We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC111: Nostr - Decentralized Social Media and Bitcoin w/ William Casarin (Bitcoin Podcast)

Episode Date: January 4, 2023

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN: 01:54 - So what is Nostr? 03:50 - It seems like the protocol is optimized around simplicity, is that it? 06:30 - What does this look like 5 years from now? 10:38 -... What other application might pop out of this? 16:19 - What are all these clients interfacing with the protocol? 26:11 - What concerns do you have about open speech on sexual, racial, or explicit things? 28:06 - How do you remove centralized servers with something like this? 33:45 - Can traditional social media companies benefit from using Nostr? 38:24 - What would someone's incentive be to run their own relay? 45:46 - How does this all tie into Bitcoin? Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. More information about Nostr. William Casarin's Nostr Account Pub Key: npub1xtscya34g58tk0z605fvr788k263gsu6cy9x0mhnm87echrgufzsevkk5s. William's Damus App webpage. William's Twitter. Astral.Ninja (for creating a Nostr Account). Verifying your Nostr Account: NostrVerified.com. NEW TO THE SHOW? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts.  SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Bluehost Fintool PrizePicks Vanta Onramp SimpleMining Fundrise TurboTax Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. On today's show, I have a person taking the world by storm, and that's Mr. William Casserin. For many years, we've heard the promise of a decentralized social media platform, but up until recently, there really hasn't been a project that has showed much promise. Well, in the past year, there's a new protocol called Noster that is being developed that lays the foundation for sharing encrypted messaging traffic across decentralized relay nodes. This protocol, which doesn't require or have any native token, crypto tokens that's linked to the protocol, is demonstrating an explosive growth rate in new users.
Starting point is 00:00:40 What's the advantage for something like this you might ask? Well, in traditional social media that we're accustomed to, you can be canceled or have your account deleted for having thoughts or opinions that differ from that of the centralized gatekeepers like you see in today's social media. Our guest, William Casserin, is currently building an application that interfaces with the nostrils. or protocol called Damus. On today's show, I talked to him about this new and exciting space and how the Bitcoin Lightning Network is offering an immediate and friction-free way for people to provide tips and financial incentives for people using the free and open decentralized social media network.
Starting point is 00:01:16 I think you guys are going to love this one, so sit tight and here's my chat with William. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the show. I'm here with William. William, I am thrilled to have you here. I'm really excited about this conversation.
Starting point is 00:01:50 Yeah, it's great to be here. It's the first time I haven't watched too many of your podcast, but yeah, I'm excited to be on and chat about Nostra. So this topic is incredible. I think we just need to start for everybody in our audience. I would imagine most are not familiar with what we're talking about. give them just a basic overview of what Nostra is. So Nostra is an idea that started from someone named Fiat Jaff. He was a Bitcoiner.
Starting point is 00:02:16 He is a bitcoiner in the Bitcoin community. And he was just trying to come up with a way to build a social network like Twitter, but make it decentralized so that it's not in control of a single party because we were starting to see the issues crop up around that recently. So he just came together with like the simple. It was just like a markdown document like, hey, how could we do this? And that's where it started. And I saw this technology a while back.
Starting point is 00:02:36 I'm just, hey, let's try to build the client and then started building on it. I've just been like blown away at how impressive it is and how simple it is. So for people that are hearing that, they, I think the use case is really obvious. Decentralized social media, you see both parties, political parties trying to gain control. I think you see a lot of large banks trying to control the boards of like Facebook and Twitter and trying to control the messaging. That's really what you're after, right? but doing it and practice is the difficult part.
Starting point is 00:03:07 Talk to us a little bit about why that's so hard to solve from just a technical standpoint, from a broad brush overview. So when you're trying to build a network that everyone in the world can connect to and communicate with each other, you naturally have centralizing effects just because to even pull that off,
Starting point is 00:03:24 you need some beefy servers, and those servers are run, those servers are run by someone. And the minute you try to make things more decentralized, typically the user experience gets very poor. These networks tend to be kind of, a little bit more complicated than a centralized solution like Twitter. So now we're just trying to figure out what's the best way to do this in a way that we can
Starting point is 00:03:39 scale it out to more and more people. So this is where Nostra comes in. We think we have a pretty good idea of how to do this with not just one person in control, but maybe like a small set of people. So it's like a little bit more decentralized. And it's a tough problem, but I think we actually might be able to crack it with this one. What's the foundation? Because my understanding is that you have an event.
Starting point is 00:03:59 And I think it's really important for people to understand that you're going to the protocol level and then we talk about the client level. So get into some of that and also talk more specifically about this idea of the event and the simplicity around the event in the protocol level. The way I like to describe it is if you're not familiar with internet protocols, they underlie a lot of the technology we use, like our web browser. It speaks to HTTP and TLS protocol, and that allows us to contact any server.
Starting point is 00:04:25 The browser knows how to fetch the page and render it and things like that. There's other protocols like email where we can run many different email clients, so like Gmail, Outlook, and they all can talk to each other, because they're using this underlying language. So this is all what a protocol is. It's just an underlying language for that computers can use to talk to each other. So what not sure is we're trying to, what's the language? What's the computer language for social media?
Starting point is 00:04:43 The basic idea that we're trying to go for here is instead of like we're a Twitter-like model where you're just sending a tweet to a single server, you just send that event or that note like you mentioned, you just send it to like any server you want. But they all kind of have the same, they understand the message that you're sending them. So they'll understand like, okay, this is a tweet that this person sent out and they save it to their server. and then other people who are also connected to those relays can just pull those messages. So instead of just getting it from one server, you're just now getting it from 10 servers.
Starting point is 00:05:08 So that kind of decentralizes the risk in terms of you being censored or you being like, your speech being controlled. But also you get the benefits of having like high performance servers and versus like some type of peer to peer model where we're all trying to get it from each other, which can be kind of bad for performance. It's a new type of protocol. I don't know that many protocols that like do it in this particular model, but for the use case of social media, it works really well. How are you able to make the size of the events small enough that if a person runs a relay or their own private server that it's just not, how do you truncate that and make it small but still carry the underlying message? There's all this blockchain craze that took off recently and this idea where you just collect everyone's transaction, everyone has a store, everyone's transaction.
Starting point is 00:05:50 This is not what Nostra is. Nostra is not a blockchain. It's not these like we're not trying to achieve global consensus. So if you want to just run a relay in your own house that just stores your messages and your messages for your friends, that's completely okay. You probably don't want to sync Twitter's database to your node at home because you'll probably your computer will catch fire. It's kind of specifically designed in a way that allows you to get the messages from the people you care about from your own nodes. And then you can ignore a lot of the other busier stuff. And so we can kind of start to talk about like different types of relays there might be in the future. I'm sort of thinking about this a lot now in terms of like what's a public relay versus like a private relay. But yeah, we're just starting to see the beginnings of this because right now they're just a bunch of public relays.
Starting point is 00:06:25 everyone's just kind of sending all their messages to, but it's starting to get kind of crazy with like a lot of crazy people on the relay. So we're trying to think about how we're going to scale this out and what that's going to look like. That's one of the biggest questions that I see is five years from now, scale-wise, how in the world can something like this scale when you talk about the incentives around people running their own? And you're using the term relay for people that might not be dialed in. Just think of that as like your own personal server or anybody can host as many of another person's persona that they want or as few as they want. But go ahead and explain a little bit of that scaling. So the way that I look at a relay, a relay in some sense is like you take the
Starting point is 00:07:05 Times Square. So Twitter and Elon is trying to, you know, Twitter is going to be the new public town square on the internet. That's fine, but it's in control of one person. So what a relay is that in my mind is it's democratizing the town square on the internet so that anyone can become a platform of speech that you can connect to. So they're kind of like free speech nodes on the internet. The way that I see it breaking down is I can see it. There's probably going to be like a public good or like a public relays, which are kind of crazy. There's going to be a lot of spam, but anyone can go there and get their message out. It might be a shelling point for meeting up and things like that. But maybe you don't want to have that crazy, hectic wild west
Starting point is 00:07:36 of communication. So maybe you'd pay some money to whitelist your pub key and get onto another like maybe more semi-private public relay where you can have a more civilized conversation. But the cool thing about clients is they can connect to both. I can connect to the public relay. I can connect to the more, you know, chill relay that's like less crazy. And then I can turn them on and off at will and just see different perspectives of the worldwide. conversation. Those are like the two modes I've been thinking about recently. And then you can have a node in your own house just to back up your own speech. Which is cool is that every time you send a speech into the internet, it's getting backed up onto your node or in your house.
Starting point is 00:08:07 And then if you ever want to broadcast your history of your speech, you can do that to the internet. And just backing it up has that benefit of no one can just delete your speech off the internet or take you off the internet. You can always broadcast it to new relays. So yeah, it has a lot of cool properties in that aspect. There's a lot of people, Bitcoiners specifically, that are already running their full nodes. And I've seen a lot of chatter with people saying, hey, I want my Umbrel full node, which is for people not familiar with Umbrol. It's basically a turnkey, really simple. You don't have to have a lot of technical chops to be able to run your own full node if you're running this Umbral version.
Starting point is 00:08:43 And so people are saying, I want an application on my Umbrel that I can just basically run my own relay, my own Noster Relay by clicking a couple buttons and it sets it up on the hardware that I already have that I'm running my umbrella. Is something like this possible? If it is possible, how many personas could you basically load or store on something like that for somebody who's just running maybe a terra of hard drive on their umbral? I actually do this. I don't have an umbril, but I have a machine on home that I connect to over like a VPN. So I have a private relay that I connect to. And the reason I do this is A to back up my speech just in case, I mean, I run a public relay and I'm like, I'm not worried about that going down, but it's just nice to have a local cache of my speech that I have backed up.
Starting point is 00:09:25 And I think that's a really good, just to start, a really good use case, just the backup idea. But you could also use that as a local cache of speech that you want from the internet. So for instance, let's say I have a bunch of people that I really want to make sure that I get their speech from the internet. So maybe I'll know that they're on certain public relays and I'm worried that those relays might go down. So I can sync their speech to my local node and only store the things that I care about. And it'll be really fast and it's on your local network and things like that. I see that is a really cool use case of having an umberl-like free speech node just for those use cases. But in terms of, like, you're syncing the entire public relays to like your local node is probably not, it's not reasonable.
Starting point is 00:10:00 There's no reason why you want to do that unless you really want to just see a public conversation and have it backed up locally. You could do it. It was just you need to have a lot more space in that sense. But to give you an idea of how much this takes the store, I've probably been running the biggest relay for a couple months now. And I'm only up to like four or five gigs. That's going to, because it's just small text. It's just text. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:10:18 Any mean, all that's in an event is just a content, some tags, a signature, and your pub key, which is just a hex pub key of your snor key. It's very small in terms of what you can store. Do you think that there's been enough functionality built into the events, these individual events of the Noster protocol? Or do you think that, I know there's, similar to Bitcoin, there's this submission process. If people think that there needs to be more functionality added into the protocol, there's kind of this community. Talk to us about that process and then talk to us about the additional functionality that you think might need to be added into it or removed from it. Yeah, so the interesting thing about Bitcoin is that, you know, it requires some form of
Starting point is 00:10:59 global consensus. So anytime you try to change the protocol, everyone kind of has to agree. If people don't agree to upgrade, then everything starts breaking and we don't want like Bitcoin knows it's breaking around the world because then people can't transact and it's not good. Bitcoin is very restricted in terms of like how you upgrade it and things like that. Whereas Nostra doesn't require a global consensus. So I didn't even talk about this yet, because I was specifically focusing on the social media use case. But Nostra isn't technically doesn't need to be a speech or social media protocol. It actually stands for notes and stuff transmitted over relays.
Starting point is 00:11:27 And those notes can be have content of any kind. So there's some people using it for like playing chess. You know, there's like chess games going over Nostra right now. And the way that works is that each note has like something called a kind and all it is is a number. Speech notes are just kind one. Your contact list is kind three. And there's direct messages and end-to-end encrypted direct messages, which is like kind four. But there's like an integer number of kinds you can do.
Starting point is 00:11:49 So if you have a custom application and you want to run it on Nostra, the protocol is flexible enough to do that. And there's nothing we can do to stop you because you can just run your own relay and put your own notes of your own kinds on. And that's fine. That's what it's meant for. So it's really extensible in terms of types of applications you can build on it. So that leads into like, okay, maybe there's going to be a substack for Nostra where you
Starting point is 00:12:07 can just, you don't even need to run a or even, yeah, so content publishing or publishing blogs. You don't even need to run a server. You can just publish it to the public relays. There's a lot of cool use cases that people are not even exploring yet. Wow. So I think you said kind four was encrypted messaging. When we set up this discussion, that's how I contacted you was over this encrypted messaging system. I'm curious if in your opinion, do you find that to be more protected from a privacy standpoint than something like Signal? So Signal is probably much more secure because they have like hardcore crypto people who are working on state of the art ratcheting technology for to make sure it's forward secret our encryption spec right now isn't
Starting point is 00:12:48 that good it was kind of just thrown together so there are some flaws with it so for instance if you ever leaked your key or i've ever leaked my key or some pot access to it they can see both of our conversations whereas that would be much harder to do on a signal because they have much better properties for that but there's no reason why we couldn't build something like signal on top of nostril because of the extensive sensibility so i have a bounty we'll get into that but i have a bounty, it's like if you want to implement a cool signal level spec on top of a Nostra, I'm happy to pay to get that going because I definitely want better secure comms as well. Going back to the discussion on the umbral, as far as people running their own full node,
Starting point is 00:13:22 let's say that there's an app that's built, a Nostra app that's integrated into it, and I want my node to basically monitor 100 different people that I personally follow very closely. from a storage standpoint, going back, you were talking about how small the storage space is. Do you think that for the typical person that wants to closely follow 100 people, that should be no problem, to basically input those addresses of those people? I think for most people, they won't even need to run their own node, right? So this is more already the power users. This protocol is set up so you don't need to run anything.
Starting point is 00:13:57 So it already has a somewhat advantage over Bitcoin in the sense that you don't really need to run your own node. Again, the protocol is designed that way, just so it's just that easy. And not only that, you don't need to run a node. You don't even need to have a phone number or an email address. You just generate a key and get going. So that is already huge compared to what most things you're used to online, where you need to like KIC yourself and things like that. But if you do want to run your own node and you do want to sync stuff locally,
Starting point is 00:14:18 yeah, it's super trivial. And even if it does get too big, it's not like a blockchain where you need to keep the whole history. You can just chop off the data. Because a lot of time, there's this thing on social networks where older data seems not that interesting or not as useful. The value of older data isn't that, Unless you're like going back and looking for old tweets, there might be a concept of like an archival relay and maybe more just like a real time relay that you don't really care about the older data. It's very flexible in that sense.
Starting point is 00:14:43 What if somebody, okay, so let's say I'm running my own relay and I wanted to be nefarious and say, well, we'll just take your feed as example. And let's say that I'm trying to misrepresent something that you're saying and I want to create an event that says the opposite of what maybe you said. And so then I'm propagating this event. that's a fake event. How do the clients, I know it has to do with you signing, basically signing that event, but if I was going to try to misrepresent something, how is that protected against? Walk people through that. So these messages are these just small JSON blobs. And so JSON is just like, you know, data format that's very simple text. The content, so the content, the tags and pretty much all the data on the note is signed
Starting point is 00:15:27 using something like very similar to a Bitcoin key. And it's called, that's just your nostril key. that signature is included in the message. And when you send it to a relay, the relay will actually check the signature. And it won't even store that message unless it's like a valid note from that person. So that's why that signature is really important because your client will say, yes, verify this is from this person. But there are some things that people can do like fishing like attacks.
Starting point is 00:15:49 Because there's no unique username on this protocol. Really the only thing unique is is your pub key, which is like a long key. You need some way to distinguish if a person is like, like how do you like people are not going to be memorizing people's pub keys. So we have a way of, the way that I do it in the Domus client is that if you're following the person, it'll show like an icon next to their name like, hey, this is someone you know. But if someone's trying to pretend to be someone else, it's very visible because it's from a different key. And there's other things we're doing as well, which is domain verification. So you can have like JB55 at jb55.com and it'll be very apparent on your profile.
Starting point is 00:16:19 So you know that that person actually is who they say they are. Amazing. Okay. Let's talk about the clients. For people that are non-technical listening to this, I'm going to provide what I think it is and then I want you to correct me and give us the actual definition. But so like people are familiar with Twitter. And so they like, they log into quote unquote Twitter. And that would be, let's just say that that's a client. Then you have Facebook. That might be another client that people
Starting point is 00:16:46 hear and recognize from like a brand standpoint. These are just interfaces to the Noster protocol that is all the messages people have created throughout their lifetimes. And so like you're developing a client right now, talk to us about this client, this software that you're developing that allows people to tap into this network of messages that are out there. Right now, since all the social media companies, they're not using any underlying protocol. Their protocol is simply their API to their centralized servers and it's usually very locked down and they don't interoperate.
Starting point is 00:17:19 If you send a tweet on Twitter, it's not going to show up on Facebook, right? It's just, it's not something that people expect because it just seems so ridiculous. But the minute you have an underlying protocol, sending a tweet and that showing up on Facebook would be a very reasonable thing. or even just retweeting a tweet from Facebook. I don't know if they have retweets. Whatever those things are called. It might show up on the Twitter side.
Starting point is 00:17:38 As long you have some common language, right? Yeah. This is kind of how it works right now. So I've written an iOS client called Domus. It doesn't do anything fancy. It doesn't connect to my servers. It just connects to relays. And then so the messages you see on that client are,
Starting point is 00:17:50 people could be from people could be posting from the web clients that I don't even write that I haven't written. It's just people have written. There's probably like 10 or 20 clients that people have written on Nostra. And people are all communicating. each other. Yeah, it's just, it enables this more flexibility in terms of what types of clients you want to use. Like, for instance, I know someone who runs a terminal client, and this might be really good for people who, for accessibility reasons, just being able to use a text, you know,
Starting point is 00:18:12 mode version of your Twitter client. Yeah, there's a lot more flexibility in terms of what the experiences you would want to have on Usher just by having that flexibility between the clients. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year, bringing
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Starting point is 00:22:32 I can tell you, so like I have my iPhone, I have the Domus app downloaded. It's D-A-M-U-S for people. It's in test flight right now. So if you want to download it onto your phone, you have to download test flight, and then you go to the Domus website and you can download the app right off the app store. And it works just like Twitter right there on my phone. It looks a lot like Twitter. The feel, the interface, everything is very much like Twitter.
Starting point is 00:22:59 And then I go to my computer and I go to astral. Ninja. And I signed in with my private keys and which that's a whole other thing for people. There's a safer way to do it. And we might get too technical through an app called Albi, which is what I would highly recommend people do if they're working off of their desktop computer. But for simplicity, I went to this. astral. ninja website, I logged into my account that I've been creating these effectively
Starting point is 00:23:30 tweets from my iPhone through the Damos app. And it's almost like what we were describing earlier where I was logged into Twitter on my phone and then I went to my computer and it was like I logged into Facebook and I'm seeing the same exact messaging. It's crazy. Yeah. And we all support like different features. Like I think Astral Ninja doesn't even have likes or anything. it causes a lot of confusion because when people are talking on the network, they're like, oh, this is broken. And then everyone's like, okay, what client are you talking about? Like, what's broken?
Starting point is 00:23:59 So there's a lot of like interrobability we still got to figure out. But for the most part, like if you're just sending that text messages, we can all kind of communicate with each other, which has been really cool. And it has this is going to be very underappreciate. I think it's underappreciated. The network effect that you have, like there's a reason why email is still like everywhere. It's because the network effect, like everyone has it. Everyone has servers and everyone has clients and we're just so used to it.
Starting point is 00:24:21 But imagine if, I don't know, just having it as a protocol is really helps it spread to a wider audience. Well, explain this to me. So we have an email protocol. Why couldn't we use that protocol for this type of activity? What's the differences? Yeah. So with email, there's not a concept of querying notes.
Starting point is 00:24:40 Because if you, let's say I wanted to like pull an email thread from somewhere, there's not a really a good way to do that. Maybe there might be a way to do it to hack it, but it wasn't really designed for that use case. it was more designed for sending these like long-worded letters and stuff between servers, whereas this is, we're trying to build it more for a Twitter-like experience. So maybe you could build Twitter over the email protocol, but that would be pretty crazy. Well, it seems like that protocol was designed for point to point where this is more designed for just broadcasting, right?
Starting point is 00:25:11 Yeah. Yeah, so you're just broadcasting a message to the public. And then people may or may not hear you, but depending on which relays are connected to. So it's very much different than, maybe it's more closer to the Usenet or whatever, the old school mail servers or something. Do you see the clients, so like you're doing the Damos app,
Starting point is 00:25:30 do you see clients specializing in certain benefits or restricting things in the future that gravitate? And does that potentially cause kind of a split in the network or these compartmentalized groups? I think we're going to see a lot, different things play out. There's going to be some clients that just are maximum interoperability and just want to work for all the different types of messages. There's some clients are just kind of, okay, well, they want to craft a more friendly user experience for their users, so maybe
Starting point is 00:26:00 they'll block all public messages unless you're verified on their platform. And that's okay. I think you might have them as a company Slack. You have an internal relay within your company, and you just use that for communications. And you can use all the standard clients to talk to your company Slack and it's not controlled by Slack and you control your own data. So you get a lot of flexibility for these use cases. I can see it playing out in many different ways. It's just very early and I've yet to see. It's really just public relays right now, so we'll see. So I don't think that Bitcoiners would have this concern, but I think people, other people might, where there's a bit of protection that you currently get with the centralized servers where you don't
Starting point is 00:26:38 have pedophiles, you don't have people doing racial slurs and this type of stuff because it's being monitored. With this, this is the Wild Wild West. I mean, you could literally go on there, say anything you want from a masked, no one would know your everything's anon unless you want to be known who you are. And so it opens up this free communication where people can hide behind. So like, how do you see that playing out? This can't be stopped. This protocol can't be stopped. So I think that that's out of the question. I'm curious if you would agree with that. But what are some of your thoughts on this? Again, I think it's just going to come down to, you know, there's going to be a Wild West part of the network of the public relays and just crazy people
Starting point is 00:27:17 shouting at each other. But even in that mode where you have the public Wild West, you can still build clients that only pull messages from your friends. Clients will have very strong filtering capabilities, and I suspect clients might even compete in terms of like creating the best algorithm for filtering a lot of this garbage. And this, again, should always be a client choice. We shouldn't, initially I was always like, oh, well, maybe relay should just be completely dumb and just never filter anything. And I'm still kind of along those lines. And I think that clients should provide the tools to filter everything that the people don't want to see. But it's hard to say. I totally imagine there's going to be a situation where you have like private relays that just filter all this stuff and have heavy
Starting point is 00:27:55 moderation. And people who are on the Fediverse right now, they kind of prefer that. Maybe there's a certain type of people who prefer heavy moderation and that's fine. And you can only connect to those relays. But even just today, just having the public relays and all this crazy stuff going on, just being able to just only see messages from your friends and friend to friends already filters out all of the nonsense. Again, there's so many different ways to deal with this spam and this network and just and I've been brainstorming like all the different ways. And I think it's going to be okay. As long as we have this underlying protocol that's just uncensurable, I think that's the most important part. So we can sort of build these type tools on top of it.
Starting point is 00:28:24 I can tell you from personal experience, using your app. So I go into the settings where it's just the people that I follow. I think I'm following like 100 people on the platform. And I mean, it's just pure signal. It's so nice because all the politics are not in there. It's just, it is awesome. You can see everybody building. And then I'll click on the global search. And I'm seeing, like the global conversation. And I mean, there's a lot of cesspool there. And I guess I'm kind of curious. I'm assuming you've had the same experience.
Starting point is 00:28:56 But from a spam standpoint, how do you start basically putting a cost to spam and bots and all this? I mean, you're seeing it on Twitter. It's a disaster of bots. So how does that work with Noster? So I've been thinking about this a lot. And I think there's a couple ways to do it. again, there's two kind of modes. There's this one mode where you may only want to talk to your friends,
Starting point is 00:29:20 and that's easy because you can only pull messages from your friends. That's just a query that says, only give me these messages from these pub keys, and you'll never see anything from anyone else. And that's fine, but if you want to have more of like an open, you don't know who wants to talk to you, you want to be able to accept messages from strangers.
Starting point is 00:29:33 Unfortunately, messages from strangers aren't always the nicest messages. I think there will probably be a mode, and I'm planning to do this in DMAs, where any message from a stranger that either shows up in your DMs or notifications is going to have a cost associated with it. I put together this spec on an ostrich called the proof of work spec that it's based on hash cache cache. It's basically identical to hash cache. It's just counting the number of zeros on the ID of the note. And then we have a special way to query number of leading zeros in the protocol.
Starting point is 00:29:59 So you can say, okay, if it's not from my friends, but I still want messages from random people, maybe, okay, you can send it to me, but it's going to, you've got to do some proof of work before I receive that message. And maybe we can put that as a label on your tweet that says, if you're a stranger, you want to send me a message, just know I won't get anything because I'm not going to query it, but if you want to try to send me a message, you got to run your CPU for like an hour. So I think that's kind of one cool way. I don't know how scalable that is, but it's kind of fun. Another way I've been thinking about it is this whole idea that Michael Saylor was talking about at one point is like the orange check. Imagine you go to some service provider
Starting point is 00:30:31 and you can just buy a badge. We're working on the badge specs. You can attach badges to your profile. It's kind of fun. Maybe you buy this orange check badge and your client recognizes those as you can use those despite spam. So if someone has that badge, okay, fine, you can, if you're a stranger, you can reply to my thread. Those are the two that I'm looking at in terms of getting messages. But yeah, there's other things as well, like just paid relay. So everyone who's on the relay is pays once to get on. Those are the things I've been thinking about right now. So for people that aren't familiar with Michael's idea, I would just describe it like this. And this is how Michael also describes it. And when he's trying to explain it to people is just,
Starting point is 00:31:06 if you go to a hotel and you check in, they're going to swipe your card for call it $100 or $200 and they're going to put a hold on the card so that if you would go into the hotel room and break the faucet or do whatever, cause damage to the room, that they've already taken some money from you that you can't claw back. When you think of like your Twitter or Noster or whatever and you're posting a tweet and somebody comes in there and is just wrecking havoc and is just a total idiot, they would have to post some type of collateral, some small amount. let's just say it's 25 cents to make a post. And if they're in there, you know, swearing at you or just, you know, whatever, they're a bad actor. You can basically take their 25 cents within a
Starting point is 00:31:52 certain period of time. Let's say that it's active for one hour or one day or whatever that they have to basically post this collateral. And you can take it if they're a bad actor. And if they're not a bad actor, then you don't do that because then you're going to get some type of, there would have to be some type of this person takes any amount of money that's posted to their feed. So there's like a star ranking or something that talks to your history of whether you're taking people's posts or you yourself or a bad actor on that policy. So that's the idea is just there's an economic consequence to being a bad actor. And so where I'm going with this, William, is you have, I saw this on Nostra. You said, none of this would be possible without the lightning. You believe
Starting point is 00:32:35 none of this would be possible without the Lightning now. Explain what you mean by that. Lightning enables a very fast point-to-point transactions without like dealing with like the legacy financial system. So this allows for really tight integrations with incentivizing relays to stay up because it costs money to run a relay. So we're going to need some ways to incentivize relays to run. If there was an option.
Starting point is 00:32:59 And so this originally came about because I'm starting to integrate lightning more and more into Domas. So right now you can post a lightning invoice in a tweet or in a post, and it will just like render a little cool widget. You can click pay. So people love that feature, but this is just the start of this where maybe there'll be a SAT button where you click it, and then you can just send SATs instantly to another person on the network. So I started thinking about like, what is it going to look like when you, anyone in the network can send SATs instantly to anyone else on the network and you have these network effects where people are doing this all the time. Well, maybe it would be cool if you just a portion of that and just send it to all
Starting point is 00:33:28 the relays you're connected to, to incentivize them to run, as well as to maybe even white, and white you list your key for some temporary amount of time. You imagine like, okay, you send me some stats, so I trust you for now. So I'm going to let you post my thing for the next day. And if you keep sending stats, so that is some sense and aspect of what you were referring to, of the Orange Check, where you're putting down collateral. You don't get it back. I mean, I guess the relay can send it back to you once you're done.
Starting point is 00:33:49 But I think that's one possible way to fight Sam. And I think it's really cool. And I think a lightning specifically enables that because it's just so fast and easy. And relays can put a little lightning invoice or an L&Ural on their relay, and your client can easily connect to it and send to it without any coordination, which is really important. Do you find traditional social media platforms being able to benefit from this protocol by incorporating it in some kind of way? I mean, it's all centralized for them today, but maybe they move a little bit towards decentralization
Starting point is 00:34:20 and it allows them to optimize their performance. Is that something that you think is possible? So this is already happening. Oh, really? Props to Bill at minds.com. because we had to call with them a couple months ago and with their team and we're like, how can we integrate Nostra in your platform? And they were so, because we talked about activity pub and the previous protocols they were looking at and they're like, oh, it's so complicated.
Starting point is 00:34:39 And I'm like, well, let's try it with Nostra. They were able to build a Nostra relay that you can connect to it. It's still kind of buggy, but we're still working on it. But if you connect to it, you get like this fire hose of events from their platform because they have a lot of users. And it allows you to, it uses this feature that they developed called Delegation. So they actually created a new spec so that if you go onto the platform and do a post, it can create events on behalf of a Nostra key that, anyway, so that's a bit more complicated, but it basically allows them to post events to Domas, and it just works. So Mines.com is a Nostra client that sends notes. And there's no reason why Twitter, for instance, could implement
Starting point is 00:35:11 Nostra. It's really a flexible protocol where you can, any large platform could in theory implement it. So it would be cool one day, hopefully one day Domus can connect to like Twitter. Would that save them on cost because they're not having the stores as much data on their own servers or like what would be the benefit for them or the incentive for them to do something like that? In some sense, the Nostra relay would just be the interface to their database. So they still store all the data. The benefit to them is they get access to the wider. If Nostra eventually takes off and everyone's using it, then your Slack channel communicate via DM to like Twitter or something. It's like they get the benefits of that network effect. And then
Starting point is 00:35:46 Twitter could just become the best Nostra client because it's a pretty good client right now. Like I love Twitter. I've been using it since like 2007. So I wish they would implement Nostra. But I think it would be technically kind of challenging just because they built all of their infrastructure around Twitter, but they could totally run a Nostra relay even without the Twitter client itself being a direct Nostra client. Other clients could still connect to Twitter. I don't know. It would be hard, but it's doable. And that's kind of cool that it's even possible. So we had mentioned earlier that you're designing this Damos client that connects into the Noster relay of all these messages. And this is on iPhone, iOS. The first question I saw on Twitter whenever I'm, I said I was going to be interviewing you is when, when, W.E.N. When Android. This is my number one question. And I'm like, oh, yeah, I'll do it tomorrow. I'll just put together a whole Android client. No, but I was working on one when, when things were much more chill and I had time to like tinker and like build multiple clients. But yeah, I have so many users on iOS now. It's just like, been just trying to put out fires over there. And I would love
Starting point is 00:36:48 to get back to the Android client. I'm just hoping with someone to just build one and then I can just use that. So I don't have to do it. I'm still waiting for that. There's a couple in progress, and I hope they'll be up to speed and up to future parody with Domas one day. But yeah, I would love to, but I don't know if I have time to do it. When do you think you're going to get out of test flight? I'm going to do it soon. I'm going to try to submit it today or tomorrow.
Starting point is 00:37:09 Oh, wow. Okay. Because we hit the beta limit. So we hit 10,000 users. We went from like 5,000 users to 10,000 users in like two days. I didn't even know there was like a beta limit on test flight. I was like, okay. I guess I should get releasing this app now.
Starting point is 00:37:22 That's a good sign. Yeah. Thanks to Jack. Ever since Jack started tweeting about it, it's just like everything went crazy. Biggest challenge you face right now on the Deimos app. I think the biggest challenge right now is getting the UX up to as par with what people are familiar with on Twitter. Because I have this real, okay, I'm not even an iOS developer. I just had an iPhone at the time and I just wanted an app for Nostra. The first time I've ever built an iOS app, so I have no idea what I'm doing.
Starting point is 00:37:50 So the UX is completely terrible. I'm not even a UX person. So I'm surprised that it's even usable, but I've had a lot of people who are helping me out and making it much better. So that's nice. Other than that, once I get, once I get released it to the public, my biggest concern is this, the spam issue. Because if people have a really bad experience, we have like Nazi propaganda, it's like flying the global feeds. It's like, that's going to be instantly probably banned from the app store to begin with. And so I'm going to need a way to filter that.
Starting point is 00:38:12 So I was thinking maybe just maybe there's a premium version where you can get an unpaid relay or something. But then again, we're already starting to move to like this privatized relays. But maybe it's inevitable. inevitable, I don't know. I'm just worried that people have a bad experience. They don't, because a lot of times we'll join an app thinking it's just going to be like another Twitter and everything's moderated for them. But reality, this is like, this is Wild West, right?
Starting point is 00:38:30 And I can't control what people see in some sense. Because if they connect to a relay, I'm like, I can't control what you see. It's just that's what you got from that relay. I mean, I can't stop that speech, right? That's my biggest concern right now is once it starts getting more popular. For a person who's hearing what you just said, they might think, oh, my God, this is going to be, it's just going to turn into a centralized thing. If the App Store can moderate these apps, these clients like this.
Starting point is 00:38:54 But I would maybe push back and say, I don't think that it is a centralizing force because anybody can go out and run their own relay and it's not hard to do. Well, I won't say it's not hard to do because I'm struggling. But I think in the future it's going to be very easy to do. And the cost, the barrier to entry to run your own small relay is going to be very minimal in the grand scheme of things for people to do it. And so I can still check into all these notes via web browser, right? That's not something that Apple controls.
Starting point is 00:39:27 I'm curious. So if somebody's posting content there, it's not your app that's creating that content, right? So how would you be responsible for the global messaging that's happening on the Nostra protocol? And how would you be held responsible for that? Or would you or would you not? And that's the thing. in some sense, it's just a web browser. Like, you know, is Chrome responsible for every crazy website that someone puts up?
Starting point is 00:39:52 It's like, that shouldn't be the case, right? So maybe like I have some responsibility for the bootstrap relay list that I initially. So there's some initial set of relays that you connect to. So maybe that would have to be locked down just because like, well, I'm providing that. I don't want that to be the case because I want this to be like an open hour. But it really depends. I have to look through the Apple terms of service. And because I don't, I don't want to get banned.
Starting point is 00:40:10 I really like the app I'm working on. But if I do get banned on, I'm actually not that worried. It just give me more time to focus on the Android version or something. It would be sad. but I can totally see Apple maybe getting upset about this app just because it's too much free speech or something. I don't know. Too much free speech. Holy moly.
Starting point is 00:40:24 Shut them down. Biggest reward that you've experienced building this client. I just love seeing people get excited. It kind of reminds me in the early days of IRC or like the old school internet protocols where people would just like join these crazy weird networks that people are communicating with each other freely. And just the amount of feedback I'm getting from people saying like this is revolutionary. I'm like this is like changing. It's blowing my mind. People are so excited.
Starting point is 00:40:47 I'm like, oh, that's cool. I'm just sending JSON messages over web sockets. I guess it's kind of cool. But in some sense, it does have these wide-reaching implications. And so for me, it's always just been like this toy thing. And this was always the same thing with Bitcoin as well. I just, I got it in like 2010, just playing. There's always just a toy to me.
Starting point is 00:41:02 I didn't know anything about monetary theory. The more I started to build it out, I'm like, holy crap, there actually does have some pretty, pretty big implications. And I think that's why people are excited. It's like they can see the future where, you know, free speech is not limited on the internet. and then that it's easy, it's easy to communicate with people without getting blocks. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
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Starting point is 00:44:48 I think if people just want to get involved, if you want to contribute, if you're a coder and you want to contribute, or if you're like a designer and you want to design, suggest improvements to the app, or if you want to write about it, if you're a writer and you want to spread the word, all these things are helpful. Because I think education is going to be a big part of this just because it's just a new thing and it's kind of confusing. So just be able to like communicate what it is and what it isn't.
Starting point is 00:45:10 It's not another like true social platform. It's not like, you know, this is a truly a different beast. You know, just learn about it, you know, write about it, like help out, contribute. It's like it's a very, it's an open source project. Everyone seems, everyone's very welcoming. So yeah, get involved. And that's it. I can't ask for more really.
Starting point is 00:45:28 I've seen some comments about Fetament being incorporated into this. And I'm not so sure that I fully. have wrapped my head around the implications of that. Can you first of all explain very generically Fetamint and then talk about how that fits in the Nostre? I actually don't know anything about Fetamint. So I am a Bitcoin dev and I work in Bitcoin Core and Core Lightning. I love lightning. I haven't had a lot of time to jump into like the eCash whole thing. So I couldn't give like a technical breakdown or even a high level breakdown. But more generally, what I was trying to say with that post was I really want Domas to be a Bitcoin only, I want like a Bitcoin only app
Starting point is 00:46:03 on top of Nostra where you can make it just everything related to Bitcoin and interacting with Bitcoin with your friends. I just want to make it easy as possible to do that within the app. So if there's some way to send eCash using Fetamint over Domus and maybe do another widget that like we do with the Bolt 11 widgets, I think that would be cool. Making it easier to do multi-sig stuff on Domus would be fun. Like imagine if you have a group DM chat and you all want to cooperatively sign a Bitcoin transaction or something, you can just paste your PSBTs in a chat and then it'll like build up this. It'll combine the PSBTs and whatnot to like have for a multi-sing transactions.
Starting point is 00:46:33 So anything that makes it easier to use Bitcoin inside this app, that's kind of what I want to focus on and want to make the best user experience for. Because I'm a Bitcoiner. I love a lot of the underlying protocols built by Bitcoiners. So leveraging a lot of that energy. And it's not to say Domit's like a Bitcoin-only app, but it's just right now we have a lot of Bitcoin users, and I want to support them.
Starting point is 00:46:51 Well, when we look at Bitcoin Lightning and we see the immediate settlement and we see the fees, which are, for all intents of purposes, non-existent, it almost seems like that's just the natural thing to be used for something like this. When you look at these other things that are quote unquote blockchains, even though we kind of smart when we say that, from a fee standpoint, I just don't know how any of that would even work as seamlessly as lightning would on this. Would you agree with that? And I'm assuming that's where you see the future going based on how you're working your
Starting point is 00:47:23 clients. Yeah. So it's interesting because Nostra doesn't really care about what you use it with. right. Nasha has nothing to do with Bitcoin or Lightning. I just think lightning is great. And the way to show that is great is to maybe integrate it into a social network. So that's what I'm trying to do with Domas. But there's no reason why you couldn't create like a Monero client and all people who love Monero, they want to use Monaro within the app and you have little tip buttons for Monaro. Like, sure, you can do that. So you can totally maybe see in the future where there's clients that have
Starting point is 00:47:50 all these different tokens and people can use them in any way they want. But we can still all interoperate and I don't have to like see a Monero tip button in my client. Lightning makes so much sense, It's just the instant settlement and the protocol is decent. There's still some issues with lighting in terms of liquidity and stuff, but I'm hoping maybe this network will uncover some of those issues and improve liquidity just from people trying to pay each other, right? People are familiar with Mastodon as a former free speech platform that can't be shut down by any central entity.
Starting point is 00:48:20 Why is this different than Mastodon or other attempts at doing this in a decentralized way? So this is a really good question because, you know, I spent probably two years on Activity Pub or Massadon or whatever. Macedon is a client for activity pubs, activity pubs protocol. And when it ended up happening, I noticed there were some severe flaws, some very bad flaws with Massadon, or at least just the way that the federation on that protocol is set up. So typically, your typical experience when you join this platform is like you'll join an instance that's called. So it might be Massadon.com. And then you'll get an account. You have all your followers set up.
Starting point is 00:48:54 But that server is run by a single admin, and they have sole discretion to, like, ban you at any point for anything you say. And then once they do that, there's no way you have to start over. You have to go to another instance. Hopefully they're already like psychologically scarc and you're, I noticed I was like censoring myself just because I'm like, hopefully I don't say anything bad. And so the admin bans me have to start over.
Starting point is 00:49:14 Even on the Bitcoin instance, like, I know, I know NVK is cool and he runs a Bitcoin hackers instance. I'm like, if I say something bad about cold card, maybe I'll get banned. So like, whenever you have one person in control of like of a social graph, It gets really bad. So I think that's the biggest, and it's a huge flaw with Massadon. And that's why I eventually, I was trying to write it in an activity pub node and clients and stuff.
Starting point is 00:49:32 I'm like, I give up. This is just not going to work. And that's when I started focusing on Nostra. So I'm like, okay, this Nostrad solves a problem because your contact list and your social graph, you control it. You can put it back it up on your note and you can broadcast it anywhere. And you can't be, you know, you don't have to start over every time, right? I mean, I just look at the amount of time I've spent on Twitter in the past decade.
Starting point is 00:49:51 And if I got banned and they just deletened. deleted all that history of those interactions. I mean, it's just, it's a massive blow to people that are interacting in a public kind of way. And so your point there, as far as like admins controlling it, I mean,
Starting point is 00:50:07 it's just, this needs to happen. Well, yeah, in some sense, masson is worse than Twitter because, like, I thought I was getting,
Starting point is 00:50:14 I got banned from like three instances in this ban of like, I'm not even a controversial person. I just like, I said Bitcoin once and like, it's so full of like people on the left. I just got banned for just saying Bitcoin. I'm like, all right,
Starting point is 00:50:23 this is crazy. So there's another attempt to decentralize social media with Blue Sky. What are the differences between Nostr and Blue Sky? A briefly looked at Blue Sky. It seems like what they're trying to do is they're trying to build a specifically a social media protocol. And in some sense, that's what we're doing on Nostra, but Nostra's a bit more general. And they're trying to design it for scale.
Starting point is 00:50:47 So you have like really big nodes and then it's really easy to set up these big nodes and they're very performant and things like that. And I think that's actually a really interesting way to do it. And I think that we should totally explore that. And maybe one day, Nostra can interact with those types of nodes. So I think it's not a waste of time as much as I'm like a Nostra maximus. But, yeah, it's really just subtle differences in terms of how data is communicated and types of technology they use. They're very similar.
Starting point is 00:51:12 And this is the cool thing about there's so many decentralized protocols now. We can kind of just battle them against each other. So I love to see, like, I've been getting ideas from other protocols like, hey, that's a good idea. We should implement caching at this part of Nostra. So I think the competition is good, and I think that's, yeah. One of the things that I've noticed with using it is it's a little bit slow to load, but I don't have my own personal relay set up yet. If I had my own relay set up, would that solve that?
Starting point is 00:51:37 Or how do we get kind of the speed that we're accustomed to with Twitter through Noster? The relay that I'm running is written by this one guy who just built it in his spare time. And there's not even that, like, we've been going back and forth and trying to optimize some basic stuff. but there's almost been no performance optimization done on the relay side. I was working on something called, it doesn't have a name, but it was just a caching relay so they can sit in front of your relay that doesn't have to do the full query, but can return results. We don't even have basic caching yet on the relay side.
Starting point is 00:52:07 So anytime you experience slowness is just because everyone is querying everything at the same time. And we just haven't done that part of performance tuning, but these things will come with time. And for now, it's just adding more relays kind of spreads out the load and seems to help a little bit. But yeah, we definitely need to improve performance on the relay side. Would you have caches on the client side as well, which would help improve the speed? Yeah, there's, I mean, Domas doesn't do this, but it could just like cash more things. I don't like the idea of storing like a huge historical cache in Damos because it'll start going to be bloated.
Starting point is 00:52:38 Imagine all the data has to store from like, there's no reason why I couldn't store like stuff that you're tweeting in real time. It doesn't really help in the cases when you're trying to pull an old thread because the client definitely probably wouldn't have that. And that's the case where it seems to be the slowest because we don't have the relay caches yet. But hopefully in time, I hope we can get it more performance. In general, what do you think brings the user migration to Noster? Is it just the freest and most open way to communicate is going to win in the long run? Or like, what's your thoughts around that? I think just because it made it so easy, you know, you don't have to, you know, create an account.
Starting point is 00:53:13 You have to add your phone number. It's just so easy to onboard people onto the platform. And it's just, they just get it instantly. I think that's a huge one. Obviously, Jack talking about it, Jack Dorsey, just been tweeting about it. So that was a huge boost. But it was cool just to see so many people get in and that it was somewhat stable and it didn't just crash right away. So people just seeing that it works and is somewhat stable, they're starting to be like, hey, this might actually work.
Starting point is 00:53:34 And like that was something I always want to do with the Domus client. It's like prove this that it could actually work. It's still somewhat as a prototype. Is this going to work at scale? So we're up to 10,000 users now. I think I see like 2,000 or so people connected to my server at any given time. Who knows what the next stage of scaling is? let's see you can get this up to like 30,000, 100,000.
Starting point is 00:53:52 Yeah, we're still early, but... William, I can't believe how active Jack is. Jack Dorsey is on the platform right now. I mean, he is very active. He's called you. What are some of your thoughts around Jack being so active on it? I think he got it so quickly just because this is what he, in some sense, wanted Twitter to be. I'm guessing it's like nostalgic for him because it probably reminds him.
Starting point is 00:54:14 And he tweeted about this. This reminds him of Twitter sub 5,000 users, but better. Right when he said that, my servers went down. basically. That costs so much FOMO when he said that. But yeah, I think Jack just, he sees the potential of the protocol and he just wants to support that. Even though he's also supporting the competing protocol
Starting point is 00:54:29 Blue Sky, right? So he has the same idea. Like, let's see which best protocol win. And so it's cool to have this support and to see how, we call him the Walmart like reader guy because he's always there. He's like, hey, he just sends this emoji to everyone. So it's funny. He's been
Starting point is 00:54:45 very active user on the network, which has been awesome to see and hang out with them. Last question is just your Bitcoin story. I think I just saw it on Hacker News in late 2010, and I just like just jumped on and started playing with it, jumped in the IRC channel and just like chat. I was chatting with some of the people at the time. Someone was named Sipa.
Starting point is 00:55:03 I didn't know who he was. Turns out he's like now a major cord developer. So he got me into the system really early. Yeah. And then, you know, I've always used it. I worked at a record label and we were selling our albums in 2013, a record label called Monster Cat.
Starting point is 00:55:16 So that was kind of cool to see if we can actually start selling stuff on this network. But yeah, it was always just kind of this fun protocol. It's kind of like Nostra. It was just a fun thing to play with. I wasn't like super into Monterey theory or like, you know, some of the stuff I know now, but the community has really like educated me on all that stuff afterwards. But it was just, it's just been a while to see it just see it grow from the start. So William, I know you're active on Noster for sure.
Starting point is 00:55:39 You're definitely active on Twitter as well. Give people a handoff. I'm assuming you're going to get some interest from this discussion of how people can help out. tell them where they can find you. And anything else you want to highlight, we'll have links in the show notes to all this stuff so that people can quickly access you. But give them a handoff. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:55:59 So for Nostra, I highly recommend checking out our GitHub. It's GitHub.com slash Nostra dash protocol slash Nostra, I think. And then there'll be a link there to our telegram. We probably have like 4,000 or something people in there by now. So it's a huge group of people who are just, you can ask questions there. They'll help you get you onboarded. You can find me on. I'm not going to announce my whole pub key.
Starting point is 00:56:18 I don't know if I could say. But I'm sure you'll find me talking on there. If you go to the global feed, you'll find me. And just my Twitter is JB555. My website, jb55.com. So, yeah. Fantastic. We'll have links to all that in the show notes.
Starting point is 00:56:30 I know you are an extremely busy guy right now. So taking time out to have this conversation for a full hour, I really appreciate that. And I know all the listeners are going to appreciate it as well. So thank you for your time. This has been awesome. Thank you so much for having me. So thanks. All right, guys.
Starting point is 00:56:47 I hope you enjoyed this one. I know I personally learned a ton. Just a note to the listeners, if you're wanting to try this noster social network out, one of the many ways you can do it and to open an account is through the Damos app, which we were talking a lot about during this episode, which is being built on Apple's iOS. But the Damos app is still in test flight and isn't officially released to the public yet. Interestingly enough, Apple will only allow 10,000 people to, to use a test flight application and Will is still stuck in the test flight status with Apple.
Starting point is 00:57:26 And so it's maxed out at the 10,000 users. With that said, since this is a decentralized social media protocol that doesn't have any centralized servers, you can still create an account and start using it by going to a different software client. One of the more popular software clients that are out there is just go to a web browser and type in astral. Ninja, hit enter, and it'll take you to an interface that you can create this social media account from. And you can start interacting on Nostr right now, and you'd be amazed at how many bitcoiners you're going to find on this social media site and how much it feels like Twitter. I'll be sure to have a link in the show notes to that astral.
Starting point is 00:58:11 ninja. One other thing. So through all of this, you have a lack of verification to know whether a person is real or whether there's robots. I secured a website called nosterverified.com. And similar to like Twitter's verification process, anybody can, because you're dealing with a decentralized protocol here, anybody can verify themselves through their own website.
Starting point is 00:58:39 And so this verification process, I thought maybe might be something that people need. So anyway, you can go to it. It doesn't cost anything. You just go to nosterverified.com and you can verify your Noster account by just filling out your pub key and all this stuff that you're going to get whenever you open an account. So pretty straightforward, easy. You don't have to even enter an email address or anything like that. It's really to try to help reduce spam and the bots. which I know anybody who's on Twitter has a deep appreciation for getting rid of that.
Starting point is 00:59:14 And I think if people go onto the platform and check it out, I think you're going to be really surprised at how there's just a total lack of all of that happening over there right now. So anyway, I really enjoyed this chat and thanks for tuning in. And I'll catch you guys next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions, consult a professional.
Starting point is 00:59:42 This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

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