And feel free to drop it. Those are sturdy pieces of technology.
How's that? You cannot rub on anything.
All that looks good. I'll do one of these in case I need to recover
and synchronize, which shouldn't happen, but has happened in the past.
All right. And I'll just press and we just go and we just get into it.
You know the drill. You've listened to every single one of those, which makes you,
I think the only individual alive right now in the world that you have a claim to fame.
The one person who listened to every single episode. I don't think there's anyone else.
I myself haven't listened to every single one. I doubt Pablo has.
I know you're very modest and the proverbial five listeners that you mentioned.
It's a thing. It's not 500. I can tell you that.
It's a small, it's a small crowd. It's a small crowd.
But I consider all of them important people.
So tell me about that. How did you end up finding no solutions?
How did you end up finding out about sovereign engineering?
What brings you here? You're a first time participant.
We're in SEC-08. And I want to just pick your brain about all of this.
How come you're here? How did you discover this crazy niche world?
This corner of the internet?
Yeah, I think it's a series of breadcrumbs where each transition
was a gate with a relatively low probability of passing through.
So what was the first one? Was Bitcoin before that?
Yeah, so Bitcoin was definitely before that.
And I have heard of Nostr a few years back, but never explored it because
it was initially framed to me as this decentralized social network.
I have kind of an uneasy relationship and a history with social networks.
So I just like I kind of dismissed it out of hand.
How come? What were your social networks of choice, if any?
And how come you have an uneasy relationship?
Are you a terrorist and you were deplatformed all the time?
I was deplatformed by Instagram of all places.
And it's an interesting story. Not that I was censored, but my handle was rugged.
So it's kind of, yeah, I think unusual story.
But I had...
A short one, probably.
Without kind of...
Without doxing yourself too hard.
Reducing the anonymity too much.
I had a very valuable Instagram handle.
As valuable as they get.
Because I was a super early user.
I literally registered my account, I think maybe within an hour or so of them.
Announcing that they're live on TechCrunch.
Okay, wow.
So I had a good handle.
And about 10 years of history of posting.
Yeah.
Mostly travel photography and so on.
So quite an investment.
And I knew...
You're not the only person that happened to...
That ran into this issue.
There are some other people that had like very valuable accounts.
And the platform just decided to grab it.
Yeah, so it was clearly an inside job.
Yeah.
Because I knew I had something valuable.
So my OPSEC was top-notch.
It was unguessable password of ridiculous length.
Yeah.
2FA.
Yeah.
My email was also similarly protected.
There was just post-factum.
I did a security audit, nothing else was compromised.
It was quite clear that it was just rugged.
And it was an inside job.
You got an official statement from anyone or no?
No, but there was an article in Wall Street Journal a few months later.
I think it was titled,
Meta employees and security guards fired for hijacking user accounts.
Oh, okay.
So that came out eventually.
And it's interesting, I tried to actually recover my account.
Because it's a massive entity.
So you're unable to go through regular channels,
because there's no person to talk to.
But I used to live in Bay Area, in San Francisco.
So I have my network there.
So I was able to go out of band, actually,
and talk to some people inside Facebook that were quite close.
And they were actually even able to try to do a few things out of band,
to restore my account, to give me access to the account.
It was quite clear that there was something going on internally,
where I could not regain access to my account.
So someone higher up the food chain wanted to have your account?
I don't know.
I gave up on it and soured on the whole idea.
Yeah.
But in general, this kind of planted the seed.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, this is, you really don't own this.
Yes.
And I knew this for a while, because I had something valuable.
But I was very well aware that I really cannot make any claim.
You know, I did not hold the keys.
You have no power.
You can also go the legal route and all those kind of things.
But you won't have a leeway, because there's so much fine print.
You don't own anything there.
It's their house.
They can kick you out at any time for any reason.
They can do whatever.
And so, yeah, that was one part of your radicalization.
Yeah.
That was one pillar, for sure.
And then, yeah, like I said, I dismissed Nostr initially.
And it was not until I decided to quit my Fiat job due to,
you could say, like a crisis of purpose.
I had quite a cushy...
That makes two of us.
Okay.
Quite a cushy job where I was writing a sizable team, you know, a data team,
maybe like 20 plus people across multiple layers of the stack.
And yeah, I really couldn't continue doing this any longer.
And I wanted to do something in Bitcoin specifically.
So I spent a few months just going through the layers of the Bitcoin stack, top to bottom,
looking for something that at the intersection of what I would be interested in
and kind of the things that I understood well, you know, my capabilities.
And I spent months and months actually on this and filled a lot of gaps in my knowledge, for sure.
But in the end, I was like, fuck, man, this is like so mature, actually.
There's so much that has been done.
So when you're talking about data science and big data on Bitcoin,
you're talking about stuff like Glassnode and analysis of block data
and those kinds of things, potentially.
Yeah, I was not even looking to do any kind of analysis.
But I mean, before I was a data engineer guy and a data analyst,
I was a software guy for like 20 years.
Okay.
So systems, anything.
So I was just looking for something to do.
And yeah, I was getting quite desperate.
I feel like after a few months, I just,
I thought at some point I thought maybe I would do,
I recognize this tunnel from the old episodes.
Yeah, it's a free audio effect.
Yes, I love it.
I love it.
I knew it the instant we were inside.
Yeah, so I was getting quite desperate.
And at some point I was like, okay, I'm just, I'm forcing it too hard.
So fuck it, let me just play around a little bit and do whatever just for fun.
And the thing that I picked up for fun was one of those so-called Lotto miners.
It's literally a ESP32 board with a screen.
Was it before BITX or was it?
Before.
Yeah.
That was the precursor.
Yeah.
So I picked one of those up.
And I was like quite captivated by the fact that it's, you know,
here it is a super low power piece of compute
that is actually contributing hash power to the network.
Yeah.
As miniscule as it is.
Yeah.
It's doing its work hashing.
So I started tinkering with NerdMiner.
It's the open source piece of software that was running on the ESP32 device.
And this was also around the time where it became practical
to actually do some byte coding and so on.
Because my background is kind of computer science and mathematics,
actually, of all things, not electrical engineering.
So I was a total noob.
It was a gap on the hardware side.
So I was like, finally, with LLMs and coding agents, this became accessible.
So I was able to just start hacking on NerdMiner and start modifying the software.
So quite fascinating.
And then, of course, at some point it occurs to me,
all right, so I'm fucking around with this low hash rate.
Let me get the real thing with a real ASIC in it.
All right.
What I can do there.
All right.
So you got hooked.
Yeah.
So I got an S9 or something.
No, not that far.
But still solo mining.
But BitAxe and the things that OSMU guys are doing.
Yeah.
So and lo and behold, it actually turns out that BitAxe is also based on ESP32.
So it's a very versatile platform.
I mean, surprise, surprise.
Things are just good abstractions and good platforms.
They just layer.
So amazing.
So I start looking into this.
Start doing a bunch of things like overclocking them,
building tooling for noise monitoring.
For example, I'm quite sensitive to noise overall.
And it was bothering me that I had at that point, like maybe four of these solo miners
had a BitAxe and three QX++ at some point.
I was like running something like 20 terahash and they were overclocked.
Nice.
So it was like it was quite loud.
I was like, OK, let me try to actually tune these guys.
But.
And that was at home, basically.
So noise is an issue with sleeping and everything.
In a separate bedroom.
But still, I could hear it from the opposite end of the flat.
So I tried to build software and actually a complementary hardware rig where I would
have a noise sensor picking up on decibel levels and I would be able to tune.
OK, like a thermometer, basically.
Not just for the hashrate, but also for the decibels that I thought were acceptable.
So through that, I had a few fans fail on these BitAxes.
Because, of course, I was abusing them.
So a couple of fans failed.
And overall, noise, failure rates and so on.
I was like, man, there's got to be a better way.
I care less about, you know, after a while, you realize that you care maybe less about
the hashrate rather than that you are hashing and it's low maintenance.
You're co-living with your miners and you care more about the co-living aspect than
the brute hashrate aspect.
So I thought, wouldn't it be nice if a completely fanless miner existed?
So a solo miner, but completely passively cool.
So maybe like a honking piece of, you know, honking beautiful piece of copper that just
sits on top of the ASIC and does the job.
And then the software stack does the job of regulating.
I mean, it turns out it's quite complex and you're working within a certain window.
You cannot go too low.
Anyway, but I was convinced that this is something I wanted to do.
And at that point, actually, I distributed a few BitAxes through the local Bitcoin community.
I knew that people were resonating with the whole idea of having their own little bit
of hashrate and contributing to the network.
I was convinced that I was going to build a fanless Bitcoin solo miner.
Thought about the name.
WhisperHash sounded...
So that's where your handle comes from.
I was about to ask you that.
Okay.
So it sounded like a good brand name as, you know, we're great at naming as nerds.
So it sounded good to me.
And then, yeah, I thought I was going to do that.
And sort of like next logical transition is I will need a social identity to engage with
the community.
I see.
So I created a TwitterX handle.
And then from previous interactions with Bitcoiners, I knew about Nostr.
I was like, okay, Bitcoiners are in Nostr.
Some of them are.
A surprising amount aren't.
It's an interesting topic in itself.
Why, given the extent, like maybe a side topic.
Given the extent to which values align, why Bitcoiners?
Why are so many Bitcoiners still cocked by Elon on Twitter?
I mean, we can get into this.
But yeah, so I created this identity on Nostr and just like started posting on my
hardware explorations.
I see.
So you basically, you documented your journey a little bit and participated in the community
in that way.
Yep.
Yeah.
So some engagement.
But then through that, I couldn't, I could not not just notice some, start noticing stuff.
Some Nostr kind of unique traits.
You got infected by the Nostr bug along the way.
Yeah, so it was like, it piqued my curiosity to the point where, and it also gave me some ideas.
Okay, this is like a pretty unique network.
Maybe there's something I can do actually that is more network native.
And I had some questions, some basic questions, including,
but how, like, what is the state that this thing is at?
Even in terms of active users and sats flowing through the economy and so on.
So that's where your data, your data background came back in.
So I went looking for our data, just like Google searches, saw a few things.
Yeah.
But I couldn't quite see what I thought was reliable data.
Because I have, you know, this is, what is it called?
Occupational hazard, you know?
I see somebody's data product and I pick up on enough smells.
I was like, okay, I don't think I can trust this.
Plus I was seeing wildly varying numbers.
Yeah, the data we have is subpar for sure.
I know nothing about data science, but I know that the data we have is basically dog shit most of the time.
So at that point, I was like, okay.
I'm like, I'm sufficiently intrigued and I'm the data guy.
You know, I'll just do this.
I'll just do this.
And this will be also sort of my active learning journey, hands-on.
I will understand what's going on better.
So I started building very early versions of the data acquisition infrastructure and also learning about key events, you know?
Yeah.
kind 1, kind 3, and so on, bit by bit.
And so my initial push was to, very naive in retrospect, trying to understand active users, daily active users on Nostr.
So, interesting, right?
So through that...
It should be such an easy thing to figure out, right?
Yeah.
So that took me on a scenic journey of Nostr and everything that's going on.
And, yeah, sort of very...
It didn't take very long where it just dawned on me that this was very special.
This was very special and it was profound.
What makes you say that?
Like, what was the insight or the cascade of insights that you have that makes you say that now?
So one is a cryptographic identity, of course.
You hold your keys, nobody can...
No one...
Yeah, I mean, that's very apropos to what happened to you, right?
The thing that happened to you is impossible to answer.
Easy.
And then next insight, and this is also when I was starting to listen to No Solutions.
How did you discover that?
How did you find it?
Like, we do zero marketing or anything of that sort.
I think...
On purpose, you know?
We want people to discover us in some weird way.
I was trying to remember the sequence.
I think the sequence was...
It was...
I think I saw an unrelated interview with Justin Moon.
I think he was on TFTC, something like that.
Eventually, yeah, yeah.
So I was like, okay, this guy is...
Yeah, he name dropped us a couple of times.
He's amazing.
I don't think he actually...
So I don't think he did at that point.
Or maybe he did.
But I went and followed him on Nostr.
And then I think this was actually between cohorts.
So I was already following you, but it was between cohorts.
So you were not publishing No Solutions episode.
So I could not see it through that channel.
But at some point, he mentioned just like a very simple comment he made somewhere.
That wouldn't be great if somebody just built this thing where you could talk to...
Something along the lines where you could talk to No Solutions...
Maybe this is now my interpretation.
Talk to No Solutions and kind of vet your ideas against how the topics were explored.
Against the hive mind.
Yeah.
So I was like, hmm, interesting.
But what is this No Solutions thing?
So I went looking for it.
And lo and behold, I found it.
And I started with episode one.
I know they're not episodes, but from the first dialogue.
And then I just kept listening.
That's amazing.
Awesome.
I kept listening.
So you ended up listening to Justin again, you know?
Yeah, twice.
Yeah, at least twice.
So I listened to a few early ones.
Then I started complementing it with the more recent ones.
With the most recent ones.
Okay, jumping back and forth.
Yeah, so I understood, okay, where's the frontier?
And then I kind of like met in the middle somewhere.
Yeah.
Yeah, but I covered them all.
And you mentioned to me before that it was quite useful on your journey.
So that makes me very, very happy because that's, of course, the whole point.
We are notoriously bad at explaining ourselves and getting the word out there.
And kind of explaining our way of thinking.
And kind of what we went through collectively.
And kind of trying to work on Nostr and so on.
And so I'm glad that the one artifact that we have, which is the recorded dialogues,
were helpful to at least one person.
So that's great.
Massive success.
So I'm very happy to hear that.
No, I really think it's a crown jewel, honestly.
And where are you now in terms of your journey?
In terms of...
One of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you is because you mentioned to me
that Nostr kind of swallowed you whole.
And you were at a point where you felt so compelled to look into it and work on it and so on
and figure it out that you weren't able to do much else.
And so that to me is always interesting because there is very few people
that will just say that publicly.
Yeah, correct.
I had about half a dozen other projects, including this Bitcoin miner thing going.
And after a while I just realized that everything just kind of has been pushed to the side.
And I was 24-7 more or less with my agents trying to progress.
And how is it now for you?
You just went through the first week of your first cohort that you're participating in.
And I mean, you're way more well-versed about this whole thing than most other people
because you listened to No Solutions and so on.
You kind of knew what you would get yourself into.
But still, how was it for you?
How was kind of... What did you expect?
What did align with your expectations?
What are some things that surprised you?
Did you enjoy it first and foremost?
And where are you now, having gone through the first week and participated in the first Tuesday talks,
the first Wednesday workshop, first Friday demo day?
How was it for you?
Yeah, I think overall the very first week is super intense.
And it's also part of this could be me because my social muscle is not particularly well exercised.
It's kind of atrophied, especially after months of just like me and my agents.
That's the tension we're working with, inviting 21 introverts and nerds,
like nerdy introverts, diverse kind of introverts to an island,
not letting them leave and just packing them all into a room,
working, trying to have them work together 24-7.
It's, you know, there's some tension there.
Everyone is feeling this.
So you're in good company.
I land and of course, these are remarkable individuals.
So it's a very high bandwidth communication with every single one of them.
Yeah.
So it's just that alone is just taxing, maybe not the right word,
but you've spent a lot of energy because you have to be so switched on.
It's why my go-to pro tip for everyone who's new,
I think I mentioned this to you as well in the beginning,
plan in lots of alone time and get lots of sleep.
Yeah.
Like you'll need time to decompress.
You need time where you're completely alone and you need sleep first and foremost
because you have just too many inputs.
You'll just get too many inputs from too many sites, too many new things, too many ideas
and your subconscious mind will have to do a lot of integrational work
and just kind of composting all those kind of things.
So at least for me, like alone time and sleep,
if I don't get enough alone time and sleep, I just go crazy and start engineering.
Yeah. So the social aspect was intense.
But then, yeah, so first week, I knew the structure roughly,
but still it wasn't quite obvious to me
how much time I would actually have to work on the demo.
So I was a bit on edge early on in the week where, you know,
I wanted to show something, something real by Friday.
And I know the handbook and the way this is framed that, wow,
Thursday is unstructured time.
Yeah. You have all Thursday to prepare for Friday.
Very, very unstructured. So I was a bit on edge about that
and I think, but everybody is, it turns out.
So I changed my mind as to what I was going to do on Wednesday.
Also, as advertised, this many people told me,
I was literally pacing on the beach Wednesday evening,
just like for two hours probably, just like pacing, thinking,
okay, this thing that I have in mind, am I actually able to produce something by Friday
where I would just not bomb completely, you know?
Bombing completely is also okay.
Yes, totally. Yes, I think.
As you know, only like opting out is not okay.
You're not allowed to opt out and showing slides is not okay.
Those are the big no-nos. Bombing is completely okay.
Yeah, I think it should be encouraged also because that's kind of a sign
that you attempted something maybe a little too ambitious.
So you kind of, you want some rate of, not failure,
but maybe, okay, the person didn't get there in time.
Yeah, I mean, that's why we always say, just show something,
even if the demo breaks, even if it doesn't work, doesn't matter.
Like it's, get the idea across and if something fails, it really doesn't matter.
At least you tried and at least you tried to demo actual,
you know, working product, actual code.
It's like one remarkable thing actually that I observed is that
nobody has recorded any video of their stuff working in case they would bomb.
So that is an interesting observation.
So people were so confident but also comfortable in, you know,
actually not having something working, you know, on stage.
No time to record videos.
And I decided, you know, I decided to do the same thing.
I was like, okay, this may not work, but I'm just, fuck it.
I'm just going to show what I have at that point in time.
I took a few precautions, kind of like normal software engineering
where I could go restore to a working configuration, but not too much.
Yeah, yeah, that's the spirit.
That's good.
But the demos were incredible and it's also quite varied.
Probably it's hard to pick favorites, but yeah, the variety was there
and kind of some stuff was, I don't know, for example,
we saw a port of FIPS to another operating system
that was just done within a week or within a couple of days.
Yeah.
So not a particularly spectacular demo in the literal sense, you know.
But lots of work has to go into it.
Not a great animation.
Literally, the gentleman was like, Andre was showing a terminal
and just like packets going across.
Yeah.
But fucking hell, you know.
Yeah.
All right, this is...
Yeah, we're cooking.
I mean, like you said, these are all exceptional people that are here
and they actually know how to get stuff done.
So that's...
And the demo days are always a testament to that.
And like, it's...
Yeah, it's fun to...
For me, the most fun is seeing how things come together
in terms of some of the building blocks we're using now
didn't even exist a year ago.
And now it's kind of like second nature to a lot of people.
And this just kind of keeps happening.
And it's a positive spiral.
It's a reinforcing feedback loop of positivity of,
okay, now we have Blossom.
Now we have Nsights.
Now we have Napplets, for example.
And now we have FIPS.
And you can just plug all these things together
and build things very easily
that were borderline impossible to do
before we had these building blocks.
And that's just so beautiful to see.
And of course, you know, like Nostr, same thing and so on.
And, you know, on the monetary side, of course,
nothing we do, almost nothing we do
would be possible without Bitcoin and without E-cash
and all those underlying things.
But they are, of course, a given.
They're not second nature.
They're first nature.
They're like the air we breathe.
And so to me, that's amazing to see the evolution
cohort by cohort,
and also new people coming in and getting up to speed
and really getting it quickly,
like getting the various primitives that we have.
It just makes sense to them.
And that also, to me, is a good signal
that we're on the right track.
Like we're not completely deluding ourselves
and just, you know, like hallucinating shit left and right.
So I'm very happy that, you know,
like the new people like you that joined this cohort,
it seems like everyone got something out of it
and stuff more or less makes sense.
So that's a good sign.
That's a good sign for me.
It's also...
Something to be expected also, in the sense that when you're building stuff,
if you pick the right abstractions, you know, and the right primitives,
yeah, then things compose, things layer in the beautiful way that is capable of supporting
very tall structures, you know, complex structures reliably. So we have at this point,
we have some wonderful primitives, I think. Blossom is one of them, you know, content
undressable, blob storage. Yeah. One of them, obviously, right? Yeah. FIPS on a networking
layer. FIPS. So there's a, it's quite clear we're still kind of at the network fabric
infrastructure and primitives stage. Yeah. But you're already seeing some outlier success stories.
For example, one of my favorites is Zapstore. Yeah. That thing just needed to exist. This is
such a perfect fit for Nostr. Yeah. You're a developer, you publish in an uncensorable
fashion. Everything is signed with your Nostr identity. Yeah. People see who you are through
the web of trust. It's amazing. This just fits so perfectly. It's awesome. It's the first and
only thing I install on a new phone. And then everything goes from there. It's like, I get a
new phone, I install Zapstore. I install the apps that I have in my list. And I, you know, like I
use my various phones differently. I install some other things. If it's not on Zapstore, I'm not
interested, basically. And that's it. I live a very pure life, very simple life. And of course,
what makes me insanely happy is Zapstore came out of the first cohort. So it actually evolved
from discussions we had around how would you do an anti-virus system using Nostr. You have
binaries and you can, you know, like malware scanning, basically. And then I think France
was working on this idea already, had this idea already. And then we kind of turned it around.
And basically, if you do the positive of that, then you have an app store. Those are the apps
I trust. Those are the binaries I trust. And then we went to, okay, what if the developers,
you trust the developer and the developer signs the release and so on and so on. And of course,
you know, like, I mean, there's lots of prior work on this. Lots of people still use GitHub release
pages, similar idea and so on. And I just love it how it evolved and how well it works. Like
it worked from the get-go already. France have put a ton of effort into this. And I talked to him,
like we recorded, we have a recorded dialogue with France. That's how blessed we are.
And now it's just, it's a fantastic app store, no matter how you cut it. Like it's on par,
basically, with the big app stores that everyone uses. And it has all the features and it just
fucking works. It just fucking works. It's so great. It's amazing. And there's, I mean,
credit to the team because having listened to the dialogue with him, there's a lot of stuff that
they need to grind on continually. Absolutely. Version mismatches. It's not an easy task. And
so on. But yeah, I'm very grateful. And now also publishing. I think I mentioned it when I talked
to him, but it's worthwhile mentioning it. And I actually, myself didn't do it yet, but I plan
to do that very, very soon. I haven't built a native app in a very long time, but someone,
I think it was American hotly, but I'm sure some other people as well. You can just instruct your
agent, build an Android app and publish it on an app store on Zapstore. And it will just work.
That's how permissionless it is. And then you don't even need an Android phone. You don't need
anything. It's just the publication, the publication pipeline that's built for Zapstore
is so well done. And pushing an Android app to Zapstore is so easy and so seamless right now.
That's just, that's just amazing. Like anyone who who's ever been fighting with the review process
of, you know, it doesn't matter if it's iOS or if it's the Google play store, like knows how
painful this can, can get. And that's, I mean, that's the main benefit of the permissionless
world. You actually don't have to ask for permission. You can just push stuff out there
and give it to the people that are interested in it. Yeah. It's also a wonder. It seems like the
next natural step is making part, part of this application pipeline app release pipeline
seamless in a way where somebody could vibe an app maybe by talking to their phone and it would
get published to the Zapstore and maybe in a fashion with everything around it, where that
becomes kind of this remixable type of content. Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. And I don't know how much
headache it would cause to the Zapstore guys if we suddenly saw an explosion of apps. Yeah. I mean,
that's how every single Linux distribution started, right? Like you fork something that exists and you
give it your own spin and so on. And Pablo actually played around with this idea in the past.
He put a little, like in some of his projects, and I'm not sure where his thinking is now,
but a while ago he was like, what if every little app has like a little chat box that lets you
chat with an in-app agent that can modify the software that's running. So you can just prompt
the feature into existence and just modify some things to your liking. I'm, yeah, I'm of two minds
of that when it comes to that, because to me an app and the interface of an app and how an app works,
it's almost like a shared language. Like Excel is a great example. Everyone knows Excel and how it
works and how it looks and feels like and so on. There would be many other ways to do a spreadsheet
software, but it all looks the same and everyone's so used to that it's a skill and it's a shared
language. So if everyone would have their own flavor of this, some sort of communication would
break down in between people if you want to, if you need to cooperate with people. Just like the,
I think I talked about this in the past, but there are some genius mathematicians and physicists
that came up with their own mathematical notations to describe, you know, what they're
working on. And not using the default notation that everyone knows, but they came up with their
own because they thought it was better. And then of course they can't talk to anyone about their
discoveries and no one can, you know, like make sense of it. So I don't know. I'm definitely a fan
of opinionated software. I love opinionated software, but I'm not sure how the world would
look like if the software stack of everyone would be hyper-personalized and I don't know.
I think we'll find out. We'll find out. People like Pablo and people like Martti Malmi, they're
rebuilding the whole software stack that they're using from the ground up right now. So yeah, we'll
find out. But this also touches on how things layer fundamentally because there is the data
formats and protocols and then there is a user experience. So maybe what emerges naturally
is that in the spreadsheet example that we would converge on one representation which relates to
Nostr, right? We have effectively, you know, we're agreeing on schema for events, but maybe this is a
more elaborate format, but just as an example. So we converge on the format that describes
any sensible spreadsheet and then users are able to interact with spreadsheets in a
hyper-personalized way. Yeah. And maybe this is mediated by the agents that are aware of the
underlying format and the protocol. Yeah. So maybe this, I don't know, maybe this is one version of
the future. Yeah, no, I think that makes a lot of sense and that's also, I think it was on
Tuesday I showed this one slide, Justin actually sent it to me, Justin Moon, with kind of the
velocity of how fast things evolve and data formats were at the very bottom and then protocols and so
on. And the top layer was intelligence, which is, you know, all the rage right now, which was just
kind of a squiggly line, like a drunken random walk evolving very fast. And so the point was
kind of don't worry too much about what agent you use or your harness or what model or whatever.
Worry more about what protocol do you build up on, what does your data structure look like,
and so on and so forth. Like worry more about the primitives, because that is what will provide a
solid foundation for whatever you're building and that also doesn't move very quickly. Like that's,
if you want to have this thing used in 10 years from now, really think about your data format and
those kind of things. So yeah, no, I think that's very well said. Like we might have a
Cambrian explosion of like UIs and interfaces and how do you interface with the data,
but we might be able to agree on a shared data format and all those kind of things that
make collaboration possible. I have one more question for you in regards to, you mentioned
you were in Silicon Valley and now you are in Hong Kong. Yeah. So how did this happen and did
this in any way relate to your journey and your decision to step out of your professional
fiat life? No, this is, we're talking multiple distinct chapters that extend very far into the
past. So Silicon Valley chapter was early on, essentially straight out of uni. I got swept up
into the first internet wave, also sometimes known as the dot-com bubble. So straight out of uni,
I had an opportunity to go work in the Bay Area. At that point, I remember vividly, I had to look
at the map. So yeah, I have an option to go to this place. I look at the map, like San Francisco,
the Bay. Let's turn around here, otherwise I'll collapse. So this is where the Silicon Valley at,
the proverbial one. I mean, it was no accident that I went into computer science. So to me,
there was just zero question that, okay, I'm just going to go for it. So I went for it. This was
late 90s. Total change of scene and also interesting point in time.
And time flies. How was it for you in Silicon Valley? Like, did you enjoy your time there?
Was it kind of too crazy sometimes? Or how was your experience? I'd be curious. For me, this was
also my 20s. So it was also a journey of, an inner journey of just kind of understanding a bit
more about myself, the kind of person I was and also understanding firsthand what America stood
for, kind of the internals. So there's the professional component, which I think left an
imprint forever in me, which is that I'm just very fluid with software. When I look at other
people or in other places that are attempting to do software, then I can see kind of, it's almost
like a difference when you look at a professional athlete that is doing things kind of naturally,
effortlessly. It looks like it. Versus people that are just kind of doing it in a tortured way,
maybe they try to follow the form, not understanding the essence. So later on,
I observed a lot of this, including I lived in London actually for like five years during a wave
where agile development was all the rage and there were a lot of snake oil salesmen going
around kind of ruining teams. Selling Kanban boards. Exactly, Kanban boards, pair programming and so on.
So the professional side, I'm quite grateful that I got to
live in the belly of the beast for a while. Yes, and meet other hardcore people.
It was very interesting. But at the same time, I was kind of becoming aware of the
broader world and also the internals of the US. 9-11 happened when I was there
and I saw all the consequences, how they were rolling back on a lot of things that
America stood for. I was also quite idealistic, I think. The final straw for me was
when George W. Bush got re-elected. I was in California and so on.
First time he was elected, I thought, okay, this is just like an accident.
But then when he got re-elected, despite everything that
everybody has had a chance to observe, that really raised some questions in my head as to
how rotten the system was. Yeah, I see. So at that point, I was like, okay,
I think I'm ready to... I was more certain that I'm kind of European at heart.
And as much as there are many things that I love about the States, including the nature, for instance,
and the variety of very distinct and deep communities that they have. It's a big place.
It's a big place in many ways, on many dimensions. Yeah. So I was ready to leave.
And I was also feeling confident, professional. Okay, I can take what I have learned and mastered
and just land anywhere and do something else. I mean, use this to do something else
outside of the area. So at that point, I had a choice of, okay, I can always go back to Europe.
So let me just go to Asia first. Okay. So... I see. So you accident and you didn't...
want to take the easiest route out. I was like, okay, let me go to Asia, check it out. I can always go back here.
So, uh, went to China first and then while I was in mainland China, I discovered Hong Kong. I think
I was doing like a visa run or something like this. Just took a flight to Hong Kong
and just fell in love with the place instantly. What a, what a beautiful place, very special
anyway. So what made you fall in love with it? I, I guess because it's a mix,
it's a, it's a melting pot kind of place, right? It's a, what, what, what aspect of it made you
fall in love with it? I, because I've never been to Hong Kong. I don't know, like you just mentioned
the nature in the U S and so on. I guess for Hong Kong, it, it must be something else a little bit.
So a lot of it, I think is just resonated with me personally, but, uh, but some are,
some aspects are, um, objective. So it's a, it's in a beautiful natural setting overall. It's a
very compact place, but, uh, not as compact as, uh, as Singapore and, and in a, in a different
category altogether, but it's a, it's in a beautiful setting. So Hong Kong Island, uh,
which is the main Island, it's kind of like Madeira, you know, it's an Island.
So you have, uh, water on all sides. So you're, you always see the horizon and, uh, um,
it's also mountainous. So even though this is as urban as it gets and super dense,
you don't have this feeling that you're just like trapped in a, in a jungle. Okay. And, uh,
and, uh, and then because of the density and the space constraints, uh, they are benefiting
uniquely from being able to construct a top-notch transportation system. Okay. Their Metro system,
the MTR, it really is the best in the world. Uh, you know, I've lived in many places, I travel
too many places, including Japan, you know, I'm intimately familiar with the London
you know, with the London system, the tube and all the anxiety that causes people. So the Hong
Kong MTR system really is a gem. And when you rely on it, it just, uh, it really affects the
quality of life. So you're able to do things, um, in a single day that would be impractical in other
places. So literally do maybe just, just the ease of moving around, just ease the ease of moving
around, uh, because it's, it's reliable. It's constructed in a way where you don't need to,
it's just a very, very well-designed, very reliable system that you just nothing breaks ever.
Uh, and so huge difference. And then of course the location, uh, in terms of regionally. So Hong
Kong is like easy to travel to other places in Asia and it's super connected to, uh, other,
other places in the world. Yeah, sure. Yeah. It's a hub for sure. Yeah. There are downsides of
course. And, uh, one of the downsides is that, uh, and one of the one where that I think affects
me most directly is that, um, the pallets of industries and spaces that you get can get into
professionally is a different one, radically different. Yeah. So there is, uh, finance is a
big pillar, insurance, property, logistics, very few startups. Um, so yeah, it's, uh, that part
is limiting and it, it bothers me and I'm still reconciling this. And this is also part of the
reason why, I guess I'm like loose looking outside of this at this point, like track where
you go into particular industry or whatever vertical, I'm like, okay, maybe this is the
point where I just pick the thing, you know, pick the thing I really feel passionate about and just
you're ready to do something in that space that is kind of, it's a irrespective of the physical
realm. I see. And you're, you, you feel like you're ready to plunge yourself into a new
vertical in some sense. Yeah, I think so. Yes. Okay. Okay. Interesting. Interesting. Uh, you're
not the only one from Hong Kong that, uh, is participating in this cohort, by the way. Uh,
we have three Hong Kongers, uh, in this cohort, right? Yeah. Uncoordinated, which is interesting
also. Yeah. So, so people are discovering Hong Kong for themselves individually and discovering,
uh, sovereign engineering also in their own way and are coming and now there's three people from
Hong Kong here. So G sovereignty is in Hong Kong and you know, like, wouldn't you think it
with a female participant? Is this the first ever? Yes. I know we had, we had like,
if you want to squint, we had like two and a half female participants, but not really.
They kind of were looped in just because they were around basically kind of thing.
This is the first female participant that actually signed up, went through the whole
process, everything. And it's here and it's actually also proper technical, like, uh, actually
we're getting there. We're getting there. And we just full disclosure. We just,
we don't discriminate by sex. All we ask is like an npub and a repo that contains proof of work,
like whether it's GitHub or something else doesn't matter, but just, you know, get repository and
npub. And so, yeah, I was pleasantly surprised that we, we have a female participant and,
and she, that was something nice as well. Fantastic. Everything's great. Like I'm,
I'm very, very happy. So, um, yeah, tell me more about your kind of what, what you've,
what you're currently exploring, uh, from the, from the, and I think we, we didn't,
we didn't finish the conversation about the Nostr data science, kind of how that journey,
what did you discover and how did it turn out? Like you're, you were trying to find out the daily
active users of Nostr and so on. You published some of this data, right? Yes. Like what did you
end up publishing and what are the issues you ran into? Um, so the issues of course, that you run
into is, uh, like I said, my, my, my, there's no global. It's one of the issues. Yeah, exactly.
Episode one, episode one. There is no global. This has been mentioned a few times. Uh, this,
this should be internalized in a similar fashion as, uh, the fact that there is no deleting,
you know, there's no confirmation of deletion. Exactly. So let's get on with it. Um, yeah, so
I was literally just like acquiring the data and trying to construct for my own purpose, the,
the usual DAU, MAU, you know, daily active users, monthly active users and, uh, through various events
and just like plotting, okay, these are the unique npubs that publish an event. Uh,
and let me just plot this and see, uh, what this looks like. And they arrive at the, uh,
at the main metric, you know, the DAU given, uh, activity, you know, unique npubs for,
um, various events on that date. And of course, what I was seeing is all kinds of crazy shit,
massive spikes. And, uh, so it's just, it was, uh, very clear that, uh, that deserved a second
look and, uh, and that I just, yeah, there was like very quickly takes you to like the notion
of a web of trust. Yeah. You have to, so I had to learn that myself. You saw some of the attacks
that we had to go through. I saw crazy spikes. My first instinct was, okay, I just want to get
to the fucking DAU. So let me try to, uh, construct a block list of, uh, of npubs
that are polluting my, my amazing data sets. So my method was quite, uh, simple. I was just
literally, uh, I would pick a spike on the, on the graph I was seeing, and I would ask the bot,
Hey, like there's like something going on here. Can you just look into the anomaly? And it's
actually surprisingly, it does surprisingly well at picking the patterns and constructing
the block lists and so on. So for a while I was like cruising like this. Um, but then, uh, so I
kind of, I, I got, got to the point where I, I satisfied my own curiosity as to at least the
order of magnitude that the MAU/DAU was at for the network, uh, as a whole. Tell me the number.
It's small. It's a, it's moderate. I wouldn't call it small. It's a moderate, but.
Because I have a number in mind, but just based on pure vibes. So I'd be curious what the data
says. It's stable. I haven't looked at this in a while. I think it's like something on the order of
20, 30,000 daily active users. Yeah. But, uh, 20 is my gut feeling. Yeah. So I'm, uh, I'm actually
one of the reasons I decided not to pursue this MAU/DAU thing in the end was that, uh,
maybe this is, uh, maybe this is actually not going to have a positive effect. If people knew
ahead of time that, okay, the network is relatively small. Uh, so they need to fall in love with it
for other reasons than there being a massive user base. Yeah. So, and I have, uh, since
arrived, or I still have a question in my mind that, uh, the thing I was showing, you know,
Nostrology, Nostrolo.gy, um, one of the, one of the domains that I looked at, uh, from the
data perspective was, uh, uh, Nutzaps. Yeah. Trying to understand, okay, what's the sat flow,
how many active users they are. And it's, it's small. Yeah. It's very small. It's small to the
point where, uh, it got me thinking, okay, so I can, even though the data is out there, right?
Anybody can acquire it and cut the data, arrive at the numbers, but the, even the act of me
publicizing this data, you know, is it gonna be useful to the people that are working with this,
or is it going to do more damage in the sense that, okay, this is so fucking tiny,
which is going to ignore it, you know? Uh, so it's still a question in my mind. I think
it's still a question in my mind. I think maybe there's a way to expose it in a way where
people working on it benefit so they can, they can see their MOU, GAU, uh, metrics, uh, moving.
I think from a builder's perspective, it's positive in the sense that, you know, uh, and
that's what I tell people at Summer in Engineering always, uh, as well, just push your stuff out
there. It's literally like half the, half the power users of Nostr are in this room. Like
at most you'll offend like 30 people, you know, don't worry, just, just do your thing,
push your stuff out. Don't overthink it. You're not gonna, even if it, if, even if it goes viral
in a bad way, it's still, you know, like it's such a small group of people. It's live, I just don't
expose it like on, uh, it's buried a little bit. Okay. Great name, by the way, Nostrology. Yeah.
Uh, so I basically, I had this running locally for the longest time and, uh, a few weeks,
uh, before the cohort, uh, I set the goal to actually stand this up as a proper environment,
uh, and, um, yeah, have all the data infrastructure, you know, data processing,
all the jobs and the publishing of the, of the charts, uh, happening reliably on a schedule.
So this is live now. I have a look, uh, kind of a few domains that, uh, publishing, uh, data on,
which is one is the relays. I had to look. Okay. I mean, it's a foundational piece of
infrastructure. I was curious, you know, uh, what's going on then relays. And, uh, I have
some metrics around lightning and then of course my darling Zap store. Yeah. I was interested.
What are the trends in a total number of, uh, apps, uh, breakdown by, uh, most are native apps,
which is, you know, uh, a developer publishing using their own Nostr identity versus what is
being republished, uh, and signed by Zap store. Uh, yeah. From a GitHub or Android. And then
other, other metrics like, uh, you know, Zaps that are attributable to, to an app and other
aggregations. So this, I think this is kind of the most baked thing that I have working,
but then, uh, this connects to what I wanted to do actually, while I'm here, this got me thinking,
you know, I've done all this work to, um, acquire the data from the network,
figure it out. And the process is in a way where I now have an artifact, you know,
in the form of a chart that I can plot. For example, a simple chart where I show,
um, bar like a bar chart where I'm showing a count of Zaps on a, uh, per day and, uh,
overlaid with a cumulative number, a cumulative amount of sets that are attributable to
Zap store apps over time. And then, uh, so I've done all that, but, uh, what occurred to me
then was that it's kind of, uh, there are two problems. One problem is that I have to
essentially make an editorial decision, a subjective one, or decision that was aligned
with the quote unquote data story. I was trying to tell you how to slice up the data, how to
slice it up. And then, you know, what, what am I trying to, what is the message, right? So that's
a decision I had to make that is a divorce from the underlying data. And, uh, second thing that
bothered me was that, uh, again, even though I've done all this work and I have this data now,
it's going to, it's going to die here. You know, like nobody else in the ecosystem is able to
benefit from this other than maybe copy pasting the chart, the final chart. Yeah. So that got
me thinking, okay, maybe there's a way to expose this. Yeah.
Set the data free and make it available for other participants in the ecosystem in the
form where it's a primitive that is done in a Nostr native way.
But at the same time done in a way so that it's easily ingestible by data manipulation
tools that a data scientist would use.
Going back to, yeah, you want to stand kind of on the shoulders of, again, this layered
cake, right?
You have the formats at the bottom.
So one of the decisions is how do you, in what format do you expose the data?
So I picked Parquet, which is lingua franca of a big data world.
If you want to expose a data set that is terabytes in size and you want to run a crazy aggregation
on one column, this is the format.
It's incredible.
Like lots of serious dudes, mostly dudes, have done a lot of work just on the freaking
format.
Sure, sure, sure.
It's a hard thing to do.
Yeah.
And it's optimized to the point where, which, I mean, it's incredible the lengths to which
people go to when they're singularly focused on something.
So Parquet is optimized to the point where it actually takes into consideration the speculative
execution on the CPU.
So it's able to optimize at that level.
It does its own branch protection.
Yeah.
So it's incredible.
So I picked Parquet format and I landed on, the design I landed on was I would be publishing
a data manifest event of sorts that would, of course, it's an Austria event, which means
the manifest is signed with the publisher, you know, with the data producer's identity
and the data would be, these Parquet blobs would be exposed by a blossom.
So yeah, this is where I'm at.
Basically, data in a bedrock format that is signed by a data producer's identity that
is exposed in a Nostr native way.
That is, you know, in a fashion where somebody can provide your own lens on the data.
You can take it and do something with it that the original data producer did not intend.
And slice it up in your own way.
There are some aspects to this that are interesting and deep and need to be unpacked.
For example, the question of data provenance, you know.
I have taken these Nostr events from somewhere at a point in time and so on.
So how do you capture this?
So this is like, I need to think through this.
And then maybe also the question of data lineage, it's called.
So essentially, you know, I am producing and publishing a data set, but...
Where did it come from?
How did it evolve over time?
Yeah, exactly.
So this data set.
What's the history?
What was upstream of the data set?
You know, you can think of this data as a direct cyclic graph, you know, a DAG.
So each data output has inputs and kind of a transformation.
What entity produced the data?
What happened to it?
So I think this is also worth thinking through, because like in the spirit of Nofter, yes,
I am producing and publishing this data artifact, you know, it's signed with my key, but it's
still kind of...
It's still signed with my key, but it's sort of, you know, trust me, bro, this is loosely
what I did with the data and maybe loosely where I got the data.
So I think maybe, depending on the response I get, maybe it's worth pushing further in
terms of the data lineage.
Okay.
I see.
This data set was produced with this exact transform from these upstream data sets and
maybe publish the whole chain.
Yeah.
In which case you ultimately actually, if you push in that direction, you have to publish
the kind of the raw events ultimately, you know, these are the ZapStore events that I
collected.
And then there are some interesting questions actually, you know, is that a good thing or
not?
Because this gets into a question of bit rot, you know.
Some bit rot is good, but when you talk about kind of structured data that you want to take
downstream into applications, bit rot, not so good.
You want to have the whole chain, you know.
What makes you say that some bit rot is good?
When is bit rot good?
I think social data, bit rot is good, you know.
In the sense of just like forgetting?
Yeah.
So for instance, I'm not sure if I want to draw it, I mean, it's obvious, but sometimes
you question whether you should draw attention to it or not.
But the history of your follows, somebody can capture this.
You know, if I stand up or like some party stands up a data acquisition infrastructure
and just captures every mutation of the kind three events, they have the whole history,
you know.
Yeah.
So it's things like this, I think, maybe borderline where it's worth pausing at least for a moment.
Is this a good thing?
Like publishing some data, even though it's out there.
But when you get like all the way upstream, this is maybe this kind of events.
Because with what I'm proposing, you know, it's data is, these are large data sets that
are in a format that makes it possible to ingest and process just enormous amounts of
data.
Yeah.
So to the extent that somebody is able to acquire data from a representative slice of
the network or as much data as they're able to grab.
Yeah.
Somebody would be able to run some computation on it and get to something they're looking
at.
Yeah.
Make inferences based on it.
Yeah.
So there's that question.
I think eventually it brushes up against this.
But I think this is, I'm hopeful that it's, this doesn't surface in every domain.
For example, I mentioned this app store is one of the domains that's kind of like, it's
a very specific domain and the data, you know, they're not capturing application usage data.
It's nowhere.
Yeah.
It's not available anywhere that, you know, Gigi has these apps installed and he's using
them on this cadence, whatever.
That data is not available.
But the app catalog is available, releases and so on.
So I think it's okay for that data to go like all the way upstream to all the events
that were collected at some point.
I see.
Okay.
Yeah.
No, I think all that's very interesting.
And we had some, after your demo, we had some good discussions about like, why are Nostr
events structured in the way they are?
What are some pitfalls that you might run into?
And you also mentioned like exposing these datasets on Blossom servers.
And I think you yourself made this comment.
Maybe you want to look into ContextVM and exposing it in a different way as well.
So there is a lot of prior work that has been done by Jesus and also by Pete Wynn.
And I think it's inspired by no solutions.
There is the good stuff.
It's also recorded dialogues.
Great, great format.
And they talk a lot about kind of, if you have a server that serves certain data, how
do you expose it over Nostr without sending all the events over Nostr basically, like
without getting all the data out from the database onto relays.
And that's, you know, like, again, that's where ContextVM is also relevant and so on.
And you can make these bridges, make kind of Nostr native bridges without porting everything
to Nostr, like directly, so to speak.
And I think it's, you know, like every, you have to figure out what's the right tool for
the job and kind of, you know, what trade-offs are you okay with and what also is actually
workable in practice, because the things you mentioned with, if you have datasets that
are like terabytes and terabytes in size, then you have to think about this stuff differently
than it's just, you know, a couple of kilobytes that you send around that can be everywhere
and so on.
Like globally replicating terabytes and terabytes of datasets is not an easy task.
Maybe not even the, I'm not sure if I want to host terabytes and terabytes of data I don't
care about in my Boston servers.
This is another aspect to unpack at some point, which is, okay, so maybe you make the
data available as blossom blobs, but maybe you're not constraining yourself only to this
method of distribution.
Maybe some data you distribute through...
Maybe you don't care what the storage provider is, basically, yeah.
So maybe the right interface would be one abstraction layer.
I'm not sure if it's above or below, but whether it's stored on the blossom or as a torrent
or we mentioned Marty Malny's hash tree as well, which I think would work well for your
use case, almost shouldn't matter, you know, and I think that's also historically with
stuff gravitated to where you just, you have a storage provider and in the background,
whether it's like S3 or like whatever else, it doesn't matter and yeah, it's interesting.
It's an interesting problem space.
There are many directions, so I'm kind of at the stage where there are many directions
that I can push this into and I feel quite confident that I would get there, next step
along every dimension so far, but what I'm trying to, I'm trying to validate this, instead
I'm trying to validate this end-to-end, so just light this up kind of a tracer, a tracer
bullet cell, okay, find somebody who is interested and enough, who has a burning need to actually
consume some data that somebody may be producing through this method.
So I, and I think once you actually light things up end-to-end, you flesh out, it just
becomes clear, it becomes less theoretical and more concrete, the concerns come into
focus that you may not have.
No, that's always a good approach, get a real user, get really, get at least one real user,
even if it's yourself, in the best case, get multiple users that are actually real, actually
using your stuff, that have real needs and serve those needs and then iterate from there.
So yeah, no, I think it's a good approach.
But what are some things on Friday that you liked?
You mentioned one already, but we saw 21 demos, so, which is awesome that we managed to land
on 21, by the way, just kind of as a side note, that's the number we're aiming for,
we managed this time.
So we saw 21 demos, what's, what's some of the things that stood out to you?
Again, difficult to pick, but.
Yeah, yeah, you mentioned you don't want to pick favorites, but I'm not, I'm not asking
you for favorites, just kind of what, what is something that resonated?
I think the, the globe, the FIPS globe, I think it was Thomas demoed this.
Yeah.
This was very well done, and also, I mean, it showed the extent to which the FIPS network
has propagated.
Yeah.
So that was, that was good.
I was also, what I liked was that some folks who use the opportunity to just like play
with things, play around, just have a little fun.
So we had a demo by the FLX, Felix, Felix, the, you know, 600 billions, gentlemen, and
yeah, he has the, I don't know, NFTs, trading cards, trading cards, trading cards, and it
was done beautifully, tastefully, and it's like a lighthearted project, but obviously
a lot of work went into this and it's, I think it's a, I think it's a, it's good to mix things
up like this.
So not everything is serious.
Some things are through play and this is actually maybe one way that you stumble, stumble, stumble
on something.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
G also showed something similar, Nostragochis, I don't remember the name, but that was a,
that was compelling.
I was really impressed by what the Archipelago guys are doing.
Yeah.
It is a very impressive project.
It's very far along.
Yeah.
It's very, very polished already.
Yeah.
But overall, it's a, I think it's, it's just very clear that we have, it's a, we have a
lot of capability and creativity and diversity packed into, into a cohort.
So this is a, to your earlier question, you know, did it kind of, is it the way I imagined
it?
And it's, and it very much is, you know, it was something that was, that came through,
through the previous dialogues on no solutions was just kind of the caliber and the level
of agency of the people that are part of the group.
Yeah.
It turns out that you actually really can just do things.
Yeah.
You can just put stuff.
I am, yeah, very grateful that the stars aligned, that I could be here as part of this group,
you know, in this place, in this particular moment in time.
Awesome.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm, I'm very glad it worked out.
I'm very glad you managed to make it.
I'm very glad you're here and I can just echo what you said, you know, like I think it's
an amazing group of people again and in terms of being too early to tell, usually what happens
is like you said, lots of ideas, lots of stimuli in the beginning and then the dust settles
a little bit in week two and week three and usually what happens is some idea or some
combination of ideas catches fire and after the dust has settled, like the real kind of
the real building starts. So usually after two, end of week two, beginning of week three,
really interesting things usually tend to emerge because it's always like everything
is a remix, right? Right. And you take parts of one project or one idea and marry it with
the thing you always had in your head and then something new pops up. So that's usually
how it works. And also, I knew, you know, I was trying to go as fast as I can, given
my interest and just kind of moving at the limit of just the amount of time that's available
to try to fill the gaps that I have in my Nostr knowledge because the frontier, there
are many things at the frontier and the frontier changes quite quickly. So there were a few
things like FIPS, for example, I knew this is profound and this has momentum and excitement
and it's, you know, it's very clear that this needs to exist and so on. But I also knew
that I have other gaps that I need to fill ahead of this. I wanted to prepare. I also
knew, you know, this would be a big theme here. Jonathan would be here. Others are here.
So this is my chance to actually immerse myself in an area I haven't had a chance to touch
yet. So I will try to be mindful of how I balance my time. So even though it seems like
six weeks is a good chunk of time, but I'll try to balance things in a way where it's
not just the stuff that I came here with, you know, in my head already kind of preconceived
or kind of the itch, the pre-existing itch, but also the things that I haven't touched
yet that I'm exposed to here. So I'll try to balance this. Yeah, no, I like how you're
approaching it, you know, with some thought and some planning, some strategy, because
yeah, I mean, six weeks, it's a lot to commit to. But once you're actually here, the time
goes by really fast. And always at the end of every cohort, we ask people kind of for
feedback and what would they do different, like, you know, what was good, what was bad
and so on. And consistently we get, it was too short. And it doesn't matter how long
we make it, you know, like the first course were like eight weeks and we still got like,
it was too short. But you know, like we can't do constant cohorts all the time. So what
we landed on now with six weeks is, I think, pretty perfect. And it also has to end, you
know, like you mentioned the intensity and so on. You can't stomach it for a prolonged
amount of time. You need the decompression time, you need the alone time. Everyone needs
to go back into their bunker, you know, and just have some solitude and again, like compost
all the thoughts and the inputs and so on. And also regenerate in some sense. And then
you can start again fresh. Like you can't be in full on cohort mode all the time. It
would destroy you.
Yeah, you need a pause where, a restorative pause where you get to the point where it
doesn't feel like you're pushing uphill. But you again start feeling the pull. Okay,
this thing is pulling. I'm just gonna like, I'm just gonna see what's going on here.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you need this. Again, just like in nature, you need these cycles,
you know, there is a winter exists for a reason and so on. And then spring comes again. And
you know, let winter be winter, let spring be spring. Those kinds of things. Give me
just one second. I'll need to I'll need some water. I'm on. I'm at my limit. When it comes
to hydration. But I'm, I'm, I'm glad that I can be outside and walking and so on like
hooray for modern medicine. Hooray for painkillers. Yeah, fantastic. No, like, I'm glad that stuff
makes sense to you. I'm always worried about because there is definitely an iterative in
group dynamic in sovereign engineering. And that's also one thing that actually
surprises me, and keeps surprising me. People keep coming back.
Let's switch places again, because of the mics. And because when we started, I was like,
that's such a crazy idea. And it's so strenuous and taxing and kind of out there. And there's,
there's like, basically no payoff except work with cool people build cool, cool shit, you know,
like no one, everyone loses money on sovereign engineering. That's just how it's set up to be.
And, and still people come back, like we have, we have many repeat participants with people
like Jesus who participated in every every cohort so far. And, and that that also tells me that
there is a need for such a program, like you mentioned, the high bandwidth interaction with
high quality people, and just hashing things out together and having, yeah, lots of
dialogos around those problems we're trying to solve. And yeah, I'm just glad it's working. And
I'm glad that we are, you know, like people like you are discovering it, bumping into it and
actually making the plunge to participate. So yeah, thank you for that. That's fantastic.
No, thank you. Very grateful that this all comes together. And that this exists to begin with,
that this is not to be. Yeah, that's why doing it needs to exist. And it's
things don't crystallize by accident. And it's, yeah, it's specific individuals also.
So if any OG, if any OG whales are listening, we're looking for sponsors, we're looking for,
you know, large scale philanthropists to sponsor Sovereign Engineering so they can continue to
exist. We want to make patronage great again. All the great artworks in the past
were made possible by patrons. So yeah, we want to continue with the program for as long as we can.
And hopefully also build it out in some way, shape or form. We discussed this briefly,
that Madeira is fantastic. I love doing the cohorts here because it's just so conducive
to everything we want to do. Just like, you know, like the walk we just took along the coastline,
it's very beautiful. It's very kind of, it gets you in a different frame of mind. And so you're
not sitting in a room drawing on whiteboards and so on. And yeah, we've been thinking about
kind of branching out potentially geographically as well. You mentioned Hong Kong, or you mentioned
also mainland China going to like a hardware heavy place, somewhere where you can just,
you know, like send a file to whatever, you know, a fab or something, and you have like an
integrated circuit, like three days later. No joke, no. Same day, you can get things same day.
Same day. The European mind cannot comprehend. So that would be fun too.
And you will actually, this is like maybe one thing to touch on. There's a lot of vilification
that goes on, especially kind of in the States. They're obviously dialing things up, turning the
level of heat up against China. And you know, I'm based in that part of the world and I have
direct experience with people, including people from the mainland, including as,
you know, I get to meet the nerds and I see how people work. And it's,
there's a lot of hardworking people along many dimensions.
So not everyone is a villain just because they're Chinese.
So I think this is kind of, it's a, that's a trap, clearly.
Yeah, unfortunately, the propaganda is still working to some degree, but I feel like the
propaganda machinery is also breaking down to some degree, like one side effect of the
internet and social media is like the hyper fragmentation of everything and so on. I mean,
it's different forms of propaganda now, but it's, you know, like, I don't know. I feel like,
I feel like people that are internet native and grew up on the internet and so on,
they understand that the regular people are just regular people. Doesn't matter where they come
from. You know, like it's, it doesn't matter if you're Russian or China or from the US or
whatever. It's all just people like just by playing computer games, you'll know that it's all just
the same kind of people. Government structures might be different and, you know, economic
situations might be different and so on, but people are people usually. And most people are good,
like that's otherwise the world wouldn't work. Yeah. Once you have a direct experience of
individuals, you know, specific individuals in the group that may be otherwise rolled up to you
through media or whatever, this, it just, that shatters the image very quickly. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. All right. I'm all out of steam. Any last words from your side?
Anything you want to touch on? Any wisdom you maybe want to pass on to the younglings
that aren't listening? I think this is a bit circular, but no solutions, do the homework.
Every single episode I would highly recommend. This is, I don't know of a better way to
immerse yourself and try to understand the inherent tension, you know, the trade-offs
that are involved. I think this is, otherwise it's much easier to fall into traps,
common traps that are based on sort of pre-existing conceptions of how things work
on the internet. And then I think, yeah, I would like to just encourage people to,
if they're on the fence, just fucking go for it. You know, I had a very distinct
decision fork at some point, you know, I spent several months being immersed in Nostr stuff,
hands-on, on my own. And I had a choice to make, you know, do I just continue in that mode or
do I just go all the way? And I chose to go all the way and arrange everything
in the universe around me to be able to be here now. And I'm thoroughly enjoying this.
And this is just the beginning. Awesome. Awesome. I love it. I love it. I want to echo that. Always
go all the way. You have nothing to lose. We're all going to die anyway. Might as well go all the
way. Thanks so much. Thank you. That was a great joy. And now same dance as always. Let's hope
the recording and everything worked because I hate nothing more than having to manually
recover stuff. This is the part that makes my heart sink every time I'm listening to it.
No, that looks good. That looks good. For a fraction of a second, it's like, oh my god,
did you record this? But then, of course, it's like, okay, but I'm listening to it.
We have backups. We have backups. Momentary. We have backups and we have backups of backups.
No recording was ever lost. It's just about manual labor. And I want to minimize manual
labor. So the clankers will do the rest. All right. Awesome.