Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] My Apple ID, which I have held for around 25 years, it was originally a username before they had to be email addresses. It's from the itools era, has been permanently disabled. This isn't just an email address. It is my core digital identity. It holds terabytes of family photos, my entire message history, and is the key to syncing my work across the ecosystem.
[00:00:30] The best in Bitcoin made Audible. I am Guy Swan and this is Bitcoin Audible.
[00:00:53] What is up guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. I'm, I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about Bitcoin than anybody else you know. And this, today's article is a story is a hell of a thing and I think it just demonstrates so many problems with where the web is today and how we have isolated, how we have lost control as users of all of the things that are actually important to identifying, finding and controlling access, identity, content and discovery on the web. And that this is a fundamental, a very deeply troubling problem and the consequences are increasingly worse and worse the more we head in this direction.
[00:01:55] Literally the only sort of saving grace or kind of caveat to how bad the direction is that we have gone is the fact that we have so many different ecosystems and so many different networks and platforms and all of this stuff for various purposes. And I will say it's not necessarily the case or it's not at all that we want the exact same identity everywhere because there is a nature of, there's a benefit to that, but there's also a huge drawback. Like there's, there's definitely something to the fact that, you know, you log into Facebook and you have one network and you log into Instagram. Well, I guess Instagram now is actually the same network, but you log into Tick Tock or whatever and it's not the same people, you know, it's not the same demographics. There are separate cultures for separate communities and that is a feature as often as it is a bug, I think, which means that both, space for both needs to be possible. But I don't think having separate identities or having separate community faces, so to speak, means that you can't have one proof of ownership for your identities or that you have to let go of control over your id. Quite the contrary, I think. I think this can actually work very nicely within a system, within a key based system. But getting a little bit ahead of myself because I think this, this story is a very cautionary tale, I guess. And as someone who is very deep in the Apple ecosystem, Personally, I mean, I always have had a foot out of any ecosystem that I've found myself in. But if, you know, if you compare, I'm essentially out of the Google sphere entirely and I have replaced all of my large centralized dependencies with far more often or far more deeply into the Apple ecosystem. And as someone who basically lives off gift cards on a Bitcoin standard through fold, which I don't think I've ever really used Apple gift cards, but I absolutely do just in general use gift cards on all sorts of stuff. I mean, Amazon, I don't do anything on Amazon that's not gift cards now. Not even my wife does. And that one would be a big hit. I have both my narrator and my publisher accounts on the exact same thing. There they are, Amazon accounts. And even though I do use Linux and I always try to have kind of like a backup outside of it, like it would be devastating if I found myself in exactly this sort of scenario. And with as bad as the censorship and the political thought control has become in the recent years, especially like Australia now is explicitly. I just watched a video talking with a bunch of young kids who have just totally like, you're basically saying that the Australian ban for kids on social media has been hilariously incompetent because they all have workarounds and they're just talking about all these different ways. It's like, yeah, we just, we totally just got around it by doing this. I had my sister, my older sister do the face verification, blah, blah, blah. But the Australian government responded to comments with, you know, journalists and stuff saying that, well, we always knew it wasn't going to be perfect and there were going to be growing pains and lots of adjustments, but we put the onus on the companies on the platforms to do their best to shut down all disallowed parties from accessing it. And if they don't take reasonable measures to essentially police their own customer base, they will be fined $50 million.
[00:05:35] This is going to get worse and worse. This is all Western governments are doing this. There is only. If you look at the trend of this, there is one direction this is headed. This needs to be fundamentally solved or it is fundamentally going to be a bigger and bigger pain and problem with far more devastating consequences and importantly, no recourse.
[00:05:56] And they are putting the onus, they're stealing our money to say they have to keep us safe and then literally outsourcing the policing to our service providers so that we no longer even have a mutual, a cooperative relationship where they help us and we help them with our platforms, but instead we are literally necessitated their enemy because anything that we do wrong they're going to be held liable for and punished for. So they have to treat us like criminals. They have to behave under the assumption that their customers will do them damage. That is such a poisonous situation to have created in the market itself. Not even between like one company and their user, not in like some particular situation, but in the entire market of social media, of provision of these types of services.
[00:06:50] There is now an explicit conflict artificially created between the platform and the user. And exactly these types of disaster scenarios where the user just gets completely thrown under the bus and there's nothing they can do are going to continue to increase and get worse. If we are not building, preparing for and thinking about the solution to this, we are going to continue to be victims of it.
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[00:08:09] We'll hear a lot about that actually in the post the commentary of this episode because of how important I think it is to the solution to this problem. But if you want to get a head start or follow up afterward, there's a link right down in the show notes and a shout out to getchroma co. These guys are all about light health and there's two of their products that I use along with like the Daylight computer which is not Chroma's but I detailed a little video on some things that I've done. Just a few really few easy things that I've done to hugely shift my energy levels and my peaks during the day and night and it's on Nostr, YouTube and X and all that stuff. If you haven't seen it, I'll have the links right down in the show notes and I have a discount code by the way. Bitcoin audible gives you 10 10% off. And lastly, the HRF, the Human Rights foundation and their incredible irreplaceable Financial Freedom Report to keep up with the news of financial tyranny around the world and the tools and stories of how people protected themselves and their families and their communities and got around it all this and more. And you know where to find it right down in the description of this show. And the most interesting thing about this story, maybe the most the most disconcerting thing about this story is that this was a this was not a just anybody and they were deeply in the Apple ecosystem, had a very active developer id. I mean we'll get into it. I'll not to lead the article too much, but this sort of entangling of our lives into a platform, into some other ecosystem or somebody else's server that actually owns our entire digital lives and often we don't think about just how deeply tied to them we are. I hope you think about that during this episode and think about how you can get a foot out the door, how you can prevent yourself from ending up in disaster or decrease the total amount of harm possible if you found yourself in this situation because you may not have any recourse. And with that, let's go ahead and get in to today's article and it's titled 20 Years of Digital Life Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple.
[00:10:32] Written at hey Paris, I am altering the terms. Pray I don't alter them any further. Tim Cook, a major brick and mortar store, sold an Apple gift card that Apple seemingly took offense to and locked out my entire Apple id, effectively bricking my devices and my icloud account, Apple Developer ID and everything associated with it. And I have no recourse. Can you help?
[00:11:04] Email Parisarris ID au@ the head of the article there are some updates in an FAQ which we will cover at the end.
[00:11:14] Here's how Apple permanently locked my Apple ID I am writing this as a desperate measure. After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer authoring technical books on Apple's own programming languages, Objective C and Swift, and and spending tens upon tens upon tens of thousands of dollars on devices, apps, conferences and services, I have been locked out of my personal and professional digital life with no explanation and no recourse.
[00:11:46] The situation my Apple ID, which I have held for around 25 years. It was originally a username before they had to be email addresses. It's from the iTools era has been permanently disabled. This isn't just an email address, it's my core digital identity. It holds terabytes of family photos, my entire message history, and is the key to syncing my work across the ecosystem.
[00:12:13] The Trigger the only recent activity on my account was a recent attempt to redeem a $500 Apple gift card to pay for my 6 TB iCloud storage plan. The code failed. The vendor suggested the card number was likely compromised and agreed to reissue it shortly after my account was locked. An Apple support representative suggested that this was the cause of the issue, indicating that something was likely untoward about this card. The card was purchased from a major brick and mortar retailer, Australians think Woolsworth scale. Americans think Walmart scale. So if I cannot rely on the provenance of that and have no recourse, what am I meant to do? We have even sent the receipt indicating the card's serial number and purchase location to Apple.
[00:12:57] The consequence? My account is flagged as closed in accordance with the Apple Media Services terms and conditions.
[00:13:05] The damage I effectively have over $30,000 worth of previously active bricked hardware. My iPhone, iPad, watch and Macs cannot sync, update or function properly. I have lost access to thousands of dollars in purchased media and software. Apple representatives claim that only the media and services side of my account is blocked. But now my devices have signed me out of imessage and I can't sign back in. And I can't even sign out of the blocked icloud account because it's barred from the sign out API. As far as I can tell, I can't even log in to the secure file transfer system Apple uses to exchange information because it relies on an Apple id.
[00:13:49] Most of the ways Apple has suggested seeking help from them involve signing into an Apple service to upload something or communicate with them. This doesn't work as the account is locked.
[00:14:01] I can't even download my icloud photos as one There are repeated auth errors on my account so I can't make photos work and 2 I don't have a 6 terabyte device to sync them to even if I could.
[00:14:14] A support nightmare I contacted Apple's support immediately. The experience was terrifyingly dismissive. 1 no information support staff refused to tell me why the account was banned or provide specific details on the decision 2 no escalation when I begged for an escalation to Executive customer relations, noting that I would lose the ability to do my job and that my devices were useless. I was told that an additional escalation won't lead to a different outcome. End quote. Many of the reps I've spoken to have suggested strange things. One of the strangest was telling me that I could physically go to Apple's Australian HQ at Level 320 Martin Place, Sydney and plead my case. They even put me on hold for five minutes while they looked up the address New Account Trap Most insultingly, the official advice from the senior advisor was to create a new Apple account and update the payment information.
[00:15:15] This advice is technically and legally disastrous in my opinion. Legally, Apple's terms and conditions rely on termination of access. By closing my account, they have revoked my license to use their services. Technically, if I follow their advice and create a new account on my current devices, which are likely hardware flagged due to the gift card error, the new account will likely be linked to the banned one and disabled for circumventing security measures and Developer program. As a professional Apple developer, attempting to dodge a ban by creating a new ID could lead to my developer program membership being permanently blacklisted, among other things.
[00:15:52] Who I am I am not a casual user. I have literally written the book on Apple development, taking over the learning Cocoa with Objective C series which Apple themselves used to write for O'Reilly Media and then 20 Plus Books. Following that, I helped run the longest running Apple developer event not run by Apple themselves Dev world. I have effectively been an evangelist for this company's technology for my entire professional life. We had an app on the App Store on day one in every sense of the word.
[00:16:28] My plea I am asking for a human at Apple to review this case. I suspect an automated fraud flag regarding the bad gift card triggered a nuclear response that Frontline support cannot override. I have escalated this through my many friends in WWDR and SRE at Apple with no success. I am desperate to resolve this and restore my digital life. If you can help, Please email Parisarris ID AU UPDATE December 14, 2025 Someone from Executive Relations at Apple says they're looking into it. I hope this is true. They say they'll call me back tomorrow on December 15th. In the meantime, it's been covered by Daring Fireball, Apple Insider, Michael Tsai and others. Thanks folks. I've received hundreds of emails of support and will reply to you all in time. Thank you. Fingers crossed. Apple calls back second update December 14, 2025 no luck so far. Not looking good. Anyone got a good lawyer to send them a letter and or help me sue them Paris Update Dec 16 the Register covered it. No luck yet. Update Dec 18 we're back. A lovely man from Singapore working for Apple Executive Relations who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days has let me know it's all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me and did not credit My account was already redeemed in some way. Sounds like classic gift card tampering, and my account was caught by that. Obviously it's unacceptable that this can happen and I'm still trying to get more information out of him, but at least things are now mostly working. Strangely, he did tell me to only ever buy gift cards from Apple themselves. I ask if that means Apple's supply chain of Blackhawk Network, Incom and other gift card vendors is insecure and he was unwilling to comment. I'll post a more substantive update soon.
[00:18:18] FAQ the original post continues below, but to answer some questions Yes, I have the receipt for the card, including the activation receipt. Yes, the card was legitimately purchased. It's not from ebay. Yes, I have contacted the retailer. Yes, I do have backups. That isn't the point. The hardware is somewhat MacBook Pro and iPhone to completely iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods, Apple TV, HomePod useless.
[00:18:44] No, I don't know why parts of the account still kind of work and parts don't. No, I didn't write this article with AI. I just tried to make it clear what was going on with headings and I've been writing for a long time. Yes, Apple really did use emojis in their live chat. Yes, I am in contact with Australian government regulators and ombudsman, but that process takes months to allocate cases.
[00:19:05] Yes, I'll write to my local federal member Andrew Wilkie. He he's helped me with many things before, but Apple is still Apple. Yes, I have had problems with WISE and the Commonwealth bank of Australia in the past. No, I'm not a glutton for punishment. I don't know what's going on. Yes, my business recovered their money from Wise, but the AFCA complaint is ongoing. As I said, the process is slow. No WWDR and friends in SWE and SRE at Apple haven't been able to help beyond trying to escalate.
[00:19:34] This is what can happen when you don't own your digital id.
[00:19:41] Now this is I want to point out a few things about this dynamic. Here is understand that and why this is so important to the discussion about how we are directing what we're building and why I think so much of the foundation and direction of Bitcoin, of Nostr, of pubkey, of the pair stack of these things, why they are so unbelievably critical, even in a world where obviously trust will still exist. Like, it's not as if platforms won't exist. It's not as if platforms won't bundle services and there won't be some potential of getting wrapped up in one space. But we have gone so far toward the direction, like this person, Paris, or whoever this is, literally doesn't. Essentially doesn't own their devices.
[00:20:35] Like, we have entered a space where we literally own nothing. And this was essential. Like when you use your Apple ID to sign in with other stuff, which I do just out of sheer convenience, especially when it's an account that, you know, isn't like critical, like, isn't like super important, but it's just kind of explorative or I'm just using it for some side benefit, like, there might end up being something. It's kind of like trying out a bunch of different wallets. You know, I've had that happen before as well. In fact, this occurred specifically because of a very poor backup process that I had on my previous iPhone that I was trying is the iPhone 7 that I was trying to get to last as long as I could possibly make it last.
[00:21:23] And as a, as a rule or as a job, I guess I will download and explore and test out tons and tons and tons of different wallets. And I'm always super good about my backup ritual, but there have been times where I was really lax about it. Today I don't even. I will download a wallet, but I will not even start it if I am not in a place where I can do my full ritual of my backup, of writing it down, of confirming it, of doing the whole thing. And I even, no matter what I'm doing, I will stop and I will do that ritual. So, and that's something. If you do not have a backup ritual for your stuff, absolutely do it. Especially if you have multiple wallets. You just have to do it. If you have a wallet right now, you're thinking about right now, you have a bitcoin wallet, a hardware wallet, a software wallet, a mobile wallet, whatever it is, and you realize that you have one that you do not have backed up, that you're like, oh, I was going to do it later. Stop right now, pause this episode and go back it up, Write down your seed phrase, put it in a safe place, and then Come back and listen to the rest of this episode.
[00:22:26] I'm going to give you a second to pause. Don't be a bitch. Just do it.
[00:22:30] But I had the iPhone 7 and I actually lost a wallet because I had not kept up with it very well. Granted, it only had a few hundred bucks in it at the time because it was. It was Moon Wallet, actually. And I really, I kind of liked the wallet, but it was one I had booted up and was starting to explore with just a few, you know, I was like $1250 maybe, like, I was just like kind of testing things out. But then I enjoyed the wallet. I thought it was a good wallet. And so I ended up using it far, far more and putting more money into it and then receiving money into it, etc. And I never went back and properly did the backup. And also I will, I will say there was. There was a quirk about it too, because I did actually back up my password for the wallet, but there was something about.
[00:23:19] I cannot remember what it was. It was something about there was like a combination password and seed phrase and I only copied, I only saved one of them. And I can't remember exactly what the. What the thing was, but I had done it in a rush. I had done it very poorly. I had not been consistent about my ritual and it was slightly different than what I was used to. And so part of it was I effed up, but then part of it was also. It was like slightly unique. But regardless, it doesn't matter. The idea was that, like, my hardware, my hardware failed and luckily I was able to restore essentially everything else. And this was the only one that I actually lost. But there are numerous accounts and keys, when you're looking at like pass keys and these sorts of things that are literally directly connected, they only exist inside the Apple account. And that if I attach my Apple account to a wallet or to some sort of a service, it's gone if I don't have access to my Apple account. And then these things get tied to a developer ID to literally your livelihood. Like, you might, you might be an app developer, you might literally sell apps on the App Store as a job and because of a $500 gift card, you get locked out from your income.
[00:24:36] I just want to say kind of at the outset here, what a horrific failure this is. And this is also a projection or kind of a window into how bad a lot of these AI systems are, because there are going to be enormous false positives of automated decision making and automated locking out. And the fact that the support people specifically did not have access to undo this. There was nobody in the escalation tiers of literal Apple support of anybody who's supposed to be helping, being able to help and regain access to an account when there's a fault or an error or a misjudgment. If this was anyone other than this person who luckily had enormous contacts with people at wwdc, people in Apple and luckily got an enormous amount of tension in the media. But if this is the only way to actually get this undone, you're talking about people losing their entire digital lives and not having a recourse. They would not get this treatment. They would not be able to get this exposure. And if that's the only way an Apple does not leave some other option, that's crazy. That is such a gross failure. And this is somebody who is. I am sitting here with my iPhone in front of me and I am recording this on my MacBook and I have Apple TVs in the living room and in our bedroom. I like Apple products. I love their, their general inst interface. I hate all of the stupid.
[00:26:09] The, especially the players. I hate and distrust as Samsung TVs. I don't even like smart TVs. I want a dumb TV and I want to be able to plug my Apple TV into it because Apple TV is just in my opinion, the best player. And I've played. I've used every single one of them. Use fire sticks. I've used Chrome, I've used the western digital tv. I've used. God, I don't even know. I've literally had like 15 of the things and every single one of them suck after. Even the ones that work kind of pretty well at the beginning, which was probably fire stick more than anything after like nine, nine months, a year, they just, it's just like they die. It's like they, they're just struggle. There's something that's just like constantly eating up RAM or drive space or something or zombie processes that just never like close out enough that it just sluggish. Like I hit a button and it's just like why I'm. How, how long do I have to wait? I'm going to go make food right in the hell. I'm just trying to open an app. Apple TV is the only one that I have had for years and years and since we, since we switched over to it, never had a problem with it. And so I would hate to lose it for that. Like, I really, really like that device. But it is one thing if my ID is attached to a service and I'm heavily dependent on that service or that ecosystem or their, their platform versus it actually only existing. The key, very frightening reality here is that the user didn't own the id. Whether it was banned or blacklisted or not, they didn't own it. Apple owned it. They owned the network, they owned the distribution, they owned the developer account, they own all of the software. The second they can say that this developer is no longer able to access it, they own the reins to their income stream. And no matter how benevolent of a dictator the system is supposed to have, the consequences when things go wrong are increasingly going to get worse and worse and worse.
[00:28:20] This is why I believe this is one of the most important problems to solve in what I believe will be the next era of the web, of the Internet itself.
[00:28:33] And it's why I leverage all of my focus into nostr, pubkey and the Pair stack. And granted there may be other, other tools and systems out there that I'm just not aware of.
[00:28:48] I mean, I know Airo as well has like, you know, just peer to peer is a really interesting peer to peer framework and there's, you know, some people swear by IPFs and you know, all of this stuff, but I, I think simplicity and there are not only simplicity in implementation, but also simplicity in design.
[00:29:09] This, one of the things that has always attracted to me, attracted me to Nostr.
[00:29:16] Then in addition, PubKey, one of the interesting things about PubKey is that each piece is its own very simple tool and used in tandem is essentially the solution. But you can basically use any individual piece of it in isolation. Then Pair obviously itself is just a full peer to peer tech stack. It's, it's essentially its own.
[00:29:40] It is, as I, as, as I have said on many different occasions, I believe it to be BitTorrent 2.0. It's like, okay, what if we took this, the static idea, the very immobile and clunky thing that was BitTorrent and we turned it into a web environment, we turned it into one where we're establishing connections, we're updating feeds, where we have like a constant stream of ID based networks and data streams. And the three most critical problems, I think off the top of my head that there may be another one in this stack that I'm not, I'm not thinking of right now. But the, the three that come immediate to mind, especially in regards to this, is that the ID itself is inside the platform and we need the ID to be separate. We need the ID to be owned by the user. Now if that user then connects their ID to Apple services and Apple provides an enormous amount of services and then they get locked out of those services, we. Well, it does, in fact, still, it still causes a huge problem and this could still be a huge disaster for someone, but it doesn't lock their ID out of every other account, every other system, every other platform and service and website that they use when those aren't tied to Apple. Like so the example is that like, let's say I use my Apple ID to sign in with Google, I don't know, just any Service, Asana or GitHub or something like that. And then I lose access to those accounts because I can't swap it over. I have no recourse to detach it from my Apple ID and move it to some other account system. Now if this was a Nostr, if I have a Nostr key or I have a pub key identity and I am able to log in with Apple and log in with GitHub, then the fact that GitHub and Apple are two different companies and two different services and two different hostings and servers and all that stuff just makes it so that I lose Apple and I don't lose GitHub. And then it just makes me mad because I'm like, I had all of these services with Apple and now I got locked.
[00:31:46] But I do not lose my id, I do not lose my, my digital existence. My ID is the key itself and I can take it with me to any other service or any other platform that I want. And it is owned by me. And importantly that the network attached to that id, maybe many of the people who access that are through an Apple service. You know, let's, let's think about it like again, Nostr is actually a pretty good example because we have a bunch of different, we already have a bunch of different clients. So I use Domus and Primal as kind of like my two main.
[00:32:22] And if Primal sucks, if Primal goes on like, you know, automated AI account lockdowns and they have a false positive and somehow they think that mine is a fake account or I bought a $20 primal gift card or something, I don't know, and tried to redeem it and it failed, I would be locked out of a significant portion of my network.
[00:32:42] There are a ton of people who like Primal and who use Primal and it would be a little bit clunkier. Like the, probably the feed and the delay and the access, the spread of my posts into the, the circles of people who use Primal might be a little bit slower or I might get less engagement and recognition because I'm less likely to show up in people's feeds, or I show up slower in their feeds because I'm now having to go through other relays or specifically only to those who are also connected to Domus. And maybe some of them are only connected to Primal. But my ID is still active on Domus. My ID is still active on any other relays that don't have the stupid policy or AI thing that Primal had. And anybody who is looking for me, who is still looking for my public key and my signature on posts, can still find them as long as they're connected to some other relay. And they will still be attached to my network wherever it is that I find a relay willing to relay my information or host my own and invite other people to it. That's the first primitive is IDs need to be separated from the platform because we have turned the web into something where we exist as people, but we do not actually have a way to identify people on the web. We have a bunch of different systems and a bunch of different accounts owned by the servers and platforms on which they exist. They own the IDs, they own the streams, they own the payment mechanisms, they own the networks and they own the content.
[00:34:21] We are entering the age of feeling the consequences of what a terrible decision that was for us to offload that responsibility.
[00:34:30] That brings us to the number two big one, the payments.
[00:34:34] The flow of funds need to be separated from the platform. This obviously is bitcoin, lightning, ark, etc. This is also deeply attached to the identity system to Nostr and pubkey because both of them, pubkey hasn't released theirs yet. But they, I know they have a bunch of things working on the back end for their own basically lightning based payment system, essentially like Noster Zaps. But I know they're, they're doing something that's a little bit more complete because it's going to be tied into BitKit and they're going to have stablecoins like Tether is going to be a part of it.
[00:35:09] And also there's, I know there's been a bunch of work in the background on Pear Credit, which is a whole different thing. But I don't really know what it looks like, but I know that there is a lot of stuff coming. And the critical thing is that the payment goes to your public key.
[00:35:23] Like you, you generate the payment data from the actual key, that is your identity. Which means that no matter which platform, which service which relay you're going through your payment information. As long as you still access, have access to your id, you still have access to control over how and when people can pay you. That's because the payment networks, the payment and monetary structure of the system itself is separate from the platform we are unbundling. This disaster of a web we have found ourselves in now, just those two primitives having a fundamental shift, I think is enough to essentially be responsible for a technological revolution, for a systemic revolution in how we organize the web and people and the structure of how content flows on the web. One that is significant, that is as significant and as profound as the shift from kind of the, the website centric Internet of the 90s and early 2000s and then the social, social centric web of you know, basically 2007, 2008, 2009 and on essentially after the smartphone era. Like people I think discount how powerful of a shift that was like that was a very, very profound structural change in how we interacted with the web itself. But I think there is a third primitive that if you attach to these others, these other two core primitives, you really have something. So you have such a deep change that the nature of what provision of a service is, could be fundamentally altered online as well. And I think this is the removal of servers and the need for DNS.
[00:37:25] This is actually utilizing the peer to peer nature and separating the content from its location from the host responsible for delivering it relays on Nostr and you know the relationship between home servers and pub key distributors. Actually I'm not sure but they how they term it in the pub key system. But essentially your home server is the source of your information and you deliver it to.
[00:37:52] Conceptually it's a little bit like relays on Nostr but you essentially direct to where your hosting is or where your content is located and you're using a, you know, something like PKDNS to essentially be the master of where it is that people actually find you.
[00:38:08] And then there is the pair stack where the content itself is key, addressable in the sense that it doesn't even matter who or where it's being delivered.
[00:38:21] You essentially have blind forwarding as a potential path on the network at all times, just based on the stream or the sub network that you actually join. So not only could you make your own like general peer to peer space or as they're referred to as like topics where everybody's joining a network, you can actually have it so that the app itself has its own topic. And within that you can have different blind forwarding rules and, and sub networks inside that network so that you kind of have a isolated peer to peer network that behaves in a certain way or has certain rules for all of the users in it. And this would allow you to have like a public index only in that network. Like Keat is a good example is that like when you join Keat, you're actually joining a hyperswarm that's a peer to peer network that's specific to Keat so that you can actually, you can essentially recreate a global ID system and you can search people by username within that network, but you can still just broadly use the peer to peer network without joining the Keat network and have a totally different set of names and IDs and all this stuff, but still be using the same set of keys. But the beauty of this, the beauty of this is that the content itself, wherever or however it's delivered, is separate from its host, is the content is addressable in its own sense. And this is the, and in addition is that you remove the need for port forwarding for DNS because it's the person itself, it's the key, it's the social identity which we've already separated. With a key that you actually use to source the information, you actually find the relevant data to prove that it is actually associated with them. So in nostr, it doesn't matter which relay I get the information from, it's signed by the key of the person I follow and I know it's theirs.
[00:40:19] Wherever in the relay network I am, wherever on the web I am, doesn't matter as long as I can check that signature.
[00:40:26] I know that I got the data, I know that the data comes from the person I am following obviously under the assumption that the key is safe. Therein lies actually another problem that I think Nostr doesn't solve. Well that, which is why I think pubkey does a really good job. But I don't know also how their content integrity, at least in the naive sense of just using sessions in like PubKey app, I don't think is as secure as Nostr's. But their keys are specifically offline. You, you, you only sign to log in. And because of that the keys are far less likely to actually get stolen or get compromised. But this is exactly why we're building peer drive the way that we are building it.
[00:41:09] And we have a, essentially a key delegation system where you, you're essentially creating tons and tons of sub keys or you're delegating the key. This key belongs to you.
[00:41:22] So that you can get some sort of a marriage between the benefit of having your key that attests to which devices are yours or which networks are yours completely offline, like Pub Keyring does.
[00:41:35] But you have hotkeys that just never leave the app. Every hotkey is actually specific to the app or to the device or to the program that you are interacting with, rather than your identity. Your identity just proves that this is your key and then everybody else recognizes it.
[00:41:52] So essentially all device and client keys are ephemeral. They can be attested to belonging to you or attested to the fact that they are compromised and therefore ignore them. But the dominant key, the main identity key, never stays hot online or it stays in a secure location and doesn't just get pasted into applications that aren't necessarily a risk in how we even associate with that and runs itself into a problem of not even just like getting locked out of your Apple account, but having somebody completely steal your identity and payments and everything like that. Like if we don't treat that with extreme care by default, well then you've, you've, you've set yourself up for a very profound failure that isn't even subject to some platform or, you know, client or whatever. So it's like, okay, yeah, sure, I own it. But your lowest common denominator of risk is literally the weakest link of all of the clients that you're using or all of the devices that you're using. So if you're using the same key everywhere, like how Nostr currently does it, if I'm using it on two Android, two apps in Android and four apps in my Apple and Apple my MacBook, I only need one of those apps to go bad. I only need one of those devices to be vulnerable or to get confiscated or whatever, for all of it to fall apart. So while I think the fundamental nature of having a key as an identity is a vastly superior from a sovereignty and platform dependency perspective, from a technical and kind of opsec perspective, if you're having to pace that key around and use it as a hotkey in many different locations and many different devices, well, you run yourself a severe technical risk, which does solve the problem in a very naive sense, but opens you up, it kind of moves much of the problem just to a different location. It's just a different sort of trade off. But here's the thing with why I think the way we're, the direction we're moving with Pear Drive and why I think this is such an important part, the Pear Stack, Nostr and pubkey are so important. I'm looking for that kind of like that sweet spot in the recipe of how to take advantage of all three of these pieces and create an environment that's easy to use, that has a really fun and simple user experience, can do things that cannot be done in any other context, and that the user truly owns that.
[00:44:37] How could we design an application or an interface or an ecosystem where we are not liable?
[00:44:47] And I don't mean that in the sense it's like, oh, I'm legally worried about what they're doing, but I mean, we're not liable in the sense that it's not my. I don't have to worry about keeping somebody else's data safe, that we as a company could provide benefits to them without being a risk to them. And I think it requires solving all three problems or finding a sweet spot in all three where the ID belongs to the user, where every new client or device being added to it doesn't add a new layer of risk to that user, but does simply add benefit that keys and devices and clients can easily be added or revoked, which also allows a very simple delegation system. So, like, if, you know, you know, I have a producer or whatever that I just give access to my Twitter account so that he can produce, he can post stuff while I'm not around, how do I make it so that our system can easily do that by delegating, you know, partial access to someone else. How can we ensure that even if a network that they join that's, you know, being curated and allowing many different people to connect to them, that or discover them really is the thing. So like, like a YouTube sort of situation is you, you want the ability to discover other channels and other users and content creators in a large, broad environment or a curated environment where you don't have to worry about CP or just porn in general or any like, just horrible gross content? Well, you want curated networks, you want curated environments. You also don't want someone else stealing someone else's work and getting more credit or more payment for it than the original person who actually owned and created the content.
[00:46:25] But how do you do that where if that content curator and the network provider decides that, oh, well, not only are we not going to allow pornography, we're also not going to allow Republicans or Democrats or people with of this persuasion or this religion. How do we make it so that anybody who follows or any network that has been built up with for that person, that they can still exit? And all of those users, like, I shouldn't be able to decide for a thousand users who want to follow this one guy, because I disagree with them, I should not be able to decide that they can't, they suddenly can't follow or find that guy's content. So how do you separate the role of the network provider and the curator from the role of.
[00:47:11] To only a facilitator, not an owner, to only a, an aggregator, not a controller of the content flow. And then of course, payments. How do you make it so everybody can pay, can, has, has an ID that can be paid and can use any payment provider or lightning address or Bitcoin address, whatever it is, stablecoin address that they want. And that as a curator or a service provider, or a mirror, you know, like an additional host so that your content is already online. How do you make it so that that can be paid for specifically as a service? And if that service fails, you simply don't pay them, you pay somebody else. But if that service just provides a bad service or, and, or wants to not enable your content on their network or their cur feed, I'm not in the middle, I'm not in the way of that payment. I'm simply providing a platform for them to broadcast how it is that they get paid. Now, I have no idea if the way we're trying to go about it is actually going to be the way that works. And we'll try a bunch of different things, but I think having those three pieces where the content is separate from the host provably so that the payment is separate from the platform and the network creator, and the ID is owned by the person whose ID it is by the individual. And thus all of those things travel with them.
[00:48:45] And any facilitator, any curator or network booster, you know, like let's say Twitter, right, is like a huge network that can access and broadcast and save tons of data for tons of different people. Well, what if I can still just leave and access it from anywhere else? And somebody who's accessing it through Twitter may increasingly have problems trying to find my content because their host won't deliver it to them, but they can connect to someone else and there it is, connect any other host or any other mirror. Because my key, my key, my identity is the thing that makes them look for my content and know that my content belongs to me and know that they can pay me directly and there's nothing that Twitter can actually do to get in the middle of that. And when that is the case, when we actually find the recipe to create an environment A set of protocols, a set of tools, and with a high to vibe code the crap out of every potential option. Like we should be trying this a million different ways because something is going to work when we do that and we unlock devices and hosts and networks from the platforms that they are currently stuck in, they are trapped in.
[00:49:56] That, in my opinion is a fundamental and extremely important shift that we need the Internet to have. And I thought this story was such a profound example of exactly how bad and how naive some of the mistakes can be made and how terrible some of the consequences can be be. When something is fundamentally designed, there is a systemic problem with the system and not even maliciousness. But simple error has increasingly greater and greater and more and more cascading consequences.
[00:50:33] It needs to be fixed. And this is one of a million stories as to why, but I thought it was a very interesting one.
[00:50:42] A shout out to Leden IO for Bitcoin backed Loans Synonym is also a sponsor of this show and as I've always talked about many times, I'm very fascinated with their protocol stack. I think they are a key player in building a new decentralized web Chroma as well. I just did a video actually on kind of like my Lighthouse and how I think about this and what I've done in the last like six months to a year to correct that. Check it out, it's on Nostr X, TikTok, Instagram, all that stuff. In fact, I'll have the link down in the show notes and shout out to Chroma for their amazing products. But then also for supporting the show I have a discount code for you guys, 10%. And lastly the HRF, the Human Rights Foundation. Their amazing work in fighting for freedom and connecting the people who are trying to protect freedom and financial sovereignty around the world. Check out their indispensable newsletter, the Financial Freedom Report and the Oslo Freedom Forum starting June next year.
[00:51:39] Tickets, details, links, goodies, right down in the show notes with that. Guys, thank you so much for listening to Bitcoin audible. Don't forget to subscribe and share it with everybody you know. And until next time, that's my two SATs.
[00:52:07] Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present Marcus Aurelius.
