← All Episodes

#17: Organic Tech w/ Arjen

#17: Organic Tech w/ Arjen

Arjen (guest) Mar 31, 2026 1:13:12

"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:

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

Vintage recruitment poster encouraging applications

Ready for adventure?

Experience, build, and alpha-test the future of self-sovereign technology in beautiful Madeira. Don't miss the opportunity of a lifetime.

Apply Now!
Jul 20 - Aug 28

Check the dates of our upcoming cohorts .