million is it me or is the world going crazy
i guess those two are not mutually exclusive right but uh the world's getting crazier by the
day for sure yeah more interesting more chaotic yeah it feels like uh
it feels like we're like a heart not a hard fork like a fork in the road
There's things that are incredibly exciting, powerful, and optimistic.
And then you have other things.
I originally reached out, it was like three or four weeks ago, you were on a little vacation.
So we scheduled it for this, but it was to talk about the UK, aid verification laws,
censorship, and the importance of open protocols like NOSTER.
But things have just escalated since then.
they want to ban vpns now totally i mean once you go down this path of trying to control everything
like where does it end you kind of really need to uh you know close all the exits as they like to say
the all the escape routes yeah well i mean it ends uh i don't want to smirk here but it ends
typically with camps, suffering, mass death,
if you continue down the path.
That's why it's important to leverage the tools that we have today
in terms of open protocols
and the communications technology to get the message out.
That's the big question I have.
Are we at a point in human history where
we have all these tools at our fingertips?
Can we actually use them to prevent, at least in Western society, the devolution into pure Orwellian socialist communists, authoritarian hellscape?
Well, the open protocols give us that chance, right?
Like if we're using the legacy closed systems, we just don't have a chance, right?
Because that's a single throat to choke.
if any government makes any new rule that forbids a certain type of speech.
If you're dealing with a closed platform, it's the end of the story.
They'll just have to tell X or whoever, close this down,
and companies need to comply.
That's the end of it.
That content only exists behind their wall in their walled garden.
since they fully control it, they certainly can comply.
And the governments know that.
When it comes to open protocols,
I don't think we automatically win by default
just because we're using open protocols.
Open protocols give us that chance to kind of fight back and resist this.
But there's still quite a bit of work that needs to be done
by a lot of people to win, so to speak.
And I'm not like super gloomy about all of these things that we're seeing everywhere.
I kind of look at it more from the point of view of, hey, this is a test for us.
This is something that's giving us an opportunity to grow, to step up, assert our own sovereignty over our online lives, over our wealth, our money, our transactions and so forth.
there are a number of us who build tools for people who wish to step up and use them
and like I said we get that opportunity and it's up to us to see how we're going to use the tools
to assert our sovereignty. Yeah somebody on the bleeding edge of the open protocol
that is Noster what are what are some of the unique ways you've observed people
not only leveraging primal, but just leveraging Nostre to really stick an eye in the, or a needle in the eye of sensors or creating cool applications that leverage Nostre relays in some way to create robust applications that are very hard to censor.
Yeah, I don't even think it's about sticking a needle in the eye of anyone.
It's just like we want to be free.
The people out there who would like to censor and all these monstrous organizations,
they're doing their thing, and we're doing our thing.
We're not necessarily fighting the existing system.
We're just building a new system and enabling people to join them as they wish.
And to answer your question, lots of new stuff being built all the time.
A lot of it is really exciting.
You know, not even talking about Primal.
So outside of Primal, the cool things we've seen on Nostra recently is, for example, Jack Dorsey's BitChat app, which he vibe-coded over a weekend,
which uses Bluetooth-enabled mesh network to communicate with devices that are in close proximity to you.
Close proximity meaning 20, 30 meters, maybe 100 feet or so.
And then so you can kind of relay messages directly to one another without even needing an internet connection.
And then when any one of these users gets an internet connection, they can upload those signed messages to any relay and then replicate them further.
So this is a really neat use case, which I think this kind of network topology, I think, is extremely appropriate for Nostar.
Nostar is perfect for this because the protocol is so simple and it's comprised just out of signed messages.
And each of these signed messages can exist on its own.
has meaning. Each individual message
on its own stands on firm legs, so to speak.
The more of these messages
you have, the more sense you can make out of the network.
You can broadcast them
to those that are close to you. You can broadcast them to
relays. You can index them and so forth.
If they get deleted from any relays, you can repost them to other relays.
This type of architecture is extremely resilient and hard to stop.
So I really love this as the foundation for the new internet.
What we're trying to do here with Nostra, by the way, for those who might not be paying attention on a daily basis, we're trying to fix the internet.
We're trying to fix all of the broken incentives and the current predicament we're in, which is that basically the majority of the internet is controlled by five corporations.
So this is about building an internet worth having, and we are well on the way to doing that with Noster.
So for example, this BitChat application came out of nowhere.
Nobody was really thinking in these terms prior to Dorsey launching it
after a weekend of Vibe coding.
Then, of course, Dorsey launched the iOS version.
Then Kale very quickly Vibe coded an Android version.
I think both of these BitChat applications are now in production
like in full app stores, so App Store and iOS and Play Store on Android.
They're open source and they continue to be developed.
And it's a beautiful example of what can be done just by a few guys
and then adopted by a bunch of people who wish to kind of take control over their communications.
So that's one great example.
Another one is the work that Alex Gleason is doing with Shakespeare.
I think you can access it at shakespeare.diy.
So basically, it's an AI vibe coding tool that enables anyone to build NOSTER apps, but just prompting in English.
And what's different about this tool compared to many other vibe coding tools is that it leverages the open NOSTER network.
So there are a whole bunch of problems that you already have kind of pre-solved for you.
Like you don't need a backend because you can rely on the public relay infrastructure that already exists on Nostr, which is formidable, by the way.
I think this doesn't get maybe mentioned enough.
people compare Nostar to other networks
and often it's like apples to oranges
specifically because of the fact that
anyone can run any part of Nostar infrastructure.
That's not a very common occurrence in these type of competing networks.
But not only that it can run, there is so much evidence
that this is being run.
Any part of the Noster infrastructure is being stood up
by a bunch of different people independently
without any central planning or control.
So when it comes to relays, last time I looked,
there were almost 3,000 active relays of just people
and companies and projects.
Whoever wants to stand up a relay can.
So we end up with this public relay infrastructure
that can be used by anyone to publish content,
but also to do interesting things like build, you know,
vibe-coded apps that don't need a backend.
And then you get Noster Identity and the Web of Trust for free,
which is all open out there.
And, of course, you get payments because, like,
Bitcoin micropayments are kind of blended in with Noster.
So you have these incredible building blocks,
all of which are open.
and then you get this new generation of AI tools
which are still a little janky but getting better
where you can vibe code whatever comes to mind
and kind of plug into this network.
Try doing any of this with a closed system.
Try doing any of this with X
or any of the other closed platforms.
You just can't.
Yeah, and we're seeing it particularly in the context of BitChat
with the Android
Play Store or Google Play Store. I've seen Cali posting a lot about
the back and forth he's had with the Play Store. It's hilarious.
I mean, I'm sure it wasn't hilarious for him as he was going through this.
But it's just hilariously bad
how these systems are and how much gatekeeping they're doing
and how inept they are at this.
Sorry, I cut you off, Marty. Go ahead.
No, I was going to say, there's profanity in the name of the app.
Ah, yes.
No, but you brought up relays, which is very promising to see
because I'm having flashbacks to Nostriga in Riga, Latvia last year
where I vividly recall you on stage with Michael Tidwell.
I believe the conversation is who will run the relays.
And so I think you mentioned it.
There are 3,000 relays being spun up by individuals and companies.
I guess anchoring back to that conversation on stage in Riga around this time last year, has the sort of network of relays surprised to the upside is where you expected it to be when you were having that conversation?
Yes, it has so far.
But to be fair, the conversation was like, how does this scale to kind of global scale?
So there is definitely the ecosystem that's sprouting around Noster that kind of contains app developers.
There are probably 200 different apps that are built on Noster.
The relay infrastructure, the indexers, the media hosting services, all of these things are extremely impressive.
They are definitely surprising to the upside.
So when people look at NOSTER and compare it to other networks, usually the only metric that's used for comparison is user numbers.
And NOSTER user numbers are quite a bit smaller than something like, let's say, Blue Sky.
Like orders of magnitude we're looking at.
And by the way, these numbers are not super precise.
Yes, we do some indexing and we do web of trust analysis to understand which accounts
on the network are bots, of which there are millions, so we don't want to count them as
kind of humans.
But we use web of trust heuristics to figure out active humans.
And we're probably looking at maybe 70,000, 80,000 users who are active on Oster.
So it's a very small network in that regard when compared to something like, let's say, Blue Sky, which measures millions of users.
But these are apples to oranges comparisons because Blue Sky is ran by one company, even though they define their protocol.
I think it's called at protocol.
You know, they run the only instance or by far the biggest instance.
I think there's something called Black Sky 2.
It's a much, much smaller one.
But essentially, they control everything that happens in Blue Sky, including your account.
So basically, if they decide you shouldn't exist, you're gone.
The vice president experienced this.
Oh, okay.
All right.
Oh, yeah, that happened to JD Vance, right?
Yeah.
I think some of these things are hilarious.
People show up on Blue Sky and post something like, there are only two genders, just as a feeler, and they're gone.
They get immediately removed.
It's like, oh, guys, this is not even up for debate on this network.
And the backstory, of course, is that a lot of people who got upset by Elon's takeover of Twitter moved over to Blue Sky.
So that kind of their user base And those users are demanding censorship basically from the people who are running Blue Sky That kind of the way they like to operate online
And the Blue Sky leadership is happy to oblige.
So that's what we have there.
So going back to your question, you can't really compare Nostar to Blue Sky in that sense.
Noster, in my mind, has no competitors.
If we're looking at a truly self-sovereign network
where all the users hold the keys to their online existence,
which cannot be revoked by anyone,
no single Noster service provider has power over your existence of Noster,
over your ability to post or view content.
That's very different from all of the competing networks.
So we have people who hold their keys,
and then we have, as I mentioned previously,
many people who run the infrastructure
without any central planning or coordination.
Both of those requirements need to be met, in my mind,
for something to be a truly decentralized network.
Otherwise, it's similar to comparing Bitcoin to an altcoin.
Yeah, you might be holding your private key on Solana,
but there are a couple of guys that run that network
and you exist there at their pleasure.
So it's very similar.
That kind of comparison is appropriate, I think,
when it comes to Noster and other competing networks.
Yeah.
Matt and I were discussing this in RHR
I think two weeks ago.
Not at this point, but it feels like
when you look at whether it's Blue Sky,
Farcaster, BASE is a
what is their social network? Is it BASE?
Is BASE the social network Zora? I think it's
still based on Farcaster. I think it's the same network still.
Yeah, they're all pumping big numbers, but to your point
when you really get down to brass tacks,
like what are these networks?
They're Dino, decentralized, name only.
And there is a lot of hype around them
in the sense that Coinbase is really trying to get people to use Zora
and use USDC to do the equivalent of Zaps on that network.
But when it comes to true freedom tech, open protocols, I think it's objectively true that Nostar is a different animal than all of them, even though it doesn't have the adoption of Blue Sky.
I'm not sure what Coinbase's Zora app is at right now, but I think Nostra is sort of existing somewhat in the background, but has this slow, steady, methodical build out that is well underway.
If you actually pay attention and look at the ecosystem and the growth of the ecosystem and the number of apps and different types of apps, more importantly, I think BitChat is a perfect example of just using relays as sort of like a fallback for when you are not in a 30 meter vicinity of the person you're looking to chat with, that the sort of new open web is being built out methodically.
It's not getting nearly as much shine as I think it should be getting.
But I actually like that, too.
It reminds me of Bitcoin in the early days where you have this intolerant, transient, not transient, but sort of intransient minority that's really dedicated to building this out.
And that's the signal I look for.
It may not seem like Nostar is as big as these other things, but the sort of effort, the energy focused on ensuring that it gets built out is not only still there, but from my observation, getting stronger by the day.
Yeah, I think many of the comparisons to Bitcoin are appropriate, including this one.
um i prior to discovering nostr i tried to design my own protocol that would kind of try
attempt to solve these same issues and my protocol wasn't anywhere near as good as nostr
it was way too complicated um so when i when i discovered nostr um it was like um you know
a revelation i knew right away it was going to work and i was just interested in how good it
could get. But going back to the days when I was trying to come up with my own protocol, I knew
that a protocol like this had to be bootstrapped by Bitcoiners. There was just no other way. There
was no other group out there that has the culture of both holding keys and running nodes.
So we go back to the same point I made earlier. Farcaster, you mentioned, it's interesting.
Firecaster users are holding their keys.
So that's good.
But who runs the infrastructure?
Nobody in the Ethereum land or altcoin land
has the incentives or any interest to run the infrastructure.
So you actually end up like a few big players
running everything for everyone.
And they have pretty much full control over the network.
So Noster is different.
Noster is different.
Without any doubt, you can tell.
The specs are being kind of done in the open.
It's as messy of a process as you would expect it to be at this early stage.
But things are getting stood up.
Things are getting better.
The kind of core app experiences are improving, I think, rapidly.
and whoever, let's say, has multiple touchpoints with Nostr
with maybe six months in between or something like that,
they, I'm sure, are seeing massive improvements.
And that's going to continue and it's going to accelerate.
Just by knowing what's in Primal's roadmap,
things are going to get excellent and very interesting.
but also many other projects.
There are hundreds of them.
So it's amazing to see and I love being a part of this ecosystem.
You alluded to it.
Are we allowed to tease what's on the Primal roadmap to anybody?
I guess I did it to myself, didn't I?
Usually I don't like talking about features that don't exist yet.
I prefer to announce availability.
but at the high level
at Primal we would like to lean
more into long form content
and we've already done that to an extent
with our previous 2.0 release
we've done a pretty elaborate implementation
of long form textual content
so blogs, articles, things like that
are a main tab on Primal
and kind of our first class citizen
both for discovery and kind of consumption and so forth.
And as of recently, we shipped, you know, Primal Studio back in June,
a product that's aimed at content creators.
So we kind of completed that offering for long form content
where you can, you have kind of professional authoring environment
for this type of content.
So we'd like to lean deeper into long-form content with better support for long-form video in Primal 3.0.
So that is going to be kind of a main theme.
We're going to build essentially a YouTube slash Rumble competitor that is fully open and that utilizes, of course, Noster for kind of publishing and messaging.
But when it comes to media hosting, we're using protocols like Blossom, which allow users to post binary content or media content onto multiple kind of media servers to kind of enhance resiliency and censorship resistance and so forth.
So that's the kind of high level theme.
and by the way all of these things already exist on Noster
the specs are there, there are many clients that do a pretty good job already with videos
we're just building a more integrated experience into Primal
so that you can kind of have feeds, reads
and videos as kind of top level tabs
and maybe I'll kind of give you some thinking behind this
so there are many different directions you can go into
with a product like this.
Social media these days is defined by feeds
and some products like Instagram or especially TikTok
went super far into creating these like very addictive
kind of low consciousness,
kind of endless, mindless scrolling type of feeds
because they monetize attention
and that kind of seems to work best there.
So in my mind, there's no sense in competing with them in that kind of segment.
This isn't something we want to build.
And even if we wanted to, we probably couldn't build a better TikTok than TikTok.
Like we couldn't, you know, the types of things these guys, the amount of spying on users and kind of the patterns that these guys are willing to do to enable a product like this, we just are not interested in.
So I think the correct move for Primal is to go firmly in the opposite direction.
So firmly into kind of high signal, nuanced content, you know, long form, high consciousness content that will enable content creators who really wish to provide high signal content to their users.
We want Noster to be the best place for them.
So that's what we're building at Primal.
Yeah.
Yeah. And I've seen the benefits of this.
I mean, obviously Matt and I, we live stream RHR every week to Zap.Stream.
And the amount of zaps we've been getting week in and week out,
I think it's a material amount of money.
I think we're each making like anywhere from like $200 on good weeks,
like $700 a pop, which is crazy.
We've gotten a million sats in one episode before.
And so there is the ability to not only distribute the content, live stream the content on this distributed open protocol,
but you can monetize it in real time.
And I've always, I mean, we've had these discussions, I've always thought the ability to easily monetize the content
by combining Noster with Bitcoin is going to be the killer app that really takes hold someday.
And we're beginning to see it.
And I think the emergence of the vlogs, the vlogs of the last few weeks is evidence of that too.
And that's been like a really interesting sort of social experiment on Noster specifically, like trying to create.
And I really like that HODL sort of started this trend.
Who knows how long it will last.
It will just be a short ephemeral trend.
but I think it's fun nonetheless, but trying to create unique content specific to Nostra
that other people sort of pulls people to the protocol because that content's only living there.
He's killing it, isn't he?
Yeah.
And the Bitcoiners who are not on Nostra are missing out.
In fact, he started something that got bigger and many people are killing it now.
It's interesting.
I don't know how much staying power it has.
Maybe it has a lot, maybe not.
But one thing kind of remains constant on Oster over the past couple of years,
two, three years that I've been participating in,
which is like people are having fun there.
They're having fun with different things and experimenting with a bunch of stuff.
And some of it sticks, some of it doesn't.
But similar to what Dorsey was talking about in Twitter's early days, where he said that all of Twitter's features were kind of created by the users.
hashtag or at mentions and like a bunch of other things
were just, you know, the product people observing
how the users are using their product and then reacting
and kind of tweaking it to make it easier to do the things
that the users are already trying to do.
So there's so much of that going on in Noster.
So the Noster user base is kind of, we can say,
small in kind of global terms, but very formidable
in terms of how enthusiastic
the users are, in terms of how technically competent
many of them are. It's very interesting to build for Nostar because
many Nostar users are actually developers.
So you get this very competent feedback constantly
that helps you improve the product and so forth.
And I was kind of looking at it and comparing it to, let's say, Bitcoin Twitter, just kind of to ballpark things to try to understand, you know, the relative sizes of these communities.
And I would say it's formidable.
So for order of magnitude, kind of some of the best estimates I could get to for Bitcoin Twitter is about 150,000 active users.
And Nostra has about half of that probably.
terms of active users, we might be undercounting Noster users too.
It could be that some new users who just joined
didn't quite make it fully into the web of trust in terms of being followed
by other accounts and so forth. So we might be undercutting it, but let's say it's
half And that means if you a Bitcoin content creator and you not a Noster well you missing out on probably half of the potential audience that you could have And on top of that you get kind of new people that are getting into Noster who are not Bitcoiners
who are getting into Bitcoin kind of just because they end up hanging out with a bunch
of Bitcoiners in Noster and kind of get into it.
We have many such cases.
So there's that as well.
and I don't know if the Bitcoin Twitter group is growing
or if it's been kind of similar size over the years
but I think it's like I said interesting to compare these two groups
and Nostra is already formidable
and only one of those groups is holding the keys to their speech
yeah
it's fascinating
And that's like the big question going back to when we started the conversation on.
And I wonder if the sort of Orwellian pressures that are beginning to increase, particularly in Europe, UK specifically, do they drive people to Noster?
And that's why I wanted to catch up.
And this was like a month ago when the age verification laws, but things seem to be escalating.
There was a woman, the commissioner of children in England was on the BBC two days ago, vehemently expressing her desire to put age verification on VPNs, which would render VPN services moot in the first place.
And I was telling you, the second biggest demo that we have here at TFTC beyond the United States is the UK.
And I'm curious if you've seen any indication that people are experiencing these Orwellian pressures and falling back to open protocols like Noster.
So we've experienced some growth on Noster in the past few weeks.
And we've been trying to kind of figure out what to attribute this to.
Within the Primal team, we're seeing kind of significantly higher user numbers.
And then we don't do any tracking, so we don't really know where these people are coming from.
But we're trying to decipher if it's all American HODL bringing new users through his V-logs.
Or, in fact, this phenomenon started happening prior to him starting vlogging.
So probably that's not the answer.
It could be a combination of things.
But I think it's a factor that, you know, many people who are aware of where these types of things are leading to in these countries,
or outside of these countries too, are starting to look at alternatives.
And those who have done enough research and critical thinking might be realizing that NOSTER is the best alternative there.
So, yeah, we are seeing increased user numbers.
And probably these new policies in UK, Europe, I think Australia, too, have something to do with it.
Yeah.
I would hope that people recognize that these tools are there.
Because it is crazy.
You can't voice your displeasure in these countries
without being put on a list and having the police come knock on your door.
Which is probably good building on that point
in terms of onboarding the NOSTA for people in these countries.
Again, you have a private public key pair
and you can attach some human readable name to your profile.
And so best practice is probably don't put your real name, spin up a name.
Yeah, I mean, the process of onboarding itself is the first step.
Right away, you can see the difference between the centralized legacy platforms and open protocols.
When you create an account on X, let's say, you're given this account by this corporation.
This is something that they give to you and something that they can take away from you at any point.
In contrast, when you're on an open protocol like Noster, you claim your key pair.
You take this massive number out of the universe, and that's your private key.
So you've claimed some territory in this like massively large namespace of numbers.
And then you've claimed something, and this is yours, and then you defend it.
What a stark contrast between these two.
And then everything is downstream from there.
So I think that holding our keys and existing and operating with these open protocols is our only chance to assert and reclaim our sovereignty, both in terms of money and transactions and wealth, as well as speech and online communication and publishing.
There's just no other way.
we need to all step up and be sovereign online well those of us who are interested in that
seems to be like a small minority currently but that's fine potentially i think i'm trying to
quantify these numbers too it's like how big is the kind of world population who's even interested
in this and it's far from a majority currently maybe the pain is not big enough for most people
to be interested in this.
But I think the silver lining of things like COVID,
like what we went through during the few years of COVID,
is that many people woke up.
And if, let's say, prior to this,
maybe 1% of the population was interested in these types of topics
and asserting their sovereignty and so forth,
now we have multiples of that.
Maybe we have 5% of people.
So still a minority, but it's five times more.
And from that standpoint, things are moving in the right direction.
And the crazier these policies get, the more people we're going to have who care about this.
So all we need to do is to make sure that the tools exist for them to use when they're ready to,
and that the infrastructure is robust, et cetera, et cetera.
So I kind of tend to take the optimistic point of view behind all of this, even though, you know, you see some of these things go down and it's like, you could feel desperate, you know, like what's happening in the UK.
That's wild.
And I'm kind of shocked that people don't push back harder.
But then you, you know, look back at COVID and go like, oh, yeah, people, people take a lot.
Yeah.
People do.
It's shocking.
And that's what I wonder.
Does the quality of life have to become so degraded
that you're forced to push back and find these tools?
But we don't have to belabor the negative.
Let's talk about potentially something more positive and negative.
I think this is probably one of the sharpest double-edged swords
that exist in the world today, which is AI,
in the intersection of AI and Bitcoin, AI and Nostra,
different ways to leverage it.
We've been leaning into AI-generated video
to get the Bitcoin message out there
or help people understand the problems
that Bitcoin is attempting to solve.
And then there's many other ways we use AI
on the back end to automate processes.
As it pertains to AI, I think there's three things
I'm interested to hear from you, like how at Primal are you guys leveraging it like to build the business?
I turn these off to what have you seen in terms of unique AI applications in the Nostra landscape?
And then three, like what are your thoughts on like the cool use cases of AI to particularly from a marketing propaganda perspective that people should be leaning into to draw people?
to Nostra and other open protocols.
Yeah, I think those AI videos
are probably a good example
of how quickly things are evolving there
and how quickly these tools are getting better.
Like a few months ago,
you'd see those videos and they were just terrible.
And now we're at the point where they're not terrible.
They're actually pretty reasonable,
but you can tell it's AI.
And probably won't be long before they get much better, even from here.
So I think when it comes to AI and how it relates to open networks like Noster,
I think there's something very interesting at the intersection of open source AI models and open data.
and open social graphs and open user directories and things like that.
I think it's leveling the playing field quite a bit.
It has the potential to do that.
So, of course, currently only the biggest companies have the resources
to train new AI models.
And even though they all LARP about openness,
They kind of keep the most powerful models closed and kind of in control.
So that's an interesting dynamic.
And then, you know, we see that these models coming out from China, these guys are kind of trying to catch up and they have different approaches because they don't have access to that much kind of compute power.
because in theory, at least they can get access to the same GPUs,
but they have unlimited electricity almost.
And then they're kind of forced to optimize their algorithms a little bit better.
So we had this situation with DeepSeek a few months ago,
which was as good as the best closed models in the West.
for a week or two, you kind of have to take these snapshots in time
and kind of assess who is where,
and these things move almost on a weekly basis.
So you asked about Primal.
So we do what you would expect a company like Primal to do.
So we use, of course, AI tools for some of our internal kind of coding efforts
efforts and, you know, QA and testing and stuff like that, as you would expect.
We're not really vibe coding our products.
We're doing it the old fashioned way by hand, but there's a lot of kind of kind of AI tools
that you can use in the process to make you more kind of productive as a developer.
So there is that.
We're looking at automating some of our business processes using AI tools, and we're kind of at the beginning of that.
We're still a very small company.
We're eight people.
And I think what's interesting, standing up a new company like this at this particular moment in time,
I think these types of tools will enable a company like Primal and many other companies.
In Noster alone, there's probably half a dozen companies of our size or bigger.
So these types of tools will enable companies of our size, very tiny companies, to serve millions of users just because we can leverage our kind of power using the tools.
So that's exciting, I think.
and then of course we need to productize
some of this and offer capabilities
to our users so for example something like
Grok is extremely powerful
on X that's probably the best feature on X
currently I think it would be great to have something
like this on an open network based on an open
source model.
So this is something that we
will be looking at
down the line at some point
after we ship 3.0
with video
capabilities and stuff like that.
So yeah,
that's kind of the range of
AI
thinking that we're
leveraging that we're doing at the moment.
Grok, is this true?
Maybe the NOSTA version should be Korg.
Korg, is this true?
It is fascinating.
It's really cool to see, to your point of the individual users having agency,
not only via private-public key pairs and just joining a protocol like NOSTA
and having that freedom, you see users wanting to give back.
and I saw one of a Primal user make a commercial for Primal
using these AI-generated videos,
the one with the zoo freeing the animals from the cages.
That was really well done.
That was incredible.
Like, I woke up one morning and opened Primal,
and I saw that, and I was like, man, like, how amazing.
You know, our users are creating this type of content,
And the message was super crisp.
I recommend everyone to go check it out because it sort of kind of leaned into this whole idea of, oh, we're the most connected we've ever been.
But it's also superficial.
And the level of actual human connection is probably at an all-time low.
Like when you look at the rates of you know young people getting married and having kids and stuff like that like these things are not looking great So anyway I butchering the message here Everyone should check out this video that was created by one of our users
We've reposted it on the Primal account and also my own.
It's extremely rewarding, you know, because as you know, we are constantly in touch, Marty.
It's a lot of hard work.
We work night and day to build these tools so they are at the level of usability that users are used to.
And the bar for usability is being set by these multi-billion dollar companies who've been at it for 10 years plus.
And they're dealing with just like a closed centralized system, which is easier to develop against.
In contrast, we have a small group of people, mind you, in a bigger community, which is all open sourced, trying to catch up in terms of feature sets and UX and stuff like that, performance.
So we work day and night and it's nice, like occasionally we get these incredibly rewarding moments when, you know, when we observe people use our products and also appreciate our products enough to put in the work to create these types of this type of content.
So that was amazing to see.
Yeah.
And that's what you want to see, too.
Like, that's a signal like, all right, we're on the right path.
People.
Yeah.
feel so passionate about the product, the protocol,
that they're out there spending their time, money, and effort
to make sure that they can help push it along,
which is going back to your point about the early days of Twitter.
That's sort of what you want to see.
It's incredible.
And Sam Altman, of all people,
made a really good point years ago in some presentation.
So even though we probably don't see eye-to-eye
in just about anything, this point made sense to me.
And I remember it frequently, which is he was trying to,
I forgot it was some sort of presentation where probably to entrepreneurs
or investors, I forgot, but it was about how to spot fads,
like in terms of like big waves that are coming in,
how to distinguish between something that's going to be a fad,
you know, it's going to taper off versus something that's going to really take off.
Like in the early days, you as, let's say, an entrepreneur,
you're investing everything, all your time, probably wealth and so forth,
to go in a certain direction.
Or as an investor, you're kind of putting your LPs, capital on the line and so forth.
So how can you tell if, of course, you need to do it early for this to make sense.
So you're early.
So how can you tell if something is going to be big or if it's going to taper off to nothing?
And he said a very good indicator is how passionate the early adopters are.
that's that's the kind of that's what separates uh you know the iphone from vr sets vr sets you
know even though quite a few got sold but they're all kind of sitting on a shelf somewhere collecting
dust um and uh there just wasn't the the signal was there from the early days like the the uh you
The early adopters, even though they bought the sets,
were not that excited about them.
Whereas when the iPhone got released,
everybody told all their friends
and was flexing their new device and so forth.
So I think that's correct.
That's the correct assessment.
And then if you look at Nostra's user base,
well, we can only be super bullish about where this is going.
Yeah, a lot of power users.
And again, going back to the point I made earlier of
if you're not paying attention, you probably should be
because if you observe over time
the amount of effort being put into building out the protocol
building out apps like Primal
but other non-social media related apps as well
It's growing and it's becoming more robust in terms of the optionality of different ways you can interact with the protocol.
And one thing, again, it's already saying, I think the first real market is the market for attention on Noster and monetize via Zaps.
But it's one thing that makes a ton of sense to me is like Noster is this open protocol to create marketplaces.
The killer marketplace right now is posting content and getting zapped for it.
But you're beginning to see the emergence of data vending machines to buy AI compute and still early days there.
but even physical marketplaces, people selling physical goods,
using Noster and the MPUB sort of Web of Trust to facilitate trade.
I'm just curious to hear from you.
What is your perspective on Noster as a marketplace
and what you're seeing in terms of that maturing?
So just to back up a little bit, you mentioned AI, Noster, and Bitcoin.
The intersection of those three things is extremely exciting.
Right. Because AI agents need some self-sovereign money to, you know, do their work.
And, you know, especially the more sophisticated they get, the less likely is that they'll accept Solana or USD.
Right. So and then the ability to interface with other systems in an open matter and kind of plug into.
open networks without requiring access to proprietary APIs that can be switched off.
Right.
You have to be bullish about the intersection of those three technologies.
And as far as marketplaces are concerned, yeah, there are already marketplaces on Oster.
and the ability to utilize this open social graph
and open web of trust as it grows
to create more powerful marketplaces is there.
For example, let's take Amazon product reviews.
right
if
currently they're built
in a closed silo by Amazon
and that's it basically
you go and look at a product
and they sort those reviews
in a couple different ways
but basically
you're extremely unlikely
to see anyone there among the reviewers
who you know
how amazing would it be if you were to
look at a product or
travel destination or anything else that where user input and user reviews are kind of
relevant and important in your decision making.
And to have these things sorted by your web of trust, by the people that you are connected
to in some ways, and so that you can see how they are valuing a certain product or service.
So this is already being built on Noster and you can tell how when the internet gets open again because of Noster, how glorious this is going to be.
And guys like Alex Svetsky with his Atlantis project are doing something like this.
This is a very interesting project on Noster that people should check out that kind of showcases the versatility of the protocol.
It's not just Twitter clones that are being built on Noster.
You can literally build anything.
And the killer feature of Noster isn't necessarily censorship resistance.
This is kind of what people talk about a lot.
I think the killer feature is openness.
The fact that all of this data is open and can be combined in a number of different ways to build new experiences and new product categories that are not even possible.
currently when you deal with a bunch of closed silos.
Yeah.
I think that's a very good point.
And it's not to say that censorship resistance doesn't exist
and it's not a killer app, but I think the openness,
the flexibility with which that gives end users
and probably more importantly builders is extremely powerful.
Yeah.
sovereignty for users, builders, and creators
is a big deal. I agree.
I feel like we do this every time you come on, but I think
in terms of forward-looking guidance, we're going to adopt some Fed
speak here, forward guidance.
Dog plot coming up.
What do you see happening
primal over the next year, Noster
generally over the next year, catalyst for more people
waking up to this, is it possible to tell or do you even worry about it
as it just heads down, take it day by day, brick by brick?
Yeah, it's very hard to predict the future here
unless you're building it, of course. So I have some
visibility in what's in primal's roadmap, of course. But
If you asked me three months ago to predict the most exciting apps on Noster, I would have not said BitChat and Shakespeare.
I would have said something different.
So when you have such an open network with so many creative people participating and building without permission, the activity of trying to predict what they're going to build is frivolous, basically.
You're not going to make it.
I think it's still useful in some ways to kind of brainstorm and try to imagine things.
But the takeaway here is that we're going to get surprised by some apps that nobody saw coming that are just taking off.
And that's so amazing to see because every such app is adding more gravity to the network.
It's bringing in new users potentially.
And then those users might kind of show up for BitChat, but stay for other things, for V-logs.
and as for primal
yeah so like I said this
long form high signal content is something
that we really want to lean into as hard as possible
so we want to create the best possible user experiences
for finding and consuming high signal long form
content this includes text and video and potentially sound
down the road and so forth.
We also want to build great tools for content creators
to be able to post and manage this type of content on Oster
in a way that kind of feels familiar
from kind of the more centralized legacy platforms.
So basically to bring the long form content UX
for both users and creators in kind of highly polished shape
is our goal.
And then to lean even deeper into it.
So basically what I'd love to see is
I'd love Noster to become the best place
for content creators who wish to create
high signal content for their users.
And part of it is going to be, of course,
in addition to Zaps, the micropayments
that you mentioned that people can do
on an ad hoc basis for a particular piece of content.
In addition to that, we want to have paid subscriptions for content creators so that creators can create one or more paid tiers and create kind of simple rules regarding how their content is distributed so that they can better monetize the work that they do directly with their audience.
so those are kind of implementing all of the above in a way that's polished and just works
but also open so you know when we create when we say paid tiers these are not primal you know paid
tiers they're nostre open paid tiers that should work in any other nostre client so the specs for
this already exists. We need to just lean in and kind of implement them correctly. So implementing
all of the above is quite a bit of work. So we have our hands full with Primal, just kind of
doing these relatively obvious things. But that's kind of been the MO at Primal where we, you know,
we try to make basic things work well. That's if at the high level, that's what we do with Primal.
Yeah. No, and I, the fountain guys, they've, they've released paid tiers for the podcast and we've implemented that here at TFTC and at RHR. So if you're listening and you want, you want ad free episodes day early, ad free day early episodes of TFTC, subscribe via fountain, ad free episodes of RHR, subscribe via fountain.
But I think the reason I bring it up in Fountain for anybody who's unaware is a podcasting app that is also a Nostra client.
So it's been really cool to lean into that.
But from the content creator perspective, I've been talking to Oscar and Nick from Fountain about this.
The onus is on us as well to really drive people to these clients.
And I think I'm beginning to really understand this with Fountain specifically.
specifically. It's like you can actually make
more money, more Bitcoin at the end of the day by participating.
The onus is not only on Million, Oscar, and others building, Gleason, Jeff,
building all these clients.
It's on the end users really driving their audience.
And so that's one thing we've made a point of,
and we've actually seen it convert into higher revenue.
It's like pumping, like, hey, come support us on Noster, be a fountain,
and you'll get a better product if you do these paid tiers.
And it's led to more revenue for us.
But the overall point being is the onus isn't only on Millian and others
building out these clients.
It's on us as power users, really trying to drive our audience there as well
with simple calls to action.
And we've seen it converting pretty well in the last two weeks
as we've been doing it more.
Let's go.
I love Fountain. It's another one, kind of a very highly polished Noster client.
They existed prior to Noster, but when Noster kind of took off, they moved their membership over to Noster and they are using Noster feeds now.
And they're using Noster events for likes and trending things, also for live streams.
It's great to see.
And again, another example of the versatility of this protocol.
Just imagine everything, all the apps, all the products you're using, if they were on the same open network and you could use the same online identity controlled by you to access all of these apps and services.
That's what we're building on Oster.
Yeah, and I think building on the fountain example, it's really cool because I'll go into Primal, I'll check my notifications and I'll see somebody write a comment and there will be a fountain link to a particular episode and they're commenting on that episode so I can see it in Primal.
and it's just like in the stream of all my other notifications,
people zapping, liking, sharing posts.
But then I'll go over to Fountain
and to speak to the versatility of the protocol,
like that comment will be in a specific episode.
Like I'll go into an episode and that one comment
that was in a flood of other notifications on Primal
will be sort of consolidated with other comments
specific to that episode in the Fountain client.
and it'll aggregate the amount of sats that were zapped
to that particular episode and you get a consolidated
conversation around that particular episode in Fountain.
But in Primal, it's just in the flood of everything else happening.
I think that's a really
stark example of the versatility you can get with these clients.
Yeah, what a great example.
Because what actually happens in this open network is these
artifacts, the comments, the zaps, the episodes,
the posts, exist as kind of signed messages
that are kind of published to relays.
And every app developer gets to decide how to present them to their user And the different apps have different competencies and different kind of points of view
in terms of how the data should be presented.
So Primal is mostly kind of a social media client
with notification feeds and stuff like that.
So as Marty described,
it makes sense for us to display these events in that form.
but fountain is predominantly like a you know music slash podcast player uh and they're plugging
into the same data but they're they're showing it in a way that makes sense for their use case
and it's it's a kind of mind-blowing moment for a lot of nostril users when they log in with their
private key in in another app and see a bunch of useful content already there for them and
It's sort of like the app already understands who they are.
And there are many such cases.
There is another, for example, let's say if we look at long-form textual content, like blogs, articles, and so forth.
You know, there are already closed legacy platforms that do a pretty good job in this area, like Substack or Medium.
and when you post an article
people can comment, people can highlight
and all of those comments and highlights get
trapped inside of that closed silo
and no one will ever see them outside of it
and as a consequence that you don't even get
that much traffic
the many users using these features
where in contrast on Noster, you publish your article.
It exists as a signed event on any Noster relay.
And then any app developer can use that artifact
in any way that makes sense within their app.
Within Primal, we decided to make long-form articles
a first-class citizen within Primal.
So we kind of have a dedicated tab
and you can list all of those things there.
But essentially, in other clients,
people might decide to do it differently.
But then when you interact with that article,
when you post a reply,
or even when you do a highlight,
that highlight is a Noster event,
it's a signed event that gets published to a relay.
And then it exists in this open network
for anyone to kind of see and interact with.
And there's all kinds of experiences
that can be created around that highlight alone,
for example.
You know, Highlighter, Pablo's Highlighter
is, you know, an Oster app that's kind of for creators,
but also for consumption that kind of creates
this whole dedicated UX around highlights, right?
There's a highlight feed and so forth.
So these are just some examples
where we're scratching the surface
of what can be done when all of this exists on an open network And we very early still We still in the kind of process of catching up to the legacy kind of closed players
in terms of capabilities and UX.
But at some point soon,
we will have caught up.
And when we overtake them,
it will be very stark.
It will be like,
it will be about implementing experiences
that are just not possible in closed silos.
so all of this is very exciting
yeah
it's uh
it really is and I think
again
I don't want to belabor the fountain
point but like it is so cool
going from like primal to
fountain it's like oh I saw this in primal
like it's almost
like as a creator I think I'll just
be checking notifications
on primal we'll see
that some fountain related
link is in a notification that reminds me, all right, I've got to go over to this client
to see how this particular episode is doing.
And then I go over to Found and I get a consolidated
diagnosis on a particular episode
and a notification of Primal led me
to go take that action.
And then things sort of blurs the line of
what products are. And we've talked about this before. What is a business at the end of the day?
how are businesses going to be created in the future?
And I think as you were describing the sort of different ways
in which this is all compatible and interoperable with each other,
I think the best business builders in the future
is going to be incredible curators, right?
Like curating specific experiences for specific types of users
and specific contexts.
and just having a creative, curative mind
that is really going to set people apart.
I agree. We are seeing proliferation of content,
not least to which is a bunch of AI
slop out there, but that's getting better too. But in a sense
where curation becomes
a very important feature, maybe the feature.
So I keep repeating, one of our goals at Primal is to enable people to find high signal content that's relevant to them.
And then to provide a great user experience around consuming it and also creating it for creators.
Well, on that note, disclaimer, 1031 is an investor in Primal.
But this is an unbiased opinion. Putting my TFTC newsletter writing hat on, the Primal Publisher, is the best I've come across on Noster. You've made it so easy to just upload and publish the content in a very intuitive way.
somebody who's worked with a bunch of different
back-end publishers, not only on Noster, but MailChimp,
WordPress, Ghost, you've made it very simple,
very intuitive So thank you for that Thank you Marty That was a lot of work But you know it all open source By the way like everything that we do at Primal is open sourced under the MIT license which is the most permissive license
So that means that anyone can take any part of our code, any part of our product, and do anything they want with it, including building competing products.
Let's go.
I mean, this is how this entire network is being built.
And we are certainly standing on the shoulders of many giants to even be here.
So it's good vibes all around.
And I think good business in the long run as well to build out this open network in an open manner and bring the capabilities forward so that people can have the tools they need in their time of need, which seems to be about now.
If you're out there, you're not on Nostra yet, you're living in one of these countries, UK, I know you're second in our audience.
I know there's some of you out there listening.
If you're not on Nostra, get on.
You want to be on before you need it.
And you already need it, but you may need it more in the relatively short term.
Millian, thank you for doing what you do.
Thank you for joining me again.
Any final thoughts for the freaks out there?
well thanks for having me marty that was great um i will say you know like you said thank you for
doing what you're doing and like that's acknowledged appreciate that thank you marty
for doing what you're doing all of the things that you do like you know uh i uh grew up in
bitcoin listening to you and matt day in day or week in week out back from you know 2017 uh you
guys helped me avoid all the shit coinery just because uh the the points you guys were making
just made sense to me and i was mildly interested in ethereum from the technology point of view until
i figured out that both the tech and the people behind it are you know uh not not something i
want to invest time in so um all like there must be countless people who you guys helped educate
on these topics.
And I'm super grateful to be a 1031 portfolio company.
I think 1031 really stands out as a venture investor in the space with high principles.
And you guys really, you know, many out there LARP about being founder friendly and kind
of mission aligned.
you guys walk the walk
so thank you
and Matt and the rest of the
1031 team for all
your support
many more years of development
you know and building
to come so thanks again
and thanks for having me on the show
as well. Well, Milyan
it's an honor and a privilege to be walking
the walk with you sir. We're going to win
Let's go
Peace and love freaks
The cake.