Welcome to Pleb Chain Radio, a live show brought to you by Plebs for Plebs, which focuses
on the intersection of NOSTER and Bitcoin protocols.
Join QW and Avi as they run down the weekly news and developments, breaking down the current
thing and the future frontier with the foundation of decentralization, the builders, thinkers,
doers, and plebs.
All right, we are live.
Welcome, gentle pioneers, to the Lightning Laced Airwaves. Today is Friday, the 17th of October, and it is 12.55pm on the East Coast of the United States.
At the time of recording, this is episode 133 of Plep Chain Radio, and we have a great show ahead of you.
David Strayhorn, creator of Brainstorm and Grapevine,
joins us to talk about Web of Trust and much, much more.
A reminder, folks, if you are listening to the show on Apple or Spotify,
first of all, thank you for listening.
But I would urge you to hit pause and switch over to the Fountain podcasting app
where you can earn some sats and support the value-for-value revolution while you listen.
And while you're there, we would appreciate it if you hit that subscribe button.
Your support helps keep our mics warm and this podcast ad-free.
The show is streamed live on Zap.Stream.
Yes, indeed, Zap.Stream is back, and I checked, we are streaming live.
and also on any other Nostra client that supports streaming such as Amethyst, Nostra, Fountain and Primal.
And folks, the second episode of my travel show, Finding Home, in Prague this time,
is now available on IndieHub for streaming.
And you can use code PioneerChain21, P-I-O-N-E-E-R-C-H-A-I-N 21 for, you guessed it, 21% off the price.
And for Culture Corner today, we have Nostra Valley coming up tomorrow.
In fact, I believe the festivities begin later this evening.
Noster Valley in State College, Pennsylvania, organized by friend of the show, friends of the show, I should say, Derek Ross and Seth.
There is also Nosterville 3.0, and that's happening next Saturday, the 25th of October in Nashville at Bitcoin Park.
And indeed, friend of the show, Open Mic, is the man behind the curtain for that one.
And another exciting event has dropped on the calendar, folks. It's BitFest. This is three days of incredible NOSTA and Bitcoin content and indeed Bitcoin and NOSTA art that is taking place in Manchester, England between the 21st and the 23rd of November.
The first day will be Nost-a-only, an event called Nost-a-sher, followed by the BitFest, which includes BitFlix, working with the Bitcoin Film Festival, a screening of fantastic Bitcoin films.
and please use code PLEBCHAINRADIO, P-L-E-B-C-H-A-I-N-R-A-D-I-O,
one word for 10% off tickets for the entirety of BitFest.
And for our sermon today, I want to talk about a word we use every day,
but rarely think about, trust.
Trust is one of those foundational bedrock problems for cypherpunks.
How do you create trust in a network of pseudonymous strangers without a king, without a central authority to tell you who's legit?
In the fiat world, the old world, this is actually solved in its own way.
The solution is to create gatekeepers.
It creates giant centralized entities whose entire business model is to sell you a stamp of approval.
You trust that the app you're downloading won't steal your photos because the benevolent overlords at Apple gave it their stamp.
You trust your doctor isn't just some guy who watched a lot of YouTube tutorials
because a big, intimidating credentialing board gave his diploma a stamp.
The thing is, that stamp comes with a price.
The gatekeeper who grants trust can also revoke it, take it away on a whim.
They can resort to censorship if they don't like what you're building.
They demand you hand over your personal information, heavy-handed KYC, just for the privilege of being considered trustworthy.
The fiat system doesn't create trust, it monopolizes it and rents it back to you.
But what if trust didn't have to be a top-down decree?
What if it could be an emergent property, something woven from the bottom up?
What if your trust in someone wasn't based on a corporate logo, but on the verifiable web of connections you already have?
That's real user empowerment.
A world where your client, your feed, and your reality are shaped by your network, not by a central gatekeeper.
This isn't just a philosophical daydream.
This is one of the most active and important frontiers being built on NOSTA today.
And my guest is one of the key architects laying the bricks for this new foundation of trust.
We have David Strayhorn, a builder, a thinker, and now a co-founder of NOS Fabrica.
And we'll talk about that in a little bit.
And we're going to talk about how we, the users, can finally build this thing together.
So David, welcome to PlapChain Radio.
Avi, thank you very much for having me.
It's a pleasure and an honor to be on your show.
And I love that introduction that you gave, the sermon that you gave about trust, because that is a good statement of the problem, of the question.
And it's the, I would say, that could be the problem I've been obsessed with for many years now.
So, David, for our listeners who are unfamiliar with you and your background, walk us through that journey.
I mean, I believe you are a doctor, a medical doctor.
So how does a medical doctor move into this complicated foundational cipher problem of trust?
Well, so, yeah, that's correct.
I am a neurologist.
My subspecialty is in epilepsy.
I see patients in the clinic and I enjoy doing that very much.
I, you know, if your question is, how did I get to being obsessed with the problem of
trust?
I suppose I could trace that back to when I was still in residency in neurology when
the housing market crash happened, which renewed my interest in alternatives to the fiat system
of money.
Something I'd always been interested in and didn't have a whole lot of time to think about it back then because I was so busy in training.
But it got me thinking about what we could do to replace the fiat system.
And I eventually came upon what I would consider the Ron Paul kind of perspective, which is that we need a marketplace.
We need a system where anybody could issue currencies.
what we would call now a token
and the barrier to entry should be as low as possible
and we would need two things
first of all we'd need a marketplace or multiple marketplaces
to trade one currency versus the other
and then secondly we would need a web of trust
is there some echo coming in there?
No, go ahead David
Okay, so second thing we'd need
would be a web of trust because if anyone can issue a token and if,
and if that's going to be a low barrier to entry,
then you should be able to do this. So pseudonymously.
And then we would need some way for our trust network to identify, okay,
well, this token right here is actually worthwhile. You know,
this person says that he's going to back it with gold or silver or whatever.
and that person's trustworthy.
And so at first I was focused a little more on how would the marketplace work.
But I eventually realized that the web of trust part was the difficult part of that equation
and the real challenge.
And not only that, but web of trust has applications beyond just what tokens are trustworthy.
But, you know, it has applications for so many different things.
And so and that's also about when I discovered Bitcoin.
And and and so now in my mind, freedom technology, I think of it as having two different pillars.
One is Bitcoin and the other one is Nostra.
Bitcoin is how is is is a decentralized method for value to flow in a permissionless fashion from person to person.
And then Noster and what I believe we're going to build the web of trust system that we are going to build on top of Noster is how does trusted information flow from person to person in a completely decentralized manner with no single points of failure.
and so um yeah i've just i've spent a lot of time thinking in a very abstract way on how to solve
that problem which i think and i think that that those of us the four of us in os fabrica agree this
is you know how to get webist trust to work is one of the most difficult problems in all of freedom
technology um so i've thought about how to how do you frame the problem how do you solve the problem
what are the big principles, but then also what are the nuts and bolts details
of how can we make it happen?
And we can probably go back and forth during this show,
from the big picture to the nuts and bolts,
what's the next step that we need to do?
Yeah I think that we should definitely do that But maybe first David when did you get into Nostra and you realized that there was an opportunity here with Nostra
to build out this trust framework?
So I was building, before I discovered Nostra,
I discovered it when a lot of other people did,
when Jack Dorsey posts about it.
Was that December of 22, I think, or 2023?
I don't remember.
So that's when I discovered it.
And that's when I, prior to that, I was building, I was trying to build my conception of the grapevine and the concept graph.
These are the modules that I see as building blocks for Web of Trust.
I was building those using IPFS, interplanetary file system.
and uh and then nostrum came along and and i realized that was much better because i mean for
for one thing i didn't have to build a community from scratch that's you know a whole the the
starting building block of web of trust is um is identity is a cryptographic identity that no one
controls. And one of the great things about NOSTER is that it is not unnecessarily complicated.
It's just bread and butter, public key, private key cryptography. And that is the starting point
for Web of Trust. So that is, so 20, yeah, December 2022 is when I came to NOSTER.
You know, this is one of the underrated aspects about NOSTER, which is the adoption flywheel or
the network flywheel. I mean, yes, there may be, we're talking about 20 or 30,000 weekly active
users, maybe 40,000, you know, the number goes up and down. But even that number, if you're building
a solution, if you come in fresh and you start building a solution on Nostra, in theory, you
inherit that network out of the gate, right? So there is, that flywheel is already turning.
yeah that's absolutely true i mean so when i was building on ipfs i was thinking okay i have to
build this tool and it's going to be really awesome and and then people are going to start
using it but it definitely helps when you're not starting from zero you're starting from
you know 20 tens of thousands of users like you say and and uh yeah so i i love nostr i think it's
There's so many people building so many things and there's so much creativity. And I think it is a better starting point for Web of Trust than any of the other so-called decentralized frameworks.
Noster is more decentralized to me in the sense that there is no single great big code base that we are forced to adopt.
you know there's not a library that you have to use and if you deviate one tiny bit then you're
not using it like blue sky for example i've not delved into the code base of blue sky but i but i
think you can't just change one little piece of it without not being on blue sky but nostr
all you really you don't have to you only have to adopt how many nips maybe just nip one in order
to say, I'm on Noster. And you don't have to agree with everybody else about all the other details
on how to do everything. And that's the way decentralized communities should work.
People need to be able to experiment and come up with different ways of doing things,
but do that without having to start an entirely new community all the way from scratch.
yeah agreed i think nip one obviously is foundational as long as you're you're using
that you should be good but i mean obviously a handful more if you can agree on um it just makes
it a little easier uh but yes that that makes sense david so so when you started building
these tools uh what were the existing solutions that you saw back then
and this is on Nostra I mean um yeah the so so in first so I so I guess the question is how what
how does web of trust work now and how did it work so so at first in the very beginning
Nostra was just a firehose you had global view and anybody could post anything there was no web
was just. And then the, you know, the follows list was, was the first tool that everyone used
in order to, um, to filter out the noise. So, uh, you know, I, I'm only going to see a feed
of people who I follow. Uh, and that's, that works very well to get rid of content. Um,
you know, downsides are that, well, one thing is that you've got to curate it. You're, you have to
manage the list yourself. And, and so you have to, every piece of every new user, you have to find
all by yourself, um, as opposed to letting your, having a tool that your community can help you
find new users. Uh, and so the next, so, so I would say one's web of trust at that point is
your follows list that you maintain. And then at some point, you know, people wanted things
more sophisticated than that. And I'm not sure when UTXO released his Web of Trust relay.
But it's my understanding of the way Web of Trust works in that relay is that people I follow plus
the people they follow, that's my slightly extended Web of Trust. So now I can start seeing content
from users automatically that, you know,
who I didn't manually add to my followers list.
You know, the disadvantage is, well,
that you might have some bots to sneak in,
but, you know, it still works very well.
Its limitation is now you're only looking two hops away,
people you follow plus people they follow.
And to me, the next step in evolution of Web of Trust was using PageRank, which is probably the most well-known centrality algorithm out there.
It's the algorithm that basically launched Google and eventually becomes a trillion-dollar company.
you know with i remember when when page rank was in when google was introduced in 1998
internet keyword search before that was awful you would type nine out of ten of the of the
results you'd get if you if you did a keyword search would be websites that are complete spam
and then page rank comes along and suddenly nine out of ten of the results that come back
are what you're looking for. It was miraculous at getting rid of spam. And that's the first
reason to use Web of Trust is to get rid of the spam. And so the way Google uses page rank is that
if website A has a hyperlink to website B, then that is effectively a signal that website B can
be trusted and, and its page rank score gets boosted. And the amount of the boost is relay is
a function of the page rank score of the website that, you know, that, that's, that has the hyperlink
to the, to the second one. Um, so if a bunch of, of websites that have zero trust scores,
all hyperlink to each other, it doesn't matter. They're no one's score gets boosted. Um, and so
that worked very well. The way that page rank, the most obvious way for page rank to work in Noster
is to use the follows list. So if I follow you and you follow someone else, and then
that person follows someone else, and suddenly, you know, there's no limit to the number of hops
away that whose page rank score can get off of zero. And...
So, David, on that, maybe just to simplify for our less technical listeners.
Basically, you know, search was a complete mess.
Discoverability was a complete mess in the 90s.
And then Google comes along sometime in the late 90s,
and they come up with this algorithm that, based on your query,
it filters out websites based on how they're hyperlinked
and, you know, different connections.
and it just delivers these results to you
that are incredibly or far more accurate
than what used to be the case.
And it looks like a complicated mathematical equation
that happens under the hood,
but what Google does is it uses this essentially
trust-like filter to deliver meaningful search results.
I actually have an interesting anecdote on that one, David,
But from back in my first job out of college, I was working at a robotics research lab.
And this was in 2003, I think.
And it was a robotic surgery lab, part of the cardiothoracic surgery unit.
They were using this Da Vinci surgical robot.
And there was one of the surgeons there.
So this is, you know, 2003 would be, what, four or five years after PageRank came out, right?
So it was relatively new, early days of PageRank.
And he had this incredibly basic website about aneurysms.
And he, you know, it was pure text, nothing fancy at all.
And it just listed a whole bunch of links to different resources on aneurysms.
As it turned out, over the course of the last couple of years leading up to that, some of those websites linked back to him, to his website, saying he has a list of resources about aneurysms.
So much so that if you typed in the word aneurysm into Google back then, his website was number one.
A simple plain text website, all it had was links to resources about aneurysms.
yes it was i mean i had no idea how it worked in when it first came out and it wasn't until
you know more than a decade later that i was even interested to learn how it worked all i knew it
was it was magic it was it was just like you said it's like my god how you know the entire world and
the best website comes up for exactly what i'm looking for um yeah and um and and you know so
So PageRank is relatively simple as far as algorithms go.
It is a little complicated to gather all the data and then actually implement the algorithm.
And maybe we can get into the shortcomings of PageRank.
And maybe we can get into whose job should it be in NOSTER to calculate PageRank scores And I think our view is that we need to have services that provide third service providers for those scores and they should
be personalized scores, not global scores. I'm actually, maybe before we get into those,
I'm curious to know a little bit more of your pathway. You've worked in healthcare in many
different ways and um and you know you've i'm actually not sure how is it how is it that you
and and um avi pamplona and john gordon came together to form nosfabrica and uh yeah what was
what was that path like for you i think it'll be it'll be helpful to give our listeners some
background on this and on Nosfabrica as well. So yeah, look, I can keep my background on this
brief. I was an electrical engineer. I was focusing on robotics. And a hospital that was
affiliated to my grad school said, hey, do you want a job? I said, sure. Working on a surgical
robot, Da Vinci, why not? Interesting stuff. So that was it. I was in healthcare. And after that,
I was very heavily mathematical, so got into mathematical finance, ended up in a job in healthcare, securitizing healthcare claims, believe it or not.
And then, you know, that sort of cemented, I guess, that stage of my career in healthcare, ended up at a company called Change Healthcare several years later, around the pandemic time, actually.
And that company got acquired by UnitedHealth, and we were spun off into the Optum unit.
So that's where I was.
And this is where the seeds of Nosfabrica's genesis lie, because in February of 2024,
there was a major cyber incident where actually changed healthcare servers in Nashville
were ransomware attacked.
And that, you know, the project I was working on
was completely, was basically, it went to zero
in the sense that all the code was gone,
a million lines of code, four years of work, and so on.
So it was that point I reached out to John Gordon,
who I'd met at the Bitcoin conference
a couple of years before that, one of the Miami ones.
and we started talking
and then a few months later
John had been talking to Vitor
the creator of Amethyst, Vitor Pamplona
and then we, so the three of us got together
at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville
had a chat and then a couple of months later
launched Nosfabrica, all three of us had
a health tech background
and when we thought NOSTA is a fantastic way
of solving a lot of the issues we were seeing,
such as these honeypots that were created, right,
these data honeypots with the change healthcare cyber attack.
But even beyond that, the patient access to their medical records,
the care discovery process, price transparency,
none of this exists, especially in the U.S.
and with NOSTA, you know, patient identity being owned by the patient
and then them being able to sign and, you know,
events that tied to their personal health records,
being able to delegate access and so on and so forth,
was incredibly powerful, right?
We could create a marketplace where patients could look for healthcare providers
and, you know, sought by a web of trust, if you will, right,
which provider is good or not, and then get the price right there, pay in Bitcoin if they wanted to,
you know, make their appointment either virtual or in person, that sort of thing.
So, you know, that was the idea.
We started building a few things late in or early this year.
We launched a hackathon because we thought that would be a good way of getting community engagement
and interest in a lot of these healthcare use cases
because there was minimal to none healthcare use cases
being built on Nostra
with all the focus going primarily
into the social media type clients.
And we ran a successful hackathon
for went from January to May of this year.
We had our calls were super well attended.
Many times over 20, 30 people.
We had five or six teams that were actively building, and we saw some really cool apps come out of that.
We live-streamed the last couple of calls, including the prize award.
So Vitor, John, and I, we funded a bounty for the hackathon.
It was about 16 million sats.
We had a couple of other folks chip in as well, small amounts.
and that last
the prize ceremony
if you will was live streamed
and we had almost 200 people on Zap.Stream
listening
so we had a
so the hackathon was a great experience
we took a lot of learnings out of it
and then over the summer
we started building out
you know some proofs of concepts
and prototypes
and this is what we ran into David
which is
So let's take the example of the care discovery marketplace.
It's critically important, especially in the US, but I suspect around the world as well,
for a patient to be able to describe their symptoms into a simple text field,
get a list of doctors, and then be able to know which doctor is right for them
based on some sort of rating.
But here's the problem in a truly decentralized network.
someone can list themselves as a doctor on that directory.
How do you know they're a doctor?
That's question number one.
Question number two is, let's say there's some way in which you know they're a doctor.
How do you know they're a good doctor?
And the way we, the view we took, you know, at some point late in the summer was,
well, it's an important question, but let's for now get past that
by saying Nos Fabrica would be the credential issuer.
We would issue NIF 58 badges.
If someone wants to be a doctor on the marketplace, they could reach out to us.
We would do some like a soft KYC handshake because friends and so on.
Just to prove the concept.
I think we very quickly realized that while it was doable to move things forward,
we were just recreating the same thing I talked about in the sermon.
We were becoming the gatekeeper.
Absolutely not our intention to.
and incredibly fortuitously
John bumped into you
John Gordon bumped into you
at Bitcoin Park a month or so
ago and
we started talking about all
the web of trust tools that you've been
building, Brainstorm, Grapevine
and we'll talk about those in a second
David and I think
from there
it made complete sense
for you to come and join Nosfabrica
for Nosfabrica to broaden its scope
to being not just healthcare use cases on NOSTA,
but a broader web of trust substrate,
building tools and making sure that these reputation
and trust relationships that are so critically needed,
not just in healthcare, but any kind of commerce,
remain open, decentralized, and user choice based.
So that's kind of where we are.
So I guess folks listening, breaking news, Nosfabrica is pivoting or rather broadening, I should say, to web of trust.
And I'm sure healthcare will follow once we solve this critical problem.
So that was a long answer, David.
You're the guest and I rambled on for the last five minutes.
No, so I mean, that's, yeah, it was so great meeting John at Bitcoin Park.
That's just a great place to be in for so many reasons.
But yeah, I was so glad to run into him and then to connect with NOS Fabrica and I'm overjoyed
to be teaming up with the three of you so that we can, I envision that we'll be able
to provide some leadership for the NOSTA community on how to incorporate WebOS Trust.
I bet there are lots of other development teams that are working in other fields.
They have a need for trust, just like Nosfabrica.
We needed a way to trust doctors.
They have their own similar web of trust problems to tackle, but don't really know how exactly to do that because it's just such a big problem.
And I think that maybe you mentioned it or Vitor had mentioned at one point that maybe the thought was doing trust for this small sector, you know, healthcare as opposed to the great big problem of web of trust might be easier to tackle the smaller problem first.
But I don't think that's the case. I think that we need to have the substrate, the foundation of Web of Trust first before we start tackling the individual use cases like health care, because there's no limit to the number of use cases.
and we need a roadmap for how to do that.
And hopefully we can dig into some of the details of our next steps.
And by the way, I love the name Nosfabrica.
It's the fabric of Noster.
That's the way I – and it's great for web of trust.
You know, we're building – we're building –
Yeah.
Yeah. Serendipitous at multiple levels, for sure, David. So let's talk about the solutions. And maybe since you'd mentioned PageRank before, and we sort of explained it in the context of search back in the late 90s, how would that work on Noster?
How would you tackle the web of trust problem using PageRank?
And then maybe you could talk about in your work looking into it, in your research looking into it, what the shortcomings you found in the context of NOSTA.
Yeah.
So the first question as far as how do you get PageRank to work, the first question is going to be who's going to calculate it.
There are lots of individual clients and platforms.
They calculate Web of Trust scores using, mostly using follows, but, you know, sometimes roping in other bits of information.
And they use Web of Trust scores on their platforms But to do something as complicated as page rank really I think we cannot expect each individual client to do that on their own
First of all, you need to gather together a whole lot of data. You need basically all the follows
that are available to you. And then you need to run the calculations, which can be done relatively
quickly, but you have to actually implement that. And so I think one of the big messages that I
think that I want to get out there is that Nostra needs third-party service providers to calculate
personalized trust metrics and then provide those metrics to the greater Nostraverse so that they can
be used throughout. And I have an article that I wrote pretty recently on why I think that's so
important. Right now, there are two examples that I know of. One is Vertex, which was started by
Papelia, run by Papelia. Also, Franz App, who was a guest of yours not too long ago,
helped to create Vertex. They calculate personalized page rank scores and make them
available through a NIP that Fran Zapp authored.
And then the other existing example is my own prototype, Brainstorm,
which calculates personalized page rank,
also calculates personalized grape rank,
which is what I see as the next step past page rank,
and several other trust metrics,
and then makes them available to Nostra.
so before we dig into brainstorm and grape rank and grapevine uh it might be helpful david if you
if you could explain to some some of our listeners who who might just be regular nosti users right
like look i all i want to do is go to primal post some memes make sure i could talk to my friends
right that's that's really what i'm interested in maybe if i see a you know soap miner or great
ghee or, you know, Leather Mint, one of those merchants.
I want to be able to interact with them and buy their stuff with Zaps.
Your regular garden variety user, consumer of the Noss' social experience, from their
perspective, how would this impact their user experience, these improved web of crust tools?
You know, the first use case would be just being more effective at getting rid of bad
actors. If you go to Primal and you search for, or if you go to almost any client and you search
for someone's profile, who's an influencer, who's well-known, you're going to see, you'll probably
see the actual person you're looking for, but you'll also see a number of impersonators.
and sometimes it can be hard to know um you know which is which people can be fooled sometimes the
impersonators and and also bots and just spammers they they make it through the existing filters
and they you know pollute your timeline and so the first improvement is going to be just clean
cleaning up your timeline um cleaning up your content and doing that in a way that does not
unfairly disadvantaged new users to Noster because we don't want to rebuild a system where the only
content that we see is from influencers, people who shitpost all the time and they have tons and
tons of followers. We don't want them to their opinion effectively to count more than someone
who's new to Noster and hasn't had time or maybe doesn't have the inclination to build up a lot of
followers. So yeah, that's the first is just getting rid of the spot of the, of the spam and
the bots. To a large extent that a lot of people are, will agree to on a whole lot of spam. There
are, there are, there are some types of accounts like AI. There are a lot of AI bots that are,
you know, some people don't want to see them. Others, maybe they do because some of the AI
these bots are actually entertaining or useful or worthy of seeing.
So after we just eliminate the really obvious spam,
then the tools that we're going to be building in the not too distant future
will be ways that you can, let's say,
let's say that you do want to see, you know, this category of AI bots,
but not that category of AI bots or this category of users and not that
category.
We want a system where your community can identify, put users in those categories,
and then you can just select, well, I want this category, not that category.
And so the idea is to give you, as a user, more control over your user experience.
First of all, it's just getting rid of the bad actors, but then secondly,
It's just being able to fine-tune what content you are interested in as opposed to seeing just a global feed that may or may not be what you're interested in.
So a couple of things come to mind here, David.
One is, I mean, I use the example of you're trying to go to Great Ghee or Soap Mine or any one of those merchants on Nostra and trying to buy one of their products.
You want to make sure you're going to the right one.
You're zapping the right person and not a crook.
So I think that would be helpful.
The other is, I think if someone is on their quote-unquote following feed,
that acts as a reasonable filter, I think,
in that very narrow context of seeing what the people you're following are saying.
However, if you switch over to a trending feed,
like the primal trending or Nostur has a whole bunch of feeds,
at What's Hot and other clients have different names for their feeds.
I think that's where things get tricky because you don't have that blunt instrument filter
of the people you're following.
And that, I believe, is where a lot of these impersonators and what have you can slip through
the cracks.
So then the question becomes, is the end buyer of these tools the user of Nostro or is it
the clients who implement this within their software so that the client's users have a
much better user experience?
So it's a great question.
What is the monetization strategy for service providers?
I don't know if you saw Odell gave a great talk at Imagine If at Bitcoin in Nashville
a few weeks ago, making that exact point that we need monetization strategies for open source
tools.
We can't just rely on grants forever.
And so, you know, I'm thinking who's going to pay for the third party service providers.
There's going to be multiple monetization models.
The model that makes most sense to me is that the end users are going to want to pay to have their personalized trust metrics calculated.
And they'll do that if, you know, once we prove the utility of having these scores.
You know, I not too long ago, I renewed my Nostra.build subscription.
I think it was like five bucks a month.
And, you know, there are certain things that are kind of must haves if you're going to use Nostra.
You know, you need someone who's going to store, you know, your photos and videos if you're going to upload them.
And so that's sort of a must have.
And I think that having personalized trust metrics that are high quality and configurable to your own preferences is going to become a must have.
And so that's I think the answer is that is I would see users ultimately being the ones who would pay to get the scores created.
so on the topic of scores you've obviously built brainstorm um which is the you know the
computation mechanism and then and and the scoring algorithm and then there's grapevine the the
delivery mechanism do you want it so why don't we start with uh with brainstorm how does it
calculate the scores today so yeah so so i have a prototype um service brainstorm that you can find
If you go to my Noster profile, then it's linked there.
It's straycat.brainstorm.social.
And so what it does is it calculates my personalized grapevine,
but it also, you can sign up and I will calculate the scores personalized to people who sign up.
So the idea is that this is open source.
Anybody can run a brainstorm instance.
You can calculate your own personalized scores, but you can also calculate scores for a number of, let's say, your friends or your family or maybe some community that you're operating or perhaps even paid customers.
And so the way that the scores are calculated is that I, right now, I take follows and mutes, the kind 1980s.
So follows from kind three notes, mutes are kind 1984, and then report, I'm sorry, kind 10,000,
and then reports are NIP 56, kind 1984 notes.
So I track those, and the grape rank score, in a way it's similar to page rank.
So the grape rank score, right now there's just a single score.
It's a number between zero and one.
And the idea is that if it's a one, then that means your grapevine is effectively telling you that this person is probably not a bot, probably a real Nostra user.
And if the score is a zero, then it means that this is maybe a bot or maybe we just don't have any information.
If someone has zero, you don't know anything about the default score for a new NPOB is zero.
And if the score is between zero and one, then it's as if your grapevine is telling you this user is probably not a bad actor, but we don't have enough information to say that with absolute certainty.
So let's say someone is four hops away from you and followed by five users who are themselves probably not bots.
Well, that is probably not a bot, but you're not 100% sure about that.
And, and so the, by default, everyone's score is a zero, except for yours.
So you are always at the center of your grapevine.
These are personalized to you.
So your score, your grape rank score is, is pegged to one, meaning you're a
hundred percent confident that you're not a bad actor.
And so then if you follow someone, then.
that person's score gets boosted.
It gets off of zero.
And then if they follow someone,
then that gets their score off of zero.
And the amount of the boost is a function
of the grape rank score of the person who's doing the follow.
So again, if a bunch of bots all follow each other,
but their score is all zero, then it doesn't matter.
And this is similar to how page rank works.
one of the really well-known attacks of page rank is that you can have what's called a link farm,
a bunch of, let's say you spin up a hundred different bad actors. They all follow each other.
Then all you need to do is get a handful of them followed by, you know, quote, quote, unquote,
you know, real users. And then that their score gets off zero and then they all boost each other
up. And that is an attack that is actually, we see that out in the real world. There are a lot of
users on Nostra whose page rank score is elevated because they've done a link farm attack.
And for that, that's the reason that I'm pulling in mutes and reports. So if Alice mutes Bob,
then instead of boosting Bob's score, then it decreases Bob's score. And if she reports him,
then that also suppresses someone's score. And the amount, you know, so this is what I call
interpretation. We take whatever data is available to us, in this case, follows mutant reports,
and we interpret it. So I interpret that as a statement, as Alice stating, if she follows Bob,
she is stating this account is worth following, is worthy of your attention. And so that's why
the score goes up. People follow relatively indiscriminately. So every follow mutant report
comes with a certain weight. And the amount of weight that a follow gets is not as much, you know,
people mute a little bit less indiscriminately. And if someone reports, then people do not do
that indiscriminately. Usually they mean it. So a single report, KIND 1984 NIP 56 report,
is going to outweigh a large number of follows. And so if a link farm attack is successful and
a bunch of bots make it through the system that only uses follows, then that's where mutes and
especially reports come in because the remedy for that is it only takes a handful of people to
report the bad actor and now their scores push down to zero again and you can take out the entire
link farm by only getting the ones who are actually followed by real users.
and um yeah so so these scores it's between zero and one um and i also calculate how many hops away
everyone is from you know like alice is three hops away from me so the hops trust metric is three
um the and and then i also calculate a verified follower count you know that's a big topic that
you hear people discuss, what does it mean to, you know, the follower count? Who cares? What does
it mean? Well, it doesn't mean anything if you're counting everyone who follows, you know, there's,
you know, there are lots of, if you can have a million bots follow you and your follower count
is a million. So what does that mean? But it does become meaningful if you have a system to say,
okay, the number of users who are verified using some method.
And so the way my default method is if, you know,
how many users follow you whose CREEP rank score is above,
I think 0.01 or 0.05 is my default.
And now we have a meaningful number and, you know,
the verified follower count.
And I also calculate how many verified followers mute you
and, more importantly, report you.
because these are very useful for getting rid of spam.
And so all these different trust metrics, they are then, this is a whole big topic,
is how do you take these scores and how do you communicate them to other clients?
And so the primary method that I'm using now is VTOR's NIP85 Trusted Assertions.
And the idea there is that these scores are published using kind 30382 notes.
So basically a single kind 30382 note would be from the perspective of someone, like my grapevine, and then it is a score for your NPUB.
And then your grape rank score is 0.99.
Your verified follower count is 2,000, whatever it is.
And then those scores are very, very easy to access by a client like Amethyst or Primal or any client out there.
And then they can be used for a number of purposes.
If I search for Odell, then if I do that on Primal or almost anywhere, I'm going to see five or six probably come up.
But if I can see their verified follower count or if they're a GrapeRank score, then that will do a very effective job of telling me which ones are the bots and which is the real one.
Or Primal, if they adopt GrapeRank, they'll just show you the right one.
Exactly.
Right.
That's a possibility as well.
Yes.
Actually, let's just go back to the computation.
finish your thought, David.
I was just going to say that empirically,
GrapeRank actually does a much better job
than PageRank of getting rid of the bots.
So yeah, so the only one you would see
would be the actual of Dell
from our kind of internal testing.
Got it.
So let's go back to the three vectors
or three signals, I should say, that you use.
follows, mutes, and reports.
And all of these either increment or decrement a user score.
And then there's obviously hundreds of thousands of connections
that contribute to the score.
Now, follows and mutes are revocable events in some sense,
meaning you can unfollow someone and you can unmute someone.
I'm not sure what the deal is with reports,
if those are revocable or not.
I don't think so.
With followers, yeah.
So a follower adds to the score.
Does that mean an unfollow subtracts from the score?
And the same question for mutes as well.
No, an unfollow or unmute would just be,
if you unfollow, then you're just no longer boosting the score.
So it's the same as if you never followed someone
as far as the way the calculation goes,
in the same way with a mute.
Right, so it does decrement the score then, right?
In the sense, okay, okay.
Because I was thinking, I was going back to the link farm attack.
All you need to do is seed it with a handful of people who are following the first four or five bots, which then follow the remainder, right?
And then the people who seeded it, all they have to do is unfollow.
And then there's plausible deniability at that point.
But if it does decrement the score, then the score would eventually collapse to zero.
if the humans who started the bot farm
actually got themselves out of the picture.
Yeah, yeah.
Makes sense.
But that said, though,
so let's say there are 1,000 daily active users.
I'm guessing, but I suspect if you're looking at daily active,
we're in that ballpark, somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000, right?
It can't be more than that.
I think it's around 15,000 daily from Nostra.band.
Is it daily?
Okay.
Yeah, daily.
Okay.
Yep.
Doesn't feel like it on my timeline, but we'll go with that.
There's a lot, yeah.
I mean, there's going to be lots who we don't see.
Fair enough.
But that said, so if it's 10,000 or 15,000 daily active users,
that is hundreds of thousands, potentially even millions,
of follows, unfollows, mutes, unmutes, potentially even reports,
which means you this this this score has to be calculated every single time correct so it's like
so how does the compute work in in this situation well let's see let me look right now so i've got
um about six million is there no no about about 20 million followers i think is in the database
right now, roughly, maybe a little bit more than that. And maybe about 300,000 or there about pub
keys that are all connected by 20 million follows. And so, yeah, so how often, ideally, we would
update those scores, you know, in real time. In practice, that's not going to be doable to do them
in real time. And especially my prototype, I'm not updating them all the time. I'm just,
you know, every, I'm just manually, I'll recalculate from scratch. You know, it might be
every couple of weeks since this is only a prototype. But, you know, one of the big questions
is going to be, what is the technology stack that we're going to use in order to do all these
calculations? And so for a long time, I've pushed the idea that we really need to incorporate graph
databases into, into Noster. Um, if, because in order to calculate Alice's score, I need to know
everybody who follows and mutes and reports her. And if all I have is a, is a stir fry or, or, or
just a, even, you know, just a Noster relay, then if I want to know everybody who follows Alice,
I have to, I have to screen through every follow note that exists and see whether Alice is in that
list and that takes way too long.
Graph database is much more efficient at coming up with who,
who is everybody who follows or mutual reports, or, you know,
we're going to incorporate ZAPs at some point who, um, uh,
whatever source of information, um, you know,
a graph database is much more efficient at coming up with scores, uh,
like this. And so how often, you know,
I think that the service that we want to build will probably have a free tier that will calculate
these scores on a very infrequent basis And then probably different paid tiers that are how frequently do you want these scores to be updated So for example a high priority would be if some high profile let say Jack Dorsey NSEC gets compromised
Obviously, you know, he's got about 10 or 12,000 verified followers, if I remember correctly, according to my default grade rank studies.
there's no you know there's no way that we're going to get 10 000 people to unfollow dorsey
but what is going to happen is that he can tell his people who he knows in real life hey can you
report this uh and this npub is being compromised and so um you know i so brainstorm potentially
doesn't do this now but could have a service where we monitor whenever a high profile account
starts getting reports, um, then it'll recalculate that score, that score, um, quickly. So, so you
would hopefully, you know, so, so in, you know, in 60 seconds, you would see Dorsey's in pub gets,
you know, the great rank score goes down to zero because five, 10, 20 people report, report them.
So, yeah, so that's going to be a journey for us for Nosfabrica is figuring out what is technologically feasible.
How quickly can these scores be recalculated?
What are the technological limitations?
That's something that we'll be discovering in the near future.
And so you brought up a great example there, David, because that is like the catastrophic scenario for NOSTA, right?
which is Jack Dorsey's NSEC gets breached,
and then whoever has it now starts posting as Jack Dorsey
about all sorts of things.
Hey, click on this link to get, and I will, whatever,
I will invest in your company.
And then people start clicking on it,
there's malicious links.
So if you think about that type of scenario,
you need a system to prevent that.
That is, in real time, looking at the follows,
mutes, reports, and so on, and calculating it over and over and over again, right, so that the score
collapses to zero. If it's a system that does it once a week, I mean, that's one week in which this
imposter, impersonator, has free reign, right, to pillage and plunder NOSTA users. So this is the
magnitude of the problem we're talking about. I mean, just to highlight that for our listeners,
each user might be following several hundred maybe even a thousand other people on NOSTA
they might be followed by several thousand people on NOSTA so every time they follow or unfollow
someone or someone follows or unfollows them or mutes or unmutes them or reports them
and that could happen multiple times a day,
their trust cost changes
and that needs to be calculated.
So if you do it in long, discrete intervals,
there is a risk that bad actors have that time
in between the calculation intervals
to act with impunity.
But then, so really what this becomes
is a large computational challenge, right?
Because this is a major, major calculation
and someone's got to pay the bill.
Someone's got to pay for the energy for these servers.
So is this, so now again,
so David, we get back to the situation
where should it be one company,
one entity that says,
I will horizontally scale, all right?
I will just keep adding server rack after server rack
so that I can calculate these scores in real time.
In that case, you know, you have this one monopoly
that's doing all these calculations.
If they become the de facto gatekeeper,
So, I mean, the score metrics could be open source,
but it's still one entity that's crunching the numbers.
Or, and maybe this is the point that you were referring to
that Odell was talking about, right,
which is do we have a marketplace of multiple entities
that say I can be the compute provider, right,
for these core calculations?
And then, of course, they will have their own trust scores, right?
Someone's going to have to score the scorers.
So I guess it's web of trust scores all the way down.
It is all the way down.
That's what we're talking about.
So the answer is, yeah, the goal is not to rebuild Google.
It's going to be the one company that calculates,
because that's just centralized again.
That's why these trust metrics need to be personalized.
That's why they are personalized.
And you ask, you know, who trusts the trusters?
Who trusts the scorers?
Ultimately, that's you.
If the scores are personalized to Alice, then Alice is the center of her grapevine.
She's always the center of her web of trust.
I'm the center of my web of trust.
You're the center of yours.
And so ultimately, you're the one who you state whose trust score gets off of zero.
And then it ripples out away from you.
So who's going to be doing it?
The way that Brainstorm works is that it's open source.
any any bun can can run their own brainstorm instance um you know right you know you know
this is why i'm so excited to be working with with you for you is because execution is everything
this and and and it's way beyond me to do on my own but um but once this is executed well then
it is the solution to like that problem the jack dorsey's compromised insect problem we were just
talking about. This is how we rapidly address and realistically address that problem. And so,
yeah, so every, imagine, ideally, I'd love it for everyone, every Nostra user to run an
individualized brainstorm instance, which means that you have an app on your phone that does all
the calculations locally, monitors all the information, updates them in real time.
That would be the ideal.
Now, I think of running a brainstorm instance as like running a Nostra Relay.
It'd be great if everyone has a personal realized relay, but realistically, that's not going
to happen.
And that's okay for that to be the case, which is why actually Cloudflotter is the one who
gave me this idea, who is the creator of Relay Tools, which, by the way, imports, currently
imports a whitelist that's created by a brainstorm instance. Talk to him about that. But he gave me
the idea that a brainstorm instance should not only calculate the personalized scores of the
owner and operator of the instance, but also for a list of other people so that you don't have to
run your own brainstorm instance. Someone else can do it as a service or maybe just someone who's
a friend of yours, or maybe someone can do it for you, who you trust for whatever reason.
So I want to see a world where there is no one big corporation doing all this.
I'd like to see lots of people running brainstorm instances that will be maybe forks or just
open source that we are going to start rebuilding from scratch soon.
I would like to see other companies create alternatives to what we are creating in Nosfabrica.
I would love it for Primal to build their own third-party service provider, which will calculate personalized trust metrics.
We have Vertex.
And I think we are in a position where a rising tide lifts all boats.
NOSTER needs to have personalized trust metrics.
They need to be sophisticated, which means they need to be calculated by sophisticated service providers.
We need the ability to run them individually.
But we also need to have it where we don't have to do that.
others, because realistically, not everyone's going to do that. Once we all, once Nostra starts
to have personalized trust metrics that are available to everyone, and that can be conveyed
throughout Nostra, because I want a consistent experience, I want the same follower count
that I see on Primal to be the follower count that I see on Coracle, or Amethyst, or anywhere else.
Once all that infrastructure is built, then I think that is going to be what is going to bring, that's what's going to get us past 10 or 15,000 daily users.
Because obviously our vision is we want that to go up by many orders of magnitude.
And so, yeah, I'm very excited for us, for Nosfabrica to be hopefully showing the way for how we can build that.
now absolutely exciting times david but there you know this question came up
on uh in the conversation qw and i had with franz app a couple of weeks back
which is we're talking about scores here right and when we and we're taking great pace to say
these are personalized scores user choice all of that good stuff however there will still be people
who we're talking about filtering people based on rank based on score we're going to say
is this some kind of well-disguised social credit score?
What would your rebuttal to that be?
So that's a question that comes up a lot,
and it is a fair question
because we obviously don't want a CCP-style social credit score.
And I would say it's like Bitcoin.
Bitcoin and fiat are not the same thing.
the the different they're both you know money or trying to be money but it's centralized version
versus a decentralized version and a social credit score is like a centralized reputation system but
we're not building a centralized reputation system we're building a personalized trust metric system
so it is decentralized so i i think the concerns about social credit score are
are worthy. It's worth thinking about how we don't want to build that.
The reason that social credit scores are so bad is because we don't have control over them.
We don't know how they're calculated and we don't have control over what they do with those
scores. But a personalized, you know, if you're the one who's calculating the matrix,
you are the person who ultimately has control over how the algorithms work
and what they mean and what they do
and what you do with them.
So I guess that would be my answer to that issue.
Yeah.
It's opt-in, right?
It's voluntary.
Socialized, or rather,
social credit scores are coercive You don have a choice I think that a fundamental difference And also to your point David it in the user hands how the calculation happens
So we have another bit of big breaking news, David, apart from the fact that you're joining
Nosfabrica as a co-founder.
Do you want to talk about what we're calling the what-a-thon?
Yes, absolutely.
So I'm, yeah, I'm very excited about what I think will be Nostra's first Web of Trust hackathon.
Have there been any other ones that you know of?
I don't know of any.
But yeah, we will be, I think we, our goal is by, um, by November, uh, certainly before Thanksgiving to have the details out of a, not of a web of trust hackathon or a what-a-thon, um, that, uh, it'll be, it'll be Nos Fabrica's second hackathon.
And so, yeah, I think that we will have rewards just like the first one, probably more, hopefully more stats than the first hackathon.
But, you know, we want to get people building Web of Trust solutions.
And one of our messages, our first message is going to be we need to have third party service providers.
And so I think, you know, we haven't decided exactly how we're going to define the Wattathon.
But I think any submission that would either use trust scores that are calculated by a service provider or perhaps a service provider that is creating scores.
So right now, and a major drive for us is going to be to encourage integration of trusted assertions.
So once again, this is Vitor's NIP85 Trusted Assertions.
They are personalized trust metrics.
And right now, the only creator of these trusted assertions that I know of are mine, are from my brainstorm instance.
Hopefully, we'll get some other creators of trusted assertions.
but I would love to see multiple clients using personalized trust metrics by
accessing them from, from these kind 30382 notes.
Now the, one of the things I like about,
I think it was about a year ago when the Vitor authored this net.
One of the things I like about it is that one is that it names several different
scores. And the first one that it names is, is rank.
which is a score between zero and 100.
And the NIP is agnostic on how exactly rank is calculated
or what precisely it means.
But this is one of those things that's just fundamentally very important.
We need a score that's between zero and 100 or zero and one,
because then we can use it as a weight for all sorts of purposes.
if you want to calculate a weighted average or a weighted sum like how many votes exist for
for something then you can use a rank you can you can pull the rank score from trusted assertions
and use that as the weight you can't this is one of the down one of the reasons that
the shortcomings of page rank is that if you use page rank as a weight then it's going to give
Jack Dorsey way, way more weight than anybody else in Noster. We don't want that. The great rank
score will limit, the more people follow you than the higher score gets, but it asymptotically
approaches one or 100% if we multiply by 100. And so trusted assertions has a rank score,
which is between zero and one. Pretty much if it's a one, then it means that you're a real user.
if you're a zero you can ignore it if it's somewhere in between then probably a real user but
not 100 confident so i would love to see multiple clients uh integrating
trusted assertions and um once that is done then i think that will encourage more teams
to start publishing scores using NIP85.
So, David, we're going to be running this hackathon,
hopefully starting early November,
running it for about six months, factoring in the holidays,
where there's the Thanksgiving break, there's the Christmas, New Year's break,
maybe till early May and end of April, something like that.
And as you were hinting, and maybe we won't give too much away,
the previous hackathon had a bounty for 16 million sats.
This may or may not be significantly more than that.
We'll stay tuned for that.
I'm confident.
But what do you think at the end of those six months
would be, from your perspective,
a successful outcome of the hackathon?
Or, you know, what do you think the winner...
Well, actually, let's not do that
because we could lead the witness there.
Yeah, what does success look like for the whatathon?
Well, so I would like to see, you know,
obviously lots of different clients
incorporating personalized trust scores from trusted assertions.
I hope that we will start to communicate a roadmap
to building Web of Trust in Nostra in general.
I think there's lots of pent-up energy.
People want to build Web of Trust solutions, but not really sure how.
And so a success would be if we can communicate,
here's a roadmap for doing it,
and there are going to be lots of different players.
There's going to be the clients that use the scores.
There's going to be the service providers that create the scores.
There's going to be multiple methods to communicate those scores.
Trusted assertions is only one method.
There are use cases where an API-type method is better,
such as, you know, FranzApps, Web of Trust, DVM,
or some other API-type method.
So I think success would be that people start to, I want it to click in people's heads. Aha, this is how it can actually work. We can move from just a pie in the sky idea to nuts and bolts. Here's how we actually built it. That's what I would see as success as people are confident in this roadmap that we'll be providing.
I think what would be amazing from my perspective, maybe this is hoping for too much for something that's so early stage, is if one of the major Nostra clients like Primal or Amethyst or Darmus or Nostra, I mean, any of them, Nostrudel, one or more of them joined the hackathon or sent a delegation.
and at the end of it incorporated
in a completely transparent way
this web of trust methodology
into whatever they develop, right,
into their client.
I think that would be an amazing outcome.
So I hope if you're listening,
Milian, Vitor, well, Vitor is listening, I'm sure.
Yes.
Will and others think about that.
Give that some thought.
Absolutely.
I would love to see a major, multiple major clients to integrate, integrate this.
And I would also, like I was saying earlier, I would love it for one, you know, maybe Primal would like to create.
I've wondered what would be the thought process if I were, you know, in Million's Shoes, Odell's or just the entire Primal team.
I can understand that they might want to create their own, calculate their own scores internally.
They certainly are already going to have all the data available to them.
I would encourage that if they calculate personalized trust metrics, then they should make those trust metrics available throughout NOSTER.
Just because that's the only way that NOSTER is going to survive and thrive.
So, yeah, I would love to see them integrate scores and even I would also love to see them creating their own personalized trust metric providers.
That would be exciting.
Yeah, for sure.
And, you know, we've been talking about the what-a-thon from the perspective of developers.
but how can the broader Nostra community
beyond just the developers we've been talking about
it could be product people, it could be content creators
it could be memers even
how could they get involved in this water-throw?
That's a good question
I'd say join in on the conversation
tell developers
what features you'd like to see
what kinds of scores you'd like to see. Eventually we're, you know, our scores that we develop are
not going to be just simply bought or not. They're going to be contextual scores. Um, you know,
my grapevine tells me this is a doctor and my grapevine tells me this is a, here's a list of,
of end pubs that sell, you know, leather goods or whatever you're interested in. So,
So there's going to be lots of, so users can just voice what applications do they want to see.
I don't know.
Maybe we have to make the case to developers first so that we can start building some of these so then people can start to see what's possible.
Yeah, that makes sense, David.
But I actually want to go back to the scores themselves and Brainstorm specifically, right?
It's worth pointing out that the three signals that we'd mentioned, Brainstorm uses, mutes, follows, and reports, that's not the be-all or end-all, right?
That is part of the prototype, right, David?
because I mean, to calculate a score,
you as a developer can take a much broader view
and say well where is the economic element of this Why are we not waiting zaps Why are we not looking at the replies that they get And you could take it even one level deeper
saying not just the fact that a reply exists,
let me look at the text of the reply,
use an LLM to parse the sentiment in it.
So you could take this anyway.
And correct me if I'm wrong, David,
but Brainstorm provides the scaffolding
to extend those signals beyond just the three you have today, correct?
That's absolutely correct.
The GrapeRank algorithm was designed specifically
to be able to incorporate data from wherever you can find it.
So the first step in GrapeRank is what I call interpretation.
You take a source of data, which could be follows and mutes and reports,
or it could be zaps or it could be reactions or badges or labels or whatever.
The data needs to be available to you and it needs to be relevant to whatever score you're
trying to calculate.
So the first step in interpretation is that someone needs to write a script that takes
the raw data and then converts that into a format that is convenient for the Grape Rank
algorithm.
and uh uh you know manny me and i spent a long time earlier this year maybe the end of last year
going over the deep you know working out how does a grape rank calculator uh do you know what's the
format that it needs to be in that can be generic enough to um to work for any data source and and
i think we we came up with i think we've answered i think we have the scaffolding we have a roadmap
out for how that works. Um, you know, man, he's actually the first person to take a stab at make
at having an open source, a great rank calculator library. Um, and so if you want, if you don't like
follows, if you'd rather use zaps, then that is very doable. Um, some, and, and, you know, like,
like I, I think I mentioned that follows and mutes and reports on my, the way it's currently
implemented on my prototype, they have different weights. But those weights are configurable on the
back end. And so you might say, I trust Zaps more than a follow because it's money, it's skin of the
game. Or you might say, I trust Zaps less because they can be spoofed. And that's up to you as the
user. Your value system, your beliefs don't have to be the same as everyone else's or anybody else's.
So, yeah, so every piece of data that's out there will be usable by great way.
So let's actually talk about how that manifests itself into the user experience.
Well, the step before the user actually starts seeing stuff on their feed.
We're talking about configuring weights, adding more signals, right?
Maybe complex signals even, like analyzing the text of a reply to see if it's trollish or happy or whatever.
This clearly is something a developer would have to build out.
So how would it present to the user?
Would they have, for example, they open their favorite client, they go to the settings, and then there's a toggle saying, show me only happy stuff or whatever.
show me something they'd have some options they could choose from to,
I guess, tailor the experience.
The way I would envision that working is that as first you would go to the
service provider.
So the brainstorm instance or whatever third party service provider
calculates the trust scores.
And you would, you would say, okay, I want these,
I want to calculate these 10 scores.
And, you know, first score is just the baseline great rank score.
But then I want another one that is the score that has a different meaning, something else.
And then those scores could have parameters that you can adjust.
And you can dig into the weeds and adjust all the parameters if you want.
Or maybe right now, my prototype, there's like 15 different parameters.
It's way too much.
And so in order to simplify it, I just have three presets.
There's the default.
And then there's the, do you want to cast a wider net or do you want to cast a narrower net?
So three different options. And so, so first the user would go to wherever the scores are calculated and decide what scores to calculate and how and what parameters are configurable.
and then you could go to the user would go to let's say uh you know amethyst and say i want my um
i want to see my followers list my list of followers and i want to i want to see stratify
them by you know the score what number five whatever you know i i want to use my grapevine
and so that you have a selector.
So I want to pull scores from my personalized to me
and then my grapevine has these 10 scores
that are output by my service provider
and I select this one right here
and this is the one that I want to show up
throughout Amethyst.
So that would be, yeah.
So the complexity would be spread apart
the service provider and then the client that integrates the scores.
And then someone would need to, you know,
you would need a developer to actually create the algorithm.
And that could be the service provider.
That's something else that, you know,
Manny and I spend a lot of time thinking about.
How do we separate all of these complex steps into different modules
so that different people can do the different modules?
The interpretation step is one that,
All you need is one developer to write a script that inputs zaps and outputs the scores in a format that's ready for great rank.
And then everyone in Nostra could use that script.
And then someone else could say, oh, you didn't take the time, you know, how old it is into account.
I'm going to write a new script.
So then someone else, another developer writes a script that takes something like that into account.
so all all of that to say david you know six months down the road at the end of the hackathon
and maybe around this time next year we have to give these things of a few months to breathe
nostr could be a very different place the user experience could be much improved uh nostr already
is a happy place maybe it'll be an even happier place a year from now it could be very very
different a year from now. I want us to prove that Web of Trust can do things that we didn't
even think were possible. And so your earlier question, what would success be? So specific
things I'd like to see from the hackathon. One is that I want to see keyword search for either
for users or for content where the search results are stratified using great rank scores that are
fetched using trusted assertions. Um, another, another thing that I'd like to see is lists that
are curated in a purely decentralized fashion. And, and I just, this last week or two have been,
you know, we've been talking internally about, uh, a decentralized list NIP that would be an
alternative to, um, NIP 51. And, uh, and we're still crafting that, but I actually just, um,
you know, posted about that last night. Uh, you can link to my current version of it. I would love
it so that my grapevine, so I could say, I want a list of, um, all the coffee shops in my hometown.
And then anybody can add a list. I can add an item on that list. And then we use web of trust to
get, to eliminate the spam from that list. And maybe even to boost contributions made from
coffee aficionados or someone who I trust for that. For starters, it would only be we want to
get rid of all the contributions made by spammers. So now I've got a list of all the coffee shops
that is a list of whatever that I'm interested in that is curated in a purely decentralized fashion.
That would be, that's a very important building block. Suppose you have a list of NOSRA developers
and if you know who curates the list nobody everybody you know that um and now i want to
have a list of nips for example um but i don't want so i don't want bots to curate the list of
nips but i also don't want every nostre user to curate the list of nips i only want um nostre
developers to curate the list of nips so once we can curate lists in a purely decentralized fashion
and start daisy-chaining them.
So this list of pubkeys curates a different list of pubkeys
that list A, list B, list C,
then it can be as complex as we want it to be
and start to really start doing some sophisticated things.
You know, you're talking about daisy-chain lists,
a great abstraction of that
is places that accept Bitcoin across the world.
A problem that the folks at BTC Map are trying to solve.
I wonder if there's something there.
Yeah, so let's say you just have a list,
create a list.
So right now I'm calling it NIP 93, I think is,
I just call it decentralized lists.
So it's as simple as I could possibly make it.
you'd issue a kind 9998 event, which would be a list header,
a list of places that accept Bitcoin throughout the world.
And the description would say that these are places that accept Bitcoin
as a lightning, whatever.
And then anybody would be able to contribute an item to that list,
which is a kind 9999 event.
you could specify in the list header that the description needs to have
coordinates on a map or something like that.
But yeah, so imagine that being possible.
And then we make sure that no spammers can add to that list using just
great rank scores.
Then yeah, that would be a simple enough thing.
If you want a daisy chain, then would you want a list of Bitcoiners as opposed to a list of any Nostra users to curate that list? I don't know.
Yeah, lots to look forward to, both from building as a builder, but also as an end user with all these tools and user experiences down the pike.
David, where are you past the 90 minute mark?
But you are on your way to a special place, aren't you, David?
Yes.
I'll be going to Nostra Valley.
I think, yeah, you mentioned that at the beginning of this podcast.
That's one of the events coming up.
I'm very excited.
Yeah, Derek Ross, Seth in charge of it.
This is the second annual Nostra Valley.
I didn't go to the first one, but I'm excited to go to this one,
and I'll be catching up with people.
and yeah, so I'll be,
I'm going to hopefully make it there
for their meetup tonight
or if not, then I'll definitely be there tomorrow.
So folks who are listening on the live stream,
if you have more questions for David,
make sure you head on over
to State College, Pennsylvania.
You might be able to catch him this evening.
If you are listening to this episode
on Saturday the day,
Saturday the 18th,
the day it is released,
there's probably still a chance to catch
David at the event, the main event
itself, but
if you're listening to this on Sunday, Monday
Tuesday, etc
you are fresh out of luck
my friend
so David, I will post
the links to some of your most
recent articles on the topic in the show notes
is there anything else
you want to plug?
No, I just want to
reiterate how excited I am to be joining
this team I kind of the dreamer but you all are the builders yeah I very excited about rebuilding Brainstorm from scratch and I excited about the hackathon
So one of the links that maybe you'll put in the show notes is just ideas
on how you could incorporate NIP85,
and that could be your entry into the what-a-thon.
Yeah, for sure.
Great.
Well, David, thank you for taking the time and educating me and the audience on all the work you've done and all the thought you've put into Web of Trust for the last couple of years.
And it's great to see it shaping up into something concrete in the very near future.
Enjoy your time at Noster Valley.
Say hello to all the folks there.
And I'm sure we'll have you back on the show some point soon.
We'll certainly have much, much to talk about.
And I will definitely say hello to everyone.
And thank you very much again, Avi.
It's been great speaking with you.
Yeah, absolutely.
And thank you folks who listened to the live stream on Zap.Stream.
We finally got it to work after three weeks in the streaming wilderness.
And if you are listening to this on, if you're not listening to this live,
but as a podcast, thank you for listening.
I hope you're doing so on the Fountain Podcasting app.
And don't forget to hit that subscribe button if you are.
Goodbye.