Karrot (@bikarrot) is the pseudonymous builder behind HiveTalk — a Nostr-native, Lightning-powered video-conferencing platform "built for the swarm." This is the first Fundamentals of Fundamentals done as a live demo: the whole episode was recorded inside HiveTalk, wired through Riverside, so you watch Karrot screen-share, zap Brian mid-call, and show the thing working while he explains how it's built. A tightrope walk, and a great one. The through-line is a reframe of what Nostr is actually for. Not the public square — the login. Karrot builds HiveTalk on a LiveKit backend that scales to a thousand people, with Nostr sitting in front as the authentication layer: you sign a NIP-98 note to enter a room, rooms are published as Nostr notes gated to a moderator/trust list, and your pubkey (plus a web-of-trust) becomes a distributed check-mark. In a year of Cold Card seed disasters, fake Zoom links, and voice-cloning, a call where every participant is cryptographically who they say they are is quietly a big unlock — the same thing AnchorWatch is reaching for by requiring video to move funds. From there it opens into the 2026 AI shift. Karrot's Prague dev talk, the agentic tooling that now spins up a whole Lightning/BTCPay stack in 60 seconds, and the hardware breaking inference wide open — Cerebras and Talus running at 1,000–17,000 tokens/second against NVIDIA's ~100. Plus the honest cost: AI has no accountability ("like having a horse in your house"), Karrot's story of an agent burning ~100k sats of e-cash doing proofs nobody asked for ("Claude does not understand how precious sats are"), and why the durable human edge is accountability and collaboration. In this episode: • HiveTalk as a live demo — screen-shares, zaps, and audience mode, recorded inside the product itself • Nostr is the login, not the feed: pubkeys, credentials, and pseudonymous identity as the real value • NIP-98 room auth on a LiveKit backend that scales to 1,000+ — rooms as Nostr notes, gated to a trust list • Why cryptographic call identity matters now: fake Zoom links, voice-cloning, Cold Card fallout, and AnchorWatch requiring video to move funds • The pivot from "client" to infrastructure: a pay-to-relay / DVM model where you vibe-code your own front end and pay for the secure, scalable relay + recording • Value-for-value that shouldn't work but does — 24 months of anonymous monthly zaps keeping HiveTalk running, and skipping the OpenSats/HRF grant path • Lightning's brutal learning curve: BTCPay Server, LNbits, LND vs Core Lightning, Go-lang, Chaincode Labs, and near-burnout (with Evan Kaloudis of Zeus) • The 2026 agentic-AI threshold — Cloudflare's "more bot traffic than human," and whole stacks built in 60 seconds • Inference speed breaking open: NVIDIA ~100 tok/s vs Cerebras (largest-ever hardware IPO) and Talus at ~17,000 tok/s, plus agent orchestration (Codex Spark + SWE) • Vibe-coding guardrails for non-engineers: unit vs regression tests, GSD/GStack, Playwright watchtowers, and "measure twice, cut once" (Brian maps it to automorphisms and field extensions) • Why AI has no accountability — the ~100k-sat e-cash burn, "a horse in your house," and accountability as the human moat • Self-sovereignty as epistemics: programming's tight feedback loop, confirmation bias, and knowing that you know • Nostr Valley (State College, PA, mid-October) with Derek Ross and Seth — and shout-outs to the Cornychat crew ️ Brian Hirschfield · Karrot (@bikarrot)  Fundamentals of Fundamentals — a first-principles conversation about Bitcoin, money, and the people building it ⚡ Follow: Karrot on X: https://x.com/bikarrot HiveTalk: https://hivetalk.org Brian on X: https://x.com/Fundamentals21m Magic Internet Math: https://magicinternetmath.com #Bitcoin #Nostr #Lightning #HiveTalk #AI #VibeCoding #Cashu #NIP53 #SelfSovereign #FundamentalsOfFundamentals #BitcoinPodcast