Welcome to Pleb Chain Radio, a live show brought to you by Plebs for Plebs, which focuses
on the intersection of Nostra 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 plebs to the lightning-laced airwaves. Today is Friday the 22nd of August and it is 4.04pm on the east coast of the United States at the time of recording.
This is episode 126 of Plep Chain Radio and we have a fun one for you today. Short Fiat, creator of Fanfares and author of a highly anticipated manifesto on the new internet is here to tell us all about that.
and a reminder folks if you are listening to this show on apple or spotify first of all thank you
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NQW, you have been paying attention
to Bitcoin and Nostra culture in the last week.
What have you witnessed?
Avi, I just checked on Fountain app again
And there we are live now.
So this is a thing.
I'm super stoked about that portion that we can, we can be live via another client.
You know, cause not no stir and amethyst and, you know, those kinds of social media first
clients, those Twitter replacement clients were, you know, that was the first of it.
But now we're actually in a, a client where people go to, to consume a hundred percent
consume audio and video and kind of get your 40 hours per week in. So I think that's, I can't
stress how much I love that. So you're telling me, QW, that I need to update my intro script
to include Fountain. Well, that's what made me think of it when I started listening to you.
And I'm like, wait a second. And so I pulled up the app and had to check it out. So yeah,
there might be an update. And eventually, you know, Avi, we just don't even have to name which
ones are on because it's just everything. It's just hyper-Gnostification. That's right.
When hyper-Gnostification, Avi? Well, our guests will let us know fairly soon.
So secondly, the V-logs, Avi. So apparently, Nostris popularized V-logs so much that we actually
now put a hyphen there and it's a V-log. So it's not that far away from GULAG, the way you say it.
And the more you post on there, on Nostra and your V-log, I would say there's a pretty good
chance you have a better chance of getting into a GULAG. It's just a matter of time, right?
I don't know if I'm ready to bite on this new trend yet, KW.
I did see our buddy Richard Greaser from the Bugle. He did one. Maybe he did a few, but I just saw one last night and he's got his mask on. He's got some video in the background. I mean, he's definitely going cypherpunk with it. So it is something where, you know, you don't necessarily have to dox yourself. You can still participate.
I have not gotten that far
but it is definitely not going away
and I think they're starting to build
clients around these
vlogs and maybe it's
similar to a TikTok, I don't know
but you can
rest assured it's about 80%
dudes, some with their shirt off
just giving you a piece of their mind
with their video
It's an important cultural
phenomenon, how else
would the culture permeate if it wasn't
for shirtless men ranting at a camera.
Well, and it's not just the jungles anymore.
You know, these are out in the fields.
They're out.
I mean, it's really, I think,
the naked jungle people probably started this.
So shout out to the NJPs and the Primal House.
Yes.
And secondly, BitChat.
Just updated today for me on the App Store
or, you know, maybe 10 hours ago.
But it's getting more and more.
So it's integrated geocaching, caching, or just basically geohashing.
Hashing, yeah.
Hashing.
So essentially, you can find, it's opening up the discoverability.
And it's also more Nostra integrated.
So whatever that is, I'm still yet to find anything, any use for it.
But things are being rolled out.
maybe Jack's playing 4G, 4D chess and I have no idea what's going on. I'm still waiting to see.
I want to participate, Avi. How do I get, how do I get a friend on there?
Yeah, this is a bit of a curve ball that happened, at least I discovered today at about 5am in the
morning, my time I woke up and I saw something on Nostra that said, GeoHash teleportation now
available on bitchat.
So geohashes, for folks who are
wondering, it's a scheme.
It's a schematic
by which you can map
different locations
on the planet using alphanumeric
strings. And it's all
deterministic, right? But the more
characters you use, the more you zoom
into the map. So it's basically the map is
broken into grids, right?
The longer your character string,
the smaller the grid
gets until you can get to a super
a specific location. I think if you get to 10 or 11
characters long, you can practically
have a single house,
the geohash of it. And it's
a hexadecimal, I think
it's hexadecimal string
that does that.
So this update...
Avi, at 5am you were
reading about this?
Yeah, I do these things.
Did you get your coffee in?
Oh yeah, I had my, right after my espresso,
I dove right into
geohash. The hexadecimal geohashing?
The hexadecimal geohash teleportation.
Actually, don't quote me on the hexadecimal.
It looks like a hexadecimal string.
I'm not actually sure.
Sounds like a show title.
We're winning now.
But so, you know, it's alphanumeric.
And the fewer characters you have, you know, the bigger your square is.
So someone said, let's go to 21M, right?
And that's somewhere off the coast of New Zealand.
and everyone had teleported into 21,
you know, 21 million because of Bitcoin, right?
And there were about, when I joined in the morning,
there were about 12 people in there.
Callie, someone who claimed to be Jack Dorsey.
Now, later on, they posted a screenshot
of that very chat.
So I guess that is proof it was Jack Dorsey.
And a handful of others.
And it was just, you know, goofing around
like we used to in the early days of Nostra.
Fun stuff.
Anybody drop any invoices?
Nuts.
They're dropping nuts.
Just trying to relive the glory days of the great Jack Hatcheting.
Yeah.
The Jacketing.
So that's really it.
You're being inundated with V-logs,
and the flavor of the week is definitely the BitChat release.
That's it.
We need some more cultural.
I don't know if there's anything going on out there, but I'd love to know.
If there's anything out there coming up, shoot me a DM and I'd love to promote it.
Excellent.
And then for our sermon today, QW,
the fiat world runs on the attention economy.
Eyeballs for rent, outrage for sale,
truth outsourced to algorithms with a quarterly target.
Clicks are cheap.
Bots are plentiful.
Clout is a costume.
We choose a different altar.
In a reputation economy, proof of work is personal.
Your word is signed by your keys.
Your deeds are time-chained by memory.
And your promises settle in lightning.
Noster is the commons where notes outlive trends and zaps measure gratitude.
not gullibility. Web of trust means the graph isn't bought. It's earned one honest interaction
at a time. Attention chases the loud. Reputation follows the consistent. Sats flow to signal.
Bitcoin is the base layer that refuses to lie. Lightning is the handshake that clears in
milliseconds. Noster is the town square where pseudonyms carry weight because receipts beat
reach. Followers inflate, reputations compound, virality decays, integrity accrues. Don't trust
verify was never cynicism. It's love for reality. Verify the code, the custody, the character.
KYC, but make it know your character
Bring your own keys, bring your own ethics
Be sovereign, then be social
The attention economy rewards what pops
The reputation economy rewards what holds
What holds wins
Less theater and more truth
Smaller promises and instant settlements
Merit gets zapped, not marketing
You are the node your friends can route through
When the world goes noisy
When the lights flicker on the clout carnival
Only two things will remain
The sats you kept and the name you kept clean
Stack both
And with that, QW, we have a man
We have a guest
who can speak about this far more eloquently and in detail than I ever can.
One of the strongest guest names we've had.
One, if not the most, the strongest guest name, Short Fiat.
Welcome to Plebschain Radio, sir.
Thank you, Avi. Thank you, QW. It's very nice to be here.
Yes, hell yeah.
I wish Avi would have a cool name like yours.
He went with the full docs and you know it just doesn have the edge that I was looking for in a co Indeed So Shat Fiat you know to the extent that you want to share tell us how
you got here today. I know there's an announcement you want to make, but before
we get there, what was your journey like to Nostra, to Bitcoin? What led you down the rabbit hole?
Well, I guess I actually bought some Bitcoin back in 2013 without really knowing what it was.
It was a kind of an exciting new market that appeared to be going up quickly.
I actually bought right at the top of the 2013 bull market and then watched it crash from $1,000 all the way down to about $1,50.
and I kind of, I really lost focus on it
and actually lost my keys of those original Bitcoin
that I bought, which was unfortunate,
but it's not an unusual story.
I think quite a lot of people have actually lost their keys
that got in that early because we, yeah,
it was quite sort of flaky at that point
buying a local bitcoins.com.
And yeah, it was a very different world back then.
But yeah, I spent more time looking at it later on
in years that came and started to see it
as a real potential alternative currency.
Whereas at the beginning, it did look a bit like a Ponzi scheme, to be fair.
And I wasn't completely convinced by it.
I just kind of jumped in for a bit of a punt and a bit of a play.
But yeah, over time, I learned more about it.
I learned more by reading books, by talking to people, by going to conferences.
and I slowly converted it from being the classic price goes up person
to ultimately being a believer and seeing it as a potential to change the world.
So I stayed for the revolution.
And from there, I suppose, as I understood more about it,
I started to see that we could build new systems using Bitcoin,
particularly from the point of view of micropayments.
I think that was what really kind of drew me in there from sort of 2019 onwards.
I understood that there was potential to have a currency that would have very low transaction costs.
And that's what been one of the challenges on the Internet from the beginning is using credit cards, have significant minimum transaction fees on them, which has made micropayments very difficult, virtually impossible.
so yeah I mean spent a little bit of time in the shitcoin space as many Bitcoiners did and
eventually figured out that Bitcoin was the only one that was genuinely decentralized really can't
be taken away from you genuinely is limited in supply and I think above all the community around
Bitcoin is much much stronger than anything you'll see in any other cryptocurrency.
On the community point, what is your theory for it? Is it that it's held together by a strong ideology in Bitcoin, which you don't necessarily find in some of these other cryptos?
I personally don't think it's ideology
I think it's understanding
I think if you read enough about Bitcoin
and spend enough time thinking about it
you come to the inevitable conclusion
that it is the only one that actually has any real value
and it takes quite a long time to get there
to be honest with you
my opinion is that every shitcoiner
is basically a Bitcoin
and it hasn't yet figured it out
I think that's really
I think it's Jack Dorsey who talks about the horseshoe
where you start off with Bitcoin
and then you get distracted by the excitement of the faster moving prices in the other currencies
and start exploring the kind of use cases that they put out there.
And then ultimately you end up back at Bitcoin.
So, yeah, there's been a real kind of narrative arc, though, when you think about it.
At the beginning, Bitcoin wasn't, the miners weren't charging transaction fees.
So it was effectively a micropayment currency at that point.
And people like Roger Ver were going around to shops and persuading them to accept Bitcoin as a currency.
But once the block space was filled, they needed to start charging transaction fees.
And then it became too expensive to be a micropayment currency.
And then from sort of 2015 onwards, Lightning was in development, whilst some other currencies out there, like Ripple, for example, were saying, look, you know, we're a micropayment currency because our transaction fees are lower.
but the only way they achieve that is by being less secure, by being centralized.
So it took Bitcoin a long time together in terms of actually delivering on that dream of micropayments.
And now that we're there, you know, I think you could say since sort of 2022,
there's been quite a reliable set of Bitcoin Lightning wallets that you can use to make fast and cheap transactions.
And so now we have the potential to really deliver on that.
And then once you add into that NOSTA with Bitcoin Lightning integrated, it really is a really amazing space for development, in my opinion.
You mentioned 2022, which was an inflection point for a lot of folks, especially a lot of folks listening to this podcast, and indeed who are on this podcast, QW myself, which is NOSTA happened in the latter half of that year.
Was that when you fell down the NOSTA rabbit hole as well?
I got down the NOSTA rabbit hole in 23.
Yeah, we were looking at building a micro-payments application.
And once I saw NOSTA with Bitcoin Lightning integrated, that for me was the real aha moment where I thought, yes, this is exactly what we need to build on.
Because it gives you the ability to publish content and get paid for it in Bitcoin Lightning micro-payments.
So that was the moment for me that NOSTA was, as far as I was concerned, is the next layer of the internet.
Love it. So you have, I believe you have an announcement to make. What is it? There are people waiting with bated breath.
yes so today we are officially uh launching um fanfares which is the app that we've built
so i have a small team of developers we've been overall working about three and a half years on
this project but yeah we've really been very much on the kind of uh nosta train for about a year and
a half now and um yeah we've reached a point where we have a good mvp that's fully functional
and it enables people to publish content.
So that might be audio books, podcasts, music.
At some point, we'll be doing videos.
Not too long away, that'll be coming as well.
But you can publish those items of content
as Noster notes that are encrypted.
So when you upload them through FanFares,
they will be automatically encrypted.
And then people that want to gain access to that content
can zap the specified amount of Bitcoin,
which will create a decryption key
that only they have access to with their NSEC,
and they then have the ability to access that content forever.
So it's ownership of digital content, ownership by the creator,
and the ability to sell copies that people can own as NOSTA notes.
Is it fair to think of Fanfares as a NOSTA client,
or is it more of a protocol that sits on top of NOSTA?
That's a very good question, yeah.
I mean, it's an app at the moment, so it acts as a NOSTA client, but it's potentially a proof of implementation for a protocol that can sit on top of NOSTA and Lightning.
So the answer is both. It is a client. But if the wider community of Nostra and Bitcoin choose to adopt the code that we've written, and it will be open source, we've been developing in StealthMade, but the code will be open source because we do want acceptance from the community.
If the other Nostra clients out there adopt our code, then it effectively becomes another layer of the protocol.
how normie friendly will fanfares be or is it kind of something you're building this
product currently just for those familiar with maybe nostril login wallet connect zapping
all those things that come with kind of our culture yeah i mean that's a very important
thing we've built it to try to be as normie friendly as possible so the way you would be
introduced to fanfares is someone would send you a link of some content that they might have created
themselves or they might have discovered it from somebody else and they're recommending it to you
when you click on that link you go to our web app so we're not in the app store so we can't be
constrained through that bottleneck but effectively you're on our website which appears like a web
app on your phone from there you'll be able to play the free part of the content and then by
if you want to continue beyond the free part
a lightning wallet will pop up on your phone
if you have a lightning wallet
you can then make a payment that gives you access to the rest of it
so the most kind of
non-normy part of that is actually having
a lightning wallet with some lightning in it
once you've done that
using the app itself is
relatively simple
it should be
it should be possible for anyone
to use it really in practice
and it may be something we need feedback on
in terms of messaging within the app as time goes on
but we've always had that in mind
we want anyone to be able to use it
they don't have to create a new Nostra identity
they get one as they come into the app
so they're automatically allocated a Nostra identity
if they're already a Nostra user
they have the option to put their Nostra ID in there
and use their normal Nostra identity
but essentially it's tried to make the whole thing as simple as just a few clicks
to get from receiving a link to coming to our app to making a payment
and having access and ownership of the whole content.
And what we would hope is that anyone that comes into Fanfares that way
will become a new Nostra user because that's where they've experienced
the ability to buy content without the platforms.
now short fiat uh fanfaz existed welcome back by the way avi yeah wi-fi kicked me out
just noticed you disappeared i'm sure your heart dropped and now you're trying to figure out what's
going on as a brief wifi just appreciate for you uh you you launched uh fanfaz in a previous
iteration, right? And I understand
that this is like the
I guess the latest version
or a non-beta
version, is that fair? Because
a previous version of FanFest did exist
prior to this, is that correct?
Yes, yeah, yeah, and we're
very appreciative for Pleb Chain Radio
and for the Once
Bitten podcast for helping us test that.
That one was not particularly
easy to use it was a kind of proof of concept that we could get the basic functionality there but it was pretty complicated to kind of log in and it was definitely not normally friendly So the route we taken now is that the solution has to be normally friendly
It has to be as easy to use as possible. And there's additional functionality that was not
there with that original implementation. So we've kind of come a long way and it's been
over a year of really kind of hard development.
The team have been working incredibly hard
and developing in the Nostra space is difficult.
You know, you don't have a lot of the kind of tooling
that you get in more developed environments.
It really is a case you have to build a lot of things from scratch.
But yeah, we've built a very sound product now.
I think Arkenox, our CTO, has been very diligent
about building a solid foundation
so that when we need to make changes,
it's all going to be possible.
and it's something that can be built on top of
without going back and regretting the kind of shortcuts
that we took at the beginning.
So, yeah, it's been a hard and long process
to get to where we are.
But from my point of view, it's an absolute relief
to actually have the working product now
because I've been talking about it for a long time
and finally I can show people this is how you use it.
Now, there is something else that you are releasing.
if you haven't released already, it's coming very soon. That ties in very nicely into Fanfares.
And this was the manifesto for a new internet that I referred to at the very beginning of the show.
Now, I have had the honor of reviewing it, Short Fiat. I think I can admit that now.
Well, it's too late. I've done it already. And it is a remarkable book. I think one of the first
things I said to you when I read it is this is this reads like a manifesto for the new internet
now those weren't your words those were my words after reading that book do you want to talk a
little bit about that yeah yeah the book I have spent the last sort of eight months writing and
it really has been the bait of my life to be honest with you because I don't think writing is
one of my natural skills but um i wanted to do it because i wanted people to understand
what fanfares is as an app and what it can become what problems it solves and um how the the
problems that we have how we arrived at those problems as well because i think that's a key
part of understanding the solution so i got all of my ideas together down on uh on digital paper
and started to write the book about eight months ago.
And it's been through so many rewrites since then.
And it really has been almost all of my time for those eight months to get it written.
And my vision was always that once the app was ready to go,
it would be recorded as an audio book and it would be the first thing to go out on the app.
So that anyone that's been introduced to the app has a kind of point of reference there
where if they take the time to listen to the book,
they're going to understand what Fanfares is.
and what it can potentially achieve.
And I think with your description there,
it goes beyond just paywalled media.
It really kind of changes the way,
changes the incentive system that the internet is built upon.
I think that's really kind of where we go with it.
We talk in the book about the problems that we have with the platforms.
I think most people know about how the platforms are not necessarily very good
for us mentally.
They're designed to be very addictive.
The main reason for that is because they're largely funded by advertising.
And if the advertisers are paying the bills, then they want people to stay on there as long as possible.
So the incentive is always to target people with their data, knowing where their weaknesses are and what kind of content is going to keep them glued to the screen.
And that's the way the platforms have been built.
But we know that's not an ideal form of digital media on the Internet.
so within the book then we look at what really kind of led to that and my opinion is that it was
the lack of a native digital currency on the internet and a native way to pay between people
so when HTTP was developed it was really good for sharing information freely but you couldn't
share value so that was the the key kind of bit of history that I wanted to explain and say this
this is how we got here we we built products that were dependent upon advertising and so we ended up
not being the customer we are the product and you know everyone's heard that before but it's
it's it's more difficult to understand how to solve it so yeah the book goes on it's it's in
in reality it's not just the payments that were missing it was the ability to have an identity
um at the moment we all have username passwords on platforms but they're not ours they belong to
platforms. There's the ability to host data. I mean, we've been able to do that with websites
from the beginning, but that has cost associated. And when you have YouTube and Instagram offering
you free storage for your photos and your videos, it's very hard to resist that. And apart from that,
you know, if you create a website with your photos on, how is anyone going to find it? You know,
and that's the other part of the internet that's required these companies to exist. You know,
we've depended upon Google for search and the platforms now provide that
discovery service. And if you are a creator of videos,
you have to be on YouTube in order to get discovered. You know,
that's just how it works.
So we've kind of walked down this path without really understanding entirely
where it was taking us and not really understanding the forces that were
taking us there. But ultimately it was, it was a bad incentive system.
It was the incentive to capture your audience because that's what gives you most value.
And if you're on a platform, if you want to perform on that platform and be seen by the algorithm, then you need to engage in that kind of audience capture form of content, which isn't necessarily the kind of content that creators actually want to create.
But then, yeah, we move on to the potential escape.
And that is the tools that we now have with Bitcoin Lightning, with Nostra, with the FanFares kind of build on top where we enable people to encrypt content and have it paid for.
And then the real kind of thing that was definitely not there with the prototype that you've used is the ability for creators when they upload the content, they have the option to specify a percentage of the revenue that will go to anyone that reposts for them.
so when someone's bought something when they're listening to it they can on their screen at the
same time generate an affiliate link which is unlike any affiliate link you've ever seen because
there's no company in the middle you don't have amazon processing your payments and paying you
after 90 days and taking a big fee for that sometimes not paying you at all depending on
whether you meet the terms and conditions that what we have here is a sovereign affiliate link
where it's automatic, it's instant, and it's a decentralized peer-to-peer payment effectively.
So that is what we hope will help form a new discovery system on the internet,
a network of humans that spend time looking for good content or creating good content
and then selecting the very best that they're willing to stake their reputation on
and sharing that with their peer group, with their network.
So, let's talk about the sovereign affiliate links, because I think that gets into the heart of this new reputation-based economy that I'd referenced in the sermon.
because the first thing that jumps into most people's minds
when you mention affiliate links or referral links
is some kind of, you have all of these influencers today
pumping out codes for whatever, erectile dysfunction pills
or libido or whatever it is, right?
Creating supplements.
And it just feels like this constant shill saying,
hey, you can get 10% off on these pills,
on these supplements or on this merch at the store
if you use my referral code.
These sovereign affiliate links that you're talking about,
they are different because,
and I want to make sure I understand this, Shod Fiat,
is that because the person who is creating these links
is signing that note on NOSTA
and it's essentially irrevocably tied to their,
npub is that correct yeah the npub is part of the link itself and we have a link shortener so you
don't end up with a very kind of long long link long link each time but the information
of the lightning address of the person that's that's that's created the link and that shares
the link is is within that that link so you you have the original creator the person that's done
the referral their payment information is included within that link so that when the payment is made
it's automatically split in between those two
those two people that helped bring the content
to you. Let's
take a real life example. So
you've written this book
and I believe it will be the first item
listed on FanFares, is that correct?
Yes, it's now
published on FanFares and I just put
a Noster note out at the beginning of this
live show.
So the link is now
out there. You go to my Noster, you'll be able to see it.
But yeah, if you go there, the purchase price is 8,000 sats, which is probably not an unreasonable price for an audiobook.
I mean, Audible, quite often you pay more than that, but that's the price in Bitcoin.
Yeah, the money all goes through to the author.
So anyone else that publishes an audiobook or a podcast or other content on the Fanfares app, all of the money is going through.
Less lightning fees, which are obviously quite small.
But if you compare that with Audible, anyone that publishes on Audible, they're giving away 70% to the platform.
If you agree, I think 75%, that's it, 75% you're giving away to the platform.
If you agree to a seven-year exclusivity period, then it's only 60%.
But with this system, if you publish through fanfares, you're outside of the platforms, you can't be censored.
you're getting all the money and you have the potential to recruit your audience as promoters
that will share it with their with their peers so it's a very different kind of publishing system
so let's double click a little more into that just a second on that because um you made me
remember because i was talking about this i think last episode the episode before and it wasn't
actually the the books it was the audio books that you know you get your credits for audible
and you use those credits to buy books but from what i was reading those credits when when you
use those to buy an author's audio book uh the actual author gets crumbs for that because they're
like credits or something do you are you familiar with that at all yeah the exact amount that the
that the author gets is kind of shrouded in secrecy a little bit
because the way Audible works,
they're always pushing people onto the subscription service
because they get more money that way.
And I mean I a customer of Audible I do it I been subscribing for years And you know I buy what a month It is the old one a month book club I don know if I old enough to remember that one but it was something we used to get in the back of magazines
where they would sell you hardback books
and the one a month book club.
I remember Columbia Records and getting discs.
There you go, yeah.
It's not a new formula in terms of economics.
It's just a new delivery system.
But yeah, in practice, the authors do get,
I understand about $1 or $2 for each actual purchase.
And, you know, we're paying much more than that for the book itself.
So Audible has got not a complete monopoly, but they've got a very strong stranglehold in that market just because of the way these marketplaces work.
If someone's looking for an audio book, then they'll go to Audible.
So in order to get discovered, you have to be on Audible.
And if you want to sell your book, that's what you have to do.
And you're really at the mercy of that centralized platform that's controlling the delivery.
But all they're really doing is, you know, they've got an app and they're hosting your data for you.
They're managing the payment process.
And in theory, they could give you discovery,
but in practice, they're only really going to pump the existing bestsellers
through their app as recommendations.
So for most authors, they're not really getting any discovery at all,
but they are paying a huge percentage of their revenue to Amazon, basically,
who own Audible.
So let's continue working through the example of your book, Shot Fiat.
but so the book is available for 8,000 cents.
Someone who's listening to the show
goes to FanFares, pays the 8,000 cents,
listens to the entire audio book,
and they're like, holy crap, this is amazing.
I want all my friends to hear about it.
They go get a referral link, right?
So 8,000 cents, and then they,
what do they do?
They post a note saying, hey, get this book.
How would that work?
They can generate a referral link,
which is like any kind of normal web link,
and they can publish that any way they want.
So they can put it in their Telegram groups,
their WhatsApp groups, they can post it on Twitter.
Effectively, the discovery system for fanfares
is the existing rails of the internet.
But the real discovery system is the network of humans
that choose to promote content
that they appreciate the value of.
They might read my book and think,
okay, that's a nice idea.
Not really worth 8,000 sats,
so I'm not going to recommend that to anyone
because they'll be upset with me
that they've paid 8,000 sats
and it was only worth 2,000.
Or they may think, yeah, what a great idea.
Someone's clearly spent some time writing this book
and it is worth 8,000 sats.
So I'm willing to put it out there
through the existing channels of the internet.
And if other people buy it,
then the referral split on this book is 50%.
So 4,000 sats for every purchase
that comes off the back of their referral link
will go instantly into their Lightning wallet.
It's worth pointing out,
there is a kind of prologue to the book, which is free,
which gives you a taste of what the book is all about.
And we do make it clear within that that there is that referral process.
So anyone that receives a link to the book can understand
what kind of revenue split they'll be if they make the purchase.
So they post the referral link on – they could post it anyway.
It could be on Nostra, it could be on X, it could be on Telegram.
and then someone clicks on it
and it comes from, you know, they recommend it.
So presumably people who like
or, you know, who feel that this person has,
they trust their opinion, let's just say.
They click on the link and say,
okay, you know what?
This guy told me, he gave me the link.
I'm going to buy this.
And then you said it's 4,000 sets each, right?
So does that link that they post
take them directly to fanfares
and then they choose to pay in,
I'm assuming there is no fiat option, right?
It is just Bitcoin.
There is no fiat option.
This book will only be an audio book.
So yeah, you can only buy it with Bitcoin.
It's not going to go on Amazon.
It's not going to go on Audible.
The only way you can get it is through the FanFares app.
But yeah, so the link will take them through
to the FanFares web app.
They will listen to the prologue
if they think it's worth it
based on the recommendation,
based on what they've heard in the prologue.
Lightning wallet can be opened through the app itself.
They can make the payment of the invoice,
and the rest of the book will play.
But it's then held on their device as well.
It's downloaded onto their device, so they own a copy of it.
Bobby, you just asked short fiat if there was a fiat option.
Well, I was going to say, I was going to say,
it was a trick question, KW.
If you had said yes, I would have pointed out the irony.
There we go.
I chose the name short fiat.
Before I got into Bitcoin, I was a big gold bug.
From sort of 2008 when the financial crisis first happened,
I figured out that fiat money had real problems.
And I was buying gold coins and burying them in the back of gold.
So I was shorting fiat from before the point where Bitcoin actually existed.
But it took me a number of years to really get my head around Bitcoin
and why it's actually better than gold as a store of value and as a currency.
So the sovereign affiliate links, I think this is the key part of the hypothesis, which I certainly want to be true. It remains to be seen how it will play out. But I think it will change digital interactions, internet transactions, if the hypothesis plays out.
And the way I understand it is there is these sovereign affiliate links, which is, you know, it's tied to your end pub and essentially, therefore, tied to your reputation.
right so if if you are someone who's promoting someone else's work
and you know to your web of trust you want to make sure that you're promoting something good
so that the people who who you promote it to you know either listen to it read it or whatever it
might be and say oh yeah that was good or because if they don't like it your reputation will
essentially take a hit right as the person who's who's promoting these links yeah that's the crux
of it yeah sorry carry on no so and i think this is the key here right that hypothesis that
if we can get it to that point where it is people basing things off of reputation within their webs
of trust, then high quality content will permeate. And this low quality swap, right, that we're
seeing everywhere in the attention economy, that will slowly phase out.
Yeah, it's very much a sort of game theory solution. And the example I like to give,
if you recommend a video to me on Twitter, and I say, I'm watching, I mean, you know,
everything's free on Twitter. So it's a different kind of incentive system entirely. But if I spend
two minutes watching and I think that was rubbish, you know, why did every waste my time at that?
You know, I'm not going to have any recriminations about that. I'm not going to be complaining to you
that you've wasted two minutes of my time. I'm just going to move on and not care about it.
But if you send me a link to a video that costs $2 and I pay for it and it turns out to be
absolutely rubbish or something that wasn't what you said it was or even misinformation,
then I am going to have a grievance over that.
I'm going to be like, well, Avi really isn't recommending good stuff to me.
He's just trying to get his referral splits and he's wasting my time and my money.
So I might unfollow Avi or I might even mute him,
which would affect the web of trust that you have on Nostar.
And it would mean I wouldn't see your stuff in the future.
Or even if I didn't do either of those things,
I still wouldn't trust your judgment in the future.
So your ability to actually have influence and promote content
and earn from your recommendations is reduced
if you actually don't really kind of make good recommendations over time.
And it's kind of, it's an idea that will evolve.
You know, we have the basic building blocks here,
which are now the gated content,
but you're paying with Bitcoin Lightning and the payment splits.
And I've spent a lot of time sort of working on the game theory
of how does this evolve as a discovery system over time?
And what I consistently arrive at is that the net effect is better quality because of the friction that exists with the payments and because of the NOSTA reputation system.
There already exists on NOSTA and the web of trust that's being built there.
The more that we're able to remember what people said in the past and if it was a positive value or a negative value, the more that's going to affect how we react to them in the future.
And so people's behavior will change.
people, everyone, lots of people will complain about the way people behave on Twitter.
And a lot of that, in my opinion, is just because there isn't consequence for what people do and what people say.
But if you actually have a system where there's real consequences to what people do and what they say,
then behavior will change.
And the net effect will be a filtration for quality.
Because we do believe that there will be people that probably currently call themselves influencers
and what they're doing quite often is actually making referrals already.
They're referring content, they're reposting content,
they're commenting on content, but they're not getting paid for any of that.
They're getting paid when they give you the seven ways
to increase your penis size or whatever it is that they're advertising,
VPNs they don't use, who knows.
But that's what they're actually getting paid for.
So they're actually doing some referral work already.
They're doing some curation, but they're not being financially judged on that.
So the amount of time and effort they put into that curation process probably isn't very high.
But if they were actually doing that work as their primary function and they were getting paid for the quality of what they referred, then they would probably spend a lot more time on it.
And the same applies to creators, you know, creators that might be publishing content.
They might be under pressure with a subscription service to publish every week or twice a week.
And they might not really have good stuff to say at that point in time.
So they have to put something out anyway.
But if they're only really charging for what people use or only getting paid for what people use, they might actually spend much more time and wait until they've got real inspiration, something really good quality before they actually publish.
So we end up with less noise, more signal, better quality.
And it really kind of, you know, it changes the game in terms of the way the platforms have been built and funded through advertising.
intermediation is disintermediated
and it ends up being in the hands of the network. The people become the
advertisers as a network and the web of trust is what
keeps them in line effectively. They have to be honest
otherwise they will lose revenue over time. They'll lose reputation and
they'll lose an ability to make revenue over time.
A key thing this hinges on is the
idea that consumers of content will be intolerant towards bad recommendations.
If that statement is true, then it follows that the people promoting content will be
concerned about their reputation and will only promote good content.
And the creators of the content will only produce high quality things.
But if the public is so inured to slaughter,
that they tolerate anything, right?
Oh, yeah, I got an affiliate link and it was trash,
whatever, I don't really care.
I think that's when this hypothesis doesn't play out.
Do you see that risk?
Yeah, I mean, if people are happy to lose money
and get rubbish for it,
then, yeah, I guess they're not really
a high signal within the system
because the same people that don't really care what they watch
and what they pay for will probably be reposting it.
And they will be removed from the web of trust
that people really do care about quality and what they're paying for.
So, you know, effectively everyone is creating their own discovery system
through the people they choose to follow.
And people that don't have any discernment for quality or signal,
then they will end up in a different web of trust to people that do.
and if that's what they choose if they want to just consume whatever sent to them by
whatever influence them they might be following if they don't want to improve the quality of what
they're seeing then you know it's entirely up to them it's it's a free and voluntary system it's
not financially free but anyone is free to enter to leave whenever they want and to follow whoever
they want so if people choose to watch rubbish you know i can't stop them i have no wish to stop
who's to say what is rubbish and what isn't you know i mean it's art isn't it you could say what
is good art what isn't you know it's it's entirely down to people's personal opinion so
that they're free to do that as much as they like
i think that is the one nagging thing in my mind because what you said right people consuming
rubbish and i'm sorry if this sounds dismissive to majority of the world but that's the world we
live in today. People are completely happy consuming rubbish. And I just wonder...
My fantasy football draft is this afternoon. I'm sure you think that's rubbish, but for me,
I'm really looking forward to it.
But are we going to see an inflection point where there's leakage, I suppose,
where people suddenly,
you know, they say,
I want to consume better quality content.
I'm, you know, I'm, it's not okay
that I've, you know, I'm eating trash.
I'm, you know, watching AI slop,
consuming AI slop day in and day out.
And I want to break out of that.
And I just, it's unclear to me
if we will hit that inflection point
where these people turn the corner and say,
you know what, no, I want to make a change.
I want to join that.
Yeah, I think the answer to that,
I mean, this is a sovereign system
and it only works if the people within it are sovereign.
So that's the key element to it.
It is your choice to be sovereign about what you consume
that makes you a positive part of the system.
And if you are just not caring about what you see,
you'll probably just stay on Twitter
or X as they call it these days, you know, because it's free.
And you'll just watch whatever low-quality content is being pumped out,
whatever the algorithm wants to send you because they know it will keep you
addicted and keep you watching.
You know, that system is what it is.
And the people that choose that will probably choose that over Nostra.
but people that find good stuff through fanfares they will be brought into NOSTA they will choose
to stay on NOSTA because that's where they can curate their own experience through following
people that are providing genuine signal and if they don't want to be that person they won't be
part of the system so it's a self-selecting process you know you won't have people that
come on NOSTA because they don't care what they see because it's you know it's not as engaging
and Twitter is not designed to be as engaging.
It's not what Nostra optimizes for.
I think Nostra optimizes for value rather than for engagement.
You know, and that's the main difference.
I think you're right.
There's a lot of people that are just happy to see rubbish,
but I think there's a general sense that people know they're being made addicted
to those platforms.
They know that they're wasting their time on them more than they want to.
So there's a sense of dissatisfaction with the system overall.
they might like the latest meme they've seen or the latest video they've seen but
they probably know that it's not really adding any value to their lives and it's wasting their time
so i think it's it's none of it none of it's going to happen overnight people aren't going
to suddenly leave twitter instantly and come to nostra and start paying for content on fanfares but
over time you know the fundamentals are stronger and if you end up with a system that is consistently
better quality, gives you more autonomy, gives you freedom from censorship, then there's
plenty of people that would appreciate that.
And for people that don't, you know, that's entirely up to them.
You know, they just naturally won't become part of the system.
And you do outline a migration path, a plausible migration path.
I think it's, you structure it as concentric circles, right, of different levels of, I don't
know if that's made it to the final version of the book but the one i read right and i and the
names are slipping my mind right now shot fiat but you have the core it's something like the core
uh consumers and the bridge and then it goes out yeah that that one is is not part of the book now
i think because it was it was kind of my musings over how the whole adoption curve could happen
And ultimately, I wanted the book to be more grounded in sort of mostly, in fact, about the past, where we are now, about how the solution works, the tools that we now have, which are relatively recent.
You know, Bitcoin, Lightning and Nostra are so recent.
We're still at the early stage of these things.
And, you know, I've done some kind of hypothesizing about how the curation system builds a better quality network, better quality content.
but yeah I think the adoption curve that I was originally including in there I take that out now
because it was just too speculative but yeah the reality is I think the easiest adopters will be
Bitcoin authors because they're being royally ripped off on Audible and their audience mostly
will have Bitcoin that they can use to pay for an audiobook so I think that's going to be the
obvious one to target initially. Bitcoin podcasters, I think, will be real potential
once they figure out that they can release premium content and put a price on that.
That should generate quite a lot of interest in the Bitcoin community if Bitcoin podcasters
do start to experiment with this technology. I think the way that the numbers might work there,
if you look at, obviously, you guys are doing this podcast without monetization, which is
admirable you're just contributing something to the community but for people that are trying to
make a living out of it if they have good levels of sponsorship they earn about twenty dollars for
every one thousand streams so that's that's not a huge amount of money but if you take the
equivalent you charge one dollar for a premium podcast and have a free part as a flyer to that
that gives them the introduction to it they've only got to get a two percent conversion rate
to compete positively with what they would have earned on the sponsorship side.
And then, of course, you have the potential that some of that 2% or more
might go on to do a referral, bring in a new audience for them, actually,
and bring in more money as well.
So I think the adoption is initially through the Bitcoin space, for sure,
because that's where we understand these kind of technologies,
where we've got the money to pay for content.
And if we do understand it, we'll probably want to support this kind of technology because we can see that it's a way of building Bitcoin as a use case.
And it's a way of bringing people into NOSTA.
And with the vision of there potentially being a more high quality Internet where people are accountable for what they do and there are consequences for what people say.
I think the Bitcoiners are most likely to get that most quickly because a lot of us have read books about these kind of concepts already.
It is the intersection of business and economics and technology.
And I think that's what we kind of understand in this space.
So I think the media element to it is slightly different to what a lot of Bitcoiners already think about.
But that's where NOSTA really kind of is the new branch of this community.
It is decentralized media together, decentralized money.
The two are very well suited to each other.
And in many ways, they are the use case for each other.
the more I think about it,
the more it makes sense to me
that something like FanFares
will work as a protocol
as opposed to a standalone app.
Because if you want to expand
to all types of content,
video, audio books,
you know, other media,
the issue becomes if you're an app,
and you can keep me honest here,
short for you,
each of those forms of media come with their own intricacies For example in video you have to offer transcoding services if you want to have a proper video offering right Podcasting has its own set of constraints
live streaming, another set,
audio book, something else.
Whereas if it were,
if FanFares were a protocol
that enables this
sovereign affiliate links
and monetization layer,
then you can have an actual,
you can have applications that specialize in specific forms of media that just slap on fanfares
on top as the as the layer that allows the creators to monetize and promote their content
is that what do you think about that i think yeah you're exactly right and i think yeah that's
something that we do want we want people to extend upon what we've built and and create specialist
things within it. We're confident we can deliver all forms of
media through our app. So we will be doing video
potentially courses, maybe even games will be delivered
through the app. But it's going to take time to build all that stuff. We're not stopping here. This is
really just our first base in terms of delivery. But yeah, we
expect that there will be people that will want to use parts of our code
to make stuff better, to make stuff far more specialist.
But the thing to really conceptualize is that the real layer is the people, the people within the network that are choosing to share content on fanfares.
So you might find the specialisms within the network where people choose to specialize in video or they choose to specialize in educational content.
Or maybe they're just people that have really good memes and will just stream a whole lot of memes through to you for a kind of streaming payment.
So I think there's a whole lot of different ways in which this can be developed, improved upon, and certainly a specialization, I think, is something that will happen.
But, yeah, the extent to which it becomes a protocol depends upon how successful it is if there is take up by the audience and by the Bitcoin community and people choose to use these tools within their own applications.
I think the initial way that you and me, Avi, can dip our toes into fanfares, because we already have kind of paywalled content, kind of our own sub-shows.
And with fanfares, you have to be intentional.
So you have to upload this media file, correct, to fanfares?
So it's not like it's blasting through RSS.
So it's something that's a brand new protocol.
You're not going to get the reach like you would if it was a very mature product.
So you kind of have to have a hybrid approach, in my opinion, the way we can touch this is just putting those paywall shows on there.
and then still having that RSS blast for our main weekly conversations.
So kind of – and what that would do is kind of create a pleb wheel
or a flywheel to where people would be listening anywhere,
but they would come to fanfare.
So it's a way to kind of cross-promote everyone,
and really it's the road to plebhood, right?
That sounds exactly right.
I mean, the way to see it is we're not competing with RSS.
RSS will always be there.
We're more sort of in the sub-stack Patreon kind of park, really.
We're a pay-as-you-go Patreon.
So obviously with Patreon, you have to put in your credit card details,
name and address, and commit to the ongoing payments.
With this system, you get to pay with Bitcoin.
You're only paying for what you actually use.
You don't have to worry about going to council
after you've got that one thing that you wanted for a subscription.
So it's a much more user-friendly economic proposition as well as a better UX
because paying with Lightning, you don't even need to ID yourself.
You'll simply just make it a payment with your wallet.
And you can put e-books on it as well, right?
We're not there with e-books yet, but we will be.
Yeah, that's coming.
We need to have the kind of reader UX for that one, which we don't have right now.
Are you going to launch 24 on Fanfare?
Well, I'm almost done with July 18th, the sequel.
So that's why I was asking.
I figured.
Intrigued.
Speaking of, where's the funding at for the Finding Home, Avi?
I don't think we talked about that, and I want to talk about it.
I think on the Angor, I'm at 90%.
So pretty much that.
Okay, 10 more percent.
Yeah.
Anybody listening, I'll put it in the show notes.
Let's get Avi over that 100%.
What we should also put in the show notes is a link to Shot Fiat's book,
the audio book, and to the latest fanfares as well.
So what are the immediate forms of media you're talking about?
It sounds like audiobooks and podcasts.
Anything else?
Yeah, I mean, you can publish notes on FanFares.
So you could do a normal NOSTA note that's encrypted.
So, yeah, we think that's going to be interesting.
Our CTO Arkenox is really enthusiastic about this one
because there's the kind of idea that if everyone on NOSTA
was encrypting every note for one sat, then the whole thing would be encrypted.
And your cost for using that in terms of the normal people,
the normal number of notes you might look at in a day,
you're probably not going to be spending more than about 200 sats,
which is pretty much nothing.
Whereas anyone that wanted to mine the data off of Nostro or scrape the data
and use it for AI training or advertising purposes or anything else,
that it just becomes very cost prohibitive for any form of mass data collection
would become quite cost prohibitive.
So we think that's going to be an interesting one.
It's possible to do it on FanFares right now.
And, yeah, I think Arkenox is going to be leading the challenge on that one
because he's super, super enthusiastic about it.
Where did you meet Arkenox?
He's a good man, by the way.
I've hung out with him twice in real life, two different locations.
We were very lucky to find him because he's a very, very enthusiastic NOSTA person.
How do you control his wild ideas?
Because he's quite the man with his imagination.
Well, I mean, to answer your first question, we were introduced through G Sovereignty.
Because I'd met G Sovereignty in Australia.
It turns out Arkenox was there as well, but I never met him there.
But we were advertising for a new CTO on Nostra.
G saw it and said, oh, I know that Arkanox is looking for something because he'd actually posted up on Nostra as well, saying that he was looking for a new job.
So, yeah, it was a kind of very fortunate encounter because he had the skill that we were looking for.
We had the right position at the right time.
He was working on his Metaverse project already.
but he kind of took the view that
FanFares was something that would
deliver more quickly and could be
a real project that he
could manage and
he was enthusiastic. I think he understood very
quickly about the proposition of what we were doing
and yeah
it was a very lucky find I think
and he's leading the team very well.
The encrypted notes.
Are you still mining the billboard
for PCR
are in the metaverse.
Unfortunately not.
That was a good show.
We had them on short via, we had them on early in our ventures for PubChain Radio, but it
was one of those shows I had to listen to about three different times to kind of really
understand how the real world can connect via hash to the metaverse.
and the metaverse needed that real-world electricity
to make things real in the metaverse.
Yeah, it was a lot of – it was a mental hurdle.
The concepts that he works with there, yeah, they're quite mind-blowing.
But, yeah, if you think of digital space as being, you know,
a whole load of coordinates and every one of them is a NOSTA NPUB,
you know, you have an infinite amount of territory there.
anyone can put a stake in the ground
and it can be
there. Something that they own
that can't be taken away from them and they can build on
that space and create
something that other people want to come and visit
come and explore
and it's building a digital world
effectively but there's room for everyone
it's never going to be full up
it's free to enter and
you can build what you want
if people like it they'll come
if you build it within fanfares they might pay
for it as well so uh it's it really is um a whole new world in my in my opinion and uh yeah there's
there there is a bit of a bit of a sort of an interlock there between what arcanox was doing there before and what fanfares could eventually become If we ultimately become metaverse spaces that people pay to enter then that where it could all go
And when we think about this digital world and we talk about reputation, web of trust,
it's essentially, and it's not, but I always wander to the CCP and the social credit score.
but it really isn't it's you pull the authoritarian figures out of there and you put sovereignty in
there and it's not a bad idea to kind of have a digital digital footprint of reputation right
yeah it's it's it's a difference between centralized and decentralized systems
and if you don't like a credit score you could sign on with a different nostril identity every
time you go on and you will have no credibility whatsoever but you know that's you that's your
your choice if you want to make it or you can choose to build some credibility over time
you can choose to be remembered for what you've done or what you haven't done
um it's it's entirely voluntary that's the thing you know there is no central service it's it's a
completely decentralized reputation system and it's in my opinion it's what the world is missing
you know i think it's what makes the internet a better space because we're not dependent on the
central control to sensor to moderate to choose what we see you know it's the network that's
choosing that that's that's what makes the difference and the way we are able to to
control the firehose of information is through that web of trust through the reputation that
people have built over time that was one of the first epiphanies that i had in nostril when you
actually truly own your identity you own your insect your in pub and it connects and and you
can have that interoperability where you're jumping from client to client and every year,
your whole social graph moves, but it gives you the sense of responsibility. Meaning, uh, as you,
as you spend more time, you build your social graph, you don't want to be an asshole. I mean,
it's almost why Nostra, if you go on there, uh, it's, it's a lot of positivity. Um, you don't
have the, the trolls just kind of disappear, uh, because it's just not worth it. It's just not
worth it. I feel like as humans, when we truly own something, and it is our private property,
we start to treat things differently. And I think that's a powerful way of looking at it.
I think you're absolutely right, QW. It's a much quoted line of with freedom comes
responsibility. I think that what they said in Spider-Man was with great power comes great
responsibility. I don't know if you remember that with Uncle Ben talking to Spider-Man.
But it's, yeah, the way I see it is with freedom comes responsibility.
And the way you achieve freedom is by being responsible.
But, yeah, in reality.
I actually used that meme in my introduction to Nostra to my local Bitcoin.
And I was talking exactly about this.
So, great minds.
It is such a subtle thing to really understand.
But the more you kind of go down that rabbit hole, the more you see that the two are entirely entwined.
I want to talk a little bit about the Nostra notes that you need to zap to unlock.
Because that's fascinating to me.
So let me make sure I understand this.
I go to fanfares, I sign in with my
with my
and then I post an
encrypted node that can be open for one sat
is that a
does that show up on
Primal or Amethyst as a kind
one note which people would need
to zap to open
right this is where we have to defer to
Arkenox I think yeah
I think it will show up
you can zap it
but then to actually see the unlocked part of it you'll need to click through into fanfares i think
that's how it works but um again it's something that would improve with um adoption of our code
within other apps but i think yeah the really interesting part of that for me is the way for
it to work in practice is to have an auto unlock feature within a nostra client because if you're
there having to click on every single note it's just going to be a real pain to use but if you
were able to set a threshold and say okay anything below the price of five sats i want that to be
also unlocked and you it's then a question of not about what do you choose to unlock it's who do you
choose to follow because people that you follow that are regularly regularly publishing notes that
have a small price on them you're also massively going to have that money taken out of your wallet
as you scroll through and and the the key sort of aha moment with me for that one uh was sorry
for me with that one was
Nick Zabo wrote
a paper in 1999 about how
microtransactions
could be very difficult because of the
mental transaction cost and people
in practice wouldn't want to pay
for a small amount
of content with a small
price because they just don't want to have the
mental overhead of thinking about it
and that's something that's often been cited to me
when I've been building this app and talking to people
about it, they say microtransactions never work
because of the mental transaction cost
But if you actually engineer this kind of NOSTA client where you've got that option to auto unlock your mental energy overhead, is there nothing?
Because you've just made the choice about who you want to follow.
They're doing the curation.
You're outsourcing all of the thought energy to the curators that are choosing what they want to post, what they want to repost.
And then over time, you might find that one person is just wasting your time and your money and you choose to unfollow them.
maybe you see a repost from somebody else and you're finding a new a new channel you want to
open up to yourself there but it's it's all part of that curation of your own experience that
i think is the real key to noster it's it's not a central platform that's pushing advertising on
you because they want to keep you on there it's you choosing what you see and the money needs to
be there because you know without advertising how do we pay for the infrastructure for the
relays and everything and I think that's where we go over time as we get more flow of sats through
the systems there will be an opportunity for clients and relays to take a percentage of the
flow for themselves and people will be happy to pay that and if they're using one particular app
they know that a percentage is getting getting rekt off to the app and if they don't feel like
they're getting good service with the app they can move to another one and take their entire
history and connections with them so it's it is sovereignty to the individual
the other one that always gets posted that always gets uh pointed out to me is uh well if you have
something going to paywall then people are just going to steal it and give it away for free
and again that's a key part of the system for us um with the referral splits we believe that's an
incentive system that will prevent people from doing that because in practice if you know you
You can download a free copy of the unencrypted file once you've paid for it,
and you can share that with people you know.
But if you were to publish that on Nostra or Twitter or anywhere,
then you're doing the work of promoting for the creator,
but you're not getting paid for it.
So you have the option to get a paid link and give them the paid link instead.
Surely that would be the more logical thing for 99% of people to do,
would be to just share the paid link, become part of the system,
to secure the system rather than attacking it because that's more profitable.
Yeah, it's the economically rational thing to do, for sure.
Avi, did you know that we were the very first Nostra signed podcast?
I did know that.
Yeah. Is that still a thing, Shorfiat?
Basically, I made a handshake.
some on the back end of podcasting 2.0 essentially.
Do you want to talk about that?
Yeah, that was the first podcast to be posted with that kind,
that sort of Nostra note kind.
So you have that record.
That was another Arcanox construction.
Yeah, we're going to get to Arcanox territory here.
I was a developer 20 years ago,
but I haven't written a line of code for a long time.
So I'm more on the economic side of this.
That's what really makes me interested is the game theory
and how we can have new systems that generate better outcomes
through really just using Bitcoin and Oster, basically.
It's the tools that we've never had and we've always needed.
So, Shotfiat, you have, on a separate note,
you have a podcast with our friend of the show, Ben Ark.
when did that begin and how many episodes deep are you
we uh we've done about six or seven episodes ben's been very busy recently so i don't know
if he's got all of them posted out on on youtube but yeah we we just thought it would be interesting
to do a little kind of uh half an hour what's going on in the bitcoin nostra space we've had
some guests on there, yourself, Abby.
I think Jeff G been on there with his white noise messaging service which I looking forward to using because I entirely sick of Telegram and WhatsApp But yeah I mean the Noster messaging service
is going to be great.
So yeah, we've been working on that.
Just review the news,
see what's happening in the Bitcoin Noster space
and chat about it over YouTube.
Yeah, it's been nice.
It's been a good way to keep up with Ben.
He's always got interesting stuff going on.
We don't always agree on stuff,
but that's what makes it interesting.
and yeah, I think it's been a nice little practice run
for creating content, getting a feel of how it works.
Love it.
Yeah, Ben is a busy guy.
And you too, right, Short Fiat,
you have a lot going on as well.
Yes, yeah.
The episodes, I don't see episodes, right.
so yeah this project is is taking up a huge amount of my time and it has done for
for years now and it probably will continue but for years to come it's my main focus and i'm
very hopeful as to where we can go with it um i've got more book ideas after this book i
i yeah yeah i'm already starting to write the next book so um yeah we're we're in a process
now whether the app's going to get better we'll take feedback from anyone that uses it please feel
free to message us on our
Fanfares Nostra. We do want
to hear what you would like to see on there, what you
think could work better. And yeah, we're going to
continue to build.
Does Ben
own Nostra.com? It's Ben,
right? He does, yeah.
He was offered five million for
it. Was he?
Yeah.
What happened?
Avi, if you own Nostra.com,
Avi, if
you own Nostra.com what's what's your price come on I don't know actually uh I might I mean five
million is nothing to sneeze at I'll tell you that did we ever ask Ben that's a lot of sats man
I feel QW we might have even talked with Ben about this when he was on the show over a year ago
and I just can't remember what the answer was yeah I'm I'm drawing a blank too but it's it's
it's itching in my brain.
I might have to go back and see.
That was always interesting to me because he did put what,
he offered it to Jack.
Is that who it was?
Was it 6 million or 10 million?
I don't know.
Essentially, he just wanted to go to good hands.
Yeah, I think Jack Dorsey would be pretty good hands.
Yeah.
He supported the Nostra project quite early on, didn't he?
with some funding.
He's definitely on board with it.
I don't know if that actually happened.
Right.
Anything else you would like to plug
apart from Fanfares and your audiobook?
I know.
I mean,
I think
that's
it's really a case of
we're just getting
started with this. I think that's the main thing to say
is watch this space because I think
the whole Bitcoin NOSA space is
only going to get bigger.
Interested to know
what do you guys think of Bitcoin treasury
companies?
I hope they burn.
I'd like to burn
the suits.
Me and Avi
it smells funny
that's it
a lot of these are built off
shell companies
one hotel
and all of a sudden they're a big treasury company
I don't know, it's funny to me
Avi, what's your thoughts?
QW, we asked
what else he's working on
or what else he wants to plug
and he asked us about Bitcoin treasury companies
it sounds like
he's testing the waters
for stopping well.
I can tell you what I think of him if you want.
I think there's a right way to speculate.
There's a right way to speculative attack.
Like I told Avi before the show,
it feels like ordinals in a Wall Street blanket
is what I kind of thought about it.
Yeah, it's just tough.
Something doesn't feel right,
but maybe it's just some of the players in it,
Not all of them.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because there's been a bit of a sort of divide within the Bitcoin space about whether Bitcoin is a store of value or a currency.
And the whole kind of micro strategy Bitcoin treasury company thing is it's a kind of manifestation of that store of value kind of argument, isn't it?
You know, it's saying this is the use case.
It's price goes up.
It's make my share price go up.
but yeah I can confirm I have no plans to launch a Bitcoin treasury company
and for me I'm very much on the side of Bitcoin as a currency
and yeah okay any currency is a store of value as well
particularly one that is finite and clearly identifiable
but yeah you know my path is in the currency space
and I feel like so much of the Bitcoin community is looking at the treasury companies
I feel like I'm kind of almost on my own, doing my own thing while the crowd is going in another direction.
And I'm convinced they're wrong about where they're going.
But I'm going to carry on in my direction and keep on building the use case of Bitcoin as a currency of the Internet.
You're not the only one who shot Fiat.
Let me tell you.
Stick on the Oscar.
That's it. We're all short Fiat.
I think the biggest uh-oh was when Saylor posted on Twitter all the boxes of pizza on Pizza Day.
And he said, we bought all this with USD.
It's like, no.
What are you doing, man?
So, yeah, digital real estate.
I'd rather mine that real estate with Arcanox
than actually use my own Bitcoin for it
so there you go
Michael Saylor is very very popular
in the media space
I listen to the detail of what people say
I don't find there's a great deal of substance
that's my view
anything else for our guest qw from you no that that's it i'm actually really looking forward to
uh messing around with fanfares uh and as a creator um but both on the creator and the
consumer side so uh looking forward to it and uh all the links we talked about will be in the show
notes and uh everybody i you know what avi we i think we peaked at 75 listeners today and i can't
help but wonder if some of that is is the expansion into fountain um but yeah it's it's it's it's
interesting we just we hit a uh we hit a record on uh on zap dot stream today yeah close to a
zap dot stream oh just do we have yeah yeah because the old uh nostr ness uh we we got up there too
I think it was 150 on NostraNest.
Anyway, it's just an interesting thing to watch.
You know, you're just sitting there not expecting it.
Expect the unexpected, I suppose.
So, yeah, we're a small space, very niche community,
but a bunch of psychopaths, so I'm here for it.
And nothing else.
That's my rant.
For sure.
and folks i would urge you to check out short fiat's audiobook it is unfortunately short
fiat you've said you've trimmed some of the sections which are fantastic but whatever is
there is still an amazing manifesto for a new internet it lays out the problem in a very clear
way and it talks about the solution
and I would urge all of you to
check it out, check out FanFares
QW and I will be doing that
as well, we'll have the links in the show notes
and
thank you Shot Fiat for
educating us
on all of this and all the work
you've done and looking forward to
talking soon
Thank you very
much for having me on, it's been an absolute
pleasure to talk to you both
and to have some time to talk about what we've been building.
And I'm sure Arconauts would like to come back on sometime soon as well
and tell you more about the metaverse.
We'll do a five-hour format.
That is a thing.
A thing for the future.
We're all going to be there one day.
A three-part series as we zoom in.
Well, thank you, everyone.
Thank you for tuning in to Pleb Chain Radio.
If you appreciate us as much as we appreciate you,
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until next week gentle plebs farewell goodbye