love. It's up here somewhere. Yeah. Um, you know, and that was, uh, we wrote that during

the, the, the sort of the peak of the pandemic, you know, where the world is like turning into chaos, you know? Um, and I think, you know, for, for all of us in, in a way, like it was, uh, it was kind of a way to deal with that, you know, to sort of reframe the world and sort of reframe the vision for the future with sound money and, you know, lower time preference and, you know, how things can change if we just stick with you know stick with the basics you know bring people into bitcoin as we can you know build uh in the ecosystem you know do our little our little pieces and eventually you know we we get to a world that's different yeah thank god for bitcoin yeah thank god for bitcoin we should mention thank god for bitcoin we'll be in miami next week too 16th

and 17th yeah yeah jordan props to to jordan uh who has been like you know running ragged putting that on he's got a you know an awesome set of speakers i can't even i haven't been able to keep up with with all the good guys that are going to be uh be speaking there but definitely uh you know uh go by thank god for bitcoin conference which i think is on tuesday tuesday and wednesday i think tuesday and wednesday before definitely hit that up or wednesday wednesday thursday i think it runs wednesday and thursday 16th and 17th i believe i could be wrong that's tuesday Wednesday 17th is Wednesday alright that's on me

yeah so yeah thank God for Bitcoin really it does feel I mean our case unpopularized this but it's almost like messianic where it feels like this intervention God just came down

during the banking crisis like here you go yeah yeah I mean you know it's there's all sorts of you know, sort of good things that happen in the world that, you know, um, I don't know, can we attribute it to God or, you know, someone else or whatever, but I, I don't know, but I sure am happy it happened, you know, I'm happy it happened and I'm happy that, you know, we have

this other option, uh, for people to sort of free themselves from the, from the, the shackles of fiat. I mean, you know, I know it sounds sort of ridiculous, you know, if you're, if you're listening to this and maybe you're you know you're a skeptic or whatever but um you know well i think the most important part of that phrase you said is free yourself like you don't you don't have to vote harder you don't have to like wait hand out looking to the government like please do this like you just free yourself you'll build build companies you can build education platforms you can write books and try to get the idea out there so that more people realize like hey there's something here don't need to wait you can take action yeah absolutely i mean if there's one thing that makes

me most hopeful you know and confident about bitcoin it's it's the knowledge it's the fact that every day there's people all over the world just like me and you doing their little piece of the you know of their part to push bitcoin a little further you know every day it's a you know it's a it's a global thing like people just don't realize it's it's global you know there are people everywhere every day you know trying to push bitcoin forward and you know over time work matters proof of work you know we change the world with our efforts and um nothing's going to stop that, you know, no one, nothing's going to stop me and you and everyone else waking up tomorrow and still, you know, wanting to push this ball down the field. Um, so, you know, um, I think

that, you know, those work changes the world, you know, energy, uh, changes things and we're all sort of pouring our life energy into, you know, into, into, into manifesting, creating this reality that you know where this other option exists at scale and you know we're gonna win we are gonna win thanks to people like you people building out there and the group of people building globally is only getting bigger by the day yeah um which is massive to see thank you for doing what you do yeah you too thanks for inviting me on the show it's been great and i really want to apologize it was very rude of me to be texting um and i lied a little bit my son doesn't have an illness he got a rock stuck in his ear and he's got to get it removed on monday well family first

yeah and uh so i had to answer a question um from the doctor that my wife didn't know um it was a little urgent so usually don't do that i'm very sorry no no that's good it's good i've enjoyed how casual this has been it's been good we like to keep it it's comfortable here it is it's it's very comfy it's very comfy place what should we leave the freaks with i mean that was very inspirational the last part that we just discussed people waking up and working but as it pertains vita what you're doing how can people help try our products give us feedback you know earn some sats you know if you produce content you know try our products you know we're trying to create useful things um i will pay for your product yeah i want you i want you to know

that like if i can cut out restream support a bitcoin company restream charges a lot like it's yeah yeah um uh i like uh what um you know the saying build build things bitcoiners want you know um you know you can always win you can always at least win that game you know building things that other bitcoiners are going to use but hopefully we can you know do a lot more than that too yeah i mean if you're a content producer like you said like we said restream riverside I mean in some regards like YouTube with everything being up there it's all possible

and you get paid in Bitcoin yeah yeah let's see how many sats we've stacked during this live stream get into the room wow 7,000 sats let's go there we go I'll take it

you guys need to zap some more next time and we've got a now we need to put a sponsorship on your uh on your profile so that anybody watching your show going forward can earn sats that's what we need to do yeah i meant to set that up for today and then i kind of dropped the ball well this is the value of vita jordan who's running the uh thank god for bitcoin uh conference next week he's zapped so now as a host i feel compelled to read his message which is go to tgfb.com slash conference use the promo code swan for 20 off pish foss gladstein btc sessions hersman paul miller mills justin moon skyler mark mossbury

love beauty on a bunch more hell yeah there and uh jordan also said let us pay you lyle no um you know yeah it's gonna be a good conference y'all definitely hit that up uh when you're in miami yeah i'll see you down there yeah for sure see you there all right go for some build freaks we're gonna win peace and love Thanks for watching!