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.
This is episode 141 of Plep Chain Radio.
Today is Friday, the 12th of December, and it is 3.04pm on the east coast of the United States at the time of recording, 12.12.
That is a nice day.
We have a fun show ahead of you.
Eric F.J., de-commerce evangelist and creator of Conjuet Market, a newly launched decentralized marketplace on Noster, joins us to talk about that and much, much more.
Another reason why I am excited about this episode is because I will be debuting a Valley for Valley music segment here.
I've picked a great song by an independent artist.
So if you are listening to the show on an app that supports Podcasting 2.0 and you want to support the artist, make sure you hit that boost button during the song's duration.
At which point, 90% of what you boost will go directly to the band.
This is a new experimental feature we're testing on our hosting platform Fountain, where this song shows up as its own independent chapter, and the boost split of 90% is localized to that chapter.
Stay tuned to find out what the song is.
and all the more reason, folks,
that if you are listening to this 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 stats
and support the value-for-value revolution as 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.
This show is streamed live on Zap.Stream and any other Nostra client that supports streaming such as Amethyst, Nostra, Fountain, Primal and Nostria.
July 18, the sequel to my first novel, 24, is now available for purchase.
This is not a book about Bitcoin. It is a soaring philosophical epic disguised as an action thriller.
this is the most important and meaningful work I've ever created
and I do hope you check it out
the link will be in the show notes
also 24, my first book, the prequel to July 18
is going to have its second edition
coming out very very soon in the next two or three days
so keep a lookout for that
the link for that as well will be in the show notes
the Nos Fabrica Wattathon is underway
with the fourth group call taking place earlier this week.
We've had some excellent discussions so far on Web of Trust.
These calls are very well attended, 20 to 30 people on the live call itself,
and then another 30, 40 people listening in on the live stream.
The teams are still forming, and it's not too late to join in if you're listening to this.
We're inviting builders, philosophers, marketers, you name it,
from all walks of Nostra and Bitcoin
to participate and build out open source web of trust solutions.
The prize pool is 50 million sats of 50 million bitcoins,
as the kids these days like to say,
the largest Bitcoin prize pool that I'm aware of in recent memory.
More info at nosfabrica.com slash whatathon.
That's W-O-T-A-T-H-O-N.
And for our sermon today, it is Reclaiming the Bazaar.
Markets began as conversations.
Just people in a square, arguing over the price of grain,
while the smell of cumin and charcoal drifted through the air.
In the old bazaar, price was a story.
A storm at sea, a failed harvest, a caravan arriving early.
You looked the other person in the eye.
You weighed their words, their track record, their reputation.
Then you shook hands.
Price was not just a sterile number.
But somewhere, we outsourced that entire ritual.
We traded bazaars for platforms that promised efficiency and scale
and woke up inside malls built from code, from JavaScript,
where the stalls stretch to infinity and somehow everything still feels the same.
Middlemen became the high priest of price discovery.
Algorithms decide what you see.
Payment processors decide what you're allowed to buy.
Ad auctions decide who is allowed to be heard.
Price is supposed to be a language.
Information about scarcity, desire, time and risk.
When middlemen meddle, they scramble the signal.
Fees distort it.
Censorship deletes it.
Personalized feeds mutate into something optimized for addiction, not truth.
But the bazaar never actually died.
The bazaar is an idea more than it is a physical, or indeed a digital space.
And it's an idea that's been waiting for protocols strong enough to hold it.
Bitcoin gives us money that does not report to a boss
Just a neutral, incorruptible ledger open to anyone
Noster gives us a social layer that feels like a new kind of town square
You arrive with a key pair and a voice
You publish relays no one owns
Identity becomes a trail of behavior, speech and value
Sprinkle in the magic ingredient of Web of Trust
and it starts to look familiar.
In the old market, your aunt told you which stall to skip.
Your cousin swore by one particular baker.
Today, you see who your friends follow,
who they zap, who they vouch for with their sats and their attention.
Reputation becomes portable.
If one marketplace misbehaves,
you and your history simply walk out keys in hand.
This is the chance to reclaim the bazaar, to let sound money, open protocols and human trust rebuild markets that feel honest, alive and human again.
The stalls are opening and we're joined today by someone who's leading the way.
Eric F.J., welcome to Plep Chain Radio.
Thank you, brother. Damn, that was beautiful. I don't even know if I need to talk after that one.
I got to write some of that down, man.
I appreciate you saying that, Eric.
So, you know, for folks who are unfamiliar with you and with Conduit, but maybe we start with you.
Who is Eric and how did Eric find Nostra?
Eric found Nostra through Bitcoin a couple of years back.
I'm actually a professional from a completely different industry.
I come from the construction industry.
I found Bitcoin in 2018 and have been trying to find a way to get involved ever since.
And then Nostra came along and we tried to, basically we tried to create a coffee shop
to sell something for SATs and saw that there was kind of a need for infrastructure.
So we dove in and started building something for ourselves.
And that turned into something that we realized might be useful for other people as well.
And as the magic of Nostra goes, as we started to sort of publish, you know, things around the original marketplace,
a spec which was NIP 15, some good people looped us in.
And they brought us into a bigger group of people that are actually building marketplaces on a different shared specification, so NIP99.
And so while I appreciate you said we're leading the way, I want to be honest and say that I don't know if we are.
We've got some great peers in this space like Plebeian Market, Shopster Markets, Cypher Space.
these are the folks that have brought us into the fold
and allowed us to contribute
and help build this collective bazaar with them.
Shout out to Chief Monkey and Calvadev and others for sure.
Chief Monkey, by the way, a friend of the show
and an amazing artist apart from being an incredible innovator
with Plebeian Munk.
Yeah.
I hope that that is a person that I get to connect with in person one day.
I really value everybody in this space and want to connect with them deeper rather than just online.
Hey, Noster's cool too.
Yeah, so you talk about your profiles as d-commerce, and I've seen that term used informally in one or two other places.
Do you want to talk about what – actually, is that a term of art or is that something you just made up?
But in any event, what does de-commerce mean to you?
De is a shorthand form of simply saying decentralized e or even just decentralized commerce And if I were to give a general definition of it it would be using shared protocols permissionless protocols
to try to mimic the benefits of what we've been getting from the centralized services in an incorruptible way.
that would be like the high level definition if i were to get more specific we're obviously
using nostr to do this we've built you know this shared specification what we're calling
the gamma e-commerce sorry the gamma markets e-commerce extension on top of nip 99 and so
what that does is that nip 99 for anyone who's not familiar is the spec that basically allows
you to do Craigslist style listings on Noster. It's really simple. It works a little bit similarly
to, you know, how long form posts are made in terms of the properties, but it doesn't have,
it's not overly specific in how it, in how it handles certain things. So it needed a bit more
juice to make it ready for, you know, scaling like, like a store because we don't, the goal
here is we don't want everybody to have to handle everything manually. And we want to make a
decentralized e-commerce flow that is as smooth and competitive in terms of user experience with
the centralized flow. So I think there will be a lot of people who are, including myself, by the
way, who are unfamiliar with how the commerce or the, I guess, the shopping spec works on Nostra.
You said NIP 99. Is that basically an event that contains some information about the product that's
being sold, the buyer, sorry, who the seller is, the price, and other such important pieces of
information? Yeah, that's exactly it. So mimicking, you know, how Nostra does events for all kinds of
social data, now we have an event for a product that you then post.
That product has some very relatively simple attributes.
What we've done is we've specified an order flow that comes along,
a potential order flow that comes along with that product.
So these are basically a, we use NIP 17 private DMs as a channel
to handle this entire flow.
And all we've done really is we've specified certain data structures for these events and how they'll flow from client to relay and relay back to whoever's client it is.
Once we've actually, we've already done this, but so since we've standardized these events, we can now have multiple marketplaces, you know, going to, it's a many, it becomes a many to many relationship instead of a, you know, many to one in terms of like an Amazon type relationship.
So in this new world with these channels, what we can do is we can have a decentralized product pool that just sits out there, just like Nostra events, and you can choose to look at that product pool through any type of lens that you want to.
One of the lenses that we've recently released is Conduit Market.
Another lens might be Shopster.
Another lens soon will be Plebeian.
They're actually getting up to NIP99 spec and I think are going to be dropping a really, really, really cool release sometime soon.
Once we're all pointing at the same spec, this product, this sort of infinite store on the relays now exists.
And you can choose to filter that any which way you want.
You could even have an individual store that is fully Nosterized, and that's just filtering for a specific merchant's event.
You could have a grouping of products like, let's say, you were into shoes, and you wanted to make the coolest shoe market on Noster.
You can make that.
So right now, there's a few teams that are deciding to put our specific lenses on it, our specific user experience on it, and building out the tooling around that.
But ultimately, that's all going to be shared, and anyone could remix and replay that in any way that they want.
And no matter how a customer finds a product, they're always going to be connected one-to-one with a merchant through NIP 17 DMs,
and then through payments, sorry, for payments, we're talking Bitcoin, so that is also directly peer-to-peer as well.
so i'm trying to think about this from the perspective of a seller and by the way the
way you explained it made complete sense right someone signs and and this event that's whatever
the event kind is that's specified under nip 99 and it just lives on relays anyone can do that
and then you have these quote-unquote storefronts right or lenses if you will or as you call them
Shopster, Conduit, Plebeian that allow you, you know, they have their own unique take. Maybe they
use some kind of web of trust filter, right? And so they will have one listing. So Plebeian will
have one listing, Conduit presumably will have a different listing, all feeding off the same
fire hose, if you will, of these NIP99 events. Now, if I'm a seller, right, I obviously I need
a client which allows me to sign these NIP99 events, right? And presumably, Primal and Darmus
are not those. I mean, I don't think they have the ability to yet to sign these events. So I need to
go to an actual client that is built to sign these events. Is all of this fair so far?
Correct. And you're also correct in that there is no reason in the future, once we've got the
flow down and some of the tooling down that these other social clients couldn't incorporate
certain marketplace listings into their clients as well. But currently, I think that that's the
state. I do believe Amethyst does do NIP99 listings, but it doesn't have the full gamma
e-commerce kind of superpowers on top of it. I'm sure that's coming because Vitor adds everything
to Amethyst. It is the true super app, the Swiss Army knife of Nostra. So where would I, so today,
right, if I wanted to sign a NIP99 event and I had some, and presumably I would only want to sign
one if I had something to sell, correct? Where would I go? Right now, I would recommend Shopster
is currently probably the best place to go sign a NIP99 event. What Conduit has done is we've
split the scope into two different applications.
So there's the shopper side of the equation and the seller side of the equation.
We have done the shopper side of the equation.
So if you post something on Noster, or sorry, on Shopster, the magic that you'll see is
that it actually can show up on Conduit as well.
That's kind of the proof of concept right now.
And again, soon Plebeian is going to be in the same condition.
but um yeah i at this point i would recommend uh shopster and shout out to calvadev for that but
we are also working on the conduit merchant portal which would which you know for us our goal was to
make a central central but not centralized place to for merchants to manage their their product pool
so i'm seeing i think it seems like a lot of the key folks are in the live stream chat
the soap miner shardrack so i'll and i actually want to talk about their unique angles here right
so there's the soap miner today is he used i and i don't know this uh for a fact or not is he using
the 99 events i'd have to check with him i've i'd have i haven't seen his products on on in the pool
recently but that doesn't mean they're not there somewhere else okay and then i guess we'll just
jump into this this bit as well right which is you there you know there might be some vendors who i
just trust out of the box because i've interacted them with them on our store i actually know them
in real life right uh so i'm a buyer and i i know the seller through like you know some kind of
physical proof there um and that's fine in in that scenario i'm more than happy to give my personal
address and get the product delivered to me.
But when this really takes off, and there are multiple sellers selling their wares on
Noster, even if there's a web of trust filter, maybe that points to some kind of good reputation
in shipping and delivery and so on.
I, as a user, might not want to give my address up to someone.
I'd rather keep that information private.
And I don't know if you're familiar, but Shadrach is building A to B, the onion-routed physical mailing.
Is that something that's on the cards in the near future?
I had the chance to meet Shadrach, actually, when I met you over at Nostraville.
but um and and we we chatted a bit about how that might be integrated the shipping problem is is a
huge huge challenge um because we we do want to find a way that uh that we can maximize uh privacy
privacy in shipping and i wouldn't say that that is is solved yet i'm really grateful that people
like shadrack are are working on that issue we're not currently focused on that um right now yeah
you would have to sort of trust the individual merchant with certain data as a user.
Now, there's strategies you can implement as a consumer to sort of mitigate that,
like delivering something to your local post office, for example,
if you're super concerned about privacy.
But that is not something that is currently implemented.
I really interested in exploring that in the future but right now we just trying to scale up the product pool itself and leave that responsibility Currently if I being honest
we're leaving that responsibility with the buyers and the sellers of how they want to handle that.
At the very least, the connections are private between those two parties.
so that in my mind increases the the potential attack surface for someone to want to exploit that
but you know I do understand there are concerns with you know individual merchants being you know
becoming like honeypots and different things like that so that is something we have to we have to
definitely look at long-term short-term conduit specifically is not focused on that I hope other
people are right now though and I and I do plan on staying in touch with with Mr. Shadrach there
excellent so you know if i wanted to purchase something um let's just say shoes right and
i i go to one of these uh clients that supports snip 99 like conduit or plebeian the upcoming
plebeian i should say and uh and shopster like how would i decide which one to go to presumably
all three should have similar views of the products that are available, correct?
Currently, yeah.
I mean, it's all going to be about the UX around how we implement web of trust and social data around products.
It's really easy to append social data to these product events, and that's one of the beautiful things about this spec.
And so how do we then display that product data or social data around the products rather in a way that informs the user in the most truthful way about what's actually happening or how people are actually talking about this product?
that is something that I think we're all going to end up interpreting slightly differently
but hopefully we're all going to converge on you know some standards of of how you know reviews
get handled or how or how you know even just like a simple star rating is is displayed I'd have to
defer to others I'm not sure if the others have a star even a star rating system in place yet but
But the social features are something we are definitely planning on adding in Conduit Market as soon as possible.
So really, as a user, the choice is very similar or be analogous to do I use Primal, do I use Darmus, do I use Nostr, Amethyst, whatever it might be, right?
Okay.
It's really about how the app or the client makes them feel and the user experience it gives them.
100%.
And that's honestly the way things really should be in Noster.
We're all going to be developing at different paces.
We're all open source and going to be sort of spinning off from each other and collaborating and sharing.
And as long as, you know, there's four of us right now and there's a few other people we're trying to convince to join us on the specification.
you know, like, like bullish Bitcoiner, low timer with his ikno.com and even, you know,
Dine Direct that Alejandro Gill is building. The more of us that there are, the more this is,
this is truly decentralized. Like I appreciated that you said, you know, Conduit is building a
decentralized app in your, in your intro there, but really we're not, none of us are decentralized
if we can't sort of hide amongst each other in the crowd.
That's a really, really important thing.
That's why I'm never going to go on one of these shows
or talk to the good folks and just say,
we're the only one or we're the best or we're this or that
because we all need each other.
We all need each other for this to be truly decentralized.
And that's why I personally love Noster.
There's no single point of failure.
And that actually makes us all stronger together.
Yeah.
I guess the critical bug of Silk Road was that it was only one of them.
Exactly.
We need to build.
Well, I almost shouldn't say this publicly, but we...
Well, then don't.
Okay.
This is going to be recorded for eternity.
Yes, I should be careful.
Be careful with what I say there.
But yes, Silk Road had a single point of failure, and we are trying to avoid that type of design.
But yeah, for whoever's listening, Conduit is focused on legal products as our primary listings.
No, absolutely, right?
And that's the thing, right?
I mean, there's Silk Road, the idea, and then there was what people were doing with it, right?
You could take a good idea and do all sorts of illegal things with it.
But how do you, as a practical matter, right, if you give people the ability to transact, I would say a vast majority of them would transact for ethical, good, you know, legal reasons.
But there will be a small minority who try to, you know, transact in illegal things.
And I don't mean, I mean actually morally irreprehensible things as well.
Right, right.
So how do you guard against something like that?
So in this model, it's up to each service provider's policies of what they want to display.
And the legality around that, as far as I understand from our legal team, is that you're responsible for what's on your own infrastructure.
sure. I'm not going to, you know, come out here and say, you know, what people should or shouldn't
do in their lives. That like, you know, it goes against my personal philosophy that obviously
goes against the philosophy of so many people in this community. However, each individual service
provider can choose their own policies, just like, you know, anyone can choose, you know, what they
choose to display on their social app. And that right there is the beauty of Doster.
Is that like the goal is not necessarily to burn everything down and make this like
hellish landscape of reprehensible products. That is definitely not the goal. The goal is to
increase the attack surface and make it more expensive for, um, the, whatever powers that be
to limit people's rights and freedoms that they actually legally have through, by pulling on these
levers that they currently have available to them, uh, through these centralized, um,
parties. Like it doesn't, uh, take much for a, whatever current administration, you know, left,
right middle up down to say uh to to pull on a certain lever and and get a product delisted
because that's the sort of political flavor of the day you know that shouldn't be happening and
unfortunately it is happening right now and how do so how do we prevent that is we have to make
each of those attempts to limit um you know rights and freedoms that we already have legally
We have to make each of those attempts more expensive.
How do we make that more expensive?
We decentralize.
We all share a specification, and it becomes a game of whack-a-mole for the person that would actually abuse their power.
That's the mission rather than – so that's kind of a coy way to answer the question, but I hope you understand where I'm going with that.
No, absolutely.
That makes complete sense.
Let's talk about something I mentioned in the sermon,
which is the distortion of these middlemen distorting price signals.
And I say that as someone, not an expert on e-commerce.
You've clearly spent more time studying this.
What, in your view, if you look at the Amazons, Etsys, and the Shopifys of the world,
and then even the physical marketplaces that exist today,
some of the chain malls or what have you,
What are the ways, do you think, in which prices, price discovery is completely distorted by these centralized entities?
I think discovery is actually distorted a lot more than price.
For price, obviously, I would say a big one is Amazon making everything basically cheaper than it should be.
and we're trading price for quality, clearly.
And so it's almost like you're taking a loan out against your future self
because you're going to have to replace a product later.
But that's kind of a more nuanced discussion.
The other piece on the price bit is that they're charging a lot of overhead
for the ability to be able to have these cheap sort of returns.
And also, like, they're transferring credit card fees to people,
and that just doesn't need to be happening.
Bitcoin itself, aside from Noster, does seem to me to solve a lot of the pricing issues.
I think the bigger problem where they really do screw with the signals is discovery.
and that is whoever is paying to get to the front of the line to them.
So that seems to optimize for products that are low quality
and are scaling a lot.
So instead of localization you get these sort of monoculture of just crappy brands paying their way to the top in a system that incentivized to do that What we would hope a decentralized model would ironically bring a lot more localization
because the discovery and the price signals aren't being distorted.
So that should naturally optimize actually for localization
because your discovery is going to be based around people who you know
and assumedly, unless you're like some crazy world traveler dude,
that these people are somewhat localized around you.
Or at least if you do travel to a place,
you have a network of people that know what the good stuff is locally.
And then back to the pricing piece,
localization in a healthy economy should actually be more competitive
because you simply don't have as,
you're likely to have less shipping costs,
just straight up, just based on proximity.
Obviously, that is way more complex
with a whole landscape of products.
So I'm talking generalities, not specifics.
But that's what we would hope to see
by decentralizing the protocol itself for marketplaces.
There's an interesting parallel here, as you were saying that, Eric.
We've had a lot of folks in the music business, musicians themselves, on the show,
and they talk about the Spotify attention casino.
In fact, we just had Aaron of SX last week talking about this,
how these centralized platforms,
the discovery of truly good music is impossible
because the algorithm sort of promotes this monoculture,
uh milk toast nonsense right and any kind of complexity in music any kind of creativity
is almost certain not to rise to the top because it just doesn't fit into the algorithm's parameters
and it sounds like that it's very very similar for buying goods and goods and services online as
well absolutely i mean i i was talking to uh to someone else about this when i travel somewhere i
want to get the local products.
Why doesn't that happen? It's because we have
these monoculture style incentives right now.
And I want to live in a world where that's actually
different, where the merchants that are flourishing
locally are flourishing that way
both in the physical space and in the online space.
And those should actually feed off of each other
with the right incentive model.
isn't the the irony has just struck me as eric is for all the talk of diversity and promoting
diversity we're converging into a monoculture when what what and really what you're talking
about is true diversity right of of products of experiences and that can only come from
authenticity and and and having tools that allow people to discover these unique and authentic
products that are out there. Exactly. You can't let, you can't force diversity to happen. You have
to let diversity happen. Yeah. Now, you know, let's talk about the, you know, finding prices,
our price discovery itself. And again, you know, we have Soap Miner, who's been active in the chat
today. There's great ghee, there's leather mint, you know, several other Nosti users have become
popular because of their craftsmanship, because of building authentic products. Now, clearly,
there is a cost to what they do, given the level of craftsmanship that goes into it, right?
High quality ingredients, in many cases, handcrafted, minimal, or at least not the industrial
grade automation that the monoculture produces.
So there is a clear physical cost to this.
And then on top of it, you add on shipping.
If you want to do the private shipping with something like A to B, I think presumably
that gets even more expensive because of the multiple hops involved.
How does price in this sort of truly sovereign, reputation-based, authentic craftsmanship coming
to the fore, how does price actually converge to an affordable number?
That's an interesting question, because what is affordable? I mean, to me, a good that lasts
longer is long-term more affordable than repeatedly sort of paying into crap products.
um but how do we how do we converge on on the correct price of things i guess
yeah i mean that that that's that's a tough one i don't i don't quite know how that all shakes out
that is a you know the complex economic question um but but i think i think you know what these
folks are producing it's expensive but it's it's really you know not that expensive like why why
should my certain products have sort of stayed the same price or stayed cheaper than others.
And I think we've been suffering in quality, like the stuff that, you know, soap minor,
please like, you know, meet me in real life and hit me or something if I speak incorrectly.
He's making soap the way it used to be made.
And as far as I understand it, there's less ingredients.
why can't why can't we scale why can't something like that compete with something with a bunch of
petrochemicals in it um there's clearly some some subsidization happening there for that specific
product um yeah this this is something that's hard for me to answer because i think it really
depends on on the product categories that that we're talking about but i personally just want
to know the true price for the quality that I want. And I think long term, I'm going to be able to,
you know, in some cases, live longer, be healthier. And, you know, maybe something like a
leather mint will last longer, and I won't have had to buy seven belts instead of just one belt,
and I will have actually saved money in the long term. So I think what I hope Nostra markets and
Bitcoin in general is going to do is going to raise people's time preference.
And this should translate to the types of choices that people are going to make and where they're
going to spend their money. And then maybe that allows somebody like a soap miner or an Oshii
or a great gi to scale their operations to something that they feel comfortable with,
but something that gives them a better unit cost. But they're actually getting the chance
to do something like that because people are being informed by the correct social data.
Yeah. So there is a supply side to this and there's a demand side to this. And I think we're seeing the attention to quality detail and craftsmanship and so on come through on the supply side with all of those folks that you just mentioned.
The question is, is it going to come on the demand side, meaning the consumers themselves? Are they going to demand high quality products? And it's, again, a bit of a chicken and egg, it seems to me. Do you see that?
Yes, absolutely. And that's, you know, that's why we're trying to service both sides of that equation. But I would contend that just given the success that some of these merchants are having on Noster, that there is currently more peer to peer money than product out there right now.
So for at least right now, I think getting more high-quality products out there to Bitcoiners specifically, merchants will be successful in this.
If we remove as many of those frictions as possible, it's going to be really...
Sorry, I'm going to say it this way.
When we remove as many of those frictions as possible, it's going to be really interesting to see what people truly value in this type of system.
And then from there, we can adapt what we build next.
Is Conduit live today?
Can anyone go to conduit.market?
It is conduit.market, right?
Yeah, conduit.market.
So you can check out the alpha for the shopper side of the equation at alpha.conduit.market.
Our landing page kind of expressing the larger vision is at just conduit.market.
But yeah, the alpha works.
It interoperates with Shopster right now.
Hopefully when Polybian does their release soon,
it'll interoperate with that.
It actually interoperates with CypherSpace as well.
Checkout works through NIP17 DMs.
We're still working out some kinks
on certain specific order messages,
but you can definitely check out using DMs.
That's kind of where we're at right now.
And what are the products that...
So if someone listening to this went to alpha.conti.market,
what would they be able to purchase today?
Let's take a look.
I'll just read what I see on the screen.
You know, a bunch of different food products.
We've got sunglasses.
It is kind of a, I mean, I use this word,
a smorgasbord of whatever people are putting on there.
We're not putting any filters.
I kind of love the fact that it's just this like random tapestry of things right now.
If you go to the categories at the top, though, you can see there's a lot of art, clothing, accessories, food, crafts, e-cards, collectibles.
By the way, the categories anyone sees at the top, those are not generated by us.
Those are generated by the user tags that they put on them.
And it was kind of interesting to watch what just kind of appears there.
and that might be your best way
to click on a few of those categories in there
and see what you see under the food category,
under the merge category,
under the art category.
Those types of products
seem to be dominating the listings.
Again, just to be clear, those were definitely created somewhere else
because we don't have the immersion side of things ready yet.
But, I mean, just looking at the trends that we see on Nostra
is we're looking at the products that are successful
seem to be very artisanal or high-quality food,
alternative health and sort of natural products
that route around the sort of petrochemical complex
seem to be very popular as well.
But it kind of fits what type of Nostra users you get, right?
The people that have been sort of outcast,
or products, let's say,
that have been outcast by mainstream society,
those are going to show up on a freedom-based protocol first.
Eventually, we hope it's normal for everybody,
and then we get to see what a society based on a decentralized protocol actually looks like,
and that's what really excites me and drives me.
But for now, yeah, you're seeing the people that have been,
and the people in the products in this case that have been put out of the margins
or been unfairly treated by the Amazons of this world.
So clearly in a market like this, well, in a Nostra-based marketplace, right,
trust and reputation are everything.
Because, I mean, anyone can create a pub key.
Anyone can sign events, including NIP99 events.
And you have, at first blush,
you really have no way of knowing whether something,
when you buy something,
whether it's actually going to deliver to your place or not.
And also who on earth you're giving your address away to,
which is the other thing.
um so do you i mean i would think web of trust solves this how are you thinking about reputation
and web of trust for conduit yeah i mean the goal is to carry your web of trust from other social
places right like i'm not going to be i want to be your friend but i'm not going to be your friend
on amazon avi i'm sorry but i will be your friend you know on a true social app right so uh right
now we're leveraging the social reputations that are built up elsewhere on the protocol and trying
to use that for reputation scores here. Eventually, you know, merchants can build up their reputation
directly on the protocol. But I'd say, you know, if my goal is to make this as smooth as possible
for merchants that we're competing with the Shopify's of the world, right? So then what you
can do is you can actually bring an already reputable merchant to Noster. That is like a huge
focus of mine because if we bring people that, because, you know, even though they're not on
decentralized protocols, people are building up reputations out there in the sort of, for lack of
a better word, normie world. If they've got a good one, I want to bring them here. I've got a, you
a long list of merchants that I think would do very, very well on Noster selling for Bitcoin.
And I want to bring them here.
And my pitch to them is basically, hey, look, we're going to get you access to a bunch of Bitcoiners,
people that are holding peer-to-peer money who actually are, you know, already follow the ideology
and want to spend it and use it in their daily lives.
And that's kind of a free option to the upside for that merchant.
They're basically opening up a new sales channel.
at very, very, very low cost.
In fact, no cost.
We're not even going to have to charge them at first.
Actually, no one should ever have to charge them.
That, to me, is a pretty good pitch to merchants.
Hey, I'm going to open up a new sales channel for you.
What's it going to cost me?
Zero.
All upside.
Okay, let's go.
So I'll give an example of a reputable merchant
And that is definitely, I don't believe a bitcoiner or an ostrich.
There's a dairy farm out in Utah called Ballerina Farm.
Have you heard of these guys?
I have not.
No.
So it's all, you know, grass-fed, free-range dairy cows,
and they produce a lot of milk, these cows,
like way beyond anything that calves would ever need.
And what Ballerina does is basically it creates this, they make this raw colostrum protein powder.
It's all, you know, pure ingredients and they add fresh vanilla to it.
And it's just, it's delicious.
Protein bomb, it's raw colostrum.
It's incredible.
This would crush on a lot of marketplaces.
Well, 100%, 100%, right?
So, and these guys have a fairly decent following.
I mean, following meaning that a lot of people buy that product.
They keep running out.
And they hit pause for a couple of weeks to refresh their inventory.
But if someone like that were to come to Noster, how would...
Let's say I'm on Conduit, and I suddenly see Ballerina Farm listed there,
and they're selling rock lostrum.
How would I know that's the real Ballerina Farm?
You'd have to check their social profile on maybe a Primal or Amethyst or something like that to kind of triangulate that, for lack of a better word.
Or I would need someone in my web of trust to attest that that is Bellarine file.
There has to be some kind of trust onboarding process into this ecosystem.
Yeah, and I think we see that, too, with a popular Twitter profile, for example.
they'll post their end pub on Twitter.
They've already been somewhat socially verified over there,
and they're transferring that reputation and verifiability over to Nostra that way.
I think a similar thing would happen.
People might use their existing channels to broadcast that this is actually their store on Nostra.
I think that happens in a lot of different use cases for Nostra at the beginning
before we have built up a critical mass of people
that are going to be verifying each other for each other type thing.
So have you looked at different web of trust score mechanisms?
How much thought have you given to that?
Are you thinking just in terms of follows?
If a vendor is followed by people in your trust graph, then that's good enough?
Or are you looking at more events to add to that trust score?
I mean, there are so many good people working on Web of Trust right now and developing tooling around that.
And I don't know how that exactly looks to integrate in our app right now.
we are going to just focus on the basics at the beginning,
which is just being able to see the social data that you already see
on your typical social apps,
being able to see the comments and the likes and the zaps
from across the network on these product events
and let users kind of do the work a little bit at the beginning,
but eventually maybe integrating one of these web of trust services
or some web of trust tooling from one of the good people that are already working on that
and have become experts at that.
That is definitely an option.
And on the roadmap, at some point, I'm already talking to a few different people that are
building in that space.
And basically, I'm just like, we got to get the whole pipeline ready.
And then we're going to integrate social, fully integrate social features.
But I'm really, really, really excited to build those features out.
and I guess I'll keep you posted on that.
Yeah, there's lots to look forward to there.
I think I remember reading on your homepage, Eric,
I think you said zero platform fees, no profit cut.
The code is completely open source,
which all great Bitcoin or NOSTA false values.
I guess the question is, how do you make any money?
Love that question.
yeah I mean everything's happening in private and crypto channels that you know not even we can see
so how do we charge money for something like that the mental model I'm not going to reveal
everything on this front just yet but the mental model around this is well two things first you
know what is a valuable service that you can provide merchants that would help them increase
their sales. That's going to be worth something. So because everything's happening in private DMs,
there has to be a way to automate certain order messages so that shoppers don't have a ton of
friction when they're trying to check out. Right now, with a DM-based checkout flow, even with
the special order messages that we have developed here, it does require presence and permission to
use an NSEC to push these messages through. Basically meaning that you could initiate a
checkout and the merchant on the other side needs to be present to receive the order and generate
an invoice. And if they're not there, like the second that you clicked buy, then there's going
to be a delay and some friction in that process. And unfortunately, I think that that means
merchants get less sales through that. So the core innovation that we're excited to bring in
the merchant portal, and this would be a premium tool, is how do we provide the sort of cash register
that allows them to push those orders through automatically without revealing
their insect to anybody, including Conduit
or anyone providing this service So the mental model around that is like this is the digital cash register of the 21st century I think that has value
And the story around the cash register is actually somewhat important to me.
It's a guy, John Patterson, in the late 19th century, you know, made the National Cash Register Company.
And that company did a lot of good things for America and also was an extremely profitable company.
And a cash register was a mechanical closed system that never looked at their merchant's transactions and was never able to take a cut.
He just leased those machines.
That's kind of the business model that we're aiming at.
And of course, you know, there's other services that you can offer, you know, to help people build their stores and help people nostrilize their stores and help people generate their stores that are also really interesting that we want to explore.
But yeah, that's kind of my idea of how we're going to make money without revealing a little bit too much.
Okay.
Coming soon, TM.
Yes.
So we have a question from Soap Miner in the live chat.
Oh, sweet.
who asks, I wonder if white noise could be implemented.
And I think if I had to pass that question for you, Eric,
I think you'd mentioned NIP 17 DMs.
And I think white noise is a reference implementation
of the Marmot protocol, I think, which is the new one.
So is that something you're looking into,
either white noise itself or the Marmot protocol in general?
Yeah, whenever white noise is ready,
obviously we'd love to implement that. NIP 17 has, you know, its limitations that actually makes the
trusting of a counterparty a lot more risky than it needs to be. But right now it works.
And so we're using that. We, I actually, I think it's over a month ago now, I did message the
entire group and was like, hey, maybe we should, we should think about, you know, working towards
switching to something like a white noise eventually. But yeah, we haven't spent a lot
of time on that, but it's definitely on our radar because, yeah, you don't want a situation where
a merchant gets compromised and then reveals, you know, whoever compromises them then reveals all
their customer data because you didn't have, you know, full forward secrecy and all that stuff.
so yes I to answer Mr. Soap Miner that that could there's no reason why it can't be implemented we
just we just haven't yet and we'd have to look deeper into white noise and see how it works
with the specific order messages and how that you know transmits things to the relays how that's
read how that's unpacked both on the client side both for shoppers and for merchants rather
and nipple four in this scenario would absolutely not work right the the old school you don't want
to tell everybody when you're buying sex toys
that's right because you you know i mean it'll clearly show that the buyer well but two people
one could be the buyer one could be the seller but it's fairly easy to know who the seller is
right right and and if they're dming each other that's pretty much it you've leaked everything
right yeah i mean you you basically like are filming people walking into stores at that point
and you know even though you don't um you know you may you may not be able to like see exactly
what's happening you know that they've been to that store and a certain amount of data has been
exchanged and that's that's just like not acceptable so at least you know we do get some benefits from
you know the gift wrap uh bit of nip 17 because you know at least we're not filming people walking
into the stores. But yeah, then, you know, we can take that further with something like a white
noise to provide that forward secrecy. But that just said, we haven't really looked at that yet,
to be honest. Yeah. Yeah, I actually never thought about Nipple 4s in this month. I mean,
you know, there was some semblance of privacy if you just, in the sense that at least the message
contents are encrypted, if you're just, you know, shooting the breeze, right, on Noster.
in this case the message content in the case of commerce the contents are irrelevant practically
right the fact that a a nipple for event exists is proof enough that you you're you've essentially
uh you're doing commerce yeah you've had a transaction yeah you've you've you've associated
yourself with the store i mean you could just say yeah like i was just talking but like you know
everyone's going to like say you were there anyway,
which that's not the world I want to live in.
I want some privacy, especially around my shopping.
All right.
So Eric is, we are very close to the one hour mark.
So I'm going to do this.
Yeah.
It is time for our first ever Valley for Valley music segment.
I've got a track today from a band out of Tallahassee, Florida, called The Retrograde.
You know how sometimes you hear a new band and you swear you found a lost tape from the 70s?
That's exactly what these guys are doing.
They aren't trying to reinvent the wheel.
They're just driving it down a dirt road with windows down.
This track is called Closer to Somewhere.
It's got this raspy, desperate optimism to it, that feeling of being stuck in relationship purgatory, but knowing you're moving towards something.
So, turn it up. Here is the Retrogate.
Down on your luck like you was before
Bills piling up on your front door
I believe it's true
That it starts with you
Lord, won't you tell me what to do?
Yeah.
Close to nothing.
Ex-de-leaving.
Not believing.
Won't you check it out?
Closer to someone.
Don't you want me?
Don't you need me?
I can feel it.
We can work it out
Closer to somewhere
Waiting around for your lucky break
Picking apart the things you say
I don't like the sound
Won't you come around
Lord, won't you tell me
That it's true, yeah
Close to nothing
Next to leaving
Not believing
Won't you check it out
Closer to somebody
Don't you want me? Don't you need me?
I can feel it. We can work it out.
Closer to yourself.
12 dating
close to nothing
next to leaving
not believing
won't you check it out
closer to somewhere
don't you want me
don't you need me
I can feel it
We can work it out
Closer to somewhere
That was Closer to Somewhere by The Retrograde.
I really appreciate the production choice there.
Did you hear that swing?
It's loose.
In an era where everything is quantized and grid perfect,
this track actually breeds.
Joe Fox's vocals have that perfect morning-after rasp that makes you believe him when he sings about bills piling up at the door.
This is a song that wears its influences proudly.
You can definitely hear the ghosts of Lynyrd Skynyrd or the Ormond Brothers haunting the guitar tone.
But honestly, that familiarity is exactly why it works.
It's comfort food for rock fans.
It's not trying to trick you with complexity.
It's just good, honest, blue-collar songwriting.
Eric, what did you think?
Dude, that was cool.
I was getting a little, like at the first it was like Tom Petty
and then it kind of turned into like a more modern version of live.
Wow.
Yeah.
So folks, if you're listening to this
on your favorite podcasting 2.0 app like Fountain,
make sure you go back a couple of minutes to when the song playing and hit that boost button 90 of your boosts will go to Tallahassee
All right.
So let's pick up where we left off, Eric.
In fact, let me ask you this.
I talked about Ballerina Farm, right?
And let's say they wanted to join this revolution, join the NIP-99 revolution, but get onboarded onto Conduit.
Right. So let's assume they're listening to this somehow.
What is the actual setup journey?
I mean, on that one, I got to say, stay tuned for the Conduit merchant portal.
you know we're planning on having you know really really smooth onboarding flow for them to you know
all the way all the way down to creating an NSEC and storing it in a secure manner but yeah right
now the flow we don't have a flow for getting on condo we're sort of leveraging you know standing
on the shoulders of what other other good folks have done and so I would encourage them actually
to go to to Shopster or Plebeian or even Cypher Space to create their first profile if they're if
if they're technically minded.
We're all working on increasing the satisfaction
and smoothness of the onboarding flow for merchants.
But if I wanted to do it, right,
forget Ballerina Farm,
maybe I have some, I don't know,
whatever I want to sell on Nostra,
how would I actually even sign a NIP99 event?
Oh, I mean, that would be pretty easy through Shopster.
Okay.
Yeah, you would just, just through his flow, you can just generate, make a product and post it quite easily.
Okay, so I just log in, presume.
I'm ashamed to say I haven't used Shopster before, and I've been hearing about it for over two years now.
So I go to Shopster, I sign in with my browser extension, so I'm there.
Then there's some kind of UI where I put in the product description,
and then it automatically creates, signs the event, and sends it off to the relay.
Okay.
I mean, honestly, you should have Calvo on the show, too.
I think the more of us that get out there and put the good word out about what we're all trying to do,
the better it's going to be for all of us.
I mean, I'm not here just for myself, man.
It's for all of us.
But it is actually kind of selfish, too, though, because the more successful one of us is,
the more successful we're all going to be.
This is why I love Nostra and Bitcoin.
Fiat world is completely zero sum, right?
If you winning means someone else is losing, right?
And vice versa.
If Nordstrom Bitcoin, you build something that improves the protocol,
everyone else using the protocol, because it's free and open,
their lives improve.
So it's just the beautiful positive sum rising tide effect.
Exactly.
Shadrach just reminded me of something when I was talking about selling things,
and he said, a book perhaps.
So here's a question that's kind of been bugging me.
I was with Chief Monkey at BitFest in Manchester, and I put this bug in his ear, and he said,
hey, man, there's literally nothing I can do because we live in a fiat world.
No, and about this very specific thing, which is it is really hard to have a simple workflow for selling.
So I'm talking about myself as an author for selling my book for Bitcoin.
because the issue is I'm self-published, right?
So I have to rely on a print-on-demand service.
And Amazon offers the most scalable and the cheapest one, unfortunately,
as they tend to, right?
And there are others.
There's IngramSpark.
There's another one called Lulu.
And there's another one called Printful.
I mean, the key thing with a lot of these players, right,
It needs to be a company that has a global footprint, meaning it needs to have their machines or their warehouses where they spit out these print-on-demand books in different continents just to ensure that they can ship the books to buyers in these continents.
And the way it works is someone places, you know, as a writer, I have the manuscript, I have the cover.
There's some specifications, right?
I have to meet all those specifications, the cover dimensions, all of that stuff, right?
And all of that is just stuff you have to deal with as an author.
So you do all of that, you upload all of that,
and then the book gets listed on Amazon or on,
in the case of something like IngramSpark,
it's more of a B2B company.
So for example, they work with front ends like Barnes & Noble
or Target or Walmart or whatever.
So if the book gets listed on Target, it gets listed on Walmart,
someone places an order,
it then triggers this print-on-demand process, right?
And because they have the specification,
the book, the cover, and everything,
whether hardback has one specification,
paperback has another one,
the thing gets printed, and it gets shipped out.
So set aside the fact that these are all horrible fiat companies,
just that process itself is just a massive blessing in disguise
for self-published independent authors, right?
Because otherwise you're screwed.
So unless a publisher picks you up and they have the infrastructure and machinery, you're kind of on your own.
That makes perfect sense.
Now, the problem with all of these places is they're still fiat companies.
So this is the conversation I was having with Chief Monkey.
And I said, is there some way in which you can hook up to a print-on-demand service with Playbion?
And then that way is just easier.
People can buy my book for Bitcoin.
And he said the problem is none of these places except Bitcoin.
And he doesn't want to dip into fiat.
Completely understandable and honorably doesn't want to touch fiat.
His platform accepts Bitcoin, and then he just wants to push that.
If a print-on-demand service accepts Bitcoin, that's it.
Easy.
Except that that's not there.
So I don't know if you had a chance to think about something like this, Eric,
but this would be a huge boon to Bitcoin authors who want to offer that,
maintain their independence and their sovereignty,
and then still offer a Bitcoin payment option for their books?
Yeah, I mean, that is a really interesting problem,
but I think it is solvable,
but it may in the short term come with just a bit of centralization.
So I think the risk, besides ideologically not wanting to deal in fiat at all,
which is very honorable of Chief Monkey,
there's the other tricky bit where if you're helping facilitate
you know, conversions from Bitcoin to fiat, then you risk, you know, depending on how your flow
is set up, you risk becoming basically a money transmitter, which, you know, nobody wants to get
involved in that. But, you know, that being said, you know, if you used a third party,
like a strike or something like that for the conversion step, there actually doesn't seem
to be a technical reason why someone couldn't, you know, set up, uh, you know, an enhanced, uh,
flow that would work, uh, with an IP 99, uh, type market, but you, you, you there, but in that design,
there is a centralization around like strike, for example, I, again, I don't know if this,
if this is possible. I'm just using them as an example. Um, so, so there'd be, there'd be trade
offs, but, um, I actually do think that's a really interesting thing for someone, uh, uh, to build,
once some of this tooling is there.
Yeah, the conversion to the person accepting fiat
is definitely the tricky step.
Obviously, if they don't accept Bitcoin,
that makes things a lot easier.
But if you can find somebody to convert,
and especially if you can delegate that
because you don't want to become a money transmitter,
I think this is actually technically achievable.
so i'd say like stay tuned you know we're i unfortunately the answers i give you today
on this podcast are not the answers that i want to give you in the future um you know like like i
we are we are early we are very very very early um once once we see the flow uh end to end uh on
multiple marketplaces i think i i really do i mean i wouldn't have invested as much you know time
capital and energy into this project if I didn't believe it was going anywhere. And I think the
future is really bright and it's really open to solving, you know, niche problems like this
through specific services. You know, we have an interoperable marketplace protocol who says
someone can't come in and focus on books. You know, who says someone can't come in and even focus on
alcohol. So like a Ben Justman could get his products, you know, listed and legally shipped
and all that.
Like these are all solvable problems
once we have a, you know,
we've laid the foundations
through the protocol layer
and through some of the tooling.
I'm actually going to show something else
that Calva hit me up with recently.
He's making a BTC pay server plugin,
which is going to allow BTC pay merchants
to sync their product inventory
and payment information to Noster
via NIP99 and our gamma market spec.
So like these things
are coming down the pipeline
and none of us are stopping.
So don't be surprised if, you know,
sometime in the future,
hopefully I get to come back on
or one of these great gentlemen get to come back on
and we're talking, you're saying,
hey, you know, can I sell my book through this?
Yeah, someone's working on that.
That'd be really cool.
I think the perfect solution is,
I hear what you're saying about the strike solution.
It's not ideal, again, because you're centralizing there.
The problem is someone wanting fiat.
We've got to get rid of those people, get those people out of the equation.
So I think maybe a call to arms.
I don know how economically viable this is but if there are any Bitcoin whales who want to see Bitcoin authors be able to sell their books for Bitcoin just set up a print service maybe invest in a handful of machines one in each continent And I think that that a good
starting point, right? Maybe like five or six machines spread across the world. Right now,
Bitcoin authors are just, it's not a massive supply site, right? There were less than 100,
maybe 200 at best.
So we're not talking a lot of books.
We don't need a lot of heavy duty machinery.
Just set them up across the world.
And it's probably a low margin thing
because we don't have the scale yet.
But yeah, that would solve a lot of these problems.
And at risk of everybody hating me for saying this,
stable coins are not the direction we want to go long term,
but short term, they can be used as gateway drugs for Bitcoin.
So while some of these services may not intend to
or don't have Bitcoin on the roadmap,
a lot of them do have stable coins on their roadmap.
And I would love to talk to Chief Monkey
or really anybody about this,
but my mentality is I'll use any tool available to me
to get people to the promised land.
And if it needs to be some inferior technology
because it's currently sponsored by certain entities,
then so be it.
I think that that will probably work reasonably quicker,
just the way things are going in that market.
But Nostra is technically payment agnostic,
So, you know, allowing merchants, booksellers or anybody for that matter to get cash flow positive in any terms, whether it's fiat or Bitcoin, is going to be the thing that allows people to get more Bitcoin on their balance sheet.
and you know the to me some I think some people miss the the forest for the trees on this one
it's like we need to get as many people as possible on on these open protocols and you
know how we get there you know people are going to take different approaches yeah I hear what
you're saying Eric I think if I had to sort of put it in order of what I like obviously Bitcoin
only, just find a publisher, not publisher, a print-on-demand service that is willing to accept
Bitcoin. That really solves the problem in the cleanest way. I think the next compromise would
be to have some kind of fiat ramp, on-ramp, like a strike, obviously create centralization.
The third, I think, is what you're saying, which is have a stable coin in the mix. And then the
last one, obviously, is no Bitcoin. You just pay with your credit card. That one sucks completely
because it comes with like a ton of fees.
And I hope to skip that last one.
But I think like Bitcoin is going to win
because you see this when you're developing these products.
It's the easiest thing to implement.
Like it's the easiest payment method to implement.
And it's the one that actually has the least risk of implementing
because I don't get involved in the transaction at all.
Like that's beautiful.
It has properties.
that's going to make it win
regardless of what comes first.
And I sort of trust in that
and know that that's going to happen long term
and so I'm going to accelerate anything
that moves that future forward
even if it involves, for lack of a better word,
like a shortcut or a hack in the meantime.
That's all these things are.
They're just like digital dollars.
It's kind of like a hack to get to the real thing
which is Bitcoin.
Yes, that is the hope anyway,
that you don't have a central entity like Tether or whatever
suddenly come in and change the direction in between.
But yes, the best case scenario is it is the gateway drug
and ultimately it does lead to Bitcoin.
I think I remember reading something on your website
about conduit coffee.
Am I making stuff up, Eric, or is that real?
It was real.
we've shut it down for now. Okay. So originally, yeah, we did start just by making a coffee shop
and trying to sell coffee for Bitcoin. And we were just posting about our Noster and then trying to
implement the original NIP 15 marketplace. But my thinking around that as someone who's running
now a software development company, is that like, what is the best way to learn how to build the
software that your customers want is to actually be one of those customers yourself. So I do want
to eventually actually be a merchant on, you know, NIP 99 marketplaces again, because that to me gives
Conduit a feedback loop of what tooling we're actually, you know, trying to convince other
people to use as well. So the revival of Conduit Coffee will happen at some point. There's definitely
going to be a Conduit merch store. And, you know, that to me is a feedback loop for the experience
of the merchants. It's also a feedback loop for me with, you know, the brand of Conduit. Like,
if people are actually wanting to buy Conduit merch or Conduit coffee, that means they like
what we're doing and are willing to, to support us through, you know, some small revenue, uh, there.
So there's a couple of signals there that I'm, I'm excited to, to revamp and, and get, you know,
back under our hood right now. But we shut that down because it was a little bit of overhead and,
um, you know, I like to sell quality goods if I'm, I'm, I'm shilling, you know, quality, quality,
quality. So I got to make sure that, uh, the coffee beans have been roasted within a certain
timeframe. And, um, if you don't have enough volume, you, you can't maintain that. And I'm
not going to go to a third party and just resell some crappy beans. So, uh, that's, that's where
that's at, but do expect that to come back in the future. I'm, I'm determined, uh, to make that
happen. So, so let's talk about the future. You're right now in alpha when beta and when general
availability? I mean, the alpha is technically available. Generally, it's just, it's only being
advertised on on Noster. I think when Merchant Portal is probably the next most important
question. I had wanted it by the end of this year, but that's not looking like it's going to happen.
I'm going to set myself a stretch goal to get the alpha for Merchant Portal out by... I hate doing
this. I hate doing this. I know there's other people that don't do this on purpose, but I kind
of like setting setting goals let's say end of february oh you heard it here folks that's it
it is set in stone oh shit so so many other other people that are that are a lot more experienced
in the software game are looking at or listening to this right now i'm going you idiot you shouldn't
have said that so you know in a in a prior life i used to run a product team and i it was a constant
And so, you know, as I matured as a product leader, I learned to recognize things in engineers.
So the junior engineers give you dates when you ask them, and the senior engineers don't, right?
They know how to play the game, right?
So basically the battle between the senior product manager and the senior engineer is to the question of when.
The product manager wants it today, immediately, or yesterday, actually.
And the engineer says it's going to be never ready, right?
The answer somewhere lies between never and yesterday.
Yeah.
And I am constantly trying to refine my skills in that arena.
I'm 100% heads down, focused on product right now,
de-scoping it to what would be an alpha
and getting the essential flows there.
That's what we are working on as we speak.
So as we're thinking ahead,
I mean, February, whatever it ends up being, right?
Do you have an idea of what your first few merchants that you're building for are going to look like?
Would there be basically coffee roasters, other artisanal vendors, food maybe, or even some digital products?
Do you have an idea in your head?
Yeah, I mean, it's the people that we already see out there.
I would be honored if they did choose us as their primary client.
So that's the Oshis, the Great Gis, the Soap Miners, BJ with her Ketolicious,
Ben Justman, if we somehow figure out all the dance around alcohol.
But there's also a lot of artists, actually, that are looking to sell things as well.
So I have a few people waiting in the wings that are orange-pilled but not selling their wares for Bitcoin yet.
Just personal friends that are going to be our alpha testers that are artists.
Actually, since you brought up Ben, Ben Jussman and Peony Lane, is there a different set of considerations because we're talking about wine here?
I'd have to ask him.
Last time we briefly chatted,
there was, as I understood,
there were some complications
with what he was allowed to,
you know, how he had to, like,
collect certain things
to be able to legally ship.
But I should check with him
because I've actually seen
people post his bottles
on here somewhere.
Well, I purchased directly from him,
from his website.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, as of.
As have I, but I need to make sure...
actually I want to just completely defer to him with that question.
You should have him on the show and ask what would the limitations be.
Got to get Ben back on the show.
So Ben, in case you're listening,
we want Peony Lane as a NIP99 event.
I agree.
Let's make it happen.
Yeah.
Let's see.
So have you, in this brief, like early stage, have you seen any emergent patterns in buyer and seller behavior?
Or are the numbers too thin at this stage for patterns?
Yeah, I wouldn't really be able to comment on that too, too well at this stage.
Yeah.
So, Eric, paint a picture of success.
So let's say it's 2035.
What is, 2035 arrives and you wake up and you're wildly successful.
What does that look like?
To me, that looks like we are one of many providers that are making a healthy living,
helping people as basically Noster Markets service providers.
To me, it would look like back in the days when we had a healthy ISP market, where you had so many different options of getting yourself connected.
and that we would be, you know,
hopefully amongst the leaders in that space,
but that there was a healthy, diverse market
of providers that were collaborating on, you know,
how to make the specification and the tooling
and the services better for their you know collective clients That would be an amazing future 10 years from now to be making an honest living and honestly employing a strong team of people competing in a market providing these
services. That's my version of success here. I'm not really interested in becoming or really for
to see anyone become like the next Jeff Bezos or whatever.
Like that, you know, I come from an industry
where things are relatively commoditized
and you compete in that space.
And when you're competing in a more open
sort of commoditized space, it's a lot of work,
but it's honest work.
you're trying to differentiate on other vectors customer experience you know if I were to sum it up
in in one thing it would be that so you know that that's a world that's a world I want to live in
where where people are competing on on the vectors that actually matter and not just you know
doing these monopolistic sort of practices and sort of screwing up and creating these monocultures
Another version, another way to look at that, you know, success is through the diversity that we were talking about earlier.
I want to be able to go to a bunch of different locales, even ones that I don't service and see NIP99 marketplaces and, you know, socially connected markets through Noster.
And I honestly, I want all those transactions to be happening in Bitcoin.
But that would be beautiful.
And I think the landscape of products that would flow out from those protocols being the main thing being used would be just a lot more rich diverse high quality beautiful in the world we living in today I think that is a future to look forward to And it not that far away 2035 blink and you miss it
It'll be right here. So if you had to say something to the audience, we potentially have
vendors, we have consumers listening in. How can they help you achieve that 2035 vision of this
ideal world that you've talked about? Today, just go mess around with what's already published
and give us feedback. What do you like? What do you not like? What do you love? What do you hate?
We want to hear all of it. We want to hear also what you're missing from the current landscape
of things. We want to hear, as users, I would say the feedback is the most important. Try the flows.
See when something doesn't work for you.
See when you run into a bug.
Message us on Noster when you run into those things.
That's the type of feedback that's going to keep us focused and moving forward.
Love it.
Anything else you want to plug, Eric?
I actually had a list of plugs, and I got to almost all of them.
Actually, I have a little heart next to a guy named LSAT here.
this guy runs around
and I don't know if he's like
he PMs multiple
groups to get them interoperable
and he was one of the people that
brought us in the fold early
so I don't know if that guy
he doesn't get enough credit for what he does
that's a guy that deserves a shout out
oh yeah
there is a story
the first time I met LSAT was on a beach
in Miami, it was I think 2am
and he said
I heard a voice in the darkness
say I'm LSAT
so of course
the first thing I did was I took my phone out of my pocket turned the flashlight on and shone it on his face right into his eyes I don think he was too amused but I think he forgiven me since then
But no, shout out to LSAT.
Yeah, he's a tireless steward of the protocol.
Yep.
And great stuff from him.
I hope to meet him under similar circumstances one day.
You should ask him about the story when you do chat with him.
So, Eric, appreciate you taking the time and, you know, really looking forward to what you're building.
You, Chief Monkey, Calvadev, and others who are building towards these de-commerce solutions are genuinely playing your part in making the world a freer and better place.
So, yeah, I appreciate everything you do.
Right back at you.
Thank you for having me.
And, dude, those were some awesome questions.
You really challenged my thinking,
and I'm taking a lot away from this.
I appreciate you.
Awesome.
And we appreciate our listeners.
I hope you listened to this episode
on a podcasting 2.0 app like Fountain
because if you didn't get a chance
to boost our artist retrograde,
you can go back to roughly the 59-minute mark
when the song begins and show them some love.
Send some sats streaming to Tallahassee.
And if you are on Fountain, we would appreciate it
if you hit that subscribe button.
Your support goes a long way in making the show what it is.
Thank you to our live audience for keeping a lively debate
going on on all the NOSTA live streaming chat apps.
And until next week, goodbye.