Calle is the creator and lead maintainer of the Cashu open source protocol. Cashu enables users to easily use bitcoin in a private, offline, and programmable way. Calle is also the maintainer of Bitchat android, a cross platform meshnet app that enables users to chat and send bitcoin without an internet connection.
Calle on Nostr: https://primal.net/calle
Calle on X: https://x.com/callebtc
Bitchat: https://bitchat.free/
Cashu: https://cashu.space/
Hackathon: https://nutnovember.org/
AOS: https://andotherstuff.org/
EPISODE: 184
BLOCK: 925030
PRICE: 1126 sats per dollar
(00:04:44) Bitchat: Bluetooth Mesh Without Internet
(00:06:21) Protests and Outages Drive Downloads: Nepal, Indonesia, Madagascar, Côte d’Ivoire, Jamaica
(00:09:51) Predicting Unrest from Download Spikes
(00:14:27) Adding Nostr Transport: Hyperlocal Mesh vs. Geohash Chats
(00:18:03) Geolocated Relay Selection
(00:23:56) Ephemeral Identity, UX, and Censorship Considerations
(00:28:37) Mesh Upgrades: Voice, Images, Files, Source Routing like Tor
(00:30:23) WiFi Aware Mesh and Background Operation to Boost Range and Uptime
(00:34:15) White Noise vs. Bitchat
(00:40:00) Protocols and Transports: Weaving White Noise, Cashu, and Bitchat
(00:43:48) Transport Neutral Design: Cashu and Nostr
(00:45:57) Cashu Progress: Shipping Libraries, Dev Ecosystem Growth
(00:51:18) We Need More Bitcoin Devs
(00:53:08) Integrating Cashu into BitChat: Wallet UX and Local Payments
(00:57:17) Running Mints: Spark, Ark, and Proof of Reserves/Liabilities
(01:03:40) Layered Scaling Without Consensus Changes: Ark, Spark, Cashu
(01:04:18) Bitcoin for Signal: Replacing MobileCoin with Cashu
(01:13:32) Why Cashu for Signal? Privacy and Scaling
(01:22:31) Mint Choice vs. Simplicity: Defaults, Lightning Interoperability, and UX
(01:32:21) Focus on Financial Privacy for the Masses, not Distractions
(01:37:11) Zcash Hype Dismissed; Call to Build on Bitcoin
(01:39:26) Nut November Hackathon and How to Contribute to Bitchat and Cashu
(01:45:06) Happy Thanksgiving
more info on the show: https://citadeldispatch.com
learn more about me: https://odell.xyz
nostr: https://primal.net/odell
[00:00:03]
ODELL:
Happy Bitcoin Monday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Citadel dispatch. The show focused on actionable Bitcoin and freedom tech discussion. As always, dispatch is brought to you without ads or sponsors. It is supported purely by Bitcoin donations by viewers like you. You can find all relevant links at ciddledispatch.com. The two easiest ways to support the show is through your favorite Nostra app. I like primal. You can just download it in your favorite app store. The largest app from the last episode with NVK was rider die freak Mav 21. He sent 10,000 sats. He said great rip.
The second easiest way to support the show is through podcasting two point o apps like fountain podcasts. The highest zap there was from Chris with 20, 2,345 sets. He said, love all the talk of future cold card features in this episode, but the one I want the most is still missing from the list. The ability to take sport a secure note which has been encrypted with deterministic entropy So it can be decrypted on any cold card with the same seed and passphrase. This would be huge for inheritance planning. I will make sure Enrique sees your message, Chris. As always, freaks, thanks for supporting the show.
Share with your friends and family. It really does go a long way. Dispatch is available in all your favorite podcast apps. With all that said, I have a great show planned. Today, we have rider die freak, return guest, absolute legend, Cali here I've Cashew and BitChat and Nostra AI fame. How's it going, Cali?
[00:01:46] Calle:
Hey, Odell. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to this conversation.
[00:01:51] ODELL:
Always a pleasure. Last time I had Cali on was episode one seventy one back in July. We made a deal to try and make these quarterly. I think we're a little bit oh, maybe we said half a year, so we're on schedule. It's been, like, six months. Yeah. I think so. Good to have you back.
[00:02:11] Calle:
Good to be back. Long time listener. I also listen to the MBK show, and I just urge every ride or die there to to zap you. I think, like, we can do better than 10 k sets this time. I hope I hope, someone out there listening to this feels inclined to open their lightning wallet now and send the big fads up to sort of dispatch.
[00:02:35] ODELL:
Cheers to that. I, I mean, dispatch now has maybe been going for four years, maybe longer than four years, trying to prove out value for value, no ads, no sponsors. And someone brought up, the other the other day on Nasr. Someone brought up, probably my my most, favorite rip, which was with Lionel Shriver of Mandibles, the author of Mandibles. And, I mean, besides enjoying her book, I enjoyed that rip because I waited till the last ten minutes to give my Bitcoin pitch in that rip. But we onboarded her with a Bitcoin wallet, an on chain self custody wallet, and she accepted Bitcoin donations afterwards.
And she received more in Bitcoin donations than the entirety of to dispatch, like, five years of dispatch. She got more in Bitcoin donations, which, you know, is a win in of if win in it of itself. But, I think she received, like, 1.2 Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin was, like, 20 k at the time. Wow. She's held this entire time. I I spoke to her about a year ago. She told me she's holding till the apocalypse. And so she's got she's got a little over a 100 k in Bitcoin.
[00:03:54] Calle:
I mean, there are there are many people out there who wanna express their gratitude. It's kind of like a hit or miss sometimes, but, obviously, lots of people have read her book also due to you. And, also, I have read her book. It's an amazing book. I can wholeheartedly recommend it to people. It's like they people wanna wanna give back when they consume, like, the work of others. And, yeah, you've done you've done so much. I mean, like, you've you've got all the recognition that you deserve, and you also deserve big fat zaps. So if there's anyone out there, take out your lightning wallet and send to the dispatch a big one. Well, that's,
[00:04:33] ODELL:
the dispatch promo is done for the day. We got enough in there. Where do you wanna start? I think, let's start with, you have a bunch of projects. Let's start with BitChat. Where do we where do we sit with BitChat? How's things going over there with, your mesh your mesh chat app that you and Dorsey have been working on together?
[00:04:55] Calle:
BitChat is going great. So BitChat is a Bluetooth mesh based messenger app that I've been working on with Jack Dorsey. He's working on the iOS app. I'm working on the Android app. We're kind of both working on protocol to be compatible with each other. And the thing that makes TheyChat special from other messengers is that you can chat with people around you without Internet. That means, the messages travels from one phone to another phone directly without touching the Internet. And, it's been going great. So we've seen lots of adoption, lots of downloads. It's truly impressive how many people are interested in BitChat itself. The Android version, like, which is the stats that I look at, has so far, I think almost 900,000 downloads, which is huge. Crazy. It's it is crazy. And I assume that the iOS app has more.
Well, at least that that's my last piece of information I got from Jack about the downloads in iOS, which is also going great. So lots of people are interested in it, and it's kind of, like, spreading the word is spreading, by itself, where where we don't really do any promotion or anything. And,
[00:06:12] ODELL:
we just tweeted it.
[00:06:14] Calle:
Yeah. And I also keep tweeting about it, but it's it's like the two of us, basically. It's nothing like we don't have any, like, campaigns or anything. The the thing is about BitChat, which we have seen in last couple months, and it's also something I talked about in BTC Amsterdam just couple weeks ago. But, what's been really fascinating to to, watch and observe is that people, by themselves, understand that it's a form of communication that, could be useful if the government shuts down the Internet or if, like, Internet outages are caused by any kind of natural disaster. So to give you a couple of examples, we've seen in recent months since the last time we talked, there have been couple of, large scale demonstrations happening all over the planet.
One of those was Nepal. And, it started, I think, with Nepal, but there were four more countries. So we've had, Nepal, Cote D'Ivoire. We had, let me see what what was it. One second. I'm pulling it up here. So we had Nepal, Indonesia, Madagascar, and Cote D'Ivoire. Both like, all these four countries had major demonstrations in recent months, and we've seen insane uptick in downloads in all of these regions, for BitChat. And, like, three or four of these demonstrations, or I should say, like, civil unrest movements, were Gen z protests.
We we're living through a year of the Gen z uprisings. And, well, in Nepal, the government decided to to ban social media, which is, kind of a stupid decision in a in a country where the median age is 25 years old. It's an insanely young country. So they've decided to they've decided to ban social media, all of it, like Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, like, the big ones. And, Gen z didn't like that so much, so they went out onto the streets. And we've seen very big download spikes in all of these countries due to the protests. So people themselves understand that, they might need a secondary form of communication in in in case the government shuts down the Internet. And that's just it's great to see because that is why we're building the tech is freedom tech for people who need it the most.
And even if the situation isn't, you know, even if the Internet still keeps working or, you know, the worst outcome doesn't happen, people know that if you download BitChat and you install it on your phone, you'll still be able to communicate in case the Internet goes down. So it's great to see that the the word is spreading despite itself. People are understanding this by themselves.
[00:09:21] ODELL:
I mean, what I thought was interesting was you said online that you can kinda see, like, where the next unrest is about to happen because of download spikes.
[00:09:33] Calle:
Yeah. I I'm not sure how much alpha I have compared to others. But at least from my vantage point, I see the download spikes first. You know, I see the spike in my Google Play Console or in the Apple Store Console, and then I go back then I go to Google and, like, enter, like, Indonesia news, and then you see, like,
[00:09:56] ODELL:
fire. And Oh, so, like, the protest is already happening. It's just how you find out about it, basically.
[00:10:02] Calle:
Yeah. I mean, I I don't know. I didn't, like, compare day to day, but I would I would assume that the news are fast enough to pick it up. It's just, like, I'm not quick enough to observe everything that's happening on the planet. For me, I first see the spike, I go to Google, and then I see the demonstrations. Be crazy. So that that this this happened four times in a couple months now, which means this is not a statistical fluke. It is happening. And then we also saw a massive download spike in Jamaica shortly before the hurricane that happened there, maybe a month ago. So in Jamaica, there's been this huge hurricane that turned off the Internet and electricity. It was there was a massive storm there.
And, people downloaded BitChat before the storm hit. So we saw this insane spike there, just before. And yeah. I mean, there were there were That's fascinating. So that was that was preemptive. That was preemptive because, I mean, you obviously can't download it anymore. The error rate is already gone. But, Bitcher jumped to number two in the app stores, both Android and iOS in Jamaica, And the first place was like a weather monitoring app. So it was kind of obvious what's happening there. And yeah. I mean, people need to communicate. This is this is a basic human need. And this is obvious for natural disasters where the Internet doesn't work anymore, then you might, like, wonder, you know, where is the next spot where I can get drinking water? You wanna ask, like, someone around you, maybe the message propagates across your neighborhood.
But it is also very interesting to see this for social movements. And I could, like, I could we could really go deep into that because I've been doing some research for my talk about that, and the history of these movements, and how communication is essential for these movements. And, yeah, this is happening without any marketing or any kind of work. We don't even explicitly say, download BitChat for, you know, in case you wanna help with your government or something. It's not it's not the messaging that we that we, put out there. It's just people understand all by themselves what these tools are useful for, what when they might be useful.
[00:12:29] ODELL:
That's always been the bull case to me for Freedom Tech was if people have the need, they'll they'll figure out, you know, they'll they'll figure out how to satisfy the need. And the key is to have the tools there available to them. But it's, like, it's a whole different yeah. It's a whole diff particularly when there's a need. Like, it's a whole different ballgame than trying to explain to Westerners, you know, why they might need something if if they don't feel they need it themselves.
[00:12:57] Calle:
Yeah. It's a bit like with Bitcoin itself. Right? We've seen this with Bitcoin many, many times. It's like you're somewhere in, I don't know, New York, Wall Street. You need to explain the suit, like, why Bitcoin, and they're like, oh, but it's not a productive asset. Blah blah blah blah blah. And then you go talk to someone in South America or in Africa, and you just explain to them, like, hey. This is money that only you can move and no one can take away from you. Done. Sold. Like, people understand immediately what the value proposition is because they live in very different circumstances. And, that is the ultimate test. The test is, you know, not, is this convenient? Will this slightly improve your standard of living or not? The test is, is tech? Will the tech be there for you, in the worst circumstances when you need it? And if so, people people understand.
[00:13:48] ODELL:
So, I think I don't I probably should've went back and listened to our last rip. But I think between then and now so you the a a key question I have for you is, so BitChat became popularized as this or at least in the early days, the first wave of hype popularized as this mesh chat app, that specifically use Bluetooth low energy to hop between phones of people that are, you know, within relatively close distance of each other. It works better in dense areas like cities or sports stadiums or concerts. But then you guys also added this ability to when the Internet is working, when you do have traditional Internet, networks, to use NAST relays for people to communicate on a much wider scale.
Yeah. I'm wondering how you think about because those are two completely different things. So, like, from, like, a UX and, like, a user like, are are users getting confused? Do they think, like, if they're using the Paris, Nostra chat room on BitChat, do they think they're using mesh? And how do you deal with that user education?
[00:15:17] Calle:
Yeah. So, yeah, since then, we've added bunch of a bunch of features that use Nostr. It's not only the what we call the geo geohash chat, which you just mentioned. We have a couple more. But, yeah, to your question, this is it is, quite challenging to explain to users what what's an offline part of the chat and what is an online part of the chat. Is, first of all, not everyone cares. So it's, something, you know, you don't wanna kind of overwhelm a user that's that is not interested in that inform in that information. But at the same time, you just wanna be clear of what the app is currently doing. That is obviously, you know, it's it's the responsible way of of building an app. So it's been it's been a challenge to make it clear to users, like, which chat is currently happening, what we call hyperlocal, that is just a mesh, versus, the geographic Internet based test. So, we have color indicators. We say everything, like, the UI is obvious and is clear about that, But many people just don't really, you know, read the fine print and then sometimes make wrong assumptions about, you know, that I I've seen people who say, like, how is it possible that I'm talking to all of all of France right now by using Bluetooth? That's, like, it's clearly a scam. I mean, it's, like, it's not a scam. They just, like, you just probably didn't read the manual right.
But There's also a
[00:16:49] ODELL:
it's a bigger thing than that too. Right? Because it's I mean, I, there could be there could be if you're in, like, the Nepal chatroom, I I could be in America and still be in the Nepal chatroom. Right? So it's like you're not even talking to just French people in the France chat. Right? It's just like France is the topic. Like, it's almost like you think you should think of it like a subreddit. Right? It's like r slash France?
[00:17:16] Calle:
That's right. So I'll so what we focus on is location. Right? So, location meaning you you wanna talk to people close to you. That's where the whole idea of pitch head starts because that's limited through the range of your mesh. So what we added is, a way to extend your range using Nosler. And No Sur has been the best choice so far for that because everyone can just plug in, you know, plug into No Sur. You can just, you know, build an app that uses Internet based communication without having to really talk to anyone. You can just build on on NoStar without having to set up servers yourself or talk to relay operators.
And we've come up with a pretty cool, method of doing so. However, like, the feature that the user sees is you have a mesh chat to talk to everyone who's close to you, and then you can zoom out. You can zoom out from, like, your immediate surrounding to your block that increases the radius to, let's say, a couple 100 meters. And then you can talk to everyone who's dialed in into that chat for the block, and you can zoom out further and talk to everyone in your city and then zoom out further in your region and even the whole continent. So we're like we have several Zoom levels for chat, and you can go super small or super large. So there are couple of cool features there, that that I wanna I wanna dissect. First of all no, sir. It's it's beautiful that you can build, like, a permissionless chat on top of this existing platform, just as WeChat developers who can just hook into it and and start using it. Second of all, we've come up with a very cool way to make, actually, make the use of Nostra very decentralized. And, I mean, maybe it's probably it's not too bold to say that we might be the most decentralized Nostra app so far because we have a very unique way of using Nostra relays.
I've built nozzle wraps myself many many so far, like, maybe a dozen different nostraps I've built myself. And with nostra, you have this, this decision to make as a as a developer, which Noster relays will I ship with my clients? Like, no. And if you wanna talk to me over Noster whether there's, like, a kind one client, like, primal, like, well, primal actually doesn't qualify. But, all the cool all the times where you could actually set your relays. If you wanna if you wanna, you know, communicate to someone, then you need to You can set your relays in primal, to be clear. Okay. Alright. And then I need to, you know, take that back because at, I I I thought that you you're just blasting it with primal client, and they blast it to others.
[00:19:59] ODELL:
No. No. Send send goes directly to relays, and you can choose your relays. And by default, primal picks. We have, the primal relay is is on by default, but then we randomize the other relays that get chosen when you create a new account, to try and distribute it a bit. And but on on the read side, you're reading from the caching server. So you're reading from a separate server, not
[00:20:25] Calle:
not relay servers. Yeah. I mean, and that that it makes sense. And that's that's where I'm trying to get to is that, you know, as the client developer, you need to make sure that your users pair at least one relay. Otherwise, they cannot talk to each other. It's very simple concept. Right? So, Primal does that by basically hosting the best relay, and everyone wants to talk to the Primal Relay. Right? So every single NOS app that I've built so far includes Primal as a default relay as well because I know that everyone basically, everyone is on the Primal Relay.
So, that's cool. It works as long as Primal is there, and, it's not the most decentralized way of using Nostra, but it's a way of using Nasr. For BitChat, however, we have come up with a super unique way of making use of the almost, let me see. I think we have around index around, well, 300 different three days or so that you can use in the BitChat app. And the way we do it is unique because, we use it for geohash chats. And geohash means you have a location, associated with the chat room that you wanna talk to. And with that location, you can actually make a an educated choice for the relays that you wanna use. So what we have done, we have a we have a GitHub pipeline that does this every twenty four hours automated, goes through a huge list of relays. It it crawls relays, so it it assembles a long list of relays through, NoStar itself. So it's kind of seeded with a couple of relays and then builds this huge list of relays every twenty four hours. Then we look at the IP addresses of these relays, and we map them to locations.
You you cannot, like, be extremely precise of where that relay is located, and often it's just like an IP address that points to a data center. But it gives you it gives you a rough idea of the country that this relay is located in, maybe even, like, the region or city that the relay is located in. So what we end up with is a long list of relays, 300 relays associated with their IP address and their GPS locations. So we have this location list. And then now when you go into BitChat and you wanna talk to people in Nepal, let's say, or you're in Nepal and you go into Nepalese GeoHatchat, What the app does is it downloads this this list of relays, these 300 relays, and then chooses the five closest relays to your location that it connects to and uses those relays to talk to others. And it this solves, like, this problem of having to share at least one relay with the people that you wanna talk to because the mapping from your location to the relay list is deterministic. So the the other guy who's also talking in the same chat, in the Nepalese chat, also chooses probably the five same relays as you do. And as long as one of them is the same, you can actually talk to each other. And that way, we can basically make sure that we use the a very large set of relays, 300 in total.
And that even, like, if some of the relays go down and then come back up and so on, we don't have to maintain this list for the others. And, most importantly, the users don't need to make a choice. Like, we don't have a we don't even have a setting where you can set the relay in BitChat because users don't know what a relay is. They shouldn't have to learn this. We just want to make the best decision for them, and it works really, really well. So I think this is a unique way of using Nostril Relay so far. I haven't at least, I haven't seen anyone doing the same thing so far. Well, I mean, I love that. I think it's a great concept and execution.
[00:24:04] ODELL:
I mean, also, BitChat's a bit unique among Nasr apps because it's ephemeral by default as well. So you don't have a, like, a fixed Napster identity. So every time you load up the app, whatever, you know, purpose you're using it for, then sane defaults can be chosen by, the app itself rather than the users, which makes sense to me. Have you given any thought to the fact well, let's use a protest. Right? Like, there's a if there's a protest in Nepal, and specifically, it's a protest around Internet censorship and social media censorship or whatnot. Wouldn't servers you know, relays are are interoperable servers. That's what relays are. But wouldn't, like, relays located in that region be easier to censor than, you know, something that's like, a relay that's hosted in California?
[00:24:57] Calle:
Yeah. Probably so. However, I mean, first of all, there are not many relays in Nepal. So you're not using Nepalese relays anyway, but that's just, like, the fact that relays are sparsely distributed across the planet. So even if you use BitChat in Nepal, you're going to use relays across the wider, you know, Asian, region. So in that sense, I don't think that the Nepalese government could do anything about it. They could obviously block these relays through IP blocks, but, we are updating the list every twenty four hours. So it should be possible to kind of circumvent any kind of block by updating that list every now and then.
But I should say, like, currently, the list is shipped within the app, so it's hard coded in the app, but the app also fetches the latest list every day from, GitHub. So we have a centralized place where we store this list, and that is also a potential choke point. So if if Nepal decided to turn off GitHub, for example, then you you wouldn't be able to get the latest list. There might be ways to make this more robust, you know, distribute the list itself over Noster, for example. But, you know, we haven't seen the the the need for that yet. I think there are still ways to make it a bit more robust.
[00:26:13] ODELL:
But it is not theoretical. I would still use the local
[00:26:16] Calle:
whatever the local list was if it didn't if it can get an update. If there is exactly. If there is no, you know, if get get up is down or something, you still have the the list that was supplied with the net with the latest app update. So it's it's inside the app.
[00:26:32] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I mean, like, Nepal is an is is maybe not the best example. But if you have, like, someone like India that has a bit more powerful influential government, but also not like a US level, you know, like US, Russia, China, Israel level kind of adversary. I just think they might have, you know, they have stronger relationships with their, quote, unquote, regional partners than they do with in terms of, like, mutual censorship than they might have from someone that's located outside. But I guess you can also deal with that more on an ad hoc basis. Yeah. Yeah. And, also, I've The Nasr piece isn't supposed to be the as censorship resistant as the Bluetooth hyperlocal mesh. Right?
[00:27:22] Calle:
Yeah. That's just what I what I wanted to say. So the I mean, the Nostra chat is is amazing, and you can see lots of activity there. But I also wanna like, our main focus is the mesh. We wanna we wanna contribute to building out a dedicated separate infrastructure network that is based on, like, built on this mesh. So we have a bunch of features that are built on Nasr. And the reason why we use Nasr again is because it's, decentralized, permissionless. Everyone can just build on it. However, it's not the main focus of the app. So we, the the you could even say, like, the Nostril features that we have are, ways to make the app more sticky. So anything that that makes people open the app more is good for us because that means that the mesh will be supported. And that's our ultimate goal, is to improve the mesh.
And because they need to have the app open to relay messages. That's right. At least for iOS, you need to kind of have it open in front of you, and you can close it into the like, you can put it in the background. It still keeps working on iOS and on Android, but you need to, like, at least have it opened once without closing it, after your last reboot. But, yeah, we're also working on on the mesh side where we have some really cool updates in the pipeline there. So, the things we've just added recently was file transfers and image transfers. So you can also now, share voice notes and images and even files using the Bluetooth mesh, which can be useful because many people just use communication just via voice voice chat, so they wanna be able to to speak into the into the microphone. Everyone else in your vicinity will then receive this this, you know, speech message.
And, we're also improving, like, making the mesh more advanced in a sense that we're adding source routing now, similar to how Tor works. So currently, if you do if you send a DM if I send you a DM in the mesh, currently, it's like a broadcast. I will send the DM to anyone hoping that all of these people, some of them are connected to you or at least they are connected a couple of hops down the line with you. So it's a flood system where many, many people get the message that who are not really interested in it. So if I have a DM, a more efficient way of getting that message to you is, would be using kind of a routing method. And what we've implemented is something similar to how TOR works or the space protocol works, where we take the message and then we, find the route through the mesh, starting from me ending up at you, and then we hand over that packet down the the predetermined route so that DMs can reach your destination much more efficiently. That is great because it reduces the stress on the system by, like, many orders of magnitude or direct messages, especially if you have larger payloads with, like, files and and and audio and whatnot.
And, and what I'm currently working on, and this is, like, we you know, this is still in-depth. It already works, but it's not released yet is for Android. We have a working version for Wi Fi aware. That is a Wi Fi based mesh mechanism that you can use on Android. You know, considerably increases the range for the mesh, where you can you can do a peer to peer connection between two Android multiple Android devices using the Wi Fi chip without having to, like, manually connect to them. So it's kind of complement the Bluetooth as well, both run side by side.
We still struggle a bit with the compatibility between iOS and Android because there is, like, some Apple shenanigans going on there, but, the EU regulations might force them to actually become, cross compatible. We'll we'll see. So there's Wi Fi based NAS in the pipeline. And what I'm How much bigger range is that? Well, the Wi Fi chip is way stronger than the Bluetooth chip. I haven't tested it myself. Is it, like, a five x range improvement, 10 x? Like Hard to say. I haven't tried, so I don't wanna say a number. I I haven't tried. Just like but you have your from your own experience, how strong Wi Fi is to to you need to extrapolate from there. It's it's going to be much better and going it's going to penetrate, like, walls and stuff like that much better.
So Wi Fi aware and that's it's cool because you can, like, you can just upgrade all the Androids, and it still improves the iOS devices as well because the Androids also still work on Bluetooth. So can, like, get the message from, iOS to Android via Bluetooth and then from Android to Android via Wi Fi. And, like, this still helps the iOS device communicate further. Yeah. And what I'm looking forward to the most right now, and that's been something that I've been spending, like, most time testing and QA QA testing, this is, the background activity for Android.
In Android, you can do, you know, really cool tricks to make the app extremely sticky in the background. That means, for Android, soon you'll be able to start the app. And even if you close the app, it will still run-in the background as a note, as a kind of a relay for all the other BitChat devices around you. That means you just start it once. And as long as you don't manually close it, like, you'll be able to to change this in the settings, obviously, it will just keep running, and that's gonna boost, the mesh capabilities by a lot. It also means that you can run around with the device in your pocket.
And if someone's close to you, they'll be able to see that, hey. Now there is someone with the chat around me, and they'll be able able to talk to you without really using lots of your batteries. So you just, like, keep keep running this in background. And it reminds me a bit of, Satoshi. If you read the emails between Marti Momi and Satoshi, where, they're discussing, you know, this is, like, Bitcoin zero point whatever. It's like, even the first even before the first real release or just quickly after the shortly after the first release, Marti Maomi and Satoshi are discussing whether they should port it, to to Linux.
And Satoshi says, well, Linux is cool, but that's low priority right now. Let's first make sure that if you close Bitcoin, the client, that minimizes into tray in Windows. Like, you know, you if you close it, it still keeps running in the background because that's what that's what's going to increase the note count by, like, 300%. Whereas, you know, if porting it to Windows maybe by 5% or so, that's what he says in the email. So I think we're we're about to play the same trick for BitChat, by making sure that the app just keeps running in the background as long as you don't close it explicitly.
[00:34:08] ODELL:
Yeah. That makes sense to me. And just prioritizing accordingly. Although, that all sounds awesome. I mean, so you are part of, like, a a five man nonprofit engineering team called and other stuff, with Jack, Rabble, Alex, and Jeff. That's right. And and probably the most famous project that has, you know, come out of it, which didn't really because I guess Jack kinda just vibe coded on the side was his big chat. They've recently made news waves on Rabel's focus of a vine reboot. But the other piece the the other project that has been getting at least within our community has been getting a decent amount of press, but not in the wider community, not like Devine and BitChat, is white noise, which is a Nostra based, signal alternative. So encrypted messaging.
There's I mean, at the surface, there's a lot of overlap on use case with something like BigChat. Do you guys talk internally about how to think about each project and, like, how do are they complementary to each other? That is it one is gonna end up with more users? Like, how do you think about that?
[00:35:40] Calle:
Yeah. Absolutely. We we we're in close close contact. We talk about these things regularly. And, so I mean, in a sense, like, I I'm a big fan of white noise, and I think something like white noise is needed and necessary. So I'm I'm a big bull very bullish on it. The use cases, however, are fairly different in my mind. So I I don't see, like it could be complimentary, but the utility of white noise is being able to securely chat to anyone everywhere. Right? We know the use case of signal. That's what it's supposed to replace. You can add someone as a contact and keep talking to to them, independent of where where you are. The use case of BitChat is, like, completely different in that sense. Like, we have also noise based communication, but it's very primitive noise based communication compared to white noise.
Our use case for BitChat is more who is around you right now, and you don't know these people yet, but you still wanna talk to them. So I've been in a conference recently giving a talk, and people were discussing my talk while I was giving the talk. So someone sent me a screenshot of, like, a 120 people or so in the BitChat mesh at that moment discussing what's happening on stage. This is something, you know, you don't need to connect with them. You don't need to talk to them. You just you you just directly connected to anyone close to you. So in that sense, really, you know, the overlap is limited.
However, I I wanna say, like, what white noise is doing, is, like, the the approach that Jeff and his team, have taken in building white noise is very smart in that they, first, they, formulated as a protocol. So there's the, I think, the NIPXX improvement protocol, proposal that describes how White Noise works, but they're also working on the Marmot library. So this is gonna be kind of a for TypeScript and Rust, a module that you can just pull into your own project and make use of this double ratchet encryption algorithm that they have ported onto Noister. So that means even us using, you know, Noister for communication on BitChat, we could make use of the white noise libraries eventually when they are, you know, ready in order to, provide, like, even better encryption than what we're doing right now. Right now, we're using NIP 17 encryption for, bit chat messages.
And, you know, if white noise is there, we'll just we'll just, use that. So but this is the general theme of for, what we're doing with end other stuff. We're kind of using each other's results to improve all these products that we're working on because the overall goal was always to move into the same direction in synchrony and build no experiences and products that are more, you know, coherent, basically. So the Vine itself, for example, is going to implement Casu. White noise also is probably also implement Casu because we're working on Casu closely together. BitChat will implement, white noise libraries to make communication more useful. Hell, even with Cashew wallets can make use of, white noise libraries in, you know, in cases where you wanna send eCash over Nostra, for example.
So there's there's lots of synergies in that sense in that group, and all due to the fact that we constantly talk to each other and try to support each other by making, you know, sure that everyone builds the best software possible. And we can create, like, a cohesive Nostra experience together. Because that's what Nostra was lacking for way too long before, so that everyone is doing their own thing. And it's, like, beautiful and amazing things are being produced on roster, but it felt like, you know, we're we're expanding in multiple directions at the same time. Whereas for AOS, for and other stuff, we're kind of trying to make a group and then move together in one direction. And I think, you know, the things that we've been currently building show that we're doing pretty well so far.
[00:39:43] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, the, like, the true power of open protocols is is, you know, the compounding interoperability, which we've we've, we've seen at scale with Bitcoin. It's yet to be seen with Nasr. It's, like, very early days. But would you agree with me that, like, so, like, I see like, if I would distill what you said about, at least right now, the differences between something like BigChat and White Noise is is BigChat is focused more on ephemeral communication. So, like, on demand, no fixed identity kind of communication and probably even more focused on, like, group ephemeral communication, while white noise is more focused on, fixed identity, one to one communication. Obviously, they wanna add groups too. I think they already support them at least in a early stage.
But it's it's it's more similar to, like, a Telegram or, like, a signal in terms of competition. But would you not agree that, like to me, like, the holy grail is, like, an app that gives me the white noise functionality, but then also can communicate via mesh if the Internet's down and can do location groups and can do a femoral stuff. We can also do fixed identity stuff. Like, this all becomes one app. Right? At some point I mean, they're both open protocols. At one point, at some point, there there's gonna be one app that has all the functionality. No?
[00:41:18] Calle:
I I would like to see that. It's just, like, you know, from a product perspective, you just wanna be clear about why you're doing what so that you can attract those universe who are interested in that specific thing. So this is a process that should be taken step by step in that sense. However, you know, I agree with everything that you said with the focus that each individual project is taking on. However, like, to make the contrast more clear about how I see BitChat and White Noise is for me, White Noise is a communication protocol that is that uses NoSri as the transport.
Whereas, BitChat, in my view, is a new transport. It's a new type of infrastructure that we're trying to build with the mesh. And it's kind of like comparing the the cables that provide your Internet. Right? So the the with the application that you're using on the Internet. So BitChat is like the cables where we're laying out new infrastructure rails in order to send messages on to, on top of, whereas white noise is a way to make sure that these messages are correctly encrypted and secure. So you could imagine a future where we use the white noise protocol in BitChat because BitChat can provide the rails to transport these packets, the white noise packets on top of instead of using the Internet. So in that sense, there could be more ways to find complimentary ways of making use of each other. I'll give you another example.
Currently, like, we're working on Cashew, and most, you know, most Cashew apps use just pure normal Internet to talk to each other and to to mince. And, if you wanna send eCash from one person to another, currently, the, you know, many the the most popular way is to scan a QR code from one phone to another. That means you're using a transport that is kind of the QR code hardware lights to camera. So that, you know, you're not using the Internet. You're not using the mesh either. However, you could use the mesh to send the the cache token as well. And that's what we've been, you know, demoing also with integrating Casio into BitChat is BitChat can provide the mesh underlying mesh infrastructure to send all sorts of data around, and this data can be, normal messages. It could be white noise messages, but it also can be eCash.
And so you can use BitChat to make payments as well. That's how I see it at least.
[00:43:48] ODELL:
Well, I mean, the cool part of both the Cashew protocol and the Nasr protocol in my well, one of the cool parts in my opinion is that they're both transport transport neutral protocols. Right? I mean, we could you can send a Noster note via carrier pigeon if you wanted to. It wouldn't scale very well, but at the end of the day, it's just signed data. And, I mean, same with Cashew. Right? Like, I could just pay someone with Cashew, through, like, a a messenger that's just running down the street with a printed out piece of paper. Or a piece of paper. Yeah. That's right.
[00:44:25] Calle:
So, yeah, it really feels like we're building an entire stack. Now we're building an entire stack. Right? Like, we started with Bitcoin, but we're now working on, like, laying out the cables up until, like, inventing new encryption protocols to get messages send messages around in a secure way.
[00:44:46] ODELL:
It's great to see It's like it's this it's the snow crash future we were promised, but didn't materialize yet, basically. Well, it turns out we need to do the work. Who would have thunk it? So, I mean, I think this is a good trans transition point here is, like so what's what's been going on with Cashew? Have we had any significant updates? I mean, it seems like it's a project that moves quite slowly. You guys are rarely shipping things.
[00:45:13] Calle:
Yeah. We're we're, like, we're rather, we'd like to talk about things instead of shipping updates. No. I mean, I I don't know if, if everyone got the, the the, how do you say, the sarcasm in your voice there, but we are very focused on shipping and cash, and it's been going It is. Great. Yeah. It'd be clear.
[00:45:35] ODELL:
To be clear, it is probably one of the most it's probably the fastest shipping project, that I have ever witnessed. It's almost it's almost impossible to keep up with.
[00:45:46] Calle:
Well, thank you for that. And, like, that's the the reason for that is the amazing contributors who joined the project. So there's, like, many people working on Cashew, in the foreground and in the background. We have a crazy motivated, super enthusiastic team of Bitcoiners, of very different backgrounds who are, like, all joined the project at some point because they truly believe that Bitcoin needs to be used as money everywhere and to penetrate into every single port of this digital world. And that is what why we wanna work on eCash because we think that it gives, like, the it has the most potential to work, like, to to, you know, for Bitcoin to penetrate through every single crack, of the digital world. And what do I mean by that? I mean, eCash itself is is super efficient, lightweight way of transacting with each other without having to create accounts and without having to, take care of your privacy because everything just works magically for you, and you have you enjoy almost perfect privacy when you use it. And we've been focused in the team, we've been focusing a lot on, first of all, making sure that we built a protocol with well defined specs so anyone can verify our work and and implement everything from scratch if they wanted to. But we also build tooling and libraries for other developers. So most of our work basically goes into, areas of work that can multiply our impact. So, we don't build apps. We build libraries for others to build apps. And so far, I mean, it's hard for me to keep track of how many cash wallets are there. There are it feels like I don't wanna sound cocky, but it feels like there are as many cash wallets as Bitcoin wallets as well. Because every week, there's someone new comes around and says, like, I've built the cash wallet. Here it is. And with the emergence and uptake of AI, it's getting even crazier to witness how many products are being rolled out because we're investing heavily into the tooling itself and documentation to make sure that it is also AI friendly, basically. So, we've had a we've just had a dev call just a couple days ago, which we have monthly, by the way. So anyone working on Casio or with Casio should definitely join our dev calls that usually happen on the last Thursday of every month at sixteen UTC.
You can find all the information usually in the channels and so on. But in these dev calls, every single one of those dev calls is insanely bullish. It's crazy to be at these dev calls because you see all these different projects that people are working on, and we talk about all the all those things that happen each month. And it it kind of blows my mind how much is happening every single month. And in recent months, the number of wallets that have been popping out up from people, especially people who have never coded before. Like, we have had, I think, three or four people in the last staff call that started their introduction with, hey. My name is Store and Sell. I've never coded before, but here is a working cash awarded. And, it's just amazing to see how much, agency people have these days if you provide the necessary tools. Obviously, the tools are AI, but also all the libraries that we've prepared so far. And you can really see that people want to build Bitcoin stuff. It is not it's not really about caching. Right? We wanna make Bitcoin accessible.
And it is, you know, make very easy provide very easy ways to build Bitcoin apps, that you can just, like, start using and without having to commit to a single company, I should also say. Because there are also other libraries that I also recommend to people to check out. You can build things on liquids. You can build things on Spark and so on. But, you know, with all of these, you kind of dedicate, like, making a decision to be with this entity. And with Cashew, it's just like a grassroots. You know, there are many mints to choose from. You can run your own mint. It's it takes, like, fifteen minutes to set up a mint if you're technically inclined, and you can just if you have a a community, you can spin up for that community, and people truly own the entire stack. And if you wanna build on something where you own the entire stack, or you just don't wanna care about the back end and you just wanna build the wallet and make it, like let the user decide which mint they use. You can just use a cash flow library and just build it. And so it's great to see. The the shipping is crazy, and that's exactly what we're focusing on, exactly what we always wanted to see, and exactly what we're going to focus on in the future.
Like, we don't talk. We just ship. And as long as we keep doing that, we keep adding features, we keep rolling on software, we'll still see more and more people join the ecosystem and start building. Right? I think we both agree that the number of Bitcoin developers needs to go up significantly. Bitcoin is, like, the world class ginormous asset that dominates the Internet already. And the number of developers that we have for this immense project is tiny in comparison to what what's what's on our shoulders. Right? The the the the the weight on our shoulders is insane, but the number of people working on Bitcoin is tiny compared to it. Like, just compare us to let's compare us to Block, Jack Dorsey's company. Right. That company has 10,000 employees.
10,000. There aren't there aren't, like, you know, 10,000 people working on Bitcoin. Not even, like, on the entirety of anyone working, like educators, people doing, like, marketing for Bitcoin, or let alone the developers. We're not even close to that. So we can't even compete with a single S and P 500 company in terms of number of people working on it. And that is something that must change. It needs to change because we cannot, like is we're not a company where we can just go out and hire people, or, you know, say, like, this is the salary, and I'll just take the best engineers in Silicon Valley. No. It's not. It's an open source project. And the how we grow is through open source initiatives being, you know, opening the doors, being inviting, reading the word, about, like, how it is to work on Bitcoin so that, competent and world class engineers out there can make this decision for themselves to decide, you know what? I'm going to say no to this job offer from this Silicon Valley company.
I'm going to dedicate my time into building out and improving this the money of the Internet. And so that's that's what our primary, you know, North Star goal, if you like, is is to provide you more ways to get more people into Bitcoin to make sure that Bitcoin grows and Bitcoin is successful. And it's going great so far. Lots of developers in the Casio ecosystem have never worked with Bitcoin before, and the first time that they work with Bitcoin is through Casio because we make it easy, fun, inviting, and, you know, kind of magic experience to use it and to build on it and and, you know, just great to see.
[00:53:08] ODELL:
So I haven't, what what are your thoughts I mean, just to bring the two those two topics together, what are your thoughts on how you expect Cashew to be integrate integrated into BitChat? Right now, I mean, obviously, you can send Cashew anywhere you the cool part about Cashew is anywhere you can send a message, you can send a Cashew token. Right? It's just copy paste. But long term, like, how do you see that integration on something like BitChat playing out?
[00:53:42] Calle:
So for BitChat, we've already demoed kind of, like, what our step one of our vision will be is we're going to integrate a cash wallet into BitChat itself so that users of BitChat just have a, like, a Bitcoin wallet that feels like a lightning wallet where they can choose the mint that they wanna run. Eventually, we'd also like to you know, this is something that we've already built, and, you know, you'll have a Bitcoin wallet inside BitChat itself, and you'll be able to make payments. The chat gives us an easy way to communicate between wallets. So it would be, like, the easiest way, basically, to send someone Bitcoin who's just sending right across you in the store, for example. No scanning of QR codes. No nothing. You just, like, you see I'm in the same room with Odell. I see you pop up in my on my screen because we are connected via Bluetooth.
I sent, hey. You received the money. It's done. No registration.
[00:54:36] ODELL:
No accounts. So it's it's perfect for that use case. How does that work with, like, ephemeral identities, though? Like, I'm in Macy's.
[00:54:43] Calle:
Oh, like, in between myself
[00:54:45] ODELL:
five other people pretending to be Odell.
[00:54:48] Calle:
Yeah. Yeah. I can I can in BitChat, you can favorite, contact? So once I know that you are Odell, and there's also in iOS, this is not yet an Android, but you can also do, like, a, verification of the of the other user by scanning a QR code on their screen. So, like, we can favorite each other, and then no one can pretend to be you. Basically, once I know it's you So even though the identities are ephemeral and rotating, the favorites
[00:55:12] ODELL:
cross that?
[00:55:14] Calle:
That's right. So there is a there is a there is a static identity for your Bluetooth part, and there is another, if you want, for the, DMs over and also as well. But we like, in BitChat, we have a host of different identities. All the ones where you just, like, talk to random people, they're kind of ephemeral and rotate, but you can also choose to have a have a static identity with the people that you wanna connect to, on the long run.
[00:55:41] ODELL:
So, So it's gonna look like a traditional wallet interface, like, within the app. Yes.
[00:55:47] Calle:
Yes. That's that's, like, the first step. Eventually, we would also like, communities of, you know, regional, let's say, like, physically, communities in a physical proximity to be able to run their own Mint very easily. That's a bit of a bigger challenge because running Mint means that you need to be able to provide infrastructure. That is something that we're also working on in fashion itself, which is, like, kind of on demand Mints, where you can spin up a Mint somewhere on a server that runs for you, but you provide the the Bitcoin back end, basically, you yourself. So, either you bring your own Lightning node or you use a different service like Spark, for example, where, or or Liquid where Lightning kind of is, provided out of the box. But, giving, like, local communities to manage their own local banking is one is one of the goals that we have also in, you know, in the collective of and other stuff. This is one of the goals that we would like to be able to offer to, for example, Nosto communities as well. So a Nosto community should also be able to run their own Mint easily so that they can provide, like, Bitcoin rails or Cashew rails to their to their members, who don't want to run the infrastructure.
[00:57:03] ODELL:
So that is one thing that's Relays are rel relays are relatively easy to run. That's one of the cool parts about them. But with with Mintz, the hard part is is the really hard part is the Lightning piece. Right? It's the Lightning node infrastructure and liquidity. Right?
[00:57:18] Calle:
Yeah. We have a we have a solution for that due to, like, the recent advancements in Bitcoin itself. It becomes easier and easier to run a cashier mint soon. So, we have a working, example of Spark, where you can use Spark as lightning back end for cashier mint, which is great because Spark, the poor privacy that Spark offers is actually a plus for Casio because it gives the Mint, kind of a cryptographically safe way to, show proof of reserves, which is impossible with Lightning. So we've we've built And that's just, like, a fixed bark address, basically. Right? That's right. Yeah. So, like, we've built a mint where everyone can kind of see what's happening in the mint, like, the the the funds coming in and out of the Mint. Obviously, the Mint itself provides, like, almost perfect privacy to the users, but the Mint itself wants to be observable. So everyone can, like, point to it and say, like, hey. There's still money in there.
So Spark is one way of running a Mint with just extremely thin layer of infrastructure, and it's it's really cool. I've seen it myself. Like, running the Mint itself is super easy. A Mint is simple software. It's, like, almost as dumb as a as a noce relay. It just, you know, prevents double spending of the eCash tokens. That's basically it. And it provides a way to go in and out of the mint using their lightning back end or the on chain back end. And that part has traditionally been the most, you know, the hardest part from running a Mint because you need to take care of your Lightning node. But with that, with Spark or with Arc as well, we can provide, like, the Lightning infrastructure can be provided by someone else.
So running the Mint itself just becomes running the Mint software itself and nothing more than that. So that's why you can just do a Mint like that.
[00:59:14] ODELL:
Or, like, your ARC operator is running the actual Lightning node, so you don't have to deal with the Lightning infrastructure.
[00:59:19] Calle:
That's right. That's right. And That's fascinating using Spark to be preserves. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's really cool, because that's been the the, you know, the part that is not possible with Lightning because we we have a way to do proof of liabilities on eCash, by, you know, proving that the Mint hasn't issued more funds that it received. However, the proof of reserves part, the proof of liabilities is super hard for eCash, but it's kind of, like, at least, theoretically solved. But we didn't have much motivation to build it out yet and to really build the infrastructure for it because the proof of reserve part depends on whether you can also prove how much Bitcoin you have. And with Lightning, that is kind of impossible. You would have to use on chain Bitcoin for the mint in order to prove how much Bitcoin the mint has. So that's been a kind of a blocker for that feature. Now that we also started working with Spark, that means, like, prove reserves is for free. We can just point to the Spark address, and you see exactly how much Bitcoin the Mint has. And then prove liabilities is, you know, what we've designed before.
And those two pieces of information together can prove that the Mint is not running fractional reserve, and that's becoming, you know, much easier now than it has ever been. I just say, you know, we haven't, you know, the proof of liabilities part, we have built, like, alpha versions of that, but none of it is deployed yet because we just weren't there. I think things with Spark can, you know, really, boost boost adoption of it again.
[01:00:51] ODELL:
That's fascinating. Yeah. It should be interesting to see. It's still very early days with both Spark and Arc, and, I know they're making some changes on how Spark is being run, and it's obviously very centralized. Arc, to me, is a little bit harder for me to conceptualize. And, I mean, I had a whole episode, with Alex b talking about Arc. But I actually if I go back and listen to the episodes, I was theoretically talking about lightning. I didn't really understand lightning until I was running a lightning node and losing money.
Like, yeah, I gotta learn by, like, actually, like, holding the thing in my hands. So I I think it's still very early days, but it's really it's it's it's incredibly bullish, that and I would I would group Cashew in here for different reasons, but Cashew, Arc, Spark, like, these innovations that are happening without actual protocol changes to the Bitcoin protocol, they're just shipping things, is is gives me a lot of hope. It's it's it's it's impressive what we can do without actually changing underlying consensus things on Bitcoin because that is, you know, incredibly difficult.
[01:02:10] Calle:
I mean For good reason. This is this is what happens if the pressure is strong is if the pressure is strong enough. Right? Like, you have a bunch of smart people who wanna work with Bitcoin, and, boundary conditions are very tight. The number of transactions that we can do on Bitcoin are very limited. And everyone with, like, more than three brain cells knows that l one scaling is is just, is not gonna work. And no blockchain can provide enough throughput without layers on top of it. And, like, even, like it it doesn't matter what the shit corners will tell you. It's just not working. Like, it's so trivial that we don't even talk about this anymore in Bitcoin because we know that blockchains don't scale.
And so if the pressure is strong enough, people will find ways. That's why I think it's so important that we have that we attract people into our space because all these things are just, like, single people's ideas. I remember exactly how Burak proposed ARC, and that one single person who didn't even build it. Right? She just, like, threw out the idea out there. Whereas caused, like, a whole wave of innovation that just comes afterwards. So it's like the ideas of a single person can change everything. And this is it's it is the truth. So we need to attract these people into our space to make sure that we can, like, keep innovating in that in the in the same fashion as we do.
[01:03:41] ODELL:
Yeah. I agree. I mean, so on that note, and you're just scaling in layers. And to our earlier conversation about BigChat, I don't know how involved you were, in the promotion. I mean, you were definitely involved in the promotion of it, but in the in the details but out of the Cashew project has come this proposal for for signal to adopt Cashew. It's pretty cool. How how are you thinking about that?
[01:04:18] Calle:
So, yeah, that's we've started a a campaign. This is probably a month ago or so and still going on, and it was more, thought as an educational campaign. So it's called Bitcoin for signal, and you can check it out on bitcoinforsignal.org. And it started with a with a hackathon project where, some some Casio devs have integrated a Casio wallet into Signal for iOS and for Android. And most people don't know this, but Signal has a shitcoin built in. It's called MobileCoin. And no one uses it. No one cares about it. It's a complete disaster, and Signal just carries it along for a long time already. And it's just like a big question, wonder why is this shitcoin integrated into Signal? And Signal, like but, you know, Signal has a whole built in wallet integrated that you can use to you know, the the UX is pretty good. I can talk to you on signal, and just in the chat, I can send you some mobile coin chip coins.
And, obviously, you know, what is mobile coin? Who cares about mobile coin? No one. So what we've done or what, like, Cashew devs have done, and this was, like, Simple Kid and Lava First and Zookmaster. They came together and ripped out the mobile coin and just replaced it with with Cashew because Cashew allows you to send the money in the chat, which we've been doing for, you know, years at this point, is instead of copy pasting the token into a signal chat, which you can already do, and this is you know, and when we go, like, to a dinner together as a group, and we're a bunch of Casio people, then one person pays dinner, everyone else just pays back using Casio tokens in a signal chat. That's what we're already doing, basically.
So what we did is to rip out the MobileCoin wallet and replace it with a Cashier wallet and, just take over the entire UI that they've already built for MobileCoin and and use it for for SaaS. So that's what you can do now with this with these forks that we've built. You can charge your wallet. It's a cash wallet due to the mint or it's a prebuilt mint, and you can charge your wallet. You have SaaS in there, and you can send the SaaS in the chat, and it appears like as a nice model where you can just push a button and receive the coin. It's pretty cool. And we've done this, and we think it's it's something you know, first of all, signal payments require like, signal itself provides incredible privacy for communication. Right? So you would expect or at least, like, requirement of a payment system that you put, into signal or you built on top of signal also also must be private. So you need a privacy preserving way to exchange money, and it should be Bitcoin for obvious reasons because mobile coin is a shitcoin, and no one cares about it. So we should use the best money that exists, which is Bitcoin, and use it in the most privacy preserving way that we can. And Casio offers a very good way of using Bitcoin in a extremely privacy preserving way. So that's why we thought it's a great fit. We put it, together. We build it. We demoed it and showed that it's feasible, and then we put together this campaign to educate people about it. And we had couple goals with that. So our first goal was just to put Bitcoin out there and show the world that, you know, Bitcoin is great money, and it can be used with privacy. And Bitcoiners care that Bitcoiners care about signal, and we want the best messenger in the world to use the best money in the world. So that's one thing. We obviously wanted to, you know, show also how easy it is to build with Casio and that you can, you know, just, you know, take existing software and add eCash to it very, very easily, and your users can use it without having to create accounts or and and whatnot.
And, and that's what that's what we achieved. Like, there's been lots of talk about it. I talked to the signal people about it, and lots of people have seen it. And the software is out there. If you're interested, you can look at the forks. Obviously, we're not going to distribute this because it would be kind of reckless to distribute forks of signal, that you you that you're not planning to maintain over the long term. And there is a fork of signal out there. It's called Moli, so it could also be integrated into an existing fork of signal.
But our goal was to kind of enable, allow people to imagine what a world would look like if Bitcoin was integrated into mainstream tech products. And that's that's what we should aim for. I think we should aim for the tallest the biggest targets out there. And and and we should make clear that Bitcoin can also be extremely private if you want and that it fits up in excellent product like Signal. Obviously, there will be people who say, like and for example, Steve Lee said that in a podcast I where that I listened to is, like, talked about highlighted this campaign and that he supports the idea and everything's cool. But, you know, who's gonna run the Mint? That's the thing that comes back to us all the time.
It's who's gonna run the Mint. And, you know, it's it's a bit funny that people keep asking who's gonna run a mint. Because first of all, there are, like, 60 mints out there. If you wanna if you wanna find a mint, there's there are mints. There are more mints than anyone needs already out there. And, you know, you can compare then you know, some sometimes people compare it to, like, Spark or Arc, for example, where you know who's gonna run the Mint because there's only one single Mint. There's, like, one Spark server. So that's, like, one company running the Mint. And, obviously, like, you could prefer this because you can say, there's a company running the Mint, so it's gonna stick around for, you know, I can I can go to that company and and complain if something goes wrong? And you're right about that.
But if you look for a company that wants to run a mint, then, you know, I can point to Coinos. Coinos is a well known Bitcoin company that runs a mint. They're gonna run the mint if you like. So if you're truly interested in answering the question, then you can, first, you can find 60 different mints, maybe more, just the the ones that I found so far. And, also, like, point to companies that have been around for a long time that will still be around, hopefully, in a couple of years that run mints already. Or you could just, you know, accept the fact that cache is a distributed system, and anyone can run a Mint. And, like, just like with no still with relays, you know, we don't say, like, who's gonna run the relays? It's just like there are enough people who run the relays, and users will be able to find relays if they need it. And the the same is true for Casio. So, yes, there's not a like, signal will probably not run a mint. We know that.
But there might be a financial institution that runs a mint for signal. Right? And this is, like, it's not completely irrational to assume that that there are financial institutions who are interested in running Mints, and they're already doing it today. And, you know, I'm I hear a lot about, like, people looking to business models with Cashew and people sharing their plans with me. And, you know, I cannot talk about what I know, but I know for a fact that, you know, there's, like, a couple people who are talking to banks, like, real banks that exist today that consider running this stuff, you know, because they wanna know, how can I do this in a regulated session and provides, like, a a next generation financial service to my to my customers, right, by using eCash, making, you know, giving them privacy, offline payment capabilities, and all this, like, access to an ecosystem that already already exists? So Signal could partner with a financial institution that runs Mint for them. This is not, like, completely irrational thing to assume.
So, yeah, I I I guess we just, like, you know, wait and see. Someone is going to run a Mint. And then, Signal also, or a company like Signal could also use that mint by default, and then the entire question is basically, you know, the results.
[01:12:21] ODELL:
I mean, so two things here. First of all, I mean, I love this initiative, because I love signal. I mean, the freaks know I've talked about, and I love Bitcoin. I've I've talked about signal at length, on this show and my other shows and Noster and, you know, I think it's one of the most successful Freedom Tech projects, to ever exist. I've moved the majority of my personal and business life over to signal in terms of communication. Obviously, it's not without its own faults. It it takes its own trade offs. It's it's centralized. There was the first real major signal outage, that we've seen.
I mean, at least since I've been using it at scale for for a couple hours when AWS went down a couple weeks ago. But it's awesome for what it is, and it's it's it's convenient and gives you very strong security guarantees. And, obviously, the holy grail would be to have Bitcoin integrated. I don't really but on that note, you know, and and just I mean, I don't know what it's like, where you're at, but in America, like, a significant portion of the economy is basically running on Venmo rails. And having Bitcoin integrated into signal seems like just a very obvious drop in improvement, that could actually scale. They're, like, actually, people would use it. Like, I convincing them to download a Bitcoin wallet is completely different. I already have them on signal.
With all that said, how do you think if if you take off your Cashew hat for a second, do you, do you think like, what's the argument for Cashew being the best way to implement this? Like, obviously, there's multiple options available to them. It could first of all, we saw Tethr, you know, they own, nearly 50% of Rumble. They added a Bitcoin wallet, to Rumble for Rumble users. They're just doing on chain for now. You say you it could be an on chain wallet. That's obviously the base case. We're we recently we just talked about Spark and Arc. It could be a Spark or Arc wallet. It could be a liquid wallet.
Well, like, why why if if you're sitting there as signal and you're trying to choose how do we we wanna let's say we wanna integrate Bitcoin. And to their defense, when they added MobileCoin, the founder of Signal Moxie was also one of the advisers, I believe. I don't think he was I don't I don't think it's fair to call him a founder of MobileCoin, but he was involved with the MobileCoin project. And there was a little bit of questionable incentives there of him trying to pump his shit coin by integrating it into his open source project. And he kinda got run out of the project. So he's not involved with signal anymore. Now they're kinda sitting on this tech debt. So if we're gonna give them the benefit of the doubt, they're sitting on this tech debt of this shit coin that they integrated.
They don't wanna rip out something that maybe even 10 users are using because that always sucks from a project lead point of view where you have users that are actually using something and you you wanna move to something else. But let's say they actually do wanna move to Bitcoin. Why cash you versus other alternatives? Is it the best option?
[01:15:33] Calle:
Well, it it depends. This is a multidimensional question. Right? So first of all, privacy. That is, like, the the the thing that stands out the most given all the alternatives that you've just that you've just mentioned. You'll get no transactional privacy with any of the alternatives that you've mentioned. All of them have a transaction graph. All of them are either based on UTXOs or VTXOs or blockchains where the the movement of any of those, you know, coins or whatever can be transparently observed by at least one party. So eCash just is on a different, let's say, privacy model where you don't have a transaction graph. And it's not even like in liquid where you have confidential transactions.
In confidential transaction, hide the amount, but they don't hide the transaction graph. ECash, there is no transaction graph. So it's kind of, like, the most privacy preserving way to exchange value that we know of. And I can say this is confidence because, I mean, I have a fairly good overview over, like, what's possible. I wanna say that Lightning would be awesome as well. Like, non custodial Lightning has amazing privacy properties for at least the sender as well, but we know that running a Lightning node inside a client app is unfeasible or is very hard to pull off at least if you're not, like, focusing on specifically that. Any of the alternatives, like whether it's Spark, ARP, or Liquids that pose themselves as a lightning alternative or a way to use lightning more easily come with very poor privacy.
And that is just something that I think as signal, you wouldn't wanna make that, compromise. You would have to, like at least MobileCoin is also a privacy coin, and that is the reason why I think that they couldn't even consider putting it into signal. Obviously, it is a shitcoin that has failed. So in that regard, Cashew is great. Second of all, Cashew is is also the only one of these options that you can run yourself. Okay. You could run a smart validator, but, like, I wanna see it until, like, on I I just need to see that someone can actually run it. You cannot run your own liquid federation. You put in principle, maybe, but some parts are still not open source. So it's not the focus. No one really cares about it. No one runs a separate liquid network.
Arc, is the software is out there, but the capital requirements are so high, at least that's the projected capital requirements, that no one expects that there will be multiple arcs. There will only probably be one arc. Spark is, like, more obvious because it's, like, this well funded company that wants to provide rails for everyone. So in any of those cases, you have to kind of log in into a single company's road map provider in order to provide those rails for you. And for many applications, this might be okay. But for for Cashew, you can run this completely yourself and, or you can choose a partner that runs it for you.
So I think that's there's a big distinction there. The and third, cashier has infinite transaction speeds. It sales infinitely. Like, these, other types of, you know, l twos, if you like, they still inherit some kind of a bottleneck from the system itself. And eCash is just like the double spend ledger. You just need to make sure that the coin hasn't been spent twice, and that's everything that limits the speed. A cash transaction is as fast as the signal message travels. So, you know, you could run cache humans for millions of people using it at the same time already today. There is no research required. We've we've gone through this, like, for decades already. ECache has been around since the eighties. We know that ECache scales to many, many people.
So those points all give you, like, a big upside. The, the the one thing that Casu lacks in regard to all these old other alternatives is the unilateral exit. The unilateral exit is not provided with Cashew. You have to put trust into the mint that runs and has the Bitcoin reserves. So all the other protocols that we just mentioned, no. I should, like I correct myself. Liquid also has no unilateral exit. At least for Spark and Arc, you have unilateral exit opt ins. In principle, I haven't ever seen anyone actually doing the unilateral exit yet, but I just I'll I'll believe it because I I believe that they are truthful in their messaging. So, if you are okay with partnering with someone who's trusted enough to not run away with the funds, That is a bank, for example. It could be a financial institution.
And Cashew gives you properties that the other systems cannot give you in that regard, and I think those fit, a product like signal much better. I mean, I'm I'm bullish on Tether integrating on chain Bitcoin into into Rumble, but, you know, how many people will be able to use that? Seven transactions per second. It's not like this can scale into any meaningful volume. It's great to have you My understanding
[01:20:57] ODELL:
my understanding, just for some context, is that they did on chain first because it's ease much easier to implement. And then my goal their goal their plan is to use Spark to integrate Lightning. At least that's that's my understanding. Obviously, it's not out yet.
[01:21:16] Calle:
That's cool.
[01:21:21] ODELL:
Yeah. That's interesting. I think that's, I mean, that's a compelling argument. Like, if if if the main goal is private transactions, then it makes sense because Signal is, a privacy focused app, right, with privacy focused users, and that's been their North Star since the beginning. But, also, one of the reasons that Signal has been so successful is, that they make sane default choices for their users, and they are still relatively convenient to use and good UX to use, and you get the the benefit of the privacy. The the thing I often talk about, on the show and elsewhere is that, you know, signal is the first, quote, unquote, privacy app that I'm able to get my 90 year old grandma to use. Right? And because it's just very user friendly, and that's through saying defaults.
So on that front, I mean, I think it was something we talked about last time we were on the show, and it's something we talk about offline all the time, is is that idea of, you know, one of the cool empowering user aspects of Cashew, is that you can choose your Mint. You can choose your infrastructure. You can use multiple Mints. But that also adds a level of friction, in terms of users having to choose which Mint they might want to use, which infrastructure they want to use. If you were in a room with, you know, one of the project managers at Signal and they were actually thinking about implementing this, what would be your candid suggestion on how they handle the mint selection process for the user?
[01:23:01] Calle:
Well, I think, like, this is this is something, yeah, we talk about a lot, the two of us. And I think it's a strength and a complication at the same time. The strength is it gives you freedom, power, as, like, there are many wallets out there, cashier wallets, that will not make the choice for you. But some of them will help you to make, an informed choice. We can talk about that. It's something that I've just recently also added to cashier. Me. But there are also ones who make the decision for you, who have a default, and you don't even need to know what a Mint is. You don't need to click anything. You don't need to make any decision. So I think from a product standpoint again, like, I wanna know, error error reply, how do you say, sub tweet Steve leave here.
If you have an entity that runs a mint, then the there is no choice to make. It's just that one mint. So as a signal in in if I put myself into the shoes of shit signal, the way to to build this, I think, in the best possible way would be find a financial institution that wants to run this for you, like, just for you. They will figure out, you know, what the what the regulatory framework is. And this is not something that is impossible. We have seen multiple companies already, you know, set out onto the path, and we we see, like, companies like Spark and Arc and so on being able to provide infrastructure. We'll find a financial institution that will run a mint for you and just use that mint. You're done. That's it.
[01:24:35] ODELL:
So you would default all signal users into that mint?
[01:24:39] Calle:
Yes. That's what I would probably do. That would be the easiest way where you don't have to explain anything to anyone, and you can also do it with fiat as well. So it doesn't need to be just Bitcoin. You could offer the same exact experience for credit card payments into signal and then, like, bank transactions out of signal or something like that. So you can expand this also across multiple currencies if you like. And just because Cashew is not tied to, like, the Bitcoin protocol itself, it offers you the same exact properties for all currencies that you want to support, basically.
So you can build the same thing inside signal also for US dollars if you like. Find a financial institution that will run the mint, that will take care of the reserves, you know, takes, you know, gets takes money in and sends money out, and you just use that integrated into your app, and your users never have to make a decision, and it just scales infinitely.
[01:25:32] ODELL:
Would you if you were in charge of this rollout, would you give the users the ability to change their Mint? You would default them into a Mint. Would you give them the ability to change their Mint, or would you just keep it hard coded?
[01:25:45] Calle:
No. I mean, I think, like, this rolling it out, I would you know, one of my highest priorities would be that it is kind of self evident what needs to happen to users. I like products where you require zero education for a user to actually make, you know, use the product in a good way. So I would probably roll it out with just a single mint, integrated there, and you can everyone will have a perfect user experience because it's a singular mint. And then if you want to expand this to multiple mints and allow people to use their own mint or the the mint that they choose, then you really need a system like Lightning. Then you need Bitcoin in between in order to connect all these mints. So, again, I I say this all over and over again, but the reason why Cashew is interesting today is because of Bitcoin. ECash, you know, in the nineties, eCash was supposed to run, you know, just one single one Mint that is run by a bank. But what if that other user has a different bank? Right? So now you need to make, like, a bank transaction from one mince to another. To connect these two mince, you need something that connects them on a higher level financial rail.
And for us, that's just Lightning. And the reason why Cashew just works so well is because lightning is super fast. And so that since there is nothing comparable really in the Fiat world, I think, you know, that voice wasn't really made. You know, people didn't think of building, constructing, like, an architecture of many different means that can talk to each other. Whereas, right now, in Bitcoin, we can just do it with Lightning. So, yes, if you, you know, you would have to integrate Lightning as well to make it useful for, for for users that choose different names, I would say.
But I think, still, the best experience would be one singular financial service provider for for signal, and you peg in using either lightning or on chain or even, like, a credit card or Apple Pay or Google Pay. You peg in using many different payment methods, then you have eCash, and you transact with eCash on signal. And that's it. And then you take out using any of those, rails again.
[01:28:05] ODELL:
You'd be able to offer, you know, the most reliability and the easiest use to users. That would make sense to me. I mean, I I think there's even an argument that, you know, maybe there's a legal exposure argument to why they wouldn't want to do it or a or a lack of focus argument of why they wouldn't want to do it. But, if signal got a little bit more involved in that aspect, you know, maybe they do partner with a financial institution, but they could presumably take in, you know, an ethical user aligned fee alongside that. And then all of a sudden, you have a sustainable funding mechanism that's not just donations for the signal project.
That could be really interesting. I I think, you know, to me, always the holy grail has been, you know, sustainable, you know, profit driven funding for scalable open source projects. And this would be a very easy place for them to, you know, take a couple, you know, basis points off of every transaction. You know? A small less than a percent small transaction fee that would still compete with everybody else and would be privacy preserving.
[01:29:17] Calle:
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, the privacy preserving part is really the most important part. But, concerning the fees, I think this is something that is universal. Right? Someone you know, anyone providing any kind of infrastructure will want to be compensated at the end of the day. And the only thing you could even argue, I just I was about to say, like, the only thing where you can be sure that you don't pay fees to anyone is to use Bitcoin in a fully noncustodial way where you don't interact with with a third party, not even a trusted third party. Even if it's an untrusted third party, like, for example, with ARC, then you you still will have to pay transaction fees because running an ARC server is super, expensive. So someone will have to earn money by running that. But I I just said, like, I was about to say because then I noticed that even Bitcoin itself requires transaction fees, obviously, because someone is mining. And some like, the miners won't do their job for free. So at the end of the day, anything that is useful has to have transaction fees.
The question then becomes, what is more efficient? You know, what can keep the fees low enough that many people use it because it's super efficient or not. And some things are more efficient, other things are less efficient. I think that's where the competition then kicks in.
[01:30:32] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, that'd be from a user point of view, it would just be awesome. I could send I could send Bitcoin to my signal contacts. They could receive it in dollars. They could receive it in euros. I could send them euros. They could receive it in Bitcoin. I could send them dollars. They could receive it in euros, and it could all just be handled using Cashew and a single mint. Get their regulatory shouldn't order. Maybe they, you know, implement some kind of limits if they if they need to based on regulatory reasons. But, let's be honest. I I think the majority of commerce that's happening on something like Venmo is, you know, sub a couple $100, and and you could get that done relatively easily. And then maybe you you push it from there. I mean, one of the things that I thought was fascinating about the last few years of politics is how many times has it you know, we've seen chat control and all these, you know, pushes against encrypted messaging.
But the amount of times we've seen, world leaders or incredibly influential rich people that are in signal groups using signal chats. Right? There's there's there's a there's a cultural victory brand wise that has been won by signal that most open source projects do not have and could only dream of having. And they can flex that a little bit. They can push it. I mean, we we see, like, the department of I guess, it's war now. Like, the department of war talking about, ongoing strikes in other countries from America, and it's in a signal group chat. Right? So there's there's a brand leverage they have, that most open source projects could only dream of, and they could push they could push the boundaries a bit on the regulatory side if they wanted to.
It's just an interesting it's an interesting thought process to think about.
[01:32:21] Calle:
I just wanna, you know, just clarify again. It's, like, our main focus is not to compete with any of the, like, Bitcoin layer protocols that we've just mentioned. I think, like, they are amazing, and we are using them in Casio. Like, we don't want them to be to go away. On the contrary, like, I want ArcSpark Liquid to be successful so we can actually use it in sig in in Cashew, what what we're which we're doing already. What I think about what we think about when we talk about Cashew is the millions and millions of people using Venmo, Cash App, bank accounts, PayPal, Wallet of Satoshi.
There are so many custodial users out there and with zero privacy. So you get like, even if the privacy of Spark is kinda bad, it's still much, much, much better than any of these financial institutions can offer because you don't need an account. You can just start using it. It's kind of like, I wouldn't say a permissionless system, but it's, you know, no registration. You just, like, use it. That's that's how how it works with Bitcoin itself. Right? So I see Cashew in general, like, eCash itself as a way to offer similar properties and even better privacy for all these use cases where you do have a financial institution involved.
And, there is, like, there's enough to fix there. There's there there are many, many people who would be you know, where their lives would improve if their legacy financial transactions would would also would also have, level of privacy that is, you know, adequate or comparable to the level of privacy that we already enjoy for messaging. So for messaging, the work that has been done in order for signal to be where it is right now, that's, like, decades of work of education and and activism that has brought us to the point where we are right now. Now we can see like, we see politicians using signal, talking about their war plans, or you talking about your your mother, being able to use signal so she can be, like, see the pictures of your kids, receive the pictures of of her kids. Like, that's that's the most human way of expressing why we need privacy.
And at this point, it's kind of accepted. We've due to this incredible work that activists and educators have done for decades, now we can talk about messaging privacy in a human way and not in a, like well well, the the terrorists, they would they would then, you know, send messages, and, you know, bad people would use privacy preserving methods and so on. Like, that is what the discussion was a couple decades ago. Whereas right now, we've seen a normalization of messaging privacy due to this relentless work. And I think the work this you know, the amount of work that we need to do for for financial privacy is still you know, it's a it's a very big amount of work that we still need to do. We're still at the beginning of this whole conversation where financial privacy is seen primarily as something that would only be people who who has who have bad intentions would wanna wanna have.
You know, the the exact like, even the the law says the exact opposite. So in in The United States where financial privacy is part of your human rights. It is like when you move money, you should also be able to enjoy the same level of privacy that you have have had for for for centuries already when we were using cash. We just completely lost that idea somewhere along the way and got used to the fact that we're completely traceable and transparent. And, like, the vast majority of users use systems where they have zero privacy. It's not on chain Bitcoin. It's not Lightning. It's not Spark. But it's these huge financial institutions that have completely departed from the concept of providing basic levels of privacy for basic levels of human rights.
And, that's what we're trying to fix. I hope I hope that we will achieve that because, you know, if you zoom out a bit and you look at around what's around the entire Bitcoin space, it's pretty bleak. And there's there's so much to fix. So that's what we're trying to do.
[01:36:59] ODELL:
Incredibly well said as always. But we officially passed the hour and a half mark. I wanna be very conscious of your time. So I think we should wrap. But before we wrap, in terms of financial privacy and blockchains, I mean, there's been a lot of hype and excitement, particularly in in Bitcoin land, but also among, you know, tech bros and very influential people about Zcash. And I'm curious. I've I mean, I'm not that curious of your opinion, but I think the freaks might be curious of your opinion on Zcash and how you think about that current hype cycle that's going on over there, versus something like Cashew on Bitcoin.
[01:37:50] Calle:
So, I mean, do you know this this meme where it says, like, I don't even think about you? Yeah. The madman meme. I love that meme. That that's kind of my take. Like, I I don't know. I've seen these things come and go. It's obviously a coordinated psyop to pump a shitcoin. Everyone suddenly talks about the same thing. We've I've seen this more than once. Like, I really don't care about Zcash. I really don't care about any Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is you know, that's the main focus. The main focus is fix the money, fix the world, and then improve the rest of the world using Bitcoin. That is the most likely scenario that I can see. Everything else is just a pure disreactions.
I I really as much as I respect the methodology, the academics, the cryptographers, the developers working on these projects, I really do think that they are valuable and their work is, you know, is is is good by itself. I think the project that they focus on is just a waste of time. So as long if anyone is listening, you should, like, you know, think about your life choices, step back, and look at what you're putting your energy into. You should put your focus on to Bitcoin because, like, that's that's what's going to win. And all these, you know, pumps and dumps are just, like, temporary noise in my opinion. So I really couldn't care less. So, if you're interested in privacy, check out Casio, and, you should only focus on Bitcoin. Everything else is, is probably a scam.
But, yeah, if you wanna check out Cashew, by the way, you know, before we close here, I wanna plug something else, which is not November. It is a we still have, like, a couple days left in November. I don't know when this podcast will come out, but I'll release it today. That's awesome. So you still have, like, almost a week to join our month long hackathon that we've been running for already couple weeks. You can check it out on notnovember.org. And we are we welcome anyone who's you know, people who haven't called it yet, people who wanna do everything with AI, or people who just wanna do, you know, raw dog it and code the old fashioned way. If you wanna build anything using Cashew, check out that hackathon. We have a bunch of prizes that people have, contributed to, and you can send in your your, project and hopefully win.
We're doing this to increase the number of Bitcoin devs. So if you wanna support us as well, you can also leave a donation for the prize pool, and we're going to distribute 100% to the to the hackathon products. Check it out on nutnovember.org.
[01:40:33] ODELL:
Nutnovember.org. I'll put that on the show notes as well. On the BitChat side, if people wanna contribute to BitChat, what's the best way for them to get involved?
[01:40:43] Calle:
Yeah. BitChats, the best way to get involved is on GitHub right now. We don't have, like, any community events or anything like that, yet, might come, but, we have a bunch of issues open. Lots of people having, you know, eyes on BitChat. So if you wanna if you're a Kotlin dev and you wanna help me with Android, check out, permissionless tech slash BitChat dash Android. That's on GitHub. And if you're an iOS dev, then it's permissionless tech slash BitChat. We have our GitHub repost, lots of issues open. We welcome contributions from others. So just get involved, start coding. The best way to get involved is to just start doing things. If you wanna be, you know, if you wanna be recognized and separate yourself from the noise out there, then you just need to sit down and code. It's just like there's only one single way. Like, people ask me all the time, how do I get started? Where should I do? Like, just start doing. Like, even, you know, ruminating that question is a waste of time. You have I'm sure there are projects that you like out there in the Bitcoin space or somewhere, some project that you use.
Go to their GitHub, check out their issues, and start coding. If you wanna get recognition and be part of a team and build with that team, the best way to get started is to ship all requests. That's what makes people aware of your existence. It's not like, one day, I'll start looking into blah blah blah blah blah. You're no. Stop talking. Just start coding. It's the best way to get involved. It's the best way you can contribute to things happening. And literally, coding is magic. If you wanna be as close as possible to being a magician in the twenty first century is to write code. You can transform your ideas into the movements of electrons using code. This is, like, the the most agency that you can feel in today's world is maybe, like, Odell will will say, start a family. You can also start a family. Okay. Do that. Right? You can do, be a very, you know, purposeful in your in your, microcosm.
But if you wanna change the world in today's twenty first century, the best way to do that is to become a programmer. You don't need to protest. You don't need to go into, like, a political campaign, convince people of your ideas. No. You sit down, you write code, you publish it, and you just keep doing that, and you will have an impact. This is the best way of getting involved today. And, in the Bitcoin space, we need you the most. Like, we desperately need people like you who will, you know, put their giant pipe job aside for a couple of hours a week and and contribute to a humanity level project that is Bitcoin that only survives because people make that decision.
It's only those people who make the decision who drives this project forward. Sit down, go to GitHub, find a project you like, read the issues, and open pull requests. Talk to the people, say, hi. I exist. I wanna help. How can I help? Write code and submit it to repos? This is the way. This is how I started. This is how everyone I know who works on Casio today started is by being interested in it, getting involved, and you can do it. Love it.
[01:44:01] ODELL:
You can have babies at the same time too.
[01:44:04] Calle:
Oh, you can also have babies. Yeah.
[01:44:08] ODELL:
I, this is awesome. Last time, I had last time I had you on the show, BitChat wasn't on the official Android Play Store. Now it is. So you can just search BitChat in your favorite app store, whether that's iOS or Android. The main domain is bitchat.free. What's the main domain for Casagio? What's the best domain for people to go to for Casagio stuff? That is casagio.space,
[01:44:36] Calle:
cashu.space.
[01:44:39] ODELL:
There you go. Cashu.space. I'll put all these links in the show notes. Awesome.
[01:44:47] Calle:
Should we do this again in six months? Great conversation. Serve in six months. Yeah. Definitely. That would be enough to fill out. I'm sure.
[01:44:54] ODELL:
We always have more to talk about than time allows. I mean, we could go for hours and hours and hours. It's the best. This has been great. It is now pouring over here by me. Starting to storm real hard. Freaks, American freaks, happy Thanksgiving. I got family in town. I'm sure you have family in town. Preach a good word of Freedom Tech to them.
[01:45:19] Calle:
Don't forget to like and subscribe and send some zaps. Odell really, really, really deserve this. Like, I just wanted, like, Odell, you're like a you're a fucking legend. Like, you're the the best fit corner I know probably. Like, I just wanna give a huge shout out to everything you're doing. I think, like, you're a bit, in you know, you've you've walked a bit off the big stage and doing your thing now, but you're still, like, massively impactful. I just wanna say thank you for everything you're doing. Your work with OpenSets is immense.
Don't think that most people recognize how much, like, you have done with OpenSets. You have done how much you've done for Bitcoin and Noster. It's incredible. The amount of work that you're putting out there is crazy. So the least you can do, Freaks, is to send a big fat Zap as a form of recognition to sort of dispatch. Like and subscribe to show. If you're on YouTube, leave a comment. If you're on Spotify, it really helps if you leave a comment. Boost the engagement. Pump this show up into the charts, and you just send send a nice message to Adel. He's he's really doing Satoshi's work.
So thank you.
[01:46:31] ODELL:
Thank you, sir. Means a lot coming from you. I treasure our friendship, and, I appreciate all the work you do. Freaks, all the relevant links are still at dispatch.com. No stats are precious. Sharing it with your friends and family goes a long way. So while you're preaching the good word of Freedom Tech this this week, consider sharing dispatch with them. Ali, pleasure as always.
[01:46:58] Calle:
As always, thank you for having me. I'll see you around, man.
[01:47:01] ODELL:
Freaks. Love you all. Stay humble, StackSats. Peace.
[01:47:05] Calle:
Peace.
Happy Bitcoin Monday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Citadel dispatch. The show focused on actionable Bitcoin and freedom tech discussion. As always, dispatch is brought to you without ads or sponsors. It is supported purely by Bitcoin donations by viewers like you. You can find all relevant links at ciddledispatch.com. The two easiest ways to support the show is through your favorite Nostra app. I like primal. You can just download it in your favorite app store. The largest app from the last episode with NVK was rider die freak Mav 21. He sent 10,000 sats. He said great rip.
The second easiest way to support the show is through podcasting two point o apps like fountain podcasts. The highest zap there was from Chris with 20, 2,345 sets. He said, love all the talk of future cold card features in this episode, but the one I want the most is still missing from the list. The ability to take sport a secure note which has been encrypted with deterministic entropy So it can be decrypted on any cold card with the same seed and passphrase. This would be huge for inheritance planning. I will make sure Enrique sees your message, Chris. As always, freaks, thanks for supporting the show.
Share with your friends and family. It really does go a long way. Dispatch is available in all your favorite podcast apps. With all that said, I have a great show planned. Today, we have rider die freak, return guest, absolute legend, Cali here I've Cashew and BitChat and Nostra AI fame. How's it going, Cali?
[00:01:46] Calle:
Hey, Odell. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to this conversation.
[00:01:51] ODELL:
Always a pleasure. Last time I had Cali on was episode one seventy one back in July. We made a deal to try and make these quarterly. I think we're a little bit oh, maybe we said half a year, so we're on schedule. It's been, like, six months. Yeah. I think so. Good to have you back.
[00:02:11] Calle:
Good to be back. Long time listener. I also listen to the MBK show, and I just urge every ride or die there to to zap you. I think, like, we can do better than 10 k sets this time. I hope I hope, someone out there listening to this feels inclined to open their lightning wallet now and send the big fads up to sort of dispatch.
[00:02:35] ODELL:
Cheers to that. I, I mean, dispatch now has maybe been going for four years, maybe longer than four years, trying to prove out value for value, no ads, no sponsors. And someone brought up, the other the other day on Nasr. Someone brought up, probably my my most, favorite rip, which was with Lionel Shriver of Mandibles, the author of Mandibles. And, I mean, besides enjoying her book, I enjoyed that rip because I waited till the last ten minutes to give my Bitcoin pitch in that rip. But we onboarded her with a Bitcoin wallet, an on chain self custody wallet, and she accepted Bitcoin donations afterwards.
And she received more in Bitcoin donations than the entirety of to dispatch, like, five years of dispatch. She got more in Bitcoin donations, which, you know, is a win in of if win in it of itself. But, I think she received, like, 1.2 Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin was, like, 20 k at the time. Wow. She's held this entire time. I I spoke to her about a year ago. She told me she's holding till the apocalypse. And so she's got she's got a little over a 100 k in Bitcoin.
[00:03:54] Calle:
I mean, there are there are many people out there who wanna express their gratitude. It's kind of like a hit or miss sometimes, but, obviously, lots of people have read her book also due to you. And, also, I have read her book. It's an amazing book. I can wholeheartedly recommend it to people. It's like they people wanna wanna give back when they consume, like, the work of others. And, yeah, you've done you've done so much. I mean, like, you've you've got all the recognition that you deserve, and you also deserve big fat zaps. So if there's anyone out there, take out your lightning wallet and send to the dispatch a big one. Well, that's,
[00:04:33] ODELL:
the dispatch promo is done for the day. We got enough in there. Where do you wanna start? I think, let's start with, you have a bunch of projects. Let's start with BitChat. Where do we where do we sit with BitChat? How's things going over there with, your mesh your mesh chat app that you and Dorsey have been working on together?
[00:04:55] Calle:
BitChat is going great. So BitChat is a Bluetooth mesh based messenger app that I've been working on with Jack Dorsey. He's working on the iOS app. I'm working on the Android app. We're kind of both working on protocol to be compatible with each other. And the thing that makes TheyChat special from other messengers is that you can chat with people around you without Internet. That means, the messages travels from one phone to another phone directly without touching the Internet. And, it's been going great. So we've seen lots of adoption, lots of downloads. It's truly impressive how many people are interested in BitChat itself. The Android version, like, which is the stats that I look at, has so far, I think almost 900,000 downloads, which is huge. Crazy. It's it is crazy. And I assume that the iOS app has more.
Well, at least that that's my last piece of information I got from Jack about the downloads in iOS, which is also going great. So lots of people are interested in it, and it's kind of, like, spreading the word is spreading, by itself, where where we don't really do any promotion or anything. And,
[00:06:12] ODELL:
we just tweeted it.
[00:06:14] Calle:
Yeah. And I also keep tweeting about it, but it's it's like the two of us, basically. It's nothing like we don't have any, like, campaigns or anything. The the thing is about BitChat, which we have seen in last couple months, and it's also something I talked about in BTC Amsterdam just couple weeks ago. But, what's been really fascinating to to, watch and observe is that people, by themselves, understand that it's a form of communication that, could be useful if the government shuts down the Internet or if, like, Internet outages are caused by any kind of natural disaster. So to give you a couple of examples, we've seen in recent months since the last time we talked, there have been couple of, large scale demonstrations happening all over the planet.
One of those was Nepal. And, it started, I think, with Nepal, but there were four more countries. So we've had, Nepal, Cote D'Ivoire. We had, let me see what what was it. One second. I'm pulling it up here. So we had Nepal, Indonesia, Madagascar, and Cote D'Ivoire. Both like, all these four countries had major demonstrations in recent months, and we've seen insane uptick in downloads in all of these regions, for BitChat. And, like, three or four of these demonstrations, or I should say, like, civil unrest movements, were Gen z protests.
We we're living through a year of the Gen z uprisings. And, well, in Nepal, the government decided to to ban social media, which is, kind of a stupid decision in a in a country where the median age is 25 years old. It's an insanely young country. So they've decided to they've decided to ban social media, all of it, like Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, like, the big ones. And, Gen z didn't like that so much, so they went out onto the streets. And we've seen very big download spikes in all of these countries due to the protests. So people themselves understand that, they might need a secondary form of communication in in in case the government shuts down the Internet. And that's just it's great to see because that is why we're building the tech is freedom tech for people who need it the most.
And even if the situation isn't, you know, even if the Internet still keeps working or, you know, the worst outcome doesn't happen, people know that if you download BitChat and you install it on your phone, you'll still be able to communicate in case the Internet goes down. So it's great to see that the the word is spreading despite itself. People are understanding this by themselves.
[00:09:21] ODELL:
I mean, what I thought was interesting was you said online that you can kinda see, like, where the next unrest is about to happen because of download spikes.
[00:09:33] Calle:
Yeah. I I'm not sure how much alpha I have compared to others. But at least from my vantage point, I see the download spikes first. You know, I see the spike in my Google Play Console or in the Apple Store Console, and then I go back then I go to Google and, like, enter, like, Indonesia news, and then you see, like,
[00:09:56] ODELL:
fire. And Oh, so, like, the protest is already happening. It's just how you find out about it, basically.
[00:10:02] Calle:
Yeah. I mean, I I don't know. I didn't, like, compare day to day, but I would I would assume that the news are fast enough to pick it up. It's just, like, I'm not quick enough to observe everything that's happening on the planet. For me, I first see the spike, I go to Google, and then I see the demonstrations. Be crazy. So that that this this happened four times in a couple months now, which means this is not a statistical fluke. It is happening. And then we also saw a massive download spike in Jamaica shortly before the hurricane that happened there, maybe a month ago. So in Jamaica, there's been this huge hurricane that turned off the Internet and electricity. It was there was a massive storm there.
And, people downloaded BitChat before the storm hit. So we saw this insane spike there, just before. And yeah. I mean, there were there were That's fascinating. So that was that was preemptive. That was preemptive because, I mean, you obviously can't download it anymore. The error rate is already gone. But, Bitcher jumped to number two in the app stores, both Android and iOS in Jamaica, And the first place was like a weather monitoring app. So it was kind of obvious what's happening there. And yeah. I mean, people need to communicate. This is this is a basic human need. And this is obvious for natural disasters where the Internet doesn't work anymore, then you might, like, wonder, you know, where is the next spot where I can get drinking water? You wanna ask, like, someone around you, maybe the message propagates across your neighborhood.
But it is also very interesting to see this for social movements. And I could, like, I could we could really go deep into that because I've been doing some research for my talk about that, and the history of these movements, and how communication is essential for these movements. And, yeah, this is happening without any marketing or any kind of work. We don't even explicitly say, download BitChat for, you know, in case you wanna help with your government or something. It's not it's not the messaging that we that we, put out there. It's just people understand all by themselves what these tools are useful for, what when they might be useful.
[00:12:29] ODELL:
That's always been the bull case to me for Freedom Tech was if people have the need, they'll they'll figure out, you know, they'll they'll figure out how to satisfy the need. And the key is to have the tools there available to them. But it's, like, it's a whole different yeah. It's a whole diff particularly when there's a need. Like, it's a whole different ballgame than trying to explain to Westerners, you know, why they might need something if if they don't feel they need it themselves.
[00:12:57] Calle:
Yeah. It's a bit like with Bitcoin itself. Right? We've seen this with Bitcoin many, many times. It's like you're somewhere in, I don't know, New York, Wall Street. You need to explain the suit, like, why Bitcoin, and they're like, oh, but it's not a productive asset. Blah blah blah blah blah. And then you go talk to someone in South America or in Africa, and you just explain to them, like, hey. This is money that only you can move and no one can take away from you. Done. Sold. Like, people understand immediately what the value proposition is because they live in very different circumstances. And, that is the ultimate test. The test is, you know, not, is this convenient? Will this slightly improve your standard of living or not? The test is, is tech? Will the tech be there for you, in the worst circumstances when you need it? And if so, people people understand.
[00:13:48] ODELL:
So, I think I don't I probably should've went back and listened to our last rip. But I think between then and now so you the a a key question I have for you is, so BitChat became popularized as this or at least in the early days, the first wave of hype popularized as this mesh chat app, that specifically use Bluetooth low energy to hop between phones of people that are, you know, within relatively close distance of each other. It works better in dense areas like cities or sports stadiums or concerts. But then you guys also added this ability to when the Internet is working, when you do have traditional Internet, networks, to use NAST relays for people to communicate on a much wider scale.
Yeah. I'm wondering how you think about because those are two completely different things. So, like, from, like, a UX and, like, a user like, are are users getting confused? Do they think, like, if they're using the Paris, Nostra chat room on BitChat, do they think they're using mesh? And how do you deal with that user education?
[00:15:17] Calle:
Yeah. So, yeah, since then, we've added bunch of a bunch of features that use Nostr. It's not only the what we call the geo geohash chat, which you just mentioned. We have a couple more. But, yeah, to your question, this is it is, quite challenging to explain to users what what's an offline part of the chat and what is an online part of the chat. Is, first of all, not everyone cares. So it's, something, you know, you don't wanna kind of overwhelm a user that's that is not interested in that inform in that information. But at the same time, you just wanna be clear of what the app is currently doing. That is obviously, you know, it's it's the responsible way of of building an app. So it's been it's been a challenge to make it clear to users, like, which chat is currently happening, what we call hyperlocal, that is just a mesh, versus, the geographic Internet based test. So, we have color indicators. We say everything, like, the UI is obvious and is clear about that, But many people just don't really, you know, read the fine print and then sometimes make wrong assumptions about, you know, that I I've seen people who say, like, how is it possible that I'm talking to all of all of France right now by using Bluetooth? That's, like, it's clearly a scam. I mean, it's, like, it's not a scam. They just, like, you just probably didn't read the manual right.
But There's also a
[00:16:49] ODELL:
it's a bigger thing than that too. Right? Because it's I mean, I, there could be there could be if you're in, like, the Nepal chatroom, I I could be in America and still be in the Nepal chatroom. Right? So it's like you're not even talking to just French people in the France chat. Right? It's just like France is the topic. Like, it's almost like you think you should think of it like a subreddit. Right? It's like r slash France?
[00:17:16] Calle:
That's right. So I'll so what we focus on is location. Right? So, location meaning you you wanna talk to people close to you. That's where the whole idea of pitch head starts because that's limited through the range of your mesh. So what we added is, a way to extend your range using Nosler. And No Sur has been the best choice so far for that because everyone can just plug in, you know, plug into No Sur. You can just, you know, build an app that uses Internet based communication without having to really talk to anyone. You can just build on on NoStar without having to set up servers yourself or talk to relay operators.
And we've come up with a pretty cool, method of doing so. However, like, the feature that the user sees is you have a mesh chat to talk to everyone who's close to you, and then you can zoom out. You can zoom out from, like, your immediate surrounding to your block that increases the radius to, let's say, a couple 100 meters. And then you can talk to everyone who's dialed in into that chat for the block, and you can zoom out further and talk to everyone in your city and then zoom out further in your region and even the whole continent. So we're like we have several Zoom levels for chat, and you can go super small or super large. So there are couple of cool features there, that that I wanna I wanna dissect. First of all no, sir. It's it's beautiful that you can build, like, a permissionless chat on top of this existing platform, just as WeChat developers who can just hook into it and and start using it. Second of all, we've come up with a very cool way to make, actually, make the use of Nostra very decentralized. And, I mean, maybe it's probably it's not too bold to say that we might be the most decentralized Nostra app so far because we have a very unique way of using Nostra relays.
I've built nozzle wraps myself many many so far, like, maybe a dozen different nostraps I've built myself. And with nostra, you have this, this decision to make as a as a developer, which Noster relays will I ship with my clients? Like, no. And if you wanna talk to me over Noster whether there's, like, a kind one client, like, primal, like, well, primal actually doesn't qualify. But, all the cool all the times where you could actually set your relays. If you wanna if you wanna, you know, communicate to someone, then you need to You can set your relays in primal, to be clear. Okay. Alright. And then I need to, you know, take that back because at, I I I thought that you you're just blasting it with primal client, and they blast it to others.
[00:19:59] ODELL:
No. No. Send send goes directly to relays, and you can choose your relays. And by default, primal picks. We have, the primal relay is is on by default, but then we randomize the other relays that get chosen when you create a new account, to try and distribute it a bit. And but on on the read side, you're reading from the caching server. So you're reading from a separate server, not
[00:20:25] Calle:
not relay servers. Yeah. I mean, and that that it makes sense. And that's that's where I'm trying to get to is that, you know, as the client developer, you need to make sure that your users pair at least one relay. Otherwise, they cannot talk to each other. It's very simple concept. Right? So, Primal does that by basically hosting the best relay, and everyone wants to talk to the Primal Relay. Right? So every single NOS app that I've built so far includes Primal as a default relay as well because I know that everyone basically, everyone is on the Primal Relay.
So, that's cool. It works as long as Primal is there, and, it's not the most decentralized way of using Nostra, but it's a way of using Nasr. For BitChat, however, we have come up with a super unique way of making use of the almost, let me see. I think we have around index around, well, 300 different three days or so that you can use in the BitChat app. And the way we do it is unique because, we use it for geohash chats. And geohash means you have a location, associated with the chat room that you wanna talk to. And with that location, you can actually make a an educated choice for the relays that you wanna use. So what we have done, we have a we have a GitHub pipeline that does this every twenty four hours automated, goes through a huge list of relays. It it crawls relays, so it it assembles a long list of relays through, NoStar itself. So it's kind of seeded with a couple of relays and then builds this huge list of relays every twenty four hours. Then we look at the IP addresses of these relays, and we map them to locations.
You you cannot, like, be extremely precise of where that relay is located, and often it's just like an IP address that points to a data center. But it gives you it gives you a rough idea of the country that this relay is located in, maybe even, like, the region or city that the relay is located in. So what we end up with is a long list of relays, 300 relays associated with their IP address and their GPS locations. So we have this location list. And then now when you go into BitChat and you wanna talk to people in Nepal, let's say, or you're in Nepal and you go into Nepalese GeoHatchat, What the app does is it downloads this this list of relays, these 300 relays, and then chooses the five closest relays to your location that it connects to and uses those relays to talk to others. And it this solves, like, this problem of having to share at least one relay with the people that you wanna talk to because the mapping from your location to the relay list is deterministic. So the the other guy who's also talking in the same chat, in the Nepalese chat, also chooses probably the five same relays as you do. And as long as one of them is the same, you can actually talk to each other. And that way, we can basically make sure that we use the a very large set of relays, 300 in total.
And that even, like, if some of the relays go down and then come back up and so on, we don't have to maintain this list for the others. And, most importantly, the users don't need to make a choice. Like, we don't have a we don't even have a setting where you can set the relay in BitChat because users don't know what a relay is. They shouldn't have to learn this. We just want to make the best decision for them, and it works really, really well. So I think this is a unique way of using Nostril Relay so far. I haven't at least, I haven't seen anyone doing the same thing so far. Well, I mean, I love that. I think it's a great concept and execution.
[00:24:04] ODELL:
I mean, also, BitChat's a bit unique among Nasr apps because it's ephemeral by default as well. So you don't have a, like, a fixed Napster identity. So every time you load up the app, whatever, you know, purpose you're using it for, then sane defaults can be chosen by, the app itself rather than the users, which makes sense to me. Have you given any thought to the fact well, let's use a protest. Right? Like, there's a if there's a protest in Nepal, and specifically, it's a protest around Internet censorship and social media censorship or whatnot. Wouldn't servers you know, relays are are interoperable servers. That's what relays are. But wouldn't, like, relays located in that region be easier to censor than, you know, something that's like, a relay that's hosted in California?
[00:24:57] Calle:
Yeah. Probably so. However, I mean, first of all, there are not many relays in Nepal. So you're not using Nepalese relays anyway, but that's just, like, the fact that relays are sparsely distributed across the planet. So even if you use BitChat in Nepal, you're going to use relays across the wider, you know, Asian, region. So in that sense, I don't think that the Nepalese government could do anything about it. They could obviously block these relays through IP blocks, but, we are updating the list every twenty four hours. So it should be possible to kind of circumvent any kind of block by updating that list every now and then.
But I should say, like, currently, the list is shipped within the app, so it's hard coded in the app, but the app also fetches the latest list every day from, GitHub. So we have a centralized place where we store this list, and that is also a potential choke point. So if if Nepal decided to turn off GitHub, for example, then you you wouldn't be able to get the latest list. There might be ways to make this more robust, you know, distribute the list itself over Noster, for example. But, you know, we haven't seen the the the need for that yet. I think there are still ways to make it a bit more robust.
[00:26:13] ODELL:
But it is not theoretical. I would still use the local
[00:26:16] Calle:
whatever the local list was if it didn't if it can get an update. If there is exactly. If there is no, you know, if get get up is down or something, you still have the the list that was supplied with the net with the latest app update. So it's it's inside the app.
[00:26:32] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I mean, like, Nepal is an is is maybe not the best example. But if you have, like, someone like India that has a bit more powerful influential government, but also not like a US level, you know, like US, Russia, China, Israel level kind of adversary. I just think they might have, you know, they have stronger relationships with their, quote, unquote, regional partners than they do with in terms of, like, mutual censorship than they might have from someone that's located outside. But I guess you can also deal with that more on an ad hoc basis. Yeah. Yeah. And, also, I've The Nasr piece isn't supposed to be the as censorship resistant as the Bluetooth hyperlocal mesh. Right?
[00:27:22] Calle:
Yeah. That's just what I what I wanted to say. So the I mean, the Nostra chat is is amazing, and you can see lots of activity there. But I also wanna like, our main focus is the mesh. We wanna we wanna contribute to building out a dedicated separate infrastructure network that is based on, like, built on this mesh. So we have a bunch of features that are built on Nasr. And the reason why we use Nasr again is because it's, decentralized, permissionless. Everyone can just build on it. However, it's not the main focus of the app. So we, the the you could even say, like, the Nostril features that we have are, ways to make the app more sticky. So anything that that makes people open the app more is good for us because that means that the mesh will be supported. And that's our ultimate goal, is to improve the mesh.
And because they need to have the app open to relay messages. That's right. At least for iOS, you need to kind of have it open in front of you, and you can close it into the like, you can put it in the background. It still keeps working on iOS and on Android, but you need to, like, at least have it opened once without closing it, after your last reboot. But, yeah, we're also working on on the mesh side where we have some really cool updates in the pipeline there. So, the things we've just added recently was file transfers and image transfers. So you can also now, share voice notes and images and even files using the Bluetooth mesh, which can be useful because many people just use communication just via voice voice chat, so they wanna be able to to speak into the into the microphone. Everyone else in your vicinity will then receive this this, you know, speech message.
And, we're also improving, like, making the mesh more advanced in a sense that we're adding source routing now, similar to how Tor works. So currently, if you do if you send a DM if I send you a DM in the mesh, currently, it's like a broadcast. I will send the DM to anyone hoping that all of these people, some of them are connected to you or at least they are connected a couple of hops down the line with you. So it's a flood system where many, many people get the message that who are not really interested in it. So if I have a DM, a more efficient way of getting that message to you is, would be using kind of a routing method. And what we've implemented is something similar to how TOR works or the space protocol works, where we take the message and then we, find the route through the mesh, starting from me ending up at you, and then we hand over that packet down the the predetermined route so that DMs can reach your destination much more efficiently. That is great because it reduces the stress on the system by, like, many orders of magnitude or direct messages, especially if you have larger payloads with, like, files and and and audio and whatnot.
And, and what I'm currently working on, and this is, like, we you know, this is still in-depth. It already works, but it's not released yet is for Android. We have a working version for Wi Fi aware. That is a Wi Fi based mesh mechanism that you can use on Android. You know, considerably increases the range for the mesh, where you can you can do a peer to peer connection between two Android multiple Android devices using the Wi Fi chip without having to, like, manually connect to them. So it's kind of complement the Bluetooth as well, both run side by side.
We still struggle a bit with the compatibility between iOS and Android because there is, like, some Apple shenanigans going on there, but, the EU regulations might force them to actually become, cross compatible. We'll we'll see. So there's Wi Fi based NAS in the pipeline. And what I'm How much bigger range is that? Well, the Wi Fi chip is way stronger than the Bluetooth chip. I haven't tested it myself. Is it, like, a five x range improvement, 10 x? Like Hard to say. I haven't tried, so I don't wanna say a number. I I haven't tried. Just like but you have your from your own experience, how strong Wi Fi is to to you need to extrapolate from there. It's it's going to be much better and going it's going to penetrate, like, walls and stuff like that much better.
So Wi Fi aware and that's it's cool because you can, like, you can just upgrade all the Androids, and it still improves the iOS devices as well because the Androids also still work on Bluetooth. So can, like, get the message from, iOS to Android via Bluetooth and then from Android to Android via Wi Fi. And, like, this still helps the iOS device communicate further. Yeah. And what I'm looking forward to the most right now, and that's been something that I've been spending, like, most time testing and QA QA testing, this is, the background activity for Android.
In Android, you can do, you know, really cool tricks to make the app extremely sticky in the background. That means, for Android, soon you'll be able to start the app. And even if you close the app, it will still run-in the background as a note, as a kind of a relay for all the other BitChat devices around you. That means you just start it once. And as long as you don't manually close it, like, you'll be able to to change this in the settings, obviously, it will just keep running, and that's gonna boost, the mesh capabilities by a lot. It also means that you can run around with the device in your pocket.
And if someone's close to you, they'll be able to see that, hey. Now there is someone with the chat around me, and they'll be able able to talk to you without really using lots of your batteries. So you just, like, keep keep running this in background. And it reminds me a bit of, Satoshi. If you read the emails between Marti Momi and Satoshi, where, they're discussing, you know, this is, like, Bitcoin zero point whatever. It's like, even the first even before the first real release or just quickly after the shortly after the first release, Marti Maomi and Satoshi are discussing whether they should port it, to to Linux.
And Satoshi says, well, Linux is cool, but that's low priority right now. Let's first make sure that if you close Bitcoin, the client, that minimizes into tray in Windows. Like, you know, you if you close it, it still keeps running in the background because that's what that's what's going to increase the note count by, like, 300%. Whereas, you know, if porting it to Windows maybe by 5% or so, that's what he says in the email. So I think we're we're about to play the same trick for BitChat, by making sure that the app just keeps running in the background as long as you don't close it explicitly.
[00:34:08] ODELL:
Yeah. That makes sense to me. And just prioritizing accordingly. Although, that all sounds awesome. I mean, so you are part of, like, a a five man nonprofit engineering team called and other stuff, with Jack, Rabble, Alex, and Jeff. That's right. And and probably the most famous project that has, you know, come out of it, which didn't really because I guess Jack kinda just vibe coded on the side was his big chat. They've recently made news waves on Rabel's focus of a vine reboot. But the other piece the the other project that has been getting at least within our community has been getting a decent amount of press, but not in the wider community, not like Devine and BitChat, is white noise, which is a Nostra based, signal alternative. So encrypted messaging.
There's I mean, at the surface, there's a lot of overlap on use case with something like BigChat. Do you guys talk internally about how to think about each project and, like, how do are they complementary to each other? That is it one is gonna end up with more users? Like, how do you think about that?
[00:35:40] Calle:
Yeah. Absolutely. We we we're in close close contact. We talk about these things regularly. And, so I mean, in a sense, like, I I'm a big fan of white noise, and I think something like white noise is needed and necessary. So I'm I'm a big bull very bullish on it. The use cases, however, are fairly different in my mind. So I I don't see, like it could be complimentary, but the utility of white noise is being able to securely chat to anyone everywhere. Right? We know the use case of signal. That's what it's supposed to replace. You can add someone as a contact and keep talking to to them, independent of where where you are. The use case of BitChat is, like, completely different in that sense. Like, we have also noise based communication, but it's very primitive noise based communication compared to white noise.
Our use case for BitChat is more who is around you right now, and you don't know these people yet, but you still wanna talk to them. So I've been in a conference recently giving a talk, and people were discussing my talk while I was giving the talk. So someone sent me a screenshot of, like, a 120 people or so in the BitChat mesh at that moment discussing what's happening on stage. This is something, you know, you don't need to connect with them. You don't need to talk to them. You just you you just directly connected to anyone close to you. So in that sense, really, you know, the overlap is limited.
However, I I wanna say, like, what white noise is doing, is, like, the the approach that Jeff and his team, have taken in building white noise is very smart in that they, first, they, formulated as a protocol. So there's the, I think, the NIPXX improvement protocol, proposal that describes how White Noise works, but they're also working on the Marmot library. So this is gonna be kind of a for TypeScript and Rust, a module that you can just pull into your own project and make use of this double ratchet encryption algorithm that they have ported onto Noister. So that means even us using, you know, Noister for communication on BitChat, we could make use of the white noise libraries eventually when they are, you know, ready in order to, provide, like, even better encryption than what we're doing right now. Right now, we're using NIP 17 encryption for, bit chat messages.
And, you know, if white noise is there, we'll just we'll just, use that. So but this is the general theme of for, what we're doing with end other stuff. We're kind of using each other's results to improve all these products that we're working on because the overall goal was always to move into the same direction in synchrony and build no experiences and products that are more, you know, coherent, basically. So the Vine itself, for example, is going to implement Casu. White noise also is probably also implement Casu because we're working on Casu closely together. BitChat will implement, white noise libraries to make communication more useful. Hell, even with Cashew wallets can make use of, white noise libraries in, you know, in cases where you wanna send eCash over Nostra, for example.
So there's there's lots of synergies in that sense in that group, and all due to the fact that we constantly talk to each other and try to support each other by making, you know, sure that everyone builds the best software possible. And we can create, like, a cohesive Nostra experience together. Because that's what Nostra was lacking for way too long before, so that everyone is doing their own thing. And it's, like, beautiful and amazing things are being produced on roster, but it felt like, you know, we're we're expanding in multiple directions at the same time. Whereas for AOS, for and other stuff, we're kind of trying to make a group and then move together in one direction. And I think, you know, the things that we've been currently building show that we're doing pretty well so far.
[00:39:43] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, the, like, the true power of open protocols is is, you know, the compounding interoperability, which we've we've, we've seen at scale with Bitcoin. It's yet to be seen with Nasr. It's, like, very early days. But would you agree with me that, like, so, like, I see like, if I would distill what you said about, at least right now, the differences between something like BigChat and White Noise is is BigChat is focused more on ephemeral communication. So, like, on demand, no fixed identity kind of communication and probably even more focused on, like, group ephemeral communication, while white noise is more focused on, fixed identity, one to one communication. Obviously, they wanna add groups too. I think they already support them at least in a early stage.
But it's it's it's more similar to, like, a Telegram or, like, a signal in terms of competition. But would you not agree that, like to me, like, the holy grail is, like, an app that gives me the white noise functionality, but then also can communicate via mesh if the Internet's down and can do location groups and can do a femoral stuff. We can also do fixed identity stuff. Like, this all becomes one app. Right? At some point I mean, they're both open protocols. At one point, at some point, there there's gonna be one app that has all the functionality. No?
[00:41:18] Calle:
I I would like to see that. It's just, like, you know, from a product perspective, you just wanna be clear about why you're doing what so that you can attract those universe who are interested in that specific thing. So this is a process that should be taken step by step in that sense. However, you know, I agree with everything that you said with the focus that each individual project is taking on. However, like, to make the contrast more clear about how I see BitChat and White Noise is for me, White Noise is a communication protocol that is that uses NoSri as the transport.
Whereas, BitChat, in my view, is a new transport. It's a new type of infrastructure that we're trying to build with the mesh. And it's kind of like comparing the the cables that provide your Internet. Right? So the the with the application that you're using on the Internet. So BitChat is like the cables where we're laying out new infrastructure rails in order to send messages on to, on top of, whereas white noise is a way to make sure that these messages are correctly encrypted and secure. So you could imagine a future where we use the white noise protocol in BitChat because BitChat can provide the rails to transport these packets, the white noise packets on top of instead of using the Internet. So in that sense, there could be more ways to find complimentary ways of making use of each other. I'll give you another example.
Currently, like, we're working on Cashew, and most, you know, most Cashew apps use just pure normal Internet to talk to each other and to to mince. And, if you wanna send eCash from one person to another, currently, the, you know, many the the most popular way is to scan a QR code from one phone to another. That means you're using a transport that is kind of the QR code hardware lights to camera. So that, you know, you're not using the Internet. You're not using the mesh either. However, you could use the mesh to send the the cache token as well. And that's what we've been, you know, demoing also with integrating Casio into BitChat is BitChat can provide the mesh underlying mesh infrastructure to send all sorts of data around, and this data can be, normal messages. It could be white noise messages, but it also can be eCash.
And so you can use BitChat to make payments as well. That's how I see it at least.
[00:43:48] ODELL:
Well, I mean, the cool part of both the Cashew protocol and the Nasr protocol in my well, one of the cool parts in my opinion is that they're both transport transport neutral protocols. Right? I mean, we could you can send a Noster note via carrier pigeon if you wanted to. It wouldn't scale very well, but at the end of the day, it's just signed data. And, I mean, same with Cashew. Right? Like, I could just pay someone with Cashew, through, like, a a messenger that's just running down the street with a printed out piece of paper. Or a piece of paper. Yeah. That's right.
[00:44:25] Calle:
So, yeah, it really feels like we're building an entire stack. Now we're building an entire stack. Right? Like, we started with Bitcoin, but we're now working on, like, laying out the cables up until, like, inventing new encryption protocols to get messages send messages around in a secure way.
[00:44:46] ODELL:
It's great to see It's like it's this it's the snow crash future we were promised, but didn't materialize yet, basically. Well, it turns out we need to do the work. Who would have thunk it? So, I mean, I think this is a good trans transition point here is, like so what's what's been going on with Cashew? Have we had any significant updates? I mean, it seems like it's a project that moves quite slowly. You guys are rarely shipping things.
[00:45:13] Calle:
Yeah. We're we're, like, we're rather, we'd like to talk about things instead of shipping updates. No. I mean, I I don't know if, if everyone got the, the the, how do you say, the sarcasm in your voice there, but we are very focused on shipping and cash, and it's been going It is. Great. Yeah. It'd be clear.
[00:45:35] ODELL:
To be clear, it is probably one of the most it's probably the fastest shipping project, that I have ever witnessed. It's almost it's almost impossible to keep up with.
[00:45:46] Calle:
Well, thank you for that. And, like, that's the the reason for that is the amazing contributors who joined the project. So there's, like, many people working on Cashew, in the foreground and in the background. We have a crazy motivated, super enthusiastic team of Bitcoiners, of very different backgrounds who are, like, all joined the project at some point because they truly believe that Bitcoin needs to be used as money everywhere and to penetrate into every single port of this digital world. And that is what why we wanna work on eCash because we think that it gives, like, the it has the most potential to work, like, to to, you know, for Bitcoin to penetrate through every single crack, of the digital world. And what do I mean by that? I mean, eCash itself is is super efficient, lightweight way of transacting with each other without having to create accounts and without having to, take care of your privacy because everything just works magically for you, and you have you enjoy almost perfect privacy when you use it. And we've been focused in the team, we've been focusing a lot on, first of all, making sure that we built a protocol with well defined specs so anyone can verify our work and and implement everything from scratch if they wanted to. But we also build tooling and libraries for other developers. So most of our work basically goes into, areas of work that can multiply our impact. So, we don't build apps. We build libraries for others to build apps. And so far, I mean, it's hard for me to keep track of how many cash wallets are there. There are it feels like I don't wanna sound cocky, but it feels like there are as many cash wallets as Bitcoin wallets as well. Because every week, there's someone new comes around and says, like, I've built the cash wallet. Here it is. And with the emergence and uptake of AI, it's getting even crazier to witness how many products are being rolled out because we're investing heavily into the tooling itself and documentation to make sure that it is also AI friendly, basically. So, we've had a we've just had a dev call just a couple days ago, which we have monthly, by the way. So anyone working on Casio or with Casio should definitely join our dev calls that usually happen on the last Thursday of every month at sixteen UTC.
You can find all the information usually in the channels and so on. But in these dev calls, every single one of those dev calls is insanely bullish. It's crazy to be at these dev calls because you see all these different projects that people are working on, and we talk about all the all those things that happen each month. And it it kind of blows my mind how much is happening every single month. And in recent months, the number of wallets that have been popping out up from people, especially people who have never coded before. Like, we have had, I think, three or four people in the last staff call that started their introduction with, hey. My name is Store and Sell. I've never coded before, but here is a working cash awarded. And, it's just amazing to see how much, agency people have these days if you provide the necessary tools. Obviously, the tools are AI, but also all the libraries that we've prepared so far. And you can really see that people want to build Bitcoin stuff. It is not it's not really about caching. Right? We wanna make Bitcoin accessible.
And it is, you know, make very easy provide very easy ways to build Bitcoin apps, that you can just, like, start using and without having to commit to a single company, I should also say. Because there are also other libraries that I also recommend to people to check out. You can build things on liquids. You can build things on Spark and so on. But, you know, with all of these, you kind of dedicate, like, making a decision to be with this entity. And with Cashew, it's just like a grassroots. You know, there are many mints to choose from. You can run your own mint. It's it takes, like, fifteen minutes to set up a mint if you're technically inclined, and you can just if you have a a community, you can spin up for that community, and people truly own the entire stack. And if you wanna build on something where you own the entire stack, or you just don't wanna care about the back end and you just wanna build the wallet and make it, like let the user decide which mint they use. You can just use a cash flow library and just build it. And so it's great to see. The the shipping is crazy, and that's exactly what we're focusing on, exactly what we always wanted to see, and exactly what we're going to focus on in the future.
Like, we don't talk. We just ship. And as long as we keep doing that, we keep adding features, we keep rolling on software, we'll still see more and more people join the ecosystem and start building. Right? I think we both agree that the number of Bitcoin developers needs to go up significantly. Bitcoin is, like, the world class ginormous asset that dominates the Internet already. And the number of developers that we have for this immense project is tiny in comparison to what what's what's on our shoulders. Right? The the the the the weight on our shoulders is insane, but the number of people working on Bitcoin is tiny compared to it. Like, just compare us to let's compare us to Block, Jack Dorsey's company. Right. That company has 10,000 employees.
10,000. There aren't there aren't, like, you know, 10,000 people working on Bitcoin. Not even, like, on the entirety of anyone working, like educators, people doing, like, marketing for Bitcoin, or let alone the developers. We're not even close to that. So we can't even compete with a single S and P 500 company in terms of number of people working on it. And that is something that must change. It needs to change because we cannot, like is we're not a company where we can just go out and hire people, or, you know, say, like, this is the salary, and I'll just take the best engineers in Silicon Valley. No. It's not. It's an open source project. And the how we grow is through open source initiatives being, you know, opening the doors, being inviting, reading the word, about, like, how it is to work on Bitcoin so that, competent and world class engineers out there can make this decision for themselves to decide, you know what? I'm going to say no to this job offer from this Silicon Valley company.
I'm going to dedicate my time into building out and improving this the money of the Internet. And so that's that's what our primary, you know, North Star goal, if you like, is is to provide you more ways to get more people into Bitcoin to make sure that Bitcoin grows and Bitcoin is successful. And it's going great so far. Lots of developers in the Casio ecosystem have never worked with Bitcoin before, and the first time that they work with Bitcoin is through Casio because we make it easy, fun, inviting, and, you know, kind of magic experience to use it and to build on it and and, you know, just great to see.
[00:53:08] ODELL:
So I haven't, what what are your thoughts I mean, just to bring the two those two topics together, what are your thoughts on how you expect Cashew to be integrate integrated into BitChat? Right now, I mean, obviously, you can send Cashew anywhere you the cool part about Cashew is anywhere you can send a message, you can send a Cashew token. Right? It's just copy paste. But long term, like, how do you see that integration on something like BitChat playing out?
[00:53:42] Calle:
So for BitChat, we've already demoed kind of, like, what our step one of our vision will be is we're going to integrate a cash wallet into BitChat itself so that users of BitChat just have a, like, a Bitcoin wallet that feels like a lightning wallet where they can choose the mint that they wanna run. Eventually, we'd also like to you know, this is something that we've already built, and, you know, you'll have a Bitcoin wallet inside BitChat itself, and you'll be able to make payments. The chat gives us an easy way to communicate between wallets. So it would be, like, the easiest way, basically, to send someone Bitcoin who's just sending right across you in the store, for example. No scanning of QR codes. No nothing. You just, like, you see I'm in the same room with Odell. I see you pop up in my on my screen because we are connected via Bluetooth.
I sent, hey. You received the money. It's done. No registration.
[00:54:36] ODELL:
No accounts. So it's it's perfect for that use case. How does that work with, like, ephemeral identities, though? Like, I'm in Macy's.
[00:54:43] Calle:
Oh, like, in between myself
[00:54:45] ODELL:
five other people pretending to be Odell.
[00:54:48] Calle:
Yeah. Yeah. I can I can in BitChat, you can favorite, contact? So once I know that you are Odell, and there's also in iOS, this is not yet an Android, but you can also do, like, a, verification of the of the other user by scanning a QR code on their screen. So, like, we can favorite each other, and then no one can pretend to be you. Basically, once I know it's you So even though the identities are ephemeral and rotating, the favorites
[00:55:12] ODELL:
cross that?
[00:55:14] Calle:
That's right. So there is a there is a there is a static identity for your Bluetooth part, and there is another, if you want, for the, DMs over and also as well. But we like, in BitChat, we have a host of different identities. All the ones where you just, like, talk to random people, they're kind of ephemeral and rotate, but you can also choose to have a have a static identity with the people that you wanna connect to, on the long run.
[00:55:41] ODELL:
So, So it's gonna look like a traditional wallet interface, like, within the app. Yes.
[00:55:47] Calle:
Yes. That's that's, like, the first step. Eventually, we would also like, communities of, you know, regional, let's say, like, physically, communities in a physical proximity to be able to run their own Mint very easily. That's a bit of a bigger challenge because running Mint means that you need to be able to provide infrastructure. That is something that we're also working on in fashion itself, which is, like, kind of on demand Mints, where you can spin up a Mint somewhere on a server that runs for you, but you provide the the Bitcoin back end, basically, you yourself. So, either you bring your own Lightning node or you use a different service like Spark, for example, where, or or Liquid where Lightning kind of is, provided out of the box. But, giving, like, local communities to manage their own local banking is one is one of the goals that we have also in, you know, in the collective of and other stuff. This is one of the goals that we would like to be able to offer to, for example, Nosto communities as well. So a Nosto community should also be able to run their own Mint easily so that they can provide, like, Bitcoin rails or Cashew rails to their to their members, who don't want to run the infrastructure.
[00:57:03] ODELL:
So that is one thing that's Relays are rel relays are relatively easy to run. That's one of the cool parts about them. But with with Mintz, the hard part is is the really hard part is the Lightning piece. Right? It's the Lightning node infrastructure and liquidity. Right?
[00:57:18] Calle:
Yeah. We have a we have a solution for that due to, like, the recent advancements in Bitcoin itself. It becomes easier and easier to run a cashier mint soon. So, we have a working, example of Spark, where you can use Spark as lightning back end for cashier mint, which is great because Spark, the poor privacy that Spark offers is actually a plus for Casio because it gives the Mint, kind of a cryptographically safe way to, show proof of reserves, which is impossible with Lightning. So we've we've built And that's just, like, a fixed bark address, basically. Right? That's right. Yeah. So, like, we've built a mint where everyone can kind of see what's happening in the mint, like, the the the funds coming in and out of the Mint. Obviously, the Mint itself provides, like, almost perfect privacy to the users, but the Mint itself wants to be observable. So everyone can, like, point to it and say, like, hey. There's still money in there.
So Spark is one way of running a Mint with just extremely thin layer of infrastructure, and it's it's really cool. I've seen it myself. Like, running the Mint itself is super easy. A Mint is simple software. It's, like, almost as dumb as a as a noce relay. It just, you know, prevents double spending of the eCash tokens. That's basically it. And it provides a way to go in and out of the mint using their lightning back end or the on chain back end. And that part has traditionally been the most, you know, the hardest part from running a Mint because you need to take care of your Lightning node. But with that, with Spark or with Arc as well, we can provide, like, the Lightning infrastructure can be provided by someone else.
So running the Mint itself just becomes running the Mint software itself and nothing more than that. So that's why you can just do a Mint like that.
[00:59:14] ODELL:
Or, like, your ARC operator is running the actual Lightning node, so you don't have to deal with the Lightning infrastructure.
[00:59:19] Calle:
That's right. That's right. And That's fascinating using Spark to be preserves. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's really cool, because that's been the the, you know, the part that is not possible with Lightning because we we have a way to do proof of liabilities on eCash, by, you know, proving that the Mint hasn't issued more funds that it received. However, the proof of reserves part, the proof of liabilities is super hard for eCash, but it's kind of, like, at least, theoretically solved. But we didn't have much motivation to build it out yet and to really build the infrastructure for it because the proof of reserve part depends on whether you can also prove how much Bitcoin you have. And with Lightning, that is kind of impossible. You would have to use on chain Bitcoin for the mint in order to prove how much Bitcoin the mint has. So that's been a kind of a blocker for that feature. Now that we also started working with Spark, that means, like, prove reserves is for free. We can just point to the Spark address, and you see exactly how much Bitcoin the Mint has. And then prove liabilities is, you know, what we've designed before.
And those two pieces of information together can prove that the Mint is not running fractional reserve, and that's becoming, you know, much easier now than it has ever been. I just say, you know, we haven't, you know, the proof of liabilities part, we have built, like, alpha versions of that, but none of it is deployed yet because we just weren't there. I think things with Spark can, you know, really, boost boost adoption of it again.
[01:00:51] ODELL:
That's fascinating. Yeah. It should be interesting to see. It's still very early days with both Spark and Arc, and, I know they're making some changes on how Spark is being run, and it's obviously very centralized. Arc, to me, is a little bit harder for me to conceptualize. And, I mean, I had a whole episode, with Alex b talking about Arc. But I actually if I go back and listen to the episodes, I was theoretically talking about lightning. I didn't really understand lightning until I was running a lightning node and losing money.
Like, yeah, I gotta learn by, like, actually, like, holding the thing in my hands. So I I think it's still very early days, but it's really it's it's it's incredibly bullish, that and I would I would group Cashew in here for different reasons, but Cashew, Arc, Spark, like, these innovations that are happening without actual protocol changes to the Bitcoin protocol, they're just shipping things, is is gives me a lot of hope. It's it's it's it's impressive what we can do without actually changing underlying consensus things on Bitcoin because that is, you know, incredibly difficult.
[01:02:10] Calle:
I mean For good reason. This is this is what happens if the pressure is strong is if the pressure is strong enough. Right? Like, you have a bunch of smart people who wanna work with Bitcoin, and, boundary conditions are very tight. The number of transactions that we can do on Bitcoin are very limited. And everyone with, like, more than three brain cells knows that l one scaling is is just, is not gonna work. And no blockchain can provide enough throughput without layers on top of it. And, like, even, like it it doesn't matter what the shit corners will tell you. It's just not working. Like, it's so trivial that we don't even talk about this anymore in Bitcoin because we know that blockchains don't scale.
And so if the pressure is strong enough, people will find ways. That's why I think it's so important that we have that we attract people into our space because all these things are just, like, single people's ideas. I remember exactly how Burak proposed ARC, and that one single person who didn't even build it. Right? She just, like, threw out the idea out there. Whereas caused, like, a whole wave of innovation that just comes afterwards. So it's like the ideas of a single person can change everything. And this is it's it is the truth. So we need to attract these people into our space to make sure that we can, like, keep innovating in that in the in the same fashion as we do.
[01:03:41] ODELL:
Yeah. I agree. I mean, so on that note, and you're just scaling in layers. And to our earlier conversation about BigChat, I don't know how involved you were, in the promotion. I mean, you were definitely involved in the promotion of it, but in the in the details but out of the Cashew project has come this proposal for for signal to adopt Cashew. It's pretty cool. How how are you thinking about that?
[01:04:18] Calle:
So, yeah, that's we've started a a campaign. This is probably a month ago or so and still going on, and it was more, thought as an educational campaign. So it's called Bitcoin for signal, and you can check it out on bitcoinforsignal.org. And it started with a with a hackathon project where, some some Casio devs have integrated a Casio wallet into Signal for iOS and for Android. And most people don't know this, but Signal has a shitcoin built in. It's called MobileCoin. And no one uses it. No one cares about it. It's a complete disaster, and Signal just carries it along for a long time already. And it's just like a big question, wonder why is this shitcoin integrated into Signal? And Signal, like but, you know, Signal has a whole built in wallet integrated that you can use to you know, the the UX is pretty good. I can talk to you on signal, and just in the chat, I can send you some mobile coin chip coins.
And, obviously, you know, what is mobile coin? Who cares about mobile coin? No one. So what we've done or what, like, Cashew devs have done, and this was, like, Simple Kid and Lava First and Zookmaster. They came together and ripped out the mobile coin and just replaced it with with Cashew because Cashew allows you to send the money in the chat, which we've been doing for, you know, years at this point, is instead of copy pasting the token into a signal chat, which you can already do, and this is you know, and when we go, like, to a dinner together as a group, and we're a bunch of Casio people, then one person pays dinner, everyone else just pays back using Casio tokens in a signal chat. That's what we're already doing, basically.
So what we did is to rip out the MobileCoin wallet and replace it with a Cashier wallet and, just take over the entire UI that they've already built for MobileCoin and and use it for for SaaS. So that's what you can do now with this with these forks that we've built. You can charge your wallet. It's a cash wallet due to the mint or it's a prebuilt mint, and you can charge your wallet. You have SaaS in there, and you can send the SaaS in the chat, and it appears like as a nice model where you can just push a button and receive the coin. It's pretty cool. And we've done this, and we think it's it's something you know, first of all, signal payments require like, signal itself provides incredible privacy for communication. Right? So you would expect or at least, like, requirement of a payment system that you put, into signal or you built on top of signal also also must be private. So you need a privacy preserving way to exchange money, and it should be Bitcoin for obvious reasons because mobile coin is a shitcoin, and no one cares about it. So we should use the best money that exists, which is Bitcoin, and use it in the most privacy preserving way that we can. And Casio offers a very good way of using Bitcoin in a extremely privacy preserving way. So that's why we thought it's a great fit. We put it, together. We build it. We demoed it and showed that it's feasible, and then we put together this campaign to educate people about it. And we had couple goals with that. So our first goal was just to put Bitcoin out there and show the world that, you know, Bitcoin is great money, and it can be used with privacy. And Bitcoiners care that Bitcoiners care about signal, and we want the best messenger in the world to use the best money in the world. So that's one thing. We obviously wanted to, you know, show also how easy it is to build with Casio and that you can, you know, just, you know, take existing software and add eCash to it very, very easily, and your users can use it without having to create accounts or and and whatnot.
And, and that's what that's what we achieved. Like, there's been lots of talk about it. I talked to the signal people about it, and lots of people have seen it. And the software is out there. If you're interested, you can look at the forks. Obviously, we're not going to distribute this because it would be kind of reckless to distribute forks of signal, that you you that you're not planning to maintain over the long term. And there is a fork of signal out there. It's called Moli, so it could also be integrated into an existing fork of signal.
But our goal was to kind of enable, allow people to imagine what a world would look like if Bitcoin was integrated into mainstream tech products. And that's that's what we should aim for. I think we should aim for the tallest the biggest targets out there. And and and we should make clear that Bitcoin can also be extremely private if you want and that it fits up in excellent product like Signal. Obviously, there will be people who say, like and for example, Steve Lee said that in a podcast I where that I listened to is, like, talked about highlighted this campaign and that he supports the idea and everything's cool. But, you know, who's gonna run the Mint? That's the thing that comes back to us all the time.
It's who's gonna run the Mint. And, you know, it's it's a bit funny that people keep asking who's gonna run a mint. Because first of all, there are, like, 60 mints out there. If you wanna if you wanna find a mint, there's there are mints. There are more mints than anyone needs already out there. And, you know, you can compare then you know, some sometimes people compare it to, like, Spark or Arc, for example, where you know who's gonna run the Mint because there's only one single Mint. There's, like, one Spark server. So that's, like, one company running the Mint. And, obviously, like, you could prefer this because you can say, there's a company running the Mint, so it's gonna stick around for, you know, I can I can go to that company and and complain if something goes wrong? And you're right about that.
But if you look for a company that wants to run a mint, then, you know, I can point to Coinos. Coinos is a well known Bitcoin company that runs a mint. They're gonna run the mint if you like. So if you're truly interested in answering the question, then you can, first, you can find 60 different mints, maybe more, just the the ones that I found so far. And, also, like, point to companies that have been around for a long time that will still be around, hopefully, in a couple of years that run mints already. Or you could just, you know, accept the fact that cache is a distributed system, and anyone can run a Mint. And, like, just like with no still with relays, you know, we don't say, like, who's gonna run the relays? It's just like there are enough people who run the relays, and users will be able to find relays if they need it. And the the same is true for Casio. So, yes, there's not a like, signal will probably not run a mint. We know that.
But there might be a financial institution that runs a mint for signal. Right? And this is, like, it's not completely irrational to assume that that there are financial institutions who are interested in running Mints, and they're already doing it today. And, you know, I'm I hear a lot about, like, people looking to business models with Cashew and people sharing their plans with me. And, you know, I cannot talk about what I know, but I know for a fact that, you know, there's, like, a couple people who are talking to banks, like, real banks that exist today that consider running this stuff, you know, because they wanna know, how can I do this in a regulated session and provides, like, a a next generation financial service to my to my customers, right, by using eCash, making, you know, giving them privacy, offline payment capabilities, and all this, like, access to an ecosystem that already already exists? So Signal could partner with a financial institution that runs Mint for them. This is not, like, completely irrational thing to assume.
So, yeah, I I I guess we just, like, you know, wait and see. Someone is going to run a Mint. And then, Signal also, or a company like Signal could also use that mint by default, and then the entire question is basically, you know, the results.
[01:12:21] ODELL:
I mean, so two things here. First of all, I mean, I love this initiative, because I love signal. I mean, the freaks know I've talked about, and I love Bitcoin. I've I've talked about signal at length, on this show and my other shows and Noster and, you know, I think it's one of the most successful Freedom Tech projects, to ever exist. I've moved the majority of my personal and business life over to signal in terms of communication. Obviously, it's not without its own faults. It it takes its own trade offs. It's it's centralized. There was the first real major signal outage, that we've seen.
I mean, at least since I've been using it at scale for for a couple hours when AWS went down a couple weeks ago. But it's awesome for what it is, and it's it's it's convenient and gives you very strong security guarantees. And, obviously, the holy grail would be to have Bitcoin integrated. I don't really but on that note, you know, and and just I mean, I don't know what it's like, where you're at, but in America, like, a significant portion of the economy is basically running on Venmo rails. And having Bitcoin integrated into signal seems like just a very obvious drop in improvement, that could actually scale. They're, like, actually, people would use it. Like, I convincing them to download a Bitcoin wallet is completely different. I already have them on signal.
With all that said, how do you think if if you take off your Cashew hat for a second, do you, do you think like, what's the argument for Cashew being the best way to implement this? Like, obviously, there's multiple options available to them. It could first of all, we saw Tethr, you know, they own, nearly 50% of Rumble. They added a Bitcoin wallet, to Rumble for Rumble users. They're just doing on chain for now. You say you it could be an on chain wallet. That's obviously the base case. We're we recently we just talked about Spark and Arc. It could be a Spark or Arc wallet. It could be a liquid wallet.
Well, like, why why if if you're sitting there as signal and you're trying to choose how do we we wanna let's say we wanna integrate Bitcoin. And to their defense, when they added MobileCoin, the founder of Signal Moxie was also one of the advisers, I believe. I don't think he was I don't I don't think it's fair to call him a founder of MobileCoin, but he was involved with the MobileCoin project. And there was a little bit of questionable incentives there of him trying to pump his shit coin by integrating it into his open source project. And he kinda got run out of the project. So he's not involved with signal anymore. Now they're kinda sitting on this tech debt. So if we're gonna give them the benefit of the doubt, they're sitting on this tech debt of this shit coin that they integrated.
They don't wanna rip out something that maybe even 10 users are using because that always sucks from a project lead point of view where you have users that are actually using something and you you wanna move to something else. But let's say they actually do wanna move to Bitcoin. Why cash you versus other alternatives? Is it the best option?
[01:15:33] Calle:
Well, it it depends. This is a multidimensional question. Right? So first of all, privacy. That is, like, the the the thing that stands out the most given all the alternatives that you've just that you've just mentioned. You'll get no transactional privacy with any of the alternatives that you've mentioned. All of them have a transaction graph. All of them are either based on UTXOs or VTXOs or blockchains where the the movement of any of those, you know, coins or whatever can be transparently observed by at least one party. So eCash just is on a different, let's say, privacy model where you don't have a transaction graph. And it's not even like in liquid where you have confidential transactions.
In confidential transaction, hide the amount, but they don't hide the transaction graph. ECash, there is no transaction graph. So it's kind of, like, the most privacy preserving way to exchange value that we know of. And I can say this is confidence because, I mean, I have a fairly good overview over, like, what's possible. I wanna say that Lightning would be awesome as well. Like, non custodial Lightning has amazing privacy properties for at least the sender as well, but we know that running a Lightning node inside a client app is unfeasible or is very hard to pull off at least if you're not, like, focusing on specifically that. Any of the alternatives, like whether it's Spark, ARP, or Liquids that pose themselves as a lightning alternative or a way to use lightning more easily come with very poor privacy.
And that is just something that I think as signal, you wouldn't wanna make that, compromise. You would have to, like at least MobileCoin is also a privacy coin, and that is the reason why I think that they couldn't even consider putting it into signal. Obviously, it is a shitcoin that has failed. So in that regard, Cashew is great. Second of all, Cashew is is also the only one of these options that you can run yourself. Okay. You could run a smart validator, but, like, I wanna see it until, like, on I I just need to see that someone can actually run it. You cannot run your own liquid federation. You put in principle, maybe, but some parts are still not open source. So it's not the focus. No one really cares about it. No one runs a separate liquid network.
Arc, is the software is out there, but the capital requirements are so high, at least that's the projected capital requirements, that no one expects that there will be multiple arcs. There will only probably be one arc. Spark is, like, more obvious because it's, like, this well funded company that wants to provide rails for everyone. So in any of those cases, you have to kind of log in into a single company's road map provider in order to provide those rails for you. And for many applications, this might be okay. But for for Cashew, you can run this completely yourself and, or you can choose a partner that runs it for you.
So I think that's there's a big distinction there. The and third, cashier has infinite transaction speeds. It sales infinitely. Like, these, other types of, you know, l twos, if you like, they still inherit some kind of a bottleneck from the system itself. And eCash is just like the double spend ledger. You just need to make sure that the coin hasn't been spent twice, and that's everything that limits the speed. A cash transaction is as fast as the signal message travels. So, you know, you could run cache humans for millions of people using it at the same time already today. There is no research required. We've we've gone through this, like, for decades already. ECache has been around since the eighties. We know that ECache scales to many, many people.
So those points all give you, like, a big upside. The, the the one thing that Casu lacks in regard to all these old other alternatives is the unilateral exit. The unilateral exit is not provided with Cashew. You have to put trust into the mint that runs and has the Bitcoin reserves. So all the other protocols that we just mentioned, no. I should, like I correct myself. Liquid also has no unilateral exit. At least for Spark and Arc, you have unilateral exit opt ins. In principle, I haven't ever seen anyone actually doing the unilateral exit yet, but I just I'll I'll believe it because I I believe that they are truthful in their messaging. So, if you are okay with partnering with someone who's trusted enough to not run away with the funds, That is a bank, for example. It could be a financial institution.
And Cashew gives you properties that the other systems cannot give you in that regard, and I think those fit, a product like signal much better. I mean, I'm I'm bullish on Tether integrating on chain Bitcoin into into Rumble, but, you know, how many people will be able to use that? Seven transactions per second. It's not like this can scale into any meaningful volume. It's great to have you My understanding
[01:20:57] ODELL:
my understanding, just for some context, is that they did on chain first because it's ease much easier to implement. And then my goal their goal their plan is to use Spark to integrate Lightning. At least that's that's my understanding. Obviously, it's not out yet.
[01:21:16] Calle:
That's cool.
[01:21:21] ODELL:
Yeah. That's interesting. I think that's, I mean, that's a compelling argument. Like, if if if the main goal is private transactions, then it makes sense because Signal is, a privacy focused app, right, with privacy focused users, and that's been their North Star since the beginning. But, also, one of the reasons that Signal has been so successful is, that they make sane default choices for their users, and they are still relatively convenient to use and good UX to use, and you get the the benefit of the privacy. The the thing I often talk about, on the show and elsewhere is that, you know, signal is the first, quote, unquote, privacy app that I'm able to get my 90 year old grandma to use. Right? And because it's just very user friendly, and that's through saying defaults.
So on that front, I mean, I think it was something we talked about last time we were on the show, and it's something we talk about offline all the time, is is that idea of, you know, one of the cool empowering user aspects of Cashew, is that you can choose your Mint. You can choose your infrastructure. You can use multiple Mints. But that also adds a level of friction, in terms of users having to choose which Mint they might want to use, which infrastructure they want to use. If you were in a room with, you know, one of the project managers at Signal and they were actually thinking about implementing this, what would be your candid suggestion on how they handle the mint selection process for the user?
[01:23:01] Calle:
Well, I think, like, this is this is something, yeah, we talk about a lot, the two of us. And I think it's a strength and a complication at the same time. The strength is it gives you freedom, power, as, like, there are many wallets out there, cashier wallets, that will not make the choice for you. But some of them will help you to make, an informed choice. We can talk about that. It's something that I've just recently also added to cashier. Me. But there are also ones who make the decision for you, who have a default, and you don't even need to know what a Mint is. You don't need to click anything. You don't need to make any decision. So I think from a product standpoint again, like, I wanna know, error error reply, how do you say, sub tweet Steve leave here.
If you have an entity that runs a mint, then the there is no choice to make. It's just that one mint. So as a signal in in if I put myself into the shoes of shit signal, the way to to build this, I think, in the best possible way would be find a financial institution that wants to run this for you, like, just for you. They will figure out, you know, what the what the regulatory framework is. And this is not something that is impossible. We have seen multiple companies already, you know, set out onto the path, and we we see, like, companies like Spark and Arc and so on being able to provide infrastructure. We'll find a financial institution that will run a mint for you and just use that mint. You're done. That's it.
[01:24:35] ODELL:
So you would default all signal users into that mint?
[01:24:39] Calle:
Yes. That's what I would probably do. That would be the easiest way where you don't have to explain anything to anyone, and you can also do it with fiat as well. So it doesn't need to be just Bitcoin. You could offer the same exact experience for credit card payments into signal and then, like, bank transactions out of signal or something like that. So you can expand this also across multiple currencies if you like. And just because Cashew is not tied to, like, the Bitcoin protocol itself, it offers you the same exact properties for all currencies that you want to support, basically.
So you can build the same thing inside signal also for US dollars if you like. Find a financial institution that will run the mint, that will take care of the reserves, you know, takes, you know, gets takes money in and sends money out, and you just use that integrated into your app, and your users never have to make a decision, and it just scales infinitely.
[01:25:32] ODELL:
Would you if you were in charge of this rollout, would you give the users the ability to change their Mint? You would default them into a Mint. Would you give them the ability to change their Mint, or would you just keep it hard coded?
[01:25:45] Calle:
No. I mean, I think, like, this rolling it out, I would you know, one of my highest priorities would be that it is kind of self evident what needs to happen to users. I like products where you require zero education for a user to actually make, you know, use the product in a good way. So I would probably roll it out with just a single mint, integrated there, and you can everyone will have a perfect user experience because it's a singular mint. And then if you want to expand this to multiple mints and allow people to use their own mint or the the mint that they choose, then you really need a system like Lightning. Then you need Bitcoin in between in order to connect all these mints. So, again, I I say this all over and over again, but the reason why Cashew is interesting today is because of Bitcoin. ECash, you know, in the nineties, eCash was supposed to run, you know, just one single one Mint that is run by a bank. But what if that other user has a different bank? Right? So now you need to make, like, a bank transaction from one mince to another. To connect these two mince, you need something that connects them on a higher level financial rail.
And for us, that's just Lightning. And the reason why Cashew just works so well is because lightning is super fast. And so that since there is nothing comparable really in the Fiat world, I think, you know, that voice wasn't really made. You know, people didn't think of building, constructing, like, an architecture of many different means that can talk to each other. Whereas, right now, in Bitcoin, we can just do it with Lightning. So, yes, if you, you know, you would have to integrate Lightning as well to make it useful for, for for users that choose different names, I would say.
But I think, still, the best experience would be one singular financial service provider for for signal, and you peg in using either lightning or on chain or even, like, a credit card or Apple Pay or Google Pay. You peg in using many different payment methods, then you have eCash, and you transact with eCash on signal. And that's it. And then you take out using any of those, rails again.
[01:28:05] ODELL:
You'd be able to offer, you know, the most reliability and the easiest use to users. That would make sense to me. I mean, I I think there's even an argument that, you know, maybe there's a legal exposure argument to why they wouldn't want to do it or a or a lack of focus argument of why they wouldn't want to do it. But, if signal got a little bit more involved in that aspect, you know, maybe they do partner with a financial institution, but they could presumably take in, you know, an ethical user aligned fee alongside that. And then all of a sudden, you have a sustainable funding mechanism that's not just donations for the signal project.
That could be really interesting. I I think, you know, to me, always the holy grail has been, you know, sustainable, you know, profit driven funding for scalable open source projects. And this would be a very easy place for them to, you know, take a couple, you know, basis points off of every transaction. You know? A small less than a percent small transaction fee that would still compete with everybody else and would be privacy preserving.
[01:29:17] Calle:
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, the privacy preserving part is really the most important part. But, concerning the fees, I think this is something that is universal. Right? Someone you know, anyone providing any kind of infrastructure will want to be compensated at the end of the day. And the only thing you could even argue, I just I was about to say, like, the only thing where you can be sure that you don't pay fees to anyone is to use Bitcoin in a fully noncustodial way where you don't interact with with a third party, not even a trusted third party. Even if it's an untrusted third party, like, for example, with ARC, then you you still will have to pay transaction fees because running an ARC server is super, expensive. So someone will have to earn money by running that. But I I just said, like, I was about to say because then I noticed that even Bitcoin itself requires transaction fees, obviously, because someone is mining. And some like, the miners won't do their job for free. So at the end of the day, anything that is useful has to have transaction fees.
The question then becomes, what is more efficient? You know, what can keep the fees low enough that many people use it because it's super efficient or not. And some things are more efficient, other things are less efficient. I think that's where the competition then kicks in.
[01:30:32] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, that'd be from a user point of view, it would just be awesome. I could send I could send Bitcoin to my signal contacts. They could receive it in dollars. They could receive it in euros. I could send them euros. They could receive it in Bitcoin. I could send them dollars. They could receive it in euros, and it could all just be handled using Cashew and a single mint. Get their regulatory shouldn't order. Maybe they, you know, implement some kind of limits if they if they need to based on regulatory reasons. But, let's be honest. I I think the majority of commerce that's happening on something like Venmo is, you know, sub a couple $100, and and you could get that done relatively easily. And then maybe you you push it from there. I mean, one of the things that I thought was fascinating about the last few years of politics is how many times has it you know, we've seen chat control and all these, you know, pushes against encrypted messaging.
But the amount of times we've seen, world leaders or incredibly influential rich people that are in signal groups using signal chats. Right? There's there's there's a there's a cultural victory brand wise that has been won by signal that most open source projects do not have and could only dream of having. And they can flex that a little bit. They can push it. I mean, we we see, like, the department of I guess, it's war now. Like, the department of war talking about, ongoing strikes in other countries from America, and it's in a signal group chat. Right? So there's there's a brand leverage they have, that most open source projects could only dream of, and they could push they could push the boundaries a bit on the regulatory side if they wanted to.
It's just an interesting it's an interesting thought process to think about.
[01:32:21] Calle:
I just wanna, you know, just clarify again. It's, like, our main focus is not to compete with any of the, like, Bitcoin layer protocols that we've just mentioned. I think, like, they are amazing, and we are using them in Casio. Like, we don't want them to be to go away. On the contrary, like, I want ArcSpark Liquid to be successful so we can actually use it in sig in in Cashew, what what we're which we're doing already. What I think about what we think about when we talk about Cashew is the millions and millions of people using Venmo, Cash App, bank accounts, PayPal, Wallet of Satoshi.
There are so many custodial users out there and with zero privacy. So you get like, even if the privacy of Spark is kinda bad, it's still much, much, much better than any of these financial institutions can offer because you don't need an account. You can just start using it. It's kind of like, I wouldn't say a permissionless system, but it's, you know, no registration. You just, like, use it. That's that's how how it works with Bitcoin itself. Right? So I see Cashew in general, like, eCash itself as a way to offer similar properties and even better privacy for all these use cases where you do have a financial institution involved.
And, there is, like, there's enough to fix there. There's there there are many, many people who would be you know, where their lives would improve if their legacy financial transactions would would also would also have, level of privacy that is, you know, adequate or comparable to the level of privacy that we already enjoy for messaging. So for messaging, the work that has been done in order for signal to be where it is right now, that's, like, decades of work of education and and activism that has brought us to the point where we are right now. Now we can see like, we see politicians using signal, talking about their war plans, or you talking about your your mother, being able to use signal so she can be, like, see the pictures of your kids, receive the pictures of of her kids. Like, that's that's the most human way of expressing why we need privacy.
And at this point, it's kind of accepted. We've due to this incredible work that activists and educators have done for decades, now we can talk about messaging privacy in a human way and not in a, like well well, the the terrorists, they would they would then, you know, send messages, and, you know, bad people would use privacy preserving methods and so on. Like, that is what the discussion was a couple decades ago. Whereas right now, we've seen a normalization of messaging privacy due to this relentless work. And I think the work this you know, the amount of work that we need to do for for financial privacy is still you know, it's a it's a very big amount of work that we still need to do. We're still at the beginning of this whole conversation where financial privacy is seen primarily as something that would only be people who who has who have bad intentions would wanna wanna have.
You know, the the exact like, even the the law says the exact opposite. So in in The United States where financial privacy is part of your human rights. It is like when you move money, you should also be able to enjoy the same level of privacy that you have have had for for for centuries already when we were using cash. We just completely lost that idea somewhere along the way and got used to the fact that we're completely traceable and transparent. And, like, the vast majority of users use systems where they have zero privacy. It's not on chain Bitcoin. It's not Lightning. It's not Spark. But it's these huge financial institutions that have completely departed from the concept of providing basic levels of privacy for basic levels of human rights.
And, that's what we're trying to fix. I hope I hope that we will achieve that because, you know, if you zoom out a bit and you look at around what's around the entire Bitcoin space, it's pretty bleak. And there's there's so much to fix. So that's what we're trying to do.
[01:36:59] ODELL:
Incredibly well said as always. But we officially passed the hour and a half mark. I wanna be very conscious of your time. So I think we should wrap. But before we wrap, in terms of financial privacy and blockchains, I mean, there's been a lot of hype and excitement, particularly in in Bitcoin land, but also among, you know, tech bros and very influential people about Zcash. And I'm curious. I've I mean, I'm not that curious of your opinion, but I think the freaks might be curious of your opinion on Zcash and how you think about that current hype cycle that's going on over there, versus something like Cashew on Bitcoin.
[01:37:50] Calle:
So, I mean, do you know this this meme where it says, like, I don't even think about you? Yeah. The madman meme. I love that meme. That that's kind of my take. Like, I I don't know. I've seen these things come and go. It's obviously a coordinated psyop to pump a shitcoin. Everyone suddenly talks about the same thing. We've I've seen this more than once. Like, I really don't care about Zcash. I really don't care about any Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is you know, that's the main focus. The main focus is fix the money, fix the world, and then improve the rest of the world using Bitcoin. That is the most likely scenario that I can see. Everything else is just a pure disreactions.
I I really as much as I respect the methodology, the academics, the cryptographers, the developers working on these projects, I really do think that they are valuable and their work is, you know, is is is good by itself. I think the project that they focus on is just a waste of time. So as long if anyone is listening, you should, like, you know, think about your life choices, step back, and look at what you're putting your energy into. You should put your focus on to Bitcoin because, like, that's that's what's going to win. And all these, you know, pumps and dumps are just, like, temporary noise in my opinion. So I really couldn't care less. So, if you're interested in privacy, check out Casio, and, you should only focus on Bitcoin. Everything else is, is probably a scam.
But, yeah, if you wanna check out Cashew, by the way, you know, before we close here, I wanna plug something else, which is not November. It is a we still have, like, a couple days left in November. I don't know when this podcast will come out, but I'll release it today. That's awesome. So you still have, like, almost a week to join our month long hackathon that we've been running for already couple weeks. You can check it out on notnovember.org. And we are we welcome anyone who's you know, people who haven't called it yet, people who wanna do everything with AI, or people who just wanna do, you know, raw dog it and code the old fashioned way. If you wanna build anything using Cashew, check out that hackathon. We have a bunch of prizes that people have, contributed to, and you can send in your your, project and hopefully win.
We're doing this to increase the number of Bitcoin devs. So if you wanna support us as well, you can also leave a donation for the prize pool, and we're going to distribute 100% to the to the hackathon products. Check it out on nutnovember.org.
[01:40:33] ODELL:
Nutnovember.org. I'll put that on the show notes as well. On the BitChat side, if people wanna contribute to BitChat, what's the best way for them to get involved?
[01:40:43] Calle:
Yeah. BitChats, the best way to get involved is on GitHub right now. We don't have, like, any community events or anything like that, yet, might come, but, we have a bunch of issues open. Lots of people having, you know, eyes on BitChat. So if you wanna if you're a Kotlin dev and you wanna help me with Android, check out, permissionless tech slash BitChat dash Android. That's on GitHub. And if you're an iOS dev, then it's permissionless tech slash BitChat. We have our GitHub repost, lots of issues open. We welcome contributions from others. So just get involved, start coding. The best way to get involved is to just start doing things. If you wanna be, you know, if you wanna be recognized and separate yourself from the noise out there, then you just need to sit down and code. It's just like there's only one single way. Like, people ask me all the time, how do I get started? Where should I do? Like, just start doing. Like, even, you know, ruminating that question is a waste of time. You have I'm sure there are projects that you like out there in the Bitcoin space or somewhere, some project that you use.
Go to their GitHub, check out their issues, and start coding. If you wanna get recognition and be part of a team and build with that team, the best way to get started is to ship all requests. That's what makes people aware of your existence. It's not like, one day, I'll start looking into blah blah blah blah blah. You're no. Stop talking. Just start coding. It's the best way to get involved. It's the best way you can contribute to things happening. And literally, coding is magic. If you wanna be as close as possible to being a magician in the twenty first century is to write code. You can transform your ideas into the movements of electrons using code. This is, like, the the most agency that you can feel in today's world is maybe, like, Odell will will say, start a family. You can also start a family. Okay. Do that. Right? You can do, be a very, you know, purposeful in your in your, microcosm.
But if you wanna change the world in today's twenty first century, the best way to do that is to become a programmer. You don't need to protest. You don't need to go into, like, a political campaign, convince people of your ideas. No. You sit down, you write code, you publish it, and you just keep doing that, and you will have an impact. This is the best way of getting involved today. And, in the Bitcoin space, we need you the most. Like, we desperately need people like you who will, you know, put their giant pipe job aside for a couple of hours a week and and contribute to a humanity level project that is Bitcoin that only survives because people make that decision.
It's only those people who make the decision who drives this project forward. Sit down, go to GitHub, find a project you like, read the issues, and open pull requests. Talk to the people, say, hi. I exist. I wanna help. How can I help? Write code and submit it to repos? This is the way. This is how I started. This is how everyone I know who works on Casio today started is by being interested in it, getting involved, and you can do it. Love it.
[01:44:01] ODELL:
You can have babies at the same time too.
[01:44:04] Calle:
Oh, you can also have babies. Yeah.
[01:44:08] ODELL:
I, this is awesome. Last time, I had last time I had you on the show, BitChat wasn't on the official Android Play Store. Now it is. So you can just search BitChat in your favorite app store, whether that's iOS or Android. The main domain is bitchat.free. What's the main domain for Casagio? What's the best domain for people to go to for Casagio stuff? That is casagio.space,
[01:44:36] Calle:
cashu.space.
[01:44:39] ODELL:
There you go. Cashu.space. I'll put all these links in the show notes. Awesome.
[01:44:47] Calle:
Should we do this again in six months? Great conversation. Serve in six months. Yeah. Definitely. That would be enough to fill out. I'm sure.
[01:44:54] ODELL:
We always have more to talk about than time allows. I mean, we could go for hours and hours and hours. It's the best. This has been great. It is now pouring over here by me. Starting to storm real hard. Freaks, American freaks, happy Thanksgiving. I got family in town. I'm sure you have family in town. Preach a good word of Freedom Tech to them.
[01:45:19] Calle:
Don't forget to like and subscribe and send some zaps. Odell really, really, really deserve this. Like, I just wanted, like, Odell, you're like a you're a fucking legend. Like, you're the the best fit corner I know probably. Like, I just wanna give a huge shout out to everything you're doing. I think, like, you're a bit, in you know, you've you've walked a bit off the big stage and doing your thing now, but you're still, like, massively impactful. I just wanna say thank you for everything you're doing. Your work with OpenSets is immense.
Don't think that most people recognize how much, like, you have done with OpenSets. You have done how much you've done for Bitcoin and Noster. It's incredible. The amount of work that you're putting out there is crazy. So the least you can do, Freaks, is to send a big fat Zap as a form of recognition to sort of dispatch. Like and subscribe to show. If you're on YouTube, leave a comment. If you're on Spotify, it really helps if you leave a comment. Boost the engagement. Pump this show up into the charts, and you just send send a nice message to Adel. He's he's really doing Satoshi's work.
So thank you.
[01:46:31] ODELL:
Thank you, sir. Means a lot coming from you. I treasure our friendship, and, I appreciate all the work you do. Freaks, all the relevant links are still at dispatch.com. No stats are precious. Sharing it with your friends and family goes a long way. So while you're preaching the good word of Freedom Tech this this week, consider sharing dispatch with them. Ali, pleasure as always.
[01:46:58] Calle:
As always, thank you for having me. I'll see you around, man.
[01:47:01] ODELL:
Freaks. Love you all. Stay humble, StackSats. Peace.
[01:47:05] Calle:
Peace.
Bitchat: Bluetooth Mesh Without Internet
Protests and Outages Drive Downloads: Nepal, Indonesia, Madagascar, Côte d’Ivoire, Jamaica
Predicting Unrest from Download Spikes
Adding Nostr Transport: Hyperlocal Mesh vs. Geohash Chats
Geolocated Relay Selection
Ephemeral Identity, UX, and Censorship Considerations
Mesh Upgrades: Voice, Images, Files, Source Routing like Tor
WiFi Aware Mesh and Background Operation to Boost Range and Uptime
White Noise vs. Bitchat
Protocols and Transports: Weaving White Noise, Cashu, and Bitchat
Transport Neutral Design: Cashu and Nostr
Cashu Progress: Shipping Libraries, Dev Ecosystem Growth
We Need More Bitcoin Devs
Integrating Cashu into BitChat: Wallet UX and Local Payments
Running Mints: Spark, Ark, and Proof of Reserves/Liabilities
Layered Scaling Without Consensus Changes: Ark, Spark, Cashu
Bitcoin for Signal: Replacing MobileCoin with Cashu
Why Cashu for Signal? Privacy and Scaling
Mint Choice vs. Simplicity: Defaults, Lightning Interoperability, and UX
Focus on Financial Privacy for the Masses, not Distractions
Zcash Hype Dismissed; Call to Build on Bitcoin
Nut November Hackathon and How to Contribute to Bitchat and Cashu
Happy Thanksgiving
