there we go i found an open source an open source voice recorder it actually works
all right i think that's it are we on yeah that should work all right i'll trust it again
which didn't serve me well so far every single time i said like i trusted something went wrong
and i had to do some manual recovery
but we made it that far
all right yeah let's just go there
and we'll we'll see where our feet and our conversation leads us okay so yeah i think
we both agree that the internet is fucked i really like the title that you gave one of your talks
which was the internet is fucked yeah i completely agree the thing is the internet is the best thing
that we've ever invented and it's so fucked because our expectations were so high about it
i remember this from my youth and childhood when the overarching theme was that the internet is going
to be this massive intense uh technology that's going to unite us and elevate us the human spirit
will reach a new level and the sphere free access to information free access to knowledge
free everything at your fingertips yes and like uh kind of a uprising of the human soul
yeah to the powers that be yeah and and now we have memes and porn and misinformation memes porn
misinformation violence political manipulation crazy people finding each other on the internet
starting cults yeah i mean i think as i as i'm getting like i don't want to say as i'm getting older
but looking at how things turned out and i become less disappointed about it at the same time though
so i'm kind of finding my peace with the developments that we've been seeing because
maybe um i think maybe our expectations have been a bit too naive about how things going to work out and
maybe just maybe the things that we're seeing now as the internet perpetrates or penetrates the entire
world the frictions that we see that you just mentioned maybe are just part of the process
and you know it's like you know a child expecting like the the gift and then you get the gift and
you realize it's not like what you imagine it to be yeah but you still get something out of it and
you only when you grow up you see that it was something actually towards that goal that you
anticipated and i'm kind of thinking maybe for example misinformation or cults or just you know
the crazy people finding each other maybe that's an unavoidable point in the path on the path towards
this original vision what the internet would have brought us you know yeah i mean i think it's also
it's also good that crazy people find each other i mean we found each other on the internet as well
correct i mean we're also crazy people but it's it's the the thing is that um you know it's always
a two-sided coin or a you know like a uh uh what's the saying with the sword yeah double-sided
double-edged sword double-edged sword that's right yeah and and so you can't have the good without
the bad and i think all all the wisdom traditions will tell you this as well you know and that's what i
think is that i think that was the main mistake that the early internet people they equated
information with knowledge and with wisdom and those are three very distinct things like if you're
lucky you get from information to knowledge and if you're very lucky you get from knowledge to wisdom
but but it doesn't come just because and it doesn't come for free and i think we were very naive
and what i kind of hope that i mean in some sense we're trying to build the next version of the
internet right now in some sense yes and what i'm worried about is that we're going to make the same
mistakes so i really hope that we're not going to make the same mistakes and so i don't want to be
utopic about you know bitcoin and oscar and e-cash and all those kind of things because it's not
going to be utopia i i mentioned i mentioned as many times already but i really like john riveki's line
neither nostalgia nor utopia so so both of those are misguided we have to learn from the past and
extract the good things from the past and kind of aim for have a utopic vision in some sense but we're
never gonna have any utopia ever and i think that's where the early internet people they got a lot of
things right like net neutrality for example um which of course you know it's debatable whether we
still have that and so on um but i think they got a lot of things wrong as well which which was kind
of you know being convinced that we will usher in the utopia yes and i mean looking back at the
cypherpunks the cypherpunk movement itself uh defined itself through uh making everyone aware of the
terrifying world that we could end up in if the internet if the world digitizes and we yeah we become
more connected it's not a utopic vision per se um it is even stronger i think i would say is the
dystopic vision is the thing that you're trying to avoid the insights that speaking of things trying
to avoid i was like let's walk here i'm sure there isn't it's going to be it's not going to be that
noisy and there's like you know a jackhammer like it's it's really terrible instruction everywhere
so let's see these mics they are pretty good all right so that's closed off anyway so fuck it let's
turn around because i wanted i wanted to to get up there but everything's closed okay so that's
construction let's just for the listeners this is uninteresting we're just turning around in circles
basically walking in circles that's gonna be the the future of the internet it's like
so the long arc of history is getting back to the to the warnings the early warning signs i think
like they're also in bitcoin you'll find some of the i think interesting voices uh made us aware of
the dangers of a hyperbitconized world for example oh yeah not everything should be purely optimistic
you need to think about what happens let's say if nation states adopt bitcoin and uh use it
as a weapon to oppress their own people yeah it can be it's not like just because the tech is there
everything will turn out fine yeah there is the the the idea and the fundamentals of the tech are the
most important i think we all agree on that but obviously the way it's implemented is a whole like
it's it's undefined until it's done yeah yeah yeah and i think it's it's i mean that's a
that's just kind of by definition always true you know it's but i flip flop on this because it's like
you know it's just a tool technology it's just a tool it depends on how you use it and so on and you
have i don't know let's let's take nuclear power you know like you can have uh clean abundant energy
forever and you you have nuclear weapons it's the same tech kind of you know you have a great kitchen
knife it's like you can murder someone with it or you can cook a great meal and and and so so the
technologists will tell you that technology is neutral but the reason why i flip flop on this is
is because i feel like there's some technologies that aren't neutral like reading and writing for
example i don't think are like it's it's i don't think it's super neutral in some sense or i i don't
know i'm again i haven't made up my mind on this yet but the the reason why i bring it up is because
i think the
there is such a thing as a certain ethos embedded in various technologies like the car for example
there's there's there are arguments that that personal transportation is what in part would
brought out the brought down the soviet union because it's basically it's hyper personalized you
know it's like you can go anywhere you just you fill up your car and you can go anywhere it's it's
freedom technology in that sense you increase the ability of people to move you increase agency
you increase agency and that's why why i i brought reading and writing as well because
reading also increases agency in the sense that that it expands your horizon and it expands your
knowledge and those kind of things and i think i think it's undeniable that there is a certain
ethos embedded in bitcoin for example and it truly changes people i mean i've seen this over and over and
over again and it changed me as well and like that's why lots of people wrote about this and and i think
that's this by now this is a known fact and so that's why i'm not sure if technology if all technology
is truly neutral in some sense but i don't know so my my the reason why i bring all this up is because
i my hope is that we can have a kind of and i'm not even sure if technological is the right word like
i was about to say that we can have a technological substrate that brings more agency and thus also more
responsibility to society but i'm not sure if it's the right word it's like i mean there's a reason
why we go through great lengths to you know to to the things we have to do so that almost everyone
in society can rewrite it's like insane it's insane it takes like years and years and years of education
it's like our whole society is geared towards this you know towards literacy and numeracy and so on
so so we obviously think that this is valuable and we obviously think that this is beneficial
to everyone and and and so with the with the internet right now for example we don't do anything
like that and someone just a couple days ago brought up an excellent point that the current where the
internet is trending right now with internet with tiktok and all all this bullshit it's completely
passive it's like i'm here now entertain me yes give me all the recommendations even like amazon
shopping is like that you don't even you know go out to look for the thing that you need you're just
like yeah please dear algorithm tell me what i need on average the agency of the individual
is on average is reduced at the number of people with higher agency probably increases but as more and
more people use the internet we ended up in a point where most people are pure consumers that was
always the case that most people will be consumers but um i think we both can agree that
the morality of the question whether something is good or bad only depends on the human itself
technology itself just can never exist in a pure vacuum it has no meaning in a pure vacuum it always
needs to be applied for human and whether it's used for human good or human bad depends on the
individual situation i think we we can all agree on that so the the thing itself is neither good
nor bad i'm i'm a strong proponent of stoic philosophy and stoic philosophy basically dictates
that also technology and everything outside of your control has no moral meaning the fact that it can
be used by a totalitarian regime to control its people and the same technology can be used by the
people to topple the totalitarian regime shows that very very distinctly very obviously
yeah yeah i like the i like the stoic thought uh you know basically it's it's it's it's in in eastern
philosophy as well right where it's you know if if you can do something about it then do the thing
and stop worrying about it and if you can't do something about it then worrying about it won't do it
any good right same same thing but yeah i i mean my my hope is kind of that with what we've learned
now from the current iteration of the internet and i i view i view i mean this is still all ongoing
and it's like you know ai is like proliferating and everything is algorithmically driven and it's
kind of it's in some sense i hope that we'll build stuff that allows those who want to
position themselves in the driver's seat to be back in the driver's seat and actually have a say
in kind of what happens to their money what happens to their compute what happens like how they
like have agency in cyberspace basically yes and increase the number of agents also like yeah we will
always there will always be something new that enables those who adapt it first to gain more
power and influence and what i find interesting is all the technological breaks that we encounter on
the way um sometimes equal the playing field again yeah right now it's ai it doesn't i mean it's
ambivalent i think because you can see that the larger companies that were you know uh developing this
technologies such as google amazon maybe apple as well they have a head start yeah but at the same
time the models are getting so much faster and more efficient that suddenly like thousands and
thousands of new people can build products that really rival those big ones yeah you know that's
the best thing that can happen that's like that's the that's really the best thing that can happen
because there is no other moral direction as we have discussed before there's no ai is not going
to be just good yeah but we can increase the chance of it being good by making sure that more people have
access to it and more people can use it to fulfill their dreams and their goals instead of like the few
one company dictating already have their goals already know where things need to go to to benefit
themselves yeah yeah yeah i think it's it's interesting to watch this happen over and over
again that that kind of uh you know like the the cost gets driven down and and also the open models now
catching up and stuff gets smaller and easier and cheaper and that means more people can use it and
have access to it that's the most exciting thing and the same thing happened also with bitcoin yeah
absolutely the banking system the entire finance anything that has to do with money like literally
anything from payments to saving to whatever you want to come up with 15 years ago there were maybe
like you know hundreds of entities in the world that could do those things yeah now we have hundreds
of thousands of people who can build this and deploy this and just go with it because of bitcoin
because we have like completely equalized the access to financial systems to find to financial
operations on the internet and we're going to see the same with intelligence hopefully like actually
like i'm so impressed with by what's happening one year ago i remember this very clearly that i said
to someone it's like i don't think that we'll be able to build uh you know that we'll have
competitive on-device ai because of the big of this huge gap between large data centers and the local
llms that people have been using one year ago and this has changed now like a couple months ago i was
telling someone else the same i did the same uh wrong prediction by saying now we're in this regime of
um excuse me what is called like the the thinking models um the ones that you know first produce
uh the chain of thoughts that's that's what it's called like chain of thoughts models and then you
make the actual uh synthesis of data yeah and i was like convinced this is a new paradigm this is going
to you know win over the old paradigm which turned out to be true now everyone does thinking models but i
thought because it uses so much energy local llms will never be able to compete with large data
centers that now offer this uh you know prediction time compute basically uh that that requires so much
compute during prediction and deep seek v3 just came out you know a month ago and just shattered that
prediction again so it's like this force of equalizing is the most the strongest force
that that that i can think of it really like on an economic level forces everyone to rethink
what they've been doing and adjust to the new status quo and i like that's why i'm so in love
i mean technology that's that's what that's what free markets usually do right but but i i feel like
not every technology works like that and not all systems work like that and i feel like we have to be
i briefly uh touched with this on on on pablo in one of the conversations um that we have to
be very careful to distinguish with stuff and systems that gets better over time which is what
you just described it gets more uh you know more democratic to use the term over time more people
will have more access and so on and other things that have a centralizing tendency that centralize
over time and can get kind of worse over time it's like um i don't know i feel do you see it in a
similar way or do you think it's always going to be kind of nature works in a way that it's it's
automatically tending towards the good no i don't i don't think that it's uh it's an automatic thing
there are systems that get you know that benefit from centralization some things just scale better
when you centralize them and that's like the opposing force to what i just described
um and network things are very good examples of that social networks are like the best example of
that it's it's known as the network effect yeah the more people participate in a network the more
valuable the network becomes that means like inherent to the way this system works means that competition
is really hard to bootstrap you can make a social network with your five friends but it's not going to
do anything sure i mean that that was the that was the bane of uh like every single time uh bitcoin
has tried to move away from bitcoin twitter it didn't work because of network effects i think we're
now now with nostr it's the first time where it has a chance of working yeah and i agree and uh with
nostr we've we've kind of unlocked one thing that the closed systems will never be able to unlock
because they cannot cooperate in their they don't have synergies in their dna they must compete yeah
this is the only thing that keeps them alive yeah is the competition they must steal each other's
uses from each other forever because they cannot transition into a different model yeah many people
have tried that it's why jack dorsey left twitter at the end yeah it's why so many protocols in the
past that were supposed to be adopted by you know the large players for example facebook or meta
adopted 80 proto uh for for their instagram twitter clone whatever it's called and it's like it's
irrelevant no one interrupts with them no one even you can't you kind of just with blue sky like the
same to to you know mention the b word it's it's if you if you need like uh billions of dollars to run
one node then no one will ever interrupt it's like it's it's not an open it's it's open in name only
right it's like you you need you need so much money to run the single master node that is required of
the system that you just can't it's just like you know try joining the the swift node banking system
you know it's like yes it's it's you can in theory but you need like billions of dollars and we are
doing it with noster we are literally doing it with not with noster it's like my same nsec i can use it
to stream videos i can sell stuff with shopster i can use it as my wallet on noster i can like i can
do so many things with the same identity now and all of these systems benefit from each other yeah
because they have not been founded on this premise of becoming the big thing yeah none of these
small subsystems of noster want to become the only thing that is around because they kind of
you know they know that noster will fail so their entire system will fail if they are the only thing
yeah right so even like let's take primal as an example primal is like the most walled garden
experience that you'll get on noster and it's also sometimes makes compromises you know on on
decentralization and whatnot like people know that but even primal knows exactly that if only primal is
used at the end of the day everything else breaks yeah none of their business models will work out
like we've we've found the system in which synergies are rewarded yeah exactly it's the same thing in
bitcoin like i look at the bitcoin space and i see all these different companies and i've never seen
this in my life before we are all in the same boat you can feel that people think that they're in the
same team you have competing companies that produce for example like two wallet providers that both
compete for number of users maybe like but both of them know that they both improve the bitcoin
ecosystem with their products yeah and everyone's working on the same mission bitcoin fails we all
fail yeah i think i think that's a perfect way to put the incentives out there it's new it's never
been done before it's so exciting to witness this yeah no i think i think that's what what the
the the current like platform style building of internet systems is like it's it's it's pure
competition basically without any any symbiosis and we had no underlying substrate that allowed for
symbiosis no and i think if you look at nature like the the most successful systems are symbiotic
systems it's like nature is full of symbiotic relationships that's what a lot of the you know like
uh i i feel like a lot of people gloss over this fact that it's not all the jungle is not all
like competition competition and like only the strongest will survive and all those kind of
things i mean in that case we would have probably only one single species left at the end of the day
like if that were the case yeah no i i i i but i think coming back to the you know stuff gets better
over time and stuff gets worse over time uh what are your thoughts on what still i feel like is the
main criticism in in bitcoin especially from outsiders but also also like some some people
that know a lot about bitcoin will tell you that you know mining is centralized lightning will centralize
over time uh um like cashew is a terrible idea because who will run the mints and we'll only have
a couple of big mints that they will be like banks or what have you what's your what's your response to
all of that i mean um i let's steal minute for a second uh with lightning i think we have a good
example of a system where the network effect again plays uh has a strong strong effect on how the how the
system develops in you know this in network theory the stronger hub becomes the more efficient the system
becomes right so there is an incentive to centralize in lightning this is just simply
true and we've been seeing it and you can measure it in in lightning and you see it happen but the the
the important point in lightning is that it allows you to participate in the system without asking for
anyone's permission yeah and i know this phrase is being said over and over again permission that's lost
its meaning yeah it's being said over and over again but i just want to you know make this more
concrete and uh how this and make this more concrete and show how this specifically applies to lightning
as as an l2 system also different from others lightning is the only thing that we have that invites
everyone to join without signing up anywhere so you can spin anyone invites anyone anyone anyone's
join we know mathematically impossible to invite everyone yes correct like if i said everyone then i
need to correct myself there so um lightning is the only decentralized layer two system so even if
the the incentives drive it slowly towards decentralization uh sorry drive it mildly to centralization
that means that doesn't mean that you cannot run your own node and connect to the system and
offer an alternative to a subsystem or something like that i think there is also an important
difference between a centralizing force and a monopolizing force right because if you fuck up
you're dead immediately and someone else will take your place and that's not true in the monopoly
but even if you're the biggest player and so on oh my lord we're good we're almost getting run over
we're actually getting run over by a truck we are still alive all right okay thank you
so yeah this is this is the exciting thing about recording a podcast in the wild that's why that's why
that's why most people uh are are pusses and build a studio and hide in the studio no no we don't need
they can't take the the jungle of the street
but yeah i think i think that's an and the reason why i want to have all these conversations is because
again i feel like we are missing the vocabulary the right way to talk about those things because
there is a big difference between between centralization and monopolization there is a big difference
just like for example like just two days ago we talked about um custodians and so on and it's the
first time i i stumbled into the phrase of a blinded custodian a blinded custodian is distinctly
different from a regular custodian and i think i think just having that word just having that phrase
blinded custodian makes it so much easier for me to talk about those things and think through these
things and so so i i think you you hit on something let's take the example of cashew there
uh because like that's kind of that was the dream for such a long time is okay so we have custodians
we have blinded custodians we can talk about the specific meaning of the blinded custodian later
but you know an e-cash system with a blinded custodian that offers you great privacy
with a single entity that gives you that service let's say a bank a one single bank would
would develop like an e-cash system and provide this for their users that bank could fuck up it
could blow up it could fractionally fractional do fractional reserve and then like all its users
would be you know left holding the bag for example so it could just break very easily what we have
tried to do and what i think we're we're really you know achieving at this point is to allow anyone
to spin up an alternative system if they want cashew is super easy to deploy and it really like the the
only thing that you need is a lightning note and you can become uh you can spin up a custodian or a
service and offer it to all the users what we've done like none of the cashew wallets out there
assume that you're going to use a single mint yeah for example all of them kind of assume that there
will be many different mints and you can connect multiple mints to your single wallet and that's
exactly what we've been seeing like there are 30 to 40 different mints out there run by people and
like some of them will blow up some of them will fractional reserve some of them will rock their
users i'm sorry there's like no way to prevent it it's a custodian system but the thing is like there
are 39 different mints out there still alive yeah and even if that happens like a small part of the
system breaks but the entire system keeps growing yeah and like that's what we're trying to achieve
like even and it's the same principle everywhere right like if one bitcoin note goes down it doesn't
matter if one lightning note goes down it doesn't matter if one computer on the internet goes down it
doesn't matter and so on and so forth yes and i think that i mean that's what to my mind the the
whole nostril architecture it's so simple and so ingenious because you just default you default to
you default to you know a couple different relays and and you just blast everything out to like five
six different ones by default and so if one goes away even if it's a big one you don't even feel it
it doesn't matter at all i was just asked this this like yesterday this question about like what
happens if that if that relay goes down and my answer to that was it's like you won't even notice that
the relay goes down it's like you have eight relays or ten relays in your client yeah i have no
emotional connection to my relay if it goes down whatever man i'll just use the next exactly and
and you can have that again relays are not necessarily blinded in that sense but but they
don't have any real power over you and that's what we we discussed when we said like it's it's like the
data is bearer you know like you sign the data and it's almost like if you if you if you look at
storage for example you can have a blinded custodian when it comes to storage because you
can you can just split stuff up and encrypt the charts only knew what's there and and like okay
i give you my hard disk whatever you store there i cannot even know that's also how a lot of the
modern you know email providers and so on work where it's just like the provider doesn't have the
keys to access the data so they don't know what's going on they just they just provide the system and i
think that's a again i feel like we're we're we're missing the succinct vocabulary to talk about
these things because that's a very very different power dynamic um than what we've had previously
where you know like your email provider reads absolutely everything knows absolutely everything
and if the government comes and and and and says you know like oh you have to get mr snowden off
your platform or something then then exactly those are like two different and very important things
to distinguish there as well you have one is the service provider that either knows what's happening
and can therefore individually sensor in the users or course individual users and the second thing
is that the provider itself could be forced to to censor an individual or rock an individual so
uh the state might from like from external information that the state has acquired about a certain user go to
that provider and say just stop this provider if you have a blind system then neither the provider can
uh rug you specifically nor can it be coerced to rug you specifically exactly those are two different
things that the the provider can protect itself from and the user of that provider can protect and it
makes a big difference because then it's like an all or nothing like if if if someone with a really
large stick knocks at your door and tells you okay we have reasons to believe that you know like
problematic person is using your system then you have to you would have to shut down absolutely
everything for everyone yes and that's what what like uh i mean if you know your i'm sure you do
but if you know your cypherpunk history it's like with love a bit you know it's like okay a problematic
person used uh love a bit email provider uh please hand over you're you're legally obliged to hand over
all encryption keys all everything and so you know the absolute legend of the guy printed everything out
with the printer and as the printer was printing the keys he shut down and nuked everything and that was
the end of love a bit so a little bit of history for everyone here fantastic that's how but then
then you at least kind of you know you have a way a meaningful way to protect your users basically
and you have a meaningful way of of also kind of um you don't want to have all the liability on your
shoulders and i think that's what we what we see now happening with the next iteration of the internet
so to speak it's user data in general is a liability yes it's absolutely it's treated as an asset with
the current platforms people to step in and provide services for others yeah it's like you have to be
afraid of you know knowing too much about the people that you serve absolutely so the way to protect
yourself is to apply cryptography so that you cannot know anything and you cannot hand over anything
and you'll be in a much better spot if if things go south exactly and and the reason why i say like
i think this is what we see happening now because for some businesses and for some people um user data
is an extreme liability and that's of course you know like um vpn providers and those kind of things
and so the first people naturally that uh accept bitcoin accept lightning and so on is something like
a mulvat vpn or obscura vpn or silent.link and so on and and i think this will continue to happen like we
we will see continue this adoption will continue to happen at the edges where you absolutely do not
want to know anything about your users so you will accept e-cash for example it's just like here is your
user id you pay that's it and that's all the service needs to know about you i want to go one step deeper
because we're talking about the internet right and like i like our theme it's it's a bit like a fractal
but we're trying to trying to keep it like focused on you want to go from the internet is
fuck to everything is fuck everything is no but like one good example that just came to my mind when
you said this was i want to talk a bit about internet infrastructure i think that's that's
something that we talk so little about because we have almost like almost no power as users oh yeah
yeah yeah run your own isp yeah run your own fucking email yeah yeah try that you know and
if you run your own isp and there are very brave individuals who run their own isp and offer this
as a service to their local community for example local city and so on like if you can know which
every isp that uses standard techniques kind of has to know who uses your your service who the
individual users ip addresses are what services they connect to then you're going to run into
into problems that's why it's like scary to run an isp yeah and like there are countries where you
cannot host a wi-fi for example it's a very simple problem that many people know about you have a cafe
and you host a wi-fi like you become kind of responsible for what happens on your wi-fi because
because people people can just point towards your cafe and say like something bad happened at your
cafe and now you're responsible for that figure out who did that and hand me all overall
information like we're still at the very very beginning of what we could do there and i think one
example of how we can fix this is you know exemplified through tor and many you know similar techniques
that try to kind of use encryption and other techniques to to hide user data and again like running
a tor relay that takes you know data from the tor network and and relays it forward to the tor network
is super safe it's like you can do it at your home it's there is almost nothing that can happen to you
the data is encrypted just because you don't know who sent it and you don't know who where it's going
and you can run a tor relay that's no problem the problem with tor relays rather is like the entry
node and the exit node again the points where someone can point to and say now you have to hand over the
data or you're responsible for this kind of traffic that flew flowed through your node so i think in in
terms of internet infrastructure now when we go down the stack really really down the stack and even to
the hardware level we haven't even started that process yet that we've been talking about with you
know social networks and money social networks being noster money being bitcoin the all services all
infrastructure that we rely on is still in the hands of the of the you know powerful isps because
we haven't developed yet alternative ways wherein like an uncle jim isp can just spin up a network
for their for for their community for their village or something like that and be protected himself
not have all the liability of everyone using that infrastructure i mean to to to be fair like to be
fair to to our society and civilization uh pre-cryptography all of this was impossible
because we had to rely on authority like there was no other way to to build these systems and scale
these systems and so on and i think uh also like i'm convinced and i i have very technical reasons
for that i'm convinced that bitcoin is the only solution to like proof of work is the only solution
to um again i have this big talk and thing about uh cryptography is not enough so you still need
like an arrow of time in cyberspace and you need an authority that that you cannot get with
cryptography alone and bitcoin provides this with proof of work and you basically like it's a long
long long argument i'm not going to go into it but i'm convinced we need this we need this this
substrate and the only way to build it out um we need entropy in cyberspace and we don't have
entropy in cyberspace and bitcoin provides entropy in cyberspace and the only way to provide it is
actually with proof of work provable randomness that's what you mean yes yeah and but but that's
also how you build up an arrow of time like you need provable randomness to build up an arrow of
it's so interesting because also you know in in physics itself the definition of the arrow of time
it's the same thing no that's why i'm convinced it's the only way like physics works in the same way
all physical laws are symmetric in time and the only thing that is asymmetric in physics except for
like symmetry breaking or crazy quantum and or fundamental physics is entropy basically space
time emerges out of entropy delta s always larger than zero yes and and and and so so so we now
know kind of you know i mean that's where everything's heading uh space time emerges out of entropy out of
irreversible processes and all those kind of things it's the same we need the same in cyberspace
so and that's what bitcoin provides and so so it's a it's a long-winded way of saying kind of
we have to also forgive ourself and forgive society and forgive the banks and everyone else
and the ice piece and so on it was quite impossible to build that up um i mean you know this as well
like pre-bitcoin it was quite impossible to build all this up same with e-cash you know having large
scale deployed e-cash systems on top of fiat would be an improvement yes but it's kind of you know it's a
band-aid it's like it's bitcoin really makes it work as we've just said before it's like it's going to
be jp morgan who builds this and it will be offered to jp morgan's clients and that's it
and if jp morgan goes down the whole system goes down yeah like without bitcoin you cannot do this
in a meaningful way you need the underlying substrate that's actually fair and open to everyone
and provides kind of a you know to have a marketplace you first need physics you first need an actual
substrate where you can build a marketplace on and that's kind of how i see it and and i think
i think it's all going in that direction as you mentioned where where we have we can actually
build those systems out now where you are kind of zero knowledge about your customers and you are
zero knowledge about certain things and we see this now with tollgate for example you know it's one
of the one of the experiments currently going on where you basically you you you use e-cash to pay
for internet access and in this way the you know the mini isp basically your local isp
doesn't know anything about you can't know anything about you and and that's fantastic because it's
actually it it allows for an equal playing field in terms of who will actually provide the best
service can we just please for a second appreciate this wonderful fact that you can finally pay for
things online without having to kyc yeah i know i like i mean we're both hardcore bitcoiners and we
kind of sometimes forget about the hey this guy recognizes us as bitcoin bitcoin is great
so you know there is so much stuff on the internet that you could purchase and buy and like
many also privacy improving technologies vpn as the best example like the only way to pay for a vpn
was a kyc credit card for the entire existence of the internet and again there are technical reasons
there are technical reasons for it there are technical reasons you needed you needed bitcoin
before you before you could fix that because because before that all it's so funny that like
in the white paper it says electronic cash you know it says electronic cash and in my mind the
electronic says already something about the whole system because you need to push electrons around to
make the thing work so so so the proof of work stuff is kind of embedded in the title it's not digital
cash that's why it's so distinct from cbdc and so on and and and in the digital world purely digital
world if you remove electronics if you remove proof of work you're immediately in credit there is no
other way to do it it can be just a representation of like exactly because there is no link between the
the physical world and the digital world yes and so you always need a trusted authority to resolve any
conflicts that will inevitably arise and so so if you have digital money it is credit money period
and credit implies identity and implies thus kyc because i need to know who you are because if
there are conflicts or the credit goes bad then i need to find you with the police in my back you
know that's that's how it works and that's why if you pre-bitcoin if you bought a anything like a
a domain or a vpn or what have you you had like you had to use credit rates there was no other way
it's it's it's like once you truly understand this stuff it's like okay okay that's but now we have it now
we can actually rebuild it and build it properly absolutely and the thing is like this is a
like a slight philosophical take but we see these very obvious truths only when the alternative is
presented to us yes yeah like this is something absolutely that that thought was almost worthless
yeah insight was almost worthless without being able to point to the alternative yeah and today we
can see like we can just say as like a lemma yeah credit means you need a gun yeah without guns
credits credits doesn't work yeah it doesn't scale or what what have you like you need to
at least kyc and in order for kyc to make any sense you need a gun because like what what benefit do you
have to know that joe owes you money if you can force joe to pay you back basically it's all about
enforcement in the end then yeah and that's the neat thing about bitcoin it does the enforcement for
you and that's still true on lightning so that's i think that's why that's why it allows anyone to
participate anyone to participate because you don't need a lawyer you don't need an army
like to actually be your own bank in bitcoin and have a self-sovereign monetary policy you don't need
a standing army that's kind of a big innovation let's tie it back again i'm trying so go ahead
in terms of e-cash no no you're you're great i love listening to you i'm sure everyone everyone
else does as well i derail every single conversation you you tend to sometimes
go on a tangent you go ahead no no like let's get back to the internet and why the internet looks
like it is today and i think this is also something that both of us have thought about a lot
is the way that the internet developed due to a lack of being able to finance itself yeah i think the the
word here is micropayments it sounds like a small part you know a small feature of something but
when you look into the history of micropayments and what people wrote about it and so on it kind of
it's not just about you know paying your coffee and being able to make a transaction with low fees
it was seen as the way that this cyberspace like the the electronic sphere that uh that is built
that is kind of finding a way how the electronic sphere itself can finance itself from within
you want we see that you cannot offer a service for free it's just everything takes resources so
you need to refinance it some way and the early visions of the internet thought that we are going
to find uh a way like you have talked about this with pablo in the last episode about 402 that was
kind of added as the error code and then you know we'll find a way to to to make payments in a
couple years and then we'll we'll be able to use that error code yeah it was kind of baked in into
the assumption that the internet would grow on an ability to make payments for things online and
that's why i you know i'm so bullish on on e-cash because it kind of finally gives us a very simple
way to to make payments online for services that we use online in a microscopic scale you need to be
able to pay like one cent or less than a cent for some things you need to be able to pay per second
if you don't want to rely on credit so if you want like a better access to a service and then be able
to use that immediately and the service provider can shut you down immediately if you don't pay
if you want that dynamic you need like a bear token that can move instantly for almost for free
and in any arbitrary amount that you want and like i'm so bullish about e-cash because in my mind it
opens this possibility of this new internet the internet kind of bifurcated in the 90s
when everyone thought that we are going to have a cyber economy and we will be able to finance all
these services from within we saw that no it's not going to happen it's not happening with credit
cards and people do not enter their kyc data into a form to make like a 10 cent i don't even i don't
even think that's the issue it is the 10 cent payment because it's impossible with credit cards
and so you have to batch payments because otherwise otherwise the counterparty risk kills you even the
10 cent payment must be a fake payment that's why every single subscription that you you'll ever see
online is like at least five bucks a month and it's mostly paid annually so that it's like 20 bucks
the bottom is dictated by the transaction fees of the entire system basically yeah or like the risk
inside the system exactly yeah so so it was impossible and just to interject for for a brief
moment but i think one of the guys who who wrote most kind of lucidly about this was uh i think um
the book's name is who owns the future and it was i think jared lanier he was very early on vr stuff as
well and he wrote about kind of um uh in the best case money flows through the whole internet and and
these kind of levies build up where we're just like wherever the value is provided like um that's
where the value will flow and his main criticism at the time was there was the book was written like
well over 10 years ago i i don't know exactly when but it's it's an old book in internet standards
and and he was one of the early critics of like the big players like facebook and those kind of
things where basically um there is lots of value provided but the whole value flows to one central
point and for i think he didn't know uh like you know big commie and so on he thought it was only for
for structural political reasons not for technical reasons i'm convinced it's mostly for for technical
reasons where you just you can't do it basically you can you cannot enter the space and become a
competition exactly like you will always end up with a monopoly if there was no one else can can
and also if there are any micro payments in the thing you still would have to kyc to receive payouts
and so on and so forth and it's like very high barrier to entry and it's like you get in the best
case you get facebook points like reddit karma you know and then to to pay like to actually exit the
system again you'll have to go through the whole you know kyc everything is so stupid yeah it's so
fucked like it's so fucked like if we continue on this path just think ahead like 10 years
is the is the is the realistic expectation that every person will have like 50 subscription at some
point yeah yeah that's the other thing is this how you're going to live on the internet you're you're
limited to only like 20 services because that's what you can pay for because you need like five
dollars minimum per month to be able to access them yeah it's like so stupid that's why i showed the
comic with like the pirate bay you know ah netflix comes around and it's like ah i don't need you
anymore and he puts away the pirate bay hat and then it's like netflix and disney plus and hulu
and youtube premium and whatnot and then like 10 years later he gets back into oh yeah my old
friend hello my dear old friend i made this i made this development myself so much like i'm so in love
with torrents right now and you know to resolve this issue to to really make sure that torrents can
survive forever which i think like i'm such a big fan of torrent for me it's like there are three
systems in the world that i think are really well done this is bitcoin torrent and nosta you know
torrent was there since the beginning and it will survive every nuclear disaster that we have like i love
it but torrent has no economics incentives built in that's the biggest weak point of torrents and when
i saw bitcoin for the first time a long time ago because also about the name overlap of bit torrent
and bitcoin i kind of automatically assumed that this will be used for online file sharing immediately
like it's just you know we're in the cyber world we have exchange of value in terms of data people
seed data people leech data and obviously like things cost money so let me just pay for for the data
that i download from you it's a very natural exchange basically as we all know we haven't
reached that point with bitcoin yet and that's due to technical reasons only like i'm convinced we would
we would see this already if we could make like micropayments with pure bitcoin and we can still do
it with lightning because we cannot force everyone to run to run a lightning note just to see it torrents
with ecash things look very different if we both share a mint then we can do micropayments for
for every kilobyte of data that you sent me i can send you like a satoshi and that's totally doable
and i i really hope that we will see this so it's also just again i'm i know i hate to interject but
it's also it's also about rate limiting because that's like every open system has this issue as well
and so it's not only about payments payments are a great way to rate limit stuff because the other
way to rate limit stuff is to kyc even if it's pseudonymous and so on it's like you have to create an
account and so on but it's like one one satoshi per whatever you know kilobyte or megabyte
don't pick your thing it's a fantastic way to rate limit yeah absolutely and like uh again lemma from
that so either to rate limit someone either you need to know their identity so you can say like
this identity now you had enough stop doing that or if you want privacy which we all want then you
have no solution other than payments yeah right and that's that's so beautiful to see and satoshi
says that the signal actually says that to himself proof of work exactly that if you want a anonymous
system where everyone like an open set of people everyone can join and leave whenever they want they
do not have to register they have no identity then you must find a way to slow them down and the way
to slow them down is to make them pay and the only way to do it like internally inside cyberspace
without going out it's we all know it's compute it's proof of work and the funny thing is like
at the end of the day you would use like for example if you would use cashew for that is that
you you peg on the proof of work that has been provided earlier by some miner yeah by mining that
satoshi the real satoshi that is represented by that by that cashew token so you kind of only can
piggyback on real energy being spent and it's so clean yeah it's like almost the the universe giving
you a signal there's only one single way that we know of like there might be maybe another super
revolutionary idea but there's only like anonymous systems need proof of work which is bitcoin or you
have no anonymous system yeah yeah yeah that's that's also why like like from first principles
i think that's why also you can dismiss absolutely everything that doesn't have proof of work baked in
outright it's like all that's why once once i had this insight i just i was able to dismiss everything
else and if you if you look at the proof of work share yeah in the world it's like it's only bitcoin
so it's only bitcoin i reasoned myself into maximalism i did not absolutely i get that 100
percent and also proof of stake i think like proof of stake as an example as an alternative example
to proof of work i'm like strongly convinced that this all these systems are like super unstable and
the reason why they are still around is because bitcoin is still around yeah like we see it all the time
take bitcoin out of the equation yeah all of that would collapse like it's funny because they kind
of you know in a hidden way yeah or not to mention they're hiding behind the shield kind of all hiding
behind that proof of work sheet of bitcoin no no absolutely but you see it with the with the
shittiest uh uh proof of stake systems with like i don't know like is it solana that restarts every
week and so on no but but there there's plenty that just have to kind of uh you know reset themselves
like every couple weeks and so on because they run into unresolvable conflicts and then you have to
ask a quorum which can't agree on what is right um like what is the actual state of the system and
you cannot know without proof of work you cannot know and then you just have to all right like this
is the checkpoint this is like we dictate now this is the actual state of the system and then we
continue again and that's a political process of course and so so i mean everyone should know this
by now but but but basically the beauty of gold was to move the question of of um monetary policy
to the realm of physics yes away from the realm of politics to the realm of physics it's a kind of
like objectivism about what the state of a system is and yeah it removes humans from the equation can
only be based on physics yeah and bitcoin does the same thing just in cyberspace it it it it shifts the
question of monetary policy away from humans into physics so so physics dictates what the monetary
policy is and you can you know whatever you can be angry at you know physics as much as you want but
it's going to be no use don't be the angry man shouting at clouds yeah they won't shout back
so what would the internet look like if we were able to uh if we would have been able to build it
without without having to and i i kind of skipped over this fact before when i had my made my rant
about the bifurcation of the internet because the other path the world the path that we actually went
on was the monetization through advertisement through attention i would say yes attention exactly
attention attention is the currency yeah and advertisement is the way to to kind of monetize
that maybe yeah but um so that's what we ended up with the entire internet has now basically two modes
either you pay a subscription fee or you consume yeah ads or you pay with your eyeballs or you pay with
your eyeballs oh that's nice i i hope the listeners can hear the church bell ringing
mics will pick it up it's loud enough what do you think like what what what would we what would
the internet look like first of all for sure i'm sure that we wouldn't have this you know the world
that you're either a netflix subscriber or a disney plus subscriber and you know you just cannot
afford like five million different subscriptions so you must kind of become a separated folk from the
others like oh sorry i cannot watch that series because i i don't subscribe to that platform i i think
we would have less monopolies in general i think you know like going back to a very old book the
cathedral and the bazaar which talked about the ways to the different ways to develop software it was
like you know microsoft versus unix systems basically and i think the because we had to monetize
attention we kind of it favors monopolies it favors like you you you scale to like a half billion
users and then you're able to monetize and the the you know the user base is large enough that you
actually make money and then you squeeze them and then you do it all over again i think i think
it's not smart for us to go up that steep i think we'll just we'll just do a loop around all right
and can i have a look of just all right can i have a look again yeah sure we've been recording for one
hour oh okay good yes because as i told you after 90 minutes my brain is usually fried no we have 30
more minutes of your juicy brain to squeeze let's see let's see let's see you might need another coffee
i i will i will try this once just to just fuck it and just sit down and and go i i want to bring
someone to a shisha bar or something and just go really wild just record it all but anyway i i think
i think it would have evolved very differently and i think with the beauty to me of noser and and
with baked in e-cash right now is that it doesn't matter who you are it doesn't matter what you are you
can be a bot you can be a dog you can be a kid you can be from a sanctioned country whatever you
one click create a cryptographic identity and you immediately can receive money that's so
revolutionary like people it feels so not revolutionary but if you actually know what's
happening underneath like that's that is revolutionary and and if you allow people to make money things just
change very quickly things like i think i think because with the with the kind of current iteration
of the internet you the the barrier to receiving money is really high like you need a bank account
you need a credit line you need basically you need to be able to create a paypal account those kind of
things there's so many people that can't do that but absolutely anyone can you know like for example sign
up to all us and just receive saps immediately anyone can do that and so i think the internet would have
evolved very very differently just because of look at look at how the world works in general like
how many shops are in in this city there isn't only one there isn't just like one amazon that you go
to and you get everything there's like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of shops and there's people
like you know standing at street corners making money absolutely everywhere and we don't see this
we don't see this online yes without without cash you cannot like you cannot imagine a world where just
someone sets up a rogue store yeah that's why i use the lemonade sells sells there try to set up a
lemonade stand without without cash exactly it's it's it's impossible you'll have to fill out forms of
regulations and everything we will also lose that if we don't you know if we are not aware of what cash
brings us we will lose many of those nuances that we see right now and i think the same analogy
applies to the internet as well you have this you know media outlets crying out loud for years you know
oh like print media is dying no one buys stuff anymore and then they're begging for your credit card
number so you can like pay a little bit for the article that you're paying and at the same time you have
like customers when you do when you ask people like would you be able would you be willing to pay if you
could without any mental barriers like everyone says yes like of course i will pay like 10 cents
50 cents yeah but it's also i don't believe the customers in some way just like oh everyone will
buy the all natural uh buy a you know bio raised good meat chicken whatever and they just usually
don't they just usually don't it's like if you if if if you ask people they will tell you something
else and if they if you let them vote with their wallet they will behave very differently so so i would
be careful with that but i think also the mistake that the new york times and everyone is making
is they're trying to sell the wrong thing and i keep coming back to this i hate talking about the
fucking nft retards every single time but it's like you cannot sell a jpeg just like you cannot
sell a blog post there is no market that can form around a blog post because it's not this car's
thing so i think i think the people that that force you into these subscription models they are they're
trying to sell you the wrong thing well they can only do that because as you say there it doesn't have a
defined price you can just pick the price out of the yeah you have to make it up because there is
no supply and demand because i can take a screenshot of the blog post and send it to everyone for free
and so there is there is no like the supply is infinity and once one supply approaches infinity
market prices make no sense so they're selling the wrong thing and i think twitch figured that out for
example like twitch and like the streaming world and also to some extent the free-to-play games
figured that out what can you sell on twitch they are not selling the mp4 files they are not selling
access to the streams they're selling access to a community access to super chat and so on and i
think for journalism it could be the same way where it's like okay like maybe maybe you have tier
subscriptions and whatever but it's like you get access to the journalist you know and you get access
to whatever like was whatever was discussed in this thing and so on you you have to sell something that
is actually scarce and the blog post itself is not actually scarce and i feel like people are
insanely confused about this because they still try to sell blog posts and jpegs and mp4 files and so on
it's like oh i'm gonna build a youtube killer and it's like a paywall for every single video
it's like it it it does not work at all because also you're limiting the spread of the information
which is never a good idea you want to you you have to sell information wants to be free information
can be freely copied as well and and it's it's you have to sell something else and that's what
what i kind of want to that's why i keep harping on it because like almost everyone is still confused
about it and we see it already trending in a very different direction just because you it it like
everyone real like the market dictates that but we i think we can also if you know that beforehand
you can build something that you don't need like 25 iterations of until you land on something that
works like you can actually figure out what is cars in the first place and sell that but anyway
long round over no no explain this to me then like how this works with torrents because
like i would private trackers are scars yeah i would the trackers are scars it's not the files
the kilobytes and the things are not scars that doesn't mean that we shouldn't add e-cash to the
things because of the rate limiting issue and all those kind of things i but but that's not going
to be the you you it's very it's going to be very hard to have market dynamics around this and it's
also like metering everything doesn't necessarily make sense just because of mental transaction costs
that's why we have flat rates for everything that's why you get a flat rate for your gym and a flat
rate for your internet access and so on and and but um having high quality curation for example
that's something people should and could pay for it's like it's we see it with relays it's like we
have relays that are paid i assume because they are paid it's it's higher quality you know less spam
um higher availability all those kind of things and that's actually a service that is scarce and that's
worth paying for but you're not paying for you know like for the notes yeah you know but but
anyway like i'm trying to to to figure all these out again by by just picking the brains of of
everyone it's like figure out what is actually scarce in cyberspace and the easiest one of course is
compute and that's why i think i mean you we started uh talking about other lamps and so on and i think
that's why why why this is a match made in heaven like especially like e-cash and ai agents i think it's a
match made in heaven because you don't necessarily want to sign up for you know jet gbd or whatever
with your credit card and and you know like you i mean jet gbd obviously is what killed google no one
is using google anymore everyone is just like querying and and just like you know having a
conversation with their ai agent for absolutely everything with so paul you know like just like
coding is if you if you like learn to code is like a dad hashtag because you have to learn learn to
prompt i really want to i really want to see us go down that road because as we said before the
question of hardware and like hardware is inherently scarce because it's physical
anything physical is inherently scarce there is nothing physical that is not scarce yeah in a sense
like you can say yeah molecules there are enough air molecules for everyone but it's not an infinite
amount of air molecules and i don't know maybe in a dystopian uh world war three situation the
submarine you might have to pay for the oxygen as well exactly so uh that's really why where i want to
see us and i think like that would set us on a path of so much more freedom if we could create
markets for hardware-based services on the internet that starts with an isp but i think the more generic
form of it is compute as you said if we you know if we could even dream of a world where we do not
have to rely on gigantic centralized super clusters of compute that are controlled by a small amount
of companies but where we can actually have a market on-demand market where everyone could pay for
the resources that they that they use for that specific purpose and you know compute is universal
you could do ai with the same hardware you could you know do all sorts of different different ai
models on it you could mine bitcoin with the same hardware and you know who knows what in in the future
because the hardware itself a general purpose and yeah i mean in some sense that's what airbnb
uh figured out and same for uber it's like okay to pick all the hotels in the world world which are
like that like in our analogy now the big data centers the big compute super clusters there is many
hotels and there's big hotels but take all the you know living rooms of all the people in the world
there's way more of those and so so switching to that like in some other areas that already happened
and and uh i think you know if you actually allow people to make money with their living room
they will rent it out and they will make money and it will proliferate so we see this that is work
same for uber and and everything else you know like most people have cars and so on and they don't
need it all the time so same for graphics cards and same for hard disks and everything and and so you
just need to be able to to pay for that and build a system that actually scales and scales in a trustless
manner basically yes and so uber unlocked this because um it was the apps that kind of unlocked this
like the missing link for that uber success story was our phones and the applications that connect us
yeah but and they were able to build this empire um while still being like the centralized party in
between navigating yeah everyone from from and to yeah and also the the payments going through them
yeah like payments existed before uber and then the apps came and connected everyone online now
everyone could use these services and boom you have like the biggest taxi service in the world
doesn't own a taxi yeah right so um if we think this one step further and we want to get rid of uber
at that point i mean again this is already happening i think like because then you have competition and
you have the same thing happen that happened to netflix where it's like 15 other things pop up and
then everyone hates it again because you actually want the stuff that interrupts and you don't want
to be locked in one silo and uber is a silo yeah uber is a silo and we can replace uber with nostr
yeah we we don't need the company in between that tells you what you can rent and what you cannot
rent but you would still you know without bitcoin you still couldn't do it because uber uber depends
on the credit card system all the payments need to go through uber and otherwise it's not possible
like with the right combination especially for compute you can't do it because because the more
micro something get the more the smaller the the kind of um yes the smaller the packets so to speak
that you want to sell uh are the harder it's going to be on credit rails that's why you need like an
instant payment system that is better absolutely and you want to pay for uh one second of compute
you want to be able to a single second of compute and once you stop paying you just turn off the
computer and i think the last step that's missing and that's coming now is blinded compute
and i think that's gonna be that's gonna be fantastic because that's we know that this
already works like again coming back to the torrents like people exactly even without payment people are
seeding torrents even without payment people ran sati at home and we're trying to search for
extraterrestrial life and or do protein folding and all those kind of things yes but what about the
risk of storing someone's data on your hard drive right yes and do you really want to go that risk
i don't know but if you cannot decrypt the data that is stored on your hard drive then you're fine
yeah so blinded compute and uh especially for ai i mean it's a two-sided coin again it's good for
privacy for the individual user but again also for the service provider you cannot become a service
provider if you don't like have a huge team of lawyers protecting yourself or being a company with
the resources of that but once you cannot look into what's happening the risk basically goes to zero
there is nothing you could have done and nothing you can be coerced to
yeah and i how how far along do you think are we i i i know that you know a little bit about the
you know zero knowledge compute stuff and all those kind of things i know very very little uh the only
thing that i know is that a lot of you know very smart people are currently looking into this working
on this and also trying to wet this stuff with nostr dvms yeah which i think is going to be
quite oh i think i think zero knowledge computation is going to be like the you know the next thing
it's like what we have with bitcoin and what it feels like is happening now with ai i think the next
step looking like 10 years ahead or something is going to be zero knowledge compute because it it's a
whole new paradigm of compute it basically like a summary is you can make computations on a machine
where the machine itself doesn't know what's being computed and this sounds like but you can prove
that it's right right you can prove that it's right and you can do crazy things with it like one
thing that for example i i can imagine us seeing at some point is you know you can make unruggable
compute in a sense you can pay for someone to calculate something for you but you know that they
couldn't have manipulated the calculation yeah and that's like a very very important point especially
if you want to rely on these services right so you cannot let's say i don't know which is what we
already use on the nostril and the bitcoin side just with cryptographic signatures basically you know
that you you yes but that's the static data yeah yeah exactly you can attest to the to the static
data that comes from the same from the correct source and hasn't been tampered with but how that data was
computed we cannot prove that yet yeah so with zero knowledge compute like i just want to make an
example with uh with what we are looking into for cashier right now so in cashier we have i hope
this is not too technical we have like spending conditions in cashier so it's it's similar to a
bitcoin spending condition so uh i pay you a coin and you can only you can only withdraw that coin or
receive that coin if you know the uh the result of a secret like of a riddle for example you have to
for example sign it with your private key or something like that yeah so that's how that's
also how you can lock e-cash to an endpub right exactly like we call that pay to public key and we
have another spending condition which is called an htlc a hash time lock contract it works the same way
as an htlc in bitcoin so you can only spend the coin if you know the pre-image to a hash or after a
time lock you can withdraw it so we have two different spending conditions in in cashier and people
always ask us like hey can we not add a third one and this idea and that idea and like all these cool
ideas of how to make more spending conditions but we have the problem in cashier that we want
incredible privacy so the more ways you add to spend the coin the worse the privacy for everyone
else becomes you make the unknown sets smaller and smaller because the mint needs to execute the
spending condition and so it needs to see the spending condition so like it's a complicated way
of saying if the two of us have a contract of how to spend a coin we need to show the mint the
contract and your signature for example on top of that and the mint would look at the contract and
see like public key a public key b and time log and blah blah blah okay it's valid you can get the
coin right so that's how it works today with a what we've been looking into is a zero knowledge
spending condition and this is this is based on work by people at startware who have built a vm called
cairo and in cairo cairo is a vm in which you can build uh spending conditions or programs in zero
knowledge what that means is that you write normal code and you can then execute this code and while
executing you can also produce a proof that you have correctly executed the code so basically i could
give you the proof after executing the program i could give you the proof without showing you the
program i can prove to you that i have executed it correctly yeah yeah and like that's the magic
point so getting back to cashew what we want want to see at at some point is a spending condition that
is zero knowledge so that you and me can make a contract and you can say like i want a signature
from this public key i want time to has passed until this point and so on and so forth i want the moon
to be in a special position and the weather in in madeira to be this and that degree like all these
different uh variables inside there which make it a very specific spending condition which means it's
very bad for privacy if we would release this spending condition to the mint and what what you
can do instead with zero knowledge compute is we can agree on that very complicated contract you and me
and then we can put it into cairo and produce a proof that we have correctly executed the proof and now we
can go to the mint and say hey mint me and this other user have come to an agreement of a certain
contract and we are not going to show you the contract but we're just going to show you that
we have correctly executed the contract without even telling you what the specific details are
and the mint can then verify this proof and say okay you guys seem to agree so you can make the
transaction so this is one example of how you can make a computation applied to cashew where we don't
have to tell the the verifier which is in this case the mint what we actually did so coming back to
the earlier example if i could rent a piece of compute from a server and i could just tell it
you know i want to compute uh some kind of operation on my data set that is like a for example it's a
secret data set i'm a company with secrets or something like that i don't want to share the
data set but i still want you to make a computation on the data set i could give that to you in a form
that is hidden so it's this is called you know sometimes homomorphic encryption but you can do
operations on that and give me the results and i can verify that you've done the correct operations
on top of it without me ever showing you what the data was yeah so i know this all sounds a bit weird
and crazy and zero knowledge proofs are weird and crazy but they open up a whole new world of
computation so i want to end this monologue with one vision that i really want to see in like 10
years is we today rely on hardware security modules to make sure that our hardware has not been
tempered with this is in bitcoin hardware wallace this is sometimes also in phones these days and so
on so forth i can see a future where we carry a phone in our pocket that runs the os in a zero
knowledge vm and at the same time produces a proof that the vm executed the code of the os correctly
and some other part of it that checks this so we can look in the moment where someone tampers with
your phone you can immediately detect that something has gone wrong without relying on specific hardware
that again relies on the fact that no one can look into the hardware like a hardware security module
so yeah zero knowledge is definitely going to have like a massive effect on things how we can prove
things in cyberspace without showing what we prove which is a condition for most of the things that we
want to that we want to do like we have so much private data and we need to operate on the private data
but we don't want to share it with anyone you think 10 years is a realistic time frame
i mean you usually underestimate how fast things go into the future so it's probably it's probably even
too bearish to be honest it's probably too bearish that's a good point yeah that's a good point it's
especially now with uh i really feel that stuff is accelerating um in in terms of kind of also
compute innovation in some sense i think the llms are just kind of you know um kicking things into
high gear because you can just iterate so much more quickly in on so many things and i mean material
science is another or i mentioned protein folding before you know it's just like you throw the llms
on it and suddenly it's like oh okay we have new stuff and a new material that we can synthesize that
is stable or like new proteins and i view code as the same way where it's just like you you shoot the llms
at it and and something comes out that you after the fact maybe understand basically
and that will just accelerate stuff things are going freaking exponential yeah yeah it's it's uh
you know i was big on the on the singularity idea uh um in my past and and oh yeah me too and
you know like kurzweil and those people they were onto something i still don't think that we're gonna
upload ourselves into the cloud and you know live in utopia ever after in cyberspace like not at all
and i'm not optimistic but i i think yes i would also bet on the fact that he will die
but um you know big innovations happen stepwise it's so hard to predict what's going to happen
no one would have thought you know i've just recently saw this video about uh the number of
proteins that we have identified and this was a tedious process and people were like building
algorithms to predict the folding structure of proteins for years and years and we had like
one thousand per year and then we had like maybe like one thousand five hundred it was an exponential
two thousand per year and then um we built an llm that can do it and the number of of identified
proteins just shot up like by i don't know it's like you don't even see the graph anymore
of all the proteins when you hit the knee of the curve right it's like it goes up and up and
the problem is solved and this was with with the genome as well so hard to predict so hard to
predict real innovation comes in unpredictable steps yeah so we really don't know how things
will work out but but it's still like a lot of the things that's kind of what what surprises me
all the time it's also very hard to predict like what yeah just again it's it's i love the phrase
it's very hard to make predictions especially about the future you know um but for example the switch
from ip4 ipv4 to ipv6 is still you know like far off from done like like upgrading a network it
it turns out it's like really hard and and so it's funny that some things happen really quickly
way more quickly than you would think they would and other things way like take way longer or even
to pick another example um that might be actually a good a good analogy like in in in developing
countries they completely skipped the infrastructure that we needed to arrive at cell phones so we needed
you know like copper wires and then uh you know like the landlines yeah exactly and and i think like to
bring it back to to to lightning and e-cash and so on it's like if if our assumptions are correct
and e-cash will actually uh be the thing that you know fixes 402 and and and allows all these things
to happen that we just kind of sketched out i think in a lot of systems and areas not only geographically
geographic areas but just like cyberspace areas you can just use e-cash without knowing anything about
bitcoin or lightning or whatever it's like you know like maybe you know a little bit about
lightning if you're running mint but that's it but you can just build it into your thing
leapfrogging all this stuff and just like in a in a developing country you have a phone and that's it
you have e-cash and that's it does that make sense yes it makes sense and we need to find like
more ways how we can accelerate the exponential growth and the use of bitcoin at the end of the day
i think like i've been observing the development and spreading of bitcoin really eagerly
in the past years and it is slower than most people anticipated that's for sure like most
people thought that we'd be paying for most like you would have the option to pay with bitcoin
everywhere by this time it's very local it's it's very local it's very hard and similar to hardware
and networks as you said it grows much slower than people thought yeah because you have to upgrade the
network of merchants basically so merchant adoption uh that was the first kind of you know like uh
the scam kind of wave of bitcoin adoption oh it's all the merchants but but but i think the the current
wave is very different because the most people that um i mean i know a little bit about this stuff
just by being in places where bitcoin is accepted most merchants they hold all the bitcoin so the previous
adoption waves were always like as used as a payment rail and now it's kind of uh used as a
you know savings yeah so that's a big difference i feel like so i think it won't go away should we do
one more ring around the rosie and then we can end in like a maybe a spot where there isn't too much
wind sounds good yeah that's but i'm i'm getting close to my limit in terms of i think it's just walking
in the sun also like i'm at the end of my mental capabilities but i think just being in the sun
makes it worse it makes thinking even harder but it's nice right so that is a pretty butterfly
yeah look at this butterfly oh wow that's what she said but there was a lady who just made us aware
of a beautiful butterfly butterflies are rare these days but yeah i i hope that nostr will accelerate
things in some way but that's that's what i kind of i mean i'm very biased i know that i'm i'm
insanely biased i'm kind of like in a bubble of a bubble i surround myself with with like i pick my
i curate my echo chamber very very very carefully and i live in a very bubbly place as well but it's
the way i see it is like i i met a bunch of people now and i know people from online they had no idea
about bitcoin had no idea about lightning didn't know what sets were signed up to nostr got sapped and it
was fun and cool and so on and then later on they found out what's kind of going on and what happened
and so on and i think i hope that this will continue to happen where you just you you sign up to obscura
and and you just you just want to get a vpn and there's a new thing of payment whatever you just do
it ah i can do this and then that's on you don't even know what what happened i see the same thing
happening now with with nostr with things like olas i really love it like people sign up to olas
because they want to try this thing and then they know oh my god there's a whole universe attached to
your olas that i didn't know about or you didn't have to know about and that's how kind of the
internet worked right that's why why i to me nostr feels so much like the early internet where you
have one entry point and it was i don't know what it was back in the day but just i mean i i still
remember the days where i would go through computer magazines and i would manually write down urls so
you're like oh my it's not only aol i thought it's just the start page of aol
and then you you discover this is this vast universe of stuff so now we live in an echo chamber okay but
it feels like to me still that the topics that we care about are universal it's not like small topics
that we care about we we care about the bigger bigger things so and that's where like it all comes
together so nicely i really think we're getting back to bitcoin adoption as well merchant adoption
is slow individuals understanding bitcoin is super slow education itself is like super slow
and i applaud everyone who puts their energy into into these endeavors i really really respect that
but what i really hope to see and this was my first thought when i discovered bitcoin is i thought
it's the perfect thing for the internet the money of the internet it's the internet's own money and so
what i want to see in 10 15 20 years us doing is for all of our activity where we make transactions
online there is no question it's going to be bitcoin it's going to be based on bitcoin and it's going
to be so much larger than the payments that you make at the store here and it's going to spread so much
faster than the merchants accepting bitcoin in a pos system in a store here these are all important
things that we also need to work on but the internet is only going to grow the number of people
using the internet is only going to grow the services that you're going to consume the number of services
only going to grow all of these things just point completely upwards and what we need to make sure
is that we can connect all these things with a system like nostra and make sure that we can pay
with for all these things with a system like bitcoin and then it's like the sky is the limit it's the
the pie is so big the pie is so big the only ones eating the pie right now are facebook meta and like
credit card systems what do you see what do you see as the next step because i i i completely agree but i i
kind of what i what i uh sometimes wreck my brain about is what's the the next plausible step that
we could take that someone could build that someone could do like on a general level i have like i
cannot give you like an idea for a specific app or something but on a general level i think we need to
bring down the cost of entry for everything as soon as someone just automatically can join these systems
and naturally receive naturally have an identity that they connect with other applications i think
like that's the best way we can do because that's our superpower we don't like the others don't have
the superpower they all they need to compete something only we can take away not saps for example
not saps is only something we can do yes that's not something that only we can do not saps is like a
zap on on on nostra with e-cash no one can build an alternative to this system and i think if we can
lower the barrier of entry such that you don't even have to spend a single cycle of your brain to be
able to use these systems this is how we're going to this is how we're going to win we we have to we
have to kind of you know get people where they're at i think that's why why olas for example works
really well because everyone knows kind of comparable systems like instagram and so on it's it's but
again like i mentioned this a couple of times in the past but it's like the the power that i see the
power of cryptographic identities is basically it's it's one click setup yes this is part of it you don't need to
make an account like why would you need one click you're in and the power of nuts apps you don't need
an account to receive cash on your in your store that you pop up exactly and the power of nuts apps
is like you you one click create your account and immediately like you you suddenly have money in
your in your in your pocket you can receive instantly and no one asks you who you are yeah now do this please
yeah eight billion people yeah no that's very very powerful so i'll share one of my ideas that i've been
stewing on for at least the last like six or ten months or so so as you might know the internet
archive almost went down just because of a lawsuit and and so so i would love to see
um i would love to see us rebuild the internet archive and do it properly so that this cannot
happen again we talked about this very very briefly over coffee that it's like it's funny how the
internet is both forever and the internet remembers everything but at the same time stuff goes away and
and links 404 and uh you have link rot and bit rot and all those kind of things so both are kind
of true at the same time i think if something is juicy and spicy enough the internet will remember
forever if something is kind of supposed to be forgotten yeah exactly if something is embarrassing
it will stay around forever and and and many other things but just just go away so we have like
little little fires of uh the library of alexandria like all the time you know stuff just goes away and
and i'm i'm i'm somewhat of an of an of an archivist so so i uh you know like i'm a
hunter and gatherer in cyberspace and i i really i i hate losing stuff
and so what the the shift that i see that i hope will happen in the next couple of years is not only a
move away from silos to you know uh to to bitcoin industrial to the underlying substrates that allow for
marketplace style of doing things um so i really hope that but again like
the issue i see right now it is related to what you said education and all those kind of things
because it doesn't come for free you have to take responsibility for it and so we have to also
educate users and and not everyone is going to make the jump because it actually you have to take
responsibility for at least for your keys for example and those kind of things so so it's not it's not
it's not like super super easy but it's still it increases your agency and i think that's why it
will happen on the edges like people that will get the platform people that will get the banked
and so on they will discover those things early on earlier than most but anyway i hope that we can
so the move that i see is from a global view and we see this like in in society at large where you
you know like uh think global act local those kind of things that people going back to their local
farmers and those kind of things and i hope that we'll have we'll have the same thing in cyberspace
in some in some sense um so so what i hope to see is the stuff that you really care about personally
you can archive it in a i hate this word i'm gonna use it anyway in a decentralized way
you can archive it on your home relay or on your like phone relay even or what have you
and that we have just kind of like there's a swarm of people just like we talked with with
airbnb and this kind of things like if you want to invite people into your house you can and you can
get paid if you want to invite websites and youtube videos and uh and songs into your local relay or
into your local blossom server or what have you you can and i think i think that's a way way smarter way of
of building an internet archive where you have local archives that can if they want to talk to
each other and that way i think we we we just kind of re-decentralize the internet in some way because
i the reason why i work on all this stuff is like i just like you i really care about the internet
i'm still i i grew up with the utopic vision of the internet i i grew up with all that stuff and i
really think again i don't believe in utopia anymore i'm i'm too old for that but but i i still
think the internet is amazing and i i hate to see it go to shit and i think that what i see with
nostr is kind of like a a rebirth where where it aims for amazing again and to me like nostr feels
looks and feels amazing and and i i hope that like with the right ideas basically and with the right
principles and morals embedded in the whole thing i really think we can get one step closer to the
vision that the early internet people had it's again it's not going to be utopia again it's like and
there's going to be like terrible side effects and other things as well like i know that much
we learned so much i know that i know that stuff was going to be shit as well but still i i think i
think trying to to rebuild an internet archive for example would be would be an awesome next step
and then we can take things from there because everything shares the same architecture in some
sense like the the architecture is universal the principles are universal and it applies to so many
things and and also we see it now with journalism and and writing and so on i i one last tangent
and it's tangent after tangent but it's like the reason my books are so great is because books are
inherently decentralized it's like e-readers and so on are great too but but if you just pull your
stuff from amazon then it sucks because then it's just like one finger snip and and the book is gone
books are so great try to get rid of of books try to get rid of one single edition of a book if
there's like 10 000 copies and they're all over the world well good luck and it's crazy that we
have not achieved this in the digital realm yet it's it's insane right and you know we don't have
it inside space and there's anna's archive now yeah we have it with torrents and with some of the
single projects and like the cedars you can look at the statistics it's like one to two sources we
have the biggest sources of information that the world has ever produced we have this marvelous
technology of the internet that connects us all all our hardware all our resources yeah but we're
still at a point where like a single server basically can burn and we lose massive amounts
of information that humanity has produced until now we can still have alexandria moments we can
still have alexandria that's what we've been building we've been building libraries of alexandria for
everything yes and i really hope that we can get out of silos yeah and and so so that's why i'm a huge
fan of local copies and because because and there are these communities of people that know this you
know like there there are the people that build anna's archive and those kind of things there is
a group of people that knows this and they will store their files on their own hard disks and and
and periodically will make backups and put the hard disks in the bunkers that they have and so on you
know and so we i feel like we need to tap into those people and make this this style of dealing with
data way easier and it's the noster native way of doing things that's why i think the marriage of
noster and those kind of things is is so awesome because because in the end like i'll i mean i've
spoke about this a million times basically but i i feel like i'm a broken record but but the way
that youtube works youtube doesn't have one server if you if you're in germany and you fetch a youtube
video it will come from a german youtube server so so so so just to be efficient you have to build things
everyone knows that you have to build content delivery networks and and it has to be replicated and so on
and so noster does this by default yes and so so so you get so much for free in the noster world
where it's like you you maybe have a relay on your phone you maybe have a relay on your home server
maybe like a synology or start nine or what have you and depending on the context and depending on
what you care about stuff will be stored in this relay and i think what ecash brings to the table
what i'm so excited about is like okay let's build all up all these archives and we're like
beyond early with all this stuff we don't even have the archives really yet but make it easy to build
up local archives and if you share the underlying substrate and if things can talk to each other
which which they can by default if again if you build it right if you build it on noster and all
those kind of things you can by marrying it with ecash open it up and create a marketplace you can for
example create a marketplace for hashes you know you want this book you know you want this pdf you know
you want this meme whatever and and and who can give it to me fastest i'm willing to pay sets for it
all those kind of things you know and so so i really hope that we can we can we can you know
like learn from the mistakes of the past and stop building libraries of alexander it's so beautiful
like we we converge on this is the early values are still the most important values it's the distribution
of information it's the commerce between peer-to-peer commerce between people and making it's the knowledge
which that is embedded in the market and it's also net neutrality because zero knowledge compute
it is it is natural net neutrality in the same sense blinded custodians and blinded compute and
all those kind of things it it leads to neutrality neutrality of money yeah yes yeah that's a nice
that's a nice way to end it right yes it's a beautiful way to end it awesome let's let's build it out
man i appreciate you really i appreciate you too like i i i i hope that we can make it happen i'm
becoming all emotional thank you for this conversation yeah that was great let's see
let's see let's see if we if we if we managed or if we fucked it up maybe it was just between us too
that would be it would be nice too