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Join me today for Episode 884 of Bitcoin And . . . 

Topics for today:

- Hodlbod joins me for a deep dive into nostr. What is it? How does it work, and much, much more.

#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd

Circle P:
https://primal.net/p/npub172mu27r5yny0nnmvgjqwhx055dmsesrrx7j0p5d3pxagfx6xgxfsv75p3q
nostr handle: @beisnerds
Twitter: @beisnerds
Product: Maple Syrup and Soaps

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Find me on nostr
npub1vwymuey3u7mf860ndrkw3r7dz30s0srg6tqmhtjzg7umtm6rn5eq2qzugd (npub)
6389be6491e7b693e9f368ece88fcd145f07c068d2c1bbae4247b9b5ef439d32 (Hex)

Twitter:
https://twitter.com/DavidB84567

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fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI

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Music by:
Flutey Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

[00:00:00] David Bennett:

Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin Ant, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture,   casting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of two systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system. And that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems.   It is 1:50   PM.  

My God, it's late today. But there's a good reason, there's a good reason.   Got an interview with Hoddlebod   coming up. We're gonna talk only about Nostr.   Pretty much why it is that you want to know what why you want to be there,   why you wanna know what it is,   why you wanna interact with it,   sort of how it works.   I kinda   tried to get him to   get back to,   you know,   the basics.   What is it? How does it work? Why do we need it? What does it do? That kind of thing. And it's all for you and it's coming up. But first, it is the 11th day of April 2024.   And this is gonna be episode, what?  

885   of Bitcoin and is it is it really? Is it let me just make sure. No.   884.   Episode 8 8 4 of Bitcoin.   And the circle p is open for business. The circle p is where I bring plebs just like you   to plebs just like you   with their goods and services   for sale in Bitcoin. If they're not selling it for Bitcoin, they ain't in the circle p. And today we got Maple Trade.   He makes the best maple syrup that I've ever had, and he makes it by hand. He's not drop shipping it. He is actually tapping the trees. He's getting the sap. He's boiling   giving it to you as long as you give him some bitcoin.  

If you want to do that, and I highly recommend that you do,   then also order some of his sister Sarah's soaps.   Some of the best beef tallow soaps   I've ever used in my entire life. And as far as the maple syrup is concerned, you can get a quart for $27,   you can get half a gallon for 45,   or 4 pints for $50   His   in pub for Noster will be in the show notes, but you can find him   at Bysnerds, that is b   e I s n e r d s. Both on Noster   and dead bird site,   b e   isnerds.   Now,   let's hang out   for about 2 hours   with a good friend,   hollobod.  

So, yeah,   hollobod. We're not gonna be using real names here. Of course, you can always call them you could always call me David because everybody already knows that anyways. Yeah. And I'm pretty thoroughly doxed, so John is on the table. John is on the table? Oh my gosh. Are we recording yet? Yeah. We're recording. Okay. Yeah. You mean to kill that one?  

[00:03:25] Hodlbod:

No. That's fine. I was gonna say how thoroughly I doxed myself, but I'm not gonna dox myself.   I'm not gonna dox my doxing of myself right now. So   Well,  

[00:03:35] David Bennett:

at least at least you didn't do it the way,   somebody I know   has done it.   Because this is I guess we you know, maybe we should start with a   issue of doxing and and, you know, what kind of information,   you know, you should not be releasing in podcast and whatnot. I'm not going to say the person's name at all.   It has been a long time since anybody knew that I talked to the guy. Right?   But there was I was listening to one of the one of his shows, and he said that he had 300 Bitcoin.   Don't do that. Yeah. Don't say that. Don't please, for the love of God, don't don't do that kind of thing. Yeah. For the record, I do not have 300 Bitcoins. I do. I do. I have no Bitcoin. It all burned in the fire.   It's a terrible tragic gardening accident. I don't like talking about it. You were gardening on your boat, and it lit on fire and That's right. I was mowing the lawn on my boat. Yep. And the whole thing just caught on fire, and then it sinks. I hear you. Yeah. Same thing happened to me. Freakish. Anyways, so this will be the first this will be this is actually gonna be the first   sit down face to face in person interview   on the Bitcoin ad podcast. I'm honored. So I'm really excited about this. Me too. And, honestly,   it I just find it fortuitous   that we live we don't live all that close to each other,   but we live, like, within driving distance. Yeah. Close enough. And that's like and do we know anybody else that's within drive, like, anywhere, like,   close to this area?  



[00:05:08] Hodlbod:

There's some people on the west of the Cascades, I know, on Noester.  

[00:05:12] David Bennett:

Uh-huh. But I think that's as close as it gets. Well, that's, like, 4 hours. Yeah. You know, that's, like, oh, that's a long way away. Yeah. Well, I mean, for me, it's not because I've lived in Texas for so long. 6 hour driving is That's just the next town. Is nothing, but the thing about it is you drive 4 hours and you do your thing.   If with the 4 hour drive back, depending on how long your thing is,  

[00:05:35] Hodlbod:

you'd have to stay over, you know, for the night. Oh, yeah. I I almost never I used to live on the Westside of the mountains, and I I   never, do the full round trip in one shot. That's that's insane. I'll tell you one thing, though. I used to always be  

[00:05:50] David Bennett:

a I'm a I'm a junkie for the Rocky Mountains.   I mean, an absolute junkie. And I'm actually a real snob about it too for some reason. I don't know why, but I'd go   you know, my cousins live on the East Coast, so they go skiing on the Appalachians. And I'm like,  

[00:06:05] Hodlbod:

whatever. Oh, yeah. The Appalachians are nothing. Just just walk over those mountains. That's just like mountains.  

[00:06:10] David Bennett:

Yeah. Like, you know, hills or something like that. But then so but, you know, and then there's like some other other places. And I was like, look at the mountains going.   It's just it it doesn't it doesn't sing to me.   Well,   we went to, you know, we went to Seattle a couple of times,   since we've been since we've lived up here.   But   you don't really drive   through the spectacular part of the Cascades when you're going that way. So what you end up doing what we ended up doing is we somehow or another, we got told by the Google Maps or whatever,   there's some traffic. You need to go up north from Seattle before you start heading heading east.  

And we drove drove so far north that by the time we had a ride, we were gonna go cut right through the heart of the kick ass part of the Cascades. Yeah. And I was like, okay.   These are okay. These are fine.   The just, like, these are actual mountains. They're really impressive, and, like, I kinda wanna go back.  

[00:07:09] Hodlbod:

Yeah. Up up north, the northern Cascades are spectacular. I've only been through there once.   Drove a lot of, Stevens Pass for a long time, which is not that interesting. Right. I I do have a special place in my heart for Snoqualmie.   Yeah. But, you know, you go a little bit farther south to White Pass, and that's where, Rainier is. We would Rainier is insane. It's amazing. We went we drove through that, like, and and we actually  

[00:07:33] David Bennett:

if what you're thinking of is the pass that is part of Rainier National Park Yeah. Then, yeah, we went we went through that on one of the other times that we were coming back from,   from Seattle.   And it was,   yeah, it was spectacular. But what's so funny about it is that the cloud the clouds had socked in actual Mount Rainier.   We're it was right there. Can't see the shit. Yeah. I'm like, god. Dang it. You know, I was like, of all the of all the times in the world to not be able to see this this spectacular mountain. It had to be now because it was the only time we're gonna be driving through anytime soon. But   enough about travel blog.  

We I will Let's just stay on this topic for the next 2 hours. Yeah. Exactly. I've I've I've seen it done on podcast, and it's like, dude, shut up.   But   I you let's start with not your past past background, but your immediate background   is a Nostra you're   developer on the Nostra protocol,   and you've put out your baby is coracle dot social. Right? Yep. So one of the I think   there's   I get into this trap, and I think a lot of us that that do podcast or a lot of us that are explaining stuff to other people   is that we forget where they're at,   and we know where we're   we know our knowledge base, except that we kinda don't know what it is that we know because we already know it. It's tragic when you think about it that way. Because when we go to explain it, it's   tragic when you think about it that way. Because when we go to explain something,   we're trying to explain something from, why don't you already know this? You know, you get that feeling in the back of your head is, like, oh my god. And, like, I will find myself getting kinda upset.  

Not with them, but with me, because I'm like,   I feel inept   when I'm trying to unpack   7 years of Bitcoin   in a 15 minute discussion.   And the same is becoming true with when I'm trying to explain what the hell Nostra is.   So   can you get I want you to take a stab at that, like like, thinking that you're talking to somebody   who does it who's on Twitter and Facebook, and that's all they give a shit about. As to not why they need to move, but   if we were to engage in that discussion, we would first need to say,   well, what is Nostra?  

[00:09:52] Hodlbod:

Can you do that one? Yeah. It's a tall order. I mean, who better to to ask to explain it than the guy who's, like, deep in the weeds and, can't remember what people don't know. So,   I'll I'll I'll do a similarly terrible job of this, I think. But,   I was thinking about it on the way over. So, hopefully, my my thoughts are are,   organized enough. But I think the thing about Gnostr to understand is that,   it's a protocol. And there's 3 parts of the protocol. You got relays,   cryptographic key pairs, and,   and, it's an extensible interoperable protocol.  

[00:10:26] David Bennett:

Let let me hold you right there and and see if I   because I'm I'm trying to pretend like I know nothing. Yep.  

[00:10:34] Hodlbod:

What the hell is a protocol? Yeah. There's a ton there's a ton to unpack there. So, a protocol is,   basically, it's a language.   You know, and it's in a sense, it's a programming language,   but it's also very similar to a human language.   It's basically a set of vocabulary and grammar,   that allows people to communicate.   And in the in the context of a   computer communications protocol, it allows computers to communicate. So, one computer can talk to another computer and say, say something and the other one can know what they mean.   This is just what happens   all over the place. This is how the Internet works. This is how proprietary closed source software works.  

Different pieces talk to different pieces, and they understand each other, and they're good to go.   The interesting thing about protocols is that they're meant for different people, different developers, different pieces of software to be able to communicate with each other. So a good example of that is email.   You know, if I send an email from ProtonMail to Gmail,   you can actually receive it.   You know, Hotmail,   Outlook,   Pax Mail,   your own mail server that you run on your box,   at home. You know, all those things talk this, same language,   also known as SMTP.  

And, so you have this this common ground through which different parties can communicate,   and cooperate.   And,   one interesting thing about languages or about protocols is that normally they're designed from the top down.   Right? If you ever heard of the w three c, they're the kind of web,  

[00:12:11] David Bennett:

technologies working group. Oh, yeah. I haven't heard about them in a while. That's kind of a blast from the past. Yeah. They're they're always working on new stuff and,  

[00:12:19] Hodlbod:

you know, they they they have these multi year conversations, and they write down the specs in these huge,   pretty rigorous,   very dense documents.   I've read only a few of them,   and yet I've been doing web development for years years. So there ends up being this, like, disconnect between the theory and the practice,   where   people only implement parts of the HTTP standard or at least, you know, ignore the parts that are, implemented in underlying software because,   they just wanna do what they wanna do. And so they misuse parts of the protocol. And so, you know, you have these different views on language,   which are prescriptive and and descriptive, broadly speaking. So a prescriptive view is someone designed this language, and you should use it the way it was designed. The descriptive view on language is this is how people use the language, and therefore, the design should reflect that. Mhmm. Right? And when you talk about computer language, it's usually prescriptive.  

Someone came up with this idea.   They described how it works, and now everyone kinda does it that way. And if you don't do it that way, you're wrong.   The thing about human language   is, there ain't no rules.   You know? And you understood what I mean when I said that. Exactly. Because ain't isn't a word. Ain't ain't a word, but Right. It is now. Yeah. It I mean, it's more of a word than a lot of words that are words, if you know what I mean. That is true. This this is true. There's they're the longest word in the in the human lang or the English language is something like 15 syllables, and both of my kids can pronounce it perfectly. Antidisestablishmentarianism?  

[00:13:49] David Bennett:

No. It's no. It's a disease. It's like when you Is it? It's when you inhale silicate particles from specifically from  

[00:13:56] Hodlbod:

volcanic eruption and get cancer because of it. I love how specific some vocabulary jargon is. It's fantastic. It's like It's a little ridiculous. 3 3 people have ever used this word in in all seriousness. Like, same thing with anti disestablishmentarianism.   Everyone knows that word, but it's, like, no one actually uses it in its proper context. It was, like, invented by some writer, 50 years ago. And then, everyone immediately took the the word and,   misused it by using it as an example of a word that's really long. Mhmm. Which is is really interesting because you have these, like, meta meanings. So what's the meaning of anti disestablishmentarianism?   That's one thing.  

That's, you know, consistent with what the guy who originally wrote it down,   decided it meant. But the real meaning,   the the way people use   it, is as an example of long word. So   the the more important of those two meanings is the one that's in use. Right. Right. It doesn't even matter what it originally   means. It's become this example that people trot out, when they have conversations like this. So so yeah. Like, language develops,   and, you know, hermeneutics is a a really fun,   area of,   amateur study,   that I that I enjoy. I've read, you know, a couple of books about it. It's not like, I know everything about it. But,   people's ability to communicate is incredibly   deep.  

You know, it depends on not only,   what words you choose, but how you say them, your inflection, your body language,   what medium you choose to use, whether the person you're talking to knows that you're talking to them or who you are, what what they think,   Whether you're in a group, whether you're being recorded on a podcast, all of these things influence   communication.   So anyway, that's just like, that's sort of a a diversion on on my happy horse of hermeneutics. But,   you know,   Gnostr is a protocol. So it's a language   that is,   I would say aspires to be descriptive rather than prescriptive.  

It's hard to break our old prescriptive ways.   So when we write specs,   we often say, like, this is how things should be, and we forget to check to see if everyone's actually doing that.   And then, you know, that breaks things. And so there's kind of this battle going on back and forth between prescriptive and descriptive. But   I think,   the prescriptive model is boring. Uh-huh. And it I mean, it might work better in software,   but, Nostra is at least an attempt to discover the sort of descriptive   way of building a software language. Well, that that sounds a lot like something called emergent properties. Yes. Yes. And I know you're all about edge effect, and I can't wait to get to get into that. So   Yeah.  



[00:16:44] David Bennett:

Well, let let me see if I can   take in what what you said and and spin it around here. Is that   a protocol because I'm looking at this, how does this contrast with a platform?   And so the way that I'm thinking about it is that when we   when we have a protocol   that we are able to stick our fingers into,   then we're sort of able to be we're sort of sticking our fingers into this goop that we can mold any way that we want. And I'm not even talking about from a developer standpoint. I'm talking about from a user standpoint.   But   that means that it's unpolished,   and there's problems.  

Whereas, if I not to say that there's not problems with platforms, but   technically,   if I'm looking if I'm if I'm trying to gauge what's the difference between a protocol, a communications protocol like Nasr,   versus a communications   platform   which uses their own proprietary protocol like Twitter,   because I'm not gonna call it X,   then   that contrast is   having my fingers, I feel like I'm sort of straddling   a very crappy developer   and a user who is confused   when I'm using Nostr.   Right? Whereas if I'm using,   dead bird sight, I just feel like a user who knows how the platform works.   And   but the problem there,   ostensibly, but I think credibly, is that   that   platform's   protocol, since it's internal and is locked away behind all these gilded walls,   has no chance, no hope in hell   of ever being able to communicate outside the platform,   whereas there's no real   platform   for Nostra. There's clients. You have a client. There's,   Domus is a client. And these clients speak this protocol.  

Therefore, they're able to communicate with each other. But even then,   some have nuances and others, and we'll we'll we'll get into that. But essentially,   what I want   peep what I what I always what I feel like I'm always unable to get get a   to impart to somebody who doesn't know what the hell this is and why it's   important, is I can plug it in anywhere.   Whereas Twitter, I can only plug into a Twitter wall outlet.   Facebook, I can only get energy from the Facebook wall outlet. If I've tried to plug Facebook,   my plug for Facebook into the Twitter wall outlet, it's it it doesn't burn down. It just doesn't do anything. It doesn't turn on. Whereas,   all of the stuff that we're talking about with Noster,   that the the protocol itself is a universal power source.  



[00:19:33] Hodlbod:

Am I getting too far out? Yeah. No. I I think that's all ran on track. And I think it's really interesting what you pointed out that when you're on Twitter, you feel like you understand what's going on. Because, you know, taking that linguistic metaphor,   and applying it to platforms,   I would say, like, a platform is   the prescriptive approach taken to the extreme. Right? So you can be prescriptive, and you can write down a bunch of rules and then give them to people and say, please follow these, but they don't have to obey you.   You know, you're not exerting any power. A platform is those rules plus power. So,   a platform locks down your ability to express yourself in ways, that are not prescribed.  

Right? So Twitter does this in a whole bunch of different ways. Like, you can't edit your tweets. Right? You can't,   you can't upload videos longer than a certain length to Twitter. Mhmm.   They say, well, this is these are our resources. This is our code. You can't see it.   And, so you have to do things our way. And there are benefits to that.   Like, as you mentioned, the user experience is a lot more polished. And that's partly due to maturity, but it's also partly due to the fact that Twitter has designed   their experience.  

And so they and, you know, like, limiting   constraints are where art,   thrives. Right? Mhmm. If you say, I'm gonna do whatever,   comes out of my paintbrush,   you you end up with,   art that is, in my opinion, and people would probably argue with me, inferior. But it's art that's that's, I think everyone would agree is corrosive. It's meant to break down,   norms and stuff like that. So but if you if you, limit yourself, and you say, you know I guess, compare, like, a Jackson Pollock and a Mondrian just to stay within,   within modern art. Mhmm. A Mondrian is more interesting to me than a Jackson Pollock. Because it says, we're gonna use straight lines and primary colors.  

And,   we're actually gonna do something a little bit more structured.   And so   when you limit yourself, you get,   you get more opinionated and coherent results. And so that's that's what Twitter has done, and that is not what Nostra does. So that that'll be that's something interesting to think about. I don't know exactly where to go from there. We can maybe come back to that idea. But but going on to the just answering the question about protocols versus platforms,   like, a platform is,   it's owned,   by,   an entity.   Right? So it's it's controlled in certain ways. There are rules with how you engage with it.  

And this is exactly what spawned, Nostr.   One of those rules that Twitter has are not just rules about the technology, but rules about what you can say. So they do censorship.   Right.   Of various kinds, some,   really helpful, some more questionable.   And, Nostra   can't because it's only a language.   So you can't tell me not to swear.   Right? Like, no one no one actually controls my ability to swear.   Like, I'm the only person who can choose whether or not to say certain words. Right. My mouth is my own. That's how God made the world.   You know, parents can't even control what their kids say,   often to their chagrin.  

That is a good thing. Right. Freedom,   individual responsibility   for what you say is a good thing. So,   yeah. I would say, like, platforms,   limit expressivity.  

[00:22:54] David Bennett:

Does that kinda answer the question? Or Yeah. So that that's what I wanna what I what I wanna get at is that,   you know, the the underlying protocol that is Noster   is a piece of of the puzzle, because without a client like Coracle   or Domus or something like that, you you cannot communicate with the protocol. You can't get information out of the protocol.   It exists. It's doing stuff, all kinds. But if it's like stuff going on in China. We can't see it. I don't know what's going on in China. I know stuff's going on in China, but I'm not hooked into China right now, so I don't know what the hell is going on in China.   Is I mean and I guess I could say the same thing with with a platform like like dead bird, but   what what   I guess, you know, have you heard the news out of Brazil? The thing that's going on with Elon Musk and stuff like that. Supreme court justice or Yeah. He's in this fight, and Brazil wants him to to take all these accounts down. And   that's when we get into this I think that that's one of the the heaviest,   examples of why Noster.  

Is that   nobody can limit my in pub, except   you can   if you wanna blackball, you know, my particular in pub from coracledot social.   But   you doing that only affects what it is that you control.   And that's one of the reasons why   much of the chagrin of many people who were, like, there's too many there's too many,   clients.   Good.   Good. Because if, you know, if John doesn't want   swear words on on coming up on Quarkle,  

[00:24:27] Hodlbod:

put a swear word filter up. It's not worth your while, but you could. I have one. Yeah. It's like there's some default mute words, and if you choose to opt into that,   then, you know, the it hides those post by default. Right. It's not a hard thing, like, you can get around it, but it's just something to, like, ease the initial experience for people coming on the Nostra. Right. Yeah. And then but then, like, let's say that every, like, let's say, j b 55 from Domus and,  

[00:24:55] David Bennett:

you and,   whoever else has got, you know, one of these myriad of of different clients to do different things, all decide, you know what? We're all going to get into a room together. We're gonna sign a Noster agreement like they did with the New York agreement for Bitcoin, and we're just not going to allow   this litany of stuff.   Well, okay. Fine. I don't like that litany of stuff. I wanna see it all. I   literally can go plug directly into the protocol itself. It won't look nice,   but I can get I can get every single message.   And if they were filtered off of everybody or if it had some I could still see it, because it still exists. Whereas   once you're behind the walls of something like Twitter and Facebook   and Instagram and TikTok,   you're playing in their playground. Right?  

And we're in a time now where   maybe that didn't matter.   But as Brazil is showing us right now, and clearly, a lot of other stuff has shown us that but, you know, this is the most   this is the most out temporal relevant   instance of what's going on, is that   Brazil is telling an American company, United States based company,   you better do this,   or we're gonna fine you, which I still don't like.   I if I was the United States state department, I would literally be going,   no. You're not. Because we're not gonna honor that. You know? It's like if if you wanna close down their why anybody has Twitter offices in in another country is beyond me. I mean, I I   I kinda get it   when the world was young and we weren't, like, so mad at each other all the time, and you could have offices and embassies in other countries. But now at this point, especially with digital stuff like protocols, I'm, like, going, I don't even know why they bother. It just seems like a lot of rent. It probably is something like that. Some some kind of diplomacy where it's like, yeah, I we wanna establish a, like, a nexus in this country so that we can pay taxes, so that we have a good relationship with them. I I don't know. I I've never  

[00:26:55] Hodlbod:

worked at that kind of scale before. But Right. You know, like,   having a physical   location,   has has a ton of downsides for doing a software company. That's what people think of, but I'm sure there are some significant upsides as well. Right. But, you know, coming coming back to Nostra is that Nostra just it doesn't experience this.  

[00:27:15] David Bennett:

And if it's built right,   and if   if we keep doing if we keep going on, like,   going through the pattern that I see with   that happened with Bitcoin, that was happening with light that's still happening with Lightning, that is now happening with the cash. Now we have, you know, Nostra actually kinda   was on the scene first, but whatever.   It if we keep going down this road,   it seems like we're not going to get into a situation   where   things can be limited, unless   you do it at the hardware level of the Internet.   And if like I've said before, if you wanna see cities burn,   then shut off worldwide Internet. Just go ahead and do it. Make sure nobody can pay their municipal bills, because we're all addicted to this. You know? Make sure nobody can go shopping. Make sure nobody   like, not that   because there are times when I threatened to live in a cave and become Amish.  

I I really do, because I'm just I'm kinda sick of half of the stuff that I see. But   you that's just a very few people that have even thought that way.   The majority of 8,000,000,000 people,   let's say the majority of 4,000,000,000 people, let's say half of let's say half of the of of   of the known human universe   is addicted to being able to do stuff online.   Turn that off   and see what happens. Yeah. And that's why I don't think they can turn it off. And that's why a   protocol   that is not controlled by anybody,   that sits on top of the   almost like sits on top of the hardware of the Internet itself.  

The only way to turn it off is to turn the entire thing off. And again,  

[00:28:55] Hodlbod:

give it a shot. Yeah. Well, that's a very interesting,   claim. There's a lot of convolutions there.   You know, so there's all kinds of attack vectors for the Internet.   Right now, as it is, knows to relies on the Internet working. Right? So that means that you're trusting ISPs, you're trusting DNS,   and you're trusting,   SSL root certificate,   issuers. Mhmm. These are all centralized points of control,   and they can all be used to take down,   domains.   Mhmm. And, you know, China also has their great firewall, and they do traffic analysis in order to block certain things.   Not just based on what IP they're coming from, but what what, like, protocol they're speaking. So no secret could be blocked in the same way. It'd be very easy to, if you can decrypt the traffic or even if you can't, I I think, potentially,   to to be able to fingerprint what no looks like Mhmm. And to block it. So, like, for example, you know, Tor is detectable.  

If you're using Tor, your ISP knows you use Tor. They don't know anything   that you're doing on Tor. But they can see, like, oh, this person is hiding something from me.   And right now, you know, in America, we don't really have any problems with ISPs blocking you because you're using Tor. But, I mean, you know, that could tip the FBI off to be, like, well, maybe they're you know, that, like, slightly increases the chance that you're a drug drug trafficker or something like that. Right. And so that's why people use Tor over VPNs,   because the VPN   gets past your ISP, and then you can use Tor.  



[00:30:21] David Bennett:

But a VPN itself would be vulnerable to Right. You know, because they would, you know Yeah. I get different ISP, basically. The universal they, but those that don't do not like us, that's that's the they that that I keep thinking about. It would would be able to identify that traffic. And this is what one one of the things that that I wonder about with with just a Bitcoin transaction   is what you said about fingerprinting. Mhmm. Like, even if it's encrypted,   that doesn't necessarily mean   that   it can't be fingerprinted.   But I got   sometimes I wonder about that, because I'm like, okay. Well,   I mean, if   no matter what the message what the original message length is,   like, I well, actually, no. That's that's not true. Because I'm thinking in terms of hash, and I don't wanna get into that.  

So let's say   that 100%,   that even if it's encrypted,  

[00:31:16] Hodlbod:

certain protocols messaging has a certain feel to it, for certain look to it. Can that can that be changed? Consent to be done about that? Yeah. You can you can do certain things. So there are and this is not really like a Nostra thing. Nostra is kind of an application level protocol. Uh-huh. And and, you know, just to be clear, it currently does rely on the Internet working, but it can work,   through any of these other communication,   media.   So solving things at those lower levels will solve things for Nostar and anything else like Gnostr,   that wanna take advantage of that. So,   there are there are ways to obfuscate what is actually going on inside of an encrypt encrypted protocol.  

You can't hide the fact that what you're using is encrypted,   like Right. To start with. Right. But, you know, you can add padding, you can change,   you can do,   like, timing,   you you can do stuff to to toward timing analysis.   So there's all these different techniques, and they're they're really like in the realm of cryptography way above my pay grade. But,   you can you can   make things look diff   yeah. You can obviously get the fingerprint, basically.   If you're inside an encrypted envelope. If encryption becomes illegal and becomes a, you know, quote, munition like it   like it it it was close to being,   classified as in the nineties. Uh-huh. You know, that would pose a whole different problem.  

But, yeah. And there are all kinds of networks that try to do this kind of thing. So there's, I2p   and GNUweb,   in addition to Tor.   There's at least one more I've looked at recently, but,   there's a lot of different alternative Internet  

[00:32:56] David Bennett:

options that are basically encrypted by default. Would this just popped in my head. It's   gonna sound insane, but   would there be a way to take a a large language model and turn it into   a public private key pair? What I mean by that is this.   I've got a large language model. You've got the exact same one.   They're tied together   through some through the same kind of way that   my private key generates   an encrypted message that only a public key that was generated by my private key would be able to unlock, and I gave you that public key.   If we were to do the same thing with AI   and please   please forgive me for the people that hate AI out there. I'm not thinking that this is like I I don't look at AI as something like it's god given and it's gonna cure all of our ills, But I do wonder about the following.  

I sent her Noster message that says, we're going to storm the,   I don't know, the   the   Brazilian shopping mall at 12 AM or 12 12 yeah. 12 AM. The one shopping mill in the mall in Brazil. Yeah. The the one. Everybody knows where it is. Alright?   Except so I throw it through through the large language model. It it encrypts it with,   honey, could you please pick up some diapers on your way home?   Well, that message gets spread out. Nobody else's public key can read it because all their large language models have a different public key.   Yours, however, says,   I know that message.  

I can decrypt that message   because I know that, honey, can you pick up some diapers on your way home, actually means we're gonna storm the cap or the the I don't wanna say   capital, storm   the mall at 12 AM. Is that even inside the realm of feasibility?  

[00:34:43] Hodlbod:

That's a that's a great question.   I mean, it's basically that is encryption.   It's just encryption that is,   masks itself as a as a pickup diapers. Who cares? Yeah. It it's a it's a black box, and so I don't think that would be a highly reliable way to do encryption because, you know, you can do all this statistical analysis to break encrypted payloads.   But even really simple ones are very hard for a human to break,   without doing a ton of math. Mhmm. Like, I was teaching my kid, my son,   how to do,   encryption Oh, God. By, you know, just like route 13, basically, which is just add 13 to the number roll over when you get to z. Right. And he was, like, that's boring. I'm gonna make up my own scheme. And he gave it to me, and I was, like, I have no idea what this says. Uh-huh. And and then he decrypted it for me. He's 8.   Like, I I was, like, I think I'm pretty fairly confident that I can decrypt anything that my 8 year old son can come up with. Nope. I can't.  

But that doesn't mean that if you have a computer and you can you you know what sort of methods to apply, you couldn't decrypt that in, you know, fractions of a second. Right. People always say, don't roll your own crypto. That's why we use elliptic curves and all that stuff. So I think I think AIs or LLMs would be similar to rolling your own crypto,   except you're having a non deterministic   large large language model do the rolling for you. Right. It's not gonna do any better because it's not well well suited to that. But it is interesting an interesting idea, because large language models are essentially a compression algorithm. Right.   And that's kind of,   well, it's that's similar to what encryption does. So, like, large language models take in, you know, terabytes, petabytes of data, and they compress it down to a couple of megabytes, gigabytes.  

And then they can   with a pretty high level of fidelity,   repeat things that they've seen in that huge data set. Uh-huh. That's that's compression, basically.   But compression   is,   it's a,   what how how do you say this? It's a it's like a lossy,   function.   Right? So when you round a number,   and I I say, I rounded a number and it's 5.   You don't know what the number was. It could have been 4a half. It could have been 5.3.   And that's what that's what compression does. Mhmm. Is it takes a bunch of information in, rounds off the edges, finds the patterns, and then,   gives you the,   kind of the compressed,   format. But if you have perfectly random data,   compression does nothing. You get the same amount of data out as you put in. Right.  

Actually, maybe I could be wrong about that, but   because a lot of compression algorithms algorithms find the patterns inherent in the data.  

[00:37:26] David Bennett:

That's where we get into that's that's where the mathematicians   that that freak out about chaos theory. That that's one of the reasons why that's studied. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not. Why why do you care if a clock is wrong? And I'm like, because it has implications. Yeah. I am not the person to pontificate on information theory.  

[00:37:43] Hodlbod:

Neither am I. But  

[00:37:46] David Bennett:

let me just   backtrack back to, like, the I think that the most important part of the existence of Noster   is for now,   all things being equal,   is the ability   to not get censored   and   not have   messages that you want to read   not delivered to you. And   Twitter doesn't do that. None of the other platforms do that because they all have liability issues.   Whether we agree with their liability issues or not, I don't really care because it's something that actually happens.   And it's the reality that I have to deal with. It's that that thing you were talking about with prescriptive   versus descriptive.  

Oh, here's what it should be,   but here's what it actually is. And what it actually is is the Brazilian Supreme Court is telling Elon Musk, an American citizen and an American company, what they can and cannot do.   Well, then just shut it down. Then just shut the Brazil, sorry for you, I'm not lifting a   finger. You know, that's what I would say if I I wouldn't if I was Elon, I wouldn't even fight him. Him. I wouldn't have even made made this tweet where he's going up against this judge. I mean, that's kind of a waste of time. I would just say,   I'm not doing anything.  

If you think you're smart enough to be able to take it down, then take it down. And you can deal with all your pissed off Twitter customers.   And I don't know why he didn't do that, but   that can't happen with Noster. And that's the point. That's the whole point of why we're here.  

[00:39:15] Hodlbod:

It it is. It's the big e on the eye chart for sure.   But again, I I would add more more nuance to that. So,   Nostra may not work as a censorship resistant,   network. Okay. It's an attempt.   And, you know,   the the whole question of incentives   is is a very difficult one because it's hard to keep,   things decentralized.   Things that are decentralized have a lot of gravity towards centralization.   You see this in, like, dust clouds, you know, in space. Like Right. This is just the facts of nature. And so with with Gnostr,   and I I would like to get into how how Relay is make it decentralized. But you have this decentralized network,   but there are centralizing factors, because   decentralized means far away. Right?  

Things in a decentralized system are harder to get than things in a centralized system. And people want to get stuff easier.   So they're gonna create shortcuts shortcuts,   centralized. Right. You see this with the lightning network. It's hard to,   it's hard to find a path between 2 really,   distant nodes. Mhmm. You know, if they're 4 hops away or something like that,   good luck sending anything more than a couple, 1,000 Satoshis. Yep.   The channel liquidity is just not there.   And even a couple years ago, when I did a lot with the night lightning network, we were already kind of coalescing into hubs. Yeah. We've got these, you know, async node with 1,000 of Bitcoin on it,   which lubricates all the, the routes,   that pass through it. And that's a good thing for the lightning network. We want it not distributed, we want it decentralized.  

Mhmm. We don't want a single central core. And so, Gnostr has the same sort of stuff going on that the Lightning Network does, where,   it's difficult   to,   do all that routing path finding stuff.   And so software comes up to help you do it better, and then services come up to help you, make those paths better.   So,   you know, there it's like an open question. This is something that the FJF was posting about last week about, like, you know, do we wanna do the outbox model,   or do we wanna do proxies, or do we wanna do caching services,   and all this stuff. And so yeah. It's like, it's an experiment.  

And the reason the thing that keeps me in Nostra is it's the most promising   experiment that I've   found. Right. So it's not like it's a silver bullet or it's definitely going to work, but it has a way better chance of working than anything that I've seen so far. Mhmm.   And so that's why I'm working on it.   And, I mean, maybe this problem is not solvable. Like, maybe decentralized  

[00:41:50] David Bennett:

stable systems are a contradiction in terms. Who knows? Well, see, you you hit the nail on the head. And I I've I've talked about this and, you know, anybody that's listened to the you know, to my show more than 5 or 6 times knows that I always talk about that   everything that we see here, whether it's this   RODECaster Pro 2 that we're using to record these mics,   the the mass that's in your body,   the rules of gravity,   how cars drive, how planes fly, how fish swim, all of   it was   and this is just opinion,   but I think I'm actually right, is that all of that was already predescribed in the first   picoseconds   of the formation of the universe.  

Now I am somebody that actually does believe in in the Big Bang. I just think it was a tool of God, because I also believe in God. People are like, how the hell do you rectify belief in being a Christian and and Darwinism? And I'm like, for me, it's   freaking simple. It really is simple, but I won't get into it. But the point is is that everything that we see here   coalesced   because the the four rules of the universe.   You got the gravitational   force, you have electromagnet   magnetism,   you have strong force, and you have weak force. That's it.   And everything that we see has come from that.  

The co the the coalescing of dust clouds into planets.   The coalescing of larger hydrogen clouds   to form new suns.   And then those suns exploding and, like, all these things that we think are, like, oh, lots all different in all these different patterns. And I'm, like, I see the same pattern.   And and it doesn't bore me, but I'm just, like, these are the rules and the rules seem to suggest   centralization.   And   but what's neat about it is the gravitational   force. Is the gravitational force   that seeks to centralize a cloud of dust into a planet   is the same force   that under different circumstances   make sure that that dust never coalesces into a planet. Yeah. It took a supernova   to collapse just enough of a dust cloud in our portion of the Milky Way to ignite a sun, which is now our sun. If that supernova hadn't have ever happened, or that sun had been in a completely different place and it did go supernova,   then we wouldn't be here. Yeah.  

Because gravity is pulling it apart just like it wants to suck it all together. And I'm like, how do we harness that for decentralization?  

[00:44:21] Hodlbod:

And I I don't have the I don't have enough neurons. Yeah. Yeah. Stability is dynamic, not static. Right? You can see this in the life cycle of a star. Right? Stars,   slowly get, bigger and, what is it? Let's see. Yeah. They get bigger and bigger over time Uh-huh. Until suddenly they collapse in on themselves. They collapse in and then they explode.  

[00:44:39] David Bennett:

Or or if it's well, if it's our sun, it will just become a red giant and just drift, and it will never actually No. It's never gonna it it doesn't it's not gonna No. It's gotta be a certain there's actually a certain mass. There's there's a there's a mass threshold that we're gonna get into. Yeah. So, like,  

[00:44:53] Hodlbod:

you know, looking at Gnostr,   as this,   force of decentralization,   Like, you have to see that dynamic balance within Nostril, but also in in everything around Nostril.   You know, we're in a time where we desperately need decentralization,   because everything has become so centralized in economic and social terms. Mhmm. And,   you know, Gnostr is not like a static,   stability, neither is Bitcoin. Like, Bitcoin is great, and hopefully, it'll last us a few 100 years, but it is not the last form of money we're gonna come up with. No.  

[00:45:26] David Bennett:

No. I I've I think about that a lot myself.   I don't have any specific thing to say about that, but I I wonder   I'm also a Trekkie fan, where they where the suggestion is is that there is no money,   which brings up a whole that's that's a discussion we should probably have with a full scale economist that's not an asshole. Right? You know, like, somebody who can actually, you know, not go, oh, like, it'd be like talking to Paul Krugman. I don't wanna have a discussion with Paul Krugman because I don't like the the closed mindedness   of   bringing what was,   you know, here in the sixties, fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties, which   just doesn't seem to work anymore. They're not going to have a credible discussion about   what does that actually mean   to have no money?  

I mean, does that mean that all of a sudden,   time doesn't need to be   solidified into something that we can trade? And what the what the hell does that mean? These are these are the kinds of questions that I ponder, but,  

[00:46:28] Hodlbod:

I mean, whole books can be written about that kind of thing. Whole books are written about that kind of thing. So we're definitely not gonna be able to answer that shit here. Oh, I I could I could go on that tangent for sure. But, but, let's like let's like button things back down. So Yeah. Like,   you know, let's assume that Gnostr   successfully   can   decentralize,   the Internet,   and or at least social media. And and, like, I think an important point to make as well is that, no sir is not just social media. This is kind of the big, you know, that's the big thing is censorship of social media or individual communication.   But,   you know,   language encompasses lots of different   domains.  

Right. You can talk about art or economics or   breakfast with language. Mhmm. And so if you're working on a language   and this goes back to those three points. Just to recap for everyone. You've got cryptographic key pairs, relays,   and an extensible,   open protocol.   And so starting from the last one,   an extensible open protocol,   you can talk about anything with Gnostr.   You   like, no one because there's no control layer on Gnostr, anyone can start writing events. Mhmm. They can write events that mess up that that, kinda   don't follow the established conventions. I get and   you don't understand that. And so you throw that information away.  

Right? So   we have to deal with with attacks to the conventions on on the network. Clients have to be resilient to say, like, I'm not gonna accept that information because I don't know what the heck it means.   But you can also it also leaves room to invent new things. So So a couple years ago, I wrote, you know, there's that passage in, the Lord of the Rings where Tom Bombadil singing songs in a language that seems to be intended mostly to express wonder and delight. Right. And I was, like, I wanna hear that language. Uh-huh. Yeah. Thanks, Tolkien. You gave us Dwarvish and Elven and, you know, the black tongue and all this stuff, but I wanna hear that one. So I set out to write it. So I wrote my own language. Uh-huh. And, I'm the only person that knows it, and I,   barely know it.  

I Right. You know, but it has grammar, it has vocabulary.   And I didn't have to ask anyone permission to do that. And so with Gnostr, you know, you're not stuck   rebuilding Twitter.   You're not even stuck rebuilding Facebook.   You can express anything you want, in Gnostr. So there is one of the oldest Gnostr   little sub protocols is a chess protocol.   People play chess on Gnostr.  

[00:49:00] David Bennett:

As a first class I yeah. Okay. I I forgot about that. Yeah. It's like gesture UI or something like that. Uh-huh.  

[00:49:07] Hodlbod:

And people have, sort of done initial passes at ecommerce,   at, ecashment   discoverability.   There's a lot of meta protocols that talk about Gnostr. So, you know, where do I find this pub key on this relay, all this stuff?   There have been so Pablo has done a lot of these.   You know, highlighter is we'll bring in a URL, we'll select some text, and then we'll comment on it.   There there are literally infinite possibilities for what you can do with Gnostr. Right. And, like, this is another area that's a question for me. Like,   are we going to collapse under our own weight,   as the protocol grows?  

But,   I don't know. We'll just have to see.   But the the way the protocol is is structured is you use integers   for different types of data.   And so if you don't follow the conventions for a particular type of data, people are gonna either get confused or throw it away. Either one is an okay outcome.   But that may be, an attack vector on the network.   But the power of that is you can just make up an integer, and then you can do whatever you want.  

[00:50:14] David Bennett:

An integer just being a whole number with no decimal place. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, it's probably even more descriptive than that, but it's, like, not 1.0.   It's   1 or   2, not 1.5.  

[00:50:27] Hodlbod:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think we have a a 32 bit integer for kinds. So Wow. You have a lot of options. Yeah. That  

[00:50:36] David Bennett:

wow. That's a lot. Yeah. I had no idea that there was that many, but we're already up and but but we're already seeing kinds.   Like, actually, let's let's   kind of talk about that.   But, actually, let let's do this. Now that we've we've   we've really   beat the living crap out of   why this is important and what what this could possibly be.   Let's go all the way back to, I know I still know nothing about Nostr.   What   I want I want to get on Nostr, and I use an an iPhone.   What do I do? Oh, yeah. Sure. Yeah. It's nice to have some practical,   something to do. Well, if you're on an iPhone,   you can use Domus. That's probably the most popular iPhone client. Let's just stick right there. Let's say, okay. I've I've taken your device. I've gone to the Apple App Store. I've gotten Domus.  

I'm looking at the interface.   What is this stuff I see about  

[00:51:32] Hodlbod:

key pairs? Yeah. What the hell?   Yeah. So,   yeah, key pairs,   Let's see. I I wanna get more into that, but via   via relays in a second. Yeah. But, yeah, key pairs are basically your username and your password. So you've got an n pub, and that's your username,   and you've got an n sec, and that's your password. Does n pub stand for something? It's like public number? Yeah. Public key. So this all comes from asymmetric key cryptography, which is a pretty old idea in, computer science. It's how people access servers and stuff like that. It's how,   it's how SSL,   HTTPS   is brokered,   is using asymmetric,   cryptography.  

And so it's an old idea, but it's very confusing when you first get into it. I remember the first time I SSH into a server, I was like,   what is even happening on my computer?   And,   again, I'm not the person to explain the math, but what it basically allows you to do is if you have a secret and I have a secret,   we can   securely come up with a a shared secret,   or a set of shared secrets that allows to communicate securely. Uh-huh. So it's a way to come up with a code on the fly that no one can break.   And it uses just a bunch of math.   So that's what these pub keys do. Is it they allow you to do 2 things.  

They allow you to prove who you are. That they allow you to prove publicly that you know your secret. Right? And that's basically what your,  

[00:52:56] David Bennett:

your NSAC does. Your NSAC is your secret. Okay. So that, like, the way that I look at it, my NSAC,   I I look at that as   SEC is secret. Yep. Okay. Alright. Exactly. So that is my identity,   and I own that identity.   I have a signature. I have a pen that is locked like I'm holding a pen mechanical pencil.   And I have   this locked with who it is that I am. I'm holding my pencil. I'm the insect.   I'm holding my INPUB.   My INPUB writes a note.   And then that way, when you read that note, somehow you can discern that it was me that was holding the pencil. Yeah. Okay. But   if you were to hold this same pencil, then all of a sudden, what? It doesn't write for you? Or  

[00:53:45] Hodlbod:

Yeah. I could I could say that I, you know, I could I could make a note and include your pub key on it, and then I could sign it.   But I have to sign it with something. And if I don't know your secret, the math doesn't work. And anyone can look at that event and say, oh, the math doesn't work. David didn't actually say this thing. Okay.   Yeah. And there's some really interesting implications to that. Right. So so following along from Domus, you've got,   key pairs.   You've also got relays. I don't know how much Domus puts that front and center.   But, and I'll I'll go into, like, the theory on that in a minute.  

But between the relays are basically servers that store data. So you choose some relays, and you   you,   pull notes from those relays.   And,  

[00:54:33] David Bennett:

then you're on the network. And it's like The notes being what other people have written Yeah. That they're, you know, like, I'm replying to you. You said, here's a funny meme. Blah blah blah. Yeah. And that is just our word for a tweet. Yep. Okay. And it's it's more broad than that, you know, anything is a note. All those different, extensions to the protocol Right. Count as notes or events. So Yeah. And I wanna I wanna get into those because there's something there's something that really I think is the most powerful thing, but I don't wanna do that right now. Because   the the issue is is that so all I really have to do, if I'm a new user and I don't know how to do this,   I can go I've I've gotten to the point we've gotten to the point now in the development of these protocol   not the development of the protocol, but the development of the clients that talk with using the protocol as their underlying structure,   has become to the point where   very many many of them look like,   here is your   it's like we we we understand that you're new. I've go we're going to assign you 2 pieces of information, and you need to hold these pieces of information,   as seriously as you want to take   your future identity.  

And, like, that's the great thing about Nostra is I can spin up a key pair,   like, it doesn't cost me nothing. I can have identity after identity after identity, but   that loses the ability for anybody else to understand who the hell it is that you are. And there's there's there's social   and I wanna talk about social media, but there's social   capital with that. Like, you know who I am,   but not just because we're sitting across the table at each other.   If I was a person that just didn't want anybody to know whoever I was, and I was putting out outlandish stuff all the time,   I would choose multiple key pairs   and multiple thereby being multiple identities. So   nobody would really know that these things are ever connected. Yeah. So   when we come back and say, I I I'm serious about interacting with other people   digitally   over the air, over the wire, in other places around the planet, then I need to take the security of my   key pair seriously and that's become easier. And we don't have to really, you know, get into that. But   I just wanted to make sure that people understand if if they're have just refused to try Noster   because they can't see the similarities between all I want is a username and a password.  



[00:56:59] Hodlbod:

Then the username is your nsec that's given to you. Username is your n pub. Oh, it's our username is your n pub. And, n pubs and nsecs are connected. So you don't need to store your NPUB anywhere. Right. You just need to store your N SEC. Right. Because you can always get your NPUB from your N SEC.   It's like I mean, if you, you know, if people are familiar with Bitcoin, it's the same exact stuff. Like, it's even the same cryptography.   Yeah. If you have a hardware wallet, you know, you send,   you send transactions to,   not that person's pub key, but it's really similar. It's a it's a derived key, so you can rotate addresses. But that's all an address is. It's a,   it's it's a variant of a pub key that's derived from your your private key. Okay. And your private key is your seed. Right? Your 12 or 24 words that you keep secret. Same exact stuff. But these are so much easier to to navigate now  

[00:57:48] David Bennett:

than than it was,   you know, a year and a half ago, because I think I I think I spun up my first key pair.   I wanna say it was,   I wanna say it was December, the year before last.   And   thank God I did, because it was shortly after that that Jack started   coming on to Noster.   But,   so it's not all that hard.   That's what I'm trying to get at, is that this isn't hard.   It's a little different, but it's becoming more squared up with what people's   expectations  

[00:58:21] Hodlbod:

that they're coming from. It's starting to align a little bit more. Is that right? Yeah. It's far as experience? There are all these, like, there are all these implicit structures and   assumptions   that people don't ever think about. Mhmm. Like, the idea of username and password,   people don't think about the implications of that. The implication is that someone holds the hash of your password and checks it for you to let you in. Right. Like, it's essentially custodial.   Yeah. You cannot use a username and password in a self sovereign way. Like, it's impossible.   Because your password   doesn't,   doesn't prove anything. There's nothing in your messages on Twitter that prove anything. So, like, Twitter can not only shadow ban, they can   also, make you say things that you didn't say.  

I don't think they've ever done that,   but it's trivial. But you could. That's the point. Yeah. Because And we know they can. And all of your speech is permissioned.   And it's not you giving them permission.   It's them giving you permission to say anything.   It's crazy. It's, like   I I mean, I can't even believe that this hasn't actually been an issue.   Like,   I I can't imagine that it hasn't happened in China or Russia. Right. Right? Like, more authoritarian states that don't mind leveraging   these sort of heavy handed,   approaches to controlling people. Like,   yeah. I'm I'm sure. Shit. You know, some guy in China got disappeared 5 years ago, but he's still on Chinese Twitter,   saying stuff. Right? Like   yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good example.  



[00:59:52] David Bennett:

Because nobody I was like, I I guess somebody seen him lately, but for a long time, we'd Yeah. Have no idea. Yeah. He disappeared for a while.   But I'd see that you just saying that. See, that's the thing. I I mean, how long do you have to be in something   to have something like what you just said completely escape me? That's not   I mean, I feel remiss.  

[01:00:12] Hodlbod:

Actually, I feel kinda dumb. It's that paradigm thing. You just don't think to think about these attack vectors.   It's, like, it it's the whole thing with privacy, you know. I don't need privacy because I don't have anything to hide. Well, you're completely missing   tons of attack vectors. Right. Even if you never have anything to hide,   people knowing stuff about you gives them the ability to exert control. Yeah. So   take care of your privacy. Right.  

[01:00:37] David Bennett:

Right. And and I think this this is where I wanna kinda go off into   we we've   we've talked about that. If you haven't done Noster yet, it's not hard anymore.   And even even when I first got on, it wasn't all that hard, But I had the knowledge of what a public private key pair actually was.   So I was comfortable with the idea.   And   but now we get into the situation where   it's it becomes   that identity,   that set, that public private key pair, if you're very   careful with it,   becomes an identity that does more for you than I think a lot of people understand. Yes.   And   I'm gonna go ahead and and say this, but we're we're gonna end up coming back to relays, because I I really wanna know about how this works. But let's do it in this context.  

And I we we talked about that me and you talked about this before.   Is when   I spun up my first private public key pair.   I won't even say which   which client I did it from because I can't remember. Because there's been that many. Yeah. I should remember, but I don't. And that's probably not a good thing in either event.   I've I haven't been compromised. I don't put my insect into everything that I see. I think I've I think I've actually did that at the very first about 4 times, until I realized, no. You don't wanna be putting your your your private key into all this stuff for various reasons,   because it's it it blows your privacy away   and you get compromised.  

But   what I didn't realize is that the second that I spun that up,   I spun up   my identity   on every client that existed at the time.   And that's important to understand because not only did I spin up my identity   on every client that existed at the time, let's say there were 4.   Alright. So I I did it on client number 1.   What I didn't realize is that   or what I what it took me   a couple of days to figure out was that   that identity was on these other clients.   I just hadn't I didn't know about them yet. That's an important point. Because when I went to   because that was one of the first things that I I started being really excited about Nostra is realizing that if one of these clients if the owner said, I don't like you, I can tell who you are by your IP.  

You're never coming to my to my client again because I have an IP filter.   Okay. Fine. So I practice and said, pretended that that had happened.   So I went over to the next one. I can't remember what it was either. Right? Because this is long time ago at this point.   I get to that one,   and all of the notes that I had ever written,   and all of the people that I had followed.   And for the most part, the people because I was fall like, there was, like, we're talking about 8 people.   8 identities.   I can keep track of that.   At the time, I didn't lose any of them.  

This is an issue now, but at the time, because, you know, I've got many more followers,   and many more people that I follow. But at the time, it was the same people. The people that I communicated with, the people that I followed, the people that followed me,   they came along for the ride. Same public private key pair.   I go, wow. This is interesting. And all the notes that I'd sent. And any of the DMs, which were all I think they're bad now. They were really bad back then. But there was evidence Oh, I remember. There was evidence that they existed, and I could see them on at least 2 different things. And then I went to the 3rd client, same thing.   And then I realized that's why I wanted to be on Nostra.  

And, but then, I put I packed all of that experience into a nice neat little travel bag and I shoved it under my chair and I forgot about it   until   a few months ago. And a few months ago,   I saw   there was this,   there's this store that's up in   Spokane,   and they have 3 stores and it's plant store. I think it's like Fern USA or something like that.   And I found them on one of the Nostra clients. I saw them come across and I was like, holy crap. They're on Nostra. And then I kinda dug into them and realized that they're Bitcoiners, and they take Bitcoin for some of their plan or for their plants. And anyway, so I just kinda, like, rolled with it started looking to see what was going on. And then I started going to, like, these different clients.   And,   one was Slidester,   and the other one was Flame, flame dot pub.  

And both of them   had   the identity of Fernstore, the this Fern USA. And in Slidester, they had a bunch of beautiful photographs.   And I'm like, man, I'll bet I'll bet that would be, like, you know, I'll bet they're really good videographers. I wonder if they're on flare. I go over to flare.   They're there   without a single video.   And it was at that instant that I realized that I had to unpack that travel bag   and go, oh, that's right.   They spun up their identity on this one thing, but they have identities on all these other clients and now all these other clients do a hell of a lot more than just send notes.   There's   Instagram clone I don't even like saying clones, but there's places where you can put your still pictures, there's places where you can put videos,   there's places where you can stream video live,   there's,   like, we've got Nostrandest.  

And I don't ever have to create an identity for a 150   different clients. And I will never have to create another identity, another biography, another   here's all my stuff. This is where you can go find me, like, anything that you would put into a biography.   All of that comes along for the ride. And when, like, let's say that my 11 year old son,   5 years from now, builds his own Noster client, if he does, I will have an identity on something that doesn't even exist yet.   It's like it's literally   like existing in the future.   What   give me something back on that. What I mean, have I   is is that as important as I think it is? Or am I just being pedantic?  



[01:06:47] Hodlbod:

No. That's I mean, that's absolutely right. That's the that's the point I was trying to get out with the whole language metaphor. Right? Right. So because there's a common language,   anyone who hears it can understand it.   You know, think think of it this way, like, a client is your body. It's your mouth and your ear.   You speak with your mouth and you hear with your ear. So when you publish a note from a client, you are publishing,   you're speaking.   You're saying a word. Mhmm.   That's the client is your mouth. It it's what it's what physically allows you to do that.   The key, your private key, that's the that's the timbre of your voice. Right? You can hear the difference between me and David speaking. Right. So it's it's authentic.  

I could not  

[01:07:29] David Bennett:

I could not I could not speak like David.   Oh my god. I'm help help a bit of rest.  

[01:07:39] Hodlbod:

You can hear the difference even when I try to forge it.   So you my the timbre of my voice authenticates me. Mhmm. That's what your key does.   The relays that you published to, that's the carrier medium. That's the air through which the sound waves pass. Okay. And then the other person's client is their ear. Okay. That that client,   receives,   the the vibrations in the air from the relays.   It   authenticates the timbre of your voice Mhmm. By validating that signature on the event,   and it,   displays,   the content,   which is, you know, the word that you said.  

So hopefully, that that,   ties those two things together. Mhmm.   You have you know, and and, like, Twitter, just to, like, juxtapose here,   Twitter is almost like, Aristotle's idea of optics. I think it I think Aristotle's   idea of optics was, you know, this,   I think he called it ether.   But you have this stuff in your eyeballs that goes out, and it touches everything, and it goes back into your eyeballs. Really? Right.   He did not understand   the refraction and,  

[01:08:52] David Bennett:

and, reception of light. Right. Or or the the nature of light itself as a as a   photon. Yeah. Yeah. That I mean, that's a hard one. Is is it a wave or is it a particle? And it still confuses us today. Yeah. And so so that's what that's what Twitter is. Right? Twitter is that ether.  

[01:09:08] Hodlbod:

You know, your ear, your mouth are the same, but the ether comes into your ears and says,   like, don't worry. Trust me. Mhmm. This is who they say they are, and I've delivered their message. But maybe maybe that medium chooses not to deliver that message to your ear, or maybe it chooses to,   you know, forge forge the, the timbre of the other person's voice. You can't know anything. Like, there's an epistemological,   hard stop in Twitter. Mhmm. And in, you know, Facebook, any other centralized   custodial,   service. I mean, same thing again with Bitcoin. Like, in the legacy financial system,   the the number on your,   on your balance in your bank account, that you can check that by adding up your your income and expenditures.  

But you basically have to trust that every day, the bank's computer system is going to maintain that number. Mhmm. You have no control over that number. In Bitcoin,   that that number   cannot change.   It's all math. Right. So,   yeah. Yeah. So the interoperability,   being able to go from one client to another, it's just a bunch of different I mean, it's like in my metaphor, it's like, basically, body hopping.   Right? Everyone's ear works the same way, but with no, sir, you you as the user can try on different ears and different mouths and see. Well, and but, you know, from that standpoint, I you know, as as  

[01:10:38] David Bennett:

much as I want to and as much exposure as I've had, I still don't understand Spanish very well. Yeah.   If if if at all.   And think about it is is that   when because I don't understand it,   I don't ingest it.   So I hear somebody speaking Spanish   and it's like a filter.   And it's not because I don't like Spanish, I think it's one of the most important languages that that people that speak English can learn.   I just don't know it. Let's I let me pick on something else, Japanese. Right? Like, nothing against the Japanese people. But I hear people speaking Japanese and it's like it's like this automatic system in the back of my head says, you don't understand this language. Stop wasting your resources trying to decipher it. So when I look at something like Nostra Nests, you know, it's a live, you know,   audio platform for, like, several people to have a conversation   with their microphones, no video.  

You know, there's you can send notes on the side, or or comments on the side, and stuff like that. But that   is never going to decipher what's coming out of Flare dot pub.   So it's, like, it's almost as if the event kinds, kind one is just me writing a note,   you know, saying pick up diapers.   Right? Or   here's a funny meme, but I can't attach a picture because we're we're just doing kind one. It's just text.   Like I can have a client that only picks up kind one,   which means that the kind events   enable me to filter whatever the hell it is that I wanna filter. And by cobbling, okay I want kind one but I also want kind this and I want kind that. And all of a sudden, I've built a meal   that has a that   imparts a particular   experience.  

And   I haven't ever seen that anywhere else. Yeah. Even in Bitcoin, I don't see that. I don't have a flavor   of transaction.   I I guess, well You have a couple different address types. Yeah. Segwit. You know, p to p hat you know,   all that kind of stuff. Very rigid. But Yeah. But the the information that's imparted on the other side is the same. Here's your Bitcoin, dude. It was a successful transaction.   It's my experience is ping   or oh my god. It didn't come. Yeah. You know, you're either   terrified or you're   delighted. Right? There there's 2 experiences with the Bitcoin transaction.  

With Nostr,   I I can do just video on Flair Pub, and I can do just audio with Nostra Nasser. I can take these different kinds and call them together for a completely different kind of experience and new kinds are coming up all the time. Yeah. You know, and there's one that that's in my head about smart notes.   In the yeah. In the use of Obsidian,   which will I'll I'll get to in a second. But first, I gotta ask, how much time do you have? I've got, all the time. You've got all the time? Yeah. At least okay. I gotta be somewhere 2. At 2. Yeah. Hours from now, I think. Okay. Because I I still I still gotta feed this guy.  

[01:13:36] Hodlbod:

That's right. I promised him lunch and I gotta take my kids before they, come out of the woodwork and start eating my face because they're hungry. But yeah. But to to your point about, like, all these different kinds. In in a sense, these are all different sub protocols. Mhmm. And and that's the same way that human language works. We've got,   there's really one protocol.   Human language. Right. That's what it's called. But there's all these sub protocols,   Spanish and German and Japanese and French. But   the the cool thing about human language is not only do all these protocols change   and adapt, but you can mix and match. Like, c'est la vie. I just spoke French.  

You can people do that all the time. They integrate those in English sentences. English, you know, is high is closely related to Dutch. So, like, that's a fork. Right? Yeah. It's a fork. So You know, and and Spanish and and French and and Italian are all, you know, romance languages. They're coming out Latin. Yeah.  

[01:14:28] David Bennett:

Except for Portuguese, apparently. I I don't know. That   the fact that Spain and Portugal live fried by side together and they speak a completely different language and it sounds a lot alike, but they can't really understand each other. Freaks me out. I just don't understand it. But I mean, I understand it, but it still freaks me out. You know? And that's sort of what what you were saying. Oh, by the way,   Tico   CR says.   Yeah. You know, do do you know Tico? I don't think I do. Is he he sent me a note on Nostra. I said that I was gonna be me and you were gonna be Oh, nice. Today, and he's like, well, tell   tell Huddl bot I said, Puravita. So I promised I would do that. So there you go. I'll look you up, Tico. There you go, Tico.  



[01:15:10] Hodlbod:

Let's, let's go to relays. Okay. Because it's a super important point, and it is kinda hard to explain. And I think for more technical people, all of this is gonna sound like hand waving unless we really get into what relays are doing. Let me ask one question first.  

[01:15:25] David Bennett:

What is a server?   What is that what does that mean? When I say, oh, it's on the server. Yeah.  

[01:15:31] Hodlbod:

There's that saying, the cloud is somebody else's computer. Okay. A server is a computer. Okay. That   and, you know, conventionally, it it's attached to the Internet, and it can respond to requests. So, like,   I don't know what a good example would be. But it's it's a it's a little robot that sits there and answers questions. Because I always I always  

[01:15:52] David Bennett:

not don't wanna say assume because it makes an ass out of you and me. But somehow or another, I've always assumed   before I really got into all of this stuff starting with Bitcoin,   was that a server was a large machine   and that you didn't, that it was much larger than you would like   like physically large. Yeah. Like a heavy piece of steel.   And what I've come to find out is that it does yeah. It could be,   depending on how much you wanna serve. Like, what's your throughput? What how much memory do you how much storage room do you want? You know, how much processing power? How like, what kind of requests are you getting?   How much processing power does it take to to terminate those requests and extinguish them, which just means I've answered your question. And what I find found out is that, you know, my server can run a phone, or my phone can run a server.  

And my computer, I can actually have it run  

[01:16:42] Hodlbod:

another server. Yeah. Or Raspberry Pi. You can also have fake servers, virtual private sir or, what was it? Yeah. Virtual virtual private servers are servers   that act like a computer, but they actually run on another computer next to a bunch of other fake computers. Right. Like and and so, like, a server   the important thing about a server is conceptual.   Like, it answers questions over the network. It serves you answers. Yeah. Another kind of server is, like, Twitter. Uh-huh. Like, conceptually, they have one server. Uh-huh. But they actually have tons of servers all over the all over the world. But they're synchronized. Yeah. Yeah. They're synchronized, and they have different parts and components that act and work together. So, yeah.   Servers are just a thing that answers questions  

[01:17:25] David Bennett:

on the Internet. So and the reason I ask is because a relay for Nostr is a server. We we use those terms interoperable. Yep. And and I that's why I wanted to make sure that  

[01:17:35] Hodlbod:

what the hell is the server Yeah. Is answered. So we've answered that, so let's do relay.   Yeah. So, like, you know, when when people talk about these censorship resistant, like, peer to peer technologies, there is a ton of hand waving. Right? And this you see this especially in the blockchain world. Uh-huh.   Someone I know recommended to me DeSo,   d e s o. Don't look it up. It's evil and terrible. Okay.   And, you know, it's it's your typical, like, Sequoia   funded,   you know, venture capitalist, crypto  

[01:18:05] David Bennett:

nonsense. 7 and a half percent APR and  

[01:18:08] Hodlbod:

Yeah. Well, it's got a token. So Yeah. It's gonna get you some money. It's gonna make you money. Yeah. And I I was, like, I'm gonna do my due diligence. I'm gonna read the docs, and until I understand   whether this thing actually works. Mhmm. And so I spent, like, 2 or 3 hours going through the the documentation until I got to the the the section that talks about scaling. Uh-huh. And, you know, there is a lot of good engineering that went into this, a lot of effort.   And you get to the scaling page, and they're like, well,   we can scale by making bigger blocks.  

And I was like,   I understand. Because you have to understand the scale of social media. Right. Facebook ingests 500 terabytes of data a day. Oh my god. Okay. So   if you're gonna do like, a blockchain is not the right solution for social media.   Even if you can figure out how to partition that blockchain and distribute   it. Like, that is such a hard problem. Mhmm.   Same thing with, you know, distributed hash tables or torrents.   Right?   So torrents are a bad,   a bad solution for, d for social media,   because   the like, torrents work work great for files, because files are many times bigger than the hash of the file. Mhmm. Right? But if you have content where the hash is the same size as the content,   you might as well just replicate all the content. And now you're back to having every node having, you know, petabytes,   zettabytes of data. Right.  

Like, torrents were great because you only have to keep an index of the files and replicate that.  

[01:19:45] David Bennett:

And the index being,  

[01:19:47] Hodlbod:

I know where to go find it Yeah. If I get a request to go get it. I know the name of this file, and I can ask for the network I can ask the network where where is this file, establish a connection, start pulling down the chunks.   And, you know, another thing is latency. So torrents are not fast,   and   but you don't need to download an 8 gigabyte file in a quarter of a second. Mhmm.   No. Like, it it torrents are a great solution for distributing files in that particular way that it's used.   But not great for, like, loading it memes on demand. Right? When you're on social media. Right. Another instance is DHTs, distributed hash tables.   And what what those basically do is they're a bunch of linked pointers. So you say,   I want this piece of data and the your   DHT   client says, well, I I have a couple of peers. I'll ask   for that content. All the peers say, well, I don't know where it is or I have this or, well, you might try these other nodes. And so you do this recursive pure discovery thing. And so you walk like 4 or 5 hops down until you find the content, and then you request it from the pure that has it, and you pull it back.  

DHTs are really cool, and I think they have a lot of interesting uses, but they don't scale either because, you know, if you have   6,000,000,000  

[01:21:06] David Bennett:

nodes Mhmm.  

[01:21:07] Hodlbod:

And, you know, I think DHTs also have to be online too. So if the person who has the content is not online, or you can't find a a path to that person,   then you can't find it at all. Right. Even if they are, you're,   you're still gonna be waiting for a while for stuff to load. So   relays are an attempt to   maintain some level of decentralization   without all these the latency problems of these, like,   giant indexes   and,   you know, loosely   loosely coupled, like, routing systems, basically. So if you ever if you know your relay's URL, you go to the relay,   and you ask it for stuff, and it gives it to you. It's a server. Mhmm. So it's really really simple. The thing about Gnostr is it it turns these servers into,   like,   plural servers. Right? So when you go to Twitter, you can't there's one   endpoint,   you know, that you you go to twitter.comorx.com   now. And so there's one place where you ask for your stuff. There's one conceptual server. On Nooster, there's a lot of conceptual servers, and so you can choose which ones you're gonna ask. You could choose just one server, and then you'd be no more centralized than anything else. Or you could choose 2 servers. And so if one is down or one is censoring your notes or whatever, the other one will respond.  

And so this this diversity   means   that,   you know, there are lots of different options for where you can store your data, and lots of different counterparties that you can choose to trust. Mhmm. So it's about diluting trust. That's basically no stress relay stuff in a nutshell. Okay.   And   there are all kinds of,   you know, wrinkles to this that we can we could get into, but probably shouldn't for this conversation.   You know, one of it which is like, well, how do you know which relay has the note you're looking for? And so, that requires an understanding of who who posts to a given relay. So if you have a note,   ID, you just don't know. But if you have a pub key, you can then find the relay. But that that, like, how do you find the relay? That's a whole question.  

That isn't, like, completely worked out right now, but there are partial solutions. But that's the kind of problem that can be indexed. Right? You if you 6,000,000,000 records in a database is not a lot. Right. That's not   zettabytes. That's,   gigabytes. Yeah. Yeah. You know?   So a single computer can store the entire index for the whole network.   Because all you're asking is who post to what relays. Mhmm. Because you don't wanna assume that a relay is gonna be there forever. It might go offline. It might choose to ban you. So saying, I'm gonna always post to relay dot dam domus.io   forever   Mhmm.  

Is not feasible.   Because that's that just gets you back to, like, web 1, where there's a website, and I'm gonna go to the website, and then the government shut it down. Right. Relays can easily be shut down in the same way. But pub keys can't be shut down. They're part of that intrinsic language of Gnostr, and they will always be there,   unless someone loses their pub key or gets compromised.   And then we have key rotation schemes that we're working on to solve that. But that's, like, a pretty minor thing that doesn't happen very often. It's not something that can happen systemically. It's a very one off sort of thing. Mhmm.   So if if pub keys are permanent,   then you and you know where to find which relays a a pub key currently lives on, you can find those relays. Okay.  

So that I I just wanna say that for the for the people who will dismiss Nostra as too dumb to work or,   hand waving.   Like, it's not hand waving, it's a very specific set of trade offs.   And, you know,   they're   in the original read me to the Nostra protocol, they're trade offs that are dumb enough to work. Like, DHTs,   torrents,   Filecoin,   IPFS,   all these things are too smart.   They actually solve the whole problem   from a particular perspective. Like, they systematically   make it possible in theory to find everything you wanna find. Oh. But the thing is, they still actually suffer from all these flaky,   flakiness problems of, like, network partitioning, basically. Where it's like, well, you can't get from a to b because there aren't connections between a and b. It's like, you know, if I ran a lightning node with,   no channels.  

Right? You can't pay me. Yeah.  

[01:25:41] David Bennett:

I did I did that. I literally did that, but but but I didn't open up a channel on my lightning node for, like, months   because I was helping the network. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, this is the the lunacy that that all of us go through. We we get excited about something, and we're like,   I'm in.   And we do everything that we can to to jump in the pool, and all you end up doing is, like, all the people that know what they're doing or looking around you, and you think you're swimming,   and And what you're doing is, like, half ass about to drown. Yeah. You know, you're in the middle of the pool, splash around because you don't know how to swim. You don't know that. Virtue signaling mind rod, you know. Right. I put a black square on my Facebook. That means that I, am a good person. I stand with whatever,   you know. I run a Bitcoin node. That means I'm a sovereign individual. No. It doesn't. Yeah. And I did, you know, and I did that too. It's like because, you know, before,   I had a Bitcoin I had a Bitcoin full node   and on a Raspberry on the same Raspberry Pi that I have now, which is honestly   kinda scary to think about. Because a lot of people are, like, going, it shouldn't be alive. But it's doing just fine. My my SD card's gotten corrupted twice. Really? Yeah. I still have my my Umbrel, but I'm I'm moving,  

[01:26:52] Hodlbod:

my node to a to a VPS online. So Really? Yeah.  

[01:26:57] David Bennett:

Well, I'm thinking about I'm thinking about moving my all my stuff over to a start 9. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I I don't have any direct experience.   I hear good things. I've heard good things. So that's that's that's all I can really, you know, really can go on now. But,   so   my question about relays   is just   when when we have these relays and they're attaching to each other, not all of them are attaching to all the other ones. Yeah. So they do they form   like, do they end up forming   clusters?  

[01:27:31] Hodlbod:

This is this is another thing. It's like, yes and no.   Nothing's prescriptive, and so relays can also do what they want because the people who run them can run whatever software they want. Right. You know, we've got lots of clients. We also got lots of relay   versions. Lots of different pieces of software, probably   at least   30, 40 different Relay implementations.   And they support different features, and they do different things. Mhmm. So,   there are like, one particular kind of relay is a proxy. So if you've ever heard of,   if you've ever heard of blaster, you'll know that I love blaster. I love blaster. I've got I've got it up on my I've got mutiny on my thing is what, you know, on all my stuff as well. No. I'm joking. I actually I I criticize blaster all the time Oh, really? To to the point where it's gotten a little crazy. I try not to talk about blaster now, but I can't help it. It's It's it's just too good of an example. But what you do with blasters, you you publish your notes to blaster, and then it sends them to,   300 relays on network. Right. And so it's a useful way to get your your stuff out there.  

And I won't talk about, like, the the the pluses and minuses of that. But it the basic idea is it's a relay,   but it doesn't let you pull anything from it. You can't read from blaster. You can only write to it. Uh-huh. And when you write to it, it doesn't store it like other relays do. It actually relays it to other places. And then deletes what it got. Yeah. Yeah. So it's always it's always, like, clean, like, self cleaning kinda. Yeah. Yeah. It it it's stateless. It it doesn't have a database.   And so, like, relays   are just servers, and servers can do whatever they want. So they could federate.  

You can,   only only serve notes to certain people. You You can only accept notes from certain people,   either based on signature or who's actually sending the note. Right.   Relays. Yeah. They could,   replicate data among each other. They could crawl the network and pull pull data into their cache.   They could push notes out. So   there's a whole bunch of different patterns that are emerging for how to use relays.   But,   what you can trust a relay to do is,   have some events. That's, like, that's basically it. It's a named repository of events. And how you use that named repository of events,  

[01:29:41] David Bennett:

totally depends on what the relay wants to do and and what you wanna do. And again, what what kind like, I can said it say only accept kinds 1, 3, and 5. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So now the relay is actually taking on the the prepared meal that I've talked about before,   in and of itself, and then whatever client   attached, like, if you're just actually, this is another question. If I've got, like, 10 relays and one of them is gonna serve me this this particular meal,   isn't that all buried with all the rest of the stuff that I'm getting from the other 9 relays? I mean, do I have I covered over   the the   potential of having a specific   kind of experience   with this relay when I do  

[01:30:24] Hodlbod:

that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And, there's it's a really interesting balance between doing it in protocol   content selection in protocol and out of protocol. So out of protocol would be, like, I am gonna look at this relay, and I'm gonna look at everything they give me. Uh-huh.   In protocol would be, I'm going to specifically say, I want this content from all these different relays.   But there's strange ways to mix all those things. You can't you can't really just look at the whole database of a single relay. Mhmm. Because relays won't generally serve you their entire database. Mhmm.   And so you almost always have to specify what what do you actually wanna see and when.  

But then, you know, a relay   can differentiate. So, like, pyramid.vijaf.com   is a relay where only, like, 15 or 20 people are allowed to post. Mhmm. And so if you add that relay,   it doesn't magically change your experience, especially if you already have, like, relay dot domus,   added. Because depending on how your client pulls things,   all the stuff from Domus is just going to mix in with the stuff from Pyramid.   And likely, a lot of the stuff on Pyramid is also on Domus anyway. So because blaster. Yeah. Yeah. Because because of last year. Exactly.   And,   so you end up with this redundancy, which is actually, like, a good thing. That's part of the centralized   censorship resistance stuff. Like, if if Domus bans Fjaf, like, he's got his own relay. And so if you're on pyramid, you'll always see Fjaf stuff.  

But,   you know, there's all kinds of different ways to handle this stuff. One of it, which is the outbox model.   And,   you know, this is what I advocate for, and I think this is basically essential to what Gnostr is is   choosing relays based on   user preferences. Mhmm. So if you choose a random relay,   in practice, that relay probably has what you're looking for,   because of blaster. But   in the future, as relays get bigger and bigger,   and the amount of data on the network increases,   individual relay runners aren't gonna have the full copy of everything. And so if you choose a random relay, even the big ones like Domus, you may not find what you're looking for. And that's already starting to sort of happen. Uh-huh. And so you need this layer of how do we choose which relay I'm gonna look at.   And that's the outbox model. You say, I've got a pub key. I wanna know where they write to, and then I'm gonna read   stuff from that relay for this pub key. Okay. And so what that would look like is, like, you know, if   if you got this domus and pyramid and pyramid Uh-huh.  

You,   you have Fia Jaf's pub key, and the pub key says, I write to Pyramid. Uh-huh.   What you can do is instead of saying, I want everything for all my 500 follows from both relays, and then you get 500 things from Domus, one from Pyramid, and it's totally redundant and canceled each other out. Right. You can say, I want a 499 things from Domus and one thing from Pyramid. Uh-huh. And when you apply that, it means that you're downloading a lot fewer duplicate events.   So it can increase it it can improve your performance.  

[01:33:32] David Bennett:

Well, it has because your your your   the the amount of data streaming in because all that has to be processed. Yeah. Like, it doesn't matter what it is. It has to be processed, which your that's that's why it takes 3 days to get the blockchain. You know, if you're spinning up a new node, is it all that just gotta be processed by the processor that's physically on the little node that you're running to just decide that you wanna run run a Bitcoin full node.   Same thing with, like, a, you know, web request. So the more data that's there is this the   and that's one of the reasons why when he did the the Nostra experience,   the the client experience, they're all different.  

But there's some   but there's some,   I in my opinion, there's fundamentally   experiences that are shared   by everybody across all all these things. And one is,   how come I've got this note on this client, but I don't have it when I'm looking at it on this client? Yeah. And why like like, DMs. Perfect example.   Like, I was DM ing you off of off of Domus   because I'm on my phone, and I'm, like, going, hey. Let's do a re let's let's record. I got I got this portable rig set up. Let's let's take it around the block.   And I didn't hear from you for, like, 2 days. Yeah. And I didn't think anything of it. And then I'm, like, going, then I wrote you a note. And I put, you know, at autobod or DanBot, I guess. We're   all Dan. We're all Dan. We're all Dan. We're talking about Dan days.  

And then you got back to me, and you were, like, I don't see any note   or or DM.   And then I go back, and I'm looking at, I think I'm looking at I I go back to Domus   and look at it, and sure enough,   my DM didn't go to you. And then   I tested you I think I just put in test.   And then I looked at it, and it looked like it got it went. And I'm like, I don't know. Let's do this. And I got the app to close, you know.   Then I well, I think I I think I actually had to restart my phone and then open Dom as backup completely.   Sure enough, it's not there.  

So I go over I go over to my my computer, and then I go I go over to your client, koracle.social,   and I DM you from that one.   And then I go over to prime, primal, and I DM, and I say test from or DM test from coracle, and then I went over to primal, and then from there, I said, DM test from primal.   Only one of those came through. Yep.   And   this is the kind of thing see, and and here's where the for my situation, this is where the rubber meets the road.   And I'm not going to take what a lot of other Bitcoiners and ostriches and stuff take, where   if you can't nail down the user experience, then screw you.  

It's your it's all your fault, and this is going to fail. Yeah. I hate that attitude   in ways that I cannot because I'm like, don't you see the value   of how these different experiences impact you? If you're the person that wants everybody's experience to be the same and you wanna have the same experience as every single person,   what you're doing is you're saying, please, god, daddy, put me in a blender. Uh-huh. And make me   like everything else around me. And I'm looking at this at this   field, like, it's like looking at a pasture with different tufts of grass everywhere and different lengths and different heights and look that spot's dry and that place is all soupy and wet and   and it ends up being a tapestry that I look at it as gorgeous. Yeah.  

And all I hear   are like other podcasters that have said the same crap in my head that say, but if we don't nail down the user experience, nobody's gonna use it. Bullshit.   Am   am I being   am I not being a nice guy about this? Because I'm like,   I I don't I just don't get people that when they   trip over something,   and they completely lose their mind about it.   I see weakness.  

[01:37:40] Hodlbod:

Yeah. Well, it's an interesting question because they might be right. Like, people people want stuff to be easy,   especially when you've been conditioned for everything to be easy. Uh-huh. Like, maybe if we were, like, cowboys living in Texas in the 18 forties,   we'd be like completely different approach. I can deal with no stir. It's no worse than the Pony Express. Right.   But we are   yeah. And that, like, DM example is a great example. So let me explain what's going on there. Uh-huh. Right? You use Domus. Domus does not implement the gossip or the outbox model yet. Uh-huh. And so Domus doesn't know where I look for my DMs. Okay. Domus sent   your DM to me to your relay selections. Uh-huh. And   sometimes   those overlap, and sometimes they don't. Okay. Adamus is,  

[01:38:23] David Bennett:

dumb. And this is not a criticism of Will or anything. It's just, like, he hasn't gotten around to adding outbox. It's a lot of work. It's it's hard. It's really hard. A lot of work. I mean, your heads down. He's heads down. Yeah. Fiat Joffe is still heads down. I mean, it's not. This shit isn't easy. No.   And that's one of the reasons why   I'm actually looking at this  

[01:38:43] Hodlbod:

thing's not working the way that that I think that they work to actually understand how it works in the first in place. Yeah. But but, like, to bring it back to that that metaphor, the body metaphor. You know, we're all used to speaking into the ether,   And that's a lot easier than actually making sure that everything aligns so that the person understands my message. Mhmm. You know,   on on Nostra with this whole, like, DM thing, what basically happened was   you yelled at me, and you were in a different room. Uh-huh. And I didn't hear you because we're not in the same room. Like, the air   didn't work. The the sound did not carry through the relays. Mhmm. Because you chose the wrong relays or Damas your your your client chose the wrong relays. Uh-huh.  

The ones that I was not listening to. So, you know and this is just like something we take for granted in real life. If if I am 5 miles away from you, and you say,   hey, huddle bod. What do you think of this? I'm not going to respond because I am not there. I'm not physically there. Right. And this is a reality of the Internet   regardless. Like, this is why phishing works,   works. You know, you go to the wrong website, you enter in your username and password. You just told someone the wrong thing. You were in the wrong room. You didn't realize that you're in the wrong room. You need to make sure that you've authenticated the person. And so, like, you know, on the like, no seems way harder because you have to actually deal with these problems. But it actually makes it easier Mhmm. Because you have those keys. Right? So, like, if you could   if you could go to what a website   and have something that says, like, this website is verified because they signed your message   requesting verification   with their private key that you had previously stored when you created an account. Mhmm. Like, a big check mark or a big x.  

You know, you go to the wrong website, and you say, please verify that you are my bank. And they say, we'll verify, and then the signature doesn't check out. Just show like a big old x, red x on the screen. You're not gonna get phished because you've authenticated the website. But in the model where you're trusting the website   to do all the authentication for you, you just can't. You don't have that power, and that's why phishing works. Mhmm. And, like, phishing can still work, you know, on Gnostr,   through the, like, social layer, but it gives you a lot of tools to mitigate that.  

You know, and so, like,   if if, with the whole relays thing, if you choose the wrong relays, you're speaking in the wrong area, in the wrong room. I'm not gonna hear it. Same thing with, like,   language, you know. If you just speak a different language, I'm not gonna understand. Right. So if you send me, like, you know, there's 2 kinds of DMs right now. Mhmm. And this is, like, potentially a weak point of Nostra is there are so many ways,   that could potentially,   be done   that, so many different ways to potentially do the same thing. Right. You know, we've got kind 4 DMs and kind,   was it like 14, 15 something. NIP 26, whatever that is. Yeah. 2 different DMs. So,   you know, if you send me a,   KIND 15 DM,   I might not get it if I'm not using a client that understands how to do that. So so there's all this complexity, but it's basically like, you know, look,   when you when you shoot a gun, you have to align the sights. Okay? You can't expect to hit the target if you don't align the sights. It's your job to align the sights. Right.  

You know, whereas, you know, maybe you play a computer game that has auto targeting for you. Mhmm. It's like, okay. You got auto targeting. Is that better or worse? Well,   it's better in some ways. It's also not real. Right. Yeah. Like, Twitter's better, but it's not real. Like, maybe that's the takeaway to take from this. I think see,  

[01:42:21] David Bennett:

from a user experience,   if I go back if I go back to the the complaint on the table is that, well, no. This client doesn't work the same way as this one, and I'm not seeing the same notes, and it's clear that this is just broken. Why can't you be more like Twitter? And then we   okay. Well, let's talk about the Twitter experience.   I don't know what I'm seeing at this point. There's no reality to it whatsoever. If I go over to, like, if I go to the home, right, and I I   the only reason I use Twitter at this point is to have a a further reach, so that when I put out, like, this show,   that some of the people that just refused to get on Noster will you know, some of them will see it.  

Still got, like, you know, I used to have, like, 9,000 followers on Twitter, which wasn't big in the first place, but now I'm dealing with, like, maybe 250.   Mhmm. So it's even worse. But I can still   get this experience, so I went through and I followed a whole bunch of people, and then I defollowed them and just put them onto my Bitcoin list of that's I can go to home or I can go to Bitcoin.   And even though that I designed Bitcoin,   the Bitcoin list,   to be specifically following these I don't know. I think there's like 4 100, like, 300 people in there,   versus my home experience. First of all, yes, they're clearly different. But if I go to the home experience,   the first tweet up that I see will be from, like, 23 minutes ago. Mhmm. This is not real.  

That's not the fire hose. That is not this this is not the API you're looking for. Right? This is not the fire hose of all like, I want it right when it came out. Whatever is going on, but they can't do that. Yeah. That that would be impossible. It's like, dude, you'd have tweets flying by so fast, it would just   the   so I I kinda get that, but it still forces me into a   false sense of reality.   Then I go to my Bitcoin list which I made. I put those people on there. Quote, unquote, I control the protocol. No. You don't.   No. You don't. Because I'm, like, going   if   and I can't really describe it, not with words. It's a gut feeling that I have that I'm like, I somehow or another, I'm pretty sure   that I'm seeing, like, these same 5 people   out of the 300 that I've got. And I know at least a 100 of them post a hell of a lot more than this. Yeah. No. I know the feeling. Definitely. There's something's going on in the background there that I cannot trust. So now,   I go rotate back over to the to the nostril experience and say, I have these 2 experiences.  

1 is   kind of like my kid with chocolate on his face and   dirt under his fingernails. And I just love the living crap out of him because at least he's honest about it. And here I've got this somebody else's kid who's just a polished princess and has   50 trophies from being a beauty queen when she was 12 and they when they were still doing that kind of crap. And everything about it's fake.   You know, everything about it's fake. I mean, it's, like, sure there's a beauty there. Sure there's, you know, there's a maybe there's a glow. Maybe there's, like, you know, whatever. But then I remember she's 12, and she's wearing makeup, and this just doesn't this is like lipstick on a pig.   Whereas, I go back to my my own son who's dirty and cruddy and got torn clothes and, you know, at least I know he's playing.  

And it's always gonna be a different experience, but it's my boy.   And if I have to choose between the 2, it is evident now that I'm choosing Nostred not just because I'm trying to shill it to everybody. I'm shilling it to everybody because   you wanna hang out with my son a hell of a lot more than you wanna hang out with somebody whose mom is dragging her behind, you know,   from 40 different cities   to go stand in front of a bunch of gawkers   and throw in, you know, makeup on somebody who shouldn't be wearing makeup in the first place. Yeah. Yeah. And, like, you know, people say that the, the devil lies,  

[01:46:10] Hodlbod:

most effectively by mixing lies with truth. Right? Oh, absolutely. There's lots of value to Twitter if you're whether you're building a business or trying to get in contact with certain people because,   you know, that's where they are. Yeah. So, like, Twitter leverages the authenticity   of   the the people who actually use the platform,   for the platform's good. But it doesn't mean that the platform is authentic. Mhmm. And of course, you know, like, a really easy objection all this is that, well, this is just an excuse because of Gnostr's terrible UX. You're saying, you're putting all the burden on the user   to make all these decisions and figure these things out and study it. And, that's neither fair nor effective. That's not going to work. And I would, like, completely agree. The UX on Twitter, I I mean, on Nostr needs needs to become as good as Twitter. Mhmm. And I think it can. Yeah. I I don't know if it will, but this is what we're working for. And if you've ever heard of the fail whale, you know, that persisted for, like, no. You haven't? No. No. No. No. Oh, dude. So Twitter used to be built on Ruby on Rails.  

And, it was like a a fine option to start with, but it just doesn't like scale the same way that, you know, Scala does. Yeah. 10 tweets a second versus  

[01:47:20] David Bennett:

a 100,000,000 tweets a second. Right. Different scale.  

[01:47:23] Hodlbod:

Yeah. So, you know,   Dorsey and and all the other engineers built Twitter in a particular way with a particular architecture, and it didn't scale at first.   And, you know, it had bugs, just quality assurance stuff. That is that's life cycle of any piece of software.   The Nostra clients,   the, like, the best Nostra clients are   less than a year old. Yep. You know,   my no store client is a year and a half old. Mhmm.   And there are clients that are 2, 2 and a half years old. Mhmm. But no one uses them. I don't think that some of them even exist anymore because,   they were very early. If they're even, you know, still alive. Yeah. But, like, you know, primal is one of the best clients. Mhmm. And they started just a little over a year ago. Mhmm. So and even I mean, primal has lots of bugs that I've noticed.  

But, you know, whenever I go there, I'm like, okay. I'm gonna try primal again. See why everyone likes it so much, and then, you know, like, a like won't go through or whatever. Just trivial things. Yeah. I get that. This is, like, this is early. We are super early. Uh-huh. And, I've found a,   a, an accusation that works really well to browbeat people into submission. I tried it on Matt Odell, a couple weeks ago. I I told him that he was a high time preference.   And he was like, what? On my podcast, you're gonna tell me that? But, I I mean, Nostra naysayers   are,   you know, there's like a there's a lot of good reasons in the naysay noster. And not everyone has to love no ster right now. Mhmm.  

But if you don't love no ster, but you value what no ster is trying to accomplish,   you're acting high time preference. Mhmm. Yeah. You're saying, I want my following on Twitter. I want my good UX,   and I don't care if there'll be a following on Nostra in 5 years or if there'll be good UX on Nostra in 5 years. I'm not going to invest in it. I'm, like, gonna let other people do that for me, and then I'll come when it's ready. And it's, like, that's that's fine. Like, maybe that's not your fight,   but,   I mean, you can't complain   Yeah.  

When when Twitter censors you. Right.   Like,  

[01:49:31] David Bennett:

get on Nostra and contribute. Help out. And that was the that was the whole other thing. The there the whole other argument that is a kind of, like, well, it's not a sub argument. It's it's a sidecar argument to what I was saying that once I built my   my Nostra   identity,   it was on every Nostra client.   And, yes, I'm carrying all my, you know, all my the people that I follow and people that follow me, they they most, more or less, nowadays, they all they all go with me.   But it's like the last identity I have to build   because of that.  

And let me go back to to before Noster, I had a Twitter account. I had a Facebook account. I had LinkedIn. I've I've got   Instagram. I'd never had TikTok.   I think I've actually got a TikTok account, but I don't actually ever use it or anything.   Because at that point,   already,   just there, I'm like, I I don't wanna have to log in to all this crap all at once.   That's a lot of work. Not only is it a lot of work setting up your bio, setting up your your avatar,   your your banners and whatever artwork, all that stuff. Your your link tree or whatever, all that all that, and it's all different. There's different places to put all this stuff, and that's just setting up quote, unquote, your account.   Now I've gotta log in to all of them   every day because the people that are on Instagram don't wanna be on Twitter, and the people that are on Twitter hate Facebook, and the people that are on LinkedIn   think LinkedIn is the only thing that exists or whatever it is, you know, because that seems to be, like, I'm I'm surprised LinkedIn even exists, but it's actually gaining traction.  

In either event,   my Nostra identity allows me to hit all that   just by going to a different client   and and saying, do you wanna log in with your browser extension? Well, absolutely. I wanna log in with browser extension. Otherwise, I'd be in the same boat.   But at that one button thing.   And right there, I'm like, how come nobody talks about the ease of which I can navigate through clients with a single click because of stuff like Insect Bunker,   GetAlBI.   The the we're taking that for granted and then just bitching   and moaning   about the fact that,   dude, I lost all my followers. Hey, it happened to me 8 times,   you know, if not more than that. And does it suck? Absolutely, it sucks.  

But I got I'm getting I'm I somebody somewhere is gonna build a badge out of that. And they're gonna be able to find out, hey, dude, this in this insect,   this or this impug, he lost his follower count, like, 12 times.   And somebody like Sir Sleepy is gonna go, dude, that that guy needs a badge. A badge master. You know? Yeah. You know, and and then there was a, you know, a couple of clients that had badges on there and and some of I don't even remember who they were. And now some of them did and don't, but all this okay. All of this is okay for me because it's like watching a movie.   It's not only is am I utilizing the thing,   I'm watching the thing grow up.  

And   there's   no way that you can do this with any of these other client well, any of these other platforms. And we will and and Nasr is not a platform. It's a protocol. And it allows the attachment of whatever the hell it is you wanna attach to it. Yeah. And that's that's no stranger's best chance at at succeeding is  

[01:52:50] Hodlbod:

what I like to call the network effect of network effects. Right? Right. So Twitter,   you know, has a network effect of a bunch of people who are there, and so it's sticky.   Mhmm. And, you know, I've heard things like the value of a,   of a piece of software,   a social piece of software is equivalent to the number of users   squared or something. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, if you have 2 users, your value is 4. Yeah. If you're if you have 4 users, your value is 16. Mhmm. So you get this exponential growth. Mhmm.   And,   on no share is the same thing because it's social. Right?  

So the more people who are on Gnostr, the more valuable it is to the participants. But   the thing about Gnostr is the more different   applications are built on Gnostr, the more valuable it becomes. So you have,   you have, like, the   the the number is more like the number of users times the number of applications squared. Right. Right? Okay. So we've got a 100 applications.   So I'm worth a 100. Mhmm. We've got 30,000 users.   That gets inflated up to 3,000,000.   So a network of 30,000 users is equivalent in value to a network of 3,000,000 users because there are a 100 different things you can do on Noister.  

[01:54:05] David Bennett:

Right. But, I mean,   okay. I I'm gonna go pedantic on the math. I mean, if we do order of operations, it should be   what's the output, you know, output number of network effect, and it's how many users squared,   then multiply that Sure. By how many applications there are. Alright. Because the the the the the properties of network effects has to come along for the ride in everything that we do. Mhmm. And if we if we dismiss that, a, we're gonna miss we're gonna like, somebody's like, I why did I underestimate this, you know, how much room I was gonna need for, you know, if we're going to scale?   If we're not including network effect proper you know, the that properly, then   we'd really miss a mark on on scaling. But  

[01:54:49] Hodlbod:

we're about a we're an oh my god. We're almost 2 hours in. So I wanna I wanna one more thing about the the whole interoperability thing. Like and and, you know, this will sound like I'm footing, Nostril. Probably, the entire conversation sounds like I'm footing Nostril. But, like, my approach is to,   be as   as, you know, steel man, the arguments against Gnostr, as much as I can. Uh-huh. So that I really know where I'm at.   But, you know,   being able to log in to everything with the same key pair,   comes with that comes,   privacy questions. Right? Right. So if I log in to my bank with the same key pair that I log in to my, like, local KKK,   chapter Yes.  

Right. Maybe my bank is not gonna like that. Right.   And, and so, like, it's,   you know, you talked about having different   password username combinations for every different thing that you have. Mhmm.   I think that'll still be a reality in Nostril world where it's, like, I have these 2 it's not that I have different identities. It's okay   that these two areas of my life know about each other, but I want to maintain them in a much more looser way. Mhmm. Like, you know, my church people really   would get tired of me talking about Bitcoin all the time. Right. And they do.   So having this Bitcoin identity separate from my my church identity is   is a is an okay thing. It's okay to, like, partition out   different parts of you that way. And, you know, if if Gnostr gets into, like, online shopping and stuff like that, that's where it becomes kinda scary because all the Gnostr data is public,   by default currently. And so companies can scrape that data and learn a whole lot about you. So we were talking about privacy before.  

Privacy and public   are obviously   incompatible.   So with Noister,   this is not something people have really, like, thought that much about, but it's always in the back of my head.   You know, don't reveal things about yourself that you don't want people to know,   But that includes correlations between different areas of your life. Right.   So just just something to to be aware of. That's a trade off of the public first thing. And so, we can solve that through different identities,   and identity management systems, or we can solve that by,   encrypting   data or not not sharing data as widely. So there there are ways forward all of this stuff. But I just kinda wanted to mention that as a, like, kind of a area of open research  

[01:57:19] David Bennett:

on this topic. So Well, when we were talking about last thing that that I wanna touch on is, like, I was gonna pause this and and show you   show you Obsidian to let you know what I was thinking about. But I'm I'm   we're we're it's not that we're running out of time.   But But maybe our listeners are. IV in 2 hours. It's like, we gotta, you know, I I'm just gonna try to respect everybody. Make it stop. Make it stop. You exit make it stop.   Is do you know anything about,   when I say the word obsidian.md?   Yeah. Okay. So you know what I'm talking about. Yeah. I have it on my phone. I don't use it that much. I baked my own, notes solution. But k. So for those of you who don't know what we're talking about, Obsidian is an interface that that you can interact with for something called Zettelkasten,   which is also known as smart notes.  

And it's a way to take notes from books that you've read or videos that you've seen or whatever that   keeps it in a fashion that is supposed to have a lot more utility   than just underlining something in a book and thinking that you're going to remember it later, because guess what?   You're not.   So the thing about that that are wanted to bring this up to you was because   I'm   bit I cannot get the particular this particular idea out of my head, and it is this.   And there's already there's already a nostril extension for Obsidian. Oh, really? Nice. Yeah. But but   who cares?  

Because here's what it does. It allows me to put in my   insect   into Obsidian   and write notes from Obsidian.   Yeah. Whoop de doo. Pretty basic. I can do that from highlighter.   Oracle. I can do that from shipyard. I can do that from domus. I don't I don't need that. That doesn't make sense to me. But when you were talking about Pyramid,   right, here's a relay that's only 25 people are allowed to use. Okay. This is what here's   follow with me.   I would like to be able to use interface that is Obsidian,   and I would like you to be using the interface that is Obsidian. And I would like to be able to write a note from a book that I read and likes like something about carbon, because I'm I'm I've just got finished with a fascinating book about carbon. I know it sounds boring, but honestly,   when you realize that diamonds   were actually in this in space as diamonds before any planets were ever formed,   things get weird because you're like, holy crap. But so I wanna write a note about that. And then I've got that note   because it's marked down, I can put a live, like like a hypertext link into that note,   back to another note that I have   about something else about carbon,   about something else that it was that this other form of carbon that wasn't a diamond was also here before planets like Graphene.  

Right? Because Graphene was. Graphene and diamonds were both here before before planets existed.   Well,   there's a link between those two notes and it's live. I can just click on the link and the other note just comes up   on my screen.   But   how can I interface that with your notes,   with your smart notes,   but filtering out the 1,000 and thousands of users?   So what I would what I'm thinking is like, I want Obsidian to act the way Obsidian acts, with this hyperlinking in between those. But I wanna be able to reach out.   And I wanna be able to say, hey, I've published this note about carbon and the fact that diamonds were existed before planets were existed.  

You've got my my input   in your Obsidian,   and maybe each one of our Obsidian   has its own relay. I don't know. Because I'm I'm this is not this is why I don't get paid anything, because   I I suck at all this. But I got ideas. Right? So you   me and you have Obsidian, and me and you both running our own Obsidian Relay. And when I send a note out, I can choose to send it back, you know, to the general protocol.   But nobody's really gonna be able to either want it or give a shit about it. Or it could be a private note. I don't want anybody to see, so just you.   So you get that on your but it comes in through your Obsidian.  

Right? And then   it's got a link in there.   And then that link is actually a request back to my relay of what the hell else was he talking about. And then all of a sudden, that other note gets parsed and then put into your relay.   It's like having my Obsidian   on your machine,   but not. Right? And same with you. But let's say we drag somebody else, like, I don't know, Guy Swan is a great big Obsidian user.   What if we drag him into the mix?   And then all of a sudden, it's just us it's just our in pubs, just us 3.   Right? So whenever it is that we write in a particular vault, like, you know, I could have another private obsidian that does something I don't want anybody knowing about because it's how I like to play with dolls or something. I don't know. Whatever. But I don't want somebody to know this. Right? But the public stuff, the stuff that I wanna share with with you and somebody else,   that I write in a particular different vault that is set up for this.  

And then, like, the whole point is   if I   can use SmartNotes and Zettlekasten   to have   moments   over all of the 47   books about soil and carbon that I've read over the last 10 years, because I continuously take these notes and put them into this pile and have them start connecting with each other.   What if there's a thread that would exist there   between you and your pile of notes?   And then but all of a sudden, we can leverage that together.   And Noster seems like a perfect protocol   to put into place for this   as being able to communicate   with just these in pubs,   in just this way.  

And   here we have this emergent property of,   oh my god, yet another client, but this is a client I want. I want this. I don't know how to build it.   I would probably just catch on fire if I tried. You know? Just like, boom. The eyes pop out of my head and the head explodes, and then I just body just runs around bouncing into walls while it's on fire, because I can't figure this shit out.   But I get the feeling that if you were to just keep it between just a couple of people or, like,   2 or 3,   And you were able to see each other's notes in a way that connected back through their own notes.   And, like, start saying, okay. Well, I'm gonna click on the on this this hyperlink that I get. It was not really a hyperlink, but let's just say it is.  

And then all of a sudden, your machine says,   yeah. Okay. Well, if you want that note, sure. I'll I'll here it is. But it's not all it's not like I have everything of yours together. It's like a way to limit the amount of information being sent between people, and then it seems like that might actually be a way to scale up between 8, 10, 15. After a while, you lose coherence on the entire idea, because   15 different people reading 15 different things,   looking at 15 different issues,   you're probably not gonna be able to to pull out as much as you think.   But   is what I suggest is that sounds possible. That doesn't sound like you'd even be I mean, it would take somebody work, and I don't wanna discount that. But it doesn't seem like it's   all that hard and so far not impossible.  



[02:04:46] Hodlbod:

Could it be done? Yeah. Absolutely. And that brings up kind of the whole question of, like, depth of integration. There's a million different ways you can approach that. And, like, the first one I would ask is, like, do you need to step outside of Obsidian to do that? Mhmm. You know, is Obsidian the kind of thing where the custodial nature   of the single server is   significant?  

[02:05:06] David Bennett:

Is is Obsidian going to censor your notes? That's good. That okay. All that I I love that line of thought   because that all makes sense.   It's like but I here here's where I'm getting at. Or the okay. This is this is another thing that I'm thinking of alongside   the same thing.   Is that if I already have   an interface that I'm   able to use, and it's extensible through stuff like because   there's so many things that are extensible through plugins.   You know, like like it started with DLC content with games, and now we're, like, Obsidian's, like, doing the same thing where it's, like, plugins.   Plugins are everywhere. And the and and more and more people are are understanding, like, GIMP.  

You know, the Photoshop that's free and open source software. The free this is the model of the free and open source software thing is plugins, and and community plugins. Right?   And if I have an interface that I'm comfortable with,   and I can just   plug in   another protocol,   and I understand how that protocol works,   then that   seems it would be easier for me to just hit the ground running on that. Then   if the answer to the question of do you need Obsidian,   can you just use another client? And I say yes to that question.   Well,   now I've got more injected noise. How do I use this client?  

You know,   could it be that I just needed to use this client? So the that's those questions that you that you're asking,   while   clearly needing to be asked,   is something that I automatically almost have an allergic reaction to because I'm like, no. I love Obsidian.   I love my interface. I know exactly how it works while I'm inside of it. I just want a pipeline that shoots out of it. Because otherwise,   this is one of the reasons why I I stopped playing standalone video games. I wanted MMOs.   Why? Because it's if I'm not connected to the outside world, then what's the point? Mhmm. And I think that that's where all the social media came from. And   we're getting taking all that back and saying it's not social media.  

It can do that, but that's the least amount of of of the ability of this protocol.   Because it's a communication protocol,   I have another type of value I wanna transact with you. I can we can already do that with lightning,   Fedimans,   Bitcoin.   That's a monetary value. That is a value that we see. It's a value we understand.   This is an informational value that we cannot wrap our heads around yet, and we never have been able to as a species.   This thing and I'm not even talking about this thing, this this idea that I have with Obsidian. I'm talking about the protocol. Why me and you are here? All of us that actually give a shit about this.   We're on this thing that I think is more important than any of us put together know.  

And I I wish I could see the end of it, but I'm kind of glad that I can't see the end of it. Because it's just this road that I'm gonna be able to travel down until   they put my ass 6 foot under.   And I'm gonna be happy about it.  

[02:08:19] Hodlbod:

Yeah. Well, like, a similar example that I think of is Mutiny. Mutiny recently released a whole bunch of social features. Yep. And, you know, it's kinda like, people have been asking should no store clients have a built in Bitcoin wallet. And, when no one asked until, Mutiny answered is, should, should no, should Bitcoin wallets have a built in Nostr client?   Right? And the value proposition   for   for mutiny adding Gnostr was,   public private key pairs. So, you know, it gives you that sort of Venmo, PayPal sort of experience where you type in someone's username and you send them money. Mhmm.   And so they, like, piggyback on that part of Nostr.  

They're not using I mean, they are using relays, but relays aren't essential to making that happen. All they have to do is have a database of key pairs and the relationships between those keys,   And now they can send Lightning and eCash   and Bitcoin,   over those   those systems,   to the right people. Mhmm. So Nostra has this, like,   this value proposition that complements   the the Bitcoin thing. And so, like, with Obsidian,   Obsidian has this value proposition of basically, like, the front end. Mhmm. The front it like, the data format is kinda whatever. I imagine it's probably good, because Obsidian is good. Mhmm. But the really amazing thing is the front end Mhmm. And the user experience that they build. Because there have been other things like Rome Research and stuff that, like, haven't quite gotten the same level of,   adoption.  

And so Obsidian does a great job with that. But, you know, like, we're talking earlier, that's the ear and the mouth. Right? And the data format is the actual words. Right. So you could have the same ear in the mouth and teach them different words. Mhmm. So you're talking about teaching the same ear in the mouth, the nostril words.   And so, what what does speaking in the nostril   protocol give you over speaking in the Obsidian protocol, whatever that might be internally. Well, like, the big thing is signed messages. Mhmm. So you can spit these out into the the wider network   and have it verifiable and link things together that way.  

But when you're introducing   kind of the private aspect of it, that doesn't it doesn't,   give you as much benefit. Right. Because if it's private,   it's easy to police, you know, a small number of those relationships that you have with other people. Uh-huh. Be like, well, this person is an impersonator or not authentic or whatever. Right.   And so, like, yeah. Like, moving public notes   well, you know, you can also have other clients that interoperate. So that's a that's a big benefit.   But yeah. Like,   private sharing   is is something that,   no stranger only really helps with   for,   you know, when there's a synergy between public and private. I wanna privately share something with this public identity. Right? Or I wanna,   publicly share something with   someone who is,   anonymous. Right. Like, those are both good,   good synergies.  

So I I think there's something there.  

[02:11:20] David Bennett:

No. I see exactly what I see exactly what you're saying, and that makes that makes more sense. Except now I'm starting to think about, like,   well, crap. Now, like, you know, instead of using a prebuilt model   that works and we know it works,   then I you know, it seems like it just seemed for me, it just seems like overkill to have to build it, you know, like some other kind of protocol that just does this one thing. Mhmm. And I love use like, okay. Look.   We're gonna use we're gonna use Nostra. It's like, but you don't need it. I know. We don't need it, but it's already there. It's already built.   It works.  

It works really well   If we can just modify our end of it to do this one thing,   then we can leverage what is already there.   And   that's why. Yeah. That's why for me. The if the answer is, do you have to use, you know, Obsidian?   I think the other the other question that mirrors the mirror image of that is, do you have to use Nostra? Mhmm. Because both those questions are valid.   And from my standpoint, I'm like, I I I'm going to say I have to use both. Because I'm familiar with this interface,   but I know that this network over here works. I know it's trusted, and I know it's a communication protocol.   And I'm talking about short short notes. I'm not talking about sending pictures and videos and stuff like that to each other because that's not really what Obsidian is set up for. So for me,   the genetics of Obsidian seem to match with the genetics of Nostril.  

Like, the genetics of Nostril kinda match with the genetics of lightning. And what is now happening is that the genetics of another organism entirely,   this e cache stuff,   also seems to fit.   Which is where I kind of want to leave this off,   is   the these organisms as they start tangling up   are not   organisms that share the same   DNA. That's my opinion.   And yet,   they're able to code not only coexist but start having offspring, which shouldn't be possible   from if we look at it from biological   or Darwinic   species   level type things.   2 different species like a giraffe and an elephant should not be able to have a baby.  

They should their their their genetic material should not understand each other To the point that it just it it was just never good. There's no copulation that's going to be able to be effective in having a child.   That said,   we've got   different things that are starting to   to crash into each other, and they're not bouncing off of each other, they're sticky.   And that means that there's some, in my opinion, that there's some there's enough,   for lack of a better term,   genetic   similarity.   That we're going we're starting to see the very advent of these brand new organisms come to life.   And I wanna leave it there because I wanna leave on that note   for me, because I don't wanna discuss that further here, because that's another conversation that I think would be really interesting to have,   and we should do that maybe in, like, a different interview.  

But   if you were to leave the audience with the the most important thing that you think about Noster,   what would that be?  

[02:14:47] Hodlbod:

I think the most important thing is censorship resistance.   And that's maybe little high time preference myself,   But, that's the most important thing we're facing right now. We're facing,   you know, top down authoritarian,   ideology being imposed.   And I wanna stay free. And if we can be free,   like, none of these things really matter. They're means to an end. Mhmm.   I think Gnoster   is exciting   from a philosophical   standpoint in a lot of ways. But, I just want my kids to be free. That's  

[02:15:20] David Bennett:

On the the mirror image of that is the question,   what's the worst thing about Nostra?  

[02:15:25] Hodlbod:

It's really stupid.   No. Like, I think probably the worst thing about Nostra is it it could eventually grow in complexity to where it becomes not feasible. Okay. But I don't actually think that will happen   because   you can you could always filter out noise, and you can always   choose to   ignore   complexity that you don't care about.   If something doesn't work, you just don't show it. And so there will be sub protocols that emerge that say, these this is no sort of the good parts. Right? These are the parts that we have chosen to support. You don't need to support the whole protocol. So I think I think we could be in the clear, but that's definitely,   an open question. There's a lot of open questions, lot of different possible failure modes.  

Okay.  

[02:16:16] David Bennett:

Well, where where can people get a hold of you? Yeah. I'm Huddl bod on Gnostr. Huddl [email protected]  

[02:16:23] Hodlbod:

is my nip05.   And,   yeah. I also do the Thank God for Nostra podcast. So if you like to hear me talk, there's at least   20 or 30 more hours of that over there. So  

[02:16:37] David Bennett:

Alright, man. I'm hungry. Let's go eat. Let's see it. I know we went long on that one. But there's a lot of information that's involved in trying to explain what the hell nostril   is. How do you explain what nostril is to somebody?   Hell, how do you explain what Noster is to somebody like Adam Curry who   kinda doesn't   doesn't like Noster.   And I don't think that he doesn't like Noster. I get the feeling that   him, like a lot of other people, are operating under a I don't know. A false sense of what noster is.   And I don't I don't think Hogglebox knows what Nostra is. I don't know what Nostra is.  

I don't I honestly think fiat Joffe doesn't know what he created.   None of us do. These are emergent properties. These are   these are systems that we bring online.   And we think that, oh, since since we created them, therefore, we know what they do. We know what they are. We know what they always will be. And that is not true.   Nobody   nobody can predict   what will happen in the future with that with which or that which they create.   You like, if you have children,   you have no idea what your children are gonna become. You can't direct that. All you can do is educate them and hope for the damn best.   But beyond that, it's a crapshoot ladies and gentlemen.  

So   if you're not using nostr,   just give it a shot.   You don't have to, you know, don't make me happy by, oh well, I'll just use it because he said so. No.   No, just try it out. Try it on like you're going to a store and it don't cost you nothing to try on a pair of pants that you may or may not be able to afford or you may or you may not want.   Treat Noster the same way.   Just go find a client.   There were many that were mentioned in today's show.   Spin up a public private key pair.   Try it out. But try more than once. And if you hit a stumbling block,   then at least, you know,   put some effort into getting over that 1 or 2 or the first 5 or 6 stumbling blocks.  

Try to understand this thing. It's going to do you a world of good if you do. Alright, that's it for me. I will see you on the other side. Alright, you ready to go? Uh-huh. What's your name?  

[02:19:07] Hodlbod:

I don't know,   ma'am.  

[02:19:10] David Bennett:

This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon.   Have a great day.