^ Air-gapped is over? I'm just beginning to really think about it properly actually, especially after the recent Ledger fail. And the Passport has a 1% rate of bad units? You're... not serious are you? =)

Keep these interviews coming, and continue posting them here in BitcoinTalk? The forum needs more information, and more education in different topics about Bitcoin.

The Bitcoin discussions in here have become a little boring, plus the gaslighting trolls which make the discussion very tense and exciting have left.

Bitcoin Takeover Podcast, S17 E25 with Milan De Reede — Nano GPT CEO on Paying for Claude with Monero & Vibe Coding

I chased Milan De Reede for this interview, not the other way around. Met him a year earlier in Amsterdam, thought Nano GPT was cute, then actually used it, got addicted to Claude, rebuilt bitcoin-takeover.com with it, and realized he had quietly built one of the only services on the internet where paying with crypto is genuinely better than a card. We recorded at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas — the edition where the mining stage got renamed the energy stage and half the sponsors quietly pivoted to AI. Milan did not need to pivot: Nano GPT already lets you hit every premium model (Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, plus the open-source ones) and pay per prompt with bitcoin, Monero, Zcash, Nano or Lightning. No account, no email, no card. Just an anonymous token.

We covered the origin story (a Telegram bot with a one-nano deposit cap that turned into ~500 models and ~10,000 daily users), how Nano's block lattice actually works, validator incentives without fees, the mining centralization fight, Qubic's Monero selfish-mining episode, and Milan's monthly payment stats: Monero has been their most-used coin for ten straight months, Lightning was added as a joke and now does 5% of payments, and the coins whose communities shout the loudest often settle at zero transactions. Then the AI side: closed vs open vs TEE models, the auto-router that picks which AI answers you, Cake Wallet's early integration, Erik Voorhees as a day-one Telegram-bot user, vibe coding, and whether AI will replace this podcast. Spoiler: I am not renaming the show.

About an hour and twenty-five minutes with the guy who turned "pay for frontier AI in Monero" into a business both founders can live off. I hope that you will find it useful!

Stats for nerds: 3,354 downloads and views so far, up about 7% since the first monthly count in May 2026. The X livestream leads with 2,138 of them — not bad for a Vegas conference-table chat with the guy who lets you pay Claude in Monero!

Below, you will find links to the podcast. Special thanks to SideShift, LayerTwo Labs, Cake Wallet, and Orange Rock for sponsoring this episode!

Blog post about this interview (includes complete time stamps): https://bitcoin-takeover.com/s17-e25-milan-de-reede-on-nano-gpt-ai-vibe-coding/

Listen to this interview on YouTube (with video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OArTzQc8sDw

Listen to this interview on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Fountain, and many other audio-only platforms (without video, links at the top of the page): https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/media/2026-05-19_s17_e25_milan_de_reede_on_nano_gpt_ai_vibe_coding_-_15.05.2026_16.51.mp3

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A "who called it right" clip review is a fun idea. Noted, no promises, mostly because I'm scared of how many of my own predictions would land in the wrong column.

On big blocks in retrospect: that road-not-taken argument is exactly what I spent more than three hours on with Kurt Wuckert Jr. (Gorilla Pool, CoinGeek), from the BCH/BSV split to Craig Wright, with me pushing back the whole way: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/s17-e39-kurt-wuckert-jr-on-the-big-block-wars-bsv-craig-wright-the-road-not-taken/
And another branch of the big block family shows up in this thread later today: S17 E26 with Steve Thurmond and Calin Culianu on nine years of Bitcoin Cash.

Bitcoin Takeover Podcast, S17 E27 with Kieran Mesquka — Railgun & Building Privacy Where the Users Are

Sometimes you have to wait a year for an interview. I first met Kieran Mesquka at DevConnect in Argentina while chasing both the Tornado Cash people (who still will not go on the record) and the Railgun contributors. He was busy then; this conversation finally happened. Kieran is best known for Railgun, the zero-knowledge privacy system for Ethereum, but he started as a high-school kid in 2011-2012 writing GPU mining clients for Litecoin on unserious hardware — including a thermally-throttled MacBook Air — and discovering Bitcoin by trying to edit the database file and add zeros to his balance.

We covered why privacy matters beyond forum fights: the bar-tab problem, ENS domains that wear your financial history in a Twitter handle, Railgun vs Tornado Cash, multicalls and DeFi from a shielded balance, PPI filtering, Wasabi vs Samourai as the Bitcoin parallel, Groth16 and verifier efficiency, and why Ethereum got state-of-the-art privacy while Bitcoin mostly pushed it to the edges. Also Naomi Brockwell, smart TVs and robot vacuums, HP ink subscriptions, and Kieran's one-minute pitch: wallets that can do whatever a public wallet can, just privately. About an hour and forty-five minutes with someone who builds privacy where the usage actually is. I hope that you will find it useful!

Stats for nerds: 2,907 downloads and views so far, up about 21% since the first monthly count in May 2026. The X livestream leads with 1,591 of them — not bad for a privacy deep dive that started with a DevConnect handshake a year earlier!

Below, you will find links to the podcast. Special thanks to SideShift, LayerTwo Labs, Cake Wallet, and Orange Rock for sponsoring this episode!

Blog post about this interview (includes complete time stamps): https://bitcoin-takeover.com/s17-e27-kieran-mesquka-on-railgun-building-privacy-where-the-users-are/

Listen to this interview on YouTube (with video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDgwqKQFjls

Listen to this interview on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Fountain, and many other audio-only platforms (without video, links at the top of the page): https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/media/2026-06-01_s17_e27_kieran_mesquka_on_railgun_building_privacy_final.mp3

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Hey Vlad, thanks for hosting these podcasts! And also, I find your X posts very useful, and on some occasions, wildly entertaining especially on the topic of ZCash.


ZCash maxis have the thinnest skin. Even @mert blocked me after I started bullposting Monero. Honestly the BCashers and the Richard Heart fanboys were tamer.