TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #384: Nostr Got 1.4B Sats From Jack Dorsey And Banned From Twitter with jb55

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

Join Marty as he sits down with jb55 to get an update on Nostr, the 14 bitcoin grant from Jack Dorsey, and how the grant will be allocated and the strange moves out of Twitter to box out competitors. Follow jb55 on Twitter Check out Damus 8:11 - @Jack funded Nostr 12:22 - What is Nostr anyway? 614:25 - How to spin up a Nostr relay 16:18 - State of Nostr 18:27 - How Jack's donation is being used 21:12 - fiatjaf 23:13 - How are people interacting with Nostr? 23:06 - Building clients and the future of Nostr 25:52 - BOLT11 invoicing 29:56 - Delegation 33:25 - Minds social network 34:33 - Things that need work in Nostr 36:06 - Private key scraping 37:33 - Personal Nostr signing devices 39:17 - fiatjaf's monthly bounty 41:32 - Open source community 42:25 - Building Nostr to return to the old internet 49:57 - Three Letter Agencies controlling social media 54:38 - Wrapping up Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins CrowdHealth 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's up freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce rip 384 with our good friend jb55 who's working on the nostra project which has gotten a lot of coverage over the last few days following a 14 bitcoin more than 14 bitcoin but just add round it to 14 bitcoin grant from jack dorsey and then they got mentioned by name by twitter support as one of the quote-unquote social networks that will not be allowed to be linked to on twitter so jb55 and i talked about all that how they're going to disperse the grant from jack the state of the nashra protocol and why they're building a very important project rip 383 bitcoin a work in progress with shores provost we got the top four boost

at eric99, 50,000 sats. Stay humble. Stack sats. Thank you, Eric. From at Boz, B-A-Z, 21,000 sats. Shores, one of my favorite Bitcoiners. I love hearing you speak. He does have a good voice. So cool. So practical. Thank you for the sats. Thank you for the boost, Boz. At Garth, perennial TFTC. I don't think perennial is the right word, but I'm just going to go with it. Booster, 20,000 sats. Great episode. Thank you. Thank you, Garth. And at Vake, another week in and week out booster here at TFTC. 2,500 sats, no message. Thank you guys for listening. Thank you for boosting. Thank you for participating in the Value for Value model over Podcasting 2.0. If you guys are not aware what that is, it allows you to support the show

directly in specific podcasting apps fountains one pod verse breeze is another if you get a nude podcasting apps.com that's nude podcasting apps.com you'll find out all the apps that allow you to participate in the podcasting 2.0 value for value model we thank you guys for supporting the show we love that you're getting value out of it and feel compelled to send value back in the form of sats over the lightning network we'd like to move to a full value for value model in the future but until then we have sponsors this was brought to you by good friends at unchained capital the right down the hall for me here at the bitcoin commons in austin texas they're here to help you eliminate single points of failure in your custody model

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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. It's been a crazy week. We are live. It's been a crazy weekend for you. yeah i i feel kind of bad because i was like i was supposed to spend some time more time with the fam but it's just like they could just see that i'm just engrossed in what's happening right now and just trying to keep things alive but it's been wild it's been it's been exciting

yeah i mean a lot has happened over the last five days particularly um for any freaks listening at home sitting down with jb55 who's on the show earlier this year to give us a download on nastra he's had his head down working hard since that first episode and it seems like there's been an explosion of growth particularly in the last week in the in the wake of elon taking over twitter and debates over censorship jack dorsey has been talking about nostrum or sharing screenshots of him using it using your bolt 11 feature in it and then uh toward the end of last week he decided to give you guys 1.417 odd billion sats in a grant yeah what's that what's that been like for you yeah it was crazy so this all started when uh i guess jack funded signal and he he did

a post about how he i didn't actually read the whole post i should probably do that but it was i don't know if you read it but it was something along the lines of like he wants to you know fund more decentralized projects and things like that um and then so i think people just started to like message him on that thread on twitter about like my project and about nostra in general and then just like enough bitcoiners like spammed him they're like okay what's this and i think he just like he just dm me he's like does nostra have a foundation i'm like what is this about because i guess he was like hey if he is going to donate like he did to signal because signal's a non-profit he's like what would be the easiest way to donate to nostra so he's like okay i'll

figure it out i don't really know how to do this yet um so he jumped i think he did so i sent him a link to domus and he just jumped on and started chatting with people and then i think he did this for like 12 hours like he's just playing with nostra and like checking out different clients and after 12 hours he's like yep i'm sending you guys bitcoin this is awesome i was like okay he makes his decision pretty quickly i guess but it was cool and yeah no it's funny because he he wrote that post on review which was a twitter product and then like within 24 hours they like t-platformed them from that newsletter service it seems oh i didn't know that i think that's what happened i believe so uh you got an email saying you have to shut down your account

which is funny that's bizarre yeah it is bizarre there's a lot of bizarre things going on in the world today particularly social media i mean the twitter files showing that the fbi was intimately involved with decisions that were being made there it seems like nostra is having its moment in the sun and it's desperately needed as we find out that censorship is on the rise here in the west yeah so that was like the the first burst of users which pretty much like took down the servers like we've got like a thousand new signups which was like i seem like that's a lot because we didn't we didn't have that many active users until jack showed up so like having a thousand people and like you know hitting all the relays at once like

okay like we're starting to see some some obvious issues with the servers and then just when i thought like okay this is enough for me to like okay this is already keeping me busy trying to keep the servers up then twitter support like yesterday um i'm sure we'll get there but they just say like oh yeah we're no longer and they include nostra like we're no longer going to allow you know promoting alternate platforms like nostra and like that so the jack one was big but that like i think that exposed nostra to a lot more people or something because like it was starting to go into the news websites and like um so that one like it began brought our relays down again it's just like that was more promo than even jack stuff i think it was insane so like an opposite

effect like Streisand effect yeah massive Streisand effect and technically in that announcement they're wrong right like Nostra is in a social media app it's just a communications layer that social media apps can be built on top of correct I'm guessing they just threw that in there because of Jack because of Jack because Jack started like promoting it a lot and he has a lot of followers so they probably just didn't really look into what Nostra is they probably thought it was just another platform like you know true social or something but it's not so for anybody who just became aware of nostra in the last week and didn't listen to our previous episode what is the 30,000 foot view synopsis of what nostra is what you guys are building and then how apps like domus play

into it i find the best way i like to describe it is is you know using the email analogy you know So, so I'm working on a client called Domus and it's, it's a work in it and it's a client for a protocol called Nostra. So the way that you can kind of think about that is that Nostra is like the email protocol and then, and Domus is like Gmail. So it's just like one particular client that can communicate this with this way of sending messages. And so it's, it's kind of like email, but it's not email.

It's actually meant for social media. So it's kind of like the email protocol of social media in some sense. Yeah. And so messages are being relayed through these relay servers, which you were mentioning earlier, and they use WebSockets to communicate, correct? Yeah, so one big difference from, let's say, email. So all the communications are real-time, so you can connect to a relay and send and receive messages in real-time. You can subscribe to messages that are to you. so I've written a couple programs on my computer

where I just like I will just monitor any notifications toward me and then it'll pop up a notification on my desktop so that's easy you can do that with WebSockets so and there's yeah so the main point of it is like you could use just a single relay but that's not that interesting

because that single relay can just ban you and censor you so we the idea is that you create a relay pool so you connect to multiple relays at the same time and you send it and receive messages to all the relays at once and therefore you get all these nice properties such as um not one relay can censor you um if you're and if you're a high profile person let's say you're like alex jones you maybe have like info wars relay and then like what are they what

can you do they'd have to shut that down but um if you're you have a client you can just connect to that relay and then and and that's that's what it should be like you should be able to it's kind of like you know that's how the internet should be you can run your own stuff and no one can tell you what to do it's kind of the original ideas of the internet right so yeah in terms of spinning up these relays what what does that look like how hard would it be for a motivated individual to do that um so i used it's the currently the fastest relay it's called nostra rs relay so if you download if you know how to compile like rust code which is like cargo makes it so easy to compile rust codes you can just like download this thing type cargo cargo compile or whatever

cargo build release and just run it it's it's a small sql sqlite database you don't it has very minimal dependencies it's easier than running like a bitcoin node really i mean that's arguably that's anyway i won't get into that but it's very easy to run node very like low on the the resources so yeah and i saw you interacting with wiz last night to get a server up on on his isp yeah that was cool because i guess he's running a lot of like bare metal servers with like tons of uh you know they're beefy servers and i'm like well we need more of those right now because i heard relay set. So when you first connect to, when you first use Domus iOS, for instance, it'll just use the Domus relay. Cause I did that kind of as like a nice thing to do. Cause I realized

if there's a lot of people going to join the Domus iOS, I don't want to just like add a bunch of bootstrap relays and like kill everyone's relays at once. So users have the choice to add additional relays afterwards, but you know, the default set, I'm like, it would be nice to have more bootstrap relays in that default set. So, but I would want someone who could actually run like serious infrastructure. So Wiz was one of those people who offered to do that. And that's really cool so he's running one now and it's the default relay i just pushed out a version of domicile west that adds his adds his server so hell yeah which is kind of cool because like i don't i i don't know i don't control that right so he has the choice to so if i start censoring

people on my relay then it doesn't matter because it's the by default the client is still using his relay which i don't even know i don't control so yeah truly distributed message sharing over web sockets and so how would you describe the current state of nostra and apps like damas because i've been using damas off and on over the last few months and i mean obviously everybody's going to compare it to their everyday social media interactions with twitter facebook instagram whatever it may be it's obvious i mean i think you would admit it's not we're nowhere close but it has made serious leaps and bounds over the last six months since we last spoke so what has the pace of growth been what is the current state and how quickly

especially with this new funding from jack's grant do you think you guys can grow to begin competing with these services um yeah so like one thing to keep in mind is that everyone in the nostril community right now is like not getting paid to do this we're all kind of just doing this for fun in our spare time and like on the weekends just because we think it's like this cool fun project it's kind of like the old irc days it's kind of it's very nostalgic because it feels like you know back in the early internet days when you can just join these small communities and we're just trying to do something cool and it's like we don't really care we're not trying to be commercial we're not trying to be you know start this in a huge like money-making business

we're just trying to build uh you know we're trying to free speech again on the internet which is like so it's it's more of a ideological drive for us right now um which means like in some sense the client's client development's been really slow um like you know even domus ios i haven't I haven't been updating as much because I've been working on the Android client. So I think I personally have been kind of lazy on the iOS side. So ever since this started going down a couple days ago, I realized, okay, this is getting kind of more serious and I need to put more effort into it. And so this funding is going to help a lot.

And I think I've already gotten not even the funding itself is really good. But I think the most importantly is that Jack just bringing attention to the project and getting it into people's consciousness. I've been already getting a lot of help from the, you know, PRs and stuff. Some people have already redesigned the Adamas iOS app within the last day. I'm like, so it's been really helpful overall, just getting it into the public exposure. But the funding going forward is going to be really helpful as well to

incentivize it some more. So we can talk about that. Yeah. Again, 1.417, some odd billion sats, I believe it was like $250,000. Yeah. Grants at the time when the Bitcoin was sent. and so you guys have set up you have tiers you guys had a live document for a while i hopped in there got very busy yeah i guess you and fiat jeff said all right we'll we'll make this clear you can still go to the doc but it's um read only and you guys have set up different bounties uh

and competitions to distribute the sets that that you've been granted what is this looking like yeah so this document was something um i think relay or fiat jeff i called him relay i don't I don't know why I called him a relay. Fiat Jeff set this up by himself, I think. I don't know if he collaborated with anyone to, like, come up with that. But it was just kind of like, here's a rough outline of what we could potentially do. But after that, there's been, like, okay, you know, is there a better way to do it? Should we have submissions and proposals and then people vote on it and then distribute funds that way?

And I think Fiat Jeff was just kind of getting overwhelmed because he's not, like, doesn't spend all of his time in the Nostra space. So, he does – so, like, he just was getting stressed. So he messaged me. He's like, OK, well, this is bad for my mental health. So I'm going to send you half the funds and then you can we can kind of like operate independently. But I still think we're we're going to operate together. It's not like we're completely separate funds. You know, I've been talking. I got all the devs together, all the core devs to kind of like brainstorm a lot of different ideas. And how can we improve the proposal and the document that Fiat Jeff put out? Um, and so Fiat Jaffa is giving kind of me a lot more power to make, uh, alternate funding

decisions that are like separate from that document. So, and that's something we're still trying to figure out right now. But I do have something I had to announce on this podcast and I, that I've, this is something that all the core devs agreed upon and, um, I don't know if I want to do it now, but I guess I can get into it right now. So, uh, as the first act of funding, at least on our side of things, at least my side of funds is that um we're going to be rewarding all of the all the devs who have made a substantial impact on on the ecosystem so far that have been just working tirelessly without pay and that kind

of keep um things alive so we're going to do a thank you fund for those for those devs i think there's about 10 of them um about 5 million sats each and uh fiat jeff doesn't know this but we're gonna for my fund i'm gonna we're gonna give him one bitcoin just for um oh shit just from starting this whole thing and i'm just getting it going because like without him this all this wouldn't be here right so uh i think it's like it's important that we do that just to recognize like without him that we wouldn't have this today so we're gonna that's gonna go out with the initial thank you fund so yeah it seems like you're getting a little emotional right now well it is like if you have jeff he's like i don't even know him as far as i know he's like

a kid from brazil i don't know much about him um he's very humble he's like very he he never asked for money he doesn't want any money like even when i suggested to give him like five million that was like he's like that's too much um so i think it's really important that we recognize that you know he deserves it like it's it's really all his idea so we really want to show that you know people within the in this space who are doing good work and really want to push this forward that um that they should be rewarded for that so yeah i mean i would agree it's incredible i mean again like the first time you came on you guys started messing or it became nostra became something in my mind like about a year ago and it was just some

like i think fiat joff tweeted out like hey we can do an alternative twitter twitter client using this more distributed relay system we're calling nostra i thought that was really cool but at that point it seemed like just like a pet project proof of concept and to see how much progress has been made in only a year, knowing how much he's dedicated his time and work to Nostra. I mean, shout out to you guys. And he really cares about making it decentralized. So he has been really critical of some of my decisions, because I've been focusing on user experience. So I could have been doing a lot more stuff with decentralization. There's one big issue with the network right now, where if you want to give

give someone your pub key it doesn't have any information about which relays they are on so right now a lot of people just been assuming the domus relay as like a shelling point where everyone could just go there to to find people and find messages but we're in reality we need a better pub key format that has a relay to make it more decentralized so he's been focusing on that he like he's been trying to push me to implement that so i'm going to work i'm going to be working on that next so it's really important that so i'm glad that he's focusing on like making sure that the network is as decentralized as possible and that and that's So I really appreciate those types of specs

that he's been working on. Are you guys able to tell on your end how most people are interacting with Nostra, whether it be desktop, Noble, Domus, other apps? So the only hints I get from on the Relay side is I... So whenever you send a query, there's an ID associated with it. It should be...

Like, it's best practice that you just make that sure that that is random so you don't really have an idea, but there's certain clients that do certain things. so you can kind of see which users are using which client but there's no at least if you're like the relay operator so most other people don't see that and so some people have been starting to put like client tags or like user agents within messages I don't really like that because I don't feel like you need to give away that information to people because like that there's now public public information on the network because I don't know maybe they know

that you're using some particular client that's vulnerable and they can target you so I try not to include any client metadata in in any posts and at least in my clients yeah and the reason i ask is getting back to like the ux and the future of nostra and these clients that get built on top of it like what is what does that look like like when we're thinking about if people are using twitter um maybe they're not happy with the direction it's going and they want alternatives more distributed more robust more censorship resistant alternatives and they say hey i want to begin in sending messages via this nostra messaging protocol um what does that look like for them in your mind well i think what we're going to see is that and we're already

starting to see this on the network where um the client competition is actually insanely important um for instance when i added that bolt 11 feature um every all the users on the other clients are like well i want that feature and now now like uh uh monlo i forget his name but he's like the ash our uh astral ninja maintainer now now he's starting to implement that bolt 11 feature because of users complaining about it that it's in thomas ios so i think this like competition between clients is going to like make the best clients and it's going to make the best uh social media clients, like way better than Twitter, just because Twitter doesn't have that competitive pressure. So that's one thing that I was thinking of, which is really fascinating.

And also on the relay side, we're going to see like, okay, oh, why is my client so slow? Why is it you're going to see relays start to implement, you know, start to compete for that as well? Because that's still an open question of like, why would you want lots of users on your relay? They're like, what's incentivizing that? I get that question asked a lot, but for now, it's mostly just obvious, but we'll see going into the future. What's the, why would you want run relay but yeah let's dive into the bolt 11 invoicing because it is really cool you essentially just post or excuse me paste uh a bolt 11 invoice in and you've created something within domus that populates this widget it has a pay button you pay and you can pay directly from

from the app or you have to go into another wallet yeah so i just want to do something really simple before i have full um lightning integration so in the future i do want to have the ability to connect to a Lightning Wallet inside the app. And I have lots of ways to think about doing that so that you can actually just click like, like, and it'll send a, you know, Lightning Tip instantly. But I figured in the meantime a really cool feature would just be, well, hey, wouldn't it be

cool if we, if a user pasted a Bolt 11 string, it just parsed it into a little widget that you click pay. It's just it seems like a simple thing, but people love it. Like people, people message me like, this is the coolest feature ever, which is which is weird because it's like, it's the same content as just like copying a Bolt 11

and pasting it into your wallet. But there's something about that, just like the big pay button, you just click it. So whenever it pops up in the network, I always just try to pay them instantly. And it's really funny. You just click the button and pay it. So yeah, users love it.

So I want to expand that further. So right now it's only Bolt 11, but there's no reason why you couldn't do that with LNU roles and things like that. And then in terms of privacy, I mean, obviously a lot of individuals who are using this feature right now on Domus are posting it publicly,

But hypothetically, theoretically, not hypothetically, theoretically, if you did really have to invoice somebody, an individual or a company on the other end of a business transaction and you use Domus to do a peer-to-peer message, it's significantly more private or privacy-preserving than sending it over text message or email, correct? Yeah, so, you know, it's not peer-to-peer in the sense that, you know, so I do this with my friends. So I have a friend here, Leo, in Vancouver, and he always makes me buy stuff with Fiat, and then he sends me the Bitcoin afterwards. So now what I do is we send the Bolt11 invoices over encrypted DMs. So that's been awesome, just having that as a use case.

But it's not completely peer-to-peer, so those messages are still on the relay. So this is a big issue, and this is something that is always brought up in the space of DMs on Nostra, is that every note type currently is all public. So if you want to see who's DMing who, you can see it. You just can't see the content, but you can see who's DMing who, and that's not good.

So we're actually introducing a new authentication spec so that only the people involved in the DM conversations can pull those notes. And I think that's pretty important. So the relay operators can still see the metadata, but we don't want the entire public seeing that metadata. So that's going to be important going forward. Yeah, they can see the metadata,

but it's unencrypted, so they can't see the actual message. don't know that it's a Bitcoin invoice. And it's not as good a signal because we don't have forward secrecy. So if either of those parties leaked their private key, anyone could read all those conversations. And considering how lax people are with private key security right now and all the vulnerabilities we've started to see in the past few days, it's still not, I don't think is a great signal replacement. So I do want to see, and this could potentially be a part of the fun is, can we make a better DM spec? Because the DM spec was just kind of thrown together and it was kind of like, it's not the most secure.

so like can we do better i would love to see a signal like protocol uh spec on top of nostra that'd be awesome it would be yeah now talking about private key management there was a video going around twitter over the weekend uh body cam footage of some police that pulled some dude over and they pulled out a 24-word seed phrase and the one cop was asking it's like what the hell is this and the other guy was like oh that's some crypto so uh if the cops didn't sweep the funds right after pulling that guy over their body cam footage just leaked the private key to the whole internet oh yeah wow better private key management yeah make sure you have a you know a uh what is it 39 passphrase just like me so if anyone sees your you know backed up seed phrase

that i can't just swipe it instantly so yeah that's i mean it's a bit tangential but the whole concept of teaching a generation of people or generations moving forward, how to secure private public key pairs is just the UX hurdle that has not been solved perfectly yet. Yeah. So we've been thinking about a lot on the Nostra side. So we have a few solutions, which have yet to be implemented really in all the clients. So one is called delegation. So delegation is really cool because it really, it solves the problem of, let's say you have your private key, but you also want to use other clients, you don't necessarily trust those clients and and they might not even be like web clients or they

could be like kind of any like a robot or like maybe even like one of those cross posters so how do you like let a cross poster post on your behalf without giving them your the private key so we actually have a we actually have a solution that's working now on the network and actually minds.com actually uses it um so the way that it works is that you sign this little uh it's called the delegation and it gives some other party some other private key permission to post on your behalf subject to some conditions. So you'll say, hey, you can only post text messages and you can only post for the next week. But every time you publish a note with that private key, when other clients query my key, it'll actually return those as well. So it didn't require any client updates, which is

kind of nice. And it just works. So I've been testing it and I've been posting on minds.com with my user. And now it shows up in Domus, which is we're already starting to see a big cross-compatible interoperability between large platforms now which is really cool yeah so trying to think of how that delegation works in my head um it's kind of just like a token that you sign it's like hey it gives you permission that person permission to to create events on your behalf so you can even show this in the client it says oh this person has posted on behalf of this person okay and so like if you're on minds.com you post on damas and you just you have your minds.com profile or your account there you do

this delegation and they could just pull it from damas post it but it's still coming from you it's not coming from them right or the delegation or so the way that it works is um so on minds.com if you go into the settings area you'll see like um it's like uh this little delegation section and it'll give you a string that you can sign so you can take your private key you don't even have to expose your private key to minds sign that delegation now minds runs their own relay and i don't know if people know this yet because it's because it's kind of alpha it's not really the most robust relay but if you connect to the relay you can see every message from every minds user and it's kind of crazy because and i need to add a feature in domus ios to like filter that

from the global timeline because it's just like a fire hose because they're they're pretty popular network but what this means is that you can like you can follow zoobie you can follow all these people on mines in in domus um and so the way that it works is you know that that account that i have delegation set up with um it's a different private key but it can send messages and it'll show up on the mines relay and if you're connected to the mines relay on the domus client you'll see those messages and it looks like it's actually from my root key um which is kind of cool so it anyway so it's like one of these features that it's going to make a lot make it a lot more secure and it'll make it a lot user-friendly

without having to put your private key in everywhere, which is really bad. I eventually imagine your private key will be on your hardware wallets and they'll just sign delegations and you'll never have to expose it. Yeah. Now, my memory is being jogged.

The Mines.com Nostra integration was something. I'm pretty sure we touched on it on air last time we were on. It might have been off air, but this is a pretty big sign of validation for what you guys are building at Nostra. I mean, Minds is a – I mean, it's not the biggest social network, but it's a pretty well-established one.

Yeah, I mean, Bill is really cool. Like, Bill is the CEO. Like, he's been on, like, Joe Rogan. Like, he's – I think he's pretty well-known in the space of just, like, trying to make a decentralized social network, and he actually really cares. Like, he tried to integrate with ActivityPub, and he realized – and he ran into the same issues that I did when I tried to do that. It's just – it's insanely complicated, and it's just horrible.

But when we had a bunch of meetings with their dev teams, and they're like, this is so easy to integrate with. And I truly believe that Twitter could implement a Nostra relay if they wanted to. It's just that easy to integrate with. Yeah. I mean, Mines is proving it. I did want to get back to a little bit more on the funding in terms of things. Yeah, that's where I was just about to turn back to.

I mean, you mentioned DMs, making those more private. What else? Yeah, so there's some really important things that we need right now, I think. So one is scaling. So I think we should be looking into like a fund for people who want to help improve the scaling aspects of the network

because I think we're almost at the limit again where if we have any more, if we have like 10,000 more users, it might, everything might die. So we're going to need A, like caching relays. So a caching relay would be, if I send a query to the relay, Maybe it doesn't actually have to do the query.

It just saved a previous result and return it. So this would be really useful. That doesn't exist. And if someone wants to build that, that would totally be in the scope of the fund. Also performance improvement patches for Nostra RS Relay. More patches to the Postgres implementation. So Nostra TS Relay.

So anything like those types of contributions, we're looking at that right now. It's really important. Two, I think we need security bounties for cross-site exploits and vulnerabilities. Like right now, DomusWeb is offline because someone found another vulnerability and they just did it

and they just were swiping private keys. And maybe if they knew that there's actually a fund that could be rewarding them instead of them just like causing havoc, then they wouldn't just be causing havoc and they could actually be rewarded for finding these vulnerabilities. So I think that's a big one too.

So those are the two ones I'm thinking about right now. And I think that would totally be in line with at least my side of the fund, what I would be happy to reward people with. Scalability, cross-client security. How does that private key scraping, how did that particular attack work? Yeah. So people are pretty lax with their private keys right now. So Domus Web, for instance, I might even just remove this from Domus Web. So if you log in,

you could actually just paste in a private key and it gets stored in local storage. But due to the way that the network works, someone could put some JavaScript in their profile in a cleverly crafted way. And then when Domus Web tries to render that in the browser, it might actually execute some JavaScript and like, let's say, send your local storage to, you know, their server and swipe key. So this has actually happened already on Enigma IO. And I hope Enigma is not running still because, so super test net, if Enigma is still running, we should take this stuff down. I don't think any of the web clients right now are still running. Like we should be, they should be down. Anyway. So yeah, web clients are, the web sucks.

And, and you know, Nostra is particularly vulnerable to these types of attacks because no one's really focusing on improving the security. So yeah, Domus iOS is fine. So if you, it's really just the web client. So no one should be using any web clients right now until we fix this. Domus iOS is okay because the private key lives on your device and somebody would have to

physically get that. And it's not a web, it's not a web thing, right? So these attacks only apply to like web apps that can like run JavaScript and stuff. So Domus iOS doesn't do that. So it's not vulnerable. I'm trying to think ahead and like, again, I'm an idiot just thinking through this. Like, is there, do you see a future in which

you could have like a dedicated hardware device where maybe you just sign the private key once a month say hey this is my account I'm going to post from it or something like that just to keep the private key out of the browser exactly so this would

again this is something I want to add to Domus WebDAO we can just use this delegation feature and then maybe you have a seed signer and so another project would be cool is like a seed signer nostril integration we'd totally fund that that's awesome Yeah. And I'm thinking, would it be possible to run relays from like a, like a start nine

embassy? Absolutely. Yeah. Number L or something like that. I think it's a good idea for personal backups. Like I, so I run the Domus relay, but I also run my own personal relay for my own personal backups. Like it's not that I don't trust myself running, but like, it's just nice to have a local backup

of stuff on your own home or your home network and that you can actually send private events to like, you know, payment notifications and stuff. So I think it's nice to have just for your own personal backup of your posts. Yeah, yeah. And then in terms of the fund and other stuff, what type of UX improvements would you be looking for? Yeah, it gets weird because I have a conflict of interest because anyone who's helping my project, I would love to award them,

but I'm also running a fund. So I'm hoping Fiat Jaf maybe would want to help fund if people are contributing to Domus. but he's ultimately he's in the decision to like he's controlling his fund he can find people the way he wants um i still think it'd be good that we all get together and like think about the most efficient way to apply these funds so we're not like completely opposed to each other or anything um but i i yeah it was good that we we split it just because you know it was a lot to bear just for that one person but we're still mostly working together so yeah no i know it's another

cool part of uh fiat joff's fun disbursement um document or whatever was seen to sort of just incentivize people to build cool things and then maybe once a month have um a bounty paid out to somebody that the community deems built the coolest coolest thing that month that was the one suggestion i made to fiat joff to like that was like my feedback before he wrote his document so i'm glad that he added that that's something i was always i love i mean i'm that's my personal personal bias. I love when people build cool, exciting things so that it gets more people into the, into the system. So if, if, if one client author or some, someone contributing to one of the clients just build something really cool, I'm like that I would want to implement. I'm like,

that's one example of something that, you know, we should totally reward those people for being creative, thinking creatively, getting people more, getting more and more people into the system, making, getting them excited, building cool stuff. Like that's what we want to reward people for. And I, and there's one more thing I want to mention, which was, I also think it's really important that we reward some of the people that are have been that are sticking around the space like i it's good to have people pop in and do one thing but also people who like have been around and contributing stuff for a long time i think it's important that those people are rewarded as well just to you know um yeah so there's lots of lots of different ways of doing it but uh those are the

top ones that i'm thinking about yeah no and in that particular section again i think it helped me get a better understanding of how nashra the different moving parts of the ecosystem built on top of it work like you you'd want like a particular app for notifications one for better for messaging like it just seems very modular yeah so like one one guy he's uh he just joined recently he's an ios developer and he started to build his own ios client i'm like that's that's great i'm like it's good to have more ios clients i'm like bastard he's trying to compete with me but in reality he realized that he's actually he was just decided to focus on one specific thing which is make a really good direct message client.

And like, that's one example where it's like, you don't have to build these monolithic clients that do everything like channels and Twitter and like DMs. Like if you want to just focus on one, that one user experience, like a signal like DM app, like that's really cool, right? So we should definitely be funding that as well. So, yeah.

So. Yeah, and I guess the other thing is just the past few days, you know, I'm just really used to like, you know, lone wolf programmer and just like i'm trying to do everything myself but it's actually been insanely helpful just the amount of people who have just been submitting patches making domus look better and the fact that like scuzzy bug is basically working for free making sure that my relay doesn't explode and he's just like he's not getting paid to do that and just seeing all the people come in and help out um you that's it's just it just shows how cool this

community is like this really true open source community that we're all just trying to build something cool and seeing everyone help out is just amazing so i just wanted to mention that Yeah, no, it's awesome. I mean, what does it feel like? I know you're probably a combination of stress and excitement the last few days, but I think, again, going back to our first conversation, just to reiterate, and you've mentioned it in passing in this conversation, but like, why are you building Nasher? Why are you building Damas? Why should other people come and contribute to this? I think that for me, you know, growing, and I mentioned this before, I think, but just growing up on the internet in the early days and, and having that feeling of like, you know, it's not controlled by any corporate interests. It's just, it's just real people and like nerds and like, and people have like everyone, right.

Just, just communicating with each other online, like as it should be. It's, there's something about that. There's something really nostalgic about that. And it just, that's what I, I just wish we would see more of that in the world. and just working on it is more just more people should experience that because it's there's something really true and real about it versus just what we are exposed to just getting ads jammed down our throat and all this stuff so yeah it's very ideological for me because i just because i think it's really cool um but yeah obviously i do want maybe look well i want to make this into a

business maybe make it easier for businesses to get on nostril and things like that so i've been definitely considering that um i'm looking to talk to jeff booth because jeff booth this message me and like potentially do some type of ego desk um set up so i definitely won't think about getting some vc funding to to build this out even bigger um so we'll see yeah i mean put my 1031 hat on again oh sorry you got your own no it's definitely i mean i told you earlier this year it's definitely something we explore as well but going back to your point of like the nostalgia i agree it's definitely nostalgic but i'm actually it's funny you put it that way because i'm writing a newsletter right now that'll go out later today, which I think like the future of the

internet is a return to the past, the nostalgic past that you just described. And I think what we found over the last decade particularly is just it wasn't as easy to build that more distributed web topology maybe between 2000 and 2015. I think it's become considerably easier over the last five to seven years and more particularly the last few years, with certainly Bitcoin highlighting to people the importance of these distributed systems. But no, I do think we're going to return to the original version of the web or vision of the web, which is individuals creating and distributing content and that content being distributed in a more decentralized fashion. And the example I'm using is,

I think everybody producing a website or a newsletter articles should move away from the Substack model and should own and host their own Ghost and inject it with BTC Pay Server. And the tools to enable this more pure web experience have never been better than they are today. yeah i think there was like this great centralization on the internet between 2000 and like even till today really and but i think uh bitcoin was like the first thing that kind of broke people's like they're under some type of spell like this is all so great there's all these nice products and it's nice ux and then then we're starting to see the cracks and all that right we start to see the flaws and like how much power these companies have over censoring speech and can like and and really just in some sense mind controlling us because they can control how we

think they can control you know what products we should ingest so there's something just like really like corrupting and evil in like really in a true way about what has happened to the internet and even like when you go on google these days and the results you get are just complete bs and just completely paid for and nothing's real it doesn't seem like so i feel like bitcoin in some sense broke that spell it showed that like hey protocols are important again and we can't escape this like spell that we're under um and so i think we're slowly getting back to what the internet's true vision um yeah and it's just easier than ever like it's easy to spin up a ghost site yes out of the box you host using ghost's hosting provider but if you have a competent developer

who can spin up your own server or find a partner that does cloud services that you trust you can easily port that over you get all the benefits of the publisher ui they've built and the distribution channels they've built and and host to yourself and then with bitcoin you can monetize it directly with bitcoin um in a peer-to-peer fashion on top of that and it was just so much easier to spin up a facebook page or a twitter account or an instagram whatever it may be to get your message out there um it was much harder to to build your own site and self-host it actually control your content everybody allocated it to these behemoth tech companies for better part of 15 years now and it seems like and it seems like the trend's being forced too

i mean with the the tweet from twitter support over the weekend that has since been deleted i mean who knows what's going on there now that elon's taken over it's been a bit volatile in terms of messaging and positioning in the public but uh regardless of what the intentions are or what ends up happening i think it's certainly driven home to people like hey these are very centralized and very controlled uh companies that we probably shouldn't be building our brands building our companies building our connections on yeah they're becoming more and more of a liability and um and it's it's really i think it's really important that we're building out these alternate solutions and just making it easier. So one thing I really like about Nostra is that you don't have

to run any server to interact with it. But it still gives you decentralization. So when people think about not having to run a server, like, okay, well, whose server are you running? Are you really in control? Is it really that decentralized? So it's really cool that we can actually maintain a lot of these decentralized aspects without having to have the burden of running your own server so like so maybe you can find a developer to like you know set that up but a lot of people don't have access to that right and there might you might be just some person in the middle of nowhere who doesn't have a lot of money and did they want to you want to put your message out and want to start a website or start a blog so i could totally see um people using

for blogging and things like that that's not really been explored yet um and just it would be as easy as starting a client and sending a message you wouldn't have to set up anything so yeah that's exciting things are exciting again it's uh it's that old adage like uh like innovation comes when it's not the old adage i'm just ad-libbing right now but like innovation gets forced when people get backed into a corner and oh yeah people are getting backed into many corners right now yeah i i kind of suspected this would happen eventually there's a there's come to a point it's like how badly do they want to abuse their power just to the point where you're going to push us to the state like yes i'm willing to you know

spend countless nights sleepless nights like getting all this stuff working just because i don't want you to have that much power to like have to have that much control over me like there's something so you know there's something something so uh it makes me so angry when people abuse their power over me i'm like you know what i'm a software engineer i can like you say fuck you and build a different solution and the the hardest part at that point is not the technology just getting enough people to like see past the warts of the ux and get on board with this new system and escape the old system and so i find that's gonna have been the biggest challenge of any of this really yeah and going back to your your point that it really could be like i'm like

these particularly social media companies can be a form of mind control or at the very least if uh mind control as a term drives negative connotations in your mind at the very least like propaganda mechanisms it's being i mean we're coming to find that again with the twitter files they were working very closely with the fbi and had ex-fbi cia agents working in their holes and then when that news broke people were like all right how many uh agents does facebook have and they have hundreds of fbi and cia agents and that's another thing i've been trying to get out there more recently is these three-letter intelligence agencies are not really here to help you they're here to control you um and others around the world and just with those facts

of mind of how close they were to these social media platforms particularly close to the policy around who can and cannot say things uh they're definitely trying to to craft a particular narrative or maybe not even craft a narrative only let certain narratives get out there and really stamp out open discourse yeah you know there's always this there's always a suspicion that stuff like this was happening behind the scenes but just seeing it all play out that oh wait yeah okay it's actually happening what everyone the way that everyone thought it was happening and so there's they're just there seems to be more accountability like who is watching like who are these agents and how are they getting away with this shit like um there's just huge

accountability issues in that in that agency and they need to figure that shit out because it's just this should not be happening um so having more public networks and more open networks i think maybe it'll help with this and um going along what you're saying with uh you know i think this has been affecting this uh lack of diversity of thought on the internet just because you know if there's so many um there's a survivorship bias on on twitter which like you know just from what you see it's like oh this seems normal this seems this is what everyone thinks but reality everyone who doesn't think that way have been like banned from the platform so you don't really have an idea of what is actually what is reality because it's been crafted for you just through the survivorship

bias so i think that's a has been a huge issue just on the culture in general like this moderation and censorship because it just it gives you a warped version of reality yeah i mean you literally had this san francisco fbi precinct emailing twitter hi twitter folks here's who we want you to ban today it's like it's bizarre it's creepy it's creepy yeah we're at this weird inflection point i was talking about the sovereign individual the book with um somebody in the space last week and that was uh everybody in bitcoin focuses on the fact that they they were very presciently predicted bitcoin or be the cyber money protected by cryptography that would escape but the other two-thirds of the book or the other two most important topics were the emergence of ai and

information distillation in the digital age it's going to be the signal to noise ratio is going to be as distorted as ever and the individual is going to need to equip themselves with tools that allow them to filter information more granularly like facebook twitter they're filtering it for you this is what something like nashra and damas gives you the ability to do is to create your own filtering mechanisms to to get the information that you want or that you deem to be valuable in your life yeah it's scary to see what would happen if you were to apply a very powerful ai like chat gbt to changing discourse and changing people's opinion i'm sure it's already even happened it's already happening um so just not having one like party in control of that one

information stream is pretty important so i can totally see there's going to be like a lot of small communities pop up around you know maybe more this isn't happening right now all the relays are public and everyone kind of sees everyone's messages if you're connected the same relays but you can totally see like smaller relays with just small communities that only you have to be whitelisted to get into them um so there's there's a lot of different use cases as well but yeah this whole idea of a global consensus view on reality it's probably just not not true no in the last three years have proven that probably isn't the best idea to just go along with the consensus view of reality you'll end up without your business um with some

some forced bodily injections and yeah um and believing that that inflation is transitory and get like a fauci tattoo or something whatever what is going on uh how are things up in canada uh they're pretty chill they're very cold right now um so it's been i haven't gone outside but mostly inside coding so that's good um but in terms of freedom um things has pretty much died down like definitely can actually go to restaurants again which is nice it's like but it's still like it's still uh not a free country in any in any means but it seems like alberta's making moves to try to assert themselves as an autonomous province that is going to say hey trudeau we're uh we're gonna do our own thing over here yeah alberta's

always been kind of one of those provinces that uh just kind of like fuck you to everyone else and yeah they're much more conservative and yeah much cooler than a lot of parts of countries well awesome I don't want to take up too much of your time I'm sure you're busy looking at the servers and

dealing I restarted it during this conversation because it started catching fire but otherwise it's been okay oh yeah well I'm excited for you this has been a cool I'm sure it's been a cool surreal week for you but

time will pass this will come and go shit needs to get built out and it seems like you guys are motivated getting more organized than ever to actually bring your vision to fruition which is really cool to see uh i'm just i'm glad that people are excited i'm glad that people are starting to see like the importance of these protocols you know i don't know if this will be like the protocol that wins i think it's currently in the lead just because it's i think it's the best um and i've tried a lot of the other ones i'm a protocol nerd and i think it's coolest and we got some some big integration to the big uh companies and so i think it's winning um we just need to make it build it out make it better um so yeah so anyone who wants to try it

out like again we were please beware that's still very early like a lot of the software is kind of crappy and we're trying to build it out so any feedback we can get is is always great so um so And if you're willing and able, competent and prepared, do some code review, make a PR, help building. It's an open project. Yeah, we'll give you SATs, so help us out. All right, well, JB55, it's always a pleasure. Again, just want to reiterate, extremely excited for you. I think the work that you, Fiat Joff, and everybody else contributing to Nostra is doing is extremely important.

And especially considering everything going on in the world right now on the internet and I'm, I'm pulling for you guys using it, having fun and that's the most thing it's fun. Most important thing. It is fun. Just trying to keep it fun. If you want to have fun,

come join, come join Nostra. We're having fun over here, but it's been a great conversation. It's always fun coming on here. So thanks. Well, enjoy the rest of your probably chaotic day.

And hopefully we can do another update at some point. 2023 we have a lot of cool things to talk about them for sure all right and so we got today peace and love freaks