the 2020 election just kind of validated that this mystery and confusion and anger and all
these things that came out for people that claim the votes weren't accurate, that can all end
easily with true vote. There should be no ambiguity into who won and who lost. That needs to be as
clear as a Bitcoin transaction where it's just it is what it is. Greetings and salutations my
fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast. The Bitcoin block height is 819450
and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin. Today's episode is Bitcoin talk where I talk with
my guest about Bitcoin and many other things as well. Today that guest is Brett Morrison. Brett
is a computer scientist and tech entrepreneur who recently launched truevote.org. Truevote is an
open source solution for tamper proof ballot data built on Bitcoin, No-ster and open timestamps.
Brett and I talk through a ton of questions about truevote in terms of how it works,
but we also focus the conversation on why a solution like this is needed in the first place
and get all of Brett's links and truevote info in the show notes. As always you can watch the
video version of this episode on rumble, youtube, or x by searching at walkeramerica or listen on
fountain.fm or wherever you get your podcasts by searching for the Bitcoin podcast. If you listen
to the Bitcoin podcast on fountain, consider giving this show a boost or creating a clip of
something you found interesting. If you haven't checked out fountain yet, I highly recommend it.
You can send Bitcoin to your favorite podcasters and earn Bitcoin just for listening to this show.
Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Brett Morrison.
Thank you for coming on here and congrats on the launch because I've been seeing
just like a lot more buzz about it first of all and your timing I think could not have been better
with the election. Well, many elections coming up. There are always elections, right? But specifically
in the US, I think this next year we're going to see a lot of focus on election integrity.
One would hope that would always be a focus, but I think after the shenanigans last time around,
people are definitely going to be a little bit more on high alert. So yeah, for sure. Yeah, but
I want to keep this pretty, pretty free Roman and easy. I've got some questions for you just to kind
of things I think people definitely want to know. I got some submitted on NoSter and on Twitter,
but anything you want to talk about as well. This is an open forum. I'll just give us a little intro
and then we'll dive right in if that sounds good. Yeah, sounds good. It'll be a conversation, right?
That's how it's going to be. Exactly. We'll keep it casual and have a good time with it.
All right. So with that said, greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker
and this is the Bitcoin podcast. Today I am doing a Bitcoin talk episode and I am joined by Brett
Morrison. Brett is a computer scientist, tech entrepreneur, and he recently launched Truevote.org.
It's an open source solution for tamper proof ballot data built on Bitcoin utilizing open
timestamps and also using NoSter. So you published this on November 20th, Brett, and I'm glad to
get you or you made it go live on the 20th. Glad to have you on the show. Welcome. And thanks for
coming. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, I was happy to hit the publish button on that.
It's a working demo. So that's the app in action, the platform in action, and
was happy to show it to the world. I'd written the white paper two years prior, so it was good to
really build out all the promises in the white paper. NoSter wasn't around at the time that the
white paper was written, but I had always thought about how I'm going to do authentication. And
I used LastPass as a model as the kind of right way to do it. And then when NoSter came along,
I thought, okay, I can use OAuth. I can use traditional email password or NoSter. So I
chose NoSter as our primary form of authentication. I love it. I remember, I think you and I met in
Jackson Hole and got to talking and sharing stories. And I think that was around the time you
joined NoSter and you started messing around with it. And Lightbulbs clearly started going off for
you because I think it's this beautiful thing that you're able to take this real world process and
very currently very manual and labor intensive process, both voting itself and the counting of
said votes and utilize the best and newest tech that's out there to be able to verify and authenticate
in a very secure but also very open way. And I want to dig into true vote, but I'd love to just
start first just for people who may not be familiar with you with your past work. Let's just start
with who are you, Brett? And how did you get here today? I'm a computer scientist, grew up in the
East Coast. I went to school at University of Arizona. And I like to say at the time I was a
computer science student there. It was a top 10 program in the nation. Computer science wasn't as
sexy as it is today back then, but it's become quite the way to go for careers. And I strongly
encourage young ones out there that are considering that are going to college and have an interest
in programming that the computer science degree is definitely something that you'll have value
your whole life to offer somebody. And as someone who's interviewed hundreds of engineers over my
career, I definitely can spot the difference between self taught and computer science taught.
And there's pros and cons to both, not dissing either, but there's definitely a difference to
both. So yeah, I had a computer science degree and I've always just had a passion for programming.
And I've had various tech jobs throughout my life and tech entrepreneur ventures. I had an
e-commerce company that was super successful in Los Angeles. We had 250 employees. I wrote all the
e-commerce software for a lot of apparel brands like John Verveto's True Religion, Lululemon,
all the back end and the front end and the warehouse shipping, photography, returns, customer
service, all that fell under our e-commerce platform prior to the invention of Shopify or
Magento or Squarespace. Those things didn't exist back in the early 2000s. So Von Dutch was our
first client and they had this meteoric rise of adoption with, you know, celeb culture. You
didn't call it influencers back then, but you know, people like Gaston Kutcher and
Paris Hilton and Britney Spears are wearing the Von Dutch hat and all of a sudden, okay,
Brett, I hope your e-commerce system works because we're getting a lot of orders and
that was the beginning of a great business. So I've had some really, really interesting and
successful entrepreneur efforts in my life and I did take a break in the mid 2010s and I joined
SpaceX as a director of engineering there. I really saw Elon's mission to make us a multi-planetary
species and get to Mars as something I was super passionate about too. So I worked there as a
director of engineering and helped the software that helps design all the rockets and in the
manufacturing process. So that was an interesting experience to be there, but really my heart is
being an entrepreneur or so. And I knew voting was something that we've all voted. We all can
relate to voting. We all are used to doing everything on our phones and I was online. I
think it was probably 2012, 2013. I was online at a polling station just frustrated that I was
standing here online. I had a lot of work to do. I had two kids at home and I was a busy guy and
I'm like, what am I doing online here? This is a waste of time. So that's where the seed was
first planted. And then I figured in a few years later, I decided, okay, I'm going to make a company
out of this. And so I started it and then I thought, well, what's my strategy to build this?
And you look at all voting systems today, they're all kind of this nebulous black box
mystery. You don't really know what's behind anything and that's not acceptable. And as a
Bitcoiner since 2013, I was early, I saw Bitcoin early. So my Bitcoin origin story is real quick.
I read this article from Wired magazine in the fall of 2011 called the rise and fall of Bitcoin,
which was basically declaring Bitcoin dead. And I read it thinking, wow, that's so sad,
Bitcoin's dead. But then I went online and I saw, wait, Bitcoin's not dead. There was no
fall of Bitcoin. There was an active vibrant community. So I was really interested and I
did recognize it as freedom tech. I never thought of it as, oh, this is an investment number go up
technology. I never ever thought of it that way. And I still don't today. One Bitcoin is one Bitcoin.
I've stayed true to that. And so yeah, I've been interested in Bitcoin for a long time.
I was around the early days when it was Roger Ver and Eric Voorhees and some of the original guys
that was actively attending meetups and Andrea Santinopoulos, all that kind of stuff. So
I've been happy to be part of the Bitcoin community and it's been great to watch it grow,
especially since 2017, where the first real bull run happened and all the people that have come
into Bitcoin since then, it's been great. And you'll find me at Bitcoin conferences usually.
My wife and I love going in. We just love being part of the community. But then back to true vote.
It's not acceptable that we have these systems that nobody understands. So the only way in my
opinion is to build one that's open source. And then, okay, it's open source. How do you prove
the data isn't altered? So because anyone can backdoor into a database, people don't really think
of these things. They think, okay, if I post a tweet, that's my tweet. But they don't realize
someone at Twitter can edit that tweet and change it. And you will have no way of knowing who,
when, or why. You can complain and you hope they listen, but you really don't know.
Nostra is a little different that way because you're signing with your private key and that
can't be altered. So that's something I really admire about Nostra. But anyway, so ballot data
needs to be as thought of as equally as important as like a Nostra note where you are submitting
something. It's from you and it needs to be immutable and you need to know that it can't be
tampered with. So I'm using Open Time Stamps, which was written by a core developer named Peter Todd,
I think in 2014, 2015. And the really elegant thing about Open Time Stamps is that you do not
have to post a transaction to the Bitcoin blockchain to use it. It just runs kind of alongside its
anchor to the Bitcoin blockchain and you can take any data and hash it and then use Open Time Stamps
to their calendar service. And it marks it as this was the hash compared to the Bitcoin blockchain
at this block height. So your ballot data is hashed and you can see if it was altered, the hash
wouldn't work anymore. And I make that very transparent on the ballot. So we're all used to,
all us Bitcoiners are used to using blockchain explorers. With Truevo, you have a ballot explorer
where you can see everyone's ballots, you can see the ballot ID, you can see the time it was
submitted, you can see the hash, you can see the ballot choices. But you can't see is the user ID,
just like Bitcoin, there is no user ID for a Bitcoin transaction. Same with the block,
the ballot explorer, there's no voter ID, it's just that that is decoupled from your ballot. So
you as a voter know that it's your ballot, but the rest of the world does not see that connection.
So, yeah, to wrap up your question about who am I, I'm someone who's super passionate about
tech and open source technologies and programming. And I really love doing it, like it's something,
I liken it to a writer who loves to write, I love to write code. That's my passion, that's what I do.
And I've been working on this Truevo platform for a while, and we're, we'll be releasing it in 2024.
And I was happy to just show beyond marketing materials what Truevo is beyond the white paper,
and that's why I published that demo a week and a half ago. So, yeah, and it's gotten some great
feedback so far and a lot of optimism and some skepticism. And there's always skepticism with
new tech and especially, you know, people who don't trust, the community we're in is very
suspicious of everything. And that's why statement. Yeah, yeah, so that's fine. They should be.
So, you know, I'm, it's going to be a process. This is going to take years of
refinement, just like the Lightning Network, you know, has taken years to get it right.
You know, look at look at the Lightning protocol. It's evolved. Look at the Bitcoin protocol.
It didn't work the first, it didn't work perfectly the first, well, it did, but it's been
it's been iterated on since then it's been improved. But same thing with that Truevo,
we will release it and it will continue to improve as the years go by.
Well, you know, this is the beauty of open source too, because you're putting this out in the open.
You're freely saying, look, you want to you want to come, you know, submit a poll request for this,
like, go ahead, like, please come in here, hack on this, see what you can do, see if you can make
it better, like you're welcoming ideas. And I think that for a process like voting,
that ethos of open source is actually just the, it's the perfect marriage. And it's like the only
one that actually makes sense. Because I think maybe a good place to kind of kick off from
what you just said, great, great intro, by the way, I love asking that question, because it
tends to, you never know what you're going to get from it. And I think it's always helpful to
know where somebody's coming from to understand what their motivations are. So I appreciate
that answer. You've had quite a career, and it's pretty incredible that this is what you're focusing
on now. But what I'd like to talk about to start us off is just, I want to go through the
how of Truevote in terms of how it works and also, you know, maybe pick it apart a little bit,
we can talk about some of the criticisms. But I think a good place to jump off is the why.
Why is this so important right now? We talked about this a little bit earlier, and you touched
on it as well, this black box of voter data, not to mention just the incredibly manual and tedious
process of needing to take a day and go down to wherever you're supposed to vote locally and cast
your paper ballot and stick that in a box and then wait until maybe that night, maybe the next day,
maybe after a recount for you to actually know how things went and to have absolutely no idea
where your vote, your specific vote went. Did it get counted? Because I think that that's a huge
thing that's having people lose faith in democratic elections in general is I don't think my vote
matters because I don't actually see where my vote goes. So I'm just not going to vote instead.
It's because of the obscure nature of the system, it breeds a lot of apathy. And that's an unfortunate
thing. So maybe we can talk through a little bit just what do you see as the biggest problems
in need of fixing? Why did you say, you know what true vote needs to happen? What made you think
this system is so broken? Yeah, exactly. You touched on it. It was my moment waiting online.
So the convenience part of it where whether you're in person or mail in ballot, it is tedious to
wait online, take a day or for mail in ballots, use a pen and paper with which I don't know about
you, but I don't ever use a pen anymore. And fill it in, put it in an envelope and then drop that
envelope either in a ballot box or in the mail and hope it gets counted. So this is a good
thing. So there's two problems. One is the convenience. We do everything else on our phone.
And that's a good thing. I mean, we have really become much more productive because of that.
We don't have to wait online for things that we shouldn't have to anymore. And that's great.
We love using our phones. We love automation. We love freeing up our time. And as you know,
time is our most scarce resource. We have from the moment we're born, we're dying. Our life is
getting shorter. So we're one day closer to death that I think was a song, a Pink Floyd song. I
don't know if they're originally, but so I value my time and my time on this earth and I want to
do good things with it. So I don't like wasting my time and I don't think anybody does. And taking
a day to vote is absurd. And we should be doing it on our phone for automation. So that's one
problem is the convenience. The second is exactly what you said, what happened to your ballot after
you submit it, you really, really truly have no idea in today's current voting system what happened.
You think they counted it, you hope they do. You hear a story on the news, oh, they lost 30,000
ballots. Was my ballot in there? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. You have no idea what's going on
behind the scenes. That to me is laughably absurd. And if that applied to other segments of our
life, then we wouldn't accept it. So why do we accept it with voting? And because of some of the
political gaslighting that's gone on, especially with the last 2020 election, by the way, I started
True Vote before the 2020 election, the 2020 election just kind of validated that this mystery and
confusion and anger and all these things that came out for people that claim the votes weren't
accurate, that can all end easily with True Vote. There should be no ambiguity into who won and who
lost. That needs to be as clear as a Bitcoin transaction where it's just, it is what it is.
And I want to make voting boring. I want you to get a notification on your phone saying it's time
to vote. Good morning. Good morning, Brett. It's time to vote. You tap on it. Okay, submit my ballot.
Done. And I know my vote was counted. Why don't we have that today? We don't have it today because
no one's built it. No one's built it because I don't know. They just haven't tried. So I'm
building it. How long has it been since you tried a new hardware wallet? Or maybe you need to get
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Oh, I love it. I mean, it's the builder mentality, right? You're like, this is a problem. This is
annoying to me and guaranteed to a lot of other people. Why is no one fixing this? Okay, fuck it.
Let me fix it. Let me build it. Exactly. You know, I'm glad that you are and I've seen
some pushback against the idea, which is natural again, especially Bitcoiners are by nature dubious
of certain things. And I think specifically, there's a lot of Bitcoiners that are saying,
you know, like, I'm never voting, for example, like, I'm, I'm just not going to vote. It's a,
I'm not going to vote into this flawed system, not going to participate in this, the charade.
But at the same time, even if that is your opinion of the current system, and I am no
lover of the state by any means, that being said, right now, these are the rules of the game.
These are the rules that we're playing by what I don't see a ton of downsides to at least making
that system more radically transparent. And also just more efficient. If you think about just the
collective productivity lost for during each election, whether that's federal, local, state,
even at your, you know, if it's a union or something like that, it's absolutely massive.
And at a national scale, it's like, Oh my God, the amount of time that was wasted. I mean,
the media loves it, right? Because they sell a bunch of new ad space, because everybody's
following along to see did they find a new briefcase of votes in Pennsylvania or wherever it might be.
But it's just a time suck. It's a money suck. And with each of these elections, it feels like
there's just less and less trust in the system, because people know that this,
rightly so that the system is broken. And so I think it's a good thing to at least introduce
an option for people to do it more efficiently. I'd love to talk through, if you can walk us
through that, you know, kind of in layman's terms, how does it work? You know, at which
points in the process, are you using open time stamps? And then noster, as I understand it,
using the noster for the identification, basically to validate as you're signing your login mechanism.
But it's also paired with some elements of the traditional system, right? I believe it's the
election access code. Is that the correct term? Can you walk us through how that works and also
how True Vote will interface with the existing system and kind of quote,
safeguards that are in place on the side of elections as they exist today?
Yeah. Yeah. First, I'll touch on what you said about, you know, people being disincentivized
to vote. I totally understand that. And True Vote is not attempting to solve democracy. There's an
old adage like what do two wolves and a chicken vote on for what's for dinner? The minority
obviously gets destroyed in that situation. So democracy is flawed, but it is what we have now.
And so it might as well work properly at least until some other system replaces it. But I mean,
yeah, I don't see democracy, at least in this country going away anytime soon. So we might as
well have accurate voting integrity. I don't. So the skepticism around that I get, you know,
the system is broken a lot of ways. You know, I'm not trying to solve everything with True
Vote. I'm just trying to have election integrity. And I think that that can be a launching point
for people being more civil to each other and accepting results. And I think there's so much
upside to having an accuracy in election where, like you said, the productivity drain won't be
there. And I think the energy drain won't be there either. I just, you know, you vote, here's the
results. Let's move on and work as far as how it works. So yes, noster is how you authenticate
in a True Vote. Now, to, as you know, anyone can create a no stride and you can create one on the
True Vote site. I did not put that in the demo video because I cut it for time. But there's a
there's a register button where you can click and it will generate a no stride for you.
Now, as far as being able to submit a ballot, you need to be an authorized voter. And so today,
everywhere, US and elsewhere, we have voter registration, you have to prove that you are
a citizen of whatever jurisdiction you're voting in. And usually that's a driver's license in the
US. And you have to not be a felon. I think I think I don't know if that's federal, but it may be
where you can't vote if you're a convicted felon. I don't know. But if you have a valid voting
registration, then you can submit a ballot through the traditional system. So you will be able to
submit a ballot through True Vote. And the way it works is through the election access code EAC,
you are issued True Vote creates a block of those EACs. And then we connect them to your voter
registration with the local registrar. So for Los Angeles County, for example, the Secretary of
State maintains that voting record. And everyone who is eligible to vote that they would have sent
a mail in ballot had the voter opted into that. They just get an EAC instead. And then they take
that EAC, they type it in or QR scan it in to True Vote, they submit their ballot, and the ballot
submitted. And the EAC is decoupled from there's no binding of the EAC to the voter's user ID at
that point. They just that allows them to vote to that allows the ballot to be submitted, but then
it the connection is gone. All that's noted is that they did vote, not what their ballot is.
And that's because and that's the way that thing. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the way the voting system
works today. Like you can go on, for example, LA County dot gov or whatever and type in last name
and birthday. And you can see someone's party registration and what elections they voted in.
That is public information today. So True Vote is going to abide by all of those laws that have
been fought over for decades, the way those work. That's outside the scope of what I'm building a
True Vote. I'm building a ballot submission system that's that's accurate. Right. So the voting
registration itself is still handled by whatever jurisdiction there is. And if they want to do
strict KYC that they can do that if they don't they don't. I think, you know, there's a lot of
discontent into polling places that anyone could just walk in and say, yeah, I live on the street
and they hand them a ballot. That is a problem with True Vote. I think
that will be more kind of you will have to provide some sort of real voter registration for you to
be issued an election access code. So you will not be able to just state that you live somewhere
and expect to get a ballot doesn't it needs to be more robust than that. It's not scalable that way.
Right. And the the election access codes that's still that's not going to be something again
that True Vote is handling that's still handled through the traditional means. So again, you're
not trying to fix the system as it stands today in terms of how you decide who is eligible to vote.
It's just saying for eligible voters, we want to make sure that the ballots are counted,
that they're done efficiently and that people have a more convenient way of casting that ballot.
Is that fair? Yeah, exactly. No, that's it. Yeah, because I think that's I know one of the
comments I saw a couple times from people is, oh, you're, you know, somehow contributing to KYC
people. And it's like, well, that's, you know, again, outside of the scope of what this project
is aiming to do. Yeah. You know, you need to have a valid ID of some form to vote most places.
That's probably, you know, I'm sure there are pluses and minuses to that. Maybe there are better
ways to do it. I'd rather have that be the case than to need to give my thumbprint or an iris scan
in order to vote, for example. So I think that this is a really nice step in the right direction.
And again, you can't solve it all at once, right? You're not going to fix everything that is that
is broken, but at least you can fix one of the most contentious parts, which is, does my vote
matter? And are the results of this election accurate and fair? Because that's what, you know,
that's what people hate. That's what makes them mad. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, the KYC thing is
definitely something I'm sensitive to. And I don't want people to get discouraged by that, that line
of thinking. I do think voter ID has become a political issue for some reason. I don't know
why some parties are against it. Some parties are for it. True vote is apolitical. In fact,
I purposely designed the logo. It's purple and green. There's no red and blue. There's no affiliation.
We are just software company building ballot submission election integrity software. And I
did make it multilingual out of the gate because it's not just about the US. There are other places
around the world and I already have interests outside the world where there's emerging democracies
that want to be able to vote online. And maybe they'll adopt it even faster than the US will.
It just depends on the size of the bureaucracy and the resistance to it.
Now, we certainly have a large bureaucracy here in the US to contend with. Do you foresee a lot
of pushback from, let's say, it's called the, well, from the US bureaucracy, if we're talking about
an American centric view here, do you think you'll see a lot of pushback against this that ends up
somehow getting politicized? Is true vote going to get cast incorrectly so as partisan one way
or another, do you think? Or I mean, there's no way to stop that from happening per se.
But hopefully with enough education, some of those risks can be mitigated.
Yeah, I mean, I think the ethos is very clear. It's not about that. It's about whoever you vote
for, your vote should count. And I really wish both parties would just start to also have that
message and realize not everyone's going to agree. And why do we even have a two-party system? I mean,
personally, I think it's severely limiting. And so we also have ranked choice voting as part of
the true vote platform. So if your election supports that, you can do ranked choice voting
online. So all sorts of combinations can be added to the true vote platform. Also propositions for
against some sort of infrastructure bill or something like that. Those show up on ballots
quite often. Yeah, it will be politicized at some point. Again, it's just like,
Bitcoin doesn't care what you spend your money on. It's kind of like, true vote doesn't care what
the ballot choices are. They're just ballot choices. And so that's how I'm staying kind of
agnostic to the entire politic is politicalization. That's a different. Yeah. So I'm just saying
agnostic to it. It's just about writing good software that works and is auditable and verifiable.
Well, I think that it's something that hopefully both parties would find, at least in the U.S.,
find a reason to get behind. Because on the Democratic side, they're always accusing the
Republicans of voter suppression. And the fact that when the vote is for a presidential election
is on a weekday and there's no public holiday for the election, well, a lot of people can't take
time off work. And on the other side, the Republicans are saying, well, we need to make sure that
this isn't some dead person who's voting or someone who is illegally in the country. And we need to
make sure that the Democrats aren't spinning up all these all these fake votes. And so to me,
this addresses both of those problems in a very elegant way because it says, look,
now you can vote whether you're at work, whether you're at home, you know, whether you're in the
bathroom, like you're good to go from wherever you are. And we're traveling. Yeah, exactly. Which
is another huge thing because most people, if they're traveling, they're not taking the time to do
an absentee ballot mail in. Like it's just not happening. And on the other side, you're making
sure, okay, if you have an election access code, you can vote. And if you don't, you can't. So I
think that it has something for both sides to like there. Probably things for both sides to
dislike as well, but say la vie. And you're working with, is it global election services? Is that the
like a, is it a partnership with them? And can you maybe walk us through that a little bit? What
do they do? How are they kind of going to help get the word out there and start utilizing this?
Yeah, global election services has been around. It's a family business. It's been around
over 30 years. They've run thousands of elections nationwide, mostly association and private
elections, but some public sector. And so they're a strategic partner of ours. And they are just
waiting for me to deliver them be one of the product where they can use it immediately. So
they're ready to use it for smaller elections. And the idea is, they grow with us. So we grow
together and we prove, Hey, you know, here's some case studies of some elections that were successful
using Truvo. And those elections just get bigger and bigger and bigger. And so we'll start with
that as a proving ground and build off that. Yeah. As far as you mentioned, you know, whether you're
Democrat or Republican, it shouldn't matter. Absolutely. That's the way I look at it too.
And it's like, if you don't want transparent election integrity, you really have an
unindefensible position. Like why? And I love the question. I love asking someone a question. So
why don't you want Truvo? There's really no good answer. So and I love that I
in building a business where it seems like such a win-win and I don't know why you wouldn't want it.
So I think that will make itself known as we gain momentum and prove that we can succeed in this.
And whether it's, you know, a large election outside the US or within the US,
once we have a few elections kind of done and shown, I don't see how there should be any reason to not use us.
So to those critics, because I'm inclined to agree with you, I think that transparency,
you know, light is always better than darkness, especially when it comes to something as integral
to our current apparatus of government as voting is. And the less trust we have in that,
the less trust people have in the government. Now, that is not to say to clarify that I believe
people should implicitly trust the government. But I would hope that people would see the benefit
of at least having the knowledge that their vote counted and that the election was fair,
at least within the bounds of ballot counting and valid ballots being cast. I would hope that
people would think that that is at least a good thing. Because again, I am not one to be an advocate
for the state or for the state to have more power. And in my mind, true vote seems to be a way to
remove some of the power from the state, whether that be at a local level at a state state level,
or at a national level. Because again, it's taking out the potential failure points,
where things can go awry, where people can tweak the system. Some still exist, sure,
in the existing voter registration system. But at least it's a step in the right direction.
If we want to be fair to the critics, what is your potential failure case for true vote? Or
if you were to steal man true vote, what's the biggest thing you could say that is a downside
of it or that may cause it to not be successful or maybe to have unintended consequences that are,
wow, didn't think that would happen, but it did. What's your take on that? Just to give the critics
something to chew on and to look at all sides of this thing. Yeah, I do spell out some attack
factors in the white paper. I think the biggest threat to true vote would be a massive DDoS attack
at an inopportune time. We're using Microsoft Azure and CloudFront, but they're not impenetrable.
There could be a situation where the amount of traffic is so severe that the true vote systems
respond slowly and people get frustrated because their ballot submissions don't work.
That's a concern. That's one that keeps me up at night, to be honest. I'm going to have to lean on
Microsoft Azure and other edge providers to help with that. That's probably going to cost some
amount of money to defend against. It's hard to defend against DDoS, but it's not impossible.
That's one big concern. I guess the other would be some unauthorized usage of election access
codes. Obviously, that's an obvious one. Those have to be accurate.
But again, that's something out of the current system though still. If you get a mail-in ballot,
you're supposed to have a witness there that watches you sign it. Only you are supposed to
complete it, but you're doing that in the privacy of your own home. Nobody has any idea whether or
not that was actually you that filled out that ballot and sent it in and who the hell signed
the witness signature. To me, again, that's a different problem than true vote is trying to
solve if I'm understanding correctly. Yes. I'm glad you brought that up. I'm an optimist and I am
hopeful that people act in, let's just say, a moral way. As far as committing election fraud,
why? If you want to commit an illegal act and commit election fraud, whether it's
having someone else fill out your ballot or whether it's a mail-in ballot or a true vote ballot,
you are committing election fraud and you are violating the terms of the election. If you are
okay with that and you don't really care about your own integrity, that's something you have to
reckon with at some point in your life. I would hope that most people would just be a little bit
be a little bit more ethical that way and know that, hey, this is my vote. It's no one else's
but mine and I will vote. That's that. I know that's wishful thinking and there's probably
people who will listen to that and just laugh me off. That's my starting point.
But unfortunately, the utopian world that I sometimes wish we had isn't really reality yet.
Hopefully, someday it will be. But yeah, there's a lot of dishonesty in the world and bad actors.
So again, it becomes a moral issue. A lot of this does. Like, okay, you want to launch a DDoS
attack a true vote. Why? Why? And I think, you know, I share your optimism. But I, of course,
I have a lot of doubt in general, because I think we've seen and often it's not at the individual
voter level, but it's at a higher up level. Maybe it's a super PAC who decides, you know what,
we're going to put out bounties on the dark web for election access codes and say, hey,
you know, we'll give you 100 bucks to send us a message with your election access code
that we can use and we're going to spin up a bunch of, you know, noster key pairs and use your access
codes and pretend to be you. Fair. You to be fair, you could also do that with paper ballots,
mail and balance as they exist today. Again, I'm trying to separate the problems with the current
system that are not in scope for what true value is trying to accomplish. Because I think that's
where people get caught up. That's where you'll probably and probably have already faced the
biggest pushback is confusion between what problem it's trying to solve versus all of the problems
that exist that could be solved. It's like, you got to walk before you can run a little bit, like,
at least this is something that adds a shred of integrity to an incredibly archaic and,
well, lacking an integrity system. So, you know, just trying to think through this because again,
to touch on one of your earlier points about the DDoS attack,
I think that may be another big criticism that you'll face in terms of, okay, well,
if it can be DDoS, then it's too centralized. And is there any way for true vote to embrace,
let's say, more of the Bitcoin no-ster ethos of decentralization? Is there any way to reduce
that attack factor by decentralizing or is a certain amount of centralization
inevitable and necessary when you're dealing with votes? Because then maybe true vote is even if
things are publicly verifiable, maybe true vote becomes the target of those
validity attacks where people say, well, what are these computer nerds doing behind the scenes?
They could be just putting ones in a computer, especially for folks who may not have much of
a handle on cryptography in general. So, is there any way to break that out more? Can you have an
instance of, for local elections, even of multiple community members running nodes for this sort
of thing? Is there any way to utilize a relay-based model like no-ster uses to be able to break down
some of those attack vectors? Or is that just not really possible with this kind of system?
That's something I've thought about as well. And by the way, if you Google blockchain voting,
you'll see 15 years worth of heavy, heavy noise and no signal and claims of decentralism and
closed source and tokens and blockchains. You'll see all sorts of claims that never would work or
never will work. I'm not trying to create a new token or a blockchain or claim to be decentralized.
Prior to open timestamps, my original design was going to be kind of enlightening like an app that
would run where you'd have to exchange some sort of, some SATs to validate ballots. And I realized
that it was a little bit over complicated. I think there's something to be said for
centralized systems as far as code deployment and control. And then, but being open source,
and having something like open timestamps validate the hash of the data, that's where I think is the
sweet spot. As far as resisting a DDOS attack, Microsoft Azure and like AWS is one of the
biggest networks in the world. And they do have redundancy and geolocations all over the place
where they can handle the traffic and distribution of the load. I think at some point, maybe we'd
build like a true vote server that can run on a note or like as an umbral app or something like
that and they could be peer to peer. Probably like a future version, I could see us building out
something like that. For now though, it's, there's an API, we're using Cosmos DB, which is a no SQL
database, very much like MongoDB. And it scales very, very well. It can scale across
geo regions of Azure. It has partition keys. It's super, super fast. And then the front end,
a lot of code runs in the front end, it's just a static React web app. So there's not like this
bottleneck of client server hand shaking all the time. It's very, very efficient.
So yeah, I mean, the answer is not for V1 or probably V2, but at some point, yeah,
yeah, I'd probably want to look at that. And it's something that will always be, I will always be
thinking about is how to make it more decentralized than beyond just being open source and having
distributed load across Microsoft Azure. There are other ways like you mentioned. So
yeah, it's in the future at some point, I'm sure. Yeah. You know, I think it's interesting.
This is really one of those cases where the power of open source really shines through. Because as
you said, like sometimes you don't need a blockchain for everything. First of all, I think
that's very clear. Blockchains are not an efficient way to do most things that you would want to do.
They're very, very good for Bitcoin. But for most of the other shitcoin applications,
so-called applications of blockchain, it's completely superfluous. You don't need to have
a distributed ledger for most things. A centralized database is going to be faster. It's going to be
cheaper. It's going to work better. And in this case, that's, you know, a potential thing where
people say, well, it's centralized. I don't know about that. But here's where the open source comes
in, because anyone can go ahead and audit that code, can see what exactly is happening behind
the scenes. Not anyone. Obviously, you have to have some capabilities. But there are enough
programmers in the world now that I'm sure people on all sides of the political spectrum will have
someone that they can bring in that can audit it for them. And so I think that that's a good
thing. Because yes, it is centralized, but it's centralized because it doesn't make sense to
decentralize it at this stage. But the development of it is out in the open. So at least people
can have the confidence that, okay, I know how the sausage is being made. And that's something
that we have no idea about in our current system. Another thing I wanted to talk about was just in
terms of the pushback that you may get about, what about people that don't have phones? Is it safe to
assume that this can be pretty easily run on an iPad or some sort of a kiosk that they could still,
so if you still want to go down to your, you know, your voting, voting location, that local
station can run true vote, you can go there and, you know, sign or create your key on the spot,
sign in, and this is not in any way exclusionary towards those who don't have phones.
Yeah, absolutely. It will be, you can have a kiosk mode where the second you submit your ballot,
it signs you out of your Nostra key and waits for the next person. So that's just like a toggle on
the election configurator or on the kiosk configurator. And then I've been asked before,
so I'll answer even though you didn't ask, what about voting alongside the traditional systems?
And I think there will be a time where people will want to vote the current way and end true
vote. It won't be all or nothing. And so we'll just add the totals up. So here's the true vote
voters. Here's the mail in voters. Here's the in person voters, add them up and there's your
results. Just like today, they add up mail in voting with in person voting. So now we have a
third one. Now we have a third one, true vote, mobile voting. So yeah, and then eventually,
like most hybrid technologies, they go towards the best one, which would be online.
And so for people who don't have phones, they'll have that option to vote the old way or go and
find a kiosk. Okay, now that's good. And I'm curious if, obviously, old habits die hard.
It may be a difficult uphill battle, as I'm sure you are full aware being engrossed in this, but
to get people, but also the folks running these elections to make a big change like this. Do you
think that at least is there going to be an interim period where maybe true vote is used not
alongside but on top of existing election structures as a way to just validate to say, okay,
if you're going into, you know, place your ballot, they've got a little kiosk in there where you can
also go and place your true vote ballot to say, okay, I'm just trying to do a double check. And
then to compare the tallies at the end and see, okay, is this a way for us to double check the
authenticity of the existing system? If the adoption isn't quite there yet to fully switch over,
do you foresee that having a chance at happening at all? Or do you think it's going to be
either alongside or fully implemented? Yeah, like I said, I think there will be a time where there's
both at the same time and then eventually fully implemented. We do have a big national election
coming up in about 11 or so months. I think it would be helpful if we did a true vote mock
election in time for that where if you want to vote with true vote, you can it won't count obviously
because the secret, the states won't certify it yet, but they, but we can have it just as an exercise
of usage and a test case. So I think I'll build something like that where if you want to vote
with true vote, you can just for fun, you know, just to just to do it alongside. Yeah.
Do you think there's a chance of this being implemented for either party in primary elections,
at least at a state level? Have you been in any talks with that or is it getting too close already
where they're just they're not trying to rock the boat? Yeah, no, not yet. Not yet. It needs to be
proven out first. The primaries are just around the corner. So yeah, but, but there's always elections
going on, like you said earlier, there is all they're all over the world. They're always going on.
So we'll just, you know, once once we're ready, the yeah, once we're, once we're ready, you'll
just start outing them. Yeah. And you touched on this earlier, but I think it's worth maybe going
into a little deeper. This isn't just something that needs to be used for democratic elections
in terms of political ones. This is something that can be used for across a lot of different
sectors. I mean, even for any sort of corporate or union or heck, your local school board PTA,
meaning whatever it might be, because this is just an app on your phone, it's very accessible.
So do you see more of a bottom up adoption of this happening where maybe it starts with a
local union and they try it out and that's just, you know, words start spreading a little bit.
Or do you think you'll get some like the political elections will start just rolling in at the same
time too? Yeah, I think it will be bottom up. It's hard to predict the future at Walker, but you
know, I think it starts with that with that and you listed some good examples, unions, association,
school boards, you know, little league commissioners, you know, there's all sorts of elections
always going on. And there's unfortunately, there's probably corruption, even at those levels too,
like somebody wants to, you know, who has access like a cantilellic, cantaloupe effect of elections,
right? Those closest to it can control it. So true vote, true vote ends that you can't corrupt it.
So yeah, no, that's that's the strategy for sure is bottom up and then just just grow the election
base, the number of voters per election. Yeah. What are you most, let's say true vote is implemented,
starts being implemented at a really wide scale. What are you most looking forward to? What is,
you know, what is kind of your, what's keeping you going to say, this is the future that I want to
see. And I think that it's possible because of true vote. Yeah, I want, like I said, I want
elections to be boring. In 2028, November, I want to wake up. I have an alert on my phone, Brett,
don't forget to vote. I tap it, I vote, I submit, and then I wait for the results to come in and I
see and I know that they're accurate. Like that's my vision of what is possible. Yeah. So that's
what I'm working towards is that moment. I like the sound of boring elections. Yeah. Although,
you know, it is kind of fun sometimes to watch the really terrible takes as votes start rolling in.
So I may miss that a little bit, but I look forward to the process being boring because it
should be something that isn't this massive amount of uncertainty and doubt and unnecessary
fanfare. Yeah. Something that's part of our existing political structure. For now, as you said,
maybe something else better comes along. But for now, we're working within the confines of the law
as it exists in various jurisdictions, like it or not, participate in it or not. At least if you do
choose to participate, true vote does give you a way to know that your vote went somewhere and not
just into somebody's back pocket, which I think is a pretty powerful thing. What about for folks who,
because again, this is open source for folks who want to contribute, who want to, you know, kick the
tires a little bit or write some code. What is the best way for them to help out with this and be
able to contribute to true vote? Yeah. Like any opensource project, it's available. It's on github.com
slash true vote and the repos are all there and you can run it locally. You don't even need to
publish it to Azure or AWS. You can run it on your own device, your own computer, and you can submit
pull requests just like the Bitcoin community does. And that's how Bitcoin Core got built out.
I have an internal JIRA issue tracking system that is not public, but I will be publishing some of
those issues on github so anyone can just take one. And if they want to get started, they could just
start working on one. So yeah, I would absolutely love to see any developer, whether anonymous or
someone we know, start working on github. And it's such a beautiful thing to have pull requests
and code reviews and exchange of ideas and a community. So yeah, it's going to, yeah, it all
starts with that initial command and then we build off of that. Yeah. And do you have any message for
folks out there? Maybe they are elected officials. Maybe there are folks who are running local state
or national elections by some freak chance they're listening to this Bitcoin podcast. But for folks
that are out there or maybe they're a member of a union who want to implement this, what do you
want to implement this? What's your message to them? Why should they jump on this now? And
basically, how's it going to help them and why should they do it?
I think like a lot of incentives, it comes down to budget. And there are organizations that have
a budget to run an election. And that budget can be pretty much reduced by a gigantic amount
if they just use true vote, right? The amount of effort that it takes to run an election all
across the world is massive. And when you can just do it all online, it brings all those costs
down. So that's the biggest carrot to show to say, hey, you want accuracy and decrease costs,
why wouldn't you use true vote? So it seems like a no brainer really. Yeah.
And now that's honestly, great answer, because I think money is something that
everyone can relate to. And especially for those of us who are Bitcoiners, we think about money a
lot and what it is. And again, the time value of that money. And so the idea of saving money and
saving your time and the value of that time by not fucking around with unnecessary elections,
or I should say unnecessary election processes is very attractive. So anything else that you think
people are missing about true vote, is there one last message to the skeptics? Is it to, hey,
take a look at my code? Is it to just have fun not voting? Is there anything else out there
that you want to give one last plug for those that may still just be either on the fence or saying,
you know what, this is just another way to support status regimes?
Yeah, that's a good question. I would just say be patient and be optimistic.
These problems won't be solved overnight. As far as the people's disenfranchisement with their
government, that is a large problem. And we all are subjects to it. Term limits are an issue that
I think are super important. True vote doesn't solve that problem. So yeah, I don't give up.
I mean, I do think I do love the message. I was taught as a young age, your vote counts,
and I still do believe that. So I guess I would say that. And one of the main reasons people
don't vote today is because it is inconvenient. They really just don't want to hassle with it.
So I'm giving you a lifeboat for that. It's as simple as launching an app on your phone and
tapping a few choices and hitting submit. So the inconvenience part is over. The inconvenience
part is over. It's solved. So yeah, I think we'd see a huge rise in number of voters once this is
deployed. And again, if you are against that, you have to answer to why. Why wouldn't you want
everyone who was able to vote to vote? Politicians always say, oh, if you don't like it, vote.
Change this, change that. Use your vote. Use your vote. Okay. Here's a system where you can
make it much easier to vote. Why wouldn't you want someone to use that?
Yeah. And I think that's a very fair point. And I think for a lot of others to focus specifically
on Bitcoiners here, because right now, Bitcoiners are probably some of the ones who are paying
attention to this the most or folks on Noster, because they're following anything that's being
done in and around this technology, right? And as we stated before, and is very evident to anybody
on Twitter or Noster, Bitcoiners are doubtful of things and doubting is good. It's good to be
skeptical. It's good to check things out, to verify for yourself, not to trust. And luckily,
that is something that's actually possible with this again, because it's open source.
And so I think that fix the money, fix the world is not just a meme, but I think there's
so much truth to that. But we also have to remember that we do still exist within the
current paradigm. Now, I am all for building parallel systems. And I think that that is a lot
of what's happening within the Bitcoin community, within the Noster ecosystem today. Parallel
communities are being built, there's a move towards more localization versus globalization.
And I think that that is a beautiful thing. That doesn't, however, negate the fact that
within the system that sits alongside our new parallel system, within the existing system,
I would personally like to see more transparency that is reflective of the ethos of open source
software of Bitcoin and Noster. I would like to see as much of that ethos as possible permeate
its way into the existing state apparatus. I see that as a good thing, even though I don't
support the state itself. I still would like to see if it is going to be around for a little
while longer. I'd still like to see it just be a hair more transparent. I'd like that.
So maybe for that, I'll get called a statist cuck. But who can say these days just about anything,
I'll get you called a statist cuck. Oh, geez. Yeah, I don't think that would be deserved at all.
You're just living your life the best you can. And I'm setting a good example for others. So
there's nothing statist cuck about that. Yeah, not everyone can be a rebel like at 24 seven.
That's just not. Yeah. And honestly, for Bitcoiners, if I am going to vote for a politician,
I would like them to be pro Bitcoin. That's a starting point for me. That's an immediate
filter out. That's not to say that just by saying I'm pro Bitcoin, I'm going to vote for you. My
vote is harder to win than that. But it's a starting point to say, I will at least look into you more
if you are pro Bitcoin. And if I do find myself voting for a pro Bitcoin candidate, I would like
to make sure that that vote is actually counted and not thrown in a suitcase somewhere. Like,
I'd like to make sure it actually in my little drop in the bucket actually made it into that
bucket and wasn't just sloshed away elsewhere. So yeah, we'll see. I've seen some politicians
recently claim their pro Bitcoin, but it seems more a little bit more pandering like I'm sure
you've noticed that as well. We'll see if who really is pro Bitcoin and who isn't once if they're
elected. But I've seen some of that where, you know, I mean, to call someone out, but he deserves it
as the mayor of New York, you know, he claimed to be pro Bitcoin, but he was just saying that he
didn't he didn't really mean it. You know, those other examples, I won't say them. But you know,
he's he that's a good one that we should be a little bit wary of candidates like that that
really are just pandering. I agree. Because at the end of the day, even if they say they're
pro Bitcoin, they are still politicians, they are trying to get your vote and also your donation
dollars. Yeah, this is a fact. That being said, I am at least glad that the Overton window is
shifting a bit, where we now see candidates on both sides of the aisle. If we look at the
presidential election, you've got the back on one side, and now you've got RFK, like he's no longer
on the left. Now he's in the middle of the aisle, running as an independent. I think that's ultimately
a good thing. I'd like to see a legitimate independent challenger come in to the American
political scene. That would be fantastic. But at least that conversation is shifting. You see,
you know, Malay winning the election in Argentina, like him or not, believe him or not, when it comes
to his Bitcoin support, at least it's changing the conversation. You know, and I think that
that conversation doesn't change overnight. It has to happen in stages. It happens one
election at a time, you know, one debate at a time. Like I look forward to a cable TV, not that I
watch cable TV, but I'll watch it on YouTube afterwards, debate where we see candidates
talking about how broken the money is, talking about, you know, Austrian economics, talking about
Bitcoin as part of that conversation, and how people need to have something that can help them
in this world of broken money. And again, even if they don't get my vote, I'm glad to see
they're talking about it because each of those mainstream quote unquote conversations that
happens about Bitcoin is just one more little shift of that over to window. It's just opening up
that discourse a little bit more. And that's that's what I like to see. Again, maybe I don't,
I don't know who I'm gonna vote for, or if I'm going to vote, or if I think that everyone who's
a pro Bitcoin politician is essentially full of shit, but I like that they're talking about it.
Like that's at least a step in the right direction. So we'll see, it's gonna be a,
it's gonna be an interesting year, like a very interesting year. I don't know. I really hope
it doesn't end up as Trump versus Biden again. Like that's just, that'll just be sad. Like I
think America can do better than that. I agree. I hope so. Yeah, it's a, but hey, hopefully we'll
at least maybe even Trump and Biden will talk about Bitcoin. We know that Trump loves his NFT
collection. So at least there's that I still think that's one of the most absurd things I've seen.
If you saw his NFT collection, yeah, I did. I did probably wish you hadn't seen it, but yeah,
I can't unsee it. Oh, dear Lord, that, that's just, that's just absurd. I have trouble understanding
how a lot of Bitcoiners seemingly support him, but hey, Bitcoiners are a very diverse bunch. So
you're, you know, whatever you want. I think they don't quite understand who he is if they
support him. That's my contention. Yeah. Something I say probably far too much is just,
there is no red, there is no blue, there is the state and there is you. And to me, Trump and Biden
are two sides of the same coin, a very, very old weathered coin. And, you know, they may have
advantages over each other in some particular little nitpicky ways, but ultimately I just view
them as pretty much more of the same. I'd like to see something a little bit different. I'd like to
see a change that isn't just a slogan, you know, but one step at a time, I suppose.
Well, well, to, to finish that thought, if, if I may, a lot of it comes down to the money
printer and both Biden and Trump would print money as long as possible if it's politically
advantageous for them to do so. So if you hate Biden with everything you've got, like some people
do or hate Trump with everything you've got, like some people do, you are, you don't realize they
will both print money and they will both devalue your currency and they don't care if you hate them
or not. If it's politically advantageous to them to bail out something by printing more money,
they will do so. They do not care about causing inflation because inflation is latent. It doesn't
happen. There's a delay in inflation. So when they print money, the inflation doesn't happen the next
day. It happens months or years later. That's the biggest problem. And there was a lot of money
printing under the Trump administration, especially in his last year, and a lot of money printing in
the Biden administration. I don't know the exact numbers, but I, they're, they're both massive.
Yeah. So that's the cause of it. That is something I think about a lot. I just wish they would stop
printing money. Yeah, it's just, it's just that, that is the cause of almost every problem.
Print money, money is what funds war money is what funds violence money is what funds
oppression. And when you can print it, it doesn't matter what your spending is or what your tax
collection policies are, they can just make more. So, you know, these tax the rich and tax billionaires,
that ideology, it doesn't work. Even if they taxed every billionaire, the max, the maximum
amount that they think they could or want to, it wouldn't change a thing. They would just print
more money if they were short anyway. So, yeah, no, I, yeah, I, I agree. And it's, it's sad to see,
you know, I'm all for railing on Biden, because he just makes it so easy. But if you're going to rail
on Biden, you should also rail on Trump. Like I think, yes, rail on Biden and rail on Trump, Trump,
I think under his admin, it was at least four trillion, if not five in M2 expansion. And I mean,
they are, they were both responsible for having Jerome Powell in there, right? I mean, I like
Jerome Powell a little bit more actually after his close the fucking door, little gaff that he had
on stage. I was like, that somehow makes you more likable. But that's just a smidgen of like, but
again, when nothing changes at the base layer and the base layer of everything is money, it's half
of every, you know, every exchange. And when that is so broken, it doesn't matter if you've got,
you know, an old guy with borderline dementia or an old clownish guy with tiny hands and strange
orange hair in an NFT collection, they're both expanding the money supply. They're both pretending
like it's the other guy's fault that bad things happen. And nobody is willing to make the hard
choices because turning off that money spigot is not going to be a popular choice, because it's
going to in the very short term result in a lot of pain. And that's why they don't do it. That's
why it expands at an exponential rate, because they know that's not a good way to get reelected
if you cause that much pain. But at a certain point, I hope we have somebody brave enough to
bite the bullet to try and fix the system, at least a little bit, because that's what it's
going to take is somebody who says, you know what, maybe I don't get reelected, but hopefully,
you know, after I'm gone, people will be able to say, Oh, wow, okay, maybe he was on to something,
because now things are starting to at least get better. Now we're starting to actually take advantage
of all the gains that technology brings us that are just being stolen by our inflated currencies.
That's one of the saddest things to me is just people have to spend more and more and more
and get less and less and less at a time where technology has never been better at delivering
productivity and efficiency gains. And that's just so backwards. And I hope that we have somebody
who comes in that realizes that and says, let's actually let the people keep the fruits of their
labor, not by centralizing the means of production. Let's make that point clear, but just through
good old fashioned capitalism. Yeah. Yeah, we can get there. It will take some technology,
some leadership, some integrity, some pain, but this country is still savable. I believe so.
And, and yeah, a Bitcoin standard would be would be awesome at some point. So hopefully,
we'll see that in our lifetime. And we can at least dream if not then in our children's lifetimes,
that would be acceptable as well. Yeah, as long as it can happen sometime. But
Brett, I want to thank you for your time before we close out here. I was curious,
are you reading anything right now that you'd recommend? I always like to find out is there's
something good that's on your bookshelf that you would recommend for others to check out.
Yeah, there's two books that come to mind. I'm reading right now. One is text and the other's
audible and they're both very familiar with it to Bitcoiners. I'm listening to mandibles,
which Matt O'Dell has plugged endlessly over the last year. It's a story about a
civilization that inflates their money so high and they it's pretty much like a modern version
of 1984. It's it's it's it's pretty sad and dystopian. And I'm reading Fiat ruins everything
by Jimmy Song. I'm about halfway through that. So I I do love those those types of books. And
the most impactful book for me was the creature from Jekyll Island, which you learn about how
the central bank was formed. And I that really changed my worldview about everything. So I highly
recommend that. Yeah, I read it every couple years, just as a refresher. Well, and they also in
creature from Jekyll Island, they've got the nice like summaries too. So if you want to just,
you know, flip through to get a little bit of a spark notes version, a little refresher,
you're good to go. But those are some I still have yet to read the mandibles or Fiat ruins
everything there on my list. I've been going back through some older Austrian texts to try and set
a better baseline for myself. So I need to need to jump back up to the present a little bit. But
thank you so much for sharing your scarce time with us today. I'll put all of the links so that
you're at the GitHub, the website, Twitter and Noster. I'll stick that all in the show notes.
Is there anywhere else people should should check out or is the website the GitHub,
Twitter, Noster accounts, those good to go? Yeah, the website links to everything. Perfect.org. And
I'm pretty active on my Twitter and and Noster and
yeah, that's it. And then yeah, the GitHub. Yeah, I thank you for being such an advocate for Noster
too. You're really helping move it along. And I'm super excited to see like other Noster adoptions
of Noster in new nascent ways like the way the way I'm using it, you know, I think people first
think of Noster as like a Twitter clone. And it's so much more than that. So I've your your your
like at the forefront of all that you're plugged in all the new projects going on. I need to catch
up myself and see what else is going on out there and check out some of the podcasts and and keep
up. Yeah, because I'm super, I'm super excited about Noster too. It's like, I can see why it's
mostly Bitcoiners. But hopefully there's people that are not Bitcoiners that are interested in
Noster, you know, as well as Bitcoin. But yeah, yeah, they came in maybe not through Bitcoin.
Well, that's a cool thing that I think we're seeing on Noster. And because I can't code,
at least I can use it and talk about it and try to share it with others because I think it's,
it's incredibly important. We need that free and open communication, like we need free and open
and sound money. And the difficulty about keeping up with things on Noster is the pace of progress
is just so fast. Like just just between Will Kasserin and Pablo F7Z. I mean, they're each just
throwing out new things every day. And it's like you take one day away and you're like, okay, I
missed like three new apps that dropped just in the last 24 hours, which is an amazing thing to
just see that. And now true vote utilizing it to which I think is a wonderful use case because
at the end of the day, Noster is just, it's just messages, right? It's just messages. And that
can apply to quite literally everything. It starts with social media because that's what's
familiar. And that's what gets people in the door and using it because people want something that's
fun, doesn't censor them, hopefully. And with Noster, they have that. And I think we'll see
a lot of people will find Noster like with Bitcoin, they find Noster. Once the pain is enough, where
they finally get maybe they get shadow band, maybe they get deep platform and they realize, oh,
shit, okay, I need to look for alternatives. And then they come googling around and find their way to
Noster, hopefully. And actually, I just did a session with with Will yesterday. And we'll probably
try to publish it tonight if I can. I'll see. But yeah, he goes through a bunch of stuff just that
he's working on kind of what he sees as the future. And it makes me very hopeful to talk to folks like
you to talk to Will, to talk to the real builders, because that's what gives me some hope for the
future. Like it's what makes me think, you know what, yeah, there's a lot of doom and gloom right
now. There's a lot of just shit out there and shitty people. But then you meet folks like yourself
and Will and so many of the amazing people I've met through Bitcoin and Noster. And it's like,
you know what, the world's not so bad. I have a lot of hope. We're going to be okay as long as we've
got builders who don't ask for permission and just keep building. That's what's going to make the
world a better place. 100% agree. Thank you for everything, Walker. Yeah. Thank you so much, Brett.
And thank you to everyone who is watching this a little later than we've talked. Bitcoin is scarce,
but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant. So thank you for sharing your scarce time to listen to
another fucking Bitcoin podcast. And thank you, Brett, so much. This was awesome.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin talk episode of the Bitcoin podcast. If you are a Bitcoin
only company interested in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast, head to Bitcoinpodcast.net
or hit me up on social media. On Noster, head to primal.net slash Walker. And on Twitter,
search for at Walker America or at TIT coin podcast. You can also watch the video version of this show
on X or on YouTube by going to youtube.com slash at Walker America or rumble by searching for at
Walker America. Bitcoin is scarce. There will only ever be 21 million, but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant.
So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to another fucking Bitcoin podcast.
Until next time, stay free.