
Putting a Paywall on Your Inbox with Rythm.xyz
About this episode
Sean is my boy from Boston and a great fellow Bitcoiner. He's building Rythm.xyz, a last line of defense for Gmail and Outlook that whitelists known senders and lets strangers pay a Lightning micro-payment to land in your inbox marked as paid. No custody, no money transmitter risk, just LNURL and Cashu tokens doing God's work to bring sound money to the masses.We spend real time on the two filters missing from the internet: identity and cost. Without them, you get an infinite cat-and-mouse game with spammers, AI slop, and eventually a government ID attached to every click. With them, you get something closer to how physical mail works. Intent and honesty, because sending something costs something.From there we go into open-source AI versus proprietary frontier labs, why metered intelligence is the real dystopia, and Sean's ecosystem analogy for what fiat did to civilization. We close on agency. Jeff Booth, Ayn Rand, Satoshi, and why nobody is coming to save you.I hope you enjoy listening to this rip, as much as I enjoyed engaging in it.
Timecodes:
00:00:00 Intro and Sean's Bitcoin origin story
00:03:01 Unlearning broken money
00:05:56 Trojan horse for freedom
00:09:00 Rhythm.xyz and the last line of defense for email
00:17:28 Identity and cost, the two missing filters
00:22:25 Panopticon, deepfakes, and paywalling attention
00:35:54 Open source versus proprietary AI
00:47:04 Metered intelligence and the Tesla JP Morgan parallel
00:53:13 Diluting the calorie, the ecosystem analogy
01:00:09 Agency, Ayn Rand, and the question for SatoshiCheck out Rhythm: https://rythm.xyz
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