Lightning Turns Money Into a Data Network | Jesse Shrader, CEO of Amboss

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 story

00:05:46 — Rails X: peer-to-peer trading on Lightning

00:09:27 — Stable coins at the edges & Taproot Assets

00:11:28 — AI tools for building & the "vibe coded app" problem

00:20:41 — Self-custody flips finance on its head

00:29:17 — Lightning for AI agents & micropayments

00:36:04 — Arc, eCash, and symbiotic L2s

00:43:03 — "Never before has greed tempted me to live a simple life"

00:51:38 — 100 years from now: Bitcoin as humanity's record

00:57:01 — If you could ask Satoshi one question

00:58:33 — Sloan's verdict: Bitcoin or fiat?