Expanding Access to ChatGPT-4 Through Nano Payments

While platforms like ChatGPT-4 offer a treasure trove of knowledge and assistance in various domains, the cost and payment options can be a barrier for many. Nano democratizes this access, allowing people to pay only for what they use.

This article dives into how I leveraged nano to make ChatGPT-4 accessible to a broader audience. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, an educator, or someone looking to stretch your dollar while making efficient use of AI and crypto, read on!

Opening up access to ChatGPT-4 to anyone, anywhere

ChatGPT-4 has been an incredibly versatile tool for me, assisting in everything from learning programming languages to generating creative content. It’s an invaluable asset that has helped me learn NodeJS and Python, figure out the extent to which I could replace my easy runs with bike rides, summarized texts for me, recommended books, and explained dozens of concepts to me in a simple and interactive way. It’s helped me come up with recipes, written poems, generated images for me, and even helped me write this article.

I’m in the position of luxury that I am able to pay a $24-a-month subscription to OpenAI, live in a country where credit cards are widespread, and usually feel secure enough to ask my questions to OpenAI on an account linked to my real identity.

This is not the case for everyone. Some might want to ask just a few questions and think $20 a month is too much. They might not have access to the payment methods OpenAI accepts or might want to use it anonymously.

The Telegram (and Discord) bots I built strive to help fix this. Rather than paying $20 upfront, you pay only for what you use. The bot can be used anonymously, and no information on the user is stored. Anyone can use it from anywhere because it uses nano.

There are users that deposit Ӿ0.1 XNO, about $0.06 currently, presumably asking just one or a few questions. Adding any sort of fees to such transactions would be prohibitive, so nano’s feelessness is crucial here. Nano also eliminates any waiting time, allowing users to send funds and immediately start using the bot.

To me, this is a fantastic combination. I believe nano is a force for good in the world, making value transfer infinitely better through instant and feeless transactions while being fundamentally the strongest possible store of value. ChatGPT-4 has been an immense help to me, and I feel like it’s an extremely good teacher and assistant for very little money. Both should be accessible to a broad audience, and I’m happy to help accomplish this.

Integrating into the Nano ecosystem

Unfortunately, at this stage not everyone has nano or access to nano. Some might hold some other crypto, and they would not be able to use the bot.

To solve this, I built the ability to swap other currencies for nano into the bot itself. Using /swap, people can create an order to, for example, swap 0.05 Monero into nano, which will then be immediately sent to their deposit address. For this, I used the NanSwap API.

This API is easy to work with, and NanSwap as a service is very speedy. The minimums to swap into nano are fairly low, usually around $2.5. By implementing NanSwap I was able to open the service up to the broader crypto ecosystem. That said, nano, by far, is the easiest, fastest, and cheapest way to add funds.

There are also people that don’t have any crypto. For those, I’ve built /earn into the bot. Using this command shows people options to earn nano. Options listed there at the moment are PlayNano’s offerwall and NanSwap’s “Nano Mining”, where you mine XMR and have it converted to nano immediately.

Finally, there’s a /nano command in the bot. This provides some basic info on nano, along with some recommended wallets and a link to AnarKrypto’s fantastic Nanodrop 2.0, a Nano faucet that allows anyone to try out Nano easily.

Click here to try the bot

Developing with Nano

As a developer, nano is a joy to work with. When developing this bot, I would make changes, run it, send in a test transaction with Ӿ0.000001 XNO, and instantly know whether it worked. Seconds later, I would be doing the next test transaction, using just Ӿ0.000001 again, paying practically nothing for my test transactions, and getting immediate feedback.

To be clear, I am not an experienced developer. Yet I was sending transactions programmatically within an hour of starting to work on this.

Some tips for those working with Python: the Nanohakase library makes it incredibly easy to integrate nano. There are many public nodes you can work with to do RPC calls (essentially a call to a node to provide information from the Nano network). There’s an overview of public nodes here. For those working with NodeJS, which I’ve recently started doing, the tutorial by SomeNano is a great way to quickly get started.

As a side note, ChatGPT-4 is surprisingly well aware of how the nano node and node commands work and can be a great help here as well. I’m reasonably sure that anyone can build a basic program that works with nano within an hour using the Nanohakase library and some help from ChatGPT-4.

Next steps

The Telegram bot has been a bigger success than expected. As of writing this, it’s been online for 17 days and has over 250 users. The number of users is still growing rapidly, and I’m very grateful to those who are using it. That said, I’d like to grow it further.

I would like to implement the option for people to be shown ads by using the /ad command, so those without crypto can add to their nano balance, wherever they are. I’ve just started looking into this, if anyone has experience with this or has recommendations on services/partners, I’m open to suggestions.

More importantly, a fellow community member (Huggi) and I are working on creating a website version of the ChatGPT-4 Nano bot. Not everyone has Telegram or Discord nor wants to install either, and I’d love to see this bot and Nano services, in general, be as accessible as possible. Progress on the website is rapid so far, so we should be releasing something fairly soon.

I’d encourage those interested to try out the Telegram Bot by visiting this link or messaging @ChatGPT4_Nano_bot directly on Telegram. New users get some credit added to their account so they can try it for free. I’d encourage sending in small amounts of Nano as needed if you get good use out of the bot!