Chat_119 - Why Nostr Will Win with Miljan

[00:00:00] Speaker A: On Nostr, we have maybe a couple hundred thousand users who are active, but all those users are holding their keys and we're actually bootstrapping this censorship resistant network. There isn't anything like that out there. Nostr is the only game in town when it comes to truly like sovereign presence on the web. [00:00:41] Speaker B: What is up, guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about bitcoin than anybody else you know. And this is the place where we discuss open source, liberty technology and of course, everything bitcoin. This episode is brought to you by Folding. I have been religiously. I mean anybody who's been listening to the show for any length of time knows I religiously use Fold. It is the center of my bitcoin standard world and it is one of the most critical tools that I have. I can do DCA right in it and I don't have any fees because premium is 10 bucks a month. I pay, I buy enough bitcoin and or sell enough bitcoin moving in and out to make that more than worth it. In no time at all. I do roundups. So every single time I'm purchasing something, it rounds up and buys more. In bitcoin, I get sats back on gift cards. I use gift cards like crazy. In just two years, I have over like 7,6 million sats, which is like 7,200 bucks in Bitcoin just from normal use of the Fold card. If you are not using this, you should definitely check it out. And right now for a holiday special, you can get 20,000 sats for free by using my referral link. I have had it down in the show notes and it is still down in the show notes. Check it out. If you haven't used Fold, you need to. All right, we have a really, really awesome chat today. This is with Milian from Primal and we talk a lot about just protocols and general networks and where we think things are going. We really sprawled into a bunch of different stuff including his background and what kind of led him here, digging into the ideas of this kind of like the dumb networks and open protocols and how and why they end up evolving so much faster and catch a degree of momentum that cannot be outpaced or competed with and how and why he thinks that Nostr is that and why he has invested all of his time and energy and building toward making that. Making Nostr that reality. We also talk about a lot of the things that they've released in Primal 2.0 and tried to make a really User friendly and really easy onboarding tool for a lot of these really cool things that we've watched develop and slowly release over time, which I'm. I've been a big fan of Primal for a while. So if you're on Nostr, you're going to really love this one. If you're not on Nostr, you need to be. And this is a great conversation to understand why. So with that, let's go ahead and get into our conversation with Milian on open protocols, dumb networks and why Noster will win. Dude, welcome. Welcome to the show. Welcome to Bitcoin Audible. It feels like this has been long overdue. I've been meaning to reach out for like a while and I feel like our conversation has kind of like strung along for a little bit trying to get you on the show. But welcome finally to Bitcoin Audible. Man, it's good to have you here. [00:03:52] Speaker A: Yeah, great to be here and yeah, it's been a long time coming. I'm super psyched to be on your show. I've been admiring your work for years now. So it's a little bit surreal here for me to be on your show. So, yeah, great to be here. [00:04:07] Speaker B: Hell yeah. It only took like 30 minutes to get all the technicals working. [00:04:13] Speaker A: It's all good. [00:04:15] Speaker B: So I want to start off with an easy one, but I want to get your big picture. Perspective is what got you on. Like why Nostr? Why Nostr for you? Like, why did we get to this place with Nostr and bitcoin as being your focus, as being like the thing that you're building on, you know, like what, what led you to this, to where you are right now? [00:04:41] Speaker A: Yeah. So my background is enterprise software. I've done a few startups in the past and that's kind of my area of expertise. I tried to retire in 2017 from that and tried to. Exactly. And then I fell down the bitcoin rabbit hole and had to do another startup. Couldn't just like observe from the sidelines. I had to step into the arena. So did a, did a bitcoin startup in 2018. [00:05:11] Speaker B: Out of curiosity, what was the startup? [00:05:14] Speaker A: Ah, the startup was called Rise Wallet. It was a non custodial bitcoin wallet and the whole kind of angle was to help onboard people onto non custodial or self custodial bitcoin using physical gift cards. So we had the system where we were kind of selling bitcoin gift cards in physical stores where you kind of walk by the gift card rack and you see bitcoin hanging like a bitcoin card hanging there. So the UX was pretty smooth where you like a normie could pick up a card. [00:05:52] Speaker B: Yeah, that's great. [00:05:55] Speaker A: Very kind of simple instructions. You know, download the Rise Wallet app, scan this code and you have bitcoin. And the app would actually walk people through, kind of backing up their key and the whole thing. And we got it to the point where it was in most cases normies were able like 90% and plus cases we did like a lot of user testing. Like you know, a civilian could walk by this card and kind of get intrigued, maybe buy $25 worth of Bitcoin and you know, download the app and scan the code and they would have self custodial bitcoin. [00:06:34] Speaker B: That's awesome. What did run into regulatory stuff or what was it? [00:06:39] Speaker A: Yes, of course that was a part of it. But the bigger issue here is that we have kind of like system where two companies control most of the kind of gift card racks out there in retail. Right. They're called Blackhawk and Income. Those two companies control hundreds of thousands of locations. Right. So the plan was to obviously partner with them and to get these bitcoin cards in front of millions of retail shoppers. And that's been an uphill battle. That was an uphill battle back in 2018, 2019 when got. I was trying to do this and made some progress. But it kind of, it was obvious that it was going to take years before these companies, these big companies would come around and be. [00:07:35] Speaker B: Walled gardens, man. Yeah, walled gardens every time. [00:07:39] Speaker A: And it was a big learning experience for me because you kind of are faced with the world as it is, as opposed to the world as we would imagine it, as we would like it to be. So you're faced with a reality and then you have to deal with the situation as it is. Right. So, you know, adjust your product and you know, make plans accordingly. So like I said, that was a massive learning experience for me and actually informed a lot of the decisions that later on I made in Primal. So kind of to back up and kind of fully answer your question. So after that startup, after Rise Wallet, I spent a year or so kind of researching decentralized publishing protocols that seemed like it would be very important. That was before Trump got deplatformed and all that stuff got really crazy. But it kind of felt like, hey, this is a space that needs some work and in the long run we need a censorship resistant protocol. So I was researching this, I even designed my own protocol at some point, really? And I wasn't. Yeah, it didn't go anywhere. Yeah, yeah. But I was kind of tinkering with it and I ran it by a few people actually. I spoke with nvk, I spoke with Adele, and like, we were kind of looking at it, but it was too complicated. I wasn't really happy with anything that I found, nor with my own protocol. So I kind of set it aside. And then when Nostr came about, I really discovered it in December of 2022. Like a lot of people, I was kind of primed to understand the problem, understand the kind of the problem space, the existing solutions, the solutions that didn't work, that they were too complex. They were dealing with the distributed hash tables and trying to maintain the state of the network and all of that. Noster really kind of impressed me by its simplicity. And as I was reading through Nip 1, I wasn't even done reading through the whole page. It hit me, okay, this is going to work and this is going to also be a ton of work for us to build on top of this. Because it was fairly obvious to me at that time that we'll need to rebuild everything on top of this protocol. And that's when I right away fell down the Noster rabbit hole and decided to start building for it. So I fell down the Nostra rabbit hole in December of 22 and then right away in January 2023, I put a very small team together, actually a kind of engaged one or two more guys. And we started coding in January. And Primal, like the first public preview of Primal was available two months later in March of 2023. We wanted to make sure that it was live before the Nostril conference. So we literally like launched it like a couple days before the conference. [00:10:59] Speaker B: Oh, nice. That was the, that was the browser base, right? [00:11:02] Speaker A: That's right. So there was the web app and the kind of, the first iteration of our caching service, which is kind of a key part of our system. And you know, one of the ways that Primal differentiates itself over other clients in terms of, you know, the different types of trade offs that we are making here to accomplish our goal, which is best possible. Ux, we can put, you know, deliver to users. So that's the trajectory of me getting to Noster. When I discovered it In December of 2022, I was, I started obsessing over it and it was obvious to me that, you know, this is gonna, it's gonna take the next few years of my life. So I'm still super obsessed with it two years later. Almost two years later. [00:11:56] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:11:57] Speaker A: And, yeah, two years in, we have a few primal releases under our belt, but it really feels like we are. Have barely started. [00:12:10] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Oh, no. For a thousand percent, like, things have just started in nostr. And I think it's like, one of those things, like, people still think they're late to Bitcoin, and I just don't think. I think most people don't have the frame of reference for the timescales that a lot of these things happen in. But money is such a great example. With Bitcoin, people's like, what's been around for 15 years is the investments. And it's like, no, dude. Like, every other historical monetary transition is you measure in hundreds, hundreds of years, you know, and, yeah, this is going to be faster. But, like, protocols, not only monetary networks, but just protocols in themselves, take an extremely long amount of time to mature because it's a constant, like, kind of beating against the nature of the beast. And, like, nobody really knows what's going to work. And just, you know, you talk about the protocol that, you know, you built that didn't go anywhere or whatever. Like, you literally have to do it wrong 90 times to get the thing that finally does work. And NOSTR is such a perfect example of kind of dumb networks are better. You know, like, when. When you go back to the basics is like, just make it simple. Like, just make it simple, because simple works. And that's really the thing that, like, brought a lot of attention to me as far as, like, what I know about networks and the history of the Internet and stuff, is that it screamed at me. Okay. I think it was, oh, my God, I'm gonna feel really bad because I can't remember his name right now, but I had multiple conversations with a guy and over the course of 22 and 23 with TBD, who they were trying to build, like, a ID and, like, authentication thing. [00:14:11] Speaker A: Was it Daniel Buckner, maybe with the DID system? [00:14:15] Speaker B: Daniel. That might. I think that might. I think that might be him. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Daniel. Um, and we talked back and forth a number of times. I mean, just in, like, Twitter threads and stuff. But he kept saying that, like, no, you had to have these other pieces, and you had to, like, build this ID thing. And I was just like, but, like, I'm using Noster. Like, you know, like, I'm. Like, I'm using it, you know, and, like, what's wrong with the one that's working right now? Like, I can't figure out what's wrong. It just needs Some layers on top of it to give it the sort of interaction that people are used to or people expect, I guess. But he insisted and like, and I wanted to assume that, like, I just didn't know something, you know, like, I don't want to, I don't want to feel like I don't. I'm not a protocol designer or whatever, but it just seemed intuitive to me. But, like, now I'm pretty sure TBD shut down. Right? [00:15:12] Speaker A: Yeah. A little fun fact. You know, the protocol that I designed used the DID specific as a yes. Yes. [00:15:20] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:15:21] Speaker A: And it was too complicated. Not necessarily the DID spec itself, even though it's probably a bit more complicated than it needs to be. But like the protocol, the resulting protocol that had all of these pieces that were, quote, like figured out from the get go. It was too complicated and probably you're not going to figure everything out from the get go. Yeah, that's kind of such a, like, almost like a overly arrogant stance, like, oh, we'll build a cathedral perfectly. [00:15:57] Speaker B: We'll just do it all first try. [00:16:00] Speaker A: Whereas Nostr is just signed notes relayed. That's all it is. [00:16:06] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:16:07] Speaker A: And if when people say, oh, you can't do this in Noster, what they're really saying is you can't do this with side notes relayed. [00:16:18] Speaker B: And it's like, what can't you do? [00:16:21] Speaker A: Exactly. Turns out you can do a lot with sign notes relayed and you're not making assumptions regarding how they're relayed. There's a bunch of things that are open for people to then experiment with, including the stuff that Primal is experimenting with, the caching service and so forth. What's cool on Nostr is that all of these projects get this massive design space to play in and we get to actually try a thousand different ideas on top of this very simple foundation. And then the market will decide that this will happen organically and is happening organically. And this is extremely exciting to see all of this because, you know, like, people get discouraged when they hear news like, oh, Blue sky onboarded 5 million users, meanwhile Noster has only way less than that. It's like, really, it's like comparing Venmo to Bitcoin. You know, one is a company that is like onboarding users and the other one is protocol that's getting bootstrapped. The fact is that on Nostr we have maybe a couple hundred thousand users who are active, but all those users are holding their keys and we're actually bootstrapping this censorship resistant network. There isn't Anything like that out there. Noster is the only game in town when it comes to truly, like, sovereign presence on the web. And yeah, it's taking time to bootstrap. For me, it's being bootstrapped by exactly the right people. There's lots of bitcoiners, but also some people who discovered Noster outside of Bitcoin and are here with us. You almost need that kind of intolerant minority or the core of a network like this has to be the type of community that we have now, and then it will grow from there inevitably. Right? But I kind of think of it even like in terms of Bitcoin. When you look at the Bitcoin network and the user base there and how the network functions, you have, let's say the core of the network is the intolerant minority that holds their keys and runs nodes, runs their own nodes. And probably we're looking at numbers that are measured in tens of thousands, so not, not some crazy numbers in terms of millions and so forth, so forth. And then the next cohort up is people who hold their keys but don't run their nodes. And here I'm pretty sure we're looking at millions of people. And then you have people who hold ETFs, people who have coins on coinbase, like with custodians, et cetera, et cetera, which, I don't know, maybe are in the hundreds of millions. But if you look at the Bitcoin network, it's thriving using this type of structure. It's enough to have tens of thousands of extremely high conviction people who are the core of the network and kind of the rest is built on top of that. We're seeing similar kinds of things with nostr. I think in terms of people who run relays, most NOSTR users currently hold their keys. There have been some attempts to make custodial products for, for Noster users. And there are arguments to be made that, you know, for some use cases that make sense. This isn't appropriate for Primal in my view, but there, there are some out there. So individual market participants make their own decisions and then users do what makes sense for them. And it's all happening organically, without any kind of central planning or central control. And if we were to, we as humanity were to bootstrap a network like this, this is exactly what it would look like. What's happening with Noster right now. It's exactly what it would look like. And maybe the speed, the pace at which the network is being bootstrapped these early years looks about right to me I am. Personally, I'm not impatient. Like we, you know, do a lot of work on Primal to make it accessible to almost anyone out there. Right. We make some trade off choices to, to make it accessible to more people. But we were patient. We'll. We'll take some time to onboard everybody, but I have no doubt that we'll eventually get onboard everyone on Nostra. [00:21:34] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of people end up using Nostr and not know it. Kind of not unlike how I suspect a lot of people start interacting with bitcoin. Yeah. And how a lot of people ended up working on the Internet not knowing it. But have you gotten like, you know, I guess I have seen stuff like somebody posted like a chart of like the Blue sky thing, which because of the political exodus from Twitter. But honestly I haven't really thought about it. You know, like, I don't really care much what Blue sky is doing. But have you or anybody else that you can think of who's building on the Oster been felt like that that's something to be concerned about? I know you kind of gave your perspective, but I was just curious if you, if you've seen that just because like I, I don't know, I hadn't, I hadn't really thought about it. I mean, Blue sky is just like one big server right now, Right. Like there's. It's not really much they talk about. [00:22:40] Speaker A: The protocol, but there's no such. There's no evidence at all that whatever they're doing is being adopted as a protocol. You know, they hold everybody's keys. You know, just the fact that it's. [00:22:51] Speaker B: I mean, everybody signs up with email, right? [00:22:54] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean the fact that it's possible to run your own instance and hold your keys in theory doesn't mean that you're bootstrapping a brook. [00:23:08] Speaker B: That's how Twitter started. Look where we got. [00:23:13] Speaker A: It's quite different from Nostr for sure. No, I haven't really seen other Nostr devs be concerned about this. It's more like people who are adjacent or maybe participants in Noster who kind of see the news and they say, hey, how come we're not getting some of these users who are fleeing, let's say from Twitter or I think the previous episode had to do with Brazil and so forth. Yeah. For whatever reason, these new users don't seem to kind of Noster apps are not popping up on their map yet. It's more kind of these types of blue, Blue skyish types of apps. But like I said we're not at that stage yet where we are like mainstream enough for Normie users to kind of jump on it. But I think we'll get there. And I think we'll get there. Not necessarily because people out there care about censorship, resistance or sovereignty in large numbers. Unfortunately, they don't. Yet I think we'll end up onboarding everyone on Nostr because we'll have better content and better apps. Due to the open nature of Nostr, new app developers have a bigger and bigger incentive to plug into Nostr instead of bootstrapping their own networks. And the fact that you can build much more than just social media apps. You can really, you know, choose any content type and create Nostr events and publish them to relays which then become available to other Nostr apps. When you kind of play this out, you end up with much more powerful apps. We're kind of seeing some initial examples of this, you know, like we recently released Primal 2.0 where we added support for long form content as like a major first class citizen within Primal. So it's like a major tab. So all of the artifacts that long form content kind of apps can create on Nostr are now available in Primal. And when you, when users interact with this content, when they, let's say, highlight something, those highlights are then available not only with Primal, but in the entire Noster ecosystem. So it's just an example of something that like, you know, a highlight artifact was, you know, discovered or invented, you know, decades ago, probably like on Medium and so forth, but it was always trapped in their little silo. It never really went anywhere. And even if you browse Medium now, you kind of, you see these highlights and they have the capability to have some collaboration and some comments around the highlights and stuff like that. But if you look at that content, it didn't really pick up. Whereas on Nostr, all of that is open. And even with the tiny user base that we have, you can see a lot more traffic and engagement and kind of lively kind of discussions around comments already. Because those users that are participating in that are coming from a bunch of different monster apps and they're able to collaborate because the network is so open and the content is accessible to all the apps. So when this plays out for more content types for different types of applications, I think we'll end up with some very interesting new apps that were impossible before, and then they'll bring more users and then content creators get attracted to it and then kind of the wheels start spinning. Right? So I have no doubt that eventually, everyone ends up on Ostr and by extension, everyone gets onboarded into Bitcoin as well. Yeah, because Noster apps, dude, they are. [00:27:38] Speaker B: God, they are married. They are like, they are built for each other, man. Dude, apps on Noster are like, where it's at. [00:27:46] Speaker A: They are for sure. And this is something we have a lot of evidence for, even right now at this early stage, where there are many people who now got onboard onto Bitcoin using luck via Noster. And I have no doubt that actually we'll end up onboarding more people into Bitcoin via Nostr than in all other methods combined. [00:28:10] Speaker B: I kind of think so, too. That's literally how I feel about it. I think Noster is the way to onboard people to bitcoin. I have 100%. [00:28:20] Speaker A: I think we'll get to the point over the next few years where apps that are not bitcoin enabled are going to feel inadequate. They're going to feel broken. [00:28:31] Speaker B: Frustrating. Yeah. Broken, broken. [00:28:33] Speaker A: It's like, how come I can't zap on this app? You know, what's going on? I think we'll get there and it might happen sooner than a lot of people think. So it's wild to be a part of this, of this kind of this process of bootstrapping this magical network. [00:28:51] Speaker B: Yeah, man. I think people really discount how big of a deal it is for small things, like small differences that actually, over the course of, like, how people interact with it having huge effects. Like the highlighting thing is such a big one, is to not have these stuck in walled gardens. Is that like. That is such a huge. God, that's such a huge, like, differentiator for how, like, I can't believe how much of. I don't even know what the word it was. It almost like it was a relief when it, like when I'm going between Damas and Fountain and Primal. So Primal has been my main web app for a while. It was. What was the one that looked. They were headed towards, like, the Instagram feel? Iris. I was using Iris for a long time, then Coracle for, like a hot minute, and then Primal. So Primal has been my main web app, and I haven't really played with the app itself much since launch because I'm careful with my Insec. And so the only app that I had ever put my Insec actually in was Domus. So I had Domus, Primal and then Fountain integrated Nostr and so, like, all of those things ended up becoming the same thing. I would see my boost and stuff in Damas from Fountain and then vice versa. So I was, like, suddenly able to keep up with something that had been separate before. And it was so crazy to kind of see it all start to kind of become the same, like, ecosystem. And I would, like, jump over to Fountain. I found myself jumping over to Fountain just to find different messages or different types of content. And then when you sent me the link to 2.0 to Primal 2.0, it was so funny because it's like, it was the main thing you talk about long form, that has been the differentiator. I actually just log in with my in pub at first. And that's like my favorite way to try stuff out is the fact that I can log in without logging in. You know, like, I can just experience it from my viewpoint without actually putting in my insec. But, dude, being able to get reads, that was the number one thing for me for years. For years on Twitter was the fact that I could just separate out articles. And immediately, immediately upon this, this has basically been the only thing I use Primal 2.0 for, is I've just been going through all of the articles and the fact that I can see them based on, like, oh, it's a read. This is a noster, A read about Nostra. This is a read about Bitcoin. This is a read about philosophy, you know, And I was just like, oh, my God, this is great. Because you can immediately see how easy, like, how easy and intuitive it is to expand to other content. Like, to expand to another form of information and sharing and zapping and all of these things. And like, when you. When you break it down, you realize this literally it. Like, this is just signed notes over relays, you know, like, there's nothing. Like, this can literally be anything. And the key is that, like, you can prove who you are, that you can zap people, you can send money frictionlessly and without censorship and without, you know, middlemen, and that you can own it. But there is no other reason. There's nothing that limits it from being any type of data whatsoever. And it's so crazy. It's so crazy to. When you, like, kind of see all the pieces, like, slowly coming together. [00:32:40] Speaker A: It's true. Like, the example you gave there with Fountain is excellent case in point here. First of all, they've done an amazing job integrating Nostr. And then you no longer need to squint to see this sort of like, wait, what if Spotify and Twitter and Medium and substack and YouTube and Instagram and a bunch of other things who are basically monopolies in their space. What if they were all on the same network? [00:33:13] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:33:16] Speaker A: We'Re starting to see that. Yeah, it's wild. [00:33:23] Speaker B: Dude, you mentioned something earlier. So, and this is more about protocols in general and you were talking about, you know, talking about in the simplicity of nostril and stuff and you mentioned the difficulty or the headache of dealing with dht. Can you kind of expand on that? I've been talking about it a lot now with Pear Drive and we have been using the pair stack that is the key and stuff is built on and the hole punch platform, I don't know what you call it. And we certainly run into headaches in trying to design it. Like it's, it's crazy because like stuff works. Like that's the, that's the really big thing is that like we can get stuff to work and that's what I've wanted since the beginning of dealing with files forever. But I'm curious your thoughts on dht, the problems with peer to peer. Because I constantly see people back and forth and I just don't have a good footing on why to use one versus the other a lot of, a lot of times. And I'm just curious your perspective on that. Like what's, what's the difference between peer to peer and nostr? Why do you think noster I guess is the, the, the better path forward or the, the path of least resistance maybe is the way to talk, label it. [00:34:52] Speaker A: So you see like the key difference there is in the ambition, the level of ambition of the core protocol, DHT based protocols like let's say MPFS or I'm less familiar with hole punch and the pair stack. Like I've used the product actually it worked reasonably well for me when I used it. I was impressed that I was able to in a peer to peer fashion, get on a call with someone and it was pretty good quality and like there's some good stuff in there that is impressive. So, but, but when it comes to the ambition to keep the state of the entire network, keep enough of a state so that you can find everyone reliably in every packet and so forth, that tends to be quite challenging in practice and that's why we tend to see these types of protocols not really work in practice. Like I said, I don't know about hole punch and I don't have enough experience with hole punch and the pair stack, but with ipfs it's like it doesn't work. [00:36:09] Speaker B: Yeah, IPFS has always been like a nightmare for me, a driving crazy and. [00:36:13] Speaker A: You can tell it's exactly the same type of problem. Right? Like, the reason it doesn't work is because it's trying to like keep track of the network and like look up things in real time and stuff like that. So Nostr, on the other hand, doesn't try to do that. And since relays are not meant to talk to each other, you know, it's supposed to be a simple client or like a little bit of smarter client, like posting to very simple relays, very simple servers that are relays, and that's it. So the protocol is so simple that that's all it requires. And then you can build stuff on top of it. If you want discovery, you build indexers. You know, we at Primal, we built an indexer. I think actually we are still the only open source indexer for Nostr, so. [00:37:10] Speaker B: Oh, interesting. Okay. [00:37:12] Speaker A: Yeah, there are other indexers, but I think they're not open source yet. To my knowledge. We're still the only ones and I hope that there will be more. Which, by the way, you can stand up the entire Primal stack, our entire stack is open source under the MIT license. So anyone can stand up Primal of their own and fork it and make changes and so forth. So there are no restrictions whatsoever there. But to answer your question, the reason why, and I think it was Fia Jeff who said it very early on, maybe even in that first blog post that he did, he said like, it doesn't use the dhc, therefore it works. Something like that. Uh, so anyway, I remember running into that, that it was like, damn, you're right. Uh, actually you have my attention. Right. So, yeah, I think it's that core simplicity of the protocol. It's not trying to do everything. It's extremely simplified. And then you build layers on top and those layers can be complex, can have any level of complexity you wish, but you're not overburdening the core protocol and everyone who needs to support it with the complexity. So that's why I think Nostr works as Gotcha. And that's why also it has so much adoption among developers. There are hundreds of projects, you know, people working on Oster, building on top of it, apps, services of all kinds. It's really glorious to see what's happening already. [00:38:59] Speaker B: It's definitely easier to get started, I guess is probably the thing like you don't have to know a lot going into it. A lot of it's very intuitive with building with it. Whereas the hole punch stuff has been a significant uphill battle in figuring out how to integrate with everything because they have Built so much of it over the, like, math has been building itself for like a decade, you know. [00:39:25] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:39:25] Speaker B: So it's already got layers and layers and stuff on top of it. And you have to know how all of these things interact. So there's a degree of like. I think even this is like John Carvalho and what they're doing at Synonym. I think this is why they've created PCAR and PUB key. Their, their new thing is because they were just like stripped out all the complexity and just use the DHT to connect to each other. And so even they're doing it a different way and everybody's got their own branch, all this crap. [00:39:59] Speaker A: I spoke to him in Riga briefly at one of the dinners, and I think it was me and Pablo were chatting with him and we just made a case. Look, strip everything out, just plug into nostr. We already have a network that does these things. He wasn't super into it, but who knows what happens over time. [00:40:21] Speaker B: Yeah. And we've gone back to the drawing board enough times with the project. We're on that. I mean, if I have to do it again, I have to do it again. Like, I'm, I'm gonna, I've. I've decided I'm just, I'm done. I'm gonna solve this freaking problem. I don't care. Like, I'm so fed up with file transfers and maybe it ends up just being Noster. We already had like a major part of our thing has always, always been Noster ID is to be able to log in with Nostr and then share like your rooms with people that you want to specifically on Nostr. And we always knew there's going to be like a heavy integration with it, but. [00:40:58] Speaker A: Nice. Are you familiar with. Speaking of file storage, are you familiar with the Blossom protocol built on top of nostr? [00:41:08] Speaker B: Not in any great detail. I roughly have explored it. I've gone to the page, you know, been kind of like, look through it maybe. Do you know more? Can you expand? And here's the good news, how that might be useful. [00:41:23] Speaker A: Here's the good news. There isn't a lot of great detail. It's also a very simple protocol. [00:41:28] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah. [00:41:30] Speaker A: So. And again, let's kind of define the problem a little bit here. So. Of course. And this is one of the first questions that developers have about Nostr. You know, like, it's, it's excellent for text. It's not really, like, designed to handle binary data. [00:41:49] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. [00:41:50] Speaker A: So it's possible you can, you know, base 64 encode stuff and send it to relays and stuff like that. That's not really what the protocol is designed for. So one of the questions was, well, okay, that's great. You know, we can have these like, notes that are being signed and they Certain things. And there's quite a bit of semantics there. There's a lot that can be built. But what do we do with binary data? How do we store that and access in a decentralized manner? And we really didn't have a good answer to that until this Blossom Protocol proposal, which is already being implemented by many apps, where it's basically relying on the fact that we now have nostrs and we have this social graph or kind of like global user directory. You can put it this way. So a user can say in your user profile, you can sign a message actually that says, I'm storing my binary files on these three servers. And then the Blossom servers, what they do is they hash all the files that get uploaded. So you basically access each file by its hash. And this is nothing new. You know, IPFS does this and it's like a good way to, you know, do. To refer to content. Right? That way, you know, if you ask a Blossom server for a specific file by cache, you as a client can verify that that's the correct file that you got. [00:43:30] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:43:31] Speaker A: So Blossom servers store files and make them accessible via hashes, and then each user can, say, can sign an event signal into the network regarding where their files are. So let's say you are posting your binary content on Primal on Primal's Blossom server, which we're in the process of building. And let's say we ban you from Primal and make all the binary content you uploaded to Primal inaccessible. All you need to do is publish a new nostr event, saying, actually, all my binary files are here on this other Blosom server. And Blosum capable clients will know how to interpret that message and will be able to still access all the same file files using the same hashes. And none of the clients out there will be like, the users won't even know that there was an attempt to censor you because, like, you can just like signal to their network, hey, my stuff is over here. So. [00:44:43] Speaker B: So it's kind of like updating your Lightning address. Is that like the user doesn't know? It's not like you're not like publishing like a post and says, hey guys, this is now how you find me. It's literally the Blossom Protocol, like reads and updates the location and then like when you're just interacting with it, it just still works, even though you've moved everything. [00:45:02] Speaker A: And you can have a list of Blossom servers, so the clients that are smart enough can try the first one, and if it's not there, try the second one and so forth. And this all works quite nicely. And it's a stupid, simple way of handling this, which is so in line with the Nostr philosophy. It's stupid simple and it works. Um, so I'm quite excited about this. [00:45:26] Speaker B: Yeah. If we don't make it to the finish line, we'll probably look at. Look at Blossom. I've reached the point where it's just like, I don't care. I don't care. I'm just. I'm getting this thing. I'm gonna solve this stupid problem. I'm gonna build this stupid app because, like, it's so needed. It is so needed. And, like, for a million different reasons. And I want to be able to. And maybe we should have just leaned that much more into nostr. I don't know. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. I'll keep you updated. I'll definitely want your feedback. [00:46:00] Speaker A: I have a lot of respect for everyone who builds Freedom Tech. We may disagree on the approaches and we may say, okay, TBD is using DID specs that are too complex and stuff like that. Still, they're trying to solve the same types of problems for probably for the same types of reasons that we work on this stuff. Similar thing can be said probably for Hole Punch and the other stack. I don't really view them as kind of competing stacks as much. And like I said, I have a lot of respect for everyone who builds those things because these are hard problems and we're not going to know what works best unless we try all of these things. [00:46:46] Speaker B: I was about to say, yeah, like, so, yeah, we have to see how everything behaves in practice and, like, what the complications are, you know, because, you know, from a distance, it can look like, oh, yeah, we'll just do this, or this is how you build with it. And then you actually get into the weeds of it. You're like, oh, well, there is definitely this problem and this thing that I haven't saw of. You know, there's only so much you can predict before you're actually, you know, in the battle, so to speak, impossible. [00:47:16] Speaker A: To predict what you're gonna run into. [00:47:19] Speaker B: And I. I could not be more agnostic. I could not be more agnostic. I literally don't care. I just want it to work as long as it's on the Internet. I guess that's the only thing I, I want to talk a little bit about Primal more specifically though because one of the things that has gotten me that seems like a clear like a no brainer on like moving things to the next phase I guess is probably the way to put it is the chronology of the feed is like when I'm using like I'll check on Domus or whatever pretty regularly and you know, I'll scroll through and I'll scroll through like 200 posts or something like that and I'm like trying to get an update on everybody I'm hanging out with up there. And then I come back an hour later and I scroll through 50 posts and then boom, there's that, there's that one that I saw at the beginning of the last time I was there. And then I know I've just, if I just scroll forever, it's just going to be stuff I've seen and pretty much my general outside of like Primal's like latest or popular, you know, like the, the big posts on the web app, it would basically become like a barrier that would just be kind of like where I stopped and then I would just wait and come back later because I can't. There's not really an alternative view. Like I'm just looking at my feed in chronological order. So I'm constantly seeing stuff that I've already seen. And you guys have a really interesting thing that you've done in 2.0 specifically of just like different feeds. And one of the things that I just thought was really cool like I had always thought like okay, yeah, the relays could just make different feeds and different views. Just kind of like the popular bar in the web app. But allowing other people to make feeds, to make custom setups or search terms or whatever that I thought was okay. That's a really cool extension of this that isn't totally obvious like at the outset. And I'm curious your thinking on that and like how you see curation as what it seems to me a marketplace. And like how, how you're thinking about that. Because there's, you know, I go to the feed list and there's like free, which has a very clear indication that also there are some you'll be able to pay for and so expand on that. I'm really curious your big picture view of where that's headed. [00:50:09] Speaker A: So to me this is one of the most exciting aspects of Nostr currently. The fact that on Nostr we already have an open feed marketplace. And this isn't something that we invented. We weren't even the kind of early movers on this. The Primal team. It was Pablo who invented the whole DVM data vending machine idea a year plus ago. And it's quite versatile. You can do all kinds of things with DVMs, including create custom feeds. [00:50:43] Speaker B: My buddy knows Pablo doesn't really do much of anything. He's like, he. Nobody likes Pablo. [00:50:49] Speaker A: He's a slacker, hardly has any ideas, right? Yeah. So he came up with this thing and we all saw the potential. But you get busy, you get kind of. It didn't pick up immediately. Some people created some test DVMs to see that it works, but this is still a largely unexplored space. There's so much potential DVMS in general, but a subset of this is using DVMs to create custom feeds where the DVM creator just needs to send a bunch of note addresses. Right? That's it. Note IDs, that's all. How you come up with that list is up to you as a kind of feed creator. Right. So there is a standard now on Oster that anyone can publish a special event saying, hey, I have a feedback DVM based feed and here's how you access it. And this feed becomes visible in the Feed Marketplace. So clients like Amethyst and Nostrudle and maybe some others that I'm not even aware of because there are hundreds of them, implemented this a few months ago. And that was so obvious that this is, to me anyway, that this was going to be massive. So at Primal we wanted to really lean into it. So we're doing three things related to this kind of Feed Marketplace idea. Number one, we re architected the app user interface for all of our apps, Android, iOS and web, where the app shell allows you to manage any number of feeds. You can have infinite feeds there, you can add new feeds, reorder them and so forth. So every major tab like Home tab or Reads tab gives you this ability to kind of just switch between any number of feeds. And then we allow you to browse the Feed Marketplace to select the feeds that you want to see on this list. And then you can set any one of them as your default feed. We literally kind of open the first feed when you open the app. So you can have like non primal feeds be your main view into Noster on Primal. And then since at Primal we build apps, but we also run services, we run the caching service and the indexing service. And so forth. So we, we also build feeds. So we decided to make every feed that we build is accessible by other Nostr clients in the same Feed Marketplace. So this is completely open now. We now have users who are not even using Primal apps. They're using our feeds in Amethyst or nostrudle. Pablo and I were at dinner one night and we were about to give a presentation the next day about these types of things, and we went back to the hotel room to work on our slides and we realized that during dinner, you know, nostrudl got better because somebody, somebody created a custom feed and our slides from the previous day were already out of date because. And the developer of nostrudle Hazard was with us at dinner. So we were all hanging out and his app got better because of the. Of how open this ecosystem is already. And we're just starting. [00:54:32] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:54:32] Speaker A: So you can imagine how crazy this is going to get. You're going to get all kinds of algorithmic feeds, you're going to get human curated feeds. Like, I think curation is extremely interesting and people will be able to monetize these feeds as well. We are planning, we have Primal Premium now, which we launched with Primal 2.0 a few days ago. So every feed that we've published so far is free feed, but we can envision kind of creating some custom feeds that are maybe compute intensive or whatnot, that are available only to premium users. So again, within, there's this capability to do this, the protocol allows you to do this, and of course people are going to do it. So I think what happens here is, first of all, we get a high degree of user agency, which is a common theme in ostr, first starting with holding your keys. But then, you know, it's not that we don't want algorithms, we do want algorithms. We just want algorithms that work for us and not for someone, not against us. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. And we get to decide which algorithms are suitable to us on Nostr. So anyway, I think this whole notion is going to explode in terms of usage and the kind of, the wide variety of feeds that we're going to see. And it becomes a rallying point, I think, for Nostr, because it's such a simple concept to explain. It's like you understand it in two words. Feed Marketplace. Yeah, well, only Nostr has one. There's no Feed Marketplace on Twitter. BlueSky, apparently, like, you know, supposedly an open protocol. Where is your Feed Marketplace? Yeah, it becomes a very simple message. Simple and powerful message that really underscores the power of nostr, which in my mind, the biggest power of Nostr is not necessarily censorship, resistance. It is the openness of the network that makes it so powerful. [00:56:53] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. There's. You know, it's interesting too that like, when you think about, when you think about the Internet, man, and like all the different websites and services and subscriptions and all this stuff, like so much of it is just recreating or trying to curate things in a special way and then trapping it behind a walled garden. And like, so many of them are completely redundant. Like they're not even needed, you know, and it's crazy to me that like, like the Feed Marketplace, like, so like just thinking about, like you mentioned, like the algorithm, right. Is. And I wrote an article like a year ago, I guess, talking about, like, we shouldn't be afraid of the algorithm. Like, it's a misunderstanding to think that like. Or being controlled by an algorithm is that, like, that's not, that's not. And I love that, you know, it's just referred to as feeds because, like, if you called it like algorithm marketplace, people are like, what is going to control me? It's like, no, dude, like this, this is just about how you organize information. That's all it is. It's just a filtering structure, essentially. [00:58:04] Speaker A: It also rhymes with reads. So we like to say feeds and. [00:58:08] Speaker B: Reads reads, but it also, like it boils down or it, it simplifies the concept of like, kind of what data is and like how to interact with it, you know, without over, like, like branding everything. I don't know, it seems like a, like a microcosm of like what I was doing with my show or whatever is I was trying to put everything in its own brand and give it its own feed and all of these different things. And I was like, no, I should have just figured out how, like, there's no reason to make a new product or a new tool or a new thing like this. Like, NOSTR is already those things. It's already the different feeds and the different. All the information we need, we just need to see it. Like, you don't need, you know, a hundred different payment apps, you don't need a hundred different websites for different types of content or whatever. It's like you just need to look at the same thing differently and being able to have that open ecosystem. It's funny, I didn't even know. Everybody tells me I need to try Amethyst and use Amethyst a lot, but a bunch of people rave about it and I Didn't even realize they had feeds and things already. But that's like, one of the coolest things is that you just plugged into this. You didn't have to go get a bunch of people to be like, make feeds, you know, and be a part of our marketplace. It's like, it's an open marketplace, and now it's just available inside of Primal, Just like, I was looking at comments and zaps and stuff, and then suddenly there it was inside of Fountain, and vice versa. I would see people posting, like, comments on Fountain. Like, I was just seeing it in DM and in Primal or whatever, randomly. And then I realized, like, oh, no, these aren't response. Like, I get notifications and I'm like, oh, these aren't responses to my post. This is a response to my podcast. This is. This is underneath my podcast episode. You know, like, oh, you know, like that. They were just so. It's that, God, the open ecosystem is such a huge deal. And, like, to benefit, I. I don't want to take everything back to bitcoin, but everything goes back to Bitcoin is like, when you make something that makes the bitcoin ecosystem better, it makes you, as well as everyone else more valuable. It is the essence of being able to benefit from other people's progress. That you are in this natural incentive, in this natural structure of cooperating as opposed to competing. And Nostra feels the same way, is that, like, Fountain got to tap into a giant user base that they didn't have to fight with. They didn't have to build their network effect for it. And the same thing with Primal is that you got to plug in to all of these feeds that other people are making and these DVMs and these marketplace. And so when someone else creates a way, like, maybe somebody's got a really great way or a really great interface to make it so that it's obvious and easy to build a bunch of really great feeds. Or somebody comes up with a little AI trick to, like, organize stuff phenomenally well. Primal benefits from that. Everybody who's been building on NOSTR will immediately get the benefit of that. And there's no reason to hate that person. You love that person for making it better because you make it better for everyone at the exact same time. And that's the thing that gets me, is that I don't see how you compete against that. Like, I don't care what your timeline is. You know, I don't. I don't care if you got 3 million people on Blue sky in, like, four weeks. How do you compete with the fact that everybody who is building on Nostr is building with each other when essentially every other platform is at competition? They're fighting. [01:02:12] Speaker A: There's no way to compete with an open network like that. So yeah, it's exactly what you said. Everyone else's actions, whatever everyone else builds adds value to the whole ecosystem. That's extremely hard to compete with in the long run from a closed ecosystem. We've seen this many times. There's only one way this ends. [01:02:40] Speaker B: Aside from Premium, which I have premium on Thomas and I'll probably get premium on Primal just to experience and probably get. And maybe I'll have a custodial Lightning Wallet now. Right? How do you all do that actually? How do you build your Lightning stuff? Do you have a particular SDK, you build your own stuff? [01:03:03] Speaker A: No. So we partner with Strike and we're using their, I think they call it Strike Black. So basically it's a service that they offer to businesses. So we basically use their Lightning infrastructure and all of that to host Primal Wallets. And they've been amazing to work with. Very, very proud of that partnership. So to back up a little bit, back a year and a half ago, it was obvious that we needed great UX that's built into the app for people to participate in the zapping economy and just like bring kind of the monetary network into the app, its itself. I was looking at different ways we could do this. I had my experience with a self custodial solution previously and given the target audience where we wanted to make sure that anyone can just sign up and use this. Also given the success of products like Wallet of Satoshi in the marketplace, even among bitcoiners, the market was giving a very, a clear signal regarding for these types of casual wallets where we're dealing with like very small amounts that they prefer, you know, convenience over self sovereignty over these small amounts. [01:04:27] Speaker B: So maybe I was using it and I hadn't even had much reason to but like you know, if it's like 50 bucks, it's like who can't like just. Yeah, just use the one that Many. [01:04:38] Speaker A: Hardcore bitcoiners use Primal Wallet as their daily driver now. And for the same reason it's just simple. It works. It does on Chain does lightning, it just works. Right. Like, and then we have all this Noster integration where it's easy to look someone up, send them a payment and then all your zaps are also integrated with it. So like it's kind of weird to look at your feed through the wallet. That's kind of why we made the wallet. The center kind of piece of the whole app is that big lightning pole, you know, where you open the wallet and you can look at your zaps going in and out, but you can select any one of those transactions and then see right there which note was zapped and then you can click on it and go into that thread and so forth. It's kind of like interesting to look at your social media feed as kind of a list of wallets through your Sats lens. Exactly. SaaS going in and out. So it was obvious at the time. So basically we're looking at like a year and a half ago, maybe a little bit more, that it would have been too big of a burden for new users, especially those who are not into Bitcoin, to manage their lightning channels and manage kind of self custodial lightning on on within Primal. It was just inappropriate for our use case. Of course it has some drawbacks, which is now we're custody people's money, which is not something that we are super keen to do as Bitcoiners. But to offer this type of ux, it was necessary. Of course, we need to do this in a legal way that's not going to make us shut down the product a few months later. So strike legally. You know, it's a legal custodian here and they have the right to do this. And so we are kind of using their services for this. But we made the decision to like cap the wallet balance. So you can't have more than a million sats in the Primal wallet, which of course you shouldn't anyway. Yeah, exactly. So this is kind of where enforcing this, which. There's another unfortunate requirement here which is like we need to do Kyc Lite to enable these wallets in order to be able to offer this service over the long run. But since we have this cap, we were able to minimize the amount of data we collect on people. So it's like first name, last name, email, country and date of birth is what you need to see. It kind of fits in one page. We don't love it, but it's required for a service like this to exist over the long haul. And then the benefit is it's like frictionless onboarding and then for new users, they get onboarded and they're part of the zapping economy right there and there. We've had cases actually. Jack Mellers was talk talked about it on stage with me at one point. He told the story of how his best friend's girlfriend got orange pill through Primal even though he was trying to orange pill her for years, she didn't care. She was like not interested in protecting against inflation. All the type of stuff that we bitcoiners care about a lot. Like think about how resilient this person must have been to withstand constant orange filling. Jack Mallor's exactly right. Nothing, none of that worked for her. But she downloaded Primal at one point and posted something on Nostr and apparently it was a personal story, like something health related. And then she got a bunch of zaps and her brain just exploded. She was like, okay, I understand everything now. I get it. [01:08:47] Speaker B: It makes sense. [01:08:49] Speaker A: And she went ahead and read the bitcoin standard and went down the rabbit hole, the whole thing. [01:08:55] Speaker B: Oh my God. [01:08:55] Speaker A: How about that? [01:08:56] Speaker B: Down the rabbit hole. [01:08:58] Speaker A: So I think there are a lot of people out there like that who were just like not connecting with the way the bitcoiners have been presenting this for whatever reason, probably of the people out there. Right? Yeah. And that's why I'm so bullish on the idea that everyone gets onboarded onto bitcoin just using mobile apps that they use anyway every day. Like social media apps, long form apps, video, you know, consumption apps and so forth. They will all have bitcoin integration, we'll make sure of that. Because if they don't, they'll look inferior. It's just game theory of bitcoin playing out again through Noster. It's beautiful, man. And then everyone gets onboarded like that and I think it looks like that might be the way the majority gets onboarded. [01:09:53] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think so. It lends us back to what we were talking about earlier is that Nostra I think will be the big funnel into bitcoin. And my sister in law actually had a really similar experience. Like, and she didn't even have like a Prof. Like she wasn't like anti bitcoin or anything. In fact we've. I gave her some bitcoin like years ago as like a. Like you just need this in your savings account and she's always kept it very safe and she knows, she knows where keys are and all her treasure and all that good stuff are and. But she didn't really do anything with it and she was like at arm's length, you know, she didn't, she didn't read about bitcoin or anything like that. And I got her on Noster a few like a couple months ago, maybe two months maybe. And she, it's funny, she doesn't really post it, but she goes over there and she, she lurks a lot and she reads and looks at stuff, but she doesn't really like anything and she doesn't really post. She's like a little bit nervous about it. She's like, what do I post up here? And I'm like, I don't know anything. Just post, man. And. But she just like posted like, hey, checking out Noster. I told her post running Noster to nod at half any and she's like, okay. And she just did like a random like, you know, I'm here, I'm checking it out. And she ended up getting like 8 bucks or like 10 bucks or something like that in zaps. Because I was like, we're going to get you a lightning address. Don't worry, like you're going to do that. And she, she kept messaging me for like for two days. She was still getting like little zaps in. She's like, these people are crazy. They just keep sending me money. It's like real money. [01:11:40] Speaker A: It's unbelievable. [01:11:41] Speaker B: Like, no, it's awesome, man. Like you, this is why you need to be here. [01:11:45] Speaker A: She posted something and she got zapped by a bunch of strangers and now she can buy a buy breakfast with them. How crazy is that? [01:11:53] Speaker B: Yeah, it's nuts. It's nuts. It's crazy. It's almost like at the same time that it's crazy. At the same time that it's crazy. There's also a piece of me that like, isn't this what this was always supposed to be? You know, like, isn't this, wasn't this always like what the Internet promised and somehow we still got all of these walls as if we're, as if we're not on the Internet, you know what I mean? Like, this is the Internet, man. Like, isn't this how we were supposed to. This is the goal, right? [01:12:27] Speaker A: You know, Totally fix the 402 issue with Bitcoin and now we're fixing the rest with Noster. And it's glorious, isn't it? [01:12:39] Speaker B: Yeah, we're going to fix it. One more thing before. How are you doing on time? [01:12:48] Speaker A: I'm doing great. [01:12:49] Speaker B: Doing great. Okay. Spam. So this has always been something in all peer to peer networks and all decentralized and semi decentralized networks. And as we were talking about before, which we don't have to get into detail, but you all are dealing with a bit of that right now. How do you deal with it? You know, like Nostr pushes it off. You know, Nostr does not care. Think about is completely agnostic to all data. So. And I think at the protocol level, that makes sense. But it, it leaves quite a bit of responsibility on the people building on top of it, and also risk, as I'm sure you well know. So how do you think about that and how are you targeting and dealing with it going forward? Because we want to be able to onboard everybody, but onboarding everybody means accepting everybody's connections and everybody's posts and everybody's comments and pictures and everything, you know, so what's, what's your strategy at least? Like, how are you thinking about this? [01:14:03] Speaker A: Okay, so first of all, Nostr, like we said, is a radically open network. Anyone can participate in it. Like, there's no barrier to entry, and you can create like millions of new accounts, millions of mpubs or key pairs without basically any effort. So there are a few tools that we have on Nostr that makes, makes it possible to deal with these types of scenarios. First of all, of course, the web of trust. So as we said, nostr user directory is publicly accessible to everyone. Any Nostr app has access to it. And it's not just the fact that you have, you know, a directory of public keys and their associated profile metadata. You also see connections between these entities, right? So through follow connections and also other connections, you know, there are mute lists. There are all different types of ways to kind of connect different user accounts in a way that's visible to everyone publicly on the network. So you can infer a humanity of certain public profiles by how they're connected to other profiles that you are certain are human. So there are all these algorithms that have been created for this, and we're using one, it's all open source, where essentially you start with a set of and pubs that you know for sure are, you know, human because you met them, or, you know, you trust A signaling service, let's say, that verifies certain end pubs as, you know, humans on a certain network. For example, at Primal, part of our premium, you know, offering is you get a primal name, and that way it's easier for people to find on the network. And we are signaling to the rest of the network that this Ampub is a Primal Premium user and the rest of the network can decide what to do with it. Maybe they trust us, maybe they don't trust us. But there's some signaling that goes on. So you kind of get your core set of identities using these techniques, and then from there you can see which other accounts, those supposedly human accounts are following. And then it gets a Little bit more complicated than that. Because a human can follow a million bots, you need a system to kind of derank them and kind of filter the bots out. But all of these are relatively easy problems that have been solved decades ago. So this whole web of trust approach works quite well actually. On Nostr, the only problem so you can kind of filter out, let's say, content that's not within the web of trust fairly easily. The problem there is that new users who just created their accounts and don't have any, they're not verified on Primal or any other, let's say verification service and are not being followed yet by all kinds of real humans. For them, you need a way to allow them to participate in the network and see their replies and so forth and accept their media content that's being uploaded. So that's where the problem becomes a little bit more challenging. So we're kind of developing some techniques to deal with this, but I can't say that we've fully solved it at Primal. But again, it's an open problem that a bunch of Noster developers are working on and we all can benefit from each other's work. [01:18:28] Speaker B: Yeah, that's another great example is when somebody figures out like a good solution is that it will be available to everybody. [01:18:35] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. So, and even at this point where you know, like maybe for certain types of actions you maybe wait before you show someone's reply. You remember there was this, we had this problem on Oster with the reply guy a few months ago, you probably remember, right? So yeah, this, this, you know, guy was creating millions of M pubs, putting in replies everywhere and various services were dealing with this in different ways. And by the way, like he was hammering all the relays with all this like nonsense spam and when the relays are being hammered, the indexing services are being hammered a hundred times more really, because we need to index all of this. So anyway, having this public web of trust already helps us solve a subset of this problem quite effectively without requiring kycing everyone and actual verifying someone's identity. So that's super important because we don't want to go the route of X and others which appear to be on the path to actually want to kyc everyone. So you can participate in Oster as a full first class citizen without being kyc. You just, you know, create your profile and then if you get verified by a verification service, you know, you pay a few sats to the extent that the rest of the network, you know, trusts that service. And it's up to network participants to decide if they want to. Right from the GEBCo you even can like with a few sats become a part of the web of trust and then participate on all of this. So that's the kind of the state of the art currently and I'm sure it's going to improve moving forward. [01:20:29] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. You know, there's something maybe this is. So you're talking about like when you do Primal Premium, you get like it's the Nippo 5 verification, right? [01:20:40] Speaker A: Yes, we call it Primal name. So you get the Nippo 5 nostr address, nostr verified address. You also get the friendly Lightning address. So and then you get the kind of friendly URL on our web app so people can go to primal.net guyswan to find you instead of having to know your mpub and so forth. So get three of these things. When you get Primal Name you get these three things. [01:21:08] Speaker B: Gotcha. So one of the things that I had been thinking about and I'm sure I probably heard this from a developer or somebody or Pablo or you talking about it on Monster, who knows. But it doesn't seem like a totally new idea. But I also like it because from the context of building networks there's this element of exclusivity without being exclusive is having kind of like a sub key invite code where from my key I can generate a. This person is in my web of trust even though they have no followers, no anything and it's like a single use signature. And so like I could give it to my sister in law and then when she comes up like it would be something that Primal fountain everybody already recognizes is be like oh, this person was quote unquote verified by Guy. Guy is in my web of trust. Therefore I can extend a, a secondary degree of trust to this person. And then it's also something where like a 20 other people can't like get that invite code and then use it because it's. It ends up being attached to one key. So I have to generate them and it and it creates this. I become the verifier of who is human for anybody that I invite on. And then if I just start willy nilly giving them out to everybody and you know, people spam this like well then God, we're just not gonna knock guys invites down on the list of like we should not pay very close attention to it. He's kind of a jackass. [01:22:51] Speaker A: You can accomplish exactly the same thing by just simply following them. [01:22:56] Speaker B: So I mean, yeah, yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. Yeah. It's probably too much. [01:23:01] Speaker A: If you have one or two kind of real humans following a new npub, then they slowly start to enter the web of trust. But if one of those humans ends up following a million npubs which are low signal, then that human loses their kind of verification privileges or whatever. So that's like a new account. [01:23:23] Speaker B: That's a good point. That's a good point. Yeah. [01:23:25] Speaker A: Who doesn't want to pay for a verification service? And once their content seen right away, as long as they're followed by like a handful, maybe two or three people who are in the web of trust, that should get them on the radar. [01:23:41] Speaker B: Gotcha. Yeah. So it's probably just a over complicated way to do something you can already really do easily. [01:23:47] Speaker A: Could be something that I'm missing here. But yeah, from what I, when I think about it, I don't see why you would need more than just this follow. [01:23:56] Speaker B: Just follow. Yeah, yeah, it could be cool to have a link to do that auto. Eh, maybe not but I'm thinking like to do that automatically as like kind of a tool to onboard somebody. [01:24:11] Speaker A: I like that a lot. I like that a lot. [01:24:14] Speaker B: To package it so that I don't have to do like an extra step, you know. [01:24:19] Speaker A: That's a great idea actually. I like it because basically what we can do is by the way, a lot more work needs to be done in this like an onboarding UX for new users. So let's say one thing we have going for us in Nostr is that the user base that we have is extremely passionate. Like it's actually such an amazing community to build for because they're super passionate and they're extremely knowledgeable and most of them are very technically kind of savvy. So you know, when we get bug reports like they're quite detailed and they help us pinpoint things and it's kind of wild like building for this. But anyway, one of the things we have going for us is that we have a passionate user base who want to onboard more people. So creating that UX where an existing nostril can easily create these kind of invites for their, you know, friends and family and from Primal we could probably do it in a way where you could include a few sats. [01:25:22] Speaker B: I was about to say you could do it with an E cash token and a redemption token. And they don't even have to see it or anything, they just be like totally. Hey listen, I'm going to get you a Thousand sats and you can sign up and you'll be in my web of trust. And you get all these perks, man. Just use my link and you get. [01:25:39] Speaker A: Some money there too, so you can zap somebody and, like, you know, see how wild that is. So, yeah, all of this is just, like, stuff that needs to be built out, like, and it will be. And if you look at the trajectory of improvement of Noster apps, you know, a couple of years ago, they were unusable. A year prior to that, you had to build your own clients. [01:26:01] Speaker B: It was a struggle bus, like, not that long ago. [01:26:05] Speaker A: But now we have things like feed marketplaces and, like, pretty powerful search, actually, now that we actually shipped with Primal 2.0, that I think objectively is better than Twitter search or any of the other kind of social networks out there. [01:26:23] Speaker B: Dude, search on social sucks, man. It sucks so bad. Like, that's a huge thing. I've felt like that is like a really good differentiator that Primal, that Nostr in general. Nostr clients could do really well. I only. I've. I've basically used the search, like, twice in the Primal app, so I don't really have much to attest to it. But the stack that it's open and that you can pull all of this data, it intuitively screams to me this could be better than any other search. And it doesn't care about chronology. If the data's there, the data's there. Whereas Google is incessant on trying to tell me what it thinks I want rather than what I'm looking for. Twitter endlessly wants to just put the latest thing in front of me and doesn't care that I'm looking for something from two years ago. And just. God, drives me crazy. I was looking for something just the other day, and I swear to God, I spent like 30 minutes and I just could not find it anywhere. And it was so. It should have been so easy to search for. [01:27:27] Speaker A: You know, the difference is that, like, Google and Twitter don't work for you. [01:27:31] Speaker B: No, no, not at all. [01:27:33] Speaker A: Whereas, you know, like, Primal, we. Our way to monetize is through our premium paid premium subscriptions. That means our users are our customers. We don't monetize user data. We don't show advertising. So we're incentivized to make the product as good as it can be for our users. We wake up every morning and work for our users, so the incentives are aligned correctly here. So let's see what happens. [01:28:05] Speaker B: All right. All right. Well, dude, thank you for coming on the show. I'm actually curious, like, what's your. I guess what's next? Like, let's. What's your plan forward with Primal specifically? And. Oh, are you just taking a break right now? Are you. Are you going back? Are you sitting outside in the sun and enjoying it and getting a moment to breathe? Or are y'all still deep in it? Like, where are y'all at right now? [01:28:39] Speaker A: That's what I'm going to do right after this call. I'm going to go out and touch grass a little bit. Still kind of catching up on sleep. After the 2.0 release. It's been a long grind. It's been many months that we've been kind of working around the clock for this. But, like, we were all obsessed with this type of stuff. Like, when you see all of these opportunities to build this type of stuff, you can't help but obsess over it. You want to kind of see them exist. Right. So that's been the main driver for me and the whole team. And we had a big milestone like a few days ago when we shipped 2.0. Now we're kind of working on our roadmap, looking at what's next. There's a lot. There's literally everything to build, but we, yeah, we'll probably spend like a few weeks, you know, tightening the product even more. We just like Primal to be fast, reliable and beautiful. Right. Like, so things that are there needs to always kind of work as expected. And I must say, the bar is set pretty high when it comes to those things by the legacy player who've been added for years and have multi billion dollar budgets. So a lot of times simple. Like there's a thousand simple things that need to be done perfectly for these apps to just feel right. And when they're not done perfectly, you see it right away. And so there's still a lot of that. So we intend to kind of take it all the way in terms of polish, where, you know, it would be nice to reach Instagram level of polish on Primal. Right. So that's kind of what I have in mind. And then there are many other ideas of things that we can get into and probably will get into, but just want to make the full app extremely polished and fast and reliable and then keep expanding on the premium features as well. There's a lot to give me down there. [01:30:51] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, sweet. In fact, on that note, I mean, technically I can't do this because they can just send me a lightning invoice, but you should make it so you can gift Primal Premium. I'll be getting premium and I'll just give you feedback and you know, all that, all that good stuff. Just, you know, keep, keep chat open. But I'd also love to give it to my sister in law and you know, give it to people in the family or whatever as I like on board and get them integrated in all this stuff. It'd be cool to just be like, listen, here's your premium. And like, they don't have to do anything, they don't have to think about anything. It's just like, boom, you get your premium, you know. [01:31:29] Speaker A: So yeah, we actually have that. I don't know if we launched that part of the system, but we already have that in our web app within the purchase premium process. Really? You can pick end pub that you want to assign this to? [01:31:46] Speaker B: Oh, dude, you're way ahead of me. [01:31:48] Speaker A: Okay, yeah, yeah, but we want, we want this UX to be perfect. So sort of like gift Premium should be a top level menu option and then like a few steps later that person has premium or if they haven't onboarded yet, like the onboarding link will include premium. [01:32:05] Speaker B: Go do the process. [01:32:06] Speaker A: So lots of things like that which end up being a lot of work to execute well is what's like on our, on our list to do. [01:32:16] Speaker B: Nice. Nice. [01:32:17] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:32:18] Speaker B: All right, man. Well, stay in touch. Dude, thank you for joining me. This one's. This was great. Every time I have one of these conversations, I get more and more bullish on Nostra, which seems hard to believe. [01:32:27] Speaker A: Let's go, let's go. It was fun. Thanks very much for having me, man. [01:32:31] Speaker B: Yeah, man. Dude, thank you. Thank you, man. It's. It's been a good ride. Same. All right, guys, I hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do not forget to check out Nayan on Nostr. I will have his pub key as well as a link to Primal. So you can check out Primal 2.0 or the web app and obviously Primal Premium and he mentioned that in the show. I have links and stuff to all of this if you want to explore it. And if you have not, seriously, if you have not done Nostra yet, if you have not explored it, I think this is a really, really good time to get in because I think a lot of the tools are maturing and as I talked about in the episode is, you know, that chronological feed. I think that step from having one feed in chronological order to kind of having a dynamic view of everything that's happening on Nostra and everybody you're following, I think it's going to have a meaningful difference in how you experience the protocol and the network. So it's probably a really cool time to check it out and see what they've got. Again, links to everything will be right down in the show Notes, don't forget to check out Fold, don't forget to check out Fountain and everybody who boosts zaps on Nostr and boosts on Fountain and leaves me comments and stream sets. Thank you guys so much. You really keep this show alive and it's also just awesome to read all your comments in my Albie wallet while I while I get to scroll through and look at stuff. It's pretty baller. Lots of other good links to products and services that I really love and use all the time right there. Everything you'll be able to find in the description and I will catch you guys on the next episode of Bitcoin Audible and until then everybody take it easy guys.