Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] The server owns your data, owns your account, and owns the cryptographic keys used to secure it. That last bit is obscure, but important.
[00:00:13] Cryptographic keys are how we enforce security, privacy, ownership and control in software. Not your keys, not your data.
[00:00:25] The best in Bitcoin made Audible. I am Guy Swan and this is Bitcoin Audible.
[00:00:48] 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, I am slowly but surely getting through the process of swapping keys and passwords, but holy crapola, is that not the biggest undertaking in the world? And I feel like I have to come up with an entirely new system because I like to have obviously super secure passwords and everything, but I also like to be able to rebuild them in the case of an emergency or a total loss scenario. I like to have something that's kind of like a model for creating passwords that are crazy secure and long enough to never be, you know, at risk. But when you spend a long time finding a really, really good one and now you have to change it up, it's just, just sad, super sad. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you should listen to the recent guys take. I believe it's like the last episode, actually, about the guy who broke into our room, because that will make that make sense. But today we are getting into a read to kick off the week. And this one is such a good one. This one was.
[00:02:10] I am not supposed to say that he Jedi mind tricked me and said that. You've never, you've never heard me say anything. I never recommended anything. You should just read this on the show. I wasn't even here. That cracked me up. But I'm not going to say. I'm not going to say who it was that recommended this one. And it's not the author of it. And I don't see how it matters at all. It's just way more fun for it to be a mystery for absolutely no reason. But it was a really good article and I love the framing and the thinking of how to apply or look at like, kind of network topology and how networks evolve and why certain things are possible and certain things are silly to even shoot for, and what that middle ground is and why nostr is the way it is and how it's the simplest, strongest and most resilient model accepting network, Accepting the network science as it is, as we know it to be, how do we work within that? But. But gain censorship, resistance, gain autonomy and regain control over our own networks and identities. And that nostr is kind of may very well be in that sweet spot of the best of all worlds. So I will let the author Gordon. Oh crap, I already forgot. I already forgot the name. Hold on a second. Where's my browser here? Let's bring it back up. Let's take some time. Gordon Brander Gordon Brander is our author today and he wrote a fantastic article which we will delay no longer.
[00:03:44] And it's titled Nature's Many Attempts to evolve a Noster by Gordon Brander P2P and federated protocols converge toward becoming Noster, but with extra steps.
[00:04:06] Here is the architecture of a typical app. A big centralized server in the cloud supporting many clients. The web works this way. So do apps.
[00:04:19] This architecture grants the server total control over users. The server owns your data, owns your account, and owns the cryptographic keys used to secure it.
[00:04:31] That last bit is obscure, but important. Cryptographic keys are how we enforce security, privacy, ownership and control in software. Not your keys, not your data.
[00:04:48] The architecture of apps is fundamentally futile. Apps own the keys and use them to erect a cryptographic wall around the hoard of data us peasants produce. You sign in to cross the draw bridge and the castle can pull up the drawbridge at any time, shutting you out.
[00:05:12] Centralization is the state of affairs where a single entity or a small group of them can observe, capture, control or extract rent from the operation or use of an Internet function exclusively.
[00:05:26] RFC 9518 Centralization, decentralization and Internet Standards Powerful network effects build up inside those castle walls. These network effects can be leveraged to generate further centralization, extract rents and shut down competition. We are seeing the consequences of this centralized architecture play out today as platforms like the App Store enter their late stage phase. When growth slows, the kings of big castles become bad emperors.
[00:06:04] Federation choose your server.
[00:06:08] The Internet has succeeded in no small part because of its purposeful avoidance of any single controlling entity. RFC9518 Centralization, decentralization and Internet Standards so apps are centralized. How might we fix this? Well, the first thing we could do is bridge the gap between apps.
[00:06:32] This is called federation. Users talk to the server and servers talk to each other, trading messages so you can talk to users on other servers. Now you have the benefit of choice. Which castle do you want to live in? Email works this way. So do Mastodon and matrix. My email ismail.com yours rotonmail.com we live on different domains, use different apps run by different companies, yet we can freely email each other. The Great thing about federation is that it's easy to implement. It's just an ordinary client server architecture with a protocol bolted onto the back. We don't have to build exotic technology, just exapt existing infrastructure. That's why Mastodon, for example, is just an ordinary Ruby on Rails app.
[00:07:24] But there's a wrinkle.
[00:07:28] Federated networks become oligopolies at scale.
[00:07:33] Why does this happen?
[00:07:36] Well, networks centralize over time, converging toward an exponential distribution of size, power, wealth. This centralization is inevitable. You see it on the web in social networks, airline routes, power grids, trains, banks, bitcoin mining, protein interactions, ecological food webs, neural networks and oligarchies.
[00:08:01] Network theory tells us why preferential attachment More connections means more network effects means more connections, leading to the emergence of densely connected hub nodes n to the 2 scaling if every Fed has to talk to every other Fed to exchange messages, the number of connections will scale exponentially with each additional node n times n minus 1. This leads to the emergence of hubs that can aggregate and relay world state fitness pressure. Small nodes get taken down by large spikes in traffic, while large nodes stick around. Small nodes have fewer resources, Large nodes have lots. Unreliable nodes attract fewer connections, while reliable nodes attract connections just by virtue of staying alive efficiency. Exponentially distributed networks are ultra small worlds. You can get from anywhere to anywhere in just a few hops through hubs.
[00:09:08] Resilience Exponential networks survive random failures because the chances are exponential that the node that fails will be from the long tail.
[00:09:20] This is called the scale free property and it emerges in all evolving networks. Federated networks are no exception. Take email for example.
[00:09:33] Email is not distributed anymore. You just cannot create another first class node of this network. Email is now an oligopoly, a service gatekeeped by a few big companies which does not follow the principles of net neutrality. I have been self hosting my email since I got my first broadband connection at home in 1999. I absolutely loved having a personal web email server at home. Paid extra for a static IP and a real router so people could connect from the outside. I felt like a first class citizen of the Internet and I learned so much over time. I realized that residential IP blocks were banned on most servers. I moved my email server to a VPs. No luck. I quickly understood that self hosting email was a lost cause. Nevertheless, I had been fighting back out of pure spite, obstinacy and activism. In other words, because it was the right thing to do. But my emails are just not delivered anymore. I might as well not have an email server.
[00:10:32] After self hosting my email For 23 years, I have thrown in the towel. Carlis Fenollosa 2022 we can see the outlines of a similar consolidation beginning to emerge in the Fediverse. In 2023, Facebook threads implemented ActivityPub, and it instantly became the largest node in the Fediverse. This made some people angry and led to demands for defederation. But Threads is already over 10 times larger than the rest of the Fediverse. Defederation is hardly an effective blockade. The network has consolidated Network science strikes again.
[00:11:12] At scale, Federated systems experience many of the same problems as centralized apps. That's because Feds are still futile. They own your data, they own your account, they own your keys.
[00:11:26] Large feds occupy a strategically central location in the network topology, and they have powerful influence over the rest of the network. They can leverage their network effect to pull up the drawbridge by inventing new features that don't federate or cutting off contact with other feds. So federated networks become oligopolies. We can choose our server as long as it's blessed by the oligopoly. Still, an oligopoly is better than a dictatorship email, better than Facebook. But can we do even better?
[00:12:02] P2P all peers are equal OK, for git servers, what if we could connect to each other directly? This is called peer to peer networking.
[00:12:15] In a peer to peer network, each participant runs a peer that can find other peers and send them messages. Users own their own keys and use them to sign, verify and encrypt messages. This is great. We have all the ingredients for credible exit and minimal user agency. However, peer to peer presents some tricky engineering challenges. There's no central source of truth, so various peers will have different points of view of the network state. That means we need to design for eventual consistency and the ability to merge potentially conflicting states. Other things, like timestamps, are also hard. Decentralized protocols are hard. All of this is headwind compared to ordinary app engineering. We also run into some practical networking challenges. We no longer have centralized servers. So many requests take several hops from peer to peer to peer to get to their destination.
[00:13:16] Also, peers are unreliable. They are bandwidth constrained and blink in and out of existence. Close your laptop, your peer disappears. This adds a cost to peer discovery. You dial a previously available peer, but it's gone now, so you dial another and another. Unreliable peers plus multiple hops equals long delays and occasionally the inability to reach portions of the network.
[00:13:43] But some peers are more equal than others.
[00:13:48] The same evolutionary pressures that Apply to other networks, apply to peer to peer networks, and some of them, like fitness Pressure on reliability are exaggerated by peer availability.
[00:14:02] This leads to the evolution of super peers. High bandwidth, high availability peers whose job is to serve other peers on the network.
[00:14:15] Peer to peer networks have grown to such a massive scale that performing an efficient search in the network is non trivial. Systems such as Nutella were initially plagued with scalability problems as the number of users grew into the tens of thousands. As the number of users has now climbed into the millions, system designers have resorted to the use of supernodes to address scalability issues and to perform more efficient searches.
[00:14:40] Hadler, Reagan, Russell, 2012. The necessity of super nodes.
[00:14:47] Instead of connecting directly, we connect to one of the high bandwidth, high availability super peers. Peer discovery is no longer a problem and everything is just one or two hops away. An ultra small world.
[00:15:03] Wait, that just sounds like centralization. With extra steps like Feds, super peers occupy a strategically central location in the network topology and have powerful influence over the rest of the network. Our peer to peer network has converged toward an exponential distribution network. Science strikes again.
[00:15:25] Well, but on a peer to peer network, we do own our keys. This is a big improvement. Trustless protocols are better than trustful ones. And by owning our keys we have the foundations for minimal user agency.
[00:15:38] Still, we've done a lot of hard engineering to support a flat peer to peer network that will never exist. In the end, is there a simpler way?
[00:15:51] The many attempts of nature to evolve a relay.
[00:15:56] Let's start at the end and work backwards.
[00:16:00] All networks require large servers at scale. Not your keys, not your data.
[00:16:07] Can we design a distributed architecture that admits these two facts? What might such an architecture look like?
[00:16:16] Take some ordinary off the shelf servers. Treat them as dumb untrusted pipes. Their job is just to relay information.
[00:16:26] They don't own the keys. You own your keys. You sign messages with your key, then post them to one or more relays. Other users follow one or more relays. When they get a message, they use your key to verify that you sent it. That's it.
[00:16:43] This is the NOSTR protocol. I want to claim that NOSTR has discovered a new fundamental architecture for distributed protocols. Not federated, not peer to peer relay relays. Cut to the chase. Relays are simple. They use boring technology like plain old servers. You benefit from all of the tailwinds of traditional app development.
[00:17:10] Relays take advantage of economies of scale. Big dumb servers in the cloud have high availability and high uptime. And their commodity infrastructure relays sidestep the N squared scaling problem Relays don't talk to each other, and users only need to join a small number of relays to gain autonomy. Less than a dozen. We never really hit the scale where the N squared scaling problem matters.
[00:17:37] Relays support user ownership. You own your data, your account, and most importantly, your keys. Relays are large, but they aren't in charge. If a relay goes down or shuts you down, no problem, your account doesn't change and your data is already mirrored on other relays. Credible exit Most importantly, relays are what you would get in the end anyway. It's fewer steps for the same result Looking for a good place to buy Bitcoin? A reliable and trustworthy place to do so? Looking for a good hardware wallet to use to keep your Bitcoin safe? Are you looking for the most fun Bitcoin board games that exist? Are you looking for a way to do custodial multisig to get the best of distributing trust across multiple companies, across multiple jurisdictions while getting the features and benefits of professional service? Or you're looking for really good homeschool content or fantastic resources for breaking through the nonsense that we have been taught in public school and learning. Real economics, real history, real logic. You will literally find all of this in the description of this podcast. These are links of services, companies and resources that I know personally, that I have used, that I trust, and that I recommend to people regularly and specifically for the ones that I have available. I have used my affiliate link. So they are also great ways for you to support the show. So check them out. Hopefully you'll find something really useful and maybe you'll get to help out me and support my content as well.
[00:19:24] All right. I really loved this article. I really love this article for a few different reasons. One is just the kind of natural breakdown explaining the problem and the benefit of network effects. Very simply, I really liked how it framed and just kind of admitted the reality of the network effects and understanding that what we need to do is work within it. That the idea that we're going to fight the reality and we're going to undo the natural effects of networking or we're going to find some clever way around it. I think is is just trying to deny what is. It's like spending all of your time trying to make an engine that runs on water when water is one of the most stable elements that we have, which is why it ends up being the source of life. It's not a volatile. It's not a volatile element or a molecule. It's Extremely stable. It's exactly why.
[00:20:29] Exactly why hydrogen is so volatile is because you don't have to do much for it to give off a crap ton of energy desperately trying to make itself back into water with the oxygen in the air. Maybe I took the analogy too far, but hopefully you get the idea is that you can't fight reality. You look for something that wants to produce energy. You look for something that exist within the paradigms of understanding and what we know to be true. You don't fight. You don't yell at the clouds. You don't yell at the clouds. You look at how things are and you work within those constraints. You work to make things the best that they can be the optimum toward achieving your goal within the constraints of reality. You don't hate reality because hating reality is just basically giving up. And you'll always lose against reality. Reality is not going to change because you disliked it. Now I will shift. I wanted to talk about this article specifically because of what I think peer to, how I think about peer to peer and that I think the model that the kind of perfect world utopia sort of model is not the model that peer to peer should be thinking about. But I think there is still an extremely important step or extremely important reason why peer to peer is still the fundamentally best model. And it's got nothing to do with the fact that we don't have servers or we don't have supernodes or we don't have relays. And I don't think it even suggests that relays aren't the model. I think this article is right. I think nostr's approach is right, is that relays are the model dumb pipes. The simpler they are, the better and the less likely or the less capable they are of centralizing or of censoring anything on the network. But the reason, the reason I think peer to peer protocols have an incredible potential here is not only because NOSTR and the relay model aren't really necessarily connected to each other. Like the, the mode of standardizing or formatting data signing it, the kinds of events, you know, kind one, kind 1000, whatever it is on Nostr, how things are displayed, how people connect to the relays specifically these things actually aren't attached to each other. The networking side is just right now it uses relays and DNS because that's the obvious way to make use of it. But this is specifically why I've talked about in the past on this show and on the pair report specifically, you can transmit all of the NOSTR information The profiles, the events, the signatures, all the feeds and all of the data, peer to peer as well as through relays. It literally wouldn't have to change to just have one. You could, you could literally put this into any client that we already have and just have a new type of connection method for attaching, for connecting to a relay. But the network will still evolve, it will still head toward or move toward a larger and more scalable relays, basically super nodes. And so we'll come back around to this in just a minute because I want to talk about a couple of other things first, but I want to talk about why exactly peer to peer is actually, I believe, I genuinely believe that peer to peer is really important for the creation of these supernodes, for the creation of relays, and why I think it ends up with the most optimum outcome or the most optimum optimal censorship resistant capabilities or properties of the network itself. That the reason I think peer to peer is the best case or the best option for achieving that isn't because I think relays shouldn't exist. It isn't about the network topology. The network topology will be the relay model. I think the author is completely correct about that, that it heads in that direction. BitTorrent is the perfect example. There is nothing that has been so complete as an example or has been large enough as an example other than BitTorrent in showing exactly how peer to peer evolves and what actually the network topology looks like. And it looks very similarly to a relay model where you have a small number of very big seeders and publishers on the network. But the big thing is related to the cost and ease of moving those super nodes, of shifting those relays to new entities. And we'll get back to that in a second. So I want to make the case after I kind of go through some of the notes that I copied down from the article. All right, so there's a quote closer to the beginning of this article. It says, quote, the server owns your data, owns your account, and owns the cryptographic keys used to secure it.
[00:25:55] That last bit is obscure, but important. Cryptographic keys are how we enforce security, privacy, ownership and control in software. Not your keys, not your data, end quote.
[00:26:12] Now, I want to, I want to reiterate this because I think this is kind of lost in a lot of people is understanding an extremely fundamental and universal truth about software, about any and all apps, communication, digital communications in any way, shape or form, all security, all privacy, all ownership and all individual control in the world of software, in any and all Digital environments is managed and controlled by cryptographic keys.
[00:26:57] If you do not know where the keys are, if you cannot manage or back up those keys, or you don't understand the cryptographic keys or where they are, you have no control. Someone else has it. Because the only reason edges exist, the only reason authority exists, the only reason naming exists, the only reason DNS like URLs exist, the walls of all digital spaces that define why a server is a server, or that the program being run is definitely the program created and coded by this one developer or this group or this entity, that it is the website that you know you are going to, that this is the right device, this is the right account, et cetera, et cetera. All of it, all of it is defined by cryptographic keys. Without those cryptographic keys, every single bit of every single thing on the Internet is an amalgamation, a blob of undefined, unreliable, inconsistent stuff. If you didn't have keys that are required to sign or to denote the date, the DNS database, anybody could just get in and change it. Like you could quote, unquote, buy a URL and it's completely meaningless because somebody else can just get in, log into the machine without any authentication, without keys, and change it. A developer that delivers an app to the App Store and signs it, it's all meaningless. If that is not. The control is not limited to that key. I could just go up there and change it to a different app. It is all cryptographic signatures, locks and access controls. And I think it's easy when you don't have a strong foundation in software and the Internet to think that, like, oh, Bitcoin is the thing that introduced keys. And, you know, I wasn't. Because you don't see it typically, or you are specifically using a platform that has the keys, that controls the keys. Like my Apple ID isn't controlled by me. Apple controls the keys. Same with every social media or anything the keys lock. I mean, just like the castle analogy, I thought that was a fantastic analogy, is that the keys are just the drawbridge. Everything inside is just controlled by the king inside the castle. And you are allowed in the castle. And then whatever store or shop front or identity, anything that you have inside that castle is completely owned by the king. It is a small feudal system. And what's interesting actually is that what you're actually looking at is the continued progression of everything that we have had of the same systems we've had in the physical world kind of playing out in a more explicit network sense rather than kind of A social and geographic sense. When you're talking about, you know, meat space, or the physical world, or the. The histories of governments and cultures and societies, well, you're actually getting to see this kind of like crazy sped up evolution of perfecting, of building these new network rules and these better network architectures inside or within the Internet, within the digital environment. And what we have now is something like a highly centralizing feudal system. And the biggest part of that problem, at least in my estimation, and it seems to be in the argument of this article as well, the biggest part of the problem is the lack of ownership by the user. You have no autonomy. And it's also why, you know, crossing castles or being in one castle versus another. You can't carry any of the progress, any of the network, any of the investment that you have made. The investment itself is owned, the content and the id, the system, who you even are and who knows you is literally owned by the castle, by the platform or the network. And that's such a huge problem when we're talking about producing the natural evolution of society. If we actually want culture to be the result of all of our interacting values, it requires that we actually own our own, own little cultural space, and that the interactions are actually honest, that they're actually legitimate interactions between you and me, not some middleman either manipulating, redirecting, or changing the focus for what that conversation is. And the consequences of that are extremely similar to the consequences of intervening in a market. We're thinking that we can have one institution or one group or committee of experts decide what the price of something is, when the only idea, the only concept we have, the only reason the price is meaningful in any sense, is because it is earned by the person who has traded value for it in a real trade. And that the decision to then let go of that value or let go of that money, or trade it for something else. It's all comparative, it's all relative. There's no such thing as a unit of value. It's only in relation to the previous trade and the voluntary decision of the people making the trade that you actually can determine what is valuable to begin with, or what the price of anything, how the price of anything even makes sense. I talked about this in my talk at Lugano actually is, you know, it doesn't matter. You have no idea how much the. I think I use the microphone or something as an example, but you have no idea how much it is worth or if it's expensive or not. If I tell you it's a trillion units If I say it cost me a trillion dollar he dues or if I say it cost me five of them, which is expensive, you have no idea because there's no unit.
[00:33:15] The unit is completely arbitrary. We have no idea if a dollar you do is a lot or a little.
[00:33:20] Now however, if I say that you agreed to pay me 10 dollary dues to mow your lawn and I did an hour's worth of work for those ten dollar edos, well now a five dollar edu microphone is pretty affordable. But a $1 trillion redo microphone is stupid. It's impossible. No one will ever, ever buy it. So it's very clear which one is expensive. But either one is only expensive relative to what it costs to trade to get the unit. So when some expert committee just decides that this should cost $100, it is less than arbitrary. It is completely meaningless. And there is zero way because the market price must actually account. The only way it actually accounts for any of the economic and value information and judgment in the market is for to be filtered through the billions of trades of all of the people in the market voluntarily. As soon as an expert comes in and just says the price should be this, you just get an absolute huge surplus or complete scarcity, just depletion of the resource itself because the price is just necessarily wrong. And even if it was ever near correct, as soon as conditions change or as soon as preferences change, it's wrong again. And now the experts are trying to keep up up and account for information that they literally can't have. That axiomatically from their position it is impossible to obtain. A great example is the ussr when they started setting prices on a bunch of goods and like cars and stuff, and they were deciding what the price was, you know what they used, they had some sort of metric. No, they didn't have a market, so they couldn't know what the price is. The only reason is it actually managed to survive for a long as it did was because they just went off of international prices. They just used other markets in order to set their prices and those were close enough that it didn't completely destroy the country for like, you know, 20 years. But the longer and longer the market goes without good signal and the more you actually deplete the internal resources and the foundation, both culturally and then just mechanically, well then the more and more of those international prices don't actually have anything, have any meaningful relationship to the conditions inside the country and the level of scarcity and market dynamics. This is why they had black markets emerge where things were, you know, three times the price. Black markets literally kept the uss, the external markets that they could basically just cheat off of. You know, it's just saying that like, well, because we don't have any way to actually do our test and we have no idea, no idea how to actually obtain the information necessary. We'll just cheat off this other person's paper, paper. Because that's what they did as far as the price that helped them sustain. And then the other thing that sustained the market and actually made sure that, I mean, a lot of people starved but that basically the country didn't implode overnight were black markets, that black markets had real prices. And that's where you get like 200% premiums and crazy things that swing is like, oh yeah, well, the government sells eggs at, you know, $2 a dozen, but they never have eggs. Every time I have gone to get eggs, they don't have them because that's not, not the real price. But on the black market I can get them for $10 a dozen and the black market actually provides me eggs. This same problem arises in social connections, in centralized networks, in networks that attempt to control people. That's why you get so much exodus and so much of this black market moving around where, where the disconnect between what you see on social and what you talk about in real life or where people's actual mentality or actual feelings are, you get these kind of crazy feedback loops where incentives push in the wrong direction and even slight control over these things that is not at the individual level can just have enormous, enormous negative consequences. And it feels like we're kind of going through that same evolutionary process that we've done in the last 3,000 years when it comes to government and society and quote, unquote, physical networks, that we're kind of doing this thing again at a hyper, hyper accelerated rate and evolving essentially liberty in the digital world as well. That's what the end goal is, right, is to put the individual back in the autonomous driving seat, is for everyone to, quote unquote, be created equal. Which I think is why peer to peer sounds so appealing, even though it doesn't actually play out that way, that the natural growth and distribution of the network itself still ends up basically being a Pareto distribution. It's the thing that you see in life and networks and just all, everything, everything. The Pareto distribution is everywhere now. There's something that my brother actually pointed out. I was talking to him just a little bit on the phone a little, a little while ago on the phone and I brought this up and we kind of just hit on like some of the topics of this and one of the things that he kind of analogized it to that I thought was really good is that the point of the network is to establish a set of rules and that peer to peer, the idea of a peer to peer system isn't about or the idea of a decentralized and censorship resistant and like user controlled a quote unquote liberty in the protocol sense is that every node, every peer is created equal. Not because they will end up equal for exactly the same reason that not everybody is going to own the same amount of stuff or accomplish the same amount, or have all of the same things happen to them, or have the same situation in a free market or under liberty. That's an absurd proposition in the exact same sense. It's in a similar sense, not to the degree of course, but in a similar sense. The idea that all peers should be equal and have equal traffic and equal forwarding and all of this stuff is also extremely unrealistic and an impossibility to attempt to target it. And Gordon isn't wrong here in a certain sense of his explanation that peer to peer is just relays with extra steps. It's just harder to design, harder to get around the practical limitations. All of these things. The dynamic and the engineering for peer to peer is more complicated. However, I still think peer to peer is the goal and there is one very specific reason why again, it has nothing to do. I am 100% on board that what ends up happening is that it ends up being relays. But the most important way to protect the censorship resistant nature and ensure a broad and extremely agile system of relays is to drastically lower the barrier to entry and the cost to running a relay. That is where peer to peer comes in. It isn't about trying to fight the natural topology of the network, at least in my opinion. It's about being able to establish connections without certain networks being inaccessible or without having to be on one side of one network. Like not being able to be behind a NATO like on a home router or firewall, or having to have a DNS and purchase a domain from icann, or having to have port forwarding and a server hosted in the cloud and sign up for Cloudflare, blah blah, blah. You know, the success of BitTorrent wasn't because, you know, they shunned everybody being directly peer to peer and went to supernodes. It's because super nodes ended up becoming the norm. Relays became the norm. But the barrier to be a relay, the ability to censor quote unquote, who decided to be a relay was essentially non existent. Literally anyone could just buy a bunch of hard drives, download a bunch of stuff and then seed it to other people. Anyone, literally. Some of the. If you ever watched I used to be a big fan or a follower of Torrent Freak, I still will go up there every once in a while, just kind of get a sense of, you know, what's been going on because I don't watch a bunch of the copyright lawsuits and all of this stuff anymore. But back in its quote unquote heyday, Torrent Freak, I basically read it and would explore what was going on all the time. Like every single, every few days I was up there reading about what was going on, looking what the websites were up, what was going on with the fight with Pirate Bay which just lasted for 15 years. There was just always something happening on that front. And the number of times that somebody quote unquote got caught that, you know, Yiffy got called and all the people who were seeding that stuff, all of these publishers and people who were ripping content and putting it online, or people who were prolific Cedars who had been around and had hundreds and hundreds of terabytes of data and they would post pictures of them, quote unquote raiding these, these quote unquote operations, these evil operations of pirated content and all this stuff. And it would literally be some, it would look like my office. It would be some ridiculous custom made machine with just like this stack of hard drives and a bunch of like NAS things just like sitting around. It's in the corner of some room. It's not on a server farm, it's not a vps, it's not, you know, at Amazon Web Services. It was just some dude with a computer. Which is exactly what made it so unbelievably difficult to shut down or do anything about was the ultimate game of Whack a Mole. Because all anybody had to do to be another mole popping his head up out of the, out of the hole was to go on Amazon and buy a bunch of hard drives. That was it. That was the barrier to entry. Do you have enough storage left to seed stuff? And this is specifically why, whether it's a Picard or Pear stack or whatever it is, I think a client, a nostr client integrating the, a peer to peer protocol, a Picard or the pair stack, which it's hard to them, they're both hole punching things. I guess it would Be mainline DHT versus the hole punch DHT or hyper DHT naming conventions, who cares the bittorrent one or the pair stack one. But regardless, being able to integrate those connections so that like my computer, my Linux machine would be so, so, so, so easy. I got, I'm paying for relaying IO which is utxos service, which I don't think he's actually selling anymore or actually running as like a thing. I just paid him for like a good span of time and he said he'd keep it up, keep it running for me. So I have a bitcoin audible relay for Nostr and I connect to it on my various Nostra clients. So I quote unquote have my own relay. But it costs him a lot to service and host that, and it subsequently cost me quite a bit to keep the relay running. But I shared it with people in the audionauts and I don't think many people connect to it, but if they want to, they can. I just like to have it there as an option. But my Linux machine could easily, easily. I have all the hard drive space in the world that I would need to be able to do this. I would love to have a personal local backup, which I do have, but I had to manually do and it's now like three months out of I need to do it again. But I could easily host my own relay. I could have this machine watching, organizing, checking for updates, caching all of the likes and reposts and zaps and everything on that machine so that I could just connect to my own machine and use it as kind of like the top authority rather than having to reload and pull this information from all of these relays constantly. I could connect peer to peer. I could just connect directly to my Linux machine and still have the relay connections so that if something else came in and I wanted to ping something new, and for some reason my Linux machine wasn't getting it very quickly, I could have both of those connections and I could use my Linux machine, I could use my own machine as kind of the quote unquote dominant authority for what my Noster history and feed and everything is, because it's going to pull that information or it's going to give that information to me much quick, much more quickly because I'm specifically caching and storing all the information that's directly related to me. It's my feed, it's my friends and follows and all of that stuff. So I don't need to keep the entire global database of NOSTR or connect to a million different relays. I just need to connect to my own. That allows me to basically run this for myself. And importantly is that this could. I could also be a quote unquote relay or super node for my friends, for people that I know and trust, for the audio notes, all of my friends and family, my brother, everybody in the audio notes, I could give them my peer to peer key for the pair stack or Picar, whatever it is, and let them connect to my Linux machine. And it basically be a private relay for just the 20 or 30 people that I know. I'm not going to get ddosed because I'm not public. I'm trusting them with that information and they can pull that information too, and even store information so that I note their keys and keep that information ready as well. And suddenly we have the ability. I have the ability to be a relay with almost zero cost. Obviously I have the cost of an Internet connection, I have the cost of the computer, but I have both of those things regardless. But my barrier to entry and the scale at which I can be a relay or provide relay services to other people, which I could also make a little bit of money off of, I could make SATs, not that I would quote, unquote, earn a profit necessarily, but you know, if they were using my relay, maybe I could have a thing pop up in their client that says, zap me every once in a while, how's the relay doing? Give me some feedback, blah, blah, blah. Again, the barrier for me to provide that to someone else is so unbelievably low. And I think that's the point, that is the point in order to get the barrier so low that without any setup, someone who chooses to be a super node or chooses to be a relay can be one extremely easily with as little overhead or setup cost or even need for literacy, like the amount of knowledge that they need to have in order to become one. In the context of BitTorrent, I think is such a great learning environment or a test case is that in order to be a seeder on BitTorrent, to be a super node, you didn't have to know anything else or make any great cost aside from what you needed to know to be a downloader on BitTorrent, like it was the same function and the same setup. Sure, you could limit it and you could just be a leecher on the network if you wanted, but being a seeder required no special change or getting a domain name or doing anything, setting up some special server or special client. You simply could be One and again, I do not think this means the network topology is different. I think the barrier to entry is the ultimate deciding factor that, you know, actually, okay, this is a great example. Nick Szabo wrote Exit and Freedom. And I think this is a really good analogy, is talking about that the degree to freedom, the ability to sustain or enforce freedom is directly tied to the cost of exit. How much do you lose if you have to pick up shop and leave the country? How much can you take with you? Do you lose your social circles? Do you lose your home? Do you lose the foundation of your savings? What does it cost you? $50,000? You know, a thousand hours worth of work and shifting and adjustment in order to find a new norm and settle into a new place. And that the secret to achieving liberty, because that, that cost is exactly what you will bear before you leave. In fact, oftentimes if, and this is exactly why the bully, the bullying, the, the boiling frog issue or the boiling frog reality is in fact the problem with getting people to actually fight for their freedom or to exit in order to get their freedom back is because if you build that cost up like, sure, let's just use, for the sake of numbers, let's say, because it's easier to understand rather than say hours or the amount of time, like value is extremely subjective, right? So let's just use dollars, let's say the barrier to exit, to leaving your life in the US the friends that you lose, the culture that you lose, the, the norms that you lose, the services that you lose access to, the home that you can no longer live in, et cetera, et cetera, that the base cost and then citizenship and everything, the base cost is just $1 million. Well, if someone institutes $100 cost on you, clearly you're going to be pissed and you know you're going to see $100 worth of freedom be taken from you. But you will never pay $1 million to get away from $100 cost. Now what if you have a hundred dollar cost imposed on you every single day for 50 years? At no point is that $100 cost, is that the loss of your freedom. Does it justify the million dollar cost to get out of the situation? The only way is that you can actually think, okay, this is going to be the cost and I've got to get out of here before it hits me this hard. But the boiling frog approach, if your short term mindset and even midterm mindset, the 50 years, 50 years, by the way, $100 a day amounts to like 1.8 ish million dollars. So you have lost more freedom by staying than you would have if you had left. But there are so many unknowns and it comes at you so slowly that it never seems to make economic sense for that trade off to occur. Therefore it never happens. You literally just lose your freedom, even though the amount of freedom that you lost costs more than what it would have cost to exit. But it was only in aggregate, at no particular time were those costs comparable. It always just made economic sense or made the and even worse is that you normalize the freedoms that you have lost, the new costs that the society has imposed on you. So the secret to achieving freedom, the secret to sustainable freedom is as much as possible to lower the cost to exit, lower the cost to establishing a new network, lower the cost to changing your position or the provision of that network effect so that you can maintain the same network effect, but change where that network topology is pointing to. That is what I think peer to peer does. By default you don't have to manually change your topology or manually shift from delete this relay and add this relay in order for a pure peer to peer network to provide you with an alternative relay. When this one starts censoring or, you know, whatever change in the network or attempt to control has surfaced, so to speak. But then there's also the element that Gordon brings up that I think is really important in this article as well, is just simplicity is make it as dumb as possible because that itself is a barrier. The more likely you are to have a complication, or for it not to be reliable or for it not to operate quickly, it all turns into an additional barrier to actually utilizing it. But ultimately I think every technology that actually leads to more freedom, censorship, resistance and autonomous or control at the individual level over the connections in the network, over how communication is actually facilitated in the bandwidth between peers. If you want that at the individual level, which is the point of freedom in a market, it's the point of having a completely ambiguous or a completely universal set of rules and no second class and first class citizens in a legal system. It's why you want to lower the barrier to exit as much as possible in the physical world so that you can take your value with you. And that's exactly why Bitcoin is such a powerful element, is that you can, you can massively change the dynamic of exiting. It used to be kind of a universal truth that if you were trying to leave a totalitarian regime, you just couldn't take your value with you. You couldn't Take your money with you. The money was permissioned inside the jurisdiction in which you lived. And you basically had to.
[00:56:07] You know the story I tell of the chemist or whatnot who bought a bunch of platinum, put his life savings into platinum wire and twisted them into coat hangers and then drove across the border in Germany in order to escape Nazi Germany like those, that's your recourse because you can't. He couldn't have money in a bank account. And as I said in my talk at BitBlock, boom about that is, you know, as soon as you share that out, it stops working. They know what to look for and they will still, they will trap your value. That's the whole game. It's the entire game of war is controlling resources. And I think this conflict is exactly the same in the network era when it comes to information. It's just the control of information, the flows of information, the identities and networks of the people. Because all we are doing is creating sub networks inside of Twitter or Facebook or whatever that Facebook and Twitter own. This is why it is such a powerful thing to shadow, ban or block or knock people off and punish them for saying the wrong thing because of how insanely valuable those networks are. And when you don't own them, when the barrier to exit is so massive because you can't take it with you, it's like trying to rebuild real estate into the digital realms. That creates that exit cost in a completely unnatural way. It doesn't need to be there. It's literally artificially recreated so that they have silos so that you can't take your Facebook feed with you, you can't take your Twitter feed, you can't take your Apple ID and account and all of its history and your device information, all this stuff that's extremely valuable to you. You can't leave the Apple ecosystem with that information. And in fact, they don't even let you pull it with an API. They get to decide whether or not they even let you look at it. And that needs to be solved. I am inclined to think, I am still inclined to think that peer to peer, that caters to the natural topology is ultimately where things go. But in a general sense, and in a far simpler setup, the relay model is vastly lower technical debt. And it makes perfect sense why Nostr chose that at the stage that it was, and it absolutely is, a utopia is utopian nonsense. To think that all the peers are just going to all be relays and everybody's going to be equal because it just. Nothing ever happens that way. It's a complete negation of simple reality and the Pareto distribution. We will have relays. It will evolve to look like NOSTR looks. The question is, what are the barriers to the evolution of the peers on the network, whether or not they do show up or become a relay or a super node, how much more difficult is it to be a relay versus just being a peer or user of the network? And honestly, in a general sense, I just think we're still at the cusp. You know, NOSTR just started and think it, I genuinely believe it solved some of the most important questions or most important problems and did so in the simplest way possible, so that it wasn't massive, bloated, complicated and just annoying to build on or with. And I think that literally opens us up to the possibility of being able to do this on top of different network topologies or network stacks. I guess not. Not really a topology, but a networking system. Like, I don't see why the other modes of connection, why peer to peer is necessarily separate from nostr, other than the fact that the R in the acronym says relays, I still don't see why anything is it. Again, the pieces are dumb enough and simple enough that you can deliver them over any type of connection that you like. And I just think that means that we're going to be able to build, we're going to be able to accomplish anything that we want to accomplish. And I think this is such a strong foundation and piece of the puzzle to start from. And I agree that on a long enough timeline, we're all just trying to rebuild Noster, but we're trying to make the perfect Noster, so to speak, and lower the barriers to being a relay, to being a user, to managing your keys, the barrier to exit from tyranny, from network silos, to make that as low as possible. And honestly, I think we're closer than we've ever been. So with that, I'm Guy Swan, and until next time, everybody. Take it easy, guys.
[01:01:18] Low exit costs have not only enabled liberty for the individual and the small group, but they have, more than any other factor, motivated the larger jurisdiction to provide the most important rights and freedoms for those who stay put.
[01:01:34] Nick Szabo Exit and freedom.
