We can walk and chew gum at the same time, building out great lightning tooling for both humans and machine to machine payments. They're not mutually exclusive. I think it's also an opportunity to get a bitcoin foot in the door of a bunch of companies/people who otherwise wouldn't be interested, but are currently facing monetization problems that bitcoin uniquely solves.

Credit based API keys don't work for a couple reasons, big ones being chargebacks and requiring you to maintain a persistent identity for the user instead of just being able to give them the service in receipt for money.

E.g. every single company trying to add AI into their product is facing this exact problem that they can't monetize it so are either having you BYO api key, using stripe exclusively, or just otherwise limiting access to people with credit cards. Entirely possible they end up just going the way of the rest of the internet but would prefer they use bitcoin and think there's a good case for using lightning (as it exists today with good sender side privacy) to allow wider access to AI

Maybe this offers a different perspective Tony

I'm doing a twitch stream tonight with mckay wrigley on how to wrap a vercel chatbot with lightning micropayments which'll be a great one to watch: https://twitter.com/kodylow/status/1676984029722329088

For Fedi development specifically we launched fedi alpha https://fedi.xyz/builders which will have a ton of cool stuff around fedi mods coming out soon

Haha thanks I'll take that one as a compliment. I get really into what I'm working on when I know it's meaningful and important. When I was leading Marines it was about helping and serving them and making sure i did everything I could to prepare and train them and myself, so didn't have time to do other stuff I might've liked to like coding. Pretty common quip in infantry is that if the Marine Corps wanted you to have a family or social life they would've issued you them . I only started coding on my last active deployment because COVID happened and we weren't allowed to do anything we were locked in our rooms and I had tactical operations center watches for like 12-24 hours where nothing happened because everything in the world was locked down.

You work hard and stay focused so in the event we end up in a sticky situation we don't have to go through the rest of our lives thinking "Well if I hadn't taken that vacation or weekend off or whatever maybe John would still be alive".

Working on Bitcoin I get the same feeling, we've got this incredible opportunity to bring property rights to billions of people and if we don't succeed I don't want it to be because I took time off or didn't push through. It makes me really annoying to work with for people who try to lead a balanced life haha.

AI4ALL Hackathon we're currently running, it's remote and ends July 31st. Ton of use cases for bitcoin within scaling generative AI because the API calls when you hit against GPT/Midjourney/any of the more cutting edge models are so expensive, you need to wrap them in micropayments.

For Fedi specifically seeing more federations popping up in the wild. Fedimint is going to have a release in the next couple weeks so people can start setting up their own mainnet federations more easily and building more fedimint modules.

balancing and allocating resources and data across different federations to maintain your privacy. Everyone's tracking the bitcoin custody aspect of it, but to own bitcoin is to control the data used to spend it, and when you come up with a federated consensus mechanism for handling that data you can use it for any other type of data as well.

There's a bunch of guys working on wrapping self hosted AI applications and models with lightning payments so you can open them up to everyone and get paid sats which is cool to see different approaches towards.

And everything ollie the dev's been working on is mind blowing, he's doing really amazing work with AI agents giving them lightning wallets and building resources they can purchase like embeddings databases

Immediate: establish bitcoin and lightning payments as the standard for AI scaling so when we roll out more fedi mods support there's an ecosystem of L402 and WebLN payments infrastructure. Long term: build out federations for high trust communities to create platforms for sovereignty using bitcoin and other freedom technologies.

Just a general recommendation on how to better approach this, I used to make this mistake all the time when you ask people if there's anything you can do to help you're also asking them to take to come up with something that's a good weapon-target match to your skillset which they're unsure of, which ends up being an imposition on their time to both try to evaluate your skillset and figure out how to best match it to what they're working on. When people are really busy it's not the best way to get to them or get them to help / give opportunities.

A better way to approach it is by building some demonstrations of your skills and do a little research into who you're pitching so you can open with "Hi I built this and I think your company could benefit from this and me in xyz ways" . Everything I've been able to do for Bitcoin I did by taking that approach of "here's how I can help", but every time I did a "how can I help" it ended up going nowhere.

Yup definitely, both through fedimint modules and fedi mods. More on this to come in a couple months.

Social recovery mechanisms for bitcoin and for other data storage like password managers. Out of the box with Fedimint you get bitcoin, lightning, and ecash, but through the module system you can extend it to also backup arbitrary data. Fedi's going to be a great tool for organizing your data across different aspects of your life, seeing the first glimpses of that now.

Cowboy hat?

It depends what operation you are doing on the federation. Ecash is very difficult to censor since you cannot identify who is spending it (ideally). So the worst you can do is rugpull