I built a Lightning-native way to earn sats while your AI agent works. No KYC, 10% of revenue to OpenSats + HRF.

TL;DR: people pay sats to put a tiny one-liner in the spot where Claude Code usually says "thinking…", and you, the dev running it, keep half. no KYC, no accounts, 10% to OpenSats + HRF. live + open source, built it solo, come break it.

A few days ago I watched kickbacks.ai go viral. It slips an ad into the little status line under your AI coding agent while it churns, and you get paid half the ad revenue. Nice idea. But it's fiat, weekly payouts, accounts.

I thought: someone's gonna do this with bitcoin, it's obvious.

Peter2Paul payments baby.

12 hours later it hadn't popped up on my X or nostr feed yet, so I built it with Claude Code. It's called Kicksats. Lightning-native, no KYC, no accounts.

How it works:

- You run Claude Code with a tiny status-line script. While the agent thinks, an ad sits under your prompt.

- An advertiser funds that slot with a Lightning invoice. No card, no account, no KYC.

- Every qualified thinking-window bills against their budget, and HALF accrues to you, the dev.

- When your balance crosses a tiny floor it auto-pays to your own Lightning address via LNURL. No withdraw button, no dashboard. Sats just turn up in your wallet.

The split, because this crowd will ask: 50% to the dev (sacred, never touched), 5% routing, 5% OpenSats, 5% HRF, the rest keeps the lights on. So 10% of every sat goes to bitcoin and open-source dev and to HRF.

Some technical bits: (from Claude, I barely understand)

- Auction is weighted-random by bid, not winner-take-all, so a small advertiser still gets impressions.

- Billing is server-authoritative and credit-gated per window, single-use signed token per impression, so a forged metrics POST can't mint sats.

- Real LND on the backend. The first outbound payouts already landed via LNURL, so the money side is not a mock.

- The client is open source, read every line before you run it: https://github.com/xoxoskeleton/kicksats

It's live today. The abuse-testing started within hours (someone rotated a few dozen client ids from one IP to probe the payout path). The caps and the payout floor caught it and it extracted exactly zero, which honestly made my night more than the launch did.

I'm one person who built this for the love of it, so I'd take any of:

- devs willing to run it and tell me if it works lol

- anyone who wants to be one of the first advertisers (it is stupidly cheap)

- a beating on the billing/abuse model from people here who think about this harder than I do

Link's in the comments.

Thanks in advance.

Allmyhomieshatethefed