Welcome in to This Week in Bitcoin, episode 97.
My name is Chris, ChrisLAS.com, JupiterBroadcasting.com.
Well, today's episode is way off format.
You got to have fun every now and then.
I think this is really the episode 100 party.
So that way episode 100 is all about business, you know, like the show is supposed to be.
And this is where we have the fun.
So today we're going to talk about node management in 2026.
And to do that, I have a couple of my unplugged buddies with me.
Hello, Wes.
Hello.
Hello, Brent.
Hello there.
Hello, you two.
So all three of us are node operators.
Wes, you probably have some of the most experience just because you play around for hours.
And then I have probably the most amount of nodes.
Yeah, definitely.
And then, Brent, you probably have some of the most early experience.
You have Ranonode.
You also have AlbiHub.
So you're kind of in that kind of maybe where some of the audience is at.
It's a nice way of saying the least experience.
We're trying to represent like the full spectrum on this episode.
Yeah, you guys kind of got into it early over in office hours when my node was just a twinkle in my eye.
I remember that fateful day.
Early days of Umbral.
In fact, that was one of our tasks that we'll talk about later is we had to rescue an old Umbral node.
and I think we should start by acknowledging there's a lot of ways to run a node. Of course,
you can run a Bitcoin node just about on any machine that has enough hard drive space,
but these days you might also want to run a Lightning set up on top of that.
And so this segment is going to assume you already have a node of some kind. Maybe it's AlbiHub,
LND, Core Lightning, and then some of the deeper stuff we're going to get into down the road might
require you have AlbiHub set up in a certain way if you're going to use AlbiHub, but most of it
should be applicable to just about everybody. And the thing is, is there's a lot that is new
in 2026 when it comes to managing a Bitcoin node. A lot has changed in the last few months.
A lot of it is API driven. A lot of it is more programmable. And a whole lot of things are very
agent friendly now. And that is one of the big shifts in 2026.
Anybody who listens to this show, you probably know you should be running a node.
So the question really isn't, should I run a node?
It's how do you properly run a node?
What can your node talk to?
How does your node get authenticated to?
What's allowed to talk to your node?
How do you monitor how your node is doing?
And how do you keep an agent, if you want to deploy one,
from getting too clever with your scarce money?
This is the new stack we need to talk about.
It's not just wallets and dashboards anymore.
It's APIs, credentials, setting budgets for agents,
event monitoring, and then guardrails. And when you put all of this together, it is not only a
really fun stack, it's an extremely powerful stack that can nearly be automated to run itself.
So I think we should start with Bitcoin Core and kind of talk about maybe what we could describe
as the API ladder here. So you still need Bitcoin Core. It's the foundation of running your node,
and it's the boring and it's the right answer. It's there. It's because it offers a couple of
primitives that some of the tools will rely on like a json rpc for control yeah yeah indeed you'll
see that on a lot of tools actually around here it does look like you can find some supporting
programs like talking via that json rpc you'll find like a bitcoin prometheus exporter which we
can get more into later so a lot of things we'll we'll talk through that there's also a common
pattern with json rpc because you're doing rpc like remote procedure call right so you're kind
of sending commands over the network and it happens to be sent with json instead of something
like xml in the old days and so a common pattern you'll see is sort of like implementing some kind
of proxy or manager that can implement even more trust on top depending on what the actual daemon
underneath implements so you can maybe filter like commands that can do changes on your node
versus read-only reporting commands and so when you get bitcoin d going you've got the json rpc
you're going to get a source of truth for what's the chain sync at,
what's the mempool state, what's your wallet state,
and what's your disk usage, what's the index health,
all of these things, notification hooks and things like that.
Yeah, the other part is, you know, it kind of just provides the base info layer
if you're going to build other things on top,
especially if you're going to have a lightning node on top,
which needs to get all of that underlying chain data.
Right. So then the next thing is the lightning node,
and this really gives you, well, what some people would describe
as the machine interface story.
But it's another way of saying
when you get a Lightning node,
there's a lot of tools available
for agent integration.
Well, right.
So, I mean, a lot of that has to do
with just Lightning versus, like,
base layer on chain Bitcoin, right?
Like, there's a lot of programmability
and ways you can interface with the chain,
but that's the kind of primary thing
you pay attention to is, like,
you know, what new blocks got mined,
what got added onto,
what transactions did that come with?
and lightning is a whole other beast of a layer two on top and kind of by its nature it right it
has new and different things to pay attention to including invoices and liquidity and channels
and it comes with a lot of state that isn't on a blockchain or at least is sort of you know not yet
on the blockchain or only accounted for at sort of larger less granular levels and then you're
going to need extra observability on top. And LND, and you can do it also with CoreLitning,
they have something called a GRPC. What's a GRPC with? Yeah, so this is another format for doing
remote procedure calls. And this is one that kind of developed out its protobuf at the base. It came
out of a lot of stuff that Google had been doing for their own sort of internal calls. You'll also
see a lot of REST APIs. You'll see things called mech runes, which are essentially just tokens you
need security, you know, private key type credentials that allow you to authenticate
to your node.
And scope.
So you can have macaroons that are scoped to certain permissions only, like read only
permissions or only certain things on that node.
Yeah.
And that comes down to the individual demon.
Like this is one area where if you run a core lightning node, by default, they don't
have that kind of granularity built into their macaroon setup.
But on LND, you get that out of the box and you can bake your own macaroons with custom
access controls if you want.
So that's where core lightning has the JSON RPC interface.
And so what's done kind of more over there in that community is often like a proxy or some kind of control that only allows certain RPC commands to go through.
All right. Have we lost you at all, Brent?
Well, it seems to me like the distinction I can find here is that Bitcoin is like the super stable base that doesn't change very often.
And then with lightning on top, there's a bunch of playing around going on there and just a lot of flexibility as well.
Yeah.
Do I get any of that right?
You got it.
And then they're both giving you a set of different APIs or remote procedure calls that you can use.
And the reason why we're harping on this and kind of establishing this space is because this is what you're going to build on top of to manage your node going forward.
And it makes sense to kind of get an idea of what that API surface is because, like, some of them are, you know, closing or opening channels, which commits your real on-chain Bitcoin to things.
And some of them are just, like, getting some info in a JSON format that you can use to update a dashboard.
And those are totally different implications.
And if you have like LND right now, it's built in.
And if you have Bitcoin D, it's built in.
This RPC is already available.
It might not be exposed to the network, but it's available.
But let's clear up something before we go any further.
Because you've mentioned a couple of times, I've mentioned it a couple of times.
There's LND and there's Core Lightning.
What's the difference?
Yeah, well, they're both just different implementations of the Lightning network protocols.
So they're, you know, kind of like with email or other systems, you can have different daemons
that both speak the same protocol.
On Bitcoin, we have Bitcoin Core and Nots.
Exactly. Yeah. So that's the same thing here. So LND is a Go version and they've kind of like, it's like all in one. It's very comprehensive. It has support for like a lot of just like detailed APIs on a large surface area and does a lot of things well.
core lightning the core part is kind of the key it's like really meant to just do the really like
tight minimal essentials of what you need the really hard parts of like the actual network
protocol and doing that safely and securely and you extend it with modules yeah and so it has like
a plug-in system that you can just run any binary talks like standard io kind of style and so you
can extend it with these plugins and that's actually where like how key send is implemented
and even internally a lot of the features that you get out of the box are actually just
modules or plugins of some kind of extensibility feature outside of the true core.
So that enables some things to happen earlier, like they had Bolt 12 support pretty early
on, that kind of stuff.
So a lot of experimental things can get developed.
Right, it's easier to add.
Yes, but it can be a little more do-it-yourself or less out-of-the-box for a Node operator
standpoint.
Yeah, I will say, I think a lot of community how-tos and scripts and services kind of expect
you to have LND.
Yeah, yeah.
compatibility is also not as good.
For instance, like AlbiHub is not nearly as easy to get going on top of a core lightning
node as it is with an L&D node.
Let's talk about AlbiHub because that's one more wrinkle.
And then I think we've got the groundwork laid here.
AlbiHub is software that you can install that includes its own lightning node, or you can
run it on top of your existing lightning node.
Or one more or, there is the AlbiHub cloud product.
That's the least flexible, but probably the most appliance like is AlbiHub cloud.
And then the next would be the entire AlbiHub package that includes its own Lightning configuration and daemon.
Yeah, it uses a thing called the Lightning Development Kit or LDK, which it's saying contains a bunch of the base primitives.
And then AlbiHub wraps that so it can be its own node using that library built in.
Or it can talk to a bunch of different node backends, including LND.
Or it can even talk to another node sort of backend with Nostra Wallet Connect.
And some of the fun stuff we're going to get into later does kind of require that you're on L&D or Core Lightning and not using their built-in Lightning.
Some of it.
Let's talk about some of the stuff.
What, you're saying self-hosting is more fun?
What are you talking about?
Well, even depending on no matter what version of AlbiHub, if you have AlbiHub, you are already kind of set up with Nostr Wallet Connect.
And that's very powerful just on its own.
It's a standard way for apps and services to talk to Lightning Wallet, to your Lightning Wallet, over Nostr.
And it's pretty simple.
You're seeing more and more adoption in different applications.
Fountain recently shipped it, so you can use Fountain's built-in wallet,
or you can connect it to your AlbiHub wallet using Nostra Wallet Connect.
And a lot of the apps that ship today give you permissions to make a payment,
receive a payment, and they let you set strict budgets
and have scoped permissions as part of the Nostra Wallet Connect protocol,
or I guess spec.
Yeah, and the basic idea, right, is it provides a way for you to encrypt
and then can send encrypted commands
and get results back over Nostra relays
to talk to your nodes.
So you can have an app or an interface of some kind
on whatever machine you're on
and your node's somewhere else.
And instead of having to make a direct connection
or do a direct API call,
you will let the Nostra network take care of it.
And really, honestly, that might be all you need
because there are command line interfaces
and MCPs that Albi makes available
and an agent can interact with that.
And if you just want to do basic payments
and check balances and set budgets,
You might be set with just AlbiHub and NostraWallet Connect and a CLI.
Yeah, so you get get info, get balance, make invoice, pay invoice, multi-pay invoice, pay
keysend, lookup invoice, and list transactions, at least in the base sort of NostraWallet
Connect API surface.
That's where maybe if you want to do fancier stuff in terms of like complicated node management
and liquidity management and rebalancing, that won't be sufficient.
But for a lot of the day-to-day stuff, maybe even a lot of automations or agent stuff, that's a pretty decent interface.
So what we've got here, you've got Bitcoin Core.
Then you've got Lightning with a couple of different implementation options, including AlbiHub in there.
And then you've got the APIs that these different services provide that have always been there, but perhaps you've never really been using them.
And now there's tooling that makes them extremely powerful and makes things that maybe were too complicated or took too much time to set up very straightforward.
So that's the foundation you need to understand.
And now here's how you can start to take advantage of them.
Let's start with the low-hanging fruit right here.
You could just use OpenCode.
Learn to love OpenCode.
And it is one of the biggest practical unlocks for node operations.
You can install it locally on your workstation and point it at configs and scripts.
You can have it SSH into your remote node and put it in plan mode at first, have it learn the system, then come back and propose changes before it touches anything.
And we did this with a couple of nodes.
Brent's had a very old Umbral node from the very early days of Umbral.
Yeah, years ago.
On a VPS.
Worst case.
It kind of broke at one point.
We said, oh, we got to get around to fixing that.
And then every time I would visit, we'd say, oh, we should probably get around to fixing that.
And then a couple of years went by.
But you guys fixed it recently.
Yeah.
So we ended up, we had the VPS and we thought, oh, we'll also run IPFS on this thing.
Yeah.
Port conflicts happened, took down the lightning node and just messed things up.
But we wanted to get those channels back up.
And so in you know probably 15 minutes OpenCode was able to assess the problem disable the right services restart things and then continually monitor the Lightning server and make sure things were coming back up
And it noticed, oh, your VPS is running out of RAM.
We can make these adjustments.
It's really great like that.
We also had an Umbral script
that was broken on an old install,
and it recovered that.
It's also really fantastic at verifying
if you're waiting for your services to start.
You don't know, is Lightning starting or not?
It can go in and knows where to check
and tell you what's going on.
Open code can be a fantastic tool
that can take advantage of not only things on the file system,
but also these APIs.
Yeah, I mean, you can get into like finer grained work,
but even just as a default,
and you should be careful
and we can get into the safety part of this.
But, right, like even just the base commands,
you run like a get info command on your lightning node,
that often spits out like a JSON blob
that it's not hard for the human to read,
but it's not really what we're best at.
And it is what these things are best at, you know?
And so it can present that in a nice little table for you
to check out.
It can call out things
that might look like an error.
Or yeah, just report on the status
of like, nope,
we're still waiting to catch up
with the blockchain.
Yeah, you're at block height this.
And by, like one of the things I love
is you're at this block height
and by observing so far,
I estimate it'll be another half hour
before sync is completed.
Yeah, that kind of stuff.
But let's touch on safety
because you do need to be careful.
There's plan mode.
It is helpful.
It's permissions that really matter.
So if the agent is logging in,
it's logging in with whatever
that user has access to,
whatever wallet that user has access to.
You need to be really careful there.
And that's where something like you were trying to play with
is writing some sort of pre-made agent scripts and wrappers
that you can supply with like their own Macaroon style
or like whatever auth, password, et cetera,
stuff that is injected in there.
And then they can just, they just have access to that.
Yeah, exactly.
So we could talk more about Bolts in a minute,
But my LNCLI and bolts commands are wrapped exactly like you say with just certain protections in there and they're designed.
So there's like bolts and then each each lightning node has a bolts dash host name and that is scoped only to that host with only those commands.
And that way there's less work or speculation and agent or a tool like open code has to do.
And then especially with LND, like you can give them some of them could just have the read only macaroon.
Some could have the full commands, maybe gated with special instructions that require more of your, you know, input or authorization.
And you can, like, make a custom one if you needed to.
So it could only do a couple of changing commands.
Like, you can make payments, but not X.
And sticking with the repair and using open code thing for one moment, too, I will just say, before you have it move out of plan mode into build mode, ask it to create a spec.md and review that with your human eyeballs before it works.
And make sure that's, you know, what you want done.
You know, and really, I mean, I think both you and I, including with Brent, have had nodes kind of repaired or rescued with this.
Yeah, I think three is the count. Two that were significantly down for the count.
I specifically remember rescuing nodes with you, Chris, before, you know, these agent times.
Yeah, back when we were first learning Umbral.
It was one of your most hated mornings when you would come into the studio and sit down and be like, oh, the node went down.
Okay.
I got to set aside three hours to try to dive into this and figure out what's going on.
And you would, you'd figure it out, which is great.
But 15 minutes versus three hours, I think we've advanced.
I know, I know.
It really is so much better now.
The tooling is so much better.
I had an issue where I was trying to plug in that was doing some automated fee management
for my node.
But as part of that, it was occasionally opening channels that thought would help my network
like reachability and stuff.
but it kind of ran into an issue where it tried to open some channels but like the fee rate was
too low so they're never going to actually open and then it kind of got into a loop where it just
kept doing that so i had several hundred like phantom channels that were never going to open
yeah yeah and so these kinds of automation tools were super useful and exactly like i could draft
a plan with the exact specific ids so i could make sure i was like not going to touch channels i knew
i still wanted to keep or anything like that very helpful do you recall did you use open code to
take care of that? No, I think this was a little before I was into open code, but I used
some crush and yeah, I think it was well said crush. Yeah. It's so if you take nothing else
from this, like just use what we've talked about so far with open code. However, really the thing
I think would be ideal is to automate this a level further to make this even smoother.
It is 2026. It is the year of the Asians after all.
Now, I suppose we'll really be talking in the context of open claw,
but this would really work with just about any kind of agent,
from the clods to the whatevers.
And it's stacking everything we've talked about
and really turning it into something that's effective for you,
that gives you actionable information,
and maybe even helps you save sats off of your node.
You know, because that's one thing,
I think if you have a Lightning node, you're using it,
you can sometimes collect some sats on there.
It can sit there for too long.
You know it's a hot wallet.
You know you should be getting them off there,
but it takes time.
That's my wallet.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, mine too.
So that's something I wanted to fix.
This is really an intervention episode.
Right, yeah.
I feel called out.
Yeah.
So there's two areas, really, that I wanted to address,
and that was, I guess, three.
I wanted to be able to check the balance of my node from my agent.
I wanted to be able to send a quick payment and I wanted to be able to swap or sweep sats
that are sitting on my node in my hot wallet to a liquid wallet, because that's sort of
my intermediary step before I go to cold storage.
And a lot of this is relying on these APIs we just talked about.
And then one more quintessential killer piece of software that we all love.
we've talked about it before bolts and but not in the way you're used to using it so before before
we go any further quick explainer of what bolts is bolts is a non-custodial swap service that lets
you move between a bitcoin layer to like a lightning or liquid layer or in between any of those without
having to give up your custody it's a clean way to move sats between lightning or on-chain or liquid
when maybe your node needs a little rebalancing so you can use it in the context of your node too
Yeah. You know, for us, it's often an issue kind of depending on how you run your node. Like if you're a merchant, it's going to be one issue. If you're trying to run a routing node, it's another target.
You're just trying to zap or something.
Right. And for us, you know, we often get stuff sent to us very generously from the boost.
A boost.
And so we often need to then rebalance to push sats back out. So we maintain enough liquidity to receive new boosts.
Right. And they need to have sending liquidity and all that.
And so Bolt is one service that's been really helpful to do that.
And one of the mechanisms they offer is what's called a reverse submarine swap.
And it's actually kind of really neat and clever.
And the kind of high-level version is you on your end generate a pre-image.
It's like a random value.
And then you hash that and you send that to Bolt.
And then it creates the swap sort of based around that.
So it's first able to make a special kind of lightning invoice called a hold invoice,
which when you pay it it doesn't actually like fully lock your sats kind of in an intermediate
htlc state because it's waiting for like the actual reveal of the pre-image before it does
anything so you kind of like stash your sats there but in a way that you can recover them
and then once bolt sees you've done that first step it'll make a corresponding sort of staged
contract on whatever base chain you're using so could be on chain or in our case usually liquid
but that's also waiting for a pre-image and so the way it works is once that's done and you see
that that is locked up temporarily and then you can finally reveal the pre-image which lets you
claim the liquid the liquid sent to whatever wallet id you put in at the start and then because
you had to reveal on the liquid chain the pre-image to get it back for yourself that lets bolts then
claim that Lightning transaction and then they get paid out. And so at no time are you at risk
of like actually losing the custody. But at the end, you get to execute this whole smart contract
sort of transaction cross chain stuff that will ultimately do the swap for you. And it's super
powerful because not only can you use it to say, take hot sats off of a hot wallet, but you could
use it maybe to balance liquidity in a channel. You can have a liquid wallet running on the node
because Bolt offers four nodes, Bolt D and Bolt CLI.
And this is something you install.
Some packages for Umbral and Start9 include Boltz with them,
but it's a command line tool you can install on your workstation
and it's a command line tool you can install on your server
as well as a daemon that will run.
And it talks to Lightning and it also creates its own API.
Yeah, exactly.
So Bolt D runs, it talks to your Lightning server
and it supports both LND and Core Lightning.
Boltz actually run both of those on their network.
which is pretty great.
And then on top,
so Bolt2D has its own API.
You can call from your own tools
to interact with it
or it comes with
the Bolt's client CLI tool,
which will just do that for you.
Yeah.
Which is pretty handy.
And then what's nice about Bolt2D
is like that little,
like, you know,
state machine we just walked through.
It's kind of a lot.
Like if you go,
you can do it.
They provide SDKs
if you want to do it programmatically
in your own client.
But like there's some crypto stuff
to get right
and like make sure you do the right order
and account for possible failures.
So Bolt2D kind of wraps that
into a more manageable interface.
And this is really where it gets great in 2026
because Lightning's no longer this thing
that you have to have in a particular app
or in a web page.
Your agent can now inspect your node.
It can pay for an invoice.
It can swap liquidity around.
It can sweep sats to your Lightning wallet.
And the killer combo here is Bolt D and Bolt CLI
with a skill that your agent follows
to interact with it appropriately.
and it works so today i have moved about 250 000 sats from my primary node to my liquid wallet
just through telegram by prompting my agent that's so great and right so the idea here is you
you like sort of pre-put in here's like the address i want you to send it to you which is
a liquid wallet you control so when i tell i i made it really simple so i say sweep five i say
sweep 50,000 sats to liquid. And if I don't supply a wallet, it comes back and it asks me for the
wallet address. And then when I give it the wallet address, it gives me all. Well, before it asked,
before it, before it asked for the wallet address, when I just say sweep 50,000 sats to liquid,
it comes back with a fee estimate. Here's what it's going to cost. Here's the bolts fee. Here's
all of that. So you'll get exactly this amount in your liquid wallet. If you're ready, send me the
address and say yes or whatever. And I, so I give it the address and then it does it all in the
backend, follows the skill that I created, which I will publish in the show notes.
And then it does the swap.
So the skill is about 80, well, probably about 60, 70% complete.
But if people would like to take it and work with it, so far I've managed to make sure
I can inspect the channels.
I can get my entire node balance on chain and lightning, and I can do the sats to liquid
sweep.
And it all works fantastically.
And there's other things, obviously, I want to do inevitably with that, but that's a pretty good start.
If you just want to be able to check on your node through an agent, and this is, I'm using OpenClaw, but it would work with OpenCode, it would work with Clawed, any agent.
I have a question here about security practices, I guess.
You guys are always saying, you know, don't throw your API keys into a bunch of your prompts.
how does it feel about putting all it, you know, node addresses and things like that into some of
these prompts and letting these agents go wild? Yeah, I mean, you should definitely think about
what, you know, what you're going to put on there, what you're going to let it access and control
and what provider you're sending it to. Yeah, there's that. And I suppose if you're really
paranoid about this, Venice AI offers a lot of good solutions, but, and so does Paper, what was it?
pay per query.
Oh, yeah.
That also offers
some privacy there.
The only thing that's
really getting exposed
in this process
is the public
liquid receive wallet address.
Otherwise,
all of the credentials,
all of that stuff's
not in what I'm prompting
to my agent in this case.
Yeah.
Now, there would be more
like when you get
a channel status or whatever,
but a lot of that
ends up being scraped
and sort of revealed
on the network
so the discovery tools.
Yeah, like it'll give me
channel ID information
in the prompt,
but that you could just
get off of Amboss.
So it's not that bad.
And that is also
being able to just see the status of my channels which where they're at where if it's on the send
or receive side extremely useful and then if you have a if you have multiple nodes you're managing
like i do it really is a force multiplier and then you combine that with the capability of bolts
and there's also lncli which i've also wrapped it really it really is a powerful agent combination
there's also actually we were talking about lb but separately they just make a lot of great tools
along with albiub itself yeah and so they have made a pair of tools a cli and an mcp server
for basically being able to talk nostril wallet connect to to node so if you don't want to sort
of like do a direct wrapper but you do want your agent to be able to use nostril wallet connect you
can use the albi nostril wallet connect cli for instance as like an easy way for the agent to be
able to do that but without you having to do a lot of the plumbing uh-huh yeah that is really
See, yeah, we should link to it.
We'll put links in the show notes
because they do have some really good stuff.
So the real unlock though for me this week
was the sweep to my liquid wallet.
Just something that I can you know something that not a huge deal but it is so nice to just have it done Well it kind of changes the task right Before it was it felt like a serious task you wanted to do seriously Yeah so you have to think about it So you be like let me go to the node
I will assess the state of the channels in liquidity, come up with my own plan to then
go try to pull some sets off of here.
And now you can have like a whole other pair of eyes who can pull fresh info from the node
and help you do it and second guess what you're doing.
And in some ways, having it done programmatically where you're, you know, the addresses of the wallet you want to go to are hard, well, soft coded in, in this case, but like better than the human who hasn't slept, you know, for four nights or whatever. So in some ways, it might be more reliable than you doing it manually.
Well, especially because like the flow I've done often, right, is especially like it's between my phone and the computer and I'm copying like exact IDs that need to be exact to get the money to send to the right place.
Right. So it's not really the kind of thing you want to screw up.
And you know what I can do now, too, when I said one of the times I tried to sweep to liquid, it didn't work because I didn't have enough outbound liquidity.
And now I can say, why did that fail?
And the agent figures out, well, this channel didn't.
But you might be able to send it out this channel if you pin it.
And, you know, it comes back with recommendations and actionable suggestions on how to actually get that payment out.
So I can actually say, so why did the payment fail?
And actually get information without having to dig through logs and all of that.
It's great.
You need to keep an eye on things, though.
You need to monitor that stack.
And like we've been mentioning, these APIs, they give you the ability to do just that.
Bitcoin D, LND, Core Lightning, they all offer the ability to monitor them and expose metrics.
And one of them, one of the ways you can do this is through Prometheus.
Yeah, I mean, it's really become, of course, pretty much a metrics standard out there.
Even if you don't use Prometheus itself as a tool, all kinds of different telemetry options, both on the client and the server side, support it.
So like there's Bitcoin Prometheus exporter for Bitcoin D.
And a lot of these even come with, say, a starter Grafana dashboard you can use in conjunction.
And LND has LND Mon, which is a side project that is still a really easy way to get information from your LND node that you want to monitor.
you can see things like invoice flow, channel health, forwarding behavior, peer status, how
the RPC is doing. And that's what's also really good if you want to make sure your agent can talk
to it. Yeah, right. That's how a lot of these tools end up working is like they will go make
the calls, like the limited set of calls to go just collect data and expose that in the Prometheus
metrics format. And it is really, really straightforward to task the agent to build a
Prometheus scrape on this information. Core Lightning kind of has a built-in system here,
which is really nice, right?
Their plugin you can just get, I guess, built-in is...
Yeah, it uses the built-in plugin systems
and it's in the sort of not official,
but sort of official sort of like list of community plugins.
And it seems pretty well rated.
Yeah, whereas with LND, you do need to have LND Mon.
But either you get that plugin or you get LND Mon
and now you can monitor with Grafana and Prometheus.
Prometheus pulls the stats, Grafana visualizes them.
And you can get pretty far.
And if you install Mempool Space,
which a lot of us have on our node,
That also exposes a series of API endpoints that can tell you things about the network state, like the current fees, transaction status, the block height, mempool conditions in general from your node's perspective.
Essentially, all the information about the Bitcoin network that mempool is aware of can be exposed as Grafana endpoints around that.
You know, I think that's a good wider point, too, is there's already a lot of good software and dashboards and ways to surface in-ho around node management.
and a lot of them end up having or using under the hood APIs
that you can tap into, like with Mempool or Ride the Lightning
or a lot of these things.
So I'm now scraping all the data with Prometheus
and then with Grafana, it pulls that data out of Prometheus
and it builds me my own custom dashboard.
So I now have a dashboard that shows me what block height I'm at,
how my node is doing, the memory usage, the disk space usage,
the active lightning channels,
how my inbound versus outbound capacity is doing,
how many sats I've received in the last 24 hours.
It's one Grafana dashboard that's pulling the data
from Bitcoin Daemon, from Lightning Daemon,
all of it, and then into Prometheus,
and then one dashboard.
One panel to view it all to make sure everything's up.
And then with that, you can also base alerts.
Which is also nice since you can now kind of separate things.
You don't have to go log into software
where you might be able to do both read and write actions.
You can just pop open a dashboard
and get a sense of what's going on.
And I actually think it's almost more important.
I'm not a dashboard stand at all
but if you will
it might be more important than ever
because if you're tasking agents to do more stuff
it's probably a good idea
to keep an eye on things and have some alerting built in
and so that's why I'm really kind of saying
now is the time
I've had other reasons in the past
why I really didn't have monitoring set up
but that sort of was like the last
like you got to do this
and this is such a great system now
because a lot of just the day-to-day tasks
the agent can monitor and manage for me.
And then when I still need visibility,
I've got it through Grafana and Prometheus monitoring.
You know, I just have to say this
because it's who I am now,
but for some of our nodes,
we've been using NixBitcoin.
Yeah.
And that really makes a lot of the stuff
really easy to integrate as well.
Yeah.
And the agents can just sort of spin it up
in a declarative way for you.
Yeah.
Like I just tell the agent,
go turn on Prometheus support on Bitcoin, Dean.
It's just a flag in the config and now it's on.
It's so amazing.
Yeah.
There is so many things out there you can use besides this entire stack.
Ride the Lightning is still a really great tool.
I think people should check that out if they haven't.
I know you love Zeus.
Oh, yeah.
If you're going to use something to check in or just send some sets somewhere on Android, Zeus is great.
Yeah.
Really, the point I'm trying to make here is you're not replacing the dashboard with the agent.
You're using the dashboard now to serve the human and monitor the agent's work.
And then the API is being used on the back end from all these tools to give you a single interface.
And that is, it is really great.
Because as long as you have an eye on things, really managing a node is very, very simple.
And now having an eye on things is easier than ever, really.
Well, let's talk about backups really quick.
So NixBitcoin does make backing up really easy.
Do you want to talk about that briefly?
Well, it's just really good at setting things up
so that you have clear delineation
of where secrets are kept
and then where the stateful components
of each of the demons that you're running.
Obviously, with Bitcoin, you have the chain state,
but then for the various lightning demons,
there's seed material,
there's information on the Bitcoin wallets they have.
Your channel information.
And then all the stuff about channels.
Yeah.
And so this is where, too,
you might want to be pretty careful
in terms of, like,
do you turn the node off when you do a backup?
Does it have an API that you can trigger to make sure things are synced before you do a backup?
Because what you don't want to do is be broadcasting false stuff to the network and then get penalized or have your channels forced closed.
Yeah.
And so that's where you also don't ever really want to just like blindly restore from a backup.
And do investigate ways to like newer channel mechanisms exist that allow for better mechanisms of being able to restore a channel without having to take the risk of sort of doing a whole backup
when there might have been advanced state
that you weren't privy to?
I think maybe a takeaway for somebody too
that's building a new node today,
even if you're not in on the agent stuff,
it's go minimal and clean.
Build a clean node.
Focus on surfacing APIs securely
with scoped credentials.
Payments can be something that are programmable now.
You need to think about event-driven automation
for certain things.
Monitor everything that you can
and then keep backups
and make sure those backups are outside
any kind of blast radius of an agent
or anything like that.
This is also where like, you know, using some more stuff, like you can go all the way to the base layer. But if you do choose to use something like AlbiHub, you get some of the nice features, right? Like you get LNURL support out of the box, which can be a nice way for maybe for agents to receive payments. And you can, there's also various ways to build this on top of the base nodes, but you can have like sub wallet support.
so you can maybe give a dedicated wallet to your agent.
I have done that.
Yeah, so one of my agents,
I have a dedicated AlbiHub sub-wallet
and it uses Nostra Wallet Connect.
He's got a very limited balance
with a budget he can spend and it works great.
He's got all the stuff he needs to connect to it
and Nostra Wallet Connect is so easy for them to understand.
And that's where, right,
as is often sort of the boring case of security,
if you can just restrict the ability of things
and have defense in depth in multiple ways.
So, you know, even if it does go crazy
into a loop spending stuff,
if it only ever had a balance of X,
That's all it can ever really damage.
Yeah.
Do you tip your agents or give them an allowance or something like that?
You know, maybe.
What I was setting up was a complete workflow so that if the credit balance ever got too low and I wasn't around, they could auto top off.
Like a buffer?
Yeah, their own credits using.
You can make them pay you when they waste tokens.
I should.
That's a good idea.
So I think, you know, what's been really freaking great is this stuff is ready to go in the agent of or in the era of agents.
There's a lot of a lot of things that are not really agent ready that we're going to have to drag along and make work and build front ends to and all of that.
But all of this is pretty much good to go.
And so and so it's Bitcoin is programmable money, right?
Yeah.
Like it's it's it's here already.
I mean, they've got APIs where there's not APIs.
Albie's making MCPs.
It's like it's really ready today for the agent workflow.
And a lot of them are being very careful.
A lot of the off the shelf stuff is mostly read only or manages scoped payments and stuff like that.
But I think the real power is in the Bolt D and Bolt CLI and getting your agent with the skill that will link to be able to manage liquidity a little bit, tell you about the channels on your node, send payments, sweep to liquid.
That stuff is massive.
And it's just the beginning.
And that skill could use some improvement.
It's not been fully, fully tested.
Just the workflows I've talked about have.
And I'll post that.
And if you've got a wild hare and you want to test it and smoke test it and improve it,
at least submit the changes back up.
I'll put it up on GitHub.
But I have a question, gentlemen.
Out there in the wild, listener, what would you like to do next with your node?
Assuming you've noted up, are you planning to do anything?
Or are you just leaving it and letting it tick-tock next block?
So boost in and tell us what you're planning to do with your node next.
Well, coming up on the show, some clips I feel like playing, your boost, and a lot more.
So you can support the show just by doing what you do.
You want to buy some sats on River? The best way is River in the U.S.
And I have a link in the show notes. Use that link. Supports the show.
Guess what? Any of these. I have a link in the show notes and you use that link.
It supports the show. Bitcoin Well. You're up there in Canada like our buddy Brent.
The Bitcoin Well is an amazing automatic self-custody Bitcoin platform.
They don't host the wallet. You do. Goes from your wallet to your wallet.
The Bitcoin Company. You got sats burning a hole in your pocket. Go spend it with the Bitcoin Company.
all they do is Bitcoin from Lightning to a gift card in just seconds. Now, if you want to passively
stack sats, maybe pay your bills and all that, bold card. Audience loves it. Passively stack those
sats. It's a great way to go. If it's time to get access to your Bitcoin liquidity without selling
it, that's where salt lending comes in. Great platform, low minimums, and some wipeout protection,
which you never know could be useful these days. Links to all of that in the show notes. Thanks to
everybody who supports the show by doing what you do.
Well, guess what? It is time for a few boosts.
And now it is time for le boost.
Get ready for this one, boys.
Derivation Dingus comes in as our baller booster this week,
breaking, I think, our total for last week in one single boost with 190,000 sats.
Wow.
You're the best around.
Nothing's going to ever keep you down.
You're the best around.
Nothing's going to ever keep you down.
Superior ability.
That's enough sats.
Three, superior ambition.
That's enough sats to actually buy some lobster, maybe.
Derivation writes,
Hi, Chris.
I recently, I really appreciate everything you do
and the work you put into the show.
I hope this value makes it a little more worth your time.
Twib is one of the best Bitcoin shows on the internet.
Let's get these numbers up, boys.
Thank you, sir.
Well done.
Make it show.
Appreciate you very much.
You are our baller booster coming in right below there.
Also in the baller category, it is Adversary 17.
Hey, rich lobster.
Coming in with 98,899 sats.
This was a great episode.
I know you're going to try changing the format.
I'm excited to see how that goes.
I just wanted to give you some signal on the current format
as I get a lot of value in each episode.
So when you choose what to cut please don cut the state of the network section I like hearing that each week Oh it not a format change I just wanted to have some fun for one week Everybody I should have said that maybe earlier in the show
People are going to get to 40 minutes of the show until they hear that.
Are you having fun?
Yeah, I'm having a fun.
You did it.
Thank you, adversaries.
Kiwi Bitcoin Guide comes in with $49,999.
Oh.
Hey, Chris, I want to echo some of the other comments here and say that Twib is a highlight
of my week and the signal and value you provide is awesome. The fact that you live and breathe
open source and live off value for value means the content is of the highest quality. It seems
like all the other Bitcoin pods have either lost their values, sold out to advertisers,
or just gone batshit crazy. So we need you here, buddy. I'd like to see more of the memberships
for TWIB, and I think there must be some opportunities.
Wow.
Thank you, KiwiBitcoinGuy.
That's way too nice, and I'm embarrassed, and I appreciate you very, very much.
Yes, hi.
Thank you very much for the boost.
And the value.
JQubed boosted in $36,057.
I like you.
You're a hot ticket.
I got busy and I forgot to boost last week.
Honestly, I'm a little tired of billionaires telling us what we're doing wrong.
Feels like a lack of perspective on the common man at best, and manipulation at the worst.
Maybe I'm getting a little paranoid.
Oh, I agree.
The traders love the ball.
I agree.
Is there any bacon on board, Tim?
Yeah, I do have some bacon somewhere around here.
I always keep bacon nearby.
Do you like it crispy?
No, it wasn't bacon.
I love it, though.
Either way, it's Bigfoot tonight.
I hope that does it for you, J.K.
Perfect.
Hey, Darabish Dingus is back with 21,420 sats.
Just sending a bit more value from the old NixOS node, by the way.
Keep it up.
That's great.
Well, that's very on topic, isn't it?
Indeed.
Thank you very much.
Double ball.
Philippa A. comes in with 21,221 sats.
Put some macaroni and cheese on there, too.
hey Chris
thanks for your
consistency over time
with the show
even hearing your
theme music
calms my nerves
and lifts my spirits
each week
I totally understand
you need to shake
things up a bit
and give yourself
a boost
I've noticed you
getting more and more
upset over the
Bip 110 situation
it does bother me a lot
as the weeks go by
these guys know
I complain about it
a lot there
and not your usual
calm self
change is as good
as a rest
really looking forward
to going to
Cheat Code Bedford
next week
and seeing Lynn
alden et al do their thing and then there's something that got cut off yeah i would love
to hear how that goes love i'd love to meet lynn lynn is a rock star thank you very much that philpa
appreciate that bitcoin is my 401k boosted 21 000 sats oh my god this drawer is filled with
brooves here's 21 000 saps to help keep my favorite bitcoin podcast afloat thank you chris
Thank you. Bitcoin is my 401k. I love that. That's great. I always love it every time. And it's true. It's true. Mac Jollers comes in with 21,000 sats.
gas for air after your hiatus content sweet pure signal yes we're back hopefully people don't mind
the episode 100 party a little early but it's fun to hang out with the boys and talk nodes
thank you very much mac jollers appreciate the boost boba comes in with 21 000 sats
dig me some drum and bass and then uh second message here bad take on btc question mark i
think mr wonderful's break the chain comment on quantum fud was embarrassingly bad considering it
was espoused from the position of informed authority at the time i hate it when they do that
i know and a third message off topic would converting out of liquid into lightning or
back on chain automatically incur a taxable event? Not looking for advice, just a thought experiment.
Tease the season. Yeah, it is, isn't it? My understanding is no, because liquid and Bitcoin
are the same exact value. So there's no change in value there, right? But I could be wrong.
I could be wrong. But you're pegging to a particular price in Bitcoin. Now that I think
about it, I'm not sure. I assume it's not a taxable event, and I like to believe that.
Do you have any instinct either way? What you believe doesn't necessarily mean.
It does seem like, right, if the value is the same, then if you haven't converted that value, good question.
I could see if you're going to stablecoin and back that being taxable then.
And probably maybe even between something like ETH and BTC.
But like, say you put 10,000 sats into Liquid five years ago, you would still get today's amount of 10,000 sats back.
You would get the same, so you would always get the same amount of Bitcoin value back.
It might just change in Liquid.
Yeah, there's no ratio that differs.
Yeah, yeah.
So I don't think it's a taxable event, but I'm honestly not.
And if anybody out there has a better understanding, of course, not tax advice, just your opinion.
Please do boost it and let us know.
I'd love to know.
Moon and I sent in just slightly over 9,000 sats with 9,001 sats.
It's a shame that the sat flow into the show is so low.
I've been getting a ton of value out of your podcast, as you seem to be one of the very few Bitcoin podcasters that has their head screwed on straight.
I've grown pretty tired of the podcast that's spent all day interviewing weird culture war people and financial dudes that have never had a real job.
And it shows in how they view the economy.
That ranting aside, I really appreciate the work you're doing with Twib, so I'll be bumping up my sats.
Thanks, Moodyne. I really appreciate that.
I'm not saying I agree, but, you know, I really appreciate that boost.
Hey there, Gene Bean's back, 6,492 sats.
Well, that's Eric Goodbody.
He's blown away at the $3 billion in expenses and interest today.
He says, your description of just how bad Luke is trying to centralize political power over Bitcoin could be explained by him disliking the key thing that makes Bitcoin different from Ethereum.
No CEO.
Maybe he wants to make Ocean the CEO of the network with the biggest market cap.
Yeah, I know I'm wearing my tinfoil hat here.
He says, how is that JB mining pool coming along?
I think Adversaries was working on that when you were out there with him, right?
Yeah, and didn't you have a little miner on the-
I'm a bottleneck.
On the soundboard.
there for a little while.
I'm such a bottleneck.
I am such a bottleneck to this stuff.
It's horrible.
I don't know.
I think adversaries has made some really good progress.
So I got to sit down.
Adversary 17 and I are going to have a chat and we'll figure it out at some point.
I am the bottleneck there.
And I just because things are so busy.
I don't know when things are maybe in four or five years and my kids are all growing up.
Maybe.
I don't know.
It'll be too late.
I don't know.
Thank you, Gene.
And when I do know, I think you're going to be the first person I tell.
user 888 comes in with 2,000 sats
thanks for doing what you do
thank you user 88
appreciate you
Cosnow also came in with 2,500 sats
but no message found
OB came in with 2,000 sats
no message found
make it so
and Ace Ackerman came in with
Rodex
that's 2,222 sats
keep TWIP alive and healthy
with a boost
boost
Jetpack81 sends in 4,200 sats
Hey
No message on the first one
But thank you
This is my favorite Bitcoin podcast
Aw
Thank you very much
Okay
Bug-Eyed Stormtrooper's here
And he's got 2,042 sats
I feel like I got something for him
Right?
I got something
Miss Bustin' with happiness
See you in a second
This is the way
Hello there
Suppose that BIP-110 does pull it off
And it goes bad
Is it possible for the community to roll it back?
or is it a one-way street?
Hmm.
I don't know if I have an answer.
I mean, it depends on how far it goes
and how much, you know,
mining power they would actually be able to get.
The length of diverged history
is going to increase the pain over time, right?
That's it.
Yeah.
And now we just don't know really
until it happens, I suppose,
and how far it gets.
It's one of the things
I just don't even want to have to worry about.
I really...
Yeah.
Like Philip, I mentioned,
like it does bother me.
It really bothers me.
It bothers me because I, you know,
I've been following this for nearly 16 years.
It's pretty important to me.
And I think it's pretty important to the world.
And it's just, it's crazy where you...
Yeah.
I have a box of soap here if you need it.
Thank you.
Yeah.
All right, let me wrap this up.
Paranoid Coder comes in with 2,000 sats.
I mentioned Spark on these booths a couple of times now,
and I just noticed that Primal recently switched
from using Lightning via embedded Spark Wallet
to a custodial Spark Wallet that auto-swaps to Lightning.
Pretty cool to see this technology actually get adopted.
Big Primal update.
Primal being the Noster front end, Primal 3.0 is huge.
Yeah, and they redid the wallet stuff.
I haven't had a chance to play with it yet.
I did see some people talking about Spark custodial services being not ideal for privacy, but what custodial service is.
Well, I think this one was self-custodial.
Yeah, exactly.
So that seems like a much better route.
Very cool.
And I have Primal 3 installed.
I'm going to start playing around with the wallet feature.
But thank you for that boost.
Thank you, everybody.
Thank you, everybody else who streams sats.
You collectively stacked 71,688 sats for the show.
Not too bad at all.
B-O-O-S-T.
When you combine that with our boosters, we had great support.
This episode, we stacked 616,555 sats.
If you'd like to support the show, a boost is a great way to do it.
Fountain FM makes it really easy.
There's also a membership option in Fountain as well as Jupiter.party if you want to support the entire network.
No advertiser.
Just do it for the love of it.
And of course, for the long term stacking of those sats.
Support the show by sending a boost.
All right. So the last couple of weeks, I've been trying to put together what the hell's going on with the billionaires.
Why is Ray Dalio and Chamath and others coming out who were pro Bitcoin now saying Bitcoin's it's a loser? It's no good.
And I knew there must be some sort of shitcoin play in the works.
And I believe, boys, I have put it together.
Oh, wow.
Oh, and it's a doozy.
I'll get my wallet ready.
To be honest with you, it deserves more of my time to fully dig into it because this is a big one.
And I have just begun to scratch the surface.
And it's really something.
So, let's see, where do we even start?
The token that we're going to talk about today is called Tau.
And again, if you're listening, you know more about this.
Please boost in a correction.
But Tau is in a league of its own because it's an AI play.
Things that has really stuck out to me is this intersection of Bitcoin and crypto and artificial intelligence.
And it feels like there's a lot of folks that are talking about like agentic payments and stable coins and Bitcoin and all that kind of stuff.
I think you see some other areas where that intersection of Bitcoin and AI are going to show up.
Talk about what you're excited about there, what you guys are spending time on.
Yeah, I think most of it is kind of bullshit in that, you know, a lot of projects are saying, hey, we're AI.
There is clearly, I think, a big opportunity around the convergence of crypto and AI.
This is Billy, Billy, this, Billy, that's great.
This is Barry Silbert.
He's very famous.
You ought to look up Barry and why he owes people a lot of money.
And there's certainly, you know, we're definitely, we're obviously seeing it with, on the infrastructure side, with compute and Bitcoin miners diversifying into or pivoting into kind of into AI.
But I do think that the ability to incentivize contribution, the ability to incentivize stakeholders.
The other word they use is to create a marketplace for GPUs.
in unique ways around AI is super exciting.
And so we got involved in something called Bitensor,
which is a decentralized open source protocol,
just like Bitcoin.
Just like Bitcoin, guys.
I bet it's one-to-one.
But instead of incentivizing security of the network,
it incentivizes people to essentially kind of compete
and try to solve complex problems in the world.
So instead of doing silly SHA-256 throwaway math
or whatever, you know, just stuff that's just burning stupid electricity, just dumb mining.
This is the same thing as Bitcoin, but it's solving AI problems.
But Tensor is comprised of over 100 of these different subnets.
These subnets are competitions where people are trying to predict sports, sport outcomes
or discover drugs or incentivizing commute or storage.
Super, super interesting intersectional kind of crypto AI.
There's a few other projects that I think are interesting, but this definitely is the first one that has reached escape velocity.
And the token that the entire network operates on is this Tau token.
And yeah, go ahead.
Wait, well, he said solve the world's biggest problems.
And then the first example he came up with was baseball betting.
Well, that's, you know, I mean, that's a big problem.
If you're losing a lot of money on your baseball bets.
That is a problem, I guess.
I also, are we, you know, like we have like DevSecOps.
Are we doing that?
Is it crypto AI now?
it's just one word, crypto AI.
I guess so, yeah.
Agentic crypto AI, you can make a three.
Good point.
But it's funny you caught that.
Brent, because, yeah, the Tau token and the subnet, which sometimes there are individual subnet tokens.
Don't worry, they're coming to Robinhood and Coinbase.
How does one buy that?
By the way, this is Jason Calacanis, who has become cheerleader number one for Tau.
Because Tau is listed on Robinhood and Coinbase now or not yet?
Tau itself is on Coinbase.
I'm not sure if it's on Robinhood.
It's not.
I don't think it is.
I've looked for it before.
But Tau, you can get at Coinbase.
I've actually gotten it on Coinbase, so I know it's on there.
So it's in full shill mode right now.
It's going to be on Coinbase.
It's going to be on Robinhood.
Let's talk about the shilling a little bit in a minute.
I don't want to get there just yet because I want to still talk about how they're really kind of trying to compare it to Bitcoin.
You could get like 50K a day, this mining contestonomic thing that makes mining programmable.
They're already making history.
They spent less than a million dollars.
They release a lot of hype videos on social media.
Compared to Anthropic, which has spent billions.
Most of them are probably going to be bad startups.
Probably.
It's the most important thing that's happened in crypto since Ethereum.
People are using this stuff.
In Earth's largest supercomputer, in aggregate, it 3x'd the efficiency and speed.
So if you can sell the same thing for 90% off.
Do you think that BitTensor could outgrow the big giants?
Suddenly I was competitive and suddenly I could earn.
So these hype videos come out there all the time.
These 3x'ing and 90%ing of what?
There's no base number, no baseline ever established.
How convenient.
And one of the reasons why they consider it a lot like Bitcoin, because one of the things they've done like Bitcoin, is they have built in a halving mechanism.
In fact, it just halved.
It's halving.
Tau just halved, actually, and it is up as a result.
This is one of the evangelists kind of explaining.
Well, don't forget, Tau BitTensor is built very similar to Bitcoin.
Of course.
21 million fixed supply of 21 million tokens having every four years.
You could just see those two things alone.
How many mids are going to get completely sucked in just by those two things alone?
The only thing that's different is BitTensor.
Besides the fact that it has a CEO, besides the fact that Barry's behind it and that Barry's the organizer of it and that he's selling early tokens to guys like Chamath and Rydalio.
Besides that, the only difference is.
21 million, fixed supply of 21 million tokens, a halving every four years. The only thing that's
different is BitTensor, again, the tau is the token, BitTensor abstracted away the incentive
mechanism. So it's a very similar idea. Let's give incentives for the people who help us. So
Bitcoin does that, gives incentives to the miners who validate transactions.
Yeah, it's called the scarcest asset on earth. Pretty good incentive. Okay.
But BitTensor gives incentives to people who come up with better and better AI models or whatever
the problems are that the subnets are trying to solve.
So it really is.
It's like the Bitcoin of entrepreneurship.
What do you think so far What is your how do you validate How do you validate that Like it such a subjective idea that well you saying someone who comes out with a better ai model well well so you have
to be in on the idea that ai is the most revolutionary technology ever and the most
scarcest precious thing we have is electricity and gpus this is something that this is something
that chamath on the all-in show has been positioning they had nvidia ceo on recently
and they talked about this.
Two days ago, you may not have seen this
because you were busy on stage,
but there was a training run
that happened in this crypto project
called BitTensor.
Subnet 3, they managed to train
a 4 billion parameter LAMA model,
totally distributed,
with a bunch of people
contributing excess compute.
But they were able to do it statefully
and manage a training run,
which I thought was like a pretty
crazy technical accomplishment.
Yeah.
Because it's like random people
and each person gets a little share.
Our modern version of folding at home.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So what do you think about the end state of open source?
Do you see this decentralization of architecture as well and decentralization of compute to
support open weights and a totally open source approach to making sure AI is broadly available
to everyone?
I believe we fundamentally need models as a first class product, proprietary product,
as well as models as open source.
These two things are not A or B. It's A and B. There's no question about it. And the reason for that is because models is a technology, not a...
Let's be clear what's happening here. Chamath is using this moment with the world's most famous CEO to pump his shitcoin. And Jensen's doing probably the best he can to give a sort of generic answer here. But Chamath is using this moment, maybe one of the largest moments for the show in this year, to pump a shitcoin.
Yeah, right. Maybe the idea of distributed training of models, that can be interesting. The idea of figuring out a way to exchange value to pay for that, sure. None of that seems to necessitate this exact technology.
No. Also, his buddy Jason Calacanis has been on X telling people to sell their Bitcoin and buy Tau. And now he's turned his podcast This Week in Startups basically into a Tau advocacy podcast. Today's episode's all about it. Here's a moment from last week's episode.
And I don't give financial advice, but if anybody's listening and you had a hundy that you were going to spend on some margaritas, I'm going to say, maybe drink some water a Friday night.
You know, get some filtered water, tap water, whatever, have a nice tea.
Put the other $99 into just buying a little towel for yourself.
Why not?
Not financial advice.
I think I'll take a margarita and some Bitcoin places.
It's starting to sound like an LML.
Yeah, it is.
Multi-level marketing.
Yeah, well, anyway, it is.
These guys kind of have a history of doing this.
I've played clips before on the show where they bragged about they got access to Solana.
And so they get some sort of stake in like a company and then they get the tokens And the stake in the company is locked up but the tokens aren And so they get to just dump on retail all they want And I had a clip I played I don know if I could find it but I had a clip I played maybe last year There was them just having a good old laugh In fact you know I bet you I could find it here
YouTube, they're inside of Twitter. And what these folks would do...
Okay, so this is the first part of the clip where Chamath, who is now, by the way,
pumping Tao, tells you how the scam works. This is from a couple of years ago.
YouTube, they're inside of Twitter. And what these folks would do when we talked about this,
the game that they played was they would get a team, they would create a token,
they would also buy equity at some crazy valuation. The equity was locked up, but the tokens were not.
and then they would put them on an exchange and sell them to unsuspecting people and they would
be able to dump these tokens and if you look inside of that trend what you're going to see
and brian just mentioned this those were the sale of securities except it was done in a completely
unregulated way so if the sec is really and the doj is really going to take this ftt token
issue seriously and what happened to ftx which they haven't this was back after ftx crashed
and everybody's like, something's got to change.
They're going to start to look at a bunch of other tokens and token sales,
and you're going to end up looking at some very well-known venture firms
inside of Silicon Valley.
Including his own.
Then, about 10 months after that, this next clip comes in.
So I saved this for us because I thought this might come back up.
This is later on the All In podcast.
They're heavy.
Good Lord.
They're heavy, dragging you down.
That's where you're hiding all that Solana, under your eyes.
you better clear that solana position what's your lockup 24 months
fuck no he's trying to sell it to me on text message yeah of course we're negotiating discounts
i just had the fact hey you're fucking the whole thing up bro you don't you don't think i'm holding
i'm holding you think i buy hundreds of millions of dollars of anything without a discount
everything is a discount everything's discounted you want to clear that position in an llc are you
saying i got a billion dollars of solana no bro i'm saying i have one but you know i brought it
to discount but you're holding correct ish yes okay yeah me too
all right let's wrap up with the state of the network it's block height 942 217
The price is currently $71,210 to one US, you know, you know what I'm saying.
It is what it is.
It is per dollars, 1,404.
I like that.
I got distracted by the 404 and lost my train of thought.
Did you mean Fiat fund coupons?
Yes, thank you.
Now we are still down 43 from our all high which was now a long cold 170 days ago if you can believe it October 6 2025 Our retarget date is set for April 4 2025 with an estimated difficulty upward adjustment of 3 Reachable Bitcoin nodes
on the network continues to decline at 23,957. Hopefully, we'll change that a little bit. This
network can get you firing up a node. Node up, everybody. And of course, whenever the network
fees are low, it's also a great time to experiment with Lightning. So take advantage of that.
Looking at everything, though, we're moving right along. Bitcoin Core 30 continues to get a bit more
adoption. And Bitcoin's looking better and better when priced in gold this week. So that's a nice
positive to see. And the state of the network is strong.
well thank you so much for joining me and boys thank you so much for joining us thanks for having
us it's nice to change it up a little bit i think it was just the boost i needed we'll be back to
the regular format i got so many clips and so many things to talk about but we'll have some very
useful links at thisweekinbitcoin.show so go check that for some of the resources and then
Let me know what you thought about some of the information and what other bits of node management you'd like to be covered in the future.
I don't know what it might be.
There's a lot of topics.
So we could use your suggestions.
Send us a boost with what you'd like us to explore in the future.
I'm sure we could probably cover it again.
And if you do make a node, you know, boost in and open a channel.
You're right.
Let us.
Yeah, dude.
If you, oh, if you set up a node this week and you got anywhere close to what we talked about, that's next level stuff.
I mean, what we talked about today is pretty advanced.
if you get close to it, you're doing really, really great.
So you got to let us know.
You got to send it in if that happens.
All right, that wraps it up for us.
Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of This Week in Bitcoin.
See you next week.
Thank you.