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 pioneers, to the lightning-laced airwaves.
Today is Friday, the 7th of November, and it is 3.04 p.m. on the East Coast of the United States at the time of recording.
This is episode 136 of Plep Chain Radio, and we have a special one ahead of you today.
My good friend Max Hillebrand, cypherpunk philosopher and much, much more, is here to talk about all things cypherpunk and whatever else is on his mind.
And a reminder, folks, if you are listening to this show on Apple or Spotify, first of all, thank you for listening.
but I would urge you to hit pause
and switch over to the Fountain Podcasting app
where you can earn some sats
and support the value-for-value revolution
while you listen.
This show is streamed live on Zap.Stream
and any other Noster client that supports streaming
such as Amethyst, Noster, Fountain and Primal.
And folks, if you do want to catch
the Finding Home Prague episode
It is now available on IndieHub, and you can use the code PIONEERCHAN21, one word, for 21% off.
And folks, I'm actually excited to say the sequel to 24, the title of the book is July 18th, will be released in a little over a week.
It's taken me about 18 months to write, about 180,000 words that came straight from my soul.
and I hope you like it as much as you liked 24, maybe even better.
We'll wait and see.
And for our Culture Corner today, there's BitFest that's coming up in Manchester, England
between the 21st and the 23rd of November.
That's just in two weeks' time and it's going to be three full days of Noster, Bitcoin,
in film and art in sunny and glorious Manchester.
And you can use the code PLEPCHAINRADIO, one word, for 10% off tickets.
I will be there, as will several other of my friends.
So I'm looking forward to catching up with those of you who can make it.
And for our sermon today,
Bear markets are for building
And urban decay is the fertile ground for cultural revolutions
Especially in the case of New York
A city I love truly, madly, and deeply
It was my home for almost 20 years
I arrived as a boy, really
A short few months after 9-11
And became a man there
I got my first job there and my second, third and fourth.
Met my wife, fell in love, and then fell in love again when my son was born in New York.
He grew up there playing soccer in the public fields of Harlem.
I've had to learn how to overcome severe adversity while I was there and also got to celebrate incredible triumphs.
For someone like me, unmoored from any single culture or country for most of my life, New York was the closest I ever came to finding home.
So today's sermon is one of hope. It's one of hope for a city I love.
in light of Zohran Mamdani's victory in the mayoral elections
a short few days ago, earlier this week actually
it's a victory that has left a lot of my friends in despair
so here's what I have to say to them
this is a city that moves in long breaths
30 to 40 year inhales and exhales
booms and busts
Booms bring glass towers, velvet ropes, and a glut of fair-weather wanderers enamored by sterile and sanitized fiat opulence.
Bus bring plywood, pigeons, and rent cheap enough for a drummer, a coder, and a poet to split a railroad apartment and accidentally invent the future.
History doesn't repeat.
It rhymes like a subway busker with two chords and a dream.
After the Civil War came the gilded age of the late 1800s.
It brought the Brooklyn Bridge, the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
and it also brought bankers.
Then came the crash of the 1890s and a long decay,
which brought in the Harlem Renaissance, the Jazz Age,
the New York subway system culminating in the roaring 20s.
After the Great Depression and the crash of 1929,
the next decade and a half of decay until the end of World War II
brought with it incredible theater and photography.
It also laid the fertile ground for the madman era that followed in the 50s and 60s.
Then 1971 happened and the inevitable fiscal face plant that followed.
Violence, arson, and looting were the norm.
But that birthed punk, hip-hop,
and a downtown that learned to speak in spray paint.
Then the Giuliani-Bloomberg boom of the 90s and early 2000s happened,
and that one hit its first speed bump in the financial crisis of 2008.
The decline didn't become obvious until 2015 or 2016.
but it has been slow and almost inexorable since then.
But here's the pattern.
Every time the money left, the muses moved in.
It's like the city has a built-in difficulty adjustment.
When the block gets too rich to feel, it forks back to real.
So here we are in late 2025.
I had hoped the pandemic would be the final nail in the coffin of this cycle, but I was wrong.
And here's how I think things will play out.
Mamdani will play the role of the final catalyst.
First, there will be capital flight.
Then, crime will spike.
Then, urban flight.
Rents will collapse.
And the creative, creatives, move back in.
Trust the difficulty adjustment.
It's a story as old as the stones on Canal Street.
By the decade's end, the Renaissance shows up late and underdressed.
Basement galleries humming, warehouse theaters cracking open, rooftop podcasts.
Why, hello.
And a thousand micro scenes stitched together by lightning payments, open protocols, and the oldest network of all, word of mouth.
The city won't be saved by any politician
It'll be saved the old way
By kids with cheap rent and unreasonable confidence
So builders, sharpen your chisels
Writers, steal a table by the window and pay in sats
Musicians, tune to the hum of the F-train
When the boom forgets what it's for
The bust remembers
Bear markets are for building
busted cities are for birthing.
And if history keeps rhyming,
New York is about to clear its throat.
And with that, it is time to bring on our guest,
Max Hillebrand.
Welcome back to Plep Chain Radio, good sir.
Well, what a sermon, Avi.
That really is something special,
especially when I hear it on 1.x speed.
It's delightful.
Excellent.
I'm glad to be back.
And yes, it's dire times, as so common outside of our beautiful bubble of freedom tech.
But that's why we're in here, in the cave, in the rabbit hole,
to make sure that there's some alternative to escape to.
And inevitably, more people will want to leave the suffering of the first realm behind.
We are ready.
Yeah, exactly, Max.
And we are fortunate.
it. We've built this decentralized citadel today, where we feel like we belong anywhere we meet and
hang out in the world. And I don't just mean you and I, we have a lot of friends. Bitcoin in that
sense is a country. But from your vantage point as an outsider to New York, and I don't know if
you've ever visited, Max, but everyone knows about New York and what it stands for, or at least what
it once stood for. From your vantage point, what do you make of what's happened and how do you think
it's going to play out? Yeah, New York always seems like a very
bustling place and I prefer quiet. So I never really wanted to especially live there.
Visiture might be cool, but never really made it. And yeah, from the outside, I mean,
America is a crazy place.
New York is kind of the pinnacle of American craziness.
Well, not really, I guess, to some extent.
But I think it's such a big city that you'll find whatever you're looking for.
There are so many people there, so many different stories,
so many different environments, circles that you could maneuver in.
And, you know, I'm sure that the underground Bitcoin counter-economic scene is massive there.
and I'm sure that you can get basically anything you want with Bitcoin
if you're really looking into it and have the right connections.
So yeah, the city is full of socialism and despair and political chaos
and interventions into the market.
That's all right, that's what the first realm does.
It's optional, you don't have to suffer that much in it
or at least you can work diligently to decrease the suffering
that the first realm gives you.
And, you know, that's all we can ask for.
Yeah.
Indeed.
I think so many people
live in cages of their own making.
And part of it is the realization that,
you know what, I hold the key
and I can step out of this door
whenever I want to.
I do not have to participate
in this clown show or in the suffering.
Yeah, exactly.
So much of the human existence that seems to be bad is actually consented to at least implicitly And while that for one why why do humans so easily just accept and and and welcome their own you know enslavement but on the other hand it it a very hopeful
realization because hey then you can just stop doing it you know you just stop out and you opt
out and you stop obeying the the authority that enslaves you and choose another route and and
live in a more free existence.
And Bitcoin obviously shows this on the monetary realm.
Like, the Fed's gone mad.
Every central bank has since their inception.
They're just crazy institutions.
What are you going to do?
Like, become the most popular, freedom-loving politician and chant,
end the Fed, and, you know, do a bunch of campus tours and spend so much money on big media.
And, well, guess what?
Ron Paul did that.
and he didn't end the Fed or abolish the Fed or improve the Fed.
So not much of a success.
But on the other hand, you can, you know, chill on your couch,
download an app, you know, earn some Bitcoin, send it to that wallet.
And that's it. The Fed's gone for you.
It's no longer in your direct realm of influence.
Now, sure, because other people still get stolen from by the Fed.
that puts you in a worse situation as well
because your trading partners are less wealthy
and less eager to be productive.
So that sucks, but you just work only with Bitcoiners
and all of a sudden everyone around you
is using honest weights and measures, so to say.
And that's very liberating.
That's why we enjoy so much to go to Bitcoin tribe gatherings,
like conferences, meetups, live podcast shows, whatever it is.
Just taking a walk through the park with a friend
and talk about Bitcoin and why it matters
and how we can use it better.
Because it's nice to hang out with people
who share that common culture and mindset
and vision for where the future ought to go.
So treasure that and look for it and make it happen.
if nobody around you is picking up the organizational direction,
then, well, this is a task for you.
So just go do it.
Gather the Bitcoiners and talk.
You know, and this is sort of,
it ties into the notion of a galtz galtz, right?
A digital galtz galtz, if you will.
You just exit.
You opt out of the system that's enslaving you, as you said.
But at some level, the question still lingers, doesn't it, Max, which is what about your compassion for the rest of humanity?
You're sort of taking the step.
When I say you, I mean the abstract.
The Bitcoin mistake is eventually just had enough and said, all right, you know what?
I want to deal with this.
I want to be with my people.
I just want to transact freely, interact freely, speak freely.
and I will find my gold's gulch and just move there.
But where does compassion for the rest of humanity
who might not be at this stage of courage or exasperation
or whatever it might be, right?
What happens?
How does that play in, Max?
Like, what do we do with our compassion for the rest of humanity?
I would say that opting out is a compassionate thing to do for your fellow men on multiple levels.
For one, first save yourself and then save the children.
Because if you're not safe, then you can't help anyone else.
And also by walking through the exit, you're showing others that there is an alternative.
And so you're actively living the example of a better, freer existence and that can inspire and rescue people from the despair of fiat.
And, you know, that is ultimately helpful.
And now, I do think to some extent, once you understand the truth deeply
and you know that others are misguided and are harming themselves,
then to some extent you have a moral obligation to help out and to speak up
and to offer advice, even if they slap you in the face, right?
That's when Jesus turned the other cheek, right?
When people were misguided and he spoke the truth and they didn't want to hear it, so they slapped his face.
And so he turned the other cheek and continued speaking the truth, ready and accepting that he would get slapped again.
That is what turning the other cheek actually means.
And I think a lot of Bitcoiners live this, right?
We don't shut up about Bitcoin, even when people slap us in the face twice.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. And, you know, our show, this conversation, I suspect, is going to be a lot about the different ways of opting out.
And, you know, we discussed talking about the various cypherpunk projects that excite you.
But before we get there, you know, you'd mentioned the possibility of underground markets, Bitcoin markets popping up in New York.
I don't know if they exist, but in my upcoming sequel to 24 July 18th, there is an active, well, a fictionalized version, right, an active underground Bitcoin market in Harlem, fully unregulated and thriving.
and Max
I don't know if you remember this but about
a year and a half
ago when I first started writing this book
I
reached out to you because
there's a, without giving
anything away about the book, there's a situation
where one of the characters
essentially needs to
perform a spell of invisibility
on their Bitcoin
and I was
I think he was still with Wasabi back then so I
I reached out and said, Max, I want to build something.
I want to write something fictional, but also plausible.
So how best to go about it?
And, you know, you walk me through, obviously a single coin join is great,
but you walk, the more the better, right?
And then you can, a few other things you can tweak along the way.
So that is in the book.
That's made it to the book, Max.
I don't know if you remember this conversation.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
And it's great to see like plausible fiction, right?
Because then there is more of an anchor to reality for it.
And it seems more applicable in the life of the reader.
So I'm really glad that you're doing your due diligence on more of the technical sides to give a solid foundation to the world that you're building.
Yeah.
So thank you for that, Max, for that conversation we had a year and a half ago.
So anyway, so let's talk about when we can go through these one by one in any order you want or no particular order.
But I think the meat of our conversation, I'd like it to be the cypherpunk projects that excite you the most that are taking place.
So do you want to start with the first one, Max?
yeah i i think when we're talking about cyberspace it's it's good to start from the
kind of base layer and so what's interesting in the hardware realm um tropic square uh the the
new open source secure element from trezor is like they released it and that's already a miracle
when they first announced that they're going to work on a fully 100 open source chip a secure
element without any and the a's needing to sign for the developers etc everyone in the
industry told them that's impossible you'll run out of money like ridiculous why would you even
attempt this right and they were mad enough to continue the journey for like i think it's been
five years or more and and now they've actually shipped something that so many people told them
it's impossible. And I think that's just a perfect example of if we really want to have
great tools according to our ethos, then we can just do it. And sure, it might be expensive,
especially if you have big dreams and Bitcoiners dream big. But also, some Bitcoiners got really
rich and that allows us now to to allocate funding and capital to those crazy cypherpunk wet dreams
that that would take humanity to the next level and that's that's exactly what's happening now
on a hardware level which is incredibly hard uh but but yeah those chips are out you can you can
buy them uh you can hack with them you can you know put them in your product and sell them to
millions that's that's amazing um is this sort of equivalent to what's happening on the mining
side with bit axes oh yeah um no a bit lower level because so the what the bit axe does that's another
really cool project hardware wise so good that you bring that up the the bit x started by they
they bought like existing miners existing big asics from big suppliers and they they ripped
them apart and took the motherboards and desoldered the actual ASIC mining chips from the already
done machine and they put them back on a smaller motherboard for like a you know small scale USB
powered or small powered miner they lose a bunch of chips this way right so they have the problem
that they don't have access to this ASIC chip
on like a more hacker basis, right?
Because it's all just huge scale manufacturing
and not really made for them.
So they had to do all types of hacks
to create their products
and which by now has so many iterations,
all open source as well.
But they do rely on a closed source chip.
And so what Trezor did
is they actually worked on the chip,
not a mining chip,
but a hardware wallet chip, so to say, right?
a chip that's designed to keep your secrets secure.
Even if someone has physical access to the chip
and they have like a million-dollar laboratory
with all the fancy lasers and scanners and whatever equipment,
they should still not be able to get to the secrets.
That's kind of the level of security that they're aiming for,
but without any obscurity.
So there's no hidden backdoors or something
that might make an attacker who doesn't know about it more difficult.
This is all in the open.
this is exactly how it works and it's still secure and that's quite powerful so for folks
who are less technical max who are wondering what exactly this means for them how how it translates
into i guess user empowerment how would it this breakthrough well today just go buy a treasure 7
and that's their latest edition of the hardware wallet and this includes this secure element that
they've been working on. And the end result is your private keys will be more secure. If someone
gets physical holds on your treasure they can get to the keys But on top of that you can be more sure that there is no hidden backdoor somewhere in the chip that actually does leak your data if something like this would exist
the developers of other hardware wallets could not tell you because they needed to sign a
non-disclosure agreement before being allowed to to see that this type of malware exists
and then and then well maybe they still added it into their hardware and maybe later they or
someone else might exploit some
vulnerability that was there in this chip all
along, but only the people
involved actually knew about it.
It's a bit of a far-fetched
attack.
It's not super likely that this
comes, but it could. And so
having yet another chip is
quite cool. And another benefit that you get
of supporting the
builders of this is that they'll keep building.
So, yeah.
Play around with it. Buy 1 by 10
and give them to friends. Why not?
So let's piece this together for our listeners.
The latest Trezor, the Trezor 7,
I think it launched like a few weeks back, right?
There was a big event in Prague.
That hardware wallet is built
using this open source secure element specification, right?
Anyone, any developer can look up that specification,
if there's new malware or whatever it is, right?
They'll be able, because the specification is open source,
they'll be able to know exactly what's going on,
how secure something is, right?
Is that the idea here?
Yeah, exactly.
And now you will be able to buy other devices
that have implemented this chip as well.
Like for example, maybe the next iteration of BitAxis
will have a hardware wallet included as well.
Next to the ASIC chip is the Tropic Square chip.
The ASICs mines you the Bitcoin
and the Tropic Square chip,
they store the Bitcoin or the private keys.
So why not put this all together?
If we have open hardware that we can all use
and develop on top of,
then we can do all types of crazy ideas like this.
Yeah.
So last thing on this cypherpunk idea that excites you.
So you've mentioned one potential use case
where a BitX has a hardware wallet baked into it.
Where do you see this playing out in the next five years?
What are the best case scenarios
for this Trezor open sourcing the secure element?
You know, there was this whale
who sent 80,000 Bitcoin to the exchange.
let's assume this guy is liquidating his bitcoin position to fund you know as much hardware and
software freedom tech as possible and let's see where that could take us in in five years
that that would be quite cool i i think there's a really cool or really interesting philosophy of
we're currently using like a hundred dollar devices like cheap plastic hardware wallets
to protect multi-generational wealth of the hardest money ever, right?
That's maybe, or maybe we could do better.
What if we didn't have a budget for,
like how much can we spend on protecting our Bitcoin?
Like what if you had like, you know, a lot of budget?
How crazy could you get?
And I think we'll start to see this
because the people who have a lot of Bitcoin
are starting to realize that they really, really, really
need secure computers.
If they don't have secure computers,
their Bitcoin is fucked.
And that will incentivize the next wave of builders.
And hopefully we'll build on interoperable standards
and open source protocols and technologies
so that the rising tide lifts all boats
and we can all benefit from the innovations of others.
Yeah.
Certainly lots to look forward to on that.
All right, Max, let's move to the second idea.
What have you got?
Yeah, so once you have hardware, you need a good software on this,
and it starts with an operating system.
And most people use phones nowadays,
so one project definitely worth a shout-out is Graphene OS.
That's an Android operating system focused on security and privacy.
You can install it on Google Pixel devices at the moment only,
which is a bit of a shame and Google is being more and more of a pain in the ass of closing down this
option of installing an alternative operating system securely.
So to get back to the hardware question, GrapheneOS has now made a deal with another hardware producer
to produce hardware that is compatible with GrapheneOS.
So this is quite encouraging that now other hardware producers actually want to open up their hardware
such that alternative operating systems like Graphene OS can be run
for purpose-built, secure communications.
That's really encouraging.
And hopefully there will be more there to come.
But if you really want to take an actionable step
of improving your digital sovereignty and security,
my first recommendation to almost anyone,
if you have a little bit of budget, not unlimited budget,
as the guy with 80,000 Bitcoin, but a little bit of budget,
and a couple days worth of time
then start by getting yourself a Google Pixel phone
flash the Graphene operating system
get familiar with how to use it
and then continue installing open source
and secure applications on there
some of them we'll mention in a bit
but with Graphene you really have a solid foundation
where your phone kind of turns in the hardware wallet
the original idea of the hardware wallet is that
a 12-word paper backup is insecure.
If someone gets the physical copy, he knows the secret.
So let's create a computer that's hard to crack into,
and we can put the secret there.
And then if someone gets physical access to the computer,
they don't get the secrets.
Well, initially we needed to make tailor-made custom devices
just for Bitcoin to make that secure.
What Graphene OS has achieved is to do it with something as complex as a phone.
And so your phone kind of turns into a hardware wallet,
meaning that if a bad guy gets hold of your physical phone
but he doesn't know the password
he cannot get anything
he cannot even connect the USB cable to it
like he won't get any data out of it
there's so many layers of defense there
that you can really rest assured
that your phone is not easy to compromise
and doesn't spy on you so much
Is there anything on the Horizon Max
where the phone's hardware specification
is fully open sourced?
that I imagine is still a while away.
We will get there, I think,
but it's a lot of work.
So there are some projects
that have progressively more and more open source access,
but the thing is, especially the chips, right?
Specifically, for example, the mobile chip,
like the thing that gives you internet, right?
The 4G, 5G connection.
This chip is crazy, like proprietary.
it's closed it's probably backdoored like crazy and there is no way like there is no open source
chip available that provides you this type of service that's what government monopolies get you
yay for that so we need a tropic square moment for chips like the the broadband and that will
we don't just need one moment like that we need like 10 different chips or probably more that
would need to be open sourced which is a multi-million dollar investment and you know i
definitely see why the tropic square uh bet will pay off because they're dealing with bitcoin uh
but for a regular phone uh you know difficult to to make this work but not impossible well let's
that's an interesting thing that you brought up the 4g 5g the trans receiver transmitter chip
isn't, and I haven't looked into this too deeply, Max,
but my understanding is the spectrum itself
is entirely permissioned.
And the gatekeeper is some kind of federal regulator.
So even if you were to open source the,
figure out how to crack the chip and open source it,
you're still going to have that bottleneck
of the regulator saying, well, yeah,
I control the spectrum, so you can't have a piece of it.
Yeah, exactly.
but guess what there's pirate radio you know for for decades already like freedom lovers have just
used the airwaves to to send their messages you know there's rules that you cannot send encrypted
data via radio etc because that's military-grade technology or whatnot you know so there's there's
stupid bureaucracy on on many levels but ultimately you know as long as your hardware
accepts the laws of physics, it works.
So at some point, the enforcers will run out of money
and people will see that resisting the stupid rules
gives them a lot of benefits and they will.
And some courageous entrepreneurs will make some helpful products
on the hardware and software level and they'll probably get rich.
But that one sounds like it's a decade away, just at least.
and assuming freedom go up in the human heart
because sometimes I look around and other than Becker
and I wonder if anyone actually wants to be free.
Well, I think people are tricked into not caring about that question.
I think inherently the human nature depends on freedom.
Like without freedom, the human spirit suffers too much.
so yeah it's it's sad but you know on the bright side there there is the opt-out so we have that
yeah all right do you uh anything else on graphene os because i think one of the actually
you know what on the graphene uh one itself right the one thing that's bugged me is that today it's
only Google Pixel.
And who knows what's on that device, right?
Yes, you're going to flash it with Graphene OS,
but what kind of hardware backdoors exist
that you're unaware of?
Yep.
Yeah, it's a big, it's an issue, right?
Graphene OS will protect against some of these attacks,
but most probably not all of them.
And if you're a big enough target,
they will be exploited, likely.
Hopefully it's not that cheap of an attack that it can be done by a script kitty somewhere very easily on anyone.
That would be bad, but I hope it's not that bad.
But yeah, let's install some apps on there.
So I guess first let's deal with your network level privacy because we want to download the future apps privately.
By the way, Max, I love this.
I love this progression.
We're starting at the most base layer, working our way up.
at some point we reach the human layer when we talking about Cypherpunk projects So love it Carry on Yeah so get Tor the Onion Router
It's like the Lightning Network, but for communication.
And so you can send a request to download a website,
but through multiple computers, through the internet,
before you actually go to whatever website you want to visit.
And so that gives you quite a lot of privacy.
Fewer people will know which websites you're visiting.
and for how long, etc.
You know, the NSA still knows they can break the Tor network.
So we need stronger technology to protect against these types of adversaries.
But at least the website operator shouldn't know.
And that's often useful if you don't want to know that the website operator knows that you,
this IP address at this location is connecting to his servers.
Tor is great for that.
Orbot is a VPN application that runs the Tor network.
It's free to use.
It works perfectly fine.
It's a bit slower than other VPNs,
but it's free and more censorship resistant
and arguably more private,
depending exactly on how you look at it.
But VPNs are another good solution.
There's a couple good ones to mention.
Molvat and iVPN are two quite popular OG solutions
that have been accepting Bitcoin since forever.
And there's also a couple new ones.
For example, Obscura is a kind of two-hop VPN
with two different companies.
So the Obscura company makes the first hop
and then Mulvart makes the second hop.
And presumably Mulvart and Obscura don't work together.
And so you have a nice two-hop separation
and different jurisdictions.
That's quite useful.
You also have, for example, the NIM VPN.
NIM is a mixnet.
It's a little bit like Tor,
but it adds random timing delays with each hop.
And these random timing delays
makes it so that even the NSA has difficulties
to spy on the network traffic.
So Tor is worse in this regard than mixnets.
But mixnets are even slower than Tor
because of these random timing delays.
And so they're very much not good for watching 4K videos
or doing a live stream to NOSTER.
but they're very much good enough
for downloading your NOSTER posts or whatnot.
So for text messages and so on,
that's what it's designed for.
Originally, that's what the original email remailers were about.
They were early mixnets.
So yeah, that's how to protect your IP address
so that others don't know where exactly you're calling in from.
Love it.
Let's keep moving up the stack, Max.
I'm waiting for the Bitcoin and NOSTER part
because that's where I'm going to jump in
and have a lot more questions.
This is all great stuff, by the way.
Yeah, so let's keep moving up or down the stack,
whichever way you orient yourself, I guess.
Yeah, that's the thing, right?
People are always so eager to like,
yeah, let's receive and send Bitcoin.
Let's start shitposting on Luster.
But actually, take your time.
Consider this from the ground up
because if you're new to this,
you have a cool opportunity to really start out
on a solid ground.
and it starts with good hardware, good operating system, good network level privacy.
And then next for me is always a password manager.
You need a tool that helps you remember your secrets
because you're going to deal with a lot of secrets.
If you want to be secure in cyberspace,
you better learn how to generate and remember and store secrets for the long run.
That's the only, that's the root into security that we have in so many different tools,
including Bitcoin, including Noster.
so we need a password manager
keypass is a very good solution
there's a bunch of different implementations
look for keypass xc
is a good option
bitwarden another one
bitwarden kind of is built more around
you have a server available
and in that world it's quite good
you can self host this bitwarden instance
on your own hardware
but
keypass is another
solution that
is just a database, right?
You get a file and the file is encrypted with a password.
And if you type in the file and the password
into this key password manager,
then you get access to the passwords
and how you store the file and synchronize the file
is kind of left up to you.
So, you know, if it's important secrets,
why not put them in the password manager
with a strong password that encrypts them
and get a hundred cheap USB sticks
I copied that encrypted database on all of these USB sticks.
You know, data is cheap to copy, why not?
And now you can hide these 100 USB sticks,
not only in your home, but in your office, in your gym,
in the park, in like the electricity cabinet on the street.
You know, there is so many places
where you can hide a small USB stick.
And then you know that whenever you somehow are stranded
and you have no computers whatsoever,
you just have to go to the city, go to this random spot,
check if the USB stick is there.
If not, it doesn't matter.
If someone else found it, they don't have the password,
so they cannot decrypt it.
And you still have 99 other hideouts,
and one of them is probably there.
So that's quite a bulletproof way of making sure
that you will never forget your secrets.
But let's talk about the concept of a password itself.
Have we reached the point where maybe passwords themselves get phased out?
Or not yet?
Well, passwords in the sense of, like in the traditional sense, what a password is, is there is a computer somewhere.
It's always online.
It's called a server.
and you are a user and you want to connect to the server
and download some data, maybe upload some data.
And now the question is, will that server allow you?
Because behind that server is a human called the server administrator
and he can choose what software runs on the server.
And the software he runs might say that, you know,
only people who've registered with me can actually connect to the server
and download and upload data.
And how do you register?
By defining a username and a password.
So in this environment, if you want to use a service,
then you have to ask the administrator,
hey, please, is this username available?
Can I use this password?
And so the username is kind of a public-facing identity,
something that other people could see,
hey, this username uploaded this data or whatever.
But the password is supposed to remain private
that only you know it and the server administrator
and so that you can make a handshake
and basically say that, hey,
I'm this guy who knows the secret password.
So the legacy password is a secret that the user has
that authenticates him to a gatekeeper on the server
who will let him in, the bouncer in front of the door.
And yes, this concept will go away.
Like Bitcoin and especially Noster
make this reliance on a server administrator completely obsolete.
However, secrets, they will not go away.
We no longer have a password associated with a username,
but we do have private keys that can derive a public key,
or we have encryption passwords, symmetric keys.
These types of secrets are still important,
and we need to memorize them somehow.
And human memory is flawed to some extent.
Not only do we forget things naturally,
but accidents can happen and your memory can be severely affected
for the most mundane of reasons.
And for this, thankfully, we have technology.
There's pen and paper.
It's a really good way of recording something
and making sure you don't forget it.
It works really well.
That's why every Bitcoiner basically recommends
that you write down your 12 words on a piece of paper
because that's a stupid foolproof way
how humans have been doing this for, well, millennia.
And it'll work in the future as well.
But the downside is we cannot do fancy math
like encryption on paper.
So for this, we need to use computers and storage devices.
But, you know, we can and they're cheap,
so we can duplicate.
And if any one of them fails, others are still there.
If all of them failed, yeah, we're kind of screwed.
But ultimately, these computers can help us to generate and store and use the secret.
So to generate a secret, first of all, you need to create randomness.
Because you want to have a large number that is randomly chosen,
such as it's very difficult for anyone else to come up with exactly the same number as you have.
And the larger the number and the more randomly you've picked it, the better.
and humans are not good with large numbers and not good with randomness and computers are very
good with both of these things so you know let the computer do that for you and then of course
the memory like an industrial grade sd card can definitely keep your data for 50 50 like 50 years
or or more and that is already a a solid you know addition to your human memory so passwords
are very important in the architecture
of the internet of the past.
This will change to private keys
and encryption keys in the future.
But in any case, secrets have always
and will always be important.
And having tools that help you manage your secrets
are very useful.
And that's what a password manager is.
Yep, makes sense, Max.
So let's move on to the next one then.
on your list.
Yeah, I think now we're ready for the juicy stuff.
What do you want to start with?
Earning money or posting online?
Why don't we start with posting online?
Because, yeah, why don't we start with that?
Cool.
So for that, obviously, we do Nostra, right?
We're future people here.
So for that, Nostra relies on private public keys.
So you need a tool to help create your private key
and to store it and to keep it safe.
And on your Graphene OS phone,
the best app for this is Amber, A-M-B-E-R.
And this is a private key manager.
Think of it as a hardware wallet, as an app, right?
It generates your private key.
It remembers it.
And other people can request that this signing application
will sign a message that the first application created.
So this means that you can use
all of the many Nostra applications,
but none of these Nostra applications
actually need to learn the private key that you have.
They only request your signing app
to please, can you sign this message for me?
And that's a much more secure use of your secret.
Not any app should know all of your secrets.
If you can reduce that to only one app,
that's much better.
So on Ember, you just create a private key.
You write down your 12 words,
on a piece of paper.
You have a backup of your identity.
And next you can start creating content.
So for this, Amethyst is, I think,
the Swiss army knife in the world of Android.
It can do basically everything.
You can watch this live stream on Amethyst if you want.
And yeah, you can sell goods.
You can make short posts.
You can reply to people.
You can use many feed algorithms on a marketplace.
Lots of really cool features.
And this works together with Ember,
so Amethyst doesn't need to know your private key.
And a third cool application is,
it addresses the question of where is all this content on Nostor stored?
The answer to that is a Relay.
A Relay is an application on a computer
that when requested will accept a valid NOSTR event
and store it and later give it to anyone who asks for it.
So the cool thing is relays are just software
and you can run software on your phone.
So you can run a relay on your phone.
That's called SitRide.
So this will be the application
where any other app on your phone
can put a NOSTR event for storing for later
and other applications can read all of the NOSTR events
that you have in there.
So this is very cool to have a backup of all your posts.
Imagine if Twitter goes down, all of your posts are gone
and there's no way that you can get it
because the app doesn't store it.
The app only works if the server is online.
Same does the website.
But with Noster, you can keep a copy of everything
that you ever created on your phone offline.
And regardless of if any other server on the internet
decides to delete your data,
you will always have a copy of it.
And so that's a solid foundation to start to explore other Nostra apps.
Great.
So we've set the foundation for Nostra itself.
Let's talk about specific use cases, the Cypherpunk use cases on Nostra.
Now that we've established relays, you can be completely sovereign by running your own relay.
You can protect yourself or you can minimize your risk by using Amber.
to manage your secrets.
So you're ready to go as a Cypherpunk Nostra user.
What are the really cool, let's pick a few, right?
The really cool projects that you're seeing that are leveraging Nostra.
I actually forgot the first application you should install on your Corfin OS phone.
That was a mistake because actually you need an application store, right?
you need a way to find and install and update other applications.
And you're not going to ask Google for permission to please,
can I install my Freedom Tech, dear Google?
So let's find a freer alternative, and that's ZapStore.
This is an App Store built on Nostar.
And as someone who works with people who ship software to people,
ZapStore is the only App Store that works.
At this very moment, some of the apps I'm working on
are stuck in the review of the Apple gatekeepers
and we have to ask their permission to please,
can we give better code to our users?
They're all waiting for it,
but no, they have not responded yet
because they're busy being in the way of other people.
So while they make their life miserable,
they let us wait,
which is great use of their time and our time.
But so the way that Zapso works
is if you want to publish an application,
you just create a Nostra event,
which is a text file basically.
And in this text file, you say,
hey, I'm publishing a new software.
It's called whatever.
And this is what it's about.
Here's some pictures.
And this is what's in the latest version.
And here is where you can download the package.
And this is the hash of the package and so on.
And this entire message,
you sign it with your private key
and you publish it on one or many NOSTA relays.
And voila, now people are notified
that you have just published a piece of code
and they know where to get it
and they can install it
and they can tell other people about it, right?
So you can review and suggest to your friends
that, hey, these are the five applications
that I really enjoy and others can see it.
So this is what SAP Store is.
It's kind of a social, unstoppable app store
where you can discover cool applications
and there are thousands of cool applications on there
and all of them are open source.
Most of them are privacy preserving
and most of them I would classify as freedom tools.
So it's definitely worth to just browse through
the history of recent releases
and click through and check out what that app does.
And this is how I regularly find new amazing applications
that are really useful.
So ZapStore, absolutely recommended as the first app
that you install on your phone.
The second would be a VPN like Orbot.
Great. More foundational pieces. I'm just going to raise one point on ZapStore Max. And we had Fran on the show a few weeks back, actually. Great discussion on this. I'm going to raise one point on ZapStore and in general, a Freedom Store of that nature.
but we can parking lock that
for after we've gone through a few more of these
which is you absolutely as a user
should be able to install whatever you want
I mean it's your phone, your sovereign
and if you want a piece of software
you should be able to install the software
there is a risk of course
that
a piece of software could be malware.
How do you know, right?
So you need to solve that trust problem.
Obviously, how Apple and Google solve it
is by complete gatekeeping, right?
They rent out trust by doing KYC
and doing their heavy-handed code reviews.
So we should, when we get to the point
where we talk about web of trust,
this should be one of the things we talk about,
which is how do you trust a piece of software?
and I don't know if bio beware right is is the right answer or not right I think there's a better
answer to it and maybe web of trust is that answer but just wanted to put that out there
Max we could circle back to that once we go through a few more of these no but that's a
super important point but I think that because app stores build on open foundations it can tackle
these difficult problems much better than centralized alternatives like with Apple there's
one company doing all the reviews
of all the applications that
are possible to run on this phone?
That's ridiculous. How could one
company have enough expertise
to audit every piece of software
that is out there? It's impossible
that they can do a good job
or a great job
that both satisfies the speed
and ease for developers to improve the
software of their users and keeps the
security in mind. What we can do
with Nostra
and ZapStore is that
First of all, anyone can announce that his software is ready.
Like, why should anyone be able to stop you doing that, first of all?
And then, however, you cannot stop that others are gossiping about your release.
Now they have a provable tag of the piece of software that you're releasing,
and they can write reviews.
They can say, hey, I don't think that the architecture of the software is good.
I do not recommend this app.
They could say, hey, I don't trust this developer.
Anything that he posts I think is bad, right?
He might be compromised.
A security specialist firm, or why not five at the same time,
can audit the source code of the app and then attest that, yes,
this is actually good code.
And you could configure it such that you only download
when this auditing agency has said that it's good.
Or another cool way is just, sure, it might be malware, but what if you know that this is exactly the same application as 50 of my friends have installed?
So, you know, if it's malware, at least we're all going down together.
And at least it's not a targeted attack just against me.
If I would see that, hey, this is an app that looks like it's the app that I'm interested in, but it has a different hash than what my friends have installed, and it looks like that this one that my friends have installed is the actual correct one.
And so having this open, attestable graph of releases and metadata and reputation about those releases and the developers or authors of them is incredibly powerful.
And it will allow us to produce way more secure infrastructure.
A big caveat, of course, this is a whole bunch of work.
So all of these features that I just talked about probably don't exist yet because it's hard.
but this is one of the many ways that you could contribute
and make one of the really promising projects even better.
I think this is the most exciting part or time in a technology
where you have a problem and finally you find a solution
that just barely solves the problem.
If you look at it, it's actually shit and almost broken,
but you can see the potential of how,
if these couple things just would be fixed
and we totally can fix it,
then it would be an incredible solution to a hard problem.
And so it's worth to work on and make it possible.
And there's like a million applications,
not a million,
there's a thousand Freedom Tech related applications
that I would say absolutely deserve your attention
to off-contribution.
And there's actually a broader,
we were talking specifically about ZapStore
and sideloading applications
onto your phone.
But there's a broader point here.
So you talked about how the hell can we trust Apple
to curate essentially hundreds of thousands
of application submissions.
And how do we know that they're going to do the right thing?
And the way they do it is they just keep bloating their bureaucracy.
And then that gets heavy-handed.
We saw what happened with Dahmus.
But there's a broader point there.
And you can extend that to music.
How can you trust Spotify to curate hundreds of thousands of songs,
some of which could be incredible new aspiring musicians,
and to deliver that to users who might listen to it?
You can't, right?
It's that simple.
The answer is Spotify cannot help you find music you actually want to listen to.
They will make you listen to music that will allow them to sell advertisements to you.
And you just take that to film.
How can you trust Netflix to give you, to curate all the movies and give you what you want?
And then so on and so forth, right?
And I do want to come back to that in a bit.
So let's talk, so you talked about we need a venue for being able to, in a sovereign way, install software.
We obviously have the Phone Foundation.
We have the Nostra Foundation with Amber and Citrine and all of that and Zap Store.
So you've loaded the apps.
Now let talk about the apps themselves what are the cool ones yeah what is more important than than having a wallet to be able to receive bitcoin and that is having a podcast app so that you can receive bitcoin
podcasts which will make you even more bullish on bitcoin which will get you to stack more bitcoin
so ultimately that's the the sound of a bitcoin accumulation strategy is first install the podcast
app then install the wallet so let's talk about fountain it's it's a really cool app
um to to find podcasts and and recommend podcasts to your friends and and easily clip highlights
out of these podcasts and live streams right you can listen to this very live stream right now
in fountain and if you didn't know about that yet then well there's your chance
to travel in time to listen to this podcast live.
So, yeah, really cool app.
And you can log in with Nostra.
So that's the cool thing.
Once you have your identity created in Amber,
other applications can just use that same identity
so that you will see that all the people
whom you followed in Amethyst
because you liked their posts,
now you can see what podcasts they listen to.
And because you already like their posts
and you probably like the sources,
that they've accumulated.
So really cool to find recommendations
that are more tailored to you and your friends
rather than whatever the mainstream
is listening to at the moment.
I think the cool thing about Fountain is
they really do, for the most part,
cut out the middleman.
I mean, I know they take a small cut
of the zaps and the boos,
but it's really de minimis, right,
what they do.
and it creates this slightly, not slightly,
a very different relationship between the consumer and the creator, right?
You have these boosts.
I mean, you know, on Pipe Chain Radio,
we have all these regulars who keep boosting us
and I feel like some of them we haven't even had on the show
and I've never met them, but I feel like I know them, right?
And they feel like this show gives them something
and, you know, they want to boost us or zap us.
it's a very different relationship it's not that standoffish
influencer high priest sort of thing you have in you know on on apple podcasts or spotify podcasts
yeah exactly and this relationship to to your fans especially for a small podcast
are are incredible because you know if you get like 50 views or whatever then that that feels
like nothing but you know eventually you meet someone in real life and he's like oh yeah i
watched these videos you're like what you're one of those 50 people but that that that is a thing
right and and it actually happens more often than you think and and these micro relationships that
we can build in this vastness of cyberspace are quite beautiful that that this is possible
and I think we should relish in that fact.
And Bitcoin brings this to the next level
because money is a very strong token of appreciation.
An online message of, hey, thanks for this content is cool
and it does warm the heart, but it doesn't feed the belly.
And getting paid for something that you put out there
is really a great encouraging feedback
and that Noster enables this so easily
where it really is just a click of a button
and magic internet money moves to the other guy,
that is phenomenal and it decreases the hurdle
for enjoyers of a content to say thank you
in a more meaningful way than just a like.
And that is, I think, the type of community-supporting software
that the world needs right now.
And Fountain's just getting better by the day, right?
Oscar, Davidas, Nick, they're just doing an amazing job.
All right, next one.
One thing, though, because actually I have to say that Fountain is the first closed source app that we're talking about here.
And I don't know, I've been yelling at Oscar for many years that that's nonsense.
It should be open source.
It really should be.
So if you're listening to the sermon, then Oscar, you know the right move.
join us on the freedom side?
Well, the last time,
I think Oscar's been on the show three times
and I've asked him every single time.
And I think he wants to do it.
I think the issue, Max,
is they're a small team
and they have so much to do.
And open source, I mean, look, again,
Oscar, if you're listening,
I urge you to open source it.
But I also understand
that you're juggling a lot right now.
So, but yes, do open source.
That's exactly why you need
the superpowers of open source.
Like if you work on free software, you grow from a small team of three people to a team of 50 million people with half of them dead already because they wrote a foundational open source software that you can get for free.
It's incredible.
And not just you passively can you consume all of these libraries that others worked on.
If you publish your code as well, others will look at it and tell you where it's shit and where it can be better.
And yeah, that's a bit embarrassing and painful, but the end result is better code and much better code.
So that in and of itself should be worth it.
But then also you enable others to learn from the mistakes that you did.
And ultimately, cyberspace is so vast to think that you're going to be the only website on the internet that does a certain thing is ridiculous.
Obviously, others will do a website that's similar to yours.
and same with apps.
And if they just copy-paste your code, that's fine.
They can do that anyway.
You can reverse engineer any proprietary software
if you really, really want to.
So that's not really a good defense in any case.
And then, well, what if someone copies your code
and puts it on his own website?
So what?
You still have yours.
Your friends still can get your app.
They can still pay you for that app.
So, like, working on open source is kind of like being in Bitcoin, right?
Like, once you've made that step and you rearranged your worldview, it's so obviously better.
It's like such a no-brainer.
But then there's people on the other side who are just not seeing it.
And that's really frustrating, right?
And I feel free software advocacy and Bitcoin advocacy has a lot in common there.
so yeah oscar join us on the free side yeah and look there's there's stuff like path dependence
and network effects and all of that fountain has all of that i i yeah i think they should do it
it's not i don't think it's going to be an issue yeah someone else can clone it and whatever but
fountain's got the path dependence and network effect baked in i just don't see how someone
takes their code base and and runs away with it at this point and
all right so that was podcasting max what else what else he got yeah music let's talk about that
a cool new app that was just vibed into existence by the legendary derrick ross's zap tracks so
that's a fun one that's a app designed to for you to discover music that your friends are listening
to specifically free and open source music right that's freely available and that is is really cool
right there has been over the years now a slow but steady growing group of of musicians on Noster
who have published their tracks for free and simply adding their their lightning address
as a place where people can show some respect and guess what people do if they like your stuff
they'll send you magic internet money if you make it easy for them.
And so, yeah, ZapTracks is exactly that.
It's a way for you to listen to music and show some respect
and appreciation to the people who bring you that joy.
And, yeah, that's worth to check out.
And the beauty here, Max, is that that music that goes on ZapTracks
will presumably show up on Fountain as well
because Fountain supports music too.
Exactly.
Yeah, they have a whole music section on their app.
Cool.
And there's Wavelake as well.
I know Sam is busy.
He's touring with his band.
But there's Wavelake too for music.
A close source app though, I believe.
Yeah, but that just shows you
we have more and more tools
that speak this open interoperable protocol
and you use whichever one fits you best.
And if none of them really scratch your itch, then you just build your own one and do that.
So speaking, so then I guess now it should slowly be time to actually be able to send and receive money, right?
Because first of all, we want to get stats for the posts that we make, but also we want to say thanks to the others.
So I think let's get started with the wallets.
Let's do it.
Let's start with one that's easy, fast, cheap, and super private.
And that's cashu.me.
That's a browser-based wallet, which you can install on your home screen as a kind of progressive web app,
which you can receive and send Bitcoin in a custodial form, very fast, very private, very cheap,
and compatible with the Lightning network.
so this is I think the easiest way to get a lightning address
so that you can receive money from anyone all the time 24-7
and yeah that can be configured here
so this also shows it because it's in the browser
it's very censorship resistant
like the app store cannot stop Kale from making improvements to this app
so you get updates almost every day which is really cool
And yeah, definitely check out this wallet.
Great for sending and receiving small amounts of Bitcoin.
With the big caveat that this is a custodial system,
so someone else has the actual Bitcoin and they could run away.
So once you have more than you're comfortable to lose on there,
you should move to a more secure alternative where you do have self-custody.
And the next step up for this would be a Lightning wallet.
And the one that just works is Phoenix.
it's a bit expensive especially compared to cashio but it it just works all the time it works with
even large amounts but for it's kind of the medium-sized wallets that where you cannot
receive easily payments when you're offline and so this is not the right wallet to use for your
post posts because there are people might want to send your money when you're sleeping and the phone
is offline so for this something like cash q or server wallet is better but for paying your coffee
in in the cafe or or showing a friend the qr code so that he can pay you back this wallet is great
a next step up then is is for you your your actual savings right stuff that you don't want
to easily spend where you want to have a more secure environment probably use a hardware wallet and for this the nunchuck wallet is very good Here you can manage single signature wallets but also multi wallets
where you need multiple private keys or multiple hardware wallets to actually approve a transaction
before the money can move. Incredibly powerful technology, not just for your own savings,
because, you know, you could have a hardware wallet on each continent. And if you want to
spend your money out of your multi-generational savings vault, then yeah, you do need to travel a
bit before you can spend it, which, you know, gives you enough time to reconsider if you actually want
to move the money of your grandkids and spend them on whatever frivolous, you know, consumerism
culture, and hopefully you reconsider and your grandchildren might thank you very dearly for that.
But also, if someone shows up with a $5 wrench and hits you until you give him the money,
you can tell him, yeah, sure, I'll give you the money,
but you'll need to hop on a flight with me
and go to this other country
and go to a bank vault or wherever
where I have the password to the hardware wallet.
So these types of things can be all configured with Nunchuck
and they can also connect to your own Bitcoin full node,
which is quite important.
So yeah, these are three wallets worth considering.
There's many more, of course.
I guess Zeus is another noteworthy mention.
Yeah.
Yeah, Phoenix is great.
I mean, all of them that you mentioned are great.
But, you know, one recurrent,
and I'll bring up the one that I wanted to talk about, Max,
which I hinted at earlier.
Every single use case you brought up, right?
So you're talking about Zap Store,
how do you trust the software?
Yes, you're sovereign, but you need to trust the software.
You brought up Fountain.
Well, how do you find the podcast that,
I mean, there are thousands of podcasts out there.
How do you find something that actually you would like?
Fountain doesn't have a central algorithm,
as far as I know, but Apple and Spotify do.
And they force crap onto you that's good for them,
but not necessarily good for you.
We talked about music.
How do you find music that you like?
There's thousands of musicians making,
some of them making incredible music,
but how do you discover them?
Discoverability is an issue, especially if they're unknown.
And then what was the last one you were talking about?
Oh, yeah, you were talking about mints.
How do you find them?
Right, it's custodial.
But can there be a situation where you have a choice of mints
and then you can choose one that you can trust somehow, right,
given the choice?
And I would extend that to stuff like coin joins as well, coordinators.
How do you pick the right coordinator for your coin join
and so on and so forth.
And I think there are several other use cases
that I can pose as a similar problem.
But I think you get the picture here, Max,
which is the overarching theme here is one of trust.
And to me, this is one of the foundational
and not entirely solved cypher problems
in a truly decentralized sovereign distributed system.
How do you get, how do you solve the issue of trust
without creating a centralized gatekeeper.
Yeah, I think you do this by human connections.
The way that PGP, the OG email encryption and software signature software,
the way that you established a web of trust was by meeting someone in person
and handing him over a physical piece of paper that had your name
and your public key identifier on there.
And this way, the other person was sure that this person,
he might even ask you for an ID that he can verify the name,
that he says that this is my key.
And this wasn't some dog on the internet pretending to be him.
This was him in person.
I touched his hand, shook his hand,
and he was made of flesh and bones and blood.
So that is a good anchor point.
to establish a web of trust.
And I would encourage us actually to do this more in Nostra.
We don't really do it that much.
When we meet at a conference,
there should be a cool app that you can scan someone else's public key
and get him to verify that, yes, this is actually me.
And we could make a special type of Nostra event
that attests that, hey, I've met this guy in person.
Maybe even the location or the context
or some other metadata that he would want to reveal.
but this type of connection can then be interpreted.
And the good thing is first of all,
we have an open playing field
in what type of data do we create?
Like how exactly does this attestation look like?
Is it just a following list?
That's how most people do it right now.
It could be much more nuanced than that.
But then also the question is
how do we interpret all of these attestation events
and display the result to the user?
And for this algorithm, there's also a bunch of choice.
You can run a different algorithm over the same set of data
and get vastly different results.
And this means that ultimately we have competition
of many different ways that we could approach this topic
and many developers working on better solutions
and you as the end user will just use an app
that implements one of them and it either works or it doesn't.
And you can move on to another better app if you find one.
vertex is one easy web of trust algorithm that we currently have implemented it uses a similar
algorithm to google's page rank as they originally started out with you know these web of trust
algorithms are quite simple if you actually look at them they're not rocket science and they kind
of work you know they and there's a bunch of existing research here that that we can apply
so this is really not that much of an issue but what it enables us is as you say you can find
solutions or services that your friends recommend.
A perfect one is KashQ, right?
This eCache system,
where in KashQ.me,
you can click a button and you see
what are all of the available mints
that I could connect to.
Because Noster mints announce themselves to the network.
And then also you can see,
do any of my friends leave a recommendation
for any of these mints?
And now you can filter it.
And at the top of the list, you will see the mint that most of your friends have given a positive review.
And then, again, at least we're in the same boat together when it sinks and the guy rug pulls us.
But that is a nice assurance to have.
Equally with CoinJoin coordinators, right?
In Wasabi Wallet, their now new CoinJoin coordinators announced themselves on the Nostra network with a new event kind number that clearly says, hey, this is a CoinJoin coordination announcement.
There's the name of the server, the URL where you can reach them,
and then you can get the fees, et cetera, that they're charging.
And you can display that in an app so that users just click
and it automatically connects them to this coordinator.
And anyone can build these types of interfaces.
So that's the cool thing.
The wallet developer doesn't have to add these features.
We can have a dedicated client optimized for this type of review process,
and the user just uses two apps.
That's not a big of a deal.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Vitor Pamplona
developed trusted assertions, NIP85,
which is a way of delivering web of trust scores.
Right now, how they're computed
can be this open,
some kind of open source algorithm.
I'm not sure Vertex is open source,
but you can have a,
in an ideal world,
you want an algorithm that's fully transparent
and configurable, right?
You can just use one signal
to calculate a web of trust score,
and that could just be followers.
Or you could add multiple signals, economic signals,
like zaps, like replies to posts,
if you're trying to look at who's a good person to follow.
Or for music, it'll be a slightly different contextual set of signals.
For food, restaurant recommendations, it's a different context,
a different set.
So it's configurable, it's personalized to each individual user,
it's contextualized within a given user, right?
Because your web of trust for music recommendations will likely be very different from your web of trust for coin joint coordinator recommendations, right?
So I think we, and then you have a pretty cool and open delivery mechanism.
It's not behind an API.
It's a Nostra event, NIP85.
I can't remember the kind number, right?
And you just need a client that can digest that.
and then you have an open and transparent view
from a user's perspective
for how your content gets filtered
and you get to choose it.
No one chooses that for you.
Yeah.
And one of the other main ways
that we get notified about useful information
is that a friend sends it to us in a private message.
And so this is one of the other problems
that we need to solve, how do we actually talk to our friends?
That's very important.
And it's not just friends and family.
It's other developers, people working on your projects,
colleagues, friends in spirit and people to talk to.
And that is an important need to satisfy.
With the identity system of Noster
and the censorship resistance that the relays give us,
but in addition to that secure solid unbreakable encryption and encryption in a way that it doesn't
only work for two people but it works for 2 000 people as well because some groups get really big
and and we require the collaboration of a large amount of people and and so having a secure way
for them to talk privately using nostril rails is super important and so a good app to install for
this is white noise you can get it on zap store as well and this is a chat app kind of like signal
or telegram but you don't have to log in with a phone number you can just create a new nostor
private key or log in with your existing one and then start chatting to others and it uses
your your key and and your following list so you will see all of the friends that you have and you
can just write them and it uses nostril relays to send the messages reliably either you can use
public relays like you know primal damos etc or you can run your own relay if you would like
in the future we could even connect directly to the citrine relay that is running on your phone
right so you send direct peer-to-peer messages via the tor network directly from one phone to
the other. So all of this is possible in the future. And the cool thing is that White Noise
is not just a standalone application, but this is actually a protocol called Marmot, which brings
together Noster and Blossom and MLS, this encryption scheme, to have a bundle of tools that others can
use to create applications that send private messages and hopefully in a way that it's all
interoperable So primal users can create a group with another Damos user and an Amethyst user and a White Noise user and they can now send and receive messages in this group together even though that every one of them uses a different application
And that means not only that users have the ultimate choice
in a hopefully large amount of different apps,
but even better that if there is no app that you would like
that does the one thing that you would really like it to do,
then you can just create your own one, right?
and make an app that is exactly how you like it,
maybe themed to your community
and you have a dedicated private chat app
for your church community or whatever it is.
So this is quite powerful.
And also it allows that developers of existing applications
can just make an upgrade to their app
and all of a sudden people can chat with people
outside their applications.
And so this is going to be quite nice
when big clients like Primal and Damos, et cetera,
are finally going to add.
So Max, I think it'll be helpful to clarify this for folks.
And we have Condelorian and a couple of others
in the Zap stream chat asking for a clarification here
because when the Marmot announcement came out,
some people were confused, which is,
hey, I thought White Noise,
you were working on White Noise,
what is this Marmot business?
and since you're
deeply involved
in our project, Max
if you could help clarify
so Marmot is the
protocol which
you mentioned MLS, Blossom
Noster Relays and so on
and then white noise is the reference implementation
can there be other reference
implementations and if this messaging
comes to a primal for instance
they would be integrating
the Marmot protocol, right?
They wouldn't be integrating white noise.
So, you know, these types of slightly confusing questions,
it would be super helpful if you can clarify that.
Yeah, that's always a bit tricky in the nuances, right?
But you basically hit the nail on the head.
So there is the Marmot protocol,
which is a combination of three other protocols, right?
Noster, Blossom, and MLS.
And this protocol is implemented in a library
called the Marmot Developer Kit, right?
written in Rust, as well as the Marmot TypeScript library as well.
And now people can use this library to add to their chat app and make it work.
So originally, this whole quest started not because we thought that,
hey, we need another chat messenger.
That's really the one thing that's missing is a new chat app.
Because there are like a million chat apps already.
But what we realized is that's missing
is that the Noster protocol suite
and all of the collection of protocols
that we have in Noster,
none of them really address group messaging
in a private setting.
And we really need that.
A lot of good use cases open up
if we would have that tool in our toolbox.
So it was from the beginning the goal
to create a protocol
that all the Noster developers can use.
And, well, how do you best create a protocol?
By actually working on an app that tries to implement that protocol.
Because nothing beats actually doing it.
And it's even best if you don't just work on one library,
one implementation of this protocol, but even two of them.
Recently, we started work on this TypeScript implementation.
And the guys working on it instantly found a bunch of bugs in our Rust implementation.
simply because, you know, things are hard.
Sometimes if a fresh pair of eyes looks over a problem,
they will see a bunch of ways of how to solve it better.
And that's exactly what happened here.
And hopefully we can continue this a couple times,
that every time a new person is implementing the protocol,
they will see ways of making it better.
And so gradually we will have a solid, holistic set of protocols
that fully encompass all of the use cases needed for secure private messaging.
Because it's more than just one thing.
It's like 20 different sub-problems that need to be addressed.
And this is also why we moved away from using the Nostra NIP repo and standardization body.
Because it's not just one standalone thing.
We already have now, I think, six different protocol documents that each cover different areas of it.
And so it's slowly turning into a small book of standardization text.
And having that separated and clearly modularly defined and do one thing and do it well, that's the philosophy that we're going for here.
So if you talk about the average NOSTA user who might not be super technical, I mean, look, anyone who's on NOSTA is semi-technical for sure, right?
But maybe they don't understand the intricacies of protocol design.
And they're like, look, I don't want to use NOSTA DMs because they're horrible for privacy.
I don't want to use Telegram.
I don't want to use Signal.
I want something on Nostra that just works, right?
That gives me close to a Telegram-like user experience
for my group chats.
When can I expect it?
And is White Noise what that's going to be
or is it going to be something else?
Yeah, hopefully White Noise will be one of the apps
that you could choose here.
And hopefully there will be many that are all good enough.
But ultimately, White Noise will probably be
the first one to get there
just because we've been working on it for a long time.
And it is a decent chunk of work.
But yeah, ultimately for you,
it will just be installing the app,
logging in and messaging your friends and that's it.
So when is that ready?
You can download it right now.
In fact, we're just now about to cut a new release,
version 0.2.0.
So it's slowly starting to feel like an actually usable app.
This next release or newest release comes with notifications,
which work quite well on Android, actually,
without having any third-party server involved, which is great.
And also the ability to send images.
But there are so many things still missing.
You can't send voice messages.
You still cannot kick people out of a group or delete them.
The whole administration workflow of a group,
to have group admins and selective permissions and so on.
and you know million and one little user experience hiccups where the white space is not great and
and i don't know press duration is not optimized small animations are are missing we actually do
want to re or overhaul and further improve the user experience entirely so there's so many so
many things to do that yeah if you are expecting a polished product wait another half a year or a
year if you're willing to tolerate a bit of a an ugly app that doesn't do all the things it should
yet and you want to experiment and give us feedback then yeah check it out it it works like
it sends messages back and forth and they are very well encrypted and yeah i mean i wouldn't put
like don't don't put your life into it yet like if if your life depends on the security
and deliverability of these messages then please wait because it's hard to build software that
actually can protect lives yeah so if a if a dhamus or a primal or noster or amethyst said okay
you know what we we don't want to do nipple for dms we don't want to do nip 17 isn't that great
either, the gift wrap stuff. I think it's Nip 70.
Maybe I'm mixing the numbers up.
So let's, I'm ready.
My body is ready for
incorporating
really proper privacy into
my DMs. They can then go
to the Marmot protocol, look at the documentation
and then
build it themselves into their
DM
capability in their
app, correct? Exactly.
And what they don't have to implement is all of the craziness of how do we come up with private keys?
How do we encrypt stuff?
How do we kick people out of the group?
All of these scary things are first of all handled in the MLS implementation itself.
And then even further handled and nostrified by our Marmot developer kit library.
And so for the end developer, it's like, hey, create a group, you know, title this, description this.
and you send that and the group is done.
And then, okay, add a person to the group
and that's the end part of the person you want to add
and done, he gets added by the magic black box
in the background.
And send a message, send a reaction, whatever.
All of these functions should be very easy,
developer friendly.
So you really don't have to worry about
the crazy encryption and other things.
You just worry about building a cool user interface
and a cool user experience for an awesome product.
And the encryption and message delivery
just gets delivered to you with batteries included.
Great.
All right, so I know we're at the 90-minute mark, Max.
I'll give you one more Cypherpunk project
that has got me super excited.
And in fact, it's something you hinted about
and when we were at a friend's place in Paraguay
like last month, hanging out,
and you said, oh, someone might be building
this onion-routed postage delivery thing.
And I said, this sounds incredible.
But I don't think you knew who it was.
You just heard it on the grapevine.
By complete coincidence, I was at Nosterville
a small NOSTA gathering at Bitcoin Park
a week or two ago
and I bumped into Shadrach
and I was saying, hey
we were just exchanging ideas
about
different NOSTA projects we thought were cool
and I'd mentioned
that you told me about this
this onion routed
courier service
and he said, wait a second, I'm the one building that
so I thought
that was pretty funny
but all of that to say
A to B
that Shadrach and I think a couple of others
are building is
exactly the kind of
you know, cypherpunk meets
meets space
reality, like think about it
onion routed physical
male, how cool is
that?
Yeah, absolutely
and you know, these are the projects
where I wish I wouldn't
work on the money but could
work on other stuff
because there's so many cool projects like that
that really need to be built
like the problem of securely and reliably
delivering
a package from A to B
securely privately is hard it's a really really hard problem but you know humans have been doing
this since forever and the postal service has been a decentralized natural emergence since forever
and now with modern day tooling and tamper evidence and incentive systems and smart contracts etc
If someone really sits down and goes through this problem structurally and builds an architecture for a system and an app that implements that, it should be doable nowadays.
And having a reliable, secure transportation medium for goods and persons is great.
We very much need that.
yeah i mean there is no reason to apart from the security of the of the transfer itself
is there really a need for a buyer to disclose their address to the seller
i mean it's a transaction why expose that element of their private life to a complete stranger when
they don't have to yeah i mean if like if if you're buying a bed and it needs to be installed
then sure, you probably have to invite that entrepreneur into your bedroom.
But if it's not that, then you can just get the product delivered a bit outside of where you are.
And next time you're walking out in the park, you make a stop and pick up the package.
There's no need for the merchant or that shipping provider to know where exactly you sleep.
and the fact that so many merchants know where we sleep
is just weird.
Like, first of all, why do they care?
And then why do so many people tell them?
And I guess it's just because it's the default, right?
Like on Amazon, they just ask you,
hey, where do you live?
And you put it in and magic packages arrive
and it's easier than having to walk across the block every time.
Yeah, but it would be great
if a more secure, more private alternative
would be easily and affordably available.
And I think we can build that.
Oh, it is being built.
Shadrach is doing it.
He's a pioneer.
Max, anything we've missed?
Any big one, super exciting project
that we didn't talk about?
There's like about a hundred that we've missed, brother.
so this is so hard to to pick the right ones um which is a cool one i guess we could talk about
arcade uh that's that's a really fun one it's a it's a new way of sending bitcoin back and forth
really fast and and cheap and in a way that's extremely programmable like the most programmable
way of sending Bitcoin basically where you could do a bunch of smart contracts you know tools like
this would probably be quite interesting for for example A to B to have some financial smart
contract that takes a bunch of conditions to be unlocked such that people who deliver a package
cannot run away with the money or at least get a financial punishment if they do and
And yeah, so this is the original Arcade or Arc paper
was actually inspired by the Wabi Sabi coin join engine.
And basically the realization is that with some tweaks to the script,
like the spending condition that we're using on the blockchain,
we can have basically a coin join where you can enter
and then you can transact off chain, so to say.
and then just at a later point in time leave this pool.
And this has not just great privacy potential but also great scalability potential Because not everyone needs to verify every transaction that you making Just some service provider needs to do that
And that has quite good potential.
So the people working on these projects are quite solid
and they have a cool roadmap
for delivering a nice product with good privacy.
And so this would, for example,
make it much easier to receive payments on Noster while you're offline.
And you could receive self-custodially money while your phone is offline
and you only have the private key on the phone and nothing else.
And so these types of use cases can be done.
It could behave a little bit like eCash, also in the user experience,
but it does have that big benefit of even if everyone else is malicious
and tries to steal your money, they can't.
and you can still always get your money back.
It might take you some time
and it might cost you some money,
but you will get your money back.
And that is a really reassuring guarantee,
not only for the users and the developers
on a technical level,
but also on a legal level.
Like you wouldn't want to be operating a service
where you can easily take away the money of the users.
That just opens you up to a pain of trouble in the future.
So it's not strictly self-custodial.
It doesn't fit the very narrow and tight definition of self-custody.
But for all intents and purposes, it is, right?
It's because of the synthetic nature of eventually being able to recover your funds
and no one else being able to access them or take them away.
Yeah, it's quite similar as Lightning in some aspects of you're no longer alone, right?
You have control over UTXO where other people have a spending condition as well.
So this means you will have to collaborate.
And if you do collaborate with an honest peer, everything will go super fast and super smooth.
But if any one of you tries to steal or do some shenanigans, then you can prove that.
And there is some remedy where either you actually steal all of the money that the attacker has.
that's kind of lightning, or you just gradually prove who exactly owns how much in this ARK second
layer. So yes, slightly different, but ultimately, even if you're all by yourself and you just have
your private key and a computer and internet connection, then you can still get your money out.
Even if that counterparty that you opened the channel with or the ARK service provider,
even if those counterparties become malicious,
you're still secure, minus fees.
I feel like, Max, for ARK,
it needs a whole show just for itself,
probably a two-hour show,
just to break everything down and understand it.
Because, I mean, you didn't even mention VTXOs.
There's a whole rabbit hole there with our arcade, I should say.
Well, so, all right, Max, I think, you know,
we're in the hour and 40 minute mark.
Probably could go on for another two hours and 40 minutes
on some of these topics, but I know it's getting late for you.
So anything, any final thoughts before we wrap up?
Yeah, I think it's sometimes cool to reflect
and just see how far the cypherpunks have come.
If you read the early mailing list posts,
you know the the the ideas that they had you know they were quite big and impressive for the time but
if you now look back at it they so underestimated of how far we could take these ideas and especially
now with with bitcoin and nostr taking this into hyperdrive like the tools that we can build is just astonishing And that means you as an end user
are living in the best time ever
when it comes to having secure, reliable tools
of protection and defense and privacy.
You can really live a very, very secure life
if you want to go down that rabbit hole.
And on the other hand,
building these technologies has never been more fun and more rewarding,
not just socially, but also financially,
considering the massive success of Bitcoin
and what that enabled in second and third order effects.
So when you are convinced that freedom is better than slavery
and that technologies are essential in establishing
whether you are in freedom or you are in slavery.
And you want to have fun hanging out with plebs
and building the future?
Then join us building Freedom Tech.
The importance of the project is so obvious
and the number of people working on it
is also so obviously not big enough.
So we're not getting bored here.
The problems are amazing.
the people are amazing you can you can make a good living with just helping people liberate
themselves and that's spiritually rewarding as well so very much consider to just pick up the
shovel and and start building and you know build the tools that you want to see like the apps that
you use whatever they are find out how you can make them better and find out who's building on
them and and and help them out right be be useful in whatever shape you can and that's different for
everyone but that's a that's a good step you know go through your apps go through the the list of
apps and see which applications are super important to you and and without them you would have a less
free life and then you know make it better and you don't even have to bug the developers necessarily
because they're busy too.
You can just tell people,
be part of the decentralized underground marketing army
that does user support and education and onboarding.
And if you find out that five of your friends
have this one common problem,
then maybe tell the developers that,
hey, I've done some user research
and this is a problem that many people stumble upon
and I thought about it
and maybe this is a good solution on how to improve it.
What do you think?
these types of
feedbacks and support
is really really helpful
when you're deep down the rabbit hole of actually
building it you often don't see
the way that a fresh user sees
the app and so that's
one of the many easy services
that anyone can provide
so there really isn't any excuse
hell you know if Avi can start
a podcast and
sing us a gospel
every week
then you can do something as well.
It is good to reflect, Max,
because sometimes it's easy to get caught up
in the here and now and say,
oh, Nostra is in a bear market.
Everyone's talking about paper Bitcoin.
They're arguing about call versus not.
The conversation's gone down the toilet.
But look at where we were in December of 2022.
right around the time most of us,
maybe you might have been there earlier, Max,
but a lot of us came in that wave of December 2022
where we could barely get threads to work, right?
You reply to someone,
it wouldn't show up in the right thread.
And now here we are complaining
that music curation tools are not up to scratch right We come a long way Yeah Yeah And then extrapolate that out
Think where we could be in five years
if we all do as much as possible
to build amazing things.
Like, that's like a goosebump thing
to meditate on for a while.
Yeah.
But I think the important thing is
there is a risk, right,
that with this whole paper Bitcoin business
and people are getting complacent.
And I think enough people need to realize
that there's so much fun
in building these cool new freedom tech things.
Paper Bitcoin isn't fun.
What are you doing?
You're sitting on some synthetic contract
hoping the president says the right thing
so that your fiat value goes up.
instead you could join us
and build something really cool
that makes the world a better place
so
yeah
the choice is yours
which way, Maston men
indeed
well Max, appreciate you coming
back to the show
always love these conversations with you
and I'm sure we'll
have you back soon
are you going to be at Bitfest by any chance?
in Manchester?
No, unfortunately not.
I thought that there would just be too much sun in Manchester.
I would get sunburned, so better not.
There is a whole Nostraday.
They're calling it Nostraday.
Yes, that's great.
It promises to be fun.
All right, well, I'm sure I will see you at some point.
Our paths always end up crossing
at some remote point on this planet
multiple times a year.
Always somewhere else, but always in good spirit.
And I must say, I really enjoyed the audio-only recording session.
It's much more comfy and familiar to talk with,
and you get some more food for thought for the imagination.
I'm imagining you sitting by the fire with a cigar and a good red wine.
It's very nice.
Very good to chat with you again, my friend.
absolutely Max
thank you again
my best to Elena
and folks
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our mics warm and this podcast ad free until next week and also yes don't forget
to to check out finding home because that is a lovely show i really enjoyed the proc edition
actually that's yes and uh well thank you for that max uh do check out finding home
the paraguay episode should be coming out in about a month or so um i think there might be
a few seconds of you in a frame
in that episode, Max.
That was quite a
funny backstory of me with
some friends walking into a restaurant
and all of a sudden there's
Avi literally shooting
for the
movie with
Jan. So that was a
small world's moment. And I think
it was the first time I saw you while I was in Paraguay
there. So it was a perfect surprise.
Yeah, and you said, come on and join us. And I had to
pointed to the camera and I said we're in the middle of a shoot.
Yeah, that was funny.
Excellent.
Well, thank you, Max, and thank you, folks.
Goodbye.
Have a good one. Bye-bye.