They don't actually have to throw you in jail anymore.
They just turn off all your money.
We are now in an arms race,
and we're on the losing side by default, for sure.
We do not have as much money as them.
We do not have as much resources as them.
We might be ideologically correct
and morally have the high ground,
but since when did that mean you won?
You must play their game by their rules.
As soon as people stop doing that,
then yeah, they get scared for good reason.
Unless we just say no,
we will end up like China,
where shit works and it's really cheap
been pretty effective and efficient and all the rest, but like don't step out of line.
We need to get out of this trap of thinking that we have to be building Nostra specific
things.
A handful of curious people will realize that like, hey, wait, what's this thing built on?
And like, how can I'm seeing all this other content from other places?
And how are people paying me Bitcoin?
This is crazy.
When people talk about freedom tech, like that's, that's literally what it is.
You're like helping people that for them could be a life without situation.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast.
Bitcoin continues to make new blocks every 10 minutes and the value of one Bitcoin is still
one Bitcoin. If you are listening to this right now, remember you're still early.
This episode is brought to you by Blockware. What if you could lower your tax bill and stack
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Head to the show notes for links to find the show on centralized social media platforms and
on Noster or just go directly to BitcoinPodcast.net, you'll find it all there. And kind reminder
that you can support this show by becoming a paid subscriber on Fountain. Or don't,
Bitcoin doesn't care, but I sure do appreciate it. Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin
talk. This is all kind of like still very much emerging. I'm always very pleasantly surprised
when things work out as they should it's like oh okay sick like we're totally wild i mean it is
kind of wild yeah yeah you're like looking at something like oh yeah it just the message just
arrives oh cool okay yeah right the thing decrypted properly wow okay wow look at that we are we are
doing this without the need for uh youtube or uh rumble you know rumble is not too bad at least
they like run all of their own servers and have a i would say a more favorable attitude towards
free speech people saying things yeah but you know towards like just saying stuff uh right
problem being of course that it's still like well there's still a throat to choke there
you know and and like that's where i think i hope that we see more live streaming services kind of
pop up in and around noster because it is such like it's such a massive culture generally just
like streamer culture i didn't even know that until i started kind of like looking at some
this stuff and it's like holy shit it's wild some of these twitch streamers it's just insane and
people just watch them just like i don't just like hang out all day i'm like it's television
you guys aren't even talking about bitcoin yeah yeah yeah like what do you do it's crazy um like
i worked at a startup that did video streaming it was like an api for video streaming so um you know
other platforms would use their products or whatever and like just the amount of tech that
goes into you know transcoding on the fly being able to do live streams of really really low
latency you know they specialized in like you know tv broadcast type things and so it was like
latency of under two seconds is like what they were aiming for and like to get that is just insane
it's like how do we even have the tech to do this like you can beam something across the world in
you know just a handful of seconds but you know right after it happened and it can show up on
someone's screen like insane it is just wild like and i think it's got to be i feel like we're
probably of this, we're the interesting like, uh, age group where we're not full digital natives.
Like we, we remember, well, I'm actually not sure of exactly how old you are, but I'm guessing.
We grew up with it basically. Yeah. We grew up with it. It sort of like came about while we were
kids and it was like, Oh, exactly. This is a thing now. Yeah. It's like, you know, we remember like,
you know, there was a time before wifi kids, you won't believe it. You know, like, you know,
it's crazy. You know what that sounds like too. You know what that sounds like. That sound is
seared into our brains, right? The dial up. I mean, totally. But then there's this whole new
generation where it's like, they, this, this is just the air they breathe. It's the water they
swim in. This is all totally normal. I mean, the idea of buffering, like anything buffering
is just like, what do you mean? What does that, what does that even mean? I don't even know what
that word is. Is that an insult? Is that a racial slur? It feels like it is. It's wild. Like shit,
just like shit works really well. It's also though, like a lot of it works so well because
so much the infrastructure is so centralized right like because you've got massive aws instances
all over the place and then you see what happens when you know what was it aw one of the aw east
it's always east one it's always us east one is that yeah and like like half the internet
seemingly was just not working right which is just right or cloud wire like that's another one
like i saw the cloud fire thing was literally somebody just wrote a bug like it was just a
memory overflow issue um you know standard run-of-the-mill software bug uh and actually
no it wasn't it was an unwrap it was it was in rust and there's this method that you calls unwrap
and it sort of like opens up this object that you get back from most methods but they always say like
you know one of the very first things you learn when you're learning rust is like don't use unwrap
in production like you're only allowed to use it in like tests and things like that because if it
fails okay it just errors and crashes the whole program and somebody did this in production on
cloud flare and the thing just it started up again and it was a crash startup crash startup crash and
so like until they found that they weren't able to like turn the thing back on basically um so
hilarious though like one small software yeah yeah and in the meantime like shit breaks like like
potentially very vital infrastructure shit breaks right and it's like oops sorry like fat fingered
that one you know like i mean that's basically it though right like that's you know when you think
about that like we have built this crazy you know it started out as a decentralized network and it's
slowly become more and more centralized and it's um you know in the past when we had something that
was so infrastructure mission critical we had like proper protocols and like people that were
you know looking at this and they were very careful about how they changed like think about
nuclear power plants right they had like big notebooks full of like this is what happens if
error code four sets off and like these are the four or five things you're supposed to do next
and like no one cares they're just like i don't know merge it looks good code's good let's go
yeah and then the internet falls off it is just kind of nuts yeah yeah and i've just rated myself
on on noster boom nice look at that how refreshing man jeff i'm i'm stoked we're we're doing this
right now and hello to everybody who's already joined on noster what i love about live streaming
these things on noster because this was never meant to be a live streaming show but then zap
stream came about and i thought well well neat i could just live stream this just why not no stir
why not why not just do it but it's amazing like thank you to uh to manny oh and thank you to brian
who just sent zaps uh that's just awesome like it's still it does not get old it doesn't matter
i i give i give a lot of grief for one sat zaps uh but you know as a fun joke but a zap of any
amount is still worth more than than just a like right it's that's totally a beautiful thing that
we're able to do here. So it's great to be doing this beautiful thing with you here, man. It's a,
thank you. We saw each other in Lugano and we were like, we, we need to rip a fucking pod together.
We need to do a podcast. Yeah. We've been trying to do it for a while. And I feel like it's just
been like ships passing in the night. We see each other every, you know, couple of conferences and
it's like, bro, we got to do the thing. Yeah. We got to do the thing. Okay. And then we're doing it
now. Life, life intervenes. Well, you've been building, right? You've been doing a lot of
building. You've been busy. You just got, you just got back from, just got back from Africa,
right yeah from the africa bitcoin conference down in mauritius and i say it's my first time
to africa and technically yes mauritius is africa but it's like 2 000 kilometers off the coast of
southern africa out in the indian ocean so it doesn't really feel like my idea of what africa
should be like right right but it's amazing like it's tropical paradise that's for sure
i saw some pictures i think that btc sessions and gladstein posted i was like dear lord this is
insanely beautiful. Yeah. I've heard also very high signal conference. Yeah.
Very high signal conference. Yeah. Very interesting. Very different. Um, you know,
just being able to hang out with a bunch of the African Bitcoiners that, I mean,
they've just got to build stuff in such a completely different way. Uh, you know,
because of lack of internet or lack of electricity in some cases, um, certainly the lack of like
coordinated governments that make any sense whatsoever. Um, and there's just, you know,
there's a ton of countries and a ton of languages. It's like 54 countries and 42 languages. Um,
and like a large portion of those are dictatorships or author, you know, authoritarians. So like
they've got a different problem set than we have. Uh, and so it's really cool to be able to hang
out with builders there and see what they're doing and like understand how they've gotten
around all these weird constraints and stuff like that. So yeah, it was a really good conference.
Well, you see so many just really novel solutions, whether it be around, around Bitcoin or,
or whatever, but you know, I'm more aware of the stuff on the Bitcoin side,
just like even like, like much on Kura is one great example, uh,
which is just like not even something I would have thought of or anyone in the
U S would have thought of because we don't have an issue where most, you know,
people have a lot of feature phones,
but still want to be able to interact with money in that way. Like,
it's just incredible. Like you, it just goes to show,
it's like people developing novel solutions for their individual problems,
their local problems and creating stuff that is just like,
that's not going to be created in the USA, right?
Cause there's no need for it.
Nobody needs that product in the USA or, you know,
maybe they will in the future.
I don't know if we go back to future phones, but like for now, no, you know,
and like, that's just amazing.
Everything stops working. Yeah.
Well, right.
I'm curious too, was,
was there a pretty large focus on Noster and just general,
like let's say decentralized communication protocol stuff there,
or was it, was it still, I mean, heavily, mostly Bitcoin?
It was quite a lot of Bitcoin, but to be honest, there was a lot of focus on both just communications in general and very specifically how to do private communications and how to do communications safely.
So it was really cool.
We had a couple of the engineers from the White Noise team gave a talk at the BeTrust Dev Day, which was sort of just before the conference started.
Max gave a really great talk on the main stage about what we're doing with Marmot and everything.
Um, and yeah, I talked to a ton of people that were needing to build, you know, uh, encrypted
communications and encrypted messaging into whatever their products were.
And so it wasn't like, Hey, we're, we're doing this as the product.
It was like, Hey, this is a part of our product and we need some way to do it.
And like the thing looks like this is going to be perfect.
You know, I think Noster was not, uh, new to anybody there.
Um, you know, the, the most like new people were to, it was like, Oh, I didn't realize
you could do all these other things with it.
But like everybody knew about it.
everybody knew what it was and like, you know, kind of what his general purpose was.
They knew about the notes. Maybe they just didn't know about the other stuff yet.
Exactly. And they knew that all of it was transmitted by relays though, regardless.
Yeah. They did know about the relays. That's good. So there, there's a bunch of things I want to get
into with you, Jeff. And I think maybe a good spot to start is actually just to talk about,
to talk about white noise, to talk about Marmot. Uh, and then to kind of weave that into some of
these, these larger themes, it just seems like it's kind of serendipitous, or maybe it's not
serendipity at all. Maybe it's just a forcing function. But like all these incredible things
that folks like you and a lot of people building on Noster and Bitcoin builders, freedom tech
builders in general, are building right now at a time where it's like, Oh, yeah, actually, we
really need that, like, right this second, that's really convenient. Okay, you know, again, but it's
kind of like Africa, where it's like, these are the problems that are coming up and builders are
building solutions that are going to address them. So can we can we start out by by saying,
maybe just what is white noise? And then that can kind of lead us into a little bit of like
talking about Marmot. Sure, absolutely. It's actually this will be an interesting one,
because I usually do it the other way around. But let's start at this one. Okay. So white noise is
the messaging app that we are building, that hopefully will feel just as easy to use and
responsive and just generally amazing as an app like signal right um signal is a great product
it's been around for i don't know 10 or 15 years at this point um it's a very mature product like
there's no kind of gotchas you know exactly what you're getting like i talk to my friends
like they get the messages i get their messages back it works um we're still very early i mean
it's like incredibly early innings with white noise but um it's really encouraging that we've
been able to, in a few months, get fully in an encrypted messaging running over a fully
decentralized network.
Um, you know, they're like the guys who created the signal protocol in the first place, you
know, said publicly multiple times that like, there will never be decentralized in an encrypted
messaging because it's just a problem.
That you know really hard Um you know you you can be sure of who getting the messages when you can trust you know how you delivering these messages And if that the case then the whole thing falls apart in their mind Now I have heard them sort of retract that a little
bit recently. But I, you know, I think that it has been a bit of a, not a holy grail, but like
a very difficult problem in the kind of cryptography circles for a long time of like, how do we take
something like this, where, you know, you and I have a conversation going, but no one in the
middle has any chance of understanding what's in that conversation. How do you do that over not only,
you know, servers in the middle, but like servers you don't control and you have no idea who does
control them. And, you know, in a way that's resilient to the fact that one or more of those
servers in the middle could fall over at any point and disappear. Yeah. So white noise, white noise
has been basically that, right? Like we're trying to get to the point where we've got an app that's,
everybody's good at signal. We can do video calls, audio calls, media, everything. It's fully
encrypted and it doesn't leak any metadata about who's talking to who or when.
Which sounds pretty great at a time when if there is metadata available, it can and will
be associated with you.
And I feel like especially with as more and more systems incorporate, let's just say AI
to use the blanket term, it's like the aggregation and kind of like combination of all these
different data sets becomes much easier, right? It becomes much more trivial, I think. And like,
that's, that's not a good thing for just the average person who maybe just doesn't want every
aspect of their life looped in with every other aspect, right? Like we have privacy is something
that we should strive for. I think that you can't really have true free speech actually, unless you
also have privacy, like speaking publicly freely is one thing, but you need to be able to speak
privately freely as well and that's that's a huge thing and so i'm i'm i want to get into a bunch
more things kind of on that tangent but maybe now we can just say okay that's the stage for white
noise basically signal but with all that capabilities with all those those amazing features
but without all the metadata potentially getting linked to you without any uh any reliance on like
aws east for example which signal went down for a while we were talking about that outage earlier
like that's another thing. What is Marmot? So Marmot is the protocol that white noise is built
on top of, right? And, um, I guess a good way to think about this, um, for the kind of less
technical folks, a protocol is just a set of instructions, right? It just says, do the thing
this way so that it works in both places, right? So if I do it this way and you do it this way,
we know that our two things are going to be able to work together. Um, so, you know, some obvious
protocols that people will know TCP IP, that's how the internet works. It's how computers
talk to each other. SMTP is email. It's just a very simple thing that says, you know, the format
of the data looks like this, and then I can read it on the other computer. So Marmot is kind of a
mashup. And I'd say most protocols at this point are mashups of a bunch of other protocols.
And the two things that we are combining is something called MLS, messaging layer security,
and NOSTER, obviously. MLS is sort of an evolution of the signal protocol. So the signal
protocol for people that don't know is was the sort of thing that all of encrypted messaging is
now kind of built on um except for telegram which isn't encrypted in the first place um but you know
the signal protocol was the first double ratchet algorithm is the first thing that said okay you've
got forward secrecy and post-compromised security for messages so if any single key leaks on a
message the attacker only gets that one message by the next message there's a new key and you know
they don't have it anymore. And so it's sort of a self-healing encrypted messaging system.
And it was a really big evolution at the time. When that came out, it was a big deal.
And WhatsApp started using it and Facebook Messenger started using it. And basically,
almost everybody is using some version of the signal protocol at this point.
What MLS tried to do was basically fix the one Achilles heel of the signal protocol, which was
that it starts to get very inefficient with big groups.
So if you have a really big group of people,
you basically can't use the signal protocol
because it just becomes too slow and too complicated.
So MLS, they started working on this
kind of in probably 2017, 2018,
a bunch of like gigabrain cryptographers,
people working at Cisco, people working in academia.
And it went on and on and on
because it was an internet standard,
you know, I, uh, ITF, uh, the internet engineering task force, you know, project, and those things
are very bureaucratic and they move very slowly, but, but they do a lot of work on them and they
do a ton of auditing on them and they get lots and lots of people to be extremely excruciatingly
detail oriented about the whole thing. Um, and so you end up in the end with something that is
pretty well thought through, um, pretty well tested and, you know, has been audited, you know,
up and down, left and right for all the security and, and, you know, features like that. So by the
time this became an actual, okay, we've released this, uh, which happened in July, 2023. Um,
it, it was like a pretty solid thing. Um, and its main feature is it helps you figure out, uh,
a shared key between all the people in a group. And it helps you distribute the keys within a
group in a way that allows you to set up this thing called a tree, a ratchet tree of all the
keys you would need to talk to other people in the group. So that's one half of what we worked
on with Marmot. The other half was how do we use, you know, Noster's identity system, Noster's
delivery system relays and MLS's, you know, encryption and, and encryption and authentication.
How do we put those two things together such that we get all the features of MLS
through Nostra public relays, but also in a way that uses Nostra's identity.
Because MLS fundamentally just cares about, you know, getting a shared key and sharing those keys
around. It doesn't care. It doesn't have an opinion about where the, you know, identity of
the person comes from or who vouches for an identity or how are you going to deliver the
messages in the end? And, you know, funny enough, Nostra does those two things very, very well.
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Now, back to the show.
Okay, that was a – it's almost like you've explained this before.
A handful of times.
Yeah, just a handful.
So maybe just kind of working backwards there, the identity piece is really interesting and I think kind of important.
because obviously for anybody who's used signal and probably most people who are listening to this
will have or you've at least heard of it uh you know that one of the difficulties is usually like
if you don't actually have any prior communication with a person like you you need to basically
exchange your your signal um your signal username through another channel right you need to go through
some other channel and then of course like okay well has that channel been compromised with
somebody is it actually some you know there's so many different i feel issues that come up when you
And you talk about, well, how do I actually know that this person is the person that I'm meaning to communicate with?
Like really, if for and for most people, maybe it's not maybe it's not an issue.
Right. Nobody's trying to like a man in the middle attack your other communication.
But that's not to say that it can't be.
And so, yeah, I mean, I've seen a lot of I feel like there was a lot of I don't know if it's FUD or if it's justified criticism from some people building other distributed identity systems.
when Noster was first kind of coming to prominence,
saying like, well, Noster actually doesn't really,
like, this isn't actually solving for this.
It's not actually a good identity system,
but you guys are using it.
And obviously there's like the web of trust layer there
from the social kind of the social graph.
Is that all just kind of baked in it?
And do you think that Noster is actually like,
is this the best way that you can do this?
I mean, presumably it is because you guys are doing it,
but I'd love your perspective on that.
Just like, are there drawbacks to it
or have some of those just kind of like been solved?
Where are you at with that?
Yeah. So I actually think Nostra's identity system is probably the closest system that I've seen on the internet or in a digital realm. The closest thing that to like what we do naturally as humans.
um you know i think most of the criticism that comes from people that want to build some gigantic
blockchain of digital identity with you know whatever all these crazy systems of namespacing
and stuff like that like that's an engineer's solution to a problem that is not an engineering
you know realm right like humans are messy like we just don't function perfectly like computers
and there's no way that you're going to be able to build an identity system in the digital world
that doesn't sort of account and leave space for some of that messiness, right?
So I actually think Nostra is kind of perfect in the sense that it's pretty simple.
It's just this like one public key thing.
Yeah, okay, you've got to look after it.
Don't lose your private key.
Things get weird when that happens.
But again, there's actually ways to recover from that
using normal human social interactions that we've used for 100,000 years.
And yeah, the web of trust thing is,
I think it's an underutilized part of Nostra still.
We all know it's a big deal. We all know it's like, you know, going to be a massive part about how all this works. It's just literally like we haven't gotten there yet. But that's exactly how white noise, you know, is using identity and how the Marmot protocol sort of uses identity here is, you know, we're not using your Nostra keys to do any of the encryption, which is really important because if you were to lose your Nostra keys, you know, if your insect got leaked or whatever, we wanted to have a situation where that doesn't mean anybody gets access to any of your groups.
that you had in white noise or in any other marmot protocol app right and right now that's
the case like they won't even know your they won't even know what groups you're in because all that
stuff was on your phone or on your computer and without being on your device they don't get access
to anything um and so that's that's like the main benefit of like we embed the identity in there
and it's cryptographically guaranteed by the way that mls works um but it's sort of your nostril
pub key is buried inside of an envelope and that envelope is like you know the mls wrapper um and
so we know who you are for sure but uh we you know if your key were to leak it actually is not a security issue at all for the group or for you know your communication with other people So that super interesting I actually did not understand that part yet because that kind of
it's kind of huge.
And I think that's one of the things that people rightly worry about with
Noster is like when it comes to social media style, Noster clients, it's like,
yeah, somebody could be basically posting from your, your end pub.
If they were able to compromise your NSEC somehow,
they could be posting from your end pub pretending to be you.
but you're saying in this case, the way you guys have it architected, that all of the, like,
everything is done and encrypted locally. It's like, it's device specific in that sense. And so
basically, even if the worst should happen, you should somehow get your NSEC burned. That doesn't
mean that you are exposed to any of that risk that would come from, you know, with all these
other social protocols, like there would be that, that problem there, right? Like somebody else can
post on your behalf, can send DMs on your behalf, like all of that. This is a step outside of that
existing architecture, correct? Exactly. Exactly. And I mean, that's an important, like one of the
most important things that I kind of set out to do when I started looking at the whole,
you know, messaging thing was like, we all know Nipo4 is terrible. You know, it shares all the
metadata with everybody in the network publicly. Nip 17 was an attempt to sort of fix the metadata
problem, but it didn't fix the forward secrecy or post-compromise security, which is if my key
leaks, can the attacker continue to read stuff into the future or go back into the past and read
all my past messages? And so NIP 17 doesn't attempt to solve that at all. It just says,
Hey, we're going to hide metadata. That's all we, that's all, that's the step we care about right
now. Um, what we get with Marmot protocol is full forward secrecy, post-compromised security. Um,
and because it's in and encrypted, like you said, it's bound basically to the device and client,
you know the app on the device um that is uh that you're using and so it is still susceptible to
things like pegasus um so if you're talking about like high-end you know mercenary spyware like
that's still an issue um if your device gets compromised if you get stopped at a border and
somehow they make you unlock your device like they're going to be able to get to whatever they
want to at that point um but that's kind of the same with signal or any other app like this right
it's and then encrypted doesn't mean it's totally impervious it just means you're dealing with a
slightly different threat model. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's the thing. It's like,
we're talking about defenses in cyberspace versus if you are physically compromised. And I think
borders are just like, that is, that is in my opinion, like the highest, highest risk scenario,
because you basically surrender all rights at the border, whether you realize it or not,
like they can just put you in a box and like you're, you're as long as they like, they can
hold you there. Yeah. As long as they want, uh, they can take your device devices. Uh, it's a good
idea to cross a border with multiple devices. If, if you, uh, if you're so inclined, uh, some decoy
devices, I would, I would recommend decoy devices. But also as soon as they see multiple devices,
they're like, Ooh, this person's interesting. Let's see what they have. Okay. That's true too.
That's like, it's, it's a trade-off. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no. It's, it's, it's true. Um,
sorry. That's, that's my work phone. And the other one is my, you know, uh, organizing
illicit activities phone don't worry right exactly yeah but but it's like yeah if they if if they and
i've ever there's a lot of different uh tech out there too with like they can physically clone your
device very very quickly if they have the physical device like they essentially you know like put it
in a box and they clone it they strip everything off it and then they have an exact replica of of
your entire system which is like terrifying uh but but again like that comes back to okay you know
don't use face id when you're crossing a border because then they'll be able to unlock your device
without you having to give them a password, right?
Like simple things like that
can at least add another layer of protection,
depending on how long they want to keep you in that box, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, look, all of this stuff comes down to
what's your adversary?
Like what's your situation, right?
Most people, certainly in the West,
are not in the position where they are
against state-level actors.
You know, they don't have to worry
about getting Pegasus on their phone.
Those things cost the governments
that use them a lot of money.
They have a very limited number of people they can go out and attack with them because that's just how the licensing works.
And it's not easy to get that onto somebody's phone necessarily, right?
Like you're usually trying to use a zero-day exploit, something that can cost millions of dollars, and you want to keep it in your back pocket as long as possible.
Because once it's out in the open, it's not a zero-day anymore.
Everybody's seen it and knows what it does.
So I think most people really don't have to worry about these things, right?
like end in encrypted messaging with a passcode or a pin, you know, to unlock the app is like a huge,
you know, like miles, miles ahead of like, you know, Telegram or a lot of other systems you
could use that are not really encrypted at all. So, um, you know, I think for most people,
this is like already overkill by a long shot. Now, if you are a activist working in Africa
under an authoritarian regime, these things start to become really important. Right. And like you
said, like when you cross borders, you probably wipe your phone completely. You want to have
distress pins that you can punch in when they ask you at the border and it can like nuke all the
chats in your app. Like maybe it doesn't delete the app, but it just either hides all the chats or,
you know, maybe it does delete all of them. Who knows? But you, you have to have options when
you're in that situation. Um, and kind of back to white noise. Like I've, I started building white
noise when I went to the first, um, the first time I went to the Oslo freedom forum a couple of years
ago um hrf's like main event of the year and i just sat there for two days like bawling my eyes
out like listening to these stories of these activists and you know people from you know
really horrific situations and it was like like we can do something about this with technology
and like when people talk about freedom tech like that's that's literally what it is you're like
helping people that you know for them this could be a life or death situation which is fun but also
totally terrifying because now that thing is like half built i'm like oh god oh no we better do this
really really well right so so so speaking of half built can you give us kind of an update for where
you are at right now with the with the app and then where you plan to go like just generally
what's the broad roadmap yeah so i mean i think um i mean this time last year i mean maybe it's
more like october of last year that like up until then i really wasn't sure that this whole marmot
protocol thing was going to work at all. Um, we were still very much trying to research like how
we were going to fit Nostra and MLS together. Were we even going to be able to get this to do
anything on a consistent basis? Um, and about last October, I sort of hit the point where it was like,
Oh no, it goes like, it's going to happen. Um, you know, I had done enough tests at that point.
It played around with stuff enough at that point to, to kind of know, yeah, we can get a really
work, uh, you know, well-working system here. Um, and then I built a kind of prototype version of
the app um ahead of oslo the freedom forum this year and we did a bunch of user testing with that
prototype app um while we were in oslo we talked to about 20 different people and some of them were
bitcoiners some of them were activists some of them were just interested public um but we had
like a you know kind of script we walked them through and we had them use the app a whole bunch
and tell us about their situation and then we compiled all of that into kind of this big research
report and went, okay, from all those learnings, what do we need to do now? And the answer is
basically throw the app away and start fresh and start from a point of view of trying to address
some of these like really big pieces at the beginning. So right now the app is, it works.
I would call it beta software, early beta software. You know, some of the cool things it can do that
Signal still can't is you can run multiple accounts on the same device. So you can sign in with as
many, you know, in pubs as you want, uh, and then have conversations with people from any of those
at any point, you know, while you're using the app, um, which I don't think there's any other,
uh, encrypted messenger out there that allows you to do that yet. Um, we've got things like images,
uh, in chats now reactions, replies. Um, the cool thing about the way white noise works is it's
actually just a Noster event inside the chat. And so when you're sending these encrypted messages,
you know, back and forth, all you're doing is sending Noster events, which, you know,
we've already got a whole slew of Nostra events.
So when you want to do a reaction, you know,
you use the right kind and you send a Nostra event.
When you want to reply, you do the exact same thing.
And so we kind of already have access to whatever we want to show in the chat.
It's just a matter of like, you know,
designing the little thing to make it look right.
So that's kind of where we're at.
Yeah, that's kind of where we're at.
Like one thing that we've been working on a bunch over the last month or so
was to sort of figure out how we were going to do notifications
in a really privacy-preserving way
because that's the other place
where you potentially leak a lot of metadata
is how do you get a notification to somebody's device?
And there was a study there recently
that one of the team came across
and we were sharing around
and it was basically like a review
of all these major messengers that are out there
and how they do notifications
and how badly they are leaking information
all over the place.
In the worst case,
it's like they send all of your message content
in plain text to apple or google because then they're exactly like there's tons of stuff like
this right um you know lots of the notification servers can see who are all the members of the
group and like when they're talking to each other and like you know they can very quickly form a
pretty clear picture of what's going on um signal again is probably the best of the best in this
area they do a lot of stuff to like blind who's sending what make sure that you can't see um you
know who's in each of the groups um when they send a notification to apple and google it's blank
it's basically just a notification to say hey device wake up and download the stuff from the
server um and so we ended up with kind of a variant of what they're doing um but more suited
to like how nostril relays work and so we will have to run a notification server um that's just
a you can't get around that if you're gonna get notifications from apple or google um but the
notification server we run will be basically stateless. It will have almost no database.
It will just take in a list of encrypted tokens. It'll decrypt the tokens and it'll send it to
Apple and Google again, blank so that, you know, this notification server doesn't know who's in
the group. The notification server doesn't really have an idea of what the message was.
It just knows, Hey, somebody told me to notify these people. I just turn around and hand the
notifications over to Apple and Google and they do it. So that's kind of a, that was a big question
mark in my mind. So I'm super happy that we figured out a way to do that. Well, nice question
for you, just as it relates to Apple versus, uh, you know, Google Android, uh, do you, uh, just
like personally, do you have a preference there? Cause I know some people like are like, Oh, you
don't use Apple, apples, apples, crap. It's all, you know, whatever you should use, you know,
graphene OS on, you know, your stripped down pixel or whatever. And that's the only way
the other people are like, well, if you use that, you're actually opening yourself to all
these other vulnerabilities. Like you should just use Apple. It is the most secure.
Where do you fall on this from like an actual device security standpoint?
So I think both can be pretty secure.
I think if you're going to be on Android, you should probably be on graphene.
That said, you know, I think the kind of pixel with the stock Android without any, you know, like not the Samsung flavor or whatever, you know, the device flavor is.
I probably would never buy anything from, you know, like Huawei or Zomi or whatever they are, like the straight up Chinese.
Like to me, those are just like straight spy tech.
I mean, they have to have something in them.
Apple and Google.
Okay, probably, probably maybe do.
I think Apple is quite good, especially if you turn on lockdown mode.
If you turn lockdown mode on your phone, it's quite secure.
And I've talked to some people who do a lot of really deep research in this area.
and that's effectively where my opinion comes from is like people who are working in this all
day every day trying to find you know how did pegasus get onto this person's phone and you know
they work out what those zero days are i know that they're constantly feeding data back to apple and
google about you know hey this is a bug this is a hole this is you know things and and they're
pretty like positive they're like you know these guys take it seriously they do actually respond
to us they want to know more and they very quickly will patch some of these things um so
again it's a little bit of uh knowing what your situation is and what you need um and then you
know doing simple things like lockdown mode it doesn't really actually cause that much of a pain
to use the device like you know some stuff does stop working or starts to work a bit weirdly um
but for the most part like you just go on using the phone and and you just know okay it's a whole
lot safer this way okay somebody had uh just asked kind of generally in the noster chat as well
about like sim swapping is that at all a vulnerability for for somebody who's using
white noise if somebody does get sim swapped i mean we don't need your sim for anything i was
gonna say just making sure somebody had asked but okay yeah there's there's no so again because
again we're talking about the local device here so even if like we're not talking about you needing
to do 2fa with your you know your phone number you know for it exactly because that's where the sim
swap usually gets you right yes exactly the sim swap usually is to catch that uh sms coming in
from the 2FA thing.
So I don't think there would be any issue there at all.
I guess one other thing that I'll say
is that we are in the midst of a security audit
on the whole stack.
So the security auditors first started looking
at the design of the Marmot protocol,
just the specs that we've written.
They're now looking at MDK,
which is our Rust implementation of the whole protocol.
And that's the implementation that we use in White Noise.
And so they're slowly kind of stepping their way down
into the application.
and they haven really surprised me with anything that they found but there definitely a lot of little small details And I mean they going over with a fine tooth comb Like I get a couple of signal messages a day being like explain
And I'm like, oh, okay, very fine grained.
All right, let's go into this.
But it's really good because that's exactly what you want those guys to do.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
So they're still communicating with you on Signal, though.
They're not using white noise yet.
Correct.
Maybe that's correct.
And I will say the white noise team doesn't even use white noise for stuff
because we haven't gotten those notifications done yet.
That's like the one piece that's sort of blocking us
because otherwise you just have to keep opening the app
to see if there's anything new.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
No, I mean, it's super interesting.
I do want to come back more to kind of like
some of the technical stuff,
but for a little while I want to just,
I want to zoom out a tiny bit
because again, we talked about how this all seems to be,
builders are building freedom tech
at a time when we really need freedom tech, right?
I'm very grateful for it
Because I look around right now and I see whether it's all of these new social media age requirements.
You know, you submit an ID to prove you're over 16.
And if you're under 16, we won't let you on.
But I don't know why you would submit an ID if you're under 16, of course, because they're not going to let you on.
So there's no reason for anyone under 16 to send their ID.
So it's really just a way to tie your ID to your social media accounts, which will then be, of course, tied to the CBDCs they roll out,
which will then be tied to their larger social credit system,
which will just, you know, create this totalitarian panopticon,
which is absolutely fucking terrifying.
Yes.
What are you most concerned about on that front?
Like, is it from just like a personal level?
Like, what is the most kind of glaringly horrific abuse
of kind of the free and open internet that you're seeing right now?
Christ, where to begin?
Um, sorry, that's a big one.
Dude.
Yeah, it is.
But it's, it is really top of mind for me right now.
And it's, and it's terrifying.
Um, I mean, all of these things, uh, all of these things are kind of the same thing,
right.
Um, in a lot of ways, like, you know, we have a society now and a, and a political system
that, uh, isn't really effective at doing anything real.
Um, they look at problems that, you know, society faces and they treat symptoms rather
than trying to go what's maybe the root cause of this problem um you know and so their their
ideas and their solutions are always going to be let's just put more control uh if we only had a
little more control then we'd be able to fix the problem for good uh which we're going in the wrong
direction basically you know we've seen this before this movie's played out many times over history
we go 80 or 100 years and we forget it and we do it again um and right now we're living through this
insane shift from everything is physical where it's like there's actually you know real costs
to go and like do surveillance to now it's all digital and it's actually just plug into the back
door of google's servers you know right into the you know into the pipe that's coming into one of
their major data centers and you get everything um and you can just watch everything and it used
to be even that was kind of okay because the amount of data coming through was so enormous
that no one could sift through it right but now we have a solution to that problem you know we have
these you know llms that are incredibly good at like parsing huge amounts of data and like trying
to make some sense of it or just at least being able to point a human in the direction of like
it's probably over there you know go look there um so i think we're sitting at this uh juncture
and i think the thing that makes me most frightened is that like it's a race now like we are now in
an arms race. Um, and we're on the losing side by default, for sure. We do not have as much money as
them. We do not have as much resources as them. Um, you know, we might be ideologically correct
and morally have the high ground, but like, since when did that mean you won, you know? So, you know,
I think all of those things are, are problems, right? Like the chat control stuff here in Europe,
the digital ID stuff that's being rolled out all over the place, all of these, uh, quote unquote,
hate speech laws. Um, you know, like total bullshit. Like, you know, when I was growing up,
it was like the thing that people called out in America was that landmark case where, uh,
the Jewish attorney from the ACLU defended the Nazis' rights to march through a town.
And you're like, you know, that's like a symbol of America to me, basically. I'm like, if anything,
like no other country in the world would that happen. Um, and I think America's lost that,
to be honest. Like, I don't think that would not happen today. Uh, there would be people screaming
and you know there'd be a lot of name calling and there would be people calling for heads on
twitter and like you know that's just how it would play out now um so yeah i don't know like
it's a it's hard not to be blackpilled by all this and i think the only way that like i just
try to not be blackpilled is like i just have to work harder and faster to like do the thing
um and we need to get more people involved in doing the thing uh because unless unless we just
say no, we will end up like China where, you know, shit works and it's really, you know,
cheap and pretty effective and efficient and all the rest, but like, don't step out of
line.
Uh, you know, like, and, and I, you know, I don't want that.
I don't want a world like that.
I was talking to a German friend the other day and I was just remarking on the fact that
video surveillance systems have gotten so incredibly, so incredibly good.
and all of the data that they're able to parse now
with the help of these LLMs as well,
it's mind-blowing.
It's terrifying.
And he said, I like this guy a lot,
a good guy and a good friend,
but he's like, well, you know,
Valka, it's just the price we must pay.
And I was just like, no.
No, we don't.
No, no, I don't agree.
But that's how a lot of people,
a lot of very good, well-intentioned people think.
Like, and that's the problem is that with those good, well-intentioned people thinking that that makes it way easier for the people who are not well-intentioned, who do want to just exert greater and greater control over the individual citizens.
That makes their job way easier because there's actually very little real resistance to a lot of this stuff, which is right.
That's what's troubling to me is like, it's just sleepwalking into totalitarianism.
Not only is there not resistance to it, but like people are actively doing it for them.
They're like, here's this nice doorbell camera, put it on your house.
And somewhere in the fine print, it's like, we can do whatever we want with the video.
And it's like, people are like, this is great.
Let's put this technology here.
This is great.
Let me share everything about my life on the internet all the time with my like address
and like everything else in public.
And you're just like, okay, I understand.
I understand how we got here.
But at the same time, it's like, you're just bringing it on yourself.
and and again like you know some of the things that like people always go back and forth about
like oh you know we need these systems of control because if we didn't then like the capitalists
destroy everything or you know if like if you don't like it like you should go somewhere else
and it's like but i can't bro like you won't let us leave like this is not an a system that you can
like opt in or out of like if you allowed me to opt out i would happily do that um but i can't
You know, like you are telling me that I will go to jail if I don't pay the taxes and I don't follow your laws, but you also aren't allowing me to have any sort of say into like how that stuff happens.
You know, we're well beyond the point of having a representative government, I think, in any of the major Western countries.
Certainly, Europe has probably never had a real representative government.
It's a bunch of like, you know, unelected bureaucrats that just decide whatever they want and then force all of the member countries to like implement the laws.
America's a little behind that
but like I don't know
I'm not so bullish on that either
that's I mean
this whole saga with
the EU levying this whatever
120 or 140 million dollar fine
against X and Elon Musk
the number's not even important
it's just a chump change to them
they don't care they love that
you know what it is
that sort of thing actually
is a regulatory capture
they love it because
no one else can afford those fines
except for them
so they're like keep it coming
like we'll pay a billion dollars
every single year because it's less than we'd pay in taxes to you guys like well funnily enough i
did see that eu collects more in fine revenue than they do in tax revenue for these other companies
which is hilarious but but like this this whole thing at least this saga i think the very positive
thing that has come out of it is just a lot of these these eu bureaucrats basically outing
themselves for the closeted totalitarian fetishists they are and basically you know because because
Because that's what this comes down to.
It's always done under the guise of safety or compliance or whatever else.
But it's control.
It's all about control.
And Elon is, for better or worse, the guy is a much more productive human being than these EU bureaucrats, right?
He has plenty of faults like we all do.
Like all humans do.
Like all humans.
but at least he's actually building like cool shit like fucking reusable rockets man fucking
cool just just like really really amazing science fiction stuff but like for this saga in particular
it's just very clear that when you do see people who are very supportive of the eu's measures
it's it's all i mean it's just like a lot of class warfare being used to justify surveillance
crackdowns and free speech crackdowns under the guise of, well, we can't let these billionaires
run amok with this. And it's like, it's all very clever positioning really, because it's,
you're trying to say like, well, come on, do you think the billionaire should be in charge of this?
We need to get them under check and we need to also know your name and address and have that
associated with your account. And it's for your safety. It's actually for the kids' safety.
This is really all just about protecting the kids because you can't just ask the parents to be good
parents and take away their fucking phones. No, no, no. We have to actually just subject everyone.
or don't even take away their phones just teach them how to like navigate the world right like
as we always did you know like you know i i kind of have to put this a little bit on the millennials
unfortunately because like i think you know gen x was raised without parents basically you know
those are the eight-year-olds on the subway in new york when they were kids um and i think the flip
was uh you know they ended up kind of being overprotective and then millennials had this like
you know gold star for everything mentality and like everything must be perfectly fair and like
yes perfect yay we're all we're all great and it's just not true like it's just not true people
are different um amazingly enough uh and and i think that's there is a lot of like you know
millennials kind of grew up in this like very protected space and because of that they're not
very resilient to like shit going sideways um you know from the west at least um there's still
plenty of places in the world where that's not the case but you know i think america and europe
that's certainly the case and and they've just gotten this kind of delusional mentality that like
it's you know all we have to do is make sure that the bad people don't have things and like we can
stop them if we just have enough toys if we just have enough control we'll be able to fix it and
it's just like no this is not how the world works like you're never going to be able to stop
something like here's another random example you're never going to be able to beat drugs with
the war on drugs.
Like people will find a way to use them no matter what.
There's just no way around it.
So like, why don't you spend the money and the time on like educating people, telling
people about the dangers, giving them a clear picture of like, what are they actually risking
versus not?
Because once you do that, people can kind of make it an educated guess for themselves.
And like, you know, like, yeah, some people are going to die.
Some people are going to get addicted.
That's like par for the course.
But having a war where you destroy entire governments, entire countries, entire like civilizations because you can't get your coke problem under, you know, under control in New York City, like that doesn't make any sense.
it's you know a an example of just government trying to over regulate or trying to put in as
many guardrails as possible and it's still just failing miserably that i always think of is in the
uk where it's like they don't have guns right there's no guns but somehow people still kill
people right they kill people with vans and they kill people with knives and like well they're not
going to get rid of vans so but they they like i've there's a huge spat of different uh eu
politicians and people campaigning for, we should blunt all the knives. You just shouldn't be able
to buy a knife with a sharp tip on it. Like, because, and then if we just get rid of the tip
on the knife, then people stop stabbing people. And it's like, well, they'll just slash them.
Then what are you like? Are you fucking stupid? Like, have you ever seen a kid? They'll sit down
on the ground and like sharpen the rock for like 20 hours. If they have to, they're like, look,
I've made a knife from a rock. And you're like, yeah, let's blunt the knives. I'm sure that'll
fix the problem yeah well we clearly just need to get rid of rocks too we just need to get rid of
anything sharp so nobody can hurt themselves because a specific like it's just it's insane
it's insane but like that's yeah that's when i think when you have a group or uh i it's not even
i was not we can't even put it all on on millennials you know but because like the
boomers are just as plenty of boomers yeah there's plenty of boomers i think it's overall just
do you have a mentality that government is the solution to your problems or the
cause of most of them?
And that's kind of like the demarcation is like,
do you think that if you give the government more power,
they'll be able to fix stuff or if you give the government more power they'll make stuff worse
i'm of the camp and i believe you are as well and probably most people listen to this that
the more power you give the government the worse off you are like the government is best which
governs least but so many people just honestly believe it's like if i just if i just vote harder
and give the government more power and my colored team is in power especially that's that's extra
that's an important one yeah then everything will be okay and all there won't be bad people and even
and the bad people is actually,
it's actually just the fault of white supremacy that bad people even exist at
all.
That's a whole different story,
you know,
but like,
like all of it is just so absurdist.
It's like you,
you have to really try hard not to think deeply to believe any of this
bullshit.
But the problem is that thinking deeply takes a lot of energy,
right?
Like a lot of brain power involved.
It's funny.
Cause you don't even necessarily have to think deeply.
You just have to look at some like basic things and like not allow the
overcomplication that they try to sell you to sink in.
Right. You know, like economics, like economics is not complicated. It's just like people
transacting, but you know, in a situation where both people feel like they're better off at the
end of the transaction, otherwise they wouldn't do it. And so it's really not that hard, you know,
like if you just let that happen, it's going to happen and it's going to work. But, but if you
start to put moral arguments on top of everything and you start to put a bunch of rules and
regulations on top of everything, then all of a sudden that picture becomes a lot murkier and
you're like, I don't actually know what's happening here. Um, and people can't figure it out. And then
they have to think about like, okay, maybe since I can't figure this out, I'll just listen to what,
you know, Powell has to say this month. Um, he'll tell me what to do with all my money. Um, it's,
it is wild. Like, because people just, yeah, they do have to do a bit of thinking, but I actually
wouldn't say that it's actually the harder part of thinking. It's actually the, you know, just the
not believing the bullshit that they've been fed and then just going, yeah, based on my own common
sense in my own experience of the world, like that's probably the right answer. Um, you know,
you get by a long ways on that. It's, it's true. But, and again, you would think that more people
would do this. I find that generally it's easier just to maintain the status quo for most people.
And the status quo is being told what to do. The status quo is not thinking for yourself.
inertia is very real you know this this totalitarian object wants in motion state it wants to stay in
motion right and and this is what i i come back to all the time is that this is why privacy tools are
so important this is why uh communication protocols are so important this is why separate money
separated from state bitcoin is so important it's because for this totalitarian panopticon to
continue spreading its tentacles across the world and across each nation.
It requires that you do not have privacy.
If you have privacy in a totalitarian system, then that totalitarian system is undermined
because you can speak about how shitty it is privately with other people.
And they're like, yeah, this is shitty.
We should overthrow this bitch.
We should do something about this.
Yeah.
We should do something about it.
We should drag our dictator out in the street and Ceausescu him, Romania style.
what we should do because we're sick of this. You also, you can't have any sort of true free
speech in the public sector either because again, then people can speak about the things they were
speaking about privately in public and even more people hear them. You also need to have control of
the money because you like, that's first and foremost, you need to be able to cut people off
from the money. And that's gotten so easy to do in the digital age. It was a lot harder when
everything was just cash a lot harder now it is trivial i mean truly trivial you can if you can
cut off an entire nation from the banking rails then cutting off a single individual is you know
again trivially easy to debank somebody right and that was one of the things that tools now are so
important yeah at the africa bitcoin conference that was one of the main themes that i kept hearing
repeated over and over and over again it's like they don't actually have to throw you in jail
anymore they just turn off all your money like they just turn off all your money and they turn
off all your access to your, you know, way that you speak publicly, which is all social
media now.
So like, yeah, they can stop you from like standing on a street corner on a box.
Um, you know, you could still do that, but like eventually the police will come and get
you if a large enough crowd, you know, shows up, but they can, it's trivial for them.
They just go, nope, X is gone and your bank account's gone.
Uh, and now what are you going to do?
Like you can't tell anybody about it and you don't have any money to do anything about
it.
And so like that's I think that's actually one of the most one of the most used and most effective tools of any authoritarian government right now is just that total control of the money.
I mean, and the communication like you think about Venezuela, like WhatsApp is banned.
If you have WhatsApp on your phone, you go to jail.
X is banned in Venezuela.
And so, you know, those are pretty much the most primary means of communication.
Like we've got our public square type of thing and we have the group chat that most of the world uses most.
WhatsApp is by far the biggest messenger out there.
And it's now fully illegal in Venezuela.
It has been for a good while.
It's always crazy to me that WhatsApp is the biggest because I just think WhatsApp sucks.
It does suck, but man, it works for a lot of people and it's been around for a long time.
I know.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't like it either.
Facebook of messaging apps, you know, like it's like, I don't know.
But yeah, it's a great tool still, right?
For a lot of people all over the world.
Yeah, it does the thing.
And to be honest, if you think about it,
we were actually having a conversation about this last week.
If you had to pick what was the single most important thing
that gave the single most important win for privacy in the 2010s,
what was it?
It was probably when WhatsApp turned on encrypted messaging
for every one of its users by default.
It just went overnight, click,
everybody's using Indian encrypted messaging now.
Now you can argue whether or not Zuckerberg's got a, you know,
a set of keys for the door in the back, but you know,
like there is at least a minimal, uh,
level of actual encryption that is based on the signal protocol that is in
WhatsApp.
It's better than nothing, right?
It's way better than nothing.
It's miles better than telegram. Like I know, you know, uh, you know,
I know Pavaldorov likes to talk about how it's the most secure messenger and
they've got the best encryption and stuff it's just not true like it's 100% not true by default
it's just plain text it's just going to their servers it's readable by anybody in their team
it's if you want to turn on secret messages in telegram both people have to be online at the
same time what like who does that and it's buried like four layers deep in menus so there's it's
no one uses it and so I think it's really disingenuine that he goes on these podcasts
and talks about how it's so encrypted
and it's the safest thing out there.
It's like total fucking bullshit.
WhatsApp is way safer than Telegram.
So, I mean, that is interesting
because he definitely touts that, right?
Harps on it, harps on it.
But for sure, I mean,
the vast, vast, vast majority of Telegram users
don't have Seer message.
99.9% probably are totally unencrypted.
Yeah.
And this is the reason why Telegram groups are so fast
and they work so well.
And, you know, you can have 200,000 or a million people in a group.
It works because it's just plain text using the internet.
Like it's, there's nothing encrypted about it.
There's no keys.
There's, there's nothing.
So it's, um, yeah, of course it's fast.
Like there's a reason.
So we've, we've been, uh, we've been maybe black pilling a little bit here.
Um, but I think it's, it's important to, to black pill a little bit so that we can appreciate
the white pill.
I do want to know.
Okay.
what are you like what is what is your white pill right now i mean i obviously what what you're
building is there other stuff that you're looking at outside of white noise that other people are
building or that you've just heard about recently or that you're really excited about that you're
like wow this is like fuck yeah this is a step in the right direction so yeah i said earlier like i
do feel like this is a bit of an arms race at the moment um and it really does feel like uh the major
Western governments are cracking down on privacy in specific. You know, they want to know, they want
to have your identity tied to all of your online activity. They want to make sure that they have
some way to see as much of it as possible. And it's really important that we actually stand up
and fix that right now. You know, like make sure that we carve out, you know, even if it's not for
everybody, even if not everybody's going to get on board with it, we need to keep the option and
keep the door open. Um, cause it's a door that once it's closed, it's going to be almost impossible
to get back open again. Um, so, uh, you know, to me, uh, obviously what we're working on,
I'm super bullish on, um, we can't build it fast enough. Like I'm, uh, doing everything I possibly
can trying to find people to help us in the team and contribute and things like that. Um, we'll get
there. I think another thing that I'm just really excited about is I feel like Nostra is maturing
a lot. Um, we're seeing like, you know, encrypted file sharing coming around and we're seeing,
you know lots of these projects that are aimed towards not just the social media use case You know I think Odell is like spot on Like I think we used the social media thing to bootstrap the network in a way that was really unique
and gave us a lot of runway
to then do a lot of other stuff.
And yeah, all this other stuff is hard.
It takes time.
But we're doing it and it's happening.
And I'm seeing these apps coming out
that's just like, okay, cool.
We've now got encrypted calling.
We've now got messaging.
We've now got encrypted Dropbox.
that runs on Noster and is like fully backed up.
So we will have the tools for people that need them and want to use them.
I think the other thing that I'm,
I'm pretty bullish on is there's a lot of,
I mean the coin join stuff has sort of gone a little bit quiet.
I think partially because of,
you know,
certain legal action that was being taken by the American government.
But there's still so much privacy stuff happening in Bitcoin.
That's so cool.
like silent payments.
There's a bunch of things that are happening around that to make silent payments work well
for normal users and be more adopted.
I think things like pay join are also super important.
And I think, again, like we're going to see a bunch of these just all of a sudden they're
going to be everywhere in all the wallets and it's just going to be the default.
You're not going to have to think about it.
You're not going to have to like stress about worrying, you know, how this functions and
works.
you'll just be able to give people your silent payment address and it'll just work and no one
will be able to look and see where those coins went or what address they went to or anything
so it's a lot of these little things like that that i think keeps me hopeful and again we don't
have to fix this for the entire planet we have to fix this for the people that care about it
and we have to stop thinking that like we have to comply with everything they say
that's the other piece is that you know you see our bitcoiners all the time like getting you know
kind of freaked out like, oh, well, how am I going to like account for all the taxes on my lightning
zaps? And you're like, bro, really? This is like peer to peer electronic money. We don't have to
talk to anybody about it. Right. Um, so, you know, I just think it's like one of those things of
you have to let go of the mindset of you must play their game by their rules. Um, they're,
they are completely dependent on that being the system and that being the case. And as soon as
people stop doing that, then yeah, they get scared for good reason. Um, like I just saw five minutes
ago, like the, you know, president Bulgaria stepped down or prime minister or whatever he is, um,
because the entire country just flooded the streets and they were like, no, this is not okay.
Like you, you must leave now or everything's getting burned down. Um, and he, he left,
he like was like, okay, I mean, I have to resign. That's it. End of story. Um, so, you know, I think
people underestimate their power. Uh, but it really has to start with, like we were saying
before private conversations that then spill over into public discourse. And then the public
discourse gets hot enough where it's like, no, we're not going to take this anymore. You know,
we're not going to listen to Nancy Pelosi about our insider trading, you know, for any longer,
we're going to make this stop. I say amen to that. I mean, this is one of the reasons that I'm just
still remain so bullish on Noster broadly, even just in the narrow social media implementation
that we're seeing a lot of, you know, a lot of the uptick with today is just, it seems,
and I'd love your opinion on this. You know, we've, we've kind of plot in terms of like
Noster user growth. It's, it's, it's slowed down, right? There, there hasn't been like
massive influxes. I don't know about that. So here's the cool thing. You tell me,
here's the cool thing.
A lot of the uses of Noster don't look like Noster anymore and you can't tell
it's Noster.
And so think about BitChat.
There's a shitload of Noster users that don't know they're using Noster and
that's the way it should be,
right?
It's a protocol that people don't go around being like,
Oh,
I'm using TCP IP today.
I am using SMTP today.
No,
you're just like,
I'm on the internet.
I sent an email.
Like you don't think about it,
those terms.
And you know,
everybody that uses BitChat is a Noster user.
Um,
And I think that is more and more the way we're going to go.
And we need to get out of this trap of thinking that we have to be building Noster-specific things.
We are building tools that provide value to users.
That's it.
And hopefully those users are our customers, right?
Because if they're just users and your customer is someone else, then we're just redoing the same thing that we had before.
But there's going to be plenty of products where people have zero idea they're using Noster.
And like Rabble's Divine app as well.
like this is another example you know instantaneously all 10 000 test flight uh
you know coupons were gone like three hours wild bang and then he had immediately in his dms all
the old like mega influencers from vine were like bro i can't believe you're bringing this back i
can't wait you know they're they're like freaking out because they loved it um and to them they don't
give a shit about noster they have no idea what it is um but a handful of curious people will
realize that like, hey, wait, what's this thing built on? And like, how can I'm seeing all this
other content from other places? And how are people paying me Bitcoin? This is crazy. And then
Rabble will just be like, yeah, and you can have your key. Now you're now yourself sovereign. See
you later. So again, I actually think that the network is growing really fast. We just don't
have the tools in place to see it. So that's actually another project I'm working on a little
bit of a side quest is like getting a bunch of Nostradata dumped into a very large analytics
database and building a dashboard so that we can see some of this stuff.
And some of it's just tricky because it's like,
how do you measure BitChat users?
You know, they're all technically ephemeral.
They don't have profiles,
but they are publishing good events and they are using the thing.
And I appreciate you calling that out there.
Jack had a note on Noster, of course, a week or two ago.
Noster wins if it stops trying to be a Twitter clone
and starts being the invisible layer underneath apps.
you actually want to use,
like BitChat for location-based messaging,
Divine for entertainment,
White Noise for private messaging,
Zap.stream, hey-o, what we're on right now,
for streaming, Shakespeare for vibe coding, et cetera.
He went on to say it wins by unbundling
into 50 different apps that all talk to each other
rather than one giant app slash corp that traps you.
It's all about the ecosystem.
I mean, safe to say you're in agreement
with that position.
Very, yeah.
Yeah, strongly in agreement with that position.
again like it's you know uh engineers fall into this trap all the time it's like i want to build
something cool because i want to build something cool versus i want to fix a problem for someone
um and i think we need to just keep focusing on fixing problems and watching what users are doing
with things um and adjusting accordingly to whatever that is no i definitely agree with that
and it is it is cool to see you i mean seeing the response to divine was really cool because it was
just, I think more, uh, more intense than anyone thought. I mean, especially even rabble thought
he's kind of like, Oh, wow. Wow. Like, but that's awesome. That's great. Like it's, it's striking
a nerve and it's great. And I also like the focus that it's filtering out the AI slop,
I think is really cool. Making things that are human centric experiences and finding out that,
Hey, people, yep. People still want that people resonate. Yeah. They want the, you know, just the,
the real, the authentic, the, the personality driven, the human driven versus just so much
more generative slop, like people are already tiring of it, you know, which is like, okay,
bullish on humanity then that that's the case. Right. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean,
yeah, that like the response to divine, you know, I remember rabble showing me like a very early
version of this and like telling me about it months ago. And I was like, this is really cool.
Like I remember divine or vine and it was a big deal. Like people really loved it. Um,
just because of the format was so fun. And, uh, and I remember I was in the car with him somewhere
going somewhere and I was just like, this is going to be cool, but like, it'll probably take,
you know, it'll probably be niche, whatever. And then it came out and it was just like, Oh wow.
Okay. What? Yeah. Yeah. I, I don't think, I mean, I lived through the whole vine era and thought it
was really cool. I still don't think I had any idea how much certain people like really were into
it. It was like a cult thing. I, I, I loved using Vine and it was, it was, it's interesting
because you remember too, Vine came around and only after Vine did Instagram add video to the
app. Yep. Yep. And like that, that was a definite, they've realized, oh shit, there's been a massive
response to this. You need to get on this. And now you look at, I mean, short form video is
everywhere. That's the, that's the thing everywhere you go is short form video. Vine was just like
short form video on steroids. It was like, you know, like seven seconds or whatever, like ultra
short form. But I also like love that because it made you be even more, you know, even more
creative, concise and creative. And yeah, it's, so it's, it's cool. That's coming back. And again,
this is the thing where to your point, people are going to use that without any idea what,
you know, no stir means what they're not going to know that it's notes and other stuff transmitted
by realize they not even going to know that it is the thing that is behind all of this They just they coming for the experience So I guess a broader question is cause I think you got kind of you got two sides of like what NOSTER enables
One is it enables truly superior experiences
because of the interconnectedness,
because of the ability to create this ecosystem
of applications that can all still speak
the common language of the NOSTER protocol.
The other side is the censorship resistant,
like, you know, being able to give the middle finger to the totalitarian fetishizers, like that's amazing too.
But realistically, the people who are going to come for the anti-censorship, anti-totalitarian freedom tech,
it's minuscule compared to the people who are going to come for, hey, sick new video app.
Like that's just the reality.
But like that's kind of the Trojan horse too, right?
Of course.
You get more and more people making this protocol bigger, more resilient.
and then it's all still interconnected if and when they need it for that fuck totalitarianism
side of things which is like kind of kind of it's this it's like the sly roundabout way for bitcoin
like it's a similar thing here you're bootstrapping with fun stuff so that the freedom tech kind of
slides in unbeknownst to the uh to the would-be totalitarians out there which is just it's kind
of beautiful to watch yeah i mean it is it really is that right like i said before we don't have to
save everyone or make everyone do the thing in the exact right way right we just have to keep
that option open um and you know if it's only a small percentage of people fine for that small
percentage it really really mattered um and so you know i think that to me is like full success
on the nostril side like if loads of people are using it they don't have any idea what nostril
is super i don't care um if you know we stop seeing uh you know aws us east one go down and
half the internet turns off even better uh if people are actually able to like topple you know
authoritarian governments in africa and like do it safely because of tools we've built like icing
on the cake you know we've like fully won it doesn't matter you know like europe can put in
chat control all they want like we don't care you know like fundamentally we have a github repo
and we have no servers.
So they can ask us to do things,
but we just will not do them
because we don't, we can't.
We're like, literally, look, there's the code.
Here, why don't you fork it
and you can add your client-side scanning nonsense to it.
See if people want to use it.
I think that's, this is the right attitude, Jeff,
is like, fuck you guys.
Look, we can't even do anything if we want to.
So like, you know, what do you want?
There's nothing you can do, right?
like you you need to make the tech so that it can't be stopped and that's the beauty of no
story is that there is no single throat to choke it's a protocol like it's there's you know nobody
is in charge of it and what people build on top of it is predominantly open source which is great
because that means anyone else can pick that up and run with it and that means that it just becomes
a game of like super intense whack-a-mole for any would-be totalitarians who want to crack down on
Like you're just not going to be able to do it.
And there's something,
you know,
it's an analogy I made very early on and getting on Noster was it's,
it's the Hydra,
right?
You cut off one head.
It doesn't matter.
Two more pop up in its place.
And that Hydra is open source,
baby.
Like it is an open source mythological creature and you cannot kill it.
And that is fucking amazing.
Do you know,
that's even cooler.
I was talking to somebody recently about some local first type stuff that a
lot of folks are working on with Noster things.
You know,
Will from Thomas is doing a version of this with note deck where he's got a
relay running in the app effectively um you can imagine a place like you know whatever central
african country uh you know they can easily just turn off the internet but then you've got something
like bluetooth mesh or long distance radio you've got relays that are in each device uh so that
you're basically running locally until you get internet somewhere whether it's from a satellite
or whatever it sinks down really fast and then can send all the things that you had sent while you
were offline um and you end up with this extremely resilient network like not only to um you know
people actually turning off relays but like the relays are everywhere then and the relays move
around and they're i mean basically everyone is a relay then and so it's like you know that's the
world i'm most interested in seeing is like us getting away from this like okay yeah we got fiber
up to cables that are really fast and that's really cool and unfortunately elon's the only
guy with satellites right now um but that you know elon having satellites is still better than
the nsa having all the cables um you know and google being everything so you know i want us to
go in a world where we've got radio and we've got bluetooth and we've got wi-fi mesh and we've got
like all these different options for how we connect to each other and how we do things like that
online. Um, we're still a really long way from that, by the way. Uh, and the government is not
going to let radio spectrum out of their hands anytime soon, but you know, these are things that,
uh, you know, squad goals, like we, we got some work to do, but like, I think we can be pushing
in that direction constantly. Yeah, it is amazing. And all these things ultimately come down to a
more fundamentally peer to peer experience, right? It's, it's removed, it's removing middlemen in,
in kind of all of these different situations,
whether it be money with Bitcoin or,
I mean,
like radio people,
people really,
I think,
think about radio as this antiquated thing.
If we talk about,
you know,
like HF radio even,
but it's like,
man,
the shit works and it's incredible.
Like,
and you can do a lot more with it than you realize.
Yeah.
They forget that there's like 17 radio antennas in their phone.
Like there were,
everything is radio.
Basically everything is radio.
And,
and this is like why,
yeah,
this is why it's so highly regulated is because it's,
so unbelievably powerful, you know, you can knock planes out of the sky with it. Um, so, uh, you
know, it is, uh, some of these things that we discovered a long time ago, like they are still
very, very powerful. Um, you know, we are just using them in, in wild ways now. Uh, and unfortunately
we don't have direct access to them as normal citizens. Um, so again, you know, I love the,
the little mesh tastics and things like that, where they're starting to play with some of these,
you know, shorter distance, um, you know, mesh networks and radio signals that way,
you know, I would love to see us get, you know, ultra long wave stuff where we're able to bounce,
uh, Bitcoin transactions off the stratosphere and stuff and, you know, have them received
somewhere else. You know, I know that NVK plays with that stuff and does it on a normal basis,
but you know, I think it's, it's still a bit of a pony, you know, party trick. Um,
I would love to see all that stuff become a little bit more normal and normalized.
I wrote a white paper for that a couple of years ago, actually, that I haven't published
specifically about using HF radio waves and bouncing them off the ionosphere and using
that to create basically a Bitcoin doomsday network that would always allow you to propagate
transactions, even in the event that you didn't have internet connectivity.
Because everybody's like, well, what happens if the internet goes out?
And it's like, well, you'd have this.
Use radio.
Yeah.
Yeah. You'd need a certain, uh, basically then your,
your question becomes physical security of those sites. If you're actually,
you know, like worried about that, but that's a, that's like, again,
just different problems. Yeah. Maybe I need to unearth that, uh, unearth that.
Get it out and send it to NVK. He'll, uh, spot check it for you.
Yeah. I had actually talked to him about it as I was writing it at this time.
And he was like, let's do it. And then, you know,
and then life comes at you and then life comes at you. You know what?
I'm going to have to unearth this. I'm going to pop this up.
I'm going to wait. And if I don't see it in the next like week or two, I'm going to start bothering
you every day on Noster. Good, good. I need to, I need to go revisit it and see how I did with it.
I'm pretty sure I was just about done with it too. I just didn't actually publish it. So I'm
going to have to, I'm gonna have to pick this thing up again. You've convinced me. Yeah. I
want to be conscious of your time here. One thing I just maybe like last thing to kind of
wrap up on a little bit, vibe coding and Shakespeare. I know you just like recently
gave a, gave a talk where you were just vibe coding live and like building an app
based on user or people's requests from the audience.
Can you talk about that a little bit?
And just like for folks maybe who don't know what Shakespeare is,
like it's really cool.
I talked to Derek about this recently too.
Like it's just, it's awesome, right?
Yeah, it's amazing.
So yeah, Shakespeare is Alex Gleason's AI tool.
If you're familiar with something like Lovable or Replit,
it's really similar.
It allows you just to go in and start vibing,
trying to one-shot basically an app.
The thing is that it's highly tuned for Nostra apps.
And so it knows all the NIPs.
It knows how to go read all the NIPs.
It knows how to look at other Nostra products.
It knows how to set up Nostra login with, you know, put in your Insec here or use an extension or, you know, use a remote signer.
So it's got all these, like, you know, shortcuts and things built into it.
And it knows a lot about things like, I mean, everything from cashew wallets to lightning wallets to Zaps, like everything's in there.
The other really cool thing which is I don think many people have talked about this but like Alex figured out a way to basically build a virtual file system in the browser And so when you do stuff with Shakespeare it actually creating a Git repository locally in the browser
and doing everything in an actual file system
rather than just like, you know, trying to spin something up.
And so when you're done with it,
you can actually just, you know,
Git clone and take it somewhere
and put it on GitHub if you want
and run your app, you know, wherever you'd like.
so it's a really approachable easy to use tool but at the same time there's actually a pathway
for like more advanced people to like you know break the thing out and actually go build on it
in a real way um but to be honest like most people have pretty good ideas and they can get jakespeare
to pop it out pretty fast you know like you can go in there and be like i want to have a thing that
kind of looks like primal but instead of being normal you know posts i want it to be video only
and it will almost certainly do it well um and yeah like the the african bitcoin conference they
gave me a workshop slot and i had a bunch of time and it's kind of a mixed thing you don't know who's
going to be at what technical level so i was like we're just going to wing this and we're going to
start from the point of just like somebody give me an idea and somebody was like you know uber eats
for uh uber eats on nostor that's it that's literally what i typed in and it pretty much
one-shotted the thing immediately now now funny scenario when you scroll down and you're like
seeing these things that look like restaurants and then there's like a picture of boobs and you're
like, Oh God, Noster. Thank you. No blur hashes obviously. Uh, but you know, this is Noster still.
Uh, so it was really cool. And, and it was a good jumping off point to just give people this,
you know, uh, a bit more context around like, yeah, there's lots of different models and lots
of different ways of using AI. And, um, you know, a lot of the models that are in Shakespeare
are available in Shakespeare are open source models.
They might not be quite as advanced as something like
Claude Opus 4.5, but they're free.
There's not a company behind them taking all the data
for the most part.
And so I think that's another area where I think
we really need to put a lot more energy and focus.
And this is very much not Nostra specific,
but it's a bad, bad world that we end up in
if we've got three or four gigantic AI companies and that's it.
And that's basically what we're at right now.
We are perpetuating this centralized internet because to run these things well,
you need football field-sized data centers running at full capacity.
And it's cost prohibitive for most things and most companies and most people.
I've been meaning to play around with Shakespeare a little bit more
Um, because I am not a developer, but it's like, I, I do like to vibe.
So, you know, it will, it will do a really good job.
Like it is like shockingly good at this point.
Um, like how, how fast it does it and like how it, you know, you get to see the feedback
in real time.
Like it's a split screen.
So it's like, you can see it thinking and sort of talking through all of its changes.
And then you just see this, you know, the browser page just keeps updating and you're
like, Oh, okay.
There's a header.
Okay, cool.
Now it's a sidebar.
And like, okay, now I can see the actual content of the app.
and it just appears before your eyes.
It's really, really fun to see.
It's wild.
I can finally make a Footster Noster client
specifically for Derek.
It's time.
Do it.
It's really just for Derek.
But I think it is time.
It's time for Footster Noster.
That could literally be your next podcast episode.
Instead of doing a podcast episode,
just live stream you building Footster with Shakespeare.
It would be amazing.
Honestly, I'm super into that.
I'm going to have to bring Derek on forward or he's going to feel left out.
He doesn't want, he never wants to miss out on the feet. You know, you know,
Derek never wants to miss out of the feet, man. But okay.
Yeah. This has been a blast. Uh, do you want anything else you want to close out
with anything else? We, we, you know,
we didn't get into like super technical stuff with white noise,
but I think it's, it's more important for people to like,
especially cause you guys are still building this out for people to get the
context behind it and to understand why this is so important right now,
why we need more of tools like this. Um,
maybe like uh your your beta is still open right i'm on the the test flight it's it's still yeah
you still have some thoughts yeah yeah yeah so if you go to whitenoise.chat that's the website
um and that's got the download links for everything um we're on zap store for android we're on um like
you can just get the android builds off of github as well um and then we're in test flight on on
ios um we'll probably try to just stay in test flight until we get to a point where we're sort
of like running out of spots because it's just easier the review process is just way easier to
get to run test flight um and yeah i think our next pieces that are going into the app now are
notifications um we're doing a bit of a re-architect of some of the ways we pass data around
it's an interesting way the app is built uh it's definitely a little non-standard um but yeah
notifications we'll have audio messages really soon we'll probably have uh a bunch more like
privacy and security features before too long and the goal really is to have sort of a one point
know before oslo in may of next year um so at that point i hope we can say credibly you know with a
straight face that like this is ready for light activism you know like if you're in real danger
please not yet quite but like you know we'd love more people to try this out that aren't
deep in the nostril world deep in the you know crypto world like we want when i say crypto i
don't mean like shit coins i mean cryptography um just make sure that's clear to everybody i got
Yeah, exactly. I hate it. Um, but yeah, like, you know, I hope the app is going to be very soon to
the point where, you know, you can do the basic stuff indistinguishable from the way it works in
signal. Um, it won't have all the bells and whistles and it won't have video calls quite
yet, but again, hopefully by mid next year, we will also have video calls and things.
That's amazing. I mean, I'm very grateful that you are building this out. How many,
how many people are now, uh, contributing to the development out of curiosity?
Oh gosh. Uh, kind of like very regular people. I'd say it's probably seven or so engineers and
maybe three other people like designers and people that help on the marketing side and stuff like
that. So yeah, it's probably like around 10. Dang. That's awesome. That's really cool. It's great.
It's great. Really, really helpful. Anything else you want to leave? Did we cover, cover things
pretty well? We're going to have to do this again, especially as you guys are rolling out
more features anything else though that we didn't cover that you were like damn it walker you should
have asked me about no the only other thing i'd say is like the marmot protocol like one of the
other really cool things about the way we've done this is um marmot is an open protocol right like
we want other apps to be using marmot to build secure messaging right and so we already know
like we've got bitcoin wallets they're going to use it to do multi-sig coordination so you can
talk to the other people in your wallet um in the app with you know marmot based messaging
we also there's like a bunch of really weird interesting use cases that people are using it
for but like fundamentally i'd love to see people be able to create groups across white noise and
primal or white noise and damas or white noise and amethyst and that this just becomes kind of
the de facto like way that we do secure messaging on both nostr and in bitcoin so i would say like
anybody that's got a project out there where that might be interesting or applicable like reach out
to me. I would love to talk you through it and like help you figure out whether it makes sense.
Um, and also, you know, help you implement it if it comes down to that.
I love it, man. It's a people helping people resist totalitarian overreach. That's a,
right. It's all we can do, right? One, one step at a time. We'll do exactly Jeff. This was a
pleasure. Thank you for coming on here. Appreciate you sharing your scarce time. Thank you to
everybody who joined and watched this on the Noster only live stream. I appreciate each and
one of you. And I appreciate the zaps. That is always appreciated, even if they are one sat,
but there were some larger than one sat. So thank you guys for those. Much appreciated.
Jeff, thank you for building Freedom Tech. It is awesome. Looking forward to seeing what happens
next. Thank you, man. It's always fun to hang out. Cheers.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of The Bitcoin Podcast.
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Thank you.