No Solutions

33: ASMap, nix, and nix-nostr w/ Julien

Gigi — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 14:53:53 +0000

"There is no real address book for the internet."

Julien & Gigi take a walk.

Julien came to Sovereign Engineering through a strange path: Nix, Bitcoin Core, ASMap, Nostr, and a growing sense that packaging, routing, identity, and deployment are all part of the same sovereignty problem. The first part of the walk goes deep into ASMap: why Bitcoin Core cares which autonomous systems its peers live in, how eclipse attacks turn peer discovery into a security question, and why mapping the internet is harder than it looks.

The trade-off is familiar: IP addresses are useful but misleading. A single entity can control many non-contiguous ranges, routing data is messy, BGP was not designed as a cryptographic truth machine, and even better inputs like RPKI only cover part of the world. So Kartograf builds from several imperfect sources, and the asmap-data process turns map generation into a collaborative run with hashes, review, and a paper trail.

From there the conversation moves into Nostr and the social layer of infrastructure. Julien describes finding Nostr through the simple feeling that the primitives were right, using Amethyst and Zapstore, thinking about Git on Nostr, and watching FIPS make old assumptions about DNS, IP addresses, NAT, and transport layers feel suddenly optional.

The last thread is nix-nostr, or more precisely Julien's early nostrpkgs work: a Nix package set and deployment path for Nostr tools. The inspiration is nix-bitcoin, but the target is wider: relays, FIPS nodes, git servers, Blossom drives, Cashu mints, and other services that should be easy to compose, reproduce, and ship. If agents are going to run infrastructure for us, declarative systems start to look less like taste and more like leverage.

In this dialogue:

how Julien found a path into Bitcoin Core work through BTC++, Nix, and a conversation with Fabian Jahr
why ASMap exists as a Bitcoin Core feature, and what it tries to improve about peer bucketing
how eclipse attacks, Sybil attacks, AWS, Hetzner, and autonomous systems change the threat model for peer discovery
why IP address prefixes are only a heuristic for control
how regional registries, autonomous systems, BGP, RPKI, IRR, and RIPE RIS fit into the map-making problem
why no one can build a perfect ASMap, and why that does not make the project useless
how Kartograf aggregates imperfect data into a usable ASMap
why collaborative runs give the process a reproducible paper trail instead of relying on one person's machine
how ASMap files are now managed in the bitcoin-core/asmap-data repository
why Julien would still like more users to generate fresh maps for themselves
how Nostr first clicked as the right mix of clients, relays, keys, and trade-offs
why Zapstore makes Android distribution feel native to Nostr
why replacing GitHub means replacing hosting, search, issues, pull requests, CI, releases, and social discovery
how Git-on-Nostr, agents, and mobile-first workflows point away from old repository interfaces
why voice, text, and agent interfaces are starting to blur
how FIPS changes the address and transport conversation by routing through Nostr identities
why a FIPS route for Bitcoin Core peers would be worth testing
why Julien sees Nix as sovereign infrastructure, not just a package manager
how reproducible builds, dependency graphs, hashes, and declarative systems connect Nix back to Bitcoin instincts
why nix-bitcoin is the obvious reference point for packaging Nostr infrastructure
what nostrpkgs is trying to do for Nostr tools, binary caches, and deployment recipes
why Nix is unusually friendly to agents because the desired machine state is written down as text
how demo day, Napplets, FIPS, Archipelago, and Sovereign Engineering changed Julien's first-week view of what can be built
why the right way to reach younger users is to build tools they love before explaining why the architecture matters

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Recorded at 959,604.

32: Nostrology w/ WhisperHash

Gigi — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 23:28:45 +0000

"No Solutions, do the homework."

WhisperHash & Gigi take a walk.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

WhisperHash came to Sovereign Engineering by following breadcrumbs: Bitcoin first, then small solo miners, then Nostr, then No Solutions, then the strange realization that the protocol was not just another social network. After losing a valuable Instagram handle to platform control, the idea of cryptographic identity stopped being abstract. If you do not hold the keys, you do not own the thing.

The mining part of the walk starts with NerdMiner and ESP32 tinkering, moves into BitAxe and open-source ASICs, and lands on the dream of a quiet fanless home miner that can coexist with humans. The Nostr part starts with a data question: how many people are actually here, how many sats are moving, and which numbers should anyone trust?

That question became Nostrology, an ecosystem observatory for Nostr data. But making data visible is not neutral. DAU, MAU, relay lists, zaps, Nutzaps, and follow history all exist somewhere in the event graph, but packaging them into convenient datasets changes the trade-off. Some data wants to be useful. Some data probably wants to rot.

The deeper thread is about primitives. Blossom, FIPS, Zapstore, Nostr identities, Parquet files, and ContextVM all show up as ways to compose small pieces into larger systems without pretending there is one global application. If the abstractions are right, things stack. If the abstractions leak, you get a different kind of centralization with better branding.

In this dialogue:

how WhisperHash found Bitcoin, dismissed Nostr as "decentralized social," and then got pulled back in by ownership, identity, and curiosity
why losing a valuable Instagram handle made platform ownership feel concrete
how a data-science background turned into a search for something useful to build in Bitcoin
why NerdMiner, ESP32 boards, BitAxe, OSMU, and solo mining made mining tangible again
what changes when a miner is something you live with, tune, cool, and hear
why fanless home mining is partly a hardware problem and partly a co-living problem
how Nostr became interesting once WhisperHash started asking basic measurement questions
why active-user counts on Nostr are harder, messier, and more political than they look
how No Solutions served as a strange curriculum for catching up on Sovereign Engineering and Nostr culture
why demo day failure is acceptable, but opting out and showing slides are not
how Blossom, FIPS, Zapstore, and Nostr identities feel like primitives that are finally starting to compose
why Zapstore is a natural fit for Nostr and a glimpse of a different Android distribution model
how app stores, agents, GitHub releases, signatures, and social trust start to blur together
why durable formats matter if you want software and data to survive beyond the current wave
how Silicon Valley, London, Hong Kong, and SEC-08 all shaped WhisperHash's sense of software culture
what Nostrology is trying to observe across relays, lightning, Zapstore, and Nutzaps
why publishing small numbers can help builders, hurt momentum, or do both at once
why Parquet is a practical format for large Nostr datasets even if the events themselves remain the source
how Blossom, storage providers, and ContextVM point toward Nostr-native access without replicating terabytes everywhere
where data ethics, bit rot, public events, and easy aggregation start to collide
why the right next step is not a grand platform, but a tracer bullet that proves someone can consume the data end to end

Related dialogues:

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Projects & tech mentioned:

Recorded at 959,604.

31: Buzz, Mosaico, and Other Stuff w/ Pablo

Gigi — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 15:51:07 +0000

"You can always buy more tokens, not more time."

Pablo & Gigi take a walk.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

Pablo and Gigi start with the FIPS map: the strange pleasure of seeing a protocol become a place, with nodes scattered across the world, Archipelago getting faster through a FIPS connection, and Nostr VPN quietly pulling more people into the mesh. From there the conversation turns into a familiar No Solutions pattern: if you try to make one global thing, you usually fight the design. FIPS works better as locality. Nostr works better as locality. There is no global.

The second half becomes an agent-swarm walk through Buzz, NIP-29, Mosaico, proactive context, and the difference between coordination and awareness. Buzz packages a lot of things together: rooms, agents, Git-like collaboration, ACP harnesses, and Nostr identities. Mosaico tries to stay much smaller: a shared-awareness fabric where agents see enough of the other work happening around them to find relevance by themselves.

The trade-off underneath both projects is the same one that keeps showing up everywhere now: more instructions can make agents obedient but brittle, while too little structure leaves them blind. Somewhere between micromanagement and chaos is the place where local intelligence starts to coordinate.

In this dialogue:

why seeing the live FIPS map was more inspiring than expected
how nostr-vpn and FIPS turn network participation into something more tangible
why FIPS and Nostr both make more sense as local-first systems than as one giant global state machine
why freedom-tech projects do not need Silicon Valley scale metrics to matter
how Buzz packages a Nostr relay, NIP-29 rooms, agent harnesses, Git-style workflows, and human-agent collaboration into one workspace
what changes when agents have pubkeys, signed actions, and a cryptographic paper trail instead of pretending to be whichever human launched them
why NIP-29 is an acceptable trade-off for some team and agent channels even though it is not encrypted
how trust boundaries, hosted relays, local deployment, and organizational context shape the security model
why "more autonomous agents" really means agents that can make better local calls without burning human time
how Pablo thinks about persistent agent identity, throwaway workers, higher-level roles, and the "Pablo replica" pattern
why too many explicit instructions can remove agency and recreate a brittle workflow engine
how Mosaico gives agents awareness without becoming an orchestrator
why workspaces, one-line status, subchannels, mentions, and narrow context hints can be enough for agents to find each other
how proactive context tries to keep the actual user input as the source of truth instead of letting a memory layer hallucinate intent
why "no context" is better than bad context
how Napplets, Amethyst, Blossom, Outbox, and composable clients rhyme with the same move away from one cathedral-sized application

Related dialogues:

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Projects & tech mentioned:

Recorded at 959,531.

30: Napplets w/ Sandwich

Gigi — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 22:58:58 +0000

"You should be able to compose your clients."

Sandwich & Gigi take a walk.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

Sandwich and Gigi spend the first 45 minutes or so talking through napplets: composable, sandboxed Nostr apps that can run inside a host shell while the host mediates signing, storage, relay access, uploads, permissions, and user trust. What starts as a conversation about applets quickly becomes an operating-system conversation: if Nostr is flexible enough to carry many kinds of software, clients probably need to become composable runtimes instead of monolithic apps.

Along the way they get into browser sandboxes, iframes, postMessage, malicious applets, Blossom uploads, NIP-5D, nsites, specialized relays, agent workflows, slop scanning, and why the AI subsidy era will not last forever.

In this dialogue:

why a normal Nostr client can feel too restrictive for a protocol built around maximum flexibility
how napplets grew out of earlier experiments with Naps, Nap.run, nsites, Hyprland-inspired desktops, Tauri, Thorium, and iframe hardening
why the host runtime handles keys, signing, encryption, relays, resource loading, storage, uploads, and user prompts
why napplets should get high-level helper APIs plus low-level escape hatches instead of direct access to everything
how a napplet can upload through Blossom without knowing which Blossom server the user prefers
why the shell should see plaintext over the message bus, and how that helps defend users from malicious applets
how applet-to-app communication starts to look like Android intents, MIME types, archetypes, and operating-system resource APIs
why the browser is a practical deployment target even if the napplet protocol itself is not browser-bound
what Kehto, Paja, the napplet dev tooling, and the no-dependencies approach are trying to protect
how a workshop produced a dozen napplets, including live stream views, paste-to-upload flows, and even a rough multiplayer chess app
why nsites, nsyte, Blossom, Hashtree, and specialized relays all rhyme with the same broader Nostr publishing model
why relay specialization and relay discovery might matter more than one giant general-purpose relay model
how agent workflows are starting to rebuild older software-development structures: specs, milestones, issues, review teams, and CI
why slop scanning, naming discipline, and opponent processing matter once code becomes the context future agents learn from
why local model hardware is tempting, but only if you think about it like mining: power, refresh cycles, subsidy cliffs, and cost per watt

Related dialogues:

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Projects & tech mentioned:

Recorded at 959,164.

29: State of the Mint and Mind w/ Calle

Gigi — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 01:48:07 +0000

"You cannot look at something without touching it."

Calle & Gigi take a walk.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

Calle and Gigi start with Cashu mint internals and end in embodied cognition. Along the way they unpack sparse Merkle trees, exclusion proofs, unilateral exit, trusted execution environments, recovery paths, the move to BLS signatures, agentic coding workflows, specialist versus generalist models, world models, and why Bitcoin, Nostr, and local AI still feel like reasons for optimism.

In this dialogue:

how mint state can be compressed into a sparse Merkle tree and why exclusion proofs matter for ecash
how unilateral exit could reduce both the slow rug pull and the fast rug pull for Cashu mints
why trusted execution environments change the trust model, and why on-chain-first mint backing is the easiest place to start
how timelocks and third-party recovery paths might soften mint downtime
why Cashu is moving away from its current signature setup toward BLS signatures and what that unlocks
how Calle actually works with coding agents, from OpenRouter and OpenCode to fresh contexts and ruthless resets
why context windows are scarce, token maxing is wasteful, and one agent per project beats one giant assistant
why cognitive science still matters when talking about specialists, generalists, and what frontier labs are betting on
why world models differ from next-token predictors and why Vervaeke on AI and embodiment keeps coming back
why Thomas Nagel and The Blind Spot show up once the conversation turns to observation, physics, and experience
why high-agency builders should feel more hopeful than scared right now
why Bitcoin, Nostr, and improving local models still look like the right ingredients for a freer future

Related dialogues:

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Readings mentioned:

Recorded at 952,654.

28: Speak Human w/ MouxDesign

Gigi — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 17:28:15 +0000

"We just need to speak human."

MouxDesign & Gigi take a walk.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

Recorded in June 2026.

Mo and Gigi keep circling one question: how do you build products for people who speak plain language instead of protocol jargon? From there they get into wallet copy, fee panic, backup rituals, agentic design workflows, broken Nostr onboarding, fun-first software, and the old Bitcoin fight over purity versus adoption.

In this dialogue:

why design starts before the interface, at the app store screenshot, the first sentence, and the story a user tells a friend
Mo's current workflow: screenshots, Mobbin, a skill file, n8n, sleep, then a sober morning review
why wallet UX still stumbles on backup rituals, fee displays, and error messages that dump the cognitive load on the user
why "copy is design" and why everyday users need plain language instead of protocol vocabulary
how Nostr key loss turns people into read-only ghosts and leaves account recovery in an awkward place
why apps on Nostr still feel early, and why fun matters if you want people to come back
why Martti's work keeps coming up, from Iris to Nostr VPN, plus a callback to #21: Hashtree, Nostr VPN, and Iris w/ Martti Malmi
why Jeff G's work on White Noise still matters when the conversation turns to strange network conditions and real apps, plus a callback to #25: White Noise, MLS, and marmot w/ Jeff G
why Gigi still leans toward protocol purity when mass adoption asks for compromise
why walking and thinking out loud can still beat Slack threads, group chats, and solo brainstorming
how communities form when somebody plants a flag, names the thing, and keeps showing up, whether that is 21 World, EINUNDZWANZIG, or something else
why the simple test still matters: did you ship something that makes people happier?

Related dialogues:

People mentioned:

Jack Dorsey
Alex Gladstein
Martti Malmi (#21: Hashtree, Nostr VPN, and Iris w/ Martti Malmi)
Jeff G (#25: White Noise, MLS, and marmot w/ Jeff G)
Rabble
Josh
Christoph
Arno
Marcus

Projects & tech mentioned:

Recorded at 952,115.

27: Separation of Business from State w/ gsovereignty

Gigi — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 05:59:59 +0000

"It’s the people who receive Bitcoin as payment for something who decide what Bitcoin is."

gsovereignty & Gigi take a walk.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

Recorded in May 2026.

They explore what it would take to separate business from the state, why a Bitcoin economy still depends on fiat imports, and how Nostrocket might route human energy into Bitcoin-native production. Along the way they get into circular economies, merchant adoption, stablecoins, organizational design, application-specific agent harnesses, and the trade-offs behind merit-based equity, minimal governance, and forkable ventures.

In this dialogue:

why merchant adoption alone does not create a sovereign Bitcoin economy
why registered businesses remain exposed to state control
how Nostrocket reframes proof of work as human coordination around useful production
what minimal governance, merit issuance, and forkability might look like in a Bitcoin-native venture
why open source projects, DAOs, and Bitcoin itself keep surfacing the same authority trade-offs
why application-specific agent harnesses, formal specs, and peer review may be the right proving ground for these ideas

People mentioned:

Projects & tech mentioned:

Recorded at 951,874.

26: Zapstore w/ Franzap

Gigi — Sun, 31 May 2026 18:52:34 +0000

"The user joins the community, and the community does a lot of the heavy lifting."

Franzap & Gigi take a walk in Oslo.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

In this dialogue:

How Zapstore grew out of the first Sovereign Engineering cohort in Madeira, earlier experiments like ZapThreads, and Franzap's frustration with closed mobile app stores
Why Ninite, app stacks, and curated discovery mattered as much as the raw "permissionless app store" idea
What it means to run Zapstore as a real marketplace: breaking the chicken-and-egg problem by pre-populating supply, signing apps under the Zapstore key, and gradually moving developers toward self-publishing
Web-of-trust computation, trust providers, and why app distribution raises the stakes far beyond regular social posting
Franzap's "credible exit" framing: sometimes you dial down decentralization to improve UX, as long as users can still verify, leave, and choose another community
ZSP, the Zapstore publisher CLI, and how agents can already build and publish Android apps without the developer even owning an Android phone
Device keys, encrypted preferences, onboarding trade-offs, and why social features, comments, and zaps are a different problem from simply installing an app
Why app lists are a privacy leak, how update infrastructure can turn into a honeypot, and what it means to distribute software without building a profiling machine
The operational pain behind a living app catalog: pre-releases, key rotations, migrations, certificate mismatches, and endless edge cases
Google's tightening sideloading and KYC rules, Apple's developer-account maze, and why every new permissioned hurdle makes the permissionless route more compelling
Why Zapstore may matter most for people at the edges: controversial apps, developers outside the usual payment rails, and users who cannot or will not pass through the official gates
What's next: default communities, reviews, malware checks, privacy analysis, reproducibility, and smoother handoffs from indexed apps to self-published releases

Related dialogues:

People mentioned:

fiatjaf (built an earlier Nostr-native commenting system that influenced ZapThreads)
American HODL / Viper (example of agent-built, agent-published Android apps)
DHH and PewDiePie (part of the closing Linux detour)

Projects & tech mentioned:

Recorded at 951,851.

25: White Noise, MLS, and marmot w/ Jeff G

Gigi — Sat, 30 May 2026 20:03:46 +0000

"What we're actually building is an unstoppable messenger."

Jeff G & Gigi take a walk in Oslo.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

In this dialogue:

Jeff G explains how White Noise started as an attempt to build the most private messenger possible, then slowly mutated into something else: an unstoppable messenger that can survive ugly network conditions and hostile environments
Why MLS on Nostr is mostly an ordering problem: identity and delivery are the easy parts, group-state evolution is where everything breaks
Forked histories, missing commits, and the nightmare scenario where a group silently splits into incompatible realities without anybody noticing
The temptation of coordinators, sequencers, and Pablo's hilariously named Serial Killer Relay, plus the deeper question of when a relay stops being a relay and quietly becomes a server
Calle's Cashu headaches, NIP-60 and NIP-61 edge cases, and the "pocket with a hole" problem where balances seem to disappear, reappear, and generally behave like loose change under a couch
Jeff G's current bet for Marmot: a deterministic state machine, tunable convergence rules, and automatic re-init flows that make occasional desync tolerable
Why large-group privacy degrades fast, and why "perfect privacy" stops meaning much once a chat has hundreds or thousands of people in it
Why Pika felt more reliable than NIP-17 for one-to-one chats, and where simple tools still beat more ambitious systems
The White Noise v2 direction: replaceable key packages, smaller app components, and decoupling Nostr identity from the transport layer so relays become just one option among many
How FIPS pushed the design forward by making transport agility feel real: relays, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Direct, and whatever else can move packets when the normal internet is gone
BitChat as a useful proof that narrow, situational tools matter, especially when the internet is overloaded, absent, or simply the wrong abstraction for the problem
Other experiments blooming around the edges: Tubestr as a weirdly great MLS-backed permission system, plus gaming demos, new clients, and other signs that the building blocks are escaping the original chat use case
OpenClaw, Fabian's OpenClaw NIP-17 plugin, and why cryptographic identities make one-agent-per-project workflows feel native
Jeff G's current AI workflow: multiple agents, multiple boxes, very little hand-written code, and a strong belief that the implementation middle is collapsing while architecture, taste, and judgment matter more than ever
Why "build it right" is getting harder to teach and more important to teach, because now you can vibe a terrible idea into existence in an afternoon just as easily as a good one
Apprenticeship, elders, and why people like Johnathan Corgan matter: some engineering instincts only show up after you have lived through brittle systems, bad assumptions, and real adversaries
Notification servers that should know almost nothing, the coming KYC of the internet, and the broader goal of building systems with less data to seize and fewer chokepoints to attack
The argument over easy abstractions at the edge of Nostr, from "Coinbase for Nostr" worries to the closing detour on onchain zaps and second-order effects. For more on that last part, see Gigi's rebuttal, Careful, Icarus

Related dialogues:

People mentioned:

Justin Moon (Pika, small-group messaging trade-offs, and prior White Noise conversations)
Pablo (Serial Killer Relay, naming crimes, and forcing the hard coordination question)
Calle (Cashu, event-ordering pain, NIP-60, and NIP-61)
Johnathan Corgan (FIPS, transport-agnostic networking, and wise-old-builder energy)
Lee from Bitcoin Jungle (Tubestr, MLS as permission system)
Jack (BitChat, Bluetooth-first messaging)
Fabian (built the OpenClaw NIP-17 plugin)
hzrd149, author of noStrudel & Blossom

Projects & tech mentioned:

White Noise (Jeff G's unstoppable messenger project)
Marmot (MLS-based group messaging on Nostr)
MLS (Messaging Layer Security)
Nostr (permissionless identity and event substrate)
Pika (lean encrypted messaging)
BitChat (ephemeral Bluetooth mesh messaging)
FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System)
Tubestr (MLS-backed access control for family video sharing)
Cashu (ecash protocols with familiar ordering pain)
Serial Killer Relay (relay-enforced sequencing experiment)
OpenClaw (agentic tooling, memory, and project-scoped identities)
OpenClaw NIP-17 plugin (Nostr messaging integration for OpenClaw)
NIP-60 (wallet state and event-ordering pain in the Nostr ecosystem)

Recorded at 951,696.

24: Building FIPS w/ Johnathan Corgan

Gigi — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:24:22 +0000

"Don't be afraid of going your own way."

Johnathan Corgan & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Recorded during SEC-07.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

In this dialogue:

Why FIPS started with Arjen asking for networking that does not depend on registrars, central authorities, or yankable domain names
Johnathan disappearing for a month after Costa Rica, then returning with a protocol design that scratched the itch
FIPS as a self-organizing peer mesh: no privileged coordinator, only what each node can enforce locally
Transport-agnostic networking: Ethernet, Bluetooth, UDP overlays, Tor, serial links, and whatever else can move packets
A hilariously impractical but very useful test: tunneling FIPS over Nostr relays, with ping times measured in seconds, and it still worked
Why robustness under ugly conditions matters more than looking elegant on the happy path
150 nodes already on the FIPS testnet, and what has to change to get from 150 to 1,500 to 15,000
Friday Demo Day as the forcing function: build it, show it, let other people poke holes in it
The next FIPS release: fewer unnecessary pieces, stronger protocol negotiation, harder internals, more battle testing
"Try to break it" so friends can fix it before hostile actors do
Costa Rica and SEC-07 as a return to the early Cypherpunk and early Bitcoin energy: do not reform the old system, route around it
Why Nostr feels miraculous if you remember the world before it, even if normies still see it as half-baked
"Rough consensus and running code": academic rigor, design review, and why code still has to survive contact with reality
Johnathan's critique of "shower thought to ZapStore in six hours" culture: speed helps, but engineering still matters
Claude Code wrote most of FIPS only after two months of protocol iteration and roughly 30,000 words of design docs
Johnathan read every file and every line of code his agents produced, which is probably the only sane way to use them
Agentic coding as a force multiplier, not a substitute for thought: bad programmers get worse, good programmers get faster, non-programmers can finally build
Drive-by AI pull requests, effort-matching reviews, and why maintainers should not do all the thinking for you
Advice to younger builders: dissent, trust your own judgment, stop scrolling, and start doing stuff
"You can just do things"

Related dialogues:

People mentioned:

Arjen (brought the original itch from Costa Rica, noDNS instincts, freedom-tech networking)
Cobrador (TollGate, weird deployment constraints, "I didn't think this would exist for 10 more years")
SatsAndSports

Projects & tech mentioned:

FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System, a transport-agnostic encrypted mesh)
Nostr
TollGate (connectivity sold by the packet in hostile or weird environments)
Tor
ZapStore

Recorded at 945,297.

23: Shipping Violently w/ Justin Moon

Gigi — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:29:09 +0000

"I want to optimize for hackability and customization."

Justin Moon & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Recorded during SEC-07.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

In this dialogue:

Justin's new obsession: building Shadow, a hackable mobile operating system for people who want full control over the stack
Why Android is interesting again: not because it's clean, but because it is at least open enough to fight with
Android file chaos, and the immortal "file saved successfully" meme
One wallet, one relay connection, one shared set of primitives at the OS level, instead of every app reinventing the same mess
The "UNIX tools of Nostr" idea, revisited from #07: Zig Multiplatform w/ Justin
Booting a phone with less Android, then turning Android off piece by piece once the system is running
Early signs of life for Shadow: Kosti successfully compiled and ran it
From 13-second button clicks to instant GPU rendering, and why that counts as real progress
Ricing phones like Linux desktops, with the usual Typecraft explainer and awesome-ricing rabbit hole
Why Justin chose TypeScript apps on top of a Rust core: make the parts you should not vibe-code solid, and let users vibe-code the rest
Apps as source code, almost like DMs, instead of a permissioned app store pipeline
How maps, notebooks, and everything else dematerialized into the computer, via this video of stuff disappearing into software
The app store tax, DUNS numbers, LLC theater, and why Justin would rather build a parallel thing than beg Apple and Google for approval
Permissionless alternatives at every layer: phone OS, payments, relays, networking, app distribution, and compute
GrapheneOS as the security-maximalist trade-off, versus Shadow as the hackability-maximalist trade-off
"I want a 3D printed gun of phones" as Justin's deliberately unhinged way of describing maximum user freedom and minimum guardrails
"I want to optimize for shooting yourself in the foot" as the sharper version of the same trade-off: less safety theater, more user agency
Why many Linux phones failed: server people building for phone users, without a real vision for what a phone should become
The Nostr opportunity: a community weird enough to flash devices, test strange tools, and actually use them
"Where do your ideas come from?" and the obligatory Norm clip
Why the future may look like one agent per project, each with its own identity, memory, and full machine to operate
Personal clouds, bare-metal boxes, ephemeral VMs, and feeding your agents compute instead of feeding SaaS subscriptions
Why local-first and self-hosted agent setups matter if you want real sovereignty, durable memory, and no surprise bans
FIPS as a path toward permissionless networking, cryptographic addressing, and small resilient parallel internets
Nostr VPN, tailscale-like overlays, and why overlay networks beat waiting for the whole world to rewire itself
Messaging trade-offs: Marmot, SimpleX Chat, MLS coordination pain, chat relays, double ratchets, and what actually works for small groups
Pika, identity, signaling, and why Justin wants to stop theory-crafting and start shipping
Sovereign Engineering as a high-bandwidth filter for crazy ideas, where most things die, a few things bloom, and that is the point
Why Bitcoin, Nostr, and projects like FIPS feel Amish-compatible: the goal is not rejecting technology, it is rejecting dependence
Justin's closing promise: less talking, more shipping, and yes, shipping violently

Related dialogues:

People mentioned:

Steve Lee (early sounding board for Lightning-at-the-OS-level ideas)
Johnathan Corgan (creator of FIPS, pulled out of retirement by the right kind of weird)
Martti Malmi (Nostr VPN, offline-friendly networking, also on #21: Hashtree, Nostr VPN, and Iris)
UTXO the webmaster (building Wisp, see also Citadel Dispatch #200 with UTXO)
Kosti (successfully compiled and ran Shadow OS)
Pablo (app-as-chat-box idea, Pika, general agentic mischief)
Arjen (mesh instincts, noDNS lineage, helping make the weird legible, also on #17: Organic Tech)
Dimi (running VPS and simple cloud infrastructure alongside bitcoin mining facilities)
Cobrador (TollGate, rural and off-grid deployment instincts)
Shadrach (parallel systems, Amish country, and practical off-grid thinking, also on #20: Archipelago Meshtadels)
Bitstein (orange-pilling the Amish remains a live meme)
Erik Cason (mind-blowing people without realizing it)

Projects & tech mentioned:

Shadow (Justin's experimental mobile OS)
GrapheneOS (security-focused Android fork)
FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System)
Nostr VPN (overlay networking over Nostr)
Pika (encrypted messaging experiments for OpenClaw)
Marmot (MLS-based chat on Nostr)
SimpleX Chat (private messaging reference point mentioned in the conversation, see also Citadel Dispatch #196 with Evgeny Poberezkin)
OpenClaw (one agent per project, memory, and task execution)
ZapStore (permission-minimized Android app distribution)
Wisp (mobile Nostr client being built by UTXO, see also Citadel Dispatch #200 with UTXO)
Pokey (Nostr notification aggregation for power users)
Deno (runtime for TypeScript apps on the phone)
Nix (reproducible builds, environments, and OS packaging)
Magisk (rooting and system modification on Android)
BitChat (UX-first mesh messaging reference point)
TollGate (connectivity and payments at the edge)
HRF (trainings, activists, and the account-creation pain of the permissioned web)

Recorded at 944,875.

22: Sovereign Engineering w/ Yo

Gigi — Sat, 05 Apr 2026 16:00:00 +0000

“Permissionless, permissionless, permissionless.”

Yo & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Recorded during SEC-07.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

In this dialogue:

Gigi’s AI setup: voice prompts via vibeline to brainstorm, brainstorm to implementation plan, cron job that tackles one to-do every 20 minutes, builds overnight
One agent per project: dergigi.com/projects, each agent spins up with an nsec and gets to work
Nihao: Gigi’s skill for spinning up Nostr identities from the terminal
Claude Code “Mythos” codewords leaked – swearing at your models actually helps
Planner vs developer vs tester: three distinct personas, separation of powers for AI-assisted development
Separate sessions for questions vs implementation, like separation of powers
“Are you human?” vs “Are you useful?” – the only question that matters
PoW + WoT = useful. “Sats are just difficulty-adjusted PoW.”
Dialogical development – Vervaeke on why dialogue, not monologue, is how you actually think
Opponent processing – Vervaeke: competing forces sharpen each other
DiaLogos and the importance of walking dialogue
Opus maximalism ended yesterday: Anthropic cutting off OpenClaw, now broke, looking at cheaper models and local hardware
Routing models: OpenRouter and Routstr now route between thinking and simple models automatically
Yo’s Sovereign Engineering journey: showed up to SEC-04 with no programming experience, three weeks’ notice, on a climbing trip visa
SEC-04 was the vibe coding big bang: Paul showed the way, Calle tried to build a Cashu client live, Paul beat him to it
Got offered to join the team because “you are the one who would actually be crazy enough to move to Madeira”
“Safe return doubtful”: the Shackleton ad as a model for SovEng recruitment. No pay, no wages, but glory. Read Endurance by Alfred Lansing.
High barrier to entry, no option to leave, “in it for the right reasons” – the SovEng filter
“Make the internet a better place.” The actual mission statement.
Demoing on Demo Day is not optional
The Weekly Loop: Monday Movement, Tuesday Talks, Wednesday Workshops, Thursday build day, Friday Demo Day
Nuns Valley – where the walks happen
SEC-06 was about identity and signers. Agentic identity: spin up an nsec, now you can talk. The problem of identity in the age of OpenClaw.
Fabian’s NIP-17 plugin for OpenClaw: Nostr DMs as a transport layer for agents
Yo’s Zig NIP-17 plugin: building the same from scratch in Zig
MLS, Pika, and pika for OpenClaw: encrypted group messaging for agent fleets
The “social media intern” problem: you gave the keys to someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing
Social attestation vs cryptographic proof: Yo’s combined approach where clients only display migration events and users decide out-of-band
Gzuuus’s identity continuation proposal: simpler, no key management, just OTS timestamps and preimage commitments. Don’t migrate old notes, just continue
Pip’s Vertex demo: purely social web-of-trust metrics already handle identity migration in practice
“Identity is a social thing” – Vitor was right about that part
PortalSDK & the portal team joining SEC-06: hardware signers meeting agentic identity
Nostr, Blossom, nsites, Cashu – everything you need without permission
“Permissionless, permissionless, permissionless” – we need a new Steve Ballmer
SEC-06 was three weeks only. Learned that three weeks is not enough, just a warm-up. Minimum four, six is the sweet spot.
But SEC-06’s energy spilled into SEC-07: first week was one of the most energetic ever, hit the ground running
“The gray beards and the big brains actually came!”
From Tollgate to NoDNS to fuckips to FIPS: the naming history of the Free Internetworking Peering System
FIPS parties, not LAN parties: running on ESP32 radios, TCP, UDP, VPNs, Tor
Jonathan came out of retirement, built FIPS from November to February, and now everyone’s building on top of it
“DNS is a shitcoin” – direct quote from Jonathan
Martti migrating Nostr VPN onto FIPS, Thomas showed a collaborative drawing board running on FIPS + Tor
Quake III server running on FIPS
nsites becoming the default deployment target for demos
Blossom, nsites, NIP-60/61 – all came out of SovEng cohorts and are now in the wild
BTC++ coming to Madeira after the summer cohort, first public demo day since SEC-01
Tollgate on balloons: a gorilla Starlink, “we are all choked by the fiber optic cables”
Rob’s silent payments over Nostr getting picked up by Sparrow: prototype gist
L402 + nginx: Paygress – pay-per-request HTTP monetization
“The most awesome thing is everyone has this project in the back of their head they always wanted to build. Once you’re at Sovereign Engineering, there’s no excuse.”
Doom deployed on an nsite
“After not shitcoining for so long, now I’m addicted to tokens.”
“No Solutions, only trade-offs.”

People mentioned:

Pablo (TENEX, Highlighter, SEC co-founder)
Martti Malmi (Nostr VPN, migrating to FIPS)
Paul (showed the vibe coding way at SEC-04)
Calle (Cashu, live coding at SEC-04)
Justin (browser, separate sessions for questions)
Jonathan Corgan (FIPS creator, came out of retirement)
Gzuuus (identity continuation proposal)
Vitor Pamplona (social-only identity migration)
Pip (Vertex, web-of-trust identity demo)
Arjen (Tollgate, noDNS origins)
Pete (Pete’s kid doing games on Nostr)
Cobrador (TollGate on balloons)
Sir Sleepy (multiple npub power user)
Sandwich (nsites resurgence)
Thomas (collaborative drawing board on FIPS + Tor)
Rob (silent payments over Nostr, picked up by Sparrow)
hodlbod (key rotation proposal)
Ben from LNbits (hardware Nostr signer)
Fabian (NIP-17 plugin for OpenClaw)

Projects & tech mentioned:

FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System)
Sovereign Engineering (the program itself)
OpenClaw / ZeroClaw (agent harnesses, rapid prototyping vs security trade-off)
Codex (OpenAI’s coding agent)
Routstr (model routing with Cashu payments)
Tollgate (mesh network toll gates, now on balloons)
Vertex (web-of-trust tools, identity migration demo)
Nostr VPN (migrating to FIPS)
nsites (Nostr-based web hosting, default demo deployment)
Blossom (content-addressed blob storage)
Cashu (eCash on Bitcoin)
Nihao (skill for spinning up Nostr identities)
Pika (MLS-based encrypted messaging for OpenClaw)
Paygress (L402 nginx, pay-per-request HTTP monetization)
Fabian’s NIP-17 plugin for OpenClaw
NIP-17 plugin PR for nullclaw
NIP-17 (encrypted DMs)
NIP-29 (relay-based groups)
NIP-60 / NIP-61 (Cashu wallets on Nostr)
Amber (Android Nostr signer)
Portal (hardware Nostr signer cards)
Primal (signing abilities release)
Sparrow (silent payments integration from Rob’s work)
BPD5 (key management proposal)
Endurance (Shackleton’s expedition, Alfred Lansing)
BTC++ (coming to Madeira after summer cohort)

Recorded at 943,743.

21: Hashtree, Nostr VPN, and Iris w/ Martti Malmi

Fri, 04 Apr 2026 20:00:00 +0000

"We have this window of opportunity to steer the LLMs and the future of technology into a freedom-tech direction."

Martti Malmi & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Recorded during SEC-07.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

In this dialogue:

Martti's GitHub annoyance spawned Hashtree: a content-addressed file system on top of Blossom that adds directories, file chunking, and encryption. Everything encrypted by default using content hash key encryption (inspired by Freenet), so Blossom server operators have cryptographic deniability about what they host.
git remote hashtree: set up a hashtree remote for any Git repo, push to your Blossom server. Martti uses it for all Iris development, with GitHub only as a backup mirror. The web interface at git.iris.to supports NIP-34 issues and pull requests.
The WebRTC mesh layer complements Blossom: peers find each other via Nostr relays for the initial handshake, then communicate directly. Requests route through peers with hops-to-live (starts around 15, probabilistically varied for privacy). No domain names, TLS certs, or IP addresses needed.
Iris Browser loads apps from Hashtree URLs, bypassing web hosting entirely. Same idea as the old Freenet concept: content addressing means links don't break when servers go down.
Nostr VPN was born from Martti's refusal to use Tailscale's Google/GitHub login. Built in two days. WireGuard underneath, Nostr relays for peer discovery and IP negotiation. Every device gets an npub. Exit node functionality coming, with a future Cashu-incentivized exit node marketplace.
Double Ratchet messaging on Nostr: works well for two-party sessions, complexity grows with multi-device per user and group chats. Tested at SEC-07 via chat.iris.to with QR code invites. Martti prefers Double Ratchet over MLS for Nostr because MLS has stricter consensus requirements that conflict with decentralized relay sets.
"Coding is going to be done by AI agents pretty soon." Martti writes basically zero code by hand now, vibecoding over tradcoding. Claude Opus (late 2025) was the inflection point that enabled Hashtree. He expects fully capable local models within a year.
The window of opportunity: if freedom tech developers stop building now, Stripe, Cloudflare, and GitHub win by default because that's all the LLMs know. Getting freedom tech into the training data matters while models are still being shaped. Gwern wrote about this dynamic years ago in Bitcoin is Worse is Better, and his Scaling Hypothesis hints at where the AI side is headed.
AI agents will eat network effects: your agent queries ten platforms, posts to all of them. The bundled interface becomes irrelevant. Big tech's moat dissolves. "An ouroboros effect, the snake of big tech eating its own tail." As Jack Dorsey recently put it, the killer feature of Bitcoin and Nostr is that they're permissionless.
Pre-Nostr, Martti built Iris on Gun.js as a public-key-based social network. No traction after two or three years. When Jack Dorsey joined Nostr and it gained community, Martti ported Iris over quickly.
The Ethereum confession: social nouns NFTs, Ethereum login in early Iris. "Every saint has a past, every sinner a future." The Bitcoin community's cultural friction was an interesting experience, but Martti found the maximalists more admirable than other groups.
Early Bitcoin: first commit around early 2010, ran bitcoin.org, built the first exchange (bitcoinmarket.com), sold over 30,000 bitcoins through it. Life happened, moved on, came back through Nostr. "Bitcoin is singularity insurance" -- the one thing machines can't make more of.
Web of trust vs. proof of work for fighting spam: PoW won't stop spammers more than it stops normal users. Social graph is the only proper solution for most interactions. A combination of both has its place, but WoT does the heavy lifting.
Identity is prismatic: as moot argued in his SXSW talk, you're not the same person at church, the nightclub, or work. Nostr enables multiple npubs for different contexts. But spam is the trade-off with free identity creation, and social graph is the only proper solution. Web of trust filtering in Iris means no NSFW spam, at the cost of possibly missing new users.
Content addressing as the foundation: files live in multiple places, links don't break, peers cache data from their social graph. DNS-like caching but without the hierarchical trust. "No global" is a feature.
Local agents as a privacy layer: if your AI agent is your interface, platforms can't fingerprint your typing patterns. Even traffic analysis becomes harder with noise-based bandwidth usage.
FIPS is Martti's most exciting Nostr project outside his own work: public key-based network routing that replaces IP addresses. Low-level infrastructure that could underpin everything else.
SovEng experience: "awesome", intense from morning to evening, a teenage dream of hacking with people on a beautiful island. Came on short notice after Jonathan reached out following the Nostr VPN release.
Martti's ask: use Hashtree, default your repos to hashtree remotes, solve real problems. "Nostr VPN actually solved a real problem. Scratch your own itch."

Related dialogues:

People mentioned:

Justin Moon (browser discussion, GitHub stars feature request)
Jonathan Corgan (FIPS creator, invited Martti to Madeira)
Pablo (Nostr Signer / Nsec Bunker)
Kieran (social graph library usage in Snort/ZapStream)
Knut Svanholm (early Bitcoin history conversation with Martti)
Gwern (Dwarkesh interview)
utxo the webmaster (Wisp creator)
jb55 (Damus / Notedeck)
Christopher Poole / moot (4chan founder)
Vitor Pamplona (Amethyst)
isolabellart (Nostr-native artist, isolabellart.it.com)
Sir Sleepy (traffic analysis demo)
Jack Dorsey

Projects & tech mentioned:

Hashtree (content-addressed file system on top of Blossom: directories, file chunking, encryption by default)
git remote hashtree (decentralized Git using Hashtree storage, replacing GitHub remotes)
git.iris.to (web-based Git interface with NIP-34 support: issues, pull requests, likes)
Iris (Nostr social client with built-in social graph filtering)
Iris Browser (loads websites and apps from Hashtree URLs in a content-addressed way)
Nostr VPN (WireGuard tunnels using Nostr relays for peer discovery and signaling, no accounts needed)
Nostr Double Ratchet (Signal-style encrypted messaging on Nostr with group chat support, demo at chat.iris.to)
Blossom (content-addressed blob storage)
WebRTC mesh (peer-to-peer data transfer, works in browsers and servers, probabilistic routing with hops-to-live)
FIPS (Nostr public key-based network routing, by Jonathan Corgan)
Reticulum (low-bandwidth mesh networking stack)
LoRa (long-range, low-power radio for mesh networking)
MLS / White Noise (encrypted group messaging on Nostr)
Marmot Protocol (encrypted messaging protocol for Nostr)
Freenet (early content-addressed peer-to-peer network, inspiration for Hashtree's encryption)
Ladybird (independent browser implementation)
OpenClaw (open-source AI agent harness)
Cashu (eCash on Bitcoin, future incentivized exit node payments)
Maple (privacy-preserving AI inference)
Trusting Trust (the problem of trust in computing)
Routstr (Nostr-based AI routing)
PPQ (decentralized AI inference)
Amber (Nostr signer for Android)
Aegis (Nostr signer for iOS)
Plebeian Market (Nostr marketplace)
Shopstr (Nostr marketplace)
Amethyst (Nostr client for Android)
Wisp (Nostr micro-client)
Damus Notedeck (Nostr client with app shell, built on nostrdb)
ContextVM (execution environment for Nostr)
Vertex (web of trust tools)
Relatr (relay-side WoT filtering on ContextVM)
Eternal September (what happens when a subculture scales)
Zooko's Triangle (the naming trilemma: human-meaningful, secure, decentralized)
nsite (Nostr-based web hosting)
Commander Keen (DOS-era classic)
IPX/SPX (LAN party networking protocol)
Pirate Bay (decentralized resilience patterns that Nostr echoes, Peter Sunde: "I Have Given Up", keynote)

Recorded at 943,634.

20: Archipelago Meshtadels w/ Shadrach

Wed, 02 Apr 2026 16:00:00 +0000

"Bitcoin doesn't need more believers. Bitcoin needs more understanders."

Shadrach & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Recorded during SEC-07.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

Projects & tech mentioned:

Archipelago (sovereign home node and mesh network platform)
Archipelago Foundation
Archipelago promo video
AtoB (interoperable service protocol, co-authored with Jesus)
Angor (Bitcoin-native crowdfunding; Archipelago placed 2nd in the Angor pitch contest)
Podcasting 2.0 (open podcast ecosystem)
#DeMu (decentralized music on Nostr)
Fountain (podcasting app with value-for-value)
castr.me (Nostr-to-RSS podcast feed)
Indie Hub (independent film distribution on Archipelago)
Plebeian Market / Shopstr / Conduit (Nostr marketplaces)
Zap Store (Nostr-based app store)
White Noise / MLS / PICA (encrypted messaging on Nostr)
Fedimint (federated eCash)
Cashu (eCash on Bitcoin)
Framework (modular laptop hardware)
Meshtastic / Meshcore (mesh networking)
Start9 / Umbrel (existing node platforms)
SyncThing (decentralized file sync)
GrapheneOS (privacy-focused Android)
Rayhunter (EFF's cell-based surveillance detection)
Tollgate (mesh network toll gates)
Bitchat (mesh chat, bitchat.free)
Spilman channels (unidirectional payment channels for nano-sat streaming)
John Vervaeke (the universe is dialogical)

People mentioned:

Sir Spencer (venue npubs, live streaming)
Duh Laurien (#DeMu)
Oscar Merry (Fountain)
Fountain
Adam Curry (Podcasting 2.0 godfather)
Joe Martin (value-for-value musician)
Zaza (Archipelago builder)
Martti Malmi (Nostr VPN demo)
Gzuuus (encrypted state machines, AtoB protocol)
Cobrador (balloons)
Tollgate (mesh network toll gates)
Bugle

In this dialogue:

The episode opens discussing the podcasting 2.0 publishing workflow: AI models can now generate the XML spec, value splits and all, from a simple instruction
Spencer's idea: every venue gets an npub, the venue starts the live stream rather than the artist, creating a proper mapping from real-world locations to cryptographic identities
Shadrach's #DeMu journey: tried to orange pill Austin musicians, but they were too disillusioned to believe music could be monetized directly. Pay-to-play venues, Spotify killing label revenue. No traction at all.
Value for value as social signaling: free-to-play games make millions from cosmetic skins. We still don't do anything like that on Nostr. Adam Curry gets it -- his listeners aren't listeners, they're producers.
Shadrach's path: punk rock DIY ethos to sysadmin, industrial Bitcoin mining in Texas (2017-18), briefly a crypto hedge fund ("That sounds terrible. That's two words."), S9 miners sold for scrap metal
The Meshtadel: a network of citadels meshed together. Any node can be taken out and the system routes around the failure. The name means both literal mesh networks and communities connecting in a mesh topology.
"I'm here to orange pill the Amish": Shadrach moved to Lancaster, PA for food security, rented a farmer's market stall just to talk about Bitcoin. The Amish save in dollars, didn't raise prices through COVID, are partly a gift economy. The most insulting thing you can do is give exactly the same gift back.
Printed Cashu certificates: Shadrach's dream is physical eCash notes the Amish can trade at the market, then drive their horse and buggy to a Bitcoin bank drive-through to redeem them. Fedimint stability pools make this more feasible now.
"Bitcoin doesn't need more believers. Bitcoin needs more understanders."
Archipelago: a sovereign home node built on Framework laptop hardware. Plugs into your TV, runs a dashboard, companion app, modular and upgradeable. Scalable from a simple home node all the way to a community server.
Indie Hub partnership: watch independent films on day one. Directors upload movies, set their own pricing schedule, everything distributed via paid torrents. "Make torrents great again" is a recurring theme at every SovEng cohort.
The reversed marketplace: instead of broadcasting what you sell (which leaks privacy and enables enforcement), broadcast what you want to buy as an encrypted blob on Nostr. Agents match buyers and sellers. Your daughter looks for a lamp, gets three offers, never buys a rug she didn't need.
"Salespeople will hate it." -- "I know."
AtoB protocol: Shadrach co-authored it with Gzuuus to make ride-sharing apps (Ridester, Drivester, Trotter) interoperable. Two devs refactored their entire packages in a day using AI.
Gzuuus's encrypted state machines for commerce: requests, responses, agreements, work done. Wraps up ride sharing, package delivery, online sales into one framework.
Web of trust is Nostr's killer feature: people wrote about it in the seventies, PGP signing parties never caught on, but Nostr makes it natural because the social graph is the web of trust
Nostr VPN: every device gets an npub, devices find each other the same way people find each other on Nostr
Nostr clicked for Shadrach immediately after growing up with PGP. In his last job in international finance, they still used PGP for sharing sensitive information.
SovEng experience: "the most incredible experience I've ever had in my life" and also "some of the most exhausting mentally, physically, socially"
On retirement: moved to Lancaster thinking he'd chill out, immediately started driving to meetups and flying to check on a beef ranch in Oklahoma. "I give up."
The universe is dialogical: podcasts as time capsules, searching for truth by speaking it out loud. Karl Popper, David Deutsch, the longest chain wins.
"We are back again in the early days. And we just have to make it work."

Related dialogues:

Recorded at 943,357.

19: Romantically Shitting on Paywalls w/ Pablo

Tue, 01 Apr 2026 19:52:00 +0000

"I need to build something to test the thing."

Pablo & Gigi take a walk. Recorded December 2025.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

Projects & tech mentioned:

TENEX (multi-agent coordination on Nostr)
Agora (Nostr client for local communities, by Pablo & Leopoldo Lopez)
NDK Swift & NDK Kotlin (native ports of NDK)
nostrdb (embedded Nostr database)
NIP-60 (Cashu wallets on Nostr)
Podcasting 2.0 (open podcast ecosystem)
#DeMu (decentralized music on Nostr)
Olas (rebuilt with TENEX agents)
castr.me (Nostr-to-RSS podcast feed)
ants (Nostr search)
Boris (reading and highlighting)
Pyramid (fiatjaf's invite-tree relay)
Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans

In this dialogue:

Agents tried to fix world hunger: made a Google Doc and a React app, nothing worked, world hunger still not fixed
"We're behaving like LLM agents: never learn"
Everything Pablo builds is a way to test TENEX: "I need to build something to test the thing"
Agora: a Nostr client starting from the premise that you only care about your immediate surroundings
Invitation-based trust networks: cryptographic proof of who invited whom into a relay, similar to fiatjaf's Pyramid
Citizen journalism use case: pseudonymous publishing where a known figure vouches for a source without revealing identity
NIP-60 wallet baked into Agora: your key is no longer just identity, it's also money
Social key recovery via Shamir secret sharing: select people you can reach (not necessarily trust), hidden behind follow events
Identity migration for stolen keys vs. key loss recovery: two different problems, solvable with similar tools
"Fiatjaf had the right ideas around community-based backup and recovery"
Romantically shitting on paywalls: you cannot box content in, no matter how hard you try
What you can monetize is not the content itself but the relationship, the access, the live interaction
Twitch figured it out: everything is free, everywhere, always. People pay for something else entirely.
Substack's unfixable problem: it's a function of size, always Pareto, 20 people making a killing out of millions
"You're prostituting yourself for nothing because you're playing in a winner-takes-most market where there is already a winner"
The Matthew principle: to those who have everything, more will be given
All content types competing under the same lens: why every platform turns into TikTok
"Scaling Nostr is hard, so it will always fragment" -- and that's the feature
Nostr's promise: many small markets strictly superior to one big centrally planned instance
Digital fast food: platforms serve maximally engaging slop, like lucid dreams generated on the fly
The health food analogy: McDonald's still exists, but a whole industry grew around health-conscious people. Digital health is next.
Young people craving real connections over influencer slop, drawn to vinyl and gramophones for the same reason
Walking the Roman path: 3,000-year-old cart tracks still visible, "look at the UX of that thing"
"I switched my whole online identity to Nostr because this thing has legs and will still work 30 years from now"
Email marketers already know: own the list, everything else is a funnel
Relays as magazines: you don't quit magazines because one magazine is bad
Most people perceive Nostr as "the crypto app" -- we're not at the "email is a protocol" stage yet
Special-purpose clients: a posting-only client with an empty text field, ants for search, Boris for highlights
"I'm amazed at how well things work. Blossom every day without thinking about it."
"We've been on this professionalizing mode for the past six to nine months. Technically, we're in very good shape."

Related dialogues:

Recorded at 929,730.

18: Rewriting TENEX w/ Pablo

Tue, 01 Apr 2026 16:22:00 +0000

"You're yelling at someone who is lying to you."

Pablo & Gigi take a drive. Recorded December 2025.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

Projects & tech mentioned:

TENEX (multi-agent coordination on Nostr)
NDK (Nostr Development Kit)
NDK Swift & NDK Kotlin (native ports of NDK, vibe-coded)
nostrdb (embedded Nostr database)
Negentropy / NIP-77 (efficient event sync)
NIP-60 (Cashu wallets on Nostr)
Vercel AI SDK (multi-provider LLM abstraction)
Notedeck & Nostur
Olas (rebuilt with TENEX agents)

In this dialogue:

Bitcoiners in cars getting coffee: recording from the sun visor, Seinfeld style
TENEX rewritten "about a hundred times," now in TypeScript on Vercel AI SDK
The pain of supporting every LLM provider: Gemini returns encrypted reasoning tokens, every API has different subtleties
Removing structure to improve performance: deleting 80% of agent code makes agents work better
Agents defining their own workflow phases instead of having phases imposed on them
Composable workflows: the CEO agent doesn't need to know what the engineering director's workflow looks like
The parallel to human organizations: you can't hold all the information in your own mind
John Vervaeke and the idea that dialogue is how you solve the really hard problems
Participatory knowing: you don't understand Bitcoin until you actually use it
Agent wallets removed because "there was nothing for them to actually buy" -- a commune with no walls
$700/month running Opus for everything, replacing "like fucking 30 people"
Context windows are a non-issue when the hierarchy is deep enough: each atomic agent finishes fast
Henry Ford's insight applied to agents: each worker does an incredibly stupid task that takes five minutes
Agents are bad at self-correction, so they delegate competing implementations in disposable work trees, then compare notes
Confidence scores: the delegating agent monitors every 5-10 messages, checks if the sub-agent is going off the rails
"Once they are convinced that humans have seven legs, they will make up scientific papers to prove it to you"
NDK ported to Swift and Kotlin without looking at a single line of code: outbox compilation, negentropy syncing, offline publishing, NIP-60 support
Cross-platform frameworks are dead: "if you're just programming in English, React Native makes no sense"
The developer experience right now is "as bad as it's been, at least in our lifetimes"
"You're basically yelling at someone that is lying to you, that will take all the shortcuts"
Vibe coding flow state: sculpting code like marble, micro-adjustments every five seconds
"What if all I know of development is actually problematic? What if I just let go?"
Non-developers building real apps on Nostr thanks to vibe coding
The naming podcast: "Claude Opus, make up a name. Just put a U."
"I'm on vacation. The agents have been running the entire time. They've done amazing work."

Related dialogues:

Recorded at 929,726.

#17: Organic Tech w/ Arjen

Gigi — Mon, 31 Mar 2026 15:55:00 +0000

"Nostr is organic tech. Data will flow more naturally instead of going out and fetch, going out and coming back, going out and coming back."

Arjen & Gigi take a long walk. Recorded October 2025.

Projects & tech mentioned:

Blossom (self-healing links)
noDNS
Tollgate (router-to-router payments)
Wally (Cashu wallet connect)
innpub (positional audio, innpub.dergigi.com)
Citrine (Android local relay)
Amber (Android signer)
nostr-relay-tray
Applesauce (code snippets)
Wingman (remote dev assistant)
CDK (Cashu dev kit)
NIP-03 (OpenTimestamps)
ants (Nostr search)
OTRTA / Routstr (pay for LLM compute with Cashu)
Notedeck & nostrdb
gitworkshop.dev (Nostr-native git collaboration)
Boris (reading and highlighting)
Spotstr & Earthly.city (maps on Nostr)

In this dialogue:

Convincing hzrd to make Blossom more of a protocol
Self-healing links: content addressing like Nostr but for blobs
Blossom pacemaker: a tool that monitors your notes and blobs, rebroadcasts and re-uploads as needed
Local first: local relays, local blossom, local cash, local signers
"I still get shit for the audio quality"
Verschlimmbesserung: the German word for making something worse by trying to improve it
"We should reclaim localhost"
Every Nostr app should work in airplane mode
Citrine roadmap: auto-rebroadcast local events once you're online again
Tollgate v0.2.0: router-to-router payments, released at btc++
"Some people just hate e-cash" -- "Those people can't be helped"
Cashu and CDK: making it easy for devs to use e-cash without managing wallets
Wally: Cashu wallet connect, like NWC but for e-cash, runs local
Install Wally and you're good to go with everything Nostr
Special-purpose components that do one thing well
Zero configuration: if there's a local relay, use it; if there's a local signer, use it
innpub jukebox: zap the jukebox 200 sats to play a song with positional audio
Moving away from subscription hell: attach e-cash to your requests
noDNS deep dive: traditional DNS records published on Nostr instead of Cloudflare
Self-signed TLS certs verified through Nostr identity
The human approach: ask around your group of friends vs the authoritarian approach: one central authority
Pi-hole would be perfectly fine running noDNS
NIP-03 / OpenTimestamps: indisputable proof of profile existence over time
"We went back to basically having mainframes and thin clients"
The vision: everything is a relay, offline or online shouldn't matter
Damus relay wiped multiple times, nobody cared -- that's resilience
Data should accumulate in the right places by your pattern of usage
The Nosterverse: every client is a different lens, there is no global
"Nostr is organic tech"
Vibe coding setup: Roo Code, Claude, code snippets from hzrd and Pablo
"Claude 4.5 is very agreeable -- I could rile it up and start a revolution together"
The dream flow: just speak voice memos into your phone, code updates 20 minutes later
Screenless coding: the underutilized interface
ants search: took npub.world plus nostr.band, crossbred them
"Software evolution is crossbreeding, not merging back into the original repo"
Maps on Nostr: the social part is what makes Google Maps useful, Nostr can provide it
Sovereign Engineering cohort 5: "we really know what we're doing now"
"The future is already here, we just have a lot of building to do"
"If you want to build something, the easiest way right now is Nostr"
We're gonna make torrents great again

Recorded at 918,425.

#16: One Click and Run w/ SEC-05

Gigi — Mon, 31 Mar 2026 13:37:00 +0000

"You have a roaming army of servers."

The crew continues on the pirate boat. Recorded October 2025.

Projects & tech mentioned:

Paygress (VM provisioning over Nostr)
Error 402 (HTTP payment required)
nostr-relay-tray
Pyramid Relay
castr.me
PM Tiles (offline maps)

In this dialogue:

The dream: press record, press save, everything auto-publishes to Nostr
Zero post-processing, zero editing
Error 402: endpoints that can be paid over the protocol level
nginx 402 module: it takes lightning, it takes e-cash
Paygress: buy a VPS just knowing an npub
Get an IP address, a Docker container, SSH access, and a VPN
"You have a roaming army of servers"
Self-healing infrastructure: move your servers around like Blossom relays
"Who will run the mints?" -- hide them behind Paygress, move them around
We're still underutilizing payment required
Paid relays, but also: attach e-cash when you want reliability
Free but unreliable vs paid and reliable
First Bitcoin client was an executable on Windows because Satoshi wanted it easy to start
nostr-relay-tray: one of the easiest ways to run a local relay
"We need to dockerize everything and make it really easy to run"
Sane defaults, one click and run
uTorrent: you just clicked it and it worked
Enough weird people on Nostr willing to run mints, blossom servers, relays
"It's still too hard to set up"
The bar is higher now: demos improved thanks to vibe coding
Vibe coding is more art than science
"The more you do it, the more you learn"
Maps and location data on Nostr
Almost every data has some kind of location
PM Tiles: offline maps you can download and use
Local relay as the universal cache: don't build your own, just use a relay
48 hours left in the cohort, more demos to come

Recorded at 918,200.

#15: Make Localhost Great Again w/ SEC-05

Gigi — Mon, 31 Mar 2026 11:52:00 +0000

"127.0.0.1 -- that's the only IP address we're gonna need."

The crew passes the mic around on a pirate boat. Recorded October 2025.

Projects & tech mentioned:

Beacon
noDNS
innpub
MOQ (Media Over QUIC)
ContextVM
Chrysalis (self-replicating Cashu mint)
Paygress (VM provisioning over Nostr)
BloVM (blossom server monitor)
HyperNote

In this dialogue:

"How was Sovereign Engineering for you?" -- "Inspiring. Stressful."
Most exciting demo? Beacon has been trending
noDNS mentioned by basically everyone
Mapping projects: putting OpenStreetMap tiles on Nostr/Blossom
MOQ working live in innpub, eight people hanging out yesterday
Pete's demo day race condition: a literal race to claim e-cash
"There is no global, but there's also kind of a global"
Chrysalis: a self-replicating Cashu mint that pays for itself and moves
"Who's gonna run the mints?" -- "Nobody. They're gonna run themselves."
Andreas Antonopoulos talked about self-sustaining Bitcoin services eight years ago
noDNS explained like I'm five and drunk: "Websites and you don't have to ask daddy"
Instead of buying domain names, you claim yours via your npub
Conflicts resolved with web of trust and proof of work
Self-signed TLS certs trusted through Nostr identity
HTTPS websites with zero certificate authority involved
"That's also what triggered Justin into writing his own browser"
"Most browsers like to babysit their users quite a bit"
Dolphin sounds
ContextVM: MCP over Nostr as a transport layer
"MCP is not just for LLMs, it's a protocol for anything"
"Make localhost great again" -- 127.0.0.1 is the only IP we need
Interrupting chicken (the joke didn't land)
"Europe who?" (Australian humor)
Ending on a hug, as always

Recorded at 918,196.

#14: Building Browsers w/ Justin

Gigi — Mon, 31 Mar 2026 08:10:00 +0000

"I want Nostr to be the perfect thing just for me."

Justin & Gigi drive to the airport. Recorded October 2025.

Projects & tech mentioned:

Blitz (Rust HTML/CSS renderer)
QuickJS (lightweight JavaScript engine)
Dioxus (Rust UI framework)
Iroh (peer-to-peer networking)
MOQ (Media Over QUIC)
White Noise (MLS-based private messaging on Nostr)
Ladybird (independent browser by Andreas Kling)
VRChat

In this dialogue:

Driving to the airport
"Don't say anything that could be used against you"
The low quality of this podcast focuses the mind of the listener
You need proper headphones
Walking focuses you, and stops you after 90 minutes
Justin's adoption curve: hater first, builder later
"I'm the ascending left curve"
Bitcoin hating, Lightning hating, Nostr hating
Audio calling with npubs: Nostr as signaling & identity layer
First version: Iroh for peer-to-peer, Nostr for lookup
Calling Paul Miller's npub from a CLI
innpub: a 2D pixel art level with rooms you can hang out in
The killer feature of positional audio
VRChat Bitcoin meetups during COVID, thanks to Udi
Twitter Spaces, Clubhouse, and why one big room encourages attention seeking
Positional audio lets you hide in a corner
WebRTC is Google Meet shipped as a "web standard"
Safari and Firefox just shipped Google's code
MOQ (Media Over QUIC) as the simple alternative
CDN-style mesh relays for binary data
What if MOQ relays were Nostr-style, and you'd pay to relay?
E2E encrypted group audio in the browser using White Noise / MLS compiled to WASM
"Let's make Nostr fast"
The web is dying: Chrome blocked ad blockers and Justin just stopped visiting websites
No SQLite in the browser, no TypeScript in the browser
Why do I need a domain name? Why certificate authorities?
Building a browser in 3 days
Blitz + QuickJS = a browser that runs a React counter app
"This would have taken me months"
Andreas Kling: built a browser as part of a 12-step program
Ladybird proving that you can build a browser from scratch
Vibe coding: 20-30 projects in six weeks
Nerd-sniped into implementing Mosaic in Zig, then dropping it in two days
What Nostr got right: "good enough"
Binary transport for Nostr relays
Getting rid of DNS: a theme every week at SovEng (noDNS)
Claiming names via Nostr events, no .com needed
Web of trust for conflict resolution
Self-signed TLS certs trusted through Nostr identity
Social handles already replaced URLs in practice
"Build for the nerds, not the mass market"
"I want Nostr to be the perfect thing just for me"
Building blocks crystallizing: mesh networking, noDNS, better relays, search
Relays in the browser
The synergistic ecosystem
"You're gonna miss your flight"

Recorded at 917,999.

#13: The Linux of Social Media w/ hzrd149

Gigi — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 21:14:39 +0000

"The identity should be outside of the computer."

hzrd149 & Gigi contemplate local relays.

Libraries & apps mentioned:

In this dialogue:

Automation & robot armies
If this than that (IFTTT)
Permissioned vs permissionless automation
Self-hosting and the local-first people
"The identity should be outside of the computer"
Private vs public, local vs remote
DRM and other nonsense
Private means encrypted with my key
Nostr apps should be local-first, thanks to local relays
All nostr apps should work in flight mode, somewhat
Outbox model, writing, and reading
Search & NIP-50
Ants & thisishowyougetants.com
6 degrees of separation & FoaF
WoT
Friend list curation & "circles"
"Don't touch my follow list"
Bootstrapping a network by saying GM a lot
Recommendations usually suck
Nostr can shine
Vertex & figuring out who John is
NIP-05 & realness
Root-level domains & realness (e.g. @dergigi.com)
Zaps & realness
Nutzaps & realness
Local-first & local algorithms
nostrdb VS local relays
Local data & relevancy
noDNS, locality, local preference, and "good enough"
Mostly online vs mostly offline
"Servers aren't bad. Getting rugpulled is bad."
"Information is easy to spread but hard to stifle"
Local hubs, community hubs, global hubs
"nostr was built for broadcasting"
Building stuff badly & nerd-sniping people
Gigi's ants video
Walking in circles
DM metadata leakage
"It shouldn't matter where the data comes from"
"Deleting data is a lie"
The impossibility of proving deletion
Bitrot & data loss
Fighting bitrot with duplication & rebroadcasting
Bouquet, blossom, and self-healing links
Local-first vs local-also
Left-side of the bellcurve CDN
The one whale relay
Topic-based relays
fiatjaf's pyramid relay
Torrents, early video content, game installers
fiatjaf’s take on IPFS
Why not rebuild Cloudflare?
Censorship-resistance = 100% uptime = no rugpulls
Getting offered weed on the streets
Every app works in flight mode
No developer needs an API key
"The data accumulates where it needs to accumulate"
Browser history as an example of local data & user interests
WoT is kinda local
wot.dergigi.com
Blossom is different; blobs are heavy
American HODL's vlogs
"Step 1 is to build a shitty version"
HAVEN
Nostr Repair Kit (Nostr pacemaker)
Shout-out to Pablo's highlighter (fucking hell)
Open-source & scratching your own itch
Applesauce v4
"It's almost done" - famous last words!
Outbox in applesauce, and how it makes everything more difficult
Waves, routstr, Pete, Justin, Paul, Gzuuus
Hzrd's SEC-05 highlights
noDNS
Wally & Cashu Wallet Connect
Crazy idea => Consensus => Implementation
Difference between idea & implementation
"Domains are shitcoins"
We've been living in a post-domain world for a while
Independent browsers & project Ladybird
Nostr-native browser - who will build it?
"A different way of doing internet infrastructure"
Is a world without APIs possible?
Mainframe => Personal Computer => Smartphones
Online sometimes => Offline sometimes
Local LLMs
Nostr allows you to build less
Thin layers & special-purpose apps
NIP-60 and finding spare change under the couch
Does negentropy fix NIP-60 synchronization?
Nostr is synergistic
The beauty of nostr-relay-tray
Nostr works. We've come far!
It's all coming together
Boris
"You can always go back and build it right"
Just begin again.
Just begin again.
Just begin again.

Recorded at 917,886.

#12: The Windy Lawnmower Stuff w/ Pete

Gigi — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 19:49:52 +0000

“Nostr is what the internet could’ve been.”

Pete & Gigi try to talk to lawn mowers.

Websites & other stuff mentioned:

In this dialogue:

ECash fixes 402
Eucalyptus in Madeira
Pete’s time at Fedi
Lighting equals Swift, ecash equals payments
Chaum’s paper
ECash for Localism, farmer’s markets
Square terminals accepting bitcoin
BTCMap and merchants in Madeira
It’s normal to pay in bitcoin
Bitcoin for babysitters
1st Lightning Conference in Berlin (2019)
Australian Bush Bashes
BTCPay terminals (with NFC and stuff)
Costa Rica: Bitcoin Jungle
Super easy, super fast, green checkmarks everywhere
Cash-only shops are incredibly based
Credit card fees
ECash to replace APIs
Subscription Hell aka the Netflix Problem
Open Router, Routstr, ppq
LAWNMOWERS
Dumb models vs smart models
Economics of LLMs
ECash fixes subscription hell & sign-up barriers
NIP-60/61 as pocket money
Corner stores and consumers taking the risk
Stripe excludes half the world
Aaron Swartz & RSS
Pieter Levels & his dad’s credit card
“You can just charge for things”
DHH vs Apple & his Rails keynote
KYC payments = begging for permission
Sovereign Engineering: build something new every week
Lemonade stands in cyberspace
Relocalization
Moving from AWS to bare metal
MORE LAWNMOWERS
Rent your excess compute & earn ecash
“The internet is fucked” - do regular people actually agree with that?
“nostr is what the internet could’ve been”
Old ladies cleaning up phones
UK’s child protection law: scan passport to watch YouTube videos
EVEN MORE LAWNMOWERS
Ideological use vs necessity
Sideloading apps & Zapstore
“Asking for permission is not a good pattern”
Payment deplatforming in the US: gaming, porn, gambling
“Fix the money, fix the internet”
We’ve come far!
“If bitcoin wouldn’t work I would literally starve”
The fact that nostr works is amazing
The norm in nostr is that there’s no global view
Nostr came incredibly far, considering it was only 3 short years and had very little funding
Funding: how could it be solved?
“Funding implies the wrong thing”
Benefit of AI: cost goes down, cheaper and easier to build useful stuff
Cost of experimentation needs to be low
If people are getting paid you don’t need to fund them so much
BitChat is a great example of a useful tool built on nostr
“Zaps are bitcoin?” —Normies
Compute is a scarce resource, as is storage
Paid relays, paid blossom servers, paid video hosting
Nostr is the largest bitcoin circular economy in the world
Still too small for businesses to move in though, probably
“There’s lots of ways to earn money and also be on nostr”
SoapMiner, Leathermint, Isolabellart, etc.
WIND
MORE WIND
Arbitrage opportunities in businesses & the value trap
Agents doing paperwork vs agents doing coding work
Using agents to create open-source mashups
Allen Farrington’s take: Vibe Capital Accumulating
LLMs and atom bombs
Vervaeke, Meaning, Salience Landscape
Abundance, Radical Life Extension, and Meaning
The Meaning Crisis & the Suicide Epidemic
The train meme
Pessimism vs Optimism
LLMs allow us to get away from the computer
Strong local communities, shake your farmer’s hand
Bitcoin is local & global at the same time
SovEng: good vibes, good ideas, good people
Shipping things, vibing, and getting the idea right
“I’m not as married to nostr as a I am to bitcoin”
No Solutions spawning The Good Stuff

Related dialogues:

Recorded at 914,219.

#11: 10x Less Productive w/ Pablo

Gigi — Fri, 21 Jun 2025 19:42:06 +0000

What does it mean to build something "in the spirit of Bitcoin"?

Pablo & Gigi want to encourage you to apply for SEC-05.

Books & websites mentioned:

Stackoverflow is dead by Gergely Orosz
Sovereign Engineering by Gigi and Pablo

In this dialogue:

Gigi's vibeline & vibeline-ui
Pubcastr aka castr.me
Pablo's thread about TENEX
Alex Gleason's MKStack
What is the essence of nostr?
What are nostr's values, and can LLMs extract them?
Agents and workflows living on nostr
Agent specialization and Roo code
“What would Jesus do?”
What does it mean to build something "in the spirit of Bitcoin"?
Hierarchy of agents
Generalists vs specialists
Top-down constraints and bottom-up emergence
Wise architects VS efficient diff-merging LLMs
Where does the human fit in?
Distributed cognition: agents and humans
Hiring agents via nostr
"If the human has to intervene, something is catastrophically wrong."
Confidence levels of an agent's action
Giving agents money using mcp-money
Offering bounties to solve problems
Stackoverflow is dead
Stock photography is dead
Real vs fake photography test
Vibe-coding vs regular coding, and how it relates to the switch from analog to digital photography
What is economical, and what isn't?
Dialogue and Dia-Logos with LLMs
Specialization in a multi-agent world
Adding a small vibe-coding widget to every app (allowing users to customize stuff)
Multiplicity VS canonical design
Money is singular, language is not
Jack's original sin: the twitter Bootstrap theme
The "other stuff" initiative
What's missing from TENEX? Why isn't it fully working just yet?
Rebuilding everything every 3 weeks
Voice vs text, sentiment analysis vs tone
The power and informational density of silence
In-person vs online communication
Letting agents learn lessons
"Where do you get your ideas from?"
Anonymity vs pseudonyms vs government ID
Agents need identity, money, and reputation
"I own this dude." —Pablo
Owning agents
Vibe-coding lessons: don't look at the code, and in the best case don't even look at the IDE
Human-agent communication: typing vs speaking
Why some meetings couldn't have been an email
Clearly defined problems vs undefined problem spaces
Why TENEX will be in perpetual alpha
What is Sovereign Engineering?
Why should you sign up for it?
How come so many awesome things came out of it? Blossom, nsite, Zapstore, etc.
Who should come, and who shouldn't?
How did it start?
What's the idea?
"Fix the money, fix the internet."
"Ship stuff that lasts."
Keep it pure. No monetization.
Focus on exploration and ideation
What's the structure?
6 weeks, 21 participants
Same structure every week
Monday Mornings: Orientation
Tuesday Talks
Wednesday Workshops
Thursday: No Agenda
Friday: Demo Day
Weekend: Hikes
SEC-05: YOLO Mode
Empower users
Optimize for self-sovereignty
Bitcoin works
Lightning works (Gigi's post)
Build the future you want to see
Madeira: you can pay in bitcoin almost everywhere
tl;dr: Listen to every single No Solutions conversation to get an idea of what Sovereign Engineering is

Related dialogues:

Recorded at 901,069.

#10: Walking with Jesus w/ gzuuus

Gigi — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 18:05:02 +0000

"It's gonna be permissionless or hell."

Gigi and gzuuus are vibing towards dystopia.

Books & articles mentioned:

AI 2027
DVMs were a mistake
Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Takedown by Laila michelwait
The Ultimate Resource by Julian L. Simon
Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling
Momo by Michael Ende

In this dialogue:

Pablo's Roo Setup
Tech Hype Cycles
AI 2027
Prompt injection and other attacks
Goose and DVMCP
Cursor vs Roo Code
Staying in control thanks to Amber and signing delegation
Is YOLO mode here to stay?
What agents to trust?
What MCP tools to trust?
What code snippets to trust?
Everyone will run into the issues of trust and micropayments
Nostr solves Web of Trust & micropayments natively
Minimalistic & open usually wins
DVMCP exists thanks to Totem
Relays as Tamagochis
Agents aren't nostr experts, at least not right now
Fix a mistake once & it's fixed forever
Giving long-term memory to LLMs
RAG Databases signed by domain experts
Human-agent hybrids & Chess
Nostr beating heart
Pluggable context & experts
"You never need an API key for anything"
Sats and social signaling
Difficulty-adjusted PoW as a rare-limiting mechanism
Certificate authorities and centralization
No solutions to policing speech!
OAuth and how it centralized
Login with nostr
Closed vs open-source models
Tiny models vs large models
The minions protocol (Stanford paper)
Generalist models vs specialized models
Local compute & encrypted queries
Blinded compute
"In the eyes of the state, agents aren't people"
Agents need identity and money; nostr provides both
"It's gonna be permissionless or hell"
We already have marketplaces for MCP stuff, code snippets, and other things
Most great stuff came from marketplaces (browsers, games, etc)
Zapstore shows that this is already working
At scale, central control never works. There's plenty scams and viruses in the app stores.
Using nostr to archive your user-generated content
HAVEN, blossom, novia
The switcharoo from advertisements to training data
What is Truth?
What is Real?
"We're vibing into dystopia"
Who should be the arbiter of Truth?
First Amendment & why the Logos is sacred
Silicon Valley AI bros arrogantly dismiss wisdom and philosophy
Suicide rates & the meaning crisis
Are LLMs symbiotic or parasitic?
The Amish got it right
Are we gonna make it?
Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Takedown by Laila michelwait
Harry Potter dementors & Momo's time thieves
Facebook & Google as non-human (superhuman) agents
Zapping as a conscious action
Privacy and the internet
Plausible deniability thanks to generative models
Google glasses, glassholes, and Meta's Ray Ben's
People crave realness
Bitcoin is the realest money we ever had
Nostr allows for real and honest expression
How do we find out what's real?
Constraints, policing, and chilling effects
Jesus' plans for DVMCP
Hzrd's article on how DVMs are broken (DVMs were a mistake)
Don't believe the hype
DVMs pre-date MCP tools
Data Vending Machines were supposed to be stupid: put coin in, get stuff out.
Self-healing vibe-coding
IP addresses as scarce assets
Atomic swaps and the ASS protocol
More marketplaces, less silos
The intensity of #SovEng and the last 6 weeks
If you can vibe-code everything, why build anything?
Time, the ultimate resource
What are the LLMs allowed to think?
Natural language interfaces are inherently dialogical
Sovereign Engineering is dialogical too

Recorded at 892,372.

#09: No Strudelutions w/ hzrd149

Gigi — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 16:04:11 +0000

"It isn’t obvious that the world had to work this way. But somehow the universe smiles on encryption."

hzrd149 & Gigi take a stroll along the shore of cryptographic identities.

This dialogue explores how cryptographic signatures fundamentally shift power dynamics in social networks, moving control from servers to key holders. We discuss the concept of "setting data free" through cryptographic verification, the evolving role of relays in the ecosystem, and the challenges of building trust in decentralized systems. We examine the tension between convenience and decentralization, particularly around features like private data and data synchronization. What are the philosophical foundations of building truly decentralized social networks? And how can small architectural decisions have profound implications for user autonomy and data sovereignty?

Movies mentioned:

In this dialogue:

Hzrd's past conversations: Bowls With Buds 316 & 361
Running into a water hose
Little difference, big effect
Signing data moves the power to the key holders
Self-signing data sets the data free
Relay specialization
Victor's Amethyst relay guide
Encryption and decryption is expensive - is it worth it?
The magic of nostr is that stuff follows you around
What should be shown? What should be hidden?
Don't lie to users. Never show outdated data.
Nostr is raw and immediate
How quickly you get used to things working
Legacy web always tries to sell you something
Lying, lag, frustration
How NoStrudel grew
NoStrudel notifications
Data visualization and dashboards
Building in public and discussing in public
Should we remove DMs?
Nostr as a substrate for lookups
Using nostr to exchange Signal or SimpleX credentials
How private is a group chat?
Is a 500-people group chat ever private?
Pragmatism vs the engineering mindset
The beauty and simplicity of nostr
Anti-patterns in nostr
Community servers and private relays
Will vibe coding fix (some of the) things?
Small specialized components VS frameworks
Technology vs chairs (and cars, and tractors, and books)
The problem of being greedy
Competitive silos VS synergistic cooperation
Making things easy vs barriers of entry
Value4value for music and other artists
Adding code vs removing code
Pablo's Roo setup and DVMCP
Platform permission slips vs cryptographic identities
Micropayments vs Subscription Hell
PayPerQ
Setting our user-generated data free
The GNU/Linux approach and how it beat Microsoft
Agents learning automatically thanks to snippets published on nostr
Taxi drivers, GPS, and outsourcing understanding
Wizards VS vibe coders
Age differences, Siri, and Dragon Naturally Speaking
LLMs as a human interface to call tools
Natural language vs math and computer language
Natural language has to be fuzzy, because the world is fuzzy
Language and concepts as compression
Hzrd watching The Matrix (1999) for the first time
Soylent Green, 2001, Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind, Johnny Mnemonic
Are there coincidences?
Why are LLMs rising at the same time that cryptography identities are rising?
"The universe smiles at encryption"
The universe does not smile upon closed silos
The cost of applying force from the outside
Perfect copies, locality, and the concept of "the original"
Perfect memory would be a curse, not a blessing
Organic forgetting VS centralized forgetting
Forgetting and dying needs to be effortless
(it wasn't for IPFS, and they also launched a shitcoin)
Bitcoin makes is cheap to figure out what to dismiss
Would you like to have a 2nd brain?
Trust and running LLMs locally
No need for API keys
Adjacent communities: local-first, makers and hackers, etc.
Removing the character limit was a mistake
Browsing mode vs reading mode
The genius of tweets and threads
Vibe-coding and rust-multiplatform
Global solutions vs local solutions
The long-term survivability of local-first
All servers will eventually go away. Your private key won't.
It's normal to pay your breakfast with sats now
Nostr is also a normal thing now, at least for us
Hzrd's bakery
"Send Gigi a DM that says GM" - and it just works
The user is still in control, thanks to Amber
We are lacking in nostr signing solutions
Alby's permission system as a step in the right direction
We have to get better at explaining that stuff
What we do, why we care, why we think it's important

Recorded at 891,754.

#08: Navigating the Vibe w/ Pablo

Gigi — Wed, 04 Apr 2025 10:21:21 +0000

"With the shift towards this multi-agent collaboration and orchestration world, you need a neutral substrate that has money, identity, cryptography, and web-of-trust baked in, to make everything work."

Pablo & Gigi are getting high on glue nostr.

Books and articles mentioned:

Saving beauty by Byung-Chul Han
LLMs as a tool for thought by Amelia Wattenberger

In this dialogue:

vibeline & vibeline-ui
LLMs as tools, and how to use them
Vervaeke: AI thresholds & the path we must take
Hallucinations and grounding in reality
GPL, LLMs, and open-source licensing
Pablo's multi-agent Roo setup
Are we going to make programmers obsolete?
"When it works it's amazing"
Hiring & training agents
Agents creating RAG databases of NIPs
Different models and their context windows
Generalists vs specialists
"Write drunk, edit sober"
DVMCP.fun
Recklessness and destruction of vibe-coding
Sharing secrets with agents & LLMs
The "no API key" advantage of nostr
What data to trust? And how does nostr help?
Identity, web of trust, and signing data
How to fight AI slop
Marketplaces of code snippets
Restricting agents with expert knowledge
Trusted sources without a central repository
Zapstore as the prime example
"How do you fight off re-inventing GitHub?"
Using large context windows to help with refactoring
Code snippets for Olas, NDK, NIP-60, and more
Using MCP as the base
Using nostr as the underlying substrate
Nostr as the glue & the discovery layer
Why is this important?
Why is this exciting?
"With the shift towards this multi-agent collaboration and orchestration world, you need a neutral substrate that has money/identity/cryptography and web-of-trust baked in, to make everything work."
How to single-shot nostr applications
"Go and create this app"
The agent has money, because of NIP-60/61
PayPerQ
Anthropic and the genius of mcp-tools
Agents zapping & giving SkyNet more money
Are we going to run the mints?
Are agents going to run the mints?
How can we best explain this to our bubble?
Let alone to people outside of our bubble?
Building pipelines of multiple agents
LLM chains & piped Unix tools
OpenAI vs Anthropic
Genius models without tools vs midwit models with tools
Re-thinking software development
LLMs allow you to tackle bigger problems
Increased speed is a paradigm shift
Generalists vs specialists, left brain vs right brain
Nostr as the home for specialists
fiatjaf publishing snippets (reluctantly)
fiatjaf's blossom implementation
Thinking with LLMs
The tension of specialization VS generalization
How the publishing world changed
Stupid faces on YouTube thumbnails
Gaming the algorithm
Will AI slop destroy the attention economy?
Recency bias & hiding publication dates
Undoing platform conditioning as a success metric
Craving realness in a fake attention world
The theater of the attention economy
What TikTok got "right"
Porn, FoodPorn, EarthPorn, etc.
Porn vs Beauty
Smoothness and awe
"Beauty is an angel that could kill you in an instant (but decides not to)."
The success of Joe Rogan & long-form conversations
Smoothness fatigue & how our feeds numb us
Nostr & touching grass
How movement changes conversations
LangChain & DVMs
Central models vs marketplaces
Going from assembly to high-level to conceptual
Natural language VS programming languages
Pablo's code snippets
Writing documentation for LLMs
Shared concepts, shared language, and forks
Vibe-forking open-source software
Spotting vibe-coded interfaces
Visualizing nostr data in a 3D world
Tweets, blog posts, and podcasts
Vibe-producing blog posts from conversations
Tweets are excellent for discovery
Adding context to tweets (long-form posts, podcasts, etc)
Removing the character limit was a mistake
"Everyone's attention span is rekt"
"There is no meaning without friction"
"Nothing worth having ever comes easy"
Being okay with doing the hard thing
Growth hacks & engagement bait
TikTok, theater, and showing faces and emotions
The 1% rule: 99% of internet users are Lurkers
"We are socially malnourished"
Web-of-trust and zaps bring realness
The semantic web does NOT fix this LLMs might
"You can not model the world perfectly"
Hallucination as a requirement for creativity

Recorded at 890,848.

#07: Zig Multiplatform w/ Justin

Gigi — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 23:07:55 +0000

“The age of the idea guys has begun.”

Justin & Gigi vibe about Zig.

Articles mentioned:

LLMs as a tool for thought by Amelia Wattenberger
Micropayments and Mental Transaction Costs by Nick Szabo
How our interfaces have lost their senses by Amelia Wattenberger

Talks mentioned:

The Art of Bitcoin Rhetoric by Bitstein

Books mentioned:

Human Action by Ludwig von Mises
Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal

In this dialogue:

nak
Files
SyncThing (and how it BitTorrent Sync became Resilio Sync)
Convention over configuration
Changes & speciation
File systems as sources of truth
Vibe-coding shower thoughts
Inspiration and The Muse
Justin's LLM setup
Tony's setup (o1-pro as the architect)
Being okay with paying for LLMs
Anthropomorphising LLMs
Dialog, rubber-duck debugging, and the process of thinking
Being nice and mean to LLMs
Battlebots & Gladiators
Hedging your bets by being nice to Skynet
Pascal's Wager for AI
Thinking models vs non-thinking faster models
Sandwich-style LLM prompting, again (waterfall stuff, HLDD / LLDD)
Cursor rules & Paul's Prompt Buddy
Giving lots of context vs giving specific context
The benefit of LLMs figuring out obscure bugs in minutes (instead of days)
The phase change of fast iteration and vibe coding
Idea level vs coding level
High-level vs low-level languages
Gigi's "vibeline"
Peterson's Logos vs Vervaeke's Dia-Logos
Entering into a conversation with technology
Introducing MCPs into your workflow
How does Claude think?
How does it create a rhyme?
How does thinking work?
And how does it relate to dialogue?
Gzuuus' DVMCP & using nostr as an AI substrate
Language Server Protocols (LSPs)
VAAS: Vibe-coding as a service
Open models vs proprietary models
What Cursor got right
What ChatGPT got right
What Google got right
Tight integration of tools & remaining in a flow state
LLMs as conversational partners
The cost of context switching
Conversational flow & how to stay in it
Prompts VS diary entries
Solving technical vs philosophical models
Buying GPUs & training your own models
Training LLMs to understand Zig
Preventing entryism by writing no documentation
Thin layers & alignment layers
Working in public & thinking in public
Building a therapist / diary / notes / idea / task system
"The age of the idea guys has begun."
Daemons and spirits
Monological VS dialogical thinking
Yes-men and disagreeable LLMs
Energy cost vs human cost
Paying by the meter vs paying a subscription
The equivalence of storage and compute
Thinking needs memory, and memory is about the future
Nostr+ecash as the perfect AI+human substrate
Real cost, real consequence, and Human Action
The cost of words & speaking
Costly signals and free markets
From shitcoin tokens to LLM tokens to ecash tokens
Being too close to the metal & not seeing the forest for the trees
Power users vs engineers
Participatory knowing and actually using the tools
Nostr as the germination ground for ecash
What is Sovereign Engineering?
LLVM and the other side of the bell-curve
How nostr gives you users, discovery, mircopayments, a backend, and many other things for free
Echo chambers & virality
Authenticity & Realness
Growing on the edges, catering to the fringe
You don't own your iPhone
GrapheneOS
WebRTC and other monolithic "open" standards
Optimizing for the wrong thing
Building a nostr phone & Gigi's dream flow
Using nostr to sync dotfile setups and other things
"There are no solutions, only trade-offs"
Cross-platform development
Native vs non-native implementations
Vitor's point on what we mean by native
Does your custom UI framework work for blind people?
Ladybird browser & how to build a browser from scratch
TempleOS
Form follows function & 90's interfaces
Lamentations on the state of modern browsers
Complexity & the downfall of the Legacy Web
Nostr as the "new internet"
Talks by Ladybird developer Andreas Kling
Will's attempt of building it from scratch with Notedeck & nostr-db
Justin's attempt with rust-multiplatform
"If it doesn't have a rust implementation, you shouldn't use it."
Native in terms of speed vs native in terms of UI/UX
Engineer the logic, vibe-code the UI
From Excalidraw to app in minutes
What can you one-shot?
What do you need to care about?
Pablo's NDK snippets
7GUIs and GUI benchmarks for LLMs
"Now we're purpose-building tools to make it easier for LLMs"
"Certain tools really make your problems go away."
Macros and meta-programming
Zig's comptime
UNIX tools and pipes
Simple tools & composability
Nostr tools for iOS & sharing developer signing keys
Building 10 apps as one guy
Simplicity in a community context
Most people are on phones
Most people don't install PWAs
Zapstore & building our own distribution channels
Web-of-trust and pushing builds quickly
Improving homebrew by 10x
(Micro)payments for package managers
Guix and bitcoin-core
Nix vs Guix
Reproducible builds & web-of-trust
Keet vs "calling an npub"
Getting into someone's notifications
Removing the character limit was a mistake

Recorded at 889,812.

#06: The Winds of AI w/ Pablo

Gigi — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 17:23:24 +0000

“The human spirit should remain in charge.”

Pablo & Gigi talk about the wind.

In this dialogue:

Wind
More Wind
Information Calories, and how to measure them
Digital Wellbeing
Rescue Time
Teleology of Technology
Platforms get users Hooked (book)
Feeds are slot machines
Movie Walls
Tweetdeck and Notedeck
IRC vs the modern feed
37Signals: “Hey , let’s just charge users!”
“You wouldn’t zap a car crash”
Catering to our highest self VS catering to our lowest self
Devolution of YouTube 5-star ratings to thumb up/down to views
Long videos vs shorts
The internet had to monetize itself somehow (with attention )
“Don’t be evil” and why Google had to remove it
Questr : 2D exploration of nostr
ONOSENDAI by Arkinox
Freedom tech & Freedom from Tech
DAUs of jumper cables
Gossip and it’s choices
“The secret to life is to send it”
Flying water & flying bus stops
RSS readers , Mailbrew , and daily digests
Nostr is high signal and less addictive
Calling nostr posts “ tweets ” and recordings being “on tape”
Pivoting from nostr dialogues to a podcast about wind
The unnecessary complexity of NIP-96
Blossom (and wind)
Undoing URLs, APIs, and REST
ISBNs and cryptographic identifiers
SaaS and the DAU metric
Highlighter
Not caring where stuff is hosted
When is an edited thing a new thing?
Edits, the edit wars, and the case against edits
NIP-60 and inconsistent balances
Scroll to text fragment and best effort matching
Proximity hashes & locality-sensitive hashing
Helping your Uncle Jack of a horse
Helping your uncle jack of a horse
Can we fix it with WoT?
Vertex & vibe-coding a proper search for nostr
Linking to hashtags & search queries
Advanced search and why it’s great
Search scopes & web of trust
The UNIX tools of nostr
Pablo’s NDK snippets
Meredith on the privacy nightmare of Agentic AI
Blog-post-driven development ( Lightning Prisms , Highlighter )
Sandwich-style LLM prompting, Waterfall for LLMs ( HLDD / LLDD )
“Speed itself is a feature”
MCP & DVMCP
Monorepos and git submodules
Olas & NDK
Pablo’s RemindMe bot
“Breaking changes kinda suck”
Stories, shorts, TikTok, and OnlyFans
LLM-generated sticker styles
LLMs and creativity (and Gigi’s old email )
“AI-generated art has no soul”
Nostr, zaps, and realness
Does the source matter?
Poker client in bitcoin v0.0.1
Quotes from Hitler and how additional context changes meaning
Greek finance minister on crypto and bitcoin ( Technofeudalism , book)
Is more context always good?
Vervaeke’s AI argument
What is meaningful?
How do you extract meaning from information?
How do you extract meaning from experience?
“What the hell is water”
Creativity, imagination, hallucination, and losing touch with reality
“Bitcoin is singularity insurance”
Will vibe coding make developers obsolete?
Knowing what to build vs knowing how to build
10min block time & the physical limits of consensus
Satoshi’s reasons articulated in his announcement post
Why do anything? Why stack sats? Why have kids?
All you need now is motivation
Upcoming agents will actually do the thing
Proliferation of writers: quantity VS quality
Crisis of sameness & the problem of distribution
Patronage, belle epoche, and bitcoin art
Niches, and how the internet fractioned society
Joe’s songs
Hyper-personalized stories
Shared stories & myths (Jonathan Pageau)
Hyper-personalized apps VS shared apps
Agency, free expression, and free speech
Edgy content & twitch meta , aka skating the line of demonetization and deplatforming
Using attention as a proxy currency
Farming eyeballs and brain cycles
Engagement as a success metric & engagement bait
“You wouldn’t zap a car crash”
Attention economy is parasitic on humanity
The importance of speech & money
What should be done by a machine?
What should be done by a human?
“The human spirit should remain in charge”
Our relationship with fiat money
Active vs passive, agency vs serfdom

Recorded at 888,635.

#05: Prompt & Pray w/ Paul

Gigi — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 15:23:09 +0000

"What should the next iteration of the internet look like?"

In this dialogue:

Paul and his awesome nostr t-shirt
Are we all just nostalgic?
Where did the optimism of computing and the information superhighway go?
We went from interop to pay-to-unlock.
Do we have to live in the digital gulags forever?
Homecooked meals and homecooked apps
Paper straws and the downfall of Western Civilization
"You need to be okay with people getting rekt"
If the car would be introduced today, it would be illegal
Bravery and personal responsibility
"nostr will only be what diehards will build it to be"
Bad teleology is built into the current (non-nostr) app landscape
"You can get a lot of the upside without holding your own keys”
“...but you can't get ALL of the upside!"
Expressiveness and free speech online
Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Assembly, and Financial Freedom in Cyberspace
Self-publishing vs platform publishing
Information calories. Can we count them?
Don't make me think!
Is not being forced to think part of the problem?
Mutiny & bitcoin UX that's too easy
Games and costly mistakes
The early days: software distribution via print magazines
Prompting allows you to define your own teleology
Vibe coding and Cursor
"The hard part is to figure out what you want."
"What should the next iteration of the internet look like?"
GenZ doesn't know shit about files and folders
Why files are great
Gigi's SyncThing & Standard Notes setup
File-based apps like Smart AudioBook Player
Reading apps like Pocket, Instapaper, and Readwise Reader
Saving all the things & linking stuff together
Clips of podcasts and videos, e.g. Fountain
A Commonplace Book to cyberspace
Creating a "Family Bible" app
If you want to maximize profits in the attention economy, you have to get users addicted
(Zaps potentially fix this, as you wouldn’t zap a car crash)
Let computers do computer work, let humans be humans
"The end is not being on the computer"
Solo private / group private / public
Liberal vs Conservative sentiment in social environments
Whom to care about?
Web of trust & our understanding of it
Forgiveness, Trust, and Repeat Games
Tit-for-tat and forgiving tit-for-tat
Three strikes and you're out!
"Choose your gulag" is the alternative to nostr
7-generation thinking
2140
The Sovereign Individual is embedded in a social structure, always
I, Pencil
Jungle vs Civilization
Fiat = because I said so (“Fiat Lux” - Let there be light)
Do we need leaders in bitcoin?
Peterson Fallacy / God vs Bitcoin
Jesus early followers were the Followers of The Way
Zaps are not payments
Zaps are not "tips"
Bitstein & Pierre: The Reorg
Vervaeke: “Where do you go for wisdom?”
Rough consensus and Pieter Wuille
"There is no such thing as a leaderless system"
Wisdom in cyberspace
Can we build wise tools?
Prompting the Bible, ChristGPT, and Bible Slop
Gell-Mann amnesia effect
Vervaekes AI argument: The Coming Thresholds and The Path We Must Take
Where do new ideas come from?
Sandwich prompting style (HLDD / LLDD)
The Tale of John Henry
Silicon Sages
Conscience and The Muse
Hypermedia and HyperNote
Glassholes, Google Glasses, and wearable technology
Prompting & Praying for An Internet Worth Having

Books mentioned:

The Bible
I, Pencil by Leonard E. Read
Don't make me think! by Steve Krug
The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg

Recorded at 887,644.

#04: Ecash Fixes 402 w/ Calle

Gigi — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 21:21:21 +0000

“I don’t believe in Utopia anymore. I’m too old for that.”

Calle & Gigi philosophize about nuts.

Books and articles mentioned:
- Who Owns the Future?
- The Cathedral And The Bazaar
- Cryptography is Not Enough
- Bitcoin is Time

In this dialogue:
- Where is the Utopia that the internet promised?
- “Neither nostalgia nor utopia”
- Net Neutrality is a moral stance
- Where did the internet go wrong?
- Tech as a tool; is tech always neutral?
- Technology that increases agency VS tech that enslaves
- Competition vs Symbiosis
- “Who will run the mints?”
- “Anyone” can use it vs “everyone” can use it
- Centralizing vs. Monopolizing
- Bitcoin has an ethos baked in (You Shall Not Steal)
- Passive internet vs active internet
- Agency in cyberspace, and how to maximize it
- Blinded custodian vs regular custodian
- User data is a liability
- Obscura / Mullvad / Silent.Link as obvious early adopters
- Run your own ISP - Tollgate
- Cryptography is Not Enough
- Bitcoin is Time
- Time requires heat
- Zero-knowledge service providers
- Electronic Cash vs Digital Cash (CBDCs)
- Credit requires KYC, KYC implies outside enforcement
- Writings on Micropayments by Nick Szabo
- eCash fixes 402, obviously
- Who Owns the Future?
- “You are the product” vs “Subscription Hell”
- “Hello old friend!!!”
- Cathedral vs Bazaar
- Why paywalls suck
- Information wants to be free
- "Markets become absurd as supply approaches infinity."
- eCash + AI = match made in heaven
- #LearnToCode vs #LearnToPrompt
- Scarcity in cyberspace: compute, storage, networking
- Zero-Knowledge compute & zero-knowledge proofs
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof
- https://github.com/AbdelStark/cashu-zk-engine
- Cairo: https://github.com/starkware-libs/cairo
- MCP https://github.com/AbdelStark/bitcoin-mcp
- MCP DVM: https://github.com/r0d8lsh0p/n8n-AI-agent-DVM-MCP-client
- DVMCP: https://mcp.so/server/dvmcp
- Olas & Nutzaps (NIP-60, NIP-61)
- Bitcoin is not only the internet of money, but it is the money of the internet
- Re-building the internet archive on top of nostr
- Bitrot & 404
- Resurrection markets & marketplace for hashes via Blossom
- Hugs 🫂

Related dialogues:

Recorded at 887,039.

#03: Data Ownership is a Lie w/ Pablo

Gigi — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 18:39:32 +0000

“You’ll get all that for free if you build it right”

In this dialogue:

01: Start Ugly
02: There is No Global
Concept of ownership & “Read, Write, Own”
Shamir Secret Sharing and Timelocks
“No amount of violence will ever solve a math problem.”
You can’t prove deletion of a key (or anything, really); best you can do is “burn” bitcoin
Data is information, which behaves like an idea (not like an apple)
“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” – https://dergigi.com/threads/memes-vs-the-world
Why the Pubky architecture isn’t great
Cashu
Nutzaps: NIP-60 / NIP-61
How nutzaps fix fake zaps on zaplife.lol
“Ecash fixes HTTP 402”
“[Bitcoin [and nostr]] take advantage of the nature of information being easy to spread but hard to stifle.” –Satoshi Nakamoto
Discovery with NIP-89
#RunDVM with NIP-90
Why micropayments can’t work on credit rails, and how bitcoin is the rediscovery of money.
Putting payments into blossom
“Money is essentially a tool to keep track of who owes what to whom. Broadly speaking, everything we have used as money up to now falls into two categories: physical artifacts and informational lists. Or, to use more common parlance: tokens and ledgers.”
“maximum utility in the world of Bitcoin entails the adoption of maximum responsibility.”
Complexity of Lightning vs the simplicity of eCash
Amber and Citrine
How Pablo became the BIS
12 words in your head can literally save your life
The in-between of custodial and non-custodial in a multi-mint world
Nutzaps integrated in chachi.chat
The intermediacy of nostr is magic
In nostr you’ll get a lot for free IF YOU BUILD IT RIGHT
“Free Speech platforms cannot exist; if there is a ‘deplatform’ button, the button will be pressed.”
“Neither nostalgia nor utopia.”
Solutions that make stuff worse over time vs solutions that make stuff better over time.
#asknostr on passkeys, and why we think they’ll make things worse over time.
Authentication vs identity: “identification asks, authentication proves”
You are not your name and photo; identity is prismatic
(m00t’s talk on it at web summit 2011)
Starbug from CCC pwning TouchID biometrics from a high-res photo (article)
Key rotation and (American) HODL
Social recovery
Multi-sig for nostr with FROSTR

Links & References

Nostr Protocol Repository: https://github.com/nostr-protocol
Cashu (e-cash): https://github.com/cashubtc
NIP-60 (Nutzaps): https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/60.md
NIP-89 (Service Discovery) & NIP-90 (DVMs) – upcoming proposals: https://nips.nostr.com/89 & https://nips.nostr.com/90

Recorded at 884,723.

#02: There is No Global w/ Pablo

Gigi — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 19:08:23 +0000

“We do not have the answers."

In this dialogue:

What is this No Solutions thing anyway?
Why dialogue and distributed cognition is so important
Why is nostr exiting for developers?
Evolution, Life, and nostr
What is the perfect nostr app, and why can’t there be THE perfect nostr app?
Why there is no “global” view in nostr
Impossible problems vs. possible (but still hard) problems
Blossom, blossom, and more blossom
Zooko’s Triangle
Freedom Tech Building Blocks
NIP-60/61, NIP-89
Email vs ICQ
Accepting constraints & moving forward
Nostr has data integrity, but no data guarantees
Bitcoin as an extreme RAID system
Fault tolerance vs. efficiency
“Build the infrastructure, don’t run it.”
eCash fixes 402
Everything in nostr can be one-click
There’s infinite nsecs (and they are free!)
The magic of the nostr view-only mode
The Local-first movement
How to monetize without putting yourself in the middle?
RoboSats as an example of open-source monetization
The YouTube like count is a lie

Further links:

Recorded at 883,903.

#01: Start Ugly w/ Pablo

Gigi — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 09:53:46 +0000

“We have the chance of building the next iteration of the internet, and hopefully, not repeat the mistakes of the past."

In this dialogue:

Why starting ugly and shipping early is hard
The ugliest thing that Pablo ever shipped
“Happiness is shipping”
Make it real first, you can make it pretty later
Getting into the habit of shipping
Highlighter and the hang-up of shipping something big
How nostr allows you to have cash flow from the get-go
#value4value for artists and devs
What DHH & 37Signals got right

People and projects mentioned:

fiatjaf
DHH
SuperTestnet
nostr.build
Highlighter
Primal
ProtonMail
Hey

Further links:

Recorded at 882,856.

#00: Test Recording / Teaser w/ Pablo

Gigi — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 10:00:00 +0000

A teaser.

Recorded at 882,688.