About this episode
Jesse Shrader built Amboss after paying $60 in Bitcoin transaction fees and watching his payment fail to arrive. Now Amboss is launching Rails X: full peer-to-peer trading directly on Lightning, self-custodial, near-instant, with the network itself acting as a decentralized exchange. In this episode of the Conor Chepenik Podcast we get into Lightning doing 40 million TPS vs Solana's 17,000, why stable coins at the edges actually serve Bitcoiners, AI agents streaming sats for compute, the newspaper-page-size tax story, why the four-year cycle is dead, and Jesse's quote that still floats around Twitter: "Never before has greed tempted me to live a very simple life." Plus my kid closes it out, and if a 3-year-old knows what the best money is, well, you should too.Timecodes below:00:00:00 — Intro & Jesse's origin story00:05:46 — Rails X: peer-to-peer trading on Lightning00:09:27 — Stable coins at the edges & Taproot Assets00:11:28 — AI tools for building & the "vibe coded app" problem00:20:41 — Self-custody flips finance on its head00:29:17 — Lightning for AI agents & micropayments00:36:04 — Arc, eCash, and symbiotic L2s00:43:03 — "Never before has greed tempted me to live a simple life"00:51:38 — 100 years from now: Bitcoin as humanity's record00:57:01 — If you could ask Satoshi one question00:58:33 — Sloan's verdict: Bitcoin or fiat?
