Paul Itoi has built two of the most popular Lightning applications to date, Sphinx Chat and Stakwork. These platforms already enable people to chat and earn over the Lightning Network, and Paul’s vision for where these platforms will go next is incredible.

In our wide-ranging conversation, Paul and I discussed the concept of earning Bitcoin, how AIs and humans can work together to truly build a world computer, and how decentralized knowledge graphs can help people learn faster than ever.

→ Sphinx: https://sphinx.chat/ → Stakwork: https://stakwork.ai/

"Most programmers right now go to Stack Overflow and will try to look up and self-serve the answer. What if you had a real-time Stack Overflow, where people were hanging out and they get a notice saying 'Hey, someone needs help with Rust right now.'? And then you have twenty minutes, you jump into a buddy-coding session, and then you try to solve that programming problem, in real time. You don't know the person's name, you just know their pseudonym. You pay them some sats."

"No friction. Because the payment rails add the friction."