TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #653: Building the Open Internet with Miljan Braticevic

Episode Date: August 23, 2025

Marty sits down with Miljan Braticevic to discuss the growing importance of open protocols like Nostr in the face of increasing censorship and authoritarian pressures, the unique advantages of decentralized social networks over closed platforms, and how Primal is building tools to enable content creators to monetize high-signal long-form content while maintaining user sovereignty. Miljan on Nostr: https://primal.net/miljan STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bit.ly/TFTCBitkey20 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Obscura https://obscura.net/ 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/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ 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 if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all 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 million isn't me or is the world going crazy i guess those two are not mutually exclusive right but uh the world's getting crazier by the day for sure yeah more interesting more chaotic yeah it feels like uh

it feels like we're like a heart not a hard fork like a fork in the road there's things that are incredibly exciting powerful and optimistic and then you have other things like uh i originally reached out i don't know it was like three or four weeks ago you were on a little vacation so we scheduled it for this but it was talk about the uk aid verification laws censorship and the importance of open protocols like noster but things have just escalated since then they want to ban vpns now totally i mean once you go down this path of trying to control everything like where does it end you kind of really need to uh you know close all the exits as they like to say all the escape routes yeah

well i mean it ends uh i don't want to smirk here but it ends typically with camps suffering mass death if you continue to continue down the path that's why it's important to leverage the tools that we have today in terms of open protocols and the communications technology to get the message out that's agreed that's the big question i have is like are we at a point in human history where we have all these that are fingertips can we actually use them to prevent at least in western society the devolution into pure orwellian socialist communist authoritarian hellscape well the open protocols give us that chance right like if if we're closed if we're using the legacy

closed systems we just don't have a chance right like because that's a single throat to choke if any government makes any new rule that forbids uh you know certain type of speech if you're dealing with a closed platform it's the end of the story you know they'll just have to tell x or whoever you know close this down and companies need to apply or comply and that's the end of it that content already exists or only exists behind their kind of wall in their wall garden since they fully control it they can they certainly can comply and the governments know that when it comes to open protocols i don't think we automatically win by default just because we're using open protocols open protocols give us that chance to kind of fight back and resist this

But there's still quite a bit of work that needs to be done by a lot of people to win, so to speak. And I'm not like super gloomy about all of these things that we're seeing everywhere. I kind of look at it more from the point of view of, hey, this is, you know, this is a test for us. This is something that's giving us an opportunity to grow, to step up, assert our own sovereignty over our own lives, over our wealth, our money, our transactions, and so forth. There are a number of us who build the tools for people who wish to step up and use them. and uh like i said we we get that opportunity and it's up to us to see how we're going to use the tools to assert our our sovereignty yeah is somebody on the the bleeding edge of the open protocol that is nostre what are what are some of the unique ways you've observed people

not only leveraging primal but just leveraging nostre to really stick an eye in the or a needle in the eye of sensors or creating cool applications that, that leverage Nostra relays in some way to create robust applications that, that are very hard to censor. Yeah. I don't even think it's about sticking a needle in the eye of anyone, you know, it's just like, we, we want to, uh, be free. Uh, we, you know, the people who are out there who would like to censor and all these, you monstrous organizations. They're doing their thing and we're doing our thing.

We're not necessarily fighting the existing system. We're just building a new system and enabling people to join them as they wish. And to answer your question, lots of new stuff being built all the time. A lot of it is really exciting. Not even talking about Primal. So outside of Primal, The cool things we've seen on Nostr recently is, for example, Jack Dorsey's BitChat app, which he vibe-coded over a weekend, which uses Bluetooth-enabled mesh network to communicate with devices that are in close proximity to you. close proximity meaning you know 20 30 meters maybe 100 feet or so and then you know you so

you can kind of relay messages directly to one another without even needing an internet connection and then when any one of these users gets an internet connection they can you know upload those signed messages to any relay and then replicate them further so this is a really neat use case, which I think this kind of network topology I think is extremely appropriate for Noster. Noster is perfect for this because the protocol is so simple and it's comprised just out of signed messages. And each of these signed

messages can exist on its own. It kind of has meaning just each individual message on its own kind of stands uh on the firm legs so to speak so to speak uh so the more of these messages you have the more you sense you can make out of the network and uh you can broadcast them you know to those that are close to you you can broadcast them to relays you can index them and so forth if they get deleted from any relays, you can repost them to other relays. This type of architecture is extremely resilient and hard to stop. So I really love this as the foundation for the new internet. What we're trying to do here with Nostra, by the way, for those who might not be paying

attention on a daily basis, we're trying to fix the internet. We're trying to fix all of the broken incentives and and the kind of the current predicament we're in which is that basically the majority of the internet is controlled by five corporations right so this is about building an internet worth having and uh we are well on the way to doing that with noster so for example this bit chat application came out of nowhere like nobody was really thinking in these terms uh you know prior to dorsey launching it after a weekend of vibe coding then of course kalle uh dorsey launched the ios version then kalle very quickly vibe coded um an android version and i think both of these bit chat applications are now uh in production like in full uh app stores so app

store and ios and play store on android um they're open source and they continue to be developed And it's a beautiful example of what can be done just by a few guys and then adopted by a bunch of people who wish to kind of take control over their communications. So that's one great example. Another one is the work that Alex Gleason is doing with Shakespeare. I think you can access it at shakespeare.diy. So basically, it's an AI vibe coding tool that enables anyone to build Nostra apps, but just prompting in English. And what's different about this tool compared to many other vibe coding tools is that it leverages the open Nostra network. So there are a whole bunch of problems that you already have kind of pre-solved for you.

Like you don't need a backend because you can rely on the public relay infrastructure that already exists on Nostr, which is formidable, by the way. I think this doesn't get maybe mentioned enough. You know, people compare Nostr to other networks. And, you know, often it's like apples to oranges, specifically because of the fact that anyone can run any part of Nostra infrastructure. That's not a very common occurrence in these type of competing networks. But not only that it can run, there is so much evidence that like this is being run. And like any part of the Nostra infrastructure is being stood up by a bunch of different people sort of independently without any central planning or control. So when it comes to relays, last time I looked, there were almost 3000 active relays of just like people and companies and projects, whoever wants to stand up a relay can.

So we end up with this public infrastructure that can be used by anyone to publish content, but also to do interesting things like build, you know, vibe coded apps that don't need a back end. And then you get Nostra Identity and the Web of Trust for free, which is all open out there. And of course, you get payments because like Bitcoin micropayments are kind of blended in with Nostra. so you have these incredible building blocks all of which are open and then you get this new generation of ai tools which are still a little janky but getting better where you can vibe code whatever comes to mind and kind of plug into this network try doing any of this with a closed system try doing any of this with x or any of the other closed platforms you just can't yeah and we're seeing particularly in the context of bit chat with the android uh play store google play store

i've seen callie posting a lot about the back and forth he's had with the play store it's hilarious yeah it's i mean i'm sure it wasn't hilarious for him as he was going through this but it's just like hilariously bad how these systems are and how much gatekeeping they're doing and how inept they are at this sorry i cut you off marty go ahead i was gonna say there's profanity in the name of the app ah yes no but you brought up relays which is very promising to see because i'm having flashbacks to nostriga in riga lafia last year where i vividly recall you on stage with michael tidwell and i believe the conversation is who will run the relays and so i think you mentioned it there are 3 000 relays being spun up by individuals

and companies i guess like anchoring back to that conversation on stage in riga around this time last year has the sort of network of relays surprised to the upside is where you expected it to be when you were having that conversation oh yes it has so far but to be fair um the conversation was like how does this scale to kind of global scale right so there is definitely uh the ecosystem that's sprouting around nostre uh that kind of contains app developers there are probably 200 different apps that are built on nostre the relay infrastructure the indexers the media hosting services all of these things are extremely impressive like they are definitely surprising to the upside so when people look at

noster and compare it to other networks usually the only metric that's used for comparison is user numbers and noster user numbers are you know quite a bit smaller than something like let's say blue sky like orders of magnitude we're looking at um and by the way these these numbers are not super precise we do some indexing and we do web of trust analysis to understand who are which which accounts on the network are bots of which there are millions so we don't want to count them as kind of humans but we use web of trust heuristics to figure out active humans and we're probably looking at maybe 70 80 000 users who are active on oster so this is a very small network in that regard, when compared to something like, let's say, BlueSky, which measures millions

of users. But these are apples to oranges comparisons, because BlueSky is run by one company, even though they define their protocol, I think it's called at protocol. They run the only instance, or by far the biggest instance, I think there's something called black sky too that's a much much smaller one but essentially they control everything that happens in blue sky including your account so basically if you uh if they decide you don't want to exist you shouldn't exist you're gone right vice president along with experience this yeah okay all right this is oh yeah that happened to jd vance right yes i think like some of these

things are hilarious people show up on blue sky and and post something like there are only two genders just as a feeler and they're gone they can't they get immediately removed it's like oh guys this is not even up for debate on on this network and the backstory of course is that a lot of people who got upset by elon's takeover to of twitter moved over to blue sky so that's kind of their user base and those users are demanding censorship basically from the people who are running blue sky they that that's kind of the the way they like to operate online so and the blue sky uh leadership is happy to oblige so so that's what we have there so going back to your question you can't really compare Nostr to BlueSky

in that sense. Nostr in my mind has no competitors if we're looking at a truly self-sovereign network where all the users hold the keys to their online existence which cannot be revoked by anyone no single Nostr service provider has power over your existence on Nostr, over your ability to post or view content. That's very different from all of the competing networks.

So we have people who hold their keys. And then we have, as I mentioned previously, many people who run the infrastructure without any central planning or coordination. those both of those um requirements need to be met in my mind for something to be a truly decentralized network otherwise you're it's similar to comparing bitcoin to an altcoin yeah you might be holding your private key on solana but uh you know there are a couple guys that run that network and you exist there at their pleasure so it's very similar it's that kind of comparison is uh appropriate i think uh when it comes to noster and other competing

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Matt and I were discussing this in RHR, I think two weeks ago. Not at this point, but it feels like... I mean, when you look at whether it's Blue Sky, Farcaster, BASE is, what is their social network? Is it BASE? Is BASE the social network? Is it Aura? I think it's still based on Farcaster. Yeah. I think it's the same network still. Yeah.

And they're all pumping big numbers. But to your point, when you really get down to like brass tacks, like what are these networks? They're dyno, decentralized in name only. And there is a lot of hype around them in the sense that Coinbase is really trying to get people to use Zora and use USDC to do the equivalent of Zaps on that network. But when it comes to true freedom tech, open protocols, I think it's objectively true that Nostr is a different animal than all of them, even though it doesn't have the adoption of Blue Sky. I'm not sure what Coinbase's Zora app is at right now. But I think Nostra is sort of existing somewhat in the background, but has the slow, steady, methodical build out that is well underway. If you actually pay attention and look at the ecosystem and the growth of the ecosystem and the number of apps and different types of apps, more importantly, I think BitChat is a perfect example.

i'm just using relays as sort of like a fallback for when you're are not in a 30 meter vicinity of the person you're looking to chat with that the sort of new open web is being built out methodically it's not getting nearly as much shine as i think it should be getting but i actually like that too reminds me of bitcoin in the early days where you have this intolerant transient not transient but uh you know sort of intransient minority that's really dedicated to building this out and that's the signal i look for is like it's made not seem like noster is as big as these other things but the sort of effort the energy focused on ensuring that it gets built out is not only still there but from my observation getting stronger by the day yeah i think many of the

comparisons to comparisons to bitcoin are appropriate including this one um i prior to discovering nostre i tried to design my own protocol that would kind of try attempt to solve these same issues and my protocol wasn't anywhere near as good as nostre it was way too complicated um so when i when i discovered nostre um it was like um you know a revelation a new right away it was going to work and i was just interested in how good it could get but going back to the days when i was trying to come up with my own protocol i knew that a protocol like this had to be bootstrapped by bitcoiners there was just no other way there was no other group out there that has the culture of both holding keys and running nodes so we go back to the same you know

point i made earlier you know farcaster you mentioned it's interesting uh farcaster users are holding their keys uh so so that's that's good but who runs the infrastructure nobody in the ethereum land or altcoin land has uh you know the the incentives or the any interest to run the infrastructure so you actually end up like a few big players running everything for everyone And they have pretty much full control over the network. So Nostra is different. Nostra is different. Without any doubt, you can tell.

The specs are being kind of done in the open. It's as messy of a process as you would expect it to be at this early stage. But things are getting stood up. Things are getting better. um the uh kind of core app experiences are improving i think uh rapidly um and uh you know whoever let's say has multiple touch points with noster you know with with maybe six months in between or something like that they i'm sure are seeing like massive improvements and that's going to continue and it's going to accelerate just by knowing what's in

Primal's roadmap. Things are going to get excellent and very interesting but also many other projects. There are hundreds of them so it's amazing to see and I love being a part of this ecosystem. You alluded to it. Are we allowed to tease what's on the Primal roadmap to anybody? I guess I did it to myself, didn't I? Usually I don't like talking about features that don't exist yet.

I prefer to announce availability. But at the high level, at Primal, we would like to lean more into long-form content. And we've already done that to an extent with our previous 2.0 release. we've done a pretty elaborate implementation of long-form textual content. So blogs, articles, things like that are a main tab on Primal and kind of our first-class citizen both for discovery and kind of consumption and so forth. And as of recently, we shipped Primal Studio back in June,

a product that's aimed at content creators. So we kind of completed that offering for long form content where you have kind of professional authoring environment for this type of content. So we'd like to lean deeper into long form content with better support for long form video in Primal 3.0. So that is going to be kind of a main theme. We're going to build essentially a YouTube slash Rumble competitor that is fully open and that utilizes, of course, Noster for publishing and messaging. But when it comes to media hosting, we're using protocols like Blossom, which allow users to post binary content or media content onto multiple media servers. to kind of enhance resiliency and censorship resistance and so forth so that's the kind of high level uh theme um and by the way all of these things already exist on nostre the specs are there

there are many clients that do a pretty good job already with videos we're just building a more integrated experience into primal so that you can kind of have you know feeds reads and videos kind of as kind of top level tabs and maybe i'll kind of give you some thinking behind this so there are many different directions you can go into with a product like this social media these days is defined by feeds and some some products like instagram or especially tiktok went super far into creating these like very addictive kind of low consciousness kind of my endless mindless scrolling type of feeds because they um they monetize attention and that that kind of seems to work best there so uh in my mind there's no sense in competing

with them in that in that kind of segment uh we this isn't something we want to build and even if we wanted to we probably couldn't build a better tiktok than tiktok like we couldn't You know, the types of things these guys, the amount of spying on users and kind of the patterns that these guys are willing to do to enable a product like this, we just are not interested in. So I think the correct move for Primal is to go firmly in the opposite direction. So firmly into kind of high signal, nuanced content, you know, long form, high consciousness content that will enable content creators who really wish to provide high signal content to their users. We want Nostra to be the best place for them. So that's what we're building at Primal. Yeah.

yeah and i've seen the benefits of this i mean obviously matt and i we live stream rhr every week to zap.stream and the amount of zaps we've been getting week in a week out i think it's a material amount of money i think we're each making like anywhere from like 200 to on good weeks like 700 a pop which is crazy um we've gotten a million sats one episode before and so like there is the ability to not only distribute the content live stream the content on this distributed open protocol you can monetize it in real time and i i've always i mean we've had these discussions i've always thought the ability to easily monetize the content by combining noster with bitcoin is going to be the killer app that really takes hold

someday and we're beginning to see it i think the emergence of the uh the vlogs the vlogs of the last few weeks is is evidence of that too and that's been like a really interesting sort of social experiment uh on nostre specifically like trying to create and i really like that huddle um sort of start at this trend who knows how long it'll last it will just be a a short ephemeral trend but i think it's fun nonetheless but trying to create unique content specific the master that other people sort of pulls people to the protocol because that content is only living there he's killing it isn't he yeah uh and uh you know the bitcoiners who are not a master are are um missing out in fact like he started something that got bigger and many

people are killing it now it's it's interesting i don't know if it how much staying power it has maybe it has a lot maybe not but one thing is kind of remains constant on oster over the past couple years two three years that i've been participating in which is like people are having fun there like they're having fun with different things and experimenting with a bunch of stuff uh and some of it sticks some of it doesn't but similar to what dorsey was talking about in twitter's early days where he said that um all of twitter's features were um kind of created by the users hashtag or at uh mentions and like a bunch of other things were just uh you know um them the product people observing how the users are using their product and then

reacting and kind of tweaking it to make it easier to do the things that the users are already trying to do so there's so much of that going on a noster so the noster uh user base is kind of we can say small and kind of global terms but very formidable um in terms of how enthusiastic the users are in terms of how technically competent many of them are it's very interesting to build for noster because many noster users are actually developers So you get this very competent feedback constantly that helps you improve the product and so forth. And I was kind of looking at it and comparing it to, let's say, Bitcoin Twitter, just kind of to ballpark things to try to understand, you know, the relative sizes of these communities. And I would say it's formidable.

So for order of magnitude, kind of some of the best estimates I could get to for Bitcoin Twitter is about 150,000 active users. And Noster has about half of that, probably, in terms of active users. We might be undercounting Noster users, too. It could be that some new users who just joined didn't quite make it fully into the web of trust in terms of being followed by other accounts and so forth. so we might be undercutting it but let's say it's half um and that means if you're a bitcoin content creator and you're not a noster well you're missing out on probably half of the potential audience that you could have and on top of that you get kind of uh new people that are getting into noster who are not bitcoiners who are getting into bitcoin kind of just because they end up

hanging out with a bunch of bitcoiners and noster and kind of get into it we have many such cases. So there's that as well. And I don't know if the Bitcoin Twitter group is growing or if it's been kind of similar size over the years. But I think it's, like I said, interesting to compare these two groups. And Nostra is already formidable. And only one of those groups is holding the keys to their speech. Sup freaks, this report was brought to you by our good friends at Obscura. Obscura is the first VPN that can't log your activity by design. Instead of empty promises, Obscura fully embraces the Bitcoin or don't trust verify mantra. They can't log your traffic even if they tried. Obscura

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the age verification laws but things seem to be escalating there was a woman um the commissioner of Children in England was on the BBC two days ago vehemently expressing her desire to put age verification on VPNs, which would render VPN services moot in the first place. And I was telling you the second biggest demo that we have here at TFTC beyond the United States is the UK. And I'm curious if you've seen any indication that people are experiencing these Orwellian pressures and falling back to open protocols like Nostro. So we've experienced some growth on Nostro in the past few weeks, and we've been trying to kind of figure out what to attribute this to. Within the Primal team, we're seeing kind of significantly higher user numbers. And then we don't do any tracking, so we don't really know where these people are coming from.

But we're trying to decipher if it's all American huddle bringing new users through his vlogs or, in fact, this phenomenon started happening prior to him starting vlogging. So probably that's not the answer. It could be a combination of things, but I think it's a factor that, you know, many people who are aware of where these types of things are leading to in these countries, or outside of these countries too, are starting to look at alternatives. And those who have done enough research and critical thinking might be realizing that Nostr is the best alternative there. So, yeah, we are seeing increased user numbers and probably these new policies in UK, Europe, I think Australia too, have something to do with it. Yeah. I would hope that people recognize that these tools are there because it is crazy. Like you can't voice your displeasure in these,

in these countries without being put on a list and having the police come knock on your door, which is probably good. Building on that point, like in terms of onboarding the Nostra for people in these countries, again, you have a private public key pair and you can attach some human readable name to your profile so like best practices probably don't put your real name spin up a name yeah i mean that the the process of onboarding itself is the first step that right away you can see the difference between the centralized legacy platforms and open protocols when you

create an account on X, let's say, you're given this account by this corporation. This is something that they give to you and something that they can take away from you at any point. In contrast, when you're on an open protocol like Gnoster, you claim your key pair. You take this massive number out of the universe and that's your private key so you've claimed some territory in this like massively large a namespace or of you know numbers and then you've claimed something and this is yours and then you defend it this is what what a stark contrast between these two and that everything is downstream from there. So I think that holding our keys and existing and operating with these open protocols is our only chance to assert and reclaim our sovereignty, both in terms

of money and transactions and wealth, as well as speech and online communication and publishing. there's just no other way we need to all step up and be sovereign online well those of us who are interested in that seems to be a small minority currently but that's fine potentially i think i'm trying to quantify these numbers too it's like how big is the kind of world population who is even interested in this and it's far from a majority currently maybe the pain is not big enough for most people to be interested in this. But I think the silver lining of, you know, things like COVID, like what we went through during the few years of COVID, is that many people woke up. And if let's say, prior to this, maybe 1% of the population was interested in these

types of topics and asserting their sovereignty and so forth. Now we have multiples of that, maybe we have 5% of people. So still a minority, but it's five times more. And from that standpoint, things are moving in the right direction. And the crazier these policies get, the more people we're going to have who care about this. So all we need to do is to make sure that the tools exist for them to use when they're ready to, and that the infrastructure is robust, etc, etc. so i kind of tend to take the optimistic point of view behind all this even though you know you see some of these uh things go down and it's like if it could feel desperate you know like what's happening in the uk that's wild and i'm kind of shocked that people don't push back harder

but then you you know look back at kobe then go like oh yeah people people take a lot yeah people do it's it's shocking and that's what i wonder is like does the quality of life have to become so degradated that you're like forced to push back and find these tools but we don't have to belabor the negative let's talk about potentially something more positive and negative i think this is probably one of the sharpest double-edged swords that exist in the world today which is ai um in the intersection of ai bitcoin ai noster different ways to leverage it we've been leaning into ai generated video to get the bitcoin message out

there or help people understand the problems that that bitcoin is attempting to solve um and then there's many other ways we use bitcoin or excuse me ai on the back end to sort of automate processes what uh like as it pertains to ai i think there's three things i'm interested to hear from you like how a primal are you guys leveraging it like to build the business i gotta turn these off um to um what have you seen in terms of unique ai applications in the nostre uh landscape and then three like what are your thoughts on like the cool use cases of ai to particularly from a marketing propaganda perspective that people should be leaning into

to draw people to Nostra and other open protocols. Yeah, I think those AI videos are probably a good example of how quickly things are evolving there and how quickly these tools are getting better. Like a few months ago, you'd see those videos and they were just terrible. And now we're at the point

where they're not terrible they're actually pretty reasonable but you can tell it's ai uh and probably won't be long before they they get uh much better even from here um so i think when it comes to ai and the um and how it relates to open networks like noster i think there's something very interesting at the intersection of open source AI models and open data and open kind of social graphs and open kind of user directories and things like that. I think it's leveling the playing field quite a bit. It has the potential to do that. So, of course, currently only the biggest companies have the resources to train new AI models. And they, you know, even though they all LARP about openness, they kind of keep the kind of most powerful models closed and kind of in control.

So that's an interesting dynamic. And then, you know, we see these models coming out from China. who these guys are kind of trying to catch up and they have different approaches because they don't have uh access to that much um kind of compute power because in theory at least they can get access to the same uh gpus but they have unlimited uh you know electricity almost and then uh like they're kind of forced to optimize their algorithms a little bit better so we had this situation with deep seek a few months ago which was as good as the best closed models in the west for a week or two you know you kind of have to take these snapshots in time and kind of

assess who is where and these things move almost on a weekly basis um so you asked about primal um so we do what you would expect a company like primal to do so we use of course ai tools for some of our internal kind of coding uh efforts and you know qa and testing and stuff like that as you would expect we're not really vibe coding our products uh We're doing it the old fashioned way by hand, but there's a lot of kind of kind of tools that you can use in the process to make you more kind of productive as a developer. So there is that. We're looking at automating some of our business processes using AI tools. And we are kind of at the beginning of that. We're still, you know, a very small company. We're eight people. Um, and I think what's interesting, you know, standing up a new company like this at this particular moment in time, I think, uh, it will, and these types of tools will enable a company like Primal and many other companies there, you know, uh, Noster alone, there's probably half a dozen companies of our size, um, or bigger.

so these types of tools will enable companies of our size very tiny companies to serve millions of users just because we can leverage you know our kind of power using the tools so that's exciting i think and then of course we need to productize some of this and offer capabilities to our users so for example something like grok is extremely powerful on x that's probably the best feature on x currently i think it would be great to have something like this on an open network based on an open source model so this is something that we will be looking at you know down the line at some point when, when we, uh, after we ship 3.0 with, with the video, um, capabilities and stuff like that. Um, so yeah, uh, that's kind of the range of, uh, AI, uh, thinking that we're

kind of, uh, leveraging that we're doing at the moment. Grok, is this true? Maybe the, uh, the NOSTA version should be Korg. Korg, is this true? It is fascinating, and it's really cool to see, to your point of the individual users having agency, not only via private-public key pairs and just joining a protocol like Nostra and having that freedom, you see users wanting to give back. And I saw one of a Primal user make a commercial for Primal using these AI-generated videos, the one with the zoo freeing the animals. from the cages that was really well done that's that was incredible like i woke up one morning and opened a primal and i saw that and i was like man like how amazing you know our users are creating this type of content and the message was super crisp uh it was i i um i recommend everyone to go check it out because it sort of um kind of leaned into this whole uh idea of

oh we're the most connected we've ever been but it's so also superficial and the level of actual human connection is probably at an all-time low like when you look at the rates of uh you know young people getting married and having kids and stuff like that like these things are not looking great um so anyway i'm butchering the message here everyone should check out this uh video that was created by one of our users we've reposted it on the primal account and also my own um it's it's extremely rewarding uh you know because as you know we we are constantly in touch Marty. It's a lot of hard work. We work night and day to build these tools so they are at the level of usability that users are used to. And the bar for usability is being set by

these multi-billion dollar companies who've been at it for 10 years plus. And they're dealing with just like a closed centralized system, which is easier to develop against. In contrast, we have, you know, a small group of people, mind you, in a bigger community, which is all open sourced, trying to catch up in terms of feature sets and, you know, UX and stuff like that, performance. So we work day and night and it's nice, like occasionally we get these incredibly rewarding moments uh when uh you know when we

observe people use our products and also appreciate our products enough to put in the work to create these types of uh this type of content so that was amazing to see yeah and that's what you want to see too like that's a signal like all right we're on the right path people yeah feel so passionate about the product the protocol that they're out there spending their time money and effort to to make sure that they can help push it along which is going back to your point about early days of twitter that's sort of what you want to say it's incredible and uh you know sam altman of all people made a really good point years ago in some presentation uh so you know Like even though we probably don't see eye to eye in just about anything, this point made sense to me and I remember it frequently, which is he was trying to, I forgot it was some sort of presentation where probably to entrepreneurs or investors, I forgot.

But it was about how to spot fads, like in terms of like big waves that are coming in, how to distinguish between something that's going to be a fad, you know, it's going to taper off versus something that's going to really take off. Like in the early days, you as, let's say, an entrepreneur, you're investing your everything, all your time, probably wealth and so forth to go in a certain direction. Or as an investor, you're kind of putting your LP's capital on the line and so forth. So how can you tell if, of course, you need to do it early for this to make sense. So you're early, so how can you tell if something is going to be big or if it's going to taper off to nothing? And he said a very good indicator is how passionate the early adopters are. That's what separates the iPhone from VR sets.

VR sets, even though quite a few got sold, but they're all kind of sitting on a shelf somewhere collecting dust um and uh there just wasn't the the signal was there from the early days like the the uh you know the early adopters even though they bought the sets were not that excited about them whereas you know the when the iphone got released everybody told all their friends and you know it was flexing their new device and so forth um so i think that's correct uh that's the correct assessment and then uh if you look at noster's user base well we must we can only be super bullish about where this is going yeah a lot of power users and that like and again going back to the point i made earlier of

if you're not paying attention you probably should be because if you observe over time the amount of effort being put into building out the protocol building out apps like primal but other non-social media related apps as well like it's growing and it's becoming more robust in terms of the sort of optionality of different ways you can interact with the protocol and one thing again it's already saying i think the the first real market is the market for attention on noster um and monetize these apps but it's it's one thing that makes a ton of sense to me is like noster is this open protocol to create marketplaces um the killer marketplace right now is posting content and getting zapped for it but um you're beginning to see the emergence of

um data vending machines to buy ai compute still early days there but even physical marketplaces people selling physical goods using Nostra and the mPub sort of web of trust to facilitate trade and just curious to hear from you like what what is your perspective on Nostra as a marketplace and what you're seeing in terms of that maturing so just to back up a little bit you mentioned AI Nostra and Bitcoin the intersection of those three things is extremely exciting right because um ai agents need some self-sovereign money to uh you know do their work and you know the especially the more sophisticated they get the less likely uh is that they'll accept solana or usd right so uh and then uh the ability to

interface with other systems in an open matter and kind of plug into, uh, open networks, uh, without requiring access to proprietary APIs that can be switched off, right. You have to be bullish about the intersection of those, uh, three technologies. Um, and as far as, uh, marketplaces are concerned uh yeah there are already marketplaces on oster um and uh the ability to utilize this uh open uh social graph and open web of trust as it grows uh to create more powerful marketplaces is there right so um for example let's take amazon product reviews right um if currently they're built in a closed silo by amazon and that's it basically you go and look at the product and they sort those reviews in a couple different ways but basically

you're extremely unlikely to see anyone there among the reviewers who you know how amazing would it be if you were to look at a product or a travel destination or anything else that where user input and user reviews are kind of relevant and important in your decision making and to have these things sorted by your web of trust, by the people that you are connected to in some ways and so that you can see how they are valuing a certain product or service. So this is already being built on Nostr, and you can tell how when the internet gets open again because of Nostr, how glorious this is going to be. And guys like Alex Swetsky with his Atlantis project are doing something like this.

This is a very interesting project on Nostr that people should check out that kind of showcases the versatility of the protocol. It's not just, you know, Twitter clones that are being built on Nostr. You can literally build anything. And the killer feature of Nostr isn't necessarily censorship resistance. This is kind of what people talk about a lot. I think the killer feature is openness. the fact that all of these uh all of this data is open and can be combined in a number of different ways uh to build new experiences and new product categories that are not even possible

currently when you deal with a bunch of kind of closed silos yeah i think that's a very good point And it's not to say that censorship resistance doesn't exist and it's not a killer app, but I think the openness, the flexibility with which that gives end users and probably more importantly, builders is extremely powerful. Yeah. Sovereignty for users, builders and creators is a big deal. I agree. i feel like we do this every time you come on but i think uh in terms of forward-looking guidance we're gonna we're gonna adopt some fed speak here uh forward guidance dot plot coming up what uh what do you see happening in primal over the next year noster generally over the next year

catalyst for for more people waking up to this is impossible to tell or be even worried about as it just heads down they take it day by day brick by brick yeah it's very hard to predict the future here unless you're building it of course so uh i i have some visibility in what's in primal's roadmap of course but um you know if you asked me three months ago to um predict kind of the most exciting apps on nostre i would have not said bit chat and shakespeare i would have said something different so like the when you have such an open network with so many creative people uh participating and building without permission uh the uh the activity of trying to predict what they're going to build is frivolous basically

you're not going to make it i think it's still useful in some ways to kind of you know brainstorm and and try to imagine things but the takeaway here is that we're going to get surprised by some apps uh that nobody saw coming that are just taking off and that's that's so amazing to because every such app is adding more gravity to the network it's at it's bringing in new users potentially and then those users might be might kind of show up for bit chat but stay for other things for for vlogs um and as for primal um yeah so like i said this um long form high signal content is something that we really want to lean into as hard as possible so we want to create the best possible user experiences for finding and consuming high signal long form content

this includes text and video and potentially sound down the road and so forth we also want to build great tools for content creators to be able to post and manage this type of content on Oster in a way that kind of feels familiar from kind of the more centralized legacy platforms. So basically to bring the long form content UX for both users and creators in kind of highly polished shape is our goal. And then

to lean even deeper into it. So basically, what I'd love to see is I'd love Nostra to become the best place for content creators who wish to create high signal content for their users. And part of it is going to be, of course, in addition to Zaps, the micropayments that you mentioned that people can do on an ad hoc basis for a particular piece of content. In addition to that, we want to have paid subscriptions for content creators so that creators can create one or more paid tiers and create kind of simple rules regarding how their content is distributed so that they can better monetize the work that they do with directly with their audience so those are kind of implementing all of the above in a way that's polished and just works

but also open so you know when we create when we say paid tiers these are not primal you know paid tiers they're noster open paid tiers that should work in any other noster client so the specs for this already exist we need to just lean in and kind of implement them correctly so implementing all of the above is quite a bit of work so we have our hands full with primal just kind of doing these relatively obvious things uh but that's kind of been the the uh mo at primal where we uh you know we try to make basic things work well that's if at the high level that's what we do with primal yeah no and i the uh fountain guys they've they've released paid tiers for the podcast and we've implemented that here at tftc um and at rhr so if you're listening and you want uh

you want ad-free episodes day early ad-free day early episodes at tftc subscribe be a fountain ad-free episodes of rhr subscribe be a fountain but i think i love it the reason i bring it up and fountain for anybody who's unaware is a podcasting app that is also an ostracline um so it's been really cool to lean into that but from the content creator perspective i've been talking to uh oscar nick from from fountain about this like the bonus is on us as well to really drive people to these clients and that that's i think i'm beginning to really understand this with fountain specifically it's like you can actually make more money more bitcoin at the end of the day by participating it's not only uh the onus is not only on million oscar and others building

police and jeff building all these clients it's on the end users really driving their audience and so that's one thing we've made a point of and we've actually see it convert into higher revenue It's like pumping, like, hey, come support us on Nostr, be a fountain, and you'll get a better product if you do these paid tiers. And it's led to more revenue for us. But the point, overall point being is Neonis isn't only on Milian and others building out these clients. It's on us as power users really trying to drive our audience there as well with simple calls to action. and we've seen it converting pretty well in the last two weeks as we've been doing it more.

Let's go. I love Fountain. It's another one, kind of a very highly polished Noster client. They existed prior to Noster, but when Noster kind of took off, they moved their membership over to Noster, and they are using Noster feeds now, and they're using Noster events for likes and trending things. also for live streams it's great to see uh and again another example of the versatility of this

protocol you just imagine everything all the apps all the products you're using if they were on the same open network and you could use the same uh online identity controlled by you to access all these uh apps and services that's what we're building on oster yeah and i think building on the fountain example it's really cool because i'll go into primal i'll check my notifications and i'll see somebody um write a comment and there will be a fountain link to a particular episode and they're commenting on that episode so i can see it in primal and it's just like in the stream of all my other notifications people zapping liking sharing posts but then i'll go over to fountain and to speak to the versatility of the protocol like that comment will be in a

specific episode like i'll go into an episode that one comment that was in a flood of other notifications uh on primal will be sort of consolidated with other comments specific to that episode um in in the fountain client and it'll aggregate the amount of sats that were zapped um to that particular episode and you get like a consolidated sort of conversation around that particular episode and fountain button primal it's sort of just in the flood of everything else happening and so i think that's like a really stark example of the versatility you can get with these clients yeah what a great example because what actually happens in this open network is these uh these artifacts the comments the zaps and the episodes you know the

posts exist as kind of signed messages that they're kind of published on to relays and every app developer gets to decide how to present them to their user and the different apps have different competencies and different uh kind of points of view in terms of how the data should be presented So Primal is mostly kind of a social media client with, you know, notification feeds and stuff like that. So as Marty described, it makes sense for us to display these events in that form. But Fountain is predominantly like, you know, music slash podcast player. and they're plugging into the same data but they're they're showing it in a way that makes sense for their use case and it's it's a kind of mind-blowing moment for a lot of noster users when

they log in with their private key in in another app and see a bunch of useful content already there for them and it's sort of like the app already understands who they are and there are many such cases there is another for example let's say if we look at long form textual content like blogs articles and so forth you know there are already closed legacy platforms that do a pretty good job in this area like substack or medium and you know when you post an article people can comment people can highlight and all of those comments and highlights get kind of trapped inside of that closed silo and no one will kind of ever see them outside of it and as a consequence that you don't even get uh that much uh even traffic the many users kind of uh using these

features, where in contrast on Nostr, you publish your article, it exists as a signed event on any Nostr relay, and then any app developer can use that artifact in any way that makes sense within their app. within primal we decided to make long form articles uh first class citizen within primal so we kind of have a dedicated tab and you can list all of those things there but essentially um in other clients people might decide to do it differently but then when you interact with that article when you uh post a reply or even when you do a highlight that highlight uh is an Oster event that's a signed event that gets published to a relay and then it's it exists in

this open network for anyone to kind of see and interact with and there's all kinds of experiences that can be created around that highlight alone for example you know highlighter Pablo's highlighter is uh you know um an Oster app that's kind of for creators but also for consumption that kind of creates this whole dedicated UX around highlights, right? There's a highlight feed and so forth. So these are just some examples where we're scratching the surface of what can be done when all of this exists on an open network. And we're very early still.

We're still in the kind of process of catching up to the legacy, kind of close the players in terms of capabilities and UX. but uh at some point soon we're we will have caught up and when we overtake them it will be very stark it will be like it will be about implementing experiences that are just not possible in closed silos so all of this is very exciting yeah it's uh it really is and i think again i don't want to belabor the fountain point but like it is so cool going from like primal to fountain it's like oh i saw this in primal like it's almost um like as a creator i think i'll just be checking notifications on primal we'll see that some fountain related link is in

in a notification that like reminds me like all right i got to go over to this client to see how this particular episode is doing and like and then i go over to found and i get like consolidated sort of the diagnosis on a particular episode and a notification of primal sort of led me to to go take that action and then like things get it sort of blurs the line of what products are and we've talked about this before like what is a business at the end of the day and um how are businesses going to be created in the future and i think as you were describing um the sort of different ways in which this is all compatible and interoperable with each other i think the best business uh builders in the future to be incredible curators right like curating

specific experiences for specific types of users and specific contexts and just having like a creative curative mind that that is really going to set people apart yeah i agree we are seeing proliferation of uh content uh you know not least of which is a bunch of ai slop out there but that's getting better too but in a sense where um yeah curation becomes a very important feature maybe the feature right like so uh i i keep repeating one of our goals at primal is to enable people to find you know high signal content that's relevant to them right um so and then to provide a great user experience around consuming it and also creating it for creators um yeah well on that note i disclaimer 1031 is an investor in primal yeah but this is an unbiased

opinion putting my tftc newsletter writing hat on the primal publisher is the best i've come across on nostre you made it so easy to just upload and publish the content in a very intuitive way somebody has worked with a bunch of different you know back-end publishers not only on nostre but mailchimp wordpress ghost you've made it very simple very intuitive so thank you for that Thank you, Marty. That was a lot of work. But, you know, it's all open source, by the way, like everything that we do at Primal is open sourced under the MIT license, which is the most permissive license. So that means that anyone can take any part of our code, any part of our product, and do anything they want with it, including building competing products. uh let's go i mean this is how this entire network is being built and we are certainly standing on the shoulders of many giants to even be here so uh it's it's good vibes all around and i think good business in the long run as well uh to build out this open network in an open manner

and bring the capabilities forward uh so that people can have the tools they need in their time of need, which seems to be about now. Yeah. If you're out there, you're not on Nostra yet, you're living in one of these countries, UK, I know you're second in our audience. I know there's some of you out there listening. If you're not on Nostra, get on.

You want to be on before you need it. And you already need it, but you may need it more in the relatively short term. William, thank you for doing what you do. Thank you for joining me again. any final thoughts for the freaks out there well thanks for having me marty that was great um i will say you know like you said thank you for doing what you're doing and like that's acknowledged appreciate that thank you marty for doing what you're doing all of the things that

you do like you know uh i uh grew up in bitcoin listening to you and matt day in day out or we in wake out back from you know 2017 uh you guys helped me avoid all the shit coinery just because uh the the points you guys were making just made sense to me and i was mildly interested in ethereum from the technology point of view until i figured out that both the tech and the people behind it are, you know, uh, not, not something I want to invest time in. So, um, all like there must be countless people who you guys helped educate on these topics. And I'm super grateful to, um, be a 1031 portfolio company. I think 1031 really stands out as a, as a venture investor in the space with high principles and, uh, uh, you guys really, um, you know, many out there

LARP about being, being founder friendly and kind of, uh, mission aligned, uh, you guys walk the walk. Uh, so thank you and, and Matt and the rest of the 1031 team, uh, for all your support, um, many more years of development, uh, you know, and building, uh, to come. and so thanks again and thanks uh for having me on the show as well well million it's an honor and a privilege to be walking the walk with you sir we're gonna win let's go peace and love freaks okay if you've made it this far i want to thank you for listening and ask you for a couple things can you subscribe on the platform that you're listening to maybe give us a rating and a review

that helps the show quite a bit whether you're listening on spotify apple or fountain speaking of fountain that is my favorite podcasting app if you go over to fountain you can subscribe to the show become a paid subscriber to support the show and receive these episodes ad free in a day early let's go find fountain or go to fountain.fm become a paid subscriber