Miljan, welcome to the Freedom Footprint show, thanks for joining us.
Hi guys, good to be here.
Yeah, good to see you, Miljan.
Uh, last time we met was on Madeira, uh, on a rooftop.
Uh, I think that's where we first met, right?
That's right.
Yes.
told me, you told me a very weird story, which I'm kind of proud, proud of.
It felt like an Achievement Unlocked moment.
Can you tell, tell our listeners what that was?
Oh, um, maybe it was, uh, when you posted the, your full book as a
short note, as a short Nostr note and broke, uh, Primal and probably
a few other clients as a part of it.
Yeah, I broke Nostr, or we broke Nostr because it was Luke's idea
to, to post the entire book, so.
It's a fun, fun experiment.
worries at all.
Uh, Nostr was already broken before you did that.
So, so no issues at all.
Fantastic.
No, it's great to have you here.
Um, we are, as we, as we just said noobs.
So we'd love to, to learn more about Nostr and Primal specifically.
But first of all, we'd like to know a little more about you.
Who are you?
And can you give us the, the TLDR on Millian?
Sure.
And just a quick note prior to that, we are all Nostr noobs.
Uh, all of us, even the developers, and even the creator of the
protocol, and those who have been in it from the very beginning.
We're all just kind of grappling with this, we're all trying to
come to terms with what Nostr is.
I think it's going to take some time, it's kind of evolving, so, uh, we're all noobs.
It's all so early.
We'll get into it in a bit more detail, I'm sure, during the show.
And it's quite magical to be a part of this something, something that appears to
be quite special at such an early stage.
So happy to dive into all the details with you guys, whatever
you guys want to talk about.
As for me, I'm a software entrepreneur.
I've been building products and companies since I was a teenager.
I honestly lost count how many products or companies I started.
But ever since I fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole back in 2017, I've been
obsessing over that and couldn't really build any other type of software.
There's so much to be built in this space.
And then I fell down the Nostr rabbit hole in late 22, 2022.
And, uh, it's been 24 7 since then.
Every waking hour of the day, uh, all, I wake up and I just work on Nostr.
Fantastic.
Um, so what is Nostr?
Well, as I just said, we're all trying to figure this out.
But at the high level, um, if we look at Bitcoin as an open protocol for
money, Uh, you can think of Nostr as an open protocol for speech, speech in a
kind of a, the broadest sense possible.
Um, so this includes, uh, communication, but also publishing, things like that.
it will, as a part of that, it brings us, an identity layer.
Uh, basically what we have, what we're seeing now is a global web of trust
of cryptographic identities emerging.
as a part of this Nostr experiment, let's call it.
Uh, so that's, all of that is quite exciting and, uh, I think will
have far reaching consequences.
Yeah, and Nostr stands for notes and other stuff, stuff through relays,
if I'm not misremembering this.
Um, well, what is a relay and how, how does this thing work?
uh, well the good news about Nostr is that it's extremely simple.
as a protocol.
and, uh, let's maybe describe it just in a few sentences.
So there are three major concepts in Nostr.
concept number one is every user gets a key pair.
So bitcoiners will be very familiar with this.
You get a private key and a public key.
concept number two is you use client apps.
so everyone's familiar with that.
and using the client app, you create a message and sign it with your key and then
transmit it to the set of relays, which is the third and final concept In noster, uh,
relays are, uh, very simple, uh, servers.
they're capable of, uh, accepting signed messages from users and storing
them locally, and then, uh, answering to, uh, responding to very simple,
uh, queries, like, for example, if I say, hey, this is Knut, I have
his public key, do you have any, uh, content that Knut has published lately?
And the relay will respond to that type of request.
So that's basically it.
That's the entirety of Nostr, and, and the protocol is so simple that
it can be described in three words, which is signed, messages, relayed.
That's Nostr.
The rest of it has to do with the format of those messages and so
forth, and, you know, like, it can get quite detailed from there.
Uh, there are, the protocol itself is defined in a collect connection of, uh,
collection of nips, uh, noster improvement possibilities similar to bips and Bitcoin.
I don't know where we're at in terms of the count of like nips so far.
I think we might be like past a hundred, uh, nips.
But what's interesting is that only, uh, nip, uh, nip oh one
is the only mandatory nip.
So you can, it's like a few pages, you can just read that, and that
kind of defines the protocol itself, and all the other NIPs are optional.
So the protocol is, like I said, very simple.
It doesn't try to do too much.
It doesn't try to achieve global consensus, for example,
like Bitcoin is doing.
It's much more casual from the point of view that you're just like sending
Notes to, uh, a collection of relays and, uh, then client applications.
Uh, figure out how to make sense of it all.
Okay, and the only identification, so to speak, is the public private key pair.
Uh, right.
You, you get a public key and a private key and you sign your
messages with a private key.
And I guess that means that you could have multiple identities, like
an infinite amount of identities, uh, theoretically at least, right?
You can, and you probably should have multiple identities on aster.
Like it's so easy to create name accounts and, uh, because anyone
can create key pairs so easily.
There are also millions of bots on noster presents.
Uh, an interesting situation.
I mean, Noster is not unique to that.
There are millions of bots on Twitter too.
Uh, it's just much, much easier to create bots on Nostr.
Okay, and how is that a good thing?
Well, it kind of, uh, I don't know if it's a good thing, it's just a thing, right?
But, um, throws that monkey off our back.
We know there are gonna be bots.
And we kind of, as we're building applications and infrastructure on top of
Nostr, we just have to account for that.
So every developer building useful products and services on top of Nostr
needs to understand that this is an open network, that we're, that we
live in an adversarial environment.
And build products and features accordingly.
And the good news is that, as I mentioned previously, we're
spinning this global web of trust.
of kind of public, of cryptographic identities where
we can rely on this web of trust.
There's quite a bit of signal in there to filter out the bots.
So that's one of the strongest kind of aspects of Nostr that you have
this global identity layer that's fully open and kind of equally
accessible to any user or developer.
Yeah, and It's been pointed out to me a lot when I try to poke
holes in Nostr just for the sake of argument that it is not Twitter 2.
0, it's a protocol layer and all sorts of things could at least
theoretically be built on top of it.
Uh, so it's not directly competing with the social networks of the world, but
rather competing with the internet itself.
Would that be a good description that we're sort of reinventing the wheel,
but with cryptography at the base layer?
Is that a good description?
yes, that's a good description.
So the Nostr is definitely not, uh, just built for social media applications, even
though that's a content type that has taken off, in the early stages of Nostr.
Uh, there are other content types and there are other application
types that are, uh, that are being built and have been released, and
they're kind of starting to take off.
to various degrees, uh, so, um, long form content would be, uh, another one.
Maybe that's what you should have used with your, uh, with your book,
maybe post it as a long form note.
I don't know.
Well, I wouldn't have broke primal if I did, right?
So the achievement wouldn't have been unlocked.
That's true, actually.
So, um, yeah, we still don't support long form nodes on Primal, but this
is one of the, uh, next things that we're, that we have on our roadmap.
We're actually working on it right now.
Uh, I'm quite bullish on that content type.
So to kind of be, um, to be a little bit more specific, if Social media
content is competing with Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and so forth.
Long form content is competing with the sub stacks of the world
or medium, those types of products.
And what should be pointed out is that on the one hand, you have Twitter,
Reddit, Facebook, and so forth, and then you have Medium and Substack.
All of these, let's call them legacy web applications, have their own social
networks, have their own kind of user directory and a social graph that's
like included in each one of these products, and they're all siloed.
They're all closed, and they all have their own network, and they jealously
guard that network from anyone else.
It's essentially a walled garden where, uh, walls are getting taller as time
goes by, where it's kind of, you're realizing that, uh, if you're not logged
in, you're able to access less and less of Twitter content, for example.
so, in stark contrast to that, you have Nostr, where you have a few dozen
Social media clients already working on the same data layer on the same open
social graph where you can take your private key out of one app and plug it
into the other one and you will be able to access the network the same way.
You'll have the same followers, etc, etc.
But it goes beyond just social media content.
Uh, then you plug your private key, let's say you take your Primal,
your Primal, your private key from Primal and plug it into highlighter.
com, which is a long form, client that's competing with Substack.
And you can You're still dealing with the same, uh, social graph, so you
have, not only do we have a bunch of social media clients working off
the same social graph and the same content, but we have multiple types of
applications, so again, beyond, Long form content and short form and social media
content, we have, streaming content.
So let's say, Zapstream is one of the most exciting Nostr projects,
which is a Twitch competitor.
Uh, then you have a number of music applications and marketplaces.
There's even a GitHub competitor.
So Nostr is quite versatile.
because like its core is so simple that it's extremely extensible
and it's quite versatile in terms of the types of applications
that you can build on top of it.
And I really believe that we will end up re implementing the entire
kind of legacy web onto this, uh, on top of this protocol, which
will give users full sovereignty.
over their online identity, over their social connections, and,
uh, the content they publish.
Yeah, and as I understand it, the zaps are not in the protocol itself, right?
It's something you build on top, like lightning support in the clients.
Zaps are a part of the protocol in the sense that they are defined in a NIP or
a collection of NIPs, uh, but they are not mandatory, as I mentioned previously.
Only NIP1 is mandatory, so it's just an extension of the protocol, and it's
up to individual client developers to decide which NIPs they want to implement.
And the Zaps NIP is very popular, of course, because it's such a great
feature that most clients implemented it.
So it kind of, they became, de facto, a part of the protocol.
Yeah, and speaking of saps, like, I, uh, this is, this is like the part of
Nostr and Nostr as, uh, Nostr clients as Twitter clones or social media
clones that I, that make it, makes it different, but, but I don't really see,
like, let's see if I can, uh, Um, tell this story correctly, but, but, um,
right now the Internet is a game of, um, um, if you're a content creator,
it's a constant game for, for subscribes and likes and stuff like that, right?
Uh, and retweets and whatnot and mentions.
That's how you get, you know, Internet fame, if you will.
And on noster, you sap people, so you send them actual money, uh,
over the Lightning Network work.
And the post that gets zapped the most, uh, are the ones that
people usually see in their feeds because most of the Noster clients
prioritize, Well zapped post, right?
Am I completely wrong here or is this a somewhat fair representation?
I would say that's a somewhat fair representation.
Let's maybe dig into the details.
So my question is, um, doesn't this create an even more, um, harsh
competition for, for, uh, uh, for likes, like the people will do even
more clickbaity things in order to get the zaps to that they will, instead of
being honest and, and, uh, open about.
Uh, whatever they're talking about, won't they just have the incentive to optimize
for zaps the way they have an incentive to optimize for attention at the moment?
Aren't we just shifting the attention economy to something
like attention on steroids?
Yeah, let's take a closer look.
I think this is a good, uh, Fascinating topic, uh, because it kind of, plugs into
like one of the key points, which is, uh, the current legacy web, let's put it
this way, is there's a set of incentives that exists currently between, uh, like
you said, content creators, viewers, people who are just like consuming
content and the big platforms that are literally in charge of this, all of this.
And the monetization model has predominantly been based on
advertising, as you guys know, which of course means that users are not
really customers of these platforms.
They are the product which is being sold to the real customers,
which is the advertisers.
And by competing to provide the best possible product to their customers,
the best possible advertising, uh, real estate and kind of advertising, uh,
data, uh, to their advertisers, to their customers, uh, the current platform
owners are incentivized to do all kinds of crazy things and super creepy things.
They're incentivized to spy on us.
Uh, we all know now it's a common knowledge that, you know, Instagram
will kind of listen in on your conversations and then serve kind
of, uh, the related ads later on.
So, like, this used to be a conspiracy theory, maybe like five years ago or
so, but everybody knows that today.
So, there is a certain sort of incentive structure that exists with the legacy web.
And it's not great, to say the least.
with Nostr, we have the, uh, opportunity to, uh, maybe Rework this incentive
structure and, uh, what's different with Nostr compared to, let's say, 10
or 15 years ago when these, like, major kind of legacy, what are currently
legacy apps were being developed.
What's different with Nostr is that we do have Bitcoin.
We do have Lightning that works.
And I'm happy to talk about that.
specifically why Lightning works today.
There's a little bit of a debate about that going on in Bitcoin Circle, so we
can maybe have the conversation if you want to, but Lightning definitely works.
It's here, and it's integrated into Nostr using this ZAP specification.
So now, um I think the balance of power is shifting dramatically with
Nostr in a couple of different ways.
One is, well, the user is in charge.
The user is sovereign when it comes to their identity.
So it's, uh, the legacy platforms are able to, of course, de platform
you to change your, you know, access to your account, even post from
your account, which is pretty wild.
That's not possible on Nostr.
Uh, the user can pick up and leave any client that they're not happy with.
So that changes the incentive structure quite, kind of the power dynamic,
let's say, between, uh, the app providers and the users quite a bit.
And the second one is the kind of the incentive structure between,
let's say, content creators, uh, app providers and users.
in the sense that, content creators are now able to monetize their
content directly from the users.
And the very first iteration of this is visible in zaps.
So, if, if I value your content, I can, uh, send you a zap, and
you will receive it directly from me, and that's the end of it.
and then I think we're going to see quite a bit of iteration and
experimentation with this feature.
This is not by any means a done deal.
The first most primitive implementation is like, okay, well, instead of a
like, because likes are cheap, anyone can press a button and that's it.
Uh, let's, uh, have this capability to zap a certain note, any note, and then,
uh, The author gets the funds immediately.
That's the, kind of, the most obvious, uh, and, kind of, the simplest way to utilize
the technology that we have, but There are going to be other iterations of this.
For example, Pablo, the creator of Highlighter, is currently working on, or
has already launched this capability kind of in early form where content creators
can create these, uh, backstage passes, basically the ability to, for their, uh,
audience to access, uh, exclusive content.
and creates kind of subscription tiers.
when defining the subscription tier itself, the content creator
gets to decide what happens with the revenue that's coming in.
So that changes the power dynamic entirely.
Whereas, In Legacy Web, you, as a content creator, are subjected to
whatever rules the platform sets for you.
The platform, like Substack, might say, uh, you know,
you'll get X number of percent.
We decided already, and take it or leave it.
Whereas this, situation is reversed on, uh, Nostr.
Uh, so the way that Pablo wrote this spec is, You as a content creator can, you
know, how about 100 percent to start with and, you know, and then you decide, okay,
the, uh, you know, the application that surfaced this particular subscription, so
if a user came through, You know, Primal, let's say, and subscribe to Primal or
any other kind of client application.
I will, uh, give them 2 percent or 5 percent or whatever.
You get to decide as a creator how the revenue will be split up.
And then through Zap Splits, you can share it with your kind
of collaborators and so forth.
so that's a very long winded answer to your question.
I mean, it's such It's such a, it's such a fascinating topic, and I think, uh, Zaps
and this ability to pay content creators directly is underappreciated currently.
They completely, this will completely change the power dynamic on the
web, and I think for the better.
Yeah, that's fantastic.
Pablo is fantastic.
I had the pleasure of joining the very last
session with him and Gigi on Madeira, where they have this development cohort
developing stuff for Nostr and Bitcoin, and that was a wonderful
group of highly intelligent freaks working on stuff like this.
And, and that's, that's just amazing that, um, it might just imagining
a world where, where the creators decide how much the, the middleman
gets instead of the other way around.
I mean, imagine that for self publishing on the, uh, uh, Nostr
equivalent of Amazon, for instance.
Okay.
Whoever gets, whoever gives me the best deal gets to publish my book,
print on demand, like that completely turns the, turns all the tables, right?
so exciting.
And like, you can't help but be extremely bullish on Nostr when you see the type of
developer activity that's going on there.
No, it was really cool.
All the projects like me as a layman sitting there in the audience and
understanding a handful of percent of what people are saying, but, but
still being very excited about it because you know, they're building
it on top of this unstoppable layer.
It's, it's a pretty amazing.
Yeah.
Yeah, love it.
Hey, maybe, uh, maybe I'll jump in, uh, uh, now with, uh, just to
direct things, um, maybe a little bit in a different direction here.
Can you tell us a little bit about how Primal came to be?
Like, uh, what was the impetus for developing a Nostr client?
So, prior to starting Primal, I spent a couple years, I was kind of between
startups, let's put it this way.
And I was basically just a bum, not doing much, kind of just tinkering with, uh,
things here and there, but, uh, fairly empty calendar all around, and, uh,
one of the things I was, uh, tinkering with is kind of just research about,
uh, on things Decentralized publishing protocols and so that seemed interesting
to me and it seemed like it will become quite relevant in the coming years.
I even tried designing my own protocol and I wasn't quite happy
with anything including my own design.
All of these things seemed way too complicated to me.
And then, um, I discovered Nostr in mid 2022, that was my
first kind of exposure to Nostr.
Unfortunately for me, I didn't take a close enough look and
I kind of just discarded it.
That was kind of the first touchpoint, which I guess there
are parallels to Bitcoin here.
It seems like many of us need multiple touchpoints, needed
multiple touchpoints with Bitcoin.
in order to kind of start actually paying more attention.
So that was the case, with me for Nostr.
And then, at the end of 2022, when Jack Dorsey, uh, tweeted about it, and
more people started paying attention, uh, I decided to take another look,
actually went and read the spec, uh, and, immediately fell down the rabbit hole.
I immediately knew I had to, I was going to do a startup, and, uh, I had
this itch to build, uh, a Nostr client.
And one of the, kind of the immediate reactions once, once I was reading through
NIP1 basically is, first of all, I was Certain that this was going to work,
just hit me immediately in a flash.
I was like, okay, this is, this is the one we've been looking for.
It's going to work.
And, uh, then I realized we have so much work to do.
And I was kind of wondering, I was like, okay, this will work,
but I wonder how good it can get.
I wonder in terms of UX.
I wonder how fast we can make this thing to go without jeopardizing
some of the, uh, kind of censorship resistance, uh, aspects of the protocol.
and it's like, it was this curiosity and an itch, like, just that I couldn't shake
that I have to build something here.
Uh, so I immediately came up with the idea to build a caching service, uh, for
Nostr, um, which is, uh, the ability to essentially to connect to all of the,
uh, available relays, all of the publicly accessible relays and kind of collect all
the content in real time and index it.
And of course, uh, it was obvious that Discovery, Discovery.
was going to be one of the, uh, discovery layer, was going to be one of the things
that would need to get built because the content is, lives on just like,
hundreds of unconnected Relays, right?
And by design of the protocol, uh, relays don't talk to each other.
It's, it's one of the kind of, one of the aspects of Nostr
that makes it so simple, right?
But also it creates some challenges around discovery and so forth.
So I started Primal, I discovered Nostr in December of 2022.
I started Primal in January of 2023.
Uh, and, we started coding also in January, and, uh, the idea was to
code the caching service, the indexer, and, uh, we started with a web client.
So, A month later, uh, it was decided that the first Nostr conference will
happen in Costa Rica in mid March, and I wanted to make sure that we
have something to show before the conference, so we actually shipped the
first preview of Primal, which kind of previewed the whole stack, the caching
service, the indexer, and the web client.
A couple of days before Nostrica, then I flew down to Costa Rica and I thought
nobody will notice that, you know, this new client got launched, but it turns
out that everybody noticed and that was kind of the beginning of Primal.
Yeah, that's awesome.
And I'm remembering the history, like really, really early days, just
when Nostr was blowing up properly.
And I guess this would be late, late 2022.
And I mean, I think I remember using a couple of clients
that are even now defunct.
Iris is one of them that something happened with that.
I don't know actually what happened there.
And then Snort is still kind of around.
Uh, and there were even a couple others I tried back then, but Primal
seems to have kind of snuck up the middle and really turned into the
web client that gets recommended, and even nowadays the app as well that's
recommended, and I mean, uh, do you have any idea, what do you think Primal
has done differently to really become the premier Nostr client these days?
Well, first of all, I would just make a comment about Snort.
Snort is very much still around.
It's a great client.
It's one of my favorite clients.
Uh, uh, you asked about Iris.
It's actually Marty, who is the founder of Iris, who decided to
join, uh, Kirin, uh, on Snort.
So, so they're working on the Snort, uh, code base together.
And I think, uh, maybe, I think they have two kind of flavors of it.
Iris is still up and it's using the Snort code base, I think.
And so, so they're collaborating on this.
Uh, Kirin is also busy with Zapstream, which is just amazing.
and it, when it comes to other, uh, web clients, we need to talk about
Corel as well, which is excellent, as well as, uh, one, the, the, one
of the new clients is Nodel, uh, and, uh, and we have satellite as well.
So there's still a number of.
Uh, web clients.
I think that the number of Nostr clients of all different, uh, kind
of on all different client platforms is going to continue to proliferate.
what did Primal do that's different?
Um, maybe I think a couple of things.
Uh, one has to do with the caching service, definitely.
So, um, by using this approach, we were able to, improve the
performance and speed of, uh, the UI.
And the other thing we did is just like we focused on a ton of details,
um, you know, we, you have to, There's a lot of work, basically, that has to
be done for these types of clients to work as you would expect because we
are all competing against legacy web clients, legacy platforms that have a
long history and a lot of work to do.
Both web and mobile clients have billions of dollars behind them.
And in most cases, you have a single developer working
behind one of these projects.
It's also the case with Primal.
So we have a fairly small team.
we have one developer working on the web client.
One developer on the iOS client and one developer on Android.
And then we have one developer on the backend working on the indexer
and the caching and so forth.
So, to answer your question, I think what's different in our approach Uh, is
this caching service, which we, by the way, open sourced so that anyone can,
any client can, can use this approach.
and then, uh, just attention to detail, just being willing to do a lot of UI
work and a lot of kind of refinements and a ton of fixes, a lot of things
that are busted, you know, it's just like, it's just work basically that,
that, uh, that you need to put in.
Yeah, we're, uh, I mean, you've done a fantastic job, uh, within less than
the span of less than two years, you've constructed an app, which I use on my
phone almost every day and on the web every day, like, and I, at least I read
on it every day, or maybe not post on it every day, but it's a great, uh,
Like, the way we're using it now, I mean, we try to be more Nostr centric,
uh, but, uh, the way we use it now is as a complement to everything else, and
it's, it's good to have this, well, if everything else goes to shit and, uh, if
Elon goes bonkers or something, we can always just migrate to, to Nostr, um, it's
very good as a complement, complementary tool, is that the phrase, Luke?
Yeah, I mean, I'd say so.
And actually, maybe I can explain a little bit about how we use Nostr.
And I mean, the main thing is we, we put everything currently on, on
Twitter, just because and there's scheduling programs and things like that.
It's pretty easy.
But the thing is, we also tried to make sure that everything
goes on to Nostr as well.
But it feels a bit like just putting it into a black hole.
Like, our show actually has quite a lot of followers and it seems
like somehow we've made it onto some list of things to follow.
We constantly are getting new followers, which is awesome.
But whenever we post something, there's not a lot of engagement, and I mean, it's
hard to understand what people really do to get engagement with Nostr, whereas
with Twitter, it's at least a little easier to kind of understand, because
there's sort of a follower base, and the algorithms work a certain way so that
you get a certain amount of engagement.
Whoever you're following, especially if you scroll down the list quite a lot,
but from, from my perspective, the, the usability in terms of, uh, it's, it's
either the top of the top posts, all clients, not, not just, just primal.
It's, it's either, it's either some view showing the top of the top posts,
or it's some kind of latest view.
And that latest view is Transcribed Pretty hard to actually use, uh, so it seems like
discovery is still kind of different, it's definitely easy enough to find the top
stuff, like the best content, and I mean that's fantastic, but it's also difficult
to kind of break through, so I don't know.
Kind of a, kind of an open discussion point.
Do you have any insights into sort of this, this difficulty
compared to the legacy social media and algorithms versus a sort of
inherently non algorithmic approach?
Well, yeah, I mean, it's all a function of stuff that still needs to get implemented.
it's important to look at Nostr on a trajectory.
So, if we back up a year, let's say, um, it was borderline unusable.
This includes Primal, right?
Like, things were just, uh You know, not there, uh, and there, you
know, the meme that I was referring to earlier on in the conversation
that Nostr was already broken.
That's like an ongoing meme that we, we developers, at least on Nostr, have
everything's broken on Nostr, but we're working on it, we're improving it.
So, uh, if you look at where everything was a year ago.
Compared to where it's now, I'm sure everyone will agree that
we're seeing a massive improvement.
And the types of discovery features that we're missing, essentially, that
you just pointed out, Luke, it's just a matter of building the stuff out.
And we at Primal, we're building that.
Uh, as are other developers of other kind of clients and services.
But what's interesting is that the level of kind of collaboration of, uh, kind of
building these features out on a, on an open protocol, where, uh, let's say if
we broadly speaking can divide, divide this kind of functionality into client
apps, And then some services, and services could include things like discovery
services, like custom feeds, search, those types of things, but also media hosting.
services, uh, spam, filters, things like that, right?
Nostr is being built in such a modularized way, and kind of the dream
is that uh, within a client app like Primal, you can decide Who, which feeds
do you, you, you want to subscribe through to like, so the feeds that
might have nothing to do with primal.
Uh, so you kind of curate your list of feeds, uh, from
all kinds of feed providers.
You, uh, set your search and discovery provider.
You set your media hosting provider.
You set who your.
Who you want to rely on for some kind of spam filtering and so forth.
And, uh, at Primal, we are building both the services as well as the
clients to make this possible.
And the idea is that our services could also be, uh, used in a third party
clients, uh, to the extent that, uh, uh, those users find them valuable.
Uh, so all of this, again, is a stark contrast to the closed systems that
we are ultimately competing with.
And my point, and the answer to your question is, this gets
incredibly awesome over time.
If you just look at the rate of improvements, and the fact that
it's all being built out in the open, and, uh, just about everything
built on Nostr is, is open source.
every good idea will get replicated by everyone.
And, uh, bad ideas will just fall off, and, uh, we will very soon reach
the capabilities of the legacy web platforms, and then we'll just surpass
them and leave them in the dust.
And they won't be long until they will look dated and
feel like relics of the past.
Uh, I'm pretty, uh, bullish about this.
so it's a matter of, it's just a function of time.
And, uh, and the effort that all the devs are putting in.
All right, let me devil's advocate that one to try to poke holes in
that argument for argument's sake.
let's say, um, the average user of social media does not want, this options.
They want convenience, right?
They don't want to be able to select their feed algorithm.
They want their feed algorithm to automatically select for them
what they look at because they're, Basically, the social media fees
have basically replaced the TV, uh, in stupefying the general public.
So, so how, how does not Nostr ever get over that hurdle?
I mean, I seem so many things that you could potentially do as a bad actor.
So like, for instance, if I If I want to advertise my Nostr post, I fire
up a million, uh, key pairs and I sap myself from 999, 000 of them, uh, just
to get my, my own post up in the feeds.
And I simultaneously get all the attention and I DDoS, uh, attack
the network and I, I fuck things up.
And also like what's preventing.
Uh, this from developing into, uh, the same type of monolithical, uh, monopoly
things we see on the, in the legacy internet where, where, because it's
basically the email protocols, right?
Which sort of centralized into Gmail and.
Hotmail, or whatever else they're called, and only a few, select few use
ProtonMail and these alternatives, right, and even fewer run their own SMT or
POP3 server or whatever they're called.
So, so, yeah, there's a question in here somewhere, what would you say
to that kind of criticism in general?
think I can identify three questions there.
Three completely separate questions.
So let's unpack them one by one.
So the
I couldn't.
so, so if I followed you correctly, uh, your first question was, uh, what
do we do with users who don't want to, don't want the bells and whistles?
They just want simple apps like TikTok that open and give them their feed.
Like, that's question number one.
Well, well, no, no, not really.
The question is more like.
Um, will you ever get the, because there's a first mover advantage for the
old legacy apps, like, so, so how, how can Nostr ever compete with that and,
and achieve the same network effect if it requires the users to be so active?
Won't the, won't the old users just stay at their old platforms?
Aren't they already lured in and sort of like glued to their TV sets already?
And will just being better in general really pull them over to your network?
Or will they stay in the old system?
Something like that is the question.
that is the toughest challenge that Nostr is facing.
So dealing with battling network effects that have already been
strongly established with the incumbents, you know, like Twitter,
Facebook, Reddit, and the others.
I don't think that features will get users to move over.
Um, in terms of bells and whistles, because they get enough of bells and
whistles everywhere else, and the biggest feature in, let's say, social media apps
is the network itself, the notion that, you know, that everyone's already there.
Uh, so this is a big, uh, so again, we're referring now to a subset
of Nostr applications that, are, let's say, focusing on social media.
It's just kind of for clarity here.
this is a major problem, and I think, uh, interesting features like zaps,
for example, um, might be attractive to Bitcoiners, but to a larger audience,
that's kind of like, uh, it's questionable whether that something like that will
bring them over and get them to stay.
I think at the end of the day, it's going to be content.
so, so when it comes to general audiences, uh, the value proposition
of Nostr at the moment is not amazing.
It's, uh, it's like, okay, well, this is an interesting new network.
Maybe it has some kind of censorship resistance features, which let's
say the majority doesn't, let's be honest, majority doesn't care about.
Uh, so it's a tough, it's a tough pitch to the general audience.
However, to content creators, I think.
Uh, it, that type of pitch becomes more interesting.
And if we can get a certain kind of a critical mass of content creators to
adopt Nostr, at least partially, at least kind of in addition to all the other
platforms that were there already, uh, you know, present, just like you guys.
So you guys are actually a great, uh, example of that.
How this might evolve, pitch to content creators is completely different.
The pitch is, whatever you build on Nostr is yours forever.
unlike all the other platforms, you build your audience on Nostr,
that cannot be taken away from you.
As long as you control the key to your content, uh, and your online identity,
no one can take away your followers.
So that's interesting.
And when it comes to, uh, compensation, of revenue coming in, as we
said previously, how about 100%?
And we get you to decide what, how that gets split.
Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not a content creator, you guys are, uh, but, uh, you
know, to me that seems like it would be an interesting and intriguing pitch to a
content creator, even though it currently comes along with a, with a relatively,
well, very small network comparatively.
to the other ones.
But maybe, uh, it's justifiable to spend a bit of time to incorporate Nostr into
your kind of publishing activities, but curious to get your take on it.
We absolutely want to do that, and we already do that, and we plan to
do more of it because as you say that the, like we have, we have talks me
and Luke all the time about what this thing is and what we want to do with
it and what we can achieve with it and what, what the purpose of sitting here
talking to interesting people every day.
Really is.
And to us, we want these messages and what we talk about on the show
to go out to quality listeners, rather than a quantity of listeners.
And of course, there's no clear line, distinct line between the two.
You can't really have one without the other because the quality listeners won't
find you if you don't make at least a little bit of noise on the internet.
So you need to play, play these games, right?
And, and, uh, and play them.
And to get the kind of following that you really want, because I want all
the fans of this show to be people that I'd gladly go out and have a pint with
and, and talk Bitcoin or Nostr with, like, or, or anything else interesting.
and I think we almost have that every time I, I meet a fan of the
show, it's a person I like, like, so.
It's, it's great.
but of course, yeah, so right back at you.
If you want to see more of us on Nostr, well,
zap away, or, uh, I mean, we're going to go where we get appreciated, but
we're also appreciative of the fact that we can own our own content on Nostr.
So yeah, absolutely.
We will increase our presence on Nostr.
Have you considered, I don't know if you're aware of this feature that
I think Pablo rolled out relatively recently, where you can create some
sort of, uh, like a backstage, setup for maybe some exclusive content
for people who subscribe to your.
Content.
I don't know how that fits in the overall content strategy for you, but it's an
interesting, uh, addition, hopefully.
Yeah, I, I think I heard him talk about it on Madeira.
I find that there's a lot of memories to flip through from Madeira.
So I don't remember it.
It's all a blur, but, but anyway, that, yeah, that's sort of like a paywall.
And we, we try not to do that.
We want to be as, as, uh, open with what we create as we can.
I, we're not big believers in intellectual property.
Okay, right.
so, so, uh, so, uh, but, but that's a balance too, of course.
And yeah.
Um, I posted one book on Nostr, but it's unsure if I'll post the others anytime
soon, especially if it breaks clients.
So, yeah, that's the general attitude, I think.
What's interesting, I think, for people, uh, that produce content, especially
the type of content that you guys produce, there is something Interesting
about signing that with your key before you put it out into the world.
It's, it's quite unique to have that.
And you know, you publish it anywhere else.
There is no proof.
People can't know that this wasn't tampered with in any way.
They can't, they can't know for sure that this was, uh, your own words unaltered.
Uh, but with Nostr, you get that for free.
You, you sign your note.
And that's forever.
We have cryptographic proof that Knut said this.
Uh, and we know that for sure because it's signed with his key.
Well, how do you know that the, that the one signing off
as me really is me, though?
This is a five year old question, but, like, someone else could pose
as me, with another key pair, and just say, I'm Knut's new account,
don't worry about the old one, it's hacked, and pretend to be me, right?
So this is the kind of question around bots and impersonators and so forth.
So, for the listeners, anyone can create a key pair super easily, and then you
can copy somebody's profile metadata very easily, you know, the profile
photo, labels and so forth, the bio.
And there we have another Knut.
the answer is, uh, Web of Trust, again.
And these are fairly simple algorithms that are able to filter out the bots.
And, uh, we have enough of a user base on Nostr to be able to decipher real, uh,
Knut from maybe thousands of fake Knuts.
Uh, and this works.
It works today.
And it's actually,
people, like, vouching for me being me?
Sorry for interrupting, but is there a vouching thing?
vouching by following you.
and this kind of implicitly just happens through the follow relationships and in
the graph, nothing else needs to be done.
You can very easily filter out bots.
You can filter out, uh, even if humans are trying to bring in a million bots
or something like that through their human account, that gets filtered
through the, through the algorithm.
And, uh, this is a solved problem on Nostr, and I'll just underline once again,
no one's in charge, uh, it's just network participants, uh, acting in their own self
interest, and this thing somehow works.
And we have maybe a couple hundred thousand human accounts on Nostr and,
this, and we have this capability today.
I mean, it's great because, as you say, like, when you give something away to
another entity, especially going into the future here with AI things becoming
better and better, you never know what people are going to do to your
voice or to video recordings of you.
It's very easy to impersonate other people today, much easier than ever before,
so maybe this is the remedy for that.
Sounds like you think that that is the case.
it's a remedy to a problem that's going to get a lot worse, like you said.
And, uh, I haven't thought about this enough, but it,
it might be the only remedy.
Signed content by cryptographic identities through, uh, identified
through a global, uh, Web of Trust might be the only solution to this.
Okay.
The only thing here is like, uh, that comes to mind, uh, in terms of
actual protection from, From bots and the likes of them, uh, in the
future, because these bots are going to get more sophisticated as well.
Right.
And, um, the saying in Bitcoin goes, not your keys, not your coins, but isn't
the flip side of that, not your coins, not your information, because if you
don't have an actual asset attached to the information, like you have in
Bitcoin, Then it's much harder to know if that information is actually true.
Does this make any sense to you?
Like, is there, is there a flip side of the Bitcoin ethos here that,
that is yet to be explored in the Nostr, um, under the Nostr umbrella?
I don't know.
I'm not sure if I follow the question.
Maybe if you want to elaborate on it.
Yeah, maybe I'm just trying to sound smart here.
What do you think, Luke?
Uh, did you
Well, okay, if I would sort of try to translate Knut's Knutisms, uh, the,
um, uh, I guess, I guess one thought here that comes to mind for me is that,
is that, Bitcoin as the decentralized monetary network actually does have
some, some capabilities to be sort of a spam defense and then Nostr being
the communication protocol that has the public private key identification system.
These two things can actually work entirely interchangeably, right?
And they, and they do with, with the, uh, you, you can have your
same address for receiving and sending from, from Lightning, right?
And, uh, and so I guess the interconnectedness between those
two things is like, um, To what extent is, is Bitcoin required
to actually make Nostr work?
Like, grounding Nostr in the monetary system that is going to change the
world and then become the, the base of the monetary system for the next
thousand years or something like that, or ever, forever, or whatever it is.
That's a great question.
So, um, so Bitcoin and Nostr are separate protocols, separate and related protocols.
So each protocol, stands on its own.
It doesn't need the other one to function.
But I think they have a symbiotic relationship in the sense that
each makes the other one better.
And, uh, it's fairly obvious how Bitcoin makes Nostr better.
Uh, we, uh, already talked about zaps and this ability to potentially
reshape the incentive structure for the web using Nostr and Bitcoin.
I think it's a little bit less obvious, uh, to Bitcoiners,
especially those Bitcoiners who are not paying attention to Nostr.
It's, it's less obvious how Nostr makes Bitcoin better.
And, uh, I think those who are sleep, those Bitcoiners who are sleeping
on Nostr are kind of missing out.
And, um, this is one of my Uh, favorite topics, actually,
so I'm happy to dive into it.
I don't know if I'm answering your question by this, but,
uh I'll dive in anyway.
Okay.
All right.
So Nostr makes Bitcoin better in a number of different ways.
So the first one is, since we have this global web of trust of public
identities, most of whom have their Lightning address defined as a part of
their public profile, what has emerged here within, with Nostr is the global.
Public Lightning Directory.
So, uh, to send payments between Bitcoiners, you can literally
look someone up and send them a payment because we have Nostr.
And you, you look them up, you literally go to Primal or Mutiny or any wallet that
supports, uh, that has Nostr integration.
And by the way, I think All Bitcoin wallets will have Nostr integration.
This is a no brainer.
It's just a matter of time.
This is like a massive improvement in the UX of sending payments.
Think about the situation where, let's say, you're splitting your
lunch bill among five people.
Currently, the person who paid needs to create four invoices.
One by one, and then it needs to be scanned and so forth without Nostr.
But with Nostr, everyone looks up the person, sends them the payment, it's done,
uh, and the person who paid it doesn't need to do anything, which seems fair.
Uh, so that's.
The first and kind of more obvious, uh, way in which Nostr makes Bitcoin better.
Uh, then we have, uh, Mint discovery for Chomi on eCash.
this is an extremely important topic.
First of all, Chomi on eCash is extremely exciting and probably
the future of Bitcoin payments.
It might take some time and especially currently it's, it's, uh, um, Questionable
whether commercial entities are going to be able to, uh, provide mints, uh,
or even participate in mint feder in, in mint federations, like for FettyMint.
So, there is this inherent problem of mint discovery.
Like, if I'm a new eCash user, let's say I'm a Cashew user and I'm trying
to decide which Cashew mint to use, I can use my Nostr web of trust to
see which, users I'm connected to are using which mints and basically,
uh, provide mint discovery that way.
this is already being used in, uh, Cashew wallets and in, and
Mutiny, uh, for Fetty Mint.
It's a massive community.
Uh, addition in terms of practical capabilities for,
for Bitcoin, uh, payments.
then we have things like, uh, just protecting speech.
It's kind of a big deal for Bitcoin too.
Let's say you're a monetary, uh, maximalist, uh, as maybe A lot of us are.
Uh, let's say you're not too interested in payments, uh, in the, in the short term.
Uh, you, but you care about the monetary, kind of base
money capabilities of Bitcoin.
Well, if, The fiat system is designed to steal from you.
That's kind of the core of the system.
And the only way the fiat system can perpetuate this is by lying about
what they're doing and is by kind of controlling the flow of information.
Uh, and, uh, Nostr has the capability to break that.
Uh, so even if you're, uh, if your main concern about Bitcoin is
protecting the monetary qualities of Bitcoin, Nostr still is, uh, relevant.
there are, like, I think a couple of other, um, examples where
Nostr makes Bitcoin better.
let's say onboarding new Bitcoiners.
This is, this is something we're observing with Nostr, where Nostr is
onboarding users who are not Bitcoiners.
And then through either the fact that they're being exposed to a lot of
Bitcoiners at Nostr currently, maybe that in combination of kind of being
intrigued about the zapping capabilities.
We are actually observing many new Bitcoiners being, created through
by coming through Nostr, through a more casual kind of, um, uh,
environment and, taking a little bit of time to actually wake up
and, you know, take the orange pill.
And at Primal, we are quite interested in this dynamic.
And we've decided to build a wallet into the, our, into our clients.
Uh, to make this process even smoother, so we can talk more about that.
So that's another reason why, Bitcoiners should care about Nostr.
And then maybe the final one is, those of us who are already on Nostr are
noticing that the vibe, uh, and the quality of the conversation on Nostr
is different than it is on Twitter and, and, uh, Reddit, and so forth.
It's much more informal.
It's less, how would I say it, like when you, when you, it's less official
sounding, it's less defensive, you know, like a lot of times when you
post something on Twitter, you're kind of preparing for the trolls to
come out and you're kind of, you're forming your argument, you know, in
a defensive manner where you're kind of, Pre empting the attacks that are
inevitably coming and stuff like that.
and then there's just a kind of the, the general vibe on Twitter
is, uh, can be quite kind of negative and draining and so forth.
This is not the case on Nostr.
If you, uh, come to, uh, on Nostr and you, you kind of scroll, instead of doom
scrolling, it's kind of hope scrolling and you see, You know, people like Jack
Dorsey being a little bit more open than they would be maybe on, on Twitter, even
though this is like an open network and anyone can read it quite easily, can,
can access this content in an easier manner than on Twitter, without being
logged in, the tone is somehow different.
So I think, I'm hoping that they've kind of outlined a number of good arguments
for Bitcoiners to take a closer look.
And then I guess the last, the last reason maybe, this is becoming like the Spanish
Inquisition sketch, there's one more.
the last reason is, are you kidding me?
Reason.
And the are you kidding me question is, are you kidding me?
You're a bitcoiner and you're, you're not okay with someone else holding keys to
your money, but you're okay with someone else holding the keys to your speech?
Are you kidding me?
Like, you know, all the censorship aside, anyone, like, Elon
can post from your account.
That's insane.
I think we will look back at this, uh, you know, stage of our history as
kind of the stone age of our online lives before they were improved
for the better forever by Nostr.
Yeah, this fantastic, fantastic pitch.
And I love all the points.
Makes me think of start nine.
the only thing I could think of as, as like FUD for you to debunk here regarding
these points is the, um, Uh, turning Nostr into a registry for people's lightning
addresses, that, that might be a honeypot.
Like, if, if you're not a nym, but, uh, uh, if you've given away your
identity and, and your lightning address is connected to that and it's
easily find on Nostr, like, there might be a 6102 at some point where
men with guns come and do stuff to people on Nostr, what do you think?
Well, uh, people need to be aware of the fact that these are, this
is all publicly accessible data.
So, to the extent that you're, that you wish to have your Lightning address
publicly accessible, you can have that in, uh, in a, in a Nostr profile,
and people will be able to find it.
Uh, and I think this is, uh, Uh, appropriate for kind of payments that
should be in the public domain, payments like zaps where you're doing essentially,
you're not only transferring value to the content creator, you're also doing public,
public signaling, uh, to the rest of the network that you think that this content
is valuable or interesting and so forth.
So there is, um, there is room for publicly visible, uh, Payments for these
particular reasons, and then there's obviously the majority of payments
should be private, and those shouldn't be mixed, so these wallets should not
be kind of connected in any manner.
If you're to preserve your privacy fully, don't connect it to your
public, don't connect those payments to your public, uh, Nostr profile.
Yeah, those are some good best practices and yeah, I think, I
think, at least maybe a good way to mitigate that potential attack avenue.
Now, since we're on the FUD topic a little bit, we've had some conversations
with, with other folks who have opinions about Nostr, but I, I think, I think
you're actually the first time we've had a, like a proper Nostr developer on.
And, and I think the, the, the thing here is that we've.
we've talked about some sort of FUD scenarios here in terms of
especially the scalability of Nostr and, and a lot of this is coming
down to that relays are essentially a point of centralization, right?
And, and so is there a risk here that Nostr will hit kind of a critical
mass and then the architecture won't really be scalable anymore?
And Maybe just to sort of calibrate that a little further that something
like relays will become so expensive that it's impossible to run them
without, the costs rising to the point that they say price people out.
So same effect.
Uh, what do you think about that in terms of the scalability of Nostr?
That's a great question.
And, uh, the kind of, the common practices among Nostr clients up until recently have
been such that most clients, including Primal, uh, were kind of onboarding people
onto, you know, the top dozen relays.
and just by default, you kind of, we, we had like a static list of the most
popular relays and then everyone's content was easy to find because like
you can interrogate those relays, which obviously isn't scalable.
And, uh, you, you asked if there is a risk that, you know, an noster
one scale, if, you know, we, uh, do stuff like that, there's no risk.
The chance is a hundred percent at one scale.
There's no risk involved, uh, so obviously this was identified, uh, and, uh, we now
within Nostr, I don't know how much you guys are following this, these are kind
of developer, uh, topics, but, we do have, uh, protocol within Nostr, which is called
Gossip or Outbox model, which is meant to kind of spread out the users amongst all
of the known publicly accessible relays.
So we're not onboarding the latest versions of Primal and
many other Nostr apps are not just using the top 10 relays approach.
You actually, we, according to our records, there is about 1, 100 relays that
are up and running and responsive and, you know, are participating in the network.
So when a new user gets onboarded onto Primal, we make sure that
we, uh, include the Primal relay.
Uh, the purple pages relay, which, uh, kind of stores Nostr
profiles only, doesn't store data.
and then we take a relatively random sampling of the, uh, the
remaining, uh, uh, relays and kind of, Pick like a top 10 among those.
So we are already in the process of spreading new users out among many relays.
So that's one way that the network will scale.
Another way is, and by the way, these are complementary, is what we're doing
with actually with caching at Primal.
We believe that, uh, Having these caching instances that are able to
have, highly available copies of latest content that's most commonly
being requested in a way that you provide, like, very quick response
times without overburdening the relays.
I think that's a part of the solution too.
Uh, we are running a caching service.
There are a few other teams that are, uh, starting to do this.
Uh, so I actually am quite optimistic about no's ability to scale.
There's nothing architect architecturally that's in, in our way.
Uh, it's just a network will react to events that happen and adjust accordingly.
And we do have the tools to do that.
Okay.
Yeah.
So I, I guess the, the main thing there, the, the follow on is, is what
do you see as the outlook for Nostr over the next, say three to five years?
What's Predictions for what's going to happen in the ecosystem.
I think Nostr will eventually consume everything, like, uh, everything,
every app that you use today that has a social graph, which is a
lot of web apps, everything gets consumed by Nostr eventually.
It will take, it's just that it will take more than three to five years.
I think we're talking about like a bigger, uh, kind of timeline than that, uh, could
be maybe 10 years or more over time.
just, uh, The dynamics of the network are such that any new app developer, uh,
that's building on Nostr will do their own efforts to grow their user base, and by
doing so will grow Nostr for everyone, and when you play that out over time, Kind of
the openness of the network is ultimately the killer feature because you end up with
a massive ecosystem, ecosystem of apps that are, that are oral interoperable.
I'm bullish on this pro, probably not surprisingly.
Okay, I think I have a final question from us to you, and that is, what, so
what happens first, hyperbitcoinization or hypernostrification?
Do we want to define those two a little bit more like, so is hyper
ization the moment when we start using Bitcoin as the unit of account?
uh, this is a fantastic response, because, uh, this is a trick question,
since, uh, I don't believe there's an end point to either of the two.
First of all, hyperbitcoinization and hypernostrification are personal
things that happen to you, and And there can always be more people.
There can always be more economic activity among humans.
There can always be more speech.
So I think these are ever growing phenomena that don't end anytime soon.
And that's the most optimistic outlook for humanity ever, maybe.
I agree with that.
And I would just add one more thing.
Um.
In the presence of unstoppable money and unstoppable speech, it's
impossible for any tyranny to survive.
We need both of these things, but when we have them, and when
they're kind of deployed widely enough, it will be impossible for
any tyrannic regime to survive.
They just can't.
It's like kryptonite.
Or any tyranny.
It's fantastic.
So in the long run, it's the end of inflation and the end
of any cohesive measures.
So it's the end of taxes too.
I guess.
Suck on that, governments.
Anything else you want to bring up, Milian, before we wrap this thing up?
No, I think this was a great conversation.
Thank you very much for having me, guys.
And, uh, I guess the final thing I would bring up is just, uh, if you haven't
tried Nostr lately, Go ahead, there are a number of great app, Nostr apps
and services that you can try, uh, come join us, uh, we're building the future
there, and it's actually quite fun.
Yeah.
And if you tried Nostr a year ago and found it too clunky, try it again because
it gets exponentially better over time.
It's, it's really a fantastic thing to be a part of.
So go ahead and hyper Nostrify yourselves.
And Milian, where, where can people find you online?
I guess on Nostr, but anywhere else?
Primal.
net slash million, M I L L J A N, that's my profile.
Fantastic.
I enjoy this a ton, and looking forward to seeing you in real life
again, and online, and looking forward to increasing our Nostr presence.
So thanks a lot for this, this was very informative and very, very enjoyable.
Thank you guys, let's fucking go, and, uh, have a good one.
LFG, perfect sign off.
Milian, thank you so much and thank you for listening.
This has been the Freedom Footprint Show.