Fireside chat with Jack Dorsey in front of live audience at Nostriga in Riga.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUwXRDrfJU0
Jack on Nostr: https://primal.net/jack
ODELL on Nostr: https://primal.net/odell
website: https://citadeldispatch.com
nostr live chat: https://citadeldispatch.com/stream
nostr account: https://primal.net/odell
youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@citadeldispatch
stream sats to the show: https://www.fountain.fm/
(00:00) Introduction and Acknowledgements
(03:31) The Importance of Open Source and Nostr
(07:06) Comparing Nostr and Twitter
(12:03) Challenges and Opportunities for Nostr
(20:23) Identity Verification and Privacy Concerns
(28:02) Public vs. Private Companies
(37:01) Blue Sky Initiative and Nostr Development
(44:03) User Experience and Onboarding in Nostr
(50:08) Final Thoughts and Future of Nostr
[00:00:00]
ODELL:
Exactly when we say Odell and Jack. Thank you, David.
[00:00:06] Jack:
Thank you.
[00:00:10] ODELL:
Do you own any other shirts? No.
[00:00:13] Jack:
Just that one? Just this one.
[00:00:17] ODELL:
I think most people in this room know this. Maybe people on the livestream do not know this, but Jack personally pays for these Noster events. This is the third one, that a team of volunteers has has put on, first in Costa Rica, then Tokyo, now here in Latvia and Riga. It's incredibly important, for you and the and the team of volunteers to try and do it as global as possible. But I just can we just give Jack a huge round of applause for It's it's kind of ridiculous. Like, that's an insane thing to do is throw free conferences around the world. I've never I've never been to a
[00:01:08] Jack:
a a packed free conference before. Matt, that's the guest over lunch that we charge for the next one. I did. I did. And if we do,
[00:01:16] ODELL:
blame him. Wait. Wait. There there's some there's some nuance here. There's some nuance here. I said charge $21 in Bitcoin, and every every every, guest here today got a payable Bitcoin, NFC card where they can pay with Bitcoin at the bar or the restaurants at the food trucks outside that had $21 on it. So I suggested that you pay $21 and then you get $42 if you show up on the card. So there's some proof of work. So actually, it's even better than free because you actually make money to come to the event. So, I mean, you gotta be clear here.
[00:01:56] Jack:
What's what's the goal? But yeah, I I do think, I I wanna another round of applause for all of our volunteers because they really do all the work and come up with all the creativity. Apologies in advance. I'm getting over bronchitis. So if I, I, my voice is a little bit weak. But I do think it's really important that, we foster this community and we foster the development through meeting in person. And, we did start in Costa Rica, we went to another continent, chose Tokyo, another continent chose Europe and will continue to bounce around the world, every single year and hopefully it continues to grow. But while our attendance hasn't grown a lot, the depth of the conversation and the presentation has has really been impressive. And I think just getting together in person like this really accelerates what we're able to do, and I think it's complementary to a bunch of the work Matt and others are doing in terms of funding development, funding education, funding content. All these things add up and all these parts play a significant role in compounding to building this this thing that we love and the thing that we know will impact so many people in the positive, not just yet, but over time, absolutely.
[00:03:17] ODELL:
Love it. I mean, so while we're on that topic, why do you focus so much time, energy, money on Noster?
[00:03:31] Jack:
It's the only reason I'm in a position that I can even consider doing something like this is because of the grace of the open source developers on the Internet and the way that the Internet was built. For those of you who are as old as me, you remember Usenet, you remember the early days of Linux, you remember Gopher, you remember the early days of the web, you remember the principles, but most importantly, you remember that you could read the code. And that was incredible. And the fact that all these APIs were open, the fact that, Ravel brought this up, that TCPIP, the very foundation of the Internet, was considered the ugly, wrong choice and people made it work and every single interaction we have today in the world every single person in the world has an interaction today where they touch that work and they touch this concept of the bizarre model instead of the cathedral.
And we have so many companies and we have so many organizations trying to build this cathedral model and control it and take more and more so that they can profit more and more, and we need to have an opinionated and different approach that we build in parallel, for when those things fail, which they will, we have some, we have some place that people can go to. And and that's what gives me a lot of patience around what everyone is building here is because, like, our only goal here is just to build in parallel and to make sure that we continue to build something that when people need it, it's available.
And I think that's really important that we always have those options available to us. The same is true for Bitcoin. There's a lot of talk about how censorship resistance is important and a lot of talk about censoring and a lot of talk about freedom of speech and all these things, but no one has proven that they actually want that. If they actually wanted it, they'd be using it every single day. And it's a lot of it it's really good marketing right now. But if you actually want to see if people believe in it believe it in their soul, they're going to act and they're going to do something about it. And we're just not seeing that right now. But when they are ready and when they or when they're forced to be ready or when their mind is finally open to take another action and sacrifice the convenience they have right now and the network they have right now, that this place is ready and that Bitcoin is ready and it's up to the task of supporting billions and billions of people.
So it's a long haul and it's something that, you know, we may not even see the entire fruits in our lifetime. I think we will. But the fact that we have this collection of people working on this, and working on these ideals, and thinking about the long term, and suffering through the small numbers right now, I think is really important, really unique, and, I don't know. I I I love it. I love I love being part of this community. Matt Matt is very big on clapping and getting energy back from the audience, so I don't care. So any after any time he stops talking, if you could just give him some energy back and I'm good. No. We we clap after Jack. No. No. No. No. No. No.
[00:07:16] ODELL:
Let's, we have a packed house here. We have short time, so let's get in it. You're the cofounder of Twitter, obviously. Now it's x. Elon brought it, took it private. Now it's x. It has about a half a 1000000000 users, 500,000,000 users. 5 years, does Noster have more users than X?
[00:07:45] Jack:
Yeah. Great question. It's not about the answers. It's the questions you ask, and that's how we're judging this this, this conversation. It's finding the right question. Right? In 5 years, I I don't I I don't know. I certainly hope so. There's no the thing about Noster and and Bitcoin is there's no fundamental reason why it can't have all of the earth's information, like, have the largest corpus of information, and I think we want that. I think we should push for that. There's a lot of conversation today about information overload. I think we want and we benefit from more and more information.
The other side of that is we need the right ability to organize it, and that's where algorithms do come in. And if we have agency around choosing whether to use those algorithms or not being able to build them, then we have a perfect union. But there's no reason there's nothing stopping people from just putting everything on this on this platform, and there's no reason why we shouldn't welcome it. Because if we do have the largest corpus of information, people can build really amazing things on top of it. And I think from that from that degree, maybe the number of users is the wrong metric.
It's how much how how useful it is, and how useful the information is, and how much is actually how much is actually there. What is the density? Because it's not just going to be humans utilizing this. It's not just gonna be humans connecting on all this. I know they're a bad word right now, but, like, bots are our future and they will be a valuable part of our future if we have agency over them, if we can help control them, if we can choose to use them or not, and they're transparent. And there's no better platform to start working with Agenik AI and bots than Nostra because of the openness, because of the transparency, because that you don't have to ask for permission for anything.
So we have a playground that these new systems can actually intersect on, and I think we should embrace that. And we we should our strongest our strongest message right now, and this was said by, I don't I don't know what presentation it was, but there was a slide with a number of developers, Blue Sky and Twitter and who's the was that Pablo? Pablo and Pablo. Young. That's our strongest message right now is is the strength and the size of our developer network, and that is unbounded in terms of growth. And that metric, I think, is unique and and super important.
[00:10:35] ODELL:
We're gonna have more users than than x in 5 years. Very long winded non answer from Jack. I think I think you believe it. I think you just feel a little bit pigeonholed.
[00:10:48] Jack:
No. Not at all. Like, I'm just being realistic. I don't I like, I sure. X is cutting down on on bots and and all these things. I don't think we're we don't have that constraint because we don't have that problem. Fair enough. And I I think we should embrace that. So along that metric, having more programs and having more automations and having more experiments, Rob will remember this. This was this is what made Twitter super weird and super interesting back in the day, is people were hooking real things to it, and devices and bots and Tamagotchis and all these things. And it was fun because it it was like humans you could talk to, but also like things that were, like, suddenly had emotion and were were alive, and that was so early. This was over 18 years ago.
But all that technology behind all that stuff right now with everything we're seeing with AI and agenics systems, it's really mature now. It's actually useful. It's actually useful, and it's providing real value, and I think it's a big, big part of of our future. So if if Noster can be one of those those protocols in those playgrounds, I could there's there's no question that we have more, but how are you measuring that? Okay. So you're you're you're saying that you expect Noster to be more useful than x in 5 years? I would I would say it's already more usable because, people don't have to ask permission to change it. So they can make it usable for themselves. They can make it usable for people like them.
And and as you saw with the ditto presentation from Alex, people can come to it and build their own custom viewport and their own custom experience that fits them, and everything they do in that small little world benefits the entire world and the entire protocol of of Nasser and ends up benefiting everyone. More energy. After after he asked the questions only. They were doing the right thing. Okay. So so on Tuesday,
[00:12:49] ODELL:
in a court case, with Elon and x from his x employees, the investor shareholder cap table of x, got released, in that court proceeding, and in there, they listed the different investors that took x private. It includes a who's who, like a p. Diddy connected VC fund, a 16z, the Saudis, a Palantir connected VC Fund, and you. And so my question for you is, how do you feel about the direction that Elon has taken the platform that you built?
[00:13:36] Jack:
I think that was actually sincere applause for you. I made a decision to roll over my shares, so I had 3% of the company. Elon bought it. I kept all my shares. I didn't sell any. I didn't have this giant payday, as a company was sold. I did so because, 1st and foremost, I believe in the idea of Twitter, much more than the man any particular manifestation. The manifestation of the idea that it believed in the least, the absolute least, was a public company. We were a public company that was reliant upon 1 business model solely in a singular fashion, and that was the advertising model.
And the reason why we had an advertising model is because our peers did. We wanted to go public, and that was the fastest path to do so. And there was no ability to send value across the Internet. There was no micropayments on the Internet, as Jack talked about. We've actually been talking about it for 40 years, if not more. And Zaps is the biggest living, scaling, experimentation of that idea. Thank you, Will, and thank you for the entire Bitcoin ecosystem for making that possible. So taking it private, I'm so grateful that someone was able to do that.
I'm so grateful that, it was taken private by an entrepreneur and a technologist instead of a private equity firm. It would be dead at this point. It would be dead if it was still a public company because there's no hope of competing with, the likes of Facebook and Google. And it allows the space to do some experimentation and do a lot of different things, and Elon is testing that. I don't always agree with the methods, or the sequence, the reaction to perceived threats, which I don't see as threats at all, but I appreciate that it's covered and protected, and they can experiment.
The biggest disagreement I have with the way it's run and the potential for it in the future is before I left, we, you know, we wanted to build a protocol. Right now Twitter owns the protocol. It owns a presentation layer and it owns the distribution. All 3. It puts a ton of pressure for whoever is running that company to make decisions around what's on the on the service and what's not. Having a protocol where the content, lives and you can separate those other layers takes away a bunch of the liability and still allows you to build a really amazing business on top of it. And it'd be my hope that Elon and the company recognize this, and they recognize the single point of failure that they're they're in. It doesn't matter who is the CEO of that company, no matter how much you love them or hate them, they're in a place where they have a a choke point.
And that choke point can be their business model. It can be the relationship with their other businesses. It can be countries threatening to raid the offices of their employees or put them in jail, which we had when I was CEO of Twitter many, many times in countries all over the all around the world. And it's not sustainable. You can't build a company that means to serve as a town square, a public town square, without having something underneath it that no single entity owns. And that's what Nostra represents to me, is that you you can remove some of that liability and you can get back to the idea of what Twitter was meant to be and what it what it ultimately is by providing a much stronger foundation that no single person, no and no government, no company owns or can can remove.
And that's what this this is all about to me, is giving options to a company like Twitter so that they can take that option. I'm not saying that they will, but the fact that it's an option is is really important. I I don't know. I I'm I'm conflicted. I really love Twitter. I I loved building it. I still love it. I think the algorithm has taken over too much. I, everything I don't love about it, I see alternatives and noster that I do love. And it's not me saying, like, we should do this, we should do this, we should do this. People just come to their own conclusions. I'm like, man, that's awesome. That's awesome that someone's thinking about that, and they're doing it, and no one's telling them to do it. They just want it, then they wanna build it.
And, they don't have to ask for any permission. As a CEO of another company, like, people have to ask permission from me all the time to get money and to, to fund their their projects and to get budget and whatnot and to be able to take myself out of that equation and instead take the benefit I've had from building something like Twitter and Square and Block and giving it to organizations like like Matt to make those decisions in a rigorous way with a board of 9 people, which I'm told is extremely important at that particular size, and other organizations.
And for them to make those funding decisions about ideas that that we should have in these experiences, in the in these protocols, in these platforms is pretty amazing to see. And so while I'm upset about various things in Twitter, I love that the ideal ID idea idea persists and that it's even being made stronger and stronger and stronger every day in in in the work that we're talking about over these past 2 days. They're pre clapping for your question because they know the next one's gonna be a banger.
[00:20:26] ODELL:
I mean, I I I used to love Twitter too, but I think Nostra fixes this.
[00:20:31] Jack:
Yeah. I I do. I I I also I I agree. And I and I no. I respect that you are able to delete your account and that you did. It's a big step to walk away from an audience. It's a big step to take away the convenience, and it's a big step to go the opposite direction of the momentum. And you're brave because you're you're in a world that is dependent upon people knowing what you do and your audience and you're only as good as your reach ultimately. And to take that channel and just say, I'm building elsewhere, I think is important because we're if people don't follow your lead, we're we're not really going to be anywhere. Like, we need to have that, and we need to have this new experience that you haven't seen elsewhere. And I agree completely with Rabble in terms of the the magic.
The first magic thing is being able to plug that N2C into different clients and different apps, and I think it's amazing. The second for for me is apps, but that that freedom that that gives is important. Having more of those, but also people like you that are braving ahead and saying, like, I'm forgetting this. You can find me here and I'm dedicating myself to it. It's important. Snowden was going that direction and the technology got in his way. He has a very complicated setup and there were some issues with Tor and we haven't seen him for quite some time on either service, but he wanted to do something very similar.
He has a massive audience elsewhere. But the more people we have like you and him and hopefully others that do that and make this a thing and make it present, I think we we all benefit and then as long as technology is backing up in the product experience. So thank you.
[00:22:27] ODELL:
Thank you. So let's drill in a little bit more there. Do you have an opinion on Elon's decision to do mass identity verification on x's half a 1000000000 users?
[00:22:51] Jack:
This is great. Yeah. I mean, I I think, I wish he didn't have to and I wish he wouldn't, but running a company that we have to, I understand. You know, we're running a payments company. It's a public company, and, we have a lot of, regulation around us and a lot of requirements, as was talked about in some other presentations. We can't be a full Bitcoin company. No company can be a full Bitcoin company because as soon as you intersect U. S. Law or any other law, you make compromises. So, you have to keep in mind that Elon's stated goal is for x to be the everything app, and part of the everything app is moving money.
And I don't know what the plans are and how they move that money, but they're certainly getting money transmitter licensees, and that requires KYC.
[00:23:57] ODELL:
Yeah. But that's not I mean, his his explanation for why he's doing it is to combat bots and spam, and there are other ways you can do that Yeah. That don't require identity verification. We've had a couple panels today that have discussed ways that Nostra clients can do that through proof of work or through micropayments with Bitcoin. Yeah.
[00:24:17] Jack:
There are there are other ways, but it's a question of, like, convenience for the individual. And again, the reality is people might say they care, but they don't care. They don't. And they'd rather go the convenient path and just get the blue check and and go and get the bigger audience or remove the ads, and it's not important to them right now. And hopefully, it becomes important through more understanding or hopefully not through a crisis that they have in terms of, like, losing some of their identity or or being doxxed or whatnot, but it's not important. If it was important, people would care about it and it would demand it from and the market would provide a different solution, but that's not the case.
[00:24:58] ODELL:
I mean, the concern is You got you got a fan back there. See you. We appreciate you. We'll talk. The concern is when you see the increasing attacks on speech around the world. We see a country like the UK right now, right, where they are targeting people who are retweeting tweets, who are liking the wrong tweet, that are posting the wrong comment on Facebook, and they're throwing them in jail. Yep. And then you couple that with widespread identity verification on social media users. And then all of a sudden, you have these governments that are gonna use that information to then target people that say things they don't want to say.
And, unfortunately, the reality is most people learn this the hard way. As you said, they choose convenience first, but it it will be people being thrown in jail, people having their lives ruined, before they real realize the danger of this mass identity verification.
[00:25:58] Jack:
A 100%. But it's not just it's not just that. And I agree. I would rather not link any identity to, you know, quote unquote dangerous political speech. But in activists today who's questioning their government, choosing between x and choosing Noster, the risks are effectively the same. Why? In terms of privacy. We're very leaky with IP addresses. There are ways to go around this, but the average activist doesn't know how to use those tools effectively.
[00:26:33] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I think the IP address concern is a real concern. That's just a general Internet concern. Obviously, you are leaking your IP address to Twitter or Facebook or anything else you use. Right. But but But you're not you're not leaking it externally. You can use VPNs. You can use Tor. We're gonna have clients that provide different types of services to try and mitigate that kind of exposure to users, and we're not quite there yet. So I do agree with you. And if that audience is truly important to us, then we need to build those tools into the the stack as much as we can. 100%. 100%.
I mean, it's the same way I view bit Bitcoin. If you can't if an activist in an authoritarian country can't safely use it in an easy way Yeah. We've completely failed. Like, the mission, the movement, it's it's a complete failure. There's a percent of a percent of a percent of a percent of a percent is who's going to go through the same
[00:27:29] Jack:
setup that someone like Snowden goes through to protect truly protect their identity. And if we can build that into these stacks and, again, play towards the convenience and the momentum that people naturally drive towards because they need to get something out, then we win for the audience. But but right now, there is an equivalence. And I know it doesn't feel that way, but, like, the fact is the tools are pretty scarce and they're pretty dangerous for this this, this use case that we we care so much about.
[00:28:03] ODELL:
So I have one last question for you, because we're up on time. I mean, so you're just you're a fascinating person. You've built 2 massive publicly traded companies, juggernaut tech businesses. And you you said you said on the stage today that you you regret that Twitter went public. Right? And this is something that at 10:31 am I constantly thinking about with the private Bitcoin businesses that we're investing in. Do you think there's ever a reason for a company to go public or should just no one no one go to public markets, just stay in private markets?
[00:28:41] Jack:
It's a question of, in incentives because as soon as you go public, you your different incentives are forced upon you, and it's very, very challenging to build against those incentives. And, I don't know, like it it's a question of it's a question of I I don't think companies are inherently evil, but it's very easy for them to go that direction, and it's almost incentivized for them to go that direction. And I think if you make conscious choices around how you build your company like, we gave equity to our employees day 1, and that equity is a promise that they have an ownership in the company that will eventually be made good in 1 of 3 ways. 1, we go out of business, so they lose everything.
2, we're purchased, so they get some potential markup on what they originally got the price of their share for. And 3rd, we go public, which is an open market and it's traded up and down and all the volatility that that that suggests or or the the long tail. So if you're building your company and you're hiring, folks with that promise, then you have to deliver on it. If you strike a different thing where there's a revenue share or there's a we're gonna you know, as a company we've made so much money, we're gonna buy back your shares and we're gonna put a premium on it, They have to agree with it because companies really come down to the team, ultimately.
And it's just a function and a strategy for, like, how you, how you build that and ultimately what what you can do with it. But I I don't think, I regret the fact that, Twitter could not have just been an open source project, could not have just been an API, but I don't regret the fact that we turned it into a company because it spread the idea super quick. And if I had to choose anything, it'd be the idea. The manifestation of it doesn't matter. I think the idea is really solid and the idea has inspired new things such as, you know, what what we've been talking about, and it makes the idea even even better and better and better.
[00:31:02] ODELL:
So time is scarce, but, we just got it. We got an added 15 minutes here. I think it's because you guys are clapping so hard. So thank you. So you said you wish Twitter was an open protocol. Obviously, I think that is Nostar.
[00:31:21] Jack:
It is.
[00:31:22] ODELL:
Before you before you, left leadership at Twitter, because now we know you are continuing you still own the same amount, So nothing really changed there. You launched this initiative, Blue Sky, which from my perspective was an unmitigated disaster. Do you have any insight in what went wrong there?
[00:31:54] Jack:
So I I I wrote some I wrote some tweets. I don't know what year it was. Rabel, do you know? Where's Rabel? So I'm over here. Hey, Raval. Yep. Hey. What's up? So Raval was my boss for a long time. Yeah. Do you know when, we announced, like, the initiative to build the protocol?
[00:32:19] Rabble:
I think it was 2020 or 2021. It was maybe 2019. I think the first time I sat down and said, hey, let's do a protocol was 2018. And you were like, oh, so I'll invest. And then some Twitter person, like lawyer was like, oh, no. You can't invest personally and Twitter can't invest in this either. And then it took a couple years until you figured out how to do it. Yeah.
[00:32:46] Jack:
In a lot of pain by the way. But we we did it, we committed to it, and we we launched this thing and then, we had a small team who were talking with this growing community. And actually someone named Fia Jaff actually came by and had conversations with us, not physically came by, but but talked with the group, Rabble, a bunch of others. And the the team, you know, eventually, came, upon the the ultimate lead of of what became Blue Sky, which was Jay. And at that time I was also, well, when we had an activist come into our stock and that time when the activist came in is when I committed to leaving the company. It took me about a year, but that year was up and as I was leaving the company, we were hiring Jay and she was launching Blue Sky and then suddenly Elon expressed interest to buy the company and that actually went through after a lot of back and forth, which really, really depressed me and I thought was terrible, and and really hurt the company, and I think set up Elon for some some negative outcomes early on.
And and then Jay, got pretty nervous about funding existing. We gave we gave them 14,000,000 and funding continuing to exist, after he launched purchase. And, she started to raise money from other VCs, and that and the fact that it had a board and the way it was being developed, as as Raul talked about earlier, and finding PHF's markdown file on GitHub, where he diagnosed every single problem Twitter had and an actual solution that that kind of worked and the humility in releasing that. And the number of people that were coming to me saying, you should look at Noster, and then, tweeting about it and downloading DAMAS and talking with Will and again, like, the moment for me was taking my NSEQ was which was kind of a mix between NSEQ and the HEX fields at that point, and moving it to another client on the web was, like, wow.
Like, this this is it. Like, it's super janky right now, but there's something there's something here and the people are amazing. And, the next day I realized, like, fundamentally blue sky is the wrong direction, in terms of the way this this has been built and that, I should do whatever it takes to help Nasser and I reached out to Fia, Jeff and Will and I said, like, do you have a foundation I can donate to because I'm donating money to these Internet, nonprofits and they both said, hell no. So we figured out other ways to do that and, and I started the Nostra Development Fund. And ever since that moment, it's just gotten more and more exciting. More and more people have come on, more and more people have taken it seriously, and I'm I'm just so grateful for, like the, the grace of the the folks in this room and and Will and Fia, Jeff and all the early people, that stuck it out for at least a year and a half before I discovered y'all, and just just because they believed in it. And, like, that that moment right there, like, that time span is the most fragile of any project, of any company, of any initiative.
And we we have, you know, we have Will and we have Fia Jaff and a bunch of others to thank. So huge round of applause for them. And Matt, Matt actually had a podcast with Will early on, and he used it on that podcast and then never used it again, until until recently where he's now deleted his ex account. So we also have him to thank for finding early technology and finding early folks like like Will and and believing in them and then believing enough in them that, you know, you you put them on the on the platform and the stage of, of your
[00:37:33] ODELL:
huge podcast platform. What what is the name of that podcast?
[00:37:38] Jack:
Was it Sildot Dispatch or I don't know which one you It was Sildot Dispatch. Okay. So Open your podcast app. Click subscribe.
[00:37:47] ODELL:
That was a fun rip. That was it feels like a decade ago. What was that? Like, 3 years ago, Will? It was 3 years ago? Oh, yeah. It was a long time ago. Feels like a decade. We do have the best open source contributors. This movement is a special beast, and I I I don't think you can overstate that. The it is incredibly undervalued. You can throw it up in all caps on the back screen over there, and people would still not appreciate it enough.
[00:38:10] Jack:
True. The the claps.
[00:38:17] ODELL:
So, I mean, one of the coolest parts about Nasr to me is this idea of of being able to move between apps without permission. Right? We have this massive ecosystem of of hyper focused apps that do different things. You know, we have, apps that do events. We have apps that are that are based on on streaming videos. We have we have clients that look like an Instagram or clients that look like Reddit. I think Open Sats alone is now funding over 30 Nostra clients, and you can just easily move that private key that that that nsec that is generated when you first launch Nostr in any Nostr app, you can easily move it to any other client. So it's it's like the ultimate first of all, it's ultimate in terms of interoperability of being able to move around with your social graph and have all your followers and have everyone that that you wanna communicate and interact with move with you between apps, but it's also the ultimate check on on on on corruption or or or apps doing things that users don't want or that are predatory against users. It's like a core foundational element of Nostra. Right?
The the the difficulty there, right, is so, like, we might have a lot of people watching this livestream right now that have never used Nostr before. And I I find myself in this situation a lot, where it's it's how do you how do you recommend to a new user where to start on Nostr, with with without, you know, going into all the nuance of, you know I I I don't know how to phrase this question. Basically, instead of, like, listing 30 apps and be like, you could use all of these clients, how do you do it? Like, do you just tell people to, like, Google Nostr? Do you tell them to go to nostr.comornostr.org?
Like, how do you handle that situation? I start I start sending them, links.
[00:40:22] Jack:
I start sending them post because I I think the the thing that's going to drive people to it is who's on it and the the content and what they can find ultimately. So whatever client I'm on, there's a share sheet and it goes to Imessage or, signal and, that that to me has been the the stickiest way to get people in. I think, you know, Primal did a really good job of making people feel the importance of it through the the Bitcoin wallet built in and being able to buy Bitcoin and receive zaps. Like, the the thing that really made Twitter click for people early on was the fact that, like, it was SMS based and it would actually buzz your pocket and your your your pocket would, like, vibrate.
Like, it felt really, really tangible. Like, you could feel the network. And Zaps is another amazing way to feel the network. The fact that you're getting value, however it's denominated or explained to you. I just signed someone up who this guy Tony Schifrazzi. And, check out check out my recent notes because this guy is a legend. This guy was the one of the one of the people that found Basquiat, the artist, defaced a number of really important paintings as a as a statement, as an artistic statement, and this guy just knows everyone. He's he's just got such an interesting mind. And him posting and then me reposting him and introducing him and him getting zaps because I signed him up for the wallet right away, he's just like, my good. I'm a look at this again.
And I I think that someone said this in an earlier presentation, but it's very easy to get people to try it and it's very hard to get I think it was you, Paul. Very hard to get them to stay and to come back to it. But the only thing that gets people coming back is, like, the content, ultimately. And right now, when you sign up with, with Primal, for instance, I'm a I'm a pick on you guys, The experience is, oh, I I have why am I following a 134 people? Who are these people? And they actually it puts them in this defensive position of, like, why am I following these people and how do I unfollow them and what the hell are they talking about? And to Rabel's point, they're all talking about Bitcoin.
And now they're just, like, doubly insulted and never gonna open the app, you know, never open the app again unless, like, you send them post, and through other channels. So the onboarding experience and how people get in is really really critical and really important and none of the clients have really figured it out yet. But it's not that far off. Like, it's really not that far off, and I think we see line of sight to it, but it's it's work, and people will reintroduce some themselves to services like this, but only so much.
And we have to, you know, just be really hyper aware of, like, they're only gonna try this maybe twice, and if we miss them on the first time and we miss them on the second time, we're probably gonna miss them out completely. And that's the power of the, you know, the social app protocol that Raba was talking about, where this ecosystem of apps, is that you may not get them for the Twitter clone. You might get them for another app experience, and they're still using Nostra. And if they're using Nostra for any one of those social social apps, then the whole network benefits, including the Twitter clone.
That's magic. Like, you don't see that anywhere else. Like, the power of an ecosystem is every part positively reinforces other parts, even if there are completely different use cases and completely disconnected. And, like, if you were to talk about an everything app, like, it's it's amazing. We've seen proof of it in China and and other places, but to actually have an everything ecosystem where you have thousands and thousands of apps that are not controlled by an Apple or Google, that people control themselves and they can control their data and bring their data and their identity anywhere, and they can even take it off and and remove it. That's powerful. And it will be something that people want over time. But what they want right now is utility.
They want immediate realization of value and we're not gonna get it by just competing with the use case of of Twitter. We're gonna we're we're gonna get it by offering a bunch of doorways in and one of them is gonna hook and it's going to provide that that value and that, lifting all the boats, for for all the other use cases that we care about.
[00:45:29] ODELL:
They they just keep adding time for us.
[00:45:32] Jack:
We have another panel, right, about the whole conference?
[00:45:34] ODELL:
Yes. So let's wrap this on one more question, and we'll bring it back to we'll bring now that I have more time, we're bringing it back to x.
[00:45:43] Jack:
The For someone who's deleted their x account and doesn't care about x, there's a lot of conversation.
[00:45:53] ODELL:
You're the cofounder. I have you on stage. We have a I'm the cofounder of Twitter. It's, and and you still own the same percent of x. So one of the reasons I love Twitter, right, it was the only social media I used for over a decade. Right? And the the reason I love Twitter, one of the core reasons I love Twitter was because I knew that if I had a Twitter link, if I had a piece of content on Twitter, I could share it with the world and they didn't have to be logged in. They didn't have to be signed in. They didn't have to have an account, and they were able to see it. Yep. Reddit famously called itself the home page of the Internet. Both x and Reddit require you to have accounts in order to view and and engage and interact with it. Like, right now, if if I open a It's dumb. An Xlink Mhmm. On my phone and I don't I don't have a Twitter account, I literally can't see replies. I can't click the user profile. I can't see any responses or anything. It's it's completely broken. Dumb.
Was that a bad decision on x's part? Was it a necessary decision? And how does Noster
[00:47:00] Jack:
it it that's an edge for Noster. You have to answer that question in the context of what where it's being asked. Like, the context of X right now is a business that has to make money and their their money right now is either selling a premium account or advertising and logging in is important to that. For for Noster, like, one of the beauties beauties of of Twitter in the early days was that I could text from my phone to our short code 40404 and it would create a permalink web page that anyone could see immediately, and then the conversation would build.
So it was literally the fastest way to reach the world, and I think that's what grew it. It's because I know it doesn't matter what device I put this into, it's going to something that every single person in the in the world could read immediately. And without an account and without logging in, and I think that that's what made the public conversation the public conversation. And that's what made Twitter, in my view, a news app. Like, when when I was CEO, we pulled Twitter out of the social network category in the App Store, where we were 20, and we put it in the news category in the App Store, where we were number 1.
And we did that globally because it's news. It's literally new, new, new, new, new, new. And that that speed is is really important, and it's speed of the access of information, it's speed of the interface. And if we want any hope in competing with that use case, we need that we need that speed. We have it. Like, I in terms of, like, a technology that it can put something out, where I know it's going to be up and I know it's going to be readable by every single person in the world in a format that they can consume, to me to me, the the the best answer right now is Nostra. It is, because everyone can read it and the and the consumption side of it is extremely, extremely critical and important.
We have some issues with the URLs we produce and and how things are cached and how, you know, the the page is constructed and it's a little bit slow, but if we focus on that and be become the permalink for all conversation, in the world, which I think we can, you know, it's it's something that people turn their heads to more and more because like there's it's not it's now not just the fastest way to put something out. It's the most durable and resilient place to put something out because no one can take it down except for me, my the author. And right now you can't even do that. But the but the fact that a government can't do it, a company can't do it, it's a it's the fastest place, it's the most stable place, the most resilient place, and most durable place, and and those are some pretty powerful attributes.
[00:50:09] ODELL:
But just real quick, just to drill into that. Do these walled gardens that are popping up all throughout the centralized Internet are obviously bad for users. It's a worse user experience. The the argument that's being made by leadership, at least internally and sometimes externally for publicly facing companies, is that it's gonna be better for business, that they wanna control their product and the users of their product, so they don't want that content out there. Do you think it's actually a good business decision?
[00:50:38] Jack:
It depends on the business model. For the for the business model of advertising, it it it it helps because you get more identity, and more identity leads to better targeting
[00:50:48] ODELL:
for for the advertiser. Yeah. But it's ultimately gonna be the kill shot. Right? It's what it's how Nosta really takes over everything.
[00:50:57] Jack:
This is a statement you wanted to make instead of the question you asked. There was a question mark at the end. Yes. Yeah. I I'm I'm a believer in protocols over over platforms, obviously. I believe that companies can benefit from protocols. I'm building a company that benefits massively from protocol and that protocol is Bitcoin. And recognizing that and being able to contribute back to it and recognizing the fact that, like, it truly love it's the only thing that levels the playing field for us, inclusive of, like, all those open protocols that the Internet has provided. And I hope all the open source and open protocols that AI will provide us in the future instead of, like, having 5 CEOs make all decisions around these models.
You know, we I can build a fantastic business on top of that and others can as well and it doesn't favor our business versus other businesses. So I I think open is always the way to go, but, like, I understand that businesses will have will have different decisions based on, like, what their what their model is around.
[00:52:04] ODELL:
Fair enough. I think it's a ship business decision, though. I guess we'll find out. Do you have any final thoughts for everyone before we wrap?
[00:52:17] Jack:
Thank you. I mean, it it takes a lot of time and it takes it takes a lot of time, one, to even consider this concept, to come all the way out here, some some of you away from your families and your friends for these few days, for a conference that, while free, like we're not no one's paying you to be here and you're sacrificing a lot. Even if it's not a lot, it's meaningful. And the fact that we show up for something like this, I think says everything. The fact that we can have this conference, and that we can have this gathering, and that we have tons of amazing conversations says it all about the future of this this work to me. Like people are willing to sacrifice real tangible things to make this make this matter and, and that that means a lot. It means a lot to everyone here. It means a lot to to me that these things are appreciated and that we should continue doing them. I think that's what the new panel is about. We always have this, should we continue doing this? Like, should we do it every year? Where should we do it next? Wrap up panel.
What worked? What didn't? But generally, I think it's working, and, I think we'll only benefit these permissionless tools, and I hope it inspires more conferences like this for different use cases and different permissionless tools that that we all know we need.
[00:53:41] ODELL:
Love it. Thank you, Jack. I appreciate you. Thank you. Use the tools. Try out Nostr. Play around with it. Freedom Tech is hope. Let's make this thing happen. Peace. Thank you.
Exactly when we say Odell and Jack. Thank you, David.
[00:00:06] Jack:
Thank you.
[00:00:10] ODELL:
Do you own any other shirts? No.
[00:00:13] Jack:
Just that one? Just this one.
[00:00:17] ODELL:
I think most people in this room know this. Maybe people on the livestream do not know this, but Jack personally pays for these Noster events. This is the third one, that a team of volunteers has has put on, first in Costa Rica, then Tokyo, now here in Latvia and Riga. It's incredibly important, for you and the and the team of volunteers to try and do it as global as possible. But I just can we just give Jack a huge round of applause for It's it's kind of ridiculous. Like, that's an insane thing to do is throw free conferences around the world. I've never I've never been to a
[00:01:08] Jack:
a a packed free conference before. Matt, that's the guest over lunch that we charge for the next one. I did. I did. And if we do,
[00:01:16] ODELL:
blame him. Wait. Wait. There there's some there's some nuance here. There's some nuance here. I said charge $21 in Bitcoin, and every every every, guest here today got a payable Bitcoin, NFC card where they can pay with Bitcoin at the bar or the restaurants at the food trucks outside that had $21 on it. So I suggested that you pay $21 and then you get $42 if you show up on the card. So there's some proof of work. So actually, it's even better than free because you actually make money to come to the event. So, I mean, you gotta be clear here.
[00:01:56] Jack:
What's what's the goal? But yeah, I I do think, I I wanna another round of applause for all of our volunteers because they really do all the work and come up with all the creativity. Apologies in advance. I'm getting over bronchitis. So if I, I, my voice is a little bit weak. But I do think it's really important that, we foster this community and we foster the development through meeting in person. And, we did start in Costa Rica, we went to another continent, chose Tokyo, another continent chose Europe and will continue to bounce around the world, every single year and hopefully it continues to grow. But while our attendance hasn't grown a lot, the depth of the conversation and the presentation has has really been impressive. And I think just getting together in person like this really accelerates what we're able to do, and I think it's complementary to a bunch of the work Matt and others are doing in terms of funding development, funding education, funding content. All these things add up and all these parts play a significant role in compounding to building this this thing that we love and the thing that we know will impact so many people in the positive, not just yet, but over time, absolutely.
[00:03:17] ODELL:
Love it. I mean, so while we're on that topic, why do you focus so much time, energy, money on Noster?
[00:03:31] Jack:
It's the only reason I'm in a position that I can even consider doing something like this is because of the grace of the open source developers on the Internet and the way that the Internet was built. For those of you who are as old as me, you remember Usenet, you remember the early days of Linux, you remember Gopher, you remember the early days of the web, you remember the principles, but most importantly, you remember that you could read the code. And that was incredible. And the fact that all these APIs were open, the fact that, Ravel brought this up, that TCPIP, the very foundation of the Internet, was considered the ugly, wrong choice and people made it work and every single interaction we have today in the world every single person in the world has an interaction today where they touch that work and they touch this concept of the bizarre model instead of the cathedral.
And we have so many companies and we have so many organizations trying to build this cathedral model and control it and take more and more so that they can profit more and more, and we need to have an opinionated and different approach that we build in parallel, for when those things fail, which they will, we have some, we have some place that people can go to. And and that's what gives me a lot of patience around what everyone is building here is because, like, our only goal here is just to build in parallel and to make sure that we continue to build something that when people need it, it's available.
And I think that's really important that we always have those options available to us. The same is true for Bitcoin. There's a lot of talk about how censorship resistance is important and a lot of talk about censoring and a lot of talk about freedom of speech and all these things, but no one has proven that they actually want that. If they actually wanted it, they'd be using it every single day. And it's a lot of it it's really good marketing right now. But if you actually want to see if people believe in it believe it in their soul, they're going to act and they're going to do something about it. And we're just not seeing that right now. But when they are ready and when they or when they're forced to be ready or when their mind is finally open to take another action and sacrifice the convenience they have right now and the network they have right now, that this place is ready and that Bitcoin is ready and it's up to the task of supporting billions and billions of people.
So it's a long haul and it's something that, you know, we may not even see the entire fruits in our lifetime. I think we will. But the fact that we have this collection of people working on this, and working on these ideals, and thinking about the long term, and suffering through the small numbers right now, I think is really important, really unique, and, I don't know. I I I love it. I love I love being part of this community. Matt Matt is very big on clapping and getting energy back from the audience, so I don't care. So any after any time he stops talking, if you could just give him some energy back and I'm good. No. We we clap after Jack. No. No. No. No. No. No.
[00:07:16] ODELL:
Let's, we have a packed house here. We have short time, so let's get in it. You're the cofounder of Twitter, obviously. Now it's x. Elon brought it, took it private. Now it's x. It has about a half a 1000000000 users, 500,000,000 users. 5 years, does Noster have more users than X?
[00:07:45] Jack:
Yeah. Great question. It's not about the answers. It's the questions you ask, and that's how we're judging this this, this conversation. It's finding the right question. Right? In 5 years, I I don't I I don't know. I certainly hope so. There's no the thing about Noster and and Bitcoin is there's no fundamental reason why it can't have all of the earth's information, like, have the largest corpus of information, and I think we want that. I think we should push for that. There's a lot of conversation today about information overload. I think we want and we benefit from more and more information.
The other side of that is we need the right ability to organize it, and that's where algorithms do come in. And if we have agency around choosing whether to use those algorithms or not being able to build them, then we have a perfect union. But there's no reason there's nothing stopping people from just putting everything on this on this platform, and there's no reason why we shouldn't welcome it. Because if we do have the largest corpus of information, people can build really amazing things on top of it. And I think from that from that degree, maybe the number of users is the wrong metric.
It's how much how how useful it is, and how useful the information is, and how much is actually how much is actually there. What is the density? Because it's not just going to be humans utilizing this. It's not just gonna be humans connecting on all this. I know they're a bad word right now, but, like, bots are our future and they will be a valuable part of our future if we have agency over them, if we can help control them, if we can choose to use them or not, and they're transparent. And there's no better platform to start working with Agenik AI and bots than Nostra because of the openness, because of the transparency, because that you don't have to ask for permission for anything.
So we have a playground that these new systems can actually intersect on, and I think we should embrace that. And we we should our strongest our strongest message right now, and this was said by, I don't I don't know what presentation it was, but there was a slide with a number of developers, Blue Sky and Twitter and who's the was that Pablo? Pablo and Pablo. Young. That's our strongest message right now is is the strength and the size of our developer network, and that is unbounded in terms of growth. And that metric, I think, is unique and and super important.
[00:10:35] ODELL:
We're gonna have more users than than x in 5 years. Very long winded non answer from Jack. I think I think you believe it. I think you just feel a little bit pigeonholed.
[00:10:48] Jack:
No. Not at all. Like, I'm just being realistic. I don't I like, I sure. X is cutting down on on bots and and all these things. I don't think we're we don't have that constraint because we don't have that problem. Fair enough. And I I think we should embrace that. So along that metric, having more programs and having more automations and having more experiments, Rob will remember this. This was this is what made Twitter super weird and super interesting back in the day, is people were hooking real things to it, and devices and bots and Tamagotchis and all these things. And it was fun because it it was like humans you could talk to, but also like things that were, like, suddenly had emotion and were were alive, and that was so early. This was over 18 years ago.
But all that technology behind all that stuff right now with everything we're seeing with AI and agenics systems, it's really mature now. It's actually useful. It's actually useful, and it's providing real value, and I think it's a big, big part of of our future. So if if Noster can be one of those those protocols in those playgrounds, I could there's there's no question that we have more, but how are you measuring that? Okay. So you're you're you're saying that you expect Noster to be more useful than x in 5 years? I would I would say it's already more usable because, people don't have to ask permission to change it. So they can make it usable for themselves. They can make it usable for people like them.
And and as you saw with the ditto presentation from Alex, people can come to it and build their own custom viewport and their own custom experience that fits them, and everything they do in that small little world benefits the entire world and the entire protocol of of Nasser and ends up benefiting everyone. More energy. After after he asked the questions only. They were doing the right thing. Okay. So so on Tuesday,
[00:12:49] ODELL:
in a court case, with Elon and x from his x employees, the investor shareholder cap table of x, got released, in that court proceeding, and in there, they listed the different investors that took x private. It includes a who's who, like a p. Diddy connected VC fund, a 16z, the Saudis, a Palantir connected VC Fund, and you. And so my question for you is, how do you feel about the direction that Elon has taken the platform that you built?
[00:13:36] Jack:
I think that was actually sincere applause for you. I made a decision to roll over my shares, so I had 3% of the company. Elon bought it. I kept all my shares. I didn't sell any. I didn't have this giant payday, as a company was sold. I did so because, 1st and foremost, I believe in the idea of Twitter, much more than the man any particular manifestation. The manifestation of the idea that it believed in the least, the absolute least, was a public company. We were a public company that was reliant upon 1 business model solely in a singular fashion, and that was the advertising model.
And the reason why we had an advertising model is because our peers did. We wanted to go public, and that was the fastest path to do so. And there was no ability to send value across the Internet. There was no micropayments on the Internet, as Jack talked about. We've actually been talking about it for 40 years, if not more. And Zaps is the biggest living, scaling, experimentation of that idea. Thank you, Will, and thank you for the entire Bitcoin ecosystem for making that possible. So taking it private, I'm so grateful that someone was able to do that.
I'm so grateful that, it was taken private by an entrepreneur and a technologist instead of a private equity firm. It would be dead at this point. It would be dead if it was still a public company because there's no hope of competing with, the likes of Facebook and Google. And it allows the space to do some experimentation and do a lot of different things, and Elon is testing that. I don't always agree with the methods, or the sequence, the reaction to perceived threats, which I don't see as threats at all, but I appreciate that it's covered and protected, and they can experiment.
The biggest disagreement I have with the way it's run and the potential for it in the future is before I left, we, you know, we wanted to build a protocol. Right now Twitter owns the protocol. It owns a presentation layer and it owns the distribution. All 3. It puts a ton of pressure for whoever is running that company to make decisions around what's on the on the service and what's not. Having a protocol where the content, lives and you can separate those other layers takes away a bunch of the liability and still allows you to build a really amazing business on top of it. And it'd be my hope that Elon and the company recognize this, and they recognize the single point of failure that they're they're in. It doesn't matter who is the CEO of that company, no matter how much you love them or hate them, they're in a place where they have a a choke point.
And that choke point can be their business model. It can be the relationship with their other businesses. It can be countries threatening to raid the offices of their employees or put them in jail, which we had when I was CEO of Twitter many, many times in countries all over the all around the world. And it's not sustainable. You can't build a company that means to serve as a town square, a public town square, without having something underneath it that no single entity owns. And that's what Nostra represents to me, is that you you can remove some of that liability and you can get back to the idea of what Twitter was meant to be and what it what it ultimately is by providing a much stronger foundation that no single person, no and no government, no company owns or can can remove.
And that's what this this is all about to me, is giving options to a company like Twitter so that they can take that option. I'm not saying that they will, but the fact that it's an option is is really important. I I don't know. I I'm I'm conflicted. I really love Twitter. I I loved building it. I still love it. I think the algorithm has taken over too much. I, everything I don't love about it, I see alternatives and noster that I do love. And it's not me saying, like, we should do this, we should do this, we should do this. People just come to their own conclusions. I'm like, man, that's awesome. That's awesome that someone's thinking about that, and they're doing it, and no one's telling them to do it. They just want it, then they wanna build it.
And, they don't have to ask for any permission. As a CEO of another company, like, people have to ask permission from me all the time to get money and to, to fund their their projects and to get budget and whatnot and to be able to take myself out of that equation and instead take the benefit I've had from building something like Twitter and Square and Block and giving it to organizations like like Matt to make those decisions in a rigorous way with a board of 9 people, which I'm told is extremely important at that particular size, and other organizations.
And for them to make those funding decisions about ideas that that we should have in these experiences, in the in these protocols, in these platforms is pretty amazing to see. And so while I'm upset about various things in Twitter, I love that the ideal ID idea idea persists and that it's even being made stronger and stronger and stronger every day in in in the work that we're talking about over these past 2 days. They're pre clapping for your question because they know the next one's gonna be a banger.
[00:20:26] ODELL:
I mean, I I I used to love Twitter too, but I think Nostra fixes this.
[00:20:31] Jack:
Yeah. I I do. I I I also I I agree. And I and I no. I respect that you are able to delete your account and that you did. It's a big step to walk away from an audience. It's a big step to take away the convenience, and it's a big step to go the opposite direction of the momentum. And you're brave because you're you're in a world that is dependent upon people knowing what you do and your audience and you're only as good as your reach ultimately. And to take that channel and just say, I'm building elsewhere, I think is important because we're if people don't follow your lead, we're we're not really going to be anywhere. Like, we need to have that, and we need to have this new experience that you haven't seen elsewhere. And I agree completely with Rabble in terms of the the magic.
The first magic thing is being able to plug that N2C into different clients and different apps, and I think it's amazing. The second for for me is apps, but that that freedom that that gives is important. Having more of those, but also people like you that are braving ahead and saying, like, I'm forgetting this. You can find me here and I'm dedicating myself to it. It's important. Snowden was going that direction and the technology got in his way. He has a very complicated setup and there were some issues with Tor and we haven't seen him for quite some time on either service, but he wanted to do something very similar.
He has a massive audience elsewhere. But the more people we have like you and him and hopefully others that do that and make this a thing and make it present, I think we we all benefit and then as long as technology is backing up in the product experience. So thank you.
[00:22:27] ODELL:
Thank you. So let's drill in a little bit more there. Do you have an opinion on Elon's decision to do mass identity verification on x's half a 1000000000 users?
[00:22:51] Jack:
This is great. Yeah. I mean, I I think, I wish he didn't have to and I wish he wouldn't, but running a company that we have to, I understand. You know, we're running a payments company. It's a public company, and, we have a lot of, regulation around us and a lot of requirements, as was talked about in some other presentations. We can't be a full Bitcoin company. No company can be a full Bitcoin company because as soon as you intersect U. S. Law or any other law, you make compromises. So, you have to keep in mind that Elon's stated goal is for x to be the everything app, and part of the everything app is moving money.
And I don't know what the plans are and how they move that money, but they're certainly getting money transmitter licensees, and that requires KYC.
[00:23:57] ODELL:
Yeah. But that's not I mean, his his explanation for why he's doing it is to combat bots and spam, and there are other ways you can do that Yeah. That don't require identity verification. We've had a couple panels today that have discussed ways that Nostra clients can do that through proof of work or through micropayments with Bitcoin. Yeah.
[00:24:17] Jack:
There are there are other ways, but it's a question of, like, convenience for the individual. And again, the reality is people might say they care, but they don't care. They don't. And they'd rather go the convenient path and just get the blue check and and go and get the bigger audience or remove the ads, and it's not important to them right now. And hopefully, it becomes important through more understanding or hopefully not through a crisis that they have in terms of, like, losing some of their identity or or being doxxed or whatnot, but it's not important. If it was important, people would care about it and it would demand it from and the market would provide a different solution, but that's not the case.
[00:24:58] ODELL:
I mean, the concern is You got you got a fan back there. See you. We appreciate you. We'll talk. The concern is when you see the increasing attacks on speech around the world. We see a country like the UK right now, right, where they are targeting people who are retweeting tweets, who are liking the wrong tweet, that are posting the wrong comment on Facebook, and they're throwing them in jail. Yep. And then you couple that with widespread identity verification on social media users. And then all of a sudden, you have these governments that are gonna use that information to then target people that say things they don't want to say.
And, unfortunately, the reality is most people learn this the hard way. As you said, they choose convenience first, but it it will be people being thrown in jail, people having their lives ruined, before they real realize the danger of this mass identity verification.
[00:25:58] Jack:
A 100%. But it's not just it's not just that. And I agree. I would rather not link any identity to, you know, quote unquote dangerous political speech. But in activists today who's questioning their government, choosing between x and choosing Noster, the risks are effectively the same. Why? In terms of privacy. We're very leaky with IP addresses. There are ways to go around this, but the average activist doesn't know how to use those tools effectively.
[00:26:33] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I think the IP address concern is a real concern. That's just a general Internet concern. Obviously, you are leaking your IP address to Twitter or Facebook or anything else you use. Right. But but But you're not you're not leaking it externally. You can use VPNs. You can use Tor. We're gonna have clients that provide different types of services to try and mitigate that kind of exposure to users, and we're not quite there yet. So I do agree with you. And if that audience is truly important to us, then we need to build those tools into the the stack as much as we can. 100%. 100%.
I mean, it's the same way I view bit Bitcoin. If you can't if an activist in an authoritarian country can't safely use it in an easy way Yeah. We've completely failed. Like, the mission, the movement, it's it's a complete failure. There's a percent of a percent of a percent of a percent of a percent is who's going to go through the same
[00:27:29] Jack:
setup that someone like Snowden goes through to protect truly protect their identity. And if we can build that into these stacks and, again, play towards the convenience and the momentum that people naturally drive towards because they need to get something out, then we win for the audience. But but right now, there is an equivalence. And I know it doesn't feel that way, but, like, the fact is the tools are pretty scarce and they're pretty dangerous for this this, this use case that we we care so much about.
[00:28:03] ODELL:
So I have one last question for you, because we're up on time. I mean, so you're just you're a fascinating person. You've built 2 massive publicly traded companies, juggernaut tech businesses. And you you said you said on the stage today that you you regret that Twitter went public. Right? And this is something that at 10:31 am I constantly thinking about with the private Bitcoin businesses that we're investing in. Do you think there's ever a reason for a company to go public or should just no one no one go to public markets, just stay in private markets?
[00:28:41] Jack:
It's a question of, in incentives because as soon as you go public, you your different incentives are forced upon you, and it's very, very challenging to build against those incentives. And, I don't know, like it it's a question of it's a question of I I don't think companies are inherently evil, but it's very easy for them to go that direction, and it's almost incentivized for them to go that direction. And I think if you make conscious choices around how you build your company like, we gave equity to our employees day 1, and that equity is a promise that they have an ownership in the company that will eventually be made good in 1 of 3 ways. 1, we go out of business, so they lose everything.
2, we're purchased, so they get some potential markup on what they originally got the price of their share for. And 3rd, we go public, which is an open market and it's traded up and down and all the volatility that that that suggests or or the the long tail. So if you're building your company and you're hiring, folks with that promise, then you have to deliver on it. If you strike a different thing where there's a revenue share or there's a we're gonna you know, as a company we've made so much money, we're gonna buy back your shares and we're gonna put a premium on it, They have to agree with it because companies really come down to the team, ultimately.
And it's just a function and a strategy for, like, how you, how you build that and ultimately what what you can do with it. But I I don't think, I regret the fact that, Twitter could not have just been an open source project, could not have just been an API, but I don't regret the fact that we turned it into a company because it spread the idea super quick. And if I had to choose anything, it'd be the idea. The manifestation of it doesn't matter. I think the idea is really solid and the idea has inspired new things such as, you know, what what we've been talking about, and it makes the idea even even better and better and better.
[00:31:02] ODELL:
So time is scarce, but, we just got it. We got an added 15 minutes here. I think it's because you guys are clapping so hard. So thank you. So you said you wish Twitter was an open protocol. Obviously, I think that is Nostar.
[00:31:21] Jack:
It is.
[00:31:22] ODELL:
Before you before you, left leadership at Twitter, because now we know you are continuing you still own the same amount, So nothing really changed there. You launched this initiative, Blue Sky, which from my perspective was an unmitigated disaster. Do you have any insight in what went wrong there?
[00:31:54] Jack:
So I I I wrote some I wrote some tweets. I don't know what year it was. Rabel, do you know? Where's Rabel? So I'm over here. Hey, Raval. Yep. Hey. What's up? So Raval was my boss for a long time. Yeah. Do you know when, we announced, like, the initiative to build the protocol?
[00:32:19] Rabble:
I think it was 2020 or 2021. It was maybe 2019. I think the first time I sat down and said, hey, let's do a protocol was 2018. And you were like, oh, so I'll invest. And then some Twitter person, like lawyer was like, oh, no. You can't invest personally and Twitter can't invest in this either. And then it took a couple years until you figured out how to do it. Yeah.
[00:32:46] Jack:
In a lot of pain by the way. But we we did it, we committed to it, and we we launched this thing and then, we had a small team who were talking with this growing community. And actually someone named Fia Jaff actually came by and had conversations with us, not physically came by, but but talked with the group, Rabble, a bunch of others. And the the team, you know, eventually, came, upon the the ultimate lead of of what became Blue Sky, which was Jay. And at that time I was also, well, when we had an activist come into our stock and that time when the activist came in is when I committed to leaving the company. It took me about a year, but that year was up and as I was leaving the company, we were hiring Jay and she was launching Blue Sky and then suddenly Elon expressed interest to buy the company and that actually went through after a lot of back and forth, which really, really depressed me and I thought was terrible, and and really hurt the company, and I think set up Elon for some some negative outcomes early on.
And and then Jay, got pretty nervous about funding existing. We gave we gave them 14,000,000 and funding continuing to exist, after he launched purchase. And, she started to raise money from other VCs, and that and the fact that it had a board and the way it was being developed, as as Raul talked about earlier, and finding PHF's markdown file on GitHub, where he diagnosed every single problem Twitter had and an actual solution that that kind of worked and the humility in releasing that. And the number of people that were coming to me saying, you should look at Noster, and then, tweeting about it and downloading DAMAS and talking with Will and again, like, the moment for me was taking my NSEQ was which was kind of a mix between NSEQ and the HEX fields at that point, and moving it to another client on the web was, like, wow.
Like, this this is it. Like, it's super janky right now, but there's something there's something here and the people are amazing. And, the next day I realized, like, fundamentally blue sky is the wrong direction, in terms of the way this this has been built and that, I should do whatever it takes to help Nasser and I reached out to Fia, Jeff and Will and I said, like, do you have a foundation I can donate to because I'm donating money to these Internet, nonprofits and they both said, hell no. So we figured out other ways to do that and, and I started the Nostra Development Fund. And ever since that moment, it's just gotten more and more exciting. More and more people have come on, more and more people have taken it seriously, and I'm I'm just so grateful for, like the, the grace of the the folks in this room and and Will and Fia, Jeff and all the early people, that stuck it out for at least a year and a half before I discovered y'all, and just just because they believed in it. And, like, that that moment right there, like, that time span is the most fragile of any project, of any company, of any initiative.
And we we have, you know, we have Will and we have Fia Jaff and a bunch of others to thank. So huge round of applause for them. And Matt, Matt actually had a podcast with Will early on, and he used it on that podcast and then never used it again, until until recently where he's now deleted his ex account. So we also have him to thank for finding early technology and finding early folks like like Will and and believing in them and then believing enough in them that, you know, you you put them on the on the platform and the stage of, of your
[00:37:33] ODELL:
huge podcast platform. What what is the name of that podcast?
[00:37:38] Jack:
Was it Sildot Dispatch or I don't know which one you It was Sildot Dispatch. Okay. So Open your podcast app. Click subscribe.
[00:37:47] ODELL:
That was a fun rip. That was it feels like a decade ago. What was that? Like, 3 years ago, Will? It was 3 years ago? Oh, yeah. It was a long time ago. Feels like a decade. We do have the best open source contributors. This movement is a special beast, and I I I don't think you can overstate that. The it is incredibly undervalued. You can throw it up in all caps on the back screen over there, and people would still not appreciate it enough.
[00:38:10] Jack:
True. The the claps.
[00:38:17] ODELL:
So, I mean, one of the coolest parts about Nasr to me is this idea of of being able to move between apps without permission. Right? We have this massive ecosystem of of hyper focused apps that do different things. You know, we have, apps that do events. We have apps that are that are based on on streaming videos. We have we have clients that look like an Instagram or clients that look like Reddit. I think Open Sats alone is now funding over 30 Nostra clients, and you can just easily move that private key that that that nsec that is generated when you first launch Nostr in any Nostr app, you can easily move it to any other client. So it's it's like the ultimate first of all, it's ultimate in terms of interoperability of being able to move around with your social graph and have all your followers and have everyone that that you wanna communicate and interact with move with you between apps, but it's also the ultimate check on on on on corruption or or or apps doing things that users don't want or that are predatory against users. It's like a core foundational element of Nostra. Right?
The the the difficulty there, right, is so, like, we might have a lot of people watching this livestream right now that have never used Nostr before. And I I find myself in this situation a lot, where it's it's how do you how do you recommend to a new user where to start on Nostr, with with without, you know, going into all the nuance of, you know I I I don't know how to phrase this question. Basically, instead of, like, listing 30 apps and be like, you could use all of these clients, how do you do it? Like, do you just tell people to, like, Google Nostr? Do you tell them to go to nostr.comornostr.org?
Like, how do you handle that situation? I start I start sending them, links.
[00:40:22] Jack:
I start sending them post because I I think the the thing that's going to drive people to it is who's on it and the the content and what they can find ultimately. So whatever client I'm on, there's a share sheet and it goes to Imessage or, signal and, that that to me has been the the stickiest way to get people in. I think, you know, Primal did a really good job of making people feel the importance of it through the the Bitcoin wallet built in and being able to buy Bitcoin and receive zaps. Like, the the thing that really made Twitter click for people early on was the fact that, like, it was SMS based and it would actually buzz your pocket and your your your pocket would, like, vibrate.
Like, it felt really, really tangible. Like, you could feel the network. And Zaps is another amazing way to feel the network. The fact that you're getting value, however it's denominated or explained to you. I just signed someone up who this guy Tony Schifrazzi. And, check out check out my recent notes because this guy is a legend. This guy was the one of the one of the people that found Basquiat, the artist, defaced a number of really important paintings as a as a statement, as an artistic statement, and this guy just knows everyone. He's he's just got such an interesting mind. And him posting and then me reposting him and introducing him and him getting zaps because I signed him up for the wallet right away, he's just like, my good. I'm a look at this again.
And I I think that someone said this in an earlier presentation, but it's very easy to get people to try it and it's very hard to get I think it was you, Paul. Very hard to get them to stay and to come back to it. But the only thing that gets people coming back is, like, the content, ultimately. And right now, when you sign up with, with Primal, for instance, I'm a I'm a pick on you guys, The experience is, oh, I I have why am I following a 134 people? Who are these people? And they actually it puts them in this defensive position of, like, why am I following these people and how do I unfollow them and what the hell are they talking about? And to Rabel's point, they're all talking about Bitcoin.
And now they're just, like, doubly insulted and never gonna open the app, you know, never open the app again unless, like, you send them post, and through other channels. So the onboarding experience and how people get in is really really critical and really important and none of the clients have really figured it out yet. But it's not that far off. Like, it's really not that far off, and I think we see line of sight to it, but it's it's work, and people will reintroduce some themselves to services like this, but only so much.
And we have to, you know, just be really hyper aware of, like, they're only gonna try this maybe twice, and if we miss them on the first time and we miss them on the second time, we're probably gonna miss them out completely. And that's the power of the, you know, the social app protocol that Raba was talking about, where this ecosystem of apps, is that you may not get them for the Twitter clone. You might get them for another app experience, and they're still using Nostra. And if they're using Nostra for any one of those social social apps, then the whole network benefits, including the Twitter clone.
That's magic. Like, you don't see that anywhere else. Like, the power of an ecosystem is every part positively reinforces other parts, even if there are completely different use cases and completely disconnected. And, like, if you were to talk about an everything app, like, it's it's amazing. We've seen proof of it in China and and other places, but to actually have an everything ecosystem where you have thousands and thousands of apps that are not controlled by an Apple or Google, that people control themselves and they can control their data and bring their data and their identity anywhere, and they can even take it off and and remove it. That's powerful. And it will be something that people want over time. But what they want right now is utility.
They want immediate realization of value and we're not gonna get it by just competing with the use case of of Twitter. We're gonna we're we're gonna get it by offering a bunch of doorways in and one of them is gonna hook and it's going to provide that that value and that, lifting all the boats, for for all the other use cases that we care about.
[00:45:29] ODELL:
They they just keep adding time for us.
[00:45:32] Jack:
We have another panel, right, about the whole conference?
[00:45:34] ODELL:
Yes. So let's wrap this on one more question, and we'll bring it back to we'll bring now that I have more time, we're bringing it back to x.
[00:45:43] Jack:
The For someone who's deleted their x account and doesn't care about x, there's a lot of conversation.
[00:45:53] ODELL:
You're the cofounder. I have you on stage. We have a I'm the cofounder of Twitter. It's, and and you still own the same percent of x. So one of the reasons I love Twitter, right, it was the only social media I used for over a decade. Right? And the the reason I love Twitter, one of the core reasons I love Twitter was because I knew that if I had a Twitter link, if I had a piece of content on Twitter, I could share it with the world and they didn't have to be logged in. They didn't have to be signed in. They didn't have to have an account, and they were able to see it. Yep. Reddit famously called itself the home page of the Internet. Both x and Reddit require you to have accounts in order to view and and engage and interact with it. Like, right now, if if I open a It's dumb. An Xlink Mhmm. On my phone and I don't I don't have a Twitter account, I literally can't see replies. I can't click the user profile. I can't see any responses or anything. It's it's completely broken. Dumb.
Was that a bad decision on x's part? Was it a necessary decision? And how does Noster
[00:47:00] Jack:
it it that's an edge for Noster. You have to answer that question in the context of what where it's being asked. Like, the context of X right now is a business that has to make money and their their money right now is either selling a premium account or advertising and logging in is important to that. For for Noster, like, one of the beauties beauties of of Twitter in the early days was that I could text from my phone to our short code 40404 and it would create a permalink web page that anyone could see immediately, and then the conversation would build.
So it was literally the fastest way to reach the world, and I think that's what grew it. It's because I know it doesn't matter what device I put this into, it's going to something that every single person in the in the world could read immediately. And without an account and without logging in, and I think that that's what made the public conversation the public conversation. And that's what made Twitter, in my view, a news app. Like, when when I was CEO, we pulled Twitter out of the social network category in the App Store, where we were 20, and we put it in the news category in the App Store, where we were number 1.
And we did that globally because it's news. It's literally new, new, new, new, new, new. And that that speed is is really important, and it's speed of the access of information, it's speed of the interface. And if we want any hope in competing with that use case, we need that we need that speed. We have it. Like, I in terms of, like, a technology that it can put something out, where I know it's going to be up and I know it's going to be readable by every single person in the world in a format that they can consume, to me to me, the the the best answer right now is Nostra. It is, because everyone can read it and the and the consumption side of it is extremely, extremely critical and important.
We have some issues with the URLs we produce and and how things are cached and how, you know, the the page is constructed and it's a little bit slow, but if we focus on that and be become the permalink for all conversation, in the world, which I think we can, you know, it's it's something that people turn their heads to more and more because like there's it's not it's now not just the fastest way to put something out. It's the most durable and resilient place to put something out because no one can take it down except for me, my the author. And right now you can't even do that. But the but the fact that a government can't do it, a company can't do it, it's a it's the fastest place, it's the most stable place, the most resilient place, and most durable place, and and those are some pretty powerful attributes.
[00:50:09] ODELL:
But just real quick, just to drill into that. Do these walled gardens that are popping up all throughout the centralized Internet are obviously bad for users. It's a worse user experience. The the argument that's being made by leadership, at least internally and sometimes externally for publicly facing companies, is that it's gonna be better for business, that they wanna control their product and the users of their product, so they don't want that content out there. Do you think it's actually a good business decision?
[00:50:38] Jack:
It depends on the business model. For the for the business model of advertising, it it it it helps because you get more identity, and more identity leads to better targeting
[00:50:48] ODELL:
for for the advertiser. Yeah. But it's ultimately gonna be the kill shot. Right? It's what it's how Nosta really takes over everything.
[00:50:57] Jack:
This is a statement you wanted to make instead of the question you asked. There was a question mark at the end. Yes. Yeah. I I'm I'm a believer in protocols over over platforms, obviously. I believe that companies can benefit from protocols. I'm building a company that benefits massively from protocol and that protocol is Bitcoin. And recognizing that and being able to contribute back to it and recognizing the fact that, like, it truly love it's the only thing that levels the playing field for us, inclusive of, like, all those open protocols that the Internet has provided. And I hope all the open source and open protocols that AI will provide us in the future instead of, like, having 5 CEOs make all decisions around these models.
You know, we I can build a fantastic business on top of that and others can as well and it doesn't favor our business versus other businesses. So I I think open is always the way to go, but, like, I understand that businesses will have will have different decisions based on, like, what their what their model is around.
[00:52:04] ODELL:
Fair enough. I think it's a ship business decision, though. I guess we'll find out. Do you have any final thoughts for everyone before we wrap?
[00:52:17] Jack:
Thank you. I mean, it it takes a lot of time and it takes it takes a lot of time, one, to even consider this concept, to come all the way out here, some some of you away from your families and your friends for these few days, for a conference that, while free, like we're not no one's paying you to be here and you're sacrificing a lot. Even if it's not a lot, it's meaningful. And the fact that we show up for something like this, I think says everything. The fact that we can have this conference, and that we can have this gathering, and that we have tons of amazing conversations says it all about the future of this this work to me. Like people are willing to sacrifice real tangible things to make this make this matter and, and that that means a lot. It means a lot to everyone here. It means a lot to to me that these things are appreciated and that we should continue doing them. I think that's what the new panel is about. We always have this, should we continue doing this? Like, should we do it every year? Where should we do it next? Wrap up panel.
What worked? What didn't? But generally, I think it's working, and, I think we'll only benefit these permissionless tools, and I hope it inspires more conferences like this for different use cases and different permissionless tools that that we all know we need.
[00:53:41] ODELL:
Love it. Thank you, Jack. I appreciate you. Thank you. Use the tools. Try out Nostr. Play around with it. Freedom Tech is hope. Let's make this thing happen. Peace. Thank you.
Introduction and Acknowledgements
The Importance of Open Source and Nostr
Comparing Nostr and Twitter
Challenges and Opportunities for Nostr
Identity Verification and Privacy Concerns
Public vs. Private Companies
Blue Sky Initiative and Nostr Development
User Experience and Onboarding in Nostr
Final Thoughts and Future of Nostr
