24: Building FIPS w/ Johnathan Corgan

“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”

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.