support dispatch: https://citadeldispatch.com/donate
EPISODE: 125
BLOCK: 839662
PRICE: 1658 sats per dollar
TOPICS: nostr development culture, sovereign engineering, bittorrent, i2p, ipfs, tradeoffs and benefits, AI and LLMs, how communication will evolve going forward
project websites: https://satellite.earth/ + https://nostrudel.ninja/
hzrd on nostr: https://primal.net/p/npub1ye5ptcxfyyxl5vjvdjar2ua3f0hynkjzpx552mu5snj3qmx5pzjscpknpr
stuart on nostr: https://primal.net/p/npub1lunaq893u4hmtpvqxpk8hfmtkqmm7ggutdtnc4hyuux2skr4ttcqr827lj
website: https://citadeldispatch.com
nostr live chat: https://citadeldispatch.com/stream
nostr account: https://primal.net/odell
youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@citadeldispatch
stream sats to the show: https://www.fountain.fm/
(00:00:03) Fox Business Intro
(00:04:18) Introduction to Citadel Dispatch and discussion on Gold vs. Bitcoin arguments
(00:06:44) Conversation about the Nostr ecosystem and its development
(00:26:19) Focus on developing the satellite stack and creating a Discord like server on Nostr
(00:36:04) Importance of making Nostr infrastructure indestructible and uncensorable
(00:39:55) Discussion on Hyper DHT and its role in making Nostr more secure and decentralized
(00:44:39) Exploration of alternative DNS solutions and the concept of discoverability in Nostr
(00:45:33) Reasons for the limited adoption of I2P and challenges with its complexity
(00:45:51) Connecting to the entire world and the peer-to-peer aspect
(00:46:45) Importance of web of trust in making connections based on followers
(00:47:55) The significance of social activity in producing signal and deriving social capital
(01:29:14) Discussion on the reliance on large relays and the deletion of the Damus Relay
(01:30:26) Importance of users holding the cards of the actual infrastructure in Nostr
(01:33:09) Debate on the role of peer-to-peer networks and the need for authenticity in the digital sphere
Much lower than this, if Natalie were smart, as soon as this segment is over, she would sell all of her Bitcoin.
[00:00:11] Unknown:
Because if she doesn't sell it now, she's gonna sell it later at a much lower price. Well, VIM's what we call fighting words. And I think they're similar drivers for both, but let me introduce the 2, Natalie. Natalie, meet Peter. Peter, meet Natalie. Alright, Natalie, some choice words for you. What would you tell Peter? Oh, I know Peter. And you know what? Bitcoiners don't feel the need to constantly attack gold because we're not threatened by gold. And the reason that we have this failed fiat experiment
[00:00:38] Unknown:
that has impoverished our nation is because of the defects of gold. The fact that it's not easily portable, it's not easily verifiable, it doesn't offer instant final global settlement. And so you know what? Centralized authorities hijacked it. They papered over it, and we have a system of leverage and rehypothecation that hurts the working class. Bitcoin is immune to all of that. It is the savings account for billions of people that we really need and and can most rely on, and it offers that final global settlement that we need. And so gold is the analog version of sound money, but Bitcoin is the digital version, and that's why it's gonna be the faster horse in this race. Peter?
[00:01:15] Unknown:
There's there's nothing sound about Bitcoin. It's losing the race right now. Take a look at your screen. Gold is up 25, $26, and Bitcoin is getting clobbered. You know, there there is no flaw in gold. Gold worked great for 5000 years. The problem is the flaw is with governments, the flaw is with human beings, not with gold. But Bitcoin is is really flawed because it doesn't have any actual value. Gold is the most useful metal on the periodic table. That's why it's money. Now it has great characteristics that make it better money than other commodities, but absent its intrinsic value, it it couldn't be money. And Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. It's just a digital screen of numbers. Because And all of this is just a bunch of hype. Anything could be money. Right? On the island of Yap, they used to have big stone,
[00:02:04] Unknown:
stone money. Anything could be money, if people, use it as an exchange. And this is the thing But that's because they But here's the thing, though. You have to No. Bitcoin is on the rise. Wall Street has embraced it, and this is just a tiny speck. I mean, could you imagine could you imagine, Peter, at the rate, of of recognition, if Bitcoin keeps going at this rate, it's hard to deny it could go substantially higher.
[00:02:28] Unknown:
No. I just told you it's been dropping for 2 and a half years. That's what it that it what it means. All time high recently. And I think that decline is gonna accelerate. It it it it that does not keep going up. They suckered in a bunch of people. Wall Street didn't embrace it. They're just trying to make a buck off it. I mean, these big Wall Street firms aren't buying any Bitcoin with their own money. This is their customer's money that are dumb enough to buy it. They're just booking the bets. They're operating the casino. They're not at the blackjack tables or the roulette wheels. Natalie wants to customers that are doing that. Natalie wants to jump back in.
[00:03:01] Unknown:
You know, if you look at the short term, Bitcoin is gonna be volatile. But if we zoom out, Bitcoin has outperformed gold. In fact, when Hamas attacked Israel, since then, Bitcoin is up a 125%, and gold is up only 27%. So let's really look at the numbers that we're seeing. And the best thing about Bitcoin is, again, no one controls the ledger, whereas gold is really vulnerable to centralization and top down control, which is why we need a system that is a neutral place to store your wealth. We need a neutral system and proper even could blow your ear or your ear or your ear or your ear. Own boat. Why can't someone have exposure to both?
[00:03:37] Unknown:
Yeah. Well, first of all, Bitcoin has outperformed everything. So don't compare it to gold. It's outperformed stocks, real estate bonds, collectibles.
[00:04:18] Unknown:
Happy Bigfoot Wednesday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Citadel Dispatch, The interactive live show focused on actual Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion. That clip was from Fox Business this week. It was, Gold Shield Peter Schiff, failed banker, against Natalie Brunel arguing about gold versus Bitcoin. And, Schiff came away with the beautiful takeaway that Bitcoin has outperformed everything, which I thought was fucking hilarious, and I I needed to capture that moment. I also just wanted to point out that it's a little bit weird measuring Bitcoin returns based on when Hamas attacked Israel. I don't know why she used that as the the time frame. But, anyway, freaks, I have a great show lined up for us today. We're gonna be talking to 2 prolific developers, contributors in the Nostril ecosystem.
We have Stuart Bowman here. How's it going, Stuart? How's it going? Thank you for joining us. Absolutely. We have Hazard 149. How's it going, Hazard?
[00:05:27] Unknown:
Great. Excited to be here.
[00:05:29] Unknown:
So you guys are both working on a lot of different things, in the Nasr ecosystem. You both have clients that you've developed. Stewart has, satellite dot earth. Hazard has, Nostrudel, one of the best named clients, in the ecosystem. And then you both have been working on on interesting ways of kind of solving maybe solving is the strong word, but solving the problem of Noster is a text first protocol, text first com comms protocol. It it makes it very easy to to share text around the world and and interchange text based communications, but it doesn't necessarily solve, the media problem. And you guys have both kind of come at it from different angles, but also very similar angles.
Hazard has this new protocol out called Blossom, which is pretty exciting. And, Stewart has a CDN where you just, like, pay in Bitcoin, and you can just host media files really easily. So I don't know what we're gonna talk about today, but I think we're gonna talk about many different things. I guess, I guess a good place to start is, the freaks know I just keep talking about Noster. Why do you guys put so much energy and time and focus into such a nascent protocol?
[00:06:59] Unknown:
I mean, I think Nostra is like I feel like Nostra is in the inevitable like, I feel like it's it's it's basically like the, it's just like, the fact that, like, you you can have, like, a shared data layer that is allows you to kind of build, like, a, sort of, like, world on top of data is the thing that see see, to me, it seems like completely inevitable that you're going to have a permissionless social media layer. But I I think we're, like, not quite as far to actually accomplishing that as it might seem because there's kinda 2 halves of it. There's, like, there's the cryptographic side of it, but and that's kinda the easy part. It's just, like, sign JSON.
Right. And but then there's, like, the hard part of it, which is the, well, there's I think there's 2 hard parts. Like, the 2 hard parts are basically only 2 hard parts. Well, there are 2 2 broad classes of hard things. And, like, one broad class of hard hard things is, like, how do we even get anyone to care about this? And then that's kinda, like, where most of, like, the dev energies on Austria right now, it feels like. It's, like, people trying to figure out, like, you know, how do how do we get people to actually use AUSTR. But then I think there's, like, this little sneaky third thingy that is not really been addressed yet, which is, like, how do we actually own our actual infrastructure?
Because that's kind of required for sovereignty as well as the cryptographic aspect. And, you know, Nostra, like, succeeded or I should say, like, Nostr actually got off to a good start because it had this, like, really, like, dirt simple, like, you know, like dead simple, like, you know, like, relay standardized transport layer, just a dumb pipe, sends and receives, sign JSON. Like, that was a super smart idea. But I think to make Nostra, like, stronger in a way that it can actually resist, like, a state level attack, you need to have some kind of peer to peer redundant archival recovery mechanism thingy. And to be clear, not peer to peer in terms of the delivery of the data, but to peer to peer in terms of the archival async stuff. And that's something I got really got I have I have to give a lot of credit to Hazard, on this point, because I've been obsessed with, like, BitTorrent for a super long time. And when we were in Madera, Hazard convinced me that BitTorrent is actually not the solution to deliver data, but it's a made solution for data portability.
[00:09:30] Unknown:
So It's not Yeah. It fixes the yeah. The no, sir. I mean, to to your points to the, it's the redundancy that is that that is the the missing piece, you might say, or, like, that's the more important piece that we didn't see before because, like, BitTorrent doesn't and I'm going out on a limb here because I I don't know I've been around long enough to know the BitTorrent protocol, but, like, there's a you could make an argument that the BitTorrent protocol doesn't work because it's peer to peer, but it works because everyone has the file. Like, that's why it's censorship resistant, not because it's talking peer to peer.
However, to answer your original question, Odell, yeah, like, I I to be why I'm here, like, why interested why interested in Noester? Never really got too much into much social media, especially Twitter and whatnot. But, like, now that no Notion's kind of kicking off, getting off the ground and all that, like, it is the possibility it it's it's almost it's a hackable social media protocol. There's there's almost no end to what you can do, And not necessarily build, like, that's the that's the exciting part. It's like, there's there is almost no end to what we can build, but the cool part is, like, for everything you build, you can look at it in a different way. So, like, you can take like, the Zaps are a perfect example. Like, you can we have Zaps on every client, but you can build, like, a Zap dashboard. You can start, like, pulling analytical data out of this network.
I like not that since the day is opened, it's a network that, like, there's there's so much analytics and so many interesting things you can run on the network that you would never be able to do with, Google, Facebook, any other closed network.
[00:11:18] Unknown:
I love it. Guys, this is a one man show here. I just do it all myself, and I forgot to play our intro music. So we're gonna play the intro music. I knew something I knew something was missing when I did the intro. What? This is episode what episode is it, freaks? And we've done, like, a 150 dispatches. I've never forgot the intro music, so I felt like I had to do it. Guys, do you think we sound a little bit crazy when we explain why Noster? Is it Noster or Noster?
[00:12:21] Unknown:
I think it's like Noster, you know, because it's like it's Portuguese. It's like the noise. Right? You have to channel your Fiat Jeff when you say it. Exactly.
[00:12:32] Unknown:
I I just use them interchangeably. Yeah. It's,
[00:12:35] Unknown:
Well, doesn't mean, like doesn't it mean, like, us in Yeah. Us. But I think that wasn't his reason. I don't think It wasn't I think that was, like, we pretend that after the case. Oh. It also sounds like it in Spanish. Right. I mean, I guess there's a lot of similarities. We can say that. We can just pretend that's why he named it that. I think I think Fiat Jaff was just incredibly lazy and and was just, like, notes and other stuff transmitted by relays and just made it an acronym.
[00:13:01] Unknown:
Yeah. Well, he yeah. In that case, it's karma, the fact that it's an STR at the end, and it fits so well onto every single client name. It does not fit well. I was, like, half joking when I said your client name was a good name. Like, I mean, I
[00:13:17] Unknown:
it Nostrudel? Like, what it does that get people excited?
[00:13:20] Unknown:
Nope. Otherwise, it doesn't get people excited.
[00:13:24] Unknown:
I'm like a big anti stern name guy. But, anyway,
[00:13:28] Unknown:
not It's, like, the best name.
[00:13:30] Unknown:
I, I feel like I kinda broke the flow of conversation. You guys are both at Sovereign Engineering in Madera. How was that? What was that experience like?
[00:13:42] Unknown:
I mean, I feel like I got about 6 months of thinking done in about 2 months or maybe maybe, like, even, like, a year's worth of thinking because, like, the ability to just, like, info dump on, somebody is and then have it be, like, reflected back at you is, like, super valuable. Well, actually, I mean, Pablo Pablo and Gigi and, Martin did, like, such an amazing job putting it together. And they I think they like, their whole one of, like, the main things was, like, the missions was basically just, like, how do we prevent people from, like, building the wrong thing for, like, 5 years before realizing that it's the wrong thing? And so when you're around people who are, like, capable of just, like, shooting down your ideas, it's the most valuable thing in the world. Oh, nice.
[00:14:27] Unknown:
Yeah. That was huge. Yeah. The, yeah. I mean, to sum it up in a few words, like, life changing. But to get be be more specific. Yeah. The, yeah, it, the, if the goal was, which I think that was one of the goals, to like prevent people from building the wrong thing, It definitely helped with that because the yeah. The everyone everyone there was so smart, knew everything. And so you come you you come up with this idea that's, like, half baked You you thought you haven't thought it through all the way. And then it was it was more beneficial to throw it out to the group and mention it to a few people and start talking than it was, like, try to finish thinking about the idea yourself, because then it would just be yeah. It was incredible conversations for coming up with ideas.
That's something that's how Stu and I basically, I mean, I think day 1, we started talking about torrents. And then it was pretty quick after that that we decide that we figured out that, like, it probably wouldn't work with torrents and we need something else.
[00:15:30] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, sovereign engineering is pretty crazy as a concept. I mean, I haven't met Martin yet, but both Gigi and Pablo are absolute fucking legends, and I have the honor to talk to them all the time. But, like, just this idea of getting, you know, some of the brightest minds in Noster altogether in this little island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. I know my oceans. With, like, no money attached. It was like an accelerator program without, like, a fund. Yeah. I don't think that's ever existed before. Like, how like like, I think this is one of the things that people are sleeping on about Noster is just this, like, mission focused, like, aligned group of of people that are just like, fuck you. Like, I'm gonna build this shit, and I'm gonna, like, uproot my life and just go to this random ass fucking island and spend 3 months
[00:16:32] Unknown:
Yeah. And and try and do the thing. I feel like that's the thing that sets the Nostra dev community apart is that we actually, like, do things. Like, we actually like, it's like it's like a it's like a, we're trying to actually, like, kind of build something and see if it works. And the fact that everyone does like, the fact that we don't have, like, $1,000,000,000 is, I think, a great kind of accelerant because it makes it to where you don't have the luxury of just kind of sitting around and trying to figure out ways to, like, degrade the pile of capital that have you you've accumulated. Because I because because I've been to, like, different like like, last summer, I went to this, like, decentralized web thingy out in the San Francisco forest, and it was, like, all these San Francisco people and, like, it wasn't Nostra focused. There was, like, some Nostra thing there, but it was just a whole, like, grab bag of a bunch of, like, shit coin protocols and stuff and stuff like that. And so I was like, yeah. Whatever. There's probably some smart people here. And there were honestly a lot of really interesting people, but I couldn't get away from the sense that the emission of most of these projects like Filecoin, for instance. Right.
Years years years ago, when I first heard about it, I was like, oh, that makes total sense. Well, the reality of Filecoin is that they raised, like, a $1,000,000,000 and now all they've done in the last 5 years is, like, sell, like like, buy, like, massive piles of, like, merch and everything. And I'm like, well, I'm glad that, like, the free coffee cup mug that I got was somehow paid for by your ICO in, like, 2017. Like, it is truly, like, trickle down shit. Like, it just infects everything, and the noster does not suffer from that problem.
[00:18:11] Unknown:
It's really interesting because I think, I mean, I think the Nostr, dev community, has probably been the first developer community to like spawn or to come out of like the Bitcoin movement, you might say. Like, because a lot of almost all the developers who, who started in who started working on Nostra stuff that either came from Bitcoin or were Bitcoiners and weren't working on Bitcoin or just had that kind of ethos. And so, like, it seems to have this, like, inexplicably almost like this this core of, like, I'm gonna build it and ask for permission later. Like, it seems to be the only Dev community that's like embodied that, and it's kind of like, you can kind of relate that to like just going to an island is like, I want to do this. Like, I want to build this. I'm gonna do it. And then, like, figure it out later or ask permission later. And, yeah, it's it's such a it's definitely the strangest dev community I've I've been part of or ever seen. Like, the energy is I don't know what
[00:19:16] Unknown:
it is. Were you guys both Bitcoiners first?
[00:19:19] Unknown:
Actually, I got into Bitcoin because of Master. Oh, wow. A deal. I think I'm a bit of an exception. You were a shit coiner first. I wasn't I wasn't in anything coiner. I was actually so I was I I was a Bitcoiner by necessity back in 2013. I wouldn't call myself a Bitcoiner, but let's say I used Bitcoin back in the day as a currency. And I, unfortunately, didn't save in Bitcoin, and I, I've always been super, super interested in decentralized stuff. I spent years years trying to build a web torrent based social media. But I've no. I mean, I'm I've always I've always I've I've been following Bitcoin the whole time, but I don't I've never been, like, around other Bitcoin devs and stuff since, last year, January of 2020 no. No. No. December of 2022, I found out about Nostra, and I was like, what is this? This is sign JSON. This is the future. Where, you know and then I went to Nostrika.
I didn't even have a ticket. I I published the first version because I has been I've been working on satellite for, like, a long time trying to, like, bootstrap my own protocol and stuff. And Right. When I found about Nostra, I was, like, initially, like, super mad because I was like, damn it. Like, someone already did this. Like, it is it's better. And so, like, I went through this whole, like, processing thing, and I finally was like, alright. Nope. Can't beat them. Join them. So I was like which turned out to be a super good decision, actually. But, anyways, I flew down to Nostraka in Costa Rica. I showed up, and I had actually published satellite dot earth, like, the day before from the airport Wi Fi because I had, like, finally got it done. And I didn't even have a ticket, but then somehow I weaseled my way in, and I met a bunch of people. And, actually, I briefly met Hazard there, But, like like, I think we talked for, like, a minute or something, and then, like but, like, we didn't, I didn't know what he was working on at the time or anything like that. But, anyways, this whole, basically, last 12, 14 months has been a very interesting journey for me in the whole space. So, yeah, the Madera thing was kind of the thing that capped it off recently.
[00:21:30] Unknown:
Over that's only because it's recently. There's a there's a whole lot more to come. Yeah. Yeah. I think I was like Bitcoin class of 2020, like most people, and then, you know, there's a little ways there's a ways before, I had I had known about it for a long time. Like, I had known about it, like, I found it, like, back in 2004. It was, like, a 1,000 no. I found it when it was a $1,000, read the white papers, like, oh, yeah. This is the future, and then proceeded to ignore it like everybody else said. That's what you're saying.
Yeah. It's the what's the saying? You get Bitcoin, the price you deserve is very true. Yeah. It had the same, when I found,
[00:22:14] Unknown:
what was this? You got to be early to Nostr.
[00:22:17] Unknown:
Yeah. I I there was the, the Telegram kind of client, that had the cross site scripting problem that I I remember interacting with, and then there was, astral.ninja at the time. Yeah. But it was right before, the Jack Grants. That's where I like well, I found Nasda way before that. I think it was like 5 NIPS when I originally looked at the repo. Had the same reaction to Bitcoin like read over all the nips. I was like, oh yeah this is the future, this is gonna be a big thing, like this is so simple, and then proceeded to forget about it. Until, like, the Jack grants, and that's when everything that's why I got back into it. I was like, okay.
Let me actually see what's going well, because there was activity, and that's where I was like, oh, let me see what's actually happening here.
[00:23:00] Unknown:
Yeah. No. I mean, the only reason I bring it up is because a lot of people like, I've only talked about Bitcoin for about a decade now. And a lot of a a lot of people think that is a negative of Nasr, that it was, like, seeded by Bitcoiners. But I kind of look at I think it's the opposite. I think it's a feature, not a bug. I agree. And it really is. I mean, I think Hazard said it's like the first child it's the it's the first child of Bitcoin. Right? Like, a lot of the a lot of early Bitcoiners, a lot of times, what they said was, like, the biggest impact of Bitcoin or one of the biggest impacts of Bitcoin is that there's a whole new group of people that are ideologically, like, bent different, and they are they have access to fuck you money. And as that fuck you money becomes more robust and is adopted more, like, they they will go and do their thing.
And there's all these knock on effects that you can't even really comprehend or speculate on ahead of time. And Noster feels like one of those things. And I just wanna be clear to Freaks because on my rip with Cali of Cashew, I said, if you're still on Twitter, it means you don't have fuck you money. That's not an amount. That's the properties of the money you use. And if if someone can't separate you from your money, you have no rulers, and you can do whatever the fuck you want. And that's one of the beauties of Bitcoin, and I think that has pulled over into into Nasr in a big way.
[00:24:38] Unknown:
It's it's cool too because that ethos or that that, you might say what Noster inherits from Bitcoin, it's not just or it seems to not be just the, like the ethos or or the the mentality of the people working on it, the mentality of people coming to it, and the the values they hold. But it's there's a definite, like, like software design or architecture that's like been inspired by Bitcoin. I like the best way I could put it was like, it's like it's like, there's something there's like a focus on simplicity, which is not exclusive to Bitcoin, but
[00:25:21] Unknown:
simple and robust.
[00:25:23] Unknown:
Yeah. But it's not it's not for the sake of being simple. That's, like, no shit is designed simply not because it wants, like, for the sake of simplicity. It's designs it's like with Bitcoin where it's designed to be simple so that it can spread quickly and not like spread, like spread in the minds of the developers quickly. Right. It's such an interesting, yeah, that's what caught me finding Gnostro initially was like, or as I've kind of like learned more and more about Gnostro, that's what's really impressed me is like this concept of not simplicity for simplicity's sake, but simplicity for, like, growing the community and and spreading the idea.
Yeah. As I said, it seems to be inherited from Bitcoin.
[00:26:04] Unknown:
So, enough enough about Bitcoin. You guys went to Sovereign Engineering. You came out with a renewed focus. What is that focus? What are you guys what are you guys working on right now? What is your perspective on Noster? Where are we heading?
[00:26:19] Unknown:
Well, right now, we're both working on the satellite stack, the new because, like I said, satellite's been a web client, but now me and Hazard are building a, kind of, like, the simplest way to describe it would be, like, Discord, but for, because, you know, like, I I think somehow, like, a Discord server has become like like, everyone has a Discord server now. Like, even, like, like, large companies, it's, like, terminal support. Like, it's it it like, somehow, this thing that was, like, for video games became, like, the de facto, group app. Right?
So it's kind of like, you know, Discord server is not really like a server. It's like I don't know how many servers Discord has, but it's not your server. Right. So Completely closed source controlled. Yeah. A Discord server is just like a term that means it's your little space, but you don't actually own the server. So, you know, I think Nostra can do that because this kind of ties into the whole, like, owning your infrastructure thing. The new version of satellite or I should say it's not, like, the new version, but, like, the deeper version of satellite is going to be a Discord server that is just a server that you actually it was like it's like if a Discord server was actually your server and you had, all the benefits of cryptographic identity, and, the ability to host your own media. And that's why the blossom thing is, like, super, super, super important is because, like, if you don't host your own media, then you're not, you can't really own your, like, infrastructure.
And if you don't own your infrastructure, you're not really sovereign. And so I'm really interested in trying to transform trying to project this idea of self sovereignty into a group level of organization. Because, like, no, sir I sort of almost think of it like there's, like, this analogy where, like, you know, you always say, like, not your keys, not your coins. Right. Bitcoin. Well, not the Nostra version of that is, like, not your insect, not your notes. And then I think the community version of that is, like, not your well, there's 2 things. It's not your insect, not your community, but it's also not your infrastructure, not your community. So, like, the because when you're communicating with people, you need to have you need to own the actual, means of communication.
So that that it's a pretty big problem space. And I I think, like, the I mean, it sounds kinda crazy, but I really think that the end game of this all these online community building stuff, community is almost too narrow of a term. It's more like an organization or, like, even like a state basically in some in some like, just like from a from a modeling sense, it's kind of like a way of creating some type of governance or curation of some aspect of the world that is now kind of, like, coming to sort of eclipse the the physical world that we're living in. Like, you know, because, like, we're all like, the all mine What? It depends. There's there's a difference between,
[00:29:28] Unknown:
a community and a state in that, the community doesn't really have governance rules. They don't really do anything outside, like, community mostly just covers, like, communication between individuals and then, a governance or a company or an organization would be communication plus a direction you might say or something, a focus? On a permission structure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But but geared towards action,
[00:29:56] Unknown:
mostly, I imagine. Yeah. And there's this kind of paradox in, I think, the way that, like, there's this kind of polarity between these totally decentralized things and then centralized hierarchical things. And I think that the integration of those two opposite things is really powerful kind of idea because you kind of need hierarchies in some way to get things done because, like, you see groups that have effective leaders actually are able to accomplish things. Because, otherwise, like, corporations wouldn't be structured that way or, like, teams wouldn't be structured that way or, you know, there's some kind of mission aligned leader that is good for a person or good for a group. But then, like, the danger with that type of architecture is that you don't can't get rid of the bad leaders. And so you need to somehow have this architecture where you have these little hierarchies that are embedded in a decentralized context where, like, the context itself serves as the final judge of who's doing a good job.
And the way you can create forkable communities on Nostr is super powerful. And we've I've been, you know, me and Hazard both implemented, this NIP 72 thing, which was an attempt to create these forkable Reddit style communities on Nostra. But I found it quite limiting to have those communities only defined abstractly while still being rely on other people's infrastructure. So I think there's a need to sort of marry and integrate the infrastructure of the community with the permission governance of the community so that when you fork, you can, like, almost like a migrate or export all this stuff to a new server so you can jump infrastructure. And there's a lot of real interesting stuff.
[00:31:38] Unknown:
The infrastructure is definitely the key there because yeah, I mean, I don't think I ever the NIPS 72 Communities, we did we did both, I think, no, there's other clients that implement NIPS 72 communities, but both of our clients have like the, the kind of Reddit focus of the community. And, yeah, both of the, it probably wouldn't be a stretch to say that both of our clients don't implement it well. And, yeah, I think, as you mentioned, like that, the infrastructure is the key. It's not something you can because NIP 72, the way the communities are structured in the NIP and whatnot, is it kind of, ignores infrastructure. It's just like, oh, it's going to be published to a relay, a few relays, and then it'll be loaded from those a few relays.
But, yeah, there's something about it, like, you can't ignore infrastructure.
[00:32:33] Unknown:
What is NIP, like, for people that are not following all the NIPS? What is NIPS 72?
[00:32:40] Unknown:
Oh, you can Moderated
[00:32:41] Unknown:
moderated communities,
[00:32:43] Unknown:
on top of Noister. But what does it dictate? It dictates, like, a specific set of relays that that community is using? Or It's like it's like a subreddit song Nostr.
[00:32:52] Unknown:
Okay. Yeah. It's it's a kind of a moderated context on Noster. And, yeah, it specifies the relays that the, community, exists on, but they're kind they're, there's nothing specialized about the relay. The relay is just used as kind of a data store or an event store.
[00:33:12] Unknown:
Yeah. Got it. So the idea with the new satellite is that you're gonna have, your own, like, a relay just a community is a relay. And this is kind of, like, reaching way back to the original idea of Nostra, which is that there's these kind of specialized relays that are kind of groups unto themselves. And you can, of course, be in a bunch of overlapping groups, but the relay is this is like a central idea. And I think it was just too complicated to try to build groups on top of relays while treating them all the same. It just makes sense to actually connect the infrastructure to the group because then you can do super cool things like like, with the new satellite, you'll be able to have like, every relay will have every community relay kind of has, like, a blossom server integrated with it. So that, like, if you join so if you join a community, you can get you can join in a community and they can you can get permission to upload files onto their infrastructure because you have to align the incentives of the person who's deciding what data gets hosted into the community and the person who's actually hosting the data. Like, those should be the same person because if I wanna start some community that hosts really questionable stuff that might be illegal, I can't ask another person's, to host that, like, in their on their server. So you I need to take responsibility from that so for that. So I think that's a probably a cleaner thing.
[00:34:33] Unknown:
Well, it's interesting, as you mentioned, the, the the infrastructure might not be critical to create kind of a community, environment on Noester, because SNP 72 for, for everything it's lacking, does kind of function. Well, those type of communities, they do seem to kind of function despite what it's lacking in the protocol level. But, once you do add infrastructure or you start like, you make infrastructure part of a community in the sense that, you know, the community has a server, the community has, as you mentioned, like a, like a blob server or something to serve the media, and all that.
You can start doing a lot more once you have access to the infrastructure. They unlock so many things, because you don't have to. The downside about Relay is that it's running on someone else's computer or someone else's server. And so you're always rate limited. You're always, you always have to ask permission in some sense to read and write to their relay. Yeah. But if you're yeah. So, like, that maybe that's why the communities need, like, sovereign infrastructure is so that you can, there's a lot of operations in community that's more than just like, I wanna put one event up or take one event down. And so maybe you need something where you just, you don't need to ask permission, you just need to run something against the database. You just need to crunch some numbers without ask asking, asking a relay to
[00:36:02] Unknown:
serve you up a few 1,000 events or something. Yeah. And I think aside from the kind of, like, organizational benefits that come with this, there's also just, like, the simple thing of just trying to make Nostra just completely bulletproof. Like, you know, because it's I mean, I don't know how long it's gonna be, but I after living through COVID times, I feel like it's completely inevitable that there's gonna be some it's more of like a question of, like, when than if that there's gonna be some kind of thing where people start getting deplatformed and need to fall back to a kind of so type of social media that is completely uncensorable.
And I think, like, there's it's it's not just freedom of speech that matters. It's also freedom of association because if you can't create groups and kind of, like, you know, like, organize group activities and stuff and organize movements, then you do you you you're never gonna have as much political power as people who are able to do that. So you need, I guess, kind of, like, one of, like, the large part of the mission is just try to make this completely indestructible to where, like, kinda like Bitcoin where, like, even if the US government was fully aligned against it, good luck turning it off. I think Nostra needs to be brought to that same level of security because and right now, I don't think it's quite there yet because there's a few relays that everyone uses. They're like the main you know, there's like a dozen or something. I I mean, I use them because my whole idea is I just wanna broadcast it to the most number of people. But Right. It won't be too hard. I mean, it it would still be difficult, but it would not be impossible to take down those centralized points of things because we all see this with BitTorrent. Like, even BitTorrent trackers are centralized points of failure and you can you can whack a mole those things and you could you could degrade the utility of Nostra to the point that it wouldn't be a viable alternative, with in in with the current architecture. And I do think it's there's still gonna be global relays in the future, but they're gonna be more discovery bootstrap kind of relays that are gonna point toward these more decentralized community group relays that are just, you know, there's like I want there to be, like, a 100,000 of them running on everyone's MacBook all over the world. Like, good luck turning that off. So I think that would really change that could real if you had just completely unsensurable media, video, voice, you know, that 100,000 member groups, that that could actually be a a force in the world to
[00:38:37] Unknown:
project some type of power and, you know Well, that's that's the fun part, about Noister is that and specifically that, because I I I share the kind of the same vision, the way you mentioned Stu, is that, like, the concept of, borrowing, you might say, or taking the concept of a Bitcoin full node and or just a private relay or just, kind of making the concept a loose concept of like a Nostra full node. And that all that means is just a backup. But the cool part is, is, that leans into what actually makes Gnostr uncensorable. Like the cool part about it is like, like, Gnostr's, it's not unsensible because you can't take down the relays. Like it's not unsensible because like we're talking over Tor or something.
We're like an uncensorable community, like we're talking over DNS, we can just lose the DNS name tomorrow. It's uncensorable because you can, with the cryptographic signatures, you can re upload everything. So, if you have enough backups, like it's it's kind of funny in that it borrows that from Bitcoin. If you have enough backups, if you have enough copies, it's uncensorable. It doesn't matter if the communication method can be cut off because you just eventually need to reestablish communication, and now you have everything back or majority of it.
[00:39:54] Unknown:
And So maybe you should talk about hyper DHT because Yeah. I feel like that's something that is gonna make the transport layer pretty bulletproof as well.
[00:40:05] Unknown:
Yeah. That's that's, that we've been kinda messing around with that a little bit. Kind of a hypercore I guess it's called compare now, but, hypercore, hyper DHT, and stuff like that. I it's it's still magic. Still magic to me. But, for the purposes of, like, synchronizing these full nodes between each other or just making kind of permissionless connections between these full nodes, or or just honestly the utility of it. The ability to have a, I should I guess I should explain what it is from what I've seen. Hypercore and the pair stack, from what I've seen and what I've read up up to this point is kind of a, it's got a peer to peer application architecture, with like data storage built in and, peer to peer synchronization built in and all that stuff. I have not looked too much at that level of it. I've mostly gone down to the lower level of the DHT which is the, the way the hyper nodes actually make connections to each other. And that's honestly what I think is the coolest part is it's, it's almost a, the Hyper DHT is it's a little I'm not sure how it works, but it's a little, program.
It's a little Node. Js package that will allow you to basically hole punch to another piece of software, based on a public key. So you can effectively have public key, these nodes that advertise themselves to the network under a public key, and then they can just make a direct connection with each other without any DNS in the middle, without anything, and it seems to work very well. I like I said, it's kind of magic to me at this point until I can understand the networking layer more, but it's, it's it's a really cool technology.
[00:41:57] Unknown:
Yeah. To answer the question in the chat, it is open source. The whole, like I don't know about key pair, but, like, the actual hypercore, hyper DHT stack is is open source. It's just a DHT hole punching thing, and it has been around for a long time, but, it seems to work. I mean, I I think just being the ability to make a connection is it it's I just love the idea of having an alternative DNS because, like, the d you know, DNS, like, has a dependency on the government. Like like, the US government is one of, like, the packages that DNS depends on. So, like, you can't exactly rely on it as a long term solution if your DNS can get just rogue. You know? So and and, you know, we haven't seen that yet, but it's it's sort of like, I haven't heard a good logical reason, like, why we should just trust DNS is never gonna get, you know, like, deep platforms. Because, you know, 5 years ago, you know, there would it would've sounded crazy to think that people were to get, like, deleted from YouTube for, you know, saying certain things. So Right. You know, it's just like the overtone window is eventually gonna shift there, and that's what happened. But, you know, what I love about the having nostril as, like, the kind of signaling layer is that you don't have to have DNS be, like, hard coded into a group. The DNS can change all the time. And then as long as you have a Nostra event that represents the community, you can just publish a new version of that event to nostr and just switch the, DNS, location.
[00:43:25] Unknown:
Or you know using, like, nostr as the negotiation kinda layer.
[00:43:29] Unknown:
You just have ability. It's the point of interest. Mobility. Exactly. Yeah. Like, boot because you all you need to get a people connected is you need a way for a way for them to discover each other, which, in Austria, is obviously really good at that. Right. As you mentioned, like, you just build an event that is, represents, like, this is the discoverability event for the community. And then under that, you list all the ways that you can connect. And it could be, you know, DNS is the fastest, simplest right now, but, one of the options might be like hyper a Hypercore, pubkey that you can connect to.
Or it doesn't even have to be limited to hypercore. I've actually done looked a little bit into like I2P, and that has a very similar kind of permissionless DNS system where you can just, without asking anybody, start up a start up a a server that has an identity, serve stuff from it, connect to other servers that have identity, and then you could even, if you wanted some pain, you could even like talk over Tor, and it has the exact same type of system where like permissionless domains, and so really all you need is like discoverability
[00:44:36] Unknown:
plus a permissionless way to talk to each other. So let let's just pull it back for a second. I2p, to me, has been hyped for a fucking decade now. Like, why hasn't I two p become a thing? Like, what is the
[00:44:56] Unknown:
I'm gonna say something controversial here. Nice. Something ignorant because it was written by Java developers. If you've looked at the UI for the I2P router, it is very hard to understand. I believe it has a full email client in it. I believe it has a full chat client built into it too, and I do not know how to use either of them. There's a really great project called I2PD, which is a reimplementation of the router in, I believe, C or C plus plus that project seems really good. But, I think I could, to answer your question, I think there's two reasons. Like my biased reason is that it's run by Java developers and they seem to have a tendency to quite really complicated code. And then I think it was missing like a lot of other peer to peer networks were before, that special sauce that Nostra has, which is just an identity system.
Right. Because if you're trying to connect to the entire world, it it the entire like, if you're if you're just opening up your computer to the entire world, basically, like, that's the most peer to peer thing you could do, just open up your IP address and plug straight into the Internet. It's just full of spam. And there's no way you can tell what's not spam without an identity system.
[00:46:13] Unknown:
Yeah. I think the, actually, the in some ways, the web of trust that Nostra is, sort of, like, percolating up to the surface or, like, maybe, like, the web of trust that's, like, kind of, like, distilled from Nostra is going to be, like, the most foundational base layer for a lot of things, including infrastructure. Yep. Because infrastructure, you know, like, as you mentioned, spam is a big problem. You can't have like, if you don't have web of trust, you can't really have nice things. But one of the things that web of trust allows you to do is be like, you know, maybe I'm only gonna make a connection to someone who has, like, is, like, followed by someone I follow or something like that. And that right there enables you to actually have, like,
[00:47:00] Unknown:
you know, like, nice nice things. So if that's have been, like, trying to make webs of trust thing for fucking ever. And, like, Nostril, like, we're, I've said this before, like, we're shitposting our way to, like, the first real global web of trust. Yep. I think so too.
[00:47:17] Unknown:
It's it's the, as an engineer, because, like, I I had I had played with PGP, which was is the most notable one that I tried to build a web of trust. And, it's so funny how this how this half broken protocol is achieving something that, like, cryptographers and programmers have been like dreaming about for almost in the invention of cryptography. And it it it it, I don't know how. Like I said, we're just shitposting and and we're building this network somehow via that.
[00:47:55] Unknown:
The shitpost were a requirement.
[00:47:58] Unknown:
Yeah. It it unironically, it seems to be the case that, like, the stupid kind of broken slash just let's have fun and break things was, like, somehow re required.
[00:48:10] Unknown:
Well, I I think that what's it's like it pointing at the fact that social activity is the only way to produce signal because there's let's say there's signal if you just find signal as things humans care about. Well, you can't. Okay. You can you can try to, like you can have the Encyclopedia Britannica model, which is like, these people know what you should care about. Here's the thing. Okay. Great. You could have the Wikipedia medic, make Wikipedia editor model, which is like, we're just gonna use mainstream media as the signal source of things that are real, things that are we should care about. You know? But without it so what's happening with when anytime you curate content is you're you're at at best, you're kind of, like, proxying some existing source of curation into your dataset.
But something like a subreddit or Discord server is an attempt to kind of, like, aggregate or produce or spin up this little pool of social capital that can be sort of derived from the interactions that happen on that thing. So Nostra itself right now, the patterns of interaction are actually, sort of, like, producing a kind of signal. I don't I don't think it really matters how you distill that signal. That's there's a million ways to do that. You could have a really simple algorithm like the number of max number of follows, but there's probably more complex way to do it. But it doesn't really matter. That that that is the gold right there. The gold is the kind of The key is the the signal. The key is the signal. It doesn't matter how you represent it or or distill it. Yes. Because, like, the kind three
[00:49:48] Unknown:
event is how we've distilled the signal in Nozture. How we've how we've distilled the web of trust out of, like, the signal we're getting out of Nozture. And it's kind of a bad implementation. But, yeah, it's it's, sorry. I had a point about that. But, yeah, the key is the signal. The key is the signal because you can't there's, like, web of trust means nothing if it's a web of trust between, like, digitally native AI bots and identities. Like, it only means something if it's a if it's a connection between people in the real world or if it mirrors something that could be a human interaction. Like, it it means nothing to us if it's if it's connections that aren't like human connections.
And, yeah, oddly enough, coming to your point, Stu, like about signal and whatnot, it seem like, Gnostr seems to be working to build or, like, represent the human web of trust on the network, purely because, like, it's implementation of literally the connections between people is frictionless. Like, to update your kind 3 is like one one action, and then now you've updated your so there's something about, like, reducing the friction that makes the signal higher.
[00:51:13] Unknown:
Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I think that that's, like, probably the most the the example I always use to to kinda illustrate this is, couchsurfing.com, which was, like, the greatest I think it was, like, the greatest website ever. And and, like, so, you know, basically, what couchsurfing.com was was it was a thing where you could just it was really active, like, around, like, 2,010, 2011. You could go to a new city, and you could make a request to stay at someone's house, and they would, like, let you sleep on their couch. And like the precursor to Airbnb. Right? Exactly. It was like the free, like, dirtbag version of Airbnb, and it was amazing. And the the it was, like, in around, like, 2014 or 2015, they sold out to, like, I think, like, a private equity firm that start put pay put, like, a really big paywall on it to try to kind of, I guess, make their money back or something. Monetize it. Yeah. And it sucked because it was, like, a tragedy that this dataset of that had been built too much friction suddenly. Yeah. Like, it it it was, like, a tragedy that that dataset gotten destroyed. And, like, I I was one of the things I've been thinking about is that, like, when you have any kind of web of trust, it is effectively deflationary to an economy because you can do things like okay. If I can go to a new city and use my past history of interactions to stay at someone's house for free, I just saved money on a hotel room. And not only that, but I also gained the benefit of the people I was gonna meet and stuff like that. And so you I think it's like the the one of the best ways of selling, like, Nostra to non Bitcoin, non tech people is just, like, almost like the kind of, like, social capital angle and just say, like, does isn't that just like a kind of, dangerous? Isn't it bad that all these big reservoirs of social capital are just dangling by this little thread that it's just, like, one decision away from getting kind of, invalidated.
And Noster is like this long term permanent ratchet of social capital accumulation that is
[00:53:17] Unknown:
really never cute. I don't know how to erase it. And, I mean, now with the, like, the introduction of LLMs too, like, I think a lot of these centralized platforms have started to realize how much value their dataset is. Right? Which is why we're starting to see, like, Reddit and Twitter, all the walled garden. Like, the walled gardens are becoming the walls are growing. They're they're making it more difficult. I don't know how many people out here are listening to this, that maybe don't have a Twitter account, but sign out of Twitter and try and click a tweet link, And all you get is the bare minimum. All you get is just the single tweet. You can't see any of the replies. You can't see any of the quotes. You can't click the profile.
You can't do any of those things. Try going into Reddit with with a VPN enabled and no account. It's very, very difficult. You cannot see anything that's going on there. They they, like, pop up this, like, disclaimer and say, woah, partner. Like, you don't have access. And they're all starting to do this. I mean, the one exception being TikTok because the CCP probably has ulterior motives and just wants that to be kind of open playground so people can see it in a guest profile. But the majority of centralized social platforms are building these massive walls because they realize what you post there is the product.
The dataset is the product. That is the value. That that's the equity that that company has. And meanwhile, Noster is basically doing the exact opposite. It's by broadcasting out to the world. I like this idea of the ratcheting dataset. It's, like, just growing. Yeah. It's just constantly growing. To pull it back again, so on the vein of I2p, BitTorrent. You know? It's a protocol that I I loved and used for years. It worked. It got the job done. I think probably a lot of, engineer types were like, nah. This thing is, like, half broken. But it fucking worked. Like, you wanted a movie or something, like, you could you get the movie. Yeah.
Why why why is BitTorrent not the solution?
[00:55:27] Unknown:
I think it's part of the solution.
[00:55:29] Unknown:
It doesn't have identities. You there's no web of trust. It's a great, fantastic and then you said it's it is probably half broken, but it is a as far as functioning goes, it is a fantastic, like, peer to peer file sharing network. It yeah. I mean, there's yeah. You can you can get so much from it. It does suffer for smaller files. Getting smaller cat pictures is a little bit little bit difficult off of BitTorrent, but, I think it just lacked an identity system because you can't get past, you can't get past the spam without, like, sovereign provable identities, like, crypto some sort of cryptographic identities. You can't differentiate, not even, like, humans from bots because that's not the important part, but, like, who is in my network and who is not? Because you can't connect to the entire world. It's too big.
You need to you need to pick a smaller dataset. And so I think, I wouldn't say that's why Bitcoin doesn't work, but I think that's what's why it's not the solution that we're looking for going forward is it it lacks identities and it lacks a way of, like, not connecting to the entire world.
[00:56:40] Unknown:
Okay. So, like, where does Blossom we're about an hour in. Where does Blossom come into play here? What is what is Blossom?
[00:56:50] Unknown:
Yeah. Okay. I guess we can talk about that before cover run run over it real quick. Blossom is it was kind of a it came out of, like, Stu and I's discussion in mid year of, like, 2 months. I forget, I mean, I forget how many talks we had about this and how many crazy ideas we did, but, it came out of, I believe the core of the conversation was, like, what does it look like to make users and media on Noister? What does it look what does it look like to make that media move like events do? Because the events in Gnostr, like, for who there's many reasons, but you can never really figure out why, but they have a tendency to just, like, like, just kind of crawl throughout the network.
You can post something on a private relay and then in, like, a week or so, it'll pop up somewhere else and it'll eventually get. And so our conversation was like, what does it look like to make media do the same thing? Like, what would it take to do that? Not like and so we kind of ended up like, these hash addressable content is you have to have an ID for a file to be able to talk about it because a URL is a really bad identifier. It changes all the time and it can break. So you need like an identifier for the file, which is like shot 256 of the of the file. That's kind of, there's many programs that run that use that. BitTorrent kind of does, but it has its own system for that.
And then, yeah. And so Blossom is try to, like, figure out how to it's it's really simple. It's how do you retrieve or how do you talk to multiple servers about the same file? Okay. So that just like we talked to multiple relays about the same pub key or multiple relays about the same event, it's just this kind of the same concept with, you know, how do you talk to multiple servers about the exact same file because you know what you're looking for, you just don't know where it is. And so the Blossom spec itself is, it's a set of 5 different endpoints for an HTTP server, and how to implement each endpoint and how it's expected to behave so that you can so a Notion user can upload media to the server.
They can see what media they have uploaded to the server. They can delete the media and then they can retrieve the media by its, or, you know, by, by its hash, basically it's universal ID. And as far as the technical side of things, like, that's kind of it.
[00:59:26] Unknown:
So, like, the idea is I mean, so what it what it comes down to with with hosting media, photos, but, like, image image files, but even video files are probably the harder problem. As you get, like, size increases in in the in what data you're sharing, it becomes more of an issue because with size comes cost. The the the main concern the main issue historically has been almost one of of liability. Right? Like, this idea of, like, where are you storing it? What like, how are you how are you handling who decides to keep the file with you?
We've talked a lot about communities here. We've started a physical community here in Nashville called Bitcoin Park. We have our own relay, for Bitcoin Park members. It's mostly I think it's at this point, it's, like, mostly used as, like, a shared backup Yeah. To be honest. Like, I don't think anyone's, like, reading from it to see specifically, like, what Bitcoin Park members are saying. But that's subsidized because we already have, like, yearly dues for that to be a member of Bitcoin Park. Like, you pay to be a member of Bitcoin Park. You get access to the facility. The relay is is this bonus.
But if is my understanding of Blossom correct that this idea is right now, most people that are, like, sharing a video on Nostr are just choosing a server. Right? Like, they're just choosing a server. They're gonna store this video on the server. They're gonna post their their URL. Right? That's like dotmp4 or dotpng or something like that. I think, you know, primal is probably a a an interesting vertical stack, example here where, like, it's just at primal's web server, which is probably AWS or some shit. And then they they're just storing the dot PNG for you. And then that that event is just getting spread around, and everyone needs to hit that web server to to see that image.
With blossom, we hash the file. The hash is unique. Because the hash is unique, and that's just how hash functions work, that file can then be hosted on 10 different servers or 15 different servers, and your client is, like, kind of dynamically choosing the most performant one or something like that to to fetch that file from? And is that, like, the basic concept?
[01:02:07] Unknown:
Yeah. So yeah. It is all based on, I mean, it is all based on the hash, which is not a new idea. Right. IPNFS has the same idea, a little bit more complicated hash, but has the same idea. Like, if you have this universal ID for a file, it is no longer stuck on a single server. It can, in theory, live on multiple servers. And so yeah. But it can't live on every server because that's The problem the problem set being, like,
[01:02:35] Unknown:
at the end of the day, if Milan or Primal decides that he doesn't want my PNG there, it doesn't matter that you have my event. You don't have you have my signed note that has this link to to primal.net/blahblah.png. If he deletes the file, you just have a fucking dead link, and you don't you can't see anything. Right? That's a problem we're trying to solve.
[01:02:58] Unknown:
Yeah. That that is that is the problem. The best solution, and this is kind of in the BLOSUM spec, the best solution is to the simplest solution seems to be just to put the hash in the URL. So that when that link does go down, because it will go down, is the way the Internet works. Every link goes down eventually. Right. Yeah. The Internet has an odd decaying factor to it. But, yeah, so when the link goes down, you still have that universal ID of the file. And then the idea is that because it's in the context of the pub key, this is the oddly simple and efficient part of the only probably the only efficient part of the Blossom idea is that because you've you've posted it in an Notion note, you have this pub key.
This pub key can then broadcast an event kind of like the, NIP 65 or the relay list, where it's an advertising of what servers I I I post my media to, what servers I I publish my data to. So if I your PNG goes down and I get the hash from the URL Right. Then all I would have to do is go to your pub key, use the Gnost or Discoverability layer, figure out what media servers you post, and then start talking to specifically those, because those are the ones that are most likely to have your media, similar to relays. Because if I got the hash and then I started to talk to the entire internet, it might be a week before I find that file.
That is way too long of a loading time. And so, yeah, there's there's this kind of a combination of because it's not just the hash that makes it, work. It's the hash plus
[01:04:47] Unknown:
nostril and the identities. Like a signed list assigned list of potential servers to narrow your set.
[01:04:56] Unknown:
Yeah. And so that that's, because I I believe I mean, everyone kind of knows or seen the kind of the article that Fiat Jeff has written about, IPFS. And I believe that was one of, well, I don't know if that was one of his criticisms, but one of my main criticisms of IPFS
[01:05:15] Unknown:
that we might share is that Yeah. We've shad on IGP. We've shad on BitTorrent. Now let's shoot on IPFS.
[01:05:20] Unknown:
Yes. Controversial. Is it takes to it takes too long. It takes too long to load stuff. And the reason why is not because, like, it's not well made. It it probably is well made. It's that it's looking. It's searching the entire Internet. Like, it's the search area is massive when you're looking for this, like, specific file. And the nice thing the cool thing about Gnostr is, well, we we have a we can get a universal ID for a file, but in the context of Gnostr, we have these identities. We have these pub keys. We have this social network, but mainly the pub key. And if I if I'm looking for a file that was that you posted or a PNG that you posted and it's not there anymore, I don't have to search the entire Internet anymore.
I can go and look at I can go again, like, kind of figure out where you post your media, kind of scope it down to the public key. Yeah. And now I only have to search a small portion of the Internet instead of the entire Internet. And so that that that back to my kind of previous point I may I talked about earlier about, like, why torrents might not be the way well, probably is not a good solution going forward is it's exactly that. Like, you need the identity because without the identity, you're without that identity and without the connections that the identity provides, you're left trying to search the entire world for that one thing you want.
And it's such a it's it's incomprehensibly large search area.
[01:06:54] Unknown:
I see in the chat friends app telling me to talk about something, or maybe you should talk about that, Hazard. Yeah. He's asking
[01:07:02] Unknown:
Fran Zap's asking you to ask Hazard to talk about, bounties for hashes. I mean, I I was gonna bring this up. I mean, one of my, like, left curve IQ issues, left, yeah, left left curve IQ issues with, IPFS is this idea that it's kind of just based off of altruism to a degree, which is is what Bittorrent has been based off of for decades and continues to work. But there's no, like, payment scheme. There's no, financial incentive for people to host files. I know Justin Sun bought BitTorrent for an insane value and tried to monetize it with Tron. I have no idea what happened with that. I know I continue to use BitTorrent and never interact with Tron whatsoever. But is that is this bounties aspect have something to do with some kind of financial incentive to have popular files? Is is there any aspect to that in BLOSUM?
[01:08:09] Unknown:
Well, there's nothing in Blossom, and that was kind of intentional. I was trying to keep trying to put nothing in there outside the bare minimum. But it could definitely be enabled by it because, it might even work with BitTorrent, but BLOSUM is a little bit simpler protocol. But I think I think the idea was originally, like, Studio originally came up with the idea, but, like, the whole concept of, like, if we're going to we have this universal ID now, and if we're gonna start storing it in multiple places, you know, like, if the the single server is not the single source of truth anymore. Right. And then we have Noister, which is a great discoverability layer and a great communication layer.
There's nothing there's nothing really stopping you from just putting a bounty up or, like it would be like making a Twitter post or just a post on Notion saying, hey. I'm looking for this particular file. I'm willing to pay somebody, if they have it. And you can just up the bid or you can kinda change it until you get the community. And so it's really just using the note. It could just be I don't know if it's a solution to anything because I don't know if people want files that badly, but it could just be a, it'd just be like using the Notion layer to advertise,
[01:09:23] Unknown:
I'm looking for this thing. I need this hash. I will pay you if you give me
[01:09:27] Unknown:
access. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's like a bounty hunter for data, sort of. Like, you're you're kind of, like and I think it really speaks to the idea of how Nostra is, like, kind of, like, this API to a market in some sense, where if you want something, you can send it to just, like, a regular, like, get endpoint, like, you know, CDN dot whatever slash shot 256. And if it if, you know, if the CDN has that file, send it back to you. If it doesn't have that file, it can kick off this whole Ruby Goldberg machine in the back end, talk to, like, 100 different people, put out bin you know, bids, e cash, lightning, just like, you know, who even knows? Black box. Okay? Somehow Depends on how desperate you are. Yeah. How des how desperate are you in your just some you know, there's all kinds of, like I made, like, a whole slideshow about this that was, like, way too complicated, and I had to cut it down because, like like, you like, especially when you start involving ecash, like, the number of, like, schemes that you can come up with for, like, forwarding payment and all this stuff. Right. It's it's it's insane. But, like, the a basic idea is that, you know, it's like, hey. I I can use Nostr as the interface to this market. Somebody get me the hash. The first person to upload it is gonna get paid by the CDN. Okay.
So then the user from their perspective, all they see is a long running get request that maybe takes, like, 10 seconds, and then they get their file. Hey. Still faster than IPFS. So and then the next time they hit the endpoint, it's just it's already in the bucket, so it goes fast. So I think that's really interesting because the communities, satellite communities are almost putting, like, another layer on top of that where you can kind of, like, sort of have an inkling of where that data might be, to look for it in the first place. Because, like, if someone's a member of a community and they have permission to upload some stuff there, maybe you hit those buckets associated with that community. So I feel like, there's a lot there that you could you could just yeah. There's kind of already,
[01:11:21] Unknown:
it it it doesn't, involve an ecash or Lightning or Zaps or anything, but I I've made an implementation of, like, a Blossom server. That being like a an h a file server that conforms to the Blossom spec. So it lets you request files, via, like it lets you request files based on their hash. And there's already an implementation of this, so I wrote up in, like, 10, 20 lines of code or something. But if it doesn't have the hash, it will just connect to some random relays, and it will start looking for that hash on events. Like it'll start looking for 1063 events, which are like a noester file advertising event. Like I publish this file, here's where you can find it.
And, yeah, the server will, like, with a few lines of code, connect to the Notion relays, it'll look for the hash. If it finds it, like a like a proprietary URL, it'll then download it and then reserve it as the hash. And the concept of, like, bounty hunting with the files could just be that with a little bit more on top of, like, payment and incentivizations
[01:12:21] Unknown:
kinda put on top of it. This is I mean so I got 3 things. First of all, if you're stuck in the YouTube chat, I see some people like, what the fuck is going on on screen? Like, how do I join that? That's dispatch.com/stream. The second thing is, to me, like, one of the big tests of Noster is this idea of WikiLeaks on Nostr. And so, like, when WikiLeaks came out to me, I was a big I've always been, like, a relatively large, like, conspiracy head. I like, you know, like, dramas and stuff like that, movies, books. And, like, WikiLeaks broke all that because it was, like, half of the shit like, you could just end it in chapter 1 like he just uploaded it to WikiLeaks.
You just had something he needed to say. Just upload it to WikiLeaks. And I I feel like Noster hasn't had that moment yet, but, like, that's the real test. Right? And, like, that requires, like, actual media hosting. That's not just necessary text files. A lot of WikiLeaks was, like, PDFs. I mean, the big one was, like, that video of the helicopter, like, bombing just innocent civilians in a van. Sure. You gotta host that somewhere. And then the third thing is big time file hoarder. Love hosting files. Never been able to monetize them. Right? And there's there's it's kind of this idea kinda, like, throws the normal file hosting thing on its head, which is usually okay. I post a dispatch.
I want multiple CDNs to host my dispatch, so I go out and I pay people. Right? Like, I pay Primal. Well, Primal is not accepting money yet, but, presumably, they're gonna start accepting money to host large files. I pay satellite to host large files. Like, it's it's the broadcaster that's paying. This is the opposite. Right? This is the the idea that the the viewer, the consumer of the content, is going out there and being like, I need access to this shit. Yeah. I will pay you for this. And then all of a sudden, there's a market price aspect there. That's not just like, what is disk space and bandwidth cost?
[01:14:45] Unknown:
Yeah. The interesting thing about that is they're effectively paying for the same thing. They're they're paying for the media or the file to be more accessible, which is, like, you're not just it's interesting because it kinda goes like, why can't I just host my media on my Raspberry Pi at home? Right. It doesn't work because if you like, there's like a cool mental model I like to think of. If you think of the Internet like the media hosting sense as a mountain, and all the small devices, all your phones, all your laptops, they're all the bottom of the mountain. And all the big media hosting servers, the S3 buckets, the massive companies that host all the files, the YouTubes, they're at the top of the mountain. They're the easiest, like and if the data and if you think about the data, like the files as water, it kind of flows down the mountain. It has to like it comes from those big things all the way down to the small devices. But if you have a small file on your phone, it takes work to get it up the mountain. It takes work to put it all the way up on YouTube, to put it on these like discoverability, these massively powerful servers to distribute things. And so that work is kind of what you're paying for in this model. Like, if you're if you're looking for a file and you're putting a bounty up, you're in some you might think like it's kind of like you're paying for the file, but what you're really in some sense, what you're paying for is someone to do the work to get it up high enough so that you can access it because you can't connect to their phone directly.
So they gotta get it to some sort of server that you can both access and easily get it.
[01:16:20] Unknown:
That's an amazing metaphor. I it's it's like a CDN that pulls things in from the edge instead of pushing things to the edge. It's like Yeah. And this pulling function.
[01:16:30] Unknown:
The monetization aspect, like, Yeah. There's there's so many ways of building this. You gotta figure out, like, the the right way, I guess. But the monetization aspect is so much fun because yeah. I love hoarding like I love hoarding files. Are we all file orders here?
[01:16:46] Unknown:
Maybe. But is he like Kieran Kieran's in the comments. He's like, oh, I can monetize my 50 terabyte NAS.
[01:16:52] Unknown:
Oh, absolutely. You just have to listen for, like, when somebody wants that file. And then, you know, you need to actually do the work to get it to get it to them. But, yeah, like you can just buy like what is it? Like a 100 terabytes for 4, sorry, $100 for 4 terabytes? Like that holds a lot of potentially monetizable content.
[01:17:11] Unknown:
Yeah. What I really like is the idea that, CDNs will be kind of like this, acceleration gateway from between files that are hosted on a very decentralized way to people who actually are trying to load them, like, on their phone or something. And so the only thing that needs to get paid for is the first time it gets pulled onto it, and it can get deleted after a while. But, like Right. It can be, like, ephemeral. Exactly. Like, like, almost like like a least recently accessed cache or something like that. So you have a, you know, CDN operator, which by the way, if anyone runs wants to run their own version of satellite CDN, it's open source now, and you can just put an ENV variable that's like the number of cents per gigabyte per month, and you can set up your own lightning gated, s 3 bucket or Cloudflare r two bucket. So Wait. It's in dollars?
It's in cents? It's it's denominated in USD, but it's charged at lightning on the current exchange rate. Oh, that's cool. And it refreshes because, you know, just for unit of account stuff. That's what you're paying
[01:18:11] Unknown:
AWS for or whatever.
[01:18:12] Unknown:
Yeah. So you basically set because well, I'm play I'm using Cloudflare r two because Oh. They're both centralized, but Cloudflare r 2 is great because they don't charge for data transfer. So it makes sense. Only company more evil than Amazon. Well, exactly. But you know what? The it's good. Like, if we're if we actually want to win, we need to use the powerful CDN networks and then build in, like, a fallback solution. Right. Like, all this decentralized stuff, like, it's never gonna work if you have to, like, wait 10 seconds for your video to start loading. So, like, all this No one's switching from TikTok if they're waiting fucking Exactly. Half a minute. These decentralized censorship resistance is like break glass in case of emergency kind of stuff. But otherwise, it needs to go quick. So there's, like, this fallback kinda thing.
So, you know, I mean, I guess, not to ramble on too long here, but to connect to connect it to what, we were talking about a minute ago, the whole idea of the edge, I really think there needs to be a way for there to be a lot of edge devices that actually back up the media, and that's one of the things I, me and Hazardous Building with satellite communities is it's like a desktop app that can run on an actual, like, MacBook that when you subscribe to a community, you download and cache and backup media files selectively, and then those are sitting on your hard drive. That's cool. So then if a CDN needs that file, it knows who to ask to to upload that file. So it's an example of kind of welding that, welding get paid? Yes. You get paid with eCash or lightning.
[01:19:43] Unknown:
Exactly. And and you set a market rate. You I asked the important questions. You you say, like There's a lot to build. Like, to be clear, like, that probably won't be a, a steward issue. That yeah. That's like a way down the road because, like I said, we gotta figure out Well, because it's easy. But you could be. You could be. And that's and, like, the market rate is the interesting part of, like, what does that even look like? It depends on what you're saying. Market for uploading files.
[01:20:08] Unknown:
Because the thing is is, like, if it's just me posting a video of a sunset or something. Right? Like, people just want that to load quick. If it doesn't load quick, they're just gonna scroll on past. They don't need to see my fucking sunset. No big deal. Right? But if there's, like, a controversial video that gets posted or something like that Yeah. And, you know, I I personally think Alex Jones can go fuck himself, but he's a really good case study. Yeah. And so, like, Alex Jones, like, releases some kind of really controversial video, and it it gets censored from 80% of the Internet, 90% of the Internet.
Like, people will sit there and wait a minute and a half to watch the video. Like, if if there's something they need to see, they really wanna see it, and they're being blocked from seeing it, then at that point, they're willing to, first of all, pay for it, and they're willing to deal with the friction of the loading times and whatnot. And so, like, how do you do that gracefully? Right? Is that the that's basically how you guys are looking at it. Yeah. The gracefully part is
[01:21:14] Unknown:
oh, is question is hard. But it kinda like Stu's point. Like, that is the that's the I think that was the missing piece to some, like, censorship resistant media is that the peer to peer, the censorship resistant part, the, you know, the resilient part to all that, that's like break glass in case of emergency. Like, we can still use S3 buckets. We can still use all that great hosting, the fastest hosting that we have. The important part is that, as you said, like, you can get it when it's down. When it go when it disappears, when it gets censored, that's when you start needing, like, the central super assistant. That's when you start needing the network. The gracefully part, let's just well, there's many ways to solve that. There's, you have to get the file and you knowing what you want and you're how it's searching the network is part of like what I mentioned earlier about having the pub key. If you know who posted it, or you know who who of your friends might have it and have talked about it, that that reduces the search area, which can make which can make getting the the the file you're looking for a lot a lot faster. I mean, if you kinda think about it, like, that's what happens already. Right? It's like if there's something controversial,
[01:22:29] Unknown:
what really happens is, like, it's like WhatsApp groups or signal groups or something. It's like people are just messaging, like, did you do you have the file? Yeah. Like, can you send me the file? And it's just manual text messages, like, on chat apps and chat groups. Like, can did you download it? Did you get it before they banned it? Share it. Part about it is you say, do you have that file? Like, that's a shared understanding of what file. You have no idea if you're talking about Right. You're not checking the hash and seeing if it's actually been modified or not. And we're entering the age of AI, so it's, like, relatively easy to mod like, there's gonna be all these fake show. I've given the AI way too much, the LLMs way too much content of me speaking.
[01:23:10] Unknown:
They could probably make me say whatever they want me to say. Dude, that's another thing. I feel like almost just like the simple fact of having a hash of a file that is signed by the author of the file. Massive. Dude, that is like the one that might be bigger than all of Nostra combined. If once once the average person's like like, oh, like, they they they they're they're gonna be so freaked out the first time they see a video AI deep fake of themself. There's it'd be like a moral panic about that. And then if you had a service that was like, look. This is a CDN, except it contains this little signature. Don't trust anything unless it has this little signature.
[01:23:48] Unknown:
Most the average person can completely understand that. The client can just give you, like, a little check mark, like, Odell posted this. This is what Odell wanted
[01:23:56] Unknown:
was saying. Not all face. Part. Sorry not to jump in and interrupt you guys. The craziest part about that is it doesn't have to be a Noesha client. You can take the hash of the file that you're currently watching. You have the whole video and you grab the hash of it, and then you go to the Noesta network and be like, who has posted this hash? Oh, it's Odell. Okay. He's like connected to me in this way, so it's all good. Like, you don't even have to show it like it has a no you could just put it anywhere and use the Nostra network as a lookup table for like, not accountability, but for, reputation in a sense.
[01:24:28] Unknown:
Yeah. That's yeah. That's huge.
[01:24:31] Unknown:
Yeah. The whole AI thing is really, really, really, almost like kind of an accelerant on top of all these trends, I feel like, which is, like, good because it makes you build the infrastructure in a way that's really, like, defensible. So yeah. I mean, I I think there's almost there's this interesting connection between trying to defend against spam and trying to find actual interesting content source of signal. It's the same problem. It's just looking at it of, like, are you trying to get rid of the bad? Are you trying to find the good and find the needle in the haystack? And, like, and if you're gonna have if you like, even just a market for files that people want, like, the files that people pay for is almost itself a trending feed of sorts, a kind of honest trending feed. Right. So you could, you know Well, the problem is I mean, the problem I understand with zaps is, like, it's hard to verify.
[01:25:24] Unknown:
Like, zaps are not verifiable. No. But I cache, I think we can make verifiable.
[01:25:32] Unknown:
Well, maybe the BitTorrent version of this is IP addresses, like Cedars because IP addresses are actually, you know, edge just edge cases, but they're kind of a scarce thing. So if you could have a, you know, some type of network space, there is a kind of scarcity inherent in network topology
[01:25:50] Unknown:
that might be useful. There's something more scarce than IP addresses though. Mhmm. Nose to public keys and a reputation. The connection the connections that make the connections that connect you. Yeah. But more importantly, the connections that connect you to the other random person you just met. Like, that's a really small dataset. So if you're looking for, like, who to connect to or or who to get this file from or who has the most reputation in the network, If I see a random key that I have no connections with, like, if I search my friends list and they have no connections and so on and so on, then, like, it's it's basically has a rank of 0, you know, web of trust kind of stuff. But then if if, like, I know that, like, Stu is if I'm if I'm looking for a file and I see that, like, Stu's public key says that he has the file or he has the thing I'm looking for, that's like, well, I don't need to do hardly any verification. I might not even need to pay him, like we just have trust. But if I see it's like a friend of a friend of a friend, I might need to pay him. But like, I'm like, oh, okay. I can see how you connect to me.
It's a really rare. It's a it's a to your point too about like, would you say, things that are rare or things that are scarce. It's a really scarce connection. Yeah. There's only, like, a few of them. There's only a few thousand of them that if you go friends are friends. So
[01:27:08] Unknown:
Yeah. You you need some form of scarcity to to serve as, like, the backing asset to create any finite system. You know, like, the infinities always destroy your beautiful constructs. You can't have infinities sneaking into your models, and so you need some kind of thing that brings this in infinite space down into kind of, like, a concrete finite thing. And so, I mean, you know, like, Bitcoin just uses energy, which is, like, the most bulletproof physics based form of scarcity, but there's these kind of, like, higher level forms of scarcity like reputation and network topology and, you know, maybe other things like human humans themselves, human attention, something like that that I think almost, like, kinda recapitulate this process of scarcity projection.
And it's just no no is almost, like, very interesting, kind of like, it's, the social media version of, like, this it's like projecting reputation like, it's it's projecting the scarcity inherent in human social networks onto the Internet just like bit Bitcoin is projecting the scarcity inherent in physics onto the Internet. Right. So it's like you know, you can take an analogy too far, but I think it is an interesting lens sometimes to think about some of this stuff. It can reveal things. So I don't know. I don't I I always I kinda wondered for a long time, like, who were the miners of Noster? You know what I mean? Who are the people that are, like, really holding the cards?
I'm not sure.
[01:28:41] Unknown:
The shit posters maybe? Shit posters.
[01:28:44] Unknown:
They seem to be building the network. It's it's the meme. I'm the captain now. Yeah. Maybe that's dumb. Who are the miners?
[01:28:54] Unknown:
I mean, right now, it seems like the relay operators are holding the cards. Like, the 6 people running the 6 biggest relays?
[01:29:00] Unknown:
Yeah. Depends on what you mean by Nostril. Because if if it's, like, the data that's being generated and and built up, then it's probably the relays. But if it's, like, the public key social graph,
[01:29:13] Unknown:
then it's every single user. It's not the relays because I mean, look. I sympathize with, I would like to see outbox model, a horrible name, Humble model, the Humble protocol, implemented by as many clients as possible to to reduce the reliance on individually large relays. But one of the cool beautiful aspects of Noster is is simple, you know, left left side of the bell curve concept that that these these notes are being broadcast, and people tend to hoard things and they share them all around. I mean, Will literally woke up one morning and deleted the Domus Relay, and pretty much nothing happened.
Like, I know none of my notes were lost. I don't know of any note of significance that was lost. If, like, if someone wants to let me know of a note that they're missing out on when he deleted that relay and that's probably the most like, one of percentage wise, probably the most centralized we'll ever see in Noster history is when he deleted that domus relay. Like, it was probably I I don't you can't measure that. It's unmeasurable. But
[01:30:27] Unknown:
Yes.
[01:30:28] Unknown:
I don't think they hold that many cards. Like, I think you delete the top 6 relays, and all my notes will still be there. Yeah. I see problem. Yeah. And nostrils still work. So is there really that like, we should have better protocols. Like like, we should the client should be smarter, and we can improve them, but I just don't think it's, like, necessarily a kill a kill shot. And it's a little it's way different than miners and Bitcoin. And I also will say, completely irrelevant of all of this, that you know it's a good dispatcher when you have Pablo in all caps in the comments.
[01:31:08] Unknown:
That's so you know you're doing something right. Yeah. I'm gonna have to ask about this later. I'm curious about this users being the miners thing. I that's I would like to make that more true. I would like it to be more the case that users were holding the cards of the actual infrastructure in a way that, like, every like, you know, Nostra kind of started almost took, like, the opposite path of Bitcoin where, like, Bitcoin started off where everyone was running this really full heavy node. And then it started moving in this light kind client direction because out of necessity. But then Nostra, maybe because it saw that, learned that lesson, it's like we're gonna have smart clients that are smart enough to do all this, like, feed construction stuff, but basically, they're not gonna store all the data. They're basically nostril clients started as like clients.
But so now it's like almost maybe there's to equalize, there's a need to move in the other direction where you have more nostril node type stuff on devices. I mean, obviously, not mobile devices.
[01:32:06] Unknown:
It it it's moving in the other direction. Yeah. So it's moving in the other direction because the user is the miner, and the what is the miner doing? The miner is, like, deciding what goes in and what doesn't. It's it's it's the thing that's making the decisions on the network. And there's no consensus in there's no consensus in Noester. And so the well, you can't have no consensus. There's no consensus, so that means it's just the individual. And so the individual is kind of their own minor, making their own decisions, making their own stack of data that they that they have, like, kind of put into their own consent. Look. If you it's kind of, kind of a stretch of an analogy, but it's they're mining, you know, with their attention. They're mining what they find
[01:32:54] Unknown:
most interesting and collecting it. Well, this is the local cache relay thing. This is basically yeah. If you had if if if you take this to the theoretical extreme, if if every user was a relay, well, that's called a peer to peer network. So then that question doesn't make sense anymore if whether it's the relays or the users But aren't we trying to avoid that? Well, I think we're trying to avoid peer to peer network as the transport layer. See, and I I always get in dangerous territory when I start bringing up peer to peer, but I think that I I I Fiat Jaff is so angry at you. Right? No. No. No. I've talked to Fiat Jaff about that. I've I he originally was, like, hell suspicious, but I think that peer to I'll be clear. Peer to peer network as the transport layer is a terrible idea and will never work. However, peer to peer network as a slow kind of recovery archival, layer is a great idea, and and the 2 can work together.
You have, like, the relays and the s three buckets, but the all they need is just this little emergency system to where if that gets nuked, they can be like, hey, decentralized social network people, can you all upload this stuff again, please? And then, like, the benefit of that is that if you if you are one of those people who are backing up stuff, you're backing up notes, you're backing up media, you have a Nostra Relay and a Blossom server on your local host machine. I would do that. Yeah. No. That's that's what that's what the whole what happens. Dozens of us that would do that. Right? Like I mean, actually, I mean percent. Like, if I could just toggle that mode and it was just making all this backing up shit. That's the whole point of making in the satellite community as a desktop app is because the whole whole idea started as a local relay backup thingy. I was like, wouldn't that be great if you had a relay that was 0 mill milliseconds from your app? Like, it would, but then it turns out it also serves as an archival mechanism. So it's really interesting.
[01:34:36] Unknown:
Well, the cool part is it serves as an archival mechanism, not because we it's funny with data backups. It serves as an archival mechanism, not because you have the data, because it can download everything on the Internet and have the data. It serves as an archival mechanism because I can re upload it. Because those things are signed, there's no questions about whether, like, reuploading it or not. I can't modify it. Yeah. Because if I download all my pictures on Facebook, I have a great archive of my on my feed on Facebook, but it's completely useless to anybody but me. But the cool part about Noester is if I download everything I care about on Noester, it's very valuable to me and maybe other people because I can just because it's all signed. I can just put it back up. Right. There's no trust involved, and it's beautiful.
[01:35:24] Unknown:
That yeah. That's I people are sleeping on it.
[01:35:27] Unknown:
Oh, yeah.
[01:35:29] Unknown:
I, I mean, like, we're nobodies. Right? But, like like, leaders of of countries. Like, what? They're just, like, posting unsigned events out to the world. Like, what the fuck are they doing? Like, they they don't even realize.
[01:35:48] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. I I it just feels early for some reason. It's It's like literally Elon Musk
[01:35:55] Unknown:
can just decide. Like, you're just a random world leader. You're like the fucking president of Paraguay. Don't know who that guy is. He just, like he posted a tweet. Like, Elon can just make the tweet whatever he wants it to be. And everyone's cool with it. No no one realizes the issues inherent with that. I think people are gonna start to realize the issues.
[01:36:19] Unknown:
Yeah. And it's as you I think as you mentioned before, Stu, it's like, AI is just accelerating that. Like, it's it's pushing that faster and faster and faster. It's making it more and more obvious that, like, the communication layer and the data, like yeah. I don't know what's gonna happen, but it's it's gonna have to end in some sort of self verifiable signatures. There's no there's no there's no like, AI is gonna destroy every little bit of trust on the Internet that was, like, inherent to just like oh. It is It's great. We need we need this. Yes.
[01:36:53] Unknown:
AI sometimes I say that AI is, postmodern self postmodernism self destructing because AI is the most postmodern technology that has ever existed because all it does is ingest and reexpress the entire canon of everything that's ever been made. And so it has, like, the ultimate ability to, create, generate something that is based on something that already exists. But it it so it's completely commoditized the expression expression, but it has not commoditized, truth. It's not commoditized and, like, truth in a in a sort of, like, socially constructed way. Like, what do we want? Well, truth is values we're trying to do. You know?
[01:37:34] Unknown:
Truth in the physical world sense. Because it can make up its own truth on the Internet, but it has no relevance to us humans who live in the real world. Well, also truth in the social consensus way. Yes. Because, like, one of the things you saw during the pandemic was, like,
[01:37:50] Unknown:
this function of Reddit. Because, like, I I I mean, I think Reddit has been, like I'm gonna braille on Reddit for a second, but I I feel like Reddit has been a spy op for, like, a few years now, probably ever since, like, 2015 or 2016. Bought it or whatever? Yeah. Probably. I mean yeah. Or whenever it became apparent that social media is no longer downstream of the world, but the world is kind of downstream of social media. Once whenever that thing changed, Reddit be was this thing where, like, it tried, you know, not not not only did it censor people, of course, it censored people, but the main way it functioned as a propaganda engine was by creating the illusion of false consensus where you go on there and if you're like, dude, isn't it kinda, like, weird that we're, like, all locked in doors for, like, 2 years for no reason? Like, the ability to make people feel like they're isolated in thinking that is the main power of Reddit. It's the it's the ability to atomize people and to prevent this kind of consensus about reality.
And so you need and and AI is kind of like almost just to putting that on, like, super max mode where any if you wanted to make it look like you an entire crowd of thousands of people agreed about something, well, then you just spin up a 1,000 convincing sounding AI personas. And so, fortunately, actually, what it's doing what it's doing is AI is kind of leveling the playing field to where anyone can make it look like tons of people believe anything because you don't know what real people are anymore. And that's actually good because now it just means that the only playing field that exists anymore is this cryptographically prescribed web of trust area. So the maybe the the overall thesis is that this is good because Nostra is gonna be the last social network left standing.
[01:39:34] Unknown:
Yeah. It it can't copy. AI can't copy. It can copy it can't copy the rare things. It can't copy Bitcoin, and it can't copy cryptography.
[01:39:43] Unknown:
Yeah. It can't forge a digital signature. It's, you know, like, the whole asymmetric key, cryptography thing, it's really there's something really poetic about it that we we're really familiar with the obfuscation aspect of encryption to where, like, if we didn't have, crypto no. It's asymmetric key cryptography, we wouldn't be able to have a private sphere. Right. However, what's an kind of underrated observation, I think, is that without this cryptographic, construct of digital signatures, which is, of course, just the mathematical other side of the coin, you wouldn't be able to have a public sphere.
And we're in the we're in this, sort of transitionary stage where the public sphere used to be just defined by the hegemonic media, you know, cable news or Reddit or, like, wherever web 2 is kind of like the the public sphere for, you know, in in our at least in my lifetime. But now there's, like, this need to construct an actual cryptographic public sphere. So I think that's gonna be, like maybe the 20 twenties are gonna be, like, the second version of the crypto wars. If, like, if nineties if the nineties was the crypto wars for the ability to have privacy, the twenties are gonna be the,
[01:40:54] Unknown:
the the the war for authenticity. The war The war never happened. No. The war never ended, Stuart.
[01:41:01] Unknown:
It's just been continuing. Really? Maybe I'm naive. It seems like we at least, won on a technical basis, though,
[01:41:10] Unknown:
or at least maybe just We've won some battles. Yeah. Some battles have been won, but the war has been continuing. Created a little bit of space. Yeah. I just think everyone's sleeping on this shit. Yeah. It's crazy. I feel so crazy. I feel like such a crazy person. I felt like a crazy person for many years with Bitcoin. Now, like, Larry Fink's shilling it on CNBC and stuff. It's like, okay. I'm no longer crazy. And now on on the Nostra side, I just feel like a fucking crazy person, but it's so fucking massive. It's so fucking massive. And I just I wanna tell everyone who will listen, but also at the same time, like, I'm just so diluted and disenfranchised from my years at Bitcoin that I also just don't give a shit. I'm just like, whatever. Just build it, and then they'll come eventually. They'll figure it out.
[01:42:00] Unknown:
Yeah. The selling point, I feel crazy a little bit, but the part of the I guess there's just something unique about Noeschter. There's something and it's not just like a theoretical thing. It's back to what I initially said before. It's the only network, really social network, we can hack on. And so, like, I don't know why, like, it does feel crazy to be like on this, to be almost dedicated to this network that has such a small in comparison, such a small community. Like, how many of them how many of us are there?
[01:42:33] Unknown:
We have, like, 20,000 people or something? I think monthly active pub keys is around 20,000, I think.
[01:42:40] Unknown:
I haven't looked in a long time, though. It's mostly active pub keys, so who knows how many people there are? They're all dogs.
[01:42:50] Unknown:
Dude, dogs are great. I'm cool with working for them.
[01:42:55] Unknown:
Yeah. Well, that's maybe the point is is that there's no such thing as a proof of unique human. There's just, humans exist on the Internet as a probability distribution.
[01:43:04] Unknown:
You know? I love that. I love the I I mean, that that's that's that's You're like I know that that's demonstrated so well by the fact that the follower count is not consistent. You fucking
[01:43:16] Unknown:
so I actually consider this for your Nostra client. People just wanna see a number go up. So just mathematically increase their follower number over time. You're like, I gained 0.25 followers. They're just constantly growing forever.
[01:43:32] Unknown:
Just their follower count just constantly grows. If they like the number going up, I could just give them a a button that would create a fake pub key that would then subscribe to them and fill it for fake information,
[01:43:43] Unknown:
and then they could have an extra follower. You're going too far. You can just hard code it. You just be like, every day, your follower count goes up by 1% and just they're like, oh my god. There's so many people following me. 21,000,000
[01:43:56] Unknown:
followers that asymptotically
[01:43:58] Unknown:
approaches, the I know. It'll get ridiculous eventually. We can fix it. At that at that point, we'll be the standard. It won't even fucking matter. Then it's just like, oh, like, here's your actual here's your actual follower count. But in the meantime, you just like you know, TikTok, you have to work for it. Twitter, you might have to work for it. On Nostar, your follower count just increases every day forever. There's something there. That would be a fun I'm just I'm putting it out there. Not involved. Not the person who did it. You know, but someone should make a client that just increases
[01:44:33] Unknown:
your money. How much, how much, there's gonna be some people who know about basic, like, bot farm kind of things, like, bot users. Right? You can spin those up relatively easily on Twitter. Yeah. Have you seen the Nostridge House people?
[01:44:47] Unknown:
No. Like, the they have, like, the AI that just responds to everything. They they all are they're all nip5 [email protected].
[01:44:57] Unknown:
Oh, this is awesome.
[01:44:59] Unknown:
Yeah. Like, there was a whole controversy where, like, I was like, oh, like, ask me any question you want. Like, I'm gonna open book. And, like, even the AI was, like, asking me questions. I was like, I'm not answering the AI questions. I was like, I know you're at nostridge.house. Like, I'm not answering your questions. And then some of the questions were kinda good, though.
[01:45:18] Unknown:
Ostrich. Got it. But that like, you could you could, in theory, just pay to have those things follow you if you need followers.
[01:45:25] Unknown:
I know. It's super easy. I mean, that's what like, what's a real follower?
[01:45:29] Unknown:
Exactly.
[01:45:31] Unknown:
But same thing with Twitter and all the Pomp became Pomp. Pomp was a nobody, and he just paid for followers on Twitter. I mean, it was, like, India click farms and shit, but I mean, with Nastr, it's like it really, like, pulls away the curtain. Right? Like, because I can just be a nobody and just generate a 1000000 end pubs. Yeah. And, like, are they followers? And, like, what is a follower? And, like, really, just people wanna look at their profile and see the number go up, though. That's what I'm saying. This is, like, you just kinda I like this product thinking. You kinda just accelerate it. You're just like, whatever. You know? We all oh, even the plebs on Noster have a 1000000 followers. You know? It's just like everyone's like it's just growing exponentially. No. That's actually a really that's, you could sort of hyperinflate
[01:46:22] Unknown:
attention the attention economy in some way. Like, if you really wanna get rid of kill Google, just make, like, a 1,000,000,000 AIs that click on AdWords things, and they'll be bankrupt in no time. There you go. That's crazy. Excel. Right? Yeah. You know, that's one of the things about, that I feel like, Google's goose, I feel like, is really quite cooked in some sense unless they really pivot because someone at that cohort actually mentioned to me that I should check out perplexity dotai, which is like an open source version of, chat g p t kind of. It runs like the open source models and it uses. I think what it does is it just queries different search engines that it has an LLM summarizes search results, and it's really great because it's like, answer engine essentially. But what they do is they have this way of configuring your queries to where you can use, like, Stack Overflow or Reddit or whatever as, like, kind of, like, the source of signal that you use to summarize.
And I think it's really, really showing you and pointing, like, it's like to me, that's like a very strong indicator that, there's gonna be this scramble for sources of actual signal, in in the world. And may maybe Nostra, like, being, like, the back end data layer of an answer engine might be, like, its main utility. And if that happens, then that will kind of, like, position Nostra as in a very strong position as, like, the author and arbiter of, signal and information which could be very strong. So I guess I guess my point in saying that is that, like, leaning into making Nostra as easy to scrape as possible is a good strategic move because,
[01:47:59] Unknown:
you know, it's it might be the only network left left standing and, like It will be. I mean, because everyone else is, like, basically moving to, like, the solution is more KYC. Well, can I Like, Like, that's what, like, Twitter, like, Twitter, like, part of it with Elon is, like, not only is the user more valuable if they're k y c's and you have identifying information with them? Give give credit card data. There's a reason it doesn't accept Bitcoin payments. He wants the credit card data. Credit card data gives a lot of information about an individual. But, also, like, are you clicking?
Like, who's clicking the fucking link? Like, he doesn't wanna pay out random Twitter bots to click links, and then he has to he has to pay out the ad re the ad payments on a CPM basis. He doesn't wanna do that. He wants to only pay out if it's a KYC person. And and more and more of the Internet is going to let's KYC as many people as possible. And Nasr is kind of going in the exact opposite way Yeah. And doing, like, sign pub keys I mean, pub key signatures and Web of Trust. And then you can you can act and then that actually works, because you can fake all this KYC bullshit. Yeah.
[01:49:12] Unknown:
How long do you think this is gonna take to play out? Do you think it's gonna be, like, a 5 e x thing? Or I don't know. Too long. Too long? Yeah.
[01:49:19] Unknown:
I'm tired. I don't know. I we'll we'll see. I I I do think, like, a lot of the LLM stuff, AI shit, like, it accelerates a lot of this.
[01:49:30] Unknown:
Yeah.
[01:49:31] Unknown:
I mean, you can cause, like, a global incident if you do l m fuck LLM fuckery with, like, a world leader. Like, imagine, like like, there was just, like, a fake Biden press release that came out or something. And, like, so that those kind of things could accelerate. I I do wonder, like, when do we have our first world leader on Noster? Like, when do we have the first world leader that realizes they wanna have censorship resistant signed communications with their populace and the rest of the world.
[01:50:09] Unknown:
Maybe Bukele? Maybe?
[01:50:11] Unknown:
Yeah. But I mean, besides him, I guess. Because, like, he's, like, seems like low hanging fruit. But, yeah, he'll probably be the first. Let's be honest.
[01:50:20] Unknown:
It's it's yeah. I mean, you it's inevitable in some sense. Well, inevitable if people figure things out, but, yeah, faced with AI, it's it's the it's like the only solution, because you post another stuff, and you post the videos, or if you I mean, something even as simple, like even on Nostra right now. If I post a link to an image and the image the link doesn't contain the hash of the image or that the event doesn't reference the hash of the image in any way. Like, you have no way like, that that's Like, Milan could just change it.
[01:50:55] Unknown:
Yeah. Well, as long as the there's If I host some Primal servers, like, Milan could just, like, change dispatch, and it could just be, like, download Primal. Download Primal over and over again.
[01:51:07] Unknown:
There I I think there is, there's a there's extra metadata that can be added to the event about the thing you're linking to that can protect against that. But, yeah, it's, if you don't have that and you don't have the hash and you don't have the signature, it's it's crazy how insecure the Internet is.
[01:51:28] Unknown:
Guys, I agree. I this has been a fucking amazing conversation. I would say to the freaks in the live chat who said a lot of this went over their head, you know, part of what inspired dispatch was the wonderful bitdevs community in New York, led by our fearless leader, Jay. I no longer live in New York, but it's one of the things I miss the most. And I will say that the first 4 years of bit devs in New York, literally everything went over my head. It kinda just comes in through osmosis. You just wanna surround you surround yourself with people talking about interesting things, and it kinda just comes in. So don't get overwhelmed. Don't don't be like, holy shit. I had no fucking idea what the fuck was going on in this conversation. It's important to go deep, and it it does it does work its way into your brain.
Guys, this has been you you guys make me incredibly bullish on the future. Thank you for both working on Noster. I I really do appreciate it. I know it can be thankless a lot of the time. I know people think we're fucking crazy. But I I I really do appreciate it, and I appreciate you guys joining us for the show. I know it's Hazard's only his only second time on a podcast, which is kind of a big deal. But thank you. I appreciate you both. Thanks, man. Yeah. A 100%. I'm gonna give you guys final thoughts, but before I do, still dispatch has no ads or sponsors.
We are purely supported by Bitcoin donations from our audience. I think it was unique this week, that our largest supporter was a completely anonymous person, who decided to send 21,000 sats. So shout out to you, Einon. I do appreciate it. We also had support from rider die freak, Ape, who gave 18,000 sets. And then we had original size with 10,000 sets and with 10,000 sets. I haven't met in person yet. I'm gonna ask him how to pronounce his name his name, but, I do appreciate him. He's helped out with open sats as well. But, yeah, we don't have ads or sponsors. We're purely supported by our audience. Thank you guys for supporting us. Thank you for the rider, die freaks that are constantly in the live chat, making this show unique, making the show, special. That's what brings me back week after week. I know it's a bear market, but it's not really a bear market. But I know Peter Schiff is saying that Bitcoin's going to 0, and you guys are all really scared out there, and you don't wanna spend your Bitcoin.
And if that's the case, just share it with friends and family. We're on every podcast app. We're on YouTube till we get banned. We're on Twitter until I rashly decide to delete this dispatch Twitter account. And all of our links are dispatch.com. So just share that, subscribe, and shit. I don't know. I don't really like doing that thing. Guys, Stuart, Hazard. This has been great. Before we wrap up, let's, let's hit the audience with some final thoughts. Stuart, final thoughts.
[01:54:44] Unknown:
I mean, I feel like I kinda got into most of the stuff I wanted to get into today on technical level, but I just wanna say that, appreciate you guys, and I'm happy to be part of this. I got a kind of a kind of a funny feeling about this year. I feel like it's gonna be significant and kind of really looking forward to see what happens, and, hopefully, I see, some of you guys in Riga. I just signed up for gonna be in? Yeah. I I hope so. I mean, I I I signed up for it. So assuming I get a ticket, I'm gonna get buy my plane tickets and I I assume you're gonna get a ticket. That'd be sweet. I would love to see some of these a lot of people that I've met over the last year there again in person because something about being around people is, I think, really important. Maybe just everything's becoming AI, but, like, the flesh and blood is is becoming important, I think.
It is it always was important.
[01:55:33] Unknown:
Fuck you. Well, thank you for joining us. I I plan to be in Riga. Oh, sweet. I don't wanna feed the conspiracy theories too much, but I miss Nostrika. I miss Nostrasia. And, Jack himself said to me, he was like, I'm just, like, paying for these events, and you're not showing up. So I, like, feel, like, kind of, like, I should I should I should show up to Riga. And, also, HODL HODL, amazing people. I think it's the best Bitcoin conference of the year. Riga is a beautiful city. It's cheap. Everyone speaks English. Very safe. So people should consider going to Riga. I I I last time I was at was 2019, and I need to go back.
So I'm planning to go for the whole week. I will give people a 95% certainty, that it will happen.
[01:56:28] Unknown:
Gotta sign that with Nastr keys.
[01:56:30] Unknown:
I'm not signing it yet with Nastr keys. You're you're just getting this. We can make a hash of this video file afterwards, and that that's the best you're getting. Hazard, final thoughts.
[01:56:42] Unknown:
Yeah. It's it's great to be here. It's great to talk. I love, like, over the last year, since, I guess, the beginning of NoStar, there's nothing more fun than just talking to people who are understanding Gnostr, people who are building it. It's craziest ideas can be found there. Final thoughts? Let's go build stuff. Build crazy ideas. Build like, there's so much new apps. There's so many new weird solutions that Gnostr enables with just backs backing stuff up, managing events, or anything. I just build stuff. The more stuff we try, the more the more we'll know what actually works.
[01:57:25] Unknown:
Fuck you. Thank you for building stuff, guys. I appreciate both of you. You guys are fucking crushing it. Keep pushing forward. And, hopefully, I mean, hopefully, I'll meet both of you guys in person sometime soon. If not, Enrique, somewhere else. And, if there's anything you need personally, don't hesitate to reach out. You have me both on signal now. It's my favorite way of communicating.
[01:57:52] Unknown:
And, yeah, thank you. Amazing. Great talking to you guys. Peace. Thank you. Peace.
[01:58:22] Unknown:
Mister Reebram has suffered a massive and irreparable damage. You never know what has happened to him. If I'm not for sure of this, I would not have committed him to live. What is democracy? What is democracy? That's something to do with young men killing each other up. And when it comes, Mike, For democracy, any man would give his only begotten son. It is impossible for a decelerated individual to experience pain, pleasure, memory, dream, or dreams, or thought of any kind. This young man will be as undefeated, as anything as the day until the day he joins me.
I don't know whether I'm alive and breathing or dead in remembering. How can you tell what's a dream and what's real when you can't even tell when you're awake and when you're asleep? Wish. Father. I need help. I need trouble trouble, and I need help. Don't you remember when you were little? How you and Bill Harper would, bring a wire between the two houses so you could telegraph to each other. You'll remember
[02:02:55] Unknown:
the most
[02:03:06] Unknown:
It's Morris Cove. For what? And over again. Don't you have some message for a doctor? He is a Please stay in touch with that by itself. Hello? Goodbye, father. Inside me, I just screamed. Nobody pays any attention. I had arms. I could kill myself. I had legs. I could run away. I have voice. I could talk and be some kind of company for myself. Why don't they get it over with it? Kill me. I could yell for help, but nobody helped me. I just Love you, freaks. If you've been living under a rock, that was won by Metallica. It just felt right. It just felt right. What a great rip.
We have, Will from Domus, coming on next week, Tuesday, 1717 100 UTC. It's gonna be a great rep. Definitely join us. I'm working on other rips. I appreciate you all. I love you all. We must win. Thank you. Stay humble, Stack Sats.
Fox Business Intro
Introduction to Citadel Dispatch and discussion on Gold vs. Bitcoin arguments
Conversation about the Nostr ecosystem and its development
Focus on developing the satellite stack and creating a Discord like server on Nostr
Importance of making Nostr infrastructure indestructible and uncensorable
Discussion on Hyper DHT and its role in making Nostr more secure and decentralized
Exploration of alternative DNS solutions and the concept of discoverability in Nostr
Reasons for the limited adoption of I2P and challenges with its complexity
Connecting to the entire world and the peer-to-peer aspect
Importance of web of trust in making connections based on followers
The significance of social activity in producing signal and deriving social capital
Discussion on the reliance on large relays and the deletion of the Damus Relay
Importance of users holding the cards of the actual infrastructure in Nostr
Debate on the role of peer-to-peer networks and the need for authenticity in the digital sphere