2026-11-21 –, Momentum - Hack Zone Stage
Noderunners Radio, the first 24/7 Bitcoin Only internet radio station where the crowd is the DJ! Listeners choose the music.
Pay a few sats over Lightning, from the website, Telegram, Nostr or X and your song plays next.
I'll show how it works, what it taught me, and how you can join the fun by using the Jukebox or joining a live-sesh.
Our goal with this project is to take the power back to the people. No more dictator DJs, at least when there is no ongoing live-sesh, the crowd is the DJ. You search for a song, pay a few anti-spam sats over Lightning, and, if our library holds it, your request goes into the queue. When it plays, the station announces it on Nostr, X and the Noderunners Radio Telegram group.
You can request a song from the website on your phone, from the Telegram bot, or by posting on X or Nostr. The sats are not a business model. They are friction: a small cost that keeps the queue fair and free of spam. Independent artists on Wavlake get paid straight to their own wallet when someone picks their song. That is value for value, with no middleman taking a cut. The station also pays its music licence, so the songs on air are played legally.
Everything runs on one home server: a Bitcoin node, a Lightning node (LND), LNbits, Icecast and Liquidsoap. These are all open-source tools. No cloud platform, no payment processor, no permission needed.
In this talk I'll cover:
Noderunners Radio
- How we deal with music licensing.
- Paying artists directly: value for value with Wavlake.
The Jukebox
- How a song request travels from your phone, through a Lightning invoice, to the speakers.
- Why a few sats beat likes and algorithms for picking music together.
- Shoutouts: add a message to your request, and the station posts it when your song plays.
- Live DJ sessions, where the tips split between the DJ and the station, and how you can host one yourself.
- What broke along the way, and what I would do differently.
- (demo) We finish with a live demo. Take out your phone, request a song, and hear it play in the room a few minutes later.
What's next
- Silently adding the state of the Bitcoin network to the broadcast, for robustness (think Carrington event and solar flares).
If you are into music or bitcoin, in whatever way, and you see what we've built and what we still wish to achieve, please support our efforts. The project currently leans on old hardware that I've scraped together from my own broken workstations.
Join the chat via Nostr or our Telegram group.
Listen and request and please support the ship and donate some sats via: noderunnersradio.com
If you wish to help or need to contact us please tag @plebroyale in the Noderunners Radio Telegram group or DM @lePlebRoyale on X.
Noderunners Radio
What we have built:
A radio station that streams over the internet (video + audio), run as a labor of love for over three years, currently rebuilding itself from a shipwreck into a proper vessel.
A jukebox: any listener can pay a few sats (the smallest pieces of a bitcoin) to request a song. The payment is instant, borderless, and goes where it should. This payment is purely anti-spam protection: 21 sats per song, and a little more for a long song.
Live sessions: guest DJs come aboard, stream their set through our channel, and receive their fair share of everything the audience donates while they play — automatically, without paperwork, without waiting, without a middleman skimming.
One can interact with the Jukebox in four ways, at the time of writing. Via our website, over telegram, via X and nostr, too!