The signal is here.
This is Blood Channel Radio.
Welcome, gentle pioneers, to the Lightning-Laced Airwaves.
Today is Friday the 13th of March, and it is episode 155 of Plebchain Radio,
and we have a fun one for you today.
UTXO, the webmaster, returns to the show,
and we're going to talk about WISP, his new NOSTA client,
His replacement for Nostaband and much, much more.
If you are hearing my voice right now on Spotify or Apple,
thank you for listening, but also welcome to the legacy feed.
It's a reliable signal, but it's read-only.
Over here on Fountain and Nostar, the frequency is open.
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If you want to move from passive listener to active participant, come join the signal on the V4V side.
Now, let's set the table for the final word.
We have an executive producer for this episode, as you will hear later in the show.
but the EP chair for next week is currently empty.
As always, the top booster secures the title and the right to close out the show.
The rules of the board are simple.
Ratify or rectify.
In a few minutes, I'm going to lay out the sermon.
If the message resonates, boost in to ratify it.
Add your context and back it up.
If I miss the mark, boost in to rectify it and set the record straight.
The board is in session and the top supporter gets the mic.
Let's get into it.
The sermon is, ask not for whom the bell tolls.
We celebrate the dismantling of the old gates.
We rejoice that the traditional tollbooths have been burned to the ground.
In our new world, anyone can plug in, broadcast and build without seeking a blessing from a centralized authority.
We often equate this open door with an effortless ascent.
We confuse the absence of a warden with the guarantee of a thriving kingdom.
A permissionless environment removes artificial barriers while retaining the fundamental laws of gravity.
The terrain remains exceptionally rugged.
stepping into a sovereign network means accepting a blank canvas alongside a set of cryptographic
tools the network provides the immutable rails yet it'll never write your code orchestrate your
film or synthesize your ideas into a compelling narrative the burden of creation rests entirely
upon the individual the curtain is up you are now required to have something genuinely valuable to
say. A system devoid of gatekeepers ruthlessly filters for competence. The old world offered
corporate ladders to climb, credentials to hide behind, and managers to appease. This new paradigm
strips away the bureaucracy and measures your output entirely by its raw utility and its resonant
truth. You must forge your own discipline in the quiet hours. You have to do the unglamorous work
of refining your craft and deploying your creative energy with absolute precision. Excellence becomes
the only remaining metric. Many expect immediate validation because fiat algorithms have conditioned
us to crave sudden engineered engagement. Sovereign networks operate on a significantly longer time
horizon. Building a true web of trust requires years of consistent and reliable action. Establishing
a meaningful reputation demands immense patience and a steadfast commitment to the mission.
You are planting seeds in a digital soil that reward deep roots far more than sudden fleeting
blooms. The individuals who survive here are the ones who learn to love the slow, deliberate process
of accumulation. The friction we experience is a necessary proving ground for the builders and
the artists alike. We're laying the foundation for a parallel economy and a sovereign culture.
The magnitude of responsibility requires a hardened spirit. We must welcome the challenges
that forge our competence and test our resolve. The beauty of the open path lies in its brutal
honesty. You carry the full responsibility for your own ascent. Embrace the gravity of the
undertaking. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, for it tolls for you. And joining me today is a man
who knows a thing or two about tolling bells. UTXO, the webmaster. Welcome back to Plec Chain Radio.
Thanks for having me, Avi. It's great to be here again, and nice to see you've upgraded the setup
since the last time I was here. Yeah, we're not on Nostan S anymore. I think you were on Nostan
Nostra last time, weren't you? Yeah, or Corny Chat, or I'm not sure. Probably Nostra, yeah.
It was probably Nostra Ness. I mean, definitely Nostra Ness, but that's what we were on Nostra Ness,
and now it's Riverside, streaming to Zap.Stream. So UTXO, you know, you're an interesting character
because you have an, well, I say interesting, you have an interesting history with Nostra,
which is you have these periods where you are ever-present, posting, memeing, you name it, building, and then you disappear.
You disappear for months, and then you suddenly come back.
So you are now in one such phase where after a period of, I don't know, being in the shadows for a while, you're back at it.
you're one of the top posters as i was seeing someone someone posted a leaderboard recently and
you're one of the top posters uh in the last few days uh what you've been up to man i know it's
been like a year and a half or so since you were last on the show um yeah thanks for uh for shaming
me there yeah that i think it was uh uh will will put out yeah the top poster i had like 800 posts
in two weeks i was just that's just sad man um yeah but uh yeah i go through i do go through
cycles and i definitely don't like bull markets that much man like when everyone's just like
posting about the price and oh my god it's going up so much like oh i don't i don't like it um
but it is it's just how i build man i get like all in on things i get like addicted compelled to just
like work on a project and sometimes it's nostor sometimes it's my own business and then i need to
take a break from nostor but i ain't going anywhere man good to hear man and i gotta say
that was probably one of the worst bull markets of all time i'm oh i say all time it's my third
that i've experienced and it was really bad because i feel like we have the worst of the
worst people crawl out of the woodwork posting their price things and you know all this uh
treasury company stuff that came out um and these people who were pretending to be bitcoiners but
were actually shit corners in disguise right the treasury companies gave them the fig leaf of uh
of protection saying oh what are you talking about of course it's bitcoin
receipts and we're doing bitcoin stuff and i did not enjoy it yeah completely agree man it's oh god
it was like all just driven by like governments and treasuries and wall street and preferred shares
and all just fuck off man holy crap that was ugly and you know hopefully hopefully people are
getting the picture now you know you can't just like hang your hat with some politician expect
don't pump your bags. That's not how this works. We're trying to build money here.
Yeah. And frankly, I was getting pretty uncomfortable with that,
partly because of exactly what you said, which is you can never trust a politician.
But more than that, there's the other side of it, which I was worried about,
which is if you do, as Bitcoiners, get full-throated mainstream adoption amongst Wall Street,
amongst all the politicians, then we stop being a dissident money at that point.
And I don't think Bitcoin survives if it's not a dissident money.
Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, nobody can stop the politicians from getting in.
I think the main thing to remember is that all money, Bitcoin included, but maybe especially,
is a network effect technology, right?
So if we're not encouraging people to actually adopt the true technology that's behind this,
then it won't grow.
It is not written in the stone that this is going to happen.
And if everyone's like, oh, I don't need to learn about money.
I can just buy my ETF or buy MSTR.
That is not going to work in the long run.
Maybe that will work for one cycle, but that's not going to bring true adoption.
and what everyone's like, at least I don't know what everybody wants anymore,
but at least for my time, the Bitcoiners wanted Bitcoin to be money.
So, yeah, I don't know.
That vision in the community seems to sort of be fading, which is a little sad.
Yeah, it is.
I've noticed that too, right?
That cypherpunk ethos is heavily diminished, if not gone.
I mean, it's like there are a handful of people who actually give a crap about privacy, no KYC, peer-to-peer.
Everyone's readily embraced intermediaries.
They've embraced these proxies.
I mean, it's too much of a strategy even to call these ETFs and treasuries proxies for Bitcoin.
They're not Bitcoin, period.
They have almost nothing to do with Bitcoin.
and you'll have as much luck trying to zap an austenote with micro strategy stock as you will
trying to zap it with gold right it's it has um it it has almost nothing to do with bitcoin
yeah it it totally it's completely disconnected like who who even knows like what claims or where
i mean yeah i don't know it's just a clusterfuck man so i like just my on-chain bitcoin i'm a
simple guy, man. I just like my Bitcoin and my Sparrow wallet and that's it, man.
Yeah. Noster wasn't entirely immune to the bull market blues. It wasn't as wretched as X was.
X was completely taken over by the shills, right? The suits. Noster, while it didn't go that extreme,
wasn't entirely immune. There were people talking about this stuff, right? The feed was that. And it
didn't feel like, um, there is a bull market. How many bull markets have you experienced UTXO?
Um, well, I got in at the end of the 2017 bull run, like I bought the top of 2017. So however
long that is. Yeah. I mean, I was around that period as well. If you maybe just early 2017,
when it was beginning with ICOs and all that stuff as well, late 2016.
But there is a certain kind of euphoria that's there when the price is ripping.
Yes, you get the deranged people coming out of the woodwork,
but there is also a nice euphoria, which is there,
which I certainly experienced then and in 20, whatever that was,
the post-COVID bump, right?
which was, it did not feel that way this time around.
I don't know, it felt dirty.
And the bear market that's followed
has been one of complete and abject apathy
from what I've seen, right?
The 2022 bear market,
I felt like there was a lot of hope.
People were celebrating the FTX debacle
and they were like, okay, finally we get to clean up
and a lot of really cool stuff,
including Nostra by the way got built in that in that 2020 you know from that bottom of 2022 I don know I don get that feeling yet over here And I don know if you heading there
What are your thoughts? I mean, look, like when it comes to trading, what the price is going to do,
I'm like complete new, but just my general sense is like, we didn't get any sort of event that
we would normally get, I suppose, with like bottoms. And then I don't know, the stock market
seems pretty shaky to me, especially with all this like war bullshit going on. So I don't know,
I think if if stocks take a huge dump, then it's probably going to take Bitcoin with it.
That would be my guess. But I, I have no idea. But yeah, I mean, just like my general sense,
looking at all the cycles, like at least 2017. And I'll admit it, like back then,
I was like shit coining. I didn't really know it just everything seemed really exciting.
and new technology and new blockchains and you know it was the technology was super exciting and
then in 2021 it was like all right the end of the world is actually happening um and bitcoin is going
up so maybe it's actually true but this time it was like the president launched a shit coin like
yay oh the the president is coming to the conference oh like fuck my life man it was
it was not even the same there's no like there's no real excitement there i don't know i i just
really don't get excited about politicians i don't know call me crazy yeah all right let's talk about
um since you've re-emerged when was that like three or four months back um you've uh you've
been pumping out things. So you recently launched Wisp, an Android client, and you're teasing a
replacement to Nostaband, a much needed replacement, I would say. Let's start with Wisp.
What, I mean, you're an Android user. You've got Amethyst, you've got Primal Android,
you've got a few other options on Android. What made you say, you know what, I actually need to
build something um well probably the biggest thing and i'm totally not going to turn this
into like let's poop on all the client fest i'm just going to talk about from the perspective of
like what i want and what my vision for nostr is and of course like everybody doesn't have to follow
it um but i think most people probably know me on nostr from working on the relays right like
Haven relay, Watt relay, all that kind of stuff. So I was really heavy into relays and like people
hosting their own relays and having cool like algorithmic relay feeds. So I worked on that for
like years, I would say, you know, like maybe I disappear for a couple of months taking a break.
But I mean, that was the big thing I was working on. And like basically no clients adopted it,
you know, like I didn't see very much client innovation at all in terms of like, let's say
doing inbox outbox like having any kind of feed that's not chronological like chronological is
great i'm not saying we should not have that but i mean there's a reason why every single social
media out there doesn't use uh feeds like that right um that's because users want algorithms
and rankings and stuff like that so i i put so much work into it and i even i got a grant from
open stats for a couple of months to work on algor relay and stuff and then like no clients
really adopted it and still no clients were doing outbox so i don't know i just got really tired of
it um but i couldn't i didn't have like the front end skills to like make a really beautiful client
i could have maybe made the engine and stuff for it but i couldn't have actually made it beautiful
and nice um but now with like ai coming along it really helps sort of uh close the gap there
so I mean just the big things to take away the things that I wanted and I think are really
necessary for Noster is to do the outbox model which means that it doesn't matter what relay you
post to the client can find it like if if Avi likes to post to his own relay because he got
banned from the big one I should still be able to see Avi's notes like that's the whole point of
Noster and virtually like none of the clients implemented it correctly so that always like
really pissed me off um and then just other little things like not having gif keyboards like we didn't
have gif keyboards for like two years it took me 15 minutes to build that in my client you know why
do we have to wait years for it um yeah so it was basically just that you know i just wanted to build
the client that worked exactly how i wanted it and we're getting pretty damn close with wisp i would
say so again we don't have to single out specific clients here right it's this is not about that
It's about what you're building.
But I am curious to know,
and the last time you were here on the show,
UTX, you were talking about Haven, right?
And you were talking about the three different relay types that you had.
Why do you think it is that none of the clients ended up adopting it?
What is the pull the clients have to the existing model of relays?
um i i truly i truly don't have an answer for that because it's not it's not hard to do the
inbox outbox model like maybe it seemed like that would be difficult or maybe it would be too slow
like nostrils i mean that's another thing with ux like nostril like seems so broken all the time
like slow and broken so maybe they thought it would be even slower and even more broken but i
I hope people see with Wisp,
but it actually makes it go faster.
But yeah, I really don't know, Avi.
I don't have an answer for you on that.
Maybe they just didn't think it was an important feature
or, you know, end of the day,
we don't have that many users.
So, and we don't have a problem of relays banning people.
So it's not like, quote unquote,
maybe necessary to be able to index all small relays
and maybe other things are important.
But I mean, I don't know.
I couldn't tell you, man.
Yeah, I do wonder because in,
you say what you will about the legacy social media world, right?
There is a lot of these companies at least have the economic,
you know, hand on the throat of,
look, if I make my customers unhappy,
then they'll go to the other one, right?
They'll leave Facebook and they'll go to whatever.
Twitter or they'll leave Twitter and they'll go to, what are the other ones?
LinkedIn?
Who knows?
Anyway, but the point is that there is that sort of simmering fear that's there of the
fear of attrition.
And I wonder if that, because it doesn't seem like NOSTA clients have that, right?
Because the gift keyboard is a great example, which you brought up.
A lot of people have asked for it.
And a lot of clients have not implemented it.
Some saying it's not a priority.
Others have said, well, how can you have a decentralized GIF keyboard?
I don't want to use a centralized service for GIFs.
I don't think either of those two pushbacks made any sense to me.
First of all, there was a lot of demand for GIF keyboards.
Secondly, if you're making the decentralization arguments, I mean, come on.
We're talking about cartoons of frogs here, right?
It's okay.
It's okay to pull from a centralized repository for something like that.
It does not, that does not need to pass the purity test, I don't think.
So, you know, there was a lot of the clients were unresponsive to that.
Ironically, not ironically, but interestingly, UTXO, just today Primal launched 3.0 on TestFlight,
and they finally introduced the GIF keyboard.
and I'm talking about as an iOS user
until now, Nostur, shout out Fabian
he had the GIF keyboard over a year and a half ago
but that was the only one
and I think as of today Primal is the next one on iOS at least
to offer a GIF keyboard
so that's one example of clients generally being unresponsive
to customer requests
and then from what you're saying
It's not a particularly complicated switch to move to the outbox model.
And yet clients haven't done it.
Is it because there is no economic cost to attrition in Noster?
I mean, there is an element of that.
I mean, like, look, Noster, I think everybody who's on Noster can tell that it's not really growing, right?
um but you know all the grants still keep flowing so it's like you know all these users are leaving
and we don't have a good ux but everybody makes the same money like maybe there's a
problem there i i don't know because yeah i mean they're either without the grants like the client
developers are not making any money like the donations are lol um so yeah i mean that could
be it but i don't i don't really think that that is it i don't know i think a big part of it just
generally is also just bitcoiners like i can't tell you how many bitcoin like little little
bicker arguments i get into on austere just like little sly comments about how there's nothing wrong
with like the lightning ux like setting up a lightning node like oh that's so easy like bro
no it's not like i i think bitcoiners are so accustomed to like really complicated ux that
they don't see the problems on Noster. They think everything is just fine, but they don't,
they don't like have good taste for slick and easy UX. You know, that's, I think that might
be part of it as well. You know, just complacency with sort of janky UX.
In fact, actually, it's a good point, UTX. So it might be even more perverse than that.
and what I mean by that is
there could be BitCorners
that are so hardened
by using
by basically garbage UX
it's almost as if a good UX
is a sign of selling out
like oh it's like
I'm going to show up in dirty jeans
and you know
a t-shirt I haven't showered for a week
and you know I haven't
trimmed my beard in two weeks
it's like yeah because that's what
cypherpunks do right
We need to look like we slept under a bridge for a week.
And I think the same sort of goes with UX as well.
It needs to look like it was something from the 1980s.
And then we've somehow passed the test of it being a worthwhile app.
I wonder if it's as perverse as that.
I mean, I hope not.
I hope we're not trying to go out of our way to look bad.
I don't think that is the case, but it's just...
Yeah, like Nofter, it is hard to have a nice decentralized way of doing things.
That's, for example, why Primal went with a cache
and why their search is better than most clients.
Because it's really hard to actually pull from 90 different relays
and rank them all and stuff.
So there are trade-offs to UX.
but yeah i couldn't uh i couldn't tell you why it's not improving because i i really feel like
it should be improving a lot and at least on the android side like i didn't really see that
anything i saw like degrading of ux over time well part of it could be
um if you look at some of these centralized platforms like facebook twitter whatever right
one advantage they have is they have large pools of capital primarily because of the centralization
so they can coordinate design teams and you have a boss who tells you okay you're following here
are the orders here's the plan here's what we're building go and build it right now there's several
problems a whole set of problems that come with that centralization but one i think we have to
admit one good thing that comes out of it is the ability to coordinate and execute on a plan,
which gets infinitely more challenging in our world of messy and rough consensus and
developers with strong opinions, strong and deferring opinions on just about every topic.
Like, so how do you get coordination to do something as simple as figure out what the hell the end user wants and giving that to them?
Oh, yeah, you got the good questions.
I don't have the answers, man.
Like, yeah, we're like four, five years into Nostra now, and we still have clients using like NIPO4 DMs.
Like, we can't even agree on that.
Now we have new protocols coming out.
Like NIP17 wasn't good enough.
now we doing the Marmot or the white noise or whatever And then are half the clients going to adopt that And then is a new one going to come out like i don know um hey man don knock nipple for i sent you my signal
handle on nipple for so that we could coordinate this uh the show that's that is true it is useful
for getting off of nostr dms and onto a real dm app it is useful at that i will give you that
no but uh but you're right i mean it's just it's amazing to me that there are clients that still
offer nipple for why do you think nip 17 wasn't good enough for so many well i mean it's like look
it's not perfect because it doesn't have forward secrecy so people even though they can't see the
contents of your dm or even necessarily like know who you're dming they still know that
you have a bunch of dms if you're not using an auth relay and then auth relays are like now now
you're already sort of breaking the ux right because you users have to know what that is
um so i mean it like nip 17 is definitely not perfect for perfect anonymity um so it is possible
that something better is available but i mean it is pretty good and like it's good enough for most
people considering like you know i don't know what percentage is i'll just make it make it up you
know like 90 of people use gmail and like whatsapp um so i don't think people like care about having
such high degrees of privacy and the ones that do they can just take the step of using a better
relay and then they basically get their perfect privacy um so it does work on nip 17 depending on
how hardcore you want to be about it um but for the regular for the average user that you know
just wants to, I mean, I don't know what people are DMing about on Noster, but, you know, NIP 17
already offers like pretty strong privacy protection, even though like I'm certain there,
there's better ways. And I haven't looked deeply enough at the, at white noise. I'm,
I'll take their word for it. It's probably, it probably solves that problem, but it also creates
a whole new problem, which is, you know, like now we have bifurcated clients, um, and just like
disjointed UX. So yeah, I mean, I don't know. I'm just rambling, but I don't know the answers here,
Avi. Yeah, I think on the point of White Noise, I tried their latest release. It's getting more
and more stable. I think the first release barely worked, which is, you know, it's understandable,
right? They're trying to solve a very difficult problem. And again, you're right. I'm not an
expert on the cryptography for direct messages. So I'm going to take their word for it, guys like
Max Hillebrand and Jeff G are involved,
who I believe are good actors.
So you know what?
It's like, look, I can't go around
verifying every single thing I see.
At some point, I have to outsource
some level of trust.
So no concerns for me on the algorithm itself.
And then I do see the progress on the UX.
I just started using White Nights a week ago.
I would rather upgrade it to the latest release.
using a burner, NSEC, and it seems okay.
But I think you hit the nail on the head.
The biggest problem is it breaks interoperability, right?
If everyone needs to be on white noise
with their actual NPUB
and then every single client that offers DMs,
whether explicitly on the main screen
or somewhat hidden the way Primal
and some of the other clients do it
where you need to click a menu button
for the DMs to show up.
Whatever it is, right?
Those have to be gutted out.
There's NIPO4s or NIP17,
like Nosterna does NIP17.
You have to gut those out
and replace it with the Marmot implementation.
It won't be White Noise, obviously.
White Noise is the reference client
for the Marmot protocol.
And this is going to break
so much stuff. The UX is going to be atrocious. And I'm hoping that once Marmot and White Noise
are at a really good UX and stability and all of that back and front and all look good,
we just bite the bullet, go through three months of absolute chaos, and then emerge from it with
some kind of interoperability. I suspect there will be pain.
yeah i mean if it if it works and it's relatively easy for client developers to put it in um then
yeah we should be open to it because because here's here's like the the big problem is if you
just like sort of do a cutoff then like users all lose their dms and we don't know how important
those dms are to them you know like that's a big problem but it's also a problem to keep
going backwards compatibility you know like clients are already having to do this where
they have to support both nip 04 and nip 17 um just because like we figured it out later a better
way and then now we might add a completely different protocol on top of that so now it's
like to have a working dm client that's interoperable with everything you need three
backwards compatible implementations like that's you're basically like that's basically how we do
bitcoin you know where it's just like all these soft works you gotta keep remembering and
yeah i don't know what the answer is like i did a hard cut off for nipple fours like last year i
took the stance that none of my realized what would accept nipple four it's just too it's too
excessively bad for privacy that i just rejected all of them um but that also didn't work like all
that all that happened was we just broke the ux worse and no domus user was able to message me or
any of my users so just everything is broke more so yeah i don't i don't know man i've i mean
the state of dms on nostra is just abject right now right like i said i still use nipo4 to exchange
to give people my signal handle i need to schedule like a bunch of shows and sometimes the only way
i can get hold of them is on nostra not everyone's on nip 17 so i have to use one client
one or two clients for NIPO 4.
Because I have no way of knowing
whether the person I'm sending the message to
is using a client that accepts NIP 17.
If it does and they reply using a NIP 17 DM,
then I have to go to NoStir,
which is the only iOS client that I'm aware of
that's compatible with NIP 17.
And then send them a message there,
then someone else replies on the nipple for client it is just this is horrible right so we
we need to get out of this situation real fast yeah i agree it's bad it's real bad
yeah but there are i mean look i think dms have been probably the weakest link
on nosto uh let's talk about what you're doing uh with the nosto band replacement by the way do
you know what why did nostoban suddenly just die do you know what happened um i i don't know for
sure but i know like if like i know what it's like to just like run such a site for so long
like a site like that is is expensive you know like it's gonna it's already costing me not like
a lot but just enough that it nags you that you you stand the site up you spend all this time
building it you spend all this money hosting it and then there's like maybe some bugs in it or it
goes down and then everyone just complains and then you know it's just like after some time
you're just like well what's even the point of this anymore and you just kind of just walk away
from it um so i don't know if that's what happened but if that is what happened i wouldn't be
surprised because like before it died it was already like on shaky ground it was like not
working all the time people were getting upset with it and then eventually just died and vanished
right so that's my speculation as to what happened but i don't know i never talked to the guy about
it so i'm not sure but that would be my guess and this is the thing with anyone building a common
some kind of commons on nostril now you're not going to make money off of it unless someone
miraculously comes up with a new revenue model.
Another guy I feel really sorry for is Karen,
who's built Zap.Stream.
And he's come on the show and he said,
look, if I didn't have a grant,
none of this would have existed.
None of this stuff would have been possible.
The only way I could do it is because of grant money.
And I suspect that's true of a commons
like Nostradot banned as well.
I don't think he'd cracked the revenue model.
I know he was trying to do some premium.
pricing or whatever i saw some options to upgrade no one who no one pays on nostor this is the other
thing right like we all talk about value for value barely anyone uh everyone wants to take stuff for
free right and it's a natural human uh instinct to try and get away with um without having to pay
for something but that is i think is something that uh plagues nostor so no one wants to play
want to use the really good commons infrastructure like Nostoban for stats or what have you,
but then not necessarily return the value. And the only way things like that can survive
is through grant money as a result. So do you foresee that? So before we talk about what you're
building as the Nostoban replacement, do you foresee that as a problem for any of the things
you're building, which is if you can't crack the revenue model, then it's down to ground money.
And at some point you'll have to walk away from that as well.
Yeah, I'm not, I'm not sure. It's tough. Like, so for me, I'm sort of,
I don't, retired is really the wrong word to use. Like, cause I, I have other apps. Like I,
I have other apps that I own that aren't Noster or Bitcoin related, you know, like you see what I build on Noster.
Like I have Normie stuff that I built, too.
So I don't have to like go nine to five.
So I'm able to like spend my time working on Noster and not I don't need Noster to pay me anything to work on these projects.
So for for me, I think it's a little bit maybe different than a lot of other people.
I know some of the other devs are in another situation that I'm not in where they're pretty
early Bitcoiners and they also don't need the money. So I don't, I don't think for sure that
like you have to crack some kind of revenue model to make it work. Um, and sort of like circling
back to the central, you know, it takes someone like Twitter or Facebook, they like have all of
this money, but if we have, you know, like, let's just say we had a thousand relay runners. I know
there's over a thousand relays but i'm not sure that we have a thousand relay runners but they're
all spending you know 20 bucks a month on something like we have twenty thousand dollar a month
infrastructure like that's actually very strong infrastructure that can handle a lot um so we
it's not like we're completely like helpless and at the mercy you know it doesn't take a lot of
money from like individual developers to get it going and like i could just be transparent like to
to host something like nostor band like my version probably costs like 90 a month you know like that's
not an incredible amount of money like the the community should be able to come together and
you know put together 90 bucks you know and i i don't i think that is achievable and i i have had
some notes well not some i'll just say one note where i actually did ask for donations and i got
like five million sets you know like that's oh wow that's starting to get good where it like makes a
difference you know like regular day-to-day zapping like you let's say a good note gets 10 000 sets
like okay that's great and everything but that's like six dollars you know like that's not doing
anything uh but if you're getting into the millions of sets you know that could pay for a year of
hosting like that makes a difference so i think it is possible
okay well i hope you're right um so let's talk about this uh well when is it ready to go or
still some time away um it's like half ready to go it's like pretty much all the functionality is
there but it's just crawling all the old notes so it's missing a lot of older stuff but for newer
stuff it's pretty much working and ready to go i think but i mean it's only a couple of days old
so i'm sure i will find some issues and maybe potentially have to like nuke it and rebuild it
so like those things are still in the cards but so far it's working pretty well and like if you're
a wisp user and you see the like trending feeds or like how search works now because that's another
reason like why i wanted to build it like i don't know if you have this problem on ios but like
search also doesn't work on nostr um which is also like not that part of a problem to solve
we just you know it's just like all the relay implementations don't really have a good search
because relay operators don really know what client developers need and vice versa So yeah part of it is you know working on that piece
So like search is ready and like new trending and that kind of stuff,
but not the old notes.
Yeah, search is a problem, certainly on iOS.
I think the closest you get is you need some kind of caching service,
just to simplify.
I'm saying you need one way of doing it is with the caching service, right?
And Primal's search is probably one of the better ones.
But even that misses a lot.
Like I'm searching for stuff that I know exists.
I just need to find it on the timeline and it doesn't come up on Primal
despite the caching service existing.
And I think Nostraband used a caching service too, if I'm not mistaken.
I actually never looked at the back end.
yeah or just like even this term you know caching service like nostor band it was saving all the
notes in a database so they could just build a nice search endpoint for nostor clients um
you know like that is that's basically how a good search has to work like just just a quick example
you know like if you're let's say you search for just bitcoin you know what should what should the
search give you you know should it just give you the most recent person who typed bitcoin like maybe
it was a bot or a spammer or something you know um it should be it should work similar to how
google search works you know like google search works because other um people are like linking
to that website which builds authority it builds page rank and they have an algorithm for that so
a noster search should work like that too if i search for bitcoin it should probably give me
posts that are combined with like being recent also have a lot of likes or have a lot of zaps or
were posted by like a credible user not like a bot with no followers like all of those
things need to be taken into account and the way we do it right now is we're just like okay put
four search dm relays in just search all of them and spit out the notes chronologically like that
is a terrible search experience and we're basically still doing that today you know it's so bad
mm-hmm how would wisp doesn't so how yeah how does wisp do search uh so we just used this new
um like nostor band replacement that i use uh that i built and the first thing like the first
core features that i built were really to make clients better so the first one was search
and the next one was having trending relay feeds um so you don't have like right now primal is like
one of the only clients that have trending because they have their own like proprietary thing but
other clients can't like put the trending in without doing like this custom dvm and all sorts
of stuff so um that's why like on this new nostor band thing that i'm building we have relay feed
so anything that we say is trending on the website you can also put that in any client just by
connecting to the relay.
Right.
I think we, you know, there need to be multiple ways of looking at trending and the user should
be able to choose that, right?
And I think that'll go a long way in, if a user has access to a trending feed of their
choice. It'll go a long way in solving some of the apathy we're seeing, some of the disillusionment
that I'm seeing certainly in the last five or six months. Yes, it coincides with the Bitcoin
bear market, but just the general engagement experience on Nostra has been particularly
really great in the last few months.
And I suspect if users start seeing feeds
that are relevant to them,
that they've chosen,
as opposed to like this firehose
of a chronological feed,
I suspect the quality of engagement will improve.
Yeah, I mean, a better algorithm,
just more, just anything,
like being able to browse relay feeds,
having good like hashtag feeds,
having a good search like just any any kind of feed is better than just having the one single
follow only feed that is missing half the notes because they're not outboxing and
yeah like there's just so much wrong with how the majority of the ux in nostor has been
up until now that like i completely agree that just you know stale feeds is a huge part of it
just seeing the same shit over and over again um is a huge part of it and you'd be surprised how
much content is actually on nostr from people you don't follow um that you can find with a good
hashtag search you know like um you know bookster is a is a great example of one you know like there's
i look at bookster and there are pretty much nobody on here i follow but these are
all people posting stuff that I'm actually interested in. And I had no idea that any
of these people existed. So like going out of your way to also like curate your feed,
of course, like having a client that makes it easy for you is important. But if we could just
break this paradigm, like I hear it all so much like, oh, the reason why Nostra is different is
because we only have one feed. Like that's so stupid. Like we can have unlimited feeds here.
we shouldn't hang our hat on like the worst one uh yeah that's that's my opinion on it at least
i think the chronological the enchantment with the chronological feed that ship has sailed for me i
did like it in the beginning i'm not going to lie utx coming from the twitter world where you've
been caught you know you're being manipulated by the algorithm and i guess there was no exit at
the time. This was pre-NOSTA. So when NOSTA shows up, it's like, ah, finally a stream of
consciousness, a global fire hose. I want this. I don't want whatever it is that Twitter's giving me.
But, you know, a couple of years in, or three years in now, and with the general apathy,
the degradation and quality of discourse and so on that, you can call it a temporary blip on NOSTA,
or whatever it is, right?
But just having experienced it in the last few months,
I think I'm at the point where I'm like,
okay, let's actually seriously start looking into feeds.
It could be based on your web of trust.
You could look for any kinds of signals.
Hashtag is the easiest one to do, right?
Use simple text tag that you filter by,
but there are other signals that you can look for as well
with emergent signals in the network
and try and curate your timeline.
It's time. It's time we did that.
Yeah, so download WISP because WISP has lots of feeds.
Okay, everyone? Do it.
So that brings me to the next question then, UTXO.
When WISP desktop or WISP web, I should say?
Never.
It's only ever always going to be an Android client.
uh i'm sorry but that's how that's why it's so fast like i i mean that's the main thing just
don't don't take my word for it ask the users like what they think um the real reason why
wisp is good is because it's fast and if i just try to like port it into for sure a browser will
never be as fast um maybe ios can but i don't really know ios and then i don't know if it will
be approved in app store and yeah i just don't know so for me it's it's android and end of the
day like i really built it for myself you know i'm just so happy to share it um but i'm an android
user so it's my android client and that's what it will always be what do you do about the wallet
lightning wallet uh so two things so the the built-in whitening lightning wallet is nwc only
um so you you must use nwc to use wisp you can't do that clunky ux where you like click it and then
like open your other wallet and then like go back to the app like we don't do that because that's so
ugly um so you must use nwc we have a few wallets that we recommend like rizful um and mini bits
and for the base they can put like get albi on their own node and it will work with that
um so that's how it currently works but we will shortly also put the breeze spark support so
people can use like the spark wallet which is custodial i know a lot of people like to say it's
It's not custody, but it is custody, just like using Rizvul is.
So we're going to be adding support to that soon.
Shout out Daniel.
If he's listening, he's working on that PR right now.
Yeah.
Daniel has been, the Daniel, formerly known as Maybe Daniel,
has done stellar work on Vibe coding these wallet implementations.
I mean, he's been doing it for the past year.
He has this thing called Sats Factory.
We're trying to get merchants onboarded in New York for all places with its crazy regulations.
So that's great to hear that you guys are working together on that.
So it's NWC only.
How many are there, right?
So really the idea of NWC is you have an app that has essentially an open socket.
You have a lightning wallet that has the plug, right?
and then you go to your app like Wisp
and you plug the plug into the socket
and you've just brought your own Lightning wallet to a new app.
It's a really neat way of doing things.
Now, the problem is in an ideal world,
you want a lot of these plugs, right?
A lot of these wallets available that you can choose from
and plug into any app you want.
but I don't think that number is very large, right?
You, I think, just listed those off.
It's getAlbi, and getAlbi is harder
because you have to run your own node
and have Albi Hub.
I either pay Albi to do it or you could do it.
So there's Albi's one, Rizful,
which I've heard of, I've never used.
Koinos was another one,
but they had some issues recently,
if I'm not mistaken.
and that's about it isn't it um there's a couple more like um cashew.me has it mini bits has it
um i think there are a couple of other ones but yeah i i should add to that like if you go with the
spark wallet you don't need to do any sort of nwc it's just like if the client implemented it
correctly it works the same as nwc where it's just like the wallet is on your phone um so that
that will work as well but yeah i mean there's not a ton of them but there there are enough to serve
nasa users you know like there are plenty of working ones out there it's not like we have zero
so five is good enough for the 20 users we have you know right and i so i just realized uh speaking
of interoperability breaking.
I went to another Zapstream,
or rather streaming client,
and I'm seeing a bunch of chat messages
that I've missed.
Too many to catch up from the beginning,
but towards the end,
you have folks saying,
Wisp and Rispel.
That's Mark saying that.
And then Condelorian said,
Blitz.
Globe 99 is saying Koinos.
Okay, I'll take his word for it.
Last I heard, they had, wasn't there some issue, UTXO, do you remember?
CoinOS has been hacked like five times.
Yeah.
I mean, like, look, I don't want to throw shade.
He's providing a great service to the users, but it's not known for reliability.
Let's just say that.
Yeah.
So, okay, let's talk about Spark because that is another topic that divides people.
So if you look at the, you know those matrices that they do where they have, so here, I'm going to do four quadrants, okay?
So the Y axis is custodial.
So bottom is custodial, top is non-custodial.
The X axis is left is KYC, right is no KYC, okay?
Okay.
Top left quadrant, no KYC, non-custodial.
That is the ideal, correct?
Yes.
We want that.
Now, and then the bottom right quadrant is custodial KYC.
That is, you might as well just use Visa or MasterCard at that point.
So now the question is, you have the other two quadrants, right?
top right and bottom left,
which is custodial non-KYC or non-COVID.
Custodial KYC.
Which one would...
Spark, I believe, is custodial non-KYC, right?
So it sits in the top right.
For now it is.
Okay.
Of those two quadrants, top right and bottom left,
which one would you pick?
Definitely no KYC custody.
Yeah, no KYC.
The privacy part is the most important to me.
um you know like i should be able to just spin up an end pub or give my agent a wallet or whatever
and not have to go through kyc if if i'm getting like the the speed and reliability of somebody
else hosting the node and the trade-off is i have to trust them with my 21 sat zap i think that's a
perfect trade-off to make given the situation that we're in right now and like the way lightning
works um you know like i'm already kind of skeptical skeptical about lightning as a solution
generally speaking i mean that's i don't really want to open that can of worms so let's just say
we have to use lightning i mean we i think we have to x we have to expect that there's going
to be a trust trade-off given the complexity of running lightning um even if like i would say the
best the best non-custodial ux is the way zeus does it with their embedded lightning nodes um
right on the phone like so sick like i love zeus zeus is what i use for my nodes um but like if
you're a brand new user you've never used bitcoin before like if you want to set that up you have to
already have sats to buy your lightning channel you know like that's yeah that's just not appropriate
for a first-time user just checking out Nostar for the first time.
It should just work.
They should have to do nothing,
and Sat should just be able to come in on their very first post.
And I just don't see another way.
Maybe somebody much smarter than me has a way better way to do it.
But as far as I can tell,
the best way that we can have the most seamless UX
actually is using the Spark Wallet thing,
even though that it's pretty sus, man.
like it it could be a giant fed chain by spark who knows you know they are already proposing putting
kyc directly in the ln url uh protocol so maybe all these wallets get set up then they shotgun kyc
everybody like i don't know i'm pretty skeptical about it personally but the ux is just it's there
man and for for me it's like the because the fact that it's like kind of a custodial protocol
is fine.
If I'm okay with you using RISVOL,
then I'm okay with you using this
semi, we'll call it
self-custody, even though it's really not
protocol. To me, it's the same thing.
Your Zap wallet is not that
serious, and it's okay to
take a risk with a custodian on it.
Yeah.
I mentioned the GIF keyboards
a while back,
right? Yes, in an
ideal world, everything is decentralized,
but do you really care if a GIF keyboard
or it comes from a centralized server or not,
I don't think you should.
It's impractical if you wanted it to.
That's my view.
And I think UTXO,
what you're saying about your Zap wallet
kind of falls into that practical trade-off thing.
Yes, in an ideal world,
everything is in the top left quadrant
of that graph I was talking about, right?
Non-custodial and then no KYC.
but show me
show me a zap wallet that's that
right like
Phoenix, Breeze, none of these
would work
on Nostra today
so fine, bite the bullet
don't keep more than
pick your number right
if it's like
is your number 50k sats, 100k sats
whatever your number is, 20k sats
pick that number, never let it go beyond that
if it goes beyond that, sweep into self-custody
and we'd be done with it.
And you're zapping frog photos, for heaven's sake, right?
You shouldn't be putting your child's college fund in there.
Yeah, exactly, man.
And the other thing too is like,
you know, most people on Noster are not getting
even thousands of sets.
Like they're not even getting dollars worth, you know?
We're talking like 500 sets or a thousand sets or something.
Like even the big accounts are like probably only getting like 30,000 sats or like 40,000 sats.
Like it's like 20 bucks, man.
Like just calm down a little bit.
Yeah.
Hey, so let's, so I do want to come back to this UTXO, but we actually just got past the hour mark.
And this is typically the time where we take a pause and I play a Valley for Valley song.
So on my other podcast, Under Plep Chain Radio, Sunday Brunch, I had on Sunday, Bud Tender from Hash Power Music.
And he introduced me to this band that he's onboarded into the Valley for Value.
And they're called the Velviks.
And the song he played had this incredible sort of Pink Floyd vibe to it, especially like the post-Roger Waters, the Division Bell, David Gilmore vocals era.
So I've been going down the Velvix rabbit hole for a bit.
I picked a song which is not quite Pink Floyd,
but I think it's still a good one,
and it actually highlights their range.
So this is Consensual by the Velvix.
Meet by the side door
I wanna taste
The amount
Inbred
My hands around your throat
You're rolling back your eyes
I caught it on my phone
Turned up the radio
Now your hands are tied
You're begging me for war
What must be doing you a favor
Indeed, by this I don't
I wanna make you mine
In the way you could let me tie your knee
Oh, you're tasty
Oh, you're fiesty
Oh, can see this experimental drug
You're holding back your eyes
I caught it on my phone
Turn off the radio
But now your hands are tied
And you're begging me for more
I must be doing you a favor
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
And kill
I'm throwing back your ass
I caught it on my phone
Turn the radio
But now your hands are tied
And you're begging me for more
I must be doing yours
Doing yours
Fever!
That was consensual by the Velvix.
A high energy piece.
The one Bartender played on Sunday Brunch a few days ago was a far more languid,
had that hypnotic Pink Floyd type cadence to it.
This one had a nice high energy vibe to it.
I think it's a nice way of winding down on a Friday.
So UTX, you obviously are a guy who's primarily focused on the application layer in Nostra.
Have you taken a look much at the value for value music world that's blossoming?
Other than checking out the new client there, Nostria.
I got to admit, I'm not very heavy into the music stuff, even though I do see that there's a lot of exciting stuff being built.
I haven't been too into it myself.
Yeah.
And shout out Sandre, by the way,
the creator of Nostria.
He's built a Swiss army knife of an app.
I think he's going,
I see a lot of Vitor Pamplona in him.
Like he's trying to build everything.
And I mean that in the best part.
I love Vitor as well.
I mean that in the best possible way.
He's building this everything app, right?
He's a guy who listens to feedback
or sees something new and cool and says,
I want that in my app.
And he builds it.
So Nostria is turning into a really robust app
with a lot of features,
including, as you said, the music bit.
What do you think of that, by the way?
I know we were talking about wallets
and we'll get back to that in a second.
What do you think of the idea of an everything app,
sort of the amethyst Nostria direction
versus the more surgically targeted apps
that focus on a super narrow use case,
maybe just three or four kinds that just serve that use case?
I don't know.
It's tough to say.
I think trying to actually build an everything app that is good
from an execution standpoint is basically impossible,
especially for a solo dev doing this in their spare time
or even a solo dev on a grant.
So I'm pretty skeptical you can get the UX
in such a way that it's like super pleasant
to use such a tool,
but I could be wrong.
But I do generally feel like having a very tailored UX is more ideal than trying to be like a Swiss army knife Yeah And I joke with Vitor sometimes because he and I we have our own startup together with a couple of others working on Web of Trust
So, you know, we get to talk a lot. And I was joking with him saying, is there a nip you've seen that you haven't liked and brought into Amethyst?
and he had a laugh about that
because I think he probably holds a record for Amethyst
for the most number of nips
that are actually integrated into that app.
Probably.
I would bet money that that's true.
All right.
So let's get back to wallets.
We're talking about Spark and how it's convenient today.
By the way, again, I just want to point out,
I just upgraded to Primal 3.0 today,
so I'm seeing some of these new features.
The gift keyboard is one.
The other, since we're talking about Spark,
is they've changed their wallet.
They gutted out the old one,
old Primal wallet,
which was running on,
I think it was Strikes B2B engine,
and now it's a Spark wallet,
which I believe is available in every region.
At least, and as things stand today, no KYC.
And I think the most interesting one, apart from being available in every region,
is there are no caps, no limits.
The previous Primal wallet had a 1 million SAT limit.
So really interesting stuff happening on the Spark side.
But I am, yeah, the shotgun KYC is a big concern.
What do you think UTXO about?
there are other options that are in the same ballpark as a spark type setup right like there's
i think uh the breeze guys had a reference wallet called misty breeze which uses liquid
to solve the inbound outbound uh liquidity problem that he sorry the inbound liquidity
problem that you get with any Lightning wallet.
Again, semi-non-custodial, I guess, if you had to say that.
And people are talking now about, what is that, the other, ARK, right?
ARK could play a similar role that Liquid or what I think,
Spark uses state chains, right?
The Spark does.
What are your thoughts on these different approaches apart from Spark?
Well, I'm really happy that at least somebody is trying other things other than Lightning.
So I'm very happy about that.
On the technical implementation of them, I'm not good enough to sit here and give you some
graybeard answer for it, but I think that they've made the correct trade-offs where
it's like yeah it's it's not like a full-blown custodian but there are some pretty big trust
trade-offs that you make in order to like achieve the speed and the no kyc and the privacy so i like
i think that it's a good direction to go in um just the the real big thing about spark is i really
don't trust light spark you know they're like this is a team that came from facebook that
basically tried to make their own cbdc way back in facebook um and then they came into lightning
like basically like there are some bitcoiners that joined them but this was mostly like a facebook
silicon valley play get a whole bunch of money from vcs and like some of the first things they
wanted to do was just like stable coins and kyc and ln url and then yeah just all that stuff just
you know i don't like it but then you see this breeze implementation they put together and it's
like wow well that ux is like super clean um and it they're not asking for any kyc or anything so
like the concerns i have don't currently exist but i do like my tinfoil hat part of me thinks that
this is some kind of like expand get everybody hooked on your product and then fucking kyc them
and ask for all sorts of subscription fees or take their sets or god knows what i don't know
but i don't trust these like big money types which light spark is so that's my big caveat with it
even though i'm going to support it because the ux is clean like i i don't really trust it like i
trust Rizful more than Spark personally. So I have seen the name Rizful before, um,
on Nostra. Is that just like a standard custodial wallet like we used to have with
wallet to Sathoshi or Coinos back in the day? Yeah, yeah, pretty much the same. Um, but they've
been a little bit more reliable. Um, yeah. Uh, I, I mean, I use them personally, like I'm well
capable of running my own Noster
node and stuff, but
they do it great, and I'm happy to keep my
30,000 sats in my RISV
wallet, and it works perfectly for me.
Okay, so
that's good to know.
It's another arrow in the
quiver, if you will.
I guess Fountain's another
one, right? You can use...
If you do have a Fountain account,
you get a Lightning address, and I
believe they support both
both Nostowallet Connect and
you can
ZAP and NIP57
I'm pretty sure
I can check on the NIP57
NWC I'm sure they do
but
okay so let's
I know you didn't want to go down the
lightning rabbit hole but I have to ask
and see if I can get
something out of you here
the way you framed it
or the way you were talking about it just made me
think of a framing
which I hope to dear God is not true,
which is, as we talked about,
as many people have talked about a lot in the past,
the biggest issue with lightning is inbound liquidity, right?
If you're just doing raw lightning,
like there's nothing you can do
unless you have Bitcoin before that
and you create these deep channels
and then you send the money out
and open up the liquidity.
You cannot ask a normie to do that.
You just, that is, it's a dead on arrival there.
Yep.
So my concern, as you were talking about it,
is have people looked at that need
for solving the main pain point of inbound liquidity
with these solutions.
and maybe it's not spark and it's not breeze, certainly not breeze, right?
I know Roy, I'm a man of integrity.
I'm not worried about that.
And spark, I just don't know enough about.
But can someone like a spark or a breeze look at that and say,
aha, this is how I lure the people in.
I dangle the carrot of saying, hey, I've solved the inbound liquidity problem.
Lightning works perfectly, no KYC, everything's great.
Then they come in, they give a beautiful UX, everything is amazing,
and then that's how they get you.
It's the perfect honeypot right there.
You present Lightning as something that works perfectly, right,
because you've quote-unquote solved the inbound liquidity.
They come in, but you've got them by the balls at that point.
Is that one of your main concerns with Lightning,
or do they go beyond that?
um that's that's not really my concern with lightning that would be like my concern with
with like the spark wallets or people using them for you know smaller applications like i'm not
to work because like let's say they do do that you just like abandon your zap wallet and you
lost your 5 000 sets and too bad um i think the real problem with lightning is that even if if
you're a really hardcore bitcoiner and you want you do want the hard ux you know lightning is still
too much um like you know when everything's working on lightning it doesn't seem that bad
even though okay you've you've gone through the trouble of like learning linux and like learning
what force closing means and you've you know you just love bitcoin you went down that rabbit hole
now you like also have to be a devops engineer you know you your web server needs to always be
online you definitely need to like learn linux and like uh suddenly if your one node goes down
you can't receive any payments anymore you know like this is this is not good man you need to
like my main thing with lightning i i would say is that it has that single point of failure problem
that like self-custody chain Bitcoin doesn't have, you know, like half the miners can go down
and I can still send my transaction because there's still tons of miners. But with Lightning,
if your one node goes down, it's broken. You can't receive, you can't send. So I feel like
Lightning needs to work like more like a cluster. So like, let's say me, me, Avi and Derek Ross,
we all trust each other. So we should be able to like link our nodes together. So if my node
goes down avi you can still receive the payment that i wanted and i'll settle up with you later
because i trust you like i think some kind of way like that so we have more high availability and
you don't have to have such a like insane server that's online 100 of the time i feel like that's
some kind of thing that we need to make it more viable like otherwise it like lightning is really
good let's say if you're an exchange and you do have big servers and big money and like if one
server goes down you have your other high availability one ready to go like then lightning
is great and it always works and it's awesome but just a regular pleb in their basement with their
little raspberry pi like that it's just lightning is not good for that in my opinion so it's already
dead on arrival even for like the most hardcore bitcoiners and once you there's a company you
were doing Bitvora was that something to do with lightning yeah so it was basically like you could
think of it sort of like Rizful I guess like just trying to provide a custodial lightning solution
that is easy for people to just use right away like but it was more for like developers like
normie developers you know like if they wanted to accept payments on their website or do like
affiliate payouts like someone doesn't want to take PayPal they want to send Bitcoin but you don't
know anything about bitcoin so here just use my api it just works and that's all i was trying to
do but there's literally zero demand nobody wants that not a single person wanted that shit
so i gave up what did they want they want uh just you know if they want to do any crypto stuff they
want to do stable coins but they don't want to do any crypto stuff they think crypto is a big scam
and then you say crypto and they think donald trump and they hate that too so it's just
just they don't want anything to do with it at all and they don't really see that they have a
problem they just oh you coming at me you telling me all this stuff about bitcoin i don understand but all my money coming through stripe anyway and you know if they accept bitcoin payments maybe like one percent of their sales will transfer from stripe to something
they're completely uncomfortable with and kind of think is a scam and is complicated and they don't
get it you know like it's just not a strong selling proposition like the real key in my opinion is
that we have to people have to be sold on bitcoin as money first before we can start talking about
payments like payments are super important don't get me wrong like that's why i built two payment
companies already two failed ones um to like learn my lesson really the hard way that it only matters
if people believe in bitcoin and you know if you have michael saylor running around saying oh just
buy mstr and just keep paying everything in usd then it's just like it's just never going to happen
like payments will just never be part of the conversation maybe your target audience was
might not have been the right one then, ETX.
So if you're targeting Canadian and American developers, right,
to use Bitvora, and they're like,
hey, man, what's the problem?
Stripe works, right?
Venmo, whatever the hell they use, works.
Maybe they're not the right people.
Maybe it needed to be some developers in Latin America,
in Asia, or in Africa who feel the pinch,
who first of all don't have a Stripe.
setup. The fiat trails might not be as robust as they are in North America. And then on top of that,
they're actively facing the debasement of their fiat currency. So they want to hold something
that's not debasing, want to be paid in something that's not debasing. Maybe they would have been
better customers for Bitvora. Well, I mean, that's who I was going after with Nodeless.
and that's who my customers were and it was actually going pretty well but i almost went
to jail for that shit you know so uh that's why i went with bitvora and got regulated and worked
with other like above the board companies but that didn't work so like neither of them worked
you know you want to do it right you go to jail you do it bad nobody buys it so i just i just give
up man i'm just i'll just work on the charm man it's talking i'm done with payments no it's done
it's over for me somebody else can pick up that torch i give up officially yeah it's not easy man
uh that that is for sure uh especially i mean this is this is this goes back to the point of
bitcoin being dissident money i don't know if there's a scenario in which above the board
scales right it's only when you're threatened only when someone's after you and you're like
oh shit i need to hide what i'm doing or i need to be really smart about what i'm doing
right that's i'm a dissident i'm i'm i'm i'm on the run that's when
uh but you you realize you need bitcoin and that's when bitcoin really works
yeah and i mean hopefully we get there i think the other thing that's like
just related to to lightning and custodians like the majority of people when they first get into
Bitcoin. And I'm sure like pretty much everybody listening got into Bitcoin the same way as they
went to like Coinbase or something and they bought Bitcoin there. Right. And that was their entry
into Bitcoin. So if and obviously you move on from that. So if our entry into Noster is like some
custodian or a breeze wallet or something, that's just easy. That's fine. You know, that's the very
top of the funnel and eventually maybe we can turn them into node runners maybe but it's still
better than like being on coinbase for fuck's sake or having an etf so i'd still rather us like go in
this direction yeah for sure all right so we've i don't did we talk enough about your uh
nostriband replacement i don't think you told us what it's called or what it's going to be called
um you know if somebody is listening at this point i'll just tell them so you could go to
nostrarchives.com and that's the site it's still crawling the old notes okay so don't be mad
if the old notes are not there i know they're not there um it's going to take a couple of weeks but
yeah you can you can check it out uh i'm still i'm sort of working on it in tandem with wisp
because, you know, if I improve the search on Noster Archives, then that directly makes Wisp
better. And same thing with like the trending feeds and all sorts of other things. So I'm sort
of working on them at the same time to enable these different UXs. And other client developers
are completely open to it too. So it's not just like a proprietary thing. It's completely open
source. And all of our APIs are fully open too. So any client can just adopt it. Like these,
the feeds i built yesterday already work on jumble today because we built it in an open way so
yeah nostararchives.com nostararchives.com how uh so what what what does it have that nostarband
didn't have i think nostarband did have the idea of feeds but i suspect what you're talking about
is a it's a little more sophisticated than that what what else does it have that that was missing
you felt in Nosterband?
Yeah, well, the big thing, I mean, I don't want to gloss over that point.
So the feeds, if the old Nosterband feeds, you had to go to Nosterband.com to use the
feeds.
You had to go to their website.
But the feeds that I'm doing on Noster Archive, you can use it in your own client.
So you don't have to go to the website, you know, and you could see it's in Wisp today,
like the reference implementation of it, I guess.
It's on Jumble.
So any client that lets you browse a relay, those feeds work today.
And Nosterband never had that.
So that's one very key critical component.
The other one is search.
Now, Nosterband had search, but it wasn't an algorithmic search.
I think they may have offered a relay search.
I'm not sure.
But I know they had a relay, so it probably did.
But I'm spending a lot of time to make sure that search is good.
Like, I'm sure you notice, like, everybody's had this experience on Noster.
Like, maybe you type Odell, right?
And then you see 30 impersonators of Odell, but the real one is not there, you know?
So, like, we solve basic things like that.
Like, we rank things.
We're like, oh, this Odell has 10,000 followers and the other one has zero.
I wonder who I should show first, you know?
Like, most Noster clients didn't even bother trying to do a basic thing like that.
um so i would say it's you know we're trying to be a much more polished version so definitely a
more of a 2.0 vibe um something that actually interoperates with clients like now that i'm
building a client i have a much better understanding of like what a client needs from a relay so even
though yeah like it looks like a website it's also a relay you know so i'm trying to like
play around with that idea um and just overall just be a lot more of a beautiful experience you
know like i'm not uh you know i'll let people judge for themselves like just go to the websites
and which one is more pleasant to use i'll i'll let the the people decide now i've seen it and
it looks great and i know you said there's still there's more coming so i'll wait for that um but
that's interesting that you say it's a web it looks like a web server it's a relay first
would you say utxo then that if a relay had a front end if a nostril relay were to have a front
end it would look like what you're building um no i don't think that's a fair way to look at it
um maybe you could think of it more like an indexer relay or an archival relay or like a
a Noster full node or something like that.
You know, regular
relays should not be trying to pull
in every single node
in the entire network. That's not
feasible, you know, and it's not necessary.
Like a good client
can just connect to multiple relays and
get all the information instead of relying on
one relay to get everything,
which is like basically what Noster
Archives is. That's basically what Primal
cache is. Like it's just a central
database that has all the nodes.
But I do think that it is important that these do exist somewhere on the network, that somebody is doing it so that you can do better searches than like relay searches or compute algorithms.
Like a client could really never do that because, you know, when you log into your client and you download notes, you can't download the whole network.
You can't download seven days of all the notes and all the likes.
That's just not feasible.
but you know a web a good big web server can do that and it enables a better ux so
that's that's basically what we're doing um but the really important piece is that it acts as a
relay it's like it has relay endpoints so that natural nostor clients can take advantage of it
instead of being like a rest api which is what nostor band was that only like web clients could
maybe take advantage of in certain instances like no strudel i know like pulled some stats
from nostr band so you could get like your follower count um so that's like one small example but that
was only api based like you couldn't connect to your you couldn't connect to it with amethyst to
get the follower count but in nostr archives you'll be able to do that which is a like a totally new
paradigm in Nostra.
So, well, obviously I can use the Nostra archives front end for the browsing and so on, but
you just mentioned Nostrudel.
Would I be able to hook up the event console to the relay you have?
Because that would just supercharge the queries on Nostrudel.
Sorry, you said event console?
question mark? Yeah, yeah. Nordstrudel has an event console where you can query
different relays. And I almost, I mean, there's a whole bunch of things
I can't find when I do that. You know, when you're looking for
very specific kinds
that users might have created,
I tend to go to the event console of
Nordstrudel and then type in the query and then point it to the right relay.
I'm wondering if you're building this full indexer relay,
it's just going to become a really rich source
for those types of queries.
Yeah, I mean, if they're using the just regular search,
like the NIP50 search,
then it will work today in Nostrudel.
Now, we don't index every single kind that comes through.
We're very specific,
and that's how it's actually able to work.
like if we have to save every single kind that would be impossible um so we're just doing like
the social kinds you know like kind ones apps likes retweets that kind of thing um yeah so you
won't be able to like find every kind but i bet you if you use it to search like do a keyword search
or a user search i i would be willing to bet that it's probably the it's probably going to give you
the best results of any relay that you've tried.
Awesome That great All right got a last question for you UTXL Unless actually let me ask you do you think you covered everything you wanted to talk about on wisp and on nostril archives
um i think it might be it might be worth spending a little bit of time like just a couple minutes
talking about inbox and help box and like yeah let's do it why it's so important so
basically like how a lot of Nostra clients work right now is like, let's say you, Avi,
you're using your own relays on some client. And then I reply to you and I'm just picking this.
I'm not trying to pick on anyone. I'll just say some purple client. Okay. And then I reply to you.
How most clients work right now is that that reply that I sent to you is actually completely
random. Like it's just whatever relays I've set on my side. So for you, if you don't have those
relays, now you can't see my replies. Like that is, that makes no sense. And that's basically how
Noster works right now is every time you reply, a lot of these clients just send it to random relays
and just hope for the best. Where really what Inbox and Outbox does, and it's very simple, is
just before i reply to avi i say what relays does he use and then i send the reply there instead of
some random list um so i think that's really really important it's a very simple super simple
concept just check the relay before you send um and that's what we do in wisp and that's like the
quote-unquote secret to never missing any notes is just sending them to the goddamn right relay
so hopefully more clients will adopt it it's semi-embarrassing that they still don't do that
because it's so easy to do but when you use wisp you can like rest assured that the person who you
send a reply to or a like or a zap they're gonna see it because we always send it to the relay that
they read from.
Yeah, that sounds obvious, but obviously it's not.
That's how it ought to be.
Yeah.
Great.
And yes, you're right.
For whatever reason, they don't do that.
I mean, do they get their, they basically look at the end profile, right?
That's what you do.
You look at the end profile of the person you're applying to and you pull the relays
from there.
uh it's it's not on their profile but you look at their pub key and then you search for their
relay list okay yeah and everyone's got one everyone's got yeah yeah no i know i know the
reason i said so the end profile the nostor end profile has has your has a relay list along as
part of the metadata it should it doesn't always like the end profile you can encode like anything
into it.
So it doesn't necessarily have
the right hints in it. So just
because someone shared an end profile doesn't mean
that there are really hints in it.
Gotcha. But it should.
Cool.
Alright, so here's my last question for you.
Have you written,
handwritten, a single line
of code in the last year or two?
Oh yeah,
I handwrite code pretty much
i want to say almost every day or i i will at least like write some code in my prompts
um you know the ai still comes up with some bad patterns and like still sometimes you'll have a
bug that is very easy when like you look at the code but maybe your prompt is bad um so i do edit
code but i don't like sit there and write any code from scratch it's always like editing or
within a prompt that I'll be writing it.
What's your go-to?
Is it Claude Code?
Yeah, Claude Code is my main jam.
Even if I'm using OpenClaude,
which I'm getting so frustrated with these days,
pretty much never going to use it again,
I was still using Claude.
Claude Opus is just really good, man.
Oh, yeah, 4.6.
I mean, it's probably the best out there for anything,
not just for coding, but well worth the ticket price.
What is your, I mean, everyone has their favorite pet peeve with open claw.
What's yours?
Oh, God, there are just so many, man.
Probably the very number one most annoying thing is that it doesn't remember the time zones all the time,
like maybe 60 70 percent of the time it does so it's completely useless for like hey remind me of
this tomorrow you know it always like it screws it up 60 70 percent of the time um so that's probably
like the most annoying for just normie stuff that like i would expect at the very basic if i say you
know send me a reminder tomorrow at 2 p.m that it can do that um but it can't and then the other
thing too is like when you're trying to let's say like do some vibe coding on telegram if you
asked it to do too big of a project it just like gives up and stops responding and then you have to
like ssh in try to like resume it and restart the gateway and it's just it's just jank man it's i
don't think it's very good personally yeah and you forgot the biggest one you're watching your
life savings bleed out in front of you if you're using uh if you're hitting an api with it if you're
Hitting the Claude API, Anthropic API with it, oh my God.
It's just, it destroys the context window in like two or three rounds.
Oh, yikes.
Yeah, I don't, I mean, I subscribe to the Max Claude plan.
It's pretty hard to hit those limits.
I've done it once though, but yeah.
Actually, so have you, how did you, so this is the, I have that one too,
but I haven't figured out how to wire up my OpenClaude to the Claude Max plan.
And I remember reading somewhere that Anthropi actually doesn't like you doing that.
And they might try and – yeah, I don't know.
They might shut you down even if they find out you're using OpenClaw with the Max Plan.
Oh, is that true?
Goddamn.
I definitely don't want to risk my Claw account, man.
I'm screwed without that.
I could – this is a rumor.
I think at this point, most of us would be screwed if we got banned from Claw.
but uh what uh i i could i could be wrong it's a rumor but but you figured out a way of wiring it
up okay well maybe you didn't let's just leave it at that i i didn't i mean i didn't do anything
special man i just go i just followed the the open claw that it's already there but now that
you say that i'm just i'm not even gonna risk it like i i don't even know why i'm using open
claw it's it's fucking bad anyway so i'll just use cloud code and that's fine and just delete my
agents but cloud code does the same thing anyway right it's like it spins up five or six agents
to do whatever and if you want to do some of the desktop type stuff that if you were ever using
openclaw for that just use the what is that thing called co-work right point it to whichever folder
you want and it'll do what it needs to uh yeah i mean i i don't even know like so if if it does
that's great but yeah open claw like cloud code was already better than trying to vibe with um
open open claw anyway so that's pretty much the main use of ai and then i just tried to have it
do other like personal things and it was just shitty and not worth it i basically don't use
it anyway so no big deal no harm no foul okay yeah and again if you the for the personal stuff
like Claude Code for, sorry, Claude Cowork, right?
I don't know if you said you haven't used it,
but it's there on your Claude thing, desktop app.
You have code, chat, and Cowork.
That does a great job with the personal stuff,
especially if you put it on Opus.
Okay, I'll have to give it a try.
We have globe99 in the live chat.
make a very good point
saying
lol our quote unquote
decentralized future
all dependent on one company
skull emoji
it's true man
got him
it's true
without Claude Noster fails
I'll just
I don't know what I'll do without Claude
even though I know how to code
I ain't going back to that shit man
yeah there is no going back
but of course
you know we're living through the golden age
of venture capital
subsidized inference
and at some point
that is going to dry up
and we'll face the real economic cost
of inference
yes we will
awesome
well hey UTXO
thanks a lot man
appreciate this
as always enjoy conversations with you
whether it's outside of a rowdy bar in Miami Beach
throwing out drunks from a karaoke bar
or across the airwaves.
Always a pleasure, my friend.
And same to you, sir.
Thanks for having me.
Awesome.
Thank you.
And thank you to our live stream audience
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