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- [00:07]
Matt Caro
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.
- [00:19]
Host
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
- [00:29]
Matt Caro
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitco.
- [00:32]
Host
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
- [00:34]
Matt Caro
Probably should be.
- [00:35]
Host
Probably should be. Mr. Caro, gonna be nine years in October since you first came on the show. It's crazy. Crazy to think almost a decade of recording with Matt Caro.
- [00:50]
Matt Caro
Yeah, that's crazy.
- [00:51]
Host
Lot things have changed.
- [00:54]
Matt Caro
Little bit. I mean, you know, a lot of changes and people always predict the future to be drastically different. And a lot of things change, but most things just end up staying the same. You don't really think about that.
- [01:07]
Host
So you're a big fan of nothing ever happens.
- [01:12]
Matt Caro
Some things happen, but it's a lot rarer than people think.
- [01:18]
Host
We were talking about how to set up this conversation because I think things are changing in the world of software engineering, programming. It's been a running theme over the last couple months. I've had Justin Moon on talking about Vibe coding what it means for freedom tech. Mark Suman from Maple AI talking about running these models in a freedom oriented, sovereign and private way. And then Calle talking about what he's been doing with Bitchat, Cashew and Clawey AI to really accelerate his programming efforts. And I think that's a good jumping off point because I think Kali, I forget it was you who sent the first tweet or Callie who responded to it or vice versa. But there was a little back and forth between the two of you, highlighting the fact that the progression of these AI tools has gotten to a point where there's no excuses for bitcoiners to go out there and win the digital currency game. It won't be a lack. It won't be because bitcoin lacks anything. If bitcoin doesn't succeed the way we believe it can, it will be because people don't have the willpower and the agency to make it so. And I thought that was a very interesting back and forth. Actually wrote about it, talked about it, and have been thinking about that for the last few weeks since you, you and Callie had that exchange.
- [02:44]
Matt Caro
Why do you think that? I think that's really true. I mean, I think there's two big changes that are coming with this technology or that are here and coming soon with this technology that I think make a big difference and give us a really unique opportunity that's unique in bitcoin's history. So, first of all, you mentioned just these tools are good now at development, at building software applications. That wasn't true six months ago, that was not really true three months ago. Literally, when the latest generation of models, Cloud 3.5, now Cloud 3.6, the latest codecs came out, did they go from, you know, you still kind of have to know how to code, or you can do a good demo with these things to you can build something really awesome with these things without ever looking at the code or really materially thinking about the code. You're not going to build a full lightning node, you're not going to build the next full node implementation. They're not at a point where they can do things that are particularly complicated in that way and very easy to subtly screw up, but building things that are kind of easier to build or at least harder to subtly screw up. You know, front ends, good web applications, you know, good apps on your phone, whatever, these kinds of things, they can just build it and you don't really have to think too much about it. So that's one thing. And I think that enables the entire bitcoin community. The bitcoin community has always been excited to try things. It's a lot of early adopters and excited to, you know, it's. It's kind of a. There are tons of bitcoiners building tons of different things, trying tons of different things and hoping that that one works. And I think that's a really great model to get the kind of adoption we want. Just having one company building the bitcoin payments platform is less likely to succeed than everyone going out and building. But bitcoiners have to step up and actually do it now. Like the tools are there. You don't have to know how to code, you just have to know how to type. Actually, you don't even have to know that. You need to know how to formulate a thought and have a concept of what you want built. But then from there it's just a matter of doing it and executing. So on a Saturday, some free time, bitcoiners have to step up and do it. And I think that's really huge. I think the other thing that gives us unique opportunity is that everyone is starting from zero on agentic payments. So I think going forward a number of months to multiple years, but a number of Months really people are going to start using these tools to buy things. And this isn't whether you think AI is ASI and super intelligence is coming soon or whether you think it's just a sycophant that repeats what you tell it and doesn't really add all that much. No matter what you think. The reality is that these tools are very capable of just saying, hey, I need to up my beef tallow, I'm running low on beef tallow, can you ship me some more? And it can go off and do it and you don't have to think about it. And so I think that's going to be a genuinely non trivial part of total consumer spend in the world. In not very long, not tomorrow, but in a few months people are going to start building out all these tools and start having all these tools and then in some number of years they're going to be very popular for buying things. But none of the existing payment flows work for this. So you can't. Visa is not really going to work here. So for multiple reasons. First of all, most websites that offer things for sale with credit cards are anti botted to fuck. Like they have captchas, they detect bots, they try to prevent bots because that's part of how they fight fraud. And they're responsible for fraud because of chargebacks and the way Visa and MasterCard are structured. And so that's, they're not. You can't use these existing websites to buy things if you're, if you're an agent, if you're, if you are a bot. And so they need to build something new, they need to restructure the way chargebacks work. So it's not just Visa, it's a whole new Visa, what do they call it? Intelligent commerce platform. And on the flip side, the stablecoin people are trying to push stable coins. But that also similarly, you know, there's no merchants who support stablecoins yet. You know, that's a whole new integration point for merchants. So everyone's starting at zero. You know, for all of Bitcoin's life, Bitcoin payments certainly weren't really 10x better than whatever people had access to. You know, there's things where bitcoin was 10x better, maybe it's 10x better at savings, maybe it's 10x better AT, at some cross border setups, maybe it's 10x better at settlement, whatever, but it certainly wasn't 10x better at just domestic payments. And so you struggle to get over the line. Right? The classic Adage in Silicon Valley is that users don't, people don't switch from one product to another unless the other product that they're switching to is 10x better. If it's a little better, some people might try it, but you won't get that kind of critical mass. You won't get the switch. Especially for things that are very network effect dominated payments. For agentic payments, everyone's starting from zero and so we have a shot to actually build something that people use. The race is starting now. There's three or four or five different competing standards now being pushed by various payment companies, AI labs, whatever, and we need to be a part of that fight. We may not win, but, but if we stay in that race, we will get from fairly low to really material merchant adoption and Bitcoin will be a actually usable option for payments.
- [09:11]
Host
Yeah. Before we get into the landscape of when everybody's building competing protocols, not only with traditional payment networks like Visa, MasterCard, stablecoins, but even within Bitcoin, that's something I've observed over the last month is all these development kits and different ways of equipping your agent with the ability to send and receive Bitcoin. Before that. What led you to, what was the tipping point for you to believe this? Was it observing what's happening or did you build something that you were like, oh wow, it's, it's here, it's ready.
- [09:46]
Matt Caro
I mean, I think it's, to a large extent, it's the jump in the quality of models in the last three months. You know, there's a lot of things for which there's still not, they haven't really materially improved on in three or four years. You know, writing from scratch. And they're great at critiquing, writing, writing new ideas from scratch, not so much. But then there's some things where they went from being a useful tool to being actually genuinely good at like writing many types of applications, like writing a lot of software. And so I think that plus, plus the, you know, one of the big step functions has been kind of how long they, how, how well they can work on a task that has multiple steps and they have to keep working at it to get to it. And it used to be that they would kind of collapse in on themselves fairly quickly. And this, this limited your ability to do things like build stuff like openclaw or these agents that might be able to then go buy something. Right. Because this is like this multiple step. You have to go merchants that offer these products. You have to find Compare the products. You have to decide which one might be good. And then you might have to come back to the human and say, hey, here's a product. I think it's good. Should I buy this? And they might have struggled with that and I think now they're very capable of that. And at the same time there's so many different companies that have gone from kind of in the early stages of building to okay, now it's serious. Now we're trying to really push our specific payment rails for these kinds of payments.
- [11:30]
Host
And was there something that you were working on or just simply observing it?
- [11:35]
Matt Caro
Mostly observing, yeah, yeah.
- [11:37]
Host
Okay, now let's get into the landscape of what's out there. Visa, I think it was Visa or MasterCard earlier this week or late last week said hey, a lot of people are thinking we're going to just bolt on a agentic payment protocol into what we're doing now. But we're starting this new thing. We're going to sort of equip them with agent specific digital cards or whatever. Obviously the stablecoins are going after I think base created x402, which is funny, it seems like people in bitcoin were ahead of this trend and seeing where this was going way before many others who are, who are hopping onto it now, which I think could play into our favor. But I mean L402 from roast beefs and the L and D team's been out for many years now at this point. I think three or four years basically. Seeing that this is going to be a thing. You have many people talking about the idea of agents spinning up their own real world asset tokens to conduct commerce with each other. And it to your point seems very chaotic right now. The landscape for agentic payments doesn't seem like there is a uniform protocol that everybody has settled on that makes sense considering how many.
- [13:00]
Matt Caro
Yeah, there's more than that. There's also, you know, Google's got one stripe is both pushing the crypto angle but then also has their own other protocol that they did with OpenAI. So there's. Everybody's got a protocol for this and I don't think, you know, I want to, I think in kind of a traditional software world we think about this like ah, there's so many protocols, like one has to win, people have to start adopting one. I don't think that's really true for AI. Like the things are good at writing code. If you give it a protocol spec, it can write code to interact with that protocol on the fly and use the protocol, it doesn't care what the specific protocol is. What is going to impact, you know, what, what does have to be standardized is the actual payment rail. Like are they using lightning? Do you have to have Bitcoin? Do you have to have stable coins? Do you have to have a Visa card linked? Do you have to have, you know, like what is, what is the process of getting funds into the system such that they can then flow within that system. And so I think that's the, the thing that is going to be necessarily winner take all, but certainly winner take most. And so that's where we really want, you know, we want open payment rails, right if, if there's a good shot right now I think that the payment rails that could used are either, you know, a stable coin, a single stablecoin, right? Where there's one company that operates the blockchain they run on, you know, a centralized blockchain they run on right? In like the case of Base or stripe is now building this tempo thing and also then gets all the interest from all the tokens that are being used for the commerce like you know, Coinbase for the case of USDC on base or Circle if it's USDC elsewhere. And then once they have a monopoly, presumably those prices will then continue to increase. If they have a monopoly on the payment rails and the payment token that's being used, they'll slowly increase their price over time because why wouldn't they? And so we want freedom tech there. Not just both philosophically but also for competitive reasons. We, we've suffered especially in the US outside the US a little less so. But we've suffered in the US from this Visa tax on all of our commerce where whatever, 2, 2.5% of every transaction, sometimes more, sometimes less gets taken out of the merchants hands. And it really wrecks small businesses. I mean it's a really material portion of their profit goes to the payment networks. And we have this opportunity where we need new payment networks for these new types of payments and these new types of buyers and just rebuilding the existing monopoly kind of setup. Whether it's using Visas protocols or whether it's using a stablecoin, a single stablecoin would just be such a loss for humanity and the country and we'd lose out on so much that we could have.
- [16:24]
Host
Yeah, and you're getting into a first principles argument here. So let's steel man it and get into basically the first principle argument for why Bitcoin should be the medium of exchange for the agentic economy that seems to be emerging. Obviously you mentioned the competitive landscape. And if a monopoly takes us over, they'll have pricing power, which will not be good for the end consumer or merchants that are leveraging these payment rails. But let's just strip it down to the base and build it up from there. Why is bitcoin suited for this use case particularly?
- [17:08]
Matt Caro
Yeah, I mean, I think the, the network that gets built needs to, you know, I, I guess I don't think bitcoin is like, uniquely suited in a way that like Visa could not build something that operates here. It can't be the existing Visa network. It has to have different rules around chargebacks. It has to have different, different setup. It has to have different type of private keys. So it can't just be the same kind of card numbers they use today. They'll be issuing temporary debit cards. These are things they can build. They're hard. There's some regulatory questions around having a different chargeback system, but in theory, this is buildable. Certainly bitcoin isn't kind of fundamentally fated to win this over. Stablecoins. For some reason, people hate stablecoins. Stablecoins on a centralized blockchain are efficient and cheap. Payments are fast, just like bitcoin. I don't think any of these are kind of better or worse in terms of the fundamental properties that might enable them. Bitcoin on Lightning, specifically, payments are cheap, payments are fast, currently cheaper, and often faster than stablecoins on most stablecoin platforms. But that's something they can fix. They can centralize their blockchains more and have payments be faster and cheaper. And they are. I think Coinbase is moving that direction with Base and Tempo. I think from Stripe will be even more centralized and even more of a central database. Just to make the payments cheap and fast is really just a question of who gets adoption first. Right? So who gets merchants to start using their new protocol before the others do and gets payers and agents to start using their new protocol before the others do. And I think this is where the bitcoin community has a real shot because all these other protocols are one company, maybe a partnership of two companies pushing their specific protocol because they want to be the winners and they want to be the ones who ultimately control the flow of how agent e commerce happens and make a ton of money on it by becoming the monopoly. Whereas bitcoiners are a ton of different companies and a ton of different people who all want to not become the monopoly and give everyone and give merchants and buyers back their economic freedom and give Them total control over the way they make and accept payments. And that kind of network I think gives us a real shot that we have so many different people pushing in complementary directions, not necessarily the same direction and trying from different angles and getting more merchants on board and all of that stuff in interesting ways. And I think that gives us a real competitive edge here. But for that to happen we need bitcoiners to really step up and participate. Not necessarily just build stuff, building stuff is important, but also get merchants on board, actually use these tools, install OpenClaw or Clawi or whatever the newest hottest agent software is and give it a bitcoin wallet and tell it to go buy your monthly beef tallow or whatever you need and see how far it gets and tell it to email merchants and tell it to say hey, I tried to use your site, I'm an AI agent, I tried to use your site to buy this thing because I was told to and I couldn't. Please consider updating your site so that it doesn't have captchas and so that it takes bitcoin and go, you know, I know the Nick Slaney's team at Money Dev Kit has been building some cool stuff here. They now have sites where your agent can buy coffee with bitcoin and can buy supplements with bitcoin and can buy various things. So they're trying to push into this world. They also offer merchant services, make it easy for merchants to integrate self custodial bitcoin payment acceptance. Obviously a lot of merchants don't necessarily want that. They might want other integration. There's a ton of bitcoin payment processors out there and crypto payment processors that they can integrate into their Shopify. So it's really about like we have to get moving and we have to have. Bitcoin is really pushing on this angle because if we don't then one of these monopolies can take over and we're going to be stuck with some new payment monopoly that's going to be equally shitty and take another puke chunk out of the economy. And if we do, then not only does bitcoin thrive and have a ton of transactions to pay to miners and get a more robust lightning network and fund more development. And price probably goes up because everyone's buying bitcoin to transact in it. But on top of that for humanity, the payment Rails people use is free and open and anyone can participate. And Visa is not going to censor porn or gun shops or whatever. And also on top of that, Visa is not going to take this huge percentage bite out of the economy and transactions are going to be cheaper and merchants are going to have more money in their pocket.
- [22:39]
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- [22:49]
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- [23:58]
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- [24:31]
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- [24:43]
Host
So you mentioned Money Dev Kit. I had Nick on a couple of months ago. I love what they're building. Let's dive into the landscape of the solutions that are being brought to market. You have money dev kit L402. It looks like they just revamped that Breeze has a software development kit. There's some NOSTR Wallet Connect dev kits that exist out there. Cashew, I think they have cash or not.
- [25:08]
Matt Caro
Albie has some agentic wallet stuff too. Yeah, there's a ton of bitcoiners who are exploring the space. You know, a lot of bitcoin groups or companies who had wallet software have been exploring. Okay, can we take our wallet software? Can we add it to our agents? I think there's also like a Phoenix D skill for agents. So a lot of wallet software that you could already run on a server. Now agents can easily manage and especially the ones that kind of make it easy. So probably you don't want your agent to be running like whole hog LND and like trying to manage liquidity and stuff. Waste a lot of tokens doing that. But stuff with an lsp. So that's like Money Dev Kit, that's Phoenix D, that's. Or stuff that doesn't use lightning directly but supports lightning. So like cashew wallets, picking a mint and stuff like that. So I think on the wallet, on the client side, on the agent side, there's a lot there, there's a lot of options. And I would strongly encourage bitcoiners to go play with. I think Money Dev Kit's probably the easiest. But the cashew stuff is also awesome and same with Albi. So I would strongly encourage bitcoin is to go play with that, like get an agent, install it, give it a wallet. MoneyDevKit also has a cool chatbot version now that you don't have to do anything. You just add the chatbot to your WhatsApp group chat or your Telegram group chat and then you can, you can give it a bitcoin wallet. You can send money, you can do all kinds of fun stuff with it. I know a lot of people have been playing with, like making bets with each other by. By having it hold the money and then it resolves the bet. So, so there's a Lot of cool stuff people have been doing with that. So you don't have to like deal with the whole agent thing. You can just add that chatbot to your chat and that's, that's also cool. And then on top of that. Yeah, then we need the merchant side. Right. So we need merchants to actually want to accept agentic payments, payments from these agents, automated payments, and then support that on their websites on their software stack. And that's a little more complicated. Right. Because that often requires retooling the merchant's website. The merchant's website is probably built around Captchas and Visa and preventing fraud that they would then have to pay for. And suddenly you're asking them like, no, no, no, remove all of the CR built up over all these years for fraud prevention, because you don't need that anymore. We're not. We're going to give you a payment scheme that doesn't have chargebacks. And there's a lot of consumer protection reasons for chargebacks. But if you're buying $10 coffee, your agent's probably going to do fine. It's probably going to get you actual coffee. And then you don't need a chargeback. It's 10 bucks. If it screws up, you're not that worried about it. You know, okay, if you're buying a car or a house or something, then we're. You might want some other avenue through which to get your money back if something goes wrong. But for the vast majority of purchases people make on a daily basis, you don't really need chargebacks. And they just are this massive drag on the economy in terms of the cost imposed by Visa and others to get it there. So, yeah, it's about people reaching out to merchants. It's about bitcoiners saying, hey, merchant, I know you haven't cared about Bitcoin in the past, maybe you still don't care about Bitcoin, but there's this agentic payments thing. It's going to be big. It's going to be a big part of your customer base. And you need to start thinking about how you're going to support agentic payments. You need to start supporting Agentic payments. And specifically, the thing that exists for agentic payments that actually is usable today is Bitcoin. So you should add bitcoin to your. If you're on Shopify, go find Shopify plugins and share those with merchants. Whatever.
- [29:04]
Host
Yeah, well, this, you're right about the client side and I'm just going to go down a rabbit hole here. Explain My user experience with my agent and it's Bitcoin Bitcoin wallet, which is a Phoenix D server. So I had my agent Martin, who's sophisticated Marty, do some research on what he thinks, what he thought would be the best Bitcoin wallet or lightning setup specifically. We tried LDK first, ran into some problems with channel management and banged our head for a couple of hours. And I was like, you know what, this is too, too complicated. Go find some out of the box simpler solution to this. And I found Phoenix D and was like, okay, this Phoenix D thing looks pretty cool. I can download it on my server and we can use this. And so it downloaded it and it was like, okay, we need to, we need to fund, fund a channel. And so I found this bolts, this bolts thing and it'll allow you to like send on chain bitcoin to that and it'll basically open up a channel immediately with Phoenix. So just here's the bolts on chain channel, send it here and then I'll open a channel. So I did that and it's been working flawlessly since then. But the other thing, and this is the client side, but talking about demand side from the merchants, the other sort of lightning primitive that exists that has really allowed my agent to do things rather flawlessly is ln URL Auth. And so since it's running Phoenix D, I was like, okay, I want you to go test out some spends on some websites, like find some websites that allow you to sign in with the private key on your Phoenix D server using ln URL Auth. And it found Ellen Markets. And I was like, okay, it has an API, like download the API, figure out how to sign in, all that and let's deposit some sats and make a trade. And it did it within five minutes. And so that's actually just injecting my own bias, my own experience. Like, I think one thing that could be beneficial and we should focus on making it as easy as possible for these websites to integrate is ln URL auth is the ability for these agents to sign in with their private key. And I don't know, you, you would know better than I. But is there a way to have like an if and function if they sign in via ln URL auth and have made a purchase before, just don't feed them captchas or something like that. And could you easily, Yeah, I mean,
- [31:37]
Matt Caro
I think this gets back to to some extent my point that agents don't care too much about specific APIs. So whether a website uses LN URL auth or whether they require the agent to sign in with some bespoke sign in API and use a unique private key for it. Whether it's a totally different protocol kind of doesn't matter. Like the agent, like your agent didn't have some predefined code for ln URL auth. It didn't have already built in logic for that. Specifically it said, oh, okay, here's a website I want to use. It supports lnurloth. Let me go find the spec for lnurloth and then let me implement against that really quick and just do that on the fly. So it did that on the fly. It doesn't care what the specific protocol is. And I think that's really the cool thing about these agents that because they're fairly competent at writing small scale software, as long as something's straightforward and can be specified in a reasonably compact way, they can just use it. They don't care. And so I think that's what. Yeah, so I think that's really powerful. On your point about merchants and using this for turning off captures, I think to a large extent they don't need to. The reason for all of the captchas and anti fraud and whatever is because of chargebacks. Small merchants regularly get people who come to their websites and buy stuff with stolen credit cards and then the merchant ends up getting screwed. So someone will come to, I think one popular scam at least a while back was that people would go sell, sell a merchant's products to legitimate buyers on ebay or Amazon or whatever. And then they would, when someone bought it from them, they would take a stolen credit card, go to the merchant, have it shipped directly to the legitimate buyer who wanted this thing and was buying it from this scammer on Amazon. And then the merchant would ship the good, the legitimate buyer would be happy, they would pay the scammer via Amazon or ebay or whatever. And then ultimately the person whose stolen credit card was used would declare their card stolen and the company, this merchant, would get screwed and they would lose, lose the money. And so that has. So merchants have to do all kinds of stupid anti fraud to try to prevent these kinds of scams from ruining their bottom line. And again, for the 90 whatever percent of purchases where people don't really need that kind of purchase protection that you have with chargebacks, there's no need for these chargebacks to be there and for merchants to be putting in, pouring capital, pouring time, pouring effort into anti fraud and chargeback protection. To retain their earnings. This is, I mean ignore the two two and a half percent fee that Visa takes for that, you know, the Visa network takes from every transaction. And also the amount of human effort tied to this anti fraud stuff that all these merchants have to build. And not just human effort, but like they have to hire support staff. It's not just software engineers, not just like they have to hire. They have to integrate all this capture crap and anti fraud technology and ML models to do anti fraud and whatever. They also have to hire humans and support to talk to people and try to fish out whether they're a scammer or not. It's a huge drag on all these small businesses and on the economy generally. Right. And so if we offer options where there isn't chargebacks, they can just remove all this crap and all of a sudden all those costs go away. And sure, some, some customers might want to buy with purchase protection and might want to use chargeback supporting payment rails. Those can be built on Bitcoin too, right? You can have some arbiter who sits in the middle of the payment and doesn't clear the funds until the payment is not is approved by the buyer. And they do dispute resolution. Whatever. You can build on, on Bitcoin too. It's been built before. There hasn't been a lot of demand for it in part because there just hasn't been a lot of demand for bitcoin payments. So hopefully, you know, hopefully we can shift that now, build more demand for bitcoin payments and then those kind of tools might come back. People might be more interested in using them and building them. But yeah, I mean merchants can just remove all of this crap that they've built up over the years and just offer payments in bitcoin.
- [36:32]
Host
Well, you mentioned Bitcoin payments have not, not won in their first 17 years. And I think many people would point to price volatility and say using Bitcoin as your unit of account is, is risky as a business owner. So on this point, how imperative do you think it is for people providing these agentic receive tools, Bitcoin receive tools for merchants to include dollar off ramps like auto conversions to dollars or the ability to receive stable coins side by side with Bitcoin.
- [37:09]
Matt Caro
Yeah, I mean certainly it's important for many merchants and there are a ton of payment processors that will happily take Bitcoin and deposit money into your traditional bank account via wire once a day or once a week or whatever. This is not like particularly novel technology for some merchants that's going to Be really important for some merchants. They might be happy to take some bitcoin and actually hold something other than just dollars like we've seen. But you could uptake with a lot of merchants just in their desire for bitcoin. So yeah, I mean that certainly needs to be an option. It needs to be an option for many merchants. Doesn't need to be an option for all merchants. Not everyone's going to want that. But I think that's pretty straightforward. There's a lot of companies that offer that, so that shouldn't be an issue for merchants these days. It does have some more onboarding friction. Right. They have to do KYC or KYB to onboard for a lot of those platforms because they're regulated. Whereas for something like Money Dev Kit or something that's more native Bitcoin or native stablecoins they can just install some software package and they're done. There's no real onboarding. So yeah, I mean I think stablecoins are useful there. I think we just want to make sure that they're used as the, the savings part. So once a merchant receives money via a more open payment royal, they can then swap it into some stablecoin and there's competition for stablecoins because then each merchant could have their own stablecoin they prefer based on the interest rate they receive for holding that stablecoin or whatever. And that wouldn't impact the payment Rails. It's really when all of the payments flow over the same rails, the same stablecoin on the same blockchain that we get this like monopolistic effect where switching costs become, you know, infinitely high for people to switch to some new stablecoin because the entire economy has to rotate to using that new one when it was using some old one. And that's where you get this monopolistic effect where you know, eventually those fees will go up and we'll have another visa sup freaks.
- [39:32]
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Host
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Host
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Host
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- [41:01]
Host
So go check it out. What's the lowest hanging fruit that you want to see built that doesn't exist right now at this intersection?
- [41:13]
Matt Caro
I think it's really about merchant outreach. So it's, it's. I'm not aware of a good tool of a good site that kind of covers all of the options for merchants. Like, you know, I'm a merchant, I want to take bitcoin. Okay, you know, what store are you using, right? If you're using Shopify, click here and here's all your options for Shopify. If you're using your own self hosted, what's the self hosted WC something commerce, whatever, then click here and here's all the plugins. And like I care about receiving money via local currency or I care about stable coins. And like here's, here's the options. And I think it would be great if someone built that out so that there's a more easy place to point merchants to, to say here's where you need to go. And then on top of that, once that exists, I think it'll be really clear what, what holds remain. So like, you know, there will be, there'll be categories where there's no option. Right. It'll be, you know, I'm using this particular commerce platform and I want payments via, you know, I want my payments to come in, in Bitcoin and then I want to swap to, you know, usdt and it'll be, well, there's no option for you, there's no pre built option for you. And there again like all of the pieces probably exist and there's probably some plugin for that where they can take Bitcoin and then there's certainly USDT and like Bitcoin USDT swap services, but there's not a cohesive plugin and then I think that is where an agent can totally build that. Right. Where there's already the, the big building blocks already exist but they need to be put together into some coh. Cohesive platform and plugin for this particular commerce solution. An agent can absolutely build that and someone can just sit down on a Saturday and say this is missing. I was talking to some merchant who wanted it and this tool doesn't exist. Let me just spend three or four hours with Claude or ChatGPT or whatever and have it go build this. And I think that's where we as a bitcoin community need to get to if we want to grow and really become the kind of currency that I think we want to be.
- [43:23]
Host
Yeah, yeah. We got to make sure that educational website is aeo optimized so that the agents, if they're doing research, they can find it quickly and understand what's going on. Yeah, it's so fascinating how fast it's happened. That's like the one question I have. When you consider all the capital behind Visa, Stripe, Coinbase, all these competing agentic payments companies with their own vested interest and perspectives and subjective views on how this should play out. It does seem a bit daunting. But I think your point, and my point would be is the tools basically collapse the cost to do this to near zero so you can't compete.
- [44:11]
Matt Caro
That's totally true. And also all of them are busy competing because they all want to take the crown. They all want to win. It's not like Google and OpenAI and Stripe and Coinbase and everyone are pulling in the same direction. No, they're all trying to compete. They're all trying to have their own solution win. And I think that really gives us an opportunity. And I mean, I think it is moving fast and so there's a good chance that we start to see some kind of, not necessarily winner, but a lot of merchant adoption in one or two of these solutions over the next year. And so I think bitcoiners need to also move fast. We need to as a community be using these tools and building these tools and talking to merchants and getting them onboarded before anyone else does. Because it's only that, it's only by doing it quickly and moving fast that we can beat these companies that are trying to move as fast as they can.
- [45:10]
Host
All right, let's call some people out. Who in your mind is moving too slow is not doing enough right now? Who can be doing more to purchase?
- [45:19]
Matt Caro
I think it's, we have an army of people who are interested in Bitcoin and have a few hours to spare to learn about Bitcoin on a Saturday that they could also be using to play with bitcoin and play with these tools. Right. I think just saying, like, oh, all the developers or all the people who work full time on bitcoin need to do this. Yeah, they should. True. And I think we'll continue to see developers build out these tools and hopefully, you know, I hope also on the, on the merchant side and focus on that side. But also, you know, we're not going to be able to do this alone. Like all the full set of people who work full time, have a full time job working on bitcoin is not going to do the level of merchant outreach we need. Right? So there's like, we need, we, we need the average bitcoiner to be, you know, saying this week I'm going to talk to, to one or two merchants and I'm, I've got my agent set up. I use, you know, Kali's Clawi service or, or I, I got an old Linux laptop and I put a, an agent on there or whatever, openclaw and I gave it a wallet and now I want it to just go buy my monthly creatine subscription. And so just make that happen. Like go reach out to the different merchants that you have or have your agent. The great thing is you don't have to do a lot of this stuff anymore. You just ask your agent to do it, give it access to an email account and have it send a bunch of emails to 10 different merchants and say like, hey, I want to, I want to do this and I don't want to have to think about buying this anymore. I don't want to have to manage an auto subscription that may get too fast or too slow. I just want to be able to text my agent and say, hey, hey, go buy me this creatine or whatever. And I think just everybody Does a little bit and we win.
- [47:28]
Host
Well, to that point about the agents just doing things. We've touched on it a bit here, but I think it's important to really nail it down. Like, how important do you think robust documentation and an open API is for wallet builders in the space to make it easily discoverable for these agents who are looking to spend on the web?
- [47:51]
Matt Caro
Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean the big thing like agents are these LLMs are necessarily great with tons of subtle documentation. Like you mentioned, like trying to use LDK directly. Like, yeah, I mean an agent's not going to do great with directly using LDK and building its own lightning node using that software in kind of an easy environment. Right. They want to use PhoenixD or, you know, a cashew wallet or moneydev kit or Albi or whatever, where it's just, you know, here's one page document that explains like, install the wallet by this command. This command gives you an invoice, this command checks your balance, and this command lists your previous transactions. Right? They want something that's simple and straightforward and well documented and clear. And the good thing is, I mean like you're writing that in English, right? It's not like developers also want that. Right. It's not like this isn't really that novel like writing things for agents. And it's just, it's really all the same things you were going to write to begin with. And so. But yeah, having these simple and straightforward and understandable APIs really just lets them run.
- [49:07]
Host
Yeah, I'm bullish. I think the merchant outreach is going to be imperative. And I tweeted this out last night, but we're getting some electrical work done in our house and was talking to the electrician who's doing the work and we got to pay the deposit today. And I just threw it out there like, hey, if you want to take the deposit in Bitcoin, we can make that happen. He texted us last night, he was like, you know what, I am going to take it in Bitcoin. Obviously this was meat space. That's like a very manual business. And I think where I'm going with this is I think one of the larger opportunities that people are recognizing with the emergence of these agents that are, that are competent enough to get a lot of work done, particularly in the realm of software engineering, is that you can go and basically help these small to medium sized businesses that are typically family owned and very manual at this point, and help them build a website and a social presence rather trivially with these tools. And I Think if you're a bitcoiner, basically caught the AI bug and recognizes the profound nature of what's happening right now. And this is one of your ideas is just give them out of the box bitcoin payments as well if you're going to go help all these small businesses build a presence on the Internet.
- [50:26]
Matt Caro
Yeah, totally. And I mean look, mean space also matters, right? The square integrating bitcoin payments means for some million or so merchants in the United States, except New York. Thanks New York, thanks. Bit license. All they have to do is go in settings and change one settings setting and then all of a sudden they, for some subset of their payments. And sure, bitcoin payments aren't huge but, but they're, they're not zero anymore. Then suddenly they get no fees, right? So instead of fees is two and a half or whatever percent fee, you get nothing. Right. And so they, they, that's a really huge portion of their revenue. And I think just even doing in person merchant outreach for in person payments and coffee shops and whatever can make a huge difference for some of these companies. And to get bitcoin payments in meatspace off zero as well. And I think that's also really important. And the bitcoin community should be working hard on that. And there's like the bitcoin merchant community, if you Google bitcoin merchant community, they have a good website that kind of targets more meatspace and square merchants and explains why they should turn the feature on and why they should offer it to their customers. And bitcoiners obviously also need to be using it. The great cash app. Now you can pay with bitcoin without having any bitcoin. So you just have to have dollars in your cash app balance and it'll automatically buy bitcoin and then send it all in the same transaction. You don't have to tell the ira, you're not supposed to tell the IRS about it. There's no, there's no tax implications, there's no, nothing. So even if you have a stack of bitcoin in another wallet, you know, install cash app, put some dollars in there and then go use it to spend bitcoin and make the bitcoin economy happen more. And then you're automatically replenishing, you know, you're not, you're not selling your stack, right. So you don't have to sell your stack anymore to encourage the bitcoin economy to grow. Yeah, so all of the above. You know, I think this is the great thing about the bitcoin community is that there's so many different people pushing in complementary directions. And I've said this a few times, but, but I think that's really great. And part of that will be in person payments. But I think we have this opportunity, this genuinely unique opportunity in Bitcoin's history with Agentic payments as well.
- [52:44]
Host
Yeah. And something we didn't touch on that I think we should highlight as a comparative advantage. I think again we've alluded to it quite a bit, but I think the interoperable nature of all these different payment mechanisms that exist, whether it's ecash, Bitcoin, stablecoins on liquid lightning, obviously on chain you have spark out there. Ark. I mean we forgot to mention Arcade. They launched some Stablecoin to Bitcoin agentic payment rail as well. And I think comparing it to the competition that you described between Google Stripe, Visa, Coinbase, Circle, whoever it may be, the interoperability does not exist. Or if it does exist, it's a bit janky. But within Bitcoin and the disparate sub protocols that people are building on, it's rather seamless. Because of the lightning network.
- [53:41]
Matt Caro
Yeah. And this is, I mean the wild thing is that this is actually unique even in crypto. I mean you look at like even the Ethereum ecosystem with all their L2s, the things aren't compatible. There are bridges you can send between them but you have to know to. You just scan a QR code and then you send money and all of a sudden it went into a black hole because they were expecting it on one chain and you're actually on some other chain, it's awful, it's actually really painful. And that's what the Stablecoin ecosystem is built on. In many cases. USDC on base is a different token from USDC on Ethereum and if you accidentally send the base one to someone and they're expecting it, on Ethere of a sudden the money went into a black hole and like now you have to figure out what happened. There's actually some really substantial user experience challenges as a result of that architecture. And so yeah, I mean the, I think there's always more work to be done on making sure everyone in Bitcoin, all the wallets and everybody speaks the same language and can fall back to lightning, even if they might have an option to use something more native within their ecosystem. But yeah, it's huge because it really enables this seamless user experience. And we've seen people show up and for some reason there's this trend of everyone builds their own little ecosystem and then they get stablecoins in it and then they go buy with their stablecoin at Stake n shake and then they post on Twitter about how Run X about how great it is that they can buy with their stablecoin at stake n Shake. And all it's doing is buying with lightning and it's doing a swap to buy with Lightning. And so, yeah, that is a huge part of enabling this future of bitcoin payments is lightning. And the fact that all of these different ecosystems can just plug into lightning and get seamless payments.
- [55:38]
Host
Yeah, I think it's very underappreciated in terms of the narrative battle that we're currently in and will only increase from here. I think highlighting that as a value prop for integrating sort of bitcoin rails for your gentic payments is not giving enough, enough credence in this discussion right now is something.
- [56:01]
Matt Caro
Yeah, absolutely. Especially the stablecoin people, like ignore the Blockchain and Ethereum L2 mess that you have. But also on top of that you have which stablecoin, like not only, okay, there's USDC, but there's also USDT. There's now GUSD, which is some new one. There's PayPal USD. There was some rumor that Stripe or no, Facebook's now going to create a new one. So there's going to be Facebook USD. So all of a sudden you don't have compatibility there either, like stablecoins. Oh, stablecoin payments are going to win. Well, which stablecoin? That's not a single system. You can't point and say that's, you know, merchants are just going to accept stable coins. No, they're going to accept a stablecoin or two. And payers are only going to have a stablecoin. They're not going to have all of the stable coins as an option. So that's not really an answer either. And sure there's bridges and whatever, but when you have 40 or 50 different stablecoins and they're on 10 or 20 different blockchains, there's a lot of complexity there. And that doesn't actually build a cohesive system either. And I think that is what's so powerful about Bitcoin. And you're right. I think we need to highlight that when we talk to people about, well, where agentic payments going to go, it's like, well, there's this bitcoin thing that has all of these different platforms around it and you just settle in bitcoin and then whatever platform you wanted to use, you can use with a Stablecoin, even if you want USDC on base, you can get that and you can swap that to Bitcoin and make that payment. And so that really simplifies it and makes it this open payment network, unlike some of the closed payment networks from Stablecoins.
- [57:48]
Host
Yeah, I'm bullish. I think we can win this.
- [57:51]
Sponsor Announcer
It's just going to take some effort.
- [57:53]
Matt Caro
Yeah, it's going to take a lot of effort, but we can totally win this.
- [57:57]
Host
Last on this particular agenda payments topic, before we get to the last topic I want to talk about, which is an update on Clarity, ACT and brca. People listening to this like Matt, picking up what you're putting down. But I've never done this before. What can I do? This has been a common question I've asked over the last month, but just to really drill it home for people, how good is this AI tech? Anybody sitting there at home listening to this who has never programmed a line of code in their life, never even hopped into a development environment or a text editor, how can they develop the confidence then? Or what would you say to them to give them the confidence to go try the stuff out?
- [58:43]
Matt Caro
Yeah. Or even if you tried AI stuff three months ago, it really is a totally different ball game from just three months ago. And I know a lot of people are used to often the free models from OpenAI or from Google, they're used to those hallucinating all over the place. Even the most expensive paid models still hallucinate all over the place. And there are lots of problems for using them in a lot of the ways that people use them all the time. And they're like, yeah, these kind of suck. They're. They're sycophants, they hallucinate. And now you're telling me they're great at coding. I don't really believe you. Like everyone's been telling me they're great at giving all this information, but when I try them for some cases, they really suck and they give me garbage. And now you're telling me that everyone's telling me they're great at software engineering. I don't really believe you because I don't see it on the cases that I've tried. And the reality is they're much better at software engineering than most other tasks. Large complicated software projects. Okay, maybe not totally doing it on their own, but for stuff like websites, apps, taking larger building blocks and building a cohesive product, they are really good at and they really can do it just from talking to them. And so yeah, I mean, try it. You do have to fork over some cash. You want the latest models, you don't want to be using some of the free options. They're good, but they're a year behind the latest models. And again, the latest models only really got good in the last few months. So fork over some cache, get the latest models, use the latest Claude, the latest OpenAI, whatever and then yeah, use it with your clawy subscription, which is Kali's self hosted agent service. Um, or try money dev kits, Ori bot is what they call it, which you can just add to your group chat. It's not hard. I think that one is free and might not always use the latest models. You have to look into how to switch it over. But, but you know, just try it like start with something simple. Start with something that's applicable to you. You know, I, you know, if you have your, your at home candle business or jewelry business or whatever, you know, just hook up oribot and say, hey, I've got this business, I've got these items. Put it up on a website, integrate, you know, moneydev gets the easiest if you just want to, if you want to accept bitcoin, you don't need dollars necessarily. So if you're listening to this, listening to this, you're probably a bitcoiner. Maybe you just want on bitcoin, you don't necessarily need to swap it to dollars right away. Just ask it to integrate moneydev kit. Build a store around moneydevkit and I can almost guarantee you it will work. Okay, maybe not exactly the first shot but you know, just tell it to fix stuff like notice that it's broken, tell it what's wrong and in three or four hours you will have a fully functioning website that can take bitcoin payments. It really is that good now. So just do it, just do it.
- [61:47]
Host
Just do it. We're sponsored by Nike, so thank you for getting that catchphrase in.
- [61:53]
Matt Caro
I thought they stopped using that.
- [61:55]
Host
Did they Shocked if they did, just do it. All right, wrapping up here though. Clarity act. I'm confused. I've been talking with Kyle only behind the scenes it seems like the saber rattling between the banks and coinbase and the banking lobby and crypto lobby is hitting ahead. And we see within the Trump administration, Scott Bessant, Trump himself, really saying, hey guys, let's get this done, we need to get this done. Let's get it across the line. I think everybody, not everybody, but a lot of people are looking at the posturing from Besant and Trump specifically and saying Yay, we're going to get the Clarity Act. This will be good. It's unclear to me whether or not the language about self custodial Bitcoin and the ability for free and open source software developers to write code without fearing getting thrown in a cage is still in the current act. I know you've been on the tip of the spear of advocating for BRCA and including it in the Clarity act, but it's not clear to me if the language is still in there or if it will make it into the final draft. What are you seeing?
- [63:04]
Matt Caro
Yeah, I mean we don't know obviously there's lots of debate on the Hill. It's great that Trump, Trump said like, no, we still need to do this. We need to make this happen. We're running out of time. In not very long, basically all of Congress is just going to be focused on the midterms and winning their upcoming elections and not focused on writing new bills, let alone passing them. So yeah, there's pressure to be had for making sure that the BRCA and protection for LSPs and software developers stays in there. There's also pressure to be had to get it over the line. And obviously the big banks are worried that this great business they have where they pay everyone zero interest and then loan out their money and make interest on it is going to go away. It's the dumbest thing because I was reading an article in the Wall Street Journal the other week. I was talking about how actually everyone's already moving their money out of banks and just holding them in brokerage accounts now because brokerage accounts will give you a debit card, they'll let you write checks, they'll do bill pay you send wires, they let you ach. And also they hold your money in a, a, an account that gives you interest because they hold Treasuries for you. And now the banks are saying like, no, no, no, no, no. Crypto can't stable coins can't pay interest because people might move their money out of banks into, into Coinbase when like, I mean I, I stopped using a bank, I use a brokerage account for a lot of my dollars now because yeah, I want some interest. It would be nice to get some interest. More than zero. So it's the dumbest argument. And, but the banks are standing on it and some of the Senate is buying it because they're worried that, you know, if banks don't have any money, they'll stop giving loans and that'll crater the economy. It's anyway. And yeah, The Trump administration coming out and saying like, no, no, no, we have to get this done is good. Obviously, you know, one or two posts on Truth Social is not going to like force all the senators to, to really say, okay, actually no, I need to, I need to let up on this and go forward with it. We'll see how, how involved he gets. You know, does he pick up the phone and call some senators and say like, come on, just get this over the line, this is, this is dumb, we'll see. But yeah, I think it's all, it's all still fairly unclear. I'm not in D.C. i'm sure coin centers or the BPI or those folks could give you a more up to date sense of where the wind is blowing. But at least what is public right now, it's still just kind of up in the air. They're still doing work on it. Hopefully we get it done soon. Because if it's not done, I mean, what I've been told is basically end of March, it just starts to become primaries. Primaries have already started, so in many cases a lot of people are already fighting the for reelection, but it just becomes re election season and then you don't get anything passed. And if we wait till, if we wait till next Congress, you know, there's a decent chance that Warren runs the banking subcommittee because if the Democrats retake it, she would be the, the senior member on, I think it's the Finance Committee. I believe she would be a senior on finance and then she would get to, to steer what happens and what doesn't. Then there's no way in hell she's gonna care about any of this stuff. You know, there's some Democrats who care about this stuff, but specifically she certainly wouldn't. And, and she would get to steer what happens in that committee and that's, that's very bad for us.
- [66:48]
Host
Yeah, not ideal. People in Massachusetts, I think it's time to stand up and.
- [66:52]
Matt Caro
Yeah, I don't know what they're, they're thinking with Warren. You know, there's a lot of Democrats I think do get it and boy, Warren is not one of them.
- [67:03]
Host
No, no, that's abundantly clear. She had Brian Armstrong calling her a communist yesterday on cable television, which was basically true. It's funny, it's forced Brian Armstrong into position to defend Bitcoin harder than he has in the last decade, which has been pleasant surprise.
- [67:21]
Matt Caro
Yeah, I mean, look, obviously clarity is a bunch of stuff for the crypto industry that bitcoin doesn't care about. I mean, it's mostly focused around token regulation that doesn't affect us at all. But you know, hey, if, if we can get the BRCA and protection for, for software developers and LSP operators and ARC service provider operators and, and, and, and, and, and in there, then we got to support that whole hog.
- [67:46]
Host
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned bpi. I know I said that was the last thing, but refresh my memory of that research paper they released on agentic money earlier this week. What are your thoughts on that?
- [67:58]
Matt Caro
Yeah, I mean, you know, you have to be careful reading too much into like, you know, LLMs predict the next token. Right. And so if there's, there's a ton of articles out there about how bitcoin is the best money for LLMs, there's not very many articles out there about how dollars are the best money for LLMs. And so if you start typing into an LLM, what is the best money for LLMs or an AI agent, the response is going to be, well, look, there's all these articles in my training set about how bitcoin is great for this. So the answer is Bitcoin coin. That doesn't necessarily mean that that's the correct answer. I think it is to some extent the correct answer in many contexts, but it also doesn't mean that that's what's going to win. Even if that is the correct answer, even if AI agents prefer bitcoin, ultimately the human is going to prompt it and say like, hey, can you just buy this? And if OpenAI ChatGPT hosted agents product, which doesn't exist really yet, but I imagine will at some point has direct integration for USDC or their own proprietary payment protocol so that they get the money, the OpenAI and Stripe payment protocol, where presumably they would get the revenue from all of these things, then the agent is going to be told to use that and it's just going to use that. So I don't think we can rely on agents preferring bitcoin. It's good to see that there is a lot of that data out there in their training set. It's good to see that a lot of people write about how bitcoin is great for agents and that that shows up in the training set of these models. But we certainly can't rely on that as going to lead us to victory here. We got to do the work, you
- [69:54]
Host
got to do the work. Freaks. Just do it, okay? It's the phrase of the day. Just do it. Matt, always been a pleasure. Over the last eight and a half, almost nine years, I'm sure this won't be the last. Keep crushing it and it'll be fun to watch this play out. If you're out there listening, you do your small part. Make a website, talk to a merchant. Build a tool at the intersection of Bitcoin and AI payments that doesn't exist yet. Where there is a hole, go do it. Just go play around with it. It's fun. You can ask the LLM to teach you how to use it. If you're looking for a step one.
- [70:34]
Matt Caro
Yeah, all right. All right.
- [70:37]
Host
We'll do this again at some point. I'm sure we always do.
- [70:40]
Matt Caro
Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for having me.
- [70:42]
Host
Peace and love, freaks.
- [70:45]
Sponsor Announcer
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