The signal is here.
This is Blood Channel Radio.
Welcome, gentle pioneers, to the lightning-laced airwaves.
This is episode 149 of Plep Chain Radio, and we have a fun one in store for you today.
Goodbye, Uber and Lyft.
My guest today is Sterling Forge, and he's going to talk about Rydster and Drivestir,
and perhaps more.
If you are hearing my voice right now
on Spotify or Apple,
thank you for being here.
But understand this.
You are tuned into the legacy feed.
It works, but it's a monologue.
It's a one-way street.
Over here on Fountain and Noster,
we're building two-way radio.
This is a Valley for Valley broadcast.
There are no corporate ads here
because the producers of the show, that's you, keep the frequency clear.
If you're ready to upgrade your experience, earn sats while you listen,
and actually have a say in the direction of the show,
then come join the Real Signal over here on the V4V side.
Now let's set the stage for the final word.
The role of executive producer for next week is currently up for grabs.
As always, the top booster earns that title and the exclusive right to close out the show.
But remember, this segment works best when there's friction.
I'm not looking for an echo chamber.
I'm looking for a peer review.
In a moment, I'm going to get into the sermon.
If I strike a nerve, or if you think I missed the mark entirely, use the boost to correct the record.
This is your chance to direct the show, not just support it
The final word is yours to take, provided you're willing to back up your argument
And now let's get to the sermon
It's the calculus of resilience
I want to talk about math
I don't mean elliptic curve cryptography
I'm talking about the kitchen table math
the specific terrifying calculus of the man who walked away from the fiat cage.
I am one such man.
And there are a lot of us out there right now.
I've spoken to many others myself.
You know who you are.
Six months ago, maybe a year ago,
you looked at your stack, you looked at your soul, and you made a trade.
You handed in the badge.
You walked out of the corporate glass tower.
You bought your freedom with the sats you scraped together by working inside the very system that was inexorably consuming your soul.
And when you did it, you had a spreadsheet.
You had a runway.
You said, I have enough for a year, maybe two.
Enough to build the future.
But then you looked at the charts in the last couple of weeks and you watched the red candles fall like rain.
and suddenly that runway, it looks a lot shorter than it did in October.
The silence in the room gets loud.
The doubt creeps in.
The voice in the back of your head,
the one that sounds like a disappointed parent
or even your old boss starts whispering.
You were reckless.
You were too early.
You should have played it safe and kept your job.
At least you had health insurance.
It is a specific kind of nausea, watching the battery that powers your life drain faster than you can recharge it.
It tests you in a way that hodling never could when you had a paycheck hitting every two weeks.
When the stack is all you have, the volatility isn't just a line on a screen, it's the walls closing in.
but listen to me this pain this tightening in your chest this is the price of admission
conviction is cheap when number go up everyone is a revolutionary during a bull market but right now
this is the fire this is the fire where your resilience is forged this is where the tourists
go home and the builders dig in. You didn't quit your job to get rich in fiat terms. You quit your
job because you realized that time is the only scarce asset you actually own. If the market price
is wrong today, it is simply an opportunity for the truth to catch up tomorrow. We're not here
because it's easy. We're here because the alternative is to go back to sleep. And we are awake.
So let the price drop, let the paper hands fold
We're in the bunker for a reason
Check your runway, tighten your belt and get back to work
We're building the raft while the rest of the world drowns
Hold the line
And with that, it's time to bring on our guest, Sterling Forge
Welcome to Plep Chain Radio
Heck yeah, what an intro, man
yeah man it's uh you know i'm in that boat it's real it's very real uh but uh this is not the time
to walk away i will this is this is the time that separates the real ones uh from the taurus right
absolutely i've been living off bitcoin for a long time but it's it's times like these they
give me back to work driving Uber and Lyft and things like that.
And that's kind of why I'm here today in a roundabout way.
Speaking of Uber and Lyft, you know, I saw a post from you, Sterling.
I'm looking forward to actually getting to know your story a little more.
I saw a post from you a week or two ago where you were talking about
Rightster and Drivestar, these Uber and Lyft alternatives.
I think you made a 10-minute video.
I'll actually link that in the show notes so folks who haven't seen it, you should watch that.
But what's the story, man?
What brought you to Noster and to say, you know what?
I'm building these things.
Let's build a replacement for Uber and Lyft.
Well, I've been around Noster for a while now.
So I don't know, three or four years.
I'm not sure when it really started kicking off, but I kind of joined all the Bitcoin people in the exodus from Twitter at the beginning there.
And I have been in Bitcoin for a lot longer, probably really started stacking Bitcoin around 2019.
but around Noster
I've wanted to build
the Uber and Lyft
sort of idea into Noster
for a while now
almost a year I've been
kind of like
hacking at that
a little bit in and out
but I don't have the skills
as a developer
so it's
it's actually
just being here
at the right time and place
where you don't need
as many development skills
to build things
and you talked about going back uh to thinking about going back to uber and lyft
is that were you ever an uber and lyft or lyft driver yeah so i used to be a weather forecaster
for 10 years and i was doing that for air force and airport bases or air force bases and airports
and um so i would you know make forecasts and brief the weather to pilots and commanders and
stuff like that um and that was my job for 10 years but i started doing uber on the side around
2020 and 2019 maybe like late 2019 and back then it was awesome i used to just do it part-time
after I got off of work on like a night shift or something, I would just start Ubering. And it was
very good money back in the day. I remember you used to make like 70% of the fare, sometimes even
80% of the fare back then. And it was actually a decent living on top of my day job. I could
put in a few hours and then all of my Uber and Lyft money went into Bitcoin directly.
So I would just put it straight into Bitcoin, deposit it to Strike, and put it straight into Bitcoin as soon as possible.
Nice. So what happened with Uber and Lyft payouts?
I mean, people here have a – people listening probably have a vague sense of how this works, right, that you're a contractor with these companies and they take a percentage off the top.
and as you said it started off well but you know you hear stories of the predatory nature of these
things and drivers have overworking themselves because they're not able to make enough money and
and all of that so what what exactly happened there did you face that where you you found the
payouts to be dwindling over time yeah it was actually kind of a surprise so I lost my weather
job in 2021 because um i didn't want to take the vaccine actually that was the reason why i got
fired and um and it was like you know you're working for the the government and in a roundabout
sense as a weather forecaster and they were like okay anyone who doesn't take this like you're
gonna get cut so um it it kind of sucked but i in 2021 i lost that job and then i came back i i was
originally like okay well i've got tons of bitcoin that i've been stacking from doing this on the side
and um stacking regularly so for three years i just didn't work and then you know as the bitcoin
stack starts dwindling you usually get like get on edge and you're like okay i'm gonna have to go
back to work eventually so i came back to uber and lyft here around uh like early 2024 and um
when i did that it was like a completely different landscape um where i used to be able to make you
know with a nice car and um really good service you used to be able to make somewhere between 40
to 70 an hour after tips and uh that was like close to 70 of the fare at the time and when i
came back it was 30 of the fare that you're making so you would ask people like hey do you
mind sharing how much you paid for this ride and they would say oh yeah i paid 21 bucks and you
would look at your fare the the actual amount you're making you're making six dollars and 77
cents so i was like oh my god you know that's uh that's a huge difference you know you're not making
anything compared to what people are paying but you're taking on all the risk you're taking on
the risk to your car you're taking on the maintenance costs you're taking on um all the
risks of having a business and you haven't even paid taxes before that 30 is taken into account so
um it was a big difference to what i saw back in 2020 and 2021 and you know it could be because
there's more drivers out here the economy is not as nice as it was so a lot of a lot more drivers
are out there so maybe that pushes the the the options up for uber and lyft and the the wage down
for the people who are driving so that could be one of the things but um there's also excess
regulation in it so uber and lyft when they do a fair breakdown they say that you know 20 of your
ride is going to government and insurance fees that are required for them to pay but i feel like
that was the case before they were taking 70 or before they were taking a 70% of the ride.
I felt like they still had those regulations. So, um, I will say that Uber and Lyft both became
profitable companies around the same time that the fare started being taken a lot more, which is
good for them. Uh, I can't blame them for wanting to be profitable,
but, uh, it does feel a little unfair as the person putting your car online.
And in an ideal world right so clearly the 30 from what you saying the 30 that they were taking originally and giving 70 to the driver was not a profitable business model So they had to find some kind of sweet spot Yeah I think they were heavily subsidizing their growth at that time And in a perfect world what would happen is they would
push it down so much that the drivers would be like, what the hell? And the drivers would drop
like flies. And then Uber and Lyft would then have to adjust back to a higher cut for the drivers,
maybe push something, increase the prices on the consumers. You know, there's a balance between all
of those those three things but uh it sounds like for what you're saying that that model isn't
working meaning it's not actually a sustainable model where the platform can make enough money
to be profitable the drivers aren't driven into the ground uh because they it's they get so little
um and and then the customers aren't charged exorbitant numbers because it's there is obviously
a number at which someone's not going to pay um yeah as a customer right so i don't know is the
model actually working i think that it's it's sustainable in the the world that we live in right
now because there's no escape hatch and i want to build the escape hatch that makes that unsustainable
and makes it much more beneficial for the driver and the rider.
So in the current model, it is sustainable.
They're basing all their pricing off of their own analytics.
And as the economy gets worse, more people turn to Uber and Lyft
as the fallback for their having a job at all.
Because it's better to have a job driving Uber,
even if they're paying 30%, than not having a job at all
and not being able to pay your bills.
So in the economic downturn that is like global inflation and everything else, it is sustainable because people are going to do it even if they can't make a really nice living.
They'll try to make any living at all.
And it is a very convenient fallback.
But I think it can be better.
And I think that the profitability of some public companies, it shouldn't cost quite as much as it is costing the people who are building those companies from the ground up, the drivers and the riders.
And I think that building an open source driving app that doesn't require any infrastructure kind of proves that.
it doesn't require back-end servers
or it doesn't require companies to interfere.
But go ahead.
No, and we'll get to drive-strand,
right-strand in a second, Sterling.
But I'm finding the economics of this fascinating
because you were talking about
what happens during economic downturn
from the driver's standpoint,
where they do have a fallback option.
However little money there is,
it's you know it's it's still something but the economic downturn should also impact the consumers
themselves right so they might not have as much money to yes pay so how i mean how does that
balance out i will say you know i i don't have a view of the whole market either so um i live in
Las Vegas. And in Las Vegas, it's very unique because people come to this town as travelers.
And at any one point in time, one third of Las Vegas, over a million people at a time,
are travelers. And so it's a very popular town for rideshare. So I think, you know,
this 70% take might not be happening everywhere. I have a very specific perspective on it because
I'm seeing it here. And I think that the consumers that are traveling, maybe Uber and Lyft's
algorithms are able to recognize that they're more beholden to rideshare anyways. And so they're
willing to pay more. So in other markets, it may be, you know, they're only taking 50%.
percent and um but i know that the goal of of uber and lyft both is to charge the rider as much as
they will pay and to uh pay the driver as little as they can pay so yes and and that's kind of the
economics of it is it it might vary in market to market but in in las vegas it comes out to about
70 they're taking and that's my um my firsthand perspective on it yeah this it is also interesting
with this market,
it's kind of hyper-localized, right?
Each locality has its specifics.
One thing I noticed in New York City,
I don't live there anymore,
but I don't live too far away.
Every time I go back,
especially in the last couple of years,
you're talking about an escape hatch.
I mean, in some sense,
there is a,
well, it's not an escape hatch
that's free from any ills, right?
But you do have the yellow taxis,
the yellow cabs.
in New York. And those medallions have their own set of issues there. But there is an option.
And I've noticed that the yellow cabs are 10 to 20% cheaper than Uber and Lyft.
Yeah, I think that Uber and Lyft really know that they have the market kind of cornered and
they're able to extract a little bit more these last few years than they could before.
um the thing is is it's still there's still a lot of inconveniences to taking a taxi
uh the main thing not knowing the fare ahead of time um i know that they they have some apps
themselves to book taxis but i haven't ever used them i don't know anyone who's used them either
personally um but yeah but knowing the fare ahead of time is a stress relief thing you know if if i
I'm almost more inclined to take a uh an uber and lyft every time even if it is 10 or 20 percent
more because I can compare the two and see which was which one is the cheaper one ahead of time and
just know what I'm gonna pay with a taxi it's kind of like gambling you could get a driver that just
lets the clock run and and uh you would just watch it go up in the back seat stressing out
that reminds me of uh there's the woody allen joke from the movie manhattan
where he's in the car with uh with his girlfriend i think might have been diane keaton actually
uh and and he said or actually i can't remember who it was but the actress was but but he says
uh you look so pretty tonight i can barely keep my eyes on the meter
so let's talk about drivester and ridester right the escape hatch that you're building and maybe
start at the beginning because i know you mentioned one of them is a protocol one of them is the app
so it'll be helpful to unpack that yeah so there's actually two apps um so i i've built just like
uber and lyft have they have a driver app and a rider app um for each of their platforms and
I've built
Ridester is kind of the protocol
name but there is a
Ridester app and there is a Drivestor app
the Ridester protocol
is basically using
Noster as a communication
layer between the peers
it's using
a local routing
that runs on your phone to calculate
the fares and
it's using Bitcoin
as the default payment
method but not
necessarily the only payment method.
Got it.
So walk through,
so when this app is built out,
and it sounds like it's pretty close,
right Sterling?
Or is it actually out?
There is a version of it out right now,
which is exactly,
almost exactly what I showed off
on the very first video.
And there is a version
that I will be updating it to very soon
that makes it a lot more usable and a lot more fun.
But the base applications are out right now.
I would almost not recommend downloading them right now, though,
because it's kind of useless to download a rideshare app with no network,
and there is a solution to that we'll get into.
so yeah but let's just talk about when when you believe it's it's uh going to be ready right
well that might be a month or two from now um a user downloads the app on presumably on zap store
right it's hard to see something like this that is the that is the default right now it's the it
was the easiest store to just kind of bootstrap and it's already nostril native so it was a lot
of fun to see your app come up on that store. But yeah, presumably right now you'd be downloading
it on ZapStory. Okay. So I download it and I'm looking for a ride, right? So is it like,
will it be an Uber-like interface? I see the drivers around me. I pick one.
Just walk through that process. Yeah, absolutely. So the base open in the app,
you're greeted by a default screen similar to uber where it's like request a ride and you have you
know a where are you going question and you've got your address box that you can search for in
in the top and then you search for a destination and you can check the little box if you want to
use your your location that you're at right now um there's some favorites and recents you know so
you can pick the places that you recently went etc you know the default uber like interface um
the the big difference is is that i didn't really invest any time in making a map interface you know
there's no uh showing like the full route on this on the map or anything or there's no um like
viewing drivers nearby you on the map coming towards you or anything like that it's very
bare bones in the fact that like once you get the address selected correctly um based on what you
typed in so if i type in the venetian casino it might tell me it's blank las vegas boulevard
um when i click click all that and calculate it calculates the ride it will in the background
calculate a turn by turn route but it doesn't actually need any mapping uh data or it doesn't
need a map itself to calculate that and it's doing it all locally so it gets a distance it gets an
estimated time and uh by that it calculates the fare the default fare got it and and so then the
user selects it what happens then so does the user need to be logged into nostor so yeah on the first
app you are greeted by either creating a key or importing a key and if you import a key it brings
back all of your favorites all of your recents um all of your driving history and you can delete
that at any time but those are just so those are all stored encrypted in a in a nostor event so you
kind of have this driver profile or rider profile that's uh out on nostor and and when you import
your key it'll just come all back so it's just like uber lyft except you don't need an email
password you just need that private key and um and it's nice in that sense that you get kind of the
the whole um really all the all the useful features of a regular rider app and um
a little bit more when it comes to the next big update,
which will kind of solve the onboarding and network problem.
Let's go through the user journey.
User logs in with Nostra.
They put their destination in.
The fare gets calculated.
They accept it.
What happens then?
Is an event, Nostra event created and blasted out to relays?
Yeah, so by default, I'll be walking through this in the background, but I pull up a route and it's calculated.
It says my fare is going to be like $14.
I hit the request a ride button.
And the default thing that happens now is it actually pops up with a window that says select a driver.
And what it shows in that window is any available driver nearby you.
And this is a sort of option that I chose in the way that this works because it preserves the rider's privacy.
My idea about this is if you're putting out things like locations on a public network like Noster, it's not ideal.
And so to solve that problem, the drivers kind of put out their approximate locations by default, not a precise location, but an approximate location because the driver is out and about.
They're not at their house sitting there driving.
They're out and about driving.
So they're giving an approximate location and the rider doesn't put out any location.
But what they are able to do is see the list of drivers nearby them that could take this ride And by default you select the closest driver and you hit the check mark and then it sends off that ride offer to the driver and um
underneath that select a driver screen there is an advanced button for a public broadcast and this
would be sort of more similar to uber and lyft where you're putting out an approximate location
as the rider and now every driver around you can see that too but it's it's sort of warned against
in the ui because you are broadcasting a location as a rider and you know if you're at home or
something it's not ideal to do that so it's kind of the the hidden option there at the bottom but
it is there if you just want to put out a ride offer and see if anybody takes it
got it and if the driver then accepts it so let's just say the user hasn't gone to the advanced
setting, right? They've selected a driver, they haven't broadcast their location, the driver gets,
what information gets to the driver? Presumably the drivers have their own interface, right?
Yeah. And the driver interface is, you know, they click the I'm going online button. And
when they are online, they're going to show up in that list for the riders. And when they receive
a request, it shows up in the main screen under the go online, go offline button.
And that just has a list of any ride requests coming in at the moment.
And so it'll say, you know, $5.99 fare ride requests coming in.
And it will actually tell you, based on the information that the rider shared from their
route calculation, it'll tell you exactly how many miles, sorry, how many dollars per
mile you're earning or how many sats per mile you're earning depending on your settings and it
will tell you how many sats per hour that is estimated to be based on the time calculation
of the ride as well so it's um it's kind of a nice ui feature that uber does not have uh that
the rider knows exactly what they're getting paid per mile and what they're getting paid per hour
to estimate whether a ride is worth taking or not.
But that pops up to them.
Like any rideshare app, it does a little ding.
You get a notification if you have it in the background.
And you open that up and you can see all that information
and decide whether to take the ride.
Okay.
And then let's say the driver accepts it.
Does the payment happen at that point?
No.
So by default, if you're using the Bitcoin setting, there is a sort of intricate, a more intricate dance that happens.
So what happens when you accept the ride is that there's a handshake between the rider and the driver to basically both confirm that they're going to be on that same ride together.
So in the background, they're sort of exchanging encrypted DMs saying, I accept the ride.
OK, you've got to accept the ride.
I see that you've accepted the ride and we're both on the same ride.
And so when that happens, there's no exchange of money.
But at the point of acceptance, you are exchanging as the rider.
if you're using the Bitcoin cash you option, you're exchanging a pre image or a or not a pre image,
but a payment hash that is basically, hey, like I'm going to get the wallet key, the wallet pub key
from the driver and I'm going to make a make a payment up ahead of time as escrow. But you can't
unlock that payment until you pick me up.
And so, and that's,
that's at the base layer behind the scenes is that there has to be an actual
pickup to prove this is a real ride. And so in the front end,
it's a lot simpler than this because, you know,
the front end app is confirming that the rider has funds for this.
They're letting them send out a ride because of that.
And then once the ride's accepted,
they're making that sort of transaction ahead of time but they're not it they haven't paid
anything yet it's sort of an htlc with with escrow sort of behind the scenes but what happens for the
rider is they see a pin and um they see the ability to chat with the driver if they need to
tell them information like a gate code or something like that um and so their pin pops up and this
says give this to the driver when he gets there basically and when the driver pulls up he presses
a button that says he's arrived that notifies the rider if they don't know already and um and then
it gives them the option to put in the pin that the rider has so this is just proof of life
stuff you know the rider gets in your car he's going to tell you that pin and then once that
rider has told you that pin the the escrow is technically unlockable by the driver
so so he's because at the same time the pin acceptance verification happens the rider shares
the pre-image that will allow the driver to unlock the funds and i have some local um some local
stuff on the app to basically make it so that the driver can't unlock those funds until they get into
a certain distance from the drop-off, if that makes sense.
But that's local.
On the back end, technically, they can unlock the funds after the pin verification, just
if they hacked their own version of the app together.
But at least they picked you up, so there's some level of real-life drive is happening.
And I think that's the best trade-off you can get for a decentralized system, is at
least you know that you pick somebody up and you've got them in your car.
and in a polite society that will work out pretty well.
Well, also web of trust will solve for a lot of these things.
And we could talk about that in a second.
Exactly. Web of trust and that sort of update I've been teasing,
which is a different topic we'll get into, I'm sure.
Yeah, yeah. But let's just, I want to go back to one thing which we skipped over.
when the driver accepts it clearly the the consumer's location needs to be communicated to
them how does that happen yeah so after the driver accepts the ride they are communicating their
um approximate location and then as it's set up right now they're communicating their approximate
location first and then as the driver gets closer it updates to the real location but i do think
that that's easily gameable in the background anyways so i'm probably just going to change it
to where the once the acceptance handshake happens they are broadcasting their real location
you mean the driver or the or the rider because i'm talking about the rider okay yeah the the
rider will be broadcasting the real location as the pickup but they're only broadcasting it to
the person that accepted their ride so is that via nip 17 dm or uh something else it's it's a
NIP44GM that is deleted during the end of ride process.
But it's encrypted to your in-pub either way,
and it's decrypted by the driver's app.
But it's only to that one person you shared the ride with.
Got it.
Okay, so the location gets revealed,
the driver comes, picks them up,
then they can claim their escrow.
And really the only thing that could go wrong at that point is they claim the escrow and then they kick the rider out.
Yeah, and it's sort of a game theory thing.
It's like, well, are people really going to be bold enough to do this?
I hope not, but it's possible.
Well, you'll never get it right again.
Yeah, and that's sort of the thing is that I do have a plan to mitigate a lot of these things by sort of incentivizing good drivers through the next update.
But go ahead.
Keep on asking questions.
No, so this is good.
So this makes sense.
So really, the transaction itself, in theory, has ended, the financial part of it, once the rider gets in because the driver can't claim it.
And then they just drop them off and they say, off you go, right?
Yeah, and by default in my app, it is going to prevent that by basically hiding the confirm to drop off thing until your location is within a certain distance from the actual drop off.
So at least if you're using the actual app, you won't be gaming people like that and just kicking them out.
If you cancel early, it will allow the rider to refund after the HTLC expires.
But yeah, I mean, if they hack their own app together, they could theoretically grab the pre-image ahead of time as soon as they get a real person in the car.
actually there are two locations from the i was just thinking about it from the rider's
perspective that need to be communicated right the pickup and the destination right and i think
and both of those are are uh communicated in that ride offer in that in the nip 44 yeah yeah and
actually the way i have it set up is you're not communicating both of those locations in the in
the initial ride offers you're you're kind of communicating like this is the route distance i
calculated this is the time i calculated and this is how far i am from you the driver and so all that
is the initial ride offer once it's accepted you are transmitting your destination and the and the
pickup so it's a slightly different from uber and lyft because if i'm not mistaken right because
in uber and lyft obviously the driver sees the exact location of pickup they have no idea of the
drop off right and then this is to prevent people saying drivers from canceling complicated locations
well actually they they do now uh tell you ahead of time so before you accept the ride on uber and
lyft they will tell you an approximate street like intersection so they'll say oh you know las vegas
boulevard and elkhorn drive or something like that they'll kind of like give you a street corner
before you accept the ride.
And once you accept the ride,
it does tell you more information on Lyft.
Uber kind of hides it until you pick them up again.
But ahead of time, it does show you on the map,
number one, this is where you're going to be dropping off.
But it also shows you estimated street corners
or names of nearby places that you might recognize.
But they do kind of share that ahead of time
with the driver and rider on both systems.
got it and and i know you mentioned this at the beginning but uh it'll be helpful to
restate it there's drivester and there's ridester and i think you called one of them a protocol
so this app the rider uses that's ridester correct yeah ridester is the name of the the
rider app and it's also just the name of the protocol that i you know i haven't really thought
too much about naming the protocol, but it's, it's just goes, goes hand in hand, I guess.
Got it. And DriveStir is the driver app.
Yes. And DriveStir is the default driver app.
Got it. Okay. So in your, in that video that I talked about at the beginning,
the one that helped me find out about you and what you're building,
you talked about the chicken and egg problem so why don't you talk about that in simple terms
what what is the chicken and egg problem that you're trying to solve here yeah so in the second
video i posted um i posted about this chicken and egg problem and um in my first video where i just
showed a ride a ride flow it sort of describes um how the app i've just described to you works
And it shows that in that first video.
But I was getting a ton of comments that were like, hey, Uber and Lyft have a giant network effect.
How are you ever going to actually make this popular enough for it to function?
And so I made a second video following up because after I started development on RideStar and Drivestir, I had this thought in the back of my head.
I understand network effects just like those people in my comments.
And I have, I've been thinking, okay, I'm going to build this out, but if no one uses it, I might want to just build myself a little app that like bat signals out to, to riders that I already know.
and um when i was talking to another nostor user about ridester and drivester
um who who all he also made like a prototype ride share protocol on nostor his name is darren
we were talking about this and i brought up my whole idea that like hey if ridester and
drivester doesn't work out i'm just gonna make an app for when i'm ubering ubering and lifting
where I can just hand out
the app to people
and then they can reconnect with me
and it calculates a fare for them and stuff.
And I'm just thinking that this will be
their little bat signal to get a hold of me.
And then
as I was talking to Darren about it, I'm like,
wait a minute.
Hold on This bat signal idea is actually the killer app Because basically if I a great Uber driver and I a great Lyft driver and people already sort of ask me for return rides sometimes you know if they having a great time on my ride and they love my car it might be you know nice interior nice seats
and they've just like had a great ride experience,
a lot of times people ask you,
hey, can I get your number?
I'm going to hit you up later after I get out of the bar
or do whatever.
And from that, I'm like,
well, if I build my own app on the protocol
for just bat singling out to me,
what if they're able to add other riders to that easily?
And then it kind of onboards
their own little personal rideshare network.
And so the chicken and the egg problem
is basically Uber and Lyft have a giant network
And any rideshare company that has tried to compete with that doesn't really have the ability to onboard all the drivers and riders enough to make the system work.
Because the chicken and the egg problem is like, I, as a rider, want to ride, but nobody's driving on your app because there's no other riders right now.
and by making a a new sort of application that's more of like a bat signal like hey i already
rode in your car i like you as a driver and now i'm just going to be able to press this button to
get a hold of you and see if you're available am i doing a good job at explaining that
well i'm trying to draw a parallel to how it works in more informal markets which is
they just give you a business card right and say call this number next time you can call me directly
yeah and and so that happens so i i explained how a lot of people they just ask for your number
but what happens with this is there's a song and dance that happens if you're trying to to perform
a ride outside of an app because um normally if i give out my number to somebody i might get a text
back from them either if if they're trying to get a ride that day i might get that text back that day
and i come pick them up and it works out for that one ride but there's a song and dance of like okay
well where are you where am i what's the fair gonna be um i'm just spitballing you know 20 bucks 25
bucks 15 bucks depending on where they are um but there's so much back and forth and it's all over
text message or calling and it's like it's kind of a lot of friction it's a ton of friction and
what what happens is invariably whether you get two three return rides after that it fizzles out
and they never text you again and it's not because you're providing a bad service it's just
the back and forth friction yeah of plotting that ride was so freaking hard that it's like
it's just easier to open the app and book a ride, a driver, um, that's nearby me. Right.
And so that, that brings me, I'll just lead into the, what is the egg for this chicken and egg
problem? Um, the egg that I want to make is inside of ride stir and drive stir. I'm building
a tab that's just called road flare and road flare is this bat signal.
if you will.
It's the ability that if I like a driver,
I have a little contact list where it's like,
I can just scan their QR code after they make a key
if they're brand new to this.
And then it adds them into my list of followed drivers.
And then what that allows me to do
is I can get their real location encrypted
and sent to me to calculate fares.
while they're online. And so it makes it so that I have my own little ride share network.
Say that I ride on Uber and Lyft every day. Say that that's how I get to work every day.
Those type of people are spending ridiculous amounts of money a month. They could probably
buy a nice Cybertruck with all the money that they're spending on Uber and Lyft.
with this alternative they maybe add four to five good drivers that they really enjoyed their ride
with on their daily uber and lyft commutes to a list and there's no friction for sign up it's just
put your first name and you know you're in and uh but the the trust factor is kind of already
solved i've ridden with this person i like their driving abilities and now i'm putting them in my
little list and now when those drivers go online they could just go online on road flare and um
if a road flare is sent out by one of those repeat riders then it kind of sends that offer
out to everybody who they've already put in their favorites list and now they have their personal
favorite drivers with a lower fare than uber and lyft and they're going to get paid 100 of the fee
or the fare.
Okay.
I think it's beginning to make sense, Sterling,
but let's just walk through this slowly
with, again, a tangible example.
I get in, I call an Uber, right?
Regular Uber.
I get in.
I like the driver by the end of the journey.
I happen to have DriveStar installed
or RideStar, rather, on my phone
because I'm the rider.
so really you need
evangelists like this
so then I say
alright driver you did a great job
can you download this app called Drivestor
download it
scan this QR code
my road flare
from my Ridester app
and now you're added to my
trusted list of drivers
so
is that how it works
And then I have, and I do this with.
That is how it works right now.
In the flow that I've built, that's how it works right now.
However, I do want to move towards a progressive web app and, or a PWA for short, if people
have heard of those, because essentially it'd be even better if it's just the link, right?
So, you know, as the writer, I want to just show my QR code and then the driver's like,
yeah i'll scan this and then just create a key in my web browser and then that's going to be like
where these notifications come from if you want to ride later and and the fare is already plotted
out and the rider and the driver can deny it or accept it just like any other ride okay so let me
just take a click of this is almost certainly going to happen um i flash the qr code the driver scans
it, it opens up a tab in their phone browser.
And maybe a couple of clicks, they have a NOSTA key.
Yes.
All good.
Then they close the tab.
What happens?
Right?
What happens then?
As long as they don't delete their cookies, in theory, it should all resume to exactly
where it was the next time they open that.
But ideally, like any progressive web app can, you want to flash the little, you want
to install this to your home screen yeah yeah um and then they can sort of install that web app to
their home screen yeah so that before they get online anything else they click that button
and it you know it's not a perfect system but i am trying to make it as little friction as possible
in the long term so that it makes sense i this it's a great starting point sterling look you need
these enthusiasts, these evangelists who start off small, right?
I mean, look, let's not kid ourselves, right?
There is no network effect on day zero or day one even.
No, no, not at all.
So you need it to spread like a virus through.
Exactly.
Through patient zero, right?
So we are all patient zero.
All these, the nostril evangelists, nostril enthusiasts,
and Bitcoiners even, right?
Because this is all Bitcoin based.
at least default. So you really need this to spread like a virus, build up a massive database
of drivers. So I get it. So evangelism from the rider side, is there a sort of a counterpoint,
not counterpoint, is there an equivalent on the driver side where the driver is an evangelist?
Absolutely. Absolutely. So it's clearly stated when I sort of open up that QR code on the driver's side that this is for people who are asking for return rights.
but I'm trying to make it so that
your driver isn't too much of an evangelist
like they're not forcing people to sign up for this app
but they know that when a person
already likes them a lot
and is asking for their contact information
instead of your contact information
give them this
if that makes sense
because ultimately
I drive Uber and Lyft enough to know
that people will ask for return rides a lot
if you're a good driver
and
And, you know, you get that question a lot like, hey, you do this outside of the app sometimes.
It's like, well, why don't you take my QR code here?
And then you just make a writer profile with your first name.
And next time you before you hit up Uber and Lyft, just calculate the fairness and see if it's worth it.
So let's talk about that scenario.
Right.
I'm a sly roundabout orange pillar
and I've decided to become an Uber driver.
Well, take your example.
Let's say Bitcoin crashes to 58K
and you're like, crap, I have to go back to Uber and Lyft
for a couple of months.
And you do that.
And you have a customer who says,
hey, you know, you're great.
How can I call you again?
So instead of handing them a business card,
you open up Drivestir.
you flash the road flare which is the qr code they scan it it again opens up in a tab in their
phone browser and then you tell them look save this to your home screen it becomes a progressive
web app but you need to fill in your profile blah blah blah right it's just the first name
because you already know these people they've got an in pub in the background which is their real
identity but that first name is just all they need to put in so there's not a whole lot of
sign-up friction or anything like that?
Right.
So scanning the QR code will spin up an NPUB
that's sitting on their phone that they control.
Exactly.
Yeah.
That's great.
Okay.
So then this rider gets off,
and then a couple of days later is like,
hey, who is a really nice driver?
Let me see if he's available.
Let me open this app he made me download.
So they open the Progressive Web app,
and they book a ride,
and then it comes time to pay, right?
And presumably the PWA is full-fledged rightster at that point, right?
So I've sort of fallen back to, okay, well, any Bitcoin app is a lot harder to push than a regular app.
And what this does is on the writer screen, they can essentially select which alternate payment methods they have.
So if they don't want to use Bitcoin, by default, it's going to pop up with a list that they can check.
okay i have zelle i have cash app i have paypal i have venmo i have whatever and um i want to make
it so you can sort your priority like what you like the best to the top i haven't made it yet
like that but as it works right now is that if it's a road flare you already know the driver and
rider they're real people you had a good experience with both of them on both sides because they added
each other um now they both select the alternate payment methods that they're willing to accept
in their region and then when they make that right offer it comes up with a little extra
message on that right offer it says it's a road flare and it says you have this mutual payment
method of zelle or you have this mutual payment method of venmo or whatever your mutual payment
methods are so you are paying outside the app there is not the sort of trust guarantees of
using a cash you meant um sort of htlc in the background but you've already met this guy you
like this guy you gave him your phone number in the first place and that's as it is right now
that's how things outside of the app are handled most of the time is everybody just sort of does
the ride and then at the end of it they're like so do you have venmo or do you take cash or whatever
and so I'm sort of integrating that in the front end so that you just choose those things ahead of
time when you're booking the ride and then it's the same to your profile. Just to clarify any fiat
payment whatever it is Zelle Venmo PayPal that's going to be out of band right it won't be within
the app. Yes it's out of band so and and this is sort of the whole idea of Roadflare is the trust
element is no longer dependent on a decentralized network or decentralized money.
It's sort of really a social layer of just, I trust this guy and I'm willing to pick him up again,
or I trust this guy and I'm willing for him.
to pick me up again, if that makes sense.
Which is already what people are doing.
Yeah.
It is tempting as a Bitcoiner to say,
God, I've got this person down to this level.
Why not just throw in the orange pill right now?
Just get them to...
It is subtly thrown in because that very first message says,
hey, you don't have any Bitcoin,
which is the preferred payment method for this app,
but set your alternative payment methods if you don't want to deal with that.
So it's sort of like I'm throwing it out there.
The orange pill is first.
This is the preferred payment method of the app,
but here's alternative payment methods you can set only for road flares,
if that makes sense.
Yeah. All right. Fascinating stuff, Sterling.
We're approaching the hour mark.
so and I do there's lots of stuff I want to talk to you about like you said there's a new thing
that that's coming out and there's we need to talk about that is that is the road flare stuff
we're talking about so okay that's right gotcha okay but I do want to talk about web of trust
as well so and I'm sure there's more to talk about with the app but before we do that it's time for
our open music segment and you know we're hitting this hour mark with something absolutely crushing
I talk a lot about signal versus noise on the show.
Well, this track is all signal.
It's heavy, it's slow, and it vibrates at a frequency that feels like the earth is moving.
The band, I don't know how to pronounce their name actually, it's either I-R-O-H or Iroh, Iroh, and the track is called Heaven Knows.
This isn't background music, this is a warning.
So crank the volume and let's feel it.
Man built this vessel
It washed away
Reverse all creation
Hell's burning rain
Heaven knows that the valleys will flood
Heaven knows that the mountains will drown
What could lie underneath?
Break the gates
For a moment
Beware the milk flow
The knowledge it brings
The lives that were taken
The fountains of deep
Heaven knows that the valleys will flood
Heaven know that the mountains will drown
What could lie underneath?
Break the gate
For romance
Lonely like the tide
Breaking like the wave
Carried out by time
Broken by the waves
Heaven knows we reap what we sow.
That was Heaven Knows by Iroh.
You feel that?
That riff carried the sound of gravity.
And that hook, we reap what we sow.
That is the only law that matters in this bunker.
It is the absolute unyielding math of the universe.
You can print fiat, you can fake the numbers, but you cannot cheat the harvest.
The ledger always balances.
I've got the 90% split setup for the chapter.
If that track hit you in the chest, hit that rewind button by a minute or two
and send some value back to this phenomenal band.
That is how we keep the frequency pure.
What do you think of that track, Sterling?
It's awesome.
Yeah, almost like a Rydster track.
Maybe that's the soundtrack.
Yeah, I could definitely drive to that.
All right, so let's get back to what we were talking about,
which is, you know, as a rider,
so let's say the network is there, right?
It's spread like a virus both through the rider evangelists and the driver evangelists.
We've hijacked Uber.
And really, that's how it's going to work.
We need to hijack those networks.
Yeah, we stole some leads, so to speak.
We've onboarded drivers and riders into their own personal networks, really.
And it's sort of spiderwebbed out.
And ideally, that does build up the network pretty fast.
And I think for those people that are daily users of Uber and Lyft, it really does bring a huge benefit to them to just check that first.
So it probably will spread like fire.
Okay.
So let's say that's happened.
I'm a rider.
I look for a driver.
And let's say the UX – and I get what you're saying, right?
You're not going to show a map now and at least initially it'll – because that's not –
It's technically challenging.
for not a lot of benefit right now.
But I wish I had development skills
to do everything that Uber and Lyft can do right away.
But I am also just,
a lot of this stuff is straight up vibe coded.
So that's how it begins, man.
Yeah.
So this is going to be open source, correct?
It's all open source.
So once more people hear about it,
you'll have people come saying,
hey, I can do the integration
with OpenStreetMaps.
In fact, if there are any developers listening,
I'll actually, if you have the GitHub link, Sterling,
and you send it to me, I'll put it in the show notes.
Absolutely.
Take a look, help contribute to this amazing project.
Maybe one thing you could do is help integrate OpenStreetMaps
or some kind of open source maps into the app as well
so that we can just make the UX undeniably good
for both riders and for drivers.
Okay, so let's just get back to the example.
You know, fast for over six months, everything that I've talked about materializes.
You have this influx of open source contributions.
And it's a beautiful app.
Now, I'm a writer.
I look for, you know, I'm looking for a driver, right?
And a whole list pops up.
How do I know?
How do I solve for the serial killer problem, right?
Like, how do I know this person I'm selecting is not going to kidnap me?
Because, again, people will know this is a Bitcoin network and we have people's limbs being chopped off and all of that stuff happening, right?
Not limbs, but thumbs and whatnot in France.
So how do you solve for that problem?
Well, that problem is never fully solvable before.
As we know from Uber and Lyft, they're still having the murderer problem every once in a while.
but
I mean
ideally in the long term
there is sort of web of trust
integration like you are
alluding to
in ideal terms
you have a reputation system
for rating your driver and rider
at the end of a ride
and that is
one way to solve things
but with onboarding for this
because it's so frictionless
you know
You don't want new users being penalized for starting to drive right on there by not having reputation either.
So in the ideal world, I think the best way that this is actually solved for is that if people are mainly onboarded to this through Roadflare,
one of the best things you can do is as the person onboarding you to Roadflare, you basically give out your list of recommended drivers as well.
um so say that i'm a rider i i use uber and lyft every day and my friends like hey like i need to
go to the airport next week and then instead you say to him hey do you want to save some money on
that ride like use road flare but also here's my list of all the drivers in town that i use
and so as a primary method if they're just using the road flare side of things
they have sort of that trusted network from their friends already.
But in the large scale of things,
say that this is already built out large term,
I mean, ultimately, there will have to be some web of trust stuff
if you don't have any friends that use this
or if you are onboarding for the very first time
straight onto the decentralized network.
And so ultimately, one thing that can be done
is that you can have data vending machines essentially that are calculating the most
frequently followed riders and or sorry most frequently followed drivers in a town so the
people that people like the most you can essentially see the public lists of the pub keys that are most
followed by all these riders and while while that is gameable you know someone could fake follow
themselves to become a serial killer.
On a default
use of the network,
I think that you'll be able to look at that data
and say, this is a list of really good drivers
that a lot of different
what do you call them?
Spokes and webs
are connected to.
You can mine that data
for your good
driver list in a town.
Yeah.
I mean, all it takes is for someone, as a rider, if you're looking for a drive,
yes, set aside the bootstrapping problem of a new driver coming in who has zero reputation,
right? But let's say for an existing set of drivers, all it takes is for,
as a rider for someone whom you trust so someone you follow or maybe a subset of your followers right who you trust even more and you can have that predefined list
If they've liked or engaged positively
with the driver,
that's, you know,
they just get filtered out that way.
Yeah, and you could absolutely do it
where you have a friends list of people
who also use the app
and it just privately uses, like, all their lists
and the list of lists.
And if people start using their keys from this
on the social side of Noster,
then that could even expand farther, I think.
But it really is up to the designer of each client
on how much they want to integrate
a sort of reputation layer and web of trust.
Well, in an ideal world,
the user has the option of either,
whether it's a rider or a driver,
they have the option of either using their existing NPUB
in which case they port their entire identity
sorry, their entire reputation into this app
and their social graph
which really honestly is the benefit of NOSTA
actually one of the biggest selling points of NOSTA
is portable reputation and identity and social graph
but of course you want to give them the option
if they want to compartmentalize
different aspects of their transactional behaviors.
Yeah, you can do it either way.
And I haven't integrated any use of the regular follow list,
but it absolutely could be easily done where if you follow someone on social Noster
and they're a driver, they're going to go straight to the top of the list
and it will say, hey, you follow this person on Noster.
It could easily be done to put in that feature in the future.
And I think that would be awesome to like, oh, like I've zapped this guy before and he's driving on here.
Like, why wouldn't I just like meet him for the first time and say hi while he's driving me to the airport?
So there's always that possibility.
But yeah, it doesn't you can never fully solve for the murderer problem, unfortunately.
But you can't I think by making the road flare app in addition to the sort of ride store and drive store default.
it really it onboards at the right place because you can continue using uber and lyft if there's
no drivers available on this protocol and just build up your own little network as as you do that
so and what's nice about those is that uber and lyft do have background checks they do have an
identity layer of their own that's like the state issued one and you can kind of you're stealing
those leads to put them into uh drive stir for later so road flare man yeah road flare is the
magic forget about it is that's why i mean so i i had almost built i had almost built the full
prototypes by the time i came up with with road flare so like when my very first video had nothing
to do with road flare at all but i was like in the back of my head just thinking about it beaming
because I just put out that video like,
hey, this is how the Ridester and Drivester work.
But I have a solution for the network effect.
I just need to build something to show off
before I can make that second video,
which is the one you saw.
Being the how Ridester and Drivester win video.
But yeah, Roadflare is the secret sauce.
The thing about this is you don't need a network effect.
The game of Silicon Valley, because they're trying to rent, seek and middleman everything, they need a network effect to win.
But because the main benefit of these protocols is all at the peer level, at the rider and the driver level, you actually don't need the network to win.
You can utilize other networks to win and get cheaper fares and pay your driver more.
and so it's really the best of both worlds and i think in some sense the network effect idea is
an antiquated effect from the rent seeking era that we've experienced like the last 10 years
and um what's really the magic is building community from the ground up well there's another
angle related angle to this which i think makes nostr such a good place for this so you mentioned
Silicon Valley and the obsession with the network effect.
And the thing is, every app that's built in Silicon Valley,
I mean, just given the incentive structure,
there has to be a walled garden.
There is zero incentive to build open ecosystems.
So the network has to be bootstrapped
every time there's a new app idea.
Anything that involves people using the app,
they have to bootstrap the network.
With Noster, there is an existing network.
granted it's not you know we're not talking about millions of people maybe you know 10 20 000 active
users uh but that's going to grow in its own way for other reasons right whether it's through
fountain for music for podcast music or wave lake for music or um you know just you know amethyst
primal dhamus for the social media use case and all sorts of other things that are coming up right
the other stuff that people are building,
the Noster network will grow,
assuming all of those projects continue on their current trajectory
and continue being successful.
Absolutely.
So you're automatically inheriting a network in some sense.
Yeah.
Yeah, you really are.
And I don't think that, like, if I had posted either one of those videos on Twitter,
I don't think they would have gotten any traction
because people would be like, what the hell are you trying to do?
but on Noster it's like people people kind of understand this alternate network effect so to
speak um nicely and building communities from the ground up nicely and so it kind of resonates with
with this place first um but yeah you're inheriting a network on all these things and the best part of
this is imagining like you said where there's already a lot of drivers on on this because it's
you know, a good incentive system for road flare and it builds out slowly.
And then people, um, also can build other clients. I mean, ultimately right now,
the competitors to Uber and Lyft are niche things like, Hey, I want my, I want my, um,
driver to have a gun. So there's like a, there's like a bodyguard, uh, Uber called
black wolf, I think it is. And they're like a little niche startup and stuff like that.
they could build on the protocol of ride stir and drive stir and basically just ask users who
already use that hey you have a gun if you want to like get drivers from our network or sorry if
you want to get rides with people from our network and you have a gun then you know maybe you just
check those boxes and now you can have both right so you get an incentive as as someone who already
has rideshare clients to adopt a network of a lot of drivers and um there's other things like
i know another nostor guy um his shad rack is his name he's building something yeah yeah he's
building a to b which is like shipping and um and stuff like that and and if you have a pool of
drivers that are already on drivester in the future and you've got those lists that you can
mine from the users of like these are my favorite drivers in the town and these are the best drivers
in the town now you could just send a nostril dm out to them theoretically and be like hey um
if you want you can pick up this package you know on using the same protocols as as the
underlying thing you can make a write offer basically to pick up a package and um and move
it from point a to point b and then have that in a chain where maybe you know you're going from one
city to the next on various different rides like chained together and you have now anonymous
shipping or cypherpunk sort of shipping layer um which is fun to think about so i'm going to do
something sterling that i've that's becoming a fairly common theme on the show uh and which is
Shadrach, if you're listening
and you haven't met Sterling yet,
you guys should connect.
We met through Darren,
the guy who
I was
talking to when we figured out the bat
signal idea was actually the road flare.
The reason I even bring that up is I think
the work that Shadrach and others, several
others, are doing on the
Meshdadal side, I think
will fit very nicely with what you're doing, Sterling.
If you don't know those guys,
I'm happy to make that connection.
And Shadrach, again, I know I did this.
I think I keep doing this every alternate show
where your name comes up
because you're involved in everything, it seems.
And I make the connection.
So obviously you guys are connected,
but there's more than just A to B, right?
There's the whole Mesh to Del stuff
and all sorts of other things that Shadrach and several others are involved in.
Yeah, it's awesome.
And I think it all comes together in the future for sure.
And it makes me really excited.
I mean, I've kind of made some shitposts on Notster about how, like, you know,
if this actually starts to work and there's a ton of drivers riding on that network,
then maybe like we can make little pay phones that you should,
you could just pick up the phone and say, you know,
I need an exit like the matrix and,
and then like have a car pull up from,
from nearby to, to make that exit. But you know, it's,
it's fun to imagine like what, because these are so,
so open protocol, you know, based,
you can really make them interact with the real world in a lot of different
ways. So I don't know. It gets fun.
for sure all right so let's talk about payments for a second if i remember correctly from your
and you posted about this as well i think you you're using cashew and nip 60 instead of lightning
is that correct yes i'm using cashew and nip 60 it is going over lightning if if you happen to use
two different mints um and but as as it as you onboard in the app the default mint i recommend
as many bits because it seems to be a reliable player in the space but it lets you add custom
mints and if you do add custom mints then it um has to make a successful payment bridge between
those two or it alerts the driver basically uh that that couldn't happen but was that just a
like was there a technical reason you didn't go with raw lightning and went i mean cash is great
but i'm just curious there was a technical reason and it's really because i wanted it to be
i wanted it to be like easy to use your own festival implementation so i really wanted to
do nostril wallet connect originally um but i realized that the only people who had htlc
functionality in Nostra Wallet Connect, so using HODL invoices, is Albi.
And while majority of people using Nostra Wallet Connect might be on Albi I would say that I wanted people people like who use zeus and who use other nostril wallet connects uh wallets to not understand like they have to understand why it not working
if if the htlc thing happens and as of right now like there's only one um implementation of
sort of escrow payments via nostril wallet connect so so that was my original thought was to do
nostrilout connect but then that became uh like unfeasible if i wanted to have some sort of escrow
that unlocks feature and i i thought about raw lightning as well but the thing with that is
i just couldn't imagine myself building a reliable lightning node into the app or it's like
you know like uh it's just you know channel management and back end stuff i just didn't
want to deal with it and i'm also a very new new developer and i i looked at all the different
you know payment methods that people use in bitcoin and what seems to be the most
quickly spun up like new wallets are these cashew wallets i mean right right when cashew came out
there was like cashew.me then nutstash and then and then minibits and then there was like 10
wallet integrations with cashew within i don't know it was like a month or two of that starting
up it seemed very easy to integrate in the beginning so um you know i i started out with
that because i was like you know i'm vibe coding a lot of this i don't want people to use or to
lose user funds or anything so like ideally i have somebody who's reputable as my default mint
and make sure that cash you works under the hood
and hopefully it all goes well.
I also don't want the liability of custodying funds myself,
which would be like,
if I wanted to make it as seamless as possible,
that's probably a way I could do it.
But I'm also like, I don't want to do that
because it's dangerous.
You're building a ride sharing app.
Why don't get into custody?
Makes complete sense.
No, no.
So yeah, especially if it's decentralized, you don't want to be liable for everybody's issues if something goes wrong on that.
So I don't know.
I don't want to get sued by Uber and Lyft because I'm a transportation network company.
I want to build something that's a peer protocol and a peer-to-peer messaging app essentially that just happens to connect peers.
And I'm not a transportation network company.
I'm not building that.
i am building an app for me the driver to use to connect with people later so um you know i i
i think it's very like it's a very different game if you start building a literal uber and lyft
competitor company than building a protocol that hopefully uh benefits the riders and drivers right
way so so you know that makes complete sense sterling uh so you're not a dev you've said that
you you're vibe coding a lot of this but this is so how long have you been doing this because
these are not simple things to wrap your arms around right like figuring out the distinction
the technical distinction between cashew and lightning in in this specific context why one's
better and everything else you've talked about even the right nosta nips to use to broadcast these
events the right uh you're using the nip 44 dms right all of i mean this couldn't have been easy
and this couldn't have been quick so what's interesting about me is i've been around bitcoin
trying to make products better from the sidelines for a very long time so uh i think around 2019
2020 like i was creating feature bounties for blue wallet um under the nim of god says hodl
i was making like i made a bounty for the ability to connect to your own node with a qr for instance
and i made a bounty for the tor implementation uh for blue wallet and then as i as blue wallet kind
of you know is a perfect product in itself that just kind of stuck around like but it hasn't
changed much in a while i started sort of suggesting features to evan at zeus like i said
that little paste button up in the top right um whenever you have a lightning invoice in your copy
clipboard that that little paste button that pops up that was just a simple suggestion to evan
so i've been following lightning and wallets and everything very closely because i use this stuff
every day. And that's one of the reasons why if you look at my profile, it says my title is
chief power user of Bitcoin and Noster. Because all I've been doing, I'd like to try new things.
I like to try everything new in terms of the best wallet functionality and find the absolute best
because I used to orange pill people a ton. I used to go around trying to onboard people.
And I was like, how do I get this less friction when I'm doing this to people?
And so like I would make little suggestions here and there and I would be following the back ends closely to figure out how it works.
But the thing is, I cannot code.
I tried to learn coding for a year straight around 2017.
I spent a year really hacking into coding.
I was a UI developer for Windows apps, like Windows.
They don't even really exist anymore.
Universal Windows applications, UWA.
And I spent a year learning that before they shut down Windows Phone.
And then I was like, I'm just going to stop trying to do this.
And so then I tried to learn coding again around like 2021, 2022,
trying to get into Bitcoin stuff.
but it's just like it's so so much headache to actually write the code um whereas i know the
things that are happening under the hood very well i know how they work i don't know how to
write the code to make them work that way if it makes sense so um i you know i've been i love
talking to all the developers around stuff um evan and ben the carmen and everybody like when i talk
to developers i always have a good time uh like talking about theorizing better features and
theorizing things we could we could do um but i've never been a builder really until
uh vibe coding became a thing so i tried to make ridester and drivester
um initially in march of 2025 so a little less than a year ago and i tried to make it and it just
didn't work out um the the vibe coding wasn't there yet i i made a lot of the ui elements
but i couldn't get things like cashew or especially the routing engine the ability to
route locally in the background of a phone like that stuff was nearly impossible to implement
without having a development background um whereas now with clod code i am able to do the stuff
that I want to do without knowing how to write the code now.
So it's really evolved in the last two months.
And as soon as I realized everybody on Twitter was talking about it,
I was like, I'm going to give it another shot.
And about almost one month ago,
exactly, I started trying to develop Rydester and Drivestre
from the ground up.
And the first thing I implemented with the routing engine,
as soon as that worked, I was like, holy shit.
We could do it.
We could do it because the Noster and stuff,
the Noster events and stuff, they're so simple
that that stuff's a lot easier to integrate to an app
than a lot of other protocols and stuff would be.
The routing engine, having to compile a routing engine
for mobile use is no joke.
And I'm still struggling with the progressive web app side of things
because one thing I'm learning is progressive web apps have major limitations in storage.
So if you're trying to store a routing tile to do local routing in a window,
it's almost impossible.
So there's still a lot of hard problems to solve on the horizon
if I want to get it into a progressive web app.
But as of now, I'm trying to finish up the Android side of things,
get these apps running with Roadflare in them and get them released.
You know, the other thing, and I feel your pain on Vibe coding tools,
especially if you're trying to do anything NOST-related about a year ago.
And I was trying to do it on Replet, and the libraries just weren't there,
and it was hard.
Now, Shakespeare's actually made things on the NOST side specifically, right?
I'm sure you could use Cloud Code.
for just general stuff.
But especially on the Noster side,
I think they have the Nosterbook MCP
that powers MKStack.
So it just made building Noster apps really simple.
And even if you have a custom NIP
that you're trying to implement,
all you have to do is paste the Nader into Shakespeare
and it figures out what needs to happen.
Yeah, and what I was doing constantly is
before I would implement any feature,
I would look up open source apps that have implemented the same feature and give them the cloud code as a reference and give them the documentation as a reference also.
And it would reference all three of those things.
And usually it would one shot the feature.
So like, and that's been pretty amazing.
In the beginning of the app, it would one shot a lot of the features.
As the code base has grown, it's obviously getting harder to do that because they have so many things that they're connecting to in the background.
and um it's definitely not easy anymore uh it was easy to get that initial prototype working but
i've started you know as i test it more and more i am realizing there's like dangerous areas of the
app to navigate like with refunds uh where the driver cancels or whatever like a lot of these
cashew things have not worked out as planned so i've like been hot fixing uh like that to make
sure that nobody loses funds so it is it's not easy to implement you have to do a lot of testing
but um it is doable if you have the time and it's amazing that that's happened because
i really have felt like i have an engineering mindset in in how i want these apps to work but
i've just i don't know what it is about me not being able to learn how to code but it's been
the main blocker.
Well, you found the tool that works for you, right?
Yes.
But, you know, the one-shotting features,
this is just so, such a classic
vibe-coding thing where, you know,
you go in there and especially if you write a good prompt
and using something like Cloud Opus,
even Sonnet sometimes,
$1 or maximum $2,
you have 80% of the app done.
then to get from 80 to 95 percent is $200
because it's just the code base has gotten more complicated
and you adding these little things the long tail is what starts burning through those AI credits Yeah the Claude code is made that simple because the a month thing is absolutely worth every penny
i mean i i literally one of the things that's been so amazing about it is like while i have
you know claude working in the background chugging away at like a bug fix or a new feature or refactor
of like making things more efficient while that's happening i can open up another quad code window
and like do something that i've been putting on the back burner for like months like oh yeah i
need to calculate my cost basis for the taxes for the last two years because i don't have any
freaking clue like quad code's just doing it in the in the background like two minutes flat it'll
take three csv files filled with transactions and then calculate a cost basis that would have cost
me like eight hundred dollars with a cpa and i probably wouldn't have trusted them as much on
the result is this a new thing with cloud code it's 200 bucks and then you get unlimited token
it's nearly unlimited it's not unlimited um one thing that's that's said about it is you get the
subscription to use cloud code natively like in your cli uh like terminal but it doesn't give you
unlimited api access and you don't want to connect your subscription to other products via the api
because they really don't like that and they'll actually ban your account um so it's been kind of
weird with that they they clearly want people to use quad code itself and not api so that if you
get the direct api cost of doing this you're basically getting a hundred times more cost
than using the subscription so there is a weekly limit to subscription use but i have not hit it
yet and i've been doing this 24 7 so i wake up in the morning and i vibe code till i go to sleep
pretty much um with a little bit of like you know kids and wife um in the background but
like i i have claude code running pretty much 24 7 and i don't hit those limits with the 200 max
subscription so and can you switch to like between models to opus and and sonnet or whatever or does
it yes you can but i keep it on opus all the time so opus is the most effective and and i've just
been 100 opus all the time and now i've even figured out that if i want to throw more compute
at a problem um i can tell it in the prompt to use sub agents and that will just like spin up
like multiple sub agents to review more so i've been actually like i've been increasing the
accuracy of how it codes um by doing that and increasing the planning effectiveness
i've also just started using codex um from chat gbt i don't pay for the subscription but i'm on
like a trial subscription um and i use that to review the plans that claude makes and so
from people who are engineers on twitter they're saying that codex is better at like
the actual code but not better at navigating a code base or or planning so i've been kind of
using both and having them review it's really slowed down my effectiveness at shipping bug
fixes and features but it's probably increased the accuracy of all of them so i i can't wait until
um i can run this type of stuff locally and have the same sort of effectiveness as an opus
but as of right now it's worth every penny of $200 a month for me.
Nice.
I think that's where this thing is moving, right?
Which is it's not going to be just one AI thing you're using.
You'll use Gemini to generate a clean prompt, right?
You'll bang in your product idea.
Gemini will actually structure the prompt.
Then you send that over to Cloud Code
and then you have the chat GPT one review it,
Codex review it.
Yep.
Yeah.
Cool.
Yeah, it's using a lot of different things.
I use Grok for a lot of the research on like,
hey, like which open source projects are doing this, this, and this.
And it will like, you know, find me a good research bundle,
a bunch of projects.
And then, you know, that's how I've researched some of the stuff
I didn't know, like routing engines and whatnot,
was through Grok too.
cool so one more question um sterling which is right now we're talking about android are you
thinking about apple for ride star and drive star and if so i mean what's going to happen
the 30 cut all of that nonsense that you have to deal with with apple um i want apple i mean i want
to be on ios too i unfortunately don't have a mac which is almost a requirement for developing on
apple but uh because i've if i want to fully port everything i feel like it is i plan on making an
ios version of this i don't know how they will view the 30 cut thing but i'm not taking any
money from the users so i don't know how that works honestly um i i also don't know if they'll
accept my license that i'm using for my project which is mit no shit coins um custom license
so they they tend to not like copy left licenses or anything like that on the project so we'll see
what happens but um i do want to build on ios i just don't know the timeline because with the dip
right now i do have to get back to driving uber and lyft soon and um so most likely i'm going to
finish road flare integration i'm gonna uh fix a lot of the bugs on android side and i'm gonna
launch it as it is on android and start going back to work and using it um but
I might even just hire people to port it to iOS in the long term because
I know I could do it, but I need to buy a Mac or do something equivalent.
And also, it just feels like I don't have a lot of time if I'm living life in the dip,
if that makes sense.
Yeah.
because all of this time that I'm spending
Vibe Coding is time away from like actually
saving my sats
so
I feel your pain
my friend
alright and actually last question
I mean I know you said you're building this out
as a protocol but Rydester
is a protocol but it's also an app as is
Drivestore
any concerns that if this gets big enough that uber and lyft are going to come after you
i'm kind of accepting that uh the more publicly successful this gets the more likely i get banned
from uber and lyft so it's sort of one of these things where it's like okay i'll be the martyr
but they're not going to really be able to ban it working if it makes sense especially if i make
the progressive web app it'll be really hard for them to ban it so um long term i think
you know i might be sacrificing my own income and have to go back to the real world of fiat
mining through a regular job but i think it'll be worth it for the other drivers and riders
regardless so that's sort of the plan i'm in it for the revolution if that makes sense
amen
amen to that
alright Sterling anything else
you want to plug other than
Rydester and Drivestor
how can people help you
how can we make this successful
what can people do
that you don't have the bandwidth to do right now
man if you are
a developer out there and you
are good at
or
things of that nature
or just notification layers or anything from Android development.
Like, truly, I could use extra eyes on the project.
I could use extra bug fix help and extra testing help.
I don't want people to lose funds,
and I have done nothing but bug fixes in the last three days
just trying to get a big patch ready.
And so the more eyes, the better.
And if you are an iOS developer, you have familiarity with that
or a progressive web app genius,
then definitely need more people on board
for those implementations.
Ultimately, I will probably stop myself for a while
after the Android's done to get back to work.
So the more help, the more eyes,
the more developers, the better.
You heard it here, folks.
If you can help Sterling, if you're a developer,
please do step up.
This is an amazing project and really hope this is successful.
Sterling, thank you for your time.
Thank you for educating me and the audience on this.
And really, I mean it.
I think this is a super exciting project.
I'm rooting for you and I hope it's successful.
It's going to make not just being a consumer, as it would be in my case, a rider, a whole lot easier and more pleasant.
And it would have a knock-on effect on increasing the network effect of Nostra as well, make this a bigger and better place.
Yeah, I think ultimately the more that this is successful also, the less drivers will be online on Lyft and Uber and the prices of – or the amount of money that drivers will make will go up naturally.
So maybe the knock-on effect spread out naturally to the behemoths too.
But yeah, thanks so much for having me on, Avi.
Absolutely.
And thank you to our live stream audience for listening.
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Transcription by CastingWords