If you want to see Jack Dorsey talk openly about what happened at Twitter,
well, he's going to do that on Nostra.
If you want to see Snowden be openly rift with the plebs about his thoughts,
that's going to happen on Nostra.
That is already happening on Nostra.
If you want to tune into Lynn Alden and kind of get some of her less official takes
and kind of get to know her a little bit deeper,
that's happening on Nostra.
Primal.
In case you're not aware,
Nostra stands for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays.
It's an open, decentralized protocol for communication,
which is currently being used primarily for censorship-resistant social media,
but which has limitless potential applications.
Milian and I dig into the story of Primal.
Challenges and opportunities that come with building on Nostra.
The next wave of Nostra adoption, what makes Nostra different?
Greater monetization and a whole lot more.
If you're already using Nostra,
I think you'll find this conversation very interesting.
And if you haven't tried Nostra yet,
I think this discussion will give you some good reasons to check it out.
If you're on Nostra or just joining,
let me know what you thought of the episode.
And I will zap you some sats.
You can find me on Nostra at Primal.net-slash-walker
and Milian at Primal.net-slash-milian.
That's M-I-L-J-A-N.
Before we get started, I want to remind you that the Bitcoin halving is just a few months away.
And I find that much more exciting than the Bitcoin ETF.
So now is a great time to get your Bitcoin off the exchanges
and into your own custody.
Go to bitbox.swiss-slash-walker and use the promo code Walker for 5% off
the Bitcoin-only BitboxO2 hardware wallet.
The BitboxO2 is fully open source.
You can verify it for yourself on their GitHub.
No need to trust me.
But it's super easy to set up and it's a great tool for seasoned psychopaths and new Bitcoiners alike.
When you go to bitbox.swiss-slash-walker and use that promo code Walker,
not only do you get 5% off,
but you also help support another fucking Bitcoin podcast.
So, thank you.
As always, you can watch the video version of this episode on Rumble, YouTube, or X
by searching at Walker America.
Or listen on fountain.fm or wherever you get your podcast by searching for THE Bitcoin podcast.
If you listen to THE Bitcoin podcast on fountain, consider giving the show a boost
or creating a clip of something you found interesting.
And if you have not checked out fountain yet, I highly recommend you get on it.
Finally, if you are a Bitcoin-only company interested in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast,
hit me up on social media or through the website bitcoinpodcast.net.
Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Milian.
Man, how are you?
How was Nostra Asia?
I actually just watched your talk there that you gave.
I know you gave a few, like a panel, and then you gave a talk on just kind of primal
and everything that's going on, but that looked like an amazing, amazing event.
Yes, it was an amazing event.
You probably remember Nostraica back in March.
That was March, right?
Yeah, it feels like longer ago, but it wasn't that long ago at all?
It feels like a lifetime ago in Nostra terms, doesn't it?
Yeah, it really does.
You kind of roll back the tape and just think about where everybody was back then,
where all the clients were.
I mean, we had just released the very first public preview of Primal like two days before Nostraica.
Wow.
Yeah.
What was that?
You mean on the web version, like primal.net?
That's right.
That's right. So I fell down the rabbit hole a little bit less than a year ago.
So I've created my key pair on Damus on December 25th.
Nice.
So my roster is still coming up.
So fell down the rabbit hole pretty hard, decided to build something right away,
but found the first kind of developer to work with by kind of mid to late January.
We started coding, got another guy on board, and the plan or the goal was to have something,
whatever it is, something launched before Nostraica.
So we kind of made it happen.
So we built the first iteration of the caching service.
This was kind of, as you probably know, our angle on Nostraica.
And then a very rudimentary web client that's utilizing that service.
And we kind of launched that.
And I thought no one's going to notice, but at least, you know, I'm going to have some reference point
when speaking to people at Nostraica.
And to my amazement, everybody noticed it.
Everybody there.
So the tiny little community that is Nostra, and it was even smaller back then.
Almost everybody noticed that it was a really nice intro to the whole group.
Well, I remember when you first launched Primal, because before that, it was really tough to get any decent stats
on just overall Nostra adoption.
Like, you know, just there were a few different websites publishing stuff about, you know, here's the total number of Zaps
or, you know, here's the number of NPUBS that have been created, things like that.
But it was all kind of spread out.
And I remember the first time I opened up that Primal Explorer page and I was like, oh, wow.
This is like, this is amazing to see.
And then to see the trending view as well, like it was just something that, because I actually,
my Nostra, Nostraversary is tomorrow, actually, it'll be December 14th.
And I was able to find exactly when it was.
I had a rough idea, but I was actually using the Primal mobile app because I spun up an end pub for this podcast on there.
And I was using the mobile app and I went onto my Walker profile and I just started scrolling.
I was like, let me see how far I can scroll with Primal.
Like, is it going to cut me off at any point?
And it did not.
I mean, I had to scroll a lot.
It turns out I've sent a lot of notes and other stuff, but I just kept scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and finding.
It took me a while, but I got back to the very start and I was like, oh, here we go.
Found the note ID and I was like, wow, now I've got my official anniversary all taken care of there.
But it's wild to see just in a year how much things have exploded.
And I've seen some people talking about, oh, we're in like a little bit of a lull or something like that.
But it doesn't feel that way.
Maybe that's just people feeling that way because they're feeling their engagement is lower or something.
Who can say?
But from where I'm sitting, it seems as though the network has continued to grow.
And I was just looking at your Primal Explorer page again today and it looks like the network has been growing.
But I'm curious from your seat, seeing this now, you guys have just launched your Android and iOS.
You're on both of the Google Play Store, the App Store, out of beta and into full production.
Are you guys seeing a pretty nice uptick in users and just with the other data that you guys are able to look at with all the services you provide,
what are you seeing in terms of kind of the network trends over the last couple of months?
Well, first, the small corrections.
So we're fully live with the 1.0 iOS app in the App Store.
We're still in beta with Android and I like to consider our web app kind of still in beta, although we're very close.
We're very close in both of those and the plan, the aim is to have both Android and web fully launched by the end of the year.
So that's kind of what we're going for.
Nice.
To answer your question, when it comes to network growth, it's interesting.
I think I kind of sympathize with the point of view that we're in a bit of a bear when it comes to user growth.
Obviously, we're signing up new users and you can see more activity on the network, but it's not kind of, it's not hockey sticking.
It's not taking off in a big way.
And honestly, I think that's a bit of a blessing in disguise for many of us developers because if we were hockey sticking right now, we'd be like,
it's complex enough as it is to build all this infrastructure from zero.
And if you had all kinds of crazy amount of like new users signing up at the same time, they'll be tough.
So on the user growth side of things, I think we've plateaued a little bit and we're kind of growing organically from here and kind of,
it's going to be interesting to see what the next big cohort of users is going to be.
So I'm really curious to kind of brainstorm with you about that.
But going back to the network itself, I think when it comes to developer engagement and developer,
the number of new projects that are sprouting, not just the number, but the quality,
like in just about every direction when it comes to development activity on the protocol, it's off the charts.
To the point where I'm full-time in Oster and I can't keep up with all the good projects that are being spun up.
So that's extremely encouraging.
And I would say unique in this space.
There are a number of other protocols for decentralized publishing, decentralized social media,
as Rabble likes to point out, this is not a new thing.
People have been trying to do these things for a long time.
So that's all, I appreciate all of that.
However, the amount of developer engagement that we're seeing in Oster, I think is unprecedented compared to all these other protocols.
And it's pretty cool just how much is being built out in the open.
And I want to, I have a bunch of stuff to kind of brainstorm and pick your brain about here.
Before we get too deep, I'd love to take a step back though for anyone listening and maybe give you a proper introduction
and let you introduce yourself a little.
So this is a Bitcoin Talk episode.
But I think usually this will probably transition into more of a Noster talk because that is, I think, where both of our heads are out right now.
But you are Milian.
You are the creator of Primal.
You have built a team around you now.
And Primal started out on the web as we said you are now.
And thank you for the correction.
In beta still on Android, but live on the Apple App Store.
You also have a lightning wallet integrated into the Primal iOS app.
I was able to buy sats with Apple Pay when I was setting up, which was super nice because I just went into onboarding myself into Primal
like I'm a completely new user to it.
Like let me just see what this Noster thing is all about and see how easy this is.
And it was super easy.
It was a really nice onboarding flow and the ability to buy a few sats to start zapping with Apple Pay was really, really nice.
But I'd love to just start out with, you know, who you are Milian and how did you get here today to be building clients on Noster this nascent protocol?
What was that path like?
What's your story here?
Okay, let's see how far we're going to go. Born and raised in Belgrade, Serbia.
As far as you want.
Born and raised in Belgrade, Serbia.
And I think that might have something to do with what we're discussing here because as a kid there, as a teenager, I witnessed the hyperinflation episode back in former Yugoslavia back then.
And I don't think I was overly traumatized by it. I thought it was hilarious. I was just a punk kid.
It was just like, you know, a lot of wild stuff going on all around you.
And by the way, we had one of the all time greats in terms of hyperinflation episodes.
I think it was a top three ever.
So I think we had Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe and then former Yugoslavia, right?
So even though I don't think I was super traumatized about it, it kind of did leave a mark.
So, you know, I moved to Canada when I was 19, went to school there, dropped out of computer science after a couple of years, started working, building stuff.
I've been kind of building software startups for a very long time, probably close to, well, approaching 30 years actually.
So, yeah, I've done quite a few software companies, spent some time in developer tools, probably over a decade, had Enterprise Software Company,
which was acquired by Microsoft back in 2015, tried to retire, didn't work for me,
fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole back in 2017 and decided to do Bitcoin startup.
So I did like an Bitcoin onboarding startup called Rise Wallet,
where we were onboarding people onto non-custodial Bitcoin using physical gift cards.
So did that for a few years, sold that company to a small publicly traded Bitcoin company in Canada.
And I was just kind of tinkering with decentralized publishing protocols, decentralized social media,
just kind of in my spare time, being a bum basically for a few years, not really doing much.
And interestingly, I ran into Nostar mid-last year and dismissed it.
So, hand up, totally missed Nostar the first time I looked at it.
And I wonder how many parallels we could draw to Bitcoin when it comes to these types of things.
How many times do you need to actually have contact with Bitcoin to decide to take a closer look?
So we all went through that journey.
So for me, luckily for Nostar, it was just once.
And then I guess when Jack Dorsey started making a bit of noise about it on Twitter
and when Elon did his famous post,
and we kind of, I decided to take a closer look and literally as I was reading through NIP 1,
it kind of hit me, okay, this is actually going to work, right?
So decided to put a team together and try to build something.
And back then things were quite early, like many of the clients were very rough around the edges.
So my first thought was like, okay, this is going to work.
And my second thought was, I wonder how good this can get.
I wonder in terms of UX performance, these types of things,
because obviously it's Nostar is kind of optimizing for decentralization and censorship resistance,
which I think at the protocol level is absolutely what we need.
But that comes at the expense of performance, UI, completeness of data, things like that.
So I was wondering, I was like, I almost had this itch that I needed to scratch immediately,
which is like, I wonder if somebody kind of put together a project that was optimizing for UX.
So carefully assessing all the tradeoffs and then selecting the tradeoffs in a way that optimizes for UX,
while also being mindful of things like centralization and avoiding some of the common pitfalls.
So I decided to build that kind of client and that's primal essentially.
So every step along the way, we want to basically do everything possible to make the UX as good as it can possibly be on Nostar.
And that means doing a ton of stuff that wasn't there, for example, the caching service is a part of it.
The reason why we built the caching service and just for some background for people who might not know,
the primal caching service essentially connects to all of the publicly accessible relays.
So we try to collect all of the notes that are being published in real time.
And we aggregate that into our own service, into our own database essentially.
And then we use that to be able to very quickly serve content in ways that are comparable, sometimes even better than the legacy centralized services.
So at the high level, our model is that all of the primal clients connect to all the relays directly and do all the publishing directly to the relays,
to the set of relays that you've defined as a user.
But for reading, we use a combination of the caching service and working with the relays directly as well.
So we can get into those details maybe later if you're interested, but we've decided to leave Nostar on turned to make UX as good as it can possibly be.
So again, that included writing this caching service and then as a kind of side effect of that, we're like, hey, we have all this data.
We can probably use it to do other useful things for users.
For example, full text search is useful.
Let's see if we can do that.
So we implemented that as well.
And then we have the whole notion of trending content and other algorithmic types of feeds that you can do when you have access to all the data.
And when I say all the data, it's under quotation marks.
There's no such thing as Nostar as all the data.
Like who knows what kind of relays are being spun up out there that we are not aware of.
We try to get to all the data we can to publicly accessible relays.
And I think we are able to collect the data from all the relays that want to be seen, essentially.
So that's kind of the framing behind primal and this kind of the goes further, goes all the way.
So when we make decisions around how to best support zapping within primal, within primal apps,
we decided that this first user experience that you just described, which by the way is music to my ears,
that you were able to easily get onboarded and buy some sats and start zapping.
This is precisely what we were trying to accomplish.
So it seems like the first 1.0 release is quite good when it comes to that.
But of course, we're going to further refine it and improve it and do more user testing
and make sure that there are no kind of walls that users hit anywhere that just about anyone who downloads the app
is able to create a profile, get onboarded with some sats and start having fun zapping.
Which I think is kind of a fundamental feature of Nostra, the ability to zap.
And it's a fundamental function that I think has the potential to change everything, maybe.
So I laid out quite a bit of stuff here. Let me know what you want to add further.
No, I love it. And that's why I like to ask that question because you never know where it'll take you.
You know, it's funny you mentioned running across Nostra at some point before mid 2022 and kind of dismissing it.
I did the exact same thing. I was on Fiat Jaff's GitHub looking at something.
He was some lightning based thing he was working on. I'm not a developer, but I do enjoy perusing GitHub
and taking a look at what's going on and seeing, okay, is there anything interesting that I should be aware of?
And I saw this on his GitHub. I saw Nostra, this decentralized social media and it's trying to be as simple as possible.
And I kind of glanced over a little bit and I was like, you know, I don't have time for this or whatever.
I don't know what this is. Let me onto the next thing, you know, and then it was when Will posted his beta testing link on Twitter for test flight.
And I said, you know, that was months later. And I said, oh, I remember this from before.
So now I can do this right here on my on my phone. Okay, great. Let me try that.
And then from there, you know, I was I was hooked and started actually going deeper into it and was like, why didn't I pay attention to this more before?
But it's as you said, as with Bitcoin, sometimes you need those multiple touch points to be able to say, ah, wait, this is something that I should pay attention to.
I need to pay attention to this. This could be really, really important.
And, you know, just getting into primal specifically a little bit, I think your focus on that initial user experience is so key because one of the things that I would hear, you know, when I was at Bitcoin conferences earlier last year,
when I would try to, you know, talk to people about Noster who hadn't yet tried it out.
You know, it was already a lot of Bitcoiners on there by, you know, March, April, May, but still a lot that had not yet played around on there.
And so you're at conferences and Bitcoiners should, by all rights, be the first ones to get why Noster is so important as a protocol and why in its many of its current uses as a social media protocol and network,
it is so useful and as you said, the integration of zaps is massive. It's using Bitcoin as your way to signal value on a protocol.
Like that's beautiful. But what I would constantly run into is people saying, oh, well, I just, you know, I tried this client, this client, and I didn't see anything.
You know, I wasn't seeing anyone pop up, you know, or it doesn't seem to be anyone on here. I don't get how I'm supposed to do this.
These relays I need to set up, you know, obviously basically all the clients have improved a lot since then, but that was one of the big hurdles for most people and even most Bitcoiners who should have gotten it a lot quicker.
That was a big hurdle for them was just that initial onboarding pain point not being as smooth as they expected it to be.
Because when they hear, when people hear social media, I think they expect, even though it's a decentralized protocol, they expect it to be as smooth and seamless as signing up for Twitter, as signing up for Facebook.
If anyone is still using Facebook, I'm not sure. I think so.
But it's kind of funny really because now we're at the point where I think we've actually gone, the pendulum has swung way, way, way to the other side where now it's so much easier to get onboarded onto an Oster client.
And I think it always was, but now the clients like Primal and others have made it feel so much easier.
Like it is much easier to set up your account on Primal than it is to set up a new Twitter profile. Like it's night and day difference.
You're not having to stick in your email, not having to do any authentication, anything like that.
You just download it, generate to a key pair. Okay, set up your profile. Great. You're good to go.
Save those like you would any password. And oh, by the way, if you want to create a Bitcoin wallet, here you go.
That's an amazing experience and it takes literally seconds to do it.
And I'm curious if you're able to talk about it at all, how were you guys able to get around some of Apple's restrictions on the App Store with inline on post zaps or on note zaps?
Are you able to talk about that at all? And are you at all worried about Apple having any weird shenanigans in the future where they try to kneecap you guys?
Is that a concern? Or I should say Apple in the USA especially.
Well, yes, I'm able to talk about it definitely.
And we just like all other Nostra users have been frustrated with what happened there to Damos and how Apple threw its weight around and just decided nose apps for you guys, you being iOS users.
And we analyzed that alongside other Nostra developers looking at different pros and cons, looking at different ways we could actually get in there and try to get apps back into iOS.
And we noticed that another Nostra developer current app, they have an app that essentially was able to get zaps back into the iOS platform just by offering a custodial wallet and a simple small in-app purchase.
So we just experimented and kind of tried to implement the same thing. Our wallet is a little bit more elaborate and there is not much discussions going on with Apple when you submit apps, especially as new developers.
From what I understand, they don't really discuss, they don't like to discuss things even with much bigger developers, much bigger publishers because they don't want to open a can of worms.
They're really after monetizing the app store and they've gone to court against the likes of Amazon and one. So it's not reasonable for us, you know, lowly Nostra developers at this point anyway, to expect some sort of audience with Apple and some sort of even kind of reasonable discussions or anything like that.
All we can do is build apps, submit them to the store and look at the feedback and wait for approvals. This sucks as a model for building software. This definitely is problematic because in this day and age under this model, you don't as a kind of software developer,
you don't ship a product when you say it's ready, you ship a product when Apple says it's ready. And same goes to a lesser extent, similar situation is on Google. So this is a problem.
And you can kind of, you can approach a couple of different ways, you can say, well, we're not going to pursue, you know, placing zaps into iOS clients. We're just going to give up on iOS and make Android a lot better, improve progressive web apps,
do it like look at all the alternative ways that we can offer these features to users. Or our kind of take on it is that this early stage of Nostra development where we kind of need all the users we can sign up, we need to kind of increase network effects around Nostra.
What we had primal decided to do is to do our best on every platform and form factor imaginable. And iOS is a massive part of it, of course, there are so many users in iOS and we just need to do the best we can to provide the best possible experience there is in the best possible feature set on iOS, given all the constraints.
So it was evident that Apple for whatever reason, I'm not really, I don't really understand their logic, I must say, for whatever reason they don't seem to like non custodial wallets. So basically, when you when you connect through Nostra wallet, connect to an external wallet, and
use that to zap individual notes essentially to provide tipping on the note level. They seem to be okay tipping profiles so sending sats to people individually like directly, but they don't like the idea of tipping content using this method.
And all I can think of there like they never provided as far as I understand they never provided some sort of elaborate explanation to to the damos team or anyone else they just said no you can't.
And my guess is that they're trying to protect, they're trying to not make precedence they would jeopardize some of their bigger cash cows elsewhere. And they're more than willing to sacrifice Nostra user base, which currently is a rounding error, but that's going to change.
And I think at some point the balance of power changes here. We're just not there yet. So to answer your question, are we concerned about this. Yeah, we are. I mean, we, I don't know if this is the final solution. You know, our product was approved multiple times already like in the app store we didn't ship the very first feature that very first version that was approved.
So we went through the approval process multiple times without any issues on iOS when you submit when you create enough purchases that each individual in a purchase also needs to go through the approval process. So that was fine as well.
So for all we know what we're doing is fine with Apple, but would I bet that this is absolutely the final solution forever? I don't know. But we're going to use this time to sign up as many users as possible and to put sats into the hands of those users so it can start zapping as much content as possible as well.
I love it and it's so absurd to me. I remember when very vividly when Apple let will know that they were going to remove Domus if he didn't take out the note level zaps. Again, the profile zaps as you said were okay, but the note level and if I believe if I'm remembering correctly the slim justification that they gave was that it constituted providing, you know, monetary value of the
digital content. Like they were viewing it as an actual exchange of money for content, even though it of course that's not what's happening at all. It's just like a tip, right? It's a donation if you will.
It is. It's completely just arbitrary where they're saying okay, even though we've been explained multiple times, I think we'll even manage to get somebody like a human on the phone a few times, which is shocking for Apple. But I guess it shows that maybe the Noester community, even at that time being very, very small, must have made enough noise. So that's a good sign, I guess.
Imagine once we have a couple of friends in high-poll places maybe. Yeah, that helps, I think. But it's just it's a ridiculous thing. And I guess it's one of the, it's a good reminder that even with a decentralized protocol, if you're still utilizing centralized services as gatekeepers, that is always going to be an attack vector.
So it's obviously if it's a web-based app or a progressive web app, that's a different ballgame, right? But if we think about PWAs, if you, Apple could very easily make PWAs extremely difficult to use on their devices as well without batting an eyelash.
So it's a tricky balance to keep. And you know, I'm curious, is the reason that they're okay with, so basically if I'm understanding the flow correctly of what you guys are doing now, yes, you're allowed to do note levels apps.
And that's because when users are onboarded, they can receive Bitcoin by buying it with Apple Pay. Do they take a cut of the purchase of those Sats or because it's through Apple Pay, do they say, okay, it's all good, this is still flowing through our channels, we're getting a couple percent on the back end either way.
And so we're fine with it. Do you know any of the intricacies of how Apple makes that judgment?
So first of all, yes, Apple is taking their cut and it's more than a couple percent. So they're taking the full 30 Apple tax. It's not 30% in every jurisdiction, it's actually 15 in US and Canada, and 30 everywhere else.
So when you do an in-app purchase of Sats on the Primal app, this is kind of the tax you're getting hit by. This is part of the reason why we limited these in-app purchases to only $5 at the time, because these are not cheap Sats and we don't want people paying too much money for Sats.
By the way, Primal doesn't make any money when you do an in-app purchase of Sats. So there's a fee that Apple charges and our partner is strike as well. They have a 1% fee there as well.
Primal doesn't make any money there. So they never provided the full explanation to us as to why this is okay and why we are approved. We just got approved.
My interpretation of it was that it's kind of, or my rationalization of it is that it's similar to, let's say, I don't know if Spotify is a good example, but I'm going to use them.
So on Primal, you sign up as a new user. You don't have any Sats. You can gain Sats. You can get Sats by doing an in-app purchase. And if you do so, you're paying the Apple tax.
And then you're part of this kind of system on Oster where you can zap around. However, you don't need to buy your Sats through an in-app purchase.
The receive function of the wallet works the moment you activate it. So if you already have Sats, you can just activate your wallet, hit receive and send yourself some Sats and then use them for zapping.
So this kind of pattern is in some ways similar to, let's say, I don't know, let's say Spotify or let's say in-app purchases of books and Audible or things like that.
Apple wants a cut, like their cut if you're buying content through them. But if you bought it elsewhere and you happen to have it and you're accessing it through your iOS apps, they seem to be fine with it.
So there is a parallel here. I really don't know if this is the answer, but that's how I'm rationalizing it for now.
I mean, it seems like a reasonable analogy anyway. It is just such a shame that they are so opaque as these gatekeepers because obviously the iOS market is massive.
And I believe you guys are also developing natively. You're not developing cross-platform, right? It's native building on iOS and you have two separate code bases for iOS and Android, right? No cross-platform development.
That's a lot of work.
It is. That's another one of those trade-offs that we talked about previously where we could have done React Native and probably have shipped both apps months ago, but we decided that we want the best possible UX and the best possible performance and to leave no stone unturned, as I mentioned previously,
which means going native on both iOS and Android and there's basically no overlap in terms of code. There's no code reuse between the two platforms even though it's all been done within the same team.
So yes, that's kind of our take on things.
Now, it's a slower road, but ultimately you're going to be providing a better experience in the end. So I think that's admirable that you're going that way. I'm curious. I want to switch gears a little bit and I want to talk about something that's obviously a concern now on Noster,
but I think will become certainly a bigger concern as more and more people become aware of this network and that is spam content moderation and how to best handle that because obviously people are already spamming.
There is already certainly been content posted that should probably not be posted. There are some people who would go to one extreme and say, you know, post absolutely anything you want, nothing should be stopped, doesn't matter what it is.
And there are other people on the other side of the spectrum who say, well, listen, certain things should absolutely not be posted. This, you know, it's ridiculous that you'd even think that it should be completely free.
And then I think a lot of us, at least myself, I fall in the middle where I view it as it is, you know, up to essentially the relay that, you know, whichever relay you may be using to set whatever rules they want, right?
If you don't like the rules on a relay, you can, you know, publish your notes to a different relay. That's kind of the beauty of Noster, right? It's not that it gives you complete freedom from censorship. It's just that it gives you censorship resistance where it's, I like to use the analogy of like a hydra from Greek mythology.
Like you can cut off one head, tool grown its place, you have options. You have that optionality to say, I don't like this client. I don't like this relay. I don't like their rules. So I'm going to use another one.
Or if you have the ability, I'm going to build my own. But I'm curious how you guys, because you're obviously with your caching services and I want to dig into those a little bit too.
But with all the services you provide, all the data that you're aggregating, you have exposure to basically all of Noster, probably as close to a complete network view as you could get.
So how are you guys thinking about handling spam, handling content moderation and I guess what concerns do you have going forward as we see more and more growth in this network?
Okay, there's a lot going on there. So let's go. I'm done. This is a great topic, maybe the most important topic.
So first of all, there are no gatekeepers on the protocol level. So Noster as a protocol, there's no specific person or company or organization that can say what's allowed what isn't.
So that's massive right there. This is kind of what Jack Dorsey was talking about that this core shouldn't be owned by anyone. It needs to be a public, a common good like and be based on a protocol.
So we do have that with with Noster. Now, the next question is, how do you provide content moderation on such a radically open network where anyone can post anything?
I'm going to guess that most people are don't want to see everything. I certainly don't, right? Like, but who should decide what I get to see? I think I should decide as a user.
And each individual user should have the tools and the power to decide how they want to shape their Noster views and how they want to shape social media and web views in terms of content moderation and etc.
So the way we are approaching it at primal is we, well, first of all, we build apps and services for Noster. So in that respect, we'll, I think we're a little bit unique at the moment and Noster usually developers either decide to build apps or services.
We decided to kind of build to kind of play in both of these areas. Going back to our original goal of providing best possible UX. This was just necessary.
So, and I think this is a great long term strategy for primal, where we build apps for Noster and then we build services and these services include the indexing service that I mentioned, which provides full text search of Noster, the caching service, which is kind of an acceleration service that provides very fast response times for commonly requested content.
Then we have the media hosting service. We have classification services like things like identifying spam and not say for work content and so forth.
So we're kind of running all of these services and we have kind of the UI, the apps that the users are using.
So, and by the way, our entire stack is open source. So we are realizing that some of these things that we are doing are introducing centralizing factors to Noster, specifically any sort of a service has the potential to centralize around itself if it's too successful.
Right. So, so we realized that by running an indexer for Noster, that people are utilizing that this is introducing a centralizing force to Noster. So we're not happy with that. And our solve for that are our way to mitigate that is to open source it.
So to make sure that and by the way, we're open sourcing it under the MIT license. So the most permissive license word literally giving it away.
So you anyone can stand up their own caching service their own indexing service, etc. based on primals code and set their own rules and so forth.
So the dream is that these services and clients are built in such a way to make them interoperable with other Noster services and clients.
So and I think we'll we'll get there in 2024. I'm pretty excited about where things are going, you know, working closely with other Noster developers as well.
It will be amazing if in primal or any other Noster app, you can say, yes, I'd like to I like the UI of this app, but use this indexing service and use this media hosting service and use this content classification service, etc.
So you're kind of opting in into things as a user. And then from primals point of view, we want to make sure that primal is that kind of client where you can select these types of things as a user.
But also that our services are such that they are provided in a standard manner so that users of other clients can decide, oh, okay, well, actually, I think that primals content classification service is pretty good.
When it comes to, let's say, spam detection, I'll subscribe to that.
So the the this is the social media and this is online publishing in the web as it should be, I think, where you have a number of open services that are operated by different actors, and the user has the control to opt in or opt out into any one of those services in their journey.
I think that that is such a truly beautiful concept. And it's one of the things that's genuinely so exciting about Noster is that you have the option to choose, right, and one could make the argument that well with platforms you can choose whether you use Facebook or Twitter or
Instagram or TikTok, but it couldn't be further from the truth really you you simply have the option to choose completely different silos, completely different walled gardens, where where you cannot take any of your following with you you cannot take your audience with you
and you cannot interact with the same people. It's such an incredibly powerful thing that on Noster, where whatever client you spin up that key pair on, you can take it and move it anywhere else, without any penalty, taking and able to still communicate in the exact same way, and no one can stop you from doing that.
It's just a beautiful and powerful thing. And I think that, you know, again, right now, we're seeing implementations at the social media level, right, we're seeing analogues to Twitter, some that are more Instagram like that are clients that are focusing more on that visual
experience, you know, grid type experience. I think we'll see clients that are trying to emulate something like a TikTok, where you know what we're just going to feed you and focus on video based content, and maybe that filtering is done at the relay level for whatever client is running that relay.
They're also just filtering it right there. And that's the beauty of it, though, is that you can basically choose your adventure on Noster, you can choose your experience. And back to what you said, just when it comes to moderation, it's not about someone being the arbiter of yes, this is good, yes, this is bad.
It's about giving people the right to choose that for themselves, which is completely new. I mean, you don't have that right on other platforms, or I should say on platforms, you have that right on Noster because it's inherent, right, you have to it's an opt in, versus maybe we'll let you opt out.
I just think that's such an incredible thing. I'm curious to cut you off like, oh yeah, no, please do profound thought. Yeah, with other platforms, you can opt out of the whole network, really, that's your only option, right?
That's it.
There's silo as you mentioned. And with Noster, with these types of services that we're discussing, you will not only have the option to opt in or opt out of any individual service, but also, we need to set the standard wind to set the bar higher than that even where it's the services that we're offering, they need to be transparent as well.
So not just a yes or no, take it or leave it type of thing, but here is the algorithm. Here's the source code of the algorithm. Here's what we're doing exactly. And you know that this is the true algorithm because you can take the whole stack or any part of the stack, stand it up yourself and see the results.
And then there's the third part, which is verifying what's coming out of the algorithm. So I think, I think we should set the standard so high. I mean, of course, Noster is a permissionals protocol so anyone can build anything they want on it, including completely closed clients and services and close source, you know, indexers and things like that.
I'm not sure, but I think primal is the only open source indexer for Noster right now. And somebody please correct me if I'm wrong there. If there are other open source indexers love to take a look and collaborate and so forth.
But yeah, this is this is a new world that we have going here. And even though there aren't too many of us in terms of absolute numbers, you know, we're talking about maybe a couple hundred thousand people who are active on Noster, which is a small number in in the global context compared to other
kind of legacy social networks and but what we've accomplished here, sprouting this type of a network with so many users that hold their keys that use dozens of different clients that are all built on the same protocol on the same open social graph.
This is really outstanding and quite magical, I think, and to be a part of it so early, like I feel very, very privileged.
Amen to that. It's a it's really kind of an incredible thing to see how much collaboration there is between different client developers within Noster.
That was something that really stuck out to me at Nosterica was this wasn't a bunch of competitors getting together.
This was a bunch of collaborators who may be working on different projects, but also realize that with Noster arising tide lifts all boats.
Users are always going to have that optionality to jump clients. And so it's really a great motivation to help each other to each make sure that there is that interoperability because you're all building on the same stack.
That's a lot easier to do.
But then also just that the more the network itself grows, the more every client developer is going to benefit because all of their numbers are going to grow up and everyone has the incentive to make their client as good as it can possibly be to compete in the free market.
Because again, users have that optionality. And I think that that's a it's a really incredible thing that even in this I mean, in this is very free market protocol based system.
There is so much collaboration and camaraderie between the different developers.
That's just a it's a beautiful thing to see and it's such a far cry from what you see in the legacy world where everybody's keeping their algorithms close to their chest and trying to steal users from each other and you just obviously every client wants to be the best client right.
But they realize that even if another client is succeeding, that doesn't mean that they're going to fail. And I think that that's a powerful thing.
It's extremely powerful. And not only that, if you see another client succeeding, it doesn't mean that your client is going to fail.
On the contrary, what you know, even if we look at things from the purely selfish point of view, let's say primal's point of view. For primal to be successful, we absolutely need there to be at least half a dozen or a dozen top tier highly successful
of Nostra clients for our pitch to be, you know, credible that Nostra really is different than the legacy media.
There need to be many credible alternatives and many kind of top tier clients.
So we it's in our interest to help the rest of the ecosystem improve.
I think that that's that's such a brilliant way to put it. And it's also a good kind of segue into talking about how Nostra grows. How do we hashtag grow Nostra?
How do we onboard more people and I'm curious to get your take on the next wave of adoption. Let's see, because adoption typically happens in these kind of waves, right?
As we discussed earlier, maybe now it's feeling like it's in a little bit of a lull. But before you know it, there's we just know that there's going to be slammed with another wave of new, new Nostra just flooding onto the protocol.
And I'm curious if you think that are these next few new waves, let's say into 2024 2025, if those will be driven by client based enhancements, new features, new functionality, things at the UX level.
Or if you think it's more just going to be a matter of running away from the legacy systems that more and more people are going to realize they don't have the freedom to speak that they thought they did on these legacy platforms.
So, you know, is it going to be running toward something, which is running towards great features, great functionality, great user experience, or running away from something, running away from that legacy walled garden that they realized they were trapped in.
I'm curious to your take on that.
I think it's going to be both. And we, if we just stay focused and keep building the best possible kind of UX and feature set on top of this open protocol, we can count on the legacy players messing up repeatedly, you know, we don't know when it's going to happen and how it's going to play out,
but it's pretty much guaranteed that these steps or things will occur. And if we have a credible alternative that seems to be growing and not going away, like we said with multiple touch points with Bitcoin, you know, people thought it would go away, you know, like a year or two into it.
And then a couple years later, still there, but bigger. I think something similar will happen with Nostar for these types of for the cohorts of users that are quote, running away from stuff.
What excites me more is building things that people can run towards, you know, and building this great UX around as apps and integrated wallet, I think is a part of it.
I think the biggest, the biggest factor is going to be great content. And to the extent that we're able to onboard content creators, who are probably more receptive to the whole kind of censorship resistance and ownership pitch than regular users are,
to the extent that they're curious and are able to get onboarded and get get have great UX and credibly be able to invite their audience to join them as well.
I think as as a whole kind of industry as a whole space, all the clients combined, we still have work to do to make that UX onboarding UX better.
We've gotten a lot better in recent months, but there's still a bit more work to do, I think, and we're probably talking in terms of months where everything is going to be super smooth and all platforms, right?
So then then it becomes easier for somebody who believes in the ideals that Nostar is kind of bringing to actually invite their audience and say, hey, it's actually easy, just do this, and you'll be able to follow me there and so forth.
And when it comes to kind of interesting, unique content, I think we're already starting to have some of that. It's kind of it's early days, but it's delightful to see these types of things happen.
So for example, if you if you want to kind of see Jack Dorsey talk openly about what happened at Twitter, well, he's going to do that on Nostar.
If you want to see Snowden be openly riffed with the plebs about his thoughts, that's going to happen on Nostar. That is already happening on Nostar.
If you want to tune into Lynn Alden and kind of get some of her less official takes and kind of get get to know her a little bit deeper, that's happening on Nostar.
You know, the UK, Odell, you know, Preston Pish, you yourself, you know, like a number of people are kind of using Nostar is a different type of medium.
You guys post things or Nostar that are that you wouldn't post on Twitter, even though you have probably a bigger audience on Twitter and whatnot.
It's already shaping up to be that type of a medium and that's something really unique. And that's something valuable that people are going to gravitate towards those who are interested in and following the, you know, the thought leaders who are kind of somehow speaking more freely on this platform.
I think honestly, that's such a great pitch to potential users of Nostar that you have because I agree.
Nostar feels like a place where you can be more raw, be more authentic, be more unfiltered.
And maybe that's part of it is because it's it still feels small. It still feels like this little community of people out there.
But it's a growing community. And as you correctly pointed out, seeing people like Jack, Snowden, Lynn, just to name a few, just say things that you've do not see them say on Twitter, and also go into detail and take a much more personal tone than they would on Twitter.
It's really powerful to see that. And, and you truly can't find it anywhere else. Now you can find it on any single Nostar client you use, but only on Nostar.
It doesn't matter which client you're seeing it from, but it's only happening there. And I think that that is a great selling point for people at this stage.
I'm curious, you know, I view that as a truly outstanding pitch for new users. I'm curious what at this stage right now, and with the growth in mind that we have for the protocol in terms of network growth and users, what is your pitch to content creators because I agree that
that's an incredibly important demographic because those are the people who make the platform, you know, everybody who's using it is creating their own type of content, right? But we're here specifically talking about people that are content creators.
You even look at somebody like Tucker Carlson, who is now making X his news distribution platform. That's huge for Twitter X. And that's because he creates content that people want to see and they know they have to go there to do it.
So to other content creators or to Tucker Carlson, what's your pitch for why they should check out Nostar and why they should especially check it out now in its early stages?
Well, as a content creator, if you value sovereignty, Nostar is the only game in town really. There is no second best. There's only Nostar. So on Nostar, you can create your profile. You can post content and you can have kind of censorship resistance
assurances to the extent that you replicate that content on a number of different relays. And you truly own that content and the, and your own identity and the social graph that comes associated with it. So all your entire following is not going anywhere, regardless of what any individual
client, Nostar client or service wants to say about it. This is what Nostar gives. And I think this is Nostar uniquely provides this. I'm not aware of other platforms that can do our protocols that have are able to provide this to such an extent.
On top of that, sorry, sorry. No, no, please. Second part of the pitch, of course, has to be related to zaps. Nostar has like a monetary network that is attached to it, where you can use, you know, Bitcoin lightning payments and monetize your content directly from your audience, where
without any middleman or intermediary, your users are able to pay for content and reward good content with tips and so forth. So those those are, that's a powerful combination of features that Nostar brings to the table.
And it's not just theoretical. There actually is a network, you know, a vibrant growing network of humans who have already been on boarded and are using it and having a lot of fun every day there. You know, like, I kind of tuned out of Twitter or X for quite a few months now, mostly
because I don't even have time to, you know, browse Nostar most days, but I got in the other day and it's like, man, the vibes are so low. It's it's really it really is doom scrolling.
So I guess that would be maybe a third aspect of the pitch, both to users and content creators. The vibes are just a lot nicer, a lot better on Nostar. I don't know if that's a function of it being a very small network or not. But it's, it's a fact.
So let's see what happens as it grows from here.
I mean, three valid points for the pitch. And I think it's, we're going to look back in a few years at the idea of zaps. And I think Dorsey said this when they first came out that this is the first fundamentally new thing for social media in a very long time,
because it's the highest form of signal you can possibly have, which is monetary value. It's not just a like which can be spammed. Sure, a retweet gets you out to a larger audience, but it's still something that can be very easily spammed.
If you want to spam zaps, at least there's a monetary cost. So it's decreasing the incentive to spam them, right? But more so than that, it is genuinely the most pure form of signal that somebody could give you to say, I value what you are doing, I value what you created.
And I'm showing it to you by literally sending you value without a middleman. And there's no YouTube taking a cut. There's, you know, no, no middleman to say, hmm, we don't actually like that particular thing you said.
So we're not going to allow you to monetize that video because you said fuckity fuck fuck too many times. So now you can't, you know, can't make any money off that video.
It's like, no, no, no, your fellow users decide what is valuable to them and reward you accordingly. And I think that that is beautiful.
And I'm curious, because something I've been, excuse me, thinking about a little bit is for creators.
Are we going to see the rise of creator specific relays or content specific relays that are paid relays where I am a creator. And let's let's just say for the sake of example, off the top of my head, I am posting pictures of my feet that people really, really want.
But I'm only posting those pictures. I'm only broadcasting them to my footster relay. And if you want to see those feet, you need to subscribe to that relay and it's a paid relay.
Do you think we're going to see more of that. And then the other flip side of that is curated content specific relays where we say that, okay, on this relay, we whatever notes we get broadcast we filter those out for the users and we only serve to
them. Notes that have, again, for example, feet, or only food picks, whatever it might be. Have you guys thought about that at all? Do you think that or is that is that sort of filtering something that should just be done at the client level versus the relay level.
I'm curious to get your take on that.
Sure, we think about these types of things all the time as do all other master developers and there's debates and things like that. I don't know how it's going to play out. And what I know for sure is that we collectively are going to try all of those things.
Everything is allowed so everything will be tried. And this is another massive, massive strong points that Noster has. No one can stop you as a developer to try that. So people will do it. And we'll get to see we as users will get to witness it all go down and we'll vote with our sats and our patron patronage and stuff like that.
But everything will be tried and probably the best ideas will bubble up to the top and gain the users and the support and this is how it's going to play out in the end.
That is kind of the incredible thing about this being completely open. If it can be tried, it will be tried at least by someone and the cream will rise to the top because again, because of Zaps you have this ability to really get so much to get such better feedback than you would in a traditional network.
Even just thinking about the insane pace of development from you guys, from Will, from Snort, from any of these clients over again, it's about to be one year ago tomorrow that I joined Noster.
And it feels like there's been something new released by someone every hour of every day to where as you said earlier, I can't even begin to keep up with it.
Pablo is out there just this wild card building things all the time as well.
When he came out with highlighter just out of nowhere, I was like, well, this is amazing. What a brilliant thing.
And that being based on Gigi's writing purple text, orange highlights gave him that idea.
And so he just built it and people like it and it's useful. It's so incredible to see. I feel like with open protocols like Noster, you have this feedback loop that is so much faster than in traditional platforms where you're developing in the background, in the dark with nobody watching you.
And then you roll something out to users and the features that you roll out are based on what you focus grouped with some agency focus group for you.
And you think that people are really going to like them and you roll them out and it turns out people hate them.
And those features stick around for another two weeks or a month, a couple of sprints until you decide to roll them back because, oh my God, turns out the market hated this.
On Noster, it's like, oh, I had this idea. So I built it. What do you guys think? And people will tell you in real time and you can tweak in real time and you're building it in the open from the start.
And that's just, it's wild to see that actually happening.
And I mean, I'm sure you guys get so many different requests for enhancements for features, you know, constantly somebody is adding you saying, oh, this, this is great or this sucks, this works, this doesn't.
And that's probably frustrating at times, but it's also so powerful because you're getting great feedback in real time.
And I'm curious what, you know, what you guys are kind of focusing on what's, I know you want to finish up the browser and the Android app by this next little while here.
The browser to me seems very complete already. So I'm curious what the final final form will be.
But what else are you guys really excited about in terms of things that you're working on right now that you think is going to really get folks on Noster really excited.
So first of all, your point there about user feedback and feature requests and many, many bug reports.
All of that's music to our ears. Any developer worth their salt will appreciate all feedback, even one star reviews.
If somebody took the time to, you know, provide that feedback with a one star review and basically whatever the comment is, like this product has no redeeming properties, obviously it's a one star.
And this is what bothered me about it. That's way better than radio silence radio silence.
Well, so you launch a product is the case of death, right? It means nobody cares, right?
So I think at primal and like many, many other Noster developers, we are getting a lot of feedback and it can get overwhelming sometimes because like the bar is being set by these, you know, multi billion dollar companies that have been at this for like 10 years.
And people like, well, how come you don't do this and this and this? It's like, yeah, we'll get to it.
So, but, you know, we're quite happy with what we were able to accomplish with a very relatively small team. We're only six people actually in a short amount of time.
And what comes next? Well, yeah, we'll finish off version 1.0. Beyond that, we really like, you know, things, things that are, we like to see what's taking off on Noster.
So obviously the social media aspects of the network are have taken off. Definitely. That's probably the most used, most used content type on Noster.
Probably the second most used is long form content, long form textual content. And for me, this, this is extremely important.
This type of content is kind of falls into the same category of online speech, online textual speech is what Noster really excels at.
And guys at Habla and Blockstack and others are doing an amazing job and love to see like all their progress.
So I think we would, you know, we'll focus on integrating long form content into primal clients in a nice way.
And I kind of, the level of UX that people have come to expect from us where hopefully that type of content will get more eyes and encourage content creators to write more of it.
We'd love to see, you know, we already have, excuse me, we already have a decent amount of content when, I don't know how much time you spend on Habla, but there's just some very thoughtful pieces there.
But I think we can take that to the next level and start competing with the likes of Medium and Substack, etc. To me, that's a very important kind of segment of the market that Noster is uniquely equipped to dominate, honestly.
So that's very exciting to us.
I completely agree on the long form side of things because it just makes sense to use Noster for this kind of content.
Because again, in contrast to Medium or to Substack, whatever it may be, you're still using a walled garden of sorts versus being able to take your note, which just happens to be a long form type note and blast it out everywhere.
And it's accessible everywhere on all of these different clients and some of which are purpose built for the best experience with long form, but still accessible for the others.
And I would be very surprised if we did not see a huge influx of journalists in the next couple of years because to me, it just makes sense. You have the ability to freely publish whatever you want.
You can directly monetize it without needing to clutter your web page of your news site with a bunch of ads.
And you know that if you're for a person or for an organization, you could run your own relay and be able to make sure all of that is backed up so that you're not going to ever have it taken down by whatever the hosting provider is.
And that's hugely powerful. And I think at the place we're at right now in the long arc of history, more and more people are starting to wake up to the fact that it's not free speech unless everyone has the ability to speak and to be heard.
Now, those on the receiving side can choose not to listen, but they can't choose to silence you.
And so I hope that as more people wake up to that, we're going to see that larger influx of people who say, wow, this is a new paradigm.
This is completely, I'm not in the walled gardens anymore. I'm in the open field and I can speak freely. I can post freely and nobody can take me down, can shut me off.
And I think that's a really powerful thing. So I hope we see more and more journalists try out Noster.
Yeah, I think what's going to happen is we'll see real journalists flock to Noster for all the reasons that you mentioned.
And of course, on top of that, we have the monetization aspect as well, where they will be able to get rewarded for their work by the users directly.
So where the whole advertising model gets cut out of the picture that the entire web is kind of based on and with its perverse incentives.
And you end up working for your users, you end up working for your readers.
If you're a journalist, for us, we're app developers.
We would like to monetize by, you know, directly, you know, providing services to the users without having to rely on advertisers.
We'd love to be in a place where we just all work for the user all day long.
I think that's a beautiful world and we're going to get there.
Just because you mentioned advertising, I'm curious and you and I have spoken a little bit about this idea before of ZAP for tising.
And for those who are not familiar with this concept, it's the idea of a person, a brand, an organization zapping you with a message included with their ZAP or a link or a video, whatever it might be.
To get that message directly in front of you by assigning monetary value to it, but also depending on what client you're using, it may be shown at the top of the stack of other ZAPs if it has a higher value.
I'm curious if you've thought any more about that, just the general concept of ZAP for tising. For me, it's still, I believe, a really viable way to increase the monetary value that is flowing around the network.
And it's also a bit of a chicken and egg situation where in order for people who want to advertise to bring monetary value to the network and spend it on various notes, they need to know that the network is going to give them a return on that investment of theirs,
which requires more user growth, more content creators, more diverse types of content. But I'm curious, your thoughts on ZAP for tising in general, have you guys dabbled with any ideas there or where are you at with that entire kind of concept?
I think you're onto something there. And we'd love to step in and experiment with it a little bit after we ship version 1.0. So that's one of those like multiple, you know, it's on our list of things to work on.
Long list.
It's a long list, but it's pretty close to the top of the list. I really think there's something there. And I'll actually reach out. Once we get into that to kind of discuss some UX around it and see how we can, how we can do this effectively.
I think this falls into that category of everything that we talked about, which is it's allowed. So it will be tried. And I think we'll just see many experiments around that. I can tell you we from Primal, we're definitely going to participate in those experiments.
And we'll just see what sticks.
Yeah, absolutely. I know I'm currently still experimenting with it myself at my personal podcast brand level. You know, whenever I send off his app, I'll just throw in a link to a video or to an episode that I've just released.
And at least then if somebody decides to take a look at it, they know that I've given them some value. I also do it on posts that I still find valuable myself. So there's a beautiful flow of value in both directions.
And if I can ask just on the topic of value in general, you mentioned you have a team of six. You guys have been building on this open protocol, Noster.
Can I ask, are you guys fundraising? How are you basically, or how are you thinking about monetizing? Because obviously you've got to keep the lights on. You've got to put food in the table. You've got to pay your developers.
Can you talk about that at all? Just what are your thoughts on that? Because I know people are, it's a very polarizing thing. Should you raise money? You know, should you go to VCs?
Should you raise from friends and family? How should that be handled with Noster? And does it change the incentives at all? So what's your take on that?
Yeah, this is an important topic. And I think many people are rightfully cautious about getting VCs involved at such an early stage of protocol like Noster.
Luckily, you know, Noster is one thing. It's a protocol that cannot be coerced by anyone. And then we have a number of teams, mostly very small teams working on building clients and services and so forth.
And most of those teams are either self-funded or there are kind of beneficiaries of some grants. Luckily, we have open Sats that are managing a substantial pool of money for Noster terms for open source Noster projects.
So that's great. We have not applied for a grant, even though all of our everything that we do is open source, we have decided to go the VC route.
So we raised a seed round from 1031 capital and hive mind ventures and a few angels back in April or May this year.
So when selecting the investors, when selecting the VC partners that we work with, we were extremely careful to work with the right people.
So you want to make sure you're perfectly aligned when it comes to the long term vision for this network.
And at the time when we were negotiating these deals, our plan actually was to open source the caching service because we saw that, you know, the danger of that if we keep that closed that it would centralize the network, as well as the clients.
But some parts of our back end, we wanted to keep closed source kind of as an edge, the analytics and so forth.
And then a couple months later, after we had raised, we decided to go ahead and open source everything.
And I was delighted to see like, not that we needed any sort of permission from our investors that we don't have that kind of a deal with them, but still, you know, you want to, you want to, you know, keep everybody in the loop.
And I was, I honestly respect their opinion. So I ran this by them, and it was a unanimous immediate yes. This is absolutely the best move for the network.
And we got full support from them. We don't get any of those. Oh, yes, baby, but wait a little bit, wait a year or two.
No, it was it was very, it was it confirmed that our choice of VC partners was correct. So we are funded for like, we have run away for another year or so.
Right now we're not focused on raising, we're just focused on building. It's a nice place to be. We can, we can build for a long time with this and and that's what we like to do.
We like to focus on building.
That's, that's incredible. Just hearing that story of a startup deciding to open source all of its code after fundraising and having your investors say, yes, great decision.
That's something that and I'm not super familiar with this space only recently becoming more so. But I have to imagine that's a pretty rare occurrence in typical VC land.
I think you would have usually gotten shouted out of the room for suggesting that you were just going to be giving away all of your, you know, trade secrets.
But but it goes back to the point of a rising tide lifting all boats for this network. You know, as the network grows, so does the value of all client providers who are building on top of it.
And it's, it's great to see people actually put their money where their mouth is from the investor seat and say, yes, we believe in you guys and we believe in this network.
So we want the network to be as great as possible because that's what's going to make your products, your services ultimately as good as they can be in the long run.
It's a it's a very low time preference mentality versus the short term thinking high time preference. Keep it close to the chest. Don't tell a soul.
It's really, really inspiring to see honestly.
Absolutely. And that's a point that's not being made almost ever in the context of VCs in Nostar. The handful of VCs that are, you know, participating in this space, you have to give them a lot of credit for their courage and their vision and kind of for being mission aligned on a long term basis to be with us on this.
Because they're taking quite a bit of risk. They're taking the usual startup risk. Most startups don't make it. I know I've had quite a few who didn't, didn't make it.
And then you're taking on top of that you're taking a protocol risk. That's a compound risk. Like, you know, if, if you're investing in a Nostar based startup in May of 2023.
Well, that's a long shot. But that's the investors we were able to, you know, get on board, show the courage and the long term vision to be with us and then to support us moving forward.
So that's to be respected. I don't think they get enough respect actually. Usually like Nostar people, they like to, you know, I guess maybe there's trauma around, you know, the likes of Twitter getting coopted by, by the financial interests.
You know, according to Jack's, you know, story. So that's understandable. We need to be vigilant. But also let's not overcorrect. Right. Like there are some really good players, good actors in this space that are actually going to help us grow.
It's, it's great to see and it's a, it's really a testament to open source focused VCs, you know, or ones that are at least open to open source. It's not something you see every day.
And I hope that it starts more of a trend in that direction. I think a lot of these Bitcoin only VCs, that's all part, you know, it's weaved into their ethos because they are true Bitcoiners and they want to advance open source freedom tech.
And yes, they also want to make money because there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with being a capitalist.
Capitalism really just means you are creating value and other people find what you have created valuable and give you their value for it.
And that's what you guys are doing here. And I'm, I'm really glad to see it. And speaking of value, your time, I know is very valuable. So I want to be conscious of it because it is scarce.
Before we close out, and I've really just loved this conversation here today, totally different topic, but are you reading anything right now when you're not developing and building that you would recommend?
I just finished the mandibles.
Okay, I still, it's still on my shelf. I, Carlo Reddit, I have not yet. So did you enjoy it?
Oh, I enjoyed it quite a bit. I thought I thought the author nailed many of the details of kind of society that starts to disintegrate after the money stops working.
She like I was able to draw many parallels to to my experience back decades ago in Serbia. And yeah, it was at the same time kind of sad, tragic and hilarious.
Like so many hilarious anecdotes. The characters were great. And actually some of the, some of the events that she described actually transpired in my family, like almost verbatim to do to the way she described it.
So maybe I'll share one if that's okay.
Please. I love it.
One of my favorite characters in the book is this fiat economists economics professor called Lowell. And he's my favorite character because he continuously gets wrecked throughout the whole book.
He just keeps getting wrecked and keeps kind of stubbornly, you know, hanging on to his beliefs and continues to get punched in the face. So that was that was delicious to just, you know, observe.
But one of the one of the scenes was like he gets, he gets a bunch of back pay from the university and goes to the grocery store. We're talking about months of back pay goes to the grocery store and is not able to get the groceries with the money he got.
And then he just leaves in disgust. And this is precisely what happened to my dad. He was a university professor, not of economics, thankfully, of computer science.
But he got his, I think, monthly pay, like a whack of dinners. He went to the grocery store and had like a list that my mom provided couldn't pay for the groceries.
And he just left. He just like picked up and left. My mom wanted to kill him, of course, because like what do you mean you got nothing. We have people coming over tonight and all of that.
But it was one of those moments that kind of hit me as like, Hey, this is very real what she's talking about. This is not, this is not fiction.
So hopefully it's a cautionary tale. And, you know, one thing that she got terribly wrong is Bitcoin. But I think she came around since, you know, in her book, Bitcoin doesn't make it.
It gets one sentence in the whole book. Bitcoin didn't make it, basically.
So there's a lot of hope that we Bitcoiners and nostriges are aware of. And that's, that's kind of nice to be in that hopeful part of the society that are kind of observing all of this and is building the alternative, the alternative financial system.
And also the alternative media is is and communications is what we're doing in Austria. So it feels good to wake up every morning and work on that stuff.
It's, it's such a true thing that these two protocols side by side and sometimes overlapping no stern Bitcoin.
They do provide so much hope. Like I think for myself, probably for you, for many people out there, the world would seem a very, very dark place, devoid of much hope if it weren't for Bitcoin and no stern, because it and not just at the protocol level,
but at the people level, the people that you see spending their time, their energy, their life's work building on these, because they realize them as the most important things they could be working on.
That's so inspiring to see. And I'm so grateful to you, to all the builders out there who do that hard work. So thank you very, very much.
And now for anyone that's listening here, go check out primal primal.net. It's available on the app store. Should they just search primal primal no stern?
What's primal?
Best to search for them.
I'll link it in the show notes as well.
Anywhere else they should go or that that good for now, I'll link you as well. But let me know primal.net is good and or you can search for primal in the app store.
All right. Well, man, thank you so much for your time here today. I really enjoyed this. Bitcoin is scarce, but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant.
So thank you for spending your scarce time to join me for another fucking Bitcoin podcast. It's been a pleasure and I look forward to doing it again.
I hope let's do it. I love the reminit of it. Thank you, Walker.
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 Bitcoin podcast.net or hit me up on social media on no stir. Head to primal.net slash Walker and on Twitter search for at Walker America or at Bitcoin podcast.
You can also watch the video version of this show on X or on YouTube by going to YouTube dot 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.