BUILD OPENSOURCE

“last week, Cohen actually shut down the AI marketing startup that he launched with his brother Lazar. And he is focusing exclusively on NanoClaw. So he had something else going, realized this thing had so much momentum, he shut that down. Right now, both of them are building a company around the project called NanoCo.”

“But the biggest blocking factor for Bitcoin today, I think, is not kind of the existence of the tech. It's more the UX side and kind of convincing people to stay on board. And I've noticed or experienced this multiple times myself, that I go into a store, as you said, there's like, there's the Bitcoin enthusiast's owner of the store, who set up a POS device like months ago. And then as other workers join or, you know, another cashier works at the counter today, and they might not know how to use Bitcoin. And so on that day, you cannot pay with Bitcoin, but you have to come back when the owner is back in the store.”

“A few weeks later, after he made, you know, a post, Andrew Carpathy, of course, the famous AI researcher, was saying, you know, like, hey, this thing's pretty cool. It went super viral when he did that. He posted on X. And this basically put it in front of thousands of developers. And from all the attention that that got, it got more than 22,000 GitHub stars. It had 4,600 forks and dozens and dungeons of contributions and collaborations on like new features that people wanted to add to it.”

“Another project that I'm thinking of is Portal, for example. Portal is a new Bitcoin inspired kind of a wallet and identity management app. And they're partnering also with a Bitcoin conference in this year where they are selling the tickets as Cashu tokens. So you will have kind of privacy preserving tickets for a conference, for a Bitcoin conference that cannot be double spent. So you can also sell them or give them to someone else. It's a big problem in the ticketing world is double spending, because when you go online and you buy a ticket, which is just a PDF file, for example, how do you know that the same ticket hasn't been sold to three other people?”

“this is usually how these open-source projects go, right? Because technically open-source means they're giving the code away. Anyone can use it for free or kind of with a license. I mean, there's different ways you can do open-source. But you really are trying to give this away for other people to use. But you typically will create a company around it where you host it on your own server and usually have an API. And if people don't want to kind of run it on their own hardware, they can still get access to it through you.”

“while he was kind of looking at some of the performance issues, he realized that OpenClaw's agents had downloaded all of his WhatsApp messages and then stored them locally as plain unencrypted text, which right? I mean, these are WhatsApp is famous for being encrypted and now you got them all as unencrypted texts, you know, just stored on your device. And so I think not just, you know, his work messages, it had authorized that he like told it, you know, it had authorization to access. Apparently, it had actually went and downloaded his entire messaging history.”

“So for this, we have built in the auto withdrawal with lightning address. And what this looks like is very simple. When you set up the wallet, you can go into the settings and you say, enable auto withdrawal, and then you can set a threshold, an amount threshold. For example, it could be 50,000 satoshis and enter a lightning address from your non-custodial lightning node or any other wallet that provides your lightning address.”

“So that is a purely offline payment. Your customer's phone doesn't really, doesn't even need to be online for it. As long as there is some eCash in the phone, the eCash will travel directly from one phone to the other without even touching the internet. And that has a couple of very cool features or, you know, gives, first of all, it is instant.”

“And if you're a developer out there who is kind of looking for a purpose and figuring out what to do in the next couple of months, I urge you to consider joining the Bitcoin open-source development space. We are working as a very large group of people all around the world with strong purpose into a singular direction, which is pushing Bitcoin as a global monetary system on the Internet. Reconsider if your job is boring and you work in a stupid tech startup that you never supported, then just quit, start contributing to Bitcoin, look for grants, look for companies that can help you support that, and join us.”

“So I believe that privacy needs to be a default, and you should not have to decide or research or figure out how to improve your privacy if you want everyone to use it. So we should be working on solutions where the user even doesn't need to care whether it's a private method or not. They should be just basically thrown into a privacy preserving system by default. And that's why also using privacy preserving systems must be as smooth as using any other system out there, because it just requires too much effort for most users to even climb over that hill.”

“And the differentiating factor and the reason why we've been working on Numopay was because we wanted to see tap to pay in Bitcoin. We're all kind of jealous about the fiat payment experience with you tap your phone and the payment goes through instantly and takes maybe a second or two. And with Bitcoin, we kind of achieved good UX over the last couple of years, but we stagnated a little bit in terms of we all converge to QR codes and scanning, showing QR codes.”

“But for most developers, and it's probably like above 95% of developers, AI agents today produce already better code than them. And they're not only producing better code, but they're also producing it 100 times faster than any developer can do. So if you're a developer, then you're already too late if you haven't adopted this, but you still have a chance. You still have a chance to save yourself, because the output efficiency that you gain from using these tools correctly is just mind-blowing.”

“It has been an absolutely crazy six weeks for the creator of NanoClaw by Gavriel Cohen. He created this tool basically in 48 hours on his couch, and it has now led six weeks later to going completely viral and creating and having a deal with Docker. So today on the podcast, I want to break down his story, how he built this product, what it does.”

“He took what was 800,000 lines of code and he brought it down to 500 and was really just trying to create an absolutely minimal and secure alternative to OpenClaw. And so that's what he built with NanoClaw. I mean, that is insane. 800,000 lines of code down to 500 It was a super stripped down framework. It was written very, very concise. And so instead of relying on this kind of massive dependency tree, it used containerized environments that would isolate AI agents and then strictly control what data they could access.”