TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #573: A Free World Needs Private Money with Calle

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

Marty sits down with Calle to discuss Cashu. Cashu: https://cashu.space/ Calle on Nostr: https://primal.net/calle 0:00 - Intro 0:36 - Programming is art 5:36 - Zooming out on the struggle for freedom 10:23 - Dealing with the pace of change 14:20 - Unchained & Fold 16:13 - Financial privacy 20:43 - Chaumian ecash history 33:34 - Zaprite & SOTE 35:06 - Ecash on bitcoin 42:55 - Hash pools 48:45 - Interoperable systems 52:11 - We need more privacy and more devs 55:24 - Narrative and communication 1:00:45 - Magic stuff that just works 1:10:19 - Nostr as a gateway to bitcoin 1:17:21 - Wrap up Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Fold https://foldapp.com/marty Zaprite https://zaprite.com/tftc Salt of the Earth https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

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. Probably should be.

Probably should be. Callie, this is a long time coming. I was looking forward to this. Thanks for having me, man. I was too. I wanted to do it in person. I'm happy that we're in person in this beautiful, beautiful place. Yeah?

The vibes have been high here. You showed us some skills last night. We won't dox too much. but you've got some good gaming skills. Let's say I won. You did win. I've been thinking a lot how to start this conversation. Obviously, we'll talk about Cashew, eCash, Bitcoin, Noster.

But really, what has impressed me the most ever, after having gotten to know you probably over the course of, we probably met over video call this time last year, and have met in person a couple of times since then. But it sounds like you're an artist in the cypherpunk world. You use Cashew, Bitcoin, Nostr as a canvas to really bring your art to the world, which you think can make the world a better place. Is this how you view this?

Is this the vibe that you get off and that I get from you every time I meet you? Yeah, first of all, I'll take that as a compliment. I think of programming as an art form, yeah, for sure. So the way I think about it is that an artist needs to do art because it's their most direct way to translate their thoughts into physical reality. So an artist would have an image in their mind, or a poet will have language in their mind,

and the way they can translate that into the world is by writing or by painting. so my mind is a computational mind i think of algorithms and software and when i take a shower that's the problems that keep reverberating in my mind and i feel the urge to realize those thoughts into the world and the way to do that is through programming but that's i think that's just a personal perspective of it obviously programming has way more implications on the world it can change the world such as any form of art can do it can have an impression on people consuming it and inspire others to do the same and another thing that i think that programming writing

software being in bitcoin um has in common with art is that it's a skillful it's a skill and you can get better at it you can master these skills you can study it you can devote your time and energy into getting better at those things and yeah i think most programmers don't think of it the way I do, which is unfortunate. I think it would give them more creative energy, more purpose in what they're doing. But I know that many do. So there is beauty in code

and there is beauty in technology. We just have to know how to look for it. And maybe to end on that is the perception of beauty is something that needs training. So let's say you're looking at an abstract piece of art that looks like complete garbage to many people, which is just a mess of, a chaotic mess of colors, for example.

A painter who has spent his life on abstract painting will see something very different from the uninitiated mind. mind and i think that's also true with code so reading djbs dan bernstein's code for example is like one of the godfathers of elliptic curve cryptography looking at his code versus just random code anyone in the business sees a big difference between the code of a true master versus the code of a person who isn't there yet. So I think, yeah, there are many similarities and it makes sense because we're all the same

and I think the creative energy that leads to this output comes from the same source. It's some kind of a deeper human desire to manifest your own work, your own ideas and energy in the world. And some people choose one way and others choose another. Yeah, ultimately the art affects the world in a positive way and has a net positive effect on what happens in reality and how people actually live their lives, the quality of their lives,

the quality of the reality that they live in. And I think where it stands today and why we're both here focused on Bitcoin, you're heavily focused on e-cash now, both interested in Noster. It's because we recognize that the world really needs better tools, more beautiful tools that really enable people and give them a better quality of life and give them a better starting place in this world, which seems to be at a fork in the road, where you get the dystopian surveillance state, CBDC, social credit score, which are all built on centralized systems that are tightly controlled either by governments or private corporations like Palantir, or you get the open source, open protocols that anybody can access, anybody can opt into, opt out of, just as importantly, where the playing field is level and everybody has a fair shot.

You know what you're operating in. And I think, what did Hal Finney say about the Internet? It could be a tool for good or for bad. Yeah, he said the computer can be used as a tool to liberate and protect people and not to control them. And I think what you're saying is completely right. And I invite everyone to zoom out on that problem a lot more than we tend to do we look at these things in from the lens of someone living on a

human scale so we think of the last 10 years and we think of the next 10 years but humans are at least hundreds of thousands of years old homo sapiens right so we're still just a blip in terms of the age of our planet and we have way to go and the technological revolution that we're experiencing right now have been experiencing in the last let's say 100 years is just the beginning of a new era i think everyone agrees on that so what we set out to do now will have a way bigger impact than you can imagine today it is you know we have to express these problems in terms of, let's say, Palantir and X and the NSA and financial surveillance and so on.

These problems are very understandable in the timescale of what we experience right now, but we will continue to exist for thousands of years to come. And so the question is not only is it an ethical company versus an unethical one, or is it a open source community versus a closed source product? I think, you know, zooming out, it will just starkly determine the outcome and fate of humanity, whether we will be living in a dystopian cyber dystopia or a utopia that we will have to build using these tools. it's way scarier than we can imagine because I don't know what life will look like in a hundred years but I'm pretty sure it will be very very different from now

and I'm also sure it will be much more technological and integrated to these technologies our lives will depend on these things a lot more just as an example think of prosthesis body modification the machines that we put into our bodies which we will do a hundred percent, which we're already doing with things like just glasses, for example, are already in modification of your body.

And as we integrate these things more and more into our bodies, the question is, do we control them or do they control us? And well, which path we'll take simply only depends on what we built. and, you know, an individual's decisions of what they want to do, you and me. So I'm optimistic and scared at the same time. I am as well. I'm really optimistic. I think I'm always optimistic because I truly believe in the human spirit.

But like you said, it is scarier than ever because of the technology, particularly surveillance technology, social media platforms with algorithms that know how to manipulate people's psyches, the ability to quash the human spirit has never been as easy as it is today. That's why I love hanging out with Bitcoiners, people building on Nostr and these open source protocols because you can really feel the human spirit reacting

to that all-encompassing attempt to squash freedom and liberty and the ability of the individual to have agency over their life in this digital world that is evolving. And that's one thing that I hope these technologies really enable is to unleash the human spirit in the digital world and allow it to be free. I think this is already happening. As you said, this is happening in real time right now.

I used to be a bit more pessimistic about where we are right now. As I get older, I tend to accept things a bit more and look at them from a different perspective, and I'll make this more specific. For example, you can complain about fake news, online manipulation, hatred online. Just the ugliest parts of humanity are revealed once we go online and can talk to each other.

And thinking of the 90s, early 2000s, We had a very strong expectation of that the Internet would allow us to feel closer to each other. Now, 20 years later, it feels like it's one of the most divisive forces on the planet as well. And I used to think that this is because we failed. These days, I'm coming closer to the conclusion that maybe it is actually doing exactly what it's supposed to do. and the road is a lot bumpier than I expected it to be. Maybe this is what it looks like when humanity wakes up. Maybe hatred, fake news, manipulation is just part of the equation.

And we're just trying to grapple with a new type of technology that no one has showed us before. It might just take another 50 years until we get used to it. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned earlier the fact that we've been around for a couple hundred thousand years as homo sapiens and i think that's the thing that always is is one thing i always anchor to is particularly i'm a 90s kid born in the early 90s saw a welcome into my house saw mobile phones get distributed to the market saw the emergence of social media bitcoin financial crisis and the pace of change in our lives alone uh in my life alone

it has been incredibly fast to the point which has never been experienced in human history this pace of change and as you were describing maybe we're just going through the process of learning how to take in all this data filter it and try to discern the signal from the noise and make decisions that are in our best interest at the end of the day and who knows maybe what are we 12 15 years in longer than that almost 20 years in to the social media age and maybe we're just developing the brain processing power to actually filter all this data and make correct decisions. And we've explored the design space and the edge cases of this for two decades now and are finally at a point where it's like, all right, this seems to be something that we need to course correct.

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I'm going to stress that. Go sign up now at foldapp.com slash Marty. And so I don't want to say we're getting esoteric, but I think what you're working on, I said this on the Money Matters podcast on Monday, particularly with CashU. E-cash generally as a concept is where the signal is in terms of innovation for banking in this digital age, banking on Bitcoin specifically. And instead of waxing poetic, getting esoteric, I think you do a really good job at highlighting the juxtaposition of the dystopian surveillance financial system that has emerged around us, how it works, and the potential alternative that we could opt into with a financial system built on Bitcoin, eCash, Lightning, Nostr, and all these other open source protocols. Yeah. So let's get more specific. The conversation about financial privacy is something that we're kind of just started having in the last couple of years.

I think this is one of the biggest taboo issues still in the tech space or in just general in society. We have converged in the last couple of years to a point where most people agree that private communication is important. We see it as a human right. We see it as a condition for human expression and freedom. And I think we need to achieve something similar with financial privacy as well. Right now, financial privacy is typically associated with crime and just bad people doing bad things. And this was exactly the same for private communication a couple of years ago. It was associated with the things that you wouldn't want to be associated with.

And we've got to this place by lots of people working on communication, communicating these ideas to the right people at the right place in the right time. And I think we need to go to a similar place for our financial transactions. I'll just make an example. If you buy a newspaper with your credit cards, then there are three, four companies involved in this single transaction. And they all know which terminal you used at what time with which credit card company and which phone manufacturer you used to make your tab to pay. And that phone manufacturer knows your account.

So there are so many individual companies in this single operation. They could all say no. So they can stop you from transacting. They could turn off your money at any point. But I think even the worst part of it is that they can fully track your entire life. You can try to be as private as you like with anything that you do and say. You can turn off Google Maps on your phone. You can use Signal for your communication.

But as soon as you make kind of anything in the world, which always involves a credit card these days, then you're back at zero. And we need to come to a place where everyone understands that this is not how it has to be. I think we are limited by what we can imagine. We always thought that this is just how any financial service needs to work. A financial service needs to know who you are and what you're doing and why you're doing it. But we're trying to show the world that this is not necessary with eCash. eCash is a completely different way of building financial services, banking services, streaming services, anything that kind of requires a payment.

And it respects the user's privacy. And we are building it on top of the Bitcoin system because the Bitcoin system invites innovation in contrast to the banking system, the fiat banking system that we have today. This should be possible also on the fiat banking system. It should be possible to, you know, you should not have to use your credit cards to make a simple purchase. But there is nothing, there is no alternative or no product that you could use today. with cash we're trying to build this new generation of services on top of bitcoin hopefully to see it expand to anything and everything but i think we can build a safer financial system for the individuals where their privacy is guaranteed through cryptography and not only through their

own individual choices whether they have good opsec and so on and so forth yeah i mean and go back to the beginning of the conversation like an artist creating beautiful software that makes the world a better place i mean that's that's the way i've used satoshi pushing bitcoin into the world 16 years ago now and it's funny because e-cash um the sort of idea of these blinded signature this blinded signature system that enables this digital cast system is old i'm sure if you've listened to this podcast you understand this but it's probably important for those who new to bitcoin to understand this uh chami and ecash is an idea that's at this point over 40 years old um so it launched uh in the late 80s correct yeah so the initial paper by david chom

who's the inventor of the ecash systems or blind signatures as you said is from 82 yeah and um history is super fascinating it is so david chom is this uh cryptographer he's a genius well-regarded genius across the board still alive today and he's still going strong and in 1982 he invented something called blind signatures it's basically a way to sign a contract without having to see the contract and he realized that using this primitive which we call these cryptographic primitives it's kind of like a building block on which you can build more complex things and using this primitive that you could build electronic money systems that preserve user privacy. Now, mind you, this is 82. So David Shum was so visionary that he knew that one day we will

be at a point at a place where we are right now that most of our lives will be online. Everything will be electronic. And he saw what we just discussed. He saw that payments will be the perfect way to control and track the population. So he invented an 82, a method to build these systems in a privacy-preserving way. He's very famous for his quotes where he says that without privacy, democracy is not possible. And this is very true. If you cannot have a private life, you are not able to form your own ideas, independent ideas, and push the world to a place where you want it to see in. So in 82, David Chaum invents Chaumian eCash, what we call Xiaomi and eCash today. And everyone was extremely excited about this technology.

And if you look back into the history, starting in the 90s, they had this company called DigiCash and DigiCash was marketing to the biggest financial players in the world. So you had deals with Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, JP Morgan. I think it was Visa or MasterCard, or one of the two big credit card systems, and even Microsoft. Like, I'm dropping the biggest names that I could be dropping. And all of these companies were building e-cash infrastructure in the early 90s, or at least were interested in offering banking services or financial services that allow users to use those services with a similar privacy as with physical cash,

but online, electronic cash, e-cash. and so we're still around almost 20 years before bitcoin even emerged and you know historically speaking this is the first cryptocurrency meaning it is a currency that uses cryptography to ensure security and privacy and the whole plan was to build to transition the fiat system from a from this legacy banking to an e-cash banking system where users would have their let's say jp morgan bank account you would log into your bank on your computer and then you download e-cash you can imagine it's similar to going to an atm from your bank for example you just go to your account and download e-cash and you download it to your computer and think of it

the same way as physical cash. And then as you go to a website, you would then be able to spend this e-cash, let's say for a merchant online, just to buy a t-shirt, for example, or to read an article online, or eventually also use it in form of payment cards so you can make purchases, physical purchases were offline. So there was a big consensus of that this is the technology that everyone should follow. However, it's very interesting to follow this up and to go into the reasons like why it didn't work.

None of this worked out at the end of the day, although those huge deals were on the table. Just one piece of trivia is that Microsoft offered to David Chaum's company, DigiCash, that they would include a DigiCash wallet in every Windows 98 installation by default. This was how serious everyone was taking this. So you would have a digital wallet in every Windows computer in the 90s. None of this worked out, though.

There were a couple of pilots and experiments that were successful, but it seems like David Schaum was unable to make any deals. She required too much. She changed the terms of these deals in the last minute and so forth. So lots of testimonials there, Whitefield. Eventually, none of this succeeded. And only in the late 90s, we see credit cards emerging and then PayPal entering the scene and using really Stone Age technology again to transition us to the digital world.

Basically the same ledger technology that the ancient Egyptians have invented, double entry ledger where you just add one entry here, subtract one entry there, and you're done. But with full transparency, everyone is completely trackable. Everyone is completely controllable. I can just turn off your money if I don't like you and so on. And with that, the internet grew. This was a precondition for the internet to grow. And I want to say this, this is something that I've been just recently realizing. These payment technologies that were invented in the late 90s, beginning of the 2000s were not really innovations they were really like ancient technology in a digital excel sheet duct taping it onto the internet 100 the reason why they exploded so

much is not because they're so good but because there was real real demand the internet needs payments it it it became one of the biggest places for markets and economics today this is trivial to say today but in the early 2000s this was the emerging market for example the story with paypal is ebay people realized that hey you can trade goods with other people peer-to-peer but there is no good and easy way to make the payment the other half of the transaction so paypal emerged because of ebay and ebay got super popular and then therefore paypal got popular so these technologies as they came they really took their spot because of real demand this is a great position to be in you have real market demand for new type of solution and the gatekeepers of

those days really were successful in monopolizing and taking over that that part coming back to e-cash well at that point in history everyone forgot about e-cash this was largely ignored and put to bed, basically said that the experiment died. Well, wasn't there another important detail to the eCache, to DigiCache experience, particularly, and I think Aaron Van Weerdom wrote about this in the Genesis book, is that it became quasi-permissioned and a lot of the cypherpunks working or wanting to contribute were sort of boxed out. And so this idea that DigiCache became this centralized third party in the world of eCache sort of was a detriment to its ability to flourish as well.

Yeah, this is a very good point. So that's probably like the reason number two why everything failed is it needed to be bound to the fiat system. So in order to be able to innovate anything, you needed to cross these huge gatekeeping organizations. So you would have to make a deal with a bank in order to be able to develop anything that is better than the existing thing. Imagine that today.

Like, even the slightest improvement of financial technology needs cooperation with the old guard. You need to talk to MasterCard and Visa, and maybe they'll allow you to use their network to make transactions, right? So that is, I guess, maybe historically speaking, even the more important reason is the banking system, the fiat system is fully permissioned. The entire stack is permissioned. The only non-permissioned part is physical cash. Everything else is permissioned from the central bank up to the PayPal transaction that you do to buy a T-shirt. So not everyone could just enter the game. And there were many cypherpunks around in that time.

Like all the cypherpunks in that time, their frame of reference was Charmin eCash. Everything, like when you look at the academic papers from that time, everyone's tried to just improve Charmin eCash. And even if you came up with a good idea, which there are many, many out there, there are like thousands of academic papers improving Charmin eCash, and none of them have been tried. Literally none of them have been tried really on a larger scale, except for CyberBucks, which is from DigiCash. It's like play money that they've used for a couple of years,

but nothing that really interacted with a real economical framework or system. So, all the good ideas just vanished into history and it took another 20 years or so for them to be picked up again. Now, maybe this is an interesting context also from the history of cryptocurrencies. The innovation of Satoshi is the emancipation of the constraints of Charmin eCash. As I said, Charmin eCash only worked with the cooperation of the banks. So it required access to the banking system. And everyone understood at that time that the biggest problem is centralization. So you'd have a single company issuing e-cash and you would have to use that company in order to interact with the larger financial system.

And Satoshi then finally after, now this is almost 40 years after the invention of e-cash, invented Bitcoin. And Bitcoin closes that part of history. It is kind of the conclusion of that struggle to invent digital money and then finally set it free. And Satoshi was able to do that. Now, interestingly or trivially, he needed to invent a new currency for it. You couldn't build this on the dollar. It's not possible to decentralize the dollar. So he came up with his own currency, which we call Bitcoin today, which became a major part of the financial system that we're experiencing today. Now, for people like me, me, this is great because I'm still very interested in what the cypherpunks have developed in

the early 80s and 90s and charming e-cash and privacy technology. But I can now use Bitcoin to build these things that I'm dreaming of. And I don't need to go to JP Morgan and ask them, hey, please, daddy, could I use your infrastructure to make a few transactions here and there jamie please jamie please please and jamie says no because jamie still doesn't understand bitcoin um but yeah we don't we don't really need them anymore we we don't really think of think about them anymore they're thinking about us it's like they're trying to they're trying to catch up with us now um that's because we have a free system where everyone anyone can join all the geniuses of the world who do research on this stuff can just directly implement what

they're dreaming of because we have a system that is open for innovation and everyone who wants to build upon it which is bitcoin that's why bitcoin is so truly truly magical the first innovation of satoshi is just the beginning of a really really big process a long revolution that will be going on 500s of years. This rip was also brought to you by good friends at ZapRite. If you're a Bitcoiner and run a business or an independent contractor, you should be accepting Bitcoin as payment. If not you, then who? If we believe that fiat is systemically fragile and is a risk, the rails that that currency runs on are risk as well. You need to begin accepting Bitcoin as soon as possible. Invest in the future of your business. Create a redundant rail by accepting

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you're hydrating got to be getting your electrolytes this is the best electrolytes mix that i've ever come into contact with pink himalayan salt with calcium magnesium potassium sodium no sugar it taste incredible my favorite is the orange and the pink lemonade go to drink saute.com that's drink sote.com use the code tftc when you make your purchase and you'll get 15 off i'm telling you get on it freaks you're gonna love this stuff all right in the context of e-cash coming back it even took what 12 years after bitcoin launched when was eric syrian the first one to write the what was it, Minicash, the MVP that he launched, I believe it was in the summer of 2020 or 2021 even,

that proved that you could do these Chaumian banks, these e-cash banks on top of Bitcoin. Yeah, definitely. And we'll get back to Eric and Fediment and the leading role that they've played in this process. um but there's this famous quote by halfini himself in very early days december 30th 2010 i think i know the one you're referencing where he already i mean scaling was always an issue with bitcoin right like that that was the first comment on satoshi's email was like this doesn't

scale and now here here we're sitting 16 years later and still trying to scale scale this baby to uh conquer the world but yeah they they saw the same kind of issues uh that we have today but um the first thought that comes to mind when you have a base layer that can be decentralized is like how can we rebuild the banking system on top of that and uh yeah this famous quote by by halfini says that he believes that bitcoin might become the base currency the interbank exchange currency and allow for new type of banks to pop up that could issue their own virtual currencies on top and that's basically e-cash he was talking about e-cash without using the word there so it was that the thought appeared immediately that someone should build an e-cash system on top of

bitcoin and this kept reappearing time and time again you can find old posts on reddit there are couple posts on the Bitcoin meeting list, people just playing with this idea to build eCash on top of Bitcoin. But it took quite some time until anyone actually did it. And my full credit goes there to Eric Sirian, a true innovator, a real cypherpunk, a co-founder of the company called FedE. And his first, his attempt was, it came from a previous system called SkritCash. SkritCash was an e-cash system that wasn't bound to an existing currency. It was kind of only e-cash without any base layer. And more of a proof of concept, I would say it wasn't really built out in a way that it could be used, but they laid the foundation to build federated e-cash mints,

which is the foundation of what we call FedE-Mint today. And Eric Sirian is the inventor of the FedE-Mint protocol, the FedE-Mint project. And that's basically similar to Cashew, an eCash system on top of Bitcoin, with the prime difference between the two projects is that FedE-Mint is a federated system, meaning that these eCash mints, they're run by multiple organizations or multiple key holders. Whereas, uh, for Cashew, uh, we focus on simplicity and efficiency, basically, uh, uh, mint mints that are operated by single entities, but are extremely, uh, low, extremely lightweight and, and, and fast to set up and easy to use. Yeah. And I mean, I think that's,

I don't want to say it surprised me, but it's been really exciting to see fediment cashew in the wild and i think it's pretty clear the protocol that you and the other contributors the cashew have built has really enabled this explosion of out-of-the-box experimentation that people have really grabbed onto and run with yeah that's that's that was kind of always the hidden plan behind all this was never to build an application and just call it a day. I've built applications before and obviously they can have a big impact. But what we saw there is, again, a cryptographic primitive, a building block for others to build on. So from the very early days of the Cashew protocol, we decided it's going to be a protocol.

That practically speaking, that means when you develop a protocol instead of just an application or just a platform, it means that you spell out the language of the system in in English terms. So you make specifications that are documents, PDF documents that describe exactly what's happening and what time and how to communicate between a wallet and the mint and so on and so forth, what cryptography to use. And we just spelled it out from start to end. And we're still working on that protocol, extending it with functionality. But the reason for that was that we wanted others to build on top of that. And we've seen exactly that. So since we've started the project, which is now Keshu's around maybe two and a half

years old project, we've had dozens of independent implementations by dozens of independent programmers that all have their own use cases and specific applications that they have in mind. But they find a repository of specifications, which if implemented, they can become compatible with the entire ecosystem. So that's one of the benefits of working on protocols, although it's a much harder road to walk on and it's a slower process because it involves many people deciding things uh what you end up with is something that enables others to lift them up themselves and build upon and yeah the the adoption has been staggering uh our main focus the people we talk to or cater to were always the developers because we're we're still in this early stage where

we focus mostly on those who built so they can focus on the users that they want to build for. And we're seeing exactly that. And we're seeing now applications of Cashew that were never intended in the first place because we couldn't think of all the different ways that you could.

And, you know, you can, getting back to the beginning with our allegories to art and creativity, instead of painting a simple picture, we decided that we want to create the canvas and the brush so others can paint their own. And this is what really drives adoption and now makes Cashew the easiest way

to onboard people into Bitcoin And we see a lot of adoption on Noster, which is, again, a social media protocol or platform of a whole host of different applications that also need money. Similar to how the story with eBay went, right? So you have now lots of different things on the Internet and they all kind of need integration with money because we humans, we need money to transact. And now people can look at Cashew and see if it fits their use case and choose one of the libraries and boom, you have an eCache system inside your application that respects users' privacy and allows your users, gives them much more control than a traditional custodial system would. What's one of the most surprising implementations, applications of eCache that you weren't expecting? I think the most bullish that I'm on currently, and it's something that I'm overwhelmed with every month. Every month I see new applications and new developers that just pop up out of nowhere and say,

hey, I've built this, and it's just immensely grateful for this. But right now the most bullish thing that I can think of is something that a fellow called VNPRC is working on, and he's working on a project called hash pools and he's using e-cash to improve the payouts to bitcoin mining pools to their to the miners so i can just briefly explain the problem bitcoin mining pools are basically all custodial in nature even if they don't feel like it sometimes because the pool pays out immediately often most of the time it does not pay out immediately, but you have just a balance that keeps increasing until you withdraw. And the first ideas that were floating around when we started thinking about whether we can also improve

Bitcoin mining tools using e-cash were just simply focusing on the fact that you could pay out the miner with e-cash and then the miner could decide at any point to withdraw the e-cash back to the Lightning wallet, for example. So the intermittent time where you are in a custodial relationship with the mining pool could be improved by using e-cash instead of just a stupid Excel ledger table. What does this improve for the miner? First of all, you can use the mining pool without creating an account. And this is great for miner privacy. It is actually very, very important to improve mining privacy because mining is the Achilles heel of Bitcoin. It is one of the most fragile parts of the Bitcoin system in terms of regulation or takeover

by governments. So eCash mining pools that pay out their users, the miner in eCash would allow them to use their service without having to register an account, without having to give them your on-chain address or your lightning address. You could just simply turn on your miner and connect to the pool and start mining. And as soon as the mining pool either finds a block or depending on the payout scheme after a certain time has expired, you would then just get e-cash directly from the mining pool. And that e-cash is like an IOU. It says like this mining pool owes you that in this much satoshis and the nice thing about it is the mining pool is not able to

track you as an individual miner it wouldn't be able to know that you're the same miner who mined yesterday it wouldn't be able to know how much you've mined in the last year it wouldn't even necessarily have to know you know what are your withdrawal addresses on on-chain addresses and be able to connect individual payouts to each other and then being able to see you know what you're doing with the bitcoin that you've earned so um i'm very very bullish this is just a basic way of doing it vnprc is working on a way better system in which uh the the reward is not only paid out uh when a block is mined but also before a block is mined so that the payout can be more regular and the nice thing about this is if you issue the the potential future reward as a bear

instrument like e-cash that allows the users to trade this instrument before even the block is found so in his proposal his project is built on stratum v2 it is it's very fascinating as he is building it for bidax the the home miner his whole vision is to enable pleb miners to regain more control and to, you know, decrease the, let's say, the discrepancy between what a large miner can do and what a pleb miner can do at home. And if you are able to put the e-hash, he calls it e-hash, it's a beautiful name, into a pair instrument, then you are allowing the miners to trade this and use it similar to a future instrument for a potential block reward that might come in the future.

And this can allow miners to hedge against the risk way more safely and develop a hash price market to emerge. It's kind of like over the top of my head because I'm not a financial instruments guy, but I think it serves also as a good example of what people do that we have never thought about. And what I'm most happy

about this specific project is that, and I've said this now in this part before, we, those who are building the Cashew system, we benefit from the existence of Bitcoin. Like we're kind of leeching

on the existence or the success of Bitcoin. The only reason why we can build Cashew today is because Bitcoin has these properties. And this is the first project where I truly have the feeling that e-cash can become a benefit for Bitcoin itself.

So kind of giving back to the mother of all protocols and improving mining, I think, is a very worthwhile thing to do. Yeah, I mean, it goes back to Hal's post, too. I think a lot of what you just described leads me to appreciate the interoperability of these open systems even more. Obviously, you have Bitcoin, the base layer. Obviously, you have these Chaumian mints. And then you mentioned Lightning, like withdrawing the Lightning.

We haven't even brought up applications within Nostr. But you have this sort of fractal progression of applications and use cases that are emerging due to the sort of interoperability of all these different open networks. And you can, again, what you just described is the emergence of this new way of doing banking and financial products and the hash rate problem. The centralization of mining pools specifically is a big one. And privacy is one of the Achilles heels for miners. And being able to shift the asymmetric advantage that these large mining pools have is a massive benefit to Bitcoin. which is funny because it's enabled by this interoperability so you're seeing the symbiotic relationship between all these protocols emerge and for the longest time going back to the scaling

debate within bitcoin everybody's like squinting at the problem and saying oh you're not gonna be able to scale on chain you're not gonna be able to scale with lightning we're gonna need all these other shit coins to scale payments and all that we're gonna need dedicated blockchains for all these different use cases. But I think a lot of that comes from a high time preference that has emerged in our high velocity trash economy over the last 30 to 50 years. And if you really take a step back and let these ideas germinate and these tools get built, you can really see how being patient and letting everything mature to the point where this interoperability is as easy, not only as it is today, but I believe it will get much easier moving forward.

And you can see how this canvas is beginning to get filled in with a beautiful piece of art that can ultimately replace the incumbent banking system. Oh, yeah. We're going to scale this without shit coins. That's for sure. And this type of technology building on top of Bitcoin also attracts the right kind of people. So all these projects that I've talked about and Cashew itself is something that doesn't allow you to do a pump and dump.

There is no token associated with it. There is no shitcoin that could make me rich or throw me off rails, basically. I do this because I want to build on Bitcoin. I want to improve Bitcoin. And my incentives are very clear. And those who join me or join us, their incentives are completely aligned with the incentives of anyone participating and improving Bitcoin. and i mean this is just for me all this stuff is just background noise and it comes and it goes and i just i don't even pay that much attention uh anymore because the moment you start understanding

one thing it blows up and is replaced by the next thing as i said i i like to think of our future in a way way larger time scale and i think we're in one of the most important times that we ever had that we will ever have again. It is the transition from the non-digital world into a digital world. We have only one shot. We need to do this right. In terms of priorities,

in urgency about particular priorities, what do you think people should be focusing on, developers out there and maybe listening to this specifically? Well, I think we all need to, I mean, it's clear that I'm a privacy advocate and we all need to take privacy a lot more seriously. This does not mean that you need to hide your face like a crazy person like I am

or do everything as a nim and so on. But just have a conscious understanding of who you are asking for permission when you live your life. And this is something that we all need to be a lot more aware of and especially the developers need to be a lot more aware of. And secondly, I think maybe that what comes to mind is that we need more developers. We need a lot more developers. Many people focus on the Bitcoin price, for example.

I know that the Bitcoin price is going to go up. It's not that interesting for me. It just goes up and it doesn't go down. It just fluctuates upwards. And it will do that because it's programmed to do that. What's not programmed is whether Bitcoin will be built and kept alive by people, by people. Those are individual decisions. And so we need to increase, largely increase the number of developers that we have.

We have a constant lack of innovation, a constant lack of developers. And for that, we need to work on our culture. We need to work on our messaging and engage a lot more with the world. we cannot build this in isolation by closing off. We can build our little projects and our little citadels without having to

engage with anyone. But then we will fail. We are currently racing first against a technological dystopia that will come if we don't do anything against it. And secondly, we're also racing against CBDCs.

The central bankers aren't sleeping. And they are being paid to do their work. Good thing is that they are very slow. They are way slower than a startup could be or a high-tech company could be. It's still very bureaucratic, but they keep on churning on. And the CBDC is going to come. So we need to be able to provide a safe alternative for people who don't want any of that.

and we will see a world where there is no physical cash anymore and everyone will be forced to use digital money and the question is what type I hope that everyone will be able to use a free and open source system like Bitcoin that is made from the people for the people that allows us to choose how much privacy we want to have how much control we want to have over our money that allows us to to store our wealth without permission and to make payments without being tracked. Yeah. And this is something we've been talking about on the side off and on over the last week, which is something that obviously running a media company, I focus on a lot as narrative.

And I think if going back to meeting people where they are and communicating and framing things properly, that's one thing I think I'm going to be focusing on more in the coming years of the framing of this privacy. Obviously, Matt and I talked a lot about it on the Rabbit Hole Recap. We've had plenty of privacy advocates here on TFTC throughout the years. But I think, again, going back to the point that you made, which is we are at this pivotal, crucial moment, I think the main focus needs to be on financial privacy over the next few years, particularly um and i think we've seen particularly with esg dei that if you do speak up and frame things correctly and and put good points out there people that'll resonate with people it'll connect

and ultimately the bad ideas will get pushed out and the better ideas will will will emerge and win out in the long run but framing narrative and good messaging is important and when it comes to financial privacy, obviously, since 1970, funnily enough, with the Bank Secrecy Act here, or not here, but in the United States, that has really devolved into this surveillance financial dystopia that we've been discussing. I believe a lot of the core of the problems with financial privacy stem from this one act that I think we should attempt to abolish. But before we even get to the point of being able to abolish it, it's really framing the narrative of why financial privacy is good um and why the the tried and true tropes that the regulators and

people will fear monger over financial privacy put out there terrorism money laundering drugs whatever it may be you're letting you're letting the bad actors win because everything we've been discussing here like that's what frustrates me the most about this discussion about financial privacy and the inability of regulators to let innovation in a banking and financial application sense flourish is it all anchors back to oh no you can't do that because we can't surveil you it's you're literally letting the terrorists win when you say that 100 this is exactly what what we are in right now they are controlling the narrative it's not us and it might feel for some that we are because you're thinking of a smaller world that that there is but the

the world is really really large and most people don't care about what we say right now and so this is it's not only about being right it's also about winning an argument and those are two different things as uh you know as most people will know but it requires rhetorics and knowing what's going on outside the world that you move in and acquiring their own their language and meeting people where they are. And just to repeat, we've gone through the same thing with private messaging. When people were talking about privacy and messaging, it was associated with child sexual abuse material, terrorist financing, and all sorts of criminal activity. And that was the first association that a normie on the street would have when you say encrypted chat. Today, encrypted chat means

I can be free and I can send a love letter to my loved one without being intercepted. This is a commonly regarded part of freedom that we have today. We have still the entire road to walk in terms of financial privacy, and we need to walk it, I think it would be good to walk it in the same way, By finding people who can transport this message appropriately to the appropriate people and show that it's not only the bad guys who want financial privacy, it's mostly 99.9% the good guys who also require financial privacy. I think people like Alex Gladstein are doing an amazing job by communicating the idea of Bitcoin, the ideals of Bitcoin and the opportunities that it gives us to a world that is first like outside of this techno bubble. But there is like on a political realm, on a societal realm, there's so much to do. and i hope we won't get there by making huge mistakes it can also you know some people wish

that something explodes and then people get hurt and that's how they find the good thing i hope that that's not going to be the way although this might be what we end up with but i hope that not a massive data leak that docks half of the planet will be it but rather that we can, um, that we can provide positive and constructive, uh, arguments why, uh, this is important for everyone. Yeah. Again, like the frustration of letting the baddies win. And I don't, I don't think it's, I think the regulators and a lot of people, um, in the financial realm understand that this technology is probably good, but they like their boat and like having control but i think it's important to get the narrative outside of that bubble and into

the minds of of the layman the common man if you will financial privacy is good and not only that like the technology the stack the banking stack that is emerging on bitcoins we have bitcoin lightning e-cash arc is pretty interesting to me noster creating this messaging layer um that can set past messages between all these different layers that are interoperable with each other like the high-tech sci-fi applications that can be built are mind-blowing when you sit there to think about the thought of uh being pigeonholed and boxed into the traditional financial system and only being able to innovate there is completely demoralizing and i think that's one part of the message and financial privacy is just a part of that sci-fi future i mean

interoperability and the applications that you can build are the power and the the privacy i would argue is not just an added benefit but it's just a feature of the system that that is emerging and i think that's one thing from a messaging perspective that we need to do as bitcoiners is that we can build the sci-fi financial system of the future like these are the tools that are going to get us to that place. It's not getting a license with JP Morgan and setting up a broker dealer or a wire house to be able to do this. It's this interoperable open source, these interoperable open source protocols that anybody can build on. That's where the innovation is going to come from.

Yes. And it's not only privacy that we are improving. We're also improving functionality. We're making things possible that were impossible before, such as true microtransactions, for example. So an e-cash system allows you to make real microtransactions. What I mean by that is sub-cent payments that take a couple milliseconds to settle, for example. Another thing is that I think this is also interesting for the audience to realize is that because e-cash is a bearer instrument, which means that kind of think again like physical cash that you take out of the atm you can use it without internet so the fact that you can go into a bar and make tap to pay with your bitcoin wallet without having to be online is is mind-blowing this is like this is where we

need to be this is what we need to achieve in order to um to replace mastercard and visa But the same property of being able to make offline payments is also what gives you fantastic privacy properties. So it's a whole package of innovations and privacy is just a small part of it. And I think this is also a narrative that we should focus on is that you don't have to believe in privacy in order to use these systems. They just give you also more ability and more control. And privacy can also be seen as a side effect of these things. Similar to, for example, using Lightning. So in Lightning, you're able to make Bitcoin transactions that settle almost instantly.

And the fact that it's onion-routed is something that is technically necessary for a system where everyone can pay everyone, basically. So it needs to hop through multiple lightning nodes until it reaches the end. But the same method also gives you great privacy as the payer. So maybe something also to keep in mind as a developer is that we can put our own ideals into the software that we built. And we can package things in such a way that they give a comprehensive collection of these ideas that users can use in a whole package. I think we're going to win. But it is going to take people taking agency over their own lives and getting off their ass and actually building this stuff. And that's the one thing that's been incredibly encouraging to see emerge from the Cashew protocol and the culture around it is this idea of you can build immediately, come test it out.

and seeing the applications that are being built whether it's ehash to fix the mining pools uh things like the what boardwalk is doing with their with their application the stability pools and um just on nostre while it's implementing mpub.cash and giving people who join the nostre protocol a wallet out of the out of the gate so they can receive bitcoin i think like that use case is incredible you download a a noster client iris.2 or something like that and boom you're able to receive money you essentially have a bank account immediately from downloading a piece of software it is quite crazy yeah i'm like this is this pumps me up so much uh the the true innovation there is is pablo's nip 60 this is something that most noster clients are looking into right now

Just as a small, short summary of what this allows you to do is right now in Noster, Noster works in a way that you have a key pair. So you have a private key and a public key. It's an NSEC and an NPAP. And that NSEC, that allows you to kind of log in everywhere. So the first magical experience that everyone has with Noster is they generate an NSEC, then you use one client. And then someday they learn that there are more clients out there and maybe they want to use a different client because they don't like the first one. anymore so they take their insect and put it into the second client that they've just downloaded and boom everything just appears like your whole profile all the people you're following all the

posts that you that you're reading and your comments and so on like everything just reappears and this is like the true power of nostra which gives the user control to switch as easy as possible nothing can lock you in and that's amazing and uh this was this was quite hard to achieve with a Bitcoin wallet itself. So your wallet would typically be bound to the client that you are using. And as soon as you want to move the client, then you would have to take care of that wallet somehow, either empty it or do something with it. Always like a friction for users. And now with NIP60, NIP60 basically allows you to have an eCash wallet inside your NOSTA client that stores the eCash on the NOSTA relay. So that means you can have the same experience as

the posts that you can take your nsec and move to another client and see everything reappear and the same can be true also for your money it means that you can take your money with you basically take your nsec go to the next client everything loads up and there are your sets and you can immediately start zapping again yeah it might scare people your ecash hits on the relay but you need your nsec to unlock the ecash oh yeah everything is completely encrypted and by the way everything we say sounds super complicated but all the time we keep the normie user in mind Like, my prototypical user in mind is the old lady on a Brazilian beach selling mangoes for Bitcoin. Like, I want to cater to her.

I want her to have the best privacy possible, the best functionality possible, without having to understand anything that's going on. So the goal is always peep. That's like tap to pay, you're done. Yeah. And thinking of the Brazilian grandmother selling mangoes on a beach, you just go to her and say, hey, download this application and broadcast to the world that you're out here selling mangoes to draw attention to your business. And then, oh, in the same application, you can receive payments as well. Yeah, and it goes even further than that. So with these integrated Bitcoin wallets inside Nostor, we can build real circular economies.

And I don't mean just people zapping each other in a circle, but literal trades that happens inside. So one example of that is, let's say you make a post on Highlighter, you write an article because you're a journalist and people really like that and they can zap you and you receive those sets and you put them directly, you see them appear in your Highlighter clients. Now you can take the same insect and you can go to Shopster, for example, Shopster is a Decentralized Marketplace built on NOSR uses all the same primitives. And you can take your NSEC and put it into Shopster and see your money reappear.

And you can use that money to buy a phone that can be sent to you in physical space. So this is actually happening. People are earning money on NOSR and spending the same money on NOSR without leaving the protocol and without having to install any additional software. It's quite magical. The only thing that you need to keep is your NSEC. And with that, you can move anywhere and take everything with you. Yeah. And I mean, I think you've been if I feel comfortable saying this because you've been

sending notes about it and we've talked about you, you're becoming more convinced that Nostra is going to be an incredible bootstrapping mechanism for Bitcoin itself. Yeah, absolutely. I was I mean, I'm a big fan of tips and zaps and all this, like my my half of my life I've spent building systems where people can do that. And I think the Internet is supposed to be monetizing through peer to peer interactions. And that's a whole nother discussion with the advertising model that we've gone gone with instead of the peer to peer payments model that people in the early days have envisioned.

But again, that's another discussion. However, what I'm seeing right now, I'm getting more and more convinced is that maybe the best way to onboard someone a completely naive person who doesn't know about bitcoin yet maybe it's easier to onboard them to noser actually than to bitcoin because you get bitcoin for free when you're a noser you get everything in a package and it's in a context so the context really makes people understand what's happening there when you start get your first sets because like one of your bitcoin or friends gave you a wallet of satoshi and give you 10 000 sets there and you just felt this instant transfer most people are like great but what do i do with the bitcoin now like

10 000 sets is not enough to really take security super serious and maybe not enough to get into the entire bitcoin rabbit hole and understand what's what it's about and start stacking yourself or something like that but what do i do with these 10 000 sets and with noster that question just doesn't arise. You just, you enter Noster, you start making posts and people start zapping you and then you acquire a few hundred, a few thousand zaps, sets as zaps. And the first thing that you can do immediately is to just zap it on to someone else. So you become a recipient and the sender of value inside Noster. And no one asks like, what do I do with the Bitcoin on Noster? It's just like, if you don't know what to do with it, just zap it on. And you can just also keep it in your NSEC.

soon you'll just keep the nsec and the money will be there with you when you log in like in a week again when you think of nostra for the second time or something but um having a way to receive and send in a context i think that's truly powerful uh i think basically all the all the questions they answer themselves if you can embed the user in an ecosystem right away yeah i was talking with um a bitcoiner at the event that we were at last week and he was explaining to me that in the town that he lives in they have a lot of merchants that accept bitcoin and he's literally been living off of zaps like he'll get he'll make post get zapped acquire balance and then in meat space go to the the butcher and buy some steaks and just use the zaps straight from his

wallet and pay the butcher i'm sure those steaks were fucking delicious but it is emerging and it does seem great and it is i think the ultimate goal of sitting down with you in person thank you for doing this by the way um my pleasure is to introduce the world to artists like yourself working on this and more importantly the fact that there's a lot of as the price of bitcoin goes up what happens with this show is people looking to learn about bitcoin come to learn about Bitcoin, but many get distracted with the siren calls of shit coins, DeFi, Web 3.0, whatever it may be, whatever the meme of the week is. And I love bringing, I love having you on the show because I think, again, I said it on Money Matters and I'll reiterate it now. I think what

you're working on is the signal, the true infrastructure that will lead us to a new banking system built on Bitcoin. It's going to take time. It's going to take effort. It's not going to happen overnight. It's going to take a lot of patience by the individuals who expect these things to just hit the market. It's not going to happen that way. But if you squint and you actually begin experimenting with the tools, you can see where this is going. And I think it is imperative that anybody, particularly anybody new out there, or maybe even people have been in Bitcoin for a while and have cast away Nostr or eCash, whatever it may be, to begin using the tools and seeing it because once you use it like that's the crazy thing over the last

two weeks uh i didn't bring a lot of cash down here i made the mistake of not hitting the atm uh and getting cash and a lot of places are cash only and i've had a bum um bum some tabs off of friends but immediately i'm able to open primal find them in my contacts and just zap them and And that use case alone, like replacing Venmo with this web of trust on Nostr with an embedded Bitcoin wallet is incredibly useful for me. It is the most important thing to try these things out for yourself because you won't be you don't you don't experience the magic of this by just listening to two dudes talking about it. You must experience the self. And although we're early, all of what we've talked about already exists. like this is not just we're not drawing uh ideas here uh you can try this yourself you can go to

cashew.me c-a-s-h-u dot m-e that's a web wallet for cashew it's just one of like a dozen different cashew wallets it doesn't lock you in you can just it's one of the things that you can try and find a mint and start using it as a as a lightning wallet for example you can it's it's One of the best custodial Lightning Wallets that you can have and make payments and receive payments. If you're more well-versed and you're running a service, you're running, let's say, a video streaming platform or you're selling something online, you have any kind of software that gives users a balance, then you can run a cash or mint as well. So you can research how to do it. It's super simple to set up.

All you need is a Lightning Note and that's basically it. And you can issue e-cash to your users, and the users can use it in your platform, for example. And so all this stuff is already there, and more and more people are using it. The most important thing is that you try it out. Only if you convert that zap into a stake, you know that shit is real. That was my first experience. The first time I bought, I think it was beer. something with bitcoin except for just stacking it i understood that this stuff is actual money

it is money it's just money it's that it's very simple to understand khali it was a pleasure sir i know uh i know it must be painstaking for you to wear the mask through an hour-long interview i was born this way any final messages for the freaks other than that yeah go to cashew.space if you're interested that's casu.space

you can find all the information there if you want if you're a developer and this inspired you look into cashew we're always looking for contributors if you have any ideas how you could use these systems

to improve your own technical stack try it out you can reach out to me directly i'll always show you around and help you to get into this and if you're a developer listening to this and you're not particularly interested in cashew then please consider becoming a bitcoin developer we need all the help that we can get we can only build the system in an open source and a collaborative manner and i can assure you that working on a huge project like this will give you life fulfillment and motivation to keep going you don't have to work for a company that you don't like which is unfortunately most of the people that i know who work in tech do so please consider it and help us to reach you know to

prevent a massive dystopia from emerging and on the contrary to build the utopia that we want to see no one else is going to do that for us so join us join us peace and love freaks