Read_902 - Nostr Unpopular Opinions

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Nobody is going around marketing their app as a React native product. And while I understand that's a false equivalent in the sense that Nostr is a protocol while React is a framework, the reality is that it does not matter. For 99.9999% of the world, what matters is the hole, not the drill. Maybe a thousand people on earth really care that something is built on Nostr, but for everyone else what matters is what the app or product does and the problem it solves. The best in Bitcoin made Audible I am Guy Swan and this is Bitcoin Audible. What is up guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about Bitcoin than anybody else you know, and we are shooting for a little bit of sobriety today. So these are this is an article by Svetsky on unpopular opinions about Noster and I specifically wanted to get at this because I think we see it so, so often with the people that I talk to and are building something in Keat and the Pear stack and same thing in Synonym and pubkey and then in Nostr as well is everybody is so excited about the tech and they're so excited from a development perspective of this really cool thing that they've built that we lose sight of what the point of it is. There's a really great quote, actually. It was a Q and A. Somebody like kind of challenged Steve Jobs on it and Steve Jobs gave a really great answer and I've got it saved somewhere. I'm going to bring it up so it will have it in the commentary of this episode. I'll find it before I'm done with the read, but I think he does a really good job of kind of hitting the nail on the head of how to think about this and how to think about it. Not from a development perspective of who's building the perfect system or the perfect perfect tool or how cool this protocol is, but what solves the problem from the user's perspective? What problem do they have and how is it solved with these tools? And I loved that line from this article is what matters is the hole, not the drill. Nobody cares what the drill looks like if it gets them the product, the outcome that they need. In fact, that's exactly how on the decentralized Internet we all ended up spending 99% of our time in social media centralized silos. So real fast before we jump into it, shout out to Leden for their Bitcoin backed loans. This is an incredible tool for bitcoiners who don't want to sell their Bitcoin or are looking to make an investment or to make a purchase and just know that bitcoin is going to outpace it. You don't have to outpace bitcoin. You can get a bitcoin backed loan and you can just beat the interest rate. You don't pay capital gains, you still own your bitcoin. You can prove that it's there. They do proof of reserves every six months. They have monthly open books and it's literally so easy, it's a little bit scary. Check them out. I have a special link which gets you a discount right down in the description. Shout out to the HRF and their Financial Freedom Report as well as the Oslo Freedom Forum. These guys do incredible work. If you aren't following them on nostr, if you aren't checking out their Financial Freedom Report, their newsletter, it's fantastic. And of course if you get the opportunity to go to the Oslo Freedom Forum, absolutely take it. It'll be June 1st to 3rd of 2026. I have the link down in the details. Check out Get Chroma for your light health. They have red light therapy. They have lights designed to protect your circadian rhythm as well as the nightshade glasses. And as I've said, one of the best things about their nightshade glasses is that it actually lets through a small band of purple light that does not have any effect on your hormones, but actually allows you to see more color depth rather than just completely red washing everything after, you know, 8 o' clock at night. And a 10% discount with code Bitcoin audible by the way. And lastly synonym is building Pub key and their protocol stack Picar in particular I've been reading a lot about. So this is really cool. They've literally built a DNS built on the it's the mainline DHT but it's built on the same network that BitTorrent was run on. If you are trying to build censorship resistant apps or peer to peer tools and you're not aware of these and you haven't tried these out, you must. There's a link down in the details to go start exploring. And they also have PubKey P u b k y dot app which is kind of a way to showcase what you can do. All right, with that, let's go ahead and get into today's article because if we actually want to move Nostr forward, if we want to move pubkey, if we want to move the pair stack forward and we actually want people to utilize these things. This is how we have to think about it. And so today's article is titled Noster Unpopular Opinions by Alex Svetsky Slaying some sacred cows in 2024 I was high as a kite on Noster Hopium and optimism. Early that year, my co founder and I figured that we could use Nostr as a way to validate ambassadors on quote unquote destination Bitcointhe germ of a travel app idea we had at the time that would turn into Satlantis. After some more digging and thinking, we realized that Nostr's OpenSocial graph would be of major benefit. And in exploring that design space, the fuller idea of Satlantis formed a new kind of social network for travel. I still remember the call I had with Pablo F7Z in January. I was in Dubai pitching the AI idea I was working on at the time, but all I could think and talk about was Atlantis and Nostr. That conversation made me bullish. Af I came back from the trip convinced we'd struck gold. I pivoted the old company, reorganized the team and booked us for the sovereign engineering cohort in Madeira. We put together a whole project roadmap, go to market strategy and cap raise around the use of Nostr. We were going to be the next big Nostr app. A couple of events followed in which I announced this all to the world Bitcoin Atlantis in March and BTC Prague in June being the two main ones. The feedback was incredible, so we doubled down. After being the major financial backer for the Nostra booth in Prague, I decided to help organize the Nostra Booth initiative and back it financially for a series of Latin American conferences in November. I was convinced this was the biggest thing since Bitcoin, so much so that I spent over $50,000 in 20 on Nostr marketing initiatives. I was certainly high on something. Sobering up it's March 2025 and I've sobered up. I now look at Nostr through a different lens, a more pragmatic one. I see Nostr as a tool, as an entrepreneur who's more interested in solving a problem than fixating on the tools being used should A couple things changed for me. One was the substandard product we'd released in November. I was so focused on being a Nostr evangelist that I put our product second. Coupled with the extra technical debt we took on at Satlantis by making everything Nostr native, our product was crap. We traded usability and product stability for Nostr purism and evangelism. We built a whole suite of features using native event kinds, location kinds, calendar kinds, etc. That we thought other Nostr apps would also use and therefore be interoperable. Turns out no serious players were doing any of that, so we spent a bunch of time over engineering for no benefit. The other wake up call for me was the Twitter ban in Brazil. Being one of the largest markets for Twitter, I really thought it would have a material impact on global Nostr adoption. When basically nothing happened, I began to question things. Note with a screenshot wow. Welcome to the 1 million new users in the last 3 days to BlueSky. Reply by Derek Ross Bluesky has done some incredible marketing and is a media darling. Googling Twitter alternatives gives you Mastodon and Bluesky all over the place. Nostr is by far an underdog. Sadly, combined these experiences helped sober me up and I came down from my high. I was reading the Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chin ex Uber at the time and was doing a deep dive on network effects. I came to the following realization. Nostr's network effect is going to take way longer than we all anticipated initially. This is going to be a long grind and unlike bitcoin, winning is not inevitable. Bitcoin solves a much more important problem, and it's the only option. Nostr solves an important problem, yes, but it's far from the only approach. It's just the implementation, arguably in the lead right now. This sobering up led us to take a different approach with Nostr. We now view it as another tool in the tech stack, no different to the use of React Native on mobile or AWS for infrastructure. Nostr is something to use if it makes the product better or avoid if it makes the product and user experience worse. I will share more on this below, including our simple decision making framework. I'll also present a few more potentially unpopular opinions about Nostr. Four in total actually. 1. Nostr is a tool, not a revolution. 2. Nostr doesn't solve the multiple social accounts problem. 3. Nostr is not for censorship resistance. Four grands come with a price. Let's begin. Nostr is a tool, not a revolution. Nostr is full of bitcoiners and as much as we like to think we are immune from Shiny Object Syndrome, we are somewhere deep down afflicted by it like other humans. That's normal and fine. But while bitcoiners have successfully suppressed this desire, when it comes to shitcoins, it lies dormant yearning for the least shitcoin like thing to emerge which we can throw our guiltless support behind that thing arrived and it's called Nostr. As a result, we've come to project the same kind of purity and maximalism onto it as we do with Bitcoin, because it shares some attributes and it's clearly not a grift. The trouble is, in doing so, we've put it in the same class as Bitcoin, which is an error. Nostr is important and in its own small way revolutionary, but it pales in comparison to Bitcoin's importance. Think of it this way. If Bitcoin fails, civilization is f ed. If Nostr fails, we will engineer another rich identity protocol. There is no need for the kind of immaculate conception and past dependence that was necessary for Bitcoin, whose genesis and success has been a once in a civilization event. Equivocating Nostr and Bitcoin to the degree that it has been is a significant category error. Nostr may win, or it may just be an experiment on the path to something better. And that's okay. I don't say this to piss anyone off, but to piss on Nostr is to piss on myself. I say it because I'd prefer Nostr not remain a place where a few thousand people speak to each other about how cool Nostr is. That's cute in the short term, but in the grand scheme of things is a waste of a great tool that can make a significant corner of the Internet great again. By removing the emotional charge and hopium from our relationship to Nostr, we can take a more sober, objective view of it and hopefully use it more effectively. Instead of making everything about Nostr the tool, we can go back to doing what great product people and businesses do make everything about the customer. Nobody's going around marketing their app as a React native product, and while I understand that's a false equivalent in the sense that Nostr is a protocol while React is a framework, the reality is that it does not matter. For 99.999% of the world, what matters is the hole, not the drill. Maybe a thousand people on earth really care that something is built on Nostr, but for everyone else, what matters is what the app or product does and the problem it solves. Realigning our focus in this way and looking at not only Nostr but also Bitcoin as a tool in the toolkit has transformed the way we're building. This inspired an essay I wrote a couple of weeks ago called as Nostr as Possible. It covers our updated approach to using and building with Nostr, not just on it. You can find that here if you're too busy to read it. Don't fret. The entire theory can be summarized by the diagram below. This is how we now decide what to make Nostr native and what to just build on our own. And as stated in the An AP essay, the that doesn't mean we'll never make certain features Nostr native. If the argument is that Nostr is not going anywhere, then we can always come back to that feature and nostrify it later when resources and protocol stability permit. The following is a diagram where on the vertical axis we have up at the top it's good for Nostr up down at the bottom it's worse for Nostr or it's incompatible. Then to the left we have worse for Satlantis users and to the right we have good for Satlantis users. So the top right is good for Nostr, worse for Satlantis users. These are things we avoid. This should rarely if ever be considered, let alone build. Maybe when we're a billion dollar company and can afford to sacrifice the resources. The bottom left worse for Satlantis users and worse for Nostr or incompatible with Nostr. Never, never ever build this top right good for Nostr and good for Satlantis users. Yes, always, always build, of course, taking effort, complexity and technical trade offs into account. And in the bottom right good for Satlantis users and worse for Nostr or Nostr Incompatible? Yes, when push comes to shove, making the product better is more important than Nostr compatibility the Nostr all in one approach is not all positive. Having one account accessible via many different apps might not be as positive as we initially thought. If you have one unified presence online across all of your socials and you're posting the same thing everywhere, then yes, being able to post content in one place and it being broadcast everywhere is great. There's a reason why people literally pay for products like hypefury, Buffer, and hootsuite, aside from scheduling. But this is not always the case. I've spoken to hundreds of creators and many have flagged this as a bug, not a feature, because they tend to have a different audience on different platforms and speak to them differently depending on the platform. We all know this. How you present yourself on LinkedIn is very different to how you do it on Instagram or X. The story of Weishu, Tencent's version of TikTok comes to mind here. Tencent's WeChat login worked against them because people didn't want their social graph following them around. Users actually wanted freedom from their existing family and friends, so they chose douyin Chinese TikTok instead. Perhaps this is more relevant to something like WeChat because the social graph following you around is more personal, but we saw something similar with Instagram and Facebook. Despite over a decade of ownership, Facebook still keeps the social graphs separate. All this to say that while having a different strategy and approach on different social apps is annoying, it allows users to tap into different markets because each silo has its own flavor. The people who just post the same thing everywhere are low quality content creators anyway. The ones who actually care are using each platform differently. The ironic part here is that this is arguably more decentralized than a protocol approach, because these silos form a marketplace of communities which are all somewhat different. We need to find a smart way of doing this with Nostr, some way of catering to the appropriate audience where it matters most. Perhaps this will be handled by clients or by relays. One solution I've heard from people in the Nostr space is just spin up another impub for your different audience. While I have no problem with people doing that, I have multiple mpubs myself. It's clearly not a solution to the underlying problem. Here we're experimenting with something. Whether it's a good idea or not remains to be seen. Satlantis users will be able to curate their profiles and remove, hide or delete content on our app. We'll implement this in two stages. Stage one simple in the first iteration, we will not broadcast a delete request to Relays. This means users can get a nicely curated profile page on Satlantis, but keep a record of their full profile elsewhere on other clients or relays. Stage 2 more complex later on, we'll try to give people an option to delete on Satlantis only or delete everywhere. The difference here is more control from the user. Whether we get this far remains to be seen. We'll need to experiment with the UX and see whether this is something people really want to I'm sure neither of these solutions are ideal, but they're what we're going to try until we have more time and resources to think this through. More Next Nostr is not for censorship resistance, I'm sorry to say, but this ship has sailed, at least for now. Maybe it's a problem again in the future, but who knows when and if it will ever be a big enough factor anyway? The truth is, while we all know that Nostra is superior because it's a protocol, people do not care enough. They are more interested in what's written on the box, not what's necessarily inside the box. 99% of people don't know what the F A protocol is in the first place, let alone why it matters for censorship resistance to happen at that level, or more importantly, why they should trust Nostr to deliver on that promise. Furthermore, the few people who did care about free speech are now placated enough with Rumble for video, X for short form and Substack for long form. With Meta now paying lip service to the movement, it's game over for this narrative, at least for the foreseeable future. Tweet from Steven Taylor Zuckerberg says Facebook and Instagram will now prioritize free speech attributes, a recent cultural tipping point to debates like immigration and gender, where censoring is now out of touch, says fact checkers were too biased and legacy media too political about censorship. And the people who did care enough all onboarded for the normies who never cared. They still don't care or they found their way to the anti platforms like Threads, Blue sky or pornhub. The small minority of us still here on Noster are, well, still here, which is great. But if the goal is to grow the network effect here and bring in more people, then we need to find a new angle. Something more compelling than your account won't be deleted. I'm not 100% sure what that is. My instinct is that a network of interoperable applications that doesn't necessarily or explicitly brand themselves as Nostr but have it under the hood is the right direction. I think the open social graph and using it in novel ways is compelling. The trouble is this needs more really well built and novel apps for non sovereignty minded people, especially content creators and people who don't necessarily care about the reasons Nostr was first built. It also requires us to move beyond just building clones of what already exists. We've been trying to do this Atlantis thing for almost a year now and it's coming along, albeit way slower than I would have liked. We are experimenting our way into a whole new category of product, something different to what exists today. We've made a whole bunch of mistakes and at times I feel like a LARP considering the state of non delivery. But what's on the horizon is very special and I think that all of the pain, effort and heartache along the way will be 100% worth it. We're going to deliver a killer product that people love, that solves a whole host of travel related problems and has Nostr under the hood where nobody except those who care will know grants come with a price. This one is less of an opinion and more of an observation. Not sure it really belongs in this essay, but I'll make a small mention. Just as food for thought grants are a double edged sword, I am super grateful that Opensats et al are supporting the protocol and and I don't envy the job they have in trying to decipher what to support and what not to depending on what's of benefit to the network versus what's an end user product. That being said, is the Nostr ecosystem too grant dependent? This is not a criticism but a question. Perhaps this is the right thing to do because of how young Nostr is, but I just can't help but feel like there's something amiss. Grant's put the focus on Nostr and instead of the product or customer. Which is fine if the work the grant covers is for Nostr protocol development or tooling. But when grants subsidize the development of end user products, it ties the builder and grant recipient to Nostr in a way that can misalign them to the customer's needs. It's a bit like getting a government grant to build something who's the real customer? Grants can therefore create an almost communist like detachment from the market and and false economic incentive to reference the NOSTR decision framework I showed you earlier. When you've been given a grant, you are focusing more on the x axis, not the Y. This is a trade off and all trade offs have consequences. Could grants be the reason Nostr is so full of hobbyist and experimental products instead of serious products? Or is that just a function of how ambitious and early Nostr is? I don't know. Nostr certainly needs better toolkits, SDKs, and infrastructure upon which app and product developers can build. I just hope the grant money finds its way there and that it yields these tools. Otherwise app developers like us won't stick around and build on Nostr. We'll swap it out with a better tool. To be clear, this is not me pissing on Nostr or the grantors. Jack, Opensats and everyone who supported Nostr are incredible. I'm just asking the question. Final thing I'll leave this section with is a thought experiment. Would Noster survive if open sats disappeared tomorrow? Something to think about. Coda, if you've read this far, thank you. There's a bunch here to digest. And like I said earlier, this is not about shitting on Nostr. It's just an inquiry mixed with a little classic Svetsky sacred cow slaying. I want to see NOSTR succeed, not only because I think it's good for the world, but also because I think it is the best option, which is why we've invested so much in it. Something I'll cover in an upcoming article. Why we Chose to build on Nostr. I'm firmly of the belief that this is the right toolkit for an Internet native identity and opensocial graph. What I'm not so sure about is the echo chamber it's become and the cult like relationship people have with it. I look forward to being witch hunted and burned at the stake by the Nostra purists for my heresy and blaspheming. I also look forward to some productive discussions as a result of reading this. Thank you for your attention. Until next time. I cannot say this enough is that we need to be tackling something that the user needs and the user doesn't. The 99.9999% of them do not care what solves that problem, why it solves the problem, or how it solves the problem. And this is the thing with all of these various tools is when you give it to someone and it's like a little bit clunky or it's awkward or it's unfamiliar and they're just doing the same thing that they've done with the other tool. They're just using Nostr, just like Twitter. And now this is just a different Twitter. Like kind of takes a little bit longer to load, kind of harder to find posts and stuff, not quite as much activity. They need a really good reason to stick around that they care about. Which is exactly why bitcoiners and people who seriously care about censorship, resistance and about fixing the web and all of this stuff actually do stick around and but that's a tiny, tiny group of people. We've arguably found basically all of them that matter and even some portion of those who do care about that still just went back to Twitter or X because it just kind of does the job and they've got Nostr as a backup or whatever it is or you know, rumble. The user just wants something that works. And I've always felt that there is this as someone who's kind of like in that middle ground between like super technical and not very technical. Like I still treat and think about most of what I do. I do get like totally in love with like the technical side and like, oh, this is a protocol and I love this because it's a protocol. But I also recognize and I think it might have a lot to do with the fact that how much I partly how much I try to onboard people to privacy tools or things like no. And I get their reaction. I see how they try to interact with stuff and it just hits me as like, wow, this is like this is a whole different world from what this person is expecting or what they think about or they care about when they're getting into something like this. And then also more specifically is I'm always thinking about stuff that I want to build for me because as a user I want the easy version, I want the iOS version. It's not like that I can't break out a terminal and do stuff. I have like three terminal windows open right now doing crap because I only have like a simple script and I don't have an app to accomplish some of these tools. And that's because I haven't spent the time to vibe code it. So it's not like I'm afraid of it, I just don't like it. I would rather things just for the exact same reason that instead of like writing down explicit notes or doing a math problem on which frequencies sound good together, I'd rather just play the guitar or play the piano. I want to be able to play these things because that's a great user experience. Doing the math and showing your work is not fun. Jumping to the answer, being able to play with the tools, that's fun. This is exactly why I feel like there is this massive chasm between what developers like or think about or want to build or are interested in and what the user actually wants or needs and what their experience looks like. I gotta think this is a huge part of why the filter debate is so completely bonkers is because all the developers are saying like, oh, you can easily get around this. It's like, well yes, of course a developer can, somebody who's deeply in this. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about are normal users going to use this to accomplish something or to just stick a bunch of dick butts or whatever in the chain? And there's this developer blindness that like, well, they could just go to a miner or they could just go around the relay network and do this and this and this. The typical nobody is going to do that. Like 99 and a half percent of the people won't do that. Which means you'll block 99% and a half of the people who actually want to do that because won't be an easy way for them to do it. It's a soft barrier that works for people that aren't deeply motivated and deeply knowledgeable about the tools, which is exactly what you want. But the argument is constantly being leveraged out there, just thrown that because a bunch of developers can easily get like, break. I've literally watched when it's like broke out a terminal window and did like a thing and says, see, I got around it. It's like you don't understand how many people that you just eliminated from the able to do this problem. Time and annoyance are costs. Knowledge is a cost. And I see so many developers getting off the filter thing, but just in general, I see so many developers building things that developers want and then getting bored with it the second that it's not an interesting problem for them. And what's left is something that performs the function but is so far away from a product or something that you can actually put in front of a normal user. And then they just kind of like dismiss it or they get angry. You're like, well, they're just gonna have to learn how to do this because they're stupid or they'll never get sovereignty. It's like, well, no, if you never deliver sovereignty into the space where they interact or how they think about it, if you never create a guitar, nobody's gonna create good music. And you can't blame the people for being like, oh, well, they just need to learn how the wavelengths work and they just need to be able to math it together and then they can produce it into a machine. There is no blame or obligation or they gotta do this or learn this. Because the simple reality is that we specialize for a reason. There's no time for everyone to learn everything. And the idea that learning how to use Nostr or manage keys for social media or for a social open graph is something that every single person, everywhere must learn is crazy. Like that a doctor who's focused on learning how to cut into somebody and take out an organ and replace it needs to be worried about what they're doing on their social graph and how they're managing their Noster keys. No, if they don't have the time to do it, then you're just never going to meet them into a. In a place where they can actually utilize this thing. And yes, obscuring it away always has a trade off. The point is, what's the best trade off available with the tools that we have? The option, the option of going a step further, of going deeper, of learning it if they need it, if that doctor ends up being against the COVID vaccine and against the lockdowns because it didn't make any damn sense, because it was against the science and there was nothing that suggested the COVID vaccine was actually going to help anybody. He will learn about keys when it gets to the point that he needs them. But in the meantime, the that's not a priority, it's not a concern. And there's only so much that you can know in advance of a potential problem. You can't have insurance on every single possible outcome in life. And that's what it ends up being for a lot of people if there's no immediate problem that it solves directly in front of them. So the question is always what can you do with this thing that you cannot do with the others? And you lean into that. This is why we did the the BitTorrent Lessons from BitTorrent Lessons of BitTorrent series, which was a four part by Simon Morris. I always loved that one because I think that's a really good fact. That's probably something I should bring back at some point for a reboot because I think it's a really important perspective as to what BitTorrent solved and why it kind of left its heyday. Like what was it that prevented it from mattering so much anymore. Because if we're building censorship resistant protocols and open protocols with an open graph like nostr, or we're building open networks for file sharing or direct peer to peer communication with the Pear stack, or we're building a open and decentralized DNS system on the BitTorrent mainline DHT, just like Picar, and what they're doing with Pub Key, if we're doing these things, we need to understand and think about what we can do with those that isn't being served in some other way. Because if a centralized service does it better, more convenient and more directly, then you've got five times the uphill battle in getting people to switch over to yours. And if specifically it's something that requires a network effect to be of any consequence, then your uphill battles 10 times steeper. You might as well be climbing a sheer cliff face, because it means that it's not even able to provide its benefit unless there's millions of users already on it, which means you have to convince millions of people to adopt it before it's of any use to anybody. And that was one of the lessons of the BitTorrent series, is you have to be breaking the rules in some way, just a little bit. You need to be able to provide something that basically all other turn all Other alternatives are explicitly shying away from or making difficult because of some either explicit or unspoken rule about what you're able to do. Now, another thing I wanted to point out or make note of that I thought was an interesting point. And I had been slowly coming to this realization or thinking, but I've been thinking about it kind of differently, was the one account for everything. Now, I don't fully agree that one account for everything is not a benefit, but that it's not the whole problem of accounts and networks. You also need isolated networks. You also need separate networks and separate identities because people join different communities and behave different ways and say different things. Not everything is open and global. Not everything is meant for public ears. This is why you have Facebook groups. This is why you have things like Instagram and Facebook and TikTok and Twitter. Like you have generations that separate themselves and silo themselves into different platforms. LinkedIn, another great example. And funny, a lot of times when these things cross over or mesh, there's problems because in one community it might be perfectly acceptable to have a particular political opinion or to be, you know, to rage, bait and, you know, just be like, aggressive. And then in another one, it's a completely professional community or a. Your audience is generally a completely different age group and they don't even understand what the hell you're talking about or why you're bringing up this political issue in the middle of this thread about a TikTok dance. And I was generally of the opinion that just having different in pubs of creating different accounts and kind of like closing them off in certain ways was. Or separating them by topic or what the scope of what it is that you want to talk about, or whether you're kind of professional or you're just kind of a troll. This sort of thing, which honestly though there's a, there's a problem with that is just like it's so hard. Like, I, I can't even keep up with two. Like, I have my personal and then Bitcoin audible and it's so hard to keep up with like a bunch of different accounts and networks and stuff, which is why I've invested basically nothing, no time and, or energy in anything other than Twitter and Noster. I'm trying to put a little bit towards YouTube, but it's just like I, I just don't have the, the willpower, the energy. I don't know what it is, but I just. That one feels like it's just nice to be there so that I can link people to it. But it's really hard to keep up with multiple identities, but then at the same time that not only is it like important to be able to take that somewhere and have a different space or an identity or a different network, but it also is really useful to just be able to import, to be able to bring it in into things that I do want public or, or I do want to be in the same social graph to basically have that optionality. And I kind of think that's where a lot of this will fall is in some sort of UX that allows people to register or make the easily recognize that that's what's happening, that they're either pulling in their social graph from over here or their identity from over here or they're creating a new one or this one's like closed into a closed group. But I do think we need something similar to the Facebook group type equivalent is you. You don't necessarily. Everything's not meant to be public. Everything is not meant to be public. When you get all your friends together and you can, you can go, you can bring up, invite a hundred people that you know over to your house and you can still talk about things and you can do things at the house and with that group of people that you just know is acceptable and you know is just kind of. It will be taken in context exactly the way it should be because they know you and you know them, but that if you ever post it out, you just broadcast it out, you took a video and you posted on TikTok, nobody would understand. They don't know you. And that's never a thing that you would want shared or be made public. And it's not because you're hiding something. It's not because you're ill intended, you have ill intentions. It's because literally the whole world is ignorant about you that has no, they have no relationship to you. And all they're going to do is project onto you some idiot straw man ideological cardboard cutout of an idea of a person onto you. And it's going to come with all of their baggage, all of their political baggage, all their relationship baggage, all their experience, all their everything they've had, the problems that they have with their parents. All of it's going to be dumped onto this court cardboard cutout and going to be put in their context, whatever it is that you said or did. And then suddenly you're the worst person in the world and it's got nothing to do with what you said you meant or who you are. It's because nobody can possibly interpret everyone under the context of who they are in a public setting. It's like 99.5% misinterpretation and projection. So the idea of everything being public, everything being on the same identity and everything being just a broadcast layer type network, having that is crucial, but not having that is equally crucial. And I agree with Fetsky on this is that his, the idea that he has of like deleting this externally or having this only on Satlantis or whatever is. It's not an optimal solution. It's. It's not a great approach, but it is a approach that moves in the right direction in the absence of a clear solution to the problem. All right, now I want to do the I want to do the Steve Jobs video, which you've probably heard because it's just really good and it's specifically a response to an insult. But I think I'm going to use it to close out, close out this episode. So real quick, just a shout out to Synonym and their Pub Key app. This is another great example of one that if you, if you know what the tool does and you know what you're trying to build, they have built a set of tools for solving a problem. Think about the problem in the user. If you want to get a feel for it, go to Pub Key pubky app shout out to Leden LEDN IO Here's a perfect example of a what do people need? They need to be able to get fiat without having to sell their Bitcoin. This is actually why I think this is going to be one of the biggest markets in the next five to ten years in Bitcoin hands down secure Bitcoin backed loans. LEDN has an amazing product and service and they we got a special link for you down in the show notes. Then the HRF. Don't forget to check out the Oslo Freedom Forum June 1st to 3rd next year and their amazing newsletter. Probably the best source and simplest place for the full breakdown of globally what's happening with financial freedom and the tools to maintain your sovereignty at the Financial Freedom Report link down in the show notes. And then lastly get Chroma for light health, for red light therapy, for getting your circadian rhythm right and your hormones right, which is fantastic for your energy levels and your sleep. You need to start down that rabbit hole if you haven't and get chroma has a 10 discount code bitcoin audible so you can save sats when you get started. Okay this is one of my favorite and probably most it's the biggest thing That I think in being in Bitcoin, being in peer to peer stuff and loving Nostr and all of these protocols, it seems to be the thing that is universally least understood. And I cannot tell you how many people I hear who sound like this guy in the audience who were like, why would you use this tool? And this tool's better. Do you even know what the hell you're doing or what you're talking about? And I've run into the same thing, you know, like the peer to peer summit was like wild to me. Like, it was so cool being in that room and there were so many people building so many cool things. But I did feel that same disconnect is they were building things that were fascinating and they were way more like advanced and in depth things that I could even attempt to accomplish. But one of the things we talked about in our, we did a brainstorm thing and we were talking about, separated off in the groups and talking about like mass adoption and like, how do you get people to care about this? And one thing that just kind of kept coming up is I, I couldn't tell you what problem a lot of the tools were trying to solve. They were fascinating, they were incredibly well built, they were doing seemingly impossible things. But I didn't know what the user, why the user would care about this. And the only one that I think had a clear reasoning was explicitly because it was being adopted, where the Internet was being like heavily controlled. So it's only explicitly during capital quote, unquote, capital controls. The basically controls over the Internet and who you're allowed to connect to and what server you're allowed to talk to, that the tool provided an obvious and immediate purpose to the user. But simple reality is that's not most people. And the second that immediate use is no longer necessary, the second the Internet is back open and you can just connect to that server, to that other person, is the peer to peer option better or is it just a stopgap? Does it simply solve a transitional problem that will just be met by a new layer of service providers? This is what I think happened to BitTorrent, right? Is that it exploded and it like reached its peak in the 2006, 2007 era, where literally peer to peer traffic was like 70% of the bandwidth cost of the Internet. But then what happened? Streaming. The, the old copyright infrastructure, the old restrictions around how, when and where you can consume media fell away. Basically the entire industry started conceding one at a time that, okay, we can't lock this up, we can't force you to watch only this channel, force you to buy 150 channels to watch these two. We can't force you to watch it at this time of day. The user wants it whenever they want it. They want to be able to watch the whole season or they want to be able to watch one episode. They want it on every one of their devices and they want it easy and they want a great UX streaming, provided that BitTorrent was the only thing that could give that until streaming. But then streaming did it. And Bitcoin BitTorrent has been in decline ever since. And even better is that it could offer things that BitTorrent couldn't. It offered an incredible UI and environment. It offered recommendations for what to watch, ratings from other users. It allowed you to easily discover new things to watch. And specifically they turned capital that they got from the service back into producing more stuff that people wanted. And literally today, you know, Hollywood is way like. Hollywood is on the downhill, like for real. Like the type of media that is king today is long form, seasonal stories. Essentially the novel form of. And I don't mean novel and new, I mean like the book, the novel form of media that isn't what, you know, used to work on broadcast TV. You never did this on broadcast TV, right? Broadcast TV was always episodic. It was sitcoms, it was 90210. It was, you know, every, everything, every single episode sort of stood on its own. And there was like sort of an overarching thing. But now you've got things like the last thing she told me, see a Game of Thrones foundation. You've got these big arching stories, this, these massive epic storylines that go on for seasons. And every episode is only in the context of the previous episodes. That's something that would never. You just couldn't do that on TV at scale and you can't do that in feature film. This is basically, this is the king. This is the content type today. And it's specifically because the medium changed, because the technology change and what the user was able to do with it. And that's the thing about when you change the environment and the technology is new things come about and you have to recognize those new things that can be built. Sometimes it's a new media type, sometimes it's a new way of interacting with people. Sometimes it's getting something that's not quite part of the rules or part of the cultural norm, but this is the only way you can get it because everybody, all the centralized and, you know, controlled platforms shun it for the nature of I either a not trying to anger the people that they are in partnership with. They don't want to draw the ire of groupthink. And think about this too. Apple. One of Apple's greatest quote unquote achievements was something that was explicitly at odds with all of the copyright giants, with all the platforms, all of the album producers. They wanted to be able to sell a single song individually for 99 cents without having to lock people into the entire album. And they wanted to deliver it directly on the device so that they could listen to it whenever they wanted to. That was crazy. At the time, that was something that nobody wanted except for the customer. And it took Apple and Steve Jobs to convince the music industry that it was going to go this way one way or the other, and they could either have a part of it, or it was going to be built by dissidents with technology that simply undermined the entire industry. Much of Apple's success, centralized as it is, was actually built on breaking the rules. So with that, we'll close the episode out and I'll leave you with this, one of my favorite videos of Steve Jobs. So thanks to our sponsors, thanks to the audionauts. Don't forget to subscribe and I'll catch you on the next one. And until then, that's my two sats. [00:49:02] Speaker B: Yes, Mr. Jobs, you're a bright and influential man. Here it comes. It's sad and clear that on several counts you've discussed, you don't know what you're talking about. I would like, for example, for you to express in clear terms how, say, Java in any of its incarnations addresses the ideas embodied in OpenDoc. And when you're finished with that, perhaps you could tell us what you personally have been doing for the last seven years. You know, you can please some of the people some of the time, but one of the hardest things when you're trying to affect change is that people like this gentleman are right in some areas. I'm sure that there are some things OpenDoc does, probably even more that I'm not familiar with that nothing else out there does. And I'm sure that you can make some demos, maybe a small commercial app that demonstrates those things. The hardest thing is how does that fit in to a cohesive larger vision that's going to allow you to sell $8 billion, $10 billion of product A year? And one of the things I've always found is that you've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it. And I've made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room, and I've got the scar tissue to prove it, and I know that it's the case. And as we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with, what incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer? Not starting with, let's sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have, and then how are we going to market that? And I think that's the right path to take. I remember with the laser writer, we built the world's first small laser printers, you know, and there was awesome technology in that box. We had the first Canon laser printing, cheap laser printing engine in the world in the United States. Here at Apple, we had a very wonderful printer controller that we designed. We had Adobe's PostScript software in there. We had Apple Talk in there. Just awesome technology in the box. And I remember seeing the first printout come out of it and just picking it up and looking at it and thinking, you know, we can sell this because you don't have to know anything about what's in that box. All we have to do is hold the something, go, do you want this? And if you remember back to 1984, before laser printers, it was pretty startling to see that people went, whoa. Yes. And that's where Apple's got to get back to. And, you know, I'm sorry that opendoc is a casualty along the way. And I readily admit there are many things in life that I don't have the faintest idea what I'm talking about. So I publish. I apologize for that, too. But there's a whole lot of people working super, super hard right now at Apple, you know, Avi, John Guarino, Fred. I mean, the whole team is working, burning the midnight oil, trying to. And people, you know, hundreds of people below them to execute on some of these things. And they're doing their best. And I think that what we need to do. And some mistakes will be made, by the way, some mistakes will be made along the way. That's good, because at least some decisions are being made along the way. And we'll find the mistakes, we'll fix them.