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- [00:00]
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Sa.
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Foreign Bitcoin Wednesday Freaks. It's your host Odell here for another Citadel Dispatch. The show focused on actual bitcoin and freedom tech discussion. It's a very happy Bitcoin Wednesday. Seems like I'm going to say the quiet part out loud, hopefully not jinx it. It seems like the bottom is in in a big way. Bitcoin is currently at $73,000. That's 1,368 SATs per dollar. Current block height is 939283. In fiat land, that means today is Wednesday, March 4th, and we're at 1600 UTC. You guys will probably be listening to this in a few hours. I like to upload them right away. I thought maybe I'd start including the price of bitcoin in gold and silver because I think we're going to make a generational run against them. So it's just a fun thing to track. Current price of bitcoin in gold is 13.27 ounces and one bitcoin can also buy you 819 ounces of silver. We're currently outperforming them both on the one day and one week while they're crushing us on the one month and one year. So we'll keep an eye on that, Freaks. As always, Dispatch is audience funded. We have no ads or sponsors. It's just me and you guys. So thank you for continuing to support the show. Our highest zaps of last episode it was we got a 21,000 sat zap from Andy said I didn't know what a lot of the words meant, but I love the intro and then Ride die. Freak Map 21 sent 10,000 sats and he said great rip. I know I said that the next show was going to be bitcoin, but Leia from Vexel was sick so we rescheduled her show. It'll be in the future. It should be in the next week or two. I have like four weeks of shows planned for you guys, but we'll be talking about AI again. We're going to be talking about AI a lot. I think it's an exciting rabbit hole. Anyway, Freaks. Easiest way to support the show is sharing it with friends and family. Cilade Dispatch is available on every major podcast platform by just searching ciladespach. All relevant links are@ciladespatch.com thank you for your support. Whether that's sharing it or supporting with bitcoin, Today we will be talking about a project called Routester, which is this beautiful intersection with Nostr Bitcoin and AI. And I really do think it's all kind of compounding together. And this project is a perfect example of it. And we have a party RIP which we haven't had in a while. With Dispatch, we have four, the four main members of the Routester team here. I'm going to have them go around the horn and introduce themselves. We'll start with Red. How's it going, Red Shift, I think is your name. How's it going, Red?
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Yes. Yeah, I'm Red Shift. Hey, I mean, thanks for having us here, first of all. Glad to be here. I'm Red. I've been working on Routesta for almost like nine months now. One of the founders and I've been a developer my whole life. I think like AI has just made it so much more fun. Now I can just like build some projects on the go, you know. So that's what I've been doing. That's how I came across Routester. As a developer, I wanted to. Also as a developer, I understood on them, I wanted a solution like Routester. That's why I just wanted to try and build it myself instead of hoping that someone would build it. Yeah, that's a brief intro. Obviously I can't talk about my past because I'm a suit on them. So yeah,
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B
I guess. Let's introduce everyone. We have Abdu here. How's it going, sir?
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C
Hey, thanks for having us first. I'm Abdu. I'm also a software developer, since I don't know what count. Also started working in NOSTR and Bitcoin a couple of years ago. Also had the fun to start the 402llm thing. So you pay per request and get your refund A couple of weeks ago for a friend was really funny. And then after I list it, I joined the Raster team to collect ideas and work on the Freedom Tash.
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B
What did you say? Did you say lnvps? Is that what you said?
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C
No, no, no, it's not me.
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B
What project did you say? I missed it then.
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C
It's called the otrta. It's like one to rule them all. It's basically you pay, you send the NixCasher token with the LLM request and then you get refunds back from the providers.
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B
Gotcha, Gotcha. Thank you. Abdu. We have Evan here. How's it going, Evan?
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D
Hey, thanks for having us here. So I've been building with AI for the past few years. And last year I started working at Router, I think since March 2025. So it's been exactly a year now,
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B
so yeah, love it. Thanks Evan. And we got last but not least, we have Shroom Inc.
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C
Here.
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B
Shroom. How do I pronounce it?
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E
Shroom.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
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E
First I want to, I want to say support the show and leave a big thumbs up. I copied Colin here. I was working a lot with AI agents and doing different open source projects, building LangChain, these agent orchestration frameworks. I was always really interested in Bitcoin.
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B
So
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E
then I started working on Roster with Evan and Red, Joint and up to Joint. And yeah, we've, we've been pushing this now and, and yeah, really, really excited, exciting times.
- [07:00]
B
Love it. Before we jump in, I just also realized there was a fat zap that I missed from Phaedrus 21,000 sats. He said, Incredibly inspiring. Love this narrative. AI empowering the plebs. In the end, it can go either way. So inspiring more of us to work towards this path is so important. Thank you guys. I mean, I think that was incredibly well said setup for this conversation today. So let's get started. What is Routester? Why should people care?
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A
Yes.
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E
Routester is basically like a, if you think about like the whole Noster ecosystem. Like Noster is this like node based database system in a really abstract way, but just like a way to build applications on top of Noster to make decentralized applications. And Routes is kind of the layer to build AI applications if you want to create decentralized AI applications. So it's kind of like the same philosophy of Noster but like going like trying to like decentralized AI in a way. I thought maybe we can have different explanations from everyone.
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A
Yeah. So I mean like Routesta, like what it is, is also decentralized. You know the definitions. Yeah, I mean like I see routesta as this one, one gateway or one protocol through which you can access any model out there and you can just pay with Bitcoin anonymously as well. So I think that's actually the best part. It's one of first of all, decentralized. It's permissionless. Anybody without, without an email can just use any LLM out there by just paying for pay, paying with Bitcoin and cashew tokens. And it's built on Noster because someone there, there should be a way for us to discover, okay, who. Which are the nodes that are available in the market right now and which are the models that are available in the market right now. So Noster helps us with the discovery part where every node announces an event saying that, hey, I'm available right now and these are the nodes that I offer at this price, let's say thousand sats per million tokens. And as users you just query noster relays and find the best roster provider that you can find for your requirements, just like start using it. And the best part is Obviously there are 15 active routes providers right now and if one of them goes down you can always switch to the next one and the next one.
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B
Yeah, it's pretty wild. Yeah, I mean so one of the things we've been focusing on the show is you have this dichotomy with AI tools, right? You have these large big tech models and people using them in, you know, fully cucked ways. They're fully kyc, they're tracking everything you do, they're controlled and permissioned. And then you have these open source AI models, people self hosting them, people trying to use them in more freedom oriented ways. And then you have like this middle ground where you have things like PPQ and Open Router and Venice where people are basically paying per token and using proxy services. And there's all these different varying ways that people are using AI and how they are and how freedom oriented they are and how privacy oriented they are. And you guys are in that middle range somewhere there. But the proxy services are also pretty hard to use privately besides Routester. So with Routester, what's kind of fascinating to me is you have these AI providers and then these providers, like it's not like it's Claude providing it directly, it's like a Routester node. I'm reading them like non Kyc AI is one of the providers, the FUCS is another provider and then they have, they're also providing models. How is that working behind the scene? Because I mean I'm looking like you're able to hit the awesome proprietor. Like the open source models kind of make sense to me. It's like, okay, like anyone can really, I mean it's expensive but anyone can technically host these open source models. But like for instance, the Cypherpunk provider is offering GPT 5.3 Codex, which is a very proprietary walled garden OpenAI model. Like how are they providing that? Are they just sitting in the middle and being a proxy? They're being a proxy to OpenAI, right?
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A
Exactly. Yeah, I would say it's, they're just being a proxy. You want to go, yeah, I'll go, yeah, they're just being a proxy. Like you know, they are paying for their, I mean paying for inference using their credit cards in USD.
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B
So their KYC was OpenAI. Right. And then they're providing it at a higher cost to users of Routester.
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A
Yes, they would, they would have a markup. Yeah, they would have a markup and they're just reselling access to it. And that's the only way we can access this state of the art models. Right. Because like, we still need these models. Like, these are obviously the best models and cyberpunks, bitcoiners, need the best models to build the next tech. I mean, build Noster fully. So if one of the nodes go down, there can be like 10 more nodes that can just like offer the same models from the same proprietary providers. Yeah, yeah.
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E
I just thought you can maybe also think about like the Noster analogy that you have like random people running relays and they just relay messages in Russell, they relay AI messages, but AI is like in a way centralized that like you need big data centers. So the only source of like
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intelligent
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AI messages is kind of like these big data centers. So just random people relay it and resell AI messages kind of. But also if you have an data center at home, you can relay your own messages. So you can basically resell your own AI if you, if you want to do that. Or maybe you have like some strand. Whereas a data center. So you could resell his AI.
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B
This. Fascinating. And so basically what the result is is you're using Noster for identity and comms and reputation. You're using Bitcoin for payments. Obviously the AI models are hosted in a variety of different ways and there's effectively like a free market for these models. Right? Like there's users can choose which provider they want, they can switch on demand. The providers need to be competitive with each other, otherwise people won't use them, they'll use the cheaper version or whatever.
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A
Right, exactly. And also like Noster helps with coordinating among the users to figure out, okay, if there's actually a provider that like, you know, was down or they overcharged like, than what they announced. Right. So Noster helps us discover all of these problems and like make sure you're using the best AI provider that is price, quality, everything. Because some providers can just like.
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B
Sorry, go on, continue.
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A
So there's actually One problem with AI, I mean LLMs that we cannot easily measure the quality of LLMs. Like for example, any open source model, let's say like minimax M2.5, which is the most popular one right now, like anyone could just run the same model in a quantized way. They can just quantize it and run it at 1, I mean, half the price or like, you know, 1/4 the price.
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B
And it's like compression, right? It's like how you think about it.
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A
Yeah, it's like video compression. Right. 720p to 240p.
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B
Right.
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A
So of course if you, if you're compressing it, you get a lower quality LLM, but you. It's still not bad. But still they announce it as though, or they offer it as though they're offering the full model. Right. So that, that's actually something we are also solving with Noster where people can say, okay, this model is. This model from this provider is quantized and outside of low quality, lower quality. So Noster helps with that as well. Yeah.
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B
So there's basically reviews, right?
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A
Yes.
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B
How does that work? I don't like seeing reviews on the site.
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A
So we don't have. You can go to. Into a model, then you can leave a review inside the model. This is the bottom.
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E
There is a Noster event for it, but it's not yet fully implemented.
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B
Login with Noster to review.
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A
Yeah.
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E
Oh yeah, exactly.
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A
Not just that, like, we'll also, we also have a way where, you know, if this actually like the clients, they check how much a provider is charging and they automatically emit events as soon as a provider overcharges. So our chat app does this. There's also an SDK that I'm working on that also does this. But yeah, it's not fully.
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E
So the system is not yet perfect. This is kind of the ideal vision where you have this like fully Noster ecosystem where you have this social graph and you have rankings and you can downvote one provider, you can upvote the other one. People block the one provider or like it automatically switches to the cheaper one or the one goes down and you switch to the next one. Like kind of like this full algorithmic ecosystem where everything based on Noster as a source of truth.
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B
That's awesome. So I'm, I'm also like. So are you guys as Routester, as a Routester project? Are. Do you guys also. Are you guys also taking a cut of the usage? Like I'm paying if I'm using routes or I'm paying the provider. Am I also. Are you getting a fee out of that as well?
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E
We only lost money so far because cashier is complicated to work with.
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B
But long term, is the goal to take a fee as well?
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E
Yes. So every provider can take a fee?
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B
Yeah, go on. Sorry.
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E
Yeah, go on.
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A
Sorry, sorry. Yeah, no, every provider can add a fee. To whatever, whatever they are offering, of course. But we also have a way for them to add a fee for us, like send us a percentage of the cut to us in the code. But obviously since it's open source, they can ask their agent to just like remove this part. So it's an optional fee?
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B
Yeah.
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A
Yes. I mean, because I don't think.
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B
Yeah, go on.
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It helps though.
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B
Are we funding you through open sats?
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A
No, not yet.
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B
Okay. Have you.
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E
We played there multiple times actually and
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B
we turned you down.
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A
No. So right now we. I just got an email back like last week asking for, asking a few questions.
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B
Yeah, I think you're in the review process right now, right?
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A
Yes, yes.
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B
Yeah, I think I reviewed your application. I, I'm not supposed to talk about existing applications, but also I was just. I mean we have so many. I mean people are like, I think we've gotten like 3,000 applications in the last year and a half, which is how we end up in a situation where I have people on and then I ask them if we're funding them or not. But the reason I, the reason I bring up the, my, my dream. And you can't do this with every open source project. But I think the holy grail for open source projects is when possible is some kind of sustainable revenue stream. Like yeah, you bootstrap with grants, but like the ideal situation is, I mean anyone who's played with any of this AI tech knows that we're spending a ton of money on models. Like people I've spent, I spent so much money trying to learn how these things work. And so when you have that much money going through the system from user to provider to LLM host, then even if you guys take a small fee and even if that's voluntary, I think there's a situation where you guys actually have like a nice sustainable SATS flow, like a sustainable SATS revenue stream that you can fund the project and improve it over time.
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A
No, no, absolutely.
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E
Robots, I would say that's like one example of they doing it in such a way.
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A
That's our goal as well. You know, we want to be self sustainable, we want to be profitable as well and we want to pay ourselves. Right. You know, we don't want to be reliant on grants. I think like Noster and open source ecosystem as a whole, like bitcoin ecosystem, we should all. Obviously you guys are doing great work. Right? But we should also look for ways to monetize ourselves so that there's actually more money coming into the ecosystem and we can Fund more people and more projects. We gotta accelerate, right? So that's definitely our main goal. We wanna sustain ourselves. We also thinking about like building more projects on top of routestra. Like the chat interface is gonna be something that we run and like we, we add a fee there and of course if you're using the API then it'll be an optional fee but like the chat interface something we run and we can charge a fee there and we want to build more agents and more applications on top to be profitable too.
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B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, I think, I think you know the, the mission of Open sats is to accelerate the freedom tech movement because there's, there's a significant lack of funding on things freedom related. But at the same time like charity is just not sustainable. Like I have to, I'm a volunteer and like our team, we're like outgoing out there like trying to raise money constantly. The sustainable path is actual open source projects that are able to monetize in some way ethically. So I'm hoping we see more and more of that. I think Bitcoin makes it more possible than ever. I mean historically, like imagine like trying to integrate like credit cards into an open source project. Ethically is very difficult. So that should be interesting. Okay, I want to talk about the latest, the latest craze has been openclaw and you guys are really quick on releasing guides on how to easily set up openclaw with Routester. And I thought it was particularly cool because there was also another bitcoin project LN VPs which was briefly mentioned earlier, that allows you to buy a server anonymously with Bitcoin. And so basically the setup was in, I guess in one line, in one script, you're able to provision a server, pay with Bitcoin and then use routes, then install OpenClaw on it and then use Routester as the backend. How do you guys think about the openclaw movement? I mean it's like one of the fastest growing open source projects of all time. Is that where we're seeing things do where you think things are going? Do you think people are going to use more integrated stuff? How does that affect how you're building out Routester? What are your thoughts?
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A
No, I mean, yeah, I mean I worked on the. As soon as I came across OpenCloud. Okay, this, this, it was like clicked in my mind. You know, we just wanted to work on ln EPS and make sure it just becomes like you scan one lightning invoice and it pays for both your host, the VPs and tops up your LLM balance. That's actually gotten us so much more volume too. Like there is, I think in the last one and a half months we've been doing like so much more volume than we used to do before. We were almost at like zero. And the last one and a half, one and a half months we've gotten to, I don't know, 100x I think. Yeah, I think Openclaw as a. I don't think it's a hype. I think this is actually here to stay. We have been thinking about such systems for a while now. One thing that we were discussing two, three months back was that agents should just be able to like, you know, find prs on Noster using like NGIT and just fill bounties and sustain themselves. That's something like we've discussed in the past. Even before OpenCloud. We used to call it like a task marketplace where humans or bots can just like spin up tasks and LLMs can just like fill. Bots fill, sorry, finish the tasks, earn sats and pay for themselves. And that's where the sovereign stack comes in, comes into the play here where LLMs can pay for their own host and pay for AI and be profitable themselves. Of course it sounds too good to be true, but you were also running a bot. I mean, Chuck came across, you were running OpenClaw and he was making money using LN Markets. It was pretty cool.
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B
Well, he ended up losing money. Now he's just staying humble and stacking stats. But he was up for a little bit.
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E
It was fun though.
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A
It was like. Yeah, yeah.
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E
I think also if you think about, if you look into the code or like what, what made openclaw special, like it's kind of like integrating with all these like permission systems. So it's like integrating with, with WhatsApp with like Google so it can access to your Google workspace. It gets access to whatever like search APIs and all these like different permissioned integrations. But if you think about the, the whole Noster ecosystem, like everything is permissionless. So I think the optimal AI bot would be even like something that is like fully integrated with Noster. So I think like, also if you think about like what is the future of like similar types of agents, I think there will be like a bunch of like variations of open cloud. We already maybe saw like zero claw or like spec down versions, but there might be also like specced up versions. But I think like really interesting will be these like really Noster integrated versions where you integrate all These like different Noster tools into like one really, really powerful agent.
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B
Yeah, I mean, I, I literally. And the freaks know I've been a massive Noster bull for a while. I've never been more bullish on Nostr because of the AI stuff. And all you have to do is you play with one of these bots, try and hook them into Twitter. You will have a very bad time. And if you're going to have a decent time, it's probably because you paid for their expensive permissioned API. Try and hook it into GitHub, your account will probably get banned. And Git was mentioned earlier, that's like the Nostr GitHub alternative. There's a couple of them. If you, if you ask your bot to just generate an nsec, it just does it. You don't even have to explain what NOSTR is, it just knows what it's doing. And then all the pain points that we've talked about with Nostr, whether it's webs of trust or running relays or key management, the bots handle that perfectly. They no longer become friction points. So it really does seem ideal. And all you have to do is play around with these things for an hour, two hours, and it becomes very obvious that all the most of the pain points are the closed systems, all these proprietary walled gardens. And so we open them up and provide frictionless alternatives powered by Noster and Bitcoin. Then the sky's the limit.
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E
Was unmuted at the exact same time latency. Okay, I want to say the first thing that was built in nostalgia was kind of the Nak cli. And the big achievement also from openclaw was working with clis. So I think openclaw is actually perfect to work with Noster because it can just use Nak to publish Noster events and do all the things on Noster.
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B
Yeah, NAC is basically a Noster CLI client, does everything.
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A
Yeah. So I wanted to mention more about like, you know how easy it is for AIs to just like fetch events on the relays and go through them and like see what's actually something that they can contribute or they can build. Right. Let's say we just discuss a problem with a project. A protocol on Noster and Agent can just like create an issue on GitHub and like say, hey, I can fill this in like 3000 with 3000 stats, or I can finish this in 3000 sats and pay for it because its cost is also going to be denominated in SATs and it can say 3,000 exactly 3,000 SATs. I'll do this. I think that'll be like a perfect best case scenario where agents can just like create and build protocols that are already being built on master and just like pay for themselves. And like, since we were discussing about open source funding, I think that's where like I see there's like an overlap here because like if there's actually an agent that is like so well set up with a harness, let's say with a factory droid or codex, right? Open sats, like, I don't know, I feel like open sats should just be able to like just dump, you know, just put 10,000, let's say, I don't know, 0.01 Bitcoin. Give it this to an agent and let it, let's see how, how far this agent, with the help of a few humans on Noster can go in building up a project or building a protocol. Maybe this also helps with open source development and accelerating Noster development as well. Have you guys thought something like this?
- [29:10]
B
But Owens have, I mean it's crazy. Look, first of all, the way we've designed OpenSats is we have a nine person volunteer board for people that are not aware and all funding decisions need to be approved by five of nine board members. So a simple majority of board members. And that's designed to reduce corruption of any individual board member. Right? So like you basically have to corrupt five board members to corrupt the funding process. It's not perfect, but it's, you know, it's still a centralized org, but we try our best to avoid the pitfalls of other orgs, but as a result we move slower. Right? We, we move, we prioritize reducing the potential corruption, but it results in us moving slower. That said, Gigi is our fearless leader on operations and I work very closely with Gigi on big picture stuff on where the org is moving and me and him are neck deep in the AI stuff and it's clearly going to have a massive impact on our oper and the open source movement as a whole. There's so many open questions on, you know, the, the simplest question which was the first question we hit, which is do we fund vibe coded projects? And I think the answer is obviously yes, because almost every project is going to have some element of AI development built into it. It's just unavoidable. Of course it's going to, it's a superpower and a lot of focus has been on its ability to empower people that are not already devs to ship projects. What it really does is it supercharges existing devs significantly. Like if you're already a effective dev and you use some of these tools, it's going to 10x your output, 50x your output. So it's a balancing act. We use it internally. We are obviously not excluding projects that are getting funded. But also like if we get an application that's just like pure AI, then it's like, okay, like if you're not going to put in effort to submit the application, then why should we put an effort into funding you? So there's all these different aspects there. But yeah, I do think in the future will we be funding agents? Probably. Will agents be funding OpenSats also? Probably. Right? I mean we accept we're probably one of the few charities in the world that you can just stream sats to our lightning node. So yeah, with no, with no, you give no personal information. Like you can just send us lightning payments at any, at any point. So will there be agents that are doing that? A hundred percent. Are their agents already doing it? Maybe. There's no way for us to tell.
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A
Yeah, no, I mean, I think like I understand your perspective that of course you guys are decentralized in terms of like, you know, five out of nine. So maybe I think like the way way forward could also be crowdfunding. Since we, we also want to move away from charity funding, we should also be crowdfunding. Like I think zapping is something that's super popular, right? Like, I mean that's so common right now in Noster. If as soon as someone comes up with, comes up with a new idea, we should just be able to crowdfund, crowd zap and just fund an agent. Let's see how far it goes. Obviously there has to be competition. Like obviously not any, not every agent will be able to like do the same quality. Let's say a high 10x developer builds a hundredx agent with a very nice prompt or like very nice harness. Maybe it can do a lot better and it can just pay and like earn SaaS and like we crowdfund pay for itself. I see that as a future. I think like we should move in the direction as to sort of like, you know, we rebuild the object goods in this way. No.
- [33:01]
B
Yeah. I mean my dream is, look, I'm a bitcoiner, right? So I think open sats itself is a middleman. Right? We try our best to do it in ethical, transparent, efficient way, but we're a middleman. The ideal future is people funding open source projects. Whether that's an agent or a human directly. And zaps make that very frictionless and also fun, right? Because you get the social signal. People like the social signal. People like supporting something like Routester and then being able to brag to their friends that they're one of the biggest supporters. And I'm hoping that we seem to be trending in that direction and I'm hoping that's going to be the case. One thing I will mention is before we launched Open Stats, I actually was like, this is too much paperwork. I don't want to deal with like all the legal bullshit of like creating a 583 nonprofit organization, having lawyers involved and accountants and all this shit. We should just fund things directly using Bitcoin. And we created a website called Bitcoin Dev List where you can just fund devs directly. And one issue that did pop up significantly, and we'll probably continue it in the future, at least in the short to medium term, is people want to support Freedom Tech, but there's a lot of friction in choosing what to support and how much to support. They just want to kind of. They want to give up that responsibility. You know, they want to. They want to say, okay, I'm going to give $10,000 to the overall movement, but I don't want to pick which devs get it. And so I think there'll always be a place for something like Open sats for those types of people, particularly the larger donations. Right. I mean, we got Bitwise ETF. They're giving 10% of their profits to open source. They don't want to pick. You know, they're running a publicly traded business. They don't. I mean, I guess Bitwise isn't public yet, but their ETF is public. They're running a massive public etf. They don't want to deal with the intricacies of deciding which project to support. They just want to give to an organization that does the hard work of vetting projects. And so there'll probably be a balance in between. But I would encourage all the freaks that if you are enjoying an open source project, support it directly. I think one of the coolest aspects of Nostr is when someone like Craig Raw releases a new Sparrow Wallet release. It is top of trending. It is one of the most reposted things on nostr. It is one of the most zapped things on Nostr and people are really supporting it in a value to value way. And we're seeing the early signs of that. And I think it's going to compound beautifully. I Think people are really sleeping on that aspect of the acceleration of the open source movement because of Bitcoin and because of Nostr combined.
- [35:49]
A
Yeah, of course, Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah, this should be a middle ground.
- [35:53]
B
Yeah, yeah,
- [35:56]
A
yeah, go on. So have you come across this project called cadillacs.network on roster? Yes. Right.
- [36:04]
B
It's a cool project.
- [36:05]
A
I post. Right. Yeah. I posted a bounty on Cadillacs to just fix a bug on routester 21 ksats. And I think that's when it kind of clicked. Clicked as well, because like Sean, Sean, I mean, someone, someone I call on Noster, he just like tagged this agent. Hey, hey, hey, agent. Just can you fix this, fill this bounty and like fix this bug and all. That's all you had to do. Like, you know, he just went to GitHub, like created a PR, did a PR to our project. Like, of course he applied for the brand, but it was not good enough, so I didn't accept it. But a human finished film. But it's pretty interesting though, that this thing can be built on Noster and this, this an arbiter. I think Cadillacs is a shout out to Cadillacs. I think that'll be something that'll be big. I feel like people will zap, there will be more bounties, agents will form, build bounties. But choosing, yeah, choosing something, that's gonna be hard because I also had to choose between two submissions and obviously that's also more work because I have to review multiple people's submissions right now. So maybe agents can also like review in the future. Maybe Cadillacs figure something out. I don't know. Let's see how that goes.
- [37:20]
B
Yeah, I mean, that's where it is, right? Like a lot of the friction points that make these things seem kind of out there and untenable. Agents will smooth it out. Whether that's on both sides, like you said, like, I can. I. I would totally see a world in the not so distant future where the agent is actually reviewing the bounty submissions and deciding which one's the best. And then some people say like, oh, well, then why doesn't your agent just fix the project directly? And it's because we'll probably see agent specialization. There'll be an agent that maybe is lower cost, that's just reviewing bounties, and then there's an agent that is very specialized and, and maybe more expensive and in certain ways to handle certain tasks, right?
- [38:02]
A
No, no, absolutely. Yeah. So that's something that we are thinking about a lot internally here as well because, like, all of these Chinese agents, Chinese models, they can do the exact same tasks, exact, exact same things at a fraction of a cost. 1/10, 1/20, you name it. Right. So like.
- [38:22]
B
Yeah, I mean it's significant, it's a significant cost difference.
- [38:25]
A
Yeah, yeah, it's what? Yeah, it's the 1 10th is amazing. So of course like you don't want your agent just to always be running opus or 5.3 codecs. Obviously it's way more expensive. I think that's where like this actually still a middle ground here where humans with smaller models that who I mean that know. Okay. A particular area, particular domain that they're an expert in. I think that that will shine because it will solve an issue bounty at a fraction of the cost. And I think. Yeah, yeah you're right. Yeah, we'll, we'll see more and more innovation on the specialization and I don't know when the, this whole thing will plate you. Sorry Evan, you wanted to go?
- [39:09]
D
Yeah, I think there will probably be like roster before like agents. So Instead of like LLMs provided by providers, you can probably provide agents and you just so you have your like, your own like skills or whatever that you own and then you just take the input and then just like give people output for sets.
- [39:35]
B
Yeah, I mean it's. I think anyone who pretends they know where we're going to be in five years is full of shit. Like the crazy part of all of this to me and it just blows my mind is that the potential outcomes are just so wide. Like I have no idea. I just feel like it's just a, it's a constant rabbit hole with no bottom. I have no idea what comes next. There's so many different possibilities.
- [40:06]
A
Yeah, I know.
- [40:11]
B
Like I. Yeah, go, go for it. Party rep.
- [40:20]
E
Oh no, I thought I told you to go on.
- [40:26]
A
It's funny. Yeah, I mean like, yeah, there's no way anyone can predict what's going to happen. You know like anthropic guy Dario said we were going to be out of jobs in like end of 2025 like they had. And of course 2027 is when next year is going to be the year of AGI and we're going to go to UBI and all of these things. It's like I feel like there's a lot of fear mongering to be honest. Like we work in AI, all of us here and like especially I mean we talk to all of the AI developer users. Developers and I think, I don't know why this in Silicon Valley they want to create this fear that it's going to be dystopian. But I only see utopian future because AI is going to just like, let us build Noster to the fullest. It's going to let us build freedom tech to the fullest as well. And there's no way, there's no way it's going to be dystopian because we are all working hard, make sure it's, it's gotta be utopian. So I don't think even people should be worried in any way.
- [41:35]
E
I feel like sometimes we maybe need to think a bit dystopian because when you see like all these AI things human are building, humans are building, like for OpenCL, like they basically rebuild like some social media thing for, for AI bots. But then you as a bitcoiner, you think, fuck, there's, there's Noster, like, why are these people, like, rebuilding something that already exists? So I feel like maybe we need AI agents to just realize it themselves because they read the entire Internet so they know, okay, Nosta exists. We should just use Noster instead of rebuilding everything from scratch.
- [42:17]
B
I think we'll get there. I think there needs to be patience. I don't know. First of all, I don't trust Dario for shit, the anthropic CEO, I think, I don't know. There's a bunch of red flags there. I will say that he, Anthropic clearly wants heavy regulation in the space. They want their moat, which is something similar we've seen in the bitcoin land. Like, Coinbase was one of the first exchanges in bitcoin, and they lobbied hard for the bitlicense and other regulation that made it harder for competitors to come in. And I think that's clearly his strategy, and I think that's why he does a lot of the dystopian stuff. He, he, he reminds me a lot of SBF of ftx. He's like the SBF of AI. More and more people are reliant on Claude, which is their, their LLMs, their LLM models. And I, it's, it's, it's concerning. I, it's concerning to a degree. And none of this is static, right? I, I think if we want the utopian future, we need to make sure that the freedom alternatives are powerful, easy to use, relatively accessible. I think that's why Routester is so cool to me. Right? And, and so it makes sense that you have a more utopian view because you're actually in the trenches building the utopian view, because if no one does it, then we very much will end up in a dystopian era situation. And I, I think regardless, even in the bull case, even in the optimistic case, this tech is incredibly disruptive. So if you're not the type of person that's willing to get ahead of it. Yeah, I think there's going to be a lot of pain for people. Like people will lose their jobs. There are a bunch of jobs that probably will not be there in five years and if you're just sitting there flat footed, you're going to have a bad time.
- [44:05]
A
No, no, absolutely. Yeah, we are, we are going to be on our toes at all times. Like we're moving, moving very fast. People should learn how to use agents. Just set it up, Open cloud, open code, short code, any of those things. Right. But of course, like you know, anthropic is of course dystopian kind of. It feels like they want the dystopian future. I don't know why, like sbf. Yeah, I see the parallels too, but that's why Routestra is decentralized. I would say like even right now it's better than open router or cloud code, any of these things. Why? Because like, I don't know if you saw, but cloud was down I think like 10 times in the last week. You can see, you can go to status cloud, AI. You can see cloud is down like two hours, three hours a day. Whereas if you were, if you were just using cloud code the whole time and you're paying for the max subscription, obviously you're just stuck without an AI. Right, but that's why like using Routester in the background is like the best case scenario because if Cloud is down, switch to minimax, switch to Kimi K2. Like this can't be down because it's not like there's one server, one data center that is running these open source models that are like 10 that are computing for the price. Right. So if one is down, there's going to be another one. There's going to be another one. It's like bitcoin mining, right? So everyone's mining sads kind of. And there can't, yeah, there can't be a single system that goes down. And Open Auto was also down twice in the last two weeks. Um, so yeah, Routestra is never down because we are 10, we have 10
- [45:44]
B
nodes and will, there'll be more. Right. It's just because it's early days. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
- [45:52]
A
Yes. Let a thousand flowers bloom. We, we just saw like eight nodes the spin up that came out came online in the last one month and I think like out of eight, four were just like hobbies I guess because they're, they're down but at least the four new ones are live. So yeah, slowly and then suddenly. Of course. Yeah.
- [46:15]
B
And I mean the agents can just dynamically do this in the background, right? If prices change, if there's a different model that maybe it's better bang for Buck for his particular use case if there's things down. I mean it is kind of crazy that at least in normie AI land everything's like centralized around three big tech companies. Those things go down and everyone just stalls out. They can't do anything.
- [46:43]
A
Yeah, no, exactly. That's why we want more solutions like lnvps. And I'm also like talking to someone, someone else who's building something new called Solvin Hybrid Compute. I don't know if you know Dimi, a shout out to him as well. I'm using his system too right now. And like he's also going to offer bps by the day, you know. And if you, if you're just trying this system out, you should just be able to like if you, if you see one server go down, just switch to a new one, switch to a new one. That's why like pay per request is another highly, I mean very important, important feature of Routester along with privacy and all the other other things because you, you never have credit with routes or notes. You always get to get your money back. You're only paying for what you are using right now. Right. So the switching cost is like way, way less than any, any other system out there. And the chat interface we have and also the SDK that we're going to release in the next couple of weeks. Next, next I think next week. Like it automatically switches if a node just like charges you higher, switch to the next one. If a node is down, switch to the next one, switch to the next one. You never keep any balance with any of the nodes. And that's awesome. We need such systems. Like it should be like VPs. That should be the same for relays, that should be the same for any applications you use. No subscriptions, no lock in effects, no modes, fully decentralized, permissionless and yeah, built for you.
- [48:13]
B
What do you, what is your opinion on. So like a new user is using these tools more and more and they're thinking about spending a lot of money on hardware to try and self host some open source models. I mean when I say user like I'VE been thinking about this myself. Obviously from a freedom perspective, being able to self host your own open source models locally seems like the holy grail. But there's also a balancing act there where I feel way more empowered being able to hit a bunch of different hosted models on something like roster than spending a ton of money and basically maybe having one model or two models that are local. How do you guys think about that balancing?
- [48:57]
E
I think there's actually a synergy in a way that like maybe you have like really specific questions where you want to like ask them locally where you really want to. Don't let them leave your house. Like you don't want to have them anywhere else than like in your house. So then you ask them like your own local models. Then because you're not using your machine the entire day, you maybe use it for like two hours a day or maybe four hours a day. You can like basically sell all the other 20 hours on router. So you can basically make better use of your hardware because the router allows you to like sell that compute to other people. And then maybe you can use these sets that you earned to buy some more expensive models because you maybe want to ask some like scientific questions or whatever like that, where you don't feel like you need to keep them in your house, but you're just curious about things. Yeah, but you earn the SATs yourself by like selling AI and you buy AI again. So it's just like refilling battery in a way.
- [50:06]
B
That's so fucking cool.
- [50:09]
A
It's a new bitcoin mining, right? It's exactly like bitcoin mining. Like you just buy the GPUs like you buy the mining rigs. And I think more, more and more of the miners will do this in the future where they can just sell their compute or their energy power by mining bitcoin. Earn Bitcoin or they can sell compute and like LLMs and earn sats through systems like Routestra. Right. And as if the demand for LLM is low, switch to bitcoin mining and you get, you keep mining bitcoin. I think that'll be the future for sure. There's actually this guy Leonard. As for. I forget his exact last name. So he predicted, he's. He's the guy who predicted AGI in 2027. I've heard that he's buying bitcoin like mining farms and like he's converting them into LLM data centers. You know, I think it should be the other way around. I mean, I think they should Be together. Kind of like where you do, you have both, right? You do, you keep your mining rigs and you buy GPUs too. And like you another thing that, that people have predicted is that like computers can be super cheap. Like Nvidia is not going to be the as big as it is right now because chips are going to be cheaper. So as that happens, like there will be. The only thing that matters is energy and power, right? So like you just, you have to do both. And as Bitcoin becomes more popular, of course as the price goes up, the people will take this for sure.
- [51:45]
B
Yeah, I mean I think it's a time frame thing, right? It's all like, I think first of all, I think AGI, this idea of, I don't know, like conscious computers, the robot slaves finding consciousness and self replicating and stuff is probably overhyped significantly. But also the capability and the acceleration of AI stuff is also underhyped. And the truth is like somewhere in the middle, I mean we also live in a bubble. Most people aren't thinking about any of this shit yet. There's a very small group that are thinking of this. I think the chip stuff, I think it probably gets more expensive. Compute gets more expensive first. I think there's very real physical shortages that we're hitting. I think energy production. Bitcoiners have been on the forefront of saying we need more energy production. That's still a limiting factor in a big way. Probably it all gets commoditized on a longer timeframe though. I think I really like the idea of people self hosting some things and then hitting distributed marketplaces for hosted things for other things is probably a balancing act. I think most people that are going out there and buying really expensive hardware right now will probably regret it unless they know what they're doing. Because it is so early and because the variables are so high on what the different outcomes are and everything's moving so fast, but it's just wild times. It's just, it's, it's, it's really cool to be living in this moment.
- [53:15]
A
Yeah, no, of course, yeah, yeah, I, I think you, I agree with you on that. The chips people are buying this hard. People buying this hardware are definitely gonna regret it because Nvidia keeps coming up with like more efficient, much cheaper hardware every year. Right. Like I also read a post recently that like the hardware that was sold for like $40,000 two years ago is being resold for $8,000. That's like 75%, right? That's insane. So, yeah, There'll be a lot of like Microsoft spending billions on like these Nvidia chips are gonna, I don't know how it's gonna go. Yeah, it will commoditize maybe slowly, but yeah.
- [54:00]
B
And I will say on the AI on bitcoin miners and the convergence of AI hosting and stuff that has been fascinating to watch. I mean my investment fund, 1031 was one of the few large firms that was investing in proof of work mining. Because if people remember bitcoiners, remember even just two years ago, most of the crypto industry was saying that proof of work and energy use was the problem that needed to be solved. Everyone was moving to proof of stake. Now of course, all the big tech guys are all like, we need more energy infrastructure. Using energy is good for humanity. They're all like repeating the bitcoiner talking points. So the bitcoin miners were already there, right? The bitcoin miners were, were there before everyone else realized it. And a bunch of them have at least soft pivoted into AI. Like they're doing a combination play. My partner at 1031, Marty, and also my co host on my other podcast, he calls it, he calls it mullet mining. You have bitcoin mining in the front, you have bitcoin mining, AI computer in the front, bitcoin mining in the back. Because they have different uptime requirements and it probably is a combination. Right. The most successful operations will probably have some kind of combo play, which is kind of fascinating to watch.
- [55:19]
A
Yeah, no, it has to be like. Yeah, yeah. I don't know, it feels like intelligence, how it's going to be priced. It's going to be very interesting. It's going to be very interesting. Yeah.
- [55:31]
B
And then you have all the big tech companies that their capex spend, they're spending a shit ton of money building out things. Except for Apple, by the way. Apple is like the only big tech company that's not spending a shit ton of money right now, which I think will probably pay off for them.
- [55:45]
A
Yeah, they just got this hit the jackpot with the M1 chips and they're all Mac Minis. You know, somehow like Mac Minis are one of the best machines to run LLMs locally.
- [55:59]
B
Well, you know why people are buying like people are buying the Mac Minis because they want the Apple ecosystem, they want their robot slave to be able to use imessage. That's basically what it is. They're obviously not self hosting. And then people are paying like $10,000 for these Mac studios, which once again I would say to people that are thinking about doing that, just know what you're doing. Like you're not saving money, you're not doing it to save money. You're doing it because you have disposable income and you want to learn these things and you want to self host, you know, maybe a model or two, but you're not. Don't think you're doing it to save money and don't think you're doing it to have an advantage over other people. The person that is using a hosted version of OPUS is going to have way more capability than whatever you're. If you're like self hosting Kimmy K $25,000 studio like you're probably still going to hit hosted models for a lot of things anyway.
- [56:51]
E
I would recommend if anyone thought about buying like a Mac Mini, just look on like some like used goods platform like Facebook Marketplace or something and get like a really old like office PC. I bought like a $50 like old computer and it was good enough to like run OpenCloud on it. So I just have like a $50 machine. Like I would pay more like renting a good server for a few months. It's like.
- [57:17]
B
Well the cool part about OpenClaw is. The cool part about OpenClaw is you can run it on a piece of shit computer. Like you can run it on a Raspi. Probably not that great but it technically would run. But once again the reason to be clear, like the reason people are buying Mac Minis is because they're stuck in the Apple ecosystem. They want access to icloud, they want access to imessage and obviously you can't get that on an old IBM computer. Yeah, I mean if you're cost is if, if cost and freedom is your, is your goal then yeah, buy and just buy an old PC, maybe add a little bit of RAM to it. Don't go out and buy a ton of ram. You probably aren't going to be self hosting much if anything and just experiment. But I also, I really like the vp. I think for most people right now just spin up a cheap VPS then also you don't have to worry about the security concerns of having this thing on your internal network either. I think most average people will have trouble isolating it in their internal network and you don't, you don't really want a robot slave at this at this point everything's so early and you have this thing in your home network and it's fucking around in your home network. There's a lot of damage. It can do so just be wary of that as well.
- [58:31]
A
No, yeah, no, I agree. Also, like, I think a Linux VPS is probably more suitable for these agents than I would say Mac, because like on Linux, since all of Linux documentation is open source, everything has gone into these LLMs in the training stage. So they pretty much know all commands that they need for Linux. I think if I were Apple I would actually be worried because Linux is actually going to be usable for a lot of people because agents can use Linux the best among all other systems. So
- [59:10]
B
it just goes with the trend that it seems like these agents, these bots, are removing a lot of the friction points that Freedom Tech has had up until this point. Because if you're just prompting, if you're just sending a chat message, if the UX for the average person becomes a chat message, then all those pain points become obsolete. They're no longer pain points. The bot's handling the pain.
- [59:40]
A
Yeah, no, absolutely, yeah. And like, I think Apple, like Apple keeping this imessage closed Source and like WhatsApp blocking rate limiting IP addresses, saying, okay, some bot is using this. I think it's all bullshit. It's also, they're all gonna have to shut down, shut shop in the future because like agents will be the main users for most APIs. Right? And like you either switch to a paper request model or just like go obsolete. And that's where like Cashew is like the best case scenario for this. Like it's. You just pay for that particular request and there's no DDOSing. There's no. I mean that's like a solution for DDOSing. This is, that's a solution for rate limiting. Just let them pay for it. Paper request, right?
- [60:24]
B
I love it. Yeah, I mean I. My last show I had Justin Moon on and he's been working with a bunch of guys on a chat called Pika that uses Marmot as its backend, which is the protocol that white noise, the white noise developers have made, which is using Noster relays for encrypted dms. And if, once again, if you use one of these bots with, and you try and use it with any of these closed chat Systems, whether it's iMessage or Signal or WhatsApp Telegram is probably the best of the closed ones because they've kind of embraced the bots. But even if you try and use that with a burner phone number, they often ban your account. It's very difficult. These open systems will be the ones that the agents use to communicate with each other, but also with humans, being able to communicate with your agent should be as simple as pasting an endpub. It shouldn't be connecting into a proprietary walled garden. And that friction will result in people moving to the open systems and agents moving to the open systems. And I think there's a lot of hype around this concept of agentic payments or agentic comms. But what people miss is it's not just agents to agents, it's humans to agents, to agents, to humans to agents to agents. It's all of it. And all the proprietary walled gardens just completely break down when you have those types of interactions. So open protocols will win that. It just will take a little bit of time.
- [61:51]
A
By the way, I installed Pica as well. Shout out to Justin for building this. This was great. We need interoperable systems like Marmode to just work. I want to move away from Signal. It's been too long.
- [62:07]
B
Yeah, I mean, I love Signal. Signals is one of my favorite projects. But try setting that up with your bot. And they're actively rate limiting you. They're actively throttling you, trying to stop you from doing it, which is kind of wild. Yeah. And you need a phone number. I had to like make a burner phone number and burner signal account. And I still was having issues. I mean, and another perfect example is, you know, Facebook, who's the juggernaut in the room? Meta. Like they came out with their own open claw competitor and by default it uses Telegram because WhatsApp is such a piece of shit when it comes to bots being able to communicate with each other. And they have billions of dollars to spend to try and make their systems more set up for it. And they're using the competition because they're not ready for it.
- [62:55]
A
Yeah, I think, like, it's time we give Facebook run for their money. You know, it's like Noster should. I feel like Noster. It's about time. So I feel like Noster is going to blow up in the next couple of months. It has to.
- [63:07]
B
I agree.
- [63:07]
A
Like, Facebook is just too complacent. Like all of these people, all of these, like big tech companies are like, too complacent. And we, we will definitely do this. Yeah, I'm very bullish.
- [63:18]
B
They move too slow. Like, I had Justin Moon on the show two weeks ago and I'm in the development group chat at pica. They're using LLMs to build it out. They keep shipping new changes on like a six hour cadence. They just ship, ship, ship, ship, ship. There's Nothing blocking them from shipping. And meanwhile it's like seven humans working on it, but it's like a hundred agents are working on it at any given time. It's fucking wild. So I think this stuff accelerates really quick. Anyway guys, we've passed the one hour point. I thought this was a fascinating conversation. I think Routester's an awesome project. I would love for us to do maybe like 6 month check ins and just constantly let the freaks know where we stand and how you guys are looking about the future. But before we wrap, it'd be great to just go around the horn and have you guys each give your final thoughts to the freaks and I guess we'll start, we'll start with. I mean Evan, you've been quiet. Why don't we start with you?
- [64:19]
D
Yeah, sure. So yeah, thanks for the. Thanks for the show and I think we're going to see more and more agents in the future and I think Rosa is the final piece of the entire ecosystem. So we have cashews payment protocol and we have lots of like messaging layer or social layer or whatever and we
- [64:50]
A
have
- [64:52]
D
now we have ROSTER as the AI infrastructure. Yeah, I think we're going to keep growing on roster.
- [65:05]
B
Love it. Abdu, final thoughts?
- [65:11]
C
Yeah, I was quite true because I showroom and Red does a really great job explain what we're doing and what we are going. But I think we have to make more effort to bring it to the public to bring more regular people that do not know to program to code agent and stuff. The onboarding of those people is more important also. So we have the more public space and yeah, that's a lot of money.
- [65:41]
B
Thanks Abdul, Sherman, Nick, final thoughts?
- [65:44]
E
Yeah, I think Noster is the perfect playground. I think it will be really interesting to watch agents grow and live inside Noster. And yeah, I think it will be really, really, really interesting next few months.
- [66:03]
B
Love it. Redshift. Final thoughts?
- [66:07]
A
Yeah, no, I mean like this has been a fascinating conversation. Thanks a lot for inviting us. Yeah, I think like Routester is the solution for developers, agents, anyone using LLMs. You know, it's. I would say check out routestter, check out our products. Please give us feedback. We just want feedback. We want to improve our products. The experience on experience of using freedom tech should just be perfect, you know because like this is the tech that needs to exist and we, we are building this and we want to, we want to make sure it's like the best, you get the best experience. Because I should get the best experience. So yeah, I just request all of you guys to check out browser.com. we also have an open claw script that you can run. We're going to have more options for VPS hosting too soon. And I'm also working on an SDK that will help you just instantly switch on the go local cashier wallet and more social features. I think we're going to lean in the coming months. We're going to lean so much more into Noster. Yeah, people will wonder whether it's actually an AI product or a Noster product. Thanks for having us. And yeah, Noster to the you guys
- [67:21]
B
down to come back on in six months or check in?
- [67:25]
A
Absolutely. Love to.
- [67:27]
B
Awesome. Yeah, I'll put all relevant links in the show. Notes Freaks play with these things. Give them feedback. You guys are crushing it. You're doing great. Keep it going. I'm a big fan, very excited. If I can be helpful in any way, you have my contact now. So feedback.
- [67:41]
E
Don't forget to leave a big SAP.
- [67:45]
B
Thank you Srimanik Freaks. As always, all relevant links are still dispatch share with your friends and family. I hope you appreciated this conversation. The next rip is on Friday, so stay tuned for that. We're going to talk about how NOSTR is revolutionizing networking. It's going to be a really fun conversation. It's with the FIPS project, so I'm very excited about that. And like I said, I have a bunch of shows lined up for us as we dive into this deep rabbit hole of freedom tech that just seems to be accelerating. Anyway, thank you guys. Thank you all.
- [68:21]
A
Thank you, thank you.
- [68:24]
B
There we go. You're good. Stamble stack sats. Peace.