Let's see if that looks good. That looks good. Seems to be working this thing.
All right, we're off to the races. Great, fantastic. So again, I'm fine, I'm fine.
I'm on lots of... Oh yeah, let's go this way first a little bit, because I
need to refill my water and then we'll just turn around. But like I
mentioned, I'm on lots of pain medication, so I'll let you do most of the talking.
Oh, thanks man. And I'll just chill and listen. So yeah, tell me all about it.
Like, I was quite surprised to see you sign up for Sovereign Engineering and
actually be here. I mean, I obviously know about you and your work. You've been
working on ASMap. So maybe, I don't know, you pick and choose. What would be a
good entry point to start of kind of... Well, why were you surprised? I don't know.
Lots of Bitcoin people don't care too much about Nostr and the stuff we're
doing here. And I consider you like very deep into Bitcoin technicalities and
those kind of things. Oh, I don't know about that. I don't know. How did you end up working on
ASMap in the first place? Like, how did that go? Yeah, so I was... I mean, I've been
interested in Bitcoin for a long time and I was always trying to find ways to
contribute, but I never really... You know, like, I'm a dev, but I've never done C++,
and I don't really want to either. And I never really found stuff I could
contribute to in Core that I thought was very meaningful. But I went to a BTC++
in Berlin in 2023. That was Nix edition, right? And so I had happened to do a fair
amount. I went down the Nix rabbit hole. You were a Nix guy before that. I was a
Nix guy. Yeah, I was a Nix guy. And somehow during the COVID lockdowns, I ended up, you
know, just in my house and learned a ton about Nix. I went way too far into it. Like,
approached madness and stepped back from the brink, you know? And so, yeah, Lisa did a...
chose to do a BTC++ on Nix, which I thought was super cool and super random.
And so I... she invited me to do a talk. So I did a talk in Berlin. And there I met
Fabian Yar, who was, you know, a longtime contributor in Bitcoin. He's done a ton of
work on plenty of different things. And we were just chatting, you know, and he was like,
"Yeah, you know, I have this problem with this project I'm working on." And I'm trying
to make sure, like... because a lot of people have to, like, run this software together,
but I need to make sure their dependencies are, like, the same and that they're reproducible,
so we can be sure about reproducibility. Yeah, you can see that in the GitHub issues,
right? Like, everyone is running the thing and reporting the result of, like, the runs
now. Right, right, right. So we do this collaborative
run thing with ASMap that, you know, we can get into the ASMap process and whatever, where
we all kind of run ASMap together and see what the output is. And so to do that correctly,
you have to at least have, like, the same software and the same dependencies and make
sure we're on the same version, et cetera. And so Nix was a good solution to that, right?
So after that conversation, I kind of, like, poked at ASMap, tried to understand what it
was and started, yeah, and started contributing here and there to ASMap. I was kind of, like,
moving countries and, like, in between 14 different things over the next handful of months,
but started contributing to the project a little more. And there was a lot to do. You
know, it was one of those things where it was kind of a big -- so I should maybe take
a step back here. Like, there's, like, the thing I'm talking about is this program called
Cartograph which creates ASMaps, right? >> For those people who don't know what ASMaps
are. >> Yeah, so, I mean, I can give the whole --
we can get into what ASMap is. It's a cool story and it's been part of Core for a while.
So yeah, so ASMap is a feature of Bitcoin Core. And it's been included as a feature
since about Core 20. So it's been some time. And it was started by Gleb Nalmenko. And then
a lot of people contributed to it. I think SIPA, Virtu, and a handful of other people
over the years. And where it came from was to realize kind of an observation that Gleb
had at the time, which was the way, like, a Bitcoin Core node peers with the network
with other peers, you know, the node, like, keeps track of all its other peers and other
addresses, right? >> By addresses, you mean IP addresses.
>> IP addresses, right? Or Tor addresses or other transports. But let's stick to the clear
net example, right? Because that's where ASMap is relevant. It would be unfortunate if you
started your Bitcoin Core node and you connected to, like, mostly peers that were in the same
AWS data center, the same Hetner data center. So, you know, we want this to be decentralized.
And so, like... >> In part, this would be problematic because
that would one easy way to sibyl attack someone, right?
>> Right. So yeah, the problem we're trying to avoid is that your node gets sibyl attacks
or that you get eclipse from the network, we sometimes say, right? So that means that,
you know, a malicious attacker manages to control all your peers and feeds you this,
like, alternate view of the network. And you're no longer on the Bitcoin network.
What do you think about the network?
You're on kind of a fake mirror world that your attacker has created for you.
Yeah, everyone you attack to is a malicious actor and tries to fool you.
So you have no way of actually knowing about that if every single person you're connected
to is part of the bad bunch.
Right, right, right, right.
That's the issue.
Yeah, like we want, you know, the peer to peer network should be the wild west.
Hello!
You'll have a guest appearance.
Big hug.
Say hi.
Say hi to a friend, hello.
Good, good, perfect.
I sleep almost all day.
I'm super good now.
Guest appearance to the show by Sherry.
Yeah, we are recording a recorded dialogue right now.
So if I would have a third microphone, I'd clip it on to you and you could join.
But unfortunately, I don't have a third, so we'll have to.
Oh, okay.
I didn't know this.
Okay, wait, wait.
Yeah, we look like regular people.
Are you guys going to cut this part?
No, no.
There's no cutting.
There's no edits.
Just roll with it.
I'm going to listen.
So we'll continue and we'll just, where do we need to go?
I might, I might, I might, I can't help you.
I will find my flatmate.
Okay.
Yoro.
I still have difficulty pronouncing his name.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
So you went down here.
You might, no, that's right.
Yeah.
How close do you continue going down?
Yeah, yeah.
Just go that way.
No, you go ahead and we stay in the shade a little bit.
Okay.
And then, and then we see, because if you get lost again, we can help you.
Definitely.
Okay.
You, you go ahead and try, try, try to find your way and we'll, we'll, we'll catch up
with you.
And don't cut it.
All right.
No, I won't worry.
Bye bye.
No solutions podcasts.
Fantastic.
Yeah.
We were, we were, we were talking about her today already because you know, like the,
the female participant rate in the sovereign engineering cohorts is steadily increasing.
Is it?
Yeah.
Cool.
Yeah.
We went from zero to one big moment.
There you go.
Breaking out anytime soon.
So we are on the beginning of an exponential curve.
Oh, that's how you got it like that.
Yeah.
Let's see.
Let's see how it goes.
Easy optimistic math, my friend.
Very optimistic math.
Very nice.
Yeah.
So we were, we were, um, uh, like the goal of AS map is to, um, protect users from eclipse
attacks.
Right.
Is that fair kind of?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
That's the goal.
Right.
Um, so, you know, obviously like the way core is set up is, is meant to help with this.
Right.
You know, the way we manage, we learn about a lot of peers and we connect, we learn about
a lot of peers through other peers.
Yeah.
So we have a very large number of addresses on our core nodes.
I mean, usually, I don't know, between 40, 50,000, something like that.
I mean, you're actively connected to a much smaller subset at a time and getting information
from them.
But it's a hard, just to, just to make it clear how hard that problem is because we still
have, correct me if I, if I'm wrong, but they're still, you need, you need to see the initial
connection somehow.
Right.
So you need to start from a trusted seat in some sense, and then you branch out from there.
There is no, there is no other sensible way of, of doing it in a decentralized network
without an authority, basically.
So the, the, yeah.
Or having a very long bootstrap time where you crawl the network without interacting
with it beyond just like gathering information about peers or something.
Right.
Yeah.
You can do some stuff, but it'll be quite annoying.
Yeah.
So the bootstrap seed thing in Core is, I mean, I don't know, it's, yeah, it's the best solution
we came up with.
I wouldn't say it's optimal, right?
We still trust this set of seeds to start our peer bootstrapping.
Right.
Yeah.
So it's a hard problem for sure.
And this is not, this is not to do with like, you know, Byzantine generals problem or whatever,
right?
We're just talking about like connecting to peers and not getting eclipsed.
That's either two separate kinds of.
Yeah.
It has nothing to do with consensus in that sense.
Right.
Nothing like that.
Nothing to do with that.
Networking peer to peer.
Yeah.
Networking peer is this thing we call your, it's called Aderman in the code.
It's just like your address manager that stores information about peers.
And I think it does where, where it kind of buckets your peers into, yeah, little buckets.
Right.
And the way it does it is that it takes your, the first like two octets of your IPv4 address,
let's say.
So, you know, the two numbers after the dot, the first two numbers.
And that's a bucket.
So we say anybody in this network, given your IP address, you get put in the same bucket.
We'll pretend if you're, you know, 12.2 and everyone with addresses that start like that,
you put in the same bucket.
Right.
Yeah.
And the reason for that is because if you would be in the same AWS data center without doing
any additional fancy IP address masking or anything like that, you would have a sign,
you would automatically be end up in the same bucket.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
And so what's the assumption that, you know, networks are controlled by the same entities.
Right.
So, and it's a good heuristic and it works well for most of the internet because that's
how the internet works.
Right.
Yeah.
And obviously, I mean, some networks are bigger than that.
Some networks are smaller than that.
But that's that held true for most of the internet.
It's perfectly fine heuristic.
Like it works.
Right.
Yeah.
But, but there's the internet has kind of.
I've changed a bit over the last 15 years in that, well, so first I should say that
the way that the internet works is that you have regional registrars that control IP address
space, right?
So, Europe has a thing called RIPE, U.S.S. Air-In, Asia is APNIC or whatever, and they
partition the internet amongst themselves, and then they go to entities that they give
into like say Cloudflare or Amazon or whatever, and then Amazon goes and gives them to their
customers or consumers or universities, individuals, whatever, right?
And these entities that enter into a contractual relationship with their regional registrar
is called an AS, an autonomous system, right?
So they're called autonomous systems, so that's why it's called ASMap.
And so these ASs can control lots of different networks, they don't have to control just
one, right?
Like Cloudflare A has like multiple ASs because they're really big, and so does Google and
so does Amazon, but they can also own networks that aren't contiguous, right?
They can say I want 12.2/16 and all the stuff below it, but I also want 100.11, whatever.
And so if you just looked at the IP addresses, you wouldn't know that they're the same entity,
right?
So you can imagine where like in Core this might be a problem, right?
Because if you're...
A sophisticated civil attacker might split it up across there, the things they control.
Yeah, or the AS is the attacker themselves, right?
Or the government knocks on the door of the ASs and says, let's hijack the traffic, right?
So yeah, so this observation that A, you know, multiple, like ASs could have multiple subnetworks,
and also the fact that they were trading them more often.
Like if you looked at just how different ASs trade like...
IP address ranges and zones.
Yeah, they break them up, they trade them, and it's happening more frequently than it
used to.
Interesting, okay.
So we're having trouble keeping a static map of the internet valid, you know, like 20 years
ago or even like, you know, I don't know, 30 years ago for sure was not, it was less
of a problem.
But today...
You could map it out once and you would be fine for a long while, and now it's way more
dynamic process mapping it out.
Right.
Yeah.
So, you know, the idea with ASMap was, okay, well, what we really want to do is map who
owns these networks.
It has the control from an entity standpoint over individual peers.
And so that's...
So what we're trying to do, well, what ASMap is doing is using, is building maps between
the IP...
Instead of using IP networks, we use the autonomous system.
So we create maps of who owns what IP networks, and then we bucket the peers in your peers
by AS and not by IP address, right?
So we change the whole, like, peering code itself to no longer be... no longer respect,
like, well, I mean, it does a bit of both, but it can also do by AS if it has an ASMap
to use.
Okay.
And that's considered superior, right?
Yeah.
So, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So basically, the goal of the ASMap is to be an extra security for your peering system.
Yeah.
So you wanna... like, now you... with what you just described, you basically build up
the connections, and I want one peer from this zone and one peer from this zone and
one peer from this zone and so on, and you can define the... like you said, you can connect...
you can initiate a connection based on the AS as the main criteria.
Well, it's more like when you hear about a peer and, you know, you get its IP address,
or you're... in this case, it's AS or in this case, both.
It says, "Oh, you know what, like, I would get this AS123 that is Hetzner or whatever."
And you know what?
That bucket's full.
Yeah.
If it was your IP address, I might catch you.
Okay.
So you don't establish the connection in the first place.
Right.
Well, so you might.
Yeah.
Or, you know, you'll keep filling up the bucket until it's full, and so you'll say, "Okay,
you go in this AS 'cause you're Hetzner clearly."
Yeah.
Or something else, right?
Yeah.
And so the idea is that it's much harder to do that, like to control entire autonomous
systems than it is to control an individual IP network.
Yeah.
And it's elevating the cost of attack of a peer... the cost of a peering attack by itself.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
So that's the idea, right?
Then the...
So I mean, this has existed, you know, all this backend code and core has existed for
a long time.
It's been... you know, 20 was in, I think, 2020, maybe earlier.
But the whole problem with this is how do you actually build these maps?
Like, how do you build a map of the internet?
And this is a problem that kind of dragged along for a while 'cause it's quite difficult
to do.
And the answer is, well, it's not really possible to, like, do it correctly or, like, fully,
right?
'Cause there's no real address book for the internet that doesn't exist, you know?
So Fabian went on a bunch of big research bent to kind of, like, figure out how to do
this optimally.
Like, we went to network research conferences and everybody was like, "No, don't forget
about it.
You can't do it."
But you know, so, you know, in the spirit of no solutions, only trade-offs, we came up
with...
So he started working on this project called Cartograph, right?
Cartograph with a K is is a Python program that fetches
We've got a lot of information about who owns what AS, and try to merge it as optimally as possible, like giving the trade-offs of what we think is valid, and I can go more deeply into how we assemble these maps if that's interesting, but basically we try to build these maps up as sanely as possible, and as of the last Core release, we're now embedding an ASMap into Core directly.
It's not on by default, but if you add ASMap on, or I can't remember where the setting is, then we'll use the default ASMap that we embed with the releases.
Why was the immediate reaction from the network, guys? It's impossible, basically, and don't do it. What's the main issue that you run into? What is it that makes it impossible?
There's no authenticated way to prove that you own an IP network. The way that the internet is a network of networks, and the way that we find IP addresses on the internet is that there's all these routers that point you in the right direction.
These are called BGP routers, Border Gateway Protocol. BGP sucks a lot, and there are "attacks", but it's really just how BGP works is that you can just announce whatever you want, and routers will just replicate it unless they have extra checks behind to try to ensure or have someone to call and say, "Is this really your network?"
There have been plenty of documented attacks. Yeah, I remember. We had some big internet outages a while ago related to BGP 15 years ago. I still remember that I did all my networking classes at the university and so on.
Long ago, my BGP knowledge is very bad, but that's what I still remember. It's one of the hilliest hills, basically. If you want to bring stuff down and just cause a bunch of ruckus, BGP is the way to go.
Yeah, and luckily, obviously, this is a known problem, and a lot of people, all the operators of the internet are well aware of the problem set. There's been a lot of thought about how to do it better, so it's hard to pull off.
These attacks are visible immediately, I guess, is one way. The other part is that people have tried to come up with solutions to this, so there's stuff like BGPsec, which I don't really know much about it, but it's part of making BGP better.
The thing we use a lot in cartograph is this thing called RPKI. I'm sorry, I'm throwing a ton of backbones, but that is just the way the internet is. It's just alphabet soup.
I mean, PKI, people should know what PKI stands for. What's the R?
So, it's resource public key infrastructure. So, yeah, RPKI is basically a way for regional internet registrars like RIPE and ARIN to attest that a certain AS is authorized to advertise a route.
So, effectively, we have a public key infrastructure around publishing announcements that say, "Okay, I'm AS444 and I'm allowed to advertise these internet routes."
So, you have a public attestation that is verifiable against the RIR's public key and this thing called a trust anchor, and anybody can just hook up to RPKI servers and check that all this stuff is valid.
So, this is really good and it's got some limitations and some soft spots, but it's already a huge leap forward in our ability to verify the address.
At least you have cryptographic assurances. Of course, the PKI infrastructure is still permissioned and those kind of things.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, so anybody can pull down from it. The RPKI server is already centralized, so there's multiple programs you can use to go verify RPKI information.
So, the problem is that RPKI is kind of under what's being rolled out and so it covers about 55% of the internet today, which is good.
Surprisingly good. Usually, if you roll something new out, like IPv6 had this issue for the longest time and still has it, right?
It's been around forever, but the internet doesn't like to change.
Indeed, like herding goats. But yes, that's kind of our basis for Cartograph.
It's like what we use to be the kind of bedrock of AS map, of how we map an AS to an autonomous system.
We go through all the RPKI info, we validate it, and then we take those routes and those ASs and that's the basis for our map.
Yeah, I see. Tell me more about kind of what I briefly mentioned before.
There's all these GitHub issues where various people run certain things and basically everyone needs to arrive at the same result.
What's that about? Explain this to people.
Right, so every month or so we do something called a collaborative run, which is where we all decide...
It's on a certain UNIX timestamp, a certain second, that we're going to launch this cartograph program at.
And the goal is to see if we can arrive at the exact same ASMap on the other side, right?
So for our PKI, it's a decentralized set of servers, we're connecting to a bunch of servers around the world,
and we're fetching all this our PKI data, we're validating it, we're building it into a map,
and we're also, since it's only 55% of the internet, we're also pulling other information from other public databases
that are not cryptographically verified, right?
And we want to to agreement what we don't have.
And so doing all those things, we want to see if it's possible to get to a final map that is correct.
And that works. I mean, usually we're, you know, there are certain things like,
oh, like a route changed right the second we did this, so some of you got in, some of you didn't.
Or like straight up, like we failed to connect some servers or whatever.
Yeah. But we're able to see like how different the maps are.
And most of the time, you know, we gauge like, okay, 50% of the run, if we have more than six people, five or six people running,
and we get to 50% of people that have the same map. Yeah, you know, and we look at maps that are really divergent to see like what the problem is.
So yeah, I looked at the output, I was surprised that from the issues I looked at, most people got the same output.
I was like, oh, wow, that's amazing. It actually works. You know, it really depends.
Some months don't go so well. And some months are really easy. And, you know, almost everyone gets it. And it's cool.
We've we built some better tooling these days to kind of try to see the differences between maps, and they're usually pretty minor.
So I mean, like the idea of doing this is, is a to give assurance to ourselves that like cartograph is a reliable way of building these maps.
Yeah, which we're pretty confident with now. And, you know, we can inspect them or whatever.
And the other is to ensure that, you know, especially when we embed it into core, that we are that that the the map we give core was not just like yellowed on someone's computer.
Yeah, there's a multiple people have done this. We've looked at the map, like we got the exact same hash outputs.
This wasn't like invented by me. And there is a, you know, like cryptographically verifiable paper trail, so to speak, like how this map came about, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, I've thought about, you know, how can we not purify this or like, you know, what if we did, you know, broader publication of hashes and everybody like hit their hash, but only reveal it together at the same time to make sure that, you know, there's also fun stuff you can do.
But for us, yeah, GitHub is the paper trail. And that's yeah, yeah, sure. I mean, you know, one step at a time.
Yeah, so so yeah, I mean, you know, anybody can join like a hop in or one of our collaborative runs, you really just have to like run, like set the program to run at the time.
And it's one flag, you know, yeah, just a thing. And you get an AS map at the end. And that's it.
Awesome. Yeah, no, I'll definitely put stuff in the show notes so people can join and participate.
I think it's a fun little thing to do. Very, very low barrier of entry, very low barrier barrier. Run one command, paste the output.
Yeah, yeah. And you know, it's like the we had this debate about AS mapping core a lot, because, you know, I was kind of of the of the bent of like, well, you know, the features there, like if people won't just go build their own AS maps when it's this easy, I don't know if they're ever going to like, we're gonna have to embed it into core for them to use it.
Yeah, but I really wish people would just like, whenever you spin up a new version of core, you just, you know, snap a new AS map that's fresh off the presses for yourself.
And just use it. Like, you do it, you don't have to wait for core for us or for anybody to build one for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I see. Yeah, yeah. But it's it's kind of an esoteric topic. So so very few even very few like hardcore Bitcoin users would will care about it in some sense.
Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, it's a it's a it's definitely I mean, that's a it's a niche subject. Yeah, for sure. For sure. So how come you already spoke about you thought about, you know, notifying some of those things?
How did you bump into nuster? And what has you kind of excited about it? And and also important to me personally, how did you bump into sovereign engineering? Well, how come how come you discovered the whole thing and decided to sign up and you're here now?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Always blows me away that people actually come, you know, like, there's nothing in it for you. Just hanging out in Madeira for a couple of weeks, basically.
And I don't know. I think there's a lot in it for you. Yeah, no one come guys. This is already plenty fun. Don't join sovereign engineering. No, so nuster. I mean, I was, I think the first person I heard about it from was probably will casserine.
When I was following him on on Twitter, and he's always hacking together fun stuff, I was looking at I think it was like, Ellen's socket work or whatever. Yeah. And just poking around his little prototypes, which are always super fun.
And, and, and he learned a lot from just listening to what will cause casserine outputs. And he started poking at nuster. And I was like, Okay, like, what's this nuster thing? And I read, yeah, if you had jobs, like one page on it. And it was just like a good example of like something that was
I thought so clearly, so well-exposed, and I was like, "Ah, thank you."
And it seemed to me that it was at the right time where everyone was trying to find the
next social media because Twitter was kind of a mess at the time.
And it just came with like, oh, someone finally saw clearly the right mix of clients and servers
and...
Yeah, the right trade-offs, kind of, right?
The right trade-offs, right?
Right primitives, right trade-offs.
It's funny, when you deal with technical solutions like this, you can almost feel when the thing
is right.
You get it and you're like, "Ah, immediately, I know this is exactly it."
So I just watched it, I was like, "Where's this thing going?"
I'll make a little profile and I'll start listening and see what happens on Nostr.
You know what a Bitcoiner is going to come up with.
Maybe it goes nowhere and then in half a month or half a year, people fizzle out or whatever.
And the exact opposite happens.
It's dying right now.
Haven't you heard?
It's dying right now.
Nostr is dead.
If the Nostr hive mind is to believe it's dying right now.
It's the same with Bitcoin.
It's dying all the time.
We're off on our little island in the middle of the Atlantic.
They just can't find us.
They don't know we're here.
Yeah, exactly.
No, yeah.
And honestly, over the years, just watching the experimentation and the breakneck pace
of experimentation that happened on Nostr, right?
And I was just like, "Yeah, this is how I like to social."
You know?
I don't want to be back on Twitter.
I've been off most social media.
I think there was only one I had and I was like, "Yeah, this is where me and my friends
can hang out.
If it's only just us, this is perfectly fine for me."
And it has not disappointed.
So for me, it's like the exact right primitive we can build on and people have done so in
ways that still blow my mind every day and I think the future is very bright.
What's your daily driver right now or what's your Nostr usage look like?
You know, I really wish it was better, but my daily driver is just amethyst.
All right.
I'm insane.
Guilty as charged.
Yeah.
I just like...
Kitchen sink client for the win.
Yeah, exactly right.
Yeah, my phone almost takes off and leaves for the next room every time I open amethyst.
Yeah, no.
I mean, it's great.
I mean, it's a great mobile app, et cetera.
I wish there were better like desktop clients.
I never found one I really loved.
Yeah.
I don't really want to log into the web for Nostr, like I'd really like to just keep it
on my own.
I use Nostr, which is actually an iOS client on my desktop since I'm on Mac as you can
use the iOS apps as well.
Okay.
So that kind of works for me, but I agree.
The desktop clients are subpar, like I'm very close to building my own.
Very, very close.
Great, you know, I might do this in summer engineering.
We'll see.
All right.
Yeah.
Please nerd snipe me on it.
Like I really don't want to.
And yeah, the other desktop client I use is co-op, but that's just for Nip17, just talking
to my agents warm basically.
Yeah, yeah.
And those days are numbered probably as well because I'll probably follow Pablo's path
and switch to Nip29 group chats and so on.
But we'll see.
Do you use...
Are you iOS or Android?
Android.
Do you use Zapstore a lot?
Oh yeah.
Yeah?
It's a friends app.
Shout out.
We never met, but dude, I love you.
Yeah, I know.
He's fantastic.
And yeah, friends, like Zapstore, because it's one of my main nostril use cases.
It's like I got a new phone, I install Zapstore, and I'm off to the races, and I love it so
much.
Yeah.
And for me, it's kind of like I'm at a point now, if it isn't on Zapstore, it doesn't exist
for me.
Yeah.
Like I probably don't need the app.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And so it's awesome in that way.
Yeah.
And it's got a bright future ahead too.
There's plenty of things left to build on the whole distribution of apps and whatever.
Yeah.
So, I mean, you know, it was funny that nostril is like...
I think I've ever been more bullish on nostril than right now.
I know I say this.
I probably say this a lot.
But now in the nostril bear market, how dare you?
Oh, no.
I am so bullish, dude.
I mean, the Git thing alone, like Jack is so right to push on this that we should be
rebuilding GitHub on nostril in a way his new buzz thing that he just released is kind
of in that direction.
Oh, it's happening.
And...
Did you look into and get and get workshop?
Yeah.
Deeply.
Yeah.
And I'm going to probably build some stuff on it.
This cohort.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Like we need to get off...
Like we need to get off Twitter at some point.
Yeah.
No, it's coming.
It's coming.
I, myself, I'm very close to this transition because I've been using GitHub forever.
Just like with...
Like I deleted my Twitter profile when I was like 15 years old or so and this is similar
for my GitHub account.
Like it's ancient and the reason why I deleted my Twitter was nostril was there and it was
good enough and I just...
I hated Twitter more and more and the same thing is happening right now to me and GitHub,
my relationship with GitHub.
It's like a toxic, abusive relationship and I feel like GitHub is abusing me all day every
day.
The stuff that always used to work is breaking and it's time I jump ship and go Nostr only for my git stuff as well.
I'm not 100% ready yet to pull the trigger because I rely on it so much and every time I tried to go purely Nostr-based,
I always ran into issues and always something was missing that I needed.
But it is going to get there. I can feel it in my plums.
The thing that's interesting with GitHub is that you have to unbundle a bunch of things.
This is just where my git repo lives and people can push and pull to it.
It's where I read files and interact with code and then explore it.
There's CI, which is a huge reason why people get locked into GitHub.
There's the social part, which to me is also super important.
I actually really love on GitHub being able to just follow people and see what they push or what they're working on.
I follow so many people and the star thing, like Justin Moon was talking about this as well.
It's such a big signal. All those little things are so important.
We have to either unbundle and re-bundle.
Issue tracking pull requests, of course. All that kind of thing.
Oh, that stuff. The social thing will be really interesting too.
What are the parts of GitHub social that we can reinvent on Nostr primitives that work?
What works with GitHub that we should keep? There's git dev workshop, which is kind of like,
let's get exactly the GitHub UI, try to get to parity, like we did with the early Nostr clients.
Let's try to get to parity with what exists and then build from there, which is awesome.
Shout out Dan Conway. Works awesome.
But I would like to see more, more different UIs.
Yeah, Marty Malmy is building his own thing as well.
Yeah, he has a git interface. I think even Justin built his own.
Cool.
Git interface basically just with the features he needs.
Why not?
No, it's definitely happening.
Cool to see also that you looked into it.
I think about it for Core a lot. It's come up over the years here and there.
Core has good resilience plans. If GitHub shut us out tomorrow, what would Core do?
And there's mirrors. People are backed up, all the issues, the pull requests, the history.
CI, they've been to movement, different directions.
But if CI went out tomorrow, we could rebuild it fairly quickly, I think, at least for Linux.
But yeah, Bitcoin is one of the most important software projects in history
and it should probably not be dependent on Microsoft's company.
And I agree the infra work around Core is humongous.
But I think they're going to have to figure out a solution to move towards it.
Yeah, step by step. I mean, same for there were discussions around the mailing list as well.
Using the mailing list as the communication hub and getting booted off of certain providers and so on.
I would like to see Core push more towards...
be further on the edge of, yeah, we're going to try to do it right and be as independent as possible
instead of GitHub and Google doing our crutches until they kick us out.
Yeah, yeah. But I think it's bound to happen. It's just kind of a matter of time
and also you have to be a little bit pragmatic about the choices as well.
It has to work. If it makes everyone only half as productive, then it's a really bad move.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, another thing like on that train of thought about GitHub over Noster is like...
I don't know about you, but for me, LLMs on having the co-pilot in GitHub has been really nice.
Like it has changed the way I interact with repositories distinctly, right?
So like when I have any question about a repo or like not even like where's this file,
but like where's the part of this code base where this logic happens or like does this do what I think it does or etc.
I don't bother. And you use co-pilot directly on the GitHub interface or...
Yeah, yeah. And they give it to you for free, right?
They had never limited me about some questions on there. It's not a fairly advanced model.
I've never used it. I've never used it. I do the same thing, but I always use my own stuff.
I mean, I'm almost never in the GitHub interface.
So you clone locally and then ask questions about it?
I have a swarm of agents and I just paste the link to repo and tell me about it.
Okay, you're further ahead than I am. You have to show me your ways.
Yeah.
But I think what I was going to get at was like, you know, there's an opportunity for whoever rebuilds GitHub.
I mean, this is basically what Jack did with Buzz, right? Is like get agents plus get in one interface and see what happens.
Yeah.
And I think it's a really good move, really good move.
Yeah, it's the right move. I had a long conversation today with Pablo about all this.
And basically the the you just mentioned, you know, like show me your ways. My ways are very simple.
I'm a very simple man. I want to be in front of the computer for as little time as possible.
So all my stuff has to be mobile first and basically what I landed on is like I use NIP17 to DM my agents.
The agents run in various harnesses that are various systems underneath basically.
Mostly open-claw still just because like I set it up when it kind of came out and I still like it and it does everything I need to do.
And so for the thing you described if I want to like literally just I open any Nostr client doesn't matter, Amethyst doesn't, Wisp is more reliable on NIP17-DM so I use Wisp mostly for that.
And on the desktop I use Co-op and so on and I just you know I pick my, I have one it's called Sovereign Sven and he knows all about the sovereign tech I'm interested in.
And I will paste in the GitHub link or repo link whatever it doesn't matter you know it can be GitLab, Gitia, whatever, plain also hosted on Nostr repo.
It's like tell me more about this what's the most interesting, what's the most interesting feature of this thing and so on and then I just go back and forth and I'm on my phone or whatever.
Also text to speech and voice and so on like this stuff works.
So these are my ways because then I can do it here you know like I walk up and down or I'm at the beach and I'll just I'll do this stuff and not stare into a screen all the time.
So it's almost like GitHub just died on its own.
Like everyone just like walks out of the interface and like if you have agents and if you have Git servers.
That's part of the agentic world, the death of UI is part of the agentic world.
I think it's one of the one of the very logical consequences.
You think voice will become the primary interface?
I think the differentiation between text and speech will continue to blur.
It definitely has for me, but I also realized that I'm an insane person and you know like.
You're just ahead of the curve.
Dropped off of the curve a long time ago, but to me it kind of doesn't matter for some things voice is way better like if you if you have.
The good thing about writing is it really helps you think it helps you to distill your thoughts.
The good thing about a long rambling session is like if you don't even know what the problem is you just just just talking into a microphone for like 15 minutes while you're walking is like fantastic and other lamps are insanely good at distilling the essence of it and so on.
And so I might one of my workflows just to stick with the example you posted like new repo I want to figure out I don't know how Bitchat works or whatever.
OK, there's this new thing and I paste it in like look at this repo and then in the same same session like same chat basically same agent everything so have a good overview and then I'll ask a follow up question along ramble voice note.
You know and I just go like ah that sounds interesting tell me more about you know like the way it utilizes Bluetooth or the way it utilizes and pops like what is an identity in Bitchat and so on and what else so I might come up with and I just that's it.
I hit send and then five minutes later I get a text message back I might use you know like the phone can also read it to me and so on.
And so that's I think the line between text to speech will continue to blur and I know it does also for Pablo for example who is even more insane than me and he will have all his agents work and stuff as autonomously as possible.
And then one of the agents will go over all the work and produce a podcast produce a podcast episode and his podcast player will just pop up.
Oh you know like daily update of what happened so probably living his own life anymore. No no he made himself a cog in the machine and what the machine is doing no one knows what's the goal of the machine no one knows.
Did you did you see what you push last night. No. No it's really funny so he's he's very close to the peak of a psychosis I think he's not at the peak yet so yeah we'll see.
You know what I was thinking about with like speech and text interfaces was you know one interface that has not changed with computers in like 50 fucking years.
It is a keyboard and mouse. Yeah we've been we've been stuck with like graphical terminals.
And yeah typey typey on the keyboard and like a little mouse around your little guy. Yeah as the default mode of how most of humanity deals with computing. Yeah right. And I think the fact that we have LMS and we can do like voice speech text is going to radically change the nature of like interfaces with computers for society as a whole right.
Yeah I think it's a pretty massive change. Yeah no that's definitely happening. And also what what fear Jeff for example doesn't understand is like 98 percent of the human population that interface with compute interfaces on the mobile phone.
And so so so that most people don't have computers anymore like everyone just has a phone and the phones are still it's still.
It's still point-and-click basically, but the interface has evolved to all the buttons are bigger, the interfaces are smaller, mobile-friendly, and so on.
And I think the next step of this evolution will definitely be kind of, people just will have, it's already happening with AirPods and so on, tiny earplugs.
Or also with, like, everything dematerializes further. You have your watch, you know, your smartwatch, it can display some things, you have something in your ear that can whisper to you, and I think that's just where it's heading, it's very natural.
Also, some of these rings, you know the Pebble smartwatch? The guy who built the Pebble smartwatch, he's building a ring now, and the ring has one single button and all he does is record a voice note.
So basically, that will be one of the input interfaces, where you just go like, you know, 20-second voice note, and it will go to your phone and do things and so on.
I think, you know, some of this, it's not quite like, the thing that's nice about computers and less so on mobile is that they are not on us, or around us, right?
You have to go to a desk and like interact with the machine. Yes, it's frustrating.
No, no, I guess, what do you mean? But then like, yeah, and so like the first instinct for people with AI is like, okay, can I like wear it? Can I have it, you know, in my ear? Can I have it in my glasses? Can I have it in my ring?
Yeah. And I don't know if that's gonna stick, right? Like, I don't think people like that. I mean, some people are like, really into it, and I've seen a lot more wearable AI stuff in the last six months than I have in a long time forever.
But I wonder if people will not always want computing to be outside of themselves. Like, if we had drones that could be solar powered and just follow us around all day, I think you would much prefer that with their AI than they would to have something on them at all times.
I think I know what you mean. Like, for me as well, especially if I start a new project, I need to go into the workshop and hammer on the thing intensely for like a couple hours, and do really like rapid iterations and be really close to the matter and literally be in the workshop. There is another way. I can't do it on the go. I can't do it from my phone and so it doesn't work.
However, once I'm in maintenance mode, for example, and someone reports a bug, and it's, you know, one of my agents fixed it, and I just have to look over it and press merge, I can do that on my phone, or get a briefing like a daily briefing or something, some summary of stuff that happened.
I'm fine with, you know, getting that on mobile or even in voice message format at the end of the day or something like that.
So kind of, you know, right, right tool for the job kind of thing.
Yeah, you could imagine like your phone, because I mean, they're not even phones anymore, right? No, no, no, no, no one's using their phone for phone purposes.
I mean, we still have, you know, you know, however many gigs of memory and phone plan and data, whatever, it's a full blown supercomputer. Yeah, exactly. So, like, if everything is remote, and it's just like your agent texting you what's up all the time, or telling you, you're giving you little yes or no prompts or whatever, how small can the phone be?
How much can we remove from this idea of a smartphone? Hey, hey, hey, next guest appearance. Yeah, we're recording. I'll see you around. Take care, man. Small island.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's just pretending he's not that popular. No, really small island. We have to chase away his fans. That's crazy.
Bitcoin engineer, obviously. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really good guy. Yeah, he did lots of lighting infrastructure stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like really deep into the weeds. Yeah, you wouldn't guess it if you see him, right? He looks more like a CrossFit type of person or something.
Big corners, man, we're all shapes and sizes, and we're everywhere. It's crazy. Yeah, really cool. Yeah, let's see how it evolves on the computing side. I mean, it's definitely exciting times. Everyone has some level of AI psychosis. Stuff is moving really fast.
Do you have any, like, sci fi references that you think about when you think of AI, like things you'd like to see? Things that have been like, ah, you know, man, I can't wait till we get to that point where like, AI is like that, or like, sounds are like that, or whatever.
Good question. Really good question. Whoo, I hope not. Lots of the sci fi I really like is like this topic, you know? I was kind of mining for positive examples. Yeah, I don't know. Like, like, the first thing that popped into my head now when you asked a question was snow crash. And basically like something, something that is so sophisticated that it takes over your mind.
And you see that happening kind of like Bitcoin is a little bit like that, you know, you get infected by the Bitcoin virus. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and, and so on. But no, but you mentioned the autonomous solar powered drones, I would love to see that I saw some prototypes years ago, I used to do lots of big scare quotes, like extreme sports.
Snowboarding, skateboarding, BMX riding, those kinds of things.
And it would be awesome to have just a little drone
that you can just throw over your shoulder and it will unfold
and just follow you automatically and kind of, you know,
like shoot some cool things or whatever.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, yeah, I don't know. On the AI side, I mean...
I don't know. It's a really great question.
I think, I mean, I talk about this a lot.
I think I mentioned it almost every single recorded dialogue we do
is like, LLMs have their limits.
And one of the limits is they are not embodied.
Yeah.
And because we humans, we're just going to do it.
We are going to embody LLMs.
And I talked with Kelly, for example, about different approach
to building artificial intelligence systems is building robots
and let them build up world models themselves.
And I'm kind of...
I'm looking forward to seeing that evolve.
And I wouldn't mind having a, I don't know,
like an autonomous spider robot in my house,
just like a watchdog for like...
Instead of having a security camera, have a thing like that.
Yeah.
And...
Was it Snowcrash where there were like robotic dogs?
Pretty sure.
Was it another...
Snowcrash had many things.
Yeah. They all burned around there.
But yeah, so, I mean...
So, I mean, one thing that's interesting with embodiment
is that they're no longer LLMs, right?
When we talk about world models,
we're not talking about large language models anymore.
Exactly. Yeah, yeah.
So, to go over the limit,
to break through that limit that LLMs will always have,
one of the requirements is embodiment.
Well, so I'm not sure if they're not just differences in kind, right?
Because like, the reason why LLMs are so successful at software engineering
is because it's ultimately written text and code, right?
That they can manipulate and they're so good at this, right?
But a world model is no longer language, right?
And so like, there's no, like...
But you can also plop an LLM on top
in the sense of like, our prefrontal cortex is like an LLM,
but the rest of our brain is not.
You know, the closer you go to the brain stem,
the more different it is.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'm obviously simplifying by a lot, but you get what I mean.
Yeah, and I wonder how, what that jump looks like, right?
Are we going to find out that, oh, shit, actually,
like the jump from LLM to whatever happens in the brain
is like actually humongous,
and we need a totally different science to do it
than the large language models we've learned so far.
I mean, you could argue like vision is a good counter example, right?
Like vision actually works great, right?
We have self-driving cars, etc.
But yeah, so I mean, this is Jan LeCun.
But it's still, you say vision works great.
Yes, but general purpose vision is really hard
because a self-driving car cares about a very specific subset
of the things you can see.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
And so your vision, and like, again,
quoting my favorite guy, John Ravecki,
like your whole perceptive apparatus depends on your value structure,
on your belief system.
It's like, what is salient to you?
What do you care about, and so on?
It's like, you know, if you're thirsty,
everything becomes a water source.
The example I was, used is, again, like I used to be,
like skateboarding was my life.
I was a skateboarder.
I started when I was three years old, you know,
and I did nothing but skateboarding.
And so everything to me was like a handrail
and something to grind down to and like a latch
or a staircase was not a staircase.
It was like, can I jump it or can I not jump it?
Even like, this still annoys me.
Like, you cannot skate on this asphalt, you know,
like it's absolutely terrible.
We're looking at really jarred out asphalt
that was terrible for us.
It's a gravel road, basically, you know,
and so that's still, this perceptive structure is still inside me
and I see, I notice all these kind of things
because I'm still a skateboarder.
Yeah, yeah.
My soul is still skateboarding.
Sure, sure.
I'm not anymore.
I'm too old, but but yeah, perception is super tricky.
So this will be very interesting to see and like from a cognitive science
perspective, we know that it will be very different than the world
of LLMs we have now, but it will also be necessary because the one thing
that LLMs can't do at all is care about the information they are processing.
We care about the information we're processing because we don't want to die
and we care about ourselves.
We care about our kids.
We care about society.
We care about the true, the good and the beautiful and so on.
And so one challenge will be how do you make any artificial intelligence
system care about itself and the world and so on.
So it's going to be a long journey.
We're not at the end of the, you know, singularity might be near,
but it's not as near as Silicon Valley Bros would like you to believe.
Yeah, I mean, the interesting part is that we'll get to bootstrap LLMs
to write the code to build the world models and embody that.
Yeah, we're definitely on an exponential and we'll see where it goes.
But yeah, I'd be interested in kind of.
Your thoughts on Nostr and some of the things that we touched on in the first week of the
court?
Like, you're a new participant, it's been your first week.
There was a lot of, like, we went very broad, kind of, you know, like, lots of different
Nostr primitives.
Naplets were a big part of the first week's sandwich at the Naplet Workshop on Wednesday.
Fantastic.
I really like it.
This workshop I've ever come to, in the sense of, like, everybody got it all running, and
we all shipped it with it, like, half an hour was crazy.
80% success rate of the people that were there, it was really good.
Obviously, lots of FIPS talk, and that's what I kind of want to pick your brain about.
Since you come from the network world, we went really deep into ASMap, and, you know,
what is the issue with IP addresses and clustering and all those kind of things?
And what are your thoughts on FIPS, and what do you know about it up to now, and are you
excited about it?
Do you think it's stupid?
Like, talk to me about it.
So I love the idea.
I haven't evaluated, like, the technical internals, not just, like, only, like, service level,
and I've messed with it slightly, but it's interesting, because you could basically do
an introduction to FIPS by describing ASMap, right?
Yeah.
And, you know, if you have FIPS, well, none of the ASMap problem even exists, right?
Yeah.
And so you don't need ASMap as a solution, which is really cool.
Yeah.
So, yeah, like, FIPS is this idea that you can create an overlay and skip DNS, and point,
and create an intranet between cryptographically- Skip IP, see?
Well, that's what I don't really get, like, I mean, yes, you're routing towards, you're
obviously routing towards an IPv6 address, or is that just locally?
No, you don't have to.
You can also route to an input.
But why do you need to route to an input?
The IPv6 just comes in to make it compatible with the existing internet.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I don't quite follow how that works.
I need to sit down with Arjen, and- Let's say you only have LoRa devices, so whatever,
and like, you pick your thing.
Pick your radio.
Yes, you can pick radio.
Yeah.
But if you're using the internet, what are you using?
But then you just go to radio to radio.
IP addresses don't even factor.
You can just, you know, you run into a guy who wants to sell you muscles, that's one
of the benefits of being on an island.
It's true.
Not bad.
Very fresh.
He just got it.
Infinite cetaceans.
So, I mean, yeah, no, I get like, you know, you can have a transport over a radio or over
another medium, but if the medium is the internet, how do you route traffic if it's not
like, what do you mean, route to an NPUB?
Like an NPUB is in an IP place.
It's hosted somewhere.
No.
So the issue that all mesh networks face, all of those new things is like, you would
have to rebuild everything on top of the mesh system to make anything talk, any node talk
to any other node, right?
To make fibs actually work in practice is like, if we have the internet already, we have compute
and networking infrastructure already.
So fibs right now, if you go the IPv6 route, acts kind of as an overlay network on the
existing stuff and the exit point kind of is an IPv6 IP address.
And the NPUB maps deterministically to IPv6, but that means then you have to go to, you
go through like...
Yeah, okay.
No, okay.
Yeah.
The TCP/IP is then the channel, but you can use...
It's transport agnostic.
So you can use a different transport layer and like what sandwich try to show with just
using sound, using sound waves.
Yeah, yeah, okay.
Yeah.
Sure.
And then IP addresses don't even come into the picture.
So it's the layer under IP layer, whatever layer that is.
You know, you choose me as a network guy as hilarious because I really have very little
network knowledge.
I'm not sure if it's up or down.
But it's basically the beautiful thing that makes it backward compatible is that you can
deterministically derive an IPv6 address from an NPUB and vice versa.
But inside of FIPS, all the routing and everything only goes to an NPUB.
Yeah.
And there's a whole magic around like doing an actual mesh network via NPUBs and relays
and whatever.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Totally.
And if this is how, as advertised, like this is like we're building a new transport for
the internet that is going to be far more independent than what we had before.
And that is so rock and roll.
Super based.
Yeah.
That I'm just about right.
It's a new addressing mechanism.
That's what's happening.
It moves it away from IP addresses, and it doesn't require DNS in the traditional sense.
That's what makes it so powerful, because DNS is one of the archaeologist's heels of
the internet, and IP addresses, for all the things we talked about, especially IP before,
are terrible.
It's permissioned by default, and so FIPS solves both of these problems, and the rest
of the, like, again, so that's kind of simple, and the hard part is then, it depends on the
transport layer.
Like, making FIPS work over Bluetooth is harder than making FIPS work over, you know, or making
FIPS work over sound waves is harder than making FIPS work over PCB.
Sure, sure, sure.
But then it can be arbitrary, right?
You can pick whatever you want.
Like, if you go to the FIPS website, FIPS.network, you'll see a FIPS package, you know, going
over the wire, then going over Tor, then going over Bluetooth, and you know, on Tor it slows
down massively, and Bluetooth is slow as well, and so on.
But it's all FIPS, and it's just the underlying transport layer is what changes.
It's like, one idea I had that I was talking about right about last night was like, wow,
it would be cool, you know, like, what if we, you know, add another transport layer to
a Bitcoin Core, so we have Tor, IQP, and then FIPS, and then I was like, oh, well, wait,
if it just does that BV6, it already just works out of the box.
You can have a FIPS peer be a Bitcoin Core node, and there was no problem, right, it
just works.
So I want to test this out and make sure I'm right about that.
That'd be, you can do all sorts of fun things here, right?
Have one core relay for the island, and then it just FIPS over radio to your entire island,
or whatever, right?
Like, I love the versatility, the fact that it's amorphous, right?
It can change shapes and go in every direction it needs to go.
It's kind of a bridge building technology.
It's like, you can bridge anything with anything.
The archipelago guys, what they showed off, making the archipelago nodes that they're
building FIPS compatible, that was so amazing to see that they managed to pull it off.
And also, like, one of the side effects is like, you don't have to care about, you know,
like hole punching, or any net stuff, or any router configuration to make it connect to
this IPs and so on.
It just works.
You just, you punch in the end pump, that's it.
You even have a discovery layer, you know, like, you can discover the end pump and so
on.
And then it just works.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's quite amazing.
No, so, I mean, you know, you asked me, like, what my overall, like, first week impression
was.
I think, like, I am beyond, like, I could not be more bullish about the next couple of
weeks than just, like, the things we can do on nonster.
Like one thing that was amazing was, like, stuff like the Archipelago guys was like,
yeah, it was just, like, easy to integrate, and it made everything better, and it was
all easier.
And you see this path, and I've seen this in a couple projects now where you just do
the, Buzz would be a good example, right?
Where you take the nonster ideas, and it turns out that they're very simple to integrate
and give you so much for free that all you have to do is step away from your old way
of thinking about application building, about the web, about centralized services, SaaS,
etc.
Yeah.
And then you start bubbling up that are so, like, within reach, and make your product
so much better, right?
And that's been, that I didn't think about before, but yeah, very bullish on that front,
right?
Yeah.
Did you play around with Buzz already?
Did you give it a go?
So I've been, I put NixOS on my laptop, and so I suffer with any package building, and
I've been trying to build Buzz for a better part of the past week, unsuccessfully.
But I did learn a lot about half-image packaging.
So, no, I haven't gotten past the interface.
The thing that was weird with Buzz was, like, it forces you to get either codecs or, yeah,
or a clod, and yeah, I didn't really love that.
Yeah.
So I don't know why I could just use Goos or something.
Yeah.
You're a kind of maple-only kind of guy, what I heard, right?
Yeah.
Is that correct?
I try to use maple, AI, shout out to Tony.
Yeah.
Because I like it, and it's a great service, and that's how I want to use LLMs, is privately.
Yeah.
You run local models as well, or you have any type of hardware to speak of?
No, I don't have very serious hardware, so that's why I'm kind of stuck with the services.
Yeah.
That's why maple's the right fit, right?
You plan on getting one?
Nah.
Post-hype Bitcoinization?
So, I mean, yeah, right.
Like, right.
I kind of like, I mean, the thing that's interesting with this whole AI thing is, like, are we going
to wake up a year from now and all of a sudden there's a model you can run that's very small
and focused exactly for the task you need?
You know, like, are we going to wake up and all of a sudden the GPUs didn't actually matter
that much?
Mm-hmm.
Or are we going to have to keep gobbling up hardware until 2030 to run the next and best
thing?
Or is it always going to be just in the cloud because no one's going to have a server rack
in their closet?
Like, I don't really know where it's going, so I'm not going to invest in, like, hardware,
you know?
Yeah.
I don't know yet.
Yeah.
Yeah, the future depends on open source local models.
I think we talked about this somewhere.
I think that's where things are heading. I know very little about this stuff, but I obviously talk to people that know a lot about this stuff.
And the kind of research consensus seems to be models get smarter and smaller and catch up faster to frontier than most people would like to think.
And I think also the specialization aspect that you mentioned is going to be big going forward.
Like quoting John Verweke and everything we know about cognitive science is like you can't be a specialist and a generalist at the same time. So we will need to have specialized models.
And the stuff you talked about obviously looks like highly specialized, like an elixir specialist, you know, like a rust specialist or like even more stupid than that, like, I don't know.
Only HTML. Yeah, diff merging, code conflict resolution specialist and those kind of things. Yeah. And people will definitely build this and also like distill bigger models into these specialists and so on.
So that's definitely happening. I mean, is it just that I don't know the like cutting edge LLM training subculture of the Internet and they're all doing this?
Like, I feel like someone must have done similar things, right? Yeah, I know too little about it myself.
I'm sure there's people out there that did the first experiments along these lines.
You know, there was an interesting moment. Jesus, my sense of time has gone out the window with this fucking LLM stuff.
But I want to say a year ago where like I think it was AMP, AMP code. They're like they're kind of a harness for the UI for coding with agents.
And they were like, you know what, we're removing all tool calling because soon we see a future where the models will be so good that we won't need to do any like actual tool calling engineering. Interesting.
And then like a month later, the exact opposite thing was the status quo in the world.
Where everyone was like, you know what, actually the dumbest fucking models, as long as they're good at tool calling, will outperform anything.
Because what we really want for software engineering isn't like a hyper super, you know, independent model that understands everything about everything.
We want someone that is really good at using the tools at its disposal. Picking the right tool for the right job. Yeah.
So I actually I think that's the right thesis. And I think that's why we're seeing all this like agentic engineering stuff take off because that's why I think anthropic.
I'm super bearish and anthropic for lots of reasons. But like one of them is that they their main thesis is that the best model will win.
There will be one model to rule them. Yeah, that's what I disagree with. Obviously, as well. No, no, no, terrible strategy. Right. Yeah.
So so I don't know, I would like to think of the future is like models that are very good at tool calling and managing their environments and can be like their actual size is really, really small.
And you need very little memory. Yeah. Yeah. But again, man, I don't know. Yeah, no, we'll see. We'll see. I mean, I think stuff.
Well, I mean, Apple is doing that as well. They are ahead of the curve in some sense that they have all the hardware, you know, and like the chips in the iPhones are insanely capable.
And so we will have locally I that's where it's trending. Basically, we'll have lots of stuff run locally on on on the supercomputers we have in our pockets and so on.
And I don't rule it out that open source models will get good enough and small enough that you can just run it on relatively simple consumer consumer hardware.
We are at a strange time right now where just hardware prices are all over the place. And just, you know, if you want to buy something and run your own inference like strong models, you'll have to buy the equivalent of like a medium sized car.
I wouldn't like I wouldn't underestimate the hackers, right? They come up with ways to do things with with models that are never like never bet against human ingenuity. Like that's that's yeah.
And isn't I know it's kind of like, you know, we have lots of who we're gonna know where this is going to go. But isn't it so fun? Like, I feel like in the next couple of years, it's a lot of fun.
Yeah, no, it's a lot of fun. What a time. Yeah, yeah. I have one more one more thing to pick your brain about. You mentioned it already briefly, but it relates to what you demoed this Friday.
So you packaged a bunch of nasty stuff for next. So tell me all about this. And what's your what's your plan for that? And and and yeah, how do we get Justin Moon aware of it as fast as possible?
So, yeah, I started packaging nosterer software with Nix, right? And so I presented basically, like, and I packaged a bunch of stuff, and I threw it onto a Nix binary cache. So if you use Nix as a package manager, you can just use this binary cache to give you binaries, right?
So, you say, yeah, I want to go, you know, I want to build.
The developer environment that uses NAC or Engit or FIPS, you know, or all these things,
it'll just check the binary cache first and say if it's there, I'll just pull it down, right?
So, I mean, we're all used to binary caches as software engineers.
So the reason to do this, like, my motivation for doing it was that, like, software packages are the bedrock
of how we build all the things we build, right?
Bitcoin uses other people's software, we ship software to others, and so we need a transparent tool
to be able to manage both, like, publishing packages and downloading packages from the web
and make it as easy as possible to use tools, software tools.
And to me, the answer to that is NiX, right?
You know, I've seen the good and the bad side of NiX on by no means like a NiX zealot,
but I think there's only one tool that's a true universal package manager
that can handle any language, any output build system, or output target, I mean,
and have, like, one language and system to handle all that.
And I think that's, like, that's a necessary...
I see it as, like, sovereign infrastructure, right?
How come you got into NiX in the first place?
But it feels like it's your first love affair, something like that.
So, I was... I mean, I've been coding in Elixir for a bunch of years,
and so it looks just a functional language, and I've been looking at, like...
I honestly kind of stumbled upon it, and I had a couple of...
I guess I just, like, went reading about it, and I was like, this looks like a total mess,
and I definitely don't want to get nerd sniped by this,
because this feels like this is going to suck in years of my life, and no thank you.
So you were right about that, probably.
So I was right, and, yeah, it did take a while to just be with NiX,
and I wish I had waited for LLMs to just teach me, but whatever.
And, yeah, I mean, there was just something that the creator of NiX saw
about how to build software, like, a question about, really,
what does it mean to build software, and what is the optimal way to do it,
or what is at least a sound way to do it,
better than all the other examples we have today,
which are all kind of shitty for different ways,
for different reasons.
And so I read his... He had a PhD thesis, which isn't, like,
it really isn't that long, or whatever, and he just exposes...
- So readable PhD thesis? - Yeah, totally readable.
- Those are few and far between. - There are few.
And it just laid it out, and it was all, like, based on cryptographic identifiers,
and, you know, having a graph and map of different...
- Dependencies? - Yeah, that created a graph of dependencies.
And so it was, you know, they used Merkle trees,
they used all sorts of things that are really familiar to us.
- All this stuff you already loved. - Exactly.
And I was like, "Oh, well, like, I understand this pattern,
and, like, I see how it fits, and, like, does it really work for building packages?"
And it turns out it does.
And you get some really nice things out of it.
One of them is reproducibility, so you're able to, like...
If I write it on my machine, and we have the same machine type,
and you write it on your machine, if you did it correctly,
then we'll get the exact same binary bits a bit, right?
And that's really hard to do on most other systems or other build systems.
And Nix has, like, a way to do that.
And that's important for certain trust assumptions,
so you want to know that the stuff you're executing,
there is no funny business going on,
there is no man-in-the-middle injecting stuff into your software, and so on.
- Yeah, exactly. - And that's one way to make sure that...
And, you know, it should be how all software works.
I know that the fact that we live without this is kind of like the Wild West...
The world has been running on the YOLO mode for a long time.
Exactly.
And so, you know, with Nix, I found a little, like, island of sanity
in terms of how to distribute and think about build systems and building packages.
And, you know, the Nix community took this idea and went very far with it, right?
It went from a package manager to, actually, you know what?
We can use the same theory to build operating systems,
so there's, like, a Linux distribution called Nix OS.
We can actually use this to be able to deploy management systems
that are incredibly powerful and useful because they don't have to recompute everything every time
and they can see transparently what's happening on both machines, blah, blah, blah.
All sorts of stuff.
And so, yeah, I just became comfortable with it.
I mean, I worked for Nix Company at some point.
I worked for the Nix OS Foundation briefly.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, I just... You know, and then when I came into Bitcoin...
I mean, I'd heard about this project, but Jonas Nick and Eric Arvstadt built Nix Bitcoin,
which was like a whole Bitcoin deploy thing with lots of Bitcoin stuff packaged.
So that was kind of my inspiration for Nostra package.
It was like, "Well, it'd be cool if we had a similar thing of, like..."
Nix Nostra.
Yeah, Nix Nostra. Exactly.
Where, like, stuff is packaged.
Let's go.
There's recipes to deploy it.
Awesome.
You can deploy your own nodes.
So, like, what I'm going to work on next is, like, that deploy story stuff.
Like, can we make a really easy, reproducible way of shipping a FIPS node
with a
And get GRASP server with, you know, a blossom drive with cashew mints.
You know, can you compose these services and ship them composably mix and match etc.
Yeah, awesome.
And so like the whole goal with that is to make it easy and safe to deploy your own machines.
It's also very agent friendly, right?
Like agents are very good at deploying nix stuff.
So if you have an infrastructure agent and, you know, you just like you just said, you
know, like, okay, like, I want from this, I want the blossom server and I want the cashew
mint and maybe I want the relay, just deploy it and it will just go ahead and do everything.
Definitely.
Like the fact that nix is like a written configuration means the clankers are just really good at
it.
It's all text and they love text.
Yeah.
Fantastic.
Yeah.
So yeah, it's been, it's been also another happenstance of LLMs that they are, they are
quite in love with nix.
Yeah.
Match made in heaven.
You might know a little bit about geeks as well.
Since we spoke about building Bitcoin and I always thought that was interesting because
that's a very hard problem to solve as well.
How can you start with as little dependencies as possible and, and, and, you know, like build,
yeah, bootstrap the software into existence, like with every step, making sure that there's
no funny business going on.
Like can you talk to me about that a little bit?
How much do you know about geeks?
Uh, g-u-i-x.
Yeah.
G-u-x.
I mean, conceptually, I don't know much about the internals apart from like they forked off
of nix super early and did their own kind of, they took that same idea I was talking about
at nix and just implemented it very differently.
And it's what we use in core.
Right.
Yeah.
And people will like rebuild core locally on their machine with geeks and they publish
the hash to make sure they have the same one.
Right.
Yeah.
And so, you know, what's really interesting is, uh, so that works great.
And like, you know, people use geeks, you could go verify the attestations and all that.
But recently, uh, oxb10c, uh, went and did the same thing with nix because we always
thought that it'd be possible to do this thing with nix.
Um, and he was like, can I actually find the geeks hash with nix?
Okay.
Like, can I do this cross, uh, cross tool, come up with the same output for core and
the mad lad did it.
Uh, so he figured out...
Mad lad is right.
Yeah, dude.
He's such a mad lad.
And uh, so I think now we have it for all builds for macOS or nix, where you can actually
just, yeah, you get a correct reproducible build, whether you use nix or geeks, nix or
geeks.
Awesome.
Yeah.
He's just insane.
And stuff he does in the Bitcoin world, it's like, um, yeah.
To me, it's always fascinating that those type of people even exist, you know, just
doing hardcore stuff and being so consistent for so long.
Yeah.
And, and he's also, I think he's like picked up the LLMs and he's kind of just having fun.
He's like, yeah, man, I just threw cloth on it.
It was like, go figure it out.
So it's more like about having all these great ideas and just, uh, yeah, yeah, like knowing
how the internals work of all these systems.
Yeah.
Uh, no, God bless them for sure.
Yeah.
Um, yeah.
So when do you think, uh, will, uh, nix noster be a thing?
When can we send the link to Justin and he can install all this stuff?
Um, well, I think I'm going to go ham on it next week.
All right.
Um, and I have the plans for it.
So there's going to be quite a bit of kind of drudgery work and testing around the config
stuff, but conceptually, I don't see any big blockers.
All right.
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah.
I was looking at the next Bitcoin code base again, because they have all this extra niceties
around, uh, secret management and like making sure the configs don't conflict.
And like, uh, there, there, there is a lot of, you have to dig into the specifics of
each software.
Yeah.
I think I'm going to mess with the others in, and you have to be careful about stuff.
Yeah.
I see.
I want to say I'm going to go see how far I get next week.
Yeah.
Um, but I'll definitely have a demo on that front.
Cool.
Speaking of demos, you saw your, you had your first demo day this Friday.
Yeah.
Yesterday.
Wow.
It was only yesterday.
It wasn't a long day again.
Yeah.
Tell me about it.
And, um, yeah, time, time kind of moves differently.
Like Bitcoin time is different than, you know, like real world time.
And you mentioned, you know, the, your, the whole AI LLM stuff again is like a different
sense of time again.
And every time I'm, I'm participating in the court, I lose all sense of time entirely.
That's just how it goes.
But, um, yeah, Friday demo day, what were some things that are still bouncing around
in your mind?
Some stuff that you thought was, you know, like interesting or, or funny or well done
or an interesting idea.
What's something that stood out to you?
We saw 21 demos, so I have to ask.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like, the...
I mean, there's stuff like FIPS over sound waves. It's like pure hacker, you know,
we were at the bar just like masterminding all the possible different ways we could send information, you know,
like, and to see fun little hacker projects like that is just...
Someone on Austro was like, "Oh, okay, so just like dial-up."
Yeah, that's hot.
And cheese-arminty was like, "Yes, but slower."
But look, you know, it's fun, right? It's like the creativity of hacking stuff together, that's the fun part.
The fact that you can actually do it and you can, like, you're...
The other participants in the FIPS network wouldn't even know.
Exactly.
That's amazing, you know? Like, that's amazing.
The other... I mean, the one that really stuck with me and that hit me very deep in the soul was the Archipelago demo,
which was the UI one where they showed you the thing for the nodes, you know that?
Yeah, yeah.
And so this isn't released yet, but the start-up screen of this, like, home node system from Archipelago
is the first time I've seen aesthetic and design so badass and so beautiful
that it really lives up to, like, the mission that it's trying to embody.
Yeah. Like, I think we've failed so much at aesthetics in Bitcoin and design
and really getting into people's, you know, grabbing them from the first time they look at the screen or something, you know?
All our software is fine. I mean, it works. It's what you're used to.
Yeah, it's not exciting.
It's not exciting.
It doesn't pull you in.
This is the first time, and I won't spoil it because people are going to have the experience of loading it themselves.
But, man, I can't...
It's an experience. It's like you're sitting in the cinema at, like, the THX sound place or something. You're ready.
And it was also something different, something I had never seen before, right?
And that's cool. That's very cool.
I told them six months ago already, "Please release it. It's so polished already.
Like, please make it available to the public." And they're like, "I don't know. There's still some rough edges."
So there are some perfectionists at work here.
Well, does this mean, like, it's not, you know...
They promised me now July 31st, right? I think is what they said.
I thought you said October 31st.
October 31st. God damn it. Rock pulled by a month again.
But, OK, I'll take it. October 31st.
Yeah. But, I mean, you know, I don't see this perfectionism, right?
I mean, it's like it's obviously like really amazing top shelf work by far.
But it's I think as engineers, we often think about the systems themselves and like the the techniques behind it and how it works.
And, oh, look at it. Isn't it amazing that it works?
But the rest of the world doesn't belong on to things or doesn't like appropriate things for themselves because of the rational merits of it.
This is aesthetics.
It's aesthetics. Yeah. And like, you know, we fail to communicate like the badassery of cyberpunk aesthetics.
Yeah, like it's it's it's cyberpunk, self-sovereign aesthetics. It's with what Archipelago?
Yeah, 100 percent. And it's one of the first times I've really seen it.
Yeah. You know, I could honestly I don't know many good examples of cyberpunk aesthetics that were properly
designed and communicated that well. Yeah. Yeah. Shout out to Zaza.
He's the main designer behind this, like he makes all this work and pretty and like he's a he comes from the AI world.
And he I think he mentioned he started with flash animations, you know, like those this era of the Internet where we saw more of these kind of flashy intro heavy websites and so on.
So so that definitely comes through. Yeah, no, I'm I'm very excited to see it progress like I've known about the project for quite a while now.
And it's amazing to me how well it works.
And it's also like you said, you know, the design and the aesthetics of it is top notch.
And I'm very much looking forward to it being out in the wild and other people like getting up and running with it.
And we see some Archipelago notes pop up. And right now it's internal testing.
I think they mentioned the cohort will get, you know, like exclusive access in terms of testing and just running it for ourselves.
And yeah, a little bit over a month from now, it will be hopefully out in the world. Nice. Really cool.
One of my favorite node projects. I don't even know about it until yesterday. Yeah, it's really cool.
What else stood out to you? Let's see. What else? What else was what else happened yesterday?
I can't keep up with Pablo, man. He demoed three projects in four minutes. It was crazy.
Oh, well, this was pretty cool, actually, was so Pablo demoed this thing that was basically how to compose different filters together.
Yeah. And so the end of the back end can compose them intelligently.
So you basically it was a UI where you use you can.
I want long-form nodes from this person, but also single nodes from this other person,
and just throw them into one bucket, and then the event starts streaming to you in a given way.
Long-form nodes from someone I follow, but it's blocked by VHF.
Yeah, so really arbitrary composition of filters.
And so it was drag and drop, right?
I don't think it's the right UI for it, because I don't think anybody wants to sit there,
but I can see it as a speech thing, right?
And say, yeah, just give me, all right, hey, good morning, Nostr.
Get me the last memes by Corn DeLorean, or whatever, but nothing, you know,
only the things that got zapped, or whatever.
And also give me anything about the World Cup, and anything happening on Madeira, boom.
I think that'll be something that a speech UI like that, but you've got to design the backend
to be intelligent enough to compose them and stream them back.
Yeah, that's what he's building out, in the sense that it's infinitely composable.
And depending on, I mean, I think you like it because you come from the functional programming side, right?
Like a very similar idea.
And then the output of the whole function is of a certain kind, let's say like a list of profiles,
or a list of kind one nodes, or a list of whatever.
And depending on the kind, the way you display it, it's going to be different.
Like a list of images is just going to be a gallery, those kind of things.
Cool.
And the part that's tricky is you can also nest kinds, which means you have to nest representations,
because you can have a kind one node that mentions an article, for example,
or embeds an article, you know, and all those kind of things.
And then it gets tricky, so that's what he's currently banging his head against,
because then you need, dependent on the representation context,
you need a different kind of representation for the thing.
Like if I embed an article, you don't want to see the whole article,
you might want to have the article name, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Or how do you display a profile when it's just mentioned in a kind one,
it's different to how you show a profile if it's part of a block list, for example, or whatever.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, that's interesting for sure.
Yeah, it's an interesting problem.
But the whole system already works, like the composability, and the kind of like how basically,
it's basically relay filters, but composed, and queries composed infinitely deep.
And the cool thing you could do on top of that is like then start having arbitrary queries, right?
Yeah.
Say, okay, give me anything that mentions x, but nothing that mentions y.
Yeah.
And yeah, then you're running, not SQL, but you're running some kind of query on top of a composable query of the actual.
Yeah, and it's extremely performant as well.
Like it was quite impressive.
Yeah, he's always cooking up something crazy.
Let's see where that goes.
And you know, it's a whole class of things I've always thought that's really well suited to Noster,
because you can't query Twitter.
Yeah, of course.
Unless you pay for the API, like, you know, everybody's experience with Twitter would be so much better
if you could just like compose your own UIs over it or whatever.
And I think once there's a little bit, once people get that composability in the tools you can build on top of a Noster,
I think will be a really big one.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it's already happening.
Like the Noster, we have, you know, more Noster clients than users, basically.
And some of them are really different.
I think they're built a little too hard.
And on the Twitter side, lots of people use Notec, you know, and lots of people use alternative Twitter clients.
But unfortunately, of course, they shut all that down, basically, with restricting the API access.
But that's all just an incentives game.
You know, they need to squeeze the users, keep them in, make money somehow, and so on.
Yeah, yeah.
That's just how it goes.
No, I think when finally people wander into the Noster tents, they'll be kind of like, you guys built what?
Like, holy shit.
Yeah, that'd be fun.
Yeah, lots of things going on.
What else happened yesterday that was cool?
I feel bad now.
I'm like blanking on all the awesome projects, but I mean, one that was cool was the data one.
So why don't we have data sets as like blossom bits, and you can just query for data sets over Noster?
Yeah.
Which is a super obvious one.
But I mean, there's some technical things you got to figure out with like, he used Parquet as a data format.
Exactly.
And how you compose chunks and all that stuff.
But ultimately, like, I would love to have a public data repo.
And it's just like stuff I can compose and query and cross-reference over Noster, like, it makes a whole sense.
Yeah, that was Wispahash, that was his demo.
And I spoke to him today about it, actually.
And he'll get it done for sure.
Like, he's highly motivated.
And his main concern is he still has too many blind spots in terms of Noster technicalities, like how to structure the events right and so on.
But I told him, like, you know, all the right people are here.
Yeah, yeah.
Talk to Hazard.
Talk to Pablo.
It's like you're Gucci.
I locked you guys in a room.
Yeah, you're fine. You're fine.
It's not an issue.
Talk to your expert.
Yeah, and that's a good example of someone who's, like, a data person and, like, a specialist.
What surprised me was kind of the FIPS world map that was really really surprising to me.
How could I forget? Dude this was mind-blowing. So this was basically like, I thought FIPS was
like 12 nodes and there was what 2500? Yeah something like that way more way more than
you would think. And so it was a live it was a live globe of like all the active FIPS connections.
I think Arian must have just given a talk or something and like everyone has gone off and
tried it because this thing just blew up like it's crazy. Crazy yeah it's I still I still don't know
what happened or why there are so many nodes someone mentioned it's probably Marty Malmy's
NostrVPN which basically bundles a FIPS node. No way he's got like even a thousand nodes. I don't
know like I don't have a working theory for why there are so many there are way more than I would
have expected. I think Jonathan might be unhappy about this because the last time I spoke to him
he mentioned like there's way too many people using this thing it's not ready everything will break
and it feels like it just gets worse by the minute in terms of like people are actually adopting it.
I mean this is this will only spur him to death faster like I see no downsides here. Yeah
and what else do we have we had some fun ones like the NostrTamagotchi thing that can potentially
kill itself. Yeah I was like that's fine man but you know like I you know I mean we live in
Europe and like I'm very you know like the France is like forcing social media for kids
or doing identity verification and I'm like I want to build the like infra stuff that matters
so that we escape we have all the tools escape the gulags right so you know all you know respect to
whoever built that I yeah I won't be building Tamagotchis you know I think there's lots of
lots of it would be a nice tagline like anti-gulag technology yeah oh yeah for sure well I'm so I'm
so like I'm not disappointed I'm just like I can't believe it's a real AGI anti-gulag infrastructure
yeah but like I want young hackers to come out and be like how do I escape this shit
of the this country making all these stupid decisions about my use of the computer and
social media yeah and I want them to like wander in and have like a vibrant tool set ideas and
people building in it yeah and they see that it's not just like you know four hackers somewhere
often wherever yeah that kind of got a side project that sort of works yeah so I'm kind
of feeling the pressure to like run fast and and build build this stuff we need to build yeah yeah
build those cape hatches yeah yeah what's your what's your take on the future in general like
the next I don't know five years ten years speaking of European Union decisions and
the digital gulags we find ourselves in um well it's never been a better time to be a cypherpone
but I think I'll just quote Hunter S. Thompson when he said uh when the going gets weird the
weird turn pro yeah yeah um I don't know I mean it's such a weird time to be alive and so many
things are changing so quickly yeah that's kind of all I got yeah I'm along for the ride yeah
you have kids yet no not yet no kids one and a half kids or no uh not sure yet we'll see
no comment no comment because that's kind of it for me for me obviously
supercharge is my kind of enthusiasm and motivation to actually get this right and
build something that my kids can use that no one else can you know take away from them or
shut down or whatever yeah and I grew up in a free and open internet mostly and I watched
you know with dismay kind of things get really weird and the doors closing in and yeah just
most things going to shit and I mean obviously everyone knows and everyone realizes
kind of the conundrum we're in Cory Doctor for example wrote the book and shitification you know
I think it's a nice term yeah like how every single online thing kind of slowly but surely
turn to shit and yeah I don't want to see my kids grow up in the in the gulags digital or otherwise
so yeah I'm highly motivated to keep working on this stuff and you know hopefully help it along
a little bit and push things in the right direction a little bit so yeah I mean for
me it's clear my kids won't have a bank account for example they're three and six now yeah so
They're not going to need a bank account, especially my family, like the last couple of years.
We moved to Madeira because there's a Bitcoin circular economy here, basically,
and you can live on a Bitcoin standard.
So, you know, like if push comes to shove, I still have a bank account, but I hardly use it.
And I want to maneuver myself into a position where I can just always fully live off Bitcoin,
and my kids will be by default in the same position, basically.
And the same for, you know, whatever, communication, social media, and all those kind of things.
Like the chat control that's coming, it just won't face me.
And I had, you know, the talk with the wife already and so on.
Her life is already complicated because, you know, my life is peculiar.
But I just told her, just so you know, you know, like the EU just passed this thing and so on.
So going forward very soon, you know, like the mother-in-law and father-in-law
and everyone who still wants to get baby pictures and so on, and pictures of the kids,
they'll have to install special software, just like prepare them for it, you know.
It's going to be some nip.
And that's just, you know, that's just what you have to do.
Yeah, and you know, like, yeah, like Bitcoin's only one part of the puzzle, you know.
Oh, absolutely.
I feel like I'm very worried about the fact, I mean, not really, right?
It's just that the rest of society truly is kind of oblivious to it.
Like they're going to let chat control just happen, right?
They're just going to be like, yeah, well, you know, shucks, what are we going to do?
You know, I'm like, okay, well, if that's the level we're dealing with,
it's going to be hard to get you to fight against anything else, you know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, yeah, who knows?
Yeah, the general population doesn't have any type of revolution in them.
I think the testosterone levels are too low for any kind of violent overthrow of the European government, for example.
I'm just asking them to, you know, follow their own laws as they're stated,
and they can't even do that, you know.
No, it's a sad state of affairs.
But I want, you know, it's like, that's why I want us to build this stuff
and have it ready for the young people that come in trying to figure out how to navigate this world
and find out that we have been thinking about this for a long time,
and we've been through a lot of thinking and built a lot of things
and a lot of tools that are available to you to navigate in a way that isn't insane.
What do you think would be the best way to get the young people in and interested in this stuff?
Build tools they love, you know.
Like, that's why the archipelago thing, like I said, it hit me really hard
because I know that if you were 16 years old and you hit, like, show me the badass messaging app
or show me, you know, the tool that doesn't track me,
if it's just another bland, like, Google material-themed, you know, Android application,
they're going to just be like, whatever, you know.
But if it's something that really grabs them in the first 0.3 seconds that they open the application
and speaks to them directly, then you've hooked them, right?
And then you can teach them about anything, right?
Yeah.
So I think it's...
Yeah, that's a good point.
That's a good point.
For me, definitely, there was gaming and, like, certain types of games and so on.
That's how I learned about networking and, like, you know, plugging computers together
and all these kind of things.
And, yeah, no, definitely getting the pull right.
Yeah, that's a good point.
I think a lot of them will also learn by pain.
Like, again, just, you know, not being able to connect to their existing online communities
because of, like, age verification checks and those kind of things.
And then we'll kind of see what happens.
But, yeah, I'm not too worried.
Would you say you're optimistic or, like, where do you fall on the line
between optimist, pessimist, realist?
Yeah, I wouldn't say I'm optimistic, but I also don't think it really matters
whether you're optimistic or pessimistic about it.
Are you optimistic for yourself at least?
For your future trajectory?
I am.
Not landing in the gulags?
I mean, you know, that's a future I'm willing to accept.
You know, I've chosen what I'm going to work on, and, you know,
one day you might be branded a pariah for doing so.
And I think anyone that works in Bitcoin, to some extent, has that talk with themselves.
Yeah, sure.
And you just got to live your life the way that you can feel good about.
Yeah.
And whether that means you get thrown in jail for using social media
or using non-approved social media platforms, well, fine, whatever, you know.
Well, sign notes from jail.
Yeah, sign notes from jail, right?
Whatever.
But I hope that, you know, it's our job to kind of start building those things
that when people come to need them, that they're there for them.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so I feel very lucky to be able to work on that.
Awesome. Likewise.
Likewise. That's a fantastic closing word.
So let's keep it at that.
GG. Thank you.
Thanks so much.
Thanks for making the time and indulging me.
That was fantastic.
i'm i'm i'm very tired now lots of luck