 Hello, and welcome to the reason live stream. I'm Zach Weissmuller. I'm joined today by my colleague Nick Gillespie And today we're talking about Nostar a new decentralized social media and communications protocol and we'll explain exactly what that means shortly with the help of our two guests today NVK the founder of the company coin kites, which offers a number of Bitcoin related products a Bitcoin related product developer and the host of the Bitcoin review podcast. Hey NVK Thanks for having me guys and Will Kazarin a Nostar protocol developer and creator of the app Damos, which was the first Nostar based app to make it on to the Apple store and Which is my preferred client for accessing Nostar will thank you for joining us Thanks for having me so guys, I wanted to talk about Nostar which is a relatively at least to me new Protocol that's that's openly available Because I've been interested for a few years now in multiple efforts to decentralize or Really? Decentralize the foundations of the web and when I look at Nostar, which to be clear is still in very early days It's it's kind of exciting and I do get that feeling the kind of you know, Ron Paul It's happening meme We'll see after this conversation with her cold waters poured on that But I did think you know a good way to begin would be to look back at an excerpt from a piece I put together back in September of 2019 called the decentralized web is coming to kick off a conversation What year was that again 2019 all right, so life time. Okay. Yeah So we'll see if you know four years later or you know three and a half years later if it's actually arrived and So let's take a look at this clip and I'd like I'd like to get your your reactions and get into a conversation about Decentralizing the web is about topping the global digital advertising market last year. We're seeing this incredibly large company Getting involved in almost every area of Media companies, they're actively Silencing what I'm saying is we got to break these guys apart. You want to run a platform? That's fine You don't get to run a whole bunch of the business Google handles 88% of search traffic in America Facebook has more than 2.4 billion active monthly users and it's projected that half of US online retail will go through Amazon by 2020 there are calls from both sides of the aisle to break up the tech giants to strip them of liability protections for what others say on their platforms and to impose new regulations that would stop them from misusing the personal information of their Customers, but there's also a growing movement among some of the web's pioneering thinkers and software developers to come up with technological solutions to countering the growing power of Facebook Amazon Twitter and Google the goal is to build a new Decentralized web. Corey Doctorow is a science fiction author and tech journalist at Boing Boing Who's been thinking and writing about the web since it was introduced by Tim Berners-Lee in the early 1990s? Berners-Lee and other web pioneers Doctorow points out intended for their creation to be Decentralized an open source the cyber utopian view Was not merely that Seizing the means of information would make you free But that failing to do so would put you in perpetual chains. There are a lot of reasons to want a more Decentralized diffused pluralistic internet. It's hard to imagine that anyone is competent to make great decisions for two and a half billion people So does what Corey Doctorow said there have any Resonance with either of you and we can start with NVK and then will you know in terms of what you're interested And what's happening with Nostar? Yeah, so I think like that the initial sort of like a web 2 web 3 kind of thing was all essentially VC scams And you know it was essentially a 16 Zed and company trying to own the next version of the web So it was not really decentralized. It just had new owners and You know Bitcoin happened right about over a decade ago now and Bitcoin is Freedom money right and you can't really do anything without freedom money You can't even build a decentralized like internet or communication without freedom money because otherwise You can't really do anything even pay for the servers so What what what Nostar will infiat Jaff did That you know what was about two years ago now will When he came out is they created this incredibly simple protocol that that that is very good at relaying information and And being sort of like is like distributed decentralized and it can also be private It lives in all spaces It's incredibly hard to kill It's sort of like resolves this problem. So you can have Decentralized money and decentralized communication so that humans can sort of trade in peace, right? There is no owners. There's no company Same for Bitcoin same for Nostar This this this two sort of this at least how I see it the combination of the two Really sort of like came Had the stars aligned For us to build a more free future for everybody So will you along with Fiat Jeff as NVK mentioned there are one of the protocol developers What was your motivation for doing this and then we can discuss a little further exactly what it is We're talking about but first I just want to know, you know, what is what is the vision here? Yeah, I've always been interested in like, you know new and interesting protocols, you know Bitcoin really caught my eye early on and you know I've always been looking out and trying to think of the way as to getting back to like the early days of the Internet when everyone just it wasn't like owned by corporations and people just hung out and had fun And you know, it was much more decentralized back then because there's it was much more a focus on protocols So I've always been interested in like, how do you apply, you know protocols like to improve freedom on the Internet? So, you know, the first one that I tried was masted on the mast and I was like this really cool idea where you could You know, spin up an instance and then join it and then hang out with your friends But that we we started to see that that started There's a lot of cracks in that design in the sense that any one of those instance admins becomes like their own little Like they can just ban you and then you have to start over So as I was always looking out for a way to like make this kind of solve that issue where Like that we have on masted on and then eventually from Nostra and it got me really intrigued It was really simple and I just kind of dived in and you know, and it's been amazing since then so This might be a good spot to bring Nick in because you know, you mentioned masted on Nick I know that you have experimented a little bit with masted on and there was, you know a And a kind of exodus after Elon took over that that seemed to be the big alternative and Some recent articles have shown a bit of a drop-off in recent months I would like to hear from from you will and maybe NBK, you know What it is that is the differentiates Nostra from something like masted on but Nick what do you think about, you know, the kind of initial Twitter exodus? Towards something like masted on yeah, I remind well first of I want to point out that I just as we were having this conversation I realized I had just tweeted out. Hey come and listen to all of us talk about Nostra and mammoth Which is what I keep calling masted on in my head. I like I've officially My father always used to rob. I'm almost 60 years old So I'm fucking old but my father would always refer it to Cheech and Chong as Gucci and gongo And I am like totally in my gooch and gongo phase now because I keep calling it mammoth But yeah, you know I always saw the people who were like and there were a lot of journalists because Twitter one of the one of the Good things and bad things about Twitter is that there's a ton of journalists on it And they're always they were always like, you know the minute that Elon Musk took over they were like Oh, you know what fucking Twitter sucks. This is a hellscape. You know, I've got to get out of here I've got to go to digital Canada, which was going to be masted on and then of course like Five of them left half of those people came back after they realized Twitter wasn't going to disappear But I do you know my my questions for you guys And I I guess just off the bat like the promise of masted on was that you could get to a place where somebody like Elon Musk or Jack Dorsey before him or Less those guys really and like all of the faceless mid-level managers And we've seen this in the Twitter files who actually had it, you know have the opportunity to just say, you know what? I don't like what this person says. I don't like what I think they believe so I'm going to you know screw them over Something like masted on you know gives you the the idea that you can get elsewhere If you could just for this particular moment and well, maybe because I think you were you were leaning into this a little bit Or leading up to it. It's like when you get to masted on there are little islands of community there That are more repressive than anything outside of like north korea where there were there were whole Journalists who went to certain servers or whatever in masted on to find out that that came with an auto block list So that they couldn't communicate with anybody and nobody could see their shit Is that Like the big flaw with masted on and then how does nostre kind of route around that issue? Yeah, so Like I was mentioning, there's there's a huge flaw in the sense that you join an instance So I think nvk ran bitcoin hackers and it was like the only instance that I was able to get on and without Because I signed up to like multiple different instances And I would just say the word bitcoin and there's just so many communists on that these platforms I just got instantly get kicked off and I get banned so I have to start over and build my follower list again So like I found a home at bitcoin hackers But then the issue was you know every other instance just banned bitcoin hackers It was really just you know, we only had our small community and every leaf and it's pretty crude, right? I mean, it's yeah, they're not like actually going. I mean, you know, at least that old You know social clubs in new york or san francisco They would kind of look at you and pretend to give you a whatsoever half the time This is all just done based on your handle or what what identifiers you put in your profile So we open bitcoin hackers.org just to in case twitter sort of started kicking off kicking out bitcoiners This was while back. I can't remember. Well was the reason but there was something that was going on I think a lot of bitcoiners were getting shadow banned on twitter because twitter was being run by comies, right and So we all started like, you know joining master and I'm like, okay Maybe maybe this instance is like how we finally sort of like get enough people a critical mass outside of twitter as at least a backup And uh, you know, my my instance had no no moderation, right? I'm like, listen, you guys are all adults Please don't do criminal things, you know, talk about whatever you want Um, and that caused the whole mastodon universe to just block my instance Like so essentially every single mastodon server out there blocked it Um, and we had no communication outside Very verse fake And then I realized like, oh wait There's also people joining my instance who I actually really dislike and I don't want to host their data So I went and I deleted one of them and I was like, okay, great I don't want to be benevolent the theater either, right? Like this is not a roa want. I don't want to host your data um, so Uh, when I learned about nostra, it was like a little bit too early and and you know, these guys were playing that I was too busy with bitcoin um, and then I think it came back a few months ago I was like, okay, holy crap like this thing is really sort of like Now the clients work wheels diamonds was like, this is great. Um And uh, I think jack joined uh as well and you know, like he he sort of did a little bit of an infusion of uh of cash and uh and and attention And uh, and that project sort of like taken off like it's working um And uh, it's it's been it's been a blast. Uh, we we built a like a relay over the holidays Uh, we survived the the chinese spam influx um You know project still going can you uh, uh, nvk Can you explain then and and layman's terms because like I I'd like being an end user of this kind of stuff But I really don't fucking understand a lot of it but What is different about hosting a relay on nostra Versus running an instance on uh, mass. I was gonna say Mammoth, I think Yeah, uh, so on mammoth On mastodon, um, it's fully centralized like fully centralized I have the instance. I have the domain all your data sits on my server And then they have uh, like a few sort of like apis in their protocol for you to sort of like Push to all their instances. They want to see your content Right. So it's like there is a very thin layer of how you can sort of like interconnect that That uh, I'm oversimplifying but there's a very sort of thin Uh, very narrow way of you sort of like to transport those those Tuts as they call it those notes tweets between the instances, right that that are okay with each other But users have absolutely no freedom and no control Other other than to choose to join This instance or that you're just speaking a new dictator um Yeah, so maybe I need to make a network approach it from this angle in the sense that You know, you don't actually what NVK was saying You don't actually own your data because all the data and all and all the keys for the data is all signed by the instance admins So that gives them the power to just like they own your data, right? So it's just it's kind of like google button in smaller scale But with nostra Every piece of data that you create on the network It's signed by your private key and then you can take and so in some sense That gives you really strong ownership over all of your post all of your contact lists And it allows you to really easily move to different relays like I couldn't you can't really easily move from one mass on instance to another because you don't control the keys You don't control the data the mini you have control the keys of all your posts and all of your of all your speech You can now replicate it to different relays So um, it's much more flexible than mass it on in that sense and it gives you like a user more power The information is transportable by the user I mean it really lives in many relays and you choose you can even have your own private relay just for backup Um, and and you can also transport your identity between clients So, you know like on a bitcoin wallet, right? When you reload your seed in a different wallet the money just show up there Is the same idea with this uh, if you load your keys into a new client You're instantly accessing all your information that was already there um, and also all the all the The communication is public, right? So there is no deleting There is no backsies There is no censorship Because you always going to find a different relay To relay your comments and maybe start them temporarily or permanently I was pulling up this uh, this snowden tweet snowden is I would say probably one of if not the highest profile user of nostra at this point, you know, maybe jack dorsi But he describes, uh, this difference between a platform and a protocol and everyone involved with nostra is very Uh, you know insistent that this is a protocol not a platform He says a plat if a platform is a silo a protocol is a river No one owns it and everyone is free to swim Is that an accurate characterization? Yeah, I think I think he really hits the nail in the head in that sense. It's like, you know, platforms they they control the data They they they define who's allowed to access the data at what time and and if you get kicked out, then you can't, you know It's it's a silo. It's and you can't get to it, but you know In this case, it's more of like a river where anyone kind of jump in the river swim down and everyone can kind of be involved Um, so I really like that analogy. Um, but yeah, it's definitely more of a protocol than any than a platform So can I ask real quick, uh, just to follow up with the metaphor of the river and I'm thinking now of like, you know The lazy river at uh at an amusement park Everybody's kind of floating along in their inner tubes. How does nostra work? As a protocol to make sure that like things, you know, there aren't too many people You know clogging everything up, uh, et cetera And yeah, so this is actually a big issue. Um, because you know I run probably one of the biggest relays on the damas relay and it's wide open to the public and it's just getting spammed to hell Um, so it's like that's just that's the analogy. There's like everyone's kind of clogged and crammed in and you look at the global feed It's just like spam spam Um, so that's a big issue and one way one way you can get around this is a paid relays Um, so there's a bunch of paid relays where you just have 10 000 Satoshi subscript um entry fee and it just you know, and that kind of wait And only people with those keys can actually post on the relay. So that's one way to kind of clear up the congestion When you say spam, how do you identify spam and how how do you Categorize that as a different type of information than you know, an actual meaningful communication Yeah, it's usually just like them spamming the same message over and over and over. It's not you can tell us your noise Yeah, it's like visit my poker website visit my poker website visit my poker website. It's very obvious Well, I I mean, I guess that I'm what I'm I'm interested about is that you you guys were talking a lot and this is you know I I think I uh my first email account or online account email account was like 89 or 90 So it was way back. It was pre spam Uh, you know, then there was this the kind of spam revolution And a bunch of people particularly in a kind of libertarian or an cap world were kind of like hey, don't You know, don't be so fast to call something spam Because the original, you know, the original problem Were commercial messages that were being sent to people via Email So could you walk a little bit through perhaps the you know, the pre Uh, you know the pre web internet and why that was more decentralized Even if it was being hosted, you know up through some point in the 80s or I guess by the end of the 80s I think the government was out of it. But why was you know, the the era of usenet, which a lot of old people You know talk about this was a glorious moment of decentralization and then How how did the web or how did the internet become the web and get centralized in in Which seems to be what we're trying to get away from right now Uh, uh, do you want me to take that? Yeah, go ahead Yeah, so the way I see it is that, you know, the web is a great is that is a great platform I don't know. We're kind of, you know, abusing terms here But you know, it's a great platform and people started to build silos on top of this like Landscape, which is the web. So the web is is decentralized you anyone can spin up a server um, but the kind of the main issue is that You know, how do these like silos talk to each other right? So if you set up like gmail or youtube or All these different platforms that you know, they're all independent So yeah, in theory like the underlying substrates decentralized, but the things we're building in this landscape are not and they don't talk to each other Um, so when I think of decentralization or at least like the re decentralization of the web I see like how do we connect these silos together and how do we make all these apps that we're building interoperable? So I think master is like one of the that one of these protocols that can actually link these, you know Disparate silos together, which is pretty fascinating to me. Yeah, and while we're talking about this I'm just going to pull up this so the way what you do is you sign up You you create a key pair So you have a public key and a private key and then you can use that to access kind of I guess What we call the nostril network is that I don't know but You can use different clients and all of the uh, all of your followers all your posts You can see all of it no matter what you log into and so I'm just going to pull up here I just kind of did a screenshot of multiple tabs. I've got one There's one called astral. There's one called snort dot social There's one called iris and when you switch between them you see me switching between them It's the same feed The same people all my followers are portable So I just wanted to have that as a kind of demonstration as as we're talking about that that concept And then of course, uh, you know, this is damas, which was the first Uh app to get through the store to to allow you to to through the apple store to get Connected to the nostril network. What was that like? Will um, both building that and then getting past kind of the the apple programmers Did the decentralized aspects make that, you know, more difficult than a typical app Yeah, so it was actually a very long struggle with the apple review People because they're not used to like a concept of the decentralized social media app They don't really understand what that is So there be so a lot of the time to be like, okay Well, we need you need we need you to add a feature that allows you to like block a user and or to De-platform someone I'm like I literally can't do that this protocol does not allow that and I'm like so So all I can really do is add the um blocking features so you can users can block other users But you know, I'm just a client. I have no ability to tell a relay to like kick a user off, right? I'm just talking to like the silo or these these relays So that was a big struggle and I and I don't know how it got through I eventually just kept resubmitting it and then it finally went through There's not there's like from what I understand that there's it's a kind of like a magic To get on the app store, but eventually I got on and then within two days I was banned in china because like the ccp, I guess got wind of it pretty quickly and they're like, oh I gotta stop this But it was it's been an interesting experience to see it just going through the whole process How many uh, how many downloads have you seen so far? Uh, we're up to about 250 000 It went up to 24 000 in mainland mainland china in like a day and then that before it got cut off So if they didn't cut off china, I bet it would have been much much higher if when you say, okay So it's cut off. So uh people in uh mainland china can't get it anymore But the people who have it can they continue to use it or hasn't been rendered in operative They can just use it outside of dummies and outside of uh the app store, right? Like I remember when the relays were getting bombarded with chinese traffic Because the app store did open there That the the downloads on the store for for china dropped But the the relay that we run that the chinese traffic just sort of like remained the same Yeah, uh, so That's the thing right you don't need the same client. It doesn't matter if ccp doesn't like it anymore, right? I mean people will just run vpms or tor and get around it because the information Network is the same Right, the client is just sort of like, you know, one more nice sort of experience and shapes How will you absorb it? How will 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 Um, you just find another way of tapping into it and I'm sorry I'm speaking up for the other, you know, the one other person listening to this other than me who Needs this kind of analogy, but then is the client I mean the client is kind of like outlook used to be or something like it It's a it allows you to pull your email into Like it's part of that form that you can organize, etc I do like email analogy though in that because yeah, because email is a protocol, right? Yeah, so email is vertical So the main difference is so it's a really good analogy because you can have multiple different clients So there's a gmail client. There's a client things like that Um, so diamonds would be one client. Um, but the difference between email and nostra is that, you know In some sense the the information is siloed within It's kind of hard to like, you know, you know, pull down your data and push it to another email server So, um, that's kind of the main difference is that the data is much more flexible can flow much better But it's very similar analogy, I think, you know, remember us net where you have, you know, multiple servers hosting a lot of the same data Yeah, it's more like that. So you have the us net sort of clients And then you have this multiple servers you can pull the same data from You can also push to different servers Disrelays, right? They would also sort of like they can mirror each other. They can send To different other relays. So you're not tight. It's not like hub and spoke. You're not tied back to a single point Your client can talk to multiple places or rss same idea, right? Like you can pull from different places And back back to the china example for a second because I think it's worth lingering Up on since that is, you know, the the prime example of an authoritarian very powerful Authority saying second only to uh, mark zuckerberg and facebook This is not allowed I'm putting up here just right now the the notice that will posted uh, that his app had been banned In china and you see snowden commenting down there smells like fear But the reality is, you know, 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 nostre you still see like a ton of Chinese posts. It's almost maybe even, you know, half of the posts Have, you know, chinese characters on them So clearly that's some evidence that this protocol is fairly censorship resistant. Yes It's yeah, it's gonna be really hard for them to shut down all the relays because for instance I 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's there could be like a sub network that we don't even see that they're using within their country And that's so like that's one of 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 and we wouldn't even see that right so Yeah, I mean so Think about it this way You don't really have like a global global feed, right? Like it's not like there's a single source a single river It's more like a blue veal system, right? So you have like multiple rivers and they're all connected to each other Uh, and 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 Uh 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 it's pretty clever So the the thing that you you start to think about then is you know What are the choke points that are that that governments are going to try to use it? I mean it seems to me that the the relays themselves would be that the target like like there's going to be malicious actors, right? There's going to be people putting child abuse up there or you know scam type financial schemes Trying to like The you know 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? Um, or 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 they can ask amazon to take down a relay here They can ask you know her so like to take down a relay in germany or whatever But you you can't 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 olfak compliance for bitcoin mine blocks, right? They olfak cannot olfak is this stuff that it's essentially like the treasury saying hey This is a terrorist transaction. You can't accept. You can't mind it, right? sanctions violating Yeah, so most of the most of the miners like still do it, right? So it's no different than this I mean like half the world doesn't give a crap about what your government locally cares So they will relay And and you can attach that economic sort of Interest or or incentive so that they they have a reason to do so But does that push people out of I mean like you guys are living in in the developed world in OECD countries You know, if they come after you isn't that going to have a chilling effect on you know On people who are either developing clients or or other pro You know programs that lay on top of the protocols, etc And if they go to amazon, I mean like if you know if the 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 know You you make a lot of money having you know web servers But you make even more money And you have your freedom, you know in the amazon retail stuff is isn't that enough pressure to kind of squeeze The type of you know the type of activity you're talking about out out of the developed world How's the war against turrets going? How's the war against drugs going? You know, these guys don't really achieve what they're trying, right? I mean part they still online um It all sure like I mean i'm a law abiding citizen. I mean they don't like yeah I mean they don't you know the war open source. Yeah, okay I know and i'm saying like you know that I I I guess this isn't a question of whether you're right or wrong But then it becomes You know the the amount of workarounds and the and the dead weight loss of working around stuff because you know The fact is is the you know, I was just talking about this with Some people the other night the dea the drug enforcement administration Actually hosts a site where they put out the street price of drugs, you know in inflation adjusted terms They you know for the past 50 years they've been interdicting this stuff the price goes down in real dollars and the potent Thing but they still arrest you know a million people a year for you know Simple possession of pot or something like that. So it's always going to be about selective enforcement, right? This guy's great broad laws and then they essentially only enforced against the people that they don't like with the current government in place, right? Uh, thankfully flag theory sort of resolves a lot of these problems Can I also ask just and this was something I think mvk you brought up when you were Running your little personal dictatorship on mastodon you know It it remains it's it's a kind of principle of a free association and in many ways, you know the The the kind of grammar of the internet the dna of the internet in a lot of ways You know, even if it comes out of massive defense spending on some level is very libertarian Part of voluntary association is that people can shut down like they can choose not to associate with certain people Yeah, I mean just Yeah, yeah, just just get off the relay or or you know, don't Like block people on your own personal client. You just can't prevent them from talking So that's I mean that that is a great work around right instead of saying like we're not going to let you talk to anybody It's just I don't have to deal with you which seemed to be One of the you know, one of the promises of twitter I was always amazed when people are you know, like all you have to do to never hear from somebody again Is to block them or mute them or whatever but people were like no, that's not good enough I want to make it because they want to shut them off. Yeah, right We'll have to deal with this for the app store submission. Yeah And so how did you do that? Well, did you say because that's one of the things that the apps will say like that you I mean and it's worse on apple I guess than it is for android stores But you you have to kind of show that people can't use this for criminal behavior or if there is criminal behavior going on There'll be sanctions for that, right? Yeah, I mean ultimately they just want to make sure that their users on their platform have a good experience And obviously if you just go into the wild west of nostra, you know Even though it's like it is limited to like 17 plus and that's the rating on the app There's but there's still kids who download these apps and if they they go into the global feed and see porn Like that's not a good experience So I think apple is just trying to guard against those scenarios So it all I can really do is just do the best I can in terms of like trying to hide bad content Like I blur photos and people you don't follow Um, I have this feature where yeah, we could block people and you can always like yeah Unsubscribe from the relay to like not see that stuff from that relay So that's the best I can really do and I just try to convince apple that this is all I could do Like I can't ban people so Yeah, god That's just how the world works. I mean, I mean, you know like you You can't prevent people from talking right and and we're creating networks bitcoin and nostra where we essentially Enforced that sort of like naturalness of the world which is people can do whatever they want If you don't want to see it just close your eyes, right? You can't shut people up In this system. No, and you shouldn't you shouldn't be able I mean so this is Where you're harkening back obviously this is a very forward-looking protocol and system But you're looking back to the origin points, you know when when you know anybody watching this I mean fucking read a John Perry Barlow's declaration of independence in cyberspace You would think that's not just from the 90s, you know, it's not just from like 25 30 years ago It's from a different It's an alternative timeline from man in the high castle or something like that But that's kind of I mean what I I find really exciting about what you're doing is that it's it's channeling that energy of like Okay, we're we are actually in a new and different space that has different potential And we're actually going to run with that as opposed to immediately try to revert back to turn the internet or the worldwide web and to broadcast tv circa 2000 Yeah, and um, you know the the culture that those first principles that this has been built upon I think has attracted At least as the first adopters a certain type of user and created a certain culture that I want to get into In a minute, but I also want to bring first in some of the audience questions And if you have questions about this conversation, feel free to drop them in the chat. We'll try to bring them up One is um, marto. Pete says what happened china used to be cool Um Alexander jerry says you choose the relays. What makes a trustworthy relay? How does someone know it's not going to ussr? Sorry. I mean russia or china So is that a Concern think about personal responsibility. That's the world we're building, right? It's a no master nodes. No master relay So, you know like do your own research It's your problem. Yeah fair enough Not sure is a very public uh, a very public protocol. So anything you broadcast will guarantee, you know, it'll go It'll be everywhere. So Especially yeah, yes or no Would you talk a little bit about the the non-delete function because that's you know One of the big things that people were you know crying for elan must to implement was you know an edit button on twitter And things like that people set their tweets to auto destruct or you know, they you know And twitter got rid of the thing where you could save people delete deleted tweets and things like that How important is that you know, this is a this all is going on your permanent record You know, like they used to threaten us in high school and stuff like that How important is that and when do you think you'll be worth thinking that? So damas actually used to have um delete in the at least on the web version when I had the web version Um, and that's all well and good But in some sense it's un enforceable because you could you could send like hey I want this message deleted to all the relays but somebody like could be like no I don't want to delete it and so it doesn't doesn't really delete anything like so um, that's kind of the biggest issue um, but I started thinking about it and I think it's actually Although this is kind of like there's a controversial idea But I think it's kind of increasing the integrity on the network like you don't you can't just Just say whatever you want and then delete it and like take it back It's like you actually have to think and like and not just blur it out the stupid stuff So I think it's actually healthier for public discourse not and that's not leading to people just choosing not to say anything because that's right Yeah, um, but you know like on the internet you can't delete anyways, right? Every time somebody deletes something you get strikes in effect. So You know Can we just be grown-ups here and just say stuff you stand by and then listen you make a mistake I make a lot of spout mistakes, right? You just you know, do it again Uh, the network does support a a note that refers to another note saying hey that was deleted So please use this new note. Um You know, that'll be useful in non-contentious situations, right? So say for example, you're using Nostra to create a long part like you're creating you're using Nostra to replace A medium for example, right or or sub-stack very doable. Somebody already deal that it's a habla dot news um You know, you can create a new note to just replace the post you had there linked so that you you know fixed your bullet points or whatever In that sense. Yes, but you can't use You can't use deletes to sort of like forget gdpr is hopeless. Yeah So, I mean nvk is really, uh, you know, leaning into the kind of freedom responsibility like uh being connected and that that that's uh, it's a very It's very like bitcoin view of the world, you know, you got to have self sovereignty over your own keys It's your responsibility. It's also what I what I like I find really appealing about it and you guys are talking obviously you're working at the level of coding and everything But a lot of this is kind of, you know, really philosophical But it's an iterative process so that you know, we all make mistake We all make typos big and small And we shouldn't be ashamed of that in a way It's it's a better world where there is our past that we can see and learn from and renounce, right? You know, because Yeah, which lowers lowers the uh the fear and anxiety about being naked and possibly the desire to stay in shape Which could be an unforeseen, you know consequence There's nothing stopping us from just adding an edit. No, like I think that's fine You see a revision history of like spelling mistakes like this we can add that but like you just can't delete so But I would say that that's always been the the trade-off It seems for decentralization is it it puts more responsibility on the user Does that concern you at all in terms of adoption? Because like one one example that came to my mind when I was signing up for this is like, okay I am now in charge of the this private key and if but somehow gets lost or someone else gets it and I build, you know Thousands of followers then there's no, you know, Nostra customer support. That's gonna, you know, bail me out here Is there is that? A problem is it is that is that specific situation? First of all insurmountable and then just the idea that there's no You know customer support, uh, is that gonna really limit the growth potential of something like this? There is a very good community first and foremost. So there is customer support is just not like a corporate customer support People will help you Now the the other thing is I mean there is work being done in key rotation key delegation. So this is just sort of like it's early Uh, uh, it's just a challenge But you know like eventually we're gonna have means for you to have better key management. Let's put it this way So, uh losing keys won't be the end of the world They might just have to tell the world that he was lost and hopefully enough really see it and and then, you know um So you're building out these kind of networks of trust would be the solution there of like trusted relays No, it's more like it's more like a cryptographic solution to the problem Like it's very similar to when you lose a key to Important computers you can essentially sign that you lost and sort of like with another key. That's the parent key for that Uh, it can get very complicated fast. But the idea is uh, you would have means of of Sort of changing keys and and sort of like affording to lose some keys And there's a few things that domus is gonna is doing and is going to do One is that it automatically like saves your key into your password manager So, you know, really strongly encourages you to do that Um in the future we might have an option where you can just um put in your email and like maybe a password And then it'll just encrypt your thing to your email. So you can always recover it that way So there's a lot of just like practical user experience things we can do just to make it Just make it like less of a pain if you lose your key And and then the lastly like I've seen this happen all people what you're describing this has happened all the time And usually what they do is it's like hey, I this I you know Well, I guess that in that particular case it's usually because they're leaking their private key And they usually have to do another post like hey, I'm moving to this key But yeah, losing your key kind of sucks. It happened to be a few times in the very early days I will say it's part of course it is interesting like there's already a verification system So you can you know get your coveted checkmark without having to you know, beg a company to Give it to you. Uh, and there's I guess You are pay them eight dollars a month to retain it. What is um, and it seems to rely on this concept called a nip What what is that how how is the network, you know modifiable in that way? Yeah, so nips are just they're called not sure improvement proposals very similar to the bitcoin Or is that what it's called? Yeah, yeah, not sure improvement proposals. Okay. Um, I think I should know that But yeah, it's just a way that you extend the network like anyone can make a nip and you know It's not we don't have global consensus like bitcoin in the sense that if we're trying to Suggest to change the network that everyone has to agree anyone can just extend it Because the way that the nodes work is that they're really flexible So anyone can create a new note type which is like a different kind and then you can just have a custom application That does things like you know, you do like a ride sharing app or So the the nodes themselves are very flexible and that allows great interoperability between all the clients because at any point If someone makes a new app, let's say ride sharing app Then I can just pull down those notes into domes and I can like show like your route on your in domes for well I don't know So this this increase like flexibility between Applications is like the most powerful thing that we actually haven't really talked about yet So one of the ways that corporate, uh, america has sort of like captured the internet is through c8 certificates Right. So when you have your browser say ssl encrypted that then sort of like all the the main browser distributor said Hey, we're going to force you now to be ssl encrypted because it's for your own safety Right so that you can't be man in the middle, which is kind of through but With that they also introduced this thing which is essentially like a master list of of approved As a certificate authorities, right? And and with that they essentially remove the capacity of most people To self sign their own certificate for their own website So essentially you have to give amazon cloud flare and this big corporations The keys to the kingdom. They have to be the ones who sign this Um, they are the ones who can see the traffic in between. Uh, so the nsa gets their piece. Um, so Essentially with uh with noster now, which is really cool is you self sign, right your, um, your Verification by having your public key under a domain that you own You know, you're still sort of like, you know at the mercy of the dns servers registrars and all that stuff But at least now we've like seriously like a five minute guide any person Even nick uh can go there And and set up, you know, he's a nick at the least be calm, right? I think it's gonna take me at least 10 minutes But yeah, let's let's talk about that nick you you did set up your nostra recently What was that experience like for you? It was it was really kind of painful. I mean I sort of felt like I You know, I got a glimpse of what Alzheimer's is like Um, and zack helped me through it I you know, I had tried to do it a while ago when I first heard about this when uh, I guess when dorsi left twitter And it was then started talking about nostra Because I like the idea of that I have an account again. I was going to call it mammoth on mastodon I have I I ended up making two accounts because it was very confusing but yeah, I mean I what is Is the nostra ethos always going to be kind of Inscrutable to newcomers or is there going to become a kind of a well of nostra or or is it Is it, you know, I years and years ago. I ghost wrote a god. This was in the early 90s I ghost wrote a uh book chapter for a then sprint executive Who was talking about how we will know that computers have fully penetrated our consciousness When you take it out of the box and you don't need an instruction manual to start it It's like a toaster You just you know how to use it when you pull it out of the box and that's partly Design changes, but also like society, you know, you I mean like people know how to start cars now Even if they don't have any idea of like what's under a car or anything like that So could you talk a little bit about that and and I guess we haven't gotten to this we were going to Zach put together A kind of great list of like the you know the slang that Nostra people are using and it's like I you know what the fuck are they talking about and that's part of a new thing Right that you're learning a new language So but Yeah You know it's early, right? It's very early. It's early in this protocol. It's early in this technology Uh, you know, of course it's like the nerds are gonna come in first because they know how to do stuff, right? They know how to code Uh, but but then comes will and and sort of like, you know releases this this app They're like any person any person can just download click button and use like I mean if you're not importing keys or doing anything You're just downloading from the store and starting the app works It's actually easier because you don't have to create a password and username, right? So You know like I don't know like I don't see where the difficulty is anymore if you're using so these apps Yeah, the biggest issue right now is like there's certain things that users expect like being able to set a profile picture Which is like surprisingly not an obvious thing on this protocol because we there's actually no ways There's no way to host media like video or images on Nostra. It's all just text So you have to kind of go elsewhere to like Put your images on and the client like I mean I could do that I'm eventually going to do that where damas just has their own image host And you can upload your profile picture But those are just like ux improvements that we can make over time and just makes it easier for users So yeah, and I was using iris on my computer and That was very simple actually all of that kind of stuff becomes very simple very quickly Yeah, that's coming to ios as well by the way Uh, uh, yeah, he has a test flight already. Yeah. Yeah, I I agree that that's a very It's quite a seamless and well designed desktop client. I've been using that one on desktop You know, we've been mentioning that this is still early days Uh, these are some this is a guy runs a site that I guess monitors the relays to try to You know deduce how many user daily active users there are on Nostra The blue line um is what they call high quality pub keys writing events. Um Something happened on february 16th that caused, you know, more than 480 for pub keys to write events Which just means it's just accounts posting to Nostra, you know over 400 almost 500 000 times the total users profiles of bio is the blue line so a little bit above 500 000 users Which is probably the right line right the right line to be looking at to get a decent estimate of like, you know, real people using Nostra, um by just by comparison, you know, facebook is over 2 billion uh user so it's you know early days Not a big fish yet But that creates an opportunity for this interesting culture to arise because it's a very self-selected group of people Jack Dorsey says Nostra is counterculture today And has the potential to stay that way the open and wildly decentralized development model Keeps it punk. Um, so that that's that's an interesting assertion because he's saying, you know, he's It's kind of saying the medium is the message here and that just the very design of Nostra is going to keep it that way It's going to keep that that punk ethos indefinitely, um, do you think that's right or Is it going to kind of evolve new norms as the user base if and when the user base grows? um So so like, you know, I hate like sort of like bringing the coin all the time to this but um, you know When you have technologies that the culture can't be shaped The culture can't be enforced, right? You end up having the the first comers always to be Sort of like self-selecting freedom loving people, right? Because it's just it's just part of the nature of the protocol itself, right? Um, I find that Nostra to be very much the same way. It has that sort of like bbs After dark vibes, you know, it's it's like good vibes. It's the people who are into it now Um, you know culture does tend to dilute over time But because you can have sort of like this sort of like in groups out groups You can have this sort of like segregated spaces, right? So you can have private relays Right or like invite only relays that that still sort of interact with the rest of the universe um You know, you can preserve that thing that is pretty awesome I mean like beckwains, but like over 10 years old now and we still have you know end caps having You know a space to talk Uh, so so it's it's pretty cool that way Here's an example of I think this post from odell, uh, really distills down the nostre culture It's going to make no sense to anybody who has not been on the network pure vita Stay humble and stack sets and then kind of hang hang loose emoji Underneath there it says pv hang loose What does any of that mean? Go ahead will You integrated into the client So jack has had a huge influence on at least the damas client You know, so right when he started joining he would do the the shaka the hang loose emoji to every person who joined So eventually we changed the like button to uh, which was the heart on twitter We changed it to the shaka So it's like because it makes more sense and and jack agreed is like, well, you know, it's just anyway so, you know, the culture is kind of like Getting is evolving and we're kind of integrating into the client over time and pure vita. I think is a term from, uh, you know Costa rica or something where just means pure life and it's I don't know It just it kind of took it just it took off and that now we use up everything and so It's got that, uh, you know, it's a positive attitude after like laid back vibe to it. That's uh, and it's I mean It seems like a bit of surfer culture Yeah thrown in in a positive way You know, I think we should definitely bring up to this audience that jack was like a walmart greeter uh for uh For like pretty much everybody who joined on the first on the on the big wave that came in What was it three four three months ago two months ago? Uh, it was it was fun to see uh, he's Say to you the fact that the founder of twitter is certainly it's he's got to be the most high profile backer He's certainly put, you know, the most money Into the project. What does jack dorsey's involvement mean for nostre? It's validating, right? I mean, you know will like you closely like more working Oh, yeah Yeah, it's interesting because you know, he he said this is what this was a big post that he did on nostre He's like, this is what twitter felt like at 5 000 users, but better and so I feel like jack This is kind of what he always wanted to build is an open free speech protocol. That's like real time It reminds him a lot like it's nostalgic to him from the early days of twitter when Because nostre's actually was very much like what it felt like in the early days of twitter more real time and like Open protocol open apis. So I think he's like, yeah nostalgic and he just wants to you know He wants to like take that what he had it in the early days of twitter and he Relive it in nostre and build it out. So it's kind of cool Yeah, sorry guys, like what's really cool is that like he is contributing a lot financially to to a lot of projects Uh, and and like but the community itself is doing as well Uh, we actually have a website bound sir sr.org where people put bounties For features and projects and people are building like this hablah dot news and uh, and there were others So, uh, so if you're a dev out there watching this, uh, do go check out and participate Uh, a couple of years ago at the uh, bitcoin miam conference, uh, alex gladstein of human rights foundation interviewed jack dorsey who I you know, I think I I find jack dorsey to be the most inspiring and Very tech leader that we have and he was talking about how twitter Never should become the platform where people speak, but it should you know the the internet or there should be a twitter of twitters There should just be you know a kind of utopia of utopias Um, you know, it's a very libertarian very dispersed very decentralized things two questions Part of the power of twitter and this is also true of facebook and before it it was true of you know, aol Back when it had a walled garden is that it is a place where lots and lots of people are and Is there is there a necessary trade-off between? The size of the audience which gives things a lot of power and a lot of meaning And the ability to kind of control your experience or to have Maximum freedom is that just is that just the trade-off? That's one question and then the second one Is there a way that you can see or or has jack dorsey talked about this of integrating Nostra with twitter so that you can you you can participate in twitter without having to worry about You know elan musk has a sugar You know blood sugar spike and blocks you forever and ever and like You know the past 10 years or 15 years of your fucking life is just locked away from you forever Um, so so like first of all protocols shouldn't be companies, right? They should be an open protocol that anybody builds on top um Yes, twitter could create a client could create a relay tomorrow and I mean like twitter could literally push All the tweets into a relay as the author Or they could you know go really the proper route and create like a key pair for each user and sort of like go that direction So yes, it's totally possible that they could participate in this but At least in my view like most people don't want freedom. Most people just want a better sell So you have to give people tools for them to sort of like Sensor the things they want to censor for themselves and you know, and we're gonna see this We're gonna see relays where it's like I don't know like a pg-13 right a pg-13 relay where You know, you follow those guidelines and you're okay if your kids go on that relay And and that's sort of like the the moral set that you have and But but the key here is choice, right? It's not preventing the people who do want freedom to have that freedom And just going back to your your first question about like, you know There is that power of that global network and you can kind of you know Tap in anyone have conversations with anyone But we're also starting to see how that is not always have the the most positive effects Like there's a lot of anger on twitter whether that's you know, these algorithms that are You know making people like fight each other who might not necessarily even want to interact it to begin with And sometimes you're kind of being you're forced to to like click the you know the anger bait on on twitter So maybe it makes sense that we have we distill our networks into smaller sub communities And maybe those are represented by different relays and they overlap in some in the ways that You might want to overlap and you like and if you want if you're a part of two communities Maybe you join that one relay and you join the other relay and you see both in the in your in your client But people who don't want to see that other community that don't have to join that relay So we might see it's like smaller Community-based relays in the future So can I ask just to kind of follow up on that issue because you know part of this is technology and protocols And what is possible, but the other part is kind of what is permissible not simply by governments but by you know a kind of You know global zeitgeist or or regional zeitgeist and you know mvk. I think you were saying you know most people don't want freedom You know that makes me think of people you know like herbert herbert marcusa and one dimensional man or going back to eric from escape from freedom There's a persistent You know You know sense which is not you know completely off base that most people don't Not only do they not want freedom for themselves. They don't want freedom for other people and so Uh, you know how much of tech policy that we're seeing as you know, both from government levels in terms of regulation But then also within companies are coming from the fact that you know, all of us are in some Part of libertarian world or you know and capistan Um, how much of it is that we are in a moment now where people are like, oh, I've seen beautiful beautiful freedom I don't want it for myself and I don't want it from you and like You know, how do how do we attack? How do we change though when those hearts and minds so I think it's important to understand that at least to me like one of the main reasons a lot of people don't want freedom I'm sorry. A lot of people don't want you to have freedom is because like Free people remind people who don't want to be free that they're pussies, right? So essentially like I think that the only way to do this is to create absolute environments Right. So absolute freedom environments like like Nostra or Bitcoin or whatever Uh, and then we as people who who interact with these networks choose the extent in which We want things to be free and also choose the the the people we want to interact with and all those things I mean humans were not designed to to know what's happening in every place of the world at all times And talking to every kind of culture in the world at all times, right? I mean you lose your mind and that's why like maybe as we We allude it like Twitter is angry because like we're just not designed to have the fire holes into our balls eyes of like This is all the violence that's happening everywhere. It's like, please stop You know, I just want to hang out with my friends at this moment and say some stupid jokes You know what I mean? It's like it's like we're having like a poker night And we're gonna be offensive about certain topics and I don't want to be judged about those It's like everybody has your difference sort of like safe spaces, right? Yeah, you know, sometimes I just want to talk about and kept things and I don't want commies to come You know like mess with my safe and kept space um So it's just giving people both the freedom to say and express themselves absolutely But also having people Have ways to absolutely desegregate sort of segregate themselves from that absolute environment So, uh, can I ask does that solve we touch on this a little bit? But does that solve, you know, let's call it the child porn problem That you know the response on nostra is to child porn is that you will not see it unless you want to see It's not that we're gonna we're gonna hunt it down and get rid of everybody or we're gonna report people to the police You know on a system-wide basis. It is, you know, and I'm not I mean, I think it's a hard Line to to push but I you know, I I think there's a lot of a lot of validity in that Yeah, I mean, it's a fair thing. I mean like screw them. I mean, these people are horrific horrible human beings, right? I mean, there's a lot of horrific horrible things in the world Uh, you know, like you can police your house. Yeah, right. So like you can police your server You can police your client To a certain extent or to the extent that's technologically possible Right, but like what people do in the world is not your problem, right? I mean like you should strive to get those pieces of shit the things that they deserve but like You know, that's that's the kind of externality you have to sort out with the people who participate in the network How does like what are the in as simple terms as possible? What are the mechanics of blocking from an individual user basis? I mean, I know will mention that that was kind of a An essential part of getting past the the apple store was Implementing blocking, but how does that actually work since it's a it's an open network How do you stop users from interacting with your individual? Keep there Yeah, so each user has uh their public key and then so all you have to do is you know I don't want to see any messages from that key anymore Um, and then you just so that's what the client does it just hides all the messages from that key So if they're posting you know, it would be it would require the client to just respect Any of those requests from the users and all the incentives are probably going to be for the clients to Respect that request Yeah, the idea is that the client is is on your side to you know try to craft a view of the network that you prefer So it doesn't try to do anything that you don't want it to do at least that's my philosophy You don't have to create a client that does that you can create a client That's very opinionated and tries to block people automatically, but the dumbest client is the only way to You have full control over who what you're allowed to see and what you don't what you don't see so So for the the last part of this conversation I want to really talk a lot about the relationship between Nostra and bitcoin and specifically the lightning network before we turn to that Let me bring in a couple more the audience questions One is from uh emcee wild, uh who gave $50 in some sort of currency Regarding the client is it just pgp implementation so that you just use your key to self custody your identity Connected to all your messages, and if you could translate that question for you know The normal person that would be helpful. I think they're signaling al-qaeda, but i'm not sure Um, yeah, I mean it's uh, it's a form of uh, just signing of you know cryptographic signatures It's not using pgp per se. It's using something called libsec p 256k one And this just happens to be the library that bitcoin uses for their keys as well So we reuse a lot of technology from bitcoin, which is which was cool But yeah, it's it's very similar in that sense that it's cryptographic keys, but it's a different type of key btc pins nvk orange crocs or purple crocs Why not both? Um trainwreck is amethyst a legit nostra app Um, and then really helped because that's what I got on my phone And i'll follow up with that question to say if it is a legit nostra app What's the best way to to you know protect yourself and make sure that you're not accidentally giving your private keys out to a malicious actor who's running, you know a bad client Yeah, so amethyst is a legit app. Um, he's doing a really good job. He's probably the best android client right now Um, but there is a risk you're putting your private key into this client So if they have some rogue code in there that just is stealing keys, you know, you probably wouldn't know that's happening So that's that's kind of scary on the web. We have tools such as there's like the albi plugin and there's Things where you can put your private key into a browser plugin and it will hide It'll protect your private key from that from the browser apps, which is really important So if you're using a web app, please use albi or another extension And in the future we have this thing called nip 26, which is going to allow you to keep your Root key private and then use different keys for sending messages. So that's that's up and coming Can I ask with uh, you know, I I have an android phone and I I've downloaded amethyst. I haven't put my private key in it But should I not do that or what do you do when you want to use a phone based app? um, and if you don't want to put your um your Key I gave my keys to damas. So I better be able to trust you You're trusting me, but it is open source. So you can go and check the code and see if I'm doing anything bad But it doesn't mean that I couldn't have changed the code before upload it, right? I'm not I'm saying I did that I'm just saying it's like it's definitely the thing you got to think about Which is why in the future we're going to add this new feature where you don't ever ever have to put That private key in so that's gonna be probably for advanced users So what what should I do or what should amethyst users should they feel comfortable? Do you think putting their private key into amethyst? If you don't feel comfortable you should you can at least just create a new account and then just play with it and yeah In that in that way and then you know, but if you're it's probably fine, you know, we're not like malicious We're just trying to build this cool network. It's mostly yeah, I mean listen bugs happen, right? Yeah, yeah, like, you know like approach This is this is a big experiment. Uh, you know still like it's early. So, you know Don't use those keys for your life savings. Like it's the same idea Too light too light, right Last audience question here that I think you both might have an answer to What would you recommend for a learning developer to learn as far as decentralization? Where's a good place to start? Well, decentralization is a pretty broad term So you could it could be like if you want to get into bitcoin and see how like decentralized money works Or if you wanted to get into Nostra and see how decentralized free speech works You know, whatever whatever tickles your fancy just go down and look start reading some there's a lot of resources online Um, so I don't know. I don't know what the best answer is for that one You know, just learn how to code and then you're gonna find ways of Finding interesting things to work on just ask just ask chat to BT and then This is a post that you made uh, well Zapping is a gesture along the lines of I liked your post so much that I want you to prosper more in this life That is pretty strong zap equals love What does it mean to zap someone some sats on Nostra? Yeah, so Um, a lot of most of the clients have a way to integrate into the the bitcoin lightning network And it's it's very fairly simple You just attach a lightning address onto your profile and that just that usually puts a little Lightning button on each post that you can just send people some sats See it there on the right bottom right here on this post, right? Yes, I think I had a lot of wine when I made that post I was feeling like somewhat romantic or something But uh, it was it's it's it's true though It's like, you know, you're you want to if you see a post and you really like that person Like I'm happy to send some money their way and like I want them to create more content like that So it's like to suggest your love sometimes likes are cheap right likes Require no proof of work require nothing really like you know We created the like society in the last 10 years and look where he got us right So so this idea of you having even though it's like nearly no economic difference to you to send a few sats Um sats are especially a small unit of bitcoin And we're talking Like a a sat could be as little as a penny, right? No wait we last it's like it's like a hundred of thousands of a penny Um, but you know like there is this bigger thing that happens, right? You're actually parting with something that is yours, right? And you're giving it to somebody because you did like their post so it's not just this empty like society Uh, you also help with spam, right? So people can't game The the likes anymore And the the retweets and things Um, it's a at least in my view. It's like a better way forward We have this with podcasts now the podcast 2.0 people can send sats and they can stream sats to the person They're listening to Uh, maybe value for value makes a way back. Yeah, you know for why you know I have been somewhat of a skeptic of this micro payments idea, but uh, it's so seamlessly integrated on most through most of the clients and It's a fascinating idea. I mean and it is fun You know, some people have been zapping me some sats on my posts and it's you know Maybe worth like a dollar total or something, but it's exciting to see people You know engaging in that way So and it also makes me think like wow this really Is could be a competitor not only to something like twitter, but maybe one day something like venmo Um, like how integral was you know putting Um, uh, you know bitcoin and specifically the lightning network, which is a second layer on top of bitcoin that you know Kind of speeds things up. How integral was that to the development of nostre? um I just think for me, it's like If I just created another twitter and just like replicated it it wouldn't be that interesting to me So I was like, what can we do to make this like let's just like amp it up to the next level and make this really interesting And so lighting I was working on lighting at the time just like as a protocol developer I'm like, let's just add this because it's easy to kind of combine protocols in that way And and yeah, I just I feel like there's something happening on the network now Which is it's really amazing to see just the people sending money back and forth and you know the other day I just like zapped someone a million satoshis, which was like $400 I'm like I can't like that's amazing that you can even do that on a social network just like Like zap on people so You know adding economic incentives to things tend to make them better when it's the hard money, right? I mean, this is not the fiat standard. It's the bitcoin standard. So um, you know You you create People who care more about the things that they're interacting with Uh, and I think this is this is making a huge difference on on this You know, like will said like, you know, just recreating tweet twitter Like, you know, it's totally possible in austere, but then you arrive at the same sort of horrible place you're in um, like yeah, yeah And just like in sending a zap People just seem like happier on the network because you know, there's so much love going around if zap is it loved And there's so much love going around on the network and everyone's having a great time And I think everyone's just I think the reason why everyone's so happy is like There's like we have a path forward into the future and people really hopeful And they now they know they can't be censored. They can't be you know D-platform and it's just like they can just be themselves They a big issue with like a lot of these mastodon instances is I was always self-centering myself because I didn't want to Say the wrong thing to tick off the admin to get banned But now on this network that they don't have to worry about getting banned So people are just being themselves and be happy and be cool even though it's you know It's kind of quirky and but it's it's fun I mean, it is easier to be happier when you can't be censored, right? It's you know, it's the same with financial transactions with bitcoin like you're just you just don't self censor yourself It can be yourself You might even be nice or two you might not be trying to show a different thing because the incentives are different Can I ask well? I think you were talking about how You know jack dorsi was talking about this, you know, this is what twitter felt like when it had 5 000 users There a lot of what you're talking about it, you know the early days of twitter Um and as it became a global phenomenon phenomenon a mass phenomenon It was mostly people were really happy on it, you know, and it helped underwrite Who supercharged the hour of spring? It brought new life to things, you know boring worn out shows like the nhl all-star game or the or the Academy awards and things like that Is there a is there a a moment when you could say definitively this is when twitter started to suck Or are there events, you know that you are worried about happening for nostra that will You know that will make it sour I have a theory and I think the big one is the algorithm So I think the algorithm is just making people unhappy even though it's like boosting engagement people are more gauged But it's like engagement doesn't always mean it's like good engagement. It's like right. Um, so I think right now You know, we wrote reason a couple of issues go ahead a great story Cover story called in defense of algorithms because you know a lot of times people now talk about algorithms Like, you know, it's fucking zardos or a witch hunt or something where you know, it's this evil alien force But you know on its most basic level algorithms tend to you know, they're trying to push you shit that you like, right? but continue please Yeah, but like a lot of the way that these like these machine learning algorithms work is like They don't really know if you really like it or if it's having a good mental effect on on your brain They just notice that you click it more and so maybe like a lot of times it was click it Because it's like this is pissing me off on a click I'm going to respond and that would just register as like. Oh, this is an engagement This is great. People are interacting more when reality is so there's no there's no systems that there's no algorithms that can like Detect if the user is happy or not Based on how they're using the system at least from the from the perspective of the actual machine learning algorithms Will it be possible for relays to implement those sort of algorithms? Would they be using the nips to do that? uh Yeah, I mean it could definitely create relays that sort of like the creative certain feed the way that that it wants It's kind of nice. I mean like, you know, you might not want to see every repost. You might not want to like see every You know, like some some words you don't like, you know what? I mean like any Sometimes you can push some of that sort of work to the relay or the clients can do it, too That the clients are going to be able to offer you a certain experience that you prefer Uh, and in that very libertarian manner, you know, you can vote of your feet Uh and your wallet Algorithms, but sorry I say algorithms, but I'm actually about to implement one in the domus, which is This is a very simple one that just shows you all the top Zapped posts. So I don't know if that'd be bad. I don't know if it'll be be doing it But usually it's just like people are sending money to a post. They like it So I don't I'll see if that that turns out bad or not Well, that uh, you know, this is part of the problem because then people are going to be like, oh That's getting a lot of zaps. I want to do that. So they start modeling off of that, right? Maybe you do affect you do shape you do shape behavior, right? But but again, like the problem that we have now is that there's no choice, right? You have twitter you have facebook you have instagram, which is really facebook And and and snapchat Which exactly talks about because that's for my kids not for right or tiktok or whatever, right? So but you're stuck in the silas is and you don't have a choice Of of like how you want to interact with your friends your network and the world really right or news So like just being able to choose clients based on honest or dishonest You know, like the clients will do what they're going to do and and eventually you're going to find experiences that that make you happy Or maybe you want to be miserable and you choose a miserable app like I saw that Do you worry about, you know, well, what what's an event that could really fuck things up as far as you're concerned That's like, uh, it's hard to say because that's one of those things where it's like I wouldn't I can't really predict What what that would be Yeah, maybe this like, you know, we start implementing algorithms Just and it just becomes just as bad as of twitter What I what i'm actually really interested in looking into is this idea of like a free market for algorithms So maybe there's like some type of like scripting language that all clients might be able to implement And then you can have like you can choose which algorithms like rank stuff on your feed and I think that'd be really interesting This I don't think and many other social networks are doing that right now, so I want a dumb bar. Sorry I want a dumb bar. I'll go, you know, there's only I'm only allowed to have a hundred people I follow at all times on my app and I have to sort of like make these awful decisions of like To have a new one in I saw that um, uh, there was talk that twitter may be Rolling out some sort of twitter coin that would replicate this zap idea on twitter Where you reward people with these twitter tokens instead of likes is elan musk feeling the heat from naster Are you worried? I guess are you worried that Basically anything that succeeds over there is just going to be kind of absorbed by twitter or or is it or is that kind of the goal that you you want naster ultimately to be absorbed by a competitor I think musk is going to use and I I've already forgotten the name of what was facebook's, uh, cryptocurrency You know, he was able to pick those up, uh, that's great for like he bought them with old camel bucks You know, you give a man a money a chance to have a money printer. He will use it So, you know, like musk is just gonna print his, you know, like a twitter shit coin and uh But these things lose value right because you're gonna be stuck to that thing You're gonna have to use kyc to buy those the credit card You know, you're sort of it's just remaking this horrible environment, but now you're gonna have like twitter cbdc, right? You mean one twit coin doesn't equal one twit coin. That's right I saw I happen to see this comment down there imagine thinking that bitcoin can scale laughing emoji um, and I only bring that up because actually like seeing The kind of seamless integration of bitcoin via the lightning network on nuster makes me think well Actually, this does seem like it could scale How how worried or like what are the big concerns for you in terms of scaling it? You know that does does big does the integration of lightning Cause any scaling concerns. Um, and then just you know more and people more and more people Uh jumping into the relays obviously it's gonna, you know, slow things down at times How do you deal with scaling concerns? Say if if you know nuster, you know starts, uh, you know Got an upward huge upward trajectory after this stream today There's a lot of projects to scale lightning. Uh, there is also fediments. Uh, there's there's a lot going on in scaling You know nuster is not the only thing, you know, who knows maybe a much bigger network right now goes and adds bitcoin to it Um, you know, it is scalable. There's always going to be some snags along the way Because this is sort of like, you know freedom tack, right? So somebody has to go and build it Uh, uh, there is no big check from government. Hey here, uh, scale this to fake money, right? So, um The the thing is this kind of criticism is is a little annoying because everything is working You know, aside from a snag here and there, I mean like we're here bitcoin is running, you know, nuster is running the tips are flowing Um, isn't the lightning network seem to be a contradiction to bitcoin though in the sense of you know, the whole idea is that you're doing peer-to-peer Disintermediated, you know irreversible irrevocable Transactions and then the first thing you got to do after a certain number of people are using it as I'll put something on top No, absolutely not. Um, so lightning is just a different way for you to transport the utx so the the unspent Transactions, right? It's just a more efficient way to do that without having to go back to a block But you you can call that that say capital at a chair Right at any time, right? So you can close that channel and and there are penalties if you don't people lose money if you don't So, uh, no, it's it's not it's not a good sort of way of representing it It is it is bitcoin I see I see lightning as like a clever way to Use bitcoin transactions because all all lightning is it's like you you create this bitcoin transaction that you go at multi-sig And then you just don't broadcast it to the chain and you're up You're updating it off chain and it's just like it's just a smart way to to do a to update a bitcoin transaction You know, obviously in the white paper it is a micro payment system I mean that's the whole point or you know the original statement But it does seem like once you're you've add any space. I mean some you know, that's it's it Presents the possibility for funny business to be happy, you know, that's that's the that's the beautiful thing about the cryptography is magic, right? We can we can do things with a fair degree of certainty Right like nothing is a hundred percent, right? But you can do things with a certain degree of certainty That that you can create sort of like human transaction models on top of it without being a real concern Can I ask I and I I want to turn it back to uh, zack to Follow up on on the bitcoin stuff But you know part of you know part of what's happening with bitcoin and we saw this, you know, even uh, gary genzler You know who is nobody's idea of a you know frontiersman when it comes to you know, financial transactions Or anything but he was saying, you know, you got it if you don't if you don't Own your keys you don't own your crypto and things like that and it seems like nostra is coming out of the same mindset where You know at a couple weeks ago we had Powell on from kraken talking about You know like ultimately in his favorite future there will be no Bitcoin or you know, there'll be no crypto platforms because everybody will own their own stuff Are we going through a phase here a kind of phase change that bitcoin? Maybe is like the first part of like where People really do have to kind of own up and understand the technology they're using on some basic level, but also take responsibility You know and I mean not to get too grandiose about it But if you know what happened in the enlightenment was that individuals ultimately were given They weren't given they took it they stole it from the powers that be But they insisted on having more control over their lives of more responsibility Are we are we in the beginning stage of another broad base shift where individuals were pulling back information? We're pulling back our identity. We're pulling back power from these large corporations or states That have been saying now we are we're running things. You don't get to choose You know If you if you have your own private keys I mean any person right now in the world that can remember 12 words could travel make it with all their Money all all their wealth right and there is absolutely nothing I state actor can do aside from killing them Right, they won't even know that they have it. So I think you'll take like another 20 30 years First-aid actors to get around that and understand that productive people are going to have to be offered Better terms in order to to stay with their capital So everything that goes around this new sort of dynamic Right of of actual true ownership is the first property can actually own right without state enforcement So, uh, it's a paradigm shift. It really is and nostril is the same for identity And in a network That's very fascinating. I just want to you know, I want to travel with somebody Who is carrying? You know all of their wealth, you know, and as we just cross border and border and they are like whispering to themselves They're don't forget it. Please don't forget. Yeah. No, but I mean I I love that vision I think it's one of the most absolutely captivating ideas of a future That is, you know, it's just like insanely free and autonomous So I repeat my 24 words to myself every day just like in my head just Just just in case I need to escape the country. Yeah I uh, uh, just to close out the conversation. I want to talk about something will was alluding to early on that social media Is really kind of just the beginning at least of the vision for nostra and um, this post from nvk Says, uh, bitcoin is distributed Nostra can be centralized decentralized and distributed all at the same time for different interactions slash content nvk, could you explain first of all, what is the difference between say decentralized and distributed? and then talk more broadly about the point you're making here about Nostra and kind of the the possibilities beyond just social media So like bitcoin is almost the literal opposite of nostra in topology so in bitcoin Everybody has to be in the exact consensus Of the ledger and every single participant has a full copy of the ledger I mean real participants if you have your coins on coin base, you're not a bitcoiner Coinbase is a bitcoiner in your name, right? But in that distributed map, right? You notice that every single node is connected to every node you could draw that same analogy, right? Not that everybody's actually connected, but the idea is everybody has a copy of the same exact thing We all agree that that is exactly the same thing through proof of work, right? And that's bitcoin um Now on on nostra relays And and clients and users they have a many too many relationship Right and they can even have slightly outer versions Of the network itself not everything but you know, there is things you don't necessarily have to agree on You might actually even fall off consensus say for example, you're using the nips in a different way It's not ideal. It's not a good use of the network But is this possible and you may find other Network players that also want to use the slightly variant version of the network Um, it just means that you may not talk to each other anymore, right? You become decentralized and you may have points uh bridges that make sort of like interface between the two is inefficient But but what I'm just trying to represent here is that there is a freedom for that, right? And and on nostra you can also have this private relationships too You can have your private relay that just keeps backups of all the interactions you have with all the relays, right? There all the relays may not have full visibility on all your notes So you may choose to send cat pictures to cat picture society relay groups. You may choose to send, you know, like You know long form articles to some other place And and you can keep this thing separate separate on how you interact with the whole universe, right? But then you can have like different ways to interact to some of them that may be more private less private It can have company relays that only see like employees of google have access to So so that's essentially what i'm trying to explain These two things are completely separate, but they use very similar uh pre symbols of of like freedom style networks How about you will what what is the what is what are your wildest dreams of where this heads, you know in the long term? Yeah, so the way that I see these relays is that they're like they're free speech nodes in cyberspace And you can interact with them in different ways and they can have different access levels So you might maybe you would have like one like like nvk was saying one within your your organization and it's private to your organization But it's actually much more general than just speech So this is nautra's notes and stuff transmitted over relays. It's not just speech and stuff You know, so you could have application data that is transmitted and censorship resistant for different use cases You can know you could build applications. I someone built like a chess application on top of nautra so what what nautra really represents to me is like It's like a generalization of the web specifically for interoperable applications And that's the one thing that the web lacks is that you yeah, you can go to a website and you have all yourself in that one website But they don't talk to other websites so nautra is like this You know this system that is like everything can interoperate and that we we're just starting to see what what's possible with that Like we don't even know where this is going to go, but it's it's really exciting You know there is a bounty sorry for 300 000 dollars right now for somebody to build a alternative to github using nautra So git is a decentralized protocol already right for you to write software where it keeps version control right Because that is tax-based you can actually sort of send those commits via nautra And somebody just has to build sort of like you know a client that sort of takes advantage of that Yeah, what I would love to see is you know, I've just this has just been on my mind lately with the kind of rolled doll rewrites where they went back and kind of excised problematic passages from his books I would like to see some sort of blockchain based solution to kind of Sensorious revision of like historical works And it does I mean nautra seems like a potential Route for that because it you know, it's obviously can handle text-based Information, but yeah, that's it's a really interesting vision that that you sketch out there will I would love that type of stuff for literary works in general because you know I mean authors as well as corporate authors, you know change stuff all the time the hearty boys We read today is not the same hearty boys from 1980 or 1930 And to be able to see that kind of entogal in between but even you know, even You know short story writers like raymond carver Radically rewrote their stories over time and the question isn't whether that's going to happen It's how do you make it visible so and how do you give both the reader and the writer control? I think put it on it Yeah, well Guys real quickly, you know, you're you know, how did you come into? Not simply obviously coding and stuff like that but being libertarian because you know We started this conversation with a clip from a great doc that's acted only a few years ago with quarry doctor You know the quarry doctor that we're getting in 2023 is not the same quarry doctor We were getting in you know, 2003 You know Well, why don't you start like where where did your world view? Come from and and what are your commitments? Yeah, I was like very politically ignorant and like it just like philosophically ignorant I was just a computer nerd and I just like building software And then and then I discovered bitcoin and I started talking a lot of bitcoiners And I started asking like what is money and the minute I went down that rabbit rabbit hole That's like you should have asked what is a woman that's easier But then I instantly like yeah that I basically became libertarian overnight and this and that's been kind of Because I just find that a fascinating topic like what is money and and how bitcoin fixes so many issues in our society um Yeah, anyway, that's guys that was where I came from Um, how old are you well? I am 34. Okay, and NVK I'm a product of the early internet Yeah, um, and uh, you know hacking school and crap like that But I was very confused politically, uh, you know, I'm of a you know generation where Um, you know, we were trying to seek a better world through Through very confused ideas And I think bitcoin and like, you know, when I found bitcoin understanding money similar path It just it crystallizes right because money is everything is where the incentives come from is where freedom. It truly is made Information. Yeah, yeah, you know and and and sort of like that that shaped Uh, that shaped my uh, my last uh, my last 14 years Uh, how old are you NVK if you uh? I'm I'm I'm 40. Okay. Wow. You are ancient Ancient and early internet pioneer. Well, do you guys see then you're both and zack you're what 38? 38 38. Yeah 38. So I you know, I I speak here as like, you know, if I can charlton hasten and planted the apes or something but Do you I mean you guys as um, you know as representatives of of millennial and and actually yeah, right? Well, you're still extra. No, no, no. I refuse. I'm on the border No, you're not you're I'm sorry. You're a millennial. No We've checked with the you know the powers that be but Is there um, you know, I mean there's a real interesting kind of split right generationally where you know, certain millennials are very You know, you know, they want to be protected. They want the trust the third party to do everything Uh, and then there seems to be you know a growing, you know, or a flip of that is you know Can you can you speak to that and is bitcoin? You know is bitcoin the way uh, and and a kind of distributed decentralized future? Uh, one that's you know, where individuals are really talking about having more control and more autonomy over their decisions um, you know, is bitcoin helping to make that a reality or is it just going to harden a kind of divide between Collectivist and kind of arch individualist So I grew up in brazil, right and and I had my savings removed from me with bailed in I oversaw for currency collapses Uh, you know a society is completely broken down economically socially like everything and with all the natural resources you know all the the usual brazilian problems and you know like at least in brazil like It you don't see young people being as naive and as sort of uh, uh You know commie like the champagne commie as we call them Uh, they're not champagne socialists like here in north america. I mean You know, maybe it's just a product of life is just too easy and and now you have like, you know pizza porn video games And in your parents basement. So people people Don't find responsibility because they don't have to You know your generation and in the generation before you like kids would start working at like, you know 15 But actually working I I can tell you I'm like like you I'm at the end of the baby boom. It's like No, it's like my fucking life and I grew up lower middle class My life was easy particularly compared to my parents who grew up in the depression. So maybe It just but that's it. It really is just a it's a product of responsibility, right of like being forced To have responsibility at least in my view. So like bitcoin once you you get into bitcoin You sort of like you truly it clicks for most people that are in it that like there's clown world out there Is all designed to exist in this sort of like boring from your future Uh, and and that's the money opportunity cost problem that you you can't find it You can't price your life in fiat And you get into bitcoin you're like, holy crap, you know, I have responsibility over my money now and and and I can't build things on the future because you know, the bitcoin price sort of appreciates in this specific distribution schedule because the discarsity thing The inflation is it's sad, right? So Provided that this project works like, you know, you're building your future based on this on this very strong pillars That has like, you know over a decade now of sort of like working So I I don't know. I think that's why like It doesn't matter which generation you are you find bitcoin and you quickly like very clearly and very fast you snap into the a more hayek or or sort of uh Uh, uh version of the world Well, do you have a any Uh, pretty much everything in mvk said I don't think I made anything extra Let me uh, let's uh wrap up with just these last few audience questions. Um, and then get out of here One is from anon aterlin. I fear human nature will always lead to isolated islands on the internet Like how mastodon is turning out to be um, I mean I I tend to think the opposite actually that the human nature has shown that people love to jump into a big Uh, why uh network where they have a huge audience like twitter or facebook and kind of maximize their connections But does anyone else have thoughts on That's that concept Echo chambers islands I think there's room for both. I think you can um So I think duster really supports different different use cases and it can really enable a if you want to hang it with your Smaller communities you can do that if you want to reach a wider audience you can do that And I think that makes sense. I don't think being like always in the global audience is always a good thing So just providing options. I think is is better situation Uh, yo Yale ossocky says zack. I love that you're big on this right now and have plenty of zaps in your wallet Yale was the one who got me Looking into nostre. So thank you. Yeah, it's a it's a really fascinating um space Um mc wild 11, uh again says where data stored how our message is tied to private key are their limits to data types Um, maybe that's just the last question here is worth addressing any web with technical documentation You can point us to so just people who want to know more about the underlying protocol. What do they do? So you can go to the uh our github. It's the nostre dash protocol Slash nips and that will give you all the protocol documentation. You can also just go to nostre dash protocol Slash nostra, and it'll give you a really good overview of like why this exists and why it's cool Um, yeah, and for the other questions the messages are stored on the relays and they're signed by your key and yeah And i'll set that how yeah not sure about how yeah, so can I ask so like if a real light disappears Does your map do your messages disappear with it that potentially? Yeah, if you're not having them somewhere else, too So this is why you connect to like more than one If you're just connected to one you just you're basically twitter So you want to connect to like 10 and then every time you do a post it'll send it to all those relays So this is it's all harry potter right this is all we're in like a horcrux age where we're we're taking ourselves and kind of It's not an exact metaphor, but we're spreading ourselves around in different places So that when we really need it we can go retrieve ourselves Yeah, I mean in time you're going to see paid services to archive your stuff You know again It's these are all problems. They're still not present right because we're still all experimenting and having fun But as people try to do things with like higher economic incentive Like solutions come Yeah, yeah Well, thank thank you guys. This was a great conversation. I'm putting up. You can follow all of us on nastra There's the uh handles you can use to yeah, that's either my public key or my cholesterol In some kind of binary code. I don't know but thank you Yeah, you can copy uh nick's long public key uh from the text below Or for the rest of us just copy those uh addresses to find us on there. Um, thank you, uh, will thank you nvk Thanks, nick. Um, thank you to best buyers our backstage producer And uh, also to everyone who tuned in will be back here next thursday at one o'clock Thanks