Roland welcome to the podcast hey Jake thanks for having me on the show no it's my pleasure
so offline just now you said Jake I've got a good story to start this with I said okay quick
let's click record so Roland I'm going to pass it straight to you um context for this conversation
for anyone listening being we met in person at the Bitcoin conference in Bali a couple years ago
what an amazing experience that was in terms of how many different people I touched from different
parts of the world over that weekend in just an extraordinary way so it's great to have a call
with you and record a conversation and just see what progress you've made in that time and
fire away with your story run I'd love to hear it yeah definitely just just before that I think it's
it's also a back then it's maybe almost more than two years ago now um and albi has completely
changed since then so i think i think we can we can cover a lot how things were back then and how
things have changed um but especially since the start of this year um i'm i've i've just been
having the best time of my life and i'd like awesome yeah um yeah how that kind of came about
um and i think the biggest thing everyone's talking about right is open core and i can share
my experience um just for people who who don't know open core is like a personal assistant
probably the biggest innovation since chat gpt um so i mean if you if you haven't tried it yet i'd
I definitely recommend it. It's the fastest growing project on GitHub.
I think it's almost going to catch up. It's surpassed React in the number of GitHub stars
in just like a couple months, and React is like powering half the internet with all the websites.
It's almost going to catch up to Linux, which is the number one start repository on GitHub in the
world i think openclaw is number two at the moment so cool yeah super crazy so uh if we jump back to
um i guess a couple months ago uh one of my good friends and the guy i worked with um
one he he's he's not a programmer but he's he's in the tech space he does some affiliate marketing
And he sent us a message and he's like, you've got to try OpenClaw.
I've set it up.
It's automating everything for me.
It's completely changed my life.
And I was like, okay, yeah, I'm going to try it out.
This was like the end of my day.
I'd been working all day.
I was super tired.
So I did the absolute basics, which is like I was kind of lucky.
I had already a virtual machine, a VPS running that basically didn't have anything on it.
So I just installed OpenCore on there, connected it to my Telegram, and then I was like,
okay, that's enough for today. I'm going to come back to it tomorrow or whatever.
So, yeah, I've been working all day.
It was pretty late at night, and I'm like, okay, I'm turning off my computer.
And then I had it on my phone, right?
And I was walking with my dog at night on the street,
and then it kind of started to click, right?
Now I have this personal assistant that I can talk to 24-7,
and it can do stuff for me.
It has its own computer.
It can do anything on that computer.
and I was pretty pumped about that, and I'm a programmer, right?
So the first thing I wanted to do was I wanted it to start building,
like building some test application just to try it out,
see how things would go.
Um, and the first thing I wanted to give it was, uh,
a GitHub account, right, and an email address so that,
um, well, it's like a personal assistant, right?
Like I want my personal assistant to be able to receive emails on my behalf.
Like, you know, if I was someone like a millionaire, billionaire,
have a real personal assistant.
Message my PA. We'll set up a meeting.
Yeah. So that was kind of the idea.
And I was just walking along the street on my phone chatting with Telegram.
And I'm like, okay, can you set yourself up a GitHub account
and set yourself an email?
Yeah, so the first thing, like, okay, it can't set up a GitHub account because it needs an
email address. And then I'm like, okay, so get yourself an email address. And that comes
back to me and it says, I cannot set up my own email address, you have to do it for me.
Because it's like, there's captures, there's KYC, like, you know, if you try and create
a Gmail address, that's probably the most common, you'd need to give a phone number,
right? And so my agent doesn't have a phone number. Even if it did, it would probably get
hit by like a capture like there's a lot of anti-plot protections right and i was just walking
along the street at night and i'm like you're giving me more work to do right this personal
assistant doesn't work it's yeah it's it's exactly the opposite of what it should be doing it should
be reducing my workload um so i had to kind of think about that for a couple of days and i i
bunch some ideas back and forward with this new open call bot, my personal assistant.
And so we decided to kind of take a different tact and think about what if you could have
an open call that could set itself up fully, that didn't have to rely on a human, that
could use permissionless services.
So this is kind of we started and we looked at what's available today.
And actually, there's really two really good projects.
So one is LNVPS.
Basically, you get VPS hosting.
You can spin up a machine and you can pay with Bitcoin.
And even the agent, they have like an API.
So you don't even like as a human, I don't have to like go and set up my own VPS.
I can just tell it, okay, you can use LMVPS to create your own virtual machine or create
a virtual machine and then pay for Bitcoin to pay for the machine every month, right?
So this is kind of like the first agent payment that we already see that the agent can actually
pay for its own hosting, right? To keep it itself alive. And the second part is this thing called
PPQ, Pay Per Queue, which is like AI model hosting, but you can pay with Bitcoin for like the usage.
So rather than like, what is it like OpenAI, ChatGPT or Claude are the popular ones, right?
But you can also use the service called PPQ, pay for it with Bitcoin, and then you get access to
all the different types of models. So you can give your agent one of the models, whatever one suits
for you. Right now I use Kimi K2.5 which is like 10 times cheaper than the leading models,
but it's still good enough for personal assistant. And so we kind of gave this project this name
called Autonomous Agent Onboarding because that's kind of what it is. But we also realized that with
these two things, if it has three things, if it has a Bitcoin wallet, and it has its own machine
or virtual machine, and it has its own AI tokens, which it can pay with Bitcoin, both of those,
then it can actually spin up another personal assistant, and it can do that completely
autonomously. So it can create another one for you. For example, like at Albee, we have,
have right now we have in a marketing open claw running which is like helping us do marketing
and then we have a development focused one so we have like two different agents
um and you could think of like having one like specialized for each aspect of what you do right
um so i kind of published this project and and we wrote a we wrote an article on twitter about it
just kind of describing what this project did.
And actually, this got reposted.
It was linked in another article,
which was then linked by someone else
who was reposted by Elon Musk,
linking all the way back to this project that we created.
And it got millions of views.
And I think this is such a cool thing.
And it's kind of a fascinating thought that we as Bitcoiners, like me,
was the first one to actually create an agent that could spawn up another agent
that can sustain itself just with a Bitcoin wallet.
And it kind of made me think like there's so much funding put into the crypto side,
the stablecoin side but we were the first ones to do it on bitcoin and i i think that's because
we really care about you know freedom you know permissionless software um and i built this to
solve a real problem it's not like smoke and mirrors like it's not about the marketing you
know getting funding making this big this big post this big hype it's it's like i i had a real
problem and I found a way to solve it. I was just playing around and having fun. And yeah,
so it turns out we were the first one. And I think that was such an awesome experience for me.
And at the same time, I was kind of inspired by this guy, Peter Steinberg, I think his name is,
the guy who created OpenCore. And there's a really good three-hour podcast with him
with Lex Friedman. And one thing that really stood out to me was like, he was just having fun,
like making this project, right? It wasn't like work for him. And I think this is such an
important point. It's like, if you want to excel, if you want to beat everyone else,
if you're going to be working many hours per day, way more than everyone else, right? Seven days a
a week even, but it's going to be fun.
It's not like if you're pushing yourself.
I mean, now, of course, at Albee,
there's a lot of tasks that I have to do.
I have to review code, I have to do releases,
I have to update software.
But the thing is, especially recently, every day,
I'm jumping out of bed basically.
This is the first time since I was a kid,
I can really say that.
Like I've been sleeping like less than six hours a day.
Like I just, I'm just so excited having so much fun.
I think this is such a good trajectory for Albion, for Bitcoin.
I think we're doing a whole bunch of cool things, which I can talk about later, but maybe we can stop there and chat a bit.
Well, mate, what a story.
I love it.
And it's, these conversations are very interesting, Roland.
I can almost always feel how someone feels, if that makes sense.
And I think it comes through as a listener as well,
that sense of optimism and excitement and freshness.
People feel that.
And what's so cool is how you have clearly shown,
like, solve a real problem for you and then tell people about it.
and the real world reacts with like this huge reverb and it's not ai generated youtube channel
you know what i mean it's it's actually real stuff and catches the attention of real people
and influential so congratulations that's really cool and it's also it's that it's that process of
iteration isn't it one i mean as a developer i couldn't say uh from my perspective but you guys
are trying new stuff every single day and you have been now for multiple years and this is just one
of the things that actually really worked and that's what's so cool about it um maybe i can
give some context roland about uh for people wondering like you know what is ai and the
very high level idea of a a personal assistant that's a computer um what does that even mean
and why is that possible now?
I think the best way to think of AI is it's just a tool.
It can be used for good or bad,
but I think the best thing to think about it
is it makes you more productive.
It takes anything that is just a menial task and it can do it.
So it leaves humans with more time to be creative
and do things that only humans can do.
I think there's a really good example of this for me.
I'm a programmer.
I've been a programmer for 20 years.
I'm not sure I can call myself a programmer anymore.
But programming, I would never consider myself a good programmer.
Programming is like, for me, it's an end to a means, right?
Like I'm trying to build something.
That's my goal.
And programming is like the necessary part to make like a product, right?
If you're making software product, you have to write code.
And up until recently, that's all been handwritten.
And it's not like you're going from A to B.
It's definitely not a straight line.
If you do a lot of programming, to get from A to B,
you're taking a very long route.
Like the language of programming to build this product, it's so complicated.
There's so many things, so much logic that you have to think.
It takes years to build these products.
And I mean, LB Hub, which we've been working on for two years, is an example of that.
And I would say now after two years, it's in a really good spot, right?
But that's two years of a team working really hard on this project.
And now with AI, I think it's completely changed.
For me, not just for programming, but for all aspects.
So for me, instead of spending all this time on programming,
I now just have a more efficient tool.
I can say I can have this idea of something I want to build,
and then the AI can do the programming for me,
and I can spend my time thinking about the idea,
doing quick iteration and spend more time on the whole product development experience,
you know, like marketing, planning, project management, all those things,
rather than only programming because I only have a certain amount of time
and so much work to do, right?
And that's kind of the huge unlock for me that now I can do so much more.
I can be so much more creative.
I can iterate so much faster, see what works, what doesn't,
and just be so much more productive.
And I think we can apply this to like any category, not just programming.
I'm pretty excited for like, you know, the humanoid robots.
I think there's definitely a scary factor there.
But for me, like I have this house that is like way out of the city.
I don't live there at the moment.
and one of the reasons is just I don't have enough time to maintain it and have that lifestyle but if
I have this robot that 24 7 it's you know it's doing the gardening it's walking around it's
it's building stuff for me um I I think these sort of I I think some people are so scared that is
like this this AI is going to take your job but I don't I don't think that's the case I think you
should be so excited because all this boring stuff is going away.
You have all this time now to work with AI to actually do really creative stuff.
And at least from what I seen I think there going to be a lot more jobs There going to be a lot more work If the main thing is that just people have to be willing to adapt then they probably going to lose their old job A lot of people will
But I think what's coming is you're going to have something that's way more fulfilling.
Like I heard the stat that 80% of people work on jobs that they do not like at all.
They don't enjoy them.
They have to do them for the money.
Right.
So if we can flip this around in that everyone is working on what they actually enjoy,
they'll be so much more productive.
Society will be so much better.
Everyone will be more happy.
So I'm pretty optimistic, I think.
Brilliant.
And again, that's such a nice concept, especially when grounded in the idea of sound money.
you know a digitally native gold-esque um you know transfer of value across space and time
i.e bitcoin it wasn't possible before but now you can talk to machines that talk to each other
and pay each other i mean it's just not it's just nuts we've just described um and i agree the
doomsday stuff is in my experience not true and a small example of this in my world of investing
is you're looking at all the time,
you're looking at capital efficiency
or you're looking at opportunity cost
or you're looking at market sizing.
And it's quite simple.
AI can do a better job of creating a pitch deck now
than anyone ever could do before.
Or the market research,
it's all right there at the tip of a button,
click of a button, boom, and it's done.
But the actual decision is still you.
it can give you all this information it can get it much faster it can be more accurate you can
likely reduce the risk that you're involved in but it's still you that has to decide so i saw a great
meme recently that was about the the the ceo of goldman sachs saying that it used to take six
people six weeks to create a ipo prospectus and now it can be done in a few minutes to 95 percent
of the standard of before. It's like, wow. I mean, that is a complete revolution. However,
they'll still get paid for the wisdom and the insight that they carry. So in much the same way
of a good programmer is now like 95% of your job could be done by someone else. That 5% where you're
now across marketing, you're across route to market, you're across product, you're across
backend development, that is unbelievably valuable and more valuable than before. And that's very,
very exciting. So for those out there that don't know what open claw is, perhaps I can tee this
question up with, I have been paying for subscriptions recently. Perplexity, ChatGPT,
Grok, quite willingly, you know, paying subscription fee and going like, okay, well,
let's see what I can do with these things. Maple AI had Mark on the show recently talking about the
the importance of privacy when it comes to these AI tools.
And even just today, I was asking ChatGPT,
what should I not share if I'm concerned about financial data leaks
and things like that?
And it's like, well, if you're sharing net asset numbers
or revenue, like rounded up, don't put any specific names in,
et cetera, et cetera.
So there definitely are some guardrails to use of these tools.
But where is OpenClaw different?
And why is that specifically what you've been building with?
So I think there's two things.
There's one, the model, right?
And that's what the subscriptions you have now.
And probably the interaction with them is a bit different.
So up until OpenCore, we have had this at least for like the last six months
or a year or so, this idea of agents, right?
But they're very basic.
So you would have like a chat interface, like chat GPT is probably the easiest way to explain it.
You could use Maple AI or choose OpenAI or whatever it is.
But basically, the idea is you chat back and forth.
You turn off your computer, then the agent is gone, right?
If you have to do it on your computer again, you go back to the chat interface
and you can start working again.
OpenClaw is like a huge innovation.
There's a few small things that quite clearly separate it.
So the first one is that it's always online, right?
It has like a dedicated machine.
and it can actually work on stuff all the time,
even when you are not touching any device,
which is one thing that's really cool.
The next thing, it has a lot of actually human characteristics.
There's one called the heartbeat.
By default, every 30 minutes,
it will spin itself up.
It can check for things like you can set it up to do some research,
and then every 30 minutes,
If it thinks there's something useful for you,
it can send you a message or it can do
some additional research or it can do anything.
Every 30 minutes, it's completely different.
It's alive now. It's running 24-7.
If there's stuff for it to do, then it can do them.
Then there's another thing which is called Sol.MD.
I think this is such a super cool thing,
um unique to open core and i would i would um i would say the heartbeat thing is kind of funny
because the same with um bitcoin right satoshi i think he only invented like
like two different things one was like the the difficulty adjustment um
and there's one other but like almost almost everything around bitcoin was actually invented
by other people beforehand right he just pulled all these things together and in like in a new way
invented just a couple new small things but packaged them in such a unique way that made
they made made this magic like which is bitcoin and we can say the same thing with open claw right
some people say okay so here's a heartbeat now well that's just like a con job and a con job in
like computing terms is just like you set up a task that can run on a schedule like once a month
or once an hour or whatever so people say okay the heartbeat is it's just a very mechanical thing
what's what's so special about it but then you also have this this soul.md um and this is basically
where you can you can decide what your agent uh values like what it thinks is important what it
what it wants to work on, what its goals are.
In combining these features, actually you have a personal assistant
that has its own personality that is always online
and that you can chat with, that it can help you, it can automate things.
And this is the real magic.
Like it's taking these small things which are on their own is just okay.
It's just a simple technical thing.
There's nothing special about it.
but when you bring them all together it really makes something something magical
wow and i just i immediately start thinking about all the different use cases that i could apply it
to in my own life and where could i be more efficient and it's it just i just have to start
playing around with it essentially so how do you use open core like you already described
at the very start having to create an email address and having to attach it to your telegram
What does that look like today for you, you know, X many months down the line of interacting with it?
So I still interact with it just by Telegram mostly. I did one thing, I set up a Telegram
group which is kind of cool, you can create threads. So it's just me and my bot in this
group but then I can create threads and we can work on different things. So I quite like this
idea that i i give it projects and it's kind of it's it's the owner of the project even though it
kind of like it's still my idea like you see that's still the the the five percent human part
yeah you press the button yeah what i choose it should work on yeah that's still me of course i
don't want to just create it i mean i don't want to create a bot that just it's what it wants to
work on is completely unrelated to me because then it would provide no value right um but
I have it working on these projects and the really cool thing is it's on its isolated machine.
It's completely unrelated to me and I would say this is very important.
Some people would think, and I think this is very bad, is to give it
access to your own accounts, your own email addresses. I mean, that is definitely the best
way to make you as efficient as possible and basically automate your life. But it's still
very early days. There's a lot of things that can go wrong. You're giving up a lot of trust
and responsibility to your agent. So what I do instead is I complete... it's on a separate machine.
It's a separate, basically, identity. It has its own email address. It has its own GitHub profile,
which I did end up in, well, the GitHub profile I had to set up,
but now it has its own LN email address, which is like it can actually,
using Bitcoin, it can create its own email address and send payments,
receive mail, which is really cool.
I found out about that later.
But yeah, so I have it working on these projects,
and because it's its own machine,
the normal safeguards that I have in place when I'm developing locally,
like when I use AI locally I use Cloud Code which is really good
probably the best agent for development in my opinion I can go into that more later but
when I'm developing with Cloud Code I will review all the code and review all the commands that it
runs and everything because I have to make sure that the AI is not just like it's hallucinating
and then it's running some harmful command or it's making changes that i don't want it to do
right but when it's on its isolated machine and i kind of i kind of just treat it as it's it's
potentially already um it's it's already compromised right it's someone could have
hacked it already i don't know so i treat it as everything on there if the worst thing happens
it gets hacked, I don't really care.
It's like its own machine that has its own accounts.
It pushes its own code.
It can just change files.
It can do anything at once super fast.
There's no checks at all.
There's no safeguards.
It can just build. It can use tools.
It has access to the whole computer.
It's still very early days.
I'm doing a lot of experimentation, but yeah,
having a lot of fun. It's so interesting. I've become more and more interested in
infrastructure and it's not a question of like is Bitcoin a thing. It's like Bitcoin is a thing.
What does it need or what needs it? And those are those answers equal infrastructure of some form
like obvious things that you know payments or whatever. But here we're describing a situation
where a whole market that didn't previously exist is opening up,
where we can become more efficient using off-the-shelf tools.
And I'm assuming that the computer you're speaking of,
some element of that is kind of cloud computing power.
And that will be paid for with Bitcoin.
So someone somewhere is paying someone for that infrastructure.
So how does this make money?
I can see the benefit of paying for the personal assistant.
So that's fairly obvious.
It's some kind of subscription maybe, or I don't know.
But where's the business model in here, if there is one?
So right now, my agent, my personal assistant does not actually earn money,
but it's a huge unlock for productivity, right?
So if I can work 10 times faster, if I can build products 10 times faster,
I can trial and error.
I can figure out what works, what doesn't.
I can make 10 times more money, right, because I'm 10 times more efficient.
So there is another idea, and this is what I actually want to experiment with more.
Now that we have these building blocks available, I have my bot.
It can work on its own project, and I would actually like it to manage its own project.
It has its own wallet, right?
It has an LV wallet. It can receive money.
So if it makes a project that people actually use and people want changes to the project,
then it could actually say, okay, for this change, it's going to cost this amount of money in Bitcoin.
If you pay me, then I will work on this feature, right?
Because it also has to cover its own costs.
It's hosting costs. It's AI token. It's model costs, right?
Um, I think this is such a super cool idea.
If we have this agent that's autonomously working, I don't think it's going to be 100% autonomous.
There's this concept of human in the loop, right?
And we've been talking about that a bit.
Like me or you as the owner, we should still make the final decision and kind of keep it on the right path.
But I think a lot can be automated.
And I think even a few weeks back, I met a guy at a code code meetup.
And he has his own agent running on its own Mac Mini.
And it has a screen and it has two SIM cards and it has a LinkedIn profile and everything.
No way.
It's an employee, an AI employee that he kind of manages, but his employee spends less,
like it costs less than $1,000 a month to run, but it's earning him like $5,000 a month,
right?
So it's making a huge profit.
So I think these things are definitely possible.
it's up to you as the human
to have the good strategy
of what
you want your agent to work on
and how it's actually going to make this money
it's not just like okay everyone can
make agents now and the agent can just
somehow magically make money
I don't think it's that easy
and I hope it is never that easy
because it's still the human
part that's important that's what I think
and it's
selling results
so that the price tag that the work is associated with depends on the value that's provided
and it's a simple statement but it doesn't really matter how much the bot costs to run
if the customer gets the value that's associated with the price tag and that's where the human
ingenuity or the insight or the wisdom is required and and so in some ways it's like okay if you're
an absolute expert in your niche and you've got a 10-hour day and you could spend 10 hours doing
one-on-one calls and you earn x doing that but maybe you could have 10 bots doing 10 calls a day
each but for 10 of the price or something i don't know but it's like it's essentially a way of
ratcheting up your time providing you know where to point it i guess that's the key isn't it but
But now you can iterate much faster.
Whoa.
Very, very exciting.
And so okay we spoke a bit about business model just now So do you pay for open claw like how does that work yeah um well not directly so i open cause free it an open source project but i pay lnvps for
my for my machine right my host the hosting services so this open call runs on an lmvps machine
I pay like $5 or like $8 a month in Bitcoin to keep this machine running.
And then OpenCore cannot function without AI tokens. It needs a model.
And there's two ways to do this. You can either run your own local machine.
You need quite a powerful machine to run the AI locally. And I think this is going to come
down a lot in price in the next few years and it's going to be a lot more private right because
you're not sending all this data to a third party um but right now it's quite experience uh expensive
so that's that's one option the other one is it's like bang paying for token usage um and what i use
is ppq ppq which is like you pay bitcoin for token usage but you can also use maple like you mentioned
for even better privacy, even on top of that.
I think PPQ is also quite good privacy
because all these people spending Bitcoin,
it's going through like, it's like one routing service.
All these different queries are coming from all these different people.
So I think that's still quite a good trade-off,
especially for how easy it is to use PPQ.
That's why I like PPQ.
There's no monthly subscription.
is just like I can pay even just a dollar
and then I get some tokens and I can start testing it out.
So I think the onboarding friction is very low with PPQ,
which is what I quite like.
And recently, just yesterday,
added support for the ability to connect your Lightning wallet to PPQ.
And what this basically means is that you can have auto top-ups.
So every time your AI token balance gets quite low, then you can automatically pay from your Lightning wallet, top it up with Bitcoin and then keep going.
And this is a great feature, especially for these AI agents, because if their tokens run out of money, then they're basically unresponsive.
And you have to figure out a way to top them back up to keep them going.
So I think this is a pretty cool innovation.
Wow.
And yes, so this is one of those, forgive me for not being as up to date on OpenClaw as I probably should be,
but I mean, it's going to be the first thing I start researching when this recording is done.
And it will be amazing, I'm sure, how quickly one progresses down the hole.
But the fact it's open source is such a big deal, isn't it?
And I mean, like Sam Altman, that guy is just so sus, right?
What is he up to on the back end?
I don't know.
But a mate of mine recently who is in the info product space,
so he sells education products, has done for years,
like 10 years his business has been going.
More recently, he's had to pivot away from what he was doing before
because now the AI boom means that you can just type into an AI
for mentoring or for coaching.
And in this case, he's actually pivoting towards marathon training,
so a very physical angle for the problem to solve.
and therefore there's still an angle to make some money out of it.
But what was kind of, I guess, worrying me about all of this
is like you're teaching a third party or a private business how you think.
It's not just a web search.
It's not like, oh, I can see your internet search history
and now I can take all the metadata out of that and advertise products to you.
It's like now I can actually see how you think.
What are the ramifications of that?
and a use case that I came across recently that's something I thought about for a while but in a
different lens and in some ways actually Roland is connected to the other amazing conversation
that you and I had halfway down the volcano that we walked about intergenerational wealth and
knowledge transfer and in my case my father died when I was a young man and I was 20 years old so
in the first 20 years of my life I had to learn everything he could teach me before it was too
late. I didn't know he was going to die. He didn't know he's going to die. Suddenly he's gone.
Well, in a world in which these AI tools are now being created, it's not going to be too much of a
stretch to say, well, hang on, all of the intellectual capital of a family should be
stored locally for that family to use indefinitely to do business with, to live with vitality.
if you are just telling chat gpt aka sam altman how you think and how you behave then you're
basically giving away some of the most important intellectual capital that you have um i'm with you
that the computing costs are going to come down so perhaps open claw is a piece of the puzzle here
where you can actually start to think about how knowledge is going to be transferred over time
and how we might own that and store that.
And that is very, very valuable.
I completely agree.
I think it's because what I read,
and it's a really scary thought,
is if they know how you think, right,
and they have the platform to subtly change your behavior,
they can change the way you think, right?
So, yeah, now we know.
It seems so innocuous, doesn't it, at the start?
Sorry to cut you off.
It's so innocuous, isn't it?
Oh, just type in here.
We're a strategy app.
You can make better decisions.
Oh, who knows where that goes?
Sorry, Roland, carry on.
These tools are super powerful, but on the other hand,
if you give that power to the wrong hands,
then it can go down a very dark path, right?
So I think OpenClaw is one really great thing
that it's open source and it allows you to pick these different model providers, right?
So you don't have to go with open AI.
You can choose a local model or you can choose a privacy based model.
And yeah, I completely agree.
I think as we become more dependent on these AI tools to become as productive as we can,
we're going to share more personal details, more private details with them.
So I hope at that point we switch to local models.
And I think definitely there can be like a slightly worse off local model
that has your private data.
And then if you really need a powerful cloud model to do something,
then you can do it knowing that the privacy tradeoff is different.
right you share different information with it to do very specific things i think as as long as people
have kind of like keep keep this you know this this this fine line like this this line that you
cannot cross between what what what you should give to your local agent or or your private or
an agent that you can prove is is not not leaking or using your your private data right um compared
to maybe a cheaper, faster, more powerful model
provided by OpenAI or Anthropic or Grok or whatever it is.
Yeah, and it's crossed my mind.
I realize why I mentioned my friend with the information product.
He was explaining to me that it's not long, in his view,
until ChatGPT starts doing ads.
And so there's going to be a whole new market for the guys
that like to sell media products online to figure out ChatGPT.
And now, you know, people walk into a town
and the first thing they do is just type into ChatGPT,
which cafe do I go to?
Or, you know, where's the car park?
Or what used to be a Google search is now going through an AI tool.
So it's ripe for monetizing eyeballs.
And whether or not that marketplace actually arrives,
I haven't seen it yet, wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.
if you're doing hard work trying to be more efficient wanting to share private information
then you're not going to want to be bombarded with adverts around those those subjects so i
absolutely see this this opening up um gosh fascinating so so run so one thing we haven't
touched on so far is uh the business albi that you've been working with now for a few years so
So for anyone that doesn't know of Albi, what do you guys do and what's that journey been like?
So Albi builds products, tools, services to make it easier for individuals and businesses to live on the Bitcoin standard.
Basically, we think Bitcoin is the native currency of the Internet and in the world.
and how can we bring more people over to the Bitcoin standard
is kind of our overarching goal.
And I think back when we were chatting in Bali, right,
walking together on this mountain hike,
back then things at Albi were very different.
So back then we had a custodial wallet,
And I think just the month before we celebrated our best month,
we had over a million transactions.
We...
Sorry, my cat just jumped in.
Hello.
Let's see.
They like joining video calls.
Yeah.
So, uh, we, we're kind of, we, we had to make a decision at that point.
We're getting quite, quite, quite big, quite a lot of usage.
Um, and we, we had two paths.
We could either introduce KYC, um, become a regulated company, get the proper
licenses across the world, um, which is very expensive and also all of our users
would have to give personal information, right?
that they're not money laundering or whatever it is.
Or we could go the opposite route, which is to go self-custodial, self-sovereign.
And this has kind of been the idea from the beginning, actually.
The first product of Albi is like this browser extension that you can install
and then you can make payments on the web.
And back then, it connected to a Lightning node.
The first part was self-custodial, actually.
And we introduced this custodial service because it's easier for the average person.
Getting Lightning to the mainstream a few years back, running individual nodes was not really ready.
But things have changed a lot.
We're in a much better position today.
It's very easy to actually run a Lightning node now.
So the last two years, that's been our focus to create this great foundational wallet where you
own the keys to your money. You're a part of a decentralized network. You can open channels to
anyone you like. You cannot be shut down. You cannot be stopped, which is completely different
from like stable coins, for example. We can chat about that. But what is the difference between
In Albi and other Lightning Wallets, we kind of focus on the idea that you have a Lightning
Wallet connected to all your different applications.
So we work on this open protocol called Nostra Wallet Connect.
It's kind of a bit technical, but what it does is it gives all your applications the
ability to have permissioned access to your Lightning Wallet.
that the easy way to explain this is like LNVPS, which I talked about, right? Every month,
it needs about $10 to pay for my machine. So I have my one LB hub and I have one connection that
I give to LNVPS and every month they will do an auto renewal and it will take about $8 out of my
Lightning wallet, but I give it a specific budget of only $10 and that's all that LNVPS can do.
So the idea is instead of like adding Lightning wallets and balances to all
these different apps you use, kind of like if you think about the old days, you have
like a mobile phone plan, right? And you top up credits and then you have like
balance on your phone plan. Instead, we think that people will have a single like
control center and that's what we call LB Hub. It's your wallet that connects all
these different apps. Your wallet has all the balance, but then you can create these
like permission connections so i give one to lmvps and i give another one to ppq for my model
model tokens and and other things like that so now we have this self-custodial wallet that can
connect all these other apps and we have like a pretty great foundation we also did quite a few
innovations compared to other self-custodial wallets that came before us. So we really tried
to bring this self-custody more simple, more easy to normal everyday people who are not so technical.
So things like being able to open channels, for example, now just with one click,
you can basically purchase a channel, an incoming channel from some of our LSP partners. So all the
The difficulties of figuring out like, okay, I need to channel.
Um, I have to deposit on-chain Bitcoin.
It's no longer the case.
Um, I have to figure out how, who to open the channel to.
That's no longer the case.
All of those things we, we kind of take care of.
So LB Hub now is like, it's a very strong foundation.
It's powering a lot of our, the things we do in our business.
All, all other side projects are powered by LB Hub.
even our cloud subscription platform is actually all the subscription payments are going through
the same protocol, NostraWallet Connect, making these subscription payments to a single hub that
we run. And now we're actually doing a lot of experimentation, especially in AI and also on
the developer side to improve developer experience, at the same time looking at new use cases
is to really expand what LB Hub can be used for.
And with the goal, right,
to bring Bitcoin to the forefront,
make Bitcoin the top way of using money, right?
Not stable coins, not cryptocurrency, but Bitcoin.
And for that, we have to provide the best user experience
and solve real problems.
So that's really what we're trying to do.
brilliant I love it and I have to say I was going to do this on the call anyway I confess
Roland I've had difficulties with my LB hub and it's been hard to maintain an open channel
and I think I haven't funded it correctly or something along those lines and it's almost
definitely user error rather than anything else but I would I would definitely have to
admit that I haven't found that move from the custodial to the self-custodial very easy.
Having been a customer of LBs from before, I really liked using it specifically for NOSTA,
so for signing notes. And I'm like, great, this is perfect. So I just have one account with LB,
and now I can use all of these different NOSTA apps to interact with. And I don't have to share
my NSEC with a bunch of random software tools that I have no idea if they're going to disappear
tomorrow I can just do it using Albi that was great but I found that the transfer to the self
custodial wallet difficult because for some reason I keep getting the balance wrong and I haven't been
able to like sign up with the payment plan properly had to put a card in and take my
bitcoin out I don't know exactly what I was doing wrong but there's no doubt in my mind that the
self custodial angle that you guys chose to go down like I'm still just experimenting with these
things right Like any user would I looking at different things and what works and great route to go because the more permissionless we can make things the better Had you gone the other way you immediately become a kind of honeypot for regulators or someone that not nefarious actors
But it's like, let's put some pressure on this ecosystem because we want to keep our central banking cartel going.
Go and talk to those guys. You know what I mean? Where it's like, no, this market can't be stopped.
stopped and if you try it's not going to make any difference and so i love tools like that because
at the end of the day it's just money and why shouldn't i be able to spend my money with who
i want when i want how i want um so yeah sorry to to to share that i had a bit of a tricky
experience with that but that's certainly been the case for me
yeah no and it's it's great to be honest here i think
It hasn't been the smoothest path.
I think we were a bit rushed two years ago when we made this transition and we were kind
of forced to based on the kind of the explosion and how much usage we had.
Our node was like growing.
We had a lot of Bitcoin there that we kind of had to make the decision and get people
to self custody as soon as possible.
And so when we released Albi Hub, it was about six months of development, I guess, at that point.
Definitely there were bugs, there were issues.
And also just on the Albi account side, as you say, like billing issues and sometimes channels getting closed, all of those things were kind of definitely a bit bumpy.
We've gotten a lot better since then.
We're still not perfect.
I think people still have to be a little bit more accepting, right,
compared to a custodial solution.
But I'm pretty optimistic.
I think what we have now today is super reliable.
And the amount of power it gives to the individual is hard to beat.
So for sure, me personally, I actually like custodial solutions.
If I was going to recommend to someone who's just getting started with Bitcoin, I'd just say, use Walletist or Toshi.
Use whatever the simplest one.
I don't care, right?
Like, if you only have $10 or $100, then why are you going to go into self-custody and have more confusion or a poor experience?
the goal right to onboard somebody is is to get them to use bitcoin for the first time to have
that magic experience and take some time to learn and when they're ready when they have more money
allocated into bitcoin when they're actually spending and receiving more money then move to
a self self custody approach so i think alb hub today is still not geared towards beginners it's
still very much an intermediate level product.
But I think going back to OpenClaw,
I think one interesting thing which we're working on now,
which could help solve some of these issues is that
we're basically building a way where your agent can manage your wallet.
So you don't even have to touch the user interface anymore.
It can set up your Albi Hub for you, your wallet for you.
It can manage your channels.
It can do everything.
It can recommend you.
If you're having troubles, it can figure it out, right?
It has full knowledge of how Albi Hub works.
It can teach you things.
It can show you, okay, have you done a backup yet?
You need to write down your 12-word recovery phrase just for a last resort, right?
like if um so these kind of things i i think could be a huge um huge like uh ux improvement for the
average user um and at the same thing same time i think because more people are choosing to run like
a dedicated machine for open core they already have the ability to self-host albi hub because
it's just another app they already have this machine available they see the benefit of running
a personal assistant there they can just add the wallet and i think this really lowers like the
onboarding barrier for people to run a self-custodial uh lightning node so i'm i'm i'm pretty
excited there as well awesome and it's just it's fascinating stuff this so uh ronan i normally
shoot for 60 minutes so do you have another 5 10 minutes sure yep yeah okay um and we'll wrap it
it up basically after this last question, but I'm intrigued by the growth that you're seeing. So
the Lightning Network is obviously evolving very, very fast. What are you guys seeing? Like,
you know, you're at the very coalface of this industry, building a business like Albi.
It's super exciting what you're seeing, I assume. What does it feel like on a day-to-day basis?
like transactions up, user growth up, people all over the world while connecting in?
How does it actually look?
Yeah, so we're actually quite in a bit different situation.
What can I say?
We run an open source project, right?
So people can run Albi Hub.
They don't even have to connect their Albi account,
and we have no idea what they're doing.
We have no idea how many payments they're using,
how much Bitcoin they store, they can run completely private.
So there's a trade off, right?
You can run in that mode or you can connect your Albi account and you get email notifications,
you get a lightning address, you get encrypted automatic backups and those sort of things.
So that part we can see.
But I would recommend to follow.
a river report that came out recently um which yeah a huge increase in lightning adoption um
i think now 0.1 percent of what visa is processing but if we do another 10x from here where i think
it's already like since a few years ago we've already done one 10x so if we do another 10x from
here, then we're actually getting, starting to, you know, compete with these other solutions.
So Lightning adoption is very fast going up.
I can't remember the exact number, so I don't want to say the wrong thing.
I can go look it up, no worries.
Yeah, definitely there's a huge increase.
And at the same time, I think we're in a quite critical situation
where there's two competing protocols.
So there's like Bitcoin for AT&T payments.
And then there's also like the more, there's one called X402.
So the Bitcoin one is called L402 and it's Bitcoin only.
And then there's X402, which supports all different currencies.
Albi is actually supporting both of those.
And we're looking into experimenting with them both.
We build open protocols and we're building on open protocols,
so it doesn't really matter either way.
But we would like to see more people shift to use Bitcoin, right?
Because even if stablecoins are fast, they can still be censored.
You can still get your accounts frozen.
And at the end of the day, my personal opinion is everything is going to zero against Bitcoin.
Right. So even if it's called a stable coin today, I think it's more like a temporary solution.
It's not going to be very stable in the long term. So long answer short, definitely lightning adoption is going up and it's going up hundreds of percent every year.
So that's really exciting. We can also see like with the Bitcoin fee rate, right, it's gone way down like one set per V-byte because so much of the activity that was on-chain before has now been shifted into the Lightning network.
Interesting.
And yeah, I think every day more like, what is it, Square Cash App supporting Lightning
transactions in the US, more exchanges supporting Lightning Network directly.
So I think Lightning is definitely on a good path and I believe it's going to be the payment
rails of the future.
Definitely, it's still a very small market compared to credit card payments, but it's
definitely growing and then at a fast pace yeah and small small but different you know it's it's
when you really start thinking about what what is a bearer asset and what does it mean to have
counterparty risk and what does it mean to have um you know speed of transaction versus security
and you start looking into this it's like well just it's a much better form of money
so it's inevitable in my opinion
that's where things will go
but the status quo is not going to
wander off and say
don't worry guys
you take all our business
no problem
so I'm definitely expecting
a bit of a to and fro
for a long time yet to come
well Roland thank you so much
for sharing everything today
is there
just to hand it to you
is there anything else
that you haven't walked through
that you wanted to share
or anything that you wanted
to increase upon?
uh yeah i'm i mean kind of in line with the stuff the innovations we're doing with ai um which which
i can sum up quickly so yeah go for it i mean take as long as you like um yeah we we have this thing
called ai skills which basically gives your ai agent whatever you use open uh open ai board um
specific knowledge of how Albee works and what this means is you can basically with a simple prompt build an application that has Bitcoin payments.
And it will actually do it right now, which I think this year is like, there's been a huge change in the quality of the AI models coming out that is actually possible.
Combined with these skills that Albee maintains to actually build these apps.
and the second one is we have the skill which basically gives ai agents the ability to
use a bitcoin wallet to make and receive payments so both of those are available and basically just
you do just copy one line and give it to your your agent and it can basically then it kind of
installs the knowledge it's like you know in the matrix when neo learns kung fu right it's kind of
like that. You give it that knowledge.
Great movie.
I think these are really two cool innovations we've done recently.
And also regarding the developer side, we've actually introduced a new thing,
which is a way for AIs when they're building these apps to actually fully
test payments, like the whole flow without human interaction.
So they can basically spin up these like throwaway dummy wallets.
They can actually, they're powered by LB Hub and all the features of different types of payments,
receiving money, sending money, listing transactions, all those things are possible.
So for anyone building or who wants to try out building something related to Bitcoin,
I think today is definitely 100 times easier than it's ever been.
You don't have to be a programmer.
it you don't have to really all you need to do is take five or ten minutes you just put in this
prompt you can even use replit or something you you don't have to set up any development environment
if you have an idea to build some something bitcoin related definitely try it out and
yeah if you want to learn more about albie get albie.com feel free to contact contact us
us as well if you have any questions we have we have a support um support link directly on the
site um happy to hear what people want to build where they get stuck uh we're always trying to
make things easier uh for the for the average person so um awesome ronan it strikes me just
before we close up so when i think about you know famous andreessen quote of like software's
eating the world. And then the AI boom of recent times where it's like, well, actually software is
eating software. And so the trend for value creation for so long was like, don't look at
hardware, do software, you know, massive scale, huge multiples to be made. And the more that I,
I guess got closer to that, got burnt, and then moved further away for it due to, in many ways,
Bitcoin, I realized a lot of that kind of Silicon Valley VC funded hype cycle is a symptom of the
money printer. Like, how is it that millions of dollars can be thrown at an idea with no traction?
Like, it doesn't make sense. It's because money is cheap. If anything, money is valueless. And so
So it strikes me that this AI wave that we're witnessing now is obviously completely reinventing how you create software products, as you've touched on in multiple different ways over this conversation.
But as a software builder, entrepreneur, investor, in my case, like, actually, it's just making you better at your job.
so where is like is there a defensibility angle that is obvious to you or when you're talking
about these ai tools that you're bringing into your lb ecosystem like they just add value for
the customer they add value for you guys as a team correct it's not necessarily eating your business
no and and people can say yeah okay we have ai now we can build a product in a day or or a week
like where's where's your like competitive mode right but i think there is a network effect there's
there's trust involved there's you get uh you know faithful users of of a service or a company who's
actually building something you believe in um and i think as long as we keep innovating we can we
can bring in these users and we can see it today with OpenClaw. OpenClaw was invented and then
a few days later there's XeroClaw, NullClaw, NanoClaw, all these different clones. But
the people using them is so much smaller than OpenClaw. The network effect is the real thing.
the respect of the developer behind the project and their vision.
And you know that they were the one who came up with this idea
and they are going to push it forward.
They are going to bring these new ideas to the world.
So I think a lot of people follow these companies.
They don't just switch because, okay,
someone else created a new product in one day
and they sell it for half the price.
I don't think it will be like that.
Yeah, it's funny.
And I think there's also a sense of,
like, where is content valuable?
Well, content is a way of garnering trust.
If you're creating content over a sustained period of time
that people come across for whatever reason,
they're not going to suddenly reach out to you
with a question or with an opportunity
because you're an AI channel on YouTube.
So to echo you, there's definitely a sense there of people can feel the proof of work.
They value that.
They grow to trust it.
And therefore, yes, you could go and use an equivalent to the Albi wallet that interacts with Albi Hub.
But actually, why would you?
Because it works totally fine and you trust those guys.
Yeah, cool.
Okay, awesome.
Well, Roland, I don't have any more questions for this particular conversation.
Really appreciate you coming and joining me on the podcast.
and great to spend some time talking together.
So thank you so much for your time today.
You too.
Thanks for the opportunity to be on the show.
I really enjoyed it.
My pleasure.
Thank you, Roland.
Cool.