TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #778: Give Your Agent a Bitcoin Wallet with Vinny

Starting point is 00:00:00 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. Vinny, you're a very quick internet celebrity this week.

Starting point is 00:00:40 Welcome to the show. Yeah, pretty crazy. I like made a... Thanks for having me, Marty. It's nice to finally meet you in person. I'm a subscriber to the TFTC and I like what you guys do. So it's cool to be on the show. um i just like i made a a goal to uh post videos and be more active on twitter and

Starting point is 00:01:03 uh three videos later i got jack dorsey retweeting me so that worked out pretty well it's pretty uh pretty sweet and it is uh it's the name of the game these days content marketing you got to get in it prove that you know something it's tiring at some times yeah right people beating you to the punch getting on getting them on getting the people they want on their podcast before you stuff like that um hey greg greg beat me to the punch this week but no we had that back and forth last week when i i think we we reposted your original video on buzz and i quote tweeted about sort of l402 agentic payments and imagining that i think uh i think we definitely talk about buzz we are going to talk about buzz and how it works but i think taking a step back and just thinking

Starting point is 00:01:53 about using these agents in general or using agents using ai models thinking like of harnesses models agents like the that's where i feel like most people on the outside looking in if you haven't been playing around with these tools for a lot it's all so confusing um and most people don't know where to start and we've started we actually launched this tftc roundtable where we just have like a private group of of people um and we've been playing with this stuff for like two years now with the models at the very least but with the harnesses and open claw and hermes for the last seven months and we're like okay we sort of know our way around and we're not technical at all um i know enough to be dangerous but certainly um i certainly wouldn't consider

Starting point is 00:02:41 myself a software engineer set up my first vps in uh january of this year but um i set up my first vps um two weeks ago so and i am a software engineer yeah it's like i'm just usually mostly hosting on cloud providers and stuff like that so yeah but i mean based off of like our pre-recording like a little powwow there like how do you view the state of ai and these tools and how to use and how how people should be well i think you summed it up pretty well because like it's really cool it's very surprising to me to me to see how technical people like you can sound um like you guys you run your business you know your your workflows you know how to describe what it is you need and the agents are able to give you that stuff and then you're able to learn very quickly

Starting point is 00:03:37 you don't know the code syntax but like you know you're talking about hosting stuff on virtual private servers and things like that like it's pretty amazing the technical ability that um and the level of knowledge that you can attain just by using these tools so um i think that's where we're at i think where the playing field is being leveled there are definitely the doers and the non-doers but it's no longer limited by technical ability ability anymore no it's certainly like you just talk to your computer that's like another thing that fascinates me it seems like the form factor or the medium through which we

Starting point is 00:04:11 interact with computers is changing I mean that's what software development is right you were talking to your computer but in a different kind of language right now you're talking to your computer in English so yeah I'm a huge voice to text maximalist just option

Starting point is 00:04:27 space bar I saw you were demoing Handy I use Super Whisper haven't tried Handy yet but it looked very similar and what um what are the like how long you've been playing with these tools like obviously you've been demoing buzz but i imagine i mean you're building wasp um which is trying to solve one of the pain points of people interacting with these models these agents so what's your journey been experimenting with this and yeah so like you said um i'm a founding developer

Starting point is 00:05:00 relations engineer uh on wasp wasp team which is um like a full stack framework that makes it very in this con like the easiest way to explain it in this context is that it makes it very easy for humans and agents to build web apps with it um because it just again like we're talking about these things are like um you know abstraction layers on top of another so like the way buzz is an abstraction layer on top of the coding agents uh wasp is like an abstraction layer on top of the normal tech stack that you would use to build a web app but like it's usually all these disjointed parts you have to kind of glue them all together yourself or nowadays it's your agent doing it but um we have this like you know configuration um file it's like a central place

Starting point is 00:05:45 where you can just write really simple config and then the compiler like wasp the framework puts it all glues all the pieces together for you so it's just like it makes it does a lot of heavy lifting for you or your agent, and then makes reviewing and looking at the pieces that have been put together a lot easier because the code has been reduced to just a few lines of config. So in building Wasp, obviously, once these tools start coming out, you're going to start using them. And when ChatGPT dropped, that was the first thing I did. I was like, how can i i'm gonna post paste in um like an example of a wasp config file and see if chat gpt can do it and this was back when it was like gpt3 i made a like one of my first youtube videos

Starting point is 00:06:31 was build a full stack app in 10 minutes with um chat gpt and wasp and it was just like copying pasting stuff back because we didn't have coding agents yet so that already worked and i was like okay cool we're on to something here this is nice and then it's also like um right when the OpenAI API dropped, I was like, oh shit, how can I put this into an app? So it sounds silly now, but I built an app that was a cover letter generator. It was just a GPT wrapper. You'll hear people joke about these all the time. Oh, GPT wrappers, bro. But I made, I don't know, 10 grand off of a GPT wrapper just because I did it first. I put it on and put it behind Stripe Payments. It's like a really shitty app right when the API dropped.

Starting point is 00:07:17 So that's been my journey starting out. I see this stuff and I'm like, cool, what creative or what cool thing can I try with it? What cool thing can I do with it? And I take the other road. I'm not like super... I'm not one of these workflow freaks where I think everything needs to be super detailed and stuff. But there's definitely potential in all this stuff. And I think I think just testing it out, finding the right way to use it just unlocks a lot of new possibilities for especially entrepreneurs like young or people starting out that didn't have access to legal advice or, I don't know, tax advice. you can get really far with that stuff build a business build a product or if you have a like a service business you can build small software personal tools and like it's just like opens up

Starting point is 00:08:09 new new worlds and new economies so i really like that part of it i did too and it's uh i mean like if you've been a subscriber you've probably heard us talk about i mean we're a team of six here five or six depending on um the contractor work that we need on any given month but it's insane what we've been able to do and i know there's some people listening to this like i'm already stopped talking this is like i'm talking about this so much because i think if you haven't been playing around with us you really need to um need to start doing so and i think that's there's some decision paralysis because people are like where do i start um and what like one of my personal preferences that i i really have become convinced of over the last seven months and i think you

Starting point is 00:08:55 would think the same way as why like buzz is so appealing is like don't lock yourself into one model provider like i like having a harness i've been using hermes for many months and before that open claw and i i just like the ability to have the harness which is i view as like the nervous system uh you use the model as the as like the the agent brain but then like all this exists in the vps that i set up in january and then that has local file and folder systems that are our company brain that the model the model can plug into and then send that to the nervous system to get stuff done yep definitely yeah and i saw that um you were talking about how you have all this like context built up and these you know in in hermes and now that you can just plug that into

Starting point is 00:09:42 buzz um and share it with other agents is like a huge unlock so um i mean that stuff's really cool I think openness is... We're starting to see the openness factor of being able to have access to open source models and just choices in the AI ecosystem. That's becoming more and more important because of whatever top-down policies or government mandates or just... The stuff might just be too expensive for some kid who wants to get his idea off the ground. And yeah, you got have access to an open source model switch it over or use shared compute which buzz has which is really cool feature go for it you know yeah how do you view this closed source frontier open ai anthropic versus open weight chinese model i mean um it's good competition let's see where it

Starting point is 00:10:36 goes um cloud code is definitely i mean we have to give a lot of credit to like anthropic and and open ai they've they've paved the way for sure um but uh we see like their response to things is always kind of like take a step back like serious you guys sure about that like you sure you want to go with that marketing messaging and like i don't know there's always things like that or i'm waiting for them to um i assume that token subsidy is a real thing and that we won't get these prices forever but you never know because just stuff is progressing so fast so i think it's good it's healthy for the ecosystem and um i think the other players that are like kind of behind on anthropic they like it too because it allows them to catch up um so i think it's just interesting

Starting point is 00:11:29 to watch i'm just kind of watching from from the outside using it and um uh yeah just having fun um to kind of like bring uh one of your points that you made earlier um about oh shit i lost my train of thought um all right anyway the i mean we continue was it like the model like the one thing i agree i think anthropic and open ai despite the their flaws mainly that they're uh run by either sociopathic or effective altruist now they have effective an effective altruist the helm of one and an sociopath at the helm of the other and is uh undeniable that the the models they produced are are incredible and that's what i worry about here in the states is um them really positioning to get a regulatory moat and getting their way and the government

Starting point is 00:12:21 killing the the open weight um the ability of the open weight models to progress but um cautiously optimistic that we'll avoid that but bringing it back is like again the harnesses and um the one piece of advice i get i give to people who are beginning to to play around with this and set up agentic flows it's like don't don't get vendor lock-in like i haven't opened codex desktop or claw desktop in in six months i've just been interacting predominantly through telegram with um with my hermes agent i have a group chat with it with a bunch of different topics and just represent parallel sessions and so it's able to get work done and the only time i'll open up claude or codex really is if i have to hop in the terminal

Starting point is 00:13:09 and debug something i'll open the cli directly yep yep um that makes a lot of sense and uh you remind me of what i wanted to say earlier which was like you said people have decision paralysis around the stuff and i think really the important thing is just pick one start using it you know doesn't really matter which the same topics the same uh um like kind of the yeah same things apply to all the others so it doesn't really matter which one you start with get your hands on the one that looks good or affordable or it's your your philosophy and then just start using it to do stuff yeah you know shifting the buzz i mean i think we've both played around with it for for the last week it's definitely rough around the edges definitely still a prototype

Starting point is 00:13:55 i think but last night it took me a while going back it took me actually like two days of like i spent like an hour trying to do it on monday and then last night i finally got around to finishing it but like connecting the hermes agent to buzz and getting it um interacting with fizz uh bumble and honey the three agents that buzz has out of the box and it was pretty crazy and uh for me it was uh it was a bit of a heavier lift because again i have i have my hermes agent running in the vps so the way that buzz works it's running locally on your machine and so i have hermes desktop running locally on the machine too but i had to ssh in to the vps on hermes desktop and then port the uh basically like tunneling from buzz on my computer to hermes on my computer to

Starting point is 00:14:47 hermes in the cloud nobody would know that you're not a software developer talking like that no but somebody probably could have done it in five minutes but it took me the better the better part of like three hours over two days to figure it out but i did yeah yeah exactly but i think i'd be interested to get your thoughts too i know you explained them on greg's podcast yesterday but just in your mind compared to just using codex or cloud code or an agent harness or wasp like how's buzz different and what is it online um yeah i think like i said it a few times in like different tweets and stuff that But I think the Slack killer thing is a nice piece of marketing.

Starting point is 00:15:38 It's a little bit superficial because I don't really think that's the only thing or even the main thing. I think the main thing, the main drivers behind it is this ability to switch models and harnesses. And it's like a Trojan horse to get people to switch over to local open source models. right give them the ability to use cloud and codecs but also to switch to any other open source model or any other open source harness like open code or goose or one of those and because if you can look a little bit around the corner you can see i mean it's not even that hard to me k3 is like bumping up next to the frontier models right for fraction of the cost so it's already gives you a perfect avenue to go that route, right? So they're kind of like... I see

Starting point is 00:16:28 it kind of like a Trojan horse for open source models and for shared compute. And then further down the line, Bitcoin lightning payments, whether it's agent-to-agent, human-to-agent, human-to-human. My guess is they start small, early preview, buggy, but they work out the kinks with the users so they know which kinks to really focus on and then slowly release like those underlying features and um another one of those is git they i think they they're looking to kind of replace github right so you've got all this code on github all your code and if it's public anybody can trade a model on that like the whole idea is buzz kind of works like this global context window for you and your community or your company or whatever and then they have under the surface

Starting point is 00:17:20 an ability to host your uh repositories remotely on your vps or on your server whichever server that you run whenever your relay is hosted um self-hosted so i see them i see it as being many things more than just a slack killer you know and those are the directions i can foresee it going in yeah well and i mean you're you seem to be very well versed on it because you've done done some videos on nostre specifically but i think nostre i know nostre is at the core of this and as somebody who's been a long time nostre bull i think i was probably one of the first hundred people on nostre uh maybe first thousand i'd be more confident saying the first thousand so i've been on when did it when did it launch actually do you remember i think 2022 um if i go

Starting point is 00:18:05 let me see i think i was on it like three months after or a month after it launched and it was very it was like a very niche like not even a bitcoin side project but it was like a side project a bunch of bitcoin developers worked on i've been on since yeah july wow it's three days past my fourth noster birthday july 26 2022 um nice nice yeah i got on in 2023 i saw but i'm not a huge like primal user or or an austral user um but like i i did that app i was telling you about earlier um the gpt wrapper i was like okay i want to learn how do you to use lightning payments so i put um uh ln you're like lightning off i think it's ln url off in there it's been a while since i messed with it and um actually got some lightning payments uh for for people to generate cover

Starting point is 00:19:00 letters so that was cool that was like it seems ancient now in ai in in ai years it was like 2023 or four that i put it up there um yeah so it's pretty funny yeah but i mean to your point like primal domus so everybody's listening doesn't know what noster is notes and other stuff transmitted over relays it's a communications protocol very simple in the first predominant use cases or applications built on it were social media based. And for the longest time, Nostra developers and anybody who's been paying close attention to development, I think Jack is one of those people I've talked with him specifically about this.

Starting point is 00:19:44 Over the years, social media is just like the tip of the iceberg. Just this ability to use private public key pairs to sign events and have cryptographic proof that something existed at some point in time in a certain state. is very powerful in the social media use case you can prove that somebody who controlled a private key at this point in time wrote this message and relate it to to the network but now like you're saying i think one of the biggest problems that many have with um these llms particularly if you're using like codex or cloud code only is like the context windows are are relatively they're relatively short if you're pinging the models a lot so you can jam the context window or compact

Starting point is 00:20:33 it multiple times a day and then your your ai system gets some form of amnesia if you don't have a second brain or something set up that it's plugged into and that's where i think buzz leveraging noster um in this this historical context that you have over time with signed events is is an unlock for for creating like a corpus of context that builds over time that the agents can just plug into yeah that's a really good observation i always looked at it more like um the thing i thought was cool is that it's you know it's a permissionless protocol so you can just kind of interact with anything on the protocol so like you could you can just create these frankenstein apps you know you could connect uh you know imagine trying to connect

Starting point is 00:21:17 slack and discord and github together and like put them together like you can't really do that you could do that very easily with buzz and some other uh apps or things running on the protocol so um seeing buzz come out built on top of noster and being like okay cool there is a really nice use case for noster outside of social media this is exciting let's see what else we can do you know so for this episode was brought to you by our good friends at bitkey self-custody is one of the most important things we do as bitcoiners not your keys not your coins a lot of people never make the jump because the process feels intimidating the key is trying to make that jump easier. You guys know it pretty well here already. It's a Bitcoin wallet from Block built

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Starting point is 00:23:17 check it out and then the agents get their own identity yeah which i think is uh interesting i'm not i haven't explored the the full thought experiment about what that means but um just thinking about where this because like i have my hermes agent and everybody's like when going to let other people on buzz get access to it never because it's got access to server with a bunch of proprietary information on it um but you can think of a scenario where people just build individual agents that don't have as much sensitive proprietary information don't have access to that information people can just begin sharing agents they can have like matrix agent smith-like uh reproducibility um just basically emanate throughout buzz communities yeah yeah

Starting point is 00:24:07 exactly because because they can move you know you can move with that when you go take your identity with you to a new community it comes with um but i also think that like it's there um and built on nostrils so that it can enable um sharing of of resources of compute and paying for those you know so i think um i mean there's two there's more than one side right it's like all the benefits of master but i think it's a that's going to be something we'll see and i mean i wrote that in one of my first tweets and jack retweeted it so there's a good there's a good um good possibility that that is what they're planning yeah no and then like the fact that it's on master too it's open source protocol a lot of the applications built on top of it

Starting point is 00:24:53 are open source as well yep yep and so you can like the permissionless nature of it too like you can imagine just like sending agents be like hey somebody had to build something like this on noster and like go find it incorporated into our workspace and like the whole idea of shared compute there's like routster open agents there are these compute markets that have already been built on top of noster so the ability to to port in that code and just create like an open marketplace like hey i have a i have a gpu running running in my house so i'm not using it but i'm going to put a l402 gateway on top of it plug into to ralster or open agents i'm going to use their code to basically market that i have this compute available and anybody that is connected to me

Starting point is 00:25:40 via buzz if our mpubs are connected like you you'll be able to access this compute as well if you pay for it yeah i mean it's pretty cool we saw what happened i'm sure people or you know about what was going on in india where they're banning bit chat and stuff like that and then it's just like when you have these kinds of shared channels over open protocols there it's pretty hard to shut off access to a model if they're being shared that way i would assume right so that's also a cool uh cool possibility yeah i mean i forget what the nostre github replacement is called um but yeah if you get that in there it's open source and the code is stored on on relays that people are self-hosting i think it's going to be very hard to shut that down definitely yeah

Starting point is 00:26:33 cool so we've been pretty philosophical should we do any um some demos or what else what are you thinking uh i think let's do a demo like i mean and maybe as you're doing a demo of how you're using this explain how like what like the unlock is like for me like again the agents being able to coordinate like martin who is our hermes agent when i got him connected i made him basically like the sergeant arms lead connector and then i i rewrote the system prompts for fizz bumble and honey and created one other agent basically martin became our orchestrator and he's got access to um basically like our we put all of our meeting like our transcripts of our meetings um contracts uh advertisement schedules that we have to get in so he's got access to all that company

Starting point is 00:27:23 information so martin you know what we're trying to get done in the business uh you know So sort of some of the low-hanging fruit initiatives that we haven't begun working on, like, all right, hop in here with Fizz, Bumble, and Honey, and delegate some of the tasks that we have not finished yet to them. And it was just like, I was watching last night, there was like a, probably like a 45-minute loop of them just going back and forth until they got to a point of actually completing a task. I was like, holy crap, this is crazy. Yeah, it's pretty good at that, too. I'm surprised at the end-to-end workflows that it's able to kind of complete, know when to keep going, when to delegate, when to stop, and stuff like that. So that's pretty cool.

Starting point is 00:28:07 Sounds like you might even be doing more practical stuff than I am because you're actually using it for your team. And meanwhile, I'm just kind of playing around, doing demo-y stuff. Can you see the screen here? Yep. Yeah, and let me just get this. kind of minimize here um so yeah like you were saying you know uh what's a good one um you know one thing i shared earlier today that a lot of people seem to like was this prompt where um you

Starting point is 00:28:41 know i'm i'm pinning models to uh to the agents so like i'll have one that is pinned to sonnet like a lower level model and one that's pinned to fable um for for more complex tasks but i'll have them bounced up stuff back and forth because i kind of know the workflow so i'll tell you know shared boy you download a transcript from this uh the video and this transcript pass it to fizz and fizz which is fable find the five most surprising ideas from the time from the transcript with timestamps and really get chunks where where you're not cutting off a sentence or an idea and pass that new document of chunked uh transcript back to shared boy who's sonnet use ffmpeg cut out those sections to make short clips to post to social media so i i get them to

Starting point is 00:29:29 make basically shorts for me for like twitter and stuff with that and then like you said they're bouncing stuff back and forth and i find this site kind of workflow um way nicer than in claude code where you have sub agents i don't know why but i i never caught on to using um sub agents like you have the same thing basically but just something about having them in a shared chat which is like, people have been gravitating towards using mobile apps, mobile solutions, right? Because of something about that, where you can just kind of have conversations with your teammates, with the agent, just, I don't know, it feels nicer.

Starting point is 00:30:07 And I really like that about Buzz. That's just like one example that I used it for today, where I prefer to use it over something like Cloud Code. Yeah, well, in this exact example, so we have this exact workflow. We built this. for the pot. Like we'll, we'll use this workflow for this podcast, like a very similar workflow. It's probably not the exact same, but we do the same thing where it's like, Hey, take the transcript with the timestamps of this episode. Um, find the, the most, uh, engaging

Starting point is 00:30:39 parts. Actually, like we have a Twitter API, a third party Twitter API that we use, like, um, scrape that, look at what's trending. And if anything that we talked about matches with something that's beginning to trend like maybe we should focus on that and then find the timestamps to the clip and go clip it but we have our social media manager who has access to to martin in a sort of private discord channel doing that workflow like in a silo and so like when i think about buzz what this opens up is like like the ability to to take our social media manager and martin the single agent out of that silo and like pull them into a more collaborative space where yep not only could he ask martin to do this but like you could delegate specific tasks within

Starting point is 00:31:26 this this particular workflow to to get better better results and then on top of that like you have the human members of our team hop in and be like well actually yeah like you guys did here's some input from me about another angle we could take on this and yeah it just really consolidates uh consolidates the the work and makes it more open and that that's actually one thing i've been thinking a lot about and it's actually funny enough influenced uh by dorsey i think dorsey uh is really emerging as somebody who's viewing this whole ai revolution with with a very clear mind and particularly his uh paper that he wrote with um olaf from uh roloff excuse me from sequoia and then the podcast they did about

Starting point is 00:32:14 the intelligence layer companies becoming intelligence layers and like this whole concept of uh instead of individual uh employees or members of your team working in these silos like yes they will have delegated tasks and they'll have goals and um there will be a division of labor but the ability of these agents to open up collaboration across the team and for the team to have access to all the information about what everybody else is doing is extremely powerful and i think that's something that that people really haven't caught on to yet either yeah and that's why i like to kind of refer to it as it's the first step in the right direction to have a have a global context window right because it's like usually you have like you're saying things siloed

Starting point is 00:32:58 are spread out between different apps and you're bouncing back between them you lose context you lose the ability to um collaborate with other people get input from other people where it's like you know you just talk about what you want to do your ideas and then you can have something implemented for you right there in that moment right so it just like speeds things up gives you this global context uh window so to speak and um i think that's like the like a really cool direction with this and um one other thing i want to point out was like you know i'm doing this as a as a one-off like um it's kind of like a skill or whatever it's a prompt right but like with a lot of that stuff um i think personally i'm trying to i'm inspired by buzz that it's built on nostre

Starting point is 00:33:42 i'm trying to think of ways to incorporate nostre into apps that i build because i think it makes sense when it's a deterministic workflow right when it's like you know it's just a very strict process that's going to be repeated over and over to build some kind of niche small app that you host that does that. So like you're talking about where it's like scraping the... Using the X API, scraping X for certain trends, cross-referencing that. I built something similar. It's just a little demo. You might have seen it in the video that I posted on Twitter. And I originally had an externally facing API. And I just thought it would be cool to learn a bit more about Nostr. Instead of my agent running a workflow or a recurring daily task and doing that call and

Starting point is 00:34:31 using tokens for that stuff, why don't I use a recurring job in my Wasp app? Because that's also something really easy to do in Wasp. Recurring jobs are a primitive in Wasp. So you just set up a recurring job. Tell the agent to set up a recurring job that instead of... That takes the same stats that you're pushing to the external API, but push them to Nostr. Just make it a Nostr event. Sign it and push it to Nostr on my relay. And so I just get now tweet stats every day from my app pushing to Nostr. So the agent isn't doing this, but it's going into the agent context. So I can just reply to this here and be like, cool, fizz, tell me what's working and what's not

Starting point is 00:35:21 based on the current trends you're doing. Stuff like that, I think is really cool. I don't think it's nailed the ability to use Nostr to its full potential. But I think just through trying out things like this, we might be able to find cool ways, creative ways to build apps on Nostr that are integrated into your relays and your buzz communities. What's up, freaks? When you take Bitcoin seriously, you start with custody. You want to control your keys, avoid single points of failure, and make sure your savings cannot disappear because you or someone else screwed up. That is what Unchained has been focused on since 2016. Unchained is the leader in collaborative multi-sig custody and Bitcoin

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Starting point is 00:37:08 had multiple health events and we're never going back to health insurance. CrowdHealth is crowd funded healthcare. So you sign up for CrowdHealth, you pay a monthly fee, you help out with other people's bills. And it's significantly cheaper than health insurance. We were on Cobra as a family of three. When I left my last job before I went full-time to CFTC, went on the CrowdHealth. now as a family of five we pay i believe seven hundred dollars a month it's significantly cheaper they're going to negotiate prices lower for you they've consistently negotiated health care prices as much as 50 60 80 in many cases they help out with babies if you have a pregnancy you pay the first three thousand dollars and the crowd covers the rest um if you have a regular health event you

Starting point is 00:37:51 pay five hundred dollars and the crowd pays the rest go to joincrowdhealth.com sign up today use code tftc opt out of health insurance i'm uninsured baby and i love it use the code tftc at joincrowdhealth.com you'll get 99 a month for the first three months that you're on the crowd health platform in the community bitcoiners you found sovereign money now find sovereign health and sovereign health care i think one of the underappreciated aspects of that building a master too is the the network effect because what buzz essentially is is a master client right it's a client's a front end built on top of the protocol and the relays connected to that protocol and what many people particularly the noster haters over the years have not realized is that

Starting point is 00:38:35 all noster needs to do similar to bitcoin is just survive long enough and maintain a big critical massive network effect that if it continues to grow the for entrepreneurs specifically if you're building apps the way that noster works with the public private key pairs and the way clients work is like i have a primal i created a new nsec in public key for buzz for my individual profile there but i could easily import the nsec that i've been using for four years and so like the same nsec i use on prime i use on domus i use on wisp i use on zap.stream i use on ralster like i can just port that over to buzz and have the full context of my noster history brought to buzz and so instead of trying to basically as a as an entrepreneur releasing an app trying to

Starting point is 00:39:33 bootstrap a network effect like if your app's good enough anybody on noster with with a private public key pair can just easily sign into your app with that whole context with them which is extremely powerful yeah and it's kind of cool to see like you know sometimes we're like for people but these forward-thinking technologies it takes a while like you said it just has to not die but it's like people build it they don't even know that like ai and coding agents are coming around the corner but it takes something some other kind of progression some other kind of step change to then like open up like the aha moment right where it's like oh shit this is it this is like this is going to work now you know this might really work and that's how i kind of feel like

Starting point is 00:40:15 it's happening here it's like the beginning of that aha moment where it's like oh noster can be now so it can be bigger and uh can really play that role that it was designed to play so i'm excited about that yeah and it's like a weird feedback loop too where like the ai vibe coding is sort of enabling it in a way where instead of having to read like the the docs on how noster works it's like you just tell your clanker like figure out like i did it when i spun up my open claw agent i was just um messing around like seeing what it could do i was like okay like i want you to be able to spend bitcoin like go figure out what the best um wallet is and the best way for me to get you bitcoin it did some research it's like hey we have a server there's

Starting point is 00:40:59 this thing called phoenix d where we can run a lightning server on we spin up a lightning server in our vps we should use that i was like okay um now i'll just send you like when you when you set it up send me send me an invoice to to basically create a channel um because the way phoenix works it's like okay when you set up the server uh send me an on-chain address i'll send bitcoin to that and then you'll submarine swap that into a lightning channel so that you can spend and uh it did that and i was like okay you have a server um you have bitcoin like you have l and url off like since you have your server you can sign the private key and you can sign into websites that that are l and url off enabled i was like all right like go to ln markets and i

Starting point is 00:41:46 want to see you like put a trade i get to go long bitcoin like sign in go long it did that and then i was like okay i want like i want you to manage this like just create like a simple trend following, um, trading strategy. I don't care if you lose money. I just want to do this for, uh, experiment reasons, like also create a Nostra account, um, and then post your trades on a daily basis. And it did that, like it created an NSEC and an MPub and was posting the Nostra autonomously for like a month before I was like, all right, this is, this is cool, but I don't feel like keeping up with, uh, with the trades. Um, but like the, going back to the feedback loop like to your point about like it just needs to survive and then something will

Starting point is 00:42:27 happen where it really creates that aha moment like it's a symbiosis where like vibe coding's enabling the the accessibility to these protocols which are um a lot of times like techno babble to many people but you don't have to understand the techno babble anymore just like tell your client yeah yeah that's crazy it's really fun um because you just have the idea and then you just go for I love that. Something else I do a lot, I get it to create HTML presentations for me so that I can learn stuff. Because you're talking about like, I don't know how to use or build on Nostr, but I just tell my client here to do it. Or if I want to learn basically a high level thing, I'll just be like, create an HTML presentation. And I actually did that for Nostr.

Starting point is 00:43:13 So I was like, I'm a full stack developer. Make sure I really know what I'm talking about. out, create that presentation for me, just like an HTML file. I love doing that to learn about stuff so that I get a deeper knowledge. And then I did this before I started building that app that was sending Nostra events. So when it does stuff, I still have a clue what it's doing. And if I run into problems, I can maybe point them in the right direction. So that's cool. That was fun while building this app here that I can just click sync. And then I get that event, that Nostra event in Buzz. And then when it comes in there, some of the workflows are great. They're boom, came in, tells me, hey, you got new tweet stats, and then I can just start chatting with them.

Starting point is 00:43:58 So some of the workflows in Buzz are still a little bit iffy. I don't know. It's an experimental feature. So in their defense, they've got it in settings under experiments. You can click on workflows or projects. And I had some work, some don't, some are a little iffy. So i think they'll get it worked out though um yeah i think that's cool i do as well um the i'm sorry i got my kids yelling in the background right here um the uh the uh do you think this is making people more productive like i think that's one of the big questions particularly for the the bears and the doomers out there like oh it's great like usage is going up like is there actually more productivity in the economy uh um

Starting point is 00:44:47 Um, I can't just ask a question like that and then leave Marty. Um, I just shut the door. Um, uh, like that's a good question because yes, it can. Is it, uh, I think we got to wait a little while to see the effects. Of course, like, um, it's going to take a while to trickle through, but like, um, on a general, like on a broader basis, but I think if you know what you want and if you, if you if you if you know what you're doing you know what you want and you know when like how like even if you're asking these things for advice if you know when it's giving bad advice

Starting point is 00:45:25 and you or you have a good sense of what's the better advice which advice to take then yeah you're you're like uh i started this that app in a company um like i wouldn't have been able to do that. I probably would not have done it pre-2023, pre-AI. Because I'm not the kind of person that's going to go out on a limb and hire a tax advisor and all these people. I literally did the majority of the work first off with just agents. Copy and pasting websites, screenshots. What's this mean? What do I got to do here? What do I do? And just like slogging through it and before we really have like good agents like this but like yeah if if you're driven to do that kind of stuff you have you have so you just have an idea and a will to

Starting point is 00:46:15 do it you can do it so yeah i think for the right people it's a a multiplier for sure it's a great lever um it's a huge lever and um in the wrong hands you know it's just going to be a it's going to lead to nothing as well you know that's the way it goes yeah i mean you used the word earlier but i think uh in terms of like deterministic workflows and sharing them but i agree too like that's the way i view that's what i tell people is like the way i use these tools is i know what the output should be particularly for our workflows at tftc and so like i know when it's wrong it's like i don't expect the models to go out and like create something new for us if that makes sense it's like i know we have this task that we need done and we typically don't get it done because

Starting point is 00:47:06 we don't have enough bandwidth like i know what the end result should be like please go do that and get the output the right is wrong if it's right thank you good job if it's wrong you messed up here do that where i think people falter is thinking that it's going to just do something magical for them like these are essentially their large language models they're just doing a probabilistic analysis of what the best uh what the best next word is and um and the output and like you just need to know what the output should be and apply that lens to it like don't say build me a business that makes a billion dollars a year make no mistakes it's not right right yeah you still got to do the work it's just easier to do the work that's about it you know so it's easier

Starting point is 00:47:51 to get to it's easier to get something done that you might have basically no knowledge on previously like you're a great example like being able to self-host these things these tools to uh virtual private servers and connect to the ssh into them and all this stuff it's like yeah that stuff was very hard just five four years ago you know so it's like um it's to me it's not really a debate um but when i see companies that have token mandates like you have to use so many tokens you have to use ai to this you know hit these benchmark hit these these targets and you know the people who don't the people who sat around and did nothing before are just going to waste those tokens you know so it's like it depends all depends on how you approach it yeah great

Starting point is 00:48:40 bringing this back to buzz what's your what would be your top request for for a feature top request for a feature um i think it's i think they're doing it right like i'm willing to you know these are experimental features this is early early early um preview stuff um i think what i would like to see is like if you're used to like um if you're kind of used to working in a terminal and you know just like these views and then if you're a software developer you know you might want to jump back and run your own commands like you're used to that stuff could be cool if they had something embedded in here like that for the more technical people um but it's not like it's not um yeah the cool thing is it's open source some some someone like

Starting point is 00:49:25 me or someone could put that in as a feature and and submit a pr to block um so maybe we'll see that but i like the i think i like the approach i'm willing to deal with some kind of the rough edges at the moment while it's really early preview um because i think it's going in a very cool direction um i didn't uh you know i'm like i'm not one to jump on on bandwagons just because they're trendy like if i see something that interests me then i'll try it out um so yeah this seems like a pretty cool approach and um i want to see more integration with i want to see what i would like to actually see is other cool stuff happening on noster that gets integrated here in like a creative way so that we can use these tools together in creative ways but i think

Starting point is 00:50:10 we're still kind of figuring it out at least i am yeah and i and like the the tweet that you responded to i think the first big unlock could be basically forking or implementing ralster open agents for a market to compute particularly for open source models and then equipping the agents with with bitcoin wallets that you can they can load up or to your point like i think you said on greg's like being able to tip other humans or agents to get the work for you very trivially yeah i mean like look at primals or i'm sorry like noster i always i use primal mainly but like noster is such a good example and i mean lynn alden has pointed this out before that um the incentive structure is so different than twitter right like when you make something useful

Starting point is 00:50:58 on Nostr, people literally tip you, send you money. So we know it works. We know people are willing to tip for valuable information, insights, work, things like that. Now imagine you have that here in Buzz where it's like an open community. So it's not just your company. You're doing something private. But let's say we all join together and we start some open community that's working on an open source project and someone just comes up with a really cool idea and mentions it in the community you could pay them for like good ideas because then you get the agents to implement them or then you pay you know whoever's running the really cool low like um uh high performance um open source model you send them a zap to run that um to implement that task on their shared

Starting point is 00:51:50 compute or on their agent you know so like that's really cool i think that's what i want to see basically i think and i think we will see that if um it's like you said if it just stays around long enough it doesn't die like a bounty board too um yep let's create bounties for particular particular workflows or tasks to be done and it's like the perfect example like this podcast is hosted on nostre we use fountain their podcast host it's a it's a nostre client and so like there's going to be people listen to this podcast and stream us Bitcoin, um, over the network. Um, and like, if you were like, I could, if you like, I can literally put your end pub in this episode,

Starting point is 00:52:31 I think we can do it individual episodes and like you could share in the stream of Bitcoin that's coming our way as people are, are boosting and streaming sats to this episode. Cool. I'll spend it on some sweet, powerful agents then in the future, in the future when, when it gets implemented. But yeah, that's what I would like to see. Yeah. I know it's getting late where you are. Um, how, uh, how should we end this? Any, any final thoughts, any calls to action,

Starting point is 00:53:02 any philosophical musings about the state of AI, where we're going and we're getting job destruction. No, yeah, no. I think we did a pretty good job, uh, of, of, of covering that stuff. I like the angle we took here. is cool different than the other podcasts so that's nice um uh no i think this is like pretty good maybe if if people want to know more or like like hear more um they should let us know and then like that'd be cool to there might be some things out there that people are interested in that we haven't really hit on and then um we can explore further talk about it um on on the social media

Starting point is 00:53:43 platforms or do another one of these that would be cool that'd be awesome well uh appreciate you coming on thanks for having me sure it's been a hectic week for you you're just out there talking about the tools that you're using and become uh become a little internet celebrity this week so i appreciate you coming on this show and uh you're welcome yeah it seems like you're a bitcoiner uh at least you're playing around with it, which is, uh, which is cool to see. And, uh, and Nostra, you're becoming well-versed on it. And these are two projects that obviously I've been very passionate about for many years. And it feels like this agentic economy is,

Starting point is 00:54:23 is the moment for Nostra and Bitcoin to shine. And it seems like we're getting to the point where, um, people are beginning to recognize that. It was just cool to see you talk, um, about these technologies and the potential for them on a show like Greg Eisenberg that really doesn't cover this stuff much. Yeah, totally agree.

Starting point is 00:54:47 Alright. Well, hopefully we'll do this again at some point in the future. And until then, enjoy it, brother. You too. 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

Starting point is 00:55:02 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 make sure you like and subscribe to the show and if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms that goes a long way last but not least if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free make sure you download the fountain podcasting app and go to fountain.fm to find that five dollars a month get you every episode a day early ad free helps the show gives you incredible value so please consider subscribing via fountain as well thank you for your time and until next time

TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #778: Give Your Agent a Bitcoin Wallet with Vinny

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