Chat_145 - Trust Scales Where Bitcoin Can't with John Carvalho

[00:00:00] Speaker A: The atomic economy is in Synonym's mission is to research, design and ship a working free market society. So not just a free market economy, but a free market society. So this chart is supposed to represent the minimum amount of pieces to basically have society, but only through a digital system. So it replaces government, it replaces big tech, it replaces big banks, it replaces Visa, MasterCard. You know, everything you could do, everything you would want to do in a network is represented here as part of the economy. [00:00:57] 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, we have an awesome conversation today. We have John Carvalho back on the show, CEO of Synonym, Bitcoin error log on Twitter and Bitcoin og. He probably wouldn't want to be called that, but John Carvalho is a Bitcoin og, so he's back on the show. And in particular, one thing that I really want you to listen out for in this episode is he had a really fantastic point about this whole opera turn filter spam debate and what the consequences are, what the consequences of it might be, aside from any position on the debate itself. But I just thought it was a really, really good point and I'll let him make it as opposed to ruining the summary here. But we go into a ton of different stuff. We cover the evolution of Paykit, which is a tool and really kind of a system that they're building, and how it actually ties into their vision for a for re decentralizing the web. We talk about the flaws of nostr, what Nostr hasn't yet fixed. That's still pretty fundamental to the issue of censorship and actually owning your own data. What is the atomic economy, the dynamics of managing a team and trying to build open source and decentralized tech. And why the focus on scaling bitcoin or any trustless system even thinking about it in the idea of scaling in layers might actually be leading us down a path where we're on a wild goose chase and failing to just admit a very simple reality about the nature of decentralization and trust. So this is going to be a wild one. Get ready. A quick shout out to Leden IO for Bitcoin backed loans. They have a crazy simple process. They have proof of reserves. They have very simple to understand terms. It's very easy to refinance. You have no monthly obligations. There are no capital gains taxes because you're not actually selling bitcoin. You borrow against your bitcoin, you get fiat and you don't have to sell your bitcoin now. It's not for every situation. It is still a loan. But this is an incredible tool for people who need to get access to the value and don't want to let go of their bitcoin. I have a special link with a discount on the interest rate actually right down below in the show notes. A huge thank you to the HRF for supporting my work. They are an incredible institution and don't miss their Oslo Freedom Forum. You can grab tickets at the link in the show notes as well as sign up for their Financial Freedom Report newsletter. But they are the source to find the people and hear the stories and understand the tools for fighting for liberty all around the world. Check them out and and lastly, get your light health in order. Red light therapy. Control your circadian rhythm and your hormones. These screens are causing way more problems than most people realize. And you can get it with a 10% discount using code Bitcoin Audible with Getchroma Co. And in fact if you go to based Gitchroma Co, it's actually a website built specifically for bitcoiners. Yeah, check it out. It's pretty cool and you know, it just, it makes me feel special, you know, I'm a bitcoiner and I deserve a special website. I think that's what we should demand of all businesses. Link discounts, special goodies, all that shit down in the show notes. Check it out. All right, let's get into today's show. This is with my friend and the always unapologetic John Carvalo. Chat 145 Trust scales where Bitcoin can't. John Carvaro Bitcoin AOG you're. You've been on the show like three times now. Maybe, I don't know. [00:05:14] Speaker A: Oh, I don't know. It's been some years so it could be more. [00:05:17] Speaker B: Yeah, we've been been around the block a little bit here and I wanted to get updates on basically everything you've been doing because I know a lot of things have shifted and focus has shifted and you've gotten like a lot of different feedback on kind of what you guys are doing with Pub Key and Bitkit. And then also I was reading, I think it was posted on Pub Key like Changelog or basically like a breakdown of everything that's going to come in like a new version of Pub Key. And I did want to pick your brain about that but then I also just wanted to really dig into business stuff and like running things and you you have a history, like, synonym isn't your first thing either. And I, I kind of wanted to get just your personal experience because as I said just before the show or whatever is. A lot of people have been asking me about this and I feel like. I feel like I've been just kind of like shooting in the dark for a while now on this, and I'm making progress, but it's just because I just. I just show back up and like, okay, I'm gonna. I'm just gonna at least keep pushing it forward. But, you know, in a lot of context, I feel like I don't know quite where I'm going. I just kind of have this like one idea, this one thing that I'm fixated on, of, like a problem that I want to solve. So I wanted to get your take on how you see this, like, what you're building, the problem that you're trying to solve, how you think about hiring people and keeping the thing afloat, all of this stuff and. But just in general. Welcome to the show, dude. Not to lead too much right at the beginning here. Welcome back, John. Always good hanging out. [00:07:07] Speaker A: Yeah, always happy to be here. Happy to talk about, you know, current state of what we're working on. Happy to share any of my learnings, whether it be on R and D for, you know, Bitcoin or peer to peer web stuff, or just running a company, working on that stuff. And all the learnings there, there's. There's tons. People don't ask that often, so I'm not sure how good or quick I'll be with the answers, but there's definitely something not to dig out there, I'm sure. [00:07:33] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, so actually let's go ahead and kick this off with the, with the fun thing, antagonizing Noster. [00:07:44] Speaker A: Noster. Oh, you're one of those Noster. [00:07:47] Speaker B: No, sir, it just. It doesn't even matter. There's no pronunciation. It's just a couple of letters. [00:07:51] Speaker A: Did you see my. My Nip 177? [00:07:55] Speaker B: No, I didn't. Wait, is that the pronunciation? Was it about the pronunciation? [00:08:00] Speaker A: Well, for the audience, since I interrupted you, what. What guy is referring to is, you know, maybe a month, some. Some month, month and a half ago. I don't know when it was. I. I basically never used nostr account some time ago and use some apps here and there as part of research to compare with what we're doing, but I honestly don't pay that much attention to it. And so I decided to pay Some attention to it. And basically the only thing I knew to talk about that would be interesting would be about how Nostr is bad. And so I started basically painting in excruciating detail everything that I thought was flawed about Nostr, the builders of Nostr and the users of Nostr. And for, for a week or two, I had all of Nostr, you know, triggered. It was not a plan, it was not my intention. It's just the kind of effect I tend to have when I spend some time on social media. And so I was about to say this. [00:08:58] Speaker B: If you follow Bitcoin error log anywhere, that's typically what you get. It's just in a different place. [00:09:05] Speaker A: But there were tons of learnings. It was like an anthropological experience. For me, it was something. Something sur. But yeah, I do. I mean, obviously we don't build with Nostr, not because we think, oh, we need it to be our own, it needs to become from us. No, it's because we were building what we were building since before Nostr existed. And we go and refer to it. We learn from Nostr because they did something different. And so we try to take learnings from it since it's another experiment done differently than what we intend to do. But there's never any intention to make another Nostr or copy anything about Nostr or even necessarily directly compete with it per se. Like we're making what we're making because we have a specific vision to build our atomic economy thing. And that, like I said, that predates Nostr. So, yeah, it was very interesting to try to both see how they responded to criticism and to see how they responded to the idea that something else could be better technologically. They didn't receive either very well. Not necessarily that I sugarcoated it, I'm not going to make that claim. But I also, I didn't necessarily like, I don't know, act like some, some sort of outright asshole. I was just extremely candid and, you know, maybe a little bit uncomfortable, but yeah, I don't know if you have a specific question around all that. There was a lot that it went through, but essentially what the result were things like I ended up making a very large mute list which, of all the people that responded to my behavior much, much worse than my own behavior. And I share. And then I decided to screenshot that and publicly share it with everybody in Noster, all the people that I muted. And of course it contains some of their most favorite people. And so everybody. So then somebody made a follow pack based off of my mute list to try to troll me. I had everybody making evil, horrible memes about me. What else? [00:11:07] Speaker B: Social media is the best. [00:11:10] Speaker A: The good side, I'll say, is it actually did result in people that were genuinely interested in PubKey asking questions and people that were generally frustrated with building on Nostr or using Nostr or trying to channel their own vision through Nostr somehow. And some people came over and wanted to invite codes to try PubKey. Some of them ended up building PubKey apps and some of them, you know, ended up applying to PubKey. So why it wasn't my intention ended up being a pretty good recruiting tactic, a pretty good, you know, outreach tactic in general. But we have a lot more intentional things going on there. We're going to hire a developer advocate and improve our documentation, SDKs, etc. But yeah, I'm just ranting now. Sorry. [00:11:52] Speaker B: Gotcha. Well, you know, in thinking about like all the various tools that are available, like, it seems like everything has some degree of drawback. I had, I think it was my producer, I think it was Johnny. Ask me what my thoughts or maybe it was Farrington, I don't know, it doesn't matter. But ask me my thoughts on like the pair stack with the hole punch, team synonym and pub key and what you guys are building and then Nostr and like what the drawbacks were of each and when I specifically. Or the drawbacks and specifically the benefits that make. I think each have like a interesting niche or an interesting potential. Like I probably. Everything could be continually evolved and moved in a direction where all the problems are solved. Maybe, or maybe some of these can work together. I don't know. I'm still completely open as to what the best path is because, like everything seems to have something where it's like, okay, this is really powerful, this is really amazing. And then this other one has something that is working for it. But in the context of nostr. What. But since, you know, we're in talking about like your antagonism to it, what's the biggest drawback? Because mine in when I explained this to I think Farrington was that the key system is like there's a. There's a benefit in kind of like security and verification in the sense that like, I know no matter what relay I'm getting the information from, I can know it's from the person that I'm looking for. But then the interaction, like the user side of dealing with keys is super clunky because, like it's not safe. And if I feel like this has just been kind of pushed off to the background of just like, oh well, people should just learn about keys. I'm like, if you don't meet the user where they are, the user's just not going to meet you. You know, and the complication of having to explain to somebody the like the big thing about Bitcoin is people punching their freaking seed phrase into an email, right? Like, so if you just start getting people copy pasting their social media keys into every app everywhere, rather than something like pub keyring, where you're actually signing in remotely, your keys never actually leave the device, which solves so many freaking problems. I'm actually doing a video about that right now. Is that interaction like the normie is just going to get obliterated with pasting keys into every app they use. And so that was kind of my big thing of where I thought the drawback was, is that the same for you is as the problem they need to solve or is this. Do the people that you say we're developing that are now interested in that or talking about frustrations like what do you, what, what are the big things in your mind for, I guess the drawbacks of the NOSTR structure? [00:14:54] Speaker A: Well, I would say for me it wouldn't. That wouldn't be the number 1 1, but it is related to multiple of them in that. So my number one one is that it's actually censorable at scale. And so despite signing everything, you have no actual way to enforce provenance like that the data actually exists where you want it to exist, that the person trying to retrieve your data is able to get it confidently. Because the relay, the relay design is basically naive, it's a spray and pray. And it assumes that there will be somehow a way not only to make sure your data gets out to a relay that other people can find, but that from the other end there aren't so many relays that are so disparate that you can't find what you're looking for. And so in pubkey we address this through the PKDNS and the Picar record. And so basically because of the same thing where you like how we separate the keys and how we do that, we're able to solve. That's actually the main foundation of most of the things that pubkey is able to do better or differently than the other platforms. It's simply that we're using, we're replacing DNS with a pub key. DNS, literally. And so because you like in Noster, you sign everything, right? So you know for a fact which key the data came from, but you don't necessarily have any way to know that you have all the data. And you don't have a way to know where to find the data when the person moves location or when the, you know, just in general to know this is exactly where this person says their data is. So just like regular DNS, we use the public keys as the DNS and that removes the limitations. And so now once you start rethinking the system from this primitive, you realize you just don't need the relay network. It just doesn't even, it's just redundant at this point. [00:16:46] Speaker B: It's like the relay network's kind of a band aid on top of what Picar actually solves. In a sense, what the Picar record. [00:16:55] Speaker A: Does is it just replaces the DNS record. And so the web, it just says use the regular web. And so the regular web already has conventions for dealing with scale. There's mirroring, fallbacks, you know, you can do hot swaps, you can use CDNs. There's a whole environment made to be able to deal with scale. So you would just plug that in and basically have to recreate it. Like we are make our own home server compatible with Picard, compatible with PKDNs. And so we're rebuilding the tools that already exist, just also compatible with that system. NOSTR could do the same thing. And people say this like people say, oh, even there were times even my team were like, hey, we should just build a relay that uses Picard. But that doesn't solve the problem, unfortunately, because NOSTR is using a different curve. There's no compatibility, you know, with the DHT method. So even if NOSTR did decide to make a breaking change despite all that, even if they decided to make a breaking change and use PKDNS and fix this discovery problem, they would still now have to ask themselves, why do we do some of the other things we do anymore, like the relay system, like signing everything? Signing everything is interesting, but only if you actually think data mutation is a problem. If you're the one running your own home server, you know it's not a problem, right? So you don't actually need to sign everything anymore. But the signing or signing or not signing is left more to the application level. So another thing we have to be careful with comparing all this stuff is the scope is huge. If we, if, you know, if you want to compare like the social media capabilities of Nostr vs Pubkey vs Bluesky, that's different than comparing say the discovery methods. NOSTR just leaves it. It's just saying use a key, the rest is your problem. Go ask somebody that you trust for the data. And then bluesky basically replaces ICANN or centralized DNS with centralized like a phone book. And then we replace it with mainline dht. And so out of all of the options, nothing comes close to the decentralization of mainline THT and what it can provide in this use case. And so that's why we do it that way. And this all goes hand in hand. What you said again, where also in PubKey, because the key defines the location in the DNS record, you can now keep the key separate and you can now have sessions for writing to home servers instead, like a session token or such. And you could even revoke sessions and things like this and you could come up with, you know, different key management, delegated keys. Now there's a lot of work for us to do there to actually make all of that true to the degree any, you know, creative cryptographer or builder would want. But it is actually possible because of the foundation. And so, yeah, I agree with you that you definitely want to be able to keep your identity key cold and you want to be using, you know, more like hotkeys for other things. But there's a lot of nuance here. Like part of the reason that it seems so simple right now is because pubkey is not doing any sort of signing, it's not doing any sort of private data or encryption. Right? And so we're doing R and D right now to add private data support to pubkey. The pubkey data project is going to add noise protocol capabilities, things like this. Eventually we will probably or may implement cryptree capability for the home server. And this changes the paradigm a bit. It makes us have to actually get help from cryptographers and make a good design. But in the end, again, we can't because of this design. And so I would say, yeah, the spray and pray relay naive design and that leading to requiring some sort of discovery method and NOSTR users using hotkeys. That's the problem. I'll mention one other thing, which is earlier you mentioned comparing all of these things like you said somebody had asked you about, you know, hole punch versus pub key versus noster and maybe what the strengths and weakness are. The answer to that question will depend on the context. You know what I mean? Like I could give quick answers, but they're how I look at it and maybe somebody else would look at it. [00:21:10] Speaker B: Differently and what you're after, like, what are you trying to do? [00:21:14] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think you could probably infer what I would say with them. We didn't really talk about Hole Punch much, much, but like there's a sort of this overlap between what we do and what Hole Punch does. What Hole Punch and say no computer and their IRO project does. There's overlap with what we do and what NOSTR does. There's not that much overlap with what NOSTR and Hole Punch does, but there's a lot of overlap between what we do and bluesky. And so they're all mutations of similar goals. I would say maybe ours is the broadest scope. We're trying to design a whole civic engineering attempt to try to fix society, which is a little bit bigger scope than fixing social media. [00:21:55] Speaker B: At least you're. At least you're not ambitious. At least. [00:21:57] Speaker A: Yeah, we recently. I won't mention the name yet because we'll see how the project goes. We just started, but we recently enlisted a core developer to help with a new project of ours. [00:22:10] Speaker B: Okay. [00:22:11] Speaker A: But. [00:22:11] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, sweet. [00:22:14] Speaker A: I'm sorry, I was saying that for a reason. What was the last thing you said. [00:22:18] Speaker B: A whole bunch of was if you, if you basically wanted to give like the best. The, the simple rundown from your perspective of what each. [00:22:27] Speaker A: Oh, the differences of these things. Sure. Yeah. Or the. Maybe the. The best and the worst aspect. The best aspect of an aspect of NOSTR that they'll tell you is simplicity. Basically easy to hack with. I would argue that maybe, probably other things are pretty easy too or could be made as easy if those teams worked on making their tools easier to. You know what I mean? Like, I think that advantage is a little bit tricky because the complexity that NOSTR removes at the ground level has to now be addressed later. In other words, NOSTR can't ignore their relay naivety problem. They're just going to keep making more and more complexity to manage it. They can't ignore the identity problem. They're going to make more complexity to manage it. And so that's the kind of trade off I see is it's supposed to be really simple, but I would call it more likely incomplete. And so thus, you know, it's missing things. With bluesky and pubkey, there's a similar model where we're trying to make it so there's a confident location of the data, but they aren't using the same identity model as we are. So their weakness would be that it's very centralized. And then culturally, as a project, one of their north stars is really good at moderation, so they're really Trying to make it so people can create safe spaces and, you know, get rid of people that they don't like and this kind of thing. And that's tricky. It's okay as a concept, it's bad as a culture because it's going to make. It's going to mean that they're going to worry less about decentralization. In other words, they're going to keep warping in that direction if that's all they care about. [00:24:06] Speaker B: Yeah, they're more worried about Reddit moderation than they are open conversation and that's going to show up in how they build it. [00:24:14] Speaker A: Yeah, but we have a similar model in the sense that we are trying to say, rather than have a spray and pray relay thing or be wholly purely peer to peer, which I'll get to with what Hole Punch is trying to do, we want to be somewhere more like centralized but have a sort of claim to a credible exit. They don't, they can't currently back up that claim because their PDS, the way they do their phone book or their, their identity system is centralized. They announced, I think today, this week. Yeah, yeah, they announced today or this week that they're going to make a second organization to run that aspect, but I don't see how that fixes it. An independent organization, which I think is an oxymoron, which was my reply to their post. Yeah, Anyway, and then with Hole Punch, I would say that as I already hinted, the advantage and disadvantage is the same thing, that they're trying to be purely peer to peer. And so that means you're going to have to take the trade offs at face value, you're not going to be able to avoid them. For example, arguments like being fully peer to peer means you don't have to trust servers anymore, but it means you have to trust your peers. And so if you're leaking your home IP address through the hole punching and you're doing in your wrong kind of relationship and the person is wanting to find out where you are geographically, they might. And so you have to be more diligent and managing your own, you know, behavior. When you're being fully peer to peer, you have to know that you should be using a vpn, et cetera. So there's, there's that aspect which is basically that fully purely peer to peer means no scaling. Right. So you're never going to have like the web or X, you know, Twitter on Hole Punch. It's just actually impossible. In order to make that possible, they would basically have to re approach their design to the way that we're doing it. And so we don't focus on purely peer to peer, we focus on trying to make it so the user has this credible exit. So they define where the data lives. And then as we progress with our development and R and D, we're basically going to make it over time eventually where right now we're the only server because it's still a beta and we're still building it, but eventually it'll be where the user is the source of truth. They're running their own home server. And then our indexer for our app is pulling data from all the users. And so the redundancy will be that our data will be the redundant data. Right now it's the user's data that's the redundant data. [00:26:42] Speaker B: And so our decentralization will go in the opposite direction. So like I would host my data and then you would. The Pub key server or whatever would be pulling it from me and delivering it to people as a like, kind of like a server back end. [00:26:57] Speaker A: Think of it like Google, right? Like you have the whole web but Google knows about most of it. And so when you go out, you say, hey Google, I'm trying to find something. They say, oh, here's what we have. It's the same thing. It's just now applying that concept to applications. You say, what if every application worked that way? What if every application had to decide which keys it was going to pull data from, or which indexer, which aggregator of all that data it was going to pull data from, or whether it was going to create an aggregation or an index on its own and not depend on any of them. All of them are possible in Pubby because all you really need is the key list. Once you have a list of keys you want to generate a graph of, you just have to go to their home servers and pull the data. So it's very modular, very flexible. Like I mentioned earlier, we have to be careful with the scope because if we talk about PKDNS and Picard, that's something that's just an aspect of everything we're doing that many applications could use Bitcoin. We haven't even got into doing R and D related to Bitcoin around this. Maybe this is a good segue to talk about PayKit as well. But there's plenty of applications that could improve Bitcoin layers. Bitcoin coordination for things like Pay Join. There's all kinds of cool things you could do here. You see people already doing it with Nostr, but It's, it's, in my opinion, in my opinion it's, it's a faulty. Like once they get to the stage where people use it, it'll become censored, it won't scale. You're using hotkeys. There's just so many issues where they don't, they can't take advantage of things the way that we can. Like what I mentioned just now with like the reassembling of an index or aggregating everything. We can do that more easily because of Picar, because we can go and reassemble and make our own decks, index new index from scratch if we, if we really want to rather than rely on central entities. [00:28:41] Speaker B: So I want to ask something about Picar is what do you see in the long run as the main mode, especially if we're talking about the web here. Like, like we're, we're rebuilding the web with Picar as like a usable piece of this. Do you see this as being. In fact I think I actually saw a demonstration or something this, where like literally a public key was put into the URL, like was put into the browser bar to, to go to it. And is that, is that the interaction that you see happening? Is that, is it like, let's say maybe I have like a contact list in my browser or in an app or whatever and I'm literally clicking on them as if they are websites and then whatever their source is, like let's say it's an IP address or it's a, a different domain name or whatever that I'm just being filtered through. But it's, it's the thing that they have control over so they can change it and all I ever do is click on their key. Is, is that kind of the interaction? Like how do you see this being directly used? Because I, I tried the, the, the put in a public key and get the, the DNS record or the, the Picar record from it, you know, thing. And, and so like my, my, my immediate thinking was like how can take advantage of. Yeah, yeah, like how can I take advantage of this? Like how do I use this now? Because I want to, I want to play with making myself like my own little website or something and using this and like trying to, trying to interact with it. So like, I guess that's my question to you is that how can I start playing and, or how do you see what my interaction with, with this would be if as pub key or other users or other people would adopt it? What would be my touch point? [00:30:33] Speaker A: So with the first question you know, you saw a demo of somebody putting the public key in the URL bar and rendering something. Yeah, that's, that's the idea. That's the basic idea. It's. I don't know if it's the easiest way for somebody to understand it, but it might be. Um, especially if you have any familiarity with buying web domains and then configuring the DNS. If you have that kind of familiarity. Yeah, I, I happen. I don't know if I'm lucky or unique, but. What. But I've been dealing with DNS since forever, like, I don't know, 90s. And so I have some comfort with it. I've always managed the domains for any company I work for, and so it doesn't bother me. And so if you learn a little bit about DNS, you'll learn that you can use it for basically anything you want to point to. Like, there's not, like, there's rules, there's validation, and there's like, things that are intentionally supported, but you can put any text in a DNS record. Now, there's a size limit, of course, and there's a size limit in Picard, but in the end, like, your creativity is only limited by how, okay, if I know a piece of data, a public key, and I want to get anything to happen once I have that data, you can do that. Like, that primitive is real. And in that primitive, the best, easiest way to compare it is just to a website. So, yeah, if you buy, you know, guyswan.com and now you can go over there and you can set which. Where's the web server, where is the email server? Where is the validation for Google that you own this domain? Where is all the subdomains? It's the same thing. It's the same exact thing. And so that demo you saw, all that is is somebody running PKDNS on that machine. And so anybody could do that. You can run PKDNS on your computer and you can set your browser to use that DNS instead of Google's or whatever one you're using. And it will use that and it will work and nothing will change other than that. You can also put in a public key and render something. And so I think that maybe there's only so much we can do, but I do wonder if we should have started instead of how we're starting by just portraying this more like, you know, unstoppable websites and saying, oh, like, make it all about public key domains and less about the other stuff. But, you know, there's only so many methods we can try and so much work to do and so many ideas. But that really is the crux of it. It's just saying it's a website. And so the roadblock there is just simply when our code is mature enough and we can show some gravity to people using this stuff, it would be a business development effort that we would do to try to get browsers to support this or other other types of applications that are similar or to actually build our own, you know, like for Chrome or something. And just put all this in the browser experience because like you mentioned putting in the URL bar. But by the same token, if you think about it, we're all typing just regular domains less and less. Right? Like most of the domains that we search these days, the browser remembers it the first time and you're typing one or two letters and you're hitting enter. You know, like the amount of typing we're doing for addresses for Bitcoin as well, you're not typing out your Bitcoin address. Right. You're always copy pasting or the application is handling it directly. And so I think that that's less of a concern. In other words, people will say, yeah, but they're human readable, real domain names. Well, the problem is that human readable or nicknames are not something that can. It's not a paradigm you can provide without centralization because it's all it is, is a list, centralized list. So yeah, that's, you know, the gist of it. So as far as, you know, what, what you saw and how to play with it, I would say look into how people leverage DNS to make web applications, web paradigms, web patterns, design patterns. Because you could do anything you could do with the normal web. [00:34:26] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. See, I kind of agreed there too. Is it like a. I feel like that's like a default criticism of. It's like, oh, you can't read the public keys or whatever. And there was a time where I thought there was more, I put more credence to that and now all I can think is that like I look at my contacts list and I don't even look at phone numbers, you know. [00:34:49] Speaker A: Like, I don't know anybody's phone number anymore. [00:34:52] Speaker B: But like I see John Carvalho and I see my wife and I see my friend, you know, like, I just, I see people and like. So in that same context, when it came to the idea of pub key, that's, that's why I actually mentioned first before, I just talk about pasting into a URL bar is that, I was thinking clicking on Contacts is that like I have your pub key. And so like I literally click on you and then I have either it goes to like your website or your portal or something. And like, but that's just how I think about you as a person online is you're a contact inside my browser or whatever, like kind of window that I'm looking through this thing in. And I can pay you from there. I can go to your website or your store like tar and feathers or whatever. And so like that again, just kind of in a general idea, I. I lend a lot less credence to that than I used to because I realize how little it matters in other contexts that are already so invisible that I don't think about it. So it went away without me realizing that it went away. You know what I mean? [00:36:01] Speaker A: Yeah. The tricky thing with names is everybody thinks there's some research to be done, but it's already done. Like DNS is actually decentralized as a design and open source. Anybody can implement DNS. The only thing stopping you from providing being your own ICANN is people with guns. You know what I mean? The solution already exists. If you wanted to have two google.com, the one that you say it is, and you want to sell google.com to somebody else, there's nothing stopping you other than guns. And so as far as nicknaming goes, there's no innovation to be had other than some people think that using a blockchain for nicknaming is good. But the problem with that is it still doesn't solve, even though you can change it. So now there isn't a head to that blockchain. Now you have to deal with the multiple blockchain problem. So it's like, okay, now you're going to have google.com on Bitcoin and google.com and Ethereum and Google and then in google.com and I can. And it's like, is this useful? And so there are some interesting research and topics to be discussed maybe, and looked into, and we'll do it in the future. Like with relative naming, for example, when you look so like, you ask ICANN specifically where John's website is when you type john.com, right? And I just mentioned that there could be many ICANNs, right? And so now if you imagine this decentralized model, you could just kind of break it apart and say, okay, I can, I can have. I forgot what was going with this. Sorry. [00:37:37] Speaker B: So you actually brought up naming on a blockchain. And I didn't mention this before the show, but I do actually want to get your thoughts without going too far down this rabbit hole. But it is, it is like kind of like the key drama that's been going on right now. And you've been in bitcoin for probably longer than I have, I think, or probably about the same time. And so you have been through this whole thing. I know you were part of the or witnessed the kind of oper wars. In fact, you're probably deeper in the technical side of things then than I was because bitcoin kind of took me down the technical rabbit hole rather than me being technical before I got there. And so on chain data in general, like there's clearly you just talk about like the blockchain problem when we're talking about like naming and stuff. Is that like, oh, well, now we just have it on a bunch of different blockchains. So there's, there's obvious just kind of like general trade offs there. But what are your thoughts about specifically on bitcoin and kind of this oper turn drama? And maybe this is another question is what was your reasoning for building Picard on DHT or, excuse me, on mainline instead of something like bitcoin in upper turn data or something like that, what was it about blockchain that just made you go, why would you do it this way? [00:39:07] Speaker A: Well, you remember there was a trend where everything was blockchain this, blockchain that, right? [00:39:12] Speaker B: Oh yeah. [00:39:13] Speaker A: And so I was already kind of desensitized to the idea. And by the time that we were working on synonym, it just became, well, we're going to be the company that should even one of our narratives in the beginning was to show that bitcoiners spent so much time telling shitcoiners they were scammers and to just use bitcoin, they would always say, don't do that. But they would never say do this and actually give them something to do this instead. Like, you know, like, oh, don't do token scams, do them, do this. And so I wanted synonym to be like the answer to that is say, okay, don't blockchain, do this. And so instead of saying, you know, Web3 is a scam, I would say don't use Web3, use this. It's the same thing minus the scam. You know what I mean? And so I think that that's a good philosophy and a truth that you couldn't, you don't need a blockchain for that. I would say I'm getting even more extreme in this view in that I don't even really believe in layers for bitcoin anymore that much. I don't think they're useless. But I think that the concept of scaling bitcoin is a trap altogether at this stage. I think people need to just try on the opposite view that there is no way to scale bitcoin and that we should not even be attempting to scale bitcoin, which goes hand in hand with. We shouldn't be soft forking bitcoin, et cetera and all the risks that come with that. But yeah, I mean, I guess mostly you wanted to talk about the space before we wrap up the space on bitcoin thing. I'll just say my advice to your audience is ignore it. You will lose or gain nothing by participating other than maybe if you're new and you want to learn a little bit about how bitcoin works. But don't take a stance on this issue. It's not what people were making it out to be. You don't have to have a team. You don't have to break up with your friends over this issue. It's actually really, really inconsequential. And so just stop. The real problem that the only reason we have time to bicker with each other about nonsense is because nobody's using bitcoin for money. And that's why the blocks aren't full. And that's why we're blaming. We're just. When bitcoin is underused, we're always going to be unhappy with the people that use it because they're just getting. They're just there to fill up cheap block space. You're never going to remove that problem. The only way you can deal with that problem is actively you can say, oh, there's so many people that want to use bitcoin that the retards that want to put retarded stuff on there or use it for retarded things can't afford to, right? And so bitcoin can't compete with monkey picture use case right now. That's the problem. That's the real problem. So in any way, they're not even filling the blocks anymore. So who cares? It's just all nonsense. And then of course, policy is a much different thing than protocol. Policy you can't enforce. Anybody can do whatever policy they want. And then of course, every single time we have messed with the mempool, it has gotten worse. So again, don't meddle with the mempool because we had a pristine environment and that everybody was cooperating. But once you start teaching everybody that they don't have to cooperate and start creating tools to make them disagree, then the mempool becomes fragmented. You get slipstream, you get all kinds. You get all this alternative mempools. It's just going to get worse and worse. Maybe all that stuff is inevitable, suitable. [00:42:35] Speaker B: But. [00:42:35] Speaker A: Yeah, sorry, I. I backed up. And now. Now you want to move on to the next thing. What was the next thing? [00:42:39] Speaker B: No, no, no, no, no. This, this is great because. Because there's you. Oh, Bitcoin can't get a couple of. A couple of threads that I wanted to pull on there, so. I agree. I think the argument is way more vicious than it needs to be. Like, I think there's a worthy argument to be had. I think the difference is the difference between the technical reality and what I believe is the cultural and economic reality and that they actually matter. Peter Wella actually had somebody posted not too long ago a comment from Peter Weller that was way back in like 2013 or something like this, like, kind of at the early days of this conversation, and I thought he put it, he summed it up so perfectly in like three sentences, was that technically this shouldn't matter and the OP return would be a better place to put it, put the data. But I fear that if we say, okay, here's OP return and here's as much data as you want, please put it here so that it doesn't do much as much damage, that there's going to be a significant social. Social change and they're going to take that as an imitation and then more people will do it, even though we don't want people doing it. And I thought it was. It was just like this perfect little thing. I was like, that's the whole argument. [00:43:48] Speaker A: That's the whole. [00:43:49] Speaker B: That's the whole thing. [00:43:50] Speaker A: But yeah, unfortunately, though, like, the hard side of the argument is like, the people that hate the data on bitcoin, they're going too extreme and they're making too many narratives that are like huge stretches and they're adding too much drama and flavor to this argument. It should be a very technical, unemotional argument, quite honestly. Like, yeah, it's just, don't mess with policy. Don't mess with the mempool. If the argument that we should be having, and I think there's a little bit of an undertone of this, is one core should be trying to figure out a way to get out of policy. You know, core should Be Core. [00:44:27] Speaker B: Right. [00:44:27] Speaker A: The Core shouldn't even have a wallet. You know what I mean? Core should be this thing that never changes. And the only thing that changes about Core are things that people that make applications downstream really need, like an optimization, a speed thing, or basically a hard fork, if we ever need it. But otherwise we should not be changing Core. It should be. I'm not saying this is a very nuanced thing that's separate from ossify, and that's what I'm saying. We have to be agile, we have to be flexible, we have to keep changing as software changes and formats change, etc. There's always more to build and more to fix and optimize. But the whole creative side is, I think, a folly and a naivety. Let's design a soft fork that will fix scaling. This is a fantasy. [00:45:17] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, so that's. That's a thread. I want to ask one more thing real quick because you. Because you actually mentioned them, like taking the wallet out of it as a good thing and that I'm not so sure about. I think about it as. [00:45:31] Speaker A: No, I think it should exist. It's just a matter of separating. [00:45:35] Speaker B: Okay. [00:45:35] Speaker A: Separating concerns. And they already are making efforts to do this, I think. I. I haven't checked in on a long time, but I think that they were trying to break out the UI from the back end. But there's multiple concepts here. There's the concept of architecturally achieving it, and then there's a concept of architecturally enforcing it. And so basically where Core should just not be involved in policy decisions, you can have downstream applications that implement Core that have custom policies, which. This is already what knots is like an echo of. [00:46:04] Speaker B: It's what we've ended up in anyway. [00:46:06] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a fork of it, but a fork of it for things that are not consensus. Yeah, but there wouldn't be any drama, right? It would be a normal thing if Core was actually Core. [00:46:16] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. And there'd probably be more consensus as to what that policy ought to be like. I think so much of the backlash is about being told that you're not allowed. Like, this is what the policy ought to be. And that's what I think bothers so many people, is that the node runner, like the people running nodes, are the ones who are keeping the network alive. [00:46:37] Speaker A: Bitcoiners need to learn to stop touching stuff, I'm telling you. Because it's just going to keep getting worse. I'm not even joking. What's going to happen now is people are going to realize they can make a new mempool if they want. They can design a mempool that works however they want it to work. They can tell people to use that mempool instead. Then you're going to have people saying, oh well, my mempool watches both mempools and this is like the master mempool. And then you're going to have mempools that specialize with things like slipstream. You might have another mempool that or another type of mempool that all the miners support. And now you have a mempool that's specifically for zero conf transactions and you know what I mean? And that mempool is backed by real world contracts in the government, in the legal system. Like there's all kinds of ways it's going to unfold. But the worst thing it's going to expose is that it's actually miners that decide what gets in Bitcoin and that that's where governments need to go to censor bitcoin. So the more you guys fuck with this, the more it's just going to come rise to the top that the people that are responsible for the bad things in bitcoin are the miners. And that's where all the government needs to turn their screws and they will. So guys, if you want to have a nice non dramatic mining, you know, situation and non dramatic government involved mental situation, stop fucking with it. That's, that's it. [00:47:53] Speaker B: All right? [00:47:54] Speaker A: Because the more attention you draw, the more creative people are going to get. [00:47:58] Speaker B: I want to pull them, I want to pull on that thread about not scaling Bitcoin because this is something, and I find it interesting because like the tools and the stuff that you're building and the reason you're building like with synonym and bitkit or pay Kit and Picard and all of this stuff is to decentralize is to put control back in the hands of the users and change where the, I guess the distinctions of who and how networks are created like change where that lies. And so. But at the exact same time you have also mentioned many times about, correct me if I've said this wrong or not in how you meant it that it's trustless but it doesn't allow a. It's not about creating a trustless everything economy. It's about backstopping trust so that we can actually trust each other in a, in a sense, if that's, if my wording kind of puts it in there. [00:48:57] Speaker A: This is a tweet I made this week. I think that you're referring to. Yeah, I think the tweet was something like this. Like what Bitcoiners get wrong is being against trust by default, which is, this is extremely incorrect philosophy. You should be against trust of your Bitcoin because the whole purpose of Bitcoin is to be something you can hold yourself and, and not require trust. That's the nuance in that. Yes, you are correct when it comes to Bitcoin, but when it comes to most everything else, you need to be maximizing trust. You need to be figuring out who to trust with what, how much, when you know what I mean? You need to have all the powers possible to granularly contextually organize how you trust and have confidence in choosing whom to trust and with what. Bitcoiners are skipping all of that for the most part. There's some overlap in maybe the ECASH research and this kind of thing, but it's still a little misguided because it's all Bitcoin derivative. And so everybody in Bitcoin is thinking about the future through the lens of Bitcoin. And not just in the sense that oh yeah, we ignore shitcoins and altcoins because they're scams, but in the sense of everything. And so as soon as something becomes like, seen as, oh, this is part of Bitcoin, there's nothing else that's allowed. For example, NOSTR is the bitcoin peer to peer social web thing. And so no other entrant is going to be allowed, like because of the way our culture is, because the way they behave. But the thing is like, web protocols aren't the same concept as a blockchain. You don't need to enforce that there's a singularity of them. You don't need to enforce that there's multiple or mutations of them. In fact, it's a detriment because you want copyright competition in that area. Probably want it in money too, to be honest. But another topic. And so yeah, I think that the scale aspect is pretty important, but that you can't, as we know, we can't actually scale Bitcoin. And so we have to figure out, we have to understand this whole paradigm of systems, how we're interacting, how people use the web, why they use it, what are the primitives of what we're trying to do when we connect on the web. And this is very much what inspires the Pub key design and things like the semantic social graph that we've implemented in there. Basically we want to give everybody a way to coordinate across any context, across any paradigm, and be able to connect them in a peer to peer way. Maybe I'm getting a little off track, but. Did I answer your question? No. [00:51:26] Speaker B: No, I think you did. I think you did. I do want to do one more thing about the, the idea that scaling is I guess, kind of a red herring and that this idea of like layered protocols. Because one thing to me is that I still do. I, I agree in a couple of different contexts, but I disagree in a couple as well. And so one of the reasons I, I actually think the layered system is actually, actually is super important is in like I have shifted my thinking or my vision as to what Bitcoin is to more of this idea that it's a monetary court is that it's this way to prove and settle ownership, no matter who you are, no matter where you are, no matter what jurisdiction you are in. And the idea of something like ARK or lightning, I think we have this kind of like fantasy that everything's going to be retail, e commerce, and there's this miscalculation or a failure to recognize that E commerce and retail is not the big monetary problem. Like it's actually a really small bubble when it comes to the bigger settlement and debt issues that are happening in the world. In fact, they're like actually orders of magnitude larger. Like it. The, the problem is staggering when it comes to who owns what, who can print or just issue literally tens of trillions of dollars out of thin air and indebted a nation without actually ever giving it resources, but just inflating away. This person's money versus this person's money. And so I see Bitcoin as solving far more fundamentally. Like retail and E commerce and stuff will always be built on top of it 100%. But there will probably be a thousand different degrees of trust in all of the systems that are built on top of it. And there will be tens of thousands of systems and there won't be one. It's not going to all be lightning, it's not going to all be ark. Maybe those things are used for retail payments, but I see it more likely that those things are used to basically run. The future of what I think of as banking is that these are institutions that basically house the services and they get the trustless relationship and can extend that guarantee to customers that they don't have to worry about their government or they don't have to worry about like exactly which jurisdiction this payment is going in and out of, etc. Etc. So anyway, that's really long little rant on kind of like my perspective. But I wanted to know how you thought about that in the context of like layered scaling is. It's kind of a lost calls or wild goose chase or whatever. Is that related to kind of your thinking at all or you just, are you just in a completely different bucket here? [00:54:19] Speaker A: It's very related. I would say you're circling around the ideas similarly, using similar concepts, but I'll try to do it through my own lens. So what I believe after working on this stuff for a while is, and other things is that everything looks the same at scale. What I mean by that is, like when you look at, when you're walking and you look at the ground, you see the sidewalk and you see, you know, maybe an ant, but if you zoom in, you can't see the sidewalk anymore. You see, you know, the, the texture of the ants, armor and, you know, the grains of the sand and the concrete and this kind of thing. But when, then you zoom out again, you know, everything gets kind of reduced, right? Like less detail. And so if you think about scaling and systems the same way where like, okay, like right now we have Visa and MasterCard as like the major providers of retail payments, right? So, and then when we, when we theorize and think about what will happen to Lightning when it scales, we start thinking, the descriptions we make start sounding a lot more like that. It's like, oh, well, maybe it'll be like, you know, five or six major LSPs that act as hubs, and there'll be like maybe some sub hubs, like a hub and spoke model, you know, kind of thing. But so when you zoom out, all you're going to see is the major hubs, but when you zoom in, you're going to see people running their own nodes, things like this, right? And so I think that if Lightning, for example, were to provide the scale of Visa, it would look almost identical because the more you scale out, the closer things look similar. Kind of like how planets, they're all exactly spherical. There's only a certain range of colors they come in and a certain atmospheres that they exist in. And once they don't have that, they break apart or blow up or form or whatever, you know what I mean? And so I think that if that's true, if I'm right, that that means that the relationship here simply is complexity versus trust. And what I mean is, so every attempt to add scale to Bitcoin is an attempt that also includes adding complexity. All complexity is centralizing all centralization Brings trust. So just through pure function, not pure, maybe slightly indirect. Right? You have to logic this through. You know that every time you scale Bitcoin that you are adding trust, right? You have to, because you have to add complexity to Bitcoin to do it. You can't scale Bitcoin by making it simpler. Right? You're always adding. [00:56:57] Speaker B: You just think about Lightning and Arc like, you know, it's, it's trustless in this sense that you are, you can, you do have a credible like exit by yourself, but you are still trusting. [00:57:09] Speaker A: More importantly, look at the, look at the Ark of Ark. [00:57:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:57:14] Speaker A: Look at how lightning has evolved for Ark to now exist. In other words, at first we were going to put the whole world on lightning, the web was going to be on lightning, lightning was going to be visa, et cetera. Now we've grown up and we say, well, mostly lightning seems to be expressing through major economic hubs, mostly exchanges, some wallets, bit refill, things like this, and then the rest is just enthusiasts. So as lightning started maturing, it went more towards trust. It didn't go more towards complexity, it didn't go more towards. I mean, we did our best with user experience, right? Like we all evolved that to some degree, but like it went more and more and more towards trust. Now we have Spark, which is a little more trusted than running lightning yourself. We have Arc, which a little more centralization than lightning and also requires lightning as a dependency to even be able to pay for anything. And so all of this complexity is just ultimately saying trust plus extra steps. Right now I've logicked our way all the way to here. Can you refute? Could anybody refute that? What I've just described is trust with extra steps. Now the kind of argument that I think is correct would be. Well, John, not quite. It's not just trust with extra steps. It's more like that gradient where you say, okay, I have to trust this much, this much, this much, this much. But my argument is that that gradient is way smaller than people think it is and want it to believe that it is. And that ultimately you have a lot more impact with being good at choosing who to trust and with what than choosing than trying to figure out which complexity suits you best, which you're never going to be qualified for. So ultimately you are always, as a user 100% of the time, trusting with your scaling. You're either trusting other people to tell you that this complexity is safe, mature enough, and won't fail you. You know what I mean? This kind of thing or that the complexity won't cause so much centralization in skills and expertise of the people who can actually implement it. For example, in lightning, the quantity of lightning startups is reducing. It's this, there's, it's condensing, right? We have consolidation in the market. The quantity of people wanting to start an LSP is condensing. You know what I mean? Like all of this stuff is just centralizing and becoming more trusted over time in order to keep existing. It's not demonstrating that it's going to providing scale in a trustless way. The people that are running their own lightning node is not increasing. And so what we're seeing as how these things actually express in the real world is that more and more complexity can't actually compete with trust. That's the issue. And so we can theorize and we can design things that are hybrid and may be safer. But is it what's safer, man? Like if I can trust my mom with my money or if I can trust Ark, you know what I mean? Like, this is the question is like I know I can trust my mom. You know, there are other considerations. She's physical, unlike Ark, which is digital. And so there are other risks. But like, you know, I know I can with arc. What do I know? I know what the developers tell me, I know what the podcasters tell me. I know whatever degree to which I can audit the, the code and have the time to, tells me, which is zero for 99% of people. So, you know, so if you're in, in the room, I just ask ChatGPT. [01:00:40] Speaker B: And then I'll just trust Jabby Chat DBT. [01:00:42] Speaker A: That's actually not that, that's actually a pretty good argument because they're getting a lot better. That's true. But nonetheless, the design trade offs that I'm describing are, are real. You know what I mean? I don't think anybody's gonna, you're not going to get somebody on this show to say, oh well, technically John's wrong. Complexity doesn't cause centralization. Centralization doesn't introduce trust. I mean, come on, like you, we know how these things work. That's, that's what bitcoin taught us. So yeah, I would say that I'm describing all of this because I really, really want bitcoin to work. I want it to work so bad that I'm willing to throw away everything that doesn't meet my standards. Even if bitcoiners love it. Like, this is not some sort of, like, John thinks he's better than Everyone, John has all the answers. Everybody's stupid. Nothing. No, it's just that I am really stupid. [01:01:33] Speaker B: I'm gonna clip that out just after the John doesn't thing. And then I'm saying, look what John thinks. [01:01:39] Speaker A: Well, you also got to quote me, calling myself really stupid. But the thing is, I think I'm dumb. And when I see something that other people didn't do, I don't think it's because that I'm smarter than them. I think it's just because I just was more stubborn than them. Like I was just like, I'm not going to accept this wishy washy hand, wavy, magical, you know, narrative driven, popularity driven, meme driven thing. I'm going to ask to make sense. And so in my deep pursuit and sincere pursuit of figuring out how to scale Bitcoin and get my system that I'm trying to design this atomic economy to make sense, I've now discarded any desire to put resources into researching Bitcoin layers, to implementing Bitcoin layers, to providing Bitcoin layers as a service. Because now what I think the problem is, which for some reason nobody is actually trying to solve, that I know of in any current way, is digitizing trust, giving people all the tools they would need to do what I'm describing instead of the layers, right? And so I will introduce complexity, but it won't be to Bitcoin. It'll just be, hey, here is a mutual credit system that you can use peer to peer, where you can have credit as a paradigm with only the people you choose in an interoperable way for any money, for any denomination. You know what I mean? It doesn't matter if it's Bitcoin because what we're trying to scale is trust. We're not trying to scale Bitcoin. Scaling is trust, scaling is centralization. You don't get scale without those things. So if we know we need those things, things, what do, what tools are missing, what people, what tools do people need to be able to do them things themselves? You know what I mean? So I don't have to trust an algorithm, trust a central provider, et cetera. [01:03:33] Speaker B: Having to sell Bitcoin hurts, especially when you are certain it is going to be worth more in the future. But you can actually get access to the fiat without selling it by using a Bitcoin backed loan. Maybe this is for an emergency, maybe this is for an investment that you think will do really well, but it won't beat Bitcoin because it's monetizing or this is Actually something that you know you'll get back but the timing just isn't right. And you don't want to let Bitcoin go for that span. This is why LEDN was built. They let you borrow against your Bitcoin quickly and easily. And Bitcoin is the ultimate collateral. There is no more perfect thing to use securely in this setup and something that you can verify with their proof of reserves that they do. There are no monthly payments if you don't want you pay it off at your pace. There's no penalties for early payment. There's no finder's fee. It is quick and simple to get your funds. I think their turnaround right now is like 12 hours. And I don't know why every bitcoin company doesn't do this. Everybody who's at least holding Bitcoin for other people but they do a proof of reserves so that you can confirm that your balance is there. And something that made me really happy recently is they just cut their Ethereum loans, they cut their yield product, they cut their non custodied loans at lower rates. And so they now offer one simple hyper focused thing, custodied, secure easy Bitcoin backed loans. Use someone with a good track record who's done over $10 billion in loans available in over a hundred countries. They do proof of reserves and they've made it through the toughest times in the market without having a single problem. There's no credit check, there's no hassle. It's simple. This is why Leden IO exists. Get the value of your Bitcoin without having to sell it. Remember to read up on how the collateral works. They're really good at reaching out and making sure that everything stays balanced. Remember that Bitcoin is volatile so do not overextend. But if you know how to use it, this could be a huge benefit to your bitcoin stack and give you optionality in accessing fiat without it being that selling Bitcoin is your only option. I've been a very happy customer. Check them out. The link and details are in the description. I think there's an element too that's, that's lost. Like there's, there's a little bit of a, an additional layer to exactly what you're talking about that I think is worth delineating. And you know, kind of goes back to one of my favorite Thomas Owl quotes. Is, is he. He says there, there are no solutions, there are only trade offs and we have failed to recognize or I think we've chosen our as bitcoiners, kind of. We've said oh, we found a better trade off. But we call it. There's nothing to. We've eliminated trust. It's like no, I think we've found a vastly better trade off to trust than, than basically the old one. The old one was trust the people who control the system. But the people who control the system can profit, get astronomically off of it and you shouldn't trust them. And they've proven themselves to be distrustworthy or untrustworthy. And so in this context you trust the code, you trust the network, you trust the, the the system itself to run the rules. And in the context of something like a layered system is that it's not so much that like ARC is trustless because you have a non custodial exit. There's plenty of things that you have to trust and you have to trust that the fees aren't going to be astronomical when you're trying to exit your ARC or your lightning channel or something like that. And you have to trust that just like you said, the complexity of the code that you're actually, your version of it is actually going to be enforced. But I think the calling all of them trustless or saying this is trustless is a failure to recognize or admit that. The issue is that we value the explicit custodial trust as, as the more damaging of the trust in time of the trust in. Do I have the technical know how to actually get out of this myself? If the ARC disappears, do I trust my wallet? Do I trust the, the person that I have this UTXO with to not go offline? You know, I mean like, like there's, there's a thousand different areas in which like it's like, it's not even just a spectrum, right. It's just this big space of like all these different things that you can trust. And we've just said custodial trust. And importantly, we don't really do a very good job of delineating that it matters with how much, you know, If I'm custodian 200 bitcoin with somebody. Okay, yeah, custodial trust, absolutely. Better be top of mind for every damn thing that I think about. Like. Absolutely. But if it's $50, why is that not. Does that not garner 50 worth of concern? [01:08:27] Speaker A: It's a true nuts. Yeah. I mean on one hand, you know, from one context or one perspective you could say oh I hate wallet of satoshi because of what they do. They make it, you know, they undermine real lightning Wallets, they, they, they could rug pull, blah blah, blah. But by the same token, if you want to be real, you could say what reason should anybody care about lightning for $50 if they trust a brand that they would trust with $50 for any reason. You know what I mean? [01:08:56] Speaker B: Like 100. [01:08:57] Speaker A: And so I'm not going to try to argue with like you go to Kenya and you give a guy Wallace Satoshi as his first lightning wallet and then you want to go on Twitter and like, you know, grandstandial. But the problem is, is it's all these nuances that come with it. Like the person who made that thing for the guy in Kenya starts claiming that it's trustless or starts claiming it's this or that. And so now you have to, there's all this like narrative war and meme warring going on. So, and everybody is learning through like vibes. Nobody's actually like reading something and researching it themselves. So they're all just kind of like lazily getting this emergent understanding of everything in Bitcoin, you know what I mean? And that's just not healthy. It doesn't work. But yeah, I think that trust has a place. I think trust is okay, I guess what you were describing where you said like everything is essentially philosophically and scientifically even everything is trusted. Unless you're witnessing it in that moment, you don't know for sure it happened. That's it. And even then you don't, because our brains make things up too sometimes. So it's like literally everything is trust. [01:10:10] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:10:10] Speaker A: I do think it is more useful and okay to put Bitcoin in the category of it represents a trustless primitive. I think it is also important to bring up the nuance of oh well, you're technically trusting the devs, you're testing, trusting the miners. There's a whole bunch of things you're trusting because you didn't actually audit anything and check everything. You know what I mean? You're going off of time based trust. It's been around long enough and it hasn't scammed people, so it's good enough for me. That's trust. And so you don't actually know. I don't even know if the version of Bitcoin on any specific computer is running all of the things it's supposed to, to be trustless. But the reason why I'm okay with calling Bitcoin trustless and not trying to trust, minimize and worrying too much about that is because I think the degree is so far that it's basically binary Comparatively. Comparatively, I would say there's the spectrum of trust over here and then there's bitcoin over here. And you can say that that gap is part of the spectrum, but it's a gap. You know what I mean? There's nothing. There's nothing in there, you know? [01:11:20] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I totally agree. There's like. There's an element of. Is the language we're using useful? You know, like if. If we try to say it, describe it as trust minimized, or it's like, okay, yeah, it's. It's also trusted. Kind of like fiat it completely. It completely negates the useful means of actually comparing the two because it makes it seem like they're close when they're in totally different worlds. They don't even. They don't even exist in the same solar system. [01:11:50] Speaker A: We all know the design is meant to make it so you don't have to trust somebody else with your money or something. Or. Yeah, we're mostly not trust somebody else to. With your payments either. In other words, the miner always has to deal with the competition of another bribe. Bribe to another miner. And so that's the idea is you have the bribing and you have the trustlessness, and that's bitcoin. If you start compromising or equivocating those aspects, it's like, okay, then maybe we don't need bitcoin. I'll just start saying, well, maybe then I'll make a wholly trusted system. And if it's fully peer to peer, what's the difference? Do we need money? Maybe we all run on debt. I don't know. [01:12:29] Speaker B: I would say also one of the things you talked about Noster with kind of this, there is this like kind of Die Hard. And I've been a little bit guilty of this myself at. During certain periods of Noster history of like, Noster is the one. And I think it's this extension of. [01:12:50] Speaker A: It's okay if you say no. You don't have to say Noster because of me. [01:12:53] Speaker B: No, I. I literally go back and forth. Go back and listen to any episode where I talk about it. I promise you I didn't finish every single time. You will hear both. But we've projected this like, bitcoin is the one onto the next thing that, like bitcoiners are building or that bitcoiners are interested in is like, Noster. Noster is the one. And so. And Alex Fetzky. It's funny that you brought that up because a couple of points that you made. Alex Svetsky just had a really great article called, called Noster's Unpopular Opinions or Unpopular opinions of Noster, Whatever. I can't remember exactly, but it's like three reads back or whatever in the show. And he basically goes into all of that. Is this like this, this is the web. This is a protocol at a different layer. And this is not going to work out where, like, everybody's just using one. It's just, it's just not the same space and it's not the same way to think about it. So I'll just basically refer everyone in the audience to that because I think it's. But kind of mirrored your thoughts and expanded on all those ideas. And I thought he did a great job with that article. [01:13:58] Speaker A: I thought I read it, but I read an article from him that was similar, but it seemed like it was from March or something. And so I wasn't sure if he was, because I was gonna, when I was reading it, I was like, I was saying, oh, he must have been. [01:14:08] Speaker B: Watching back in March. I think, I think it could have been a little. [01:14:12] Speaker A: It might be because I only saw it recently and I was thinking, oh, when I was reading, I was thinking, oh, he must have seen my behavior on Nostr. Now he's saying he's like putting it into, like human terms instead of being an animal like me. And, and, but then I looked at the date and I saw that it was for March. So he actually behaved that way before me on Noster, at least. So, yeah, I agree. I think, and I hinted at that earlier, which is that, like this tribalism aspect where you can't think derivative from Bitcoin. Everything can't be like the one protocol to rule them all, all the copies are evil. You can't just be, just apply that to everything. You start applying people. Some bitcoins want to apply it to layers, they want to apply it to soft fork proposals, they want to apply it to web protocols, they want to apply it to hardware, wallets, to diets. You know what I mean? It just becomes like, we, we are the chosen ones. And because we are so genius that we saw Bitcoin before some other people did, that means we see all things before other people do. And you know, like, it's, it's insane. But that, that very much is what happens in Noster. [01:15:19] Speaker B: But it's true, though. [01:15:23] Speaker A: I, I'm not gonna tease you because I have said very similar things sincerely in the past with like, I, I, I, well, not sincerely, somewhat joking that like, things like bitcoiners are always right. Well, bitcoiners have been right for, you know, 10 years or whatever. Like, it's. There's a truth to it and just. [01:15:40] Speaker B: That there's a small category of thing where you can kind of say that's true, but it's. [01:15:46] Speaker A: I would argue it's actually the opposite. [01:15:47] Speaker B: Applied slightly more broadly. [01:15:50] Speaker A: Yeah, bitcoiners think they're geniuses, but what they don't realize is that bitcoin is actually super fucking easy to understand. And the reasons why people like it are even easier to understand. And so the. You weren't a genius. I'm not a genius. Anybody that came after, like, 2011 is not a genius. I'm sorry. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you're late. [01:16:11] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [01:16:12] Speaker A: You know, like, and. And everybody after that is just more late and doesn't make you better than them or smarter than them. It just makes you luckier than them, honestly, because it's. It's a pretty simple concept. Number go up. Oh, if I buy this, the number is probably going to go up. Oh, and it's been going up for 15 years. Oh, that sounds pretty cool. Let me. Let me dig in. And then from there, everything is juice. Yeah. And so, yeah, I don't think we're geniuses. I think we're barely geniuses on bitcoin. And I think that the people we think are geniuses in bitcoin are barely what we think they are. And so we need a lot more humility, a lot more embarrassment, a lot more conservativism, et cetera. But, yeah, nostr. Especially nostr. People, please just think about this. You really think that we got the whole web right? Just because we used bitcoin keys and we're going to send our data to as many nodes that will take it? Like, that's. That's not enough. It doesn't actually fix the problems. It doesn't fix censorship. It doesn't fix discovery, search. It doesn't fix it. [01:17:13] Speaker B: I want to ask you about something. So this is what I talked about before the show. We hadn't even got to it yet, but running a business, getting into development first, a little bit of, like, your history there. But, I mean, obviously I've been running the show as a business, but it was a little bit more like I kind of fell into it. I didn't make, like, the active decision to. For. I mean, I wanted to be successful, obviously, but I was just kind of like, doing a thing that I was used to doing. Like, I have always worked in media I've always done. I've always read, like, everything that I could get my hands on and explained it to people. Like, that was just kind of like my thing. So the whole podcast and the show just like, was a natural extension of that. I just turned on a mic, you know. But this going into a development project is. I'm. I continue to make progress, but as you talked about with Paykit, you mentioned, I think this was before the show is that you've rebuilt it. Like, you've kind of gone back to the drawing board, so to speak, to. To realize the. The real direction you wanted to go or how it actually ought to fit into things. And I've done very much the same thing with our project, like, three or four times to get what I want out of it. And so I wanted kind of your perspective on, like, actually we'll start with something more concrete and simple. Is what's the worst thing? What's the thing that drives you most crazy and makes you feel the most. What the hell am I doing? About. Any time that you've run a business or in synonym or whatever it is, what's the thing that kind of like sits as weight on you? Because there's a number of various weights that sit on me while I do all of this stuff. And I'm just kind of curious if. If what your experience is. I guess. [01:19:14] Speaker A: It'S hard. Like, like I mentioned earlier, like, it's something I probably have a lot to say about but not a lot of people ask about. So I don't have a lot of prepared, like, rants. [01:19:23] Speaker B: Sure. [01:19:24] Speaker A: Like I usually do. So what I'll say is, yeah, things that we're doing live, managing emotions of the team and the overall, like, all right, so we're a team right now of 25 people and at different sizes, you. You witness different things. You know what I mean? Like, a team of five people is much, much different than a team of 15 people is much, much different than A team of 25. I know these only seem like small differences, but there's, you know, I've never managed a team bigger than this, so I can't tell you, like, what happens at 100 or a thousand or 20,000. But, you know, there's definitely. I anticipate much change in how you would manage such companies just from the change I see at these levels. Levels. And one thing that does come up is like a big part of my job on and off, not always is like a social management aspect or a, you know, you want to make sure people don't feel that they're. You want them to have ownership in what they do, to have pride in what they do, to be motivated, to not be triggering each other to collaborate. All of the nuances of collaborating, like criticism, taking criticism, giving criticism, the words you choose when you do so, the timing, you know, the how researched you are and whether you're going to insult someone by mentioning something that's been mentioned 10 times before. The having deadlines and trying to meet all these deadlines when you have multiple teams and multiple projects that are out of sync and then trying to figure out how to correct those things. Project management, there's a lot, man. And when the nature of our company, you know, as far as this company goes, we're sort of like a lab where we do a lot of R and D, but we go from beginning to end. We don't just do research, we don't just do an implementation proof of concept. We build the whole product from beginning to end and run it live. And so when you combine those things, you need people that can work very independently. You need people that you can trust a lot of people, you need people that are self motivated, have a little bit of management skill on their own, project management, things like this. Know how to keep priorities straight. See, when priorities aren't straight, I don't know, man. Recruiting. Recruiting is a real pain in the ass. When you get to around 20 people or so, you get to the phase where you have someone leaving, now you have people leave the company. You know what I mean? In other words, you have so many people that there's going to be some natural turnover. And so if you have people leaving maybe every quarter or so and you're trying to hire and increase the size, but the people that work for you are the ones doing the recruiting, not recruiting agency. It's very difficult to scale up because now you're trying to. Now these guys have to hire, help you hire, they have to help the new guy on board. But meanwhile, you know, some guy from some other team quit and you've got to fill that role. And so there's a large, you know, g. Large problem to deal with hr, which has nothing to do with the fun stuff, right? Like you don't want to worry about, you want to build things, design things, ship new features, honestly like that, that while you want that to be most of the work and for the first few years I made it a lot of the work, it probably should be a lot less of the work, it should be a lot more time focused on grinding, shipping Things than bike shedding, you know, undoing things and redoing them. It's just a lot of balancing act because sometimes you have to. I mean, we've had stuff that we worked on for months and just threw the entire thing away at the end. Never even open source. It just threw it away, you know, and moved on to the next thing. Sometimes you have to do that. I don't know, maybe there's something there you want to stick your fork in. [01:23:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm curious about culture, actually, because this is a big, such a big issue today, just in general. And then you. Actually there's. There's something, I think recently there's. I think it was you talking about, like posting stuff on blue skies or removing stuff from blue sky and. [01:23:35] Speaker A: Because I don't want to get. [01:23:36] Speaker B: Just because of everybody. Because you don't want to get shot. That's exactly right. And so, like, I mean, it's not. [01:23:43] Speaker A: A joke, it's serious. But yeah, I know. Like, think about how mad I got people on Noster and imagine if I got blue sky people that mad. [01:23:53] Speaker B: Oh, Jesus Christ, I don't even want to. But like, how do you, how do you judge and, and think for that? Like, do you, do you kind of hire for political culture in, in some way? [01:24:11] Speaker A: Like, we have never. I don't. I'm not gonna say we'll never will. I mean, other than that, in, in the illegal sense, there are certain things you can and can't consider. Consider when hiring people. Although we do work as contractors technically, so it's more of a contract between us than, you know, typical employment situation. We don't do anything to actively manage culture for the most part. There have been maybe one or two times where we have not hired someone because we thought they wouldn't fit in, or their ego seemed like they might be a little crazy or something like this. But we also had ones get in and we didn't figure that out until they got in. We had like, straight up textbook narcissist guy where like within the first week he was fired because he was just literally telling people, I know everything. You know what I mean? And so it's like you don't catch everything either. But yeah, as far as culture, I don't think you have to actively manage it too much with hiring. At least I haven't had to. I'll be candid and say maybe in large part because we don't hire Americans and that that is a lot of where the culture drama has emerged. And so mostly we've Got, I mean, we have people from like, I don't know, I don't even know how many countries now, maybe 17 different countries on our team. So we have like everywhere in Europe. We have Mexico, we have Brazil, we got people all over the place, but mostly European. So that is also a cultural aspect in that there's not a lot of culture clash in our team. A lot of us come from either bitcoin or peer to peer web kind of stuff. So there is a decent overlap in culture. Despite the diversity of our geolocation, we're all men as well. So that could be another factor. So that I think that's a much different environment than a mixed environment. You know, whether people like that I say that or not, I think it's true. [01:26:10] Speaker B: We. [01:26:10] Speaker A: But we also haven't actively not hired a woman. It's just that we haven't had, you know, very many women apply at all and then qualified ones for the jobs we have. It's almost zero. It's very, very rare. [01:26:22] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:26:23] Speaker A: And so I don't know what to do about that. But I'm not gonna like actively seek out women. [01:26:30] Speaker B: Spend time on. It's just, just is what it is. [01:26:33] Speaker A: I don't care what you are. I want people that are interested in what we're doing and wanting to work here. We have, we have a really like. I know it's hard for people to believe because I'm obviously biased, but like what we have at synonym is like super, super blessed. Like to be able to like do what I described, doing R and D, trying to build the atomic economy and solve society with technology. Like, this is not something you normally are able to work on. This is stuff you dream about being able to. Like I always, when I was young, my dream was like, I just want to wake up in the morning, go somewhere with like the people that like, I respect and just create amazing things. And whether that, you know, at different stages in my life that meant something different. Like could have been making a comic book or, you know, printing something or making a website. But in the end, like, that's what I want. That's what I have right now. And I want it for as long as possible, as big as possible and as much impact as possible. So sorry, I'm ranting, but yeah, culture now, Culture within the team, like actively day to day. I think the only things you really have to manage is degrees of aggression. Some people are more comfortable, you know, being highly critical and aggressive and forward. Some people are more comfortable being spoken to more politely and being Less excited, and you know what I mean, this kind of thing. So not everybody has the same degree of aggression, and so you have to be a little bit careful with egos. But I do think that that's entirely manageable, even with only men around. I think it is. But it doesn't mean you're not going to have problems. You're going to have issues. You're going to have people complaining about what this guy did or didn't do or said or didn't say or what this decision that they thought was a different decision, or I said this to them, but they didn't. But this guy said that there's always something. Not always, but there will be things. But overall, it's been pretty good. I haven't had, like, real cultural issues of, like, any kind to do with, like, gender or politics or. Closest thing is we had a guy that was really, really severely in support of Palestine and against Israel and this kind of thing. And his. His Twitter feed could be a bit. Little intimidating at times, but he doesn't work here anymore, and we never did anything about it because it just didn't actually ever affect us. And so it was what it was, you know. [01:28:57] Speaker B: Yeah. I'm curious, and you may have sort of just addressed this, but I'm curious what your favorite thing about it is. Like, what. What keeps you going with this. [01:29:11] Speaker A: I'll start by saying, sometimes it's hard sometimes. Sometimes I don't want to keep going. Sometimes I start trying to fantasize about what it would be like to stop going and just be like, I've been. [01:29:21] Speaker B: There, 100% been there. [01:29:23] Speaker A: What if I just didn't do it anymore? You know, like, what would it look like? Like, what if I just, like, hired another CEO and trained him and you know what I mean? Like, this kind of thing. And I don't think I could do that. But there are days that you feel that way for sure, where you just want to stop. How do I keep going? I would say that there are also days where it's just like, okay, we finally got to show the world a glimpse of what we're doing, and they saw it the way we intended them to see it, and they're excited. That's what we're trying to do. Nothing to do with making money, very little to do with that. It was my idea so much as that, that we did it together. I do. I really make an. I know I can. I make an effort to, like, not to try not to say my eye. This kind of thing when I'M talking about our work. Sometimes I slip that. But it really is like, I make every opportunity I can to give ownership, and I try to teach the team to also learn how to do that, because you can't collaborate without compromise. And that means giving somebody their way sometimes. And so knowing when to give away ownership, to just give away the pride, you realize that what you end up having is the pride of everybody. Like, I can be proud of everything. You know what I mean? Like, if, if my web dev is proud of something, well, now I'm proud of it because it's mine too. I didn't do it. He did it. But now we're both, we both get to be proud because I gave away the pride. I said, you know, like, I can't always do that and I don't always remember to do it, but I do think it's important and to choose your battles and know when to just give the other person their way, you have to do it sometimes. Especially with things that are, like, entirely subjective. [01:31:08] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. There's a couple different. And I know we're, we're a little bit on time. I think the construction guys need me, but so I'm, I'm debating about which way to go because there are still numerous threads that I would like to pull on. But in. On, on the business side, let's say, like, or I'll agree with something, is the, the thing that kind of keeps me going is that I love, I love seeing it, you know, like the, for the months that something doesn't work or we've got this stupid problem or we felt like we've gone in some just really bad direction and then we scrap it and then go back and I'm like, what the hell am I doing this for? You know, like, how, how long is this going to take? But then, like, I kind of get to touch it and we kind of get to see what it could actually be like. And one thing about the. You talk about the atomic economy and there are a couple of pieces of, like, what you guys are building that I feel like I can see the vision for. Like, I can see pub keyring and like, everything, like, my interaction with that, like, like, I get it and I want it all over the place. I, I can begin to see Picar, at least in my perspective. I see it as like, contacts or whatever in this kind of, like, additional space in the web, so to speak, or this, this additional way that I'm interacting with the web. But I've always had this, this little barrier with the whole atomic economy. Because I, I conceptually understand it. Like, I technically understand like the value of it. But in when I go back, like I was listening to Steve Jobs, I have a few things that I'll go through when I'm like looking for clarity. There's like a set of like talks and conversations and questions and answers that I saved from a bunch of different people. And one of them that I love from Steve Jobs is the, the one where this guy like insults him, talking about like, like why didn't you use Open Docs and all of this stuff to do this thing? And he talks about like, it's not about the technology, it's about the user experience, it's about how they interact with it. And then that was kind of the thing with the original iPhone is right there was this vision of like you just, you just, you just play in the world of your phone in this, this web environment on front of you in a device. And I feel like I still don't have a vision of that. In the context of the atomic economy specifically, what is that vision, so to speak. [01:33:52] Speaker A: If I give you a link, can you screen share or if I give you a file, can you screen share it? Maybe. [01:33:56] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks. [01:33:58] Speaker A: Or maybe you could add it to the video later. [01:34:01] Speaker B: I can add it to the video later if at. At work. [01:34:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I'll give it to you later, I imagine. Actually I need to give it to you private so you can see it too though. [01:34:10] Speaker B: Okay, Put it in the studio. Chat right here, over on the side. [01:34:15] Speaker A: Okay. So you mentioned, you know, that it not being quite clear what I'm talking about and I've been referring to the atomic economy since the first year of synonym. The truth is that our mission and vision haven't actually changed other than becoming more clear and maybe a little more specific. But I was always trying to do this as far as synonym goes. And so what you're looking at here is an attempt to show the actual flow of the atomic economy and what the pieces of it are. So as a starting point, what I'll say is as I mentioned earlier, the atomic economy is in synonyms. Mission is to research, design and ship a working free market society. So not just a free market economy, but a free market society. So what needs to be. So this is supposed to. This chart is supposed to represent the minimum amount of pieces to basically have society, but only through a digital system. So it replaces government, it replaces big tech, it replaces big banks, it replaces Visa, MasterCard, you know, everything you could do, everything you would want to do in a network is represented here as part of the economy. And the reason why it's called the atomic economy is because atomic means the smallest, most reduced piece, right? And so we try to reduce the design to the minimum quantity of elements. In other words, we know we need some way to represent identity, some way to find things, some way to pay people, right? Like there's a minimum quantity of things. And so atomic is saying we're reducing it not only to the minimum quantity of roles, reducing it to its base, but we're also making it something that is user centric. So the individual, you know, atoms of the system are the peers and thus they have control. Everything derives from them. User first, local first, all those concepts, right? And then atomic economy, not just because of the concept of an economy and spending money, but the concept of economics in the abstract. And that it must be an efficient system, like a circular economy, right? So there must be, within this system, there must be a loop. There must be some way that you have a feedback loop where things continue to cycle and change and improve. And that's what economy is, that's what evolution is, that's what competition is, right? And so all these things need to be represented. You have to have these functions of society at a very fundamental level. And so what the atomic economy is is just saying, okay, bitcoin made us think about this. It made us say, oh, well, if we could have bitcoin, maybe we could have quote, unquote, hyper bitcoinization, which is everybody using the same money, everybody using it to pay. And then bitcoin just took this to mean, like all the things I'm talking about here. They think bitcoin can fix the government, can fix banking, right? They think it can fix all incentivization. Now, in my opinion, we went too far. These were naive and these were fantastical. But I think if we come back down to earth and try to take that vision and turn it into something that might actually ship, that might actually work, that's what this is. This is hyper bitcoinization spelled out, except real, except not a fantasy. And so it's not necessarily bitcoin centric. It's using bitcoin as an example. So now I'll walk you through it. Sorry if this is taking too long, but let's start in the middle. In the middle, you see there a black box that says wallet, keychain, that element. And you'll see on the left, there's like a key there that says what each color represents the black Boxes are the identity layer. The red boxes are payment and settlement. The red, I mean, sorry, the green is the application layer and the blue is the data layer. And so you kind of know, like, these are the four kind of categories of roles that are in the system. So when you're looking at this chart and you'll see within this chart there is a loop, right? And so. Well, there's more than one technically, but you'll see why. Yeah, there's. There is a core loop in that everything goes from the user through the network through some sort of payment back to the user. That's. That's the, the core loop of it, the economy, right? And so anyway, you start in the middle with, with a key, you know what I mean? In Noster, that's your nsec. In Bitcoin, it's your public key. In pub key, it's your pub key. And these keys are stored in a wallet, right? So this block just represents the keychain. It's just saying that you need to have keychain, you need to have something, you have keys. So that's a primitive of the system, is this key based. And then if you go down to the next thing, it tells you what kind of key you are. An ED21559 key. And there are reasons for this I won't get into right now, but they're justified. Then from there you go to the right signed DNS. So we talked about this in the show already, Picard. You sign a DNS record, you use PKDNs, you make. Make the public key addressable resource record, which is just another term for, you know, the DNS record. Our way, you put that DNS record in mainline dht, which is the main source of centralization and censorship resistance in this network, right? And so now that you have, you've taken your key, you've signed a DNS record, you've placed it in mainline dht, which is millions of nodes across the world. Now it sits there, right? And so you see below it you have PKDNs, but it's pointing to mainline DHT, right? So PKDNs can now fetch any type of endpoint. It basically takes your key and it knows where to find anything you want them to find through PKDNS. Now, who uses PKDNS? Well, PKDNS also, for one, serves home servers. It lets them be able to go and find the data and which home server, the data lives, which home server, where to put the data, et cetera, up. And so the Home servers act as a data layer in addition to the indexers you see to the left. Now the indexers represent, basically they're the source of efficiency in the centralization of the system, the scale of the system. Basically, they give you the ability to aggregate data from any disparate list of keys and things like this to create some view of the graph of the system. And that view could, you could use it as a feed, you could use it as a coordination mechanism, like which network I'm working with, which people to include, which posts to include, which files to include, which orders to include, whatever you want sorted through our semantic social graph. So our indexers are a very specific type of indexer, but the indexer represents the role of creating inefficient location for the data for applications. So the applications can be quick, despite being also censorship resistant. Unlike other solutions, it also fills the role of like, like Google, in other words, search engines. And finding things beyond it isn't just about, you know, sorting a social feed. It's about all URLs. Inside of our indexer is basically keys, tags and URLs and they all can point to each other with tags. So I can tag a key or I can tag another URL and I can create a graph of relationships. [01:41:44] Speaker B: Do tags live? Do they like carry with the user and like the home server and the stuff that's stored so they get aggregated just like. [01:41:53] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, they're just, they're just part of your data set. And so just like you would have, your data would be posts. Each post is technically a file somewhere, and that means it's a URL somewhere. And so your tags live in a specific place in your home server where any application could find them and use them, or any indexer could go and grab them to compile their own index if they wanted to. So say, for example, like in PubKey app, say we use the tags right now and we mostly use them for curation or creating context for posts, right? But say you want to make an appellation that took that same data and used it differently, maybe it used it for sentiment and you called it, you know, sentiment key. And you made an app and you just showed sentiments, you know what I mean? And you didn't use it for categorization or such. You use it more for emotion or trends or whatever, but you could use the same data, you know what I mean? You could ignore the posts and only use the tags if you really wanted to. You could ignore the tags on posts, on URLs and only use the tags on keys and create an identity system. I mean, sorry, a reputation system. You could have multiple reputation systems. You could have them multiple schemas for the data and how you process the data, but in the end you have all these primitives there that people can use how they want. I mean, maybe I'm being a little too detailed, I apologize, but I'm going to go through all of this. [01:43:12] Speaker B: Well, I want to go. I was about to say I want to go through it anyway. Like, yeah, keep rolling through this. I want to kind of get. I'm still trying to paint this whole picture. So. [01:43:20] Speaker A: Sure. I'll rewind back to now the ED21559 key in the middle and come down from there again, you know, coming down to application. So this is like basically showing how you use your key now to authenticate with an application, which is essentially to the right, creating a home server session. Right. So instead of putting your keys in every app like Noster might do, or instead of, you know, trusting a cloud provider or like a normal website, you actually can create a session that is revocable. And so now you can set it up to allow any client application to have write access to your home server folder, whether that home server folder is on your computer or somebody else's. And so this creates this nice separation of powers and ability to organize the applications how you prefer. So you can use your ke2auth into an application and the application is working through a home server session. So that means the application doesn't actually have its own back end of data unless they actually are wanting to be a home server. [01:44:23] Speaker B: Right. [01:44:24] Speaker A: An application can entirely serve data entirely from a third party indexer. It could serve data entirely from third party home servers and aggregate it live every time. I wouldn't recommend it because you'll have worse performance, but any configuration of these things, there's no rules, you know what I mean? This is just the best practice that we're demonstrating of the minimum set of how to use this system. So there from applications to the left you'll see kind of three more green things. Marketplaces, search and discovery, social media and subjective algorithms. I guess I'll start at the bottom you see subjective algorithms and then there's some little details there. Social governance, reputation, web of trust, coordination. These are basic. This is just a place to put the algorithm and the concept of matching coordination, you know, any type of sorting or creating a specific view on the indexer on the graph. And that's why it's, that's why you see the arrow going back and forth between the indexer and the algorithm because they, they, that's how it, that's how it behaves. But related to the subjective algorithms. Now we'll go up to social media. You can see now social media would apply only specific aspects of the, the algorithms. It would say, okay, I'm looking to, you know, create content, I'm looking to curate content, I'm looking to connect content with keys, right? You go up one level from that. And the reason why they're, they're, they're connected in this order is intentional in that you can't actually do one without the thing below it. Like, you can't have a good social media system without some solution for filtering the data into a feed of things. [01:46:05] Speaker B: The user wants, like a web of trust or reputation and curating it for. [01:46:09] Speaker A: The user or choosing an indexer. You could even do it centralized. Like you could have just, I use this indexer for my search. I use that indexer for social media. Like, you know, I am speculating into the future. This is not, you know, all of this stuff is how it could work if a lot of people use it right now it's still being built out and we're the only ones serving it for the most part. So, yeah, from social media now you have the ability basically to do matching. You can match keys with keys and match keys with URLs because of the tagging and the context that you can apply above that you have search and discovery in general. So now you can do, like I mentioned, not just matching of posts and users of people you want to follow, but matching of tags to URLs just like Google search. In other words, this is all one, like, it's all flat. Like using this, the way you would use it for Google search is the same process as using it, as you would use it to choose which pageoing people you want to coordinate with is the same process as choosing as which feed you want to see. It's all a graph query sent to the indexer saying, show me this view and here from these keys, from these tags, from. You know what I mean? However you want to filter it and then at what distance. So you can say, okay, I want every, everybody that I follow that is these tags. You know what I mean? But I want also the people that they've tagged those tags. Or I want also the people that they've tagged as human. Or I want also the people that, the people that I want everybody John has tagged and then all the people they have tagged and so you can create any view. And it's not just people, it's URLs. And it's not just pub key URLs, it's, it's any URL. So it could be a google.com URL, a noster URL, a bluesky URL, it doesn't matter, it's just a string of a URL and the application is the one that has the problem of whether it can render it. [01:48:06] Speaker B: Right. [01:48:07] Speaker A: And so then up from search and discovery, now you have marketplaces, which is you need, you know, the, the aspect of people interacting. You need all, pretty much all the features you need in social media. You also need in marketplaces, instead of posts in a feed, you have orders in a feedback. Instead of sorting by the theme of a post, you're sorting by specifics like size and color or, you know, depending on the context of the marketplace, right? Or, you know, the reputation of the provider, whatever it may be. You need some ability to continue to do the matching layers below. And so now once you have marketplaces established and all of these primitives, you have the basic concept of an offer. You know, just somebody being able to post something for sale and somebody being able to buy it, right? You need that as a primitive within the system. And so you'll see there it says pub key locks. This is a future capability that's coming. Basically, PayKit is going to integrate with PubKey. So payments will be kept peer to peer, but proofs will be provided to the server to unlock the data. So the only trusted aspect is that the server will only unlock the data when you provide the proof. And that's only trusted if you don't host it yourself. Right, but it removes the providers, it commoditizes providers to basically being cloud providers that have to do their job. And if they don't do their job, you can fire them and either do it yourself or hire someone else and you lose nothing. Like when you change providers, when you get kicked off of Twitter and now you can only use Facebook or when you get cast on Twitter and you have to make a new account, there's no migration. You don't get to keep all your followers, you don't get to keep your history. There's no, there's no continuity. That's not true in PubKey. You just, you just update your BKDNs and as long as there's a mirror of the data somewhere, there's no change. So there for now, going up from offers, we go all the way back to the top which is you need a payments layer. And in my philosophy, as I, as I hinted to you earlier, that payments layer would actually be credit based, not a, not lightning, I mean necessarily. And then below that you would have a settlement layer. So in the payments layer, I have credit routing here. A project that we're working on now, we've started working with a core developer to design Atomicity, which is a peer to peer mutual credit system that is in our design is what will be used as the payments layer, as the scale. As you know, all of the coordination of transactions that happen day to day would be happening in a trusted way. And then underneath that system is integrated with the settlement layer system. So you have basically going to have Atomicity at the top integrated with PayKit. And so while you're dealing in credit with all your friends and the businesses that you normally work with, people that have relevance to you, whenever you do want to basically settle out, you, you'll be able to basically send a request, you say, okay, I want to actually settle. You know, and you can call in your credit, call in your debt, et cetera, and level out your books this way. And so what PayKit does is allows you to have a direct access to all of the payment endpoints for the user that aren't Atomicity. So in other words, if the user is using Lightning or Bitcoin, which you can see below, right, you see settlement layer, which you know, which is where payket sits. And then below that you have Bitcoin, Lightning or any agreed settlement layer, right? Yeah, I could agree, I could say, hey guy, you owe me 25 bananas. Can you send it to me in dollars on PayPal? And you say, okay, I'm gonna give you $20 is, is what I agree on for that value. And I say, okay. And now I sign something and your debt settled with me. You have a proof that you've settled the debt with me. And I, and you paid me on PayPal. You know what I mean? [01:51:58] Speaker B: So you basically you, you produce signed receipts for all your interactions because you. [01:52:04] Speaker A: Have a. Yeah, literally like the tab. It's tabs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? It's just saying let's actually have a cryptographic intentional tab system and let's combine it with, you know, keep in mind the context of the indexer is still included here. So when you are trying to coordinate things and decide who you want to give credit to, you know, whether I'm going to trust, oh, you know, guy Owing me 25 bananas or not, I can Help determine that. Now, in a granular way, based off of the whole tagging system, I can say, well, there's. I see here that guy, you know, some, some guy I trust says guy didn't pay him when he ordered bananas. So I'm not going to give, I'm not going to let him owe me bananas. [01:52:43] Speaker B: I'm not telling people out of bananas, man. [01:52:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm going to tell him, yes, bananas. [01:52:48] Speaker B: I love my bananas, by the way. [01:52:51] Speaker A: I don't care. But you might want to be careful with saying jipping. [01:52:55] Speaker B: Okay, so. Okay. I want to give you my, like the picture that I see in my head when, when you walk me through all of this and tell me if this is kind of part of the vision that you're going for here. And this is in line with how I kind of see the, the magic of like pub key ring and Picar and like what it can actually do or PKDNs, you know, kind of the same. The flip side of that same coin is. So you're trying to separate the host, like what, what the data. How you retrieve the data and where the data is and the categorization of it from the person that you view the data through. Because, like, right now, if I'm on like Etsy, I'm just, I'm going up on Etsy and it's everything that's posted directly to Etsy. Etsy owns all of the marketplace and all of the data and of the payments and everything. And if I go somewhere else, all of it's gone. It's. It's either on Etsy or not. It's trapped. Same thing with social media, same thing with every website. Like, this is the same environment with every single thing that we have, regardless of the type of data. It's a, it's a walled garden, it's a silo over and over and over again. And you know how, like when you look at a file system and I'm like, I can do a list view and I can do, I can look for only images and I can do a what's the. What's the thing? Slideshow view or whatever and I can do a big icon view. Is that the, that relationship is. It doesn't actually. Exactly. That doesn't actually do anything to the file system. It's just a different way of looking at it. And basically the web would become those different views. They don't control the information. They're not the source of truth or where it's stored. They do store it again as an indexer. To make it available to you, but it's actually the user that you're saying, oh yeah, this view is actually accurate. And so when I click on my thumbnail view or whatever, like my icon view of quote unquote, the web, or my, my marketplace view of it, it, I'm getting stuff. Etsy might just do one type of thing, and eBay might do just one type of thing, and, and Reddit Marketplace might do one type of thing, but underlying, it's all pulling from all the various places from where the users say to pull from. And so they aren't sources of truth, they're just windows. They're creating a window that I look through to see what they think is the best way to look at this, so that we have a million different ways to compete on what it looks like and what data to pull and who to trust and where to go. But underlying it all is us making the decisions on what that information is. Is that, that was a pretty long explanation, but is that, is that what you're. You're getting at? [01:56:02] Speaker A: Yeah, that's correct. I, I still struggle with that. People want to look at PubKey App, the beta app that we have at PubKey App, which is currently a private. At beta. They want to say social media. Even in my team, there were times where it was like, John, why are we prioritizing social media? Like, you know, as far as our mission. And as I just walked you through that chart, you saw that, like the things that you need to do, social media, the primitives as you, you know, as you've now identified, you need the same primitives to do all the things on the web. You need to figure out who you want the data from, which data, you know, it's all the same. And so PubKey app is mostly at a browser. I can't call it a web browser because it's technically a web app. I can't call it a file browser because it's technically a web app. But your example that you brought up was perfect, where you said, when I do a file search, I can sort by type, I can sort by cat even. You can even do tagging in File Explorer and things like this. You can sort by all of the metadata of the file and you could even change how you look at the preview of the file, whether it shows the whole file or a small version or maybe a short description. And now you get into saying, oh, that's a lot like how Google works. Oh, Google will show me. You know, there's a headline primitive, there's the thumbnail. There's the short description, there's the link to if I want to see more. It's all the same, it's all the same shit rearranged. Like I said earlier, there's no difference between preparing your view of, of SERPs or preparing a review of a social media feed. It's all just files in a certain order of a certain filter. And so that's actually what PubKeyApp is trying to do, is trying to provide the interface for showing and rendering all of these things and connecting users with all these things in every way possible. We haven't given them every way that is possible yet. There's so many, but it's just, it's the proof of concept, the first stage to show oh, here is basically the most obvious use case of how you would use this in one of the most popular use cases. But it isn't our actual mission. Our mission is more about the economy part, more about the marketplaces part. So when we start putting in the ability to say lock a post and you have multiple types of locks, now you have E Commerce, that's the primitive you need there. But as you hinted, you could definitely have a system in pubkey where orders or offers or bounties or some sort of primitive that emerged in one app, you know, say PubKey app. Like we make these, we call them, say we call them orders and now we have a schema for it. How you make an order, what it looks like, you know, this kind of thing, but in the end everything else, you can still tag it, it still is a file somewhere on a home server. But maybe our schema is simple enough that everybody uses it. And so the idea you described where you could literally had the same underlying data living in a thousand different places, in other words a thousand different users using a thousand home servers and they are the authorities of that data and you could be pulling that data and you could assemble Etsy, you could assemble Amazon, you could assemble Vinted, like every specialized type of E commerce or marketplace you could build from the same data, just simply display it differently, Give the people different filtering tools, give the let some apps will maybe help people use AI to help create graph views. That's another thing we're going to research is how can we use natural language to create graph views. Like if I literally say to pubkey, show me all of the people that like John the most and now the AI is going to interpret that and say, oh, who follows John? Who responds to him? It's going to choose the metrics you Know what I mean? And it's going to spit back to you either a report or a feed that you can view, you know what I mean? And so there's a lot, a lot of power there. Once you realize that like, okay, like the graph is there and it's very powerful. But how do people interface with it? Well, now we have AI. AI can parse tags, it can find tags that are similar, you know what I mean? One problem we have with PubKey is that tags, there's a lot of the same tags, tag. Like you could have the plural of the tag, misspellings of the tag, multiple language of the tag, you could have synonyms of the tag, but you can. [02:00:28] Speaker B: Aggregate similar tags, right? [02:00:30] Speaker A: At some point you're going to need AI to be like, show me all the bitcoin posts from this week and it's going to know Bitcoin tag, BTC tag, btc, USD tag, bitcoin mining, you know what I mean? And so there's a lot of power here. We just have to get our get. [02:00:45] Speaker B: Dude, you could do that with a dumb lightweight LLM too. Because what you're using it for is pure semantic relationship. Like it's not even. You don't need any like huge context or complexity or anything. You just kind of like it's a. [02:00:58] Speaker A: Little bit the reverse. But we have a bot right now called Tag Key that someone made. And Tag key is just a bot that uses AI to read the post and it tells, it tells the AI, categorize, find, choose three one word tags for this post that could be used for organization, categorization, filtering. When you're reviewing the post, do not do this, do not do that, choose tags that are categorical only. You know what I mean? Like, and then the, then the bot, all the, you don't see any of that. All that happens is you make a post, you tell the, you tell the bot to follow you. And then every post you post, it goes and reads it and it does that process and it puts three tags on it. [02:01:39] Speaker B: Oh my God. So this is something that I, so early on when we were talking about this, like, like one of the things that I saw was this concept of social organization of like using the crowd to like organize and stuff. [02:01:54] Speaker A: Now this is AI, not a crowd, but. [02:01:56] Speaker B: Yeah, no, no, no, no, I know, I'm, I'm just. [02:01:58] Speaker A: Because there's fears here too, right? Because AI is centralized too. [02:02:01] Speaker B: No, here's the thing, here's the thing about this is the crowd because someone built that bot with a particular AI. That has a particular. [02:02:07] Speaker A: Oh, there'll be many bots to organize. [02:02:08] Speaker B: A different way and I can choose which one to use and everybody can choose. Like, okay, this is a high rated bot. This is a low rated bot. This is a highly political bot. This is a, this is an unbiased bot. You know, that sort of thing. [02:02:22] Speaker A: Just like people. Right? [02:02:23] Speaker B: It's just exactly, just like people. But that you have this, you have this open space where the communication can freely happen and organization can occur without me even being a part of it. And that's like making sense. Like filters on the web are, are really where I think the core of innovation is, is needed in the next. You know, because this, this flood, this literal avalanche of data and information, all of this stuff, it's like, how do you curate, how do you filter, how do you create, how do you establish trust and connections? Like, this is such a huge thing. And, and I've loved it like that. I actually immediately. So this is actually already on pub key. Like I could, I could follow it. [02:03:09] Speaker A: It's called tag key. [02:03:10] Speaker B: Okay, Tag key, follow tag. [02:03:13] Speaker A: Oh, actually there's, there's like a little string if, if you make a post that's like slash follow and then you tag at tag key. You'll see it if you look around very quickly. [02:03:21] Speaker B: I was about to say I'll just find. I'm sure I'll see the post. But dude, I really wish I didn't have to go, but I actually have to. They're gonna, they're gonna leave and I know they have to ask me a question on this. [02:03:31] Speaker A: This. [02:03:32] Speaker B: I didn't. We didn't even really get into pay kit. We didn't get into Bitcoin treasuries. I really wanted to get your, your hot take on that chit coins. This. [02:03:42] Speaker A: Oh, and Sailor is such a piece of. But anyway, next time. [02:03:47] Speaker B: Didn't you know, weren't you on the. You were on something and somebody asked you about Sailor and I think I want to say it was a video. Were you. Did this, did this happen recently? Or am I, am I mixing two things in my brain? [02:04:02] Speaker A: I mean, I've been anti Sailor for maybe a year and I don't know how long exactly. But yeah, it became pretty clear to me basically when he unfollowed me was I started looking at him more critically because we had met and he said to me, oh, I follow everything you say. And I said, I hope not. And then eventually he realized that he shouldn't read everything I said say. But he, he did read Everything I said, apparently, because he stopped following me and didn't like some of the things I said and has never talked to me since. And I, I think that it's not, that's not important. What's important is that made me look at things more critically and little with a clearer view. And I was like, wait a minute. Like, I don't know why I hadn't even thought of it till then. But I was like, wait, this guy is just buying bitcoin and reselling it to everybody over and over. Like, he's not helping anything. He's just like, he's actually. And then I realized, wait, he might be taking the bull market from us. Because if all the hype that people of interest of new people is the bitcoin he already bought at market price, when does the price go up? Because the only way the price goes up is when people pay above market price. So if he's buying the bitcoin at market price on a loan at high liquidity and then reselling it as shares, where does the pump come in? And I just started. That started really frustrating me. And I'm thinking, okay, now it makes sense to me. I always kind of thought there's no way anybody would do something this extreme benevolently or for the sake of bitcoin. There's a very pure personal profit motive here. And it's diffused and made into a smoke screen because he says things like, when I die, my bitcoin's going with me. Well, his bitcoin is not the same bitcoin as the master bitcoin. And so there's all these little nuances that are just not realistic to me and should be skeptical about where I finally was. Like, okay, it makes a lot of sense to me. This is all just a big scam. And then immediately we started seeing more Treasuries and then we saw like icos. [02:06:04] Speaker B: Oh my God. Yeah. [02:06:05] Speaker A: And then he started making all those derivatives of his stock. And I'm like, okay, this is like, like this is definitely this market's shitcoinery. Like, this is that. This is our ico. [02:06:16] Speaker B: Okay, I love that we're gonna actually going to leave it on that note. I like this market shitcoinery. And we will come back to that because that's like an hour long conversation that we can unpack the next time you're on the show. We'll, we'll give it a few months. And I want to, I want to really like get into pay kit, but I'll give you time to, to deliver the vision that you have right now on that and then we'll, we'll roll back around to that. But dude, thank you for coming on the show. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the business stuff. I know I had a number of people, I just shared like a few things about like feeling like an idiot, but then like loving that, you know, one tiny little piece of progress was made and like just staying here for it just keep showing up. And so I really wanted to pick your brain about that. And so I, I, I appreciate that. And always, always a fan, Always love what you do. Always love the unapologetic opinion and the drama or the, the, it's not, it's not really the drama. It's the, it's the clear, unapologetic opinions. I, I, I've always put you in a boat of there's probably like 10 people that I really respect and enjoy and follow. Not because I fought, like agree with them all the time if I like, quite, quite to the contrary, but that you will still, you will just stay there in the, in the midst of mountains of hate and clearly state your opinion. And so I've always, I've always really. [02:07:43] Speaker A: Appreciate if you're ever disagreeing with me, let me know because I'll help you out, you know, that's, that's all right. [02:07:47] Speaker B: All right, all right, dude. [02:07:50] Speaker A: No, I appreciate your consideration. I appreciate you taking, taking me and our work seriously and that kind of consideration because I, it's no secret to me that my style is not always approachable or likable to some people. But I am always sincere and I think, I think you see that and I appreciate that you don't look at me as some kind of troll or something because I actually am trying really hard to actually be benevolent and help everybody as much as I can. This is not very personal for me other than I like being creative. So. [02:08:23] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, well, hell yeah, man. I appreciate it. Well, thank you guys. Anything to, I guess direct people to or I mean Obviously check out PubKey app and you know that sort of stuff. [02:08:34] Speaker A: I'll just keep it simple. PubKey app is in beta right now. If you want an invite code, ask me for it. If you think that we have an invite, you think us having an invite code means that the system is not permissionless or you want to hate pub key because we have invite codes at the moment. Yeah, fuck you. It's your problem. It's really not a big deal. [02:08:56] Speaker B: That's the best note go out on. [02:08:58] Speaker A: It doesn't affect Anything. I think anybody making any kind of software, whether it be open source, peer to peer, foss, whatever, has every right and every good reason to make their beta private and permissioned. But that's not even what's going on here. Anyway, I'm ranting more. We're trying to end this show. Please. If you want to try PubKey app, if you liked what we described, just, just tag, you know, this, this tweet or whatever, wherever you see this post or this, this video and ask for one and I'll give you one. It's, it's not that we're trying to keep anybody out, we're just trying not to get spammed to death while we're only one server. That's it. [02:09:34] Speaker B: Awesome. All right, dude, thank you so much. [02:09:37] Speaker A: Have a great weekend. [02:09:38] Speaker B: Yeah, man. All right, guys, I hope you enjoyed that episode. Sorry for the people who didn't get to see that diagram, but hopefully it kind of made sense in audio. But I will have a link to that diagram in the show notes so that you can go check it out. And of course link to the YouTube so that you can also just watch it in the context of him actually explaining it and breaking down the pieces. But there's so much stuff to check out. Picar, PubKey app, the Pub Keyring app, pay kit and the things that they are, they're building like they're. They are really rethinking how to establish connections so that the user is actually at the center and replacing all of the available tools. Everything that you need to accomplish on the web. But how could you actually accomplish it in a way where the server is actually just a service provider rather than the one in control? So if you haven't actually checked these tools out, you're doing yourself a disservice. And of course, thank you so much to our amazing supporters, to the audionauts, to the people who stream sats on Fountain FM and who boost and zap me on Nostr and who share this show out, who leave reviews. You guys are amazing. You're the reason the show actually continues and gets out there to other people, because I don't really do anything else and I appreciate it so much more than you probably know. So thank you to everyone as well as Leden Leden IO for Bitcoin backed loans. I am a very happy customer and I really love what they are doing over there. So check them out. And I've got a special link for you, Chroma as well. I'm also a happy customer. I have a handful of their different products. And I've been very serious about my light health. And you can get a 10% discount with them with Bitcoin audible. All one word. Also have a link down in the show notes. And of course, the hrf, the Human Rights foundation, their Oslo Freedom Forum, their Financial Freedom Newsletter, and everything they are doing around pulling together the news, the stories and the people and the tools to fight for freedom all around the world. You can find them right down in the show notes. That is today's episode of Bitcoin Audible. I'm Guy Swan. Thank you to John Carvalho for coming on the show and for all the things they are doing and building over at Synonym. And until next time, that's our two sets. Sam.