S17 E25: Milan De Reede on Nano GPT, AI & Vibe Coding

There is something poetic about recording an episode 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. The industry is telling you where it thinks the future is. So I sat down with the one guest who did not need to pivot, because he was already there: Milan De Reede, co-founder and CEO of Nano GPT, the service that lets you use every premium AI model on the market (Claude, ChatGPT, Nano Banana, Grok, Gemini, plus the best open source ones) and pay per prompt with bitcoin, Monero, Zcash, Nano or a stack of other coins. No account, no email, no card. Just an anonymous token that you guard like a seed phrase.

Full disclosure, and I say this on the record at the top of the show: I chased Milan for this interview, not the other way around. I met him a year earlier in Amsterdam and thought the idea was cute. Then I actually used the product, got addicted to Claude, rebuilt my entire website with it, and realized he had quietly built one of the only services on the internet where paying with crypto is genuinely better than paying with a card. VPNs are the only other example I can think of. That is the whole adoption thesis, compressed into one website.

From a Telegram Bot with a 1 Nano Cap to 10,000 Daily Users

The origin story is delightfully humble. Nano GPT started as a Telegram bot that only offered ChatGPT, with a maximum deposit of one nano, because Milan was afraid he would break something. Then a website, then DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, back when those were the only image models in town. Both founders came out of the Nano community; it is literally how they met.

Today the numbers look very different: around 500 models, roughly 10,000 daily users, and a business that both founders can live off, which Milan correctly identifies as the dream. The moment he realized it had become serious infrastructure: a four minute bug triggered an avalanche of messages across Discord and Telegram. Some users do not have credit cards. Some do not trust their governments with their data. For them, this is not a toy, it is their only access to frontier AI.

The Block Lattice, Explained at a Conference Table

Since I had the Nano guy captive, I made him explain the thing. Nano has no global blockchain where one block gets added every ten minutes. It is a block lattice: every account has its own chain. You issue a send block on yours, I issue a receive block on mine, and the network confirms it globally. How is that different from sharding?

Milan’s answer: in sharding, subsets of validators secure subsets of the chain, so you only ever get a fraction of the security. In Nano, every transaction is confirmed by the whole network, yet the blocks are so tiny (about 500 bytes, no smart contracts, just “I have this balance, I send this much”) that throughput still hits 1,000 transactions per second in stress tests, with 400 millisecond finality and zero fees. Nano GPT runs its own principal representative node for $15 a month.

His verdict on his own favorite coin is the most honest thing a founder has ever said on this show: Nano is boring because it already works. Instant and feeless since day one, so there is nothing to hype. Rank 400-something on CoinMarketCap and nobody cares. Just like the Mimblewimble coins.

Validator Incentives and the Great Mining Centralization Fight

Then we got into it. How do you incentivize validators without fees? Milan: the incentive is that you rely on the network. Kraken runs a node because it will not trust someone else’s. Nano GPT runs one because it wants direct access. Big holders run one to protect their bags. And small holders delegate: 1 nano equals 1 vote, nothing ever locks up, and there are no staking rewards. The design goal is to remove monetary incentives entirely, because in Milan’s view, monetary incentives are what centralize everything. In mining and staking alike, the biggest players compound their advantage: Foundry borrows cheaper, buys ASICs in bulk, negotiates better electricity contracts.

I pushed back with the usual arsenal. Mining pools have risen and fallen throughout Bitcoin’s history; Antpool once neared 51% and does not anymore. A pool that gets too big is a bad look, it hits the price, so they self-sabotage or split. And proof of work has a real world cost in electricity, unlike leaving a Raspberry Pi on. Milan did not budge: the key phrase, he said, is that it only has to look like no one has 51%.

“Maybe they have a WhatsApp group with the five biggest miners together.” He then revealed he gave a talk at BCH Bliss calculating that buying 51% of Bitcoin’s hash rate would cost $50 to $100 billion, securing a network worth$ 1.5 trillion. I countered that market cap is not liquidity, and he turned it around beautifully: that same illiquidity is proof of stake’s secret security budget. Try buying half the Nano supply and watch the price teleport away from you.

We found one truce: proof of work works fine if you are the biggest coin on your algorithm. Litecoin and Dogecoin are safe. Everyone else lives dangerously.

Qubic, Monero, and the Payment Statistics That End All Arguments

Here is the segment every Bitcoiner should sit with. Milan publishes monthly payment statistics, and the reality on the ground is nothing like Crypto Twitter. Monero has been Nano GPT’s most used coin for ten straight months. Zcash sees real volume (Milan did the shielded BTCPay Server integration himself, which I genuinely admire). Bitcoin, actual on-chain Bitcoin, gets used a lot.

So do Nano, Litecoin, BCH and Dash. And the coins whose communities shout the loudest? They get integrated, and a month later it is zero transactions, maybe one. Meanwhile, outside the hotel, Las Vegas was plastered with XRP billboards and a bus was circling the venue playing XRP ads on a video panel. My comment stands: if you bought XRP, you paid for that bus.

The Monero part matters because of Qubic: the selfish mining episode forced Nano GPT to raise confirmation requirements while small reorgs rippled through the chain. Milan’s takeaway was blunt: when it happens to Bitcoin Gold, nobody cares; when it happens to a top privacy coin that your business depends on, maybe proof of work is starting to fail for everyone except the king of each algorithm.

The Ecash Fork and the Quantum Bounty

The quantum discussion produced my favorite exchange of the episode. Milan made the standard point: if quantum breaks ECDSA, banks break too, so Bitcoin is the least of our worries. My counter, which I will keep repeating until someone refutes it: if Google, IBM or the NSA builds that machine, they will not rob a bank, because that is a jail sentence. Moving Satoshi’s coins is legal, famous and profitable. Bitcoin is the bounty. His comeback: maybe they just sell it to the government.

Fair. That is probably the most likely outcome. We also touched the “one coin per block” withdrawal limit proposal for Satoshi’s UTXOs, and agreed every path breaches the social contract somehow: freeze, throttle or confiscate, pick your poison.

Saylor’s USDC Moment and the Blurring Lines

I spent the conference asking people whether Bitcoin is captured. The director of the FBI spoke. Regulators spoke. And then Michael Saylor took the stage and said crypto and Bitcoin have been adversarial for too long, when there are such cool use cases like staking your USDC and USDT on Solana and Ethereum. There is no second best, but apparently there is a third and a fourth. Twitter noticed.

The crowd has changed: Morgan Stanley here, Deloitte there. Meanwhile Consensus in Miami the following week featured the same headliners (Saylor, Adam Back, the Trump sons), and the line between the biggest Bitcoin conference and the biggest crypto conference has officially dissolved. A news outlet even published a hit piece complaining the conference invited “shitcoiners,” citing Milan by name because the Nano website dares call it money that cannot be debased. He wore it as a badge of honor.

My position remains: Twitter is not real life. Maximalists are delightful in person. We had dinner with Joël from Dash, the Bitcoin Cash crew and the Thorchain people, and suddenly everyone agrees everything could be improved. I also made my confession on air: I am the original kind of maximalist. Maximalism should mean maximizing, absorbing whatever works from every experiment, not “it is perfect, do not touch it.”

Lightning Was Added as a Joke

My favorite Nano GPT statistic: they integrated Lightning expecting nobody to use it. It now does 5% of their payments. Whatever moves the world from fiat rails to uncensorable money is a win, even the Rube Goldberg IOUs.

An AI That Picks the AI

On the technical side: closed source models (Claude, GPT) route through Anthropic or AWS; open source models (DeepSeek, GLM, Qwen) go through hosting providers with contractual no-logging promises; and the gold standard is TEE models in trusted execution environments, where every step is verifiable, the “don’t trust, verify” of AI. Milan shares my obsession with Qwen 3.6 27B, which does roughly 90-something percent of what paid Claude does and runs locally on my Mac Studio.

But the killer feature for normies is the auto model: benchmarks and leaderboards refresh every half hour, and a tiny fast model classifies your prompt (math goes to Grok, code to Claude or GPT, world knowledge to Gemini) and routes it to the best model in your price tier. Yes, they built an AI whose only job is choosing which AI should answer you.We are living in the good timeline.

Privacy-wise: no accounts unless you insist. You get an anonymous sign-in token, stored in your browser, recoverable anywhere. They added Google and email login for people’s moms, and both of us beg you not to use it. Compare with the alternative: Claude’s website wants your identity and your card, the top tiers now cost $200 a month, and Anthropic will not take your bitcoin. On Nano GPT you can start with ten cents of Monero.

Ghibli, Mythos, and the Honest Competition

Milan confirmed my suspicion from the Studio Ghibli craze: OpenAI kept the model off the API until the trend died. Same story now with Claude Mythos, so good and so dangerous that Anthropic is giving it to governments and cybersecurity firms first to patch the world’s bugs before the rest of us touch it. On competitors he was gracious: PPQ.ai (built by Matt, formerly of Bitrefill) and Venice both do great work. Venice bets on open source only with gorgeous UX; Nano GPT wants everything, chat, image and video, in one place.

The Business Model: Pay $1, They Pay 90 Cents

The least glamorous and most instructive part: volume discounts. You pay the same $1 you would pay Fireworks directly; Nano GPT pays 90 cents. Margins are razor thin, it is a pure volume game, and it already pays both founders’ lives. The crypto incentives are equally elegant: 5% off everything if you deposit Nano, a 10% bonus on Lightning deposits, and a whole explainer about why Stripe fees, chargebacks and data harvesting make cards the expensive option. The punchline: their Discord is full of normies with zero interest in crypto who bought Nano purely for the discount. That is how adoption actually happens. Not with billboards and buses.

The Cake Wallet Story and the Domain Flex

Nano GPT’s first big break was the Cake Wallet integration: Milan cold-messaged Vik Sharma for advice, Vik liked the product and offered to build it in. Cake is now at 750,000 downloads, and I used the moment to praise their Zcash work again (rotating transparent addresses before Zashi managed it). Then the flexes: Nano GPT powers the AI inside the Bitcoin.com wallet at ai.bitcoin.com, they bought nanogpt.com without the dash, and even cake.nanogpt.com works. The name itself turned out to be a happy accident: they accepted nano and offered GPT, and only later realized it also reads as small prompts, small payments.

Vibe Coding, the Bubble, and the End of Blackmail

I made my own confession: I rebuilt bitcoin-takeover.com from scratch with Claude, I feel like a kid with his first computer, and right now I am more excited about AI than about Bitcoin, which is sad. But I am not renaming the show, and there is a beautiful symmetry to it: the AI data centers exist because Bitcoin mining built the electricity infrastructure first, and the home GPU rig scene feels exactly like home mining in 2013.

Then we went deep. AI images went from cursed fingers and plastic skin to indistinguishable in two years. Soon nothing online will be trustworthy by default, which might push society back toward local, physical verification: show up at a conference, shake hands, that is your blue checkmark. And my most galaxy-brained take of the episode: if the political class is controlled through kompromat, as the Epstein files suggest, then AI-generated fakes destroy the blackmail economy itself. When every compromising video can be dismissed as fabricated, the puppets are free. Free to do what, exactly, is the terrifying question.

We also covered the education collapse (they added an AI text detector with 99.98% accuracy; universities love it, and students love it more, because you just regenerate until your essay passes), the old plagiarism scanners that matched five consecutive words, the Wikipedia references trick, and the fact that Milan is 32 and I am 34, so we are officially the “back in my day” guys now.

Will AI Replace This Podcast?

My answer, and I stand by it: AI is permanently behind any human who keeps growing. It can ingest every episode I have ever made, but it cannot know what I will read, whom I will have dinner with, or what will anger me next month. It can clone 90% of my style; the remaining 10% is the part that matters. Maybe I will take dancing lessons just to stay unpredictable.

Milan’s version is more humbling: AI already codes better than he ever will, and that is exactly why this is the best time in history to be a builder. You do not need the thick Python book anymore. You need to know what you want. We even outlined the classic hustle: find businesses on Google Maps without websites, vibe code one in five minutes, charge $1,000. The domain, of course, is the real asset.

The Erik Voorhees Story

Buried near the end is a genuine piece of history: Erik Voorhees was one of the first users of the original Nano GPT Telegram bot. He messaged Milan back then, asked whether he could build something similar for a decentralized compute token he was working on, and then went his own way and built Venice. PPQ started around the same time. Several people had the same idea at the same moment; the market was big enough for all of them. Not bad for a bot with a one nano deposit cap.

From Mira Hurley to Milan De Reede

One last reveal for the old timers: Milan was previously known in the Nano community as Mira Hurley. “Good times, but no, I’m no longer Mira Hurley. That’s a whole other conversation to have.” We did not have that conversation today, which only means there is a part two waiting to happen.

You can find him on X at @milan_dereede (M-I-L-A-N, then D-E-R-E-E-D-E, the Dutch D), and the service at nano-gpt.com, also reachable via ai.bitcoin.com and inside Cake Wallet. If you want to test the future, take my advice from the episode: deposit $5 once, try every model, and you will understand where computing is going. You can also use my referral link for a bonus: nano-gpt.com/r/Qx83bnwz. Use AI before someone who uses it replaces you.

This episode is sponsored by Cake Wallet (the gateway drug to Monero, now with excellent Zcash and Lightning support), LayerTwo Labs (test the drivechains today; the Ecash fork arrives at block 964000 this August, see ecash.com), Sideshift.ai (get paid in stablecoins, receive bitcoin in your own wallet; not available in the US, thank your politicians), Orange Rock (no-KYC trading from the Bitcoin.com team, with leverage for the degenerates, which I do not recommend), and Braiins Hashpower (rent hash power from the oldest pool in Bitcoin, founded as Slush Pool in 2010; point it wherever you like, but do not 51% attack BSV, and please do not sue me, Craig). Special thanks to all the sponsors for making this freely available to everyone!

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Time stamps:

00:01:07 – Intro: Milan De Reede & Nano GPT live in Las Vegas
00:01:38 – The mining stage is now the energy stage
00:02:36 – Every AI model, payable with any coin
00:03:06 – Origins: a Telegram bot with a 1 nano cap
00:04:24 – Sponsors & the Cake Wallet Zcash giveaway
00:04:41 – How Nano works: the block lattice explained
00:05:25 – Nano vs sharding
00:06:52 – 1,000 TPS stress tests & 500 byte blocks
00:07:44 – A validator node for $15 a month
00:08:14 – Validator incentives without transaction fees
00:10:44 – 1 nano = 1 vote: delegated validation
00:11:08 – Sort of proof of stake, nothing ever locked
00:11:57 – The mining centralization debate begins
00:14:07 – Do mining pools self-sabotage when too big?
00:16:30 – AI data centers & the hope for home mining
00:18:11 – Buying 51% of Bitcoin: $50-100 billion at Bliss
00:19:21 – Market cap is not liquidity
00:20:30 – Nano: boring because it already works
00:21:13 – Illiquidity as proof of stake’s security budget
00:21:55 – Zcash’s PoW/PoS hybrid & the 60% pool
00:22:18 – Qubic & the Monero selfish mining attack
00:23:41 – Monero is Nano GPT’s most used coin
00:24:09 – XRP: billboards, a bus & zero transactions
00:25:29 – Raising Monero confirmations during the attack
00:26:36 – PoW works if you dominate your algorithm
00:27:16 – The Ecash hard fork at block 964,000
00:29:17 – The Patoshi pattern & Satoshi’s 1.1 million BTC
00:30:15 – Quantum: Bitcoin as the legal bounty
00:32:03 – One coin per block: the withdrawal limit idea
00:32:46 – Freeze or confiscate? Breaching the contract
00:33:15 – Is Bitcoin captured? The FBI director on stage
00:33:34 – Saylor shills staking USDC on Solana & Ethereum
00:34:14 – Morgan Stanley, Deloitte & the corporate crowd
00:34:59 – Consensus Miami: the lines are blurring
00:35:40 – Cake Wallet: the gateway drug to Monero
00:36:05 – The hit piece attacking Milan’s invitation
00:36:41 – Maxis are nicer in person; Twitter is not real
00:38:13 – Vlad: I am the original maximalist
00:38:54 – Lightning was added as a joke; now 5% of payments
00:39:47 – Sponsors: Sideshift, Orange Rock & Braiins
00:42:40 – How Nano GPT selects & hosts its models
00:43:32 – Closed source, open source & TEE models
00:43:38 – Qwen 3.6 27B: the local AI gem
00:45:06 – The auto model: an AI that picks the AI
00:46:31 – Local models: the privacy gold standard
00:47:51 – No accounts: the anonymous sign-in token
00:49:01 – Google sign-in for normies (do not do it)
00:50:02 – $200 subscriptions vs 10 cent deposits
00:51:15 – The Ghibli trend & API gatekeeping
00:52:25 – Claude Mythos: too dangerous for the API
00:53:02 – The competition: PPQ.ai & Venice
00:54:14 – Business model: volume discounts, thin margins
00:55:23 – 10,000 daily users & living the dream
00:57:15 – 5% Nano discount & the 10% Lightning bonus
00:58:19 – Normies buying Nano just for the discount
01:00:04 – Vlad’s Claude addiction: rebuilding the website
01:01:16 – More excited about AI than Bitcoin (not pivoting)
01:01:29 – AI owes its data centers to Bitcoin mining
01:02:13 – The 4-minute outage & the Discord riot
01:03:05 – The Cake Wallet integration story
01:05:02 – Free credits, bot abuse & the $5 advice
01:05:46 – The AI bubble & why open source survives it
01:06:26 – From weird fingers to indistinguishable
01:07:05 – When nothing online can be trusted anymore
01:07:31 – Epstein, blackmail & the freed politicians
01:09:32 – The AI detector: students vs universities
01:10:04 – Plagiarism scanners & Wikipedia source tricks
01:12:42 – From ChatGPT to 2030: the exponential
01:13:12 – Will AI replace this podcast?
01:14:10 – Dancing lessons & staying unpredictable
01:14:49 – AI already codes better than Milan ever will
01:15:13 – Vibe coding magic & the Google Maps hustle
01:16:35 – nanogpt.com, ai.bitcoin.com & the domain game
01:17:45 – The name: small prompts, small payments
01:18:26 – Arcade games with the podcast inside
01:19:19 – Erik Voorhees was a day one user
01:21:28 – Making coins useful, not just speculative
01:22:31 – cake.nanogpt.com & where to find Milan
01:23:00 – Use AI before it replaces you
01:23:16 – From Mira Hurley to Milan De Reede
01:24:14 – Outro & sponsors