Jeff, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you so much. Happy to be here.
I'm very excited for today's conversation.
Where I want to start is you are building white noise,
and I've done some research around what you're creating,
and it's just a fascinating thing to be working on.
So that's where I'd love to start.
Why are you doing that?
Yeah, great question. It's been a lot of work.
Um, no, in fairness, like it has been, uh, probably the most fun project I've worked on
in a lot of years.
Uh, you know, I think, you know, I, I came to Noster about three years ago.
Um, at the time it was very broken, very hard to use, very hard to like understand what
was going on.
Um, you know, I think even from those early days, like people knew that, you know, private
messaging was a thing that we really needed to have.
And we didn't, you know, we had a very broken version of it.
and for a long time it was just something that everybody said you know oh somebody will fix this
eventually somebody will fix this eventually but no one was working on it really actively
and finally one group of kind of you know uh won't call them core devs but like devs that
were working on the protocol you know at a deep level said okay let's try and fix you know at least
dms to make it so that we're not sharing all the metadata around who's talking to who
um and so they did do that and and that was nip 17 and that actually was a big step up over the
original you know uh private or dm messaging um nip but it still didn't have forward secrecy it
didn't have post-compromised security it didn't work for groups um it was still a very you know
it was kind of a solution to a very small point salute you know a point problem which was
we don't we want to be able to dm somebody without everybody else knowing that i dm'd that person
but it didn't really solve the problem that most people think of when you think of a messenger right
you think of a messenger you think of groups you think of rich chat with images and videos and
whatever else in them and you think of at least when you think about end-to-end encryption you
think okay this conversation can go on into the future even if my like nostrikey gets compromised
the attacker shouldn't get all of the conversations and all of the conversation history
and that to be honest is just a hard problem like it's a very hard computer problem
and so that was sort of you know the the problem space i waded into i'm not a cryptographer like
i'm not a gray beard programmer that has you know been doing uh messaging for years and years i'm a
pretty left-curve web developer um but just no one was dealing with it and so finally i was like well
i guess i'll give it a try let's see what happens um and turns out you can just do things so yeah
Here I am two years later with a, you know, nearly functioning messenger.
Cool. And so to spend some time talking around the problem, you mentioned a few things there that a lot of people won't understand, like even the idea of end-to-end encryption.
So perhaps we start with that.
Sure.
What is the problem? Like, why can't I just send a message over the NOSTA DM?
And how might that, you know, bite me in the ass in the future if I've sent something I shouldn't say?
Or what can someone learn about me that I don't want them to know?
Yeah, that's a great question. And actually, it's a funny one. A couple of, I guess, a month ago or so, Signal went down for a couple of hours because Cloudflare was offline. And it was funny to watch the response on Twitter and stuff because a lot of people sort of assumed that because Signal was down, then it was somehow insecure, that somehow people could read their messages and things. And really what was down was just delivery. They couldn't get messages across the internet to your phone.
So it wasn't about the encryption.
It wasn't about the security of signal at that point.
But it really highlighted the fact for me that people don't understand what end-in encryption means.
And so a good way to think about this is let's just take your phone and my phone as the two devices here.
And this can obviously scale up to as many devices as you want.
But the idea here is that you have some sort of shared state that I also have on my phone.
so we both have the same keys and that means that we can you know put something in a box you know a
box we lock the box with the key and then we send it with a courier you know let's let's go full
analog here we send the box with a courier it arrives to you you've got the same key you can
open the box and see the message but the courier doesn't have the key so he can't open the box he
has to transport the box but he can't see what's inside of it right um that's kind of what an
encryption is. The idea here is basically that somehow you and I agree to some shared state
and we agree on a method to change that state over time as we change things about the group
or we change, we send messages. There's just some pre-agreed thing that we are going to do
in order to make sure that, you know, the keys are changing constantly and we're using fresh
keys constantly, but we're doing so in a way that once we've got it all set up, we don't have to
talk about anymore. We just know how to do it. And it means that your messages are going to be
encrypted on my device and sent to your device and they stay fully encrypted the entire way.
And they, you know, in the opposite direction, you encrypt your things on your device. They get to me,
I decrypt them. Now, what that does mean though, is that the copies of the unencrypted content
live on our devices. So, you know, if you lose a phone and you've probably seen this with signal
or something else, you know, they've, most of them have good syncing and backup now, but,
you know certainly several years ago if you lost your phone all of your signal messages are just
gone like there's no way to get them back because they were they literally only lived on your phone
um so that's sort of the trade-off inherent in indian encryption is that you make it very secure
for the pathway to get messages between people um but you need to then be careful with the device
because how you store those messages locally uh means that you know if somebody if an attacker
got your phone and got it unlocked, then they basically have all of your chats, all of your
history, everything. Yeah. Well, and who knows what you might be sending someone, but the point
is, is you send it to them, not to anyone else. And therefore you don't want it to cost you
something in the future that you never intended. And actually the context of this that really was
very helpful for me is I listened to you speaking with Tim on the Free Cities podcast. And
And just the history of communication was just a cool thing to run through.
So maybe we can spend a bit of time doing that.
But the idea that previously you'd use a telephone and you'd go to a switchboard and that would then send you somewhere else.
So how has this kind of communications technology built on top of itself to get to where we are today?
yeah it's it's kind of um it's amazing when you kind of go backwards and you look at both just
general communications and like how we have um improved speed and fidelity of communications
over time but also how you think about the way that people kept secrets um and did you know
encryption in the past uh you know if you go way far back like people have you know used to write
letters and they would seal them with wax so that if the letter arrived and the wax seal was broken
like, you know, the person knew that somebody in the middle had read it. You know, people very
quickly figured out, you know, really basic ciphers, where you could just rotate, you know,
like the Caesar cipher, where you just rotate, you know, the letters of the alphabet by a certain
number. And all that you need to know about the letter I'm going to send you is what number you
need to turn the dial by to get back to the right letters. So that's a very simple one. It's like
very brute forceable, like somebody could just literally turn the turn at once and like, keep,
you know, uh, rewriting your letter until it makes sense. Um, but over time, like people,
you know, figured out better and better and better ways of doing this. Right. Um,
so yeah, I mean, like a good way to think about this and, um, I don't remember exact context of
what we were talking about with Tim at the time, but, um, but yeah, I mean, like we have always
sort of had to trust people in the middle after a certain point, right? Like, you know, even when
it was letters, we had to trust that somebody was going to deliver the thing for us and not look at
in the middle. Um, so couriers, mail services, uh, all sorts of things like that. Then we get
to electronic age and we've got, you know, telegraphs where there's telegraph operators
in the middle. There's an undersea cable. Um, there's the guy who's actually listening to the
Morris code on the other side and like translating it into a letter and handing it to you. Um,
so there's kind of always been people in the middle of our communications, right? And we've
always had to trust them to some degree or another. Uh, I think once we got to, you know,
the internet age where almost all of our lives have been moving into the digital realm, this has
become more and more critical, right? We cannot operate in society in full public transparency.
At least that's my belief. I don't think it's possible to have total transparency of all
citizens in society and that'd be a good thing. You know, we need to have ways first.
Is it necessary?
Yeah, it's totally not necessary, I don't think. But it's also just,
it's detrimental in a lot of ways because you know,
you end up with these groupthink problems. You, you know,
you end up censoring yourself because of what you think the social scenario
around you demands of you. And so you can't have original thoughts.
You can't have dissident thoughts. You can't say,
I don't think this is a good idea because those thoughts germinate first in
your own mind. So of course you've got privacy in your own mind.
At least I hope so. At least for now.
but you know like they're they're going in that direction too but uh but you know you've got
privacy in your own mind but then where does that go next it goes between you and maybe one close
friend where you're like hey does this seem right to you like let's talk about this some more
yeah and then it slowly expands to larger and larger groups right and this is how like movements
form and you know how governments topple and how we get an improvement in life overall in the
planet in my opinion is that like we have to challenge things we have to push back against
the norm or the, you know, uh, the status quo. And so I think privacy is a really important part
of that because until you have some semblance of like security and those thoughts that are
uncomfortable, you won't have them, um, or you'll shove them down and you won't think about them.
So, you know, I think as we've become more and more digital, this sort of idea of how do we keep
communications flowing over public infrastructure, you know, the internet backbones, uh, all the
fiber optic cables, where we know there's lots and lots of people in the middle.
How do we do that without totally giving up our privacy and totally letting them see what
those ideas are?
And so there's kind of two parts of that, right?
There's like, keep the message confidential.
So they don't know what the message is, but also all the stuff around that, the metadata
is really, really important.
You know, who's talking to who, when, what are they, you know, might not know what they're
talking about, but if there's like six or seven people that are always talking together on
a Tuesday night and you triangulate a few other things, you can probably tell a lot about
what their conversation's about. Interesting. I just always love the context for these things,
because of course, you know, like a VC will be like, right, give me a pitch deck, I want to see
the exact like succinct problem you'll solve. It's like, well, here's a statement. But actually,
it's so much more than that, because this is a whole history of how humans have communicated and
how it's evolved over time. And I wonder, like, because this is something I've only really recently
started thinking through is the difference between privacy and secrecy and they're not the same thing
so how do you how do you first of all think that through uh jeff and we'll see where it takes us
yeah i mean i think um i think it was tim may i hope i'm not butchering that but like one of the
original cypherpunks had this you know statement that like um privacy is the ability to selectively
reveal yourself to the outside world um it's the ability where you know it's yeah you having control
over what you share with other people.
Secrecy is sort of a sub branch of privacy in a lot of ways
because all secrecy is saying is you're just keeping some things
from other people.
Secrecy doesn't really have a moral judgment attached to it in any way.
I don't think privacy does either.
Secrecy especially, oftentimes you hear it as like,
oh, they're being very secretive over there because they're doing something bad.
sort of the the immediate assumption when you say somebody's being secretive is that they're doing
something they shouldn't be doing but that's not necessarily the case they might be planning you a
surprise birthday party right um obviously they want to keep that secret from you but it's not
anything that's like going to hurt you so you know i think we have to be really careful that we don't
let the media and you know especially politicians spin this uh in a way that it's just not what it
means and not actually how it functions in the world. You know, this is the same thing of like
secrecy, privacy, they're tools, they're things that help us do things better in our lives.
Tools can be used for all sorts of purposes. And so, you know, you can have bad motives and use
these tools badly, you know, to do harm to others, or you can use them well. And I don't think like,
it's not the place of uh society in my opinion to come down on the tools themselves um it's much
more about like okay what were the actions that were taken with those tools yeah and that's the
interesting one though isn't it it's like a thought is not an action and a spoken word is not an action
um speaking with friends or speaking with others and and actually utilizing the freedom of speech
in my view is not an action and so when people like in the uk where i grew up are now being jailed
for things they've said online like it's quite extraordinary what's going on in terms of
the the encroachment on the idea of even freedom of speech it's like hang on so a a tax-paying and
law-abiding citizen sat in their home commented on something online and now there's a police officer
in their house saying that's not allowed we're telling you shouldn't be able to do that and i
I don't even know.
I not going to name a specific case but what the hell going on there And I then pump in with that Jeff like the very real lived experience of spending many many hours on Twitter
now X,
people who had built themselves up followings
around specific niches
that they'd become passionate about.
And Bitcoin's a really obvious one,
but people more like in the general investing space
that I was heavily involved in,
openly admit they self-censor based on platform risk you know it's like i just i'm not even going
to bother commenting on that particular area of life because it's just too much of a risk for the
other things that i use this thing for it's like wow yeah just imagine what that means at scale
when people aren't saying what they think yeah it's crazy and the scary part is i would say this
is like unprecedented, but it's not like we've seen fascism. We like, we saw this, you know,
a hundred years ago. Um, this is not, you know, super surprising. There's a book called 1984
that pretty much spells this entire scenario out. And it's like, are we so dumb that we don't see
this? Like, I don't understand how people, you know, are able to out of one side of their mouth
say that they love democracy and freedom, but out of the other side of their mouth say those people
should go to jail because I disagree with them. You know what I mean? Um, like, you know, I grew
up in America and, you know, one of the things that I remember my parents like pointed it out to
me, uh, there was this like landmark Supreme court case where, um, a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU
defended the Nazis right to protest. Um, there was a group of neo-Nazis in some small town that
wanted to do a protest and the town shut them down and said, no, you can't, you know, cause
you're nazis and a jewish aclu lawyer took it all the way to the supreme court to defend their right
to protest and it was just like that's america you know like that's freedom of speech like we
don't we might not like what they have to say we might think they're terrible people for a lot of
reasons and we might be right but that doesn't preclude their right um and i think that's like
we just have lost that completely yeah when was that jeff i i want to say it's like the 70s or
60s yeah long it feels like a long time ago because to me that that that's long gone um
that's like impossible right now like can you imagine that right now no i can't and even just
in recent years so i emigrated to australia and was based in melbourne for um the covid19 stuff
that kicked off and it was an extraordinary experience as to like we say this anyone that
questions this is not allowed you know and we ended up with a police officer on our doorstep
telling my wife that she was owing the government money for fines for disobeying the chief health
officer's rules and it was extraordinary man it was really and that's a story for another day but
the if you question the government of australia and their covid 19 policies they didn't like it
and it was turned into a police state like center of melbourne i had friends who were arrested for
trying to protest i was at protests where the police just actively shut the whole thing down
arrested everyone and said this is not allowed and it was done under the guise of health
because everyone was spreading covid apparently by being of course you know groups there's always
a very very specific health reason for the greater good yeah to to squash this this set of dissidents
and actually it was almost a radicalizing moment in a sense i went to one protest where we saw the
mainstream media crews there filming and there were thousands of people every age every color
you can imagine at this thing saying we don't agree with how this covid situation is being
managed and that night on the tv newsreel there were hundreds of protesters reported
it's like i physically saw with my eyes thousands and like oh my god they're they're lying they're
actively lying how many other times has that happened in my life and it just you know the
whole process begins of like why do i know what i know it's actually very scary what's in a textbook
well hang on well that's history isn't it oh but then very simple which history history history
history yeah exactly mate you know history is written by the victor yeah good point i mean i
would write my history book if i just won um yeah oh it's a huge subject this isn't it and so so
what is truth you know and okay something like nosta comes along like obviously there's all
this context this is what motivates you jeff so yeah why do you think this is so exciting for you
so this is an interesting like what is truth is actually a super fascinating question if you start
to get down into it because um and i'll try to not rabbit hole into the philosophy i woke up in
a slightly philosophical mood this morning take it wherever you try not to do it but but i mean
like you know i think we as humans like we've never had perfect truth about you know how the
world works, what's around us. Like we, you know, we take in an enormous, our senses take in an
absolutely enormous amount of data. Right. And like probably 99.9% of it gets thrown out immediately
because your brain has evolved to be really, really good at filtering out which tiny, you know,
fraction of information actually matters for the situation you're in currently. And then uses that
information to sort of, you know, decide what to do in that moment. Right. You see a Russell in the
bushes. Like there's a million other things happening around you, but like your brain is like
rabbit or tiger. Uh, I should probably leave, you know, because the rabbit case is maybe more likely,
but if you get it wrong, the tiger case is much worse, you know? So, you know, there's,
we have been tuned over millennia to operate in this way of filtering information at really high
speed. Um, so we don't have, there is no like truth per se. There is, you know, there's ground
physical reality but even that like you know you start to get down into the quantum area you're
like you okay how much of this do we actually understand versus not you know we have very good
theories about a lot of it um but theories are just that right they're right until they're proven
wrong because we've learned something new um and that's kind of generally how i look at the world
it's like you know pure truth perfect truth doesn't really exist um we get closer and closer
to understanding how stuff works um but even then like i don't know that we're ever going to find a
bottom of that well. And so Nostar kind of works like this, right? We have these relays in a very
simple way. We don't assume that like the like counts or the follow counts are accurate because
we're not even sure we're seeing the entire network. You know, it's a very large distributed
network like humanity. There are pools of data all over the place, which are all these different
relays. I connect to some subset of those. Maybe those relays connect to other relays and pull
data in, maybe not. But what I see is sort of my curation of the world. I follow certain people,
I interact with certain things, I use certain clients, certain applications. That helps to
shape what I get to see. If I go to Japan and connect to all the Japanese relays, I see a
totally different version of Nostar. And this is actually real. You go to Japan, they have all their
relays that are geo-flagged or geo-blocked. So you can only use them in Japan. And when you connect
to them it's all just japanese and it's a totally different set of nostril users that you don't see
anywhere else cool yeah it's cool like it's really cool and that's what humans are like that that's
literally how we have evolved over time we have smaller groups yeah it's way closer to nature and
once you break the idea in your head that like there is a global feed that's the accurate truth
of everything then you start to go okay well if that's not the way it really is then you know how
should I be using this and what should I be using it for? And, you know, all those things start to
change. Um, so I think that's part of what got me really excited was that when I looked at Nostra
at the beginning, it was like, this is a thing to replace, uh, you know, Twitter X, um, you know,
social media. But when I looked at it, I was like, this isn't social media. This is the internet over
again. Like this is the entire internet. We can rebuild pretty much anything we want on this
with two major distinctions. One, our identities are now cryptographically guaranteed, um, which
the early internet didn't have, you know, we have email and password login across hundreds of sites
because we didn't have a canonical thing that we could hang on to and say, this is me. Um,
and we didn't have base layer money on the internet. And that's why we ended up with
credit card payments and SAS providers and, uh, advertising driven models. And yeah, stripe,
like all of that stuff came out of the fact that there was no way to do micro payments on the
internet, right? Like from the very earliest HTTP spec, there was an error code, like, you know,
the error code 404, when you don't find a page, it says 404 page, not found code 402 means payment
required. So it was in the very beginning of the internet, like they were saying like, okay,
you're going to have to pay for these webpages. Um, but then it just never happened because they
couldn't really figure out how to do small enough transactions, uh, at the time. So it just,
it became a non-thing. Wow and it's that funny process isn't it I really love the phrase of
building on the shoulders of giants and so you you actually couldn't have NOSTA without Bitcoin
like if NOSTA was something you tried to build before Bitcoin arrived then you'd be creating
your own token maybe I don't know how it would work but it didn't is the point so you needed
these other things to happen first before it's like okay well what would actually a decentralized
communications protocol look like that solve some of the problems that we see with the legacy
internet experience which has become basically four or five companies that people jump between
private real estate to use for their you know very very good tools but at a cost that is hidden
and when i say hidden yes maybe that's not the right word at a cost that is disguised it's a
better way of saying yeah like use my tool it's free you get all this fun all this education all
of this information and it's amazing but free on the back end it's it's it's it's stealing from you
essentially yes yeah very cool because you you probably had a number of different directions
you could have gone in with your career uh quote career i don't really like that word these days
but like was there a specific moment or like what was it that really caught your attention about
Noster in the first place? You're like, oh, I've got to learn more about this.
Yeah. So I spent kind of, I guess, almost 15 years working in startups before Noster. And these are
all traditional tech startups, you know, starting in like, you know, the late 2000s. And, you know,
so I basically had a front row seat to see how the whole VC tech, you know, model took over
everything, you know, from the very beginning, the earliest SAS folks, um, like all that stuff.
And it was both amazing, like super fun. Like I got to work at some really amazing companies,
um, worked with some of the smartest people I've ever worked with. Um, but really towards the end,
I did start to get this, you know, feeling of like, this isn't doing what we hoped it was going
to do. Like this is somehow morphed into something really not good. Um, you know, like the early,
early internet felt just pure opportunity. You know, like it's so cool. Like all these chat rooms,
all these bulletin boards, like games being passed around, people modding everything,
you know, just everything was sort of open. And, uh, it was just like wild eyed optimism everywhere.
Um, and yeah, there was a ton of mess in there as well. Like people were selling credit cards.
I'm sure there was like some really nefarious stuff going on, like whatever. Um, that's humans.
Like we are messy creatures. That's just how it works. Um, and I think, you know, I sort of been,
towards the end of the startup journey, I was kind of going, okay, I'm either going to work in
Bitcoin or I'm going to do my own company. And I ended up doing my own company for a very short
period. We raised a pre-seed round and then we're looking to raise our seed right as the bottom fell
out of the market in early 2022. And I remember just talking to the investors and they were like,
you did everything right. You just got the timing wrong. So call us on the next one.
um and so i remember just kind of being like oh okay like it's kind of strange i just burned a
load of your money and you seem totally fine with this um and at that point i was kind of going what
am i going to do next and i was kind of looking at bitcoin companies and then i bumped into nostr
uh and when i saw it it was just i was kind of like in disbelief for a week or two uh i was just
like this can't be what i think it is um cool and i reached out yeah i don't know if you know
learn more yeah yeah yeah so i don't know if you know probably it was like yeah another nostr dev
i reached out to him you know we didn't know each other uh we had a couple things in common so i just
kind of pinged him one day and was like hey you want to jump on a call and talk about this nostr
thing and what was supposed to be like a half an hour call went for like several hours of us just
like yelling at each other at full speed like so cool at that point i was like okay this seems like
it's a thing. Um, and it's incredibly early. You got to like really squint to see it. But, um,
I think there's going to be some like really fun stuff that comes out of this. And so at that point
it was just like, okay, I'll give it six months. Uh, I'll just like work on it full-time six months,
see what we can build. Um, and we'll see where we go. And towards the end of that six months,
that was about the time open sets started to spin up and had, you know, started doing Noster grants.
And so I was able to get a grant and kind of keep the ball rolling for a little while longer. And,
um, you know, basically just keep going till now.
And so yeah I also done some angel investing and things in the past and looked very closely at startups and tried to start some of my own and they none of them worked um i always interested in like how do you make money out of something so is white noise a company or it actually just a project that you taken funding for
as a like open source uh grant process and yeah i'm just intrigued just like because it's just so
so different and i love that like hang on what does it mean if the people building this from the
bottom are motivated in a different way because the internet would be different if it wasn't so
ad driven yeah i think that's one of the problems right is the main business models become monetize
eyeballs somehow even gmail's being gamified like it's like it's out of control so what would it
look like if that wasn't the incentive structure at the bottom yeah and i think maybe like noster
tools for customers. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting question. I mean, like, you know,
white noise is not a company, not a for-profit company. I had to think about that for a little
while at the beginning was like, you know, what, what's the format here? To me I took the path I
did mostly because to me, this is like public infrastructure for humanity to thrive. You know,
we need a distributed way of talking to each other safely, privately. Um, and I don't want that,
you know, tainted by any other incentive. Um, now that's not to say that the thing is not going to
cost money and it's not going to, you know, we're not going to be, um, you know, pushing really hard
to try to make it work. Um, I think that it just, it requires a different set of incentives. Um, so
it is, you know, we've set up a 501 C three nonprofit. Um, we're still waiting on some of the,
you know, details there, but, um, you know, the idea is that similar to the signal foundation,
you know, this will remain free in perpetuity. Um, we will definitely have things where people
can donate to us in the app. Um, we will definitely, you know, there's like a version
of the world in the future. I wouldn't say definitely, but there's a version of the world
in the future where maybe we run certain like add on services that people want to pay for and they
can. We will definitely go to major donors and be looking for money for this thing, for covering it
into the future. One cool thing though I'll mention is that Signal, which I think Signal's
amazing. It's a great product. I do actually trust that they're very secure. I mean, I've
looked at all the papers, all the open source stuff that they do. I do actually think they're
incredibly secure and they go to extreme lengths to blind themselves and their servers from knowing
who's talking to who and what they're talking about. And, you know, they, they tick all the
boxes and, you know, do all the things right. Um, but even signal, like they have to run a lot of
servers. They, they pay $50 million a year in servers, uh, to run the signal service. And so
if that dried up, if they didn't have that money one year, or they, you know, got into legal trouble
because somebody didn't like something that, you know, Meredith Whitaker, the CEO said,
then signal could just disappear for all of us. And that's a centralization risk.
the amazing thing about white noise is we don't have to run any servers right we have nostril
relays and that's it and you can choose whichever nostril relays you want and so there will never be
a you know super high ticket server bill for us the way that signal is because of what we've built
on top of because we don't have you know user accounts with phone numbers and things like that
we won't be a honeypot for trying to get to people's data. So I think that's kind of a really
encouraging thing is like for a very small fraction of the money that, you know, costs to run Signal,
we could potentially run a service that's even better and more resilient.
Wow. Gosh, it's cool. It really gets me thinking about so many different angles, but it's this,
oh, how do I even describe this? Coming across Bitcoin is such a revolutionary process and it
happens over almost many years but one of the ways that i've i've previously described
um like taking a meaningful position in bitcoin and with an investment lens like what's your
allocation and your portfolio and all this kind of stuff and it's like this is this is digital
property rights that aren't previously accessible and so all of your trad fi yeah investment
portfolio it carries some kind of counterparty risk that most people won't tell you right your
stock portfolio well you've actually bought it through some kind of discretionary manager and
you've got to trust all of them to give you your money when you ask for it and bitcoin is just this
whole different beast right it's actually money it's a savings tool you can have in self-custody
and and it's it's like a foundation upon which to build that wasn't previously possible like you
hear sailor talking about the difference between using wood and steel to to build things it's such
a cool concept how you just described nostr and the ability to use relays instead of come to some
kind of centralized server and signal it's kind of similar right you're actually using an entirely
different architecture to build something that's more resilient and i would pay for that like in
the same way that i've previously played around with paying for relays like why wouldn't i pay for
a good dm service like i would i'm sitting here right now knowing that i'm i'm also paying
subscriber for um uh what is it i recently signed up to albi and their node for lightning channels
like that kind of stuff really cool and you start like i would actually pay for all of these things
to know that they're mine um right unlike for example you know a google workspace that i still
pay for i'm like oh i really would like to not use google if i didn't have to but like i like
google docs and suddenly you're doing stuff and you're using that i mean they're really good
products you can throw a hundred thousand engineers at problems like that for many many years you come
out with amazing products like it's um yeah the infinite money printer does have its uh
its benefits for google for sure absolutely um and that's a hard one for us right building on
something totally different aren't you yeah yeah yeah totally different i mean and it's a real hard
when you see when people come in like devs come into nostor and like they still have this sort of
uh client server classical client server architecture in their mind and it's really
hard for them to sort of break from this thing of like, I asked the server for data and it gives me
data. And then I display the data. You know, it's like, no, no, no, that's not how it works. I mean,
yes, you're going to ask a server, the relay for data, but it's going to stream it into you.
And you're never sure it's going to be all right. You're gonna have to validate it as it comes in.
You're gonna have to, you know, decide what you're going to do with it. And, and it's funny,
like, you know, I think simply just those two things I mentioned before, which is your identity
is portable and is, you know, tied to a cryptographic key, which means that all the content that you
put out has to be signed to be valid. So it's untamperable. You know, no one can tamper with
the events that you have put out in the world. You know, like it's actually trivial for some random,
you know, AWOL X employee to like get into the database and like start tweeting random crap
from Donald Trump's account. You know, like they can do that. That's a thing. And there's nothing
that any of us in the world would be able to look at that and be like, is that real or fake?
You know what I mean? Like what just happened? Fake news.
But you can't tell. You wouldn't know.
Like literally no way to tell. Yeah. You wouldn't know.
They would just delete them later and they'd be like, oops, sorry.
You know, we had a crazy, crazy like guy went, went mental.
In Nosterworld, literally, you know, for a fact,
like if somebody is tweeting from, you know,
or sending notes from, you know, Trump's account or whatever,
if it's signed with the right signature,
you know that that person has control at least of Donald Trump's keys.
You know, that's, that's, you know, it's a fact.
It's a mathematical fact.
And so, you know, that with an identity that's portable, you can move all of your data to
different apps.
The apps themselves are basically commodity.
You know, like very quickly, I was like, this is going to collapse to just be a total, you
know, competitive landscape built on nothing but brand and like user experience.
Because if you can't deliver the best user experience or have a, you know, much better
brand or solve the problem 10x better, then like no one's going to use your stuff because
they can literally just pick up and move over to another product instantaneously so there's like
zero lock-in in nostril um and again that that idea of like decentralized relays means that your data
is like everywhere and always and kind of backed up you like let information do what information
does which is you know spread and copy itself and so jeff this is something that's interesting in
terms of the is there venture backable opportunities within nostril and you know you just described
very well the okay we'll dive into that the context i was going to give is like the in the
bitcoin market it's like who's actually making money and what is actually a vc backable kind of
concept remains to be seen so money's been thrown around not all that much frankly as bitcoin only
and some businesses are coming through slowly but surely but like for example like the exchange
market very very obvious the people that were like bitcoin as an exchange business is really
shit and it's only going one way which is that margin is getting smaller and smaller and smaller
just because so many ways of buying bitcoin well let's list a whole lot of altcoins and get people
doing you know degen trading casino stuff because yeah that's how we're going to make some money as
an exchange yeah high volume you see very clearly why they ended up going in those directions as
businesses um right with NOSTA what you just described is interesting to me so the idea that
Like if your brand isn't brilliant or if your UX isn't brilliant, people will go elsewhere.
Well, yeah.
Where is the business there in that sense?
So you see some opportunities.
I'd be intrigued to see like, you know, what might work.
Yeah.
I mean, let's look at Bitcoin very quickly and I'll do a quick example and then we'll
step into Noster.
So like my friend Rob's company, Anchor Watch, you know, they do insurance.
Insurance is a boring business, right?
Yeah.
Yeah. So, but like, if you think about it, that's a very valuable service for someone, right? Like
they want to have control over their keys. They don't want to be leaving everything with Coinbase,
but you know, it represents a very large part of their wealth. And so they recognize that like,
I should probably insure this the way I insure my house or the way I insure, you know, my boat,
whatever it is. And so paying for insurance is a service that a company offers and that a customer
who wants that service will pay for.
Like it's just a very straightforward business
to customer transaction.
There's no like nefarious things in the middle.
Like in the advert model,
like the whole thing is predicated on the fact
that there's nine people in the middle of the transaction
and you are not one of them.
You know what I mean?
Like Google is selling to a big stack of players
over on one side that you have no idea that even exists.
And to my mind, this is also why, you know,
the whole healthcare system in America is totally fucked.
People are like, oh, well, look at America,
a public health, you know, private healthcare doesn't work. And I'm like, no, this is not what
we have over in America. In America, we've got a health system where you're forced and your employer
is forced to pay for this health insurance thing. But there's like nine people in a big stack off
to one side. It's like the buyer and then the hospital and then the, you know, aggregator of
the hospitals. And then like, so there's all these layers of obfuscation where the service between
the person providing the service and the person, you know, getting the service has been completely
erased. And so how can you provide a good service in that scenario? So in Rob's case, Rob sells
insurance, people buy insurance, problem done. They get value, he gets value, that's the end.
I think in a similar way, there will be plenty of things in Nostro world like that. So there will be
people that go way deep on having really high availability relays that do a bunch of moderation
and like cleanup and spam control.
And like, they spend a lot of time on figuring out how to give you just high quality stuff.
That's not trash.
Um, and that'll be a service that people will pay for, for sure.
You know, you'll be like, I don't want to see all that garbage.
Like, I want to make sure that like, I've got parental controlled relays for my kids.
Like you'll pay for that.
Um, and so, you know, it'll be the same as, uh, as I guess any, you know, business.
And unfortunately, like the internet has sort of trained most people to think of like everything on the internet should be free simply because, like you said before, you know, the what they're paying has been sort of hidden from them.
But I think we're sort of starting to recognize that more as a culture.
And I think we're starting to lean back in the other direction of, hey, if I want something good, I should probably be willing to pay something for it.
And there will be lots of businesses that do lots of different parts of that stack in really good ways, you know.
Yeah, very cool. And in that sense, it requires you just to kind of take a breath and think about what works in the analog world and what's been missed by the current iteration of the internet that might end up in Nosterland.
And more often than not, opportunities come from your own personal experiences, don't they? You're like, oh, well, I probably pay for that. Why doesn't that exist? And every day there is good marketing for Noster.
You know, there's just so much censorship going on.
Like even this week here in Australia, there's all sorts of laws coming in around digital identity and having to access the Internet via a driving license.
Age verification for everything.
Yeah. And 16 year olds have been banned from social media.
And it's it's wild. Right.
So the police have arrived on the Internet in a major way.
Yeah. And what was so interesting again, when I looked into this a month or two ago,
the it's very aggressive how companies are being told they have to behave and if a user
misbehaves then the penalty is thousands and thousands of dollars on the company so all of these tool providers they going to do what the government telling them to do Otherwise it going to bankrupt them basically So it be very interesting to see what comes out of that
But NOSTA benefits, it must.
How do people not look at that and go,
okay, do you know what?
I'm not having someone tell me what I can and can't say online,
and I'm not going to be sharing all of my private details
just to log in and do a search for something.
Fuck that.
I'm going in a different direction.
Yeah. And someone like something like white noise is a key part of that, isn't it?
As I think about it, it's like, of course, you need to be able to send people messages without everyone reading them.
Right. Right. Very important. I guess like one thing I thought of just there is, you know, maybe maybe I shouldn't have been so quick to say yes.
And to your like VC question, I think, you know, a lot of what people think of as VC may not quite exist for all that much longer.
I think we've just gone through a period where, I mean, VC has sort of collapsed back a little bit.
It's going mental with AI at the moment, but I think it got really way out over its skis there for a while because, you know, the VC model wins big when there's this, you know, natural monopoly effect with the service that they are, you know, backing, right?
Like when you back Google and they win completely on the online search, it means they've got
this one in a million unique opportunity where it's never going to happen again.
And so I don't know that we're going to get exactly that scenario with VC backing in Bitcoin
or in Noster.
I think it might go back to what VC was before, which is, hey, you have a capital intensive
setup.
You need capital in order to get this business up and running.
And then you'll have a very defensible position.
that we can take off of going forward.
So back to AnchorWatch,
they had to set up all the relationships
with the banking partners and the insurance providers
and the reinsurance people,
and they had to get certified for all sorts of stuff.
And it's a long, arduous process.
They also had some tech knowledge
that I think is deeper than any other player in the market.
So they knew the thing inside out
and they had all the proper stuff backing them.
So a VC in some ways should be looking at that and going,
okay, this is something where us having money can give these guys the head start to really
solidify a position. But I don't think it's going to necessarily be the 10,000 X returns of we've
taken the entire internet. We've taken all of humanity like Facebook or Google. I hope that's
not the case. So do I actually. And because it's a couple of things, isn't it? And I love this
subject by the way it's like how do we how do we incentivize innovation how do we profit from
risk reward like there are incredible people out there that are doing difficult things and trying
stuff that no one else is trying to potentially benefit many many more people than initial
traction might kind of suggest it's like that's still an interesting game to me it's like well
someone needs money to build this thing this thing could be a lot more valuable than it is right now
and I'm recently reading a book about some entrepreneurs in America that were building
railroads in the 1800s and this guy he just he just knew that connecting together these two areas
like basically between the US and and Canadian borders around the Great Lakes it was a great
fucking idea because he could just see farmland for just miles and miles and miles but no one had
done it yet so he was already thinking about how valuable this place was going to be but no one had
built it right and his position in the business he built he wasn't the wealthiest he wasn't the
most well connected but he's the guy that knew the shit on the ground inside out and they needed him
and you think isn't that interesting that's almost 200 years ago but like what's the equivalent today
where it's like well i think most people that are along bitcoin in a major way having conversations
like this re-engineered their life around sound money we're already like well along the path so
like okay fiat's long gone for us as a building technology and so this concept of putting money
into a VC fund that's able to get you outrageous returns when the money's so cheap it doesn't make
sense in the world we're moving into but real businesses will still exist and so if you see
opportunities for those businesses then investing in some of them early might well be very profitable
but of course you've got the bitcoin hurdle right next to that where it's like well of course maybe
just sit on the on the king itself and you know everything will be okay so yeah i don't know it's
it's the word vc in some ways got it just got a bit nasty hasn't it as to what it represents
but like yeah i mean still gonna take bets on early ideas right right you hit it on the head
though like when the money was uh cheaper than free you know what i mean like the the interest
rates in Europe were negative for a while there. Like everybody forgets like we were in the weirdest
period ever with Zerp, you know, money was cheaper than free. Uh, and you know, that caused a lot of
misallocation of capital and like, that's just exactly what it was. Like it clearly was that
situation. So I think you're totally right. Like bring back sound money, um, make the hurdle rate
high. Uh, people that have capital will only deploy capital when it's a really good idea,
you know? And so those really good ideas will get built and a lot of the trash won't. And like,
yeah, okay, some probably good ideas also won't get built. But that's also fine. That's just how
it works. So yeah, I mean, I look at Nostra and I think we're so unbelievably early with it.
People don't understand keys. They don't understand any of the basic cryptography
things and why that matters. I think Bitcoin's still really early, even though it's quite a bit
older than Nostra. So the idea of having Bitcoin payments for a lot of people, especially in the
that makes no sense whatsoever they're like yeah but i got them oh i got cash app why do i care
you know um when you go to africa people get it immediately you're like this is an austria this
is how it works you get paid bitcoin for shit posting and they're like what like it blows their
minds and they're like show me now you know like they're set up instantaneously yeah totally like
they are in it immediately because they're also the people that are getting cut off from the
internet cut off from the services like their voice is getting silenced in the places they are
um you know and and money doesn't work in a lot of these places you know like the money is garbage
uh like you know how many people in the west know about the you know sifa frank you know the central
african frank which is it's a colonial holdover where all these nations still have to use money
made up by the french and can't use it anywhere else in the world they can't even use it in their
neighboring countries they have to translate it from like the one sifa frank to the other sifa
frank and get you know their eyes ripped out in the process criminal so isn't it it's it's super
criminal yeah it's so criminal but like you show them nostril and bitcoin but we're the good guys
bro i got it this is yeah yeah like it's so interesting like this makes total sense
yeah and to use some more startup analogies like product market fit for bitcoin is at the fringes
of the financial services system where people are like this works and everything else doesn't so i'm
really use it yeah i made a previous podcast actually jeff called bitcoin with jake from 2022
for 12 months which is a big part of my deep dive before or as i made the biggest allocation
of the whole last five years into bitcoin from traditional assets and the thing that really got
me over the edge in terms of confidence and in terms of adoption and and just like this thing
is real was stories of people from Venezuela or from Kenya or from Guatemala, wherever they were
from. And I was able to get them on a video call and ask them like, so where did you grow up? What
was it like? Why do you use Bitcoin? And they're like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And you're
like, wow, that's massive. Well, of course, this is a big deal. I had to unlearn a lot of stuff
through that um but willingly did and and here i am today uh jeff i'm aware of time so i just want
to sneak in one question um so is max working with white noise working on white noise with you
or have you worked with him recently yes okay cool yeah yeah so max i wasn't sure of that
yeah so we when i started kind of looking into this um i like i've been you know friends with
max and we've talked about lots of different projects and things over the years um and i
I remember we were at a conference.
We were actually at Cheat Code in Bedford two years ago.
And I remember sitting down with him and being like,
I think I'm going to look into this messaging stuff.
And he was like, oh yeah?
Max loves that whole angle of stuff,
all the cryptography, everything.
So he was immediately like, all right, tell me more.
And Max is not a coder.
He's not a software engineer.
He's very technically minded.
And I think he understands the concepts better
than a lot of people that are writing code.
um so he's a great like rubber duck to like talk through stuff with uh even like quite technical
things um so i remember we just sort of like sat there for you know a couple hours one one afternoon
and we're just like going through some of the old protocols and like okay this is the way that this
thing you know otr off the record worked like and what did it like what why did it work like that
okay this is how the original signal protocol worked and this is how they made it work for
groups and you know we kind of went through all these things and um and then just you know i went
back home and you know max went along and we just would do kind of a phone call or something every
week for a while and it'd be like okay i've gotten this next section like what do you think about this
and like how do you think about you know how are we going to protect this bit of the metadata
um and so it was just a lot of back and forth like that for quite a while until um you know i
basically had the thing cracked in a sense of okay i'm using this this protocol mls for the key
agreement and key sharing, which is, you know, very efficient at large scale for groups. And
we're applying that over Nostra relays and Nostra identity like this. Um, and MLS is really cool
because it doesn't care about, you know, uh, it doesn't care about the delivery and it doesn't
care about the identity system. They basically say that at the very beginning of the doc,
they're like, you got to bring your own identity and you've got to bring your own delivery.
And I was like, what is Nostra really good at? Cool. Identity and delivery. I was like, perfect.
This is great. Um, but it was a bit of a trick to like figure out how to mash it in there and make
it so that you weren't, you know, giving away data and metadata, especially about the conversation
and who was in it. Um, so once we'd kind of worked out all those, uh, you know, a lot of those
details, it was like, okay, this is a thing, like, this is going to be a thing. We're going to build
the thing. Um, and at that point we were just real like, okay, yeah, we're going to do the thing,
right. Okay. We're going to do the thing. Um, so yeah, it's been Max and I sort of, um, driving it
a lot of ways. And I think it's great. Cause you know, he compliments me on so many things and,
uh, you know, takes stuff off of my plate that I don't want to deal with. And I take, you know,
the code stuff off that you know he can't deal with and so it's been um it's been great partnership
awesome well shout out to max i had the pleasure of meeting him at um the indonesia bitcoin
conference a couple years ago now he's also been on the podcast in the past and just a really great
thinker like you know you can just get him talking about these subjects and he he's able to eloquently
explain something better than anyone else i've ever heard explain something on some areas where
I'll ask him you're like fuck yeah that was good Max how do you do that yeah yeah yeah yeah it's
quite amazing yeah well Jeff listen so we're coming up to the hour and I said we'd finish
then so I really really appreciate your time um talking this evening so thank you I'd like to just
leave it with one last thing which is so what are you most excited for over the next kind of 12 months
excited excited in a uh slightly anxious way maybe um in the sense that uh i i mean i do kind
of feel like we're in a bit of a race at the moment um you know they are trying hard to close
the doors on us um you know all of the age verification stuff um all of the you know like
the samurai stuff is really worrying in the sense that hey you built an open source tool and now
we're going to send you to jail for how other people used it. Um, you know, I think all that
stuff is signs of more bad stuff to come. You know, I still think we're going in the wrong direction.
Um, and it's sort of a race to see like, who's going to get, you know, enough momentum there
fast enough. You know, like I don't, I don't, I'm not under any illusion that like, we're going to
convert, you know, 8 billion people to use Noster in the next few years. Um, but it needs to be
solid enough and widespread enough that it is unstoppable. For the first few years,
Bitcoin was definitely very stoppable. Any major state actor could have come in and just crushed it.
But they all laughed at it and thought it was nothing until it got to this point where it was
like, actually, the resources required to turn this off are basically beyond the reach of anyone
now. I don't think we're there with Noster. And I don't think we're there with a lot of the privacy
tech and a lot of the kind of freedom tech that's out there. And so I think, you know, next 12 months
is for sure, like, you know, it's go time. We need tools on top of Bitcoin to make it easier and
faster. We need tools on top of Nostra to make it more private, more secure. We need to like,
make this not less of a toy and more of like, these are, you know, life and death tools for
actual real people in the world. And for those people, you know, like you said before, product
market fit might be small, market might be small right now. But I think if we get it to some
critical mass um then it becomes unstoppable and we're in a much better position and it has the
raw ingredients to do that but it's that process of being okay with the fact that you happen to
know this a lot earlier than anyone else like just because you if you've pieced all the bits together
and you're early doesn't mean you're wrong just the world doesn't look like how you think it will
look and it's really hard to be in that place because you're like yeah hang on are we sure
that this is this is real isn't it what the hell's going on here right wow right awesome well jeff
thank you so much for your time it's been really cool to learn from you thank you absolutely thank
you