Liberty Farmer is a HAM Radio enthusiast and the lead maintainer of the HAMSTR project. His goal is to make it easier to send and receive nostr notes using HAM Radio. Combined with shorter range bluetooth and wifi mesh networks, and existing internet infrastructure, this tech could be incredibly powerful at making nostr a robust fault tolerant global comms protocol. We also discuss using HAM Radio to send bitcoin payments without permission.
Liberty Farmer on Nostr: https://primal.net/p/nprofile1qqsw8tha4zrj22njem340rfnktwdjr5lu5achmtrglh4ufhhggg6mwcenxmm9
HAMSTR Github: https://github.com/LibertyFarmer/hamstr
Guide to getting started with HAM: https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqszu8mass97mgk99dessa86mr658yvq6uf0zv8xy35zltyw8zcr2acxaquef
Reticulum Network: https://reticulum.network/
EPISODE: 172
BLOCK: 908770
PRICE: 880 sats per dollar
(00:01) Fox Business Michael Saylor Clip
(03:19) Happy Bitcoin Tuesday
(04:42) Ham Radio
(09:02) Getting Started with Ham Radio
(16:28) Hamstr Project: Ham Radio and Nostr
(29:49) Reticulum Network
(38:16) Zaps and Bitcoin Transactions via Hamstr
(52:05) Future of Hamstr and Reticulum Integration
(55:08) Call for Contributions and Final Thoughts
Video: https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqsdgc4ssvjyun2vxz9w7vsvm8hudg25t09n8ewdzgcde94tgkujfdc944nfw
more info on the show: https://citadeldispatch.com
learn more about me: https://odell.xyz
[00:00:03]
Unknown:
Alright. So in a in a recent expos, Michael Saylor, the executive chairman of strategy, wrote Bitcoin is a swarm of cyber hornets serving the goodness, the god the goddess of wisdom, feeding on the fire of truth exponentially growing ever smarter, faster, and stronger behind a wall of encrypted energy. Joining me now is strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor. So, Michael, I I had to go I I went, AI to ask if Hornets are indeed good, and the answer was yes. Hornets are beneficial for the ecosystem. So they play a valuable role in controlling pest populations, even contributing to, a pollination.
So I guess it's a good appropriate, metaphor there.
[00:00:43] Michael Saylor:
You know, bit Bitcoin's a virus. It's a freedom virus. It's based on a monetary virus that's in turn based on a truth virus. You know? And we we think of it as a swarm creature because everywhere in the world, there's someone that's supporting the Bitcoin ecosystem with their electricity, unstoppable as a swarm of hornets are unstoppable.
[00:01:08] Unknown:
You you can't shoot a bullet through it. You know, it's spreading all throughout the world, and it just keeps getting stronger day by day, week by week, month by month. This is something you told us was gonna happen for the last few years. Now we gotta I gotta ask you though about this, this the Bitcoin yield. I I saw on your website, 4.4 Bitcoin yield, this quarter, 25% year to date. Those sound like very lofty numbers. But what does it even mean to to folks out there?
[00:01:36] Michael Saylor:
You know, so Bitcoin's a long term asset. You know, you wanna hold it for twenty one years. It's been returning about 50% plus, a year. It's very volatile. Believe it or not, there are a lot of people that want two x Bitcoin. They don't want the Bitcoin return. They want a 100% return. So MicroStrategy, the equity, or strategy, the equity is amplified Bitcoin. We actually aim to generate two x the Bitcoin return and two x the volatility. And the way we do it is by issuing credit instruments. So believe it or not, there's someone that would like to get double the money market return or double the yield in their bank account. So if we give them 9%, we've doubled their bank account. We've kind of beat the sulfur rate by 5%.
But, you know, Bitcoin's returning 55%. So if I take the 5% boost and I give it in a short duration treasury instrument to credit investors, the other 45% goes to the equity investors. That creates Bitcoin yield.
[00:02:38] Unknown:
Wow. Okay.
[00:03:19] ODELL:
Happy Bitcoin Tuesday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Citadel Dispatch, the interactive live show focused on actual Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion. As always, dispatch is brought to you without ads or sponsors. It is supported purely by viewers like you with Bitcoin donations. The two most common ways of supporting the show are through fountain podcasts, an app you can find on your favorite App Store. The top zap on the show from there was Marty Bent, my cohost over at Rabbit Hole recap with 50,000 sats. He says epic rip. Or you can also support the show through your favorite Napster app.
The show's at primal.net/citadel. Our top zap there was 10,000 sats from rider die freak Mav 21. Thank you for your support, guys. It really keeps me coming in week after week. If you haven't listened to the last episode with Cali, I think it was a great setup for today's conversation. As always, all links are available at dispatch.com. We're available in every podcast app. Just search dispatch, to subscribe and to listen. Anyway, with all that said, I have Liberty Farmer here. He's a ham radio enthusiast building on top of Nostr. He has a project called Hamster, which fuses ham radio, Nostr, and Bitcoin that I'm quite excited about. How's it going, Liberty Farmer? Welcome to the show.
Thank you. Good to be here. Good to have you. So I think an interesting place to start and by the way, if you're chatting from YouTube, we do see your chat. So if you have any questions or comments, feel free to drop them there. We will address them. The chat that is shown on screen is our Nasr enabled, Bitcoin enabled live chat, which you can find by going to sildispatch.com. I think an interesting place for us to start is Ham Radio, specifically. It's a rabbit hole that I've wanted to go down, but life has gotten in the way so far. It you know, I gotta make it happen. How long have you been focused on that world?
[00:05:53] Liberty Farmer:
Yeah. So not, not too long. Let's see. Five years, I guess, COVID. So COVID's kinda where it all kicked off. We, went went through that mess, and then I decided to, go get my pilot's license at the same time. And so I thought, you know, this is interesting. I'm hearing these planes as I'm flying from miles away, and I couldn't quite figure out how all that works. And so I just started deep diving in, and, yeah, that's where I kinda learned about ham radio and all the different ways. And it's it scares people for some reason, but it's not, it's not complicated. It's just it's like a cell phone. Everything has radio. I mean, it's it's Wi Fi. It's cell phones. It's all all the same thing. The only difference is it, it runs on different, you know, different bands, different frequencies that the government has decided to control.
[00:06:40] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I have to, like, buy equipment and, like, get a license and ship, though. Right?
[00:06:45] Liberty Farmer:
Yeah. Yeah. So that's the biggest thing. The biggest hurdle is a license, but it it's frankly easy. It's maybe two hours of studying, an hour of taking some practice tests, and then nowadays, you just go online. You pay $15 to some ham radio club and wherever, somewhere in the world and, you take your test. As long as I think you get an 80%, then you can pass.
[00:07:09] ODELL:
So it's not And the test is just online? It's an online test in person? Yeah. It it's kinda weird.
[00:07:15] Liberty Farmer:
Like, it's, they make you do, like, some extra hoops. So it used to only be in person. That was an FAA requirement. And then what I guess they did is during COVID, I think, was actually when they started switching to to virtual tests. But they make you, like, go into this weird room with these other people, like a Zoom meeting, but you have to, like, show your desk that is clear. No cheating. You have to, like, pan around your room. Like, it's kinda weird. Almost like you're being monitored in class, but you do. You have to do, like, a three sixty monitoring thing, like, with your phone. You have to have two like, one has to be on you the whole time in addition to another webcam. Like, one, I think, points at your desk, if I remember right. So it's like this weird like, think of any kind of, like, government intervention and ruining a process. Like, that's what it is.
Well, they probably wanna make sure that you don't have, like, an LLM or something up in the window at the same time. Yeah. I'm kinda thinking that's what it is, but it it's just it's ridiculous. Like I said, it's not hard. I mean, the the basic does there's there's three levels in The United States of ham radio licensing. I'm the second of the three. The third one is, like, I probably will never go for it. It's like crazy electronics and hardware and just all this extra stuff. The first one, though, it gets you onto basic kinda handheld style, radios, like walkie talkie style. I mean, you can use it with other types, but that that's kinda what it gets you onto. And that's like I said, it's a couple hours study. I mean, we're not talking, you know, getting your nuclear physicist license here.
[00:08:48] ODELL:
Okay. Yeah. It is I mean, it's it's something that I've wanted to do, but I haven't made it happen. There is, like, a okay. This this conversation will be the, the motivation I have to actually make it happen. And the next time we'll have you on, I'll be a ham radio enthusiast myself. The on the on the equipment side, like, what are you looking at for, like, capital cost of equipment?
[00:09:16] Liberty Farmer:
So you can get started with so, like, a handheld like I said, picture walkie talkie. Handheld ham radio is gonna run on VHF and UHF frequencies. You know, picture old TV stations, same technology, same antenna structures, everything else, same frequencies. You can literally go on Amazon and pick one up for, like, $20. So that it's not this big barrier to entry. The question becomes, like, from there, like, what can that do? If you're in the middle of nowhere, not much. The shitty Baofangs or whatever. Right? Exactly right. So my first radio was a Baofang. It was it was, like, I think at the time, it was, like, $14 on Amazon. Okay. I I already own a bunch of those. I've just Well, there you go. So you you already have the way there. Don't know how to use them. But Yeah. The biggest issue on VHF and UHF is, especially out of a handheld, is power. They're probably gonna be five, six, or 10 watts.
It's not a lot of power you're outputting. They have, you know, line of sight only pretty much maybe five miles, maybe 10 if you're lucky. And so but that's perfect for an emergency, for communications. The great thing is on VHFs especially, all around the country and world, really, but all around the country, ham radio clubs have set up repeaters, like on mountain tops, on cell phone towers. You know, if you're in the Midwest, maybe like at a farm on a big tower or something, you know. And so that that allows you to kinda access that repeater, and they're free. I mean, I don't know of any repeaters. I think they they may actually legally have to be free. But you can take that Balfang. And if you're within four to five miles or even 10 miles, you can hit that repeater and then go jeez. I mean, 40 miles, 50 miles.
And so that's kinda how I got my start.
[00:11:03] ODELL:
Okay. Awesome. So let's I mean, just just for some context here. I often hear from people, like, oh, nostrils too complicated, blah blah blah. And I my one of the things I always say to them is, well, ham is more complicated, and I feel like it kinda offers a lot of the same goals. But let's talk about, hamster. Let's talk about this fusion of Ham Radio and Nostr. What are the goals of the project? What are we looking at here?
[00:11:37] Liberty Farmer:
Yeah. For sure. So I discovered Nostr, I don't know, maybe two and a half years ago. I left Twitter x. I was like, I was just I was just constantly getting in battles with people and these nonsensical waste of times and bots and everything else. So I discovered Nostr, and it's such a better vibe. And I started kinda wondering, like, well, how can I contribute to this? And I have not a lot of programming skills. And what happened first was I I had a goal. Like, I wanna be able to communicate with people, noster, maybe check-in with things when I go camping with my son.
And so that was kinda how it all started. It was just like, hey. Let's figure out a way I can use ham radio to communicate. And so I went over all these, you know, programs and looking at stuff, and it just wasn't, there wasn't a good way to do it. So I was like, well, fuck it. I'm gonna do it. And so that's literally what I did is just set out to design a way where when I'm remote, I'm out hiking, I'm out camping, I'm a hunter, I'm out hunting. I could still communicate with people, my wife or not or you know? And, that's kinda how it led. And then now the goals have changed into a, a massive change has been to, switch into freedom and oppressive states, regimes, censorship resistance, kind of the Bitcoin ethos. Right? Is that that's that's how it's totally morphed. And so now my focus has been what might somebody in I don't know. Turkey keeps getting their Internet cut off. Or what would somebody in North Korea is probably another great example. They don't have a lot of ham radios there. But, you know, places like that. Like, what do they need? What what could they use? And so I thought, okay. They need communication for sure, and then they probably need Bitcoin. There's a way how can they transact with Bitcoin without getting it stolen, without getting, you know, confiscated at a border? Maybe they wanna buy something. Maybe they wanna send something to family.
You know? So that's kinda how it's evolved, and so that's where I've taken Hamster is, just just kinda moving forward, and Ham Radio has been the way that has been able to, you know, allow that.
[00:13:44] ODELL:
Okay. So first off, I see don't zap me bro has dropped some Nasr links, in the Nasr live chat. They all seem to go to another Nasr user, h r four b t c, who I love his content. He's also a ham enthusiast. And they seem to be, like, quick start guides to getting your US Ham Radio license and getting started. So just, for the freaks listening on audio and also the freaks listening live, I will put those in the show notes. That's good. Everyone who's listening can jump into Ham with two feet, after the show.
[00:14:32] Liberty Farmer:
Dude, content's fantastic. I know. He's put out stuff on Nostr. Just constantly videos, guides. I mean, it's if I didn't already have it, he he would have been the entry for sure. I mean, I have a theory,
[00:14:44] ODELL:
at least Noster as social as a useful social, media alternative. Like, we really only need maybe a thousand high value accounts to make it really valuable to people, and I would put him in one of I would put him in that grouping. Like, he's just he clearly knows his stuff. He's very passionate. For sure. And I've I've found it very it's it's fascinating, following him. So, I mean, to me, like, the cool part about Nasr and the cool part about Bitcoin, well, specifically, Cashew, is that they're they're very simple protocols. And and, basically, at the end of the day, you just basically need to transfer text, between people, ideally signed text so you can verify that it hasn't been changed in path.
And so so our last conversation my last conversation was with Cali, and we were talking about BitChat. And BitChat kinda tries to solve the way I'm kinda thinking about it is BitChat kinda solves the last mile. It's using Bluetooth low energy. It looks like they're gonna implement Wi Fi direct. Maybe they'll add some Internet bridging, but it's kinda it's kinda handling that that that last mile connection, the the community connection, maybe the farmer's market, maybe a ranch or something like that or a small town. And to me, on the ham radio side and hamsters specifically, it kinda offers the promise of maybe bridging those meshes long distances.
Is that the right way of thinking about it?
[00:16:28] Liberty Farmer:
Yeah. 100%. So BitChat's pretty cool. I've been kinda I guess you would call it war driving, like you used to do in Wi Fi, trying to find wireless networks. But I have yet to find anybody in my area running, a bit chat, unfortunately. But that I think that is the idea. So I you know, VHF, we talked about, you know, it can get you five miles, 10 miles, maybe 50 miles off a repeater or something. Ham has, you know, different frequencies and high frequencies, HF bands, is where I've spent most of my time in trying to develop for. They're slow as hell. They're horrible. Like, take a 56 k modem divided by, like, 30, and that's the speed that you're transferring at. But I've been able to successfully send notes, and in fact, I zapped somebody on HF radio from 200 I think I was 227 miles out. That's awesome. So yeah. So and that's actually short. Like, I mean, I've talked to people, you know, around the world. I talk to people in Russia all the time on HF bans. And so I just haven't been that far. Like, the next time I go 500 miles, I'll bring my stuff and I'll test it. You know, I connect to my server and go. So we can kinda go through how it works. But and so that but we need that last that last bit. Like, what what if they can get some Internet bridging, I think we can tie it actually all together to go from whichever way you wanna look at it. Start at Bluetooth, go to ham, connect somewhere else or vice versa. And I think then you can spread it a lot easier because, I mean, that gets you data transfer rates. You get more people in these groups and things. Because I I think trying to stop censorship should be all of our goals. And if we can contribute and it's fairly amusing to me, I guess, that this that Bluetooth and everything was kinda set up by a existing billionaire, so it's just kind of amusing to me.
[00:18:11] ODELL:
I mean, the the the cool part, like, the cool part about Nasr is it's like it's literally just signed text. So, I mean, we could transfer it by USB drives. You could print out a Nasr note if you wanted to. Assigned JSON nostril note. You could print it out, and the person on the other side could just manually type it type it back in and broadcast, and it would work. You could put a nostril note on a carrier pigeon if you wanted to. That's the that's the cool part. We need to but we need the tooling all around it. So I have a friend who's a ham enthusiast, and he does, like and and this is one of those fun conversations where, like, I'm just a complete noob on this stuff. Like, I have no idea, and I'm just asking you as I'm thinking of things.
He does, like he's, like, almost, like, in text chat rooms that run through Ham. Is that how, like, you're usually using it, in the non Nostra side, or are you using it like audio?
[00:19:16] Liberty Farmer:
Both. So, yeah, I do do a lot of data. I got you know, it's it's split in the community. It's it's like you've got these old hams who were, like, literally World War two vets, military guys, pilots, submarine operators, whatever. Like, they're kind of the old guard of the ham space as as it seems. I'm like, if you go on the amateur radio subreddit, it's the most ridiculous thing of, like, these old curmudgeons versus the young guys. Like, it's it's silly. And so what happens is, I got into data first. Well, I got into voice a little bit, but I got into data first, And it blew me away. Like, I'm talking to people, like, chat with people or, like, seeing where people can kinda hit my hit my signal, and they ended up, like, 2,000 miles away, 1,500 miles away. Some guy It just looks like a text chat. Right? Like, you're connecting the radio to your computer by USB, I guess. And then Exactly. Most of them are USB or maybe a sound card that has USB.
And it's it's not at the granular level, it's not, like, this crazy setup. I mean, it's just it's very basic. But, like, I go there's a actually, he's on Nostr now. There's a guy. He's got a pretty decent sized YouTube channel, s two underground. He's now posting on Nostr that has, like, a weekly update, on different stuff going around the world and stuff. Well, he puts that out on Ham too or, like, he has a whole chat, like, I guess it's twice a week, but he's kinda set up, like, these communications plans for people. Like, people go in and give that same update over Ham Radio. It'd be like, hey. There was a flood in Texas going on right now or, like, hey. There's a shooting in Maryland or whatever. You know? It's like reporting. You could literally watch that for that evening and not watch the news, not check Internet or anything. You get everything you need.
And so that's kinda where HandStrip was born from in a way.
[00:21:01] ODELL:
Yeah. That's why I that's why I said earlier. Like, to me, in one way, it seems like it's kind of solving this trying to solve the same problem. But in a in another way, it's just very much complimentary. Like, ham is more of the transport mechanism. Mechanism. And so the question is, are you gonna be sending I guess, if you're if in those text chats, those Ham text chats, that that's completely unsigned text. Right?
[00:21:29] Liberty Farmer:
Completely. Yeah. There's nothing I mean, the the biggest thing on Ham is to be legal. You've gotta have a call sign. So that's kinda I mean, you could spoof that though. I mean, you could just literally type in whatever call sign you want. I mean, that's that's come up actually a couple times with Hamster too as people say, well, do I have to get my call sign or do I have to type my end pub with the call sign? I mean, in theory, yes. In practicality, I mean, what's the FAA or the, FCC rather? What are they gonna do? You know, like Right. I have my I have my GMRS license, and they gave me a call sign, I think. Yeah. So you have that. Yeah. So, I mean, these these limitations do exist, but at the same time, you can spoof it. It's not signed. Like, there's nothing that says, I know for sure x YZ is his call sign and he sent this message. There's nothing like that. I mean, Noster is really I mean, there are others, but Noster is the only way to do that.
[00:22:19] ODELL:
Okay. So let's talk about ham let's jump into Hamster. What is the setup? How let's go high level setup of of Hamster.
[00:22:29] Liberty Farmer:
Yeah. So so the high level would be a client at a server, not undifferent than x. Right? You have a client. You've got a server. I've got a hamster server. So if you were to go to my GitHub repo, which is GitHub /libertyfarmer/hamster, you'll see one repo you can clone. One part of that is gonna be for the server. One's gonna be for the client. I'm actually running a server right now that, I had somebody, I think, try to connect to it, but it didn't it didn't quite go through. But, that is up essentially twenty four seven unless I'm actually doing, like, live dev work so people can connect to. My goal is to get servers running around the world, that that are just running hamster that people can connect to. And then from there, you just need the clients. And anybody can have a client. You can connect, you know, from anywhere. You don't need to run the back end site or anything. The server has been designed to be totally, I guess, I would say pass through would be the word. It's almost like a proxy it's like a ham
[00:23:30] ODELL:
ham nostril
[00:23:31] Liberty Farmer:
ham Internet proxy. Right? Exactly. So as you mentioned, nostril notes are just text. They're just JSON. My server takes the hamster server takes a note that has been signed on the client and takes it. It sends it to relays. You can choose whatever relays you wanna run. It's all open source. It does not have any knowledge of your key, your NSEC. It doesn't have any knowledge of anything. It just literally just a pass through. It can request notes on your behalf. You give it your MPub. So, I guess, it would have an MPub knowledge, but it never has an NENSEK knowledge. And so you go through, and I've designed it that way on purpose. Right? Because I I want this one software to be able to be run all around the world that no matter, hopefully, where you're at, you can connect to it. So if you're in You have You know? Go ahead. How how
[00:24:16] ODELL:
so okay. I like the setup. The dream would be that that you could just broadcast to hamster servers from, like, an amethyst or a nasture or primal or something. How hard is that for developers to implement? Can it could it be as simple as just, you know, adding it as another relay effectively?
[00:24:50] Liberty Farmer:
That's a good question. I think the answer is not very easily. It's a complete custom network stack essentially that is designed to run over slow speeds, a, and b, you know, ham radio. You could I mean, that's not to say you couldn't tie in with something else on the client side. I'm actually looking right now. So it runs everything's in Python. So you run a Python server, a Python client, and it has a web front end, you know, web UI. I'm looking at trying to figure out how it'd be easier on Android, maybe how to package that Python, quote, unquote, back end, but on the client side into an app Right. Into a PWA, something like that. As of right now, I've not discovered a good solid way to do that.
So I'm running everything. I use my phone just to connect to the front end, but all on running a web server. But I'm kinda thinking more like a Raspberry Pi. You know, you you have a Pi with you or a laptop. You can run it on any laptop. You can run any I mean, in the field, you can run it. I'm working on some hardware ideas. I don't think we'll be able to do anything, lighter than, like, a small Pi. There's some other boards, but, like, that's probably the minimum. Talking about on the client side. Right? Yes. On the client. Yeah. You've gotta as of right now, at least, you've gotta have a way to talk to the radio.
And there isn't there is Bluetooth, so I'm actually working on right now a Bluetooth test, that you could in theory I'm doing it from my computer, but you could run-in theory from your computer straight to Bluetooth to a radio. There's a couple of new radios that came out that run Bluetooth. They're essentially just serial ports. So I'm testing that out, hopefully this week. But other than that, you've gotta have this tie in. And the the other issue is, like, if you're trying to really reach, like, on HF hand bands, the antennas are huge. Like, we're not talking, like, a a handheld. I mean, we're talking, like, my antenna out back in my backyard is a 137
[00:26:45] ODELL:
feet long. Yeah. Like, my buddy's got a huge he, like, hangs it from a tree or something. Right? It's, like, almost like a cable. Yep.
[00:26:51] Liberty Farmer:
So I've got two now. I've got one, thanks to OpenSats. I I've been able to purchase a dedicated radio and a dedicated antenna that are that are running. That yeah. I put up this 137 foot antenna just to run Hamster. So anybody could could put it out there. You know? I mean, I'm it's going up and down, and I'm making changes. Obviously, I'm developing it. But, over the next couple months so there there's a there's an email service called Winlink. And a lot of hams probably use it or have used it, but it's it's essentially the same thing. And I'm kinda modeling it after that. You connect to a server, but anybody can run a WindLink server, and it's for email. So while you're out in the field, I'm pretty sure it was developed for, sailors. Like, while they're on a boat in the middle of the ocean, they can check their email and send emails. And so that's kind of the idea is, you know, passing through these messages like a relay. Like, that's all they're doing. Anybody can run a Winlink server. Anybody can run a hamster server, and then anybody in the world can connect to those. Yeah. They're all public servers.
And because they don't have any knowledge of your end sec, it doesn't matter. Like, there's nothing the the notes in hamster Right. They're almost like they're
[00:28:01] ODELL:
they're almost like relays.
[00:28:03] Liberty Farmer:
Mhmm. It's basically what they are. I mean, if I wanted to, I could have just implemented a relay in Hamster too. I'm not. I'm I I put in there, like, some defaults like Domus and Primal or whatever, you know. But I could have very easily just run a hamster relay and started it up.
[00:28:18] ODELL:
Okay. So, wait, a couple things. First of all, I see CS Burner's up to 4,200 sets. Thank you for your support, sir. He's excited that we're talking about mesh, and radio technology, more on the show. He mentioned reticulum, which is my understanding is a mesh protocol. There's a bunch of mesh stuff, and Laura is also super interesting. Yeah. That I mean, part of what's fascinating about BitChat is that it entered the space that there's a bunch of other mesh stuff, but has gotten an amazing amount of enthusiasm and excitement about it, that the others have had. You know, it's been a long grind. It meshes something that I've been excited about for a while.
But, anyway, Freaks, if you have if if you know someone that is very knowledgeable about reticulum, and you wanna hear them on the show, an introduction would be helpful. A warm introduction would be helpful. My contact information is at odel dot x y z. Until we fix Nostra DMs, until white noise or whatever is out there that becomes more stable, I am not using Nostra DMs. So my signal and my simple x are at odel.xyz. That's the best way to contact me. Or just if you, like, know someone that's solid on reticulum, have them contact me. That'd be helpful. Okay. Back to hamster. Is this on the server side, is it more of a broadcast server only, or is it something that I can hit?
Like, how how if if I'm ham radio only, let's say I'm in the middle of nowhere, the Internet is down for whatever reason, and I wanna read nostril notes. Can I hit the can I hit the server to read notes, or is it only for broadcasting events?
[00:30:21] Liberty Farmer:
No. Absolutely. So as of right now and there'll be more features coming online here in the next couple of months. But as of right now, you put in your NSEC, and it securely stores it into the app. And then from there Into the client. Into the client. Yeah. So server just pretend it's just a relay, whatever. Just act like The server's basically like a ham enabled relay. Yep. Exactly. That's oh, I like that. And so the, the client, you put in your end sec. It creates an m pub for you just like you would if you're signing on Amethyst for the first time or primal. And so from that m pub, it knows that. Right? The client knows that. And as of right now, you can only do one. I'll I'll do some account switching or something later on, but for right now, it's one. You can write a note. You can send that, sign the note, broadcast it, or you can request notes. You can request I think my limit is eight just because of the slow speed. But you can request up to eight notes.
There's no reason. I mean, it could be changed in code. It's not a big deal. But so it's up to eight, but you can pick how many notes you want to. You can do, for some reason, if you want your own notes I was actually using it for testing, so I just left the feature in there. You can, you can do just regular notes of people you follow. It'll check your following list on the server side. So it'll take your m pub. It'll pull your follow list. That's the beauty of Nostra. Right? It's it's everywhere. And then it'll pull back your your one, two, three, eight notes, whatever you wanna pull back from your followers.
You can pull the global feed, which, dude, I don't recommend anybody ever search the global feed. I swear. Yeah. I mean, even if you have, like, unlimited bandwidth. It's awful.
[00:31:58] ODELL:
But if you're restricted if your bandwidth constricted, I presume, like, this would more be used
[00:32:04] Liberty Farmer:
for a situation where, like, you have a certain target mpubs that you wanna actually read from. So yeah. So you you could pull your followers. You can search for a and pull just from an m pub. Let's say I don't follow you, but I, for some reason, know your m pub. I'm I'm working on searching, display names. It's apparently harder than I would have thought ever. But, so search the names. But you can search. You can just pull in, like, Odell. It'll pull in anybody that mentions Odell. It does a full text search using I think it's no sir dot wines API.
You can search hashtags if you wanna search hashtags. You can I think I think right now, that's the main thing? So that was kind of the main I was trying to picture, like, what would I use as a client, and I tried to implement those first. And then, of course, the big one that I just added was you can connect Nostra wallet connect to your wallet, and you can sense apps.
[00:32:59] ODELL:
Well, like, hashtags make sense to me because you're in a disaster situation, you wanna see relevant notes, or you're in a authoritarian government situation or protest situation and you wanna see notes specific to that, there'd probably hashtags related. I mean, there'd also probably be certain m pubs focused on it.
[00:33:19] Liberty Farmer:
Yeah. Like, yeah, we've got a few that I follow, like, on I think it's was it War Monitor or something? You know, just just war news and different stuff throughout the world. Yeah. If you wanted, like,
[00:33:30] ODELL:
specifically when, the the fighting was happening between Iran and Israel. Right? Like, you could if if you were in an affected area, you could just pretty much follow war monitor, and you would be able to get pretty good updates even at eight notes per Absolutely.
[00:33:48] Liberty Farmer:
Yeah. And so it's been you know, on VHF and UHF bands, so those are kinda dubbed two meter. There that's the two meter bands. It's it's I don't wanna say fast, but it's way faster. So, you know, a modem used to be 56 k. That's fifty six six thousand kilobits in per second. Okay. Typically, VHF, you're gonna run at 1,200. So you're still 25 times less or whatever that math is, more than that less. But it's it's much faster, and I've optimized. So, like, you can't do images. So, like, the server strips out all images and puts in, little brackets that say, you know, image or video. Doesn't at this point, it doesn't tell you what it was. I'm looking into some AI options to be able to say, hey.
You know, it was an image of this because it might be important. It might be not just a meme. It might be something of note. You know? But for now, it just replaces it because I'm trying to reduce down my bandwidth. I think the most I've ever gotten at one time was a full eight notes, and it takes I mean, it took, like, seven minutes or eight minutes. I mean, we're not talking fast. This is not an everyday client.
[00:34:57] ODELL:
Right. No. Yeah. I mean, you're using it as a you're you're using it when you when you don't have other options, pretty much. Yeah.
[00:35:09] Liberty Farmer:
Yeah. People. Yep. Decentralized manner. Everything is fully decentralized. Everything's fully open source. Like I mentioned, I had gotten open source grant an open SaaS grant for it, so I'm very thankful for that. It's been amazing to help get the hardware and kinda keep me going, you know, kinda keep me grinding away because I do now believe there's a chance for this to help the world in a decentralized manner to against authoritarian governments.
[00:35:40] ODELL:
So I see a question from on that note, I mean, I see a question. I think it was from SoapMiner, which is a highly relevant question from a soap home soap manufacturer. How easy is it to jam this type of thing?
[00:35:58] Liberty Farmer:
VHF and UHF, it's not particularly hard for a government. Now if you're mobile, obviously, it becomes harder. But if you, on HF bands, it becomes a lot more difficult because you what you're doing on high frequency bands is you're bouncing it off the ionosphere in most cases. So it's it hits the ionosphere and bounces back. So everybody can hear it. So it becomes a whole lot harder. That that's the biggest thing. And that's kinda why I focus more on HF is because you can depending on your antenna setup, you can go from, I I don't know, maybe a 100 to 200 miles. It's called Envis, near visual incident, I think. It's a military tactic. Or you can go, hey. I wanna go 3,000 miles. I wanna go hit somebody in Russia 6,000 miles away. And, like, literally, in Winlink, I try to do that. I try to see, like, what servers can I hit? Like, I wanna hit one in Russia. I wanna hit one in France. I wanna hit, you know, all these things. So I'm kinda thinking that with Hamster too. It's like, hey.
Okay. What what can I do? And so they can't I don't think they can do a whole lot. I mean They'd have to, like, have broad they'd have to, like, broadly jam everybody. Right? Like, it Yeah. You're gonna have to cut off every TV, every broadcast, every including their own. Right? They they can't just jam unless they knew it was your house, in which case they'll just send the tanks. Right? I mean, that's Right. But in this situation, you're, I mean, you're you're literally bouncing off the atmosphere. Exactly.
So in daytime, you know, the ionosphere charges up. And then at nighttime is when it really comes alive because it creates literally a a field of electrons that you can bounce off of. And so you can just you can go and I can hit New York. I can hit Nashville. I can hit Texas. I can hit, you know, all these different places all at the same time. So it's really hard to pinpoint. Not to say it's impossible, but it's it's it's very hard.
[00:37:46] ODELL:
Got it. I mean, and then, obviously, you have the general offset concerns or whatever depending on your threat model in your environment. If you're sending out notes about, like, where you live or whatnot, then
[00:38:00] Liberty Farmer:
Just general rules for things. Unless, like, you're trying to get signal out for help. You know? Right. Then you I mean, then you want them to know your location.
[00:38:09] ODELL:
CS Burner, I see your recommendation. I will send him an email. Thank you for that. Okay. So let's talk zaps. How are you thinking about zaps?
[00:38:22] Liberty Farmer:
So Zaps, I thought at first, were gonna be impossible, because you you need to be online. Right? You can't send you gotta have a lightning node. You gotta have a connection to that node to send. Then along came in the last year, maybe, whatever it's been, the Albie team, the Nostra Wallet Connect. And so now I was able to use Nostra Wallet Connect, and all it takes is a one time you have to be online once on the client. That's all it takes. And then it curates that secure connection. They share a secret, I found out in the back end. Because NWC just uses Nasr for communication. Right? So you It does. It uses a standard relay that takes in messages.
And I've had to learn a whole lot about this. Supertestnet has a library that's Python based for NWC. That's been a lifesaver, all the cryptography and everything. And so now you connect. Once you connect, you can go offline forever. As long as that wallet and that node is still active, you can send zaps. Like, 90% of the zaps I've sent over the last two weeks have been from Hamster, like, just for fun, just for testing, going stuff. The biggest and most of that's been in my development environment, but the biggest thing that I learned is you can't connect to NoStar Wallet Connect without, an encrypted DM. It uses, I think right now, just NIPO four DMs.
So there's a problem there and that you can't well, it's a gray area, let's say, for something like this. Encrypted data over a job. Right? Exactly. So, like, for censorship, for for people around the world that are oppressed, like, who cares? Get on, use it, or send it. Send your send your money to get supplies. Get whatever. Pay your gun dealer. Whatever the hell you're gonna do. No big deal. But, like, in The US and The UK worry about licensing in that situation. Exactly. You just pop it in and go. So, yeah, that that's been the issue is and I've now added a disclaimer on my branch to my Zaps branch to, like, let people know, like, this may or may not be legal, like, on a journey, and this is not legal advice. I've sent a few. It's, I think, a gray area because you're using private keys. You're not necessarily encrypting the payload in that same way to hide the message like a like an opponent line.
[00:40:43] ODELL:
So hear me out. I think, actually, Cashew could be a really good use case for this because Cashew is I I mean, you're effectively it's it's you're effectively just sending a bearer token. You're sending a private key. Now you have the issue that someone command in the middle of that, but I they they have the capability of of of locking it to a specific end pub. So I don't think it's encrypted in that situation. I think it's just
[00:41:19] Liberty Farmer:
text. I believe it's encoded, not encrypted. And encoded is completely legal. Like, Hamster uses encodings. There's nothing there. So, yeah, you could I think that is the biggest issue is if you're sending a note or go into a relay, like, somebody could absolutely just swoop that and take it. Right? I have to I've done some testing with it on a on a separate end pub just to test out, and it it absolutely is a good way to use. It's in my road map is to add Cashew. I just didn't understand how it worked. And frankly, it's easier to send it offline. Like, I was pulling up the the I think it's dot space or whatever it is that has the has the PWA that you can go in and just, you know, hook up some mints, send some stats. So I did some dot cache. Yes. That's the one. And it it worked fantastically.
So that that's gonna be a way I'm gonna go in the future too. Maybe have both. Like, if you wanna send this way, great. If you don't, great. You can just cash you. I'm just not sure if it's something somebody I just make a maybe I make a box that just be paste in your, you know, paste in your cashew note and send it, or if you just wanna paste that into a regular note. Yeah. You could just copy and paste a token and Yeah. I mean, I, I remember a couple years ago,
[00:42:33] ODELL:
NVK is a ham enthusiast, and he sent a Bitcoin transaction from Canada to Texas. Yep. And what they did was they just sent the private key. So someone could have just taken it. Oh, that's interesting.
[00:42:50] Liberty Farmer:
Okay. So But
[00:42:52] ODELL:
he just there was no one watching. And the reason it was was because, the alternative that, assigned transaction was too large, I think, and the private key was smaller. But Casio opens up a lot of interesting possibilities here that is probably a lot clean that was in, like, an on chain private key. Yeah. Casio opens up a lot of options here, particularly because you can lock it to an end pub and because we have the open Nasr contact list, basically, of end pubs. And then in that situation, you wouldn't actually need a separate online Bitcoin node, which depending on your situation I mean, particularly if we're thinking about situations where Internet is brought down or you're in an authoritarian environment, that could be a and and you're relying on hamster for actual communications or transactions. I mean, that could be a a pretty big hurdle for people.
[00:43:51] Liberty Farmer:
Yeah. I think I mean, my my road map shows and, like, my my next six months is Zaps, on chain Bitcoin and Cashew. I wanna give people the flexibility to be able to do whatever they want. I've been testing some on chain stuff using an offline transaction from Sparrow Wallet. It makes it really easy, especially if you're on a laptop or desktop. You just copy and paste it in, and, basically, my server is gonna detect that it's a Bitcoin transaction. There's no danger there because it's signed on the client. You know, it's signed from Sparrow. It's a it's there's no issue there, and the server will broadcast it using, for now, probably mempool dot space has an API where you can broadcast the transaction. So you'd be able to construct it locally on your client, send it over ham radio in a very easy way, and then the server will broadcast it.
[00:44:41] ODELL:
That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, I just think there's a lot of possibilities here.
[00:44:47] Liberty Farmer:
I'm glad you're exploring them. I've got a lot of lot of steps to go because I am not a developer. I I've using I'm not ashamed. I I hate the word vibe coding, but because there's nothing vibe about it for me most of the time. It's just me getting pissed at LLMs. But, it's I'm using AI for a lot of stuff. I know some Python. I know some other back end and front end stuff, but I know SQL and some minor stuff. But I am not a developer. That's not what I do. So it's been a learning curve. And so just trying to get as many different options out there, I I think, is better. And I'm open to feature requests if it beats, you know, if it beats kind of the system and structure that I I've got in play. Like, please, I I've had, I think, just one pull request. Like, go on the git. Go read it. Download it. If I have a bug, fix it. You know, I'll I'll put it right through and and merge it right away probably.
[00:45:39] ODELL:
But Yeah. Where can how can people be how can people be helpful?
[00:45:44] Liberty Farmer:
Use it. Try it. If you're a hand, not a hand, download it, clone it. Give me ideas. Give me tips. Give me features. I fixed most of the bugs I found, but I'm sure there's a ton out there. But just, you know, give it use it. Like, I want somebody to use it. For right now, people can try and connect if they are ham enthusiasts and IHF bands. Seven point was it 7.12 megahertz. I've got a ham server up most of the time. I'll in fact, I'll I'll put a note out there broadcasting that. It goes up and down just depending on what I'm doing, you know, with the server if I'm making upgrades and whatnot. But it's up there most of the time, and it should, in theory, take their M pub and do whatever they need to. And I'll just it'll I'll I'll see my radio kick in. You know? I I've no right now, there's no authorization. That's that's actually next week, getting authorization in a decentralized manner. Probably you send some stats to the server address or something, and it gets you in. But, yeah, I I want people to use it.
[00:46:44] ODELL:
I mean, threshold wise, like, for this to be actually useful, it's probably we probably only need, like, 10 or so servers that are
[00:46:57] Liberty Farmer:
up there. I think yeah. So, my Regionally located. Right? Exactly. I I'd like to see a couple on HF in The US, a couple in Europe, a couple in Asia. On VHF, UHF, I'd like to see a lot more. Maybe maybe 20 in The US, 20 in Europe, 20 in Asia, maybe more. But on HF, I that would do it. Like, ten, fifteen, 20 servers globally, you would probably always be able to connect to one. I I can't imagine you wouldn't be able to. It only allows one the way ham radio packets work, you know, you can only have one person on at a time. That that's a key limiting factor as if you're connected getting stuff, nobody else can. Yeah. It's just not. There's no way to do that on that frequency. You know, you're tying up the frequency around the entire world. That's why you need the authentication. Right? Because otherwise, it's like the DDoS effect factor. That that's exactly right. I started work on that today and, tonight actually. I probably have it done by the end of the week. It's some sort of decentralized, authentication.
I think I've seen, like, five times. So reticulum keeps coming up a couple times in the chat. So I wanna talk about reticulum if that's alright. Yeah. If you're knowledgeable about it, do it. I am. So that's actually my new branch is gonna be Reticulum Network. So Reticulum was created by a guy that wanted a new way for the Internet to operate. And and I'm not, like, the most knowledgeable, but I I've done a fair amount of research. I'm in their Discord and all the time. But they so he created a a way to rebrand the Internet that is available on almost any kind of device you can think of. We're talking ham radio, LoRa, like what Meshtastic runs on, LoRa radios, ham radios, Internet, normal Internet, I two p, serial devices, serial modems.
I mean, like, if you could think of it, essentially, you could either do a custom or a, there's already a interface for it, and you literally just set up a modem. You can set up a fast modem, a slow modem, Internet. You can set up radios. You can set I mean, you just you name it. And so what it does is there's no identity. Well, there's identities kinda more in the, it kinda looks like the lightning network. Let let's put it that way for this audience. So it's a bunch of spawning nodes that connect to each other and interweb with each other and route through each other. Right? Kind of kind of the Bitcoin network, but I would say more Lightning network. You've got some central hubs with channels. That's kinda what it's doing. So, like, it'll find automatically the route no matter how it has to get there much like Lightning Network payments do. So if you've got a reticulum node and I've got a node and some guy I'm trying to get to in Europe has a node, it'll find the way. It it'll automatically reroute and find the most efficient path. You never have a sign up. You never have you download the software. It creates a, encrypted identity.
Everything on the network is encrypted. Like, every single bit. It's I think it's SHA two fifty six, actually, but, everything. So you get on, you get an identity. Your identity is not Odell. Right? It's a freaking Bitcoin address. You know, it's like a I I don't remember. It's one twenty eight or however many carry. It might be 64 bit encoding. I don't know. But it's this huge string of numbers, and you can keep that as long as you have that identity live. And what it enables is the ability for oh, Bluetooth. That's what he's adding. What it's enabled is the ability for me as a developer to say, I wanna use ham radio to connect to the reticulum network, and I wanna reach somebody who has a LoRa device or Bluetooth device.
Right. So and and enables any device that has it. I mean, you can you can use anything, and it'll just keep finding its way. So it enables me to say, hey. I want to go, I want to take my hamster notes. I'm gonna use HF band ham radio. I'm going to send this note to to that ham radio. It's then gonna send to you know, across the Internet to another guy who's then gonna do, you know, a Bluetooth device on the other end of the reticular network or whatever, you know, and 10 steps in between. So, like, if my server you in this case, you could have one server around the world. You could have one hamster server. So, like, I can connect to a reticulum node on HF instead of a hamster server. Let's say I'm in The US. I'm connecting to one in Europe. I connect to that. It then uses some other protocol, some other interface to go to somebody in France, which then goes to somebody in Africa, and then they use ham radio to get to somebody in Asia, and then Asia uses LoRa radios, and then the hamster server is sitting at the end of that LoRa radio. Like, that is absolutely feasible.
That's freaking awesome. That's the future I'm moving. That is absolutely the future as a way. In fact, I think I think, like, the reticulum main, manual, I think it even says, like, I I built the Internet that should have been or the Internet that we wanna live with or something like that. You know? I mean, that's and so that's where I'm going. The biggest hurdle for me is, again, that freaking this insane legality thing of sending encrypted messages because everything is encrypted. However, you're you're using a private public key pair to do the encryption. You're not hiding a message. So if that makes sense. So, like, the FCC guidelines are very clear. You cannot encrypt to obscure a message.
Like, you can't say, like, hey. I'm gonna attack this country and then encrypt it. You know? You can you can use potentially private public encryption, though. It's really such I don't wanna say it's new, but it's it's new enough where it hasn't been litigated. He believes, you know, the creator of, Reticulum Network believes that it's legal, and so I'm kinda operating on that. So my phase that I launch I have a road map now tonight. I'm going straight into Reticulum network, so you'll be able to connect to any interface that Reticulum can use and anywhere in between. So, like, it could literally be everybody has a node. You could run a node even though you're not a ham. I can connect to my node that has ham, and then it can get through you using the Internet, LoRa, whatever whatever means it needs to to find a way out. Right? Like, it it it could use any possible connection to find a way to the final hamster server.
That's what I want. Yeah. That that's my goal is to figure out how to how to use Reticulum to get there.
[00:53:22] ODELL:
That's awesome. Okay. By the way, Freaks, that's reticulum.network is where all the information is for that. I'll also put that in the show notes. And, I see CS Burner zapped another 2,100 sats. He he recommended someone I should reach out to to have on the show to go deeper on that, but it seems like a really interesting fit for Nostr.
[00:53:46] Liberty Farmer:
Oh, absolutely. They've they've got some other really low bandwidth type protocols and apps for examples and things. And, I mean, I think Nostr fits right in there.
[00:53:59] ODELL:
I also see a zap from SoapMiner. He zapped 21,000 sets. He says he's gonna he's following Liberty Farmer now, and we'll pay more attention to this. Obviously, an easy link to follow Liberty Farmer will be in the show notes as well, but I encourage you all to do that. Before we wrap, I wanna cover a little bit I feel like we didn't necessarily hit it. On the server side, what does that setup look like on the server side?
[00:54:33] Liberty Farmer:
Yeah. So it's anything that specifically. Anything that can run Python can run a server. Now, obviously, you need a a hardware ham radio to connect, obviously. But, it's just like the back end stuff. Like, I could run it on a Raspberry Pi. It's very low power. I it probably takes 20 to 30 megabytes of RAM. I mean, like, nothing. It's it's tiny in the grand scheme of things. You just have to be able to have a way to interface your ham radio with the server. You know, USB is the most common these days, a sound card, something.
[00:55:07] ODELL:
Got it. Okay. Awesome. Well, if this if this project interests you, if you're a developer, if you're a ham enthusiast, if you're just a Nostra enthusiast, it sounds like Liberty Farmer could use a lot of help, getting this vision off the ground. I assume the best way for them to contribute feedback
[00:55:27] Liberty Farmer:
or potentially code or whatever is is through the GitHub repo. Correct? Yeah. Either hit me up on Nostr or get just put a pull pull request on GitHub. Just download it. Try I don't care if you're a ham or not. Like, look through the code. It sucks. I guarantee it. Like, it's terrible. It's mismatched. I've added features or whatever, and I don't know what I'm doing. So if you see something, please let me know. Put a pull request in. I will absolutely just take a look, and as long as it doesn't break the program, I will put it in. I I want help. It's open source for a reason.
[00:55:57] ODELL:
I love it. Yeah. I mean, that's the power of open source. It just compounds and compounds, and I think that's where the hope is. Liberty, this was a pleasure. I had a great chat. I think, I I I need to get my act together and jump down the ham rabbit hole, but I would love to have you back on in, you know, maybe, like, six months or a year or something like that. And we'll see where you're at. We'll see where I'm at. Do you have any final thoughts, for the freaks before we wrap?
[00:56:30] Liberty Farmer:
I think everybody should learn how to use ham radio or meshtastic, LoRa radios, or something so they can be, useful in the world in case we lose Internet because it it tends to happen all the time. I'm on Starlink. We were out for three hours last week. So
[00:56:46] ODELL:
Yeah. The first global Starlink outage that I'm aware of. Yeah. And it I'm sure it's not the last. Yeah. I mean, it's, Starlink is one I battle with because, it is an incredibly useful tool. Like, I where I live, I would I mean, I'm streaming this through Starlink right now. Like, I would I would just not be able to. But at the same time, we it's it's such a strong product offering, and it's global in nature that it probably will become a bigger and bigger ISP, and it just represents this massive centralized point of failure. Like, if if Comcast or Verizon or something goes out, like, okay, like, a region loses Internet access. But if Starlink goes out, people don't have Internet in Nigeria, Ireland, you know, parts of The US. It's just everyone goes out at the same time. It's
[00:57:43] Liberty Farmer:
kinda scary shit. It's a problem. I mean, it kinda saved my family and my marriage because we were on, like, a $140 a month seven meg download wireless connection because I have nothing else where I'm at. So it saved us in that sense, but it's terrifying.
[00:57:58] ODELL:
Yeah. Yeah. That's that's the I feel that struggle deep inside. Liberty, this is great. Freaks, thank you for joining the show, particularly those who joined in the live chat. You make the show unique, even the trolls. And, we will be keep we'll just gonna I'm gonna keep shipping dispatch. I feel like we're on a roll. I feel like you guys are finding it valuable. If you have feedback, hit me up on Noster. I want you to find value in the show, and I appreciate all of you guys who continue to support it. The single biggest way you can support the show is sharing it with friends and family. All the relevant links are at syllabusbatch.com.
Obviously, Bitcoin donations are appreciated. Liberty, thank you.
[00:58:44] Liberty Farmer:
Thank you much. Appreciate it. Thanks, everyone. Cheers,
[00:58:47] ODELL:
freaks. Stay humble, StackSats. Peace.
Alright. So in a in a recent expos, Michael Saylor, the executive chairman of strategy, wrote Bitcoin is a swarm of cyber hornets serving the goodness, the god the goddess of wisdom, feeding on the fire of truth exponentially growing ever smarter, faster, and stronger behind a wall of encrypted energy. Joining me now is strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor. So, Michael, I I had to go I I went, AI to ask if Hornets are indeed good, and the answer was yes. Hornets are beneficial for the ecosystem. So they play a valuable role in controlling pest populations, even contributing to, a pollination.
So I guess it's a good appropriate, metaphor there.
[00:00:43] Michael Saylor:
You know, bit Bitcoin's a virus. It's a freedom virus. It's based on a monetary virus that's in turn based on a truth virus. You know? And we we think of it as a swarm creature because everywhere in the world, there's someone that's supporting the Bitcoin ecosystem with their electricity, unstoppable as a swarm of hornets are unstoppable.
[00:01:08] Unknown:
You you can't shoot a bullet through it. You know, it's spreading all throughout the world, and it just keeps getting stronger day by day, week by week, month by month. This is something you told us was gonna happen for the last few years. Now we gotta I gotta ask you though about this, this the Bitcoin yield. I I saw on your website, 4.4 Bitcoin yield, this quarter, 25% year to date. Those sound like very lofty numbers. But what does it even mean to to folks out there?
[00:01:36] Michael Saylor:
You know, so Bitcoin's a long term asset. You know, you wanna hold it for twenty one years. It's been returning about 50% plus, a year. It's very volatile. Believe it or not, there are a lot of people that want two x Bitcoin. They don't want the Bitcoin return. They want a 100% return. So MicroStrategy, the equity, or strategy, the equity is amplified Bitcoin. We actually aim to generate two x the Bitcoin return and two x the volatility. And the way we do it is by issuing credit instruments. So believe it or not, there's someone that would like to get double the money market return or double the yield in their bank account. So if we give them 9%, we've doubled their bank account. We've kind of beat the sulfur rate by 5%.
But, you know, Bitcoin's returning 55%. So if I take the 5% boost and I give it in a short duration treasury instrument to credit investors, the other 45% goes to the equity investors. That creates Bitcoin yield.
[00:02:38] Unknown:
Wow. Okay.
[00:03:19] ODELL:
Happy Bitcoin Tuesday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Citadel Dispatch, the interactive live show focused on actual Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion. As always, dispatch is brought to you without ads or sponsors. It is supported purely by viewers like you with Bitcoin donations. The two most common ways of supporting the show are through fountain podcasts, an app you can find on your favorite App Store. The top zap on the show from there was Marty Bent, my cohost over at Rabbit Hole recap with 50,000 sats. He says epic rip. Or you can also support the show through your favorite Napster app.
The show's at primal.net/citadel. Our top zap there was 10,000 sats from rider die freak Mav 21. Thank you for your support, guys. It really keeps me coming in week after week. If you haven't listened to the last episode with Cali, I think it was a great setup for today's conversation. As always, all links are available at dispatch.com. We're available in every podcast app. Just search dispatch, to subscribe and to listen. Anyway, with all that said, I have Liberty Farmer here. He's a ham radio enthusiast building on top of Nostr. He has a project called Hamster, which fuses ham radio, Nostr, and Bitcoin that I'm quite excited about. How's it going, Liberty Farmer? Welcome to the show.
Thank you. Good to be here. Good to have you. So I think an interesting place to start and by the way, if you're chatting from YouTube, we do see your chat. So if you have any questions or comments, feel free to drop them there. We will address them. The chat that is shown on screen is our Nasr enabled, Bitcoin enabled live chat, which you can find by going to sildispatch.com. I think an interesting place for us to start is Ham Radio, specifically. It's a rabbit hole that I've wanted to go down, but life has gotten in the way so far. It you know, I gotta make it happen. How long have you been focused on that world?
[00:05:53] Liberty Farmer:
Yeah. So not, not too long. Let's see. Five years, I guess, COVID. So COVID's kinda where it all kicked off. We, went went through that mess, and then I decided to, go get my pilot's license at the same time. And so I thought, you know, this is interesting. I'm hearing these planes as I'm flying from miles away, and I couldn't quite figure out how all that works. And so I just started deep diving in, and, yeah, that's where I kinda learned about ham radio and all the different ways. And it's it scares people for some reason, but it's not, it's not complicated. It's just it's like a cell phone. Everything has radio. I mean, it's it's Wi Fi. It's cell phones. It's all all the same thing. The only difference is it, it runs on different, you know, different bands, different frequencies that the government has decided to control.
[00:06:40] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I have to, like, buy equipment and, like, get a license and ship, though. Right?
[00:06:45] Liberty Farmer:
Yeah. Yeah. So that's the biggest thing. The biggest hurdle is a license, but it it's frankly easy. It's maybe two hours of studying, an hour of taking some practice tests, and then nowadays, you just go online. You pay $15 to some ham radio club and wherever, somewhere in the world and, you take your test. As long as I think you get an 80%, then you can pass.
[00:07:09] ODELL:
So it's not And the test is just online? It's an online test in person? Yeah. It it's kinda weird.
[00:07:15] Liberty Farmer:
Like, it's, they make you do, like, some extra hoops. So it used to only be in person. That was an FAA requirement. And then what I guess they did is during COVID, I think, was actually when they started switching to to virtual tests. But they make you, like, go into this weird room with these other people, like a Zoom meeting, but you have to, like, show your desk that is clear. No cheating. You have to, like, pan around your room. Like, it's kinda weird. Almost like you're being monitored in class, but you do. You have to do, like, a three sixty monitoring thing, like, with your phone. You have to have two like, one has to be on you the whole time in addition to another webcam. Like, one, I think, points at your desk, if I remember right. So it's like this weird like, think of any kind of, like, government intervention and ruining a process. Like, that's what it is.
Well, they probably wanna make sure that you don't have, like, an LLM or something up in the window at the same time. Yeah. I'm kinda thinking that's what it is, but it it's just it's ridiculous. Like I said, it's not hard. I mean, the the basic does there's there's three levels in The United States of ham radio licensing. I'm the second of the three. The third one is, like, I probably will never go for it. It's like crazy electronics and hardware and just all this extra stuff. The first one, though, it gets you onto basic kinda handheld style, radios, like walkie talkie style. I mean, you can use it with other types, but that that's kinda what it gets you onto. And that's like I said, it's a couple hours study. I mean, we're not talking, you know, getting your nuclear physicist license here.
[00:08:48] ODELL:
Okay. Yeah. It is I mean, it's it's something that I've wanted to do, but I haven't made it happen. There is, like, a okay. This this conversation will be the, the motivation I have to actually make it happen. And the next time we'll have you on, I'll be a ham radio enthusiast myself. The on the on the equipment side, like, what are you looking at for, like, capital cost of equipment?
[00:09:16] Liberty Farmer:
So you can get started with so, like, a handheld like I said, picture walkie talkie. Handheld ham radio is gonna run on VHF and UHF frequencies. You know, picture old TV stations, same technology, same antenna structures, everything else, same frequencies. You can literally go on Amazon and pick one up for, like, $20. So that it's not this big barrier to entry. The question becomes, like, from there, like, what can that do? If you're in the middle of nowhere, not much. The shitty Baofangs or whatever. Right? Exactly right. So my first radio was a Baofang. It was it was, like, I think at the time, it was, like, $14 on Amazon. Okay. I I already own a bunch of those. I've just Well, there you go. So you you already have the way there. Don't know how to use them. But Yeah. The biggest issue on VHF and UHF is, especially out of a handheld, is power. They're probably gonna be five, six, or 10 watts.
It's not a lot of power you're outputting. They have, you know, line of sight only pretty much maybe five miles, maybe 10 if you're lucky. And so but that's perfect for an emergency, for communications. The great thing is on VHFs especially, all around the country and world, really, but all around the country, ham radio clubs have set up repeaters, like on mountain tops, on cell phone towers. You know, if you're in the Midwest, maybe like at a farm on a big tower or something, you know. And so that that allows you to kinda access that repeater, and they're free. I mean, I don't know of any repeaters. I think they they may actually legally have to be free. But you can take that Balfang. And if you're within four to five miles or even 10 miles, you can hit that repeater and then go jeez. I mean, 40 miles, 50 miles.
And so that's kinda how I got my start.
[00:11:03] ODELL:
Okay. Awesome. So let's I mean, just just for some context here. I often hear from people, like, oh, nostrils too complicated, blah blah blah. And I my one of the things I always say to them is, well, ham is more complicated, and I feel like it kinda offers a lot of the same goals. But let's talk about, hamster. Let's talk about this fusion of Ham Radio and Nostr. What are the goals of the project? What are we looking at here?
[00:11:37] Liberty Farmer:
Yeah. For sure. So I discovered Nostr, I don't know, maybe two and a half years ago. I left Twitter x. I was like, I was just I was just constantly getting in battles with people and these nonsensical waste of times and bots and everything else. So I discovered Nostr, and it's such a better vibe. And I started kinda wondering, like, well, how can I contribute to this? And I have not a lot of programming skills. And what happened first was I I had a goal. Like, I wanna be able to communicate with people, noster, maybe check-in with things when I go camping with my son.
And so that was kinda how it all started. It was just like, hey. Let's figure out a way I can use ham radio to communicate. And so I went over all these, you know, programs and looking at stuff, and it just wasn't, there wasn't a good way to do it. So I was like, well, fuck it. I'm gonna do it. And so that's literally what I did is just set out to design a way where when I'm remote, I'm out hiking, I'm out camping, I'm a hunter, I'm out hunting. I could still communicate with people, my wife or not or you know? And, that's kinda how it led. And then now the goals have changed into a, a massive change has been to, switch into freedom and oppressive states, regimes, censorship resistance, kind of the Bitcoin ethos. Right? Is that that's that's how it's totally morphed. And so now my focus has been what might somebody in I don't know. Turkey keeps getting their Internet cut off. Or what would somebody in North Korea is probably another great example. They don't have a lot of ham radios there. But, you know, places like that. Like, what do they need? What what could they use? And so I thought, okay. They need communication for sure, and then they probably need Bitcoin. There's a way how can they transact with Bitcoin without getting it stolen, without getting, you know, confiscated at a border? Maybe they wanna buy something. Maybe they wanna send something to family.
You know? So that's kinda how it's evolved, and so that's where I've taken Hamster is, just just kinda moving forward, and Ham Radio has been the way that has been able to, you know, allow that.
[00:13:44] ODELL:
Okay. So first off, I see don't zap me bro has dropped some Nasr links, in the Nasr live chat. They all seem to go to another Nasr user, h r four b t c, who I love his content. He's also a ham enthusiast. And they seem to be, like, quick start guides to getting your US Ham Radio license and getting started. So just, for the freaks listening on audio and also the freaks listening live, I will put those in the show notes. That's good. Everyone who's listening can jump into Ham with two feet, after the show.
[00:14:32] Liberty Farmer:
Dude, content's fantastic. I know. He's put out stuff on Nostr. Just constantly videos, guides. I mean, it's if I didn't already have it, he he would have been the entry for sure. I mean, I have a theory,
[00:14:44] ODELL:
at least Noster as social as a useful social, media alternative. Like, we really only need maybe a thousand high value accounts to make it really valuable to people, and I would put him in one of I would put him in that grouping. Like, he's just he clearly knows his stuff. He's very passionate. For sure. And I've I've found it very it's it's fascinating, following him. So, I mean, to me, like, the cool part about Nasr and the cool part about Bitcoin, well, specifically, Cashew, is that they're they're very simple protocols. And and, basically, at the end of the day, you just basically need to transfer text, between people, ideally signed text so you can verify that it hasn't been changed in path.
And so so our last conversation my last conversation was with Cali, and we were talking about BitChat. And BitChat kinda tries to solve the way I'm kinda thinking about it is BitChat kinda solves the last mile. It's using Bluetooth low energy. It looks like they're gonna implement Wi Fi direct. Maybe they'll add some Internet bridging, but it's kinda it's kinda handling that that that last mile connection, the the community connection, maybe the farmer's market, maybe a ranch or something like that or a small town. And to me, on the ham radio side and hamsters specifically, it kinda offers the promise of maybe bridging those meshes long distances.
Is that the right way of thinking about it?
[00:16:28] Liberty Farmer:
Yeah. 100%. So BitChat's pretty cool. I've been kinda I guess you would call it war driving, like you used to do in Wi Fi, trying to find wireless networks. But I have yet to find anybody in my area running, a bit chat, unfortunately. But that I think that is the idea. So I you know, VHF, we talked about, you know, it can get you five miles, 10 miles, maybe 50 miles off a repeater or something. Ham has, you know, different frequencies and high frequencies, HF bands, is where I've spent most of my time in trying to develop for. They're slow as hell. They're horrible. Like, take a 56 k modem divided by, like, 30, and that's the speed that you're transferring at. But I've been able to successfully send notes, and in fact, I zapped somebody on HF radio from 200 I think I was 227 miles out. That's awesome. So yeah. So and that's actually short. Like, I mean, I've talked to people, you know, around the world. I talk to people in Russia all the time on HF bans. And so I just haven't been that far. Like, the next time I go 500 miles, I'll bring my stuff and I'll test it. You know, I connect to my server and go. So we can kinda go through how it works. But and so that but we need that last that last bit. Like, what what if they can get some Internet bridging, I think we can tie it actually all together to go from whichever way you wanna look at it. Start at Bluetooth, go to ham, connect somewhere else or vice versa. And I think then you can spread it a lot easier because, I mean, that gets you data transfer rates. You get more people in these groups and things. Because I I think trying to stop censorship should be all of our goals. And if we can contribute and it's fairly amusing to me, I guess, that this that Bluetooth and everything was kinda set up by a existing billionaire, so it's just kind of amusing to me.
[00:18:11] ODELL:
I mean, the the the cool part, like, the cool part about Nasr is it's like it's literally just signed text. So, I mean, we could transfer it by USB drives. You could print out a Nasr note if you wanted to. Assigned JSON nostril note. You could print it out, and the person on the other side could just manually type it type it back in and broadcast, and it would work. You could put a nostril note on a carrier pigeon if you wanted to. That's the that's the cool part. We need to but we need the tooling all around it. So I have a friend who's a ham enthusiast, and he does, like and and this is one of those fun conversations where, like, I'm just a complete noob on this stuff. Like, I have no idea, and I'm just asking you as I'm thinking of things.
He does, like he's, like, almost, like, in text chat rooms that run through Ham. Is that how, like, you're usually using it, in the non Nostra side, or are you using it like audio?
[00:19:16] Liberty Farmer:
Both. So, yeah, I do do a lot of data. I got you know, it's it's split in the community. It's it's like you've got these old hams who were, like, literally World War two vets, military guys, pilots, submarine operators, whatever. Like, they're kind of the old guard of the ham space as as it seems. I'm like, if you go on the amateur radio subreddit, it's the most ridiculous thing of, like, these old curmudgeons versus the young guys. Like, it's it's silly. And so what happens is, I got into data first. Well, I got into voice a little bit, but I got into data first, And it blew me away. Like, I'm talking to people, like, chat with people or, like, seeing where people can kinda hit my hit my signal, and they ended up, like, 2,000 miles away, 1,500 miles away. Some guy It just looks like a text chat. Right? Like, you're connecting the radio to your computer by USB, I guess. And then Exactly. Most of them are USB or maybe a sound card that has USB.
And it's it's not at the granular level, it's not, like, this crazy setup. I mean, it's just it's very basic. But, like, I go there's a actually, he's on Nostr now. There's a guy. He's got a pretty decent sized YouTube channel, s two underground. He's now posting on Nostr that has, like, a weekly update, on different stuff going around the world and stuff. Well, he puts that out on Ham too or, like, he has a whole chat, like, I guess it's twice a week, but he's kinda set up, like, these communications plans for people. Like, people go in and give that same update over Ham Radio. It'd be like, hey. There was a flood in Texas going on right now or, like, hey. There's a shooting in Maryland or whatever. You know? It's like reporting. You could literally watch that for that evening and not watch the news, not check Internet or anything. You get everything you need.
And so that's kinda where HandStrip was born from in a way.
[00:21:01] ODELL:
Yeah. That's why I that's why I said earlier. Like, to me, in one way, it seems like it's kind of solving this trying to solve the same problem. But in a in another way, it's just very much complimentary. Like, ham is more of the transport mechanism. Mechanism. And so the question is, are you gonna be sending I guess, if you're if in those text chats, those Ham text chats, that that's completely unsigned text. Right?
[00:21:29] Liberty Farmer:
Completely. Yeah. There's nothing I mean, the the biggest thing on Ham is to be legal. You've gotta have a call sign. So that's kinda I mean, you could spoof that though. I mean, you could just literally type in whatever call sign you want. I mean, that's that's come up actually a couple times with Hamster too as people say, well, do I have to get my call sign or do I have to type my end pub with the call sign? I mean, in theory, yes. In practicality, I mean, what's the FAA or the, FCC rather? What are they gonna do? You know, like Right. I have my I have my GMRS license, and they gave me a call sign, I think. Yeah. So you have that. Yeah. So, I mean, these these limitations do exist, but at the same time, you can spoof it. It's not signed. Like, there's nothing that says, I know for sure x YZ is his call sign and he sent this message. There's nothing like that. I mean, Noster is really I mean, there are others, but Noster is the only way to do that.
[00:22:19] ODELL:
Okay. So let's talk about ham let's jump into Hamster. What is the setup? How let's go high level setup of of Hamster.
[00:22:29] Liberty Farmer:
Yeah. So so the high level would be a client at a server, not undifferent than x. Right? You have a client. You've got a server. I've got a hamster server. So if you were to go to my GitHub repo, which is GitHub /libertyfarmer/hamster, you'll see one repo you can clone. One part of that is gonna be for the server. One's gonna be for the client. I'm actually running a server right now that, I had somebody, I think, try to connect to it, but it didn't it didn't quite go through. But, that is up essentially twenty four seven unless I'm actually doing, like, live dev work so people can connect to. My goal is to get servers running around the world, that that are just running hamster that people can connect to. And then from there, you just need the clients. And anybody can have a client. You can connect, you know, from anywhere. You don't need to run the back end site or anything. The server has been designed to be totally, I guess, I would say pass through would be the word. It's almost like a proxy it's like a ham
[00:23:30] ODELL:
ham nostril
[00:23:31] Liberty Farmer:
ham Internet proxy. Right? Exactly. So as you mentioned, nostril notes are just text. They're just JSON. My server takes the hamster server takes a note that has been signed on the client and takes it. It sends it to relays. You can choose whatever relays you wanna run. It's all open source. It does not have any knowledge of your key, your NSEC. It doesn't have any knowledge of anything. It just literally just a pass through. It can request notes on your behalf. You give it your MPub. So, I guess, it would have an MPub knowledge, but it never has an NENSEK knowledge. And so you go through, and I've designed it that way on purpose. Right? Because I I want this one software to be able to be run all around the world that no matter, hopefully, where you're at, you can connect to it. So if you're in You have You know? Go ahead. How how
[00:24:16] ODELL:
so okay. I like the setup. The dream would be that that you could just broadcast to hamster servers from, like, an amethyst or a nasture or primal or something. How hard is that for developers to implement? Can it could it be as simple as just, you know, adding it as another relay effectively?
[00:24:50] Liberty Farmer:
That's a good question. I think the answer is not very easily. It's a complete custom network stack essentially that is designed to run over slow speeds, a, and b, you know, ham radio. You could I mean, that's not to say you couldn't tie in with something else on the client side. I'm actually looking right now. So it runs everything's in Python. So you run a Python server, a Python client, and it has a web front end, you know, web UI. I'm looking at trying to figure out how it'd be easier on Android, maybe how to package that Python, quote, unquote, back end, but on the client side into an app Right. Into a PWA, something like that. As of right now, I've not discovered a good solid way to do that.
So I'm running everything. I use my phone just to connect to the front end, but all on running a web server. But I'm kinda thinking more like a Raspberry Pi. You know, you you have a Pi with you or a laptop. You can run it on any laptop. You can run any I mean, in the field, you can run it. I'm working on some hardware ideas. I don't think we'll be able to do anything, lighter than, like, a small Pi. There's some other boards, but, like, that's probably the minimum. Talking about on the client side. Right? Yes. On the client. Yeah. You've gotta as of right now, at least, you've gotta have a way to talk to the radio.
And there isn't there is Bluetooth, so I'm actually working on right now a Bluetooth test, that you could in theory I'm doing it from my computer, but you could run-in theory from your computer straight to Bluetooth to a radio. There's a couple of new radios that came out that run Bluetooth. They're essentially just serial ports. So I'm testing that out, hopefully this week. But other than that, you've gotta have this tie in. And the the other issue is, like, if you're trying to really reach, like, on HF hand bands, the antennas are huge. Like, we're not talking, like, a a handheld. I mean, we're talking, like, my antenna out back in my backyard is a 137
[00:26:45] ODELL:
feet long. Yeah. Like, my buddy's got a huge he, like, hangs it from a tree or something. Right? It's, like, almost like a cable. Yep.
[00:26:51] Liberty Farmer:
So I've got two now. I've got one, thanks to OpenSats. I I've been able to purchase a dedicated radio and a dedicated antenna that are that are running. That yeah. I put up this 137 foot antenna just to run Hamster. So anybody could could put it out there. You know? I mean, I'm it's going up and down, and I'm making changes. Obviously, I'm developing it. But, over the next couple months so there there's a there's an email service called Winlink. And a lot of hams probably use it or have used it, but it's it's essentially the same thing. And I'm kinda modeling it after that. You connect to a server, but anybody can run a WindLink server, and it's for email. So while you're out in the field, I'm pretty sure it was developed for, sailors. Like, while they're on a boat in the middle of the ocean, they can check their email and send emails. And so that's kind of the idea is, you know, passing through these messages like a relay. Like, that's all they're doing. Anybody can run a Winlink server. Anybody can run a hamster server, and then anybody in the world can connect to those. Yeah. They're all public servers.
And because they don't have any knowledge of your end sec, it doesn't matter. Like, there's nothing the the notes in hamster Right. They're almost like they're
[00:28:01] ODELL:
they're almost like relays.
[00:28:03] Liberty Farmer:
Mhmm. It's basically what they are. I mean, if I wanted to, I could have just implemented a relay in Hamster too. I'm not. I'm I I put in there, like, some defaults like Domus and Primal or whatever, you know. But I could have very easily just run a hamster relay and started it up.
[00:28:18] ODELL:
Okay. So, wait, a couple things. First of all, I see CS Burner's up to 4,200 sets. Thank you for your support, sir. He's excited that we're talking about mesh, and radio technology, more on the show. He mentioned reticulum, which is my understanding is a mesh protocol. There's a bunch of mesh stuff, and Laura is also super interesting. Yeah. That I mean, part of what's fascinating about BitChat is that it entered the space that there's a bunch of other mesh stuff, but has gotten an amazing amount of enthusiasm and excitement about it, that the others have had. You know, it's been a long grind. It meshes something that I've been excited about for a while.
But, anyway, Freaks, if you have if if you know someone that is very knowledgeable about reticulum, and you wanna hear them on the show, an introduction would be helpful. A warm introduction would be helpful. My contact information is at odel dot x y z. Until we fix Nostra DMs, until white noise or whatever is out there that becomes more stable, I am not using Nostra DMs. So my signal and my simple x are at odel.xyz. That's the best way to contact me. Or just if you, like, know someone that's solid on reticulum, have them contact me. That'd be helpful. Okay. Back to hamster. Is this on the server side, is it more of a broadcast server only, or is it something that I can hit?
Like, how how if if I'm ham radio only, let's say I'm in the middle of nowhere, the Internet is down for whatever reason, and I wanna read nostril notes. Can I hit the can I hit the server to read notes, or is it only for broadcasting events?
[00:30:21] Liberty Farmer:
No. Absolutely. So as of right now and there'll be more features coming online here in the next couple of months. But as of right now, you put in your NSEC, and it securely stores it into the app. And then from there Into the client. Into the client. Yeah. So server just pretend it's just a relay, whatever. Just act like The server's basically like a ham enabled relay. Yep. Exactly. That's oh, I like that. And so the, the client, you put in your end sec. It creates an m pub for you just like you would if you're signing on Amethyst for the first time or primal. And so from that m pub, it knows that. Right? The client knows that. And as of right now, you can only do one. I'll I'll do some account switching or something later on, but for right now, it's one. You can write a note. You can send that, sign the note, broadcast it, or you can request notes. You can request I think my limit is eight just because of the slow speed. But you can request up to eight notes.
There's no reason. I mean, it could be changed in code. It's not a big deal. But so it's up to eight, but you can pick how many notes you want to. You can do, for some reason, if you want your own notes I was actually using it for testing, so I just left the feature in there. You can, you can do just regular notes of people you follow. It'll check your following list on the server side. So it'll take your m pub. It'll pull your follow list. That's the beauty of Nostra. Right? It's it's everywhere. And then it'll pull back your your one, two, three, eight notes, whatever you wanna pull back from your followers.
You can pull the global feed, which, dude, I don't recommend anybody ever search the global feed. I swear. Yeah. I mean, even if you have, like, unlimited bandwidth. It's awful.
[00:31:58] ODELL:
But if you're restricted if your bandwidth constricted, I presume, like, this would more be used
[00:32:04] Liberty Farmer:
for a situation where, like, you have a certain target mpubs that you wanna actually read from. So yeah. So you you could pull your followers. You can search for a and pull just from an m pub. Let's say I don't follow you, but I, for some reason, know your m pub. I'm I'm working on searching, display names. It's apparently harder than I would have thought ever. But, so search the names. But you can search. You can just pull in, like, Odell. It'll pull in anybody that mentions Odell. It does a full text search using I think it's no sir dot wines API.
You can search hashtags if you wanna search hashtags. You can I think I think right now, that's the main thing? So that was kind of the main I was trying to picture, like, what would I use as a client, and I tried to implement those first. And then, of course, the big one that I just added was you can connect Nostra wallet connect to your wallet, and you can sense apps.
[00:32:59] ODELL:
Well, like, hashtags make sense to me because you're in a disaster situation, you wanna see relevant notes, or you're in a authoritarian government situation or protest situation and you wanna see notes specific to that, there'd probably hashtags related. I mean, there'd also probably be certain m pubs focused on it.
[00:33:19] Liberty Farmer:
Yeah. Like, yeah, we've got a few that I follow, like, on I think it's was it War Monitor or something? You know, just just war news and different stuff throughout the world. Yeah. If you wanted, like,
[00:33:30] ODELL:
specifically when, the the fighting was happening between Iran and Israel. Right? Like, you could if if you were in an affected area, you could just pretty much follow war monitor, and you would be able to get pretty good updates even at eight notes per Absolutely.
[00:33:48] Liberty Farmer:
Yeah. And so it's been you know, on VHF and UHF bands, so those are kinda dubbed two meter. There that's the two meter bands. It's it's I don't wanna say fast, but it's way faster. So, you know, a modem used to be 56 k. That's fifty six six thousand kilobits in per second. Okay. Typically, VHF, you're gonna run at 1,200. So you're still 25 times less or whatever that math is, more than that less. But it's it's much faster, and I've optimized. So, like, you can't do images. So, like, the server strips out all images and puts in, little brackets that say, you know, image or video. Doesn't at this point, it doesn't tell you what it was. I'm looking into some AI options to be able to say, hey.
You know, it was an image of this because it might be important. It might be not just a meme. It might be something of note. You know? But for now, it just replaces it because I'm trying to reduce down my bandwidth. I think the most I've ever gotten at one time was a full eight notes, and it takes I mean, it took, like, seven minutes or eight minutes. I mean, we're not talking fast. This is not an everyday client.
[00:34:57] ODELL:
Right. No. Yeah. I mean, you're using it as a you're you're using it when you when you don't have other options, pretty much. Yeah.
[00:35:09] Liberty Farmer:
Yeah. People. Yep. Decentralized manner. Everything is fully decentralized. Everything's fully open source. Like I mentioned, I had gotten open source grant an open SaaS grant for it, so I'm very thankful for that. It's been amazing to help get the hardware and kinda keep me going, you know, kinda keep me grinding away because I do now believe there's a chance for this to help the world in a decentralized manner to against authoritarian governments.
[00:35:40] ODELL:
So I see a question from on that note, I mean, I see a question. I think it was from SoapMiner, which is a highly relevant question from a soap home soap manufacturer. How easy is it to jam this type of thing?
[00:35:58] Liberty Farmer:
VHF and UHF, it's not particularly hard for a government. Now if you're mobile, obviously, it becomes harder. But if you, on HF bands, it becomes a lot more difficult because you what you're doing on high frequency bands is you're bouncing it off the ionosphere in most cases. So it's it hits the ionosphere and bounces back. So everybody can hear it. So it becomes a whole lot harder. That that's the biggest thing. And that's kinda why I focus more on HF is because you can depending on your antenna setup, you can go from, I I don't know, maybe a 100 to 200 miles. It's called Envis, near visual incident, I think. It's a military tactic. Or you can go, hey. I wanna go 3,000 miles. I wanna go hit somebody in Russia 6,000 miles away. And, like, literally, in Winlink, I try to do that. I try to see, like, what servers can I hit? Like, I wanna hit one in Russia. I wanna hit one in France. I wanna hit, you know, all these things. So I'm kinda thinking that with Hamster too. It's like, hey.
Okay. What what can I do? And so they can't I don't think they can do a whole lot. I mean They'd have to, like, have broad they'd have to, like, broadly jam everybody. Right? Like, it Yeah. You're gonna have to cut off every TV, every broadcast, every including their own. Right? They they can't just jam unless they knew it was your house, in which case they'll just send the tanks. Right? I mean, that's Right. But in this situation, you're, I mean, you're you're literally bouncing off the atmosphere. Exactly.
So in daytime, you know, the ionosphere charges up. And then at nighttime is when it really comes alive because it creates literally a a field of electrons that you can bounce off of. And so you can just you can go and I can hit New York. I can hit Nashville. I can hit Texas. I can hit, you know, all these different places all at the same time. So it's really hard to pinpoint. Not to say it's impossible, but it's it's it's very hard.
[00:37:46] ODELL:
Got it. I mean, and then, obviously, you have the general offset concerns or whatever depending on your threat model in your environment. If you're sending out notes about, like, where you live or whatnot, then
[00:38:00] Liberty Farmer:
Just general rules for things. Unless, like, you're trying to get signal out for help. You know? Right. Then you I mean, then you want them to know your location.
[00:38:09] ODELL:
CS Burner, I see your recommendation. I will send him an email. Thank you for that. Okay. So let's talk zaps. How are you thinking about zaps?
[00:38:22] Liberty Farmer:
So Zaps, I thought at first, were gonna be impossible, because you you need to be online. Right? You can't send you gotta have a lightning node. You gotta have a connection to that node to send. Then along came in the last year, maybe, whatever it's been, the Albie team, the Nostra Wallet Connect. And so now I was able to use Nostra Wallet Connect, and all it takes is a one time you have to be online once on the client. That's all it takes. And then it curates that secure connection. They share a secret, I found out in the back end. Because NWC just uses Nasr for communication. Right? So you It does. It uses a standard relay that takes in messages.
And I've had to learn a whole lot about this. Supertestnet has a library that's Python based for NWC. That's been a lifesaver, all the cryptography and everything. And so now you connect. Once you connect, you can go offline forever. As long as that wallet and that node is still active, you can send zaps. Like, 90% of the zaps I've sent over the last two weeks have been from Hamster, like, just for fun, just for testing, going stuff. The biggest and most of that's been in my development environment, but the biggest thing that I learned is you can't connect to NoStar Wallet Connect without, an encrypted DM. It uses, I think right now, just NIPO four DMs.
So there's a problem there and that you can't well, it's a gray area, let's say, for something like this. Encrypted data over a job. Right? Exactly. So, like, for censorship, for for people around the world that are oppressed, like, who cares? Get on, use it, or send it. Send your send your money to get supplies. Get whatever. Pay your gun dealer. Whatever the hell you're gonna do. No big deal. But, like, in The US and The UK worry about licensing in that situation. Exactly. You just pop it in and go. So, yeah, that that's been the issue is and I've now added a disclaimer on my branch to my Zaps branch to, like, let people know, like, this may or may not be legal, like, on a journey, and this is not legal advice. I've sent a few. It's, I think, a gray area because you're using private keys. You're not necessarily encrypting the payload in that same way to hide the message like a like an opponent line.
[00:40:43] ODELL:
So hear me out. I think, actually, Cashew could be a really good use case for this because Cashew is I I mean, you're effectively it's it's you're effectively just sending a bearer token. You're sending a private key. Now you have the issue that someone command in the middle of that, but I they they have the capability of of of locking it to a specific end pub. So I don't think it's encrypted in that situation. I think it's just
[00:41:19] Liberty Farmer:
text. I believe it's encoded, not encrypted. And encoded is completely legal. Like, Hamster uses encodings. There's nothing there. So, yeah, you could I think that is the biggest issue is if you're sending a note or go into a relay, like, somebody could absolutely just swoop that and take it. Right? I have to I've done some testing with it on a on a separate end pub just to test out, and it it absolutely is a good way to use. It's in my road map is to add Cashew. I just didn't understand how it worked. And frankly, it's easier to send it offline. Like, I was pulling up the the I think it's dot space or whatever it is that has the has the PWA that you can go in and just, you know, hook up some mints, send some stats. So I did some dot cache. Yes. That's the one. And it it worked fantastically.
So that that's gonna be a way I'm gonna go in the future too. Maybe have both. Like, if you wanna send this way, great. If you don't, great. You can just cash you. I'm just not sure if it's something somebody I just make a maybe I make a box that just be paste in your, you know, paste in your cashew note and send it, or if you just wanna paste that into a regular note. Yeah. You could just copy and paste a token and Yeah. I mean, I, I remember a couple years ago,
[00:42:33] ODELL:
NVK is a ham enthusiast, and he sent a Bitcoin transaction from Canada to Texas. Yep. And what they did was they just sent the private key. So someone could have just taken it. Oh, that's interesting.
[00:42:50] Liberty Farmer:
Okay. So But
[00:42:52] ODELL:
he just there was no one watching. And the reason it was was because, the alternative that, assigned transaction was too large, I think, and the private key was smaller. But Casio opens up a lot of interesting possibilities here that is probably a lot clean that was in, like, an on chain private key. Yeah. Casio opens up a lot of options here, particularly because you can lock it to an end pub and because we have the open Nasr contact list, basically, of end pubs. And then in that situation, you wouldn't actually need a separate online Bitcoin node, which depending on your situation I mean, particularly if we're thinking about situations where Internet is brought down or you're in an authoritarian environment, that could be a and and you're relying on hamster for actual communications or transactions. I mean, that could be a a pretty big hurdle for people.
[00:43:51] Liberty Farmer:
Yeah. I think I mean, my my road map shows and, like, my my next six months is Zaps, on chain Bitcoin and Cashew. I wanna give people the flexibility to be able to do whatever they want. I've been testing some on chain stuff using an offline transaction from Sparrow Wallet. It makes it really easy, especially if you're on a laptop or desktop. You just copy and paste it in, and, basically, my server is gonna detect that it's a Bitcoin transaction. There's no danger there because it's signed on the client. You know, it's signed from Sparrow. It's a it's there's no issue there, and the server will broadcast it using, for now, probably mempool dot space has an API where you can broadcast the transaction. So you'd be able to construct it locally on your client, send it over ham radio in a very easy way, and then the server will broadcast it.
[00:44:41] ODELL:
That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, I just think there's a lot of possibilities here.
[00:44:47] Liberty Farmer:
I'm glad you're exploring them. I've got a lot of lot of steps to go because I am not a developer. I I've using I'm not ashamed. I I hate the word vibe coding, but because there's nothing vibe about it for me most of the time. It's just me getting pissed at LLMs. But, it's I'm using AI for a lot of stuff. I know some Python. I know some other back end and front end stuff, but I know SQL and some minor stuff. But I am not a developer. That's not what I do. So it's been a learning curve. And so just trying to get as many different options out there, I I think, is better. And I'm open to feature requests if it beats, you know, if it beats kind of the system and structure that I I've got in play. Like, please, I I've had, I think, just one pull request. Like, go on the git. Go read it. Download it. If I have a bug, fix it. You know, I'll I'll put it right through and and merge it right away probably.
[00:45:39] ODELL:
But Yeah. Where can how can people be how can people be helpful?
[00:45:44] Liberty Farmer:
Use it. Try it. If you're a hand, not a hand, download it, clone it. Give me ideas. Give me tips. Give me features. I fixed most of the bugs I found, but I'm sure there's a ton out there. But just, you know, give it use it. Like, I want somebody to use it. For right now, people can try and connect if they are ham enthusiasts and IHF bands. Seven point was it 7.12 megahertz. I've got a ham server up most of the time. I'll in fact, I'll I'll put a note out there broadcasting that. It goes up and down just depending on what I'm doing, you know, with the server if I'm making upgrades and whatnot. But it's up there most of the time, and it should, in theory, take their M pub and do whatever they need to. And I'll just it'll I'll I'll see my radio kick in. You know? I I've no right now, there's no authorization. That's that's actually next week, getting authorization in a decentralized manner. Probably you send some stats to the server address or something, and it gets you in. But, yeah, I I want people to use it.
[00:46:44] ODELL:
I mean, threshold wise, like, for this to be actually useful, it's probably we probably only need, like, 10 or so servers that are
[00:46:57] Liberty Farmer:
up there. I think yeah. So, my Regionally located. Right? Exactly. I I'd like to see a couple on HF in The US, a couple in Europe, a couple in Asia. On VHF, UHF, I'd like to see a lot more. Maybe maybe 20 in The US, 20 in Europe, 20 in Asia, maybe more. But on HF, I that would do it. Like, ten, fifteen, 20 servers globally, you would probably always be able to connect to one. I I can't imagine you wouldn't be able to. It only allows one the way ham radio packets work, you know, you can only have one person on at a time. That that's a key limiting factor as if you're connected getting stuff, nobody else can. Yeah. It's just not. There's no way to do that on that frequency. You know, you're tying up the frequency around the entire world. That's why you need the authentication. Right? Because otherwise, it's like the DDoS effect factor. That that's exactly right. I started work on that today and, tonight actually. I probably have it done by the end of the week. It's some sort of decentralized, authentication.
I think I've seen, like, five times. So reticulum keeps coming up a couple times in the chat. So I wanna talk about reticulum if that's alright. Yeah. If you're knowledgeable about it, do it. I am. So that's actually my new branch is gonna be Reticulum Network. So Reticulum was created by a guy that wanted a new way for the Internet to operate. And and I'm not, like, the most knowledgeable, but I I've done a fair amount of research. I'm in their Discord and all the time. But they so he created a a way to rebrand the Internet that is available on almost any kind of device you can think of. We're talking ham radio, LoRa, like what Meshtastic runs on, LoRa radios, ham radios, Internet, normal Internet, I two p, serial devices, serial modems.
I mean, like, if you could think of it, essentially, you could either do a custom or a, there's already a interface for it, and you literally just set up a modem. You can set up a fast modem, a slow modem, Internet. You can set up radios. You can set I mean, you just you name it. And so what it does is there's no identity. Well, there's identities kinda more in the, it kinda looks like the lightning network. Let let's put it that way for this audience. So it's a bunch of spawning nodes that connect to each other and interweb with each other and route through each other. Right? Kind of kind of the Bitcoin network, but I would say more Lightning network. You've got some central hubs with channels. That's kinda what it's doing. So, like, it'll find automatically the route no matter how it has to get there much like Lightning Network payments do. So if you've got a reticulum node and I've got a node and some guy I'm trying to get to in Europe has a node, it'll find the way. It it'll automatically reroute and find the most efficient path. You never have a sign up. You never have you download the software. It creates a, encrypted identity.
Everything on the network is encrypted. Like, every single bit. It's I think it's SHA two fifty six, actually, but, everything. So you get on, you get an identity. Your identity is not Odell. Right? It's a freaking Bitcoin address. You know, it's like a I I don't remember. It's one twenty eight or however many carry. It might be 64 bit encoding. I don't know. But it's this huge string of numbers, and you can keep that as long as you have that identity live. And what it enables is the ability for oh, Bluetooth. That's what he's adding. What it's enabled is the ability for me as a developer to say, I wanna use ham radio to connect to the reticulum network, and I wanna reach somebody who has a LoRa device or Bluetooth device.
Right. So and and enables any device that has it. I mean, you can you can use anything, and it'll just keep finding its way. So it enables me to say, hey. I want to go, I want to take my hamster notes. I'm gonna use HF band ham radio. I'm going to send this note to to that ham radio. It's then gonna send to you know, across the Internet to another guy who's then gonna do, you know, a Bluetooth device on the other end of the reticular network or whatever, you know, and 10 steps in between. So, like, if my server you in this case, you could have one server around the world. You could have one hamster server. So, like, I can connect to a reticulum node on HF instead of a hamster server. Let's say I'm in The US. I'm connecting to one in Europe. I connect to that. It then uses some other protocol, some other interface to go to somebody in France, which then goes to somebody in Africa, and then they use ham radio to get to somebody in Asia, and then Asia uses LoRa radios, and then the hamster server is sitting at the end of that LoRa radio. Like, that is absolutely feasible.
That's freaking awesome. That's the future I'm moving. That is absolutely the future as a way. In fact, I think I think, like, the reticulum main, manual, I think it even says, like, I I built the Internet that should have been or the Internet that we wanna live with or something like that. You know? I mean, that's and so that's where I'm going. The biggest hurdle for me is, again, that freaking this insane legality thing of sending encrypted messages because everything is encrypted. However, you're you're using a private public key pair to do the encryption. You're not hiding a message. So if that makes sense. So, like, the FCC guidelines are very clear. You cannot encrypt to obscure a message.
Like, you can't say, like, hey. I'm gonna attack this country and then encrypt it. You know? You can you can use potentially private public encryption, though. It's really such I don't wanna say it's new, but it's it's new enough where it hasn't been litigated. He believes, you know, the creator of, Reticulum Network believes that it's legal, and so I'm kinda operating on that. So my phase that I launch I have a road map now tonight. I'm going straight into Reticulum network, so you'll be able to connect to any interface that Reticulum can use and anywhere in between. So, like, it could literally be everybody has a node. You could run a node even though you're not a ham. I can connect to my node that has ham, and then it can get through you using the Internet, LoRa, whatever whatever means it needs to to find a way out. Right? Like, it it it could use any possible connection to find a way to the final hamster server.
That's what I want. Yeah. That that's my goal is to figure out how to how to use Reticulum to get there.
[00:53:22] ODELL:
That's awesome. Okay. By the way, Freaks, that's reticulum.network is where all the information is for that. I'll also put that in the show notes. And, I see CS Burner zapped another 2,100 sats. He he recommended someone I should reach out to to have on the show to go deeper on that, but it seems like a really interesting fit for Nostr.
[00:53:46] Liberty Farmer:
Oh, absolutely. They've they've got some other really low bandwidth type protocols and apps for examples and things. And, I mean, I think Nostr fits right in there.
[00:53:59] ODELL:
I also see a zap from SoapMiner. He zapped 21,000 sets. He says he's gonna he's following Liberty Farmer now, and we'll pay more attention to this. Obviously, an easy link to follow Liberty Farmer will be in the show notes as well, but I encourage you all to do that. Before we wrap, I wanna cover a little bit I feel like we didn't necessarily hit it. On the server side, what does that setup look like on the server side?
[00:54:33] Liberty Farmer:
Yeah. So it's anything that specifically. Anything that can run Python can run a server. Now, obviously, you need a a hardware ham radio to connect, obviously. But, it's just like the back end stuff. Like, I could run it on a Raspberry Pi. It's very low power. I it probably takes 20 to 30 megabytes of RAM. I mean, like, nothing. It's it's tiny in the grand scheme of things. You just have to be able to have a way to interface your ham radio with the server. You know, USB is the most common these days, a sound card, something.
[00:55:07] ODELL:
Got it. Okay. Awesome. Well, if this if this project interests you, if you're a developer, if you're a ham enthusiast, if you're just a Nostra enthusiast, it sounds like Liberty Farmer could use a lot of help, getting this vision off the ground. I assume the best way for them to contribute feedback
[00:55:27] Liberty Farmer:
or potentially code or whatever is is through the GitHub repo. Correct? Yeah. Either hit me up on Nostr or get just put a pull pull request on GitHub. Just download it. Try I don't care if you're a ham or not. Like, look through the code. It sucks. I guarantee it. Like, it's terrible. It's mismatched. I've added features or whatever, and I don't know what I'm doing. So if you see something, please let me know. Put a pull request in. I will absolutely just take a look, and as long as it doesn't break the program, I will put it in. I I want help. It's open source for a reason.
[00:55:57] ODELL:
I love it. Yeah. I mean, that's the power of open source. It just compounds and compounds, and I think that's where the hope is. Liberty, this was a pleasure. I had a great chat. I think, I I I need to get my act together and jump down the ham rabbit hole, but I would love to have you back on in, you know, maybe, like, six months or a year or something like that. And we'll see where you're at. We'll see where I'm at. Do you have any final thoughts, for the freaks before we wrap?
[00:56:30] Liberty Farmer:
I think everybody should learn how to use ham radio or meshtastic, LoRa radios, or something so they can be, useful in the world in case we lose Internet because it it tends to happen all the time. I'm on Starlink. We were out for three hours last week. So
[00:56:46] ODELL:
Yeah. The first global Starlink outage that I'm aware of. Yeah. And it I'm sure it's not the last. Yeah. I mean, it's, Starlink is one I battle with because, it is an incredibly useful tool. Like, I where I live, I would I mean, I'm streaming this through Starlink right now. Like, I would I would just not be able to. But at the same time, we it's it's such a strong product offering, and it's global in nature that it probably will become a bigger and bigger ISP, and it just represents this massive centralized point of failure. Like, if if Comcast or Verizon or something goes out, like, okay, like, a region loses Internet access. But if Starlink goes out, people don't have Internet in Nigeria, Ireland, you know, parts of The US. It's just everyone goes out at the same time. It's
[00:57:43] Liberty Farmer:
kinda scary shit. It's a problem. I mean, it kinda saved my family and my marriage because we were on, like, a $140 a month seven meg download wireless connection because I have nothing else where I'm at. So it saved us in that sense, but it's terrifying.
[00:57:58] ODELL:
Yeah. Yeah. That's that's the I feel that struggle deep inside. Liberty, this is great. Freaks, thank you for joining the show, particularly those who joined in the live chat. You make the show unique, even the trolls. And, we will be keep we'll just gonna I'm gonna keep shipping dispatch. I feel like we're on a roll. I feel like you guys are finding it valuable. If you have feedback, hit me up on Noster. I want you to find value in the show, and I appreciate all of you guys who continue to support it. The single biggest way you can support the show is sharing it with friends and family. All the relevant links are at syllabusbatch.com.
Obviously, Bitcoin donations are appreciated. Liberty, thank you.
[00:58:44] Liberty Farmer:
Thank you much. Appreciate it. Thanks, everyone. Cheers,
[00:58:47] ODELL:
freaks. Stay humble, StackSats. Peace.
Fox Business Michael Saylor Clip
Happy Bitcoin Tuesday
Ham Radio
Getting Started with Ham Radio
Hamstr Project: Ham Radio and Nostr
Reticulum Network
Zaps and Bitcoin Transactions via Hamstr
Future of Hamstr and Reticulum Integration
Call for Contributions and Final Thoughts
