 Will Kazarin, a Nostra protocol developer and creator of the app, Damos, which was the first Nostra-based app to make it onto the Apple Store. Within two days, I was banned in China because the CCP, I guess, got wind of it pretty quickly and they're like, oh, we've got to stop this. But it's been an interesting experience to see it going through the whole process. How many downloads have you seen so far? We're up to about 250,000. It went up to 24,000 in Mainland China in a day before it got cut off. So if they didn't cut off China, I bet it would have been much, much higher. When you say, OK, so it's cut off. So people in Mainland China can't get it anymore, but the people who have it, can they continue to use it or has it been rendered inoperative? They can just use it outside of Damos and outside of the app store. I remember when the relays were getting bombarded with Chinese traffic, because the app store did open there, the downloads on the store for China dropped, but the relay that we run, the Chinese traffic sort of like remained the same. So that's the thing. You don't need the same client. It doesn't matter if CCP doesn't like it anymore. I mean, people will just run VPNs or Tor and get around it because the information network is the same. Right? The client is just sort of like one more nice sort of experience and shapes how you absorb it, how you interact with it. But the information system is the same, much more, much like the Internet, right? Or TCPIP, like I mean, the stuff is just flowing through. You just find another way of tapping into it. Back to the China example for a second, because I think it's worth lingering upon since that is the prime example of an authoritarian, very powerful authority saying... Second only to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, right? This is not allowed. I'm putting up here just right now the notice that Will posted that his app had been banned in China, and you see Snowden commenting down there, smells like fear. But the reality is, when I go to the global feed, which is like the kind of fire hose of everything that anyone is posting from anywhere in the world to Nostra, you still see like a ton of Chinese posts. It's almost maybe even half of the posts have Chinese characters on them. So clearly that's some evidence that this protocol is fairly censorship resistant. Yes? It's going to be really hard for them to shut down all the relays because for instance, because I was asking some people in China, I'm like, do you guys, are you guys running your own relays? And they told me, yes. So there could be like a sub network that we don't even see, that they're using within their country. And that's a big issue is when you go across the firewall, apparently, then they can start tracking things. But if they're actually running their own relays within their local communities, then they can communicate and we wouldn't even see that, right? Yeah, I mean, so think about it this way. You don't really have like a global feed, right? It's not like there's a single source, a single river. It's more like a Blueville system, right? So you have like multiple rivers and they're all connected to each other. And they can change paths too, right? So if somebody puts a stop in one, you can reroute that to some other relay and you can have say like a mirror relay or bridge relay that uses some other sort of form of communication that is not like the main internet for you to sort of create this interactivity between the two. Mostly because this protocol is so sort of like simple and contained. It's pretty clever. So the thing that you start to think about then is, you know, what are the choke points that governments are going to try to use? I mean, it seems to me that the relays themselves would be that the target, like there's going to be malicious actors, right? So there's going to be people putting child abuse up there or, you know, scam type financial schemes, trying to like funnel money to terrorists or whatever. And then the government's going to get interested. Are they going to go and start shutting down the individual relays that host this stuff? Like is the relay operator going to be the choke point or the person held liable? And is there any way to guard against that and make sure you're not going to get screwed over as the person that's hosting this content? It's just like, you know, flag theory, right? Same idea. It's the same idea for Bitcoin mining is, you know, as long as there is an economic incentive and that's why sort of like the Bitcoin start to play into this, somebody is going to relay that message somewhere else, right? So yes, they can ask Amazon to take down a relay here. They can ask, you know, Herzl like to take down a relay in Germany or whatever. But you can't block them all and they can all have a copy of the information. So this one is going to be a tough one for governments to try to stop. I mean, you know, you look at OFAC compliance for Bitcoin mine blocks, right? The OFAC cannot, OFAC is this stuff that it's essentially like the Treasury saying, hey, this is a terrorist transaction. You can't accept it. You can't mine it, right? Sanctions, violating, yeah. So most of the miners like still do it, right? So it's no different than this. I mean, like half of the world doesn't give a crap about what your government locally cares. So they will relay and you can attach that economic sort of interest or incentive so that they have a reason to do so. But does that push people out of, I mean, like you guys are living in the developed world, in OECD countries, you know, if they come after you, isn't that going to have a chilling effect on people who are either developing clients or other programs that lay on top of the protocols, et cetera? And if they go to Amazon, I mean, like if the U.S. government, if the SEC or the FTC or the FBI says, hey, you know what, you're harboring something and you have this, you make a lot of money having web servers, but you make even more money and you have your freedom in the Amazon retail stuff, isn't that enough pressure to kind of squeeze the type of activity you're talking about out of the developed world? How's the war against turrets going? How's the war against drugs going? It's always going to be about selective enforcement, right? These guys break broad laws and then they essentially only enforce against the people that they don't like with the current government in place. Hey, thanks for watching that excerpt from our conversation with NVK and Will Kasarin about Nostra and the future of the decentralized web. Check out the full interview in the description below and tune in every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern to catch these conversations live and subscribe to recent TV and hit the notifications bell to find out anytime our videos go live.