TPR_004 - Monetizing Freedom - Ostriches, Pears, and Open Source Challenges with BitKarrot

[00:00:00] Speaker A: I really want to screen share stuff with people and make it as easy as possible. And I got fed up, so I was just like, okay, you know, let's throw this up, and let's, like, stick on a noster login and let's add lightning zaps to it as a starting point. It was pushed out a bit prematurely, but, like, you know, and get out there, and I think a lot of people want to use it. Like, I know there's been a couple thousand people who hid it in the last month using hive talk pretty much all around the world, because they want a way to talk to other people where you're not really getting tracked. And I actually had to go modify the original code base to drop a lot of the tracking information about who's on it, and I don't want to know who's on it. That's the deal, is that we want to be able to provide a space where people don't feel like, oh, there's some googly eyes watching whatever they're talking about. Yeah, right. And I don't want to know either, you know? Cause, like, the way I think about this is, you know, if someone comes along and subpoenas that server, there's nothing there. [00:01:21] Speaker B: What is up, guys? Welcome back to the pair report. I am Guy Swan, and this is where we explore everything that is happening in the new decentralized revolution and the peer to peer economy. And I have a good friend of mine who has been in, who I've been exploring the pair stack with and who has been developing a lot of really interesting and exciting new tools. I got to sit down with her and just kind of pick her brain on a lot of the things that I've been thinking about with problems in the space, what our biggest challenges are that we need to overcome and that we might be ignoring and also just kind of the general complications of open source mesh net and distributed style protocols and software is why do they always seem to be fighting an incredibly uphill battle, and how do we get up the hill as easily as we can? How do we get across that barrier with the tools and the environments, with the systems that we want to build for us? So we get into all of that and a lot more with bitcaret. A quick shout out to Swan, bitcoin, and coinkite for sponsoring this show. Swan bitcoin is the best place to go get started in bitcoin. Or if you want to be on a bitcoin standard and you just want to have an IRA and a business account and everything. You name it, Swan. Bitcoin has an entire suite of tools. And then you buy your bitcoin, and then you withdraw it to your cold card. Get yourself a cold card, hardware wallet so you know you can keep it safe. And the links and details and a discount code will be right in the description of this show. With that, let's get into this episode of the pair report. Monetizing freedom. Ostriches, pears, and open source challenges with bitcarrot. [00:03:23] Speaker A: Welcome to Tech World. [00:03:24] Speaker B: Right, I've. I literally. This has kind of been like my starting situation. With every podcast I've been doing for like the last four months, I've had problems with Riverside. It, uh. The conversation that I had with Carlos, uh, ended up screwing up like an hour into it. The show that I had with Tali and Scott, I mean, literally, this has been like at least five or six episodes deep. I cannot have technology hates me, or just technology in general is just failing. [00:03:57] Speaker A: Yeah, that's more like it. Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think in so many ways, which is ironic because we're recording this right now in discord, and I think it doesn't work for everyone. Like, I. Discord was giving us so many problems with people who are running Linux. Really just had to get off of it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know. What. What rabbit hole do you want to start with? [00:04:21] Speaker B: Oh, good Lord. I don't even know. There's so many. And this is funny because this is like one of those things that I feel like we need to solve. You know, I'm paying $40 a month for Riverside and it's failing, right? I'm paying $30 a month for Zencastr and it just failed us. And now we're on discord with a free botanical. And we only have audio, obviously, but we can at least record it. But this is just such a. Such a mess. Why is this so hard? Wasn't this easy, like, not very long time ago? What happened? [00:05:00] Speaker A: I think that's the handcuffs coming out. And that's just my guess. I don't have super hard evidence because I'm not behind any of these companies. But it's real strange when like, you know, for example, discord changed its policies three times this year. And every single time they changed it. Every single time there's a Linux user, they're like, I can't get it to work. I quit. You know, I've been hearing this so many times and. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. [00:05:28] Speaker B: There was actually. I was just looking at a closed noster. But I just. There was just a post on the Nostra a minute ago. I can't remember who it was talking about. Google not letting you. YouTube not letting you watch videos now and, like, aggressively blocking ip addresses unless you were logged in. And, yeah, this is something I've been seeing more and more is. And this is one of the things that you and I may have even talked about this, like, a year and a half ago, about the. Not only the trend, but just why I think the technological landscape is headed towards siloed everything. Like, everybody's kind of putting their walls up and the number of captchas that I have. I mean, I just. We were just talking about this while we were logging in to discord, is that I just did three captchas that I have never done before. It was like a weird, rough drawing of a penguin and then a whole bunch of patterns overlaid and then a bunch of random, like, kind of hazy animals. And I was supposed to pick which one looked like a penguin, which, you know, looked like. Never used this captcha before. They're different every week. And I swear I think the AI can learn them better than the human people can now. [00:06:47] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Like, we can go down the AI rabbit hole, too, if you want, later. [00:06:52] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, for sure. [00:06:54] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, yeah, absolutely. Like, I've experienced the same thing with YouTube. Like, if I want to go watch something, I'm not logged in. It just takes forever to load. And, you know, if I decide to log in and use it, you know, I don't want it to look at my. My browsing history because then it's going to give me, like, you know, posts or videos are tuned to my history, and it just gives me such a hard time. I think they just want to track and trace everything at this point. [00:07:26] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I think it's also, too, that the bots are increasingly a worse problem. And the trade off between forcing the customer to always be logged in and essentially always be Kyc'd, plus the benefit they can get from that is the economics are just slightly shifting in that favor where they're just like, all right, we'll just ban everything that might be a botanical and we don't care anymore. We already have this huge network lock in. Everybody's got a YouTube account. We're all just going to be logged in. There's no. I really kind of think we're. We're looking towards the end of the open web is, well, at least in the traditional Internet sense, is everything's closing down. Everything's becoming KYC. And I think part of it is just that they don't know how to solve the trust problem and the incentive for them and the position they're in. It's too easy to just KYC everybody and force everybody into accounts and everybody puts in their freaking cell phone number and they get all these benefits. And I'm sure the NSA is nagging at them every couple of days to be like, you got everybody's phone number yet? [00:08:43] Speaker A: Yeah. It's funny because I tell people about in Q Tel, and they're like, I've never heard of that before. [00:08:49] Speaker B: Oh, my God. [00:08:49] Speaker A: Have you heard about them? You know about them, right? [00:08:51] Speaker B: Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were just talking about that on the chain of custody. The Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin, they. They break down in a short section or whatever, a bunch of stuff about in Qtel, in the. In the piece, which we did on Bick, on audible. [00:09:08] Speaker A: Yeah, they're, you know, they're the VC branch of the CIA, and they've got their fingers into almost every single big tech company out here and non big tech, a lot of startups as well. [00:09:21] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think it goes to show just how critical and how systemic the money problem is is that they're not. Why should they have owners? They're. They're an institution that has no fundamental cost. They misplaced, the CIA misplaced, you know, $2 trillion or $3 trillion or whatever the hell it was. Like, you don't even know where it is in their budget. And they just have access to all of this capital, and somehow it just gives them control. Of course they're going to be in VC. It just means that they have buying power, they have vote power, they have control. They have influence over everything. Why wouldn't they? It's such an easy route. [00:10:05] Speaker A: Yeah. I think in bitcoin, we have to be especially careful with that now. I mean, especially if you're, like, developing anything. Like, I've always been very wary of VC's because I've seen them destroy people's lives, destroy people's companies, you know, like, for artificial growth. But there's also, like, the grant system, which, you know, like, I'm pretty skeptical about because you never know. Like, I've seen people complain about, oh, you know, I got this grant from so and so, but now they're trying to control the narrative. Like, I'm not allowed to say certain things, and they're bitcoin developers, so that. That's. That's worrisome. [00:10:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Everything's a trade off, man. Everything's a trade off. It all comes. [00:10:46] Speaker A: Everything's a trade off. Everything's a trade off. Um, I don't know where you want to go with this or if you just want to free form this conversation or. [00:10:56] Speaker B: Well, I want to start just talking about what you're building because I haven't properly explored hive talk, and what I wanted this episode to be about was basically where its actually very much in line with how we started. This thing is why it is, I think noster and kind of the para ecosystem are increasingly going to be the only sort of open corners of the Internet. And I think a lot of it is specifically because of a public private key system where you identify users directly and you can share that. You can share a connection or a service directly with whoever you want to, and then also with a web of trust in something like Noster, and then being able to basically wall things behind payments so that everybody is staked and you basically are able to, quote unquote, by a degree of trust with a small amount of sats. And I think that model is going to be the only thing that actually fixes maintaining the open web with where things are going with all the platforms locking down. And very relevant to the problem we've been having with Discord and Zencastr and Riverside is Hive talk. And this is built on noster. I don't really know much about the backend architecture and stuff. I want you to tell me why you built this, what this is, and when I can use that to replace these. [00:12:42] Speaker A: You can use it anytime you want. The reason why I want to talk to you about this and let other people know is because we would love to have more and more users. The more feedback, the better. Let's rewind a bit back to last year, because I kind of have to tell the story forward of how I got here and how I did not intend to be here. [00:13:03] Speaker B: Go to town. That makes it that much better. [00:13:07] Speaker A: It's like a twist of fate. I'm like, how did this happen? So, yeah, last year I was doing some podcasts on Noster, and that was really interesting, but it was really intense. And I'm not really, how do you say, I'm not really that extroverted. So, like, doing lots of interviews is really hard for me. And, you know, I was doing more work on LM bits, and before then I was just doing a lot of, like, experimental stuff in lightning, just mostly out of self interest to understand it better. You know, like, I'm not a full time developer. I'm like a hobbyist in terms of, like, the time allocation. And, like, even though I was professional many, many years before, it's just like, this is so that I can really understand bitcoin lightning a lot better. And I started to realize, I was like, wait, there are so many holes in all this. This is actually really scary. It's really surprising. [00:14:00] Speaker B: That doesn't surprise me. That doesn't surprise me. [00:14:02] Speaker A: I was like, you gotta be kidding me, right? So I was like, okay, allow me to help you fix this patch. You know, let me help you fix that patch. And that's what, that's how it started. But then I think, like, uh, to Ben Arc's credit, he, like, recognizes people who have ability to help. So, you know, I got sucked more into that here and there. Uh, but at the same time, um. [00:14:26] Speaker B: You shouldn't have fixed anything. That's your, that was your problem. You fixed something and you're like, oh, you're stuck here. [00:14:34] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like, uh, oh, you have a tag on your back now. That's what turned into, it's like, you know, then I started getting all these messages just going like, hey, carrot, I want to learn how to code. How do I do this? What's the learning about? Which is all fine and good, you know, because I think a lot of people have these questions and, you know, some people are asking for one on one help. And I was like, well, okay, it's getting to be too many people, right? But I do know other people in this space who are interested in teaching, like, you know, Asher Pembroke and, like, Randy McMillan, they, you know, willing to help people even though they're, like, full time developers. So I said, okay, why don't we make, like, a spin off branch of Plebnet, you know, let's just call it plebnet Dev, and let's make a little group and we can all chat. But, you know, developers who are doing this freelance or if they're doing this part time, you know, if you want their help, if you want mentorship, here's a way to get mentorship. Or, like, if you want, like, a private tutoring session, you can do that and pay them sats. So let's create, like, this experimental micro circular Sats economy. [00:15:41] Speaker B: Interesting. [00:15:43] Speaker A: Yeah, it was all experimental. We didn't do any advertising, really. It was really just sort of like small community subgroup, really. And in my head, the reason why I actually thought, oh, this would be useful. You know why? Because a lot of people were spinning up test testnet lightning nodes and testnet Lmbits. And it was just like going up and going down and going up and going down, and there wasn't one that was like, set, you know what I mean? Like, if I want to go try something, it would be like, I would have to set up all this stuff, and then when I'm done, tear it back down, right. I was like, okay, why don't we, you know, make a little membership club and then use those sats to fund some of these services. So I just started collecting these services in one place, and that's sort of what, you know, the organization is basically support and the model, like, it works, but it depends on who's, you know, who wants to be engaged. And it's, I mean, communities are tough. You know, they really are hard, you know, because you have, like, so many different people from so many different backgrounds, and everyone's looking for different things and. [00:16:53] Speaker B: Man, it's hard to manage. It's hard to, it's like constant. Like, you can't. No, I totally agree. Communities are hard, and it's hard to grow it, too. Like, they, they easily hit plateaus and, like, trying to expand a group, especially after there is some sort of cohesion with, you know, some subgroup inside of it. It's just, it's just a lot. It's super complex. What's the herding people? It's like herding cats. [00:17:26] Speaker A: Herding cats. Especially if they're, like, from all over the world, it's even harder. But I think there's some, like, you know, regardless of what people want, like, the content is useful. That's why it's weird. And especially when people are like, can you just demo this? You know, I'm like, okay, I'll just demo it. You know, to me, part of, like, the learning experience is being able to build something and also test something and then go show it to somebody and explain it to them. Like, I feel like if I didn't ever do that last third stage, I don't feel like I've solidified a knowledge to myself. So it's always like, it's of incredible value for me to just say, hey, you know, let's like, do a regular meetup and let me show you screen share. Let me screen share this with you to show you how this works, right? [00:18:16] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:18:17] Speaker A: Cause, I mean, I've been on lots of audio chats where it's sort of like that button, hey, you know, you and I just went through this, or, like, it's the button at the top left hand corner. Under the tab, and you're like, where? What? Right. Show it to me. Right. So it's like, you know, you have these situations where people are yelling at each other over voice for about an hour, where if you actually had screen share, you could do it in about five minutes. [00:18:41] Speaker B: Yeah. And, yeah, you could do it so much faster. Like the discord thing that we just went through. I can't. I can't even think like this. I'm just looking at this right now and imagining that if I hadn't just easily found what I was looking for, trying to listen to your instructions about where. What I should visually be doing. There is so much crap in this screen right now. The top left has, like, 30 things in the top left, and there's, like, two menus hidden. It's a nightmare. [00:19:14] Speaker A: It is a nightmare, right? There's so many things in there. Yeah, yeah. So I. You know, on Nastir, I was like, okay, you know, there are a couple audio chats on Nastir, and people are really nice there because I enjoy the nastier community. Like, people are much friendlier. It's more organic, you know, and it's a very different feel from, let's say, going to clubhouse or Twitter. And I don't know if you've been on any of those Twitter spaces or clubhouse like, spaces recently, but it is just, like, it's turned into a shit show. Like, I went on one of them, and people are just yelling at each other. [00:19:51] Speaker B: It is so weird how those things evolve, how the behaviors change and, like, what the people do and say and how they react to it change over time. Because it wasn't like that at the beginning. There was something really. It was actually, like, much more polite than the typical Twitter beefs. And the comments. When you did the Twitter spaces or you went to clubhouse, there was a bit of an etiquette, but you're totally right. It's just, like, gone now. It's just Twitter posts, except in audio. [00:20:31] Speaker A: Yeah, it's gotten a little crazy. So, like, what happened was, a couple months ago, I just got fed up with trying to do screen share discord, and people were like, oh, I used jitsi. I'm like, I'm not even gonna go there. I said, what if I shopped around and then did an experiment and try attack on Nastir, you know, so that other people would potentially use this, not just a small group of people. And, you know, I did a bit, but I did quite a bit of shopping around because, you know, there's so many platforms like Gypsy and whatever, like zoom clones, there's a lot of them. [00:21:09] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:21:09] Speaker A: And I found, because I was like, there's no point for me to rewrite this from scratch. Like someone's obviously done a very good job at some point. And I found, you know, I found a code base from this one developer out in like eastern Europe called Neurotalk and it's just bare bones. Like, I like this. See, a lot of people are like, why don't you use something like gypsy? And I went and looked at that code base as well and I was like, that thing is built in react and I actually have an allergy to this thing called react. I don't know if you, it's made by Facebook originally, so is it? [00:21:47] Speaker B: I didn't know that. [00:21:48] Speaker A: Yeah, like Facebook was responsible initially for creating react and for creating GraphQL and I think in both of them for small applications. Just my opinion is that's way too much boilerplate, you know, and I golly, because I'm not really a front end dev and like I didn't really do much work with JavaScript front end frameworks until like after 2020. And I thought, okay, this can't be hard, right? So I started looking at all these front end JavaScript frameworks and there's so many of them now and I think six months later I had not written a single line of code. I was just still browsing frameworks. [00:22:30] Speaker B: Holy crap. [00:22:31] Speaker A: I was just like, this has got to be crazy because, you know, like as someone who's not full time, like, I just spend maximum like ten to 15 hours a week in this space voluntarily. I have to be very conservative, I have to be very careful with my time. Yeah, it's like everyone else has got like, you know, you got ammo, how many rounds can you shoot a day? Like everyone else has got like 50 bullets a day that can fire. I only have five. Yeah, I have to be like a sniper. I have to go in there, pick my target very carefully. So I actually spend a lot more time reading other people's code than writing, you know, like I have to figure out like what's going to, you know, if I'm going to go in and build something, I want to spend most of my time working with the actual, like, you know, business logic, application logic. I don't want to be sitting there massaging, massaging frameworks, you know, like massaging the setup. I really don't, you know, and you know, you can be critical about this approach, but the reason why I went with this code base was because it was just so minimal independencies and it was so like simple. It's like old school, but then I can go in there and do whatever hell I want. I can spend like 2 hours a night on it and then just bang it out, you know, that's the whole idea. [00:23:52] Speaker B: And that's interesting. So what is it? What is it about the. I'm not, I don't know code well enough to really have any in depth knowledge about this. What is it about it that makes this so different? This is something that fascinates me, but I don't have the time to dig into it is why different code bases produce such different results, and often only in like, one area. [00:24:18] Speaker A: Like, what do you mean by one area? [00:24:21] Speaker B: Like, in the sense that some code is optimized for certain tasks and then it sucks at others. And yeah, it does. Tell me about this. Why is this code base? What is it exactly that makes it work for this use case here? [00:24:41] Speaker A: Well, okay, so it's node JS, and node JS was built around like, originally around 2010. It's open source, and I see node js everywhere. [00:24:53] Speaker B: It's the one thing that I've run into constantly. [00:24:56] Speaker A: Yeah, right, right. It's like, it's super downloaded all over the Internet. And a lot of these frameworks that you hear about, like react and vue and svelte, you know, these are all frameworks or angular. They're all frameworks. They're supposed to be organizing your code so that you can be more organized and build better for, like, large enterprise. [00:25:20] Speaker B: Scaled applications and kind of like Lego blocks for. [00:25:25] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like a layer Lego block, but in this case, it's sort of like, okay, well, you know, we're gonna put the Lego, you don't just put the Lego pieces together. You know, we're gonna, like, make all these fancy labels, and we're gonna add on all these dings and whistles, and then we're gonna do all these other things. And by that point, I'm sort of like, it's like 130 in the morning and I want to go to sleep. [00:25:49] Speaker B: Oh, man. [00:25:50] Speaker A: I guess that's the best analogy I can give you. Yeah, if you're just probably gonna, like, say whatever. But yeah, my brain does not compute at that point. I don't know. Like, I like simple base case. That's just my style. And some people like, oh, I have to label all these things to have all this, like, infrastructure on top. I've always been more get from point a to b and, like, don't waste time getting there. [00:26:18] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:26:19] Speaker A: So that's just, that's my style. [00:26:21] Speaker B: It's just like, don't waste lines. [00:26:23] Speaker A: Yeah, it's just like, don't. Don't waste brain cycles. I only got this, you know, I only have this many brain cycles. And, you know, like, I like Python, you know, I like c, and, you know, a lot of people are like, ah, Python's a slow language, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, well, you forget one thing about Python is that it is massive flex when you talk about cross industry, because I can tell you five different industries right now that are using it. So if you want a job, you can cross from finance to scientific computing to industrial manufacturing to AI to whatever else you want, because there are so many industries using it. So that's like its breadth and its power in that sense, and also business intelligence wise, you can use it easier and faster because let's say somebody is a specialist. Let's say that person is a specialist in astronomy, and he's, like, gathering data from all the stars in the sky. His focus is on his area research. He's not going to be. He doesn't want to spend a huge chunk of his brain resources going to divert to just figuring out how to use a tool. He's going to want to get the tool working as fast as he can to get to the results that he wants. [00:27:37] Speaker B: His goal isn't the code, it's what it can produce. And. [00:27:41] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:27:43] Speaker B: Man, in AI, dude, I cannot tell you how many times in the last, like six months to a year, I have typed pip and PI something. Getting PI something installed on my computer. I don't even know, like, I always, always worry. Like, after I'm using a computer for, like, three years and I've just been installing stuff via terminal, I'm just like, I don't even, like, see these things. I've just installed, like, 800 python tools on this damn computer. I feel like. I feel like I'm just like the whole back end of my computer is just going to fill it up and then I'm just going to have nothing but applications and nothing else will fit on my computer. But, yeah, it's Python. It's Python all the way down. [00:28:25] Speaker A: Just to quote Chris Laetner, python one truth. [00:28:31] Speaker B: I would still love to get that guy on the show, but he is. He is way too busy. [00:28:36] Speaker A: Oh, he's great. You know. You know who you might want to consider talking to those? His wife, Tanya Lautner. [00:28:42] Speaker B: Really? [00:28:44] Speaker A: Well, she's a brain, like, she's like the LlVm. Oh my God. Yeah. [00:28:50] Speaker B: I haven't seen her any. I've just been watching. I've been chasing Chris Laetner's, um, interviews, like, around podcasts and stuff. I don't even think I've been exposed to his wife at all. [00:29:01] Speaker A: She's quiet. Like, I didn't even know what she did until, like, I think I bumped into her in a conference. I was like, oh, hi, who are you? What do you do? Oh, she's like, I'm Tanya letner. I'm like, oh, oh. You know. [00:29:13] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:29:13] Speaker A: And then, yeah, but she. I mean, her error is. Expertise is Llvm in compilers, but I'm sure that she's, you know, probably more available. But, you know, who knows? Like, she's very friendly and that is. [00:29:28] Speaker B: Not a bad idea. I'm gonna write that. I'm gonna write that down, right? [00:29:31] Speaker A: Write that down. [00:29:32] Speaker B: Yeah, write that down. [00:29:37] Speaker A: Sometimes you don't want to go necessarily for the person in the spotlight, but someone who's like, you know, right next to them, who's probably just as good, if not better. [00:29:46] Speaker B: Yeah. And they can always tell, like, a new story because it's a different perspective in the same area. Those are usually great guests. [00:29:54] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah. She's really smart, but she's so quiet. I was just like, whoa. Sort of starstruck. Compilers are hard. I think it's one of the hardest areas in computing, compilers. [00:30:08] Speaker B: I'll tell you, it is the most confusing to me. I don't understand. All I know is that compilers can cause a lot of problems and it can be really hard. That's literally all I know. And otherwise, I just kind of use them. [00:30:24] Speaker A: All the better to go chat with her, I'm sure. But anyhow, going back to the whole, like, where were we? Why did I pick this code base? Yeah. Because I feel like a lot of modern code is overloaded with unnecessary, like, boilerplate. That's, that's what it is. And I don't know if it's coincidental with all the politics, but I have a. I have a feeling that it is interesting. [00:30:57] Speaker B: Really? [00:30:59] Speaker A: Well, I mean, let's go back to 2020. When I was browsing frameworks. [00:31:03] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:31:05] Speaker A: I was just very, very disturbed at the time because I think at the top of every single document page, like, documentation page, it said Black lives Matter. And I'm not saying that I'm for against. It's just like, I came here to read your. [00:31:24] Speaker B: It's kind of irrelevant. Like, why it's like, going to an afternoon party and they have Trump signs, like, in the party. It's like, what? I don't. Why are you. What's here? I'm just. We just came to grill. Why. Why are we talking about votes? [00:31:41] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. What's happening? I was like, what's going on here? Because, like, a lot of the back end code didn't have it. Like, I actually delivered when looking. I was like, okay, let's go look at the c docs, you know? Nope, nothing. Let's go look at the python docs. Nope, nothing. You know? Let's go look at react. It was like, it was, like, plastered everywhere. Like, I couldn't even read one page without clicking on a pop up that said Black lives Matter. And then two years later, it was like, support Ukraine, you know, poisonous. [00:32:13] Speaker B: It's so awful. It really. [00:32:16] Speaker A: I was like, why am I reading this? Oh, my God. So, you know, and then you look at the more documents I read, I'm just like, I'm so confused by what they're telling me. And then I'm starting to ask myself, is it because I'm getting old, you know? Or is it the way you guys are writing this? And then I would go read a different language, like, you know, that didn't have the political slogans on the front. And I was like, wait, okay, this makes sense. So I think, in part, it's just there's been a very deep politicization that's gone into some of the stuff, and a lot of things are unnecessary. You don't need it. Like, people are creating these boot camps over the last five years and pushing people out of them, saying, ah, you need to learn just these things. You need to learn. React, and this will get you a job. And meanwhile, I talked to some of these people, and they come to bitcoin and lightning, and they're like, hey, I want to get my foot into bitcoin lightning. I want to work on some of this open source code. I'm like, okay, well, look at this. And they can't solve a problem. I don't know. I'm just exasperated because I want to share this. A lot of people, I feel like they think they can go through boot camps and learn coding and then get a job. And what I've discovered, and this may not be the case for all of them, but in several cases I've seen in the last couple of years, people are not able to solve problems. Like, they. They just can't solve problems. [00:33:50] Speaker B: Do you think it's. Do you think it's something kind of like how I would describe the education system is that they. They teach you. They teach you what, not how. [00:34:03] Speaker A: You know, it's sort of like regurgitation. [00:34:06] Speaker B: Yeah. It feels like they give you instructions and you're supposed to follow the instructions and then remember how to follow the instructions, but you're not. [00:34:13] Speaker A: You. [00:34:14] Speaker B: You're not told, like, these are the tools. And, okay, here's a problem. How would we attack this problem with these tools? [00:34:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it's a lot of. Definitely that it's very narrow in scope. And so, like, you know, if they say, okay, I know some of this language and I know some of that language, and then you say, okay, well, solve this problem. Like, there's no, like, specific answer. Sort of like what Michael Saylor says, you know, there's no answer in the back of the textbook. How are you going to figure out how to solve a problem that's unbounded and they just can't, you know, that's a failure of the education. [00:34:50] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:34:51] Speaker A: In ways. And I see a lot of that. You know, I've seen people. I've seen both sides. I've seen people who are self taught, who are able to figure it out themselves. No, no courses, no nothing. They've just hacked that away, edit themselves, read the docs, did their homework, tried it. [00:35:08] Speaker B: That's awesome. [00:35:10] Speaker A: Had a lot of persistence, a lot of patience. There are people who are incredibly successful, who are. I know one guy who dropped out of high school and actually went on and sold a multimillion dollar startup to a big tech company. [00:35:24] Speaker B: Wow. [00:35:25] Speaker A: And never had any formal education. But that's like sheer grit and, like, perseverance in a tremendous amount of patience that a lot of people don't have. And then there are other people who've graduated from top tier universities with a degree in computer science and five years later can't even debug Python, like, 100 line python script to save their life. So it's crazy. The individual, it's crazy. Right. And I don't know, like, I feel like in so many ways, software is very much more of an art. Like, the application level software is more of an art than a science. That's just, to me, like, a lot of it is like fashion. You know, if you ever hear devs, like, argue about some things, like it should be done this way or not, sometimes I just, like, turn off, you know, some of the words that they're saying, and I replace it in my head. It sounds like, ah, your versace is not as good as mine, like, you know, Giorgio Armani. [00:36:25] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:36:26] Speaker A: And I'm just like, oh, my God, it sounds like people are in fashion design. You know, you can do the same design for a pair of pants or shirt. [00:36:36] Speaker B: No, I can totally see that, too, because your problem is open ended, and there's so many different ways you could tackle to solve the problem. It's very much like trying to tell a story or do editing or something. You know, there's no explicit instruction. You can't. You can't tell somebody the way that they're supposed to edit their film. Like, they have to feel, and the. The editing has to be done in the context of what they're trying to. The feeling that they're trying to give and the experience they're trying to give. And, yeah, I can easily see that being the case in. In code, too, even though I don't think I would usually default to thinking about it that way. [00:37:20] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, I think of it. I think of both. Yeah. I like art and engineering, so it's not just, like, one dimension, but, yeah, in a way, like all these open source. Going back to the whole open source social media networks like Noster and key, it's sort of like that in the same way, you know, they're, like, trying to attack, you know, certain problems, but there's no one way to, like, cut that. [00:37:44] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:37:46] Speaker A: Or, yeah, exactly. Not more than one way to skin a cat. [00:37:49] Speaker B: Yeah. It's funny because I've in basically going down the pair and the pear rabbit hole and the Noster rabbit hole and everything. It is kind of fascinating how many of these things are solving the same problems with different trade offs. And it's also why I think they each kind of have their place. Like, I've been talking with a couple of different people about building Noster on top of, like, a pair client and how you could actually leverage noster without needing the relay system or basically being able to either leverage the relay system or a direct peer to peer connection. But it's interesting. Have you seen this? What's kind of your feel about the development environment in Noster and pear? [00:38:44] Speaker A: Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for both Noster and pear. I feel like Nastur is still in this upheaval phase of research and development, but it's just starting to get past stage one. So going back to, what do you call it? So direct messaging, for example, in Oster, still being worked on. You know, it's just like, I look at that, and I'm sort of like, okay, well, it changes so fast, and I want to build something on top of it, but I feel like I have to be very patient with that because it's going to go through a lot of upheaval. [00:39:21] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:39:21] Speaker A: So, you know, going back to hive talk, so what did I build and why did I build it? I really wanted to screen share stuff with people and make it as easy as possible, and I got fed up. So I was just like, okay, you know, let's throw this up, and let's, like, stick on a noster login and let's add lightning zaps to it as a starting point. And I wasn't sure if a lot of people really wanted it. I was just like, oh, this is kind of fun as an experiment. [00:39:50] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:39:51] Speaker A: And then I, I made the mistake of showing it to Ben Arc, and then there was like, oh, you have to push this out. I was just like, oh, my God. So it was pushed out a bit prematurely, but, like, you know, and get out there. And I think a lot of people want to use it. Like, I know there's been a couple thousand people who hid it in the last month using hive talk pretty much all around the world because they want, they want a way to talk to other people where you're not really getting tracked. And I actually had to go modify the original code base to drop a lot of the, and I'm still working on it to drop a lot of the tracking information about who's on it, and I don't want to know who's on it. That's the deal, is that we want to be able to provide a space where people don't feel like, oh, there's some googly eyes watching whatever they're talking about. Yeah, right. And I don't want to know either, you know, because, like, the way I think about this is, you know, if someone comes along and subpoenas that server, there's nothing there. I didn't log anything. [00:41:06] Speaker B: Mm hmm. No, I feel the same way. I don't want, I don't want, if I ever do anything like that, I don't want your information. Dear God, please don't give it to me, because I don't want that responsibility. [00:41:17] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Because, you know, this is like, me thinking, okay, another, like, open source experimentals, you know, project. And I don't want people, like someone even said, okay, you know, with all the legislation and upheaval that's been going on in the last, like, couple months, you know, including chat control, and then, like, you know, the custodial wallets, all leaving United States for lightning. You know, people are like, oh, you're promoting a platform. People are, like, zapping each other. So it's. It's like you're a money transmitter. I'm like, I didn't touch anything. [00:41:52] Speaker B: Are you worried about that? Out of curiosity? [00:41:56] Speaker A: Um, I mean, there's nothing you can do about it at this point. [00:42:01] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:42:01] Speaker A: You know, and, like, I. Like, if you guys transfer money is between the two of you. And besides, the lightning invoice never went through us. You know, like, if you click on someone's lightning address while you're in the. [00:42:12] Speaker B: It's entirely in your client that's doing everything. It's just all you're doing is hosting a lightning address, right? [00:42:20] Speaker A: It's. It's just like a relay. Yeah, it's posting a lightning address. Whatever you clicked on the lightning address, and then you generate an invoice from. That has nothing to do with me. But, you know, with the whole tornado cache, like, trial going on and I. The samurai stuff, it's sort of like, well, how far are they going to push it now? You know, is it like any chat room that allows people to transfer money? Is that now going to be a contentious issue? And I don't know. You know, it's hard to say. Like the judge, I think, for the tornado cash, you know, trial was asking if two people use WhatsApp to commit a crime, are you going to put the WhatsApp creators in jail? [00:43:08] Speaker B: I mean, that is a legitimate question. I don't understand how you distinguish the difference. I don't understand how they are trying to argue that one applies and doesn't. It does not seem that they have consistent logic there at all. And I think that's a huge part of the risk, is if we have contradictory laws, then it is all meaningless. It's just whatever the authority decides to punish, everybody's guilty all the time, and it's just who is convenient for them to put in prison. It's the whole three felonies a day thing just applied to a more ridiculous environment. Like, now you just get to prosecute anybody who creates software that is inconvenient for you. [00:43:49] Speaker A: The hot enough button issue that I kind of, like, don't want to go there. Understandably. Right? And so it's sort of like, you know, what I come on and talk about is I'm interested in helping people talk to each other without having to yell over audio. So at least you can screen share, and if you want to look at each other on video, be my guest as well, because it just, that was something that was missing in an officer space. And if you want to run your own server with these modifications, you can as well. It's open source. I mean, like, I would really love it if more people want to come and help out, you know, that's really welcome. It would make things go a lot faster. But I'm not in any rush either. You know, like, we're 100% pretty much just like community donations. And if you want to support us, great, you know, help me cover the cost of the server, you know, and for like the next x years, if you guys want to help us. [00:44:44] Speaker B: I was about to say what's the, what's the relative cost of the servers? You said you have like, you know, something like a thousand people who've used it in the last month. What's the. How much does it cost to keep that running? And the bandwidth, I would say, okay. [00:45:01] Speaker A: Well, if it increases from here on out, then I'm probably going to have to double the cost or like, you know, who knows? Triple. But it's probably around like 200 some dollars a year at this point. And then I have like a separate staging server. So, like, just test things out before I move. Move it over, which is, it's interesting because now there's like more people coming. There's like peaks and waves of people who come. But sometimes I'm like, I have to gently nudge you off the server. I'm gonna, like, push them. Sorry, guys. But, yeah, like, I think. I think that we probably have posting to them, you know, to make it, you know, to help it grow, basically. [00:45:49] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:45:49] Speaker A: And, you know, it's within reason at this point, but, like, I think if we want to grow a little bit more, then it would be great to get more donations or find some model to sustain it. It's a tough business model, but it's more of a. I mean, I never really thought it through before put it out there. I thought literally like five people would want to use this. Yeah, that many? So, yeah, like, you know, I've talked to this developer called Dev Fdo. He's the guy who created the Joinster protocol. [00:46:29] Speaker B: Okay. [00:46:30] Speaker A: I don't know if you're. [00:46:31] Speaker B: I roughly like, I know the name, but I couldn't explain anything about it. [00:46:37] Speaker A: It's okay. He created this coin join protocol after the tornado cash thing came out. I don't know too much of the details, but he also started this fundraising for privacy focused projects called Invincible Privacy GitHub IO and so he listed Hive talk along with eight other projects because I told him, you know, I kind of want to figure out a way to make this private. You know, I don't, I don't want to go get grant funding. I don't want to go like down some other route. You know, like there are a couple of noster projects which are, you know, going down the VC funding project, that kind of route. I've been suggested by some people, like go to VC. I'm like, I'm not going there. Yeah, sorry, sorry, I'm not going there. Partly is. I think that there's a lot of nostril development that still has to be sorted out. Like, you know, their protocol. Things are going to take a while. I don't think it's going to be done within six months to a year. It might be like a two or three year thing. And I'm willing to be patient with it, especially for things like direct messages, which would be great. It would be nice to have like some sort of one time passcode setup that I believe the NPUB Pro has, but they use that to direct message you a one time code so you can log in. But I think I want to see something that's a little bit better than the current direct messaging system because you can actually see who you're talking to even though it's encrypted. But I think that could be improved. [00:48:29] Speaker B: This episode is brought to you by coinkite and the makers of the cold card hardware wallet and it is brought to you by 150,000 sats that could be yours if you have been paying attention to the show. This could be the moment right now that you get yourself 150,000 sats if you've been listening. And that's because I'm going to give you the last three words to the seed phrase made on my cold cardinal that holds 150,000 sats. I hope you understand both the importance of the seed phrase with this exercise, and I hope, I hope you got yourself 150,000 sats. I've been watching the wallet just to see if anybody tried to like, brute force it. From the nine words we have so far, there has been no movement yet. As of this recording, it's still there. The fifth word is mouse. The 6th word is fault, and the 9th word is purse. Get yourself a cold card hardware wallet. If you have a cold card hardware wallet, you just punch these in. I know my keys are safe. I know that 150,000 sats is still there because I use a cold card and I normally do not read the seed phrase out in my recordings. If you don't have your cold card yet, you can get one with my discount code, bitcoinaudible. And if you've recorded down those other nine words, maybe you just got yourself 150,000 sats. I don't know. You should check. You should check anyway. Even if somebody else got it, just so you can see that you boot up the entire wallet, you have the keys. You can see that transaction in your history. Then check out Coinkite and the many hardware security devices that they have. Link and discount code are right in the show notes. Good luck. Yeah, there's definitely an element there of like, just being able to, like, take somebody's pub key because I did this for a while, just. Just because it was cool and you could explore it is you can put in somebody else's public key and then just view noster from their perspective. You can go look at all their DM's and it just says, can't unencrypt, you know, message. But the other big thing is that you can see the length of the conversation and stuff. Like, you can see each of the messages and all of the people. You just look at who's being dmed, what's recent, and that is an enormous amount of metadata and leaked info. And I think it was. I was talking to super sue from wholesale, um, just because I've been using the absolute crap out of that project. Um, and he was saying that, like, I know a lot of things. I keep hearing little things about, like, people trying to come up with solutions to the DM problem, so to speak. Um, and there was the. One of a really clever idea of creating a new account that had keys in the DM of that account and those would be shared over DM with the two parties. I can't remember what the name of this was. Maybe, you know, but that you would. It would basically look like there was a brand new account that was sending DM's to itself. But each person has the key to that account, but only the key to, like, their conversations or whatever. I guess they can sign individually their conversation inside of it. So they're the only ones that can look at the DM and look at the conversation from both of them. And they can distinguish each other's messages, which I thought was a really clever, like, workaround. But it is a bit hacky, you know, it's. Yeah, it's definitely a duct tape fix, I think. Or at least it feels like one. [00:52:23] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, it's been there pros and cons to, like, all of Nostra, I think. I think it's great because, like, the base protocol is really simple. [00:52:33] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:52:34] Speaker A: And so, like, you can get started building on it really fast, but at the same time, it's like, oh, there's things that are just constantly changing underneath you. And I can understand their frustration. I think that it's getting a little bit more mature than it was, like, a year ago. Like, a lot, you know? And, you know, with hive talk, I'm sort of, like, open to, like, requests from people of what they want to see. I'm more in the process of pulling out. Things are not necessary. That wouldn't really suit the community. Like, there's. I. You know, for. One of the things I've been on the fence about for a long time is like, should I leave the translate in there because it's tied to Google or should I not, you know? Yeah, you know, this is one of those things. I'm like, I'm about ready to rip. [00:53:19] Speaker B: That out and also keep it lean, keep it leaning. It keeps working. That's like, my thing is, reliability is shockingly hard to come by these days. [00:53:31] Speaker A: It seems like, yeah, I mean, there's that and also, like, there's chat. There's a chat GPT integration in there. And I'm like, I don't know if I want to turn that on. I would rather see something like a lightning bitcoin native integration, but that's also, like, a tricky wallet to scale. Here's one point that I just want to bring up. Like, if, you know, people are listening to feedback about nostra development, I feel like a lot of apps are very siloed. And the reason why, for example, is that there are a lot of lightning AI apps out there. There's at least five or six of them. And I've gone to several of these. I said, so, hey, do you have an API so I can integrate this into, like, hive talk? And they're like, no. I'm like, but I would like to. I'm just like, okay. And then the only one I found was. Was NBK's unleashed chat. I was like, oh, this is cool. And then I was like, oh, how am I going to integrate this thing? Because, like, I kind of want to do it per user. So now there's this can of words, and I'm like, I don't know if he's even working on that part as much anymore, you know? So this is, this is one of those things where noster, it's a little bit. It's not there. Like, there's not. I haven't seen anyone built an API which really ties together, like, the noster key with the API, they're like, here, I'm going to give you an API key. I'm like, can we use the noster key to be like, the API key? [00:55:06] Speaker B: Can't that be the API key rather than having to deal with this, this whole system? Now that's, that's a really good point. [00:55:14] Speaker A: And, yeah, I haven't seen anyone do that yet. Like, I don't know if I don't know the right way to do it, too. This is just something I thought about recently. But, like, being able to interconnect between more apps would be great because I feel like, you know, like a lot of them are still, I mean, maybe it's just too early stage so they're not really talking to each other, but, like, I think that would help the ecosystem a lot. So, like, one of the things that I'm, you know, like, I like APIs. I like, I want everybody to talk to everyone. You know, it doesn't make sense for me to build a talk platform where it's by itself. Like, we want to talk to you. We all want to talk to everybody else. So, so, I mean, I looked at the existing API. I was like, I have to rewrite this. You know, I can rewrite the entire thing so that more people can talk to it. That's the idea. [00:56:06] Speaker B: You know, there's something, man, you're right. The number of, like, odd little disconnects between things and how noster isn't being utilized in, clearly the way that the potential is. Like, I still feel like there's a lot of disconnect between the different. Like, the, one of the biggest things that has been incredibly helpful and feels like it actually works and that people can integrate it pretty easily is just the login with noster. And it's so useful when you get to do it. When I get to, when I'm running around between noster integrated websites like Stacker News and then, you know, going on primal or no stir or anything like that, or noster apps, whatever that URL is, I forget I got in my bookmarks, the app store. And when I'm bouncing back and forth between all of those and then just basically clicking login when my little albie thing pops up, it's so seamless and it's so great. And then having that experience that first time with mutiny wallet when I logged in and I could just see what other fediments other people were using that I had on nostril. You can tell that the potential is going to be so huge. But there's still, I hadn't thought about the fact that using the key itself as an API would be a huge step to just knocking down that friction. Because every time I try to get like an API key or anything from services, that's not my forte, that's not my default thing. And having to dig through settings and be like, request a key and name it and all of this stuff, now I can totally see how, what a huge benefit, what a huge boon for it to just be like, your id is your key. Like, that's your API key. [00:58:02] Speaker A: Myself in the foot, because I actually only thought about this a couple of minutes ago. So, I mean, like, if people are listening to this, like, I really want to know what people think. [00:58:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm curious too. I'm curious too. That's a really, that's a really interesting way to think about it and to utilize it, because I really think the idea is the most, the most valuable piece of the puzzle. And the fact that, you know, when you have like the main relays, they basically have the public profile. It's kind of like a loose global phone book kind of for all of the different users. And this is why, you know, Keith is doing the same thing in kind of adding that barrier. I really wish they had just, I know, I know. They needed a lot of their own specific cryptography and stuff because you have sub keys for each of the devices and every device has to have a key. So I do get that there was probably some sort of a barrier there, but I also just wish I could log in to Keith with my noster id. I wish I could just keep utilizing that for my pair tools. That's what we're thinking about doing, or at least hoping and exploring to do with the app that we're building is utilize noster for the id and then basically use pair for the quote unquote infrastructure so that we have to have a server and DNS and all that good stuff. [00:59:28] Speaker A: It definitely can be very complex, complimentary. They're like, you know, I haven't really looked at key in a while, but yeah, if you could sort of join them in some way, that'd be great. Like being able to log in to any app with either. That'd be cool. [00:59:46] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:59:46] Speaker A: Oh, by the way, there's another thing. So when I, when I put together like hive talk, I figured, okay, well, there's always going to be people who not going to be using noster as a login and also as a backup because, like, the login module we use is pretty beta. So it's gotten, it went through a whole bunch of hiccups at the beginning. And you can also log in using a lightning address and you can use, like, just, you can type your name, you can use a random anonymous name, or you can use a gravatar email. [01:00:22] Speaker B: Oh, sweet. [01:00:23] Speaker A: So, yeah, so that way people can talk to each other and you can, like, zap each other and you don't have to be on Noster because I realize there's actually a huge contingent of people who are not on Noster. And some of the people who've been using the platform have told me that they're using it to onboard people into nostril and lightning. [01:00:45] Speaker B: Interesting. Okay. [01:00:48] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. There's a bunch of communities in Australia, south Southeast Asia that are all using hive talk. [01:00:58] Speaker B: No kidding, people. [01:01:00] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. There's like a school bitcoin from Australia that, you know, they're using that now. Especially because, you know, the zap capabilities built in. You know, like, Keith had it originally, but it was just l and d. And I'm like, well, what if I don't use l and D now? I have a problem. I can't use it. [01:01:19] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:01:19] Speaker A: So, yeah, I think that was a, that was a sticking point. Like, I, you know, we used the albi plugin. So Alby created a plugin that allows you to connect, like, at least five or six different types of wallets. So you have that flexibility as well. So. Or if you don't even want to connect a wallet, you just copy the invoice and pay externally from that from another app if you want to do that. So, you know, these two components actually helped me accelerate the build of this really, really fast because, like, I didn't have to write a lot of boilerplate code. It was just like focusing on integrating things and then adding other features to it and then ripping out all the other stuff, which I think, you know, would make it a little bit more lean and also a little bit more private. You can connect to hive talk over Tordegh if you really want to. You know, some people use VPN's. You can do all that kind of stuff to preserve your privacy if you want to connect to it, you can lock rooms so that no one else can come in. But, you know, there's also, like this balance because, you know, people want to come here to talk to other people and want to get to know the people on the platform and connect with them. So, uh, you know, there's like a line to walk. It's like, how much privacy do you want to provide versus how much privacy, how much, like, community building do you want for a platform? Right? [01:02:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Versus kind of like direct chat versus kind of a community building. You know, like, what level of interaction is this meant to specifically be for? [01:03:00] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So it's like, you know, one Twitter, you can go into a Twitter spaces, for example, and everyone sees everybody else's avatar, but you can also join a Twitter space as anonymous and just listen in, you know. So here you have both of those options as well. [01:03:17] Speaker B: Yeah, that's cool. [01:03:18] Speaker A: You know, I think, yeah, you know, one of the reasons why I want to build that API out more with, like, you know, real time notifications is so that if there's another client that wants to integrate with us, then they can do something similar to Twitter, where, you know, your friend guy is now speaking in this room on Hive talk. [01:03:35] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [01:03:37] Speaker A: So that's like, right. That's the kind of integration I like to see more between not just, you know, hive talk and other clients, but between other clients and other apps, because that would facilitate things. And, you know, that's really independent of, like, what do people want to build and how they want to integrate and what's their incentive model. [01:03:57] Speaker B: That's a really interesting way to think about it. That's, that's, that would be a good way to bridge the gap. I would love to get a notification that, like, somebody I followed on flare pub uploaded a video in my noster notifications, or somebody's live on Hive talk. Like, that would be really cool if I could just basically turn that on, be like, you have this app or this public key now has the authorization to send me a notification about my other friends related to this app. And suddenly flare pub wouldn't be something that I just kind of forget about. There have been multiple periods where I'd be like, yeah, I want to have a noster video thing and upload it on Flare. But then I kind of forget about it and like three months go by and I'm like, oh, wait, that's right, flare. Let me go upload on flare. But it's still, it's disconnected. But it might just be that notification that could bridge the gap. [01:04:58] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:04:58] Speaker B: Or do a lot for it. That's interesting. No, that would be really cool to have that. [01:05:03] Speaker A: Yeah. I think Domus is working on notifications in their test flight right now and, like, I just asked one of those. I was like, so how do you figure out which one's going to be a notification and which not? And he sent me this face that was sweating going, we haven't figured it out yet. [01:05:22] Speaker B: It's like the key and peel thing where's just like sweat down the face. Um, I'll tell you about it later. Oh, jeez. [01:05:31] Speaker A: Yeah. It's that early? [01:05:34] Speaker B: Yep. That's where we are. That's where we are. There's. God, it's so much potential, but there's just so much work to do. So much work. [01:05:42] Speaker A: Right, right. I mean, like, the nice thing about keys to, you know, on the mobile app, at least you can see, like, there are notifications if somebody sends a message in a room. Right. If you, if you choose to receive them, that's great. [01:05:58] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've had to turn all my notifications off except for, like one room because I have like 80 rooms on keep now. It's. It's really bad. I have so many rooms, I can't find them. And until they get that, uh, the database update, it takes a while to search, particularly on mobile. Like after like the first, like two minutes that it's open. On desktop, it will search, like really, really fast. But on mobile, it's still, it's still sluggish and navigating, trying to find the room or your DM chat with somebody. Like, if we had a DM chat, I don't think we do. But in Keith, dude, scrolling through 80 rooms, trying to find that thing. [01:06:38] Speaker A: Oh, that's like, that's like murder. [01:06:40] Speaker B: That's a pain in the ass. It's a pain in the ass. [01:06:43] Speaker A: So painful. [01:06:45] Speaker B: Oh, my God. [01:06:47] Speaker A: Yeah. I had to delete so many of them. I was just like, oh, my God, I can't keep up. [01:06:53] Speaker B: It's all my chats. All my chat apps turn into this. Every one of them. It just happened. [01:06:59] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:07:00] Speaker B: So this is built on node J s. I'm actually curious, how well would this work with pair? Because everything, and I don't know, again, I don't know, integration or implementation, but how you said this is open source so I could run my own server. How difficult would this be to basically run this on top of like a wholesale connection or a pair connection and then just talk with all the same tools to hope or to my developers, the somebody else in my business group. [01:07:36] Speaker A: What, on key or something else. I don't know what your meaning on pair. [01:07:40] Speaker B: Like just using pair to establish a connection. Like, so maybe I'm not asking. [01:07:50] Speaker A: Explain. [01:07:53] Speaker B: So let's say just letting someone connect directly to me on my computer without DNS and without like wholesale. Have you, have you used wholesale yet? [01:08:04] Speaker A: I have not used wholesale, but I've heard it's like tail scale. [01:08:07] Speaker B: Yes, it's like tail scale, except that it just creates the peer to peer connection like he does. So there's no server or account or anything like that. You just get a key and then you scan or paste and voila, you're connected. Well, anything that's local, hosted on a port, I can then just bring up on another computer. So I'm curious, how does the framework that you have is this something that could basically just be brought up in a browser, run localhost on my computer and then have a wholesale connection to someone else, and then boom, we just have a conversation. And is something that could be done a, through your infrastructure, or b, with just a direct peer to peer as well? [01:08:57] Speaker A: You can just do direct peer to peer. You know, like WebRTC is like the web communications that's used for. [01:09:02] Speaker B: Oh, that's a good point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:09:04] Speaker A: Right. With everything, like, from everything zoom to gitz to like hive talk web, that kind of code, there's like, it's only like 100 lines of code to do. [01:09:13] Speaker B: Oh, wow. Really? [01:09:15] Speaker A: It's so interesting. [01:09:17] Speaker B: Okay. [01:09:17] Speaker A: It's not complicated. That's why I think with a lot of the, like, the tech services, they just keep adding layer off after layer after layer, probably to just track all their users. They're tracking and logging everything that you say, all the data, all the metadata, everything. And, you know, like, if you just want peer to peer, just run it straight over tail scale for like two people or a few people. I think that works fine. You know, I think that hive talk is using is doing a serving a different purpose. [01:09:50] Speaker B: Okay. [01:09:50] Speaker A: Yeah, so it's, it's like more, think of it like the Twitter spaces, but with. Yeah, with video. So, yeah, it's like more like, more like that. You know. [01:10:03] Speaker B: It'S more for a kind of broadcasting and group engagement sort of thing. [01:10:08] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, but it's like more peer to peer group engagement versus, like, I mean, you, there is a broadcast mode in there, but you can do both. You can do that and also, like, have a conversation with five or six people and they can all screen share and share their YouTube videos or share files with each other. There's a whiteboard in there as well, so you can draw stupid pics if. [01:10:30] Speaker B: You want to draw stupid pics. [01:10:34] Speaker A: Yeah. And there's also like an audio transcription. So, like, if you want to do auto transcription when someone else is talking, you can do that inside of Hive talk, provided that your browser allows for it. It doesn't have the kind of recording that we're doing right now where it's the local track splitting, which I honestly don't know if somebody wants to do that. But you can record locally, so if you want to record a session locally of somebody doing some sort of demo or workshop, you can do that. It saves locally to your drive, and then you can post it somewhere else. Yeah. [01:11:14] Speaker B: Sweet. Is that just. [01:11:15] Speaker A: There's a lot of features in there. Sorry. [01:11:20] Speaker B: I was thinking about the recording just because. How difficult is the. Or have you explored the separate track recording? Out of curiosity, as an editor, it's very useful. Granted, often I don't use it. I just take the joint recording because it's easy and I'm lazy. But it is also very useful to have. So I'm just curious what the difficulties of that are of keeping those things in sync and having multiple devices all recording. [01:11:56] Speaker A: I don't think it's going to be that difficult if you do local recording, but it's not built in. Like, I didn't focus on that. [01:12:05] Speaker B: Gotcha. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not a critical. It's not a mission critical feature at all. [01:12:09] Speaker A: Yeah, it wasn't a mission critical thing. So I was like, I'm not focusing on that usually with these podcasts. I know you guys like to have the separate local tracks for editing, so I was like, okay, we're gonna do this because you like to do editing and separate local, like, crystal clear audio. Otherwise I wouldn't have suggested this. We can go back to robot voice. [01:12:32] Speaker B: Man, that still annoys me. I just paid. I just paid for Zencastr. I'm so annoyed. Like, they took my 30 fiat poverty points and it could have been bitcoin. And, yeah, gave me robot voice and bad recording. I'm so upset about this. I'm gonna be butthurt about this all night. [01:12:55] Speaker A: I'm sorry. You know what's really amazing, though, I have to say about Nasturt, is the fact that you can do so much fundraising on platform. You know, just use zaps. I think that's the. That is the killer. Like, seriously, like, I'll tell you right now, 100% of all the zaps that came to me in the last a month and a half, ever since we launched Hyve talk, 100% of this Washington will go to supporting this server this year. So the cost of that will support the server this year. Any futures apps, I am not spending. You know, it's going to the server. [01:13:34] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:13:34] Speaker A: So, you know, this is the ideal way to do, like frictionless fundraising. Yeah. You know, without having to. [01:13:42] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:13:43] Speaker A: Oh, my goodness. That's like the best godsend ever because, like, it's hard to get started. [01:13:49] Speaker B: Right. [01:13:50] Speaker A: And, you know, the grant system is tricky, I think, because I think there's some people who had some great projects or great areas that they were working on inside Noster, but they just told me that they didn't get their grants renewed. And I'm like, God, that's got to be so hard because I'm like, who's going to work on that now? [01:14:09] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:14:10] Speaker A: You know, and it's tough. It's tough to call. It's tough to say because everyone works really hard. And I think I, a lot of people do an incredible job, but it's just like, how do you, like, how does this work? You know, it's like, what if I want to use that part? [01:14:25] Speaker B: Funding is such an issue. I really think this is the issue. It is the issue. And I feel like a lot like people are uncomfortable about it. Like, they don't. People are afraid to ask for money. And I can completely understand and identify with that because I have a problem asking for money, for charging for things, you know? So I get it. But I really think that onboarding people into noster and having an easy way for them to receive their first sats or earn their first sats, I think that is a huge barrier that if we can figure out what that is, it solves such a huge resistance. It just smooths out a huge issue in just onboarding and getting people to experience what this is and kind of like, what the value of it is and then figuring out how to fund these projects. Like, there's so many things that, you know, maybe I want to ask you get your just general opinion on this of why so many projects stagnate, I guess. Like, like, what do you think it is that is? Cause just peer to peer in general, decentralized alternatives, like why do they all seem to die on the vine half done? [01:15:58] Speaker A: Are you talking about Nastur or are you talking about other. [01:16:01] Speaker B: Just in general. Just in general. Maybe you can use noster as an example, like, just because it's recent and something you're familiar with. But I'm also just curious your in general thoughts about this. [01:16:15] Speaker A: Oh, okay. So I can tell from NaStR specifically because, like, up until this year, I have not written a single line of nostril code. It's all been since 2021. One, two, three. It's just been me observing it. Cause I only have x number of hours. So for me, it's been reading a lot, observing a lot. There were a lot of really good repositories that were built out on Oster early on, but it just flash and bang, and it disappeared. And they were left out of date. People were. They got into it, and then, um, you know, it's just their free time. [01:16:59] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:17:00] Speaker A: And so there's like, no, if there's no traction early on, and there's no, like, okay, there's some of them that people started complaining because they're like, I'm using this library, and the guy abandoned it. What happened? So there is a lot of frustration around it. [01:17:15] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:17:16] Speaker A: Right. Um, it's because there are a couple of things. One is that it was moving so fast. It was just like, I could not even keep up with it. Like, every single week, I was just like, I'm gonna die. I had it shut off at one point, just going so fast, like, whoa. You know, like drinking from a fire hose, but, like, that fire hose just exploded, so it's even worse. That's what it felt like. And, you know, it's like, incentive for the developer. Why are they doing it? You know, is there traction? Is there, like, are they doing it out of the fact that they really, you know, need it themselves, or are they just doing it as a showcase thing? Are they doing it because they need funding later on? Do they just want to make this into an actual business? That's another thing I've had people tell me. They're like, I would not be able to continue working on this if I did not get a grant. I'm like, fair enough. I cannot continue working on this unless I took vc money. Fair enough. There are very few people, I will tell you, that are like, oh, whatever. I can just keep doing this because I just can keep doing this, you. [01:18:25] Speaker B: Know, because I have all the time in the world and I have nothing else that I want to do or spend that time on. [01:18:33] Speaker A: Right. [01:18:33] Speaker B: Let me just donate all of my work to. A whole bunch of people are going to bitch about how the fact that it's not, it's too slow and there's a feature that they don't have. [01:18:43] Speaker A: I mean, it's like, what are, what's the real motivation behind it? You know? And I've also met, like, some people who are, like, not into noster, but it's like, it's still too early for the average person. Like, the average user. [01:18:59] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:19:00] Speaker A: You know, and so still awkward. [01:19:04] Speaker B: It's still awkward. [01:19:05] Speaker A: You know, it's still awkward, yeah. And there's, like, unrealistic expectations from, like, the average person. And so then people get frustrated because. Because you're hit with these comments continuously going like, blah, blah, blah. Why does this work? You know, I have been very lucky because I've had some really great volunteers to help shield me from some of that customer, like, issue stuff, you know? By the way, shout out to new one and cloud fodder and Star sleepy because you guys have all actually supported me and protected me from having to answer a million questions. That's another thing, right? It's like, if you're just one developer and they're like, who else is going to back you up? [01:19:45] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:19:45] Speaker A: Right. And, you know, I count my blessings because in this particular case, like, I launched high talk and I just, like, got overwhelmed, and then I went hid under a rock for a couple days because there's just too many notifications. So this is, this is like one of those things. It's like, you gotta have somebody to help you support all these people. [01:20:12] Speaker B: That's so funny. That's so true. It's just like having a, like, just trying to run anything that people, even if it works, then people will use it. And then it's like having six email accounts to navigate through that have 50 new emails every day, and you're just like, no, I don't want to have any of this conversation. I don't care. I don't want to answer. Stop it. [01:20:39] Speaker A: Yeah, there was a lot of that. Can I also have this feature and this feature and this feature. [01:20:44] Speaker B: And I'm just like, I'm so bad at that too. That was probably. That's probably me. I do that to, like, math and them all the time. I'm like, by the way, here's just another thing. It's just another thing. I'm sure you don't. You don't have, like, a list of 16,742 other things, but here's a 43rd. [01:21:05] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So that's one of those things. And then. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of thankless work, I think, in open source, too. It's like, if you have a real reason. Yeah. It's like intrinsic. Intrinsic desire. Like, it has to be more than just for the money. [01:21:24] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:21:26] Speaker A: Like, for example, I think there was a bit of a debate the other week when I said, you know, Albie wanted black coffee. Who's a developer to work on nostrowall connect and integrate it into elembis. And then that didn't happen over like a period of months. And then it came to me and I was like, I'm busy. I can't do it. And then like, we're both like, we're tapped out. And they put up a bounty for it. And I said, hey, you know, someone should actually take a look into this if you're new into the space and you want to get some experience. And then I got a bunch of people complaining. They're like, that's too little money for me to do this. You know, oh, there's too much competition. That's not enough to pay rent. I'm like, oh, my God. So, you know, there's all this whining about it and I'm sitting here thinking, yeah, but that's not what the bounty is really about. You know, like people have asked me like, how do I get involved? I'm like, because the hard part about this place is that it's like you entered a real role time, like a real life role playing Sci-Fi really bad Sci-Fi Star wars novel, like where everyone's like shooting bullets at each other and laughing their faces off and having fun at the same time, but also like, you know, getting stuck in a pile of goo over here. And it's, it's hard to figure out where to start. Yes. Like, I don't know where to start. Like what, what project do I work on? Yeah, like, what should I learn? There's so many things going on. It's just like every 5 seconds there's another thing that comes out. So usually, you know, it's like, okay, well, what's your skill set? Right. Okay, and then what are you interested in? And then, like, what is there that I should work on? And then I can understand there are a lot of people who are scared to work on these things because they're like, I don't know what they're like. You know, like, that, that's not like open source is so hard because you're like, you don't know what you're walking into when you walk into a project. [01:23:25] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:23:25] Speaker A: You know, you don't, you don't know if they want what you're working on. You know, I've seen this too. Like, people are like, come in and actually make a contribution and it could be a good maintainer or it could be like a not so nice maintainer. And, you know, I've been brushed off before as well. Like, well, I don't. We don't really need that here, so go away. You know, even though you looked at something that you think it might be useful. So the way I look at the bounties are, here's an opportunity for you to work on something and like, they actually want this. [01:23:55] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:23:56] Speaker A: And then the other thing, you know, people are always concerned. [01:23:58] Speaker B: It's a signal. It's a signal. It's a signal that says that the community has said, literally, we're thinking about this. This is what we want. If you were looking for something to contribute and work on, this is something people will be happy about, you know, this is, this is desired. Yeah. [01:24:15] Speaker A: And the other thing is like, the competition is so they're like, oh, there's gonna be competition? I'm like, you guys don't understand how thin we are. Like, there's not enough developers. You know, there's like ten people. [01:24:30] Speaker B: There's not ten people all racing to work on getting the first implementation and then only one of them getting paid. It's everybody saying there's going to be competition and nobody is working on it. [01:24:44] Speaker A: Yeah, it's really like that. It's more like none of us have the time to work on it if we actually wanted to work on it. [01:24:51] Speaker B: That's the problem. Everybody's always working on something else. There's just a hundred things. There's an unlimited number of things. It just. And what's funny is the more successful it is and the more we figure out what to do with it, the bigger the number of projects get. And I feel like the projects grow in need way faster than the capacity to get them done does. [01:25:15] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, there's always projects where I say, hey, you know, here is a micro subset of another project. If you want to get your feet wet, no pressure. You can improve it by doing these things like XYZ. I'll list them off and I tell someone that they're like, they want to be new in this space and they want to get their feet wet. Do this, you know, because you then establish a track record, you know, if you're going to go look for employment. These are things I've done in open source to prove this is provable work. This is proof of work that, you know, I'm capable of, compute, contributing to open source projects. Yeah, but I think it's also very hard for people to do that. It's like, it's a skill set of. I think communication is really hard for a lot of people. Yeah, that's the thing to, like step up and ask those questions. A lot of people have difficulty with that, man. [01:26:09] Speaker B: It's so taken for granted. It's so taken for granted. I think the people who don't work, like, don't think about managing people, managing a project, managing team. That, like, that is one of the most critical skills. Like, and they just. All you have to do is get a project with three people, and you get it. You get it because three people is too many. That's when everything starts to have problems. [01:26:42] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:26:42] Speaker B: That's all it takes. [01:26:43] Speaker A: People. People are hard. It's hard. But you also need, like, as the project grows, you need more people. [01:26:48] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:26:49] Speaker A: You know what I mean? It's just like, you know, I've watched, for example, I've watched elements grow from, like, early days, 2021, when it was just like, fiat, Jaff and Ben arc, just trying to piece things together by themselves. That was a rough. [01:27:02] Speaker B: That's wild. Yeah. It's crazy how far it's gone. Yeah. [01:27:07] Speaker A: Yeah. And then, of course, there'd be all these arguments about, you should do this. He's like, why don't you do that? You can make it a monster project. I encourage you to do that and never does anything. [01:27:17] Speaker B: I just wanted a bitch. Now you make me feel like I gotta do something. I'm out of here. [01:27:24] Speaker A: It's just, like, ridiculous, right? Yeah. So it's, it's, it's, it's. It's hard, you know? But I think, like, you know, some of these projects are incredible because I have, you know, had the pleasure and the honor to work with some of the really, really nice and very smart developers. And that's a treat, to be honest with you. It's really nice, and I wish people, more people knew about it. You know, people who are in it are actually pretty decent. There's very few toxic projects in the lightning and, you know, bitcoin space that's really. I don't know. [01:28:10] Speaker B: That's really. [01:28:11] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't know all of noster, by the way. I don't know all of Nastur, because I. Not deep into Nastur, but I will say in a lighting space for very nice, you know, and. And honestly, I think a noster people have been very, very supportive, more so than any other place I've been in. And especially, like, people are more forgiving because they understand that everything is a work in progress. There might be a little bit of trolling, but it's more like friendly trolling, not like malicious trolling. We want to help you make this better. That kind of thing. [01:28:45] Speaker B: I think there's a lot better perspective, as much as I shit on it. And I just had a note the other day of everybody so entitled, expecting everyone to build them free, open source, decentralized everything, and it's all going to work, and it's going to have the perfect ux, and if they ever have to cough up any money for it, they're pissed. But, you know, part of that was, like, a bit of a self reflection, because I'll bitch about how, like, this noster client takes way too long to load. You know, I go in it very, like, user, like, normie user experience. And that's kind of my. My thing to weigh it against. So part of it was, like, bitching about other people. Part of it was just a. A bit of a guy. Sit down, shut up. Like, this is an enormous amount of work, and everybody is building their asses off, and you're expecting way too much, way too fast. Yeah, but I do. I think generally there's a. There's a really good perspective. Like, people know that this is a project and that people are working to make this work. And as many as rough around the edges as it is, at times, I am shocked by how well both Noster and the pear based things just. And pear is far more mature in kind of the underlying. The time and the years that have been spent kind of putting all of these layers together to get it to work. But Noster has moved a lot faster, and the kind of development around it, like, the number of people have seemed much. Has a lot of momentum, it seems like, but both have been substantially better than all of the things previously. It feels like we're getting further than we have in the past. Like, I feel more hope at solving these problems than I ever have. [01:30:54] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. [01:30:55] Speaker B: And that's at least exciting. Is that just me, or do you feel that same way? Does it seem that way to you as well? [01:31:04] Speaker A: Oh, honey. Like, did you see noster in 2021? I mean, have you ever seen anything from there? [01:31:14] Speaker B: Oh, my God. [01:31:16] Speaker A: It was so ugly. It was just a bunch of, like, not even end pubs. It was just like, the actual, like, you know, hex string and then, like, no names. [01:31:26] Speaker B: Oh, my God. That's right. I forgot about that. I did use it then. I did. I did. I was there for, like, a week. And I think I have an old lost key somewhere. It's probably public. [01:31:41] Speaker A: Or something like that. [01:31:42] Speaker B: Oh, that's right. [01:31:44] Speaker A: That thing. Oh, my God. [01:31:46] Speaker B: Oh, I forgot about that one. [01:31:48] Speaker A: I just remember looking and going, what the heck? Thinking what the heck? And I was like, oh, this is kind of cool. Somebody's actually making use of public private keys, you know, so I thought, this is really cute. And then I started noticing, you know, I don't know if people actually realize this with Ellen Bitts. Like, there is a noster relay and a noster client built in to Ellen Bitz as extensions. [01:32:16] Speaker B: Really? [01:32:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [01:32:19] Speaker B: Kidding. [01:32:20] Speaker A: Yeah. And, yeah, I mean, Ben Arc. Well, because Ben Arc and I, Fiat Jaff, were the two who started this whole. Both. Well, both of these things. Like, Fiat Jaffe wrote a go lang version of Ellen Bits, which is sort of archived at this point. But, yeah, so, like, you know, every step of the way, you know, Ben Marks is like, I want to put this in in some way. Right? [01:32:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [01:32:43] Speaker A: And to this day, actually, I find it very useful because the noster relay, you know, which is an extension of elements. I use it for testing on a regular basis. I'm like, oh, here, I can just have my, you know, my cute little thing on the side and then not spam the network. Although the other day I did by accident. That's a different story. But, yeah, you know, it's nice to have that as a tool, or if you just want a little private relay along with all the other tools that, you know, elembits has to offer, it's really nice. You don't have to actually go run something separate. [01:33:18] Speaker B: This is the Swann Bitcoin app, and this is how easy it is to just buy bitcoin whenever you're feeling like it. And I feel like it right now. And as it shows me right here, I still have $9,388 worth of my $10,000 of bitcoin. Buying that has no fees whatsoever. And now I have $10 more worth of bitcoin. I do this quite often. One of the really great things about Swannen is the incredible number of resources they have for learning and understanding anything that you want to know about bitcoin. And importantly, they're going to teach you why you should not trade. They're not going to encourage you to trade. They are bitcoin only if you're looking for an easy and reliable way to get into bitcoin. If you're looking to put bitcoin in your IRA, if you're looking to put bitcoin in your business, if you're looking to do anything around getting on a bitcoin stand or getting exposed to bitcoin in your portfolio, check out swannbitcoin.com. guy is my special link, and you will find it very conveniently right in the show notes. I have been trying to figure out in our application how to do a lightning integration. And maybe I need to look back at and think about lnbits again because I haven't gone back to lnbits in a while. The one thing that I was trying to use Ellen bits for and was the whole reason that I went to Ellenbits originally, was trying to figure out how to do sub accounts so that I could have, like my sister in law, have a lightning wallet that was just based off of mine and was a quote unquote sub account with its own balance. And it was, she was just using my channel, basically. I was a tiny bank for her. And we had a bunch of different issues in just getting it connected. And after it, there wasn't a simple or obvious solution. I just kind of ran out of time fighting with it, and she wasn't in some I need a lightning wallet today. You know, like, she was just doing it because, like, it was fun and we were doing it. And so I never, I never really came back to it and explored it in depth again. But now that we're building an application on the pair stack, I want Noster login and I want lightning. And I think lightning is critically important for a number of different integrations, obviously, like custodial for people who are using a bunch of lightning address things and stuff on Noster. And I think it's the lowest barrier, but I want to have kind of optionality, and I think experimenting with monetization. How do you monetize something with free software, and how do you create funding around the success of your app? And that's one of the things that we're doing. I'm building the app to solve my problem for files. But, and maybe I'll just kind of get your experience on this as well. And your thoughts on this. I want to know first, how easy and to what degree is noster login? Noster being the dominant way that people log in and interact with it? How easy was it to implement? And, uh, what was the third thing? We'll start there. [01:36:48] Speaker A: Lnbits monetization. [01:36:50] Speaker B: Lnbits monitor. Oh, yeah. That's the other thing is, what was, how are you thinking about monetization and, oh, yeah. [01:36:57] Speaker A: Okay. [01:36:57] Speaker B: What's your, what's your strategy? And, or what are your intent to try options, I guess you could say. [01:37:04] Speaker A: Or models, um, what for all the things, or just hive talk? [01:37:10] Speaker B: Let's start with hive talk. And then I'm curious of just, like, your big picture, because I think this is our problem of how do we monetize and make noster sustainable and the client sustainable and the pair stuff sustainable. I think this is one of the core problems. [01:37:28] Speaker A: Okay, I'm taking my dev hat off. [01:37:30] Speaker B: Okay. [01:37:30] Speaker A: I'm gonna put my business hat. [01:37:32] Speaker B: Brainstorm hat. Yes. [01:37:34] Speaker A: Brainstorm hat. All right, let's go back to, uh, you know, the much overlooked plebnet dot de v. That is a self sustaining business model right there, which use lmbits. So it was a membership, you know, where people actually got access to services. It was a club, that kind of thing. Everything runs on. Also donations, and that pays off whatever your utilities are. So that's it. That's a business model itself. Plus, we also sold swag. So I also designed a bunch of swag. And, you know, the whole point, everybody loves swag. Designing all. Yeah. So much fun. That was actually the best. That was, like, the most enjoyable part was designing swag. [01:38:18] Speaker B: That's funny. [01:38:20] Speaker A: I mean, I love graphic design. That's another thing I doubt on. I also designed the high talk logo, by the way. [01:38:28] Speaker B: Oh, did you? [01:38:29] Speaker A: No way. Yeah. No AI there. [01:38:32] Speaker B: Oh, that's nice. [01:38:33] Speaker A: Yeah, it's funny because, like, people were like, oh, what's your favorite part about hype talk? I said the logo, the design on the front page. Yeah. Anyway, the. What do you call it? So that was like, okay, I use Ellen bits to do payments and also for shopping. So the shopping part was, I mean, this is going to go down a very interesting path, because I think there's some projects worth mentioning to you that we'll touch on as well. I think during that process, I learned, okay, so how do we make a margin? By selling swag. And there are print on demand shots which can do it, but then you have the bridge over from the fiat. From the lightning stuff to the fiat. [01:39:23] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:39:23] Speaker A: You know, so that's. That's the whole accounting stuff. You have to keep that separate unless you make your own, which, you know, now I understand why people say, oh, we got to do localize. You know, print your own stuff, manufacture your own stuff, and then sell that for lightning, which is the way to go if you do that, if you have your own equipment, your own print shop. Fantastic. Do it. [01:39:45] Speaker B: Yeah. Great. Another project. I need. [01:39:49] Speaker A: Other project. [01:39:50] Speaker B: Yes. [01:39:50] Speaker A: Or. Or you can be like me, which is like, okay, I don't know if anybody's actually gonna buy this stuff, but I'm just gonna print on demand. [01:39:57] Speaker B: Mm hmm. [01:39:58] Speaker A: And then, you know, on the front what I ended up. So it was experimental because one of them was just fiat. You know, straight print on demands. Very easy. You just upload your design. They do all the back and stuff for you. You just go home and you take whatever the, you know, the profit margin is. [01:40:14] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:40:15] Speaker A: Because, you know, you can set that. That's very easy. But everyone's still pays in fiat. The more difficult model is to have like a lightning shop, which is very interesting because I went down this rabbit hole too, because I was like, well, what's it like to actually have something paid at foreign lightning? So I did try a setup on Shopify where you could take payments in lightning. So I think. So btcpay had shopify. Oh, yeah, yeah. So you can do this. You're like, laugh looking at me like, what? Shopify has like a $5 pop per month pop up store where you can, you know. Yeah. So you can do all these experiments fairly cheaply just to see how it goes. And so if you want to integrate the PTCP, I think there's a way to do that. And then I think coin Os also has integration if you want to do that. [01:41:07] Speaker B: I forget about coin Os. I forget about. I've got to put that in my. Listen, because I used them just for their classic wallet for so long. They were my lightning liquid. Bitcoin bridge. [01:41:19] Speaker A: Yeah. Very quiet. [01:41:20] Speaker B: So easy. It was. God, it was so easy. It was the dream experience for it. And even much as I like aqua, I still think coin Os was the easiest and simplest thing. And it just kind of. It's not really their focus anymore. But that's one that I forget. That's one that I forget. I thank you for mentioning that one. [01:41:43] Speaker A: I went through the whole, okay, so the interesting path of how I got here, too, and how I discovered coin os was early, like starting late last year. Like, Alby came to me and said, hey, you know, can you integrate us into Ellen Vicks? And I'm like, okay, maybe I can find someone that fell through. That person was like, I can't do it. So I was like, okay, fine, I'll do it. So then that sort of sparked off this chain of other ones because then I integrated. So alibi's integrated into lnps and then ZBD. I also integrated that into lnvids. I like ZBD's infrastructure. Very solid, very well documented, very professional. And then who else did I integrate? I integrated blink. Blink, you know, blink wallet. [01:42:36] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:42:37] Speaker A: Non us. [01:42:38] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:42:41] Speaker A: And then the other one was Phoenix D. So the server that you can run by yourself, like Phoenix wallet. But so I did those four integrations, and, like, every step of the way, I was like, okay, so which one can I use for a shopping plugin? And there wasn't one. So that's why I went down this route. And I was like, how does this work? So that was, like, interesting. I think it would be great to have more lightning shopping experiences. This whole entire circle of monetization using lightning and keeping it within that circular economy is, I think, critical to growing the network as well. Not just the zap part, but being able to sell items. And there's a project that's working on a noster. I think it's called shopster, but it's very early stage shop. [01:43:32] Speaker B: I'm gonna write that one down, too. [01:43:34] Speaker A: Yeah, but it's super early stage. And I think that they have a lot of growing to do, but they're also focused on this track of being able to sell things on noster for lightning. Eventually, it'll be more pretty simple. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you can. We can go down this, you know, like, this is a whole entire different world from all the stuff we talked about before, but it's also very interesting. And lightning network stores actually has the listings for all these other shops online, which accept lightning as payments. So it helps with discovery, because right now, it's really hard to just discover a lot of these shops and. [01:44:18] Speaker B: Yes, no, that's absolutely true. Like, trying to find them is a big thing. [01:44:25] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. I mean, I wish there was more. I wish there was a better way for people to know about these, like, portals or a better way to find them, probably. I mean, the only way I know of to really advertise a shot from, like, the ground up is you have to go in austrian and you have to build up a social media presence, and then you have to blast it out, and then you have to hope that somebody bigger than you is going to go blast it out. [01:44:56] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:44:56] Speaker A: To get more visibility. So it's still pretty rough right there. You know, in terms of that circle, it's obviously easier with you because you have a bigger presence, but I think it's. It's very difficult for a lot of small shops when they first start. Like, how do you get that traction? [01:45:11] Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. 100%. Like, I will constantly. And it's. And it's funny how. How often I will come across something like hive talk. The first time. First time I bumped into hive talk, this fell into this exact thing, except for the fact that I'm in a bunch of different rooms, I come across you in a bunch of different places. So I was easily reconnected to it, but I could have seen very easily, and it's extremely frequent that I will hear about a project where it will come across my feed and I'll be like, oh, that's cool. And I think, I'm gonna go check that out later. And then I forget about it, or I forget the name and I can't find it now. And there's no reconnection, there's no clear way to save. It still kind of has that ephemerality that, like, something like Twitter has, where if it's not recent, it's gone, you know? [01:46:03] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:46:04] Speaker B: And there's something there that I really wish I could save. Organize kind of like, I like, sure, bookmarks, but not quite like bookmarks, where it's just like a feed of, you know, a chronological thing. I want to save them, like stores and experiences and tools. I want a toolbox, you know, I love highlighter. Yes, yes. Highlighter is fascinating. And it is another one that I use for little while, then forgot about for like, three or four months, and then came back to, and it was completely different. And I was like, hit up, was like, pablo, Pablo, what the hell? What is all this stuff? But highlighter is fantastic. I love highlighter. [01:46:42] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. A lot of stuff flies by really quickly. [01:46:46] Speaker B: Yeah, it's easy to lose stuff. Easy to lose stuff, right. [01:46:50] Speaker A: Absolutely. Like, I have to, like, just, like, you have to catch it, then I have to, like, copy it and then paste it into, like, a notepad or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, that's also really hard. You know, a lot of things are getting developed, but they get developed and then they get dropped, too. [01:47:06] Speaker B: That's true. That's true. [01:47:08] Speaker A: That's another issue. So, like, you know, one of the things I want to emphasize is that I, I don't like doing that. So I don't plan on dropping hive talk anytime soon. You know, I just want to say that because a lot of people are like, oh, how long is that going to be there? [01:47:24] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:47:25] Speaker A: Believe me, I'm trying to build enough Runway for the next three years. That's the idea. [01:47:29] Speaker B: That's cool. [01:47:30] Speaker A: And, yeah, I like long Runway. I don't, I don't like this kind of artificial growth. Short pop, make the left turn and then go downhill. [01:47:40] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:47:41] Speaker A: Oh, we raise our series to you. Okay, we're now exiting. Bye. Yeah, I hate that. I really do. [01:47:48] Speaker B: I think a lot of that goes from people who are trying to build something that they think somebody else is going to like and or is. Is going to be cool to somebody else or for some particular situation rather than something that solves their problem. And I was in a conversation recently with somebody who was actually, I think it was in, like, the para development room or something on key. Um, but somebody was basically just, like, asking what they should build. And, like, I was. I was interested and kind of hopeful in a sense. It's like, okay, there's people here, and they're just literally looking for things to build. But all I could think is, if that doesn't just explode and have tons of people interested in it, that's going to be a dead project because they're not building it because they need it, or it's something that they feel like they want to build or they're driven to build. Everybody's just kind of, like, scouring to pick something up random, which might be somebody else's idea. And I think that's how you get so much stagnancy and like I said earlier, you know, dead on the vine sort of projects. [01:48:54] Speaker A: Yeah, well, there's also, like, a lot of people coming into software. Okay. Like, let's play this one. When I. When I got into software, it was not the cool thing. [01:49:03] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:49:04] Speaker A: Like, only the nerds went to it. Who the hell cares? Right? [01:49:09] Speaker B: The nerds in biggest. [01:49:12] Speaker A: They're like, who the hell cares? Nerds on the. And then. And then there was, like, a trend in the last decade where people were like, you better get into coding because that's where all the money is. You have to chase the money. I'm like, oh, my God. Okay. You're not gonna make it. [01:49:24] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:49:25] Speaker A: You know, like, if you're only here for the money, like, sorry, I just think that's just a bad motivator. You have to intrinsically like it because you want to, like, you want to work on it. [01:49:37] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:49:38] Speaker A: You know, like, if you are into it because you find it interesting, you will go forever. It's not like, you know, you're getting it shoved down your throat so you can, like, you know, who knows? Buy your Bentley or your Maserati. [01:49:52] Speaker B: I'm gonna get a lambo. [01:49:55] Speaker A: Right, exactly. [01:49:56] Speaker B: I'm gonna build an open source project and get a lambo. No, no, you're nothing. Yeah, that's why crypto. That's why crypto worked. That's why everybody went crypto, man. You just print a token, and if your idea is even, like, remotely good, it's like a shit ton of people just buy your bullshit token. Yeah, I can see why it happened. [01:50:17] Speaker A: At least a dozen people have come to me saying like, I want to get a job in the bitcoin industry because bitcoin is like richest. Well anyway, that's not gonna work out. Going back to the Elemis monetization thing, do you know that they're actually now paid extensions? Like you can be a developer and you can actually like charge for an extension, you know, that's cool. Yeah, it is cool, right? Because that means that's great. Yeah, it's like self perpetuating. Yeah, like it makes total sense that, you know, like Ben Arc talked about how Elen bits is going to have a WordPress like model. And if you're familiar with WordPress, you know, like one of the biggest like extensions of WordPress is woocommerce, the shopping cart. Yeah, it's like pretty solid like that software has been running for, for well over like almost two decades. [01:51:23] Speaker B: How about saying long time? [01:51:25] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's not a small industry. It's like half a trillion dollar turnover per year. That's nuts. [01:51:34] Speaker B: That's wild. Yeah, yeah. [01:51:36] Speaker A: And people don't realize it's about the same size as the Apple app store industry. [01:51:42] Speaker B: No kidding. That puts it into perspective. [01:51:47] Speaker A: Yeah. People don't realize this because this is like small business. Like, you know how I said the other day, I was like, you know, small business is actually big business cumulatively. [01:51:57] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:51:59] Speaker A: That is what I was referring to. You know, there's so many small businesses, you know, turning over millions of dollars in revenue that are running that platform. So if you can imagine, you project out into the future, let's say their business businesses all running, you know, lm bits to run their e commerce platforms. There you go. [01:52:23] Speaker B: Yeah, right. [01:52:26] Speaker A: So, yeah, I think there's a lot of potential right there. I mean maybe it's not necessarily Lmbits but like something that provides a lightning platform for payments, for rapid payments. That might be it. But it's also like, to me it's a signal in the last like six to nine months how much demand from existing providers asked for integration into lnbits. Yeah, it's a lot more than I thought it would be. It was just like one after another after another and I was just like, what the heck is going on? [01:52:59] Speaker B: That's pretty cool actually. [01:53:01] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean you can take your pick then, you know. Yeah, and like in the case of, you know, I understand with blank and like South, south markets, like South Africa in particular, there's demand there because they're building out their circular economies very rapidly. And like, you know, they're going to want that infrastructure because you're a local business that might, you know, like a restaurant or let's say like a clothing shop. You know, they're going to want the infrastructure to sell their goods. And if they're a growing circular economy, then they're gonna want to have a shop for that, and then they're gonna want to back end. You know, it might be custodial, non custodial, but they're gonna pick the option that supports them. You know, supports something for that. [01:53:48] Speaker B: Mm hmm. [01:53:49] Speaker A: Right. So, and you also want something fairly lightweight, you know? [01:53:55] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, of course. [01:53:57] Speaker A: So, so these things all add up. And I think there is increasingly, like, I don't know what the visibility, but I think there's increasing, like, especially smaller, you know, remote economies that they're going to want something like this, especially where like, traditional payments are not viable. You know, they're just too expensive to get your foot in their door for. [01:54:19] Speaker B: Banking, for traditional, where the infrastructure just isn't there but you have a data connection, you know? [01:54:26] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. [01:54:28] Speaker B: Now that makes a big difference. And I'm curious too, for Lmbits, do they, is there any like splitting of like, you know, if somebody puts something on and then sells. I really think the automatic splitting, the prisms are a super underutilized tool because if I put my plugin on ln bits, I would love to have 5% of it go to lnbits automatically. Like, just like, I think. [01:55:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I think there is a plugin that really does that. Like, that's been around for at least a year. [01:55:07] Speaker B: Oh, really? In Lmbits, it's one of the extensions. [01:55:12] Speaker A: I think one of the bolts extension guys wrote it. [01:55:15] Speaker B: Split payments across wallets. Is that this one. [01:55:19] Speaker A: Forgot the name of it. [01:55:21] Speaker B: Crypto graffiti is idea sponsor fiat Jaff developer Danny Prusnak. Talov. Tal. [01:55:28] Speaker A: I think Dni wrote it. Dni? [01:55:30] Speaker B: Dni? Yeah, Dni is third one down. [01:55:32] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, DnI is the guy who wrote it. Yeah. [01:55:36] Speaker B: Okay, sweet. Is this, is, does any of this, like, does Ellen bits have a monetization strategy? Like do they quote unquote charge, or. [01:55:49] Speaker A: They have software as a service so you can pay them to run elements in the cloud for you? [01:55:56] Speaker B: Okay, see, I did not know this. [01:55:58] Speaker A: Yeah, so there's that. [01:56:00] Speaker B: How do I know so little about this? [01:56:05] Speaker A: Because it's all under the radar, I guess. I don't know. [01:56:08] Speaker B: It really is. It's something that I just kind of end up going back to and exploring again, and it's different, you know? [01:56:15] Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I gotta tell you one thing. Like, the, with most open source projects, people come and go, you know, like, just don't stick around. And there's been a lot of remodeling in the year, last year and a half, like, a lot of remodeling. So it's a lot better than it was before. And Pavel Rusnak is one of the code maintainers, you know, the CTO of Trezor wallet. [01:56:42] Speaker B: Oh, really? [01:56:44] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:56:45] Speaker B: Oh, I didn't recognize the name, but, yeah. [01:56:49] Speaker A: Well, I mean, he's pretty damn good at what he does. So I'm like, okay, you know, here, remove my code, Pablo, please. Well, actually, I like that, you know, I actually like having, like, really good quality people to work with, and I like, like having someone like that to come look at my stuff because you never know, you know, like, is it. Lightning's different, right. So you never know. I like to have someone who actually has, you know, done a lot of work with that. And what was the other thing I was gonna say? Yeah, there's. There's a vetted extensions list, I think. Oh, yeah. So the whole software as a service model is something that we're considering for hive talk. [01:57:37] Speaker B: Okay, interesting. Yeah, yeah. [01:57:39] Speaker A: If somebody wants, like, their own version, you know, like, we'll run it, and they don't want to set up that. We will actually offer that, you know, if you want to pay as a service to have your own Hive doc server, that's cool. [01:57:51] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:57:52] Speaker A: And one of the guys who's helped me quite a bit for the relay stuff, he runs relay tools. So this guy on Nostra called Cloudfodder, quite a good engineer. He's made it very easy for people to spin up noster relays, and it's also pay. It's pay as a service. So, like, you can pay him, I think it's like 12,000 sats per month. And then he will spin up a stir fry noster relay for you with your customizations, and then you can configure it because he built a whole dashboard so you can make your own custom configuration set up for that relay. [01:58:34] Speaker B: That is cool. [01:58:36] Speaker A: Yeah. And so we're running one with him right now, and that's one way we're looking at monetizing. The other way is to make another private, super private version of Hive talk where, like, nobody even knows that you're there except for you and whoever you're in the room with. And that would be sort of like pay to play effectively. I don't know. I don't know if there's like market demand, but it'll be interesting. Mostly, you know, there are privacy. There's more privacy requests from people who want it effectively. That's what seems to be like. It seems to be like people who are in noster and people who are really deep into bitcoin lightning want more privacy than the average person does. [01:59:32] Speaker B: Yeah, that's definitely a selling point. I go back and forth between what degree should these tools target an average audience versus really kind of niche down and target something that explicitly a bitcoin audience or a noster audience or a dissidents sort of audience would value, you know, would want. And there's, there's an interesting dynamic there because like heat is a decent example is I feel like Keat is actually more trying to target. I think they're just kind of assuming, and I think for good reason, that kind of the bitcoiners will just kind of find it on their own. And yes, they've slightly targeted, like telling bitcoiners about it, but I think they're more interested in trying to get people who are coming to the Internet for the first time. Because there's so many people expect, there's like 2 billion people expected to join the Internet for the first time and to basically prevent them from going to the centralized closed systems and giving a peer to peer option to them out the gate. You know, kind of setting the stage of the expectation of privacy and the expectation of control over the conversation at the start. So that suddenly the giant centralized surveillance system is awkward. It's something that is different than their normal experience, but in that bitcoiners have, and people who are on Nostra and stuff right now have a very different set of I need this or I want this level. It's incredible how much people will get very angry or very passionate about one minor privacy trade off or one minor trade off with, I guess, control over something. You know what I mean? Like everybody is very personal, I guess, is the word to use about what decisions they are in charge of and get very, very defensive if it feels like somebody took it from them. Where there's a whole other audience that just doesn't want anything to do with it, that you have to do those things for them because they. Because otherwise they're just like confused. The more optionality you give them, the more confused they are. So there's a weird balance to strike and especially in open source, I can see that being nothing but conflicts all over the place. [02:02:27] Speaker A: It's a little weird. That's. That's why I wasn't sure if, I don't know, I'm still up in error whether or not I want to do that or not. [02:02:33] Speaker B: Mm hmm. [02:02:35] Speaker A: Like, it's just additional overhead, but I think some things can be tasted. [02:02:39] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:02:40] Speaker A: You know, like, some things which are unnecessary tracking, you know, it would slim down the code base considerably as well. Less to maintain is better. Just my head. [02:02:53] Speaker B: Yes. [02:02:54] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Just like, if people use it, that's great. You know, if it facilitates what people are trying to do, that's even better. You know? What was I gonna say? Business models, other business, like, opportunity models, which have come up. One very interesting project I thought you might be too, is still being developed. It's called, uh, sovereign. Oh, sov biz. [02:03:21] Speaker B: Sov biz. [02:03:23] Speaker A: Biz. Yeah. [02:03:25] Speaker B: I've got so many links for this one. I meant to solve biz. All right. [02:03:30] Speaker A: It's. It's still work in progress. I don't think he's finished because I I've been nagging the guy. I said, hey, hey. When you're done with your thing. Because his supposed to be a flat file based version of Shopify. [02:03:44] Speaker B: Okay? [02:03:44] Speaker A: So very slimmed down. No database, but just, like, flat file. And very lean. But runs on noster. And purchases should be paid in lightning. And his name, I think his username is sync, but he's been working on this for a while. And it's a very interesting project because I really want to drop Shopify. I want to drop the centralization stuff and use his, you know, because then it's tied into noster. It's tied into, like, you know, lightning. It's more native. And it's. The most important thing is that it's super lightweight. [02:04:24] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:04:25] Speaker A: You know, and it doesn't have all this headache. Like, for example, I placed a test order on shopify to myself, and they are asking me to go, like, you need to register to pay taxes. I'm like, this is a test. Yeah, that kind of stuff. [02:04:42] Speaker B: I would want to pull my hair out. I would just be like, what? [02:04:47] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like, this is, like, insane. [02:04:52] Speaker B: The frictions, they're everywhere. Like, what happened to making stuff just work and making it clean? Like, getting. There's so much. Ah, there's so much shit in everything. Everything's too convoluted. [02:05:09] Speaker A: Exactly. It's like they don't want you to. I feel like it's a war on small business, to be honest with you. Like, they want. They want to kill small business. They want everyone to be working in these large, centralized silos, and then they want to control everybody, what they think about. So, like, there's no innovation. Yeah, that's what it feels like to me because. Yeah, like, I think a lot of people have said that during the pandemic, a lot of small businesses had to close. [02:05:45] Speaker B: And dude is, like, 40%. It was, like, 40% of small business across the US. Mandy, that. [02:05:52] Speaker A: Yeah, that's awful. [02:05:55] Speaker B: That's so awful. And I cannot believe how hand wavy and just dismissive people were about it. It was like, whoa, it saves a grandma. I was like. [02:06:08] Speaker A: Yeah, it's all politicized in that sense. [02:06:11] Speaker B: It feels, like, so awful. [02:06:14] Speaker A: Yeah, it's pretty bad. But this is also, the thing is, like, when everything becomes siloed into a big tech or a big pharma or big corporation of some sort, like, new and creative ideas just tend to die. [02:06:26] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:06:27] Speaker A: Like, really fast, you know, and everything is about conformity. And, like, this whole concept that what a lot of bitcoiners want are sovereignty and freedom, that also tends to die really fast. So it's. It's like, I think projects, like, you know, Nastur are encouraging this, pushing the opposite direction, but it's also hard for people who don't understand this side to, like, accept it. So it's like, it's very interesting because I get hit from both sides. Like, I talk to people from, you know, both outside and inside noster, and there's days where I'm just like, I don't. I'm just getting conflicting opinions from both sides because the, you know, the Normie stacker, bitcoiner out there, I just bought everything, and I left on Coinbase, and it hasn't. It's like, what's lightning? What's a lightning? [02:07:25] Speaker B: No, I know. I get it all the time. All the time, man. I cringe. I cringe. [02:07:34] Speaker A: Yeah, stuff like that. Yeah, that. And also, like, I think people. You know, it was interesting today. Like, there was a post that came out. Like, people were flipping out. I was getting messages in my, you know, an oster. People were like, what's going on with Albie? Why are they removing the custodial wallet? Like, I was just like, they're not. They're not. You know, they're doing something different. Yeah, I think there's a lot of knee jerk reaction because of the whole samurai incidents in April. And then who left the United States? Like, Phoenix said bye bye. [02:08:11] Speaker B: Yeah, they were out. That was like, my main wallet to my main mobile. [02:08:15] Speaker A: Yeah. They're like, bye bye. So it's. It's like, you got what, you know, for most of the wallet companies, it's been either bend the need to KYC, like strike and cash app. They all KYC, or you leave the United States, you know? [02:08:34] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:08:36] Speaker A: And it's interesting because, like, Alby has done a completely different model. They're like, and I know about this going back about 910 months. When I talked to Quinton, I was like, what is your plan? What are you guys going to do? Because you are a custodial wallet right now. And he's like, we're going to do Alby hub. And I was like, okay, this is going to be interesting, but this is probably the one way that you can get people away from custodial and towards selsomerty. It is a nice step off. I don't know if you heard about Albie Hub. [02:09:05] Speaker B: I don't know much about it. I heard talking about Albie hub, but I couldn't tell you what exactly the details. [02:09:14] Speaker A: Okay, so what they did is they're running. So you know about Voltage, right? You can run. Yeah. Okay. So what they're doing is they're doing, like, a slimmed down version of voltage. So where effectively you can run the node on their cloud infrastructure, but you hold the keys, and then you also are in charge of opening, closing your channels. And it's just basically a point and click interface. That's it. [02:09:39] Speaker B: Wow. [02:09:41] Speaker A: Yeah. Right? [02:09:41] Speaker B: No, that's smart. That's really smart. [02:09:43] Speaker A: It takes. It's smart. [02:09:45] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:09:46] Speaker A: They charge a fee, but it's like, a very small fee compared to, like, voltage. Like, I think voltage, if it's a paid service right now, correct me if it's wrong, it's like $25 a month. [02:09:58] Speaker B: I don't know. I haven't checked it in a while. [02:10:01] Speaker A: Let's see. I think I know I checked it the other day. I think it's $25 a month. Yeah. There's a free version, and then there's. Then the next jump up is $25 a month. [02:10:10] Speaker B: Okay. [02:10:10] Speaker A: And that's pretty. That's pretty steep for somebody who's not always using lightning, right? [02:10:14] Speaker B: Yeah. If you're. If you're trying to get somebody to just kind of, like, test something out of or explore a wallet. Like, voltage is very. If you have a business and you know you're using lightning and you know you need it and you just want something like, reliable and easy to set up okay. It makes sense justifying. But it's not in a play with. Right. Anything that's dollar 25 a month is not just play with this really quick. [02:10:37] Speaker A: Exactly. [02:10:38] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:10:38] Speaker A: Right. And the same thing with BTC. BTC pay server. I really love BTC pay server, and I love what. What they've done with the project, but it was costing me. Like, I think at that point, I was paying almost $20 a month to run it, you know, and I was just. [02:10:53] Speaker B: I think that's about what I get on Lunanode. It's. Yeah, it's something like that. [02:10:57] Speaker A: I was just like. I wasn't really using it that much. You know, that's the whole thing. I was like, okay, this is for fun, right? I'm burning $20 a month for, like, not really doing much with it. And then. So the thing. And that's the reason why I kind of rolled towards Ellen bits is because of the fact that that was like $5 or less vps. And then if I didn't want to really go all in or if my lightning node was down or I didn't have time to manage it, I could just click it over to, like, a custodial wallet if I needed to, you know, so it's like, has that option and go back, you know, like these. These lightning nodes in those days was just like. It was a lot of work to manage them. Sometimes it's not always going to be running, so. But at least this is a lot more cost effective at like a five dollar vps versus $20 vps for just small things, you know, especially if you're just experimenting. And I think now with this, you know, option where Alby's providing all the infrastructure, you manage all the channels just point and click, and you pay them a small fee, which is probably less, I think. What's like 20,000 sats or 15. 10,000 sats or something like that. [02:12:08] Speaker B: Yeah, 10,000 Sass is like $5. That's not so. 20 would be ten. [02:12:15] Speaker A: Okay, there you go. That's fair. [02:12:17] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:12:19] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think for, like, someone who's gonna be using lightning on a regular basis, that would be, like, much more reasonable, but not like, overkill, you know? Yeah. [02:12:31] Speaker B: Now I'm gonna have to try this one out, too, man. I have so many things. It's so impossible to keep up with all this stuff. And see, this is like, another great example of how many things. I mean, luckily I have, like, my AI is going to listen through this and find all the links, but find all the things that I need to link. I mean, but yeah, this is like another great example of, like, how quickly I could lose all of these services after trying them out and why I still just need a. I wish I had a good idea for solving that toolbox problem is where that there was something cohesive in the no stirred experience that let me save a tool so that I wouldn't lose it. Or I could, you know, like you said, see somebody when they go live on Hive talk, and I'd be like, oh, yeah, hive talk. I did that with this other person and same thing with flair and all of those things that I really think there's something there in being. Being able to refresh or be connected to a service that is built on Noster through Noster. [02:13:44] Speaker A: You know, one thing that I didn't really dig into much by a little bit more curious now that, now that you mentioned that is NVK's unleashed. Sorry, I can't even say anything right now. Unleash chat. Right. His AI has a noster, like, noster search. [02:14:00] Speaker B: Yeah, I've used it a number of times. Yeah, yeah, I like it. [02:14:03] Speaker A: Yeah. I'm wondering, like, how effective it is. It's like, give me daily digest of most important things or like digest of the last x days, that kind of thing. If you're not looking at every day, you kind of want to know what's, like, been the hot topics or what things that you should pay attention to. And I don't know how good it is, but if that works, great, you know? [02:14:26] Speaker B: Yeah. There was, when I was using it, I was kind of using it for just generic search. And it might depend on which model I'm using. I haven't explored it well enough to give you a comparison. If I'm, like, choosing different models or if the noster search has one already selected, I can't even remember. But I do remember that I felt the results were more literal rather than kind of like, not like it's like I was just typing it into Google or ask Jeeves. And it was just giving me the keyword search, but very direct to what I was saying rather than what I was meaning. You know what I mean? Like, almost like there was like a lot of keyword attachment to it. So that's something I need to explore a little bit more. And I'm curious how if there's, like a model selection for that one specifically, I can't, I can't remember and how that works out. Maybe it was just that I was using old version of mixedral or something instead of llaman three. And so I was getting bad results. [02:15:33] Speaker A: So, like, if you had to pick an AI, which AI would you use for? Like, for open source, like high talk? Oh, yeah, for anything. [02:15:41] Speaker B: Yeah. My, for the proprietary, I have really kind of switched over to Claude now. I really like anthropic. And the Claude 3.5 sonnet, I believe is what it's called, is their newest model. It is really good. It is really good. But for open source, it would definitely be llama three. [02:16:06] Speaker A: Llama three? [02:16:07] Speaker B: Yeah, llama three is a good one. And I try to run the biggest one I can get. I think there's a 30 billion llama three, if I'm not mistaken. I think. I think that's one of the ones I have. I don't know, there are so many freaking models and everything has like six different quantized versions of it. [02:16:28] Speaker A: But like, what do you use it for? Do you, do you use it for like, searching for information or you use it for like, something else? [02:16:37] Speaker B: Searching a lot. Mostly working with transcripts and the show to pull information out of it. Like I have my little scribe drop, which uses whisper to transcribe any audio. So as soon as I'm done with this will be a great example is I'm going to hit stop recording, I'm going to download it. And then literally I'm just going to drag and drop it onto my little icon. And then it just runs whisper on it, makes a transcription file and then saves it right there with the same name as a text file right next to the audio file. And then I use that text file and I do that for so many things. Like I make text of everything. I listen to AI episode with. Damn it. What? That guy, the guy who made fabric, which is something I haven't explored enough because time, who has it and. But one of the things he talked about was, or an idea that he shared with something called the world, a world of text, is that get everything recorded because you can turn all of it into text. And if you can turn it all into text, you can do so many different things with it. And getting like breaking down an idea. Like my two SATs videos, I'm not sure if you've seen those. And I'm doing these little pair report shorts as well for this show. But have you seen the two sats thing? Like the give a shit matrix and why your dollar ain't shit? Those sorts of things. [02:18:10] Speaker A: I saw one of them, I think, a while back, I think it was on Twitter, but not the other ones. [02:18:14] Speaker B: Gotcha. I think I've done like four of them or something. But the way I actually have, like, ideated working through that process is I've literally done a show. I'm, I have a topic in my mind. I'm like, okay, I want to talk about this idea and I want to try to get this concept across to somebody. And so I do an episode and I literally bang out like an hour. Guys take, I just kind of brain dump everything that I'm thinking about this idea. Then I do my scribe drop and I transcribe it. And then I take, first I just take the big file of the full text and I look through it and I just start editing. I just start cut, cut, cut, and I just yank out everything that's like repetitive or a tangent that's not necessary. And I try to narrow it down. And then when I have half of it or a third of it, that's when I start handing it over to AI and I say, give me the serious bullet points, pull out the best analogy like that sort of thing. And I usually do like a bunch of different iterations and change how I ask it just to see what kind of results it gets until something kind of feels like it clicks. And then I just keep narrowing that down until I have like four minutes. And wow. And then I try to create the most succinct, clear argument for that idea as I possibly can. And I try to make everything into text because there's just so many things I can do with it. I have AI basically write 80% of my show descriptions. Now. That one's usually clawed because you need a really big model to actually get a good result for it. And I've put together a really solid prompt for getting it to tease out an interesting description rather than just like a, you talked about this and you talked about this and you talked about this and you should buy a cold card, you know? So I take some tweaking with the prompt to get it to understand what you want. But they've increasingly gotten to the point where I don't even edit them that much like I usually do. They're usually like a little bit repetitive. Sometimes it sounds very much like this, this revolutionary episode of this show. It's like really media esque. It's like, feels like an advertisement and it's like, yuck. Chad, DBT does that worse than Claude. Claude is better at the tone. But, and I'll, you almost always cut it down. You know, I get like six sentences and I'm like, this needs to be three. But I have been increasingly impressed and there have been a couple of times where kind of the framing or the question that Claude asks to try to entice or lead the audience to the description of what we talked about is actually something I hadnt thought of and is better than the approach that I was thinking specifically. And im like, oh, snap. And then I'll just kind of like, tweak it and make it sound like, put it in my language, you know? Um, right. And, but, yeah, I use, I use it for a lot of stuff. [02:21:43] Speaker A: Um, AI has come so far in the, like, last couple of years. It really, you were like, telling, it's crazy because I remember you telling me, like, two years ago, you're like, aren't you going to use this? You should really use this. I was like, oh, my God. And I started using it and it's like, accelerated things by, like two to five times, sometimes ten times in, like, multiple areas. It's insanity. And I'm just sitting here thinking, yeah, this is really going to shift a lot of things. Like, a lot of junior level jobs are going to go away, you know, like gone. [02:22:18] Speaker B: And it's going to happen really quick. [02:22:22] Speaker A: Yeah, people are going to have a hard time adjusting. That's the thing. [02:22:26] Speaker B: Yeah, it's gonna be a mess. [02:22:28] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:22:29] Speaker B: That's another reason why I think, like, I'm so hopeful. I'm so hopeful about all this stuff. I'm so hopeful about pair or about the pair stack in general and noster and AI. But I also just realized how insanely aggressive the changes are gonna be and especially the changes that are happening kind of on the centralized platform side and how much as every day goes by, how much we have to build more on noster or build more pair apps to get around the new problem that the platform has caused. And it's like, oh, great, now I have to build a calendar. Oh, great, now I have to, you know, like, it just, I'm, we're constantly getting more work because, because they keep throwing flack and ruining everything that was working for us in the old system. It drives me crazy. God is going to be a mess. [02:23:29] Speaker A: Awful. Yeah. Like, was it, was it you or somebody who's saying that I couldn't follow somebody on Twitter the other day? [02:23:36] Speaker B: That was me. That was me. I went to Twitter. I hadn't been on Twitter in like two weeks or something like that. I mean, I'd gone and answered a couple DM's, but I hadn't done anything and followed anybody. And I don't remember who I was following now. It was just like a post. Somebody was mentioning somebody, and. And I tried to follow him and said, you can't. You can't do that right now. You have been limited. Check our. You've violated and please read our terms and following conditions or some bullshit. I was just like, it's a. And it's such. Always a generic error. It's always some. They never explain it. The same thing happened when I got shadow banned on there. Um, and I was just like, I was here for. I was here for 15 minutes, and I've been banned. I've been limited for. So I don't even know what I did. Why the fuck did I come over here? [02:24:32] Speaker A: Yeah. Did you see naval's tweet? [02:24:35] Speaker B: Yes. [02:24:35] Speaker A: Crazy. Did you see Noster serves as the credible backup plan when government sees or Ban X? [02:24:41] Speaker B: Yes. [02:24:42] Speaker A: I'm guessing he's referring to the whole euro, euro parliament fight with Elon or something. [02:24:47] Speaker B: No, that's pretty legendary. That's pretty epic. [02:24:50] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So I'm just like, oh, my God. More incentive to go back, build faster and auster, because, you know, that's going to be. There's going to be a moment where people just get up and they can't take it anymore, and they're like, I'm coming over. [02:25:04] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:25:04] Speaker A: You know, a thousand. That's gonna happen. There's gotta be ready. Exactly. And they were like, oh, forget it. We're not gonna be on x. We're coming over an oster. [02:25:15] Speaker B: Your hive talk. Your hive talk fees are going to go through the roof. Oh, man. Oh, my God. It is 1245. How did that happen? [02:25:29] Speaker A: I don't know how that happened. [02:25:30] Speaker B: How did that happen? [02:25:33] Speaker A: You better save the recording before it disappears. [02:25:35] Speaker B: Yes, I should. Okay. All right, we will close this one out. Thank you. I had no idea it was 1245. I thought it was like midnight. I was like, okay, we're like an hour and a half. [02:25:45] Speaker A: Time flies when you're having fun. [02:25:48] Speaker B: All right, well, I guess we'll end this on. Very bullish about noster. Very bullish about pear, very bullish about all of this stuff. And there are still just an enormous amount of projects and enormous amount of work to do. But as we mentioned earlier, I think we're further along and we're closer to where that dream of these systems, I guess, is than we've ever been. There so many other tools that I've wanted to use and wanted to do the things that these things finally due. So it's happening. Yeah, it's happening. [02:26:29] Speaker A: And if anybody wants to help out, my door is always open. [02:26:33] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely check out hivetalk.org dot. Where else can they find or check out your projects. What was the other one? The plebnet? Pleb dev? No, plebnet dev. Is that right? [02:26:46] Speaker A: Yeah. You can also go to my GitHub. But the best way to find all the links are off of Primal.net, forward slash, bitcarrot with a k. And there's like an entire link tree of everything that I work on. Okay, so it's not just those two things. I'm probably going to get focused more on Hive talk, but there's also tons of other small projects. Like, if you want to get involved, please feel free to dm me anytime my door's open. There's lots of things. Anybody's welcome to come help out. If they want to help, help out. It's all open source anyway. [02:27:19] Speaker B: Hell yeah. Hell yeah. I'll get all those links in the show notes so you guys can check them out. Vicar. Thank you. It's been too long. It's awesome catching up. I'm gonna go get some damn sleep. [02:27:30] Speaker A: My pleasure. All right, take care. [02:27:33] Speaker B: Later. That was a lot of fun. I think it's a really important thing to break down these barriers because I really think monetization is one of the biggest challenges that we have, and understanding how to make open source sustainable. And also, just in general, one of the things that big carrot and I talked about a lot that I think is also kind of misdirected in a lot of cases, is just understanding that the best way to get involved or the best things to develop may literally just be the things that you need solve your problems. Because if it's something that you use, there's no reason to drop the project. You know, that's what I'm trying to do with paired drive. I want to build the tool that I want to use, and if it solves my problem better than everything else, I won't be able to let it go. You know what I mean? That's what I hope. Granted, I also hope to be able to make a profit off of it, but if I don't, it's an important enough problem to me. And I think the project could be good enough that there's that possibility. I'm at least trying to think about it in that context, because I want it to survive. I don't want it to become one of these projects where somebody builds something really neat and then it just dies on the vine. I feel like this isn't addressed often enough. And I really appreciate Bitcarrot coming on and talking to me about it, especially. She really, really values her privacy, so it means a lot to get some time to sit down and pick her brain about it. And also, I have so many links in the show, notes in the description right here. Hivetalk.org is the tool that we were talking about and there is a ton of cool stuff with noster apps, the app store, a bunch of different like little experimental things. Find them, go out, search them, try them out and let people know that you did and zap them if you find them. Because I think that discovery is also a big part of the problem as to why projects that might actually have an enormous amount of value never seem to get off the ground. So with that, don't forget to check those things out. The links will be right there. Ever so conveniently. Just, you just scroll, you just scroll up and then, and then there it is, right there in the description. Don't forget to like and subscribe so that you don't miss this show and the many, many things that we are covering and exploring and the tools that we will be building. I got a devs who can't code episode coming out really, really soon and I'm excited about that one. And uh, that should do it. That should do it. Shout out to Swann, bitcoin and coinkitever for sponsoring this show. Buy your bitcoin on Swan, withdraw it to your cold card. And don't forget the discount code, which is also. Oh my God, it's so, it's so conveniently right there in the description. Can you believe it? Alright, I'm out, guys. I'm guy son. And until next time, everybody take it easy.