All right, Max Hillebrand. I want to understand Nostra. I want to understand if Nostra is as inevitable as Bitcoin. I want to understand where it is and where it's going, how it's being used and philosophy behind it.
And I can't think of any better person in order to help teach that than you.
So if you would kind of let us in on how you think about this.
Like the short answer is yes, NOSTER is basically inevitable.
Long answers will have a lot of work before it actually is.
So inevitable doesn't mean easy.
but Noster comes at the right time
where more and more people realize
the dangers of a centralized internet
and the permissioned internet
where you have to ask someone else
for permission to get an identity
to sign up with an account
you need an email
you need
okay I'm having some internet issues
am I still coming through?
You're freezing a little bit
You glitched a bit but it came through
Yeah
We'll fix it in post
The problem is real
We all know the downsides of centralized social media and the centralized internet, and it needs to be fixed.
And a couple of simple pieces of technology came together actually just recently to make that really doable.
And so the main difference of what makes Nostra unique is the same of what makes Bitcoin unique.
It's a protocol, right?
You as the end user define for yourself by running the software that you choose to run on what exactly the rules of those protocols are.
And that is an extremely powerful idea and concept.
And Bitcoin very successfully applied that to money.
You define for yourself the rules of your money system, how much money supply, under which condition it can be spent, etc.
And then you verify that everyone else on the network follows the rules that you set.
And if they don't, you kick them off your network.
It's as easy as that.
So this is extremely powerful.
Bitcoin works extremely well.
So now the next step to do this with is with everything else, ultimately.
And one of the big pieces that need to be handled is online publication of information.
And this is a war of ideas and a cultural war.
So we need to be able to spread our message such that it's not easy to stop.
And for this, it starts with creating your identity.
instead of signing up with some service provider to please give me an account you just flip a coin
you get a private key the same way that you do that with bitcoin right you don't need to go to
a bank you just do it and now once you have this private key you can declare certain information
about that private key so for example you sign a message that says hey my username is this and this
my profile picture can be found here that's in my bio these are my website links here's my lightning
address so you can pay me and and and you simply sign this event meaning anyone can verify that
this is actually the owner of the private key making that statement of who he is and and because
the events themselves are this kind of basic package of an event you we don't have to trust
any server in the middle right they they could try to change the message and change your name for
example but that would invalidate the signature and so everyone would quickly realize that hey
someone in the middle messed with this message it's no longer the actual thing and just don't
even show it to the user and because we don't have to trust these relays in the middle anymore
we can just duplicate it right you can put your message on a thousand different servers
some that companies run some that your friends run some that you run right yourself and now
anyone can connect to any of these servers and get your message and download it and verify it
and then show to the user that hey this person just made a post and and that's basically the
gist of how Noster works right it's it's signed messages delivered via untrusted third-party relays
that are extremely cheap to run.
And on top of this,
we can build a thousand and one different use cases
that are extremely useful
and solve a lot of problems
in how humans want to engage digitally.
So right now, my understanding of Noster
is that I have a single digital identity
and from that digital identity,
I therefore don't need to have a Spotify account
and a YouTube account and a Twitter account and all of these different things where I,
when I build a following, I'm a musician. So I have like a following of people who listen to my
music. But if I were to want to leave Spotify, I couldn't take the people who follow me on Spotify
over to another service. I couldn't take them to YouTube. And I'm experimenting with this on
Noster right now where I'm using fountain in order to publish my music. I published the podcast on a
fountain. And so I see that obviously as one of the use cases. And I know that these things are
all very much in their infancy. But when you look towards the future, what do you see? Paint me the
picture of what is it that Nostr becomes? And when it's fully fleshed out, what does Nostr look like?
It basically becomes the internet, right? Like all these things that we do online,
I think ultimately will be re-architected for something that has strong cryptography at its core
and is an open and decentralized and permissionless protocol. And so any app that you're using right
now, you could think of ways of re-architecting it so that it doesn't require the central
server anymore and that it just works on this open network much more interoperable.
But on top of that, there will be use cases that we just haven't even thought were possible.
This is another fundamental architecture shift that really opens your minds and gives
entrepreneurs a green runway of trying the most crazy things that were not possible before.
And so I don't know what these apps will be, kind of by definition.
But I do think that they will creep into every nook and cranny of human life and kind of use cases.
Like whenever you want to coordinate with others, I think this is going to be the technology that you might want to use, or at least the principles of this technology.
And I don't know if Noster, as the protocol suite it is right now, will be there in the long run.
But I'm convinced that something like it will be there.
A little bit like Bitcoin, right?
Bitcoin doesn't have to be here in the next 50 years, but something like Bitcoin will absolutely
be here. Like this idea won't be forgotten. The implementation might change and the details of it,
but I think the underlying building blocks and the use cases that that enables,
A, will be something to behold. So I'm a Noster newbie, just very, very, I have very little
working knowledge of it other than theoretical, philosophical, what I've heard people say.
if Noster re-architects the internet or if the internet is re-architected on Noster
what is that like from a first-person perspective for the Noster naive person who logs on the
internet navigates around does things is it the same experience a different experience
that's more privacy preservative or what is it is it a third thing yeah it it will feel
quite magical in the sense that you no longer have to ask for creating an account right and
and that fear of your account being removed will be gone and i think a lot of creators nowadays are
very careful what they say to to not you know piss off the wrong people that will that will
get their livelihood destroyed by removing their ability to to publish information right or music
or whatever it is. So that fear will go away. And the plethora of tools that you can use
that are tailor-made to what you actually want to achieve will drastically increase.
Right now, most people just go to Facebook and everyone has the same interface and you cannot
really leave it. If you would like to talk to people on Facebook, you have to use the Facebook
interface exactly how that company declares that you should see it and with nostr it is so
unbelievably easy to create a new user interface that might just change some colors or really
change the fundamental user experience to whatever the developer wants and so massive amounts of
creativity we have already way above a thousand different nostr apps that you can use that behave
completely different. Some look quite similar, right? But some are really crazy. And there's no
websites where you can write Nostra apps, like white code them, right? With AI, you don't even
need to code anymore in order to create your own user interface to make an app that works exactly
how you want it to. So I think we will go back to these, you know, old funky initial websites that
were also incredibly unique, right? Back in the days, there wasn't Facebook. You just had a website
and you designed it from the ground up in HTML code.
And it looked super unique.
And it was a weird time in the internet.
And I think we'll get back to that
where you will have a experience with your computer
that is tailor-made to how you want it
and not decided by some big corporation
somewhere on a different continent.
Yeah, so when I think about one of the things that,
when I think about what Bitcoin did
that kind of sent me into the fugue state
of this changes everything and this enables so much,
the thing that I kept coming back to was
how it encourages collaboration through aligned incentives.
And with Nostr, building the internet from the ground up on Nostr
is basically word for word Jason Lowry's software thesis
is that Bitcoin is both the cannonball and the castle wall,
that in order to get through to me that you have to send me sats
if I don't want you to, or I can put a barricade around my digital identity
using Bitcoin as both the passive and the active weapon in order to defend that.
And so I see a lot of like, there's a lot of like paywall things.
Like the thing that comes most to mind is that there's all these walled gardens around academic articles.
And these are the things that could truly change people's lives if they were able to consume them and be on the forefront and understand, understand, kind of understand the science that that helps benefit them.
what right now um what right now is the most i would say like transformative use of nostr how is
it how is it making waves um in the world right now and um i guess i don't i don't expect that to
be the thing that continues but like what is the greatest use case or the most popular use case or
the most beneficial use case right now for Noster?
Well, I think for right now, the main use case is basically Twitter, right?
Like short notes that get uploaded, short messages that you want to broadcast to the
world.
And that is the original thing that Noster did, right?
So back in the early days, there were basically two types of Noster events.
The first Noster event is your profile, right?
So username, picture, bio, etc.
And the second was just a short form note at a couple lines of text.
And with these two, you can bootstrap a social network already.
But the cool thing is that Nostr itself is quite agnostic to the type of content that you put on it.
It is just a text message with some structure to it.
So JSON, technically speaking.
and how to interpret these messages are completely up to client developers.
And so by now there are thousands of different types of messages,
different schemas that you can use that express completely different things.
So, you know, to build on the original short text note,
there were things like reactions.
And every time you like something, it's actually a signed event
that others can verify that, yeah, he actually liked this, right?
or reposting something, commenting underneath it,
like long chains of comments between different people.
So we have this public discourse
where anyone can respond underneath your messages.
And also quite crucially, nobody can stop that.
Nowadays, if some spicy content hits Twitter,
it instantly gets throttled that you don't see it
or you cannot comment under it.
And that is weird, right?
Nobody should have the power to just shut people up like that.
And so with Nostra, that is not possible, right?
But then on the other hand, you can really like moderate your own experience quite thoroughly.
I mean, one easy way of doing this is just by following people.
And so following someone is just a list of public keys that are signed by your private key.
And now your client, as well as others, can see, hey, these people, you know, are trusted enough by the author of this list,
though that he wants to see their content in the feed.
And then this starts to bootstrap a web of trust,
which is basically a connection between otherwise random looking public keys.
So how can we differentiate between a high quality account, so to say,
or a low quality spammer?
And the way to do that is by seeing what your friends are doing.
And this is also quite a revolutionary concept of
what kind of is important to you
depends very much on your local network.
You don't care so much about the global town square.
You care about your neighbors, ultimately,
and friends and family.
So with this, you can give them
kind of a level of trust and reputation
that is much more decentralized at its core.
And so that occurrence of big accounts
being censored or shut down
just doesn't exist there.
so i can understand the content itself no go ahead go ahead sorry no no please well i was so
you use the word event to describe occurrences within nostr and is so i can understand the
physics of what's going on you said creating the profile the event of that posting the note
describing that as an event is event is there a specific significance to that vocabulary is that
protocol vocabularies that nostril vocabulary and why event yeah um so that's it's nostril
vocabulary um also earlier so i would say computer science vocabulary and it's basically just a a
chunk of data right that if analyzed by itself is already meaningful right it's a little bit like
bitcoin blocks right if if someone sends you a bitcoin block you see the the significance of it
in the way that the data is structured and that the hash, you know, has a bunch of leading zeros,
et cetera. So this is, and similar in Noster. So an event, technically speaking, is the signed
text message, right? Specifically in JSON. And so this means that first comes the like kind number,
which is how do we actually interpret this event, right? Is it a like, is it a repost,
Is it a music video? Is it a podcast? Whatever, right? And then comes some tags, for example, if you want to say, hey, you want to tag Alice and Bob in this event so that they get notified as well, right? We add their public keys into this event as well.
Then we have the actual content and whatever that is, be it text or such.
And finally, a signature.
And so the signature is the cryptographic guarantee that the person who controls this private key actually has seen and done computation on top of this message.
And finally, is a unique identifier.
And the identifier is just a hash of this piece of data.
Again, quite similar to Bitcoin.
The transaction ID is the hash of the transaction.
And so all of this together, that is Nostre event, a text file that has structure to it
so that you know exactly how to write this message such that other people's software can easily read it.
Because the initial posts should be differently rendered than the like or than a blog post or anything else.
And the cool thing is that, so this gives you some deep fundamental building blocks,
like these cryptographic signatures, event integrity, etc.
But then what type of message you put in there
and how exactly you structure this is completely up to you.
And so there are hundreds of developers
who are coming up with new structured pieces of data
that can express something of interest.
And that can be marketplaces, app releases,
group communications, encrypted communications.
There's hundreds of these different schemas
on how to interpret that message.
But the critical piece is
that this is all open source, right?
So the protocol is open.
You can just read it.
It's not that difficult to read, actually.
I encourage even the non-technical people
to have a look.
They're not that intimidating.
Quite short documents, usually.
And then you can audit
all of the open source code
that is out there.
Again, hundreds, if not thousands
of different pieces of software
speak these different implementations
of the protocol.
And so you can just look of how they're doing it and you can write it yourself.
This was maybe one of the reasons why Nostra really was so successful is because it was extremely easy for developers to spin up everything that they need.
If you have a cryptographic library and a little bit of coding skills, then you can create a Nostra event in an afternoon and you can create this relay that receives and passes forward these messages and run them on a Raspberry Pi in your basement.
This is just not possible with any of the legacy infrastructures that developers have a playground of doing whatever they want.
And again, now with AI making such crazy progress and turning anyone into a programmer if they really want to, that just gives us now the opportunity to unleash that potential of a bunch of creativity.
And we already see that.
The different interfaces in Nosr are all fascinating and quite unique.
Like there's many things that you just don't see elsewhere on the internet because the fundamental building blocks allow the developers to do that.
So to understand the physics more than the event is the block in Bitcoin terms, the relay is the node in Bitcoin terms.
Is there a miner or something that processes the block or is it not like proof of work in that sense?
So there's no analogy.
no not not really uh so there are no miners um because in in bitcoin we want to do a money system
and for digital money it's important that we all agree that these tokens are already spent
right the double spending problem and and so satoshi managed a way that a decentralized
anonymous group of people can agree on which tokens are spent and which are unspent right
and that requires this massive
peer-to-peer network and proof of work
and all types of craziness
and
these are downsides that Bitcoin makes
because it requires this global consensus
with Nostir
we're just talking
this is not money this is communication and for communication you do not need a global consensus mechanism My speech should not be valid depending on what someone else on the other side of the planet spoke
So we don't need to have global consensus in NOSTER.
And so the specific tasks that a miner does, doesn't exist in NOSTER.
All you need is a client who creates a message, then uploads it to a relay, and some other client who downloads this message and validates it and displays it to the user.
As long as these three entities basically exist, you have a function in Nostra network.
And they can be separate.
So relays are dumb servers, and they don't talk to each other.
Nostr is not traditionally speaking a peer-to-peer network because that would require everyone to be able to talk to each other.
And these systems are just crazy complex.
So there is BitTorrent and other things or pair drive, etc.
So there are other peer-to-peer networks.
Nostr is 1% of their complexity with 90% of the benefit.
and because it enables you to just spin up a server in your home
and anyone who's on the home Wi-Fi can connect to the server
and do the things that your app supports
and you don't need to connect to the broader internet.
So I think for the social use case,
we don't want to have global consensus.
We don't need to have it.
And so that's why with Nostra,
we get away with something much simpler
that doesn't require the peer-to-peer network or mining.
So as soon as you sign an event,
it's valid and then it's completely up to the receiver of how he gets it
one of the things that you mentioned in an earlier podcast that i think is so beautiful is just the
understanding of of ideas as a positive sum game that if i bring an idea and you bring an idea and
we exchange ideas we both leave with two ideas as opposed to if i bring an apple and you bring a
carrot and we exchange, then we walk away in a zero sum. And so this spreading of ideas,
as it does blossom and as it does grow, will be obviously hugely beneficial to humanity because
it will be the network effect of sharing ideas, that it's not just me and you, that it's me and
everybody. So can you give me an idea, like comparatively speaking, I guess, to other social
networks or other, other comparatives, how big is NOSTER right now? And how fast is it growing?
Because I'm, I'm less concerned with the size of something and I'm more concerned,
or I'm less concerned with where something's at. And I'm more concerned with where it's going.
And I think the trajectory is probably far more important.
Yeah, Noster grows in cycles as well. It started in late 2020, where the real first code and clients appeared. And basically every year, though, it experienced some boom growth.
and by now we again have probably above 5 000 relays that that relay messages from from whomever
we have certainly above 100 clients we're probably above 500 clients maybe that's that's a wild guess
um it kind of depends how you count it because nowadays it's just so easy to create a client
that like you know one one person who's not even a developer can all of a sudden spin up
50 different clients over the span of a week or two.
So counting that is already kind of getting lost.
We have millions of active monthly users.
The trick here is that it's a bit difficult to find that out
because one person can have multiple key pairs.
You can have multiple main identities.
And then for some of these protocols,
you actually create a new key every time you upload something.
So there's a lot of these ephemeral events
where we don't know if it's, you know, one person or a hundred.
But ultimately, I would say, yeah, multiple hundreds of thousands,
maybe a couple million are actively kind of using this system.
And what's interesting, more and more just under the hood,
I don't know, maybe you've heard about BitChat,
which is like this Bluetooth messaging.
Yeah, this uses Nosturnum, right, for these global chats that it does.
It's no longer Bluetooth. It just connects to Nostre Relays.
And so nobody is really thinking about BitShare as a Nostre client, but ultimately it is.
There will be more and more applications, existing applications, that just add some parts of the Nostre ecosystem under the hood.
And users might not even know the difference, just that it starts working a bit better.
But for the longest time, I was joking that we have more developers than users.
And I think that's the growth metric that I'm most excited about.
the amount of developers, the quality of them, and the volume of their output is on a very, very steep trajectory.
Much more consistent than users.
Developers are just flocking to this protocol and usually not leaving.
So that is what makes me extremely bullish because you need to build out the infrastructure first before the users come.
And so if you want to bootstrap a new social network, then focusing on developers first is a very good idea.
and Noster did that right.
Again, it's such a stupid, simple protocol.
It really just, you write a message, you sign it,
you put it on a server, you put it on 10 servers
and other people get it and download it and verify it, right?
Like that's, you explain the concept in a sentence
and you implement it in less than a day.
And that really, yeah, made developers happy
and they are very enthusiastic
and by now numerous different projects.
I guess there's a lot of solo developers who just come up with a cool idea and build it.
But then there is more and more collaboration between them.
I don't know, maybe one thing to shout out is marketplaces.
Nostr can be used to publish a, hey, I'm selling this lawnmower, whatever, 2000 sats, come and take it.
And then others can download these events and see what's in the marketplace, filtered by your web of trust and the people whom you're following, etc.
So there are now probably four or five different clients that have been working on the marketplace use case for well over two years.
It was actually one of the core ideas when Nostra first started.
And now we're in the third iteration of this protocol.
And so that's the cool thing.
You can just keep improving it.
And if the old version is no longer great, you just update and move along.
It's much easier to update the Nostra protocol than it is to update the Bitcoin protocol.
because we don't require global consensus.
And so if you want to fork something, you just do it.
You don't have to ask anyone for permission.
And, you know, events are valid however you design them.
So there's a huge amount of collaboration between these projects.
And then, you know, four or five different developer teams team up
and solve big problems together and then all benefit
due to the open source and open protocol nature of this beast.
But there's also numerous companies.
not as many as there probably should be but yeah quite lots of entrepreneurs see that there is a
high value for for that can be created here and they're happy to allocate some capital and hire
people to work full-time on the protocol as well as their clients and yeah it's absolutely on a
growing trajectory so if you have these entrepreneurs and developers hoping to derive value from some
sort of interaction with the protocol is there an internal set of incentives that keep clients
and relays going like of course bitcoin has an intricate dance of incentives and it creates a
unit of value to incentivize its self-functioning is there something similar with nostr that keeps
it going as a protocol internally some sort of incentive structure no and arguably that's why
it works right because if you need to somehow figure out the payment system natively in in the
social protocol that just is really, really hard to do right.
You know, we've seen this with, I don't know, Steemit, for example, or other blockchain-based
social media networks, and they all kind of fail because it's weird to have to pay in
order to make a post.
And that just closes the door on so many different use cases that would have been otherwise
possible.
So the basic Nostra protocol has nothing about money, which is really interesting.
But the cool thing is that when you have clean building blocks, you can build advanced stuff on top.
So, you know, one of the early things was just everyone, everyone put his lightning address in their profile.
And now all of a sudden you can send someone money and reference the post that he made that encouraged you to finally send him money.
So these are known as zaps.
Much more powerful than a like is if someone actually sends money to a post.
right that that's a real economic signal so that was discovered very soon and built into the protocol
and then also the question is who's going to store your events right who's going to store all those
messages for you and sure some people will do it for free but probably you'll get a better service
if you pay for it more storage more bandwidth more reliable uptime you know that the server
will be there in five years from now right and so relay started to gate access telling people hey
only people who've paid me a monthly subscription or one-time payments are allowed to put their
events on on my relay and and so that is quite a flourishing market and then of course the question
is how do the applications get paid and I guess here the trick I realized is that's a really easy
answer if the user has money in the software right like how to get paid on the internet was always
really difficult because the user didn't have money on the internet because there was no money
on the internet right but now that we have that and now that we have cheap private instant
microtransactions that we can just write code that move money from the user to the developers
basically and that of course has to be done in an ethical way and transparently etc but
users are not that worried about a small fee to be paid for something like
Humans do that all the time, especially if it's easy and fast and frictionless.
And we can do that now.
So one very common way that clients get funded is whenever a user sends a thousand sats to the person who created the post, the developer takes 10 sats, whatever.
And this is a small micro economy that are microtransactions.
There's not that many large value payments on Noster, but it does sum up.
I forget the exact number, but probably north of 20 Bitcoin has been probably 40 Bitcoin
have been transacted over Nostra since inception.
So it's, you know, it sums up.
And again, we're at a very early stage with barely any users comparatively.
And you can imagine how that would be serious volume when we reach, you know, hundreds of
millions of people using this tool.
So there's numerous ways that you can add money and the financial incentive.
in on top of this protocol.
But the the beauty and the reason why I think it works
is that the core of it is so simple and doesn't require any of that.
And it enables developers to build that into their final app.
But it's not a requirement for the core of the protocol.
I I want to because I am so enamored by the way that you speak philosophically.
I want to hear about
sort of the axioms that drive you to really invest in this space?
Because you previously were a co-founder of Wasabi Wallet,
worked with CoinJoin and Trezor, I believe, as well,
kind of interacting on CoinJoin.
You've dedicated, it appears, your life to empowering freedom
through defensive technologies through code.
And we see the adoption rate of Bitcoin and of technologies like Noster and BitChat.
They seem to always occur in coincidence with government aggression or government overreach or censorship, etc.
so I guess I just kind of we're seeing this now in Iran in Uganda in Venezuela all across the world
and and to a lesser degree in the United States as well but still massively I guess kind of go
philosophical on us here a bit and just kind of expand expand our understanding of how this
changes things how this empowers beyond just i don't need your permission um beyond just um
yeah beyond beyond just i don't need permission to do something i guess
yeah well i guess ultimately the question is what what makes a good life and like what what's what's
It's a life worth living.
And I think to a large extent, not being stolen from is extremely essential there.
On both sides, I don't think thieves are happy.
I think they're quite hurt and have a lot of pain from the consequences of their actions, even if subconsciously.
So being a thief is not a good thing for you.
And of course, the other side is even worse.
being a victim of theft
and slavery is
horrible
that is a substantial
amount of suffering in
the human experience
is the theft that is
extremely prevalent and has been
for a long time
and that is something that
I think if
removed, if fixed
if theft were to become impossible
that would
unlock such an
unthought of amount of potential and benefit and flourishing that it's really hard to put into words.
And like I think the rule to prosperity is very simple.
Just don't steal.
And if that's the one rule that if consistently followed, and I know it's hard to actually consistently follow that,
then we have an untold amount of collaboration that is possible.
And here, this is really something that it's difficult to overstate and kind of estimate of where would we be if in the last 100 years, especially, there was no theft, there was no inflation, there was no war, right?
Like, nobody really knows of what could, where could we be already at today?
and then equally in the future like if if we would get our shit together and and start to
live peacefully and to trade freely and and to help each other ultimately uh if if we would you
know unite on solving the most monumental problems that that are facing us where could we be in two
years even five years right let alone 50 or 100 it's it's something that is long overdue for for
the human spirit to have a free and peaceful life and therefore a prosperous one.
And I believe we're at this unique point in human history where we've discovered a set of techniques and technologies that actually practically make theft impossible or unprofitable.
That is the beauty of asymmetric key cryptography, for example.
to create a private key and to derive a public key is incredibly easy like it's you can do it a
billion times a second on your phone right absolutely free and the the cost of trying to
break that right to to brute force the private key if you only know the public key it required
an amount of energy that would produce a black hole before it would crack the number like it's
It's absolutely mind boggling that this is true, like that this actually works.
Edward Snowden has this great line of the universe smiles on encryption.
Or maybe it is Julian Assange.
But it really is the case.
It's like a wink of the universe.
Like, hey, there's something really powerful in this world and you can use it.
So this is ultimately, I think, what drives a lot of people in Bitcoin and in Oster is that believe that if humans would have the right incentives in place to make theft structurally impossible, then we could build something that is godly, basically.
And that, I think, is true.
So that's why I'm building it.
So how does that connect back to Noster? I can see how Bitcoin protects from theft is a value layer that secures transactions. How does that philosophical bent towards protecting us from theft, how does that apply to Noster?
well you know theft of money is bad but the theft of your thoughts is is worse in in the sense of
like propaganda is is a horrible thing right and and indoctrination and with with the current
architecture of the technology it is inevitable that indoctrination and propaganda will be spread
to an insane amount of people right you you don't choose the things that you watch
The algorithm tells you.
And most people just do that.
And ever more so in recent years.
And that is dangerous.
If someone else controls what you're reading, not only knows what you're reading, that alone is scary.
But if you actually can control what you read, what new information gets presented to you, then you never even have the chance to form your own independent opinion on a neutral subject.
Because you're eclipsed by messages from the adversary.
So that is a very scary thing.
If you want to have actual rigorous thought on difficult subjects,
it does require a neutral way of accumulating information.
That's where the trivium starts.
But then it also is about speech.
If it is so easily possible for any middleman to silence anyone for whatever reason,
then that is such an immense power that obviously we've seen in recent years.
Like the shadow banning, the deplatforming, the financial censorship based on what was said is enorm.
And that just means that the smart people will stop talking and we will all be dumber for it.
And that is horrible.
And so this is more of your bodily autonomy, ultimately.
Where Bitcoin is a property, right, in a thing that you can use to trade.
what speech is is much more closer to the actual human soul.
And therefore, we need to enable systems and create these systems
that ensure that messages can be propagated,
that people have a voice and are able to communicate with each other
and to coordinate with each other.
Because Bitcoin doesn't help you if you don't have any friends
and have nobody to trade with.
So in order to have this free economy, we need so much more than just money.
We need everything else as well.
And so after money comes another foundational building block, which is communication.
And that again feeds back into what we can do with the money.
Like the largest circular economy in Bitcoin right now is Noster The number of payments going back and forth is unreal really Now that makes sense You said that where the Trivium starts
What's Trivium, a reference, or what is that?
The Trivium is the way to process knowledge, basically, right?
So you start with knowledge, which is just, you know, information itself.
and that is then what you can intake and internally process to understand and so after knowledge comes
understanding where you have applied your your mental faculty and and reached conclusions right
but then the final step and that's where wisdom comes is to apply this knowledge and so this is
the the trivium and old gnostic concept of of how to progress and and grow by accumulating knowledge
by understanding it truthfully and rigorously,
and then applying the things that you've learned in your actual daily life.
You've spoken before defining the state as organized aggression.
And, you know, fiat money is a technology through which the state is able to extract value.
Centralized communication is a way to censor ideas and implant propaganda.
and I heard you say, you know, that the natural, the natural in state of this is anarchy because
the, eventually the host has to protect itself against the parasite, which is, which is the
state in this, uh, in this analogy. Um, when we think of anarchy, everybody thinks of Mad Max
and they think of something that's kind of terrifying. Um, is this the wrong way to think
about anarchy? Is there a more pleasant outcome? If Bitcoin fixes the money problem and Noster
fixes the communication problem, so the propaganda and the censorship problem, then
is anarchy the natural outcome? And what does that type of anarchy at scale look like?
Yeah, anarchy is a scary word.
And I think that just shows you how deep the mind control is.
Because a synonym for it is peace.
So what is an anarchic world?
It's a peaceful world.
So anarchy comes from the Greek or part of it.
That there's a prefix, an, meaning without or the absence of.
And the suffix, archon, which means king or ruler.
So fundamentally, it's the concept of no masters and no slaves.
and a archonist is a king who wants to rule over other subjects while an unarchonist is someone who
rejects this hierarchy and and sees you know fundamental equal spark of humanity in every soul
and that requires them or or leads to ultimately self-ownership and you own your body and and the
place you stand on and the things that you work for and then they are yours and then you can do
with them as you see fit and you have the highest authority over how those resources should be
allocated. And again, if a slave is not free to speak out against the master, he cannot use his
vocal cords to voice a dissenting opinion. And so ultimately, anarchy is the opposite of slavery.
And the fact that most people associated with mayhem and violence is telling. But it is by
definition the opposite right if someone steals from you he proclaims that he's the king over you
and your your goods and and he can do it without your consent right that that is by definition not
anarchy right so christ was the biggest anarchist right jesus was uh and and many religious teachings
ultimately come back to this of just don't steal from your neighbor you know live peacefully uh and
and and love each other in this way that is uh yeah fundamentally what what anarchy is about so
yeah i i hope we will reach a much larger state of anarchy in this world it would be a blissful
thing but but i also realized that there is so much anarchy in in everyday life like our
conversation right now right none of us is is trying to lure over each other and and try to
dominate him we're just sitting together and having a conversation right there there is no
ruler here there is no master here we're just peers having fun and and that is anarchy right
and and you see that everywhere like whenever you go and buy a piece of bread from the bakery
that is ultimately an anarchy itself right here there's two consenting adults coming together and
helping each other right one wants to have money the other wants to have bread and they trade and
so both are better off ultimately and and because they are both better off they they choose to do
this voluntarily without anyone telling them that they have to so yeah anarchy is actually something
quite beautiful does it does there not have to be an archon though to secure our bodies from
aggression against other people someone who imposes the law thou shalt not steal thou shalt not
aggress and enforces it we can say i can say i own myself but if my neighbor doesn't respect that
the impulse is to want to call on a third party, an archon, who will, you know, adjudicate that
and determine what the just result is? And how does anarchy bring in an archon
to mediate that relationship between others who are aggressors?
Yeah, that's a really good question. And ultimately, I would say that
the responsibility of justice is with the victim, right? He has the ultimate authority
over what should be done about this crime.
And this extends, for example,
if the victim wants to be merciful,
then nobody else should be able to harm the person
that was forgiven by the actual victim.
And obviously, you alone are, well,
a lonely and miserable creature, right?
So you alone will not accomplish anything substantial,
let alone bring justice.
So naturally, we humans collaborate and help each other out. And I see in a free society where ultimately the responsibility and the ability or like the authority to proclaim the justice is rooted in the victim.
and it can then be abdicated via contract, for example, to others.
So let's say someone steals 100 gold coins from you,
then you can go to someone else and be like,
hey, if you get the money back, I will give you a part of it.
And now the question is, if someone approaches you like,
hey, this guy stole from me, go and get him.
What if you just blindly follow those orders?
and it turns out that the first guy was lying,
then you are the aggressor.
So just because you think that you're coming to justice
might actually be that you're the aggressor, right?
Because any initiation of force is a crime.
And so whenever you apply force,
you have to be really careful and considerate
if you're applying it justly.
And the question of if the force application is justified
is an extremely nuanced one, right?
It's just bloody hard.
like people have different opinions and different recollections and nobody was really there
so it's it's tough to to be certain here and so i i will imagine that there will be specialists
who who emerge naturally as being people in a community that can be trusted to to hear a case
thoroughly and and to to speak their mind on on if this is a crime or not and what the just
reaction should be. And then from there, I also see that there are specialists who specialize in
violence and force to then apply just retribution to the crime that was committed and the person who
did. And so there's absolutely a way that we can bring justice to criminals without becoming
criminals ourselves. It's a bit of a tautology, right, of a circular reasoning to say that, oh,
like we shouldn't steal, but we need someone that steals in order to prevent us from stealing.
Right. That's no, we just shouldn't steal.
And even difficult problems as the deliverance of justice or maybe especially such difficult problems must not be rested in the authority of one single provider.
Because as soon as you have this monopoly that only one person or one group of people is allowed to perform a certain service, then what's their incentive to be good?
And if they're bad, what are you going to do?
complain they don't care right they care if if you would move to someone else who provides a
better service and you stop paying the original people but they have the monopoly that doesn't
matter right that doesn't exist so the the monopoly itself i think is an incredible blocker
in the path to success or the the solution to a problem and they would all be much better solved
if anyone could do his best at solving the problem.
And we have a really bad justice system at the moment.
It's an injustice system.
The amount of victimless crimes that are persecuted
and people put in jail is staggering.
And in every place, right?
Like America is one of the worst offenders here.
And then the amounts of actual crimes that are tolerated,
like an insane amount of money printing or untold amount of financial fraud and Ponzi schemes and all of this that are clearly bad things to do,
where everyone would agree that this is something that ought to be stopped.
They don't because the criminal has collaborated with the judge.
And that is something that in a free system would not happen.
because sure, maybe one judge is corrupt,
but then you just go to a different judge.
And the judge doesn't give you complete absolution
of whatever he says is perfect.
The judge is just a dude.
He's as fallible as we all are.
And he's just giving his opinion.
It's just that he's seen a lot of cases
and probably his opinion is of high quality.
And so if a good judge tells you that,
no, this is not a victim or this is not a crime,
then don't go seek personal just like retribution because well you might be wrong and if if you are
wrong then other people and other judges will will judge you to have done a crime and will come after
you or at least not do business with you anymore so does this whole does this presume then a uniform
idea of justice that we believe theft is wrong for example a sort of christian morality you could
have like a Nietzschean, somebody who says it is right that the strong take from the weak because
they merit it or something like that. Does anarchy presume a cultural homogeneity to where we have
the same conception of natural law, I guess? Another really good question. I think that
that doesn't have to be the case, right? Like there are voluntary agreements that could be made.
like there is voluntary communism ultimately, right?
You could agree to live in a commune
and not own anything and share it all.
And in a free society, that's totally fine.
And if you go with your friends into a village
and start a commune,
you're not harming anyone per se, right?
So even with having fundamentally different
kind of, yeah, assumptions,
you could peacefully coexist.
But the question of, yeah,
I guess the reasons why someone else would steal from you is secondary to the fact that he stole.
And yes, if there are different agreements in the sense of a group says it's okay to steal from others and another group says no, it's not.
Well, then that's conflict ultimately.
And conflict is always messy.
and the question is of of you know how who would succeed out of this conflict ultimately
right there's there's many different solutions including de-escalation and just evacuation and
and leaving and having a separate you know existence that is certainly an opportunity but
yeah ultimately i i think a a a just society would share a substantial overlap with this one
basic rule of do not steal.
Without this rule being lived and also being understood, but those two things not necessarily
have to overlap, right?
Like you don't need to be a philosophy major to not steal from your neighbor.
You just need to be a decent human ultimately.
And sure, the philosophy might eventually lead you to those conclusions.
If we have two groups, one that has an idea of justice, that stealing is wrong, and then
another group that has an idea of justice where the weak should take from or the strong should
take from the weak. That's kind of international law, right? And how does anarchy work on the
international stage? Don't you need an archon to coordinate the defense to prevent the anarchic
society from being gobbled up by the autocratic one that believes we can invade the anarchic
society and take all of their things on the international law stage, international stage,
rather not to presume international law.
On the international stage,
there is no one kind of presumed justice, I guess,
if there are competing groups
with different styles of justice.
So does the anarchist society need
to be able to defend itself?
And do you need an archon, a ruler to do that
and to establish one archon overall
so that we don't have two A and B societies
with b devouring a and b having the conception of justice that the strong should take from the weak
this is like stuff from like thrasymachus in the republic i think saying um you should take what
you can as long as you can get away with it yeah ultimately i think the the the larger the group
of of peaceful people the the better right um great and that that of course then comes on on
question of how yeah on on the global scale right how how do other groups of people perceive you and
what do they do and that is again a kind of a question of of macro politics or economics right
so it's it's difficult to speak in like broad terms um ultimately though we we see that especially
on the international scale, there is no archon, right?
There is no highest authority.
You know, there are certain countries
that are massively powerful,
but mainly in their region,
and only very sporadically on the other side of the planet.
And most just are local territories
that have their local monopolies.
And things like international trade
has functioned in this since forever.
The law of the high seas is still a very neutral law code that ultimately gives the captain of a ship full authority of that ship.
And there's no higher person than the captain compared to another.
So, yeah, these are...
Yeah.
Am I back?
Okay.
Yeah, you're back.
You're back. Yeah. You've referenced Christ. You talked about Noster perhaps creating a world that looks more godly. And, you know, the commandment of thou shalt not steal.
as I get deeper and deeper into Bitcoin, I feel both closer and closer to God. And I also start
to question myself for having such reverence for something that is money, money being, you know,
the root of all evil. We spoke with Ardian, who's been kind enough to share some things about
uh, canonic.xyz and just kind of the way that they think. And he really kind of stunned us both
in a message where he said, remember Bitcoin is the enemy. And I kind of asked him to explain that.
And basically as a fervent supporter of Bitcoin, he's also recognizing that, um, we can always take
the technology too far and in doing so erode, I guess, our humanity.
And I guess so my question to you is like, what is, you speak about religion very, very
fluently. Do you have a relationship with a God? Do you believe in a higher power? And
how has that changed as you've gone deeper and deeper into freedom technology?
Yeah, I was raised Christian, but was never much a fan of kind of the institutionalized church.
And then, you know, ultimately started to conclude that I guess my religion is anarchy,
kind of the one commandment, do not steal. I do believe that to be, you know, a divine
law ultimately um but yeah i'm not that you know well-versed in theology so to say but uh it's
you know something that i definitely believe that there are you know judgments and consequences to
your action and um like both karmic as well as economic and and ultimately that you know the
the thief steals from himself as well.
This is something that we would all live in such a better world
if we would all just stop stealing.
The benefit that we could gain way outweighs the loot
that any person could take.
So it's, yeah, that aspect is certainly a faith or a belief.
Yeah.
And so I wanted to jump on that question too
because Bitcoin is the enemy.
is such like a zen cohen for me it's like when you hear a bitcoin maximal maximalist or somebody
who is deep in bitcoin say bitcoin is the enemy it's like they're recognizing the power of it
it's like oppenheimer seeing the bomb drop and knowing they need to make the bomb but knowing
that what comes after the bomb is a new thing and i'm wondering um maybe considering it as a cohen
that sort or even considering maybe like once the fee like once fiat machinery is dismantled once
the state that makes that possible is dismantled. Is there a stage beyond Bitcoin, beyond Nostr,
that we need to strive towards the next thing and to see that that then in a sense becomes the enemy
and we have to find another thing to move beyond that even closer to maybe what you would see as
true anarchy, if that makes sense. Yeah, this is, I think, something that we can only strive towards.
We can never really reach the end goal.
Their human life is just messy and complex.
And none of us really knows what they're doing, ultimately.
And yeah, I doubt that we will reach the end point, so to say.
There will always be new questions that need to be asked.
There will always be an interplay of technologies that are novel.
and kind of a path dependence of some things are only possible after a certain technology has been achieved And then everything changes and we need to reevaluate it So Bitcoin is not a panacea It not utopia
And it addresses a lot of issues that were there in the past.
And yes, they are fixed.
But they come with trade-offs.
And we're still grappling with those.
and it's not guaranteed for bitcoin or for anything to be a success.
It depends on an uncountable amount of data points and actions
that none of us can foresee.
We might have good guesses on the trend and the direction,
but the long-run consequences are like Satoshi didn't know
that something like this would happen.
He maybe had a couple different visions and glimpses of what might be, but certainly not for certain.
And that will continue to happen.
And that is challenging for developers and builders too, because the people who build the early internets, the Facebooks, the Googles, the Amazon, they were on a good mission.
on decreasing friction and increasing the availability of things and the communication.
These were all valuable and good problems to be solved.
And I'm sure early enthusiasts were having rose-colored glasses
and being overly optimistic and enthusiastic about the upsides of the technology
while downplaying the downsides.
and that has now in the long run led to an incredible amount being achieved
but the modern internet is a miracle it like let's be real um but it also just has so many
new problems that are introduced now that we didn't have to worry about in in the past
and so many things have just been like exponentiated right things are so much larger now
And at such an insane scale, like Facebook's growth as a company is limited by the amount of people being born on the planet.
Like that's just crazy.
And the builders of technology have an immense amount of responsibility because culture comes after technology.
The tools we use fundamentally shape us and how we act and collaborate with others.
And so making mistakes in the foundations will get worse and worse as we are building on top.
And I guess that's why Bitcoin and Noster is so interesting, because it fundamentally questions those very, very deep assumptions and removes them and puts something else in place.
And now we are seeing the long-term consequences of those new set of assumptions that we've added.
And, you know, first of all, maybe the assumptions are wrong, right?
Like maybe this whole idea of sovereign individuals and, you know, like self-ownership and censorship resistance, maybe that's bad, right?
Maybe that we started at the very wrong place in the first place.
But then much more likely is we just took a wrong path somewhere up on that thing that we were building on top.
And those small minor mistakes eventually add up.
And so in 30 years from now, who knows what the next generation will think about Bitcoin and what we've built.
They might be thankful for some aspects for it, probably not of all.
And I'm sure that they would have done it differently, knowing everything that they know later.
um but ultimately we we just have to try right and and and do things and and build things and
be be aware of the immense magnitude of our actions that that they ripple through eternity
ultimately and then still not get paralyzed with that insane responsibility but keep
keep doing our best with with every step so in the movie dune the uh the line that everyone takes
away is that fear is the mind killer and i'm i'm listening to napoleon hill's book outwitting the
devil right now where there's an interview that the author has with the devil and the devil
shares his secret that that hell is not something that occurs afterlife that hell is something that
lives inside the mind in this life. And that the only way that you get to that is to have fear and
fear of scarcity, fear of lost love and ill health and old age and criticism and death.
That when you allow fear into your mind, you allow the devil into your mind and it does not
leave space for positivity. And so I've been thinking about, you know, fear is evil. Fear is
the devil. Positivity is good. Positivity is God. And you, I know that we haven't, we didn't know
each other before this conversation, but I did do a decent amount of research to learn about you.
And you are a fearless individual with the ideas that you put to the world, the way that you live your life on a Bitcoin standard, on a Noster standard.
What are the thoughts that you consistently remind yourself to keep at the top of mind so as not to let fear in?
What are the things that you, like you said, that fear can be paralyzing, but knowing that our actions will ripple through eternity, what is that driving force, these positive things that you remind yourself on a daily basis to move forward and continue living fearlessly?
hmm i'm i'm thinking that some something as foundational as fear since it has been around for
god knows how many years is probably useful right like there there's a reason why we have it so i'm
not sure if it is all out a negative thing i think fear can be an enormous motivator
because to be honest i am afraid like i i am afraid of the horror that humans can can manifest
on this world um and seemingly without stop like that's that's terrifying so the the the trick i
guess is to also have hope and that that i'm extremely hopeful of what humans can achieve
Like even in our current state with all the mess that we're in, what we have achieved is mind-blowingly amazing.
And so that combination of a fear of imagining how bad it could be.
And if shit hits the fan, if everything goes as bad as it could, if we all purposely work towards destruction and terror, like it could get really bad.
And that's something that I'm afraid of, ultimately. But on the other hand, there is the hope of what could we build if we get our act together, if we all point upwards and in the right direction and help each other and do amazing things.
and that combination that that duality is an insane motivator to me um it's a bit like maybe
i'm not sure if bipolar is the right term but it's it's so so extreme on on both sides
that it's yeah it it it really motivates me ultimately um what what is also important though
just there are good reasons to be afraid of right and and there are people out to get you
and being aware of that also means that you can prepare and so i think a lot of bitcoiners who
have both this fear of of how bad the fiat system is you know specifically for bitcoin or money
and then the opportunity of how amazing a bitcoin standard would be and that hope that that is an
immense motivation and it motivates us to prepare ultimately.
And preparation is also a fear killer ultimately,
because if you are prepared and you have removed this uneasiness and uncertainty
of what might come in the future and how do I engage it, that helps of calming you.
So that's one of the great lines of Ludwig von Mises,
the economist is that money is a tool to remove uneasiness and to knowing that I have an amount
of capital that I can trade with whomever, whenever, for whatever, I can solve any problem,
basically, given that amount of capital. But that is something that I think the world needs a bit
more of. Not just the hope that Bitcoin gives you, but also that soothing of the uneasiness
and the ultimate fear that is quite common nowadays.
So yeah, I do think that that combination
is extremely powerful.
Yeah, I think I spoke wrong.
I think instead of saying that you live fearlessly,
I should have said that you live courageously,
which is to act in the face of fear,
I think would probably be a better way to put it.
Yeah. What do you have?
And to some extent, I'm just more afraid
of the inaction as well,
because inaction is an action.
And we're in such a precarious time and peculiar time where it seems extremely unique.
Like the set of circumstances that surrounds us at this moment is extremely potent.
And maybe it's the last opportunity of this type that we get.
And then not doing anything about it would have been devastating.
yeah i i'm i mean i'm certainly guilty of the inaction of of you know many bitcoiners which
is to wait for the number to go up which is to wait for to wait for fiat to die um and to
maybe pay less attention to how i take action in the world in the meantime um to have i've heard
patience described as the definition of patience is finding something to do in the meantime,
while you wait for that great thing to appear. And I think that's very beautiful. I did want to ask
you, you in another interview, you noted that Crypto Economics is the best book ever written
on Bitcoin. Do you still feel that way? And why is it that you feel that way? What is it about
this? Did it just hit you at a time in your life that you were really ready for it? Or,
yeah, what, what, what inside this book really changed the way you think about the world?
Yeah, it is still the best, the best book written about Bitcoin. And I think by far.
And that is because it's a very peculiar author with a very particular set of skills
that I don't know anyone else who has mastered both the computer science of Bitcoin as well as
the economics of Bitcoin. Usually people are bad at both. There's a couple who are, you know,
top of the class in one of these and they have no idea about the other. And there's maybe two
two people that I would classify as having reached mastery on both.
And Eric Woskiel is the leader of those two.
And I say that because he has articulated so clearly and so deeply understood Bitcoin
in such a useful and counterintuitive way that it helped me a lot.
To really understand what mining is about and why Bitcoin is decentralized and stay-centered resistance.
Just on this technical aspect, he's phenomenal.
But also on the economic lens, there were three major foundational axioms introduced to Austrian economic thought.
The first one was by Ludwig von Mises, the axiom of action.
So humans act purposefully, they behave in a way that they can achieve their goals by allocating their resources at their disposal.
And out of this one starting point, Mises can deduce the entire praxeology and catalactics of economic theory, which is mind-blowing, right, with basically one starting point.
Something that no other thinker has done in the past and with incredible success.
but Mises was always very careful to be value free as he called it to not impose a value judgment
on an economic concept like he would not say that a minimum wage is bad and should not be done
right he would say that a minimum wage leads to unemployment and that is a proper praxeological
analysis of that sentence.
Then next was Hans-Hermann Hoppe, which introduced the axiom of argumentation, which basically
says that people can argue and discover truth, but there is a presupposition in argumentation,
and that is ultimately self-ownership.
Hoppe's main argument is that in order to argue, you're presupposing certain things
like you control your body and have exclusive ownership of your body, your vocal cords, and the place you stand on.
And therefore, you cannot rationally argue that someone else does not have property rights
because you're performing a contradiction in the fact that you're arguing that the other person is a slave.
You are using your own vocal cords in a self-sovereign way, ultimately.
And from this, he very elegantly deduces an entire emphasis of ethical conclusions. And so I believe he famously dismantled this famous you cannot derive an ought from an is fallacy. And he does come to the conclusion, ultimately, that you ought not to steal.
And if you agree that you own yourself, then you ought not to steal from others because stealing is that performative contradiction that you claim not to do.
So this gives us an entire thought of ethics to be discussed logically and I think objectively.
So here I do believe in natural law or natural rights and they are objective.
They are eternal.
They are not man-made.
we've just discovered them and they are the truth
you own yourself that's a fact
and then
that was the state of Austrian economics
for the last 40 years or something
and in this book
Voskul introduces the axiom of resistance
and it's a bit of a different
type of axiom than the previous two
but ultimately it means that
if you are analyzing a resistant system, then you need to assume that resistance is possible.
And so this is an assumption that most people, the majority of people, reject.
The first answer to you telling someone about Bitcoin is, well, what if the government bans it?
Presupposing that resistance is futile, that you cannot resist the government.
And if that is your starting point, you will never understand Bitcoin. It does not make sense, because why would people do it? They cannot resist.
And so by him articulating this as a foundational axiom that we have to agree upon in order to have a proper conversation, he is then able to deduce an entire apparatus of security and technology that builds on top of and intervenes with those previous two axioms.
So this is why I think it's such a next level book, because it doesn't just explain what Bitcoin is. It meaningfully and fundamentally advances very, very deep epistemological and methodological insights that were so far disregarded by previous thinkers.
and with him articulating precisely on this,
he can build a rock solid definition
and understanding of Bitcoin
that previously, basically nobody really understood.
That's incredible.
I thank you so much for that.
Neither one of us has read it yet,
but it's now, we decided to put it on the list
in order to review for the podcast
because as a result of hearing you talk about it
with Efrat Finningsen,
I kind of looked it up.
And some of the other things that you mentioned, like what has the government done to our money
is just so beautiful and short and informative.
Yeah.
I do want to give you the option to dip out.
I know that we had you scheduled for, I think it was an hour.
I don't want to take your time if you've got better things to do.
You certainly do.
But yeah.
Yeah.
Good conversation starts three hours in.
So I've heard you say that before and I was so excited.
Okay.
Grant, what do you want to hear?
I mean, I have this is going to be if you don't want to we can even cut this if you don't want to, because it's just me annoying, like not even pushback.
But I'm just so interested in Rothbard.
I read some of this stuff a long time ago, but I've always just had questions about like the axioms of self-ownership.
I mean, we are biological animals.
We're born dependent on others.
It's a factor of our existence that a child born into the world, I say, doesn't own themselves because they require intense care.
They're born with the debt to the community that brings them into maturity.
We're born needing a communal protocol we call language to give us the capacity to think.
So some of these axioms I take as having social presuppositions that they don't take into account.
The social presupposition of the language community a person is part of, the cultural community, and also their dependence as a biological organism through stages of dependency as a child and also disability.
as an elderly person.
So those are, again, I mean, that's not arguing with you.
It's just my own.
I'm trying to, as I'm trying to work out praxeology
and make it make sense in my own philosophical framework.
So I don't know if you've thought about those issues or.
Yeah, the case of children is a difficult one.
But I think for any mode of thought, ultimately.
And I think praxeology has a really elegant insight in this,
that children are very different from adults, absolutely,
but they have the potential to be adults.
And that potential anchors their humanity, ultimately,
because all of us were children in the past.
So if we would violate the right of a child,
that is, again, a performative contradiction
of we were children ourselves.
We're presuming a right that someone else does not have.
And that obviously falls on its face.
um so children are kind of stewarded by their parents primarily and the broader community
but they are not owned by the parents and the the parents are stewards but but not owners you know
there there is a difference yeah and that's primarily because well children are humans too
and they will grow up to to be full-fledged adults yeah no i love that idea of a steward because
the older I get, and you talked about, you know, at the core of the issue, philosophically speaking,
is what is the meaning of life? What does it mean to live a good life? The older I get, it seems to
in things like taking on unchosen duties and living a life of imposed obligations that one
did not choose, those to children, to segments of society that for reasons of mental disability
or physical disability can't care for themselves, and that we have these duties as a result of
unchosen networks we're born into that we call family, that we call the particular community
that we are a part of by virtue of birth and not by virtue of autonomy, autonomous choice as to
having been a member, like you didn't choose where you were born, what you were socialized
into, things like that.
So to make that into a question, I mean, do you see what it means to live a good life
as sufficiently defined by praxeology?
No, and that's an excellent question.
I think it's the baseline, but by far not the ceiling.
It's going to be really difficult for you to live a fulfilled life if you consistently
steal from others.
i think right um but you can still be a dick even if you don't steal from others you know
and and so to have a like holistically fulfilled life do not steal is is the baseline right but
ultimately i do think that help others is is a very important metric or or or direction that
that would lead you towards a more fulfilling life and praxeology for me really interestingly
made me realize of what work actually is like that's why i got curious about it because i
wanted to know why we work like why do we have to do this hard stuff and and the the solution
ultimately is that work is the alleviation of problems and you you you identify a problem and
and you work diligently to remove that problem from your own life.
And then if you do that for others,
then you're of such a use that they are willing to trade for you.
Ultimately, every trade is people solving each other's problems
at a mutual beneficial scale.
So this communal aspect is very deeply tied to praxeology.
And praxeology is not like this isolated individual
that is perfectly rational.
That is actually Keynesian economics.
Praxeology is very fundamentally rooted in subjective individualism, but the consequences obviously apply to the interconnected individual that is very much dependent on others.
Like by yourself, by your loan would probably starve very quick or die of exposure because producing anything of true value is so incredibly complex that you could not do it.
At the famous essay, of course, I pencil from Friedrich Bastiat.
No one knows how to produce a pencil.
like no single person can produce a pencil ultimately because you know you need to get
the woods and for that you need like an axe and now you have to go into metallurgy and
dig up a bunch of dirt and and smelter it and sharp mids and okay now you you know need the
the the like filler the actual writer that now you have to go on a mining expedition and now you
need the the eraser some rubber so for this you have to build a boat and go to the jungle you know
cross an ocean to get your hands on on some days and now you need to feed all of the people that
work on this and produce the coffee that they drink in the morning and get the fuel for the
ships and and all of this the the chain of human interaction that leads to something as trivial
and seemingly banal as a as a pencil is mind-boggling yeah and so to think about what what
it took to produce the phone or the microphone that we're currently communicating with and and
the internet infrastructure that holds it all together, it's mind-blowing, right?
So humans are lonely and starving alone.
Like, yes, there's benefits to solitude as well, obviously,
but only in a very limited amount.
And this is a term you used earlier, and I think it's applicable here.
How does praxeology, what does catalytics mean,
and how does that stem from or interact with or its relation to praxeology?
Yeah, so praxeology is basically the logic of human action, right?
So what can we deduce based on the fact that humans act?
And it turns out we can deduce quite a lot.
And then there is a subsection of praxeology, which is called catalactics, which is basically the logic of trade.
And why do people trade with each other?
So this is like the much more narrower part of the economic thought.
But praxeology is useful even for the isolated individual.
A lot of things like time preference, interest, and these more advanced economic conclusions do make sense for a lonely, stranded individual on an island.
things like capital accumulation and specialization of resources and roundaboutness of production
stages. All of these economic concepts make sense for the isolated individual, but they're much more
interesting and much more applicable to real life in a catalactic of multiple agents working among
each other and for each other. Yeah. You, kind of a change of topic, but you've talked about
citadels a bit in the past. And I spent seven months at the network school, which is Balaji
Srinivasan's sort of grand experiment in what is possibly being referred to as like the third
iteration of societal organization, where we went from a church state and the church state fell
because the printing press democratized information
and you didn't have to go to the church to be propagandized.
And then the nation state arose
and then the internet is crumbling the nation state
because you no longer have to go to the government
in order to be propagandized and get your information.
And out of that comes this idea of a network state,
which is aligned individuals,
people who share the same values,
mostly internet values,
which are kind of internet values, I think, could best be described as what America wanted to be.
And obviously was not able to live up to that because of the failures of the technology that we had, truly, because it created these perverse incentives.
But none of this had ever been possible before.
None of these network states, these utopian societies, these grand social experiments, they could never work because the people didn't have their own money. Ultimately, there was always the king or the government that came in and put power upon them through aggression and broke it up.
Um, what is your, I guess, what is your interest and what is your, um, I guess, belief surrounding,
you know, because you, you've outlined that anarchy is, appears to be the natural outcome
of this parasitical infestation that is the state. Um, and does anarchy thus evolve into something
proximal or like the network state or like these charter cities that are popping up,
Zuzulu and Prospera and things like that.
I guess I'm always just curious about that because I'm trying to expand my,
trying to expand the things that I look at differently beyond just Bitcoin and communication And societal organization I think is one of those that really kind of hits home with me Yeah I a big fan of those as well
And in part, you know, I just don't like monopolies.
So whenever there's someone that says, I'm the only one that can do this, I kind of question
that.
And that goes for the market of living with each other as well.
I think we need much more entrepreneurship and experimentation to satisfy the need of, okay, how do we actually organize the neighborhood ultimately? And this is where network states and private cities are extremely beneficial, right? Because it is not the homesteading a ranch out in the middle of nowhere by yourself with your family.
because again that doesn't produce anything
other than a bit of food
and it's also not
a full on nation state
above multiple continents
a city
is a nice locus of
economic activity
that has the chance to produce
actually something meaningful
and when a couple of hundred thousand
or millions of people get together
that's a lot of human capital
and ingenuity that can solve
a whole bunch of different problems.
So I would like to see more independent cities
popping up that have a meaningful differentiation
in their governance model.
And that includes a full-on communist city.
I think we should actually do that voluntarily, obviously.
Don't lock people in that ghetto,
but leave the door open
so that those who change their mind might leave.
Because, you know, maybe I'm wrong
and property rights are not the best solution
to organize society.
Who might to tell that?
So people should try out.
And eventually, I think we will see
a lot of these cities succeed and flourish.
And then there is imitation
where a organizer or manager of a city
then sees some other community
benefiting from one certain technology
that they've applied.
He will most likely copy it
because if he doesn't,
then his competition is more beneficial
and people would move.
And the other fantastic thing
is that we have cyberspace now.
And then that changes everything
because now you can communicate
and collaborate and trade
and perform services for others
without being in close proximity.
So because the nation state
has such a clampdown
on the land territory,
I think that we are seeing
the network state, so to say,
emerge in cyberspace where there are people with such a high cultural overlap and shared ideology
and shared mythos like for example the bitcoin community right that where two random bitcoiners
are much closer to each other ideologically speaking than their neighbors by far right
and and this type of um yeah like experimentation in the cultural realm that that can be
done in cyberspace will bootstrap a bunch of different ideologies, ways of life that
can then reach a scale in cyberspace before it makes sense to anchor it in meat space somehow.
You know, similar to how now El Salvador, for example, on the nation state level is
at least trying to be that independent Bitcoin hub that does things differently.
that would not have been possible in 2013 with barely any Bitcoiners.
There needed to be a substantial amount of people that share this ideology
so that they can then flock to that one area in meat space and give it the best shot.
So this will continue to happen on a smaller and hopefully larger scale eventually.
Have you visited any of these spots?
I know that you travel quite a bit and you enjoy waking up in different places and knowing that home is wherever you are.
Is this something that you've experimented with as well?
Or are you more into kind of putting down roots now and growing a community in one spa?
yeah this is it's it's a difficult question because there are so many amazing beautiful
spots that that are out there and it's trade-offs all the way down right there i have not yet found
a perfect spot so to say when you do that let me know exactly i went i went my mountain next to the
beach uh you know with with clean rivers and and yeah all that exactly but matt have you ever thought
that maybe the perfection of a spot is the spot that you're from that every place has like its
own particular genius again just as i get older that's kind of the way i think that
like my unchosen biography um has a beauty to it that's not defined by its aesthetic beauty that
you know coming to love the place you're at is a journey where you come to understand something
about yourself. You're formed by an environment without knowing how it formed you. And part of
living there over an extended time is a dialogue with who you are. And that's kind of as you know,
I like to read things that we live in. We're in Kansas City now. It's near the Great Plains
in the United States. It's called flyover country. No one wants to be here.
We're both from a place that that that people often refer to as the only reason people live
there is because the wagon wheel broke or the ox died because you just you couldn't keep moving.
and that's just where you stopped.
Not much here, but wind.
But the longer you stay in a place
that you come to love it, I guess,
is, I don't know if that's a question
or just, you know,
what do you think about that?
That sounds like a really wise conclusion as well.
Because, you know, this is a big place,
but ultimately you are just,
yeah, you can make it in any place.
It's much more a question of
how do you deal with the situation
and do you try to make the best of it?
rather than is the surroundings perfect.
And there's definitely an aspect of being able to,
you know,
row for generations in the same place.
Like there are villages where the same family
is for countless generations
and they are the village basically.
And that type of anchor is certainly valuable as well.
I've heard you say on a podcast
that you don't understand a place until you've lived there long enough to see people born and
die there. And that, you know, to the age now where I've seen that happen, right? And it does
give you a certain perspective on the place. And there is both a hopelessness and a hopefulness
that comes from that. Yeah, I didn't have a question there. I just had something to say.
To the point where we're not saying questions, we're just interested in.
More interest.
Like, what are the questions that like what what's exciting to you right now?
Like, what are you thinking about on a daily basis that is that is exciting?
I mean, obviously, Noster is kind of the driving force.
Now you've sort of moved on from Wasabi Wallet and CoinJoin in order to kind of take this next bigger step.
what what's really motivating and exciting right now that's like i guess specifically propelling
you forward this shot of dopamine that's pushing you uh to you know get up and take your uh
take your take your satchel and go to work and and uh solve problems
many different things but but one that really is is a highlight is the the quality of the people
who are working on these problems Like in FreedomTech very broadly defined especially Bitcoin especially noster there the and and i not quite sure why it is but there such a shared culture that that extends
for for any nationality maybe because it is something as foundational as freedom and and
it somehow attracted just incredible people um both wicked smart but also courageous and and
and motivated and willing to do something.
This is really a blessing that our ecosystem or industry has.
And so I get to speak to countless builders
and to see their own motivation
and how they're slowly making their paths
towards really, really big problems,
which maybe is the other thing of just picking big problems
means you have a lot of work
and a lot of responsibilities
and so that makes things
damn quite
exciting
and initially I set myself
out to fix the money as outrageous
as that sounds
but a couple outrageous
people I think absolutely managed to do
that like Bitcoin has fixed the money
and
to some extent I'm satisfied
with the state of it now
so that I consider that quest
closed and now i guess specifically my my more um nuanced uh approach right now is is to fix the
direct messaging and this is something where nostr has has shown a new set of building blocks to build
an internet of publication that is beautiful in its simplicity and it's in its censorship
persistence and its possibility of what can be built with it. But one realization is that a very
small percentage of your actions are intended for the whole public world to see. And most conversations
that you have is with one person or a small group of people. And these are the types of conversations
that we have to some extent neglected in Noster specifically.
And I think with the basic building blocks of Noster
and some additional ones,
we can really get to a place where we have a free and open environment
where people can have secure and private conversations.
And especially I'm interested about the applications
and use cases that emerge when this new building block is introduced.
Because we haven't really had a way to securely and privately talk to 50 people
without having some central third party that we all trust or something or another.
And with the stack of technologies I'm working on now, that is possible.
Like you can have a group of a thousand, maybe even 50,000 people that securely talk to each other.
And there's just no third party that knows about it or that can stop it.
And with all those benefits of Nostra being able to customize that experience.
And if you have your own local playground where not just the content is yours,
but the way that the content is created and interpreted and read is also adapting to your own local culture.
This will unleash, I think, a plethora of new culture, ultimately.
If you go to the mountains, every valley has a unique set of dress and language and customs.
And that was in part because they just couldn't talk to each other because it was too much work to go over the mountain.
And so despite them being on a very close space, a huge diversity has emerged.
And I think a lot of this diversity has been taken or at least disappeared with that ever more interconnected global economy.
And that comes with a bunch of benefits, obviously, but there are sacrifices and costs here.
And I think if we manage to create valleys in cyberspace where a group of people can meet and choose to just be by themselves and choose to create that culture and mindset and knowledge that is not for anyone to see, but only for the tribe, so to say, this will have fascinating consequences.
So building towards that and seeing where that might take us in five, 10 years is always exciting.
Yeah, we want to continue to keep going deeper on Nostra and understanding more.
We've got a conversation set up with Paul Keating from Primal and kind of learn a bit about that client.
But, you know, like there's brilliant people in this space without doxing anybody.
are there some names that come to mind that you would say are really driving change right now in
Noster? And then a second question, which should be easy, is you said Eric Voskel is perhaps one
of two people who understand Bitcoin on the level that he does. Who's the other one?
That is Lucas Ontivero. He is the first contributor to Wasabi Wallet. And it has
been like in computer science for since he was a toddler basically and he's argentinian so he has
lived through economic terror and and has learned on on why like not and not just in in the textbooks
but but also in practice uh which helps a lot uh so he has yeah fantastic insights on on both
bitcoin as a technology and what's possible with him with it and as as well as the underlying
economics of that makes it so powerful um and and other people in in the nostril ecosystem
or maybe projects like one that i'm incredibly bullish and excited on is zap store as zap store
dot def it is a an app store and it is from the point of view of a developer the only app store
that works literally because every other app store you have to beg for permission to get an account
you have to make a bank payment in order to get an account every developer who who made a
yeah who published an app needed to pay apple via the banking system so if you don't have
an a bank account or if you do not get an apple account for whatever reason
you just cannot publish to a couple billion people on this planet which is weird
and then whenever you make an update to your software
you have to sacrifice a goat and do a ritual
and pray that the reviewers have a good day
and will approve that you fix those problems
that your users are experiencing
so that is enormously frustrating
and the system used to be so much better
not even that long ago
where developers just signed their release with PGP
and put it on a server and you could get it
and you could verify that it's from them
and you just run it.
So I know Apple users have no idea
that you can install software other than from the App Store,
but most actual computers do that.
And so we need to get back to that.
And App Store has achieved this for Android specifically,
where all a developer that needs to do
in order to publish an app is to sign an OSTO event It says this is the name of the app That the version That where you can download it Here the description Here some pictures And that is cryptographically signed and uploaded to hundreds of relays
so that anyone can be able to get a notification that, hey,
there's a new update available.
And then on top of that, you can recommend other people applications
that you like by signing them with your private key.
And so there on ZapStore, you will find a list of applications that I recommend together with lists of a bunch of other people.
And so that's a great way to have a social verification of, yes, this is actually the app that my friends are using.
And at least I'm not being singled out by an attacker who gives only me a different version.
And I know that this is the exact version that my friends are running.
But also it's a great discovery mechanism.
them. I've discovered so many new apps in the App Store because my friends, you know, published
about them. And of course, you can send money to the developers. That is one button. And with every
download, it gives you like, hey, you want to send a couple stats to the devs. And this can be like
serious income. Like the App Store right now is again still tiny, maybe a couple thousand users.
but there is still more than zero money coming through and as most developers you just don't
earn anything from from apple or google or they take the massive 30 cut from everything that you
manage to then earn later on right so a tiny fraction uh will will remain at the actual app
developer and this can just be turned to 100 with with nostor and bitcoin so zap store is one of
these applications that might just by itself be enough to you know to stave the worst of of the
internet fallout by simply making it free and open to publish applications by anyone and for anyone
because that just increases the number of developers who who are who have the potential
to solve problems for others now that we have so many white coders and white coders are not going
to sign up for an Apple account, but they might just, you know, if the software does
it automatically for them in the background and no extra information is required.
Grant, to you.
I don't have any further questions.
I was going to say, I'm so thankful that you gave us your time because you talked about
Eric Voskul having this ability to unite, you know, an understanding of economics with
the technical situation.
And hearing you talk about Noster, it's that same really enlightening kind of feeling, right?
I came into this conversation not knowing much about Noster, you know, seeing it here and there kind of pop up on Twitter and whatnot.
This has given me a much deeper understanding, along with your kind of conceptual description of valleys in cyberspace.
That really gives me mental traction on the possibility of what can develop, not just some uniform culture through Nostra, but really the preservation of private spaces that allows a flourishing of different communities.
So just immensely grateful. And I also wanted to just pay you a compliment that throughout the conversation, just your humility in saying things like, you know, property, you believe strongly in property, right?
That's obvious. You're very passionate about it. But a point saying maybe it's not right. And so different communities might have different ideas.
And you said something similar about sovereign individuality, maybe down the road to figure out that wasn't the right assumption to start with. And so I really like to see on display that kind of epistemic humility or that humility about, you know, what we can know. And you have to still be passionate, right? To still plow forward because you can never be 100% certain. So thank you for all of this explanation. And yeah, thank you.
Yeah, we really are super grateful for this, very grateful for Calvadev for hooking us up because it really opened me up to a thinker that I had no idea existed, that is really not just thinking, but taking action and putting that praxeology into practice.
Yeah, praxis and practice.
No, thank you.
is there anything that you'd like to leave people with?
You know, we, we,
we pride ourselves on being a fourth tier podcast with first,
first tier listeners. And so if they've made it,
and hopefully that they can find a great nugget, but is there anything that
you'd like to leave to the world so that it ripples throughout humanity?
Oh, that's a, that's a tall order to, to,
I really enjoyed your,
our conversation as well like you've both had some excellent questions that actually
make me think uh and come up with some new insights as well so so that is great um and
no ultimately i think the call to action is just to to to realize that that we have it within our
hands to make meaningful changes to the human existence like humans are incredibly adaptive
and kind of self-authoring.
And the way that things currently are
is not the way that they have to be.
And we can change them
and we can change them in both directions.
Like we could make this existence so much worse,
so very much quick for so many people.
And your everyday actions and choices are part of that.
And very much subconsciously as well.
and you know that goes ultimately with i believe that every time you get paid in fiat you're
stealing from people right and and there's good economic reasons for that and and nobody knows
about this right but but ultimately the the sum aggregate of of all of these aggressions
both overt and covert manifest and and make a difference and a difference to the to the downside
right so yeah like be mindful of of the power that that you actually have and the ability to
channel it in in a different direction and to be more conscious about how to use that
and then also realizing the amazing adventure and and fun that it can be to really double down on
your understandings of the truth
and building something that
you ultimately want to see more of
in this world.
Where you pay attention is
the most important currency
transaction that you
can make because your attention
is very, very powerful.
And so being
aware of that and channeling it
to
what you want to see more of in this world
rather than the things that you're running
away from is is powerful like yes it's it's good to not be naive and and find or be aware of of
what you're running away from but ultimately you want to spend as much as time possible in in
building that newer more hopeful future rather than just complaining about the old and it a lot
of the pain and suffering is is just self-inflicted and and doesn't have to be and you can just make
it stop. There are numerous actions
that you can take that will alleviate pain
for you and for others. And those steps are quite obvious
if you meditate on them. So have the courage
to do that. It's definitely a lot of
fun on doing that myself. Very kind words.
Thank you very much. Max Hillebrand, it's been an absolute pleasure.
and I can't wait to talk again.
This has just been fantastic.
Thank you.
Yeah, let's do it again.
We'll be fun.