Fran is the creator and lead maintainer of Zap Store, an open permissionless app store for android and desktop. Zap Store uses nostr and verifiable social reputations to provide users and developers a secure, easy to use, alternative to the walled garden app stores operated by Apple and Google.
Fran on Nostr: https://primal.net/p/npub1wf4pufsucer5va8g9p0rj5dnhvfeh6d8w0g6eayaep5dhps6rsgs43dgh9
Download Zap Store: https://zapstore.dev/
EPISODE: 146
BLOCK: 875198
PRICE: 936 sats per dollar
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stream sats to the show: https://www.fountain.fm/
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Outro Video by Webworthy: https://primal.net/p/npub1rj7eh0eu3skwcyr5adpcjwxft9z4yjdspjryq6gynqw2j49f9a3quqjpw2
(00:00:00) CNBC Intro
(00:00:48) MicroStrategy's Bitcoin Strategy with Michael Saylor
(00:06:00) Quantum Computing and Bitcoin's Future
(00:07:05) US Digital Currency and Stablecoins
(00:09:51) MicroStrategy's Addition to Nasdaq 100
(00:13:00) Introduction to Citadel Dispatch with Odell
(00:15:26) Zapstore: A Permissionless App Store
(00:17:37) The Challenges of App Stores and PGP Verification
(00:23:41) Nostr's Role in Open Source and Freedom Tech
(00:32:07) Security and Verification in Zapstore
(00:47:09) Discoverability and Social Layer in App Stores
(00:55:03) Monetization and Ethical Business Models
(01:04:51) The Future of Zapstore and Open Source Software
(01:34:44) Onboarding Challenges in Nostr
[00:00:00]
Unknown:
Bitcoin hitting an all time high on continued enthusiasm over the new administration, policies. Here's what president-elect Trump told our Jim Cramer during his visit right here to the New York Stock Exchange just last week about crypto.
[00:00:14] Unknown:
Your embrace in crypto, very different from the previous administration. Strategic Petroleum Reserve like for crypto? Yeah. I think so. I we're gonna do something great with crypto because we don't want China or anybody else, not just China, but others are embracing it, and we wanna be the head.
[00:00:30] Unknown:
One big beneficiary of the Bitcoin rally has been MicroStrategy, the stock up more than 500% just this year. MicroStrategy will now be added to the Nasdaq 100 on December 23rd in its annual rebalancing. The company currently holds 439 1,000 Bitcoin after announcing another purchase just this morning. Joining us is MicroStrategy cofounder and executive chairman, Michael Saylor. Well, you're you're the guest of the moment. So is there a limit to how much Bitcoin you are going to acquire?
[00:00:59] Michael Saylor:
No. I I've said we'll just keep buying the top forever. Every day is a good day to buy Bitcoin. We look at it as cyber Manhattan. I would have bought Manhattan a 100 years ago, 200 years ago, every year for the past 300 years. You pay a little bit more than the person that bought Manhattan before you, but it's always a good investment to invest in the economic capital of the free world.
[00:01:24] Unknown:
Do you think that Trump is serious about creating this Bitcoin reserve, and how how would that work?
[00:01:29] Michael Saylor:
I think he is. And, you know, if you think about the Louisiana Purchase, California, and Alaska, we paid $40,000,000 to buy 75% of the United States. Nobody remembers the $40,000,000. But if you know where the money is going, you should buy the property by the future. And in this case, the Lummis plan calls for a 1,000,000,000 Bitcoin acquisition. That's worth $16,000,000,000,000 to the country. RFK proposed 4,000,000,000 Bitcoin that would be worth about $56,000,000,000,000. There's room for Trump to go beyond that, even $81,000,000,000,000 in gains.
And that's against 36,000,000,000,000 in in the US national debt. So all the capital outside the US and all of the antiquated 20th century capital is gonna flow into digital assets. It's gonna flow into the Bitcoin network. And the logical thing is for the US to buy it now and own the future.
[00:02:25] Unknown:
And just chase it up at any price?
[00:02:28] Michael Saylor:
I don't I think, just a progressive acquisition of it makes sense. Keep in mind, if you bought Manhattan from 16 50 to 1700 a little bit every single year, it would have been a good acquisition. Right now, we can buy, the United States could literally buy 20, 25% of the Bitcoin network either by trading out its existing gold stores or just by just by borrowing a small trace amount of money. And so the Bitcoin network, it could go up by a factor of a 100. You might as well buy it before it hundred x's.
[00:03:03] Unknown:
Your your Manhattan analog is really interesting, Michael, because the reason it may would have made sense to buy Manhattan is because they agreed it's gonna be on a grid going north. And I wonder if you see similar, policy analogs right now in crypto. Are we that organized?
[00:03:19] Michael Saylor:
You know, the world wants a digital assets framework, and the United States has a great opportunity to define a digital assets framework. We need to define the definitions of a digital commodity, a currency, a security, a token, an NFT, and an asset backed token, and we need the rights and responsibilities of issuers and the exchanges and the owners. But if that takes consensus from the executive branch, the house, the senate, and the industry, and we didn't have that for the past 4 years. The opportunity for the US, it's it's to issue $10,000,000,000,000 of digital currency and back to dollar.
It's to capture $50,000,000,000,000 of capital gain on the digital capital network. And, I do believe with the digital assets framework that this administration could put forward, there's no reason why we won't see $500,000,000,000,000 of assets tokenized over the next 21 years and 280,000,000,000,000 in capital flow into the digital capital network that is Bitcoin. And where does that leave Bitcoin's eventual price? My 21 year forecast is for Bitcoin, to appreciate about 29% a year, ARR, to $13,000,000 a coin by the year 2045.
[00:04:33] Unknown:
I mean, your strategy is really interesting because you're really the first company to adopt Bitcoin as your primary's treasury reserve asset. Isn't that risky? Where does the risk lie besides just in the price falling?
[00:04:48] Michael Saylor:
Well, 4 years ago, the accounting was toxic. It was indefinite and tangible, and it was unclear whether the SEC would embrace Bitcoin as a digital commodity. And it was unclear what the regulatory regime would be. That has that has been substantially derisked in the year 2024. And so now you really have companies on the Bitcoin standard where they use a digital commodity like Bitcoin, which is 60 ARR, 60 vol, or companies on the US dollar standard, which is 0 vol, 0 ARR. MicroStrategy is the largest hole, the largest holder of digital assets in the world. Now we've got $46,000,000,000 worth of Bitcoin, and and we're leveraging that.
[00:05:31] Unknown:
So what do you say to people who say, well, it's just a it's a Ponzi scheme. Because every time Bitcoin goes up, you issue more equity and debt to buy more Bitcoin. It just keeps going and going and going.
[00:05:41] Michael Saylor:
Yeah. Just like, developers in Manhattan, every time Manhattan real estate goes up in value, they issue more debt to develop more real estate. That's why your buildings are so tall in New York City. It's been going on for 350 years. I would call it an economy.
[00:05:57] Unknown:
Fair. The other you know, it's not the only innovation going on right now, Michael. This announcement out of Alphabet last week regarding quantum computing kinda refreshed into that debate about whether Bitcoin or crypto encryption can survive long term advances in quantum. How can it?
[00:06:14] Michael Saylor:
There's nobody more sophisticated with regard to encryption than the Bitcoin community. Satoshi was writing about this 15 years ago. The quantum benchmark that Google ran has no practical use in the real world right now. It's an impressive benchmark. But in fact, if anybody ever develops a super powerful computer that can crack encryption, it's gonna be a challenge for Microsoft, Google, the US government, every company on earth. And of course, the entire technology community is is gonna be focused on that. When that happens, we'll all just upgrade our software with quantum resistant algorithms. Right now, the consensus in the community is is we're nowhere close to that being a threat.
[00:06:56] Unknown:
What sort of other policies are you hoping to get from a Trump administration that is definitely more crypto and has put in place people that are friendlier?
[00:07:06] Michael Saylor:
You know, the great opportunity in the United States is to is to issue the world's reserve digital currency. There's about a $150,000,000,000 of stable coin currency, and Tether is the leader. But they can't locate in the United States because we don't have a sufficiently clear regulatory framework for issuing digital currencies. If the US normalizes that, there's no reason why US banks and US companies can't issue $10,000,000,000,000 of digital currency backed by US dollar currency equivalence sitting in US banks. That would be tremendously good for the United States.
[00:07:41] Unknown:
But they don't wanna compete with the US dollar. I mean, Trump has made it he campaigned on it and has followed through with tariff threats that they want to keep the US dollar as the global reserve currency. So they don't wanna threaten that with Bitcoin.
[00:07:54] Michael Saylor:
No. I'm not talking about Bitcoin. I'm saying that the US should allow US banks and US corporations to issue a token backed by the US dollar that would be backed by 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars of US Like a stable coin.
[00:08:07] Unknown:
Yeah. A stable coin. Tether, Circle, they're stable coins. But isn't that a big threat to the monetary system, the Fed?
[00:08:15] Michael Saylor:
Well, if we if we actually normalize that, then there's gonna be $10,000,000,000,000 of demand for US treasuries. It's the best thing you could do for the dollar. What it means is that all 8,000,000,000 people on the planet will be using the US dollar on their Android phones and their iPhones in order to, in order to trade with each other. That would be great for American values and the American currency.
[00:08:38] Unknown:
Well, we kinda we already we have that with the US dollar. I do I do wonder
[00:08:42] Michael Saylor:
I mean, people have brought up before if you so pro Bitcoin and crypto and even stable coin, if that ultimately does represent a threat to the US dollar as the world has its currency. Sarah, the point is people in Russia and China and Africa and South America can't trade with the US dollar directly because they don't have US dollar bank accounts. They're using Tether, and they're using Tether because they desperately want access to the dollar on their mobile phone. And right now, the US doesn't have regulatory clarity that allows a US corporation to issue a US dollar backed stable coin that works for the Chinese, the Russians, the Africans, the Europeans. And so if the US wants to be the world reserve digital currency, you don't want a $150,000,000,000 issued by an offshore entity. What you want is $10,000,000,000,000 of US dollar stable coin issued by US regulated banks and US regulated companies with the with the money onshore in the United States backed by US treasuries.
The demand is there. We just need, a digital assets framework in order for that entire industry to come to life.
[00:09:51] Unknown:
Finally, Michael, we've been, mentioning your addition to the Nasdaq 100. I wonder what you think that says about the moment we're in.
[00:09:58] Michael Saylor:
Well, it's an enormously legitimizing for Bitcoin as the asset class for the entire crypto industry and, of course, for MicroStrategy since we're the largest holder of digital assets in the world right now. A 100 is a magic number. We've now got more than a $100,000,000,000 of open interest in our options market. We've got more than a $100,000,000,000 market cap. We've got more than a 100% volatility. We've been running a 100% ARR for the past 4 years, and we're holding $46,000,000,000 worth of Bitcoin right now that's up a 150% year to date.
So I just think it's a it's a tremendous milestone for us.
[00:10:36] Unknown:
Why should someone buy MicroStrategy, the stock, instead of Bitcoin, the asset, to gain exposure?
[00:10:43] Michael Saylor:
MicroStrategy is an operating company. And because we have that 46 $1,000,000,000 treasury, we can securitize Bitcoin using our treasury as collateral. So the bond market wants us to strip the volatility and the performance and the uncertainty off the asset and give them a lower yielding, more, more, predictable instrument. And so we're the leader in that market. And when we do that, we create high volatility, high performance equity, and the equity in the options market wants that. So let me give you a little number here. Year to date, we have issued securities both convertible bonds and equities at a premium to our underlying assets that created a 72.4% BTC yield.
That translates to a gain of a 136,965 Bitcoin without dilution or cost. At a 105,000 of Bitcoin, that's creating $14,380,000,000 in shareholder value. So how would you value a company that generated 14,400,000,000 in earnings a year growing a 100% year over year? And that that's what the MicroStrategy Treasury operation is doing, If you're a Bitcoiner, you would love that.
[00:11:59] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting to tie it to their to earnings per share there, not just a leverage levered bet on Bitcoin itself. Michael, thank you for joining us. Big day for you as it has been nearly every day, this year. We appreciate the time.
[00:12:13] Michael Saylor:
Thanks for having me, Sarah. Michael Sailor.
[00:13:01] ODELL:
Happy Bitcoin Tuesday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Citadel dispatch, the interactive live show focused on actual Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion. You just listened to, I think, the single longest intro clip in dispatch history. I don't know. I tried to clip it and make it shorter, but, Michael seemed to hit on a lot of notable things. And I felt like it would age in an interesting way over the next few years, so I wanted to cement it in its place in in dispatch history. So that's why that intro clip was there. Obviously, that was Michael Saylor of MicroStrategy on CNBC.
We will not be talking about anything that went on in that intro clip in classic dispatch fashion. I have, Fran here who is the lead dev and creator of Zapstore, which I personally think is one of the most underrated, interesting Nostra projects in the ecosystem. How's it going, Fran? It's going great. Thanks, Matt, for having me. Did I lose you in that long intro clip? Did I I'm sorry I I forced you to listen to 12 minutes of sailor.
[00:14:19] Fran:
It's sailor saying sailor things, so I kinda tune out a bit, but interesting for the time stamp.
[00:14:29] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, that's the whole reason the intro clips exist is because I think it's like an interesting time capsule. Like, there are people there are new Bitcoiners that are coming in now that are listening to all the old dispatches, so the thesis is working. You know? Like, they're going back and they're listening to clips from CNBC from, like, 3 years ago when they didn't really understand Bitcoin. And now it's basically just a forever Bitcoin podcast, largest Bitcoin podcast in the world. That inter clip was actually so long that we had ride or die freak Brian come into our ZapStream live chat, zap a 100,000 sats, and then leave before the clip ended and said he'll listen later on 2 x speed.
So that that's a new one. That would that's a new one. Thank you, Brian, for, supporting the show. If you're listening on YouTube or Twitch, the chat that's shown on screen is a Noster enabled live chat, which you can get to at sildispatch.com or by going to zap.stream/hotel. So, Fran, Zapstore, what is Zapstore?
[00:15:32] Fran:
When I started calling it a permissionless app store, because well, it's built on Nasr and basically every or pretty much every tech built on Nasr, kind of built on the foundation of being open and permissionless. Of course, we will see projects that are not bad, but, you know, in general, like, now in these stages, I think, you know, for the most part. So the idea is that you can you know, we we all, I think, been kind of frustrated with app stores. The typical experience when you think about app store, you probably, you know, think of the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store. And for a lot of people, it's just, you know, another app.
But, many others, especially developers, have had problems that I think are have a bad impression of these of these tools. They do have an important role, I believe. And, well, I could I could talk about it later more in detail, but, I would say that I have, like, I have my frustration around installing apps or in discovering apps, for a long time both as a developer and as a user. And in a way, it's like I wanted to see a solution in the world, and that's why, you know, everything came together along with Master, and that's how SaaS work was born. But, essentially, it's a way to to find apps without having, one only one centralized, curator.
[00:17:35] ODELL:
So, I guess, let's pull it back for a second. Were you were you a Bitcoiner first before you found Noster, before you started working on Noster?
[00:17:43] Fran:
Yeah.
[00:17:44] ODELL:
So why Noster? Why were you drawn to Noster?
[00:17:50] Fran:
So this is interesting because I was, the corner for well, you know, full stories are a bit complicated, but, on and off, I got deep into the rabbit hole, in 2020, but my first use of Bitcoin was around 2012, I believe. And, and at some point around, what, 2021, I think, I was so deep into the rabbit hole. I wanted to stop working on my client work and start doing something with Bitcoin, but I didn't know exactly how to go about it, what to do. So I started looking into lightning, but the possibilities of building stuff on lightning are quite restricted or I'm not creative enough.
So I I had a few ideas, but they were not great. So I spent actually, you know, actively looking for, what, for about almost 2 years. Like, what can I do? What can I do for Freedom Tech? Right? I I I really wish I could participate more, because I am a builder, and all I'm doing is listening to podcasts. So, at some point, just appear out of nowhere, and it felt like the perfect substrate to, you know, to build stuff with. So that's why I think today we see a lot of devs that are really excited, about Master because it just gives so many possibilities to build cool stuff.
It's, yeah, it's just a perfect substitute for all these things that we are actually building right now.
[00:19:40] ODELL:
Awesome. Yeah. I mean, I I mean, I that's why I was drawn to it as well. I mean, I think, there's only 2 projects in my lifetime that I've witnessed such organic developer interest, and that's Bitcoin and Noster. And and just the the fact that you can build stuff so just without permission on on on in on both protocols, I think is incredibly empowering to to developers around the world that they don't they don't have to ask anybody's permission. They can just start shipping code. And with, you have a little bit more, almost you have a little bit more freedom just because if you ship in production and something breaks, like, people's money isn't on the line.
So I think a lot of developers find that slightly less pressure environment better suited for them. But so the reason I bring this up is because in Bitcoin land, this is a problem that many of us have been trying to figure out an elegant solution for for a while, which is a developer ships a Bitcoin wallet, and you wanna make sure that that Bitcoin wallet is is not compromised when you actually use it to store your money. And so the way that modern society handles that problem, is the developer goes through a developer approval process with Apple or Google. And then when they ship a new binary, when they ship a new app release, Apple and Google make sure that it isn't changed from the time they ship it to when you download it, that someone doesn't sit in the middle and swap it out with the malicious version.
Now that obviously has a problem if if your goal is FreedomTech. Because if your goal is FreedomTech, you don't wanna have to trust Apple and Google in that process, and that trust is twofold. Right? The user's trusting Apple and Google not to actually maliciously swap it out themselves, but also the developers trusting them not to get canceled or removed from the platform. Right? We've seen, I think, like, almost within a few weeks of Domus being released, it got removed from the App Store, the the Apple App Store in China. And then later on when he added Zaps, Apple also removed it from the App Store and said you can't have Zaps in there unless we have our cut of the pie. This is in app purchases.
So just Domus alone has had 2 different instances where this Apple App Store monopoly gatekeeper has has stopped the release of that software and has dictated where that So Zapstore aims to go a different direction here. And I would also it behooves me to there's also a way you can do this without app stores, which is something called PGP verification, and GPG, which is the the open version of PGP and they're cross compatible. And this idea is that the developer is signing all the releases manually, and then the user is manually verifying that the signatures match up and the hash matches up and that the software hasn't been changed. But the problem there is it doesn't matter how much education you provide, most people will not do that. And that's why app stores reign supreme.
So, anyway, this is I I guess I'm selling your project for you, but this is why I'm really excited about Zapstore because your your concept is basically let's do an open permissionless app store where the nostril keys are the signatures so that you don't have to deal with PGP. You don't have to deal with any of of the signature schemes. You just simply press download, and it's a similar experience to the app store. I don't really have a question. I did was that a good explanation?
[00:23:41] Fran:
Definitely. Definitely. Just let me backtrack a little bit because you mentioned Bitcoin Nostra as permissionless tech. Right. I would say that, you know, you could build stuff without permission. At least for me, open source was, was that for a very long time. Maybe it was just coincidence, on when I, you know, was growing up and I had access to computers and open source, I believe, was getting more traction, so I was getting something bigger. And I think that itself enabled me and a lot of other people to build stuff with no permission. Right. I don't know how it worked before, but, you know, for a lot of software, maybe you needed to, purchase licenses or or ask for some kind of permission.
The fact that, you know, the say early 2000 where, you know, Linux was getting much more popular and there was, Java and, you know, a bunch of other tech, but open source really started taking off. And I think, sure, we didn't have an answer on Bitcoin, but you could build stuff and, you know, push it to the web pretty much asking permission. No one except maybe the dom domain name, but that's, like, a bit nit nitpicking.
[00:25:11] ODELL:
So The domain is our shit coin. So yeah. Uh-huh.
[00:25:15] Fran:
Right. Yeah. So, I mean, let's say that for me, I'm going back to the to the App Store topic. I've had issues with so I had frustrations during, like, multiple touch points because, as a user, I've been a Mac user, for a very, very long time, like, since 99 that I had a Mac. Oh, wow. And, and basically, yeah, on on desktop, like, you could always download executables, but, you know, as time passed, the, you know, the the Mac App Store, you know, is is a way that average people tend to download apps from on Mac. I think that came from the experiment on iOS, from the iOS App Store, which I I was also an iOS user for a long time.
And even though for the most part, it just works. It's just a default curator or from where you download stuff from. When I started, like, getting more into freedom tech, I started noticing things. And on desktop, I also had another, like, touch point of frustration coming to, as you mentioned, BGP because once you wanna download something like, let's say, Spiro Wallet, you wanna make sure, especially in that case, that you are delivering the right binary, because you have people that are actually actively looking to sabotage that, right, fish you or whatever that may be, to to steal your Bitcoin.
And that was another big frustration because I'm quite obsessed with UX. It might not show in my work or partially, but let's say that it's, oh, I always strive for that, so I do care about it. And and so I wanna translate, you know, all this all this energy into something. So I I think everything came together as I was saying before with, the p g the like, the PGP frustration, which I can talk about more in detail. But then the whole, like, app store as a user, and especially since for the past few years I was working building apps, I was exposed to the app store submission process as a developer, and it was extremely annoying. I think it still is.
Fortunately, I'm disconnected from that already, but it it just it it just just crazy. And, by the way, another example added to what you mentioned is Sparrow does not publish Craigrod does not publish Sparrow to app stores as far as I know. He does not. But there there have been spirals in multiple stores, I think, on Canonical's Snap Store, on the Apple App Store as well. And, you know, even when he complained, they were taking weeks to take down the, you know, the the copy. So are these centralized entities, to be trusted? I would say yes.
I think they they they do a good job, and they are absolutely necessary. But there's there's not one answer to this question. I think curators are extremely important. You know, we can hate all we want on on them, but they are providing, a lot of value. But I think we can improve that model. And one of the things that SaaS store and with the Nostra and the relay model is the idea that just as on your socials, you can swipe relays. You know, what if you don't like your app curator? Like, you don't like the SaaS for default relays. You're gonna be able to swap and just include your own or add or mix and match.
[00:29:50] ODELL:
So let's, there's a lot there. Let's talk about your frustrations with PGP. You said we could go deeper in that. Why why have you been frustrated with PGP?
[00:30:03] Fran:
Well, because every time you wanna verify software with PGP, you're basically, forced to go through a series of steps. I even me as a as a technical person, I did not have the memory of, like, exactly, you know, what commands should I run. I I needed to go to the command line interface, and I I had to if it didn't have the developer in my key chain, I had to go and fetch on some key server where the key might or might not be. I needed to compare fingerprints, and I learned that fingerprints, though it's rare, could be compromised as well because let's face it. Oh, a lot of times and we also do this with end pubs. We just check for, you know, a bunch of it's, you know, on the start of the thing.
So, obviously, average people will not go through all that, and it's clear that it's it's not a it's not such if if the user experience is not decent enough, like, you won't reach all the people that you wanna reach.
[00:31:16] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, it's been around for decades, and it really just does not have wide usage whatsoever. It's a UX com it's a complete UX nightmare. And and, you know, I've done a lot of education work with, new people entering the space, and their eyes just gloss over. Like, they just you just know that 99% of people aren't doing it. And I think that goes to your point that these centralized app stores, while we have some issues with them, for the overwhelming majority of users, they provided a strong net benefit because they're extremely convenient, and most of the time, they don't get served malicious apps. So it's a trade off that society has made up until this point, and it seems like a relatively decent trade off, but still not ideal.
Okay. So let's talk about so how does Zapstore attempt to to to fix this problem?
[00:32:16] Fran:
So there we're talking about security mostly. That's what he brought up, and I think it's it's Yeah. Important. But there are other aspects to all this, and the services that that app stores are are generally important in software distribution. But for for the security model, the idea is that you as you are kind of replacing the so does everybody understand, like, what GPG is actually doing? But it's right? You're you're verifying to explain it. Yeah. So it's it's a way of of verifying that that, binary is has been issued and has been signed by the author that you think it is, so it's not being tampered with in the middle. Right? That's what we wanna verify when, we do the GPG verification.
But the thing is with with Noster, since it's it's a cryptographic technology, we can use this to do something very similar to GPG. However, the difference with GPG is that Nasr is, let's say, an an active social network. So this changes a lot of the dynamics that GPG had in terms of having a a because the the the word web of trust probably originated there. Maybe it's from somewhere else, but it was it was I think it did with GPG. Yeah. Right. Right. You you would vouch for other keys, and you were, like, kinda store that in your I would, like, sign your key,
[00:33:57] ODELL:
and I'd put it in a mailing list or something. And I'd be like, this is Fran's key, and you know my key, so this is a good key.
[00:34:03] Fran:
Mhmm.
[00:34:04] ODELL:
That was like the original web of trust. But we couldn't bootstrap it and never really got bootstrapped because it was just like a bunch of nerds signing each other's keys. But with Noster, we're effectively bootstrapping web of trust and verifiable reputation with shitposts. That's the key. It's like humanity needs shitposts to actually bootstrap the thing.
[00:34:26] Fran:
Yeah. A 100%. We're basically using we're calling web of trust to something that technically is not web of trust. Or, I mean, if you trust people that you follow, which is a weak proxy in my opinion. Well, that's why I like verifiable reputation. Verifiable
[00:34:49] ODELL:
reputation. As a term.
[00:34:51] Fran:
Yeah.
[00:34:53] ODELL:
Because, like I mean, it doesn't necessarily mean so if I follow Gigi and you follow Gigi and Gigi has made, you know, 10,000 different verifiable events on Noster, You can a a a external observer, someone who's new to Noster that comes in, can have a pretty good expectation that that is Gigi and an expectation of what his past has been in a digital Noster sense. So that to me is like a verifiable reputation rather than necessarily meaning I have, like there's no, like, trust score or something. It's not like I'm saying I I trust this person, a certain amount.
[00:35:42] Fran:
And, usually, scammers will not put a long reputation on the line. So it's it's like in some way, and that's it's it's social capital, really, that is on the line. So that is one of the things that that I in I thought for for Zapstore because now we could bring, like, this idea of level of trust from GPG and actually apply it in a social context. So that's how the idea of prompting before installation whether to, you know, just assign her. And then for those who are not familiar with the app, like, the first time you are about to install, an app, For now, it's it's only on Android that this works, and you get a prompt and you have to check that this person is the one that you think it is.
And you see a little widget with people that you follow who follow the signer. And this is the way of seeing you can also tap and go to, I think, and you can go to, you know, an awesome social client and see for yourself if you don't trust, what I'm what I'm telling you. But that's a good enough approximation to tell whether that signer might be a fake, or an impersonator or or not.
[00:37:09] ODELL:
Well, like, let's let's let's let's bring it down to its core. Right? So so so from a practical sense, if you're a Zapstore user, what you what you do is you're using an Android phone. And and Android one of the beautiful things about Android is you can install apps from outside of the the designated app store. So Zapstore itself is an app. So you're you you go to zapstore.dev. You download the APK file, that app that that that binary, that application file. You install Zapstore. You have Zapstore. Now all of a sudden you have 2 app stores. You have Google Play, the official App Store, and you have Zapstore. And then once you have Zapstore, when you download an app, when you go to download an app, let's say the app let's say the app is Primal, right, and it's signed by 1,000,000, the the lead dev of Primal, the creator of Primal, when you go to download it, you wanna make sure that it hasn't been changed since since, 1,000,000 uploaded it. It'll say signed by 1,000,000.
1,000,000 is followed by Fran, Odell, Gigi, jb 55, whoever. Mhmm. And it's based on your who you follow. So it's like, I follow these people and they also follow this person and I know it's I know it's the real person. Right? And then you press install.
[00:38:35] Fran:
Yeah. So first of all, we need, Millian to actually sign primal.
[00:38:40] ODELL:
Oh, it's a bad example. Okay. I
[00:38:43] Fran:
know I know it will come. But yeah, that's that's basically the idea. Even though I'm thinking that there might be other approaches to that Okay. And don't necessarily rely on web of trust, but you could or you could rely on, let's say, a relay. Okay? So when with all this talk around, relay communities, you could say, well, in this community, people upload apps to it, and it's a closed community, so I trust the moderator of that relay. And then that's fine. Anything that isn't there, I trust. But the whole point here being that curators are fine, they're necessary, but we need to just break from the centralized top down approach and say, like, no. I actually want this company with this reputation to be my curator, or I wanna I wanna have 2 or 3 or whatever or none and just go buy WebTrust or a mix of both.
I think that is the innovation here with respect to decentralized stores. Obviously, this is on Apple is, or at least I should say on iOS. It's difficult to impossible, at the moment. We can talk more in detail about that, but, it is effectively a monopoly in many places.
[00:40:07] ODELL:
So They don't let you install another app store?
[00:40:11] Fran:
No. Except in Europe if you go through some bureaucracy,
[00:40:15] ODELL:
you know. So are you gonna go through the bureaucracy for the good of mankind?
[00:40:21] Fran:
Gotta think about that one. But I want to. I want to. I'm tempted.
[00:40:27] ODELL:
Yeah. Well, because there's, like, an EU antitrust ruling that they're forced to, but they did the bare minimum, right, to allow them. It's not as open as Android.
[00:40:36] Fran:
Right. Yeah. So that's why it was started on Android. And by the way, this even though no one uses it, there is a client for CLI. So there are packages that are you know, when you go to, like, your terminal package manager, like home brew or APT or DNF, whatever that might be, like, there is some the sap store actually does work. And this command line tool is what developers are using to basically sign the events when they when they sign the apps. Right? So now it's basically only used by devs, but, it is possible, like, it's fully functional. I think there are just 5 apps in there, so it's not known. I don't push it too much for now, but it's perfectly functional on multiple operating systems right now.
So the goal is to try to cover as many OSs as possible. I don't wanna make, of course, any promises as to when things will be, available, but I wanna make I wanna bring this to to the macOS as as the next,
[00:41:50] ODELL:
step. Yeah. It'd be great to have it on desktop specific I mean, specifically for a lot of Bitcoin software and other open source software that we rely on. So the the other piece that I think is cool here about using Nostr as the signing mechanism is someone can actually if they don't have a Nostr account, if they have someone they trust in their community, they can just take that person's end pub and use their web of trust. Right? So, like, someone could just sign in with my end pub, for instance, and it's based on who I follow Yeah.
Which is, like, I think, a cool bootstrapping mechanism. If someone's not actually active in the Nostra ecosystem but still wants to take advantage of it, all they need is one person they trust in the Nostra ecosystem, and they can kinda just piggyback that reputation from them. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
[00:42:43] Fran:
But that I think would show eventually through the web of trust because if you are following 1 person, then that's kind of your opening to the whole network. Right. It's it's it's basically the same. As long as you follow only one person, then the web of trust ranking should should show that. And by the way, I I have been secretly building something, for a web of trust service that is, like, just way, way, way, way better. I've been doing this with, Pibelia, so shout out to him. We'll announce something soon.
[00:43:24] ODELL:
But it it's That's all you're gonna give us?
[00:43:27] Fran:
Yes. Yes. So it's it's it's similar to it's similar to this the web of trust service that I'm using right now that is really crappy. But this is gonna be just just way better, way to, determine, like, ranks from your own point of view. So you wanna see scores of people, like, from your own, like, web of trust.
[00:43:55] ODELL:
Well, he's the only per I I posted on Nostra that I was live with you right now. Well, I I posted it when we went live. He's the only one he's the only one who re reposted it. Alright. So he's bay I think he's basically giving you permission to to tell us what it is. Yeah. No. I'm kidding. You don't have to. I, to the to the freaks who to the rider die freaks out there, if you listened to the Nostriga conversation I had about web of trusts, at the Riga conference that's on the sale dispatch feed, Pip was one of the was one of the guests on that panel. That was when I met him for the first time actually about 2 minutes before we went on stage.
But he's been doing a lot of interesting work in terms of web of trust and verifiable reputation. So I'm pretty excited for whatever you guys have cooked up there. So whatever that is, that's just gonna then be integrated into Zapstore. It's gonna kinda be like a protocolized version of whatever's in Zapstore. Is that the plan?
[00:44:57] Fran:
A 100%. Cool. And fully master based.
[00:45:02] ODELL:
That's awesome. Yeah.
[00:45:05] Fran:
So, back to because we've been talking a lot about about security and how Yeah. That we download the I mean, we're certain that we're downloading the the binders and installing stuff that are from the genuine author and so on, but I made an exploration before sorry. By the way, is my audio really bad? Because I I saw
[00:45:27] ODELL:
people Well, someone's roasting you on the YouTube chat about your audio being bad. Yeah. No. It's fine. I mean, he's not a podcaster. He's building a future app store for us. So it's we we can understand you. It's just, you know, it's not a professional mic. He's telling you to buy a mic. So he wants we're gonna pause the podcast. We're gonna pause the show. You're gonna go to the store. You're gonna buy a mic and come back.
[00:45:52] Fran:
Yeah. Well, Chris, you're coming. Right? So
[00:45:56] ODELL:
I could just fly out there and do this for you. My producer Paul said he'll fly out fly out to you and and just bring you a mic. If if you want if you want Fran to have a better mic next time he visits, make sure you zap him on Noster, and so he'll go and buy a mic with your sets. Right. But you sound fine. Don't worry about it. Cool.
[00:46:16] Fran:
So I was going to mention I I went into an exploration, just after one of these, like, frustration moments, it was about a year ago or a bit a bit longer. And even when, like, the main issue was security, I got into, like, what are apps for? What what what role do they play? And there are many more things about it. I wrote about it early January. I posted something on Stacker News. Should be there on on zapstore.dev/blog. I think the article is there. If you wanna if you wanna read this quite long because I went deep into the rabbit hole of app stores and and software distribution and what the problems were even before start starting with the first line of code for the solution.
[00:47:09] ODELL:
Cool.
[00:47:10] Fran:
And besides all the security stuff that that we talked about, and there's more on in that article, there's other aspects like discoverability. So that's that's a huge one that we always talk about in Noster. How do we discover the content that we want? It's a it's a huge shopping for more social media clients, but also for apps. And really the stores do offer this. So you go there and you have categories or you have, I don't know, but actually it's pretty bad. For me, whenever I I entered the Apple App Store on my iPhone, I just got, like, recommendations for games
[00:47:55] ODELL:
and a lot of games and shit. Did you play a lot of games? 0. I'm not a gamer person. Maybe the games are where they make a lot of money. Right? So it's all about incentives.
[00:48:05] Fran:
Yeah. But that's has nothing to do with me. So why I'm in secret? And that was a very interesting exploration because, you know, when you when you when you add Nostra as a as a social layer to something weird as an app store, you know, not only we can expect to have a social network within a place where you download apps, but this is the the the power of Nasr, the interoperability where you see it shine is that you can bring this social layer to, like, places you would never thought before. And I'm really positive that Apple and Google will never, like, bootstrap a social network for that particular use case.
[00:48:51] ODELL:
Well, Google tried. I don't know if you remember Google Plus. Google Plus. It was like a massive disaster. Complete failure. I, I actually just had a little bit of PTSD. I when I interviewed Jack Dorsey, I I called Blue Sky an unmitigated disaster, and he said that's the terminology that Business Insider uses for all their clickbait pieces. So I just had a little bit of PTSD about that. But Google plus was a disaster. No one used it. It it had a little bit of uptake in the beginning and then poor development or whatever. But that was one of their goals was to mix Google Plus with, like, App Store reviews and Google Maps reviews.
Right? Like, they have the Google Maps reviews in YouTube. Right? Google's YouTube. So they tried to put the whole picture together, but it's really hard to do in a centralized fashion. And, obviously, Nostr has many advantages there where you can just have this open protocol and just have a lot of developers
[00:49:52] Fran:
do different things. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. That's a good example. But also you need to be Google, and you need to have a product that Right. If I give an example of a friend who started to bootstrap, what was it, like, it's app for skiers. Okay. So it is super niche. You're gonna you're gonna build a social network just for skiers. I mean, my work really ridiculous. Is incredibly difficult. So
[00:50:22] ODELL:
Well, they all try and do it. Right? It's like hiking apps or whatever. They all try and create, like, communities around, like, little niche communities, and they have to bootstrap it from the for themselves. It's very difficult, but they all try. I feel like a lot of them try.
[00:50:39] Fran:
Yeah. Well, they they will discover Nostra eventually. I think just being able to have a lot of users. Well, we're not too many right now, but just way more than 0 is very so that's why I think Nasr will keep keep growing. We'll see what happens. But I was talking about discovery, and this social layer on Napster all of a sudden
[00:51:04] ODELL:
Right.
[00:51:05] Fran:
You can have recommendations from your friends instead of seeing these stupid games I don't care about. What if, like, my home page was stuff that my friends are becoming recommending or making the app packs or, all of a sudden, I think this is it is huge for for for anything really, but particularly for Freedom Tech because Right. Freedom Tech might not be a priority for Apple or Google, but, you know, if it's a priority for your friends, you know, then and, also, you have every single app. You don't you don't you don't have, like you're not censored there. It's not just the Freedom Tech apps that are available on stores, on the main stores. It's whatever, you know, your friends are recommending on any really.
[00:51:48] ODELL:
I mean, that's a really good point because, you know, I always looked at it from the security point of view because I just hated PGP I mean, I don't hate I use it. I actually am probably one of the few people that have historically used it because I've had no choice. You don't you don't wanna download a malicious Sparrow wallet. But, the discovery element of traditional app stores is a key. Even if it's poor discovery, it's a key aspect. Right? Like, people like, if you want if you need a weather app, you you're not you open the app store and you type in weather and and you wanna see what is the top rated weather app, for you and then you go and get the weather app. Now if that was like Fran and Odell really like this weather app, that'd be way more useful for me than just, like, randoms leaving star based reviews and maybe, like, you know, flaming out the developer and and the text reviews or whatever and, like, you read the reviews.
That's way better. That makes a lot of sense to me. Discovery might actually be the killer use case here, and then people get the security benefits as, like, a side effect where they don't even realize that they're getting the security benefits.
[00:53:02] Fran:
Yeah. Absolutely. I fully agree with that. I think this will bring more people because it's more stuff or it depends who you ask, but let's say a more average user that doesn't care too much about these things, they will get the side effect, the the benefit of of security as you say. So it's a little bit like especially given the the idea I have to to grow Zapstore and and reach more people than just like the Nasir and the Cypherpunk scene. We will get these people into this into this tech, and it it kinda works like a Trojan horse. It's like you came for the cool stuff because your friends are recommending, and then all of a sudden when you realize you have an insect and you're making Bitcoin payments.
[00:53:55] ODELL:
The other piece here so so we have security, which, by the way, I feel like I need to say this just to explain the security threat model when you're thinking about these things with open source software. First of all, it's important that software is open source so that people can verify the code. And even if you're not verifying the code, that other people are verifying the code, and that's not doing things that it's that it says it's not doing. And then, ideally, it's reproducible. So you're able to verify the code, and then you're also people are able to replicate the actual creation of the binaries, creation of that application. Then once you get to that step, you wanna make sure it hasn't been changed so it gets hashed. And by hashing it, you can verify easily from the hash that it hasn't been changed. And then you sign the hash to make sure that it hasn't been banned in the middle. This whole process is obviously just immediately 9 out of 10 users, their eyes gloss over, and an app store automates that entire process. Now we have walled gardens that do that, and obviously, walled garden's bad in terms of freedom.
And Zapstore aims to be the the alternative there. So but we talked about security, discovery. Then the other thing is, I mean, from a developer perspective, it's gotta be monetization. Like, these app stores are taking huge cuts. Like, Epic Games got into a huge fight with Apple. You still cannot play Fortnite on iOS or Mac, because Epic doesn't wanna pay, you know, 30% or 20% or whatever the cut is, to Apple, and they've they've never made nice over that. I mean, I think that was part of the lawsuit that resulted in the alternative app stores in the first place. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. So how do you think about that part? Like, are you thinking about that aspect too? Like, this this developers not wanting to give up, like, part of the revenue stream?
[00:55:53] Fran:
Yeah. Definitely. That was that was part of it. And I feel like I'm with Zapstore, which is a store where you cannot zap. But it's it's coming. It's coming. I I I definitely thought about the monetization, and, you know, the obvious theme is allow devs to receive money, like, be it value for value or payables or whatever the model is more convenient for them. Right. If you have, like, the permission as nature of publishing apps to any communities and you realize any curators, and then you can receive, money directly from your users, I think that that's killer. Like, if you compare it to, like, the permission, KYC, by the way, KYC, 15 to 30% that these the cuts that these stores are are taking, it's just like the improvement is massive.
[00:56:54] ODELL:
And and what most people don't realize is when, Steve Jobs first announced the App Store, just from the discovery element alone, most there was, you know, thousands 100 of thousands of developers around the world that were very excited about the discovery element and willing to pay that amount of money for it. Pay that cut. They thought that cut was actually at the time, there was a lot of feelings that that it was a reasonable cut. But it's interesting that, like, as that industry has gotten much, much larger, like, in terms of revenue generation, you know, 1,000,000,000 of dollars of revenue generation, just Fortnite alone from Epic Games is 1,000,000,000 of dollars a year. That cut seems more and more predatory.
And there so there is a big movement, by developers to try and get out of that that almost like slavery type relationship where, like, their entire fate is dictated by a single company.
[00:57:58] Fran:
Yeah. That's a great point. I I don't know where it's where the line where you can draw the line, but it it it feels parasitic at some point because you you kind of already established the connection between because, obviously, this is a marketplace, and you're connecting you're connecting the 2 sites, or you're taking cuts for, like the relationship was already established, and you're taking cuts all the time. So that does seem parasitic to me. I understand if you just make the connection once, but, you know, that's it's my opinion. But that's why we have the ability to to to improve all this all this situation. And
[00:58:40] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, you even I love these, like, real world examples. Right? Like, they're, Amazon, right, one of the most valuable companies in the world, and Apple, one of the most valuable companies in the world, if you want to buy a new Kindle book on an Apple product, you're on iOS and you wanna buy a new Kindle book, Apple insists on taking a cut. So Amazon will not sell you a Kindle book. I've noticed this because I was I'm I'm lead lead IT man of my of my my parents, and my mom wanted to buy a book on her iPad. And you literally have to go onto desktop to buy actually, you can go into Safari on the iPad, and you could buy the book at Amazon dotcom and then press send to Kindle app, and then Apple doesn't get the cut, but you're not allowed to buy it directly in the app with one one button push. Like, that's where we're currently at in terms of the the standoff between 2 huge companies. Right? This is not like little developer in a garage in Thailand or something. This is like 2 massive companies, and they're in a they're in a pitched battle about this monetization element.
[00:59:57] Fran:
Yeah. And this reminds me a lot of the discussion around the web. We had a few posts yesterday, about this. I think, kind of triggered by a post by saying, like, if if 90% of the of the users on mobile are using apps, like, why I reposted that. Right. I love because he, you know, he he he managed to trigger a lot of a lot of feelings there.
[01:00:26] ODELL:
No. Just to be clear to the listeners, if you're not actively just scrolling fiatjaf's nostril feed, which you should be doing, just to be frank, He said if 90% of users are coming in through mobile, which I think he's correct. Like, most people interact mobile first. I I think there's, like, billions of people that their main way that they're gonna interact with anything is on mobile or on iPad. Why is everyone building web apps was his post.
[01:00:55] Fran:
Yeah. So, yeah, why why so a lot of people responded to that, and I think it makes a lot of sense because the first reaction is I want we wanna be free from these terrible app stores, and I completely agree. But I also try to analyze, like, why is the market clearly favoring why why are users favoring apps over over web apps or PWAs? And it's just the 2 big players, Apple and Google, are obviously doing this on purpose because otherwise, there would be like a JavaScript API to, put a button on the website and say install. And it will just look your regular app, and it doesn't. There's a reason why they don't wanna do that, but this is this is reality.
We we cannot change the fact well, Android, as we said, is the most popular operating system in the world. I don't have the numbers, but it's by far.
[01:01:55] ODELL:
Yeah. It's like 80, 90% globally or whatever. It's not the case in the US, but globally, yes.
[01:02:01] Fran:
Yeah. So, I mean, I don't know. Should we, like, yell at the clouds? Or I mean, that that's the way it is. So we'll try to do the the best we can. And we are fortunate that that Android is an open source project, and I think Google does have incentive to keep the the open keep open the installation of of, APKs and basically allow for for stores like App Store, because of how how that works with manufacturers and so on. But, I don't think that that will change. So I think we're fortunate. Apple, you know, we'll see what what happens with that.
[01:02:45] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I I'm not gonna get my hopes up on Apple. I I do I I have a, I dip my toe in the meme arena every once in a while, And, one of my favorite meme templates is the, like, Jesus, why do you give me, like, your hardest problems? And I have one, which is, like, it's you got banned from a permissioned app store. It's like Jesus just like, this is not a hard problem. Like, get over yourself. And you're, like, you're being you're being part of that solution. Like, I I do think that, like, as Bitcoiners, there's, like, a subset of us that go down these ridiculous threat models. Right? It's like, what if, you know, 50 cruise missiles are launched and they get launched at, like, major nodes in the network or whatever? And then there's all like, the 90% of Bitcoiners, like, if an app gets banned from the App Store, they just will lose their shit. They're just like, holy like, what are we gonna do? Like, I can no longer download BlueWallet on on Apple App Store. Like, the state is coming after us. Like, everything's over. We're screwed.
And, like, that's the kind of the status quo right now. But I I think I think there's a strong argument to be made and maybe it's coming from a bias because I'm someone who historically has has been an Android user, where it's like, okay. Like, it's it's important that we have polished apps on the Apple App Store. But in a worst case scenario, like, just go buy an Android phone. You can get one for, like, $100. Maybe you can get it for less even. You know, you buy a used Android phone. You can get it for any price point you want, basically, depending on what your specs are, and then and then use that for the apps that they won't let you use. Like, it's not the worst situation. I but begging Apple, like, Apple's never I mean, I'm still amazed that they're doing this European thing, and I I'm still skeptical of it. Like, I don't I've never expected Apple to open more. They've never done that. The trend has always shown they've done the opposite.
[01:04:52] Fran:
Yeah. There's a lot of around having an app store on in Europe, on on iOS. I'm not too familiar what those are, but I think you need you need to open up your books to Apple, you know, to see that you're not surpassing certain amount of revenue where you should, you know they they gonna take a cut if you exceed that. So it's
[01:05:17] ODELL:
a lot of red tape and just kinda crazy. But And they use I think they're using the excuse that they're like, we don't want malicious app stores. Right?
[01:05:26] Fran:
So they're like, we have to have all these controls in place. So it's it's the we go back to the question of, like, censorship and filtering. You know, where do you draw the line? Is that you want filtering, you want curation, but at some point, it's like, who's deciding that? Is that who you wanna change? So, again, the web does does kind of does solve this in a way, but it's just kinda unfortunate that even for a reason, PWAs are not more popular, and I wish they were. And, actually, I wish to support them in some way on Zapier itself.
[01:05:58] ODELL:
So you talked about this. You so PWAs guys are progressive web apps. So it's it's a website that you go to in Safari or Chrome, and then you, like, and, quote, unquote, install it on your phone. And then it's still a browser window, but it looks like an app, and it gives you a lot of the same functionalities as an app. But as Fran said, like, we do see situations where Google and Apple are they, like, mess with them. They, like, screw around with them and, like, make lives for developers difficult and lives for users difficult when you use them. But I think you had a a note where you were like, I want, like, a Zap store PWA store. Is that did you not have a note like that?
[01:06:42] Fran:
Yeah. I started by because I was listening to your rep with Cali Right. And he was talking about, I think it's cashew. Me.
[01:06:55] ODELL:
Yeah. It's pwa cashew wallet, cashew. Me. It's great.
[01:06:59] Fran:
I I love the idea. That's great. I was just I would it just triggered these thoughts in my mind, like, what's you know, why, PWS didn't take off. I was also talking to Halabot about this because he initially is, like, more like a web developer, but then he he published apps, but he's, like, web dev first. And he asked me why are computer based kinda struggling in a way like they're not way more popular. I think it's just the same topics. It's it's just discovery. And and you have do you have central places to discover these these things? Yeah. Maybe. You can group them in in in another website, but the UX for installing is purposefully annoying.
So that's why, you know, you need to go to tap, 3 dots or whatever, and I don't even know. Just tap on, like, install as a home screen and then click okay, and that you you lose 90% of the users there. Yep. That that is the huge that that's the biggest problem. And then, obviously, I think that not being able to because websites are constantly, like, moving targets. We if you want a certain version of of a website, like, how do you actually do that? I prefer well, it depends on the app, really. But if there's some release that has a hash, I can verify that, you know, and we're all like, maybe I don't wanna wait for some reason, but on a on a website, it's like you you know, most developers are just pushing out updates all the time, so you don't really know where you are. Like, what are you around?
But mostly, I would say is is a discovery, and because for features, I think most apps with the tools that are available for developers, even on mobile are just are just fine. Yeah. But it's it's just that Apple and Google don't wanna make it easier.
[01:08:56] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, Yeah. I think discovery is probably the main thing, and then there's definitely additional friction. That's probably number 2. And then if you're actually an educated user, there is a security concern. But that's probably Yeah. Because from the developer point of view, PWAs are amazing in that you can just constantly ship updates. Like, I talked to the mute when the muni guys were still working on Bitcoin, that was one of the things they loved. You didn't have to wait for basically App Store, permission to ship updates. So you can just, like, constantly just ship. But What does that mean for the user? The user's like, I have no idea what I'm running. Like, there's no verification going on here.
[01:09:39] Fran:
Yeah. Yeah. So that's but let's say that it's it's good to have the the option, the ability to do that and be clear about, like, what you're pushing out. So that's that's why on Zap, if you wished, you could you could push updates every single minute. And Right. It's it's a sign it's a sign not event. It just goes as fast as any other note. Right? So you should yeah. Maybe you don't see it immediately right now because of some technical limitations on the app, but really that the principle is that you push out the app, you know, as many as many versions as you want. But then it's up to you, the developer, to to analyze the trade off whether, you know, you wanna confuse users by by shipping too much, but you should be able to do it. And I was going to mention related to security, because you you kinda hinted at it. The you mentioned reproducible builds?
Yes. So that's one of the things that that are pretty cool that I wanna integrate at some point. It's like DBMs that, basic view analysis on different things, but you could have DBMs that check for malware, that check for privacy, issues. And also, I was I was talking to, yeah, to people who in the space are doing, like, verifications, like running, or building stuff from source and getting to, you know, to do the reproducible bills. But a lot of projects don't support reproducible bills, but it would be amazing to have a flag as, hey. Actually, all these vendors vouch for this hash. Right? So now we're like extra sure, which is totally impractical to do.
[01:11:27] ODELL:
No. Yeah. That's a great idea, for for reproducible software to just have and then you could just use the master web of trust to be like all these different sources say that this is the same same binary. Yeah. Exactly. If you have this sign the results. So you actually have multiple signatures.
[01:11:47] Fran:
Right. Because you you you might also have vendors that are scammers. But if you if your web of trust is not pointing to them, well, then they're just not an authority.
[01:11:58] ODELL:
That's cool. I like that idea. So we have that idea. We have Zaps. And by the way, like, there needs to be I think it can't be purely value for value. Like, there needs to be, like, Paywall premium stuff. Mhmm. I mean, a lot of this stuff, like, app developers can just put in their app. Right? I mean, if Epic packages Fortnite they already provide an APK. It's an unsigned APK. But if Epic packages in in, Fortnite and puts on Zapstore, it's actually a free download for Fortnite. And then after once you open the app, you're paying them. So that kinda takes that pressure off of you in that situation. They can just but it'd be cool if I could donate in the app, like, in the app store straight to people.
[01:12:49] Fran:
It also depends on how how this progresses because I have ideas on how how to grow this product. If you make developers' lives easier because you're you you mentioned Fortnite, but maybe small devs don't have the bandwidth to implement all that or maybe they do because, it might be an option for force us to to handle the payments and and offer that service to to the devs. Right? That that that would be that would be a possibility. I'm just I'm just thinking that's one of the aspects I need to, you know, think more about, like, how to how to sustain this, you know, in time or what are the potential ways of of getting revenue for Zap store, but without being I kinda made this this voucher, this promise. It's mostly for myself, but it's like, the Cypherpunk use case will always be there, like, no matter what.
Even though I think the the product should I would love to optimize UX, you know, to make this easy as possible, like, for my my grandma to, to be able to verify apps. Right? That would be that would be amazing. But still, like, you you can design something that does not necessarily affect, you know, the fact that it's super easy to use does not necessarily mean that it's it's it's bad for privacy
[01:14:20] ODELL:
or that it's it's bad for Freedom Tech. Yeah. Ethical monetization. I mean, this is something that I deal with all the time at 10:31. I mean, putting on my business hat, I think that the easiest way to monetize an app store is to be a rent seeker and sit in the middle and take a cut of all revenue, which is exactly the model that has been incredibly successful. The second easiest is, like, surveillance and ads and all that stuff, which is also quite evil. But the 3rd, like, the ethical path here, in my mind, the first thing that comes to mind is, like, premium services to the developers. So it's like opt in premium services, and it's definitely the harder path.
But there's something there. Like, if you're a developer and you're, you know, you have a 1000000 downloads a year or 2,000,000 downloads a year, 10,000,000 downloads a year, like, you'd be willing to pay something to have different types of premium services on top of that, in terms of your relationship with Zapstore and, like, distribution and whatnot.
[01:15:31] Fran:
Yeah. Even for smaller devs, they actually, since they don't have much resources, maybe they wanna delegate some of the stuff, even the community building as well. So I think, yeah, that is is to be explored. But I think the fact of having building on and and advertising that because you can build a and just, like, be parasitic or just, like, take all you want from the network and not get back because you don't publish user events and all that kind of stuff. But it's it's kind of, fire in your ass because if you're not providing the the best service, like, you're gonna especially if it's false, your app will get forged and, you know, someone else will just run the project that you wanna run and then you end up.
So I think that incentive is is is super important, and that's it. You know? It is an open source app and it is built on master. So the only way how to monetize this is is just being the best. You don't have a the ability of of doing these parasitic business models.
[01:16:49] ODELL:
Right. You don't have a moat.
[01:16:51] Fran:
Yeah. And if, you know, if you another of the aspects that I was writing about was was reputation of a dev of a dev and communication and support and all all that channel because we talk about monetization, which is sending value. But how about how about users and and devs are absolutely disconnected in AppSource today? And having, like, a channel where they can come closer together, users might even suggest features and can put up bounties and just put up certain amounts as Sats if if a certain feature gets implemented. I feel that that's gonna completely change the the landscape of of what an app store is is thought about, and even you could just go crazy and much further and and think like, what if instead of just going to an app store and see if something is available, maybe even just suggest, I want, you know, I want this app in the world.
You know, here, I will put up, like, a 1,000,000 sets. I wanna I wanna see this happen. And then you have supply, basically, come online and check. Right? You just kind of are flipping the the the order of things and and letting vendors just come and and fulfill that demand.
[01:18:17] ODELL:
I don't know how much I agree with that as a concept, but, spread your wings if it works. I I think bounties in general are they they result in a lot of, like, hit and run jobs kinda, where it's like someone. First of all, if someone puts a bounty up, it doesn't actually mean that there's a a lot of real demand for something. It just means that, like, a few people think there's demand for something. So, like, what's the famous quote from Henry Ford? It's like, if I ask customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse, but instead, I made it an automobile. So that's so that's one piece. And then the second piece is oftentimes, it results in kind of developers coming in, looking through the bounty list, doing the bare minimum to claim the bounty, and then moving on to something else, right, when it's really like a 5 year, 10 year project, that needs constant care and love.
And I this is something I've struggled with because of OpenSats. I mean, we've talked many times about releasing bounties for OpenSats, and I personally just don't think it's something we should get into. Now on the flip side, I think it's important to realize, that that both j b 55 and Cali received bounties from HRF that were judged like, the judge judges was the Open Sats board. So strike provided the money, HRF custody the money and released the bounties, and then Open Sats judge 2 was successful. And you could kind of, like Cashew was almost a direct result of Cali winning that bounty. So that was just like a massive success.
And then with j b 55, it was lightning payment related. It was static payment codes and it, like, kind of led the way for zaps, but not really, but a little bit. So I would put those as 2, like, major successes for bounties. So I'm not, like, completely against the idea, but I think in the overwhelming majority of cases, they don't result in, like, a
[01:20:33] Fran:
highly used end product. But I could be wrong. I mean No. No. Actually, I I do agree with what you say, and maybe boundaries was not the right word to use here because Yeah. All that is true. And and I see it. It's really problematic. And who defines, you know, when a bounty should be given up? Yeah. But I guess I guess it was more about voting with sats for features, so there's no no, you can just upvote with Sats, for example, and that's not exactly a bounty.
[01:21:02] ODELL:
Right. I like that idea.
[01:21:04] Fran:
And then when I'm talking about, like, these people coming and just fulfilling the jobs, it can just be, like, whatever you do on on what are these sites like, Workana or Fiber or whatever. It's just it's just a job. It's not a bounty. You can even, like, you know, if someone I charge this amount or you can put out, a query, a request. I want this stuff, and then someone comes as well. This is the price or this is the hourly price or whatever. But the point here being, like, just make it make the market more dynamic than what it is right now.
[01:21:39] ODELL:
Yeah. I've seen with, like, SaaS software that I've used in the past, I've seen, like like, if you're a paying user, there's, like, community boards where you can, like, upvote different features that you wanna see, and then people, like, they they grant you like, every quarter, you have 10 votes or something. And, like, you can, like, move up and down the board in terms of how many upvotes it has. Like, you throw sats behind that. I think that could be quite powerful. That actually makes sense to me. Like, feature like act like, working software with users that are ideally already paying users, and they're they they have feature requests that they want improvements, iterations, you know, things to that makes sense to me.
[01:22:27] Fran:
Yeah. Definitely. It's it's, it's just speaking with with value more than just words and and seeing, hey. Actually, people are are just going something I didn't wanna put much priority on. Like, it's it's it's exploring all these stats, so maybe I'm not gonna focus on that. But, again, as you say, like, sometimes the bounties are are are very narrowly defined whereas, like, this feature, but maybe you have bigger plans for your project that requires some other work beforehand. Anyway, it's just we'll we'll explore, these things with time. You know, a lot of it is is is kind of dreaming too.
So a lot of stuff to get done in, in the next in the next versions, which, you know, I I think Zacks are are coming very soon.
[01:23:15] ODELL:
Awesome. Are you you're on an Open Science. You do you get an Open Science grant? Yes. I did. Awesome. I as you can tell, we're a little bit overwhelmed over there. I have to ask you if you have a if you have a grant or not. What was what's been your experience with that process?
[01:23:36] Fran:
Got it, like, a a year ago, and, I was I was for SCC zero one in Madera with Right. And that was a little bit like where where Zaps are really started because I would I would I just arrived there fresh with the idea and started, you know, talking talking to Gigi, talking to Karma, and talking to, like, a bunch of the guys that were there. So, it was it was just great coincidence, you know, to, like, have had that, you know, not straight come to my life and the frustration to actually solve the problem and also the grant and Madeira, everything together was just kind of crazy. So I'm really grateful, for all that.
But I should say, I I I really appreciate all you're doing with open sets. I think you get a lot of hate for, like, thank us work. If people wanna see this kind of stuff and don't like it, they just go free and set up their own fun. Like, I just I just found all the criticism kinda crazy, but I will say that, ideally, my my my my dream is just get out of it. You know? I wanna get out of it. I I reapplied to it because it's kinda early days, but, you know, the best way for a project is try to make sure that the market is actually validating what you're building. And a way of doing that is is just try to, you know, see how many people are are actually paying for for your product. But, again, it's it's early for Nasr. So, I mean, it's difficult
[01:25:12] ODELL:
it's a difficult line to draw there. Yeah. I mean, so 2 things. First of all, what he's referring to is Sovereign Engineering, which is like this really impressive, almost incubator like program, that Gigi and Pablo run in in Madera. That's not like a formal incubator that you'd be used to with, like, an incubator with, like, VC funds and stuff. It's just like a bunch of Freedom Tech developers that all meet for a couple months and just hack, They in Madera.
[01:25:46] Fran:
Matt. What? They walk and talk.
[01:25:49] ODELL:
Walk and talk. Yeah. It's impressive. Like, the caliber of projects and developers that come out of there, I mean, I don't think it can really be overstated. It's really cool what they're what they're doing over there. I'm I'm really impressed. I still haven't made it over to Madera myself. I need to make it over. But then the second piece, was, I mean, that's my dream. My dream is that Open Sats is the bootstrap mechanism. Right? Like, what I wanna see is I wanna see sustainable FreedomTech software. So sustainable open source software that's monetized with Bitcoin is I think it it's possible for the first time ever. Like, this is relatively new. Like, if you were an open source developer, at the very least, if you were gonna try and create sustainable software with an ethical business model, you had to integrate into the traditional financial system and accept credit cards and all this other nonsense.
And it automatically added permission to it, and it automatically made everything much more difficult. But now that we have permissionless money, and now that we have permissionless communication with Nostr, you combine the three things together, open source software with Nostr and Bitcoin, and you have this ability to have sustainable business models that are ethical that we've never seen before. And, hopefully, we see a bunch of projects come out of Open Sats where they got bootstrapped for a year or 2 years or 3 years, and then they become sustainable and actually have a revenue and, like, generation and actually bring in bring in SaaS flow and and and can be independent. That's the dream. That would be ideal. And they contribute back to open SaaS. Exactly.
It's a beautiful flywheel.
[01:27:33] Fran:
Yeah. Let's see what we what we can do, but a lot of work to be done. It's kinda kinda crazy. Yeah. Well I was planning to end the year with way more features and things, but, you know, just doing what, you know, what I can. But, yeah, Zaps Zaps next. And, hopefully, I think I the iOS getting getting into iOS and so on will will take a bit longer.
[01:28:08] ODELL:
Maybe, like, with Yeah. I mean, screw iOS for now. I mean, Mac Mac and Linux, like, desktop would be Yeah. Awesome
[01:28:18] Fran:
and and more doable. Able to to move to these operating systems, right, if, like, if they're feeling too oppressed in Right. In Apple jail. So
[01:28:28] ODELL:
I, it'd be huge to have it on desktop, especially with, like, the Bitcoiner hat on. Like, it'd be great to and and the CLI doesn't count. Like, otherwise, we might as well just be verifying PGP, signatures. Like, a nice pretty GUI for installing Bitcoin app specifically would be huge.
[01:28:50] Fran:
Yeah. For sure. I know that we'll have more much more usage, but maybe not for you, but for a lot of people, just having having that on on the CLI as well, it it's massive because it's just way easier than PGP anyway. And you can on the command line, you can see your web of trust as well. So, like, why why not have
[01:29:13] ODELL:
Fair enough. Yeah. I I get I I appreciate that. So
[01:29:19] Fran:
as I mentioned, Sparrow, you know, like, that that will be one of my dreams come true. The day where I can I can see a Craig Raw signed release and install it on Tap Store, you know, on my desktop? That that that I think would be massive. Well, I mean, to people who say that podcasts are useless,
[01:29:42] ODELL:
I actually I convinced Craig on a podcast to add his signature verification GUI. Have you used the signature verification verification GUI that he has in Sparrow now? I haven't, but I know it exists. Yeah. So, like, you can once you have a trusted version of Sparrow installed, right, so, obviously, you need to do PGP verification on the first install, which you need to do for Zapstore as well. After that, if you install if if you download any updates to Sparrow or, like, 9 different project Bitcoin projects that he has hard coded the PGP keys into Sparrow for, You can just drag and drop it into Sparrow, and it will do the PGP verification for you.
[01:30:27] Fran:
Mhmm.
[01:30:29] ODELL:
And he he kind of rejected the idea at first because it was wasn't, like, pure enough from a security standpoint, which I respect. Like, Craig is a very pure pure man. But he finally he finally did it, and he implemented it in, like, a super smooth way. So you can actually, like, ins you can download a new Bitcoin Core binary, and you can just drag that into Sparrow's GUI, and it'll just automatically verify it for you, which is pretty beautiful.
[01:30:57] Fran:
No. That's that's amazing. It's, it's it's great to have a
[01:31:02] ODELL:
I I'm but my point is is just, like, just years of being battered down by anytime you tell someone to go into fucking command line, they just their eyes glaze over. You know? There's there's some of us. Right? The ride or dies will do it. But, okay. Awesome. I, friend, this has been great. This has been a great chat. I've thoroughly enjoyed it. I I I really do think that ZapStore can be one of the killer apps for Nostr. I think there's a lot of people right now, we're at the the point in Nasr where we're hearing from Bitcoiners the things we heard from Bitcoin deniers for a long time, which is I don't I don't like Bitcoin, but I like blockchain.
It to me is like I when people say, I like Nostr, but I don't like the social media aspects because I think you need the shitposting social media to bootstrap everything else, and Zapstore is one of those things. Right? Zapstore is one of those things that there is thousands of Bitcoiners, hopefully, 100 of thousands at least of Bitcoiners that are out there that are like, we need an easy permissionless, you know, app store that is actually, like, verifying releases, in in a in a open way. And I think for a lot of them, Zapstore is the unlock. When I mentioned Zapstore, like, they they realized they're like, oh, okay. There's actually something here. Maybe I should pay attention to Nostril.
[01:32:42] Fran:
Yeah. Fully agree. And maybe even people who never heard about Nostril get into whether that is Zapstore or is Primal or any other project where you just get into it and all of a sudden they realize, oh, actually, I have this thing that is it's an NSEC, and I can move it around and just go into these other clients. Like, I think for a lot of people that will that will be the the UX. You know? Not everyone will will put up with understanding relays and NSACs and signers and all this all this stuff, because you just lose people. I I myself in the comp in the in my opinion, bad awful conference in Buenos Aires that you were at as well. Like, I was I was, actively you know, in the booth just helping onboard people.
And because other other people had already told them which clients they could have, they kinda chose. A lot of them were on demos, but this is not pointed to a particular, app. Could be demos, amethyst, or primal or whatever, but, like, all of them had a lot of problems and onboarding was terrible. I had to, like, kind of, like, made up excuses, you know, on there while while people were asking questions like, why don't I see who you just follow me. Why I don't see your name or I didn't get a notification or what what is this end up thing? Like, just too many questions and I was happy that these people were eager to try and ask her because if if you someone is, like, with not much energy to do it, like, you just completely lose them. So Yeah. I could talk a lot about onboarding, which I I feel is super important. And, obviously,
[01:34:32] ODELL:
Zastor, at some point, will have some kind of onboarding. A Let's talk about onboarding. I mean, I have some time still. You wanna talk about onboarding? I mean, onboarding's horrible right now. Let's talk about onboarding. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. What's your opinion on on the current state, and how how can we improve?
[01:34:51] Fran:
Well, I posted something about on ramps versus on the walls or something like that because I feel like some for some people, this is not a ramp from where they're at. It's just a fucking wall. You know? Right. It's like, oh, this is too difficult. I'll I'll I'll just you know? Oh, maybe next time. Right? So you just lose them. I think this has been the this experience is shared. I I heard other devs talking about this that the experience when they were actually I think, even Will from demos was was talking about, like, they they try to onboard someone and it's like, oh, actually, this is kind of painful. You know? There's, like, too many hiccups in the world. Like, it should be, like, way smoother. And the way I'm thinking about it is, like, well, there is some trust involved. Maybe we should not try to do everything permissionless and self sovereign, like, from, like, minute 10, but just gradually start, you know, showing people the way. So that's why I also think that it could be like you could think about, like, a Trojan horse. Maybe this this is just the way the word I use, but maybe they should know about relays and their end sec a bit later on the journey, like, not in the first minute. You know? And this is not trying to rob them. I think a lot of people is like, oh, no. This is like slave tech if you do that. No. Right. Because people you need to meet them where they're at. So whether that is a custodial solution, it's of some of some sort, but it all it will all depend. Like, if if you are, not malicious, then you will eventually let the user, you know, gather NSEC. Maybe they can change their NSEC because there were if they use the network for a month, you know, now they, you know, they kinda get the hang of it. Maybe you can say, actually, you could do you wanna bootstrap maybe to get a new a fresh new NSEC and do it, like, in a soft song way, or you wanna keep you I don't know. I don't have the answers to all that, but I feel like just doing everything, like, as I said, like, presenting all these new concepts, it it's it's not gonna work. And if you lose people, you probably lose them for a long time.
[01:37:06] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting dynamic. Right? And, you know, I came from the Bitcoin side first, so a lot of my, perspectives are influenced by the Bitcoin experience. And it it's very similar in Bitcoin land, where on one side, there's a bunch of people that realize that, okay. Some trade offs need to be made in order to onboard people more easily. And then there's, you know, this there's a there's a loud group of people that are also that they get they get really mad when those trade offs are made. So you're kinda like damned if you do, damned if you don't. Mhmm. And you kind of touched on that a little bit. Right? Like, oh, this is evil slave tech. And, I mean, a perfect example of that in the Nostra ecosystem, I think, is Primal. I think Primal is making certain trade offs to try and improve the onboarding experience.
Still not a great onboarding experience. Right? But, trying to make certain trade offs to make that onboarding experience much much smoother. Right? Don't show someone an NSEC right away. Like, still keep it locally and, you know, hold it locally. Don't keep it in a custodial fashion. Don't take access of of the the person's end sync. Let them export it when they're ready, but don't show it to them right away. The caching server. Right? This idea that there's a server sitting in between you and Relays in terms of reading content, very controversial, But it does make it less important which relays you have chosen in the beginning, and it also ends up in a result where the first time you load it, you're not gonna get, like, dick pics or other things that you might not be expecting, right, because there is, a not safe for work filter that is default on that you can turn off. Right? The fact that it's default on instead of default off that you could opt into, another controversial thing. The custodial wallet that's powered by Strike, very controversial.
You know, it's it's got it's got KYC built into it where you have to put your name and your email and other information there. But it makes zaps very straightforward in the beginning before they can figure out how to use a lightning rod. They might not even know what SATs are in the beginning. And I think what's important here is that people should be trying all different things. Right? Like, one one of our superpowers here is that we can have many dep different developer options many different options provided by developers because developers can provide all these different options without permission and see what works and but there should be red lines, and and that's probably where all the arguments happen. Right? Like, for me, my red line is something like what ZBD was doing, which was the NSEC itself was custodial.
Right? It was like they couldn't even the users couldn't even export their NSEC. I think they might have changed it, but for a while, that was the case, which seems incredibly, incredibly predatory. But that's why we all always get into arguments because everyone has a different red line. Right? For some people, the caching server on on on primal might be a red line or the the wallet could be a red line. But, like, also, like, you go on the opposite side and you're like, okay. Well, if there's not a Lightning wallet built into a client, like, most people aren't gonna zap and most people aren't gonna receive zaps. They're never even gonna taste it. They're not even gonna know what they're missing.
So it's kind of a in an open systems, it's a very messy situation. I don't know if I necessarily have the answers, except that I do want developers to feel like they're in a place where where they can experiment with many different things and and see what works. The other controversial thing with primal is the auto follows based on your interests, which is not an ideal situation. I know Dorsey specifically hates it. I think he partially feels guilty that he, like, empowered this, like, blue check elite class in the early days of Twitter. And, you know, there's plenty of conspiracies on the primal side about doing something similar there.
I mean, I think probably a better situation is some kind of, like, DVM feeds, algo feeds, or something that populate. But, like, I when I load up Amethyst for the first time, you're, like, onboarding someone to Amethyst for the first time, it's literally just an empty feed. You're, like, pulled to refresh, and there's nothing there because you don't follow anybody. And that's that's really that's that's really hard for new users. It's just like, watch them. Onboard a new user, watch how they interact with the protocol, and, like, let's make it a little bit easier for them. Let's try out different things and see how how it works. That's my Yeah.
[01:41:47] Fran:
I I appreciate what primal is trying to do. I think it could be from my perspective, it could be improved in that. For example, when you I believe when you're offered the the wallet, it's not super evident that you could skip it or or just input your own nostrilater connect string or something like that. I think I gave I gave, Millian, the feedback.
[01:42:17] ODELL:
Well, to go back to our previous conversation, on iOS, the only way to send zaps is through the built in wallet. And that's because he gives a portion of you can also buy Bitcoin in the wallet, and he limits it to $5 at a time in terms of purchases, but you can buy Bitcoin in the wallet. And if you buy Bitcoin, he gives Apple a cut. And so we don't you know, we're we're not sure if that's gonna continue to work and Zaps will remain in the iOS wallet. It's kind of like it's like kind of a gray zone. Right? But, like, right now, Apple's getting a cut of quote, unquote in app purchases, which is you buying Sats in the wallet. So and I I believe he tried to add NWC to that, and it got not approved in the App Store. But on Android, you can use NWC.
It's probably not front and center. I think probably a lot of that is, like, trying to keep the interface relatively simple similar. But you can add Nasr WalletConnect to send Zaps from an external wallet. And then obviously on both, you can set any lightning wallet you want for receive. Right? So that was an interesting choice that I saw Marty made, Marty Maum made for Iris, which was every user by default gets automatically set up with an Mpub dot cash custodial cashew wallet. And the beauty there is NPUB dot cash has no sign up process. Like, you just put an NPUB in front of at NPUB dot cash and that's a valid lightning that's a valid lightning wallet.
So Marty's just offloading that. Right? Now Eggie, who's the maintainer of mpub.cash, I've I've is a clearly to me, a good actor. But, like, you do run the risk that he could just, like, rug your entire user base, that you're just, like, offloading this capability. And so, like, for better or for worse, like, 1,000,000 doesn't 1,000,000 wants to make sure that he has control of his destiny. He doesn't want anyone to argue, but I think that's an interesting trade off. That, like, kinda makes sense to me. But, like, the idea that a user as as I don't know how we get there. Maybe it's not I just keep going all all over the place, but nutsack or whatever nutsaps with that Pablo's working on, in terms of keeping the Cashew wallet directly on relays and, like, sharded elements on relays.
What I want the end result should be that a user signs up to Nasr and they can immediately receive Zaps. I think that's a key element. Like, their first post without doing something like heavy friction wise can just receive Zaps seems like it's important. And and from the sender side, I feel that. Like, you go to zap someone and it doesn't work, and then you have to post underneath, and you're like, can you please set up a lightning wallet? Like, this is my recommendation. You can do this. And with me, it's even worse because I have to do it in all caps because I've committed. So then there's, like, a brand new user, and I'm, like, hitting them with, like, 2 paragraphs, all caps, like, go to mpub.cash, sign up here, sign up there. Like, there's a lot of friction there. There's a lot of things we can work on.
[01:45:46] Fran:
Definitely. But it all boils down to trust, like, and how that gradient of trust, how do you wanna expose that? And be it Casio, which is fascinating. I think that that could be why because, like, you know, self custodian custodial lighting channels and all that, it's it's another huge wall for for new users that aren't on premise. So it's a great solution to it. But on the on the other hand, it's like we're talking about, like, Millian in the sense is acting as a curator in a way like we were talking about the app stores, right? It's custodial, it's KYC, but you don't get dick pics. So, it might be a fantastic trade off for some people. I also wanted to say, like, not every project in Nasr, we need we need to understand that not every project in Nasr will be, like, completely interoperable.
You know, we'll we'll have clients, you were mentioning CBD, but, if if we're gonna grow, these actors will appear, and it's just that the market that needs to sort out, you know, as a user, you will get you you might hear a bad reputation because, you know, because they're, like, more close product, but maybe for a lot of people, they don't care. So, I mean, we will see these things on us, especially if decentralized. We you cannot stop any of the people come here and leech and be parasites. Hopefully, we will have, like, so great products that people will wanna prefer them and choose them, and they will have, like, in general, better reputation. Right? Because I hope that we keep the the culture in that even though you're not exposed to your end sec in in the very beginning, you know, that is just like in Bitcoin. Right?
Run your own node. It's like, hold your keys. Like, we keep pushing this because maybe users are not are not ready in in in minute 0, but they are ready, you know, after 1, 2 months, whatever that may be. And that at that point, they should be able to take it out and actually, you know, check if their provider, their social media service is not rubbing them. It's like, oh, shit. Where's my insight? You're not giving it to me. You know? Well, this is not, sir. I'm supposed to be it's supposed to be interoperable, so I want my insight. So I hope that those actors, like, get get punished in in some way, but we're not gonna be able to stop them.
[01:48:09] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I think a good example there from Bitcoin land is well, first of all, before seeds existed, backups were incredibly difficult. But then after seeds existed, there was all these self custody wallets that when you first launched the wallet, it would make you write down your 12 or 24 words, then rewrite them into the into the app to make sure you had them or whatnot. And finally, developers started to come around and realize, like, maybe that's not the first thing you should hit users with. Like, you can hit them with a modal and, like, a little pop up 3 weeks, 4 weeks, 2 months, 3 months down the line and be like, you haven't backed up your wallet. You should back up your wallet. But, like, in the beginning, you should just greet them with send and receive. You know? Just get them in the door, get them comfortable, and then when they have an actual amount that they need to back up and and figure out how things work, then you hit them with it. I think that's a really good example of of it in practice, and we can have kinda similar on Nostra. Right?
[01:49:10] Fran:
Yeah. Def it's it's it's better to have a a, let's say, a custodial Nostra or Bitcoin user than no user at all.
[01:49:20] ODELL:
So, you know, we'll do we'll do our best to to try Yeah. I mean, I would push back. That's not necessarily custodial. Like, it it's still self custody. Like, the NSEC is in your app. You just don't know it exists, and you don't know how to back it up until a little bit later. You know? And if your phone, like, falls in the toilet or something in the meantime, you know, okay. Well, you just lost you just lost your nostril account. It's like not the end of the world. Yeah.
[01:49:47] Fran:
Okay, Fran. Yeah. Go on. Sorry. No. I just just to add, but it it it's critical that we we put emphasis on on all this if we want not Nasr to grow.
[01:49:57] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, with Nasr too, like, with Bitcoin wallets, we do this thing. I see this comment from Muni, about the amount you triggered on Bitcoin wallets. Like, a lot of developers do this thing. It's like once you hit a certain amount or you received a certain number of transactions, that's when we hit you with the you should back up your wallet. You haven't backed up your wallet yet. And we can easily do that with Nazdar too. It can be, you know, you've done 20 events or you've done a 100 events. You know? You've you've made 50 posts, and you've done a bunch of likes and maybe some zaps or whatever. Now consider backing up your wallet. Right? Like, you can have different KPIs that trigger Yeah. When even the back not backing up your wallet, but backing up your and making sure it's secure. And, oh, by the way, here's, like, a little bit of a tool tip on you can install other apps, and you can use this, use that.
[01:50:46] Fran:
Yeah. The whole discovery thing, but I hope we can use this this this cool freedom tech like Frost or something like that to to make the whole, like, custodial aspect even better. Right. That would be fantastic. Well, like, multi sig. Like, multi sig. Like, maybe you have good students that that none of them can run you. I don't know how this works exactly, but the idea that it's it's not that your provider just holds your insect, but you can somehow recover it, you know, by,
[01:51:15] ODELL:
all these participants collaborating and giving it back to you. Yeah. I mean, you could do, like, collaborative custody, like, like an Unchained or Casa for the Bitcoin metaphor.
[01:51:26] Fran:
Yep.
[01:51:28] ODELL:
And you could even do a situation where it's, like, multi institutional or whatever. It's like, you know, j b 50 Domus holds a key. Amethyst holds a key. Primal holds a key. And, like, you need 2 of 3, to to actually send a message or something like that. I don't know. There's Frost gives us a lot of options because it's external of the protocol. So you don't actually need any protocol changes, same with on Bitcoin, which is what makes it fascinating. Fran, I've had you for for for a long time. I need you to get back and work on Zapstore so you can ship some more releases.
Do you have any Thank you for joining us. Do you have any final thoughts for the freaks before we wrap?
[01:52:10] Fran:
No. No. I appreciate this conversation. I need to catch up with the chat and see what people were asking or or zapping. But Oh, that actually reminds me. Now I'm gonna cut you off on your final thoughts.
[01:52:21] ODELL:
Subprime asked way earlier, in the Zap stream, how can users of Zapstore verify that a downloaded APK is actually signed by a specific master key?
[01:52:34] Fran:
You can go to our master profile, our con 0, and and check that the hash matches. Like, I tried to explain it on the Zapstore, profile bit, there's every time there's a new release, there's a hash published there in in the kind of 0 in the, you know, in the profile. But that's for the that's for the actual Zapstore release. Right? Because
[01:53:00] ODELL:
for the actual when you're downloading apps within Zapstore, your client is just seamlessly doing it locally. Right? It's just checking
[01:53:08] Fran:
the signature locally. Is that what's happening? You yes. Absolutely. You are, in that case, trusting Zapstore to do all this work for you. I think there's no it is actually when it when it basically, it gets complicated, but, like, the the events that the dev is is signing, link to the hash. Okay? So you have an event that says the hash of the binary you've already installed is this. And what we're doing is we are downloading the the let's say, this the APK in this case. We're calculating the hash, and we are seeing if it matches with what the developer
[01:53:48] ODELL:
Right. Said.
[01:53:50] Fran:
And that if if there's a hash hash mismatch, which actually has happened, I think a lot of people had issues with that because, well, there's another because we also in Android, we get, APK. Every every APK is also signed by a certificate. So Android is, like, Android's security model, and we also check that. So if there's a mismatch beforehand, we will warn you that this is not updatable or it's, like, installable always, but not updatable. So, yeah, all of all of that complicated stuff, like, is happening within SaaS or that's that's why it is a tool.
And at some point, like but I don't think we can minimize the trust on that one. You know? Like, if there are open to suggestions, but it's just kind of weird. Can you,
[01:54:38] ODELL:
like, it'd be nice in Zapstore if I if you could link out to the actual event that was, like, the sign message of the hash if someone wanted to then go verify that the hash of the APK actually manually matched the hash in the event. Is that already possible? Am I
[01:54:55] Fran:
I think that is is it's just adding complexity for no gain because Nobody's gonna do it. If if I wanted if I'm if you're gonna open the event from the app itself, you you're you're also trusting me. So why just not trust me the whole way? You could go you could go to to the really what's so funny.
[01:55:16] ODELL:
No. I mean, that's a I mean, you make a good point, but it's
[01:55:19] Fran:
No. What I'm saying, you could go if you wanted to get to that level, just go to just hit the relay. Hit relay.sapps.dev and search for your app, and you'll you'll get the events. And you Right. And all the events are on that relay. You can you can verify those events. But I'm happy to reconsider or just get a bunch of ideas and see if if we for for for freaks that are, you know, we don't don't wanna trust as much, like, if if there's, like, something that makes sense that adds security and not just security theater.
[01:55:56] ODELL:
No. Yeah. I mean, that that makes sense to me. That's, like, probably mostly security theater. Like, power users can actually go verify. And, I mean, people can build other apps that are that are pulling from the same events, and you can actually have multiple apps be verifying. And I I really like the DVM reproducible builds idea. That's a cool concept. Okay. So now I I interrupt you. Final thoughts.
[01:56:21] Fran:
Downloads app, and and be patient, you know, with with the features, but I have you have big plans for this. Let's see what, you know, what what's possible, but I'm still super keen on on on on exploring and going deeper on this and see what, you know, what can be built. But but, hopefully, just get out of the as much as I love my nostril bubble, try to get out and maybe expose this to to more people outside of this world. Ideally, the next huge step would be, get the wider, FOSS developer community interested in this. That would be that would be great. I think, hopefully, without necessarily, like, showing this onto the faces, like, Nostra and Bitcoin, but one once they find it, like, game changer, I hope, you know, then they will discover or or be friends with with with this tech, right, and and and hopefully adopt it for for even for other projects.
And, obviously, the the dream here, because I've been an open source dev, like, since forever, I'm really grateful for all the stuff that I could build, through open source. Obviously, not to mention lost in Bitcoin. It's it's a way of giving back, like, the fact of enabling devs to, like, just lower the friction, as much as possible and improve the discoverability so that devs can actually make a living out of their apps. Like, that's my that's really my dream. So I hope to to achieve that.
[01:58:11] ODELL:
I love it. Well, Fran, thank you for joining us. Thank you for building Zapstore. Freaks, you can find Zapstore at zapstore.dev. I'm gonna link to that in the show notes. I'm also gonna link to Fran's, Noster account. Follow him on Noster. Huge shout out to the who joined us in the live chat. I mentioned earlier that Brian zapped a 100000 sets. Our second biggest zap was Mav 21, who zapped 10,000 sets. And then, of course, you can also support the show through podcasting 2 point o apps like fountain podcasts. Our 2 low our 2 largest boosts, from podcasting 2.0 from last episode was Beholder with 21,212 sats and Oscar Mayer, who's, the cofounder of, Fountain, with 10,000 sats.
Briggs, we have no ads. We have no sponsors. This is a pure value for value show. Think it's probably the largest, no ads Sats funded show that is not run by Adam Curry. So thank you, Freaks, for making that possible. The Sats really they keep me going. They it's it's it's it's wonderful finding out that you guys find value from it, so thank you for supporting the show. And once again, Fran, thank you for joining us.
[01:59:37] Fran:
Thank you, Roy.
[01:59:39] ODELL:
Keep pushing. Appreciate you. You too. Thanks.
[01:59:43] Fran:
Cheers. Cheers.
[01:59:49] Unknown:
Instead of looking up to Thomas Jefferson or or looking up to Nikola Tesla or looking up to to Magellan. I mean, kids, Magellan's a lot cooler than Justin Bieber. He's circumnavigated with one ship, the entire planet. That's destiny. That's will. That's striving. That's being a trailblazer and explorer. Going into space, mathematics, quantum mechanics, the secrets of the universe. It's all there. Life is fiery with its beauty. It's incredible detail. Toning into it. Unlock your evil potential. Definct the bubbles you wanna shatter your mind. Your doorways to perception.
To live in this nightmare system these control freaks have created. That's why I don't care about my own life. It's about what I continue to live to fight them. That's why I don't have fear. I only have fear of myself and my flesh and not be up to the challenge. When I ask you to look in the mirror and ask yourself, what are you
Bitcoin hitting an all time high on continued enthusiasm over the new administration, policies. Here's what president-elect Trump told our Jim Cramer during his visit right here to the New York Stock Exchange just last week about crypto.
[00:00:14] Unknown:
Your embrace in crypto, very different from the previous administration. Strategic Petroleum Reserve like for crypto? Yeah. I think so. I we're gonna do something great with crypto because we don't want China or anybody else, not just China, but others are embracing it, and we wanna be the head.
[00:00:30] Unknown:
One big beneficiary of the Bitcoin rally has been MicroStrategy, the stock up more than 500% just this year. MicroStrategy will now be added to the Nasdaq 100 on December 23rd in its annual rebalancing. The company currently holds 439 1,000 Bitcoin after announcing another purchase just this morning. Joining us is MicroStrategy cofounder and executive chairman, Michael Saylor. Well, you're you're the guest of the moment. So is there a limit to how much Bitcoin you are going to acquire?
[00:00:59] Michael Saylor:
No. I I've said we'll just keep buying the top forever. Every day is a good day to buy Bitcoin. We look at it as cyber Manhattan. I would have bought Manhattan a 100 years ago, 200 years ago, every year for the past 300 years. You pay a little bit more than the person that bought Manhattan before you, but it's always a good investment to invest in the economic capital of the free world.
[00:01:24] Unknown:
Do you think that Trump is serious about creating this Bitcoin reserve, and how how would that work?
[00:01:29] Michael Saylor:
I think he is. And, you know, if you think about the Louisiana Purchase, California, and Alaska, we paid $40,000,000 to buy 75% of the United States. Nobody remembers the $40,000,000. But if you know where the money is going, you should buy the property by the future. And in this case, the Lummis plan calls for a 1,000,000,000 Bitcoin acquisition. That's worth $16,000,000,000,000 to the country. RFK proposed 4,000,000,000 Bitcoin that would be worth about $56,000,000,000,000. There's room for Trump to go beyond that, even $81,000,000,000,000 in gains.
And that's against 36,000,000,000,000 in in the US national debt. So all the capital outside the US and all of the antiquated 20th century capital is gonna flow into digital assets. It's gonna flow into the Bitcoin network. And the logical thing is for the US to buy it now and own the future.
[00:02:25] Unknown:
And just chase it up at any price?
[00:02:28] Michael Saylor:
I don't I think, just a progressive acquisition of it makes sense. Keep in mind, if you bought Manhattan from 16 50 to 1700 a little bit every single year, it would have been a good acquisition. Right now, we can buy, the United States could literally buy 20, 25% of the Bitcoin network either by trading out its existing gold stores or just by just by borrowing a small trace amount of money. And so the Bitcoin network, it could go up by a factor of a 100. You might as well buy it before it hundred x's.
[00:03:03] Unknown:
Your your Manhattan analog is really interesting, Michael, because the reason it may would have made sense to buy Manhattan is because they agreed it's gonna be on a grid going north. And I wonder if you see similar, policy analogs right now in crypto. Are we that organized?
[00:03:19] Michael Saylor:
You know, the world wants a digital assets framework, and the United States has a great opportunity to define a digital assets framework. We need to define the definitions of a digital commodity, a currency, a security, a token, an NFT, and an asset backed token, and we need the rights and responsibilities of issuers and the exchanges and the owners. But if that takes consensus from the executive branch, the house, the senate, and the industry, and we didn't have that for the past 4 years. The opportunity for the US, it's it's to issue $10,000,000,000,000 of digital currency and back to dollar.
It's to capture $50,000,000,000,000 of capital gain on the digital capital network. And, I do believe with the digital assets framework that this administration could put forward, there's no reason why we won't see $500,000,000,000,000 of assets tokenized over the next 21 years and 280,000,000,000,000 in capital flow into the digital capital network that is Bitcoin. And where does that leave Bitcoin's eventual price? My 21 year forecast is for Bitcoin, to appreciate about 29% a year, ARR, to $13,000,000 a coin by the year 2045.
[00:04:33] Unknown:
I mean, your strategy is really interesting because you're really the first company to adopt Bitcoin as your primary's treasury reserve asset. Isn't that risky? Where does the risk lie besides just in the price falling?
[00:04:48] Michael Saylor:
Well, 4 years ago, the accounting was toxic. It was indefinite and tangible, and it was unclear whether the SEC would embrace Bitcoin as a digital commodity. And it was unclear what the regulatory regime would be. That has that has been substantially derisked in the year 2024. And so now you really have companies on the Bitcoin standard where they use a digital commodity like Bitcoin, which is 60 ARR, 60 vol, or companies on the US dollar standard, which is 0 vol, 0 ARR. MicroStrategy is the largest hole, the largest holder of digital assets in the world. Now we've got $46,000,000,000 worth of Bitcoin, and and we're leveraging that.
[00:05:31] Unknown:
So what do you say to people who say, well, it's just a it's a Ponzi scheme. Because every time Bitcoin goes up, you issue more equity and debt to buy more Bitcoin. It just keeps going and going and going.
[00:05:41] Michael Saylor:
Yeah. Just like, developers in Manhattan, every time Manhattan real estate goes up in value, they issue more debt to develop more real estate. That's why your buildings are so tall in New York City. It's been going on for 350 years. I would call it an economy.
[00:05:57] Unknown:
Fair. The other you know, it's not the only innovation going on right now, Michael. This announcement out of Alphabet last week regarding quantum computing kinda refreshed into that debate about whether Bitcoin or crypto encryption can survive long term advances in quantum. How can it?
[00:06:14] Michael Saylor:
There's nobody more sophisticated with regard to encryption than the Bitcoin community. Satoshi was writing about this 15 years ago. The quantum benchmark that Google ran has no practical use in the real world right now. It's an impressive benchmark. But in fact, if anybody ever develops a super powerful computer that can crack encryption, it's gonna be a challenge for Microsoft, Google, the US government, every company on earth. And of course, the entire technology community is is gonna be focused on that. When that happens, we'll all just upgrade our software with quantum resistant algorithms. Right now, the consensus in the community is is we're nowhere close to that being a threat.
[00:06:56] Unknown:
What sort of other policies are you hoping to get from a Trump administration that is definitely more crypto and has put in place people that are friendlier?
[00:07:06] Michael Saylor:
You know, the great opportunity in the United States is to is to issue the world's reserve digital currency. There's about a $150,000,000,000 of stable coin currency, and Tether is the leader. But they can't locate in the United States because we don't have a sufficiently clear regulatory framework for issuing digital currencies. If the US normalizes that, there's no reason why US banks and US companies can't issue $10,000,000,000,000 of digital currency backed by US dollar currency equivalence sitting in US banks. That would be tremendously good for the United States.
[00:07:41] Unknown:
But they don't wanna compete with the US dollar. I mean, Trump has made it he campaigned on it and has followed through with tariff threats that they want to keep the US dollar as the global reserve currency. So they don't wanna threaten that with Bitcoin.
[00:07:54] Michael Saylor:
No. I'm not talking about Bitcoin. I'm saying that the US should allow US banks and US corporations to issue a token backed by the US dollar that would be backed by 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars of US Like a stable coin.
[00:08:07] Unknown:
Yeah. A stable coin. Tether, Circle, they're stable coins. But isn't that a big threat to the monetary system, the Fed?
[00:08:15] Michael Saylor:
Well, if we if we actually normalize that, then there's gonna be $10,000,000,000,000 of demand for US treasuries. It's the best thing you could do for the dollar. What it means is that all 8,000,000,000 people on the planet will be using the US dollar on their Android phones and their iPhones in order to, in order to trade with each other. That would be great for American values and the American currency.
[00:08:38] Unknown:
Well, we kinda we already we have that with the US dollar. I do I do wonder
[00:08:42] Michael Saylor:
I mean, people have brought up before if you so pro Bitcoin and crypto and even stable coin, if that ultimately does represent a threat to the US dollar as the world has its currency. Sarah, the point is people in Russia and China and Africa and South America can't trade with the US dollar directly because they don't have US dollar bank accounts. They're using Tether, and they're using Tether because they desperately want access to the dollar on their mobile phone. And right now, the US doesn't have regulatory clarity that allows a US corporation to issue a US dollar backed stable coin that works for the Chinese, the Russians, the Africans, the Europeans. And so if the US wants to be the world reserve digital currency, you don't want a $150,000,000,000 issued by an offshore entity. What you want is $10,000,000,000,000 of US dollar stable coin issued by US regulated banks and US regulated companies with the with the money onshore in the United States backed by US treasuries.
The demand is there. We just need, a digital assets framework in order for that entire industry to come to life.
[00:09:51] Unknown:
Finally, Michael, we've been, mentioning your addition to the Nasdaq 100. I wonder what you think that says about the moment we're in.
[00:09:58] Michael Saylor:
Well, it's an enormously legitimizing for Bitcoin as the asset class for the entire crypto industry and, of course, for MicroStrategy since we're the largest holder of digital assets in the world right now. A 100 is a magic number. We've now got more than a $100,000,000,000 of open interest in our options market. We've got more than a $100,000,000,000 market cap. We've got more than a 100% volatility. We've been running a 100% ARR for the past 4 years, and we're holding $46,000,000,000 worth of Bitcoin right now that's up a 150% year to date.
So I just think it's a it's a tremendous milestone for us.
[00:10:36] Unknown:
Why should someone buy MicroStrategy, the stock, instead of Bitcoin, the asset, to gain exposure?
[00:10:43] Michael Saylor:
MicroStrategy is an operating company. And because we have that 46 $1,000,000,000 treasury, we can securitize Bitcoin using our treasury as collateral. So the bond market wants us to strip the volatility and the performance and the uncertainty off the asset and give them a lower yielding, more, more, predictable instrument. And so we're the leader in that market. And when we do that, we create high volatility, high performance equity, and the equity in the options market wants that. So let me give you a little number here. Year to date, we have issued securities both convertible bonds and equities at a premium to our underlying assets that created a 72.4% BTC yield.
That translates to a gain of a 136,965 Bitcoin without dilution or cost. At a 105,000 of Bitcoin, that's creating $14,380,000,000 in shareholder value. So how would you value a company that generated 14,400,000,000 in earnings a year growing a 100% year over year? And that that's what the MicroStrategy Treasury operation is doing, If you're a Bitcoiner, you would love that.
[00:11:59] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting to tie it to their to earnings per share there, not just a leverage levered bet on Bitcoin itself. Michael, thank you for joining us. Big day for you as it has been nearly every day, this year. We appreciate the time.
[00:12:13] Michael Saylor:
Thanks for having me, Sarah. Michael Sailor.
[00:13:01] ODELL:
Happy Bitcoin Tuesday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Citadel dispatch, the interactive live show focused on actual Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion. You just listened to, I think, the single longest intro clip in dispatch history. I don't know. I tried to clip it and make it shorter, but, Michael seemed to hit on a lot of notable things. And I felt like it would age in an interesting way over the next few years, so I wanted to cement it in its place in in dispatch history. So that's why that intro clip was there. Obviously, that was Michael Saylor of MicroStrategy on CNBC.
We will not be talking about anything that went on in that intro clip in classic dispatch fashion. I have, Fran here who is the lead dev and creator of Zapstore, which I personally think is one of the most underrated, interesting Nostra projects in the ecosystem. How's it going, Fran? It's going great. Thanks, Matt, for having me. Did I lose you in that long intro clip? Did I I'm sorry I I forced you to listen to 12 minutes of sailor.
[00:14:19] Fran:
It's sailor saying sailor things, so I kinda tune out a bit, but interesting for the time stamp.
[00:14:29] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, that's the whole reason the intro clips exist is because I think it's like an interesting time capsule. Like, there are people there are new Bitcoiners that are coming in now that are listening to all the old dispatches, so the thesis is working. You know? Like, they're going back and they're listening to clips from CNBC from, like, 3 years ago when they didn't really understand Bitcoin. And now it's basically just a forever Bitcoin podcast, largest Bitcoin podcast in the world. That inter clip was actually so long that we had ride or die freak Brian come into our ZapStream live chat, zap a 100,000 sats, and then leave before the clip ended and said he'll listen later on 2 x speed.
So that that's a new one. That would that's a new one. Thank you, Brian, for, supporting the show. If you're listening on YouTube or Twitch, the chat that's shown on screen is a Noster enabled live chat, which you can get to at sildispatch.com or by going to zap.stream/hotel. So, Fran, Zapstore, what is Zapstore?
[00:15:32] Fran:
When I started calling it a permissionless app store, because well, it's built on Nasr and basically every or pretty much every tech built on Nasr, kind of built on the foundation of being open and permissionless. Of course, we will see projects that are not bad, but, you know, in general, like, now in these stages, I think, you know, for the most part. So the idea is that you can you know, we we all, I think, been kind of frustrated with app stores. The typical experience when you think about app store, you probably, you know, think of the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store. And for a lot of people, it's just, you know, another app.
But, many others, especially developers, have had problems that I think are have a bad impression of these of these tools. They do have an important role, I believe. And, well, I could I could talk about it later more in detail, but, I would say that I have, like, I have my frustration around installing apps or in discovering apps, for a long time both as a developer and as a user. And in a way, it's like I wanted to see a solution in the world, and that's why, you know, everything came together along with Master, and that's how SaaS work was born. But, essentially, it's a way to to find apps without having, one only one centralized, curator.
[00:17:35] ODELL:
So, I guess, let's pull it back for a second. Were you were you a Bitcoiner first before you found Noster, before you started working on Noster?
[00:17:43] Fran:
Yeah.
[00:17:44] ODELL:
So why Noster? Why were you drawn to Noster?
[00:17:50] Fran:
So this is interesting because I was, the corner for well, you know, full stories are a bit complicated, but, on and off, I got deep into the rabbit hole, in 2020, but my first use of Bitcoin was around 2012, I believe. And, and at some point around, what, 2021, I think, I was so deep into the rabbit hole. I wanted to stop working on my client work and start doing something with Bitcoin, but I didn't know exactly how to go about it, what to do. So I started looking into lightning, but the possibilities of building stuff on lightning are quite restricted or I'm not creative enough.
So I I had a few ideas, but they were not great. So I spent actually, you know, actively looking for, what, for about almost 2 years. Like, what can I do? What can I do for Freedom Tech? Right? I I I really wish I could participate more, because I am a builder, and all I'm doing is listening to podcasts. So, at some point, just appear out of nowhere, and it felt like the perfect substrate to, you know, to build stuff with. So that's why I think today we see a lot of devs that are really excited, about Master because it just gives so many possibilities to build cool stuff.
It's, yeah, it's just a perfect substitute for all these things that we are actually building right now.
[00:19:40] ODELL:
Awesome. Yeah. I mean, I I mean, I that's why I was drawn to it as well. I mean, I think, there's only 2 projects in my lifetime that I've witnessed such organic developer interest, and that's Bitcoin and Noster. And and just the the fact that you can build stuff so just without permission on on on in on both protocols, I think is incredibly empowering to to developers around the world that they don't they don't have to ask anybody's permission. They can just start shipping code. And with, you have a little bit more, almost you have a little bit more freedom just because if you ship in production and something breaks, like, people's money isn't on the line.
So I think a lot of developers find that slightly less pressure environment better suited for them. But so the reason I bring this up is because in Bitcoin land, this is a problem that many of us have been trying to figure out an elegant solution for for a while, which is a developer ships a Bitcoin wallet, and you wanna make sure that that Bitcoin wallet is is not compromised when you actually use it to store your money. And so the way that modern society handles that problem, is the developer goes through a developer approval process with Apple or Google. And then when they ship a new binary, when they ship a new app release, Apple and Google make sure that it isn't changed from the time they ship it to when you download it, that someone doesn't sit in the middle and swap it out with the malicious version.
Now that obviously has a problem if if your goal is FreedomTech. Because if your goal is FreedomTech, you don't wanna have to trust Apple and Google in that process, and that trust is twofold. Right? The user's trusting Apple and Google not to actually maliciously swap it out themselves, but also the developers trusting them not to get canceled or removed from the platform. Right? We've seen, I think, like, almost within a few weeks of Domus being released, it got removed from the App Store, the the Apple App Store in China. And then later on when he added Zaps, Apple also removed it from the App Store and said you can't have Zaps in there unless we have our cut of the pie. This is in app purchases.
So just Domus alone has had 2 different instances where this Apple App Store monopoly gatekeeper has has stopped the release of that software and has dictated where that So Zapstore aims to go a different direction here. And I would also it behooves me to there's also a way you can do this without app stores, which is something called PGP verification, and GPG, which is the the open version of PGP and they're cross compatible. And this idea is that the developer is signing all the releases manually, and then the user is manually verifying that the signatures match up and the hash matches up and that the software hasn't been changed. But the problem there is it doesn't matter how much education you provide, most people will not do that. And that's why app stores reign supreme.
So, anyway, this is I I guess I'm selling your project for you, but this is why I'm really excited about Zapstore because your your concept is basically let's do an open permissionless app store where the nostril keys are the signatures so that you don't have to deal with PGP. You don't have to deal with any of of the signature schemes. You just simply press download, and it's a similar experience to the app store. I don't really have a question. I did was that a good explanation?
[00:23:41] Fran:
Definitely. Definitely. Just let me backtrack a little bit because you mentioned Bitcoin Nostra as permissionless tech. Right. I would say that, you know, you could build stuff without permission. At least for me, open source was, was that for a very long time. Maybe it was just coincidence, on when I, you know, was growing up and I had access to computers and open source, I believe, was getting more traction, so I was getting something bigger. And I think that itself enabled me and a lot of other people to build stuff with no permission. Right. I don't know how it worked before, but, you know, for a lot of software, maybe you needed to, purchase licenses or or ask for some kind of permission.
The fact that, you know, the say early 2000 where, you know, Linux was getting much more popular and there was, Java and, you know, a bunch of other tech, but open source really started taking off. And I think, sure, we didn't have an answer on Bitcoin, but you could build stuff and, you know, push it to the web pretty much asking permission. No one except maybe the dom domain name, but that's, like, a bit nit nitpicking.
[00:25:11] ODELL:
So The domain is our shit coin. So yeah. Uh-huh.
[00:25:15] Fran:
Right. Yeah. So, I mean, let's say that for me, I'm going back to the to the App Store topic. I've had issues with so I had frustrations during, like, multiple touch points because, as a user, I've been a Mac user, for a very, very long time, like, since 99 that I had a Mac. Oh, wow. And, and basically, yeah, on on desktop, like, you could always download executables, but, you know, as time passed, the, you know, the the Mac App Store, you know, is is a way that average people tend to download apps from on Mac. I think that came from the experiment on iOS, from the iOS App Store, which I I was also an iOS user for a long time.
And even though for the most part, it just works. It's just a default curator or from where you download stuff from. When I started, like, getting more into freedom tech, I started noticing things. And on desktop, I also had another, like, touch point of frustration coming to, as you mentioned, BGP because once you wanna download something like, let's say, Spiro Wallet, you wanna make sure, especially in that case, that you are delivering the right binary, because you have people that are actually actively looking to sabotage that, right, fish you or whatever that may be, to to steal your Bitcoin.
And that was another big frustration because I'm quite obsessed with UX. It might not show in my work or partially, but let's say that it's, oh, I always strive for that, so I do care about it. And and so I wanna translate, you know, all this all this energy into something. So I I think everything came together as I was saying before with, the p g the like, the PGP frustration, which I can talk about more in detail. But then the whole, like, app store as a user, and especially since for the past few years I was working building apps, I was exposed to the app store submission process as a developer, and it was extremely annoying. I think it still is.
Fortunately, I'm disconnected from that already, but it it just it it just just crazy. And, by the way, another example added to what you mentioned is Sparrow does not publish Craigrod does not publish Sparrow to app stores as far as I know. He does not. But there there have been spirals in multiple stores, I think, on Canonical's Snap Store, on the Apple App Store as well. And, you know, even when he complained, they were taking weeks to take down the, you know, the the copy. So are these centralized entities, to be trusted? I would say yes.
I think they they they do a good job, and they are absolutely necessary. But there's there's not one answer to this question. I think curators are extremely important. You know, we can hate all we want on on them, but they are providing, a lot of value. But I think we can improve that model. And one of the things that SaaS store and with the Nostra and the relay model is the idea that just as on your socials, you can swipe relays. You know, what if you don't like your app curator? Like, you don't like the SaaS for default relays. You're gonna be able to swap and just include your own or add or mix and match.
[00:29:50] ODELL:
So let's, there's a lot there. Let's talk about your frustrations with PGP. You said we could go deeper in that. Why why have you been frustrated with PGP?
[00:30:03] Fran:
Well, because every time you wanna verify software with PGP, you're basically, forced to go through a series of steps. I even me as a as a technical person, I did not have the memory of, like, exactly, you know, what commands should I run. I I needed to go to the command line interface, and I I had to if it didn't have the developer in my key chain, I had to go and fetch on some key server where the key might or might not be. I needed to compare fingerprints, and I learned that fingerprints, though it's rare, could be compromised as well because let's face it. Oh, a lot of times and we also do this with end pubs. We just check for, you know, a bunch of it's, you know, on the start of the thing.
So, obviously, average people will not go through all that, and it's clear that it's it's not a it's not such if if the user experience is not decent enough, like, you won't reach all the people that you wanna reach.
[00:31:16] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, it's been around for decades, and it really just does not have wide usage whatsoever. It's a UX com it's a complete UX nightmare. And and, you know, I've done a lot of education work with, new people entering the space, and their eyes just gloss over. Like, they just you just know that 99% of people aren't doing it. And I think that goes to your point that these centralized app stores, while we have some issues with them, for the overwhelming majority of users, they provided a strong net benefit because they're extremely convenient, and most of the time, they don't get served malicious apps. So it's a trade off that society has made up until this point, and it seems like a relatively decent trade off, but still not ideal.
Okay. So let's talk about so how does Zapstore attempt to to to fix this problem?
[00:32:16] Fran:
So there we're talking about security mostly. That's what he brought up, and I think it's it's Yeah. Important. But there are other aspects to all this, and the services that that app stores are are generally important in software distribution. But for for the security model, the idea is that you as you are kind of replacing the so does everybody understand, like, what GPG is actually doing? But it's right? You're you're verifying to explain it. Yeah. So it's it's a way of of verifying that that, binary is has been issued and has been signed by the author that you think it is, so it's not being tampered with in the middle. Right? That's what we wanna verify when, we do the GPG verification.
But the thing is with with Noster, since it's it's a cryptographic technology, we can use this to do something very similar to GPG. However, the difference with GPG is that Nasr is, let's say, an an active social network. So this changes a lot of the dynamics that GPG had in terms of having a a because the the the word web of trust probably originated there. Maybe it's from somewhere else, but it was it was I think it did with GPG. Yeah. Right. Right. You you would vouch for other keys, and you were, like, kinda store that in your I would, like, sign your key,
[00:33:57] ODELL:
and I'd put it in a mailing list or something. And I'd be like, this is Fran's key, and you know my key, so this is a good key.
[00:34:03] Fran:
Mhmm.
[00:34:04] ODELL:
That was like the original web of trust. But we couldn't bootstrap it and never really got bootstrapped because it was just like a bunch of nerds signing each other's keys. But with Noster, we're effectively bootstrapping web of trust and verifiable reputation with shitposts. That's the key. It's like humanity needs shitposts to actually bootstrap the thing.
[00:34:26] Fran:
Yeah. A 100%. We're basically using we're calling web of trust to something that technically is not web of trust. Or, I mean, if you trust people that you follow, which is a weak proxy in my opinion. Well, that's why I like verifiable reputation. Verifiable
[00:34:49] ODELL:
reputation. As a term.
[00:34:51] Fran:
Yeah.
[00:34:53] ODELL:
Because, like I mean, it doesn't necessarily mean so if I follow Gigi and you follow Gigi and Gigi has made, you know, 10,000 different verifiable events on Noster, You can a a a external observer, someone who's new to Noster that comes in, can have a pretty good expectation that that is Gigi and an expectation of what his past has been in a digital Noster sense. So that to me is like a verifiable reputation rather than necessarily meaning I have, like there's no, like, trust score or something. It's not like I'm saying I I trust this person, a certain amount.
[00:35:42] Fran:
And, usually, scammers will not put a long reputation on the line. So it's it's like in some way, and that's it's it's social capital, really, that is on the line. So that is one of the things that that I in I thought for for Zapstore because now we could bring, like, this idea of level of trust from GPG and actually apply it in a social context. So that's how the idea of prompting before installation whether to, you know, just assign her. And then for those who are not familiar with the app, like, the first time you are about to install, an app, For now, it's it's only on Android that this works, and you get a prompt and you have to check that this person is the one that you think it is.
And you see a little widget with people that you follow who follow the signer. And this is the way of seeing you can also tap and go to, I think, and you can go to, you know, an awesome social client and see for yourself if you don't trust, what I'm what I'm telling you. But that's a good enough approximation to tell whether that signer might be a fake, or an impersonator or or not.
[00:37:09] ODELL:
Well, like, let's let's let's let's bring it down to its core. Right? So so so from a practical sense, if you're a Zapstore user, what you what you do is you're using an Android phone. And and Android one of the beautiful things about Android is you can install apps from outside of the the designated app store. So Zapstore itself is an app. So you're you you go to zapstore.dev. You download the APK file, that app that that that binary, that application file. You install Zapstore. You have Zapstore. Now all of a sudden you have 2 app stores. You have Google Play, the official App Store, and you have Zapstore. And then once you have Zapstore, when you download an app, when you go to download an app, let's say the app let's say the app is Primal, right, and it's signed by 1,000,000, the the lead dev of Primal, the creator of Primal, when you go to download it, you wanna make sure that it hasn't been changed since since, 1,000,000 uploaded it. It'll say signed by 1,000,000.
1,000,000 is followed by Fran, Odell, Gigi, jb 55, whoever. Mhmm. And it's based on your who you follow. So it's like, I follow these people and they also follow this person and I know it's I know it's the real person. Right? And then you press install.
[00:38:35] Fran:
Yeah. So first of all, we need, Millian to actually sign primal.
[00:38:40] ODELL:
Oh, it's a bad example. Okay. I
[00:38:43] Fran:
know I know it will come. But yeah, that's that's basically the idea. Even though I'm thinking that there might be other approaches to that Okay. And don't necessarily rely on web of trust, but you could or you could rely on, let's say, a relay. Okay? So when with all this talk around, relay communities, you could say, well, in this community, people upload apps to it, and it's a closed community, so I trust the moderator of that relay. And then that's fine. Anything that isn't there, I trust. But the whole point here being that curators are fine, they're necessary, but we need to just break from the centralized top down approach and say, like, no. I actually want this company with this reputation to be my curator, or I wanna I wanna have 2 or 3 or whatever or none and just go buy WebTrust or a mix of both.
I think that is the innovation here with respect to decentralized stores. Obviously, this is on Apple is, or at least I should say on iOS. It's difficult to impossible, at the moment. We can talk more in detail about that, but, it is effectively a monopoly in many places.
[00:40:07] ODELL:
So They don't let you install another app store?
[00:40:11] Fran:
No. Except in Europe if you go through some bureaucracy,
[00:40:15] ODELL:
you know. So are you gonna go through the bureaucracy for the good of mankind?
[00:40:21] Fran:
Gotta think about that one. But I want to. I want to. I'm tempted.
[00:40:27] ODELL:
Yeah. Well, because there's, like, an EU antitrust ruling that they're forced to, but they did the bare minimum, right, to allow them. It's not as open as Android.
[00:40:36] Fran:
Right. Yeah. So that's why it was started on Android. And by the way, this even though no one uses it, there is a client for CLI. So there are packages that are you know, when you go to, like, your terminal package manager, like home brew or APT or DNF, whatever that might be, like, there is some the sap store actually does work. And this command line tool is what developers are using to basically sign the events when they when they sign the apps. Right? So now it's basically only used by devs, but, it is possible, like, it's fully functional. I think there are just 5 apps in there, so it's not known. I don't push it too much for now, but it's perfectly functional on multiple operating systems right now.
So the goal is to try to cover as many OSs as possible. I don't wanna make, of course, any promises as to when things will be, available, but I wanna make I wanna bring this to to the macOS as as the next,
[00:41:50] ODELL:
step. Yeah. It'd be great to have it on desktop specific I mean, specifically for a lot of Bitcoin software and other open source software that we rely on. So the the other piece that I think is cool here about using Nostr as the signing mechanism is someone can actually if they don't have a Nostr account, if they have someone they trust in their community, they can just take that person's end pub and use their web of trust. Right? So, like, someone could just sign in with my end pub, for instance, and it's based on who I follow Yeah.
Which is, like, I think, a cool bootstrapping mechanism. If someone's not actually active in the Nostra ecosystem but still wants to take advantage of it, all they need is one person they trust in the Nostra ecosystem, and they can kinda just piggyback that reputation from them. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
[00:42:43] Fran:
But that I think would show eventually through the web of trust because if you are following 1 person, then that's kind of your opening to the whole network. Right. It's it's it's basically the same. As long as you follow only one person, then the web of trust ranking should should show that. And by the way, I I have been secretly building something, for a web of trust service that is, like, just way, way, way, way better. I've been doing this with, Pibelia, so shout out to him. We'll announce something soon.
[00:43:24] ODELL:
But it it's That's all you're gonna give us?
[00:43:27] Fran:
Yes. Yes. So it's it's it's similar to it's similar to this the web of trust service that I'm using right now that is really crappy. But this is gonna be just just way better, way to, determine, like, ranks from your own point of view. So you wanna see scores of people, like, from your own, like, web of trust.
[00:43:55] ODELL:
Well, he's the only per I I posted on Nostra that I was live with you right now. Well, I I posted it when we went live. He's the only one he's the only one who re reposted it. Alright. So he's bay I think he's basically giving you permission to to tell us what it is. Yeah. No. I'm kidding. You don't have to. I, to the to the freaks who to the rider die freaks out there, if you listened to the Nostriga conversation I had about web of trusts, at the Riga conference that's on the sale dispatch feed, Pip was one of the was one of the guests on that panel. That was when I met him for the first time actually about 2 minutes before we went on stage.
But he's been doing a lot of interesting work in terms of web of trust and verifiable reputation. So I'm pretty excited for whatever you guys have cooked up there. So whatever that is, that's just gonna then be integrated into Zapstore. It's gonna kinda be like a protocolized version of whatever's in Zapstore. Is that the plan?
[00:44:57] Fran:
A 100%. Cool. And fully master based.
[00:45:02] ODELL:
That's awesome. Yeah.
[00:45:05] Fran:
So, back to because we've been talking a lot about about security and how Yeah. That we download the I mean, we're certain that we're downloading the the binders and installing stuff that are from the genuine author and so on, but I made an exploration before sorry. By the way, is my audio really bad? Because I I saw
[00:45:27] ODELL:
people Well, someone's roasting you on the YouTube chat about your audio being bad. Yeah. No. It's fine. I mean, he's not a podcaster. He's building a future app store for us. So it's we we can understand you. It's just, you know, it's not a professional mic. He's telling you to buy a mic. So he wants we're gonna pause the podcast. We're gonna pause the show. You're gonna go to the store. You're gonna buy a mic and come back.
[00:45:52] Fran:
Yeah. Well, Chris, you're coming. Right? So
[00:45:56] ODELL:
I could just fly out there and do this for you. My producer Paul said he'll fly out fly out to you and and just bring you a mic. If if you want if you want Fran to have a better mic next time he visits, make sure you zap him on Noster, and so he'll go and buy a mic with your sets. Right. But you sound fine. Don't worry about it. Cool.
[00:46:16] Fran:
So I was going to mention I I went into an exploration, just after one of these, like, frustration moments, it was about a year ago or a bit a bit longer. And even when, like, the main issue was security, I got into, like, what are apps for? What what what role do they play? And there are many more things about it. I wrote about it early January. I posted something on Stacker News. Should be there on on zapstore.dev/blog. I think the article is there. If you wanna if you wanna read this quite long because I went deep into the rabbit hole of app stores and and software distribution and what the problems were even before start starting with the first line of code for the solution.
[00:47:09] ODELL:
Cool.
[00:47:10] Fran:
And besides all the security stuff that that we talked about, and there's more on in that article, there's other aspects like discoverability. So that's that's a huge one that we always talk about in Noster. How do we discover the content that we want? It's a it's a huge shopping for more social media clients, but also for apps. And really the stores do offer this. So you go there and you have categories or you have, I don't know, but actually it's pretty bad. For me, whenever I I entered the Apple App Store on my iPhone, I just got, like, recommendations for games
[00:47:55] ODELL:
and a lot of games and shit. Did you play a lot of games? 0. I'm not a gamer person. Maybe the games are where they make a lot of money. Right? So it's all about incentives.
[00:48:05] Fran:
Yeah. But that's has nothing to do with me. So why I'm in secret? And that was a very interesting exploration because, you know, when you when you when you add Nostra as a as a social layer to something weird as an app store, you know, not only we can expect to have a social network within a place where you download apps, but this is the the the power of Nasr, the interoperability where you see it shine is that you can bring this social layer to, like, places you would never thought before. And I'm really positive that Apple and Google will never, like, bootstrap a social network for that particular use case.
[00:48:51] ODELL:
Well, Google tried. I don't know if you remember Google Plus. Google Plus. It was like a massive disaster. Complete failure. I, I actually just had a little bit of PTSD. I when I interviewed Jack Dorsey, I I called Blue Sky an unmitigated disaster, and he said that's the terminology that Business Insider uses for all their clickbait pieces. So I just had a little bit of PTSD about that. But Google plus was a disaster. No one used it. It it had a little bit of uptake in the beginning and then poor development or whatever. But that was one of their goals was to mix Google Plus with, like, App Store reviews and Google Maps reviews.
Right? Like, they have the Google Maps reviews in YouTube. Right? Google's YouTube. So they tried to put the whole picture together, but it's really hard to do in a centralized fashion. And, obviously, Nostr has many advantages there where you can just have this open protocol and just have a lot of developers
[00:49:52] Fran:
do different things. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. That's a good example. But also you need to be Google, and you need to have a product that Right. If I give an example of a friend who started to bootstrap, what was it, like, it's app for skiers. Okay. So it is super niche. You're gonna you're gonna build a social network just for skiers. I mean, my work really ridiculous. Is incredibly difficult. So
[00:50:22] ODELL:
Well, they all try and do it. Right? It's like hiking apps or whatever. They all try and create, like, communities around, like, little niche communities, and they have to bootstrap it from the for themselves. It's very difficult, but they all try. I feel like a lot of them try.
[00:50:39] Fran:
Yeah. Well, they they will discover Nostra eventually. I think just being able to have a lot of users. Well, we're not too many right now, but just way more than 0 is very so that's why I think Nasr will keep keep growing. We'll see what happens. But I was talking about discovery, and this social layer on Napster all of a sudden
[00:51:04] ODELL:
Right.
[00:51:05] Fran:
You can have recommendations from your friends instead of seeing these stupid games I don't care about. What if, like, my home page was stuff that my friends are becoming recommending or making the app packs or, all of a sudden, I think this is it is huge for for for anything really, but particularly for Freedom Tech because Right. Freedom Tech might not be a priority for Apple or Google, but, you know, if it's a priority for your friends, you know, then and, also, you have every single app. You don't you don't you don't have, like you're not censored there. It's not just the Freedom Tech apps that are available on stores, on the main stores. It's whatever, you know, your friends are recommending on any really.
[00:51:48] ODELL:
I mean, that's a really good point because, you know, I always looked at it from the security point of view because I just hated PGP I mean, I don't hate I use it. I actually am probably one of the few people that have historically used it because I've had no choice. You don't you don't wanna download a malicious Sparrow wallet. But, the discovery element of traditional app stores is a key. Even if it's poor discovery, it's a key aspect. Right? Like, people like, if you want if you need a weather app, you you're not you open the app store and you type in weather and and you wanna see what is the top rated weather app, for you and then you go and get the weather app. Now if that was like Fran and Odell really like this weather app, that'd be way more useful for me than just, like, randoms leaving star based reviews and maybe, like, you know, flaming out the developer and and the text reviews or whatever and, like, you read the reviews.
That's way better. That makes a lot of sense to me. Discovery might actually be the killer use case here, and then people get the security benefits as, like, a side effect where they don't even realize that they're getting the security benefits.
[00:53:02] Fran:
Yeah. Absolutely. I fully agree with that. I think this will bring more people because it's more stuff or it depends who you ask, but let's say a more average user that doesn't care too much about these things, they will get the side effect, the the benefit of of security as you say. So it's a little bit like especially given the the idea I have to to grow Zapstore and and reach more people than just like the Nasir and the Cypherpunk scene. We will get these people into this into this tech, and it it kinda works like a Trojan horse. It's like you came for the cool stuff because your friends are recommending, and then all of a sudden when you realize you have an insect and you're making Bitcoin payments.
[00:53:55] ODELL:
The other piece here so so we have security, which, by the way, I feel like I need to say this just to explain the security threat model when you're thinking about these things with open source software. First of all, it's important that software is open source so that people can verify the code. And even if you're not verifying the code, that other people are verifying the code, and that's not doing things that it's that it says it's not doing. And then, ideally, it's reproducible. So you're able to verify the code, and then you're also people are able to replicate the actual creation of the binaries, creation of that application. Then once you get to that step, you wanna make sure it hasn't been changed so it gets hashed. And by hashing it, you can verify easily from the hash that it hasn't been changed. And then you sign the hash to make sure that it hasn't been banned in the middle. This whole process is obviously just immediately 9 out of 10 users, their eyes gloss over, and an app store automates that entire process. Now we have walled gardens that do that, and obviously, walled garden's bad in terms of freedom.
And Zapstore aims to be the the alternative there. So but we talked about security, discovery. Then the other thing is, I mean, from a developer perspective, it's gotta be monetization. Like, these app stores are taking huge cuts. Like, Epic Games got into a huge fight with Apple. You still cannot play Fortnite on iOS or Mac, because Epic doesn't wanna pay, you know, 30% or 20% or whatever the cut is, to Apple, and they've they've never made nice over that. I mean, I think that was part of the lawsuit that resulted in the alternative app stores in the first place. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. So how do you think about that part? Like, are you thinking about that aspect too? Like, this this developers not wanting to give up, like, part of the revenue stream?
[00:55:53] Fran:
Yeah. Definitely. That was that was part of it. And I feel like I'm with Zapstore, which is a store where you cannot zap. But it's it's coming. It's coming. I I I definitely thought about the monetization, and, you know, the obvious theme is allow devs to receive money, like, be it value for value or payables or whatever the model is more convenient for them. Right. If you have, like, the permission as nature of publishing apps to any communities and you realize any curators, and then you can receive, money directly from your users, I think that that's killer. Like, if you compare it to, like, the permission, KYC, by the way, KYC, 15 to 30% that these the cuts that these stores are are taking, it's just like the improvement is massive.
[00:56:54] ODELL:
And and what most people don't realize is when, Steve Jobs first announced the App Store, just from the discovery element alone, most there was, you know, thousands 100 of thousands of developers around the world that were very excited about the discovery element and willing to pay that amount of money for it. Pay that cut. They thought that cut was actually at the time, there was a lot of feelings that that it was a reasonable cut. But it's interesting that, like, as that industry has gotten much, much larger, like, in terms of revenue generation, you know, 1,000,000,000 of dollars of revenue generation, just Fortnite alone from Epic Games is 1,000,000,000 of dollars a year. That cut seems more and more predatory.
And there so there is a big movement, by developers to try and get out of that that almost like slavery type relationship where, like, their entire fate is dictated by a single company.
[00:57:58] Fran:
Yeah. That's a great point. I I don't know where it's where the line where you can draw the line, but it it it feels parasitic at some point because you you kind of already established the connection between because, obviously, this is a marketplace, and you're connecting you're connecting the 2 sites, or you're taking cuts for, like the relationship was already established, and you're taking cuts all the time. So that does seem parasitic to me. I understand if you just make the connection once, but, you know, that's it's my opinion. But that's why we have the ability to to to improve all this all this situation. And
[00:58:40] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, you even I love these, like, real world examples. Right? Like, they're, Amazon, right, one of the most valuable companies in the world, and Apple, one of the most valuable companies in the world, if you want to buy a new Kindle book on an Apple product, you're on iOS and you wanna buy a new Kindle book, Apple insists on taking a cut. So Amazon will not sell you a Kindle book. I've noticed this because I was I'm I'm lead lead IT man of my of my my parents, and my mom wanted to buy a book on her iPad. And you literally have to go onto desktop to buy actually, you can go into Safari on the iPad, and you could buy the book at Amazon dotcom and then press send to Kindle app, and then Apple doesn't get the cut, but you're not allowed to buy it directly in the app with one one button push. Like, that's where we're currently at in terms of the the standoff between 2 huge companies. Right? This is not like little developer in a garage in Thailand or something. This is like 2 massive companies, and they're in a they're in a pitched battle about this monetization element.
[00:59:57] Fran:
Yeah. And this reminds me a lot of the discussion around the web. We had a few posts yesterday, about this. I think, kind of triggered by a post by saying, like, if if 90% of the of the users on mobile are using apps, like, why I reposted that. Right. I love because he, you know, he he he managed to trigger a lot of a lot of feelings there.
[01:00:26] ODELL:
No. Just to be clear to the listeners, if you're not actively just scrolling fiatjaf's nostril feed, which you should be doing, just to be frank, He said if 90% of users are coming in through mobile, which I think he's correct. Like, most people interact mobile first. I I think there's, like, billions of people that their main way that they're gonna interact with anything is on mobile or on iPad. Why is everyone building web apps was his post.
[01:00:55] Fran:
Yeah. So, yeah, why why so a lot of people responded to that, and I think it makes a lot of sense because the first reaction is I want we wanna be free from these terrible app stores, and I completely agree. But I also try to analyze, like, why is the market clearly favoring why why are users favoring apps over over web apps or PWAs? And it's just the 2 big players, Apple and Google, are obviously doing this on purpose because otherwise, there would be like a JavaScript API to, put a button on the website and say install. And it will just look your regular app, and it doesn't. There's a reason why they don't wanna do that, but this is this is reality.
We we cannot change the fact well, Android, as we said, is the most popular operating system in the world. I don't have the numbers, but it's by far.
[01:01:55] ODELL:
Yeah. It's like 80, 90% globally or whatever. It's not the case in the US, but globally, yes.
[01:02:01] Fran:
Yeah. So, I mean, I don't know. Should we, like, yell at the clouds? Or I mean, that that's the way it is. So we'll try to do the the best we can. And we are fortunate that that Android is an open source project, and I think Google does have incentive to keep the the open keep open the installation of of, APKs and basically allow for for stores like App Store, because of how how that works with manufacturers and so on. But, I don't think that that will change. So I think we're fortunate. Apple, you know, we'll see what what happens with that.
[01:02:45] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I I'm not gonna get my hopes up on Apple. I I do I I have a, I dip my toe in the meme arena every once in a while, And, one of my favorite meme templates is the, like, Jesus, why do you give me, like, your hardest problems? And I have one, which is, like, it's you got banned from a permissioned app store. It's like Jesus just like, this is not a hard problem. Like, get over yourself. And you're, like, you're being you're being part of that solution. Like, I I do think that, like, as Bitcoiners, there's, like, a subset of us that go down these ridiculous threat models. Right? It's like, what if, you know, 50 cruise missiles are launched and they get launched at, like, major nodes in the network or whatever? And then there's all like, the 90% of Bitcoiners, like, if an app gets banned from the App Store, they just will lose their shit. They're just like, holy like, what are we gonna do? Like, I can no longer download BlueWallet on on Apple App Store. Like, the state is coming after us. Like, everything's over. We're screwed.
And, like, that's the kind of the status quo right now. But I I think I think there's a strong argument to be made and maybe it's coming from a bias because I'm someone who historically has has been an Android user, where it's like, okay. Like, it's it's important that we have polished apps on the Apple App Store. But in a worst case scenario, like, just go buy an Android phone. You can get one for, like, $100. Maybe you can get it for less even. You know, you buy a used Android phone. You can get it for any price point you want, basically, depending on what your specs are, and then and then use that for the apps that they won't let you use. Like, it's not the worst situation. I but begging Apple, like, Apple's never I mean, I'm still amazed that they're doing this European thing, and I I'm still skeptical of it. Like, I don't I've never expected Apple to open more. They've never done that. The trend has always shown they've done the opposite.
[01:04:52] Fran:
Yeah. There's a lot of around having an app store on in Europe, on on iOS. I'm not too familiar what those are, but I think you need you need to open up your books to Apple, you know, to see that you're not surpassing certain amount of revenue where you should, you know they they gonna take a cut if you exceed that. So it's
[01:05:17] ODELL:
a lot of red tape and just kinda crazy. But And they use I think they're using the excuse that they're like, we don't want malicious app stores. Right?
[01:05:26] Fran:
So they're like, we have to have all these controls in place. So it's it's the we go back to the question of, like, censorship and filtering. You know, where do you draw the line? Is that you want filtering, you want curation, but at some point, it's like, who's deciding that? Is that who you wanna change? So, again, the web does does kind of does solve this in a way, but it's just kinda unfortunate that even for a reason, PWAs are not more popular, and I wish they were. And, actually, I wish to support them in some way on Zapier itself.
[01:05:58] ODELL:
So you talked about this. You so PWAs guys are progressive web apps. So it's it's a website that you go to in Safari or Chrome, and then you, like, and, quote, unquote, install it on your phone. And then it's still a browser window, but it looks like an app, and it gives you a lot of the same functionalities as an app. But as Fran said, like, we do see situations where Google and Apple are they, like, mess with them. They, like, screw around with them and, like, make lives for developers difficult and lives for users difficult when you use them. But I think you had a a note where you were like, I want, like, a Zap store PWA store. Is that did you not have a note like that?
[01:06:42] Fran:
Yeah. I started by because I was listening to your rep with Cali Right. And he was talking about, I think it's cashew. Me.
[01:06:55] ODELL:
Yeah. It's pwa cashew wallet, cashew. Me. It's great.
[01:06:59] Fran:
I I love the idea. That's great. I was just I would it just triggered these thoughts in my mind, like, what's you know, why, PWS didn't take off. I was also talking to Halabot about this because he initially is, like, more like a web developer, but then he he published apps, but he's, like, web dev first. And he asked me why are computer based kinda struggling in a way like they're not way more popular. I think it's just the same topics. It's it's just discovery. And and you have do you have central places to discover these these things? Yeah. Maybe. You can group them in in in another website, but the UX for installing is purposefully annoying.
So that's why, you know, you need to go to tap, 3 dots or whatever, and I don't even know. Just tap on, like, install as a home screen and then click okay, and that you you lose 90% of the users there. Yep. That that is the huge that that's the biggest problem. And then, obviously, I think that not being able to because websites are constantly, like, moving targets. We if you want a certain version of of a website, like, how do you actually do that? I prefer well, it depends on the app, really. But if there's some release that has a hash, I can verify that, you know, and we're all like, maybe I don't wanna wait for some reason, but on a on a website, it's like you you know, most developers are just pushing out updates all the time, so you don't really know where you are. Like, what are you around?
But mostly, I would say is is a discovery, and because for features, I think most apps with the tools that are available for developers, even on mobile are just are just fine. Yeah. But it's it's just that Apple and Google don't wanna make it easier.
[01:08:56] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, Yeah. I think discovery is probably the main thing, and then there's definitely additional friction. That's probably number 2. And then if you're actually an educated user, there is a security concern. But that's probably Yeah. Because from the developer point of view, PWAs are amazing in that you can just constantly ship updates. Like, I talked to the mute when the muni guys were still working on Bitcoin, that was one of the things they loved. You didn't have to wait for basically App Store, permission to ship updates. So you can just, like, constantly just ship. But What does that mean for the user? The user's like, I have no idea what I'm running. Like, there's no verification going on here.
[01:09:39] Fran:
Yeah. Yeah. So that's but let's say that it's it's good to have the the option, the ability to do that and be clear about, like, what you're pushing out. So that's that's why on Zap, if you wished, you could you could push updates every single minute. And Right. It's it's a sign it's a sign not event. It just goes as fast as any other note. Right? So you should yeah. Maybe you don't see it immediately right now because of some technical limitations on the app, but really that the principle is that you push out the app, you know, as many as many versions as you want. But then it's up to you, the developer, to to analyze the trade off whether, you know, you wanna confuse users by by shipping too much, but you should be able to do it. And I was going to mention related to security, because you you kinda hinted at it. The you mentioned reproducible builds?
Yes. So that's one of the things that that are pretty cool that I wanna integrate at some point. It's like DBMs that, basic view analysis on different things, but you could have DBMs that check for malware, that check for privacy, issues. And also, I was I was talking to, yeah, to people who in the space are doing, like, verifications, like running, or building stuff from source and getting to, you know, to do the reproducible bills. But a lot of projects don't support reproducible bills, but it would be amazing to have a flag as, hey. Actually, all these vendors vouch for this hash. Right? So now we're like extra sure, which is totally impractical to do.
[01:11:27] ODELL:
No. Yeah. That's a great idea, for for reproducible software to just have and then you could just use the master web of trust to be like all these different sources say that this is the same same binary. Yeah. Exactly. If you have this sign the results. So you actually have multiple signatures.
[01:11:47] Fran:
Right. Because you you you might also have vendors that are scammers. But if you if your web of trust is not pointing to them, well, then they're just not an authority.
[01:11:58] ODELL:
That's cool. I like that idea. So we have that idea. We have Zaps. And by the way, like, there needs to be I think it can't be purely value for value. Like, there needs to be, like, Paywall premium stuff. Mhmm. I mean, a lot of this stuff, like, app developers can just put in their app. Right? I mean, if Epic packages Fortnite they already provide an APK. It's an unsigned APK. But if Epic packages in in, Fortnite and puts on Zapstore, it's actually a free download for Fortnite. And then after once you open the app, you're paying them. So that kinda takes that pressure off of you in that situation. They can just but it'd be cool if I could donate in the app, like, in the app store straight to people.
[01:12:49] Fran:
It also depends on how how this progresses because I have ideas on how how to grow this product. If you make developers' lives easier because you're you you mentioned Fortnite, but maybe small devs don't have the bandwidth to implement all that or maybe they do because, it might be an option for force us to to handle the payments and and offer that service to to the devs. Right? That that that would be that would be a possibility. I'm just I'm just thinking that's one of the aspects I need to, you know, think more about, like, how to how to sustain this, you know, in time or what are the potential ways of of getting revenue for Zap store, but without being I kinda made this this voucher, this promise. It's mostly for myself, but it's like, the Cypherpunk use case will always be there, like, no matter what.
Even though I think the the product should I would love to optimize UX, you know, to make this easy as possible, like, for my my grandma to, to be able to verify apps. Right? That would be that would be amazing. But still, like, you you can design something that does not necessarily affect, you know, the fact that it's super easy to use does not necessarily mean that it's it's it's bad for privacy
[01:14:20] ODELL:
or that it's it's bad for Freedom Tech. Yeah. Ethical monetization. I mean, this is something that I deal with all the time at 10:31. I mean, putting on my business hat, I think that the easiest way to monetize an app store is to be a rent seeker and sit in the middle and take a cut of all revenue, which is exactly the model that has been incredibly successful. The second easiest is, like, surveillance and ads and all that stuff, which is also quite evil. But the 3rd, like, the ethical path here, in my mind, the first thing that comes to mind is, like, premium services to the developers. So it's like opt in premium services, and it's definitely the harder path.
But there's something there. Like, if you're a developer and you're, you know, you have a 1000000 downloads a year or 2,000,000 downloads a year, 10,000,000 downloads a year, like, you'd be willing to pay something to have different types of premium services on top of that, in terms of your relationship with Zapstore and, like, distribution and whatnot.
[01:15:31] Fran:
Yeah. Even for smaller devs, they actually, since they don't have much resources, maybe they wanna delegate some of the stuff, even the community building as well. So I think, yeah, that is is to be explored. But I think the fact of having building on and and advertising that because you can build a and just, like, be parasitic or just, like, take all you want from the network and not get back because you don't publish user events and all that kind of stuff. But it's it's kind of, fire in your ass because if you're not providing the the best service, like, you're gonna especially if it's false, your app will get forged and, you know, someone else will just run the project that you wanna run and then you end up.
So I think that incentive is is is super important, and that's it. You know? It is an open source app and it is built on master. So the only way how to monetize this is is just being the best. You don't have a the ability of of doing these parasitic business models.
[01:16:49] ODELL:
Right. You don't have a moat.
[01:16:51] Fran:
Yeah. And if, you know, if you another of the aspects that I was writing about was was reputation of a dev of a dev and communication and support and all all that channel because we talk about monetization, which is sending value. But how about how about users and and devs are absolutely disconnected in AppSource today? And having, like, a channel where they can come closer together, users might even suggest features and can put up bounties and just put up certain amounts as Sats if if a certain feature gets implemented. I feel that that's gonna completely change the the landscape of of what an app store is is thought about, and even you could just go crazy and much further and and think like, what if instead of just going to an app store and see if something is available, maybe even just suggest, I want, you know, I want this app in the world.
You know, here, I will put up, like, a 1,000,000 sets. I wanna I wanna see this happen. And then you have supply, basically, come online and check. Right? You just kind of are flipping the the the order of things and and letting vendors just come and and fulfill that demand.
[01:18:17] ODELL:
I don't know how much I agree with that as a concept, but, spread your wings if it works. I I think bounties in general are they they result in a lot of, like, hit and run jobs kinda, where it's like someone. First of all, if someone puts a bounty up, it doesn't actually mean that there's a a lot of real demand for something. It just means that, like, a few people think there's demand for something. So, like, what's the famous quote from Henry Ford? It's like, if I ask customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse, but instead, I made it an automobile. So that's so that's one piece. And then the second piece is oftentimes, it results in kind of developers coming in, looking through the bounty list, doing the bare minimum to claim the bounty, and then moving on to something else, right, when it's really like a 5 year, 10 year project, that needs constant care and love.
And I this is something I've struggled with because of OpenSats. I mean, we've talked many times about releasing bounties for OpenSats, and I personally just don't think it's something we should get into. Now on the flip side, I think it's important to realize, that that both j b 55 and Cali received bounties from HRF that were judged like, the judge judges was the Open Sats board. So strike provided the money, HRF custody the money and released the bounties, and then Open Sats judge 2 was successful. And you could kind of, like Cashew was almost a direct result of Cali winning that bounty. So that was just like a massive success.
And then with j b 55, it was lightning payment related. It was static payment codes and it, like, kind of led the way for zaps, but not really, but a little bit. So I would put those as 2, like, major successes for bounties. So I'm not, like, completely against the idea, but I think in the overwhelming majority of cases, they don't result in, like, a
[01:20:33] Fran:
highly used end product. But I could be wrong. I mean No. No. Actually, I I do agree with what you say, and maybe boundaries was not the right word to use here because Yeah. All that is true. And and I see it. It's really problematic. And who defines, you know, when a bounty should be given up? Yeah. But I guess I guess it was more about voting with sats for features, so there's no no, you can just upvote with Sats, for example, and that's not exactly a bounty.
[01:21:02] ODELL:
Right. I like that idea.
[01:21:04] Fran:
And then when I'm talking about, like, these people coming and just fulfilling the jobs, it can just be, like, whatever you do on on what are these sites like, Workana or Fiber or whatever. It's just it's just a job. It's not a bounty. You can even, like, you know, if someone I charge this amount or you can put out, a query, a request. I want this stuff, and then someone comes as well. This is the price or this is the hourly price or whatever. But the point here being, like, just make it make the market more dynamic than what it is right now.
[01:21:39] ODELL:
Yeah. I've seen with, like, SaaS software that I've used in the past, I've seen, like like, if you're a paying user, there's, like, community boards where you can, like, upvote different features that you wanna see, and then people, like, they they grant you like, every quarter, you have 10 votes or something. And, like, you can, like, move up and down the board in terms of how many upvotes it has. Like, you throw sats behind that. I think that could be quite powerful. That actually makes sense to me. Like, feature like act like, working software with users that are ideally already paying users, and they're they they have feature requests that they want improvements, iterations, you know, things to that makes sense to me.
[01:22:27] Fran:
Yeah. Definitely. It's it's, it's just speaking with with value more than just words and and seeing, hey. Actually, people are are just going something I didn't wanna put much priority on. Like, it's it's it's exploring all these stats, so maybe I'm not gonna focus on that. But, again, as you say, like, sometimes the bounties are are are very narrowly defined whereas, like, this feature, but maybe you have bigger plans for your project that requires some other work beforehand. Anyway, it's just we'll we'll explore, these things with time. You know, a lot of it is is is kind of dreaming too.
So a lot of stuff to get done in, in the next in the next versions, which, you know, I I think Zacks are are coming very soon.
[01:23:15] ODELL:
Awesome. Are you you're on an Open Science. You do you get an Open Science grant? Yes. I did. Awesome. I as you can tell, we're a little bit overwhelmed over there. I have to ask you if you have a if you have a grant or not. What was what's been your experience with that process?
[01:23:36] Fran:
Got it, like, a a year ago, and, I was I was for SCC zero one in Madera with Right. And that was a little bit like where where Zaps are really started because I would I would I just arrived there fresh with the idea and started, you know, talking talking to Gigi, talking to Karma, and talking to, like, a bunch of the guys that were there. So, it was it was just great coincidence, you know, to, like, have had that, you know, not straight come to my life and the frustration to actually solve the problem and also the grant and Madeira, everything together was just kind of crazy. So I'm really grateful, for all that.
But I should say, I I I really appreciate all you're doing with open sets. I think you get a lot of hate for, like, thank us work. If people wanna see this kind of stuff and don't like it, they just go free and set up their own fun. Like, I just I just found all the criticism kinda crazy, but I will say that, ideally, my my my my dream is just get out of it. You know? I wanna get out of it. I I reapplied to it because it's kinda early days, but, you know, the best way for a project is try to make sure that the market is actually validating what you're building. And a way of doing that is is just try to, you know, see how many people are are actually paying for for your product. But, again, it's it's early for Nasr. So, I mean, it's difficult
[01:25:12] ODELL:
it's a difficult line to draw there. Yeah. I mean, so 2 things. First of all, what he's referring to is Sovereign Engineering, which is like this really impressive, almost incubator like program, that Gigi and Pablo run in in Madera. That's not like a formal incubator that you'd be used to with, like, an incubator with, like, VC funds and stuff. It's just like a bunch of Freedom Tech developers that all meet for a couple months and just hack, They in Madera.
[01:25:46] Fran:
Matt. What? They walk and talk.
[01:25:49] ODELL:
Walk and talk. Yeah. It's impressive. Like, the caliber of projects and developers that come out of there, I mean, I don't think it can really be overstated. It's really cool what they're what they're doing over there. I'm I'm really impressed. I still haven't made it over to Madera myself. I need to make it over. But then the second piece, was, I mean, that's my dream. My dream is that Open Sats is the bootstrap mechanism. Right? Like, what I wanna see is I wanna see sustainable FreedomTech software. So sustainable open source software that's monetized with Bitcoin is I think it it's possible for the first time ever. Like, this is relatively new. Like, if you were an open source developer, at the very least, if you were gonna try and create sustainable software with an ethical business model, you had to integrate into the traditional financial system and accept credit cards and all this other nonsense.
And it automatically added permission to it, and it automatically made everything much more difficult. But now that we have permissionless money, and now that we have permissionless communication with Nostr, you combine the three things together, open source software with Nostr and Bitcoin, and you have this ability to have sustainable business models that are ethical that we've never seen before. And, hopefully, we see a bunch of projects come out of Open Sats where they got bootstrapped for a year or 2 years or 3 years, and then they become sustainable and actually have a revenue and, like, generation and actually bring in bring in SaaS flow and and and can be independent. That's the dream. That would be ideal. And they contribute back to open SaaS. Exactly.
It's a beautiful flywheel.
[01:27:33] Fran:
Yeah. Let's see what we what we can do, but a lot of work to be done. It's kinda kinda crazy. Yeah. Well I was planning to end the year with way more features and things, but, you know, just doing what, you know, what I can. But, yeah, Zaps Zaps next. And, hopefully, I think I the iOS getting getting into iOS and so on will will take a bit longer.
[01:28:08] ODELL:
Maybe, like, with Yeah. I mean, screw iOS for now. I mean, Mac Mac and Linux, like, desktop would be Yeah. Awesome
[01:28:18] Fran:
and and more doable. Able to to move to these operating systems, right, if, like, if they're feeling too oppressed in Right. In Apple jail. So
[01:28:28] ODELL:
I, it'd be huge to have it on desktop, especially with, like, the Bitcoiner hat on. Like, it'd be great to and and the CLI doesn't count. Like, otherwise, we might as well just be verifying PGP, signatures. Like, a nice pretty GUI for installing Bitcoin app specifically would be huge.
[01:28:50] Fran:
Yeah. For sure. I know that we'll have more much more usage, but maybe not for you, but for a lot of people, just having having that on on the CLI as well, it it's massive because it's just way easier than PGP anyway. And you can on the command line, you can see your web of trust as well. So, like, why why not have
[01:29:13] ODELL:
Fair enough. Yeah. I I get I I appreciate that. So
[01:29:19] Fran:
as I mentioned, Sparrow, you know, like, that that will be one of my dreams come true. The day where I can I can see a Craig Raw signed release and install it on Tap Store, you know, on my desktop? That that that I think would be massive. Well, I mean, to people who say that podcasts are useless,
[01:29:42] ODELL:
I actually I convinced Craig on a podcast to add his signature verification GUI. Have you used the signature verification verification GUI that he has in Sparrow now? I haven't, but I know it exists. Yeah. So, like, you can once you have a trusted version of Sparrow installed, right, so, obviously, you need to do PGP verification on the first install, which you need to do for Zapstore as well. After that, if you install if if you download any updates to Sparrow or, like, 9 different project Bitcoin projects that he has hard coded the PGP keys into Sparrow for, You can just drag and drop it into Sparrow, and it will do the PGP verification for you.
[01:30:27] Fran:
Mhmm.
[01:30:29] ODELL:
And he he kind of rejected the idea at first because it was wasn't, like, pure enough from a security standpoint, which I respect. Like, Craig is a very pure pure man. But he finally he finally did it, and he implemented it in, like, a super smooth way. So you can actually, like, ins you can download a new Bitcoin Core binary, and you can just drag that into Sparrow's GUI, and it'll just automatically verify it for you, which is pretty beautiful.
[01:30:57] Fran:
No. That's that's amazing. It's, it's it's great to have a
[01:31:02] ODELL:
I I'm but my point is is just, like, just years of being battered down by anytime you tell someone to go into fucking command line, they just their eyes glaze over. You know? There's there's some of us. Right? The ride or dies will do it. But, okay. Awesome. I, friend, this has been great. This has been a great chat. I've thoroughly enjoyed it. I I I really do think that ZapStore can be one of the killer apps for Nostr. I think there's a lot of people right now, we're at the the point in Nasr where we're hearing from Bitcoiners the things we heard from Bitcoin deniers for a long time, which is I don't I don't like Bitcoin, but I like blockchain.
It to me is like I when people say, I like Nostr, but I don't like the social media aspects because I think you need the shitposting social media to bootstrap everything else, and Zapstore is one of those things. Right? Zapstore is one of those things that there is thousands of Bitcoiners, hopefully, 100 of thousands at least of Bitcoiners that are out there that are like, we need an easy permissionless, you know, app store that is actually, like, verifying releases, in in a in a open way. And I think for a lot of them, Zapstore is the unlock. When I mentioned Zapstore, like, they they realized they're like, oh, okay. There's actually something here. Maybe I should pay attention to Nostril.
[01:32:42] Fran:
Yeah. Fully agree. And maybe even people who never heard about Nostril get into whether that is Zapstore or is Primal or any other project where you just get into it and all of a sudden they realize, oh, actually, I have this thing that is it's an NSEC, and I can move it around and just go into these other clients. Like, I think for a lot of people that will that will be the the UX. You know? Not everyone will will put up with understanding relays and NSACs and signers and all this all this stuff, because you just lose people. I I myself in the comp in the in my opinion, bad awful conference in Buenos Aires that you were at as well. Like, I was I was, actively you know, in the booth just helping onboard people.
And because other other people had already told them which clients they could have, they kinda chose. A lot of them were on demos, but this is not pointed to a particular, app. Could be demos, amethyst, or primal or whatever, but, like, all of them had a lot of problems and onboarding was terrible. I had to, like, kind of, like, made up excuses, you know, on there while while people were asking questions like, why don't I see who you just follow me. Why I don't see your name or I didn't get a notification or what what is this end up thing? Like, just too many questions and I was happy that these people were eager to try and ask her because if if you someone is, like, with not much energy to do it, like, you just completely lose them. So Yeah. I could talk a lot about onboarding, which I I feel is super important. And, obviously,
[01:34:32] ODELL:
Zastor, at some point, will have some kind of onboarding. A Let's talk about onboarding. I mean, I have some time still. You wanna talk about onboarding? I mean, onboarding's horrible right now. Let's talk about onboarding. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. What's your opinion on on the current state, and how how can we improve?
[01:34:51] Fran:
Well, I posted something about on ramps versus on the walls or something like that because I feel like some for some people, this is not a ramp from where they're at. It's just a fucking wall. You know? Right. It's like, oh, this is too difficult. I'll I'll I'll just you know? Oh, maybe next time. Right? So you just lose them. I think this has been the this experience is shared. I I heard other devs talking about this that the experience when they were actually I think, even Will from demos was was talking about, like, they they try to onboard someone and it's like, oh, actually, this is kind of painful. You know? There's, like, too many hiccups in the world. Like, it should be, like, way smoother. And the way I'm thinking about it is, like, well, there is some trust involved. Maybe we should not try to do everything permissionless and self sovereign, like, from, like, minute 10, but just gradually start, you know, showing people the way. So that's why I also think that it could be like you could think about, like, a Trojan horse. Maybe this this is just the way the word I use, but maybe they should know about relays and their end sec a bit later on the journey, like, not in the first minute. You know? And this is not trying to rob them. I think a lot of people is like, oh, no. This is like slave tech if you do that. No. Right. Because people you need to meet them where they're at. So whether that is a custodial solution, it's of some of some sort, but it all it will all depend. Like, if if you are, not malicious, then you will eventually let the user, you know, gather NSEC. Maybe they can change their NSEC because there were if they use the network for a month, you know, now they, you know, they kinda get the hang of it. Maybe you can say, actually, you could do you wanna bootstrap maybe to get a new a fresh new NSEC and do it, like, in a soft song way, or you wanna keep you I don't know. I don't have the answers to all that, but I feel like just doing everything, like, as I said, like, presenting all these new concepts, it it's it's not gonna work. And if you lose people, you probably lose them for a long time.
[01:37:06] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting dynamic. Right? And, you know, I came from the Bitcoin side first, so a lot of my, perspectives are influenced by the Bitcoin experience. And it it's very similar in Bitcoin land, where on one side, there's a bunch of people that realize that, okay. Some trade offs need to be made in order to onboard people more easily. And then there's, you know, this there's a there's a loud group of people that are also that they get they get really mad when those trade offs are made. So you're kinda like damned if you do, damned if you don't. Mhmm. And you kind of touched on that a little bit. Right? Like, oh, this is evil slave tech. And, I mean, a perfect example of that in the Nostra ecosystem, I think, is Primal. I think Primal is making certain trade offs to try and improve the onboarding experience.
Still not a great onboarding experience. Right? But, trying to make certain trade offs to make that onboarding experience much much smoother. Right? Don't show someone an NSEC right away. Like, still keep it locally and, you know, hold it locally. Don't keep it in a custodial fashion. Don't take access of of the the person's end sync. Let them export it when they're ready, but don't show it to them right away. The caching server. Right? This idea that there's a server sitting in between you and Relays in terms of reading content, very controversial, But it does make it less important which relays you have chosen in the beginning, and it also ends up in a result where the first time you load it, you're not gonna get, like, dick pics or other things that you might not be expecting, right, because there is, a not safe for work filter that is default on that you can turn off. Right? The fact that it's default on instead of default off that you could opt into, another controversial thing. The custodial wallet that's powered by Strike, very controversial.
You know, it's it's got it's got KYC built into it where you have to put your name and your email and other information there. But it makes zaps very straightforward in the beginning before they can figure out how to use a lightning rod. They might not even know what SATs are in the beginning. And I think what's important here is that people should be trying all different things. Right? Like, one one of our superpowers here is that we can have many dep different developer options many different options provided by developers because developers can provide all these different options without permission and see what works and but there should be red lines, and and that's probably where all the arguments happen. Right? Like, for me, my red line is something like what ZBD was doing, which was the NSEC itself was custodial.
Right? It was like they couldn't even the users couldn't even export their NSEC. I think they might have changed it, but for a while, that was the case, which seems incredibly, incredibly predatory. But that's why we all always get into arguments because everyone has a different red line. Right? For some people, the caching server on on on primal might be a red line or the the wallet could be a red line. But, like, also, like, you go on the opposite side and you're like, okay. Well, if there's not a Lightning wallet built into a client, like, most people aren't gonna zap and most people aren't gonna receive zaps. They're never even gonna taste it. They're not even gonna know what they're missing.
So it's kind of a in an open systems, it's a very messy situation. I don't know if I necessarily have the answers, except that I do want developers to feel like they're in a place where where they can experiment with many different things and and see what works. The other controversial thing with primal is the auto follows based on your interests, which is not an ideal situation. I know Dorsey specifically hates it. I think he partially feels guilty that he, like, empowered this, like, blue check elite class in the early days of Twitter. And, you know, there's plenty of conspiracies on the primal side about doing something similar there.
I mean, I think probably a better situation is some kind of, like, DVM feeds, algo feeds, or something that populate. But, like, I when I load up Amethyst for the first time, you're, like, onboarding someone to Amethyst for the first time, it's literally just an empty feed. You're, like, pulled to refresh, and there's nothing there because you don't follow anybody. And that's that's really that's that's really hard for new users. It's just like, watch them. Onboard a new user, watch how they interact with the protocol, and, like, let's make it a little bit easier for them. Let's try out different things and see how how it works. That's my Yeah.
[01:41:47] Fran:
I I appreciate what primal is trying to do. I think it could be from my perspective, it could be improved in that. For example, when you I believe when you're offered the the wallet, it's not super evident that you could skip it or or just input your own nostrilater connect string or something like that. I think I gave I gave, Millian, the feedback.
[01:42:17] ODELL:
Well, to go back to our previous conversation, on iOS, the only way to send zaps is through the built in wallet. And that's because he gives a portion of you can also buy Bitcoin in the wallet, and he limits it to $5 at a time in terms of purchases, but you can buy Bitcoin in the wallet. And if you buy Bitcoin, he gives Apple a cut. And so we don't you know, we're we're not sure if that's gonna continue to work and Zaps will remain in the iOS wallet. It's kind of like it's like kind of a gray zone. Right? But, like, right now, Apple's getting a cut of quote, unquote in app purchases, which is you buying Sats in the wallet. So and I I believe he tried to add NWC to that, and it got not approved in the App Store. But on Android, you can use NWC.
It's probably not front and center. I think probably a lot of that is, like, trying to keep the interface relatively simple similar. But you can add Nasr WalletConnect to send Zaps from an external wallet. And then obviously on both, you can set any lightning wallet you want for receive. Right? So that was an interesting choice that I saw Marty made, Marty Maum made for Iris, which was every user by default gets automatically set up with an Mpub dot cash custodial cashew wallet. And the beauty there is NPUB dot cash has no sign up process. Like, you just put an NPUB in front of at NPUB dot cash and that's a valid lightning that's a valid lightning wallet.
So Marty's just offloading that. Right? Now Eggie, who's the maintainer of mpub.cash, I've I've is a clearly to me, a good actor. But, like, you do run the risk that he could just, like, rug your entire user base, that you're just, like, offloading this capability. And so, like, for better or for worse, like, 1,000,000 doesn't 1,000,000 wants to make sure that he has control of his destiny. He doesn't want anyone to argue, but I think that's an interesting trade off. That, like, kinda makes sense to me. But, like, the idea that a user as as I don't know how we get there. Maybe it's not I just keep going all all over the place, but nutsack or whatever nutsaps with that Pablo's working on, in terms of keeping the Cashew wallet directly on relays and, like, sharded elements on relays.
What I want the end result should be that a user signs up to Nasr and they can immediately receive Zaps. I think that's a key element. Like, their first post without doing something like heavy friction wise can just receive Zaps seems like it's important. And and from the sender side, I feel that. Like, you go to zap someone and it doesn't work, and then you have to post underneath, and you're like, can you please set up a lightning wallet? Like, this is my recommendation. You can do this. And with me, it's even worse because I have to do it in all caps because I've committed. So then there's, like, a brand new user, and I'm, like, hitting them with, like, 2 paragraphs, all caps, like, go to mpub.cash, sign up here, sign up there. Like, there's a lot of friction there. There's a lot of things we can work on.
[01:45:46] Fran:
Definitely. But it all boils down to trust, like, and how that gradient of trust, how do you wanna expose that? And be it Casio, which is fascinating. I think that that could be why because, like, you know, self custodian custodial lighting channels and all that, it's it's another huge wall for for new users that aren't on premise. So it's a great solution to it. But on the on the other hand, it's like we're talking about, like, Millian in the sense is acting as a curator in a way like we were talking about the app stores, right? It's custodial, it's KYC, but you don't get dick pics. So, it might be a fantastic trade off for some people. I also wanted to say, like, not every project in Nasr, we need we need to understand that not every project in Nasr will be, like, completely interoperable.
You know, we'll we'll have clients, you were mentioning CBD, but, if if we're gonna grow, these actors will appear, and it's just that the market that needs to sort out, you know, as a user, you will get you you might hear a bad reputation because, you know, because they're, like, more close product, but maybe for a lot of people, they don't care. So, I mean, we will see these things on us, especially if decentralized. We you cannot stop any of the people come here and leech and be parasites. Hopefully, we will have, like, so great products that people will wanna prefer them and choose them, and they will have, like, in general, better reputation. Right? Because I hope that we keep the the culture in that even though you're not exposed to your end sec in in the very beginning, you know, that is just like in Bitcoin. Right?
Run your own node. It's like, hold your keys. Like, we keep pushing this because maybe users are not are not ready in in in minute 0, but they are ready, you know, after 1, 2 months, whatever that may be. And that at that point, they should be able to take it out and actually, you know, check if their provider, their social media service is not rubbing them. It's like, oh, shit. Where's my insight? You're not giving it to me. You know? Well, this is not, sir. I'm supposed to be it's supposed to be interoperable, so I want my insight. So I hope that those actors, like, get get punished in in some way, but we're not gonna be able to stop them.
[01:48:09] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I think a good example there from Bitcoin land is well, first of all, before seeds existed, backups were incredibly difficult. But then after seeds existed, there was all these self custody wallets that when you first launched the wallet, it would make you write down your 12 or 24 words, then rewrite them into the into the app to make sure you had them or whatnot. And finally, developers started to come around and realize, like, maybe that's not the first thing you should hit users with. Like, you can hit them with a modal and, like, a little pop up 3 weeks, 4 weeks, 2 months, 3 months down the line and be like, you haven't backed up your wallet. You should back up your wallet. But, like, in the beginning, you should just greet them with send and receive. You know? Just get them in the door, get them comfortable, and then when they have an actual amount that they need to back up and and figure out how things work, then you hit them with it. I think that's a really good example of of it in practice, and we can have kinda similar on Nostra. Right?
[01:49:10] Fran:
Yeah. Def it's it's it's better to have a a, let's say, a custodial Nostra or Bitcoin user than no user at all.
[01:49:20] ODELL:
So, you know, we'll do we'll do our best to to try Yeah. I mean, I would push back. That's not necessarily custodial. Like, it it's still self custody. Like, the NSEC is in your app. You just don't know it exists, and you don't know how to back it up until a little bit later. You know? And if your phone, like, falls in the toilet or something in the meantime, you know, okay. Well, you just lost you just lost your nostril account. It's like not the end of the world. Yeah.
[01:49:47] Fran:
Okay, Fran. Yeah. Go on. Sorry. No. I just just to add, but it it it's critical that we we put emphasis on on all this if we want not Nasr to grow.
[01:49:57] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, with Nasr too, like, with Bitcoin wallets, we do this thing. I see this comment from Muni, about the amount you triggered on Bitcoin wallets. Like, a lot of developers do this thing. It's like once you hit a certain amount or you received a certain number of transactions, that's when we hit you with the you should back up your wallet. You haven't backed up your wallet yet. And we can easily do that with Nazdar too. It can be, you know, you've done 20 events or you've done a 100 events. You know? You've you've made 50 posts, and you've done a bunch of likes and maybe some zaps or whatever. Now consider backing up your wallet. Right? Like, you can have different KPIs that trigger Yeah. When even the back not backing up your wallet, but backing up your and making sure it's secure. And, oh, by the way, here's, like, a little bit of a tool tip on you can install other apps, and you can use this, use that.
[01:50:46] Fran:
Yeah. The whole discovery thing, but I hope we can use this this this cool freedom tech like Frost or something like that to to make the whole, like, custodial aspect even better. Right. That would be fantastic. Well, like, multi sig. Like, multi sig. Like, maybe you have good students that that none of them can run you. I don't know how this works exactly, but the idea that it's it's not that your provider just holds your insect, but you can somehow recover it, you know, by,
[01:51:15] ODELL:
all these participants collaborating and giving it back to you. Yeah. I mean, you could do, like, collaborative custody, like, like an Unchained or Casa for the Bitcoin metaphor.
[01:51:26] Fran:
Yep.
[01:51:28] ODELL:
And you could even do a situation where it's, like, multi institutional or whatever. It's like, you know, j b 50 Domus holds a key. Amethyst holds a key. Primal holds a key. And, like, you need 2 of 3, to to actually send a message or something like that. I don't know. There's Frost gives us a lot of options because it's external of the protocol. So you don't actually need any protocol changes, same with on Bitcoin, which is what makes it fascinating. Fran, I've had you for for for a long time. I need you to get back and work on Zapstore so you can ship some more releases.
Do you have any Thank you for joining us. Do you have any final thoughts for the freaks before we wrap?
[01:52:10] Fran:
No. No. I appreciate this conversation. I need to catch up with the chat and see what people were asking or or zapping. But Oh, that actually reminds me. Now I'm gonna cut you off on your final thoughts.
[01:52:21] ODELL:
Subprime asked way earlier, in the Zap stream, how can users of Zapstore verify that a downloaded APK is actually signed by a specific master key?
[01:52:34] Fran:
You can go to our master profile, our con 0, and and check that the hash matches. Like, I tried to explain it on the Zapstore, profile bit, there's every time there's a new release, there's a hash published there in in the kind of 0 in the, you know, in the profile. But that's for the that's for the actual Zapstore release. Right? Because
[01:53:00] ODELL:
for the actual when you're downloading apps within Zapstore, your client is just seamlessly doing it locally. Right? It's just checking
[01:53:08] Fran:
the signature locally. Is that what's happening? You yes. Absolutely. You are, in that case, trusting Zapstore to do all this work for you. I think there's no it is actually when it when it basically, it gets complicated, but, like, the the events that the dev is is signing, link to the hash. Okay? So you have an event that says the hash of the binary you've already installed is this. And what we're doing is we are downloading the the let's say, this the APK in this case. We're calculating the hash, and we are seeing if it matches with what the developer
[01:53:48] ODELL:
Right. Said.
[01:53:50] Fran:
And that if if there's a hash hash mismatch, which actually has happened, I think a lot of people had issues with that because, well, there's another because we also in Android, we get, APK. Every every APK is also signed by a certificate. So Android is, like, Android's security model, and we also check that. So if there's a mismatch beforehand, we will warn you that this is not updatable or it's, like, installable always, but not updatable. So, yeah, all of all of that complicated stuff, like, is happening within SaaS or that's that's why it is a tool.
And at some point, like but I don't think we can minimize the trust on that one. You know? Like, if there are open to suggestions, but it's just kind of weird. Can you,
[01:54:38] ODELL:
like, it'd be nice in Zapstore if I if you could link out to the actual event that was, like, the sign message of the hash if someone wanted to then go verify that the hash of the APK actually manually matched the hash in the event. Is that already possible? Am I
[01:54:55] Fran:
I think that is is it's just adding complexity for no gain because Nobody's gonna do it. If if I wanted if I'm if you're gonna open the event from the app itself, you you're you're also trusting me. So why just not trust me the whole way? You could go you could go to to the really what's so funny.
[01:55:16] ODELL:
No. I mean, that's a I mean, you make a good point, but it's
[01:55:19] Fran:
No. What I'm saying, you could go if you wanted to get to that level, just go to just hit the relay. Hit relay.sapps.dev and search for your app, and you'll you'll get the events. And you Right. And all the events are on that relay. You can you can verify those events. But I'm happy to reconsider or just get a bunch of ideas and see if if we for for for freaks that are, you know, we don't don't wanna trust as much, like, if if there's, like, something that makes sense that adds security and not just security theater.
[01:55:56] ODELL:
No. Yeah. I mean, that that makes sense to me. That's, like, probably mostly security theater. Like, power users can actually go verify. And, I mean, people can build other apps that are that are pulling from the same events, and you can actually have multiple apps be verifying. And I I really like the DVM reproducible builds idea. That's a cool concept. Okay. So now I I interrupt you. Final thoughts.
[01:56:21] Fran:
Downloads app, and and be patient, you know, with with the features, but I have you have big plans for this. Let's see what, you know, what what's possible, but I'm still super keen on on on on exploring and going deeper on this and see what, you know, what can be built. But but, hopefully, just get out of the as much as I love my nostril bubble, try to get out and maybe expose this to to more people outside of this world. Ideally, the next huge step would be, get the wider, FOSS developer community interested in this. That would be that would be great. I think, hopefully, without necessarily, like, showing this onto the faces, like, Nostra and Bitcoin, but one once they find it, like, game changer, I hope, you know, then they will discover or or be friends with with with this tech, right, and and and hopefully adopt it for for even for other projects.
And, obviously, the the dream here, because I've been an open source dev, like, since forever, I'm really grateful for all the stuff that I could build, through open source. Obviously, not to mention lost in Bitcoin. It's it's a way of giving back, like, the fact of enabling devs to, like, just lower the friction, as much as possible and improve the discoverability so that devs can actually make a living out of their apps. Like, that's my that's really my dream. So I hope to to achieve that.
[01:58:11] ODELL:
I love it. Well, Fran, thank you for joining us. Thank you for building Zapstore. Freaks, you can find Zapstore at zapstore.dev. I'm gonna link to that in the show notes. I'm also gonna link to Fran's, Noster account. Follow him on Noster. Huge shout out to the who joined us in the live chat. I mentioned earlier that Brian zapped a 100000 sets. Our second biggest zap was Mav 21, who zapped 10,000 sets. And then, of course, you can also support the show through podcasting 2 point o apps like fountain podcasts. Our 2 low our 2 largest boosts, from podcasting 2.0 from last episode was Beholder with 21,212 sats and Oscar Mayer, who's, the cofounder of, Fountain, with 10,000 sats.
Briggs, we have no ads. We have no sponsors. This is a pure value for value show. Think it's probably the largest, no ads Sats funded show that is not run by Adam Curry. So thank you, Freaks, for making that possible. The Sats really they keep me going. They it's it's it's it's wonderful finding out that you guys find value from it, so thank you for supporting the show. And once again, Fran, thank you for joining us.
[01:59:37] Fran:
Thank you, Roy.
[01:59:39] ODELL:
Keep pushing. Appreciate you. You too. Thanks.
[01:59:43] Fran:
Cheers. Cheers.
[01:59:49] Unknown:
Instead of looking up to Thomas Jefferson or or looking up to Nikola Tesla or looking up to to Magellan. I mean, kids, Magellan's a lot cooler than Justin Bieber. He's circumnavigated with one ship, the entire planet. That's destiny. That's will. That's striving. That's being a trailblazer and explorer. Going into space, mathematics, quantum mechanics, the secrets of the universe. It's all there. Life is fiery with its beauty. It's incredible detail. Toning into it. Unlock your evil potential. Definct the bubbles you wanna shatter your mind. Your doorways to perception.
To live in this nightmare system these control freaks have created. That's why I don't care about my own life. It's about what I continue to live to fight them. That's why I don't have fear. I only have fear of myself and my flesh and not be up to the challenge. When I ask you to look in the mirror and ask yourself, what are you
CNBC Intro
MicroStrategy's Bitcoin Strategy with Michael Saylor
Quantum Computing and Bitcoin's Future
US Digital Currency and Stablecoins
MicroStrategy's Addition to Nasdaq 100
Introduction to Citadel Dispatch with Odell
Zapstore: A Permissionless App Store
The Challenges of App Stores and PGP Verification
Nostr's Role in Open Source and Freedom Tech
Security and Verification in Zapstore
Discoverability and Social Layer in App Stores
Monetization and Ethical Business Models
The Future of Zapstore and Open Source Software
Onboarding Challenges in Nostr
