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

Episode Date: March 8, 2026

Marty sits down with Bitcoin developer Matt Corallo to discuss why the emergence of AI coding tools and agentic payments represents the most critical and time-sensitive opportunity in Bitcoin's history to become the dominant payment rail of the internet. Matt on X: https://x.com/TheBlueMatt STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bitkey.world/ OPNEXT https://tinyurl.com/tftc2026 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all 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 mr corallo it's gonna be nine years in october since you first came on the show crazy crazy to think almost a decade recording with matt corallo yeah that's crazy what things have changed a little bit i mean you know a lot changes and

people always predict the future to be drastically different and a lot of things change but most things just end up staying the same you don't really you don't really think about that so you're a big fan of nothing ever happens some things happen but it's a lot rarer than people think yeah um we're talking about how to set up this conversation because i think uh things are changing in the world of uh software engineering programming been a running theme over the last couple months i've had justin moon talking on talking about vibe coding what it means for freedom tech mark suman from maple ai talking about running these models in a freedom oriented sovereign and private way and then calais um talking about what he's been doing with bit chat

cashew and clawey.ai to really accelerate his programming efforts and i think uh that's a good jumping off point because i think callie i don't forget it was you who sent the first tweet or callie who responded to it or vice versa but there was a little back and forth between the two of you highlighting the fact that the progression of these ai tools has gotten to a point where there's no excuses for bitcoiners to go out there and win the digital currency game um it won't be a lack it won't be because bitcoin lacks anything will be good if bitcoin doesn't succeed the way we believe it can it will be because people don't have the willpower and the agency to make it so and i thought that was very interesting back and forth actually wrote about it talked about it

um and have been thinking about that for the last few weeks since you you and callie had that exchange yeah i i think that's really true i mean i think there's two big changes uh that are coming with this technology or that are here and coming soon with this technology that i think make a big difference uh and give us a really unique opportunity that's unique in bitcoin's history so first of all you know you mentioned just these tools are good now at at development at building software applications um that wasn't true six months ago that was only that was not really true three months ago um literally when the latest generation of models uh cloud 35 now cloud 36 uh the latest codecs came out did they go from you know you still kind of have to know how to code

or you can do a good demo with these things to you can build something really awesome with these things without ever looking at the code or really materially thinking about the code. You're not going to build a full lightning node. You're not going to build the next full node implementation. They're not at a point where they can do things that are particularly complicated in that way

and very easy to subtly screw up. Um, but building things that are, uh, kind of easier to build or at least harder to subtly screw up, um, you know, front ends, good web applications, you know, good apps on your phone, whatever, these kinds of things, they can just build it and you don't really have to think too much about it. Um, so that's one thing. And I think that enables the entire Bitcoin community. The Bitcoin community has always been excited to try things.

It's a lot of early adopters and excited to, you know, it's kind of a, there are tons of Bitcoiners building tons of different things, trying tons of different things and hoping that one works. And I think that's a really great model to get the kind of adoption we want. um just having one company building the bitcoin payments platform um is less likely to succeed than everyone going out and building but bitcoiners have to step up and actually do it now like the tools are there you don't have to know how to code you just have to know how to type actually you don't even have to know that you need to know how to formulate a thought and have a concept of what you want built um but then from there it's just a matter of doing it and executing um so you know on a saturday and some free time bitcoiners have to step up and do it and i think

that's that's really huge i think the other thing that gives us unique opportunity is that everyone is starting from zero on agentic payments so i think you know going forward a number of months to multiple years but a number of months really people are going to start using these tools to buy things um and this isn't you know whether you think ai is like you know asi and like super intelligence is coming soon or whether you think it's you know just a sycophant that uh repeats what you tell it and and doesn't really add all that much no matter what you think the reality is that these tools are very capable of just saying like hey i need to up my beef town running low on beef tallow can you shoot me some more and it can go off and do it you don't have to think about

it. Right. Um, and so I think that's going to be a genuinely non-trivial part of total consumer spend, uh, in the world in not very long, not tomorrow, but in a few months, people are going to start building out all these tools and start having all these tools. And then in some number of years, they're going to be very popular for, for buying things. Um, but none of the existing payment flows work for this so you can't visa is not really gonna work here so for multiple reasons first of all most websites that uh offer things for sale with credit cards are anti-botted to fuck like they have captures they detect bots they try to prevent bots because that's how that's part of how they fight fraud uh and they're responsible for fraud because of chargebacks and the way these

in MasterCard are structured um and so that's they're not you can't use these existing websites to buy things if you're if you're an agent if you're if you are a bot um and so they need to build something new they need to restructure the way chargebacks work so it's not just visa it's a whole new visa what do they call it intelligent commerce platform um and on the flip side the stablecoin people are trying to push stablecoins. But that also similarly, you know, there's no merchants who support stablecoins yet. You know, that's a whole new integration point for merchants. So everyone's starting at zero. You know, for all of Bitcoin's life, Bitcoin payments certainly weren't really 10x better than whatever people had access to. You know, there's things where

Bitcoin was 10x better. Maybe it's 10x better at savings. Maybe it's 10x better at some cross border setups maybe it's 10x better at settlement whatever but it certainly wasn't 10x better at just domestic payments um and so you know you struggle to get over the line right the the classic adage in silicon valley is that users don't people don't switch from one product to another unless the other product that they're switching to is 10x better if it's a little better you know some people might try it but you won't get that kind of critical mass you won't get the switch especially for things that are very network uh effect dominated like payments for agentic payments everyone's starting from zero and so we have a shot to actually build

something that people use like the race is starting now uh there's three or four or five different competing standards now being pushed by various payment companies ai labs whatever um and we need to be a part of that fight uh we might not win but if we stay in that race we will get from fairly low to really material merchant adoption and bitcoin will be a actually usable option for payment yeah before we get into the landscape of what everybody's building competing protocols not only with traditional payment networks like these and MasterCard stable coins, but even within Bitcoin, that's something I've observed over the last month is all these development kits and different ways of equipping your agent with the ability to

send and receive Bitcoin. Before that, what led you to, what was the tipping point for you to believe this? Was it observing what's happening or did you build something that you were like, oh, wow, it's here, it's ready? I mean, I think it's, to a large extent, it's the jump in the quality of models in the last three months you know there's a lot of things for which they're still not they haven't really materially improved on in three or four years you know writing from scratch and they're great at critiquing writing writing new ideas from scratch not so much but then there's some things where they went from being a useful tool to being actually genuinely good at, like writing many types of applications, like writing a lot of

software. Um, and so I think that plus, plus the, you know, one of the big step functions has been kind of how long they, how, how well they can work on a task that has multiple steps and they have to to keep working at it to get to it. Um, and it used to be that they would kind of collapse in on themselves fairly quickly and this this limited your ability to do things like build stuff like open claw or these agents that might be able to then go buy something right because this is like this multiple step you have to go find different merchants that offer these products you have to find compare the products you have to decide which one might be good and then you you might have to come back to the your the the human and say like hey here's a product i think it's good should i

buy this um and they you know they might have struggled with that and i think now they're they're very capable of that um and at the same time there's so many different companies that have gone from kind of in the early stages of building to okay now it's serious now we're trying to really push our specific payment rails for these kinds of payments and was there something that you were working on or just simply observing it mostly observing yeah yeah okay now let's get into the landscape um of what's out there visa i think it was visa or mastercard there earlier this week or late last week said hey um a lot of people are thinking we're we're going to just bolt on a agentic payment protocol into what we're

doing now but we're starting this new thing we're going to sort of equip them with uh agent specific digital cards or whatever obviously the stable coins uh are going after i think base created x402 which is funny it seems like people in bitcoin were ahead of this trend and seeing where this was going way before many others who are who are hopping onto it now which i think could play into our favor but i mean l402 from roast beef and the lnd team's been out for many years now at this point i think three or four years um basically seeing that this is going to be a thing you have many people talking about the idea of agents spinning up their own real world asset tokens to um to conduct commerce with each other and it it to your point seems very

chaotic right now the landscape for agentic payments doesn't seem like there is a uniform protocol that everybody um yeah has settled on that makes sense considering yeah there's more than that there's also you know google's got one stripe is both pushing the crypto angle but then also has their own other protocol that they did with open ai um so there's everybody's got a protocol for this um and i don't think you know i want to i think in kind of a traditional software world we think about this like ah there's so many protocols like one has to win people have to start adopting one i don't think that's really true for for ai like the things are good at writing code if you give it a protocol spec it can write code to

interact with that protocol on the fly and use the protocol it doesn't care what the specific protocol is what is going to impact you know what what does have to be standardized is the actual payment rail like are they using lightning do you have to have bitcoin do you have to have stable coins do you have to have a visa card linked do you have to have you know like what is what is the process of getting funds into the system such that they can then flow within that system um and so i think that's the the thing that is going to be not necessarily winner take all but certainly winner take most um and so that's where we really want you know we want open payment rails Right. If if there's a good shot right now, I think that the payment rails that get used are either, you know, a stable coin, a single stable coin.

Right. Where there's one company that operates the block chain they run on, you know, a centralized block chain they run on. Right. And like the case of base or Stripe is now building this tempo thing and also then gets all the interest from all the tokens that are being used for the commerce. Like, you know, Coinbase for the case of USDC on base or Circle if it's USDC elsewhere. And then once they have a monopoly, presumably those prices will then continue to increase. Right. If they have a monopoly on the payment rails and the payment token that's being used, they'll slowly increase their price over time because why wouldn't they? And so we want, you know, we want freedom tech there, not just both philosophically, but also for competitive reasons. Like we've suffered, especially in the U.S., outside the U.S. a little less so, but we've suffered in the U.S. from this visa tax on all of our commerce where whatever, two, two and a half percent of every transaction, sometimes more, sometimes less, gets taken out of the merchant's hands and it really wrecks small businesses. I mean, it's a really material portion of their profit goes to the payment networks.

And we have this opportunity where we need new payment networks for these new types of payments and these new types of buyers and just rebuilding the existing monopoly kind of setup, whether it's using Visa's protocols or whether it's using a stablecoin, a single stablecoin would just be so such a loss for humanity in the country and and we would just we'd lose out on so much that that we could have yeah i mean and you're getting into like a first principles argument here so let's let's steel man it and get into basically the first principle argument for why bitcoin should be the medium of exchange for the agentic economy that seems to be emerging obviously you mentioned the competitive landscape and if a monopoly takes

us over they'll have pricing power which will not be good for the end consumer or merchants that are that are leveraging these payment rails but let's just strip it down to to the base and build it up from there why is bitcoin sort of suited for for this use case particularly yeah i mean i think the the network that gets built needs to i you know i i guess i don't think bitcoin is like uniquely suited in a way that like visa could not build something that operates here it can't be the existing visa network it has to have different rules around chargebacks it has to have different a different setup it has to have different type of private keys so it can't just be the same kind of card numbers they use today they'll be issuing temporary debit cards these are things they can

build they're hard there's some regulatory questions around having a different chargeback system but in theory this is buildable certainly bitcoin isn't kind of fundamentally fated to win this over stable coins for some reason you know people don't hate stable coins stable coins on a centralized blockchain are efficient and cheap and payments are fast um just like bitcoin i don't think you know i don't think any of these are kind of better or worse in terms of the fundamental properties that might enable them you know bitcoin on lightning specifically payments are cheap payments are fast um currently cheaper and often faster than than stable coins on most stable coin platforms uh but that's something they can fix they can centralize their blockchains more and

and have uh payments be faster and cheaper and they are i think coinbase is moving that direction with base and tempo i think from stripe will be even more centralized and even more uh of central database just to make the payments cheap and fast um is really just a question of who gets adoption first right so who gets merchants to start using their new protocol before the others do and gets payers and agents to start using their new protocol before the others do and i think this is where the bitcoin community has a real shot because all these other protocols are one company maybe a partnership of two companies pushing their specific protocol because they want to be the winners and they want to be the ones who ultimately control the flow

of how agentic commerce happens and make a ton of money on it by becoming the monopoly whereas bitcoiners are a ton of different companies and a ton of different people who all want to not become the monopoly and and give everyone and give merchants and buyers back their economic freedom and give them total control over the way they make and accept payments. And that kind of network, I think, gives us a real shot that we have so many different people pushing in complementary directions, not necessarily the same direction and trying from different angles and getting more merchants on board and all of that stuff in interesting ways and i think that that gives us a real competitive edge here but for that to happen

we need bitcoiners to really step up and participate um not necessarily just build stuff you know building stuff is is important but also get merchants on board you know actually use these tools right install open claw or claw we or whatever the you know newest hottest agent software is um and give it a bitcoin wallet and tell it to go buy your monthly beef tallow or whatever you whatever you need um and and see how far it gets and tell it to email merchants and tell it to say hey you know i i tried to use your site um i'm an ai agent i tried to use your site to buy this thing because i was told to and i couldn't please consider updating your site so that it doesn't have captures and so that it takes Bitcoin and go, you know, I know

the the Nix Laney's team at MoneyDevKit has been building some cool stuff here. They now have sites where your agent can buy coffee with Bitcoin and can buy supplements with Bitcoin and can buy various things. So they're they're trying to push into this world. They offer they also offer merchant services, make it easy for merchants to integrate self custodial Bitcoin payment acceptance. obviously a lot of merchants don't necessarily want that they might want uh other integration there's a ton of bitcoin payment processors out there and crypto payment processors that that they

can integrate into their shopify um so it's really about like we gotta we have to get moving and we have to have bitcoin is really pushing on this angle because you know if we don't then you know one of these monopolies can take over and we're going to be stuck with some new payment monopoly that's going to be equally shitty and take another huge chunk out of the economy and if we do then not only does bitcoin thrive uh and and have a ton of transactions to pay the miners and and get a more robust lightning network and and fund more development and and price probably goes up because everyone's buying bitcoin to transact in it but on top of that for humanity the money is the payment rails people use is free and open and anyone can participate. And Visa is not going to

censor porn or gun shops or whatever. And also, on top of that, Visa is not going to take this huge percentage bite out of the economy. And transactions are going to be cheaper and merchants are going to have more money in their pocket. Sup, freaks? Up next, the Bitcoin Scaling Conference, where Bitcoin developers meet institutional capital, is coming to New York next month. Join Bitcoiners from Blockstream, Chaincode, Brink, and more at the Can't Miss Summit at the intersection of Bitcoin tech and finance. This conference has one of the best signal-to-noise ratios, and that's why I'll be joining Blockspace's third annual Bitcoin tech conference on April 16th at the New York Times Center in Midtown Manhattan. There's only room

for 200 attendees, and they've already sold more than 100 tickets of their open spots. So you've only got a few weeks to get your travel plans in order from New York. With a ticket, you get access to the best programming in Bitcoin tech from BitVM to BitChat, catered lunch, and access to the PubKey after party. Wearing the hat, PubKey after party. Up next is where builders meet capital, founders find funding, and companies source top talent, plus meet institutional investors and developers from BlackRock, HC Wainwright, and Bitcoin Infrastructure Corp. If you're at a venture fund or another finance firm, this is the event to learn more about the quantum computing, leading edge Bitcoin tech, and topics that will define Bitcoin's futures.

go to opnext.dev for tickets and use the code TFTC to get 25% off a general admission or VIP ticket to the event. Again, that's opnext.dev, code TFTC for 25% off a ticket. I'll see you there. So freaks, this rip of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. BitKey makes Bitcoin easy to use and hard to lose. It is a hardware wallet that natively embeds into a two or three multi-sig. You have one key on the hardware wallet, one key on your mobile device and block stores a key in the cloud for you. This is an incredible hardware device for your friends and family, or maybe yourself who have Bitcoin on exchanges and have for a long time, but haven't taken a step to self-custody because they're worried about the complications of

setting up a private public key pair, securing that seed phrase, setting up a pin, setting up a passphrase. Again, BitKey makes it easy to use, hard to lose. It's the easiest zero to one step, your first step to self-custody. If you have friends and family on the exchanges who haven't moved it off tell them to pick up a big key go to bigkey.world use the key tftc20 at checkout for 20 off your order that's bigkey.world code tftc20 so you mentioned money dev kit i had nick on a couple of months ago i love what they're building let's dive into the landscape of the solutions that are being brought to market you have money dev kit uh l402 it looks like they just revamped that uh breeze has a software development kit um there's some nostre wallet connect

dev kits that exist out there cashew i think they have cash or yeah i'll be i'll be has some agentic wallet stuff too i'll be um there's a ton of yeah there's a ton of bitcoiners who are exploring the space you know a lot of bitcoin groups or companies who had wallet software um have been exploring okay can we take our wallet software can we add it to our agents i think there's also like a phoenix d uh skill for for agents um so a lot of wallet software that you could already run on a server now uh agents can easily manage um and especially the ones that that kind of make it easy so probably you don't want your agent to be running like whole hog lnd and like trying to manage liquidity and stuff i waste a lot of tokens doing that um

but stuff with an lsp so that's like money dev kit that's phoenix d that's um or uh stuff that doesn't use lightning directly but supports lightning so like cashew wallace i'm picking them in and stuff like that um so i think on the on the wallet on the client side on the on the agent side uh there's a lot there there's a lot of options and i would strongly encourage Bitcoiners to go play with. I think MoneyDevKit is probably the easiest, but the Cashew stuff is also awesome. And same with Albi. So I would strongly encourage Bitcoiners to go play with that, like get an agent, install it, give it a wallet. MoneyDevKit also has a cool chatbot version now that you don't have to do anything. You just add the chatbot to your WhatsApp group

chat or your Telegram group chat. And then you can give it a Bitcoin wallet. You can send money. You can do all kinds of fun stuff with it. I know a lot of people have been playing with making bets with each other by having it hold the money and then it resolves the bet. So there's a lot of cool stuff people have been doing with that. So you don't have to deal with the whole agent thing. You can just add that chatbot to your chat, and that's also cool. And then on top of that, yeah, and then we need the merchant side, right?

So we need merchants to actually want to accept agentic payments, payments from these agents automated payments and then support that on their websites on their software stack um and that's a little more complicated right because that often requires retooling the merchant's website the merchant's website's probably built around captchas and and and visa and preventing fraud um that they would then have to pay for and suddenly you're asking them like no no remove all of the the crap that you built up over all these years for fraud prevention because you don't need that anymore we're not we're going to give you a payment scheme that doesn't have chargebacks um and there's a lot of consumer protection reasons for chargebacks

but if you're buying ten dollar coffee your agent's probably going to do fine it's probably going to get you actual coffee um and then you don't need a chargeback it's 10 bucks if it screws up you're not that worried about it you know okay if you're buying a car or a house or something, then you might want some other avenue for which to get your money back if something goes wrong. But for the vast majority of purchases people make on a daily basis, you don't really need chargebacks. And they just are this massive drag on the economy in terms of the cost imposed by Visa and others to get it there. So yeah, it's about people reaching out to merchants. It's about Bitcoiners saying, hey, merchant, you know, I know you haven't cared about

Bitcoin in the past. Maybe you still don't care about Bitcoin, but there's this agentic payments thing. It's going to be big. It's going to be a big part of your customer base. And you need to start thinking about how you're going to support agentic payments. You need to start supporting agentic payments. And specifically, the thing that exists for agentic payments that actually is usable today is bitcoin so you should add you know bitcoin to your if you're on shopify go find shopify plugins and share those with merchants um whatever yeah well this um you're right about the client side and i'm just gonna go down a rabbit hole here explain my user experience with my agent and it's bitcoin uh bitcoin wallet which is a phoenix d server so i had uh i had my

my agent martin who's sophisticated marty do some research on what he thinks what he thought would be the best bitcoin wallet um your lightning setup specifically we tried ldk first ran into some problems with channel management and banged our head for a couple of hours and i was like you know what this is too too complicated go find some out-of-the-box simpler solution to this and i found phoenix d and was like okay this phoenix d thing looks pretty cool i can download it on my server and we can use this and so it downloaded it and it was like okay we need to we need to fund fund um a channel um and so i found this bolts this bolts thing it'll allow you to like send on-chain bitcoin to that and it'll um basically open up a channel immediately

with phoenix so just here's the bolts on chain channel send it here and then i'll open the channel so i did that and uh it's been working flawlessly since then but the other thing and this is the client side but talking about demand side from the merchants the other um sort of lightning primitive that exists that has really allowed my agent to do things rather flawlessly is ellen url off and so since it's running phoenix d i was like okay i want you to go test out some spends on some websites i find some websites that allow you to sign in with the private key on your phoenix d server using ellen url off and it found um ellen markets and i was like okay it has an api like download the api figure out how to sign in all that and let's

deposit some sats and make a trade and it did it within five minutes um and so that's actually just injecting my own bias my own experience like i think um one thing that could be beneficial and we should focus on making it as easy as possible for these websites to integrate is ln url off is the ability for these agents to sign in with their private key. And I don't know, you would know better than I, but is there a way to have like an if-and function if they sign in via LNURL auths and have made a purchase before, just don't feed them CAPTCHAs or something like that?

Could you easily? Yeah, I mean, I think this gets back to some extent my point that agents don't care too much about specific APIs. So whether a website uses LNURL auth or whether they require the agent to sign in with some bespoke sign-in API and use a unique private key for it, whether it's a totally different protocol, kind of doesn't matter. Like your agent didn't have some predefined code for LNURL auth. It didn't have already built-in logic for that specifically. It said, oh, okay, here's a website I want to use. It supports LNURL auth.

Let me go find the spec for LNURL auth, and then let me implement against that really quick and just do that on the fly. So it did that on the fly. It doesn't care what the specific protocol is. And I think that's really the cool thing about these agents that because they're fairly competent at writing small scale software, you know, as long as something straightforward and can be specified in a reasonably compact way, they can just use it. They don't care. And so I think that's what I think. So I think that's really powerful. um on your point about merchants and using this for uh turning off captures you know i think to

a large extent they don't need to right the reason for all of the captures and anti-fraud and whatever is because of chargebacks right like small merchants regularly get people who come to their websites and buy stuff with stolen credit cards and then the merchant ends up getting screwed Right. So like someone will come to a I think one popular scam at least a while back was that people would go sell a merchant's products to legitimate buyers on eBay or Amazon or whatever. And then they would when someone bought it from them, they would take a stolen credit card, go to the merchant, have it shipped directly to the legitimate buyer who wanted this thing and was buying it from from this scammer on Amazon. and then the merchant would ship the good the legitimate buyer would be happy they would pay the scammer via amazon or ebay or whatever um and then ultimately the person whose stolen credit card was used would declare their card stolen and the company this merchant would get screwed

and they would lose lose the money um and so that has so merchants have to do all kinds of stupid anti-fraud to try to prevent these kinds of scams from ruining their bottom line and again for the 90 whatever percent of purchases where people don't really need that kind of purchase protection that you have with chargebacks they there's no reason there's no need for these chargebacks to be there and for merchants to be putting in pouring capital pouring time pouring effort into anti-fraud and chargeback protection to retain their earnings this is i mean ignore the two two and a half percent fee that visa takes for that you know the visa network takes from every transaction and also the amount of human effort tied to this anti-fraud stuff that all

these merchants have to build and not just human effort but like they have to hire support staff It's not just software engineers, not just like they have to integrate all this capture crap and anti-fraud technology and ML models to do anti-fraud and whatever. They also have to hire humans and support to talk to people and try to fish out whether they're a scammer or not. It's a huge drag on all these small businesses and on the economy generally, right? And so if we offer options where there isn't chargebacks, they can just remove all this crap. And all of a sudden, all those costs go away. and sure some uh some customers might want to buy with purchase protection might want to use chargeback supporting payment rails those can be built on bitcoin too right you can have some

arbiter who sits in the middle of the payment and doesn't clear the funds until uh the payment is is not is approved by the buyer and they do dispute resolution whatever you can build on on bitcoin too it's been built before there hasn't been a lot of demand for it in part because there just hasn't been a lot of demand for bitcoin payments um so hopefully you know hopefully we can shift that now build more demand for bitcoin payments and then those kind of tools might come back people might be more interested in using them and building them out um but yeah i mean merchants could just remove all of this crap that they've built up over the years and just offer payments in bitcoin well you mentioned bitcoin payments have not uh not won in their

first 17 years and i think many people would point to price volatility and say using bitcoin as your unit of account is is risky as a business owner um so on this point how imperative do you think it is for people providing these agentic receive tools bitcoin receive tools for merchants to include dollar off ramps like auto conversions to dollars or the ability to receive stable coins side by side with with bitcoin yeah i mean certainly it's important for many merchants and and there are a ton of payment processors uh that will happily take bitcoin and deposit money into your traditional bank account via wire once a day or once a week or whatever um this is not like particularly novel technology um you know for some merchants

that's going to be really important for some merchants they might be happy to take some bitcoin and actually hold some uh something other than just dollars like we've seen pretty good uptake with a lot of merchants just in their desire for bitcoin um so yeah i mean there certainly needs to be an option it needs to be an option for for many merchants doesn't need to be an option for all merchants not everyone's going to want that um but i think that's pretty straightforward there's a lot of uh companies that offer that so that shouldn't be an issue for merchants these days and it does have some more onboarding friction right they have to do kyc or kyb um to onboard for a lot of those platforms because they're regulated whereas for

something like money dev kit or something that's more native bitcoin or native stable coins um they can just install some software package and and they're done there's no real onboarding um so yeah i mean i think stable coins are useful there i think we just want to make sure that they're used as the the savings part so uh once a merchant receives money via a more open payment rail they can then swap it into some stable coin and and there's there's competition for stable coins because then you know each merchant could have their own stable coin they prefer based on the interest rate they receive for holding that stable coin or whatever um and that wouldn't impact the payment rails it's really when all of the payments flow over the same rails the same

stable coin on the same blockchain that we get this like monopolistic effect where switching costs become you know infinitely high for people to switch to some new stable coin because the entire economy has to rotate to using that new one when it was using some old one um and that's where you get this monopolistic effect where you know eventually those fees will go up and we'll have another visa so freaks right now someone with less capital than you is building a better Bitcoin position than you are. They're not smarter. They're not luckier. They're just using this downturn differently. The small minority will quietly make moves that matter. And Unchained wrote a field guide for that small minority. It's called 21 Moves to Make

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it has free shipping as well so go check it out what's the lowest hanging fruit that you want to see built that doesn't exist right now at this intersection um i think it's really about merchant outreach so it's it's uh i'm not aware of a good tool of a good site that kind of covers all of the options for merchants like you know i'm a merchant i want to take bitcoin okay you know what store are you using or if you're using shopify click here and here's all your options for shopify if you're using uh your own self-hosted what's the self-hosted wc something commerce whatever then click here and here's all the plugins um and like i care about receiving money via local currency or i care about stable coins and like here's here's

the options and i think uh it would be great if someone built that out uh so that there is a more easy place to point merchants to to say here's where you need to go um and then on top of that once that exists i think it'll be really clear what what holds remains so like you know there will be there'll be categories where there's no option right it'll be uh you know i'm using this particular commerce platform and i want payments via you know i want my payments to come in in bitcoin and then i want to swap to you know usdt and it'll be well there's no option for you there's no pre-built option for you and there again like all of the pieces probably exist um and there's probably some plug-in for that where they can take bitcoin and then there's certainly usdt and like

bitcoin usdt swap services but there's not a cohesive plug-in and then i think that is where an agent can totally build that right where there's already the the big building blocks already exist but they need to be put together into some cohesive platform and plug-in for this particular commerce solution um an agent can absolutely build that and someone can just sit down on a saturday and say you know i this is missing i was talking to some merchant who wanted it and this this tool doesn't exist let me just spend you know three or four hours with claude or or chad gpt or whatever and have it go build this and i think that's where we as a bitcoin community need to get to if we want to to grow and really become the kind of currency that

i think we want to be yeah yeah we got to make sure that that uh that educational website is aeo optimized so that the agents if they're doing research they can find it quickly and understand what's going on yeah it's um it's so fascinating how fast it's happened that's like the one question i have would you consider all the capital behind visa stripe coinbase all these competing agentic payments companies with their own vested interest and perspectives and subjective views on on how this should play out it does seem a bit daunting um but i think your point and my point would be is like the tools basically collapse the the cost to do this to near zero so you can't compete that's totally true and also all of them are busy competing because they all

want to take the crown right they all want to win it's not like google and open ai and uh stripe and coinbase and and everyone are pulling in the same direction no they're all trying to compete they're all trying to have their own solution win and i think that really gives us an opportunity and i mean i think there's it is moving fast and so there's a good chance that we start to see some kind of not necessarily winner but but a lot of merchant adoption and one or two of these solutions over the next year and so i think you know bitcoiners need to also move fast like we need to as a community be be using these tools and building these tools and and talking to merchants and getting them onboarded before anyone else does

because it's only by doing it quickly and moving fast that we can beat these companies that are trying to move as fast as they can. All right, let's call some people out who, in your mind, is moving too slow, is not doing enough right now. Who can be doing more to push this forward? I think it's, you know, we have an army of people

who are interested in Bitcoin and have a few hours to spare to learn about Bitcoin on a Saturday that they could also be using to play with Bitcoin and play with these tools, right? I think, you know, just saying like, oh, all the developers or all the people who work full-time on Bitcoin need to do this, like, yeah, they should, it's true. And I think we'll continue to see developers build out these tools

and hopefully, you know, I hope also on the merchant side and focus on that side. But also, you know, we're not going to be able to do this alone. Like the full set of people who work full time, have a full time job working on Bitcoin is not going to do the level of merchant outreach we need. Right. So there's like we need we need the average Bitcoiner to be, you know, saying this week I'm going to talk to one or two merchants and I've got my agent set up. If I use, you know, Kalei's Klawi service or I got an old Linux laptop and I put an agent on there or whatever, OpenKlaw, and I gave it a wallet. And now I want it to just go buy my monthly creatine subscription. And so just make that happen.

like go reach out to to the different merchants that you have or have your agent the great thing is you don't have to do a lot of this stuff anymore you just ask your agent to do it you know give it access to an email account and and have it send a bunch of emails to 10 different merchants and say like hey you know i i want to i want to do this and i i don't want to have to think about buying this anymore i don't want to have to manage an auto subscription that may get too fast or too slow i just want to be able to text my agent and say hey hey go buy me this just creatine or whatever um and i think just everybody does a little bit and we win well to that point about the agents just doing things and we've touched on it a bit here but

i think it's important to really nail it down like how important do you think robust documentation and an open API is for wallet builders in the space to make it easily discoverable for these agents who are looking to spend them on the web. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the big thing, like agents are, these LLMs aren't necessarily great with tons of subtle documentation.

Like you mentioned, like trying to use LDK directly. Like, yeah, I mean, an agent's not going to do great with directly using LDK and building its own lightning node using that software in kind of an easy environment, right? They want to use PhoenixD or, you know, a Cashew wallet or MoneyDevKit or Albi or whatever, where it's just, you know, here's one page document that explains, like, install the wallet by this command. This command gives you an invoice.

This command checks your balance. And this command lists your previous transactions, right? They want something that's simple and straightforward and well-documented and clear. And the good thing is, I mean, like you're writing that in English, right? It's not like developers also want that, right? It's not like this isn't really that novel, like writing things for agents. And it's just, it's really all the same things you were going to write to begin with. And so, but yeah, having these simple and straightforward and understandable APIs really just lets them run.

Yeah. oh i'm bullish i think uh i think the merchant outreach is is going to be imperative and i i tweeted this out last night but um we're getting some electrical work done in our house and was talking to the electrician who's doing the work and i got to pay the deposit today and i just threw it out there like hey um if you want to take the deposit in bitcoin we can make that happen he texted us last night he's like you know what i'm going to take it in bitcoin um obviously this was meat space that's like a very manual business and i think um where i'm going with this is i think one of the larger opportunities that people are recognizing with the emergence of these

agents that are they're competent enough to get a lot of work done particularly in the realm of software engineering is that you can go and basically help these small to medium-sized businesses that are typically family-owned and very manual at this point and help them build a website and a a social presence rather trivially with these tools and i think if you're a bitcoiner is basically caught the ai bug and recognizes the profound nature of what's happening right now and this is one of your your ideas is just give them out of the box bitcoin payments as well if you're going to go help all these small businesses build a a presence on the internet yeah totally yeah and i mean look a mean space also matters right that

the square integrating bitcoin payments means for some million or so merchants in the united states except new york thanks new york um thanks bit license uh all they have to do is is go in settings and change one setting and then all of a sudden they for some subset of their payments and sure bitcoin payments aren't huge but but they're they're not zero anymore um then suddenly they get no fees right so instead of fees is two and a half or whatever percent fee uh you get nothing right and so they they that's a really huge portion of the revenue and i think just even doing in-person merchant outreach for in-person payments and coffee shops and whatever can make a huge difference for some of these some of these companies and to get bitcoin payments in meat

space off zero as well i think that's that's also really important and the bitcoin community should be working hard on that and there's like the bitcoin merchant community yeah if you google bitcoin merchant community um they have a good website that kind of targets more meat space and square merchants um and explains why they should turn the feature on and why they should offer it to their customers and then bitcoin is obviously also need to be using it um the great that cash app now you can pay uh with bitcoin without having any bitcoin so you just have to have dollars in cash app balance and it'll automatically buy bitcoin and then send it all in the same transaction you don't have to tell the ira you're not supposed to tell the irs about it there's no

there's no tax implications there's no nothing um so even if you have a stack of bitcoin in another wallet you know install cash app put some dollars in there and then go use it to spend bitcoin and make the bitcoin economy happen more and then you're automatically replenishing you know you're not you're not selling your stack right um so you don't have to sell your sell your stack anymore to encourage the bitcoin economy to grow um yeah so i all of the above you know i think this is the great thing about the bitcoin community is that there's so many different people pushing in complementary directions and i've said this a few times but but i think that's really great and and part of that will be in-person payments but i think we have this opportunity this genuinely

unique opportunity in bitcoin's history with agentic payments as well yeah and something we didn't touch on that i think we should highlight as a comparative advantage i think again we've alluded to it um quite a bit but i think the interoperable nature of all these different payment mechanisms that exist whether it's e-cash um bitcoin stable coins on liquid lightning obviously on chain uh you have spark out there arc and we forgot to mention arcade they launched some stablecoin to Bitcoin agentic payment rail as well. And I think comparing it to the competition that you described between Google, Stripe, Visa,

Coinbase, Circle, whoever it may be, the interoperability does not exist. Or if it does exist, it's a bit janky. But within Bitcoin and the disparate subprotocols that people are building on, it's rather seamless because of the Lightning Network. Yeah, and this is, I mean, the wild thing is that this is actually unique even in crypto. I mean, you look at like even the Ethereum ecosystem with all their L2s, the things aren't compatible.

There are bridges you can send between them, but you have to know to. Like you just scan a QR code and then you send money and all of a sudden it went into a black hole because they were expecting it on one chain and you're actually on some other chain. It's awful. It's like actually really painful. and that's what the stablecoin ecosystem is built on in many cases um and like usdc on base is a different token from usdc on ethereum and if you accidentally send the base one to someone and they were expecting it on ethereum all of a sudden the money went into a black hole and like now you have to figure out what happened um it's there's actually some really substantial user

experience challenges as a result of that architecture and so yeah i mean the But I think there's always more work to be done on making sure everyone in Bitcoin, all the wallets, and everybody speaks the same language and can fall back to Lightning, even if they might have an option to use something more native within their ecosystem. But yeah, it's huge because it really enables this seamless user experience. And we've seen, you know, people show up and and and for some reason there's this trend of everyone builds their own little ecosystem and then they get stable coins in it and then they go buy with their stable coin at stake and shake. And then they post on Twitter about how or on X about how great it is that they can buy with their stable coin at stake and shake. And all it's doing is buying with lightning and it's doing a swap to buy with lightning. And so, yeah, that's that is a huge part of enabling this future of Bitcoin payments is is lightning and the fact that all of these different ecosystems can just plug into lightning and get seamless payments. Yeah, I think it's very underappreciated in terms of the narrative battle that we're currently in and will only increase from here.

I think highlighting that as a value prop for integrating sort of Bitcoin rails for your agentic payments is is not giving enough enough credence in this discussion right now is something. Yeah, absolutely. And especially the stablecoin people. Ignore the blockchain and Ethereum L2 mess that you have. But also, on top of that, you have which stablecoin? Not only, okay, there's USDC, but there's also USDT. There's now GUSD, which is some new one. There's PayPal USD. uh there was some rumor that stripe or no facebook's now going to create a new one so there's going to be facebook usd so all of a sudden you don't have compatibility there either like stable coins oh stable coin payments are going to win well which stable coin that's not a single system you can't point and say that's you know merchants are just going to accept stable coins no they're going to accept a stable coin or two and payers are only going to have a stable coin they're not going to have all of the stable coins as an option so that's not really an answer

either and sure there's bridges and whatever but when you have 40 or 50 different stable coins and they're on 10 or 20 different blockchains there's a lot of complexity there and that doesn't actually build a cohesive system either. And I think that is what's so powerful about Bitcoin. And you're right, I think we need to highlight that when we talk to people about, well, where are agentic payments going to go? It's like, well, there's this Bitcoin thing

that has all of these different platforms around it and you just settle in Bitcoin and then whatever platform you wanted to use, you can use with a stable coin on, even if you want USDC on base, you can get that and you can swap that to Bitcoin and make that payment. And so that really simplifies it

and makes it this open payment network unlike some of the closed payment networks from stablecoins. Yeah. I'm bullish. I think we can win this. It's just going to take some effort. Yeah.

It's going to take a lot of effort, but we can totally win this. Last on this particular agentic payments topic before we get to the last topic I want to talk about, which is an update on Clarity Act and BRCA. People listening to this, like Matt, picking up what you're putting down but i've never done this before what what can i do like and this has been a common question i've asked over the last month but just to really drill

at home for people like how good is this ai tech like anybody sitting there at home listening to this who has never programmed a line of code in their life never even hopped into a development environment or a text editor like how can they develop the confidence to end or what would you say to them to give them the confidence to go try this stuff out yeah or even if you tried ai stuff three months ago like it really is a totally different ball game from just three months ago um and you know i know a lot of people are used to to often the free models from opening i or from google they're used to those hallucinating all over the place even the most expensive paid models still hallucinate all over the place um and there are lots of problems for using them

in a lot of the ways that people use them all the time and they're like yeah these kind of suck they're sycophants they hallucinate um and now you're telling me they're great at coding i don't really believe you like everyone's been telling me they're great at at giving all this information but when i try them for some con for some some cases they really suck and they give me garbage and now you're telling me that everyone's telling me they're great at software engineering i don't really believe you because i don't see it on the cases that i've tried um and the reality is they're much better at software engineering than most other tasks um you know large complicated software projects okay maybe not totally doing it on their own but for stuff like websites apps um taking

larger building blocks and building a cohesive product they are really good at and they really can do it just from talking to them um and so yeah i mean try it you do have to fork over some cash you want the the latest models you don't want to be using some of the free options um they're they're good but they're a year behind the latest models and again the latest models only really got good in the last few months um so you know fork over some cash get the latest models use the latest clod the latest open ai whatever um and then yeah use it use it with your your clawy subscription uh which is khali's self-hosted agent service um or try money dev kits uh ori bot is what they call it which you can just add to your group chat it's not hard i think that one

is free and might not always use the latest models you have to look into how to switch it over um but but you know just try it like start with something simple start with something that's applicable to you um you know i you know if you have your your at-home candle business or jewelry business or whatever you know just hook up oribot and say hey i've got this business i've got these items put it up on a website integrate you know money dev kits the easiest if you just want to if you want to accept bitcoin you don't need dollars necessarily so if you're listening to this listening to this you're probably a bit corner maybe you just want on bitcoin you don't necessarily need to swap it to dollars right away just ask it to integrate money dev kit

um build a store around money dev kit and i can almost guarantee you it will work okay maybe not exactly the first shot but you know just tell it to fix stuff like notice that it's broken tell it what's wrong and in three or four hours you will have a fully functioning website that can take bitcoin payments um it really is that good now so so just just do it just do it just do it we're sponsored by nike so thank you for getting that uh that catchphrase in um i thought they stopped using that did they i'd be shocked if they did just do it um all right wrapping up here though clarity act i'm confused uh i've been talking with kyle only behind the scenes it seems like the saber rattling between the banks and coinbase

and the banking lobby and crypto lobby is heading ahead and we see within the Trump administration, Scott Besson, Trump himself, really saying, hey guys, let's get this done, we need to get this done, let's get it across the line. I think everybody, not everybody, but a lot of people are looking at the posturing from Besson and Trump specifically and saying, yay, we're going to get the Clarity Act,

this will be good. It's unclear to me whether or not the language about self-custodial Bitcoin and the ability for free and open source software developers to write code without fearing getting thrown in a cage is still in the Karen Act. I know you've been on the tip of the spear of advocating for BRCA and including it in the Clarity Act,

but it's not clear to me if the language is still in there or if it will make it into the final draft. What are you seeing? Yeah, I mean, we don't know. Obviously, there's lots of debate on the Hill. It's great that Trump said, like, no, we still need to do this. We need to make this happen. You know, we're running out of time in not very long. Basically, all of Congress is just going to be focused on the midterms and winning their their upcoming elections and not focused on on writing new bills, let alone passing them.

So, yeah, there's, you know, there's pressure to be had for for making sure that that the BRCA and protection for LSPs and software developers stays in there. there's also pressure to be had to get it over the line. And obviously the big banks are worried that this great business they have where they pay everyone zero interest and then loan out their money and make interest on it is going to go away. I mean, it's the dumbest thing

because I was reading an article in the Wall Street Journal the other week. I was talking about how actually everyone's already moving their money out of banks and just holding them in brokerage accounts now because brokerage accounts will give you a debit card, they'll let you write checks they'll do bill pay they let you send wires they let you ach and also they hold your money in a an account that gives you interest because they hold treasuries

for you and now the banks are saying like no no no no crypto can't because stablecrans can't pay interest because people might move their money out of banks into into coinbase when like i mean i stopped using a bank i use a brokerage account for a lot of my dollars now because yeah i want some interest it would be nice to get some interest more than zero um so it's the dumbest argument and but the banks are standing on it and some of the senate is is buying it um because they're worried that you know if banks don't have any money they'll stop giving loans and that'll crater the economy um it's anyway um and and yeah that you know the trump administration coming out and saying like no no we have to get this done is good obviously you know one or two posts on

truth social is not going to like force uh all the senators to to really say okay and actually no i need to i need to let up on this and go forward with it we'll see how how involved he gets um you know does he pick up the phone and call some senators and say like come on just get this over the line this is this is dumb we'll see um but yeah i think it's all it's all still fairly unclear um i'm not in dc i'm sure coin centers or the bpi or those folks could give you a more up-to-date sense of where the wind is blowing but at least what is public right now it's still just kind of up in the air they're still doing work on it hopefully we get it done soon because if it's not done i mean what i've been told is basically end of march it just starts to become primary

primaries have already started so in many cases a lot of people are already fighting the uh for re-election um but it just becomes re-election season and then you don't get anything passed and if we wait till if we wait till next congress you know there's a decent chance that uh warren runs the banking subcommittee um because if the democrats retake it she would be the the senior member on i think it's the finance committee i believe she would be a senior on finance and then she would get to steer what happens and what doesn't and there's no way in hell she's gonna care about any of this stuff you know there's some democrats who care about this stuff but specifically she certainly wouldn't um and and she would get to steer what happens in that committee

and that's that's very bad for us yeah not ideal people in massachusetts i think it's time to stand up and uh yeah i don't know what they're they're thinking with warren and you know there's a lot of democrats i think to get it and boy warren is not one of them no no that's abundantly clear uh you actually had brian brian armstrong calling her a communist yesterday on on cable television which was like basically true it's funny it's forced uh brian armstrong to position to like defend bitcoin harder than he has uh in the last decade which has been pleasant pleasant surprise yeah yeah i mean look obviously clarity is a bunch of stuff for the crypto industry that bitcoin doesn't care about i mean it's mostly focused around token regulation

that doesn't affect us at all but you know hey if we can get the brca and protection for for software developers and lsp operators and arc service provider operators and and and and and and uh in there then we gotta support that blog yeah i mean you mentioned bpi i know i said that was the last thing but refresh my memory of that research paper they released on uh agentic money earlier this week what are your thoughts on that yeah i mean you know you have to be careful reading too much into like you know llms predict the next token right and so if there's there's a ton of articles out there about how Bitcoin is the best money for LLMs. There's not very many articles out there about how dollars are the best money for LLMs. And so if you start typing into an LLM,

what is the best money for LLMs or an NAI agent, the response is going to be, well, look, there's all these articles in my training set about how Bitcoin is great for this. So the answer is Bitcoin. That doesn't necessarily mean that that's the correct answer. You know, I think it is to some extent the correct answer in many contexts. But it also doesn't mean that that's what's going to win, even if that is the correct answer. Even if AI agents prefer Bitcoin, you know, ultimately the human is going to prompt it and say, like, hey, can you just buy this? And if OpenAI, My chat GPT hosted agents product, which doesn't exist really yet, but I imagine will at some point, has direct integration for USDC or their own proprietary payment protocol so that they get the money. The OpenAI and Stripe payment protocol where presumably they would get the revenue from all of these things, then the agent is going to be told to use that and it's just going to use that.

So I don't think we can rely on agents preferring Bitcoin. It's good to see that there is a lot of that data out there in their training set. It's good to see that a lot of people write about how Bitcoin is great for agents and that that shows up in the training set of these models. But we certainly can't rely on that as going to lead us to victory here. We got to do the work. You got to do the work, Freaks. Just do it. Okay? That's the phrase of the day.

Just do it. Matt, always been a pleasure over the last eight and a half, almost nine years, I'm sure. This won't be the last. Keep crushing it, and it'll be fun to watch this play out. If you're out there listening, you can do your small part, make a website, talk to a merchant, build a tool at the intersection of Bitcoin and AI

payments that doesn't exist yet where there is a hole. Go do it. Just go play around with it. It's fun. You can ask the LLM to teach you how to use it if you're looking for a step on. Alright. We'll do this again at some point, I'm sure. We always do.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me. Peace and love, freaks. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify,

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