Jack Dorsey is founder of both Twitter, now X, and Square, now Block. We discuss his strong focus on bitcoin and nostr, lessons learned across his many years of experience, censorship on twitter, and the promise that open source freedom tech holds for humanity.
We also celebrate the pardon of Ross Ulbricht after 12 years in jail for the nonviolent crime of running SIlk Road. The news broke while we were live.
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EPISODE: 150
BLOCK: 880265
PRICE: 939 sats per dollar
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(00:00:03) Ross Ulbricht - 2021 Interview - Bitcoin Miami
(00:05:55) Introduction and Ross's Background
(00:07:35) Conversation with Jack Dorsey Begins
(00:10:14) Jack Dorsey on Bitcoin's Importance
(00:15:13) Bitcoin's Challenges and Distractions
(00:19:12) ETFs and Bitcoin Adoption
(00:23:00) Companies Stacking Bitcoin
(00:25:32) Bitcoin Usage and Adoption Challenges
(00:31:09) US Financial System and Global Comparisons
(00:35:57) Trump Coin and Meme Coins
(00:39:02) Nostr as a Social Media Protocol
(00:47:02) Nostr's Potential and Challenges
(00:54:01) Nostr's Bootstrapping and Community Building
(01:00:06) Algorithmic Choice and Content Discovery
(01:06:13) Nostr's Role in Content and News
(01:17:03) Jack Dorsey on Nostr and Bitcoin Wallets
(01:34:08) Nostr vs. Traditional Social Media
(01:40:24) Cashu and Open Protocols
(01:51:01) Final Thoughts and Ross Ulbricht's Pardon
[00:00:01]
Ross Ulbricht:
You're good to go? Yep. Alright. Hello. This is Ross Ulbrich. I'm calling you today from prison from, a maximum security federal protectorate. We don't have much time together today, and I don't know if I'll get another chance to talk to you like this. I'll say as much as I can, but when it's time to go, I'll have to hang up and go back to my cell. I have lost my freedom. That's what I wanna talk to you about today. I want you to understand what it means to lose your freedom. Bitcoin has been transforming our world since that very first block in the blockchain.
Now let me tell you something. We are just getting started. Wherever Bitcoin has been embraced anywhere in the world, freedom and equality follow. Bitcoin is the embodiment of freedom. So now look what we have. On one side, we have loss of freedom. We have despair and darkness. And on the other side, we have Bitcoin. We have freedom, quality, and hope. The 2 can't sit side by side, so the darkness has to be kept out of sight. It has to be ignored and forgotten. But listen, here I am. I'm crying out from that very same darkness. This is a cry for help.
My mother can't do this by herself, and and I'm crying out not just for me, but for all of us. We need your help. We need you to care. We need you to look at the stark contrast between the freedom of Bitcoin on the one hand and what it means to be locked in a cage until you die. We have a choice today, right now. Do we ignore what's happening? The loss of freedom, the dehumanization, or do we wake up? Bitcoin is strong. Bitcoin is powerful. We are powerful, and our work is not over. It's time to wake up. It's time to take the next step. I've spent the last 8 years watching Bitcoin grow up midyear.
I've seen incredible innovation. I've seen inspiring courage. We didn't know how things would turn out for Bitcoin back in the beginning, but over the years, I've been continually impressed what you've accomplished. I am proud of you, and I have no doubt we can do anything we set our minds to. We are transforming the global economy. We have brought a taste of freedom and equality to far corners of the world. I know we can transform criminal justice too. And now, today, I challenge you to set your sights on the hardest problems. I challenge you to shine Bitcoin light into the darkest places.
I challenge you to set us free. We need more miracles. I have to go sooner. I don't wanna go. I don't want go back to that cell. I wanna be there with you. It's called you've done so much for me today. Talking with you today is the most freedom I've felt in a long, long time. Thank you. Thank you for giving me your attention. I will never forget this day. The memory of this day, this can never be taken from us. Okay. This call is from a silent prison. I'm gonna go now. Thank you. Goodbye.
[00:05:55] ODELL:
Happy Bitcoin Tuesday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Citadel Dispatch, the interactive live show focused on actionable Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion. That intro was no other than Ross Ulbricht. He did that interview, almost 4 years ago in Miami at the Bitcoin conference in Miami from federal prison. He's been in jail for 12 years now for a nonviolent crime. He should hopefully be freed any day now. I know there's many of us that are sitting on pins and needles hoping hoping it happens sooner rather than later. I was hoping that it would happen actually before we went live.
But regardless, it's incredibly important to highlight. I I would say that there's a lot of things I've been frustrated with the Bitcoin community as we've grown grown bigger. But it's it's super inspiring and powerful to see people rally around this cause, to free Ross. So, hopefully, we'll see that very soon. He's been in jail for 12 years now. And I would just say, like, personally, I was there when that interview happened, and I was backstage. And immediately following immediately following it, they after giving after the prison gave permission to the interview, his only interview, they they threw him in the hole. They threw him in solitary confinement, and I was there with his mother.
And from that point on from that point on, I knew it was impossible for us to have won without him out. So, hopefully, it's imminent. And with all that said, I have a great conversation live from a beach somewhere. So you might hear some beach noises in the background. If it gets really bad, tell us, and we'll evacuate the beach. But I'm live here with Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Square. Now Twitter's called x. Now Square is called block. How's it going, Jack?
[00:07:58] Jack Dorsey:
I'm good. Thank you. I think I've been on almost every other Bitcoin podcast than before this one, so I've just been waiting for the invite. This is the final boss.
[00:08:08] ODELL:
So, technically, if you've been a listener for CIL dispatch, I've had Jack on the feed twice. We had on stage conversations in Riga that I then, syndicated out on the feed, but this is Doesn't count. Indeed his first time on a proper seal dispatch. It is seal dispatch 150, so it's a very special number. It's an honor to have you here for such a special number. Thank you. What's what's special about the number? 150. It's a round large number.
[00:08:36] Jack Dorsey:
Do you not think 150 is a a special number? Great number. Congrats on doing a 150 of them. Did the Regal one count in the 150? No. I don't count the when I syndicate the
[00:08:45] ODELL:
Alright. So what number you're actually at, though? It was significantly higher than 150. I don't know. Probably over 200. But, yeah, I only count I only count the real dispatches, and it's good to have you. I I would just say to the freaks, I asked Jack, to go on Rogan, to speak the good word of Bitcoin and Noster, and, he refused to go on Rogan and said instead he was he was gonna come on to dispatch. So that's an honor. But
[00:09:10] Jack Dorsey:
I think it's a much deeper and understanding audience than the Rogan. I've I've also been on him twice. I don't know.
[00:09:18] ODELL:
Yeah. But if a 3rd time would actually help. I feel like it's a different moment. You know? It's, you're on the next chapter now. It could be. Could be. So with all that, I mean, I don't know where to start. We have a lot to talk about. It seems like no one's complaining about our sound quality yet, which is impressive. Like, can you tell who's zapping as well? Yeah. We can see who's zapping. You see the zaps? I mean, they're not really zapping that much, but they can zap really much. Anything. We have 8 k zapped, 2.1,000 sats.
That's the most sad zap so far. If you're listening on on YouTube, you can find the Nostril live chat that is streamed on screen at sitaldispatch.com along with all the other links for the show. You do not need a Noster account to use it, and it has Bitcoin payments built in. We call them zaps. So that is awesome. I mean, I think a great place to start is, you know, why why have I mean, with the powerful words that came from Ross, like, why have you focused so much of your life on on Bitcoin? Why should people care about Bitcoin?
[00:10:29] Jack Dorsey:
I think it's, I mean, for me, it's about, like, these open protocols. For me, the reason it resonated right away was that's how I grew up. Like, I grew up on the only reason I am where I am and able to do what I do is because of the grace of so many other open source developers and people who actually built protocols that were open and anyone could build on top of them, from SMTP to, HTTP to FTP, Gopher, Usenet back in the day, IRC, Like, the golden age of the of the Internet when everything was truly decentralized, and it just felt wild. It felt like a Wild West. And Bitcoin, when I first encountered it, felt like that Wild West. It felt like undefined, and it felt vast at the same time. And it felt vast because it was on something really big, which is money. And during the time it came out, I was just starting a company called Square, which is a financial services company that has to work with Visa and Mastercard.
We started in we started with the idea in 2 in in December of 2008. I remember going back to Saint Louis to my hometown to meet, this guy, Jim McKelvey, who was my boss when I was 15 years old, and we wanted to work together again. And then in January, February 2009, we we started building. And at that time, Bitcoin and the white paper came out, and we spent 9 months asking for permission from Visa and Mastercard just to let us run a pilot of small merchants. Small merchants couldn't get through to start accepting credit cards because they had to go through a credit check. And we had asked permission of Visa to allow us to serve 100 merchants and then 1,000 merchants. And whoops, we made the we coded the constraint wrong, so it actually ends up we're serving 5,000 merchants. And eventually, we got to 10,000 and a 100,000. Eventually, they they changed the rules for us.
But just the fact that we had to go through all that, instead of just building on something that was open, as you would expect on the Internet, painted the picture crystal clear for me. And then I really when I was a kid, I loved altCypherpunks. I loved Usenet, and I loved, what those guys were doing. I followed the mailing list. Wired back in the day was, like, wild. Like, it was it was underground back then, and it was following all that activity starting with PGP and Phillips Philip Zimmerman and exporting the code by Adam Back on a t shirt in Pearl. Like, all that was just, like that was my joy. I wasn't working in that space, but it was my joy. So I think it's important because it gives us permissionless technology.
And it's it's not the only one, but it's the one that matters the most right now because we can actually build on top of it. And we can build our livelihoods on top of it, and people can choose different paths instead of a typical corporate job to go down a path of being a developer and getting a grant from someone like Open Sats and doing what they love every single day. And I think that only expands as Bitcoin becomes more and more accessible. I think that's the only blockade right now and more valuable to people. My biggest worry is that it becomes irrelevant. And I think that a real a re a relevance comes from people not finding the use case and the value on it. And so that's what I wanna do to to make sure it has value, to make sure it has relevance, to make sure it's a currency, not just a a digital gold, store of value, but, actually, it's used every single day in opposition of all the permission systems, which I have to deal with every day in my life for the past almost 16 years.
[00:14:36] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, so you're kind you're I mean, you're literally a gray beard. I'm looking at your gray beard right now. How do you how do you wrestle with this, like, Bitcoin coming of age? Just last year, you know, with Bitcoin ETFs and and now with this idea of strategic Bitcoin reserve and governments stacking Bitcoin in their treasury and companies like MicroStrategy accumulating god tier levels of Bitcoin, with that hope for what seems you were describing is this hope for this freedom money, this money that people can spend without permission and use as they see fit.
[00:15:13] Jack Dorsey:
I think it's, I think Bitcoin is the next currency because it's been resilient to so many tests, and it's met so many challenges head on, from its earliest days to the block size wars to commercialization to today. I don't think it's the ETFs, to be honest. I don't think it's corporations owning it. I don't think it's strategic government reserves. I think it's something like Trump coin. I think, for someone who was promoting Bitcoin and saying that we're gonna use it as a strategic reserve and then to create a new, quote, unquote, digital asset around a a meme that everyone bought into.
And that seems to be, growing in some regards, that to me feels pretty dangerous just because it's distracting. It's distracting away from, like, what Bitcoin can do, and we've seen this, in Bitcoin for quite some time. These distractions come up, and and people go crazy for them. And we lose core developers. We lose attention. We lose people who are trying to make Bitcoin more accessible because the Ethereum network has more APIs, and it has more developer, attention. Now it's Solana, and there'll be another thing. And if Bitcoin can't keep that developer attention, I think we become more and more irrelevant, because people are not making it as accessible.
And they're not building the interfaces for it. They're not building use cases for it. So I see all these things as a challenge. I believe in my heart Bitcoin will overcome when people see through the superficial aspects of it and the lightness of it. These like, the the shit coins and, you know, all the meme coins and whatnot. But it's it's gonna be challenging because people are going to to go there, and they're gonna follow it.
[00:17:20] ODELL:
I guess so. There's a there's a lot to unpack there. Beef I I mean, I wanna start with your comment about the ETFs. So it sounds like you don't think the ETFs are necessarily a good thing. Do you think they're explicitly a bad thing, though?
[00:17:33] Jack Dorsey:
I don't think they're a good thing or a bad thing. I think they're a distracting thing. I like, as you know, you don't own your Bitcoin unless you own your keys. And this is, like, another level of indirection to buy Bitcoin. You can make the argument that you meet people where they are, and people might be with their brokerages and on Wall Street and want a common vehicle to to buy these things. And then you can make the argument that eventually they'll convert it, but people are lazy as well. And I think it has the distraction of potentially keeping it more store value rather than, something I can use on a daily basis to buy my food, buy a coffee, to pay a babysitter, pay for services, and actually transact around the world, do remittance around the world. So I think they're neutral, but it's a question of, like, how do people go down the rabbit hole? Do people actually pull the thread on what this actually means? Do people want to be their own bank? Do people want to have their own keys?
And actually go into this permission, this land where they have the responsibility over it. And that's scary because when you have responsibility on what might be a lot of money to some people, then, I don't wanna lose it. And I don't want that responsibility. I wanna pay someone else to do it. I want or I want an abstraction of an abstraction to to deal with it. And I know it's there because I know the brokerage and all these things. So I don't know. You meet people where they are. It makes sense. But, like, if we don't do the other half of, of enabling people and ask having people ask the question why go deeper and why pull the thread, Then I again, I think Bitcoin becomes irrelevant. It's it's only going to be one use case, which is the store value instead of and the trading platform instead of what we all know it can be. If you just go back to the white paper, what is it? It's electronic cash, peer to peer electronic cash. Where is that vision right now?
It's distracted right now by ETFs. It's distracted by the BlackRocks. I'm grateful for them because they validate. And, you know, more value the more that number goes up, the more valuable it is, and the more people wanna work on it, and the more people turn their heads towards it. But it can also pause us as well if we get too comfortable there.
[00:19:53] ODELL:
I mean, I think there's a decent argument that it can kinda breed some complacency. It's like you already have exposure. You think you already have exposure. You buy the ETF on Charles Schwab or call your broker or whatever, and you think you have exposure, and then you just stop there. You're content Exactly. As a result. Alright. Check that box. Done. But also at the same time. Right? I mean, I think it clearly opens up Bitcoin to a larger market in terms of of, like, the Bitcoinization of finance, and it definitely increases Bitcoin holders purchasing power.
And if if you're talking about developers that are receiving OpenSats grants or Bit corners around the world that are self custodying their Bitcoin and trying to build strong local communities, the fact that they get increased purchasing power is obviously a significant benefit. Yeah. That's amazing. Have you noticed that there's this weird phenomenon where it's like anything that increases the price of Bitcoin is perceived as bad by a certain subset of the Bitcoin community?
[00:20:57] Jack Dorsey:
Yeah. I've seen that. I don't I go back and forth. I mean, again, like, it's, where's the attention? I think when we're in the heat of moment of the price going up all the time, we people tend to focus on that, and they tend to focus less on what does Bitcoin need to actually scale to the next 100,000,000 people. And it needs a lot. Like, it needs a lot of accessibility and needs better key management. People need to feel, like, safe with taking on that responsibility that they're not going to lose it. And, but at the same time, like, it does show that people actually value this. This I mean, it's it's all made up. Right? It's a belief system. This made up invention happens to be mat mathematically sound, and we have a lot of believers, and that price is an indication of the belief, but there also has to be the corresponding fundamentals underneath.
And if it's just digital gold, then it's just as good as a meme coin. Like, if it provides no other utility to people and they're not using it every day for that, then it is a meme coin ultimately over time, and that would be a shame.
[00:22:08] ODELL:
I mean, you keep bringing it back to Trump coin. We're gonna talk about Trump coin in a little bit. Meme coin. I mean, Trump coin is the meme coin of the day right now, the soup du jour. I think millennials. No? By the way, the zaps the zaps keep flowing. Thank you, Freaks, for supporting the show. I see you. But I wanna before we get there so ETFs we're talking about ETFs. What's your opinion on this on this trend of companies, you know, public companies specifically, but also private companies stacking Bitcoin on their balance sheet? MicroStrategy is the most obvious example with 460,000 Bitcoin.
But even your business block has a little over 8,000 Bitcoin on its balance sheet, and I believe you're actively stacking. We do see we do see into a into larger stack sets. We're stacking sets, stacking bits,
[00:22:57] Jack Dorsey:
but the sets denomination.
[00:22:58] ODELL:
That's not on the list of topics.
[00:23:01] Jack Dorsey:
So yeah. I mean, I I think, I don't know. For for for us, we we we have a lot of development work in Bitcoin. And if I could pick one thing, it would be that. If I could pick 2 things, it would be what we're doing with, Spiral. If I could pick 3 things, it would be the education that we try to do around Bitcoin, specifically around, Cash App customers and and Bitkey customers. And then 4 would be, like, having Bitcoin as a company because it's a hedge against anything going on. I we didn't buy a lot, relative to someone like, Michael Shaggy because, one, I don't feel good about just companies owning all the supply and all the Bitcoin. 2, we have a business, and that was a challenge business. And he kinda turned it into a different sort of business.
And he was early before the ETFs, and, like, it made sense. But we have a business. It's growing. It's it's, strong. But having it as a as a reserve, just in case, I think makes a lot of sense. And it can it can certainly potentially help us in the future. But I don't know how long we do this for. I feel like we have enough to keep us happy. We don't need to have more. We need to facilitate more. And that that's what I would rather it's what I would rather put our attention on.
[00:24:35] ODELL:
Okay. That all makes sense to me. I would say, though, that I think that ultimately, the goal of every business in the world should be to stack as much Bitcoin as possible, the goal of every individual, probably the goal of every functioning government.
[00:24:54] Jack Dorsey:
Yeah. You said this, Enrico. Maybe the goal is not stack as much as possible, but use it and transact in it as much as possible. I'd be down for that. Okay. Like, paying our vendors and paying our employees. Do you do any of that? We pay all the spiral people with, with Bitcoin. Oh, that's awesome. We don't have any vendors I'm aware of that accept Bitcoin, but we would. We we have it set up for that. And, we're working so that our employees can also convert to Bitcoin. They can do it right now if they put their paycheck in Cash App and do the auto convert into Bitcoin, through Cash App. So we have all the tools available. It's just, you know, not something, that's,
[00:25:31] ODELL:
you know, dominant across the entire company. Yeah. So, I mean, on that note, the year is 2025. Why can't people pay Bitcoin at Square terminals?
[00:25:41] Jack Dorsey:
We haven't seen the usage on the currency side that we want. And we actually went to sellers, and we asked them, if you if you could only have one thing from us, would it be auto convert into Bitcoin, a percentage of your revenue, or would it be accept Bitcoin? Nearly a 100% said auto convert. So we built that because it it's not easy either. Like, you know, just doing that. And they have a slider that can go, you know, from 0 to I don't know what the the limit is. Maybe 50% auto convert, their Bitcoin, and sellers actually use it. They they love it. And I think if we're to if we're to, if we're to play out the road map for, you know, hyper Bitcoinization and what mass adoption.
I think store value does make sense. And then, you know, building on that, when more and more sellers have it or more and more people have it, they can actually use it. Maybe remittance is the next thing. Maybe like a b to b thing, and then more con consumer to consumer. But there's places outside the US and outside Europe that accept it almost every day. Like, we're in one of those countries right now, and I've paid dinner here. I've paid for coffee with Bitcoin, with my my Bitkey wallet. I've paid with Lightning. I've played on chain. It all works. There's no questions from the merchant. They're happy to accept it.
And, like, we just don't have that in the United States right now. And I don't think just us building it into the terminal would create it because not enough people have Bitcoin in their wallets or know how to spend it, in the US, yet. And I think Strike tried this with some of the terminals or the partnership with the, the terminals,
[00:27:28] ODELL:
at some of the No. The department stores and The bear market crushed that one. We never really got it out the door.
[00:27:34] Jack Dorsey:
Well, see, there you go. But, like, it's it's not easy. Eventually, we will have acceptance on Square terminals.
[00:27:41] ODELL:
Why do you think That I guarantee. I mean, that's it's fascinating. I mean, I've noticed the same thing. You know, we'll run Bitcoin meetups in Nashville, Tennessee, one of the Bitcoin capitals of the United States. And we'll have, you know, 250 ride or die Bitcoiners come to the meetup. And we make sure that there's a food vendor there, a local food vendor there, seed oil free, and we'll onboard her to Bitcoin so she can accept Bitcoin. And it's literally, like, 2% of people pay with Bitcoin. But then you're outside of the US and these are, like, the most ride or die Bitcoiners. Right? You The ones that are asking why is why can't you accept Bitcoin as far as term? So white option, we're seeing the actual currency style adoption. I think it's a moment. Use case outside of the US, but not in the US. It's a comment it's a community momentum thing. Like,
[00:28:33] Jack Dorsey:
the the isolated, we don't have strong sense of community. Like, in a town that we're in, like, right now, it's a very small town. And when people see other people use Bitcoin, they'd interest and the, breads because it's word-of-mouth. And they're not Bitcoiners at all. Like, these people are not Bitcoiners, but they're using it because they recognize what it's doing for the merchant, and they they recognize what it's doing for them. And they happen to have it. But I think the biggest right here is, like, getting the Bitcoin. It's a little bit easier here, but getting it, why do you get it? I mean, that goes back to the Norwalk thing.
And then it's like, okay, is it keep going up or do I spend this? Do I buy my meal with it? You know, all these reasons, but I think the tightness of the community is a is a big factor.
[00:29:32] ODELL:
You know, historically, I thought part of it was that we have such good financial infrastructure. And I know it's not perfect. People get debanked all the time, but we have such good financial infrastructure in the United States, particularly in terms of credit cards and stuff. And that's the reason. But then you you come down here and, like, every vendor accepts Apple Pay. If anything, it's more it's easier to not travel with a wallet here than it is in America.
[00:30:02] Jack Dorsey:
Well, we I think the US just building on building on what I said earlier. I think the US has one of the worst financial systems, because it's all monopolies and duopolies, and it's all permission. You go to a place like Kenya or anywhere in Africa and you have M Pesa, and M Pesa works instantly. Every single person there can access M Pesa. You go to Latin America, a place like Costa Rica, you have Sempae. Every single person there can use it instantly. All they need is a phone number. And it works. Like, it just works. And you you you don't need things like Apple Pay. You don't need things like credit cards. You don't need things like even Bitcoin. So it's it's, again, it's it's just like a a choice, and then and it happened to be the case at a lot of countries outside the US and Europe.
They built these payment systems off phone credits. So as a telecoms, they would convert the phone credits to money. It was the original, like, meme coin. Right? It was the original shit coin, and, like, these credits go over, And, the merchant accepts them, and, you know, they're they're settled, and they're done. They go into the bank account easily.
[00:31:09] ODELL:
Should've named this, this ripped meme coins with Jack. That clearly, it's I it's the topic of the day. Like, that's It's it's living rent free in your head.
[00:31:20] Jack Dorsey:
It's disappointing.
[00:31:22] ODELL:
So real quick. I mean, so you think it's a regulation thing? You think it's mostly a regulation thing in the United States?
[00:31:28] Jack Dorsey:
I don't think it's a regulation thing. I think it's a company corporate thing. I I think, like, Visa carved out their area. The banks carved out their area. They're inner they're they're not, necessarily operable, networks and protocols across these things. I for those of you who are old enough, do you remember when SMS was just getting started? Yeah. Of course. Did you have Verizon or AT and T singular?
[00:31:55] ODELL:
I mean, I don't feel comfortable,
[00:31:57] Jack Dorsey:
stating which one, but I have I mean, back then. Back then. And I've You had one of the 2? I did. I had one of the 2. So Verizon was on the CDMA protocol, and AT and T was on the Pan Global GMS protocol. And do you remember the day that you could send a a text message from a Verizon phone to a singular AT and T phone? It was 2,005. But there was there was some years there where you couldn't do that. Right? There were 10 years. GSM was a standard for 10 years around the world. You could send text messages for 10 years before the text message from AT and T to Verizon. Was in its own little bubble. It had it and you couldn't send. And then the iPhone, like, really juice that up in 2,000 a bit, and made them work together.
But that's exactly what the US financial system is. They're all different protocols. They all wanna own them. They all have to figure out, like, how to interoperate with one another. The US government just created this, new protocol that's supposed to catch us up with the rest of Europe. I forget the name of it right now, but it's there, and it's probably a path towards a central bank digital currency. It would certainly make one easier, but it definitely solves the problem of, like for 40 years now, you all have had problems, like, sending money quickly, which is the only reason, by the way, that Venmo and Cash App exist and PayPal.
Because we abstracted the layer away, and we settled above those layers. And it didn't matter what bank you were on. It didn't matter what card you used. You would get money instantly. We can't do that with Cash App in, like, Europe because it's fast and free right now already, the peer to peer. So, you know, that's where that's where Bitcoin comes in. Do you want these government protocols? Do you want the corporate protocols that don't work together? Or do you want a protocol owned by the people?
[00:33:52] ODELL:
I mean, but by that logic, it kinda seems that if you do have a least quasi CBDC with, like, a relatively open API, In the short term, Bitcoin adoption actually can get bootstrapped quicker. Right? Maybe. Your M Pesa point? Like, M Pesa is a final policy. This is you arguing for c d c d c d kind of fascinating because that's an it's just an interesting point, and I think we're going there. Right? Like, I think in the west, like, the way CBDCs look is they're all gonna be corporate led, but there's gonna be public private partnerships. Right? Yeah. So all the people that are saying that they're anti CBDC will still use, like, x money.
[00:34:33] Jack Dorsey:
Yep. Or
[00:34:35] ODELL:
USDC or whatever, Tether, whatever it becomes.
[00:34:38] Jack Dorsey:
Yeah. If you see them all as on ramps, then certainly it can be beneficial. But then the question is why do people go to Bitcoin?
[00:34:43] ODELL:
Right. Well, because you can't take it. What's the value? No permission required. Yep.
[00:34:48] Jack Dorsey:
And then And how important is that to people right now? What's important when they get on bed? Convenience. Exactly. When they get rugged, it becomes important. But there's other things that there's other things that, can lead them there. Like, permissionless is not it. Like, we can build other utility on top of Bitcoin that, like, people run to instead of run away from the banks because they got rugged or because they got shut down. Like, we're still in this mode of, like, people are running away from a thing to get to Bitcoin instead of, like, running to Bitcoin to get to it. And I know that a lot of, like, you know, permissionless folks and, cypherpunks are running to Bitcoin for the right reasons, but that's not 99% of the population.
[00:35:32] ODELL:
Yeah. No. I've noticed this as well. I mean, you gotta make it convenient. You have to make it accessible. We have to make it convenient. The most convenient option. Yes. And I think Nasser is gonna play a really big role in that. I I wanna get to But before we go to Nasser, let's talk about your favorite your new favorite investment, Trump coin. Do you really think it's what is what is your opinion on that?
[00:35:58] Jack Dorsey:
I I think it's, I think it's very, very disappointing that people are buying into it. And there's what is what is the foundation of it? Like, what can you do with it? And I know that, like, the Jamie Dimons of the world and others say that this is the same as Bitcoin. Like, it has no intrinsic value and, like, you can't do anything, but we know that's not the case. Like, we we know the properties of Bitcoin. We know the censorship resistance. We know the decentralization. But people are running to something that they can, they can own a piece of and make a little bit money of on. I mean, it it's a casino.
Like, we made a conscious decision not to build a casino in the Cash App to stay Bitcoin only because of the underlying principles of it and because we wanted the internet to have an open protocol for money transmission. And we don't see that in f. We don't see that in hamster coin. We don't see that in, you know, n times 1,000,000 name coins. We see it only in Bitcoin. And there might be another thing that comes in the future that is better than Bitcoin in that regard, but I don't see it. I don't think anyone I've talked to has seen it. And, I think anything that takes away from that is distracting. So I I don't know. It just it feels like a recipe for disaster, but who knows? Anything could happen. Maybe it's the currency of the country at some point. It's it's not gonna be.
[00:37:37] ODELL:
I just I mean, I think it's funny that every cycle people think I hear so many people say, like, this is the end. There's gonna be no more shitcoins. I think shitcoins will be here forever. I think Yeah. Because people like to gamble. They have been here forever. There are coupons in back in the day. Like, it's it's the same thing. It's a credit score. Which ones they are. Like, ETH, for instance, right now is, you know, in complete disaster mode. Right? And it seems like it's like Solana cycle and the memes of the Solana cycle or whatever. And I really don't think of them as a threat to Bitcoin at all. I think of them as a they're definitely a distraction, and they're just a threat to the people that choose to speculate on them instead of saving Bitcoin and spending Bitcoin. Yes.
But they're they're not a threat to the Bitcoin protocol.
[00:38:22] Jack Dorsey:
They are because it they're distracting. Because we have the potential of people wanting to work on the Bitcoin protocol, and continue to make it more secure and safer and more resilient goes down. Not by a lot, but it certainly goes down. Ethereum did that to us. The NFTs did that to us. Like, that's where the money was when they filed the money, and they filed the the developer ecosystem and the and the velocity.
[00:38:54] ODELL:
Do The web 3. The web 3. Do you think there's an argument and I hear this a lot because of how I choose to spend my time. Do you think there's an argument by some Bitcoiners that noster is a distraction?
[00:39:08] Jack Dorsey:
From what? From Bitcoin. No. It it's it might be a distraction from, like, other social media protocols, but is Bitcoin our social media protocol as well? Do you think we need 1? If you answer that question, yes, then we need to work on something that that helps. And, like, the fact that, like, we have Bitcoin built into this thing. And the fact that, as you have said, it'll probably be the the the way that people onboard onto Bitcoin, because they're actually creating content and receiving Sats for it and they're receiving Bitcoin. I've converted so many people because of zaps.
They feel that a little, that little electricity, like the, the phone buzz a bit, and they see that money goes in their wallet and they're hooked. And and then they have to deal with the fact that, following a 111 people I don't know, I need to go and follow them. Like, where do I find the people that I'm actually interested in and the topics I'm actually interested in? And maybe that's too much work, and they forget the 20¢ that they got. But if they get, like, $5 or they have, like, some, like, incredible content and, like, it goes viral and they make money on it, they're gonna stick. They're gonna figure it out, and and and and they're gonna work at it. And we that's the accessibility we need. So I think Nostra is only symbiotic and only positive. And, I think the Bitcoiners who are saying that Nostra is a distraction are probably doing some distracting things right now.
[00:40:37] ODELL:
I mean, that's a 100% guaranteed. Especially in the modern age, people tend to get distracted very easily. But I and I I definitely agree with you, which is why I spend so much time on Noster and focus on Noster. I mean, I think Noster will effectively have done right, bootstraps Bitcoin in a big way. So if you focus on Noster, you're effectively focusing on Bitcoin adoption. A 100%. And specifically, Bitcoin adoption as as as freedom money. Like, to your point about Bitcoin as, like, an investment, something you buy in Charles Schwab versus Bitcoin as freedom money, I think a lot of that has to do with where people interact with it first. Right? Like, if you're calling your broker to buy Bitcoin or even if you're going on Cash App where stocks are sold and you're buying Bitcoin on Cash App Yep.
Or even something in, like, Strike that is Bitcoin only, but that you're, like, explicitly going on there to buy Bitcoin is completely different than your first experience with Bitcoin being a shitpost that some stranger zaps you money for.
[00:41:41] Jack Dorsey:
Right? It's like Oh, a 100%. I mean, I I think back to that concept of meeting people where they are. Like, it it's it's just a question of what's the next step. Buying from an ETF and and making my way to a non custodial wallet feels very challenging. Posting something on Noster and then receiving some zaps and making my way to a non custodial wallet feels very accessible and feels, very realistic. So, like, I I I do think there's a spectrum always, but I'm a huge believer in Nostra. I'm a huge believer more in just open protocols, and I think we need one for social media, and we need one for an ecosystem of apps to compete with, like, you know, the closed wall app stores and Google Play and the app stores of the world.
And we have this we have this protocol, so let's let's build on it. It's working.
[00:42:37] ODELL:
By the way, I see Rob Hamilton in the comments saying, no and tell Parker Nasser isn't a distraction. Are you familiar with Parker Lewis? Yes. He's the one who tells me the most that it's a distraction from Bitcoin. And what what's distracting from what? From Bitcoin. But what what would you what are you not doing in Bitcoin because you're doing it noster? Well, it's like a combination. Right? So, like, Open SaaS has a noster fund where we support a bunch of noster developers in addition to Bitcoin developers. Right? And 1031 is a venture fund where we support Noster companies in addition to predominantly Bitcoin companies. So you see it's more and more I mean, Noster is something that was bootstrapped by Bitcoiners. Right? It's something that the majority of our developers are were Bitcoin developers first. Right? And now they're working on Nastr. So I I don't I don't think it's without, I don't think the perspective is, like, completely crazy.
I think it's it lacks merit, and it's invalid. But, I understand where he's coming from. Right? Given your thesis is is
[00:43:42] Jack Dorsey:
a way to bootstrap Bitcoin, then it's not a distraction. Like, he might not be seeing that thesis and that endpoint.
[00:43:49] ODELL:
Right? Right. He thinks Nasr will fail and Right. That we all should just use x. And and that feels like a failure. Which I think a lot of have one option. A lot of Bitcorners think that. The overwhelming majority of Bitcorners think that
[00:44:03] Jack Dorsey:
Yeah. Right now, probably. Right? I don't know. Right? I, I don't know. I I think it depends on how Bitcoin they are, I guess. Like, are they are they are they there for the protocol? Are they there for the attributes? And if so, like, why does that that not extend to other properties such as social media? And, I don't know why you wouldn't want that. At least having that option, at least preparing something just in case everything does go down or these companies go out of business or they get corrupted or they get, owned by the state. Like, don't you want something that you can actually build your identity on and, like, it stays around and you get to choose whether it it where it exists and if it exists?
And the same is true for your content. Don't don't you want that? Because that's why you're in Bitcoin. Right? Because you want it for money. And money is content. It's the same thing. These are these are very, very symbiotic and parallel protocols. But I don't think people value the content as much, and I think that's one of those phases that will enter in when they like, they'll start appreciating why we should be valuing the content and why we should not allow corporations to own it, but that we can permission them in to use it. And, like, that that to me is what Nostra enables ultimately.
[00:45:36] ODELL:
So I see I see someone in the comments asking why we have no video today, Jack. Why do we have no video?
[00:45:42] Jack Dorsey:
I've barely seen any sort of dispatch for the video. Most of them are most of them are this clock.
[00:45:50] ODELL:
The best ones are no video. That's why. The best ones are no videos. And, also, we're sitting on a beautiful beach. We have a great view right now. We're watching the sunset. We're legit watching the sunset. It's a sunset ride. It's amazing because we don't actually have to look at each other. We can just look at the sunset and talk. We're not faced at each other. We're faced at the water.
[00:46:08] Jack Dorsey:
It takes that social awkwardness away.
[00:46:10] ODELL:
Because it is usually awkward with you, you know? Super awkward. So I want to I mean, you bootstrap Twitter. Right? Which, I mean, I've absolutely loved Twitter. It was my only social media for a decade before Nostr existed. And I've been, you know, mission focused for the last few years to bootstrap Nostra. And, I mean, first of all, you definitely do not get enough credit for the 0 to 1 problem, like getting critical momentum into something like Twitter. We got it in the Nostra as well, though. Well, so I mean, so that's my question for you. Like, how do you think about the bootstrap problem with something like Nostra? And I guess before that, why don't you just give there might be a bunch of listeners right now that have no idea what Nostra is. It's the first time listening to sale of dispatch.
Just give a brief why what is Nostra? Why should people care? And then I wanna jump into the Bootstrap problem.
[00:47:11] Jack Dorsey:
Well, Nostra, so, like, I don't know how long ago. It was maybe 4 years ago. We, we decided that, like, Twitter cannot be the view, the protocol, and the distribution mechanism all in one. For us to really get all the tweets, for us to really get all the content, for us to be the global consciousness, like, we had to open the doors. And that's how we started. We had a completely open API. Anyone could write to it. Anyone could read from it. You could build whatever client you wanted. And then we had our CEO who came in after me and then after the other one.
The company wanted to go public, and all that was closed down because of fears about other clients taking all the traffic, yada yada yada. So, like, the protocol aspect of Twitter failed when it went public. And we wanted to get back to that. I wanted to get back to that. That's why we created it. It's hard to be a public company, and you have a lot of a lot of different incentives that are not aligned with the people you're actually serving. And we can talk about that. But we wanted to create a protocol. We I have this this tweetstorm called, blues around blue sky, which was like, we're going to fund a protocol.
And we're looking for people to build it and to run it. We'll fund it for years out, at least 5 and beyond. And we'll end up using it if it's good enough. It'll be our protocol layer, and we'll be the client on top of it. And the reason we did that is because we would get more content. And our algorithms would be better. Our business models could be better, because there's just more content. So it's funny because I didn't know this at the time, but, this guy named Fia Jaf actually visited the community and talked with one of our people at Twitter who was interviewing developers, to take on this role.
And, for some reason, I don't know if it was if it was Fia Jaff, it probably was. Or if it was us, we chose not to work together. And, we chose, a woman named Jay, to build Blue Sky. And we, we funded her, and this is, you know, just after Elon, well, we funded her before Elon bought it. And then, she was on her own and and building on a structure right after. And, she started talking about it like investors and, she was worried about not getting more money because Elon bought it and, you know, he was shutting a bunch of things down and these are all valid concerns.
And I started to get nervous, and I I wanted to shift my my funding to to more Internet permissionless stuff. And I asked, like, what should I be looking at to fund this space? And someone tweeted at me, Noster. And I went to Fiat Jeff's, GitHub, And there's a page. I know this is a long entry to the description of this, but basically, this page described every single thing that was wrong with Twitter. And here is the fix, but it's open. It's decentralized. And anyone can build on top of it, and anyone can improve it with these things called NIPS. But, effectively, it's a protocol for social media.
Instead of a username and password or an email address and a password, it's a key pair. So you have a secret key and a public key, which you can give out to people and they can follow you. It's the only one out there that actually verifies you are you because of the cryptographic security as long as you keep that, secret key safe. It's the only one out there that all data you create, you sign with your key, so they can verify, it's you. And that's important in the age of AI and deepfakes and whatnot. It's the only one out there that you can state, I want to use this client, but, actually, I don't like that client anymore. I wanna use this client. And your follow graph and all your tweets, all your posts go with you, and you can see them in the same way that you saw in in the different client.
And it's the only one that you can say, like, I know that this is going to exist for as long as I want it to. A company can't take it down. The protocol engineers can't take it down. The government can't take it down. It exists. It's permanent. If I so if I choose it to be permanent, and my identity is is permanent if I choose. No company can do that. No company can say that. There's no other protocol I know of in social media that can say that. None. They're all, like, captured in some way, whether they'd be the Ethereum based ones or the Solana based ones or ones that companies are building, that they start or, quote, unquote, bootstrap and then they're gonna give to the community. They're not.
Nostra is it. And I found it, and I'm like, oh, man. This is it. I'd like I I was like, Blue Sky was probably the wrong answer. There's a lot of good ideas in Blue Sky, but, like, this is what I wanted of just something raw, just something, like, open. Again, feeling like that early Internet. Like, that's what Fiat Joff created, and that's what the community still feels like today. It's a significant developer community. They're very excited. They're building amazing stuff. And if you want social media on your terms and you still want to interrupt with the exes of the world and, the mastodons and the true socials and the blue skies, Noster is probably gonna be it because it's the only one that can say it's neutral. The only one.
Everyone else is captured in some way.
[00:53:20] ODELL:
I mean, I think that's a pretty cool thing to highlight because the way Noster is built, the only reason you can't see everything that's available throughout the Internet in your Nostr app is because of various walled gardens that are put up. If those walled gardens didn't exist, you could very easily bridge every x post or every Facebook post or every TikTok post over to Noster, without permission. And you can view it, and you can interact with it, and you can share it. But that's not the case because everything's a walled garden. So, anyway, to my point earlier, I think that was a good intro description, albeit long.
I mean, cut me off anytime. I'm not gonna cut you off. You're you're the star of the show right now. I've been told I cut people off too much. I'm trying to work on I'm not a professional podcaster. I just
[00:54:11] Jack Dorsey:
like Freedom Tech, and, I love I love this. VC. Definitely not an influencer influencer, anarchist VC. Influencers don't go noster only,
[00:54:21] ODELL:
because of the bootstrap problem. They do. You're our first influencer that has gone noster only. Did you say anarchist VC? Yes. I respect that. Thank you for the compliment. So what do you think about the like, do we have a bootstrap problem? Like, how do you think about adoption to Noster so far? Is it good? It does it need work? Is there major concerns there? How do we fix it? I'll tell you how we started Twitter. We sent invites out to our friends.
[00:54:48] Jack Dorsey:
Our friends happen to be tech bloggers that went to South by Southwest. Our friends, during the second Southwest that we were alive, in 2007, they went to South by Southwest, and they said, if you wanna follow what tracks I'm going to, what parties I'm gonna be at, follow me on Twitter. Here's a short code. You type follow and then my name on your phone, and the thing blew up. And that was it. It it had a moment. It had some attention. We were prepared for it. It's, like, it's it's not luck. It's just being ready for it. And Nasr is already bootstrapped. It's bootstrapped with Bitcoiners.
I don't know if you've seen it the past 2 weeks, especially with TikTok, but, like, there are real artists getting on. And that that thing makes that makes me so happy because, like, for an artist, like, principally, this is it. Like, I own my artwork. Nobody can say anything. I can verify it with my own identity. I can put it up in full resolution in the way that I wish. I can build my audience in the way that I wish. I can get paid for it. We just we we both know a DJ, who who, just gotten Noster, and he's been putting his work up, and he's been getting sats for it, and his mind was blown. He's like, what?
Like like, what is this? And and that's when the bars the ball starts rolling. And and during that time, it felt very slow in the moment. It's like at South by Southwest, I think we were 10,000 people using it. And then over the next year, it went up to half a1000000. Right? And it kind of felt fast and felt slow in the moment and also retrospectively, but I don't, like, I don't think we have to worry about that. We are bootstrapped, and more and more people are finding it because of that. And there's gonna be events in the world that cause people's attention to go towards Nostra, and there are gonna be things that we build that people just want. Zaps is one of those things. Like, it is a is it a it's a reason to run a Nostr. I can get paid instantly, KYC free, and actually feel Bitcoin and feel a platform that I can actually own and use.
And and, I have entire control over that. It just feels super, super magical. But to answer your question specifically, I think communities is a I think Ditto, is the solve to the bootstrap problem. I think people wanna join communities. No one's doing community as well. Facebook groups is terrible. They have terrible moderation policies no matter what Zuck says. They're not gonna fix them because it's more, driven by, the individuals. Reddit has the same issue. No one is doing community as well, and that's where people wanna go. They want more small communities. They want more private communities, and they wanna know that their content is theirs. And there's not people spying on them, which you can't say for any other platform out there that does communities and groups.
[00:58:01] ODELL:
So the the DJ you referred to, his name is Dor with with one o. So you can go to primal.net/door
[00:58:09] Jack Dorsey:
with one o. I was actually talking about Ollie. Oh, shit. Well, Ollie I was talking about Oliver. Does he have He he's a he's a painter. Zen Pub? He's a painter. I do know a Zen Pub.
[00:58:20] ODELL:
Or if you go to primal.net/jack, he's retweeted Ollie recently. Yep. Oliver Yeah. I guess Dor has been around for a while. And Door is an OG. So where were we? Ditto is a Nostra app that's focused on communities. One of the cool things about Nostra is, as Jack said earlier, there's many different, there's many different Nostra apps. You might hear them called clients sometimes, but I think probably we should be calling them apps, but you can call them whatever the hell you wanna call them, because it's more obvious to people. But Ditto is one of them. And, the may the main developer of that project is a is a man that goes by the name of Alex Gleason. He's an absolute legend among men. Amazing. It's great to have him. He's a former, Truth Social CTO.
Trump's, quasi social media. And so on on that front so I have 2 questions for you, and we'll start with the first one. Do you not see it like, is there do we not have a bootstrapping issue of, like, people creating an account, but then not really using it? You know, like, they, like, they do their first post. They're like, Nostra's awesome, and then we zap them a bunch. And then we don't see them for months. Is that a problem? I is that something you saw early days of Twitter? Or Oh, yeah. It's it's definitely a problem. I mean, I think the first big problem is just discovery,
[00:59:42] Jack Dorsey:
finding who is interesting to follow. And, unfortunately, most of the clients right now are giving people that are not relevant to them at all. And you see a bunch of content that's overwhelmingly not relevant, and then you have to figure out how to unfollow these people. And it's just work, and I don't wanna do more work. Right? So I I think blues Blue Sky actually did something really good here, which is the starter packs, which is, I think, brought from an from another, another platform. But here's a here's a pack of of, accounts you can follow if you're if you have these interest.
But, again, I think, like, communities, Ditto, is probably the holy grail. And if you have a tight community of, like, your friends or your locale, then, it's just it's much easier to wanna converse every day. Because what what really made Twitter work was not broadcasting to the world. It was the replies. It was a conversation. And if I see content that's not relevant to me, I'm not gonna reply to it. If I see content that I chose to get into because it's like, oh, football or, like, surfing or whatnot, I'm a reply to it. And that that keeps me going and that keeps me, that I I stay, especially if I'm getting money for it and I can send money.
So, like, it's solvable. It's just like, how do you get to conversation, not just posting?
[01:01:06] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I love the starter pack idea from Blue Sky. I think a bunch of apps will integrate that. Basically, the idea is, like, you're inviting a friend to join, and you're you're basically in charge of getting them started. You're in charge of, giving them almost a, a personalized experience on their on their first join, on their first their first, interaction with the protocol. I see in the comments someone called out Oliver's, NIP 5. It's primal.net/oliverkleg with 2 g's.
[01:01:40] Jack Dorsey:
Yeah. So he's a DJ and a oil painter, and he's been putting up a bunch of his works with some quotes and, like, the people are digging it. But, like, it it just takes one of those stones to roll and and, like, more and more people come. And I don't know why, but, there's a moment right now in these past few weeks where we're seeing a lot more people who are not Bitcoin adjacent. They feel more art adjacent or, like, willing to to try things out, because everything happening with TikTok and other things. And if they find community, they'll stick. If they don't, then they'll they'll bounce. Yeah. It feels like real momentum.
[01:02:18] ODELL:
What are your thoughts on like, I feel like Twitter didn't have this problem as much because of where the ecosystem was. The Internet was so young. Like, what are your thoughts on just, like, battling established network effects? Like, WhatsApp absolutely dominates. Facebook completely dominates in terms of network effects. Is that is there a deliberate way to try and break that, or is it just a slow grind? New utility.
[01:02:46] Jack Dorsey:
I mean, like, we were battling Facebook. Like, Facebook was was the evil enemy because they had this strategy of, like, you go into schools, everyone on the school gets on, then you go to cities, everyone in the city gets on, then the world, and, like, it worked. And they had a ton of utility that we didn't have. We just had one piece, which was broadcast. But the broadcast was so fast, and it was so simple. And the 140 characters made everything very digestible instantly so you could actually see news. And the thing that really turned the corner for us was trends and search. I could search any topic, and I could see what was happening in the world.
And I could type fire, and I could see all the fires happening in the world. I could see the fire was trending. Oh, that's something I didn't know about. I didn't know how to search, but now I know that this person died, or this is on fire, or there's an earthquake. Like, the earthquake moments were huge for Twitter. New Year's Eve was huge for Twitter because it's just fast, brief, digestible. Like, it really focused on speed. Speed was our number one feature. And Facebook was this, like, big clunky thing that had a 100 features, and we were able to break breakthrough, but obviously not to their scale because not everyone not everyone had someone something to broadcast. Right? And our problem was that tweets would be shown on TV or they'd be shown in newspapers, and people are like, I see it on TV. Why do I need to download the app? Like, I already get the Twitter news. Like, it's it's there.
So our reach was immense, but our usage was very, very small because not as many people had the the reasoning, which is why we shifted more and more towards conversation because everyone can have a chat every day. Everyone can have a conversation. And we really highlighted replies, and and that's what Twitter is. That's what x is today. It's it's really good around conversation and, encouraging more more replies, more conversation.
[01:04:47] ODELL:
I mean, I don't know how active you are in x nowadays, but do you not see, like I for me, it's like it seems like it's gone back towards this, like, broadcast first type of like, it used to have so much productive discussion. Now I feel like it's just influencers shouting into the world and, like, PR agencies.
[01:05:09] Jack Dorsey:
I think the the payment stuff definitely changed something. Like paying people for posting piece of the ad revenue cut. It does incentivize a certain thing. And then, like, a a lot of the indicators of, like, how many replies or replies in line were taken out of the main timeline. So you couldn't see that, oh, this this is a tweet that actually has, a bunch of interesting replies. The thing our algorithm used to do was it would promote one of the the replies as well to the top of the timeline. Whereas today, I think it's only top level tweets. So a lot of the understanding that you would have to, like, there's conversation underneath has disappeared.
And I think that's a mistake, for for what it wants to be in terms of usage. But, you know, it it is what it is.
[01:06:00] ODELL:
So it is what it is. I'll make that the quote of the episode. The
[01:06:08] Ross Ulbricht:
with with
[01:06:14] ODELL:
with with Noster, I kind of see it's interesting. Right? Because it's the first time that a lot of especially young people, young people have been exposed to some kind of social app, social protocol, whatever you wanna call it, where there is no algorithm. And I I think a lot of people find that refreshing that they have, you know, what it used to be was the standard. Right? This this idea that you're just basically getting a chronological feed of people you follow, which is what we saw, you know, in the early days of Instagram and Facebook and Twitter. And, of course, they all moved to this algorithmic first approach.
And it's I think it's fundamental that you have the ability to have no algorithm. But I think part of the reason why Nasser has been rough around the edges for newcomers right now is because you don't have the choice of adding an algorithm if you want to in terms of discovery, in terms of seeing content that you might, enjoy or wanna interact with. How do you think about algorithms in Nostr? Well, I mean,
[01:07:19] Jack Dorsey:
Twitter took a different path. So, like, in in Facebook, it was all about the algorithm and just, like, gaming as much engagement as possible. What we decided to do is, like, you're on you're on the app, and then you go away, and then you come back to it, let's say, after, like, 3 hours, and you're following, like, a 1000 people. When you have to go reverse through a 1000 people to see, like, what you missed, like, it's it's what Nasser is today. Right. It's it's it's impossible to do. You can't do that. It just takes time, and it takes time away from what else you could be doing. So our first algorithm was called while you're away, and it would try to figure out, like, what you are most likely to engage with in terms of, like, what you tend to look at more or you you reply to. And it would put 8 of those tweets at the top. And then underneath, it's the the full reverse con. And we kept that for 2 years.
And then we expanded that, and we we allowed you to turn off the algorithm. So you can say, I want the algorithm. I want the for you. That's what for you for you is or following. Right? That's what it is today. It's the same thing. That that hasn't changed at all. And the reason we did that is we we realized Twitter was, like, news and conversation, and you just can't keep up with all of it. So we needed some help to, like, get you to, like, here's what you missed. Here's what's trending. Here's those things. So it's a it's just a question of, like, what what a particular client wants to be, and what use case it's trying to solve. Is it trying to solve for the use for the news use case, the community use case? And the beautiful thing about Nasr is it can solve for all those, and they can all be different apps. But, like, if we solve for communities, it'd be a completely different algorithm than it would be for news. And right now, you have something like Primal, which has a trending 24 hour, a MoZap 24 hour, and then the fire hose. And that feels more like a news use case, but we're not getting the news content on the network. So it's more like the news of your friends or Matt Odell at the top of it every day saying live free or die. It's not really news. Do you want me to stop saying good morning?
No. Should I stop saying good morning? This this is a content problem. Right? We need Nastr needs all the content on it. It needs all the content. Like and we need to, like whatever that algorithm is, the trending 24 is looking for established accounts, and it's not trying to find, like, the trending stuff, the actual trending stuff. And if we tried to find the actual trending stuff of all the Mastodon post, of all the blue tie the the blue sky fire hose of anything we can scrape from the web, then it would be a news destination. But it's a question, do you want it to be? I think so. Like, I think Nasser can be the greatest corpus of human conversation and thought ever ever created because of the principles of it, but, like, we need to build that. Right? But don't do we not bootstrap that with good mornings?
[01:10:14] ODELL:
Like, is that
[01:10:16] Jack Dorsey:
I mean, that we've got enough of that. Like, but I mean You we're not gonna there's no escape philosophy from good good morning. It's too heavy. This is something with I battle with every morning.
[01:10:26] ODELL:
You know? Because I know why you say good morning. You're trying to remind yourself. I no. I know I know there's a subset. I I know there's a subset of people that legit resent me. Like, it builds up in their head every morning that they see me on the top of trending saying good morning and posting a music video. I'm one of those people. Unfortunately, our friendship perseveres. But then at the same time,
[01:10:53] Jack Dorsey:
you know, there's a lot of people that wanna say good morning back. Right? Otherwise, it wouldn't be on the top of trending in the first place. Yeah. So it's So it's it's this is one of my inner struggles that I have to deal with every morning. Yeah. But that's more of a community use case. Right? Like, you say good morning to your neighbors and your friends and whatnot. And, like, if we want it to be that, it's going to be as as big as a friend circle. If you want it to be global, it has to be news. It has to be something that's actually global relevant. So one thing you could do, for instance, is instead of saying good morning every day and putting a music video and being lazy about it, you could you could opine on the news of the day. You could take an article that's breaking somewhere, and you could actually opine on it. And then people will have a conversation about it, and you keep engaged in that conversation, and then it turns into a different thing. I take a lot of time and care in picking which music video I do. Realize that, but it's a friend's group. It's a group chat then. It's just like a friend's group chat, and it's gonna stay like that forever.
[01:11:50] ODELL:
So you want me to opine on the news every morning? I mean, you're a podcaster influencer, and and I just be opine on the news every morning. I don't see you doing it.
[01:11:59] Jack Dorsey:
I've been I've been busy. I'm going I'll I'll get back to it. Do you not even care? I do care. I'll get back to it. I'll get back to it. But, like, be the change you wanna see in the world. If you want that content, you have to make that content. Right? I mean, part of it is, like, we need to we need to see algorithms that do different things and people can choose them so that I'm not on the top. We have those today. We have those today. Don't blame the algorithm for your own, like, lack of desire to to make this work. It's as much a development problem as it is a content problem, and you're, like, you're bringing up the rear on the content. I just
[01:12:34] ODELL:
I try, and, I'm not trying to I'm not trying to report the news every morning, but I'll You don't need to report the news. But good morning. Where do I get the news from?
[01:12:43] Jack Dorsey:
Everywhere. Commenting on You see the news everywhere. You see it you see it.
[01:12:48] ODELL:
Okay. So why don't you if you send me a news story every morning What are your thoughts on trip Trump coin? That's newsworthy. No? Like, detailed analysis like you do on your podcast. Detailed analysis. I mean, you should stay on Stacks ads and not buy Trump coin. I mean, that's my analysis. People why. I will say that I had no idea that Phantom Wallet existed, which is, like, the main way these people interact with Solana meme coins. Moonshot is another one. Is Moonshot a different app? Mhmm. The UX They're all at the top of the App Store right now. The UX for being a day trader or, like, just a degen swapping this stuff is they really nailed it. It's, like, very clean. Yeah.
So it makes me feel like a boomer. Like, I was completely Yeah. But the I mean, this is Not necessarily caught off guard by the existence of the coin. Like, I think that was very on brand. You know, a few days before your presidency to to launch a cash grab. But, the the the way it was done was I was completely unfamiliar with. This is a gap both in Bitcoin and Nostra,
[01:14:01] Jack Dorsey:
and the gap is design. Like, these people know, like, how to make something fast and the interface fast such that you know how to use it right away. And the problem in historically with Bitcoin and with Nastr is it's been engineering led, and a lot of these engineers do not know how to partner with designers. Like, they build for engineers. They build for other engineers, which is great. It's fine, but, like, we're not going to escape velocity. We're not gonna reach the horizon, like, with with that mindset and with that approach. We just won't.
They had it has to be cohesive. It has to be focused on speed, and you have to have a sense of, like, who you're actually trying to serve. Like, are you trying to serve everyone, which dictates a certain set of features? Are you trying to serve pro users? Are you trying to serve engineers? Like and and that that clarity, you can start one way, and then you end up always to the mainstream or maybe a smaller audience. But you gotta you gotta pick a lane and then just, like, go for it and just, like, iterate and iterate. And I haven't seen that discipline within Nasr or or Bitcoin, predominantly. There's exceptions, of course, but it definitely holds us back.
[01:15:10] ODELL:
I mean, I think you guys nailed the UX on Bitkey on the Bitcoin side.
[01:15:14] Jack Dorsey:
I think we nailed it on Cash App first. Like, it was the fastest, easiest way to buy money. It worse. Yeah. I mean, this is the the tale of companies. Like, you make something simple, and then it gets worse and worse as you add things and you don't call, you don't cut, you don't edit. We're in the process of editing. It's gonna get better. But Big Key is a is a you know, it's a new one. Right? So it'll eventually have that thing where it gets barnacles and you have to edit. There's just like a desire to change. Right? So it's like constant, like Desire to add. And the ad doesn't come with, like, what are what are we subtracting? You know? Like, what are we refactoring? That's it's just common, and it's no intention. Like, let's make our Bitcoin purchasing platform worse. No. It's like, let's add this thing and then add this thing and, oh, now where does the Bitcoin thing fit? And if we add this thing, then there's a dependency on that, and then it's like a maze in the labyrinth, and we have to refactor everything.
I'm sure you hear this from your your companies that you VC over. Is that a verb, VC over? Yeah. I mean, you can take this conversation. You can replay it tonight. You can go to your your companies, and you can say, I'm here to help. I got some I got some advice. Designer.
[01:16:28] ODELL:
Do you think do you think all VCs are bad
[01:16:32] Jack Dorsey:
I think I think the gravity is towards yes, and you have to resist the gravity to be good. And there are some good ones, but the gravity is towards yes. Okay. I agree with that. Honestly I think you're a good one, just to be clear. You think Then there are others that are good ones. It means a lot. It means a lot. I mean, I've never taken money from you, so I don't know how good you are because that's the that's the ultimate lit litmus test, but I hear good things. Well, we have a couple of our founders in the live chat. So if they're Okay. We're watching the sunset, and do we think you'll see a green flash? Tiny one. Tiny green flash on the sunset. This is meant to be. There we go.
[01:17:09] ODELL:
It's a moment. Honestly, since I'm not a professional podcaster, I'm still hung up on you shitting on my good mornings.
[01:17:18] Jack Dorsey:
It's always the people who say, I'm not this. I'm not this. I'm not this. I'm not this. I'm That actually are those people. All the freaks know how much sound quality issues I have on a episode by episode basis. So how could I be
[01:17:31] ODELL:
a professional podcaster?
[01:17:33] Jack Dorsey:
No. You're an amateur podcaster, but you're a podcaster.
[01:17:36] ODELL:
Amateur podcaster. I'll take that. You know, we're day 21 of the year. I've done 21 music videos every day. Yeah. You know I'm a man of routine. Like, I'm, this is how I operate. Are you break should I break music? Content for, like, people who love music videos? I'm just setting the vibe,
[01:17:57] Jack Dorsey:
you know? I know. But it's a fun vibe. I like listening to music. So your job is 1 post a day, and it comes with a GM and a a video and and No. That's my favorite one. Else has to create the other content. No. That's my favorite one. You other plebs, you have create the other content. I create That makes this thing go. Dude, I create so much Nostr content
[01:18:14] ODELL:
that people's main a lot of people's main negative view of Nostr is that, like, it's too much Odell.
[01:18:20] Jack Dorsey:
Well, I think that's also the algorithm. The algorithm needs to be rebalanced and retrained, and also, like, it's it's gotta decide, like, what it wants to highlight. Is it highlighting news, or is it highlighting, like, friends? Because right now, it's highlighting friends, and it's highlighting the the Nostril, like, big accounts. And, like, it's just not we need more we need more. It is it has been highlighting some new folks, which, I think is great.
[01:18:49] ODELL:
No. Just Rob Hamilton's one of, 1031 supported founder, and he's, He's happy? Well, he zapped us 10,000 sats and said, I don't know if Matt is a great VC. He's on a beach podcasting instead of creating shareholder value for me crying about how his GM posts aren't bringing about hypnosters. You're such a great VC. He's giving money back. That's always a bad sign. That's always a bad sign. Why is that a bad sign? They're giving the money back. They're like, we don't need the money in it. We don't want doing this anymore. The best KPI. He's in he's in the chat zapping. What else are we gonna talk about? I, did you see did you have you watched Mark Zuckerberg's,
[01:19:27] Jack Dorsey:
Joe Rogan yet? I haven't watched it. Tell me about it.
[01:19:31] ODELL:
Are you you guys are on a I've seen clips, of course. You guys are on a first name basis. Right? So I'll just call him Mark? We were on a first name basis. I went over to his house. Like, we used
[01:19:40] Jack Dorsey:
to we used to talk, but that that fell that fell apart.
[01:19:45] ODELL:
So, I mean, it seems like Elon and him right now are the juggernauts in big social and big tech social, more so more so so Mark in Facebook. Right? Like, in terms of billions of users. In terms of user numbers, significantly more, especially globally. And then you have TikTok, which it seems like will probably be owned by one of them in, like, 6 months or at least, like, 50% owned by one of them in 6 months. Yep. So I guess before we go there, what is your opinion on the TikTok ban since I brought up TikTok?
[01:20:25] Jack Dorsey:
I think it's I think it's stupid. I think it's it's it probably has other agendas that have nothing to do with China trying to program our kids. I think I think they I think people in the US want more control over the content that goes on in TikTok.
[01:20:45] ODELL:
And it just was the one that they had no control over because it was It's China. China led. Yes.
[01:20:51] Jack Dorsey:
Which is funny because also in the US companies, it's like, we don't want any control over the content. Wink wink. But they want the control.
[01:21:01] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, so that's so that was the majority of of Mark's conversation on Rogan was that he basically said I mean, to summarize a 3 hour conversation. Well, first of all, he said they're no longer gonna have tampons in the men's bathroom, but, he also said, that he is laser focused on being pro free speech, reducing censorship, and that the majority of the pressure was the Biden administration effectively and the previous the pre the previous government, and that under Trump that they're gonna be much more free speech oriented. Elon has obviously signaled similar before Mark did that.
How do you think about that?
[01:21:51] Jack Dorsey:
I think, number 1, like, Facebook tends and Meta and Mark, in my view, tend to blow with the wind. I don't think the company has principles. I think they do whatever it takes that add advantages them themselves in the moment, and they'll switch principles completely based on what's currently happening in the world. And I've seen that at least 4 times now, specifically with free speech, but with other things as well, AI and the the the metaverse. And, you you know, you just look at the their their stances, and they just they're not a company with strong stances that last because they don't believe in them. They believe in building the biggest, greatest thing ever. And, again, like, I respect that, but I don't respect that. You know?
And then number 2, like, the extent of everything that we got from the Biden administration is in the Twitter files. We got the same from the Trump the Trump administration. And I've seen clips where Mark has characterized it as yelling and, like, I don't know. They these are not things that like, we still made decisions based on those inputs. We were not told what to do. We made decisions, and they can make decisions as well. So to put all of it on the Biden administration or any administration, I think is I think is playing a game.
And I I think it's rewriting history a bit because I was also there. The thing that I worried more about is not the the Biden administration. It's the advertisers. Mark didn't have this worry because every advertiser needed to advertise on Meta, and every advertiser needs to advertise on Google. So they don't have to have policy conversations with their advertisers. Whereas Twitter, because they're small and you didn't need to advertise on on Twitter, it was, like, this extra budget. They could change they they could chain they could say, like, we're removing our whole brands like Unilever. We're removing our whole brand. And you could you saw this play out with with Elon.
The the fortunate thing is he was private. The unfortunate thing is if you have that play out as a public company, then if the advertisers leave, Wall Street sees it and they sell the stock. And when the stock is sold, it goes down in value. When it goes down in value, you lose employees because they no longer believe it's going up, and then you lose the company. So your hand is forced not by the government. I never thought our hand is forced by the government. Our hand was definitely forced by advertisers and our various our our our very business model.
And, like, we we just had to do things, that made sure that, that entity was more or less happy. Now we did other things as well, and we certainly went too far in many, many places. I fully admit that, and I've tweeted about it and said it and writ written about it. But as a public company, this is what I ultimately realized. You can't have a CEO over these over these things. You can't. Like, no matter how good this person is, he or she can be called to Congress, can be corrupted, can be assassinated, can be kidnapped, can be taken in a closed room and told to do something, not tell anyone about it.
That's the reality. So if you choose to be on these platforms, you have to have that in your calculus. And they may align with you today, but they're probably not gonna align with you tomorrow. And that's the risk you're taking. The benefit of Noster is that that can't exist. No one can take it down. No one can shut it down, and no one can move it in a a particular way that benefits only them. And that's that's what I realized. That's why that's why I left.
[01:25:44] ODELL:
Well said. I wanna dig deeper in that, but I also wanna say what's happening in the live chat right now is a perfect example of the problem with modern social media. So we have people saying full pardon in all caps for Ross, which should be absolutely massive, and not a single link to a source. You see this? It's it's, like, classic. I don't know if Nostra fixes that. I don't know if we can reward it in certain ways. Maybe Zaps help fix that.
[01:26:13] Jack Dorsey:
But if anything But this is good because this is a vibe this is a vibe we would see on Twitter too. Like, you would have a source, but you need some sort of algorithm to bubble up. Okay. Where is
[01:26:23] ODELL:
where is this source information? Where where is this actually happening? Yeah. One of you freaks, if you have an actual source besides David Bailey saying a full pardon would be awesome, please link it in in the comments. There might be one right there. Oh, look. A primal link. But I wanna talk about the I wanna I wanna talk about the Twitter files. Okay. So it's still it's hearsay from, from a blue check. Okay. We'll we'll we'll stay up to date on that. I'd be absolutely massive to have that done tonight. I mean, everyone was thinking his sentence was gonna get commuted.
A pardon would mean that he was at you know, that he's actually not guilty, rather than time served. So I do wonder what that means for returning his Bitcoin, and if there's any implications there, but I'm not a lawyer. I wanna talk about the Twitter files real quick. A lot of people have used the Twitter files against you. What do you think the main takeaway first of all, were they actually accurate? And then what is the what is the main takeaway people should have, from them in your opinion?
[01:27:39] Jack Dorsey:
Well, I mean, there are act there's accurate artifacts in there, but I think people mainly stopped at the headlines, and they didn't really go through. And, like, our team pushed back on a lot. Some things we agreed with and we did, and other things we didn't. And, I think they're all rational choices at the time based on what we're the situation we're in. But, again, like, this is what happens in a public company when you have a business model that is dependent upon engagement and people feeling like it's a safe, clean space. That's what the advertisers want. Right? Otherwise, you get just really, really crappy direct response ads, and that could be your thing. But that's not what we're going for.
So it's a business decision ultimately. And, as I said, like, when we we banned Trump, I think we did the right thing for Twitter, the business, but the wrong thing for the Internet. And I tweeted about this and, like, this is exactly why we put more and more funding into Blue Sky and and put and why I care about these protocols so much now is because, like, the just a a company owning it and having one person in charge is always gonna have some some point in time where it is corrupted and they're making a choice for the whole, which they shouldn't be able to make. And it's gonna happen again and again and again. It doesn't matter what platform you tell me. It is whether it be X, it's already happened.
TikTok, it's already happened. Meta and threads, no matter how much they change their moderation policies, it's going to happen. Nasser is the only one I know of that you can't Blue Sky, it's happened, which, again, why I left and why I stepped off the board and why we went all in on on Nasser.
[01:29:29] ODELL:
I mean, they actually use it as a argument for Blue Sky. It's like a positive,
[01:29:34] Jack Dorsey:
which is interesting. Yeah. They they I I believe they made all the same mistakes we made and, like, just did not learn from what we need to learn in moderation and content and
[01:29:45] ODELL:
and building building systems. So to your point, do you regret you regret banning the sitting president of the United States?
[01:29:54] Jack Dorsey:
I regret that we had to. I feel like we had to as a company, because if we didn't,
[01:30:01] ODELL:
I don't think our business would be around. You were just would you would lose advertisers, not government action? Lose advertisers.
[01:30:08] Jack Dorsey:
The government wasn't pushing us to do anything. We had we had many we had many requests from the Trump administration to for take down stuff. Like, probably on the order of the the the inputs we would get from, the Biden administration and the GOP and the and the and the Democrats, like, you know, that we we saw we saw everything from everyone. We didn't take direction from them unless there were security risks or acts of violence, or CSAM or anything like that, but, we took, we took input.
[01:30:51] ODELL:
So I see, Rob Hamilton in the comments bringing up, people linking on Noster posting screenshots of this. It looks like Ross was just granted a full and unconditional pardon by real Donald Trump. Words cannot express how grateful we are. President Trump is a man of his word and just saved Ross' life. Ross is a free man. That came from the official free Ross account, it looks like. That's great. That's wonderful. Amazing. News. It's a beautiful day. It's a beautiful day, Freaks. Glad you're all here with us, and, it's a beautiful sunset too.
Really appreciate it. Do you think there's something inherently wrong with
[01:31:46] Jack Dorsey:
Nasr in its early days when you're bootstrapping it to post a screenshot of something that's breaking on x? No. Should that be something The more content, the better. The more content, the better. I think all the all the content, Nasr like, how do we get it to be the greatest repository, the biggest repository, the greatest corpus of human communication, thought, images, videos, photography? And then what's lacking then is discovery, search, and trending. And I guarantee you give people a problem that big, they'll wanna solve for it.
[01:32:17] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I it's kinda weird. I I see, like, people get angry about it when you do post a screenshot. First of all, if x wasn't a walled garden, I could post a link, and you could go to it without an account. The only way to really easily share it is with a screenshot. But it seems like something we should be incentivizing. Like, I'll I'll I'd zap that if someone is screenshotting, important breaking news Yeah. In the bootstrap first. And we we can build technology to, like,
[01:32:45] Jack Dorsey:
read the screenshot and make it into more text format that can be searched on Nasr. Like, all this is possible. It's just, like, what are we building and, like, why? And I I think, like, that having having all thought, having all communication, Nastr is the only one can that can do it because it's the only neutral party. It's the only neutral protocol that can actually host us. Our service our server costs are extremely low in comparison to everything else, inclusive of Blue Sky. It's very easy to set set a relay up. It's very easy to set a client up. It's very easy to use the API and inject stuff into it. So, like, what are we waiting for? Like, let's put it all in.
[01:33:34] ODELL:
Agreed. I'm, I'm just appreciating that Ross got a full part in. That's wonderful. No. It's incredible. I, Do you think that so and by the way, this is why I think some people think Noster is a distraction for Bitcoiners because we've been chatting for an hour and 40 minutes. We've definitely talked about Noster more than Bitcoin.
[01:34:13] Jack Dorsey:
Yeah.
[01:34:16] ODELL:
One of the arguments, so a lot of my perspective is, is based on my experience in Bitcoin. And one of the arguments we've heard in Bitcoin for years is the biggest threat to Bitcoin is governments, you know, improving their monetary policy, making their money better, having it work better, having it not debase people, and then people wouldn't have a need for Bitcoin. Obviously, that'll never happen. Like, humans just inherently, if there's an ability to be corrupted, they get corrupted. How do you feel about, you know, someone like Elon on x or someone like Mark with Meta, them adding Bitcoin or them adding algorithmic choice. Like, do you think that is a real concern in terms of Nostra adoption? Like, if Nostra is successful, will they, will they be able to compete in that way by adding, improving their own centralized
[01:35:19] Jack Dorsey:
I mean, the way I said the way I said early on is, like, if Noster, or if one of these decentralized open protocols inspires someone to do the right behaviors, then we all win. So, like, if if Elon builds in algorithmic choice, which I hope he does, and I've talked to him about it. If, he builds in Bitcoin, which we actually had in the past, but I think they shut it down, It was just tipping on the profile. It was a start, but we didn't we didn't get to finish it. Then and that's inspired by, like, seeing the use case on Nasr, then Nasr wins because we all win. Right? And if it takes away from Nasr usage, but, like, those use cases are there, I think we all still win.
[01:36:03] ODELL:
Yeah. That's best case scenario.
[01:36:05] Jack Dorsey:
Right? You want them to copy good freedom oriented things. But also, like, I their incentive. The only way these business model works is as much content as possible. So why would you not take content from Noster and put it in Twitter to put your algorithms on top of it and sell ads on it because you have more content to deal with. You have more things to trend, and they could be a client that helps Nasr because by definition, it's the only one that will have the most because it's neutral. So, like, this was my argument for why we start the protocol and why we fund the protocol in the first place when we had investors, when it we started the idea of Blue Sky. Why are you doing this thing? Because we get more content. More content means more revenue for us and and a greater a greater business over time.
[01:36:54] ODELL:
There's another piece here too where it's we're watching you know, right now, LLMs, AI, or all the hype, they're very hyped. They're very new. We're watching Elon. It appears, at least from my from my perspective, watching him attempt to monetize x with x AI with and I guess, users are familiar with it as Grok. How do you think about how do you think about that aspect changing the, I guess, not the road map, but how it gets how x gets built out? Because it it seems to me like the, like, the approach right now seems to be you don't wanna if he adopts an open protocol, if he adopts something like Nostr, he's removing his proprietary access to this real time database that Grok is using. Right? It's like Grok's proprietary advantage is that you have a bunch of accounts around the world that are providing commentary on breaking news, and so they're able to provide this real time, the these these real time updates that the LLM is then able to feed into your answers. How does that affect how things proceed? But the more, the better. Like, he'd even,
[01:38:11] Jack Dorsey:
he'd he's gonna have the best proprietary information if he has more people in using Twitter, the client, or x the client.
[01:38:19] ODELL:
Like the app itself. Yes. Yes.
[01:38:21] Jack Dorsey:
So and if x AI is built into that and Grok is built into it, it's extra utility that you can't find on other platforms. Right? So that means that even if you were to give all the content to Nostra and open it to the protocol, he still has 2 very compelling things like XAI or Grok that can make that experience much better. It can find things faster. It can find better things. It can find deeper things, and you can't find that on any other clients. So still wins.
[01:38:50] ODELL:
But it takes almost a leap of faith, right, to give up that proprietary information
[01:38:55] Jack Dorsey:
for But it's the same leap of faith that people took with the web Right. And with, email. And look at those businesses. I mean, look at the search business as example of this. Like, Google is able to able to build one of the most efficient businesses in the world on the back of search and the web and mail, email. 2 open protocols, entirely open protocols they didn't control, and everyone had inputs and outputs to it. There are models here that work for companies using open protocols such as Nasr. It's just a matter of time. You may be funding one of those companies that figures it out. I mean, I but I think 1031 is unique in that
[01:39:39] ODELL:
we actually fund companies that build open on on open protocols and build in the open. Like, I think it's kind of rare. I think what we really see usually is particularly start up capital, like VC Equity Capital, prefers proprietary walled gardens, traditional modes. And, like, it's changing, but it changes very slowly, it seems. Yeah.
[01:40:04] Jack Dorsey:
It is. It's gonna be a slow it's gonna be a slow burn.
[01:40:07] ODELL:
It's crazy how as it gets dark, it's now like the waves are battling the noise of the of the insects. It's quite it is the loudest studio I've been in in a while. Okay. One last topic, and then we can wrap, unless you have something else you wanna talk about. So In my time, I've had I've had 3 moments, where I've just seen this this incredibly viral organic developer led, movement. And that the first one was Bitcoin, and the second 2 were Nasr and Cashew, Cashew being this chummy and e cash protocol for Bitcoin. I like to say it's a Bitcoin's an open protocol for money. Nasr is an open protocol for speech and comms.
Lightning is an open protocol for batch Bitcoin payments, and eCash is an open protocol for Bitcoin banks. I know you're also seem to be pretty fascinated about Casu specifically. How do you think about it?
[01:41:21] Jack Dorsey:
I I mean, those are those are definitely my my 3 as well. Like, it just moves super fast and the developers behind each one of those what resonated with me is they're very principled, and they stick with the principles. Like, that's that to me was the early Internet. That's what kept me. That's what that's what got me there. That's what kept me. And I see that, with with those. I think Casio is really important because it's that accessibility layer. It gives, and it goes back to communities, by the way. I think Nostra communities such as Ditto and Cashew are the perfect marriage because you have your own way to exchange ideas and money, and it's all self contained, and it feels very tight, and it feels comfortable.
And that's what I think we're we're lacking right now is it just feels too big. There's no boundaries. And what do I do here? People know exactly what to do in their neighborhood. They know exactly what to do with their friend group, with their poker group, with, their surfing group. They they know, and, like, that's what we need to to build for. And I think Cashew is a part of that because I I don't think just pure Bitcoin or lightning works, in that sense, in the in the with the speed and and the way that, that we need.
So I'm super excited about it. I think the one you left out because nothing is in the horizon yet is, intelligence.
[01:42:48] ODELL:
Are you gonna are you gonna explain why?
[01:42:52] Jack Dorsey:
Because we have we have, like, we have the open source LLMs, but, like, we have no real momentum behind, like, decentralizing intelligence, taking it away from the hands of the companies, and having another option. Like, we need that other option. And I it's probably with agent systems, and agents on Nostra would be phenomenal because it is a defined protocol and, like, they can roam about and do things for you, do tasks. But if I had to look in any one space that's gonna feel that way, it's probably gonna be around agents. And I think there's a good intersection with obviously, Bitcoin and, obviously, Nostra and and probably Cashew as well. It's probably
[01:43:33] ODELL:
it's like not it's like Nostra and Cashew combined. Yeah. Right? Where, like, LLMs and users are paying each other with Cashew. They're community communicating over Nasr. And then Nasr signposts are the the the the main The identity. The not only that, not only the identity, but also the the single best dataset for LLMs to source from. Right? Because they have the verifiable reputations. Everything is signed. You know it hasn't been altered. Yes. You can use it without permission. 100%. So that's definitely the next piece, but it's still very nascent. Right? Like, have you seen anything really
[01:44:09] Jack Dorsey:
I've seen nothing. Very interesting yet, but, like, that's that's why it's exciting as well. Like, who's gonna be the first? Like, who's gonna be the first to, like, actually step into that? I think there's there's one Venice. I don't know the details behind it, but, there's some energy there, but it's just not cohesive yet.
[01:44:29] ODELL:
I mean, I think, like, in practice, what it'll probably look like for end users is kind of what Grok has been doing, what XAI has at least been
[01:44:39] Jack Dorsey:
towing into. And I I would say But not just an LLM, an agent. Right. An agent that actually can go and do work and tasks and then come back with value. Yeah. Yeah. That you own in the same way that you own your content. You own these agents. You own the like, this mini LLM, if you will. So it's like Clippy, but better. Exactly. And you can send them can I help? You can send them to battle. How can I help? Like a VC. So
[01:45:04] ODELL:
how do we bootstrap that? Do we Someone's gotta build it. We gotta build it. I think if we say enough good mornings, maybe it'll happen. I don't think so. I like to give people actionable advice on this show. Do you have if someone wants to get started with Bitcoin, what are your favorite Bitcoin wallets?
[01:45:27] Jack Dorsey:
It's changed over time. I'll give I'll give 3. The first was probably Moon, m u u n. 2 u's. And I I just they they know they really understood design. They understood accessibility. I've converted a bunch of people who are new to Bitcoin because of Moon, because they could get it, and they felt safe about it right away because of the recovery mechanisms. The second one, is probably, is it Phoenix?
[01:45:58] ODELL:
Yeah. Phoenix wallet, the lightning wallet. Yep.
[01:46:01] Jack Dorsey:
Because of the lightning aspects and because that they were starting to, like, for anyone who, like, really wants to use it. And then the third is is Vicky, who for whoever doesn't wanna lose it. Because I think we've done and the team has done a really good job at, like, building something where it's almost impossible to lose your Bitcoin, and people understand it right away. And I've watched older people and younger people who are brand new to Bitcoin fully set up a wallet, receive Bitcoin, and feel good about it. So I'm predominantly using the Bikki wallet right now, but, I I still love Moon. I still love Phoenix, and I I try to mix them up.
[01:46:47] ODELL:
Okay. So Bitcoin. Do you have any do you have any Cashew wallets you could recommend?
[01:46:54] Jack Dorsey:
The main one. Kelly's main one. Cash. The web, the pw. Dot me. Yeah. The the PWA. Cash u dot me is great. Mini Because you don't have to go through the App Store. There's no permission. Yeah. It works. It's super solid. They have backup and, I think backup seed phrases and, and recoveries in beta right now.
[01:47:12] ODELL:
It works. I tried it. Yeah. We went into depth. I had Cali on the show, twice now, a few days ago a few weeks ago. But cashu.me, casu.me. And then there's many, many Nostra apps, but Nostra apps for for beginners, people that just wanna get started that haven't used it yet. Beginners, I point people to primal.
[01:47:36] Jack Dorsey:
Primal.net, primal on the App Store, the Google Play, only because it's, it's on those 3 platforms. It's probably the most like Twitter that you'll experience or threads or kinda what you expect, And it gets you in very fast, but the most important thing is it has a built in wallet, so you can actually feel zaps right away. Domus is another great one. You have to hook up your own wallet to it. It's much faster than my experience in terms of, like, actual speed, and it's much more pure in terms of, like, the protocol. So if you care a lot more about the attributes of Noster and what makes it decentralized and, censorship resistant, I think Domus is is that.
Amethyst on on Android is a kitchen sink. If you want, like, the WeChat of Nostr, it's Amethyst if you have an Android device. Those are the those are good. There's there's so many. Have you used Nostr with a u? Nostier? I've used it. Yeah.
[01:48:47] ODELL:
I like that client too, that app. Jaco Hone has a built in Bitcoin wallet now. I wanna see more with Bitcoin built in Bitcoin wallets. Yes. It makes it easier for new people. I think every nostril app should have a Bitcoin wallet, but I'm a little bit biased. But I think those are good recommendations. And I would just say to anyone who's thinking about it, just, you know, download one of those nostril apps and, say good morning every morning. I don't know about that. Is it a good place to start? Or you There's enough good mornings. Like, let's get some other content. Provide provide your commentary on breaking news.
Like like Ross being freed. Yeah. Like I bet you I bet you right now. Message, like, on Noster reads. Like, I bet you right now, if you open up Primal, there's better commentary on Ross being freed and a more joyous occasion than x right now. I'm sure. Like, Reads has,
[01:49:38] Jack Dorsey:
Reads has, like, as an equivalent to Substack, and you can write full on essays in Noster. You can you can push them to Twitter. You can push them to Instagram, to TikTok. Keep them on Noster, but, like, the most important thing is you own that content. It can never be taken down. It can never be, altered, and you can sign it with your identity, and everyone knows it's actually you. So, try it out.
[01:50:04] ODELL:
Yeah. No. I think Reeds is really promising. I wanna see more there's not enough apps that support live streams yet. I think that's something that Twitter did pretty well. And now X is doing quite well. Yep. And, like, right now, the only two apps I know of that do it on mobile are Nastia and, Amethyst, so I'd like to see more of them support that. So reads in that. And then, like, Instagram stuff. Right? We're seeing Pablo with Olas, which is still quite early. But Yeah. I would, you know, I would like to see more of this non I'm I'm biased to the quote, unquote microblogging tweet style. That was always my favorite way to consume and participate.
But to see more formats, that's the beauty of Nostra, right, is you can use it how you wanna use it, and it's an interoperable protocol would be awesome. A 100%. Jack, this is a pleasure. Do you have any final thoughts before we wrap?
[01:51:01] Jack Dorsey:
Thank you, Marty. I mean I mean, Matt. No? We covered a lot. Well We covered a lot. Thank you. It was a beautiful sunset. I think the the timing was perfect. Hopefully. Starting to get a little bit buggy.
[01:51:20] ODELL:
Hopefully, we'll do the same time next year, maybe? Yeah. Let's do it. And 21st January. Huge shout out to all the freaks who continue to support the show. We got a lot of zaps today. I see Jack Mallers is the largest one with a 100,000 sats. Dispatch has no ads or sponsors. It's purely supported by Bitcoin donations. Has Marty zapped? So thank you for yeah. He did because he wanted his advertisement for his podcast in the feed. Oh, okay. Okay. But I appreciate the I appreciate the zap, Marty. You could have sent it from your personal account instead of your podcast account, but, Yeah. This was awesome. And, huge shout out huge shout out to Ross, to Lynn, his mother.
I'm incredibly relieved that he is free now. It's been a long time coming. I urge people to give him some space. You know, you don't have to badger him. You know, if he wants to speak publicly, he'll speak publicly when he's ready. He's gone through quite quite a lot. I said similar to with Assange when Assange just freed earlier last year, which was also massive. Give them some space. These guys are legends. Also, huge shout out to to David Bailey. You know, he has he has really put a lot of effort into into making this the issue and Bitcoin Policy Institute, for really shepherding it and making it making it a priority among many other things that could have been a priority, with this administration and, of course, to president Trump himself for signing it.
I think a lot of people thought it wasn't gonna happen. So, it's it's absolutely beautiful to see. Jack, thank you. Thank you. Pleasure as always. Thank you all. Much love, everyone. Stay humble, stack sets.
You're good to go? Yep. Alright. Hello. This is Ross Ulbrich. I'm calling you today from prison from, a maximum security federal protectorate. We don't have much time together today, and I don't know if I'll get another chance to talk to you like this. I'll say as much as I can, but when it's time to go, I'll have to hang up and go back to my cell. I have lost my freedom. That's what I wanna talk to you about today. I want you to understand what it means to lose your freedom. Bitcoin has been transforming our world since that very first block in the blockchain.
Now let me tell you something. We are just getting started. Wherever Bitcoin has been embraced anywhere in the world, freedom and equality follow. Bitcoin is the embodiment of freedom. So now look what we have. On one side, we have loss of freedom. We have despair and darkness. And on the other side, we have Bitcoin. We have freedom, quality, and hope. The 2 can't sit side by side, so the darkness has to be kept out of sight. It has to be ignored and forgotten. But listen, here I am. I'm crying out from that very same darkness. This is a cry for help.
My mother can't do this by herself, and and I'm crying out not just for me, but for all of us. We need your help. We need you to care. We need you to look at the stark contrast between the freedom of Bitcoin on the one hand and what it means to be locked in a cage until you die. We have a choice today, right now. Do we ignore what's happening? The loss of freedom, the dehumanization, or do we wake up? Bitcoin is strong. Bitcoin is powerful. We are powerful, and our work is not over. It's time to wake up. It's time to take the next step. I've spent the last 8 years watching Bitcoin grow up midyear.
I've seen incredible innovation. I've seen inspiring courage. We didn't know how things would turn out for Bitcoin back in the beginning, but over the years, I've been continually impressed what you've accomplished. I am proud of you, and I have no doubt we can do anything we set our minds to. We are transforming the global economy. We have brought a taste of freedom and equality to far corners of the world. I know we can transform criminal justice too. And now, today, I challenge you to set your sights on the hardest problems. I challenge you to shine Bitcoin light into the darkest places.
I challenge you to set us free. We need more miracles. I have to go sooner. I don't wanna go. I don't want go back to that cell. I wanna be there with you. It's called you've done so much for me today. Talking with you today is the most freedom I've felt in a long, long time. Thank you. Thank you for giving me your attention. I will never forget this day. The memory of this day, this can never be taken from us. Okay. This call is from a silent prison. I'm gonna go now. Thank you. Goodbye.
[00:05:55] ODELL:
Happy Bitcoin Tuesday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Citadel Dispatch, the interactive live show focused on actionable Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion. That intro was no other than Ross Ulbricht. He did that interview, almost 4 years ago in Miami at the Bitcoin conference in Miami from federal prison. He's been in jail for 12 years now for a nonviolent crime. He should hopefully be freed any day now. I know there's many of us that are sitting on pins and needles hoping hoping it happens sooner rather than later. I was hoping that it would happen actually before we went live.
But regardless, it's incredibly important to highlight. I I would say that there's a lot of things I've been frustrated with the Bitcoin community as we've grown grown bigger. But it's it's super inspiring and powerful to see people rally around this cause, to free Ross. So, hopefully, we'll see that very soon. He's been in jail for 12 years now. And I would just say, like, personally, I was there when that interview happened, and I was backstage. And immediately following immediately following it, they after giving after the prison gave permission to the interview, his only interview, they they threw him in the hole. They threw him in solitary confinement, and I was there with his mother.
And from that point on from that point on, I knew it was impossible for us to have won without him out. So, hopefully, it's imminent. And with all that said, I have a great conversation live from a beach somewhere. So you might hear some beach noises in the background. If it gets really bad, tell us, and we'll evacuate the beach. But I'm live here with Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Square. Now Twitter's called x. Now Square is called block. How's it going, Jack?
[00:07:58] Jack Dorsey:
I'm good. Thank you. I think I've been on almost every other Bitcoin podcast than before this one, so I've just been waiting for the invite. This is the final boss.
[00:08:08] ODELL:
So, technically, if you've been a listener for CIL dispatch, I've had Jack on the feed twice. We had on stage conversations in Riga that I then, syndicated out on the feed, but this is Doesn't count. Indeed his first time on a proper seal dispatch. It is seal dispatch 150, so it's a very special number. It's an honor to have you here for such a special number. Thank you. What's what's special about the number? 150. It's a round large number.
[00:08:36] Jack Dorsey:
Do you not think 150 is a a special number? Great number. Congrats on doing a 150 of them. Did the Regal one count in the 150? No. I don't count the when I syndicate the
[00:08:45] ODELL:
Alright. So what number you're actually at, though? It was significantly higher than 150. I don't know. Probably over 200. But, yeah, I only count I only count the real dispatches, and it's good to have you. I I would just say to the freaks, I asked Jack, to go on Rogan, to speak the good word of Bitcoin and Noster, and, he refused to go on Rogan and said instead he was he was gonna come on to dispatch. So that's an honor. But
[00:09:10] Jack Dorsey:
I think it's a much deeper and understanding audience than the Rogan. I've I've also been on him twice. I don't know.
[00:09:18] ODELL:
Yeah. But if a 3rd time would actually help. I feel like it's a different moment. You know? It's, you're on the next chapter now. It could be. Could be. So with all that, I mean, I don't know where to start. We have a lot to talk about. It seems like no one's complaining about our sound quality yet, which is impressive. Like, can you tell who's zapping as well? Yeah. We can see who's zapping. You see the zaps? I mean, they're not really zapping that much, but they can zap really much. Anything. We have 8 k zapped, 2.1,000 sats.
That's the most sad zap so far. If you're listening on on YouTube, you can find the Nostril live chat that is streamed on screen at sitaldispatch.com along with all the other links for the show. You do not need a Noster account to use it, and it has Bitcoin payments built in. We call them zaps. So that is awesome. I mean, I think a great place to start is, you know, why why have I mean, with the powerful words that came from Ross, like, why have you focused so much of your life on on Bitcoin? Why should people care about Bitcoin?
[00:10:29] Jack Dorsey:
I think it's, I mean, for me, it's about, like, these open protocols. For me, the reason it resonated right away was that's how I grew up. Like, I grew up on the only reason I am where I am and able to do what I do is because of the grace of so many other open source developers and people who actually built protocols that were open and anyone could build on top of them, from SMTP to, HTTP to FTP, Gopher, Usenet back in the day, IRC, Like, the golden age of the of the Internet when everything was truly decentralized, and it just felt wild. It felt like a Wild West. And Bitcoin, when I first encountered it, felt like that Wild West. It felt like undefined, and it felt vast at the same time. And it felt vast because it was on something really big, which is money. And during the time it came out, I was just starting a company called Square, which is a financial services company that has to work with Visa and Mastercard.
We started in we started with the idea in 2 in in December of 2008. I remember going back to Saint Louis to my hometown to meet, this guy, Jim McKelvey, who was my boss when I was 15 years old, and we wanted to work together again. And then in January, February 2009, we we started building. And at that time, Bitcoin and the white paper came out, and we spent 9 months asking for permission from Visa and Mastercard just to let us run a pilot of small merchants. Small merchants couldn't get through to start accepting credit cards because they had to go through a credit check. And we had asked permission of Visa to allow us to serve 100 merchants and then 1,000 merchants. And whoops, we made the we coded the constraint wrong, so it actually ends up we're serving 5,000 merchants. And eventually, we got to 10,000 and a 100,000. Eventually, they they changed the rules for us.
But just the fact that we had to go through all that, instead of just building on something that was open, as you would expect on the Internet, painted the picture crystal clear for me. And then I really when I was a kid, I loved altCypherpunks. I loved Usenet, and I loved, what those guys were doing. I followed the mailing list. Wired back in the day was, like, wild. Like, it was it was underground back then, and it was following all that activity starting with PGP and Phillips Philip Zimmerman and exporting the code by Adam Back on a t shirt in Pearl. Like, all that was just, like that was my joy. I wasn't working in that space, but it was my joy. So I think it's important because it gives us permissionless technology.
And it's it's not the only one, but it's the one that matters the most right now because we can actually build on top of it. And we can build our livelihoods on top of it, and people can choose different paths instead of a typical corporate job to go down a path of being a developer and getting a grant from someone like Open Sats and doing what they love every single day. And I think that only expands as Bitcoin becomes more and more accessible. I think that's the only blockade right now and more valuable to people. My biggest worry is that it becomes irrelevant. And I think that a real a re a relevance comes from people not finding the use case and the value on it. And so that's what I wanna do to to make sure it has value, to make sure it has relevance, to make sure it's a currency, not just a a digital gold, store of value, but, actually, it's used every single day in opposition of all the permission systems, which I have to deal with every day in my life for the past almost 16 years.
[00:14:36] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, so you're kind you're I mean, you're literally a gray beard. I'm looking at your gray beard right now. How do you how do you wrestle with this, like, Bitcoin coming of age? Just last year, you know, with Bitcoin ETFs and and now with this idea of strategic Bitcoin reserve and governments stacking Bitcoin in their treasury and companies like MicroStrategy accumulating god tier levels of Bitcoin, with that hope for what seems you were describing is this hope for this freedom money, this money that people can spend without permission and use as they see fit.
[00:15:13] Jack Dorsey:
I think it's, I think Bitcoin is the next currency because it's been resilient to so many tests, and it's met so many challenges head on, from its earliest days to the block size wars to commercialization to today. I don't think it's the ETFs, to be honest. I don't think it's corporations owning it. I don't think it's strategic government reserves. I think it's something like Trump coin. I think, for someone who was promoting Bitcoin and saying that we're gonna use it as a strategic reserve and then to create a new, quote, unquote, digital asset around a a meme that everyone bought into.
And that seems to be, growing in some regards, that to me feels pretty dangerous just because it's distracting. It's distracting away from, like, what Bitcoin can do, and we've seen this, in Bitcoin for quite some time. These distractions come up, and and people go crazy for them. And we lose core developers. We lose attention. We lose people who are trying to make Bitcoin more accessible because the Ethereum network has more APIs, and it has more developer, attention. Now it's Solana, and there'll be another thing. And if Bitcoin can't keep that developer attention, I think we become more and more irrelevant, because people are not making it as accessible.
And they're not building the interfaces for it. They're not building use cases for it. So I see all these things as a challenge. I believe in my heart Bitcoin will overcome when people see through the superficial aspects of it and the lightness of it. These like, the the shit coins and, you know, all the meme coins and whatnot. But it's it's gonna be challenging because people are going to to go there, and they're gonna follow it.
[00:17:20] ODELL:
I guess so. There's a there's a lot to unpack there. Beef I I mean, I wanna start with your comment about the ETFs. So it sounds like you don't think the ETFs are necessarily a good thing. Do you think they're explicitly a bad thing, though?
[00:17:33] Jack Dorsey:
I don't think they're a good thing or a bad thing. I think they're a distracting thing. I like, as you know, you don't own your Bitcoin unless you own your keys. And this is, like, another level of indirection to buy Bitcoin. You can make the argument that you meet people where they are, and people might be with their brokerages and on Wall Street and want a common vehicle to to buy these things. And then you can make the argument that eventually they'll convert it, but people are lazy as well. And I think it has the distraction of potentially keeping it more store value rather than, something I can use on a daily basis to buy my food, buy a coffee, to pay a babysitter, pay for services, and actually transact around the world, do remittance around the world. So I think they're neutral, but it's a question of, like, how do people go down the rabbit hole? Do people actually pull the thread on what this actually means? Do people want to be their own bank? Do people want to have their own keys?
And actually go into this permission, this land where they have the responsibility over it. And that's scary because when you have responsibility on what might be a lot of money to some people, then, I don't wanna lose it. And I don't want that responsibility. I wanna pay someone else to do it. I want or I want an abstraction of an abstraction to to deal with it. And I know it's there because I know the brokerage and all these things. So I don't know. You meet people where they are. It makes sense. But, like, if we don't do the other half of, of enabling people and ask having people ask the question why go deeper and why pull the thread, Then I again, I think Bitcoin becomes irrelevant. It's it's only going to be one use case, which is the store value instead of and the trading platform instead of what we all know it can be. If you just go back to the white paper, what is it? It's electronic cash, peer to peer electronic cash. Where is that vision right now?
It's distracted right now by ETFs. It's distracted by the BlackRocks. I'm grateful for them because they validate. And, you know, more value the more that number goes up, the more valuable it is, and the more people wanna work on it, and the more people turn their heads towards it. But it can also pause us as well if we get too comfortable there.
[00:19:53] ODELL:
I mean, I think there's a decent argument that it can kinda breed some complacency. It's like you already have exposure. You think you already have exposure. You buy the ETF on Charles Schwab or call your broker or whatever, and you think you have exposure, and then you just stop there. You're content Exactly. As a result. Alright. Check that box. Done. But also at the same time. Right? I mean, I think it clearly opens up Bitcoin to a larger market in terms of of, like, the Bitcoinization of finance, and it definitely increases Bitcoin holders purchasing power.
And if if you're talking about developers that are receiving OpenSats grants or Bit corners around the world that are self custodying their Bitcoin and trying to build strong local communities, the fact that they get increased purchasing power is obviously a significant benefit. Yeah. That's amazing. Have you noticed that there's this weird phenomenon where it's like anything that increases the price of Bitcoin is perceived as bad by a certain subset of the Bitcoin community?
[00:20:57] Jack Dorsey:
Yeah. I've seen that. I don't I go back and forth. I mean, again, like, it's, where's the attention? I think when we're in the heat of moment of the price going up all the time, we people tend to focus on that, and they tend to focus less on what does Bitcoin need to actually scale to the next 100,000,000 people. And it needs a lot. Like, it needs a lot of accessibility and needs better key management. People need to feel, like, safe with taking on that responsibility that they're not going to lose it. And, but at the same time, like, it does show that people actually value this. This I mean, it's it's all made up. Right? It's a belief system. This made up invention happens to be mat mathematically sound, and we have a lot of believers, and that price is an indication of the belief, but there also has to be the corresponding fundamentals underneath.
And if it's just digital gold, then it's just as good as a meme coin. Like, if it provides no other utility to people and they're not using it every day for that, then it is a meme coin ultimately over time, and that would be a shame.
[00:22:08] ODELL:
I mean, you keep bringing it back to Trump coin. We're gonna talk about Trump coin in a little bit. Meme coin. I mean, Trump coin is the meme coin of the day right now, the soup du jour. I think millennials. No? By the way, the zaps the zaps keep flowing. Thank you, Freaks, for supporting the show. I see you. But I wanna before we get there so ETFs we're talking about ETFs. What's your opinion on this on this trend of companies, you know, public companies specifically, but also private companies stacking Bitcoin on their balance sheet? MicroStrategy is the most obvious example with 460,000 Bitcoin.
But even your business block has a little over 8,000 Bitcoin on its balance sheet, and I believe you're actively stacking. We do see we do see into a into larger stack sets. We're stacking sets, stacking bits,
[00:22:57] Jack Dorsey:
but the sets denomination.
[00:22:58] ODELL:
That's not on the list of topics.
[00:23:01] Jack Dorsey:
So yeah. I mean, I I think, I don't know. For for for us, we we we have a lot of development work in Bitcoin. And if I could pick one thing, it would be that. If I could pick 2 things, it would be what we're doing with, Spiral. If I could pick 3 things, it would be the education that we try to do around Bitcoin, specifically around, Cash App customers and and Bitkey customers. And then 4 would be, like, having Bitcoin as a company because it's a hedge against anything going on. I we didn't buy a lot, relative to someone like, Michael Shaggy because, one, I don't feel good about just companies owning all the supply and all the Bitcoin. 2, we have a business, and that was a challenge business. And he kinda turned it into a different sort of business.
And he was early before the ETFs, and, like, it made sense. But we have a business. It's growing. It's it's, strong. But having it as a as a reserve, just in case, I think makes a lot of sense. And it can it can certainly potentially help us in the future. But I don't know how long we do this for. I feel like we have enough to keep us happy. We don't need to have more. We need to facilitate more. And that that's what I would rather it's what I would rather put our attention on.
[00:24:35] ODELL:
Okay. That all makes sense to me. I would say, though, that I think that ultimately, the goal of every business in the world should be to stack as much Bitcoin as possible, the goal of every individual, probably the goal of every functioning government.
[00:24:54] Jack Dorsey:
Yeah. You said this, Enrico. Maybe the goal is not stack as much as possible, but use it and transact in it as much as possible. I'd be down for that. Okay. Like, paying our vendors and paying our employees. Do you do any of that? We pay all the spiral people with, with Bitcoin. Oh, that's awesome. We don't have any vendors I'm aware of that accept Bitcoin, but we would. We we have it set up for that. And, we're working so that our employees can also convert to Bitcoin. They can do it right now if they put their paycheck in Cash App and do the auto convert into Bitcoin, through Cash App. So we have all the tools available. It's just, you know, not something, that's,
[00:25:31] ODELL:
you know, dominant across the entire company. Yeah. So, I mean, on that note, the year is 2025. Why can't people pay Bitcoin at Square terminals?
[00:25:41] Jack Dorsey:
We haven't seen the usage on the currency side that we want. And we actually went to sellers, and we asked them, if you if you could only have one thing from us, would it be auto convert into Bitcoin, a percentage of your revenue, or would it be accept Bitcoin? Nearly a 100% said auto convert. So we built that because it it's not easy either. Like, you know, just doing that. And they have a slider that can go, you know, from 0 to I don't know what the the limit is. Maybe 50% auto convert, their Bitcoin, and sellers actually use it. They they love it. And I think if we're to if we're to, if we're to play out the road map for, you know, hyper Bitcoinization and what mass adoption.
I think store value does make sense. And then, you know, building on that, when more and more sellers have it or more and more people have it, they can actually use it. Maybe remittance is the next thing. Maybe like a b to b thing, and then more con consumer to consumer. But there's places outside the US and outside Europe that accept it almost every day. Like, we're in one of those countries right now, and I've paid dinner here. I've paid for coffee with Bitcoin, with my my Bitkey wallet. I've paid with Lightning. I've played on chain. It all works. There's no questions from the merchant. They're happy to accept it.
And, like, we just don't have that in the United States right now. And I don't think just us building it into the terminal would create it because not enough people have Bitcoin in their wallets or know how to spend it, in the US, yet. And I think Strike tried this with some of the terminals or the partnership with the, the terminals,
[00:27:28] ODELL:
at some of the No. The department stores and The bear market crushed that one. We never really got it out the door.
[00:27:34] Jack Dorsey:
Well, see, there you go. But, like, it's it's not easy. Eventually, we will have acceptance on Square terminals.
[00:27:41] ODELL:
Why do you think That I guarantee. I mean, that's it's fascinating. I mean, I've noticed the same thing. You know, we'll run Bitcoin meetups in Nashville, Tennessee, one of the Bitcoin capitals of the United States. And we'll have, you know, 250 ride or die Bitcoiners come to the meetup. And we make sure that there's a food vendor there, a local food vendor there, seed oil free, and we'll onboard her to Bitcoin so she can accept Bitcoin. And it's literally, like, 2% of people pay with Bitcoin. But then you're outside of the US and these are, like, the most ride or die Bitcoiners. Right? You The ones that are asking why is why can't you accept Bitcoin as far as term? So white option, we're seeing the actual currency style adoption. I think it's a moment. Use case outside of the US, but not in the US. It's a comment it's a community momentum thing. Like,
[00:28:33] Jack Dorsey:
the the isolated, we don't have strong sense of community. Like, in a town that we're in, like, right now, it's a very small town. And when people see other people use Bitcoin, they'd interest and the, breads because it's word-of-mouth. And they're not Bitcoiners at all. Like, these people are not Bitcoiners, but they're using it because they recognize what it's doing for the merchant, and they they recognize what it's doing for them. And they happen to have it. But I think the biggest right here is, like, getting the Bitcoin. It's a little bit easier here, but getting it, why do you get it? I mean, that goes back to the Norwalk thing.
And then it's like, okay, is it keep going up or do I spend this? Do I buy my meal with it? You know, all these reasons, but I think the tightness of the community is a is a big factor.
[00:29:32] ODELL:
You know, historically, I thought part of it was that we have such good financial infrastructure. And I know it's not perfect. People get debanked all the time, but we have such good financial infrastructure in the United States, particularly in terms of credit cards and stuff. And that's the reason. But then you you come down here and, like, every vendor accepts Apple Pay. If anything, it's more it's easier to not travel with a wallet here than it is in America.
[00:30:02] Jack Dorsey:
Well, we I think the US just building on building on what I said earlier. I think the US has one of the worst financial systems, because it's all monopolies and duopolies, and it's all permission. You go to a place like Kenya or anywhere in Africa and you have M Pesa, and M Pesa works instantly. Every single person there can access M Pesa. You go to Latin America, a place like Costa Rica, you have Sempae. Every single person there can use it instantly. All they need is a phone number. And it works. Like, it just works. And you you you don't need things like Apple Pay. You don't need things like credit cards. You don't need things like even Bitcoin. So it's it's, again, it's it's just like a a choice, and then and it happened to be the case at a lot of countries outside the US and Europe.
They built these payment systems off phone credits. So as a telecoms, they would convert the phone credits to money. It was the original, like, meme coin. Right? It was the original shit coin, and, like, these credits go over, And, the merchant accepts them, and, you know, they're they're settled, and they're done. They go into the bank account easily.
[00:31:09] ODELL:
Should've named this, this ripped meme coins with Jack. That clearly, it's I it's the topic of the day. Like, that's It's it's living rent free in your head.
[00:31:20] Jack Dorsey:
It's disappointing.
[00:31:22] ODELL:
So real quick. I mean, so you think it's a regulation thing? You think it's mostly a regulation thing in the United States?
[00:31:28] Jack Dorsey:
I don't think it's a regulation thing. I think it's a company corporate thing. I I think, like, Visa carved out their area. The banks carved out their area. They're inner they're they're not, necessarily operable, networks and protocols across these things. I for those of you who are old enough, do you remember when SMS was just getting started? Yeah. Of course. Did you have Verizon or AT and T singular?
[00:31:55] ODELL:
I mean, I don't feel comfortable,
[00:31:57] Jack Dorsey:
stating which one, but I have I mean, back then. Back then. And I've You had one of the 2? I did. I had one of the 2. So Verizon was on the CDMA protocol, and AT and T was on the Pan Global GMS protocol. And do you remember the day that you could send a a text message from a Verizon phone to a singular AT and T phone? It was 2,005. But there was there was some years there where you couldn't do that. Right? There were 10 years. GSM was a standard for 10 years around the world. You could send text messages for 10 years before the text message from AT and T to Verizon. Was in its own little bubble. It had it and you couldn't send. And then the iPhone, like, really juice that up in 2,000 a bit, and made them work together.
But that's exactly what the US financial system is. They're all different protocols. They all wanna own them. They all have to figure out, like, how to interoperate with one another. The US government just created this, new protocol that's supposed to catch us up with the rest of Europe. I forget the name of it right now, but it's there, and it's probably a path towards a central bank digital currency. It would certainly make one easier, but it definitely solves the problem of, like for 40 years now, you all have had problems, like, sending money quickly, which is the only reason, by the way, that Venmo and Cash App exist and PayPal.
Because we abstracted the layer away, and we settled above those layers. And it didn't matter what bank you were on. It didn't matter what card you used. You would get money instantly. We can't do that with Cash App in, like, Europe because it's fast and free right now already, the peer to peer. So, you know, that's where that's where Bitcoin comes in. Do you want these government protocols? Do you want the corporate protocols that don't work together? Or do you want a protocol owned by the people?
[00:33:52] ODELL:
I mean, but by that logic, it kinda seems that if you do have a least quasi CBDC with, like, a relatively open API, In the short term, Bitcoin adoption actually can get bootstrapped quicker. Right? Maybe. Your M Pesa point? Like, M Pesa is a final policy. This is you arguing for c d c d c d kind of fascinating because that's an it's just an interesting point, and I think we're going there. Right? Like, I think in the west, like, the way CBDCs look is they're all gonna be corporate led, but there's gonna be public private partnerships. Right? Yeah. So all the people that are saying that they're anti CBDC will still use, like, x money.
[00:34:33] Jack Dorsey:
Yep. Or
[00:34:35] ODELL:
USDC or whatever, Tether, whatever it becomes.
[00:34:38] Jack Dorsey:
Yeah. If you see them all as on ramps, then certainly it can be beneficial. But then the question is why do people go to Bitcoin?
[00:34:43] ODELL:
Right. Well, because you can't take it. What's the value? No permission required. Yep.
[00:34:48] Jack Dorsey:
And then And how important is that to people right now? What's important when they get on bed? Convenience. Exactly. When they get rugged, it becomes important. But there's other things that there's other things that, can lead them there. Like, permissionless is not it. Like, we can build other utility on top of Bitcoin that, like, people run to instead of run away from the banks because they got rugged or because they got shut down. Like, we're still in this mode of, like, people are running away from a thing to get to Bitcoin instead of, like, running to Bitcoin to get to it. And I know that a lot of, like, you know, permissionless folks and, cypherpunks are running to Bitcoin for the right reasons, but that's not 99% of the population.
[00:35:32] ODELL:
Yeah. No. I've noticed this as well. I mean, you gotta make it convenient. You have to make it accessible. We have to make it convenient. The most convenient option. Yes. And I think Nasser is gonna play a really big role in that. I I wanna get to But before we go to Nasser, let's talk about your favorite your new favorite investment, Trump coin. Do you really think it's what is what is your opinion on that?
[00:35:58] Jack Dorsey:
I I think it's, I think it's very, very disappointing that people are buying into it. And there's what is what is the foundation of it? Like, what can you do with it? And I know that, like, the Jamie Dimons of the world and others say that this is the same as Bitcoin. Like, it has no intrinsic value and, like, you can't do anything, but we know that's not the case. Like, we we know the properties of Bitcoin. We know the censorship resistance. We know the decentralization. But people are running to something that they can, they can own a piece of and make a little bit money of on. I mean, it it's a casino.
Like, we made a conscious decision not to build a casino in the Cash App to stay Bitcoin only because of the underlying principles of it and because we wanted the internet to have an open protocol for money transmission. And we don't see that in f. We don't see that in hamster coin. We don't see that in, you know, n times 1,000,000 name coins. We see it only in Bitcoin. And there might be another thing that comes in the future that is better than Bitcoin in that regard, but I don't see it. I don't think anyone I've talked to has seen it. And, I think anything that takes away from that is distracting. So I I don't know. It just it feels like a recipe for disaster, but who knows? Anything could happen. Maybe it's the currency of the country at some point. It's it's not gonna be.
[00:37:37] ODELL:
I just I mean, I think it's funny that every cycle people think I hear so many people say, like, this is the end. There's gonna be no more shitcoins. I think shitcoins will be here forever. I think Yeah. Because people like to gamble. They have been here forever. There are coupons in back in the day. Like, it's it's the same thing. It's a credit score. Which ones they are. Like, ETH, for instance, right now is, you know, in complete disaster mode. Right? And it seems like it's like Solana cycle and the memes of the Solana cycle or whatever. And I really don't think of them as a threat to Bitcoin at all. I think of them as a they're definitely a distraction, and they're just a threat to the people that choose to speculate on them instead of saving Bitcoin and spending Bitcoin. Yes.
But they're they're not a threat to the Bitcoin protocol.
[00:38:22] Jack Dorsey:
They are because it they're distracting. Because we have the potential of people wanting to work on the Bitcoin protocol, and continue to make it more secure and safer and more resilient goes down. Not by a lot, but it certainly goes down. Ethereum did that to us. The NFTs did that to us. Like, that's where the money was when they filed the money, and they filed the the developer ecosystem and the and the velocity.
[00:38:54] ODELL:
Do The web 3. The web 3. Do you think there's an argument and I hear this a lot because of how I choose to spend my time. Do you think there's an argument by some Bitcoiners that noster is a distraction?
[00:39:08] Jack Dorsey:
From what? From Bitcoin. No. It it's it might be a distraction from, like, other social media protocols, but is Bitcoin our social media protocol as well? Do you think we need 1? If you answer that question, yes, then we need to work on something that that helps. And, like, the fact that, like, we have Bitcoin built into this thing. And the fact that, as you have said, it'll probably be the the the way that people onboard onto Bitcoin, because they're actually creating content and receiving Sats for it and they're receiving Bitcoin. I've converted so many people because of zaps.
They feel that a little, that little electricity, like the, the phone buzz a bit, and they see that money goes in their wallet and they're hooked. And and then they have to deal with the fact that, following a 111 people I don't know, I need to go and follow them. Like, where do I find the people that I'm actually interested in and the topics I'm actually interested in? And maybe that's too much work, and they forget the 20¢ that they got. But if they get, like, $5 or they have, like, some, like, incredible content and, like, it goes viral and they make money on it, they're gonna stick. They're gonna figure it out, and and and and they're gonna work at it. And we that's the accessibility we need. So I think Nostra is only symbiotic and only positive. And, I think the Bitcoiners who are saying that Nostra is a distraction are probably doing some distracting things right now.
[00:40:37] ODELL:
I mean, that's a 100% guaranteed. Especially in the modern age, people tend to get distracted very easily. But I and I I definitely agree with you, which is why I spend so much time on Noster and focus on Noster. I mean, I think Noster will effectively have done right, bootstraps Bitcoin in a big way. So if you focus on Noster, you're effectively focusing on Bitcoin adoption. A 100%. And specifically, Bitcoin adoption as as as freedom money. Like, to your point about Bitcoin as, like, an investment, something you buy in Charles Schwab versus Bitcoin as freedom money, I think a lot of that has to do with where people interact with it first. Right? Like, if you're calling your broker to buy Bitcoin or even if you're going on Cash App where stocks are sold and you're buying Bitcoin on Cash App Yep.
Or even something in, like, Strike that is Bitcoin only, but that you're, like, explicitly going on there to buy Bitcoin is completely different than your first experience with Bitcoin being a shitpost that some stranger zaps you money for.
[00:41:41] Jack Dorsey:
Right? It's like Oh, a 100%. I mean, I I think back to that concept of meeting people where they are. Like, it it's it's just a question of what's the next step. Buying from an ETF and and making my way to a non custodial wallet feels very challenging. Posting something on Noster and then receiving some zaps and making my way to a non custodial wallet feels very accessible and feels, very realistic. So, like, I I I do think there's a spectrum always, but I'm a huge believer in Nostra. I'm a huge believer more in just open protocols, and I think we need one for social media, and we need one for an ecosystem of apps to compete with, like, you know, the closed wall app stores and Google Play and the app stores of the world.
And we have this we have this protocol, so let's let's build on it. It's working.
[00:42:37] ODELL:
By the way, I see Rob Hamilton in the comments saying, no and tell Parker Nasser isn't a distraction. Are you familiar with Parker Lewis? Yes. He's the one who tells me the most that it's a distraction from Bitcoin. And what what's distracting from what? From Bitcoin. But what what would you what are you not doing in Bitcoin because you're doing it noster? Well, it's like a combination. Right? So, like, Open SaaS has a noster fund where we support a bunch of noster developers in addition to Bitcoin developers. Right? And 1031 is a venture fund where we support Noster companies in addition to predominantly Bitcoin companies. So you see it's more and more I mean, Noster is something that was bootstrapped by Bitcoiners. Right? It's something that the majority of our developers are were Bitcoin developers first. Right? And now they're working on Nastr. So I I don't I don't think it's without, I don't think the perspective is, like, completely crazy.
I think it's it lacks merit, and it's invalid. But, I understand where he's coming from. Right? Given your thesis is is
[00:43:42] Jack Dorsey:
a way to bootstrap Bitcoin, then it's not a distraction. Like, he might not be seeing that thesis and that endpoint.
[00:43:49] ODELL:
Right? Right. He thinks Nasr will fail and Right. That we all should just use x. And and that feels like a failure. Which I think a lot of have one option. A lot of Bitcorners think that. The overwhelming majority of Bitcorners think that
[00:44:03] Jack Dorsey:
Yeah. Right now, probably. Right? I don't know. Right? I, I don't know. I I think it depends on how Bitcoin they are, I guess. Like, are they are they are they there for the protocol? Are they there for the attributes? And if so, like, why does that that not extend to other properties such as social media? And, I don't know why you wouldn't want that. At least having that option, at least preparing something just in case everything does go down or these companies go out of business or they get corrupted or they get, owned by the state. Like, don't you want something that you can actually build your identity on and, like, it stays around and you get to choose whether it it where it exists and if it exists?
And the same is true for your content. Don't don't you want that? Because that's why you're in Bitcoin. Right? Because you want it for money. And money is content. It's the same thing. These are these are very, very symbiotic and parallel protocols. But I don't think people value the content as much, and I think that's one of those phases that will enter in when they like, they'll start appreciating why we should be valuing the content and why we should not allow corporations to own it, but that we can permission them in to use it. And, like, that that to me is what Nostra enables ultimately.
[00:45:36] ODELL:
So I see I see someone in the comments asking why we have no video today, Jack. Why do we have no video?
[00:45:42] Jack Dorsey:
I've barely seen any sort of dispatch for the video. Most of them are most of them are this clock.
[00:45:50] ODELL:
The best ones are no video. That's why. The best ones are no videos. And, also, we're sitting on a beautiful beach. We have a great view right now. We're watching the sunset. We're legit watching the sunset. It's a sunset ride. It's amazing because we don't actually have to look at each other. We can just look at the sunset and talk. We're not faced at each other. We're faced at the water.
[00:46:08] Jack Dorsey:
It takes that social awkwardness away.
[00:46:10] ODELL:
Because it is usually awkward with you, you know? Super awkward. So I want to I mean, you bootstrap Twitter. Right? Which, I mean, I've absolutely loved Twitter. It was my only social media for a decade before Nostr existed. And I've been, you know, mission focused for the last few years to bootstrap Nostra. And, I mean, first of all, you definitely do not get enough credit for the 0 to 1 problem, like getting critical momentum into something like Twitter. We got it in the Nostra as well, though. Well, so I mean, so that's my question for you. Like, how do you think about the bootstrap problem with something like Nostra? And I guess before that, why don't you just give there might be a bunch of listeners right now that have no idea what Nostra is. It's the first time listening to sale of dispatch.
Just give a brief why what is Nostra? Why should people care? And then I wanna jump into the Bootstrap problem.
[00:47:11] Jack Dorsey:
Well, Nostra, so, like, I don't know how long ago. It was maybe 4 years ago. We, we decided that, like, Twitter cannot be the view, the protocol, and the distribution mechanism all in one. For us to really get all the tweets, for us to really get all the content, for us to be the global consciousness, like, we had to open the doors. And that's how we started. We had a completely open API. Anyone could write to it. Anyone could read from it. You could build whatever client you wanted. And then we had our CEO who came in after me and then after the other one.
The company wanted to go public, and all that was closed down because of fears about other clients taking all the traffic, yada yada yada. So, like, the protocol aspect of Twitter failed when it went public. And we wanted to get back to that. I wanted to get back to that. That's why we created it. It's hard to be a public company, and you have a lot of a lot of different incentives that are not aligned with the people you're actually serving. And we can talk about that. But we wanted to create a protocol. We I have this this tweetstorm called, blues around blue sky, which was like, we're going to fund a protocol.
And we're looking for people to build it and to run it. We'll fund it for years out, at least 5 and beyond. And we'll end up using it if it's good enough. It'll be our protocol layer, and we'll be the client on top of it. And the reason we did that is because we would get more content. And our algorithms would be better. Our business models could be better, because there's just more content. So it's funny because I didn't know this at the time, but, this guy named Fia Jaf actually visited the community and talked with one of our people at Twitter who was interviewing developers, to take on this role.
And, for some reason, I don't know if it was if it was Fia Jaff, it probably was. Or if it was us, we chose not to work together. And, we chose, a woman named Jay, to build Blue Sky. And we, we funded her, and this is, you know, just after Elon, well, we funded her before Elon bought it. And then, she was on her own and and building on a structure right after. And, she started talking about it like investors and, she was worried about not getting more money because Elon bought it and, you know, he was shutting a bunch of things down and these are all valid concerns.
And I started to get nervous, and I I wanted to shift my my funding to to more Internet permissionless stuff. And I asked, like, what should I be looking at to fund this space? And someone tweeted at me, Noster. And I went to Fiat Jeff's, GitHub, And there's a page. I know this is a long entry to the description of this, but basically, this page described every single thing that was wrong with Twitter. And here is the fix, but it's open. It's decentralized. And anyone can build on top of it, and anyone can improve it with these things called NIPS. But, effectively, it's a protocol for social media.
Instead of a username and password or an email address and a password, it's a key pair. So you have a secret key and a public key, which you can give out to people and they can follow you. It's the only one out there that actually verifies you are you because of the cryptographic security as long as you keep that, secret key safe. It's the only one out there that all data you create, you sign with your key, so they can verify, it's you. And that's important in the age of AI and deepfakes and whatnot. It's the only one out there that you can state, I want to use this client, but, actually, I don't like that client anymore. I wanna use this client. And your follow graph and all your tweets, all your posts go with you, and you can see them in the same way that you saw in in the different client.
And it's the only one that you can say, like, I know that this is going to exist for as long as I want it to. A company can't take it down. The protocol engineers can't take it down. The government can't take it down. It exists. It's permanent. If I so if I choose it to be permanent, and my identity is is permanent if I choose. No company can do that. No company can say that. There's no other protocol I know of in social media that can say that. None. They're all, like, captured in some way, whether they'd be the Ethereum based ones or the Solana based ones or ones that companies are building, that they start or, quote, unquote, bootstrap and then they're gonna give to the community. They're not.
Nostra is it. And I found it, and I'm like, oh, man. This is it. I'd like I I was like, Blue Sky was probably the wrong answer. There's a lot of good ideas in Blue Sky, but, like, this is what I wanted of just something raw, just something, like, open. Again, feeling like that early Internet. Like, that's what Fiat Joff created, and that's what the community still feels like today. It's a significant developer community. They're very excited. They're building amazing stuff. And if you want social media on your terms and you still want to interrupt with the exes of the world and, the mastodons and the true socials and the blue skies, Noster is probably gonna be it because it's the only one that can say it's neutral. The only one.
Everyone else is captured in some way.
[00:53:20] ODELL:
I mean, I think that's a pretty cool thing to highlight because the way Noster is built, the only reason you can't see everything that's available throughout the Internet in your Nostr app is because of various walled gardens that are put up. If those walled gardens didn't exist, you could very easily bridge every x post or every Facebook post or every TikTok post over to Noster, without permission. And you can view it, and you can interact with it, and you can share it. But that's not the case because everything's a walled garden. So, anyway, to my point earlier, I think that was a good intro description, albeit long.
I mean, cut me off anytime. I'm not gonna cut you off. You're you're the star of the show right now. I've been told I cut people off too much. I'm trying to work on I'm not a professional podcaster. I just
[00:54:11] Jack Dorsey:
like Freedom Tech, and, I love I love this. VC. Definitely not an influencer influencer, anarchist VC. Influencers don't go noster only,
[00:54:21] ODELL:
because of the bootstrap problem. They do. You're our first influencer that has gone noster only. Did you say anarchist VC? Yes. I respect that. Thank you for the compliment. So what do you think about the like, do we have a bootstrap problem? Like, how do you think about adoption to Noster so far? Is it good? It does it need work? Is there major concerns there? How do we fix it? I'll tell you how we started Twitter. We sent invites out to our friends.
[00:54:48] Jack Dorsey:
Our friends happen to be tech bloggers that went to South by Southwest. Our friends, during the second Southwest that we were alive, in 2007, they went to South by Southwest, and they said, if you wanna follow what tracks I'm going to, what parties I'm gonna be at, follow me on Twitter. Here's a short code. You type follow and then my name on your phone, and the thing blew up. And that was it. It it had a moment. It had some attention. We were prepared for it. It's, like, it's it's not luck. It's just being ready for it. And Nasr is already bootstrapped. It's bootstrapped with Bitcoiners.
I don't know if you've seen it the past 2 weeks, especially with TikTok, but, like, there are real artists getting on. And that that thing makes that makes me so happy because, like, for an artist, like, principally, this is it. Like, I own my artwork. Nobody can say anything. I can verify it with my own identity. I can put it up in full resolution in the way that I wish. I can build my audience in the way that I wish. I can get paid for it. We just we we both know a DJ, who who, just gotten Noster, and he's been putting his work up, and he's been getting sats for it, and his mind was blown. He's like, what?
Like like, what is this? And and that's when the bars the ball starts rolling. And and during that time, it felt very slow in the moment. It's like at South by Southwest, I think we were 10,000 people using it. And then over the next year, it went up to half a1000000. Right? And it kind of felt fast and felt slow in the moment and also retrospectively, but I don't, like, I don't think we have to worry about that. We are bootstrapped, and more and more people are finding it because of that. And there's gonna be events in the world that cause people's attention to go towards Nostra, and there are gonna be things that we build that people just want. Zaps is one of those things. Like, it is a is it a it's a reason to run a Nostr. I can get paid instantly, KYC free, and actually feel Bitcoin and feel a platform that I can actually own and use.
And and, I have entire control over that. It just feels super, super magical. But to answer your question specifically, I think communities is a I think Ditto, is the solve to the bootstrap problem. I think people wanna join communities. No one's doing community as well. Facebook groups is terrible. They have terrible moderation policies no matter what Zuck says. They're not gonna fix them because it's more, driven by, the individuals. Reddit has the same issue. No one is doing community as well, and that's where people wanna go. They want more small communities. They want more private communities, and they wanna know that their content is theirs. And there's not people spying on them, which you can't say for any other platform out there that does communities and groups.
[00:58:01] ODELL:
So the the DJ you referred to, his name is Dor with with one o. So you can go to primal.net/door
[00:58:09] Jack Dorsey:
with one o. I was actually talking about Ollie. Oh, shit. Well, Ollie I was talking about Oliver. Does he have He he's a he's a painter. Zen Pub? He's a painter. I do know a Zen Pub.
[00:58:20] ODELL:
Or if you go to primal.net/jack, he's retweeted Ollie recently. Yep. Oliver Yeah. I guess Dor has been around for a while. And Door is an OG. So where were we? Ditto is a Nostra app that's focused on communities. One of the cool things about Nostra is, as Jack said earlier, there's many different, there's many different Nostra apps. You might hear them called clients sometimes, but I think probably we should be calling them apps, but you can call them whatever the hell you wanna call them, because it's more obvious to people. But Ditto is one of them. And, the may the main developer of that project is a is a man that goes by the name of Alex Gleason. He's an absolute legend among men. Amazing. It's great to have him. He's a former, Truth Social CTO.
Trump's, quasi social media. And so on on that front so I have 2 questions for you, and we'll start with the first one. Do you not see it like, is there do we not have a bootstrapping issue of, like, people creating an account, but then not really using it? You know, like, they, like, they do their first post. They're like, Nostra's awesome, and then we zap them a bunch. And then we don't see them for months. Is that a problem? I is that something you saw early days of Twitter? Or Oh, yeah. It's it's definitely a problem. I mean, I think the first big problem is just discovery,
[00:59:42] Jack Dorsey:
finding who is interesting to follow. And, unfortunately, most of the clients right now are giving people that are not relevant to them at all. And you see a bunch of content that's overwhelmingly not relevant, and then you have to figure out how to unfollow these people. And it's just work, and I don't wanna do more work. Right? So I I think blues Blue Sky actually did something really good here, which is the starter packs, which is, I think, brought from an from another, another platform. But here's a here's a pack of of, accounts you can follow if you're if you have these interest.
But, again, I think, like, communities, Ditto, is probably the holy grail. And if you have a tight community of, like, your friends or your locale, then, it's just it's much easier to wanna converse every day. Because what what really made Twitter work was not broadcasting to the world. It was the replies. It was a conversation. And if I see content that's not relevant to me, I'm not gonna reply to it. If I see content that I chose to get into because it's like, oh, football or, like, surfing or whatnot, I'm a reply to it. And that that keeps me going and that keeps me, that I I stay, especially if I'm getting money for it and I can send money.
So, like, it's solvable. It's just like, how do you get to conversation, not just posting?
[01:01:06] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I love the starter pack idea from Blue Sky. I think a bunch of apps will integrate that. Basically, the idea is, like, you're inviting a friend to join, and you're you're basically in charge of getting them started. You're in charge of, giving them almost a, a personalized experience on their on their first join, on their first their first, interaction with the protocol. I see in the comments someone called out Oliver's, NIP 5. It's primal.net/oliverkleg with 2 g's.
[01:01:40] Jack Dorsey:
Yeah. So he's a DJ and a oil painter, and he's been putting up a bunch of his works with some quotes and, like, the people are digging it. But, like, it it just takes one of those stones to roll and and, like, more and more people come. And I don't know why, but, there's a moment right now in these past few weeks where we're seeing a lot more people who are not Bitcoin adjacent. They feel more art adjacent or, like, willing to to try things out, because everything happening with TikTok and other things. And if they find community, they'll stick. If they don't, then they'll they'll bounce. Yeah. It feels like real momentum.
[01:02:18] ODELL:
What are your thoughts on like, I feel like Twitter didn't have this problem as much because of where the ecosystem was. The Internet was so young. Like, what are your thoughts on just, like, battling established network effects? Like, WhatsApp absolutely dominates. Facebook completely dominates in terms of network effects. Is that is there a deliberate way to try and break that, or is it just a slow grind? New utility.
[01:02:46] Jack Dorsey:
I mean, like, we were battling Facebook. Like, Facebook was was the evil enemy because they had this strategy of, like, you go into schools, everyone on the school gets on, then you go to cities, everyone in the city gets on, then the world, and, like, it worked. And they had a ton of utility that we didn't have. We just had one piece, which was broadcast. But the broadcast was so fast, and it was so simple. And the 140 characters made everything very digestible instantly so you could actually see news. And the thing that really turned the corner for us was trends and search. I could search any topic, and I could see what was happening in the world.
And I could type fire, and I could see all the fires happening in the world. I could see the fire was trending. Oh, that's something I didn't know about. I didn't know how to search, but now I know that this person died, or this is on fire, or there's an earthquake. Like, the earthquake moments were huge for Twitter. New Year's Eve was huge for Twitter because it's just fast, brief, digestible. Like, it really focused on speed. Speed was our number one feature. And Facebook was this, like, big clunky thing that had a 100 features, and we were able to break breakthrough, but obviously not to their scale because not everyone not everyone had someone something to broadcast. Right? And our problem was that tweets would be shown on TV or they'd be shown in newspapers, and people are like, I see it on TV. Why do I need to download the app? Like, I already get the Twitter news. Like, it's it's there.
So our reach was immense, but our usage was very, very small because not as many people had the the reasoning, which is why we shifted more and more towards conversation because everyone can have a chat every day. Everyone can have a conversation. And we really highlighted replies, and and that's what Twitter is. That's what x is today. It's it's really good around conversation and, encouraging more more replies, more conversation.
[01:04:47] ODELL:
I mean, I don't know how active you are in x nowadays, but do you not see, like I for me, it's like it seems like it's gone back towards this, like, broadcast first type of like, it used to have so much productive discussion. Now I feel like it's just influencers shouting into the world and, like, PR agencies.
[01:05:09] Jack Dorsey:
I think the the payment stuff definitely changed something. Like paying people for posting piece of the ad revenue cut. It does incentivize a certain thing. And then, like, a a lot of the indicators of, like, how many replies or replies in line were taken out of the main timeline. So you couldn't see that, oh, this this is a tweet that actually has, a bunch of interesting replies. The thing our algorithm used to do was it would promote one of the the replies as well to the top of the timeline. Whereas today, I think it's only top level tweets. So a lot of the understanding that you would have to, like, there's conversation underneath has disappeared.
And I think that's a mistake, for for what it wants to be in terms of usage. But, you know, it it is what it is.
[01:06:00] ODELL:
So it is what it is. I'll make that the quote of the episode. The
[01:06:08] Ross Ulbricht:
with with
[01:06:14] ODELL:
with with Noster, I kind of see it's interesting. Right? Because it's the first time that a lot of especially young people, young people have been exposed to some kind of social app, social protocol, whatever you wanna call it, where there is no algorithm. And I I think a lot of people find that refreshing that they have, you know, what it used to be was the standard. Right? This this idea that you're just basically getting a chronological feed of people you follow, which is what we saw, you know, in the early days of Instagram and Facebook and Twitter. And, of course, they all moved to this algorithmic first approach.
And it's I think it's fundamental that you have the ability to have no algorithm. But I think part of the reason why Nasser has been rough around the edges for newcomers right now is because you don't have the choice of adding an algorithm if you want to in terms of discovery, in terms of seeing content that you might, enjoy or wanna interact with. How do you think about algorithms in Nostr? Well, I mean,
[01:07:19] Jack Dorsey:
Twitter took a different path. So, like, in in Facebook, it was all about the algorithm and just, like, gaming as much engagement as possible. What we decided to do is, like, you're on you're on the app, and then you go away, and then you come back to it, let's say, after, like, 3 hours, and you're following, like, a 1000 people. When you have to go reverse through a 1000 people to see, like, what you missed, like, it's it's what Nasser is today. Right. It's it's it's impossible to do. You can't do that. It just takes time, and it takes time away from what else you could be doing. So our first algorithm was called while you're away, and it would try to figure out, like, what you are most likely to engage with in terms of, like, what you tend to look at more or you you reply to. And it would put 8 of those tweets at the top. And then underneath, it's the the full reverse con. And we kept that for 2 years.
And then we expanded that, and we we allowed you to turn off the algorithm. So you can say, I want the algorithm. I want the for you. That's what for you for you is or following. Right? That's what it is today. It's the same thing. That that hasn't changed at all. And the reason we did that is we we realized Twitter was, like, news and conversation, and you just can't keep up with all of it. So we needed some help to, like, get you to, like, here's what you missed. Here's what's trending. Here's those things. So it's a it's just a question of, like, what what a particular client wants to be, and what use case it's trying to solve. Is it trying to solve for the use for the news use case, the community use case? And the beautiful thing about Nasr is it can solve for all those, and they can all be different apps. But, like, if we solve for communities, it'd be a completely different algorithm than it would be for news. And right now, you have something like Primal, which has a trending 24 hour, a MoZap 24 hour, and then the fire hose. And that feels more like a news use case, but we're not getting the news content on the network. So it's more like the news of your friends or Matt Odell at the top of it every day saying live free or die. It's not really news. Do you want me to stop saying good morning?
No. Should I stop saying good morning? This this is a content problem. Right? We need Nastr needs all the content on it. It needs all the content. Like and we need to, like whatever that algorithm is, the trending 24 is looking for established accounts, and it's not trying to find, like, the trending stuff, the actual trending stuff. And if we tried to find the actual trending stuff of all the Mastodon post, of all the blue tie the the blue sky fire hose of anything we can scrape from the web, then it would be a news destination. But it's a question, do you want it to be? I think so. Like, I think Nasser can be the greatest corpus of human conversation and thought ever ever created because of the principles of it, but, like, we need to build that. Right? But don't do we not bootstrap that with good mornings?
[01:10:14] ODELL:
Like, is that
[01:10:16] Jack Dorsey:
I mean, that we've got enough of that. Like, but I mean You we're not gonna there's no escape philosophy from good good morning. It's too heavy. This is something with I battle with every morning.
[01:10:26] ODELL:
You know? Because I know why you say good morning. You're trying to remind yourself. I no. I know I know there's a subset. I I know there's a subset of people that legit resent me. Like, it builds up in their head every morning that they see me on the top of trending saying good morning and posting a music video. I'm one of those people. Unfortunately, our friendship perseveres. But then at the same time,
[01:10:53] Jack Dorsey:
you know, there's a lot of people that wanna say good morning back. Right? Otherwise, it wouldn't be on the top of trending in the first place. Yeah. So it's So it's it's this is one of my inner struggles that I have to deal with every morning. Yeah. But that's more of a community use case. Right? Like, you say good morning to your neighbors and your friends and whatnot. And, like, if we want it to be that, it's going to be as as big as a friend circle. If you want it to be global, it has to be news. It has to be something that's actually global relevant. So one thing you could do, for instance, is instead of saying good morning every day and putting a music video and being lazy about it, you could you could opine on the news of the day. You could take an article that's breaking somewhere, and you could actually opine on it. And then people will have a conversation about it, and you keep engaged in that conversation, and then it turns into a different thing. I take a lot of time and care in picking which music video I do. Realize that, but it's a friend's group. It's a group chat then. It's just like a friend's group chat, and it's gonna stay like that forever.
[01:11:50] ODELL:
So you want me to opine on the news every morning? I mean, you're a podcaster influencer, and and I just be opine on the news every morning. I don't see you doing it.
[01:11:59] Jack Dorsey:
I've been I've been busy. I'm going I'll I'll get back to it. Do you not even care? I do care. I'll get back to it. I'll get back to it. But, like, be the change you wanna see in the world. If you want that content, you have to make that content. Right? I mean, part of it is, like, we need to we need to see algorithms that do different things and people can choose them so that I'm not on the top. We have those today. We have those today. Don't blame the algorithm for your own, like, lack of desire to to make this work. It's as much a development problem as it is a content problem, and you're, like, you're bringing up the rear on the content. I just
[01:12:34] ODELL:
I try, and, I'm not trying to I'm not trying to report the news every morning, but I'll You don't need to report the news. But good morning. Where do I get the news from?
[01:12:43] Jack Dorsey:
Everywhere. Commenting on You see the news everywhere. You see it you see it.
[01:12:48] ODELL:
Okay. So why don't you if you send me a news story every morning What are your thoughts on trip Trump coin? That's newsworthy. No? Like, detailed analysis like you do on your podcast. Detailed analysis. I mean, you should stay on Stacks ads and not buy Trump coin. I mean, that's my analysis. People why. I will say that I had no idea that Phantom Wallet existed, which is, like, the main way these people interact with Solana meme coins. Moonshot is another one. Is Moonshot a different app? Mhmm. The UX They're all at the top of the App Store right now. The UX for being a day trader or, like, just a degen swapping this stuff is they really nailed it. It's, like, very clean. Yeah.
So it makes me feel like a boomer. Like, I was completely Yeah. But the I mean, this is Not necessarily caught off guard by the existence of the coin. Like, I think that was very on brand. You know, a few days before your presidency to to launch a cash grab. But, the the the way it was done was I was completely unfamiliar with. This is a gap both in Bitcoin and Nostra,
[01:14:01] Jack Dorsey:
and the gap is design. Like, these people know, like, how to make something fast and the interface fast such that you know how to use it right away. And the problem in historically with Bitcoin and with Nastr is it's been engineering led, and a lot of these engineers do not know how to partner with designers. Like, they build for engineers. They build for other engineers, which is great. It's fine, but, like, we're not going to escape velocity. We're not gonna reach the horizon, like, with with that mindset and with that approach. We just won't.
They had it has to be cohesive. It has to be focused on speed, and you have to have a sense of, like, who you're actually trying to serve. Like, are you trying to serve everyone, which dictates a certain set of features? Are you trying to serve pro users? Are you trying to serve engineers? Like and and that that clarity, you can start one way, and then you end up always to the mainstream or maybe a smaller audience. But you gotta you gotta pick a lane and then just, like, go for it and just, like, iterate and iterate. And I haven't seen that discipline within Nasr or or Bitcoin, predominantly. There's exceptions, of course, but it definitely holds us back.
[01:15:10] ODELL:
I mean, I think you guys nailed the UX on Bitkey on the Bitcoin side.
[01:15:14] Jack Dorsey:
I think we nailed it on Cash App first. Like, it was the fastest, easiest way to buy money. It worse. Yeah. I mean, this is the the tale of companies. Like, you make something simple, and then it gets worse and worse as you add things and you don't call, you don't cut, you don't edit. We're in the process of editing. It's gonna get better. But Big Key is a is a you know, it's a new one. Right? So it'll eventually have that thing where it gets barnacles and you have to edit. There's just like a desire to change. Right? So it's like constant, like Desire to add. And the ad doesn't come with, like, what are what are we subtracting? You know? Like, what are we refactoring? That's it's just common, and it's no intention. Like, let's make our Bitcoin purchasing platform worse. No. It's like, let's add this thing and then add this thing and, oh, now where does the Bitcoin thing fit? And if we add this thing, then there's a dependency on that, and then it's like a maze in the labyrinth, and we have to refactor everything.
I'm sure you hear this from your your companies that you VC over. Is that a verb, VC over? Yeah. I mean, you can take this conversation. You can replay it tonight. You can go to your your companies, and you can say, I'm here to help. I got some I got some advice. Designer.
[01:16:28] ODELL:
Do you think do you think all VCs are bad
[01:16:32] Jack Dorsey:
I think I think the gravity is towards yes, and you have to resist the gravity to be good. And there are some good ones, but the gravity is towards yes. Okay. I agree with that. Honestly I think you're a good one, just to be clear. You think Then there are others that are good ones. It means a lot. It means a lot. I mean, I've never taken money from you, so I don't know how good you are because that's the that's the ultimate lit litmus test, but I hear good things. Well, we have a couple of our founders in the live chat. So if they're Okay. We're watching the sunset, and do we think you'll see a green flash? Tiny one. Tiny green flash on the sunset. This is meant to be. There we go.
[01:17:09] ODELL:
It's a moment. Honestly, since I'm not a professional podcaster, I'm still hung up on you shitting on my good mornings.
[01:17:18] Jack Dorsey:
It's always the people who say, I'm not this. I'm not this. I'm not this. I'm not this. I'm That actually are those people. All the freaks know how much sound quality issues I have on a episode by episode basis. So how could I be
[01:17:31] ODELL:
a professional podcaster?
[01:17:33] Jack Dorsey:
No. You're an amateur podcaster, but you're a podcaster.
[01:17:36] ODELL:
Amateur podcaster. I'll take that. You know, we're day 21 of the year. I've done 21 music videos every day. Yeah. You know I'm a man of routine. Like, I'm, this is how I operate. Are you break should I break music? Content for, like, people who love music videos? I'm just setting the vibe,
[01:17:57] Jack Dorsey:
you know? I know. But it's a fun vibe. I like listening to music. So your job is 1 post a day, and it comes with a GM and a a video and and No. That's my favorite one. Else has to create the other content. No. That's my favorite one. You other plebs, you have create the other content. I create That makes this thing go. Dude, I create so much Nostr content
[01:18:14] ODELL:
that people's main a lot of people's main negative view of Nostr is that, like, it's too much Odell.
[01:18:20] Jack Dorsey:
Well, I think that's also the algorithm. The algorithm needs to be rebalanced and retrained, and also, like, it's it's gotta decide, like, what it wants to highlight. Is it highlighting news, or is it highlighting, like, friends? Because right now, it's highlighting friends, and it's highlighting the the Nostril, like, big accounts. And, like, it's just not we need more we need more. It is it has been highlighting some new folks, which, I think is great.
[01:18:49] ODELL:
No. Just Rob Hamilton's one of, 1031 supported founder, and he's, He's happy? Well, he zapped us 10,000 sats and said, I don't know if Matt is a great VC. He's on a beach podcasting instead of creating shareholder value for me crying about how his GM posts aren't bringing about hypnosters. You're such a great VC. He's giving money back. That's always a bad sign. That's always a bad sign. Why is that a bad sign? They're giving the money back. They're like, we don't need the money in it. We don't want doing this anymore. The best KPI. He's in he's in the chat zapping. What else are we gonna talk about? I, did you see did you have you watched Mark Zuckerberg's,
[01:19:27] Jack Dorsey:
Joe Rogan yet? I haven't watched it. Tell me about it.
[01:19:31] ODELL:
Are you you guys are on a I've seen clips, of course. You guys are on a first name basis. Right? So I'll just call him Mark? We were on a first name basis. I went over to his house. Like, we used
[01:19:40] Jack Dorsey:
to we used to talk, but that that fell that fell apart.
[01:19:45] ODELL:
So, I mean, it seems like Elon and him right now are the juggernauts in big social and big tech social, more so more so so Mark in Facebook. Right? Like, in terms of billions of users. In terms of user numbers, significantly more, especially globally. And then you have TikTok, which it seems like will probably be owned by one of them in, like, 6 months or at least, like, 50% owned by one of them in 6 months. Yep. So I guess before we go there, what is your opinion on the TikTok ban since I brought up TikTok?
[01:20:25] Jack Dorsey:
I think it's I think it's stupid. I think it's it's it probably has other agendas that have nothing to do with China trying to program our kids. I think I think they I think people in the US want more control over the content that goes on in TikTok.
[01:20:45] ODELL:
And it just was the one that they had no control over because it was It's China. China led. Yes.
[01:20:51] Jack Dorsey:
Which is funny because also in the US companies, it's like, we don't want any control over the content. Wink wink. But they want the control.
[01:21:01] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, so that's so that was the majority of of Mark's conversation on Rogan was that he basically said I mean, to summarize a 3 hour conversation. Well, first of all, he said they're no longer gonna have tampons in the men's bathroom, but, he also said, that he is laser focused on being pro free speech, reducing censorship, and that the majority of the pressure was the Biden administration effectively and the previous the pre the previous government, and that under Trump that they're gonna be much more free speech oriented. Elon has obviously signaled similar before Mark did that.
How do you think about that?
[01:21:51] Jack Dorsey:
I think, number 1, like, Facebook tends and Meta and Mark, in my view, tend to blow with the wind. I don't think the company has principles. I think they do whatever it takes that add advantages them themselves in the moment, and they'll switch principles completely based on what's currently happening in the world. And I've seen that at least 4 times now, specifically with free speech, but with other things as well, AI and the the the metaverse. And, you you know, you just look at the their their stances, and they just they're not a company with strong stances that last because they don't believe in them. They believe in building the biggest, greatest thing ever. And, again, like, I respect that, but I don't respect that. You know?
And then number 2, like, the extent of everything that we got from the Biden administration is in the Twitter files. We got the same from the Trump the Trump administration. And I've seen clips where Mark has characterized it as yelling and, like, I don't know. They these are not things that like, we still made decisions based on those inputs. We were not told what to do. We made decisions, and they can make decisions as well. So to put all of it on the Biden administration or any administration, I think is I think is playing a game.
And I I think it's rewriting history a bit because I was also there. The thing that I worried more about is not the the Biden administration. It's the advertisers. Mark didn't have this worry because every advertiser needed to advertise on Meta, and every advertiser needs to advertise on Google. So they don't have to have policy conversations with their advertisers. Whereas Twitter, because they're small and you didn't need to advertise on on Twitter, it was, like, this extra budget. They could change they they could chain they could say, like, we're removing our whole brands like Unilever. We're removing our whole brand. And you could you saw this play out with with Elon.
The the fortunate thing is he was private. The unfortunate thing is if you have that play out as a public company, then if the advertisers leave, Wall Street sees it and they sell the stock. And when the stock is sold, it goes down in value. When it goes down in value, you lose employees because they no longer believe it's going up, and then you lose the company. So your hand is forced not by the government. I never thought our hand is forced by the government. Our hand was definitely forced by advertisers and our various our our our very business model.
And, like, we we just had to do things, that made sure that, that entity was more or less happy. Now we did other things as well, and we certainly went too far in many, many places. I fully admit that, and I've tweeted about it and said it and writ written about it. But as a public company, this is what I ultimately realized. You can't have a CEO over these over these things. You can't. Like, no matter how good this person is, he or she can be called to Congress, can be corrupted, can be assassinated, can be kidnapped, can be taken in a closed room and told to do something, not tell anyone about it.
That's the reality. So if you choose to be on these platforms, you have to have that in your calculus. And they may align with you today, but they're probably not gonna align with you tomorrow. And that's the risk you're taking. The benefit of Noster is that that can't exist. No one can take it down. No one can shut it down, and no one can move it in a a particular way that benefits only them. And that's that's what I realized. That's why that's why I left.
[01:25:44] ODELL:
Well said. I wanna dig deeper in that, but I also wanna say what's happening in the live chat right now is a perfect example of the problem with modern social media. So we have people saying full pardon in all caps for Ross, which should be absolutely massive, and not a single link to a source. You see this? It's it's, like, classic. I don't know if Nostra fixes that. I don't know if we can reward it in certain ways. Maybe Zaps help fix that.
[01:26:13] Jack Dorsey:
But if anything But this is good because this is a vibe this is a vibe we would see on Twitter too. Like, you would have a source, but you need some sort of algorithm to bubble up. Okay. Where is
[01:26:23] ODELL:
where is this source information? Where where is this actually happening? Yeah. One of you freaks, if you have an actual source besides David Bailey saying a full pardon would be awesome, please link it in in the comments. There might be one right there. Oh, look. A primal link. But I wanna talk about the I wanna I wanna talk about the Twitter files. Okay. So it's still it's hearsay from, from a blue check. Okay. We'll we'll we'll stay up to date on that. I'd be absolutely massive to have that done tonight. I mean, everyone was thinking his sentence was gonna get commuted.
A pardon would mean that he was at you know, that he's actually not guilty, rather than time served. So I do wonder what that means for returning his Bitcoin, and if there's any implications there, but I'm not a lawyer. I wanna talk about the Twitter files real quick. A lot of people have used the Twitter files against you. What do you think the main takeaway first of all, were they actually accurate? And then what is the what is the main takeaway people should have, from them in your opinion?
[01:27:39] Jack Dorsey:
Well, I mean, there are act there's accurate artifacts in there, but I think people mainly stopped at the headlines, and they didn't really go through. And, like, our team pushed back on a lot. Some things we agreed with and we did, and other things we didn't. And, I think they're all rational choices at the time based on what we're the situation we're in. But, again, like, this is what happens in a public company when you have a business model that is dependent upon engagement and people feeling like it's a safe, clean space. That's what the advertisers want. Right? Otherwise, you get just really, really crappy direct response ads, and that could be your thing. But that's not what we're going for.
So it's a business decision ultimately. And, as I said, like, when we we banned Trump, I think we did the right thing for Twitter, the business, but the wrong thing for the Internet. And I tweeted about this and, like, this is exactly why we put more and more funding into Blue Sky and and put and why I care about these protocols so much now is because, like, the just a a company owning it and having one person in charge is always gonna have some some point in time where it is corrupted and they're making a choice for the whole, which they shouldn't be able to make. And it's gonna happen again and again and again. It doesn't matter what platform you tell me. It is whether it be X, it's already happened.
TikTok, it's already happened. Meta and threads, no matter how much they change their moderation policies, it's going to happen. Nasser is the only one I know of that you can't Blue Sky, it's happened, which, again, why I left and why I stepped off the board and why we went all in on on Nasser.
[01:29:29] ODELL:
I mean, they actually use it as a argument for Blue Sky. It's like a positive,
[01:29:34] Jack Dorsey:
which is interesting. Yeah. They they I I believe they made all the same mistakes we made and, like, just did not learn from what we need to learn in moderation and content and
[01:29:45] ODELL:
and building building systems. So to your point, do you regret you regret banning the sitting president of the United States?
[01:29:54] Jack Dorsey:
I regret that we had to. I feel like we had to as a company, because if we didn't,
[01:30:01] ODELL:
I don't think our business would be around. You were just would you would lose advertisers, not government action? Lose advertisers.
[01:30:08] Jack Dorsey:
The government wasn't pushing us to do anything. We had we had many we had many requests from the Trump administration to for take down stuff. Like, probably on the order of the the the inputs we would get from, the Biden administration and the GOP and the and the and the Democrats, like, you know, that we we saw we saw everything from everyone. We didn't take direction from them unless there were security risks or acts of violence, or CSAM or anything like that, but, we took, we took input.
[01:30:51] ODELL:
So I see, Rob Hamilton in the comments bringing up, people linking on Noster posting screenshots of this. It looks like Ross was just granted a full and unconditional pardon by real Donald Trump. Words cannot express how grateful we are. President Trump is a man of his word and just saved Ross' life. Ross is a free man. That came from the official free Ross account, it looks like. That's great. That's wonderful. Amazing. News. It's a beautiful day. It's a beautiful day, Freaks. Glad you're all here with us, and, it's a beautiful sunset too.
Really appreciate it. Do you think there's something inherently wrong with
[01:31:46] Jack Dorsey:
Nasr in its early days when you're bootstrapping it to post a screenshot of something that's breaking on x? No. Should that be something The more content, the better. The more content, the better. I think all the all the content, Nasr like, how do we get it to be the greatest repository, the biggest repository, the greatest corpus of human communication, thought, images, videos, photography? And then what's lacking then is discovery, search, and trending. And I guarantee you give people a problem that big, they'll wanna solve for it.
[01:32:17] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I it's kinda weird. I I see, like, people get angry about it when you do post a screenshot. First of all, if x wasn't a walled garden, I could post a link, and you could go to it without an account. The only way to really easily share it is with a screenshot. But it seems like something we should be incentivizing. Like, I'll I'll I'd zap that if someone is screenshotting, important breaking news Yeah. In the bootstrap first. And we we can build technology to, like,
[01:32:45] Jack Dorsey:
read the screenshot and make it into more text format that can be searched on Nasr. Like, all this is possible. It's just, like, what are we building and, like, why? And I I think, like, that having having all thought, having all communication, Nastr is the only one can that can do it because it's the only neutral party. It's the only neutral protocol that can actually host us. Our service our server costs are extremely low in comparison to everything else, inclusive of Blue Sky. It's very easy to set set a relay up. It's very easy to set a client up. It's very easy to use the API and inject stuff into it. So, like, what are we waiting for? Like, let's put it all in.
[01:33:34] ODELL:
Agreed. I'm, I'm just appreciating that Ross got a full part in. That's wonderful. No. It's incredible. I, Do you think that so and by the way, this is why I think some people think Noster is a distraction for Bitcoiners because we've been chatting for an hour and 40 minutes. We've definitely talked about Noster more than Bitcoin.
[01:34:13] Jack Dorsey:
Yeah.
[01:34:16] ODELL:
One of the arguments, so a lot of my perspective is, is based on my experience in Bitcoin. And one of the arguments we've heard in Bitcoin for years is the biggest threat to Bitcoin is governments, you know, improving their monetary policy, making their money better, having it work better, having it not debase people, and then people wouldn't have a need for Bitcoin. Obviously, that'll never happen. Like, humans just inherently, if there's an ability to be corrupted, they get corrupted. How do you feel about, you know, someone like Elon on x or someone like Mark with Meta, them adding Bitcoin or them adding algorithmic choice. Like, do you think that is a real concern in terms of Nostra adoption? Like, if Nostra is successful, will they, will they be able to compete in that way by adding, improving their own centralized
[01:35:19] Jack Dorsey:
I mean, the way I said the way I said early on is, like, if Noster, or if one of these decentralized open protocols inspires someone to do the right behaviors, then we all win. So, like, if if Elon builds in algorithmic choice, which I hope he does, and I've talked to him about it. If, he builds in Bitcoin, which we actually had in the past, but I think they shut it down, It was just tipping on the profile. It was a start, but we didn't we didn't get to finish it. Then and that's inspired by, like, seeing the use case on Nasr, then Nasr wins because we all win. Right? And if it takes away from Nasr usage, but, like, those use cases are there, I think we all still win.
[01:36:03] ODELL:
Yeah. That's best case scenario.
[01:36:05] Jack Dorsey:
Right? You want them to copy good freedom oriented things. But also, like, I their incentive. The only way these business model works is as much content as possible. So why would you not take content from Noster and put it in Twitter to put your algorithms on top of it and sell ads on it because you have more content to deal with. You have more things to trend, and they could be a client that helps Nasr because by definition, it's the only one that will have the most because it's neutral. So, like, this was my argument for why we start the protocol and why we fund the protocol in the first place when we had investors, when it we started the idea of Blue Sky. Why are you doing this thing? Because we get more content. More content means more revenue for us and and a greater a greater business over time.
[01:36:54] ODELL:
There's another piece here too where it's we're watching you know, right now, LLMs, AI, or all the hype, they're very hyped. They're very new. We're watching Elon. It appears, at least from my from my perspective, watching him attempt to monetize x with x AI with and I guess, users are familiar with it as Grok. How do you think about how do you think about that aspect changing the, I guess, not the road map, but how it gets how x gets built out? Because it it seems to me like the, like, the approach right now seems to be you don't wanna if he adopts an open protocol, if he adopts something like Nostr, he's removing his proprietary access to this real time database that Grok is using. Right? It's like Grok's proprietary advantage is that you have a bunch of accounts around the world that are providing commentary on breaking news, and so they're able to provide this real time, the these these real time updates that the LLM is then able to feed into your answers. How does that affect how things proceed? But the more, the better. Like, he'd even,
[01:38:11] Jack Dorsey:
he'd he's gonna have the best proprietary information if he has more people in using Twitter, the client, or x the client.
[01:38:19] ODELL:
Like the app itself. Yes. Yes.
[01:38:21] Jack Dorsey:
So and if x AI is built into that and Grok is built into it, it's extra utility that you can't find on other platforms. Right? So that means that even if you were to give all the content to Nostra and open it to the protocol, he still has 2 very compelling things like XAI or Grok that can make that experience much better. It can find things faster. It can find better things. It can find deeper things, and you can't find that on any other clients. So still wins.
[01:38:50] ODELL:
But it takes almost a leap of faith, right, to give up that proprietary information
[01:38:55] Jack Dorsey:
for But it's the same leap of faith that people took with the web Right. And with, email. And look at those businesses. I mean, look at the search business as example of this. Like, Google is able to able to build one of the most efficient businesses in the world on the back of search and the web and mail, email. 2 open protocols, entirely open protocols they didn't control, and everyone had inputs and outputs to it. There are models here that work for companies using open protocols such as Nasr. It's just a matter of time. You may be funding one of those companies that figures it out. I mean, I but I think 1031 is unique in that
[01:39:39] ODELL:
we actually fund companies that build open on on open protocols and build in the open. Like, I think it's kind of rare. I think what we really see usually is particularly start up capital, like VC Equity Capital, prefers proprietary walled gardens, traditional modes. And, like, it's changing, but it changes very slowly, it seems. Yeah.
[01:40:04] Jack Dorsey:
It is. It's gonna be a slow it's gonna be a slow burn.
[01:40:07] ODELL:
It's crazy how as it gets dark, it's now like the waves are battling the noise of the of the insects. It's quite it is the loudest studio I've been in in a while. Okay. One last topic, and then we can wrap, unless you have something else you wanna talk about. So In my time, I've had I've had 3 moments, where I've just seen this this incredibly viral organic developer led, movement. And that the first one was Bitcoin, and the second 2 were Nasr and Cashew, Cashew being this chummy and e cash protocol for Bitcoin. I like to say it's a Bitcoin's an open protocol for money. Nasr is an open protocol for speech and comms.
Lightning is an open protocol for batch Bitcoin payments, and eCash is an open protocol for Bitcoin banks. I know you're also seem to be pretty fascinated about Casu specifically. How do you think about it?
[01:41:21] Jack Dorsey:
I I mean, those are those are definitely my my 3 as well. Like, it just moves super fast and the developers behind each one of those what resonated with me is they're very principled, and they stick with the principles. Like, that's that to me was the early Internet. That's what kept me. That's what that's what got me there. That's what kept me. And I see that, with with those. I think Casio is really important because it's that accessibility layer. It gives, and it goes back to communities, by the way. I think Nostra communities such as Ditto and Cashew are the perfect marriage because you have your own way to exchange ideas and money, and it's all self contained, and it feels very tight, and it feels comfortable.
And that's what I think we're we're lacking right now is it just feels too big. There's no boundaries. And what do I do here? People know exactly what to do in their neighborhood. They know exactly what to do with their friend group, with their poker group, with, their surfing group. They they know, and, like, that's what we need to to build for. And I think Cashew is a part of that because I I don't think just pure Bitcoin or lightning works, in that sense, in the in the with the speed and and the way that, that we need.
So I'm super excited about it. I think the one you left out because nothing is in the horizon yet is, intelligence.
[01:42:48] ODELL:
Are you gonna are you gonna explain why?
[01:42:52] Jack Dorsey:
Because we have we have, like, we have the open source LLMs, but, like, we have no real momentum behind, like, decentralizing intelligence, taking it away from the hands of the companies, and having another option. Like, we need that other option. And I it's probably with agent systems, and agents on Nostra would be phenomenal because it is a defined protocol and, like, they can roam about and do things for you, do tasks. But if I had to look in any one space that's gonna feel that way, it's probably gonna be around agents. And I think there's a good intersection with obviously, Bitcoin and, obviously, Nostra and and probably Cashew as well. It's probably
[01:43:33] ODELL:
it's like not it's like Nostra and Cashew combined. Yeah. Right? Where, like, LLMs and users are paying each other with Cashew. They're community communicating over Nasr. And then Nasr signposts are the the the the main The identity. The not only that, not only the identity, but also the the single best dataset for LLMs to source from. Right? Because they have the verifiable reputations. Everything is signed. You know it hasn't been altered. Yes. You can use it without permission. 100%. So that's definitely the next piece, but it's still very nascent. Right? Like, have you seen anything really
[01:44:09] Jack Dorsey:
I've seen nothing. Very interesting yet, but, like, that's that's why it's exciting as well. Like, who's gonna be the first? Like, who's gonna be the first to, like, actually step into that? I think there's there's one Venice. I don't know the details behind it, but, there's some energy there, but it's just not cohesive yet.
[01:44:29] ODELL:
I mean, I think, like, in practice, what it'll probably look like for end users is kind of what Grok has been doing, what XAI has at least been
[01:44:39] Jack Dorsey:
towing into. And I I would say But not just an LLM, an agent. Right. An agent that actually can go and do work and tasks and then come back with value. Yeah. Yeah. That you own in the same way that you own your content. You own these agents. You own the like, this mini LLM, if you will. So it's like Clippy, but better. Exactly. And you can send them can I help? You can send them to battle. How can I help? Like a VC. So
[01:45:04] ODELL:
how do we bootstrap that? Do we Someone's gotta build it. We gotta build it. I think if we say enough good mornings, maybe it'll happen. I don't think so. I like to give people actionable advice on this show. Do you have if someone wants to get started with Bitcoin, what are your favorite Bitcoin wallets?
[01:45:27] Jack Dorsey:
It's changed over time. I'll give I'll give 3. The first was probably Moon, m u u n. 2 u's. And I I just they they know they really understood design. They understood accessibility. I've converted a bunch of people who are new to Bitcoin because of Moon, because they could get it, and they felt safe about it right away because of the recovery mechanisms. The second one, is probably, is it Phoenix?
[01:45:58] ODELL:
Yeah. Phoenix wallet, the lightning wallet. Yep.
[01:46:01] Jack Dorsey:
Because of the lightning aspects and because that they were starting to, like, for anyone who, like, really wants to use it. And then the third is is Vicky, who for whoever doesn't wanna lose it. Because I think we've done and the team has done a really good job at, like, building something where it's almost impossible to lose your Bitcoin, and people understand it right away. And I've watched older people and younger people who are brand new to Bitcoin fully set up a wallet, receive Bitcoin, and feel good about it. So I'm predominantly using the Bikki wallet right now, but, I I still love Moon. I still love Phoenix, and I I try to mix them up.
[01:46:47] ODELL:
Okay. So Bitcoin. Do you have any do you have any Cashew wallets you could recommend?
[01:46:54] Jack Dorsey:
The main one. Kelly's main one. Cash. The web, the pw. Dot me. Yeah. The the PWA. Cash u dot me is great. Mini Because you don't have to go through the App Store. There's no permission. Yeah. It works. It's super solid. They have backup and, I think backup seed phrases and, and recoveries in beta right now.
[01:47:12] ODELL:
It works. I tried it. Yeah. We went into depth. I had Cali on the show, twice now, a few days ago a few weeks ago. But cashu.me, casu.me. And then there's many, many Nostra apps, but Nostra apps for for beginners, people that just wanna get started that haven't used it yet. Beginners, I point people to primal.
[01:47:36] Jack Dorsey:
Primal.net, primal on the App Store, the Google Play, only because it's, it's on those 3 platforms. It's probably the most like Twitter that you'll experience or threads or kinda what you expect, And it gets you in very fast, but the most important thing is it has a built in wallet, so you can actually feel zaps right away. Domus is another great one. You have to hook up your own wallet to it. It's much faster than my experience in terms of, like, actual speed, and it's much more pure in terms of, like, the protocol. So if you care a lot more about the attributes of Noster and what makes it decentralized and, censorship resistant, I think Domus is is that.
Amethyst on on Android is a kitchen sink. If you want, like, the WeChat of Nostr, it's Amethyst if you have an Android device. Those are the those are good. There's there's so many. Have you used Nostr with a u? Nostier? I've used it. Yeah.
[01:48:47] ODELL:
I like that client too, that app. Jaco Hone has a built in Bitcoin wallet now. I wanna see more with Bitcoin built in Bitcoin wallets. Yes. It makes it easier for new people. I think every nostril app should have a Bitcoin wallet, but I'm a little bit biased. But I think those are good recommendations. And I would just say to anyone who's thinking about it, just, you know, download one of those nostril apps and, say good morning every morning. I don't know about that. Is it a good place to start? Or you There's enough good mornings. Like, let's get some other content. Provide provide your commentary on breaking news.
Like like Ross being freed. Yeah. Like I bet you I bet you right now. Message, like, on Noster reads. Like, I bet you right now, if you open up Primal, there's better commentary on Ross being freed and a more joyous occasion than x right now. I'm sure. Like, Reads has,
[01:49:38] Jack Dorsey:
Reads has, like, as an equivalent to Substack, and you can write full on essays in Noster. You can you can push them to Twitter. You can push them to Instagram, to TikTok. Keep them on Noster, but, like, the most important thing is you own that content. It can never be taken down. It can never be, altered, and you can sign it with your identity, and everyone knows it's actually you. So, try it out.
[01:50:04] ODELL:
Yeah. No. I think Reeds is really promising. I wanna see more there's not enough apps that support live streams yet. I think that's something that Twitter did pretty well. And now X is doing quite well. Yep. And, like, right now, the only two apps I know of that do it on mobile are Nastia and, Amethyst, so I'd like to see more of them support that. So reads in that. And then, like, Instagram stuff. Right? We're seeing Pablo with Olas, which is still quite early. But Yeah. I would, you know, I would like to see more of this non I'm I'm biased to the quote, unquote microblogging tweet style. That was always my favorite way to consume and participate.
But to see more formats, that's the beauty of Nostra, right, is you can use it how you wanna use it, and it's an interoperable protocol would be awesome. A 100%. Jack, this is a pleasure. Do you have any final thoughts before we wrap?
[01:51:01] Jack Dorsey:
Thank you, Marty. I mean I mean, Matt. No? We covered a lot. Well We covered a lot. Thank you. It was a beautiful sunset. I think the the timing was perfect. Hopefully. Starting to get a little bit buggy.
[01:51:20] ODELL:
Hopefully, we'll do the same time next year, maybe? Yeah. Let's do it. And 21st January. Huge shout out to all the freaks who continue to support the show. We got a lot of zaps today. I see Jack Mallers is the largest one with a 100,000 sats. Dispatch has no ads or sponsors. It's purely supported by Bitcoin donations. Has Marty zapped? So thank you for yeah. He did because he wanted his advertisement for his podcast in the feed. Oh, okay. Okay. But I appreciate the I appreciate the zap, Marty. You could have sent it from your personal account instead of your podcast account, but, Yeah. This was awesome. And, huge shout out huge shout out to Ross, to Lynn, his mother.
I'm incredibly relieved that he is free now. It's been a long time coming. I urge people to give him some space. You know, you don't have to badger him. You know, if he wants to speak publicly, he'll speak publicly when he's ready. He's gone through quite quite a lot. I said similar to with Assange when Assange just freed earlier last year, which was also massive. Give them some space. These guys are legends. Also, huge shout out to to David Bailey. You know, he has he has really put a lot of effort into into making this the issue and Bitcoin Policy Institute, for really shepherding it and making it making it a priority among many other things that could have been a priority, with this administration and, of course, to president Trump himself for signing it.
I think a lot of people thought it wasn't gonna happen. So, it's it's absolutely beautiful to see. Jack, thank you. Thank you. Pleasure as always. Thank you all. Much love, everyone. Stay humble, stack sets.
Ross Ulbricht - 2021 Interview - Bitcoin Miami
Introduction and Ross's Background
Conversation with Jack Dorsey Begins
Jack Dorsey on Bitcoin's Importance
Bitcoin's Challenges and Distractions
ETFs and Bitcoin Adoption
Companies Stacking Bitcoin
Bitcoin Usage and Adoption Challenges
US Financial System and Global Comparisons
Trump Coin and Meme Coins
Nostr as a Social Media Protocol
Nostr's Potential and Challenges
Nostr's Bootstrapping and Community Building
Algorithmic Choice and Content Discovery
Nostr's Role in Content and News
Jack Dorsey on Nostr and Bitcoin Wallets
Nostr vs. Traditional Social Media
Cashu and Open Protocols
Final Thoughts and Ross Ulbricht's Pardon
