Calle is the creator and lead maintainer of the cashu open source protocol, a bitcoin powered chaumian ecash implementation. The cashu ecosystem of wallets and backends provides users the ability to easily, cheaply, and privately use bitcoin, including the ability to make offline peer to peer payments.
Sorry for the technical difficulties at the beginning of this rip. We clear everything up around the 10 minute mark.
Cashu Resources: https://cashu.space/
Calle's Cashu Wallet: https://cashu.me
Calle on Nostr: https://primal.net/calle
EPISODE: 144
BLOCK: 870884
PRICE: 1086 sats per dollar
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nostr account: https://primal.net/odell
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podcast: https://serve.podhome.fm/CitadelDispatch
stream sats to the show: https://www.fountain.fm/
join the chat: https://citadeldispatch.com/chat
learn more about me: https://odell.xyz
Outro Music by TIP NZ: https://primal.net/p/npub1hrctsg2qwu5gsp65gvj29968z460g0th755jq92c8uaz620lewmq6qk525
(00:00:00) CNBC Intro
(00:05:07) Introduction to Citadel Dispatch
(00:06:01) Technical Difficulties and Live Streaming
(00:10:11) Conversation Begins
(00:15:01) Cashu Project Overview
(00:24:39) Attracting Developers to Bitcoin
(00:38:05) LNURL and Compliance Concerns
(00:50:52) Bitcoin as Freedom Money
(01:00:07) Choosing a Cashu Mint
(01:16:56) Nostr and Cashu Integration
(01:57:01) Future of Cashu and Blinded Amounts
(02:10:14) Nostr Adoption and Social Media
[00:00:00]
Unknown:
The price of Bitcoin briefly, hitting the 93,000, dollar level before pulling back. It's up more than a 150%, this year. Let's talk about the crypto market and bring in Matthew Siegel, head of, digital assets research, at Van Eck. I thought, Matt, that it was definitely, long in the tooth, this sort of, mania. You say there's in at least for your work, that you don't necessarily see that yet in terms of, whether it's totally overdone?
[00:00:35] Unknown:
Joe, we think it's just getting started. As we expected, Bitcoin saw this high volatility pump after the election. We're now in blue sky territory. No technical resistance, and we think we're likely to make repeated all time highs over the next two quarters. The same pattern played out 4 years ago. Between the election and the end of the year in 2020, Bitcoin doubled. There were about 6, 10% corrections, so it's not gonna be a straight line, but we're up 30% so far. And a number of indicators that we track are still flashing green for this rally to continue. This is a state change in terms of government support. Look at this cabinet, the VP, attorney general, director of defense, national security adviser, possibly even the secretary of treasury being pro Bitcoin.
That's not including Elon and Vivek. So the number of calls that I'm getting inbound from investment advisers who are at 0 and looking to get to 1% or at 1% and looking to get to 3%, these calls are starting to accelerate, and we think the flows are gonna follow. So our price target for this cycle is a 180 k. We think we can reach that next year. That would be a 1000% return from the bottom to the peak this cycle. That's still the smallest Bitcoin cycle, by far.
[00:02:03] Unknown:
Low double from here, basically. You look at weird things, Matthew, like so you you Google search Google search for Bitcoin is is one of the the thing so you would expect if we were getting top of you would expect that that was off the charts, and and it's not yet?
[00:02:23] Unknown:
Google searches are nowhere near where they were 4 years ago. Coinbase's rank in the Apple and Android app stores, nowhere near where it was 4 years ago. Look at the internals of the derivative markets, what it costs for funding to put on Bitcoin futures trades. You know, it it's up. But once we get into this price discovery mode, it tends to stay elevated for quite some time.
[00:02:52] Unknown:
What if Gensler's gone as a Trump said on day 1 or someone said on day 1? I mean, I I can imagine that. I don't know when, though, it actually becomes of a sell on the news because they it I don't know. Maybe I'm just, think that it's it's more of a mania move now than it than it actually is, but it just seems like it's been a heck of a move. Think it'll move when Gensler's gone? If he's gone?
[00:03:17] Unknown:
Yeah. I think, you know, maybe the disappointment phase will set in, 1 to 2 quarters after the inauguration. There's really 4 major impacts here. Okay. You know, one is just the positive impact on dynamism when you stop suing people for breaking rules that have never been written down. That's a long way of saying that regulation by enforcement is gonna end. We're already seeing the economic impact of that. There are crypto projects that are announcing that they're gonna hold conferences in the US for the first time ever, open offices in the US and New York. It's just great for US jobs and GDP. Right? We've got the Bitcoin reserve that would legitimize this asset as a reserve asset, pave the way for it to be used as a global settlement currency as the BRICS countries have been doing.
You know, president Trump recognizes the synergies between Bitcoin and AI. They are two sides of the same coin. If you wanna have cheap AI, you're gonna wanna combine it with Bitcoin mining to take advantage of that cheap power.
[00:04:18] Unknown:
They're telling me we got, I don't know, Disney, Bitcoin. They're both important, obviously. We gotta get the, we gotta get moving, and, we got, the CFO. But we appreciate your time today, Matt. Thank you.
[00:05:07] ODELL:
Happy Bitcoin Monday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Citadel Dispatch, the interactive live show focused on actionable Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion. That intro was from, the largest Bitcoin podcast in the world, CNBC Squawk Box. They were interviewing some guy from VanEck who thinks, Bitcoin is gonna go up higher. I think it was very topical for our discussion. Looks like I just lost Cali, but he'll be back in a second. We have. It's actually not topical at all for our discussion, but the Bitcoin pump continues. We are in open water Bitcoin, And, it seems like, Bitcoin is doing its thing, melting faces, as it tends to do every 4 years or so.
We have Cali joining us. He has been on the show in the past. He is the prolific maintainer of Cashew. Let's see. He just messaged me because he got disconnected. He's coming back. And I also seem to have some technical difficulties with the live chat. I don't know what's going on with ZapStream right now, but we are live. The chat you see on the screen is from last week's episode. But this is why we still stream to YouTube, and Twitch. So there are some people joining us from those streams right now, and hopefully, I'll have the ZapStream up soon. It says it's sending data, but ZapStream is not receiving it.
And we are waiting for Cali. While we're waiting, this show is supported by freaks like you, who send sats to the show. We have no ads or sponsors. I think we're the longest running largest audience show that's not run by Adam Curry that runs on a pure value for value, method where you donate your hard earned Bitcoin, your scarce Bitcoin, to support the show rather than relying on ads or sponsors. The 2 easiest ways to do that is either through the live chat, which like I said, is not working right now, or you can zap live, or through podcasting 2 point o apps like Fountain Podcasts.
And our 2 largest boosts from last week's episode were from Stimmy Yourself with Bitcoin. He's on 21,000 sats. Said holy shit. Nobody's bullish enough. And we had Reid with 14,141 sats saying consensus is messy. This is a feature, not a bug. I tend to agree with him. Those came in through podcasting 2.0. While we're waiting for Cali, I'm gonna try and get this ZapStream working better. Of course, his internet completely failed him as soon as we went live. But that's the beauty of a live show, isn't it? We just do it live and we don't really know what will happen.
I'm freaks. I know my audio last week wasn't ideal. I was on kind of a shitty connection, but I'm trying to work on it. So I think it's probably much better now. I made some changes. But just know it's a priority. It's obviously not intentional. I want you guys to have the best quality possible. Yeah. I don't know why Noster is not working right now. Well, Noster is working to be clear. This is just Zap dot won't let me connect. Oh, nice of Cali to join us. Yeah. Yeah. Loving me. Thank thanks for joining us. You had me, I had to I had to, hold the there in the rain, man. Yeah. You left me just standing here.
[00:09:19] Calle:
Wait. So here's my avatar. What's up, freaks? There we go. Interruption. My my Internet. I'm on Starlink right now, and Starlink is fucking amazing, but I think
[00:09:33] ODELL:
Did we lose you again? I think I lost you again. Starlink is fucking amazing, but sometimes when it switches between satellites, you lose connection briefly. I think I lost you again. Did you mute yourself? This episode's off to a great start.
[00:10:11] Calle:
I think,
[00:10:14] ODELL:
are we are we screwed?
[00:10:17] Calle:
Yeah. Could be. I mean, let's see. Let's just pray. Let's let's start going and see how far the Internet takes us. Okay. Well, worse worse comes to worse if,
[00:10:27] ODELL:
if if we have to scrap this episode, we'll, we'll reschedule swiftly. Yeah. We'll find a way. Near future. Should we talk about the the clip that you just, I don't know if you talked about it already because it dropped out. That was Did you enjoy the intro clip? I felt like it was very topical for our conversation.
[00:10:44] Calle:
Yeah. Absolutely. First of all, I wanna say, like, all of these snake oil salesman, they're, like, when if you're watching this for a while, you'll notice that you see you know, they they'll say the same thing every time. The only thing that has changed right now is the price, not what they say. So that's that's important to remember. You know, like, what was it? Google search is not up. Coinbase, app ranking on app store is not up. In fact, Coinbase is still up still up as well. As long as Coinbase is still up, the bull market hasn't started. I find that very amusing, especially the guy when he, compared Disney stock to Bitcoin at the end.
[00:11:27] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I I just I love how during bull market, CNBC just turns into a Bitcoin podcast. And usually it's not relevant to anything, on the show, but, I like it as a kind of like a time stamp to look back and, you know, Citadel Dispatch is going for about 3 years now. And, you get to find out what, the largest Bitcoin podcast in the world is talking about at that time every every episode.
[00:11:56] Calle:
I also wanna say, I mean, price going up is great for everyone. Right? But, except if you trust the ECB, then it's it's bad for all the for the entire population that does not own Bitcoin. But aside from that, price going up is great for everyone. But what I wonder in these price rallies is how much of that is trading versus saving. Right? I think saving Bitcoin is what ultimately puts a bottom to to the price. And as more people accumulate without the intention of ever selling, we're going to just raise the bar all the time. But, for a rally like this and with all these, you know, magical indicators pointing towards, like, no particular activity with at least plebs, I wonder, you know, will some people get wrecked because of it and people starting to buy in at 92 k, will probably melt some cases off in both directions.
[00:12:57] ODELL:
They should just stay on Bluemstack. That's about it.
[00:13:00] Calle:
Yeah. You just turn off your brain. You, turn on the DCA.
[00:13:05] ODELL:
Did you see, I had a a noster a noster note I was quite proud of. You you should have stayed humble in StackSats. You still can, but you should have to. I think it's always a good time to to stay humble in StackSats. So by the way, Cali, while you were having your technical difficulties, I was having technical difficulties with ZapStream, but I got it on. So now we have the live chat. The live chat's working. Yeah. I can see some messages going on. It's all good. Should we restart the show? Do you wanna watch the 5 minute intro clip again? Oh, no. I I think I'm good.
[00:13:42] Calle:
Did anyone else see it as well?
[00:13:45] ODELL:
Did you I mean, they'll see it in the recording or whatever. YouTube and Twitch got it, but the ZapStream literally just went live. But you guys didn't miss anything in ZapStream. Right? We appreciate you, and you're the ride or die, and I'm glad we got you on. The intro clip was, you know, mostly mostly a joke, but also hilarious. Cali, did you see what I named this episode?
[00:14:10] Calle:
What is it? Is it c d 144 cashew with Cali? Yeah. You like that? I mean, I love fucking cashews.
[00:14:18] ODELL:
Yeah. I love it a lot. Last rip I did with Cali, everyone everyone should go everyone should go listen to it, but, he was he was kinda pissed off of me afterwards because I I I kept writing e cash everywhere, and I didn't say cash you by name. Yeah. Because you're a Fed investor. That's why. Dude, there's enough conspiracies out there. You don't have to feed the fire. We can it has it had nothing to do with that.
[00:14:45] Calle:
You're proving that you're inviting me more often than the FedDev. So There you go.
[00:14:53] ODELL:
But yeah. So I I made it up to you. I did a super simple name that is literally just three words. 1 is 1 is your name, and 1 is the name of your project. So you're welcome. I I think we could have dropped the middle word there as well. Just Cassie Cali? Yeah. Okay. Well, neck next time. I I I would like you to always be a repeat guest. It's always some of the most fun rips and especially the conversations we have offline are always a lot of fun. The lost podcast episodes that no one else gets to listen to. So what do you wanna talk about? The the project has come a long way since we last spoke.
I think I have no idea when we spoke last. Do you know when we spoke last?
[00:15:36] Calle:
No idea. It was sometime this year, but things are changing. Like, things are happening so fast that it's hard to, keep track. So cache itself is 2 years old. And and when I say that, I mean, like, the first initial release of the software that I did where I didn't even have this whole plan of making, protocol out of it where others can join and participate. So I would maybe cut off, like, 6 months from that in the beginning because it was just, like, one dude doing something. And when it became a protocol with that, I mean, becoming a protocol means, in my definition, writing the spec and then having independent implementations adhering to the spec instead of just adhering to one guy's, code base, that's where things started to take off. And at this point, like, I'm I'm literally losing, the overview myself, which is a beautiful, beautiful feeling to have just to see that this thing is going on. Lots of projects people are working on. Often, I hear about them when when they post on Nostra or on Twitter. So there's a lot of stuff happening without me being aware of it. And when I find these projects, then it's just the best feeling ever.
I I think, like, my for for next year, my goal would be to to get to a stage where I can comfortably or confidently say that, if if if I write or die, if I choose the the branch of dying instead of writing, so, like a bus accident or something that the project will continue. That will be like that that will be my primary objective. Please don't die.
[00:17:24] ODELL:
We still need more attention. No There's still more there's still more work to be done. I always like to say that, I mean, OpenSats, like, our goal at OpenSats, is, you know, to to operate at a scale operate at scale that that no other charity does, period. You know, right now we're paying out nearly 200 grantees. I think actually maybe a little bit more than 200 grantees and 40 plus countries. But there's something to be said that there's, like, a there's a few people. There's a few open source contributors out there that are just, like, a step above, that if we could if if if we could somehow enable, like, 10 Cali's in the world, to to come into Bitcoin and start working on Freedom Tech in in a real way like you've done, I mean, I think the we change everything. Like, I think then we have massive success. So, please don't leave us. We still need you, but I I do appreciate, the massive progress you've made from, like, derisking yourself from the project. So I just looked it up.
We last spoke March 2024, which I think winds up. I think on that show, I said it'd be nice to do it every 6 months. So I I think just coincidentally, we actually did line it up perfectly. And you did mention that 1031 My Venture Fund is a small investor in FEDI, which is a for profit business that is built on top of the Fedimint protocol, which is another ecash protocol. There's 2 dominant ecash protocols on Bitcoin. By the way, I looked up the last episode. I called it Bitcoin Charming, Bitcoin wait. What did I call it? I called it Bitcoin powered Charmian eCash with Cali. So, the and so so FETI is built on this Fediment open source protocol, and then you have the Cashew protocol that has many wallets that are built on top of it.
And just seeing the organic growth in Cashew versus Fedimint has been something to watch. I mean, we've seen a it's it's it's it's something that is very rare. Right? I I think both of us have been in this space and the adjacent spaces for for a long time now. And it's not something that you can, like, create out of thin air or try and replicate through like force. It's something that kinda just happens virally and organically when like an idea has its time and it's been fascinating to watch.
[00:19:57] Calle:
Yeah. I wanna riff on all all those topics that you just mentioned. I think they're super important. Like, we should get back to open sets and developers and how to get them as well. But I wanna mention at this point, like, obviously, I always wanted to to get to a point where this with with Casio, we're trying to build the simplest e cash system possible. Like, we're trying to start with the minimum basics, what you need in order to have an e cash protocol in the first place, and then trying to make that more and more complex and building more features on top of that that are optional that people can use if they need it. But this approach, basically, was well intentioned, Like, there was always this this model that I've observed from, especially lnurl, and we had this lnurl mafia back in the days where we had this whole group of people just implementing this very stupid simple fiat Jeff invented lnurls, so it's HTTP based, super simple way of receiving lightning payments.
And I saw how it spread. And it was so beautiful to watch because it just spread like wildfire. And at the same time, you know, you have other protocols that do similar things, but they are pushed from by different entities. Sometimes it's a company. Sometimes it's like a set of OGs that are very, you know, very pushy about the tech. Whereas you have this punk, stupid, simple technology like lnurl that is unstoppable, which eventually forced everyone to adopt lnurl. Right? And nowadays, we have these battles between bolt 12 versus lnurl. And I think I mean, I love bolt 12. But you see that you have this now new technology, both 12, that is trying to shave off some of the success from lnurl.
And, it's trying too hard. And I think it's like opening up, like, antagonisms where they're not really needed. So in my in my view, technology spreads, in a way very unpredictably. But what seems to be often the case is that if the tech can speak for itself and those who, defend it and represent it, don't try too hard and remain, like, fact based and just show you how easy it is to use it, show you how easy it is to build it. That's what makes people, the relevant people to actually consider it and think about the tech. Right? At the end of the day, also, I mean, I I love having a discuss the the discussion with you and conversation with you, but also the one of the reasons why I go to podcast and talk about Cashew is I want to inflict, like fantasies in heads of people, in the brains of people who are working with tech.
And I think, like, by talking about what what we already do today, it will just change your way of looking at your tech stack and what you work on. And maybe you'll find, it's not one or two reasons why you might wanna look into it. And that's the best way that tech can spread. It's just purely your own reason, your own benefits, and, you discover it and then you, employ it. And I think, yeah, that's that's how we've been spreading. So we have no propaganda, ministry. We have no funding for media. We have no, like, marketing department. We just ship posts and we built. And it's been working better than anything else that you can do.
So, I'm very happy about that. But I also wanna go back get back to, like, this. Thank you for the compliments. First of all, I need to say thank you for that and also partially re reject them because I don't wanna, you know, be idealized in that sense. Like, I'm just a normal fucking plab, and I'm just building. And I'm here to stay, super convicted. I think Bitcoin is one of the most interesting and most important things to work on, on a human life choices level. I'm, like, all in with Bitcoin. And, I know, like, if I choose something, I'm I'm a person that just stays around and rides or dies.
But I think about attracting, like, these, capable deaths that each individual, we have insane potential to change Bitcoin, to improve Bitcoin. I think about how to attract them all the time. It's one of the things that is constantly on my mind is how can we build a, let's say, environment and culture in Bitcoin, and how can we reach those people, that might have this incredible impact on how Bitcoin works today. And, you know, it's a complicated topic because Bitcoin itself is a very echo chamber y closed minded, community sometimes, which I know that some people lark about. This is, defense immune system for Bitcoin and so on. I think that's kind of mostly anti social behavior. The cyber hornets.
Yeah. Yeah. I think grown grown men often explaining to themselves why they can be mean and bullying people and so, like, I I I think it's, it doesn't really help anyone. But, yeah, that that's my small diss there, so I hope no one feels offended. But, so I think of people now I wanna I wanna mention 2 people that are not, like, super consensus that we, that, you know, not everyone's in consensus that they're amazing engineers. But, I wanna mention Robin Linus, the guy who invented BitVM, and, Casey Rotimore, the guy who invented, ordinals.
And, you know, think what you will about these two inventions, and especially the ordinal stuff is very you know, many people are pretty good about it. I fucking, you know, don't care about NFTs. Like, it's very unimportant to me personally. But what I see is these 2 very special people, for some reason, they have taken a different approach, and some of their approaches even shitcoiny. Like, NFT stuff is very shitcoiny. And, Robin Linus himself, he learned all his zk magic stuff in shitcoin land. Like, he came from the developer ecosystem from Ethereum world, like, where you have z zk proofs.
And, and both of them with Bitcoin and, I think 0 sync is the other project by Robin and then obviously the whole ordinal spiel. Both of these projects had had an insane impact on Bitcoin whether you like it or not. Those are immense, like, in in the history books of Bitcoin, we will mention those two names. And so that's a very long way of saying, like, how do we attract those people? I really believe that individuals, some are so capable that just 1 or 2 of them can change the course of Bitcoin. So the biggest question, the most important question in my mind as someone who's always dealing with developers just whose life is being a developer, I wonder how do we attract those people. And I really don't know. Like, sometimes I have the urge to go to fucking, I don't know, mastodon or blue sky or just break out of the echo chamber to talk to people that are out there but who can't be reached from within our echo chamber.
So, yeah, I wonder how to do that, and I wanna expand the circus circle of Bitcoin. I want to reach more people and then, yeah, and and then and attract those people into our cult.
[00:28:03] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, that's always the question. Right? I mean, I we hear it a lot in terms of my, my noster stance. It's a common refrain that I hear is is is, oh, well, if you're if you're only using noster, like, you're missing a bunch of people. And usually it's it's used in terms of that's why someone should post to x. Right? But I there is probably an argument. There's probably a valid argument that, that there's there's more greenfield people that have never been exposed to Bitcoin and associated Freedom Tech on like a TikTok or which has way more users than x or maybe even a blue sky, which is kind of a weird little echo chamber they're building over there.
That couldn't be any more different than Nostr. But also, like, I kind of come to the conclusion that I don't know, Cali. Like, I feel like like how did you how did you discover Bitcoin? Like, I feel like the I hate the term because it just sounds like I'm wearing my VC hat, but, like, the 10 x engineers, like, the people that really, move the needle in a big way, the rider dies, they tend to kind of do the proof of work and find it. Like I found Bitcoin in in a environment that, you know, no one was talking about on x. You know, I I just I've I've I've found it. I was looking I was looking for hope and I found something that provided that hope and then I just never stopped.
[00:29:46] Calle:
Yeah. For me so the the reason I joined X was for Bitcoin. I I don't like social media that much, by itself. So I kind of entered the Bitcoin, or let's say the the public square wearing my Bitcoin hat. And to this day, I limit myself purely to Bitcoin content because, there's too much bullshit going on around that. Like, I wanna I wanna focus. The way I found Bitcoin, I don't talk about this, often, but it's, I I think, a good story, actually, because, like, I've been developing for all my life. I've had, like, various professional experience, done all sorts of crazy hardships and achieve, like, things in different domains.
But, I was building privacy software, and it wasn't Bitcoin related. And I can I can actually, this is an interesting, example? I was building a port scanner. Port scanner is a standard, you know, cybersecurity tool that checks whether ports on a different computer are open or not. It's very, very basic. And, I was looking for one that does it for, Tor for Tor services, hidden services, where you can just enter a Tor on the address and it checks for the ports. And this didn't exist, so I I just built it. And when I put it up, I noticed that it uses kind of, you know, resources, cost money to host this thing, and didn't have much money. So I wanted to put a donation button there. And, well, obviously, I had to use Bitcoin because, what else could you, use, like, anonymous service with?
And because of that fucking payment button, I fell into the developer rabbit hole. Now as I fell deeper and deeper, I just, like, dismissed completely the actual project that I was working on and and had to fix that payment button. And, that's how I became a lightning developer at the end of the day. Just following that that rabbit hole for months years and becoming an expert. As I was falling into that hole, though, and I think that's important for me personally, and it ties back to what I said before. I noticed that the rabbit hole is way deeper than I thought. Or not on a, you know, just thinking about Bitcoin and Bitcoin on a social economic level and all that stuff is also interesting, but it's not something that would have kept me inside the rabbit hole. Like, I would have just gone, you know, gone to the next thing. But, what I noticed in Bitcoin is that the technical rabbit hole is super deep, and we have amazing people in Bitcoin that are true theoreticians, like hardcore cyber bugs doing, a lot of work. And you'll suddenly sit in a room with people who talk about this tech and you you get you understand nothing.
And you notice that there's so much to learn about this if you wanna really learn. And so for for curious person, this is often like a trigger to okay. Then let's let's dive in and figure it out. And nowadays, you know, I'm trying to I'm trying to help others also follow the white rabbit and, you know, wake up, Neil. There is so much you can do with your life that isn't this corporate normal developer life that most people, most of my friends who work in development actually hate what they're doing. And this is like a standard default way of living. We have all accepted this. This is, say, a result of modern society, I guess.
But especially for developers who look at open source and they're many of them say is like, oh, yeah. And, you know, one day I'll take some time and do what's good instead of what's necessary and go, you know, become a open source developer and contribute to something that feels like a larger project than my own little fuck fucking project. And, yeah, I'm trying I'm trying to help people to to make the move. And Bitcoin is the 1st open source project, a humanity project, a project on the level of, you know, what humanity has, you know, the one of the most best and most important thing that humanity has created so far.
And, it's the first thing that also allows you as a developer to actually survive on it because Bitcoin has this ability to finance itself from the inside. It doesn't rely on support from external institutions or external entities. We have, thankfully, we have OGs who have bought Bitcoin very, very early. And at the end of the day, that's what what's coming back to developers these days. And, I mean, we we are living in a much, much better situation than, when I started developing. There was no open sets. Like, there was Brink and they were, like, sponsoring 5 people, and all core devs I knew were complaining about having to work 2 jobs so they can do core development at night.
And now and thankfully, that is changing. And most of the work there has been done by OpenSets and the HRF and bring Inspiro. And this is so exceptional. This is so amazing that we have this environment. I think, you know, now we need to attract the people. We need to grow. We need to 10 x the number of 10 x deaths.
[00:35:19] ODELL:
Damn right. I could just let you speak for the whole episode.
[00:35:24] Calle:
Fuck, man. Sorry. I was like, you
[00:35:27] ODELL:
know, I wanna look there. You're an inspiration, sir. Yep. No. You're good. Keep going. I, and on top of that, I mean, one thing that I was that I that I was quite excited about is is just the other day, we had UTXO who's doing a lot of work on on Noster in terms of trying to create smarter relays and giving people more options in terms of how they interact with the Noster network. He's like straight up just asked for a call for donations on Noster and he was able to get funded in a significant way, like over a 1000000 sets, which right now is 9.20 US dollars.
I think it was like over $1500 worth of Sats just like flooded into his lightning wallet, just asking for a call for donations, which to me is the ultimate dream. Like, I think, like, organizations like Open Sats and HRF play an important role, especially right now. But I I mean, we try our best to operate more ethically, more efficiently, more transparently than any other charity in the world. But ultimately, we are a middleman. Right? And when you have Freedom Money, the ability to support devs directly, particularly in a social environment, I think the social signal is is key there. I mean, you you could clearly watch as the zaps were coming in that people were trying to top the previous people, that donated. Everyone wanted to be the top dog.
I I think that's a really bullish fundamental, and it should be interesting to watch that play out. And I mean, to your previous, topic points you mentioned up there, like, that was possible because of open protocols like lnurl and noster that were not, that were very organic and viral in how they were adopted and when put together, they become incredibly powerful. I wanna bring it back. We have a lot of things to talk about. I if if you're not familiar of the Cashew project, definitely go back to that March episode we did together because we went through like all 101 and, stuff like that. And and I think me and Kelly are gonna go a little bit deeper on this conversation, because particularly in bull markets, I crave, the more deep conversations instead of the superficial bullshit that gets you repost on x.
You mentioned lnurl. You know, lnurl is one of those things that is super simple and is relatively easy to implement. But I do have some concerns going forward that it will be used as kind of like a compliance nightmare tool. I don't know if you've thought about it at all but, you know, LightSpark which is funded by a 16z. Yeah. One of the big bad venture firms from tech surveillance dystopia that, 10 30 1 is trying to obsolete. Gave them a $165,000,000 and they went and they launched, the universal money address which is effectively lnurl with compliance built in. Particularly because lnurl is so simple to implement,
[00:38:46] Calle:
and is effectively just a data exchange layer on top of lightning invoices. And it's also backwards compatible. Right? So this UMA stuff that works just with any lightning address as well.
[00:38:58] ODELL:
Yeah. For now, I think what's gonna happen is I think they're gonna be like you you can choose to add the compliance layer or not. And then at some point, you know, they're like doing partnerships with all these big companies. At some point, they're gonna be like, if you're paying a l n URL recipient that isn't quote, unquote compliant and isn't sharing KYC information, then we're not gonna support it. And then that point, if they have enough adoption, then it kinda pushes wallets that don't wanna support it into supporting it just so that, you know, users don't have this weird interface where, like, their payments are failing and they don't know why they're failing?
[00:39:36] Calle:
I I think this is, like, always the same thing. It will happen, and they can have fun with their compliance flags there and send around user data. It's just like there will be always a core of people and services that will not participate in that bullshit. And, I mean, I think similarly to what we started talking about. Right? You have now this massive company that's came out of nowhere, has no real you know, they have some awesome people working for them, but the company itself just popped out of nowhere, got a bunch of money, has this Facebook guy as, their front, and, you know, this this perfect looking suit, that looks like a clone of himself.
And he's raising 1,000,000 of 1,000,000 of, dollars and, integrating lightning into large service providers these day. I mean, their their their success is is is impressive in that sense that there were similar companies around before that offered the same thing, but couldn't achieve, nearly what they have achieved in terms of, who uses their their integration. But for the l n URL thing, when they add, like, a layer of compliance into those payments, I think this is the path that everything will walk towards go towards on the Internet. And, I don't think that we need to fight against it because you cannot fight against it. There will always be the compliance the compliant network that will have to adhere to absurd rules, that, for example, send your private information from one server to another because of the travel rule. But, the Internet itself will just continue existing the same way it does right now. There will always be people who say, no. I I don't I just I don't wanna play your games. I wanna play our own games. I wanna make up our own protocols and just, you know, deny interaction with those services. I don't think that they have much of a pressure onto the ecosystem.
You'll see some wallets adopt their thing because often some wallets don't care about any, you know, ideas of freedom or decentralization. They just they just wanna have the maximum amount amount of users and that's fine as well. Just, you know, I would avoid them because, you know, many people would avoid them. But there will always be an, large enough number of people services on its, infrastructure that says, no. We're going to use the OGLN URL or even better, we're going to use both 12 with blinded paths, and we're going to increase the privacy of lightning even if that means it cannot interact with your, compliant, subsystem anymore. I think these people can fork off if they want, and, that's completely fine. I think we have we have space and room for all of it.
[00:42:34] ODELL:
We interrupt this broadcast for a brief message from our sponsor, LightSpark, bringing the future of lightning payments to a bank near you. I, they, just for some context here, they, 1031 is by far the largest Bitcoin focused venture firm, and we've deployed a $130,000,000. So a 16 z that that's across 36, businesses. A 16 z gave them a 165,000,000 just to this single company. Just to kinda show you, you know, money doesn't necessarily equate to success. Like, you still need to execute. But just to show, like, the still the the massive capital, differences, between kind of the old world's, like, tech surveillance mindset and, like, the new world ideological Bitcoin mindset, there's still a massive, massive gap, in that. And, and what I've seen is that they have been, I'm hearing that they, they pay people for integrations.
So they have all they have this war chest and they're they're paying people for integrations. They got the Coinbase contract. I don't know the details of the Coinbase contract, but for instance, they are doing Coinbase. So they could be in a situation where I hope it's not a told you so, but some things I say on the show are are to to be told you so told you so's. Yeah. There there is, you know, the way I look at Bitcoin right now the way I look at Bitcoin right now is I think it's close to inevitable if not inevitable that, you know, Bitcoin gets adopted at scale.
And I would even go as far as saying, you know, it becomes this reserve currency of the world. But what my biggest concern is is what percentage of people are then using it as Freedom Money. And I think like our current trajectory is maybe 5% are using it as Freedom Money and then 95% of people are using it in this like surveilled controlled way. And like at least they can't get debased in that situation or they can't get debased easily. But that's not really the movement I signed up for. So, like, my goal is to try and increase that percentage. Like, what is that percentage in 20 years that is using this thing as freedom money?
And I'm kinda curious, like, I mean based on your answer, your answer does not necessarily conflict with my diagnosis there of 5% ride or dies using it as freedom money. Like do you think we're we're is our trajectory better than that? Am I being too pessimistic? Or I I think you're being too optimistic in my opinion.
[00:45:29] Calle:
I think the number is less than 5% for sure. But that's that's fine. I think that's you know, not everyone lives in situations that are so bad that they need to save themselves, and that's good. Right? The world isn't as bleak as some people make it look like. Obviously, we have we have big problems, and, most people who own Bitcoin today might learn the true value of Bitcoin only in in the worst case. And we can just hope that that worst case never, happens, although the chances are there. And as you said, like, the things that you say on this podcast, seem to turn out to be true at the end of the day. So, I think the the number of people who use Bitcoin for the, for its freedom properties is is way less than 5%.
And, somehow, I think it's part of the equation of Bitcoin itself because it must be valuable to also the left bell curve left, curve people. They just wanna increase their fiat stack, and, you know, that's the that's the reason why most people buy Bitcoin these days is to increase, some value that they compute in fiat, and they see the price go up, and they like Bitcoin more than yesterday. And that makes a lot of sense, and everyone's should and is free to to to do so. But those people who really need Bitcoin because they cannot get a bank account or they, I don't know. They they want to, move countries because their authoritarian regime is becoming unbearable, and they need to take their property with them. Or just people who want to ex, engage in free and open trades between ordinary human beings on the Internet, for example.
They need Bitcoin. This is like, I would consider myself, often of the latter category. For example, if you just you just wanna buy a server on the Internet, for a couple days, there is no other solution than to use Bitcoin if you want to remain private. Obviously, you could use privacy shitcoins and so on. But I'm just, you know, as a general, as a general statement there is that we need to use Internet money for Internet things. And, that number that number I think of people who who need that last part will will go up as more and more services and things that we do will be bought online and purchased online. And that number hopefully will go up.
But I think those who really need Bitcoin because of its freedom properties in terms of human rights and censorship resistant, that that is, a smaller number, than than what you think it is, I think.
[00:48:13] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I think the only like, we can theorize all we want, but, like, the only plan forward is to just, you know, build out the tools, make the tools easier, build out the education, make the education easier. And then as people find a need, they will have that option available to them and that's really all we can ask for and then going forward we'll see what that actually plays out as. But there's still I think I think my key premise here is that there's still a lot of work left to be done, and that's why I'm still here.
[00:48:45] Calle:
There's so much work to be done. I mean, all this is, useless if people don't hold their own keys, for example. Right? We all agree on that. And this is some some very simple and basic messages need to be communicated to to the larger population that people who think who own Bitcoin don't own Bitcoin if you don't hold the keys because at the end of the day, that's just an investment like your stock portfolio or something like that that could be taken away from you.
[00:49:12] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean and I think that is mostly learned through pain, which is unfortunate, and we're gonna probably see, like, the next kind of version of that with the ETFs and with a lesser extent stocks like, MicroStrategy. Real quick, we have, the top 3 zappers in, the live chat, which you can get at syllabuspatch.com/stream is SPA zapped to 21,000 sats, Mav 21 zapped 10000 sats, and Pamplemousse zapped 5,000 sats. Thank you for supporting the show. We have UTXO, who we were talking about earlier, prolific Nostredev, who's also been dabbling in a big way in lightning.
He says that we're too pessimistic. 50 ish 50 percent ish of Bitcoin on chain is held by unknown individuals. That's freedom. I think we're talking about 2 different things here. Not I I I think it's it's absolutely key that Bitcoin was kind of bootstrapped in this, environment where most people weren't paying attention to it. So we do have a a a strong foundation of sovereign individuals, of freedom loving folks. But, you know, I'm I think me and Cali are more talking about, you know, number of people, like actual, like, percentage of of global population, not necessarily the amount of Bitcoin. So it's kind of 2 different metrics, and just something to watch.
Cali, I have,
[00:50:49] Calle:
and also UTXO. Like, I hope you're right. Like, that'd be fucking great. By the way, shout out to to the writer, Dies, in the chat. Like, I'm reading what you're writing and you're fucking amazing that you're here. And, I'm seeing all those names which would I with whom I interact with Noster, and I'm happy to see you guys
[00:51:07] ODELL:
listening then. Yeah. This is a unique we got our our favorite blue check-in the house, and he's he's joining us in the Nostril live chat. We got Cali here. I, I I do wanna talk a little bit about Nostril stuff, but before we get there, so you actually because you have such a focus on privacy, you talk about, Monero a decent amount. I mean, I saw you posted a meme that I think was like the Ninja Turtles.
[00:51:37] Calle:
Yeah. It's such a such a cute meme.
[00:51:40] ODELL:
And, and Monero was named in there. I I'm curious from your opinion, why do you focus this is a question that you get a lot, I assume, because I get it a lot as well. Why do you focus on Bitcoin and not something that is, you know, privacy specific like a Monero?
[00:51:59] Calle:
Yeah. So disclaimer, I don't own Monero. I don't show Monero. Like, I barely think about Monero. But, from the shit coins out there, it's the shit coin that I respect the most because Monero has been consistent. And Monero, has never attracted their users with speculation, but with privacy only, and I respect that a lot. I know that many people today rely on Monero to do free trade on the Internet, And this is something that Bitcoin cannot give them today and does not give them today. So I I just from by being humble, I need to, you know, give proper, respect to to Monero and staying true to its ideals.
But why do I focus only on Bitcoin? That is the question. Like, I I I don't even know how to answer that question. Everything else is complete bullshit. That's the answer to me. I I I don't know what to like, most projects out there, they're simply they're they're psy ops operations that make you, like, believe in them due to cheap propaganda, grassroots, faked, how do you say, astroturf astroturfed communities of non real people, posting degenerate memes about coins and, and marketing material. Like, this is literally what I perceive most projects in this space to be. I don't want anything to do with that.
I focus on Bitcoin because Bitcoin was the first, and Bitcoin has the best, foundation in terms of the people that support it and the best foundation in terms of decentralization. In my mind, there is no competition. All the rest is completely irrelevant for me, and it's just background noise. I know that Bitcoin will still be there in 50 years, and I will be able to look back at my own life's legacy and say, I contributed to a project that actually matters. It's like, huge citadel of human achievement that we're building on.
And I wouldn't wanna waste a day of my life building on on, you know, on sand. And that's that's what every other project feels like. I find it kind of funny because I also look at, Ethereum a lot in terms of its technology. I think Ethereum has amazing technology and very, very smart people. But it's, it is definitely built on sand, so I wouldn't put my money into Ethereum at all. But I I consider it as something it's like a it's like a library or like a mood board where you get inspiration from. Ethereum is is a trove of, smart and intelligent ideas built on the wrong system.
So, I like to learn about Ethereum, how it works, interact with people who work on Ethereum. But I wouldn't wanna spend a day of my life just building on it. And so my my focus rather is how do we get people who have fallen for the scams? I mean, especially the devs, who's who chosen to spend a lifetime on this, to be, you know, failing projects and how do we get them, to Bitcoin and make them contribute to Bitcoin. That's that's that's the most important thing to me.
[00:55:32] ODELL:
Well said. I cosigned that message. So I think since we last spoke in March, you released cashew. Me which is a PWA. It's a it's a wallet you can use in the web to interact with Cashew. What is what is the goal of that project? I mean, I I've been using it as one of my daily drivers in terms of a spending wallet for a while, and it's it's come a long way. It's one of my favorite wallets now when I'm onboarding someone new and just wanna send them, you know, a small amount of stats. What is your what is your goal there, and why should people, play around with it?
[00:56:17] Calle:
Yeah. So, cash it with me is a PWA, as you said. You should all who's listening, you know, anyone who's listening, you can go to your, mobile device's native browser. So on iOS and Safari and, on your Android device that will most likely be Chrome. You can go to cash it dot me. And in your mobile device, there is a share button or in on Android, there is this hamburger button on the top right. But on iOS, it's the share button on the bottom. You press that button and you scroll to add to home screen. And when you do that, what it does is creates an icon of that of that page that you're looking at on your home screen, and it's now installed as a PWA, which is a progressive web app. And progressive web apps, those are it's kind of a browser based technology that makes a website look like an app. But the nice thing about that is that you can distribute apps such as the wallet that I just, you know, cash out of me, distributed without going through an app store. So for me as a developer, it's it's the most straightforward way to, to reach anyone who's using that wallet.
And so this is a web wallet that used to cash your protocol. It's a very basic and simple one that I I've built and, you know, I must mention that I'm not a front end developer. So, it's kind of my most, proud front end GUI based application that I've built so far. But so, the idea there is that this is a website that runs in your in your browser. It's not something that is connected to a back end. So it's just the the website itself. You just fetch it once from a server, and then everything runs on your device. And, it's a full fledged cashier wallet, so, generates its own keys, has seed phrase backup, and so on.
And, as you said, it's just it's the fastest way to get anyone to use Bitcoin, the cost of your lightning wallet, because you just simply go to the website. There is no login. There is no email sign up. Nothing. And, what's also nice is that you can take cash out of me and host it on a different domain. So even if my domain would get rugged and cache. Me goes away, anyone can just clone the GitHub repository and put it onto cache.u. And, and suddenly it runs there, and you can transfer all your e cache from, one PWA to the other PWA.
So definitely go check it out. I'm working on like, constantly working on features, on that wallet because, you know, I'm I'm deeply involved in the protocol design of Cashew with others, who who do a lot of work as well. So it's not just me, But, I'm trying to implement most of the newest stuff that we, develop in terms of the protocol. I'm trying to implement that right away into either nutshell, which is a back end and, like a mint implementation that I that I contribute to, and to cash with me, which is a one of the implementation that I contribute to. So, I'm try these 2 projects, I'm heavily involved with.
They are usually totally up to date with the specs as far as as far as I can, because we actually need to implement stuff in order to know whether it's a good idea or not.
[00:59:34] ODELL:
Awesome. Yeah. I mean, the cool part about Cashew is that it is this open protocol, that you can have many different front ends for and that it is separate, it separates the front end from the custodian unlike traditional custodial Lightning wallets. Where independent of which front end you can use you can choose different mints on the back end. First off, I have a question for you. What is and I mean, I know it's hard to pick a favorite child. What is your favorite Cashew wallet? If you had to recommend 1 Cashew wallet, what's your favorite right now?
[01:00:08] Calle:
I think the best Casio wallet out there is probably MiniBits. So, unfortunately, it only exists for Android. But if you're an Android user, then MiniBits on the Google Play Store is just amazing. It's super stable. And, I think the best quality of a cash word these days is still stability. There are still some jankiness in some wallets here and there. Fortunately, there are seed phrases, so you don't have to be afraid even if the wallet does something wrong. The seed phrase will get you e cash back. And And you
[01:00:40] ODELL:
Yeah. But with that seed phrase, you can go into a different you can go into a different app and use that seed phrase and get your Yeah. Exactly. So the seed phrase itself is also a protocol specification
[01:00:49] Calle:
how to use the seed phrase if you're an app developer. And the idea is that, you know, you start your wallet, CashNet. It generates a seed phrase for you. You you put that seed phrase somewhere safe, and you can just keep using that wallet. And you lose your phone now with e cash. One of the biggest issues with e cash is because it doesn't have an account. There is no, identification or anything. So how do you get your money back if you lose your phone? And for the 1st year in cashew, it literally meant if you lose your phone, the money is gone. It's just like cash in your wallets. If you lose the wallet, like a physical wallet, money's gone.
Since then but I I, you know, I had a hard time recommending it to normal people because I I realized how how stupid and dangerous that situation is. But, since then, we, implemented seed phrases in pretty much every wallet out there, and they're all compatible. So as long as you keep that seed phrase safe and you remember which means that you used because that information is not inside the seed phrase. It's additional information. So seed phrase plus the list of means that you have, as long as you can keep those things somewhere safe, and those mints remain online, you'll always be able to regenerate,
[01:02:05] ODELL:
the e cache that you have lost. So, I mean, that brings me to the second question, which is it seems like the biggest friction point right now with Cashew I mean, the the the beauty of Cashew and the reason why I like it so much is that it has very little friction to use Bitcoin. It's very cheap to use. The interface is is is fantastic. You can make offline payments and you have very strong privacy guarantees. So like the default way of using Cashew wallets is just a very positive user experience with the one exception being which mint does the user choose, when they they first set up a wallet? How do you think about making that process easier and, like yeah. How should users think about choosing their mint?
[01:02:56] Calle:
Yeah. That's the that's the ultimate question right there. Right? So, I mean, maybe just start with one step back. What you said before is that we're we're kind of separating the front end from the back end in a way that, that a protocol allows you to do. So what does that mean? That means, let's say, you use one of those Satoshi. There are 2 parts of that software, although you as a user only see 1. You see only the front end, which is the application running on your phone. That's what draws the graphics and shows you the numbers. But there is also the back end that's on the server of one of those Satoshi. There was there's a database and there is the actual Bitcoin, a lightning node, and so on. So, typically, you can only use one front end for one back end. That means, like, there's one company, Wallet of the Satoshi, running the back end, giving you one single application, and that's the way you use voice to Satoshi. Now what we want to do and, what we're trying to achieve is, to create a world where a custodian, that might be a company, could be a Cypherpunk friend, of yours, or it could be a service provider for a specific thing like a website or so.
They can use a back end for their, for their system, Casu Mint. But you can choose the front end that you want to use this Casu Mint with. And that kind of decouples, these 2 these 2, areas. So you can just be a custodian, for example, and you can focus on being a custodian. Maybe also create, like, one app to use your back end service. But you can you also immediately benefit from the existence of, like, 10 different wallets out there that anyone can just download and connect to your back end and and use use use your services, which is great. So that gives people more freedom and choice. It's very important in terms of, security and privacy because the privacy guarantees that cashier gives you mathematical privacy. Right? It's not like the custodian chooses to give you privacy.
It's you cannot break blind signatures. That's like, but you can only be confident in your privacy if you can actually audit the code. Right? No. Almost no one can do that. So it's good to have, like, common clients that, different people use because there are more eyes on the code and bad stuff would be detected. So, and to mention to to, to close off this, is I wanna mention coin OS. Coin OS is a is a wallet provider that has existed before Casio existed. So, I've known them for a long time. They're they're super based. They're in Canada. They're building very sleek and, easy to use web wallet, so karnos.io.
And, they've recently moved all their communications from Twitter to nostr, by the way. They're, like, nostr only now and go all into nostr. But what they also did, and this is something that I kind of always wanted to see, also predicted in the beginning, is that we will see existing service providers that already have a user base, see that, you know, there's a new product, which is e cash, and they can offer that to the users, which would be in their case, for example, a voucher system. So coin us implemented add a cash into their back end that already exists and added a Casu client into their front end, which they which also already exist.
That, thousands and thousands of users are using it already. So, they added Casio in the back end and in the front end. This allowed them to implement the feature for their users, which is like a gift card feature. So they have now this gift card button that is actually e cash. So press a button, enter amount, and you can send this piece of data to another coin auth user. And that way, you can transfer value in the coin auth system. What they also did though, and this is amazing, a super base of them, and I how I hoped that all this would play out is they just want a cash mint, and it's a cash mint that anyone can use. So you can use coin us without using their application by just downloading, a cash wallet. You can go to cash. Me, use that wallet, and use coin us as the back end mint.
And maybe, hopefully, one day they'll even make, some profit of that or be able to offset the cost of providing that service through fees and so on. But, the the connection between you as a user and the company running the mint, can really be kind of decoupled from each other, and you can choose which software that you wanna use. So, it's very similar to to our to our approach to Nostra, for example, where we just want don't want to silo in the user into a specific vision of what an app should look like.
[01:07:37] ODELL:
Yeah. The CoinOS guys are, fucking awesome. I did I had them on sale dispatch, episode 114. Everyone should go back and listen to it if they if they haven't yet. That was in November 2023. So that was pre e cash, pre pre noster integration. But they've been building out just tools for Bitcoiners for a long time, and are very, they're very focused on trying to maintain that freedom ethos. But you didn't really answer my question. How does, how does a new user, how should they think about selecting their mint and how do we make that easier for them? Oh, yeah. Because like right now, like they basically just blindly ask me which mint to choose and I blindly tell them the mint you told me to choose.
[01:08:36] Calle:
So that's kind of what I'm operating under right now. Well, first of all, I can't recommend any mint to anyone. I hope I mean, you understand that, but, the way I would go about this, as a like, I really wanna stress that using a mint is a risk. You put your money into a service provider, and that service provider could just vanish. So
[01:08:58] ODELL:
don't ever put a lot of money into a mint and use it only for pocket money, very small amounts, things that you would, you know, use to buy an Apple or newspaper or make a zap or something. Yeah. It's cash it's cash in your back pocket. I mean, I know the kids these days don't know what that's like, but it's it's the cash you have in your back pocket when you go out into the city to Exactly.
[01:09:20] Calle:
So given that, the risk becomes kind of manageable for anyone. But still, you shouldn't use just a random mint that you don't know about. You should really pick your mint depending on who you choose to trust. And I cannot answer that question for anyone. I like, there are we've mentioned a couple of serve services already in this episode, so you know that they exist. And in the case, if it's a company, then you can even reach them. But you should be very cognizant about what you use and what to choose. And we're trying to build these, tools that help you to make that decision more easier ease more easily.
But, there is no ultimate answer to that. That's the price of a cryptonarkic system is that you need to do the research. Obviously, when we are at that point where my grandma can use this because it's just integrated into her digital experience, then that choice will have been made for her already. Or she will just, you know, use the bank that she's already using or trust the shop that she's already trusting. But we're not there yet. We're still in this anarchic phase of a, you know, bottom up cash humans springing up, run by individuals that most of them I've never heard of. And I I don't you know, I can't recommend them.
But I must admit, like, I still use them. I put a couple 1,000 sets here and a couple 1,000 sets there because I enjoy the the ability to choose, and I enjoy the privacy it gives me to spread out my sets and what to talk to a single service all the time and so on. So, that's it. But what are we doing to make that choice easier? So even though we want to avoid people to use random means that they have never heard of, that's also the reason why there is no default mint in cash. Me because I don't want people to make a default choice. They they should rather turn off that wallet and not use it than to make, to follow my ill advice. So, but we're trying to make life easier. So first of all, there is a NIP. There's a Noster protocol improvement proposal that, I think it's NIP 87. I always get this one wrong. But this one allows you to recommend mints on Noster. So there is already although, you know, it hasn't been widespread adoption yet, but I think that we're on a good good track there, is that you can you can see which means your friends have, recommended, which ones they are using. I think that's a very good heuristic. Like, that's probably what I would go with if, I would be, you know, thrown into this, ecosystem without knowing, what's what's good or what's bad. I would just ask my friends. And if you don't wanna ask your friends directly, you just would use this nipsnip87, which gives you a list of recommendations of your friends. And you can try this, right now. If you want, you can just go to bitcoinminst.com.
This is run by someone else, but it just aggregates data posted publicly on Nostar of people, either announcing that the user Mint or also rating a Mint and giving a comment, which is great. Nostar is amazing for that because, well, it's uncensorable speech and uncensorable Yelp in a sense. So it helps you to get these recommendations. But also because the civil resistance of Nostra is basically doesn't exist. So anyone can just spin up an identity, as many as they want. So it's easy to fake reviews as well. So what you wanna rely on is is your web of trust, we say, is what what your friends say and what the friends of your friends say maybe. And that's that's already usually, it's big enough. That that circle of people is big enough to find someone saying something interesting.
So, you can do that. I think that's a very good approach. Another thing that, I'm, working on these days is this auditor idea. So, I have this this Mint Auditor that is you can find it on audit.8333.space. This is like a, experimental project of mine. It's basically a website that, has a has a cashier wallet with 30 different mints or so. You can donate e cash from any mint to it, and it will add that mint to the list of mints, in that in that interface. But it will constantly check the mints for their health, basically, for their uptime and whether the lightning node still works. So this is one way at least to have kind of a canary that can, tell us that a mint has, for example, gone down and their likely note has stopped working and you cannot get money out of that mint anymore. So that's obviously a mint that you should avoid and you should not recommend. And other mints that have been running for months years, and there have been, like, this this auditor has made thousands of payments with that mint without any, ever having an issue there. That's a sign for a good mint that is well maintained, and the operator is running it. And, I mean, there's a good chance that it won't drag you, on the next day. Obviously, on the long term, you don't know and other things should make you consider whether you wanna trust mint on a long term. But as I said, just we are still at a point where you should remain vigilant.
You should only put low amounts into a cash, and you should know why you're doing it. Like, you should only do it because you want to use Bitcoin and not because you wanna store Bitcoin or, receive Bitcoin and keep it there for a long time. As long as you keep these simple rules in mind, which there is no other way, I'm sorry, you need to learn these rules because that's the price of making your own choices, I think you're good. I think we will come to a point where, like, the normie won't have to won't have to think about these things because, you know, I don't know. Maybe Cash App will run a mint or maybe a Kraken will run a mint, and it will be, like a household name that lots of people trust.
And then you'll just use that mint and, you'll get dropped when the company gets rocked. But, the chances of that happening is substantially smaller than using, like, a random crypto analytous mints that's behind an onion address and you don't even know who's running that. Right? That also has its own appeal, but obviously is, more dangerous.
[01:15:40] ODELL:
Yeah, I mean I think in classic Cali fashion you gave us a very nuanced in-depth answer so thank you for that. This time did I answer the question actually or? You did answer the question. I think the Noster recommendation stuff is particularly, interesting and I think it's important to realize too that, you know, if you don't have, we we say web of trust a lot, but at the end of the day, web of trust is like this idea of just verifiable reputation. And if you don't have, like, an established network on Nostr, one of the cool aspects of it is that you can just, like, borrow someone else's that you trust. So you can use, you know, Cali's PubKey or My PubKey, and then you're basically seeing recommendations from people that we follow on Noster.
And it it kinda acts as this nice open bootstrapping mechanism in terms of verifiable reputation. I think that's a key aspect here. I, you mentioned, you know, like a sovereign mints that run behind Tor addresses. There's also something isn't there aren't you guys working on something in terms of using, like, the Noster Noster as the discovery mechanism, so that you could connect to Mins using Noster?
[01:16:56] Calle:
Yeah. So the discovery mechanism would be this SNP 87 thing. Right? How do you find the Mins? And you can do that without interacting with the normal Internet. Basically, you can just do it from pure Nosta only. You can do that actually in cash. Me in the wallet. You can when you open the wallet, you go to the mints tab. You scroll all the way down. It says discover mints. And when you press that button, like, there's a spinner that searches for mints, and it's doing exactly what I described before. It's it looks on Nosta for view reviews and stuff. So you can use that to find a mint. Again, disclaimer, you're responsible, yourself, what's happening there. But, yeah. Yeah. I'll come to your point.
[01:17:32] ODELL:
Do you know what I'm talking about? Okay. Yeah. No. So it's like this,
[01:17:36] Calle:
we call this master web services, and it was made by one of the devs working on, cashier specific stuff because, well, the the idea of sending data around on master directly is not a very new or, creative idea. Lots of people have thought about this. But the challenge with sending data over is, mostly efficiency and traffic and so on. Like, so it's you can do it, but you shouldn't stream a YouTube video over Nasr or just download high amounts of data. But if you interact with the with an e cache mint, the the interactions with the mint are pretty minimal. So you're just sending small amounts of data back and forth to, you know, mint a token and, invalidate a token or create a lightning invoice and and mint the e cash from that lightning invoice. All of those messages are text messages. Basically, you can imagine, like, a bunch of text being sent back and forth between a wallet and a mint, and it's relatively small.
So, what, this already exists in Southern app, by the way. So this is a work in progress, mobile wallet that hopefully, will also be able to recommend to iOS users soon. There are a couple of iOS, native iOS apps being built right now. But, the Sovereign app, it, is done by, an amazing dev called David Kasuri. He's he's a cashew dev. He's working on a mint implementation, Chamberlain, and, a wallet implementation, which is the sovereign app. And the default way that this, mint implementation and the app works is that the wallet talks to the mint not over normal Internet, TCP, IP connections to a web server, but through the nostril, network.
So what you do is you add the mint as a public key, essentially, and he calls these, clans, I think. He uses like a similar word, tribes. But the idea is like that you as a, you know, you you as a friend, you as a Cypher Park husband or wife, you can run a mint for your, family or your friends or your community. And this mint will never, be announced on the normal Internet. It will only live inside Mostar. And what what that means is the only way to reach that mint is to send messages via also to that mint. And that has a number of, really cool advantages.
First of all, you can run the mint anywhere. That means, like, it's for slightly more technical folks. Everyone knows that if you wanna run a server, you need to make sure that the IP is reachable, the ports are open, the file was configured correctly, and blah blah blah, all that stuff. When you have a mint that runs on NWS as a lost a web service, It can be reached by anyone because, there is this master relay in between, basically helping anyone to connect anyone to anything. That's also why master, wallet connect works so great, for example. You can just press a button on your computer, and your phone will make a lightning payment. And the reason why this works is there is Nostra in the middle mediating these messages between those devices. And so we have something similar for for arbitrary HTTP, HTTPS. I should say, for arbitrary TCP data. So you can literally pretend as if you're a normal TCP socket on one side and on the other side. And what happens in the background is that these TCP packets, they are, either sent directly by Nostra. That's one way of doing it. Or, there's a direct peer to peer connection established between the sender and the receiver through communication through Nostra. But, you know, both of these ways essentially use Nostra to connect the client to a server.
So as I said, one benefit is you can run any service. This doesn't have to be a cashier link. It can be any web service, can be any web server, and it can be reached by anyone. And the second nice thing about it is that you have relatively good privacy for cheap price, which is like you hide your IP address from your users. So if you run a mint in your own home Internet, which, is a questionable decision, but might make sense for some people, If you do that, you can isolate your IP address from users of your Mint by just, you know, having a master relay in between obfuscating that direct connection. Obviously, you're you're doxing yourself to the to the relay operator, but, you know, that's still a lot better than announcing your IP address to the entire world and, letting everyone connect to you directly into your home network.
So there's, there's already stuff happening there. I think we'll probably see more of that. We're trying to keep the protocol as agnostic as possible from, you know, assuming what transport medium is used so that we can do, things like that, have experiments like that. And the the one thing that we've done so far is to just use most of the entire communication between wallet and mint, but they have there have been people who used, LoRa, reticulum, like, mesh networks instead of, the Internet to connect the wallet to the mint, to demonstrate how you can use a cash shipment if when in a post apocalyptic scene where there is no Internet anymore, for example. So, anything that can transport, text can be used to exchange, e cash. That's what's so cool about e cash because at the end of the day, you know, your communication with the Mint is just about your text, but also the communication between wallets. Like, if I wanna pay you e cash, I just sent you a piece of text. And anything that can carry this piece of text can be useful as a trans transmission medium. Be it noster, be it, maybe one day, Apple will allow us to use its NFC, or whether it's Bluetooth or mesh network and so on and so forth.
[01:23:43] ODELL:
Yeah, I mean this is fascinating to me because I do think, the success of Cashew heavily does rely on reducing the friction of of running mints. And this seems like a very elegant way to further reduce that friction. I mean, I think that's also one of the reasons why we've seen cashew kind of organically grow, particularly in the mint side, much much faster than Fedimint where it's there's a lot more friction and technical requirements, to run a high uptime Fedimint server. Yeah. A couple of comments on that.
[01:24:23] Calle:
I wanna say, so the it's a it's a it's a balance that we're actually trying to strike there, and it's it's a delicate balance between making it easy to run a mint and making it too easy to run a mint. And, I know with, you know, with the danger of sounding like a dick, but not everyone should run a mint. Some people are just too stupid to run a mint safely and not capable of. That's what I should have said. So it's some sometimes you have a situation where someone's like, fuck it. Let's run a mint. And you're like, I don't know, man. You you don't know the Linux terminal. And, like, what do you do if something goes wrong? And, like, there there is a balance between because it's it's a it's a lot of responsibility to run a mint, and everyone should who does that should know it because people will expect you to keep that mint up for, extended period of time. And if you close the mint, you'll have to, like, reach those people who put Bitcoin into a mint to take it out again. So, like, it's it's it's not like I spin up a ghost relay and I turn it down again the moment I lose interest.
So anyone running a mint should know this. And, that's why we had multiple situations where we could have had, like, do you want a one click mint on Umbrel? And we could have done that, like, a year ago already, and we already had it basically all set up in Docker containers and so on. But we decided against doing that, because it allows too many people to run this thing too fast without really properly thinking about whether they wanna keep it up or not. Like, I don't wanna say, like, any everyone is, you know, smart and capable enough to figure these things out. Obviously, like, if you feel like you should do it, you should definitely try it and do it.
But making it a choice where you don't even have to think about the implications of running it means that's, like, where it becomes irresponsible as as a deaf at some point. And, so we're trying to strike the balance between right now, at least, you have to pass the test. You need to be able to you know, in order to install a cache image, you need to able be be able to use a Linux terminal. And I think that that's that's the filter. Right? If you cannot get past that, you should not run on it probably. And if you can get past that, then it's very easy to do so. Just set up a lightning note. And even if you don't have a lightning note, you can even use a customer back end to run on it And for some people that just makes it super easy and fast to spin up on it. And second point I wanna add is we have talked only about, like, the general mints whose purpose is to store Bitcoin amounts for the users so that can they can make, like, everyday spending.
But there's, like, the other way of running a mint is to think of a service provider that does only one thing, And that service provider doesn't is not a wallet provider or not a custodian or something, but it's just part of a, like, a back end infrastructure. I wanna make a make a, example to make that more specific. But, what I wanna say first is that running that back end infrastructure, when you run a mint that is integrated into your into your own back end, well, that's super, super simple. Like, we made Casio so simple, and we're thinking a lot about these people who just wanna run, kind of a web service maybe and want to have some kind of money component in the that application that they're running.
And so, one example I wanna make is the, currently talking to people. They're working on, like, a it's a charity platform that runs on Bitcoin, and they're already, like, super successful and doing amazing work. Like, I it's one of my most favorite Bitcoin projects. They basically just collect connect collecting donations and forwarding them to NGOs and so on. So, what they wanna do is they want to move this thing on Nostra and experiment on Nostra. Like, they want to give the, NGO or organization they wanna support. They they wanna give them an NPSAC or say, like, give me an NPSAC, basically, and we'll add you to the service.
And you'll be able to receive Bitcoin donations just with your n pop or n sec. And so one way they can achieve that is by using Cashew, and they they'll be using, like, this, nip 60 and nip 60 1 invention by Pablo, where essentially, all you need is an NSEG, and that's that's everything you need to to keep your e cash secure with the lost relay. And, so this project, they want to build a donation site, for these projects and works with Mosta, and it works with Ecash, and everything is super cool. But, in their case, you know, they they just wanna use a cashier mint as part of their their infrastructure. They're not interested in running a poll and being a customer for many people out there. So I'm thinking a lot about these use cases as well. These use cases are very important. Sometimes I think maybe even more important than creating wallet services because, the Internet is just completely permeated with, accounts and balances and, you know, charge your Netflix account by $10 here and then use it here. And this is everywhere, and, we want to make it as easy as possible for these services to transition from normal ledger based accounting systems to better privacy increased or more user controlled way of offering the same service with eCash.
[01:30:08] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, just a little side note on that. I use silent.link as my my daily driver, an eSIM that I pay for with Bitcoin, on my phone. And it it it technically registers as a I guess it's like a Polish IP address or a Polish eSIM. And I tried to I currently do not have a Netflix account because it flagged something. And, like, my credit card payments will go through, and then Netflix refunds my credit card payments and refuses to give me an account. So, that's something my wife has had to deal with recently.
[01:30:56] Calle:
I would have told you 2 years of VPN, but I think that doesn't make it much better with Netflix.
[01:31:01] ODELL:
Yeah. I I've there's been different mechanisms. Sometimes I've played them in Polish Zlotzsky's. Sometimes I paid them in US dollars. Like, it's a whole it's a whole kind of mess, and I just didn't give a shit enough to try and get them to take my money. I like it's hilarious. I can I'll pay them. I'll get, like, 5 days of usage or something, and then they refund my payment. And they're like, no. You're a scam even though I sent them money. But I think e cash e cash and and Bitcoin and everything we're working on here can fix the Internet in a big way as a result of that. To go back to the previous comment, yeah, I I'm I'm not necessarily referring to, like, everyone running a mint, but just directionally.
Directionally, the more mints, the better. Yep. And particularly being able to do so in a relatively private way without cloud services because I I think one of the edge cases here that we see is, you know, there's just like a centralization among a few large mints that are run effectively on on completely docks cloud services where the operator is known. And that that could be bad for the freedom focused adoption of Kaggle.
[01:32:16] Calle:
So I I think there are like, in my mind, we have 2 avenues, and we will and we should go both of them at the same time. And one is, you know, the corporate mint, the, you know, regulated entity, the company that's in a western jurisdiction and has a whole bunch of rules and safety and AML and KYC and all that stuff. And I think they should run Mins because it's better for their users. It respects their users privacy, and those will probably be really safe in terms of rock risk because you have this entity behind and or everything is relative, obviously. But, so you'll have this clear net mint world, if the technology proves itself useful in the highest levels of, you know, application and back ends and so on. But then the other branch, and that's the more exciting one, is the Cypherpunk grassroots crypto anarchists that run Mints because no one else does. And they run Mints because they have communities.
They have, friends they wanna serve. They have conferences they wanna run and so on. And so Right. I that second branch or avenue is way more important, but I think it's also a lot safer bet to bet on because there is need. People want to run services. The Internet is a very big place, and more and more people are joining us. So, we wanna make, like, it as safe as possible for them to run a mint, and, that includes also, you know, hiding or respecting the mint operator's privacy. In general, like, all in my my development philosophy is sometimes we have to choose between, you know, especially when designing the protocol, whether we want to keep the Mint more safe or the wallet more safe. Like, there's, like, sometimes specific aspects of the protocol that is, like, you know, when we choose this, then the mint has a harder time to remain safe. And if we choose it this way, then the wallet needs to do more to be safe.
But we always choose the mint sites. Like, we always want to keep the mint as safe as possible. Users can lose money due to accidents, and there's just one, wallet. But if something that happens to the mint, well, that's catastrophic. Right? So always on the side of the Mint operator, always think from the perspective of the Mint operator, and always also give them the features and the things that they wish for. Like, I really, I'm happy about so much feedback that I'm getting from people who are just running the software and helping us to make it better, including also companies and regulated entities who are also interested in running e cash infrastructure.
But they have very specific needs and very specific problems that, like, a random, person on the Internet does not.
[01:35:21] ODELL:
I mean, going back to our earlier conversation, they can use, UMA or whatever to control who enters and exits.
[01:35:29] Calle:
Yeah. I I wanna, mention maybe one of the features that I've been spending a lot of time with and that's on my mind recently, which is blind authentication. It, it's a good example of, how we started building a feature based on feedback. So right now, basically, when you run a mint, anyone can use a mint. It's just a web service like a website. Right? The website anyone can visit the website. You don't have to log in to a normal website to read the content. And it's similar with the with the cashier Mint. You just you spin off the Mint, you connect it to a lightning wallet, and then you're done. There are no sign ups, no registration. Any person on the Internet could be using the mint, which is great. It's great for anonymity because your onset is almost like the entire Internet.
If you if you take away the fact that you're sharing your IP address, which you can avoid, it means that anyone could be using the Mint right now, and that's that's amazing for privacy and, makes also running a cache of it super simple and uncomplicated because you have no sign up stuff. So, I've when especially when talking to companies, some companies reached out like, hey. We're looking into e cash, and it's very interesting, but there's a problem. And, also another same thing was mentioned to me by a Bitcoin, physical Bitcoin project, something like your, you know, Bitcoin jungle, Bitcoin lake, Bitcoin mountain, Bitcoin beach, and all these different things. Like, it's a similar project to that. And they also wanna run, an e cash mint for their community as well as. And this guy told me, like, I would really want to run an e cash mint because I don't want to see the activity of my community.
Like, I need to run their infrastructure that's clear, but I don't wanna know what they're doing. And that's perfect for e cash. And it's also safer for everyone because there is no honeypot of data that could be stored. But the guy told me, now this is the problem that these entities face, is I don't want an eCash Mint for the entire world. Like, I want to be able to control who uses that Mint, actually. And I think it's a very good point, but it's also, I mean, it's also problematic in the sense of privacy because you're making the number of potential users smaller, which is always bad bad for privacy.
However, this feature request has been requested many times. It's so it's necessary for a cypherpunk individuals who want to limit the use of their image to only their friends, but it's also necessary for many companies who want to run e cash infrastructure that make sure that only their user base uses, their their service. But as we said, it's bad for privacy. So what we came up with and what I've been working on in the last months intensely is something called blind authentication. So, essentially, what, this this feature will allow you to do is to have something like a sign up page for your Mint. That sign up page must be run by yourself, so it's not part of the Cashier Mint itself.
It could be logged in with anything. Like, imagine log in with Mosta, and there's a server where you can log in with Mosta. And, obviously, when you do that, you identify yourself. So that's bad for privacy. You go to a server and you say, hey. I met Adele. This is my signature. I wanna use the mint. Now that's bad. The mint now knows that you're using the mint, but that was the original idea. Like, that's what we wanna achieve. But how can we make still make sure that you can use the mint and do mint operations without identifying yourself all the time while using the mint? So what we've come up with is called blind authentication, and it works the way that you you first sign up to the mint, and we call that clear authentication. You share your data. You you prove that you're a metal dial, for example.
And then the mint operator says, like, yes. You're mad. You're my friend. You can use the mint. And in exchange for that, you then mint, a specific type of ecash token, which we call, like, a blind authentication token. It's almost like ecash, but it has no monetary value. And, it has the same privacy as e cash. So and when you mint these authentic blind authentication tokens, you can use them later to actually use the mint and make payments with the mint. So what you do is you sign up with the mint, you identify yourself, and the mint allows you because of that, allows you to mint these privacy preserving access tokens. And then you take these privacy preserving access tokens and then and you you actually use them in combination with, you know, when you when you wanna make a payment with the mint or when you create an invoice with the mint or pay a lightning invoice with the mint. So all the operator of the mint knows is that you're one of the peers registered to use the Mint, but doesn't know which one of those people you are. So we're trying to, you know, strike the balance between control of the Mint operator and trying to, you know, put them in a situation where they can be sure that only these people use my Mint, but at the same time also protect the user's privacy while still using the Mint, so that they cannot be singled out and said, like, oh, this is Matt. You made this transaction. I don't like this transaction, then censor you now. Yeah. That's great. I mean, I just,
[01:41:04] ODELL:
I recently visited Praia Bitcoin in Brazil, and I believe they run on Elan Bits right now. And I said to them, I was like, this is, like, the perfect use case for Ecash, for their community. And that was the main that was his main concern. Right? His main concern was I don't wanna I would love to not know the financial activity of my community members,
[01:41:28] Calle:
but I need to make sure I can I can easily control who actually uses it so it doesn't, you know, go out to the entire world and some random people are using it? That's so funny. Like, I I have that conversation with private Bitcoin, but I had the exact same conversation with another person from another Bitcoin project like that. Like, it's it's a it's it's it's a concern that has been voiced over and over again. And so we're we're we're almost there. We're almost fixed it, and soon you'll be able to also do that with the cashier protocol.
[01:41:59] ODELL:
Wonderful. Yes, sir. I'm on the ground constantly speaking the good word of Ecash and Cashew. I, what was so so right now, I have 2 more topics for you. I know your time is scarce and then we'll wrap. But, it's always I feel like we can just talk for hours, but we'll have you back in 6 months. We'll do the 6 month cycle. Yep. And who knows what the intro clip will be like in 6 months? It's gonna be insane. Right now I'm using for zaps on Nasr, I'm using npub.cache, which provides me, a lightning address. So I have a lightning address that works with the greater lightning network. And I'm able to easily access, that e cash wallet with just my my nostril credentials. So it makes it very convenient for me. I can just use a nostril extension and sign into m pub.cash.
So all the zaps that we've been receiving from the rider dies today on the stream are actually getting paid directly into, an ecash wallet that's provided by npub.cash. When I go to redeem those, it it because of the nature of zaps. Right? Like, some zaps are are quite large. Right? Like, I have like, shout out UTXO in the live chat just zapped 42,000 sats and Moashi zapped 10,000 sats. But then we also have Sharp Shader who zapped 21 sats. And so the result is the wallet ends up having many, many eCash tokens in it of different sizes and denominations. So when I go to redeem it, it's it it appears to me as a humble user, it appears to me that I'm only able to redeem 1 UTX one one token at a time.
Do you have any thoughts there? Is there like a way for users to combine them to make withdrawal easier? Like, how does
[01:44:01] Calle:
how do can you explain that process a little bit for us? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's a that's a good observation and actually a problem that we've been thinking about just recently. So what this service does is basically generates an invoice from the mint that, that the service uses. So there will be a mint, and it generates an invoice and serves that invoice as a l n URL invoice. So when when anyone pays that invoice, what happens in the background is that this, service that n pop dot cash service notices that the invoice has been paid and then means e cache and puts it aside for you. And then later when you come back online, you basically ask the server, hey. So did I get any new ecash while I was offline?
And the server just gives you the ecash. Now because it needs to mint all the ecash for every single payment, that you receive, it can add up to quite a lot. And it can be kind of unnecessary because, maybe, as you said, maybe it was like a bunch of small 21 set payments. And every time it minted 21 set, it actually used, like, 3 or 4 e cash proofs in order to get to that amount. So you can just, like, see how the number of e cash tokens just keeps growing and growing and growing. And at some point, it will be, you know, just take some time until you download all that e cash from the server, literally. So, we have a solution for that, which is I mean, it will go into technical details, but, essentially, the idea is to not make the the server, mint the e cash for you, but the server basically just checks whether the payment has been received and then gives you the ability to mint it when you come back online.
So that will result in, at first of all, way less back and forth and the server having to mint and then, you know, accumulating all those tokens that can then be redeemed all at once. But rather your wallet can decide, how many proofs it should mint for that payment. And that's usually, the better choice because your wallet knows best which tokens which token amounts it should receive in order to have the most efficient wallet amount distribution, basically. But, like, long story short, yes, this is something that we're aware of, and I think we have a solution to that that we're kind of started working on right now, as I mentioned. Like, with the ability of the server not minting it for you, but just giving you the ability to mint it when you come online.
[01:46:41] ODELL:
So, is that makes sense to me. But then also from like a Bitcoin perspective, right, we have in Bitcoin we have this this concept of of UTXOs, right, of of of inputs in a transaction. You send a transaction and your transaction on the input side might have many inputs and to lower your fee burden in the future. What a lot of people do will then they'll take a lot of inputs and they'll, they'll send them to themselves. Right? And they'll send them to themselves and it will result in one larger output. Now that has privacy implications on Bitcoin. Is there, is there some technique there with e cash or with Cashew to do something similar where on the wallet side, the user basically just combines a bunch of tokens into 1 bigger token after the fact? Or Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. It works the same way. So,
[01:47:40] Calle:
the one restriction with Cashew is that not every amount is possible, like with the Bitcoin UTXO. Bitcoin UTXO can have any possible amount. We don't want that in Cashew because, to keep the number of different amounts low is critical for for privacy and the unknown set. But given that, you it works basically exactly the same way. You can think of a unspent ecash token like UTXO, and you can take all many of them, put them into a single transaction as inputs, and then define outputs with new amounts and new amount distribution. And, so you can do that. Your cash reward will do that when you have, like, a if you have a cash reward with, let's say, 1,000 of 1 set tokens and you make one 1,000 set transaction, send it to yourself and receive it, then you'll end up with way less tokens that you that you signed with. So it does exactly the same thing as a Bitcoin wallet at the end of the day, managing the UTXOs and the amounts.
But, we will also see fees happening more and more. So since the last time we met, I was back then working heavily, like, on the fee implementation and allowing main operators to also charge a fee for input. That's because their database keeps growing with the number of ecash tokens that they process over time. So, there needs to be some cost offsets that is proportional to the cost of the Mint. And in this case, it will be paid with e cash fees. And at the end of the day, e cash users will have the same concerns, concerns as Bitcoin users, but only with a fraction of the cost, basically. And the concern will be, how do I keep the number of e cash tokens kind of as minimal as possible so that my fees remain as low as possible?
That's the price for anonymity. Like, if you want to, make a privacy preserving system sustainable, then you need to charge fees for the amount of data and costs incurred. And in the case of e cash, it's pretty much the same way of computing that cost, like, with Bitcoin.
[01:49:52] ODELL:
It's, like, based on data size, not the amount of money you're sending. Yeah. Correct. Correct. Yeah. Is there is there a privacy concern to combining all those
[01:50:01] Calle:
inputs or parts? I should have commented on that as well. So way way less than in Bitcoin because, the the, you know, the magic thing about e cash is first, you know, I should start with Bitcoin. With Bitcoin, you have UTXOs and you have transactions. And when you send, like, a bunch of UTXOs inside a transaction, they kind of like, they got they get molten into a single thing, and then they split up back into a bunch of UTXOs. And we call that the transaction graph. So you see what's going in. You see what's going out. And now the problem with this is that if you then spent the outputs of that transaction, like these new UTXOs that you've created, if you spent them again, they're again as well connected to the very first UTXOs that you put in in the beginning. So everything is connected to everything in Bitcoin, and everyone can see all connections. That's what makes coin consolidation so bad because, first of all, your docs that you have all these UTXOs.
But even worse is from that moment on, you make it way easier to track everything that you do from that day on. That's like the forward privacy basically is terrible, unfortunately. This is a real concern. And with eCash, you have the second point, it doesn't exist. With eCash, you have no transaction graph. So once you make one transaction, an eCash transaction, and you can then use the outputs of the transaction to with for any other transaction later, but there is no graph between them. There is no connection between the outputs of one transaction and the inputs of the next transaction. So you can consolidate as much as you want. The mint only sees that a certain amount has been spent and a certain number of UTX also has been spent and the outputs, look like this. But when you later spend these outputs again, they don't they look nothing like the outputs, of the previous transaction. So you you have no transaction graph, which means that, you you may lose privacy for a single transaction. But once you are over with that single transaction, you're back to basically perfect transit privacy again. That's the nice thing about e cash. You can fuck up your your privacy because you make a mistake.
But in order to fix your privacy, you just make one transaction and you're good.
[01:52:19] ODELL:
Got it. Yeah. That may so it's not in practice, it's not really that much of a privacy risk. I I I imagine it'd be bigger privacy risk if there's less users of a mint. Oh, yes. People making these types of Yep. Consolidating.
[01:52:34] Calle:
Privacy is your the ability of an observer to distinguish you from your unknown set. And so these are all topics and, words that we have used in in today's episode already. But, essentially, the more people use the mint, the larger the anonymity set because the the larger the number of people that you can be confused with. That's the that's the goal. Like, you want to look like everyone else. What do they say? Like, no. That's a different saying, but it still it still applies partially. That's like no one is watching and encrypt like everyone is. Right. And the point in encryption and, privacy in general is to make everyone look the same such that no one can be singled out.
[01:53:19] ODELL:
So should should wallets do you wanna see front ends that have, like, a combine button? Like, should I have, like, a easy combine button in cashew. Me that I just click and
[01:53:31] Calle:
No. The the wallet does that for you already. Like, cashew. Me does that already for you. You just While I'm making transactions. It's just doing it on the back end. While you're receiving and sending money, the wallet always calculates, like, what's the best next distribution that I should have and it tries to achieve that. So if you receive, like, a a 1,000 tokens from npap.cash, you will have a transaction with, like, 1,000 inputs, but the outputs will be, let's say, only 8 outputs or so. So, it will reduce the number of outputs all the time as much as possible because, eventually, you, you know it also tries to be smart about the future because you'll you'll have to pay fees at some point when the fees are turned on. So if end users are using
[01:54:15] ODELL:
a competent wallet, they'd all everything we just discussed, they just don't even have to think about in practice. Yeah. Yeah. That's the goal. Like, none of that. This is all just academic,
[01:54:23] Calle:
intellectual exercise for the interested, listener. A normal user won't have anything to do with these questions. They just send and receive and everything is, automated.
[01:54:33] ODELL:
Awesome. Before we get to my last topic, I see a comment from Musashi in the live chat, that I'm I'm curious as well. If if you restore a wallet with cashew. Me, like, using the seed words, can you run 2 different instances of the same wallet?
[01:54:50] Calle:
Yeah. So this will be this will be a, like, a, PTSD inducing question for Bitcoin on chain wallet. That's because it's the same issue with, Bitcoin on chain wallet. So the issue is if you have a Bitcoin wallet and a seed phrase and you import that seed phrase in a different wallet and then you use both wallets at the same time, you're fucked. Like, it's you're you're not fucked, but your wallets will think like what's going on. You don't lose money, but, like, the interface starts getting junky and doesn't show the right balances. Yeah. It it starts glitching because, like, how the one wallet doesn't know about the other wallet, and, like, they're now working with the same money, basically, and doing their own thing. So, so to come to the to the answer to that question, right now in cash. Me, when you open the wallet, it generates a seed phrase for you. And then you do have an op you have an option to restore from a seed phrase, where you have to enter a seed phrase as well. So when you go to that screen and you enter the seed phrase to restore e cash, it restores to your current seed phrase. So it doesn't use 2 seed phrases at the same time. You can only enter a seed phrase to restore the coins from that seed phrase. But once you use the coins, they are not bound to that seed phrase anymore. They become bound to the actual seed phrase of the wallet. So, you don't run into this issue where you could have 2 wallets with the same seed phrase on 2 different devices and, you know, produce these problems of, inconsistencies.
[01:56:22] ODELL:
Are you yeah. I thought that was what the answer was. Are you are you working on some kind of solution for multi instance? Like just an example, like my dad, I've gotten my whole family on to signal and and the the key way I did that was that was the only way they were gonna get baby photos. But like a major blocker for him for a while was that you couldn't use signal on iPad and on, like for whatever reason people just expect to have like multi device same instances support. Is that untenable on Casio, or is there a way to do it? You just haven't figured it out yet.
[01:57:01] Calle:
I think that's one of the hardest questions and the most important questions actually going forward in terms of UX is you want the same money on multiple devices, and it's so much harder than you than you can imagine. So one way of doing that, and that's actually, you know, goes to credits go to Pablo, is NIP 60. And it's so cool to say that, like, the closest thing of to achieving that, to have the same wallet on 2 different devices is using synchronization of that wallet using Nostra. Right now it's nip 60. And with nip 60, you essentially store your e cash on a nostril relay, and that becomes the source of truth. So you have these 2 wallets that just subscribe to events on a nostril relay. And when you receive money, both of them get an event and get the new e cash in. And when you send money, both of them get an event and get the e cash out. And so you can try to synchronize them at the same time.
To be completely precise, like, if you have 2 wallets racing each other and trying to spend the same e cash at the same time, like, one of them will fail and the other one will succeed because they might not have been able to synchronize exactly on the lock and exactly at the time. But, like, who cares? There's just one error. The wallet can recover from that error, and everything is okay. So I think we're getting to a place where this becomes more and more possible. I think, we haven't talked about NIP 60 a lot, today. It's one of the coolest things. I think it's a huge, huge important improvement for UX on on Nasdaq.
It allows you to build Nasdaq wallets without any additional software. You can just have the same wallet and the same money connected to your NSEK from every device that you log in, and that make you know, sounds a lot like the problem that we've been just talking about. But I think there's still, like, the major issue in this approach, and it's a hard one to crack, is that, you know, your ecash wallet is can be a significant amount of data at some point. Like, there is most ecash wallets will be less than 1 megabyte in size, but some of them will be 10 megabytes in size because they're, like, super popular podcast host like you are, and they get a bunch of zaps on m pop.cash, and then the wallet size grows substantially.
And that can be problematic. You know, wallets try to be smart about it, as I told you, but if they're not, you still have to deal with that e cash somehow. So how do you synchronize wallets? And 10 megabytes, like, that's, you know, that's the that's the threshold where it becomes super annoying. One megabyte is maybe something where you can you can still tolerate it with a smartphone. You have 2 smartphones. Every time you open the app, it takes you, like, 1 megabyte download to get the latest data to eCash Wallet. Maybe that's okay. You could argue it is not.
Now, so the problem is you always have many eCash tokens. And, fortunately, there is one way to solve this, and it's like the most sci fi project that we work on in Cashew. And it's called, any amount ecash or anonymous amount ecash. Sometimes all called blinded amount e cash. And so, I, the way, this is I can explain this is, you know, you have to remember what I said before. The reason why we have e cash with multiple different denominations and do different amounts, like, with 1 set, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and so on, but not every every amount is possible. Only these specific amounts are possible, and then you combine any amount with these building blocks. And the reason we do that is for privacy, as I said. We want to keep the unknown set high. We want to look like anyone who has 32 sets, and that makes the privacy great of owning 32 set tokens.
Now you could solve all these issues with having many tokens and having to synchronize a lot of data. If you just say, fuck it. I don't care about privacy. I want e cash tokens with every possible amount. And then you suddenly your wallet becomes a lot simpler. It's just like one single knot. It's a one single token. And when you receive a a new e cash token, you just add it to the knot and you end up with, again, just one single knot. But the problem is it has a very specific amount. Like, it would be visible that, you know, there is one user who has 3,526 sets, and now he received 12 sets. Now he has 3,520 6 +12 sets. So it's super easy to track the wallet if you allow any specific amount.
So we have privacy balanced against efficiency in this example, classical conundrum, and we chose privacy because that's what e cash is good for. Right? And, we we suffer a lot on efficiency, meaning that we end up with wallets that can be 1 megabyte in size, sometimes 10 megabyte in size just to keep their privacy intact. So this is all a big issue. Now, you know, 1 megabyte is tolerable, but once you wanna go, like, into the web and you want an ecash wallet inside every website that you visit, maybe you want it just to be a small JavaScript applet that is just 30 kilobytes or something to load. Like, that's what you need to achieve in order to permeate the entire web. You you need tiny wallets in order to permeate the web.
But you cannot do that, if you want to uphold privacy as I said. Fortunately, there's a science fiction method called kvac or, you know, it's also part of the signal protocol, and it's finally, it's the ecash system used in Wabi Sabi. Wabi Sabi itself, the coin joint protocol uses something very similar to e cash, and they have the same exact problem. Like, they need to, basically be able to hide the amounts. And maybe, you know, the listeners will remember at some point, Wabi Sabi said, hey. Now you can coinjoin any amount that you want with us. You know? Previously, they had just very fixed amounts like 0.1 Bitcoin or 0.01 Bitcoin or something. Like, only those specific amounts. And then at some point, they transitioned into any amount protocol.
And the way they could achieve this while still remaining privacy was blinded amounts. Now, I know this, my my monologue has been going on for quite some time, but bear with me because this is super interesting. So anonymous amount, e cash works the same way as, liquid confidential transactions work or also transactions on Monero work. And the way these transactions work on confidential transactions on mid and liquid, for example, is you can make a liquid transaction where, you can hide what the input amounts to the transaction is and what the outputs amount of the transaction is. You can make a transaction that looks like something is going in and something is going out, but no one sees what's going in and what's going out. And the way everyone verifies the transaction, like, basically basically make sure that you don't print e cash out of or, sorry, liquid BTC out of thin air, is that you provide a zero knowledge proof that the inputs equals the outputs.
So, basically, you post an encrypted transaction that doesn't have amounts in them, and you also produce a zero knowledge proof that says, like, I won't tell you the amounts, but I can prove to you that the amounts that I put in are the same amounts that I put out. And that's enough to validate the transaction. Now we know that you didn't print money out of thin air. We can validate the transaction. Everything is fine. And we're trying to do something similar with Cashew. This is a huge project that has been ongoing for a long time, and Tom is the major contributor. Cashew, therefore, is amazingly talented and, crazy good hacker. And he's working on this, basically, implementing this wabi sabi style protocol into Cashew such that we can, have amount blinded e cash at some point. And once we have amount blinded e cash, we can build e cash wallets that have one single knot. And that will be they will be so simple to work with because everything will get better once we have that.
An ecash wallet will have just a constant size. It will be one single token. And whenever you receive tokens, you will just add on to that one single token, and that will grow and shrink as you make and receive payments. And the only reason we can do that is because we we will be able to blind the amounts. Otherwise, we couldn't justify that because it will destroy your privacy. But once you combine the amount line with nature of that, you can make super efficient tiny cash wallets with a single knot. And also on top of that, you know, it's even better than with confidential transactions where for confidential transaction on liquid and also in parts also Monero, you although you hide the amounts, you don't hide the transaction graph. You still see who's sending, money to whom or which UTX always destroyed and which UTX also are generated, but you hide the amounts. With e cash, with confidential amounts and e cash, you can basically hide the amount and hide the transaction graph, and it will be just it will be crazy insane. I think it will be a true innovation actually because this hasn't been achieved yet in the e cash space, so to say, and we'll be, you know, we'll be enjoying the latest and greatest e cash tech in in the Bitcoin space because of that. So That's that's badass.
[02:06:55] ODELL:
So then you you have you have hyper efficiency while you still have the privacy guarantees. And then to the multi instance question, we could then store those hyper efficient wallets on a couple relays maybe just in case 1 or 2 relays goes down and you can have multi instance. It will be instant, and the storage cost will be none because it will be, like, 32 bytes that you store on e k on a not the relay, and that's that's your entire one. So I mean, what is the timeline on that? Do you think by the next time you're on the show, in 6 months, we'll have that? Or In 6 months, we'll have a prototype. But what we want to do is to
[02:07:31] Calle:
really integrate this into the cash support, such that everyone can then choose inside the cash wallet maybe to, you know, go into that, any amount pool and then switch back and forth. I think both approaches will need to exist side by side because one is much easier and simpler in terms of cryptography. That's the OG cash flow. That's just so simple. That's like left curve. I I need e cash. This is the way. And then we'll have the right curve, PhD in cryptography kind of hidden amount crazy efficient, e cash system that is hard to understand, but, amazing to work with. So then yeah.
[02:08:12] ODELL:
Sorry. You you know, you're your own you're you're your own worst enemy in terms of trying to keep this rip tight because your answers then run my brain and then I ask more questions based on them. So to the fee conversation we had earlier, presumably that this any amount, blinded amount version would have significantly less fees than the the current.
[02:08:40] Calle:
It will have a a lot less fees, and it will be way cheaper to run them in for as a consequence to that. Like, the fees will you you you might probably get away with 0 fees at that point because, you basically just have to make sure that not the same person is trying to spam the server at this point. Like, you barely save anything. Single transaction just leaves, let's say, 32 bytes imprint on you. So that's like That's insane. Infinite amount of transactions.
[02:09:10] ODELL:
Badass. Okay. Fucking awesome conversation. So my last topic, because I can't let you escape without having this conversation every fucking time, is you said 2 things about this topic. 1, you said on seal dispatch, you said, I'm not gonna stop using x because I still need it. And then another comment you made on Noster, and you said, I don't use Noster to support Noster. I use Noster because this is my natural habitat. You know, I I I tend to very much relate to the latter, and I also kind of relate to the former. Like, I respect if you feel you need x, but I got to the point where I felt I didn't need it anymore, and I was willing to make an ideological move, away from a platform that I couldn't support with my content anymore and my usage.
What is your opinion on current the current state of Nostra adoption where we are right now? Like, how how do you think about that ecosystem?
[02:10:15] Calle:
I think my perspective doesn't doesn't reflect, everyone's, like, the large portion of users. That's why, like, that's my my disclaimer. My preferences are probably not compatible with most people. So my preference is the following. As I said, I hate social media in general. Like, I don't wanna be part of social media. It sucks the lifeblood out of you, and it makes all the people on the planet enemies of each other because idealizes the other side and just perpetuates anger and so on. Like, it's a full on hardcore propaganda machine that has been built by a hyper capitalist Silicon Valley to mind control you and make you hate everyone and stay addicted to it. Like, that's my little rant. I'm only on social media for Bitcoin. So, that's why I can I I think, like, x is still kind of bearable for me because I limit myself to Bitcoin only and try to ignore everything else? The reason why I'm on X is very simple. It's, like, egoistic in that sense is that I need to reach more people with the tech that I'm building, and I want to reach as many people as possible.
And I also want to break out of echo chambers and maybe reach people, that aren't already in my echo chamber. Now coming to Nostra, for me, Nostra, I think, like, let's be I I wanna be, like, perfectly honest on this. I've been a bit disappointed with the growth of Nostar in terms of when it compares itself to other networks and just in terms of the number of people. But, saying that, I'm completely, like, fine with that personally because I don't need other people. I'm not I'm not looking for a place in Nasdaq. I'm not looking for a place where just I can talk to anyone anywhere.
I'm looking for a place to be with my Bitcoin buddies, and I want to be with my Bitcoin buddies in a place that's not controlled by Elon or whoever it is, who whoever is your current dictator of today, basically. Like, for and for that, you know, that use case, Nostra, for me, perfect is is basically perfect. What I would wish for is more Bitcoiners to join Nostra, and that's it. Like, personally, I don't get anything else or more from it. Now setting that aside, I am looking also, you know, last couple of days, everyone has been talking about blue sky and, you know, we don't need to talk about x. I think x is just fucked up and everyone who is there hates it, and that that tells you a lot about, the place itself. But, still, like with Nostra, although we don't have the user numbers, the tech we have is amazing.
It's just there is nothing even closely comparable to it. I I've looked at repositories of Blue Sky tools and so on, like, what they've been building. It's all a bunch of complicated stuff, and it's not just, you know, d gen built it in one day, and for some reason, it works kind of, development as we have in most. And I think, that's just because of the design of most. And maybe also the people that it attracts, but most is so simple that, I'm not concerned about its existence. It's just too useful to not be of use. And even if the social aspect of Nostra doesn't grow, like, exponentially as, you know, some people would want.
Even if the trolls troves of users, these days go to, blue sky with 1,000,000 new users per day, whereas Nostra still creeps around, I don't know, 10,000 active pub keys per day or something. I think that, you know, there's already so much software and tooling that uses Nostra that even if all the people would leave, there would be enough computers still using the network. And, you know, I find that super bullish. Like, this is where where I want to be. I I want to be in a place where the the possibilities are, so to speak, like, almost endless because you're able to build anything or, with just a couple couple of clicks and steps.
So, I remain bullish and dedicated. I don't know where else to go, and, I just want to be close with my Bitcoin buddies and then, you know, ride or die. Like, I don't fucking care about the influx of users. So that's it.
[02:15:06] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, the ride or dies are already on Noster. It's a success from that point of view. I think there's a little bit too much fascination with, because Noster is so open and transparent on, like, the, quote, unquote, daily active users metric. I think that's mostly a slave metric. How many addicts do you have? And I also think it doesn't properly measure lurkers, like people who just cons consume content and are just reading and not engaging.
[02:15:36] Calle:
Yeah. That's like probably 80% of users, though. I yeah. A YouTuber.
[02:15:41] ODELL:
But it's important to realize that with a protocol instead of a platform, like x is x or Instagram or Reddit, these are walled gardens. You have to sign up to consume that consume those discussions and consume that content. With Nostr, you know, anyone who has an Internet connection can do that without permission, and no one would know. Those people aren't getting tracked right now. And you see it when something breaks on Nostra. The people that pretend that they're not using Nostra tend to find out about it within 10 minutes. And that's because it is it is open and is accessible to everyone. But I will say that you did mention something interesting there, which is I also you know, I'm not a social media person. Like, my only social media for the last decade was was Twitter, and I was only using it for Bitcoin things. So I continue that's what I use Nostra for now, just for Bitcoin things. And there is a common refrain that people have. They're like, oh, there's too much Bitcoin content on Nostra. And to me, like, the biggest issue is that there's not enough. Like, I've been a little bit frustrated with the amount of Bitcoin discussion and good Bitcoin discussion on Noster, and I know it's not really happening on x either because it's just a fucking cesspool now. And I think just good Bitcoin discussion is harder to find than it's ever been in the past.
I think we solve that a lot. You know, we will solve that, and and that's basically through the tools, making the tools better. So, like, Primal, for instance, has a has a massive update that's coming out this week. And I'm gonna have a million, the the project lead over at primal on dispatch next week, probably Monday, freaks, but I'll tell you on Noster the exact time. It's not set in stone yet. But the the blue sky you mentioned blue sky, and blue sky is a really interesting phenomenon where people I most people don't care about the tech stack, when they're using these things. They just care about how the apps work in practice. And, actually, with Blue Sky, people are seeking it out because they want more moderation, which is like the exact opposite of Noster's ethos. So I think, like, we we we win in that front. We win in terms of more and more people using it and more and more useful conversation happening when the tools are so easy that, you know, the censorship resistance, the verifiability, the permissionlessness is just kind of a side effect of what you get from using it. And it's just a way better user experience.
And I think, you know, there are many developers in in Nostra that have realized this and are making great strides on this, and particularly the Primal team is very laser focused on kind of this, quote, unquote, you know, mainstream client.
[02:18:35] Calle:
So I was just amazing job. That guy is amazing.
[02:18:38] ODELL:
Yeah. Well, it's, I I don't wanna give away too much information because because, I don't wanna take I don't wanna take millions thunder, but, the this next primal launch, I I puts it ahead of x in terms of usability and search functionality and Well optimizations, and it just makes it a way better experience.
[02:19:00] Calle:
All without a caching server? No. With with a caching server. Still with a caching server. Alright. Wait. Wait. I'll You can choose your own caching server, you know, if you want. Okay. That's cool. I I wanna get to to your point with, with Bitcoin content. I actually, like, just, I don't hear that as a joke. Like, I I don't know if that was meant to be a joke or not. Like, I would be like seriously, I think the same thing. There is not enough Bitcoin discussion on Nasr, and that's because my my particular interest and obsession is Bitcoin. As I said, like, I wanna learn everything about Bitcoin and know everything, everyone who's talking about Bitcoin. I want them, in my face. But I'm, like, kind of disappointed by the Bitcoin conversational space for a long time. That was already the case when everything was happening on on Reddit, and then the community for some, like, unexplained and or or implicit reason moved over to x. And that's that was the reason why I joined x in the first place was also just to be closer with the Bitcoin conversation.
And to be honest, I'm I'm kind of shocked that no one is no. Not I shouldn't say no one, but, like, most, devs, which who are the, you know, the ones that I would like to follow their conversation. Like, I would enter the room the rooms in which they hang out because I wanna overhear what they're talking to each other. Like, I wanna hear on CLN, talk to, Lula Lula from, sorry. What's this? Nalu from Lightning Labs. And I I wanna observe that discussion. And I think that kind of discussion should really happen on Nosta, not on x because we're building a decentralized money system that shakes the foundations of the world's order. And, you know, people are noticing that and, you know, it's an important project that belongs to humanity and not to a single country or a single jurisdiction.
So our communication medium should be neutral, and it should be uncensorable, and it should belong to everyone, like the thing that we're building as well. But for the sake of Bitcoin, like, literally just a practical consideration. And so in that regard, like, when when Nasdaq came out, there was more excitement about it, but, I'm still kind of surprised that even the most hardcore nerds in this space choose to bring their, discussions onto x rather or ignore Noster while it's just waiting there waiting here for their discussions and, to to be part of that network. So, I think if we all, went back to our cyberpunk ideals and, you know, meditated about what we're doing here and what the goals are and so on, you know, we would see that most of it is a way better way of communicating about this even if the UX sucks. Like, who cares about UX? I want censorship resistant speech about softwares.
I don't want even the slightest possibility of a centralized entity being able to manipulate the trans the discussions to make decisions about how Bitcoin should evolve. Like, this is too important. We need neutral ground and, you know, these things are happening. This is, like, no conspiracy theories here, but, the CIA playbook is partially that is to sway discord and manipulate, conversations. And when you have someone like Elon who just, you know, probably and do whatever the current administration tells him to do because they gotten way too much at his balls at this point, and also the other way around, like, he also got the administration at the balls at some in some way.
Like, you can just see that that that's not good. It's not it's not a place to exchange ideas freely. Your ideas aren't free on those centralized platforms. Every single post you make there is for the financial benefit of that organization and nothing more. There is no other goal to maximize. They can say whatever they want. There are huge corporations with shareholders who don't give a fuck about any of the ideals that their spokespeople say. That's just a fact. Like, you can be as idealistic about Elon as you like. At the end of the day, he has basically no say over it as long as he has, like, public, investors and so on. So yeah.
[02:23:39] ODELL:
Damn right. You said it better than I can. Cali, this conversation has been great. I I wanna end it with just a call to action to to Cashew. I mean, I think, you guys have made great strides on the protocol. I'm incredibly grateful it exists. I think the freaks, if you haven't used Cashew if somehow you've made it 2 and a half hours into this conversation and you have never used Cashew, go to cashew.me, send a few stats in, play around with it, use the tools. Cali's way open to feedback. Like, the feedback does actually help. A lot of this stuff, whether it's Noster, whether it's Cashew, whether it's Bitcoin, like, you gotta use the thing. You gotta use the thing. You have to play around with it. You gotta get comfortable with it, you know, and and good engineers are are always happy for intelligent feedback as a result. Cali,
[02:24:35] Calle:
do you have a will you have any final thoughts for the audience before we wrap here? No. But I I mean, my final thoughts are always the same, and I just wanna say it again if, like, if you are deaf out there and this tickled your pickle, you know, or if you're a deaf lady and this tickles some some other part of your body, excuse the, the this joke. But, if you if you think, like, you should contribute to Bitcoin and you can feel the urge burning inside you as you stare into your corporate display and you tighten to your corporate keyboard and you know that your human potential is bigger than what you're doing, then consider becoming a Bitcoin dev. It is freedom, self determination. It's a project for humanity.
You'll feel fulfillment and, and meet people in ways that you didn't even know existed. So we need everyone who can join us on this mission. And, if you are interested in Cashew, you can go to cashew.space. That's where you can find all the information about our project. And, you can talk to me directly. We're looking for contributors. We have lots of different, projects in many different languages. Just, take a look at the libraries and, feel free to join our conversation and our channels. Ask me directly if you have any questions. That's totally fine. And if you're not interested in Casio because it's custodial stuff and so on, like, you don't or you're just you're you're a lightning person or you care about l two stuff, like, any person with that kind of interest is needed in the space. Like, you should seriously join Bitcoin because, otherwise, no one else will do the work. So thank you for having me out there.
[02:26:19] ODELL:
Wonderful. Much love, brother. You're always welcome. You ever wanna come on the show before our 6 month rendezvous, just text me and we'll make it happen. And, huge shout out to the freaks who joined us in the the live chat. You guys make the show unique, and huge shout out to all the freaks out there who continue to support the show, with your incredibly scarce stats, whether that's on Zaps using the live stream or whether that's through podcasting 2 point o apps. I appreciate you all. Stay humble, StackSets.
[02:27:01] Unknown:
Our world is chaotic, but life found its way by channeling energy to bring order to chaos. It is in our nature to seek signals amongst noise because it is through communication and exchange that we evolve beyond the darkness of chaos into the dawn of civilization. Our our evolution thrives in exchange of all the info we try to convey. They flow through to the marketplace and form the signals to regulate how we coordinate where things need to be. Price speaks so we learn to compete. This drives us to efficiently shape the world with our voice. Now let the market speak. It's how we build, we sow, we trade, we grow to meet our wants and needs. We specialize drive from the mind our creations into reality. We make progress in our process to get more for less, advancing society before full dawn of the age of technology that harness the energy to reach prosperity.
Our money embodies the power to reap what we sow, so the market becomes a channel for our collective energy to flow. When value is traded for value, we are aligned and so we evolve. This is how amidst uncertainty, life continues to grow. But the dawn of tech gave rise to light speed information exchange. So to transact fast, we further abstract money from energy constraints and became more aligned on a few large entities to coordinate trade, concentrating the power, resources, and authority to create more and more of our money, distorting its signals, eroding its worth, and throwing us back into the darkness of chaos. When we destroy the mechanism of money, we destroy our ability to navigate through uncertainty.
And when we can't trade value freely and directly, we must trust the few to govern the many. What happens when all our means center around an authority? Complexity builds now coordination. Relies on conformity, observe our thoughts, the sense of dissent and coerce our actions. Can there be true innovation when there's no freedom of expression? What happens to our voice? The ones that shape social discourse now whose ideas gets created and which problems get solved. If our progress depends on hearing many sides to resolve, then why would we suppress the voice that shapes how humanity evolves? When we cut off the perspectives that make up society, we lose sight of the truth that forms our entire reality. Each person's contribution builds up our resiliency. Did we forget these differences are what strengthens humanity?
When communication breaks our words to the silence, our acts become violent, and the world is divided, and its darkness, truth is twisted by our pain and our bias, eroding the common ground, making us more and more fragile. To navigate uncertainty, we must solve for robustness, so everything gets tried and tested by various efforts, until we discover the system that best coordinates us. Mirrors life's process of channeling energy to create signal from chaos. In the era of technology, we transform energy into computational power to process the noise of free markets into structured order. And just by looking at numbers, we can derive how much power is required to reduce chaos and inscribe a flow of value for order verify that our transactions happened in line with shared rules. We don't need to seek trust. Transactions happened in line with shared rules. We don't need to seek trust when we can see proof. It is real time consensus that our lines is to evolve. This is how, amidst uncertainty, our lives continue to grow when we uphold our own rules, be preserved our own work and defend our own voice, which lets the true market emerge. The strength of the design lies in each of our participation since we are the nodes that channel our energy end to end. As we claim this dawn of light touches all parts of the glow and it ripples throughout society, and it returns us the hope that becomes the power that sparks humanity to thrive, that same power that fuels the creation of the mind. And when our mind and our money are truly set free and they transcend the limits of past boundaries, now knowing becomes owning and ideas become wealth. What happens now we can all push to expand the edges of our existence and assume evolution when things are the hardest. As we head for the light, we have to push through the darkness that is in these moments. We do what we do best. We take the chaos in the darkness and use our power to create. It is in these moments when we're all in alignment and afraid of a difference ascends us to a highest and distant depth of it all. Though that hope is not gone, it is always the darkest before dawn.
The price of Bitcoin briefly, hitting the 93,000, dollar level before pulling back. It's up more than a 150%, this year. Let's talk about the crypto market and bring in Matthew Siegel, head of, digital assets research, at Van Eck. I thought, Matt, that it was definitely, long in the tooth, this sort of, mania. You say there's in at least for your work, that you don't necessarily see that yet in terms of, whether it's totally overdone?
[00:00:35] Unknown:
Joe, we think it's just getting started. As we expected, Bitcoin saw this high volatility pump after the election. We're now in blue sky territory. No technical resistance, and we think we're likely to make repeated all time highs over the next two quarters. The same pattern played out 4 years ago. Between the election and the end of the year in 2020, Bitcoin doubled. There were about 6, 10% corrections, so it's not gonna be a straight line, but we're up 30% so far. And a number of indicators that we track are still flashing green for this rally to continue. This is a state change in terms of government support. Look at this cabinet, the VP, attorney general, director of defense, national security adviser, possibly even the secretary of treasury being pro Bitcoin.
That's not including Elon and Vivek. So the number of calls that I'm getting inbound from investment advisers who are at 0 and looking to get to 1% or at 1% and looking to get to 3%, these calls are starting to accelerate, and we think the flows are gonna follow. So our price target for this cycle is a 180 k. We think we can reach that next year. That would be a 1000% return from the bottom to the peak this cycle. That's still the smallest Bitcoin cycle, by far.
[00:02:03] Unknown:
Low double from here, basically. You look at weird things, Matthew, like so you you Google search Google search for Bitcoin is is one of the the thing so you would expect if we were getting top of you would expect that that was off the charts, and and it's not yet?
[00:02:23] Unknown:
Google searches are nowhere near where they were 4 years ago. Coinbase's rank in the Apple and Android app stores, nowhere near where it was 4 years ago. Look at the internals of the derivative markets, what it costs for funding to put on Bitcoin futures trades. You know, it it's up. But once we get into this price discovery mode, it tends to stay elevated for quite some time.
[00:02:52] Unknown:
What if Gensler's gone as a Trump said on day 1 or someone said on day 1? I mean, I I can imagine that. I don't know when, though, it actually becomes of a sell on the news because they it I don't know. Maybe I'm just, think that it's it's more of a mania move now than it than it actually is, but it just seems like it's been a heck of a move. Think it'll move when Gensler's gone? If he's gone?
[00:03:17] Unknown:
Yeah. I think, you know, maybe the disappointment phase will set in, 1 to 2 quarters after the inauguration. There's really 4 major impacts here. Okay. You know, one is just the positive impact on dynamism when you stop suing people for breaking rules that have never been written down. That's a long way of saying that regulation by enforcement is gonna end. We're already seeing the economic impact of that. There are crypto projects that are announcing that they're gonna hold conferences in the US for the first time ever, open offices in the US and New York. It's just great for US jobs and GDP. Right? We've got the Bitcoin reserve that would legitimize this asset as a reserve asset, pave the way for it to be used as a global settlement currency as the BRICS countries have been doing.
You know, president Trump recognizes the synergies between Bitcoin and AI. They are two sides of the same coin. If you wanna have cheap AI, you're gonna wanna combine it with Bitcoin mining to take advantage of that cheap power.
[00:04:18] Unknown:
They're telling me we got, I don't know, Disney, Bitcoin. They're both important, obviously. We gotta get the, we gotta get moving, and, we got, the CFO. But we appreciate your time today, Matt. Thank you.
[00:05:07] ODELL:
Happy Bitcoin Monday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Citadel Dispatch, the interactive live show focused on actionable Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion. That intro was from, the largest Bitcoin podcast in the world, CNBC Squawk Box. They were interviewing some guy from VanEck who thinks, Bitcoin is gonna go up higher. I think it was very topical for our discussion. Looks like I just lost Cali, but he'll be back in a second. We have. It's actually not topical at all for our discussion, but the Bitcoin pump continues. We are in open water Bitcoin, And, it seems like, Bitcoin is doing its thing, melting faces, as it tends to do every 4 years or so.
We have Cali joining us. He has been on the show in the past. He is the prolific maintainer of Cashew. Let's see. He just messaged me because he got disconnected. He's coming back. And I also seem to have some technical difficulties with the live chat. I don't know what's going on with ZapStream right now, but we are live. The chat you see on the screen is from last week's episode. But this is why we still stream to YouTube, and Twitch. So there are some people joining us from those streams right now, and hopefully, I'll have the ZapStream up soon. It says it's sending data, but ZapStream is not receiving it.
And we are waiting for Cali. While we're waiting, this show is supported by freaks like you, who send sats to the show. We have no ads or sponsors. I think we're the longest running largest audience show that's not run by Adam Curry that runs on a pure value for value, method where you donate your hard earned Bitcoin, your scarce Bitcoin, to support the show rather than relying on ads or sponsors. The 2 easiest ways to do that is either through the live chat, which like I said, is not working right now, or you can zap live, or through podcasting 2 point o apps like Fountain Podcasts.
And our 2 largest boosts from last week's episode were from Stimmy Yourself with Bitcoin. He's on 21,000 sats. Said holy shit. Nobody's bullish enough. And we had Reid with 14,141 sats saying consensus is messy. This is a feature, not a bug. I tend to agree with him. Those came in through podcasting 2.0. While we're waiting for Cali, I'm gonna try and get this ZapStream working better. Of course, his internet completely failed him as soon as we went live. But that's the beauty of a live show, isn't it? We just do it live and we don't really know what will happen.
I'm freaks. I know my audio last week wasn't ideal. I was on kind of a shitty connection, but I'm trying to work on it. So I think it's probably much better now. I made some changes. But just know it's a priority. It's obviously not intentional. I want you guys to have the best quality possible. Yeah. I don't know why Noster is not working right now. Well, Noster is working to be clear. This is just Zap dot won't let me connect. Oh, nice of Cali to join us. Yeah. Yeah. Loving me. Thank thanks for joining us. You had me, I had to I had to, hold the there in the rain, man. Yeah. You left me just standing here.
[00:09:19] Calle:
Wait. So here's my avatar. What's up, freaks? There we go. Interruption. My my Internet. I'm on Starlink right now, and Starlink is fucking amazing, but I think
[00:09:33] ODELL:
Did we lose you again? I think I lost you again. Starlink is fucking amazing, but sometimes when it switches between satellites, you lose connection briefly. I think I lost you again. Did you mute yourself? This episode's off to a great start.
[00:10:11] Calle:
I think,
[00:10:14] ODELL:
are we are we screwed?
[00:10:17] Calle:
Yeah. Could be. I mean, let's see. Let's just pray. Let's let's start going and see how far the Internet takes us. Okay. Well, worse worse comes to worse if,
[00:10:27] ODELL:
if if we have to scrap this episode, we'll, we'll reschedule swiftly. Yeah. We'll find a way. Near future. Should we talk about the the clip that you just, I don't know if you talked about it already because it dropped out. That was Did you enjoy the intro clip? I felt like it was very topical for our conversation.
[00:10:44] Calle:
Yeah. Absolutely. First of all, I wanna say, like, all of these snake oil salesman, they're, like, when if you're watching this for a while, you'll notice that you see you know, they they'll say the same thing every time. The only thing that has changed right now is the price, not what they say. So that's that's important to remember. You know, like, what was it? Google search is not up. Coinbase, app ranking on app store is not up. In fact, Coinbase is still up still up as well. As long as Coinbase is still up, the bull market hasn't started. I find that very amusing, especially the guy when he, compared Disney stock to Bitcoin at the end.
[00:11:27] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I I just I love how during bull market, CNBC just turns into a Bitcoin podcast. And usually it's not relevant to anything, on the show, but, I like it as a kind of like a time stamp to look back and, you know, Citadel Dispatch is going for about 3 years now. And, you get to find out what, the largest Bitcoin podcast in the world is talking about at that time every every episode.
[00:11:56] Calle:
I also wanna say, I mean, price going up is great for everyone. Right? But, except if you trust the ECB, then it's it's bad for all the for the entire population that does not own Bitcoin. But aside from that, price going up is great for everyone. But what I wonder in these price rallies is how much of that is trading versus saving. Right? I think saving Bitcoin is what ultimately puts a bottom to to the price. And as more people accumulate without the intention of ever selling, we're going to just raise the bar all the time. But, for a rally like this and with all these, you know, magical indicators pointing towards, like, no particular activity with at least plebs, I wonder, you know, will some people get wrecked because of it and people starting to buy in at 92 k, will probably melt some cases off in both directions.
[00:12:57] ODELL:
They should just stay on Bluemstack. That's about it.
[00:13:00] Calle:
Yeah. You just turn off your brain. You, turn on the DCA.
[00:13:05] ODELL:
Did you see, I had a a noster a noster note I was quite proud of. You you should have stayed humble in StackSats. You still can, but you should have to. I think it's always a good time to to stay humble in StackSats. So by the way, Cali, while you were having your technical difficulties, I was having technical difficulties with ZapStream, but I got it on. So now we have the live chat. The live chat's working. Yeah. I can see some messages going on. It's all good. Should we restart the show? Do you wanna watch the 5 minute intro clip again? Oh, no. I I think I'm good.
[00:13:42] Calle:
Did anyone else see it as well?
[00:13:45] ODELL:
Did you I mean, they'll see it in the recording or whatever. YouTube and Twitch got it, but the ZapStream literally just went live. But you guys didn't miss anything in ZapStream. Right? We appreciate you, and you're the ride or die, and I'm glad we got you on. The intro clip was, you know, mostly mostly a joke, but also hilarious. Cali, did you see what I named this episode?
[00:14:10] Calle:
What is it? Is it c d 144 cashew with Cali? Yeah. You like that? I mean, I love fucking cashews.
[00:14:18] ODELL:
Yeah. I love it a lot. Last rip I did with Cali, everyone everyone should go everyone should go listen to it, but, he was he was kinda pissed off of me afterwards because I I I kept writing e cash everywhere, and I didn't say cash you by name. Yeah. Because you're a Fed investor. That's why. Dude, there's enough conspiracies out there. You don't have to feed the fire. We can it has it had nothing to do with that.
[00:14:45] Calle:
You're proving that you're inviting me more often than the FedDev. So There you go.
[00:14:53] ODELL:
But yeah. So I I made it up to you. I did a super simple name that is literally just three words. 1 is 1 is your name, and 1 is the name of your project. So you're welcome. I I think we could have dropped the middle word there as well. Just Cassie Cali? Yeah. Okay. Well, neck next time. I I I would like you to always be a repeat guest. It's always some of the most fun rips and especially the conversations we have offline are always a lot of fun. The lost podcast episodes that no one else gets to listen to. So what do you wanna talk about? The the project has come a long way since we last spoke.
I think I have no idea when we spoke last. Do you know when we spoke last?
[00:15:36] Calle:
No idea. It was sometime this year, but things are changing. Like, things are happening so fast that it's hard to, keep track. So cache itself is 2 years old. And and when I say that, I mean, like, the first initial release of the software that I did where I didn't even have this whole plan of making, protocol out of it where others can join and participate. So I would maybe cut off, like, 6 months from that in the beginning because it was just, like, one dude doing something. And when it became a protocol with that, I mean, becoming a protocol means, in my definition, writing the spec and then having independent implementations adhering to the spec instead of just adhering to one guy's, code base, that's where things started to take off. And at this point, like, I'm I'm literally losing, the overview myself, which is a beautiful, beautiful feeling to have just to see that this thing is going on. Lots of projects people are working on. Often, I hear about them when when they post on Nostra or on Twitter. So there's a lot of stuff happening without me being aware of it. And when I find these projects, then it's just the best feeling ever.
I I think, like, my for for next year, my goal would be to to get to a stage where I can comfortably or confidently say that, if if if I write or die, if I choose the the branch of dying instead of writing, so, like a bus accident or something that the project will continue. That will be like that that will be my primary objective. Please don't die.
[00:17:24] ODELL:
We still need more attention. No There's still more there's still more work to be done. I always like to say that, I mean, OpenSats, like, our goal at OpenSats, is, you know, to to operate at a scale operate at scale that that no other charity does, period. You know, right now we're paying out nearly 200 grantees. I think actually maybe a little bit more than 200 grantees and 40 plus countries. But there's something to be said that there's, like, a there's a few people. There's a few open source contributors out there that are just, like, a step above, that if we could if if if we could somehow enable, like, 10 Cali's in the world, to to come into Bitcoin and start working on Freedom Tech in in a real way like you've done, I mean, I think the we change everything. Like, I think then we have massive success. So, please don't leave us. We still need you, but I I do appreciate, the massive progress you've made from, like, derisking yourself from the project. So I just looked it up.
We last spoke March 2024, which I think winds up. I think on that show, I said it'd be nice to do it every 6 months. So I I think just coincidentally, we actually did line it up perfectly. And you did mention that 1031 My Venture Fund is a small investor in FEDI, which is a for profit business that is built on top of the Fedimint protocol, which is another ecash protocol. There's 2 dominant ecash protocols on Bitcoin. By the way, I looked up the last episode. I called it Bitcoin Charming, Bitcoin wait. What did I call it? I called it Bitcoin powered Charmian eCash with Cali. So, the and so so FETI is built on this Fediment open source protocol, and then you have the Cashew protocol that has many wallets that are built on top of it.
And just seeing the organic growth in Cashew versus Fedimint has been something to watch. I mean, we've seen a it's it's it's it's something that is very rare. Right? I I think both of us have been in this space and the adjacent spaces for for a long time now. And it's not something that you can, like, create out of thin air or try and replicate through like force. It's something that kinda just happens virally and organically when like an idea has its time and it's been fascinating to watch.
[00:19:57] Calle:
Yeah. I wanna riff on all all those topics that you just mentioned. I think they're super important. Like, we should get back to open sets and developers and how to get them as well. But I wanna mention at this point, like, obviously, I always wanted to to get to a point where this with with Casio, we're trying to build the simplest e cash system possible. Like, we're trying to start with the minimum basics, what you need in order to have an e cash protocol in the first place, and then trying to make that more and more complex and building more features on top of that that are optional that people can use if they need it. But this approach, basically, was well intentioned, Like, there was always this this model that I've observed from, especially lnurl, and we had this lnurl mafia back in the days where we had this whole group of people just implementing this very stupid simple fiat Jeff invented lnurls, so it's HTTP based, super simple way of receiving lightning payments.
And I saw how it spread. And it was so beautiful to watch because it just spread like wildfire. And at the same time, you know, you have other protocols that do similar things, but they are pushed from by different entities. Sometimes it's a company. Sometimes it's like a set of OGs that are very, you know, very pushy about the tech. Whereas you have this punk, stupid, simple technology like lnurl that is unstoppable, which eventually forced everyone to adopt lnurl. Right? And nowadays, we have these battles between bolt 12 versus lnurl. And I think I mean, I love bolt 12. But you see that you have this now new technology, both 12, that is trying to shave off some of the success from lnurl.
And, it's trying too hard. And I think it's like opening up, like, antagonisms where they're not really needed. So in my in my view, technology spreads, in a way very unpredictably. But what seems to be often the case is that if the tech can speak for itself and those who, defend it and represent it, don't try too hard and remain, like, fact based and just show you how easy it is to use it, show you how easy it is to build it. That's what makes people, the relevant people to actually consider it and think about the tech. Right? At the end of the day, also, I mean, I I love having a discuss the the discussion with you and conversation with you, but also the one of the reasons why I go to podcast and talk about Cashew is I want to inflict, like fantasies in heads of people, in the brains of people who are working with tech.
And I think, like, by talking about what what we already do today, it will just change your way of looking at your tech stack and what you work on. And maybe you'll find, it's not one or two reasons why you might wanna look into it. And that's the best way that tech can spread. It's just purely your own reason, your own benefits, and, you discover it and then you, employ it. And I think, yeah, that's that's how we've been spreading. So we have no propaganda, ministry. We have no funding for media. We have no, like, marketing department. We just ship posts and we built. And it's been working better than anything else that you can do.
So, I'm very happy about that. But I also wanna go back get back to, like, this. Thank you for the compliments. First of all, I need to say thank you for that and also partially re reject them because I don't wanna, you know, be idealized in that sense. Like, I'm just a normal fucking plab, and I'm just building. And I'm here to stay, super convicted. I think Bitcoin is one of the most interesting and most important things to work on, on a human life choices level. I'm, like, all in with Bitcoin. And, I know, like, if I choose something, I'm I'm a person that just stays around and rides or dies.
But I think about attracting, like, these, capable deaths that each individual, we have insane potential to change Bitcoin, to improve Bitcoin. I think about how to attract them all the time. It's one of the things that is constantly on my mind is how can we build a, let's say, environment and culture in Bitcoin, and how can we reach those people, that might have this incredible impact on how Bitcoin works today. And, you know, it's a complicated topic because Bitcoin itself is a very echo chamber y closed minded, community sometimes, which I know that some people lark about. This is, defense immune system for Bitcoin and so on. I think that's kind of mostly anti social behavior. The cyber hornets.
Yeah. Yeah. I think grown grown men often explaining to themselves why they can be mean and bullying people and so, like, I I I think it's, it doesn't really help anyone. But, yeah, that that's my small diss there, so I hope no one feels offended. But, so I think of people now I wanna I wanna mention 2 people that are not, like, super consensus that we, that, you know, not everyone's in consensus that they're amazing engineers. But, I wanna mention Robin Linus, the guy who invented BitVM, and, Casey Rotimore, the guy who invented, ordinals.
And, you know, think what you will about these two inventions, and especially the ordinal stuff is very you know, many people are pretty good about it. I fucking, you know, don't care about NFTs. Like, it's very unimportant to me personally. But what I see is these 2 very special people, for some reason, they have taken a different approach, and some of their approaches even shitcoiny. Like, NFT stuff is very shitcoiny. And, Robin Linus himself, he learned all his zk magic stuff in shitcoin land. Like, he came from the developer ecosystem from Ethereum world, like, where you have z zk proofs.
And, and both of them with Bitcoin and, I think 0 sync is the other project by Robin and then obviously the whole ordinal spiel. Both of these projects had had an insane impact on Bitcoin whether you like it or not. Those are immense, like, in in the history books of Bitcoin, we will mention those two names. And so that's a very long way of saying, like, how do we attract those people? I really believe that individuals, some are so capable that just 1 or 2 of them can change the course of Bitcoin. So the biggest question, the most important question in my mind as someone who's always dealing with developers just whose life is being a developer, I wonder how do we attract those people. And I really don't know. Like, sometimes I have the urge to go to fucking, I don't know, mastodon or blue sky or just break out of the echo chamber to talk to people that are out there but who can't be reached from within our echo chamber.
So, yeah, I wonder how to do that, and I wanna expand the circus circle of Bitcoin. I want to reach more people and then, yeah, and and then and attract those people into our cult.
[00:28:03] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, that's always the question. Right? I mean, I we hear it a lot in terms of my, my noster stance. It's a common refrain that I hear is is is, oh, well, if you're if you're only using noster, like, you're missing a bunch of people. And usually it's it's used in terms of that's why someone should post to x. Right? But I there is probably an argument. There's probably a valid argument that, that there's there's more greenfield people that have never been exposed to Bitcoin and associated Freedom Tech on like a TikTok or which has way more users than x or maybe even a blue sky, which is kind of a weird little echo chamber they're building over there.
That couldn't be any more different than Nostr. But also, like, I kind of come to the conclusion that I don't know, Cali. Like, I feel like like how did you how did you discover Bitcoin? Like, I feel like the I hate the term because it just sounds like I'm wearing my VC hat, but, like, the 10 x engineers, like, the people that really, move the needle in a big way, the rider dies, they tend to kind of do the proof of work and find it. Like I found Bitcoin in in a environment that, you know, no one was talking about on x. You know, I I just I've I've I've found it. I was looking I was looking for hope and I found something that provided that hope and then I just never stopped.
[00:29:46] Calle:
Yeah. For me so the the reason I joined X was for Bitcoin. I I don't like social media that much, by itself. So I kind of entered the Bitcoin, or let's say the the public square wearing my Bitcoin hat. And to this day, I limit myself purely to Bitcoin content because, there's too much bullshit going on around that. Like, I wanna I wanna focus. The way I found Bitcoin, I don't talk about this, often, but it's, I I think, a good story, actually, because, like, I've been developing for all my life. I've had, like, various professional experience, done all sorts of crazy hardships and achieve, like, things in different domains.
But, I was building privacy software, and it wasn't Bitcoin related. And I can I can actually, this is an interesting, example? I was building a port scanner. Port scanner is a standard, you know, cybersecurity tool that checks whether ports on a different computer are open or not. It's very, very basic. And, I was looking for one that does it for, Tor for Tor services, hidden services, where you can just enter a Tor on the address and it checks for the ports. And this didn't exist, so I I just built it. And when I put it up, I noticed that it uses kind of, you know, resources, cost money to host this thing, and didn't have much money. So I wanted to put a donation button there. And, well, obviously, I had to use Bitcoin because, what else could you, use, like, anonymous service with?
And because of that fucking payment button, I fell into the developer rabbit hole. Now as I fell deeper and deeper, I just, like, dismissed completely the actual project that I was working on and and had to fix that payment button. And, that's how I became a lightning developer at the end of the day. Just following that that rabbit hole for months years and becoming an expert. As I was falling into that hole, though, and I think that's important for me personally, and it ties back to what I said before. I noticed that the rabbit hole is way deeper than I thought. Or not on a, you know, just thinking about Bitcoin and Bitcoin on a social economic level and all that stuff is also interesting, but it's not something that would have kept me inside the rabbit hole. Like, I would have just gone, you know, gone to the next thing. But, what I noticed in Bitcoin is that the technical rabbit hole is super deep, and we have amazing people in Bitcoin that are true theoreticians, like hardcore cyber bugs doing, a lot of work. And you'll suddenly sit in a room with people who talk about this tech and you you get you understand nothing.
And you notice that there's so much to learn about this if you wanna really learn. And so for for curious person, this is often like a trigger to okay. Then let's let's dive in and figure it out. And nowadays, you know, I'm trying to I'm trying to help others also follow the white rabbit and, you know, wake up, Neil. There is so much you can do with your life that isn't this corporate normal developer life that most people, most of my friends who work in development actually hate what they're doing. And this is like a standard default way of living. We have all accepted this. This is, say, a result of modern society, I guess.
But especially for developers who look at open source and they're many of them say is like, oh, yeah. And, you know, one day I'll take some time and do what's good instead of what's necessary and go, you know, become a open source developer and contribute to something that feels like a larger project than my own little fuck fucking project. And, yeah, I'm trying I'm trying to help people to to make the move. And Bitcoin is the 1st open source project, a humanity project, a project on the level of, you know, what humanity has, you know, the one of the most best and most important thing that humanity has created so far.
And, it's the first thing that also allows you as a developer to actually survive on it because Bitcoin has this ability to finance itself from the inside. It doesn't rely on support from external institutions or external entities. We have, thankfully, we have OGs who have bought Bitcoin very, very early. And at the end of the day, that's what what's coming back to developers these days. And, I mean, we we are living in a much, much better situation than, when I started developing. There was no open sets. Like, there was Brink and they were, like, sponsoring 5 people, and all core devs I knew were complaining about having to work 2 jobs so they can do core development at night.
And now and thankfully, that is changing. And most of the work there has been done by OpenSets and the HRF and bring Inspiro. And this is so exceptional. This is so amazing that we have this environment. I think, you know, now we need to attract the people. We need to grow. We need to 10 x the number of 10 x deaths.
[00:35:19] ODELL:
Damn right. I could just let you speak for the whole episode.
[00:35:24] Calle:
Fuck, man. Sorry. I was like, you
[00:35:27] ODELL:
know, I wanna look there. You're an inspiration, sir. Yep. No. You're good. Keep going. I, and on top of that, I mean, one thing that I was that I that I was quite excited about is is just the other day, we had UTXO who's doing a lot of work on on Noster in terms of trying to create smarter relays and giving people more options in terms of how they interact with the Noster network. He's like straight up just asked for a call for donations on Noster and he was able to get funded in a significant way, like over a 1000000 sets, which right now is 9.20 US dollars.
I think it was like over $1500 worth of Sats just like flooded into his lightning wallet, just asking for a call for donations, which to me is the ultimate dream. Like, I think, like, organizations like Open Sats and HRF play an important role, especially right now. But I I mean, we try our best to operate more ethically, more efficiently, more transparently than any other charity in the world. But ultimately, we are a middleman. Right? And when you have Freedom Money, the ability to support devs directly, particularly in a social environment, I think the social signal is is key there. I mean, you you could clearly watch as the zaps were coming in that people were trying to top the previous people, that donated. Everyone wanted to be the top dog.
I I think that's a really bullish fundamental, and it should be interesting to watch that play out. And I mean, to your previous, topic points you mentioned up there, like, that was possible because of open protocols like lnurl and noster that were not, that were very organic and viral in how they were adopted and when put together, they become incredibly powerful. I wanna bring it back. We have a lot of things to talk about. I if if you're not familiar of the Cashew project, definitely go back to that March episode we did together because we went through like all 101 and, stuff like that. And and I think me and Kelly are gonna go a little bit deeper on this conversation, because particularly in bull markets, I crave, the more deep conversations instead of the superficial bullshit that gets you repost on x.
You mentioned lnurl. You know, lnurl is one of those things that is super simple and is relatively easy to implement. But I do have some concerns going forward that it will be used as kind of like a compliance nightmare tool. I don't know if you've thought about it at all but, you know, LightSpark which is funded by a 16z. Yeah. One of the big bad venture firms from tech surveillance dystopia that, 10 30 1 is trying to obsolete. Gave them a $165,000,000 and they went and they launched, the universal money address which is effectively lnurl with compliance built in. Particularly because lnurl is so simple to implement,
[00:38:46] Calle:
and is effectively just a data exchange layer on top of lightning invoices. And it's also backwards compatible. Right? So this UMA stuff that works just with any lightning address as well.
[00:38:58] ODELL:
Yeah. For now, I think what's gonna happen is I think they're gonna be like you you can choose to add the compliance layer or not. And then at some point, you know, they're like doing partnerships with all these big companies. At some point, they're gonna be like, if you're paying a l n URL recipient that isn't quote, unquote compliant and isn't sharing KYC information, then we're not gonna support it. And then that point, if they have enough adoption, then it kinda pushes wallets that don't wanna support it into supporting it just so that, you know, users don't have this weird interface where, like, their payments are failing and they don't know why they're failing?
[00:39:36] Calle:
I I think this is, like, always the same thing. It will happen, and they can have fun with their compliance flags there and send around user data. It's just like there will be always a core of people and services that will not participate in that bullshit. And, I mean, I think similarly to what we started talking about. Right? You have now this massive company that's came out of nowhere, has no real you know, they have some awesome people working for them, but the company itself just popped out of nowhere, got a bunch of money, has this Facebook guy as, their front, and, you know, this this perfect looking suit, that looks like a clone of himself.
And he's raising 1,000,000 of 1,000,000 of, dollars and, integrating lightning into large service providers these day. I mean, their their their success is is is impressive in that sense that there were similar companies around before that offered the same thing, but couldn't achieve, nearly what they have achieved in terms of, who uses their their integration. But for the l n URL thing, when they add, like, a layer of compliance into those payments, I think this is the path that everything will walk towards go towards on the Internet. And, I don't think that we need to fight against it because you cannot fight against it. There will always be the compliance the compliant network that will have to adhere to absurd rules, that, for example, send your private information from one server to another because of the travel rule. But, the Internet itself will just continue existing the same way it does right now. There will always be people who say, no. I I don't I just I don't wanna play your games. I wanna play our own games. I wanna make up our own protocols and just, you know, deny interaction with those services. I don't think that they have much of a pressure onto the ecosystem.
You'll see some wallets adopt their thing because often some wallets don't care about any, you know, ideas of freedom or decentralization. They just they just wanna have the maximum amount amount of users and that's fine as well. Just, you know, I would avoid them because, you know, many people would avoid them. But there will always be an, large enough number of people services on its, infrastructure that says, no. We're going to use the OGLN URL or even better, we're going to use both 12 with blinded paths, and we're going to increase the privacy of lightning even if that means it cannot interact with your, compliant, subsystem anymore. I think these people can fork off if they want, and, that's completely fine. I think we have we have space and room for all of it.
[00:42:34] ODELL:
We interrupt this broadcast for a brief message from our sponsor, LightSpark, bringing the future of lightning payments to a bank near you. I, they, just for some context here, they, 1031 is by far the largest Bitcoin focused venture firm, and we've deployed a $130,000,000. So a 16 z that that's across 36, businesses. A 16 z gave them a 165,000,000 just to this single company. Just to kinda show you, you know, money doesn't necessarily equate to success. Like, you still need to execute. But just to show, like, the still the the massive capital, differences, between kind of the old world's, like, tech surveillance mindset and, like, the new world ideological Bitcoin mindset, there's still a massive, massive gap, in that. And, and what I've seen is that they have been, I'm hearing that they, they pay people for integrations.
So they have all they have this war chest and they're they're paying people for integrations. They got the Coinbase contract. I don't know the details of the Coinbase contract, but for instance, they are doing Coinbase. So they could be in a situation where I hope it's not a told you so, but some things I say on the show are are to to be told you so told you so's. Yeah. There there is, you know, the way I look at Bitcoin right now the way I look at Bitcoin right now is I think it's close to inevitable if not inevitable that, you know, Bitcoin gets adopted at scale.
And I would even go as far as saying, you know, it becomes this reserve currency of the world. But what my biggest concern is is what percentage of people are then using it as Freedom Money. And I think like our current trajectory is maybe 5% are using it as Freedom Money and then 95% of people are using it in this like surveilled controlled way. And like at least they can't get debased in that situation or they can't get debased easily. But that's not really the movement I signed up for. So, like, my goal is to try and increase that percentage. Like, what is that percentage in 20 years that is using this thing as freedom money?
And I'm kinda curious, like, I mean based on your answer, your answer does not necessarily conflict with my diagnosis there of 5% ride or dies using it as freedom money. Like do you think we're we're is our trajectory better than that? Am I being too pessimistic? Or I I think you're being too optimistic in my opinion.
[00:45:29] Calle:
I think the number is less than 5% for sure. But that's that's fine. I think that's you know, not everyone lives in situations that are so bad that they need to save themselves, and that's good. Right? The world isn't as bleak as some people make it look like. Obviously, we have we have big problems, and, most people who own Bitcoin today might learn the true value of Bitcoin only in in the worst case. And we can just hope that that worst case never, happens, although the chances are there. And as you said, like, the things that you say on this podcast, seem to turn out to be true at the end of the day. So, I think the the number of people who use Bitcoin for the, for its freedom properties is is way less than 5%.
And, somehow, I think it's part of the equation of Bitcoin itself because it must be valuable to also the left bell curve left, curve people. They just wanna increase their fiat stack, and, you know, that's the that's the reason why most people buy Bitcoin these days is to increase, some value that they compute in fiat, and they see the price go up, and they like Bitcoin more than yesterday. And that makes a lot of sense, and everyone's should and is free to to to do so. But those people who really need Bitcoin because they cannot get a bank account or they, I don't know. They they want to, move countries because their authoritarian regime is becoming unbearable, and they need to take their property with them. Or just people who want to ex, engage in free and open trades between ordinary human beings on the Internet, for example.
They need Bitcoin. This is like, I would consider myself, often of the latter category. For example, if you just you just wanna buy a server on the Internet, for a couple days, there is no other solution than to use Bitcoin if you want to remain private. Obviously, you could use privacy shitcoins and so on. But I'm just, you know, as a general, as a general statement there is that we need to use Internet money for Internet things. And, that number that number I think of people who who need that last part will will go up as more and more services and things that we do will be bought online and purchased online. And that number hopefully will go up.
But I think those who really need Bitcoin because of its freedom properties in terms of human rights and censorship resistant, that that is, a smaller number, than than what you think it is, I think.
[00:48:13] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I think the only like, we can theorize all we want, but, like, the only plan forward is to just, you know, build out the tools, make the tools easier, build out the education, make the education easier. And then as people find a need, they will have that option available to them and that's really all we can ask for and then going forward we'll see what that actually plays out as. But there's still I think I think my key premise here is that there's still a lot of work left to be done, and that's why I'm still here.
[00:48:45] Calle:
There's so much work to be done. I mean, all this is, useless if people don't hold their own keys, for example. Right? We all agree on that. And this is some some very simple and basic messages need to be communicated to to the larger population that people who think who own Bitcoin don't own Bitcoin if you don't hold the keys because at the end of the day, that's just an investment like your stock portfolio or something like that that could be taken away from you.
[00:49:12] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean and I think that is mostly learned through pain, which is unfortunate, and we're gonna probably see, like, the next kind of version of that with the ETFs and with a lesser extent stocks like, MicroStrategy. Real quick, we have, the top 3 zappers in, the live chat, which you can get at syllabuspatch.com/stream is SPA zapped to 21,000 sats, Mav 21 zapped 10000 sats, and Pamplemousse zapped 5,000 sats. Thank you for supporting the show. We have UTXO, who we were talking about earlier, prolific Nostredev, who's also been dabbling in a big way in lightning.
He says that we're too pessimistic. 50 ish 50 percent ish of Bitcoin on chain is held by unknown individuals. That's freedom. I think we're talking about 2 different things here. Not I I I think it's it's absolutely key that Bitcoin was kind of bootstrapped in this, environment where most people weren't paying attention to it. So we do have a a a strong foundation of sovereign individuals, of freedom loving folks. But, you know, I'm I think me and Cali are more talking about, you know, number of people, like actual, like, percentage of of global population, not necessarily the amount of Bitcoin. So it's kind of 2 different metrics, and just something to watch.
Cali, I have,
[00:50:49] Calle:
and also UTXO. Like, I hope you're right. Like, that'd be fucking great. By the way, shout out to to the writer, Dies, in the chat. Like, I'm reading what you're writing and you're fucking amazing that you're here. And, I'm seeing all those names which would I with whom I interact with Noster, and I'm happy to see you guys
[00:51:07] ODELL:
listening then. Yeah. This is a unique we got our our favorite blue check-in the house, and he's he's joining us in the Nostril live chat. We got Cali here. I, I I do wanna talk a little bit about Nostril stuff, but before we get there, so you actually because you have such a focus on privacy, you talk about, Monero a decent amount. I mean, I saw you posted a meme that I think was like the Ninja Turtles.
[00:51:37] Calle:
Yeah. It's such a such a cute meme.
[00:51:40] ODELL:
And, and Monero was named in there. I I'm curious from your opinion, why do you focus this is a question that you get a lot, I assume, because I get it a lot as well. Why do you focus on Bitcoin and not something that is, you know, privacy specific like a Monero?
[00:51:59] Calle:
Yeah. So disclaimer, I don't own Monero. I don't show Monero. Like, I barely think about Monero. But, from the shit coins out there, it's the shit coin that I respect the most because Monero has been consistent. And Monero, has never attracted their users with speculation, but with privacy only, and I respect that a lot. I know that many people today rely on Monero to do free trade on the Internet, And this is something that Bitcoin cannot give them today and does not give them today. So I I just from by being humble, I need to, you know, give proper, respect to to Monero and staying true to its ideals.
But why do I focus only on Bitcoin? That is the question. Like, I I I don't even know how to answer that question. Everything else is complete bullshit. That's the answer to me. I I I don't know what to like, most projects out there, they're simply they're they're psy ops operations that make you, like, believe in them due to cheap propaganda, grassroots, faked, how do you say, astroturf astroturfed communities of non real people, posting degenerate memes about coins and, and marketing material. Like, this is literally what I perceive most projects in this space to be. I don't want anything to do with that.
I focus on Bitcoin because Bitcoin was the first, and Bitcoin has the best, foundation in terms of the people that support it and the best foundation in terms of decentralization. In my mind, there is no competition. All the rest is completely irrelevant for me, and it's just background noise. I know that Bitcoin will still be there in 50 years, and I will be able to look back at my own life's legacy and say, I contributed to a project that actually matters. It's like, huge citadel of human achievement that we're building on.
And I wouldn't wanna waste a day of my life building on on, you know, on sand. And that's that's what every other project feels like. I find it kind of funny because I also look at, Ethereum a lot in terms of its technology. I think Ethereum has amazing technology and very, very smart people. But it's, it is definitely built on sand, so I wouldn't put my money into Ethereum at all. But I I consider it as something it's like a it's like a library or like a mood board where you get inspiration from. Ethereum is is a trove of, smart and intelligent ideas built on the wrong system.
So, I like to learn about Ethereum, how it works, interact with people who work on Ethereum. But I wouldn't wanna spend a day of my life just building on it. And so my my focus rather is how do we get people who have fallen for the scams? I mean, especially the devs, who's who chosen to spend a lifetime on this, to be, you know, failing projects and how do we get them, to Bitcoin and make them contribute to Bitcoin. That's that's that's the most important thing to me.
[00:55:32] ODELL:
Well said. I cosigned that message. So I think since we last spoke in March, you released cashew. Me which is a PWA. It's a it's a wallet you can use in the web to interact with Cashew. What is what is the goal of that project? I mean, I I've been using it as one of my daily drivers in terms of a spending wallet for a while, and it's it's come a long way. It's one of my favorite wallets now when I'm onboarding someone new and just wanna send them, you know, a small amount of stats. What is your what is your goal there, and why should people, play around with it?
[00:56:17] Calle:
Yeah. So, cash it with me is a PWA, as you said. You should all who's listening, you know, anyone who's listening, you can go to your, mobile device's native browser. So on iOS and Safari and, on your Android device that will most likely be Chrome. You can go to cash it dot me. And in your mobile device, there is a share button or in on Android, there is this hamburger button on the top right. But on iOS, it's the share button on the bottom. You press that button and you scroll to add to home screen. And when you do that, what it does is creates an icon of that of that page that you're looking at on your home screen, and it's now installed as a PWA, which is a progressive web app. And progressive web apps, those are it's kind of a browser based technology that makes a website look like an app. But the nice thing about that is that you can distribute apps such as the wallet that I just, you know, cash out of me, distributed without going through an app store. So for me as a developer, it's it's the most straightforward way to, to reach anyone who's using that wallet.
And so this is a web wallet that used to cash your protocol. It's a very basic and simple one that I I've built and, you know, I must mention that I'm not a front end developer. So, it's kind of my most, proud front end GUI based application that I've built so far. But so, the idea there is that this is a website that runs in your in your browser. It's not something that is connected to a back end. So it's just the the website itself. You just fetch it once from a server, and then everything runs on your device. And, it's a full fledged cashier wallet, so, generates its own keys, has seed phrase backup, and so on.
And, as you said, it's just it's the fastest way to get anyone to use Bitcoin, the cost of your lightning wallet, because you just simply go to the website. There is no login. There is no email sign up. Nothing. And, what's also nice is that you can take cash out of me and host it on a different domain. So even if my domain would get rugged and cache. Me goes away, anyone can just clone the GitHub repository and put it onto cache.u. And, and suddenly it runs there, and you can transfer all your e cache from, one PWA to the other PWA.
So definitely go check it out. I'm working on like, constantly working on features, on that wallet because, you know, I'm I'm deeply involved in the protocol design of Cashew with others, who who do a lot of work as well. So it's not just me, But, I'm trying to implement most of the newest stuff that we, develop in terms of the protocol. I'm trying to implement that right away into either nutshell, which is a back end and, like a mint implementation that I that I contribute to, and to cash with me, which is a one of the implementation that I contribute to. So, I'm try these 2 projects, I'm heavily involved with.
They are usually totally up to date with the specs as far as as far as I can, because we actually need to implement stuff in order to know whether it's a good idea or not.
[00:59:34] ODELL:
Awesome. Yeah. I mean, the cool part about Cashew is that it is this open protocol, that you can have many different front ends for and that it is separate, it separates the front end from the custodian unlike traditional custodial Lightning wallets. Where independent of which front end you can use you can choose different mints on the back end. First off, I have a question for you. What is and I mean, I know it's hard to pick a favorite child. What is your favorite Cashew wallet? If you had to recommend 1 Cashew wallet, what's your favorite right now?
[01:00:08] Calle:
I think the best Casio wallet out there is probably MiniBits. So, unfortunately, it only exists for Android. But if you're an Android user, then MiniBits on the Google Play Store is just amazing. It's super stable. And, I think the best quality of a cash word these days is still stability. There are still some jankiness in some wallets here and there. Fortunately, there are seed phrases, so you don't have to be afraid even if the wallet does something wrong. The seed phrase will get you e cash back. And And you
[01:00:40] ODELL:
Yeah. But with that seed phrase, you can go into a different you can go into a different app and use that seed phrase and get your Yeah. Exactly. So the seed phrase itself is also a protocol specification
[01:00:49] Calle:
how to use the seed phrase if you're an app developer. And the idea is that, you know, you start your wallet, CashNet. It generates a seed phrase for you. You you put that seed phrase somewhere safe, and you can just keep using that wallet. And you lose your phone now with e cash. One of the biggest issues with e cash is because it doesn't have an account. There is no, identification or anything. So how do you get your money back if you lose your phone? And for the 1st year in cashew, it literally meant if you lose your phone, the money is gone. It's just like cash in your wallets. If you lose the wallet, like a physical wallet, money's gone.
Since then but I I, you know, I had a hard time recommending it to normal people because I I realized how how stupid and dangerous that situation is. But, since then, we, implemented seed phrases in pretty much every wallet out there, and they're all compatible. So as long as you keep that seed phrase safe and you remember which means that you used because that information is not inside the seed phrase. It's additional information. So seed phrase plus the list of means that you have, as long as you can keep those things somewhere safe, and those mints remain online, you'll always be able to regenerate,
[01:02:05] ODELL:
the e cache that you have lost. So, I mean, that brings me to the second question, which is it seems like the biggest friction point right now with Cashew I mean, the the the beauty of Cashew and the reason why I like it so much is that it has very little friction to use Bitcoin. It's very cheap to use. The interface is is is fantastic. You can make offline payments and you have very strong privacy guarantees. So like the default way of using Cashew wallets is just a very positive user experience with the one exception being which mint does the user choose, when they they first set up a wallet? How do you think about making that process easier and, like yeah. How should users think about choosing their mint?
[01:02:56] Calle:
Yeah. That's the that's the ultimate question right there. Right? So, I mean, maybe just start with one step back. What you said before is that we're we're kind of separating the front end from the back end in a way that, that a protocol allows you to do. So what does that mean? That means, let's say, you use one of those Satoshi. There are 2 parts of that software, although you as a user only see 1. You see only the front end, which is the application running on your phone. That's what draws the graphics and shows you the numbers. But there is also the back end that's on the server of one of those Satoshi. There was there's a database and there is the actual Bitcoin, a lightning node, and so on. So, typically, you can only use one front end for one back end. That means, like, there's one company, Wallet of the Satoshi, running the back end, giving you one single application, and that's the way you use voice to Satoshi. Now what we want to do and, what we're trying to achieve is, to create a world where a custodian, that might be a company, could be a Cypherpunk friend, of yours, or it could be a service provider for a specific thing like a website or so.
They can use a back end for their, for their system, Casu Mint. But you can choose the front end that you want to use this Casu Mint with. And that kind of decouples, these 2 these 2, areas. So you can just be a custodian, for example, and you can focus on being a custodian. Maybe also create, like, one app to use your back end service. But you can you also immediately benefit from the existence of, like, 10 different wallets out there that anyone can just download and connect to your back end and and use use use your services, which is great. So that gives people more freedom and choice. It's very important in terms of, security and privacy because the privacy guarantees that cashier gives you mathematical privacy. Right? It's not like the custodian chooses to give you privacy.
It's you cannot break blind signatures. That's like, but you can only be confident in your privacy if you can actually audit the code. Right? No. Almost no one can do that. So it's good to have, like, common clients that, different people use because there are more eyes on the code and bad stuff would be detected. So, and to mention to to, to close off this, is I wanna mention coin OS. Coin OS is a is a wallet provider that has existed before Casio existed. So, I've known them for a long time. They're they're super based. They're in Canada. They're building very sleek and, easy to use web wallet, so karnos.io.
And, they've recently moved all their communications from Twitter to nostr, by the way. They're, like, nostr only now and go all into nostr. But what they also did, and this is something that I kind of always wanted to see, also predicted in the beginning, is that we will see existing service providers that already have a user base, see that, you know, there's a new product, which is e cash, and they can offer that to the users, which would be in their case, for example, a voucher system. So coin us implemented add a cash into their back end that already exists and added a Casu client into their front end, which they which also already exist.
That, thousands and thousands of users are using it already. So, they added Casio in the back end and in the front end. This allowed them to implement the feature for their users, which is like a gift card feature. So they have now this gift card button that is actually e cash. So press a button, enter amount, and you can send this piece of data to another coin auth user. And that way, you can transfer value in the coin auth system. What they also did though, and this is amazing, a super base of them, and I how I hoped that all this would play out is they just want a cash mint, and it's a cash mint that anyone can use. So you can use coin us without using their application by just downloading, a cash wallet. You can go to cash. Me, use that wallet, and use coin us as the back end mint.
And maybe, hopefully, one day they'll even make, some profit of that or be able to offset the cost of providing that service through fees and so on. But, the the connection between you as a user and the company running the mint, can really be kind of decoupled from each other, and you can choose which software that you wanna use. So, it's very similar to to our to our approach to Nostra, for example, where we just want don't want to silo in the user into a specific vision of what an app should look like.
[01:07:37] ODELL:
Yeah. The CoinOS guys are, fucking awesome. I did I had them on sale dispatch, episode 114. Everyone should go back and listen to it if they if they haven't yet. That was in November 2023. So that was pre e cash, pre pre noster integration. But they've been building out just tools for Bitcoiners for a long time, and are very, they're very focused on trying to maintain that freedom ethos. But you didn't really answer my question. How does, how does a new user, how should they think about selecting their mint and how do we make that easier for them? Oh, yeah. Because like right now, like they basically just blindly ask me which mint to choose and I blindly tell them the mint you told me to choose.
[01:08:36] Calle:
So that's kind of what I'm operating under right now. Well, first of all, I can't recommend any mint to anyone. I hope I mean, you understand that, but, the way I would go about this, as a like, I really wanna stress that using a mint is a risk. You put your money into a service provider, and that service provider could just vanish. So
[01:08:58] ODELL:
don't ever put a lot of money into a mint and use it only for pocket money, very small amounts, things that you would, you know, use to buy an Apple or newspaper or make a zap or something. Yeah. It's cash it's cash in your back pocket. I mean, I know the kids these days don't know what that's like, but it's it's the cash you have in your back pocket when you go out into the city to Exactly.
[01:09:20] Calle:
So given that, the risk becomes kind of manageable for anyone. But still, you shouldn't use just a random mint that you don't know about. You should really pick your mint depending on who you choose to trust. And I cannot answer that question for anyone. I like, there are we've mentioned a couple of serve services already in this episode, so you know that they exist. And in the case, if it's a company, then you can even reach them. But you should be very cognizant about what you use and what to choose. And we're trying to build these, tools that help you to make that decision more easier ease more easily.
But, there is no ultimate answer to that. That's the price of a cryptonarkic system is that you need to do the research. Obviously, when we are at that point where my grandma can use this because it's just integrated into her digital experience, then that choice will have been made for her already. Or she will just, you know, use the bank that she's already using or trust the shop that she's already trusting. But we're not there yet. We're still in this anarchic phase of a, you know, bottom up cash humans springing up, run by individuals that most of them I've never heard of. And I I don't you know, I can't recommend them.
But I must admit, like, I still use them. I put a couple 1,000 sets here and a couple 1,000 sets there because I enjoy the the ability to choose, and I enjoy the privacy it gives me to spread out my sets and what to talk to a single service all the time and so on. So, that's it. But what are we doing to make that choice easier? So even though we want to avoid people to use random means that they have never heard of, that's also the reason why there is no default mint in cash. Me because I don't want people to make a default choice. They they should rather turn off that wallet and not use it than to make, to follow my ill advice. So, but we're trying to make life easier. So first of all, there is a NIP. There's a Noster protocol improvement proposal that, I think it's NIP 87. I always get this one wrong. But this one allows you to recommend mints on Noster. So there is already although, you know, it hasn't been widespread adoption yet, but I think that we're on a good good track there, is that you can you can see which means your friends have, recommended, which ones they are using. I think that's a very good heuristic. Like, that's probably what I would go with if, I would be, you know, thrown into this, ecosystem without knowing, what's what's good or what's bad. I would just ask my friends. And if you don't wanna ask your friends directly, you just would use this nipsnip87, which gives you a list of recommendations of your friends. And you can try this, right now. If you want, you can just go to bitcoinminst.com.
This is run by someone else, but it just aggregates data posted publicly on Nostar of people, either announcing that the user Mint or also rating a Mint and giving a comment, which is great. Nostar is amazing for that because, well, it's uncensorable speech and uncensorable Yelp in a sense. So it helps you to get these recommendations. But also because the civil resistance of Nostra is basically doesn't exist. So anyone can just spin up an identity, as many as they want. So it's easy to fake reviews as well. So what you wanna rely on is is your web of trust, we say, is what what your friends say and what the friends of your friends say maybe. And that's that's already usually, it's big enough. That that circle of people is big enough to find someone saying something interesting.
So, you can do that. I think that's a very good approach. Another thing that, I'm, working on these days is this auditor idea. So, I have this this Mint Auditor that is you can find it on audit.8333.space. This is like a, experimental project of mine. It's basically a website that, has a has a cashier wallet with 30 different mints or so. You can donate e cash from any mint to it, and it will add that mint to the list of mints, in that in that interface. But it will constantly check the mints for their health, basically, for their uptime and whether the lightning node still works. So this is one way at least to have kind of a canary that can, tell us that a mint has, for example, gone down and their likely note has stopped working and you cannot get money out of that mint anymore. So that's obviously a mint that you should avoid and you should not recommend. And other mints that have been running for months years, and there have been, like, this this auditor has made thousands of payments with that mint without any, ever having an issue there. That's a sign for a good mint that is well maintained, and the operator is running it. And, I mean, there's a good chance that it won't drag you, on the next day. Obviously, on the long term, you don't know and other things should make you consider whether you wanna trust mint on a long term. But as I said, just we are still at a point where you should remain vigilant.
You should only put low amounts into a cash, and you should know why you're doing it. Like, you should only do it because you want to use Bitcoin and not because you wanna store Bitcoin or, receive Bitcoin and keep it there for a long time. As long as you keep these simple rules in mind, which there is no other way, I'm sorry, you need to learn these rules because that's the price of making your own choices, I think you're good. I think we will come to a point where, like, the normie won't have to won't have to think about these things because, you know, I don't know. Maybe Cash App will run a mint or maybe a Kraken will run a mint, and it will be, like a household name that lots of people trust.
And then you'll just use that mint and, you'll get dropped when the company gets rocked. But, the chances of that happening is substantially smaller than using, like, a random crypto analytous mints that's behind an onion address and you don't even know who's running that. Right? That also has its own appeal, but obviously is, more dangerous.
[01:15:40] ODELL:
Yeah, I mean I think in classic Cali fashion you gave us a very nuanced in-depth answer so thank you for that. This time did I answer the question actually or? You did answer the question. I think the Noster recommendation stuff is particularly, interesting and I think it's important to realize too that, you know, if you don't have, we we say web of trust a lot, but at the end of the day, web of trust is like this idea of just verifiable reputation. And if you don't have, like, an established network on Nostr, one of the cool aspects of it is that you can just, like, borrow someone else's that you trust. So you can use, you know, Cali's PubKey or My PubKey, and then you're basically seeing recommendations from people that we follow on Noster.
And it it kinda acts as this nice open bootstrapping mechanism in terms of verifiable reputation. I think that's a key aspect here. I, you mentioned, you know, like a sovereign mints that run behind Tor addresses. There's also something isn't there aren't you guys working on something in terms of using, like, the Noster Noster as the discovery mechanism, so that you could connect to Mins using Noster?
[01:16:56] Calle:
Yeah. So the discovery mechanism would be this SNP 87 thing. Right? How do you find the Mins? And you can do that without interacting with the normal Internet. Basically, you can just do it from pure Nosta only. You can do that actually in cash. Me in the wallet. You can when you open the wallet, you go to the mints tab. You scroll all the way down. It says discover mints. And when you press that button, like, there's a spinner that searches for mints, and it's doing exactly what I described before. It's it looks on Nosta for view reviews and stuff. So you can use that to find a mint. Again, disclaimer, you're responsible, yourself, what's happening there. But, yeah. Yeah. I'll come to your point.
[01:17:32] ODELL:
Do you know what I'm talking about? Okay. Yeah. No. So it's like this,
[01:17:36] Calle:
we call this master web services, and it was made by one of the devs working on, cashier specific stuff because, well, the the idea of sending data around on master directly is not a very new or, creative idea. Lots of people have thought about this. But the challenge with sending data over is, mostly efficiency and traffic and so on. Like, so it's you can do it, but you shouldn't stream a YouTube video over Nasr or just download high amounts of data. But if you interact with the with an e cache mint, the the interactions with the mint are pretty minimal. So you're just sending small amounts of data back and forth to, you know, mint a token and, invalidate a token or create a lightning invoice and and mint the e cash from that lightning invoice. All of those messages are text messages. Basically, you can imagine, like, a bunch of text being sent back and forth between a wallet and a mint, and it's relatively small.
So, what, this already exists in Southern app, by the way. So this is a work in progress, mobile wallet that hopefully, will also be able to recommend to iOS users soon. There are a couple of iOS, native iOS apps being built right now. But, the Sovereign app, it, is done by, an amazing dev called David Kasuri. He's he's a cashew dev. He's working on a mint implementation, Chamberlain, and, a wallet implementation, which is the sovereign app. And the default way that this, mint implementation and the app works is that the wallet talks to the mint not over normal Internet, TCP, IP connections to a web server, but through the nostril, network.
So what you do is you add the mint as a public key, essentially, and he calls these, clans, I think. He uses like a similar word, tribes. But the idea is like that you as a, you know, you you as a friend, you as a Cypher Park husband or wife, you can run a mint for your, family or your friends or your community. And this mint will never, be announced on the normal Internet. It will only live inside Mostar. And what what that means is the only way to reach that mint is to send messages via also to that mint. And that has a number of, really cool advantages.
First of all, you can run the mint anywhere. That means, like, it's for slightly more technical folks. Everyone knows that if you wanna run a server, you need to make sure that the IP is reachable, the ports are open, the file was configured correctly, and blah blah blah, all that stuff. When you have a mint that runs on NWS as a lost a web service, It can be reached by anyone because, there is this master relay in between, basically helping anyone to connect anyone to anything. That's also why master, wallet connect works so great, for example. You can just press a button on your computer, and your phone will make a lightning payment. And the reason why this works is there is Nostra in the middle mediating these messages between those devices. And so we have something similar for for arbitrary HTTP, HTTPS. I should say, for arbitrary TCP data. So you can literally pretend as if you're a normal TCP socket on one side and on the other side. And what happens in the background is that these TCP packets, they are, either sent directly by Nostra. That's one way of doing it. Or, there's a direct peer to peer connection established between the sender and the receiver through communication through Nostra. But, you know, both of these ways essentially use Nostra to connect the client to a server.
So as I said, one benefit is you can run any service. This doesn't have to be a cashier link. It can be any web service, can be any web server, and it can be reached by anyone. And the second nice thing about it is that you have relatively good privacy for cheap price, which is like you hide your IP address from your users. So if you run a mint in your own home Internet, which, is a questionable decision, but might make sense for some people, If you do that, you can isolate your IP address from users of your Mint by just, you know, having a master relay in between obfuscating that direct connection. Obviously, you're you're doxing yourself to the to the relay operator, but, you know, that's still a lot better than announcing your IP address to the entire world and, letting everyone connect to you directly into your home network.
So there's, there's already stuff happening there. I think we'll probably see more of that. We're trying to keep the protocol as agnostic as possible from, you know, assuming what transport medium is used so that we can do, things like that, have experiments like that. And the the one thing that we've done so far is to just use most of the entire communication between wallet and mint, but they have there have been people who used, LoRa, reticulum, like, mesh networks instead of, the Internet to connect the wallet to the mint, to demonstrate how you can use a cash shipment if when in a post apocalyptic scene where there is no Internet anymore, for example. So, anything that can transport, text can be used to exchange, e cash. That's what's so cool about e cash because at the end of the day, you know, your communication with the Mint is just about your text, but also the communication between wallets. Like, if I wanna pay you e cash, I just sent you a piece of text. And anything that can carry this piece of text can be useful as a trans transmission medium. Be it noster, be it, maybe one day, Apple will allow us to use its NFC, or whether it's Bluetooth or mesh network and so on and so forth.
[01:23:43] ODELL:
Yeah, I mean this is fascinating to me because I do think, the success of Cashew heavily does rely on reducing the friction of of running mints. And this seems like a very elegant way to further reduce that friction. I mean, I think that's also one of the reasons why we've seen cashew kind of organically grow, particularly in the mint side, much much faster than Fedimint where it's there's a lot more friction and technical requirements, to run a high uptime Fedimint server. Yeah. A couple of comments on that.
[01:24:23] Calle:
I wanna say, so the it's a it's a it's a balance that we're actually trying to strike there, and it's it's a delicate balance between making it easy to run a mint and making it too easy to run a mint. And, I know with, you know, with the danger of sounding like a dick, but not everyone should run a mint. Some people are just too stupid to run a mint safely and not capable of. That's what I should have said. So it's some sometimes you have a situation where someone's like, fuck it. Let's run a mint. And you're like, I don't know, man. You you don't know the Linux terminal. And, like, what do you do if something goes wrong? And, like, there there is a balance between because it's it's a it's a lot of responsibility to run a mint, and everyone should who does that should know it because people will expect you to keep that mint up for, extended period of time. And if you close the mint, you'll have to, like, reach those people who put Bitcoin into a mint to take it out again. So, like, it's it's it's not like I spin up a ghost relay and I turn it down again the moment I lose interest.
So anyone running a mint should know this. And, that's why we had multiple situations where we could have had, like, do you want a one click mint on Umbrel? And we could have done that, like, a year ago already, and we already had it basically all set up in Docker containers and so on. But we decided against doing that, because it allows too many people to run this thing too fast without really properly thinking about whether they wanna keep it up or not. Like, I don't wanna say, like, any everyone is, you know, smart and capable enough to figure these things out. Obviously, like, if you feel like you should do it, you should definitely try it and do it.
But making it a choice where you don't even have to think about the implications of running it means that's, like, where it becomes irresponsible as as a deaf at some point. And, so we're trying to strike the balance between right now, at least, you have to pass the test. You need to be able to you know, in order to install a cache image, you need to able be be able to use a Linux terminal. And I think that that's that's the filter. Right? If you cannot get past that, you should not run on it probably. And if you can get past that, then it's very easy to do so. Just set up a lightning note. And even if you don't have a lightning note, you can even use a customer back end to run on it And for some people that just makes it super easy and fast to spin up on it. And second point I wanna add is we have talked only about, like, the general mints whose purpose is to store Bitcoin amounts for the users so that can they can make, like, everyday spending.
But there's, like, the other way of running a mint is to think of a service provider that does only one thing, And that service provider doesn't is not a wallet provider or not a custodian or something, but it's just part of a, like, a back end infrastructure. I wanna make a make a, example to make that more specific. But, what I wanna say first is that running that back end infrastructure, when you run a mint that is integrated into your into your own back end, well, that's super, super simple. Like, we made Casio so simple, and we're thinking a lot about these people who just wanna run, kind of a web service maybe and want to have some kind of money component in the that application that they're running.
And so, one example I wanna make is the, currently talking to people. They're working on, like, a it's a charity platform that runs on Bitcoin, and they're already, like, super successful and doing amazing work. Like, I it's one of my most favorite Bitcoin projects. They basically just collect connect collecting donations and forwarding them to NGOs and so on. So, what they wanna do is they want to move this thing on Nostra and experiment on Nostra. Like, they want to give the, NGO or organization they wanna support. They they wanna give them an NPSAC or say, like, give me an NPSAC, basically, and we'll add you to the service.
And you'll be able to receive Bitcoin donations just with your n pop or n sec. And so one way they can achieve that is by using Cashew, and they they'll be using, like, this, nip 60 and nip 60 1 invention by Pablo, where essentially, all you need is an NSEG, and that's that's everything you need to to keep your e cash secure with the lost relay. And, so this project, they want to build a donation site, for these projects and works with Mosta, and it works with Ecash, and everything is super cool. But, in their case, you know, they they just wanna use a cashier mint as part of their their infrastructure. They're not interested in running a poll and being a customer for many people out there. So I'm thinking a lot about these use cases as well. These use cases are very important. Sometimes I think maybe even more important than creating wallet services because, the Internet is just completely permeated with, accounts and balances and, you know, charge your Netflix account by $10 here and then use it here. And this is everywhere, and, we want to make it as easy as possible for these services to transition from normal ledger based accounting systems to better privacy increased or more user controlled way of offering the same service with eCash.
[01:30:08] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, just a little side note on that. I use silent.link as my my daily driver, an eSIM that I pay for with Bitcoin, on my phone. And it it it technically registers as a I guess it's like a Polish IP address or a Polish eSIM. And I tried to I currently do not have a Netflix account because it flagged something. And, like, my credit card payments will go through, and then Netflix refunds my credit card payments and refuses to give me an account. So, that's something my wife has had to deal with recently.
[01:30:56] Calle:
I would have told you 2 years of VPN, but I think that doesn't make it much better with Netflix.
[01:31:01] ODELL:
Yeah. I I've there's been different mechanisms. Sometimes I've played them in Polish Zlotzsky's. Sometimes I paid them in US dollars. Like, it's a whole it's a whole kind of mess, and I just didn't give a shit enough to try and get them to take my money. I like it's hilarious. I can I'll pay them. I'll get, like, 5 days of usage or something, and then they refund my payment. And they're like, no. You're a scam even though I sent them money. But I think e cash e cash and and Bitcoin and everything we're working on here can fix the Internet in a big way as a result of that. To go back to the previous comment, yeah, I I'm I'm not necessarily referring to, like, everyone running a mint, but just directionally.
Directionally, the more mints, the better. Yep. And particularly being able to do so in a relatively private way without cloud services because I I think one of the edge cases here that we see is, you know, there's just like a centralization among a few large mints that are run effectively on on completely docks cloud services where the operator is known. And that that could be bad for the freedom focused adoption of Kaggle.
[01:32:16] Calle:
So I I think there are like, in my mind, we have 2 avenues, and we will and we should go both of them at the same time. And one is, you know, the corporate mint, the, you know, regulated entity, the company that's in a western jurisdiction and has a whole bunch of rules and safety and AML and KYC and all that stuff. And I think they should run Mins because it's better for their users. It respects their users privacy, and those will probably be really safe in terms of rock risk because you have this entity behind and or everything is relative, obviously. But, so you'll have this clear net mint world, if the technology proves itself useful in the highest levels of, you know, application and back ends and so on. But then the other branch, and that's the more exciting one, is the Cypherpunk grassroots crypto anarchists that run Mints because no one else does. And they run Mints because they have communities.
They have, friends they wanna serve. They have conferences they wanna run and so on. And so Right. I that second branch or avenue is way more important, but I think it's also a lot safer bet to bet on because there is need. People want to run services. The Internet is a very big place, and more and more people are joining us. So, we wanna make, like, it as safe as possible for them to run a mint, and, that includes also, you know, hiding or respecting the mint operator's privacy. In general, like, all in my my development philosophy is sometimes we have to choose between, you know, especially when designing the protocol, whether we want to keep the Mint more safe or the wallet more safe. Like, there's, like, sometimes specific aspects of the protocol that is, like, you know, when we choose this, then the mint has a harder time to remain safe. And if we choose it this way, then the wallet needs to do more to be safe.
But we always choose the mint sites. Like, we always want to keep the mint as safe as possible. Users can lose money due to accidents, and there's just one, wallet. But if something that happens to the mint, well, that's catastrophic. Right? So always on the side of the Mint operator, always think from the perspective of the Mint operator, and always also give them the features and the things that they wish for. Like, I really, I'm happy about so much feedback that I'm getting from people who are just running the software and helping us to make it better, including also companies and regulated entities who are also interested in running e cash infrastructure.
But they have very specific needs and very specific problems that, like, a random, person on the Internet does not.
[01:35:21] ODELL:
I mean, going back to our earlier conversation, they can use, UMA or whatever to control who enters and exits.
[01:35:29] Calle:
Yeah. I I wanna, mention maybe one of the features that I've been spending a lot of time with and that's on my mind recently, which is blind authentication. It, it's a good example of, how we started building a feature based on feedback. So right now, basically, when you run a mint, anyone can use a mint. It's just a web service like a website. Right? The website anyone can visit the website. You don't have to log in to a normal website to read the content. And it's similar with the with the cashier Mint. You just you spin off the Mint, you connect it to a lightning wallet, and then you're done. There are no sign ups, no registration. Any person on the Internet could be using the mint, which is great. It's great for anonymity because your onset is almost like the entire Internet.
If you if you take away the fact that you're sharing your IP address, which you can avoid, it means that anyone could be using the Mint right now, and that's that's amazing for privacy and, makes also running a cache of it super simple and uncomplicated because you have no sign up stuff. So, I've when especially when talking to companies, some companies reached out like, hey. We're looking into e cash, and it's very interesting, but there's a problem. And, also another same thing was mentioned to me by a Bitcoin, physical Bitcoin project, something like your, you know, Bitcoin jungle, Bitcoin lake, Bitcoin mountain, Bitcoin beach, and all these different things. Like, it's a similar project to that. And they also wanna run, an e cash mint for their community as well as. And this guy told me, like, I would really want to run an e cash mint because I don't want to see the activity of my community.
Like, I need to run their infrastructure that's clear, but I don't wanna know what they're doing. And that's perfect for e cash. And it's also safer for everyone because there is no honeypot of data that could be stored. But the guy told me, now this is the problem that these entities face, is I don't want an eCash Mint for the entire world. Like, I want to be able to control who uses that Mint, actually. And I think it's a very good point, but it's also, I mean, it's also problematic in the sense of privacy because you're making the number of potential users smaller, which is always bad bad for privacy.
However, this feature request has been requested many times. It's so it's necessary for a cypherpunk individuals who want to limit the use of their image to only their friends, but it's also necessary for many companies who want to run e cash infrastructure that make sure that only their user base uses, their their service. But as we said, it's bad for privacy. So what we came up with and what I've been working on in the last months intensely is something called blind authentication. So, essentially, what, this this feature will allow you to do is to have something like a sign up page for your Mint. That sign up page must be run by yourself, so it's not part of the Cashier Mint itself.
It could be logged in with anything. Like, imagine log in with Mosta, and there's a server where you can log in with Mosta. And, obviously, when you do that, you identify yourself. So that's bad for privacy. You go to a server and you say, hey. I met Adele. This is my signature. I wanna use the mint. Now that's bad. The mint now knows that you're using the mint, but that was the original idea. Like, that's what we wanna achieve. But how can we make still make sure that you can use the mint and do mint operations without identifying yourself all the time while using the mint? So what we've come up with is called blind authentication, and it works the way that you you first sign up to the mint, and we call that clear authentication. You share your data. You you prove that you're a metal dial, for example.
And then the mint operator says, like, yes. You're mad. You're my friend. You can use the mint. And in exchange for that, you then mint, a specific type of ecash token, which we call, like, a blind authentication token. It's almost like ecash, but it has no monetary value. And, it has the same privacy as e cash. So and when you mint these authentic blind authentication tokens, you can use them later to actually use the mint and make payments with the mint. So what you do is you sign up with the mint, you identify yourself, and the mint allows you because of that, allows you to mint these privacy preserving access tokens. And then you take these privacy preserving access tokens and then and you you actually use them in combination with, you know, when you when you wanna make a payment with the mint or when you create an invoice with the mint or pay a lightning invoice with the mint. So all the operator of the mint knows is that you're one of the peers registered to use the Mint, but doesn't know which one of those people you are. So we're trying to, you know, strike the balance between control of the Mint operator and trying to, you know, put them in a situation where they can be sure that only these people use my Mint, but at the same time also protect the user's privacy while still using the Mint, so that they cannot be singled out and said, like, oh, this is Matt. You made this transaction. I don't like this transaction, then censor you now. Yeah. That's great. I mean, I just,
[01:41:04] ODELL:
I recently visited Praia Bitcoin in Brazil, and I believe they run on Elan Bits right now. And I said to them, I was like, this is, like, the perfect use case for Ecash, for their community. And that was the main that was his main concern. Right? His main concern was I don't wanna I would love to not know the financial activity of my community members,
[01:41:28] Calle:
but I need to make sure I can I can easily control who actually uses it so it doesn't, you know, go out to the entire world and some random people are using it? That's so funny. Like, I I have that conversation with private Bitcoin, but I had the exact same conversation with another person from another Bitcoin project like that. Like, it's it's a it's it's it's a concern that has been voiced over and over again. And so we're we're we're almost there. We're almost fixed it, and soon you'll be able to also do that with the cashier protocol.
[01:41:59] ODELL:
Wonderful. Yes, sir. I'm on the ground constantly speaking the good word of Ecash and Cashew. I, what was so so right now, I have 2 more topics for you. I know your time is scarce and then we'll wrap. But, it's always I feel like we can just talk for hours, but we'll have you back in 6 months. We'll do the 6 month cycle. Yep. And who knows what the intro clip will be like in 6 months? It's gonna be insane. Right now I'm using for zaps on Nasr, I'm using npub.cache, which provides me, a lightning address. So I have a lightning address that works with the greater lightning network. And I'm able to easily access, that e cash wallet with just my my nostril credentials. So it makes it very convenient for me. I can just use a nostril extension and sign into m pub.cash.
So all the zaps that we've been receiving from the rider dies today on the stream are actually getting paid directly into, an ecash wallet that's provided by npub.cash. When I go to redeem those, it it because of the nature of zaps. Right? Like, some zaps are are quite large. Right? Like, I have like, shout out UTXO in the live chat just zapped 42,000 sats and Moashi zapped 10,000 sats. But then we also have Sharp Shader who zapped 21 sats. And so the result is the wallet ends up having many, many eCash tokens in it of different sizes and denominations. So when I go to redeem it, it's it it appears to me as a humble user, it appears to me that I'm only able to redeem 1 UTX one one token at a time.
Do you have any thoughts there? Is there like a way for users to combine them to make withdrawal easier? Like, how does
[01:44:01] Calle:
how do can you explain that process a little bit for us? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's a that's a good observation and actually a problem that we've been thinking about just recently. So what this service does is basically generates an invoice from the mint that, that the service uses. So there will be a mint, and it generates an invoice and serves that invoice as a l n URL invoice. So when when anyone pays that invoice, what happens in the background is that this, service that n pop dot cash service notices that the invoice has been paid and then means e cache and puts it aside for you. And then later when you come back online, you basically ask the server, hey. So did I get any new ecash while I was offline?
And the server just gives you the ecash. Now because it needs to mint all the ecash for every single payment, that you receive, it can add up to quite a lot. And it can be kind of unnecessary because, maybe, as you said, maybe it was like a bunch of small 21 set payments. And every time it minted 21 set, it actually used, like, 3 or 4 e cash proofs in order to get to that amount. So you can just, like, see how the number of e cash tokens just keeps growing and growing and growing. And at some point, it will be, you know, just take some time until you download all that e cash from the server, literally. So, we have a solution for that, which is I mean, it will go into technical details, but, essentially, the idea is to not make the the server, mint the e cash for you, but the server basically just checks whether the payment has been received and then gives you the ability to mint it when you come back online.
So that will result in, at first of all, way less back and forth and the server having to mint and then, you know, accumulating all those tokens that can then be redeemed all at once. But rather your wallet can decide, how many proofs it should mint for that payment. And that's usually, the better choice because your wallet knows best which tokens which token amounts it should receive in order to have the most efficient wallet amount distribution, basically. But, like, long story short, yes, this is something that we're aware of, and I think we have a solution to that that we're kind of started working on right now, as I mentioned. Like, with the ability of the server not minting it for you, but just giving you the ability to mint it when you come online.
[01:46:41] ODELL:
So, is that makes sense to me. But then also from like a Bitcoin perspective, right, we have in Bitcoin we have this this concept of of UTXOs, right, of of of inputs in a transaction. You send a transaction and your transaction on the input side might have many inputs and to lower your fee burden in the future. What a lot of people do will then they'll take a lot of inputs and they'll, they'll send them to themselves. Right? And they'll send them to themselves and it will result in one larger output. Now that has privacy implications on Bitcoin. Is there, is there some technique there with e cash or with Cashew to do something similar where on the wallet side, the user basically just combines a bunch of tokens into 1 bigger token after the fact? Or Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. It works the same way. So,
[01:47:40] Calle:
the one restriction with Cashew is that not every amount is possible, like with the Bitcoin UTXO. Bitcoin UTXO can have any possible amount. We don't want that in Cashew because, to keep the number of different amounts low is critical for for privacy and the unknown set. But given that, you it works basically exactly the same way. You can think of a unspent ecash token like UTXO, and you can take all many of them, put them into a single transaction as inputs, and then define outputs with new amounts and new amount distribution. And, so you can do that. Your cash reward will do that when you have, like, a if you have a cash reward with, let's say, 1,000 of 1 set tokens and you make one 1,000 set transaction, send it to yourself and receive it, then you'll end up with way less tokens that you that you signed with. So it does exactly the same thing as a Bitcoin wallet at the end of the day, managing the UTXOs and the amounts.
But, we will also see fees happening more and more. So since the last time we met, I was back then working heavily, like, on the fee implementation and allowing main operators to also charge a fee for input. That's because their database keeps growing with the number of ecash tokens that they process over time. So, there needs to be some cost offsets that is proportional to the cost of the Mint. And in this case, it will be paid with e cash fees. And at the end of the day, e cash users will have the same concerns, concerns as Bitcoin users, but only with a fraction of the cost, basically. And the concern will be, how do I keep the number of e cash tokens kind of as minimal as possible so that my fees remain as low as possible?
That's the price for anonymity. Like, if you want to, make a privacy preserving system sustainable, then you need to charge fees for the amount of data and costs incurred. And in the case of e cash, it's pretty much the same way of computing that cost, like, with Bitcoin.
[01:49:52] ODELL:
It's, like, based on data size, not the amount of money you're sending. Yeah. Correct. Correct. Yeah. Is there is there a privacy concern to combining all those
[01:50:01] Calle:
inputs or parts? I should have commented on that as well. So way way less than in Bitcoin because, the the, you know, the magic thing about e cash is first, you know, I should start with Bitcoin. With Bitcoin, you have UTXOs and you have transactions. And when you send, like, a bunch of UTXOs inside a transaction, they kind of like, they got they get molten into a single thing, and then they split up back into a bunch of UTXOs. And we call that the transaction graph. So you see what's going in. You see what's going out. And now the problem with this is that if you then spent the outputs of that transaction, like these new UTXOs that you've created, if you spent them again, they're again as well connected to the very first UTXOs that you put in in the beginning. So everything is connected to everything in Bitcoin, and everyone can see all connections. That's what makes coin consolidation so bad because, first of all, your docs that you have all these UTXOs.
But even worse is from that moment on, you make it way easier to track everything that you do from that day on. That's like the forward privacy basically is terrible, unfortunately. This is a real concern. And with eCash, you have the second point, it doesn't exist. With eCash, you have no transaction graph. So once you make one transaction, an eCash transaction, and you can then use the outputs of the transaction to with for any other transaction later, but there is no graph between them. There is no connection between the outputs of one transaction and the inputs of the next transaction. So you can consolidate as much as you want. The mint only sees that a certain amount has been spent and a certain number of UTX also has been spent and the outputs, look like this. But when you later spend these outputs again, they don't they look nothing like the outputs, of the previous transaction. So you you have no transaction graph, which means that, you you may lose privacy for a single transaction. But once you are over with that single transaction, you're back to basically perfect transit privacy again. That's the nice thing about e cash. You can fuck up your your privacy because you make a mistake.
But in order to fix your privacy, you just make one transaction and you're good.
[01:52:19] ODELL:
Got it. Yeah. That may so it's not in practice, it's not really that much of a privacy risk. I I I imagine it'd be bigger privacy risk if there's less users of a mint. Oh, yes. People making these types of Yep. Consolidating.
[01:52:34] Calle:
Privacy is your the ability of an observer to distinguish you from your unknown set. And so these are all topics and, words that we have used in in today's episode already. But, essentially, the more people use the mint, the larger the anonymity set because the the larger the number of people that you can be confused with. That's the that's the goal. Like, you want to look like everyone else. What do they say? Like, no. That's a different saying, but it still it still applies partially. That's like no one is watching and encrypt like everyone is. Right. And the point in encryption and, privacy in general is to make everyone look the same such that no one can be singled out.
[01:53:19] ODELL:
So should should wallets do you wanna see front ends that have, like, a combine button? Like, should I have, like, a easy combine button in cashew. Me that I just click and
[01:53:31] Calle:
No. The the wallet does that for you already. Like, cashew. Me does that already for you. You just While I'm making transactions. It's just doing it on the back end. While you're receiving and sending money, the wallet always calculates, like, what's the best next distribution that I should have and it tries to achieve that. So if you receive, like, a a 1,000 tokens from npap.cash, you will have a transaction with, like, 1,000 inputs, but the outputs will be, let's say, only 8 outputs or so. So, it will reduce the number of outputs all the time as much as possible because, eventually, you, you know it also tries to be smart about the future because you'll you'll have to pay fees at some point when the fees are turned on. So if end users are using
[01:54:15] ODELL:
a competent wallet, they'd all everything we just discussed, they just don't even have to think about in practice. Yeah. Yeah. That's the goal. Like, none of that. This is all just academic,
[01:54:23] Calle:
intellectual exercise for the interested, listener. A normal user won't have anything to do with these questions. They just send and receive and everything is, automated.
[01:54:33] ODELL:
Awesome. Before we get to my last topic, I see a comment from Musashi in the live chat, that I'm I'm curious as well. If if you restore a wallet with cashew. Me, like, using the seed words, can you run 2 different instances of the same wallet?
[01:54:50] Calle:
Yeah. So this will be this will be a, like, a, PTSD inducing question for Bitcoin on chain wallet. That's because it's the same issue with, Bitcoin on chain wallet. So the issue is if you have a Bitcoin wallet and a seed phrase and you import that seed phrase in a different wallet and then you use both wallets at the same time, you're fucked. Like, it's you're you're not fucked, but your wallets will think like what's going on. You don't lose money, but, like, the interface starts getting junky and doesn't show the right balances. Yeah. It it starts glitching because, like, how the one wallet doesn't know about the other wallet, and, like, they're now working with the same money, basically, and doing their own thing. So, so to come to the to the answer to that question, right now in cash. Me, when you open the wallet, it generates a seed phrase for you. And then you do have an op you have an option to restore from a seed phrase, where you have to enter a seed phrase as well. So when you go to that screen and you enter the seed phrase to restore e cash, it restores to your current seed phrase. So it doesn't use 2 seed phrases at the same time. You can only enter a seed phrase to restore the coins from that seed phrase. But once you use the coins, they are not bound to that seed phrase anymore. They become bound to the actual seed phrase of the wallet. So, you don't run into this issue where you could have 2 wallets with the same seed phrase on 2 different devices and, you know, produce these problems of, inconsistencies.
[01:56:22] ODELL:
Are you yeah. I thought that was what the answer was. Are you are you working on some kind of solution for multi instance? Like just an example, like my dad, I've gotten my whole family on to signal and and the the key way I did that was that was the only way they were gonna get baby photos. But like a major blocker for him for a while was that you couldn't use signal on iPad and on, like for whatever reason people just expect to have like multi device same instances support. Is that untenable on Casio, or is there a way to do it? You just haven't figured it out yet.
[01:57:01] Calle:
I think that's one of the hardest questions and the most important questions actually going forward in terms of UX is you want the same money on multiple devices, and it's so much harder than you than you can imagine. So one way of doing that, and that's actually, you know, goes to credits go to Pablo, is NIP 60. And it's so cool to say that, like, the closest thing of to achieving that, to have the same wallet on 2 different devices is using synchronization of that wallet using Nostra. Right now it's nip 60. And with nip 60, you essentially store your e cash on a nostril relay, and that becomes the source of truth. So you have these 2 wallets that just subscribe to events on a nostril relay. And when you receive money, both of them get an event and get the new e cash in. And when you send money, both of them get an event and get the e cash out. And so you can try to synchronize them at the same time.
To be completely precise, like, if you have 2 wallets racing each other and trying to spend the same e cash at the same time, like, one of them will fail and the other one will succeed because they might not have been able to synchronize exactly on the lock and exactly at the time. But, like, who cares? There's just one error. The wallet can recover from that error, and everything is okay. So I think we're getting to a place where this becomes more and more possible. I think, we haven't talked about NIP 60 a lot, today. It's one of the coolest things. I think it's a huge, huge important improvement for UX on on Nasdaq.
It allows you to build Nasdaq wallets without any additional software. You can just have the same wallet and the same money connected to your NSEK from every device that you log in, and that make you know, sounds a lot like the problem that we've been just talking about. But I think there's still, like, the major issue in this approach, and it's a hard one to crack, is that, you know, your ecash wallet is can be a significant amount of data at some point. Like, there is most ecash wallets will be less than 1 megabyte in size, but some of them will be 10 megabytes in size because they're, like, super popular podcast host like you are, and they get a bunch of zaps on m pop.cash, and then the wallet size grows substantially.
And that can be problematic. You know, wallets try to be smart about it, as I told you, but if they're not, you still have to deal with that e cash somehow. So how do you synchronize wallets? And 10 megabytes, like, that's, you know, that's the that's the threshold where it becomes super annoying. One megabyte is maybe something where you can you can still tolerate it with a smartphone. You have 2 smartphones. Every time you open the app, it takes you, like, 1 megabyte download to get the latest data to eCash Wallet. Maybe that's okay. You could argue it is not.
Now, so the problem is you always have many eCash tokens. And, fortunately, there is one way to solve this, and it's like the most sci fi project that we work on in Cashew. And it's called, any amount ecash or anonymous amount ecash. Sometimes all called blinded amount e cash. And so, I, the way, this is I can explain this is, you know, you have to remember what I said before. The reason why we have e cash with multiple different denominations and do different amounts, like, with 1 set, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and so on, but not every every amount is possible. Only these specific amounts are possible, and then you combine any amount with these building blocks. And the reason we do that is for privacy, as I said. We want to keep the unknown set high. We want to look like anyone who has 32 sets, and that makes the privacy great of owning 32 set tokens.
Now you could solve all these issues with having many tokens and having to synchronize a lot of data. If you just say, fuck it. I don't care about privacy. I want e cash tokens with every possible amount. And then you suddenly your wallet becomes a lot simpler. It's just like one single knot. It's a one single token. And when you receive a a new e cash token, you just add it to the knot and you end up with, again, just one single knot. But the problem is it has a very specific amount. Like, it would be visible that, you know, there is one user who has 3,526 sets, and now he received 12 sets. Now he has 3,520 6 +12 sets. So it's super easy to track the wallet if you allow any specific amount.
So we have privacy balanced against efficiency in this example, classical conundrum, and we chose privacy because that's what e cash is good for. Right? And, we we suffer a lot on efficiency, meaning that we end up with wallets that can be 1 megabyte in size, sometimes 10 megabyte in size just to keep their privacy intact. So this is all a big issue. Now, you know, 1 megabyte is tolerable, but once you wanna go, like, into the web and you want an ecash wallet inside every website that you visit, maybe you want it just to be a small JavaScript applet that is just 30 kilobytes or something to load. Like, that's what you need to achieve in order to permeate the entire web. You you need tiny wallets in order to permeate the web.
But you cannot do that, if you want to uphold privacy as I said. Fortunately, there's a science fiction method called kvac or, you know, it's also part of the signal protocol, and it's finally, it's the ecash system used in Wabi Sabi. Wabi Sabi itself, the coin joint protocol uses something very similar to e cash, and they have the same exact problem. Like, they need to, basically be able to hide the amounts. And maybe, you know, the listeners will remember at some point, Wabi Sabi said, hey. Now you can coinjoin any amount that you want with us. You know? Previously, they had just very fixed amounts like 0.1 Bitcoin or 0.01 Bitcoin or something. Like, only those specific amounts. And then at some point, they transitioned into any amount protocol.
And the way they could achieve this while still remaining privacy was blinded amounts. Now, I know this, my my monologue has been going on for quite some time, but bear with me because this is super interesting. So anonymous amount, e cash works the same way as, liquid confidential transactions work or also transactions on Monero work. And the way these transactions work on confidential transactions on mid and liquid, for example, is you can make a liquid transaction where, you can hide what the input amounts to the transaction is and what the outputs amount of the transaction is. You can make a transaction that looks like something is going in and something is going out, but no one sees what's going in and what's going out. And the way everyone verifies the transaction, like, basically basically make sure that you don't print e cash out of or, sorry, liquid BTC out of thin air, is that you provide a zero knowledge proof that the inputs equals the outputs.
So, basically, you post an encrypted transaction that doesn't have amounts in them, and you also produce a zero knowledge proof that says, like, I won't tell you the amounts, but I can prove to you that the amounts that I put in are the same amounts that I put out. And that's enough to validate the transaction. Now we know that you didn't print money out of thin air. We can validate the transaction. Everything is fine. And we're trying to do something similar with Cashew. This is a huge project that has been ongoing for a long time, and Tom is the major contributor. Cashew, therefore, is amazingly talented and, crazy good hacker. And he's working on this, basically, implementing this wabi sabi style protocol into Cashew such that we can, have amount blinded e cash at some point. And once we have amount blinded e cash, we can build e cash wallets that have one single knot. And that will be they will be so simple to work with because everything will get better once we have that.
An ecash wallet will have just a constant size. It will be one single token. And whenever you receive tokens, you will just add on to that one single token, and that will grow and shrink as you make and receive payments. And the only reason we can do that is because we we will be able to blind the amounts. Otherwise, we couldn't justify that because it will destroy your privacy. But once you combine the amount line with nature of that, you can make super efficient tiny cash wallets with a single knot. And also on top of that, you know, it's even better than with confidential transactions where for confidential transaction on liquid and also in parts also Monero, you although you hide the amounts, you don't hide the transaction graph. You still see who's sending, money to whom or which UTX always destroyed and which UTX also are generated, but you hide the amounts. With e cash, with confidential amounts and e cash, you can basically hide the amount and hide the transaction graph, and it will be just it will be crazy insane. I think it will be a true innovation actually because this hasn't been achieved yet in the e cash space, so to say, and we'll be, you know, we'll be enjoying the latest and greatest e cash tech in in the Bitcoin space because of that. So That's that's badass.
[02:06:55] ODELL:
So then you you have you have hyper efficiency while you still have the privacy guarantees. And then to the multi instance question, we could then store those hyper efficient wallets on a couple relays maybe just in case 1 or 2 relays goes down and you can have multi instance. It will be instant, and the storage cost will be none because it will be, like, 32 bytes that you store on e k on a not the relay, and that's that's your entire one. So I mean, what is the timeline on that? Do you think by the next time you're on the show, in 6 months, we'll have that? Or In 6 months, we'll have a prototype. But what we want to do is to
[02:07:31] Calle:
really integrate this into the cash support, such that everyone can then choose inside the cash wallet maybe to, you know, go into that, any amount pool and then switch back and forth. I think both approaches will need to exist side by side because one is much easier and simpler in terms of cryptography. That's the OG cash flow. That's just so simple. That's like left curve. I I need e cash. This is the way. And then we'll have the right curve, PhD in cryptography kind of hidden amount crazy efficient, e cash system that is hard to understand, but, amazing to work with. So then yeah.
[02:08:12] ODELL:
Sorry. You you know, you're your own you're you're your own worst enemy in terms of trying to keep this rip tight because your answers then run my brain and then I ask more questions based on them. So to the fee conversation we had earlier, presumably that this any amount, blinded amount version would have significantly less fees than the the current.
[02:08:40] Calle:
It will have a a lot less fees, and it will be way cheaper to run them in for as a consequence to that. Like, the fees will you you you might probably get away with 0 fees at that point because, you basically just have to make sure that not the same person is trying to spam the server at this point. Like, you barely save anything. Single transaction just leaves, let's say, 32 bytes imprint on you. So that's like That's insane. Infinite amount of transactions.
[02:09:10] ODELL:
Badass. Okay. Fucking awesome conversation. So my last topic, because I can't let you escape without having this conversation every fucking time, is you said 2 things about this topic. 1, you said on seal dispatch, you said, I'm not gonna stop using x because I still need it. And then another comment you made on Noster, and you said, I don't use Noster to support Noster. I use Noster because this is my natural habitat. You know, I I I tend to very much relate to the latter, and I also kind of relate to the former. Like, I respect if you feel you need x, but I got to the point where I felt I didn't need it anymore, and I was willing to make an ideological move, away from a platform that I couldn't support with my content anymore and my usage.
What is your opinion on current the current state of Nostra adoption where we are right now? Like, how how do you think about that ecosystem?
[02:10:15] Calle:
I think my perspective doesn't doesn't reflect, everyone's, like, the large portion of users. That's why, like, that's my my disclaimer. My preferences are probably not compatible with most people. So my preference is the following. As I said, I hate social media in general. Like, I don't wanna be part of social media. It sucks the lifeblood out of you, and it makes all the people on the planet enemies of each other because idealizes the other side and just perpetuates anger and so on. Like, it's a full on hardcore propaganda machine that has been built by a hyper capitalist Silicon Valley to mind control you and make you hate everyone and stay addicted to it. Like, that's my little rant. I'm only on social media for Bitcoin. So, that's why I can I I think, like, x is still kind of bearable for me because I limit myself to Bitcoin only and try to ignore everything else? The reason why I'm on X is very simple. It's, like, egoistic in that sense is that I need to reach more people with the tech that I'm building, and I want to reach as many people as possible.
And I also want to break out of echo chambers and maybe reach people, that aren't already in my echo chamber. Now coming to Nostra, for me, Nostra, I think, like, let's be I I wanna be, like, perfectly honest on this. I've been a bit disappointed with the growth of Nostar in terms of when it compares itself to other networks and just in terms of the number of people. But, saying that, I'm completely, like, fine with that personally because I don't need other people. I'm not I'm not looking for a place in Nasdaq. I'm not looking for a place where just I can talk to anyone anywhere.
I'm looking for a place to be with my Bitcoin buddies, and I want to be with my Bitcoin buddies in a place that's not controlled by Elon or whoever it is, who whoever is your current dictator of today, basically. Like, for and for that, you know, that use case, Nostra, for me, perfect is is basically perfect. What I would wish for is more Bitcoiners to join Nostra, and that's it. Like, personally, I don't get anything else or more from it. Now setting that aside, I am looking also, you know, last couple of days, everyone has been talking about blue sky and, you know, we don't need to talk about x. I think x is just fucked up and everyone who is there hates it, and that that tells you a lot about, the place itself. But, still, like with Nostra, although we don't have the user numbers, the tech we have is amazing.
It's just there is nothing even closely comparable to it. I I've looked at repositories of Blue Sky tools and so on, like, what they've been building. It's all a bunch of complicated stuff, and it's not just, you know, d gen built it in one day, and for some reason, it works kind of, development as we have in most. And I think, that's just because of the design of most. And maybe also the people that it attracts, but most is so simple that, I'm not concerned about its existence. It's just too useful to not be of use. And even if the social aspect of Nostra doesn't grow, like, exponentially as, you know, some people would want.
Even if the trolls troves of users, these days go to, blue sky with 1,000,000 new users per day, whereas Nostra still creeps around, I don't know, 10,000 active pub keys per day or something. I think that, you know, there's already so much software and tooling that uses Nostra that even if all the people would leave, there would be enough computers still using the network. And, you know, I find that super bullish. Like, this is where where I want to be. I I want to be in a place where the the possibilities are, so to speak, like, almost endless because you're able to build anything or, with just a couple couple of clicks and steps.
So, I remain bullish and dedicated. I don't know where else to go, and, I just want to be close with my Bitcoin buddies and then, you know, ride or die. Like, I don't fucking care about the influx of users. So that's it.
[02:15:06] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, the ride or dies are already on Noster. It's a success from that point of view. I think there's a little bit too much fascination with, because Noster is so open and transparent on, like, the, quote, unquote, daily active users metric. I think that's mostly a slave metric. How many addicts do you have? And I also think it doesn't properly measure lurkers, like people who just cons consume content and are just reading and not engaging.
[02:15:36] Calle:
Yeah. That's like probably 80% of users, though. I yeah. A YouTuber.
[02:15:41] ODELL:
But it's important to realize that with a protocol instead of a platform, like x is x or Instagram or Reddit, these are walled gardens. You have to sign up to consume that consume those discussions and consume that content. With Nostr, you know, anyone who has an Internet connection can do that without permission, and no one would know. Those people aren't getting tracked right now. And you see it when something breaks on Nostra. The people that pretend that they're not using Nostra tend to find out about it within 10 minutes. And that's because it is it is open and is accessible to everyone. But I will say that you did mention something interesting there, which is I also you know, I'm not a social media person. Like, my only social media for the last decade was was Twitter, and I was only using it for Bitcoin things. So I continue that's what I use Nostra for now, just for Bitcoin things. And there is a common refrain that people have. They're like, oh, there's too much Bitcoin content on Nostra. And to me, like, the biggest issue is that there's not enough. Like, I've been a little bit frustrated with the amount of Bitcoin discussion and good Bitcoin discussion on Noster, and I know it's not really happening on x either because it's just a fucking cesspool now. And I think just good Bitcoin discussion is harder to find than it's ever been in the past.
I think we solve that a lot. You know, we will solve that, and and that's basically through the tools, making the tools better. So, like, Primal, for instance, has a has a massive update that's coming out this week. And I'm gonna have a million, the the project lead over at primal on dispatch next week, probably Monday, freaks, but I'll tell you on Noster the exact time. It's not set in stone yet. But the the blue sky you mentioned blue sky, and blue sky is a really interesting phenomenon where people I most people don't care about the tech stack, when they're using these things. They just care about how the apps work in practice. And, actually, with Blue Sky, people are seeking it out because they want more moderation, which is like the exact opposite of Noster's ethos. So I think, like, we we we win in that front. We win in terms of more and more people using it and more and more useful conversation happening when the tools are so easy that, you know, the censorship resistance, the verifiability, the permissionlessness is just kind of a side effect of what you get from using it. And it's just a way better user experience.
And I think, you know, there are many developers in in Nostra that have realized this and are making great strides on this, and particularly the Primal team is very laser focused on kind of this, quote, unquote, you know, mainstream client.
[02:18:35] Calle:
So I was just amazing job. That guy is amazing.
[02:18:38] ODELL:
Yeah. Well, it's, I I don't wanna give away too much information because because, I don't wanna take I don't wanna take millions thunder, but, the this next primal launch, I I puts it ahead of x in terms of usability and search functionality and Well optimizations, and it just makes it a way better experience.
[02:19:00] Calle:
All without a caching server? No. With with a caching server. Still with a caching server. Alright. Wait. Wait. I'll You can choose your own caching server, you know, if you want. Okay. That's cool. I I wanna get to to your point with, with Bitcoin content. I actually, like, just, I don't hear that as a joke. Like, I I don't know if that was meant to be a joke or not. Like, I would be like seriously, I think the same thing. There is not enough Bitcoin discussion on Nasr, and that's because my my particular interest and obsession is Bitcoin. As I said, like, I wanna learn everything about Bitcoin and know everything, everyone who's talking about Bitcoin. I want them, in my face. But I'm, like, kind of disappointed by the Bitcoin conversational space for a long time. That was already the case when everything was happening on on Reddit, and then the community for some, like, unexplained and or or implicit reason moved over to x. And that's that was the reason why I joined x in the first place was also just to be closer with the Bitcoin conversation.
And to be honest, I'm I'm kind of shocked that no one is no. Not I shouldn't say no one, but, like, most, devs, which who are the, you know, the ones that I would like to follow their conversation. Like, I would enter the room the rooms in which they hang out because I wanna overhear what they're talking to each other. Like, I wanna hear on CLN, talk to, Lula Lula from, sorry. What's this? Nalu from Lightning Labs. And I I wanna observe that discussion. And I think that kind of discussion should really happen on Nosta, not on x because we're building a decentralized money system that shakes the foundations of the world's order. And, you know, people are noticing that and, you know, it's an important project that belongs to humanity and not to a single country or a single jurisdiction.
So our communication medium should be neutral, and it should be uncensorable, and it should belong to everyone, like the thing that we're building as well. But for the sake of Bitcoin, like, literally just a practical consideration. And so in that regard, like, when when Nasdaq came out, there was more excitement about it, but, I'm still kind of surprised that even the most hardcore nerds in this space choose to bring their, discussions onto x rather or ignore Noster while it's just waiting there waiting here for their discussions and, to to be part of that network. So, I think if we all, went back to our cyberpunk ideals and, you know, meditated about what we're doing here and what the goals are and so on, you know, we would see that most of it is a way better way of communicating about this even if the UX sucks. Like, who cares about UX? I want censorship resistant speech about softwares.
I don't want even the slightest possibility of a centralized entity being able to manipulate the trans the discussions to make decisions about how Bitcoin should evolve. Like, this is too important. We need neutral ground and, you know, these things are happening. This is, like, no conspiracy theories here, but, the CIA playbook is partially that is to sway discord and manipulate, conversations. And when you have someone like Elon who just, you know, probably and do whatever the current administration tells him to do because they gotten way too much at his balls at this point, and also the other way around, like, he also got the administration at the balls at some in some way.
Like, you can just see that that that's not good. It's not it's not a place to exchange ideas freely. Your ideas aren't free on those centralized platforms. Every single post you make there is for the financial benefit of that organization and nothing more. There is no other goal to maximize. They can say whatever they want. There are huge corporations with shareholders who don't give a fuck about any of the ideals that their spokespeople say. That's just a fact. Like, you can be as idealistic about Elon as you like. At the end of the day, he has basically no say over it as long as he has, like, public, investors and so on. So yeah.
[02:23:39] ODELL:
Damn right. You said it better than I can. Cali, this conversation has been great. I I wanna end it with just a call to action to to Cashew. I mean, I think, you guys have made great strides on the protocol. I'm incredibly grateful it exists. I think the freaks, if you haven't used Cashew if somehow you've made it 2 and a half hours into this conversation and you have never used Cashew, go to cashew.me, send a few stats in, play around with it, use the tools. Cali's way open to feedback. Like, the feedback does actually help. A lot of this stuff, whether it's Noster, whether it's Cashew, whether it's Bitcoin, like, you gotta use the thing. You gotta use the thing. You have to play around with it. You gotta get comfortable with it, you know, and and good engineers are are always happy for intelligent feedback as a result. Cali,
[02:24:35] Calle:
do you have a will you have any final thoughts for the audience before we wrap here? No. But I I mean, my final thoughts are always the same, and I just wanna say it again if, like, if you are deaf out there and this tickled your pickle, you know, or if you're a deaf lady and this tickles some some other part of your body, excuse the, the this joke. But, if you if you think, like, you should contribute to Bitcoin and you can feel the urge burning inside you as you stare into your corporate display and you tighten to your corporate keyboard and you know that your human potential is bigger than what you're doing, then consider becoming a Bitcoin dev. It is freedom, self determination. It's a project for humanity.
You'll feel fulfillment and, and meet people in ways that you didn't even know existed. So we need everyone who can join us on this mission. And, if you are interested in Cashew, you can go to cashew.space. That's where you can find all the information about our project. And, you can talk to me directly. We're looking for contributors. We have lots of different, projects in many different languages. Just, take a look at the libraries and, feel free to join our conversation and our channels. Ask me directly if you have any questions. That's totally fine. And if you're not interested in Casio because it's custodial stuff and so on, like, you don't or you're just you're you're a lightning person or you care about l two stuff, like, any person with that kind of interest is needed in the space. Like, you should seriously join Bitcoin because, otherwise, no one else will do the work. So thank you for having me out there.
[02:26:19] ODELL:
Wonderful. Much love, brother. You're always welcome. You ever wanna come on the show before our 6 month rendezvous, just text me and we'll make it happen. And, huge shout out to the freaks who joined us in the the live chat. You guys make the show unique, and huge shout out to all the freaks out there who continue to support the show, with your incredibly scarce stats, whether that's on Zaps using the live stream or whether that's through podcasting 2 point o apps. I appreciate you all. Stay humble, StackSets.
[02:27:01] Unknown:
Our world is chaotic, but life found its way by channeling energy to bring order to chaos. It is in our nature to seek signals amongst noise because it is through communication and exchange that we evolve beyond the darkness of chaos into the dawn of civilization. Our our evolution thrives in exchange of all the info we try to convey. They flow through to the marketplace and form the signals to regulate how we coordinate where things need to be. Price speaks so we learn to compete. This drives us to efficiently shape the world with our voice. Now let the market speak. It's how we build, we sow, we trade, we grow to meet our wants and needs. We specialize drive from the mind our creations into reality. We make progress in our process to get more for less, advancing society before full dawn of the age of technology that harness the energy to reach prosperity.
Our money embodies the power to reap what we sow, so the market becomes a channel for our collective energy to flow. When value is traded for value, we are aligned and so we evolve. This is how amidst uncertainty, life continues to grow. But the dawn of tech gave rise to light speed information exchange. So to transact fast, we further abstract money from energy constraints and became more aligned on a few large entities to coordinate trade, concentrating the power, resources, and authority to create more and more of our money, distorting its signals, eroding its worth, and throwing us back into the darkness of chaos. When we destroy the mechanism of money, we destroy our ability to navigate through uncertainty.
And when we can't trade value freely and directly, we must trust the few to govern the many. What happens when all our means center around an authority? Complexity builds now coordination. Relies on conformity, observe our thoughts, the sense of dissent and coerce our actions. Can there be true innovation when there's no freedom of expression? What happens to our voice? The ones that shape social discourse now whose ideas gets created and which problems get solved. If our progress depends on hearing many sides to resolve, then why would we suppress the voice that shapes how humanity evolves? When we cut off the perspectives that make up society, we lose sight of the truth that forms our entire reality. Each person's contribution builds up our resiliency. Did we forget these differences are what strengthens humanity?
When communication breaks our words to the silence, our acts become violent, and the world is divided, and its darkness, truth is twisted by our pain and our bias, eroding the common ground, making us more and more fragile. To navigate uncertainty, we must solve for robustness, so everything gets tried and tested by various efforts, until we discover the system that best coordinates us. Mirrors life's process of channeling energy to create signal from chaos. In the era of technology, we transform energy into computational power to process the noise of free markets into structured order. And just by looking at numbers, we can derive how much power is required to reduce chaos and inscribe a flow of value for order verify that our transactions happened in line with shared rules. We don't need to seek trust. Transactions happened in line with shared rules. We don't need to seek trust when we can see proof. It is real time consensus that our lines is to evolve. This is how, amidst uncertainty, our lives continue to grow when we uphold our own rules, be preserved our own work and defend our own voice, which lets the true market emerge. The strength of the design lies in each of our participation since we are the nodes that channel our energy end to end. As we claim this dawn of light touches all parts of the glow and it ripples throughout society, and it returns us the hope that becomes the power that sparks humanity to thrive, that same power that fuels the creation of the mind. And when our mind and our money are truly set free and they transcend the limits of past boundaries, now knowing becomes owning and ideas become wealth. What happens now we can all push to expand the edges of our existence and assume evolution when things are the hardest. As we head for the light, we have to push through the darkness that is in these moments. We do what we do best. We take the chaos in the darkness and use our power to create. It is in these moments when we're all in alignment and afraid of a difference ascends us to a highest and distant depth of it all. Though that hope is not gone, it is always the darkest before dawn.
CNBC Intro
Introduction to Citadel Dispatch
Technical Difficulties and Live Streaming
Conversation Begins
Cashu Project Overview
Attracting Developers to Bitcoin
LNURL and Compliance Concerns
Bitcoin as Freedom Money
Choosing a Cashu Mint
Nostr and Cashu Integration
Future of Cashu and Blinded Amounts
Nostr Adoption and Social Media
