Welcome to the Free Cities podcast. My name is Timothy Allen and this is the official podcast
of the Free Cities Foundation.
Hello and welcome to this episode number 147 of the Free Cities podcast.
Yes, hello, I'm back from Serbia.
It was an incredibly interesting trip, actually, somewhat surreal at times as well.
Have you ever spent three hours in a taxi with two flat earthers?
Like you literally can't get away?
Well, I have now.
And to be honest, it was actually quite fascinating. You know me, I'm an armchair psychologist, so ideologies like that really interest me.
And until that point, I had actually never come across someone who believed in that stuff in person.
Anyway, I won't divulge here. Go and have a look online if you want to test your own theory on the shape of the earth.
yes episode 147 we're at now great harsh ad number loved by british snooker fans as well
if you don't know the connection there look it up welcome indeed to this episode which is
as always greatly supported by our wonderful partner veritas villages veritas villages are
off-grid energy self-sufficient luxury communities in latin america designed specifically for freedom
lovers bitcoin is accepted at all villages including for the purchase of property you know
where to go to find out more but i'll give it to you anyway www.ecovillages.life forward slash free
cities everything's in the show notes as always and if you want to meet the guys from veritas
villages in person patrick hibbert and others he's the creator of veritas villages will be speaking
at this year's Free Cities Conference in Prague 31st of October to the 2nd of November 2025. It's
coming up soon. The Free Cities Conference really is one of the highlights of my year.
Prague's also a very beautiful place to spend a few days in early winter too, especially if you
can take your loved one with you. It's very romantic. If you're in this space or indeed if
you want to be in this space then this is the gathering for you just ask anyone who's ever
attended before and i will see you there right today's guest he's a developer in the privacy
space he's also a climber more of that in the podcast uh there's going to be some quite important
alpha here for you if like me you're into privacy but you don't necessarily know what makes one
protocol better than the other. Jeff G develops on Noster, which you should know about already.
If you don't, check the show notes for some links. And he's currently responsible for creating
what is its most secure messaging layer to date, something that will become incredibly important
in the not too distant future if we continue along the same centralizing trajectory that we
currently see in so many countries around the world. Here's an AI breakdown for the curious
amongst you. The discussion ranges from AI tools and privacy concerns to the evolution of secure
messaging where Jeff introduces his project White Noise and its use of message layer security,
MLS. One to watch that is on Nostra. Along the way they explore the limits of existing platforms
like WhatsApp and Signal, the challenges of metadata privacy and practical defences
against sophisticated threats. The conversation broadens into Bitcoin, eCash and mesh networks
and wraps with reflections on teaching digital responsibility, the trade-offs between privacy
and convenience and the promise of open source decentralized technologies to shape a freer
internet if this sounds too technical for you please don't stop here give it a go i ask all
the normie questions this stuff is really important to wrap your head around it's easy to predict
what's coming in the future and as a sovereign individual you must take responsibility for your
and your family's privacy it's up to you to be the one who gets everyone on board with this stuff
there's a lot of pressure around the world right now to give up privacy and as far as i'm concerned
the people who advocate for that are not on the right side of history right some thank yous this
week before we go to my new subscribers and you know what quite astonishingly the free cities
podcast got to number three in the top 40 shows on fountain this week and our latest bonus episode
with Gigi and episode 144 with Leon Wancombe, which has been doing very well, have both been
hovering in the charts around seventh place on the top 40 of episodes two. So many thanks to you
for choosing to listen. It's great. We're currently we've dropped down to ninth in the top 40 of shows,
but really for a good week, we were hovering around the top. So many thanks to you in particular,
shadrach silas thornbrook set in stone by the way you're this guy's a real baller he's he's streaming
200 sats per minute when he's listening to your show so set the stone thank you very much indeed
tim a n t chris albanese uh there's a private end pub there one k j q e bullish mike matthias
cousin Vinny you know who you are many thanks I appreciate you I appreciate your continuing
subscriptions they really do make a difference to me right let's get on with this time to learn
how to become your very best private sovereign individual as you sit back relax and enjoy my
conversation with Jeff G
now um yeah i don't have a start and a finish so we're already rolling cool um i've got to
recount a little story for you because you're you're a techie person this i had a catastrophic
hard drive failure yesterday oh yeah oh doesn't happen very often these days and yeah it was a
spinning disc one okay so probably it does let's turn that off sorry let's get rid of all my in it
let's turn that off and um i've been i've been in the media years so i back everything up yeah
and luckily i had backed this i backed this up because it was all the recordings i've done over
the last seven days yeah but i wasn't as on it as normal so there was an absolute there was a gap
there was yeah there was so i didn't lose any data but what i did discover is i've lost the complete
back catalog of my whole podcast every single file including all the templates for the video
files and all this stuff right and it's not bothering me yet too much but because i can
recreate all those what i haven't lost is anything that's not recreatable which is good
but what the reason i'm telling you is because this time i went to chat gpt and i've i feel like
i've made a friend with chat gpt for the first time this guy or girl or whoever it is and i i
started using venice i use venice.ai yeah yeah but it was it was and it wasn't getting what i
wanted i went to chat gpt and all of a sudden almost the first thing it says was we're cool
you're in my hands now it's really weird that is weird and and it's been it's guided me through
this process so i i've got five terminals open i'm i'm putting all this code in and every time
i put something in i'm telling jettgpt what comes out and it's saying great we're on it it's
happening it's really you're going to get this stuff back don't worry and now i've got a probably
a 15 to 16 hour process running so i ran disc disc util yeah yeah like a dis recovery thing yeah
Yeah. Well, it's the one, it's a free open source one.
Yeah.
And it good And it even saying update me every hour and I tell you how long it going to be whether I think the drive good or not after one hour And it like wow you know that is really new and amazing and different but what crazy is like I said thank you a while ago I
instantly I and I was like hold a minute dude you're falling down yes the wrong rabbit hole
yeah you're not this is not a person this is not a thing but compared to Venice which was like
a computer talking to me yes chat gbt was really starting to sort of talk at it with me and stuff
yeah the crazy thing about the models is that especially the really frontier models you know
the you know chat gbt 5 or claude 4 um i actually prefer claude over chat gbt i mean especially in
the coding domain i think claude's way better how do i how do i access claude though if i wanted to
you just go to i think it's called.com or anthropic or claude are there places like you
know i use venice just because i'm i don't like putting all my if it's code i don't mind giving
it to chat but if it's like talking about my family or something i don't want i mean all of
those frontier models are running on you know giant data centers in the cloud and so anything
you give the hosted providers they have and yeah they say like private mode like don't store my
stuff but you know they can use venice says though that it's venice it's encrypting it from
your so you're doing it all locally and then when it sends it is encrypting yes exactly so there's
some providers like venice like maple ai which is the you know former mutiny guys um you know those
do things a bit differently but the major providers which are the ones that have the best models
are the ones that are a little bit less you know privacy oriented well i'm one i'm one of those
people that thinks that the dystopian ai future is as likely as the utopian one so i don't want it
And I don't want it to be involved deeply in my personal life because it will be able to annihilate me.
And really, I mean, the local models are actually getting, you know, the open source models that you can install locally and run on a laptop and run on a laptop in a way that's not completely terrible.
Like you're not going to have to wait 20 seconds for every response.
They're actually getting pretty good.
And I have a feeling that we're going to get to a point pretty soon where, you know, the amount that we can both spend and get out of, you know, each of the next generation frontier models, it's going to be like iPhones.
They're just going to kind of be the same pretty much.
And so at that point, I think a lot of the open source is going to catch up, you know, in short order.
And we'll all be able to run, you know, very, very compelling, very powerful models locally on our computers and have perfect privacy.
Perfect. Right. I'm glad to hear that.
At least I hope. That's my hope.
The funny thing is, though, because of my history of using AI, while I was doing all that stuff, I was very nervous because it's hallucinated many times with me.
And it was saying, right, now we're going to wipe that drive because I went out yesterday and I bought a whole new five terapyte drive.
So I'm copying what's there onto there before I do anything.
It's going to take like 24 hours or something ridiculous.
But it's saying now I'm doing this and this and this.
And I'm thinking, dude, is it hallucinating?
It might just be about to wipe my good drive.
Yes.
You know, like, so I'm still not there with them.
The way I used to check AIs in the past was already ask them about myself.
Because I've lived two very distinct lives.
I had a media career.
And then I have a kind of like Bitcoin and libertarian bit.
And most places have never actually connected the two.
JTBG now does.
So it's worked out that that's the same me.
because they're very different worlds but it still hallucinates like there's a couple of books that i
haven't written they're just made up completely made up out of nothing they don't even exist as
real books right this is what it says about you because you tell me whether it's hallucinating
okay i asked it who's jeff g it's like uh full-time nostor developer supported by open sats
focusing on building open decentralized tools for the nostor ecosystem that's all correct okay
creator founder of white noise correct still correct i know that one a project aimed at
bringing messaging layer security mls capabilities to nostra including support for end-to-end
encryption encrypted direct messages and private groups okay your contributions white noise
nostra.how you've done nostra talks podcasts featured in how to monetize your nostra apps
hosts oh you host a pod as well thank god for nostor uh i don't host that that's actually a
friend of mine's i've been on that podcast all right i've been oh it says okay it says hosts
episodes there see it's hallucinating yeah okay summary jeff jeff g is a core figure in the nostor
ecosystem leading privacy focused development improving the onboarding experience via nostor.how
and actively educating and shaping the community through podcasts and talks it's fairly accurate i
guess is that good yeah yeah fairly accurate i'm glad it didn't come out with like something in the
deep past where you're like whoa how did it know that but well yeah have you got is have you got a
different past like a lot of people who work in this kind of space i mean everybody comes from
doing something before unless they're 20 years old at this point so i think uh yeah my past is all
startups uh i've been working in tech startups since kind of 2011 12 something like that anything
i might have heard of anything interesting or what kind of stuff um i worked at a company the first
startup i ever joined actually is a company called intercom which is a fairly big one now uh they are
um you know the little chat bubble thing that comes up you know pops up at the bottom of your
screen little circle and you tap it and it opens up a window they actually invented that oh really
and then everybody took it but they're still around and they're still doing you know great
business ask me a question then because i've often wondered this when you're having a chat
conversation with a company even if it's a real person is it you know when it waits and it shows
you someone is typing yeah is it doing that to make you feel more relaxed it depends on the
company uh i know with intercoms it's real uh it is a real typing indicator yeah yeah i mean i think
that's the thing it's always with those things and intercom has been really at the forefront of this
and they're probably the best customer support ai in the world at this point um because they just
understand more about human behavior and what humans actually want to do on both sides of the
table you know like it's not nice for a customer support person to sit there and just blindly
answer the same stupid question all day every day um it's a horrible use of humanity so like
perfect use of ai but there's every now and then you want a person to step in and be like okay i
got you like this is going to be a really weird one but like we can navigate this together and
we can sort it out so a lot of what they say to you is generated automatically like tons at this
point like most companies if they are not solving 50 to 70 percent of customer requests using
something automated their test even if you think you're talking to a real person i mean it doesn't
matter i'm thinking of amazon there's the most common one i go on and it's always it's often
someone in india i think because there's a lot of indian names but there's a there's a couple of
answers you get a lot i'm sorry to hear that let me see if i can that's obviously uh someone sending
a message to calm you down right because basically it's going to take longer and if they just stay
completely silent you get annoyed yeah i mean but think about this uh they're programmed to say that
whether they're a human or they're an or they're an ai right they went through a training that gave
them a script that told them to do certain things in certain cases so either way they've been
programmed to do the thing um would you rather have that response in a sub-second or have somebody
be able to read all of the documentation instantaneously and give you the right answer
without having to go look i would much rather that so like i'd rather have an ai for most stuff that
I want to deal with with the company. It's probably a soundboard as well, isn't it? Sorry to hear you.
Yeah, exactly. I don't know. Radio shows like bang, bang.
Yeah, that's interesting. And what other things have you done then just so that I can get an idea?
I mean, it's kind of been across the board. I went to school actually for finance in Spanish. I didn't
do anything computer science related. To be honest, I kind of knew I wanted to do computer science,
didn't get into the program originally, and then got distracted with climbing for a bunch of years.
And then kind of came back around to it on my own later.
Is that anything to do with, am I allowed to say where you live?
Yeah.
Well, is that anything to do with where you live in Italy?
Because there's some good mountains there.
Well, the climbing does, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We live basically where we live in Italy for the mountains.
Really?
Yeah, yeah.
And you say we, it sounds like you're, whoever else is there.
Yeah, me and the family.
You're all into climbing.
Yes.
My wife and I actually met climbing years ago.
Have you done any pretty epic things?
What's the most epic thing you've ever done?
My wife and I met in Yosemite.
And I've spent a couple of years living in Yosemite Valley climbing.
So El Cap, half down.
Have you done El Cap?
Yeah, a bunch of times by a bunch of different routes.
You're real.
Yeah, it's really fun.
It was like such a good time.
Oh, tell me about that.
I love, I'm fascinated by climbing.
I've never climbed in the most extreme way.
I've hiked a lot of mountains.
I've been up to 6,500 meters and lived in the Himalayas for a long time.
And I've climbed Mongolia's tallest mountain, which is one of the really remote places.
with ice picks and stuff like that but i've never done oh shit yeah technical climbs sleeping on
right you know what my favorite film of all time is meru have you seen it was so good yeah that actually i feel like jimmy chin like sort of solidified his you know career on that one because that film was so good But what amazing about that film is apart from the fact the story amazing the timeline amazing because it a long timeline as well
And the whole, there are so many little quirky things to it.
And the history of that mountain, like, the whole thing is really cool.
But what's amazing is I think that film taps into the essence of how insane it is when you climb things like that.
And living vertically is a thing.
But no, not even that.
It's like I think my theory, see, on climbers who go to that extreme is they are trying to access a certain feeling.
Right.
and the only way they can do it is literally live on the side of a mountain for two weeks
freeze their feet and fingers off and when they get to that top and you see this in mirror there's
just kind of like there's like no nice one dude you know and and that's it yep that's it there's
nothing to it and that whole thing and and i get too fun is what i call it you know type two so
there's type one fun where it's fun while you're doing it and fun when you think back on it later
you're like that's just enjoyment right like normal things that people think of as fun
type two fun is mostly suffering while you're doing it and when you look back on it somehow
your memory has magically transformed it into something very lovely and amazing and something
you really love do you get scared on like el cap for example oh yeah for every i mean if anyone
doesn't know el cap is is it the the tallest flat face in the world it's not the tallest flat face
in the world there's a few others that are bigger but i mean it's one of them and i think it's i
mean it's a thousand meters um in its tallest section a kilometer it's a kilometer tall and
And what is amazing about it is, you know, it's 10 minutes from the side of the road.
Like you literally drive into the valley, you park your car in El Cap Meadow, you walk 10 minutes in flip flops and you put your hands on a kilometer tall wall.
And the wall goes, it's like a wave.
It's lower than vertical for the first half.
And then it goes vertical and then it's over vertical.
You know, it's overhanging for the top half.
So when you look up, it's like literally standing under a kilometer tall wave of granite.
And it is the most beautiful face in the world.
god and it's two or three days normally to get up it it depends on the route um so if it's easier
routes you can certainly do them faster than that you know lots of people have done you know the
nose which is kind of the standard route right up the front of you know right in the middle of the
wall um they've done it in a couple of hours uh you know super super strong folks like you know
alex hondold and others um most normal humans would take you know two three days to do the nose
but as soon as you start to go into harder territory where the climbing is you know more
strung out much more difficult and again most people are actually doing lcap with artificial
climbing aid climbing which is instead of using just your hands and feet you're putting gear into
the wall and you're actually hanging on the gear and standing up in these little ladders to reach
up and put some more gear in so it's that's a slow process you know it's vertical engineering
you're carrying a ton of gear you have to carry all your water with you you know and it just takes
time so how do you go to the loo just out of interest i've never well i mean do you literally
just let it go into the wind but uh number two you've got to bring you you can't just oh you
can't you know no it's totally illegal in lcap you'd kill someone right like imagine being killed
by falling shit depends how much you ate i suppose right if you had a big meal yeah you bring a very
specific piece of tech called a uh poop tube and it's a piece of pvc pipe with caps on both ends
and a you know runner around the end of it and you've got to bag everything and put it in and
take it with you yeah so if you can you probably try not to because that is a right i mean it's
actually not a big deal like once you get used to all the systems it's it's surprisingly
straightforward to do pretty much everything um and you'll never have a better night's sleep than
you do in a portal edge and i mean mostly just because you're absolutely exhausted yeah you lie
down and you're like oh god i'm done have you had any scares in your climbing career i mean nothing
nothing that I would say like was really actually very very close to you know ending my life I've
definitely had a lot of scares I've definitely a lot of falls that scared the crap out of me
I've definitely been in situations where I was like two or three things go bad here and we're
in a really bad situation but I think we're going to be okay but that was mostly around exposure to
be honest and to be honest most of the people that die on El Cap die of exposure because they go up
in a t-shirt, you know, there's a storm that comes in, it dumps a bunch of snow on them,
and then they can't get out. So it's exposure that kills most people, not the actual fall,
or, you know, not the actual climbing. I mean, rockfall is the other thing that I worry about.
And I think that's the thing I worry about more now, also given where we live, just because we're
in the Alps and, you know, big mountains fall down. In a place like Yosemite, you've got glacial
granite that has been there, you know, forever. And yes, there's rockfall, but the routes are so
well traveled that most of the loose stuff has been knocked off um and so it's a little bit safer
in that have you been up the matterhorn i've not been up the matterhorn i've been i've climbed a
bunch in chamonix um which is just around the corner from the matterhorn i've skied on one
side of the matterhorn but i've never climbed it but that doesn't that's not a problem you look at
the matterhorn you think good fun you don't think yeah yeah it would be a pretty straightforward i
mean it's a really well trodden route it's kind of an alpine slog there's a little bit of kind of
scrambly stuff with an ice axe but i don't think it would be anything i couldn't do it anymore i'll
be honest as for some reason as i've grown older i've i've got vertigo and um even when i was
climbing the one in mongolia that was what four or four odd years ago um it was ice axes and but
it wasn't that it was probably that it wasn't that and i i didn't look down in fact we had a we had a
lot of um weather come in so i couldn't look down there's nothing to see nothing to look at
fortunately yeah but um but i know now i watch videos still all the time and i could not stand
like for example on the side of el cap and look down my i get actually physical reaction in my
knees and feet yeah they start you know yeah i i didn't and i don't want to do about it because
it's in a one way it's annoying same with same with the alps there's a lot of really interesting
treks in the alps that involve walking across like little bits of metal right yeah those things
And that would also scare me too much. I think I might run the risk of actually my knees going, you know, and like feeling like they're going to fall away from you.
It's one of those things you habituate to, though, like like everything you get used to it. And it's, you know, climbers talk about having a good head or not. And having a good head just basically means like, am I in the mind state that I can that I can take exposure, that I can concentrate on what's in front of me and like do the thing I need to do without thinking about too much the consequences like you can, you know, assess the consequences, know what you're getting into in a realistic way, but also just zero in and focus on stuff.
And that takes time. Like it takes practice to develop that. And it comes and goes. Like it's not something like if I went out now and I haven't been climbing all that much recently. If I went out now and tried to climb something, it would probably scare me to death. Like I'd be up there being like, oh, my God, I can't take this. But if you do it on a really, really, really basis, you really kind of get into that groove and you you have a better ability to sort of focus, assess, you know, actual risk versus perceived risk.
You know, your brain is going to tell you like, this is no place that you should be like, you need to get out of here immediately. And the trick is just going, actually, I am safe. I have done the right things. I do have my stuff set up. I am looking at, you know, something that I need to do here. And maybe there is a certain degree of risk. But I feel that that's in my range right now. I can do this.
It's a great, actually, it's a great teacher for life in general. And especially, you know, what you do in the privacy world is super connected with things like that. I mean, because you know that if you, on the whole, in privacy-centric apps, if you mess up once, you've messed up the whole thing because you've revealed what you don't want to reveal.
And then a bit of software can connect that to that, to that, to that, to that, to that, to that.
So you really do have to risk analyze that thing.
I mean, do you ever wonder when you write like white noise?
I don't know.
No, probably a lot of people don't know what white noise is, actually.
Maybe you should say it yourself and then you can, and then I'll ask that question again.
Yeah, perfect.
Yeah, yeah.
So White Noise is kind of the messenger app that we're building on top of the, it's a spec for Nostra.
It doesn't actually write a new protocol, but it is a kind of specification for how to apply the MLS messaging protocol into Nostra's relay and identity system.
Just before you go on, we do talk about Nostra on this show, but in case you didn't, I did a big two-hour chat with Ben Ark, and it's about episode 100-something.
So I'll put it in the show notes just in case.
But I always, Nostra and Bitcoin, two important things to get into.
Very important.
Yeah, yeah.
And Ben does a great job of explaining exactly what Nostra is.
He was there from the very beginning.
So yeah, so effectively, you know, we've got, maybe I'll zoom out a little bit and talk about MLS for just a second so people understand what that is and why that's important to what we're trying to do.
So, you know, if you think about secure messaging, you know, all the way at the beginning, we had, you know, telephones where the switchboard operator could literally listen into everything you were doing.
You know, radio is the same.
Telegraphs were the same.
Like we had to relay messages through other people and they could read those.
And so we back in those days, we came up with like, you know, weird, you know, human readable and understandable codes that we could use to sort of, you know, do cipher text and stuff like that.
All of that stuff evolves over time We get to the Internet The Internet is fully unencrypted for a long time Finally Google kind of makes everybody do it just by virtue of the fact that they had a monopoly with Chrome
And they went, nope, we're doing HTTPS everywhere all the time.
Which is, I mean, it's encrypted, but...
It's encrypted traffic.
So the traffic is encrypted, not necessarily the data on either end.
And why is that bad in messaging?
Because someone can intercept it right now?
Well, no.
I mean, think about this in the earlier internet.
Like all websites used to just be served plain text, right?
And in a lot of cases, that doesn't matter.
If you're just serving your, you know, plain public website in plain text over the line, like who cares?
But you would never have gotten credit card payments on the internet if you hadn't had the ability to somehow take the message on one side in plain text, encrypt it, send it through all the servers in the middle, and then decrypt it on the other side.
And so that's, you know, SSL and, you know, TLS and all that stuff is the kind of encrypted transport on the internet.
And it just became standard.
And what's your opinion on it?
Is that a good standard?
Oh, yeah. I mean, it's an absolutely necessary part of the Internet.
But you wouldn't want to evolve it anymore, is it?
No, I mean, it is an evolving standard.
Like, TLS is continuing to sort of get better over time.
And actually, MLS is based on the same sort of design principles as TLS was.
You know, you should have a handshake.
You should be able to agree with the person you're going to talk to that, like, we support the same features so we can do the thing well.
And, you know, it's just it's an absolute foundational piece of the Internet that no one thinks about, which is a great thing, right?
So in messaging specifically, yeah, we could always encrypt the stuff in the middle.
But if you're going through someone else's servers, there's going to have to be some, you know, you're going to do something there, right?
The server is going to have to know something about you in order to get the message to the other person.
And so we had these protocols early on, like off the record was one of the really earliest ones that we're trying to figure out how do we do encryption for messaging where you can keep an ongoing conversation with someone.
But if someone gets the key, they're not going to be able to decrypt all the messages in the past or all the messages going forward.
You know, somebody gets your key and doesn't say anything and you keep talking.
They just keep decrypting messages as you go.
They can follow you along and see what's going on.
Which is that that was the basis of kind of World War II cryptography, wasn't it?
You only needed one sort of secret.
Yes.
If you figured out how they were creating the secrets, you could decrypt all the messages.
Right.
And this is why, like, the Enigma machine was so difficult for them because they would change the secret every day.
So they had 24 hours to try to figure out how the thing worked, and then it would flip, and they'd start over from scratch.
Right. So it was doing that. I thought the Enigma was just one encryption and then it ran down.
The Enigma was a complicated encryption scheme that it took a long time to figure out what they were doing with it, but it also was a rotating key.
And most encryption schemes were rotating keys. Like, you had some way of kind of formalizing.
Like if you think about the old spy movies where they like have a newspaper and they leave it on the thing and somebody circled a word like that word is the changing key, you know, like.
But would they have to send if it was if in the World War Two case, would they have to send over the rotating keys in one batch in one time so that they knew?
Because that's also an attack.
No. So this is kind of gets into deterministic key generation or the key derivation functions, which is everything that all of our secure messaging stuff online is built on now is you need some deterministic way to go from one key to the next key.
And so either you have to deliver the key manually, you know, and that's non-deterministic.
Like that's, you know, you circle a word in a newspaper or somebody sends you a message in another communication channel, you know, a messenger shows up on a boat and tells you what the next month's worth of keys are going to be.
That's one thing.
The other thing is start with a key and then start with some, you know, secret to you and your group, but known way of deriving out the next key.
Some way of taking a word and, you know, it's like on the first letter, we're going to add 12 and then get to the next letter.
On the next one, we're going to add 14.
On the other one, we're going to subtract 7.
Like you just kind of, you can manipulate a thing in a certain way to get a new key.
Is that two things?
So is that the word and the way we decrypt the word?
And they can be sent separately.
Because if someone finds those two things.
They can do whatever they want.
Yeah, exactly.
They have the keys to the kingdom.
So presumably you want to split that into as many things as you can.
Exactly, exactly.
So this is, I mean, cryptography in general is cat and mouse, right?
It's always going to be cat and mouse.
There's always going to have to be changing standards because people will figure out ways, you know, eventually to sort of get around some of these things.
you know yes there is extremely strong cryptography but as computers get better like many of these
you know cipher suites and things are just becoming obsolete right and with this idea of
quantum computing it's going to make a whole bunch more stuff obsolete and so we have to come up with
ways to kind of fight against that so um let's jump back to messaging so you've got like off the
record was like one of the original protocols that specified how can we do you know forward
secrecy and post-compromised security. So how do we keep keys rotating in a way that keeps the
conversation secure so that even if an attacker got one of the keys, they are only going to get
a tiny slice of our conversation. The signal protocol kind of grew out of the off-the-record
protocol. Moxie Marlin's bike, and I can't remember the other guy's name, so sorry, but
they came up with the signal protocol, which is the kind of classic double ratchet algorithm that
you hear a lot of people say double ratchet encryption. And the idea there is that there's
actually multiple key derivation functions. And you've got a way to agree on a key, a shared key
between two people that you create one key derivation function. So that's like kind of a
trunk of a tree and that's generating a certain key. And then using that key, people derive out
other keys. And so you and I both have then two chains of messages. One side is a sender side,
one side is a receiver side. So my sender is your receiver, your sender is my receiver.
and that's how we actually send messages we generate keys on those small chains to encrypt
the actual message and then every now and then we rotate the key in the middle and that basically
changes what's called the epoch the whole thing moves forward and we start doing the thing again
um just a question in that system in like in signal are you signal if you if you delete a
message is it deleted is it so think about it this way in indian encrypted messaging
the idea is you i have a message i encrypt it so imagine i just put it in a box and lock the box
you have the key to the box right i can then send the box through the mail through whatever channel
i want to and the person in the middle doesn't have the box so they can't see what's inside
you get the box you open the box and you then have the thing you're the only person that has
the thing now um and obviously if we're talking about messaging i've got a copy on my end and
you have a copy on your end no one in the middle has any like they've got an encrypted copy but
They can't do anything with it unless they get a key to unlock the box in the middle.
Could they in the future, though?
Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
So all our messages that we're sending now are potentially revealable in 40 years.
Yeah, 100%.
And that's what they say, basically.
When quantum arrives in a usable, actual functioning format, all of the messaging is going to be immediately decrypted.
And I mean, that's on one side super scary for a lot of people that have lots of skeletons.
that you know you know they're never going to get rid of those right like the internet's a giant
copy machine yeah totally so i mean you're always going to fall foul of a law in the end because
laws don't 100 and the question is more do is it going to be something people care enough about
you know going back that far to look for like no government's going to go and be like oh you bought
drugs in college on you know this platform they might say you didn't pay tax in 1980 whatever
that's potentially true or more to the point they if you are a target if they target then they'll
use yeah yeah all bets are off like they'll use all of that stuff against you so how would you
we're still going back to what you were saying how would you mitigate against that in its current
form then say you're a signal user and you you want to try and for you know so signals actually
already helping protect you against this because they are already they've already moved to a
quantum resistant cypher suite. So it's a collection of, you know, algorithms that you
use to do this, which is, you know, generally assigning a scheme and a hashing scheme that fit
together. And they have moved to algorithms that are quantum resistant. So they're much harder for
quantum computers to solve. How do you know something's quantum resistant? A bunch of math,
you have to have really giant gigabrain cryptographers do formal proofs in mathematics
to show that this is not only, you know, very difficult for a classical, you know, digital
computer to solve, but it's also incredibly difficult for, you know, the way we think
about how qubits are going to solve things.
So if we know what's quantum resistant, how come we don't do quantum then?
How can we not already have quantum computers?
Laws of physics.
It's like really, really hard to get this stuff done properly.
You know, you've got...
So theoretically, we know what quantum is.
Theoretically, we know exactly what it is.
we're actually in the position of like how do we take that and make it physical reality break that
down for me so i can understand it what is i don't know quantum as well but like my understanding at
a very very high level is you are going from zeros and ones to something that can be you know quantum
super superimposed and so you can have multiple states of things at the same time um and that
gives you the ability to have way more states possible thus you can have you know a computer
that can do way more calculations way, way, way, way faster.
And is that something to do with having to use minus 280 degrees or something?
That's exactly, yes, correct.
And they can't keep the chip stable enough.
You know, think about it as a circuit.
You know, a circuit is either open or closed.
And that's basically what a digital computer is.
It's either open or closed.
And we figured out how to do, you know, transistors that are either open or closed.
And they're very stable.
In quantum, it's incredibly unstable.
And the thing has way more states.
And so it's just like, and so they try to get it super, super cold to slow everything down.
and they're still working on ways to like how do we error correct these things because if you think
about it a transistor an electrical transistor if it gets hit by a photon in the wrong way it will
bit flip and like that's a thing that certain parts of computing have you know have to worry
about like very low probability but it does happen yeah yeah um and so that in quantum is still
incredibly difficult and you know what bit flipping i've thought that that is the same
same process as um dna evolution i think there's a four i this is purely my own idea right yeah i
mean it would make sense that you can bit flip dna and that's what causes things to change i mean
it's it's conceptually the exact same process you know mutation is basically a bit flip yeah but
it's weird when you think about it in computer terms because you don't imagine that there might
be a piece of well a photon that can actually kind of collide with your computer and do something to
it yeah yeah yeah that's weird yeah that is weird but they are fundamentally it is still electrons
right like you're still dealing with electrons in a digital computer or a quantum computer or
whatever so it's um you know and it's interesting to know like our computing at the moment is is all
incredibly deterministic right it's if if else loops it's you know loops of going through you
know lists of things you know it's why computer programmers are quite you know rigid deterministic
people they can read through this stuff in very logical patterns the interesting thing i think
about quantum is that like, I think it does open up way more probabilistic computing. And, and the
stuff that we're getting at with AI now is going in that direction in some ways, like, and, and some,
in some degrees, like in a really weird, basic way, Nostra is kind of similar. Like there is no
global feed of reality. Like there is no one single truth here. You've got all these relays
and all this data. And what you see is you, you know, your constructed reality around you.
and that's much more like the real world right like we don't know what real reality is because
we just can't be everywhere all at once and take in all the information we're still going back to
what you're saying but you're making me think of other things i was about to ask that exact question
but i've got another one to do with ai and quantum based on what you've just said because when i look
at ai now i think it's quite primitive because it's just it's basically looking at everything
and then trying to make a prediction about what should be said based on that so there's no
actual understanding there unless the basis of understanding is that it could be but that seems
a bit brutal to me yeah yeah so how would that how would quantum affect that would that be
because i when i look at ai now i think that doesn't seem like intelligence that just seems
like a computer program running and guessing things until it gets it right based on information
so will quantum make that a little bit more brain light do you think or am i wrong are our brains
just stupid guessing machines no i mean i actually there's a really good framework that uh a guy
i think it's john vervecki i get his his surname wrong yeah yeah yeah some max was talking about
him yeah he's awesome and he has a really great way of thinking about uh cognition and intelligence
and uh consciousness and i think it's a really really great way to kind of frame this question
which is there are lots of different types of knowing, right? Like knowing that a cat is a
mammal is a fact, right? Like you just, it's a thing that you can or can't, you know, know if
you've never seen it before, you are ignorant of that fact, but it is no matter what, right?
But there's other types of knowing. And AIs right now are incredibly good at that type of knowing.
They've read every book. They've read everything on the internet. They have, you know, they know a
lot of things about the world, but they've never, you know, walked through a field at sunset,
and felt the breeze in their face.
They don't know what that feels like.
And they don't know procedural things like,
what is it to swim?
They can read all the books about swimming,
but until you've been dumped in a pool,
you don't know what swimming is.
And so there's different types of knowing.
And those are just a couple of examples.
There's actually more that he goes into.
But I think as AI gets progressively better,
it's obviously going to get better
at being able to crunch all that data, right?
But I kind of feel like we're approaching
the upper limit of like they've already crunched the entire internet right they're going to be able
to form maybe better connections between things we might be able to give the ai an ability to sort
of start to make um you know leaps between things try to be a bit more creative try to connect dots
that don't seem connected which actually humans are really good at ai still aren't um but i don't
know that we're ever going to get to a point where they've got that those other types of knowing that
really only humans can have because we are going through the world and trying to i mean we have an
incredible sensory organ, right? Like we have all these, we have ears, we have eyes, we have nose,
we taste, our skin is, you know, feeling things constantly. We're actually not paying any attention
to like 99.9% of that data. We just throw it all away instantaneously. And our brain is making
these calculations of what matters to me right now. What can I, you know, safely throw away?
I want to conserve as much energy as possible, but then how do I take all of what I am looking at,
fit it into what my memory and my, you know, myself says is important. And then what am I
going to do with that information um it's kind of incredible how much your brain is doing it could
be though that what you've just described could still be that type one error error correction
guessing you just add more senses i mean you described our senses there and it just occurred
to me well yeah walking through and feeling the breeze is a function of feeling and smelling and
sound so true maybe if you create a humanoid with receptors for those things maybe maybe we'll get
to the bandwidth that bandwidth required but like i think the bandwidth required there is enormous
it's kind of unbelievable right maybe it must be sure it's a question of time i suppose is the
bigger thing is like how close are these things and i think i would posit that like agi is a long
way out um i think we will get stuff that feels very very intelligent i mean we already have stuff
that feels very intelligent like you can sit there and talk to claude or chachupiti and feel like
you're talking to a human most of the time yeah um you know they do hallucinate still they do mess
stuff up but you know they are very very intelligent at pretending to be human i i was thinking often
the ai i see now is a bit like don't take this the wrong way because i do there's an autistic
person in my life i'm not being rude to autistic people but autistic people look at what the world's
happening and they try and mimic it and it's a bit like that with with some ais you realize
the only difference is people um ai says things very authoritatively every single time yes it
never has a conversation with you where it's like i'm not sure it could you know which is what humans
do because we don't know everything but ai unfortunately thinks currently that it knows
everything yeah well and when you correct a certain maturity actually so if you think about
it like ai is sort of like an early teenager who's like no i know how everything works you know so i
think as they mature they will get better at that but yeah you're right but when they when you correct
them they it's bizarre because it's non it's very unhuman to go if you if i told if i said oh you
know bitcoin's got 23 million you know there's 23 million bitcoins available and you're like
it's actually 21 and i go oh yeah you're correct bitcoin's only got 20 you know like
no human would do that right i would be like bitcoin's got a large supply of is it 21 million
and you'd be like, yeah, it's 21 million.
You know, it's like, but they do not do that.
Right.
Let's go back to where we were.
Messaging, private messaging.
Okay.
So we got up to the Signal Protocol.
Yes.
Signal Protocol is, I mean, it was groundbreaking, right?
Like it was a really big deal.
And, you know, the guys were able to license that technology to Meta for,
you know, they put it into WhatsApp.
It was part of like Google Messenger.
Like Signal Protocol is everywhere.
It's not just in Signal.
You know, the underlying protocol itself.
the main difference between what signal does and what the other guys do is they might be using the
same encryption scheme for the actual messages but the metadata around the messages is actually
almost more important and more sensitive than the actual content of the message um so there's
you know confidentiality and then there's privacy and confidentiality is like you know our messages
are protected privacy is actually who's talking to who when like maybe why they're talking to each
other. And so both of those things are really important if you actually want to talk about
the privacy of a scheme. So WhatsApp perfectly fixes confidentiality. They're end-to-end
encrypted. Their AI is in the chat with you, by the way. You can turn that off, but you're also
going to turn off a bunch of other useful features because they're all grouped together in the same
panel. I've never thought of WhatsApp as being a good place. I mean, they say they're end-to-end
I don believe I mean it a very much trust me bro type of scenario Like they don tell you it closed source They do tell you that like yes under the hood you know we know we using signal protocol but like there a bunch of ways to break around that and say well we just put our own group member who invisible in the chat and then they
also part of the conversation um that's my base case there is like there's just a bot in the chat
i mean would that be called a backdoor is a backdoor something completely i mean a backdoor
is something slightly different like because they're closed source because they own the whole
scheme it's not even a backdoor it's just like this is part of the software like this is how
it's literally built um you know a backdoor is more uh we have an encryption scheme but there's
something that you know no one knows about that we can just turn it off or we can enter the chat
whenever we want through this kind of super user access because i saw on online this week that
um the eu are pushing to add backdoors to signal but yes chat control is back but funny enough i
I use something called Molly, which is an open source version of Signal.
Yes, I've heard of this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right.
Don't ask me whether it's better or worse.
I just read the blurb and saw the groups and thought, okay, I'll do it.
My daughter uses it.
But what I find weird is if you – because obviously if Signal added a backdoor, Molly would not, right?
Well, here's the thing.
Well, Molly, if it wants to continue working with Signal, would almost certainly have to be very, very compatible.
Like it would be very hard for Signal to add a backdoor in some way that, you know, Molly wouldn't sort of break on, right?
Because when you're doing these encryption schemes, I mean, what I'm talking about now is like the actual encryption protocol.
When you're doing them, if you get it wrong, it just doesn't work anymore.
Like it completely stops working.
And so, you know, if you've done the key derivation function slightly differently so that you can have an extra key somewhere, I mean, yes, there's potentially ways that are like, you know, undetectable or that don't have side effects.
But a lot of these things are just math equations.
And so if you change something, it changes something.
Would that be a signal then that they have changed something?
If a fork of signal couldn't interact with signal in a private way, would that be a signal that they've been…
Potentially.
Yeah, potentially.
And again, I think signal is actually a great player.
I think they're a good actor in the space.
I think they do everything they possibly can to minimize the amount of metadata they have about their users.
You've got to sign up with a phone number.
They know they can connect you through that phone number to this user, but they actually minimize as much as possible in their servers what they have.
And they try to delete it as fast as possible.
And so I think, you know, they are they are good actors, but, you know, they're a centralized player.
Right. They've got a 50 million dollar server budget.
They've got a U.S. foundation.
They have a CEO and all three of those things can fall apart in one way or another.
And then Signal disappears for all of us.
Why did they use phones just as a convenience?
Yeah, absolutely.
i mean so they could have done like nostr uses nothing you just you just create a thing there's
a few things i use well nostr has to use phones too i mean it's it's whatever the computer is that
you're actually no no i mean using your phone number as an identifier yeah they had to pick
something and they um because it's a pretty full-on identifier isn't it yeah to them it's
actually also just a spam protection measure because they have to run all these servers that
do all this stuff um that don't do a lot of encryption and you know moving stuff around
it's expensive and so they actually spend i think somebody told me recently that it's
it's high it's like 20 or 25 percent of their whole budget every year is um sms you know just
those verification sms's and that's just to stop spam basically you know because otherwise people
would just create all these numbers that are fake use those create accounts you know and figure out
ways to spam the network horrifically now signal has to worry about that because they have to pay
all its servers right um nostr kind of gets around this by saying yeah there's spam and it's definitely
going to affect everybody but it's so spread out that you know mostly it doesn't really have much
of an effect now as we grow i bet that'll become a problem and we'll have to figure that out but
like right now it's not really what do you mean spread out can you explain that yeah so imagine i
mean signal has i mean it's a fleet of servers but it's all controlled by them they have to run the
servers, they have to pay the server bills. Nostra relays are very dumb. They're not very,
you know, resource intensive. It's effectively just a simple database. All we ask relays to do
is accept events that are valid, you know, cryptographically signed validly. And when we
ask you for something, if you have it, give it back. That's it. You don't have to do anything
else. You don't have to compute stuff. You don't have to do any cryptography. Like all you're doing
is taking something storing in a database and then returning a response if you, you know, have
something. So that makes running a Nasta relay quite cheap up to, you know, fairly large sizes.
And certainly, yes, once we get to, you know, a mass adoption point where we have millions and
millions of users running a very large relay is going to be costly. But the people who are going
to run very large relays are people who are running businesses where that very large relay
that they're paying for directly improves the UX for their user base. And that's going to make
total sense for them. But there's all sorts of ways you can run small relays. You can control
the amount of data that comes into them. You can whitelist who's allowed to post and who's not.
And so there are a myriad of ways where running relays is actually super cheap and you can
actually run them on your phone. You can run them on a laptop, like no big deal.
And I think the world we head towards is, yes, there's a number of very large relays,
but in a power law dynamic, it falls off fairly fast. And there's a long tail of relays that will
accept most messages and also are completely commodity and don't matter to the actual end
user. You know, if you're connected to three or four of these things and one or two go down because
of spam, who cares? You just switch. You just move around. And so especially for our use case,
it's really important to us that we never run servers. You know, like it's we don't want to
have any servers. We're like we're client side software. You know, when the government shows up
and they're like, give us, you know, all the data on your users. We're like, we don't have any.
all you can do is go to github and see our code base that's it we've got to talk about that later
let me remind that yeah because you know i think we've just seen a ruling in the u.s which might
be bad news for that in the future makes me very nervous right okay we're definitely definitely
coming back to that let's finish the so the signal story currently still a good app to use i think
it's great yeah i think it's great i think they do a good job um you know is it foolproof absolutely
not like nothing is foolproof like if you want actual privacy you need to go way away from a lot
of other humans and have a private conversation in the middle of nowhere and even then you know
look up yeah exactly there could be a camera above you um so you know it's tough to get real real
privacy these days um but i think you know signal does about as good as you could possibly hope um
for most use cases. I'm glad about that. I've got white noise, but obviously most people I know
aren't on white noise. So we'll get there. It's early. You know, one other thing that I'd love
to mention here is that, you know, a lot of people focus in on the actual encryption scheme and use
or, you know, things like that. Um, it's really important when you're thinking about privacy,
you know, to think about like to do a proper threat assessment, right? Like who are you
actually trying to maintain privacy from like are you just trying to not stick out in metas
profiling things so you don't get you know garbage ads or so that they don't know more about you than
you want them to know that's like one thing if you're against a state level actor you're kind
of screwed like there's no way you're going to be able to get away from the nsa like if they really
want to find you they will find you um and they will know everything about you really even even
Even decrypting messages?
It's less about decrypting the messages as it is about figuring out ways that they don't have to decrypt the messages, right?
Like they will, you know, if you're important enough, they've got a portfolio of zero day exploits that they've never used before that they'll figure out how to get onto your phone one way or another.
And then they'll just have full root access to everything on your phone.
And then they've got everything on the phone.
And so, you know, when we're talking about Signal, you have a decrypted message.
You encrypt it.
you send it, the other person decrypts it on their side, they've got a decrypted message.
If the person that is attacking you is already in your phone at root level,
they have your messages, like they have everything.
And graphene and those kind of things?
Graphene is a great project and they do, and this is the thing, like
the better that a phone and the operating system protects you against zero days,
the safer you are. And so things like lockdown mode on iOS are actually really, really important.
Like I think everybody should have lockdown mode on. It makes a really big difference.
You know, I've talked to security researchers, you know, good friends that find these things in the wild and that do a lot of the research on Pegasus and are the people that point out when they found people who have been affected by Pegasus.
And universally, the first thing he says is always like, just turn on lockdown mode.
It like makes almost no difference.
And it makes a huge difference to like to your use case, but it makes a huge difference to your actual security.
Hold a minute.
Lockdown on mine.
I've got graphene.
Yeah.
It's a button you actually have to press, I think.
so i don't know exactly what the difference is and like you know i know graphing is very good i
think it's actually more lockdown mode like by default i think there's also some extreme settings
lockdown mode on ios is just this mode where it's a one switch and it turns on a bunch of features
it won load images by default it won you know do a bunch of things that look when i go to turn nine off yeah is that lockdown is that different i thought that was i thought that means scramble the whole phone and so that yeah i don know exactly what that is but lockdown
mode on ios is basically hey we're going to turn on a bunch of extra features that are going to
reduce your user experience a little bit you know we're going to not load images by default we're
going to make you opt in on certain things certain websites are not going to work because we're not
going to load javascript you know random javascript from servers we don't know um but in return it's
going to be much harder to hit you with a zero day because most zero days come in through things
like sms messages with a link in them or an image that comes in through a chat that looks like an
image but like buried in the image when your parser goes through it and tries to decrypt it or a pdf
loads of zero days and pdfs actually just say what zero days it's basically it's because it's an
exploit that's never been used in public never been seen so researchers will go through software
they will find places where it's like hey if we are able to craft a pdf something that looks like
a PDF, but buried in that PDF is a tiny bit of code that does one weird thing with the way that
the parser, you know, the thing that looks at all the binary data of what your PDF is,
if it makes that parser choke in a weird way, do something it's not supposed to do,
and somehow upgrades our access into, we have total control of your phone,
like that's the classic zero day that they're all looking for. And a lot of the recent ones,
the things that Pegasus and its predecessors are...
Pegasus is Israeli spy tech, basically.
It's a program that loads of governments use.
They've all been caught recently using a bunch of European governments that love to yell about how private and how much they care about privacy.
The Italian government was just caught using this against journalists in the country who were reporting on the migration crisis from Africa.
And this happens.
And Italy's response to this was they got caught and they were like, yeah, but all these other European countries are doing it too.
Do individuals use Pegasus?
Good question.
good question no there's no as far as i know there's no open source version of this this is
like a but but you know hackers in general that's what they're doing that's what they're doing yeah
and and basically pegasus is a you know a suite of semi-legitimate hacking company that just says
we are a suite of tools for government and law enforcement and you're like no wow so i didn't
know that i didn't know yeah it's new to me it's pretty scary stuff like it's it's scary and so
you know you find these zero days and they're very hard to find and you know they're worth
millions of dollars like the hackers out there in the dark you know markets that do this can make a
lot of money doing this um but you know back to the earlier point like the nsa has many of these
in their pocket and they're just waiting for if you're important enough they will pull one out and
use it um and then they'll have access at the bottom level so like computers are not safe period
like it's just it's a fact if the government wants to talk to you they will talk to you but
What about Bitcoin wallets then?
I mean, presumably the NSA could just take any of your Bitcoin.
I mean, anything that's connected to a real computer, yeah.
Now I know why people.
This is why completely disconnected hardware wallets are pretty important, right?
You want a signing device that has generated your private key never to touch the internet.
Cold card is for those.
Yeah, cold card is gold standard in my opinion.
Those guys are so paranoid.
And when you actually talk to them and you get into the weeds with them, you're like,
oh my god you've thought of so many things here and you know i love some of the open source
signing projects that are out there for the ethos behind them but i don't think that like their
purpose fit for very large sums of money you know there's a scale here right like if you have a
little bit of bitcoin it's totally fine to have it on a hot wallet on your phone like we should not
be yelling at people that are getting into the space for having 50 bucks of bitcoin in a hot
wallet like totally fine or a custodial service like just leave them alone for a bit it scales
And the security needs to scale with that, you know, with how much you have to protect and how much you have to protect changes based on what your circumstances, right?
Like 50 bucks of Bitcoin might be life changing to people in certain parts of the world.
And, you know, they need to treat that accordingly.
But I think if you want to think about like real security, you know, you need to have a kind of complicated setup that, you know, has a bunch of things that never touched the Internet and are very geographically dispersed.
And even that is hard, right?
Like, taking full-person responsibility is hard.
That's just the fact.
Those, the volume of people who should be in that situation is going up rapidly, I think.
Because if you look back to the big pump of Bitcoin adoption, it was about 2017.
That was a lot of individuals, wasn't it?
Yeah.
And if you track forward now.
Yeah, we're 10, 12x from even the highs in there.
It's easy to predict that there's a number of, quite a high percentage of those people should be pretty well off at the moment, if they just held.
Yeah, and if they held.
So I bet it's a smaller percentage than we think, but yeah.
But still, I mean, the point is, in four years' time, there's going to be another big batch.
And that batch from 2017, they're going to be like the 2013 lot who are basically boiling it on a yacht.
Yeah, if they want to.
Exactly, exactly.
If they want to, they could, easily.
But it's interesting. You're right. You're absolutely right. You know, if they can get on your phone, if they can get in your computer, then they would be able to have a screenshot of the time when they flashed up your private seed and you wrote it down or you were whispering it as you wrote it and the mic was picking it up or, you know.
There's a million ways that this goes wrong. And again, it's like how much like you need to do the threat assessment, like how much of a target are you actually? How much, you know, what's more risky? Like somebody was saying the other day, like, I bet more Bitcoin has been lost from people trying to do the right thing by then people who just put their seed phrase into Google Doc and left it on a, you know, on Google servers for 10 years and then found it later. And they were like, oh, there's some Bitcoin here. Like, you know, people foot gun themselves pretty regularly.
And so it's sort of, you know, do a threat assessment, really think through, like, am I going to be able to actually do the thing that I'm trying to set out to do?
Am I technically capable and competent enough to deal with this and figure out what to do there?
Like, if you're not technically capable and competent, maybe it does make more sense to go to someone like Anchor Watch and be like, hey, I'd like to, you know, do a collaborative custody thing with you guys and ensure this because, you know, it's meaningful to me.
I'm happy to pay a little bit of money for it.
You know, there's nothing wrong with custody.
it's more a thing of if you're if you have custody forced upon you and you have no choice
that's what where things go very bad um if you have the ability to move your things away from
a custodian and you actually value their service and they provide a good service there's nothing
wrong with that okay back to right we've just hit the end of signal by the sounds of it
yes let's go back so evolution from signal yes so signal is great signal's major downfall is that
it doesn't scale well. It is what's called a pairwise protocol, which means that if you are
in a DM with somebody, me and you, it's great, works perfectly. If you start scaling up the group,
we have to, each of us, for every message we send to the group, we have to individually encrypt it
to every member of the group. And so that doesn't scale well. It scales linearly. You know, more
group members means way more computation. And so when you get to very large groups,
signal effectively just breaks. You know, it can't support groups of thousands or millions.
and so that's always been something that this you know signal has done a lot of work and that's
part of you know the stuff they do in their servers there's like all these bolt-on protocols
that help make signal work better in groups but fundamentally everybody kind of knew that like we
have to figure out something better for groups that scales better and so somewhere in 2017 2018
a group of you know very very smart people who have been working in cryptography and and the
signal protocol and stuff got together and went okay we're going to come up with a scheme that's
going to do better for large groups. And what they came up with is what became MLS, message layer
security. And it's, you know, kind of like TLS, you know, transport layer security. It takes a few
of those ideas and applies a, you know, somewhat similar encryption scheme. So it's sort of a
double ratchet-ish type scheme, but arranges a group in what's called a binary tree, which is a
tree where, you know, it splits into two leaves from every node as it goes down. And so the group
members in this ratchet tree across the bottom, you know, the very bottom layer. And then there's
keys at all of the nodes above them. And the way it's set up means that when you change part of the
group, you don't have to change the entire group structure. And when you have to encrypt things,
you don't have to encrypt to everybody, you're encrypting to the keys along a path to the root,
where everybody else can derive keys down from that root and get what they need. So we're back
to these key derivation functions again.
So it's a different way of applying key derivation functions
and structuring a ROOP in a way that takes a problem.
You know, in computer science talk,
it takes it from a linear scaling problem
to a log scaling problem, which makes a huge difference.
And is this the pinnacle?
Will it be the pinnacle?
I think it's a incredibly good standard.
I know it's being adopted by a lot of really big companies.
And for good reason, it's going to help save them
millions and millions of dollars in servers.
It's also very well proved, you know,
from an academic point of view, like the cryptography is very solid. It's also got this
really cool property that you can upgrade groups and change groups over time in terms of like even
stuff down to like what Cypher suite they using So you can completely change from a non resistant to a quantum resistant thing in a group in flight You don have to like disband the group and restart with the same people So it got a lot of cool properties that I think make
it quite durable towards the future. It's also got an extension system that's sort of
built into it that allows you to kind of sidecar data into the encryption scheme.
And one other big thing that I think it gives you over Signal is it gives you sort of
cryptographic, you know, a cryptographic guarantee of the entire group state.
So, you know, cryptographically that like, these are the members of the group.
These are the extensions that this group is using.
This is the, you know, cipher suite we have to use.
Like all of that is, you know, signed and hashed.
And so, you know, okay, this is the state and we all, everybody in the group has agreed
that this is the state.
And so that gives you some interesting things that you can do with it.
Why aren't Signal adopting that?
It'll be interesting to see what they do.
uh whether they decide to their problem right yeah it'll be interesting to see whether they
uh stay with their own thing or if they start to move towards something like mls or buy a company
or buy white noise i mean they don't even need to it's an open source thing like they've got
plenty of smart people that could apply this and it's you know i think mls itself is very very
complex um but once you have an implementation library that does the really base cryptographic
math and like does have all the you know tests and things that cover off and you know does the
test vectors that show that it's doing what it's supposed to be doing.
You know, building an app on top of that becomes a lot more straightforward.
I think the hard part for what we're doing is, you know, everybody up until now, you
know, MLS has only been on internet standard.
That's the other kind of cool thing about it.
It was, you know, it's an IETF, so Internet Engineering Task Force, internet standard.
You know, TLS is in that group.
There's, you know, this is a worldwide group that comes together and is incredibly bureaucratic
and slow.
Oh, okay.
But it's a bunch of engineers coming together and going, this is the thing, stamp.
We've done lots and lots of work to prove that this is the thing, and we're all going to use it.
Or if you want to use it, you know at least that the legwork has been done.
Wow.
And, you know, most of the things that are, you know, basic internet technologies are in this group.
You know, TCPIP, TLS, like all that stuff is, you know, in IETF.
And are there any apps that I would know, non-NOSTA apps, as in, that are using it already?
Yeah, yeah. So there's Wire is a kind of well-known tool.
We use that in our foundation.
So the Wire guys are actually some of the original writers on the MLS protocol.
I'd never heard of Wire until I joined the Free Cities Foundation, but our whole company runs on Wire.
Yeah, yeah. There you go. So WebEx from Cisco uses it as the handshake for getting into webinars.
So before you actually get the webinar stream, you have to do all this handshake stuff to actually enter the room to then get the stream.
and that's all done with MLS.
Now, everybody that's done this so far
is a centralized service.
They have a server in the middle
that can guarantee identity
and can guarantee transport, right?
So MLS itself is transport and identity agnostic.
It's like, that's for you to figure out.
You know, we just talk about
how you're going to structure the data
and how you're going to do the encryption.
And so that, when I started to talk to the guys
that, you know, work on this stuff,
they were like,
we don't know of anybody
that's done it decentralized yet.
Like we've heard people talk about it,
want to do it, but you know, good luck, have fun.
They knew about NOSTA though.
They roughly knew about Noster.
You know, most people in that space are pretty skeptical of Bitcoin.
Really?
Yeah, it's weird.
I've never understood how they can compartmentalize like that.
But I think it's partially just because they didn't go down the legwork of understanding.
Where are they skeptical?
I mean, it's addressable probably.
They just haven't done the work.
Yeah.
They haven't done the work and they don't care.
And so it's one of these things where, you know, some of them get it.
Some of them don't.
I never push it because it's just like, I'm not going to spend my time doing that.
But they were supportive in the sense of this would be cool to see, ask questions, help out.
And so my job was basically how do I apply this into Noster and do it in a way that doesn't leak metadata?
How do we put this encryption scheme in, use public relays, send everything across public-facing stuff in a way that if an observer is looking at all the traffic, they don't really know much?
you know uh and that proved to be you know pretty tricky just before you go on i just had a thought
this is a complete tangent but does this system have any benefit to privatizing bitcoin transactions
and things like that yeah well privatizing bitcoin transactions maybe a little less the way you
described it then was you're sending things over an open network and no one really can derive much
information from it which is the essence of bitcoin privacy in a way yeah well the problem
Bitcoin is that those transactions need to be public, right? Like it needs to be a public ledger
so that everyone can verify. Um, what about a second layer then? Absolutely. Yeah. So this has
all sorts of use cases in, you know, things like, uh, multi-sig coordination, great use case, you
know, like you've got a wallet, you want to be able to coordinate with other people to do all
the signing. Um, you need some way to, to do that in a way that is secure. Um, so that's a great
use case for it. I'm sure there are, you know, second layer things that you could do, you know,
But I think there's probably slightly better ways to do it in a lot of cases just because there's a lot of overhead with setting up a group, with keeping the group state up to date, making sure that all the devices are clients that need to be in that group.
When you join an MLS group from your phone and your computer, and this is the same with Signal, by the way, you're actually two different members in that group.
It's just that the UI sees that, hey, this is actually the same person and kind of collapses it to one person in the view.
but you are cryptographically two different entities in that group um so i think you know
for certain bitcoin applications especially closer to the humans it makes a tons of sense
you know i think when you start to get down into the weeds of like how would you know lightning
privacy work or there's other solutions that are going to make a little more sense fair enough okay
so you so there are no decentralized versions or they weren't there weren't there's a bunch of
people working on them you know i know that the mastodon folks are are dying to have this their
proposal leaks metadata all over the place um the blue sky folks would love to have this too but
their pds system doesn't really allow for it um because it's a quite a centralized identity server
thing um so i think i think we're like the first properly decentralized version of this that does
a really good job hiding privacy um i haven't heard of any others that you know have made me go
oh we actually missed something there and in order to interact with it you just need a noster
you just need a noster publicly that's it right um and what i what i noticed was i haven't actually
i've got it but i haven't actually sent a dummy message yet that's okay but what i noticed was
what it didn't do was pull in my my list of known people so from noster and obviously there's a
privacy that there's a privacy feature or am i no no that's it's probably just an early version
yeah yeah like we're trying to get this out as early as possible to get things and we've gotten
so much great feedback and to be honest the app barely works for certain people and the longer
you've been on nostr and you sign into white noise the more problems you're going to find
because you've got all these it's actually down to relay and like how relays interact with things
and when you're trying to be quite private with with certain parts of data it makes it harder for
relays to understand what's going on and so it makes it harder for things to overlap if you've
got the kind of outbox model set up where you've defined all these different relays that you want
to use for different purposes so that's generally the thing that makes this really hard you know if
you sign up with a brand new account on there like if you just create account it's almost universally
going to work and you know once you get into the edge cases of which there are a lot in our early
you know cohort of users which are all the you know people that have been on NOSTA a while
that's what we're kind of working through now I think this is true right not a lot of people
realize this but on nostr currently if you're using primal or amethyst or whatever when you
send a direct a dm yeah it's public right pretty much i mean yeah the content of the message is
encrypted with a very lightweight encryption scheme the all the metadata of who's talking
to who and when that's all public um and there's actually bots that go around just reporting on
this the dm reporter bot it's very funny well what i what on mine i use amethyst but when someone
sends me a dm it becomes a notification yeah as in not a just there's a dm notification and
that's the giveaway for me that's the giveaway right yep and and there is another scheme like
you know i think it was like a year and a half ago or almost two years ago at this point um
you know the earliest version of the you know dm scheme nipo4 which is what primal and damas still
use um that's like always been known to be bad right like we've all known that from the beginning
and ben arc was the one who wrote that originally and like he never meant that to be an actual
encryption scheme. It was like, let's see if we can get semi-private messaging on Nostr.
You know, hacked it up in a few hours and like, okay, this is good. And there's like 30 people
using Nostr, right? Like there's no one on the network. And it just somehow hung around for a
long time. And so there, you know, whatever, a year and a half ago, a bunch of devs got together
and did some work to come up with something that was a little better, you know, in terms of it's a
better encryption scheme for the actual content, but it also wraps the messages in another message
so that it hides all the metadata.
So what you see on the network is some random pub key
that we've never seen before sent a message to
that mentions someone,
We don't know what that message is.
It could be anything inside.
And the person that, you know, receives the message knows how to unwrap that message and then get to the actual encrypted option.
So the plan going forward would probably be that the YNOS protocol would just get incorporated in other things.
Yes, exactly.
And that's actually what's taken so long in the project.
You know, like first I had to figure out how to even apply MLS into NOSTER.
And like once I was fairly sure that was possible, then I actually started with instead of writing white noise,
I was concurrently writing all the libraries that I would want other developers to use to do this.
And so I wrote the spec of like, this is how you're supposed to do the thing.
And then I wrote the libraries that implement that spec.
And at the same time, I was sort of writing the proof of concept of what the white noise messenger was, sort of to test the libraries I was building.
And as we've gone on a little bit, we've now got a pretty solid basic library that does the thing correctly.
It's written in Rust, so we'll be able to bind out to other languages and give this to other developers.
And white noise has come a long, long way in the process.
So I want this to be fully interoperable.
I know for a fact that, like, you know, Vitor with Amethyst, Will at Damas, Million with Primal,
they're all just like, tell us when it's ready and we're going to implement it.
And, like, we'll do this right across the board.
And you're funded by OpenSats, is it?
Or it can't be a business for you?
You're just giving it away freely?
No, this is definitely not a business for me.
And it was actually funny, like when I started to think about the project, it was sort of, do I try to raise VC funds for this or do I stick to the open source grants model and, you know, try to do this as like a public benefit type thing?
And, you know, I would say it was like a hard decision.
It actually wasn't.
You know, I'd been on an OpenSats grant for a little while at that point.
And to me, this is a project that needs to be fully open, fully, you know, untethered to something where there's a financial outcome.
Maybe described by OpenSats.
I assume that they weren't large grants, though, not enough to live off and stuff.
No, well, I think OpenSats has done a really good job.
So let me quickly give the definition.
Like OpenSats is just a 501c3 nonprofit that takes in grants and donations from, you know, big foundations, from donors.
You know, they've gotten a lot of kind of their seed capital from Jack Dorsey.
And they fund Bitcoin, Lightning and Nostra projects.
and specifically they fund developers with grants that generally run for you know six months to a
year they also have a long-term support program which does you know two-year grants um i was one
of the very first grantees to get an open sats grant you know at the beginning of nostr um they'd
been doing a little bit of bitcoin grants and they started doing nostr grants and you know i was
funded for a year with that and then i got a renewal and got another year um that's actually
just ended. So now I'm no longer funded by OpenSats. But, you know, there's been a bunch
of other organizations in the middle as well, like HRF gives Bitcoin grants for developers.
I'm very lucky to be working with them and gotten grants from them.
It makes perfect sense though.
Yeah. It makes total sense. And so there's an ecosystem of places that
are granting money to developers and projects for things. And I think it's cool because,
you know, OpenSats focuses more on sort of very wide, they're happy to give developers who might
not even have necessarily a clear project in mind, but have shown proof of work and built
interesting things that are just experimenting with a lot of stuff. And I think that's really
important on one side. HRF tends to fund stuff that's like a bit more, this is a known project
and it's a project that fits into our remit of, you know, trying to make more freedom in the world.
And so HRF has been a really great partner to White Noise and me and everything. So they've
been amazing. But yeah, like I think where this is headed is I'm probably going towards, you know,
creating a 501c3 going you know part of my job will be making sure that we always have money to
keep this project going um so you're going to do this full-time i mean i've been doing this full-time
for over a year now and i intend to continue working on this for as long as humanly possible
um you mentioned jack yeah tell me about bit chat which i haven't used yet
it's so much fun really it's so much fun yeah i mean look i think you don't think it's a serious
contender though well it's just a totally different thing right like it's um i think you know taking
one step back i think jack is a such a unique human um like how many people can you pinpoint
in the world that have made billions of dollars and are still hacking on stuff in their spare time
and are still looking at how do we increase freedom and agency in the world like there's not many
right you know billionaires usually get stuck into other things um so the fact that you know jack has
a public company that has two incredibly you know profitable business lines that he has to deal with
you know wall street on a regular basis but finds time to hack on stuff you know vibe code apps in
his spare time is kind of nuts talking of before we go oops before we go out are you vibe code in
this or are you no no the thing are you coding it a lot so there's parts of you know this where llms
can be really helpful you know like writing documentation writing some tests like those
are great anytime you get to code that is fundamentally novel that's new they where
you're combining things that you know an llm has never seen the number of hallucinations goes through
the roof and it's like totally useless you also just don't want to be vibe coding stuff that
really matters you know like no one should ever be vibe coding on bitcoin core like that's just
fundamental fact but what about you as a are you a coder yeah so you're sitting at the you're you've
got your hoodie on i use lms constantly for all sorts of stuff from everything from just
hey can you give me you know i can't remember what the api definition of this method is can you give
me a quick like summary of it or tell me more about how this piece of the protocol works and
we like talk back and forth about it it's a great pair programmer and as a you know experienced
engineer you really benefit from having someone to bounce ideas off of and having someone who's
literally read all the documentation for every software ever you know created in the world and
can immediately give you a correct answer on basic information without without prying 2d i take it
you could go and get a very well-paid job somewhere probably yeah just so i'm just formulating a
picture we've only just met and i'm yeah please very pleased to meet you but i'm working this
stuff out right bit chat okay bit chat is awesome bit chat is super super fun um i love the idea of
kind of off-grid stuff like that you know using mesh networks using wi-fi using radio you know
using satellite stuff i think um where we have gotten with the internet over the last 25 years
is terrifying. It's become completely centralized and totally owned by five companies and governments.
And that's not somewhere I would like to be. You know, like, to be honest, I would almost rather
it be wholly owned by governments rather than, you know, five big companies. Governments are at
least not as useful. They aren't as competent as these companies are. You know, like, Meta is full
of incredibly intelligent people. And I worry about their motivations. And so I think, you know,
Anything that helps us go in the direction away from this, you know, pure centralization,
like the internet that most people know right now is actually just five companies and their
platforms.
Like it is a platformized internet rather than the open decentralized protocol based
thing that we started with.
And I want to do everything I can to make us go back in that direction.
I think that's where we get freedom.
That's where we get interesting ideas.
That's where people actually benefit from these tech rather than, you know, being sucked
off of by the parasites.
And Jack's BitChat is essentially a mechanism for transmitting data directly between devices over Bluetooth, whatever it can get its hands on.
Well, there's nothing super novel about this, right?
Like we've known about mesh networks for a long time and Bluetooth is, I think, only recently becoming viable there with like Bluetooth low energy.
You know, it's used as low energy.
It can do a little bit, you know, decent range on it.
um so for certain use cases like you're in a cities or you're in a panel like in a talk at
bitcoin honey badger or you know or baltic honey badger we were in panels it'd be like okay open up
bit chat and send us questions and like you're basically just getting the questions from the
room right it's ephemeral it disappears immediately um you know there's no identity attached to it
so i think there's some fun stuff there but it's worth mentioning that you could transmit a message
from that room to australia providing you have enough it could make yeah and it has to be a it
has to be within sort of striking distance i mean 100 feet 100 meters is that right yeah you're not
going to get you're not going to get it across the channel or across the across the no you're
going to have to hook into something that can do longer distance at some point um so it's it can be
really good for very you know small geographic locations um i mean you could easily relay stuff
across the city in a couple of minutes but like i was i was a journalist in london for
almost eight years and often we used to cover demonstrations and during demonstrations the
police used to shut off the mobile phone signal this was back in the 90s and 2000s like it was
happening back then so that would really be a great exactly exactly and i think the cool thing
about bitchat is that it fun um people love it it like spreading really quickly and it making us figure this whole like mesh thing out because you know talking to like Kale who the one that does the BitChat Android app You know he like it so interesting because we have no idea how these mesh things are you know prioritizing different you know mechanisms
Like there's no optimization here at all.
It's literally like try to connect to anybody you see and just send messages, you know, and it fails in all these weird ways.
And so I think it's we need to get better at understanding, like, how do we do mesh well?
We know how we do, you know, the internet well when you've got a wire.
But how do you do mesh over Bluetooth or radio or Wi-Fi?
It must be great at festivals as well.
It could also be amazing at festivals.
Half a million people all in one place.
Yeah.
And the mobile phone signal can't handle all that data that you can do.
Exactly.
So I hope that we are going towards a future where we have way less centralization on the internet.
And we've got little pockets all over the place that do different stuff at different layers of the stack.
And like, yeah, it's going to connect to the internet.
some point beam you across the ocean but you know do you need your you know town chat or whatever to
actually hit the internet no it doesn't it can literally stay locally and it could be on a server
in someone's basement and it never touches the internet at all and obviously that would have a
big impact on bitcoin payments as well bitcoin payments on just privacy in general the less you
can feed data and traffic and information to facebook the better but i mean for example i
i've been to um el salvador a few times and i've realized very succinctly that if you don't got a
phone signal it's very difficult to make a bitcoin transaction and you get used to around here not
having that problem but when you go something like that yeah the papusa lady wants some bitcoin
off you and you can't send it presumably these mesh networks would you would be able to use the
mesh networks and then would with the and then settle later or you maybe use lightning and settle
later or something yeah well i think i don't even think it would be a settled later type of thing
because um you know those technologies bitcoin specifically and lightning you know do require
you know being connected so to give you any sort of feedback like it worked so it would really work
wouldn't it i could send lightning to you and me over a mesh network we would never have to touch
the internet but you wouldn't be able to validate anything about it that it worked or that it
actually happened at all and so i think you know for your example there cash is a way better use
case because cashew is a bearer instrument so like you can give a token to someone and yes they
don't know there's there's a window there where you could double spend on it because if you ran
back to the internet and spent that same token before the other person could you know get internet
and exchange the token have we got time to go into cashew we've been going nearly an hour and a half
i've got all the time you want right yeah effrat's coming in at half an hour for a friend nice yeah
yeah right good friend yeah she's great um because i use cashew mini bits yeah i use mini bits once
again because people that know a lot more than me said this is amazing use this right yeah um
i didn't realize it was a bearer instrument how does that work so cashew is basically like a
wildcat bank right like the idea behind the cashew mint is that they're taking in some asset in this
case bitcoin they are holding that and they're giving you an iou in return effectively um and
that iou through cryptography is blinded they don't know how much they don't know who they're
giving it like the bank is totally blind, which is a really great thing, right? They can't do any,
you know, anything funny with you specifically, because they don't know anything about who they're
dealing with. They're just like, hey, this is Bitcoin. Yes, this is real. Okay, here's your
thing. When I see this thing come back to me, I'm going to, I'm going to honor that, right? So that
when this IOU comes back to me, I'm going to give the Bitcoin out to whoever has it. It doesn't
matter who has it. And that's, that's kind of what eCash is, right? Like you, it's a blinded
transaction where it doesn't matter how many times or how many different people that that e-cash token
that iou moves around in the system once it comes back to be traded from the mint that created it
um if it's a you know a mint that's acting in good faith they return the bitcoin and burn their iou
so that's the point you need to be online at the when it comes in and out yes the trade point that
that point at which you want to melt the e-cash or you know trade it in for you know the actual
asset underlying it that's the point that you need to connect to so that means from mini bits i could
spend bitcoin over a mesh network oh yeah and and they've got they've got all the stuff already i
mean cali was playing with this and putting cashier tokens in uh in bitchat and it works fine you know
like it pops up in your thing and like yes there's a you know there's a place in there where yeah it's
custodial this is that that's absolutely incredibly amazing and solves one of the biggest problems i
i think personally yeah is connection with the internet that's yep and again that's like there
is a there is a there is a risk in the middle yeah i mean cash is a little bit better in this case
right because i guess the mint that you're trusting is the actual government so like
you are more comfortable trusting them than some person on the internet that just happened to set
up a mint so trust in your mint or spreading your trust across many mints is really important in a
system like cashew but it gives you other properties that are really really beneficial
and so when people yell about like oh but it's custodial it's like yes fine but like everything
is trade-offs right like you are always going to trade something for something else and so
cashew makes the trade of yes this is custodial but like look at all this cool shit we get
yeah is this an example of that the meme that we are really early is that going to become some kind
of standard because i hope well why wouldn't it i mean like this is the dream is being able to
You cash you on a card and you have NFC tap everywhere and you pay just like you pay with your MasterCard or Visa.
Like the UX of Visa is incredible.
You just show up and go ding and you walk away.
That's it.
And so if we can get, you know, experiences like that, you know, everybody loves to like go and spend lightning off their own node.
But like how nice is it to sit there and wait for 12 seconds while Zeus spins and you're like, please work, please work.
And, you know, like it sucks.
It's terrible.
So we need to get to a place where our UX is as good or better than Visa before people are actually going to think this tech is useful.
But also with Cashew, there's a great privacy angle to that as well.
I mean, incredible privacy, yeah.
Because the Mint has no idea who you are.
And the token that went out just moves around however long in the community before it gets exchanged.
So, I mean, Cashew, I can see why they called it Cashew now.
Because it really is very similar to cash.
It's a bearer asset that you give to someone and you're private, providing Google's not looking at you through a telescope or whatever.
No one knows.
This is old tech too, right?
Like David Chaum came up with this e-cash concept in 82.
Yeah, Chaumian e-cash.
And the thing that stopped him was he didn't have a way to do it without having to go through the centralized financial system.
You know, he almost had it where he had deals with Visa and MasterCard and big banks to use this as kind of the cash that people would use in the digital world.
and it just kind of fell apart at the last second because the centralized players didn't want it or
didn't what year was that 2000 well 82 is the first paper 1982 and then you know in the 90s
he had a company that was trying to do this and it you know just didn't work what was he doing in
2009 i mean david chom's an interesting guy uh uh yeah we can go on but go and look into it i mean
it's just he's i think david chom was an incredibly intelligent person obviously he came up with
cash like the whole idea of the scheme is is pretty amazing he came up with this kind of
blinding scheme for you know and the math behind it i think on the business side i think he overplayed
his hand in a few cases where you know he tried to get too much and deals fell apart because of that
um and i think in bitcoin i don't know 100 like what his thoughts on but i think it was like it
took him a little while to come around to it in the sense that like maybe a sort of not made here
sort of stance or opinion.
Derangement syndrome.
Maybe, I don't know.
Bitcoin derangement system.
I think he's pretty into it now,
but like, you know, I don't know.
I think it's been used much better
with the recent Cashew and Fetty
and things like that
that are coming back to eCash,
but through a Bitcoin lens.
I think we get a lot more.
So just to get it straight for my listeners,
going forward,
if you were to sort of make some suggestions,
it would be Nostra, obviously.
It would be Bitcoin,
but with using a cashier version of Bitcoin would be a good idea.
Use layers of Bitcoin, right?
Like I think all of these things, again, comes back to trade-offs.
Like, you know, you hold your life savings somewhere super, super safe.
You're not walking around with your life savings constantly.
You know, you don't like you expect to have a little bit of cash in your wallet.
And if you get mugged for that little bit of cash, okay, not the end of the world.
Like, you know, if you get away with your safety, then you're fine.
And I think that's the way to think about these things as well.
Like your hardware wallet that's completely disconnected from the internet that holds your life savings doesn't go everywhere with you.
Your cash wallet does.
And, you know, maybe the mint rugs you at some point.
But your money in your cash wallet was even spread across 10 or 20 mints.
And so it's like nothing.
It's no big deal.
You know, it's not life-changing bad for you.
And so I think, you know, and lightning sits in the middle.
Lightning is sort of the lingua franca of you know high payments with Bitcoin You know it going to be used by you know the payment settlers all these you know different mints it going to be used by different you know layer two protocols So between Cashew and you know ARK or you know any of those things you going to
end up with this sort of lightning payments in the middle. And so yeah, for people, I would say,
you know, yeah, have a lightning wallet, have a Cashew wallet, play with these things,
you know, do it with a very small amount of money. You know, all of these things are still new tech.
I mean, I think Lightning is pretty solid at this point, but Cashew is definitely still new.
But get familiar with them and know which trade-off you're taking and why.
And also think about it for what application you're using it for.
And from a privacy standpoint, how would you operate in the world?
Social media, money, you know, those kind of aspects.
Yeah.
I mean, I think just more people need to think about it, right?
Like I'm doxxed.
Like I've been on the internet forever.
I do try to go back regularly and sort of nuke as much as I can, you know, from the past.
um but what kind of stuff like you mean just the internet's a copy machine though like yeah but
yeah social media stuff kids right yeah 12 10 and 9 whatever mine are basically the same age and
it's the same scenario of you know i've explained it's like privacy is a semi one-way door like once
you go through the door you're not going back and getting it like so what are you telling your kids
go on then what are you advising one is we i mean we're trying to keep them off of phones for as long
as possible um how old is your oldest is 12 right mine's pale she has and he doesn't have a smart
phone and he's killing us over it but like it's like hold the line you know i i was very
the same for a long time and then i i did i don't know i don't think i'm coping i i because i gave
her a graphene phone we we operate with signal she has a vpn on there she understands all this
stuff i figured and i use this as an example you know my wife's email address is hotmail still i
she's in her 40s and she right okay my bank account is still the hsbc from when i went to
university at 18 right yes i use vodafone which is 20 i started in the late 90s you know yeah so
if i start her on graphene proton mail is her email address you know probably it's gonna do well
that's not the part that matters the part that matters is what what is she posting online and
where you know what i mean like she's not on social media yeah well actually but there's a
backdoor social media that's whatsapp yes she's on whatsapp correct in a group and i i she understands
this now because i said alice that is a social network yeah don't think facebook instagram
tiktok there's no you're in a group chat there's even you can post what you've been up to today
it's the same thing but it's but i mean we shouldn't just demonize social media and you
know blanketly like i think there's there are you know things that are there are redeeming qualities
about certain social media platforms.
I think the problem is that like the social media
that most people look at and think at
is entirely ad driven.
And that means you are the product.
And so that means they will extract
as much as possible from you in pursuit of that.
And so to me, it's more helping my kids
use the right tools, like it sounds like you're doing.
It's understanding the models
and like why does a platform want you to be like this?
And why does this platform have this algorithmic feed
that its sole job is to keep you there?
um and if you arm people with those tools and that understanding my hope is that like at least they
are going in with eyes open and you know you can use these tools to your advantage but just know
that like just like a knife it's dangerous you know if you use it wrong it's going to cut you
how long do you think you'll keep your son off smartphone then i think he's probably gonna
13 is probably where it's i don't think we're going to be able to mine is 13 but she got it at
12 yeah and i i'd we had well i i had actually in our family liz doesn't care she's not that
bothered about all this stuff but i had thought because i had i felt the most strongly about it
it's like no no never and then and everyone said oh but reality is going to hit home and
the friends are going to do this and blah blah blah and and the one that got me actually in the
end was the inability to contact me when i was away like right now she's always sending me messages
all on signal videos this kind of stuff coming through and then you do have to give yourself a
reality check because it's not all bad and i think people like us we jump straight into the this is
terrible yes and it is in many ways but it is also not and you can keep your kids away from viruses
if you want and when they're an adult they'll be they'll get loads and loads of illnesses so
i'm kind of bringing myself to the middle as fast as i can and i figured this is the best way and
I agree. I mean, I wholeheartedly agree with that statement. I think, you know, the important thing is, to me at least, is, you know, that my kids are able to take personal responsibility and understand the tradeoffs that they make in certain things. And so like, you want to go on social media, fine. But like, know what you're doing, know what you're getting into, know why you want to do that. Don't just blindly do it because everybody else does it and not think about it. But yeah, there's plenty of amazing things about the internet.
In my case, we have actually banned her from being on legitimate social media websites.
But for me, and I've always framed it as when you're old enough, you'll understand why you don't necessarily want your image all over the Internet, basically.
Sure, it's in WhatsApp chats.
There's pictures of her in her group chats and stuff.
But that's the long and short of it.
And I don't know.
I'm probably overdoing it because I just don't know because I didn't have that.
I got on I got a mobile in the late 90s I was a journalist so we used them quite quickly I used
digital photos early I didn't adopt social media very quickly I remember looking at it thinking
it was weird and very intrusive yeah you know and and you know but obviously now I do but I use it
for a business I hardly tweet I tweet business things about the podcast I I've stopped using
on Facebook, obviously. But if I was going to, it's the most I would want to do is to show
five people the family photos. We don't need to do that on Facebook. We can do that on a group chat.
I actually have come full circle. I think I was just eternal tech optimist and loved technology.
And I was on all the platforms super early. I was still in university when Facebook was launching.
And so I was in there before most people. I was on Twitter very soon after it launched.
and for a while it was just like, oh yeah, this is great.
This is all good.
Whatever, you can post whatever you want
and it wasn't until much later that I was like,
hang on a sec
and as it started to go darker and darker,
it was like, okay, what I understood this to be
is not actually what this is
and to that one-way door point,
it's really hard to get rid of stuff on the internet.
It's a copy machine
and it's really good at copying things
and so you can try to delete accounts
But like, you know, 90% of SaaS startups, when you delete something, it's just a flag in a database that says delete it or not.
It's still in the database.
It's still there.
They still have it.
So, you know, to anybody in the younger generation, it's really just like, you know, guard it.
Because once you give it away, it's gone.
And, you know, be aware of what it actually is and why it is the way it is.
But I think explaining it like that to kids really works.
I think so too.
Because if you say nothing ever gets deleted, it just gets signaled to be not looked at.
Yeah.
And then you say, right, you've got a camera in your room looking at you at all times.
How do you feel about that?
It's like, I don't want that camera.
Exactly.
Right.
You don't want to do that stuff on the internet.
Right.
It's exactly the same thing.
And they get that.
Yeah.
We're private by nature.
And I really hate this kind of global push to normalize guilt around privacy and stuff.
Yes, I hate it.
But I think there's something deeply, deeply disturbing and driven in it. It's very much that we various, you know, interested entities around the world need you to not care about privacy in order to get their way. And you have to really assert it now. And the worst thing is, of course, that as less and less people assert it, you lose your, the people that are asserting it also lose their privacy.
Exactly.
Because now we've become targets.
It's a reverse network effect. Yeah. Yep.
So, I mean, just comment on that briefly before we go then.
How do you mitigate that scenario?
I mean, I think this is a two-pronged thing.
And it's easy to get blackpilled on privacy because people just don't care.
They will take convenience every day of the week over maintaining privacy.
However, I mean, I think we're getting to a shelling point where, you know, the powers that be are pushing things too far, right?
It will go too far at some point and more and more people will start to pay attention to this.
I think the other piece is, you know, the younger generations do actually think about this stuff.
And I think they get, you know, they get the dark half of their experience online pretty quickly.
And I wonder if we're going to go back towards, you know, less online time.
You know, people put in like I saw some random video that somebody had posted about, you know, 1985 and like what it was like to grow up in 1985 online.
And like all these kids were like, is this real?
Like could this could that actually have been the way things were You know you went over and like hung out with your friends at their house And like you know you had to call on pay phones like they were all in awe that like this could be and this looked so beautiful to them yeah yeah it was like we don go outside we don talk to people face to face
we don't hang out we don't you know everything has to be pre-programmed and pre you know so i think
younger the younger generation i think is going to turn faster on this stuff it my my kids are a good
anecdotal example then because i and i obviously it's us but we have managed to convince them
that it's uncool to be head in the phone all the time because that's kind of when whenever they hang
out with someone or if you know my daughter goes on some trip and she's with people she doesn't know
when we're discussing it afterwards it'll be oh yeah she was just all over you know and she doesn't
want to associate with that person yes and i don't know whether that one day she might go oh my god
my mom and dad hoodwinked me or whatever but also we just you know push like we we we push her in
directions of working outside playing outside right she's a horse rider so we are a great expense
yeah orchestrated a scenario in which she can ride a horse whenever she wants and all those things
when you add up make the idea of sitting down and looking at a phone a bad idea yes basically yes
but it's not a simple thing and i feel deeply for people who who work hey just living imagine
living in a city in some and not going outside much and having a job that keeps you out of your
kids lives and blah blah what else is going to happen right right it's it's it's miserable that
way right and like humans were not made to live like that and um i think we've tried to do the
exact same thing it's like no go and play like and well you're rock climbers as well so that must
yeah and we live in a small town so it's super safe and like you know there's all sorts of things
that you know add up to this and i think this is you know where hopefully you know my idea of the
promise of the internet was always like you can go anywhere and do anything now like you are not
constrained by geography anymore and you know i've been working remotely since like 2007 or so 2006
maybe. And it was so weird for a bunch of years for most people. And now it's become completely
normal. And, you know, but there's a dark side of that, which is you need to use that to your
advantage rather than just be like, I can work anywhere. So I'm just going to stay inside and
work and be on my computer all the time. It's like, no, go somewhere where you actually enjoy
the place that you get, you know, fulfillment from the things that are around you, interact with the
people that are around you, you know, and I think that's hard for a lot of people. But at the same
time like that's where all the contentment and fulfillment happens you know it's in the real world
and these things fundamentally are just tools like they are tools that are meant to serve us
not to serve facebook and google and we need to just make that the case amen to that and actually
we never got to talk about this but it doesn't matter that could happen another time but
what you're describing is basically where our foundation what we do is all about i think you
are in the business of dealing with digital freedom and i think we're in the business of
trying to it's much harder it's much more messier way messier yeah dealing with physical freedom and
yeah but they are very highly connected as we can see and we'll get more and more intricately
connected as we go on so yeah absolutely um i was gonna say many thanks for um well number one doing
what you're doing i think anyone who's doing open source tools for freedom lovers are on my christmas
list every year they're great people um so thanks for that but also thanks for you know i've never
met you before i just sent you a message on nostril and said will you come sit down with me and talk
and you went sure yeah so i love talking about stuff like this talking shop is is great fun uh
so it's uh i appreciate it right well great anyway and then yeah please please i'd love to reconnect
in an amount of time in the future next time we run physically in just to see how it's going but
yeah just for everyone it's it's white noise and it's a nostor thing so you've got to be
you've got to kind of yeah you can check out the site is just white noise.chat is the website and
we've got a little bit of information there and you can you know points you to download links and
things like that um you know if you're not on nostor i would say just uh download primal as
a starting point it's a great ux to get started you know you create a key pair the app does it for
you you know if you want to it's got a built-in lightning wallet you can set up really quickly
for zaps and you know that sort of thing um and just play around like i've heard so many people
say this is the you know first experience with social media that actually felt like wholesome
and positive rather than draining and soul destroying like a guy a guy on the panel we
were doing at baltic honeybeger the other day had a question but he first started out by saying
thank you all nostr is the only thing that supports my mental health rather than destroys it
That's like amazing.
It's the good mornings that I like, obviously.
One of the redeeming factors.
Everyone says good morning.
Yeah, yeah.
But it is.
It's like 1950s digital realm, isn't it?
It feels like that, yeah.
So it feels great.
I'm sure the spammers and the scammers and everybody else will show up eventually.
But for now, it feels like you're somewhere.
It feels like you're on the internet in 1994.
But hopefully, you would posit that by the time the scammers turn up, because of your ability on NOS to really tailor make your experience,
experience yes you should be good for that i mean obviously there's going to be you're going to come
up against some things but you should be good because the algorithm is completely within your
within your sphere of control absolutely 100 and like the web of trust aspect that you know we know
you know from a research point of view webs of trust work really well and it's how our brains
function when we operate in the real world like do i know this person through someone else how
much can i trust them um we haven't built out the digital systems to make that work really well yet
But I think that's part of what Nostra gives us is the ability to really kind of map that analog into the digital world.
So that, yeah, go ahead, spammers, like have at it.
Like we don't have to look at it.
We'll never see it.
We'll never know.
It's so exciting.
I'm so glad I spoke to you this morning because you're right.
You can get a bit blackbilled about all this stuff.
But actually, it's so exciting because a lot of things are arising right now, which are very much digital representations of really fundamental old school cultural things that we do.
Like exactly what you've just described.
I've never heard anyone describe Nostum like that.
I know there's the identity part is really important, but you're absolutely right.
Yeah.
You know, I knew you because of Max and I trust Max implicitly and I know he wouldn't be mates with you if you were a douchebag, you know.
Totally.
There is no way of working that out.
Right.
You're absolutely right.
Right, right.
And it's kind of interesting that the only decentralized social network, you know, decentralized system that's actually not a social network, Nostra, it's a generic publishing thing.
But we're sort of, you know, bootstrapping the network by shitposting, you know, like Matt O'Dell always says.
We are getting to that network effect of knowing who's who by virtue of a bunch of people just posting GM and sending random stuff in a Twitter-like scenario.
And a lot of other things, like PGP failed because they really couldn't build a network effect around it.
So having multiple modes to do that means that the entire network is better.
Any business that comes and builds on Nostra immediately has the entire user base at their disposal.
and every new business or new user or everything supports everything.
So it's like a network effect of network effects.
So I think it's probably the only thing that's in it, you know,
that has a real chance of functioning.
And also it's very useful in the sense that if you, a lot of apps now,
if you want to download a new app on Noster,
it'll say who out of your friend group already has.
That's brilliant.
ZapStore is the quintessential example of how cool Noster can be.
You can develop an app, you can sign it so that everybody knows that like, hey, me, the person that you're talking to over here is the developer and I've signed this app cryptographically.
And it's the same thing on the same, you know, on the server.
And you just freely download it without having to enter any KYC, anything.
And it shows you that, oh, these mates of yours have already downloaded it.
I've already downloaded it.
Cool.
So I know I'm on the right version and not some scam version.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah. So there's like a million ways where this web of trust, this network, this kind of open publishing system means that we get the possibility of building a brand new internet that's like fully open. Yes. We hope, we hope. Long road though, it's a really long road.
Yeah, but you say we hope. It's already here. Like we're using it.
That's true.
I'm using Nostra every day, much more than Twitter.
Yeah.
It's weird that like this morning when I went to message you on Nostra, none of our messages were there. And then like 20 minutes later, they popped up. Yeah, that's weird and annoying, but I'm still using it.
It's early, but it does work. Yeah, most of the time.
anyway Jeff
many many many
many thanks indeed
for coming
and this has been awesome
I'm really happy
I really have
got wrapped my head
around some important
concepts here
so many thanks for coming
thank you for the invite
it's been super enjoyable
I'll see you next time
yeah thanks
Thank you.