Hello, everybody. My name is Daniel Prince, and I'm the host of the Once Bitten podcast.
This is a podcast focused on Bitcoin. It's my mission to interview as many people as I can
around the different aspects of Bitcoin and help people understand exactly what Bitcoin could mean
for them and for their families and for their future. I hope you enjoy the show. Thank you so
much for listening. Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of the Once Bitten podcast.
Joining me today is Max Hillebrand who has been taking Nostra by storm recently just crunching
out the content. If you're not following Max on Nostra you should be. You won't find him anywhere
else because reasons and he's been putting fingers to keyboards recently and absolutely dropping fire
day after day it seems like we go through a few of these and then get into different tangential
rabbit holes uh we talk about white noise and we talk about uh you know the the idea of how do we
get scalable group encryption is what he terms it or maybe many other people have termed it before
him and this is the first time i'm hearing it i'm i don't want to put any accolades on max uh i
really appreciate everything that uh he's been doing in the past for bitcoin he's been on this
show many times and many others he's been around for a long time fun fact you can go back and find
some very young Max Hillebrand videos of helping people set up Bitcoin wallets when he first fell
into the rabbit hole. And yeah, it's just great to see that he's been around for such a long time,
always thinking about more privacy and how to transact in a private way. And he has his own
website, towardsliberty.com, where you can go and book a meeting with him. And he's going to help
you with that if that's with bitcoin or with nostor or with uh whatever that anything is going
to help you move towards liberty and that's what max is here to do so before we get into the show
just want to give a quick shout out to the show sponsors relay are there for you to start stacking
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And please, I'm never going to tire of saying this.
Write the words down.
Do not take a screenshot, okay?
Do not take a screenshot.
Do not take a picture ever.
Do not digitally input ever your seed phrase
into a computer or a phone.
nope offline people pen and paper break out the old quill and the ink pot if you must that is safe
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slash bitten are there to help you stack your sats convert your fiat currency into the world's
hardest money we've ever ever discovered as a species it's that simple then like i said
take self-custody so bitbox.swiss forward slash bitten if you have already stacked sats and you've
got some bitcoin sitting on an exchange account somewhere that's not your bitcoin that's a news
flash that's the exchange is bitcoin they've taken your fiat currency they've exchanged it
for you and they've told you, yeah, hey, yeah, you are entitled to this amount of Bitcoin.
But you've not taken control of it if you've not taken it away from them. You can do that
with bitbox.swiss forward slash bitten, a hardware wallet and use the code bitten to get 5% discount
because then you are the only one in control of that Bitcoin. So please take that very seriously.
bitbox.swiss forward slash bitten paywithflash.com i had a catch up call with pierre corbin he's one
of the co-founders of pay with flash who are very much focused on taking bitcoin to the next level
and becoming a medium of exchange which is inevitable we are still so early but there's big
movements in that space especially with the rollout of bitcoin payments being accepted across square
terminals in the US and Nathan Day has been very busy with BTC maps getting BTC maps up to date
because now all of a sudden four million merchants bona fidedly started accepting Bitcoin now the
purists are going to say yeah but bro they're just flipping it to fiat in the background like
yeah okay maybe like I said early days but they accept Bitcoin you can walk into now one of four
million merchants in America and use Bitcoin so you can start living on Bitcoin you can exit the
system. Apparently, it's going even crazier in South Africa, where a company called Money Badger,
brilliant name, by the way, guys, have unlocked fiat and Bitcoin payments. So you can start
spending Bitcoin all over that country too. This is happening. It is inevitable. Paywithflash.com
are going to be there to be helping businesses start stacking sats in a similar way. So pay
close attention to paywithflash.com. Meanwhile, here's the episode with Max.
All right, Max, back on the show. Great to have you. How are you doing?
Let's go. Thanks, Daniel. Thanks, Laura. I'm really looking forward to this one. It's been a while.
It has been a while. We've seen plenty of you in real life this year, but it's been a while since
we've caught up on the pod and put our conversation out there into the ether.
but uh yeah how's 2025 been for you so far
really good man it really was a heck of a year like so much building so many awesome projects
that are making insane progress um a lot of fun man i'm busy and that that's a good thing
like building freedom tech is is the best all right good to hear it lohan over to you
fire away with your first question um what is the most important thing about privacy for you
oh that's as always a damn good question um i would say it's it's the the cheapest way to stop
people from stealing from you right because if if someone doesn't know that you exist who you are
what you have where you are where you're going to be then it becomes really damn difficult for
them to hurt you or to take your stuff.
And I don't like people taking other people's stuff.
And I think that's one of the cool realizations of the cypherpunks is that when we have strong
privacy tools, then theft becomes simply unprofitable.
Then the adversary has to spend 100 Bitcoin to steal one Bitcoin and any adversary will
very quickly stop doing that then.
And so this asymmetry of power to make the cost of defense extremely cheap and the cost
of attack extremely expensive, that is a clear-cut economic incentive to a freer world.
And so privacy is super important in that aspect.
And that's why I kind of turned from a freedom maximalist to a privacy maximalist, because
I realized that privacy is a really great strategy of freedom.
yeah definitely um are we private enough i don't know no is the answer
no i don't think so
even if i were to ask max that question he would say no he's well podcasting yeah there's definitely
not there's no perfect right max well i i mean what's the definition of privacy right it's the
ability to selectively reveal yourself to the world. And you're right now choosing to reveal
yourself to the world. And I would say that's actually still a private choice. You make that
voluntarily. You turn on the camera, you click record, because you have something important to
share with the world. And spreading the good word and being loud about that and speaking your truth
is incredibly important.
And it's good that we have people like you
that do that, you know,
professionally for a living all the time,
just because it's a war of ideas
and ideas are extremely powerful.
And when we seed good ideas in people,
then that makes them better.
And so I'm sure that you've reached
countless thousands of people by now
and made meaningful improvements to their lives.
And that's a fantastic thing.
And you don't have to be fully anonymous and hide in your closet all the time and never leave the house.
That's not the existence most humans actually want.
It's quite nice to reveal yourself to others, to engage with others, to express your opinions,
and then to listen to others as well and incorporate that into your own thoughts.
That is extremely powerful and at the core of human existence.
But the aspect that you can turn off the camera when you don't want to be public, that we can have a private conversation off record as we just did before, or then when we meet in person in meet space somewhere, then we don't have to share everything that we're talking about there.
So just the fact that you are public in some aspects of your lives doesn't mean that you're not a private person.
And as long as you consciously and carefully choose of what do you say to whom and when And of course when you publish something on the internet it probably there forever and anyone can see it So
that is certainly an extreme thing to do that we haven't been able to do for the vast majority of
human existence. So that's a new thing and kind of humanity is still grappling with that crazy
aspect of the internet. But I think you're doing a quite good job with it.
happy about that i mean yeah yeah that that's a good answer and that could even go for like you
know when you if your grandparents ask you a question and you only give them like 30 of the
answer that you're willing to give that is your choice to choose the privacy over what you're
saying so like you know that that is your power that's your i don't use the word right um
I would say it is a right.
You have the right to be quiet and to choose your world carefully and to not talk with someone in the first place.
You have the right to leave.
These are all the right things to do.
If you want to do that, it's your right.
It wouldn't be a wrong or a bad thing to do.
Ultimately, rights for me derive from property rights.
and specifically from your right in your body.
And it's your lips, your tongue, your vocal cords.
And if you do want to share something or not,
then that's literally your body has the ability to do it.
And anyone rejecting you that is wrong.
Someone telling you that you have to tell me this now,
that's not the right thing to do in most cases.
Right, Max.
Here's her homework.
go and read A Lodging of Wayfaring Men
I'll wrap this up for you
and put it under the tree
is that the only gift that you're getting me?
yeah, I've only just decided
that, you know
so it's not private gift anymore
you know it's coming
actually, one of the highlights
of this year actually
for me, was
chatting with you and Paul Rosenberg
backstage at B2C Prague
and uh just you know it's so nice to meet an author of a book well first of all you recommended
this book you shield it hard you you were not shilling lightly max and uh i really enjoyed it
and i got to tell paul the story of how i come in possession of this book and that's a big shout
out to uh simon from bridge to bitcoin who runs a bitcoin shop and he he uh writes the
Oh, so you have to sell Grote Edition.
Damn, that's a rare thing to have.
He writes the Bitcoin Events UK.
And he goes to events, conferences, meetups,
and he always has a bunch of books to sell
and other bits and pieces, other merch.
And he had this book at the Bristol meetup.
And I walked over, I'm like, where the hell did you get that?
Because I've been trying to get a copy.
But if I order it off Amazon, it's like so ridiculously expensive.
and he was selling it for 30 bucks in sats which i obviously paid immediately and got the book
and i got to tell paul backstage the story of how simon come across these books he found somehow i
can't remember the exact story but he got in contact with or was put in touch with somebody
in the uk did the guy reached out he reached out yeah so you know the story do you
it? Well, loosely, I probably don't remember it properly. But yeah, like, there's this big
misconception that the Silk Road was only used for drugs. That's absolutely not the case. The Silk
Road was a marketplace of merchants who refused to get paid in fiat. They were highly ethical people
that wanted to do commerce. Well, stop. That was the deal. And so a bunch of different stuff got
sold, especially books, huge amount of books, actually. And so there was this one guy who was
the seller of books on the Silk Road. And then eventually when the Silk Road got raided, he was
left with a stockpile of books in his closet. And he then reached out to Simon and was like,
hey, you're selling Bitcoin books. I have a bunch of books that I'm not going to sell.
I'm leaving the country anyway. Can you please take them off my hands? And Simon was like, yeah,
for sure let's do that and and so i i a couple hundred um books were were now like literally
the same books that were sold on the silk road uh and they are a rare breed a very uh and very
much nft very scarce i uh i hope to meet paul again one day and i'll get him to sign it uh
yeah and and thanks to simon because yeah the guy got in touch and uh sure enough he's yeah
boxes and boxes of
that book. So Simon
helps him out every now and then and when he
sells out he just gets back in contact and he
takes them off his hands. So
yeah, that was a cool thing and I'm
glad Paul got to learn that story
first hand. And you know like
the book is
amazing so I'll just shill it a bit more
in context to what we just spoke about but
the book is about
based on a true story
of a group of cypherpunks in the end of the
1990s who went
to Costa Rica, basically bribed themselves into an embassy to have an office there and
build the first anonymous marketplace, anonymous digital cash, anonymous company registration
system, anonymous future markets.
They went radical.
It was beautiful.
And then eventually Paul wrote the book, first anonymously, about the happenings there, still
fictionalized, but the gist of it was there.
And this book, then for sure, I know that it inspired Ross Ulbricht to create The Silk
Road, and that's in part why it was sold there.
It also inspired Eric Sirian from Fediment to work on Fediment, and it inspired me to
do my work on Wasabi.
And I have this deep feeling that either Satoshi read this book and he got inspired to do Bitcoin, or what might be even more likely that Satoshi is a character in that book.
And he was around in Costa Rica or at least donated to those guys to do what they did.
So that last part, big speculation, but somehow I feel that that would be a great story.
So it's probably true.
Well, it was published in 07, right?
So, yeah.
Was it 07? No, I think it was earlier.
I think this print is from 07.
I've just seen copyright here, 07, at the front.
Yeah, but this is not the first edition, right?
The first editions were only distributed in Cyberspace.
And I think that was 2002.
Am I misremembering that now?
Yeah, and then in 2007, Paul thought that, okay, now enough time has elapsed that I can actually publish this under my real name, right, via the existing books that he already published, etc. And I think that step was taken in 2007.
All right, yeah. Well, Satoshi could definitely have read it or definitely been part of that group of people. Who knows? The mystery.
yes so
you quickly mentioned wasabi there
I mean you
you moved away from that what was it now
a year ago 18 months
two years
almost two and a half by now
time flies
but you know like
over 10 years ago
or so I like set myself
to the quest of fixing the money
And of course, Bitcoin was the obvious mechanism to do that.
And to get to our earlier point, the biggest problem in Bitcoin, the first feedback on the first email that Satoshi got was this doesn't scale because it is not private.
And if everyone has to verify everyone else's transaction, that's first of all stupid from a privacy point of view.
But also, obviously, this cannot scale.
And that was the biggest criticism of Bitcoin.
And, you know, I was early in the Lightning Network and realized that, yes, this is the way that we can scale Bitcoin to the next level. Not perfect yet, but definitely to the next level. And Lightning Network has absolutely achieved that. But what was still undressed was the privacy aspect.
And we had good custodial privacy solutions in the past, but we didn't have them in the Bitcoin ethos of it's your money, nobody can take it away from you.
The self-custody aspect of it.
And so we really needed to solve that.
And then a while ago, I realized we have solved those problems.
Like Bitcoin can scale now already to a billion people in self-custody to 100 billion people, including AI agents, if we're talking about custody like e-cash, etc.
So scalability is solved.
And I do think that with Wasabi, especially Wasabi 2.0, we have solved the blockchain level privacy.
Like you can make anonymous Bitcoin transactions now.
You can receive Bitcoin anonymously.
You can hold it anonymously and spend it anonymously.
Like those, it's a solved problem.
What was still unsolved three years ago or so was that aspect of will those privacy solutions stick around in the long run?
And, well, it got really close of not being solved.
But by this point, I think it is solved.
Like Wasabi is now quite unstoppable.
There's numerous different coordinators.
There's an anonymous announcement mechanism for coordinators, ways to anonymously discover and connect to coordinators.
And that was the one big thing that was still left.
Now you can get block filters and synchronize your Wasabi wallet without having a back The back that we were running back in the days
is completely gone, right?
And the wallet survived.
It survived like a catastrophic
or kind of collapse of support almost, so to say.
And it's still around and has larger volumes than ever before.
and that kind of proves that no the the tech will survive and so i concluded the the project as
solved and could finally move on with my life because i worked like for seven years on wasabi
you know after some time you kind of want to have a change of scenery and now i'm i'm fixing
that's that's my other big next project like we need unstoppable anonymous communications online
and communications extremely broadly defined,
not just chat apps, not just short posts or blog posts
or video calls, marketplaces, gaming, all of this stuff.
We need to have a private, unstoppable internet.
And Nostra is the best bet to get us there.
And the biggest issue of Nostra was the privacy.
And it didn't have encryption for the longest time.
Then when encryption was introduced, it was completely broken.
and by now we have a perfect encryption mechanism for it.
And now it's just about putting a little bit of paint on it
and fine-tuning it a bit.
And so that's my current passion.
And it seems like it won't even be that hard of a problem.
Like the solution was way easier than anticipated.
Okay, we'll get into it.
Lauren, I know we've already got too geeky and boring for you.
Yeah, a little bit.
Do you want to say goodbye to me?
yeah alright thank you so much
for answering my question and I hope you have a great
time on the podcast
yes thank you very much
I'm looking forward to your solo podcast one day
like maybe your dad can
ask the first question
but one question of Laura is not enough
you gotta flip the roles
that's actually gonna be
really funny if that happens
well you make it happen
you know I'm just here to make myself obsolete
yeah
exactly
let's see what the future holds all right thank you bye have a good one good night
so uh that brings us nicely to white noise yes let's talk about that and then i want to talk
about the uh the article you wrote uh the um anarcho-capitalist nostor being you know and
you went full rothbard analogies and deep dives into that which i found really really fascinating
and loved reading so but let's let's talk about white noise first and then we'll get into the uh
the article yeah i guess let's let's start with a little bit of a primer on on noster just so that
we're all on the same playing field that is a very very good very good idea for those listening that
are noster noobs or noster hesitant or noster you know maybe they've been once and they're like
yeah whatever like this is weird and left again we have that happening right uh people come and they
go um yeah let's get people let's give them a NOSTA 101 so so NOSTA starts quite similar to
Bitcoin with you creating and declaring your own identity right with Bitcoin you don't have to go
to a bank dear bank manager can I please have an account no you just go into your bathroom you flip
a coin, you do some math, and voila, you have your address, your private key and your
address, and you can receive and send money.
No need to ask for any permission whatsoever.
And that's, of course, a geniusly beautiful idea of Bitcoin.
And we absolutely need that for everything else in our life as well.
And so that's where Noster comes in, where you declare your own identity, right?
You don't ask for the permission to please get an account.
You declare it yourself, right?
It's a self-sovereign, illoidal title to your identity, so to say, where you flip a coin, you get a private key, and then you write an event that says, my username is this.
My profile picture is this.
My description is this.
My lightning address is this.
And after you declare this message, you sign it.
You speak it into existence and you attest to it.
Like a contract, right?
Like the declaration of your own flag, so to say.
And nobody can stop you from doing this.
That's such a powerful idea, right?
Where you're not waiting to be acknowledged by someone.
You just do it.
And that's extremely powerful.
And you use cryptography such that now you have this event,
which is just a text file, basically, JSON to be exact.
And you sign it with your private key.
And the cool thing is, now you have this atomic unit of information that is in it of itself useful. And that means you just need to get it to your friends somehow. And the way that we do that by default is by putting it on a server, such that other people can connect to the server and download all the messages that were signed by your public key, for example.
and then your friends see exactly what you were up to.
And of course, it sounds kind of weird
that we're introducing servers back into the picture.
Wouldn't it be better if it's fully peer-to-peer?
But the core realization is that, first of all,
peer-to-peer stuff is hard.
It's really, really damn hard.
And centralized things are much easier.
And the cool thing is that we can remove trust
in the central server, right?
Like, first of all, we remove the trust
that the server gives you an identity.
The server doesn't give you an identity.
You declared your identity.
And the server cannot change the messages that you wrote
because you signed them.
And so if you would change one little bit,
then it would be an invalid signature
and nobody would trust that this is actually what you wrote.
And also then, because we no longer have to trust the server,
we can just use five servers at the same time
or 100 servers at the same time.
You can use company servers, you can use paid servers, you can use servers of your friends, you can run your own server for like a dollar a month or something. And then we've removed the trust that the server can shut you down.
Any one server operator can delete your events.
Yes, it's just his computer.
But ultimately, because you can spread your messages far and wide, if any server censors you, there's still 99 others that are around there.
And then the big question is, what do we even write in those messages?
And that's where another freedom of Nostra comes in.
You can write whatever you want.
and you can create a schema, so to say,
or like a way to interpret this type of message.
So we've already created a bunch of these different schemas.
There's like short form posts like Twitter or X.
There's long form blog posts,
like the one that you just mentioned
that I wrote a while ago.
Then we have pictures, videos, app releases,
chess moves, really whatever you want.
You can either use a schema that someone else already developed and then just get all of the existing communication that happened in this particular way and display it to your users.
Or if the exact thing that you wanted to do is not yet out there, you just invent it and standardize it and publish that.
And voila, you have a new way of using the system to get more information out.
And so that's the gist of Noster.
So it's the freedom to create your own identity, the freedom to sign the messages such that nobody can tamper it with,
the freedom to run your own relay such that you can pass along the messages of yourself and your friends,
and the freedom to define exactly how these messages ought to be written and interpreted.
And with these four fundamental freedoms, we can absolutely fix the Internet.
This was everything we needed.
We have now in our toolbox to make sure that we have an internet
that is way better than anything that came before.
Right.
So white noise.
What's white noise?
What's the thing that you're trying to solve at the moment
and getting you so bullish about the future?
Yeah, so the problem with that original vision of Noster
was that everything was public.
The schemas that were used were all about public things that you wanted the entire world to know.
And as we said earlier, that's perfectly fine.
It's important that we spread our message and our truth as far and wide as possible.
And by simply making it readable from anyone who wants to is the best way of doing that.
But obviously, only a tiny subset of human existence is actually one where you share something with the entire world.
The vast majority, you only share with one person or with, first of all, the vast majority, you just share with yourself.
Most of the thoughts you have never leave your mouth.
So it would be good to have a way that only you can read the messages that you wrote.
Then the second thing is we talk with our loved ones, our kids, whatever, but those are two people talking.
So we need to figure that out as well.
And then we have a group of people, a company, an organization, a project, 10 guys getting together to build something that will change the world. And they don't want to announce it just yet because that would fuck up the whole project.
This is an even more important part than the entire public internet, so to say.
And we need to do that.
And there were a couple different approaches to do this throughout the history of Noster.
And there were some horrible mistakes made and many bugs written and many broken systems deployed.
And ultimately, the main problem was that so we can encrypt messages such that only someone with the private key can read the message.
And that's very powerful.
However it difficult to do that at scale What if you want to send a message to 100 people You could go ahead and encrypt one message to the first pub key then to the second pub key to the third pub key and so on
But then you need to encrypt 100 messages, and then you need to upload 100 messages, and your relay needs to store 100 messages for every one message that you actually want to send.
and then that obviously doesn't really scale and this by the way is how signal works right in signal
if you have a group chat you actually are sending one message for each person and that is just not
really that efficient um signal kind of gets away with it because they have a semi-trusted server in
the middle that can help you with a lot of re-keying and re-encrypting things um so they
made some centralization shortcuts to enable more scalable group communication. But it leads to
downsides of, for example, if we're in a group, I can send one message to you and it will be a
different message that I send to someone else. And you guys don't know that I told you that we'll
meet at one o'clock and the other guy that will meet at five o'clock. And so you can lie selectively,
so to say, in this group.
And these are some of the issues that we have
with kind of the traditional encryption schemes.
And so one of the use cases that I really would like to have
is I want to tell my friends where I will be in the next month,
where I'm traveling to.
But I certainly don't want to make that public
because that's just dangerous.
But I have a lot of friends that I would like to tell that with.
And so how can we encrypt something to a group of 100, 1,000 people without the computer having to break a sweat or without us needing a trusted third-party server?
And so we were hunting for a crypto system that allows us to do that, to make scalable group encryptions happen in a way that we can easily add a new person to the group.
And even more importantly, remove someone from the group.
That's actually the hard part.
How do we kick someone out of our group for this encryption scheme?
And thankfully, we found a beautiful system that works crazy well.
It's a bit complex, which is its biggest downside, but it can scale to potentially hundreds of thousands or millions of people that we can now encrypt messages to with really high fidelity, high security, high scalability.
and now we are we first of all standardized this right we we kind of created a new schema
right this is what you have to do in order to encrypt your messages and this is how the final
events should look like and that's the marmot protocol and so that's a protocol that any
developer can use to now encrypt messages to a bunch of people basically and then ultimately
now I finally get to your question
of what is white noise
white noise is an implementation of the
Marmot protocol and if I say Marmot
just think of encrypted Noster basically
what are you saying?
Marmot
how do you spell it?
M-A-R-M-O-T
those cute
like a beaver
or something that lives in the mountains
underground
exactly
so that's just the name
The Marmot protocol, right?
Exactly.
And so white noise is an implementation of that protocol
specifically for group chat messages.
So think Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, et cetera,
but fully encrypted, scalable, hopefully.
It's still very early in the development,
so a lot of the claims that I'm making now
will be true in two weeks
when the developers do better and ship more code.
But in theory, this will allow us to have encrypted groups of hundreds or thousands or more of people, very scalable, and in such a way that nobody in the outside of the group knows who is in the group, how many people are in the group, how old is the group, how many messages are being sent, what is the message, who is sending it, who has read it.
Nobody will know this.
And it will be completely unstoppable.
This will live on many different servers, and a group can rotate NOSTA relays if needed.
So if any relay starts to censor your group, you just switch to a different relay.
And censorship itself will be extremely unlikely because we've built privacy at the very base
lane.
And as I said earlier, if you're private, you cannot be censored because nobody knows
who is in the group, etc.
So they wouldn't even know which group to censor.
And so I'm extremely, extremely bullish on this.
Not even that much for the chat messages, even though that's super important,
but especially for all of the other things that we can build
now with a private encrypted Noster that only your friends can read.
All right.
So just to try and unpack this a little bit,
would an analogy, a bad analogy, be like sending an email
and filling in a bunch of names in the BCC bar.
So the 100 people that received that email know it came from you
and they know there's 99 others, but they don't know who the 99 others are?
Or would they just not know at all how many people are in the group?
The way that Marmot works is that everyone in the group
can authenticate the other people.
You have cryptographic guarantee
that this message came from Daniel,
which means impersonation,
like AI, fake messages,
or even videos will be prevented in this way.
So we're using a system
that is perfectly authenticatable,
which means it's not deniable.
This is actually one interesting thing
with the way that Signal works, if I send you a chat message, you cannot prove to some other person
that I was the one who sent the message. So Signal is fully deniable, which is also an important part
to have. But this unfortunately doesn't really work at a scalable group level.
Cryptographic details for why that is the case. But ultimately, with Nostar or MarMet,
because we use signatures, it is perfectly verifiable, but not deniable. So you know
absolutely who is in the group, and you know exactly who has sent the message. But an outside
observer does not. It's kind of like you're writing an email with a bunch of people in CC,
but the server administrator has no idea whom you just messaged. So the provider of your email,
Gmail, for example.
I'd imagine that you could write emails to a bunch of people,
but Gmail has no idea that you even exist or who is in the group
or how many people are in the group or who exactly wrote this.
Yeah.
Right.
Scalable group encryption.
Is that what you said?
Exactly.
Yeah.
That's definitely going to get people's minds humming away.
Did this all come to you?
Am I right in thinking you were at the SEC?
Not the Securities Exchange Commission.
The sovereign engineering cohort on Madeira.
Is this where you were sharpening your tools on this?
Actually, it started a bit earlier than that.
and finally in the UK, in Bedford, of all places.
Pete turned around and said,
you know what, Max, we need scalable group encryption.
That's exactly what we need.
Almost, no.
Pete invited a bunch of people to come to his shitty hometown.
There I sat down with Jeff,
the co-founder of the project, basically.
and he thought or like a bunch of people on Nostra were saying hey we really should improve
our encryption scheme and everyone was just saying yeah like someone should do something about this
and then Jeff was finally okay we've I've said someone too many times apparently it is me now
and and so he started thinking about this more structurally and I had the exact same
thought process a couple months before and was like, okay, we really need to fix this.
So he went down one of the OG encryption protocols.
It's called Off the Record or OTR.
And he thought, okay, how can we use this protocol on top of Nostr?
And I, in the meantime, because for Wasabi Wallet, Wasabi 2.0, we actually used the cryptography
that was first introduced in the signal paper.
And so the cryptography that secures your group messages, we use the same thing to secure your communication with the CoinJoin coordination server, basically.
Specifically, keyed verified anonymous credentials.
Beautiful, beautiful crypto.
And so I already read this paper years before and was like, this is such a cool paper.
It's an incredibly genius way of doing crypto magic.
And I love Signal for as long as it came out.
um and and so i wanted to do signal on top of of nostr uh and and so when jeff came to me like hey
what do you know about off the record and i want to do private communication on nostr i was like
well that's awesome i want that too but i think we should use the signal paper that's much more
advanced than the older of the record and then in bedford there was this hackathon area and we
just sat down for like three hours or something and nerded out about how we could do this.
And we were like, oh, this might actually work.
And so after the conference, we go our separate ways and we both keep thinking about it.
And eventually Jeff writes me saying that, hey, I found something that's even better
than Signal.
It's called the messaging layer security protocol.
And it is contrary to Signal, designed from the ground up.
or no actually before that we we did make a nip a nostril implementation possibility
that says hey look here is how we could use the signal paper to do communication on nostril
and then the one of the early questions we had was okay but does this work for groups
and we were like well no not really and then everyone was like well then it isn't interesting
we need something that works for groups right so we're like okay is that what you were getting
Exactly. That was the main feedback of, no, I want to talk to a group of friends, not just one of them. And those hacks that Signal does to make the two-person chats behave like a group don't really work in Noster's decentralized architecture, are very, very difficult.
And so we went back to the drawing board and then eventually it was like, hey, I found this thing called the messaging layer security protocol.
It is very similar to Signal, but it is from the ground up, first of all, designed as a protocol.
Like the Signal protocol is kind of a bit just one implementation that does it.
It's not perfectly specced out.
And it works.
It is designed to work for groups.
That was their main goal is to make it work for groups.
And what MLS gives you is basically a way that a group of people can come up with a single shared key that they can encrypt their messages to.
And a way to add a member to this group and to remove a member of this group.
Like how can we come up with a new secret that everyone but Bob knows about?
And that is the super difficult part.
What this system, though, excludes are two things.
And it turns out that Nostra is perfect for both of these things.
First, it excludes the authentication service, which is basically what is even a user account in the first place.
They designed it in a way that it can be used by Google, where the authentication service is the Google server that tells you, yes, this is your username, this is your password.
but it doesn't like it's kind of okay google handles this for us that's basically what the
MLS people said and we're like well wait a second we don't need to use google for that
we can just use a key right we already have Noster keys users are their own authentication service
right the user declares for himself this is my username so that's a perfect fit Noster solves
this one critical thing that MLS left unaddressed we've already solved it over here we can just put
it in the box and it will work. And the second thing that it left unaddressed was the message
delivery. Again, thinking of, okay, we just put our messages on the Google server and then,
you know, message will be delivered perfectly fine as long as they're encrypted, right?
And we're like, well, that's cool, but we don't just want to have one server. We want to have
10 different servers at the same time. And again, turns out NOSTA has a perfect solution for this.
We already have, I don't know, 5,000 NOSTA relays on the internet.
You can literally use any one of them to deliver your messages.
And you can rotate them and use multiple and parallel and all this fancy stuff.
So the two big problems that MLS left out of scope for their work was exactly what we were working on with NOSTA.
And NOSTA left the whole encryption part out of scope.
and so it was this match made in heaven
where two completely independent teams
worked on
the two things that are perfectly
complementary to each other
and so that's why it turned out
to be a huge success
or at least in theory
we just have to ship it and deploy it
I was going to say
when group chats on Nostar
when do you
envision this being
shipped and people creating
their groups and giving you feedback
and messing around with it, trying to break it.
Yeah.
So, like, it's been almost two years since we started this whole journey,
and we're still far from there.
It took us, first of all, like half a year or so
of running in the wrong direction.
Then another year or so.
Sorry, back to the original question.
So post-Bedford, did this happen in Madeira?
Did you have a team there, like at the SEC?
Yes.
Yeah.
I know a lot of listeners, they love listening to stories about like, because it's been such a great success what Gigi and Pablo have set up.
I don't think it gets enough applause.
And especially, you know, it's part of the Free Madeira kind of initiative as well that Andre set up over there.
So people, I'm sure they'd love your insights as somebody that has been, has benefited from it.
What was the experience like?
What does it look like and how can other people get involved?
Yeah, the first software engineering cohort was probably, I mean, it sounds a bit weird, but it was probably the best two months of my life.
Like, it was insane. Like, the amount of high quality people that got together there, and the amount of literally groundbreaking shit that came out of there is unreal. Like, really, really, really unbelievable.
And Marmot or White Noise was definitely there.
So the way that software engineering works, basically, was talk, build, demo, ship, basically.
And that was the cycle.
And you just keep repeating it over and over again.
Throughout the week, you talk to everyone there about all the different cool problems that need to be solved.
Then you sit down and you actually build it.
And at the end of the week on Friday is demo day where you have to present what you did. And afterwards there's a big party and barbecue and a lot of fun.
and so a lot of my presentations there were for one about coin joins and wasabi and all of the
stuff that we were working on there i also presented a lot about anonymous ai and how we can do
ai in a way that the server doesn't know the questions that you're answering asking or the
answers that you're getting and then also i presented this idea of of mls and how we could
use it for Noster and got a lot of amazing feedback from all the geniuses there and then at
the end of SEC one was the the conference the the big uh free Madeira conference no big con Atlantis
it was called and there Jeff was there again as well and there for another two or three weeks we
we were sitting two weeks something like this we were sitting together and hatching out how we could
actually make this work.
So, yeah, a couple of other amazing projects
came out of SEC1.
One of my highlights is ZapStore.
ZapStore is the only app store that works.
If you're a developer and you want to ship an app
to the public, every other app store will rape you
and put an insane amount of problems in your way.
You will have to have a company
or give your government identities.
It will take weeks to get an account set up.
it will take weeks to publish the first version of your app,
and you will never know how fast you can actually release something.
Even if there are critical security vulnerabilities,
they will be in your way of helping your users protect themselves.
It's absolutely ridiculous.
And so, by the way, when we launched White Noise for the first time,
we didn't get a Google account.
We still don't have a Google account.
We didn't get the Apple developer account in time.
Once we had it, it took over two and a half weeks
for them to allow the first release to be published.
So both of these systems completely failed us.
And then the alternative was ZapStore
and was literally one command of ZapStore publish,
enter, done.
We already had a NostroKey.
People were already following it.
We just signed an event and declared to the universe
that this is our app.
This is what it does.
Here's the logo.
Here's where you can download it.
Have fun.
And nobody could stop us from publishing that code.
It was a liberating feeling, and that was part of SEC1.
Another beautiful system that came out of that was Blossom,
which is basically like Noster, but for pictures, videos,
like PDF documents, app releases, any arbitrary file
other than just text, which Noster is only text,
and Blossom is basically the same, but for arbitrary data.
these are just three of the amazing projects that came out of SEC1
so it was a blast, it was really really cool
and now I think SEC5 is over, SEC6 is about to start
hopefully soon we will have more SECs in other places other than just Madeira
there's a massive demand for that
it will be cool, it will be really good
we definitely need that, for sure
more you can just build things right i mean that's yeah that's that's what we say in the space
does this what you've what you've described does this also fix github as well does github need
fixing github absolutely needs fixing and you know literally an hour ago i had a talk with the guy
who's fixing it. He's working on NGIT, NosterGit.
And he has made an insane amount of progress.
I'm trying to remember if he was there in Madeira as well.
Maybe not. But he is basically,
he has a completely functioning replacement of GitHub that is still very rough and needs a lot more love before it actually works But now already some projects are exclusively using this
And there are some SCC projects that don't have GitHub accounts anymore, right?
Like no DNS, for example, is another cool thing that came out of SCC5, I think.
It's basically replacing the domain.com with just PubKey.
That's it.
And so you declare yourself of this is my pub key and this is the IP that I want you to connect to if you want to talk to me, basically.
Beautiful thing.
That project is only available on NGIT.
So NGIT is the command line interface where developers say, okay, publish this code, make these changes to the code, etc.
Download the code from my friends and so on.
and you have there's a server implementation that basically combines a git server with a
Noster Relay so git server is the server like github that stores your source code and helps
other people download it so that they can install it or contribute to it and then it uses Noster
Relays for all of the social stuff that github does like account creation of course and opening
a pull request and having comments about how to review this change to the code, feature
requests and so on, release packages, all of this stuff can absolutely be done on Nostar
per se.
So GitHub's days are absolutely numbered.
It still takes a lot of effort and engineering to make our solution work at scale and work
well without developers being frustrated that their tools don't work.
so unfortunately white noise is not yet being developed on on ngit i would love that i suggested
it but then the developers looked the way i see these things marrying up and you know forgive me
i'm nowhere near like a developer you know not even close but what you explained to me about
what you're working on with white noise that does that solve the problem of like the bitcoin mailing
list and all of the devs putting up their pull requests and ideas that their bips bitcoin
improvement proposals onto github because you don't know some people could just spin up a
an anonymous account and just spam the shit out of that right and i'm sure it's happened in the past
and ai now could just keep spinning up bots and just spinning out bips just as an attack vector
uh so it's actually happening right by the way like the bib repository is right now overwhelmed
with ai slop basically it's a real thing so ai slop so pleb slop is greater than ai slop is what
i'm hearing you say like definitely so it's interesting because you know what you're creating
the only way you'd be able to sign any bib or pull request would be with your public key which is
you know so you kind of like the web of trust that's being built out on on Nostra as well
what you're discussing here with with NGIT and what you're doing with white noise
and another thing you know 2025 we said before we hit record been the most bonkers year I think in
all of the years I've been following Bitcoin,
you know, with the Knotts versus Core debate,
which obviously would,
the way that was playing out on GitHub,
the way people were being censored on GitHub
by the people that had the so-called keys
to be able to do that, to be able to censor,
was really an interesting...
thing so on on the centralized communications platform of twitter you're you've got one argument
about filters don't work and you know you guys shut the hell up and then on the github you've
got right no you're not allowed to say that i'm censoring you and i'm blocking you from taking part
of the conversation anymore and as a as an observer you're like whoa like this is this is just nuts
So would White Noise and NGIT have solved that?
Short answer is yes.
I think, or rather Noster solves this per se,
because in Noster, nobody really can delete your content.
Like a relay operator can delete your event from his own computer,
but he cannot stop you from putting the same event on 100 other computers.
So for all intents and purposes, nobody can delete your data, right?
however you you can create an event that is a report event where you say hey i think that this
is bad content i think it's spam and i would suggest that you don't look at it right and this
event is signed with my private key and then your client could implement that whenever one of the
people that you follow says that this is spam then hide it by default right could be that okay there
is a button that you can reveal it still or not right but so this is a decentralized content
moderation strategy and i think that works so much better right because there are i absolutely
understand why core maintainers want to keep the working environment of developers clean
like developer attention is incredibly valuable and you you you don't want developers to have to
read all of the stuff, every AI slot that comes along, right? That would be ludicrous,
no work would ever get done. So we need a way that someone can suggest to people,
hey, I've read through this, and I would suggest you don't read it. It wasn't interesting,
it wasn't valuable, it didn't add meaningfully to the conversation. And then the developer can
save time, assuming that he trusts that person, the maintainer in this case, with being honest
and forthright.
Plus, we have a cryptographic proof
that the maintainer said that this was spam.
And so if it turns out that it was not spam,
you could still read it and be like,
hey, wait, this was important.
He should not have told me that I shouldn't read this.
So I will unfollow the moderator
and just no longer listen to him.
So nobody can prevent you from actually reading this content,
but nobody can stop you from choosing
which reports that you should see fit.
And so in the NOSTA world,
nobody could have deleted the comments that were deleted.
Anyone could have still read them,
but still the developers who trust the maintainers
would not have seen them
and could have stayed focused on whatever they were focused on.
So the problem with centralized moderation
is that values are subjective.
And what you think is spam, I think, is an insightful comment.
And if we are both forced to use one authoritative decision that was made from up high in some ivory tower, then neither of us will be happy in different situations.
So Nostra gives that ability to push these decisions out to the edges.
And that is an absolute game changer that I think would have solved so much drama on both sides.
Interesting.
how close do you think i mean are we years away because gradually then suddenly with all way all
of these things uh and not only because it's new technology but because people are sticky right uh
a great example is most people listening they've probably still got family members
of the older generation still don't even know what whatsapp is let alone on the family group
right uh you know i have a 92 year old grandmother doesn't even have a smartphone so you know she's
out by uh by design um what um yeah how do you how critical is that to like the scaling of these
things like the the the adoption the the stickiness to the the existing tech and to use this example
the the devs that have been on github their whole careers are they just suddenly and still might not
like some of them might still not even be on nostr let's be realistic yeah um it it is a big problem
right like as i said earlier i tried uh not hard enough but i tried uh to get the white noise devs
to start out with ngit right and then jeff of course knew about the project before and he's like
okay, I'll give it a shot. I'll try it out. He played around for like an hour or two. And then
he was like, nope, fuck that. We will use GitHub. And it was the right decision, to be honest,
because if you have to fight with your tools for five hours before you can do an hour's worth of
work, then you're just going to fail. It's as simple as that. And we cannot afford to lose that
much time on tinkering with technology that simply isn't ready yet.
Like this stuff is hard and it's very complex and it takes a long time to build it in the
right way.
So it will take time for sure.
If you're a crazy psychopath, you can already use it.
I know those psychopaths.
I love them.
And it is, however, not reasonable to expect that everyone will use it or like
everyone from a rather large team. So by using an objectively worse technology in spirit or in
ethos, but that is objectively better in productivity, it's hard to make that case of
you should use the tool that makes you less productive, just because in theory, it's more
liberty preserving or something like this That a hard thing to ask for The cool thing is the progress is quite astounding and the sad thing is
there's like one dude working on Noster
basically, I mean there's a couple others
but there's one guy who's really pushing it
and that's just ridiculous
something as important as secure, unstoppable
coordination of development of code
especially FreedomTech code, especially Bitcoin, Noster, etc. code is super important.
And we as a FreedomTech community is simply not organized enough to take it to the next level.
I would even argue that the money is there.
Money is not the issue.
It's the people and the coordination.
We could get unlimited budget for all intents and purposes.
We have it at the moment.
we just don't really have the skill to actually meaningfully deploy it so the problem is us like
we we need to get more people involved we need to run way harder than we are currently running
and and just do more work and do it fast and it's kind of scary that things are that slow
when all of us know that what is online like if if we mess up and bitcoin fails noster fails etc
Then humanity goes back into dark ages for millennia to come.
We really have it in our hands to completely destroy this planet simply by not solving those problems fast enough.
And yeah, that kind of drives me nuts that I feel like we're all just not doing enough.
and and we all of us have to do so much more and and so much faster and so much better without
fucking up and and introducing new problems and that's obviously a a crazy thing to ask for but
we just need to do more and a lot of people listening might be falling into the trap of
like well i'm not a dev so you know shrug my shoulders but from what i'm hearing you say is
no we need project managers we need organizers we need different skill sets here we we this is what
we need the devs i don't think are well correct me if i'm wrong but i think probably i had it i
remember a conversation uh a couple of years ago i had in btc prague with uh with mike schmidt and i
had him on the um the podcast afterwards and the the guys from btc pay server and they were talking
about like funding for devs is there like we can get devs up to speed but then there's nothing for
them to do and they go and get hired by xyz shitcoin and abz shitcoin and you know blah blah
because they're the ones with the money and the venture capital behind them that can hire these
guys and they can hire the marketing teams uh so am i right in this assumption that that's your
rally cry it's not just for devs absolutely like i'm not a dev right i'm i'm an economist
maybe a philosopher but certainly not a developer maybe a philosopher very philosophical thing to say
no so so absolutely like we need everyone i mean we need more podcasters too right it's it's just
like there's there's first of all not enough people really working on freedom tech in the
very very broad definition that's everything but code included and then even those that work on
freedom tech simply don't do enough like it i don't know i i have like this insane urge right
now to just go way harder than i ever went before simply because time is running out like we cannot
afford to be as slow as we are right now we we have to do better we have to do it at a at an
insanely larger scale the fact that bitcoin is still so tiny right now the fact that the bitcoin
economy is basically non-existent, what does the Bitcoin economy actually produce other
than a little bit of soap and maybe some alpaca socks?
Let's be honest, we should be producing spaceships at this point, and we just are not.
In large part because we're lazy and not really doing enough, and especially because we don't
have enough people involved.
I don't know, you probably have a couple thousand people listening here that listen to a bunch of podcasts nonstop. But what are you guys doing with this information? Why do you think that you have the right to accumulate this information and then not act upon it?
That is fundamentally a bad thing, right? To know that there is a problem and that it's a real serious problem and then to not go ahead and fix it with all the might that you have.
And we don't need anywhere close to 50, 90% of humanity working on this project, but we need more than like 0.01%. You know, like give me 3% of the world population and we have this fixed in like two years.
but we're far from three percent and that's just not acceptable anymore at this point
i hear you i i definitely hear you and uh i hope people listening i mean they hear me say
at the beginning or end of most shows like we need more podcasts more youtube videos more singers
more writers more artists more philosophers like whatever it is more developers um yes and i
I feel more people get released from their fiat drudgery.
That's the big thing, right?
Perhaps it's a cycle or two, and then they can find,
starts out as a side hustle, but then it just gets too much
and they release themselves from the fiat mines
and then can unleash themselves into the Bitcoin world
and where they see fit.
And that is always so, that's the heartwarming moment
when when you see those tweets like uh right that's it uh was it nathan day tweets the fiat
mines have been mined and uh time to go like full retard into btc maps or something like you know
or gamester or whatever he's working on that's just one example and you know organize and helping
organize bitfest which was a huge success in in manchester and another thing meetups conferences
like yeah the you know those in real life uh moments that you shared in madeira at sec one
like you said life-changing stuff but so can a meet up with your nearest bitcoiner at the nearest
coffee shop that you meet on club orange be a life-changing moment because you boom you're just
connected with somebody on a level that you've never connected with anyone ever before like
it's just incredible. All right. So philosopher, economist, let's switch to that area and your
article because I really love the way you write and you write about Rothbard. And I think this is
going to resonate with a lot of people. I'm going to read a little bit here and then ask you to
delve into it a little bit more. Which one should I go with first? So Rothbard. Rothbard famously
argued that all of the services commonly thought to require the state can be and have been supplied
far more efficiently and certainly more morality morally excuse me by private persons critics
critics countered that some services particularly communication networks require centralized
coordination to function. NOSTA refutes this objection empirically. I love that.
And then here we go. NOSTA demonstrates how voluntary association, property rights,
and market competition can replace coercive central authorities in digital communications.
This is precisely the domain where state corporate censorship has become most aggressive.
Nobody can refute that.
Like, look at Twitter now, X, whatever we want to call it, like the algorithm hell pit over there that it is.
And at a push of a button, you can be cancelled.
Everything you've ever posted can be wiped.
It can be subpoenaed by the FBI, whoever, for whatever reason.
And this is the state, you know, it's state corporate owned.
I think everybody's probably aware of that as well.
And NOSTA fixes this because cometh the moment, cometh the market.
Yeah.
No, there's the saying of who's going to build the roads, insinuating that the government is building the roads.
Guess what? The government is not building the roads.
The government is stealing money and funneling that through a bunch of money laundering and every politician taking a huge cut to eventually pay a private company to build the roads.
Like, bureaucrats are way too incompetent to ever be put in charge with something as important as roads, let alone even more complex stuff.
Like, they cannot pour a flat piece of concrete, right?
They would fail with that utterly.
And they are.
That's why they're outsourcing.
And this is fundamentally a problem of calculation.
Like, a bureaucrat doesn't know what is the right problem to solve.
and he cannot because if you're spending someone else's money on someone else's problems
you don't give a shit you really don't like you can't and and you certainly can deeply clearly
know of what in the first place has to be solved like i barely understand my own problems
how am i supposed to understand the problem of someone else someone else living a thousand kilometers further away That just simply not possible So all of this myth of the state is so powerful the state is so effective and productive it just wrong
They never were.
Every king, every monarch, every bureaucrat was deeply wasteful.
And the only reason why they survived this is because they were stealing faster than they could waste the money.
And that's just a sad thing.
So the opportunity cost of that is really, really astounding.
I mean, look at NASA.
An insane amount of budget to then allegedly get someone on the moon 60 years ago. The amount of problems, real, tangible, actual problems that we could have solved if not such vast amounts of money were diverted away through the pockets of bureaucrats is astounding.
And obviously, if you have a problem and you know someone can fix your problem and you give him the money to fix your problem, that is the shortest path to a solution.
If someone instead hits you with a stick, takes all of your money, gives it to someone else who gives it to someone else who gives it to someone else and who then says, okay, maybe we should actually do the thing.
Now you have maybe 10% of the budget that you had for solving the problem is actually arriving at where the solution needs to be.
And turns out that just doesn't work.
And so socialism is fundamentally flawed in resource allocation.
And that is because the decisions get made far away from where the problems are actually perceived.
If those who perceive the problem pick up the shovel and do something about it, then that is the shortest path to success.
And that's, I guess, to get back to my rant earlier, that I'm quite disappointed in so many Bitcoiners who see the problem, who deeply understand it, but then still don't do something about it because I'm not a developer or whatever other weird excuse.
If you notice a problem, it is your problem, and you have to do something about it.
And if you don't, you'll just end up being depressed and the problem doesn't get solved
in the first place.
When you could just pick up a shovel, solve the problem, derive an insane amount of meaning
of the value of fixing something, not just for yourself, but for others as well.
And then you have the problem solved, right?
So it's a win-win-win for everyone.
And it is incredibly efficient.
It's like a perfect analogy here is you're taking a walk through the park and you see
a couple of sweet wrappers, crisp packets on the floor,
and you look at them and you tuck and you're like,
ah, yeah, like, you know, littering is just disgusting.
Like who the hell would do that?
And then carry on walking without picking it up
and putting it in the bin, right?
So you just became part of the problem by walking by it
and not doing anything about it.
So don't become part of the problem, right?
I think is what you're saying.
Exactly.
Like not addressing a problem that you see
is a problem.
It compares the problem.
Yes.
And sure, you cannot solve every problem that you see.
And you have to manage your resources wisely
and efficiently.
And there's a subsidiarity of problems.
I neglected a lot of other problems
by focusing on the difficult problem of fixing the money.
And that is a sacrifice and an opportunity cost, yes. But you can handle much more than you think you can. You can solve way more quantity and hardness level of problems than you would think is possible in the first place.
it's just maybe intimidating to start but then once you start it's actually it's very addicting
because it's inherently rewarding like that's in part again a little bit of austrian economics right
humans perceive uneasiness right and removing uneasiness is what motivates us right that is
the reason of why we do things is to remove uneasiness that's what how ludwig van mises
called it. That's just another word of solving a problem. So solving a problem is at the root of
what human action means, of what human existence means. And so when you double down on that and
just solve problem after problem, remove uneasiness, not just of yourself, but of others,
it is so rewarding that it keeps continuously motivating you. And it's not like we are running
out of problems anytime soon. We have some of the biggest problems ever. And obviously the state is
quite high up there on that list. And we can fix it. So let's just do that instead of complaining
about it. And with the communications example here, we have state corporate communications
completely centralized in choose your country, right? Wherever you're listening from, you've
probably got one or two big telecommunications companies that are the go-to and you can bet your
life that they have made very cushy deals with the current government there incumbent government and
lobbied behind the scenes or have been granted certain permissions to create their monopolies
in an easier and faster way with you know regulation and policy that that gets updated
and keeps building their moat.
And then along come NOSTA
and the NOSTA relay market,
which fixes this.
So this is,
I really want to drive home
the point to people
how important
a decentralized communications network is.
Like I said,
you know,
cometh the time,
cometh the market
because how centralized,
it can't get any more centralized,
really,
this telecommunications system
like that we're using.
everything we do is tracked right if you're using any kind of phone i know you've written about this
as well at great length yes there are solutions out there with graphene os and certain phones that
you can do do the um the whole privacy thing but most people aren't doing that let's be fair so
you're being tracked completely uh by this cartel this monopoly of telecommunications
the mix of estate and private corporation.
And then there's NOSTA, the relay network
and the market that sprung up.
This is pure Austrian economics,
the flourishing of a ground-up initiative
that has been spawned into existence
because of the oppression.
Yeah.
Because of that oppression,
we find ways around it in a sly roundabout way
and persevere and get stronger.
That's the anti-fragility part of it.
And that's in part why I'm super glad
every time the government does some shenanigans
and does another lockdown or crazy regulation
because it hurts people and that sucks,
but at least they are notified of the problem
and they will look for solutions.
So humanity is quite anti-fragile in this way.
But ultimately, I think then when you realize
that there are these problems and you can just opt out
and leave that system of tyranny and slavery
and instead build something in the free and second realm,
that is an absolutely valid and good solution.
And Noster, as you said, is absolutely doing this.
It's really hard to distill down these things to the core essence.
And the founder of Twitters, etc.,
they had quite a good idea of what needed to be done.
But they kind of disregarded the fundamental architecture and put too much trust in the central server, in part because that's just what you did back then.
And there wasn't really the mind space and the technological building blocks to do something different.
But now, 20 years later or whatever, we have so much more tools in our toolkit.
And we have so much more fundamental understanding of the downsides of too centralized architecture that we can really reimagine things in a more proper way.
And this is what Bitcoin did with money.
Digital cash is around since the 1980s.
It's an ancient idea.
And it just took like 30 years to be reimagined in a way that actually works at scale.
Because people before made fundamentally wrong assumptions.
Like we can have a trusted third party in the middle that just settles things, right?
And with Noster, we're at least pushing much more in the right direction.
Like there are things like maybe it should be fully peer-to-peer.
peer, maybe relying on any, even a relay server, even if it is fully untrusted, maybe that's
a bad idea.
Arguably, we don't have the technological building blocks to go full peer-to-peer yet.
Like any other pure peer-to-peer tech solution is vastly not as performant as Nostra is per
se.
So arguably, we're not radical enough, and maybe that will bite us in the ass eventually.
But...
At least we have sufficiently removed all the trust assumptions in the relays and simply duplicating them to remove the final trust assumption, which is relays are trusted to store and deliver your data.
And that's the one trust that you have in your relay.
And in order to mitigate that, we just duplicate.
And that is a valid solution with quite good trade-offs that we can make work.
So hopefully that's good enough.
Certainly it's a lot better than anything that came before.
And obviously we can make it much better.
That's also the cool thing of these internet protocols.
We can upgrade them.
We have upgraded them.
We're like at the seventh iteration of encrypted stuff on Nostr by now.
And we've gotten exceedingly efficient at it.
Yes, for sure.
Right.
Final point on Noster and Rothbard and how this all ties together.
And then I'll ask you the final question.
He, and again, this is from your writing.
Rothbard emphasized that what acting man is interested in is future prices.
And the present committing of resources is accomplished by the entrepreneur, whose function is to appraise and anticipate future prices.
Nostar client developers exemplify this entrepreneurial function.
They commit resources to building applications based on their appraisal of future user demand
without any central authority directing their investment or guaranteeing their returns.
Some will succeed and some will fail.
But the market process ensures that resources flow toward those who correctly anticipate user preferences.
And this is the direct question that people have been positing about NOSTA from the very, very beginning.
What's the business model?
How are people going to make money?
And they'll point to Primal for an example.
How are Primal going to make money?
Or Damus or whatever.
So are people thinking about that in the correct terms?
Feel free to take this wherever you like.
What do you think here?
Yeah, what I'm meaning with this is not only about the developers making money,
but the developers solving problems that will exist in the future.
We don't yet know what the exact problem is in the future.
But we need to apply our capital today to come up with the solution to the problem in the future.
Making money is easy.
Basically, just solve a problem and get paid for it and repeat doing that.
The bigger the problem, the more people's problem you solve, the more you'll make money.
It's quite simple.
So the big question is, what are the problems of the future that people are so bothered by that they're willing to get rid of their precious satoshis for you?
That is the real tricky thing.
And so a couple of crazy cypherpunks had this realization three years ago of, hey, Twitter is a problem.
Even though a lot of people were loving it, but this centralized social media infrastructure, the architecture itself is a problem.
And it will manifest in many smaller sub-problems like people getting shadowbanned, people getting manipulated with an algorithm, people getting censored outright, people getting spied upon with the advertisement, data harvesting, etc.
All of these are sub-problems of a larger problem of the architecture as fucked, basically. And so we got together to build a fundamental solution to these really difficult problems, anticipating that in the future there will be enough people that share this understanding of the problem and that are looking for a solution to that.
And then that is the first core aspect of the entrepreneur is like find out what people in the future have a problem with and fix that.
And in order to fix any meaningfully large problem, you will need time, a lot of time, years, decades even.
And then the big question that follows is how are you going to pay for that?
How are you going to accumulate all of the resources that are needed to build the tools that build the tools that build the machine that builds the product that finally solves the solution itself?
And that is the market, right?
Those are actual production stages.
And the good thing is the economy actually does solve for this.
There are early investors that give seed capital to see a problem being addressed.
And then sooner or later, there are actual customers that either pre-buy a solution to the problem or then eventually just buy the product outright.
Then another big question here is scale.
And if you're solving a problem for like five people, you might get a little bit of money or capital, but not really enough to justify a massive investment into the equipment to do this whole ordeal.
So scale is important and that is where Noster is currently just too small to be an actual like obviously profitable thing to do.
Because there are a couple hundred thousand people who are actively using this and that might not be enough for a widely dispersed ecosystem to actually become profitable.
But then there are other ways to make revenue in the meantime.
You could, like Primal, for example, get revenue from venture capital.
They raised, I'm not sure how much, but probably a decent amount from different investors.
And that is capital for them to deploy in the production of the tools that are needed.
You can rely on donations and gifts from, for example, Jack Dorsey.
He's been prolific in providing capital to the builders of these tools,
and that works quite well.
And of course, that can come from multiple different people and organizations,
OpenSats HRF etc which works really well as an initial stopgap to provide some of the resources needed But then very soon you should go to the people whom you actually solving the problem for and ask them for the money And like your
users should pay for your services. And that's a crazy idea, I know. But that really is how it
works. And the thing is, for the largest amount of time in the internet, you couldn't just get paid
from your users, right?
Because first of all,
receiving money online
was notoriously difficult.
You need a bank account,
you need a whole company
and processing credit cards,
et cetera, is crazy expensive.
And so you cannot do it
for small payments.
And then you need to bundle it
in a subscription and whatnot.
And it comes with all types
of different problems.
But I don't know if you guys know this,
but we have money on the internet now.
And that changes everything.
And I noticed this with Wasabi Wallet because the product that we were working on was a wallet.
So literally, by definition, 100% of our users had magic internet money and programmable magical internet money.
And we could program their wallet.
So we can simply say 0.3% of your wallet goes to us.
And if you don't like that, then turn it off or change the code or just use a different wallet. But this is how this wallet works. And 0.3% is not much. And the value that we provided was infinitely larger. So it was a win-win for everyone. People saved a bunch of money. And so they were happy to give us a tiny fraction of the money that they saved.
that's great
and then the question is just
what is the mental transaction cost
for people to pay you
because if I need to fill out a form
and print it out
and sign it with a piece of paper
then upload it or send it
to some post office
just to send you 30 cents of whatever
that's not going to work
I don't want to do that
because it's too much hassle
but that's where software comes in
you can automate stuff
and so especially as soon as money is involved in the native product that you are working on
and we have that with every bitcoin wallet we have that with basically every nostre client
just take a cut and and most nostre clients do this nowadays if someone makes a zap just take
five percent you know why not um and sure maybe some users are going to complain so give them the
option to set it to zero and i would argue then also give them the option to set it to 300 percent
and so if i send you a thousand sats then three thousand sats in addition go to the developers
why not like the developer does way more work than a shit post and so if you have the money to send
a thousand sats to a shit post you should have the money to send three thousand sats to the people
who provided you the tools to view that shit post in the first place that's way harder work than just
writing the tweet, you know.
So thankfully with Bitcoin, we have a million and one ways to actually transfer money from
the users to the developers.
And the developers just have to do it and not be ashamed of asking for money and building
tools that by default transfer money from the user to the developer.
And then the only question left is scale, right?
Like we didn't earn much money in the early days of Wasabi.
And equally now, most Nostra devs don't earn much money, even though they take 5% or whatever.
And so you need to reach that critical mass to, at some point, be actually profitable.
But you know, that will come with time.
And if your product is actually good and continues to get better, then the people will come sooner or later.
And maybe, maybe if there's just isn't enough people coming to use your technology and to pay you for it, then maybe you're wasting your time on something that is not that important and you should do something else.
That's the market signaling you that you could do much better, right?
This is not the most important problem to put your hands on at the moment.
Go do something that people actually value, where people are actually happy to give their hard-earned money to you.
And, you know, that's a fine line to walk on which project do you work on?
How long do you work on it without earning any money?
When do you pivot?
And those are all extremely complex questions to ask.
And obviously, I can provide a good answer in general.
And that's where the market comes in.
That's why we have 8 billion people trying to wrestle with these ideas and come up with
cool solutions to difficult problems that people are willing to pay for.
because sooner or later, one of us will figure it out.
And guess what?
You don't have to be the one that starts the project.
You can just join a project that already has users
and a big problem and a great solution
and you just join that existing project and make it better.
Like I didn't start Wasabi.
I found Wasabi because it was cool
and then I joined the existing team.
And equally now, I'm not the only one working on White Noise.
There's Jeff, there's a bunch of others
and we're doing this together.
You don't need to do it alone.
Most things are shit if you do it alone.
It's much better if you have friends and colleagues that help you in this endeavor.
And there's a couple of amazing projects in Bitcoin, in Noster, in the broader freedom ecosystem that absolutely need your help.
And that absolutely already have the capital to pay for people that help fix the problems.
So go ahead and do that.
Love it, mate.
Absolutely love it.
perfect place to put a pin in today's conversation.
So I've got to throw the last conversation at you.
Should I change it?
If you had one last purple pill left to give to somebody,
who would you give it to and why?
Oh, I'm honored.
That might be the first time you're changing your last question.
Yep.
And now I was so prepared for the orange question,
but now it's purple.
Okay, that's a tough one.
Well, I was kind of thinking of,
like back a couple weeks ago,
I was joking at a conference of,
we need more billionaires to fund Freedom Tech.
And then someone told me that at the moment,
And I think we using less than 3 of the annual philanthropy budget of Jack Dorsey So we cannot even spend the money of one billionaire even though he would be probably happy to give us more
It's just we're uninvestable, so to say,
because we're not doing enough.
And so I'm not going to suggest Mark Zuckerberg
or anything like that.
I would split the purple pill to a bunch of people and give it to those who have the skill and the passion and the dedication to build it.
We don't need people just shitposting on Oster.
I mean, that's cool. Do it.
But even more important, we need the people who are building it.
And so give it to the builders, broadly speaking.
Love it, mate. Well, that's the call to action right there. Max, how can people reach out? If there's anything that you've said here today that's interested them and they want to reach out or they feel as though they need your guidance, maybe you can put them, matchmake them and their skills to something, another project that's going on. If anybody's inspired, where should they reach out to you?
towardsliberty.com that's my website there you find my pubkey and all my nostril posts
and and yeah to the question that you said of like where where should you go to people ask me
a lot of hey which project should I work on and I always give the same answer and maybe it's a
shitty answer but it's the one that I feel is right contribute to the tools that you're already
using right now and because you know that they're important otherwise you wouldn't use them
And you know they're valuable because apparently they solve a problem for you.
And I'm sure that for every tool that you use, you know how to make it better already.
So help the people that build the tools that you rely on.
That was my entire strategy of my Freedom Tech career.
I one by one went through all of the tools that I was using that I was relying on for a freer life.
And I asked the people, how can I help you?
What do you need that I can make it better?
and that's an important question to ask
but also think about just doing it
without their permission
you can write blog posts
or do YouTubes or tutorials
or interviews etc
about the tools that you find valuable
and just onboard your friends
onboard your family
help people set up the tools
that you're already using and working
and then encourage those users
to make a donation to the project as well
so yeah
You can just do things and you can just fix the tools that you know are broken.
And for those listening now on Apple or Google, like switch to Fountain App.
It's that simple.
This is exactly what Max is talking about.
The tools already exist.
Fountain App exists.
Yes, I know that the barrier to entry for most people to switch has been very sticky to their old tech, like we talked about earlier.
and it's just too damn easy and I've got my subscriptions running on Apple
and whatever else, but get rid of it.
Download Fountain App.
Start streaming some sats across to your favorite podcasters.
Start using the tools.
Reach out to them.
Give them the problems that you're experiencing.
They need the feedback.
Nick and Oscar, great Britco owners.
They're here in Britain.
And another example would be to support, if you love music, go and find Aaron of Essex over here in the UK, who's onboarding new musicians to Bitcoin so they can accept Bitcoin for their music.
Get them or stop listening to music on Spotify.
Start using Wyvelake.
Start using Fountain App.
You know, these things already exist, right?
And if not you, then who?
Right.
If we as Bitcoiners are not using that technology, then we're just slowing everything else down.
Everyone's talking about Bitcoin treasury companies are going to take us to the moon and this, that, and the other thing.
And it's the fiat Trojan horse.
None of that matters if the economy is not being built up from the ground up.
It's going to be the market.
Come at the time, come at the market.
the economic actors within this market are us as individuals.
And if we can lean into existing projects, get over to Geyser, right?
What a great place to geyser.fund to go and find all the projects that are listed.
And I'm not saying go and throw sats at every single one.
I'm not trying to shame anybody here into throwing sats.
But you could probably lend your skills and services to a whole bunch of those different
projects if there's something there that piques your interest.
I met a guy last night who's making a Bitcoin trading game, BTCG, and he's creating a physical and online game.
For those on video, here's one of like the gaming cards.
So it's like a Top Trumps kind of style card that, you know, people can play and connect with each other online or in real life.
Go support that if trading games, you know, card games are your thing.
And I think pretty much all these niches are being covered.
You can buy, like you said, soap, soap miner, leather mint, all these guys.
We've now got Bitcoin wine.
We've got beef bits.
It is coming along.
But these are the people, these are the entrepreneurs that we need to support and sling them some sats and well-deserved.
if they're creating products that you so desire.
Yeah.
It really is not enough to just listen to podcasts.
That is counterproductive.
It's a good place to start, but very soon you have to get out of that mindset
and you have to be part of the builders in whatever shape or form that that means.
because knowing this information
that you get on this podcast and others
and not doing anything with it,
I think is extremely psychologically damaging.
And you're part of the problem.
And you're making it worse and you're making it bigger.
And that's really not good.
You need a creative outlet for the anger
that this information should distill in you.
right and if not your your soul will will shrivel with the shame of knowing that evil is being done
and not doing anything with it so go out and actually do something with this valuable information that you accumulated over all of these years 40 hours per week i love these psychopaths that sit there and listen to it And I know exactly what you mean by this because I got to a point
and that's why I started the podcast.
I got to a point where I was just yelling, old man yelling at clouds, right?
I had no outlet.
I had no one to speak with, no one to connect to.
So Twitter was a way fun time back in the mid to late teens than it is now.
So it's an even more lonelier place for people now.
And it's been a really, really confusing year, especially if this is your first cycle
or if you've just found Bitcoin this year.
My goodness, the amount of noise that you've got to sift through.
But if you've been through a cycle and you've done your 40 hours per week,
I look forward to how you can lean into um into this space and when you do you're going to get
paid back in so many different ways not not just satoshis or you know or fiat uh you know people
don't do it for that you're going to get paid you're going to get rewarded in ways that like
it's hard to put into words like you know what I've experienced since starting the podcast and
meeting people like yourself and everybody else that I've managed to meet at the conferences
around, mainly around Europe.
It's, yeah, it's been a journey
and I just wish it on as many other Bitcoiners
out there as possible.
It's nice to leave that on a positive note, mate.
We got this.
It just requires a few more of us to keep leaning in.
Yeah, exactly.
It's a lot of fun.
It's a lot of hard work,
but it's absolutely worth it.
Join us.
100%
alright Max
thanks for coming on mate
and have
enjoyed the rest of your day
wherever you are
and whatever time zone you're on
appreciate you
catch you again soon
see you around
bye bye
thank you everybody for listening
thank you Max
for coming back on the show
and sharing everything
that you've been up to recently
if you've been inspired
by anything that you've heard there
if there's any way
that you think
you'd be able to help
with Max
and his latest project
white noise reach out if you would like to get any kind of guidance from max like i said at the
beginning he has towards liberty.com is his website you can just book a slot with him get on a call
see where you can add value see if there's anywhere that he can uh like help you out and
like i said there could be anything from helping you set up a self-custody system and just having
like an expert on the end of the line and i use that word in this case like max has been doing
this for a long time he's definitely an expert in that field he spent many years working within
wasabi and building wasabi from the very beginning when wasabi was just a an online wallet before
they became what they went on to become and yeah there's many many learnings you can go back and
listen to the other conversations that we've had in the past to see max's trajectory and
the rally cry listen to the rally cry what is it that you can do or where is it that you can add
value in your own specific way using your own specific skill set and your knowledge and that
could be in absolutely any field any field at all whatever your area of expertise is i guarantee you
you marry that with bitcoin or in fact your area of passion is because your expertise might be in a
fiat job that you really can't stand and you want to get out of so what's your passion find your
passion and mix that with bitcoin and i guarantee you opportunities will come your way completely
out of left field you've got to find your people though and there is a great place to go find your
people. Club Orange. It used to be called Orange Peel App. It has rebranded. It's now called Club
Orange. Go back and listen to my recent episode with Matteo Pellegrino. He's the founder, the CEO,
the builder, designer, the dreamer. He's the guy that scratched his own itch as a lonely Bitcoiner
on the west coast of the US when his wife and his friends and his family just gave up listening to
him talking about Bitcoin. He had nowhere to turn. He had no friends left that he could just get into
deep conversations with. He found himself just spending hours and hours on Twitter. So he built
Club Orange to connect with people, to find people. He wanted an app that he could open up and said,
yo, there's 15 Bitcoiners within 150 mile radius of you. And guess what? There's this meetup over
here there's this event going on here there's this merchant that accepts bitcoin you can go
across and go and get a coffee or a beer or you can order something from them online that's what
he built for himself there's now almost 20 000 members on club orange i'm a big fan of it i've
been part of the advisory board there with mateo from the very beginning he was very
uh he was very humbling to to be invited along there he'd been a long listener of the show
so that was a reason. I sit on that board with Knut von Holm. He's written five books about
Bitcoin. He's got his own Bitcoin podcast. Nico from Bitcoinbook.shop and Nico from Simply
Bitcoin as well and a few others and we just get together each month and we look at what's going on
and try and get as many people meeting as each other as possible because the real value is found
in in real life physical meetings. That's what we're built to do. We are social animals. It's
time to get offline and get in physical spaces with each other in real life so go check out club
orange there is a link in the show notes that you can hit it's going to take you directly there
yes it's a paid app it's a paid app because if something's free you're a project you are a product
same thing i guess uh there's no ads on there no data is harvested or stored and you can reach out
to Matteo. Ask him about it
and get connected.
Get over to Club Orange. Hit the link in the show notes.
Look forward to seeing you there. Say hi to
me on there if you sign up and
it would be cool to meet at one stage
during any of these conferences.
Look forward to meeting many of you at
BTC Prague again this year.
It's going to be in June. Hit the link
in the show notes. Use the code BITN
and get 10% discount on all
your ticket purchases.
That's the end of the show. Thanks for listening guys.
I'll catch you on the next one.
Thank you.