TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #348: Building "Web 3.0" the right way on Nostr with jb55

Episode Date: August 1, 2022

Join Marty as he sits down with jb55 to discuss building distributed apps on Nostr that monetize via the Lightning Network. Follow jb55 on Twitter Come build on Nostr Learn more about Damus Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl Upstream Data TFTC Merch is Available: Shop Now Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel Clips YT Channel Website Twitter Instagram Follow Marty Bent: Twitter Newsletter Podcast

what is up freaks it's your boy marty bent here to intro rip 347 or excuse me rip 348 of tftc i just sat down with jb55 who's a longtime bitcoiner longtime core lightning developer and more recently he's been building out an open source protocol messaging protocol called nostra which is getting me excited. SuperTestNet demoed an app that he built in Uber Lake Competitor using Nostra and the Lightning Network at the Austin BitDevs meetup last week. And I've known that JB55 and Fiat Joff have been working on this protocol for some

time. I've only observed it at an arm's length. But after seeing that demo last week, I decided I had to reach out to JB55 and have a conversation about what he's building with all these developers on Nostra. And I'm very bullish on this protocol, especially after this conversation. I think you guys are going to enjoy it. It's a bit more technical, but I think

even if you're not a technical person, you should really listen to this conversation and what these guys are trying to build, or they are building, they're not trying to, it's working. It could be massive for the future of content distribution on the internet, social media, and a wide range of other economic interactions we have on the internet.

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go through their contact page and tell them that TFTC sent you. Let's go, FREAKS. I'm going to change the world. Enjoy this rep. You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.

If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. you've been dming each other for a couple years now i don't think uh we've ever spoken to each other in person no yeah this is our first interaction but it's yeah it's cool to be here i love this it's actually one of the only podcasts i listen to in the bitcoin space so i'm glad to be on it well i'm flattered that uh that you like the show uh brought you on because i really like the work that you're doing too with noster we talked about it on rhr before i know matt has recorded a Citadel Dispatch episode with yourself and Fiat Joff

talking about what you guys have been building on Noster. The reason I reached out to you this week is because we were at Austin BitDevs last week and SuperTestNet and the founder of Arcade City were demoing their Bull Run app, which is an Uber-like product that uses monetization via the Lightning Network and they built it on Noster.

And I know that you've been very passionate about Noster for over a year now, a couple of years, I think. And it seems like one of those tangential projects that a lot of Bitcoiners are getting very excited about. And it seems like it's hitting a critical tipping point where it seems like you can actually build really cool stuff with this. So I guess to jump into it, we can, if you can explain like how you found Nostr and what about it, how it works, excites you in terms of building these distributed apps and using the Lightning Network to add a monetization path for it. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I've always been really interested in decentralized protocols. In some sense, that's what got me into Bitcoin. So whenever I see a new like toy pop up online, I'm like, oh, this is exciting.

What can this do? Because all Nostr is, it's just an idea. It's just, uh, it was just started as a text document that explained, uh, one potential way to solve this problem. And the problem that's trying to solve is the fact that we have so much censorship and people controlling how we think and what we're allowed to say. And, you know, there's been a couple attempts at trying to solve this problem. One has been Macedon and the Fediverse, but that had its own set of problems, which turned

out to have like more censorship than Twitter, which was kind of, which kind of, kind of funny. So when I saw this Nostra project by this guy named Fiat Jaffe, and he was working on other protocols at the time, like LNUral and things like that. And being a Bitcoiner, I'm like, okay, well, this guy's pretty smart. I'm going to see what he came up with. So just reading through his initial proposal,

it's just like, wow, this is really simple. And this could actually work. And that's the way he describes it. It's like the simplest open protocol to create a censorship-resistant global social network that might actually work, right? So this is what kind of got me excited. And so at the time it was, um, I actually didn't get into, I only got into it this year

for the most part. There's some people working on it. Um, I think it was created like last year or the year before, but yeah, I just, I was looking at the clients. I'm like, Oh, these are really horrible. Do you know, no offense, uh, Fiat Jeff, but like there just wasn't that many clients. Right. And he's, um, he's a one man, uh, team.

So I was like, Hey, why don't I try taking a stab at making a client? So I'm, I, unfortunately I have an iPhone. I use iPhone. So I wrote an iPhone client. Um, hopefully one day it'll be the Android climate client. But yeah, I just took off from there. And then just that's where I'm at right now. Yeah, and the way SuperTestNet described it last week,

it's essentially just leveraging WebSockets, something that is pretty common and integral to the Internet stack. And what about WebSockets particularly makes this possible? Yeah, so the protocol stack is very simple. It utilizes WebSockets, as you mentioned, which is just a way to get real-time events from the server. And, and that's about it. Like, so there's, there's WebSockets. And the only thing, other thing that's specced is that the actual content that are the things that are sent back and forth over this WebSocket, all it is, is a signed JSON blob using Schnorr keys, which are the same type of keys used in Bitcoin. So this gives you kind of like a censorship resistant in the sense that no one can modify the messages. So as a client, I have a key that no one else can see. And I can just, I can send a post to all these different relays and then, and then they're stored on many different servers.

So that's how you get kind of censorship resistance. You're not only sending it to just one server. Like in Twitter, you're sending it to five or ten servers. And it's also nice to have it backed up. And another good feature about that is that you don't actually have to run anything. It's not like a peer-to-peer system. You can just boot up a client, you can create a key, and then just start sending messages to these relays,

and then other people can get them. So that's it. That's about it. In some sense, it's just databases. Like, oh my god, we've had databases for a long time. It seems like people in the crypto space, especially the shitcoiners, they like to um like oh like we've we've amended this new form of databases so much better it's like actually no blockchains are actually terrible databases and we have really good databases called sqlite and like postgres and the cool thing about nostra is that you can actually use any database

you want it's not actually sped um so in my particular relay uses a rust project called nostra rs relay and it's just a sqlite thing and it works great but there's like bigger projects that are using Postgres. So yeah, databases are amazing. Yeah, Justin Moons explained SQLite to me. He's really fascinated with the Replit project and the way he described it is like that's what they're leveraging

and SQLite is, as described, just a very lightweight way to create robust databases, correct? Yeah, so like CoreLightning uses SQLite a lot. Actually, if you go to the SQLite website, Right. It's surprising how many projects it's in. It's in like it's in your phone. It's in like your microwave. I don't know. There's like it's it's a very embeddable database you can kind of put anywhere and it's really fast.

Sometimes it's even faster than the bigger databases just because you have that data locality. So it's it's really an impressive project. So, yeah, we utilize that just like anyone would utilize that database in any other project because it makes sense and it's fast. Yeah. And it seems like, I mean, you're describing Noster in the context of it being an alternative to social media apps. twitter and mastodon but it seems much more robust than that that just seems like the tip of the iceberg so yeah so in some sense you kind of gotta you gotta do the sell right like what is what is this thing i think i think uh most people right now they're concerned about um censorship on the internet and like things like that but actually and nostra solves that problem really well in

that sense but it's actually much more general than that so instead of just sending let's say a tweet you can send any type of note so um one spec that i've been thinking about recently is being able to send like these like tokens to each other so it's like you can basically replace the entire token ecosystem with just like nostra um just by sending tokens people because if you think about it they're just signed pieces of data that anyone can issue so it's kind of like a token i mean it's not non-transferable um but you know you could do that like one example i thought of was imagine you really cared about certificate certification so like i really cared to get that microsoft certification for whatever reason so microsoft if they're running a nostra account

they can just mint this token which is not a it's not a tweet it's like a different type of nostril note but it's a similar similar thing and it can they can send it to you specifically it's like hey here's your certification and you can display that on your profile and it'd be like signed by microsoft so there's like a lot of like cool things and obviously like uh super test next working on the uh uber um alternative which is kind of cool so he's using a different type of note just for like locations of cars and stuff um so there's a lot of things you can do it's like a real-time censorship resistant database that anyone can kind of tap into so yeah no i But I think, I mean, obviously you mentioned shit coins

and they're trying to do everything on the blockchain. They see the blockchain as this database that can be distributed and is what we should be transitioning to. But again, I've been saying this for years now on this show and on RHR is that it doesn't just intuitively, I'm an idiot and I don't really get, I mean, I can understand the broad strokes of the technical details of all these projects, But it just intuitively doesn't make sense to go try and rebuild all these distributed systems on different blockchains with different tokens that have free-floating values.

Why not combine already pretty robust distributed systems? For us at TFTC, we leverage Ghost, which is an open-source CMS system that we can host ourselves, which we do. uh and then we combine that with btc pay server which is an open source payment processor that allows you to access and use the bitcoin network and the combination of those two things seems much more worthwhile than trying to go build everything from scratch which is yeah what's what nasser is doing too yeah i mean and what's ironic about kind of the web3 crowd is like they're selling this like oh you know this is going to be a way to like re-decentralize the web like get rid of the platforms but in reality the they just become the new platform it's like that blockchain

you kind of get locked in just because of the complexities of that solution whereas you know things like nostra they're more of like let's try to build out these protocols and in a kind of not in a vertical way where you have to get locked into some blockchain it's just like these these different technologies can complement each other so that's why i really think that lightning can play a really interesting role in nostra in the sense you can start sending lightning tips over over nostra um which i'm working on in my app that i'm working on um instead of just trying to like combine all these things into like this or rely on the ethereum blockchain which is extremely inefficient or any other blockchain right just like i don't think anyone should be

relying on any blockchain like it's it's a really inefficient database and and you know for bitcoin uses it for a really good reason which is censorship resistance on on payments and that's all it really should be that's all it should be needed for is other it's just too it's too shitty of a database for anything else right so the fact that everyone is um trying to build like web 3 stuff on these shitty blockchains it's just uh it's just not the way to go i don't think so yeah anyway so that's my thought on that yeah i mean we've mentioned lightning tipping so how does lightning fit into this how easy it is it to integrate lightning into what you guys are building on nostra yeah so going back to like what an actual nostra message is so

it has a signature which is um which covers like the entire message it has a content so you can for in in the case of a text message or like a tweet it can just be like you know it's just a tweet so it's just text content but there's other types types of notes on the nostril network so um some are likes so um this isn't really specced yet but this is what domus domus sends out kind six which are likes and then domus will just query the database for all the likes for a certain post and then it will display them um so lightning tips would probably work very similar as as a like where your lightning node or some custodial lightning node um will send a a note into the network saying hey i tipped and then we can actually start to tally these notes on certain

posts um so how that actually works is still i'm still kind of figuring that out and i'm um it's going to be in the next version of domus hopefully um but yeah ideally you would just connect your node to domus and and your node can you know create the payment and then the client would recognize that and then the client would send out a note um but yeah there's there's different ways of doing it but uh it's that's the cool thing about this protocol is that you can kind of kind of extend it it's not like it's fixed in stone anyone can add features to it and we have a process called the nashra implementation possibility similar so they're called nips um similar to like bips but um yeah so there's anyone can extend it anyone can propose new ideas so yeah we're

we're looking for devs like we need more devs in the ecosystem to like help out and inspect stuff and build clients so um yeah we're in the early days still what kind of devs are you looking for like i mean right now so we need clients i know i know one person's working on android client um i'm working on the ios client there's a few people working on web we need more web clients So if you're like a React developer or you're like a web developer, you love building nice user interfaces and things like that. We definitely need that because we don't have enough web clients. And that's the beautiful thing about this protocol is that, again, since you're not relying on any central server, anyone can run any client that they want. So let's say one client does something you don't like.

It's just showing you ads for some reason. I don't know why it would. But you could just switch to another client that doesn't do that. and um every now and then i'll see like 20 new people join the network on my on on domus i'd be like oh these like people are joining from this new client that someone created so it's it's really cool to see that things interoperating that way so well yeah i mean that's an important part to bring up is the interoperability like you can cross communicate across different clients correct it's sort of agnostic in that way yeah and so because all

the clients all they're doing is they're just um they're talking to these relays the relays um all it's really they're just really dumb they're just like hey all you all you have to relay is like okay i want all the messages from this person from this pub key um so any client can do that um web clients um that's that's the benefit of also being on web sockets to that is that it just works automatically in the web it's just very easy to make a web client um yeah that's a that's a that's a big one so we're starting to see a lot of the interoperability happen right now and we're trying to figure out like how what this is going to look like in the future but i could totally see like right now it's mostly just twitter like clients um there's that that uber example but

i can imagine people building out instagram like clients um other more real-time stuff maybe people start adding spaces and video chat um so we'll see um still uh very early but yeah no this gets into i mean i don't know if it's like competition yet but i guess we have tb decks getting built out we have john carvalho the team at cinnamon building their synonym not cinnamon um building out their slash tag infrastructure um we we had the announcement of keit.io yesterday it seems like all these projects are trying to do something similar in the sense of creating these distributed systems with somewhat of a digital identity system that allows people to interact in this fashion yeah um and i've been i've been playing with some of them um

it's it's interesting like that that what's that recent one the key one right i was playing with it it is still very it might it might be successful i'm like it's trying to talk it's trying to fix a problem that maybe nostra isn't really trying to solve because nostra isn't really peer-to-peer like not just not trying to as a as a nostra client you're not trying to connect to like other nodes and you're not talking to them so that's like a very common thing that people want for some reason but i always found personally when i've ever tried to use like a peer-to-peer app it's just it's super unreliable because it's like if the peers aren't there it just doesn't work and like if you like leave the room then no one can connect to you um so i've just found

the peer-to-peer technologies are super unreliable so that's why i really like nostra in the sense that you know you do have um it's like it's like a combination of uh central server plus peer-to-peer because um it's just like instead of one server that you're just connecting to like six servers and they're controlled by different people. So you get the censorship resistant, but you also get the benefit of a centralized server. So I just find that point in design space really interesting. I haven't seen many other protocols do that.

Usually they just go hardcore peer-to-peer and try to do a BitTorrent thing or either you're centralized. But it's cool to see something in the middle and it's cool to see people exploring that design space of different solutions. So how would you describe the trade-offs in this design space? yeah so I guess like um so the benefits obviously I I I said some of those but there are some downsides with Nostra in the sense that it is just wide open so anyone can just send messages

to your relay um so spam spam will become a concern um it's not right now like I always say that if we're starting to get spam then people actually care like spam and maybe that's like we're heading toward a better direction and then maybe we can figure out solutions then um I propose like a proof of work spec for Nostra which allows you to mine Nostra notes um I don't know if that'll be used, but there's people charging fee to run a relay. So you have to like pay money to send notes. I don't like that approach because I don't like it where you have to, where it makes it harder to propagate messages.

Because I was, one fascinating thing when I was on the Nostra network, I don't, I don't know why I found this fascinating, but I just started to see like this large sub, sub community within the network of just Chinese like dissidents. And I'm like, why don't I was like, wait, why didn't I ever see this on Twitter? maybe they do exist but um but they they told me their their community came in in uh in their language and they're like oh yeah we we can't use twitter like everything's like blocked and i realized they're using nostra as a way to um it just the way the nostril works you could like bounce a nostril message off a satellite and they would and you they would never know that it came

from them whereas a lot of other solutions like peer-to-peer solutions require like ip addresses and things like that which don't which is not a requirement in nostra so i just like i'm like wait a minute this actually might be a really interesting way for people who are like in really lockdown countries who are um who don't have a lot of free speech as a way to get their message out so i started i really want to optimize the use case so just the people like that who they were relying on these like public relays to get messages out um were from the otherwise censored platforms um i think that's another fascinating aspect of it but yeah that's powerful like how have they told you how they found us sure uh i haven't actually asked them that but uh yeah i

just i see them talking all the time i read i tried to like translate what they're saying and They're like talking about like, um, like just local issues in China. And I'm like learning so much about China just from like, I'm using this platform. I'm like, I'm like, why are they using Azure? I'm like, Oh, this is must be why it makes a lot of sense. Uh, so I just thought that was really cool. What are you learning? Where are they like, where are they talking about?

Oh, cause they talk about like, um, Oh, just like the shit that's happening on the street. Just, uh, with the lockdowns and stuff, like they're still going on, like people in like the full on suits and it's like security fear, like this fear mongering that they're doing on the ground. It's like, I'm learning a lot of stuff that's happening on the ground there, which is, I can't give an example off the top of my head, but it's cool to be on there. Yeah.

I mean, it seems like, speaking of lockdowns and the constriction of civil liberties that the whole world has experienced the last few years, I mean, you're up in Canada, and I saw you express some frustration a few months ago that really hardened your resolve to work on these technologies. What's it been like for you personally throughout these last couple years in canada oh man like it's it's out of control like

absolutely you need to play like dictator people don't realize it's like am i getting disconnected here oh there we go oh it it's bad and and the banks here are horrible like inflation like we are the bank of canada just like doesn't have any reserves like we're completely effed i think uh francis had a good thread on that at one point at one point so there's been times where it's like the banks have just have like lost my 30 30k transfers on it when i was trying to do a bank down payment and stuff like that just the banks are horrible so like at some point i decided just to get all my money out of canadian dollars so i'm like i just put all in the bitcoin and i'm like my my goal is to yeah just take down the bank system in canada just

because it's just so so unreliable and it's so corrupt and they're you know they're freezing people's bank accounts because because they because they have a different opinion in them it's just insane it's like how was how did we get here people didn't like feel like everyone thought the candidate was like this nice happy place and everyone's so kind it's like in reality it's just yeah it's just it's been pretty messed up so it's definitely strengthened my resolve it's made me focus even harder on like building out these solutions building out this um centers for resistant tech for people just normal people right so a lot of things i've been working on right now on the on the c lightning side core side is just to make it easier to um use your

node without having to run extra software um so that's been a thing i've been thinking about lately is you should be able to run your bitcoin uh core node run your lightning node and then you should have a bunch of apps just to just work with that out of the box um so um that's how yeah so domus is going to use some of that technology it's going to talk to lightning nodes directly and stuff so anyway so yeah yeah the past year has been insane and it's definitely motivated me to focus on this stuff more yeah and so like speaking of core lightning what's going on there what what do you see i mean lightning has certainly seen a lot of growth over the last couple years a lot more people using it i use it every day there will be people streaming us sets as they listen to this

podcast when it's posted to our rss feed what in your mind has somebody has been working on the protocol for some time now what is what is like the state of lightning and then we can focus on like sea lightning or core lightning i'm still getting used to that specifically yeah it's interesting to see the adoption like slowly grow um it's not like super fast i mean there are there are issues with the lightning network in the sense of sometimes especially like even i'm i run my own node sometimes just liquidity is not there i try to do a payment doesn't work so i have to open a channel so that is tedious um and i don't know if that's going to get worse when the network gets larger and i have to start to open more and more channels just to do a payment um there's a lot of

So there are still concerns about liquidity issues and things like that. But for the most part, it works pretty well. And you never really get over that instant satisfaction feel when you do a lighting payment. You just realize Bitcoin can never achieve that same feeling. And that's why it's really important for Bitcoin just to have that instant settlement. And so, yeah, in terms of what I'm working on the core lighting side, I think it's pretty exciting. I'm really excited for this next release of core lighting. It's going to happen.

And we had the sea lightning meeting yesterday and they said it's going to be out within the next two weeks. But one feature that I'm really excited about is this thing called Commando. So Rusty put together this amazing feature that so core lightning nodes will now support it, will basically allow you to do remote procedure calls directly to your node with over the lightning network.

So I'm utilizing this in so many apps right now. So I have one called the sendsats.lol, which is a way to get a lightning address for your core lightning node. um i have built i'm building out a an admin like kind of merchant you can imagine like um kind of like a btc pay server but um you only need a c lightning node for it to work um so i'm really like i'm really trying to make it so you don't have to run any software because like people don't want to have to maintain and manage software uh on your if you're just like a regular shop and you

don't know anything about software you just want to be able to like plug in a little raspberry pi with just like core and c lightning and just it should just work right so that's been kind of my goal this year is just like make just build enough demos to show like this is actually possible we can build a btc pay server without actually having to run any software um so yeah so there's like so commando kind of enables this kind of cool these i'm calling them um lightning apps um because there's just all the logic is in your browser or in your in your mobile wallet and it just talks directly to your uh core lightning node to manage it so i'm pretty excited about that anyway so that's what i've been thinking about lately i'm trying to conceptualize that in my mind so running

these apps without having to maintain software yeah so where so the commands live in the browser is that what you're saying or no it's a beautiful thing because so i've written this uh ln socket library which all it does it's uh it runs in your browser or it's a c library so it can run on a mobile app and what it'll do is it'll open up a direct lightning connection to a lightning node as like as like any other lightning node so when i when i when i go to the if you go to like sensats.ll and try to connect to a lightning node it'll basically use websockets to connect directly to a lightning node and to that lightning node it looks like you're just another lightning node um but what's cool is now in in c lightning um it will now recognize a special lightning

tlv a special lightning packet which is it's called a commando packet so your browser will can send an RPC. So it's just like, let's say, list my funds from my node. And then the C lightning node will return that info over the lightning network as if it were doing like gossip or as if it were doing any other lightning type message. But now you're actually doing a remote procedure call toward your core lightning node. So obviously, this needs to be authenticated. So there's a really powerful authentication method. It's like a macaroon like thing. But why I find this exciting is that now you can start building these like lightning apps or these client lightning apps that just run in your browser

and then have a rune and it can now call any RPC on your node and just do things like you can start to pay things in your browser using your node or you can build a whole admin interface or you can open channels without having to run any software.

All you need is a CLighting node. Like you don't need any other software. So one of the demos I'm building right now is I want to build like a BTC pay server type thing that just does all the things that BTC pay server does and just doesn't require

to run any software. And just like that's just I find that mind blowing And I think that will really accelerate this idea of making it easier for people to run nodes, which is really important in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Yeah. And another thing that we were talking about before we hit record is this push to separate the keys from the node. I believe CoreLightning is leading the way there with GreenLightning, but Paul Toy has presented a similar solution for L&D as well. what for anybody who may be ignorant to this particular problem how would you describe it how does something like green lightning fix it yeah so um the way that at least i i'm not too

familiar with lnd but in core lightning um it's actually built out of a whole bunch of smaller they're called sub demons or sub processes and one of these sub processes is called hsmd which is hardware, signing module, DMN, or whatever. I think that's what it's called. So in theory, this could be anywhere and then CLang, the node, would work exactly the same. So you can imagine a situation where you have a hardware

device that is signing for any type of signing operation. It's just that hardware device can do that. But the actual node that is managing channel stuff could be running somewhere else. So it could be running in the cloud. So Greenlight, I think, is this basic idea is that you can spin up a node

really easily you don't have to actually run any hardware but you still control the keys so it's a different approach than um what i mentioned but it's still it's i think it's a good idea it's one of those things that's going to help uh adoption help uh get people into the ecosystem if they're not really comfortable running a full node or yet um and then i think uh christian decker has some ideas about transitioning that node back to your own hardware if you want to which is kind of cool yeah sorry i'm going on and off mute here because it's windy where i am and i'm outside But no, I think in terms of scaling adoption of the Lightning Network, I think something like this is going to be crucial

because while we do want as many people as possible running full nodes, you have to be practical with where most users are going to be. And I do think the trade-off of running the node and channel management in the cloud while controlling your private keys on a hardware device that you control is a worthwhile trade-off. Yeah, I think it's, I see it as a spectrum for sure.

Like, you know, on the least secure, obviously you have the custodial solution, which is, if you think about it in Lightning, it's probably not even that bad because, you know, usually people just depositing small amounts, like for instance, Stacker News, you just put a small,

like maybe a thousand Satoshis, like who cares if you lose it? I mean, some people would care about if you lost a thousand Satoshis, but if you're just, it's just for fun, right? You're using Stacker News to, you know, to upvote people.

It's just for fun. you're not like treating that as like this like super secure thing i need i need to have my own hardware signer to like do an upvote you know so in some situations custodial is already fine enough but um and then moving toward more of the secure route maybe you you maybe you want to dabble in you know maybe you want to run a business maybe you want to run it you want to be a merchant you want to have more control over your funds you don't want to outsource any of that so then you start want to look at these cloud solutions um and then and on the very hardcore side is like obviously you know i find the most fun which is running your own node and just playing with the

technology um so i'm i'm personally trying to make that like as easy as possible so it'll become more attractive in the future but obviously right now it's just um it seems oh can be overwhelming for sure yeah certainly i mean it's somebody who runs his own lightning node as well um we do host it on noddle cloud but um we manage our channels and do all that ourselves it is somebody's been bitcoin for almost 10 years it's it's still um a heavy lift for for myself i have to partner with a trusted developer to to do all that stuff for for my business yeah and i think that's probably the hardest part like once we make the hardware just running it just make that as simple as possible like don't have to run anything else i think the hardest part of lightning after that

is the channel management and i still run it the same thing where it's like i'm trying to do a payment and it fails i'm like okay well it's obviously just don't there's no liquidity in that direction so i have to open a channel so i did like take out my i have to like take out my hardware wallet run hwi do a psbt in my you know in qt and like and then open channel it's just like a pain in the ass right um so i don't know how to make that simpler but that is definitely i think the hardest part once we solve the just running the hardware right yeah and there are solutions like there's the you know the autopilot stuff but i don't trust computers with my bitcoin i don't like i don't like the idea of you like using ai to like control opening channels and

stuff i just maybe i just don't trust computers enough but i don't know i just i've never been a fan of those solutions but so i i yeah yeah autopilot i used it when i got when when casa was still making nodes i spun up my casa node and let it set up some channels using autopilot and they were just uh not very dependable at the end of the day so i'm not a big fan of autopilot either stuff like loop in loop out and then splicing which is coming to core lightning correct they seem like uh like interesting solutions to that problem i i kind of like there's like a personal feel when i open a channel to a friend like um you know i have a friend here in vancouver leo um leo was i think his name is um and you know he likes to use lightning for

everything and i'll buy him a beer and then um and he'll send me sats and and so we have a channel between us and i just i'd love the i love the personal social connections you can have when you have when each person's running their lightning node and you're opening channels to each other so i i think that is in and of itself really fascinating and fun um so i love that aspect of opening channels is like the social aspect um but yeah it can be annoying when you just want to make a payment it doesn't work so yeah yeah and so like back to nostra and lightning and it seems like just in the broader ecosystem like crypto and all the shit coins spinning up

these blockchains that will do everything for you versus like Bitcoin which is taking this much more conservative approach like how do you see what is your path to success for Bitcoin and censorship resistance as we continue to transition into the digital age

I think what we're starting to see is you know given these technologies that make it easier to connect to lightning nodes so I gave a talk about this is like i was like um like i was like lightning network more than just payments because i really think that the lightning network can become in some sense the the communications layer for like a bitcoin economy um so we're starting to see this these situations where you can all these

lightning nodes are popping up um on servers on devices on you know and then they're and if you're able to talk to them and with a very simple api and then and that api can be integrated in any app then um you're going to be able to see just lightning start to become more and more integrated into like everything and i think that's kind of the the future i see with bitcoin and lightning is that it's not that it's just trying to be like oh i'm going to be this this amazing thing and i'm trying to sell like tokens for like every other web3 you know token sale or whatever shit they're doing but you know lightning is going to be like the slower growth of like uh you know branches getting into all these different technologies i mean that's kind of like that's where i see it

going just because um it's just so easy to especially with this like new commando feature like for example one thing i did was i wanted to create a uh a gui for my bitcoin core node so what i ended up doing was just using that commando i just forwarded um rpc calls from my bitcoin core node over over my c lightning node so i was able to build a whole bitcoin core ui using my lightning nodes in some sense my lightning was was behaving as this communications layer which would otherwise would not be accessible i would have to like set up a web server or some complicated setup because bitcoin core does not like to be on the network i mean to expose rpc um so anyway so yeah i just that's how i see lightning is like um a good example of

this is in domus i'm going to have a feature where you can just give it your node id your ip for your node and then then you can use your node for doing the tipping so i don't think any app is really doing this this way right now just because it's kind of hard to like connect nodes but um yeah it's going to be much easier to link nodes together and have them talk to each other. And so, so when you, when you, there's a lot of people like trying to build, sell this as a solution, I think impervious or other companies where it's like, Hey, what's like, it's a similar idea.

It's like we can start to build cool apps on top of the lightning network. Yeah. So I think that's a cool approach. Yeah. Just inject it into everything that already exists. Like podcasting 2.0 is just injected into the RSS feed. like inject it into Ghost inject it into Nostra

into WebSockets BitTorrent I know people have been talking about injecting it into that and I think Asher made a made a project

at a hackathon recently where he basically created paywalls on BitTorrent using the Lightning Network but it's it's hard

it's not easy to make money that way and so a lot of people get distracted I don't think people are getting like thinking creative enough

because like even just I'm like, okay, well, if you just charge for a deposit on the custodial wallet, then you're making sats. In making sats here and there, wherever you can is a good thing. You need your sats before the economy collapses. So any amount you can get is good, right? You don't need to do, I don't know. I just think there's many different ways that people aren't really thinking about ways to make money on Lightning. But yeah.

What ways, how do you think people should be thinking about this? Well, I just think there's so many ways of this in the microtransactions. For instance, in Domus, I could charge a 1% fee. It would be like 500 msats. It would be like half a sat. It's not that much for individually, but if I get enough people and provide enough value, enough people tipping all the time, that's going to add up. right so there's like this whole like accumulating large large amounts of small microtransactions in interesting ways i think is people need to be thinking on that level versus you know um you know i don't know yeah no i mean i see it i go i'm like addicted to it now with podcasts too i'll go check my my wallet and just like refresh and every minute of every day streaming like anywhere from one sat to like 50 sats from people sitting there they're streaming them out and just sending it straight to our node and i believe for rhr alone uh in the last month

we've made uh i've made uh one and a half million sats and so we've probably made together everybody is participating in that that sat splitting is probably made at least 3.25 million sats which right now is only like 750 bucks or whatever whatever that turns out to be 650 bucks but you think podcasting 2.0 is very niche very small right now if more and more people adopt this it's a very viable business operation for us yeah i mean i had to create like a special ui my uh my core lightning interface just for keysend summer like summarizing keysends because i was getting so many into my node that one time i did a podcast and it's like i'm like wow this is just one instance of this like what else could you apply this to right so yeah yeah so what do

you there's broader bitcoin in general what are your thoughts on the state of adoption you think bitcoin's in a good spot a precarious spot obviously you're up in canada with the truckers protest there was a lot of hoopla about all the uh crowdfunding that was going on using bitcoin like do you think bitcoin has a chance against these governments as they continue to get more and more despotic well the way that i look at is like i mean i have i have very little um insight into what everyone's thinking i just i don't know how you would ever figure that out um so i i feel like i've created my a bubble on my twitter so i just see like bull stuff all the time and like hype and i very rarely see like negativity so i would i have really i'm so biased i have no idea

what people actually think about it probably um but to me it's just like they're what they're what what's the other solution there's just there you know there's no other solution so and if i just keep making it better and keep building on this tech and and i i don't if i until i see a better solution i just it's inevitable to me um and i don't i don't feel like it's any less hype than it was when it when i first got into this in like 2010 it's been just been like the steady increase um since then and i don't know i just i definitely noticed there's a lot more people talking about it it's like a lot less negativity at least i don't know if it's because my feed but uh the people i talk to in person it's just i think people are starting to

become less um you know shit coin eyes and becoming more i think i think the maximalism is increasing um just from my perspective because i remember there'd be a lot more negativity but there's so many there's only so many times you can say the same negative things through each cycle because eventually they're just like, oh shit, well, I'm wrong because I was wrong the last cycle. So I'm going to be wrong again, probably. So I don't know.

Maybe people are slowly waking up. I have no idea. Why were you so receptive to Bitcoin in 2010? Honestly, 12 years. I was in it for the tag. It's like I've become a meme, but I'm a computer nerd. I've been a computer nerd since I was 10.

I love programming. I love new technologies. I've always seen me as like, uh i don't necessarily i don't want bitcoin to be interesting i just want it to be like a thing that we all use and we're all accepted and we just move on to the cooler things like building dyson spheres or doing other cool shit right like um so i but i just feel like right now at this time this is the most important thing i could be doing because i think because i want because in some sense we need this to do the cooler shit because if we can't have this

inflationary system where our everyone's money is is crashing into the ground and everyone's going to be you know poor and everything and we're not going to progress into the future so i think this is an important problem to solve and then we can move on to the cooler stuff like building space colonies and stuff so you're originally in it for the tech now you're speaking very strongly about the economic properties of bitcoin the bitcoin sort of open your mind to sound money oh my god yes i mean i knew nothing i was so ignorant i was basically just a lefty just like i just like i thought everything you just get everything for free and it was like i was so dumb i just realized that now just and i started reading i started reading like

i was just exposed to so many people who just like who are very knowledgeable about economics and just like the types of people you meet in the space is just incredible in terms of like the breadth of knowledge and just so yeah it really opened my eyes i'm like holy shit this is no longer just a toy like this is actually could change people's lives and it could make the world a much better place and that's where i stopped treating it like a toy and i stopped i stop actually giving them all away for free i used to just give like bitcoin to everyone i'm like okay maybe i should hold on to some instead of like yeah i started treating it with much more respect than i was originally and like okay let's let's let's get serious about this yeah so if

you're in 2010 you were able to mine on your laptop at that point right uh so i came in like late 2010 i um i bought some off this guy named sippa i didn't know who he was at the time on paypal via paypal on the uh irc and then i mined a bunch of my gpu um but yeah not that wasn't around the cpu mining i think like late december was like i think i needed my gpu but yeah you're just you could just mine like 0.1 every day i was like that's fine i don't know i didn't i never ran it that long because it just like made my room hot so like it was annoying it was only worth like a cent or whatever so like how much was 0.1 right yeah so yeah now you're now people are mining on oil fields and energy hackers thinking about getting it that's another

thing in the context of like this whole debate you know of bitcoin versus shit coins that i really think that the shit coin crowd discounts or maybe they're not discounting it they're just disingenuous and don't want to admit it but like bitcoin has won the energy game essentially and And I think that's arguably one of the beyond the distributed nature of the protocol and the fact that people are running full nodes. I mean, the energy that's going into this network is far beyond any other network out there. And that's something I like to tell people when I'm telling them about Bitcoin. They're like, oh, why should I not buy this? It's because there's not enough energy behind it, literally. yeah and some of them they just give up on that like obviously they're not going to be as secure

in terms of proof of work style and so they'll just like switch to some other scam like proof of stake or um and then try to sell that or proof of space or whatever she is doing i don't know um but uh yeah i mean ultimately it's the purest form of uh of the securing network is using energy right and it's everything else is just more loops to get to the just to what bitcoin has achieved so um yeah i don't know i i i find it fascinating like again it's one of those things where i had no knowledge of before just like the whole energy sector and like and how bitcoin plays into that um i know some people right now who are working on integrating lightning into um like uh your energy meter in your house um just kind of cool so yeah i don't know there's like yeah it's

it's it's crazy space what are they planning on doing there just automatic payments for energy on the go apparently there's just a big issue with uh just the payments with respect to energy bills or something so i just i for me i just thought it was hilarious that's like it's great branding just like lightning payments for your for your electricity i don't know it is uh lightning is a good brand name i mean it does zap around the world i mean it's still whenever i i pay lightning invoice it's still like magic to me like we were just in nashville a couple of weeks ago at the Bitcoin Park there. They have a point of sale system in the coffee shop

that they have on their vicinity and it's run by Ebex Mercado and you pay two bucks over the Lightning Network to get a coffee and it just works. Yeah, yeah. It's one of those things where it's like, and maybe I can, I feel like if it's way more cooler,

maybe if you're just not a technical person or maybe you don't think about how these things work, it'll just look, in some sense, if you're, if you're not technical, it'll just look like a visa payment in some sense, right? But if you realize it's running on an open source stack that anyone can integrate, anyone in the world can integrate built on top of open store, open stack money, open source money. And it's just like, that is such a profound idea. And the fact that it works instantly and has instant settlement on top of a, you know, without anyone in control, it's just, it is very profound.

And it's like almost like a moment, like a religious moment. Every time you do a planning payment it's like oh my god like we've actually built this out somehow and it somehow works it's just it's amazing to me when uh whenever i get to use it so i i love using my network i always you know i love paying my friends beers lightning i just i any chance i can get i think i just bought one of those bolt hard things i was like i want to play with it um just like bought a bitcoin towel with lightning it's just it's just so much fun that's a very interesting design space that's starting to get explored i'm very bullish on which is implementing nsc technology into bitcoin wallets i think that's gonna be massive for ux yeah yeah so i got one

of those because i i i have a lightning wallet app that i'm working on and just someone i have nfc support so i think that's that's such a huge thing people are used to apple pay right just be able to tap boop to pay um so the payments must be booped so yeah um i brought you on to talk about nostra and i forgot to ask you a question earlier uh which is how does the relay network actually work uh because when super was explaining bull run last week uh he mentioned in passing that there's something like only 15 uh relay nodes on the nasha network right now and before we hit record you're saying yeah it's true but you really don't need that many relay nodes to scale this network significantly yeah more isn't necessarily better because if you think about what's happening

um let's say you connect to 15 nodes on your client if you do a if you do a post it'll send out i mean it's not that big a deal because it's like probably 500 bytes of data and you're sending that to like 15 nodes and that's pretty good um but whenever you do a query to like request stuff it's like you're then you then you're then asking 15 other nodes like give me all of your messages and there's just a lot of redundancy like a lot of these nodes are just going to have the same notes and so you're just going to get spam with redundant info so usually it's like i i think it's fine if if you have maybe like three or four or five things you're connected to. And then you'll get a lot of redundant data back,

but that's fine because they're all deduplicated by the ID of the node. Anyway, so yeah, you don't really, it's not like the Lightning Network where you need tons of nodes for it to work well. It's just you only need a few really. And what's it take to run a relay node, Nostra, or a relay server? Yeah, so it's very simple. There's an incredibly efficient piece of software

called Nostra-RS.relay. It's just a piece of Rust code that uses SQLite. It's like the most efficient node that is out there. So I run one of those on the server. I just like spin up a VPS and throw that on there and it just works. There's not much configuration to do because all it really is is just a dumb database

that you send events to. So yeah, that's all you need to do if you want to run Node. Oh, actually, I should mention this. So a really cool use case is, yeah, so we're trying to build this global censorship-resistant network. But you could totally use this as like a private internal social network for your company or maybe just a group of friends.

That's not really it's not really used that way right now. But one example of this is I actually run a relay in my own house that's on my WireGuard. It's completely private and it's not publicly accessible. But my Lightning node and my Bitcoin Core node will send Nostra events to that relay whenever it gets on-chain payment or a Lightning payment. And then so my client can then connect to that over WireGuard. and it can get those private events, which is kind of cool because I can see all these private...

It's actually mixed in with my other stuff, but other people can't see it because I'm only fetching it from that one relay and no one else can. So this is really cool. So you can start to implement these private Twitters for your company or just private notification service for yourself

using Nostro, which is a really cool use case. Yeah, I've seen you post examples of that on Twitter. You have all these bots running that are just pinging you notifications. when something happens yeah it's so much fun i love computers yeah another cool thing that came out of nashra recently was the coin join coordination mechanism and so that that is really cool to me personally obviously we talk about samurai and coin joining a lot on rhr and how does nashra basically create the ability for people to coordinate these transactions

yeah i'm not too familiar with how the the actual coin joins work but i imagine there's some uh they have to do some there's some amount of data that needs to be sent back and forth just to coordinate these things um so i i think before they were using like i don't know how they're doing it right now but maybe they recognize that nostra is is actually really good for this because you can store kind of events either you could do it temporarily or for long term but you can just basically send a custom note to the nostril relay which says here here's all the information you need to do this particular coin join and then other clients can also tap into that and pull that um i imagine that's what they're using for i um but yeah i don't know too much information about

it but yeah you could totally use nostra for something like that yeah yeah what does the world look like if nostra succeeds and uh like like i think we've already mentioned the chinese individuals who are escaping the chinese firewall to communicate with each other like what like how does this erode power over the internet i think it it's it's um it takes back control of people's of users data like um in some sense whenever you um whenever you do it whenever you create a message on nostra it's signed by you and you in some sense no one can modify that and so some sense is yours right um even if you broadcast it to these servers you could also just keep it one locally and then you can have your entire tweet history stored locally and if any one of these corporations or

any like these relays turn rogue and they want to delete all your messages they want to censor you it doesn't matter because you have it all backed up and you can send to another relay you can connect to that relay and not connect to that censorship relay so it basically gives more power to people to control their data and how um and not only that so now that you have more control of your data and you can back it up and things like that you can now have more interoperability between apps so imagine if you can you know you did a comment on your instagram post maybe there's like a nostril version of instagram and then someone on twitter can retweet that comment or like that comment it just because it just just due to the fact there's an open protocol and

anyone can integrate with it now you can start to see more interoperability between apps more interoperability with like lightning payments so imagine i want to like send a lightning tip to my instagram post and you know it's also getting likes and retweets so this instagram post is getting retweeted to my twitter feed and there's like oh so interoperability is another one um yeah but most importantly just having giving people control of their data back from these corporations who don't care about you and they're just using you for data collection and um and to profit off you so i don't know i think that's that's that's pretty good on its own i'm pretty happy if there's those use cases but yeah it's uh well when you're describing that too i just think like

we can't even fathom if this is successful what your experience on the internet will look like as you're saying like you post on Instagram

be retweeted on Twitter but like what is that even necessary like in the future like is there some broad platform that's created

where everybody congregates that's the thing it's like it's it's really up to the devs and the users and like what they what do they want this to become

because it's just we this technology exists and this is what it enables what do we want to see based off that and i think there's just a lot of possibilities and um so this is why we need more devs get more devs in here try out different things try different projects cool i'm really happy to see super testnet doing that whole uber thing that's like that's just one example we need more debt we need more people building more demos and uh i really like to i

want to see more interoperability demos because i think that'd be really cool and um yeah i just i'm hoping to kill activity pub and mastodon all those services that are just like fill the people who like to censor people and i don't know but uh this is like a i think a much healthier much better thing for a a global internet community um where you can't just like silence people and kick them out um i mean you don't have to listen to people you can just not follow them right the beautiful thing about this protocol is like you follow the people you care about and you don't get any messages from anyone else if you don't want to um so it has best of both worlds in that sense yeah that's one thing people need to get better at is filtering i think especially on

twitter you don't realize that you don't have to listen to everybody there's a block button there's a mute button there's an unfollow button you can you can avoid that and so one thing with twitter is like you in some sense you're just relying on their algorithm to filter stuff but with different clients you can start to see imagine there's a client that has an artificial intelligence that they have proprietary ai that will filter it based off of how they how how you are personally um so you start to see a lot of innovation once people start building different clients on astra um so i think that'll be really healthy for like the social internet because instead of just having one company with like a few people who like manage the trust and safety

and or usually just like have a political bias um i said that's not the right way to build in like this public town square on the internet i think it's just obviously as we've seen it's been easily corrupted right so we got to do better yeah yeah no that's why i mean i use tweet deck because it's a chronological order of tweets that I curate via list and I don't get any of the algo stuff putting pollution in my timeline. It takes work.

It's going to take work of the end user. That'll actually, it's another interesting reading go down, like how does this change end user behavior in terms of building their own experience on the internet, not just having someone hand one to you. Exactly. Yeah, because the choice of client

can really determine like your experience right um some clients like right now domus will will will give you notifications from um anyone um it will probably change in the future because just due to the spam issue maybe you would only want to see notifications from your fan maybe treat it more like a signal like app or whatsapp you could totally use nostra that way um i guess i forgot to mention that is nostra has encrypted dm so um unlike twitter where they can any employee could just read your dm um it uh we actually use something called ecds ecdh to create a shared secret between two identities and we can use that to send encrypted dms back and forth so which is really cool um uh yeah yeah no and then so like not sure i mean you explain

the way you get onto this network is you use snore to create a private public key pair so this gets into the concept of digital identity so that private represents your identity on astra when you sign a message saying hey it's coming from me you can be a synonym a pseudonym you can use your real name like so what is your thoughts on the state of digital identifiers and how it may play out because a lot of people obviously are worried that if we transport identity onto the web and into these distributed systems does it create the ability for something like a chinese social credit scoring system um to pop up exactly then this is kind of i've been pretty vocal against the whole web five camp as well just i don't know um just for this i'm not

a big fan of dids for that exact reason um i mean they'll i think they'll have arguments that it's not a problem or whatever but i just even if it's not a problem i just find the spec very complicated and in some sense unnecessary maybe as a bitcoiner i've just gotten to the use of this idea of like creating keys and just throwing them away right and so to me it's like i don't feel religiously attached to a particular key in nostra if i would ever lost my key or i needed to roll it i would just simply take all my previous messages and replay them with my new key and say and then i would say hey i moved to this key you could totally do that um on nostra so i'm not like religiously attached to this idea of like having this like one key and your one identity that's

used to track you everywhere on the internet it doesn't seem necessary to me so um i don't i don't think it's a problem i think it's like a non-issue and i'm happy with not sure just having these simple keys that you can use or throw away yeah yeah it's it off the top like intuitively it makes makes me feel more comfortable as i do worry like credit systems like oh we've seen that your key is signed uh messages to buy things from these services and over time like we're we're just not going to allow you to purchase certain things because of that i mean yeah go back to but it's the chinese social credit scoring system or the esg credit system that they're trying to thrust in the world um the ability to throw away keys and spin up new ones seems like an imperative

yeah and that's it's really important like a lot of people so i have to mention this because some people get confused and they think that nostra is like a bitcoin or lending project it's actually it's not at all it's just they're completely separate i just think people get that impression because so many bitcoiners work on this protocol it was made by a bitcoiner if you have jeff and you know i'm a big bitcoiner and there's a lot of bitcoiners in the space but um we don't want to tie keys or to or anything to like our social internet presence right we want these things to be very separate and your bitcoin should be your key should be very different from your nostril keys and we don't want to ever combine those right so i think that's really

important to mention is that nostra is a separate thing and and yeah we are concerned about that that future and the social credit course social credit score future so we want to do this right and we don't want to tie any additional information to our post that you would that you wouldn't need to right yeah that's fascinating i mean again we mentioned it earlier so many people competing in this amorphous space and that's why i'm excited that you guys are building out nostra because And again, intuitively, it seems like you guys have made very good design decisions and trade-offs and separating Bitcoin from the distributed messaging network that you're building with Nostra seems like a very, very wise design decision. Yeah, and we're seeing the benefits of that. We have this one large company.

I think I can probably say they've been tweeting it. So Minds.com, they've been working on a Nostra relay. It's a prototype right now. but they were able to get that up and running in um about a month or two like it's they're like this is the easiest technology we've ever tried to integrate with because they've been playing with dids they've been playing with activity pub and they said it was just like all of that just been way too big a pain in the ass for them but they said this nostril stuff like the end the devs love it the engineers love it it's going to be working soon they just have a few bugs to fix

then um you'll be able to connect to a minds relay and see every post from from minds.com which is pretty cool you can follow anyone from there um there's still there's i think there's some work to do like messages back and forth but it's just cool to see like that is a pretty big step for interoperability between large platforms which is exciting yeah yeah now i'm thinking like how could something like fountain app which is the podcasting 2.0 app that i use a lot um and we get our boost from fountain users like could they be nostril users at some point in the future just boosting yeah there there was one uh someone i think fiat jeff put together an example where he was, he was, uh, you could give it an RSS feed and would broadcast Nostra

notes. So you can follow RSS feeds on Nostra. Um, or yeah, I mean, you know, the podcast themselves could just publish like their episodes to Nostra. There's like a lot of different things that are not being explored right now, but yeah, there's, uh, it's exciting to think what's possible. How quickly do you think this could, I mean, you mentioned minds, that's a pretty big get because I've been following that project pretty loosely and it seems like they're very adamant about bringing censorship-resistant social networks to the web. To see somebody like them building on this is exciting.

Do you think the ease with which companies can build on this could lead to significant adoption rather quickly? Yeah, so there's a bunch of similar projects to Nostra that I was looking into because I was trying to figure out how they do things. and a lot of them tie themselves to specific databases there's one called like gun db i think um so like to use that protocol you need to use their database and that just happens to be like the social graph database or whatever but the benefit of noshra is that if you have an existing

database like with mines they have this giant database infrastructure that they you know and it's already in place right um so for them to say like oh we have to now use this new gun db um to to interact with your protocol it's like it's not it's like a non-starter for a lot of companies so for this so now with nostra they can just say okay well we can create this very simple front end that connects to our existing database and now all of a sudden like there's no reason why you couldn't create why twitter couldn't implement nostra like you could have a twitter nostra note and it would work just fine um so i think that's i don't think many other protocols could uh claim that or say they can do that but just and i think that just comes

from the simplicity of the protocol um so i'm pretty excited i think uh if yeah if you're like a large company and you have like a lot of social data or something like try try playing with nostra you'll be surprised how easy it is and how easy it is to integrate and you'll have access to the wider social like decentralized social web which is you know we bring more users to your platform so it's it's definitely attractive option i think for a lot of these companies yeah all right i'm i've all i've been cautiously optimistic and bullish about nostra in the background but after speaking with you like i need i admittedly i've not played around with it yet but i think after this conversation i'm gonna have to spin up a client and start and start using

it more i'm i'm very picky about like for me i i love designing protocols i like i like looking into protocols i'm very critical of like protocols a lot of them just they promise too much and they're just um they're like oh we can do everything like you know even like ipfs like i I hate IPVS. It's just too complicated. I like simple protocols. So when I saw Nostra, I'm like, this is exactly what we needed. This is what the internet needs right now because everything else is just way too complicated.

And just seeing something that's so simple and it works and people can start building stuff right now, it's just so refreshing because that has not happened very often. Bitcoin is a pretty complicated protocol. Bitcoin and Lightning, they're extremely complicated. You could not easily write your own Bitcoin and Lightning node, right? Whereas with Nostra, you could write a client in a day. and that is really exciting if you're a dev because it's super fun and it's powerful so yeah um i think people should be excited because it's pretty exciting yeah okay i think it's one

of the most under the radar projects out there right now which is how's it feel right yeah how's it feel to be like obviously you've been working on bitcoin for 12 years and you feel reinvigorated now that you found Nostra and they're building on that um yeah it's interesting like it's for me it's like working on protocols it's it's not sexy like no one's like oh this is so cool like I'm just used to people just not caring about everything I ever work on so like this is really different where people I've seen people are actually excited about a protocol and that's I don't know if Bitcoin kind of started this trend where it's like people start to think about protocols again because there are other protocols I like and it's just like people don't care about

them like there's one named gemini which is really cool it's like a markdown browser thing um but yeah for some reason i think bitcoin has really brought protocols and like maybe i should even like define it because my partner says this to me all the time they're like stop saying protocol it's like i don't know what that means like so anyway so protocol is just like a way for two computers it's a standard way for two computers to talk to each other and it's such a simple idea but you know once you once you make it open and you're not proprietary it's just such a powerful liberating thing that you know it's just it's

it's I'm glad that people are more excited about protocols these days because people use email every day that's a protocol it's pretty useful protocol and it's unfortunate people kind of stop thinking about them but I think people are being forced to think about them now with all the censorship going on so wait how's this happening and then

you dig a little deeper it's like oh you can you can censor us at this layer how do we route around it you need a protocol that is that is more robust sometimes i think like imagine how fucked up the world would be if the internet wasn't built out in a decentralized way like imagine if like facebook controlled the internet like because you're talking about the layers right it's like you're we're all building on top of these these

protocols and if if you have control at any given layer then you're everything above is just fucked so like um we're really beneficial that somehow that the internet was built out in that way in a decentralized manner because it possibly couldn't it might have been like this proprietary technology that we all like subscribe to right so um we're fortunate that we have this base layer decentralization that we can build on top of so we should keep to keep doing that well and then that also makes me hopeful for the future because there were people i mean aol essentially tried to do that correct and um they got blown out because the open protocol one um the distributed protocol Maybe in the last 14 years of social media age, maybe 18 years, I don't know when, Facebook, like 2006, however many years that is, it's just an anomaly.

will turn out to be an anomaly in the long long term because it just took us a while to realize that the way these social media networks and centralized platforms were constructed was simply not the correct way to do it and it took us running into censorship problems to to figure it out right around it yeah i think it's definitely like a civilizational learning process that we went through and i think we're slowly recognizing that while this was very convenient and very useful it's just not going to work in the long term and we're going to start thinking about these other solutions because we don't want to live under the boot of like some random corporation for the rest of our lives especially this is like we spend so much of our

time online these days and in some sense people make it it's their job it's their like it's their social life and if we have these corporations that are controlling that and monitoring that and collecting our information and using us to make profits it's like that is not a very comfortable online you know existence right so let's try to let's try to do better let's see well even more beautiful is like it seems like the way you're describing the interoperability capabilities of nashra like you can have a like a relatively intuitive easy way to get onboarded onto these communication protocols yeah i think that's really important I think as tech people, as people who are into protocols, they just love complicated, fancy protocols to try to do everything.

But the only way we're going to win is if it's simple and that people can just get on board without having to run any software, without having to run any hardware, but still provides the properties that we care about. So we need to start thinking about protocols like Nostra. We need to make it easier for people to get on and use these things. Because if it's not easy to use, then no one's going to want to do it. And that's why I'm really excited. um because like if you think about it like signal is amazing app but in some sense you need you need a phone number you can only run it on one device um and these are all really annoying restrictions that i i run into day to day so i'm really excited to like eventually use domus as like

my main signal replacement or whatever whatever client whatever nostril client implements a good uh influence the encryption but um it's just like yeah it's just people don't realize like yeah signal is very useful but it is centralized and and it yeah it's it's restrictive yeah i know you're very busy working on nostril and lightning but is there anything outside of those two protocols that is exciting you right now oh my goodness um uh yeah i mean i think that's kind of my main focus right now just like those are my two favorite protocols at the moment um yeah i don't know anything i if i start thinking about other things i just get too squirrely because i do like technology i i have a long-term

project that it's like it's probably going to make bitcoiners cringe which is like to build uh like a meta an open metaverse protocol that actually works that's not shitcoin um and i and i actually um i started to like step back from that a bit because i started listening a lot of bitcoiners i'm like yeah maybe i don't want to spend my entire life inside the internet and and maybe the fact that it's such low fidelity is a good thing and if it was any more high fidelity i'd be like sucked into it like ready player one style and i so i grew up playing like world warcraft and i love them that as like a metaverse i that was my existence but whether that was good for me it was probably probably not right so yeah definitely thinking about maybe i shouldn't spend

so much time on that protocol but i still like the idea of making it but it's one of those things where it's like if i make it am i really adding more good to the world probably not yeah don't push me into the pod no it is it is it is fun it has been fun and stimulating and forced introspection like digging in the bitcoin and then juxtaposing it with um the crypto world that wants to bring about the metaverse is like huh do we really want to be living in the metaverse especially as a father now with two children i look at my son's like is that the future i want for you or do i want you running on the beach and surfing exactly interacting with people in real life yeah i feel like bitcoin in some sense has been a very transformative experience just for me

and my lifestyle and like my health like just i never used to think about the things like you know the importance of eating well and exercise and eating meat and like they all seem kind of like cliche at times but in some sense i i'm just like hey i'll try it and like hey i feel healthier i feel better i have more energy and i feel like that's what you get when you tap into like the bitcoin and i felt this when i was at bitcoin miami just the breadth of knowledge the people actually like are optimistic hopeful for the future who are like just very knowledgeable and they want to make they want the world to be better so obviously they're going to be skeptical about like a metaverse type things they want people to live the best lives and that's why

we're doing this like we want people's lives to be better like why else why else wouldn't be and we're not trying to enrich ourselves like a lot of people think like bitcoiners i don't know if a lot of people think that but i don't know i just i think bitcoiners generally want the world to be a better place and you see that reflected in every aspect of the community so yeah i mean for sure yeah i mean i want to poo-poo your metaverse idea but i've i've often described it as some weird form of escapism that is just a negative externality of like the fiat system that we've been thrust into the real life meat space has gotten so shitty that people just want to escape into a digital world where they think things are better but at the end of the day it

forces you to ignore the overarching problems that exist in meat space yeah it's funny people like maybe people haven't thought too much about metaverse but in some sense we are in a metaverse right now it's like twitter it like the we're in a 2d metaverse and you're like reading text and it's very low fidelity but it is a metaverse like we're interacting with people it's maybe not a physical space and that's where maybe metaverse would extend into but it is it's like a page in some sense it's somewhat of a abstract space but we're all in it together and we're talking to each other and that space can be like an audio room like on spaces and that's the metaverse like you're talking to other people um so you know it's it's an interesting idea but like that's my

and like i as a technologist i'm interested like what would that metaverse look like even if it was just a 2d room where you're in like the kind of small little video game and that's a protocol that's an open protocol i say i find that technically fascinating but it's just like oh wait now we're going down a slippery slope where it's like now we're spending all of our time in these spaces and not interacting with humans but in some sense we're already kind of doing that online so i don't know it's just i'm kind of conflicted uh but yeah i'm just definitely not my highest priority project right now uh yeah because i mean undoubtedly like i've i've gotten a lot of value out of like twitter in that 2d metaverse in terms of being able to

connect with people and share ideas and i guess yeah it just gets down into a conversation about balance like what is the the right balance of tapping into that that world and then coming back and spending time with your family and enjoying what you have in front of you to meet space. Yeah, and a lot of people, their friends are distributed around the world, right? So for them to have a more enriching experience to hang out with them in a metaverse

might be important for their social well-being, right? Maybe it would be preferable if they're talking in person, but if they can't, then maybe the next best thing is just a chat room or maybe even a room where they can hang out. and so i i see it from that perspective but yeah it does it can get slippery so people get addicted and spend all their time in it and that would be the biggest concern right so yeah you said chat room flashbacks to aol chat rooms troll it's used to troll people yeah you say yeah i'm not gonna go

into it with people who are looking for younger people oh yeah that was that was like the early days aol those uh weird times yeah asl um yeah yeah uh well this has been a fascinating conversation thank you for doing the work that you do uh i can't believe it's taken us this long to have a conversation i've been following your work on lightning and more recently nostra for some time now and uh i'm very impressed with just how you approach the space and what you've been building and how you're helping push everything forward yeah well thanks for having me it's been uh this is great chat um love this podcast as i said it's like one of the only ones i listen to i don't have much time but uh yeah i'm uh i just i'm excited for lightning i'm excited for bitcoin

i'm excited for the future and i feel like we're really sometimes people think that oh maybe bitcoin oh the price is going down therefore it's science like there's so much happening in the bitcoin space and lightning space right now that's exciting um so i'm happy to keep building i want to build more demos build more projects to show how cool lightning is and how it can all interact with each other so yeah just it's tons of fun i love doing it so yeah and if anybody who's listening to this wants to help with nostra they've been convinced that uh this is needed for the world where can they find you where where should uh they be pointed to to help out yeah so there's a uh there's a nostra telegram um so that's kind of like where most people chat in

i don't have the link off of my head but if you just probably google it or or ask me on twitter jb55 um that's kind of where you can find me and if you want to try my uh nostra ios client you go to domus.io if you want to try nostra on your browser there's astral.ninja i think is the main one these days um and yeah i think uh there's an android client getting built out but uh yeah yeah send me a message on nostra it'd be kind of a fun thing if you want to try it out so yeah that's what i'm gonna do we're gonna wrap up here i'm gonna download domus i'm an iphone user as well and i'll message you there awesome all right well i hope you enjoy the rest of your morning it's still morning where you are um and uh hopefully

we can do this again when nostra is taken over the world and we can talk about all the cool things that have been built yeah that'd be fun i'm totally down to do that so all right that's all we got today, freaks. Peace and love.